“But she has these super weird mood swings,” Ursula said, spying on the nimble marionette perched on a high stool, vulturing over the microscope. “This isn’t that PMS thing everyone talks about, right?”
That made Gwen laugh. It was a good laugh, for someone who didn’t seem naturally inclined for it. “No, it’s not.”
“Does she have split personality or something?”
“Not at all. They have a whole separate personality apiece, each perfectly defined. Adrian and Zooey.”
“Adrian is…like, the jerk?”
Gwen smirked again. “Yeah, you could say that. Let’s just say he’s her brother.”
Ursula mouthed the word, astonished. Gwen opted for following the thread to the end.
“I used to be their doctor. One of them. I do research now. But I’ve been following their case since it fell in my hands.”
“What do you mean, ‘one of them’?”
“Well, I wasn’t the first person to diagnose them. They spent their whole childhood in institutions, tried different foster homes…Their real family abandoned them long ago. None of the doctors who treated them could figure out why this ‘schizophrenic hermaphrodite’ was always shouting to himself and needed his right hand to hold down his left. I was the one who told them apart. I listened to both, took DNA samples, and proved to the world that they were two different people. In biology, we call them chimeric twins. More specifically, Quain cenoencephalic chimera syndrome. Named after its discoverer, Gwyneth Temperance Quain.” She pointed at herself with a flourish; then she returned her attention to the laboratory. “Ayzee is the only known occurrence.”
Kimrean was watching some piece of lab equipment work (a centrifugator), slapping their knees and cheering at it as a child would to a toy hippodrome.
“So…” Ursula resumed. “She’s not a girl?”
“One half is.” Gwen gulped down the rest of her coffee. “Adrian is a little on the antisocial side; you must be patient with him.”
“Hey, Gwen!” Kimrean called. “Check this out.”
Gwen put out her cigarette and stood up: “But he’s charming when he’s having fun.”
She and Ursula hiked toward the laboratory—another workspace consisting of classic chemistry equipment and a few modern machines that felt awkwardly out of place. The wooden furniture was weathered as if it had been salvaged from the streets during a Minnesotan winter. Kimrean yielded the microscope to the doctor. All Ursula could see with her naked eye was a white, green, and black speck on the slide under the lens.
“Mold,” Gwen determined, leaning over the eyepiece. “Dead mold. It’s been sprayed with fungicide.”
“No, someone stepped on it. Sample comes from a wall in a garden; there was mold all over the foot of the wall, except for the part that was under the toes of whoever climbed up.”
“Then that someone was carrying fungicide on their soles,” Gwen resolved. “Some kind of floor disinfectant, maybe. Industrial cleaner?”
“I thought of that—no bleach.”
“Check for phenol.”
“I’m on it. You’re out of iron chloride.”
“I’ll add it to my shopping list.”
Ursula tried pinning her eyes to the microscope, but Adrian took the slide before she could see anything. With keenly meticulous fingers, he managed to split the speck of a sample in two, picked one of the halves with some pincers and dropped it in a test tube of water. Into another tube he dissolved a pinch of yellow powder. Carefully, he put two drops of the second solution into the first.
He stoppered the tube, shook it vigorously, and brought it to the lamp.
“Red is positive,” Gwen reminded him.
“I got purple,” Adrian said.
Gwen pouted, then turned toward the library and relieved a shelf of a giant-sized volume, multicolor Post-its sticking out between the pages. She queried the index, then a numbered table, and came up with the verdict. “Chlorophenol.”
Adrian jogged back to the kitchen area and googled some key words on the computer. A few clicks later he read for his audience, who were just coming after him: “ ‘Ortho-benzo-para-chlorophenol, used as an active ingredient in top-range disinfectants.’ Commercial brands recommend it for”—two more clicks—“operating rooms, sterile chambers, vet clinics.”
Ursula said, “So the killer is a doctor?”
“No,” said Adrian and Gwen in unison. Then Gwen expanded: “Hospital personnel don’t wear street shoes on duty.”
Kimrean’s left hand idly alighted on Ursula’s head, ruffling her hair.
“Well, it will mean something. Thanks, Gwen. By the way, I’m gonna need some you-know-what.”
“You leaving already?” Gwen said.
“Some what?” Ursula asked.
Adrian shushed her, then answered Gwen: “I’ve got a case to solve. And I gotta drive Little Miss Daisy here to the train station.”
“I’m eleven!” Ursula shouted after Kimrean when they left for the lab again. “Can you stop using prehistoric pop references when you talk about me?”
Gwen had moved toward a side cupboard near the kitchen that had been a school locker in a previous life. Ursula peeked while the doctor pulled out a small case and checked the syringes inside.
“What’s that?”
“Diarctorol,” Gwen answered. “A psychoactive drug derived from amphetamine. It stimulates the left hemisphere, which in Ayzee relaxes the right one. In other words, it puts Zooey to sleep, so that Adrian has more room to operate.”
Ursula did not like that picture.
“Does Zooey know about this?”
“They know the same things—they share a brain. But it’s one thing to know and another thing to be aware of knowing.”
She closed the locker as Kimrean jogged back to them, pocketing the vial from their Detective Kit™. On passing Ursula, they fixed both eyes on her and gave her a silent one-dimensional smile while their right hand took the case from Gwen and the left scratched their belly.
“Come back soon,” Gwen said. She then turned to Ursula: “You too, if you like.”
“We will,” Kimrean promised, planting a little kiss on the doctor’s cheek. “Bye, Mom.”
They popped back onto the catwalk, the sun already falling beneath the toxic smog.
* * *
—
Six p.m. A.Z. and Ursula sat on one of the red benches on platform nine in the Caltrain station under Fourth and King Streets.
ZOOEY: …so it’s very important to stay hydrated and always buy from a trusted dealer, because one day you meet a nice old hippie lady on Haight Street and you think, “Oh, she’s all organic and everything, what could go wrong?” so you drop some of her homemade acid and next thing you know you’re in the back of a van with a cow and three rednecks en route to blow up a power station, and they’re all talking about ditching the cow but you won’t have it ’cause that cow saved your life, goddamn it, so you and the cow run across the border and you end up in an STD clinic in northern Mexico, and there, my friend, they do things to you I do not wish upon my worst enemy. (Pause.) Well, okay, I do wish them on Pitbull—but no one else!
Ursula was leaning on the edge of the bench, hugging her bag of purchases from City Lights.
“What’s acid?”
The PA system announced the imminent arrival of the 6:15 Express Caltrain to San Carnal.
“Oh,” Zooey said, sincerely disappointed. “That’s your train.”
“Yup.” Ursula nodded. “Back to my monitored, goon-patrolled desert fortress.”
“Sounds like Dick Cheney’s favorite home decor magazine.”
Ursula didn’t laugh. “At least you’ll get rid of me for a while,” she said.
“Hey,” Zooey complained. “That hurt.”
“Not your
brother.”
“Don’t worry about him; he’s in his thinking corner.”
“Really?” She pulled off a tiny smile. “Can you tell what he’s thinking?”
Zooey’s sight line strayed for a second.
“He’s…calculating how different leg injuries would affect an Asian male’s average footprint depth and stride length.”
“You can read his thoughts?”
“They’re not his alone. It’s…like sharing a dorm room. You can mind your own business, but you’re hearing the other guy all the time; at any point you can turn and see what he’s doing. He has a more accurate way to explain it, but not nearly as graphic.”
The hurtling train prevented the conversation from continuing, clanking and puffing like a mad fire-breathing red dragon. It slowed down just as angrily to an exhausted, resentful stop.
A door opened right in front of their bench. It took all of Ursula’s will to stand up.
“Will I see you again?” she asked.
“Sure!” Zooey said. “We’re gonna see a lot of each other; you’re part of the case now. You’re the femme fatale.”
“What’s that?”
“Femme fatale? It’s an archetype: the devious, beautiful woman with a dark past and compromising knowledge, playing other characters like chess pawns and getting the hero into trouble. That’s who you are now. Innocent but dangerous.”
“But I don’t want to cause you trouble.”
“Oh, please—trouble is necessary. It’s what moves the plot forward. And your presence is a breath of fresh air; this case oozes testosterone. Drug cartel, undercover cops—this would be a sausage factory without you, girl. Don’t worry about us, you’re doing great. You do you.”
She hadn’t stood up; she was leaning forward, eyes level with the child’s. Ursula smiled, amused, repeating the words femme fatale to herself so she could google them later, and sticking a hand out.
“Been a pleasure, Zooey.”
They shook hands politely. Ursula turned to the panting train before her, stepped toward it. A couple feet short of the doors, she spun on her heel: “Good-bye, Adrian.”
Kimrean’s head turned sideways some ten degrees. The lipless mouth was again a straight line, neutral. He didn’t say anything.
Ursula climbed onto the train. She chose a seat away from the platform, and she overstretched the ritual of carefully settling her shopping bags and folding her jacket on the seat across from her in order not to have to peek through the window before the car started moving. Which did not take long to happen.
The train left, as impatient and loud as it had come, red dragon shrieks and fiery puffs disappearing into the eastbound tunnel.
* * *
—
Night.
After several hours of silent contemplation at the pubs in North Beach, A. Z. Kimrean climbed up the Hitchcock-lit stairwell of their building on Fisherman’s Wharf and, upon reaching the third-floor landing, noticed the yellow-and-black police tape X-marking the door to their quarters, partially striking out the fresh shiny vinyl letters of their names. With barely a thought apiece, they stooped under the tape, unlocked the door, and repossessed their office.
There was no need to switch the lights on: the cracking sound of debris and bullet casings under their imitation Converse indicated that everything was exactly as they left it. Through the shattered window, the high-power lights of the night-shift stevedores on the docks shone bright enough to confirm the hazy recollections of the fight choreography from that morning. The daily batch of neckless thugs might have made it out alive after all, judging by the absence of chalked silhouettes on the floor—or maybe they had been dragged out by the firemen and died downstairs. In any case, their ghosts would not inconvenience Kimrean for the night. The exploding propane canister had taken out the one kitchen cupboard, but overall it had not worsened the damage inflicted on the rest of the building. Kimrean spent a few minutes flapping the debris off the bedsheets, rearranging their few personal items, and restoring the toaster to its seat on the desk and the chessboard to its dais. The ceiling fan didn’t work.
They stood for a while within reach of a cool draft coming through the window, smoking a cigarette and listening to the boat horns from the bay.
Idly, their right hand lifted a white knight to h4.
The left prodded a black pawn to f2.
The telephone rang, somewhere in the bedroom area, under the bed.
Kimrean put out the cigarette and picked up the receiver.
“Your car is in one piece,” Adrian said.
“Ayzee! You gotta come back to San Carnal, now!”
(Removing their hat and placing it on the coat stand.) “No can do—I just put my jammies on.”
“It’s Frankie!”
An iris glimmered in the dark like an orange-brown standby light.
“Frankie?”
“The middle Lyon! He’s dead, with a red flower on his chest!”
“Don’t call the cops!” Adrian shouted into the receiver while they plopped their hat back on their head. “This time the scene is all mine!”
5
It was a perfect night for driving aimlessly under the stars. And Kimrean happened to have an aim, which justified doubling the state speed limit. Everything was in their favor.
The case had taken a nasty turn—nasty enough to make Adrian think about it while driving. Adrian always tried hard not to speculate on a case while it was still developing, and he passionately despised detectives who thought in voice-over. He considered it a cheap trick: filling those boring transition scenes between action sequences with inner monologues summing up the events thus far and building airborne castles of hypotheses just to meet page quotas and comply with publishing contracts that assign value to literary works by the ounce. If such paragons of investigative incompetence spent less time sitting on their asses baffled by how strange the mystery was and more time proactively solving it, they might actually catch some criminals and even spare a couple square miles of Amazon rain forest, Kimrean thought while driving, fine-tuning the radio, lighting a cigarette, and scratching their crotch at the same time. All being said, the case was strange. Because—at the risk of stooping to as low a writing standard as posing rhetorical questions in the narrator’s voice—what was the point of killing Frankie? If Mikey Lyon’s murder was the declaration of war, Frankie’s was redundant. That, or the plateau stage of a blitzkrieg: a war declared, fought, and won in one week.
Those were Adrian’s thoughts. During the same interval, Zooey thought that she could murder an egg and bacon bagel, that Jon Stewart looked like he was not naturally good in bed but he was definitely worth teaching, and that someone should just create a wormhole to travel eighty million light-years away, then peek back at Earth with a very big telescope and finally settle whether the T-rex looked like the one in Jurassic Park or more like a big angry hen.
* * *
—
Frank Lyon had been the owner of three Latin dance clubs in the city, but they murdered him because of something else. Death surprised him in his office above the Luxuria—a venue for bawdy theme nights on Palm Boulevard, in the cluster of yellow and red lights that is San Carnal’s least insalubrious nightlife. Danny Mojave had complied with Kimrean’s demands, as expected: at their arrival, there were no police cars to be seen and the club had been closed but not evacuated. Rent-by-the-hour limos vomited wave after wave of squawking boys in Hugo Boss and girls in Elvira the Mistress of Dark’s Salvation Army donations onto the sidewalk, feeding a long line of people too loud and drunk and horny to notice they weren’t even moving.
Kimrean sneaked the Camaro into the side alley and pulled up in front of the back entrance. Danny Mojave, in a tailored suit jacket over a daringly open-collared shirt, stood in the company of a bigger, less stylish thug in gray and a couple club boun
cers in black turtlenecks. He checked the integrity of the car’s fender first, then his wristwatch.
“That was fast.”
“Your car makes a funny noise at one twenty,” Kimrean greeted, striding past him toward the entrance. The yawning red metal door led into a very narrow passageway between cinder block walls; at the other end was another red door; halfway in between both lay a corpse—or rather sat, for the passage was too narrow to fit him obliquely. It was a thick-necked man in track pants and a tank top, possibly another club bouncer. An earbud was still lodged in his right ear; the left one had been displaced by the bullet.
Adrian stood over the body, picturing it the way the man must have stood an hour before, with his back against the right wall. He pointed two fingers at that picture and fired.
“He didn’t even hear the killer come in,” he enunciated. “He was an obstacle, not the objective.”
“His name was Andrew,” Danny commented.
Adrian frisked the body. “Was he the only bodyguard?”
“The bodyguard is upstairs. This guy was just here as a precaution; Frankie was the least of our concerns.” He rubbed his eyes. “I put him here to keep him out of trouble.”
“You’re awesome at this protection business.”
“Fuck you, Adrian.”
“Tell it to Zooey—that’s her department.”
Kimrean inspected the head wound. Blood covered the guy’s ear and jaw.
“Who has a handkerchief?” Adrian asked the audience. The bouncers took a while to check their pockets and shake their heads. “You, take off your tie.”
The thug in the gray suit checked Danny first, removed his necktie, handed it to the P.I., and whined when the latter used it to wipe some blood off Andrew’s temple. Using their own thumbnail as reference, Kimrean measured the bullet hole: 9mm Parabellum.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves for that?” a bouncer asked.
“It’s okay, I don’t mind getting dirty.”
This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us Page 9