***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator   –The Scorched World   

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

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Oh sure I have a million stories to tell about my experiences now that I have retired after forty years working as an operative (peeper, shamus, gumshoe, private dick or whatever your dig at name for us, hah, hah now although in the old days I would get very hot under the collar if anybody called me anything except operative) with the International Operations Organization. Stories about murder and mayhem, deceit and deviousness, strange mental states and cold-bloodedness. Ordinary stories too about three-day lost husbands, bums for the most part, that the searching wives would best get rid of but you know love-at least three-day search love, hanky-panky among the upper-crust ending in huge settlements and nice payouts to the organization, and  ho-hum dead-beat repo cases. A few cases too, not many especially not in the hard-pressed 1930s, we didn’t take, mainly because there was crass and gross illegality involved or somebody wanted us to look the other way when we should not have looked the other way.

Yes I have seen it all the worst side of mankind (male and female okay, and sometimes the women were the worst capable of things no guy would even think of doing no matter how much he hated whoever he hated), the backbiting, the scratching eyes out to beat someone out of something, the heat of passion, and not in the bedroom where it belongs, turning to dust. Not a pretty sight and not for the faint-hearted which is why I lasted for forty years, forty years of slugging it out to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world, and some days just for the pay. A lot of days for the pay when I was younger, was married, shortly married, and had a couple of kids underfoot although this business like the public coopers is note for family men. Right now my mind in on one of the last cases, the Bradford case, not because it was the worst, far from it, probably the Giles case with murder, mayhem, sexual perversion of the worst kind, and some depravity fit that bill, but because it didn’t make sense, didn’t make sense that a couple of well-off young women with plenty of prospects, plenty of guys ready to tie into the Bradford fortune, would go over the deep end for no real reason, just for kicks, kicks that we had to move might and main to cover up. Let me tell you about it.    

It all started when John Bradford, the biggest banker in San Francisco, whose family had started the business after the gold rush charging big interest for mining equipment and eats to half-illiterate prospectors, came to the agency looking for help when his two daughters, Anne and Prudence, went missing after not checking in for about a week. (Yes Mr. Bradford was some distant descendant of somebody on the Mayflower crew although that doesn’t, I don’t think, explain what happened, the problems of in-breeding among the rich and getting kinky results over the generations, not by any reasonable accounting) We had done a previous case with Mr. Bradford over an employee embezzlement scheme and so he came back to us on that recommendation, although we never apprehended the scoffer and last I heard still hadn’t although somebody told me once that had a lead on him in Tahiti.  

You might well ask why if Mr. Bradford was worried about his missing daughters, maybe having been kidnapped or worse, he didn’t go to the police, the FBI or something like your average guy would do. That is where the rich, and in his case the very rich, are different. They are worried about image, maybe about what would that Mayflower forbear think, or the country club set they belong with old hags ready to spread any juicy gossip at the drop of a hat, they want things, including messy things and maybe especially messy things hushed up. They can also afford to pay for extra service, extra service that hard-pressed police forces could not or would not provide. Bradford did not want the case ending up after three days in the cold files. Besides in this case the two young women had something of a history of walking on the wild side and so hushing it up was just in case they were involved in some freefall caper. And so it landed on the agency’s lap and the boss assigned me to the case since he believed from what Bradford told him (not all of which he told me since Bradford worked, as he had on the previous embezzlement case which hinder our operation, on a need-to-know basis) that it would involve no heavy lifting, meaning no shooting or fists, not many anyway, something easy as I eased into retirement.     

Here is the way it went down, I started with the servants at the Bradford estate to see if they knew anything. Usually when the principals, the guys paying, are clueless the help knows every juicy detail and can be coaxed into departing with that precious information for a few bucks. Nothing doing this time, except some information about the pair having packed several suitcase before they left. None of servants saw that as unusual since the girls had taken an entourage’s worth of baggage before even on short trips. Then I went the rounds of friends, relatives, and acquaintances but no dice, no dice mainly because these sources were apparently working under some national security directive about giving information to a cop, public or private. Once would think, although one would be wrong, to expect friends to let their concern for the whereabouts of kindred perhaps head down in some deep ravine to trump their blind loyalty.  

A breakthrough did come when I went to the Knick-Knack Club, a place, a watering hole for the young, rich, and infamous where the young women hung out, a place they had been seen to frequent several times before their disappearances. That tipster, who shall remain anonymous just in case the forces of evil that were unleashed when we broke the case decide to do something further about it, told me that I should check with a guy named Johnny Firestone because Anne and Prudence had often been seen in his company. At first that name did not ring a bell but checking back with our agency files I found out that the name should have been ringing many bells. Johnny, or rather his father and then him when the father retired (retired to the bottom of San Francisco Bay whether by accident or foul deed was never ascertained but you figure out the percentages), was knee-deep in the drug trafficking business in the Bay Area which meant some big-time operations, many connections, many serious connections with the Asian sources and thus connected big time on the West Coast. It also seemed that Sonny Boy had taken up a new hobby, a new stream of revenue, branched out into high-end pornography. High-end meaning that the models were rich, wicked, perverted or whatever else made them get their kicks. Had been working out of some abandoned warehouse over in the East Bay, although the whereabouts took a little snooping, mainly tailing Johnny on his rounds.   

So I followed that trail over to a converted warehouse in Haywood where Sonny Boy did his shoots. What would happen there, and what did happen with Anne and Prudence, was that Johnny would get them high, high as kites, for a while and then suggest that modelling scam. Maybe some smoke, maybe cocaine, maybe something spicier but get them indebted high then he would start to proposition them about becoming models, exclusive models who might make it onto a fashion magazine cover. If that lure was not enough the he would play to their wild sides. Get them all good and aroused to do something out of the ordinary, something new, something kinky. It came out later that he had that talent with women, at least rich young women. Then he could go either way-make money selling the photos to rich old perverts who got their kicks from seeing their own in a debased condition or, and here is where the real profit center was, blackmail guys like Bradford, bleed them forever. Nice work, Sonny Boy.

In this case both young women were eager to get their kicks that way. According to a girlfriend who went with them on one of the shoots they started taking their clothes off without prompting (and without a drug inducement). One afternoon, after trailing Johnny, and having another operative trail the girls from a sleazy walk-up over in East Oakland where the girls were hiding out and which I had discovered by following them one time rather than Johnny we closed down the operation. Before it was all over though some shots were fired, some fists flew, including mine on a so-called easy case, Johnny fell down wounded, and a very large sum of Bradford money changed hands in order to get all the negatives and all the prints bought and burned. Johnny is still operating his drug operations since no way on this good, green earth was scion Bradford pressing charges. Yeah, the rich.  Last I heard the girls were married to some stockbrokers who are clueless about what their brides are capable of. Or maybe that is exactly why they grabbed the pair.  Either way, good luck, good luck gentlemen reigning that pair in.