Cars. Stars. Murder.: A Sherlock Jones Novel

By William J Palmer

It's the Pandemic, the film industry is on unwelcome hiatus, and Hollywood's brightest star, Mandy Troy, is receiving death threats and compromising photos out of her past. Sherlock's former Marine Corps Sergeant is Mandy's bodyguard and lover.

Suspecting blackmail is imminent, he brings Sherlock Jones and the WDGA "Disreputabl

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Oct 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822902442

Book preview

Chapter 1

Stream of Carness

The 405 is a parking lot right now and I’m trapped right in the middle of it. Cars to the right of me. Cars to the left of me. It’s like the Little Big Horn 21st Century L.A. Style. But most of the Indians in the cars that have me surrounded are wearing masks not headdresses. They look more like old west bank robbers than Indians. Or better yet, they look ghostly, ghosts without faces, caught in the dead zone of a 405 traffic jam. Really, as I look around, I can’t believe how many drivers, alone in their cars, windows closed, totally cut off even though trapped in traffic, still have their masks on. I never wear my mask in the car. Who am I going to infect? Who is going to infect me? The steering wheel? The dashboard? The empty shotgun seat? Really? But as I look around almost all of them have their masks on, sitting there in traffic, waiting for the jam to break up. They are like robots who when you peel their masks off instead of faces have all wires and batteries and computer boards like the Six Million Dollar Man or Robo Cop or C3PO.

But many of the masks give away the wearers’ personalities, or nationalities, or politics, or sports teams, or colleges, or music preferences, or sexual preferences, or beer brands, or pets, or whatever their wearer thinks is important enough to express visually. I guess when your face is taken away, your smile or sneer or frown is also taken away, your mouth is gagged and your voice is muffled, you’ve got to find some way to express yourself. Over my left shoulder there’s an Asian driver I presume since his mask is decorated with graceful Chinese letters. Over my right shoulder is a guy who either went to or roots for Notre Dame. As the traffic creeps slowly forward, I see two Trump masks but no Democrats, a Coors Light drinker, a Day of the Dead skeleton, a creepy voyeur with binoculars where his mouth should be pointed right at me.

Don’t get me wrong, I always wear my mask when I’m indoors in any public place or even when I’m out in the streets with other people. In fact, when the Pandemic started, Sasha, ever style conscious, gave me a whole wardrobe of masks, masks of all different colors and patterns and hip texts, designer masks. Yikes! I wear them, though they certainly aren’t my style. But when you are in your car alone? Really!

Sitting there in that parking lot on the 405 with all those masked zombies in suspension all around me got me thinking. Yes, my car with the windows rolled up was probably one of the safest places I could be. That set me to counting the other safe places for me to be in this Pandemic. The golf course was immediately number one on my list. Outdoors. Plenty of social distance between myself and the other hackers. Certainly, the beach also was safe at least during the week when the crowds weren’t out. But even about a third of the people walking the beach were wearing masks. I was starting to wonder if the masks, in the months that the Pandemic had been going on, hadn’t come to be adopted as a fashion statement, a couture accessory like women’s jewelry and scarves and purses. I felt safe on the golf course, on the beach, in my car. But I guess all those other masked drivers around me didn’t,

Today the 405 is a frigging parking lot. There has to be an accident somewhere up there, some moron who tried to cut off a semi and didn’t make it, or some dip-shit cowboy weaving back and forth in traffic at 90 mph, or some alcoholic or stoned drug addict who should no way be behind the wheel, or some inane valley girl talking on her cell phone. Or, and it gave me a grin, some driver with a mask on who scratched his nose, twerked his mask up over his eyes and blindly triggered a ten-car pile-up. So here I am, sitting in the middle of a huge clusterfuck on the 405, reknowned to be the busiest stretch of freeway in America. I sure wasn’t going anywhere. Across six lanes of traffic, hundreds of cars, most of their drivers masked, were not at all social distanced. Past, present, future all brought to a standstill. The radio doesn’t work in my car. All that was left for me was to think.

It had been almost a year since I wrapped up the Briarwood murder case. A month after that stinking mess hit the fan 2020’s real stench filled the air—the Pandemic. It was like this traffic jam. The whole world came to a halt. All of our lives went into gridlock just like me on the 405 right now. Gridlock, a good word for us. None of us moving forward. None of us able to go where we had hoped we would go.

But for me, right now, this particular gridlock is getting to be a problem. You see, it is Wednesday and I am on my way to the Venice Public for the WDGA and if this traffic jam doesn’t break up soon I’m going to miss our 4:30 tee time. For me, the one saving grace in this plague year has been the golf course and the WDGA Disreputables. Since everyone was pretty much working from home, we were getting together more than just once a week and playing golf like a merry group of functioning alcoholics. We would get together irregularly in twos and threes, but on Wednesdays we always had a full contingent. Me, Fresh, Panda, Clay-boy, Doc and Frash never missed a Wednesday round. Now I was stuck in gridlock and our Wednesday tee time was rapidly approaching.

As if the LAPD or the CHIPies or the County Sheriffs, whoever was in charge of getting cars moving on the 405, had read my panicking thoughts, suddenly the traffic jam started to break up and I breathed that proverbial sigh of relief.

But then everything stopped again.

Damn, it was like a second wave of gridlock, the masked drivers all closing in on me once more, fender to fender, all faceless. even more of them than before. This day on the 405 was like a horror movie nightmare, an army of zombies in masks slowly bearing down on me. I had thought I was home free. Not so fast Sherlock! You know, we like to think that we can see the future and deal with what is coming at us. YEAH RIGHT! Life in the Pandemic is like driving the L.A. freeway. You get cut off every two or three minutes or you get caught in traffic jams like the one I’m sitting in now. In the past our lives were all so predictable, so governed by habit. For me, the Corps turned me into such a predictable drone: up at five, make your bed, go to drill, yada, yada, yada. It had taken me years of avoiding complications to put a dent in that predictability. But the Pandemic changed everything. Sitting here in my car in the claustrophobia of a 405 traffic jam I look around and I’m surrounded by unearthly masked creatures driving alone in their cars. Only in L.A.

L.A. has always been a culture totally dependent on cars, in love with its cars, more so than any other city in America. New York is a tiny island built up into the sky and travelling underground. L.A. is a sprawling megalopolis. Fifty suburbs searching for a city, undaunted by mountain ranges running right through it, schizophrenic in its disunity, the ostentatious gated wealth of Beverly Hills on the north to the violent poverty of South Central, Hollywood dreams contending with drug gang realities, and all of it tied together by the most complex freeway system ever engineered. In my car, alone, day-dreaming, defiantly unmasked, I imagine that from space L.A. must look like a huge ant farm—our cars the ants, our freeways the sand tunnels, all under the imprisoning glass of the Pandemic. Or maybe what the Pandemic had done was yank L.A. out of its eternal sunshine and back into the dark depression that hadn’t plagued the city since the Manson murders, the King beating, the Watts fires, the crooked Rampart cops, the ascendence of the drug gangs. That’s it, I thought, sitting there in my car, L.A. is bi-polar, up then down, then up then down again, manic then depressed, moving on the freeways between the sunshine of the pure ocean air versus the downtown gloom of dirty yellow smog around the edges of everything.

Sitting there, it occurred to me that in the Pandemic our cars had become places of refuge, safe houses on wheels. When the outside world, other people, the very air we breathe, became infectious, our cars became quiet bubbles where we could go to think, to try to figure things out, to form plans for coping. That’s me most of the time these days, sitting in traffic like today on the glutted 405, trying to figure things out for want of having anything else to do. Actually, that’s what all of us trapped there in that freeway parking lot were probably doing. We all used to be on the move, trying to get some place. Then the Pandemic hit and suddenly we were all stopped, going nowhere. I wondered if this Pandemic had turned all of those other masked drivers around me inward as it had me, forced them to cope with their own stream of consciousness alone in their cars. I hoped so. I hoped they were still human behind their masks that had obliterated their identities, robbed them of their faces, taken away their smiles. Geez, I thought, I’m giving myself the creeps.

Maybe it was the carbon monoxide from all the idling cars jammed in around me. Or maybe it was the heat from the sun beating down on me with its feel of Santa Anas coming in. But certainly, it was my desire to get my mind off of morbid Pandemic paranoia and on to something a lot more attractive. Like Sasha. Tomorrow she would get back from San Francisco. Just thinking of her made all of the stasis around me disappear. Things will really be looking up, I thought. Today I’ll play golf with the WDGA and tomorrow I’ll pick Sasha up at the airport and we’ll go straight to her place for a whole evening of beach blanket bingo. Just the thought of it cheered me up.

We had been getting along really well once the trauma of the whole Briarwood case got put away, but then she started playing competitive mixed doubles all over California with her old friend with benefits fuckbuddy, the tennis pro from the Briarwood Country Club days. Both of them had moved on, he to a public tennis center in Brentwood, she to an up-scale Fitness Club in Beverly Hills. She insisted that the benefits part of their partnership was all over, that there was nothing but high-level tennis going on between them, but me, being the suspicious, inquisitive, insecure, drowning in low self-esteem, jealous PI that I am, I was not all that sure. You see, even though we had been together almost a year, and she kept coming back to me, sleeping with me, for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. No one knew better than me that she was way out of my league. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that she was the best thing that had happened to me in, well, forever. And I didn’t really consider poor feckless Randy as any kind of sexual competition. But still I was uneasy, hoping that Sasha and I could keep going on, hoping that she wasn’t tiring of me, because when it came right down to it, I really liked her, maybe not loved her, or maybe I was starting to. All I knew, sitting there in my car in that traffic jam, was that thinking about her definitely cheered me up and made me surprisingly horny.

But then I looked up and there they were again, all the masks. But thinking of Sasha, looking forward to picking her up tomorrow, had completely changed my mood. I defied the downer that all those masked drivers were putting off on me. Screw the masks, I tried to distill something positive out of them. Come to think of it, in my business the masks are a gift, a blessing, now I was on full bore trying to convince myself. The masks have made it really easy for a detective like me, mister hands on, to do surveillance, tail my targets. My argument to myself was irrationally taking shape and substance. Since the Pandemic began and everyone donned their masks, I had developed a whole new surveillance technique. As long as I wore dull, non-colorful or non-flamboyant clothes, no debt-dodger or repo candidate would ever spot me, would never even know I exist. I’d be just another masked non-identity. Not even a face in the crowd because I had no face, none of us did. I could follow a surveillance target walking right beside them and they’d never make me. And I can change identities at will just by putting on a different mask. I had about thirty of them in the back seat, all colors and patterns, some with animals, some with dumb sayings like Who is that masked man? or Just ask the mask? I also noticed that people wearing masks tend to talk much louder than they need to which makes it much easier to eavesdrop on their conversations especially when your mask allows you to get really close to them.

Finally, we started to move. Slowly at first, creeping fender to fender. All of us masked drivers hunched over our steering wheels, slowly picking up speed, auto-social-distancing. It should have made me feel good, excited, but glancing around I realized that none of them had removed their masks. The whole time we were trapped together in that traffic jam no one pulled off their mask and gave me a smile and a thumbs-up. Why should I be surprised? I thought. Most people are hiding behind masks anyway. Come to think of it, even if a Pandemic isn’t making us, we all still wear masks most of the time. Lie-masks. Cheat-masks. Happy masks when we’re not. Agree masks when we don’t. Sympathy masks when we really don’t care. Attentive masks when we’re really not listening. Passive masks when we’re angry. I couldn’t help thinking that sometimes we all just had to drop our masks and be ourselves. Oh yes, we all wear masks, Pandemic or no Pandemic. And it is really hard to see behind them.

As the traffic began if pick up, the last lines from one of my favorite old movies, M*A*S*H, suddenly sparked in my memory. Goddam 405! Goddam Pandemic! Goddam Masks!

Chapter 2

The WDGA

I made it to the Venice Public and the WDGA tee time with mere minutes to spare. They were on the tee. Panda immediately handed me a beer: Where the hell you been? We’ve been drinkin’ since three. Here, chug this, you got some catchin’ up to do. And so it began. One thing about those guys, they know how to set the world right. And not one of them was wearing a mask.

We finished our round about dark thirty as usual and took our usual round table on the patio as usual until something really unusual happened. I was at the take-out window buying beers. The Venice Public bar, like every other eating and drinking establishment in L.A., was closed to indoor seating. When I got back to the table with the beers, the Disreputables had already started entertaining each other with our usual bull shit. Fresh, with his usual tact, said to me: You sure played for shit tonight.

In my defense, I searched my beer-buzzed mind for some believable excuses: I sat in my damned car on the 405 for forty minutes when I should have been here lubing up with beer. I think my back stiffened up. On a couple of swings out there my back felt like one of you mooks nailed me with a seven-iron.

Really. Fresh came right back at me, is having a back that feels like it was hit with a seven-iron the same as getting nailed in the left butt cheek by a 30-yard shank. I still feel that one on cold days.

Let me explain. I should have known better than to give him that opening. I did indeed hit Fresh in the butt with a shank on our trip to Pinehurst in 2014, but it was a lob wedge not a seven-iron.

You’re the only one I could have hit with that shank for one rather large and obvious reason, I raised my beer bottle to him.

Panda cracked up: That was a pretty shitty shank Sherlock.

Ah, poetry, me dripping sarcasm.

OK, now you’re getting personal, Fresh cut in with some mock anger.

Personal, yes, why not? Isn’t spanking someone on the ass pretty personal. Oops, autocorrect. That’s ‘shanking’ not ‘spanking’.

Doc, in all seriousness, being helpful, said: I’ve got a good chiropractor who could adjust your back.

Panda: What’s a chiropractor?

Clay-boy: Mine is a magician.

Doc: Sort of doctor for bad backs, crooked spines, muscle knots, messed-up bodies.

Frash: A pretend doctor.

Me: Magic fingers, I don’t think I need to see a chiropractor, I just need to stay off the 405.

Sophisticated and intellectual conversationalists that we WDGAers are, our talk next turned to Doc’s colonoscopy. He had gone for it on Monday of that week and by today he was fine to play golf, but even better to talk about it at length, in lurid detail, undaunted by the pained faces every one of us around the table were making. He began with entering the waiting room of the colonoscopy clinic and confronting a whole line-up of men waiting. He described it as an assembly line of assholes. Then he went on to describe in even more graphic detail, for which all of us were intensely grateful. He started with the prep for the procedure the night before which he characterized as like turning on a fire hose and blowing out everything in sight. Next, he moved to the afternoon of the whole procedure as his wife led him bow-legged to their car and drove him home to sit him on a special pillow shaped like a donut that his wife had bought him for the occasion.

Was it a Krispy Kreme or a Dunkin’? Panda innocently asked.

Doc ignored him. I did have her stop on the way home at McDonalds and get me a Big Mac and a large Mocha Frappe. Undaunted, he then went on, sparing us no detail, how the next morning he took his first colorectal fast-food dump causing him significant pain, which we all agreed he fully deserved as punishment for stealing about a half hour of all of our lives by telling us about it in such graphic disgusting detail.

However, heedless of the rest of us wanting to move on to other less nauseating topics, Clay-boy had to ask: So how did the procedure feel?

Yeah, did it hurt? Panda chimed in.

I don’t know? Doc answered.

You don’t know? I burst out in disbelief.

Yeah, Doc shrugged. I slept through the whole thing.

The ‘hole’ thing? Clay-boy asked counterfeiting interest in the service of bad punning.

Now bear in mind, we had all just sat and drank our way through about twenty minutes of Doc’s colonoscopy narrative under the lights around a table on the patio pf the Venice Public bar and he springs the news on us the he slept through the whole deal,

Yeah, he went on. I woke up and my wife was sitting there next to the bed and I asked her: ‘When are they going to do this thing?’

Hon, she said, they did it almost an hour ago.

All I could think was ‘hey, that surely wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.’

But it certainly was pretty bad for all the rest of us who had to sit there and listen to this grotesque narrative of this totally non-event. Hey, welcome to the WDGA.

Fresh finally summed up the group’s feelings on the subject: You know, you can take your colonoscopy and shove it up your ass.

It was that night of the great colonoscopy saga that all of a sudden my next real case showed up. I looked up from my beer and Frash and Clay-boy, both sitting across from me at the table were looking up past me. I swiveled my head around and there he was, standing in the gathering darkness, S.

Holy shit, S, my god, I can’t believe it. And I jumped up and stepped toward him. I would have given him a hug I was so excited to see him. But Marines don’t hug. So instead I whacked him on the shoulder and hit him with an old cliché: Man, what a sight for sore eyes. I can’t believe it. You’re here. It’s so good to see you.

I’ve been here. For a year. I should have checked in with you before this. Sorry about that. But I did read about your murder case in the newspaper last year.

Let me describe S. 6’4, about 220, all muscle, both arms heavily tattooed, clearly a weight lifter, brown hair buzzed Marine Corps style, slate-grey eyes the color of gun-metal, and not smiling. He looked like a man who could bench press a Hummer. A pretty imposing figure.

While this reunion was going on, the rest of the guys were sitting around the table just gaping at us. Later, when I thought about it, I think they were sort of surprised that I had any other friends besides them. They certainly had a collection of Who is this guy? looks on their