A Broad With Guts

"Maddy held her arm up and snapped her fingers until the guy in her bed took notice. Then she pointed to the door."

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Madeline Farmer drove a royal blue, 1956 Lincoln Continental. She always wore pearls and bright red lipstick and kept her wavy, dark-brown hair long, past her shoulders. She also drank two martinis for lunch and smoked like a chimney. This allowed her to keep her figure svelte so she always looked sexy in her knee-length skirts and tight, knit tops. She was never seen in anything but heels.

She had no problem handling dicks either. Whenever one would try to harass her, she’d pull the switch on him and then gain the upper hand.

“How sure are you about your whereabouts on that night?” a cop once asked her.

“I’m as sure about it as I am that you have a hairy pair of balls in those boxer shorts of yours.” She replied coolly with a puff of her Pall Mall.

Her friends called her Maddy and she earned most of her living chasing down thugs who had jumped bail, on one occasion pursuing a runner in her Lincoln at high speed through a Shriner’s parade. Needless to say, she always got her man.

The other part of her living was derived from nude modeling, a gig that paid well, but was very sporadic.

On this particular day, she was pacing the room wearing nothing but a one piece girdle and bullet bra with a bondsman on the horn.

“What-a-ya mean you’ve got no more work in the pipeline?” she scoffed.

A gruff, masculine voice came out of her phone with unintelligible grumblings.

“Okay, well, try and get your act together down there, Charlie!” she griped before slamming down the heavy receiver.

Behind her, a man lay in her wrought-iron framed bed as she went to the window and finished her cigarette. If this trend continued she would have to find another modeling job, or... go back to her 9 to 5 as a bean counter and anything was better than that.

The phone rang again seconds later. It turned out to be Jake Franklin, a guy who had always shown up in her hour of need. There was some sort of psychic connection between them she had yet to figure out. His voice made her soften.

“Hey! How are you?”

“I’m good. I have a job for you if you’re interested?” he proposed.

Maddy held her arm up and snapped her fingers until the guy in her bed took notice. Then she pointed to the door.

“What is it?” she replied as she turned back toward the window.

“A wealthy client of mine wants her husband tailed. It pays one hundred a day plus expenses.”

The big guy in her bed got up and started getting dressed.

“Well, I’ve never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. What’s the schedule?”

“She wants you to go out to her place tomorrow. Can you swing that?”

“Sure.”

Maddy wrote down the address as the lug she had spent the night balling left with a parting smirk of annoyance.

“Thanks a million, Jake. You’re the bee’s knees. Would you like to meet for a drink later?”

“Not today. I need to take the wife to a show. How about Wednesday?”

“It’s a date. Bye.”

The next morning, Maddy found herself heading up the driveway of a ritzy country estate with statues every ten feet of every armless Greek goddesses in the pantheon. Was this a warning to all women who entered the property, she wondered?

She stopped the car halfway in to refresh her lipstick, her tan, suede gloves turning the base that brought the candy-red lip paint out of the cylinder. She re-did the line of her upper lip and pressed and puckered before blotting with a tissue as she wondered who this rich battle axe would turn out to be.

She put the big engine back in gear and continued sailing through the landscape to the well-kept, stone mansion. A round porch projected out from the structure with an arched entryway. The front door frame was also arched and hosted ornately decorated glass doors. She drove around the central fountain and parked.

Maddy grabbed her purse which sported a pearl-handled 9 mm in its silk-lined interior and got out. She strode up to the porch and took note of the gold name plate in the wall next to the door.

Stromberg

She rang the doorbell and waited. An august-looking man in a monkey suit opened the door moments later.

“Good afternoon.” he simply said before leading her through the foyer into a living room, “Dame Stromberg will be with you shortly.”

Dame?

Maddy took a seat on a flower motif couch and checked her face in her compact. Everything looked hunky-dory: no lipstick on her teeth, no wild hairs.

She hardly had a chance to scope out the room before the matron of the house appeared. She was a tiny thing, the personification of poise with a face that told you she had seen the world, but with a kindness to her eyes that suggested she had come away largely unharmed. Maddy rose.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Madeline.” she proffered as she extended her lean hand.

Maddy gently gripped the delicate offering.

“Call me Maddy.”

“I’m Maria Stromberg. I hope you had a pleasant trip in.”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s wonderful country out here.”

They both sat down on the couch together.

“My husband and I purchased this place twenty years ago.” she began, her tasteful perfume drifting over to Maddy for the first time, “He died several years back, but we always loved it here.”

“It’s easy to see why.”

The matron continued with her rememberances as Maddy took inventory of her person. Her clothes were expensive- yet understated, just like her perfume. And her hairstyle spoke of the same practicality, naturally gray and straightly cut to mid-neck. She finally got around to the problem she was having with her second husband.

“My Donald is a complicated man...”

My Donald?

"... he likes to go to his... clubs.”

Titty bars?

“What I mean to say...” she qualified, “... is that he has strange habits.”

Maddy nodded.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” she checked.

“No, not at all.”

Maddy opened her purse, pushed her Beretta to one side, and brought out her cigarette case. She opened it and tapped out a filterless Pall Mall. She raised it to her tongue and licked around the end with delicacy before setting the moistened cylinder on her lips. Then she brought out a small lighter and flicked the flame to life. She watched the end glow red as she drew the smoke into her deep lungs and then flipped the lighter closed. She squinted her eyes and tilted her head back as she pulled the cigarette away from her mouth and directed the smoke up toward the ceiling. Then she put the lighter and the cigarette case back in her purse.

“When you say strange-” Maddy asked, picking a small bit of tobacco off her tongue with her gloved fingers, “what exactly do you mean?”

The matron’s expression grew troubled.

“Crossdressing I believe the term is.”

They spoke for another hour and the matron unloaded a lot of information. It turned out the husband was living a dual life, one with his crossdressing pals by night and one with his wife by day. The problem was that someone was trying to blackmail them now, threatening to release photos of the guy in drag to the press. What the matron wanted to know was whether the blackmailer and her husband were connected, or, in fact, one in the same person.

Maddy left that day feeling no envy for this woman. How terrible it had to be to think the person you shared your life with was actually out to fleece you! That was the real price of wealth.