CHAPTER 1

THE CONFIDENTIAL CASE OF MISSING CARMEL

"The world will always welcome lovers…..as time goes by…..". A sad and sensuous melody wafts in from the Really Old Oldies Station playing on the radio in the bedroom. The classic melody melts into the candlelight and steam above my sunken penthouse bathtub hidden in the clouds of a Big City Skyline.

Amber tendrils of her dripping hair draw arabesques on golden skin along the supple curves of her torso. Eyes half-closed, pouting mouth, she tosses her head toward me with a gaze that would light wet firewood. There is nothing in the world but her and me.

Lifting a leg above the water, she rests her foot on my shoulder, stroking my hair and neck, tickling my ear with her pinkly painted toes. She makes me smile idiotically, yes, please-do-it-ically. I tilt my head to meet her foot with a submissive animal twitch that lets her know she's my master.

Her leg bends slightly. A rivulet runs down her leg, melting into the canyon between her thighs. Her heel nestles next to my throat as she massages my temple with her toe. I lift my hand out of the suds to blow her a bubbly kiss. My eyes follow the ruffled waves as they ripple on the shores of her ample, island breasts. Tiny bubbles swirl and burst beneath her nipples like a tiny, iridescent fireworks show.

Slowly her caresses shift, her slick skin slithers on mine, the tip of her toe traces my chin, the contour of my lips. My eyes loose focus as I submerge myself in sensuousness. I nibble at her perfect toes, tickling with my tongue. She giggles, then laughs out loud. That sound! If it was food, I'd gain a hundred pounds!

“Oh, baby…” My voice is a horse whisper. She whinnies and lets her arching foot slide down my pecs. Her toes dig into my skin, her sole rests on the wild pounding in my chest — she can feel it! Very still, she listens to my heart with her delicious toes. It's pumping! Out of control, like some menacing machine! We both know where the blood is going now…Shadow, I love you.

She bites her lower lip. Her breathing quickens. Like a female Captain Ahab, she lowers her boat urgently into the bubble bath scented waves to hunt for the great, white sperm whale.

“Oh yeah, baby. Lower away!", I say, urging her on.

As the keel of Shadow's boat rides on the waves of our passion, I hear, in the back of my mind, the voice of Gregory Peck intoning Herman Melville’s immortal words:

"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"

The perfumed waves mount into a frothing tempest and splash onto the bathroom floor. My Moby Dick rams and hoists the shuddering bow of her sensuous ship until her timbers creak and moan, and then explode, giving way to screams!…the same, impassioned screams that have summoned the wandering souls of humanity into the next generation of baby bodies since the Omniscient Creator orchestrated the first primordial conception of homo sapiens in the dim mists of…

"Bbrrrrriiiing! Bbrrrrriiiing!"

I opened one eye slowly and carefully lurched my aching head up off my desk. Oh, (Bleep)! I was dreaming again! A very moist dream. For the third time this week I'd fallen asleep in front of my computer monitor. I felt like "Johnny Dollar, PI", in the old radio program I used to listen to when I was a kid, except for the fact that he had an expense account because he worked as a claims investigator for some big insurance company.

I have a lot of expenses, but I didn't have any accounts. Every time Johnny walked around a corner somebody hit him on the back of the head and knocked him out. He spent all of his time trying to figure out who did it and why. Usually, it was because of some women he was mixed up with. You think he would have learned to stay away from corners.

"Bbrrrrriiiing! Bbrrrrriiiing!"

The (bleeping) phone was still ringing! My answering machine picked up the call. I heard my cleverly conceived marketing message start to play as I looked foggily at the sign painted on the opaque glass of my office door:

The Un-existential Detective Agency of America

(T.U.D.A.A.) !

"We dig up the truth for you"

SAM SHOVEL

Proprietor and Public Dick

"You have reached the telephone answering device of the Un-existential Detective Agency of America. After the bleep, tell us about it: Who is it? What is it? Where is it? When is it? Why is it? If we can dig it, we'll return your call at our earliest inconvenience", the recording said. I always let the machine get the calls because I figured it was probably just going to be another bill collector or some telemarketing racket calling, anyway.

"I wish to speak with a Mr. Sam Shovel of the, er.., The Un-existential Detective Agency of America? This is Admiral Wormwoods personal secretary, Ms. Stonesthrow. I may be contacted at (222) 345-6789. If my call is not returned before 5:00 PM today, please do not bother to call…", the voice said. I quickly picked up the phone and turned off the machine.

"Hello? Yes, this is Sam Shovel. How may I be of service?", I asked.

"Good morning Mr. Shovel. I chose your number at random from the Yellow Pages directory. Admiral Wormwood requested that I contact a private investigator on his behalf".

"I'm not really a "private detective". I'll work for anyone who pays me. So, I'm really a "public detective". Actually, I should have called myself a "pubic” dick because it seemed like all the cases I ever worked on had to do with somebody’s sexual misadventures. I had a hunch this case wouldn't be any different.

"Whatever. Anyway, he asks that you come to see him at Wormwood Estates at your earliest inconvenience. You are familiar with the Admiral, are you not?", she said stiffly. I knew the Admiral by his public reputation as an crazy war monger with a weakness for women. He'd retired some years back and lived in a big mansion outside of town. I figured that anyone with a weakness for women couldn't be all that crazy.

"Yeah. I've read a few rumors about him in the newspaper. Why does the Admiral want to see me? If he needs a public investigator, he could have 300 secret servicemen from Naval Intelligence on the case in 5 minutes." I asked

"It is a matter of a highly personal nature. He wishes to employ the services of someone who is completely unknown to handle the matter, and someone of whom no one else could possibly be aware", she scoffed with dutiful disdain. Her attitude displayed an obvious and amateurish lack of appreciation of the most coveted and highly cultivated quality of a public investigator: total anonymity.

"Well, in that case I shall strive to facilitate the Admiral's need to conceal his very high profile lack of discretion and utter disregard for civilized decorum in the handling of his personal affairs by maintaining the highest attainable degree of personal invisibility in the execution of whatever covert manipulations may be required to save the Admiral's questionable reputation from exposure to the crass inquiries of the media and from the eyes of law enforcement officials who have not already been bribed or coerced into ignoring the matter".

"Very well then, if you must. Be at the Admiral's estate precisely at 3:00 PM this afternoon", she voice-dripped.

"Great! Marvelous! Terrific!" I replied, maintaining an aura of detached conservatism, befitting my professional status as an un-existential detective.

I hung up the phone, pushed my chair back from the desk, stretched, scratched my crotch and looked at the clock. Time to get to work. It was my job to dig up the truth for people. Most of the time the “truth” meant the things their spouses were doing that they didn’t know about.

I sipped some cold coffee from a soggy cardboard cup and munched on some half-eaten pizza crusts and doughnuts I found on my desk. I think they were left over from Tuesday's lunch, or was it Wednesday's breakfast? Like the secretary said …whatever.

While I rode my Harley out of the city, I reflected on the un-existential nature of my business. E xistential is a word that describes an irreducibly personal and subjective view of human existence. My subjective experience in life had proved, so far, that, most of the time, the only person who agreed with me about whether something was subjective or objective was me. This perpetual dispute makes the job of trying to be an un-existential public dick a lot bigger and harder than you’d think, from an objective point of view, this is.

Eventually, I turned down a remote country road and cruised along for another half an hour. Finally, I crossed a gated moat and drove up a 3 and 1/2 mile driveway lined with hedges that were as manicured as military haircut. I stopped at a 12-foot high iron gate. The estate was surrounded by a 10 foot high stone wall, cheerily decorated with barbed wire and security cameras. The secretary had given me a secret pass code to punch into the security key pad at the gate. There were supposed to be 12 numbers in the code, but I spilled coffee on the Post-It note I'd used to scribble the number on and some of the numbers were too blurry to read. So, I pressed the buzzer instead.

The voice of a security guard crackled through the speaker on the box. "What do you want, biker freak?" I assumed that this greeting was meant to imply a generic mistrust of persons who choose motorcycles as their principle means of transportation. I had to shut off the engine of my Harley because the security guard couldn't hear me shouting my name into the squawk box at the gate. After a stimulating exchange of a few more names, with reference to the sexual preferences of our respective mothers, I was able to persuade the security person to contact Ms. Stonesthrow to verify my identity, with the implication that the Admiral might not enjoy the sight of large bare patches in the shape of the doughnuts all over the grass of his carefully cultivated grounds. (Or was it "grounds of his grass",? Or "grass grounds"? Or maybe, "grounds grass"? Whatever).

Ten minutes later, I was shown into the Admiral's personal "war room". He was intently puttering with tiny toy ships on a vast table. My un-existential observation, based on the enormous model battle theatre, complete with remote-controlled miniature ships, blinking lights and computer console, was that the Admiral was either 1) still fighting his own, subjective version of a war that had long since ended or 2) making plans for World War III.

Admiral Wormwood was meticulously dressed in full naval uniform, except for his camouflaged battle helmet which displayed four brightly polished gold stars across the front. Admiral Wormwood had the easy grace of a manikin and the charming demeanor of a chained pit-bull -- and the good looks to match.

"Son, this is a scale model of the history of all the naval battles fought in the oceans of the world during WW II. I loved every minute of the whole (bleeping) thing. I was really sorry to see it end. If it wasn't for the (bleeping) A-bomb-dropping-Air Force, we could still be out there fighting today…what a pity…", he sighed, shaking his head slowly.

"Well, yes sir, I suppose so…ah, Admiral, sir. Yes, indeed. Well, what was it that you called me here for, sir?", I said as respectfully as one can when addressing a top-ranking, although retired from active service, war-monger of questionable mental stability.

"Very good, then. I like a man who gets straight to the point. Not West Point, mind you. I'm an Naval Academy man myself. Class of '23, back when ships still had sails and engines still burned coal and sailors were still sailors first and men second, and when women still cooked and cleaned and knew their place and when the United States still owned the Panama Canal, and when a nickel could still buy a good cup of black coffee, and when children were still taught to respect their elders and when reading and writing and arithmetic were still the foundations of our society and when the President of the United States was still writing his own speeches, and…".

"Excuse me, Admiral…", I interrupted, at the risk of shocking him back into the current decade, at which time he might become aware that he had actually stopped living any kind of meaningful existence 45 years ago and just blow his brains out with one of the arsenal of weapons he had mounted in glass cases along the walls of his enormous war room.

"Oh, yes, of course. Where was I…?" he puzzled, still hunched over one of the tiny battle cruisers amid the vast flotilla laid out on an enormous scale model of the Global Ocean.

"Your secretary called me, sir. A personal matter you need to have investigated?".

"Oh, yes. That. Well, I don't want Carmel's disappearing act to land on the front page of the newspapers or on the desk of some District Attorney looking for a cheap publicity stunt to build a political career on. I want you to find my wife and the items she took from me and keep it quiet", said the Admiral abruptly, with no further explanation of the circumstances of her disappearance or exactly which missing items were involved. Obviously, the Admiral had a highly developed awareness of female behavior, understanding the simplicity of the fact that "disgruntled wives will be disgruntled wives".

"I'll expect a written status report on my desk no later than 0800 hours each Saturday morning. You will receive a detailed briefing sheet, photographic identification of your suspect, supply requisition forms and compensation from Ms. Stonesthrow on your way out", the Admiral said, motioning toward the door with the long stick he was using to move the ships around on the ocean.

"You're dismissed, sailor", he grunted, returning to his miniature, wartime universe.

As I walked toward the twelve foot tall, engraved oak door of the war room, I glanced back briefly. The Admiral was making sounds of exploding bombs and gunfire while waving little Japanese Zero fighter planes over the tabletop with the gleeful abandon of an 8 year-old boy. "Oh, well", I mused, "it's a client and it's money". I was afraid to ask what might happen to me if I failed to find the Admiral's "missing items".

I was even more afraid to ask how the Admiral had made enough money to pay for his lavish estate, as I was sure the answer would be repulsive. For instance, I didn't want to know that he was a government official who used his insider connections through his former military position to fleece the US Department of Defense budget to make a personal fortune in the private sector by manufacturing enough weapons to annihilate the entire planet, at tax-payer expense. I couldn't bring myself to accept that kind of money without violating every fundamental humanitarian principle of ethics ever conceived by reasoning men. So, I decided not to ask.

On the way out I was shown into the office of the Admiral's charming and endearing personal secretary, Ms. Stonesthrow, with whom I had spoken on the phone.

"So good to meet you in person…Mr. Shovel", she said condescendingly, without extending her hand or looking up from her desk.

"Yeah, I'm as charmed as you are, I'm sure", I said.

She handed me a plain brown 8" by 10" envelope. I checked the contents. There were a couple of dozen assorted snapshots and studio photos of a gorgeous blonde babe in various states of dress and undress and a short list of the "items" which were found missing from the Admiral's safe, together with an estimate of their value -- just a few digits, followed by a lot of zeros. There was also a sizable bundle of cash as an advance payment for my expenses.

"Those are some pretty impressive items!", I said. "And the amount of money she took from the safe is pretty impressive too."

"I'm sure you can see yourself out, Mr. Shovel", said Ms. Stonesthrow, coldly.

I'd rather see myself next to Carmel in some of the photos I’d been given, but I'd have to find her first , I thought to myself as I left the estate.

In the old days all you needed to be a good public dick, like Johnny Dollar or Phillip Marlowe, were a .45 caliber revolver, a pack of unfiltered cigarettes, a trench coat, a couple of quirky mannerisms, a fedora hat, a lot of shoe leather, a seedy office, an insatiable appetite for women and a Zippo lighter. These days all you needed were a listing in the Yellow pages, a computer, an insatiable appetite for women and a total lack of desire to work a 9 to 5 job.

Likewise, most criminals didn't need to carry guns anymore. Instead, all they need are a slick corporate logo, a public stock offering, a clever accounting firm, a Capitol Hill lobbying group and a good defense attorney. Most of them had suites in the financial district or big desks in government office buildings, or both.

I really didn't care about investigating crime -- it was too subjective and confusing. In the old days everything was black and white. Good guy, bad guy. These days, it seemed like one man's criminal activities were another man's job description.

When I didn't have a paying client, which was most of the time, I conducted my own investigation to discover the meaning of existence. Or unexistence, as the case may be, or not be.

The potential job security was great. There were enough mysteries to solve about unexistence in the universe to make a career opportunity for the next 100 billion years. So far, I'd learned one thing in this line of business. Not many people were willing to pay to learn the truth. They only paid for what they wanted to hear: some truth, mixed with enough lies to make the truth comfortable.

Back at my office, I booted up the Internet on my PC and spent a couple of hours surfing the NET to check the usual missing persons search engines, flight schedules, news reports, police reports and pawn broker chat rooms and known fences for any clue I could get about where Carmel Wormwood might have disappeared to. Nothing.

This was a typical missing wife case: Admiral Wormwood, (USN, Ret.) says he wants me to find Carmel, not because he misses her -- they were only married for two weeks. He misses the guys she ran off with when she left him -- a lot of guys named Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln. So far, I was just as clueless as to the whereabouts of Carmel Wormwood and her famous friends, as the Admiral was about Carmel's real intentions when he married her.

I checked out the photos of Carmel again. She was a real beauty, even with clothes on. She could have been the girl of my dreams, but the girl in my dreams earlier that morning really was the girl of my dreams, except she was a real girl. Her name was Shadow. She had a face that could stop a clock and a body that stopped time. At least it had for me. After all these years, I couldn't get her out of my mind.

Sex was like an Olympic sport for Shadow. By the time she was 30 years old she had competed in every event -- with enough guys to fill the stands of an ice hockey rink. She won the gold medal every time. Even though she was an amateur, she scored more often than any professional in the sport. Shadow played the game for fun first and money second. She could suck a golf ball through a garden hose, and often did -- as a warm-up exercise. She told me, " it helps me improve my technique".

It's been said that, outside of a woman, a dog is a man's best friend, but inside of a woman, a (bleep) is much friendlier than a dog, but not necessarily more faithful. Shadow was as faithful as a dog to it's dinner dish. She ate whatever anybody put in it and begged for more when it was empty. She knew every trick in the book and made me do them all.

Shadow had a brother named Sunny. I asked her why her parents gave her and her brother such corny names. She said her parents were burned-out flower children from the Sixties. After all the drugs they had done, they didn't have enough imagination left to think of anything more original. And they weren't too bright either.

Anyway, I went back to checking the contents of the envelope I'd received from the Admiral's secretary. I shook the rest of the papers out on my desk. I counted the cash. Not a bad paycheck. It was more money than I'd seen in one place for a long time, except in a grocery store cash register. I picked up the inventory list and scanned it over. Along with the missing cash, there was one piece of jewelry missing from the safe too: a silver medallion. I couldn't figure why a piece of brass jewelry could be valuable enough to keep in a safe, much less steal from a safe. Well, whatever.

Under the other papers there was a business card for a doctor of acupuncture. The card said:

"DR. ALICE NETTLES

Discover acupuncture and your life won't be pointless anymore."

It seemed that Carmel Wormwood may have received some acupuncture treatments before she disappeared. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one giving her the treatment, but I would have to go there to follow up on the lead anyway.