I

     It was a typical ransom note — cut and paste magazine letters, no fingerprints. Wayne found it in his dressing room, taped to his monogrammed ivory mustache comb. “I have your pencil-thin,” it said. “Wait for instructions. No cops.”
     “Mr. Newton,” I said, “have any dicey characters been hanging around back stage? Any groupies or bookies or Elvis impersonators?”
     “There was a woman,” Wayne said, “dressed in a black teddy. She looked like . . .”
     “Don Rickles?”
     “No. She looked like Bettie Page. Even better than Bettie.”
     “Better than Bettie in a teddy? I’ll take the case,” I said.
     Wayne was overcome with joy. “Danke schoen,” he said, “Darling, danke schoen.”
     “Five bucks a day,” I said. “Plus expenses. Oh, and don’t call me darling.”
     “Anything you want,” Wayne said. “Money, showgirls, tickets to the 10:30 show. Just bring my stache back in one . . . um, err . . . two pieces. Jesus, buddy, bring it back alive!”

II

     There was no one in the Spanky Time Diner but me, Wayne Newton, and Senator Estes Kefauver. I was wearing a Stratocaster-green suit, Panama hat, and four-inch french heels. I was everything a private dick should be. Wayne had been tipping Goldschlager all morning. He was wearing women’s undies and he didn’t care who knew it.
     “Bettie Page disappeared forty years ago,” Wayne said. “And what would she want with my mustache, anyway?”
     “Fetish object,” I suggested. “Isn’t it erotic, don’t you think? It’s like rain on your wedding day.”
     “Dames,” Wayne said. “They’ll steal the mustache off your face.”
     The waitress shuffled over and tapped her pad with a Uniball pen. The Senator farted and his chair moved. “I’ll have the carrion platter,” he said.
     “Spam and Cheez-Wiz on Wonder,” I said. “Instant coffee, dry. Goldschlager for my friend.” The waitress shuffled back toward the kitchen.
     Wayne kept feeling his upper lip. This was rough on him.
     “Listen, Wayne-O,” I said. “I know a grifter who fences hot mustaches out of the Varietease Hotel. Name is Vic ‘the razor’. Him and me will have a little chat, see. If he don’t sing like a canary, I’ll pop him right in his prize-winning tea-rose begonia, if you know what I mean.”
     “Huh?”
     “You’ll have your stache back before you can say Grand Ole Opry, Wayne-O.”
     “Waiting is the hardest work,” Wayne said, and then he tossed another Goldschlager. “Hurry back, pop, I don’t know how I’ll get through the time.”

III

     The desk clerk at the Varietease Hotel was a knockout. She was the kind of woman who could make a guy write long discursive passages which don’t move the story an inch. From the dimly lit foyer, I watched her tug at the hem of her skin-tight latex nurse’s uniform. I watched her legs cross and uncross and cross again. Her skyscraper heels were two black sheep jumping over a white picket fence — whatever that means.
     I loosened my tie. “Keep rubbing those sticks together, doll, and you’re gonna start a fire.” That’s how G-men talk in Toughtown.
     She glanced up from under her short black bangs. Her eyes darted like nervous actors behind a rising curtain. “2B,” she said.
     “I’m looking for Vic ‘the razor’,” I said.
     “2B,” she said again. “Room 2B, gumshoe, but he’s kinda tied up right now.”
     “Two-bee-two-bee-two,” I crooned in my smoothest Dean Martin voice, and for no particular reason.
     “2B or not 2B,” she countered, “Isn’t that the question?” My mind raced back to my community theater days, but I couldn’t quite place the reference. I flipped my wrist over and checked the time. “Listen,” I said, “it’s already paragraph seven and I still haven’t found Vic ‘the Razor’. Do you think we could move this thing along?”
     She curled her lip and then passed me the pass key. I ran a post pattern behind the bellboy and she hit me in the sternum with a nice clean spiral. I fell into the elevator and the doors snapped shut.

IV

     Vic “the Razor” was a diamond fence, but when hot ice landed him in hot water he started fencing mustaches. Plans change. Vic made some poor career choices and wound up tied to a bed in the Varietease Hotel. “Kinda tied up,” the dame at the desk had said. She said it knowingly, just before she took my breath away with a room key bullet pass.
     “Room service, Razor.” I stepped through the doorway of room 2B and stubbed my toe on a large metal monkey — a Maltese monkey. I had stumbled on a clue, that was painfully obvious.
     I moved to the bedside, pulled a balled-up baby bootie from Vic’s mouth, and started giving him the third degree. “You’re gonna sing for me, see? You’re gonna spill the beans, cough up the lowdown, coo like a stool pigeon. You’re gonna snitch, pitch, and tip your mit. Where’d you stash it, punk?”
     “Stash what?” Vic asked.
     “The stache. Where’d you stash the stache?”
     “I don’t know where the stache is stashed. I didn’t stash no stache, copper.”
     I grabbed the extra wide lapels of his fuzzy-bunny PJs. I shook him like a martini. “Don’t get wise with me, smart guy. Umm, I mean, don’t get smart with me, wiseguy. Tell me what you told the girl, or I’ll hurt you worse than she did.”
     “She didn’t use that kind of persuasion,” Vic said, “She just sat there, crossing and uncrossing and crossing those gams. Before I knew it, I was humming like a tuning fork. Jeez, mac, the Pope doesn’t cross himself so much.”
     I tried to hide my disappointment. “She didn’t hurt you?”
     “Nah, nah,” he said. “She sang a few numbers from Wayne Newton’s ‘Showstoppers’ album, but that was the worst of it. When you pulled in, she pulled out in a hurry. Left her stethoscope and her rubber gloves and her little monkey friend, too.”
     I opened my mouth but didn’t say a word. Something unusual was happening at the synaptic level. No doubt about it, I was having an idea. Why, I thought, would the Bettie Page impersonator be looking for a mustache she had already stolen?
     “The dame didn’t do it,” I said out loud. “Gotta fly, Vic. Gotta run. Gotta go. I’m outta town. I’m in the wind. I’m off like a prom dress. Oh, god, somebody stop me.” On my way out, I scooped up the big metal monkey. Something told me I’d need it in Part 5.

V

     There are three or four questions that are older than time, older than dirt, older than twelve-year-old Scotch. Stay in my business long enough and sooner or later you’ll ask yourself, “Why does stout beer look foamy but taste flat? Does latex breathe? Can you trust anyone with a pencil-thin mustache?”
     There was monkey business at the heart of this caper — big, metal, Maltese monkey business — and it was driving me bananas. I rubbed the key-bruise on my sternum, and for the first time I began to cast the critical eye of suspicion on the motives of my employer. I could have brought my concerns directly to Wayne-O, got his side, but I was tired of talking. Clearly, it was time for exposition.
     On the evening of the alleged stache-napping, Wayne Newton and Buddy Hackett bought two bottles of Jaegermeister and went on a bender in Branson, Missouri. They raised a ruckus in the Box Car Willie Theater, home of America’s favorite hobo. They ran through the aisles like bulls through the streets of Pamplona, shouting “Tatonka, tatonka.” Sources on the inside swear that at closing time Wayne’s pencil-thin was still clearly penciled in. Just before dawn, Wayne was seen in an alley, making woo to a dumpster. “Oh, baby,” he said, “she was nothin’ to me. Just gimme one more chance.” Buddy tried to hustle him back to the limo, but Wayne couldn’t keep up. “Wait up, daddy,” he said. “Daddy, don’t you walk so fast.”
     It’s the oldest story in the book. Celebrity goes on a tear, loses his wallet or his undies or his mustache or his pride. The wheels start turning in that crazy, desperate head of his. He invents a cover story to put off the press. He cuts letters out of a Box Car Willie playbill and makes a Branson ransom note. I’ve seen it a million times before . . . a dozen times, anyway. I may have seen it once before, I’m not sure.
     But this case still had loose ends. Why wasn’t the big metal monkey used in Part Five? Was it just a red herring, or would it reappear in Part Six? Was the Bettie Page impersonator really seen near Wayne Newton’s dressing room, and if so, why? Only she could answer that one, but I didn’t know who she was, or where she was, or if she was wearing a figure-hugging latex catsuit with neck lacing and matching gloves. I only knew that she could read a bellboy zone better than Joe Montana, and that’s what I like in a dame.

VI

     Detective fiction is a good gig for a palooka like me. Sure, it’s a slow going sometimes — some cases crack slower than a Mona Lisa smile — but I’m a patient man. When a deadline closes in, when I run out of time to run down leads, I just kick back, have a doughnut, and hope a dame with gorgeous gams decides to do a little leg work for me.
     First thing Monday morning, the Bettie Page Impersonator walked into my office and bumped the door shut with her hip. She wore a pinstriped micro-miniskirt, sheer black stockings and garters. A hint of black lace appeared between the lapels of her double-breasted blazer.
     I gave her the up and down. Suddenly, my glazed doughnut didn’t seem so important.
     “You can’t have my monkey,” the dame said.
     “Hmm . . . sounds familiar,” I said. “Blues number, right? Koko Taylor . . . no, Valerie Wellington! Say, didn’t Wayne just add that tune to his Stardust show?”
     “I’m not here to play ‘Name that Tune,’ gum-chew.”
     “It’s gumshoe,” I said. “Gumshoe!”
     “Gum-chew, gumshoe, whatever. The monkey is mine. Not yours. Not Newton’s. Hand over the monkey, fella, or I’ll be forced to hypnotize you with my gorgeous gams.”
     “Newton?! What does Newton have to do with this monkey business?”
     “Just gimme that monkey, you big ape!”
     “Not so fast, doll. I’ve seen this movie. That little monkey is a solid block of stolen gold under a thin veneer of primate faux fur.” I scratched at my temple. “It is, isn’t it?”
     “No, no, it’s only toy bank,” she said. “I bought it on eBay.” She sat down on the corner of my desk and her tiny black mini crept over a pasty-white thigh. I could feel my eyes rolling around in my head like two magic eightballs — yes, no, maybe.
     “See,” she said, “you put the coin in here, and the monkey rolls his eyes — kinda like you — and then he slaps himself on the forehead and eats a coin.”
     “That bank ain’t big enough to hold all of Newton’s money.” I said. “Why would Wayne monkey around with a monkey like that?”
     “Stage prop,” she said. “Wayne needs someone to connect with when he’s singing a love song. He couldn’t very well sing ‘You Can’t Have My Monkey’ while gazing into the eyes of someone’s favorite auntie from Pocatello, now could he?”
     “And a real monkey on stage would be a serious health code violation . . . unless the monkey was Peter Tork, of course.”
     “You’re quick, copper.”
     “Huh? Quick? What kind of crack is that?” My eyes were rolling like craps dice. I was dizzy with dame.
     Faux-Bettie smacked me on the forehead and it felt like a kiss. “Allow me to connect your dots,” she said. “I met Wayne at the Sahara and we tried to cut a deal. He offered a fistful of gaming chips and a center stage table for his show at the Stardust. When I asked him to throw in two tickets to Don Ho’s Christmas Show, Mr. Vegas did the angry dance on a table in the Congo Room. The scene got crazy then, and his pal Razor did the clean sneak with my monkey. Wayne-O knew I wouldn’t sit still for it. That’s why he brought you in, smart guy. That’s why he stole his own stache and tried to pin the damned thing on me.”
     “So, Wayne just wanted you outta the way,” I said. “It was all about the monkey from the get go.”
     “That’s right, copper. I was disposable, and so were you, and the razor was disposable, too.”
     “Ah, Vic the Bic. And if I hadn’t shown up at the hotel when I did . . .”
     “I would have recovered my monkey, and this story would have died before Part Five.”
     “Sweet Jesus, enough!” I said. “I need a drink more than I need more answers.”
     Suddenly, I had another idea — that made two in one story! “Listen,” I said, “I know a little strip joint out on the strip — the Catch and Release Bar. Wha-da-ya-say we go down der fer a little drinkie-winkie? A glass of giggle juice? Jus you ’n me? Wha-da-ya-say, huh?”
     I made a little gun with my thumb and forefinger and popped her on the kisser. “Don’t go changing,” I said. She made a little gun with her thumb and forefinger and then turned it ninety degrees. “Loser,” she said.
     Chicks dig me. I’m a private eye. I straightened my tie and then turned to admire the Toughtown skyline. When I turned around again, the dame and her little monkey friend were gone.

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