Short Phillip Marlowe Sketch

The Assistant Murderer

Tough hard guys, and once in a while a wayward gal, have been trying to commit the perfect murder since they invented murder with Cain slaying Abel, and maybe before. And some guys, some hard guys, have actually gotten away with it for one reason or another mainly by disposing of the body in some way so the damn thing is never found and the cops tire of the case and throw it in the cold files to lie there forever. But the average citizen, and I should know since it is my business, the private snoop business, to know trying to commit the perfect crime leaves too many moving parts and so winds up facing the hangman, facing those high-hung gallows and judgment day. The only way it happens, and don’t take this as the norm, okay is if the thing is set up that way. Here’s what I mean. The organization I work for, the International Operations Organization got a call from a loner private eye, Philip Marlowe, down in Los Angeles saying he needed some help on a political case, political in that some reform politician he had known in the old days was murdered and it looked like a professional hit ordered by the in power city machine.  I was sent down from my station in Frisco since I had worked with him previously on a missing load of rare jade case that had turned south on him. As it turned out this reformer was nothing but a skirt-chaser and he ever-loving wife, tired of his sordid affairs put a couple of slugs in him to even things up. Nothing unusual in that, happen all the time. What was unusual and put it in the perfect crime category is that before this guy died he set the crime scene up to point away from wifey. And she walked, walked when Philip and I let her walk away without a murmur.           

 

But that is not the normal case, take the case of the Lampreys, Jim and Adele, and John Snyder.  Seems that this Snyder saved the Lampreys’ lives down in Mexico around the time of the revolution, you know Pancho Villa, Zapata and those guys. They were being held for ransom by some desperados and he coolly put together an attack that sprung them. That was their story anyway. So they were forever indebted to him and in return helped him on some shady capers back in the old U.S.A. One thing led to another and there was a falling out of what was supposed to have done what and who was supposed to get the bigger cut of the dough that went sour. So John Snyder wound up dead, very dead, in some forsaken ravine down around Del Mar near the cliffs. The insurance company that had insured Snyder called us in when they were getting ready to pay out on a big number policy to one Adele Snyder. It didn’t take much to turn that one over since Adele had actually been married to Snyder down in Mexico, had abandoned him for Lamprey and headed north. That was how Snyder got them to do his work in the states not some desperado tale down in Sonora. He was going to squawk to the coppers about bigamy after that failed caper and the pair beat him to it one rainy night. The insurance money lured them out and once I got my mitts on them they break like a cheap piece of china. So learn something will you let the murder racket to the professionals and stay away from such doings.