"Those goddamn the stripper bars, they’re the worst," said Lex. "A babe snaking around a pole, her hooters clanging together. They forced the classy stripper clubs out of business. How could they compete with that?"

I shook my head. Gatlin grinned through the cigar haze he’d vented through his nose. "Make no mistake, Lex. You’re a true connoisseur of our forgotten joys. Eh, Frank?"

"Make no mistake," I repeated in a bored way.

This low-lit hideaway squeezed and tucked in the 700s block of H Street in Northwest Washington, DC was scripted in shrimp pink neon tubing above its doors as "Buster Cherry." Get it? Ha, ha, funny stuff, right? On weekend nights, exotics danced and pranced in the buff. Fortunately this was a Saturday night soon-to-be Sunday morning and the entertainment served up was a hot jazz quartet. For the moment, they were breaking between sets. Even if a bluegrass music aficionado, I enjoyed their lush tones.

Liquor had lubricated Gatlin’s tongue. "What’s the hip term for these pleasure palaces, Frank?"

"Gentlemen’s cabarets," I replied. Tobacco smoke clawed at my eyes like whiffs of fresh-sprayed Mace.

"Now Frank is country as a biscuit, born and bred in rural Virginia," Gatlin went on, resting a hammy palm on my shoulder. Scowling, I looked it off. "The amazing fact is, however, no matter where I send him, he somehow manages to finish the task at hand. He’s been to Hanoi, Toronto, New Zealand, Buda-Pest -- "

Grunting, Lex rattled ice cubes in his topaz tumbler. A skinny, nervous waitress shuttled over with a new vermouth. "Yeah, I’ve asked around about Frank the private eye. The word I get is good. All good."

"Blows your mind, don’t it?" Hand shielding his mouth, Gatlin leaned closer to Lex, saying: "If anybody can buy back your dad’s saxophone, Frank is your man."

"No thanks," I said before sipping ginger ale. It tasted flat. "I’m not interested."

"Now Frank, we’ve played up the risks here. You can finesse it if you apply yourself."

"I’m not into dealing with psychopath killers."

"Schlitz isn’t a psychopath," said Gatlin. "Maybe a killer but he’s mentally well-balanced."

"If charm and diplomacy are all that’s needed, why don’t you go see him?" I asked.

"I’m a reputable attorney in good standing," Gatlin said.

"You’re a half-soused shyster who can barely stand up straight," I corrected him.

"That’s where you come in." Gatlin’s suspicious hand settled again on my shoulder. "I’ve made you the designated driver. Now, be a good enough sport and help out Lex who is, incidentally, a cash-paying client."

"All right, all right," I said, shaking off Gatlin’s hand. "Lex, I’ll ring you up tomorrow. Scribble your cell and pager numbers on a matchbook. Meantime, I’m obligated to taxi my employer back to his humble abode among the other Middleburg billionaires."

"Careful what you say," said Gatlin, a slur thickening his speech. "Middleburg is God’s country."

"Frank, I appreciate it," said Lex. "That sax means everything to me. It was my dad’s."

"Right."

"Schlitz bought it when Dad had been out of work for months," said Lex. "He got it dirt cheap, too. That King Silversonic is worth tenfold what he compensated my father for it."

"On the face of things, I’d say they struck a legal deal," I said. "Your father named a price, Schlitz made a counter proposal, and they shook on it."

"Frank, give Lex a hand," said Gatlin. "Not a goddamn lecture."

"Barkeep," I said. "Will you please fetch us a cab? The destination is out of the city to Middleburg in Virginia. We can cover the fare with no problem."

Narrowing his mouth, Gatlin raised his gin glass. "Damn straight. I’m worth more than Bill Gates."

"Well, well, " I said. "So: let’s all kowtow and kiss your royal ass."

"You want me to wash it first?" said Gatlin, a sly bent to his smile.

* * *

Late the next morning -- it was Sunday -- out at the trailer, I sat perched on the orange sofa skimming through entries in a journal. For various cases, I’d scratched down a few words to remind me what a pain in the ass most of them were. If I was a betting man -- and I wasn’t -- I wager more murder victims had fallen in my pathway than Jessica Fletcher’s in Cabot Cove.

Hoo boy. If there was an easier way to turn a honest buck, I hadn’t yet found it. Then my thoughts swerved to my present case -- meeting with the psychopath Schlitz to negotiate the purchase of Lex’s dad’s prized saxophone. My tattered Polaroid of the instrument showed a real beauty known as a Silversonic.

This job fell outside of my purview. Schlitz and I, however, had a lurid history. A dozen years ago, with a covert assist from Gatlin, I’d uncovered enough hard physical evidence to convince a jury that he’d knifed a man in the heart during a barroom brawl.

Now any sane thug would swear a vengeance against me. Schlitz wasn’t sane. Instead, his letter from prison arrived in my mail. The terms were simple. Schlitz wrote that my jailing him was like a bad debt. In other words, by applying his convoluted reasoning, I owed him a favor. A big favor. What’s more, sooner or later, he would call it in. As a model inmate, he won an early release from jail.

A matter of minutes later, I was in my red Prizm heading up Highway 29 North through the town of Warrenton and on to New Baltimore. There wasn’t a soul found on the road. Either we’d had a nuclear blast the night before or everybody was in church setting things straight with the Lord.

Schlitz was wealthy. Not filthy rich like Gatlin in his Middleburg splendor but he had money enough to reside on a palatial horse farm where I now crept along its red gravel lane. The immense oaks flanking it budded pickle green sprouts. For mid-April, noontime felt unseasonably warm, almost sultry. Schlitz’s big house sported the typical white Corinthian columns across its wraparound verandah.

The mansion’s sides were ecru stucco; the mansard roof bore slate fishscale shingles. Barns and outbuildings strewn beyond it were painted white with green trim. After not seeing any thoroughbreds grazing in the pasture, the vista struck me as incomplete. Frowning, I parked and ranged out of the Prizm. The serpentine walkway was paved in irregular flagstones.

Sunlight danced in the brick glass outlining the doorway when I jabbed the chimes button. No response. After my encore, I still only got cold silence. Right along now the short hairs on the back of my neck quilled. Apropos of nothing, I wondered if Jessica Fletcher experienced such a premonition before happening upon a murder. The green door was unlocked so I sidled through the threshold into the airy foyer.

"Son of a bitch," I muttered, gazing down a few feet from my shoe tops.

On his hefty side, Schlitz wasn’t taking a catnap. Not with that prim quarter-inch hole drilled mid-center in his high forehead. Cordite and crusted blood haloed it. My panicky eyes did a scan but didn’t turn up a 9mm, what I judged to be the murder weapon.

Schlitz’s fat corpse wore a gray Gubabera shirt, blue pants, no socks, and tasseled loafers stitched from an alligator’s hide. An aroma of decay, Brut aftershave, and shit sauced the air. Viewing yet another corpse sucked the spit out of my mouth. I forced myself to examine the crime scene. Schlitz’s hands were empty and his florid face bore no scrapes or scratches so I ruled out any struggle, whatever that meant. Nothing else of evidentiary value emerged.

"Man, it just gets better and better," I said in a sour undertone.

I plucked out my cell phone where Gatlin was at the top of my speed dial. My favorite shyster had already rolled his ass out of bed. His loud "hello!" answer warned me about his mood.

"Johnson here," I said. "Guess what awaited me at Schlitz’s place in New Baltimore?"

"A blind midget juggling hand grenades," said Gatlin. "The pulled pins lay scattered on the floor."

"Close enough. Schlitz is flaked out here with a bullet in his brain."

"Ugh. It’s too early for murder," Gatlin said. "Hang up and call me back later."

"Not a chance, counselor. Here’s something else. My name will become number one on the cops’ suspect list."

"True enough. It’s no big secret you sent him to prison," agreed Gatlin. "He’d be PO’d at you."

"As I recall it, you had a hand in that, too. Suggestions?"

"Bring the real killer to justice before the authorities catch you."

"Brilliant enough. Who, then, becomes our suspect?"

A groan emptied my ear. "Not Lex. Oh Christ, my head aches from last night."

"Sorry to hear about your hangover. Let me pry around here a little."

"Good enough. Keep me posted. I’m off to swallow down aspirins like gumdrops."

At a snappy clip, I rummaged through the mansion, room by room, pawing through wardrobe closets, underneath chairs, and behind furniture. It was a hopeless task -- there were too many niches for, say, hiding a certain saxophone. Lex had taken it. Time grew tight. I kept an eye peeled out the windows, expecting to see a lanky farmhand to tool up the driveway.

My mind raced. Lex resided across the Potomac River in a refurbished townhouse on M Street in Georgetown. While fishing out of my pocket the Buster Cherry matchbook having his contact information written on it, I stooped to peer out the windowpanes. A prowl car, its roof-bar flashing red-blue, broke into my field of vision.

"Damn," I heard myself say.

Lex resided at 459 M Street. That was my next destination. Maybe. I breathed out in relief -- the cops’ flashing red-blue light glimmered by the turn-off into Schlitz’s farm. I took a few minutes to mentally retrace my canvass of the mansion’s rooms. No surfaces had been touched. My work here was finished.

A few churchgoers in SUVs and PT Cruisers I passed on the highway had escaped. I pedaled a lawful 55. Did a law exist on the books for finding but failing to report a murder? What was the penalty? I’d probably loose my PI license as a minimum. How effective would a hung over Gatlin be at bonding me out of jail on a murder rap? I didn’t much care for the odds.

I invaded the District of Columbia over Key Bridge by way of Rosalyn, Virginia. Georgetown’s streets were lined with trash receptacles overflowing with beer and wine bottles. Saturday night’s revelers had retreated to their dorm rooms and suburban caves. A short, squatty, swarthy man pushed a broom cleaning away the flotsam in front of his dry cleaners. I rolled by the old Biograph Theater and a few used bookstores. On the radio Jim and Jesse sang a stained glass bluegrass music classic, the closest I’d over come to a church. I parked the Prizm and stared in disbelief.

"How in the hell does Lex swing the rent in this posh part of town?" I murmured.

459 M Street was a standalone Victorian, its bricks colored meerschaum yellow with steel bars fitted over the windowpanes. Drawn cranberry curtains covered them though I didn’t figure crime was a problem here. On the other hand, I wondered what thrills lurked inside the townhouse.

A sober grimness toughening my face, I stretched across the seat and popped open the glove compartment. Under a package of road flares, I rustled out a .44 Charter Arms Pub to poke into a jacket pocket. Its dark heaviness lent me a good weight.

Once edging out my car door, I did a hasty up-and-down the street scan. All was as serene as Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Wrens singing. A breeze blowing. Dandelions nodding. My heart thumping. My soles scraped up the concrete steps. Twice in as many hours I encountered an unlocked door and as before, I invited myself indoors.

In the stale dimness, my eyes flinched to adjust my new environment. Lex must’ve held a firesale in recent days because his rooms barely contained a stick of furniture, used or new. No throw rugs to disguise the pine floorboards, my tread echoed hollow and intrusive.

"Hello," I said. "Lex, are you in? Anybody home?"

Silence. The fisted .44 drew me into the kitchenette. The space was spic-and-span, what surprised me. Keeping a shipshape galley wasn’t a high priority for men except if they were off on a journey. I counted three topaz glasses in the cupboard. A few chipped melmac plates, too, and in the fridge an assortment of beer and booze and an old pizza box. Pepperoni and mushrooms and mold.

Cornering into the living room, I ran into a stack of wax recordings of Ramsey Lewis and other bebop gods and goddesses. A black-and-white TV surmounted a console built of whiteboards standing a few paces from a ratty red Barcalounger. An ceramic ashtray shaped like a bullfrog held a small army of cigarette butts. Three of them, I noted, were smeared with a pink lipstick. Unlike Sherlock Holmes who made it a practice to know all lady perfumes and cigarette brands, I hadn’t the slightest idea of what lay in the ashtray. Let the lab weenies sort it out. DNA was something the redoubtable Sherlock never had in his arsenal.

"With the one damn chair in the room, I wonder where Lex’s lady guest sat?" I said. As an obvious answer of lap dances popped into my head, I smiled a little. "Oh yeah, Lex is one sly dog."

Catty-corner to me along the far wall was a narrow flight of stairs and I ascended them, my screaming nerves on full alert. The upper space to Lex’s domicile was vacant with one notable exception which was Lex. There he lay on the floor in a pose similar to Schlitz’s I’d discovered in a short while ago in New Baltimore.

"Two damn dead bodies," I said. "Now how am I going to explain away this mess?"

After kneeling to one knee, I put two finger pads to Lex’s neck pulse point. It was inert. I pulled up his eyelids, a second test to verify the lifeless form. They flopped back into position. Lex was dead. Next I saw why.

A 9mm had punched a demure but fatal hole in his chest. Now, where had I seen that 9mm entry wound before? With a quarter turn, I next spotted the bat black 9mm on the floor where it’d tumbled from Lex’s grasp.

Arising with a tired moan, I lifted my gaze to the bedroom’s door. An X-acto knife embedded in it held a note ripped out of a yellow memo pad. Drawing closer -- again, I didn’t dare touch anything! -- I startled. It was addressed to me.

Dear Frank,

I got back my dad’s Silversonic Sax. It took a little more
trouble than I’d bargained for. Too bad, too.

Down in the cellar, you’ll find a deep freezer. Peek inside.
The Silversonic, old chap, is now yours. I can’t blow it where
I’m bound.

Ciao,
-- Lex

"Hoo boy," I said.

And so in sluggish motion I ventured down two flights of stairs into the root cellar. The freezer wasn’t plugged in. To his credit, Lex in deepening despair over what he’d done kept the presence of mind not to ruin his dad’s vintage horn. I lifted the lid.

Nestled with tender loving care inside white tissue paper, the Silversonic, the acme of saxophones, gleamed like a backbar mirror. In its reflection I witnessed a middle-age man’s dropped jowls and pale face pinched in disbelief. He shook his head.

Breaking out the cell phone, I hit Gatlin’s number and greeted him with a hurried update.

"After drinking to buck up his courage, Lex decided to take matters into his own hands and bump off first Schlitz and then himself," said Gatlin. After a pregnant pause, a thought dawned on him. "Where does the damn silver horn go now?"

"Have you ever heard a PI play the sax?" I asked him.

THE END