Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  The forgiven criminal, I thought.

  After I had recovered myself from a most unmanly display of emotion, he asked me to tell him the details of my latest crime which, I swore to him, would be my last. Dr. Conan Doyle listened as I unspooled the story of the carbuncle, expressing special interest in the jewel itself. He praised the cut I had described to him, saying he found it more elegant and less vulgar than the hard sparkle of faceted stones. When I had finished the tale, he once again sat silent for long moments. I felt a sinking fear that, despite his earlier assurances, I had crossed a line from which there was no retreat, that he would disown me and sever our friendship.

  Imagine my surprise when instead, he said, with that brightening of his eyes I had seen only on one previous occasion, “Let us look at a related problem. Suppose you had to conceal the stone. Let us imagine that you knew that the crime would be investigated by a fearsome antagonist, a detective as brilliant as . . .”

  He stopped, and for a moment I was certain he would name his own creation, Mr. Holmes, who was then being talked about with great enthusiasm in London, but instead, he said, “. . . as brilliant as your countryman Mr. Burns. Where would you secure the jewel?”

  I had, in fact, hidden the carbuncle by folding it into a piece of paper and using a dab of Hiltpeter’s very sturdy mucilage to secure the little packet to the bottom of the closet door in my hotel room. It is extraordinary how seldom people look at the bottom of a door. The packet cleared the carpet easily, and I was certain it was safe there, although I did check daily to make sure the mucilage’s seal remained intact.

  But I hesitated to reveal my arrangement, for two reasons. The first, I am ashamed to say, was that I was reluctant for anyone else, even my new friend, to know where it was. Secrets can best be kept, I have learned, if they are known only to a single person. The second reason was that, in casting about for another method of hiding ill-gotten spoils, I remembered instead the story of Clovis Menger, which had provoked laughter even when I told it one evening to a group of desperate men sitting around a campfire that they all knew could well have been their last. Indeed, they laughed so hard and so loudly that their leader brandished his guns to threaten them into silence.

  Even though it depended for its humor on a kind of subject matter seldom discussed among the cultured residents of London, the tale did have to do with hiding stolen treasure. Thus, with some misgivings, I told Doctor Conan Doyle how Clovis, a common burglar and pig farmer, had been warned one day that the sheriff was even then swearing in a posse to arrest him for the theft from the Swandale First Bank of more than eight pounds of gold nuggets. This quantity of gold, then selling at almost $21.00 per ounce, was worth nearly $2700, in the west an unimaginable fortune for all but the very rich.

  Despite its grandiose name, Swandale was a decrepit wooden building with a lock I could have picked with a dining fork. Clovis had apparently been spotted entering the bank, even at three in the morning, by some ne’er-do-well in the saloon across the way, and the drunkard had peached on him the very next morning in hope of a reward.

  Clovis gave his friend thirty dollars, a great wad of money in that place at that time, and waited until he was sure the informer was gone and had not doubled back to see what he would do. Then he ran into the house, got the canvas bag of gold, and carried it to the pig pen. There he began to feed the pigs one at a time, and as each of them opened wide, Clovis inserted the metal cleaning rod from his six-gun vertically between the pig’s jaws, thereby propping its mouth open while he forced nuggets down its throat. He finished the unorthodox meal by pouring a bucket of water into the pig’s open mouth, compelling it to choose between swallowing and drowning. When he had fed all seven pigs, the gold was gone.

  By the time the posse arrived, Clovis was sitting on his horse at an overlook that concealed him and gave him a good view of his property, the very one he had feared the informant might use to spy on him. After giving the posse time enough to search his house and the grounds, Clovis rode down to the homestead and demanded to know what the posse’s members were doing on his property. The sheriff blustered, as sheriffs will, but without the gold he had no case against Clovis except the testimony of a well-known sot. He had no alternative but to abandon the field of battle.

  When I had got this far in the story, I paused, and Doctor Conan Doyle cleared his throat and said, “Ingenious, but obviously one problem remained.”

  “Actually,” I said, delighted by his expression of interest, “more than one.” And I told him how, late that night, a group of masked men, several of whom Clovis recognized from the posse and one of whom was the informant, surrounded the cabin with much shooting of guns and how, when Clovis came out, they manhandled him to the pig pen, where he was securely tied to the fence. Then the masked men set a circle of fires around the pen and retired to their warmth. While Clovis shivered and listened to the laughter grow louder as the levels dropped in the bottles of rum and brandy the men had taken from his house, watchmen were set, with military precision, two at a time to stand on either side of the pig pen. Not, as Clovis first thought, to keep an eye on him. Rather, they were keeping an eye on the pigs.

  It was the longest, weariest, and foulest night of Clovis’s life. Every time a pig obeyed the command of nature, Clovis’s rope was adjusted to allow him to reach the new set of droppings. Pig sewage is uniquely malodorous. The men laughed, holding their noses, as Clovis, as they put it, prospected for gold. When he had searched each deposit thoroughly, using his bare hands, he dropped his discoveries into a bucket of water, which was then swirled around and tossed onto the ground so the men could handle the nuggets without being soiled. Time, as many have observed, has the elastic quality of slowing for misery; to Clovis, that night and most of the following day seemed to take years. When, at last, the men rode off, taking Clovis’s gold with them, they left behind in the pigpen a rough sign that said ‘CLOVIS MENGER’S GOLD MINE.’ Clovis left it there until he disappeared, several days later. His travel was funded, people speculated, by one or two pigs with especially slow constitutions.

  I was surprised, as I told the tale, by how avidly Dr. Conan Doyle followed it. When it was finished, he picked up his glass of wine and drank. “The plan was good,” he said. “But it required a more sophisticated digestive system.” Not until I received the book he sent to me in America and read it did I realize that I had given him a story, the one in which Holmes, in the spirit of Christmas, uniquely forgives the thief he has apprehended through his rigorous logic.

  As I sat in the dark and I considered Conan Doyle’s remarkable, perhaps even schizophrenic, ability to embrace both logic and spiritualism, I realized that at some point in my reading I’d taken the stone from my pocket and had been turning it over in my fingers as I followed Horton’s story. I’d been doing it long enough that it had warmed to the touch. And my fingers had found something somewhere, some kind of irregularity, but—

  My train of thought was derailed as I registered two things almost simultaneously: first, that the rain had stopped; and second, that I was hearing a metallic sound, just audible, from outdoors. The fence was being climbed.

  I got up, turned off the phone, and put it into one of my cargo pockets. Then I pulled out the other things I needed, sat the dolls on the floor beside the chair, and took my seat again. I turned out the little penlight, pocketed it, and waited, still turning the stone between my fingers, like a worry bead. In the fifth or sixth of a series of slow, quiet breaths, there was a sensation of something almost physically clicking into place and I realized what I had felt. I extracted the penlight again and turned it on to verify my suspicion. Then I returned the penlight and the jewel to my shirt pocket and focused on breathing. I was no longer cold. For what seemed like the first time since I first entered Horton House, it wasn’t creaking.

  I may have laughed.

  They certainly weren’t burglars. They fumbled getting the key i
nto the lock so many times that I could have come in through the kitchen window, stopped in the hallway to listen, gone to the bookshelves, chosen a book, and carried it upstairs without accelerating my heart rate by the time they’d defeated the lock. Then, opening the door, they banged it into the wall. One of them said, “Sssshhhhhh,” and I realized that I was saying it, too, although much more softly. Then the woman said, quietly but not really a whisper, “Do you think you can close it without slamming it?”

  He said, “Oh, fuck off.” So they were as cranky as I was. The door closed, just loudly enough for him to make the perpetual male point. There was some purposeful creaking as they went down the hall. The spill from an unfocused flashlight splashed on the wall beside the stairs.

  “Hey,” he said, “lookit the books.” He creaked and groaned his way across the living room below.

  “Who cares?” she said. “Wow, last time I was here this dump had furniture in it.”

  “That’s very interesting,” he said. “Some of these books are really old. Shit!”

  “What? And come on over here. If it’s anywhere, it’s up—”

  “These fucking pictures,” he said. “Got fucking spooks in them.”

  “The old guy believed in, like, everything,” she said. “Told my grandmother they’d be together forever in the afterlife, which he thought would be great, like Florida for dead people. She told my mother she’d had plenty of him already. Let’s get upstairs. We made too much noise getting in.”

  “What a fucking dump,” he said.

  “It was nice twenty years ago. ’Course, that was in the daytime. Come on.”

  Her flashlight picked out the lower stairs, and I saw her hand on the banister. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “can we please get on with it? And don’t aim that thing at me, you’re blinding me.”

  He must have turned his flashlight off because the light level dropped, and then he appeared, nose first, on the first step after the stairs curved right, up toward me. Then she was beside him, and as she began to bring her flashlight up to point it at the second floor, I turned on mine, which was a zillion-watt cop special, and got them right in the eyes.

  “Jesus,” he said, backing away with his hands over his eyes. “I can’t see shit.”

  “Both of you,” I said, “stay exactly where you are, and I mean exactly. You, too, Paulette.” Her jaw dropped. “Let go of that flashlight now, and I’m not kidding, if either of you moves, I’ll shoot you.”

  He moved, in the form of a quick backward step down, and I shot him, low in the right leg, to the accompaniment of a discreetly muffled phut from Eaglet’s silencer. It was a tricky shot, but Eaglet had a great gun. He went down screaming and grabbing at his leg, falling back a step to collapse on the landing, and I said to her, “Shut him up or I’ll shoot him again.”

  She turned partly away and kicked him, and he shut up, although he whimpered a little. When she pivoted back, she had a gun in her hand. She fired twice at the light, but it was in my left hand and I had my arm fully extended from my body, so she missed me by a couple of feet. I fired twice into the stair above the one she was standing on, which got her attention.

  “Next one’s through the heart,” I said. “Lower them both, the gun and the flashlight. Put them three steps up. Don’t climb the stairs, just turn off the flashlight, lean forward, and put them down. I can kill both of you and be out of here in sixty seconds, leave you for the bulldozer.”

  She did it, lining them up perfectly parallel and then put a hand to her forehead, trying to cut the glare and catch sight of me. I wiggled the light back and forth and said, “Uh-uh. You already know who I am.”

  She said, “Cocksucker.”

  “Get your friend’s gun,” I said, “and put it on the same step, next to yours.”

  They had a brief tug of war until I fired another shot into the wall just above their heads, and then he yielded it. “Put it right there,” I said to her when she hesitated. “This is just going to take a minute,” I said. “How did you get involved with Allan Frame?”

  “That’s your question?”

  “It’s my first. And my easiest, and I want an answer now.”

  “He was, you know, friends with my mother, like a lot of other guys. I was supposed to call him Uncle Allan.”

  “You spent a lot of money on this project—”

  “No kidding, you asshole.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  She looked up at me, and I gave her the light again, and she put up a hand to block it and said, “Damn you. Uncle Allan put it up. My mother never stopped talking about—about . . .” She glanced down at the fallen man and shook her head as though it was his fault he was lying there bleeding.

  “What did Uncle Allan want?”

  “Half,” she said nastily. “Just half. Because he loved my mother and me so much.”

  “Too bad. Next question. When you picked up Lumia, who was driving?”

  “I was,” she said, and he said, “She was.”

  “So you, Mister Nose—wait, what’s your name?”

  “Phil.”

  “Not Eddie.”

  “Phil,” he said again.

  “So you, Phil, that makes you the one who shot Lumia.”

  “No,” Phil said immediately, “I didn’t.”

  “Then this is how I’m supposed to see it?” I said. “Sweet little Paulette here is driving, facing forward because that’s where they put the controls and the window and everything, and you’re in the front seat next to her and facing back, but she’s the one who pulls the gun, turns her head a hundred eighty degrees, takes her foot off the pedal, and fires the shot?”

  Paulette said, “I should have met someone like you.”

  I said to Phil, “And I suppose you killed that awful agent, too.”

  “No, I did,” she said. “It was my turn, and she never saw Phil. But he was the one who shot your little friend.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Her forehead wrinkled. “Why what?”

  “Why shoot Lumia?”

  “She’d seen us,” Paulette said as though it were the simplest thing in the world. She didn’t shrug, but the gesture was in her tone. “The stone was going to be the beginning of a new life. I couldn’t leave people all over the place who knew about us. It was all—even with only half, everything was going to be new.”

  Phil groaned, and she said, “Shut up.”

  “Well,” I said, “here’s the issue. You two killed a friend of mine. He pulled the trigger, but who cares? You just told me that you would have shot her, too. What I should do, you know, in the interest of symmetry, is kill you both.”

  “It was mine,” she said. “That old bitch stole it from me. It was mine, it was my mother’s, it was my grandmother’s. It didn’t belong to her. It was rightfully mine.”

  “Okay,” I said. I turned the light aside. “Tell me when you can see me.”

  She said, “What?”

  “Let me know when you can see me clearly.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, opened her mouth wide, relaxed her face, and looked up at me. “Okay,” she said.

  I said, “Catch,” and threw the stone, underhand, to her.

  She fielded it neatly, looked down at it, and took an inadvertent step back that sent her tumbling down the stair behind her. Fortunately for her, she landed mainly on Phil, who let out a high puppy’s yip of pain.

  She was still on top of him, but I don’t think she even knew he was there. She held the stone up to the splash of light from where my beam was hitting the wall. Her breath was coming short and fast and choppy, and then she began to weep, a harsh, rusty sound. In between sniffles, she said, “Where did—where did—”

  I said, “Do you know anything about the Mohs Scale?”

  She was blinking at me as though I’d be
gun to talk in tongues. “The—the what?” Her eyes went back to the jewel. She rubbed it against her cheek.

  “It was invented early in the nineteenth century by a guy named Friedrich Mohs. It measures the hardness of minerals.”

  She said, “So what?”

  “He used a method that’s elegant in its simplicity. What it came down to was what you could use to put a scratch into what. For example, everybody knows you can scratch glass with a diamond.” She was moving, putting her weight on Phil, who protested wordlessly as she rose, her eyes on mine. He was bleeding quite a lot. I said, “That’s because glass has a hardness of about five or five and a half on the Mohs scale, depending on what kind of glass it is, and diamond is ranked at ten, making it the hardest of all naturally occurring minerals.”

  She said again, “So what,” but she had already seen where it was going.

  “So sapphire is ranked nine. There’s almost nothing you can scratch sapphire with, except a diamond, and even then it takes a lot of strength. Turn the stone over.”

  She did, and all her breath escaped in a hiss.

  “That’s a pretty deep scratch,” I said. “What you’re holding is glass.”

  She put the hand with the stone on the banister, and it slipped from her fingers and fell with a clatter to the uncarpeted floor below the stairs. She said, “He left her a fake? Why would he—I mean, why—”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “My guess is that Miss Daisy sold it the moment she came of age, but she had this thing made first. That way, if you ever got hold of it legally, she could claim she knew nothing about it, not even that anything was in the doll, and if you somehow got in and stole it, either while she was living or after she died, it would be a terrific fuck you. And you know what else? She even hid it, pretty well, so you’d have the thrill of finding it, giving you even further to fall when you learned it was duff. That’s the kind of hate you don’t see much of these days. A parting gesture with some real weight behind it.”