Detective Lovely And The Case Of The Silver Lining Crimes, Chapter 3

          

          Det. Lovely and Iggy drove up to Mr. K O’Gram’s treehouse, situated in the jungle that lay on the eastern outskirts of the town, befringing the cliffs of the Lottolouto Gorge with unruly vines. This was the broadest and most parlous ravine in King Lindsey and was named after Lord Lottolouto, the man with the second deepest  pockets in the town after His Majesty King Lindsey XVI himself. Det. Lovely heard parochial parakeets caw and saw bananas like golden boomerangs stuck in the trees. She made her way up the well-maintained rope-ladder to the balcony of the treehouse and knocked with an assertive rat-a-tat-tat in the name of the law. 
             The door opened and an amiable-looking gorilla with a bath towel tied around his waist stood there gormlessly, then thrust his leathery palm and  black sausage fingers forward. 
         ’Ooo-ooo, hullo officer, my name’s Kizmet O’ Gram, welcome to my humble abode!’ 
      Det. Lovely took the gorilla’s mitt and shook it with a police officer’s business-like, robust restraint.
       ’Good afternoon, sir!’ replied Det.Lovely (for it had passed midday by that point). ’What seems to be the problem here?’
       ’Please don’t stand out there, Officer, the monkies around here are very nosy,’ confided Kizmet O’Gram and gestured to Det.Lovely that she should enter with a sideways stretch of his long hairy arm.  
         Det. Lovely sat on Kizmet’s leopard-print sofa as he remained standing,  well, hunched with his knuckles brushing his tigerskin rug, obviously slightly agitated despite his rather comical appearance, as he told Det. Lovely of the crime he suspected.
      ’ Well, Officer, ooo-ooo, as you can see I woke up this morning to find something absolutely vital has been pinched - ooo-ooo - my pants!’ 
    With this revelation, Kizmet out-turned his black palm about the region of his gorilla abs, which resembled bent Snickers bars snaking round his flanks, to highlight the fact he was reduced to wearing a bath towel to protect his primate privates.
        ’Ok, Kizmet - and please call me Lovely, Det.Lovely' - upon this introduction Kizmet nodded as if to say ’But of course…’  -  ’Can you tell me the exact moment when you realised your pants were missing?’
         ‘Why yesiree, lovely Det. Lovely -  ooo-ooo - it was first thing upon getting up this morning. They’re a very special pair of pants and I wear them all the time’ - doesn’t sound too hygienic, thought Det.Lovely slightly aghast, imperceptibly turning up her nose as Kizmet went on. 
    ’ Y'see, they’re a golden pair of pants sent to me by my brother who married into royalty up north, waaaay up north!  In fact, you remind me a little of his  fragrant lady wife!’ With this attempt at flattery, rather misfiring as Det. Lovely wondered if she was being compared to a girl-rilla, Kizmet cheesily wiggled his ultrabushy caterpillar monobrow ( tho' in a way his whole face was a monobrow!), then elaborated: ‘Anyway, me and my brother used to work together as human-o-grams! Yunno, we’d go to orangutan hen nights or to a 21st birthday tea-party for a chimp empress dressed in humorous human suits, then do a little chimpantease, removing our  mancub disguises of sarcoline bald rubber to the rhythm of the jungle boogie, until we were wearing nothing but our famous gold pants. Ooo-ooo, we were quite the simian sex-symbols - ah, glory days! ’
          As Kizmet’s almost human brown eyes stared into space gleaming with nostalgia, Det. Lovely felt it was incumbent upon her to interrupt his reverie: 
       ‘Excuse me, Mr.O'Gram, but where did you keep your aureate underwear at night?’
         ‘Oh, hanging over my tyre-swing in my bedroom to give them a good airing,’ said Kizmet cheerfully, oblivious to Det. Lovely rolling her eyes at the grubbiness of gorillas.   
         In Kizmet’s monkey-musty bedroom, his tyre-swing rocked gently as the bright blue breeze outside blew in a soft gale of jungle clamminess. Recalling the summer-night squalls that had compromised her own kip with their gusty gusto during the wee hours of the past few nights, Det. Lovely peered out of the gorilla’s bedroom window on a hunch. And her detective’s intuition paid off!
      ’Ahem, Mr. O'Gram, would you please come over here and take a peek out of your window,’ she commanded in a cordial yet long-suffering, headmistressesque tone.
       ’I’d be delighted, Det. Lovely, but why? I’ve perused the tree-top panorama - the bananarama if you like - many times before, watching them nosy parker monkies for hours, erm....’
      ’Just have a look, Mr.O’Gram, I trust you’ll be pleasantly surprised,’ Det. Lovely patiently reiterated as if dealing with a particularly hirsute toddler.      
    Kizmet gambolled over with the lumbering lightness that only gorillas possess and gawped out the window. And what do you think he saw, eh? A few metres away, hooked on the bottom of a bunch of bananas looking like five crescent moons in a rugby-scrum was, yep-o, you guessed it - Kizmet’s missing golden pants!
           ‘Y’see, Kizmet, they must have clean blown out the window on a freak gust and into the trees last night, whilst you snoozed and caught your chimpan-ZZZs,’ explained Det.Lovely.
         ‘Elementary, my dear Det. Lovely, elementary, ooo-ooo!’ cooed and ooed Kizmet, stroking his chin with good humour and no little relief. The next minute, he had scooted in and out of his kitchen in a flash of indeterminate crashbangwalloping , returning shortly with a canoe-shaped and nearly canoe-sized glass dish sloshing to the brim with ice-cream and syrup, and peppered with crushed nuts and chopped cherries like the noses of clown mice. From beneath these confectionary garnishes poked out both ends of a banana, looking a little like the yellowed horns of a steer's skull roadside, only , er, slathered in ice-cream! 
     ’ Ooo-ooo! One of Kizmet’s Slurpysloopcious Banannyummy Sundaes as a token of my esteem, lovely Det. Lovely,’ the gorilla announced with only a simian whoop for fanfare, proudly beating one leathery pec with his free hand. Inwardly, Det.Lovely improvised a hasty prayer that all this gesticulating wouldn't dislodge Kizmet's bathtowel!
       ’Well, thank you very much, Kizmet, but it was all in the line of duty. Police officers don’t expect any rewards except knowing that citizens are safe and justice has been done,’  Det.Lovely stated with forced formality born of mild regret, for Kizmet’s culinary creation did look well delish. Then she remembered how poor Pinky Pawridge had had all his bumblebeegee pink honey gobbled by an intruder, so decided, this once, to bend the rules like so much bananashaped red-tape in order to console a victim of naughtiness. 
     ‘But seeing as you’ve gone to so much effort, I’ll take it to share with a friend whose tummy’ll be rumbling about now, I bet.’          
     After taking the lip-smacking-looking dessert, thanking the equally grateful great ape and reminding him to retrieve his al fresco golden pants (a cinch for a natural-born tree-climber like Kizmet), the loveliest detective in the entire Carina Signius Spiral Arm climbed down the rope-ladder from the treehouse. Kizmet then lowered the dessert boat down into her arms in a Moses' basket artfully woven of vines. He had wrapped the Slurpysloopcious Bananayummy Sundae in quality brand-name banana-skins from his joke-box (not ones peeled off the omnipresent common bananas, which bendily bedizened this jungle horizon of tropical roofgardens). After all, Kizmet didn't want any squirtyslopcious icecreamage seepage over his favourite lawwoman’s smart, snugfitting uniform. Any gift requiring a trip to the drycleaner's is more than a borderline inconvenience!   
             ‘Mmmmm,’ brummed Iggy, ‘I wish I had a stomach!’ as Det. Lovely flumped back in her devoted black roadster.
            ‘Right-o, Iggy, we’ve got to zip back  to Pinky Pawridge’s, chop-chop! On the way, we’ll radio back to the station that it was a false alarm at Kizmet’s,’ Det.Lovely informed the artificially intelligent ebony automobile. 
            ’You’ve got it, partner!’ And with that Iggy’s horn tooted - beep-beep! -  but he didn’t switch on the sirens: he wouldn’t be allowed to do that just for a melting Slurpeysloopcious Bananayummy Sundae! Mind you, if he had done and they’d have wailed ’Woo-ooo-ooo’, they’d have reminded Det.Lovely of Kizmet’s ’Ooo-ooo’ without the ’Woo’ , don't you think, my indulgent reader ? Your Nimple Sarrator does, but then again he's a nimplewit!