The Black Rose (Joe Dylan Crime Noir, #4)

by James Newman

Joe had left the city five years back and had no plans of returning back to the land of his birth. Clients were careless with money in the tropics. It might have been the sun that made them crazy, it could have been the brown thighs. It could have been the cold cans of coffee and a roadside stall selling barbequed chicken. God knew what made them crazy and He wasn’t telling. Craziness was common in a place where vipers hung from coconut palms and five year old children sold bubblegum on the streets at two AM in the morning. A fool and his money were easily parted. Usually this was why they hired him. To try and recover the money or the innocence they once had. He took cases as he saw them and now and again gave himself some down time to recover and rid his mind of all the tricks and turns in the city. Joe’s mind was a nest of snakes. You ever had that feeling? Snakes. The years and the work had aged him, but what the hell, Dequincy lived to a ripe old age as did Burroughs and Hubert Hunke. Street hustlers and writers had a lot in common. Lived off their wits and sold stories. Joe had time for neither. But one thing was clear as crystal. A shot now and again helped a man sort out the demons from the diamonds, at least that’s the way he thought about it.

  But thoughts were like raindrops.

  Little raindrops, some landed, others didn’t.

  Stood. Legs shaky. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like what he was. He looked like hell. A man down on his luck, aged heavily, with dark rings around his eyes and skin trembling with anxiety. Joe was shaking. Shaking. What the hell had happened. The missed meetings and the bar were what had happened. Jesus. How did Christ get involved in these things. Jesus. His eyes wandered towards a notice put up by the apartment staff.

  No Drugs and No Prostitutes.

  Morning rose and he opened his door at the same time last night’s screamer did. She was an Arab. Despite what they tell us we’re all the same. We have intercourse with one another, we love and we hate. We do these things together. Sometimes we do all three within the millionth of a second.

  The way it’s always been.

  Joe nodded good morning and went back into his room.

  SISTER MORPHINE

  now

  THE NURSE had these big brown eyes that stared into mine as I opened. Not sure how long she had been there.

  “Lucky you only take one of the - what they call them...?” she says.

  “Fuck knows...Ball bearings, lumps of lead?”

  “Yeah. Little bit.”

  Now her voice is causing a bit of motion in the pajama department. So sweet. Innocent. Whatever drugs they gave me, I’m taking an educating guess on morphine, is bringing on a whole new state of being.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” must be the shock, I’m looking into her big brown eyes and I’m slipping into some kind of...

  “You can walk again two or three day must rest.”

  dream

  “Right.”

  Erotic...

  I sleep again for an hour or maybe a week or a decade lost again in some strange faraway city where brown-skinned women shriek with laughter from bars under a tropical sun, a man painted as a clown smokes a cigarette as a dwarf mounts the back of a motorcycle. I fall in and out of these feverish visions until I awake fully:

  Screw it.

  I’m fifty thousand pounds down the hole and all the smiles and resting in the world and all the limps and ball bearings can’t change that. Somewhere in the ward a Christmas song plays and the sound of a grown man crying. If word gets out that I got turned over by a bunch of gym freaks, well, I can kiss the street goodbye. Ed would have been out of the picture, but the problem is the cash weren’t mine. I was a middleman for a geezer who is the most crazed looking animal since Geoff Goldblum stepped out of that fly-making machine.

  ***

  then

  First time I met Byron I as seven or eight years old. Well it might have been eight or nine, I wasn’t sure then and I’m not sure now. At that age, whatever age it was, an older man with a big house and a fast car can make an impression on a youngster. I wasn’t quite aware why I was invited. Some kind of mockery perhaps? Or perhaps Byron had to meet each and every one of the clan. Perhaps that was what the King of the Gypsies did.

  Noah gave me the directions back at the site. Between gulps of special brew:

  “Take the bypass up until the island where the motors swing by, turn up on your right heel, swing it, ya see, swing it, and through a village they call Pratts Bottom,” he laughed. “You can read, then read, son, read the signs. Up that hill, they call it Rushmoore, ‘bout five hundred steps and you’ll see a grand gaff with fifteen stone horse’s heads lining the front wall. That’ll be lord Byron’s gaff. Says he wants to see you, son, and when the big man wants something then it better be done and be done fast.”

  His directions were spot on.

  One thing we were good at is directions.

  Politeness and gratitude, forget it.

  Knocked on the door and it was opened by an elderly lady who I took to be some kind of maid or servant. Hair grey tied up in a bun. She had the face of a shrew or perhaps a dormouse. A friendly rodent jumped straight from the pages of The Wind in the Willows. “You must be Mister Jimmy, come in.” Her voice was invested with the kind of pain a child never understood.

  She led me through the house. Paintings of navel battles hung from the walls in gold plated frames. Grand open fires. I was told by Noah that he was some sort of lord and no piece of furniture, or painting, no stretch of carpet made me think otherwise as I walked into that huge mansion. Every piece of furniture, every plate, vase, carpet was worth more than both of us, Noah and I, owned. We walked into a blue room with blue books on blue books shelves. I was drawn to them. Leather bound cloth editions with bright gold gilt lettering along the spines. Some of the authors I recognized, Dickens, Hardy, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene. Other’s I didn’t: Raymond Chandler, McCain, James Hadley Chase, Jim Thompson.

  Footsteps.

  Heavy.

  That voice.

  The first time I heard that voice my heart stopped beating. To say it sounded like thunder would be a cliché, but it’s all I have. I remember the first words he said to me as clearly as my first piece of ass or my first trip to The Den.

  “Those fingers best not be sticky boy ‘cus those books ain’t for stealing.”

  I spun around. A bear-sized man with a limp. His nose had been smashed in like some kind of freak you see in a low budget horror movie. “Sit down, son,” he said.

  I sat on one of the blue sofas in the blue room careful not to stain the blue cushions too much with my filthy trousers. Between us stood a coffee table lined with motoring magazines. “Never went to school meself,” he said without looking at me. “But inside you have time, see? Never serve time, son. Let time serve you. Went down for fifteen years. Prison library. I read my way through that library and then when I finished I needed all I knew. Also learned a fair few things from the other prisoners. You know what tax is, Jimmy?”

  Byron walked over to a globe drinks cabinet took out a bottle and poured himself something amber into a bulbous glass. He took a smell of the liquid and then slammed it back, “Tax, boy, you know what it is?”

  “It’s the money the government take from you if you make money, if you buy something, or if you die, sir.”

  Byron laughed. More of a roar. Think of a lion laughing – that’s it. “At your age I didn’t know what tax was. Inside they taught me about it. How to avoid it. How to grow a money tree. Why am I telling you this?”

  “I don’t know, mush, I mean, sir.”

  He refilled that glass.

  “Because the school tells me you’re smart. When you’ve finished your education I could use someone who is good with his fists and smart. Tell me boy, you ever knocked out another kid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Smoked?”

  “Tried it.”

  “Gambled?”

  “Penny up the wall.”

  “Kissed a girl?”

&nbs
p; Said nothing.

  That laugh again. “Stand up, come outside and meet my daughter. And there’ will be no kissing...”

  I followed him past a small room with an antique rocking horse and an old wooden toy box. This room led to two large French patio doors and beyond that a lawn and then a Rose garden filled with thousands of roses in bloom. The flowers were white, red, pink, blue.

  One blossomed greater than the others.

  I first saw her from behind. She was wearing a hand knitted sky-blue cardigan and a red skirt with tights and laced up Kickers shoes. She was playing with some flowers and talking to herself as we approached.

  Now some people will tell you that an eight year old boy can’t experience love at first sight.

  Some say that love is something that only adults can experience and enjoy. Bullshit. In my twenty-one years on this planet I’d never been hit so hard. Hit with a feeling of admiration and attraction.

  A & A.

  Admiration and attraction is what love is. That is all. During adulthood stuff like money and cars and houses and kids confuse the A & A. The A & A had never been as intense as it was that afternoon.

  Byron called out her name and she turned.

  Double A.

  Blonde hair, blue eyes, and a smile that knew my fear. She sensed who I was and why I had come there which was pretty smart considering I didn’t have the faintest clue.

  “This here is Jimmy,” Byron said. “Show him around the garden. Daddy has a few phone calls to make.”

  “Hiya,” she said holding out her hand.

  I nodded.

  Couldn’t touch the hand.

  Like pissing over a Picasso.

  “Well,” she said. “You want to play or not?”

  What did I want?

  What does anyone want?

  To play, I guess.

  I followed her past the rose garden and into a wooded area. There were badger trails and mole hills. The sound of a green woodpecker hammering into an elm. We watched the rabbits in the farmer’s field.

  “Sometimes he shoots them,” she said. “It’s barbaric.”

  The use of the word barbaric sealed the deal.

  It was one of those beautiful late summer evenings that you think will last forever. The trees were shedding some leaves, changes of color and the scent of freshly cut grass. Those smells that stay with you forever, and hit you now and again when you least expect it. Times like when you are coming down from an all-night binge and the birds begin to sing and you suddenly realize that it is morning and the game’s up.

  After the grand tour of Byron’s estate we sat down on the grass in the spot we had originally met. She said her mother had left her and all she had was her father. As we sat on the grass she made daisy chains.

  “Why do you live there,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “In the camp. You are...”

  “What?”

  “Different. Look at your face. You are not one of them,” she said wrinkling her nose.

  “And you?”

  “Ah, I’m no Gypsy. My mother, was, well....My name is Rose,” she extended her hand.

  I shook it. Felt like I had earned it now. She wasn’t a piece of art, she was human, motherless, like me.

  “Jimmy,” I said.

  Her hand was warm. Her fingers gripped mine.

  “You’re cute,” she whispered.

  “Cute?”

  “Never-mind. Boy’s don’t understand anything, anyway.”

  She got that right.

  The thing that bothered me.

  Wasn’t Rose a gypsy name?

  Byron walked over with a fat cigar in his hand. I could sense some adult feeling of anger or rage. Cigar smoke will always spell fear. Snooker halls, working men’s clubs, I just can’t be doing with. That type of energy, I now see as envy, but I couldn’t grasp it. It seems my childhood, like I guess everybody’s was spent amongst adults who were operating on a different level. A level not to my advantage and without awareness of my intuition. He bent down to my face.

  Said

  “You ever fuck around with my sweetheart, son, I chop both your fucking legs off.”

  The brandy on his breath suggested he was serious.

  The sun fell below a row of evergreens as the words registered. A flock of starlings, a dark cloud, flew towards the trees to roost.

  I stood and made my way back to the camp, every hundred meters or so I stopped and smiled. Gazed up at the trees and the setting sun.

  If a shrink were to ask me if I had had one single happy childhood memory – that’d be it.

  VENUS IN FURS

  now

  DYLAN FOUND the energy from somewhere to get up out of the bed once again and struggled over to the bathroom. A large plastic bucket filled with cold water and smaller plastic tray inside. He scooped up the cold water and splashed it over himself. Legs first. Then he went for it. Bucket of cold water over the back and down the chest. Water torture, he screamed as the cold dirty water brought him partially back to life. Then the shampoo. Rinsed into a lather and applied. Threw another bucket of cold water over himself and yelped like a street dog that had been trodden on by a sumo wrestler. Once he wore a suit to work and had a hot, relaxing bath every night. Once he was innocent. Once he was suckling on a nipple. Checked his teeth in the mirror. Not quite a derelict graveyard but no Colgate commercial neither. He brushed his teeth and looked in the mirror more closely. Wished he hadn’t. The last few months hadn’t been kind. Next to the hotel mirror the sticker about whores and drugs and no visitors allowed in the room. Who made these rules? Those with sense he gathered. He shaved and toweled himself dry. The once muscular arms had thinned. His stomach was larger. He was becoming one of them. One of the guys who end up as Fun City casualties. The guys who rented rooms on high floors and one day took a jump. A jump to somewhere better; the final answer.

  Freedom.

  The Big Sleep.

  He dressed in a pair of cargo shorts and a polo shirt and decided that he needed to see the street. Or the street needed to see him. Whichever way it happened they needed each other. He found his keys and wallet and walked outside. The sunlight hurt his eyes. Where were those sun-glasses? Left in a bar somewhere no doubt and picked up by an opportunist drunkard who left them in another bar to be picked up by another crook. The beat goes on. On and on. He walked along the cracked paving slabs towards the Beach Road. An oily black centipede crawled along the sidewalk and slipped down one of the cracks into the sewers below. A man with a huge red bulbous alcoholic nose walked past, large paunch, with a hooker on his arm. Bars lined the streets with tourists sitting on beer stalls nursing bottles of beers and talking to the bargirls who latched on to them for drinks and tips and maybe something else. Maybe a trip to one of the islands, a monthly bank remittance, a car, motorbike, a house in the sticks all bought and paid for.

  He made it to a bar called The Friendly Frog in the Coconut Shell, or to its local’s, Gop’s bar; if you drank twenty shots of Tiger Sweat in a row without passing out you won a T-shirt. Dylan already had the Gop T-shirt or at least he had won it for drinking the shots. He ordered a Bloody Mary from a large Scotsman behind the counter.

  Drank it.

  Went down like a sack of rusty nails. He remembered an incident with the barman some weeks before but the details weren’t clear. The man served him without comment nor commitment. For this he was grateful. The best way to serve a broken man in a bar is quietly with no conversation and no intention of conversation to come. A young woman, attractive, early twenties sat opposite him chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles, eyes scanning the horizon. She had good skin and a symmetrical face and Joe figured she offered service both sexual and pharmaceutical. She glanced over to her left the way a lizard watches the flight of a fly. Joe glanced over to where she was looking.

  Then he saw him.

  A fair haired tall man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of sunglasses walked over to Joe.

>   “Man, you look like death.”

  “Thanks, Hale.”

  James Hale was one of those Fun City characters that hung around on the edge of sanity but never seemed to crack it. He had a healthy sense of adventure and knew which way the fortune cookie crumbled. Brought up on the mean streets of South London, like Joe, he was escaping from something here in the tropics. Quite what Hale was escaping from Joe was never sure, but whatever it was it were ugly enough to keep him smiling.

  “Any new cases on the horizon?” Hale asked.

  “The horizon is foggy. Thanks for your assistance in the last one,” Joe looked sourly at the glass. “But there’s nothing new. I’m cooling off.”

  “I’ve been branching out myself. Keeping my ear to the ground,” Hale bobbed about as he spoke as if he were coming up on some kind of chemical stimulant. His shoulders jostled and shook as he spoke. “The sad lonely old man back in the west wants to keep tracks with their loved one here in Fun City.” He took out a Samsung smart phone. “So easy now. All you have to do is make sure they have a phone with GPS or work out which dating sites they use and you can track them down to their exact locale.” He said the last word with a peculiar flourish as if it were new to his vocabulary. “I’ve stopped doing the lost girlfriend gimmick,” Joe said. “It’s pretty much the same story every time. Now give me a good divorce and it’s worth it. Where there’s cars and houses and swimming pools at stake the punter tends to pay more.” Joe looked at the glass, and wondered what it was that kept drawing him to it like a sugar ant to a forgotten popsicle. The twelve steps were a distant memory in another life-time now. A thousand light-years away, “When I see people killing each other to be the first to buy the new iPhone I feel that we’ve reached a new low. Bottom feeders, soulless consumers, cretins following the herd in the quest for the unreachable. The low-hanging fruit usually hangs low for a reason. It is easy to feel liked by attaching the recent gadgets to yourself but remember, Hale, there are some that see through these shallow tricks.”

  “Well, it’s all bread and butter, mate,” Hale said. “Anyway, I have to move. I’m all tied up. I have a six o’clock appointment with a dominatrix on the dark side of town. I love this city.”