Octobers aren’t good for me. They’re when the leaves turn brown and give up the ghost, knowing full well that an early freeze is coming. You’d think, having my office in the heart of New Orleans, there wouldn’t be a leaf in sight, but they’re still there, in my heart and on the streets.

Staring out through the window, watching passing shapes deformed by streams of oily water running down the glass, I can see the leaves. These leaves are shopping, hurrying home to their families, heading out for a night on the town. And all the while, they’re as finite as those that fall from the trees. And I’m keenly reminded that I too am one of the leaves.

I

It was definitely not my day. I’d gotten things rolling by burning my hand juggling the coffee pot after I’d nudged it off the heating plate with my elbow. Then the rain had started, which meant my shoes and socks were soggy by the time I reached the office.

Adding insult to injury, my key seized up in the lock and I spent another five minutes swearing in the chill downpour before it grudgingly worked loose and turned. That afforded me to  critically eye the motto LEE ‘RED’ GAMMON DETECTIVE AGENCY  emblazoned across the pane in the door in fading and chipped lettering. Damn, I reflected, another expense to put off for the foreseeable future.

Of course, there were no clients impatiently beating down the door to improve my mood. I wasn’t surprised, s I hunted up various and sundry objects to catch the errant drops that had made it thought the tar paper roof and onto my weathered floor. October is usually quiet for the first few days, as the Big Easy favors a slow and casual transition from September.

The city is like that. Things get done, but never in a hurry. Business generally perks up about the middle of the month, when pleasant summer memories fade and couples start picking up on the thousand and one little things that annoy each other. Then the ambitious ones come to me to see if the little woman has someone on the side, or if Antoine is experiencing an early case of cabin fever and looking for a little diversion. Sometimes their suspicions can pan out, but they can also prove to be unsupported Nine times out of ten, it’s the latter case, but, hey, it kills a day or so of boredom finding that out, and I still get paid regardless.

I spent the first hour juggling bills and neatly sorting them on the desk top by the furthest possible date I could reasonably pay them. Then I shrugged, lit up a Chesterfield, and swept the neat stacks into a desk drawer for later contemplation. Exhausted from my Herculean labors, I took a break for a cup of my usual brackish coffee.

From nine to ten, I worked on fixing a stubborn key on my clarinet, wincing a I did so at the recollection of the sour solo I’d inflicted on the paying customers at the Blue Note the prior evening. Then I wasted an hour working crosswords, erasing and revising every other word. I guess my mind just wasn’t on business.

The client arrived at eleven sharp, radiant and annoyingly dry thanks to a sightly oversized umbrella and a mauve raincoat. She was exotic. Thin, almost aquiline features and a dusty complexion that somehow defied classification. Not Mexican, not Polynesian, and definitely not Arabic. That surprised me a bit, as we get a pretty wide assortment of humanity through the Big Easy, and I can usually peg them. I got analytical.

Her hair was a dark blood red and her eyes…well, it took me a while to get a clear look at them, as she spent several minutes shaking imagined stray raindrops from her perfectly sculpted mane. When I finally got a clear view, I decided they were a sort of iridescent gray. Like a cold mist. The kind I remembered from December mornings in Texas, just before Old Man Winter worked himself up to a proper snow. It had, I reflected, been a long time since I’d been back home.

I had a funny feeling about that performance.  The lady was making a point of not looking directly at me. She settled into the worn client’s chair and out came a compact notebook. This was pretty clearly a prop again designed to avoid eye contact. Her makeup, what little of it there was, was perfect. She made a few perfunctory flutters with a powder puff before getting down to business, but I doubt a single speck of powder actually touched her face.

When she spoke, it was with studiously evasive eyes. She was pretty clearly not consulting notes, though that was obviously the impression she wanted to project. Yeah, she was every inch the matter-of-fact businesswoman. Cool, calm and almost painfully collected.

“Mr. Gammon?  I am Emelia Korvas.”

There was a slight pause between the title and my name, and there was a trace of an accent I couldn’t quite place. Maybe French. It had that slight guttural feel to it, as if her tongue had locked up on the ‘r.’

I nodded. It was my special noncommittal nod -- the one I reserve for potential clients that I’m not sure of. I’d sized her up and figured out her gray and crimson outfit must have set her back a couple of hundred in some exclusive shop, so she clearly had money. Even so, money wasn’t everything. There were just some potential clients you didn’t want anything to do with. I had a hunch she might fall into that category.

“I have a case for you,” she continued. “It is perhaps a little out of your usual line, I suppose. A party has stolen something from me, and I want it back.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

There it was. Plain and simple. Still, I wasn’t entirely sold.

“Well, I do other things than divorce work, if that’s what you think,” I protested warily, “I do occasionally recover stolen goods, as long as it doesn’t involve breaking and entering. The police around here tend to frown on that, and there’s my license to consider…”

She cut me off with a laugh that drifted up and down the scale like some exotic butterfly wafted on a summer breeze. It was a pleasant sound, but somehow it didn’t allay my concerns. It was probably just my imagination, but I felt like there was something unpleasant behind the laughter.

Be practical, Lee, a greedy little voice that lives somewhere in the back of my mind insisted. Think of the overdue rent.

 With effort, I shrugged off my unease as being due to my concern that the job might skirt the illegal. She evidently picked up on my unease.

“I assure you there will be no legal complications.”

I stubbed out the now-dead remnants of my cigarette in the ashtray, and wished that Masaka was there. Masaka was a sort of very informal partner -- more of an unpaid informant -- a young woman who might have been Japanese or Chinese, who generally appeared from nowhere to bring me some new case that I would have been better off without.

So far, that had amounted to he being confronted with eerily glowing tarot cards and a demonic summoning and, a mere month afterwards, a reincarnated and extremely hostile deity. She was an almost ethereal presence in my world, drifting in and out with no way to call on her when I needed help. On more than one occasion I’d wondered if, in spite of outward appearances, she was even human. Masaka, however, did possess one profoundly useful skill. She could easily read people beyond the facade they projected. Me? Not so much.

“What I wish you to recover,” he continued, “is a little statue carved from violet stone. It is roughly a foot in height and nearly as wide.”

“It being?” I interrupted.

She favored me with a dazzling smile, revealing small, perfect teeth that practically shone in the cloud-generated gloom.

“It’s an artist’s interpretation of a little…devil. Some obscure fetish belonging to some tribe or other that goes back a few thousand years. Have you ever heard of a toboda?”

“I can’t say that I have,” I admitted before I attempted to turn the discussion to more practical matters. Tribal gods I had no use for.

“Do you at least have a photo of the statue? It’d help considerably if I knew what to look for.”

She shrugged -- her smooth shoulders rising and falling maybe an inch. It was as if my question had all the validity of asking her whether her favorite color was yellow or blue.

“Regrettably, I was going to have it photographed for insurance purposes,” she explained, “but it was stolen the night before my appointment with the photographer. The best I can do is assure you that you will know it when you see it. It is quite distinctive. You, ah, might want to write this down.”

She waited patiently while I twitched open the long center drawer of my desk and fished around among the myriad pencil stubs for one that still had a point. I didn’t want to pull the drawer out too far. There was no point in her seeing the clutter of crushed, empty cigarette packs, peanut wrappers, and other trash that I’d stuffed in there, meaning to deal with them at some future point in time.

I located a reasonably intact pencil and, not having a notebook handy, located a tattered handout menu from a new seafood place down the street and prepared to take notes on the grease-spotted back. The lady looked annoyed that it had taken me so long to get things into a semblance of order. I fully expected her to conclude she’d made a mistake and sashay back out into the torrent. She didn’t. Instead, she favored me with a few scant details.

“The missing piece is composed of flattened spheres. The widest is the midsection, which bears some partially-effaced inscriptions, presumably in a lost language. There is no need for you to concern yourself with them.

“The head continues the overall motif, being squat and wide. What features it might have had have seemingly been worn away through the ages, though there is a hint of three eyes. The lowest bulge is meant to imply crossed legs.”

“Sounds like an evil buddha,” I remarked without glancing up from my scribbling.

That earned me a brief glance, and I unconsciously straightened in my chair at the force of it. The glower almost had the effect of a slap to my face. She hadn’t appreciated the comment one bit. A moment later, she was fishing in her purse, her eyes again downcast. ‘Sheathed’, came closest to being an adequate description. Those eyes now reminded me of the twin barrels of a shotgun.

“Here,” she instructed in a brittle tone, “is a paper with the address where you are to deliver the statue, as well as where you will find it. It is currently in an antiques shop operate by a mister Jovanovic.”

She spelled the name out for me.

“If at all possible, I would like the statue returned tonight. I leave the details to you. Feel free to be creative, but move quickly. If you cannot deliver by tomorrow at noon at the latest, I shall have to seek other assistance.”

This smelled, even if you tried to overlook the obvious, which I didn’t.  First, I felt  if I was being coerced. Too, what she was proposing sounded more than a little short of the classic definition of legal. At least it could very easily lane me on extremely shaky ground.

“Look,” I pointed out, ‘if you know where to find it, why not just confront this Javanovic? Threaten him with the law. I’m pretty sure you’d have a valid case, so all you’d really need is to find the local beat cop and bring him along. I’m sure he’d be glad of the chance of making a pinch.”

She didn’t even bother to answer -- just pulled herself up off the chair like some grand waterfall suddenly running in reverse, and headed for the door. The tin bell over the door jangled as she passed out into the now-waning storm. It seemed to me that the sound contained a mocking tone. 

I sat back and deliberated the previous ten minute, finally deciding that, given my choice, I’d have rather closed up shop for the day and invested a few hours in a haircut and a trashy novel a previous client bad left behind when they’d learned my rates and promptly bolted for greener pastures.  Yeah, there was something distinctly risky about her proposition. She’d seeming left the possibility of breaking and entering open, but I’d had the impression that it was expected if friendly persuasion failed. That didn’t go down well with me. My instincts said to move on with my life.

Still, she’d pitched a couple of items onto my blotter as she’d risen, and they were mighty persuasive. I’d always considered Ben Franklin as a dear, if distant, friend, so I figured I owed him an hour of my tine.

The address she’d given me was a good starting point. At least I had something concrete to go by. The two fifties accompanying it looked even better. Even if I didn’t lay hands on her purple whatsis, I had a pretty decent retainer in-hand, and I wasn’t big on issuing refunds. It looked like good times lay ahead.

In retrospect, I probably should have paid more attention to that skeptical little bell.