Category: Music and Dance

On the Downtown

This romantic lark is a departure from Hack’s usual hardboiled style. It’s a memory piece loosely based on an episode during his brief stint with the Merchant Marines when he had a 24-hour pass in a strange city spent with three women he met on the dock. The reality was that they were sex workers who gave him his first case of syphilis that resulted in the insanity which plagued him in his later years, and the night concluded with the women stealing Hack’s wallet and pushing what they thought was his lifeless body into a canal. It ended happily, with the syphilis eating away the facts of the evening from his brain until he now regards it as one of his most cherished memories.

The Bonus

The crowd already knew how the cards were stacked. Still, the applause hit like a freight train when Johnny Rocco — the silk-suited emperor of Van Nuys — cracked open the envelope and read the name inside.

“Big Tim.”

Flashbulbs popped. Cigars glowed. Somewhere in the back, a trumpet wailed like it had a gambling problem.

The giant Neanderthal lumbered to the stage, all shoulders and menace, and accepted a solid gold bust of his own ugly mug like it was a communion wafer. Rocco draped an arm around him, smiling the kind of smile that never reached his eyes.

“N’yeah, see?” Rocco purred into the mic. “You’ve earned yourself a little reward. Any dame in Van Nuys. Name it.”

It was a tradition — a greasy ritual that had followed every Mobster of the Year for two decades. Usually, the winner picked some unlucky trollop who was working off her father’s gambling debt at one of the mob’s brothels. Easy. Predictable. Disposable.

But Big Tim didn’t play by anyone’s script.

He reached into his coat and held up an album cover — “Hasten Down the Wind.” His thick finger jabbed at the woman on the sleeve.

“Her,” he grunted.

The room went colder than a morgue drawer.

Linda.

Jonny M.’s girl. Off-limits. Untouchable. The kind of name that made wiseguys suddenly interested in their shoes.

Rocco’s grin froze, but he kept his voice smooth as aged bourbon. “You got taste, kid. Real class. But Linda’s a closed book. How about a sweet little nineteen-year-old redhead workin’ off her ma’s bar tab down at the Erwin Street cathouse?”

Tim’s eyes turned reptilian — the kind of stare usually only saw in National Geographic specials on Nile crocodiles. He shoved the album cover inches from Rocco’s nose.

“HER.”

Chairs scraped. Glasses clinked. Half the room calculated the distance to the exits, expecting the air to fill with hot lead any second.

But Rocco didn’t flinch. He studied the cover like a man reading tomorrow’s headlines, then let out a slow, wicked chuckle that slithered through the crowd.

“Well,” he said, voice low and dangerous, “looks like it’s gonna be her.”

He leaned closer, eyes glittering with bad ideas.

“Now let’s figure out how we make that happen.”

Murder at the Ballet

It was the kind of night Van Nuys polished its shoes for. The annual arrival of the Robert Vestal Ballet Company always drew the city’s top hats and bottom lines—bankers with waxed smiles, councilmen with wandering eyes. Slumming among them were two guys who usually worked the alleys instead of the aisles: Jonny and Boris. They didn’t belong to the upper crust, but they’d bought tickets anyway. Tonight wasn’t about culture—it was about Dévyon DuMon, an old friend from Paris, cleared by their legwork when a Dali masterpiece went missing and everyone needed a villain with good posture. DuMon danced like a gardenia-scented hurricane, all jitterbug and perfume, too sweet for the detectives’ taste—but the Bro Code said you show up for your pals, even if it means five hours of tights and tragedy.

They were well into hour five when the ballet took a hard left into hellfire—DuMon leaping offstage in some double-cabriole heroics to save his lover Andromeda from Cerberus or damnation or whatever the program said. Jonny and Boris had been trading naps when a gunshot cracked the air like a bad alibi. The house gasped. A scream followed. Then Robert Vestal himself staggered into the lights, a fresh bullet signature stamped on his forehead. He tried to say something—“DuMon… DuMon’s to blame”—and then he folded, bleeding into the boards that had made him rich.

The detectives were onstage before the applause could die. Boris went to work, eyes sharp, mind sharper. Jonny did what Jonny did best—offered comfort to the two hottest ballerinas in the vicinity in the hopes of getting a three-way going later that night. Too late for Vestal. Boris checked his watch to mark the time of death just as DuMon pirouetted back onstage, blissfully unaware. That’s when Victoria Page, the prima ballerina and Vestal’s lover, broke like cheap glass. “He did it!” she screamed. “Dévyon hated Bobby from day one—ever since I told him I wouldn’t touch him while Bobby was still breathing!” The crowd buzzed. Boris shut it down with a look. “Everyone’s a suspect,” he said. “Including Jonny and me.” Then his gaze settled on DuMon, hard and cold. “But I’ll admit—right now, it sounds like you pulled the trigger.”

Happy National Ballet Day!