Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  Walter started to reach for it but drew his hand back. “I don’t know,” he said, as though struck by doubt for the first time. “Bribery . . .” He allowed the thought to sputter off into nothingness, something too dire to face without at least a warm-up. He even chewed his lower lip like someone auditioning to play Doubt in a medieval mystery play.

  I put a couple of fingers back into the pocket and came out with two more bills, neatly folded in half and waiting for him. “And for you,” I said.

  He took both, opened the folded ones, raised the pale eyes to me, and said, “Why does she get more than I do?”

  Slipping immediately into Bad Cop, Louie snarled “Because we can’t replace her. You, on the other hand, I got a thousand—”

  “Okay,” Walter said. The tight little mouth got almost small enough to disappear.

  I peeled off three more and gave them to Louie, putting them one at a time into the palm of his open hand as Walter watched. “Get it before closing time,” I said, “and put it in Louie’s hands tonight, and you’ll be all even-steven.” His forehead furrowed, and I pointed to the bills and said, “These will be yours, in other words. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Walter said, getting up. “Thanks for the tea.” With a little spurt of venom, he said, “It had too much tannin.”

  We both watched him scuttle to the door. Louie said, “Sorry.”

  I said, “I always think it’s kind of touching to see someone cling to a life he’s obviously not enjoying.”

  Louie raised his hand for the waitress. “Pie?”

  “Coffee,” I said. “Walter has drained me of my life essence. Where are we with the pictures of Horton’s book?”

  “Someone is bringing her a phone with a camera that works. Might even be there by now. What do you think it’s going to tell you?”

  “If I knew that,” I said, “I wouldn’t have to read it.” A waitress appeared at my side, and I said, “Where’s what’s her name?”

  She said, with big-league waitress attitude, “You’re gonna have to do better than that, Jack.”

  “Where’s Glinda?”

  “Ah,” she said, “a night owl. My guess is that she’s either asleep, trying to levitate the Titanic, or getting another tattoo.”

  I said, “That’s Glinda. Black coffee, please, and—Louie, which pie did you like best?”

  “I liked the mince, but you want peach. You always want peach.”

  “You guys didn’t have that last night,” I said to the waitress. “Peach, please.”

  “And you?” the waitress said to Louie.

  “French fries, more coffee.”

  “It’s your heart,” she said, and left.

  Louie said, “You suppose there’s a school somewhere, Waitress Improv? Pay it off with a cut of your tips?”

  I got up and went to the other side of the booth, used a paper napkin to wipe away the skin flakes, and sat down. “Call old Walter when you figure he’s not driving, make nice for a minute to get him off-guard, and then tell him I need the old man’s will, too. Henry Wallace Horton.”

  “Died when?”

  I had to think for a minute. “1931.”

  “Jeez,” Louie said. “That’s a long way back.”

  “It’s there,” I said. “That’s what bureaucracies do, they enshrine worthless documents and defend them with their lives. If the clerk gets difficult, tell him to offer her the extra two hundred. In fact, erase that, tell him to start with two hundred for Miss Daisy’s will, just to entice the clerk across the bribery line and when she’s said yes, offer her the other five hundred for the old man’s. Tell him we’ll give him five hundred when he brings them both to you.”

  “I guess that’s psychology,” Louie said. “I could just tell him I’ll shoot him.”

  “But he knows you wouldn’t.”

  “He doesn’t know shit. Under that I died eight months ago attitude, he’s thrilled about hanging with a crook. He probly thinks I got a whole room full of Lone Ranger masks somewheres.”

  I was looking for my pie. “How do I get the address that goes with a phone number?”

  “Reverse directory,” Louie said. “Used to be only the cops had them, but they’re online now.”

  I rubbed my eyes and said, “I’m really tired. I actually knew that.”

  “Some of them want you to sign up, though, which always makes me think cops even though it’s probly not. And it’s no good if your number is unlisted.”

  “Can you handle it, even if it’s unlisted?”

  “Yeah, sure. Give me the number. You know, you’re running up a tab here.”

  I gave him Eduardo’s number, and then, pulling more money out of the pocket as he wrote the number on the pad in his magic wallet, I said, “Here. A thousand, wait, fifteen hundred. I can give you a couple thousand more if you want to go to the car with me.”

  He folded his wallet and put it away. “Ahhh. You’re good for it. Hey, I got the names of some used-junk shops within ten, fifteen miles of that old house. Some of them are like retail outlets for fences, selling boosted stuff. You want them?”

  “Not now,” I said. “That phone number might be a shortcut, a direct line to one of the people who took the stuff out of the house in the first place. Hang on to the names, though.”

  “They’re filed away,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding. News that a court order had been issued for Louie’s files would probably drive a thousand crooks straight to Mexico.

  I said, “I’m really tired.”

  “You already said that.”

  “See?” I said.

  “You survived Itsy. No bite marks anywhere I can see.”

  “I wore a repellent. Her house is full of stuffed cats.”

  Louie’s mouth fell open. “That’s sick,” he said. “Don’t tell Alice.” Alice was his wife. She practically spoke cat. An appalled silence descended on the table. My phone buzzed, and I looked down at it as my pie arrived and said, “Jackpot.”

  The waitress said, “It ain’t that good, honey.”

  The pictures the student had taken of the book were serviceable, but just, photographed closely enough to get a two-page spread into the frame. The pages rose sharply up from the center crease to form little parallel mountain ranges on either side of it, and then tapered down again left and right to create a sort of gentle downhill ski slope all the way across the margins to the edges. This gave the lines of type a ribbon-like curl, and the words closest to the camera and farthest away were slightly out of focus but readable. The book was simply standard-size paper that had been typed on both sides on an old manual typewriter operated by someone who felt emphatic enough about the material to turn the periods into tiny holes that went straight through the paper. The pages had then been crimped and bound crudely at the center margin. Here and there an occasional line had been deleted by energetic repetition of the letter x, and less frequently a word or a passage had been crossed out in ink and a correction hand-written above it in a precise, printed hand as legible as the text on a blueprint.

  With a certain amount of squinting and occasional enlarging, the old man’s story was largely legible.

  It began:

  It has been said by wiser men than I that Fate is a jokester. In my life I have seen little that would persuade me otherwise. In point of fact, as I now pick up my pen to tell my story before I slip into dotage, it seems to me that I can take the wiser men one step further. The central fact of a man’s life is not whether it has been a joke, but whether he is the butt of the joke or the one who survives to tell it.

  If you are reading this, and if my wishes have been honored, I have now been dead for at least seventy-five years. You will, in fact, be inhabiting one of the first years that does not begin with a one in the more than 2000 that have passed, taking both fools and saints with them, since the death of Our Lo
rd. I have now joined the departed. For much of my life I feared death, terrified by the question of which extreme of Eternity, the lower or the higher, I would occupy. As you peruse these pages, should they continue to deserve your attention, you will see that there was good cause for my early uncertainty (later dispelled) about my final destination, and also for my wish that my story should remain a secret until my children are likely to have departed this surprising and endlessly treacherous world.

  I said to Louie, “The dead will find a way to speak.”

  23

  Not Fluffy and Foo-Foo

  Rain drummed impatient fingers on the roof of the car as I waited for it to lift enough to give me some driving visibility. As heavy as the downpour was, the thin clouds allowed some of the sun’s light, now the chilly, luster-free color of pewter, to seep through. Most of the people who were driving, I saw when I looked up, had their headlights on. I went back to my phone.

  After a youth and a young adulthood imprisoned in the cold dungeon of disbelief, I received a gift I had done little to deserve. If this gift, a vision of the unseen world that has brought me comfort over the past four decades, is accurate, as I firmly believe it to be, I may well be standing beside you as you read these words, perhaps even peering over your shoulder. If my spiritual superiors are correct in their understanding of the soul, Heaven and Hell may be empty ideas; and the departed fools and saints of all those immemorial years may yet lurk transparently among us, waiting only for the summons of someone they loved. Even my abandoned child, I believe, will be residing there, close to me, beyond all earthly injury, even, perhaps, in friendship with my implacable daughter.

  However, I anticipate myself. For many years my life was spent willingly, nay, eagerly, in darkness. Indeed, as these pages will show, some of it was dark as night itself.

  Another one knocking the dark, I thought, resisting an impulse to look over my shoulder. Then I did a mental double-take: I said aloud, “Abandoned child?”

  The spattering rain hit the roof like a handful of tacks. The windows had steamed up, so I checked the downpour’s slant—left to right, from my perspective—and half-lowered the passenger-side window. The air was cold, wet, and welcome.

  But the tale of my misdeeds, many and varied as they were, will have to wait its turn in this narrative.

  I came into this squalid world, without my wishes in the matter having been sought, in the shattering year of 1860. As I lay in my rough-hewn Kansas cradle, great things broke to pieces around me, creating the blood-soaked world through which I would have to find my way, and which would misshape my character. Mr. Lincoln was elected and the great peeling-off of the South was begun. I would come of age in a world where mankind, as Mr. Tennyson says of Nature, was red in tooth and claw.

  My phone vibrated and John Prine began to sing “Fish and Whistle,” the ringtone that had awakened me to Jake’s call the previous night. I saw a number that I didn’t recognize for a moment, and then I did: Eduardo, from the notebook I’d taken out of the kitchen drawer in Horton House. Curiosity getting the better of him, I thought. He probably didn’t get many calls. Maybe a little guilty conscience picking at him. I rejected the call to let him stew a little.

  The next few pages of Horton’s memoir outlined a childhood Dickens might have created: the death of a beloved mother, the brutality of a drunken and apparently stupid father, a grinding daily routine of trying to coax crops from baked earth, and then this:

  During my seven years of intermittent attendance at school, the only light in my world was shed by my teacher, Miss Greening, who encouraged me to read. But we should be as selective in our reading, she said, as we were in our choice of friends. A bad book, like a bad friend, has the power to lead us astray. Several times she told us that we must always ask ourselves why a man has written a book. What does he wish to make you believe? How will he gain from your belief? Will it enrich him? Will it give him the fame so many men seek? Will it enthrone him in some earthly fashion? Will it rescue his name from infamy? Will it injure an enemy? Or does he merely possess something he wishes to share with you, a moral approach to life or a story in which he hopes you will find delight? There are more bad reasons for a man to pen a book than good ones, or so Miss Greening believed, and while she encouraged us to read widely she also said that only when we knew how the writer regarded his reader should we consider ourselves free to honor him with our belief.

  It is because of Miss Greening’s words of caution regarding books and my desire to be a narrator who is worthy of your trust that I announce here and now, at the beginning of my own book, that the child whom she educated and befriended in the tiny Kansas schoolhouse where we broiled and froze in alternation was not named Henry Wallace Horton, Jr. Rather, he bore the name with which my parents baptized me. Miss Greening knew me as Edgar Francis Codwallader, a name I was later to disgrace and then abandon out of a combination of prudence and craven fear. My mother had died by then, young but beaten down by circumstance, and although my father still lived it was not to protect him that I discarded the name I inherited. I had no thought of how he might think of me; indeed, I had no thought of him at all. It was because I wanted to become the man Miss Greening had envisioned when she taught me, and I could not do that without adopting a new name and leaving behind the one I had sullied. If I have achieved any good in my life, and people have assured me on occasion that I have, it is due to Miss Greening and, later, to the wise friends to whom fate delivered me in, of all places, London, when I had the most need of them, and who opened to me the world of the spirit.

  Like a lot of crooks, I’ve witnessed more than my share of impromptu deathbed confessions—some from people who, under any other circumstance, wouldn’t have trusted me with a handful of small change although, when the time came, they were eager enough to spill their last to me. I have to admit that I’ve heard some whoppers from the mouths of those who knew that their flight had been called and was already boarding, and that it would be strictly one-way. Some people just can’t help lying; some people have sanitized their past so often they’ve come to believe the G-rated version; and some people apparently figure they can pull the wool over the eyes of the Welcoming Committee.

  Horton’s pious claim that what mattered most to him was becoming a person Miss Greening could admire was undercut by the fact that he’d continued to commit crimes after adopting his new name. I had no way of knowing whether he had been on good behavior in England, when the world of the spirit, whatever that was, seemed to have been opened to him, but he was passing himself off as Henry Wallace Horton, Jr. when he stole that jewelry from the New York social climber and topped it off with a little assault and battery. It just goes to show you, I thought as I pocketed the phone and started the car, that a writer will go out of his way to present himself on a good hair day even in a book no one will read until after he’s dead.

  Horton’s tribute to Miss Greening ended the installment of the book that Louie’s “girl” had sent in her first burst. I took a couple of deep breaths, started thinking about the script I was going to spring on Althea Beckwell-Stoddard, and started the car.

  To employ a child in the entertainment industry, the production company needs a special permit. To represent children for work in the entertainment industry, an agent needs a special permit. To work on a set, the child has to have a special permit, signed off on by the kid’s parent. Any time a child is on a film set, even if it’s only to walk by in the background for a second or two, there has to be either a teacher or a social worker, and sometimes both, in attendance. Every one of those laws is enforced by the California State Department of Labor Relations, in the person—for this afternoon, anyway—of the upright and incorruptible Dwight Sykes.

  I quick-checked myself in the rearview mirror. I didn’t look like a Dwight. But then, I’ve never felt that I looked like a Junior, either, and I’ve gone through life without people chasing me, crying out “Impost
or.” I supposed I could be Dwight again for an hour or so.

  My guess was that Ms. Beckwell-Stoddard had her agency’s permit all in order and one or two of the children might, too. What I was almost certain of was sloppiness on the part of the phony production company the Bride of Plastic Man had used to get hold of the kids for the day. She wouldn’t have been able to show the bona fides necessary to get a permit. And Beckwell-Stoddard, focused on conning her kids and their parents left and right, would be so happy about an actual job that she wouldn’t go all obsessive over a detail like that. I was also betting that the guy with the bushy wig and the honker nose who had shepherded the kids was neither an accredited teacher nor a social worker, as opposed to someone who alternated between moving large pieces of furniture from place to place and punching people on the nose for small change. I could make a very persuasive case, if Ms. Beckwell-Stoddard was reluctant to show me her client’s identification, that the Garden of Children, or whatever she called it, was in danger of being closed for neglecting the protection of its defenseless clients. And think of the lawsuits that would follow.

  How did someone wind up ripping off kids and their parents? I know I’m kind of compromised when it comes to moral condemnation of how people make a living, but these are kids with a precarious sense of self. These are loving parents, emotionally invested to the hilt in their children’s happiness. These are families in a time when so many family incomes are stretched to the point of breaking just to keep food on a table that has a roof over it. And to exploit the love among them—the most precious thing they all share—as an entry point to rob them blind—well, it didn’t predispose me in Althea Beckwell-Stoddard’s favor. I realized, with no guilt at all, that I was going to have a good time sweating her.

  It was a little before four, with the daylight prematurely on the wane as the clouds continued to bulk up, by the time I found the Gateway to Stardom, Hollywood’s Finest Nursery of Young Talent, and so forth. All that hype and promise had been packed into a small but somewhat graceful older building, perhaps from the 1940s or even the ’30s, set well back from the street in an area that mixed residential properties with commercial ones and backed right up against some scrubby hills that were too steep to develop. A dead lawn at the rear of the lot marked an abrupt end to the untidy, undomesticated tangle of the chaparral. Curving across the lawn was a sinuous concrete path, bordered on either side by the skeletons of last summer’s perennials, now brown and spiky. They looked cold to the point of shivering. The building was white stucco with—surprise—a domed roof, like a miniature observatory, a lucky find for a con woman who pretended to deal in stars. I was so ready to unload on its inhabitant that it was almost a disappointment to realize that I wasn’t going to get a chance to do it. Although the reaction quickly grew much more complicated.