Noir

by Christopher Moore

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” said another voice.

  The smart thing to do would have been to turn and run, but Sammy was not known for doing the smart thing. There were mugs dying in the mud in Europe, fighting all over the Pacific, and that’s what he’d be doing, too, if they’d let him. No, Sammy Snowflake Tiffin would not run, dammit. He was not a coward.

  “I got a key,” he said, coming at the craps players, holding his key up like a badge.

  “Let’s see,” said a tall, thin guy, still in his work clothes, stained with soot and sweat. Sammy could smell the booze coming off of him.

  A couple of the other dice players slipped pints and half-pints of booze into their pockets as they gathered around Sammy. The tall fellow snatched Sammy’s key out of his hand.

  “FF-27. Well, this key do go to this building, but you don’t go to this key. This strictly a no-snowflake building.”

  “No damn snowflakes,” said another player.

  “Give me my key,” Sammy said, made a grab for it. The tall man pulled it away, pushed Sammy backward.

  Sammy smacked the tall man’s hand away from his chest and threw a roundhouse punch like he was trying to knock out Hitler himself. The tall man dodged the punch easily and laughed, surprised.

  “Ah, snowflake,” he said. Before Sammy could wind up again, the tall man hit him in the mouth, twice, two quick jabs that sent him reeling back, to be caught by one of the other players.

  “You done did it now, snowflake,” said the player holding Sammy’s right arm, and he pushed him toward the tall man. Sammy tasted blood in his mouth, tried to uppercut the tall man, and ended up off balance again. A fist crashed into his temple and a bright light went on behind his left eye. Before he could shake it off he was hit from the other side so hard it nearly spun him around. He righted himself, his fists up, and saw he was facing the wrong guy. One of the players who caught him shook his head, sadly, and pointed in the direction where the tall man was standing, waiting, his dukes up, bobbing in the moonlight as light as a dream. Grinning.

  The next punch sent Sammy to his hands and knees. He blinked and could just make out dark drops on his hands, blood running out of his nose in a steady stream. A clattering ring to his left—the Coca-Cola bottle from his coat pocket skittering on the tarmac.

  “What this?”

  “That’s mine,” Sammy said. He looked up at the tall man, who held the seven-ounce Coke bottle by the neck. “I’m gonna turn it in for the deposit.”

  “Here your deposit,” said the tall man.

  Sammy tried to get his hands up before the bottle crashed across his head—dodged back hard enough to send him back on his ass—but the blow never came. Instead he saw the tall man yanked back like he’d caught a cannonball and he just kept going, backpedaling until he crashed into the clapboard siding of the barracks. As the tall man bounced off the wall he was caught by the throat by an even taller, bigger figure, who lifted him against the wall and held him there in a way that was in fashion long ago in a galaxy far away.

  “Don’t mess with a man’s Co-cola bottle,” said Thelonius Jones. “They’s a deposit.”

  The tall man tried to nod, handed the Coke bottle down to Lone.

  “This here white boy mine. I appreciate you don’t mess with him.”

  The choking man again tried to nod. Lone looked around and all the other dice players nodded with deep sincerity.

  “All right.” Lone pulled the man off the wall and threw him to the ground. The formerly tall man threw Sammy’s key at Lone’s feet, then scrambled across the concrete to his companions, who lifted him up.

  “Go home!” Lone said, and they all limped away, having strained their pride ligaments to a man.

  Sammy sat splay-legged on the tarmac, blowing threads of blood and mucus down the front of his coat and shirt as he tried to breathe. Lone threw the key on the pavement between Sammy’s legs.

  “Snowflake, you gonna have to learn to fight before you take a swing on a fella like Louis.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.”

  “I didn’t say you was.”

  Sammy blew a blob of gore at the big man. “Give me my goddamn Coke bottle before I whip your ass.”

  By the time Lone was done laughing he was sitting on the pavement beside Sammy, holding his sides, rocking, and squeezing back tears.

  18

  Dark Town

  Someone had rolled a piano out onto the sidewalk outside Jackson’s Nook, a jazz club, and a piano player was trading riffs with a sax man while scores of people were dancing and bopping halfway out into the street. Sammy drove slowly around them. There wasn’t a white face in the crowd.

  “We could leave Pookie here for safekeeping,” Sammy said, throwing a thumb out the back window at the drooling cop. He grinned. Myrtle didn’t know why.

  “I don’t think he’s dressed right for dancing,” said Myrtle. She slid away from the window a little until her left leg was nearly against the shifter.

  They drove on.

  Much of the Fillmore had been destroyed in the earthquake and fire of ’06, although a few of the grand Victorian homes had survived. After the quake, most of the neighborhood was rebuilt with little wooden box houses, the bare minimum to get a family through until more permanent housing could be built: earthquake shacks. The permanent houses were never built, and over the years the Fillmore had become a slum, where the poorest people outside of Chinatown lived. For a while it was Japantown, until the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps during the war; then, for a short while, it became a ghost town, until housing was needed by defense workers faster than it could be built at Hunters Point, Richmond, and Marin City. And so around ’43, the Fillmore filled up with black families moving from the South for work. That’s when the cops started calling it Dark Town.

  It was still a poor neighborhood—a lot of broken-down earthquake shacks—but it was still a neighborhood: home for a lot of people who couldn’t move away even if they could afford to, because zoning laws wouldn’t allow black people to live in most other neighborhoods in the city. Some people treated those rented earthquake shacks as if they owned them, and turned them into little jewel boxes, with fresh paint, manicured postage-stamp lawns, and window boxes filled with flowers.

  Around 3 a.m., Sammy pulled up in front of just such a home. The two windows on either side of the front door shone yellow in the fog, just frosting the tops of some red geraniums in the windows with light.

  “We’re here,” Sammy said. He jumped out of the Ford and headed toward the cottage. When he was halfway down the walk he looked back to see Myrtle, sitting motionless in the passenger seat. (And Pookie, equally motionless, but for different reasons, in the rumble seat.) Sammy went back to get her. She’d locked the door.

  “We’re here,” Sammy said, knocking on the window. “Come on. This is it.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Friend’s house. Guy I bailed out in a fight once.”

  “It doesn’t feel safe.”

  “Really? You’re going to love Lone.”

  Sammy coaxed her out of the car and escorted her up the walk, Myrtle clutching her little overnight bag against her chest like a schoolgirl carrying books. Sammy knocked on the door.

  “It’s kind of late,” Myrtle said.

  “It’s fine. Lights are on. Lone is just off work.”

  The lock clicked, the door swung open, and Lone Jones stepped into the doorway, still in his tux shirt and trousers, eclipsing the light from inside the house. Myrtle yipped and jumped back.

  “Hey, Sammy,” Lone said around a mouthful of something substantial he was chewing. He had a dish towel tucked in his collar as a napkin. “Come on in.” Lone stepped out of the doorway and held the door with a slight bow, which still left his head above the doorframe.

  “Evening, miss,” Lone said to Myrtle, reaching for the brim of his top hat, which he was not wearing. Habit.

  Myrtle tried to take a wide path through the
door, which wasn’t possible because it was a narrow door, and ended up tripping over her own feet and into the tiny parlor. Sammy caught her by the elbow and steadied her.

  “Myrtle, this is Thelonius Jones. Lone, this is Myrtle. She’s in a spot and I need you to look out for her—keep it on the Q.T.”

  “A pleasure, miss,” said Lone Jones.

  “Charmed,” said Myrtle, her eyes going wide enough to admit a pair of ghosts.

  “Sorry to show up so late,” Sammy said.

  “Ain’t no thing,” said Lone. “We was up.”

  Lone looked out to the street before closing the door. “You get a new car, snowflake?”

  “Borrowed it from a friend.”

  “You get a new friend?”

  “In a manner of speaking, I guess so,” Sammy said.

  “That the po-lice I bust upside the head in the rumble seat?”

  “That it is,” said Sammy, looking past Lone to see if Pookie was moving. He wasn’t.

  A woman’s voice from down the hall. “Is that Sammy?” Myrtle jumped.

  “Hey, Mrs. Jones!” Sammy called.

  “Mama got up and made me a meat loaf,” said Lone. “Since I can’t go to Cookie’s after work no more.”

  “For a while,” said Sammy.

  “Y’all want to come in the kitchen and watch me eat a meat loaf?”

  “Sure,” said Sammy. Lone bowed again, ever the professional, and presented the narrow hall with a flourish. “After y’all.”

  Sammy pushed Myrtle, who moved in tiny, resistant steps down the hallway and into a small kitchen where a petite black woman in a housecoat and hairnet was tending to a teakettle at the stove. There was a drop-leaf table under a little window, with enough room for a chair on either side. One side was set with a dinner plate, where half a fork-worried meat loaf stood amid a mound of mashed potatoes that looked like a meaty ship that had crashed into an iceberg of steaming spuds.

  Mrs. Jones shuffled over to Sammy. She wore fuzzy slippers and walked as if they would slip off her feet if she dared to lift them from the floor. She fluffed Sammy’s shoulders, then stepped back and took a look at him.

  “That’s a sharp suit, Sammy, but you skinny. Thelonius takin’ good care of you?”

  “He sure is, Mrs. Jones. Don’t know how I’d get by without him.”

  “Well, that’s good. You know I told that boy, he don’t take care of you, he ain’t never gonna get him a wife. When he was little, he got a little catfish out the crick—little itty-bitty thing. Lived in a bowl by his bed. Well, it done died.”

  “Wasn’t my fault,” said Lone, now looming over the meat loaf.

  “So you say,” snapped Mrs. Jones at her son. “I didn’t allow him no pets after that until he come home with you. Boy was so excited, and you was so beat-up and sad, I didn’t have the heart to say no to neither one of you.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t, ma’am,” Sammy said.

  “Now who this?” Mrs. Jones looked Myrtle up and down.

  Myrtle curtsied, nearly dropped her overnight bag. “I’m Myrtle, ma’am.”

  “You Sammy’s girl?”

  “No, Mrs. Jones,” Sammy said. “Myrtle’s a friend. She’s in some trouble. Nothing she did, but some bad guys are looking for her. I was hoping she could stay with you and Thelonius until the trouble blows over.”

  “I suppose so,” said Mrs. Jones. “Nobody will look for her here in Dark Town.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” Sammy said.

  “Well, let’s get her situated. I got church in the morning.”

  “She can sleep on the couch, Mama,” said Lone.

  “You can sleep on the davenport. She a guest.”

  “I don’t fit on the davenport, Mama.”

  “You will sleep on the davenport and give this young lady your bed or I will whup your ass, Thelonius W. Jones.”

  Sammy nudged Myrtle and whispered, “See, you’ll be fine. Everybody’s looking out for you.”

  “It’s okay,” Myrtle said, seeming to relax for the first time. “I like the couch. I’ll be fine on the couch.”

  “Thelonius W. Jones?” Sammy said. “That’s new. What’s the W stand for, Lone?”

  “You don’t need to know. Mama, don’t you tell him.”

  “Wedgewood,” said Mrs. Jones. “Thelonius Wedgewood Jones.”

  “It’s a nice name,” said Myrtle. “Sounds British. Fancy.”

  “The Wedgewood his daddy’s idea.”

  “Ah Mama, you don’t got to tell that story.” Lone dropped his fork into his mashed potatoes.

  “’Cause Lonius conceived on top a Wedgewood stove,” said Mrs. Jones. “Right there in the kitchen where I was workin’. Lonius’s daddy, may he rest in peace, just come up on me, talkin’ sweet like he did—”

  “Don’t tell that, Mama.” Lone unfolded from his chair, was across the kitchen in two strides, and back up the hall toward his bedroom. “Come this way, miss. I’ll show you my room.”

  Mrs. Jones leaned into Myrtle conspiratorially. “That man had a dick like a dinosaur.”

  “Oh Mama!”

  “You seen pictures of ’em dinosaurs? Just like that. I mean, they don’t show they dicks in the pictures, but you know they big. Man like to split me in two. Don’t get me wrong, I got used to it, but them first few times—well—it was a surprise.”

  “You like one pillow or two?” Lone called from the little room off the hall. “I got two. You can have ’em both, you want.”

  “I’m sure that’s why I couldn’t have no children after Lonius. That man ruined me. He wasn’t tall as Lonius, but that man dick a menace.”

  “Mama, please,” Lone called.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Lonius got a respectable dick on him, too—take him half an hour to wash it sometime—but not like his daddy’s.”

  “Well, I better be going,” Sammy said. “I have a drive ahead of me.”

  “You want me make you a cup of coffee, Sammy? Look like Lonius ain’t gonna finish his meat loaf. If you hungry, I can fix you a sandwich to take.”

  “That would be great, Mrs. Jones.”

  “Mama, he said he got to go.”

  “Myrtle, you hungry?”

  “A sandwich would be nice,” Myrtle said, more at ease now than was Lonius in his own home.

  “I think that why he died so young,” said Mrs. Jones. “Just thirty-two. Man’s heart just gave out from having to pump up that big ol’ dino dick.”

  “Mama, Sammy have to go save his lady.”

  “I’m fine, Wedgewood,” Sammy said.

  “I will whup your ass, snowflake.”

  “Don’t talk to your white boy like that, Thelonius. They’ll never let you on the Secret Service.”

  “Secret Service?” Myrtle said.

  “Lone will explain,” said Sammy. “Don’t tell him about President Roosevelt.”

  “What about President Roosevelt?”

  “You’ll see,” said Sammy. “Lone has a phone. I’ll call you, let you know when it’s okay to go home. Let Mrs. Jones answer.”

  “Call me when you find Tilly. So I won’t worry,” Myrtle said.

  “I will. And I’ll check in with Jimmy for you. Don’t you call him. I think these guys might have a line on the phone.”

  “And what was the name of that camp, the one the guards said to check with when you were locked up in the cabin?”

  “Dragons. I remember because it fit with all their other spooky stuff.”

  Sammy took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Thanks.”

  Lone Jones reappeared behind them, filling the hall. “I got Executive Order 8802 from President Roosevelt in a frame in the parlor,” Lone said. “You wanna see it?”

  “That would be swell,” Myrtle said.

  “You want catchup on your meat loaf sandwich, Sammy?” Mrs. Jones asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sammy said. To Lone he said, in a whisper, “Lone, you see two white guys in black suits coming to the door,
you take Myrtle out the back. If you don’t have time, don’t hesitate. Do what you have to do.”

  “Always do, snowflake,” said Lone.

  Ten minutes later Sammy was checking Pookie’s pulse: faint. He was cold but alive. He climbed into the Ford, put the paper sack with the thermos of coffee (cream and sugar), a cup, and a meat loaf sandwich wrapped in wax paper on the seat beside him, then headed across town to Mabel’s on Post Street to play the one outside chance that Stilton might have made it back to the city before he charged north into the redwood forest.

  19

  Sampling Social Clubs of San Francisco

  Maybe it speaks to my lack of sophistication, or maybe it speaks to my lack of desperation, but I had never been inside a whorehouse before. I was not apprised of the etiquette, and I was not in the market to purchase some tail, yet I sensed it would not be kosher to stroll in and announce that I was just browsing, and could I speak to any girls who had recently been on a small bus. I figured I’d come in on the level and hope that would work.

  After I parked the Ford at the curb on Post outside of Mabel’s and smacked Pookie a couple of times to make sure he was breathing but not awake, I sauntered up the stairs of the big Victorian and through beveled glass doors into a grand foyer, where I was greeted by an extra-large gent in a suit who wished me a good morning and inquired if the weight in my jacket pocket was a heater, which I admitted it was.

  “Hand it over,” said the palooka, gesturing gimme with his hand. He said this with no malice or threat implied. “No guns in the house. You’ll get it back on the way out.”

  “Of course,” I said, and I handed him the Walther, which he took with two fingers like he was handling a dead bird.

  “Walther is a dame’s gun,” he said.

  “That is true,” I confirmed. “A dame gives it to me. There’s one in the chamber, there, sport, so you might want to avoid dropping it.”

  He shrugged like that would never happen in a million years, then locked the gun in the top drawer of a credenza made of some dark wood, with a couple of silver candleholders on top composed of figures of couples entwined in some serpentine razzmatazz.