Walking Shadow

by Clifford Royal Johns

  Chen was always moving. He usually only touched down for a month or perhaps two before he relocated. He’d been at the Unapartments for almost four months. I figured it was Paulo’s influence. He was the homemaker type. But staying in one place had apparently gotten Chen caught. If gov could prove Chen had committed any significant crimes, they would perform a series of forgets on him. I wondered what Chen would be like after a forget and what memories they would wipe.

  I didn’t know exactly why he might be arrested, but I figured Chen was probably guilty of lots of offenses against the public trust, not only some innocent thatching. Still, having the police overflowing out of Chen’s apartment alarmed me. It made me feel a bit like they were closing in on me. But the gov knew where I lived. Cops didn’t need to find Chen to find me. It was an irrational reaction, but I still felt boxed in.

  I knew Chen hadn’t been dead when I had my memory forgotten. Forget What could send the transcript to the police, as they had threatened, who would, no doubt, be interested and would talk to me for a couple days, but I thought they would let me go if I told them all I knew about Chen, which was just about nothing. Mostly, we just went thatching. All I knew of interest was where he lived, and they obviously knew that already. I doubted they would be able to make any more sense out of my Forget What transcript than I could.

  So I had no reason to feel scared. I felt scared anyway. I also worried about Carla. She’d given me a copy of the transcript, and if the police received their copy and figured out during questioning that I had already seen a copy, they might want to know more about whoever gave me mine. They might see an arrest in it.

  I tried to slough off my concerns about myself and about Carla by telling myself I was overreacting, but I just couldn’t get them all off my mind.

  I walked for a while, pushing into the wind, then turning back on another street when it got too cold on my face. I worked on picturing that moment when Carla smiled her genuine smile. I tried to force it into a permanent picture in my mind. It frustrated me though. I could get it for just a moment, then it would disappear, like the remnants of a dream when you wake up; vivid for a second, then gone. All I could remember were her ears and her hair. Her smile eluded me. Even so, the effort distracted me from my worries for a while.

  Later, back at my apartment, the transcript still buzzed around in my head and I couldn’t resist swatting at it. Why would I forget a memory I never actually had? I had to have known the forget company would come after me when the money disappeared from their account. I had to have done this on purpose, but figuring out why was beyond me that late at night. I read my mail and went to bed.

  Three, maybe four in the morning, I was awakened by a gun barrel covering the end of my nose.

  Chapter 5

  I’d been dreaming about hitting Chen over the head with a length of angle iron. I was just telling him we could still be friends even though he was dead, when the gun barrel showed up. I almost incorporated it into my dream, which would have upset the huge policeman who held the gun, and probably would have made it easier for the dead Chen and me to be friends. The cop took a step back from my bed.

  The lights were on. I sat up and pushed the blankets aside, blinking my eyes.

  He gaped at me. “Gad, buddy, haven’t you heard of pajamas?”

  “I like the freedom,” I said. “If you’d made a fist and hit your knuckles on the door, I would have put something on before I opened it.”

  There was another cop, a woman, not in uniform, but wearing her credentials in a holster under her left arm, wandering around my apartment looking into drawers and leafing through papers. I didn’t have anything to hide, but I found the casual perusal of my limited possessions insulting and demeaning, like someone walking up to you and looking for nits in your hair.

  “You Benny Khan?” said the enormous man with the gun pointed at me.

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m in his apartment, sleeping in his bed and not wearing his pajamas.”

  “Look, buddy, we can do this nice. Why don’t you put on some clothes, and we’ll go to the station without any antagonism.”

  I nodded my head over toward the woman. “Would you mind pointing out to her that she needs a court order to snoop through my stuff? And how did you get in here anyway?” The palm lock was supposedly proof against any illegal entrance, but I guessed the cops had their ways. Probably the landlord let them in. He lived in the building and, I suspected, did his own share of snooping around.

  The woman put down my rent receipt. “You got two minutes, friend. Make good use of them.”

  Waking up to find someone in your apartment is a jarring experience. Waking up to find a policeman with his gun out in your apartment is scary. The uniformed guy, the one who pointed the gun at me, was as big as a doorway. The gun looked like a little plastic toy in his hands, but he didn’t seem to be trying to intimidate me. The big ones never have to. He was probably in his mid thirties, which meant he wasn’t going to make detective. He had a light complexion and thick red hair. The woman was tall, but thin, and wore a navy blue or black suit that had seen many arrests. Her shoes may have originally been black, but were now so scuffed and worn that they might have started life almost any color. She had straight, short hair, cut to stay out of her eyes. She was probably thirty, and she’d already made detective.

  My clothes were lying on the floor. As soon as I looked at them, the woman stomped all over them to make sure there weren’t any weapons in the pockets. “OK,” she said.

  They were the clothes I’d worn the day before. I figured if they were going to question me, I didn’t want it to be any easier on them than it was on me. “Mind if I go to the bathroom?”

  The woman went into my bathroom first and, by the sound of it, rummaged around a bit, then came out. “Sure, no problem. Just make it quick.”

  I grabbed my clothes off the floor. The bathroom didn’t have any windows and the vent was too small to crawl through. I sat down and thought for a moment about why they were there. What could I tell them about my forget they wouldn’t already know from the transcript? I was trying to think of something to add so they would feel successful, but I didn’t know what it would be.

  My copy of the transcript, which was in my pants pocket, was a problem. I didn’t want the police to know I had it, since it had to have been acquired illegally, and they would want to know who gave it to me. I could have torn it up and flushed it, but I wanted to read it a few more times, so I punched a hole through a corner with the prong on my belt buckle and hung it on the hook on the back of the bathroom door under a towel. They wouldn’t find it unless they closed the door after they came in, and they would still have to move something they probably wouldn’t want to touch at all. I pulled on my clothes.

  When I walked back into the main room of my apartment, Doorway grabbed me and put cuffs on me. “This is just so we don’t have to worry about you. Mistakes happen when we worry.” He smiled broadly at me like I should appreciate his consideration for my safety.

  “Thanks,” I said, “Steel goes with everything.”

  The woman in the suit led the way, I came next, and Doorway followed with one hand on my cuffs. He closed the apartment door behind us, and, just like a child’s toy, the door to the apartment next to mine popped open as though tied somehow to my door. The neighbors, the ones who always listened to Russian piano music, stuck their heads out like The Stooges, the man’s head above the woman’s, and tisked at me. “I knew he would get arrested eventually,” she said. He just nodded like he knew it all along too and wondered what had taken so long.

  I said, “They’re coming for you next. They know why you play that piano music so loud.” They looked startled and shut the door.

  Doorway laughed, the detective just kept walking.

  A quick car ride brought us to the local precinct which was housed in the east half of a factory that made ceramic good-fortune cats. One side of the building supported a huge cat on its roof. The cat h
ad no tail and was waving a paw at passersby. The sign at the other end of the building was a large once-white sign with black lettering proclaiming, “POLICE”.

  The painted brick building covered half a city block and attracted dirt like a town gossip. It had small windows, more like holes in the deep walls, which acted as spotlights shining into the night fog. The factory and the cops were running multiple shifts.

  On the way in, the detectors and sniffers went over me like bloodhounds with electronic noses. The machines didn’t say anything, but I figured the monitor on the other side of the blast-proof wall probably said, “No weapons, but could use a bath.”

  Doorway and the detective hustled me past the front desk and straight down a long hallway to the back of the building. They put me in a small room, took off my bracelets, sat me at a steel table, which was bolted to the floor, and left. The room was painted a mustard shade of yellow and had stains where coffee had been splashed on the walls. The floor was hard industrial tile printed with splotches that looked like dirt, so they could hide the real dirt. The interior walls were foot-thick brick. There were no windows, and I didn’t know how thick the exterior walls were, but it was quiet in that room. More quiet than I’d heard in a long time.

  I waited awhile. Maybe they figured to intimidate me a little by letting me sit and worry. I put my head on my forearms and fell asleep. Actually I’d intended to just act like I’d fallen asleep, but I guess I was tired and they took a long time.

  Police have always bored me a little. They seem to think what they do is so important—as though their time is more valuable than everyone else’s. They can bring you in to the station whenever they want to, even at four in the morning, but are unwilling to take the time when you need their help to track down your stolen peanut butter. It always seemed one sided to me.

  I woke up when the door opened. An older police guard came in. He had gray hair and a holstered gun. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t scowl either. He might have been bored too. A detective strutted in after him and pounded the table. It must have hurt, but he didn’t show it. Maybe punching the steel table was the tip of the month in the detectives’ newsletter: “How to intimidate your guests.” He had a yellow goatee and no gun. He was one of the policemen I’d seen outside Chen’s. His short brown hair lay flat and lifeless over his large ears. He had a long, Roman nose and eyes that didn’t seem to be able to settle on anything. He dressed nice, though, wearing a gray coat and black pants with a white shirt that brightly reflected the fluorescent ceiling lights. His shoes were shiny and they made a gritty, sandy sound when he walked around the room as though they were even polished on the bottom.

  “Where were you yesterday at four-thirty?” He didn’t yell. That surprised me. He knew I was at Chen’s. That was obvious. They probably had recorders at the entrances to the Unapartments from which they could pull an image and scan the databases to find likely matches. Then he shouted, “Answer me!”

  “I went to the old UN building to see a friend,” I said. I tried to look at him, but his eyes were wild, or perhaps mine were. I looked at the guard who looked at the ceiling.

  “Who was the friend you went to see?” The detective was smiling now as though he thought he had intimidated me. He rubbed the fist he’d beaten on the table.

  “I went to see Che Chen.” What was the point of lying? The more I said now, the less likely they were to pick out the lie if I needed to use one later.

  He stood straight. “Good. Good.” His shoes made that sandy sound again as he walked once more around the room, then he leaned back against the brick wall and crossed his arms. “If you were going to see Chen, why did you stop at the apartment down the hall and give Ms. Montoya an apocalypse flier?”

  My ploy hadn’t worked. Not that I was surprised by that. This guy had been watching for anyone to show up. “I saw the police at Chen’s door, and I didn’t want to get involved.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave instead of bothering that lady?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “And why were you going to see Che Chen, Benny?”

  I thought about saying I was just going to see a friend, but this guy wanted something. He would keep asking questions until he could justify the effort he’d expended sending a beat cop and a junior detective out for me at four in the morning. I wasn’t sure if they knew about the forget yet, but I thought I’d play his card for him if he did know, and get some trump if he didn’t. I spilled it slowly, doing my best to make it seem like a difficult admission.

  “Well, I—uh. Well.” I looked at him and swallowed. “I wanted to make sure he wasn’t dead.”

  He took a step forward. I continued, talking faster. “I got a bill from Forget What. They said I’d had a memory forgotten and they wanted to be paid. They said I blinked them on the money I’d sent up front. The memory I’d paid to have forgotten was of Chen dead in an alley with his head smashed in, but that was a month ago and a mutual friend said Chen wasn’t dead. That didn’t make any sense, so I went to see him. When I saw the police at his door I got worried, so I turned to the first apartment and knocked. After the woman answered the door, I just gave her the pamphlet to make it look convincing, then left.”

  “Who was the mutual friend who told you Chen was alive?”

  “Jon Tam.” I picked someone who they would already know knew Chen. Jon was Chen’s closest friend. He’d built Chen’s ass thatchers. He was known to the police, who liked to arrest him once in a while just to keep him on his toes. They could never make anything stick well enough to do a forget on him. I didn’t like Jon much, so I didn’t mind using his name in this context.

  “You said you saw Chen dead in the alley. Which alley?”

  I couldn’t tell whether he already knew about the memory or not. “Near Morph and Quacker.”

  “Use the real names.”

  “Near North and Quaker. Just south of there, in an alley on the east side of Quack, uh, Quaker. I don’t know the alley name.”

  In a fit of civic pride the city had gone around and named all the alleys after former politicians. I knew this one had to have a name, but I didn’t know what it was, or I couldn’t remember. He would know all this anyway if the forget company had contacted the police.

  “Mr. Khan, you’ve been very forthcoming, and I appreciate that, but you’re not telling me the whole truth are you?” He was smiling now. His gums above his upper teeth showed pink and healthy. He put his hands on the table and leaned in, his face close to mine. He’d eaten something with a plum sauce. “What else do you have to tell us?”

  I thought about that and realized I had told him everything. Damn. “I don’t know what else you want to know. Perhaps if you told me what you wanted me to say I could be more helpful.” I smiled politely, but he didn’t like the inference.

  He wrinkled his nose and stood back. “Perhaps you would like to explain why you killed Che Chen yesterday morning?” He stood up, smiled and crossed his arms. He might have said, ‘checkmate,’ but he didn’t.

  I looked at the detective. I had the feeling now that he was just fishing for reactions or admissions, but I wasn’t sure. “I didn’t know,” I said. “I thought he was dead a month ago.” I dropped the lie right there in the moment of my shock, hoping the mixture would fool any voice analysis machines they had rolling in the next room.

  Chen was actually dead. It jolted me, but after that initial reaction, it didn’t surprise me that much. He irritated almost everyone. Even me at times. Paulo would be out of his head, but I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be broken up about it. I wondered briefly who ended up with his ass thatchers. I couldn’t see Paulo using them.

  Chen dead. I almost convinced myself that I’d found a time machine and seen Chen’s death in the future, but you can only die once. The more I thought about it, the more Chen’s death made me unhappy.

  “How long have you known Chen?”

  “Years. We met at a
Glowball party.” That was a lie too. I couldn’t remember meeting Chen the first time, but I wanted the detective to believe I was answering with facts. It would have been a long time ago.

  “Do you know anyone who would want him dead?

  “No. At least no one in particular.”

  “What about his mate, Paulo?” He grinned at that. He seemed to think the question was funny, but I couldn’t tell why.

  “He and Paulo had their tiffs, but they were together for years. They always made up. They were in love. You could see that anytime you looked.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a pretty strong coincidence that you have a forget that includes Chen’s death and then he turns up dead?” He momentarily turned to the guard. “Marley, don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Marley didn’t express an opinion. The goatee guy looked back at me with a curious expression. He seemed to think I could explain everything away if I wanted to, either by admitting I’d killed Chen, or by telling him who had. I couldn’t do that, of course, so I just looked back at him, lifted my eyebrows and shrugged.

  He groaned and sat down in the other chair. “Look, Benny,” he said, all chummy, like he’d known me for years and we were good friends, “I don’t think you murdered Chen, but you were in the area and you knew him. You’re a lead, you see, and I have to follow up on all the leads. Who were Chen’s other friends?”

  “I don’t know. Paulo and Jon were the only ones I knew about. When he could get hold of his other friends, he didn’t call me, I guess.” I tried to sound sad, but I don’t think he bought it. The guard grunted out a little laugh. I kept from smiling though.

  The detective sighed with disgust. “Do you have anything else to add?”

  “I can’t think of anything that would help you convict me of killing Chen, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Look, Benny, you don’t seem to understand the trouble you’re in. I could keep you here for a full day if I wanted to. Heck, I could keep you here on suspicion for a week. You’re acting all smug, but I could wipe that smirk away quick enough.” He thought for a moment. “I could ask Marley here to leave for a few minutes if you had something confidential to tell me, something you wouldn’t want on the record. I’m sure Marley wouldn’t mind.”