Chapter Nine: A Fat and Jolly Fellow

From the case files of Brad Bolton, private eye.

One look at the fellow in the doorway made you think someone had taken the raw material for three men, boiled it down to lard, and poured it into one huge bag of skin. As he stepped into the outer room, he was already wiping his forehead with a well-starched handkerchief. I guess the exertion of opening a stuck door had just been too much for him. Or maybe it was the twenty-five foot walk from the elevator to my office that had worn him down before he ever started rattling the knob?

His gaze drifted across the room to me. "Mister Bolton, I presume?"

I nodded. His voice was so smooth and good-humored that he could have made his living on one of the big radio shows.

For all I knew, maybe he did—it would explain his air of prosperity. He was far and away the best-dressed fatty I ever saw. You'd reckon a guy with that much avoirdupois, when wearing a three-piece suit as white as a penguin's belly, would have a row of vest buttons straining so hard that they'd look liable to burst off at any moment. But this gent's vest must've been made to order by a very talented haberdasher; those buttons were snug but not taut, looking perfectly happy with their present jobs, as if they wouldn't dream of quitting on short notice. (Me, I just buy off the rack and hope for the best.)

While I was sizing him up, the fatty had been observing me too. After a few moments he said, "I have heard, sir, that you are a veritable bloodhound in this city that you know so well. I am here to commission your services, hoping that together we may soon complete an odyssey which has carried me across three continents. Shall we step into your private office so I may elucidate upon the details of my requirements?"

"Uh . . . " I was thinking hard. There were a couple of chairs in the inner office besides mine, but this fellow was a lot broader in the beam than anything I'd foreseen when I was furnishing the place. I'm a plain-spoken man by preference, but saying You're so fat you'd be spilling over the edges of the plain wooden chair, or else would find the one with arms to be a painfully tight squeeze, didn't feel like the right way to go.

The fatty's eyebrows went up as he noticed I wasn't answering his suggestion one way or the other.

Then Raven bailed me out. "I believe what Mr. Bolton wishes to say is that a gentleman of your ample proportions might be more comfortable with the extra . . . elbow room . . . provided by that couch just to your right. He simply doesn't have one in the inner office."

(Okay, that sounded a lot better than anything I'd been coming up with.)

"Delicately put, my dear young lady," the fatty said, his wide pink face beaming at her, and then he bestowed that same jolly look upon me as the fancy sentences continued rolling off his tongue. "And you are to be congratulated, sir, for your good fortune in finding a secretary who is possessed of a fine discernment in how to offer tactful suggestions when addressing a stranger who might be, shall we say, a trifle oversensitive about other persons' perceptions of his own girth."

Secretary? I took another look at Raven. Sitting in the secretary's usual spot, she had the desk camouflaging the lower half of her body (unless you were standing near the wall, just to one side of her, as I was). I realized a man standing where the fatty was would never know that the black thing on her arms and torso was a legless leotard—instead of a snug sweater, or maybe the top half of a long-sleeved dress?

"Not that I fall into that category," the prospective client was adding virtuously as I was still regarding Raven. "No, sir! I know precisely what my own proportions are and I make no attempt to shave any of those figures; not by so little as half an inch below the simple truth. For if a man dare not face his own measurements, how shall he ever trust himself to take the measure of other men?"

I wondered if he meant he was a tailor. Always measuring guys for their new suits? That could explain how his own clothes fit him so well.

"So what brings you here, Mister . . . " I let it trail off, and he didn't miss the hint.

"Gilder, sir. Horace K. Gilder, Esquire." He extended one broad paw to me, and I shook it. His hand was moist, but his grip was firmer than I'd reckoned. Not that he tried to turn it into a contest. After a moment his fingers loosened, I pulled my hand back, and the fatty moved toward the couch and carefully lowered his bulk onto it.

"Most comfortable," he said politely. "But before we delve into the matter which weighs upon my mind, may I inquire into just how long this charming young lady has served as your secretary, and thus just how much confidence you have in her discretion?"

I could have told him Raven wasn't my secretary. I could have said I'd just met her today and didn't know how much of a blabbermouth she was. But for some reason I didn't. Instead I just shrugged and said, "If what you've got is too hot for the lady to hear, then maybe I don't need to hear it either. My secretary would type up my final report for you, anyhow—assuming we end up doing business."

(It was a true statement; I simply forgot to mention one tiny detail: Raven wasn't likely to be the secretary who would take down my dictation and turn it into a typescript when the time came.)

He nodded agreeably, all his chins quivering in the process. "A salient point, sir, and I readily acknowledge it. But I feel very little concern over what secrets might leak out after you have already earned your fee in full, for I do not propose to linger in this metropolis once I have the item which brought me here."

I didn't like his reference to "after" I had earned a fee by getting whatever it was he wanted. I decided to crack down on that point right away. "Mr. Gilder, I'm not a lawyer who works on a 'contingency' basis where he only gets paid if his side wins. I charge by the day and I don't guarantee the happiest results. For instance, if you had me follow a guy around to see if he secretly visited someone else you were looking for, and if I tailed the guy for a week and never found what you wanted, you'd still owe me for my trouble."

"Indubitably, sir, indubitably! The laborer is worthy of his hire. Perhaps I misspoke in my casual use of the term 'fee.' Perhaps it would have been more felicitous to speak of a generous bonus to be disbursed under certain circumstances, above and beyond your well-earned per diem which shall be paid in any event!"

"All right, then. Why don't you tell me just what you're thinking of paying me to do—if you're ready to take a chance on trusting both of us to keep our lips zipped about your affairs, I mean."

"Lips . . . zipped?" He blinked at me and then chuckled politely. "A colorful idiom, sir, which brings to mind strange images. How would one go about installing the zippers? But I believe I shall outline the nature of the problem, and trust both you and the lady to hold these details strictly in confidence."

Gilder linked his fingers together and rested his hands across his broad belly, about where the navel ought to be. "I understand, Mister Bolton, that you recently accepted a commission to search for a certain jade figurine. A Burmese carving of a fairy bluebird, in fact; said to have been greatly prized by Emperor Ch'ien-lung himself. A birthday gift from his—"

I had a nasty feeling that he could go on like that for a long, long time, so I cut him off with a raised hand. "I don't care about the ancient history. And if you want to offer me some dough to help you find it, you're a day late and a dollar short. I already took a retainer from someone else who thinks it's in this city."

"Ah, yes, and how is lovely little Harriet doing?"

When I play poker, I win more than I lose. But in this case it didn't matter if I could keep my face straight or not; I didn't know any Harriet. I only had to give him an honest-to-goodness confused look as I asked: "Who?"

Gilder chuckled an indulgent chuckle. "Perhaps the young lady failed to share her proper name with you, sir! Embellishing her stories with the occasional falsehood is one of her more endearing foibles. Pray permit me to describe her for you. Five foot two, long light brown hair, trim build, porcelain complexion, snub nose, favors green in her wardrobe, speaks with a bit of a Boston accent, often sounds more than a little bewildered by the complexities of this wicked world . . . have you seen her?" he inquired, suddenly turning his gaze on Raven.

"No." It was the same relentlessly serious tone she used for almost anything she said. I recognized the description all right, but thought I'd kept my face blank as Gilder rattled it off.

The fatty eyed her speculatively. "That is remarkable; I should think that a young lady wishing to retain a detective's services would enter this office as a necessary preliminary. And if she did arrive here during business hours, surely the sleuth's personal secretary would become familiar with her?"

That wasn't a question, and Raven didn't bother to answer it. I was pretty sure that even if she knew who he was talking about, she wouldn't have gotten all flustered or tried to invent elaborate explanations to cover up a nice simple lie.

At any rate, I said pleasantly: "If you expect me to confirm or deny anything about what my current client looks like, you're barking up the wrong tree, Mr. Gilder. I offer reasonable confidentiality to the people who need me."

"But you already conceded that you were retained to seek out the Bluebird."

"Sure. Why not? I spent all morning talking to pawnbrokers in Chinatown about jade birds. Any one of them—or anybody else who overheard one of those chats—could've told you what I was looking for, and I guess someone did. From there it's an easy bet that I'm working for someone else, so why waste time denying that much? But that doesn't mean I will tell you the client's name, or gender, or anything else you don't already know."

"Eminently practical, sir! I like a man who knows when to yield on minor points yet stand firm on major ones; it suggests he is a man one can do business with. Let me put my cards on the table, sir. I want the Bluebird, and I will pay sixty thousand dollars in cold cash to the man or woman who delivers it to me intact. Has your client made an offer to match that?"

"Doesn't matter," I said flatly. "My client has already retained me. I don't drop a client in the middle of a case without a good justification, such as he or she gets arrested for murder. And I don't take money from two people at once to do the same job—not unless they were working as partners when hiring me in the first place."

"Ah! But is what I want really the same thing as what your other client wanted of you, sir? Did you agree to move heaven and earth to deliver the bird into her dainty little hands, or did you merely agree to do all you could to locate it and then report its whereabouts to her? If the latter description more closely fits the terms of the obligation you undertook, then you could find the bird, sell it to me, inform her that I now had possession of it, and thereby have fulfilled your contract with her to the letter, sir. To the very letter!"

A horrible suspicion was gnawing at my gut—earlier I'd said I wasn't a lawyer, but this fatty just might be one himself! Who else would come up with such a hair-splitting argument for how I could have my cake and eat it too by finding the Bluebird and charging two clients at once for what I might call slightly different services rendered to each? Not that I had any intention of pulling such a shyster trick—but it told me ugly things about Gilder that he could make the suggestion in the first place.

Raven's face showed she was just about as thrilled with this would-be client as I was, but she wasn't saying anything to interrupt our chat. After all, it was my agency and she was just visiting. So it was up to me to find the right words to get him out the door. I told myself that being polite might get rid of him faster than being loud and angry, and opened my mouth to explain my—

The phone rang on the secretary's desk. Raven picked it up and said, as smoothly as if she'd been doing it for years, "Brad Bolton Detective Agency."

After a little chit-chat back and forth with whoever was on the line, she covered the mouthpiece with one hand and told me: "The police want you to come down to the morgue to identify a body."

Author's Note: Coming up in the next chapter, we get a look at what's happening back in the "real world" now that two of the Titans are missing and their friends back at the Tower don't know what the problem is.

A word of reassurance: Although this chapter's fat man resulted from my sudden, strange desire to try to write a pastiche of the fat man who was a major figure in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, I don't plan to stretch out this particular subplot about the "stuck in a hard-boiled private eye movie" for anywhere near as long as Hammett's novel lasted. Just long enough for Beast Boy to do and say a few things which Raven will find herself wishing he'd do and say when he was in his right mind, shall we say. After all, sooner or later I've got to steer this plot closer to a chapter I already wrote months ago, in which Raven visits Nevermore and has a frank talk with some of her emotions about romantic issues.