The naked city.
It was a night not unlike other nights. I shut down my office on the dark end of Butler Street, lit a butt, and aimed to head out to my crappy studio apartment on Penn Avenue when the bell on the door rang out. In walked trouble with a capital T. And this trouble was spelled D-A-M-E. You know—a deb, a skirt, a dowager… any way you spelled it, it came up as the kind of complication I didn’t need. This could be dangerous. But danger was part of the job for… Sam Sleuth, private eye.
Her name was FiFi LaRue. I poured her a cup of java and told her to spill it. Not the coffee, her story, her tale, her problem, her reason for bustin’ into my life. She said she was in love with a city, but that something wasn’t right.
On one hand, a local neighborhood–the Hill District–had been promised a grocery store but was being left high and dry. Sure, fancy shmancy Whole Foods can jump at the chance to move to the swanky North Hills, but try and put a lousy Kuhn’s on the Hill and that bird won’t fly. It seems the plans were dropped because the owner had health problems. Something didn’t add up. Something smelled fishy as Wholey’s after a morning delivery of fresh cod. To me, it was a con job, pure and simple. The ol’ shell game. Get them to accept an arena with promises of economic development and grocery stores, and then, zip-zip-zip, I’m sorry, there’s nothing under that shell. Wanna play again? The Hill hadn’t had a grocery store in 30 years. They were footin’ most of the bill for this one. Now they’d have to forgo the jobs that would have come with it and take the bus just to put some grub on the table. Things like this made my gumshoe blood boil.
FiFi paused, her upper lip quivering like the last dying leaf on a blustery fall afternoon. “But Sam,” she pleaded, “that’s not all.” It never is, I thought.
Then she spun a yarn about a state prosecutor—a guy named Corbett with a big profile and big eyes for the statehouse—who was launching a grand jury against the local casino. They wanna know if there was any funny business in giving a license to Don “Broke as a City Pension Fund” Barden–a guy who, it turns out, didn’t have enough money to build a lemonade stand. This Corbett fella wanted to know if casino licenses were steered toward certain applicants who, you know, were able to show their “appreciation.” A casino. Great, I thought, surely those boy scouts wouldn’t do anything shady, would they? This prosecutor had a history of sniffin’ out funny business on both sides of the aisle in Harrisburg, and I was pretty sure that, given time, he’d find some dirty dealings on the North Shore.
FiFi pulled out a flask and poured half of it into the java. She offered me the same. Well, won’t hurt to be polite, I thought. I could tell this dame was going to be nothing but heartache. 
Finally, the jackpot—no pun intended. FiFi bared her soul and confessed to where the body was. Well, not body, actually, but bodies. Hundreds of ‘em… in North Buffalo where PennDOT had been removing some 200 deer carcasses from the yard of—I swear, I ain’t pullin’ your leg—Randy Good. Mr. Good had been contracted by the county and claims he “found” all the dead deer on area roadways. Likely story. Apparently, Good had been having some difficulty getting to the local landfill, so McGenius decided to pile the croaked critters on his property. What could possibly go wrong? Right? Wrong. I guess the stench was worse than the Steelers’ kickoff coverage. Neighbors up to half a mile away were burning candles just to cover the rot in the air. My heart sank as the weight of FiFi’s words hit home. There’s a psycho on the loose killing these animals before hunting season. This psycho drives cars, lots of ‘em. Trucks, too. All with crumpled front ends. And always the same M.O.—bumps off Bambi and vamooses. All that’s left is the chalk outline of Rudolph on the pavement. What a sicko, I thought.
And just like that, FiFi was gone. Sauntering into the foggy night air. “See ya, Sam,” she said, coyly. “I gotta go see the mayor.” With these dames, there’s always another schlub. “You remember how to be mayor, don’t you Sam? You just put your lips together… and blow.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I knew that I loved that blasted city as much as she did, and I also knew that we hadn’t heard the end of troubled times on the dark end of Butler Street. So if you see a palooka under a street light smoking a heater and stickin’ his nose where it don’t belong, you can rest easy–it’s just little ol’ me. And you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m on the case and that I’ll get to the bottom of this if my name ain’t… Sam Sleuth, private eye. (Cue Harlem Nocturne.)
(To be continued…)
