Hard Boiled Brains

A Trump Era Parody of Raymond Chandler

I snap the brim of my fedora and look in the mirror. I’ve earned the right to look like a thousand miles of bad road. Too many days I’ve woken up with an empty bottle, a full ashtray, and a mattress-load of broad with more Bondo than Cher and more layers of paint than a ’57 Chevy in Havana. But I’m running out of road, and my odometer is turning over. It’s time to pull into the lot and deal the strippers and the b-girls and the one-night stands, deal them all, trade up for one nice package. But for that, I need money. A keyhole-peeper job won’t cover my nut. I need a big score, some major cabbage, a grubstake. That’s when this skirt from D.C., goes by the name of Pelosi, raises me on the blower. One tough sister, this Pelosi, with one tough case. But tough is right up my alley.

My name is Marlowe, and I’m a private dick.

This Pelosi says some two-bit thimble rigger named Trump has gone haywire. Says he’s had a brain transplant, and the donor must have been dippy. She hires me to prove it and run the culprit to ground. But she doesn’t give me a trail to sniff, so all I have is my hat, my gun, and a hunch that’s more of a longshot than Slowpoke in the eighth at Pimlico.

But sometimes in my business a hunch is all you have, regardless of the odds.

I catch a bird to Frisco, then drive to the seedy Tenderloin district. The sky is gunmetal gray and the air smells of desperation. I grab a street urchin by the collar and tell him to watch my jalopy. My wallet is thinner than a cheating wife’s alibi, but I flip the kid a sawbuck. More than once, a quick getaway has saved my bacon.

I take a last drag on my Lucky Strike, toss it on the sidewalk, crush it out, and open the door of the gin mill that is Lana’s Hideaway.

I know the book on Lana. Grew up on Chicago’s South Side. More hard knocks than a loan officer’s door. Headed west, like all the loose change. Landed in the City by the Bay. Laid on her back, stared at the ceiling, and waited for her chance. Her chance was Big Al, who couldn’t see she was poison ivy. He probably thought she looked like the Taj Mahal in the moonlight, deaf to the treachery that escaped her ruby lips, blind to the reality that Lana had a dollar sign where most women have a heart. Big Al, you see, was the king of black-market appliances, raking in big dineros. If you wanted a hijacked truckload of toaster ovens or a boxcar of filched fruit blenders, Al was the only game in town. No sales tax, no factory warranty, just small kitchen gadgets on the cheap. The clip-joint hooch-house Hideaway was merely a front.

But that wasn’t enough for Lana. She wanted bigger things. She wanted more lettuce, all of it, and her name on the shingle. Story goes, Big Al bought the farm while hotwiring a Mixmaster. Me? I figure Lana punched his ticket. Either way, with Big Al gone to the big Black Market in the Sky, Lana took over. And expanded her turf.

Now she’s into recycled body parts.

I stand motionless in the doorway, the harsh daylight behind me. I want them to know I’m here. I pat the bulge of my equalizer. The cold weight feels good against my right hip.

Lana’s Hideaway is heavy with the smell of liquor and the desolate fog of shabby lives. I hear Peggy Lee on the juke crooning San Francisco Blues: “I ain’t got a nickel and I ain’t got a lousy dime.”

I go to the corner of the bar. The palooka polishing glasses takes his sweet time getting to me. “Lana,” I say.

“Who’s asking?” He’s got a boxer’s nose and talks dumb as a bag of hammers.

“Your worst nightmare, Slick.”

“You looking for trouble?”

“Trouble’s my middle name.”

“Take a hike.”

“Listen, Slick, you want I should drop a dime on the Health Department and have them count your cockroaches? Or maybe you’d like the coppers to drop by and make like mosquitoes in a nudist colony.”

“Okay,” he said. “Your funeral. She’s at the far end of the bar. The blonde.”

Figures. It’s always a blonde.

The joint is as dim as a game show host, with more smoke and mirrors than a politician’s stump speech. I make my way past the guys drinking next week’s booze today, the kind of lush who ducks into a bucket shop for a just one blast of dynamite, gets loaded to the gunwales, and wakes up in Paraguay with a full beard. I snake through the pool tables and the tiny dance stage with the underage jailbait hoochie-coocher, her cheeks as hollow as a Bourbon Street hooker’s soul.

Lana stands at the end of the bar, martini in hand.

Hanging onto her is a side of beef built like Tarzan. I bet a knuckle sandwich he swings like Jane and give him some rockin’ chin music. After he picks himself off the floor for Round Two, I say, “Beat it, Toadstool.”

He winds up like an eight-day clock, but Lana puts her hand on his arm and says, “It’s all right, Biff. Go prune your peach fuzz.” She shoos him off.

Lana takes a long drag on her cigarette and invites me to take inventory. She’s a slinky piece of homework, no doubt about it, with racehorse gams and blood-red lips that would make a Buick pucker up. Her tight skirt is slit up to the Promised Land and her blouse is unbuttoned halfway to El Paso. The string of oyster fruit around her neck says business is good, but her fluttering eyelashes announce she’s even better. She lowers her lashes until they cuddle her cheeks and slowly raises them again, like a theatre curtain. That’s supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air. But my look tells her I’m not impressed. I’ve seen it all before. Her kind of doll guns her engine in the pit, but she’s a clutch-buster on the freeway of life.

“I like a man who makes an entrance,” Lana says. “Can I buy you a cocktail, big boy?”

“Cuppa joe.”

She reaches across the bar for the pot, putting her cleavage on full display.

She leans close and pours my coffee, hot and black as New Jersey asphalt in July. “What’s your game?” she says. “Cut-rate Cuisinarts, half-price blenders, or maybe you’d like to go in the back and have me boil your hambone.”

I could deal off the bottom of the deck, come at her sideways, but I play it straight and tough. “My name is Marlowe. I’m a private dick.”

“A shamus. So some smackhead tried stuffing four slices of Wonder Bread into a two-hole Taiwan toaster? Too bad. Like the sign says, you buy it, you own it.”

“Body parts,” I said.

“Some flossy do a Lorena Bobbitt and you need a new flagpole? Got all sizes, quick-frozen. I figure you for a large.” She runs her finger around the rim of her martini glass, then sucks the pimento out of her olive.

“Brains,” I tell her.

“No brains.” But her sultry voice suddenly sounds like a duck startled into flight, and her body heat evaporates into the smoke, replaced by the chill winds of fear.

“Cough it up, sister,” I said. “I know you’re into the brains racket, into it deep.”

“You figure me for a nickel rat?”

“I figure you for a broad who’s not looking for trouble, and trouble’s my middle name.”

“I heard you mention that to the barkeep,” she says, as she regains her seductive composure and her eyelashes flutter back into action.

It’s time to play it tough. “Doll, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. You decide.”

“Explain the hard way.”

“I’m packing heat, and I got no problem blowing away a dame.” I pull my coat open and show her my roscoe so she knows I’m as serious as a boiler room phone jockey pitching penny stocks to a dentist’s widow.

“The Devil made me do it,” she says.

“Listen, cupcake, I need a name, not an excuse.”

“Ugly as a mud fence. Stank of sulphur. Bad complexion, pitchfork, horns. Eyes that glow fire. Lucifer.”

“The Devil, you say.” I’ve been around the block, but I didn’t see that one coming. “I’ll take that drink now.”

Lana fetches a bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey and an empty rocks glass. I pour three fingers and knock it back in one gulp. Evidence to the contrary in the persons of my ex-wives, I’ve never believed there’s a Devil, always figured Satan was just God when he was drunk.

As I’m contemplating this, Lana goes all Chatty Cathy, pulling her own string about how to defrost frozen body parts. Gall bladders, two minutes on defrost in the microwave. Fingers and eyeballs, room temperature. I ask about brains.

“Parboil, ninety seconds.”

“What does that do?”

“Thaws it out, lunkhead. Aren’t you listening? Or maybe you need a new pair of ears. Overstocked right now, make you a deal.”

“Don’t get wise on me, kitten. How do brains act in their new skull?”

Lana shrugs a bare shoulder and says, “Depends on how much freezer burn. Sometimes it’s all beer and skittles. Sometimes the replacement brain wants to play with Tinker Toys all day. Sometimes it wants to nuke Wichita. Whose head did it end up in?”

“Some grifter named Trump.”

“I had a Trump in here once, acting all Mack Daddy. Said he was looking for a bigger pair of mitts, but mostly what he wanted was to cop a cheap feel.”

“Whose brain was it?”

“Look, cowboy, brains are scarce. I don’t ask questions. Could have been an astrophysicist from Palo Alto, could have been some jelly-head snake charmer from a traveling circus out of Poughkeepsie.”

Either way, this guy Trump’s brain was now the Devil’s playground. But what the Devil didn’t know was that when he’d walked into Lana’s Hideaway, he’d stumbled into the intersection of hard luck and bad times. He’d stumbled into me, bid me into his presence. More than once it’s been suggested I go straight to hell, and now I’m going. I’ll take the express elevator down to the Ninth Circle and give the Devil his due, unleash some Old Testament wrath on this bozo. It’s time somebody did. No more evildoing like slaughtering a bum on Turk Street just to steal his kidneys. No more devilish tomfoolery like the Kardashians.

Sure, it’ll be hotter than a whorehouse on Nickle Night, and maybe I’m buying myself the long goodbye. But what the hell, I figure life will be simpler when I’m dead.

The Book says the Devil once danced with God, but he’s never danced with me.

My name is Marlowe.

I’m a private dick.