APRIL FOOLS WISE GUYS ~ AT THE BIJOU

wHo dOnE iT?

cAn yOu FiGgEr?

Jes leave your surmisals in da comments joint. There's a prize on the line. A big heist came through. It could happen to You.

G'head. Guess.

Ya know ya wants to.

Who left the pen

 to pen this one out? 

It's April Fools

for WiseGuys,

* AT THE BIJOU *

"Exhibit A"

"Tension, murder, the femme fatale who knows what she wants and just how to get it. Black and white or garish colors with low angled camera shots, or quick incisive sentences filled with language that snaps and bites. Throw in a harrowing sense of unease – the feeling none of this is going to end well – and you are almost there, but not quite." 

Clue yourself in here, Mugsy.

"Exhibit B"

You are the kind of guy who is not easily surprised.
  
She was trouble the first time you laid eyes on her and you knew it. Long legs that left nothing to the imagination, an hourglass figure with curves in all the right places, and deep, piercing blue eyes that cut through your heart like a stiletto. And then there was the way her long blonde hair dipped across her face before she flipped it back with a slight shake and twist of her head.
  
Everything about her made you want more. 

Clue yourself in here, Bugsy.

"Exhibit C"

This is how it started.
  
Ignoring the knock on my door, I reached for the bottle of rye instead. I’d already had too much but the headache making my eyeballs throb wouldn’t treat itself.
  
‘Either let yourself in or beat it.’ I yelled. 

Clue yourself in here, ya big Lug.

"Exhibit D"

I was sitting on a bench minding my own business, waiting for Harry’s Bar to open. I had a fifth of bourbon hidden in my coat pocket, was taking nips to keep the cold out. Trying to make it last. Failing. The money was running out and I had no idea what I would do when it was gone.
  
I saw Harry open the doors and he looked over and nodded. I stood up, but before I even took a step forward, a couple of kids ran past and knocked the hat off my head.
  
‘Hey, watch what you’re doing,’ I shouted, bending down to get my hat. My bad leg gave way and I fell to the ground, landing on my hat and my hip. I heard glass break, felt wetness, realised it wasn’t just my hat that was ruined. 

Clue yourself in here, Dollface.

"Exhibit E"

The cop said: "We have enough on you for petty larceny. You tell us about Anthony, we'll take that into consideration."
  
Otis sipped the shitty coffee. Other than that, he kept his mouth shut. 

Clue yourself in here, Palooka.

"Exhibit F"

As he lay dying in the East Tremont Section of the Bronx, the bullet wounds he had sustained to the throat and abdomen throbbed with each new pulse and spilled vital blood from his heart to the freezing sidewalk beneath him.

  

Miguel Sanchez gasped for help on the northeast corner of Garden Street. Getting help at 4:22 on an icy Saturday morning was futile, only Sanchez was too naïve to know any better. The streets were empty. They were usually bustling with varied kinds of illicit traffic at this hour. Maybe it was the gunfire that cleared the sidewalks. Maybe it was the cold.

Clue yourself in here, Sherlock.

"Exhibit GeeWhiz"

When they smashed in the door Tamblyn and Russell didn't know what they were going to get. Turned out what they got was a fat kid with an enormous head in a grease stained Metal Mulisha tee shirt.
  
“On the floor, asshole!”
  
Russell swept the kid's feet out from under him. Tamblyn snapped the cuffs tight. Jerked the kid to his feet by his cuffed wrists. He knew it hurt like hell. That's the way they wanted it. The way it needed to be. Pit bull dominance right off the bat.

Clue yourself in here, Mumbles.

"Exhibit H"

The brief from the Chief was short and sweet, but far from pretty. Funding was foiled, yet covert ops were to continue. Damn, what we were doing to buck the Balkans heightened an awareness it paid not to overlook. Marguerite sighed into the heat of what felt like a thousand Julys, tugged, twisted and tucked capricious auburn tresses into a smart French braid, then eyeballed the missive from headquarters once again. Like it would change anything.

FIND A WAY! STOP 

~ J STOP

Strategically, Istanbul was intended to be their crossroads, not their albatross. Conflicting concerns from two continents which spanned the powers of political history had brought them to this point of time, to this today. She and a cantankerous partner with smooth patter and tougher instincts. 

Clue yourself in here, ya singin'Canaries.

"Exhibit I"

This didn't feel right. My partners were late and I kept thinking it could have been for a thousand different reasons and all of them bad. Our job was done and this should feel like the home stretch, but things can quickly go south and get hotter than a $3 pistol.
 
The lacquer cracker on the jukebox kept skipping so I told that corn-fed giant-of-a-barkeep to unplug that hunk-of-junk once and for all or find something worth playing. Besides, it wasn't the time for the rah-rahs of wartime propaganda.

 
"This is a tavern, Bubb. We don't house stiffs here. We need music," Barkeep grumbled.

I flipped a nickel at him. "Then go find something quiet... An onion ballad sung by that skinny twerp..."

Clue yourself in here, Toots.

"Exhibit J"

Buddy had been around so long that he was just as familiar and ignored as the ottoman he liked to nap beside. Twenty-one years is a long time for a dog. He’d gone nearly deaf about five years ago and his hips were creaky like the back porch screen door but he could still see and could still smell a squirrel in the front yard while squatting for a dump in the back.
 
His still presence was a part of the house, ignored and outdated as the encyclopedias on the shelf in the living room. They’d long outlived their usefulness but it was more trouble than it was worth to toss them out. Many nights the lights would be turned off when Greta and Karl went upstairs to bed and Buddy would go another night without supper simply because they forgot he was there. If he was smart he would have taken up snoring to make his presence known but he just lay silently in the evenings as Karl berated Greta for her lousy housekeeping and Greta screeched at Karl for his lack of hygiene.
 
Buddy’s deafness was more than likely self-inflicted.

Clue yourself in here, Bub.

"Exhibit K, OK?"

I sat in the room, doing the old Sam Spade bit waiting for the femme fatale to knock, and thinking to myself, ‘There has to be a better way than this?’ I couldn’t think of anything. A man past forty, whose waist size exceeds his age, needs something kind of sedate to get by on.
 
The room wasn’t a PI’s office. In fact it wasn’t even much of a room. It was a box at the end of a damp corridor above a pole-dancing club with rusty poles. It was more like a storage closet, plaster board tacked onto a wooden frame, no paper, no photos or diplomas in frames, just boxes of stacked junk lining the walls and an old Formica-topped table and two plastic chairs. I’d sat in chairs just like them at school back in the eighties. They were uncomfortable then; now that my arse had grown much bigger they were torture. I was itching like crazy and all I wanted to do was get up and pull the material of my shorts out of my crack. But I held the nonchalant pose of a noir anti-hero; people kind of expected it when they arrived.
 
The femme fatale arrived. She didn’t knock because there was no door.

Clue yourself in here, Mr HunkyDory.

Spill your crummy guts and sing like canaries down da docks. Put your pointy finger on your matchups in da Comments-Joint down below. 

Let's jes see how swell you knows your WiseGuys . . . April fools rush in. WiseGuys never try that funny biz. They knows better ~

 OUR LIKELY WISE GUYS: 

AKK ~ Absolutely KoolKat Kate?

AJFH ~ AJ Fedora-Fella Hayes?

ASV ~ Anthony Smooooth Venutolo?

CRR ~ Chris Rat-a-tat Rhatigan?

EBB ~ Eric Bust-em-up Beetner

GGS ~ Graham Gunner Smith?

JJG ~ Joseph Just-in-Time Grant?

JMM ~ Julie Mayhem Morrigan?

KMM ~ Kevin MadDog Michaels?

MHH ~ Matt HotShot Hilton?
PBB ~ Paul 'The Bish' Bishop?

Answers posting just after midnight on Tuesday,

followed by a Daring Duo . . . a desperate Detective

and down and out Do Gooders . . . 

~ d u r i n g ~

THE  SHADOWS  OF  OUR  NOIR

*AT THE BIJOU*

And Hey, t'anks for comin' round.

These authors are just way more a screech

than any  ol' cat's meow, ain't they?

~ Absolutely*Kate

and Bogey, natch

© 2012, Absolutely*Kate presenting ~

THE SHADOWS OF OUR NOIR

Photos ala IMDB, Mr Bogart; 

Audience shot by Thuany Gabriela;

cool Colt  ala DigitalStephen

Yeah. There's a PRIZE for the foist o'youse guys who Matches the likely EXHIBITS to WISE GUYS ... correctly. Whattyathink? Katie's *AT THE BIJOU* is a class act joint, y'know . . .