The Skeletor Mysteries
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Chapter 1
It was three in the afternoon on one of those October days when the sun isn’t shining and the threat of rain hangs heavy over the city. Blue streamers from the end of my fortieth cigarette curled in the soft, slanting light as I waited for my client to show.
The rattle and chime of Lyn’s typing came softly from the outer office and somewhere on the street below a truck horn barked reprovingly as the world wheeled past. The world I’d once sought to conquer and dominate and now merely hoped to move through with as few bruises as possible.
At length, the typing outside stopped and I could overhear a murmur of feminine voices. No words – my ears being only ragged holes in the sides of my bare skull meant I’d never be an accomplished eavesdropper – but I knew the appointment had arrived. Maybe a big job. Maybe enough to pull this small-time Evil Detective Agency up into the big-leagues.
Or maybe just another husband stepping out on his dame. Nickles and dimes and the indignity of sifting through the sordid minutia of fools.
‘Yes,’ I answered the quiet rap on the door, and Lyn put her dark, slender face through.
‘Your three o’clock is here,’ she said, mainly for the look of the thing, as if I didn’t know.
As if this weren’t the only appointment we’d had for the whole day.
‘You’ll want to see her, she’s a knockout,’ Lyn added, dropping a conspiratorial eyelid.
‘Send her in, you bumbling fool!’ I barked, waving a fist in her direction. Again, mainly for the look of the thing.
Lyn disappeared and the door opened a moment later to admit a woman. She was thirty or so; tall and delicately put together, but with a firmness that told me this one was a survivor. She wore pale turquoise slacks and walked in them as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine gold wave that hung below her shoulders and curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were iron grey, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over and smiled with her mouth and that was as far as it went; little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh copy paper and as shiny as porcelain. Her face was pale as though at the end of a long illness.
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‘You’re taller than I expected,’ she said, without preamble. ‘Not much meat on your head either.’
‘And you’re uglier! But my mother always told me it’s what’s inside that counts,’ I shot back. ‘Didn’t yours?’
‘I suppose a man with a skull for a face would have to believe that.’
I decided to let that pass and smiled at her pleasantly. Or I smiled at her in some manner at least – no lips or cheeks to get in the way favouring the world with an eternal grin even when I felt lousy. I felt lousy right at that moment – too much whiskey the previous evening and too many cigarettes to chase it away today. I watched the dame leaning against the edge of my desk. She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She watched me looking her over and didn’t seem to mind it.
‘You didn’t give your name when you made the appointment, Miss…?’
‘Adora,’ she said. ‘And it’s not Miss. It’s Princess.’
‘I should say it is,’ I muttered. ‘That would be sister to the cursed Prince Adam, then? The Greyskulls?’
‘A common misconception – Greyskull isn’t our family’s surname.’
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‘It matters not! I shall destroy your whole meddling bloodline! But for now, I’m sure a royal lady didn’t come all the way downtown just to crack wise about my face. Cigarette?’
She took one from my case when I offered and our fingers briefly touched before she pulled back, almost with reluctance unless it was my wishful thinking. I lit the smoke for her and thin wisps of it seeped from her symmetrical nostrils.
‘I’m not sure yet if you’re the man for the job I have in mind,’ Adora murmured.
‘I’m the best Evil detective in the city and you’d better not forget it, missy! If anyone says otherwise I will obliterate them!’ I cackled then for almost a full minute, fists held out to the sides and skull thrown back as hard-edged gusts of laughter rattled the light-fixtures. I’d tried unsuccessfully to curb this habit and hoped she wouldn’t be put off by the display. If she was, she didn’t show it – continuing to smoke with a slight curl to her lips.
‘Now suppose,’ I said when I’d gotten myself under control, ‘you tell me your problem from the beginning and then I’ll tell you if I’m the man for the job.’
She smoked for a moment looking down at me and I didn’t rush to fill the silence. Let her draw her own conclusion – a dingy little office, a rundown man in a threadbare suit with a .38 and a grinning skull where a face should be. Every inch the private detective – grim flotsam washed up on life’s shore and ready and willing to pick through the pieces of other people’s secret disasters.
Princess Adora appeared to make her decision.
‘Mr. Skeletor,’ she said, ‘I need you to discover who is blackmailing me.’
*
