Fanfiction - Pin The Tail. Part 1. PG.
I'm writing a little fanfiction. This is set post-movie-main-action; it's an entry in the case file. This part is PG. Crit is always welcome.
The cutlery clinked as the woman played with it nervously in her manicured fingers. The fluorescent light robbed her of color, leaving her pallid and drawn as she sucked a collagen-injected lower lip into her mouth and worried at it.
You like that? I'm working on my prose. Harmony thinks it's lovely. Perry tells me to skip it and just get to the fucking point. Fine, the fucking point is that I was in one of those little cafes that choke LA like kudzu, sitting across from a woman who was all but convinced that her husband was cheating on her. Her husband was 46. I had no idea how old she was, but it's probably a safe bet that most parts of her body were younger than she was at that point. I do a lot of that is-my-husband-cheating stuff. He usually is. Most of the women are former young beauties who have been sliced and enhanced to be slightly more plasticky beauties, and the kind of guy who goes for a girl like that is not really interested in her brain, and jumps at the chance to boink a different young beauty. No shortage of young beauties in LA. If you like that kind of thing.
The woman rambled on, haltingly, and I nodded and scribbled on a pad. Drawings, lewd comments, nothing actually relevant to the case, but Perry told me that people find it reassuring if you jot things down on a pad while talking to them. Nodding and looking serious is good, too.
The woman finally petered out, and deflated with a sigh. "Thank you for helping me out, Mr. Lockheart. I just don't know what to do."
I nodded. I looked serious. "No problem, Mrs. Levitt. I'll put a tail on him this evening." God, the expressions I had gotten into the habit of using. A kid's party game - Pin The Tail On The Philanderer. But the woman smiled, and picked up the check for lunch, which I appreciated.
Does that work as a setup? I hope so, because there's a lot more to come. It gets better, really. It won't be thirty pages of following a guy and watching him boink a starlet. There will be guns and car chases and blood, and all of that other good shit. I'm not sure there's any sex at all, actually. Well, I do almost do Harmony, but I get interrupted. You can count that if you like. I don't.
The way I spent the afternoon was not very interesting. A lot of paperwork. Perry was out following one of the starlets that flock to SoCal like flies to a cow-pie; her agent wanted to know if she was hitting the nasty stuff sooner rather later, so he could arrest her career appropriately. I have been accused, by a party which I shall graciously not name, of being far too interested in bazongas, so I rarely follow starlets. A man can dream, though.
Mrs. Levitt had told me that her husband had his little poker-with-friends outings (no, I won't make the pun - I know you made it already) on Wednesday nights. Yes, it was Wednesday night. I'm not going to start out on Monday and make you hang out with me through three days of watching TV and brushing my teeth. I followed a distinctly un-starlet-like man later that evening. He was fit and handsome enough, if you like that kind of thing, which I don't. I did rather like his Mercedes, especially as it was fucking garish metallic orange and a breeze to follow from way, way back. I followed him from way, way back in the Very Boring VW Golf. It's a great car for this work, as nobody ever notices it. It's a shitty car to own in LA for every other purpose, as nobody ever notices it. It makes me feel like a eunuch when I drive it.
Right. I followed this fellow in his flashy goddam car to a big mall parking lot. I drove right past and pulled in to the next lot over, using my handy binoculars to see what he was up to. I didn't need to be close. Telephotos are good things. But surprise, surprise, the guy was meeting a young Filipino fellow in a slammed Civic with a wing you could hang your laundry on. Cheating is cheating, and I prepared for a rather nauseating set of photos, but there was no hanky-panky. Not a hank or a pank to be seen. Just a large box pulled out of the back of the Civic, big enough that it had been wedged in there, and both of them had to wail on it to get it out of there. They finally breathlessly dumped the box into the trunk of the Mercedes. The husband (his name was Jerry, in case you were wondering - actually, it was and still is Jerry regardless of whether you wondered or not) forked a wad of cash over to the Filipino. He looked left and right, over both shoulders, as he did so, in that way that just screams, "Don't look at me! I'm trying not to be noticed! This is a surreptitious action, goddamit!"
Needless to say, I had a good feeling at that point that this was not exactly an infidelity case. Not that my evening plan was changed by this. I had been hired to find out what he did on Wednesday evenings, and I would do just that.
What he did on Wednesday evenings was go to Angels Gate Park with a big box in his trunk. I parked out on the street. I had planned to meander to the shrubs, but some broad-shouldered fellows were walking around the grounds with more purpose in their stride than most park-goers, so I stayed in the car. What the hell. I had a telephoto. The event itself was disappointingly anticlimactic; the fellow drove up to the bell, a big black fellow with a great deal of bling and a shaved head walked out from under the pavilion to meet him, they shook hands and talked. I couldn't hear a word, of course - I was across the damn street! - but they moved like dudes who don't really like each other and just want to pretend to be affable for a transaction. Two other, slightly less-blinged black guys came out from the pavilion at a motion of the first one's hand, and opened the box. I tried to get a picture of what was inside, but the big fellow wasn't courteous enough to take whatever it was out and wave it around. He forked a wad of cash over to Jerry, his pals covered the box back up, and Jerry drove away. An Escalade rolling on a reasonable-sized mine's worth of chrome pulled up to the pavilion, and the fellows loaded it into the back and got in themselves. Away they went.
Well, at the time, I decided that was it. He was involved in something that must be illegal, for all of the skulking. Or maybe it was hair products, and he had an odd fetish for stealth. It didn't matter. I'd fork the photos over to the wife, and have her do with it what she would.
Now, I'm going to give you a piece of information that I didn't have at the time. One of the lackies must have seen me pull that camera in through my window and drive off, and followed me. Just because I'm telling you that, though, I don't want you to get all superior on me the way readers do when there's an omniscient narrator (I got that one from Harmony). Don't say, "Oh, he should have noticed he was being followed, the stupid twat!" No, I did check my mirrors, but I didn't see. I just drove back to the office and parked the car in the garage.
Perry was in the office when I got back. He had been keeping late nights for a few weeks. I couldn't help noticing that his lack of more fun things to do in the evenings more or less paralleled the growth of the beard and the ponytail. They'd have worked on a skinny gay guy who called straight men 'bitches,' but they just didn't work on him. I can't say it bothered me too much. I'm not homophobic or anything, but the idea of another man sticking his tongue down my best bud's throat is a little disturbing. All right, maybe I am, a little. Sue me.
"Done?" he asked, fiddling with a paper clip.
I sat down on the other side of his desk and put my feet up, out of habit. He batted them back down, for the same. "This one was a bit odd," I replied. "He wasn't cheating." I gave Perry a quick rundown of what had happened.
He frowned. "You couldn't get a look in that box?"
"Nope, and it was across the street and pretty dark when I took the pics. I don't even know if they came out all that good."
"All that well. Good is an adjective." Perry reached his hand out, and I deposited the camera's back into it. I put the box of lenses on the desk. "Well, I'll take these home, and you can tell Miz What's her face about whatever develops."
I shook my head, jiggling the paper clip he dropped in my hand. "You're losing your touch. That was terrible." The clip fell out of the gap where my missing finger should have been. To this day, I am not used to that.
He shrugged as he put the back into the box along with the lenses. "You want to come up with a good photography pun on the spur of the moment?"
"Focus of the investigation?"
"No, that's more tortured and even less funny. I shutter to think." I rolled my eyes as he stood and picked up his bag.
We locked up, set the alarm, and left. And oh, my omniscient readers (damn, I like that word), I should remind you that he was carrying the camera. I had a light jacket and a pack of cigarettes; he had a big fucking boxy satchel on a strap that looked like the kind of thing that would carry an SLR and a pack of lenses - sensibly enough, because it did. Yes, this is a plot point. Make a note.
I was thinking of nothing but getting home. Harmony, like almost every lovely young actress in LA, was working as a waitress and hadn't landed a gig since her beer commercial. Wednesdays were her rare nights off, and she dropped by on those nights. I wanted to take advantage of this, and I hoped to hell she did, too. I gave a hearty "Hi, honey, I'm home!" when I walked into the condo. I got a tepid, "Hiya," and wave. She was lying in bed with a beer, watching late-night TV. I pulled one out of the fridge for myself and joined her, kicking off my shoes and shedding my jacket.
"Interesting day?" she asked as soon as a commercial came up.
"Dull. You?"
"I went out to the mall to pick up some shoes. The ones I work in are giving me blisters." I wasn't surprised. They were stiletto heels with leather thongs holding them together. Comfortable shoes were not allowed in SoCal; even the lesbians wore foot-borne tools of torture. "The girl at the counter was an Asian Angelina Jolie. She had overdone the collagen, though. She was halfway to Mick Jagger."
I tried to mack on her during the commercials, and I must have done a decent job, because once the late show was over, she turned off the TV, straddled me, and started yanking my shirt off. She was wearing some dry-clean-only silk undergarment, and so I eased it off gently, recent piercing lectures ringing in the back of my mind. I got it safely onto the nightstand when she got off to pull my pants off, my briefs following them onto the floor.
This moment in time - me, panting, naked and erect, trying to lick the tonsils of the naked and sultry Harmony, might seem to be an odd place to take a breather and note that when I started working for Perry, I gave him a spare key to the condo for emergencies. It's a relevant point, however, because it was at just about this time that the door to the bedroom slammed open with a lot more speed and noise than I thought was called for. Somewhere between that and Perry blowing in like an irate and impeccably-dressed thunderstorm, his face covered with blood that had already dripped down and likely ruined a very sharp suit, took my desire for sex to the back burner - which was a good thing, as Harmony squeaked and jumped back. She paused a moment to take stock, then folded her hands under her rather lovely breasts and asked, "What the hell?"
Perry ignored her, which made her unfold her arms and put her hands on her hips with a glare. "Get dressed, Casanova," he said. "We've got work to do."
"The workday is over, man. What the hell happened to you?"
"Some toughs jumped me and took the camera. Get your pants on. I don't want your naked ass rubbing my seat." He turned to Harmony, who raised an eyebrow archly. "Go stay at your place, or at a friend's, or something. Things could get interesting."
You know, I think this is a good place to end the first chapter. We have exposition, we have suspense, we have the beginnings of a plot. I'm sexually frustrated, even though you probably don't care. Thanks a lot. Right, well, the next chapter will have that car chase I told you about. Yes, I know it's overdone, but it happened, and it was pretty damn exhilirating, too. 'Til then.
The cutlery clinked as the woman played with it nervously in her manicured fingers. The fluorescent light robbed her of color, leaving her pallid and drawn as she sucked a collagen-injected lower lip into her mouth and worried at it.
You like that? I'm working on my prose. Harmony thinks it's lovely. Perry tells me to skip it and just get to the fucking point. Fine, the fucking point is that I was in one of those little cafes that choke LA like kudzu, sitting across from a woman who was all but convinced that her husband was cheating on her. Her husband was 46. I had no idea how old she was, but it's probably a safe bet that most parts of her body were younger than she was at that point. I do a lot of that is-my-husband-cheating stuff. He usually is. Most of the women are former young beauties who have been sliced and enhanced to be slightly more plasticky beauties, and the kind of guy who goes for a girl like that is not really interested in her brain, and jumps at the chance to boink a different young beauty. No shortage of young beauties in LA. If you like that kind of thing.
The woman rambled on, haltingly, and I nodded and scribbled on a pad. Drawings, lewd comments, nothing actually relevant to the case, but Perry told me that people find it reassuring if you jot things down on a pad while talking to them. Nodding and looking serious is good, too.
The woman finally petered out, and deflated with a sigh. "Thank you for helping me out, Mr. Lockheart. I just don't know what to do."
I nodded. I looked serious. "No problem, Mrs. Levitt. I'll put a tail on him this evening." God, the expressions I had gotten into the habit of using. A kid's party game - Pin The Tail On The Philanderer. But the woman smiled, and picked up the check for lunch, which I appreciated.
Does that work as a setup? I hope so, because there's a lot more to come. It gets better, really. It won't be thirty pages of following a guy and watching him boink a starlet. There will be guns and car chases and blood, and all of that other good shit. I'm not sure there's any sex at all, actually. Well, I do almost do Harmony, but I get interrupted. You can count that if you like. I don't.
The way I spent the afternoon was not very interesting. A lot of paperwork. Perry was out following one of the starlets that flock to SoCal like flies to a cow-pie; her agent wanted to know if she was hitting the nasty stuff sooner rather later, so he could arrest her career appropriately. I have been accused, by a party which I shall graciously not name, of being far too interested in bazongas, so I rarely follow starlets. A man can dream, though.
Mrs. Levitt had told me that her husband had his little poker-with-friends outings (no, I won't make the pun - I know you made it already) on Wednesday nights. Yes, it was Wednesday night. I'm not going to start out on Monday and make you hang out with me through three days of watching TV and brushing my teeth. I followed a distinctly un-starlet-like man later that evening. He was fit and handsome enough, if you like that kind of thing, which I don't. I did rather like his Mercedes, especially as it was fucking garish metallic orange and a breeze to follow from way, way back. I followed him from way, way back in the Very Boring VW Golf. It's a great car for this work, as nobody ever notices it. It's a shitty car to own in LA for every other purpose, as nobody ever notices it. It makes me feel like a eunuch when I drive it.
Right. I followed this fellow in his flashy goddam car to a big mall parking lot. I drove right past and pulled in to the next lot over, using my handy binoculars to see what he was up to. I didn't need to be close. Telephotos are good things. But surprise, surprise, the guy was meeting a young Filipino fellow in a slammed Civic with a wing you could hang your laundry on. Cheating is cheating, and I prepared for a rather nauseating set of photos, but there was no hanky-panky. Not a hank or a pank to be seen. Just a large box pulled out of the back of the Civic, big enough that it had been wedged in there, and both of them had to wail on it to get it out of there. They finally breathlessly dumped the box into the trunk of the Mercedes. The husband (his name was Jerry, in case you were wondering - actually, it was and still is Jerry regardless of whether you wondered or not) forked a wad of cash over to the Filipino. He looked left and right, over both shoulders, as he did so, in that way that just screams, "Don't look at me! I'm trying not to be noticed! This is a surreptitious action, goddamit!"
Needless to say, I had a good feeling at that point that this was not exactly an infidelity case. Not that my evening plan was changed by this. I had been hired to find out what he did on Wednesday evenings, and I would do just that.
What he did on Wednesday evenings was go to Angels Gate Park with a big box in his trunk. I parked out on the street. I had planned to meander to the shrubs, but some broad-shouldered fellows were walking around the grounds with more purpose in their stride than most park-goers, so I stayed in the car. What the hell. I had a telephoto. The event itself was disappointingly anticlimactic; the fellow drove up to the bell, a big black fellow with a great deal of bling and a shaved head walked out from under the pavilion to meet him, they shook hands and talked. I couldn't hear a word, of course - I was across the damn street! - but they moved like dudes who don't really like each other and just want to pretend to be affable for a transaction. Two other, slightly less-blinged black guys came out from the pavilion at a motion of the first one's hand, and opened the box. I tried to get a picture of what was inside, but the big fellow wasn't courteous enough to take whatever it was out and wave it around. He forked a wad of cash over to Jerry, his pals covered the box back up, and Jerry drove away. An Escalade rolling on a reasonable-sized mine's worth of chrome pulled up to the pavilion, and the fellows loaded it into the back and got in themselves. Away they went.
Well, at the time, I decided that was it. He was involved in something that must be illegal, for all of the skulking. Or maybe it was hair products, and he had an odd fetish for stealth. It didn't matter. I'd fork the photos over to the wife, and have her do with it what she would.
Now, I'm going to give you a piece of information that I didn't have at the time. One of the lackies must have seen me pull that camera in through my window and drive off, and followed me. Just because I'm telling you that, though, I don't want you to get all superior on me the way readers do when there's an omniscient narrator (I got that one from Harmony). Don't say, "Oh, he should have noticed he was being followed, the stupid twat!" No, I did check my mirrors, but I didn't see. I just drove back to the office and parked the car in the garage.
Perry was in the office when I got back. He had been keeping late nights for a few weeks. I couldn't help noticing that his lack of more fun things to do in the evenings more or less paralleled the growth of the beard and the ponytail. They'd have worked on a skinny gay guy who called straight men 'bitches,' but they just didn't work on him. I can't say it bothered me too much. I'm not homophobic or anything, but the idea of another man sticking his tongue down my best bud's throat is a little disturbing. All right, maybe I am, a little. Sue me.
"Done?" he asked, fiddling with a paper clip.
I sat down on the other side of his desk and put my feet up, out of habit. He batted them back down, for the same. "This one was a bit odd," I replied. "He wasn't cheating." I gave Perry a quick rundown of what had happened.
He frowned. "You couldn't get a look in that box?"
"Nope, and it was across the street and pretty dark when I took the pics. I don't even know if they came out all that good."
"All that well. Good is an adjective." Perry reached his hand out, and I deposited the camera's back into it. I put the box of lenses on the desk. "Well, I'll take these home, and you can tell Miz What's her face about whatever develops."
I shook my head, jiggling the paper clip he dropped in my hand. "You're losing your touch. That was terrible." The clip fell out of the gap where my missing finger should have been. To this day, I am not used to that.
He shrugged as he put the back into the box along with the lenses. "You want to come up with a good photography pun on the spur of the moment?"
"Focus of the investigation?"
"No, that's more tortured and even less funny. I shutter to think." I rolled my eyes as he stood and picked up his bag.
We locked up, set the alarm, and left. And oh, my omniscient readers (damn, I like that word), I should remind you that he was carrying the camera. I had a light jacket and a pack of cigarettes; he had a big fucking boxy satchel on a strap that looked like the kind of thing that would carry an SLR and a pack of lenses - sensibly enough, because it did. Yes, this is a plot point. Make a note.
I was thinking of nothing but getting home. Harmony, like almost every lovely young actress in LA, was working as a waitress and hadn't landed a gig since her beer commercial. Wednesdays were her rare nights off, and she dropped by on those nights. I wanted to take advantage of this, and I hoped to hell she did, too. I gave a hearty "Hi, honey, I'm home!" when I walked into the condo. I got a tepid, "Hiya," and wave. She was lying in bed with a beer, watching late-night TV. I pulled one out of the fridge for myself and joined her, kicking off my shoes and shedding my jacket.
"Interesting day?" she asked as soon as a commercial came up.
"Dull. You?"
"I went out to the mall to pick up some shoes. The ones I work in are giving me blisters." I wasn't surprised. They were stiletto heels with leather thongs holding them together. Comfortable shoes were not allowed in SoCal; even the lesbians wore foot-borne tools of torture. "The girl at the counter was an Asian Angelina Jolie. She had overdone the collagen, though. She was halfway to Mick Jagger."
I tried to mack on her during the commercials, and I must have done a decent job, because once the late show was over, she turned off the TV, straddled me, and started yanking my shirt off. She was wearing some dry-clean-only silk undergarment, and so I eased it off gently, recent piercing lectures ringing in the back of my mind. I got it safely onto the nightstand when she got off to pull my pants off, my briefs following them onto the floor.
This moment in time - me, panting, naked and erect, trying to lick the tonsils of the naked and sultry Harmony, might seem to be an odd place to take a breather and note that when I started working for Perry, I gave him a spare key to the condo for emergencies. It's a relevant point, however, because it was at just about this time that the door to the bedroom slammed open with a lot more speed and noise than I thought was called for. Somewhere between that and Perry blowing in like an irate and impeccably-dressed thunderstorm, his face covered with blood that had already dripped down and likely ruined a very sharp suit, took my desire for sex to the back burner - which was a good thing, as Harmony squeaked and jumped back. She paused a moment to take stock, then folded her hands under her rather lovely breasts and asked, "What the hell?"
Perry ignored her, which made her unfold her arms and put her hands on her hips with a glare. "Get dressed, Casanova," he said. "We've got work to do."
"The workday is over, man. What the hell happened to you?"
"Some toughs jumped me and took the camera. Get your pants on. I don't want your naked ass rubbing my seat." He turned to Harmony, who raised an eyebrow archly. "Go stay at your place, or at a friend's, or something. Things could get interesting."
You know, I think this is a good place to end the first chapter. We have exposition, we have suspense, we have the beginnings of a plot. I'm sexually frustrated, even though you probably don't care. Thanks a lot. Right, well, the next chapter will have that car chase I told you about. Yes, I know it's overdone, but it happened, and it was pretty damn exhilirating, too. 'Til then.