The Golden Age Detective

By Chuck Fair

Poochy is missing. A detective's dog case turns into murder mayhem.   Bodies drop in seedy  and  opulent  haunts. Bullets  fly at  Chas  Pharlain's every turn.  Police are hot on his aging heels.  Unable to turn tail and run, he guts it out. A whodunit to the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chuck Fair
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513035345

Chuck Fair

Chuck Fair earned his stripes having written novels in different genres and in different voices. Having been a member of the Marine Corps, Screen Actors Guild and various workers' unions along with once being a newspaper executive affords him a diverse background. He is a resident of California and West Virginia.

Book preview

The Golden Age Detective

––––––––

Chuck Fair

I never liked pit bulls so wasting doggy won’t be a mind blower. Call it prejudice if you want. I call it necessity. Poochy had something I wanted.

A mix of English Staffordshire terriers and bull dogs, pit bulls were bred to strip flesh from their prey. The beasts originally chewed on bears for sport in 16th Century baiting pits in a slum called Southwark across the Thames from walled off London because the prudish Lord Mayor thought baiting pits despicable. The same Lord Mayor forced the infant Globe Theatre to set up shop in the midst of such low life places. There dwelt hookers lifting skirts, pick pockets lifting purses and drooling denizens of the dark. I visualized the clamor of that sweaty, smelly, screaming rabble pressing upon the pits, but this beast that I aimed my snub nose 38 caliber at heard the rabble’s roar. Shouts of ‘rip ‘em apart’ rang in this gladiator’s alerted ears and surged in his nasty genes.

Some lowbrows claim the beasts to be effective guard dogs. This doggie was not guarding anything. Someone guarded it and I knew who. This thirty pound package of snarling, slobbering muscle, teeth and paws would attack anything put in its path, horses, rats or humans, especially someone who wanted what it possessed. This offspring of viciousness seemed about to jerk its chain from the bolt fixed to the wall to get at me.

I pulled away the wire mesh covering the top of the underground chamber where the dog had been hidden and extended my pistol’s short barrel, its muzzle six inches from the beast’s white hot teeth. I went by the gun owners’ manual: took a breath, exhaled half and began to squeeze off a round. Something with the meanness of Hank Aaron’s bat slammed my back. Becoming a sack of potatoes slumping forward, I attempted to look up at the source. Another blow, Rocky Marciano's heavy fist, wacked my temple. I lost consciousness thinking, this is Eddy Accari’s mountain hideaway. Who else could have slammed me? 

*

My name is Pharlain, once it probably was MacPharlain as I suspected I came from scrub chewing, lowland prowling Presbyterians who sneaked into Ireland five hundred years ago and eventually fled with the Presbyterian escape to the New World. A few weeks before someone slammed me, I phoned Eddy Accari. Eddy had a knack for making a person feel he was at the top of the charts. He said, ‘Chas my man, come on down and we’ll find your son.’  He called me Chas when everyone else called me Charles. I liked the handle and adopted it. I had not seen Eddy since we downed a few beers at a creepy cowboy bar on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. We observed my catching a bus to oblivion. Strange I should phone him after ten years of silence, but I couldn’t leave LA without saying goodbye to the only person I valued. That was ten years ago, and in that time he, a single guy like me, seemed to have carved out a comfortable life in L.A. suburbia. My ten years might as well been flushed down the crapper, stuck a small northern California town that got an erection at the mention of Sarah Palin, a place where the righteous worshiped Fox News. Each year I told myself I would return to L.A. as soon as I socked away six months expenses; that return never caught the bus.

Wet nosed kids, Eddy and I had been stationed at the Marine Air Base in El Toro just down the freeway from L.A., two hell raising teenagers more interest in drinking beer and getting laid than fixing Marine Corps’ airplanes. Sporting shaved heads and thin wallets, getting laid resided somewhere beyond Mars, so we concentrated on drinking beer. Eddy was Italian, not the good looking type featured in love stories with sub titles, but the ugly type portraying cads in dramas with sub titles. He had a Jay Leno ski chin and heavy ape brows with dark sunken eyes and very thin lips. At the beaches, his pear shaped body compelled beach babes to kick sand on him. This they did after being propositioned to cuddle in the sand with him. Certainly not a girl’s heartthrob, he possessed brains, personality and what the Yiddish call chutzpah. I had a wayward boy’s good looks and enthusiasm for adventure. My ancestors were frontiersmen who drifted west when things got tough, subsequently I am given to picking up sticks when things don’t work out. Eddy started a brawl at a Marine Corps watering hole in Orange County, and we got the crap beat out of us and thrown into the brig, a honorable offense in the Marines. Broke, I left a local drive in restaurant without paying for burgers and fries, and we got thrown into the brig, a forgivable offense in the Marines if followed up with remuneration and apology. Thereafter Eddy and I splattered big time on the Sergeant Major’s shit-list, ninety days of Mess, Guard and Battery Shop Duty.

Let loose on liberty, we frequented Hollywood’s streets, freeloading at USOs and dancing with church ladies’ daughters. We patronized Hollywood’s grandiose movie houses and crashed in a car at nights. An easy hitchhike from El Toro, Tijuana with its raunchy strip tease joints, pimp driven taxies and stretching streets of bars and back alley cat houses became a payday treat. No wars or foreign intrigues came about during our enlistment, and we turned in our rifles and with a sweet/sour feeling mustered out of the Marines. Eddy went home to a farm town in the San Joaquin Valley and I went home to a steel town on the Ohio River. A few years later, both of us bored to tears with our lives, sought Hollywood where we remembered good times roared. I ran into him on a basketball court at a beat-up Hollywood YMCA on Selma off Sunset Boulevard. Once a week we ran back and forth between the Y’s backboards playing hoops. He was short, and I was tall. He hit set shots from the corners and fouled an opponent. I would haul in rebounds and pass him the ball, and he would lose it and foul an opponent. Fouled opponents knocked him on his butt, and I would pick him up.

Eddy attended veterinary school at nearby UCLA in Westwood. I hustled advertising for a West Hollywood newspaper. Both of us had mellowed since our wild Marine Corps days, drank less beer and found young women within our grasp. In the jargon of the time, we became pals, beach roaming buddies and a deadly duo cruising singles bars. When Eddy graduated UCLA’s vet school he landed a dog catching job for an animal shelter in a LA high desert outpost called Saugus. I bounced from one dead end job to another, chasing women and being chased, paying high rents and not putting anything under the mattress. We drifted apart, having an occasional hell- raising night on the town when he dropped out of the distant desert. Over time, those nights on the town changed hats, our head pieces were phone calls laced with apologies for being too busy to get together. High rents, streets clogged with traffic, random shootings, but mostly a broken relationship with my son’s mom and a young man’s dream shattered by LA reality drove me into the hinterland. I left a phone message for my son, Steven, ten years ago, informing him I was leaving Los Angeles, and he never returned the call. His silent message of good riddance became the proverbial straw breaking a strained relationship. I had had my fill of unrequited love.

That was then, this is now. I headed my thirteen year old Subaru south on the race track California christened Interstate 5 past acres of smelly, mooing bovines waiting to be milked and then slaughtered when age dried their utters and neared Kettleman City, a franchise oasis offering hamburgers and gas between stretches of nowhere. When not being terrorized by speeding nuts running up my tailpipe, my thoughts tossed in the tumble that alienated my son from me. His mom, once a long legged nymph, auditioning actress in the daylight, gyrating the stripper in the moonlight and I, believer of love conquers all, saw our Romeo and Juliet romance after a few years of hot and heavy passion, transform into a Montaque and Capulet duke-ing it out in the street. I flew the coop, hoping to be called back. She met another man. I fought over visitation with my son in Family Court. I won visitation, she won Steven’s heart. She and her broad butt two fisted mom swinging a verbal battleaxe systematically alienated Steven from me, not that difficult as I would never plant a pillar in society. After seeing my usurper infiltrate her bed I lapped up the booze, a thirsty dog in an emotional desert. I became the weekend intruder into his pre-pubescent life. So in my son’s defense I believed his indifference to me, his dad, was more his parents’ fault than his. Some say Chas Pharlain is a reckless 70 year old man. Possibly. I possess a Delusion of Grandeur complex that has kept me aggressive and optimistic. Smart guys claim it is ‘a delusion that one (thinks he) is much greater and more powerful and influential than he really is.’  I cannot give it up because I feed upon it.

Ripe age denies one a fear of mortality, especially if a mug chooses to grip life rather than slip down its slope. Not giving up the belief I can be more than what I am, a hard headed overripe septuagenarian, I started up the Golden Age Detective Agency after gulping down a correspondence course on the internet, getting a diploma to tack on the wall. Promised by a tough named Griffin Academy to spot bad guys through an eagle’s eye and finish them off like a lion, I bankrolled some detective science, but mostly learned to talk tough like a Dashiel Hammett character from the brass knuckle era. It was you who bumped off Ears Mahoney. Now you're taking the fall. And, grab some air you dirty rat before this rod splatters you over the cement.’  My favorite, ‘don’t wet your cheeks to moisten my sympathy doll face, you are taking the rap for the big M.’  I called the detective agency Golden Age because in my era opportunities were sweet peaches in a green orchard where if you didn’t like the taste of one try another; that era reigned as prime time for me. Even in today’s tough times where the rich rule the roost like pre-revolutionary French monarchs, I hang on to it, because my Golden Age society was egalitarian on a large scale.

In my day, we had factories offering livable wages, businesses caring about employees, retirement funds instead of 401Ks. Banks helped neighborhoods, not tear off families' heads and stuff villainous interest rates down throats. Unions were unions, not battered and reduced to straw dogs. Workers and workplaces had covenants of well being. Executives were content to make fifty times a workers' salaries until some greasy guru turned on a light bulb in greed's head. I never lost the need to search for a sweeter peach. Today’s generation have had their peaches swiped by bandits I called Malevolent Masters of Misinformation, the heavy hitting capitalists and their back scratching minions in the nation’s capital and just about every state legislature in the land. The 3Ms see workers as oranges to be squeezed until their pulp writhes. They toss the peeling and store the juice in vats and in the doing point fingers at every fault in society but their own. 3Ms scream like banshees that workers clamoring for a better life will destroy the American Dream. Since my prime the 3Ms, Greed Mongols if the truth be known, have stomped on the American dream to where workers’ well being matters for snot. The Greed Mongols take our factories across oceans where slave labor exists in places like China and outsource jobs in places like India to gouge their bank accounts as they run the American Dream into the ground. The 3Ms take, take, take and deprive, deprive, deprive and sing our way is best, best, best. The 3Ms tuck their tax money in foreign hideouts and clamor for tax breaks. The Malevolent Masters of Misinformation are marauders that have infested our courts, our universities, our national sports and every nook and cranny where the American Dream existed. They should be dragged out into the public square and thrashed with an angry squid. But I am not going to think those thoughts because they are counter-productive to a small business man like me.

The San Fernando Valley cement sprawl, not as smoggy as when I left, appeared like a sparkling sea as I descended from the desert foothills. It materialized as a long lost world for me. Swarms of lightening bug communities from Studio City to Chatsworth twinkled under a clear night. There the restless of my generation had once flocked chasing the good life. Steven’s mom and I met there, a chance meeting among a million harried residents commuting here and there.

The ghosts of Rodney King Riots, O.J.’s murder trial and the Northridge earthquake hung over the basin, infamous events the city tried to bury. I considered LA my hometown, but we both had changed. I wondered, would I recognize the city and would it recognize me?  This time, I didn’t return to LA because I socked away six month's nest egg, I returned because I saw Barbara, Steven’s wife’s, his ex-wife now, wedding pictures on Facebook. She danced with her new husband, a dude named Gaspar Escarra, Gaspe to his pals, a carnivorous crowd that I did not care to join.

I drove over familiar ground, the Hollywood Freeway, and the Subaru became a pony trotting down Vine Street past transients crashing on sidewalk stars dedicated to big name entertainers to a cheap motel near Santa Monica Boulevard, an area that had long forgotten the good times. I curled up with a forty-ounce bouncer I bought at a corner liquor store that by the looks of its clientele appeared ripe for a robbery. With beer in one hand and shoe in the other to lambast roaches, I mulled over the reason I was here. From what Eddy hinted at but did not put into words, my son Steven had hit the skids with no forwarding address—head in hands after a broken marriage. Sucking on my suds, I felt like a apple whose core a worm had rented. I didn’t know where Steven was and if I did find him I didn’t know how to help him. If he needed money, I had none. If he needed support, whatever support I had given in the past he shunned. Advice?  Well he told me he got all he needed from his mom and her new husband, my replacement, but they had moved to a sweltering sweatbox called Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley. His mother traded in her g-string for a prayer shawl and had found the Lord up there where she dwelt among many sweating Born Agains. Her usurping husband, Joe, whom I refer to as the slithering slug with a big slong, found a job selling farm tractors for big commissions. Her tough talking mother followed to get them to church on time. ‘Ding dong, the bells are goin’ chime.’  I knew Steven had too much pride to go home with his tail between his legs so had digs somewhere in LA.

Living upstate in my Sierra Nevada Foothills cabin in the land of hum drum routine, I deserved to be in the Guinness Book for chasing dead end jobs: I slammed unsuspecting buyers into overpriced vehicles; chaffered locals through town on public buses; terrorized the interstate highways behind the wheel of seventy thousand pounds of big rig and chased other low living opportunities. After playing out my hand on a table of mindless opportunities, I shoved my chips into a fool’s pot. I went into hock for a security guard’s uniform, epaulets on the shirt and stripes on the pants and barracks caps on the head. Always trim and fit, fulfilling my Delusion of Grandeur role, I landed a job protecting a used car lot; not falling asleep as my predecessors had done led to a promotion patrolling a manufacture’s electronics warehouse and later driving disturbed kids from juvenile holding tanks to psychiatric care. There seemed no limit to opportunity until the security agency founder laid me off in favor of a younger guy with a newer uniform and better physique, grabbing less pay. I sold my uniform and used the money to pay an enrollment fee to the Griffin Academy Detective School, an online learning experience. Armed with my diploma and used Smith and Weston snub nose pistol, I advertised my services. Cheap prices and the bullshit I learned in the car business enabled me to land a few jobs trailing unfaithful spouses, hunting down tenants who skipped out on the rent, taking the fridge and bathroom sink with them. My big snooping break came when my ex-security boss phoned me. He had started up a second business. He remembered me as a dependable underpaid lout, and I landed a job tracking down bail bond jumpers, mostly stupid kids busted for possessing pot. Crack was the favorite of Black kids. Hispanics hit the trail to the southern border so the agency rarely posted bail for them. There were a few hard edge criminals whom I sniffed out, usually shacked up with girl friends, but I did not apprehend them, preferring to notify local law to enforce the court warrant. Boys and girls with big clout, attorneys and insurance adjustors, wouldn’t touch me, but I eked out a living. Trying to be a good capitalist, I improved my business by leasing a smart phone and subsequently learned Facebook was the place where a businessman’s mug should be plastered and Twitter was where one could beat his drum. I called my plunge into capitalism the Golden Age Detective Agency. `Clients think the name derived from my advanced years, but it came from a need to taunt those who screwed society by reminding them what they rubbed out. Old men tout heavy backpacks crammed with memories of the good days. Sixties and seventies of the past century pulled heavily on my straps. My recollections resided in times when society put forth its best foot, not sticking its paw into citizens’ pockets at every opportunity. Perhaps I also used Golden Age to remind the younger generation what a few avaricious people have done to them. Who knows what an old man thinks? 

Surfing Facebook’s endless postings for potential clients, I came across my son’s wife, Barbara’s beautiful and icy face smiling like a nubile virgin in a yellow wedding gown and surrounded by Barbee Dolls waltzing with middle age. Her wedding was the Facebook feature of the day. Not one word of my son's break up had leaked to me. A bowling ball could deduct she had divorced Steven. I needed to know why and why my son had hit the skids?

After scrapping squashed roaches off the soles of my Keen sandals and sloshing down all the complementary coffee in my motel room,` I phoned Eddy at the Animal Shelter he supervised at Woodman Avenue and Ventura Boulevard in a burg called Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. His secretary said he was out of the office for the day and gave me a message he left, suggesting I check out a Barbara Bellamy-Escarra, Steven’s ex wife. Bellamy, her maiden name, originates from Normandy and meant beautiful friend. It seemed her beautiful bod was a bit too friendly. I took my smart phone west on Santa Monica Boulevard to a wireless haunt at the corner of La Brea and searched DMV records on line for my ex daughter in law. Always a stickler for keeping records up to date, her hibernated name popped up with an exclusive address in the canyons above Beverly Hills. I was about to put the spurs to my Subaru and nudge it west along the long and glamorous Sunset Boulevard to where Barbara lived off of Benedict Canyon Road when my smart phone sang I can’t get what I need. Eddy’s voice swam in concern, paddling in warmth like a fawning uncle. He had changed his plans. He said ‘I had a yearning for pastrami’ and thought of me when he entered Art’s Deli, one of our old haunts. ‘Lunch is on me.’  He broke the connection before I agreed, but we both knew I would show because I wanted more than a sandwich.

Art’s souring vertical sign stabbed the hot sky like a traffic cop directing a heavy flow along a busy thoroughfare. Art's name crowning a neon shaft, competed with signature palm trees for attention as it soared high above the sidewalk. Art’s deli motto, Every Sandwich a Work of Art, plastered a marquee above a blue awning. The sign greeted me as I turned west on Ventura Boulevard where Studio City met North Hollywood. The long ago nightmare of parking in commercial areas resurrected its ugly head, but I knew the area and turned on Arch Drive where I knew apartment dwellers would be working and I scored a space. Eddy and I, teenage babe hunters often left the Hollywood Hunting Preserve sniffing out amorous opportunities at Art’s Deli in the East Valley. Nursing New York root beers and drooling like wolves eyeballing a rabbit burrow, we hit on very pretty, very intelligent, very flirtatious Jewish girls who would take us home to neck, hot wet tongue probing, until their parents returned home. Then they would flip us out the door. Eddy and I never got to first base, let alone hit a home run off these delectable dolls.

I entered Art’s Deli, a large no nonsense eatery with its long showcases teeming with smells of salami, liverwurst, meatloaves and fresh bagels, eyeballing the lox, cabbage rolls, blintzes and knishes. Patrons packed the eatery, their din rattling the ceiling fans. I felt nostalgia wrap me like a potato pancake around a knockwurst as I eyeballed Jewish families, nearby entertainment want-to-bes and ripe young Mediterranean maids chatting away the afternoon until their boyfriends showed up. I elbowed my way through the throng waiting for tables, scanning the crowd for Eddy. I recognized his ski jump chin and apish eyebrows, but that was the extent of it. He had put on some pounds, a small truckload of them held in by a snazzy summer blue sports jacket and lavender shirt. I saw why he beefed up like a steer knee deep in grass: a massive bowl of matzo ball soup, pastrami on rye, a brisket with gravy and whipped potato plate along with huge dill pickles and cold slaw stood untouched waiting for me to appear. Before I could pull a chair away from the table, he sprung his reconstructed body upright and hugged me. Eddy was not an hour glass ball of flab anymore; he was hard as a boulder.

‘Been wearing out the bar bells in the off hours, man? I commented, picking up the rhetoric of past times.

‘I keep in shape, old buddy. You look like you have been taking care of yourself.’

‘What else is a single jerk to do?  I joked.

He squeezed my hand with his Mammalian paw and bellowed: ‘It good to see you man.’

‘Right on dude.’    He stood about five foot eight inches to my six feet with an ape like torso perched on bandy legs.

We both smiled at how jargon had changed over the decades, right on man had become I hear you dude.. We pattered like epicene girls resurrecting old times until he stated: ‘I am on the clock, Chas. So let’s get down to business. My digs are on Mulholland overlooking Universal Studios. I converted the garage into a guest’s pad. You can stay there until you find a place.’  He drank Matzo soup like a Philistine, mouthed a massive bite of pastrami and forked a slice of brisket and swallowed it after two chomps. His once dark hair turned to salt and pepper gray and had thinned to baldness on top. He developed some prominent jowls, but the eyes