Aachoo Voo, Private Eye
Episode 26 (Twenty-Six)
Will It Ever End? Or Did it End and Nobody told Me?
It was Monday after next and I didn't even remember the Monday before then. I hated Mondays anyways and didn't care who knew it. Calendars were not my friends. The parrot volunteered to mark all the Mondays off my new ones with green markers if I let him read The New Yorker and besides he liked the color green. I usually let all the animals sleep in on Mondays so we could pretend that it never happened but, oh, boy, did they ever eat like pigs on Tuesdays! If Tom hadn't kindly supplied me with leftovers, I don't know how I would have kept them fed. Of course with his extensive menus offering strange and exotic dishes there was usually a lot of leftovers. Some things even the dog wouldn't eat. I just told Tom that Toulouse was a finicky eater when he sniffed his full bowl and ran away. That really hurt Tom. Once, I saw a starving homeless man shake his head at an awful and unrecognizable concoction Tom tried to give him even though it smelled good.
Tom had a big heart and he never stopped trying. Even though he should have. His bell pepper bamboo biscotti was pretty good though. (If you ate it fast and with your eyes closed.) Even after he had attended three cooking schools (without graduating) he still put his special touch on just about everything he made. It was the clown in him I guess, as MiMi would say. Bless his heart....But hardly anyone turned down his Green Lasagna with Artichoke Hearts or his Butterscotch Pie made with real fifty-two year old scotch and hand churned butter. They were especially popular with the visually impaired.
Evidently, Mary Margaret had let a photo booth picture of the late Si and herself slip out of a pocket or purse and her widowed sister had seen it and gasped aloud. Her husband's cheek had been wearing her gaudy sister's red lipstick and Margaret Mary was aghast and had reached out to rub that awful red all across her dumb blonde sister's face. She had also pulled that tacky wig off because she wasn't really even a blonde. She was just dumb. The melee ended with tears and obscenities, torn clothes and cheering men. Lance, D'Sal and several bouncers and cops got close enough in the fray to hear Margaret Mary say "You fool! I was going to divorce that devil of a man so he could marry the rich old Ethel broad he was always talking in his sleep about. I was sick and tired of his sorry no good shellacking ass and figured I could get some good alimony out of it! "
Mary Margaret collapsed on the floor between Big david and Little Guido's legs while clutching a fist full of her sister's hair. "Ethel?" "Ethel who?" she cried. "He told me he loved me! He was going to marry me one day! Yeah, I suspected he was chasing after that Voo dame like Lance does but everybody does. He said she was just a good paying customer. Oh, what have I done? I didn't mean to kill him! I loved him! He said you wouldn't give him a divorce! He said...Oh, my Lord! I didn't mean to hurt him! I loved him! I only wanted him dead that one day when he....I didn't mean to do it! I didn't! Oh, yes, I did! I could kill him again right now, I could!" "Oh, my Lord! Help me!" And as they cuffed her and dragged her away she was still alternating between loving him and killing him again. My knights in tarnished armor sighed huge sighs of relief and mopped their exhausted faces and ordered several rounds of anything wet to celebrate. Somebody picked some not exactly sexy false eyelashes up off the floor and put them in his pocket with a grin. Later they were seen on the face of the unholy Blue Fan Dancer thingamajig thing in the front window of the King of Thing's shop. The price had been marked up so high nobody could afford it. And nobody actually wanted it but it brought Mr. Elliottt in quite a few curious and shame-faced customers. The mystery had been solved, justice would be served and MiMi Voo and I would go on that long awaited vacation to Voo Bayou she had been telling me about as I had rotted away in my jail cell those first forty-five minutes. I needed the peace and quiet of the swamp.
That is how I was rescued from my not quite hell hole jail cell at last. I must confess though, that when my mother came to pick me up and smuggle me away from society's prying eyes, chiding me non-stop like a human parrot, I begged her to let me stay just one more night and promised I would come home soon. I didn't tell her that Lance and I were spending the night in a discreet, non-disclosed location where we would slow dance to the radio, drink Gin Gimlets and run our fingers through each other's hair. I wanted to eat filet mignon, bathe in Chanel Number 5, try to erase the Surd family from my memory (ugh) and most of all I never wanted to catch the slightest whiff of a banana again as long as I lived!
Things were going as planned and I was feeling as good as a newly freed incarcerated unfairly, homesick and hungry, innocent, well, almost innocent girl could, I suppose. But then as usual, things took a turn for the worse. Of course, they did. What did you expect? You know my history, right? As I stood in the shadows of my private prison waiting for Lance to whisk me away with champagne and roses, a dark car pulled up and a crazy woman jumped out screaming "You hussy! You think I didn't know about you and my husband? You think my stupid sister was the only hussy he was chasing after? I just made Ethel up! For my stupid sister! All he ever talked about in his sleep was mainly you! You Aachoo Voo you! You and Shellac and sand paper! Do you know what Shellac is made out of? Do you? Bugs! Female bugs! Aachoo Voo! You and that stupid name of yours! What is wrong with your mother naming you that?!" "I'm going to kill you!"
And before I could make excuses for my mother (which was a very uncommon thing for me to do) and correct her on the origin of my name, Margaret Mary bopped me over the head with an industrial sized can of Shellac and I fell head first into a pile of police station rubbish, girly magazines and banana peels. Out cold. Well.... tepidly lukewarm but still definitely out. Both of those sisters were as crazy as loons and both cold blooded killers I was sure of it but then too, I had been involuntarily familiar with Si, the giver of all this grief and his slick and charmless charms. He could make any woman crazy. He could make you want to kill him over and over again in all kinds of inventive and creative ways. Even girls like me. Even Aachoo Voo, Private Eye...crime chaser, crime connoisseur, crime novel reader, crime movie watcher, crime expert, crime solver, crime preventer....well, maybe not that...crime lover...well, yeah, I admit it....I love it. Crime does fascinate me. Crime does pay. Though most criminals end up unemployed or doing other men's laundry in the Big House. I think I could possibly commit something.................I have probably committed something. Accidentally on purpose, perhaps.. Deliberately? Eh...The wrong thing for the right reason? Maybe. If only in my mind.
I can't remember.
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Sigh...I mean Si
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For Your Useless Information**
Shellac is a natural resin secreted by the female lac bug (Kerria lacca) on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is produced by harvesting the resin-encrusted branches (sticklac), refining it into flakes, and sometimes bleaching it. Chemically, it is composed of aleuritic acid, jalaric acid, shellolic acid, and natural waxes.
I had no idea. really. ewww.
