Edward McIver, Private Investigator. That’s what it says on the frosted glass office door. But for the last year it’s really been Eddy’s receptionist and eager protege, Rose Valiant, that’s been keeping the agency afloat. Eddy’s been sliding deeper and deeper into bottles of booze while Rose keeps the lights on and the rent on the office paid, which is a good thing since Eddy lives on his office couch these days.

Rose left her home in Yonkers, New York, to come to the Big Apple two years ago. Eager to earn her way in the big city, she saw a tiny classified in the Times the day she arrived: Receptionist Wanted, Private Investigator Agency, Apprenticeship Available. The ad was followed by an address, one she made a bee line to as soon as she had gotten set up in her flop-house apartment in the Bowery. She found the place, a run down three story office building in the Tenderloin, and climbed up the steps to the top floor where she found the frosted glass door with gold painted letters on it.

Inside, she met Eddy. She could tell he wasn’t the most tidy of men, but he had a warm mug, and eyes that could melt an iceberg. His slicked back hair and dark navy suits were precisely the image of a private eye she’d always imagined. He hired her on the spot, promising a $5 a day wage. She was thrilled, and she made it clear she hoped to eventually become a private investigator herself. Eddy seemed to be on board with that idea. For the first six months, the two of them worked through dozens of cases, from the mundane to the truly audacious.

Then Eddy took a job from the mob boss Nelson “Happy” Caprissi. Rose had warned him from getting in with sharks like Happy, but Eddy thought he could handle himself. Happy only wanted someone to trail a woman, a Zoologist named Eleanor Milne, and report on her activities for a week. It seemed like easy money, and being on Caprissi’s good side was worth more than the cash anyway. Rose didn’t see Eddy for the next eight days. She had become very worried about her boss, and considered going to the police, when Eddy shambled into the office, his clothes covered in stains, reeking of booze, and looking like he hadn’t slept in days.

He never explained what happened. He stopped taking new cases, preferring to sit behind his desk and drink, or snore loudly on his leather couch. Rose tried in vain to get him to at least do something about his apartment when his landlord showed up and said Eddy was being evicted. It soon became apparent that the office would get shut down too, if she didn’t do something. So Rose began to accept cases in Eddy’s name; just simple work like catching cheating spouses in the act or trailing people. She dressed up in men’s clothes while working so no one would suspect she was doing the work and not Eddy.

That worked for a while, but the money coming in wasn’t much, and Eddy drank away most of it. Rose would have quit, could have gone home to her momma or found another job somewhere else, but she worried that if she left, Eddy would drink himself into the grave. She couldn’t have that on her conscience. She tried various means of creative accounting to keep the lights on and the landlord at bay, but with jobs few and far between, she knew it was only a matter of time before it all caught up to her and her besotted boss.

And that’s when a giant shadow fell upon the glass door and in walked a mountain of a man with ruddy skin and a strange black tattoo on half his face. He wore a black pinstripe zoot suit and asked gruffly, “Where’s Eddy McIver? My boss wants to see him.”