Once when they brought in a junkie for a blood sample, Annie broke the Guinness world record for misses with a syringe. She made twenty-six straight attempts to hit a vein without success. The horsed-out junkie started yelling and screaming about Annie poking more holes than the Three Musketeers, and the narcs who’d arrested the hype decided that Annie’s antics would be deemed cruel and unusual punishment so they had to let the guy go.
People started spreading rumors that poor Annie carried her syringe at port arms. They claimed she had pulled out bone marrow during that world-record performance. Cops said that she had to work nights, and never ate garlic, and slept in a box of dirt with a lid. People warned if you owned her favorite flavor, type AB, not to get your neck too close or you’d be sporting the world’s biggest hickey.
Finally she got sick of it and telephoned a cop she used to know in San Diego who was working as a sergeant at a little police department in the Coachella Valley. An interview was arranged during which Sergeant Harry Bright said, “Paco, you’ll never find a harder-working woman than Annie here.”
Anemic Annie gave up orchids in San Diego for a cactus garden in Mineral Springs, and found that if she wore a big straw hat and long skirts, her pale skin did okay in the dry heat. She was generally much happier than when she was bloodletting down south.
On the evening that Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer were getting the crap scared out of them in the desert, Anemic Annie and Ruth the Sleuth were commiserating at the Mirage Saloon, neither wanting to drink at the Eleven Ninety-nine Club because of all the chauvinist pigs that hung around there. But both knew if they wanted to score with some young hunking cop they had little choice in Mineral Springs other than to boogie over there in the shank of the night.
Ruth the Sleuth was in a snit because she’d worked Mineral Springs for over two years and despite all her sleuthing hadn’t solved a single whodunit homicide. Of course there hadn’t been a whodunit homicide in Mineral Springs during the two years, but Ruth couldn’t hold her bourbon and wouldn’t be mollified.
She said to Anemic Annie, “I bet I could’ve done something by now with the Watson case. They found the body in our town and Palm Springs P.D. never even asked me to come in on the investigation. And now two dicks from Hollywood show up and they don’t ask me either.”
“I wish Gerry Ferraro had got elected,” Anemic Annie griped. “Then they’d treat us different, the bastards.”
They both knew that they’d better leave that kind of talk outside if they eventually sauntered over to the Eleven Ninety-nine to search for a big hunk.
Ruth the Sleuth was a burly young woman, and thus had some appeal to the midget Oleg Gridley who was sitting morosely at the end of the bar, his chin just above bar level where he cried in his beer over Bitch Cassidy, but despaired of winning her heart.
“Harry Bright was the only human being in this sexist organization,” Ruth the Sleuth griped. “Probably replace poor old Harry with another Prankster Frank or something.”
“I’d like to stick a needle in Prankster Frank’s frigging arm and suck him dry,” Anemic Annie said to her fourth Tom Collins, making Ruth the Sleuth wonder if the vampire rumors had some substance.
“I’d like to stick Portia Cassidy’s little pink rose with anything that’d make her love me!” Oleg Gridley cried boozily from his end of the bar.
“You got awful big ears for a teeny guy,” Ruth said. “Whadda we gotta do for some privacy around here?”
“You think men treat you bad?” Oleg wailed, nearly drunk enough for a crying jag. “That’s cause they’re bigger’n you. Everybody’s bigger’n me. Your left tit’s bigger’n my ass!”
“You oughtta clean up your act, Oleg,” Ruth advised, as boozy as the midget. “You get drunk’n you always start talking like a disgusting scum-sucking little creep. That’s why Portia Cassidy hates your disgusting little guts.”
“I just don’t understand the female sex,” Oleg moaned. “I do everything for women and I can’t get love!”
“So get rid of your collection of revolting sex aids you’re always bragging about,” said Anemic Annie.
“I’d do almost anything,” said Oleg Gridley. “I wouldn’t give up my genuine oak chastity belt with the glory hole drilled in it. That’s an antique!”
“Lemme think about your problem,” Ruth the Sleuth said, tapping on the glass with her pencil. Then she looked behind the bar, made a sleuthlike note or two, and grinned at the midget.
“Elementary, my dear Oleg,” she said. “I can help you score with Portia Cassidy.”
“You can, Ruth?” the midget cried. “Oh, I’d be so happy! I’d do anything for you! I’d even put you in the Wamsutta wonderland of my little trundle bed! I’d show you my blow-up donkey with the life-size …”
“Knock that shit off Oleg!” Ruth barked. “That’s your problem, you rotten little slime bucket!”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. So what can you do for me?”
“Well,” Ruth said, “you got only one thing going for you, far as I can see.”
“What’s that? My auto-parts store? I made fifty grand last year.”
“Okay, you got two things going for you. You’re rich and you’re pretty cute-looking.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, you’re pretty frigging cute,” Anemic Annie also had to admit, and now she was slurring as badly as Ruth the Sleuth.
“Gee, Annie, I only do the deed of darkness with real big girls,” Oleg apologized. “Rut what’s a little fellatio among friends. Can you put your feet behind your ears?”
“Here’s my plan, you maggot-mouth,” Ruth interrupted, looking behind the bar at the eight-string ukulele that Ruben the bartender had propped up by the cash register. “That uke gives me an idea.”
“What’s the idea, Ruth?” Oleg cried. “Stop teasing me!”
“We’re gonna change your act. What kinda clothes you got at home? Annie, you can help. We’re gonna need to borrow a hairpiece from Edna’s Salon before she closes. We’re gonna make Oleg into somebody Portia can’t resist.”
“We are?” the midget squealed in delight.
And though she could never have guessed it, Ruth the Sleuth had taken a significant step toward her consuming ambition of solving a whodunit homicide.
By the time Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer got to the Eleven Ninety-nine Club, the walls were starting to vibrate. It sounded like someone was lobbing mortars from the top of the mesa and they were landing short, thumping steadily.
“Must be payday,” Otto observed. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and J. Edgar won’t have no chili left.”
When they got inside, Wingnut Bates was standing at the bar hoisting his third margarita, complaining about a citizen who was threatening to sue him.
“She said she’s suing me and the city for eighty million dollars!” Wingnut wailed. “I shot her dog in the foot is all. Just as he came to the end of his chain which I didn’t see. All I saw was teeth that don’t let go till you cut the head off!”
“I know that broad,” Nathan Hale Wilson commiserated. “She’s one a those loonies from the Animal Liberation Front. Brought a stray inta the station and says, ‘What’ll you do with this poor little thing, Officer!’ ‘Grind it up and feed it to the other dogs,’ I says. She threatened to sue me, for chrissake!”
“That’s what police work’s come to,” J. Edgar Gomez observed. “Every time a cop cranks on the cuffs too tight some guy shows up in court with a surgical collar, a body cast, and F. Lee Bailey.”
“We don’t get paid enough to put up with lawsuits on top a everything else,” Maynard Rivas groused. “If I was the right brand a Indian I’d walk away from this shit in a minute. If I was an Agua Caliente I’d drive a Ferrari instead of a five-year-old Ford pickup with a transmission whinyer than John McEnroe.”