The Playboy Dime Mystery

I'm sitting in my office on 34th Street, cleaning the blood and part of my aunt's large intestine out of my .38, when this sharp sheila comes in and sashays on over to my desk. She's got a pair of galoshes on her that sure look waterproof. After we size each other up, she tells me her name is Myrna Leroy and that her sister Gesundheit is missing.

"How long has she been missing, toots?" I asks, taking out a flask.

"Seventeen years," she says, weeping into her hankie.

"Maybe you better sit down," I says, "and tell me about it."

II

So she tells me this crazy story about how her sister was kidnaped by the vicious cad and ex-president of France, Lord Axel Esprit; how he carried her off to a Kenya motel, where he planned to ravish her and drink an iced coffee; how she'd been shipwrecked and brought up by a bunch of apes. . . .

"Wait a minute," I says. "You don't expect me to believe any of this salami, do you, sister?"

But her big brown eyes tell me that she's on the level. Since this is the first time I've ever heard a pair of big brown eyes talk, I decide to listen.

III

"Oh, you haven't heard anything yet, Mr. Monroe," she says sweetly.

"Call me Elsie," I says.

So she continues. Seems this Esprit fellow had big plans for Gesundheit. He was part owner of a circus and since Gesundheit was brought up by apes, she'd be a whiz on the trapeze. So he kidnaped her and took her off to a dark cave somewhere west of the Jersey Turnpike. One day she breaks a milk bottle over his noodle and tries to escape.

"Then what?" I asks.

"She went to the store to get another bottle of milk."

IV

Well, none of this is making much sense to me, but I let the dame go on. Being a private eye, you meet all kinds of crazy dames and the best thing to do is humor them and then take all their dough.

"So," I says, putting out my cigarette on my chin, "keep talking, baby."

So she goes on with the story, telling me how Esprit has a whole covey of dames locked in his basement, how he likes to dress up in skeleton suits on Saturday afternoons and scare people, how he always tucks his necktie into his pants--

V

Then, all of a sudden, this punk comes barging into my office without knocking, grabs the dame and points a .45 at me. I've always been scared of guns, especially ones that are pointed at me, but this guy looks harmless, so I coolly stares him in the eye and says, "Please don't harm me, sir. I'll do anything you say."

"Shut up, Monroe," he says. "Or I'll make your head look like a pitted watermelon."

Then he motions me out into the hallway, where a couple of nasty-looking thugs are punching each other in the stomach for practice.

VI

One of these thugs claps me one on the butt with his gun noggin (or something like that) and suddenly I'm sitting blind-folded in a big black Packard, driving down a country road. I didn't know it's a country road, though, for, as I says, I'm blindfolded.

Later, we pull up at this mansion and they take off the blinders and there's Esprit and a dame who must be Gesundheit.

"Well," I says, "you must be Miss Gesundheit."

"How did you know?"

"Simple," I says. "I sneezed and nobody said anything."

VII

"Then . . . then you must be Mr. Monroe," she says.

"How can you tell?"

"It's written on your lapel," she says.

I make a mental note to tell my dry cleaner to be more careful next time.

"Mr. Monroe," says Esprit, "allow me to show you the premises."

Having no choice, I follow him into his basement, where, sure enough, he's got a bunch of gorgeous dames shackled to the wall. A couple of other dames are flying around on a trapeze. My instincts tell me he's some kind of pervert.

VIII

"You must think I'm some kind of pervert or something," says Esprit.

"Who, me?" I says, gazing into his gun nozzle. "Not at all. Hell, shackled dames are a dime a dozen. And I have trapezes in my basement. Doesn't everybody?"

Says he, "You see, Monroe, ever since I was a child, I wanted to own the greatest circus in the world. To be another P. T. Barnum. You might call me a circus impresario."

I think of a couple of other things I could call him, but I keep my clam shut and follow him back upstairs.

IX

Back upstairs, Gesundheit is reunited with her sister Myrna and they're crying and carrying on.

Touched by their emotion, Esprit puts the .38 (marked down from .45 because it is secondhand) on the table and forgets about me. (A lot of people do that.) My private-eye training pays off, as I'm able to glide noiselessly over to the table and trip on a light cord, which startles Esprit, who grabs a plastic banana off the table and threatens me with it.

"Make one wrong move, Monroe," he says, "and you're as good as dead."

X

"Oh, yeah?" I says. "Go ahead. You think you're hot stuff, don't you? Well, you're not. Actually, you're room-temperature stuff."

Then he shoots me in the arm with the banana. How am I supposed to know it's loaded? I know I'm loaded, but that doesn't count.

In the melee that follows, Myrna grabs the .38 and pulls the trigger six times and once for good measure, which puts five holes in the drapes and one in Esprit. It's a fatal one, though, and he falls to the floor, gurgling some gibberish about where to send the drapes.

XI

"Oh, sister," Myrna says joyously, "after all these years, we're finally together again. I have so many questions to ask you; for instance, where did you get that idiot dress?"

After giving Myrna a sisterly punch in the solar plexus, Gesundheit turns to me and says, "How can we ever thank you, Mr. Monroe?"

"You might try money," I tells her.

"One thing," she says. "How did you know where the secret door was?"

"Simple," I says. "I sneezed and nobody said anything."