by Bob Bickford
“Psychopath,” I said. “Big word for a cop.”
He looked at me and smiled. He held the neck of the bottle out, and I put up my cup for another taste.
“I went to college for a year before the war,” he said. “Must have stuck, some of it. Anyway, Cleveland's bent, and being a gangster gives him a way to be bent.”
“What about scaring people?”
“That's the thing,” he said. “He doesn't just like to scare with brass knuckles and guns. He also says he does magic.”
“Magic? Like tricks?” I smiled.
“It isn't a joke,” he said. “He makes his people believe he can control things. Supernatural stuff. The talk about magic makes people nervous.”
“I don't believe in magic,” I said.
“Lot of other people do. It isn't like a magician, with a rabbit and a hat. More like voodoo, reading cards, seeing the future.”
“Funny life path,” I said. “Major crime boss becomes sideshow card reader?”
“I've seen stranger things,” he said. “Maybe he thinks it's fun. Anyway, he's been doing his thing out here for more than twenty years, I guess.”
He swirled a finger in the air, indicating the building around us. “A lot of people here think he keeps a status quo in this city,” he said. “Keeps the really bad stuff from L.A. or Frisco from moving in. As long as he doesn't go overboard, Cleveland gets a pass on a lot of little things.”
“Little things like killing people?”
“I'm not saying that,” he said. “But he gets the benefit of the doubt when the evidence is a bit flimsy, that's for sure.”
“How about a little thing like shooting his wife? Will he get a pass on that?”
“If I get a solid case, I'll put the cuffs on him, same as anyone would. What do you think the odds are I'll ever get any kind of case on him?”
We stared at each other.
“I think I may go talk to him,” I said. “Introduce myself again.”
I drained my scotch and set my cup on the edge of the desk. I stood up and settled my hat. “I'll let you know how it turns out.”
“Do that,” he said. “And Crowe, I know you think you're a tough nut, and maybe you are, a little bit. This guy's crazy, though . . . dangerous crazy. Keep it in mind.”
Rain fell, cold and heavy. It came in quickly, spattered the sidewalk to get my ankles wet, and then tapered off again. I could sense the huge, slow clouds over my head, invisible in the black sky. The fires in the hills above the city were probably already dead or dying from the wet air.
The storefronts I passed were all dark. I didn’t need to look both ways before I crossed the streets, since there was no traffic, but I did anyway. I was in no particular hurry. An occasional light flickered in an upstairs window; someone who couldn’t sleep, or was afraid of the dark. I didn’t blame them. I was going to see Sal Cleveland and I was a little afraid, too.
Light from a pair of headlights splashed across the puddles, and then a white police car with black fenders followed them around the corner. It slowed to a crawl as it passed, so the two cops inside could look me over. They decided I wasn’t worth getting wet for, and the driver ground the gears and the car moved off. I walked alone again.
An aqua-colored neon sign on the next corner said Club and nothing else. I went up three steps and tried the door. It was unlocked, so I pulled it open and went inside. The place was mostly dark. Chairs were turned upside down on tables. It smelled like the usual mix of rye whiskey and smoke, but the stink of something nasty lay underneath, something that I really didn’t want to identify.
I shook the rain off my hat and walked over to the staring woman behind the bar. Her eyes bulged, and she needed to wash her hair. She turned slightly sideways, like she was ready to take a punch, or give one.
“Your boss in?” I asked.
She glared at me, her mouth slightly agape. When it became clear she wasn't going to answer me, I shrugged and moved to the back of the room. I went up a short hallway and found a man sitting in an office across from the restrooms. His desk was covered in green felt, and he had a pack of playing cards spread out in a pool of light on its surface. He was playing solitaire.
“Sal?” I asked. “Remember me?”
He looked up at me and nodded. His green eyes looked flat, painted-on, as though whatever lived inside of his head didn't want to be seen. His skin was smooth and tanned. He was a good-looking guy, almost pretty, the kind that could afford to throw a woman away. He didn't look much like a hoodlum, but I had been around long enough to know that no one really looks much like what they are.
“It's only been a little while, snooper,” he sneered. “I remember a bum like you who crosses me a lot longer than a few days. Practically forever, I remember that.”
His voice sounded hard, but had an undertone, a vaguely effeminate whine that didn't match the tough talk very well.
“You practice your lines in a mirror?” I asked.
The air changed behind me, and I looked over my shoulder. The strange woman had slipped in behind me. She stood against the wall, cradling a shotgun under her arm. She looked comfortable with it. It didn't quite point at me.
“Tell you what I don't appreciate,” he said. “Three in the morning is my favorite time. It’s when I do my best work. I don’t appreciate being barged in on.”
“I’m looking for some information about what happened to your wife.”
He looked up at me without expression.
“You and a lot of other people,” he said. “You think I’ll tell you anything about that bitch?”
“No, not really.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to tell you something,” I said. “I came to tell you that she was my client, and she still is.”
“You work for dead people?” He laughed.
“This time I do. I have a pretty good idea how she ended up at the bottom of a cliff with part of her head blown off. I'm not going to just let it go.”
“I heard you were about the only guy in the city who wasn't taking off her skirt,” he said. “Funny you'd go all romantic about her. What do you plan to do about it?”
“I haven't decided,” I said. “Except I'm not going to let it go.”
“Maybe . . ,” he said, and then found something interesting in the game spread in front of him. After a minute, he tore his attention away from it and looked back at me. “Maybe you don't know the half of what you're getting into,” he said. “Maybe what happened to my wife offended you, and you feel like you have a duty to be a hero. I can forgive you for that.”
He spread his hands expansively. “I even admire you a little bit for that. I don't meet a lot of heroes. But maybe now you've fallen into something else, and you don't even know it yet. You're stepping on my toes and you have no idea. You're smack dab in the middle of something that's going to get you killed.
He turned a card over and looked at it, mouth pursed. He cupped his hand so I couldn’t see. After a minute, he put it face down, and his eyes slid up to meet mine. I saw something dark and old in them; something I didn’t much like.
“I know a lot about magic,” he said.
“I heard something about that.”
“You might want to keep it in mind,” he said. “I want to make you disappear, you'll disappear.”
“I think you know a lot about doing tricks. That isn’t the same thing as magic.”
He picked up the card and flicked it at me. It hit the front of my raincoat and fell on the floor face-up. It was the three of spades.
“Tough guy,” he mused. “We’ll see.”
I bent down and picked up the card. I looked at it for a moment, and then I put it away in my pocket. Cleveland stared at me.
“You're missing a card now,” I said. “Guess you'll have to get a new deck.”
Something moved, deep in his eyes, and gave me another glimpse of what lived in there. I looked at the woman.
“I know the way out,” I said.
She answered by jabbing the shotgun into my ribs. It hurt. I pushed the barrels away.
“We'll see about you later, sister.”
I went up the hall, crossed the empty bar, and let myself out into the rain. The bartender followed me out.
“Stay the hell away from here,” she said. “Creeper.”
“Your boss keeps you chained beneath the bar when he sleeps?”
She bared her teeth at me. The rain plastered her hair to her cheek. “He doesn't sleep,” she said. “Ever.”
She pushed at me again with the business end of the shotgun. I was wet and my ribs still hurt, so I was in a bad mood. I had half a mind to take the gun away and shoot her with it. I didn't, though. I turned to go.
A woman stood on the sidewalk across the street, holding an umbrella over her head. She was a dim silhouette, watching us. I wondered what she was doing out at that time of the morning, but in that neighborhood all sorts of things went on that didn't add up. I walked away. My suit soaked right through to my shirt, and the cold fabric rubbed my skin and stung like hell.
I didn't look back until I got to the next corner. The bartender had gone back inside, and the woman with the umbrella was nowhere to be seen. As near as I could tell, no one else had followed me, so there was nothing else to do but go home.
-Nine-
My ribs still hurt from the night before. The shotgun had left two raw red tracks on my chest. The ugly woman had jabbed me harder than I'd thought. A shot of whiskey helped, and a couple of aspirin tablets and a sticking plaster helped a little more. I went to the office and did my day. When a decent amount of it was gone, I went home to get ready for my dinner date.
I knocked on Annie Kahlo's door exactly at eight. She opened it and stepped onto the porch without saying anything. She wore a white cotton shift, cinched at the waist with an embroidered belt. There were copper-colored stripes on the neckline, and hints of gold at her throat and wrists. I had the absurd idea Nefertiti would look like this if she stepped from her ancient tomb to have dinner with me.
She paused at the top of the steps and looked at the street, as though she needed to decide something, and then she slipped on a pair of dark glasses. At the curb, I opened the car door for her and we made the ride to the Garden Street restaurant in near silence.
The room was red and orange and green. The lights inside were soft, and the neon sign outside of the window blinked Chinese Food, over and over. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the on-and-off, and after a minute I gave up trying to find one. We waited for our food, and I looked at Annie, across the table. She still had her dark glasses on and the electric letters reflected in her lenses blinked at me.
“Chop suey,” she said. “I never had it before. I don’t go out very much.”
“It's like a lot of things,” I said. “You don't know until you try it. I like it okay.”
She picked up her water glass and drank. Her throat was elegant. When she put it back down, the ice cubes chimed gently.
“I lived in England for a while,” she said. “By myself. It took me a long time to get used to the food there. Maybe I never really did.”
She didn’t say anything else for a little while. She rested her forearms on the tabletop and slowly turned the bracelet on her left wrist, around and around. Her hands were long and lithe, with the nails cut short. They were strong—an artist’s hands. She saw me looking, and put them beneath the table, onto her lap.
“I lived in Mexico after that,” she said. “I liked the food better there.”
“Sounds exotic,” I said. “Why did you come back to Santa Teresa?”
She didn't answer.
A young woman brought small white cups and a pot of green tea. Her nylon uniform had a high, Oriental collar. Its fabric made scratching noises as she unloaded the tray. She poured and left.
“What places have you been to?” she asked.
“I'm from St. Louis,” I said. “I went to Hawaii during the war. I was stationed there. I had been a cop in St. Louis, so they made me a military cop. I enlisted, but I was too old to do anything else. I landed on a couple of islands, but mostly I did base patrol in Pearl Harbor. It wasn't much of a war, for me.”
I felt the old, familiar humiliation come creeping in. I had gotten an easy ticket out. I waded into a bar fight in Honolulu, and a sailor had hit me over the head with a bottle. I woke in a naval hospital in San Diego. When I got well enough, Uncle Sam said I had done my share and gave me a discharge.
“My mother lived in Hawaii,” she said. “She's from there, and she went back when my sister and I were small. I'd like to go there. If I ever make it, I won't come back.”
“I liked it there,” I said. “More than any place I've ever been.”
“So why did you come back?”
I came back for this. I came back for you. The words formed themselves in my mind, surprising me. I hoped I hadn't said them out loud. “I didn't have much choice,” I said. “I came back on a hospital ship. Some drunk broke a bottle over my head, and his buddies kicked the hell out of me while I was out of it. I woke up in a military hospital in San Diego.”
“Why did they do that?”
“No reason, really.” I shrugged. “I broke up a bar fight. Enlisted men don't like cops any more than people in the real world do.”
She sipped her tea. Her dark glasses watched me over the rim. Hawaiian parents explained the slightly exotic cast to her features; the delicate nose and brow.
“I'm glad you came back,” she said.
I was glad, too. I wondered if I had fallen in love with her. It hadn't happened to me in such a long time that I wasn't sure I remembered what it felt like. I reached for one of the two fortune cookies that sat on a plate between us. Annie’s hand gripped my wrist, hard.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“You shouldn’t open those…not ever. They aren’t a good idea, for you.”
After a few seconds, she took her hand away. My skin stayed warm where she had touched it.
“If you say so,” I said.
She looked down at her tea, and I looked around the room. Painted dragons crawled over the walls. I counted ten of them, moving over the tops of the booths, ignoring the diners below them.
There were paper lanterns, too, with small bulbs inside bright colored veils. I liked them. There was no music except for the faint sounds of conversation around us, and the occasional clink of crockery. The restaurant felt warm, and I wanted it all to last longer than the time it would to take us to finish our meal.
“What's the worst thing you ever did?” she asked.
“That would be a long list of things,” I smiled.
“The worst thing,” she insisted. “Tell me.”
I thought about the war, and my marriage. I thought about the ugliness I had seen as a private eye. Another memory came up, unbidden.
“I grew up in St. Louis,” I said. “My parents never let me have a dog. I always wanted one.”
“Why don't you have a dog now?” she interrupted. “You live alone.”
“I couldn't take care of one,” I said. “I'm away a lot. Anyway, there was a house I passed by on my way home from school. I was about fifteen years old, I think. I usually walked by myself. A young dog stayed tied up in the side yard, not much older than a puppy.”
“What kind of a dog?” she asked.
“Just a mongrel,” I said. “A medium-sized dog, brown, with a white patch on his face. After a while, it started to seem like he watched, waiting for me to pass in the afternoons. I started to save a little of my lunch for him, and I'd throw him some bread over the fence.”
The woman brought covered bowls to the table and set them down. She took the lids off. They held steamed rice and some kind of vegetables. It smelled good.
“Like I had a dog, even though I didn't,” I said.
Annie nodded. She didn't look at the food; her attention focused o
n me.
“One day when I went by, a big man with a red face stood in the yard. He was holding the dog’s rope and beating it with a cane. He was drunk. I remember the sound of it, like a mallet on a steak, and the dog screaming. It sounded like a child. I knew the man meant to kill the dog, and he had nearly finished.”
“What did you do?”
“I went over the fence. It was white and made of pickets.” I showed her my right palm. She took it and looked at the white scar running across it from wrist to the base of my fingers. She kept my hand in hers when I started to speak again.
“I took the cane away from him,” I said. “I surprised him, I guess, and he hardly resisted. He told me to mind my business and get out of his yard. Then I stopped him talking.”
Neither of us said anything for a little while. I looked at the untouched food and Annie looked at me.
“I beat him badly, Annie, almost to death. His face was covered in blood. Even after he fell unconscious, I still kept hitting him with his cane. When it broke, I threw it away and started kicking him. People came and pulled me away. There was yelling and shouting, but I didn't hear anything but the dog whimpering and crying.”
There seemed to be no air in the room. I felt like I was gasping, but my voice sounded normal.
“I untied the rope from the dog's neck and picked it up. I carried it out of the yard and took it home. My parents didn't say a word. The next day, I could hardly get out of bed. I think I sprained every muscle in my body, between beating him and carrying the dog so far. When I limped downstairs, my mother was nursing the dog. They always said we couldn't have a dog, but he lived with us and they never said a word about it.”
“The dog lived happily ever after,” she said. “It's a good story.”
I looked at her. Her smile was beautiful and so focused on me that it lightened the air just enough.
“He did, I suppose.” I felt my own smile begin, despite myself. “He stayed with my parents after I grew up and moved out. Lived until 1940, if you can believe it, he was almost nineteen years old when he died. He took a drink of water, looked at my mother and fell over, gone. She called me on the telephone at work, crying. I worked on the St. Louis police by that time, and they had a job finding me to tell me there was an emergency with my folks.”