Not a Ghost of a Chance Sleuth Will Investigate This Missing-Person Case

The missing-person request seemed routine at first.

A man asked Long Beach private investigator Frank Crescentini to find his wife, whom he’d last seen four years earlier. Asked where the sighting had been, the would-be client named a local cemetery. And what she was doing there? The man said she had just been buried. She was dead, he explained. But, he added, her spirit was stalking him.

Crescentini told him in so many words that he didn’t do missing-spirit jobs.

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Bad detective work on my part: Crescentini and I got together after I mentioned seeing a private investigator’s license plate--LA PI--on the mean streets of Long Beach. I wondered how a sleuth could conduct surveillance with a car advertising his profession.

Crescentini phoned to say it was his license but assured me that, when he was on the job, he used unmarked cars.

At his recommendation, we met at a joint called Polly’s. I figured it would be a dark, mysterious bar. It was a coffeehouse. Sam Spade’s spirit wasn’t stalking us.

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Tough to slice: On the subject of altered restaurant names, David Allen, a columnist for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, served up a pizza joint with an odd sign.

After Bulletin photographer Jeff Malet snapped a shot of it (see photo), Allen says, the sign was covered “with a banner touting how the restaurant had changed hands.” Thus, the new name appeared to be Under New Management Pizza.

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Another retread: “Years ago, my ex-husband wanted to start a used car business on a shoestring budget with his friend Mark,” wrote Wendy Mollett of Studio City. “They found a long defunct Arco station on Los Feliz Boulevard and simply painted one big letter in front of the already fading sign to create Marco. The business, and the husband, didn’t last long.”

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Taking another spin at it: I’m still hearing about the newspaper misprint of a spinet piano, which came out “spin-it.” At least I think it should have said spinet.

But I’m no longer sure after having heard from Jennifer Devine of Sherman Oaks and Paul Daniels of Huntington Beach. They cited the example of Keith Emerson of the rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Daniels remembered an early 1970s concert at the now-defunct Ontario Motor Speedway in which Emerson had “a grand piano that lifted up and spun in circles end-over-end while he played.”

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Lacking only a business card: As for the ad that appeared here about a chatty dog described in part as “house spoken ... spade,” Barbara Kussman of Encino says:

“Wow, Steve, you missed a terrific opportunity to point out that THIS is a dog that could clean up for himself! Maybe even start a pooper-scooper business.”

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miscelLAny: Wouldn’t you just know it? Everyone else is shivering in the Southland, but the sun is out in Beverly Hills. Really out.

At least that was the indication in a recent National Weather Service forecast spotted by Joel Davis of L.A. (see accompanying).

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 77083; by fax at (213) 237-4712; by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012; and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.