The Adventures of Rocky Stone

From the Rocky Stone notebooks, dated April 17, 1949:

Morning came and I went to the office. My secretary Wanda was there before me, told me there were no calls, so I fell back into the inner office and had a snort of ginger ale. Then another. Then a third. The telephone rang and I answered it but it was just some mug calling for the maternity hospital that’s one number different from mine. I hung up on him and had another ginger ale.

It was like that until lunch-time. I planted myself in the diner across the way and had the blue plate special and I regretted it. When I got back, Wanda wasn’t back from lunch so I was all alone in there. I lay on my back on the beat-up old couch I keep in my office for clients that need to take a rest and I contemplated the holes in my ceiling and thought about how they got there. The one in the top left-hand side came from the knife that Buddy McGurk threw at me, narrowly missing my right ear. That was during the Carver case. The middle right was a bullet from the gun of Lenny Buddinski, some nut who thought I put his uncle in jail. Lenny was right, of course, but how did he know? As I looked up at that hole and the powder burns around it, I wondered if that bullet was still lodged in there.

Suddenly, she walked in. Her dress was a pale pink and she had a flower in her flowing, blonde hair that matched the color of her clothing. She looked at me the way they all do: she needed something and she couldn’t find it any more, and it was going to be up to me to tie a rope around it and wrangle it back to her. But she was different. I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was the fact that she was six years old, seven tops.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, “but where is the bathroom?”

Polite kid. She didn’t look like trouble to me. “Well, I keep one in here,” I said, pointing to the door behind me, “but I wouldn’t suggest it. I’d use the one down the corner and to the left.”

She turned on her heel and beat it, sending me back to the land of Loneliness, population: 1. That’s the way it is, I guess. Nobody stays too long in my world.