Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  The final source of illumination, since the house emitted none, was a yellowish squint of a lamp placed above the transparent gate, which looked like Plexiglas. I estimated it as at least four inches thick and roughly eight feet high, slick as ice. On the other side of the gate was the water. Anyone smart enough to figure out how to go over, or through, the spikes or scale the gate would also have to be dumb enough to get into the water. Seemed to me like that eliminated pretty much everyone.

  So I pushed the button beside the gate.

  Almost a full minute passed, and I pushed the button again. This time, I got a mechanical-sounding voice that said, “Go. A. Way.”

  I said, “No.”

  Another pause. Then the mechanical voice said, “No. One. Is. Home.”

  I said, “I was with Lumia last night, just before she got killed. You remember Lumia?”

  After what might have been a reflective moment, the voice said, “Where.”

  “You know where. You sent her there. Don’t you want to know whether she found it?”

  An even longer pause, and then the mechanical voice said, “Shit.”

  I heard a sound somewhere between a rumble and a rasp, and a rectangle of what might have been concrete, about four feet wide, began to slide toward the gate from the far side of the water. As it came, I saw the narrow steel I-beams over which it traveled. It kept moving until it snicked into place just on the other side of the gate and then, noiselessly, the gate swung inward. It was, I supposed, an invitation.

  The front of the house had no windows, which explained its nonexistent light profile. The extra-big door—maybe nine or ten feet high—at the end of the walkway was ajar, and I went through it into a hall that disconcerted me in the same way Jack, of beanstalk fame, must have felt when he invaded the home of the giants in the sky. Everything was at least a foot taller than it should have been. Without being aware of it, we get used to the notion that the things that surround us will conform to standard sizes. Tables, for instance; the average dining table is twenty-eight to thirty inches tall. A drafting table, which is conspicuously taller, runs a maximum of forty-four inches. Hall tables are usually a little higher than dining tables because the people who put things on them are standing up. The tops of the two tables in this high, dim hallway were even with my elbows.

  The mechanical voice said, with no emphasis whatsoever, “Hold. Arms. Away. From. Body. Spread. Fingers. Turn.” The door behind me, which I had left ajar, clicked shut. Then it clicked again.

  I turned halfway and paused; the machine said, “Turn. Slowly.”

  I did as I was told. The floor was a deep gray slate, beautifully polished, and the walls were the same gray. The house felt colder inside than it was outside. As I completed my revolution, I saw that a painting hung on the wall at the far end of the hall. I had to do a squinting double-take before I recognized it as a museum quality print of El Greco’s El Coloso, the terrifying vision of a naked giant, left arm raised threateningly, with a bent elbow and a clenched fist, glaring over his shoulder at the tiny, frantic horde of people who are fleeing like disorganized ants in the lower-left foreground of the painting. The print was something like actual size, almost four feet high. I’d never seen it that big before, but it had curdled my blood in much smaller representations. Some people doubt it’s really an El Greco, but the quality of the nightmare says to me that it is.

  I said, “What now?”

  The mechanical voice said, “Your. Name.”

  I said, “I don’t know about that.”

  A break in the conversation, if you could call it a conversation.

  I said, “So far, you haven’t even said hello. I’m about thirty seconds from saying fuck you and going home.”

  Through an archway to my left I could see a large dark windowless room, almost certainly the living room, which looked lightly, if at all, lived in. Much longer than it was wide, it seemed to be all gray: furniture, carpet, walls, everything the same gray as the exit hall. Without my having requested it, my mind emailed me an image of how conspicuous a spill of blood would be in that room. On the top of several tables were frozen silhouettes of a form that made me vaguely uneasy.

  There had been no reply, so I said, “And I’m getting tired of talking to Robby the Robot, too. Either come out here—”

  “Or what?” It was a female voice, but not much warmer than the machine had been.

  “Or, as I said, fuck you.”

  “Tell me why you came.”

  “Well,” I said, “in the best of all possible worlds I would personally like to kill the people who murdered Lumia. Either you can help me do that or you can’t.”

  Another pause, but then at the far end of the living room, a light went on. It was just a table lamp, one paltry cellophane-yellow bulb, but in here it felt like the sun announcing the end of the Long Dark Night of the Soul. Sitting motionless on the table, one paw in the air, was a cat. The woman’s voice, still conspicuously not seeking approval said, “Come in.”

  I went in.

  The room had a vaulted ceiling like the entrance hall at Horton House. All the furniture seemed to be leather and a little too big, and with the light on I could see it was a shade or two darker then the plumage on a dove. The carpet was thick enough to trip over. There were four or five tables, and each one had an immobile cat on it. A very immobile cat. I eyed them warily as I walked through the room. When I was most of the way to the lamp, I said, “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Sit,” the voice said. It came from behind me.

  I said, “I wouldn’t dream of it. After you.”

  “I would prefer you to be seated.”

  “And I would prefer to have both my feet under me, right where they belong, in case I decide it’s time for them to do their thing. Nothing personal.”

  “I personally would prefer that you sit down.”

  The tone wasn’t much different, but the words were. I said, “Oh, what the hell,” and sat on an armchair across the room from the table with the light on it, allowing me to turn toward the front door without the bulb’s glare, comparatively speaking, in my field of vision. I was also slightly put off by the reflected points of light in the cat’s eyes, motionless as buttons. To fill in the royal flush of unreassuring details, I’d had to boost myself up to get my butt into the chair, making my feet dangle a few inches above the floor like a four-year-old’s, and there was another cat, this one with its head turned and its tongue out to groom itself, on the table beside my chair. It wasn’t purring. It wasn’t grooming, either.

  I heard a sort of squeak from the right, probably the dining room if the house was built on a conventional floor plan. The squeak sounded like the legs of a pair of leather pants rubbing together, and it turned out to be leather pants. They were black, they were tight, they had many pockets, they matched a black leather, form-fitting top. All that black leather clothed the almost emaciated form of the tallest woman—perhaps the tallest person of either gender—I’d ever seen off a basketball court. She had to be seven feet and an inch or two, thin as the blade of a knife, with enormously long, spidery fingers that probably could have curved around a bowling ball with the fingertips almost touching. As she drew nearer, I realized that, slanting and skeletal and angular as she was, the least reassuring thing about her was her eyes. They were wide, wide open, far enough that the entire circle of the iris was visible. When I was a kid and made an unpleasant face, my mother always told me that it would stick. Itsy Winkle looked like someone who had suddenly come face to face with something absolutely terrifying and instead of running had decided to stare a hole through it. And it had stuck. To make her face even more unsettling, her upper lip was considerably shorter in the center than it was in the corners, baring the four upper incisors. They looked like they got dry a lot.

  She kept coming toward me until she was disconcertingly close, only a few feet away, a
nd then she bent stiffly at the waist as though to see me better, bringing those unsettling eyes to bear on me, slowly tilting her head to the right. I sat there, trying to keep my eyes on her hands, thinking about the little gun I’d been warned about, and half expecting a five-foot tongue to flash out, fast as a frog’s, and do me some obscure but memorable damage. She saw it in my face and smiled. Sort of.

  “Excuse the rudeness,” she said, without a hint of apology in her tone. She spoke quite slowly, giving each word the time and effort it required to make it mildly threatening. “I’m very nearsighted. It’s part of the condition. Marfan, you can look it up later. The height is partly Marfan, too, although both of my parents were well over six feet tall, so the syndrome just added to it.” She straightened and turned, the pants squeaking again, and went to the couch opposite, where she collapsed, folding up one joint at a time, like a giant praying mantis, and stared at me. “So,” she said. “How did you come to see Luz last night?”

  “We bumped into each other at Horton House.”

  “Who sent you?”

  I said, “Uh-uh. You should know better than—”

  With a creak of leather, she leaned forward. For half a second I thought she’d spread wings and fly across the room at me, but what she did was say, “Don’t you dare take that tone with me.” The lamp to her right made her eyes shine like giant marbles, bigger and even more disconcerting than the cat’s eyes. The shine seemed to take up half of her face. Below them, the exposed teeth glinted. She licked them with the tip of her tongue.

  “Sorry about the tone,” I said. “To answer your question, as far as I’m willing to, the person who sent me was someone like you.” Mentally, I was trying to put words to the air she gave off. What Itsy projected was an insect-like indifference, a completely neutral, even mechanical reaction pattern that suggested she could kill you in one moment and, in the next, be standing there wondering why she had your detached head in her hands. I said, “Who paid you to send Lumia?”

  She clasped those immense, spidery hands over her left knee and rocked back and forth for a moment, creaking like Horton House, looking at me and through me, and said, “Who was Luz—all right, Lumia—to you?”

  Well, good question.

  “A long time ago, when I first met her, I sort of fell in love with her.”

  “Sort of. Only a man can sort of fall in love.”

  “You want to know, or not?”

  She nodded, which I interpreted as a prompt to go ahead. I said, “I was on the rebound. My wife had kicked me out because I wouldn’t take a straight job. She was tired of worrying which way I’d wind up, dead or in jail.”

  She said, “Did she have a preference?”

  “People told me you were a pain in the ass,” I said, “but they understated it.”

  “So,” she said. “Lumia. Continue.”

  “I met her when I was working with another burglar, who was kind of mentoring her.”

  “That Mott man, the one with the dandruff,” she said. “So the two of you, you and Lumia, were an item? She wasn’t exactly stingy with her affections.”

  “You know,” I said, “I can probably figure out who killed her without spending another fucking second with you.”

  “Just trying to get a rope around your desire to avenge her.”

  “I liked her,” I said. “We never got together, but back then I liked her. And I liked her again last night. As a general rule of life I don’t let people who kill my friends just skate away.”

  “Last night,” she said. “Did she find it?”

  I smiled at her. “Hasn’t your client told you?”

  For the first time, I saw her actual feelings: a ripple of irritation that, I was sure, was the watery tip of a huge, submerged mountain of rage.

  I said, “They haven’t called you, have they?”

  She pursed her lips as though to spit but then she swallowed, loudly enough to be heard across the room.

  I said, just twisting the knife, “Were you supposed to get a bonus if she found it?”

  “If you have it,” she said, “I’ll pay you much more than you were promised by whoever hired you.”

  “So you were supposed to get a bonus. So they haven’t called you. So let me make a little leap here. I don’t have it, either, but I will.”

  “When?”

  “When I do. And I’m also going to kill the people who killed Lumia.”

  “The people who killed her are invertebrates. They didn’t make the decision.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But one of them pulled the trigger, and that’s good enough for me.”

  She tapped the long fingers against her knee and looked at me. “I’m waiting for the leap you promised.”

  “First, I need an answer. Whoever sent her into Horton House did it through you because he or she didn’t want to hire her directly. So why did they pick her up there?”

  I got a lift of the chin.

  “So they could kill her,” I said. “That’s what I figure, anyway. But if they were going to kill her, why not just hire her directly?”

  She continued to tap her fingers, as though she could hear music I couldn’t. Then she said, “If what you’re asking is whether I knew they were going to kill her, the answer is no. They hired her through me, obviously, because they didn’t know where to find a burglar.” She leaned back, her head only inches from the upraised paw of the stuffed cat on the table. Its coat gleamed.

  “But you did know they were going to pick her up. You had to be the one who told her they were coming. She’d never talked to them.”

  Tap, tap, tap. Then she said, “They didn’t trust me. They were afraid I’d take whatever it was. Tell them she didn’t find it, and then go sell it to someone. They said they had to pick her up and search her, and then they’d bring her straight here.”

  I said, “And, of course, it wasn’t your neck.” She actually blinked. “So when she didn’t arrive, what did you think had happened?”

  A pause, but at least she wasn’t tapping. “I thought they’d killed her.”

  I said, “And that was all right with you.” I looked at her for a few seconds. She didn’t wriggle or look away or clasp her hand to her heart. I said, “Why did you let me in?”

  “You wouldn’t go away.”

  “And?”

  “And you might have represented them. The clients.”

  I said again, “And?”

  “And when you said you’d seen Lumia last night I thought you might be the one who killed her.” She shifted her weight to her left and reached into one of the many pockets in her leather pants. When her hand came back up, it had a very streamlined little automatic in it. In my experience, a gun that’s pointed at me always seems bigger than it is, but this one was almost swallowed up in her huge hand. That may have been part of why I didn’t feel any special menace. I’d been warned about it, and in contrast to everything else in the room, it felt like a prop.

  “So you thought I’d killed her,” I said. “And now?”

  “No, now I don’t. You haven’t got that.”

  “Got what?”

  “What it takes to kill someone when it’s not personal. You’re not in that league.”

  I said, “Here’s the deal. You tell me who hired you. I’ll kill the people who murdered Lumia and the person who hired you. When I find what we’re all after, I’ll give you a cut.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because you’re going to make it all easier by telling me the name of the person who hired you.”

  “Not a cut,” she said. “I’ll sell it for you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She started to shake her head, but instead stopped with her face turned partly away, regarding me from the corners of those awful eyes. “Do you know what it is?”

 
“I know it was supposed to be hidden in a doll—”

  “A Jumeau.”

  “And I saw the doll and I saw where a piece had been cut from its back and the stuffing pulled out to make a hiding place.”

  “How big a piece?”

  “A rectangle, smaller than a deck of cards.”

  She said, “Did you find the doll, or did Lumia?”

  I said, “I did.” I didn’t want to raise the prospect that Lumia had removed the McGuffin before showing me the doll and that her clients might already have it. I didn’t believe it; as I’d realized at the time, if she’d found it, there was no reason for her to stay in the house when I went upstairs. Also, I didn’t want to bring the conversation to an end. I needed her to think I might still find it.

  She was leaning toward me again, making the room seem a lot narrower than it was. “Where is the doll?”

  I said, “I gave it to her. She seemed—umm, worried about getting into the car with nothing to show.” I had to swallow, and even though I wasn’t looking directly at Itsy I could see the interest kindle in her eyes and knew that, to her, that would seem like a weakness. I cleared my throat and said, “So I gave it to her, so she’d have something in hand.”

  “You’re soft,” she said.

  I said, “And proud of it.” I looked at my watch, although I didn’t bother to read the time. She said nothing. I counted to five, and when it was clear that she thought it was my move, I said, “Lot of cats. Were they yours? Wee fluffos you couldn’t bear to be parted from?”

  The upper lip that bared the front teeth rose enough to show me the gums, too. “Don’t be silly. I hate the little fuckers.”