The Immortal Game

by Mark Coggins

  Duckworth squatted beside me on his high heels, the material from his gown crumpling around him in a big circle. “Yeesh, you’re grumpy when you wake up. And will you look at what this is doing to my dress.” He yanked the fabric of the skirt over his knees and folded it in a wad on his lap. “You’re just going to have to be a gentlemen and refrain from looking up my crotch.”

  “It’s gonna take every ounce of willpower,” I said and squeezed my eyes shut, fighting the pain. “Look, I’m not in too good a shape right now, so let’s keep it simple: where are we, what time is it, and how did you get here?”

  “We’re in an alleyway off Ninth, about a block from Mission. My Lady Timex is in the shop, but my guess is around 3:30. I did the late show at The Stigmata tonight. I couldn’t catch a cab at Harrison and I figured I’d have better luck if I walked up to Mission or Market.”

  “All right. I’m with you so far. Everything clear and sensible. Next question: how’d you spot me?”

  “It was hard not to, August. The sidewalk is littered with pieces of a broken cello-”

  “String bass,” I interrupted.

  “Whatever. The trail led up the alley a short way and you were at the end of it. Now can I ask what you’re doing here?”

  “In a minute. Did you see anyone else nearby? Two big guys dressed in white, for instance.”

  “No, a girl could hardly have missed something like that.”

  I opened my eyes and Duckworth gave me a broad wink.

  “Believe me, Chris,” I said. “Those guys are definitely not your type.” I briefly recounted what had happened.

  “My God,” said Duckworth. “That’s horrible. You should go to the police. Or the hospital. In fact, we should go to the hospital right now.”

  I rolled over on one arm and struggled to sit upright. My head whirled like a carnival ride and my dinner threatened to return to its homeland. “No,” I said. “No hospitals and no cops. Just help me get to my car. I’ll deal with Mr. Hastrup when the time comes.”

  “August,” said Duckworth in a strained voice, glancing behind me.

  “What?”

  “There’s a note on your back.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “August, it’s stapled to your back.”

  Now that I thought about it, there was a place between my shoulder blades that felt stiff and sore, but comparing that pain to the pain from my other injuries was like comparing a chirping parakeet to a screaming eagle. I said, “Pull out the staple.”

  “I can’t,” said Duckworth. “I can’t do that.”

  “We’re not talking about a Comanche arrow here. It’s just a staple. Now, pull it out.”

  “I’ll break my nail.”

  Exasperated, I flung my hand over my shoulder and strained to reach the note. I grasped the top of the paper and gave a sharp yank.

  The staple pulled out-smarting like hell. The note was written in ballpoint pen in block letters on a piece of lined notebook paper. There was a bloodstain at the top where the staple had been. It said:

  Riordan,

  I wonder how you’ll look on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter with your mouth full of sand? Next time this note will say, “Good-bye cruel world.”

  I crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it away from me. “Come on,” I said. “Help me to my car.”

  Duckworth straightened and put his hands under my arms to pull me up. I got to my feet, but fell back against him and nearly toppled us both.

  “Whoa,” said Duckworth. “You weigh a ton. You’re never going to make it to your car, much less drive it.”

  “Yes I will,” I said stubbornly, but black spots swam in front of my eyes as I said the words. I hunched over to keep from passing out.

  “Yeah, and I was Judy Garland in my prior life,” said Duckworth. He steered me over to the alley wall. “Lean against this and I’ll get us a cab.”

  Duckworth went away and I occupied the time by alternatively sweating, tingling all over, and counting the holes in the wing-tip pattern on my shoes. I did some lip biting too. Carbon atoms on a distant planet rearranged themselves into DNA, microorganisms formed, grew backbones, swam around the ocean, mutated into amphibians, and crawled onto dry land-and finally a cab appeared at the mouth of the alley. I straightened up and stumbled over to the car with all the casual insouciance of the Frankenstein monster taking his first steps. Duckworth jumped out, tugged nervously at his preposterous gown, and held open the door while I fell into the back seat like I was flopping into a rowboat in stormy seas.

  The driver looked back at us after Duckworth sat down and said, “You people make me sick. I’m only taking this fare because there’s no other calls.”

  Duckworth cursed and looked down at the driver’s photo ID. “You’re taking this fare, Mr. Lester P. Knoll, hydrocephaloid homophobe Esquire, because it’s the goddamn law. Now shut up or I’m reporting you to the taxi commission.”

  “Right on, honey,” I said weakly, then gave the driver my address. As we pulled away from the curb, I caught a glimpse of a sign across the street that asked, “Are you an organ and tissue donor?” Given my present state of health, it seemed an extraordinarily apt question.

  We drove in silence to my building. Duckworth paid the fare with bills he took from a tiny clutch purse and helped me to the entrance. I fumbled with the keys until he got impatient and grabbed them from my hands and opened the door. We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor the way overweight tourists from the Bronx would hike out of the Grand Canyon: sweating, breathing hard, resting at every opportunity, and arguing the whole way. Duckworth used the keys again to open my apartment, and I went straight to the liquor cabinet. I downed three shots of bourbon rapid fire and dropped into bed. I went under almost immediately, but I have a vague memory of Duckworth pulling off my shoes and covering me with a blanket.

  A DETECTIVE OR A PUNCHING BAG

  I DREAMED I WAS STANDING WITH MY BACK to a wall in front of a firing squad. Beside me was my string bass. The captain of the firing squad was Hastrup. He grinned malevolently, shouted, “Take aim, F-”

  “No!” I yelled, and sat bolt upright in my bed. Chris Duckworth came running in from the other room. He was dressed in a pair of my sweat pants and one of my tee shirts, and given the differences in our sizes, he looked like a little kid who had been playing in his father’s wardrobe. He held a frying pan that sizzled and steamed. The smell of scrambled eggs wafted over.

  “I like mine with hot sauce mixed in,” I said.

  “Judging from the accretions I scrubbed out of the bottom of this pan, you pretty much like anything in the catsup or steak sauce family. Today you’ll make do with rosemary and dill weed.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I don’t know about any accretions, but I’ll bet there were lots of layers of stuff built up in that pan.”

  “Very funny. I refuse to let your challenged vocabulary make simpleminded word choice a sine quo non.”

  “Oh, now you’re talking Dago.”

  “Drop it, will you? How’re you doing?”

  That was a topic I was trying not to dwell on. “I’ve felt worse. Everything is stiff and sore, but I don’t think anything’s broken or missing. The results from all precincts won’t be in, though, until I see if there’s blood in my pee.”

  “That’s disgusting, August. I don’t need to know things like that.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Duckworth, and walked out of the room. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes,” he called back.

  I rolled out of bed and hobbled over to the bathroom. The results of the urine test were negative. However, my cheek was puffy, there were several large bruises on my stomach, and there was a bump on the back of my head big enough to convince me it was reproducing by fission. I showered, shaved, and dressed in slow motion, like I was doing a space walk. It was well over fifteen minutes by the time I sat down at the kitchen table, but Duckworth had kept the food warm. He poured
me a cup of hot coffee and sat down across from me.

  “Say, this is good,” I said after sampling the scrambled eggs. “You sleep on the couch?”

  “No, why would I? I crawled into bed with you.”

  I paused with my fork in mid-air. The eggs fell off and bounced back onto the plate. “You better be joking. Otherwise, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Whoa, big fella. Yes, I slept on the couch. I would have gone home, but I didn’t want you to croak in your sleep. You should have gone to the hospital like I said.”

  “Well, I didn’t. But thanks for everything.”

  Duckworth glanced down into his coffee, almost shyly. “You’re welcome. It was kind of exciting. That sort of thing happen to you a lot?”

  “What sort of thing? Getting beat up, or getting picked up on the street by drag queens?”

  Duckworth laughed. “Either.”

  “The former is something I try to avoid, but not with complete success. The latter is an entirely new experience.”

  Duckworth scraped his fork aimlessly across the plate. “Say,” he said, looking up intently. “You wouldn’t need an assistant, would you? Someone to do your office work, pitch in on investigations-be your right hand man... so to speak.”

  “Sorry, Chris, that would never fly. I already have a secretary, and she only works part time. As for the investigations, I don’t have the temperament for a partner-or the volume of business to justify it.”

  “I didn’t think you’d go for it.”

  “You got canned from Mephisto, didn’t you?”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Busted,” he said. “After my last photo touch-up, Teller finally put two and two together and fired my ass. You should have seen his big red face when he told me. I thought his head would explode for sure. But it’s no big thing. I’ve got a good lead on a job at a multimedia firm in the City. Better company, better boss, and no commute. It’s perfect.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. The way this case is going, I may not be employed in private investigations much longer.”

  Duckworth sat up in his chair. “So who were the men from last night?”

  I hesitated a moment before responding, not wanting to encourage him. “One is a bouncer from an S&M club where Terri McCulloch works,” I said. “McCulloch is the girl that peddled Bishop’s chess game to Mephisto, and she’s evidently asked the bouncer-Hastrup-to protect her. In addition to beating the stuffing out of me, I think he’s also responsible for some threatening phone calls. What I don’t get is how Hastrup knew where I would be yesterday evening.”

  “Could they have followed you to your gig?”

  I reached over to a kitchen drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, lit it. I blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “It’s possible. There was a ghoulish-looking beanpole following me around yesterday named Todd Nagel. He might be working with them, keeping tabs on me. Nagel is a bit of an enigma in his own right, though.”

  Duckworth waved ineffectually at the smoke. “You might have at least asked if I minded. Why is Nagel an enigma?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Nagel doesn’t have any obvious connections to the other players, except I found a photo of Jodie-another girl employed by Bishop-in his wallet. I asked Jodie about that last night at the jazz club, and she had a fairly plausible explanation. Still, I wonder. Nagel knew my name and was following me around for a reason. Does he have Jodie’s photo because he’s hot for her and she’s conned him into tailing me? And if that’s true, what is Jodie’s angle? She claims to be a friend of Terri’s, but she gave me the tip on where Terri works. Might be she has an ax of her own to grind and is just trying to speed Terri’s fall.”

  “That really doesn’t explain why she’d have this guy Nagel follow you around. Just to see how you’re making out with her information?”

  “I guess.”

  Duckworth leaned forward on the table, his face flushed. “No, that’s not it. I know what’s going on, August. They are all working together to protect McCulloch. Jodie set you up by sending you over to the S&M club. You would have found out eventually where McCulloch was working, so that was no great tip. The important thing was to get you there at a time when Hastrup was ready and waiting. The reason for Nagel following you was to make sure you did what was expected. And last night, Hastrup knew you were going to be playing because Jodie told him. You invited her there, right?”

  I looked at him with a new admiration. “Yeah, I did at that.”

  Duckworth almost wagged his tail. “See, it all adds up. You breeder boys will do anything for a pair of big tits, and I’ll bet this Jodie girl has a tremendous set of hooters.”

  I chuckled and stubbed out my cigarette in the detritus of scrambled eggs and toast. “Okay, Sherlock, I have to admit that’s a theory that fits the facts pretty well. And you’re right about Jodie: she’s no slouch in the mammary department. But all of that is incidental to my primary task-finding Terri McCulloch and getting Bishop’s software back. It doesn’t really matter who is or isn’t protecting her, except that Mr. Hastrup’s bad karma tests off the scale and he might need a little help finding redemption.” I looked down at my watch. It was 11:20. “Time to breeze, boyo,” I said.

  Duckworth and I shared a cab as far as Eighth and Minna. The Galaxie 500 already had two tickets on it, of course. I drove it back downtown and dumped it off in a garage near my building where they charged nearly as much as the tickets to park for eight hours. When I got to my office, Bonacker was at his desk with a young couple, going over auto insurance premiums on his computer terminal. He said:

  “I’m sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you said you were both over thirty. That’s going to change the quote a little bit.”

  This was Bonacker’s standard bait and switch technique. When people called up for a quotation, he would “misunderstand” one of the parameters that affected the cost of the insurance to rig his quote so it undercut the competition. When the poor fools came running to his office to snap up their bargain policy, he would apologize, then crank the quote back up to full price. Most people went along with it because they couldn’t afford to miss any more work and were tired of shopping around.

  I made a snorting noise as I went by, and the young woman glanced up. “Don’t worry about him,” Bonacker put in quickly. “He’s just here to water the plants.”

  I kept going to Gretchen’s desk. She was wearing a tailored black pantsuit and she, too, was pounding on her computer. “Where’s your watering can?” she asked. Then after getting a good look at my face: “You got beat up again, didn’t you? Jesus Christ, August. When are you going to get on board the clue bus?”

  “Probably not until it runs me down.”

  “Things like this make me so glad we never got married. I simply could not deal with the man I love continually treating himself to this kind of punishment.”

  “As opposed to your doctor friend who goes around all day with a lubricated rubber glove treating himself to enlarged prostate feels?”

  “That comment says more about you than it does Dennis. Of the two of you, who do you think does more to make the world a better place? I’ll give you a hint: helping banks repossess poor peoples’ cars does not make the world a better place.”

  “You could be replaced,” I said peevishly. “Someone just asked me for your job, in fact.”

  “Who? That blonde bimbo you had in yesterday?”

  “No, a different blonde bimbo-with a higher testosterone count.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Look, let’s call a truce. I appreciate your concern. I was just being jealous.”

  Gretchen’s expression softened, then turned into a smile. “You want me to do something, don’t you?”

  “Hey,” I said. “That was a heartfelt expression of regret. But now that you mention it, get the number to a place called The Power Station and give them a call. Ask them if Mistress Tamara is working today.”

  “All right. But wh
y don’t you do it?”

  “Because they might recognize my voice. If she’s there, find out what her hours are.”

  “Will do. By the way, that guy Bishop has called you enough times to wear out the phone ringer.”

  “Imagine that,” I said and went into my office. I flirted with the idea of blowing off Bishop, but he might have some new information, and I’d found it politic to make sure the client understood I was working on a case even when there wasn’t a great deal of progress. In the end it didn’t matter. The phone rang as I put my hand to it and Bishop started talking before I’d even finished hello.

  “Well,” he said. “Have you found her?”

  “In a word, no.”

  Bishop cleared his throat savagely. “This is really beyond endurance. My lawyers tell me that Mephisto refuses to play ball. They are going ahead with plans to release the software next week. If I can’t prove Terri stole the software and defrauded Mephisto, I’ll have no choice but to involve the police and sue Mephisto for piracy. The whole thing could take years to resolve and I may never regain possession of my game.”

  “There’s no guarantee that things will be any different once I locate McCulloch. In fact, there’s every indication that she is going to fight us tooth and nail.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I explained to Bishop about my run-ins with Hastrup last night and at The Power Station. I didn’t tell him about Jodie’s involvement and I didn’t mention Nagel.

  There was a heavy silence at the other end of the line. Finally Bishop said, “What are you, Mr. Riordan, a detective or a punching bag? Any fool can careen across the landscape getting beat up. As far as I can tell, you’ve made no real progress on this case since the outset.”

  I got a little angry then. “Look, Bishop, I’m trying like hell to retain some sympathy for your situation here. But with your live-in call girls, your S&M spank-fests, your haughty, computer geek manner, and all the physical punishment I’ve taken in the last 48 hours, it’s damn hard to see why I shouldn’t punch the ejector seat button and leave you to auger into the hillside.”