We did that for a while, operating in an absolute vacuum of small talk, and when I had things sorted into six likely locations—living room, kitchen, bedroom, closet, bookshelf, bathroom—I put each pile in the appropriate place, neatly segregating them both from the stuff that had been trashed and the smaller number of items that hadn’t been yanked out of place. When that was finished, we went back into the living room and she resumed her spot on the couch.
“So, money,” I said. “What shape is it?”
“Rectangular,” she said as though to a small child, with a carefully modulated undertone of pity. “Flat.”
“And that was their operating thesis, too,” I said. “That’s why all the attention to the books and the couch and the stacks of dishes and the layers of the bed. That’s why they pulled all the towels out of the linen cupboard. How did you get into matchmaking?”
She gave me the owl’s eyes for a moment longer than was polite, and then she said, “Safer than doing the jobs myself. I’m conspicuous. My last job, which everyone in the world seems to know about, the one with the pearls? The reason I hit that old woman so hard is that I was trying to kill her. And I thought I had, but unfortunately I misjudged the spot I hit her in. She’d seen me and even in the dark she could give the cops a very general description of me, and that was that. I was good at what I did as long as I was in a completely empty space or in absolute darkness, but let any light hit me, and I’m done for if someone is looking. Burglars should really be inconspicuous,” she said. “Like you.”
“I work at it.”
“What do you drive?”
“A white Camry.”
“My, my,” she said. “A cloak of invisibility. Are you happy with Stinky?”
“No one could be happy with Stinky.” I was passing my hands across the bottoms of the bookshelves that were below eye level to see if anything was taped there. Nothing was. “But if you’re asking do I want a change in representation, the answer is no.”
“You’re loyal to him, then.”
“I know when he’s lying,” I said. “He’s got a tell, and I always know when he’s lying. You, on the other hand, you could tell me San Francisco is moving toward us at fifty miles an hour on the 101, and I wouldn’t know whether to believe you.”
She rearranged all those sharp joints into a position that probably would have looked comfortable on anyone else and said, “What’s his tell?”
“Ah-ah,” I said. “Why women only?”
“Are we chatting?”
“Humor me. This isn’t very interesting work. Why women?”
She licked those perpetually drying front teeth. “I like women better than I like men. I don’t like either sex very much, but women have a thin edge over you people. Then, too, women are less direct than men, more Machiavellian, which is probably a product of thousands of years of getting beat up. Get three smart women in a room and give them a challenge and let them talk, and you’ll get some very underhanded answers.”
I said, “Hmmm” and took my shoes and socks off.
“And they’re easier to frighten than men because they’re not so given to bluster. When you’ve frightened a woman, you usually know it. Why are you doing that?”
“I’m going to walk the carpet, all of it within a few feet of the walls. That was one reason I needed the stuff picked up.”
“You’ll be able to feel it?”
“If it’s in any kind of wad at all. If she spread it out, a bill at a time, I’m out of luck, but I’d be surprised if she did that. She’d have had to move a lot of furniture, and I doubt she peeled back the carpet that far. It’s likelier to be in four to five stacks, close to a wall.”
She made a sound I couldn’t spell in a million years, seemingly devoid of both vowels and consonants. Then she said, “Do you have people in your life?”
I moved a sad little dinner table and its single chair away from the apartment’s longest wall. “Several.”
“Don’t you think they’re weak spots? Pressure points that people can use against you?”
The small four-shelf bookshelf, one of two in the room, was light because the books had all been pulled out, presumably fanned, and then splayed facedown on the floor, although they were now neatly stacked in its center. “Actually, I think they make me stronger.”
“What an odd idea. Where do they live?”
I said, “You must be kidding.”
“See?” she said. “Pressure points.”
“Have it your way.” I did six trips up and back, then turned and did the wall with the front door in it. The bookcase on that wall, which had also been emptied, couldn’t be moved, so it shrunk the potential hiding area. They had dumped the stuff from the vacuum just to the right of the bookcase, so I shoved aside as much of it as I could with the edge of my foot before stepping on the carpet. That kicked up some dust, and Itsy sneezed.
“Bless you,” I said, turning around to take the next pass.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “This could take days.”
“Good thing they went through all the books, then. You don’t have to stay.”
“I didn’t know she read.”
“Why would you?” I said, and she didn’t reply. When I was finished with that wall, I said, “Please get up. Time to move the couch.” I picked up the vacuum cleaner and laid it on the coffee table, then pulled the whole thing away from the couch. Itsy reassembled herself into a standing position and took one end of the couch. Between us, we got it about four feet from the wall, and I did the back-and-forth until I’d run out of room. I went back to my end of the couch and waited, and eventually she made that unspellable sound again and picked up her end.
Then we repeated the furniture moving routine wherever it was necessary to clear the carpet in the short hall and the bedroom. In the bedroom, Itsy collapsed, looking like a collision between isosceles triangles, on the mattress that had been pulled off the bed. When I’d finished with the carpets I went through the piles of clothing on the floor. There was no reason to search the drawers because they’d all been yanked out of the dresser and turned upside down. I did reach into the empty space where the top one had been and feel the bottom of the wood above the opening.
“People forget about that,” Itsy said. She sounded almost approving. “They look at the bottoms of the drawers but forget what’s above the top one.”
“You don’t need to pass an I.Q. test to qualify as a burglar.” Hanging crookedly above the dresser was a picture of Lumia and a guy, just a guy, kind of a schlub, but a cheerful-looking schlub. They were someplace with trees, and they both seemed happy enough. I took it down, ran my fingers over the back, and said, “Who’s this guy?”
Without even looking over, Itsy said, “How would I know?”
“Right.” I stepped back from the dresser and went to the closet. About ten minutes later, I said. “Kitchen.”
After half an hour of hard and sometimes greasy work, I could almost see the black cloud of frustration and anger above her head. “Okay,” I said, “between them and us, I think we’ve exhausted most of the places where I’d hide something flat and rectangular. That leaves the other shape.”
“Which is?”
“Tubular,” I said. “A roll.” I went back into the living room, pulled the hose off the canister vacuum, and looked into the hose. Then I pulled the changeable power head off the hose’s other end, stuck two fingers into the tube and said, “Voila.” Then I said, “My fingers are too fat.”
Her eyes had shimmered when I spoke, in a way that made me uneasy. She said, “What does that mean?”
“It means Lumia put a couple of strips of tape across the inside of the roll, with a few adhesive inches sticking out on either side to hold it in place. Her fingers were slender enough that she could slide the roll in and then reach in through it and press the tape against the walls
of the tube. I haven’t got enough room to scrape the tape off.”
“Long, thin fingers,” she said. “Hmmm, I wonder who has—”
“Right,” I said. I handed her the end that had slipped into the power head. She held it up in the not-very-bright light from the open door, peered into it, then inserted two of those prehensile-looking fingers and began to work on the tape. She must have seen me moving out of the corner of her eye, but by the time she looked up, I already had my gun in my hand. I said, “Just in case.”
After a moment of staring at the gun, she said, “So you’re not stupid.” A minute later, she had a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills in her hand. “There’s another one farther up,” she said. After a little muted swearing she held it up, too.
“Okay,” I said, “time for yousies-mesies. One for you, one for me, until they’re all gone.”
She spun the second roll around her index finger. “You don’t trust me?”
I didn’t say anything. A couple of seconds later, we both started to laugh.
We were facing each other over our stacks of money. Lumia had gotten fifteen thousand and no signing bonus, so in all, that was about half what I’d been paid. Income inequality extended easily to the criminal world, where Congressional committees were unlikely to try to regulate it and unions hadn’t gotten much of a foothold except as a profitable and seldom-audited business enterprise. I didn’t see any good reason to share the disparity with Itsy. I had doled out the bills, and she felt the need to count them twice. I’d double-dealt her once, giving her one extra bill as a character test, which she failed, then folded the money and slipped it into two of her leather pockets. She looked at me suspiciously, checking, no doubt, to see whether I knew I’d overpaid her.
“So,” I said, “The piranhas.”
“What about them?” She was lying on her right side on the couch in a posture of sharp-angled collapse. I was sitting on the little chair that had been pulled up to the dining table. Itsy used those otherworldly fingers to flip through the edges of the stack in one of her pockets, not the one with the gun in it. I watched closely.
“Well,” I said when she was through playing with the money, “guess. What would I be asking about piranhas?”
“They’re hard to train, if that’s what you want to know.” There was no sign of humor in her face.
“Okay, since you’re having so much fun, are they really there?”
“They were for a couple of months. They’re not easy to buy, by the way.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“But you can’t believe how much you have to feed them. Piranhas will eat you out of house and home. I spent hours just standing there throwing raw hamburger into the water, not a particularly interesting activity. And the hamburger they don’t eat rots and floats to the surface, and then the water stinks. I can see why they’re in so few pet stores.”
I looked at her, but she seemed as serious as a straight razor. “Did they come with a handbook or something?”
“No.” She lifted her head and rolled her eyes over to me. I could almost hear them click into place. “Why would they?”
“I had a roommate in college once who bought an alligator, a baby, I guess, maybe ten inches long. And with it came a little booklet entitled Enjoy Your Alligator. Just like that, in the imperative, like if you didn’t enjoy having your fingers bitten off, you hadn’t held up your side.”
She put her head back down on the cushion and rested the back of her hand on her forehead, very Sarah Bernhardt. “Where did he keep it?”
“In the bathtub.”
“How thoughtless.”
“I learned not to drop the soap and how to do aerobics and shower at the same time.”
“What happened to it?”
“I accidentally flushed it down the toilet. So what’s in the moat now?”
“Electric eels.”
“You’re shitting me.”
She moved the melodramatic hand and gave me the stare again. “Do I look like a woman who shits people?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” she said, “occasionally. But don’t let it get out. Suppose I said it was a rare bacteria that kills on touch.”
“I’d believe you, of course, although I’d love to see how you handled it. How did you disarm the piranhas?”
“Six or eight gallons of bleach. Piranhas don’t like bleach.”
“So,” I said. “Allan Frame. The guy who came to you to recruit Lumia. How dangerous?”
“Very. And not as tolerant and easygoing as I am.” She studied the ceiling as though there were a mural painted on it.
“Where can I find him?”
“You don’t want to. He’s connected.”
“So am I.”
She said something that sounded like air escaping from a tire.
“I need to know where to find him.”
“And I’m sure someone will help you.”
“Okay. What did he tell you about his client?”
A long blink, and then she tore her eyes away from the ceiling and turned them on me. “He said that the person I gave him had better play it straight, or we’d all be dead.”
“Did you tell Lumia that?”
She blinked, and then she told me a lie. “I did.”
I just sat there, looking at her but seeing Lumia walk to the hedge and through the gate to get into that car.
Itsy said, “Do you know you’ve got a spot on your shirt?”
“Yes, that’s been brought home to me rather forcefully by a cross-section of the population.”
“Do not fuck with Allan Frame.”
“Did you see his client? Do you know her name?”
“Of course not. That’s what he’s for, one more layer between his client and the person who ultimately goes into the house.”
“And yet she talked to me, face to face.”
“Yes,” Itsy Winkle said with a conspicuous attempt at patience, “but she thought she was going to kill you, didn’t she?”
21
Thinning the Herd for Laughs
In the end, I told her that I could get to Allan Frame without her, but that if I did I’d tell him that she had sent me. I got a kind of a mad-cat hiss and then an address and a request that she be invited to my funeral. I told her I’d do the best I could from Beyond, and she said she’d try to derive contentment from the fact that I was Beyond.
Then she tried again to steal me from Stinky.
Halfway down the stairs of Lumia’s building, leaving Itsy behind to burn sage or plant curses in the corners, or perhaps even to mourn in some entomological way, I realized that it was almost one, time to swing by Louie’s and get the stuff I would need for my chat with Ms. Beckwell-Stoddard in Hollywood’s Greatest Weedpatch of Young Talent or whatever it was. Looking at my two potential approaches to my primary objective, I realized that Althea Beckwell-Stoddard, dragon though she seemed to be, was an easier and probably less dangerous route to the Bride of Plastic Man than the route that had Allan Frame in the middle of it. I called Louie.
“Hey,” Louie said, even before I’d said hello. “Your guy wrote a book.”
“My guy.”
“The rich guy, whatever his name is. Was.”
I stopped at the foot of the gray stairway and looked up at a gray sky, a sky the color of industrial sludge. “What do you mean, a book, you mean—”
“Not like a real book, not a book book like you’d get in a store, with fancy covers and Better than James Patterson, but it’s as long as a book. As long as a short book, anyways.”
I started the hike to my car. “Where is it?” A little wind kicked up, smelling sort of wet.
“UCLA. He left them his papers and stuff and some money to look after it all. You know, they’d take John Wayne Gacy’s papers if there was enough money
in there. For someone who’s writing a thesis—”
“Got it.” The day had darkened an f-stop or two.
“—about really serious twists. Title would have those two dots top and bottom, you know those two—”
“A colon.”
“Yeah, they all gotta have those two dots to separate something that’s actually interesting from the rest of it, something like Thinning the Herd for Laughs, colon, Inside the Mind of John—”
“I get it. How did—” I stopped talking as my remote, rather than unlocking my car, locked it instead. I’d forgotten, therefore, to lock it, something I always do, a sign that I was even more wary of Itsy Winkle than I’d thought. I got in, feeling the stiff wad of cash in my front pocket.
“How did what?” Louie said when he got tired of waiting.
“How did you find out about the book?”
“My girl found it.”
“Your girl?”
“At UCLA. Where she’s a student. Barely out of her teens, okay? But worth every penny you’re paying her.”
“Can she bring it to me?”
“No. There’s only one copy. It’s in, like, a reading room, you know a room where—”
“You read something,” I said, “but can’t take it out. Then what good does it do me?”
“You need like a special card even to look at it. You’re really jumpy today, you know? Hey, you coming over here?”
A raindrop ended its long leap on my front window, making a circle the size of a quarter. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve got to—”
“You got to get your papers. You know what? You should slow down, take a calm pill. She’s copying it. She’s not supposed to, so it’s taking her a little time.”
“What kind of a book? How is she copying it?”
“Like his life story, like I did this, I did that. Lot of God in it, she says. What do you mean, how is she copying it? On a copier.”
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