The neon was bleeding in West Berlin town,
When Moose Malloy surfaced and looked all around.
A giant of muscle, a mountain of dread,
In a loud, flashy coat and a hat on his head.
He’d spent eight long years in the state prison cell,
And he wanted his Velma, his beautiful girl.

He walked into Florian’s, looking for news,
And choked out the bouncer who gave him the blues.
I’m Marlowe, the finder, just watching the show,
As Moose threw the bodies like blocks in the snow.
The dive-bar was quiet, the owner was dead,
And the trail for the lady was bloody and red.

Then a new case arrived from a slick, fancy spark:
A gent named Lindsay Marriott, afraid of the dark.
He wanted a shield for a midnight exchange,
To buy back some jade in a canyon quite strange.
We drove to the cliffs where the ocean wind sighed,
And a blackjack swung down where the shadows would hide.

[…]

I woke with a headache, and Marriott was dead,
With the cold canyon gravel beneath his smashed head.
But a witness arose in the bright morning air,
A sharp little blonde with a cynical stare.
Anne Riordan looked past the lies of the state,
And helped me unravel the threads of our fate.

The trail led to Grayle, an old man of great wealth,
And his young, dazzling wife who was radiant with health.
Helen Grayle was a siren, a queen of the night,
With a past she kept hidden completely from sight.
She spun me in circles and offered her hand,
While the killers were moving across the gray sand.

They drugged me and threw me in Jules Amthor’s cell,
A fake psychic’s clinic that tasted of hell.
With a doctor named Sonderborg keeping the keys,
I fought through the smoke till I fell to my knees.
I broke through the windows, I ran through the mud,
With the taste in my mouth of the whiskey and blood.

[…]

The pieces came flashing like glass in the sun:
The lady of high-society held the smoking gun!
For Helen was Velma, the girl from the dive,
Who’d sold out the giant to stay rich and alive.
She’d murdered poor Marriott because he had known
The gutter-born secrets she’d buried in stone.

I brought Moose Malloy to her beach-house retreat,
To let the two lovers finally meet.
He stared at his Velma, his eyes full of grace,
But she looked on her giant with death in her face.
She drew a small pistol from under her vest,
And buried five bullets deep into his chest.

She fled down the coast line, a phantom of fright,
But the law tracked her down in the Bostonian night.
Before they could lock her inside of the cage,
She shot herself dead to conclude the last page.
The giant was quiet, the music was done,
And the lovely had said her final farewell to the sun.