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    The Stoner Detective
    The Stoner Detective
    The Stoner Detective
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    The Stoner Detective

    By Douglas H. Doyle

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    About this ebook

    It's the summer of 1981, and the streets of Hollywood are a riot of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, the glory days of the L.A. punk scene.

    At 21, Sean Stoner is young to be working at Krapp Productions. After receiving the ultimate insult from his boss, Sean conspires to get himself fired and sets up shop as a private detective.

    His first client is easy enough: a gorgeous woman searching for a lost husband who doesn't exist. But Sean is in trouble when he finds his nympho punk secretary with a broken neckstark naked on top of his desk.

    Things quickly get worse: the CIA moves in next door ... Sean's old Pinto explodes ... Nazi skinheads try to kill him with baseball bats ... and a strange disease breaks out in the gay community.

    Meanwhile, Sean investigates the mysterious death of his own father, who died twenty years ago in a bizarre double murderin the very office where the CIA is conducting its top-secret operation.

    When Sean's screenwriter friend, Conrad, is found with his brains blown out, Sean refuses to believe it was suicide. Then Hillary appears, Conrad's hauntingly beautiful sister, and Sean and Hillary join forces to uncover Conrad's killer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateSep 16, 2009
    ISBN9781440149719
    The Stoner Detective
    Author

    Douglas H. Doyle

    Doug Doyle is a novelist and screenwriter from Southern California.

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      Book preview

      The Stoner Detective - Douglas H. Doyle

      1.

      Fuck no. Fuck this. Fuck it.

      The note reeled in and out before his eyes.

      Sean stared at the words, knowing this meant the end.

      The note was from his boss, Joe Blitz, asshole film executive, telling Sean to call Sears and order ten trashcan lids for his house. And call his wife and tell her when to expect them.

      Sean was twenty-one, young to be working for a film executive.

      It was June 10th, 1981.

      At twenty-one, most American kids are more or less retarded, but Sean had not gone to college and was on his own and practically living on the street, in the punk sense of living in a big punk flophouse.

      Sean had tried college but he couldn’t hack it. It was like being asleep. The people were under some kind of spell, they were living in a dream world … it was a nice dream world but he couldn’t live in it even if he wanted to, which he did.

      Fuck it. It was time to get fired. He’d been at Krapp Productions for three years, first in the messenger department, which put him in charge of the Xerox machines, then going to work for Joe Blitz when it was discovered that he could read and write. Not only that, he had read the Bible.

      Not that he was in any way religious, or any way not religious, but when he started working at Krapp he saw that there were a lot of smart guys there, a lot of really smart Jewish guys from the East Coast who knew practically everything, and Sean realized he knew practically nothing … it made him panic, really panic, so he decided to start reading, systematically, starting with the Bible.

      He bought an old King James bible in the dusty bookstore next to the Nuart where he was seeing Eraserhead, because it was cool if you got stoned and saw it during the day instead of at midnight when you almost always passed out. In fact, Sean didn’t know anyone who’d seen it all the way through … but he did that afternoon, and it was definitely weird, it definitely put you in a space. When he came out he wandered into the bookstore.

      His plan was to read ten pages a day, at lunch. It took him three months. He was quite staggered by the experience. The Old Testament was heavy-duty stuff and quite convincing in terms of being told there is only one God and this is it and you’d better believe it.

      There was also a lot of filler and it got boring through the minor prophets so it was a relief when the New Testament started up … as a philosophy it was amazing and as a story it was good … it was like, we’re all going to die but that isn’t the end.

      After the Bible he launched into the Greeks. The Greeks were the best. They invented everything, one fact the Jesuits managed to drill into his head during his one semester at Loyola. So far he’d read The Iliad and The Odyssey, and was making his way through Plato’s Symposium.

      Now he had to get fired.

      He was not ordering trashcan lids.

      He got up, turned right into the corridor and right again along the fishbowl where the Krapp brothers sat behind a big glass wall with their entourage. He passed through the small modern lobby and down the stairs into bright morning sunlight.

      Still a touch of cool. He strode up La Brea, crossed Sunset and turned right on Hollywood, carefully avoiding eye contact with the dealers and teenage prostitute junkies and weird scary homeless dudes and appalling old fags who looked like their asses had been set upon by horses.

      He reached his car, an old pink Ford Pinto. The kind of car Ralph Nader objected to because if you got rear-ended you burst into flames.

      The car no longer ran. It sat in a scuzzy part of Hollywood that didn’t have parking fines. Sean kept the doors unlocked because there was no point in replacing broken glass and no one could steal this car anyway.

      A homeless Pakistani dude was living in the back seat, which ruined it for Sean. Sean himself had lived in the car once in awhile but now it was way too smelly. But he did keep the trunk locked and used it as a kind of locker. Nothing valuable, of course.

      He opened the trunk and pulled out a big old bong, the kind of brownish-yellow plastic monstrosity you associate with dumbshit stoners—that whole strata of hippie that consisted of dumbshit guys who just wanted to get fucked-up, now being replaced by heavy metal. And Nazi skinheads.

      He did not care to get busted on Hollywood Boulevard so he stuck the bong in a paper bag.

      He marched back to work, to the famous red-brick Tudor house Charlie Chaplin built at the corner of Sunset and La Brea, eventually bought by Krapp Productions, or Krupp Productions as Conrad called them.

      Sean dropped the paper bag in the lobby and carried the huge bong in plain sight past the fishbowl.

      No one noticed.

      Or appeared to.

      It would take a lot for those assholes to display interest in others.

      Sean returned to his desk. He set the bong on top. It was like laying your dick on a desk—something he had seen once, some low-life at a telephone soliciting company in North Hollywood.

      What a place. White trash. Dog fights in the front yard. A Doberman with its jaws locked around the neck of some beautiful fluffy white dog. The whole neighborhood turning out, waiting to see the blood spurt. That’s when you saw what a shit-hole it was, when the people came out. Half the porn industry was a block away … there was always some outrageous-looking chick on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, pausing before going in to do God-knows-what.

      Blitz was off somewhere, probably doing nitrous or cocktails at ten in the morning. He had a whole fridge of canned cocktails.

      Sean wondered how long it would take before someone caught him.

      There was a big clot of weed stuck in the bowl. No water.

      He opened Blitz’s fridge and emptied a Margarita into the bong.

      Not enough.

      He threw in a gin and tonic.

      He found some matches, took a deep breath and lit the bowl—pulling long and hard to a furious bubbling of Margarita and gin and tonic.

      Shaken, not stirred, he thought—almost laughing—but he held on and finished the bong, which was ridiculous, the size of it—taking his finger off the carb and sucking in fresh air to ease his lungs, which were full to bursting, with his brain reeling, because he hadn’t done a bong in over a year.

      His goal was to get caught—he wanted to burn his bridges, ruin his future, destroy his career—so instead of holding it in he blew it all out with a great whoosh—a big brown cloud of Colombian smoke … filling the office, drifting into the corridor … a rich tropical odor.

      That should cook his goose. Not that he cared. The thrill of being fired meant nothing now as his brain folded back into itself, layer upon layer, till he knew the Futility Of All Effort and burst into delighted chuckles.

      The idea was to get fired but now he didn’t care.

      How weird, though. Where was everybody? By now someone should have discovered this crime and reported him, either to Blitz or one of the Krapps or the personnel manager.

      He sat there for what seemed like an eternity, and probably was, in some sense … the smoke had dissipated … incredible … you could actually do a huge bong in an office and not get caught.

      What does that tell you?

      He remembered getting stoned in the bathroom of an ad agency where he was temping once … he hated that place, the people were incredible pretentious assholes … fucking over your colleague was considered on-the-job training … when he left he was so relieved he brought in a joint on his last day and filled the bathroom with pot smoke just to say fuck you and so he’d be stoned on the bus ride home.

      He heard a sound.

      Someone was coming!

      He got a jolt of adrenaline.

      Conrad walked in.

      Sean’s jaw dropped.

      Conrad was a friend. He was twenty-two, he worked in the fishbowl as an assistant, he was a writer, he wrote scripts, he had gone to Loyola and studied film, he took it seriously, his parents were rich but he was a good guy and he was smart and he knew a lot of shit Sean didn’t.

      Conrad stared at the bong.

      What’s that?

      What’s what?

      That … I mean … that’s a bong. What’s a bong doing there?

      Oh … It’s for one of Joe’s movies.

      Oh.

      Simple as that.

      Is it a prop?

      "Yeah … it is a prop … but it’s a problem because it is a bong … the pot isn’t real, of course, but what I mean is, you should probably take it to personnel."

      Conrad picked it up and took a sniff.

      Ooo! Smells like gasoline!

      Just get it out of here.

      Conrad walked off with the bong.

      Well.

      There was no stopping that.

      Now how was he gonna get fired?

      If he quit there’d be

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