Up on the Roof, Out on a Limb (part one)

My agency is at the darkest end of a dark corridor on the top floor of an old brick office building in the city’s Molasses District. The bare incandescent bulb that hangs from a wire three doors down from mine casts shadows against the frosted glass of a window with the words Philemon A. Barlowe Investigations painted on the other side. Those shadows? They’re my early warning system, letting me know whenever anyone’s approaching. Distressed damsels, gun molls, women scorned and looking for a sympathetic shoulder and dry handkerchief… you know the type. They fill your eyes full of décolletage, your ears full of sugar and, if you’re lucky, the only thing they’ll break is your piggy bank.

Problem is, no femmes fatale ever cast such glamorous shadows on my door. That kind of business is handled two doors down by my pal Jim Rockwell, the private investigator.

Me? My cases come through the wire.

I’m a facsimile investigator. An FI. I find the scent of Benzaldehyde as intoxicating as three fingers from the bottle of Old Overholt I keep in my desk drawer; I find the offers that await me in that tray every morning as alluring as the women I find waiting for me in the magazine I keep on the back of my commode. My day’s work is wearing out shoe leather chasing down eight and a half by eleven inch leads. Some days they bring me to the counter of a delicatessen I thought went out of business years ago for a deal on a pastrami sandwich that should have been thrown out year ago. Other days they drag me over the streets of this grimy city into places you can’t believe still exist, yank me up by the collar and push me into the company of characters from a painting by Edward Hopper or, on a bad day, Frank Frazetta.

Last week Farrah greeted me with the morning’s cases, warm as a fresh doughnut, when something caught my trained eye: Reliable Roof Repair. I’m a sucker for absurd alliteration, as evinced by my use of the word absurd instead of the more appropriate, unnecessary. And also by the fact that I named my fax machine Farrah Facsimile.

Cheap literary devices aside, I’d been noticing that the brownish blotch on the ceiling plaster above my head had expanded since the last rain storm. Maybe the fax was fortuitous. Maybe I was meant to take the ticket I held in my hand to its tarry destination and pass the information on to my skinflint landlord before my office ended up with an accidental skylight.

But I’ve been playing this game long enough to know that Reliable Roof Repair is just as likely to be a euphemism for mail-order Russian brides or short-term, high-interest loans from a crooked-nosed lout named Rocco. So I decided to check it out myself, in person, and get the facts firsthand. I had nothing better to do that day, and I gambled that the fresh air would do me good. Besides, if I was right, I’d get an eyeful of the latest in single-ply roofing membranes and corrugated steel. If I was wrong I might get a bellyful of the latest in copper-jacketed lead. Those are the chances an FI takes, and so I took a stiff pull of courage from my bottle, kissed Farrah goodbye and made my way down the hall.

To be continued…