Riverside Drive

"I'd like to see him. Mamma would raise hell if she found it out, but I'd like to see him.
'Well'?
'He's not where we used to live, on Riverside Drive, and he's not in the phone book book or city directory.'" – Dashiell Hammett, from The Thin Man









You turn your detective agency into an at home business when you are quite ready to no longer receive an offers for work. It had taken a life time to figure out that that racket really wasn't for me, and turned my attention to carving out lashes and sewing together birch bark canoes for neighbors at a hundred and fifty a pop. At that fine price, I kept busy, held onto my sanity, and didn't have to rove the underbelly, so to speak, for lost kittens of every kind. Until the phone started to do its buzzing bit in my back pocket. Where else do you put it? Keep it in the house while you're working away and you feel guilty when you walk in a few hours later and see that one of your three daughters have left the only voice mail in the last month and you weren't there. And, let's face it, in case a call came from someone left out there who still actually dialed up the services of a sleuth.
"Emerson it's me." I knew the voice but not the familiarity. As I've said, business had been purposefully thin. My birch slabs were calling my name.
"This isn't Chance?"
"You picked the right name out of the hat," he said, a thin, raspy sort of voice, as always the tinkling of glasses and the setting of silverware sounds in the background. Chance was a maitre d at the finest French restaurant a mile west, near downtown over looking the lake. That's what he'd be looking at right now as he called. Too early in the morning for customers, the lake calm, blue, and prepared for a canoe caravan, just as soon as Emerson had fixed a few more of these up and sold them.
"It's mildly nice to hear your voice," I sputtered, hoping to install a hint at my new side profession.
"I know, I know, you're laying low and figuring out ways of sliding through the next ten years without a minor injury. But you are the best of the best you know."
"That's because I am literally only one left, you know?" Chance had a lot of ears out on the street. One in the restaurant, but he had also held a city government job simultaneously in years past, and so knew all the small time crooked stuff of suits and ties and the woman on the street. I was sure this going to be a tail a cat kind of call. Long nights in car listening to smooth jazz and mindful meditation recordings.
"Lay it on me, then."