Excerpt: Peace and Joy

Franklin S. Fargo, private eye, liked to watch Humphry Bogart movies. He also liked Topper, and Cary Grant. He loved the “old fashioned” way the men dressed, the dapper suits, the fedoras. And he loved the way they worked the women then. They were all so macho, so unafraid to spit in a dame’s face and dare her to walk out.

And all of the dames were swooning at their feet.

All of it held a rather romantic nostalgia for him.

For most people, Frankie’s love of the era and his fascination with Bogart made him a bit difficult to take in large doses. He knew this, and liked it. It was fun for him to keep people guessing. “I hold my cards close to my vest, see” he would imagine himself saying to people. He had never really quite gotten the hang of using the word “see” in that way without it sounding quite contrived. But his inner dialogue was full of “sees”, and “dames” and “broads”, and “tough-guys” and “smart-guys”. It was all quite amusing for him, but sometimes did prove to be a challenge when what he wanted to say so badly was not on par with modern conversation and there just didn’t seem to be a more perfect way of phrasing something.

He had also determined it was best to keep a modern wadrobe, and resisted the temptation to outfit himself in baggies with braces and pinstriped suits.

He had, however, adopted a sort of “swagger” about himself. That, a somewhat cynical persona and a rather flippant way of dealing with people kept them at arms length, which was just where he liked them.

But Frankie had never mastered the Dames. He had fallen for one on a business trip to Las Vegas in his former life. “A real looker, she was; a boozy-floozy giving me goo-goo eyes in a hot dress” was how he liked to describe her, when he talked about her, which was never. She had played him perfectly, taking his heart and his money as surely as a baby takes to milk.

The very first room in his suite looked just the part of an old detective flick. He loved that he actually had the words “private eye” painted on the glass of his office window, which looked down on Metropolitan Parkwy and all of it’s modern day congestion. He kept the hoizontal blinds up that had come with the place. He had been disappointed that they were not wood, but they were a brownish plastic, so they were close enough.

An umbrella holder near the door, a vintage tree coat in the corner behind a behemoth of a desk. An old typewriter sat on the desk, the real kind of typewriter, complete with sticky j key and manual return. The place looked just as though his own personal gal Friday had stepped out to lunch. And that is precisely how Frankie liked it.