Runner-up 3

Palmieri was a “let your fingers do the walking” kind of guy. After giving the cabbie an address in Hollywood, he got on his portable horn and jabbed some numbers that got him nowhere and brought out the worst of his vocabulary. Where the hell was Hans?

Finally, on the fourth number, fourth try, he got an answer.

“Surprise,” he said. “Santa Claus has come to town.”

“Where am I? I’ll tell you where I am. I’m in a cab on my way to Hollywood. You be there.”

Palmieri snapped the cellphone shut. He wasn’t planning on staying long -- he would silence the chick and get over to Falco’s and straighten out that meatball . . .

The cab pulled up in front of Jumbo’s Clown Room. Palmieri paid the cabbie and nodded to the bouncer, who greeted him with a “Good to see you back, Mr. P.”

Palmieri ran a pocket comb through his surgically enhanced full head of hair. He straightened his tie and squared his shoulders. This was a house of pleasure and pros, but still a guy wanted to look his best.

He entered the sleazy club and paused to adjust his eyes to the dim light. He looked around the room, half full of wannabe johns and pole dancers. She better be here, he thought.

He felt a tug at his sleeve. “Mr. Palmieri,” squeaked a tremulous voice.

“Yeah,” he said, looking down at the 5-foot-3 brunet with little gold pasties shaped like stars and some kind of fringed thingamabob around her hips. “Are you. . . . “

“Yes,” she said, cutting him off. She crooked her little finger and motioned him to follow.

When they were alone in a little cubicle, Carmen shut the door and turned the light up. A thin cotton blanket covered a mound on the floor. She whipped the cover off.

The battered, bloody corpse jolted him. Palmieri could barely recognize the face, but there was no doubt about who it was. “What the hell. . . .? Hans!”

“He came here to squeeze my whereabouts out of Jumbo,” Carmen explained. Jumbo was the elephant-sized owner of the Clown Room. “Jumbo didn’t appreciate his attitude, so he took care of things.”

Carmen had seen her share of dead bodies. She could be nonchalant about this mass of masticated muscle, except that this particular corpse had wanted to whack her.

“Jumbo was not happy about this man coming here to look for me.”

“As if I give a. . . .”

“You need to know, Mr. Palmieri,” she said, interrupting him with a surge of courage and cool she didn’t know she had, “that everything I know is on paper -- signed and witnessed -- and is in Jumbo’s safe.”

She paused and then continued, “If anything happens to me, Jumbo is to take that paper to. . . .”

Palmieri’s eyes reflected his shock.

“Jumbo said to tell you, Mr. Palmieri, that if you wish to live a long and happy life, forget that you know my name. . . .”

“What happens at Jumbo’s stays at Jumbo’s,” he quipped with a smirk, trying to hang on to some shred of perceived invincibility.

“Something like that,” she said, opening the door and sliding out into the darkness.

Helen Ann Thomas writes a column for a freebie weekly.