by Kirk Dougal
Dim light from the hall filtered into the next room and showed the outline of a bed. I stepped inside and turned the switch on the lamp.
“Shit!” I yelled and stumbled back, struggling to bring my gun up to point at the man staring at me. The wall stopped my movement backwards as I sighted in his chest.
He never moved.
The man remained still, one foot six inches off the ground and the opposite arm swung forward—the perfect pose for a person walking away from the closet behind him. Except the man still had not moved as I stared, somehow balancing on one foot in an impossible position.
My chest heaved and skin went clammy. Even so, I heard a chuckle escape my mouth. The man was an avatar, obviously locked into position when the player turned off his game in the real world, just as Voice had been frozen at the hotel. This character would stay in the room until his player returned inside or his account deactivated and the programmers removed him. Either way I had no chance of deciphering how long the avatar would be balanced on one foot in the bedroom.
I stepped forward and glanced into the closet, noticing a board had been moved aside to reveal an empty cubby hole. I turned to stare again at the avatar and saw a manila folder in his hand, the one swung back and partially hidden by his body. I had to work the file back and forth to drag it out of his fingers, part of the cover ripping away in the process. Papers filled the inside with handwritten notes, much more than I wanted to read at the house. It was time to go.
I was partway down the hall and reaching to turn off the light when I noticed a reflection flash underneath the buffet in the dining room. I crossed the area quickly and stooped to pull out the watch, the watch that confirmed what had really happened here to Roberts and in the outside world.
The feeling of eyes on my back fell over me again, strong enough to make me spin around, half-expecting to find a target for my gun. No one else stood in the room but my skin itched with wariness.
I flipped off the lights and scrambled out the window, pushing the sash down so only a crack remained open. I was almost back to my car when I noticed the figure standing under the street lamp on the corner.
Chapter 26
The figure moved toward me. Back lit by the street light, their face remained hidden in shadow. Each step on the sidewalk echoed down the deserted street, the only sound except for my pounding heart. My hand inched toward the gun under my coat while I used the folder to hide the movement. The shadow stopped.
“I wonder if now would be a good time to buy you that drink I owe you,” a woman said. “I want to thank you for what you did outside the deli.” The woman stepped forward and the dark pulled back enough to reveal Evelyn’s face.
A smile split my lips but I kept my hand near my gun. I had never been a big fan of coincidences and this was a humdinger. “Any time is good for me.”
*****
Evelyn guided me to a nearby bar. A few blocks from Roberts’ house, people walked down sidewalks and cars dotted the streets. The trip felt as if I had gone out to the far edge of mankind, stared at the desolation, and returned to civilization.
We found a table along the wall, near enough to enjoy the band but not so close as to struggle to hear each other. The canary on the mic had a color of blonde hair not found in nature and a dress slit almost high enough to see Cleveland. A few flat notes into the next song and I understood why the dress needed to be so distracting.
“So, what shall we talk about, Mr. Dowland?” Evelyn asked.
“Call me Rick.” I pulled a pack of Luckys and offered her one. “Boxing? Horses? Tiddlywinks?” Each time she shook her head, smiling at me through the smoke curling between us. “It’s either baseball or checkers then.”
“I love baseball,” she said. “My father took me to games all the time when I was young.”
“What do you like about it?”
Evelyn took a drag before she answered. I stared at her, fascinated by the way her lipstick clung to the cigarette, the bright red not quite forming a circle around the end. “The speed,” she said, her eyes never wavering from my face. “I like it when a player takes a chance and stretches a single into a double. He never knows where putting himself into scoring position might lead.” She paused. “How about you, Rick? I’d wager you’ve hit your fair share of long home runs.”
I stared back. “I’ve hit a few out of the park. But lately I always seem to get the curve when I’m looking for the fastball.”
“Maybe all you need is a good batting practice session.” She leaned forward and smiled again, just one side of her mouth tilting up. “That might get your timing back at the plate.”
“My timing has always been lousy.” I smiled as well. “But at least I go down swinging.”
We were both quiet as the waiter delivered our drinks. Evelyn glanced around the room while I tried to catch my breath. If baseball had been half as much fun in real life as the patter, I would have stuck with the sport past Little League.
“Does your dad still go to games?” I asked after I tasted my whiskey.
The smile slipped on Evelyn’s face and she gulped her martini. “Father is dead.”
I finished my cigarette but kept my eyes on her. I had stuck my foot in the bucket pretty deep but I wasn’t going to dig out with a hollow platitude so I stayed silent.
“You’ll never meet anybody quite like him,” she continued. “Not anymore. He started as a tailor’s apprentice and he was good with a needle, but his head was in business. He opened his own clothing store and within a few years he had a whole string of them across the city. Then he began importing clothes and goods from overseas and that meant warehouses and trips to Europe. I celebrated my sweet sixteen in China on a purchasing tour for silks and met my husband in France a few years later.”
My shoulders sagged at the thought of her being married. “Sounds like a pretty good life.”
“It was better than pretty good; it was the best.” She motioned at the waiter for another drink.
“So what happened?”
“The same thing that happened earlier today,” she answered, each word clipped short. “Only with Father it was bullets and not a bomb. They started pressuring him for protection money—the Neighborhood Improvement Fund, they called it. He’d worked too hard to make a good life on his own to just give away the profits so he refused. So one of his warehouses went up in flames, a few of his store workers refused to show up for work because they were threatened. He still said, ‘No.’” She paused, her eyes looking through me and seeing something in her past.
“You’ve got to admire a guy who sticks to his principles, even when the chips are tight,” I said.
“That’s exactly what he would have said,” Evelyn agreed, “even while he was lying in a pool of his own blood.” The crooked smile was long gone. “Father hired security guards and put them on patrol around the clock.
“Finally, one afternoon two years ago, Father and my husband went down to the docks to one of his warehouses to examine a new shipment of clothes that had just arrived. The place was surrounded by the men he had hired, but apparently a few of them had received a better offer. Three of them waited until they were both inside the warehouse office and then tore it apart with gunfire. Most of the wood looked like toothpicks when they were done. They killed Father and Reg on the spot.”
The waiter arrived with more drinks. Evelyn downed half of hers before he took two steps away and then she stared into the glass, her pale face even whiter as she relived her life story. I decided she would start talking again when she was ready so I nursed my whiskey and listened to the singer croak through another song.
“We buried Father and then I took my husband’s body back to France so he could be placed in his family’s mausoleum. I begged Mother to go with me but she refused, saying she could not leave Father so soon. When I returned home a few months later, she had sold the entire business for half of what it was worth.”
I sensed this was where her tale had been heade
d but the bitterness in her voice made my stomach roil. “I don’t need to guess who bought it,” I said.
Evelyn frowned. “Big C owns what my Father built with his hands and hard work.” She took another drink. “But even worse, Big C took my family. Mother never recovered from Father and Reg’s deaths. She shut herself off from the world until she was just a ghost waiting to fade away at the end. She died about six months after the murders.”
“That would make me a little angry.” I stared as she glanced up from her glass, her eyes dark and smoldering. “Makes me wonder what I might do to even the scales.”
She took a last puff on her cigarette and stabbed down into the ashtray. “I’ll tell you what it does, Rick. It forces you to make deals with people you wouldn’t normally talk to. Then you find yourself using friends like they were game pieces.”
“Revenge is a cold business.” The double talk about baseball felt like it had happened hours ago.
Evelyn shrugged. “In this city, Big C’s got the advantage on everybody. When you’re behind the eight ball, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”
“You’ve made a deal with Rose.” I took a drink of whiskey, giving myself time to wonder how far I should push the conversation. “From what I hear, he’s just as deep in the filth and slime as Big C.”
Red bloomed in Evelyn’s cheeks. “Yes, he cheats and he steals. He runs booze and clip joints and dope. He owns cat houses in every part of the city. But if he takes your business he does it by using bribed city inspectors, tax loopholes and political pressure.”
“That may not be much of a comfort to those families who lose everything they’ve ever worked for.”
She leaned forward, her cold glare boring into my face. “You know what is a comfort? A husband still coming home at night. A father eating dinner at the table.” She sat back with her glass. “I’m not happy about doing business with Rose, Mr. Dowland, but at least I don’t need to worry about him doing any business like at the deli.”
I gasped in realization. “You knew the deli owner was being squeezed,” I said. “That’s why you were there, to talk to him.”
“Yes, I was trying to convince Mr. Silowiski to give me the information I needed so we could take down Big C. If we could just have found more…” Her voice trailed off.
I thought back to the file I found in the frozen avatar’s hand at the house. “By ‘we’ you mean you and Roberts. He was helping you gather the information.”
She laughed and waved at the waiter for another drink. “More like I helped him. Ted was smart and very curious. Rose said he was too damn curious. He wanted to nab Big C almost as much as I do. Now he’s gone and I am by myself again.”
“That’s the real reason for your finding me tonight, isn’t it? You want me to help you get the goods on Big C now that Roberts is gone.”
“I really did want to thank you for saving me at the deli.” She looked down at her hands. “But I was also hoping I could hire you to help me. Ted’s been gone for a while now and I don’t know when he will be back. In the meantime, you have proved yourself very resourceful.”
I coughed on the last of my whiskey. Either Evelyn was the best liar I had ever met or she really did not know that Roberts, Coltin Reese in the real world, had been murdered. “So you were also going to his house to see if he had returned.”
She nodded. “Yes. He loves that house. He calls it his own little paradise, a world all to himself. Since I’ve known him he’s never been away this long before. But when I saw you walking back to your car, I decided to talk to you instead.” She paused while she accepted the fresh drink from the waiter and took a sip after he walked away. “So what do you think, Mr. Dowland? Will you help me?”
The words caught in my throat. I wanted to say yes. So far Roberts was my best lead to the murderer and Evelyn’s case and mine appeared to be headed in the same direction. But a part of me wondered if I would end up one of those friends, like Roberts, that she used to get what she wanted and then tossed aside. No matter how she made my insides feel, I still knew little about her. I could not afford to end up dead in the game like he had. Too much rode on me finding Raven.
“Tell me,” I said, watching her face for a reaction, “if I end up on the wrong end of some Chicago lightning will you wear black for a whole day or move straight on to the next baseball fan?”
I could have understood a response of laughter. I would even have accepted an icy, emotionless stare or the heat of anger. But I was not ready for the sneer of disgust she shot at me.
“You’re wrong, Mr. Dowland,” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s not your timing that’s lousy—it's you. You're lousy.” She partially turned away from me, as if seeing me again might make her sick. “I believe I can find my own way home this evening.”
I stood up but stayed by the table for a moment, my fingers drumming lightly on the white cloth. “I would have gone after Big C anyway,” I said. “You didn’t need to buy me the drink.”
I walked to the front of the joint and winked at the coat check girl. She smiled and went to grab my things. After she left, I snuck a peek at Evelyn, still sitting in her chair but now staring straight at me. I gave the girl a tip and walked out into the night.
A minute later I sat in my car, fishing out a cigarette and a match. Evelyn’s problems were already gone. One thought played over and over in my brain now: Who owned the avatar at Roberts’ house?
Chapter 27
Gretchen glanced up when I walked into the office. The scene through the window showed a dreary morning with a promise of rain and the mood radiating off my secretary matched the dark clouds. That was okay with me. After reading through the file from Roberts’ house until the sun rose above the nearby buildings, I was in no humor to hold hands and swap funny stories, either.
“I was beginning to think you had forgotten how to find your desk,” she said. “Or call.”
“I need you to send a telegram to the home office right away,” I said, ignoring the criticism. “Tell them I must have the names of all the other avatars in The City. Lean on REM if they have to but I need it as soon as possible.” I watched Gretchen finish writing on her notepad. “Take it down to the telegraph office yourself. Don’t wait for the boy to come around.”
She stared at me for half a count before grabbing her purse and reaching for her coat. “Looks like it might rain.”
I reached into my pocket and handed over my car keys. “The flivver is parked out front.”
“You plan on going some place?” she asked.
I waggled Roberts’ folder. “I’ve got some reading to do and then I was going to go check on the kid. I’ll just grab a hack.”
She nodded and headed for the door, pausing in the opening. “You’d better eat something, Ricky. You look like hell.”
I waved her off and went to my desk, leaving the inner door open so I could hear if someone came into the office. I grimaced as I rubbed a hand through my hair. Gretchen was probably right. If I looked half as bad as I felt, I was doing a pretty good impression of a hop-head on a three-day binge. A shower and some coffee had helped to wake me up a little after a couple of hours in the sack but I needed a good night’s sleep.
Roberts’ file had kept me from dozing off the night before. For a long time I struggled to make sense of his notes. He wrote at length about three men named Tom, Dick, and Harry who appeared to be in charge of everything illegal happening in The City. Deep into a bottle of whiskey and about ready to label Roberts as loony, I ran across a notation about Dick owning the mayor because of his help pulling in several precincts during the election. Evelyn’s statement about Rose running the politics in The City made the jump easy to finger Rose as Dick. Once I reached that point, the notes began to fall into line. Shortly before sunrise I read a note for the second time about “E’s father” being pushed by Tom. Two plus two told me “E” was Evelyn and I already knew who bumped him off. That made Big C the man named Tom.
Harry
remained a mystery. Now in my office, I fired up a Lucky and sat back in my chair. Evelyn had not mentioned another power behind the crime in The City but she was so blinded by what Big C had done to her family, she might not have cared if a third boss existed, or she could just as easily cut a deal with them, as well. I made another mental note to call Dutch, this time to see if he knew of anyone else moving the crime pieces around town.
Smoke drifted across the desk as I leaned forward. The cigarette clung to the corner of my mouth, threatening to fall out as I used both hands to separate the notes into piles, each one representing Tom, Dick, or Harry. When I finished, I knocked off the long ash and rubbed a hand across my face.
If I had been sitting at my desk in the precinct house with Jim staring over my shoulder, I would have been impressed by the investigation. Roberts had managed to compile a thorough list of nearly all the criminal activities in The City. Prostitution, liquor, extortion, gambling, political bribes—everything sat in front of me. In real life, this kind of effort earned commendations from the police commissioner.
In the game, all the work struck me as a sick obsession.
The piles for Big C (Tom) and Rose (Dick) were extensive and I glanced through them again, looking for one more piece of the puzzle to drop into place. Zilch. Or at least zilch as far as I was concerned. Roberts had gathered enough evidence in his notes to make any prosecutor drool and start issuing warrants. Greed and graft ran rampant through the pages with note after note talking about the murders linked to the corruption. But nothing suggested a link to Roberts’ death, either in the game or on the outside.