bottles of whiskey. There were beverages in that little store from all over the world.
Ellis operated the store all by himself. It was a corner store. He wrapped each bottle that he sold in a brown paper. Many bottles were put in cardboard boxes with paper stuffed in between them. It was a small store, one display window, one front door, one sales room, shelves on three walls, a counter with a cash register on the back wall, a rear room for stock room, and a back door.
In the rear stock room on one wall Ellis had collected and displayed thirty calendars. They were obtained free from local businesses. The wall had room for them. The scenes displayed were all separately different. This was a place of art. This was a private gallery of commercial advertising. People liked to stand there at that wall and spend time looking at each one in turn. This was nice but on the first day of each month, Ellis had the arduous chore of flipping them all to the next month.
The front parking lot was dirt. There was a bathroom. The floor was worn out brown and tan linoleum tiles. The walls and ceiling were old dingy plaster with dirty wallpaper from years ago. The building was wood painted brown but now weathered, dirty and had that run down slum look to it. Trucks delivered to either the front or rear doors. In the stock room, he had a crime lab on one wall. Ellis ran the liquor store for six days a week, closed on Sunday. He made enough money to live off of. He had a telephone and business cards. Ellis got calls for detective work sporadically. He did this work usually when the store was closed. It opened at 9:00 A.M. and closed at 6:00 P.M. Evenings were enough for him to do private eye work. He had a liquor store and detective licensers on the wall. He liked detective work more than a regular police job. It did not have the routine police chores and paperwork. He was the boss. He got to analyze crime scenes, testimonies, evidence, and size up the people that were involved at the place the crime occurred. Detective work was more of a challenge to him. A lot of unknown factors and the hard facts had to be weighed for a logical interpretation.