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Chapter One
     
     
    I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, my television isn’t hooked up to the cable, and I don’t use a computer. However, I know what’s going on in the world from people who delight in telling me all about planet Earth’s daily gory details. That’s why I’m able to write that there’s too much hate, zero reasoning, and very little love in century twenty-one. Name a country that isn’t having some sort of conflict ripping it apart. I can’t.
    I’m Thanet Blake, Private Detective. People who consider me to be a walking bubonic plague might decide my introduction should be modified to private defective, snooper, peeper, shamus, dick, the dimwitted private eye with no balls, or even worse, the dick that uses his head for a castle battering ram. In reality I’m a great guy, a real dear, dear individual.
    Stanley Sudowsky was my barber and a serial killer. Somebody finalized him into maggot food. I thought I had. But six unfired bullets in my revolver proved I hadn’t. So who did put him in the permanent horizontal position? Personally, I don’t give a damn one way or the other. The person who offed him deserves a medal.
    Because I was feeling good after having my usual breakfast of three shots of rye and six gaspers, I leaned back in my battered swivel chair, propped my size twelves on my wooden desk, and began singing. “There once lived a maid, who said she wasn’t afraid…”
    “Give me the name of the person who said you could sing, and I’ll shoot him.”
    Why is it whenever I start to sing, somebody shows up and makes a nasty comment about my warbling? Could they possibly be right? Oh well. What the hell? Captain Holt, wearing his slept-in police outfit, popped in from nowhere. He’s somebody I don’t like to see. Trouble brews when I look him up or when he looks me up. We stared at each other for a few seconds before I came up with the idle conversation bit.
    “Do I really sing badly?”
    “Badly would be a compliment as to how you sound.”
    “Yeah, well, I love you, too, sweetheart. Now, are you going to tell me why you’re airing up my office with your coffee-and-donut breath, or have you just come to drink my booze?”
    “Pour me a drink.”
    I opened the bottom right-side drawer of my desk, grabbed a shot glass, and poured Holt a full-sized shot of rye. He gulped it down and motioned for another. I poured and asked, “Are you on duty?”
    “So what if I am?”
    “Well, nothing, but something is really puckering your ass into a knot. Care to tell me about it?”
    He gulped his second rye and motioned for another. I poured. He sipped three times and said the reason why he was sitting across the desk from me. It wasn’t to visit.
    “I want your thirty-eight.”
    “Why?”
    “Sudowsky was killed with a thirty-eight.”
    “Shit, Holt, there must be thousands of guns in this city that are the same caliber. It wasn’t mine that offed the barber, and you know it.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Well, I do. I unloaded my gun, and none of the bullets had been fired. When Sudowsky and I squared off in that alley I heard a gunshot. I thought it was from my gun and that I had killed him. Well, it wasn’t from my gun, and that means I didn’t kill him. And it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that somebody else did.”
    Holt took my gun right after he finished his rye.

Chapter Two
     
     
    I was still cussing when Monk showed up.
    “Godfather wants to see you.”
    “Why?”
    “He didn’t say, and I’m not an information booth. Lately he’s been…different.”
    “Oh?”
    Monk fidgeted. Tears dropped as his mouth worked around several sentences he couldn’t say in a coherent manner. From what I gathered, Godfather was drinking milk instead of booze. He was mumbling to himself, becoming feeble, staring at nothing, while being less demanding and sleeping more often in his wheelchair.
    “Blake, I love the old guy. He got me off the street. He’s been a father to me