Anonymous Rex (16 page)

A quick check of my voice mail back in LA finds, among the threats and pleadings from various loan departments, two terse messages from Dan Patterson, asking me to call him back when I get a chance. I am reluctant to tell Dan I’m in New York, as I know he’ll be hurt that I didn’t let him in on my hunch, so I put off the return call until later in the day when I can assuage my guilt with a mouthful of herbs.

I’ve just hung up and returned to sopping up a hunk of melted butter with a stack of flapjacks when the phone gives a ring.

“Hello?” I mumble through a mouthful of pancakes.

“Is this the … detective?” A familiar voice, muffled. Not real familiar, but I know it.

“Sure is. And you are …?”

Silence. I tap the phone to see if it’s gone dead. It hasn’t.

“I think I might …” and the voice trails off.

“You’re gonna have to speak up,” I say. “Hard to hear.” Suddenly I realize that the alignment of my guise is off; the left “ear” and its requisite counterparts are not situated directly over my earhole, leaving the cheekbone of my human face to block the path of any sounds. Must have shifted during sleep. Damn, I was hoping to get moving and on the street without having to reapply the mask epoxy this morning. With a little shifting here and there, I am able to realign my guise for the moment, at least long enough to carry on a conversation.

A whisper now, though audible: “I think I might have something to give you. Some information.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Do I know you?”

“Yes. No—we—we met. Yesterday. At my office.”

Dr. Nadel, the coroner. “You remember something?” I ask. Witnesses have this tendency to recollect crucial events well after I’ve left the scene. It’s rather annoying.

He says, “Not on the phone. Not now. Meet me at noon, under the bridge near the south entrance to the Central Park Zoo.” It’s nearing ten now.

“Listen,” I say. “I don’t know what you’ve seen in the flicks, but witnesses can just tell PIs information over the phone—we don’t have to meet under a bridge or in an alley, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t be seen with you. It’s not safe.”

“Whoa, whoa—on the phone’s a lot safer than meeting each other. You worried about people seeing you with me? You think only the good guys go to Central Park?”

“I’ll be wearing a different guise. You will, too.”

Like hell I will. “I don’t have a different—”

“Get one.” This cat’s scared out of his wits. Gotta play him tight. “You’ll want this information, Detective. But I can’t afford to be seen with you, so if you want it, you’ll find a way.”

“Maybe I don’t want it that much.”

“And maybe you don’t want to know how your partner died.”

Guy knows the buttons to push, I’ll give him that. “All right, all right,” I agree. “We’ll do it your way. How’m I gonna know who you are—”

But he’s gone. Ten minutes later, so am I.

There are a thousand ways to obtain black market guises in any major city, and in New York there are at least twenty times that. The textile district alone has been busted by Council operatives umpteen times for running in illegal polysuits, and mixed in with all the electronic wholesalers and porn stores around Times Square is a thriving illicit attachments industry. Any time of day or night, if you know the right dinos, you can walk into the back room of a knife store or Laundromat and pick up new hair, new thighs, a new pot belly if it strikes your fancy. Unfortunately, I do not know the right dinos. But I have a feeling that Glenda may.

“You know what friggin’ time it is?” she asks me after I show up on her doormat.

“It’s ten-thirty.”

“
A.M.
?”

“
A.M
.”

“No shit,” she says. “Long night, I guess. I hit a few more bars after we split. Lemme tell ya, I had a whole goddamn pot of this herbal tea, outta this friggin’ world—”

“I need your help,” I interrupt. Great gal, but you gotta staunch that word flow early if you want to get anywhere fast. Quickly, I lay out the situation for her: Need a new guise, need it now, need it quiet.

“Jeez, I ain’t the gal to come to with this, Vincent.”

“You’re it, babe. Everyone else in New York either wants me dead or out of the city. Or both.”

Tongue roving through her mouth, poking the insides of her cheeks as she ponders my request. “I know one guy …”

“Perfect! Take me there—”

“But he’s an Ankie,” she warns me. “And I know how you feel about them friggin’ Ankies.”

“Hey, right now I’d buy a guise from a Compy.”

Glenda barks out a sardonic laugh. “His partner’s a Compy.”

“You’re funny.”

“I’m serious.”

We’re coming up on eleven o’clock. I have no choice. “I’ll hold my breath. Take me there.”

Ankylosaurs are the used-car dealers of the dinosaur world. In fact, they’re the used-car dealers of the mammal world, too—most every pre-owned auto broker in California is descended from the small number of Ankies that survived the Great Showers, which gives you some kind of idea of the perils of inbreeding. They also fool around with real estate, theatrical management, large-scale arms manufacturing, and the odd brokering of the Brooklyn Bridge. The key to dealing with Ankies is to keep the nostrils open at all times; they might be glib, but they still leak lies through their pores.

“His name’s Manny,” Glenda tells me as we round a corner. We’re up near Park and Fifty-sixth, and I’m surprised that she’s taken me into such an opulent district.

“We in the right area for this?” I ask.

“See that art gallery across the street?”

“That’s the place?”

“You got it. Met Manny during a routine surveillance of the leather shop next door. Let us use the back room to run a few wires, so long as we bought some merchandise.” It’s always a trade-off with Ankies; they don’t know the meaning of the word
favor
.

“You bought art?”

Glenda laughs. “Nah, I bought a new set of lips. Thicker—knockoff of the Nanjutsu Rita Hayworth #242. Nobody buys art—all these joints are fronts. Shit, you ever see anybody buy anything in a gallery?”

“Never been in one.”

“Well, me neither—not till then. It ain’t about the friggin’ art—maybe a few mammals pick up some lithographs for the living room now and then, but …” We reach the front door of Manny’s, a tastefully decorated storefront with floor-to-ceiling windows out front. Through a jumble of colorful sculptures, I can make out a salesman speaking with two customers. Glenda holds open the door for me. “You’ll see what I mean.”

A horrible accident with a tanker truck carrying a payload of primary colors—that’s all I can imagine happened to the inside of this store. Posters, canvasses, sculptures, mosaics, all in blazing reds, yellows, and blues, with an occasional dash of neon green thrown in for good measure. It’s positively blinding.

Glenda issues a short wave toward the salesman—I assume this is Manny—and he politely excuses himself from the two customers near the cash register. As he walks toward us, arms outstretched, crocodile smile stretching his lips into two tight caterpillars, I can already feel the ooze seeping out of his pores. What’s more, I can smell him, and beneath the typical aluminum Ankie scent is the unmistakable odor of petroleum jelly.

“Miss Glenda!” he cries in mock delight. “What a wonderful pleasure it is to see you today.” I have a feeling that he’s laying the accent on thicker than it really comes—the last bit came out as
wat a waaanderfool pleeassoore eet ees to see yoo toodai
—but I’ll refrain from insulting the guy until I know him a little better.

“We were in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by and show my friend Vincent your beautiful gallery.”

“Vincent?” He envelops my right hand in both of his, clutching it tight. “Is that right?
Veeencent
?”

“Right enough.” I force myself to grin.

Glenda lowers her voice a notch and says, “We’d like to talk to you about some of those reproductions you sell.”

A notched eyebrow, a wink of the inner eyelid, and Manny turns back to the other customers. “Perhaps I will have what you are looking for next week, no? Manny will give you a call.” The couple—human—who know a brush-off when they hear one, exit the gallery. Manny locks the door behind them and turns around an
OUT FOR LUNCH
sign. When he returns, the accent is softer.

“Mammals. They wanted a Kandinsky. What do I know from Kandinsky?”

Are we supposed to answer? Glenda and I opt to shake our heads in sympathy. I steal a glance at my watch, and Manny steals a glance at me.

“You are in a hurry, yes? Come, come, we go to the back.”

And to the back we go, passing crate after crate of paintings and lithographs, boxes of abstract sculptures. An
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign hangs on a nearby rest room, and it’s through this door that Manny leads us, keeping up a furious stream of chatter along the way. “… and when there is a new shipment of latex, I say to my workers, we must install it in the costumes right away, as Manny makes the finest guises around, better than the companies, much better than Nakitara, for example, who don’t even use mammal polymers—did you know that?—but instead use some type of cattle product. And I suppose cattle is a mammal but at Manny’s we use real mammal products, if you understand me, for only the finest merchandise comes from Manny …” He drones on.

The rest room door leads to another, and another, and soon we’re hopping through a maze of doorways, each bearing its own innocuous sign:
STOCK ROOM, RECENT RETURNS, BLANK CANVASSES. DANGER, DO NOT OPEN: ACID
.

Instinctively, I step back as Manny opens this last door, expecting to be doused with a spray of chemicals; instead, Manny steps into a small warehouse full to bursting with empty human disguises of every shape, color, and texture. Specialized hangers—Styrofoam shapes cut to the appropriate mammalian dimensions—line the walls, each one covered in a limp mockery of the human form. An electric hum fills the air.

On the warehouse floor, a dozen workers sweat it out around sewing machines and pressing irons, carefully hand-stitching the buttons, zippers, and seams that are so integral to a perfect guise. The heat is sweltering, and I find myself pitying the dinosaurs forced to work under these conditions. I can still remember the stories of days long ago when we used to embrace the heat and humidity—to thrive in it, no less—to wake each morning and lick the sweet, steamy air, each particle dripping with succulent moisture—but now, all these easy, breezy, well-ventilated years later, I would wager that any one of us would sooner live in Antarctica than, say, Miami Beach. Then again, I do quite enjoy the taste of emperor penguins, so I am admittedly biased.

“Pay them no mind,” Manny says, clearly reading my thoughts. “They are very happy to be working here.” Then, to prove his point, he calls out, “My workers, are you not happy to be working for Manny?”

And as one, they call back, “Yes, Manny,” in a spaced-out, drugged-up monotone. I imagine that this Ankie buys cheap basil by the ton.

“Now, Mr. Vincent, what are you requiring today?” We step down to the warehouse floor, Manny leading Glenda and me toward a row of guises at the back. “We specialize in handcrafted torso attachments. Perhaps some new biceps—”

“I need a full guise.”

“A full guise, yes? This is a very expensive thing. Here at Manny’s, we have only the most excellent craftsmen—”

“Cut the line, Manny. Price doesn’t matter.” I’ve got TruTel’s credit card on me. “So long’s you can charge it up as a piece of art.”

Manny’s smile is genuine this time; he clearly enjoys when others dispense with the precursors and jump headlong into his little pit of chicanery. “Of course, Mr. Vincent. Right this way.”

The next twenty minutes are spent leafing through a series of guises, each of which has its pros and cons in terms of functionality and aesthetics. Glenda serves as my personal shopper and fashion critic, dispensing with shoddy designs and faulty tailoring. To be fair, Manny’s guises are indeed incredibly well made, and I express my surprise that he never went into legitimate guise work.

“Wait until you see the bill,” he tells me through that grin of his.

We eventually settle on the guise of a stout, middle-aged man with
a protruding belly and slightly bowed legs, a knockoff of the Nakitara Company’s Mr. Johannsen #419 model. Maybe five eight, 180, darned close to average for the age and gender, which is precisely what we are looking for. But at this stage, the costume, drooped across the Styrofoam mannequin like an ill-fitting bedsheet, is nothing but a featureless shell, devoid of hair, color, or distinguishing marks. I have forty-five minutes to make this thing look like a real human before I can don the costume and hoof it into Central Park.

“Maria is a genius at the hair,” says Manny. We are standing next to an old, withered Allosaur, her guise skin loose, wrinkled, falling off of her like it does with the Styrofoam cutouts. Manny must not include a free costume as part of his workers’ benefits package. “She has been doing the hair for … how many years now?”

Maria mumbles something we cannot understand. I am convinced Manny cannot understand it, either. “You hear that?” he says to us. “That is many, many years.”

We settle on a light auburn style, with a touch of gray at the temples—“for that distinguished look, yes?”—and a minimum of body hair in order to save precious minutes. I don’t plan on using the guise more than this one time, and I doubt I’ll be disrobing in Central Park during my rendezvous with the coroner.

Trevor is the “genius” at distinguishing marks, and from him we pick up a facial blemish and a military tattoo on the forearm, faded and blue. Frank, the human skin-tone “genius,” gives the guise a once-over with an olive spray brush, coating it somewhere between tanned and swarthy. Maria, who it seems is not only a “genius” at hair but also at prescription eyewear, picks out a set of blue contact lenses to cover my natural verdant irises.

As Glenda and Manny help me disrobe from my usual costume and place it in a fine leather carrying case—“a gift for my good friend Mr. Vincent”—the rest of the experts in the warehouse apply the finishing touches to my custom guise. Birthmark here, wrinkle there. It’s a rush job, but it’s done, and it should hold up for the next hour or so.