Upon standing up, Adrian noticed the change in Danny’s appearance since the previous afternoon—or rather Zooey noticed and nudged Adrian. Their friend had a darker look tonight, uninfluenced by his dark hair, brow, and style. That was all still there, but there was something deeper, trapped under his gangster cover, dimming his skin like a storm darkens the clouds. It was probably just crippling anxiety, Adrian concluded.
“Andrew was standing here, the murderer kicked that door open and shot him before he even noticed,” Adrian captioned, actually trying to be comforting. “Considering the business he was in, it’s about the best way to go.”
That ought to do it. He leaped over the stiff and walked the rest of the passageway.
The next room was a storage space for crates of liquor and orphaned sofas; it was so small, Adrian didn’t need to stop to inventory it.
“Video,” he said, pointing at the CCTV camera on the ceiling.
“Cameras are on rotation; we’re checking them,” Danny said, hurrying after Kimrean, who was already on to the next room. This one offered several paths; Kimrean picked the one that led farthest away from the booming music on the dance floor. They crossed through an empty kitchen, then climbed two flights of stairs and landed on a new straight corridor with wood-paneled walls and red carpet. In the center lay the bodyguard, facedown, head pointing toward the entrance, right arm stretched forward, a dropped Glock near his hand. Adrian didn’t even slow down while narrating:
“The bodyguard hears the first shot, sounds the alarm, then comes this way to investigate, runs into me, and I take him out.”
He had already reached the body when he noticed something on the stiff’s pants: a couple red droplets that didn’t belong there.
“Whoops.” (Checks the door he just came through.) “Okay, this one did have time to shoot; he nicked my side.” (Points at the door; Danny and his crew turn that way to find the bullet hole in the doorframe, a couple inches below the upper hinge.) “I must be really tough or really angry, ’cause I didn’t falter.” (Kneels down, rubs a finger on the blood drop.) “The blood print is gravitational; no arterial spurt.” (Licks his finger.) “A little low on sodium.”
He looked up to find Danny and the bouncers staring like cavemen in a David Copperfield show. Kimrean’s face split in a smile.
“Just kidding. How am I gonna know that just by tasting his blood?” (Stands up; to Danny, in confidence.) “Really, though—he is low in sodium.” (Points at the doorframe.) “I’ll be needing that bullet.”
A brief hesitation rippled through the men. Kimrean realized and picked up the sentence again: “Sooo I will recover it myself, ’cause no one else here knows how to do it since none of you are cops.” Then they resumed their way, while Zooey smugly sidenoted: “Nice save there.”
They went through the last door, and the last room scored a simple “Wow.”
Neither the scarlet wall-to-wall carpet nor the crimson fleur-de-lis wallpaper mitigated the bright pool of gore in the middle of the room. Frankie had died a few steps from his desk, the contents of his skull spread partially under it, a single red flower drinking from his red-soaked tuxedo shirt.
“Okay,” Kimrean said appreciatively as Danny and the others joined them. “Point-blank to the head. But it looks like there were punches first. Give me the timeline.”
“12:08, George here receives the alarm from the bodyguard and comes this way; he was backstage. 12:12, I get a call. 12:21, I get here.”
“So you found this?” Kimrean asked George—the thug whose necktie he had ruined earlier. “How long between getting the alarm and reaching this room?”
“Uh…A minute? Maybe two? I couldn’t hear well because of the music.”
“Let’s say two minutes,” Adrian settled. “So I barge in, Frankie’s standing up here to see what’s happening outside…and I punch his face!” He pointed at the corpse’s chest; the blood on his shirt had to have come from his broken nose. “Then I stop, because…because Frankie doesn’t hit me back?”
A humming among the bouncers seemed to confirm the hypothesis timidly. It is bad manners to trample over a man’s grave—especially before he’s lain in it.
“Yeah, I see. I was expecting a street fighter like Mikey, but Frankie’s not like that. The first blow stuns him; he freezes. He’s scared shitless. (Pointing at the body’s pants.) On his way, at least. And I’m just standing here, watching him. Must have been awkward. And all the while, the anger’s subsiding. And my side wound is beginning to sting. No point in beating him to death. So I finish him.”
Kimrean scanned the environs. The room, all in red and black with gold details—the quills on the desk, the frames around the autographed pictures of Univision celebrities—constituted an accurate answer to the old philosophical question: What if two Romanian whorehouse owners had a son who wanted to be an office decorator? It was elliptical in shape, with one door on each side. Like the Oval Office, but with dimmer lights and a minibar. Say the Oval Office during the JFK administration.
“He wouldn’t get out the same way he got in,” Adrian guessed. “But you didn’t run into anyone, of course,” he spoke for Tieless George. “When did you seal the exits?”
“I told them to when I got here,” Danny said.
Kimrean knelt down to read the body. The middle son of the Lyon family had been elegant, flaccid, and balding—as noteworthy as middle sons usually are in folktales and biblical parables. He would have been handsome for a used car dealer, but just average for a mobster. He had enjoyed a nice straight nose throughout most of his life too.
A distant commotion seemed to unclog the hallway outside. The bouncers instinctively cleared the doorway, through which was bound to enter, judging by the trepidation, either a derailed steam train or a very important member of the Lyon clan. Kimrean barely looked up to confirm it was the latter.
Xander Lyon stormed in, boisterously demanding an explanation, his roar needlessly reinforced by the handcannon in his grip, big enough to pierce the Hoover Dam. Kimrean lingered on the newcomer for a second: he was, at that moment, the spitting image of his dad in the seventies, the smart, aggressive Floridian gangster before he was spoiled by a comfortable throne. Perhaps, in many ways, he was even better than his father at the same age: more expensively dressed, more fashionably discreet, and with a share of Hispanic blood from his mother for extra appeal. He was the soap opera villain who slaps the female lead every week and has all the ladies at the Laundromat murmuring, “He’s so bad—but so handsome!” He was handsome even now, as he stood still, color flushed out of his face, contemplating his younger brother’s carcass.
Adrian registered the dilated pupils, the colorless fists, the unsteady pulse. He made a mental note: Anger, no tears.
Zooey immediately tagged him: Latino Marc Anthony.
Adrian appended to that: Marc Anthony is Latino, you stupid bitch.
Then he rushed through the body examination before someone’s emotions contaminated the scene.
Danny begged Xander to holster the gun, but did not succeed in defusing him.
“Who did this?” the man howled, daring anyone to offer an answer. “Who did this?!”
“Someone even angrier than you,” Kimrean calmly replied.
Xander turned to them with a movement that probably caused a typhoon near Tokyo.
“And who the fuck is this clown?”
“Xander, this is Kimrean,” Danny assisted. “The P.I. your father hired.”
“This guy?” Xander eyed the detective, confused. “My father said it was a woman.”
Adrian finished the exam and sighed himself up.
“Okay, while you guys go through the Glen or Glenda bit, I’m gonna go down to the club, see if I catch a murderer on the dance floor.”
They left through the other door, not bothering to check if anyone followed, but Danny and Tieless Geo
rge did.
The next room was a green stairwell. Adrian checked upstairs before down.
“The rooftop’s closed,” George said. “He couldn’t go that way.”
“He didn’t,” Adrian confirmed, pointing at a smear of blood on the green wall, halfway to the top landing. “He just hid up there when you were rushing up from downstairs, then he ran downstairs while you were in the office.” (On George’s embarrassed look.) “It’s fine, man. If you had run into him, he would have shot you. You were saved by your obliviousness.”
They ran downstairs, Adrian driving the others’ attention to a new blood droplet on the landing; they were dangerously near the beat of drums now. They bent around two corners, met another camera, pushed a final door, and then a primitive form of proto-music slapped them into submission.
On the black-lit VIP balcony, Cheshire shark grins and mounds of cocaine like the OCD potato art of Close Encounters victims shone as bright as airstrip lights, marking the way to the center stage over the rail. Kimrean sighted purple caged dancers, mud wrestlers, tattooed devils, G-stringed Atlases erected like Pillars of Hercules out of a liquid crowd waving in worship of ancient twerk masters summoning cellulite tsunamis.
The pupil in Kimrean’s green eye augmented to the rim of its iris.
“Oh boy.”
Adrian pulled Zooey away from the rail and hastened downstairs.
“Don’t get distracted now, we’re looking for Jesus H. Kirsten Dunst!” A go-go dancer, fully dressed in jingling bracelets and neon body paint, walked past them on the stairs. “Hey, beautiful, is that the regional costume? Love it! I love San Carnal!”
A chorus of onlookers echoed the cheers, raising their drinks and spraying them all over, while Adrian led them down to the dance floor.
“He would come this way, hide in the multitude. Focus!”
It was disco inferno, though easy on the disco bit. Kimrean dove into the human sea and swam down to the depths, almost crawling an all fours, snaking through the leg forest. Under the stomping crowds and the frenzied lighting, he read the marks in the sea bottom: a labyrinth of footprints and joint stubs and ice cubes and some darker droplets of a liquid, suddenly squashed by a skyscraper platform shoe with exposed turquoise-nailed toes, fishnet stockings, sky-blue microdress, TITS.
“Heeey,” Zooey grinned up at the repulsed woman looking down from atop the tits. “So noisy up here—wanna go down with me?”
“Fuck off, freak.”
(Ducking back.) “Down, triple idiot!”
“Excuse me?!”
(Looking up.) “Not you, self-worshipping twit!”
The woman squawked an even louder, more dramatic what while Adrian dove back, twenty thousand legs under the sea, trying to pick up the track again. Some three broken glasses farther on the way to the emergency exits, he found it: a new solitary droplet of blood.
“Here! I see the bouncers near the exits, so I turn to…the restrooms!”
A pair of feet in four-inch stilettos walked by. Zooey gazed up like a child at a holiday parade.
“Oooh. Bars look really interesting from this perspective; we should do this more often. Well, come to think of it, we do end up down here a lot of times, don’t we? (Peeks under the miniskirt.) Oh, looky—wanna interrogate the servant staff? Let me ring the butler for you.”
Adrian jumped to his feet, scattering the bobbing creatures near the surface, and approached or crashed into a bar counter. A dazzlingly hairless man sitting there, wearing a tight crewneck T-shirt and an eyepatch, stared at the detective in surprise, along with the mojito-holding woman nestled in his arm. Zooey noticed the attention, or the guy’s pecs.
“Hello, sailor.”
They locked eyes for a blank second, then Adrian snatched the eyepatch off him. The woman screamed.
“I’m sorry, it’s an emergency,” Adrian explained to the man, who’d just spilled his drink in the hassle to cover his empty socket. Adrian slapped the eyepatch over the green eye and turned around, but Zooey made it a full 360-degree turn and added: “Don’t worry, it’s not the least sexy hole I’ve seen around here.”
Adrian pulled them both back before the one-eyed sailor exploded into an atomic mushroom of rage and Nemoed back into a reef of grinding ravers, now heading toward the restrooms queue, right index finger hovering over the vinyl dance floor like a dowsing rod.
“Here…here…Here!” (On a new blood droplet.) “I hesitate, but what am I looking for? The escape route is clear; why do I stop?”
“Hey you, what the FUCK?!”
The aftershock of that thunderous scream left an eerie sort of silence bubble amid the drunken laughter, the clinking ice, even the subwoofer’s seismic pulse. Adrian, genuinely piqued, dared look in the direction of the cursing, surprised to find that Zooey’s hand was already there, making up for the loss of her own eye by braille-reading the human landscape around them. Her hand had gone through six people at the maximum height it reached, which meant crotch-level for most humans, and had now disappeared inside the fly of a football-scholar frat boy, Aryan blue eyes gaping at the little perv browsing inside his lower drawer.
Adrian stood up, calling all hands back to headquarters. An arrogance of college jocks, for lack of an agreed collective noun, was now staring at them.
Even without the mob pressure, the best apology that ever-diplomatic Adrian could come up with was: “As an extenuating circumstance, let’s agree you’re packing like six hotel towels down there; it could’ve been hours before I actually did something inappropriate.”
One of the females in the pack gasped at the bonus insult, but two others cackled in merriment, whereas the profaned frat boy, as expected, responded with a sledgepunch to the perv’s face.
Kimrean swooned backward, their co-op nose now split into a duplex, and fell right into the arms of the one-eyed sailor who was just storming up to them, Red Sea crowd parting at his terrifying look. He tipped Kimrean off him and threw another punch, but Kimrean was too groggy from the first hit to stand for the second and fell down, effectively dodging the fist, which hit one of the college girls instead.
Zooey, lying on the floor trampled by the retaliating pack, lost consciousness with the satisfaction of having started a bar fight that would be discussed in American history textbooks.
6
A long yellow morning had just been proclaimed—the kind that follows the swift, sweeping desert dawns and sounds like electric guitars and truck engines. A. Z. Kimrean sat smoking a cigarette on the curb outside the Luxuria, next to their hat, stanching the hemorrhage from their freshly realigned nose with a clump of tissues. Any given Saturday.
The brawl lasted a good two hours before the San Carnal police saw few enough people standing to intervene safely. Once they had taken over, it had been a swift operation: the club had been evacuated and cordoned off, the patrons frisked, and the less white of them arrested. A cluster of police vans and ambulances was still obstructing the westbound traffic on Palm Boulevard. From where they were sitting, Kimrean was now watching the all-black figure of Danny Mojave hatching from the crowd of uniforms and neon vests. Zooey had ample time to appreciate the aesthetic of the back-lit figure walking the length of the block in what the wide shot made feel like slow motion: the guy playing the cop playing the gangster playing the man in control—and carrying a box of doughnuts. Adrian wondered how the cop’s cover had held up this long.
A few steps behind him, smoothing his stress-proof suit as he crossed the crime scene tape, came Xander Lyon.
Danny arrived first and peeked at A.Z. over his sunglasses. “You look good,” he said.
“You should see the biker’s face.”
“The one who hit you wasn’t a biker.”
“I know, but I couldn’t retaliate against that one—he was expecting it.”
Xander Lyon joined them and exten
ded a hand. Kimrean misinterpreted the gesture and used the hand to help themselves up; Lyon decided to chalk it up as a shake.
“Mr. Kimrean, Danny has told me he called you as soon as he found the body. I want to apologize for my behavior earlier. I am grateful for your coming so quickly.”
Everything in that line sounded exquisitely civil. Kimrean nodded, shooing the formalities away.
“I am grateful,” Lyon repeated, “yet sorry to have wasted your time. Your job was to confirm that the death of my brother Michael was an act of war. I’m afraid that is beyond doubt now.”
“Is it?”
Danny’s fingers discreetly breezed Kimrean’s hand.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Adrian said.
“My father is devastated, as you can imagine. By his request, I am now in charge of responding to this…hostile takeover. Meanwhile, I think we have to let you go.”
From the inside of his jacket he produced a thick wallet. Kimrean almost heard the flock of dead presidents inside it gasping for fresh air.
“How much do we owe you?”
“Oh.” Kimrean queried Danny, unsure whether to decline the offer or to celebrate that the Federal Reserve was having an open house day. “Well, Danny was really just calling in a favor.”
“Oh, no, I won’t hear about that. Name a number.”
“Okay. How about that of that blonde in the flowery sarong?” Zooey pointed at the photograph inside the wallet. “I wouldn’t mind taking her to a horror movie and yawning my way around her shoulders, down Bambalooza Canyon, and into Funny-Name-for-Vagina Valley, if you know what I mean.”
Xander Lyon looked up, and in the next sentence his voice frosted the asphalt.
“That’s my mother.”
A pause, while Kimrean maneuvered out of that one.
“Right. So, should I just call your home and ask for her, or—”
Danny decided to end the sketch at that point by shoving a doughnut into Zooey’s mouth, hurriedly telling Xander he would take care of the bill, and dragging Kimrean out of the solecism. Adrian kept an orange-brown eye on the gangster until Danny had pushed them around the corner.
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