***The Live And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator –The Be-Bop Daddy Case   

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Those who have been following this series about the exploits of the famous Ocean City (located just south of Los Angeles then now incorporated into the county) private detective Michael Philip Marlin (hereafter just Marlin the way everybody when he became famous after the Galton case out on the coast) and his contemporaries in the private detection business like Freddy Vance, Charles Nicolas (okay, okay Clara too), Sam Archer, Miles Spade, Johnny Spain, know that he related many of these stories to his son, Tyrone Fallon, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many of the stories related to Marlin’s personal lone-wolf operations (he always used the term “private operative” when he referred to his profession but when cash was tight or the landlords were howling in the dead air night for their room and office rents he would bend his pride and take assignment from the International Operatives Agency which had it main offices on Post Street in San Francisco and would pay the freight to transport Marlin up there when a hot case needed his professional expertise.    

Tyrone later, in the 1970s, related these stories to the journalist Joshua Lawrence Breslin at his request, a friend of my boyhood friend, Peter Paul Markin, who uncovered the relationship and who in turn related them to me over several weeks in the late 1980s. Despite that circuitous route I believe that I have been faithful to what Marlin presented to his son. In any case I take full responsibility for what follows.        

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One day Michael Philip Marlin, Marlin to everybody except his late sainted mother and one forlorn ex-wife, a red- head so it figured, was sitting in his office on Post Street, the San Francisco Post Street for those interested in geography with their crime stories, thinking to himself that if you have been around the business, this private eye business, long enough like he had you will have seen it all, heard it all, maybe even done it all. All the low-life, jack-roll, hipster, dispster, dopester, grafter, midnight sifter stuff that you hear about or read about comes tramping at your door. Tramping at your door for you to figure out and try to stop the bleeding.

Yeah Marlin thought that it definitely didn’t pay, really didn’t pay to have a very high opinion of your fellow man or woman, not if you wanted to avoid lots of fists and lots of gunfire, gunfire mostly directed at you, the hellfire, quick-fisted, quick draw avenging angel. And he thought as well, as Jimmy Jones came traipsing through the door of his office to disturb his thoughts and to give him the latest low-down. Not much got by him but if he hadn’t seen, heard, done it all the guys, the other gumshoes, he worked with, including rookie Jimmy Jones, with at the International Operatives Agency offices would fill in the rest. They had told him stuff, the nitty-gritty, in the locker room where they checked in, the shape-up room where they got their assignments, or across the street at the Lady Luck Lounge after the dust of a case settled. The one that Marlin wanted to talk about one night to Tyrone, the story he wanted to tell him, that one was his own, and also stood as a proof positive that the human mind is capable of anything, for good or evil.  

Naturally it started out as a missing person case, like a great many cases the operation got since the organization had international connections to pull from. That stuff about every case being a primo murder thing which the organization, the International Operatives Agency, had to solve from scratch when the public cops drop the ball was so much eyewash. An exceptional case, really, but bread and butter were the high-end missing persons’ cases, cases where somebody with dough wanted somebody found, somebody important enough to find and not some deadbeat insurance salesman whose wife wanted him back for the kids’ sake after he blew town with some office pool blonde with the come hither look. Sure murder came into it, came into this be-bop daddy fly-paper case that Marlin told his son about  and I am going to tell you about too. But not all cases wound up that way. 

The missing person in this case, the Sarah Parker case, was the wayward daughter of a prominent San Francisco family who had made their dough way back in the day. Back in the 19^th century when anything went, anything at all, more than today even since the “law” was pretty thin on the ground and everybody but a few old Puritans liked it that way, liked it that way just fine. The Parker crowd, that generation or two back, got their kale building the railroads west and the kindred hadn’t had to work since but just while away their time sitting around clipping coupons and waiting for some other first family’s son to come a-courting their womenfolk.

This Sarah, young and wild like a lot of teenagers who came up with a silver spoon in their mouths, wanted none of that. She had a decided taste for the low-life, for hanging around the Embarcadero, hanging with hard guys, corner boys with shivs, hipsters, dopers of all kinds. Some women are just like that, high-born or low. She had led a merry life herself, doing a little sister, drinking Prohibition gin, doing an odd street trick or two to supply her habits, and to keep her hard guy, Moose Malone, a mountain of a man by anybody’s standard, with dough when the Parker trust closed down on her, was drained dry. Of course like a lot of hard guys Moose could not see his way to working honest labor and so she wound up doing stuff to guys in back alleys for pocket change, for him. To keep her man in style she said but who knows if that was the dope talking or Moose ready to pounce if she didn’t do her stuff. Some women are like that too, like to front for their men. Not just slum girls and fallen ones either. Marlin for one could not figure that out, figure that attraction out especially for the silver- spoon set but that was the case. And the Parker family dough talked.

This guy big Moose Malone, Sarah’s be-bop daddy from what people who knew said she called him, her pimp if you wanted to call a thing by its right name (although the organization in its periodic reports to the family called his activities the less edgy “sporting life,” making it seem like he/they were part of the racing set, or something) was the toughest of the tough.  They had lived together as “man and wife” just off Bay Street at one time. That was the last address Marlin had before the trail got cold. From there they had split for parts unknown.

The parts unknown part was when Thomas Parker IV called on the organization’s full services, was willing to use all the agency’s international connections. But here is where the rich, maybe others too, are funny.  He didn’t want the organization to get her to return as much as to know she was alright. That she was shacked up with  some low-life and had a sizable cocaine habit and could be in some whorehouse, or worse, didn’t bother him as much as that he had to that she was okay. So Marlin was in shape-up that day and drew the revved up case after Parker made his wishes known. While Parker got billed (and paid for) the full package the funny thing was that while Moose and Sarah had left town (headed first to New York then Chicago where Moose had connections) Marlin eventually found them in a flat over on the low-rent end of Mission Street where the old tars past their prime, the skid row bums and the down-low con men plied their trades.        

As Marlin thought about that last statement he thought that maybe he shouldn’t have said he found them but that Bugsy Burke and his twist, Polly, found them. That pair had found out that Sarah’s people were looking for her and figured to cash in on the fact that they knew Moose and knew that Sarah was with Moose. Except Bugsy, a long time grifter known to some of the agency’s operatives, figured to cash in on a ransom trick using Polly as a fake Sarah when pay-off time came. Since Marlin was sent out as the pay-off guy and had a photo of the real Sarah he scotched that scam pretty quickly. This Polly for one thing was busty and hippy whereas Sarah was thin and wispy. After he spoiled their fun he also put the heat on Bugsy (and Polly too) and got the Moose’s address. (That “putting the heat on” entailed Marlin putting a nice 45 to Polly’s head and his hand on the trigger ready to rumble if Bugsy didn’t tumble.    

But see guys like the Moose don’t like to be found, found by private or public cops and so whoever figured he was such a guy was headed for a very short life. And so it was for one Edward “Bugsy” Burke when Moose cornered him in his apartment one dark night after finding out that Bugsy had “snitched on” him. With Sarah egging him on all doped- upon saying “kill the fink, kill him bad sweetie.”  After that incident where Moose and Sarah left a trail a mile wide Marlin eventually got the Moose, cornered him in a railroad yard and the big guy died in a hail of bullets.

Nothing unusual there, at least for getting bad guys off the streets of Frisco town. But here is where the figuring about human nature comes in. It came out that Sarah, between the dope, the booze, the street tricks (she had caught VD), and being belted around by the Moose when they fought, which according to neighbors was a lot, was tired of the low-life. Although not tired enough to go back to the Mayfair swells’ life. So what she did was commit suicide when they found her dead on the floor of that Mission Street apartment after Moose passed away. But she was not just any ordinary suicide, you know, gas oven, jumping off a bridge, shooting herself but by a long slow process of eating small amounts of strychnine over a few weeks. And then either she, or maybe Polly, or someone who knew who she really was from the skid- row grapevine but really who knows since that trail too turned cold make her eat too much at once and she died of convulsions.  But the real  “who knows” came about once  one Thomas Parker IV wanted the thing hushed up, hushed up tight  and what a Mayfair swell  wanted a Mayfair swell got in Frisco town, and whoever allegedly make her eat more of the poison than her previous amounts was never found after she passed on over in that low-rent love-nest. Go figure.