John Malloy six--Meet Clara Withers

   This is a replacement for chapter (6) I wasn't happy with it, so i rewrote it. I'm posting it in the off chance someone here cares about chapter stories. You could catch up with this write


         +*John Malloy*+" (6)
       The Blackmailed Beauty

                  (Clara Withers)

    I was ambling across the concrete floor of the underground parking lot beneath the three-story building in downtown L.A.

    The brownstone box of a building houses my apartment on the second floor and my lonely office on the third.

    I spied my aging 1940 Hudson convertible coupe, parked against the south wall.  I was alone and listening to the sounds of my size-ten wingtips echoing off the cement walls.

      I shuffled over to my polished canary-yellow sedan, which was proudly decked out with rubberized black running boards that weren't really needed. It's a throwback to the days you had to climb up into your heap, I guess.

     I swung the door open, then parked my keister on the plush, brown bench seat and fished out my ring of keys.

      I laid out  eight hundred clams for this honey in '41. I bought it off a little old used car dealer who swore he only used it on Sundays to drive his sweet old granny to church and back.

     I appreciate a good pitch, so I laid out my moola and had it towed home…. It turned out, my new buggy had waited until I 'zigned zee papers' before the carburetor went belly-up as soon as I tried to move it.

     I cranked her over, hearing the big six come to life. Its good to be alive!

      As I rolled, I started taking inventory of the last twenty four hours since the lovely Lana Rogers slinked into my office yesterday in a sprayed on, flame-red dress.

     I was on her side the second I laid my eager  peepers on her female perfection!

       It seems Lana had been schmoozing with the homosexual movie director, George Kukor, trying to land a part in his upcoming movie, 'Adam's Rib.'

     She'd  been invited to his ritzy cocktail shin-dig as favor to her.  She showed in order to get next to this Kukor palooka..

      The Hollywood pimp to the stars, Scotty Bowers, who was volunteering as a bartender, that she could earn two hundred clams by snuggling under the sheets with the actress, Katharine Hepburn.

     I would have done it for free, mind you…..That's just the kind of helpful joe I am…. But nobody asked!

      She was hard up for rent money, so she took him up on the offer. Then this sleazebag of a vice cop who was there to get dirt on just anybody followed this Bowers character and Lana to Hepburn's hacienda in Beverly Hills.

    The next morning, he took pictures of Lana and Hepburn in their birthday suits, doing fun stuff to eachother by the pool…

     Some detectives get all the luck!

       The bottom line is….this corrupt vice cop is blackmailing Lana for a third of the million smacker inheritance she's about to have fall into her pretty lap.

      My life was fairly simple before Lana danced her beautiful frame into it, but that's the gumshoe racket for you. It beats punching a clock at the Ford factory.

     I pulled my cherished heap up the ramp and immediately got blinded by the afternoon sun, shining in my baby blues.  I shielded my peepers with the back of my hand and started tooling down the busy L. A.
street, pointing my Hudson toward Bill Withers' dive in Burbank.

     My big plan was to grill his wife to get an angle on how best to get to the crooked cop and get him off Lana's shapely behind.

      Once inside the city limits of Burbank, I cruised my three speed chariot down West Oak Street, and then I hung a left on Lomita. Half a block down the residential track home neighborhood, I spotted his house number on a squat, flat-topped G.I. special: like they cranked out by the thousands to make a place for the dogfaces coming back from the war.

   I parked in front of the cop's hovel, knowing Bill Withers was on the job, rousting somebody or other over something or other .

     I strolled up the sidewalk and rapped on the tacky brown door. After knocking for a few seconds, the door slowly creaked open.

     Looming in front of me was a frumpy, obese middle aged nightmare of a woman in curlers.

      She was sporting a food- stained faded green sack dress with red daisies printed all over it. It had a low V neck, exposing some sagging cleavage I would rather not have seen.

     She was eyeballing me like I was the buffet special at the local low rent eatery…and she hadn't eaten for a month!

     "What can I do for you, handsome?" she gushed like a horny teenager. The female monstrosity fluttered her heavily-mascaraed and puffy eyeballs at me, trying her very best to look girlishly alluring.

   Some days,  I thought to myself…. it just don't pay to get out of bed!
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