Shadow Puppet

by Jeffrey Round

  Reggie looked at them quickly and shrugged. He pointed to Joe. “This guy was in posters around the bars a while back. Never saw the other guy.”

  Dan pointed to Joe’s photo. “Sure you don’t recognize him from around here?”

  Reggie scratched his head. “Nah. I don’t think so.”

  “The reason I’m asking is because he was in a Star-X video. Are you ever around when they make the videos?”

  “Sometimes I see guys waiting in the hallway. And once in a while there are these heavy-duty lights outside his door. I mean, I’m the super, right? I know about all the shit that goes on around here.”

  “What about the other one?” He pointed to Nabil’s photo.

  “Nah. Like I told you.” He stopped and regarded Dan. “So what’s all this about, anyway? Is it because the guy you’re after was in one of Xavier’s films?”

  “That, and I wanted to get a better sense of why at least one of the men who vanished had been in Sam’s apartment.”

  Reggie’s eyes looked as though they might pop. “For real? How do you know that?”

  “I saw a photograph.”

  Reggie’s look was pure doom. “So the police will be coming here, one way or another, is what you’re saying.”

  Dan shook his head. “No, not necessarily. I’m just trying to piece some of the story together and figure out where

  it leads.”

  Reggie’s hand slammed down on the coffee table. “Shit! These freaks are going to get me in trouble.” He looked around crazily, his gaze lighting on the pot plants. He nodded. “This is all my boss’s fault. He lets this crap go on up there. They’re even filming in the basement. It’s getting out of hand.”

  “The basement? Is that the industrial door at the other end of the hall?”

  “That’s the one. They shouldn’t be down there. Other tenants use it, too.”

  “Would you show it to me?” Dan asked.

  “What? The basement?”

  Reggie looked frightened. “Why? What do you think you’ll find?”

  “Hopefully nothing.”

  Reggie’s eyes moved over to a rack of keys hanging beside the fridge. “What do I get for it?”

  “If we go over the hour, like I promised, then another fifty.”

  “How about something else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a date? Come out and have a drink with me sometime.”

  “All right.”

  “When?” Reggie snapped.

  “You choose.”

  “Friday. No one’s around on the weekend. They don’t bother me unless it’s an emergency.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Reggie sprang up and grabbed a flashlight and a set of keys. “Let’s go.”

  Dan followed him down the hall. Reggie took a moment to unlock the heavy door. It swung open into darkness. A retrofit light switch clacked under his fingers and a dim bulb of iron-age wattage flickered on. The stairs were worn, showing deep grooves where footstep had followed footstep for who knew how many decades.

  “Don’t touch the walls,” Reggie warned. “You’ll get dusty.”

  They were pea-soup green, bilious and flaking with silicate dust like a festering wound, as though the wall had bubbled. The building was old, probably mid-nineteenth century, from sometime after the Great Fire of 1849 when promises to build out of brick instead of wood got you a better chance of getting your application passed.

  It was cold. Their breath lit up the space. The air had a peculiar quality, as though they were breathing in something unsavoury. The silence felt oppressive until a furnace chugged on, an eerie, octopus-like contraption feeding its many arms up through the ceiling and filling the space with a heavy thrumming. At the centre of its bulk, an orange glow seeped around the edges of the intake door.

  “Is that thing even legal?” Dan asked, thinking it a wonder it hadn’t burned the place down.

  He recalled furnaces like this back in Sudbury, tucked away in the basements of houses built on rock. You found them wrapped in huge rolls of insulation. The risk of asbestos contamination was high until legislation made it illegal.

  “Not for much longer. We have to get rid of it. The city, eh?”

  They plunged on till they came to an old door built of wood planks with an iron grill. It swung open at Reggie’s touch. The cold seeped through even more now. It was like a morgue.

  Spiders had claimed lineage here, creating webs and tunnels coated in mica dust where no self-respecting fly would venture. Dan remembered the adage he’d learned as a child. If you had ants in your house, get some spiders; if you had spiders, get some mice; if you had mice, get a cat. It went on from there, a zoological ladder up the food chain. And if you had humans, then what?

  They twisted and wound their way through dingy rooms lit by overhead bulbs overlooked by the passage of time. Dan kept his eyes open, but saw nothing unusual in the assortment of tools and boxes and debris scattered about, the detritus of lives left behind. At the far end of the corridor they arrived at another solid wood door. Someone had had a moment of inspiration and painted it blue, the single bright note in all the greyness surrounding them. In honour of what, it was impossible to say.

  A hefty padlock lay across the latch.

  “This is the locker room,” Reggie was saying. “These are personal, eh?”

  He unlocked it, slid the door open, and switched on the overhead fluorescent light. It fluttered on, revealing a row of metal doors lined up one after another. Some opened onto empty space. Others were secured with a variety of locks, both massive and flimsy, just begging to be broken into, Dan thought.

  “The tenants keep their belongings down here?”

  “Every apartment has a locker. No one can get in but the owner.”

  “Which is Star-X’s?”

  “That one.” Reggie pointed to a scarred door secured with a heavy bolt.

  Dan tried the lock, but it held. “Which is Sam’s?”

  Reggie hesitated then pointed out another door farther down. “That one, I think.”

  The lock hung in the clasp, but wasn’t secured. Dan slipped it off and opened the door. Reggie stepped in and switched on his flashlight. It barely illuminated the room. The space was empty. Dust motes hung in the air like miniature planets orbiting a feeble sun.

  “Did he ever keep anything in here?”

  Reggie looked around. “There used to be several large boxes. Then one day they were gone. I never knew what was in them.”

  Dan wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find, but it felt anticlimactic, as though he were missing something obvious. The furnace chugged off and an eerie silence resumed as they made their way back through the maze of corridors, following the long, gloomy passage. From the floor above, a voice called Reggie’s name.

  A large silver-haired man stood at the top of the stairs, flicking the unclasped lock. His eyes glittered, green and luminous, like a predatory animal’s.

  “You should be more careful. I could have locked you in down there,” he said as Reggie emerged from the gloom with Dan behind him.

  His accent was similar to Edie Foxe’s, but cultivated as though to disguise its origins. The clothes he wore were tailored and expensive. He filled them well, a man assured of his place in the world. There was a subdued strength beneath the cloth, a hint of muscle under the fat, like an indulgent man in good shape who had let himself go out of boredom.

  Prabin had asked Dan whether he could detect the presence of a killer. This man felt close.

  The man exchanged a look with Dan. It felt oddly intimate. He smiled as though they might be friends. “And you are?”

  “He’s the furnace inspector,” Reggie interjected.

  The man’s expression turned dismissive.

  “We’ll be in compliance soon,” he assured Dan. He looked him over. “No uniform?”

  “Unofficial call,” Dan said.

>   “I see. Well, I hope there won’t be any problems until we do.”

  “No problems,” Dan replied.

  The man turned to Reggie. “Make sure you give Xavier full access whenever he needs it. Any time of day — or night.”

  “Yeah, sure — can do.”

  “And keep your eye on the kids he brings in here. All those street hustlers will rip you off nowadays. I don’t want them walking away with a camera or lighting equipment.” The big man turned to look at Dan again. “Did he tell you what we do here?”

  “No. I didn’t ask.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. We make pornographic videos. Ever want to be a porn star?”

  Dan shook his head. “Not my thing.”

  “Too bad. You’ve got the right look for it.” He turned and headed up the stairs.

  Reggie nodded Dan toward his apartment. Once they were inside, he closed the door behind them.

  “I told you all this crazy shit goes on here. I could help you with your work. We’d be great together. I see things, you know. I’d make a great detective.” He giggled. “Crazy guy, huh? No fuckin’ discretion, eh?”

  “Discretion is not the word that comes to mind,” Dan admitted. “Who was that?”

  “That’s my boss. His name is Zoltan Mirovic.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Chill

  THE BODY HAD BEEN IN the harbour for a week or more. Dan first heard about it through a personal call from the chief of police, asking him to bring his clients to the morgue for identification as soon as possible.

  “How certain are you?”

  “Not certain at all, but the body fits the description.”

  Dan wondered how many tearful relatives the chief had informed over the years that their hopes had led to a dead end, literally and metaphorically. People who trusted him to bring home their wayward children or make brothers, sisters, and spouses see reason and return to their abandoned lives, only to hear him pronounce those chilling words: the body fits the description.

  “Okay, thanks for that.”

  “And thanks for your work on those DVDs. I’ve passed your observations along to the sergeant in charge. I’ll let you know what I hear.”

  Now would be the time to mention that I met Zoltan Mirovic, Dan thought. But officially he’d been told to keep out of it. The moment passed.

  “Good luck with your clients,” the chief said. “I hope it isn’t the brother, but chances are …”

  Chances were.

  Dan was thankful to get Amir on the line rather than Mustafa, but the call wasn’t any easier to make.

  “I have news that may not be good,” he began. “I want to caution you that it might not be Nabil, but a body was retrieved from the harbour early this morning.”

  There was a silence.

  “I’ve been asked by the police to bring you to the city morgue to see if you can identify him. I can pick you up in my car, if you like, or I can meet you there.”

  Amir’s response was terse. “Mustafa and I will meet you there.”

  Dan called Prabin next. He wasn’t sure why, only a gut feeling that told him waiting wasn’t going to make much of a difference to the story’s ending. Prabin’s voice went from cheerful to sad as Dan explained the reason for his call.

  “Do you think it’s him?”

  “From what the chief said, I suspect it will turn out to be Nabil.”

  There was a long sigh on the other end.

  “We tried our best, Prabin. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, going out and trying to figure out who might have kidnapped and murdered these men.”

  “I could have been out there more. I could have gone each night.”

  “You could have done that and still not come across the killer,” Dan argued. “Or you could have ended up murdered yourself. Keep that in mind.”

  The brothers were waiting outside the morgue. It was the first time Dan had seen either of them since Mustafa’s disruption of the prayer group meeting. For once, Mustafa was the talkative one. He spoke almost non-stop about Nabil and their childhood together, an explosion of memories made more difficult for being expressed in English rather than Arabic, for Dan’s benefit.

  They were met by two police officers and escorted down the hall. Told they had the option of identifying their brother’s body through photographs or in person, they chose the latter.

  In the elevator, silence collected like a lingering odour. Dan was no stranger to the morgue, but the brothers were clearly bewildered by the byzantine surroundings: the crime labs, the storage rooms for bodies awaiting autopsies or identification, and the long, sanitary corridors. They were met by a man in a white smock, with an ironic demeanour and long cheekbones that were a cadaverous grey. He introduced himself as Stuart Morgan, chief pathologist, checked something off on a clipboard then led them to a gurney where a small mound lay covered over with a sheet.

  When the brothers were asked if they were ready, it was Mustafa who agreed. Stuart nodded to an attendant who pulled the sheet partway down to expose the man lying there. Dan had never seen Nabil in person, but he knew instantly that it was him. Or what was left of him.

  Both brothers cried, Amir silently and Mustafa loudly. Dan watched Mustafa to see if he could determine whether they were tears of grief or guilt. It was impossible to tell. The body was covered again, a sad final chapter to a young man’s life.

  There were official forms to be filled out, arrangements made for the body on completion of the autopsy. Cause of death had not yet been determined, the pathologist informed them. Nor was time of death, as the cool harbour water had kept Nabil’s body from deteriorating to any great degree.

  Thanking the brothers for their co-operation, and with condolences for their loss, the pathologist left them. Dan led the pair back upstairs and outside, where it seemed easier to breathe. Cold air hit them in the face, a snap back to reality.

  “I’m very sorry,” Dan said. “I hoped I could find Nabil alive.”

  Mustafa said something to Amir in Arabic. Amir turned to Dan. “We must accept his death. It is as God wills.”

  A cruel god then, Dan thought, but kept it to himself.

  They stood together at the corner, watching the world go by.

  “I will follow up on everything,” Dan told them. “You don’t have to do anything more at this point except to arrange for your brother’s burial. If you need help with that, let me know and I can point you in the right direction.”

  They nodded their understanding. But even as he made the offer Dan knew that he, a non-Muslim, would not be asked to help with a Muslim funeral. He felt as though he’d done nothing, had redeemed no one.

  Leaving them there on the corner, he went home and ate an early supper with Ked, then turned off his phone and fell into a sleep that was like oblivion.

  It wasn’t until he woke the following morning that he discovered the trail of messages from Reggie. He’d missed their date. The superintendent’s voice went from hopeful through bewildered to angry over the course of several hours, as he waited for Dan to show up at their appointed rendezvous.

  Dan found Reggie’s card and called back.

  Reggie’s voice was cold. “I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

  “I’m sorry, Reggie. I got caught up in something.” Dan hesitated, wondering whether to tell him about the discovery of Nabil’s body, but decided against it. Reggie didn’t need to know his business. Nor did he need to make excuses. “We can do it another time. I’ll have to check my schedule and let you know.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  The line went dead.

  Dan sighed. If the super was that temperamental it wouldn’t be worth trying to explain.

  He thought he’d heard the last from him, so he was surprised the following day to find a follow-up message from the rejected superintendent of the Viking. Despite his disappointment in Dan, he’d been pursuing a private investigation of his own. It had yielded some surprising results that “will be
of great interest to you,” he claimed. There was no indication of what he’d found. The message ended.

  “Hi, Reggie — this is Dan Sharp.”

  “I know who it is.”

  Clearly there was still some soothing needed. “I’d like to apologize again for missing our date the other night. It was work-related. I’m afraid I had no choice.”

  “You could’ve phoned.”

  “If I’d remembered I would have, but something came up suddenly and I lost track of everything else.”

  “They found that body in the harbour. That’s why you didn’t show up.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Dan said slowly. “How did you know?”

  “I saw it on the news. When they said he’d gone missing from the gay community I knew it was the guy you were looking for.”

  “Good guess.”

  “It wasn’t a guess. It was a deduction.”

  “Smart deduction, then.”

  “You see — I can help you.”

  “I believe you. What was it you found that might interest me?”

  Reggie’s voice was smug. “Not might interest — will interest. Guaranteed.”

  “You’ve got my full attention.”

  “It’s about the lockers.”

  “In the basement?”

  “Yes, those lockers.”

  “You’re right — I am definitely interested.” This was met with another silence. Talking with Reggie was like pulling teeth. “Are you going to tell me or should I guess?”

  “You need to come over here to see.”

  Dan looked at his watch. “I’m in the middle of something —”

  “Okay, forget it then,” Reggie said with a tone of finality.

  “Wait!”

  Clearly, Reggie had the makings of a martinet. With his unremarkable station in life and a boss who terrified him, it was no wonder he nurtured whatever scraps of power he could wield over others.

  The silence hummed on the line.

  “Well …? Are you interested?”

  “I’ll come over when I’m done. Five o’ clock?”

  “Five o’ clock. Don’t screw up again.”

  At five minutes to five, Dan parked outside the Viking. Reggie answered his knock with a superior look. The cat savouring its cream.