"Please tell me you are not Benjamin Slademore!"
The woman's voice ruptured through the warm cocoon of sleep that surrounded the sleeping man's brain - the hangover hovering just outside wasted no time in rushing in through the gap. He slowly raised his head slightly and then risked opening his right eye. His desk was pretty much how it was the night before, stained with tobacco smoke and covered week-old papers, bills and coffee cup rings. Lifting his head further his eye was drawn to the pattern of light and dark stripes that played across the mostly empty filling cabinets along the side of the cramped office, sunlight mixed with shadows cast from the dirty blinds across the window behind him. Except for the sunlight, this was also pretty much how it had been the night before. His gaze began the long trek across the faded wallpaper towards the doorway.
Standing just inside the office, her face a picture of disgust, was a tall blond woman. Fashionably dressed in a long cream dress with a string of white pearls around here neck, she was obviously not accustomed to seeing grown men asleep at their desks at this late hour of the day. This woman definitely had not been there the night before.
"Well, are you Benjamin Slademore?" the woman asked. Her tone suggested that not only did she did she know who he was, she was regretting ever deciding to met with him in the first place. There was an awkward pause as the man collected his fragmented thoughts and opened his other eye.
"Please call me Ben", he eventually replied.
"Mr. Slademore, I was going to inquire about hiring your services for a small job, but seeing you in this state has quite reversed his thoughts on the subject." Again, the woman's voice suggested nothing but contempt and yet she made no attempt to leave the office.
Ben wiped a greasy hand down his unshaven chin and took his time framing a reply. He knew she would not leave, not just yet anyway. There was only one reason that a woman of her obvious social standing would be in his office at - he quickly glanced at the clock above the filing cabinets - 12:15 on a Tuesday afternoon. It was the same reason that anyone ever came to see him - there was dirty business going down that required discrete investigating.
"Please take a seat", Ben said with as much pleasantness as he could muster. With a show of reluctance, the woman closed the door behind her and walked slowly across the small room. There was only one spare chair, a battered wooden seat with a high back, 30 years out of style. Instead of sitting, the woman stood behind the chair as if to keep one more thing between herself and the crumpled man behind the desk She was young, early twenties, with a pretty face framed with stylish brown curls. Ben thought she looked familiar somehow. He was sure that they hadn't met, he surely would have remembered her, perhaps she was someone famous. Trying to remember was like swimming through porridge.
"I prefer to stand, I think I will not be staying long." The woman looked down at Ben from across the desk. "By now you probably already know why I am here and what I need you to do." Definitely someone he ought to know of, thought Ben to himself.
Ben thought hard. Surely he would remember a broad this voluptous? His mind drew only blanks. He decided to fire at random.
'Were you the heiress whose father tried to entomb her alive when he decided to marry a fifteen year-old, oh, six months ago?' he tried.
'No,' she said contemptuously.
'The exotic snake-dancer with the penchant for rubbing caviar between her breasts and having men lick it off?'
'No.' Beyond contempt now.
'That woman from Berkeley who needed a double kidney transplant, real quick?'
'No. Did she get it?'
'Not sure. Not really his specialty. And you don't really look like the sole survivor of a multiple sextuplet siamese twin conglomeration, which leaves only... Ursula Handley! Are you Ursula Handley?'
She shook her head. 'No. Who's she when she's not at home?'
'She was the one with that plan to build an army of robots that would enter the houses of all the good folk of LA by night and turn the taps on, so the water reservoirs ran dry and the city entered a desert age. Never stood a snowball's chance in hell, though. She couldn't get the locomotion algorithms to work, so they all fell over. Not one of my more profitable clients.'
All this guessing was hard work. Ben pulled out his hipflask and swigged from it. Good Jack Daniels.
She stared at Ben sullenly, clearly put out that he had not recognised her. Maybe she was toying with him. Or maybe she thought that he was toying with her. Or maybe, just maybe, she was toying with Ben in order to fool him into thinking that he was toying with her. A thought hit him. Was this all a bit screwy? Ben concentrated hard. No, being a private eye meant that you could never be too careful. I'll play this one by the book, he told himself. Ben put the Jack Daniels away, taking one last swig for good measure. Her gaze was now resting somewhere around his upper abdomen, where the diaphragm sits below the lungs and heart, protecting them from all the nasty organs of the belly.
Ben lit a cigar, a good Havana. Only the best, that's how you attract the best clients. Ben thought nostalgically of Cuba. The nightclubs. The dancing. The booze. The girls!
She cleared her throat. Ben remembered his manners with a jolt. He pushed the box forward. 'Would you like a cigar?' he asked.
In France, when a woman wanted a cigar, or cigarette - Ben wasn't too clear on the details - men would apparently cluster around her like bees to honey, in order to have the privilege of being the one to light her cigar (or cigarette) for her. Ben sure wouldn't mind lighting this honey's cigar.
He wondered if that thought had some kind of homo-erotic tinge to it.
Distaste polluted the taste of his cigar as he thought of those gay-boys and their nasty little games.
Another thought struck him. Did bees cluster to honey? Surely they clustered to flowers, and brought back the nectar, or pollen, and made the honey in their hive. This clustering to honey seemed odd, kind of like going to your pantry to shop, pulling all the cans out only to stick them back in again, when you got back to your pantry. Or - maybe, just maybe, parties of bees raided other hives, to carry away their honey?
Ben made a mental night to ask his old friend Mike, who ran an apiary out San Jose way.
She was saying something. 'I'm sorry, what were you saying?' he interjected.
'I said, Mr Slademore, that I don't smoke. Then I asked you to guess again.'
This was getting ludicrous. 'Lady, are you sure that I know you?'
She nodded, and shook her honey-coloured hair. Honey everywhere! This was getting to be too much. 'I know you, very well. And I'm sure you hold the key within you to unlock this mystery.'
Her voice had changed, deepening slightly - not in some guy way, damn cross-dressers - and her accent had a trace of something interestingly foreign but unidentifiable, even to a polylinguist such as Ben.
'All right,' Ben said heavily. 'I'm going to guess ten times, and at the end of his guesses, if I haven't got it right, you'll tell me. Agreed?'
She tilted her pretty little chin, like she was about to argue with him, but then her gaze dropped and in an uncharacteristically submissive tone she said 'Alright, provided you really try.'
'Lady,' he said quietly, 'I've solved more crimes than you've had hot dinners, or had men in your bed, and by the look of you I'd say that's a lot.' She flushed and opened her mouth, but he was way too quick for her. 'What I'm saying is, I'm an accomplished private eye, and I think you knew that before you came up the stairs to my office. So I'll be the judge of what constitutes "really trying". Do we agree on that?'
Ben held her gaze until she nodded dumbly. By God she was a nice piece of work. Ben found himself hoping that she would be broke, so that he could take his payment in sexual favors.
Ben ran his mental eye along a list of women he knew to be in trouble with the law, who might come to a mastermind such as himself for assistance. 'Are you Jessica Flanders?' The noted baby butcher, after a botched abortion in her teens she had taken to wrecking other women's dreams of motherhood. An unwilling father of four himself, with most of his pay-packet going on alimony, Ben could sympathise.
She shook her head, slowly. 'Helga Highski?' The missionaries' daughter, she had turned her back on her parents' evangelical ways by attempting to open the first whorehouse franchise in the lower 49 states. Sadly for her entrepreneurial hopes, the brutal arm of the IRS had ended her holy venture before it got very far.
Another no.
'Leia Cardrona?' The self-styled Princess reckoned she came from another galaxy, but according to his contacts on the eastern seaboard, her tricks were all too familiar: swindling old ladies, credit card scams, and a number of more or less successful pyramid trading schemes.
No.
'Max Quitz?' Ben knew this one was hopeless before the words even left his mouth, but the thought of catching the world's most famous female impersonator and being the one to pull his (Max', that is, not Ben's) kit off in front of a hall of cheering private eyes and personally administer a well-deserved beating was too much to resist.
She didn't even deign to reply. Ben was about to go on when his old training from the private eye academy reasserted itself. Was she not replying because she was contemptuous of his suggestion, or because she was actually Max Quitz?
He leaned forward and spoke in a terrible voice, 'answer me! Are you Max Quitz?'
'No I'm not,' she said wearily. 'Can I have a drink? I'm starting to get a headache.'
Wordlessly he pulled out his hipflask and started to reach across the desk to offer it to her. Then he pulled back hurriedly. What was he thinking? No woman had ever touched that flask, not since Ben's dear mother passed away. Not even Sally Reptile, his girlfriend of seven years standing, had done so. Thoughts of Sally made him think of something disquieting. All those times he had woken from an alcohol-induced sleep to find his hipflask strangely lighter than he remembered it. At the time Ben had put it down to his swigging from it during sleep, but now a new more troubling possibility offered itself: had Sally been purloining spirit-juice from it while he slept? Ben wouldn't begrudge her the Jack, or any other drink for that matter, but his hipflask! He resolved that once this case was sold, he would travel to Las Vegas and get some answers from Sally, by any means necessary.
He put the hipflask back and reached into a cabinet on the left side of his desk. Ben pulled out a bottle of Beefeater's. With a bit more rummaging around he produced a dusty glass. 'Help yourself,' he said.
The mysterious/familiar woman eyed the glass suspiciously and made no move to reach for it. Ben's line of work had led him to see almost every sort of deviant behavior, and top of his list was wastage of alcohol. After a couple of seconds he realised that this woman drank like she smoked and pulled the glass back across the desk.
"I now see that your reputation as a useless lush was well earned, Mr. Slademore. You could not find any answers for me unless they were lying at the bottom of a whisky tumbler". The woman voice was now positively icy, but still she stood behind the spare chair, making no move to leave. Ben reflected that she was probably right, the last 18 months had not been kind to him. He stared morosely down at the glass on the desk - the features of the mysterious woman in his office stared back through the liquid.
"Are you listening to me, Mr. Slademore?"
As a matter of fact Ben was not listening at that moment. He had just been given his first lucky break in over a year, and he was not going to let this one slip away. He quickly lifted the glass off the tabloid newspaper that had been sitting, unread, on his desk for three days. The front page contained a large picture of the strange woman. The photograph showed her sitting alone in an upper-class drawing room, on the wall behind her was a large painting of an older man. Ben's eyes quickly scanned the lurid headline - "Distraught Daughter Dares Dream Daddy will be Found Alive", then flicked down to read the caption below the photograph - "Amy Melheart wonders if she will ever see her beloved father (pictured) again.". Ben's pulse quickened, he could feel the old excitement flooding through his veins once again, sobering him up more than ten cups of coffee. His bloodshot eyes came alive with eagerness - a case again, after so long.
"Please take a seat and tell me your story, Miss Melheart".
The woman stopped speaking, surprised at the change in Ben's demeanor and the new note of confidence in his voice.
"I see you are not quite as useless as I first thought" Her voice was still cool, but not a scathing as before. She paused, seemed to come to a decision, and then quickly sat down, "Maybe you will be able to help me."
She is hooked, Ben thought gleefully to himself, aloud he said "Please tell me about your father".
"I will start at the beginning," she replied, "There are a few details that those vultures" - she tossed her head in the direction of the tabloid - "did not mention that may be of use to you." Ben nodded, and she continued.
"As you know, his father - Victor Melheart, is a great inventor. The company he started with Uncle Angus has amassed great wealth for our family. Daddy was a intensely private person, Uncle Angus handled the business while Daddy came up with the ideas. He very seldom left the mansion at all, and never, I mean never, drove a car. That is why his disappearance is so strange. Last Thursday I went into his study to deliver his lunch to him. He was not there, instead I found this note on the table".
Amy drew out a folded slip of paper from her purse and slid it across the desk. Ben quickly digested its contents - "Amy, I have just gone to collect something from Adam, I will not be gone too long. Do not worry about me, I will not be long - V".
Before Ben could question Amy on the contents of the note, she continued with her story.
"When I realised he was really gone, I ran downstairs. None of the staff had seen him leave. It was only later that we found that one of the cars was missing from the garage. As you probably already know, the police found it in the river the next day. There has been no trace of his father, dead or alive."
Ben sat back in his chair, "Did you have any reason to think your father may have been in danger?" he asked.
"Well, he did say he was worried about meeting with some men next week. Not many people realise that Melheart Industries manufactures advanced weaponry as well as farming equipment. Daddy was going to meet with these people to sell some of his plans for a new type of handgun he had been developing. At first we all thought they were representatives of the military, but later Daddy found out that they were something else - he was not sure what."
Holding up the folded note, Ben asked "Do you know who Adam is?"
"I never heard his father mention anyone by that name, and he has very few friends.", the young woman replied. Ben nodded, the decided on asking the one question that really bothered him about this case.
"Why did you come to me? Surely the cops have been investigating."
Amy looked at him with a worried frown. "Well, at first the police were very helpful, but on Sunday the regular detectives were pulled off the case. His father's disappearance is now being handled by two FBI agents from out of town, but I do not trust them. They seem more interested in recovering the plans for the weapon than finding Daddy."
So the plans are missing too, thought Ben. God, he hated this kind of case - he regularly dealt with worst the humanity had to offer, and in his opinion upper class people were the lowest. Still, if everybody he met during the next few days was built like Amy Melheart then his time would not be wasted.
"Miss Melheart, it will be his pleasure to find your father for you." said Ben. The woman smiled for the first time since entering his office. "I will need to prepare for a few hours. Lets meet again at your family residence at six this evening.", he continued.
"That is good news" breathed Amy. Quickly she wrote the address on a slip of paper, and passed it to Ben. "I will be expecting you" she added as she left the office.
Ben sat for a moment, savoring the moment. He decided to finish the half empty glass on his desk, but then thought better of it. He was a busy man again, and the few hours left before his meeting would give him just enough time to follow the first rule of being a private detective - arrive before you are expected and take time to look around unobserved.