Written for Muse On Monday. We are asked
to write a story about an article of clothing.
Rain had been coming down on the city for three days straight, the kind of rain that got into your shoes and your bones and made itself comfortable. I had a bottle of rye in the desk drawer, a case of nothing to do, and a ceiling fan that hadn’t worked since last August. That’s when she walked in.
She had the kind of looks that made a man forget his own name, and from the way she carried herself, she knew it. Dark hair, darker eyes, a red mouth set in a perpetual pout like she’d already decided the world owed her an apology. She didn’t sit so much as arrange herself in the chair across from my desk.
“Mr. Malone. I need your help.”
“Everybody does, sweetheart. I’m listening.”
Her name was Alana Cole, and the story came out slow, like she was deciding how much of it I should know. Somebody had lifted her coat …. not her purse, not her jewelry …. her coat. A gray camel-hair number with a black mink collar, the kind of coat that cost more than my rent for a year. She’d left it checked at the Blue Orchid two nights back, and when she went to collect it, the claim ticket got her somebody else’s wrap and a shrug from the girl behind the counter.
“It’s just a coat,” I said, testing her.
Her jaw tightened. “It’s not just a coat.”
There it was. I leaned back and let her get to it in her own time. Turned out the lining had been opened up and something had been sewn inside …. she wouldn’t say what, not at first, just that it wasn’t hers to lose and the man it belonged to wasn’t the patient type. When she finally said the word heroin, she said it quiet, like saying it loud might make it more true than it already was.
“Whose is it?”
“A man named Sal Cutter uses me to move things sometimes. Nothing I’m proud of. This time he had me carry the coat three blocks between the car and a club. Three blocks, Mr. Malone. I don’t even know how much was in there. I just know if it doesn’t turn up, he’s going to assume I made it disappear, and I’ve seen what he does to people who make his property disappear.”
Sal Cutter. I knew the name the way you know a rash …. from unpleasant experience, and I’d rather not know it again. Sal ran a pawn shop on Delancey that hardly ever seemed to sell anything, which is generally a good sign a man is in a different line of work altogether. He had a smile like a car salesman and the moral flexibility of a rubber hose, and I happened to know he wasn’t half as connected as he liked people to believe. Sal Cutter needed help to move real weight. Sal Cutter needed friends in low …. or in this case, uniformed …. places.
“You know who checked coats that night?”
“A new girl. She wasn’t there the next day. Nobody remembers hiring her.”
“Convenient.”
I told her I’d look into it, quoted her a rate that made her wince, and watched her walk out into the rain.
The Blue Orchid coat girl wasn’t hard to find. Turned out she’d been paid to work exactly one shift and vanish, and the fifty that bought her silence had come from a man with a badge. That narrowed things down considerable, because there was exactly one cop dumb enough and dirty enough to run an errand for Sal Cutter personally: Lieutenant Frank Gibson, Vice.
Gibson and Cutter went back years, the two of them thick as thieves because they were, in fact, thieves …. one just happened to carry a shield. Word on the street was Gibson had skimmed a package from the evidence room a month back …. heroin that was supposed to get burned in an incinerator downtown …. and instead got sewn into the lining of a very nice coat. Cutter’s job was just to move it along the chain without anybody official noticing the chain was short a link.
Except somewhere between the car and the club, the coat had gotten switched …. not stolen exactly, switched, deliberate and clean, by somebody who knew precisely what was sewn where. And that somebody wasn’t the coat check girl. She was just hired help, same as Alana.
I found Gibson at the West Side Diner working on a plate of steak and eggs like a man with no worries in the world, which told me he didn’t know what I knew.
“Malone.” He didn’t look up. “You’re a long way from divorce court.”
“Funny thing about coats,” I said, sliding into the booth across from him. “Sew something inside one, and it’s amazing how many people suddenly want to borrow it.”
His fork stopped halfway to his mouth. That was answer enough.
“I don’t know what you think you’ve got….”
“I got a coat check girl who vanished with a police escort. I got a dame who’s about to take a fall for a job she didn’t pull. And I got a fence on Delancey who’s going to be very unhappy when he figures out his errand boy in blue is the one who lost his shipment.”
Gibsons’s eyes went hard and flat. “You want to walk out of here, Malone, you forget the coat ever existed.”
“See, that’s the trouble with a guilty conscience, Lieutenant. Everybody thinks the coat’s the only version of the story.” I let that sit a second. “It isn’t. Alana Cole’s still walking around, and she knows exactly who handed her that coat and exactly who paid off the coat check girl. You want this buried, you’d better start digging faster than I can talk.”
He didn’t answer that. Didn’t have to. Some men go quiet because they’re calm. Gibson went quiet because he was already three moves down a road that was closing in on him, and he knew it.
I found the real coat two days later, and I found it because I stopped looking for who’d want to steal a coat and started looking for who’d want it to look stolen. Sal Cutter’s warehouse on the river was full of furniture nobody was buying and one very ordinary-looking closet that turned out to be not so ordinary once you moved the moth-eaten fur coats out of the way.
Cutter himself was there when I let myself in, camel-hair coat draped over his arm like a man admiring a new suit. He wasn’t smiling the car-salesman smile anymore.
“You’re a persistent son of a….”
“Somebody switched your coat, Sal. Wasn’t Alana, wasn’t the coat check girl. Was somebody who knew Gibson’s arrangement well enough to want the package for themselves before it moved on down the line. My money’s on you.” I nodded at the coat on his arm. “Looks like I made the right bet.”
His jaw worked like he was chewing on whether to admit it or shoot me. Lucky for me, greed made him talkative before it made him desperate. Turned out Cutter had decided a man skimming heroin off a police evidence room didn’t much need a middleman, and had arranged the whole switch himself …. hired the coat check girl, paid her to vanish, and set Alana up to take the fall so nobody would look twice at him. Gibson thought his errand boy had lost the package. Alana thought she’d lost her coat. Cutter thought he’d lost nothing at all, right up until I was standing in his warehouse laying out the facts.
“You tell Gibson,” I said, “and he finds out you cut him out of his own theft. You don’t tell him, and I do it for you, with considerably less charm.” I held out my hand. “The coat, Sal.”
He handed it over like it cost him a limb. And maybe it did, in the end …. I heard later Gibson didn’t take kindly to being played by his own fence, and Cutter’s pawn shop closed down a month after, the way places do when their owner isn’t answering questions anymore, from anybody.
I brought the coat back to Alana Cole myself, lining resewn, contents somewhere at the bottom of the river where they belonged. She held up the coat like it might bite her.
“Is it….”
“Clean,” I said. “As clean as a coat like that’s ever going to get.”
She almost smiled. Almost. “What do I owe you, Mr. Malone?”
“Buy yourself a coat that isn’t a liability.” I tipped my hat. “This one’s on the house.”
She opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and walked out. I sat down at my desk, poured two fingers of rye, and decided some stories are better left in the lining where you found them.
NAR©2026
This is “Inside Job” by Don Henley
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 