IMMATERIAL EVIDENCE at Meilori's

Milo James Fowler

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Rapiers gleamed death in the mists of Meilori's.  Basil Rathbone laughed lustily as he bounded upon a table but feet from me. 

 Errol Flynn leapt on the adjoining table, his blade darting for a low-line thrust.

Rathbone  flicked it aside easily.  “Oh, non, mi Capitan!  I am not playing Lavasseur or you Peter Blood tonight!  And I was ever the better swordsman!”

“Says you!” laughed Flynn easily and bounded upon the same table as Rathbone.

As their rasping swords slid down to each other hilts, their gritted teeth in the face of the other, their table jostled mine.

I put down IMMATERIAL EVIDENCE

and glared at them. 

“Guys, I’m trying to read my new mystery here!”

There was an apricot-scented cloud of mist suddenly between the two of them, and then my ghoul friend,

Alice Wentworth pushed them apart. 

“You heard what Victor said!  Go!  Shoo!  Be adolescent boys elsewhere.”

The spinning chandelier struck fire from her very sharp teeth.  They left.  But Flynn managed to kiss Alice’s hand before he did.

Alice blushed, disappeared, and formed in the chair next to me.  “A new mystery?  Is it any good?”

I smiled wide. 
“Oh, I’ve just started, but Milo James Fowler

wrote it, and he always writes great.”

Alice said, “What is it about?”

I said, “A detective with a price on his head. An invisible criminal with nothing to lose....”

“Oh, bother,” sighed Alice, rolling her neon-blue eyes.  “That tells me nothing!  Here let me see!”

She snatched the book and read the back cover aloud in her sexy British accent (at least it sounds sexy to me):

“The vault door never opened. The bank went into lockdown in less than a minute. Yet the security footage was unmistakable: a hundred silver bars had simply vanished.

Ever since the city’s most dangerous crime boss put a price on his head, private investigator Charlie Madison has lived as an exile in Little Tokyo.

But now an old friend and police sergeant has lured Madison back into the city to hunt down an invisible criminal—if he can.

As Madison makes his clandestine return, high-profile people start disappearing. And when federal agents swoop onto the scene to take matters into their own hands, they offer Madison a deal he can't refuse—as long as he agrees to work with them.

With Japanese freedom fighters and refurbished killing machines threatening to take the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, the United World government needs all the help it can get.

Embroiled in an unimaginable mystery, one private eye must rely on his wits to solve a case where the evidence is immaterial, and the odds are stacked high against him at every turn.”

Alice turned to me.  “Sounds like the exact kind of entanglement you always seem to fall into, Victor.”

I winked at her.  “But I have an edge.”

She cocked a blonde eyebrow.  “Oh, really?”

“Sure.  Half of my enemies are distracted by your beauty.”

Her eyes narrowed.  “What do you mean half?”

Jeez.  I got into trouble even when I complimented Alice.