Dark Poison: A Mike Angel Private Eye Mystery

By David H Fears

When a grotesque and melodramatic female seeks protection from a convict Mike helped to send up, his scar needles heat up. After she slips Mike a mysterious substance in his coffee he suffers near total paralysis. While she rifles his office, he can only watch her take a file and leave. The next morning he awakes and tries to identify what was taken. Once he pinpoints the case file he stumbles through a chain of events involving three murders, an interview with a convict at Joliet, and a reinvestigation of the diamond heist and killing—which in turn uncovers a suspicious international gem company with ties to Argentina, escaped Nazis, the Daley administration, and the CIA.

Throughout the episode Mike struggles against attraction for Rebecca Lutz, a vulnerable blonde employed by the gem company whose sister is named in the stolen file. Rebecca becomes the client and helps Mike uncover the truth about the company. Tension builds from this triangle, which includes his office whiz Molly Bennett, and parallels the building suspense in solving the murders and capturing the escaped Nazi. A twisting climax in this the 4th in the Mike Angel Mystery series, complex, historical, erotic novels set in Chicago in 1963.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David H Fears
• Release date: Jan 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9780971486898

David H Fears

David was known by the handle “professor” as a boy (no doubt the thick black spectacles, Buddy Holly style), and has had a lifetime interest in Mark Twain. He has also written nearly one hundred short stories with about sixteen published, and is working on the 14th Mike Angel PI Mystery novel.Fears is a pretty handy name for horror stories, but he also has written mainstream nostalgic, literary, some fantasy/magical realism, as well as the PI novels. For the past decade he has devoted his full time to producing Mark Twain Day By Day, a four-volume annotated chronology in the life of Samuel L. Clemens. Two volumes are now available, and have been called, “The Ultimate Mark Twain Reference” by top Twain scholars. His aim for these books is “to provide a reference and starting-off place for the Twain scholar, as well as a readable book for the masses,” one that provides many “tastes” of Twain and perspective into his complex and fascinating life. He understands this is a work that will never be “finished” — in fact, he claims that no piece of writing is ever finished, only abandoned after a time. As a historian, David enjoys mixing historical aspects in his fiction.David recently taught literature and writing at DeVry University in Portland, his third college stint. His former lives enjoyed some success in real estate and computer business, sandwiched between undergraduate studies in the early 70s and his masters degree in education and composition, awarded in 2004.He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and has lived in New England, Southern California and Nevada. David is youthful looking and is the father of three girls, the grandfather of four and the great-grandfather of two; he’s written, “It all shows what you can do if you fool around when you’re very young.” David’s a card. How many of us think humor has a place in mystery tales or history tomes? He claims his calico cat Sophie helps him edit his stories while lying across his arm when he is composing, and sinking her claws in with any poorly drawn sentence. As a writer, a humorist, a cat lover and father of girls, he relates well to Clemens. Writing hardboiled PI novels is his way of saying "NUTS!" to politically correct fiction.UPDATE: Beloved Calico Sophie died on Apr 24, 2016 at 13 & 1/2 years. She is sorely missed.

Book preview

Dark Poison: A Mike Angel Mystery

By David H Fears

Copyright 2011

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles in the Series:

Dark Quarry, Dark Lake, Dark Blonde, Dark Poison

Dark Idol, Dark Moon, Dark Fantasy

Dark Conspiracy, Dark Red

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Chapter 1 – Lily Visits

I’d never been poisoned before. I’d been followed, chased, run down, beat up, tied, taped, gagged, sapped, spit on, clawed, slammed, twisted, knifed, slugged, and shot—but never poisoned. I’m Mike Angel, private investigator, Jersey transplant to Chicago. My credentials? An Army MP stint in Korea, two years with the New York blues, then picking up my murdered dad’s private investigation business for six yawn-filled years sludging into other people’s business. I’d absorbed and expected certain kinds of abuse, but didn’t much care for being drugged in a cozy lace and tea mystery. Or rather coffee. Here’s how it happened:

It was a rainy April afternoon in 1963 when a slender—to the point of emaciated—female in a tailored charcoal suit stepped into my office. In six years only three skirts had found my place of business. Not that I’m ugly or it’s out of the way—a walk up, in the middle of what Chicagoans call Wrigleyville, a few blocks from that boxy stadium on Addison where those beloved losers toss a ball around. Most of the time back then I did insurance fraud cases for corporate clients who called in the setup, boring me into senility before my time.

The few dames who did find me usually wanted me to trace a missing sot of a husband who wasn’t missing but should have been. Shabby sort of work I didn’t seek out. But Jack Daniels money.

The silver-screen image of a breathless buxom babe offering more than retainer to the hardened, horny PI never came my way. Nothing breathless about this homely visitor, although she was more than buxom enough. She looked like she needed help sitting up in the morning.

She toed in tentatively, almost tiptoeing, which I figured was her way of balancing on those silvery stilt heels she wore.

I’m seeking Mister Angel. The voice came through a long nose with a brazen Romanesque jut that gave her mug a severe expression. That nose made her quite ugly—a Cessna could have landed on it—and taken off again—without turning around.

I confessed to being the name on the door, but resisted telling her she was only client number four who’d found my office in six years. My business mostly came on referrals from attorneys or insurance companies. I stared while pulling out the chair next to my desk because she was a real puzzle to look at.

She didn’t seem old or young; her face as timeless as a mantel clock’s. Stretched tight around a bony skull and buried under smears of pancake mess and powder that crowded her hairline and crooked eyebrows. I guessed what was under all that stuff couldn’t be any worse.

She sat erect, shoulders back, then nimbly flared out a three inch ciggie holder that looked like real gold and planted one of those Canadian Black Cats and waited patiently for me to light it. I held my Zippo under it. I knew the brand by the nasty smell. A buddy of mine was addicted to Black Cats before a North Korean bullet finished his addiction to breathing.

The holder trembled slightly but her eyes were as hard as her ramrod shoulders. I thought of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

I am Miss Lily Laframboise, originally of London, French extraction. Her nose did somewhat resemble DeGaulle’s and she talked through it convincingly. I have a matter of urgency, and you’ve been highly recommended.

Have I? Well, I don’t get many French clients from London. Tell me, did they ever nab Jack the Ripper? I’ve always figured he lammed it to France.

If the lady ever had a sense of humor, customs had confiscated it. But then, most Brit humor deserves to be confiscated.

I broke the awkward silence: Who did the recommending?

She gave a weak smile that didn’t qualify for a smile at all. More like pained patience you might show in a dentist’s chair.

A charming but utterly useless man. Lieutenant Burk of the Chicago police. She exaggerated the Brit pronunciation as left-tenant. The local constabulary claims there’s nothing they can do until the scalawag cuts my throat.

Ed Burk was the only Chicago cop I halfway admired, half the time, but charming? Only if you like dyspeptic bulldogs. He had the unkempt aura I feared for myself in twenty years: always black stubble on a sour splotchy face, hair slicked back to cover a shiny circle on top. I could well imagine Burk puffing to get rid of her.

Her speech was as eccentric as her smokes, Big Ben with a dollop of the Eiffel Tower and a touch of Jane-Crawford-nasty. Her lines seemed rehearsed, delivered with a melodramatic air. I wanted to slap her just to see if she could scream through that hangar of a nose of hers.

Just as my impatience gained momentum, and as sudden as a Midwest hailstorm, the erect Miss Lily slumped forward and dampened a postage stamp-sized hankie that appeared from nowhere.

I reached dutifully for a Kleenex from my bottom drawer to offer as a backup, but the tears stopped as suddenly as they’d appeared. Maybe her hankie was properly sized for all two of them.

The corner of her mouth quavered. She took a long drag on her chimney.

He’s a beast! Oh, I just know he will do me bodily harm. What do I know about his missing diamonds?

I’d walked into a theater in the middle of a B grade movie and waited for the cartoons. I reached behind me to the cabinet and poured myself another cup of coffee, wishing it wasn’t too early for something stronger. Looking at her face much longer, I’d need a double.

I needed a retainer even worse. Why don’t you tell me the story from the beginning. I like beginnings. They start things, which is why rational folks put them up front.

The lady did lip calisthenics. Maybe she was silently sorting her lines. She asked if she might share a cup with me, that it smelled exquisite. Right then I knew she was a fake—my coffee may be many things, but exquisite ain’t one of them. I obliged and studied theatrical Lily over the brim of my cup. In time she wound up and spit out the whole ugly mess—her tale, not the coffee.

I didn’t interrupt, even though if her lines had been in a novel I’d have flung the book to the wall. I stayed awake by nodding and lighting up my own brand of smoke, Luckies, and by focusing on a Hollywood-type mole on her cheek that bounced slightly when she talked. Follow the bouncing mole.

Her coup de gras came shortly after she removed her jacket to reveal her one area of nature’s blessing. The size of her balcony was enhanced by her twig figure, but even so, they’d be huge on Kate Smith. Twig limbs, plus tits the Smithsonian would overbid for—that’s the way life often is, opposites usually even out. In the dark she might be interesting, if those acting skills translated to enthusiasm, and I could get the picture of her schnoz outta my head. Yeah, so I’m nasty.

My listening skills got better. I agreed to take her money—that is—her case. But there wasn’t really a case to take. Yet.

Later, my partner Rick told me Laframboise meant, appropriately enough, raspberry in French.

She gestured and sighed, cried, sniffled, pled and lobbied for protection from Eddie Randizi, a duck I’d delivered to Joliet a couple years back. Obviously she knew of my involvement in the case. My file showed he was on a twenty stretch. Out that early? Stranger things have happened in Illinois penal history.

Normally, I don’t do bodyguard gigs. I liken it to standing in front of a target while bullets whiz out of the shadows. But Lily slipped out five green pictures of Ben Franklin, begging me to investigate why Randizi had threatened her about some missing diamonds she knew nothing of.

She was certainly a contrast to working for insurance company comptrollers, I gave her that. I took the bait mostly out of boredom. There was that Damocles’ sword thing with my bank account to consider. If Lily’s tale read like a cheap novel, it was the sort of trash I had to read to the end.

Since five hundred was exactly five times my checking balance and the rent was overdue, I let Lily’s warm cash short-circuit my prone-to-male-fantasy judgment. She didn’t seem thankful or relieved or even surprised I’d accepted her case—another marker I should have been alerted to. But mostly, I should have listened to Dad’s signal—my jaw-line scar started to boil like a nervous, nasty snake. More on that later.

I stood and turned my back to fish out Randizi’s file. That’s when she must have juiced my coffee. I sat back down and downed the rest in my cup. Strange flavor. Not exactly French roast. Never turn your back on a pair of 46DD’s.

I tried to read the file but my eyes grew twitchy. I leaned back, rubbed my face. The room tilted. She smirked. I watched her shake a two-inch long ash from her three-inch holder onto my desk. I fixed on the flakes, which scattered and rose . . . scattered and rose.

Chapter 2 – Mike’s Down

My face was a lump of clay, disconnected from the rest of me, looking out over the cold smeared dirt of my office floor. I’d have to start tipping the janitor.

Was this the end?

My first thought was denial that the poison might be fatal—even though dirges wandered in my head like New Orleans funeral marches in even slower time. Still, I could blink my eyes and drool some, particular talents of mine, but the muscles, joints and nerves that had served me through Korea and all my PI abuse were out to lunch. This was stranger still, because my brain was in some sort of Einsteinian hyper-drive. Some trick.

Even my scar slept—a meandering ugly thing along one jaw line I’d earned solving Dad’s murder. The scar often sounded off when I was in danger, or about to be—a tingle, buzz, or touch of fire. It sounds nuts but three nights after Dad was killed, he stood by my bed one night and told me to keep going as an investigator—that I had what it takes and he’d warn me of danger when he could. Said he’d use the scar and make it itch or burn or tingle since they wouldn’t allow him to speak to me often—something about crossing over messing up universal balances. He never elaborated who they were. Even in heaven I guess a cop has a supervisor. Hell must be all supervisors.

Now I was paralyzed. I tried to pray, even though my mind was whirling, ask Dad’s advice.

I thought about what my demise would mean to the few close people in my life—to Molly, to Rick, even to Sam the bar owner down the block. I thought about never seeing the Cubs lose again, about my last good meal, about things Dad had warned me about when I joined his new private eye firm just before he was murdered. I even thought about the unfinished woodcarving of Kim Novak posed on a ’50 Merc I was working on at home.

Molly, my secretary and budding love interest, would mourn for a few years, move to Milwaukee and likely marry some real estate developer, or maybe a grocer like her uncle and have six kids. Now there was a business I should have gone into—never going hungry. Steak five times a week, Hostess cupcakes with every meal. Silly, the thoughts you have when death is tramping close—I even hoped Molly would name her first son Mike.

Rick Anthony, my junior partner who was twenty-five years my senior, would finally retire to Ft. Lauderdale and haul in major marlins. He deserved it.

Sam—well, Sam would swear about the drop in his booze revenues, that’s all. He might lift a glass to the late Mike Angel, aka D’Angelo, and shed a tear when no one was looking.

***

I had a few hallucinations of spiders turning into commies with fixed bayonets, my mind’s perverted way of distracting me from the absence of my body, no doubt. Lily had left me to dream about simple things—sitting up again, walking, saying my name.

Then came a sound I didn’t imagine: squeaks from down the hall, elevator doors opening.

Molly had left at three, hell bent on making a shoe sale at Marshall’s. It wasn’t likely she’d drop back this late.

Heels clicked closer. Not Molly’s gait. The office door swung open. A pair of gun-metal patent-leather stilettos stepped in. The odds against two lovelies sporting the same slippers in the same day in my office said Lily had returned. Where had she gone? Why had she returned? To finish the job for Randizi?

I tried to turn my head but my neck wasn’t there. I might as well have been Ichabod Crane’s buddy without his horse.

The door closed silently. Shiny toes stopped so close I could have licked them, if my tongue hadn’t been a football at the bottom of a scrum. That exotic perfume again, mixed with stale floor wax. Nothing wrong with my olfactory glands, though my ribcage wore steel bands that threatened to crack me open. Breathing had risen to the top of my to-do list.

Go ahead, sweetheart, kick me in the nuts while I’m down. I won’t feel a thing and you’re the kind who’ll enjoy it.

Lily passed on my telepathic dare—she had something more pressing in mind.

One silvery toe rose over my watery eye and showed its brown underside, at least momentarily. The sole pressed and rolled my head until I was staring at the ceiling crack that ran from one corner to the opposite wall, a crack that grew wider each year. If I survived and Rick Anthony and I were stupid enough to continue Mike Angel Investigations a few more years, the shyster who imitated a lawyer upstairs would share our tacky rooms and we’d have a nice skylight.

Being paralyzed was no picnic, but at least there wasn’t dog shit on her shoe, just good Chicago street grime. I tried to look up her skirt—not a normal reaction to a life-or-death vise, yet even incapacitated, that section of my brain is a 24-hour candy store. The effort was wasted. Lily had the kind of legs born for greatness in table advertisements. But only if they cut her head out of the glossies. Were these my dying thoughts? Lust for a horse-faced killer with pontoon breasts and pencil legs?

She slid out a nervous, wicked little laugh as she leaned over my numb torso. Her eyes glittered like black jewels in a mummy’s face.

Still breathing, are we? No more Jack the Ripper jokes? To die, Mister Angel, to sleep—to sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub.

Shakespeare. Peachy. And my over-educated buddy Rick missed it.

Her hands groped me, but it wasn’t for love. I couldn’t look down, but saw she took a refund.

More clicking to the wall and I had an unobstructed view of the crack again. From the corner of one eye I could see Lily at my file cabinets. She knew what to look for, because in a few seconds she took out a file, hipped the drawer and clacked out into the hall past the elevator squeak and down onto Addison Avenue.

***

It got dark. I was having a hard time warming up the linoleum.

While I lay there waiting for the concrete in my body to melt, my mind continued to break all speed limits. Something in the juice she’d fed me. I recounted everything she’d said about Randizi. It was all as phony as a politician’s baby kiss. But why the body Novocain? What in my files was so valuable?

Obviously, son, there’s a connection between what the woman took and the man locked up in Joliet. He’s still there. And, no, you won’t die. I suggest you relax and get some sleep. I’ll hang around and watch over you. Get Rick to help you on this one later. And son?

It was Dad—or at least his voice, or at least the memory of his voice, or at least my insanity. But, I didn’t answer, couldn’t. Dad must have known that. Instead I simply thought, Yeah?

Be careful on this one—powerful forces can align against you.

Dad’s voice, coming through with a Chinese-fortune-cookie-like line. Nuts. I couldn’t really hear it as much as feel it plowing through my thoughts. It even echoed. Dad always seemed to show up when death was near, which wasn’t often enough to be sure I wasn’t imagining the whole thing. I was either nuts or Saint Peter was letting Dad follow me around. I hadn’t told anyone about Dad or his way of alerting me to danger. Not even Molly. I guess I feared it was simply me hanging on to my hero.

I’d had only two cases involving violent felons. In 1961, Eddie’s crime made headlines and a fat reward from Excelsior Insurance Company when I brought Randizi in.

Eddie was sent up for a diamond heist, where a security guard was shot and killed. Half the rocks had never been recovered, valued in the neighborhood of thirty-two long ones. He turned for the state on his crime buddy to avoid the chair. Even if he played paddy-cake with Warden Tankersly, Eddie had another dime on his ticket.

Lily had plucked a single file from the cabinets while the R folder was still open on my desk—was there some other case connecting Randizi’s heist? One containing clues to the missing diamonds? I didn’t think so. In fact, I couldn’t think much at all, as a wooly cloud settled on my mind and forecasts of lint showers echoed somewhere in my head.

I awoke at dawn with aching limbs that actually moved when I asked them. I felt like I’d live, and said a short prayer of thanks. I like to think short ones get more attention up there. My life wasn’t worth much, but it was worth finding and wringing Lily’s lily-white neck.

An hour later I was slurping bad coffee and dropping stale cake crumbs into the files. But the files weren’t the briar patch mess I’d been used to, and without all that mess I was lost. Little colored tabs and numbers were confusing. Molly had been at work.

I felt like I’d been on a forty-day fast. Outside of creaky bones from the cozy floor, I’d had the best night’s sleep of the year.

I slumped back to my desk. The Randizi file was complete, but the five hundred from my inside pocket was gone. Lily the Indian-giver. I wouldn’t have a client after all. But I’d gained a cause.

I put in a call to Warden Tank Tankersly at Joliet Prison. He was a fat man with a fat memory, and not much got past him. Of course, being the governor’s brother-in-law helped him get the job. More Illinois politics.

Tank confirmed Randizi’s first parole hearing was still eighteen months down the road. He’d stamp out a lot of license plates by then.

I thanked the good warden, promised to bring him a box of maple bars, and hung up without mentioning Lily. If more turned up I could always fill him in. Cops see PI’s as meddlers, yet expect them to do the heavy lifting when they don’t have the time. Blind leading the blind, with fingers poked in the eye. And Tank was a long time cop with a tough job.

The mysterious Miss Laframboise swore Eddie called right before her North side apartment was ransacked. She also claimed to be Eddie’s squeeze before his last heist. She knew his voice like she knew her own fake name.

A good actress with no connection to Eddie? A red Randizi herring? Maybe she was as delusional as I was for taking her dough.

Actress or not, I was determined to make a casting call. Lily hadn’t left a card or a number. Nobody with her name was listed in the Chicago directory. I called an operator friend at Ma Bell who came up empty with unlisted numbers for the entire state of Illinois and parts of Wisconsin where they talk funny and make too much cheese.

People who use fake names enjoy lying. Most of those people get off by laughing when you’re down. Lily’s oily laugh tore it for me.

All of which left the question, why would a sadist with fake name, eyelashes, likely fake tits and phony story go to all this trouble for something in my files? Why not just break in? Any petty second story man could easily dismiss my lock. So, why? Devious crooks often climb in a third story window when the front door’s wide open, that’s why. If criminals were smart, they’d all be CPA’s. Okay, so, some are.

Lily’s motives were unclear. No matter. My anger was lucid enough.

When Molly waltzed in, fresh and disgustingly healthy, I had just the