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Finest on patrol.

Sunday, 4 July 2004 3:33 AM
Justice is Serviced
    We docked our new fishing boat at Mollusktown for the evening.
The crew was real excited to hit the sporting house. Nelson being
its proprietor, I was worried it’d be a condemned building, or
for some reason we’d end up fighting for our lives, or both. And
those were the good scenarios.

Mollusktown’s main street gave me no reason to feel
any less pessimistic—it was lined with small one- and two-story
buildings (nothing Robinson Crusoe couldn’t’ve built) that
stunk of fish in a way that brought to mind that month-long
custodians’ strike back at the cat food cannery.
Then we rounded a corner and came to a three-story
building that could’ve passed for a gentlemen’s club a century
or two ago on a good block in London. It had a glowing marble
facade decked out with all kinds of lions heads and crests and
other flourishes like that, plus elaborate curlicue balconies, and
it was topped off by one of those greened-sort-of-bronze roofs.
The lobby was done up in dark wood, sailboat paintings in
gilded frames, and fancy—but not too fancy—antique furniture.
A classy-looking pianist in a tux was playing Beethoven or one
of those guys. Clearly all the money in town was coming here.
Incredibly, this was Nelson’s sporting house. It’s called St.
Mary’s, after its original Madame who’d been beatified in a deal
whereby the local Christian missionaries were able to pay down
their doxy (local term for a sporting house employee) tab there.
St. Mary’s was featured, Nelson boasted, in one of those
glossy interior design magazine’s recent bordellos issue. I never
thought I’d say the nicest place I ever been is a brothel on a one-
horse isle, but there you have it.

A flock of doxies came to welcome us and let us choose
among them. The memory of my late wife still exercising my tear
ducts most nights, my companion of preference was a deep glass
of rum. I sunk into a soft leather wing chair in a dark corner of
the lobby, happy to while away the time by listening to the music,
even though it was interrupted every so often by sounds from
upstairs of debauchery and, strangely, a flamingo.
A half-hour or so of whiling later, a doxy walked a satisfied
customer down the stairs and to the back door. They passed
without noticing me. She was a tall blonde with a low-cut silk
gown. He was a serious-looking old buzzard with a permanently
furrowed gray shelf of a brow and a massive white beard that
looked like a waterfall. He looked familiar. Like one of those
Puritan guys from the history books, I reckoned. He was carrying
a long suitcase in which he concealed his flamingo. The doxy
thanked both the old man and the flamingo, whose name was
Rudy, and saw them out. Then I realized where I’d seen the
guy before. He’s pictured on the local money. He’s Solomon
J. Archipelago, the famously ethical and uncorruptible Chief
Justice of all these Windward Islands, the governing body of
which has got power over Guava.

Nelson, never one to let an opportunity for blackmail
pass, has every room in St. Mary’s rigged up with video cameras,
even the crappers. In other words, the libel case against me has
suddenly taken a turn for the better.

P.S. Here’s Flarq’s scrimshaw of his doxy (who he says just gave
him a massage). Of note, either Flarq’s suddenly gotten awful at
likenesses or this woman’s scrimshaw-o-genicness was enhanced
by the nineteen rums he’d had.

Monday, 5 July 2004 4:23 PM
Gus Openshaw, Blackmailer
    Could the Honorable Solomon Archipelago be blackmailed?
Well, the old buzzard still had aspirations for higher office. Both
his father and grandfather had been governor. The thing is, in
these waters, word that he dropped anchor at a high-end brothel
would win him votes. That he brought a flamingo along’d just
add color. But there was one reason he didn’t want it getting
out—his wife,