The September sun burns bright, lighting the cool blue and dreamy sky. It’s Thursday morning: breezy and mild. About a quarter until nine. I, Det. Howard Phillip Marlowe, am on my way to a small cabin in the mountains outside of Eatonville with my partner Det. Joseph Sullivan McCoy. We work for the Washington State Patrol’s Criminal Investigation Division.

  Joe carries a decade’s weight over me, in years and in the shadowed craft of investigation. We’ve worked side by side for years, yet the old Irish dog guards his secrets, as if they’re wounds too deep to share.

  State-level criminal investigation: When a crime crosses county borders, the local P.D. reports land on our desk.

  So, what happened?

  Joe fills me in on the details while I drive south to Eatonville. He rifles through a copy of the report with hands too scarred and calloused for office work, hands that have held Lady Violence in intimate embrace more than most men hold their own wives.

  “At 5:23 this morning,” he intones, his faint Irish lilt curling like smoke through the words, “Ms. Clara Baker stumbled into the department of Eatonville’s finest, claiming assault.” His voice, seasoned by four decades of grit, carries the weight of a city’s sins.“Christ almighty,” he mutters, “these cases are a knife in the gut.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Aye?”

  “Yeah. You always sound more Irish when you’re angry. You always get angry when assaults land on our desks.”

  “Two and two make four, then. You’ve got me figured, boyo.”

  “The real mystery to me is ‘why?’. Why’s the knife cut you so deep? Care to shine a light on that?”

  He stares at the road as if he’s looking into another world in another time.

  “In the old days,” he says, “it didn’t take a constable to make right of these issues. You grabbed your boyos. They grabbed their pistols. You marched down to him who’d done it, and you took care of things. You made certain it’d never happen again. Whatever it took. Now, all I can do is arrest these bloody bastards. They deserve a lot more than a pair of cuffs and a few years behind bars.”

  “I didn’t know you were so opposed to due process,” I say with a wry smile.

  “Systems are built of foibles and follies, boyo. You’d do well remembering that. They’re only worth as much as the men that keep them, and men today are growing weak and selfish. Doesn’t help that much of the good ones died in the war. I fear what the next two decades will bring. Enough of that, though.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out in a sigh. “God love us, it’s right to hope, and I should hope our Lord left enough men to make right of things or that He at least raises up a new flock.”

  None of that is up to your God. It’s all up to us. Each man forges his own future. Together, we forge the destinies of nations.

  When Joe was a young man, he left the family farm in New York State and made for the home of his fathers to fight in the Irish War of Independence. On a good day, he’ll tell you that’s where he found his faith, and on a bad day, he’ll tell you, hands wet with the blood of his brothers, that’s where he found his lowest low.

  Returning to his stateside home of New York, he took up work in the city as a cop hunting bootleggers. As much as the man loves his stouts and whiskey, that never made much sense to me, but I suspect what he loved more than anything was the action. The hunt. The chase. The shootout. A violent life lived by the skin of your teeth. Joseph Sullivan McCoy is the kind of man who walked out of a legend and into the mortal world.

  After Prohibition, Joe set out west for Washington state. A fresh start. Said he’d made too many enemies busting tubs and wanted to settle down with some land, a wife, and rifle “just for hunting animals this time.”

  Now, he lives in an apartment in the city. I don’t know that he ever married. He never hunts, though I can’t imagine he doesn’t own a rifle. Even the men of legend sometimes find their dreams out of reach. Instead, he settled for steady work in a hard decade. That’s when he started working for the state patrol.

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  Joe knew the war would come. In 1935, he enlisted in the United States Army Infantry. Hard to imagine a man with such experience being called “Private” and scrubbing floors. He said he joined early so he’d be an NCO by the time American rounds started flying. He didn’t go to fight because he believed in Democracy or any high ideal. The man simply enjoyed war as much as he hated it. I think, like all men, he was looking for something. I’m not sure he ever found it.

  After five years in the European Theater of War, Staff Sergeant McCoy came home after V-E Day, this time with a limp and a Purple Heart. He earned a few other medals, but it’s the Purple Heart he talks about most on account of explaining to people why he has that bad limp. Says he was lucky. “I made it out with a bad hip and a few trinkets on my chest, but there were better men than me whom the Lord saw fit to take.”

  Despite taking a stray round to the hip that by all accounts should have left him dead in a German field, Joe saw fit to recover as quickly as he could and to return to the front where he said his squad waited and prayed not just for their own lives but for his. How could he leave them?

  There he stayed through the end of the war, and when he came home with those left of his soldiering brethren, some fresh, few old, and none forgotten, they shared the several somber but jubilant drinks they all said they owed each other. Then, they shared their goodbyes. They went their ways. How much they’ve spoken or written to each other since I can’t say, but I can tell you he shared a fierce bond with his soldiers, stronger than any I experienced in my service.

  Joe returned to Washington, where he’s been solving crimes ever since.

  “Is the girl okay?” I ask.

  “She’s in a mental hospital,” says Joe, looking up from the report to stare at the road with a grim, granite face, jaw clenched under his flaming red mustache. “We’ll have to go and see her after we put eyes on the scene.”

  “Seems like a simple case.”

  “How do you figure that, boyo?”

  “We look around this cabin. After that, we go talk to Ms. Baker. She tells us in her own words what happened. We go make an arrest and wait for trial.”

  “You’re too optimistic, boyo. The case isn’t what it seems.”

  “How do you figure that?

  “A case is never what it seems.”

  “Well, you’ve got me there, Old Dog. I should probably be thankful: if everything were that easy, we’d be out of our jobs. Any man could grab his boyos, and they could grab their pistols, and they could march on down to who had done it and make sure such a thing never happened again.”

  “And a fine world that’d be,” says Joe, choosing to dodge my sarcasm, embracing his dream of the old days with ironic sincerity.

  “Anyway,” I say, trying to get us back on track, “the report says that Clara Baker shows up at the local P.D. and reports an assault. What else does it say?”

  He skims over the report for a moment, looking at his pencil marks. “Clara says she went to the cabin with friends from her church. There was a man there she didn’t recognize. He made her uncomfortable at first and later tried to hurt her. No one could drive her home, so she rushed off with her things, trying to walk back to town.”

  “How’d she make it to the P.D.?”

  “A handyman found her walking along the side of the road as he was driving to his first job for the day. Says here his name was Dale Carnegie.”

  “I guess we’ll need to pay him a visit too.”

  “Aye, likely. The page of his account notes that the young lady was wearing nothing but her slip when he found her. Both accounts say she was lost and scared. I can only imagine. She’d dropped everything she was carrying, trying to get through the forest. There’s a remark about her being covered in bloody scratches where the thorns grew too fond of her. Apologies. It was bad taste to put it that way.”

  “This sounds absurd. A young girl wanders through a thick forest on a mountainside for hours wearing nothing but her slip. It’s not adding up, Joe.”

  “No. It’s not, but it won’t add right until we garner ourselves a bit more information on the story. Remember, we’re playing Chinese Whispers here with the local P.D. It isn’t their fault when things get muddled either. It’s just our job to sort it all out and get to the truth of it all.”

  “So, there’s something about a Ford being found outside the cabin. It’s tagged for Seattle, right?”

  “Aye, that it is.”

  “Do we know who it belongs to?”

  “A private investigator by the name of Jack Wolfgang.”

  Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the first H.P. Marlowe chapter.

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