Darker Than Noir

by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith

  “I didn’t see nothin’. I didn’t hear nothin’,” Kowalski said.

  Glanville said, “And that’s the only proper response there is to a world that refuses to believe in evil.”

  Brendan shivered, seeing the box in the open trunk. “What about that?”

  “I’ve got a place for it,” the priest said. “Take it out in my boat with chains and an anchor. It’ll be there until this earth stops turning.”

  Kowalski nodded, and then pawed his chest, looking for a smoke. “Damn, I’m out. Say, Padre, do you have a smoke?”

  The priest pulled a package out of his pocket and offered it.

  “What do you think happened to that guy’s head?” Brendan asked.

  “It was inside the box,” the priest said.

  “The whole time?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t realize it until I opened the box in the bedroom.”

  Kowalski giggled. “You mean you never opened the box—even after you knew the demon was gone?”

  The priest helped himself to a cigarette and lit it. He took a drag and let the smoke curl around his beard. “No. I opened it once and that was enough. One can never be too sure of things.”

  They stood for a moment in the wind. Something thumped, thumped, thumped.

  Kowalski took a few steps away from the trunk and said, “Say, Father, you don’t think a devil could possess a head do you?”

  Brendan stepped away and the priest slammed the truck shut.

  No, you never can be too sure.

  MY SUBJECT

  by Justin Pollock

  Sure, I’ll tell you about 1991.

  It starts like any decent private eye story, with a client stepping into my office, but don’t imagine some dingy little hole filled with hard black shadows, lit by the trembling pulse of neon light through Venetian blinds, cigarette smoke chopped up by a lazy ceiling fan going around and around over my head. Ted Dunkowski Investigations was and still is a small two-room unit in an office building that also houses a dentist and a children’s autism clinic, lit by clean florescent lights and kept nice and cool by an air conditioner in the window, because I’m the kind of private detective who just handles worker’s compensation fraud cases. Even back in ’91 there were flecks of gray snow in my hair, and on that day I was probably wearing a polo shirt and khakis just like I am today.

  The client, a tall, nasal Midwesterner with a presumptuous mustache, laid the facts out: his employee’s alleged injury on the job, the subsequent workman’s comp claim, and his suspicions as to the veracity of said claim. I can’t tell you the name of the client or the claimant, of course, but trust me when I say it seemed—me not knowing any better at that point—a straightforward, common case. I could’ve printed out a script for exactly what the client was going to say in advance, leaving only a few blank spaces for names, dates, and complaints. No headaches in sight, I accepted the case without hesitation.

  “Here’s how it works,” I told the client. “You’ll give me Mr. _______’s address and a list of any public places you know of where he’s likely to be found. Bars, restaurants, parks, gas stations, stores, that sort of thing. But more than likely you’ll only have his home address, am I right?”

  “Ah, yeah,” the client said. “I really couldn’t say about any a’ the other ones.”

  “That’s all right, that’s all right. He may be smart enough not to be lifting weights at his local gym if he’s supposed to have torn his back muscles the way he’s claiming. In this circumstance, I’ll be limited to staking out his house with my video camera from an inconspicuous distance and hoping to get evidence on tape that he’s not injured, or even that he’s not as injured as he claims to be.”

  “When you say ‘hope,’” the client said, his voice a bowstring being drawn back, “what does that mean, exactly?”

  “Well, it comes down, again, to how smart Mr. _______ actually is. If he’s smart, he’ll exhibit behavior consistent with his alleged injuries at all times he’s out of doors, and if that’s the case, there’s nothing I can do. I can only conduct surveillance; I can’t place a heavy cinder block in his driveway so that he’ll have to pick it up and move it-- or anything like that. But that ‘if he’s smart’ has a very big ‘if’ in it. Most people don’t have the kind of acting talent required to pull this sort of thing off. Most people don’t even try because they don’t think they’re being watched; everybody thinks they invented workman’s comp fraud.”

  “So you’re pretty sure you can get him on tape like that?”

  “If he’s honestly faking it? Very sure, yes.”

  “And then you, what, jump outta the car and arrest him?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Again, this is only surveillance we’re talking about.”

  I offered a smile, but it didn’t help; the client deflated in his chair slightly, disappointed in the unglamorous realities of the private detective experience. “So what about the rest a’ the investigation?”

  “This is the investigation.”

  “Yeah, but when do you find out how he did it? What I can’t figure out’s how he could get a doctor ta back him up if he’s fakin’ it.”

  In a calm, friendly tone, I explained: “A full investigation covering the whys and the hows may or may not be conducted by your insurance company or the police. Let me be perfectly clear here, my part of the investigation is only surveillance. This ends one of two ways: either I catch Mr. _______ on tape in the act, or I don’t. If I do, I bill you for my time and for delivery of the tape. If I don’t, I’ll continue surveillance over a period of days until a reasonable attempt has been made. At which point, I may conclude that the injury is legitimate and advise you to drop the case. You can accept that advice and settle up the bill for my time, or you can hire me for further surveillance and hope Mr. _______ finally slips up.”

  A short blast of air from the client’s nostrils made his whiskers dance. “Well, pardon me for sayin’ so, but it sounds like you’re askin’ a lotta money just ta sit in a car and shoot video that might not even amount t’anything. I mean, I’m not even a hunnert percent positive he’s fakin’. You hear some things in the warehouse, the other guys talkin’, but, y’know. People just talk.”

  Keeping cool is the secret; all private detectives are salesmen. I leaned back in my chair. “Yes, people do just talk. But if you really believed that, you wouldn’t have set this interview up in the first place. You don’t have to answer this question, but I’m assuming that something in your prior experience with Mr. _______ leads you to suspect that talk is truth in this case.”

  I told him not to answer but he nodded anyway.

  “You’re a businessman,” I said, “so you know all about the bottom line. And the bottom line in this situation is either Mr. _______ is ripping you and your insurance company off, or he isn’t. No amount of explaining his methods or motives is going to change that.”

  He nodded again because I was making sense. “You wouldn’t even be kinda curious yourself?”

  “If it’s the doctor that’s throwing you for a loop, let me just say doctors are people too. They can make mistakes, or they can just rubber-stamp the claim if it’s the end of the day and they’re itching to close up shop. I’ve even had guys who made it worth the doctor’s while, if you see what I mean. Seems like more trouble than it’d be worth to me, but you know, there’s guys who’d sell their soul for a couple weeks paid off work. I’ve been doing this for some years, and there’s very little out there to surprise me at this point.

  “But it’s because of those years of experience that I know digging further into a case than you need to is never worth it. That’s not being lazy; that’s being smart. There are other guys out there—I’ve met some, I’ve known some—who don’t understand that, who try to be cowboys. You spend half a day in a car on a corner just hoping to grab forty-five seconds of usable evidence, sometimes you want that closure, you want that drama. You don’t want to quietly drive away. The whole private
detective idea from the movies gets in their heads, and their egos drive them to do stupid things. They fool around with entrapment, or they start snooping where they’re not legally allowed. But curiosity really does kill the cat, I can promise you, and that sort of thing will get you in trouble. An illegal or improper investigation can get a case thrown out of court and the fraudster could get away scot-free. So you understand, it’s not worth it, for me or you. I have the discipline to know that my investigation’s over the moment I hand over that tape, or the moment you tell me to call it off. You couldn’t pay me enough to be a cowboy.

  “But what you can pay me for is the best surveillance you can get for the price. If this guy really is faking it, I’ll get him, probably even before too long, because he’ll never even know I’m there. Frankly, for what it’ll save you and your insurance company, what I’m asking for is a bargain. So, with that in mind—there’s only the matter of some minimal paperwork if you’d like me to begin my investigation.”

  Ten minutes later I handed him the yellow carbon copies of everything he’d just signed, and I was writing my subject’s name on the tab of a clean new file folder.

  * * *

  I’m not going to tell you how I staked out the subject. The greatest trick is trying not to look like you’re trying not to look conspicuous. That’s a trick I know, and it’s proprietary; the more people know the secret, the more competition I have. And anyway, how do I know it isn’t a trick I’ll ever have to play on you?

  I will say that it took eight hours of sitting in a car with no air conditioning on an eighty-six degree afternoon. And I’ll also say that it took more skill in those days than it does now because of the size of the camera. It’s a lot easier to be sneaky with a flip-camera that fits in your palm than it is with a great big cinder block of a machine, which is all I had to work with back in ’91. You’d think that would make me happy to live in a digital world, and call me an old man, but it doesn’t. Because you can show me something you’ve captured digitally, and the first thing I’ve got to do is figure out if you faked it. It’s so easy to manipulate photos, to drop CG into video, to edit digital audio. I can’t trust anything anymore until I’ve really sat down and studied it. But magnetic tape’s not so simple to screw with; when you see it on VHS, you can be pretty damned sure that’s what really happened. It kept us honest, back in those days.

  I was thinking about giving up on the afternoon when a black pickup swung into the driveway I’d been watching just as the sun started going down. Patience rewarded, I pressed the record button. A big warehouse guy with beefy arms and a belly got out and scrambled around the back, and he sure didn’t move like someone laid up with a back injury. Not enough to nail him, though; I needed more, and he gave more. Out of the flatbed he grabbed a forty-pound bag of salt under each arm and hauled them off the truck without so much as a wince.

  This was what a done job looked like. I could’ve stopped recording, and on any other case I would have. But I hesitated because of what he was doing with the salt.

  He tore one of the bags open and started pouring it on his lawn, ten feet back from the house, then started walking so that he made a little trail of salt behind him. He kept checking over his shoulder, but he wasn’t looking out for me, or anybody like me. It wasn’t the face of a man afraid of being watched, it was desperation, and I didn’t understand it, or why he was laying down salt in a gentle curve surrounding his house. His eyes were red and haunted and his hands were shaking, but he poured very slowly and very carefully, and it took a few minutes before the circle he was making took him out of sight behind his house.

  And there’s me with nothing but questions about the salt and the strange way he looked. Even stranger was the way I felt. When I first started investigating worker’s comp fraud, every lie I uncovered had me frothing; blood thundering in my ears, gritting my teeth to see these parasites collecting money they’re not owed while my brother lived out his life in pain and ruin because he lost his job back in the days before they knew what to make of multiple sclerosis. I’ll admit, there were times I did want to jump out of that car and chase those bastards down. Prison’s too good; I wanted something just to the left of revenge. But over time—like a hot shower, like a cold pool, like anything—you get used to it, let it run over you.

  With this case, though, I didn’t feel angry, but I didn’t feel nothing, either. I just felt sad for him, and I didn’t know why, but the whole time I watched him, something inside me wanted to let him keep whatever he’d scammed; I wanted him to have that money and that time off not out of charity, but pity. Also for no damn reason: goosebumps on my arm, despite the stale summer heat.

  So yes, in that moment I wanted more. I got hold of a mystery and I wanted to unwrap it and see what was inside. But I pressed the button to stop recording, stashed the camera away, and started the car, leaving my subject to his little project. Because I am the best there is in this town, and I meant every word I said to the client about knowing when to walk away from the job.

  You don’t get paid for anything but your time and that incriminating black videocassette tape.

  * * *

  I dropped the camera off at the office and left reviewing the tape for the morning. I knew I’d gotten the footage I needed, and it was late and I was tired and cranky from sitting in a car all day. I needed to change my clothes, wash my hands. By the time I got home, I’d put the business with the salt out of my head. I came in the next day at eight, and it was all forgotten until I slid the videocassette into the top-loading VHS deck hooked up to my television in the back room.

  The angle and glare from the sunset could’ve been a problem, but my subject, his face, and his activities were all unmistakably clear on the magnetic tape. A definite conviction on fraud charges. There was no trace of the pity and curiosity I’d felt, and I thought only about what my client would pay me for this tape.

  Until I saw the charcoal-black shape following my subject.

  Not a shadow—it was all wrong for where the sun was. I was trying to make sense of it when it rolled up into some kind of black fog about ankle deep, very deliberately following my subject step for step. He was all nervous glances, but somehow he never saw the fog, even when he should have been looking directly at it.

  Only then did it hit me that I should have seen it too.

  All that pity I’d felt came back in a rush. I wanted to yell at the TV, screaming at my subject to watch out for that fog, but nothing I could say would make any difference. The fog grew fatter, and now it looked like an ocean wave threatening to break. Three times, the man in the video looked straight through it. There was no way he could have missed this, and no way I could have missed it. I was watching him the whole time. The whole time.

  By the end of it, the black wave was as tall as my subject and still in pursuit. I gave up any hope for the man in the video without really understanding why, and that was before the shape stopped being fog; before it grew arms and legs, and a column of black smoke sculpted itself into a torso. It was like a clay figure being molded by invisible hands. A hazy head rose out of the chest to complete the picture, a Rorschach blot looking a lot like a person. Mounted to the head were what might have been wild licks of hair, but if I’m being honest with myself, I’d have to call them horns.

  The smoke man stalked, but the flesh man in the tape just kept pointlessly pouring his salt. As my subject was about to turn the corner, the smoke man raised its arms, as if it was finally going to pounce on its prey.

  Then it stopped and turned to the camera.

  Where there should have been eyes, there were two white headlights made of static, the same snow you used to see at the beginning and end of a VHS tape. I wanted to look closer, but I didn’t, because I was pretty sure the smoke man wasn’t looking at the camera the evening before. He was looking at me. Right now, right through the screen. And at that moment, a mouth opened on the thing’s face, even blacker than the blackness of the rest of its body. The st
atic eyes flared and grew; you know the way the lights on the front of a train look coming at you through a tunnel? Just before they filled the entire screen, there was a sound, a voice that sounded like gargling blood, like a whole room full of different voices reading from the same script, rasping like a scratched cassette tape:

  “MINE,” it said.

  And then there was nothing but flecks of gray snow dancing on the screen.

  I kept staring in case there was something more, and it terrified me to think that there might be. But it was just ordinary TV static. I knew the moment I turned it off I’d have to face up to what I’d just seen; the rational part of me wanted to rewind the tape to double check, but the irrational part told me the smoke man had warned me away from his prize and might not give me a second chance. So I kept watching the television blizzard for I don’t know how long until the ringing of my desk telephone nearly stopped my heart.

  I picked up the receiver with one hand and tried to steady the shakes with the other. There was an awful, empty silence on the phone until I realized I hadn’t said anything on picking up.

  “Ted Dunkowski Investigations,” I forced myself to say.

  “Is this Ted?”

  I froze. Squeezing my eyes shut, almost in a whisper: “Yes.”

  “This is ____ ___________.”

  Just the client. I sucked in fresh air, relieved that the smoke man hadn’t followed me over the phone lines, and then I realized I’d have to tell him something. “This is about the _______ case?”

  “You didn’t already go out and try ta get him on tape, didja?”

  Pause. “Yes.”

  “Hrm. Guess it was a waste of your time, then.” He hesitated. “I don’t really know how to say this, other than he’s dead.”

  My eyes snapped to the screen, still snowing without a sound, and I shut it off. “Dead?” I asked.

  “The police found him this mornin’ in his front yard. Facedown in the grass. Apparently got attacked by some kinda animal; his back was all slashed and ripped up ta hell. Looks like it was somethin’ with claws, but something that big woulda had to escape from the zoo or somethin’.”