HIGH HEELS AND HOT TIPS

A Sheila Coffin Adventure

By Christopher Leeson

Chapter 1

The Narrative of D.C. Callahan

Drinking as a dame requires does hell to my present-day physiology. Two martinis used to be just a warm-up for me — the liquid courage that got me through the boredom of many a January stakeout. Now two measly martinis were enough to start me quoting Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and forgetting how the complex machine called “stairs” is supposed to work. I still haven’t gotten the hang of things after I had an alien-enhanced female libido foisted on me, but this five-foot-five lightweight constitution adds insult to injury.

Martin was grinning. We’d just gotten back from a bar whose wide-screen TV was set to the election-night coverage. The merry crowd around us was drinking up a storm until the main race was called. I’d kept my fingers crossed until they hurt. I’d honestly thought that the Evil Party would steal another election, but I’d underestimated the American people. They’d come out en masse and done the right thing. The joy of victory made my head swim. Maybe now the country could begin the hard work of climbing out of the seventh circle of hell.

Though well sloshed on cheap near-champagne, we joined in cheering the victory speech at two-thirty in the morning. By then, I was pretty far gone, almost numb enough to forget the catastrophic change that had come over my life.

Namely, I was a thirty-eight-year-old male detective whose life essence had been tucked inside the body of my nineteen-year-old secretary by alien invaders, Sheila Coffin. Like it or not, Sheila’s life had been dumped into my lap, and I had to make the best of it. How was I supposed to tell anyone what was bugging me? What else could I do except buckle down and toss the dice I’d been given? I hacked at secretarial work for a while, until Martin Dewitt saw I had the mind of a natural-born detective and made me his business partner. His old boss, D.C. Callahan, was, for good reason, considered dead and buried.

But I’ve told all that nutty stuff in the book I’ve already written. When I’m old and ready to cash out, maybe I’ll upload the whole humiliating spiel and make a Kindle Book out of it. We’ll see.
The thing Martin Dewitt and I now had going hadn’t been planned for. But when the aliens flipped a man into a woman’s body, there was nothing halfway about it. Within two days of waking up in Sheila’s body, my rewired chemistry had locked onto Martin Dewitt like a heat-seeking missile’s guidance system. I’d resented it at first — bitterly. That had lasted for a few hours. After that, snuggling within Martin’s brawny arms had become a hell of a lot of fun.

Anyway, after our candidate’s acceptance speech, Martin drove us home in Sheila’s car — my car now. I was in no condition to drive myself.

“Almost home, Princess,” he said as we turned down the ramp to the basement parking.
“Don’t call me P-Princess,” I hiccuped. “I’m a hard-boiled gumshoe.”

“You’re not old enough to be hard-boiled. But you sure can write like you were. It’s cute how you can crank out that 1940s-style mystery fiction.”

Yeah, I can write, but at the moment, I couldn’t even have held on to a pencil.

My apartment house stairs were too much for me, so Martin picked me up and hoisted me into the nearest elevator, my heels dangling like a pair of dead fish. When the doors hissed open on our floor, we faced a young cleaning lady who had both a mop and an urgent expression. The building’s cleaning staff uniform checked out, but I didn’t recognize her. Drunk as I was, I didn’t wonder why she’d be mopping linoleum at three-thirty in the morning. When I glanced back, she was trailing after us with a nervous look.

“Are you Callahan and Dewitt?” she addressed our shoulders. “The detectives?” Martin turned his head.

“That’s us,” he said carefully. “Having a problem, miss?”Her words came fast. “I’m Valentina Romano. I’m not a cleaner. I found this uniform in a broom closet and put it on so I could hang around without being tossed out. A cop told me about a male-and-female detective team — said they were brave and honest. That’s what I need right now.”

“Why?” asked Martin.

“I witnessed a murder,” she whispered. “The mob knows I talked. They’re going to kill me. I need protection.”

Those words blew away some of my wine-laced euphoria. Martin’s jaw set, and he fumbled his key out of his suit pocket. “Come inside quick,” he said.

#

She hurried in at our heels, and I gestured Val toward the cluttered sofa. The girl sat and immediately began talking. She was a professional dancer currently booked at Washington D.C.’s Velvet Room. Three nights earlier, finishing her shift at an upscale gentleman’s club, she’d gone out to her car when she witnessed a kneeling man being executed mob-style by a pair of goons in ill-fitting suits. She ducked for cover and took a taxi home. The next day, the news feeds identified the victim as federal prosecutor Richard Hayworth, shot dead in the club’s parking lot.

Val had seen everything under the lot lights, and so she’d gone to the D.C. police. They showed her binders of photographs. From them, she picked out Tommy “The Suit” Castellano, an enforcer for the Moretti crime family. The blue boys asked if she would testify. They also told her that if the mob learned who she was, her life wouldn’t be worth a flipping penny. They told her she’d need a safe house, but they didn’t have one ready on short notice. She was told to come back on Monday.

Shaking, Val went to the club lot and drove her car back to her hotel. But maybe that was a bad move because she got a call that afternoon. A gruff voice told her: “Witnesses don’t live long.”

She called in sick to the club that night and, in the morning, she went down to her car and found a dead rat on the driver’s seat. In panic, Val returned to the station house, but the cops only repeated what they’d told her before. Monday. But there was an old patrolman who took her aside and told her about the Callahan Detective Agency. He handed her their home address.

“The gangsters have to be watching the hotel,” Val told Sheila and Martin, her voice cracking. “Somehow, they tracked me down. They must know where I work and must already know where my mother lives. I can’t go to her — it would put her in danger. I’m afraid to run. Maybe they’ve put a tracer on my car, like in the movies.”

She looked at us with the eyes of someone who had run out of options. “I need bodyguards, or at least help to get away clean. I can give you three thousand dollars — my entire savings. It’s all I have.”I flashed Martin my crisis look. He knew what it meant: that I was going soft on him again.

#

“What should I do?” Val whispered in a voice so low it barely crossed the room.“Mobsters are like a wolf pack,” I said. “They’ll go for blood the second they corner you. Trying to get out of town would start the endgame. Your best bet is to hold your ground in Washington until those slow-motion cops get their safe house ready.”

I looked at Martin. “She’s right. What she has to have is bodyguards. Tough people with guns.”

“Does that mean you’ll take my case?” Val asked.“I’m willing, so long as you’re on the level about that three grand,” I said.

Martin’s expression darkened. “Are you serious, Babe? Three thousand couldn’t bury even one of us.”

He wasn’t wrong, but Martin was just being Martin — laying out the dangers of a case, so we both understood exactly what we were walking into. “We have a life to save,” I said.

He gritted his teeth. “This is a rotten situation with no good angles. If we’re dumb enough to take it on, we’ll have to be sharper than we’ve ever had to be before.”

“Ever? Listen, buddy, that alien case was no walk in Fort Marcy Park.”

By then, Val couldn’t sit up straight and looked ready to fold. “Easy,” I told her. “You’re not alone anymore. You’ll bunk with us tonight.” I had Martin get her settled on the sofa with a pillow under her head. I covered her with the fuzzy blue blanket I’d picked up for a quarter at a rummage sale. She was “lights out” in five minutes.

I met Martin’s eyes then. “We need to talk privately.”

“The bedroom,” he said.

#

Still half-drunk and dead tired, we shut the bedroom door. I shed my party dress and slid under the coverlet. Martin flopped down on the mattress beside me, wearing his boxers and staring at the ceiling.“You wanted to talk, so talk,” he said.“

We can’t play this the mob’s way,” I told him. “They expect Val to either run or hide, and they’re betting she’ll fall into her hands whichever she does. So, we don’t let her do either. We have her play it dumb — or too stubborn to realize she’s supposed to be scared. We’ll have her stay in Washington and finish her booking at the Velvet Room. Right out in the open.”

“That sounds risky. Are you suggesting we use her as bait?”

“I’m suggesting we do unexpected things. We put a trip wire in front of that pack of gunmen. When Val doesn’t break and run, the Morettis will wonder why. They might suspect she’s actually a piece of bait set by the cops to entrap them. When things don’t look right, people slow down. We use the extra time that gives us to run out the clock until Monday.

“And in the meantime?”

“We move into her hotel room. I pose as her roommate. You'll pass as my boyfriend — always hanging around. We stay with her 24-7. I have a friend of a friend who knows Dominic Santelli, who runs the Velvet Room. Word on the street says Dom’s a straight arrow. We’ll go to work with Val and guard her at home and at the club. Maybe Dom will give you a stool and a beer tab while we wait things out.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’ll ask Santelli to set me up with a job in the lounge.”

“As what? A stripper?”

I snorted. “I respect strippers, but I can’t do what they do. But I could quickly learn how to work the floor as a cocktail waitress. I served tables after college.”

Martin rested back quietly for a moment. “And when the booking ends?”

“We hunker down with her at the hotel. We'll run out the clock until witness protection kicks in.”

“That doesn’t sound like enough to flummox the Morettis.”

“I know it. But the bigger the butcher bill we offer them, the more careful they have to be.”

“Why should they be?”

“Remember the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? After such bloodthirstiness, the people got upset, and it was downhill for the gang.”He frowned my way. “I hate dealing with shooters. I nearly lost you a few months back. I don’t want to live through that experience again.”

“That’s so sweet to say,” I said. “Tell me more.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not changing anything. I’m saying we play the cards we’re dealt. What else can we do?”

He went quiet again. Outside, the D.C. traffic was humming its usual flat, tiresome drone.

“Fine,” Martin said at last. “But answer me straight. If this goes sideways — are you willing to die for a woman you didn’t know existed twelve hours ago?”

I thought about it honestly. “No. But I’m willing to take a minor risk when I see an innocent person being kicked around.” I looked at him. “You should know that there’s only one person I’d actually die for...and that’s you. You already know that.”

He swore under his breath. “You always go for my soft spot, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You say things to make it impossible to argue with you.”

“That’s one thing that makes me such a good detective,” I suggested.

“Yeah, sure.”

After that, we snuggled. Falling head over heels for a guy had taken most of the sting out of being a girl. But it was after four in the morning, and we didn't have much energy left. I dropped off and dreamed. But dreams are funny things. Why was it that with murder rattling the door, I should dream about wrapping foil around chocolate kisses in a candy factory?

#

The next afternoon, Martin, Val, and I met with Dominic Santelli in his office above The Velvet Room. He was sixty, silver-haired, sharp-eyed. His office was laid out tastefully: leather furniture, framed Sinatra photographs, and a bookshelf with actual books — nonfiction, mostly. No velvet paintings. No neon. The room had the feel of a man who paid his taxes, kept his nose clean, and didn’t have a handle that anyone could grab him by.

There were too few people of that kind left in Washington, D.C.Val explained the situation.

Dom listened without interrupting. When she finished, he looked at all three of us long and hard. He looked at me especially hard, maybe wondering what a shapely brunette of nineteen was bringing into a tough-guy bodyguard arrangement.“The Morettis,” he said. “I heard talk that they did the Hayworth hit. The bastards did it in my parking lot. Hurt business.”

He turned back to Val. “You’ve got nerve, kid. Reckless nerve, but nerve.” He picked up Martin’s business card — Callahan-Dewitt Detective Agency — read it, and set it down. “Till Monday, you said?”

“Till closing time, early Monday night, I replied. "Then she goes into witness protection.

The businessman leaned back, thinking. Then: “All right. Here’s how it goes. I’ll hire you as a cocktail waitress, Miss Coffin — that’s minimum wage plus tips. You'll stay close to Val, and you’ll watch for trouble. But, for Pete’s sake, remember to do the job while you’re wearing our outfit. Blend in. And if there’s going to be shooting, take it outside. I can’t afford to have the Morettis or the Police Department shut me down. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said.“Good.” He stood. “You start tonight. See Mercedes, my floor manager, to issue you a uniform and do your orientation.” He turned to Val. “And Miss Romano — after this booking, don’t come back. Stay away as long as you’re a hunted woman. I like you, young lady, and so I’d rather not have to remember you as a dead body in my parking lot.”

Val nodded shakily. “T-Thank you, Mr. Santelli.”

Dom gave her a quick nod and turned back to his desk. That was his signal that the meeting was over.

We three filed out into the hall and down the stairs. The action int the main lounge was lively, with the bass line thumping hard. Off to the side, a woman was dancing up a storm, and the crowd was loving it.

I loved strip joints, but tonight I couldn’t go with the flow. I knew that the wheels in gangster minds were turning, and that bad things were coming our way.

And when they arrived, they’d be wearing steel jackets.

TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER TWO