Sudden Afternoon

By Richard Davidson

She walked into my office with a look in her eye that spelled doom. Her legs were like one of those little Ham Sandwiches with the toothpick in it; just a little taste of heaven with something lethal packed inside.

I knew she’d try to play innocent on me, and that was the first tack she used; the first of many. This dame had enough tacks to lay carpet at the Waldorf.

My eyes were still bleeding from a hangover bad enough to make a Jesuit Monk rip the skin off of an otter with a fine toothed comb. A hangover like that’s no picnic, and I’m all out of Potato Salad, which is a favorite of people who like food-borne illness, and I’m not one of them.

She was wearing a pair of black silk gloves, that fit her like a designer dress. She spoke very little Portuguese, and that was just fine with me. Maybe if she had, I wouldn’t have found myself in the spot I’m in today, but the clock was ticking, and they had already canceled our appointment with destiny.

She needed help, she said, and she told me a story so completely lacking in imagination, I fell asleep fourteen times, and I wasn’t even tired. The setting was old hat; a loading dock down by the pier, and I couldn’t make sense out of the player’s motivations.

Why would the man with the burnt ears go for the cabbage, when he could’ve had the Samoleons? What was the license plate number of the car that drove over Lefty’s left foot? Would people be calling him Righty from now on? How late do they serve appetizers at the Starlight Room?

I was having a hard time buying her song and dance routine, and when she started to juggle live monkeys, I had to draw the line.

“Look sister,” I growled sympathetically, “I don’t need to hear grotesque, made-up scenarios before lunchtime, and there ain’t a cat in the world that could’ve fired that .45.”

I had long ago arrived at the conclusion that her train had left the station, and there wasn’t another one coming for quite some time.

“You’re too smart for me,” she conceded far too easily, “I confess. I killed him, but it was an accident.”

She delivered the line with such sheer drama, that I half expected the members of the Academy to walk out, and hand her the Thalberg, and then without even pausing for air, launched into an even more horribly illogical tale of depravity and lost underwear.

I quietly upended a quart of fine Tequila, and studied her carefully through the bubbles. She had been very beautiful once, and still was, for the most part, other than the two heads. I shook off the momentary Tequila Hallucination, and was relieved to see only three eyes again.

I shook my head once more.

Two eyes.

Bingo.

Her story had left me with a sick feeling, like an Italian pallbearer with a case of Gout, and the room was spinning like a dwarf falling down a spiral staircase in slow motion, wearing Gaucho pants.

“Look, I can’t take much more of this!” I shouted, grabbing her sternly by the collar.

“I understand why you were loading the fish onto the truck. I understand why the two ex-choirboys were saluting the guest horticulturist. And I have no trouble at all seeing why you’d have to kill a man if he were really doing that to your leather upholstery. I don’t believe a word of it, but I understand it.”

I fell against a table, and dealt a hand of gin to a potted plant.

“Look,” she pleaded, “you’ve got me. I only killed him for the fifty billion dollars.”

She trained those beautiful eyes on me, and for a moment I was looking at an Angel, a creature of such incredible virtue as to force a man into early retirement, on an ant farm in Florida.

“You’ve got to believe me, if it hadn’t been for the money, I wouldn’t have hurt anybody.”

Her voice grew more urgent.

“I’ll give you your cut; you won’t be left out in the bright sunshine; I’ll do anything; anything!”

She probably would too, I thought with the glee of a neutered puppy. And then she’d stick a cold steel shaft into whatever part of my body looked soft and fleshy.

“There’s still one thing I don’t understand,” I said, lighting a cigarette, and jamming a paper clip under my nail.

“What’s that?” she asked, with a pouty look that would set the hens dancing again.

“Why did you come in here? This is an insurance office.”

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