The Gilded Lily

Being a private investigator means two things. You can be sure you'll run into trouble, and you can never be sure you'll get out of it. Not much you can do about it, I guess, except, like Julie always says, Walk self-dly, Peter Troy.

And now Peter Troy investigates the Gilded Lily. It's an accepted rule of society that you never ask a woman or age. And this is a very ironic thing since dolls never look their ages anyway.

When they're kids in their teens, they make up to look like they're in their twenties. In their twenties, they make up to look like their dolls in their teens. And when they're 40, they beat their brains out figuring out how to look like they're 25.

So if you happen to know their ages, what difference does it make? I'm asking this question not because I think you can answer it any more than I can, but just to make my point that it's a wacky world we live in.

The way my secretary Julie puts it, the world was okay, like I came along and who wants to know a woman's age anyway. Well, the answer to that is, nobody. Except another woman. All of which brings me to the case of a certain French doll by the name of Suzanne Perroil, and two other characters with the unlikely titles of Johnny Swift and Gloria Gay.

Johnny, why don't we get married? Why don't we take a trip around the world? No, no, I mean, why not? You don't get the message, darling. Money, that's why. We don't need money to get married.

That's the whole trouble with the world today. It costs nothing to get married. The trap should cost a fortune, and people wouldn't go rushing into something they cut off. You're not making sense. We are making sense.