Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  For a moment, I was deeply, deeply tempted to blow off everything I’d come here to do, and instead hotwire the bulldozer and drive it straight through Mr. Horton’s fucking house of pain. Shatter the covered windows, open the whole thing to the rain and the sky, bring down that stairway, liberate the ghosts, and go home.

  But prudence, mixed with greed and an urgent, buzzing desire for revenge, won the battle. Even if I could hotwire the bulldozer, it would be noisy business in a quiet neighborhood at midnight. And I couldn’t do it later, because I would be leaving in a hurry. Back to the original plan. Such as it was.

  With several deep breaths to get me centered again, I sidled along the wall until I was just beside the kitchen window. I took a couple of steps back and then put three or four feet between me and the wall so I would be visible only to someone who was within a few feet of the door to the dining room, looking through the window at a very sharp angle. I squinted through the rain. The window on the left, from this perspective, seemed to be raised about the same four inches I’d seen last time. No mud on the sill. No one was visible through the window, so I covered the distance to it, put my ear to the opening, and waited.

  I could just barely hear the rain on the second-story roof, at the very edge of audible, but nothing else from inside, so I went at double-time around to the front door, inserted the key, waited for the barrage of handgun fire that didn’t come, and went in.

  My old friend the elephant’s foot was right where I’d left it, creepy as ever. The sweetness of baby powder still corrupted the air, underpinned by the scent of damp. The rain was louder in here, and the house gave out a couple of creaks as the wet wood swelled with moisture, but there were no other sounds. For now, as near as I could tell, I was alone. If you didn’t count the old man and Miss Collins.

  If I was alone, then either they’d come in last night, after blowing the street lamp, probably with a silenced gun, or they hadn’t. I doubted that they’d risk coming in after making the necessary noise to put out the lamp, but I supposed they could have come back hours later. If not, if they’d put it off until tonight, the chainlink fence was probably going to be a surprise.

  I reached into the other cargo pocket on my nice, wet, new pants, and skipped over the big flashlight in favor of my little dim yellow one. Walking close to the walls, I soft-footed it down the hall and into the living room and then across it to check the bookcase. I had left two books lying on their spines so they’d protrude, and both were as I had arranged them. The books gave me a little woo-hoo, but they weren’t why I was here.

  It wasn’t until I’d had turned back toward the hallway, in my mind already climbing the stairs, when I remembered that the very first time I’d been here, I’d rattled around like a clown for forty minutes or more while someone—not someone, Lumia—had patiently waited for a chance to stick a gun in my ear. It would have been an understatement to say that these past couple of days had tangled me in a snarl of emotions, but the thought of Lumia cut through them like a straight razor, straightened my spine, and simplified my life. There were only two things to do here, and both depended on my not being a bonehead. So I went up onto the balls of my feet, hugged the walls, and headed for the little alcove at the base of the stairs that contained the door to the basement.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped. The stairway might have been designed specifically for an ambush; the curve to the right meant that you were six steps up and committed before you could see all of the second-floor landing. What I heard up there was a steady rhythm track of dripping water and a random series of low notes contributed by the house. Try as I might, I couldn’t identify any of the sounds that people make: steps, the squeak of heels on wood, breathing, whispers, nothing. So I turned my attention to the basement, pressing my ear against the door, which was cold enough to surprise me. It wasn’t until then that I registered that I could see my breath. This rain was towing some weather behind it.

  I passed an unpleasant two minutes in the basement, which looked like the place where the world’s first spider scuttled into eight-legged existence, got big enough to move the furniture around, multiplied, and then moved on to terrorize the world, probably via the old coal scoop in the east wall. As much as I disliked Horton House, when I emerged from the basement, the first floor looked almost homey by contrast. The rain was drumming down now, and it got louder as I slowly took the stairs in the approved but silly-looking burglar manner. At the top I paused and listened yet again, and turned left and down the hall into Miss Daisy’s room, straight past the broken chair and the sagging bed, to kneel in front of the fireplace. It took less than half a minute to feel the hard lump in the center and a somewhat longer time to peel the partially burned clothes away. She’d wrapped it tightly. A half-burned twist of old clothes, in plain sight, was a great place to hide a fortune. If she’d had her way it would have stayed there until the wrecking ball pulverized the chimney and the bulldozer crumpled the house into a motley heap of brick and glass and wood, ready to be broken up and covered in hazardous waste. Say what you like about Miss Daisy, she was a supreme hater.

  When the flashlight picked it out, my heart almost stopped. It was an oval, rounded on top, more than three inches long. The chain it had dangled from was yellow, yellow gold. The blue that the stone threw onto the palm of my hand was enough to make me lose sense of time. Great stones, and this was the by far greatest I’d ever held in my hand, bring out the absolute worst in people. Even disregarding her apparent hatred of her father and his bastard daughter, I could almost understand Miss Daisy’s deathbed refusal to give it to the mistress’ granddaughter. She meant it to be hers until, and after, death.

  A muted thumping sound made me aware that my heart was pounding. I took ten or twelve deep, even breaths to get it under control. I needed to be able to listen. Unless I was wrong, and they’d been here the previous night, there was no alternative; they were coming. Tomorrow, the house wouldn’t be standing.

  When I’d coaxed my heartbeat back into silent mode, I got up, put the sapphire in my pocket, took it out, put it in a different pocket, took it out, put it in the pocket of my T-shirt, and finally remembered that my new black shirt had not only a pocket, but a pocket with a snap on it. In it went, and the snap was satisfyingly loud. I tugged at the flap just to make sure, and it held.

  Since I’d been distracted for God only knew how long, I did the listening routine for sixty seconds and then left Miss Daisy’s room for what I hoped would be the last time. I eased the door shut between me and the worst of the baby-powder scent, and went into the nursery. Picking up the chair beside the cradle, I toted it out into the hallway, and set it down squarely at the top of the stairs, dead center in front of the darker patch of wallpaper that marked the place where the old man’s portrait had hung. Then I went to the door of Miss Collins’s room and looked in.

  Her glasses and her book were where they’d probably been when she passed away, if Miss Daisy’s help had obeyed her command that the room should remain as it was. Listening over the sounds I was making, I went to the table to see what the book was and slowed when I saw that the table had two tiers, the lower one about eighteen inches below the upper. On it, deeply dusty, was a rusting metal box that, somehow, I had missed. I figured what the hell, and opened it. Before I talked to Eduardo, I hadn’t known she existed. She was the newest member of the cast, so to speak, and I was curious.

  A bunch of yellowing letters, or, rather, handwritten copies of letters, all from her to people in Ireland, painstakingly transcribed before being sent so she’d know what she’d said. They were full of badly disguised yearning, a kind of tentative affection, and loneliness, all tamped down in favor of bright, unconvincing lies about how happy she was, how many wonderful things she had seen, and how well she was being treated. Very few letters in return, and those stiff, factual, unloving, and, it seemed to me, uninterested except for repeated requests for money. However she felt
about the people she had left behind, there hadn’t been much reciprocation. Still, she had kept their letters bound with a narrow scarlet ribbon, neatly tied but frayed around the knot with repeated reopening.

  At the bottom of the box was a creased and faded photo of a girl of nineteen or twenty. She was stiffly seated beside something that was meant to pass as a marble pillar, a purported fragment of some classic ruin. Behind her was a very flat-looking backdrop, the kind of semi-mythical photographer’s landscape that seems to call for a centaur or two. The young woman was stiff with terror at the camera, her eyes wide and her mouth curved in a smile that was all muscle. At the bottom, in a precise hand in once-dark ink, were the words, On the verge of my great adventure.

  Something very heavy shifted around in my chest. I was found myself closing the box extremely carefully, and replacing it on its shelf as though the slightest jar would break it. I stood there looking down at it, feeling too big and too coarse to be in the same room with the photograph, too heavy, too earthbound, too indifferent. Miss Collins had endured more than enough indifference.

  I was seized again with the urge to go out, get that bulldozer chugging, back up for a running start, and see whether I couldn’t drive it straight into the living room in a single try.

  Instead, I backed out of Miss Collins’s room, went to the chair at the top of the stairs, and sat in the dark. Waited in the dark.

  32

  The Wild West

  He’d met Conan Doyle five times.

  The man whose letter in the magazine had so encouraged me was still young although already losing his hair, with a long, narrow face that seemed, to me, full of curiosity, a face meant to sniff out secrets. His features, delicate and regular, were all but overpowered by an elegantly waxed moustache, a “dude moustache,” we would have called it out west. Its points looked sharp as needles. They curved up at the ends, almost touching his earlobes. His eyes were very calm. I only saw them spark three of four times, once, early in our acquaintance at something I had said, and I desired to provoke that reaction again, so I told him a good many things. Some of them I counterfeited, but only one more time did I see my words go home.

  Dr. Conan Doyle took an interest in me, I believe, because I stood out as rougher and less polished than the others in the meetings, “more rooted in this world,” he said, and because I was American. There was an American he admired shamelessly, a New York detective named William Burns, and Dr. Conan Doyle asked me eagerly whether I knew of him, perhaps had even met him. In his youth, he said, Burns befriended a forger and counterfeiter who told exciting tales of his brushes with the Secret Service, perhaps seeking an apprentice. In the end, however, it was the Service Burns chose, rather than following in his friend’s lawless footsteps, and he quickly became famous for his skill at finding and identifying clues that no one else could discern. Dr. Conan Doyle could talk about this man until someone changed the subject, which I must say the English do much more pleasantly than we Americans.

  But I believe the real reason he took the remarkable step of befriending me was that I was a denizen of what he called “the Wild West.” Several years earlier, in 1887, Buffalo Bill Cody, that great fraud, had come to London with his “Wild West” show, with its staged gunfights, its tired, ailing Indians, and the one real wonder he could present, the female sharp shooter Annie Oakley. Miss Oakley, who had never fired a shot in anger and never went farther west than Ohio, was married to another false gun fighter, Frank Butler, who had been a dog trainer and a glass blower before he began to compete in shooting contests. Westerners they were not, desperadoes they were not, but Miss Oakley could undoubtedly shoot.

  Dr. Conan Doyle was bewitched. He thought it all real. The smell of gunpowder and the dust kicked up by the horses kindled a flame in his heart for the West. He had read many books about it since seeing Buffalo Bill, but I was the first westerner he had met, and this was a topic on which I could hold forth for some time. I told him about the little towns and the desperadoes, the slow end of the Indians, their land gone, alcohol their new anesthetic and poison. I told him about the exploits and misadventures of men, most of them fools, I had known. And in the end, with deep misgivings, I told him about myself.

  The chair got harder and the house got colder by the minute. I forced a shiver to release some nervous energy, and said, “Brrrrrrrrr.” A cliché, but it helped a little. The cold factor and the hard-chair factor were, of course, amplified by the creep factor with which Horton House was so richly endowed. So much unhappiness, betrayal, greed, illness, death, so much—no other word for it—darkness. As I sat there, distracting myself with Codwallader’s, or rather, Horton’s, adventures in London, It seemed to me at times that I could feel the old man’s eyes fixed on my back from the pale patch of wallpaper where his portrait had hung for a century. At that point, thirty or forty minutes in, I wouldn’t have been completely surprised to see him materialize like a heavy cloud on the stairs and walk straight through me, to gaze at the missing picture, an afterlife repetition of something he had probably done thousands of times while he was alive. Generally speaking, when you commission an enormous portrait it’s of someone you admire, an ancestor or something. It’s not often of oneself. Seemed to me he must have spent a lot of time looking at it. Why else did he want it?

  Twelve forty-one. I allowed a bit of doubt to seep in. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps—on the last day this house would be standing, the last night before it was reduced to rubble, and guarded rubble at that—perhaps she wouldn’t make one last, despairing pass at finding her treasure. She’d spent tens of thousands of dollars, money from some other area of her life, to find it. She’d killed two people and invaded my home in her attempt to find it. Maybe she’d finally admit defeat. Blow it off.

  Or maybe she’d been here last night. It seemed to me that it would have been stupid to shoot out that streetlight and then do a little breaking and entering. The noise and the sudden loss of the light might have been heard or even seen. If I were she, and if I were careful, I would have done it the night before I broke in, relying on the city of Los Angeles’s almost mythical slowness in responding to such things. But who knows? Maybe she wasn’t as careful as I thought she was.

  And then, of course, she’d been at my place not too long ago. So even if she had visited Horton House the previous evening, she was still on the hunt.

  As little as I liked being here, I decided to give it until three. I owed at least that much to Lumia.

  Just to move around and warm up a bit, I got up and walked the short hallway: portrait to sitting room, portrait to sitting room, three times. On the third pass I went into the sitting room and picked up the two best of the African American dolls, not for their value but because they had individual faces, which was seldom the case with these things. One of them had an air of secret amusement I especially liked, and it made me wish I had met the person, almost certainly a woman, who had painted it.

  The rain had lightened. As I sat down again at the head of the stairs with my dolls in my lap and the pale patch behind me, I decided to stay until four. Or maybe five. I paged ahead in the old man’s apology or justification or memoir, whichever it was, until I once again saw Conan Doyle’s name.

  My list of crimes, while they had seemed to me when I committed them to be grave offenses against mankind, did not, when I shared them with Dr. Conan Doyle, evoke censure or condemnation. He gave them the same attention he had probably given to Buffalo Bill. All went well as long as the stories lasted, but they soon grew scarcer and, quite obviously, less diverting to their audience. However short my criminal career had been, it was clear that I was unlikely to exhaust my store of tales before I exhausted Dr. Conan Doyle’s interest. He had begun to listen dutifully, a terrible experience for the one who is telling the stories. I was not an accomplished storyteller, for one thing; and for another, all my tales shared a fault that is fatal to certain kinds of fiction: we both knew the
ending. I was, after all, unharmed and present, in the flesh. One evening, at a cafe to which we had repaired when the meeting ended, feeling desperate at his diminished interest in my history and not wanting to lose the pleasure of his company, I plucked up my courage and told him about Hermann Wendt, the man whom I had killed in order to steal his gold.

  I must confess, however, that I softened the tale. I said I had wounded Wendt and that he had recovered but had died soon after, of natural causes. The doctor let the silence between us grow until I could feel my face heat up, which was a revelation: I thought my days of blushing were long past. Then he asked me what, if I could see that man again, I would do.

  At once, I was weeping. I told him of my wish to kneel before Wendt and beg his pardon and his blessing when I had joined him in the spirit world. I confided that the brutality of my life was the thing that made me most wish to survive its ending, in the hope that I could, in that other dimension, undo the things I had done in this one. Dr. Doyle was a man who kept his distance physically, but he reached across the table and put his hand on my shoulder and engaged my eyes with his own. He said that with sincere penance my soul would be unmarked—the soul was, he said, for all its heavenly origin, harder than diamond and endlessly bright—and that he knew I could shrug off my old ways and embrace the soul’s natural path of light. He would not judge me harshly, he promised. Our friendship was not imperiled.