***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator   –The Scorched World   

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

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Oh sure I have a million stories to tell about my experiences now that I have retired after forty years working as an operative (peeper, shamus, gumshoe, private dick or whatever your dig at name for us)     with the International Operations Organization. Stories about murder and mayhem, deceit and deviousness, strange mental states and cold-bloodedness. Yes I have seen it all the worst side of mankind (male and female okay, and sometimes the women were the worst capable of things no guy would even think of doing no matter how much he hated whoever he hated), the backbiting, the scratching eyes out to beat someone out of something, the heat of passion, and not in the bedroom where it belongs, turning to dust. Not a pretty sight and not for the faint-hearted which is why I lasted for forty years, forty years of slugging it out to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world, and some days just for the pay. Right now my mind in on one of the last cases, the Bradford case, not because it was the worst, far from it, but because it didn’t make sense, didn’t make sense that a couple of well-off young women would go over the deep end for no real reason. Let me tell you about it    

It all started when John Bradford, the biggest banker in San Francisco (yes he was some distant descendant of somebody on the Mayflower crew although that doesn’t, I don’t think, explain what happened, not by any reasonable accounting) came to the agency looking for help when his two daughters, Anne and Prudence, went missing after not checking in for about a week. We had done a previous case with Mr. Bradford over an employee embezzlement scheme and so he came back to us on that recommendation.

You might well ask why if he was worried about his missing daughters, maybe having been kidnapped or worse, he didn’t go to the police, the FBI or something like your average guy would do. That is where the rich, and in his case the very rich, are different. They are worried about image, maybe about what would that Mayflower forbear think, or the country club set so they want things, including messy things and maybe especially messy things hushed up. They can also afford to pay for extra service, extra service that hard- pressed police forces could not or would not provide. Besides in this case the two young women had something of a history of walking on the wild side and so hush it was just in case they were involved in some freefall caper. And so it landed on the agency’s lap and the boss assigned me to the case since he believed from what Bradford told him (not all of which he told me since Bradford worked on a need- to- know basis) that it would involve no heavy lifting, meaning no shooting or fists, something easy as I eased into retirement.     

Here is the way it went down, I started with the servants at the Bradford estate to see if they knew anything. Nothing, except some information about the pair having packed several suitcase before they left. None of them saw that as unusual since they had done that before even on short trips. Then I went the rounds of friends, relatives and acquaintances but no dice, no dice mainly because their friends were apparently working under some national security directive about giving information to a cop, public or private. A breakthrough did come when I went to the Knick-Knack Club, a place, a watering hole for the young, rich, and infamous where the young women hung out.

That tipster, who shall remain anonymous just in case the forces of evil that were unleashed decide to do something further about it, told me that I should check with a guy named Johnny Firestone because they had often been seen in his company. At first that name did not ring a bell but checking back with our agency files I found out that the name should have been ringing many bells. Johnny, or rather his father and then him when the father retired, was knee-deep in the drug trafficking business in the Bay Area which meant some big- time operations. It also seemed that Sonny Boy had branched out into high-end pornography. High-end meaning that the models were rich, wicked,  perverted or whatever else made them get their kicks. 

So I followed that trail over to a converted warehouse in Haywood where Sonny Boy did his shoots. What would happen, and what did happen with Anne and Prudence, was that Johnny would get them high, high as kites, for a while and then suggest that modelling scam. 

In this case both young women were eager to get their kicks that way. Before it was all over though some shots were fired, some fists flew and a very large sum of Bradford money changed hands in order to get all the negatives and all the prints bought and burned. Last I heard the girls were married to some stockbrokers who are clueless about what their brides are capable of. Good luck, good luck reigning that pair in.