The Neo Hipster Detective: The Dame Wore Vintage

The City
3:08 PM

I got duck and pear empanadas from a food truck I follow on twitter and spent the afternoon working on my 8-bit mix of the Golden Girls theme. The empanadas were good, the track was going to be great, but I was ready to go home for the day. I was just putting on my Louis Volero fedora and my London Fog pea coat when my secretary, D@phoneme, texted me that there was a woman in the waiting room. I told her to send Schrödinger's client on in and I'd find out whether she was the woman of my dreams or a poison pellet. She texted back, "WTF!! OK"

The woman was a blonde, Curves like a suburban strip mall with a Panera, skin as white as tapioca with tiny blueberry branches of veins on her arms and legs. She was wearing velour go-go boots, and her full-figure in that vintage wiggle dress from Good Will was locked in a struggle that reminded me of somebody trying to hold a beach ball underwater. I liked the way the dress cut into the fat on her shoulders, like squeezing refried beans through a silk stocking. I'd seen it before. I went through a messy phase, but it had to end when I started using the Lose It app on my phone. Chicken parm pizza is never okay, not even after a woman sat on it for ten minutes.

"My name is Haelaegh Kahmets. I'm looking for a dick," she said, and exhaled a lavender ribbon of clove cigarette smoke, her voice like warm chocolate poured over strawberries.

"This is a no-smoking office." I turned on my vintage metal-blade detective fan and cracked a window. "But I can make an exception for a woman."

She put the cigarette out anyway, because I think I was making her uncomfortable the way I kept looking at her arms, and I admit it was hard to concentrate because I kept moving the ash tray around so she didn't get ash on my $1800 Escovedo chairs. They're the exact same ones they use for the lobby at my favorite boutique hotel.

"My Macbook," she said, caressing my eyes with her burgundy-berry and red-shimmer lipstick, "is gone. It was in my boyfriend's messenger bag this morning, and now it's gone. And he's dead. But that's not important."

"I don't do computers. I'm just a regular Joe. I'll give you the number of the Apple store and a genius can help you."

"But," she let the word hang in the air like a piñata, "my private tumblr is still logged in and it's full of my naughty pictures."

I took the case. So I know a guy by the name of Topher, hangs out in all the worst sort of clubs above 14th Street. He figured out some way to ping something or do something to find an iPad once for a client. If it meant seeing this beauty in her small clothes I was willing to find her computer.