Hell's Detective

by Michael Logan

  Enitan didn’t seem to belong here. I’d read Dante’s Inferno, and if that was anything to go by, you could be lobbed into Hell for minor infractions such as persistent flatulence or kissing with tongues out of wedlock. I always tried to convince myself that the fence’s sin wasn’t as bad as mine. I was probably kidding myself. Lost Angeles didn’t strike me as a place for minor sinners. It was for the big hitters. All the same, I couldn’t imagine what Enitan had done. He came across as such a nice guy and didn’t strike me as the suicidal type.

  He looked up from his usual position bent over a book and flashed me a toothy grin. He was shaped like a watermelon with a tennis ball glued on top, and it took him a couple of rocks to build enough momentum to stand up on his bandy legs. Enitan didn’t set much stock by the rule of not talking about your real life. He’d told me some of his history: how he’d been a doctor in Nigeria and moved to Texas with his wife and grown children in the late 1960s to escape the brutality of the Biafran War. He still preferred traditional Nigerian dress, which he sewed himself. Today, he was wearing a particularly elaborate concoction: purple with embroidered flowers, a beaded neckline, and voluminous sleeves. It was my understanding that you were supposed to wear the billowing robe over trousers, but Enitan preferred to go without, to “provide a refreshing breeze in the nether regions.” Maybe that was his sin: going commando on the Sabbath.

  “Kat, it has been too long a time,” he said, stomping down the narrow aisle between the tottering stacks of goods to give me a welcoming hug. “Still putting your nose where it does not belong?”

  “Still putting other people’s things where they don’t belong?”

  “All property is theft, my dear.”

  “In which case, you won’t mind if I steal your cash register,” I said, ducking out of his embrace and wandering over to the metal behemoth on the counter.

  “You will never lift it. Your muscles are softer than my grandmother’s overcooked beans.”

  “Then I’ll steal the money from inside.” I rang the till open to empty drawers. “Somebody already clean you out?”

  “What can I say? I bought too much merchandise this morning.”

  “Let me see if I can fill her up a little.” I pulled out a twenty, snapped it, and placed it in the till.

  “So you wish to buy something? Most excellent. Can I interest you in War and Peace?” He indicated the tatty manuscript he’d been reading. “I received it yesterday.”

  I flicked through the pages. The manuscript seemed thin. “Isn’t War and Peace supposed to be longer?”

  “The man who reauthored it liked war so much, he left out all the peace. It makes for a more exciting read.”

  “I’ll pass. I’m after a different kind of information. About a job somebody carried out three days ago.”

  “Of what manner of job do you speak?”

  “A burglary up at Avici Rise. One item stolen, a box of supposedly great value. The thief would need to be skilled. The safe was high-grade steel with a concealed-entry system.”

  At first Enitan looked confused, as though he’d never heard of the place. Then understanding came into his face, and his lips curled up in a dreamy smile. “Ah, Avici Rise. Of course. I am sure they have all kinds of wonders up there. It is a great pity he did not visit me. I have not brokered such a job.”

  “Heard anything through the grapevine?”

  “Nothing about a robbery.” He rubbed his head and raised one eyebrow. “A skilled thief, you say? Something did occur that may be connected. Yesterday, a fine woman named Alexis Black came to see me, looking most upset. I was forced to give her a hug.”

  “Was it one of your special rhythmic hugs?”

  “Do not be so dirty of mind. This was a damsel in distress. Ms. Black is the partner of Sebastian Vega, a splendid thief whose acquaintance I made recently. Acrobatic. Silent. Technically adept. He disappeared a few days ago. She wanted to know if I had seen him.”

  I wasn’t convinced of the connection. Rapid and unexplained vanishing acts weren’t rare in Lost Angeles. People would go off for their nightly appointments with the Torments and never come back. There were never any witnesses, as everybody was busy reliving their own sins. Within a week, the possessions of the disappeared would be divided and their homes taken by whoever got there first. Soon, it would be like they’d never existed. “People disappear all the time.”

  “True, but the people who disappear have normally been here for some time. Sebastian is new. His absence could be considered out of the ordinary.”

  “And you think he could get into a high-end safe?”

  “Indisputably.”

  While the lead was thinner than a high-society girl on a vomiting diet, it was the sole one I had. I figured I may as well check it out. “Do you have an address?”

  “Alas, no. He came and went as he saw fit. He revealed little interest in more regular work. I can tell you where Ms. Black works, however.” He looked significantly at the till.

  “Come on. Twenty bucks is more than enough for speculation.”

  He rubbed his shaven skull and grinned. “A man can try. I did actually tell her to go see you about her missing amour. I assume she did not. She works in snuff movies.”

  I grimaced and stuck out my tongue. Although I’d never seen any examples of Hrag’s “art,” I knew all about the racket. It wasn’t exactly underground; there was plenty of demand for such perversion. Hrag wrote and directed the films, filming them by night at his studio in the red-light district of Astghik. Apparently, he preferred to shoot after the visits of the Torments. His actors found it easier to appear distressed. He ran the horror shows to full houses in his cinema every night.

  “And how would you know that?” I asked Enitan.

  “Please, Kat,” Enitan said, pouting. “You know me better than to think I would be interested in such obscenities. A customer happened to be browsing my wares when she entered. He recognized her. She is a big star. He even got her autograph. She mentioned they were shooting a new feature at the moment. This is how you will find her.”

  After a brief moment’s hesitation, I withdrew another twenty. Enitan was the most learned man I knew, even if his secondhand source materials could be unreliable. I thought I could squeeze more out of him with the right lubrication.

  “While we’re talking—I don’t suppose you’ve come across any mentions of a carved wooden box in the shape of a globe?”

  “This is the object you are searching for, I assume? I am sorry. I have no knowledge on this subject.”

  “How about this?”

  I scribbled a picture of the creature I’d seen on the small tower. The drawing came out looking like the product of a four-year-old’s crayon. Nonetheless, Enitan’s brow crinkled in recognition.

  “That does look familiar,” he said. “Let me peruse my books and see if I can come up with anything. Is this related to your case?”

  “Not exactly, but you know me—I never pass up a chance to expand my knowledge.”

  “Then allow me to give you War and Peace on the house,” he said, pressing the manuscript into my hand.

  I took it, giving him the second twenty in return, and rolled the book into a tight wad. I’d noticed a junkie sniffing around my car, and the manuscript would come in handy to beat him around the head with, even if it wasn’t as chunky as it should have been.

  “I will call if I find anything,” Enitan called after me as I ran out the door and set to with my work of literature.

  8

  I’d always been the kind of girl who chose her apartment based on its proximity to her favorite bar, and there’d been no reason to change when I died. You never knew when you were going to need a friendly voice or stiff drink, plus a local bar was a relatively safe place to meet people you didn’t trust. In my case, that covered pretty much the whole city.

  Once I’d earmarked Benny’s as my haunt of choice, I’d set to work earning enough dough to escape Desert Heights. Building up w
ork was easier than it had been upstairs. There wasn’t much competition. The other good PIs appeared to have been more virtuous than I and hadn’t fetched up in Lost Angeles. Presumably they were having a jolly old time listening to harps and sipping fluffy cloud cocktails in Heaven. The jobs here weren’t much different from those upstairs: people still wanted to know if their partners were screwing around; they still grew attached to bric-a-brac and wanted their prized possessions back when they got pinched; and gangs still kidnapped loved ones—love did still exist, even for the likes of us—for ransom. The only cases I didn’t pick up any longer were those looking into missing persons and murders. When somebody vanished without a resultant attempt at extortion, people accepted they were never coming back. And there wasn’t much call for murder investigations when the victim could sit up a few minutes later and point to the offender. I’d quickly built up a steady income and could afford a place off Providence, no more than five minutes’ walk from Benny’s. I’d stayed there ever since.

  After I’d beaten off the junkie outside Enitan’s, I headed back to the apartment. I had nothing to do until Alexis was on set, and I wanted to catch a nap so I would be fresh enough to think clearly. The second-floor apartment, rented from Flo’s regime, overlooked an alley popular with hookers, muggers, and mugger-slash-hookers, all of whom I knew by first name. A few of Enitan’s artworks, those not too obviously painted by a myopic monkey, added splashes of color to the walls of the living room, which doubled as my office, and reauthored novels filled my bookshelf. The best in this collection were near-perfect copies of all of Virginia Woolf’s novels. According to Enitan, these were so accurate because the lady herself had rewritten them following her suicide. I couldn’t check up on the veracity of this claim, because in Enitan’s telling, the author had conveniently disappeared before I arrived in town. I possessed but two real books: scruffy paperback copies of The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. These I kept under the loose tile beside my savings. They’d set me back a thousand dollars each, but they were worth every cent—they’d been my father’s favorite books. When I reread them, as I often did, I felt his breath on my neck stronger than ever. At those times, I could almost forget I was living in Lost Angeles.

  I’d also acquired a chalkboard, upon which I drew diagrams of particularly convoluted cases. I marked up a few notes and lines connecting the parties I’d identified so far—which consisted of Laureen, Sebastian, Alexis, and the mystery inside guy. I had a feeling that by the end of this particular investigation, the board would look like the work of a junked-up spider.

  I lay down on my single bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. Tonight would be the first that I wouldn’t have to revisit the Nimrod Motel. Better memories of Danny were crowding around the edge of my consciousness, but they wouldn’t quite materialize fully, always dissolving back into the motel room. Around six, I swung my legs out of bed, grabbed my gun, and wandered over to Benny’s for my habitual early evening bracer. The usual suspects filled the booths, and the atmosphere was already turning grim. I felt strangely guilty that I would be spared.

  After a while, the door swung open. I was surprised to spy Franklin, looking considerably less shaken than the previous evening. He marched over and stuck out his hand. “I wanted to say thank you for last night.”

  His bones felt as delicate as a bird’s wings as I took the proffered palm. “Thanks? Did you forget you ended up with a punctured eyeball?”

  “No. But you tried to stop them. That makes you a hero in my book.”

  “Next time I’ll bring my cape and tights. Maybe they’ll help deliver a better outcome.”

  He laughed far louder and longer than was justified. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Do you have money? Benny doesn’t do tabs until he knows you’re good for it. The man’s got no faith in humanity.”

  Benny looked up from the glass he was cleaning with the aid of some saliva. He did a lot of that kind of thing. Not because he was bar-proud; if that were the case, he would probably use water like a normal, hygienic human being. He was trying to keep his hands busy so they wouldn’t turn to the bottle so often. Half of the booze in the bar went down his gullet instead of to customers; most of the time his eyes looked as smoky as the windows.

  “I got faith in humanity,” he said. “Just not the sort living in this shithole.”

  “Ah,” Franklin said, his lower lip drooping. “I’m broke. Maybe I could wash some dishes?”

  “I don’t do food,” Benny said. “Cuts into drinking time.”

  “I’ll buy,” I said. “What’s your poison?”

  “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  I ordered two Ward Eights. He took a long gulp of his. I sipped mine. “So, have you run into any more trouble?”

  “No. I stayed in my room all day and came straight here.”

  “Take my advice: spend the next few weeks getting killed as many times as possible. Insult every gorilla you see. Stand in the middle of Route 666 during rush hour. Jump off every high building you can climb. The sooner you get used to it, the easier it’ll be to deal with.”

  “Wouldn’t I be better off learning how not to get killed?”

  I looked at his scrawny frame and bookish features, which screamed “victim” in neon letters six feet high. I said nothing.

  “Maybe you could teach me,” he continued. “You seem tough.”

  “I’m not tough. I’m just dumb enough to get into trouble and just smart enough to get out of it.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  His eyes lit up, and he tapped his foot off the barstool like a dog that had caught a whiff of a juicy steak. “Wow! I always wanted to be a private dick. I was something of an investigator myself, you know.”

  “What did you investigate? Who stole the cookies from the dorm room?”

  He forced out another laugh even though I was insulting him. It was amazing what people were prepared to put up with when they were on the make, and Franklin definitely wanted something. Maybe he saw me as a protector or mentor. If so, he was looking in the wrong place. “I know I look young, but I’m twenty-five. I am—was—a religious historian. You’d be surprised how many mysteries there were to be unraveled in all those old texts. I was good at following the threads. Maybe I could help you out.”

  I massaged my temple and took a bigger hit of my drink. The kid wanted to be my sidekick. That was what I got for trying to be nice. He probably imagined us skipping around town, fending off bad guys, getting into wacky scrapes, and “unraveling mysteries.” I imagined throwing him out of the Chevy after fifteen minutes and watching him bounce himself bloody along the highway.

  “What are you working on now?” he said, breathless. “I bet it’s a big conspiracy. Is there a woman involved? There’s always a woman, right? Or maybe not, since you are a woman . . .”

  I raised my palm to cut him off. “Listen, kid. You seem nice. That’s the problem. You’re not cut out for this line of work. You need to be an asshole to get results.”

  “I can be an asshole,” he said, adding as an afterthought, “you big, smelly bitch.”

  “Nice try, but no cigar. Everybody’s born with an asshole, but not everybody can be one. It’s a God-given talent.”

  “I could do the research. Be your backroom guy.”

  I was beginning to understand why the big goon and his pals had been so set on roughing him up. They’d probably wandered in for a quiet drink, and Franklin had started trying to recruit himself as a professional thug, citing his experience at issuing smackdowns in debate club. I drained my drink and threw some cash on the bar. “I work alone.”

  “That must be lonely. Don’t you ever feel like having somebody to talk to? It can be useful to bounce ideas off other people.”

  “If I get lonely, I talk to my superhero alter ego. Find yourself a line of work that suits you better.”

  I left before he could open his flappi
ng mouth again and set off along Providence. I hoped he’d gotten the message and wouldn’t come back to Benny’s to bug me. I wasn’t going to be driven out of my favorite watering hole. Benny had been good to me when I’d arrived. He’d extended the line of credit far beyond what the piece-of-shit car was worth, which kept me in booze until I got my feet under me. Under the gruff exterior, he had a good heart. Well, a not entirely warped heart. He and Enitan were as close to family as I had down here. If the kid did prove to be a cling on, I’d have to find some way to get rid of him.

  My feet, locked into the daily routine, had been taking me toward Fortune Hill. I stopped as I remembered that the situation had changed. Sure, I could go up to the park, sit on the bench, and watch the Torments swoop, safe in the knowledge that none of them were headed my way. Provided, of course, that Laureen was true to her word. Or I could stay down on the streets and see what happened when a Torment transported somebody to their own personal nightmare. Curiosity won, so I installed myself in a doorway across from the Lucky Deal as the crowds scurried home. Sid was outside as usual, leaning on the gold pillar. He didn’t notice me, too intent on casting nervous glances to the northwest.

  As I waited, a lingering Penitent caught my eye and tottered toward me. He’d clearly been on the starvation diet. Glittering blue eyes burned fervent in his skeletal face, and he dragged his placard along the ground, too weak to hold it up. He opened his mouth to speak, but I got there first.

  “Let me guess. I should repent, right?”

  “Yes!” he shouted, his voice surprisingly strong. “Repent! Do not sell your body to the fornicators. Surrender yourself to God, and you will be saved.”

  I snorted. “Do I look like a prostitute to you? I’m not exactly putting the wares on display.”