Scrambled Hard-Boiled

Things were perking up for Twillfigger Investigations and yours truly. Ernie made me a full partner. My bank account was healthy, I’d moved into a nice apartment, and you wouldn’t believe how much easier it was to get laid when you had a little cash to throw around. Business started booming. Indeed, things got so hectic at the office that we finally came to the conclusion that we needed to hire a secretary.

  Ernie at first insisted that any secretary we hired had to be willing to service him on a “personal” basis. Nothing fancy, mind you, just your basic manual and/or oral relief and any subsequent clean up if needed. I balked at this.

  I gently reminded him that it was a bad idea to mix business with pleasure, and in any event, if we did somehow manage to find a secretary that would include doing Ernie as one of her routine chores, it was a damn good bet she’d have something seriously wrong with her mentally. I told Ernie psycho women were hard enough to deal with in normal circumstances, much less when you got your pants down around your ankles. Ernie, after some argument, reluctantly saw the wisdom in this and dropped this requirement.

  We eventually hired Mrs. Maisy Ann Rutherford, a thirty-six-year-old black woman who had recently lost her job when the concrete company she worked for went bankrupt. She was no beauty—short and chubby—but she knew how to run an office, type a hundred words a minute and answered the phone with a pleasing soft southern drawl. She was a widow and her only child, a daughter, was already twenty and married to a Marine stationed in San Diego.

  She did have a tendency to wear low-cut blouses that emphasized her enormous breasts which in turn led to Ernie constantly looking down her shirt. There was no way she didn’t know that Ernie was ogling her, but she kept on wearing those types of tops. I guess she considered it job security, because she quit wearing them immediately after Ernie retired. She’s still my personal secretary to this day, and I can honestly say that I’ll miss her when she decides to call it quits.

  As for hiring another guy to assist in all this extra business we were getting, at that time I didn’t want to take on another detective. I knew I’d made it good in a relatively short period of time, and I didn’t want or need an ambitious young gun coming in and upsetting my apple cart.

  This didn’t mean we didn’t need help, but we got around manpower shortages by contracting out our more routine business to what Ernie called “seasoned and mature professionals.” I called ‘em alcoholic old has-beens, but they got the job done for a price a lot lower than what we were charging the customer. This freed me up to concentrate on the high-paying clients.