The Dumb Goons

Howard and Jeremiah Garboli, twin brothers, 6’9” of muscles well displaced in their massive frame not very well hidden by cheap suits. Not exactly ugly, but definitely not beautiful or charming guys. They were exactly what anyone thought when the words ‘thug’ or ‘goon’ came in mind, Both were really strong, and incredibly dumb. They had a long rap-sheet of minor offenses like the one that they had done in his town.

They had gotten drunk while waiting for someone to appear, and when he didn’t showed up they started to break the place apart.

The result? $2.450,05 in damages plus a pair of black eyes.

One of them belonged to him, Sheriff Benjamin T. Greywall. Its true that when one of them realized WHO he had punched both surrendered immediately, but still he was the one that had been carried by these two gorillas into his own office!

‘Sheriff… hey… sheriff!!!’

‘What do you want? What do you want now?’

Howard (or Jim) looked to his brother and then, acting like a constricted child, said ‘We… we decided to confess.’

‘Confess? But confess what…? Everybody in town already know what you did!’

‘Yeah, but… we didn’t told anyone why we… got drunk… and the rest…’

‘DOES IT MATTER? Does it really matter??’

‘Ehrrr, hum, kidnapping and murder still DO matter, don’t they?’

Fourteen hours later they were sitting side by side, repeating their story for the… ? time to Special Agent Carlton, who now seemed more interested in some details of the story.

On the next room Special Agent Ivory-Rhys was confirming most of what they ho ad told, and getting details that hadn’t ways to know or had bothered to tell them. It was big, it was really big. And those two idiots didn’t know how it had ended, yet. If they played it right, they could get confessions of other crimes.

‘So let me get this straight… you both insist that none of you took any part in the kidnapping of the Dain sisters?’

‘Sir. It’s Deann sisters. D-E-A-N-N, Lorena and her little sister Patty. And, well, when we got in the job, when Snaps Lewton hired us, he had already kidnapped the Patty girl. We entered his office over the car shop and found this very young gal, do you think she was 18, Jim? Me neither. Anyway she was wearing she was wearing one these cigarette girls uniforms… you know… black, showing her legs and some cleavage? Nothing impressive as her sister’s big me… okay. So there she was, bound and gagged to a chair and crying under a sack that Wally had used as a hood, I mean we saw the girl bound and Wally immediately removed her hood/sack and we saw that she was gagged. Not like in the movies or TV, I do mean gagged. They had put a rag into her mouth and tied another around her head to hold it there. And she was crying, even after Snaps slapped her and ordered her to stop she kept crying…’

‘And the big sister? Lorena Deann?’

‘Well… Snaps come and says to us ‘I killed a rat, but what he stole from me is still lost. This gal’s big sister knows where it is so give her this…’ and he gave Wally a wallet, Patty’s wallet, and said ‘…and make sure that she knows that I have her little sister!’ So while Jim and Snaps kept and eye on the frightened girl, me and Wally went to… to… to ‘collect’ Lorena. I stayed in the car, parked in the back of the ‘Blue Canvas’ where she sings every night, while Wally entered. After about forty/fifty minutes Wally walks through the back door, dragging by the arm a struggling blonde gal. Only when they are closer to the car is that I realize that the gal is bound and gagged. He jammed something in her mouth and held it there with his hankie, as for her hands they are tied together in her back, but he placed a fur coat over it, he tied the arms in parallel so they are being covered. He tells me ‘This bitch almost called the cops! I had to kill someone inside and there’s a gal locked inside a closet! Get going!’ He made her kneel on the floor between the passenger’ seat and the back seat, had his gun drawn and kept the girl’s head down o no one could see her and I drove back to the car shop. Since I’m big and strong, I grabbed and carried the gal to the office and tied her up to a chair while Snaps demanded her to tell him ‘where Giulio hid the papers’. She kept saying that she didn’t know, that she didn’t know and he kept saying that he didn’t believed in her. Until he grabbed his gun and pointed it to her little sister’s head!’

‘And YOU had the idea that saved that girl’s life?’

‘Look at me sir, I’m not smart, that’s evident. But I’m not stupid to get sunk in murder. Not me sir. So as Snaps was already yelling that he was ‘…going to kill her if you don’t tell the true!’ I stood up (I was sitting in a corner since Howie left with Wally) and asked the girl if she had been the one with Giulio when he had died, and she said yes. Then I asked if Giulio hadn’t said anything before he died, and the girl looked hesitant for a moment. Then Snaps realized that she knew something and, ignoring her sister, started to put some pressure on the girl. Until she confessed that he had said one last thing before he died, but it didn’t made any sense to her…’

‘And the phrase was ‘I need to take the dog’s certificate’, are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ – both brothers said as they nodded-

‘And how could not she know about his dog or the dog school?’

‘Giulio… was a real Casanova. He dated her at the ‘Blue Canvas’, a brunette with big expressive eyes at the ‘Flamboyant’, a black girl (a BLACK girl, not a girl with black hair) who sings somewhere in Harlem… you name it, the guy had over a dozen girls around him. That’s why it took nearly two weeks to Snaps realize which one was with him that night when he shot him as he was entering his car.’

‘And you say that Snaps was the guy that attacked that gal, Kathleen Aberty, because he thought that she was the one that was with Giulio that night?’

‘He only knew what he saw of the girl before he had to run. And that was that she was ‘a blonde with big melons’, and the poster for miss Aberty at the ‘Wacky Nuts’ shows that she is that, so he must have thought…’

‘Okay, let’s get back to the moment that Lorena says Giulio’s last words…’

‘Wally immediately understood what he meant with that. There’s this dog school in the mountains at about fifteen miles from the city, really nice place to send your dog as Wally said. Then Wally remembered that Giulio already HAD picked up the certificate from the school over a week before the ‘job’ in which he betrayed Snaps, so why did he had mentioned it before dying? Snaps looked at him, then at us and then at the girls. He said that he was going to check the information and that we had to kill the sisters. Then he left the place, and Wally cocked his gun and…’

‘And again you saved the girls’ lives?’

‘Yes we…’

At that moment Agent Ivory-Rhys opened the door, Agent Carlton stood up and talked with him, and didn’t liked what he heard. He left the room so they could talk more openly. The Garboli brothers stayed in their seats being watched by a couple of agents.

‘None of them? None of them can provide a positive identification?’

‘I talked with the local police force. Kathleen Aberty was attacked when she was returning home after the ‘Wacky Nuts’ closed for that night. She didn’t managed to turn on the lights and was grabbed, gagged with a cloth, tied with her own scarf, blindfolded with another and told by a harsh voice to ‘behave’. She heard her apartment being turned upside down as the attacker kept searching for something. After a lot of her belongings was broken, torn or otherwise damaged, she heard a question about if she was the gal with Giulio when he died. She shook her head and indicated, in a whisper after having the gag removed with a warning to not yell, where the proof of her words (a page of a paper) was being guarded. She was then regagged and left alone. She struggled for about two hours until she managed to free her legs, stood up and tried to get in touch with a neighbor, and was found by a couple returning from a big night…’

‘And the girl found in Lorena’s dressing room’s closet, Fiona Throuts?’

‘Fiona Tourrt, Lorena’s assistant. She’s not too helpful either. She’s quite deaf and didn’t heard the guy approaching from behind as she was selecting Lorena’s dress for the next time on stage. The next moment she knows she has a long coat thrown over her head, her hands are quickly tied up behind her back with a blue ribbon, another is tied around her legs, her mouth is filled with two… her… pair of panties of miss Deann…’

‘What?’

‘The attacker… gagged her with Lorena’s underwear, she kept some in the drawers as a… ehrr… safe measure of sorts, whatever that meant. Anyway, her assistant is gagged, tied up and blindfolded and locked in the closet. Since the gal can’t hear much she didn’t heard when Lorena entered her dressing room with that Pete Barley, she was found when the police entered the room and was looking for clues for the missing singer and the death of the man found in a pool of blood in there…’

‘Great… so apart these two gorillas in here, there’s no one else that can identify their attackers? So all we have is their word?’

‘Seems so…’

They didn’t exchanged one word and kept their nearly patented ‘dumb face’ plastered for the world to see. They were confident, not overly confident but just the right amount of it, and so far their plan was working very well. True, it relied too much on the Deann Sister’s greed, but they had saved their lives, like they had saved the other girls.

Pete Barley was a greedy worm that decided to kidnap Lorena, they would not mourn him, and the fact that Fiona hadn’t showed up yet was a proof that the attack on her had been another of Howard’s masterpieces. They had no fingerprints, witness or any other stuff to point at him, either in this or Kathleen’s case.

All they had to do was to stick with their story…

‘So you saved the girls’ lives…’

‘Yes, yes. Wally had already cocked his gun and was approaching the younger one, Patty, when I grabbed his hand. He looked at me with those big brown eyes of him and asked me what I was doing. I asked him back if he knew what Giulio had stolen from Snaps. He didn’t, so I told him…’

‘And you knew it because…?’

‘I already told you that!’ – And Jimmy slammed his massive hand over the table in a spit of rage – ‘I saw the papers, the shares… that stuff that is worth 10K the piece. Giulio had stolen the most of them, but Snaps had managed to save a couple of them.’

‘And he let them in the open for all to see…?’

‘No! No he didn’t! I saw him closing a drawer with urgency when I entered his office when we where watching the Patty girl, and when he went to the toilet I went to check and… I had never seen one of those before, but they are self-describing, right? All those fancy lawyers and taxmen’s words. And I realized that Snaps was paying me and my brother just $1000 in order to get involved in robbery, kidnapping and now murder! And he would cash 10K with only one of the papers! But I kept it to myself until I could say it to my brother and Wally, and convince them to rat the rat…’

‘And Wally agreed to help you and betray Snaps? Just like that?’

‘Snaps was also paying him 500 bucks, sir, and if he could kill someone for 500, what would he do for 10 grand? There was the problem of the Deann sisters, so I remembered a shack of a friend of mine up in the Adirondacks. I could drive to there, leave the girls and return in a few hours. The next morning we would go to the dog school and grab the shares/papers from Snaps fingers and leave the country!’

‘But nothing worked exactly as the plan after you left the girls in that shack… right?’

The brothers’ mood became way too somber, they just nodded.

‘Wally’s car is one of these new tailfins, tailfish… you know… BIG trunks. Big enough to accommodate two bound and gagged sisters. We treated them well, we untied them from the chair and wrapped a blanket around them, which was then securely tied to their bodies, then we reinforced the gags and placed them inside the trunk. The trip was uneventful, I took them out after I was sure that the shack was empty (my pal only uses it in the winter) and for the first time in hours they were not wearing any restraint of any kind. I told them that they had to stay in the shack for a couple of days at least, I did some rough voice and treats to make them believe that I would bother to go after them if they were found earlier than I thought…’

‘And you wouldn’t, right? And that’s because…?’

‘Because we were supposed to have the papers in our hands in the next morning!’

A shack… the thought could make him laugh if he didn’t control himself properly. Miss Himiko’s place was everything but a shack! A legitimate business build up atop a very big delirium of a maniac that killed himself right after he realized that he was broke, due to the bills he had to pay to build up his big private refuge against the impeding war with the reds. Probably the biggest private fallout shelter in the East Coast.

The estate had been bought and turned into a successful restaurant and hostelry by Mrs. Nora Keys, a ‘widow from Iowa’ that had soon become one of the most respected women in that small county, becoming a perfect cover-up for miss Himiko’s activities.

He had arrived in the wee hours and parked in the garage, each sister had been carried to one of the ‘private rooms’ of sublevel three by him, but as soon as she was deposited on the bare bed, a couple of Miss Himiko’s minions stripped each girl completely and tied her in a very stringent fashion; miss Himiko’s patented ‘first step’ on breaking and bending a girl’s will to her own. It had never failed before…

‘So the morning came and…?’

‘We had breakfast and waited for Snaps to call us. He did it and soon we were on the road, across the river but still in the State of New York. We drove for about half an hour and reached the place. As a dog school and a home it had seen better days, you know, there could be a new paint in there, a new glass on that window… it wasn’t in ruins but it had seen better days. And the front door was ajar…’

‘And there was a girl, Brenda. She was the daughter of the owner of the place, a early thirties gal with long jet black hair, big black eyes and a pair of moderate sized breasts that were cute… well she was bound to a chair in the dining room of the main house. She was clad in a pink set of lacy bra and panties and wore a blue robe. She had been gagged and tied to the chair with duct tape, and looked very frightened when me and my brother and Wally and Snaps entered her house…’

‘I wonder why she did so… and next?’

‘Wally just removed her gag and asked her what had happened. According to her a buxom brunette had arrived a couple of hours before and forced her entrance in her house, when she tried to complain and menaced to call the police the brunette produced a mean looking gun. She was bound and gagged in no time and the brunette started to search between the certificates and diplomas of the place. The school had build up quite a reputation before the owner got sick and the business started to… well what I mean is that the place had a wall filled with these diplomas and certificates of state and national dog training shows and… there were two blank spaces in it and the remains of broken frames scattered on the floor in front of it.’

‘And the shares were in those frames, right in the view of whoever entered the house?’

‘There were diplomas in front of them, real ones that the brunette (in her haste) took with her. And we questioned the gal about the brunette. And the lady that appeared to us in her description was more and more becoming like Fran…’

‘Fran as in Franciska Loeb, Snaps Lewton’s girlfriend?’

‘Exactly. He became livid when he realized who the girl was, I mean how many other brunettes with short (boy’s style) hair, a very ample bosom, one birth mark between her eyes and another on her left cheek, and who kept saying ‘darling’ this and ‘darling’ that as she taped Brenda and searched her family’s diplomas, and then put most of them back in their original places. We all knew that Fran had this thing that have to have everything around her in order and in the ‘right place’. Anyway, as she was putting the diplomas back in place a car drove by, she thought that it was us and gabbed her gun and positioned herself behind Brenda, using the bound girl as a shield. But the car for some reason just stopped and made a U-turn, then Fran reinforced Brenda’s gag and left. And there we were with another bound girl that Snaps ordered us to kill…’

‘He ordered that you killed her? Snaps Lewton did this?’

‘Yeah, he said ‘kill her and bury her somewhere’ and told us to pick her car to return to town, then he left with Wally and we had this very frightened girl in our hands…’

‘And you didn’t follow the order… again.’

‘Sir… we can beat someone anyway we’re ordered to, we can shoot someone who’s shooting back at us and we can do many other things… but kill dames are not one of those. Howie immediately freed the girl from the chair and told her to use the toilet, she tried to run through the window and we had to bring her back to the house with she doing her best to rip my flesh from my hands and kick Howie’s face. What a wildcat! In the end I had to retie her ankles and wrists with the duct tape. When I placed the fourth or fifth strip of tape over her lips she started to cry…’

‘That’s when we told her that we would give her some money for her to disappear for a while. She looked at us as if she hadn’t understood what we had said…but slowly stopped to cry and we managed to get her dressed and in her own car, going to some place in another state, in less than thirty minutes…’

‘And why didn’t she report anything to the police?’

‘Because we told her that if she did so we would not betray Snaps. We all had used gloves and there weren’t any fingerprints of our own in her house, only Fran’s and only if she had not used her white little gloves. Can you imagine her call to the police ‘Hello… a buxom brunette tied me up and stole something that I didn’t knew that I had (and we didn’t told her what it was anyway), then four guys came in looking for it and it seems, it… seems…, that the brunette and the leader of the men had an affair. Then the leader told two twin big guys to kill me and bury me, but they didn’t did it and here I am.’ I don’t think that someone would believe in her…’

‘And how do you think that Fran learned about the shares and where they were hidden?’

‘Well… you know… Snaps have the habit to speak when he’s sleeping and he and Fran… you know… so if he said anything that hindered her curiosity, all she had to do was ask him. He went in jail once because a dame asked him if he was seeing another gal and he answered yes, and she called the cops who woke him up.’

James Carlton knew that this two were hiding something. He kept the pressure for a few more hours and made them repeat the whole story four more times. They didn’t crack.

They had only confessed to that little town’s sheriff because they were afraid that the Deann sisters were found or left the shack, after all three days had passed since their kidnappings and, according to them, they were absolutely free to move as they wished.

A patrol car had picked them up a few hours back; they were fine, just some ropemarks on their arms, legs and torso. And they were backing up their stories. The same went with Brenda Zonertill, who spent a couple of days in a hostel and had already returned home when the State Police went there. She had given a complete statement of the brunette’s attack, and had positively identified her as Fran Loeb.

There were so many questions about that girl now… Where was she? An informer of the NYPD had swore that he had heard Snaps ordering the Garbolis and Wally Baxter to find her and kill her, and both Wallace Baxter and Tony ‘Snaps’ Lewton had been found dead in an alley behind an hotel in a small town in New Jersey. A buxom and disheveled brunette was seen fleeing the scene and entering a Chrysler, no partial plate to check (But Fran was the registered owner of a 1960 Plymouth).

And to make things worse, someone had already tipped the press about the ‘Gentleman Goons’ as the Garboli were already being called…

In their private cells both Howard and Jeremiah were calm and composed. By now both the Deann sisters and Brenda must have already been found by the police. If the girls didn’t followed their instructions there might be some problem for them, but that didn’t seemed to be the case. So they relaxed and had a good night of sleep.

Howard was the last to fall asleep. He kept remembering when that idiot that he had to call boss for the last five months left the dog school with Wally, while he ordered them to get rid of the ‘freckled redhaired bitch’… The stupid fella! Didn’t he hadn’t noticed that there was something way too peculiar with that house he had just left? That there wasn’t any family portrait anywhere? No, they had been successful in making him believe that his cute and beautiful and faithful girlfriend had betrayed him, and he was blind to anything else but her death now, just like they had planned.

While he freed the pretty twenty-something nearly naked girl from the chair, another gal (who besides the tape and ropes was stark naked) was brought to the room by her two companions. This girl was the real Brenda Zonertill.

She had been captured by these three younger than her girls shortly after midnight, they had been treating her well (albeit it was obvious that each and every one of them had a thing to tie up a woman in her underwear) and surprisingly had removed all the over 40 portraits and pictures she had of her and her family that were scattered around the house. Then they had overdo a tie as they left her standing and ‘melted’ by the ropes to a post in the basement, then only two of them had returned and, with guns drawn, stood at her side after they locked the door to the basement from the inside.

Then some people arrived, and Fran had thought that they were the police or something like that, she had tried to warn them of her presence, but only managed to have both girls’ free hand pressing the foam ball they had used as a gag even deeper into her mouth. Then she heard the man’s voice, high pitched and quite hysterical, and realized that whoever was upstairs wasn’t rescue in any way…

Now she stood flanked by the two still clad only in black girls, one of them was black the other seemed to be a blonde, while two giants muscle masses waited for the third (and youngest one) of her attackers to free herself from the chair she had been taped to.

Then she was placed on her sofa and the girls went to her own bedroom to change their clothes. The giants stood watching her and all the while she feared that they would do ‘that-four-letter-word-starting-with-R’ on her. Then the girls reemerged from her room.

They were all dressed in a beautiful, yet a little provocative fashion, their cleavage could be easily seen and they were dressed to attract attention. One of the white girls was wearing a crème colored dress that fitted her body marvelously, the black girl was wearing blue and white and the last white girl was dressed like Sandra Dee.

They could pass as a group of friends that had just spent a time in the mountains. True, even in the state of New York two white girls befriending a black one was rare, but these three could pass for what they were; three young women having fun together. One of the giants passed an envelope to the black girl telling her that that was the story they would tell the police. She was carried by one of the big men as if she was an empty sack of potatoes, but very carefully placed in the trunk of the girls’ car. The last thing she saw before the blindfold was applied was the red girl mouthing to her ‘Don’t worry’.

They drove for a while and the car stopped, she was taken out of the car by at least four pair of feminine hands, she was placed on a wheelchair and tried to make some noise. A motherly voice with a weird accent told her to stop with that.

She was their prisoner, and no one else but them knew that. If she behaved she would be able to save her house, her business and pay the bills of her father’s treatment. This picked Brenda’s attention right away, since the mortgage was due to the next week and she had no ways to pay it. She behaved from them on.

It soon became obvious to Miss Himiko that this would be the easiest to deal with. As long as she had money to pay the bank, and still could be able to face herself in a mirror, she would say whatever they wanted. Miss Himiko ordered that she was kept completely unable to move, see, hear or talk for a full day. So soon she was a mummy, lying on top of a cot, a very frightening experience to the dog trainer, but as soon as she was freed from the cocoon they treated her like a princess. They gave her a luxuriant bath, three or four massages and very good meals to eat. If they allowed her to see something and had removed the padlocked leather blindfold the treatment would have been perfect. Then again she her the weird voice in a motherly tone.

She thought she was alone in a weirdly echoing large place when she heard the voice. It said that they already had paid her mortgage and would give her some money; in exchange she was to read the statement that she was going to tell to the police.

If she, no matter what, kept to the story there was a new phone number in her phone list for her to use when she, or someone she loved, was in trouble and the police wasn’t too much helpful. If she, for any reason, decided to tell the truth to the cops… They told her to remove the blindfold and look up, and she did it.

She was in what looked like a large stone (or concrete) hall and wasn’t alone, suspended way over a hundred feet above her head and being held by two or three cables each were four female cocoons. And they were alive and writhing.

She heard the voice again, behind her. She didn’t dared to turn her head…

‘You don’t know who I am and where you are, I helped you and you will now help me and two of my friends, or you will join them whenever I want that it happens…’

Then she was again blindfolded and guided by the owner of the voice to another part of the large place where she had been held for the last…? A cloth was gently pressed against her face and her harms were held by a pair of hands, but she didn’t fought back. She woke up in her own bed in her own bedroom. There were five sheets of papers detailing how she had been overpowered by a buxom brunette and what had happened afterwards, she took a look on the picture of the gal and set fire to it and the sheets of paper. She would say to anyone whatever they wanted. The sight of those poor women plus the fact that that voice had been not menacing, just detailing what would happen…

So she did it.

From a statement to the police to her testimony in their trial, she repeated the story. Exactly three weeks after they were released from prison she was awakened by a hand over her mouth, three other pairs were holding her arms and legs.

They were the women she had seen cocooned three years before. It had been a ruse and she had fell on it! They held her down and, after a necessary restraining, they talked to her, then after she was calmer they talked with her. They talked for hours.

Brenda never ever met them again or discovered their names, but knew she could believe in what they had told her. And kept the phone number with her until the day, over forty years later, she had to use it.

After all that happened they only had to endure a short sentence for minor charges. With three kidnapped gals saying that they had not taken an active part on their kidnappings and had disobeyed the order to kill them… the DA was lucky that the jury accepted those minor charges! They made new friendships, renewed old acquaintances and soon made the two federal agents that were following them be sure that they were just what they looked like; a pair of giant dumb goons…

Ha! Jim decided that when he was in Rio de Janeiro, enjoying the sun and the local girls as much as he could, he would remember each and every single person that ever thought that he or his brother were idiots. It was a looooong list…

They stopped at a restaurant/hostel famous for its good cuisine, nearly all girl staff and for the fact that it located on an ill-gotten project of a great fallout shelter. They said that it has five sublevels, actually eight, and over five different ‘secret entrances’.

It looked so much like it was taken from an old movie serial or a super-hero comics that the owner, a respectable widow called Nora Keys, had decided to call it ‘The Secret Hideout’! With good food and music, beautiful waitresses and such an ambient, it was really common to wait up to twenty minutes to find a table. But as he was sitting on his seat, a disastrous movement of one of the waitresses sent the whole contempt of a jar on Howard’s pants. The girl started to apologize immediately and the tall and statuesque Mrs. Keys appeared and escorted him to a private area where he and his brother would stay, without any extra charge, until his pants were clean or a new other was provided.

As soon as the door was locked Howard’s irritation vanished, Jim took a good look at the girl dressed in a black trousers and stripped shirt (and showing some of her ample cleavage) who up to that moment was torn with guilt (and now showed him a beautiful smile) and Fran, now a jet black haired gal, kissed him on the cheek.

‘Hello boys… how was life in prison?’

‘Awful, but what are you doing here? You were supposed to be… far away from here!’

‘Calm down… calm down, Miss Himiko is arriving and she will tell you all…’

There was a knock at the door and the petite Japanese lady that was respected by all in the room entered carrying new pants for Howard. As Howard put the new one behind a curtain, Jim asked her what was the explanation for Fran’s presence.

‘Very simple. Three years ago I kidnapped her in order to blame her for our elaborated masquerade. She was supposed to be held until I broke her or your trials ended. What we never suspected was that she was tired of her old life, in all of its aspects…’

The sudden blush in Fran and Mrs. Keys face told the brothers the rest. She was another girl in Miss Himiko’s harem! But how could it be possible?

‘Well, men never ever fulfilled me as I wanted, unlike Himiko-sama. And I found out that I just love to be pampered while bound, and I always was flexible so…’

For the first time in years both Garboli brothers stood silent with their mouths wide open. They knew that Miss Himiko and her ‘boss’ Nora Keys were lesbians lovers, and knew that the ‘Secret Hideout’ was sort of a shelter from lesbian girls. They had helped her rescue three of them from psychiatric institutions that pretend to ‘cure’ the girls of their ‘disease’, they even had killed a sadistic SOB that knew that his ‘treatment’ would not ‘cure’ his subjects (but he was a sadistic SOB)!

Of course, not all of the ten to twenty (the number always fluctuated) girls that worked at the SH was lesbian. And of those who were not all were part of Miss Himiko’s harem (more like just seven or eight girls). But those who were members of her harem were amidst the most skilled cat burglars they had ever seen! And the futile and vain Fran was one of those girls now? They couldn’t believe in it!

‘Oh… Fran is not, yet, one of my helpers…’

‘But I’ll be! I’ll swear I’ll be! I will become your best helper ever!’

But the smile in Nora’s face told the brothers that Fran still had a long way to get there. Now redressed properly, Howard emerged from behind the curtain in a very good mood. Miss Himiko settled down to business and informed them the number of the Swiss bank account in which she had deposited their part of the sale of the shares. Both brothers whistled in contempt when they heard how they had achieved.

‘I presume that you are going to spend a year or two in Rio?’

‘Yes, unless any of your informers finds out about something big, really big, me and my brother wants to make one final act of our ‘stupid gorilla goons’ scheme before we retire. We have enough money to spend a decade in debauchery… we want to be able to spend the rest of our lives in it when we retire.’

‘As soon as I heard of something that big I will call you both. And of course, as soon as I heard that both are in trouble, I’ll stop by to help you both…’

‘Only if you don’t forget to call us if you or any of your girls gets in trouble too…’

‘Of course…’

‘Oh, by the way. Seeing Fran here makes me wants to know about the other girls… what happened to Brenda, Lorena and Patty?’

‘Brenda got married with a former rival in business, she still lives at that deserted place but I heard that the couple is about to become a real family… Lorena spent all the money we paid her to say what she said in the trial, her sister was more pragmatic and smart and is paying her college with her part. But don’t worry, none of the boys from Washington (including the two that are watching that door as closely as they can) got any suspicion with their ‘unexpected source of income…’.

Two minutes later Fran, who having practically only changed her hairdo and the color of hair weirdly was completely unrecognizable to the federal agents, opened the door thanking Howard profusely for his kindness and big heart. Jim and Nora followed them as she kept saying that whatever they wanted was on the house that night (they even send a bottle of champagne to the table of the federal agents before inviting them to their table). No one paid attention to the petite oriental servant that closed the door and left carrying Howard’s wet pants. The Garboli brothers vanished forever from the radar of the FBI and other federal agencies two weeks later…