Cheap Detectives

Philip Marlowe got $25 a day plus expenses. That was a fair amount of money in 1946, when Humphrey Bogart portrayed Raymond Chandler's fictional private eye in The Big Sleep. Marlowe would be stunned by what inflation has done to the price of detective work. Today, the typical gumshoe charges at least $35 an hour for snooping and stakeouts.

Thinking that the public must be in great need of cut-rate sleuths, Deanna Short, a former policewoman, opened the Cheap Detective Agency a year ago in Anaheim, Calif. She borrowed the name from the title of a 1978 Neil Simon movie in which a bumbling Peter Falk spoofs Bogart. For $15 an hour, Short's 22 male and female investigators will shadow a wayward wife, track down a runaway teen or collar an embezzler. The agency has already had nearly 1,000 clients. When a Los Angeles retailer hired her firm to crack an internal theft ring, one of the Cheap Detectives posed as a store employee and gathered evidence that led to 35 arrests.

Short, who prefers casual jerseys to trench coats, began her undercover career 14 years ago, when she posed as a drug user or sometimes as a prostitute for the narcotics and vice divisions of the Buena Park, Calif., police department. She says her investigators are less expensive than her competitors' because she hires inexperienced young people and trains them herself. Business has been so good that Short is opening a new branch in San Bernardino, Calif., and even has visions of franchising her discount detective agency.

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