***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-The Stuff Of Dreams

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Hey, Inspector Tim Riley here. I guess by now you have heard about Sam, Sam Sutter, my old friend from when he was on the San Francisco police force with me years ago, back in the rough and ready early ‘30s when this town was wide open, and who I kept in touch with over the years even after he went private. Yah, a private snooper, oops, sorry, private detective taking any case that interested him, and sometimes when the rent was due, some client “forgot” to pay the bill for services rendered leaving him short, or some dame was giving him that old come hither look instead of dough , anything that came through his door, no questions asked.

Hell, not that long ago he and I worked a couple of cases where our investigations met and he bailed me out of a couple of tight spots when the mobsters weren’t taking kindly to the idea of a collar and were throwing lead my way so I don’t know what got into him. I don’t know why he flew the coop, why he left his partner Miles Regan, to take the heat after he left. Who am I kidding. I know exactly, extremely exactly why he left, a dame, the whiff of perfume, the feel of satin sheets, you get it, right, get it if you are a guy. I got a few looks at her as we were honing in on the case so I could see why he might run amok but still he had plenty of dames, good-looking dames with dough, and no strings so all I know this time with this dame is the note he left for me at his office desk that Miles passed on to med- “the stuff of dreams, I got to go for it, Tim. Good luck.”

Hell, I better back up and tell you what I know, the facts, and maybe you can make something out of what he wrote to me. Like I say Sam and Miles ran a private detective agency over on Post Street. Miles mainly did the divorce work, key-hole peeper stuff since that was what he was built for, a pretty boy, a skirt-chaser, although he was married, very married from what I heard. Sam, not so much of a good-looking guy as Miles, but built and tough, which some dames definitely go for, did the real work, the missing jewelry, the runaway husband or wife, the quick notice body guard stuff, and when necessary the ransom stuff that took a few brains to figure out.

No job was off-limits except that it had to be legit, legit in Sam’s calculating mind. So he made a living at it after he left the force. He said to me after he left that he got tired of chasing windmills trying to bring law and order to the Wild West for peanuts when he could make some decent dough without the bureaucracy on his own. And maybe he had a point except I am married and have three hungry kids and so couldn’t, wouldn’t think of leaving the force. So Sam was ready, ready as hell, when she came through the door.

She being Mary, but who knows what her name really was, she used Brigitte on me, had a passport with the name Helen Dewar on it so who knows. Lets’ call he Mary because that is what Sam called her, okay. So she came through the door like a whirlwind. One of those dames whose every movement is calculated for effect, calculated to get some guy to do something daffy, pretty please. Good-looking too, a tall rangy one, taller than Sam, a little too thin for me but a looker, with long brunette hair, blues eyes, the works, a figure that cried out come hither. But if I know Sam it was the perfume, the scent, whatever she was wearing combined with her looks that got him, that and the story she had to tell.

And what a story. Apparently she was a chronic lying because she told about six versions of the same story with different twists from what Sam said to Miles before he left. Sam, despite his reputation for chasing windmills, was cynical enough not to believe any of them too much, although that didn’t slow him down once he got a whiff of that scent. I bet it was gardenia, it had to be; because I know for a fact that he almost felt off the deep end when he was on the force when he ran into a woman smelling of gardenia who murdered her husband and he was ready to jump through hoops for her saying it was self-defense. (She shot dear husband while he was drunk and passed out on the floor.).

Mary told him a story, a story about a statue that she had lost, a very valuable statue that she had purchased in the Orient and had been stolen from her by a ring of high-end thieves one foggy night. She had got wind that they were in town and she wanted Sam to go with her to negotiate for the return of the statue. Now I still don’t know if the statue thing, the value of it was hooey, or real. All I know is that a couple of guys are dead, Sam is gone, and I am left trying to pick up the pieces so I assume the thing was valuable. A small old time statue, with jewels on it, in the form of a Buddha.

So Sam and Mary meet this gang, the leader, a guy named Sid Green, a guy known to us from Interpol, a bad character, and a couple of his bodyguards, at the Imperial Hotel over on Bay Street. Sam did the talking but there was no go, no negotiations because now Sid knew that the damn thing was even more valuable than Mary thought. Supposedly there was a ton of stuff inside, rare, very rare, jade that made the jewels seem like costume stuff. So no go. What Sam also finds out, finds out to no effect, was that Mary had been an associate of Sid’s and they had had a falling out so that she was trying to run her own operation. Trying to grab the statue anyway she could, for herself. And for Sam now of course, now that along the way they had shared some satin sheets together. Nothing happened that night but the no go signaled on both sides that some nasty business was coming down.

The first nasty business was when Sid sent one of his gunsels, a punk kid named Elmer to eliminate Sam and Mary, eliminate for good. All this Elmer got for his efforts was a quick Sam R.I.P. That reopened negotiations or so Sam and Mary thought. Sid arranged for another meeting at the Imperial Hotel to reevaluate the situation under the new circumstances. The new circumstances turned out to be a planned ambush down the corridor from Sid’s suite. All that got was another gunsel, Willy Proust, who we had a rap sheet on as long as your arm, another Sam R.I.P. Sid alone now in his suite was easy pickings for Sam and Mary now. They just took the statue from Sid’s table while he watched, watched with a bemused smile. They left with the Buddha in tow.

Here is where things get squirrely though. Once they got back to Mary’s place and checked out the insides they found that the material, the jade, had been replaced with fake jade, glass really. See Sid had pulled a switch, just in case. Needless to say Sid had flown the coop for parts unknown. Sam was ready to call it quits, ready to come in and talk to me about everything. He did over the phone, giving me all the stuff that I am telling you, and I told him to come on in on his own. Then something happened, something happened to Sam, because I never heard from him again, except that note, that “stuff of dreams” note he left at his office. I figure Mary did one of her come hither acts and got him all steamed up and so he threw in his lot with her. Or maybe he just got tired of living on cheap street, on somebody else’s sorrows. Whatever it is I hope, I hope like hell, that it isn’t me that has to bring Sam in.