01. Labyrinth of Dreams (4 page)

That kind of stuff is readily available to franchises and chains, but little mom-and-pop stores never think that way and it's cheap to pay a fee to somebody like me to show it to them. They save more than my small fee in the first holdup they don't have.

So now Brandy's out in the twelve-year-old rustbucket that's all the transportation we have, looking over clerks at 7-Elevens, and I'm sitting there getting worried. It wasn't that she was out alone; she was pretty well equipped to take care of that. The fact was, she had really poor vision for somebody that young, poor enough that I wouldn't let her drive me to the hospital if I were dying, and certainly poor enough that the next time she had to take a driver's eye test she'd flunk, and I just knew that sooner or later she was going to crack up the car and herself with it. She has a pair of glasses but won't wear them, and they're out of date anyway.

Finally, the phone rings, and I pick it up, thinking by now it's the cops or the morgue.

"Hey! I got him!" she said excitedly. "That asshole who gave us the tip don't know a Seven Eleven from a Wawa Thrift Market, that's all!"

I was relieved, but I didn't want to show it. "So where are you now?"

"Down halfway to the airport. How much cash money you got?"

I checked. "About twelve bucks. Why?"

" 'Cause I'm blowin' my last nine on gas and I'm starving. Pick you up in, oh, forty minutes and we'll hit a drive-through or something. Guess that's all we can afford on that money. All the Jews in the world and I got to pick the one with twelve bucks. Gotta go or I won't be able to pay for this call and get 'nuff gas to get there. Bye."

I sat back and sighed. Two days of combing those stores, and after expenses we might get a hundred bucks out of it. Worse, there wasn't anything else ongoing at the moment. Things had been slow, real slow, for months now and we were up to our necks in debt, and behind in almost everything. We needed to clear about two grand a month to keep up and still survive at the poverty level; the past four months we'd made a
total
of about three. We'd had slack times before, but we always had a little money from my withdrawn pension funds or something to cover things, but they were all gone now. There was nothing wrong with us as detectives, but things were so low-class now that it'd take a big chunk of dough to pump new life into the agency. One of us would eventually have to take a job outside the business; we couldn't even afford to get sick at this rate. Brandy had looked around, but found offers only for menial jobs, cleaning and fast food and that kind of thing, all minimum wage and no benefits. Me, I was more than ten years her senior, and there wasn't much of a job market these days for a guy my age whose only qualifications were being an ex-cop and a failed P.I. Somehow I felt I'd go on welfare before I'd get a job selling shoes.

The time was coming, though, when we'd have to grow up and be adults. It might already have come. Being good wasn't enough. It had never been enough. It was who you knew and what you had that counted. More than once I wished the Air Force had decided to make me an accountant or a medic or something. Right now I could forget the twin BMWs and the big house in the suburbs. I wasn't ambitious and material things had never much mattered to me; still, I'd settle for being lower middle class.

I figured we'd talk it out tonight. It wouldn't be the first time, but we'd never been this far down and this behind before. We were approaching the point where we could never catch up, and fast.

2.

Something Big

Sitting around a little apartment-building laundry room in your underwear on a hot, muggy night at about three in the morning feeding quarters into a Korean War vintage washer and dryer and watching the moths dive-bomb the lone light bulb was not exactly the most romantic of situations, but it increased my already deep depression.

One of the craziest curses of being poor is that you get fat. That's because the kind of stuff that's cheapest to buy is full of fat and starches. Most of me stayed automatically thin, so it all went to the gut. I had three rolls of fat there, which I named Goodyear, Firestone, and Michelin. Brandy was five five and admitted to weighing two-twenty, all of it in her breasts, hips, and thighs. I didn't mind—she was still sexy to me—but neither of us had any clothes that really fit or any money to get new ones. My shirts were on their third set of buttons and still opened themselves when I sat down, and I split my pants so much there's nothing in the seats but repairs. I wasn't sure I could even get into my one old suit if I had to. Brandy's whole wardrobe consisted of jeans she could barely get into and tee shirts so faded you couldn't tell what color they started out being, and that old hooker's outfit she'd used way back when (but since, only over my dead body). It wasn't that we were so poor we couldn't spring for new clothes, it was just that at twenty bucks a shirt, thirty bucks for pants, never mind her wardrobe, we'd be up around five hundred bucks, and when you start thinking that way the money goes elsewhere.

I sighed. "Babe, we got to talk."

"You got that surrender look in your eyes," she said accusingly.

"Yeah, but a good general knows when. We owe Corbone Properties seventeen hundred bucks for back rent and utilities on the office. We owe this dump about seven hundred more. The car's so bad, if we take it to the mechanic's he'll pronounce it dead—that is, if we paid him what we owed him so he'd even look at it. We got another two, three thousand bucks in other bills, and we got eight hundred and fifty-two dollars in the bank. And none of that counts what we owe the IRS. It's over, babe. I got the word today. End of the month, pay up or out at the office. End of the month, pay up or out here. Peter Pan time's over. They're ordering us to grow up."

She sat down and put her arms around me. "I know. I didn't know 'bout the landlord, but I knew the rest. Can't run even what we have, with no phone and no office. I guess I knew it was comin' all along. I just kept
hopin',
somehow, that something would walk in. Something
big,
you know? It ain't gonna walk in, though, is it?"

I shook my head. "No, something big wouldn't even find the address. I got a call from Joe Wilkins down in Cape May County the other day." Joe was one of the salt-and-pepper brotherhood; he was black, his wife was white. The difference was that Joe was an accountant and had a real-estate license. "He knows what shape we're in, and he remembered us. They're opening one of those fancy beachfront condo developments down on the Delaware shore, and they're looking for a resident security supervisor. It only pays about fifteen grand a year, but it comes with a furnished two-bedroom apartment, medical plan, all that. It was designed with an older couple in mind, but he thought of us. It isn't bad. On the water, and the only expenses would be food and clothing."

She thought about it. "Where'd you say it was?"

"Just north of Rehoboth Beach. South Delaware shore."

"I never been down there, but I guess it's like Wildwood or something. Pretty seasonal."

"Yeah, five months of intensive activity and seven months of presiding over a pretty morgue, although there'll be a few permanent residents— well-heeled retirees and the like—and some sailor nuts will be there on the weekends even in lousy weather."

She sighed. "Not much for me down there, though. Funny—I never thought of myself as a housewife. Not 'til recently, anyway. Still, I been doin' a lot of thinkin' lately, and maybe it ain't so bad, I look around that old neighborhood and this dump and I ask what I been clinging to all this time and what do I got to show for it? I shoulda dropped it all six years ago, when we first moved in together. We'd have a nice apartment, maybe a couple of kids, and you'd still be a steady cop. Who am I kiddin'? You ain't my daddy, and I ain't, neither. His dream was worse than dead before he was. It was worse than that. It was out of date, like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op. Like Shaft and Magnum and all them others. All I did was drag you down here with me."

I hugged and kissed her. "You didn't drag
anybody. I
came because I met the prettiest, sexiest, smartest lady I ever knew who had the same crazy dreams I did and I fell in love with her. I still am." I kissed her, and we got real passionate for a while.

We took the clothes back up to the apartment and flopped down on the bed. "You're taking this better than I thought you would," I noted.

"I—I been doin' a lot of thinking lately. I saw the bills, I saw the bank account, and I know what business we don't have. I been tryin' to sort things out in my mind, you know. There's some that can be Supergirl, but maybe I'm just not one of 'em. Just goin' through Philadelphia suburbia, I got to lookin' at nice houses and apartments, seein' families in the stores, like that. I got a great husband I'm in love with, and I never really saw how
important
that was to me. You gave it up for me, now I'll give it up for you. Ain't no big sacrifice anymore, anyway. This don't sound like much work. We'll be together most of the time, nice apartment near the ocean."

I looked her in her big brown eyes. "What do you
really
want me to do, babe? I'll do whatever you say."

"I want to be with you. I want to be your wife and have a whole passel of black Horowitzes that'll confuse the living shit out of people. I think I always really knew that. I just wanted to make a
go
of it, just for a while, to see if I could really do it. Ever since I nailed Daddy's killers, I been really
scared
to be anything else. I—I never told you this, but I got that hooker outfit one time because I was down this low, and I thought that might have to be what I'd do. Johnny Redlegs—you remember him—he was workin' on me when you showed up, and I was almost desperate enough to take him up on it. You and that case were the only things that kept me out of it."

I remembered Redlegs. He was a pimp who gave new meaning to the word
stereotypical.
Pink Cadillac, fur coat, floppy hat, and a fairly big stable. About the only thing that set him apart from his competitors was that he had a reputation for not being violent with the girls and depending on heroin to keep them loyal subjects. I tried to imagine Brandy out there now, age twenty-seven, turning two or three tricks a night for her daily fix, and the trouble was, I
could
imagine it.

I could also, for the first time, really understand her almost instant attraction to me. I was a savior whose background and tastes reminded her of her father, and I was there in the nick of time.

"I'll call Joe," I told her. "Then we'll spend the rest of the month packing up and cleaning up the few loose ends of the business, and put the agency in bankruptcy, where at least we'll get out from under those debts. We'll get some new clothes and pay up on this dump if they let us out of the lease, and then that will be that."

"Yeah," she agreed. "That will be that."

It was about nine days later and we were well along. There wasn't much salvageable in the office, but there were old client files to either destroy or put in a safe place—we decided to give them to those we could find and to burn the rest—and a few other details to go through. The place in Delaware wasn't finished yet, but we were welcome to come down the first of the month and they'd put us up in a motel until the first units were ready, about twenty days after that. It had originally been scheduled to open in the early spring, but somebody had forgotten what the sea does to beaches in winter storms.

Brandy actually seemed more cheerful than she had in a long time. She was almost a changed woman, but that wasn't a big surprise. She might brood and worry and think everything through a hundred times, but once she decided something, that was
it,
and she'd decided she was going to be Mrs. Horowitz by the seashore. For the first time, she was cutting loose from the burdens of her father's dreams, and it didn't seem so painful. I wasn't overjoyed—I still would have preferred a marginal business of my own in the city to something like this—but the agency wasn't even close to the margin.

And then, almost at the last minute, Something Big walked through the door.

Something Big was actually a skunk everybody called Little Jimmy Nkrumah. He was actually built like a fullback for the Eagles and had a face that looked like it'd played one too many games. I'm not sure about the
Jimmy,
but the
Nkrumah
wasn't the truth, either. He wasn't a Muslim—he wasn't anything, I don't think—but he'd changed his name to something African sounding because it helped his image and his business.

Little Jimmy was a loan shark, or at least that was the part of him everybody knew about. He ran the Star of Africa Finance Company, a little hole-in-the-wall that made legitimate loans— few—by financing some of the little black-owned furniture and appliance stores in Camden, but his real business was with the folks who couldn't get credit on a bet. When those folks borrowed from friendly and understanding Little Jimmy, they got a rate around ten percent per month and the collateral was their legs, arms, eyes, spouses, and children. We knew that he was connected up with organized crime—even loan sharking in
this
part of town didn't get you a fifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes sports car and a house in the exclusive suburb where
he
lived—and probably was into more, but we didn't have much to do with him. Brandy knew that it was Little Jimmy who'd suggested her dad to the Reverend Billy.

Little Jimmy dressed fairly conservatively, but the suits were hand tailored and only of the best material, I think he had three people on the staff just to get rid of scuffs on his shoes. His voice was abnormally high and silky, but very cultured, sort of as if Stepin Fetchit had gone to Harvard. We just stared at him, surprised he'd even walk into a dump like the office without sending ahead a squad of cleaners and shampooers.

"I hear you're closing down," he oozed, sounding for all the world like a black Don Corleone.