***Out
In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-The Stuff Of Dreams-Take Two
Hey,
Inspector Tim Riley here. I guess by now you have all read in the Examiner or heard on the radio about Sam
Sutter who has flown the coop, Sam my old friend from when he was on the San
Francisco police force with me several years ago, back in the rough and ready
early ‘30s when this town was wide open. He, fresh out of college, U. of San
Francisco if I recall correctly, and I fresh out of the academy the first in my
family to make the civil service list and proud of it, were assigned to the
D.A.s office where we had our hands full, no, more than our hands full with
every desperado who headed west when things went south back east and we had to
clean up the mess, or at least keep things in check. Sam pulled my chestnuts
out of the fire more than once when I was more rum brave than smart running up
again Jimmy Clancy’s gang. And another time when we were down at the Embarcadero
and I was at the short end of the stick against Hymie Swartz’s boys when I
tried to serve a silly summons on old Hymie. But enough of cutting up old
torches, after all this is about Sam and his troubles, his big troubles.
I
kept in touch with Sam 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. The Roma gang, yah, the big drug and numbers
guys, was spreading its wings into the Bay Area trying to take over the rackets
from old man Clancy and his son, Billy, and we were on the inside of that one
and Sam was working a missing wayward
daughter, a Clancy daughter, and
our paths crossed. Crossed amid some old time gunfire and we had to shoot our
way out over on Bay Street, down by the park. Jesus. 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 after it came to our attention that a couple of
gunsels were unaccounted for, unaccounted for that is lying face down somewhere
and Sam’s name came up on the ticket. He
gave us the runaround like he sometimes did when he was working at close
quarters for a client, that thing about confidentiality that he hid behind when
it was to his advantage. I could see why he might run amok with her but still
he had plenty of dames, good-looking dames with dough, and no strings attached.
One dame, a looker too, some soap heiress from back East, wanted to set him up in
his very own suite, with car and expenses attached after he pulled her out of
some opium den before she went off the deep end and lost all her jack through
disinheritance. The scheme sounded like he was to be her pet poodle and so, no
way, but he thought about it. There were a couple of others too maybe not the
lookers like the soap woman but with dough and with plenty of tough guy big
eyes to go around. I know this time, with this dame, is the note he left for me
at his office desk that Miles passed on to me- “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 like with that soap dame. Remind me to
tell you about that one sometime when I have time, when we get Sam in our mitts
it was beauty. The kidnappers never knew what hit them and our soap walked away
from that mess just as nice as you please.
No
job was off-limits except that it had to be legit, legit at least in Sam’s
calculating mind. So he made a living at it after he left the force. He said to
me after he left the D.A. office when the Madera case blew up in our face s 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 on his own and without the
bureaucracy crabbing on him all the time. And maybe he had a point, maybe he
was right, except I am married and have three hungry kids and so couldn’t,
wouldn’t think of leaving the force. Yah, and too I am still proud to be on the
force, to be the first to make the civil service list. Sam had bigger dreams,
dreams he kept hidden, hidden from me anyway. So Sam was ready, ready as hell,
when she came through the door.
She being Mary Kelly, but who knows
what her name really was. She used Brigitte
O’Shea on me the first time I met her that first time I got a good look at her
when we were trying to figure out what Sam was up to. She had a passport with the
name Helen Dewar on it so and later, through Interpol we found she had used
Susan Gross, Minnie Smith and Sarah Miles according to her rap sheet so who
knows. Lets’ call he Mary because that is what Sam called her, okay. She came
through the office 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, Irish of course, a tall rangy one,
taller than Sam, a little too thin for me but a looker, with long brunette
hair, blues eyes, the works, and 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 and from what
little he told me when a few things were going awry in his life before we
lost his trail. Sam, despite his
reputation for chasing windmills, was cynical enough not to believe any of Mary’s
stories too much, although that didn’t slow him down grasping for her favors 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 before when he was on the
force after he ran into a woman, Hazel James, smelling of gardenia who murdered
her husband and he was ready to jump through hoops for her saying it was
self-defense. She had shot that dear husband while he was drunk and passed out on
the floor. Sam also neglected, or tried to neglect, the little fact that he was
having an affair with her after she shown up one day in our office claiming
that dead husband was beating her up. So, yah, I bet six-two-and even that it
was gardenia.
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, in some Hong Kong antique shop, and had been stolen from her room
at the Grand Hotel in Shang-hai by a ring of high-end thieves one foggy night. She had been on their trail ever since and had
gotten 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, lots of jewels,
in the form of a Buddha.
So Sam and Mary meet this gang, the
leader anyway, a guy named Sid Green, a guy known to us from Interpol, a bad
character, drugs, kidnapping, art thefts, that kind of thing, and no loose ends
from what we knew, and a couple of his bodyguards, at the Imperial Hotel over
on Mission Street. Sam did the talking, the hires gun talking knowing who he
was dealing with, but there was no go, no negotiations because after China Sid now
knew that the damn thing was even more valuable than Mary thought. Supposedly
there was a ton of stuff inside, rare, very rare, almost extinct jade that made
the jewels on the outside seem like costume stuff. So no go. What Sam also found out, found out
to no effect as we now know, was that Mary had previously been an associate of
Sid’s, a close associate in the days where she was his queen of the marriage
man blackmail scams. They had had a falling out because she was trying to run
her own operation, trying for her own stuff of dreams once she got onto the
fact that she was smarter and better organizer that Sid. But now she was trying
to grab that statue anyway she could, for herself to get a little capital to
pull her own scores. And for Sam, of course, now that along the way between the
different versions of her story, they had shared some satin sheets together.
Nothing happened that night, no shoot-outs, 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 over at his place. All this Elmer got for his efforts was a
quick Sam R.I.P. That action reopened
negotiations or so Sam and Mary thought when Sid sent a message that he wanted
a truce. Sid arranged for another meeting at the Imperial Hotel to reevaluate
the situation under the new circumstances, the one less bodyguard circumstances
he said. The new circumstances though turned out to be a planned ambush down
the corridor from Sid’s suite. All that got was another gunsel, Willy Proust, a
local rat, who we had a rap sheet on as long as your arm, another Sam
R.I.P. After the gun smoke settled Sid
alone now in his suite was easy pickings for Sam and Mary. They just took the
statue from Sid’s table while he watched, watched with a bemused smile. They
left slamming the door behind 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, some glass
really. See Sid, the savvy old con, had pulled a switch, just in case. Needless
to say Sid has since 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 some over the
phone, giving me a lot of 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. He, they, according to our sources which may have it
all wrong have been variously seen in Hong Kong, Istanbul, and Vienna. Wherever
he is and for whatever reason he blew town I hope, I hope like hell, that it
isn’t me that has to bring Sam in.
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