City Of Sinners

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

The City Of Sinners is a City in terminal decline; the traffic is static and stinking on the streets with poisonous fumes; litter flies up in your face; pollution is killing people; the weather is appalling, worse than you can imagine; and law and order have broken down because of corruption. No one can be trusted, least of all the cops or the politicians. Standing almost alone are the P.I.s of the Kingdom Detective Agency, who are trying to hold back the tide, trying to return the City to some kind of decency. They are threatened, shot at, intimidated, burned, but our unnamed hero and the other P.I's, Sally, Hills, Sammny and Blossom fight back with the aid of some retired Navy Seals and The Ghost, someone who doesn't like drug dealers, who doesn't like what they sell, the weapons they have, or they money they accumalate. An exciting new novel from a new author with a wonderful imagination, s.d. gripton

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Dec 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466048829

S.D. Gripton

S.D. Gripton novels and real crime books are written by Dennis Snape, who is married to Sally who originate from North Wales and Manchester respectively and who met 18 years ago. I work very hard to make a reading experience a good one, with good plots and earthy language. I enjoy writing and hope readers enjoy what I have written. I thank everyone who has ever looked at at one of my books.

Book preview

City Of Sinners

A Crime Novel

By

S.D. Gripton & Sally Dillon-Snape

Copyright © Sally Dillon-Snape & Dennis Snape (2022)

The moral right of the authors is hereby asserted in accordance with The Copyright Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication other than those of fact and historical significance available in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher

The Cover is by Mike Evans

Chapter 1

Large colorful cushions littered the floor and youngsters were sitting amongst them. Each child was blank of expression, dead of eye…

…and naked.

They sat totally still; six girls and three boys; straight-backed, cross-legged, arms by their sides, palms flat on the floor, just as they'd been ordered to sit. They looked like pale-skinned statues as, in the silence, they waited…

…and waited…

…until the metal door of the air conditioned, windowless room eventually swung open and a beautiful, and beautifully dressed, woman stood there, holding the door while a man entered. He was a very ugly man with a very ugly nose and although he was ugly, he had a very wide grin upon his face.

He pushed the metal doors shut and they were locked from the other side.

He began to remove his clothes.

***

The day was wet, the sky overcast and it was cold. It was an average sort of day in the City of Sinners where the weather ranged from awful to bloody abominable, where the locally-named seamog; which was a cold, rolling, thick, heavy sea mist from the estuary which mixed with pollution from the City and its factories and became one of the most poisonous weather conditions in the world; moved in with regular monotony and killed thousands.

It seemed to me that we had almost no old people left in the city. The seamog had gotten them all. If you didn't die, your chest became ruined and you coughed all of the time. If the seamog didn't get you it was the greasy rain that fell like stair-rods and burned holes in the roof of your car and from which nobody was safe. Shoes got ruined if you walked in it; clothes rotted on your back. Grandparents who had lived their whole lives in the city had never seen more than one week of sunshine a year and the days during which the sun did shine never occurred in the same week; there hadn’t been consecutive days of warmth since God was a child. I woke every morning feeling nothing but awe for anybody who still wanted to live in the city. City of Sinners didn't do it justice. It was so much worse than that.

And what was I doing on this unhappy day to make myself feel better?

Well, nothing much.

I was driving an atrociously colored pink van around an airport apron, delivering food to airplanes; not even that really, because I’d already delivered all my van's food, it was empty. I was now checking on food being delivered to other airplanes because someone was stealing the expensive booze and perfume supposed to be kept on board for the paying customer.

Oh, what a fuss had been caused when some rich bastard wanted to purchase his favorite brandy and the stewards and stewardesses found it to be missing; or the older playboy who wished to impress his favorite mistress with the perfume she swooned over, only to find it had gone walkabout. Oh, dear me, what a kafuffle there had been.

That's when I got called in.

Not me personally, you understand, but my company, The Kingdom Detective Agency, of which I owned fifty-two per cent, the rest of it being shared between my partners Sammy Leven, Sally Evans and Sandra Hills.

We all used to be cops in Homicide but the corruption pissed us off so much that we walked and set up our own Detective Agency. We'd been at it for over a year now and it was beginning to go all right. Nothing that was going to make us millionaires, we were never going to be Pinkerton, but we managed to keep a roof over our heads and pay the bills. It was the best we could expect from life and business, I supposed.

And the four of us had our own talents within the Company.

Sandra Hills, for example, was born to organize, to manage an office; she possessed no skills at all as a cop or as an investigator; as a cop and a working PI she'd been crap but as an office manager she’d been nothing short of sensational, a genius. I was very proud of the fact that I'd been the one to lead her into the light, to help banish any thoughts she may have harbored of actually being a Detective. She was as uptight as ever of course, unsmiling and serious, with little humor in her bones, but nobody could question her efficiency or her honesty. She didn't thank me as often as she should for me bringing her into the light.

Sammy was our undercover man. That was because he looked, and often smelled, like someone who lived in the gutter. He was like that almost all the time.

There was no low-life he couldn't mix with and not be taken as one of their own. He knew most of the drug dealers in the city and was friends with all the pushers. He understood more about the underbelly of the city than anyone alive. I was grateful he worked for our side as I would have hated for him to be batting for the opposition, not with the knowledge he had. To say he was brilliant was like saying Mount Everest was a mound. I was very fond of Sammy.

Sally Evans was our divorce specialist.

She had a body that appeared to have been put together by perverts; long shapely legs, beautifully rounded ass, slim waist and breasts that had both a life and personality all of their own. Men loved those breasts, which was a joy when Sally went entrapping them on behalf of wives. She did some other investigations, of course, but not often, because divorce was her speciality. Once she became involved in a marriage you got divorced; it was as simple as that

I was the Chief Investigator but only because I used to be a Lieutenant in Homicide and the boss of all those mentioned, and I owned fifty-two per cent of the shares. Did I mention that? I held meetings with important people who had important problems (I'd discovered that important people always had important problems, they never had unimportant, trivial, irritating ones like the rest of us). I smiled a lot at these meeting, made like I knew what I was talking about and it must work because we kept getting employed.

And this helped with the income we very nearly didn't get.

The Police Department objected to our operating license on four separate occasions; almost costing us all the money we had in appeals; on the grounds that as retired Homicide Detectives we were all party to privileged information. It was a load of bullshit, of course, but they were mad at me particularly for going to the media about the Pinkney investigation. I did it because it was the only way I thought there was ever going to be any justice.

The Department lost every appeal, which made them even madder at me. We got visited about twice a week by both uniformed cops and Detectives and if it wasn't them, it was somebody wanting to inspect the books. As if they had a chance of finding anything amiss against Sandra Hills. She sucked them in and spat them out with regular repetitiveness. Once they'd been cosseted in a room with Sandra for a couple of hours, they were glad to escape and never wanted to come back.

And we had an additional partner since we'd set up (we all gave up one per cent of our holdings to make her such, that’s why I only now had fifty two percent).

About six months ago we decided, at one of our rare meetings, that we should have an in-house lawyer, someone who could stop cops bothering us or at least threaten them with legal action if they continued harassing us, and we decided to find someone who would do it for cheap. The lawyer we employed was actually unemployed when we found her.

Blossom Street her name was, and she was red-hot. Not in a sexual way, you understand; though she was pretty hot in that department, too; but in a legal way. She was in her late thirties and a single mom. Hills and Evans got on really well with her, Blossom being the only person who could make Hills smile; not laugh exactly, but make a noisy smile. She'd been married and divorced and during the hearings for that divorce she’d been shafted by her own lawyer who, it turned out, was having an affair with her husband. No matter how much she complained, nothing was ever done about it because both lawyer and husband lied through their smiling teeth every time they appeared in front of a judge. Blossom decided it must, by the law of averages, have happened before and she decided it would never happen again if she could help it.

She paid her own way through College and University, mostly by doing bar-work, stripping and pole dancing, from which she could have earned both a living and a fortune if only she’d been somebody with less determination. Her heart was set on the Bar and at her second attempt she achieved it. Only to discover that not many companies wanted a pole-dancing stripper lawyer on their books. Kingdom Detective Agency didn't care. We offered her the job only fifteen-minutes into her interview.

She was so good that visits by cops were down to six a month.

Blossom kept us all on the straight and narrow, which was good when you were dealing with someone like Sammy Leven who often thought he was a one-man vigilante force, or Sally, who was often tempted to slide over to the sexual dark-side of life. It was a full-time job just stopping her. Blossom said Sally needed a man to keep her occupied, to get her doing some housework and making babies. That would keep her mind on the job. She was probably right.

My mind was being kept on my job, this particular job, by the cold, the wet and the sloshing around airplanes, lifting food up steps and bringing empty containers down and by the fact that I'd discovered who it was who was stealing the expensive booze and perfume.

Amazingly, it was the stewards and stewardesses, something a monkey could have told the Airport Authorities right from the get-go if only the Authorities had come bearing bananas. It was costing them much, much more than that to employ me. The stuff was being smuggled out by aircrew in their underwear because the nice people who frisked them when they left the Airport after a flight thought it impolite to actually handle the bits between steward and stewardess’s legs. Thousands of dollars worth of expensive booze and perfume were being stolen every single day and it had taken years for anyone to notice. Sandra Hills would have known in the blink of an eye. Why couldn't airports employ somebody as good as her? That question was too difficult for me to answer.

I was currently following a team of stewards and stewardesses who, between them, were responsible for serious amounts of theft, and I was making sure none of them went missing until security had checked them out, including handling their bits.

As the stewards and stewardesses disembarked, they waved and smiled at me, and me being the bastard I was, I waved and smiled back. They were all going to lose their jobs, some may even do jail time. Their homes had already been raided by real cops and all kinds of illegally smuggled stuff had been found, including DVDs and magazines of disgusting overseas porn.

How had I discovered those facts, the real cop facts, when the Department hated my guts?

It was because of Detective Stanley Livingstone (don't go there, he already got enough shit about his name, it wasn't his fault, but if my parents had given me such a moniker, I would have killed them). He was my only contact in the Homicide Division of the Major Crimes Unit. He was new, from out of the city; though why anyone from out of the city would ever want to come into it remained a mystery to me; and he didn't remember me from when I was a cop.

And those were a wonderful couple of advantage points for me when I hunted him down to a bar and bought him a drink. I wasn’t looking for him in particular; I didn’t step into the bar thinking Stanley Livingstone, he’s the one: I was searching for any new Homicide cop who would be my contact and I found him. He liked me, I liked him and he was now my inside man. If it ever got out that he was giving me information, he would be skinned alive, especially by Lieutenant Adams, who used to be my Detective Sergeant and who had developed into someone who was a first-class bastard. Luckily, Livingstone was an outsider, not only because he came from out of the City but because he bore a moustache, a real Frank Zappa type; for those of us who remember Frank; when Homicide prided itself upon the clean-shaven appearance of all its Detectives, male and female. They gave him hell about it but Livingstone wouldn't shave it off because his crazy, hippy wife liked it. His isolation was to my benefit and being the disgraceful person I was, I took full advantage of it.

Once the international flying thieves had been rounded up and taken away; knickerless I would have thought, after their lower bits had finally been inspected; I drove the pink van back to Mama; that was what we called the woman who ran the catering warehouse; and I reported in. With only a coupla more leads to follow, my time at the airport would soon be done. As I shucked out of my wet clothing, Mama called me into her office.

After hanging up my drenched uniform, I entered her sanctum, closed the door behind me and pulled up a chair.

Don't sit, Mama said, seriously, as she stood on the other side of her desk. It has come to my attention that you're a Private Investigator brought in by Fascist Management to investigate staff at this Airport. Pick up what pay you've got coming and get outta my sight. Try and stay out of everybody's sight; in fact, try not to speak to anybody, they might just slap you.

They can try, I said, as I slammed my way out of her tiny office.

Fascist management?

Who th'hell used language like that any longer?

And who blew my cover?

Cops, I bet.

***

The girl rose from her pillow, trembling and pale, and walked to where the ugly man sat on a large colorful cushion.

Kneel with me, he said.

It was not a request.

The girl knelt and there were tears in her eyes.

I will thrash you if you cry, the ugly man said and he meant it.

He would thrash her and enjoy doing it. He was twice her height and almost three-times her weight.

The girl sniffed back her tears.

You must smile for me.

She beamed a beatific smile.

That's better. Now come, lie with me here.

The girl lay down and he stroked her hair and her naked shoulders, all the time smiling at her and humming a tuneless air.

The metal door opened again and several other men entered, pulling off their own clothes. They all had smiles on their faces, too, and their brows were covered with a sheen of sweat, the result of the excitement they were feeling that was beyond their belief. They were living their sick dreams.

One day those dreams would come back, not only to haunt them, but to bite them.

Hard.

For today, they enjoyed their perverted pleasures.

***

I picked up the pay I was entitled to, departed the Catering Department and reported to the Authorities who sat in large chairs in high offices and who looked down upon the airport and saw nothing but their own huge salaries.

My cover had been blown so I would be moving on, I informed them; and did they know they were Fascist Management? They seemed confused at this, both words being somewhat of a mystery to them, so I moved on, giving them a verbal report on the thefts, promising to follow it up with a written one, with a bill for my time. They thanked me. If ever I had to come back here, I'd investigate the Catering Division instead of the flight crews. I never noticed anything amiss while I was working there; a whole seven days of it, up early in the morning, out and about around airplanes before the break of dawn, up steps, down bloody steps, I had no idea how normal people did such jobs, maybe I was spoilt; but with so much food hanging around in one building there was bound to be graft somewhere.

I eventually found my car in the massive parking lot but it was like a treasure hunt and had been every day I’d worked there. As well as not knowing how they did the work I also never worked out how they found their cars; it took me forty minutes on average each day, including the forty it took today.

Bad-temperedness was upon me when I walked into the office, as it would have been upon you if you'd just been dismissed from your job by Mama, then had trouble finding your car while the rain poured down on your head, probably eating into your skull and gradually driving your insane. Sandra Hills was sitting just inside the door; at a beautifully appointed desk I'd paid for.

You look to be in an ill temper, she said, the moment I entered.

She always talked like that, like an English Debutante, when England could afford such things. England couldn’t afford much now.

I thought about the correct English I should use in reply to her.

Piss off, I said. Where is everybody?

Blossom is in her office, a very tiny office it must admitted, only half the size of my own, but I was Senior Investigator, fifty-two per cent owner, and Sammy and Sally are out earning a living; for you.

She smiled.

Since she'd been working with me, she'd learned sarcasm and was becoming extremely good at it.

I had no idea where she'd picked it up.

Are there any messages? I asked, just to put her in her place. She was a mere office worker after all. Ah, to you Hills.

One, she replied. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but you receive very much fewer inquiries than the other operatives. They are as busy as bees all the time.

I leaned on the desk.

Listen, madam, I have just been working early morning shifts at an airport for seven days in succession. I have been out and about in all sorts of terrible weather, if you haven't noticed, while you have been driving to work in your little car, dressed for a party or a conference, as you usually are, while my conditions have been crap. Totally crap. I am fifty-one years of age now and I deserve better treatment don't you think?

She opened her mouth to reply; I raised a hand to stop her.

I do. I work hard to keep the wolf away from my door, and your door come to that. Do I deserve to be so misused? Don't answer that.

She was going to.

No, I don't. So, when I finally manage to get to my place of business…

Our place of business, Hills interceded.

I ignored her.

…I expect a little bit of respect and some kind words from partners and staff.

If only we had some, Hills added, stopping my rant dead in its tracks. As you know I have been asking for a secretary for ages now.

Hills, you are the secretary.

I’m the Office Manager, she retorted, becoming annoyed.

But you do the typing, don't you, the filing, the book-keeping, you answer the phone, you buy the coffee and milk and sugar and make sure the water machine has water in it? Aren't they the duties a secretary would carry out?

No, they are not, Hills said, huffily. And from now on you can do your own typing, your own filing and purchase your own coffee. So there.

She jumped up from the desk and disappeared into the rest room.

What th'hell was that all about?

I looked up to see Blossom standing in her office door.

Did you take lessons in insensitivity, she asked, because, if you did, you must have been the star pupil?

I'm going for a shower, I said, to get some of this airport shit off my body and out of my clothes; and I’m gonna wash the rain out of my hair before it rots my teeth.

That’s the best thing you could do, Blossom said, demurely. See if you could possibly return as a human being.

She disappeared back into her office and closed the door quietly behind her.

Junior partners don't show proper respect to their leaders any longer. Have you noticed?

I didn't have any great distance to go to shower. I simply entered my office by one door, closed it behind me and opened the one opposite it on the other side of the room, through which I stepped onto a staircase that led up to my apartment. It was no five-star residence that was for sure; it wasn't even as nice as the one I used to own in Downy Court; from where the other residents asked me to leave following an incident; but it was home. It had four bedrooms, two of them small, just in case anyone ever visited, though no one had in the year I'd lived in it, not even my avaricious kids, who called less and less times for money because they now understood that I was as poor as they were. The harassment from my ex-husband had even abated and that was a miracle akin to the Second Coming. He was still a pain-in-the-ass; I just wished he could be happier with his slut of a baby-sitter; well, my baby-sitter actually, the one I’d employed before he’d decided to move in with her; then lie during the divorce proceedings so that I lost everything. There must be a thing about divorced people lying.

But I wasn't bitter.

Much.

I pulled off the jeans and sweatshirt I was wearing, lobbed them into the laundry basket, which was full, which reminded me to do some laundry, and my underwear and socks followed. Did people, I thought, other than those who delivered food to airplanes, wear such clothes to work? Surely not. They were the most uncomfortable items of clothing I'd ever worn, except for some ill-fitting bras I purchased at a Mart once. I ran the shower to warm, climbed under the water and washed the shit of the day from my body; my body being my temple. The one I fought so hard to keep younger than the fifty-one years it was. I swam, I ran, I drank alcohol sparsely. I ate lots of vegetables, drank lots of water and still the goddamned thing looked as if it was falling apart. My breasts; which were averagely sized, so I thought, and I’d had complementary comments about them over the years; were heading south no matter how many breast muscle exercises I did. There was no color to my skin, there wouldn't be as long as I lived in this city where, on the rare sunny days, people cavorted naked in the streets. If I ever caught a day when it shone, I would cavort, too. And my ass was sagging. Other than surgery, of which I was terrified, there seemed to be nothing I could do except accept it and grow old gracefully. Of course, I was world famous for my grace.

I scrubbed myself, washed my hair twice in an effort to remove the chemicals that fell on it during the rainstorm, though I doubted I would ever succeed. I dried off, padded around in a towel, brewed coffee, which I liked strong and black, and made and ate a sandwich.

One hour later, with make-up on, hair dried and brushed, dressed in a good suit, white blouse and with my humor much improved I returned to my duties as Senior Investigator. I descended the stairs, opened one door to my office, closed it behind me and opened the other, declaring to one and all that I was back in harness.

No one seemed to care.

Sammy was at his desk, behind the screen that hid him from people passing and staring through the window; feet up as usual, no matter how many times I'd told him about it, and he was talking on the phone; Sally was reading what looked like a fashion magazine, which was a bit odd when everything she wore made her look like a hooker. Sandra Hills was back at the desk following her little hissy fit and she was also talking on the phone; hopefully with another client. Blossom was sitting in the client area reading a newspaper.

I'm back, I said, a little louder, and they all turned and smiled at me and went back to what they were doing. They didn’t appear to be showing anywhere near the proper respect towards their boss.

Piss on their shoes, I thought, as I backed into my office and closed the door. I sat at my own desk, took out my notes about the thefts at the Airport and began to type them up on the computer. What th'hell was Hills talking about? I already did my own typing.

Halfway through the typing of the report, there came a knock on my door and about time, too.

I shouted Come in, which I shouldn't've done really; I should've asked who was knocking first because all my co-workers and partners entered, like a union delegation.

What's up? I asked, as they pulled up chairs and sat without seeking my permission, in a semi-circle facing me from the other side of my desk. They looked remarkably like a jury and a hanging jury, at that.

What's up? I repeated.

Blossom spoke. It was always the lawyer who was the first with something to say. Have you ever noticed that?

We need a secretary, she said.

Why? I waved at the computer. I'm doing my own typing.

Spinning round in my chair, I pointed at the filing cabinets.

And my files are immaculate. You can find anything in them whenever you want it found.

But you didn't organize either the computer program or the files, boss, Sally said. It was Sandra who organized them so that we could all be neat and tidy and to know where everything was,

Sammy agreed with her, the treacherous little bastard.

And that said it all about Sandra Hills; bloody neat and bloody tidy.

We don't have enough work for a secretary.

We have plenty of work for one, Hills argued back. It would leave me more time to speak with clients instead of just thrusting a cup of coffee into their hand, sitting them down and waiting for someone to become available.

It works in hospitals, I argued.

People die waiting.

Thanks for that, Sammy.

I looked around at their expectant faces and knew there was no wining the argument. Hills had out-maneuvered me.

An office junior, I stated, on minimum pay and Hills trains her up.

Thank you, Senior Investigator, Hills said, with a sweet little smile.

Don't mention it, Office Manager. Will we be advertising for the position?

There is no need, Blossom said, with a wide smile. My daughter Rose is looking for work. She's a good girl, clever, sixteen going on seventeen or thirty and she can begin straight away.

My head dropped down on to the desk with a resounding thump. My co-workers could tie me in knots any time they wanted.

There are more messages for you now, boss, Hills said, as they all stood except her, putting back their chairs and high-fiving as they departed the office.

You'd better bring them in so we can go through them.

She stood, leaned forward and patted my right hand.

You can't win them all you know, and you should give up trying.

Bring the messages.

***

Chapter 2

Hills returned with the messages, all of which were written on pink slips. I was pink, Sammy was blue, Sally green, Blossom white. It was another system instigated by Miss Tidy Knickers but, to be fair to her, it worked pretty well. As the Office Manager she got to choose who got what job and her instincts were usually pretty good.

First of all, there is that one.

She slid the pink slip across the desk, it had a number in the left corner so I would know how many cases I'd had since we'd set up the company. It said 112, which I thought was pretty good until I noticed one day that Sally was in the three-hundreds.

Its a little odd in that the caller left no phone number, cell or otherwise and offered only a temporary address in Blandford…

Blandford, I exclaimed with a sense of horror, the place on the other side of the highway?

It would be that Blandford, yes, Hills confirmed.

The city was surrounded by an eight-lane highway beyond which it was not allowed to expand because of some two-hundred-year-old covenant. In earlier times, when the city had consisted of six mud huts and a shared wood fire, a circular path had woven its way through what would have been undergrowth, trees and bushes and shit like that, following the curve of the river but now, in its place, we had the eight lanes of the highway. Originally the only way to cross the river was by ferry then about two-hundred-years ago somebody designed a bridge for pedestrians and horses and carts, but now we had two bridges, one of which accommodated the highway. The original pathway had been a track for horses and their carts; probably for dinosaurs before that; and the amount of land available must have seemed enormous to the founding fathers so they placed in law a covenant about city expansion limits that nobody had ever been allowed to overturn. The founding fathers never envisaged the city would grow to the size it now was.

Somebody once famously said, during an early debate, My dear man, honorable member, millions of people will never want to live here; in fact, we shall discourage such numbers. We will make it a city for the intelligent person, the artist, the businessman and the banker. The riff-raff will never be allowed to live within the horse trail.

The ass got some things right.

Many intelligent and artistic people did work here in the city, as did businessmen and bankers, though none of them actually lived here any longer. They all lived in wooded villages such as Linding and Blandford and hundreds of other such villages that lay on the other side of the highway and which were protected in their way of life and rural beauty by the law that restricted the growth of the metropolis. The City Council, or the Mayor, occasionally challenged the ruling, but only in a half-hearted manner, and always before elections, but nothing ever changed. The city just festered as buildings got higher, closer together and not necessarily nicer, as the population grew with every passing day. The riff-raff had, in fact, won the day.

How am I to contact this person? I enquired.

"He, it is a he,