LOS ANGELES—Peering through the blinds into the glow of a nearby streetlight, local private eye Cliff Hardy confirmed Tuesday that it was hard for him to meet women who weren’t suspects in the murders of their own husbands, the mysterious circumstances of which he happened to be investigating at their behest. “I’d like to be in a relationship, but the only girls I ever meet are the ones who walk into my office—I look up and they’re just there, slowly pulling their gloves off, telling me some sob story about their dead husbands,” Hardy said from beneath a tan fedora, recalling the dozen or so women he’d met most recently, all of whom were wealthy dowagers primed to inherit their husbands’ multimillion-dollar oil empires, former Hollywood starlets next in line to run their husbands’ blockbuster movie studios, or femme fatales who married and then destroyed men just for the sport of it. “I need to find a way to meet women who don’t want to hire me to investigate the very murders they themselves turn out to be guilty of. It’s hard, because they give me these signals like they’re really into me, often sitting suggestively on my desk and flashing me a bit of thigh or taking a seductive drag off my cigarette. But then the next thing I know they’ve got a pistol pointed at me. What gives? Just once I’d like to meet a dame done up head-to-toe in a ravishing evening gown who isn’t trying to pin the disappearance of her rich husband on me! Maybe it’s time I got out of this town.” At press time, reports confirmed Hardy had struck out again after he agreed to have a drink with a woman, his vision started swirling, and he woke up to find he had been committed to a local mental institution.