Noir (18 page)

It was a shitty life and I began blaming it all on the city. Alkies are like that: everybody’s fault but their own. So whenever I got really juiced, I’d start railing crazily at her, calling her every dirty name I could think of at the top of my voice so everyone would know. She retaliated, seemed to, by moving the streets around. Nothing stayed in the same place, that was my impression. When I was sleeping one off, I could hear the buildings walking around, changing places. I didn’t know where I was most of the time. Of course, I was also completely scorched most of the time, so I couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t, though in a sense it was all real, because even if I was only imagining it, it was still real, at least in my own mind, the only one I’ve got. Which back then I was doing my best to burn to a cinder.

Then one night I stumbled over a loosened manhole cover and fell and skinned my nose and that threw me into a violent rage and I started screaming at her from there where I was lying. You did that on purpose! I yelled. There were noxious vapors belching out of the hole with the loose cover, so, along with all the other filthy things I called her, I cursed her out as a fucking steaming bottomless cunt, and as soon as I said that, I knew I had the hots for her, and I knew she was hot for me. That sounds crazy, it
was
crazy,
I
was crazy, I’ve said that. But I had to have her and I knew she wanted it. It was all I could think about, to the extent that I could think about anything at all. Come and get me, big boy. I seemed to hear her say that. But how do you fuck a city? The only thing I could come up with was to jerk off over a subway entrance, but when I tried to do that it just made her madder. Maybe she felt insulted or demeaned or just not satisfied, but after that she really got vicious. Mean streets? Until then I had no idea. What before had been a kind of subtle sleight of hand became more like an out-of-control merry-go-round. Whenever I stood up, I got knocked down again. The streets and sidewalks buckled and rolled like a storm at sea, pitched me around, reared up and smacked me in the face. Who knows, maybe I was driving her wild with desire and those were just love commotions of a kind, but they were killing me and I no longer had amorous ambitions. Stroking her while I was down seemed to help, but whenever I tried to stand, she started in on me again. Ever get hit by a runaway building? You don’t want that to happen to you. That’s when I knew I had to get off the sauce. Until the mob insisted on reinforced steel, Loui used to have a pebbled glass door out there. I got thrown through it. The little fat man took me in and saved my life. Gave me a flop at the back, dried me out. I haven’t stepped outside this place since.

SNARK IS WAITING FOR YOU AT THE STAR DINER WHEN you finally find your way there. Snark is depressed and drinking even more heavily than usual from the milk dispenser. His contortionist wife has developed lumbago and all she can do now is knot her arms behind her head and lace her toes, but the more useful middle part is stiff as a board. The Siamese twins got into a fight when one of them tried to run away from home and now they won’t speak to each other. They keep trying to turn their backs on each other, but they can’t quite, and that’s making them hard to live with. Also he’s in trouble down at the station because a prisoner has escaped, which in turn has led to a citywide crisis of stoned police officers and Blue is holding him responsible. The bags of shit just turned up in the holding cell when the prisoner crushed out, Snark says. Almost like that was what he was really made of and the spell wore off. Next thing you know: junkie cops. You figure this is Snark’s way of letting you know what his cover story is, for you’re pretty sure his extra ace was a diversionary tactic to help you out. He has also snuck out your fedora and your old .22. When the prisoner took a flyer, he says, some of the evidence disappeared, too.

Thanks, Snark. You’re a pal. Milk’s on me. He clinks his mug on yours, drains it, asks the pimply kid behind the counter to squeeze the tit again. Does taste good. That damned Bordox nearly killed you, this is the real thing. Your stomach is comforted by the familiarity of it. You check the inside hatband, which you often use as a crib sheet and reminders list. Or somebody does. Blanche maybe. Sometimes it says things like
Comb your hair
, or
Button up your fly
. Now it says
Cherchez la monnaie
. That sounds like Blanche. Also:
You already know everything.
Who put that there? Your initials are stenciled on the band at the back: PMN. A graffiti artist has circled the M and scribbled
Meathead
above it. One of Snark’s semiliterate buddies on the force no doubt, if not Blue himself. When, years ago, you told Snark what it actually stood for, he said you were in luck, with a name like that you’d never grow old. At the time you thought he meant you’d always be young; just as likely, though, he meant you wouldn’t last that long.

The panhandler is back, puffy nose flattened against the plateglass window, white hair and beard wet and stringy from the drizzle, watery blue eyes afloat in his gaunt face, staring hauntingly in at you. Not tonight. No more fucking blows to the belfry.

We know a bit more about that rube who got rubbed out with your .22 in the alley, Snark says, signaling for another refill. Seems he came from a small rural community and had a sister in the city, whom he was either trying to kill or was trying to protect, it’s not clear. Maybe both.

How’d you learn that?

Some broad called it in. Blue said it looked like a mugging. The guy’s coat pockets had been rifled, turned inside out.

That’s right. I forgot. I did that on the back stairs. You search woozily for your trenchcoat pockets which keep moving around and, when you find them, reach in and pull out a few scraps of paper, a photo, an all-day sucker, some kid’s underpants. Hey, look.

You better get rid of those.

But wait, don’t you see, it could have been the fucking Hammer who stuffed that bus station locker I tipped you about.

Yeah, maybe, but how you gonna prove it now he’s napoo? Blue has you ticketed for the hot seat, Noir. You’re the last person to have seen a lot of people still ticking. At least five, though Blue may think of more. The piano player, the whore at the Dead End, the pervert down at the meat locker, the ape in the alley, the rich jailbait . . .

He doesn’t think I killed the widow?

Snark’s eyes lose focus for a moment as if in confusion or maybe he’s only working up a fart. Oh right. The widow. Six. So all he needs now is evidence you been in some little kid’s pants.

You shrug (knowledge: lighter than air; you can just blow it away), tell him to take the drawers home with him, cut an extra leghole in them and see if they fit the twins, and you poke blearily through the other stuff. There’s a city map with pier four marked on it, a pawn ticket, a clipping of one of your toy soldier ads, a prescription for painkillers, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and a bent black-and-white photo. It’s a younger Hammer sitting on the edge of what could be a park bandstand with a shit-eating grin on his mush and some doozie standing behind him, only her southern hemisphere in the photo.

Who’s the Jane with the classy shanks?

Don’t know. You study the legs, trying to keep your eyes from crossing. Those beautiful calves. The widow a few years back? The camera angle from below allows a glimpse up her skirt into the shadows past her dimpled knees. The Hammer has his hand up there behind the legs somewhere. Instinctively, you turn the photo over to look at her backside, and see written there:
Today is already yesterday.
You feel a certain heartache. Or maybe it’s just the chili soup. Your head’s spinning. You need some air. Anyway, Snark’s gone, you don’t remember when. He was complaining about having to give up pretzels for cold toast and filling his mug again and then he wasn’t there anymore. You unload a few bills for the night’s repast (can’t count them, the kid behind the counter seems happy enough, not yours anyway) and buy a caramel-frosted strawberry and pepper-corn doughnut for the old panhandler, don your reclaimed lid and head out into the night.

ONE THING YOU’VE DETERMINED NOT TO DO TONIGHT IS follow the panhandler on his dark drizzly route, but that is what you are doing. Trenchcoat collar turned up, fedora brim tipped toward your nose, a wet fag in your mouth, your fried head a bundle of confusions. You sidle along walls to be sure no one’s behind you, doing a sequence of spiraling 360s when crossing streets, which probably gives the impression of being staggering drunk, which you are. Blitzed. Smoked. Damn that bottomless Snark. The panhandler continues on his rounds oblivious to your boozy dance behind him, clutching his frosted doughnut. Looking for a bin to put it in maybe; trade it in for some brown lettuce or an old sock. Except for his lifting and lowering of trashcan lids, his soggy shuffle and yours are all that can be heard in the dense clammy night. The tattoo on your butt is itching but that may be because, with all your looping turns, you are in effect following yourself.

No light but for the dull yellow puddles spilled by streetlamps, the cheap rainbow glitter under stuttering neon signs advertising refuges long since shut down. Even when the sun is allegedly out, it never seems to reach back into these claustrophobic back streets, your streets, where you’ve so long plied your trade that sunnier ones now seem alien to you. You used to spend a lot of time, even when not on a case, chasing the black seam on the back of women’s stockinged legs through these streets, these streets and any others where they might lead you. Sometimes up creaky unswept stairwells into sad little adventures that rarely ended well. That was back when you were young and everything was interesting. Some days you would be so focused that all but the legs would disappear, and then they’d be gone, too, just the black seams scissoring along. When you told Blanche about this and asked if you were going crazy, she said, no, you were just a foolish man pursuing your perverse and wayward dreams, an occupational hazard that could lead to a bad ending and jeopardize your career. She recommended that, whenever it started to happen, you should stop in the nearest cafeteria and have a glass of warm milk. You told her you always drank a lot of milk at the Star Diner and it didn’t seem to do any good. Blanche’s stockings, you assumed, were probably woolly and seamless, but you never looked.

One day, when the seams scissored around a corner and you chased after, you crashed into the dolly who had been sporting them. You have been following me, she said, as though solving a case.

It’s my job, lady, you said back, picking yourself up and brushing yourself off. Private eye.

Has someone hired you to do this, Mr. Eye?

Noir, ma’am. No, just practicing as you might say. Keeping my hand in.

Your hand in where?

Wherever I can keep it warm.

But why me, Private Noir?

Just call me Phil, sister. What can I say? I like your legs.

My legs?

That’s right, sweetheart. Both of them. And everything in between.

Best you could remember, you’d never said these words before, but it felt like you had. Some kind of catechism, learned before learning. So when she shrugged and said all right, Mr. Sister, I see, if that’s what you want, and started taking off her clothes, you were not entirely surprised. This was happening at a busy intersection, the sun doing its strange blazing thing, with café tables set out on the sidewalk like in moviehouse travelogues of island resorts. She stepped out of her underpants and stretched out on one of the tables like the dish of the day. She was gorgeous, the girl of your dreams, and you knew you were suddenly and crazily in love, but out here in the middle of traffic and pedestrians, you weren’t sure you could penetrate whipped cream. Worse, you feared that’s what it would feel like. Something airy and not quite there. But, hey, life’s a mystery, what the hell. You dropped your pants and Blue, chancing by, arrested you for indecent exposure. Wait a minute, what about her? you asked, but the dame had vanished, taking her clothes with her. You seemed to remember her perfect butt, flashing in the sunshine (it had already started to rain again), but maybe you just made that part up in your head and then went on believing it, the way that hoods and killers make up their innocence and never after doubt it. Blue was still slapping you around when Blanche turned up with the bail money and a habeas corpus writ and what you wanted to know was why it took her so long.