Dally shouldn’t have, but she spoke out right in front of Foggy. “What’s it got to do with Mickey Nichols?”
I looked at the two men, as if they actually might have the answer.
Foggy gave me, instead, the big shrug. “Much as I hate to let the guy off the hook on any score, we have not heard anything about Mick being involved in this particular endeavor. He might have heard something, same as me — he’s got quite an information syndicate, even in the jug, I’d imagine. But as far as his being connected to this? That’s not what we heard.”
“Could you tell us” — I thought I’d give it a shot — “what you did hear?”
“I already did. I don’t know anything more. Daniel?” He turned.
“Sorry,” Daniel said quietly. “I wish I could help.”
I smiled at him. “You already helped enough. You gave me more to worry about … and you called the cops on me. Quit helping.”
“If you say so.” Daniel smiled. We both knew his help was just beginning.
*
In the parking lot the cops gave Dally and me a suspicious look, but they had seen us leave from upstairs, a perfectly respectable business establishment called, I had just noticed, Imports of the World. There was even a nice plastic sign over the door.
So, except for the general discomfort of having policemen stare at our every move, the walk to the car and the drive away occurred silently and without event.
But as soon as we were down the block, Dally let out a big “Well.”
“Well, indeed.” I had to agree. “That was certainly some information we got.”
“Thanks mostly to me, at least about the toxins or whatever they are.’
“Right.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” she shot right back.
“Look, if you don’t mind, I’d like to drop you off and do the rest of my rounds solo. Don’t you have work to do or a club to run or something?”
“Sort of,” she hedged. “I don’t like the idea of being by myself, if you must know.” She stared out the window. “I really … liked Minnie.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just kept my mouth shut. This is what I’ve learned from long experience with the finest woman in the Western Hemisphere: Sometimes you just have to shut up and listen. That’s all you have to do to help. You don’t have to always be the Lone Ranger, riding in to fix it all and then skidding away without so much as a “Thank you, Masked Man.” Sometimes all you have to be is there.
It paid off. She didn’t look at me, but she went on talking. “She used to come down sometimes when I was getting home. You know, like, four or five in the morning sometimes. She’d have been up working in her darkroom and lost track of the time. I admired that. I admire anyone who can get that lost in their art or their work. Plus, her art was swell.” Finally turning to me: “You know, I’d really like to know how one of her photos got into that kid’s apartment you just saw — if it really was one of hers.”
“It’s one of the things I’ll be checking.” I nodded. “But at the moment I’d like to know a little bit more about stolen toxins too. Especially since Mick seems to have suggested it has something to do with scarlet fever.”
“So let me go with you.”
I began to be visited by all the creepy images of people hanging from lampposts and faces bloated from strangulation I’d seen over the past fifty hours or so. It occurred to me then that a little company — not to mention somebody to talk to when it got weird again — wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
“Okay,” I nodded, “but on one condition.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll let you go with me” — I shrugged — “if you let me go with you too. That way nobody’s just along for the ride.”
She looked back out the window. “If you weren’t already my favorite boy,” she said so softly that I almost didn’t hear, “you would be now.”
16. Germ Town
The Centers for Disease Control are over by Emory University, and they’re a fair-size complex. Some people don’t like living near the CDC, especially when there’s talk in the local papers of the kind of samples they get through the mail.
I happened to have a friend, this guy Paul, who sometimes did research for the CDC. He worked at Georgia Tech mostly, but he was one Renaissance biologist. It being a Tuesday, he would ordinarily be in his little lab at the Centers. So I nosed the car in his direction, up Piedmont, out Ponce, left at Fernbank.
Twenty minutes later the front desk was paging him to come out and greet his “luncheon appointment,” as we had described ourselves.
Of course he had no idea who was waiting for him, but when he saw Dally and me in the lobby, he picked up his step. He was always happy to see Dally.
“Hey!” He waved. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Save it, Paul, we’re here on business.” I gave him the stern look.
“Oh.” He slowed. “Business. Okay, come on back.”
I moved closer to him. “In the interest of time, let me just tell you why we’re here.”
“You’re working on the thing with the girls hanging in Piedmont Park.” He nodded sagely.
“What makes you think that?”
“Please.” He pulled his head back from me a little and gave me something of an attitudinal look. “Who else would be working on such a weird deal?”
“Okay, you’ve guessed correctly, but that’s not exactly why I’m here.”
“Oh?”
We rounded a corner, and he waved at some beefy security goon so we could all go into a small lab.
Dally stared backward. “Those security guys are always there?”
He nodded. “Day and night.”
I lowered my voice. “So then how did somebody just recently steal a whole bunch of toxic poison stuff from here?”
“Shh!” He flinched like I’d jabbed him and lowered his voice to a whisper. “You can’t just talk about that here. It’s a very sensitive issue.”
“I’d imagine.” I stared around the little room “So what got stolen exactly?”
“What makes you think I’d know?” He didn’t even ask how I’d know about such a thing. Paul just accepted that I found things out.
“Please.” I gave him back the very same look he’d given me only an instant before. “Like anybody else would know more about such a weird deal.”
“Funny.” He nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. “See, this is bad. I think the guys who stole it don’t know what they’ve got. It seemed like a pretty inept job to me. No prints, but a lot of hair and fiber and other stuff. And a lot of handling the cases we had our samples in. Anybody who’d really known what we had in there would have been a ton more careful.”
“A ton?” Dally’s whisper matched Paul’s.
“Usually a pro who’s snatching something like that will suit up like it’s Hiroshima. Whoever grabbed this lot just strolled in and picked up the first case marked ‘Toxic’. That’s what I think.”
“It was just lying around in the open?” Looking around at all the locked cabinets, I couldn’t believe that. “And wasn’t the alleged perpetrator seen on those security cameras?” I pointed to the one in the corner of our very room.
Paul looked at us both. “We’re not supposed to talk about this, okay?” Then he lowered his voice even more. I could barely hear him.
“Somebody jammed the cameras for, like, ten minutes, apparently — plugged something into the electrical system from outside the building, if you can believe that. There was a commotion outside at the same time, the guards took a look, the thief was in here for five of those minutes. A cabinet marked ‘Toxic’, that one there” — he pointed — “was popped open, and one case was taken. I think it was kids, maybe looking to get some kind of weird high, or maybe some creep looking for an untraceable murder weapon. But amateurs, I’m positive of that.”
I stared. “Amateurs? It’s that easy to break into this place, with a
ll the germs and biological warfare you’ve got lying around here?”
“Well, if we’re working on some big anthrax deal” — Paul stared back, irritated — “we’re a little more careful, but this is routine gunk we’re dealing with, Flap.”
Dally glanced around the room. “So what was in the case?”
“Scarlet fever, rabies, and some kind of spider venom.”
“Why do you even have that kind of thing here at the moment?” I asked him. “Or is it always just lying around handy?”
“Well,” he sighed, collecting his thoughts, “there’s some kind of outbreak of scarlet fever in a little rural part of Argentina; we’re helping with that. We’re looking for an even quicker way of getting somebody over rabies, so we had that here in this lab too. And the spider venom is for some kind of allergy/immune system research that I didn’t have anything to do with.”
Dally squinted. “Why were all three in the same case? Some kind of sampler?”
“Actually” — his voice began to rise to a normal level again — “we were about to send that case out, along with some of the research, to another facility in Boston for verification of our findings.”
“That case was about to be mailed out?” I let my voice rise too. “You just send this through the mail?”
“Of course you have to have a special notification.” He nodded. “It has to be marked and shipped carefully. And some hell-special container. I’m telling you, Flap, you could set off an atom bomb next to these things and they still wouldn’t break open. It’s safe.”
“Okay,” I nodded. “Okay.”
Suddenly I was feeling a little dizzy.
Dally stared at me, concerned. “Flap?”
“What’s that smell in here?”
Paul looked around. “Smell? I don’t notice any smell.”
“Jesus.” I could hardly breathe. “I think there must be something in here I’m allergic to, or something. I’ve got to get some air.”
Paul sniffed. “Smells like it always does.”
“Is it just the smell?” Dally took a step my way.
“Well,” I admitted, “you know how I told you I was going to keep my mind open, keep myself clear of all this clutter?”
“Yes.” She moved a little closer.
“I lied. It’s all crammed in my brain now, and it’s just about to bust my head wide open.”
Paul nodded. “Well, get out of here then. I don’t want to see that — brain guts all over the place.”
I stared. “And you call yourself a man of science.”
But Dally was wise. “You’d like to get back to your place.”
I knew what she was getting at. “Yes, I would.”
“I understand. You’re probably just tired.”
We started out before Paul realized we were leaving.
“Oh” — he suddenly lurched forward — “let me get the door. Damn. Short visit. Come back when you can’t stay so long, like they say.”
We were down the hall and out into the cold air before we said another word. Dally waved goodbye to Paul.
*
We settled into the car. Dally wanted to drive. Okay by me.
“I’m better now. I was just momentary overloaded. And that room had a funny smell.”
“Probably the formaldehyde,” she said. “I hate it.”
I looked out the window.
“You’re taking me back home?”
“Don’t you want to go back home? Isn’t it time for you to do … you know … the thing?”
I slumped down in the car seat, “let’s not talk about that again.”
17. Bad Day in Dreamland
Ordinarily twilight is my favorite part of the day, because the day’s work is done and a glass or two of red wine would be in order. But that particular Tuesday night was different.
I’d spent most of the afternoon trying to trick myself into dreamland. But the dream was elusive, and the second half of the day had been wasted. I just couldn’t make the trick work.
“The trick” is only a way of getting ahold of the big picture, really. Most people wander around all day seeing things but not realizing what they’ve seen, hearing things but not letting those things register. My little gimmick is a way of putting all those unregistered bits and pieces together so that they make the big picture.
I sit and clear my mind of everything, if I can manage it, and images come and assemble themselves on the blank canvas, and I know more than I did before. A lot of people will try to tell you it’s something otherworldly, like a magic spell. But that attitude just confuses the process for me, ultimately.
What I do, when I do it right, is just an unexplored portion of ordinary reality. We only see certain wavelengths of light, for example, but that doesn’t mean all the other wavelengths aren’t there — or that they are there but consist of something mysterious or mystical. It’s just that we can’t see them at a certain moment. I mean, you know, I can’t see Wyoming from my apartment, but my belief that it’s out there somewhere is hardly spiritual. It’s not even something you have to accept on faith. It’s just a bit of information that most of us accept without even thinking about it at all. Well, my little trick is just another bit of Wyoming that most people can’t see from where they live, but it’s there just the same, take my word for it.
Only that particular Tuesday, it wasn’t there at all.
So what could I do but pick up the phone and call Dally?
“Hello?” She sounded mad.
“Hey.” I tried to sound neutral. “What’s the matter?”
“No,” she said coolly, “I’m happy with my current long-distance carrier, thank you.”
“You’ve got company.”
“Yes.” She sounded harder. “But I don’t need expanded service.”
“Cops?”
“Right again,” she was really worked up. “But my no is final. Please don’t call here again today.”
“You don’t want me over there?”
“That’s correct.” Her mouth must have moved away from the telephone because her voice sounded a little muffled; she was looking at someone else in the room. “I don’t.”
“Trouble?”
“Yes. Goodbye.” And she hung up.
Well. That is what they often call “a fine how-do-you-do.” I was in need of some serious consolation, and the only person I wanted it from was in some kind of trouble that she didn’t want me helping with. What to do?
Here’s a secret. When you spend all afternoon trying to do something that just won’t get done, action really helps. Sometimes you just have to get out and do something. Any action at all is better than doing nothing. Get up. Get out. To be is to do.
So in a way I was glad of the distraction. I roused myself with a fair amount of speed and got my car to the end of her block within seven minutes. The sun was going down, and the quality of light was strange and hazy, a little golden.
Out front of her place there were two squad cars and an unmarked sedan that looked very much like the one that belonged to Detective Huyne.
What could make such a scene?
The top lights weren’t spinning, so this was more of a visit than, say, a raid. Still: three carloads. And she didn’t want me anywhere near the place; that was clear from her tone alone.
It came to me that perhaps our detective friend might have imagined I’d still be at Dally’s house, and all the fuss was over me. Maybe Foggy said something he ought not to have said. Maybe Mickey let something out of the bag that made Huyne suspicious of me. Maybe Joepye had come up with more new theories about the dead girls.
A regrettable but undeniable urge in the direction of the better part of valor forced me off the sidewalk and back into my car. Then it occurred to me that I had been presented with the perfect time to visit Mickey in the lockup with a degree of privacy, since it was certain, at least, that Huyne wasn’t at the station house.
I didn’t turn my lights on. I backed up very slowly, turned aro
und on the one-way street in the next block, and headed for downtown.
18. Mickey’s Monkey
Traffic was a dream that time of the evening, and I hit Mickey’s postdinner visiting hour almost perfectly.
With a minimum of rigmarole, mostly because of my aforementioned pal Detective Winston, I got in to see him.
“Flap Tucker.” Mickey was calm. “What news?”
I looked him right in the eye. “What’s the idea of sending me a thousand-dollar retainer and a two-dollar clue?”
“What do you mean?” But there was no surprise or resistance in his voice. He just wanted me to ask the right questions.
“Well,” I began, “I got the hint. In fact, three samples of some pretty potent microbes were stolen just recently from a lab at the CDC, including scarlet fever toxin.”
“As I had heard,” he intoned, like some Damon Runyon Buddha.
“Well, (A) how did you know? And (B) so what?”
“How I knew is my remarkable syndicate of information. You should really try, Flap, to get into the twentieth century before it is all over but the shouting, and buy yourself a computer. The Internet is to our intellectual life what the Universal Unconscious is to our psychological life. In fact, the Internet is the new Universal Unconscious. It’s not even a metaphor anymore.”
Though I never ceased to be surprised at his erudition, I forged foolishly ahead with my line of inquiry. “And what about the ‘so what’ portion of the program?”
“They say Janey was smothered to death.”
“They do.” I nodded.
“And they say my prints were all over the joint when they found her.”
“Correct.”
He looked down for a second and faltered. “That’s because I was there. It was my prints, Flap.”
“Okay.”
“They will not take me seriously, but here is the story: I came over to her place to apologize on the night of January second” — he was cranking it out like he’d told a hundred times, which he probably had, at that point — “and I found her body. She had asphyxiated, I believe. There were no marks, no struggle. She was laid out … like an angel. I couldn’t bear to see her eyes like that, all bugged out — and her face blue … so I grabbed the pillow and put it over her.”
Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) Page 10