Farewell, My Lovely Laptop
by Steven Salemi

Episode One:  Marlowe’s Mid-Life Crisis

            “I’m sorry,” I heard myself saying into the telephone for the third time in as many minutes.  “I don’t do divorce work.  Right.  Try Spade.  Sam Spade.  Yeah, he’s in the book.”

            As I hung up, a plump-looking fly narrowly escaped being crushed by the telephone handset.  From where he was sitting, it must have looked like the Hindenberg crashing to the ground.

            Perspective, I told myself.  Relativity.  It’s all how you look at things.  Marlowe, the worldly-wise philosopher.  Marlowe, the fountainhead of all wisdom.  Marlowe, the Oracle.

            I reached for a bottle of 25-Year Old Macallan Scotch I kept in my desk drawer.  The clock said 3:30 in the afternoon.  Sure, my rent was four days late.  Naturally, I hadn’t made my car payment.  Of course, I was behind on my alimony.  But there was always room in Marlowe’s budget for Scotch.  Good Scotch.  True Scotch.  Real Scotch. 

I poured four fingers and took a deep glug.  “Real Scotch for a Real Man,” I said, and poured four more fingers. 

As the Scotch went to work, I sat back to survey my kingdom and take stock of my life to date.  No clients. No prospects.  Nothing worth mentioning in the bank.  No wife, no kids, nothing to come home to but dishes in the sink and insoluble chess problems.  

            Philip Marlowe, Miracle Man.

            So when I heard the knock at the door, I braced myself for further pain.  Encyclopedia salesman?  Jehovah’s Witnesses?   

            Wrong on all counts.

            When the door opened, I saw it was a blonde.  A blonde to make a Bishop kick in a stained-glass window.

 Episode Two:  “The Lady With(out) The Laptop” 

             I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, including cynical.  I’ve been tagged with that one a lot.  But I felt like a starry-eyed child as I watched the blonde move silkily toward my desk. 

Her walk was an engraved invitation on her own personal letterhead -- an invitation to danger.  In my mind’s eye, the beat-up linoleum floor in my office became a freshly trimmed, brightly lit catwalk at a fancy French fashion show.

            She had some furry spotted thing wrapped around her neck, a real comfortable, real expensive noose.  Her dress was the brightest red I’d ever seen, cherries marinated in blood.  Thin and sheer, it must have weighed about half an ounce, and taken up as much space in her suitcase as a bar of soap.

I guess she had what they call a flair for color, because her dress exactly matched her nails, her lipstick, her shoes -- and the tiny handbag from which she produced a large stack of one hundred dollar bills.  The bills were the only thing that wasn’t red.   They were green.

            “All of this money is yours, Mr. Marlowe,” she said, placing the bills squarely in the center of my desk.  “If you can help me, that is.”

            I studied her expression and tried to read it, but the Scotch was doing a number on my intuitive faculties.  The Scotch, and her hair, which was shining with a light all its own – a blinding light. 

I felt like closing my office, turning in my P.I. license, locking myself in my apartment, and doing nothing all day but writing poems about her hair.

            “I won’t take a woman’s money,” I said, “until I know her name.”

            That one seemed to surprise her.  I guess she figured I’d be so awestruck by her appearance and her money that I wouldn’t care what she was called.

            “Br…Br…Bridget,” she said, nervously.  “Bridget O’Shaughnessy.”

            I laughed out loud.  Nobody would have mistaken it for the song of a nightingale.

            “Sure, lady, and I’m The Maltese Falcon.  Listen, run home with that money, now.  Put it back in your husband’s safe before he notices it missing.  You’re a beautiful creature and your old man won’t like you getting soiled by the likes of me.”

            She spat in my face.  Then she lit a cigarette. 

            “I may look like some American Beauty to you, Mr. Marlowe,” she said with icy contempt.  “But I’m a Gypsy.  Full blooded.  My mother was Hungarian, my father Romanian.  In the countries from which I spring, men do not own women.  If anything…”

            “Sure, fine…Bridget,” I said.  “Whatever.  Listen, it’s been a long day.  Not a hard day, but a long day, and for me, long days are hard, and hard days are long.  Long and hard, hard and long.  Am I making myself clear to you, subliminally-speaking?”

            The blonde stared at me with wide-eyed bewilderment, and I had my first real chance to inspect her peepers.  They were as blue as a Swiss mountain lake.

            What’s more, I noticed -- deep inside, way at the back -- a tiny trace of vulnerability, of innocence, of purity.  There wasn’t a lot of it left.

            “My name is not important, Mr. Marlowe,” she said.  She took a long, deep drag on the cigarette.  When she exhaled, it looked to me like clouds in heaven. 

            “What is important is that you find my laptop immediately.”

            “Your what?” I asked, not getting her.

            “My laptop,” she said, impatiently.  “A small portable computer system.  They call it a laptop because…

            I waved my hand like a traffic cop.

            “Skip the computer lesson.  If you’ve lost something, why don’t you call the Police?  Why drag a gumshoe into this?  Sounds like a routine case for the boys in lost and found to me.”

            The blonde stared deeply into my eyes, and by some alchemical magic, I was able to read the non-verbal message she was giving me.  At least, I think I was.

Roughly translated, it went like this:

            “Mr. Marlowe, it is very important not to ask any questions about the information that is contained on my laptop, and why I need it back so desperately.  That is my own business.  Your business is to find it, and under no circumstances must you bring the police into this.  Play by my rules, and you may get to sample a small taste of heaven.  Play by your own rules, and…”

I interrupted the psychic transmission.

“I always play by my own rules, Miss…Miss O’Shaugnessy,” I said, a cruel smile curling my lips.

“And I always play by mine, Mr. Marlowe,” she said, meeting me halfway to nowhere – or everywhere.  “So where does that leave us?”

I looked at her eyes.  I looked at her dress.  I looked at the hair, the nails, the pocketbook.  I wasn’t undressing her with my eyes – I was ravaging her.  And she knew it.

Finally, I looked at the large stack of bills on the desk.  And then, for some reason known only to the Gods, I thought of my ex-wife.  For just a second, I thought of my ex-wife.

“I’ll need a thousand dollars as a retainer,” I heard myself saying…

 Episode 3 -- “Terms of Entrapment”

             The pile of greenbacks sat on my desk, an awkward moment for both of us.  There was more sitting there than my thousand dollar retainer, a lot more.  Should I reach for the pile and peel off ten crisp ones?  Or should I let the blonde do it? 

For some reason it seemed important, as though the tone and tenor of our future relationship would be determined by who made the first move.

“One thousand dollars seems very reasonable for a man of your alleged talents,” she said casually.

I chewed on that one a bit, and said: “What’s a nice girl like you doing, reading the Police Gazette?”  Then I reached for the bills, counted out ten, and handed the stack back to her.  She grabbed them – a little eagerly, I thought – and stashed them back in that fancy red pocketbook of hers.

“Oh, I’m so glad that’s over with, Mr. Marlowe,” she said.  “I’m not comfortable with large sums of money.  To be honest, I didn’t know how much to bring – I was afraid I’d brought too little.  You came…highly-recommended to me.”

“Who by?

She hesitated, then said – “If you must know, a man by the name of Dietrich.  Mr. Ralph…”

“Rocks,” I said.  “Rocks Dietrich.   Not a bad guy, for a cold-blooded killer.  I’ve heard there’s a soft, sentimental side to his nature, but nobody’s lived long enough to find it yet.  Runs an escort service up in Malibu.  Most of his clients are studio moguls, movie stars, agents, producers.  Runs up a lot of unusual expenses, paying off the local constabulary.  Seems most of his girls are still in high school.”

“I am familiar with Mr. Dietrich’s…operation,” she said, reaching for another cigarette from the pocketbook.  “Since we are speaking frankly, Mr. Marlowe, I can tell you…I was one of his girls.”

I held out my Zippo and lit her cigarette.  She inhaled, blew another heavenly cloud, and nodded thanks.

“And now you might say I’m one of his women.  You see, not everyone prefers young girls, Mr. Marlowe.”

I looked her over, and said thickly: “Any man who tosses you over for Shirley Temple deserves everything he gets.”

For the first time I saw her smile.  It was a small smile, by God, it was small.  But a smile is a smile.

“You are very kind, Mr. Marlowe.  I heard you were tough, and now I see that you are kind.  The people I meet in my line of work are not always kind.”

It was everything I could do not to reach out for her, then and there.  But fate took the decision out of my hands.

At that moment, the door flew open and a short squat man wearing a cheap brown suit staggered toward my desk.  He was carrying a small parcel wrapped in brown paper, and it was impossible to miss the large bloody knife sticking out of his back.

His eyes were wild, his features contorted in pain.  By the looks of the knife, he had about five seconds to live.  He leaned towards me, gasping, and I heard the words “Pigeon Express.”  His final act was to place the parcel gently on my desk, right where the stack of bills had been.  Then he collapsed to the floor, a crumpled thing that had once been a man.

“Pigeon is right,” I said quietly.  My eyes met the blonde’s, and it was clear we both wanted to know if our opposite number had any inkling of what had just happened, or why.

“Obviously a special delivery,” I said, and reached for the parcel.  The blonde was wide-eyed, but said nothing.  I began unwrapping the package, as though something exactly like this happened every day, right around this time. 

“If it’s that god-damned bird again,” I said, having a hard time with the twine, but finally the wrapping gave way and revealed the contents of the parcel.

It was an expensive black titanium-covered IBM ThinkPad Computer. A laptop Computer…

 Episode 4 -- “The Blonde’s Bombshell”

            I looked at the machine, then over at the Blonde.  “It’s a laptop computer,” I said.  “They call it a laptop because…”

She glared at me; I dropped the subject.

“It appears I did the right thing, coming to see you” said the Blonde, coolly.  “No sooner do I arrive at your office, then my missing computer is returned…special delivery.  Why am I not surprised?  Mr. Dietrich said…how did he put it?  He said you were the ‘kind of man around which things tend to happen.’”

I smiled.  “There’s still hope for this world when a pimp and a killer like Dietrich makes the effort to use good grammar,” I said.  Then I reached for the computer and hefted it.  “Pretty light,” I said.

“Yes, it’s the latest model.  The case is made of a titanium alloy composite, the same material found in airplanes.  It was very expensive, and I daresay the fellow who sold it to me must have made a hefty profit.  But I am the kind of woman who demands the best.  The best, or nothing.”

            I handed the machine to the blonde and she reached for it with two beautifully shaped arms -- curving where they should curve, straight where they shouldn’t.  Arms, legs, neck…all perfect.

She was the best, all right.  Whoever threw the genetic dice on this babe rolled a 7-11.

“It does seem light,” she said, scowling.  “Even lighter than usual.  I hope…I hope there’s nothing missing.”

“Let me check it,” I said, taking the machine back.  Of course, I know as much about computers as I do about Eskimo burial ceremonies, but my instincts are good and I figured I might spot something.  I looked the machine over; it seemed complete.  Then I spotted the power switch on the left-hand side, and switched it on. 

            A loud clicking noise emerged from the inside, and at that precise moment I was seized by an urgent, unstoppable compulsion to do exactly what I ended up doing.

What I did was, I swung around on my army-surplus swivel chair and heaved the laptop computer straight out the window, not bothering to stop and open it first.  The loud crash of broken glass and splintered wood was followed a half-second later by a blinding light and a loud explosion. 

I threw myself on the blonde, shielding her from the blast, and we fell together onto the floor, about four inches away from the dead deliveryman.  When she opened her eyes, they gazed at me with all the adoration and wonder of a beautiful, innocent child.

In some mysterious fashion, the explosion had taken this dame off the hard-boil.  Unspoken words passed between us; I was the white knight, I’d saved her life, without me, she would have switched the thing on and fell right for the big sleep.

Without words, she gave me the single most satisfying kiss I have ever experienced in my life – a kiss that combined infinite tenderness with seething sexuality – a kiss that would have held me for the duration, if necessary.  Then she looked me in the eyes and said quietly, “Anything, Mr. Marlowe.  You can have anything you want or need from me, anything it is possible for me to give you.”

I stood up, taking her with me, and dusted us both off.  Then I said:

“Dinner, tonight.  I want you to tell me everything you know about Rocks Dietrich.”

 Coming Soon! Episode 5 – The Coast with The Most

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