01. Labyrinth of Dreams

THE LABYRINTH OF DREAMS

Copyright © 1987 by Jack L. Chalker
ebook ver. 1.0

For Jack Williamson,
who seems to have come up with the idea first
back in the dark ages of SF,
with love and respect.

1.

Spade & Marlowe, P.I.'s

It ain't often when a big case just up and walks into your office on a bright spring day, but being a private dick is all danger and adventure and you never can take anything for sure.

The dame looked exotic, like she was just off the boat, but her movements and particularly her eyes said she was here with a definite purpose in mind, one I might not like. She was covering a lot up, that was for sure. Her hair had more black dye than a licorice factory and she reeked of cheap perfume like a whore out for her first trick, but I knew right away that she wasn't no woman of the evening. Her big brown eyes met mine and her mouth turned up in a nasty curl, as if she wasn't real pleased with what she was seeing. This was a dame with a will of her own, one that wouldn't be easily turned from anything she had in mind to do.

I felt like a kitten caught raiding the garbage pail; she had that effect on you even before she said anything at all. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the feeling we'd met before, like when you remember dreaming the winning horse in the fifth
but only after the race was run and you bet on the nag that was still trying to find the track. And now she spoke, the words in accented English striking my heart like machine gun bullets at the Jersey marshes.

"Hey! Horowitz! You want I should clean this pigsty, and maybe the pig with it?"

I sighed, my lovely fantasy shattered. "Mrs. Kybanski, have you ever heard that a little politeness will get you a long way?"

"No. Sing a few lines. Besides, if I wanted to work with people, I would've taken the waitress job at Denny's. You're the only one left in this dump, and since it ain't been condemned as a public danger yet, I got to clean it. Bad enough I got to walk these streets after dark. I don't have to do it so late except for you. Why don't you go home? You ain't gonna miss no clients. They don't even come
here
in the daytime!"

Unfortunately, that was close to the truth, but her stock appeal for pity had a flaw in it. "Mrs. Kybanski—there are twelve offices in this rundown excuse for an office building, and eleven of them are empty. You just came in five minutes ago. Clean them first. I'll probably be long gone by then."

"Yeah, sure. Use
your
routine,
your
schedule,
your
convenience. Why not just go home to your
shikse
and get a good meal for a change? Not that you don't look like you been getting a good meal once too much."

That was why I tolerated, even liked, Mrs. Kybanski in spite of her wonderful manners and disposition. No matter what her other flaws, she was the only one I'd met in the seven years I've been married who thought of Brandy as a
shikse
and nothing else. That was why she could work this neighborhood. As for being in the neighborhood after dark,
I
might get a little nervous, sometimes, but anybody who dared to attack Mrs. Kybanski deserved what he would get.

"That's who I'm waiting for, Mrs. K.," I replied. "She's been out all afternoon on a case, and she's overdue getting back." The truth was, I was worried. I always worried when she went out alone on one of these things, even though it was just tracking down the address of a guy who owed about ninety years' worth of child-support and alimony payments. We were on a contingency fee, as usual, which made it all the more important. The wife had thought the guy had skipped to parts unknown, but a few days ago somebody who knew him swore to her he was running a 7-Eleven over in south Philly. Trouble was, she couldn't remember
which
7-Eleven store, and there were like fifty over there. Those damned stores multiply faster than coat hangers and grocery bags.

So all I could do was sit around the dingy little office with its cracked door-glass and its cardboard-and-tape patch on the window and try and occupy my mind. We had a drawerful of unpaid bills, a bunch of collection notices, and very little else. The only reason they let us stay in the office was that nobody else would be idiot enough to rent it, but even that had its limits. The fact was, we were sinking fast, and were only really keeping going by handouts from Brandy's large family and from old friends of her dad who'd started this agency long ago. Me, I had no family to speak of and no real friends, not since I got married, anyway. Of course, they weren't real friends at all if that was gonna put them off. The closest relative I had was Uncle Max in Harris-burg, who owned a number of car dealerships, but he hadn't even sent me a birthday card since I got married. Worse, I hate most police and detective work; it's boring and you get no respect at all. Trouble is, I don't know how to do anything else and I never saw anything else any better. I often think I was just born wrong. I was intended for one of those rich multimillionaire Jewish families that have twin BMWs and get wings named after them at Mount Sinai Hospital because they needed a tax loss that year.

God got the religion right, but He must have been having an off day that time—something I'm accustomed to (off days, that is)—and dropped me in the family of a shoe salesman in Baltimore, with no rich relatives except Uncle Max (and he wasn't rich then), who worked six days a week to feed and clothe and house us and to try to save enough money to get me a good education and not have to go through this. Instead he only got ulcers, then a heart attack of the kind you never go back to work from and where the medicines cost a hundred bucks a month, and Mom had arthritis so bad there was no way she was gonna make it, either. I managed high school—public, not the fancy prep school with the old-boy network they wanted for me—but I knew right off that if I was gonna make it in the world, it had to be Uncle Max style. He started selling cars for others while living like a dog, putting all the money in investments, becoming salesman of the year repeatedly and doing a lot of politicking. He even switched to a synagogue miles away because its members had better business connections.

So, he finally finds this daughter of a rich lawyer and marries her, although she's a hundred-percent Jewish American princess, a loudmouth nag, and to me she always bore a strong family resemblance to Lassie. But her daddy bankrolled the car business and now Max has nine dealerships, a couple of million bucks, his-and-hers Cadillacs (he doesn't sell German cars), and, last I heard, a mistress or two on the side to console him. Me, I just couldn't play that game, so as soon as I graduated I joined the Air Force.

Now, that's not all that dumb. You actually have to volunteer for flying duty, and I never much liked airplanes, so if you check "nonflying status" you get an office job or a mechanic's job and you go home at night. In fact, the only potentially dangerous nonflying job the Air Force has is Security Police, its own cops. So, naturally, they made me a cop.

I had thought about letting the Air Force send me to college, but when I found out how much time you owed them for it, I kept putting it off; so I didn't go. Traffic detail at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod wasn't exactly bad duty, and neither was security patrolling at Homestead just south of Miami, but trying to keep a bunch of crazy anti-American protesters out of Clark in the Philippines when you're ordered not to use a weapon is something else. After I got out of the hospital, I started looking somewhere else for a career.

Now, there is a sort of old-boy network among service cops, and I found a job as a patrolman up in Bristol, New Jersey, that was close enough to home and quiet enough generally to be comfortable, although they didn't pay beans. They did, however, underwrite getting a degree, along with my service benefits, but the degree they wanted was in either criminology or police science—the liberal arts of the crime-busting world. That got me bumped up to detective and almost sixteen grand a year. It might not sound like a great salary now, but it was a lousy salary
then.
How I'd settle for it now, though. ...

Anyway, junior detectives always get stuck on Vice, which even in the best of towns is like working in a human sewer half the day and doing paperwork the other half. Almost all the officers were on somebody's pad, which is how they made out on that salary, but the first time you bust a thirteen-year-old hooker, or try and find the source of a fifteen-year-old with more needle marks in him than a pincushion, you find it hard to protect the scum behind them. You know, the guys with the big houses and the twin BMWs. . . .

Not that I'm so morally against corruption that I would never take anything under the table. I just couldn't bring myself to do it in that world, even though I knew that world would grow and thrive with or without me. The big trouble was that if you weren't on the take, your fellow officers couldn't trust you. I drew the out-of-town leads, the dead-end stakeouts, and the cases involving competitors to the entrepreneurs who supplied central Jersey who they wouldn't mind getting taken down a peg or two. I admit I wasn't very diligent at it; they also would hand you the kind of stuff that could get you killed real quick. It wasn't real comfortable, but it was more of an education than Temple ever gave me.

So there I was, as usual, the outsider, the loner, the misfit. I guess I should have taken up religion again or something, but while I'm proud of my heritage I just couldn't take all the social stuff, the insularity, the class divisions, that came along with it. Besides, I always had to work weekends. I'm no beauty and I never went in much for the social graces; and the Levittown princesses didn't want a cop, they wanted a doctor at least. I'm moon-faced, hawk-nosed, with a potbelly, and I started balding at twenty-five (Thanks, Dad). So long as I stayed in Bristol I was stuck anyway, and the trouble was, I just had no place to go. Uncle Max offered me a job selling cars in Harrisburg, but if I wanted to do that kind of work, it was easier—and paid better—to just go on the pad.

So, anyway, they stuck me on this kiddie-porn case that involved liaison with the Camden police, a bunch of guys with bigger payoffs and an even more jaded outlook on life than my own sweet department. I was trying to track down a couple of long-missing local kids whose faces had shown up in a kiddie-porn magazine in Denmark, some of which had gotten imported back here, and they were recognized. The importer was in Camden, and clearly was far more than just an importer, and we were all on him. Even bad cops draw the line someplace. Most of 'em, anyway. With some relief they assigned me to temporary duty in Camden because they needed more men for stakeout duty than Camden could spare, and that's what first brought me to this neighborhood and how I met Brandy.

The neighborhood looked older than England and not nearly as well kept up. Blocks and blocks of narrow streets and rowhouses and smashed windows and sour smells and garbage all over the place. There was this one little office building stuck in the middle, so run-down-looking that to this day I believe that if they took away the boarded-up and condemned row homes on either side, the place would collapse. It kind of bends in the middle, somehow. The windows are all barred but rusty, and they're all cracked or have holes through them filled with tape or cardboard. The neighborhood itself was mostly black here, although there were some Asians now, mostly Koreans and Vietnamese who couldn't afford even the slums of Philadelphia just across the river. A couple of blocks away were a few small white enclaves, mostly old folks and those too poor to move to a higher-class slum. Eighty percent of the place were on permanent welfare; the other twenty percent were burglars, dope dealers, pimps and whores, and folks whose businesses needed this kind of anonymity.

There was no way I could stake out a neighborhood like this; I'd stick out like a sore thumb, but I needed a place staked out, preferably by somebody familiar with the place. I needed a good source of information, too, since it was clear that Camden Vice leaked like a sieve even on kiddie-porn scum. A source had recommended a private detective agency actually in the district; shady, the source said, and on a shoestring, but they did anything for a buck and kept their prices within an investigation's contingency fund. You went in this building and walked up two flights and it was the second door on the left.

SPADE & MARLOWE, Private Investigations, it said on the door in faded and peeling letters. The glass was frosted, but it was also cracked, and was held together with masking tape. Inside, it was full of file cabinets and a week or two of half-eaten lunches; and roaches had the right of way in the small outer office, which contained no desk and only one chair, an ancient overstuffed thing .like you'd see in my grandmother's living room in the old days but cracked and torn, with stuffing coming out this way and that, and springs that had surrendered when Grant had commanded the Army. The door to the inner office looked open—I soon discovered it was nonexistent—and I walked to it and looked in.