01. Labyrinth of Dreams (2 page)

There was a single old oak desk piled high with crap, a thirty-year-old manual typewriter on the floor, an old black dial phone from the fifties at least, and heaps of papers and other residue. It looked like my apartment. At first I thought nobody was there, but then I heard noises coming from behind the desk and then a head popped up and looked at me.

She was chocolate brown, with a full oval face, the biggest brown eyes I ever saw, and Afro-style hair so huge and bushy I thought at first it had to be a wig. "Oh, sorry, didn't know anybody was here," she said in a very low, throaty voice. Then she stood up, all five foot five of her, and stared at me. "You a cop?"

"Yeah, I'm a cop. Sam Horowitz—out of Bristol, so don't get upset. I need some help, and I was told this agency was handy for the kind of help I have in mind."

She was chubby, almost fat, but it was as if weight gained after a certain point had gone entirely to her breasts and hips. She wore a faded tee shirt with a marijuana plant, on it and the words buy american!, and faded and patched jeans that seemed far too tight. "What kind of work?"

"Uh—excuse me—but the place is called Spade and Marlowe. Are you one of them?"

"Marlowe's dead," she responded matter-of-factly. "I'm the Spade."

I was always uncomfortable with that kind of humor, but it was too good a line not to appreciate. It was soon clear that she wasn't the secretary or a partner, but the whole damned agency. She picked up a creaky old wooden chair that had been overturned behind the desk and pushed it out and to the side. "Take a seat," she invited. "That's the only chair, but I don't use it much anyway."

"Thanks, I'll stand. Now, then, Ms. ... ?"

"Brandy Parker. This job pay?"

"Some. A lot if we can get some results. The families involved have big rewards out."

"How big?"

"A few grand. The rewards, anyway."

"Take the chair," she invited, perching on the desk. "I'm suddenly very interested."

I told her about the case so far, the missing kids, the kiddie-pom pictures, the tracing to the distributor who worked out of a building in this area, all of it. She listened attentively, asking a few very good questions when she needed clarification, and seemed to get increasingly interested when I showed her the magazine and the pictures of the two kids before they were snatched. I liked the fact that the more we talked, the less money seemed important and the more her own anger grew. She was used to all the shit that went on around these neighborhoods, but this was particularly dirty, and the faces—and the contrast in the pictures—made it very real.

The cops had been right; she was very good when working in her element, and turned up a number of solid leads within forty-eight hours. The Camden cops would have to make the official bust, but we needed to feed them place, time, and the rest. Brandy's car was broken and she hadn't had the money to fix it, so we used my unmarked one, which for anything requiring traveling meant we saw a lot of each other. The word finally came down that a pedophile ring was working a seedy hotel in the low-rent district, and we staked it out for very long periods. A week of all-night stakeouts will let you get to know somebody pretty well.

Maybe it was because we were both lonely, both generally depressed, or maybe that we just had the same idea of right, wrong, and maybe, but we just sort of clicked in spite of our ingrained prejudices. No, it's not the way you think. She had more prejudices about Jews than I ever had about blacks. Hell, three fine, upstanding white guys had stood around while I lay bleeding on the ground back at Clark while two black SPs had finally braved the stones and dragged me back, saving my ass. Even though we'd been poor, my parents had always marched in civil-rights campaigns—they were old enough to remember "restricted" neighborhoods against Jews—and I never thought of blacks as being any different than Poles, Germans, Spaniards, or Chinese for that matter. In my family's world there were only two kinds of people, Jews and
goys.

Brandy Alexandra Parker. Her father, the colonel, had always liked that drink, and it made a cute and appropriate name for his only child. Except for the fact that Harold Parker had been a career soldier and career MP, he and I had a lot in common. I think I would have really liked him. He'd joined the Army as an enlisted man at age eighteen, and worked his way up. He was a "consultant" to the Navy at the Philadelphia Navy Yard when he realized he'd never get any higher than lieutenant colonel—when you're an Army career man and they post you to the Navy, they're trying to tell you something—and he'd retired. He was a proud man who felt a keen obligation to excel just to prove that a black man could be ten times the soldier of those white smartasses, and considered prejudice not a barrier but a challenge. He was too old and too overqualified to get civilian police work, and the places where he could sign on offered him low and insulting positions, so he decided to try it on his own.

He also was caught up in the romance of the thing, to a degree. Spade & Marlowe. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Only the best of company for Harold Parker. He didn't have much savings but he had a pretty fair pension, so he went out, got a license, rented a cheap office that looked right, and even hired a neighborhood girl just out of secretarial school as a secretary. A year later, at age forty-six, he married her. She was already six months pregnant at the time. Brandy wasn't his biological child, something she was kept ignorant of until she was in her late teens and he was trying to keep everything together and keep her from quitting school to help him. Her mother wasn't there to help; she had suffered from rip-roaring high blood pressure, and after Branday's birth, was warned not to try again. She worshipped the colonel, though, and became pregnant. The combination of that and being sloppy with her high-blood-pressure pills proved fatal. Brandy had been only ten when her mother had dropped dead of a stroke. She hadn't even gotten to thirty.

The colonel had set up the agency in the Camden ghetto at a time when it was rare to have a black private eye. He saw a need and filled it in the good old American tradition, arguing that black folks got divorces and skipped support payments and fooled around almost as much as white folks did. For a while it paid. Not handsomely, but when added to his retirement it was adequate—of course, his clientele then was of
a
higher class. When the ghetto became a place for the very poor, the paying clients went to large agencies with fancy offices and set rates, some black-owned and -operated, others the same ones that before hadn't wanted their business. He found himself working longer and harder for a diminishing client base, and he was no youngster anymore—but he had a youngster. The paying jobs often required him to be out late, and she wound up more and more in the care of her mother's relatives, mostly cousins and the like, who really considered it an obligation and weren't very good at the guardian job.

Brandy understood, but she developed a crushing case of private-eye-itus, caused by having a father who was a P.I., and by too many television shows, and she had little interest in school. She was a fat girl with no real family life and was a class wallflower, kind of like me except for the fat business—that came only from Bristol. She went a little wild as a teen. The only way to get boys to pay attention was to proposition them; the rest was taken care of by readily available drugs. She spent the rest of the time watching black-female-avenger pictures and reading lurid novels. She was a good reader because her father always was, but she got lousy grades and didn't really care. Her father, increasingly trying to hold the business together and with his health beginning to fail, finally couldn't help but notice and did a little personal detective work. The first thing he found out was that the report cards he'd seen had been stolen blanks. She had more absences than days present, and although he thought at sixteen she was in high school, the fact was that she was still in the ninth grade.

Just as bad, her closest girlfriend had been dead on arrival from an overdose of drugs and pills, and never mind the two abortions. The guilt hit him like a lead weight. I kind of feel sorry for him at that point, torn between trying to force her to the straight and narrow and his guilt at letting her go off in the first place.

I'll never know what that scene was like, but somehow a compromise was reached. She didn't want school and he wanted her out of that crowd, that was for sure. She dropped out and went to work for him at the agency as his secretary, receptionist, and assistant. She had promised him she'd get away from the bad crowd, stop fooling around, and in a year or so get her GED high school equivalency and even go to college. She never did, though. Of course, she was a good reader, a fast typist, and she knew the basics of math, and she was smart and could learn whatever she needed to learn. The fact was, her reading alone made her better educated than half the people I know who are college graduates, but her lack of formal schooling did have an unfortunate side effect in that she has the same inferiority streak in her that a lot of folks who never finish school have, and had an inordinate respect for anybody with a lot of education, even if they don't deserve it and know less than she does. If she ever runs into an ax murderer who is also a college professor, we're in deep trouble.

The cure, at least, worked. She loved the work, had his files straightened out in no time, found out how little money they really had, but the cases he got she worked on, too, and became good at stakeouts and at making endless phone calls for data. She also went on a diet and took judo and karate lessons at the "Y" and from one of those Korean karate mills that have popped up all over. She got to brown belt, which makes her formidable and gives her confidence in the streets, anyway. All those black-female-avenger films, I guess. She's also a very good shot, although even now she's only licensed to carry a pistol when performing a task for a client, and then only when hired as essentially a guard.

She saw herself in much the same way her father had seen himself and the business. He had spent his life battling prejudice and doing the best job possible, and she saw herself as showing that not just a black but a black woman was as good in this profession as any man.

Then, one day, the case of a lifetime walked in the door in the form of a chief aide to the Reverend Billy Thomas. Thomas was one of those superman types—young, personable, golden-voiced degrees in divinity and law, a family whose power in the black community came from decades of fighting for equal rights and justice. .. . Well, you know the sort. He was in Philadelphia, and he was about to run for city council in a district that was about fifty-fifty in racial makeup but had always been represented by an Italian. He was convinced that his opponent had organized-crime ties, and that to break him loose from his sixteen-year seat they'd have to get something on him they could use in the papers. They could have hired a bunch of big shots, but they wanted to use somebody who was black and totally independent of any larger companies. If the colonel came up with something really useful, it was worth twenty-five thousand dollars to the campaign, and he got a grand as up-front expense money.

The colonel was good at his job. If he hadn't clung so desperately to his failing independent company and had gone with one of the big Philadelphia concerns, he could have made it big. This one, however, was different; a last miracle from heaven. It not only paid well, but if he could bring this off, the resulting publicity from his success—where bigger and better companies had failed—would bring him so much business he'd have to hire assistants and get good office space.

For the first couple of days, he was very excited about what he was finding, but he used Brandy only as chauffeur on occasion and for random checks from cop and lawyer sources. She couldn't follow the thrust of his investigation from that, and he was pretty close-mouthed. It wasn't that he was trying to exclude her; it was just that this case was everything he'd gotten into the business to do, and for a right moral cause. Soon, though, his elation turned to frowns and gloom; he was finding information on the councilman's ties far too easily and there were disturbing undercurrents. Telling her he'd know once and for all after a night's work, he'd left.

They found his body, with five bullets in it, floating in the Schuylkill River the next day. The cops said it was an obvious mob hit, but could not tie the councilman into it. Brandy buried her father, then went to work. She dug, probed, traced, deciphered her father's notes; and because she knew his sources and knew how he thought, she began to reconstruct his movements and learn what he had learned. Eventually she came to the same conclusions her father had: there were clear trails to mob money on the part of the councilman—too clear. So clear you needed only a legislative aide and not a private dick to find them. The fact was, most Italian big shots, like Jewish big shots and Methodist big shots, had inevitably crossed paths again and again with bad elements. It was almost as if somebody had already traced out all those paths for the councilman and then filled in the blanks showing sinister motives when, say, the councilman met a mob godfather at a Columbus Day dinner, or belonged to the same Knights of Columbus lodge as a couple of mob men.

The fact was, the old Italian wasn't clean, but he was as clean as a city hack politician can get. There was, however, a mob connection in the race. The Reverend Billy Thomas looked very much like a wholly owned and operated subsidiary. When it was clear to them that her father knew this and only needed confirmation, they had acted, setting up an informant's meet late that night, one that was to turn over incriminating documents. The colonel had his own sense of moral outrage, and was even more upset that this would be pulled by his own people and others he admired and trusted. He also was smart enough to know that the headlines from busting the Reverend Billy would be every bit as good as the ones from busting an Italian. They knew it, too. They hadn't taken any chances.

With single-minded determination and solid detective work she broke the case, and proved to the Philadelphia cops how the incriminating evidence on the councilman was manufactured. They were delighted and pulled out all the stops to do the rest. They never got the actual triggerman, but when they began to get the real goods on the Reverend Billy, he began to get the sweats. Somebody behind him didn't trust him, either. While this was still unfolding, an armed band of intruders broke into his home and killed him— during a robbery, of course. It was only a surprising coincidence that he was to meet the next day with federal prosecutors to cut a deal.