Noir (7 page)

Yeah, sure. But, in a word, how did you get it on?

Get it on? Oh, you mean. . . . How did we fall in love? You were watching her legs again. She knew you were watching her legs. She parted them slightly and they seemed almost to release a sigh from within their skirted shadows. There was more of you stretching Blanche’s panties now, but oddly you felt less uncomfortable. It happened one day when I was changing out of my work uniform and he passed by. The wind must have blown the door open behind me. I didn’t know he was there until I heard him breathing at my back. As he pressed against me I could feel him trembling with emotion, as I was trembling, too. It was all very innocent, but I was at a loss to know what to do. And he was such a handsome man, strong, manly. He could not conceivably have dressed as you are dressed, Mr. Noir.

Too bad, he never knew what he missed. And where was the wife all this time?

I think I told you. The poor woman was bedridden and did not have long to live.

That’s how she was when you started undressing there?

Working there? Yes, I think so. Or soon after. The dear man was distraught. He fell to weeping inconsolably on my breast.

While standing, or supine?

Mr. Noir, I do not understand the point of your questions. And would you please put both of your hands on top of the desk where I can watch them?

IT WAS BLANCHE, LATER, WHO ASKED ALL THE SERIOUS questions. What you asked was: So, what are you doing tonight, sweetheart? We can talk more about all this over supper. But when you looked up, widow wasn’t there. She had an interesting way of coming and going. She’d left another roll of bills on the desk, but you had no pockets, so when Blanche returned she picked it up and locked it in her desk drawer. For expenses, she said. We have a lot to do. I have learned that the deceased’s estate passes to one of two heirs, but must pass intact, meaning that one of them has to relinquish their share or die. A kind of macabre joke. When you gave her back her undies, she gazed at them with something between repugnance and dismay, then asked you to turn around. What do you know about your client’s background, Mr. Noir?

Well, she comes from a small country town with tree-lined streets and green lawns where everybody loves each other.

Sure, she said. And bodies buried under the rose bushes and unspeakable horrors in the family den. I didn’t mean that. You can look now. I mean, what do you know about her mother, her brother, her boyfriend, and her father, the drug dealer?

Town pharmacist, you corrected. Your clothes were warm from the dryer and comforting. Still having trouble keeping your brainpod from bobbing about, though, and it was therefore less useful than usual.

Where are they?

You supposed they were back at the farm. What did they have to do with this case?

If her father was supplying her with poison and whatever narcotics her husband was using, then they could all be involved.

But who said—?

And what about the person you’re supposed to follow?

I’ve got a lead on that. Last night. From Snark. That’s how I got in trouble.

With Officer Snark?

No. Afterwards. Though he might have been there. The details are blurry. But Snark told me Mister Big has the hots for medieval toy soldiers. I’ll buy a few and advertise them and see if I can get a nibble.

The sort of miniatures he would want you can’t afford. Not even with the black widow’s handouts. You’ll have to rent them. I’ll look for a dealer.

IT IS YOUR OWN COMFORTABLE FRESH-SMELLING UNDERwear, warm from the dryer, rags though they be, that you are looking forward to now. But Blue’s ten minutes are nearly up when Blanche returns empty-handed. The clothes are still in the dryer, she had to wash them twice to get the morgue smells out, it will be another twenty minutes. You can’t wait. Blue is due any second. You turn your back and give Blanche her drawers back (I hope that tattoo was done with a clean needle, she says reproachfully), shove your bare feet into your squishy dogs, pull on your cold wet trenchcoat, drop your .22 and Blanche’s skin lotion in the pockets, perch your fedora atop the bandages, and hurry out, down the back stairs. At the alley door, you check the mirror apparatus you’ve rigged there as a lookout and see that some lunk is waiting for you outside, cosh in hand. Blue covering all bets. There’s probably somebody on the fire escape, too. Time for the old straw dummy routine, hoping only this isn’t a cop who has already been burned. You keep the dummy down here, dressed in a trenchcoat and fedora for just such occasions. Cops. Landlords. Disappointed clients. Irate husbands. You spread the dummy head-down on the stairs, unlatch the door quietly, stand so as to be hidden behind the opened door, throw an old kitchen chair and cry out: Oh fuck! Help! Your would-be assailant rushes in and delivers a blow to the dummy just as you brain him with the butt of your .22. It’s not one of Blue’s boys. It’s the suit, the Hammer, the thug who accosted you in Loui’s Lounge, the one you slugged and were slugged by down at the docks. He’s out cold. Your hurting head hurts more to think of how his head will hurt, but just desserts for the dickhead after what he did to you last night. You quickly rifle his jacket pockets, switch your rod with his .45, dart out into the rainy alley. You can hear sirens out front. You take a right, a left, a right, losing yourself in the alleyed labyrinth. Loui’s is a good idea. Flame will let you hole up in her room and the food’s good.

The alley. You can’t say it’s your home away from home, having no real home to be away from, but you know it well. You’ve spent serious time in it. Have been mugged, chased, blown, asked for a light, beaten up, paid off, conned, dumped, supplied, scared shitless, given hot tips, shortchanged, shot at in here. You say, here. The alley is not on any streetmap. It is under it somewhere. Or behind it. It is negotiated intuitively; maps are useless, maybe even deceptive. Even in the rain, its scabrous brick walls are layered with shadows, worn like old rags. It is not uninhabited. It has its pimps and dealers, street tramps, smalltime grifters, misnamed homeless (they know where their home is better than you do), muggers, psychopaths, deviants. Not unlike City Hall, in short, or any church or company boardroom. You have to keep your eye out for one of them in particular. Known as Mad Meg, she likes to leap out of the shadows and stab people with her rusty kitchen knife. Once an honest stripper, but misused by a sadistic sugar daddy who pumped her full of brain-burning opiates, thrown out on the streets when her mind went and her body bagged, now the hidden princess of the alley. Like the alley, she’s treacherously complex yet rough on the surface and without façade, oddly innocent or at least neutrally unmotivated even as she lunges at her victims, somewhat pestilential, smelling of urine and half-blind, the indecorous backside of the human condition, the poxy dead end we all try to avoid. She’s a friend of yours though she doesn’t always remember that. You bring her things that she collects like coat buttons, swizzle sticks, shoelaces, candy wrappers, and old tennis balls, and once she got you out of a scrape by attacking the killer who was attacking you, though that may have just been the luck of who was on top. You have nothing to give her today except Blanche’s lotion or your own laces, but no need, she remains hidden.

Not that your route to Loui’s is without incident. You witness a murder for one thing. You’ve just stepped into an abandoned bicycle shed to get out of the downpour when you see two figures at the other end of the alley dragging a third, mere shadowy outlines as though the rain were a drawn blind between you with dim silhouettes playing on it. Through the rain’s rattle you can hear one of them giving orders, the other whining in reply in a squeaky voice. The guy giving the orders does not sound like a street mug. He turns to go, but Squeaky returns and pumps a round of bullets into the victim’s head. Psycho. The boss scolds him in a father-to-son way and leads him off. Sirens sound. Can’t stay. Who was it? Never know. One of life’s little mysteries.

ONE WET DAY’S END YOU WERE TAILING A GUY THROUGH here who you thought might be Mister Big. This was after you’d delivered your illustrated classified ad for the toy soldiers to the city newsrag. Through a friendly dealer, Blanche had learned of a private collector who owned a unique set of figures from the Battle of Agincourt with brigandines made out of mouse leather and bascinets of silver with hinged visors, stuffed and quilted gambesons on the French crossbowmen, knee-length hauberks of silver chain mail on the English archers, beards and horse tails of real hair with brass and leather trappings for the horses, honed steel swords, velvet surcoats, and silken jupons (see what you learn in this racket), and she was able to get permission to photograph some of the figures for a philosophical journal she claimed to edit, though insurance for the day cost half the widow’s roll. The ad promised a private showing to genuine collectors only, and the newspapers had not even hit the streets before the calls started coming in.

You left Blanche to fend off the queries, waiting for the one phone call that mattered, and went out for a beer. Several actually, ending up at Loui’s talking with Joe the bartender about the meaning of life, having by now switched to the hard stuff. Joe’s view in sum was that life was full of sickness, loneliness, corruption, cruelty, paranoia, betrayal, murder, cynicism, impotence, and fear, and then there was the dark side. Sometimes you gotta just dummy up and let your pants fall where they may, he said, somewhat enigmatically. You realized that what was wrong with Joe was that he was a teetotaler.

Across the room at a dining table sat a fat guy in a white linen suit with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, delicately putting away the back half of a cow. Rings on all his fingers, even his thumbs. He looked familiar. Joe didn’t know who he was but said he was a loner who came in from time to time to eat a few dinners. Probably you’d seen him in here before. Joe thought he might be a thin guy disguised as a fat guy.

Maybe. But he sure eats like a fat guy. Everything but the tail and horns.

He sometimes has those with cheese and coffee, Joe said.

On a hunch (a hunch is to a gumshoe what a skirt is to a letch: a tease; pursuit; trouble), when he lit up a cigar, paid, donned his panama, and left, you decided to step out into the drizzle and follow him. You knew zip plus toy soldiers about Mister Big, but you figured it was likely his nickname was for more than power alone. Even if the guy was only a mock-Mister B, it might be interesting to see where he goes, and you’d have something to report to the widow the next time she turned up. At first you were on the street, watching in the classic surveillance manner his slow waddling movements in the reflections of shop windows, but then at some point you were in the alley. How that happens is almost always a mystery. You have privileged access to it down your back stairs, maybe everyone does, but if you step out the front door the alley is hard to find. You can’t see it and then, what do you know, you’re in it. The fat man in the panama and linen suit zigzagged along, never looking back, but you had the feeling he knew you were back there, paddling through the garbage, trying to pretend you were just out for your daily constitutional. It was probably time to forget it and turn around, but you weren’t sure where you were and were as likely to find your way out going forwards as backwards. And, besides, the more you followed him, the more convinced you were that this was the guy you were looking for. He was moving faster and faster, he maybe ate like a fat man but he moved like a thin man, maybe Joe was right, it was hard to keep up. Finally, he was running flat out, pivoting sharply around corners like a mechanical carnival target on ball bearings, hopping nimbly over obstacles, darting down narrow passageways, somehow skirting puddles that you splashed through, a pale luminosity flitting through the moist shadowy alley like a will-o’-the-wisp, and soon you were only catching fleeting glimpses of him in the distance and then you lost him altogether.