An illustration I painted about a year ago that demands a story.
“LOOKING FOR NOAH”
In a tiny, shabby, old, one-bedroom apartment in New York, a washed-up private detective sits by the windowsill, reading the headlines. Having put away the second-in-command of the underground mob, the police and the mob hate him. He is blacklisted and has not had a case in several months. A knock came at the door. A beautiful woman, the rising star of the New York Opera House, walks in and she seeks his help in tracking down her missing grandfather, Noah. She drops a bag of money on his desk, the first-half of the payment, and promises more to come. After following several trails, the detective finds himself at the pier and there is a body floating in the water. The clothes on the body are identified as having been worn by the missing old man. The police arrive on the scene and name the detective as the prime suspect of murder. The Opera singer appears, backed by the mob, and she congratulates him on finding the old man, but her job is done, since the man is already dead. The old man happened to be a renowned professor of biochemistry who was coerced into helping the mob build biochemical weapons, but he had recently escaped their grasp. He knew too much, so they wanted him dead or alive. It appeared as if the old man had committed suicide for fear of the mob and the regret he might have felt for building such monstrous weapons. Seeing the police and the mob together in the scene, the detective realizes that they were in on it together, but he does not fully know what the bigger plan is. He jumps into the ocean water to evade them. They fire shots into the water. Some blood appears on the surface and they assume him to be injured or dead. After wading in the water under the pier for several hours and the criminals have left, the detective reveals that he was aware that the Opera singer was trailing him, so therefore, he had set up the dead mannequin floating in the water to fake the old man’s death minutes before the cop and mob arrived. The real, and very alive, professor helps the detective out of the water. The detective’s trails were right on, the old man had been hiding in the abandoned shack near the pier.The professor reveals to the detective, the mob & police’s plans to release poisonous chemicals into the water main during the president’s visit to the city next week. With the help of the professor, his network of informants of “lowlife” street characters, and a call to the FBI, the detective was able to come up with an elaborate plan to trap all those involved, even the high-ranking city officials. Though the FBI offered him a huge reward and job offer to join the national forces, he abstained, stating that his passion belonged on the street corners of New York, solving whatever case, however small or big, that comes through his door.
