Walking Shadow

by Clifford Royal Johns

  A client. Carla was a pro. She hadn’t wanted to admit that to me, but it explained her affording her apartment on a grocery clerk’s wages. I held onto her. I wanted her to know I wasn’t rejecting her just because she had clients, but I’d expect her to stop now that we—well..., I felt like an idiot again. “Carla, was that about a month ago?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Did he take you anywhere?”

  “Yes, to that restaurant next to the alley.”

  “He was murdered in that alley.”

  I regretted saying that immediately. She shook all over. “Oh, no. I knew that didn’t I? I was there wasn’t I?” She turned around and faced me again, tears running down her cheeks. She grabbed my shirt. “Did I kill him? Benjamin, did I kill him?”

  I tried to come up with all the reasons why she couldn’t have killed him, or at least to come up with a better a suspect. I wanted a scenario I could believe, so I could convince her of its possibilities. “No,” I said, “but you saw somebody do it. I found you and the body, but I must have told you to leave before the police arrived. I guess I didn’t tell them about you. Paulo must have seen me find the body, and he must have figured out that you were there too. Paulo worked at Forget What. He must have made you forget what you saw. I can only guess that he blackmailed me into having my memories removed as well, or maybe I got a forget to forget I saw you there so I couldn’t incriminate you later. I don’t know. Either way, I left myself a clue.”

  I’d left myself a clue, so I’d find her again. I hadn’t cared about the body or the police investigation or even that Paulo knew who killed the judge. Or even if he’d killed Kimbanski himself. I had just wanted to make sure I found the woman who I’d last seen, or maybe just met, under circumstances I’d be forgetting.

  OK, I knew I could be wrong. It was possible that she had killed the judge, but, still, I wanted to believe it was someone else. Paulo seemed a good choice. Thinking of him as the murderer left Carla innocent in my mind. And besides, Paulo was dead and Carla was in my arms crying, her eyes shining and reflecting the street lights and she smelled so lavender-sweet and blameless and her body felt so comfortable and agreeable against mine.

  We walked slowly back south, my arm over her shoulder, her arm around my waist. We talked about the lake freezing over the year before and, when a buzzcar flashed past us at 10 meters doing 100, we talked about how loud buzzcars were; we had a common enemy.

  We also talked about her family. Her father had drunk some bad milk and died a couple years before. Her mother lived in the Pine Tree, a mixed apartment and business office building that looked very much like a thirty-story white pine, branches and cones and everything. The Tree was the last architectural marvel of the AIN, Architecture Imitating Nature, movement.

  Carla laughed at my jokes, but not too hard. She asked me if there were any apartments open in my building. I told her that it was a bit of a dump, but that there were empty units. I’d ask.

  When we arrived at my apartment, Detective Kumar was there waiting again, but he was alone. He didn’t seem surprised to see Carla. We’d probably been observed the whole time we were together, but there are times when nothing is worth getting upset about. I was feeling mellow.

  He studied Carla carefully for a moment, “What did you find out?” he said. Carla closed her eyes and leaned against me.

  “Paulo killed the judge, didn’t he?” I said.

  “That’s the easy answer.” He raised an eye brow and rubbed his goatee still looking at Carla. “She doesn’t remember anything, does she?” he stated.

  I felt Carla stiffen then she tilted her head up. “Remember what?” she said.

  I squeezed her shoulder a little in what I hoped would be a comforting gesture. “No. She doesn’t remember the alley at all. She said she walked past it all the time, but didn’t ever notice it.”

  “It’s creepy,” Carla said.

  The detective sighed. “Keep your head low,” he said, as though he expected someone to be shooting at it, but I thought the line was just something police said as a sort of see-you-later thing. He stared at Carla for a moment, then left, but his stare lingered in my mind. He was thinking something I didn’t like. He was thinking Carla had more to do with the murder, but that she had forgotten about it. He was thinking she was a suspect, and I guess maybe I was thinking he was right.

  I palmed the lock and ushered Carla into my apartment. Looking around as she scanned the apartment, I realized how dull, even lifeless, my apartment was. No color at all except for the orange PAL on the table. Only government issue PALs were orange. I felt a bit queasy with shame for living there. I was poor. I was the poor the city was digging holes to hide. I’d never really felt poor before, I just didn’t have any spending money. The gov gave me enough money to eat and buy some clothes once in a while. That had always been enough. Carla looked out of place standing there looking over my apartment, a polished sapphire tossed in a dirty paper sack.

  Carla took off her coat, kissed me as though she would always be kissing me, then laid down on the bed hugging the pillow under her face. I suppose that might have been an invitation, but she was tired, and I’d put her through a lot of emotional trauma at the alley. In any case, she fell asleep quickly.

  She slept for hours and while she slept, I paced, pausing once in a while to look at her. If, when I’d been doing my forget, I thought she had killed the judge, I wouldn’t have left the clue for me to follow to find her. I wouldn’t have wanted to find her. I knew I might still be giving myself too much credit for intellectual capacity, but who was I to argue? I laid down beside her on the narrow bed. She opened her eyes enough to see it was me. She snuggled closer and went back to sleep.

  I fell asleep trying to imagine what it would be like to live with someone and what kind of job I could get that would be legal.

  Chapter 11

  I woke up struggling to come up with any believable motive for Paulo to have killed a judge.

  I could see Paulo killing someone, don’t get me wrong, but he’d need a powerful reason. Something that would get him sufficiently upset and angry to make him do it. Paulo might kill in an emotional rage, but I didn’t think he would kill for money or power or any of the other reasons that might make a person commit murder even after careful consideration of the options and the consequences.

  I rolled over and stared at the ceiling, trying to piece together old memories and implications.

  It would have to have been Chen. Paulo would have killed for Chen. Not because of jealousy, they’d been together far too long and were too cozy for that. But he would protect Chen if he had to, or if he believed he had to.

  And I could imagine Chen needing to be protected once in a while. He irritated a lot of people and seemed to like to make enemies of those who he thought had no sense of humor. He couldn’t comprehend why the guys he thatched didn’t want to talk about the experience a few days later. Chen got beat up several times because he talked to his victims and laughed at their angry indignation.

  What’s more, I couldn’t figure out just what Chen did to make money. He always seemed to have enough for gadgets, wild costumes, restaurants and a nice apartment, but he never had to be at work. The news report had said he wasn’t employed.

  Also, I’d accepted his propensity for wearing odd makeup and modifying himself as something he just liked to do, but what if he had been disguising himself to avoid the police? And what about his rules for getting to his apartment? All these oddities had been apparent for as long as I’d known him, I just didn’t think about them much; the subject never came up. I guess I’d always known he was into something illegal but didn’t care.

  The news had said the judge was investigating police corruption in the narcotics division, but I just didn’t see Chen distributing or selling illegal drugs. He used them, mostly derpal, but he didn’t seem mean enough to deal. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was possible. After all, he must have known
how much his ass thatching hurt. I learned how painful that could be when he thatched my finger. The searing heat lasted for hours.

  Then I realized Carla wasn’t lying beside me anymore. I got up and found a note written on the back of a hardcopy of a Forget What bill. “You are sleeping peacefully, so I’m leaving. Call me.” There was no signature. I looked back at my bed. Somehow I could picture her there naked even though she hadn’t taken off her clothes. I breathed out, and my mind went blank for a moment. I was in deep, and I didn’t even know her. I felt like an adolescent boy with a crush, all knees and elbows, hesitant and worried if she liked me as much as I liked her.

  But, there was still a tiny rock in my shoe. Who killed the judge? Was it Carla? I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t, and that concerned me.

  Another thing that bugged me was that the neighbor identified Chen’s body. Chen looked different just about every day. He grew a beard and shaved it off, sometimes he would shave his head or wear a wig. He paid for injections to make his lips big. He always wore different makeup when he was out. One time, he had his nose made smaller, then a few months later, he had it made larger than it was in the first place. One day he would look like a successful gov official, then the next day he’d look like a bum. How would his neighbor even know what Chen looked like?

  I decided to go down to the city morgue and take a look for myself. I didn’t think anyone would have claimed the body.

  The city morgue was next to a city garbage incinerator. Up Your News once reported that the city was burning unidentified bodies with the garbage. The city responded by saying that that would be illegal, that the city had to use licensed cremation facilities, but the number of cremations of unknowns had dropped forty percent before the release of the article.

  The trash was separated into the basic material that could be burned and the material that had to be carted off and buried in a dump outside Rockford. The stuff destined for burial was covered with people searching for anything of value. A young girl dressed in gray was holding up the card cage from an old computer and trying to carry it down the precarious mountain. She fell and disappeared, but soon climbed back out of the hole triumphantly still holding the cage, a prize worth only the value of the metal.

  I walked past the trash junkies and pickers and into the converted meat processing plant, which was now storing bodies. At the front desk sat an older man wearing glasses and an attitude. Apparently, he didn’t believe in having his eyes repaired. He stared fixedly at his PAL until I rapped my knuckles on the table. He glared at me, brows down, probably thinking I was a trash junkie asking to use the bathroom.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to act as though coming in to look at a body was no big deal, “I’m here to see the body of Che Chen. He would have been brought in a couple of days ago.”

  The old guy sighed the sigh of old bones and walked around to the metal door to let me in. “Sure, why not. Everybody else has.” I wanted to ask who else had looked, but I didn’t want him getting interested in me. I was just an acquaintance coming down to see the body. Nothing more. “You got to sign in,” he said, pointing to a tablet on a stainless steel table. This table looked the same as the table at the police station, right down to the little metal loops for hooking handcuffs to.

  I signed in slowly while looking at the previous signatures. None were familiar, but I knew as I signed the name Wolf Irishman as illegibly as I thought I could get away with, that, just like me, anyone who came to visit Chen would not want to leave any useful clues. Then I walked past the cameras and decided that in the future I would need to plan more before I acted.

  I expected drawers, but the bodies were laid out on rolling gurneys in a huge cooler. The old man looked at a screen near the door, nodded, and said, “Yep, 104.”

  We walked past rows of white bags tented in the shape of men, women and children, seemingly floating three feet above the floor, then he stopped and zipped one open. The makeup had been wiped off, leaving smears of red and yellow. The wig had been removed. The hole at his temple had been cleaned. It wasn’t Chen.

  “Beandogs!” I said before I thought enough to realize I shouldn’t do anything to bring attention to myself. It wasn’t Chen, it was Sukey, a friend of Chen’s who did look a bit like Chen now that I looked for the resemblance. He looked enough like Chen to fool an acquaintance or a neighbor, but not to fool a friend. I turned and looked at the old guy. “He owed me money.”

  “You won’t get it back now, will you? Not unless you go after him.” He grinned. I thought he looked a bit maniacal.

  “Why, you think he took it with him?”

  He glared at me for a moment. “Let’s go. It’s too cold in here to stand around and crack wise.”

  I didn’t know Sukey that well, but I felt like another friend had died. He’d had some hard times lately, and I was saddened by his death, but I was also a little mad at him for being there where Chen was supposed to be.

  I walked out, frustrated that things were getting worse rather than better. Now, I not only didn’t know who killed the judge, but I didn’t know why Sukey’s body was on Chen’s gurney at the morgue, or where Chen was, or why I hadn’t looked at Paulo’s body too, just to make sure he, unlike Chen, was actually dead.

  Chapter 12

  I bought some jerked beandogs and vitamin water on the way to Carla’s, but she wasn’t at her apartment. I sat down in the hall, enduring the stares from the tenants standing by the vators, and ate while trying to figure out what to do next. I finished my dog and started on hers before I decided Jon Tam was my best bet for reducing the number of open questions. He and Chen had always been close friends. He lived south of Incongruous, and I decided to walk off some of the beandogs’ sleep inducing effects.

  Sunny, clean air blew across dusty brown pavement, and the air didn’t seem to mind. People passed by with purposeful strides, but me, I drifted along. I felt the need to relax and clear my thoughts, listen to the sounds and smell the scents of the city. I unfocused my eyes, and walked along, head down, and among the crowd, so I wouldn’t get hit by a car.

  Chicago was a town of motion. The wind was strong and almost perpetual, the people moved in swarms along the wide sidewalks, the political environment was always stormy, and the lakeside buildings were following the level of the lake and sliding into the lake basin. Immersed in all that movement, my life felt still; the same for many years. Before, I hadn’t considered that a bad thing. I got along, had some fun now and then, taught myself things. Now I thought of Carla and knew she wouldn’t want just that. She was used to more. She’d want more, and I’d want more too if she were with me.

  The people who walked along beside me had jobs they were hurrying to, or perhaps families they were hurrying back to. I had nothing like that, which had never bothered me before. Seeing these people rush around used to make me feel superior because I didn’t have to be anywhere at any particular time, and I didn’t have to spend eight hours a day working for a company or six working for the gov. I’d always felt rich in time and vocation. Being poor isn’t so bad as long as you don’t know what you’re missing, as long as you can convince yourself that you don’t want or need what everyone else has. It becomes a focus, though, it becomes an obsession, when suddenly, everyone you look at seems to have what you just realized you want. You start to feel unlucky, and you start to feel down.

  Jon Tam lived in the rooms behind the reservation desk of an apartment building that used to be an upscale hotel. When travel became so difficult and expensive that people didn’t come to Chicago anymore, many of the hotels were converted to living spaces. A small room with a bathroom was the standard apartment for the working poor.

  No one in their right mind lived on the first floor in this area of town, but Jon Tam never seemed worried about that. No one bothered him.

  I waited outside for a buzzcab to lift off from the driveway in front of the building, then walked in behind a fat woman and her skinny kid.

  As soon as my eye
s adjusted to the low light in the dark green lobby, I saw that Jon Tam’s apartment was a crime scene. The whole area around the front desk had been marked off with tape, and a uniform leaned up against a square pillar to the left near the entrance to the apartment. I figured there was probably a flat camera on me at that moment, so I didn’t try to act like I came in with the woman and her son, or like I was coming to visit someone else. When they reviewed the tape, I’d be digitally ID’ed and Goatee Kumar would know I’d been there anyway. Instead, I walked right up to the cop and said, “What happened here?”

  He stood away from the pillar, his eyes narrowing as his arms went from crossed to hanging ready by his side. “Who are you?”

  “Benjamin Khan,” I said distinctly and with confidence as though he should know who I was, but I could see myself in the mirror that hung behind the old reservation desk and realized I wasn’t fooling anybody. That was also when I saw Chen’s reflection. He was walking out of the elevator and toward the door behind me. He had on a gray overcoat, gray pants and black businessman’s shoes. He was bald, but it was undeniably Chen. He winked at me in the mirror, then turned and angled out the door.

  “So, what’s going on,” I asked the uniform again, trying my best not to seem agitated. Actually, I was trying not to look annoyed. Chen knew I was being monitored, yet he walked right by smiling and winking as though this were some kind of acting school and this whole thing was a test of my ability to appear calm under stress. I suspect he thought my predicament was amusing.

  The cop harrumphed. “I think Detective Kumar will have some questions for you. Why don’t you sit down here and wait?” It wasn’t a question. He put his hands on his hips, which put his left hand just above his holster. OK, I should have just acted like I knew someone else in the building and walked on when I first entered the building and saw the tape, but I didn’t have any other leads at that moment.