01. Labyrinth of Dreams (3 page)

The results were not, however, what Brandy would have expected. She had proved herself to both herself and the world, but the only mention of even the agency in the papers was that her father had been killed by mobsters linked to the reverend. The Philadelphia cops were highly impressed with her, but it wouldn't do to admit that a twenty-one-year-old black female high-school dropout had broken a case they couldn't. Her own family and circle of friends, however, almost completely cut her off. She was a "traitor" to the black race; her old man deserved what he got for trying to bring down a black leader. So what if the rev was crooked? They all were. At least he was
our
crook. Business fell to zero. Even those who didn't know a thing about it were not about to hire a girl like her working alone.

Interestingly, the only people who seemed to have no ax to grind with her were the crooks. She sold the house in west Philadelphia and moved into a studio apartment in an old section of Camden near the office. She paid off a lot of bills and lived on the rest for a while. And, although it was sparse and didn't pay very well, she actually got a few clients—all from the wrong side of the law. Loan sharks out looking for deadbeats and not able to run them down; guard jobs at illicit gambling dens; finding goods on cops who arrested the wrong people. Not big money, but it helped. The cops, too, used her on occasion, which is what had brought me there. She had deep sources among the small potatoes of the underworld, and while she was not about to squeal on them she was occasionally useful in digging for major crimes in places the cops just couldn't look.

When I met her, she was pulling in just enough money to keep in business, but she'd have made more by closing it and going on welfare, in real cash terms. She was her father's daughter; she couldn't give up the dream no matter how impossible it was, and she'd managed to make herself just useful enough to both cops and crooks that she was reasonably safe, and the local junkies knew that she didn't have anything anyway and was a bit too dangerous to tangle with. The only thing was, the cops and crooks both knew they didn't have to give her much; just barely enough to keep going. What kept her going was her dream, her felt obligation to her father, and the fact that she was good at the job and she knew it.

The grimness of reality had made her withdraw into something of a fantasy shell, though. She didn't date. She had contacts, not friends. That's when I met her.

Of course, it was timing on my part, too. My dad had finally died after years of inactivity, and my mother lasted only six months after that. I could have made use of the old-boy network through the synagogues and social organizations, but I hadn't been to
shul
or belonged to any of those things since I was eighteen. There was nobody, really, but Uncle Max, and I already told you about him.

So, anyway, two people who really needed somebody and were in the same line of work, more or less, but were socially unlikely to ever come together had, through the Fates, done so. I kind of got a taste of things just hitting a bar or restaurant with her and seeing the kinds of funny reactions and sideways looks. It didn't matter if it was a black place or a white place, it was all the same.

Oh, yeah—about that kiddie-porn and kidnap case. Well, we firmed up that the old hotel was the place where pedophiles of all races, creeds, and colors met in the area, and we linked our distributor to not only the hotel but also to, would you believe, a professional baby photographer in Cherry Hill. An undercover cop then made the connections and infiltrated the network.

He chose the easy way, setting up a kiddie-prostitution meet and then picking one of the two we were looking for out of photos kept in a nice family album. The kid—the girl—was all fancied up and brought to the hotel, but they smelled a rat, somehow, at the last minute, and we could sense it. There were squad cars around ready to make a move on the undercover man's signal, but it just didn't happen.

I was pretending to doze in the lobby, dressed like a bum and smelling of cheap booze, and Brandy was all dressed up like a hooker, all made-up and really underdressed, cigarette dangling from her lips, and perched sexily on the edge of an end table leafing through a magazine. Both of us looked totally natural in that cesspool. We saw them bring in the kid and I was shocked at how they'd made her up, and even more by her glassy eyes and automatic behavior. The undercover guy came in a half-hour later and went straight up to the room, but a lot of time passed. Too much. Finally Brandy read my mind and sauntered over.

"You take the desk clerk and call in the Marines," she whispered, as if coming on to me. "I'm going up and see what's wrong."

I didn't like that. "Let me go up."

She gave me a kiss—the first time she'd ever done that. "You just go do what I say. I'll be all right."

Yeah.
All right
is not the word for it. She swished and swayed on too-high heels over to the old elevator and I made my way over to the desk. I hate guns, but lives were at stake. I didn't want to risk identifying myself first; some of these places have floor buttons for warning signals.

The clerk was sitting back in a chair next to the old-fashioned switchboard reading the racing news. I checked my back, pulled my .38, and said, "Real quiet now, you be a statue. Police." He started to make a move and I was behind there and cracking him in the face with the gun in no time. I had been right—there were three buttons to the right of the switchboard, out of view of the desk area. He hadn't gotten a chance to push any of them. I picked up his phone and dialed a special number. "Come on in. It's going down wrong," I said, and that was that. I then looked around. A half a dozen hookers, bums, and junkies were around that place and not one of them even deigned to notice what I was doing.

The trouble was, after five minutes the cops didn't seem to be noticing, either. I decided we'd been had and ran up the stairs. When the desk bastard woke up he could push all the buttons he wanted.

Brandy had been listening at doors on the third floor, but just as I saw her there was the unmistakable sound of a shot from one of them and she ran to it, reaching in her purse and taking out the biggest damned handgun I ever saw. She blew the lock off, then kicked open the door but kept her back to the wall, very professionally. There were screams and shrieks inside the room, and when Brandy saw me she whirled and plunged right into that mess.

The bastards had gone down the fire escape probably before she'd blown the lock off, leaving the kid screaming there and one very badly wounded detective. I got to him and he opened his eyes, saw me, and groaned. "Setup," he managed. "They knew.. .. They wanted me. ... Where the hell's the backup?"

That's what I wanted to know.

By now the hotel resembled a cemetery, and not from the bodies. At the first shot the place had erupted like Mount Saint Helens, spewing its human garbage all to hell and gone before the real cops got there. Not even the deskman was there. I got down there, called for an ambulance, then called the Vice tactical number. The sergeant seemed very surprised to hear from me.

"What the fuck you doing there
tonight?"
he roared. "We got it set up for
tomorrow
night!"

"Like hell! Your man was here and now he's bleeding his guts out on the floor upstairs. We were here, and so were the bastards and the girl. I called the ambulance—I can hear it coming now. We were set up, you son of a bitch!"

"Hey, man, take it easy! Yeah, it was on for tonight, but we got orders at roll call direct from on high that it was off until tomorrow."

"Then you got a high leak who might just have gotten your man blown away. Patrol units are just coming in the door now, along with the ambulance." I told the floor and room number to them and they didn't wait, they went right up. "You want a bad cop who's a cop killer, you find out who was on the other end of that tactical phone number I called when this went down. You call Internal Affairs and get them moving
now!
Either that or you retire before you find a hole in you!"

They got the undercover man to the hospital, and he made it, minus one lung and the use of his legs. They took the kid into Juvenile, and after a lot of questioning "got much in the way of where the kids were being held and how it all worked, but in spite of fast raids they came up short. The word was out and everything had moved and dug

in. Internal Affairs finally traced the leak to a desk sergeant and his girlfriend in Communications. I don't envy them their stay in New Jersey's less-than-luxurious prison system, surrounded by folks who just
love
cops. At the price of one good cop's lung and legs we got one of the kids back, and state police finally nailed a bunch of small-fry and the photographer, but that was that. The distributor's still in business, still living in a fancy Cherry Hill home with the twin BMWs and the ideal American family, and somewhere the other kids are still in hell. That's the way the business goes, and why I was more than ready to quit it.

I found myself, at the end of that wild night, just sitting there on that creaky couch in the lobby and trying not to think. Brandy came up behind me and began massaging my shoulders. "Want to go get a drink?" she asked.

"Yeah. Any distilleries nearby?" I still looked like a bum and she looked like a hooker, but there were several diners with bars attached in Camden where even that wouldn't attract attention if you showed money, and she picked one.

"Who did you think you were up there?" I grumbled. "The Ebony Avenger or maybe Super-girl? They pay
cops
to do that, and train them."

"I'm just now getting the shakes over it," she admitted. "Still, those cops they pay weren't there, and that little girl and that undercover cop were. It just sorta clicked and I didn't even do no thinking about it. The truth is, even though I'm scared about it now, I really
enjoyed
it. I mean, I—we—saved two lives tonight. That's more than I done in this job in all those years. I don't know. Maybe I should just get my diploma and be a cop."

"It's just as boring as what you're doing, only it pays regular," I told her. "For the pay and perks, though, you spend ninety percent of your time playing politics or getting stepped on." I paused. "You did good tonight, kid, even if you did scare me out of a year's growth and make the bald spot bigger."

"Huh? I
did?
Scare you, I mean? Why?"

" 'Cause you're one of the good guys in a world full of garbage," I responded. "Maybe because you're making about thirty cents an hour out of my payoff fund for this and you still put those lives over your own." The booze was getting to me a little, and I was bolder than usual. "Maybe it's because in that outfit you're the cutest, sexiest black bombshell I ever seen."

Well, you can figure the rest. We went back to her place, and went at it all through the night. I had to. She pointed out that her conscience wouldn't allow her to throw any white man out in that neighborhood at that hour.

Even though the case was wrapped, I only lived and worked an hour or less away, and we kept seeing each other. It was amazing how well we meshed, considering just how different our backgrounds had been. Oh, sure, she loved to dance and I couldn't dance a step, but that was minor. She liked the Phillies and hated basketball, same as me. Neither of us could ever get worked up over which dumb millionaires with glandular conditions could put a ball in a basket without jumping. My taste for jazz was matched by her fondness for blues music. We both liked spicy ethnic foods and neither of us could get excited over a fried chicken. We even liked the same kind of books—murder mysteries and detective novels, I admit, both old and new, where detectives did the kinds of things real detectives only dream about.

The truth was, I couldn't think of much but her when I wasn't with her, and she was getting the same way about me, as it turned out. She couldn't move in with me, though, because she couldn't be a long-distance call from her office and her contacts and stay in business at all, so we found an old but serviceable one-bedroom apartment in the old suburbs of Camden and moved in together; but my hours plus the commute and her erratic schedule didn't leave us much time together. I tried to get her to quit, since with her overhead, small as it was, she wasn't bringing in much money anyway, take the high school equivalency exam, and maybe go to college, but she would have none of that. And that's how I wound up quitting the Bristol police and becoming a full partner, such as it was, in Spade & Marlowe.

We got married shortly after that in the courthouse, and honeymooned as fancy as we -could afford—Atlantic City. The moment they discovered that I'd married a
shvartse,
my old friends always had something else to do and never called. Her few friends weren't much different, particularly the men. Uncle Max never returned another phone call. Even the Associated Jewish Charities stopped sending form letters asking me to contribute. She also took my last name; something that pleased my ego, although it wasn't anything I was hung up about or even expected. She just loved the idea of somebody who looked like her being Brandy Horowitz.

We did get some new friends, though. Every time we came across another salt-and-pepper couple there seemed a kind of instant bond, although the nature of the bond was never mentioned. The fact is, though, that in the five years we've been married I've never been unfaithful to her and never really wanted anybody else. We were like two kids and we didn't give a damn. Even the looks don't bother me anymore. Knowing just how hand-to-mouth life would be, and how insecure it would be, I'd still do it all over again with no regrets.

The funny thing is, after I came on with the agency, business picked up. Not great; maybe we cleared fourteen grand a year the best year after expenses, but it picked up. I don't know what it is, but poor black people want a white when they have trouble with the authorities. I guess it's just because the system is run by whites and they figure (wrongly) that a white guy can talk their language and cut through the bullshit, but it picked up. The usual stuff of real P.I. work— divorces, money transfers, security analysis for the little businesses, that kind of thing. Noting that you can reduce holdups by half by just painting the curb in front of a store yellow, for example. The city never knows if it's legit or not, but while it doesn't help crooks fleeing on foot, or local burglars, it sure as hell makes holdup men uneasy to park in a yellow zone waiting for a getaway.
That
cops notice. So, instead of taking a risk, you hold up the drugstore down the street without a yellow curb.