Vic Daniel 6 - As she rides by by David M Pierce Page B

certainly must have read about that, goodness knows.”
    “I think I did see something,” I said.
    “And what did these two straights proceed to do but try and extort me,” he went on.
    “How?”
    “Not only,” he said, “not only did they want me to change my major local supplier, but also the import house I use for all my Dutch blooms. Threats were uttered!”
    “No!” I said.
    “Which was only to be expected, I suppose,” he said, touching the curls at the back of his neck carefully. “I mean, there they were, two big brutes dripping menace, and there I was, naught but a poor, trembling pansy.”
    “Yeah, I bet,” I said, taking a close look at him as a person—rather than at his pastel wardrobe and matching accessories—for the first time. Once I got past the manicured and highly buffed nails, I noticed the inner edges of both hands were heavily callused, and you don’t get that from snipping the dead bits off dwarf dahlias, you get it from screaming in Japanese and disintegrating stacks of bricks with one downward chop. Like his cuffs, his shirt sleeves were puffy, too; they probably had to be to hide his rippling deltoids.
    “Shivering with abject terror as I was,” he said, “I did remember to switch on a darling little pocket recorder I have to catch those elusive flashes of pure genius one gets from time to time that otherwise would be lost to posterity. After a while, mercifully, they departed, vowing to return, as I claimed I was, first of all, in too much of a dither to make any decisions right then and second of all, I couldn’t possibly make any business decision of such magnitude without baring all to my silent partner.”
    “No doubt nonexistent as well as silent,” I said.
    “Well, one isn’t a complete fool, is one,” he said, “if you leave such wayward emotions as love and young lust out of the picture.” Here he arched his eyebrows heavenward.
    “I take it you called the cops,” I said. “And I take it they did come back.”
    “By appointment, the following week,” he said. “Naturally they were almost an hour late, presumably to give me more time to quiver in me Guccis.”
    I grinned. “Yeah, I bet,” I said again. “Also presumably this time the boys in blue brought their own wire along.”
    “I won’t tell you,” he said, “how embarrassing it was to have to strip to the waist in front of total strangers, then have this... this machine taped to that cute little area just above one’s derriere, and from there the itchiest wires ran practically everywhere. I’ve hardly slept a wink since. I just count my blessings I’d put on clean bikini bottoms that morning, just like Mother always advised.”
    “Have you seen or heard anything since from your gentlemen callers?”
    “Please!” he said. “Callers, yes. Last night, I was just sitting down to a candlelit supper with a dear, dear friend of mine—poached turbot avec trois sauces, with a small salade endive to follow—when, wouldn’t you know, ring, ring, ring. A voice that sounded like it was talking through a filthy hankie asked me if I wanted to go on walking. Also dancing, I said, and I did take a ski holiday every year as well. Why wait for winter? he said. Now’s a perfect time for a holiday. Get me? I said I comprehended him, if that was what he was endeavoring to get across. Then he hung up, thank God; I just managed to rescue the turbot.”
    “That was lucky,” I said. “I take it your friends are out on bail until the trial?”
    “You take it correctly, sir,” he said. “That’s nice.” He pointed to an expensively framed drawing I had up on the wall next to the fire extinguisher. “A Dufy, isn’t it?”
    “A fake,” I said, perhaps unnecessarily. “So then what happened?”
    “After the Brie,” he said, “which was perhaps just the teeniest bit overripe, I called the gendarmes, and said, ‘ Au secours!’ They said they could only secours me adequately if I moved into a hotel