P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 01 - Heavy Mental
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Authors: P.J. Morse
Tags: #Mystery: P.I. - Rock Guitarist - Humor - California
| P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 01 - Heavy Mental | |
| Clancy Parker [1] | |
| P.J. Morse | |
| P.J. Morse (2012) | |
| Tags: | Mystery: P.I. - Rock Guitarist - Humor - California |
The job turns out to be anything but. Soon enough, Clancy must dodge threats from disgruntled secretaries, unhinged society matrons and rampaging ice cream trucks. The only person who can provide answers about the necklace is her client's sexy psychiatrist, but Clancy's budding crush on him only leads to more trouble.
Eventually, Clancy must rely on all of her contacts—her stoner bandmates, her Socialist landlord, and her yoga-loving, flask-toting mother—to stop the thief from turning into a killer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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HEAVY MENTAL
BY P. J. MORSE
Heavy Mental: A Clancy Parker Mystery
Copyright ©2012 by P.J. Morse. All rights reserved.
Cover and Formatting:
Streetlight Graphics
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
CHAPTER 1
THE WOMAN IN YELLOW
T
HE LADY DIDN’T SEE
A
NMOL’S
ice-cream truck coming. She didn’t even flinch at his rumbling sound system, which was blasting rap music that could be heard all over South Park, if not all over San Francisco’s South of Market District. She didn’t hear him yell as she crossed his path, “Ice cream! Fruit cream! Soy cream! Yo!”
Nor did she listen when Harold and I put down our beer bottles and shouted, in unison, “Look out!”
“Baby!” Anmol yelled. “Get a move on!”
The woman held herself in tight, as if she were in a bubble. She didn’t seem to know how to act in our neighborhood, so she froze up. For starters, she was driving a Jag, and her bob haircut was almost as black and as sleek as her car. Tailored and tidy, this classy sister was unlike the rainbow-haired tech geeks who dominated our part of San Francisco. She was one of those people who looked intelligent without seeming to have any skills whatsoever, except maybe on the tennis court.
She was clad in a beautiful, light, lemony-shaded shift and matching short jacket that just barely prevented her from breaking the cardinal fashion rule that one does not wear white after Labor Day. She had on glimmering black Olsen Twin sunglasses that blocked a third of her face, but the skin that was visible was creamy and perfect, even if it did seem just a shade too taut. I thought of how my mother’s face looked after she had her first face lift and wondered if they went to the same doctor.
Harold leaned over and whispered, “Oooh! Oooh! I’ll be your backup. I’ll pretend to read.” He stuck his hand in his cheese nibbles, and then he stuck his nose in the Adlai Stevenson biography was reading. He got so excited when I got new clients that I wondered what he’d do during retirement without me.
Anmol leaned his turbaned head out of his truck to get a better look at the woman in yellow. “Damn!” he yelled, “If you weren’t so fine, I would be mad right about now!” Then he backed up and parked the truck as hipster computer programmers promptly sprang out of South Park’s live-work spaces, ready to relive their youth through Drumsticks and popsicles.
When Anmol’s ice-cream truck paused for customers, the woman in yellow continued to float across the narrow street toward me and Harold. Although she never once acknowledged Anmol, she raised an eyebrow at the sight of the two of us. You don’t see teams like me and Harold all that often: a young redhead like me and an old man lounging in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, both of us drinking Heinekens in the early afternoon. Neither one of us liked to wait until happy hour.
“I’m looking for Ms. Parker,” the woman said.
“You’re looking at her,” I replied. I finished what was left of my beer and smiled.
Pulling her chin in ever so slightly, the woman stammered, “I thought you would be … older.”
I figured what she really wanted to say was “cleaner,” but I wasn’t exactly dressed professionally. No private investigator dresses well. The other ones I knew were schleppy dudes who favored Hawaiian shirts. However, that day was one of my good ones, as I was wearing a polka-dot secretary shirt and jeans I picked up at a thrift store in Berkeley.
As she was sizing me up, I was already returning the favor. I quickly processed the woman’s car, outfit, and manner of walking. Although you wouldn’t have known it to look at me, I grew up with money, thanks to my father’s incredible knack for convincing people to pay big money for organic produce and imported European sweets. I didn’t fit in Dad’s world, though. I played music on the side, and I snooped on people for a living, so I had minimal access to Daddy’s pocketbook. I knew how the higher rungs of society worked, but it didn’t belong to me, even if I was related to it. I liked to say that I could read the language of rich, but I preferred not to speak it.
Now, this woman spoke the language of rich fluently. She might have known some words I didn’t. Watching her impeccable posture, I imagined the woman floating through the world on a cushion of inherited wealth. Maybe she got dirty once or twice if she had a pony, like a lot of those girls I grew up with back on Cape Cod. But the woman in yellow sure didn’t look like the type to muck a stall.
Harold, my landlord and spiritual advisor, tried valiantly to be more interested in his thick volume about the life of a perennial presidential candidate. But he was already radiating dislike toward my potential client. I knew he couldn’t help it. He’d been raised not to trust anyone who looked like they never had a real job. One time, when I confessed to Harold that my own family had been in the
Social Register
, Harold begged me not to repeat it again because he might have to lecture me for it. He went as far as to clap his hands over his ears.
The woman in yellow summoned the courage to approach me, held out her right hand, and declared, “Hello, Miss Parker. My name is Sabrina Norton Buckner.” Sabrina darted a quick, dismissive glance at Harold, who responded by swigging from his Heineken. “I need to speak with you -” she tossed a second pointed glance at Harold “-privately.”
I did not like the way Sabrina looked at Harold and had half a mind to tell her to take her business elsewhere. You work with me, and you have to deal with Harold. He sits out in his lawn chair every day, and he sees all my clients coming and going. On numerous occasions, he has steered me away from those who look like trouble or won’t pay up.
Then again, someone like Sabrina was bound to pay well. Women who dressed like that and who sported good face lifts were often involved in divorce cases, and they could always afford my rate because they were using their ex-husband’s money. I decided to take a chance. “Well,” I told her, “Let’s head upstairs so my good friend Harold—this is Harold Cho, by the way, my landlord—can read in peace.”
Harold stood and extended a damp, cheesy hand toward Sabrina, saying, “Pleasure to have your formal introduction.” Sabrina, who possessed a perfect boarding-school sheen of manners, had no choice but to accept the handshake, but, when it was over, she held her hand out to her side as if she might catch plague. Harold grinned as he sat down.
As we headed for my door, Anmol finished his sales and rang his bell, advising Sabrina, “Open your eyes, baby! Next truck might not stop!” Then he threw the rap music on full blast, tossed me a free Drumstick, winked, and rolled on.
“Is your neighborhood always like this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I told her, taking out my keys. “But you know what they say: Try it, you might like it.”
She looked nervous, but she still followed me through the entrance and up to my office.
CHAPTER 2
EFFECTIVE FIRST, DISCREET LATER
S
INCE MY SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT WAS
a long shotgun shack, I kept the office up front. I played guitar in the bedroom when I felt inspired and couldn’t wait for my band, the Marquee Idols, to rehearse, but most of the music happened either in one of the rent-a-studios in Potrero Hill or at my guitarist Wayne’s place because his neighbors were either deaf or extraordinarily supportive of the arts, and they didn’t call the police.
The office was right by the kitchen, so I could treat clients to snacks and a cup of tea. Since my first name was androgynous, some people came in thinking they were going to get “Clancy Parker,” who they thought looked like Magnum PI and had a British butler. Then they saw me, and I was barely five-four. And I had Harold, but he had a bad hip and chronic Cheeto fingers, and he didn’t answer to anyone. Of course, they were disappointed. However, no one could resist free food, so I could rope them in with that, and pretty soon they hired me for their cases.
Before boiling the water, I handed Sabrina a box of tissues so she could clean up after shaking Harold’s hand, and Sabrina gratefully accepted.
I kept the front scrupulously clean and organized, almost like a dentist’s office. The office had a desk, a file cabinet with all my old cases, an end table and the choice of a hard-backed chair or a Barcalounger, depending on the client. Ninety percent of my clients went for the Barcalounger, and it didn’t take long before they were all laid out and talking to me like I was Sigmund Freud.
However, Sabrina took the hard-backed chair, the one preferred by insurance employees, the elderly and lawyers who don’t want to muss their suits. She looked around the office and seemed puzzled. “Nothing matches,” she declared.
“It’s shabby chic,” I replied, almost convincing myself that was the case.
Actually, despite how often I cleaned it, the office was just shabby. Almost all of my office items had been liberated from a Dumpster behind the offices of cupcakecity.com, a failed dot-com enterprise. Their job was to make and deliver cupcakes that people would, theoretically, order online.
However, it never occurred to anyone at the enterprise that it was much easier and cost-effective to whip up cupcakes at home, and you could eat the extra frosting and batter, too. Right after I moved into my apartment, Harold advised me to stake out the Dumpsters because he had the company on death watch for weeks, especially after the CEO of cupcakecity.com stopped by his lawn chair and asked, “Oh, wise sage, what do you do when you’ve spent all the VC money?”
Harold replied, “You start spending your own damn money.”
The CEO must not have had much cash on hand because, soon after, the employees were laid off, and they started trashing the place. Every day, a new item appeared in the Dumpster, and I took it or bargained with one of the homeless guys in the park for it. As a result of the rage of the CupcakeCity.com employees, my office chair had a cigarette burn or two, and my black laptop, also carelessly tossed in the Dumpster, was covered with bumper stickers that proclaimed “Gooey in the Center” and “Lick Our Frosting.” Despite the cracked case and salacious stickers, that laptop had never once frozen up on me.
Behind my desk was my favorite part of the office—black-and-white photographs of some of the musicians that I got close enough to capture in concert. Neil Young sitting with an acoustic guitar, taken in Santa Cruz. Neko Case early in her career. Sleater-Kinney in the midst of a raging performance in Portland. Not that any of my clients were observant enough to notice what was on the wall. That was why they were going to hire me—to pay attention to detail when they couldn’t.