Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, this is the only one rule: the story needs to involve the week’s prompt word and be precisely six sentences in length.

Been a while since we’ve checked in with our favorite P.I., Ian Devereaux. With the number of new Readers these days, I think it would be to our advantage to do a ‘character flashback’. In this case, Diane Tierney. Diane is the hostess at the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge. In the timeline of today’s Six, she’s just returned from a sabbatical. (I know! Sabbatical from working at a strip club!? Well, if there’s anything we hope to incorporate in these serial stories, intriguing incongruity is our highest ambition.) So, from the first Ian Devereaux story, ‘the Case of the Missing Starr’ allow me to introduce Ms. Tierney:

“You already know what’s on the menu,” Putting the red-stringed laminated folder in front of me, Diane Tierney slid into the opposite side of my table.

Turning her head to keep an eye on the door, the tables around the dance floor and the few other customers, a tidal wave of chestnut brown hair escaped the elaborate restraints that held her very long hair off her shoulders. Her hands were beautiful. If there was a term, ‘dancer’s hands’ it would apply, fingers perfectly proportioned and, somehow, elegant. If her hands were the only thing to go on, you’d be guessing ‘fifteen-year-old-girl… from an old-money family’.

Prompt word:

ZEST

God I hate February.

Without Hazel, my admin, the transformation of my office in a pre-War Art Deco building into Dante’s Ninth Circle was fairly complete, down to the cast-iron radiators clanging like funeral bells; her son was with her ex and she was testing the whimper-bang theory of death on her boyfriend, State Police Lt. Elizondo Cardoso on some beach at a consulting-adults-only resort in the Caribbean with the unlikely name: ‘Death-by-Zest’ (motto: everyone has a limit, let us help you find yours).

There was work on my desk, emails in my computer and messages on my phone but the sky was grey, the light passing through the windows behind me tenebrous, like in the thesaurus and, did I mention I fuckin hate winter?

‘When in doubt, Ian, do something, anything,’ my old man used to say, well, in the interest of full disclosure, it was more, ‘When the world and everyone around you seem indecisive, doing even stupid things will look like inspired leadership; so I found my coat and grabbed my hat and headed down the linoleum checkerboard corridor to the elevator and headed for the Bottom of the Sea Stip Club and Lounge, a poor substitute to that mountain-top cave and wise guru, but you work with what you have.

Stepping through the glass ‘n brass door, the warm-Italian-cuisine/cigarettes-and-hormone scented atmosphere embracing me, I was brought up short by a woman, her back to the door as a twist in my stomach promised more misery, unless it decided on bliss instead; she was not one the interchangeable temps Lou hired to cover for the extended absence of the hostess who worked for Lou for as long as anyone remembers.

Diane Tierney turned with the grace and force of the changing of the season, her eyes taking inventory, her lips smiling in approval, “Ian, it’s March not February, you made it through the winter,” again a barely noticeable smile, “everything will get better”.

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