Dark Fantasy: A Mike Angel Private Eye Mystery

By David H Fears

In late 1966, the world’s richest man, Howard Hughes, took occupancy of the top two floors of the Desert Inn on the Strip in Las Vegas. After his time was up he refused to vacate the space, and wound up buying the Inn for thirteen million dollars from the Mob.

Earlier that year Mike and Rick were called to an empty apartment where the body of a world-famous glamour model, a twin, was posed with flowers. The scene tipped Mike’s equilibrium, and when the surviving twin hit town he struggled with his darker fantasies.

Mike crosses the line when he breaks into a gallery’s back office and dark room to discover a strange pornographic film involving the dead twin and an underage boy. After viewing the film with Rick and Molly, Mike is persuaded to turn it over to the police, and take the heat for his actions. The film mysteriously disappears from the police evidence locker.

Hired by the surviving twin, also a model who makes Molly a bit jealous, the case leads Mike to Las Vegas, connections to local racketeer Big Jim Elkins, L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen, and then to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. Can Mike gain entrance into the Hughes penthouse and verify Hughes’ possession of the porno film involving the dead twin? He’ll need an ingenious plan, which is supplied by a sexy Swedish blonde he meets at the newly opened Caesar’s Palace. If the plan to get in works, can he escape alive and get out of town? He cannot trust the Vegas authorities or even the FBI, who have been surveilling Hughes for bigger issues and offer no help.

Set in Portland and Las Vegas in 1966, Dark Fantasy is the 7th in the complex Mike Angel Series, and follows Dark Moon. Just over 72,000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David H Fears
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465848390

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 Fantasy: A Mike Angel Mystery

By David H Fears

Horizon Micro Publishing, LLC

Other titles in the series: Dark Quarry, Dark Lake,

Dark Blonde, Dark Poison, Dark Idol, Dark Moon,

Dark Fantasy, Dark Conspiracy, Dark Red

Copyright © 2012 David H Fears

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4658-4839-0

Smashwords Edition

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Chapter 1 – Fair, fair lost one

She was nude and devastatingly stunning. Eve in the Garden.

Late sun streamed in, casting long shadows across her edible curves. Did I say she was stunning? Enough so that it bears repeating.

She was also very dead. Not quite cold dead.

Even with her radiance, the scene was something out of a dark fantasy.

A murdered beauty always hits me as a travesty—such a waste—a violation of universal law. True beauty’s all too rare; it should be exempt from murder, either as a victim or as a perpetrator. But the truth is, ever since Abel bought the big sleep from Cain no mug’s far from murder. We each have a little murder inside; murder lurks around us every day, whether on the gritty streets of a Chicago slum or on a sunny Iowa farm or in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest. Wrong place, wrong time and situation, any human can kill or be killed. That black truth hit sharply home in May 1966 in Portland, Oregon, our adopted hometown. It was an unforgettable murder case.

My partner Rick likes to point out if there were no murders newspapers would fold, homicide detectives would be out of work, earth would be overcrowded, and private investigators would go hungry. I reply that hunger goes with the job, hunger of one sort or another. This case brought its own brand of hunger. I counter that private investigators don’t often work homicide cases, unless a relative or interested party becomes impatient with law enforcement. In some states they aren’t allowed to work homicide cases. Rick knows this, but several times in Chicago bodies literally fell in our laps. Once a dipsomaniac bought the farm with a hole in his chest at my kitchen sink. Usually though, private eyes chase missing persons, shuffle insurance fraud papers, or dodge missiles in divorce actions, though I won’t sign on to those. Divorce makes people crazy and raw. In addition to those sorts of investigations a thousand eccentric or mundane pursuits are paid for by eccentric or mundane types for their own peculiar needs or motives. Some are too nuts to take. But the money’s all green.

This case was peculiar enough to tip me off balance, even though I’d been investigating for a living since 1954, freshly ejected from NYPD’s Twenty-third for ticking off the wrong dirty hands. I’d also seen plenty of gore in Truman’s nasty little police action, Korea.

I stood in a daze next to the body, the scene of death spinning me around. My mouth was so wide open a condor could have flown in. Okay, maybe a sea gull.

I stared at perfection in her curves. In awe I represented mankind—all was silent save for the hurried brush of traffic in the streets below.

Bright yellow aster blooms, fresh and mysterious, arranged judiciously over the body, one between her breasts, one in her navel and one between her legs, lying quiet next to the most sensuous place a woman owns—except the bonus was, her treasure was as bare as a young girl’s. The flowers’ aroma, or perhaps beauty’s cologne, seemed to fill every square inch of the room. Killed by asters? By an overeager florist? Stranger things have happened in murder cases.

My eyes kept returning to her special place, as if some knowledge of good and evil rested there. Why was a hairless pussy on a grown woman so enticing? I hadn’t seen one since little Judy K. showed me hers behind the oak tree at PS 102 where we played house and aired differences. Back then I was too embarrassed to show her mine. Boy how things change.

But this was no little girl. And the bald pubic look wasn’t particularly flattering to the deceased. It didn’t fit her image. Why would she do that? Likely some low-brow boyfriend’s fetish. Maybe he liked little girls and wanted her to look like one. Who knows? Those kinds of sickies are all too common. The victim hadn’t asked my opinion, and couldn’t now. As for the rest of her body, my first impression—she had to be fake; way too perfect—flowers seemed to be growing right out of her skin. I railed against evil that can snuff life out of such beauty. Denial.

She rested on her back, facing sunlight flooding into the apartment. By sundown she’d lie on a cold stainless slab in the city morgue. Blossoms would be wilted evidence. Murder ruins everything. It doesn’t simply snuff a life, it stomps on hope.

A trail of petals from the same buttery blooms scattered from her neck to the lower flower, as if outlining some erotic flow, the result of she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not games. Artfully posed with arms bent, elbows out, fingers on her right hand spread up her side as if tracing the ridgeline of her hipbone. The other hand, fingers pressed against silk sheets as if preparing to sit up. Nipples, light shade of pinkish-brown with ruby nubs standing sentry over tender slopes. Eyes open, expression spiritual—as if daydreaming. Except this stunner would never dream again, day or night. What were her last thoughts? With a face like hers they must have been innocent. My fantasy said so.

I held my breath until reality sank in. Even in death her tantalizing sexuality was unlike any but that of highly paid glamour models. A tingle shot down my jaw scar, slid to my groin, lingered on my dick and faded down my legs. Even without touching her, she’d touched me. Chills rushed behind the tingle when I realized she was turning me on. I shivered at the reality of—obscenity of, an erotic corpse.

Rick was also mesmerized. I knew him that well.

The private eye world has been written about as thick male fantasy—Sam Spade with a hard-on. Dry reality denies such tripe. Real investigating is nothing like that. No plump-in-the-right-places platinum nympho offering a haggard PI her charms in exchange for finding her missing poodle. Such stuff makes for good pulp novels, for those with pulp minds, is all.

After a few years I knew there was no similarity to those pulp novels where the answer to the whodunit falls into the peeper’s lap during a solar eclipse when a dog doesn’t bark. That’s fiction, just like the hack who tried to put a silencer on a revolver. But not always is real life humdrum by comparison. At times such a tale would be heaved by an editor as being too incredible for fiction, which has to fake reality without completely flipping it on its head.

Now and then a case comes along, as this one did, full of male fantasy, hot flowing wistfulness and need so deep a guy wonders about his sanity—stuff that dreams are made of, as Bogie presumed about that bird statuette that turned out to be worthless. The perception of value pushed that tale along just as the perception of perfection towed this case up from the dregs of debauchery.

She’s a twin, Mike. Famous Avery twin models of Santa Barbara.

Rick bent over close to examine the lady’s neck, then lifted each arm to hunt for puncture marks. He shook his head. No tracks, no indication of foul play.

Avery? I’m supposed to know the name? I don’t. She’s pretty far from home. Poison?

No suffocation. Mouth’s clear. No bottles about. Not even meds. I doubt she’s much over twenty-five, so that leaves out natural causes I’d think.

Sexual violence?

Not that I can see. I’d rather not move the body until police arrive. M.E. will tell the tale if rape was involved. Posing suggests prurient intent of some kind, but she was an accomplished swimsuit and lingerie model, after all. Certainly photographic intent.

Breadth of your knowledge impresses me, Sherlock.

"Elementary young sir—I merely read the morning paper in toto. One can go quite far with meaningful trivia that way."

I wanted to say that trivia’s rarely meaningful but let it drop knowing my junior-senior partner’s comeback was predictable.

How long you been here? Any idea who called you about her?

About ten minutes before you. I called Homicide right before you strolled in. Blues haven’t shown yet. Procrastination means case overloads—even our quaint Rose City has those.

I suppose you have a contact in Homicide, too? One that’s not retired yet?

Your suppositions in this case are unreliable my boy—only detectives I know here now are indeed out fishing somewhere, or hitting diminutive white balls into holes with flagsticks, picking them up and hitting them again. Retired, affirmative. Not every flatfoot has my staying power.

Or your overpriced vocabulary.

I circled the body filling my eyes, like a nasty boy sneaking peeks into a girly magazine. A waste. Such a body. Made to lie in the sun on some beach and attract men. I wonder if the photos taken here were worth it to the killer. If there were photos.

Odds are several rolls were shot here, given posing. Killers often take trophies. This wasn’t a crime of opportunity, but carefully planned, staged. If one of passion, it certainly is an outlier.

Outlier? You mean, weird?

He nodded, then pointed to several small dark points between big toe and next toe, right foot. A favorite place for junkies to hide tracks. Photos wouldn’t pick these up. Not the cause of death. Too old.

I turned away and looked down onto sunny Broadway. People were driving and walking on their way as if nothing evil could happen just above them, as if civilization in this woodsy little city way out west meant murders didn’t exist here—killings like I’d known in Newark and New York and Chicago. That denial was their fantasy. One dead model wasn’t going to convince them otherwise.

We each have at least one dark fantasy that pulls and pushes us around, not always to good ends. I wondered what brand of evil wishes got this beauty killed.

Rick continued to poke around the body, as detached as a boy scrutinizing a rare shiny beetle before mounting it in his collection.

"What do you make of the bare mons venus, my son? You’re the expert—modeling exigency for skimpy bikinis, or something kinky?"

Can’t say. Does a bald one even qualify for your fancy French term? Not that sort of expert, Richard. I prefer them mysterious, you know—black bush, tripping me at the proper moment. Rick hated to be called Richard.

He bent and stroked around the vagina with the back of his index finger. Again, beetle collector. Not shaved. I’d say a depilatory agent.

Say what?

Chemical hair remover. Nair’s a popular brand.

Not that it figures in her death, distinction between a smooth hairless pussy over a shaved hairless one. Tell me again how were you alerted—the caller?

I thought Molly—woman sounded so much like her. Maybe with a cold.

To you they all sound like Molly.

Seriously. I can hear her voice now—as dispassionate as warm milk. Her precise words—‘The Avery twin has been murdered. Room 502 at the Sovereign Apartments on Broadway. The door’s open. Walk right in. A man of your class will appreciate such a pretty picture. Take your time ogling the body before you call the police.’ Then she hung up.

She use that term, ogling? And did she call you by name?

Rick nodded, then said she didn’t use his name. Late last year he’d secured an apartment two blocks away, preferring to be downtown where action was. Action—like matinees, plays, better restaurants, a college library, society babes, and plenty of skirt watching. Rick’s kind of action. Plus he couldn’t get to sleep without traffic outside his window. A New York kind of thing he said.

This female caller—she could be the killer, or knows same. Knew you lived close. Wrong about you having class, though, which tells me she doesn’t know you well. Maybe she picked up your card at some point. Ever been in these units?

No. But my daily stroll downtown takes me by here. Could be my card, that’s certainly possible. I’ve left a few around.

You mean those that say: ‘Bon vivant, retired NYPD, private investigator partner’ with Basil Rathbone’s image and his magnifying glass—that card?

You find those amusing, but they’ve produced dates with a few ladies.

I let that go. Discussing Rick’s social life with a smooth cold nude in front of us didn’t seem jake right then. Still, I wondered if perhaps one of his new ladies was the caller.

Any background noise on the call, as if in a phone booth or a bar?

None.

We looked over the apartment but found nothing to indicate any one lived there. No personal items, no clothing, purse, or identification. Still, Rick was positive the victim was one of the Avery twins. He’d seen her picture everywhere. I didn’t read the same rags he did. I knew she’d never been between the covers of Manhunt.

Just then a detective and two uniformed cops walked in.

Who’s Anthony? said a youthful detective in brown tweed suit, blue tie, black spit-shined brogues. He bore the serious look of a used car salesman. About thirty, dark, slight, with the underfed look of a man who skips lunch and doesn’t need lunch. He wore Old Spice after-shave. I liked him at once since I’m not a big lunch eater myself and I’ve been known to splash on the same stinkwater. Lieutenant Grayson. Liking a flattie instantly is something novel for me.

Rick tapped his brow as if his identity was inside. They shook hands.

We both exchanged ID’s and Rick recited again the mystery phone call. One uniform nearly drooled on the victim until Grayson ordered him to tape the doorway and stand out in the hall. I liked Grayson better for that. The drooler walked out with the other uniform snuffling how hot he thought a hairless beaver was. No respect, that sort of fantasy.

Rick filled Grayson in on his cursory examination, reassuring Grayson we hadn’t moved or touched anything—except to determine if the late Avery model shaved or used chemicals to get that look. That exception made Grayson squint at us.

Why did this caller call you to the scene? Do either of you know the victim? Have you ever been in this apartment before?

It seems Grayson liked asking questions in threes. Multiple choice.

Rick rubbed his chin while I stared again at the victim’s expression. She looked like she was about to get up and get ready for the next photograph, go on with her life of beauty and fame. I wanted her to get up. I was growing uneasy about her lying there uncovered. I felt smoldering anger about it, but more about her lack of a future. Until this ending in a vacant Sovereign apartment, she lived her own fantasy to the fullest. At least I wanted it to be that way, to think she’d seen every good thing, done every good thing there was to do. I wanted that for her, but knew it wasn’t so. I wanted to make sense of her sudden end. So I’m a romantic fool.

I’m domiciled two blocks away—other than that I couldn’t speculate, lieutenant. We’ve never seen this woman before, except in magazines. Like her twin sister, she’s a well-known glamour model from Santa Barbara. Top model, in fact. Avery twins—I can’t speculate on which one, since there’s no identification. And no, I’ve never had occasion to enter the Sovereign, but I walk by daily.

For what purpose?

Exercise.

That’s it? You get a call from a woman you don’t know, alerting you to a murder you know nothing about to a famous model? Then you drop in, invite your partner here and get your jollies off on floral arrangements? I may look green but I’m not naïve. Why didn’t you simply call the police at that point? You two have something against being good citizens?

I didn’t care for that last crack. My instant like of Grayson melted like spit on a hot griddle. I stepped up.

Where I come from good citizens don’t refer crank calls to the cops, which is all it might have been. Rick here retired as a lead NYPD homicide detective. I’m your normal perverse peeper. Investigating is what we do. Good citizens come in many packages and we’re as good as any.

Grayson smiled slightly, if it was a smile. No offense. It just seems rather set up, doesn’t it? I mean how did the caller know Anthony? Why call him—just because he strolls by on his daily walk? Why not call the police or someone in the apartment, the manager for instance. It all says you’re not revealing your connections here. Are you on a case?

You don’t listen good, I said to Grayson’s nose. Think what you will. We aren’t on a case and we aren’t hiding anything. We have as much idea about why she called Rick as LBJ has about balancing the budget with his Great Society crap. The connection to Rick might well be innocent. Rick placed his business cards out and about—the call may simply be from that. Random.

Just when a bit of steam rose in Grayson’s eyes, the coroner boys showed up. A bald forensic type started dusting for prints. The body was flipped over and examined. And the flipside was every bit as enticing. I’d expected, even hoped for blood, which might have chilled my strange erotic feelings. But only a few crushed blossoms lay under her.

A technician signaled Grayson. We stood and watched the tech point out a needle mark at the base of her spine. The pinpoint had a small red circle around it. Recent.

Grayson bent and nodded. He pulled out a pad and jotted on it. He also noted the track marks Rick showed him between the toes. Did a junk habit lead to the girl’s death? It wouldn’t be the first time youth and beauty had been flushed down that awful hole.

Rick pointed to three round dents in the carpet a few feet from the bed, and offered to Grayson, Triangular pattern, I’d say a tripod. He kneeled with Grayson to examine the dents. In that position Rick looked back to the foot of the bed and pointed. See that little orange paper?

Grayson reached over and pulled it out by one edge. His brow scrunched like a dried prune. He turned it over, scrutinized it from every direction, then dropped it in a plastic baggie he pulled from his coat pocket.

A torn piece of cardboard, off of what I can’t say, he said.

Rick looked up at me and winked. I knew him well enough to know he knew what the fragment was, but for his own reasons wasn’t sharing it with Grayson.

After another brief look around, Grayson, arms open, ushered us out to the hall. I looked over my shoulder for one last picture of Helen of Troy’s surrender. I’d spent some of the time in that apartment breathing, but not much of it. The dead girl was a painting that would forever hang in the museum of my fancy, a painting with a spotlight touching that smooth mound stroked by Rick’s forefinger. The lit mound would feed nighttime anxieties, even as I tried to flush it out of my system. A nude pussy—a new vibe to get hung up on. But that’s the way it is with some images, whether seen, read about or heard of. They become indelible. When writers give us indelible we call them great and hurry to buy their latest volume. When photographers and artists give us indelible we seek out their work and call them genius. But when a crime scene paints indelible it only brings torment. Angry, helpless torment. Or anger from being helpless. I can’t tell which.

Grayson cleared his throat, much the way Rick does when he has something profound to add. Cause of death isn’t clear, but that needle in the spine is suspicious. Unless she was triple-jointed, someone else poked her. Anthony I’d like you to make a list of everyone you gave a business card to over the last month, or where you posted them. Any you can recall.

Rick nodded. I smirked. Grayson’s triple-jointed line was one I might have made. I’d started out as a cop after Korea, but soon ran into corruption in New York’s Twenty-third precinct. Dad and Rick were partners back then and tried to help me overcome my urges to fight the wrong parties. When Dad retired, setting up a private investigating firm, I dropped out of the force. After solving his first case, at least mostly solving it, he was murdered in a Newark alley. I took up the torch but wasn’t much of a PI in those first six years. Until, that is, I tracked down the killer and gained a smidge of justice for Dad in the tiny burg of Mattoon south of Chicago. A Russian mob nest. That’s where I won the scar that wanders down my jaw