Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
BOOKS BY FLETCHER FLORA
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
BONUS SHORT STORY: THE INVISIBLE GAUNTLET
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
The Irrepressible Peccadillo is copyright © 1962 by Fletcher Flora. “The Invisible Gauntlet” is copyright © 1964 by Fletcher Flora. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1964.
This special edition is copyright © 2015 by Wildside Press, LLC.
BOOKS BY FLETCHER FLORA
Blow Hot, Blow Cold
Desperate Asylum
(aka Whisper of Love)
Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (with Stuart Palmer)
Killing Cousins
Leave Her To Hell
Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart
Lysistrata
Most Likely To Love
Park Avenue Tramp
Skuldoggery
Strange Sisters
Take Me Home
The Brass Bed
The Devil’s Cook
The Hot Shot
The Irrepressible Peccadillo
The Seducer (aka Campus Woman)
Wake Up With a Stranger
Whispers of the Flesh
CHAPTER 1
It was a kind of natural conspiracy. Everything worked out just right to go wrong, and that’s the way it went. I figured from the first to be a damn fool at last, and that’s what I was.
It was late in the afternoon of a day that was in June, and I was in my office talking to Mrs. Roscoe Burdock, who wanted to divorce Mr. Roscoe Burdock, her husband, for beating the hell out of her while drunk. Mr. Burdock was, I mean. Drunk, that is. According, at least, to the testimony of Mrs. Burdock, which was probably not strictly unbiased. The truth of the matter was, I suspected, that Mr. and Mrs. Burdock were both drunk, which was a suspicion based soundly on precedent.
Mrs. Burdock is of no particular consequence in this account, except that there she was in my office, late in the afternoon of this particular day, and I wished she wasn’t. I wished that she had never come, or would at least go away, because I was developing a feeling of sadness and loneliness that was already pretty bad and would keep on getting worse, because that was the kind of evening it was going to be.
You know the kind of evening I mean? It goes on and on, evening forever, under the softest kind of light drawn up from the edges of the world into the sky above the first transparent shadows of night, and there’s a breeze that barely stirs the leaves of the trees, and in among the leaves are about a million God-damn cicadas sawing away with their legs, or vibrating their wings, or doing whatever cicadas do to make the sad-sounding and lovely racket that they make. That’s the kind of evening I mean, and it is not the kind in which someone like Mrs. Roscoe Burdock is welcome or wanted. It is the kind into which you withdraw alone to weep without tears, remembering every pretty girl you ever kissed or didn’t kiss, and thinking with sorrow of all the things you haven’t done that you will almost certainly never do, and of all the places you have never gone where you will surely never go. It is an adolescent kind of emotionalism, immune to reason. A man in its spell is in danger.
I was in its spell, or beginning to be, and in danger, although I didn’t know it, and Mrs. Burdock was telling me how Roscoe had held her by the hair and belted her in the eye. She had the shiner to prove it, but I wasn’t especially impressed.
“Roscoe’s pretty impulsive when he’s drunk,” I said.
“Roscoe,” Mrs. Burdock said, “is a lousy bully and a bum.”
I leaned back and made a little tent of fingers over which I sighted through Venetian blinds at the neon sign of the Rexall drugstore on the corner across from the Merchant’s Bank Building, in which I had, second floor front, my office. I avoided looking at Mrs. Burdock’s face, which had been, the last time I looked, both belligerent and aggrieved, as well as oily and ugly, and did not meet my modest and flexible specifications of a pleasant sight.
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” I said. “I’m thinking, however, of the last time this happened. Perhaps you remember.”
“Of course I remember. How could I forget something that happened only last week? Every time the bum gets drunk, he takes a swing at me.” Mrs. Burdock paused, staring at me with sudden sour hostility, as if I had invaded her privacy. “What I don’t understand, though, is how you happen to know anything about that occasion. It was a private fight.”
“I wasn’t referring to the last time Roscoe got violent,” I said. “I was referring to the last time you wanted to get a divorce. After I had given your case considerable time and work, you and Roscoe kissed and made up and left me holding the bag.”
It crossed my mind that it had really been Roscoe who held the bag, but it didn’t strike me as being funny, however true. I was far too sorrowful to think that anything was funny. Everything was sad. Everything was going or gone. It would soon be too late for anything, and the elegy of dreams would shortly be sung in the trees by a million sad cicadas.
“That was a mistake you can bet I won’t make again,” Mrs. Burdock said.
“I further recall,” I said, “that you called me a shyster and accused me of trying to break up the happy relationship between you and Roscoe for the sake of a dirty fee.”
“I was wrong,” Mrs. Burdock said, “and I admit it.”
“A fee,” I said, “no part of which I have ever collected.”
Mrs. Burdock quivered in her chair. I did not see her, but I felt her. She was probably offended by my lack of sensibility in considering anything so base as a fee when a crisis in human relations was in progress. After a few seconds, she grunted and stood up. I did not see her, but I heard her.
“It’s plain you’re trying to avoid taking my case,” she said, “and so I had better get me another lawyer.”
“What I’m trying to avoid,” I said, “is the charge of trifling with the holy
