A Matter of Justice 
by Herbert Grosshans
Lews Canon is not your average hard-eyed PI.
He doesn't wear sunglasses or a hat, instead he wears a baseball cap; he doesn't smoke or cuss, and he doesn't carry a gun. His office is in a run-down building with no Air Conditioning and his twenty-year old car is ready to quit any day. He has an alcohol problem he doesn't want to admit and he has the ability to get himself into trouble more often than not.
The funds are low and he needs a case desperately to pay the bills. His sidekick isn't some sexy beautiful woman, either. In Canon's own words, "She's built like a fridge and scares even me sometimes." However, she is loyal to him and keeps him in line.
When Canon finally gets a case, he's beginning to wonder if it was such a smart idea to take on his new client. The case gets more and more complicated and involves several of his other clients. It becomes quite personal, and Canon has to commit a violent act to save himself and the woman he loves.
Excerpt
Prologue
My name is Lews Canon. I’m a Private Investigator. A Dick.
If you’re wondering about my name, let me assure you, Lews Canon is my real name. Actually, it’s Lews Bullseye Canon. Given to me by a man with a strange sense of humor.
My father.
What do you expect from a guy whose name is Bigg Canon and who is only five feet, three inches tall in elevator shoes, is as skinny as a third-world refugee and has a head as bald and big as a watermelon? Fortunately, I didn’t inherit his genes. I’m five-eleven and I have a healthy carpet of hair on my head. It is carrot-red, but otherwise I’m a normal-looking guy, except for my eyes.
One is brown, the other one blue. Courtesy of my grandfather, Bullseye Canon.
That’s right. Bullseye! That’s how I got my middle name.
I have no kids and I may never have any. It seems this leg of the Canon line will end with me. Perhaps lucky for those unborn potential children. But, should I for some reason have children, I would never give them names like Bigg, Lews, Bullseye, or any other similar cute name. I’m not married, probably will stay single until the day I die. What sane woman would want to marry a guy who is hardly home, who spends his evenings sitting in a car, listening in on other people’s phone calls and watches husbands cheating on their wives or a wife screwing another man instead of her husband?
Unless she’s Sonya. Sonya McKinnon. She tends bar in the nightclub across from my office. I can’t figure out why a gorgeous chick like her would even think about marrying a guy like me. She could have any of the guys who are constantly hitting on her. Most of them are married, the majority of them are drunks and gamblers, but a few are actually upstanding citizens and would probably make good husbands.
She’s never shown any interest in any of them. The only one she’s interested in is yours truly. Don’t ask me why. I’ve told her many times that I’m not the marrying kind. I had a taste of it once and it didn’t work out for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like her and we’re good together. She’s a passionate woman and holds nothing back. However, I can’t see myself tied to only one woman for the rest of my natural life, which may not be that long, considering the work I do. Possibly, that is another of the reasons why I don’t want to commit myself again.
Like I said, I’m a Dick. Sounds so crude. Private Investigator sounds so much more sophisticated, more glamorous. It conveys a life full of danger and adventure.
Believe me, it is nothing but. Most of the time it’s boring.
There is nothing glamorous about watching a bored housewife screwing a guy in the backseat of his car and trying to snap a picture that shows her face and the face of the guy she’s banging.
Sometimes I take videos. Anything to give the husband the weapons he needs for a divorce to end in his favor.
When it comes to child support and support in general, the courts still seem to rule in favor of the wife. A husband who is cheated on needs concrete evidence to support his claim.
Sometimes the guy a woman is cheating with is also married. That’s when it becomes messy.
Stating my job is boring holds true for most of the time. However, there are times when it does get somewhat exciting. When I say exciting I don’t mean adventurous or fun to experience. In fact, while some cases are easy and end well, some turn downright ugly. Take the case of Frederick Titman. It started out like any normal case. Titman, a fifty-five-year-old stockbroker, was married for five years to a woman twenty-five years younger. Marriages like that seldom work out.
She used to be a model. A successful model. Everyone in the fashion world apparently knew Julia Brenner. She gave up a promising career when she married Mr. Titman.
Their happiness lasted for the first couple of years, but then the magic left; at least that’s what Mr. Titman told me. He suspected she’d been cheating since then.
One look at the picture of Julia told me enough. A good-looking dish like that will never be happy with one man, especially not with a man like Frederick Titman; according to my own experience and observation, of course.
Some women marry for love, but plenty of them marry for money. That’s what I thought at first about Julia. How else to explain why a woman like her would marry a man who was no more than five-one, if that, nearly bald, with watery eyes, a nose like a pear, and a belly that has seen too many hamburgers and fries and way too many beers. He was not a handsome man. And to top it off his last name was Titman. I’m an old-fashioned guy. I believe a woman should change her last name to that of her husband. However, with a name like that even I would not object should a woman decide not to take her husband’s last name and keep her own.
Of course, as it turned out, my assumption was way off its mark. It wasn’t the first time, either, that I was wrong, but I’m usually a little reluctant to admit that kind of thing.
