You left Blanche to fend off the queries, waiting for the one phone call that mattered, and went out for a beer. Several actually, ending up at Loui’s talking with Joe the bartender about the meaning of life, having by now switched to the hard stuff. Joe’s view in sum was that life was full of sickness, loneliness, corruption, cruelty, paranoia, betrayal, murder, cynicism, impotence, and fear, and then there was the dark side. Sometimes you gotta just dummy up and let your pants fall where they may, he said, somewhat enigmatically. You realized that what was wrong with Joe was that he was a teetotaler.
Across the room at a dining table sat a fat guy in a white linen suit with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, delicately putting away the back half of a cow. Rings on all his fingers, even his thumbs. He looked familiar. Joe didn’t know who he was but said he was a loner who came in from time to time to eat a few dinners. Probably you’d seen him in here before. Joe thought he might be a thin guy disguised as a fat guy.
Maybe. But he sure eats like a fat guy. Everything but the tail and horns.
He sometimes has those with cheese and coffee, Joe said.
On a hunch (a hunch is to a gumshoe what a skirt is to a letch: a tease; pursuit; trouble), when he lit up a cigar, paid, donned his panama, and left, you decided to step out into the drizzle and follow him. You knew zip plus toy soldiers about Mister Big, but you figured it was likely his nickname was for more than power alone. Even if the guy was only a mock-Mister B, it might be interesting to see where he goes, and you’d have something to report to the widow the next time she turned up. At first you were on the street, watching in the classic surveillance manner his slow waddling movements in the reflections of shop windows, but then at some point you were in the alley. How that happens is almost always a mystery. You have privileged access to it down your back stairs, maybe everyone does, but if you step out the front door the alley is hard to find. You can’t see it and then, what do you know, you’re in it. The fat man in the panama and linen suit zigzagged along, never looking back, but you had the feeling he knew you were back there, paddling through the garbage, trying to pretend you were just out for your daily constitutional. It was probably time to forget it and turn around, but you weren’t sure where you were and were as likely to find your way out going forwards as backwards. And, besides, the more you followed him, the more convinced you were that this was the guy you were looking for. He was moving faster and faster, he maybe ate like a fat man but he moved like a thin man, maybe Joe was right, it was hard to keep up. Finally, he was running flat out, pivoting sharply around corners like a mechanical carnival target on ball bearings, hopping nimbly over obstacles, darting down narrow passageways, somehow skirting puddles that you splashed through, a pale luminosity flitting through the moist shadowy alley like a will-o’-the-wisp, and soon you were only catching fleeting glimpses of him in the distance and then you lost him altogether.
You leaned against a boarded-up door to get your breath, torch a fag. Where were you? No idea. But you could hear rustlings, knew you’d been had, knew your situation was dangerous. You’d pocketed what remained of the widow’s roll for operating expenses (Blanche on the phone rolled her eyes and shook her yellow curls) and though you’d blown some of it in Loui’s there was plenty left and you worried now about getting mugged, or worse. These guys could smell money like sniffer dogs, even in the rain, and they usually preferred to ice their victims rather than merely threaten them, as it gave them more undisturbed pocket-poking time. The alley branched out in five or six directions from here, mostly you supposed into rat-infested dead ends where killers lurked. Your .22 was back in the office; you had nothing to defend yourself with except your fists. Glancing around for a weapon of some sort, your eye fell on a big ivory coat button and, keeping your back to the wet wall, you snatched it up in case you ran into Mad Meg. Beyond it was an old yellow tennis ball soaking in a puddle, and beyond that a red plastic swizzle stick. The swizzle stick was in front of what looked at first glance like a back door, but turned out to be a low underpass into another dark tangle of alleyways. A brass button off a military coat, a knotted shoelace, another bald tennis ball, a green-and-gold candy wrapper. These objects might have fallen out of Meg’s bagged household effects as she passed through here, or she might have dropped them on purpose. Either way, following their trail was your only shot. At the very least, if you came upon her, you could maybe wrestle the kitchen knife away from her, use it to fight your way out of here. It was a kind of scavenger hunt, chased by muffled footsteps, tumbling ashcan lids, the squawk of a startled cat being kicked.
Suddenly, picking up a pair of crimson-and-blue ice-skate shoelaces, you found yourself in a blind alley. A trap? An aluminum candy wrapper lay like a lottery ticket in front of a puckery patch of wet asphalt. There was a day-glo orange tennis ball, bright as fresh fruit, beyond the patch in front of the windowless brick wall that closed off the alley, but on your left, closer by, between two battered ashcans standing like woebegone sentries, lay a swizzle stick with a little flag on it that you remembered giving her. Mad Meg had saluted it, then picked her nose with it. You chose that over the orange ball, and as you stooped to pick it up, a red-eyed assailant in old army fatigues came charging out of a shadowy hole in the opposite wall with a switchblade. Oh shit. You braced yourself, yanking one of the ashcans in front of yourself, but when the guy stepped onto the puckery patch, that was as far as he got: his feet stuck, sank, the asphalt sucking him down, his screams smothered by the falling rain. There was a final wet sucking sound and your attacker was gone, nothing left but the switchblade and the echo of his final curse. You skirted the patch to gather up the orange tennis ball, saw the pink cloth-coat button in the mouth of the hole in the wall whence your attacker came, crouched down, picked it up, and crept through.
You were in the alleyway behind your office building. You left your collection of memorabilia in the hole along with a button ripped from your own trenchcoat and the switchblade. All right, it made Meg all the more dangerous next time she rushed you, but you owed her as much.
The office was dark. Blanche had left. There was a full-page note detailing all the incoming calls. Three had seemed promising enough to send them photographs (they were marked). She also left her panties. In case you need these, her note said. That Blanche.
You were exhausted from your ordeal in the alley and went over to lie down on the sofa, but somebody was already lying there. A dead body? No. Your client, the widow. Still veiled and primly sheathed in black, but her shoes were off. There’s something more I should tell you, Mr. Noir, she said.
AT LOUI’S, HAVING MADE IT THROUGH THE SODDEN alley dressed only in your trench and spongy gums, you explain you’re on the lam from the law and have to lay low for a time. But Loui has a problem with that, Flame, too. It turns out Blue has already been here, asking questions, making threats of arrest and worse. The place might get closed down, Loui says, and there’s a cop on the force Flame refused to play kinky games with who might be looking to get back at her.
It’s a bum rap, Loui. Somebody shot the morgue attendant with my gun while I was out cold and on ice in the crypt.
Loui, his bald pate sweating, is sympathetic, but no dice. There are others, too, the bodies are piling up. He is chewing his manicured nails and casting nervous glances over his shoulder and, much as he loves you, he wants you to move on. Flame says: The buckwheat in the suit has been here, too, asking for you. Blondie, she adds admiringly, helping you out of your soggy trenchcoat.
Yeah, the Hammer. I met him on the way.
Loui is insistent in his wheedling way, but Flame takes pity on your cold wet naked condition (Joe the bartender clucks disparagingly at the sight, pours you a brandy) and offers you her changing room for the night, provided you stay hidden in the wardrobe cupboard if she has any company. I can take care of the captain in ways Loui can’t, she says. Loui, scowling, disappears into his office with a bottle. Just have to hope he doesn’t turn stoolie and call
Blue in. Flame and Joe read your toe tag and agree that it’s good advice but know you’ll never follow it, stubborn dickhead that you are.
In the changing room, Flame applies a soothing ointment to the festering tattoo (it has been itching and you’ve been scratching at it with dirty fingernails), works Blanche’s lotion into your chafed hide, and warms other parts with her tongue, bemusedly combing your bleached hair with her long red nails. Your other hair is still wrapped in bandages. She wants to know who it is that’s following you. You don’t know. Haven’t even noticed. She offers you a frilly bathrobe and a pair of Victorian bloomers from her days as a stag-film actress. They are more comfortable than Blanche’s, but open in the crotch so they don’t hold anything. She says she’ll get word to Blanche that you’re here so she can drop your clothes by before you head off tomorrow and tells you to lie down on the chaise lounge and she’ll tell you a story.
WHEN I WAS JUST A KID, PHIL, THIS GUY TOOK ME under his wing. I knew he was trouble, he had badboy written all over him—literally, around each nipple and his navel like eye sockets and down the length of his dick, though when it was hard, it said: BEARDED BALONEY—but I was young and madly in love, and brutal as he was to others, he treated me like a princess. Of course, he was insanely jealous. I didn’t dare look at another man—it was like a death sentence. Any guy who looked my way and grinned or winked or called out something simply disappeared. Sometimes I thought I could use this as a kind of magic power to erase people I had a grudge against, like the guy who first raped me, for example. But I don’t hold grudges long and in truth, after the rough stuff was over, that guy and I became friends and sometime lovers and I wished him no harm. Just the same, he made an attempt to get hold of me, thinking I might be in trouble, and that was the end of him. Badboy had a little gun that went “spat!” when you fired it. That’s all, just “spat!” and some guy’s motor didn’t work any more. He had a twin brother who was a cop and they loved and hated each other the way brothers do, and several times had tried to kill each other, but maybe without enough conviction. Badboy ran a bigtime protection and extortion racket, and the crooked chief of police was one of many under his thumb. The chief wanted him dead and out of his life, and assigned Badboy’s cop brother to nailing him for his crimes, telling him to bring him in dead or alive, knowing which way it would have to be. My lover knew all this from friends on the force. He also heard that his brother had his eye on me or wanted him to think he did. One of the two—I’m not sure which, their voices were just alike, but probably the cop brother—called me and told me what your tattoo is telling you. Well, this was scary. I realized I was being used, without being able to do anything about it, to set a trap. And if it was my lover who had called me, it was even worse, especially when I discovered his little spat-gun in my purse. Or one just like it. Was I supposed to kill the guy following me? The cop, one would think, but my lover often followed me out of jealousy. I felt like a character in two different stories at the same time, as if the twin brothers had doubled me, too. I was setting the trap in one life, springing it in the other, and helpless in both. I didn’t know what to do, but then . . .
IT’S A GOOD STORY AND YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE (gotta know, gotta know), but you can’t help it, you fall asleep, and from there the story takes other turnings of its own. You become her lover, or else the cop, and the other guy is the fat man in the white suit and panama hat you once tailed through the alley. Are you his double? No, this is a different caper. Nevertheless, you are quite fat and you cannot move very fast. You also have the disadvantage of being dressed in women’s underwear. Maybe you are the Flame person, not the lover or the cop. The widow is in it, but more like the chief of police. Her brother is in it somewhere and he is said also to be wearing women’s underpants and a bra. You both have toe tags. Is he your double? No, you don’t have a bra. Things are becoming clear at last, the case is almost solved. At the same time, you are about to be shot. Neither happens. You wake up.
I think Joe put something in my drink to knock me out, you say.
Yeah. It’s called alcohol. It’s morning, handsome, and your clothes are here. We had another visit from Blue and his boys last night. Time to hit the road, Phil. You’re not safe in this place.
When does a man get a breakfast in this life? you want to know, but the question is received as a gratuitous comment. You return Flame’s bloomers and pull on your own clothes, laundered, pressed, and folded: the old black pinstripe suit with the baggy knees and threadbare elbows, a white shirt, frayed but clean and crisply starched, dark tie, and black socks and shoes, holes in the heels of the former, in the soles of the other. Blanche has already folded a white handkerchief into the jacket lapel pocket, dropped a loaded bill clip in the pants. Collar and tie pins, cuff links, rumpled fedora, borrowed .45 in your trenchcoat pocket. In short, a somewhat seedy version of any self-respecting gangster’s threads.
There’s a basement link to the bookies next door, they’ll show you the safe route from there, Flame says, handing you sandwiches and a bottle in a brown paper bag and a passkey and slapping your butt affectionately. See you, baby.
WHEN YOUR LATE DEPARTED CLIENT, THE VEILED widow, turned up on your couch in your darkened office after your mazy trials in the alley, she also had a story about a brother. My brother has come to the city, she said from under her veil, peaked by the tip of her nose. He says he has come to protect me, but he is a naïve boy, easily influenced, and I fear for him here. And for myself.
The football player.
No, basketball. Does that make a difference?
His hands.
Oh, I see. His hands?
Listen, I’m bushed, kid. Mind if I stretch out there beside you while you tell me your story?
I certainly do mind, Mr. Noir. You stay where you are. My brother, as I have suggested, is a likeable easy-going fellow, a playful smalltown boy with a big heart who, in spite of our father’s stern discipline, is inclined to get into ridiculous trouble from time to time. Often this is due to his rather singular passion for hardboiled detective novels and films. He is an impressionable fellow and he likes to act out what he has seen or read, or perhaps he feels compelled to, driven by some inner need to create a persona for himself, otherwise lacking.
Well, there are worse lives to take up than a private eye’s, you grumbled, somewhat defensively. Her hands, not those of a basketball player, were folded softly on her belly. Not much flesh was visible; you had to enjoy what there was. They were crowned, as a small knoll might be crowned by a lighthouse, by her large glittering ring. A lure. For catching bigger fish than you.
I am afraid, Mr. Noir, that it excites him rather to emulate the villains. She sighed and her hands rose and fell as if lifted by a gentle wave. So he has robbed some banks, turned to gambling and easy women, killed a few people, and so on, behavior that may well be tolerated in the city, but is not acceptable in our little town. He submits meekly to our father’s chastisements after each episode, but seems drawn ineluctably toward a life of flamboyant crime. The romance novels I have bought him appear to have had no effect at all.
She was flexing her toes in her black stockings as a bird of prey might. You wondered if she painted her toenails. Her toe-flexing caused her thighs to ripple faintly under the black skirt. If she lifts one knee, you thought, she’s going to have to fight you off. So, you and your brother are not getting on, and you think—
Oh no, on the contrary. We love each other very much—too much, some say, reflecting the oppressive misunderstandings that prevail in small communities such as ours—but that’s just the point. Just think, Mr. Noir. To be the perfect villain, one would have to try to kill that which he most loves, and it would be all the more villainous to accept money from others for doing so.
Others? A rhetorical question. You knew the plot here, at least as devised or imagined by the widow. What you really wanted to know was what she and her brother were up to to set off those oppressive misunderstandings.
> I have reason to believe he has taken employment with that man whose name I have given you. The one you are supposed to be following. Have you any news?
Well, I had an eye on him just now, or someone like him, but he got away.
You must be more assiduous, she said, and that wave rolled under her hands once more. I am depending on you, Mr. Noir. My life is in your hands. She turned her head to look at them, the veil flattening over her cheek and dropping off her nose, and you looked at them: gnarled, calloused, muddied by the alley muck you’d been crawling through, the fingernails filthy, the knuckles made knobby by frequent breakage. You opened them up and stared into their palms. They looked like death to you. Maybe to her, too. She was no longer looking at them, her beak poking up at the ceilinged shadows as before. It was as if she had given up on them. In one of your most celebrated cases, all you had to work with was a severed hand. From the part you were able to deduce the whole and, indirectly, solve a crime. You were younger then and drinking less. You have implied that my father may have behaved improperly with me, she said at last, and, alas, that is true. My dear sweet mother had stopped baking pies and had slipped into some crippling addiction and spent the day cursing the deity. I had no one else to turn to, so I asked my brother to hide in the closet the next time my father visited and, if necessary, to come to my rescue. But instead, he only kept watching. After that, he was always in the closet. I thought that letting him do what father did would end this perverse behavior, but it was not the sight of me that excited him. It was father.
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