01. Labyrinth of Dreams (8 page)

She was in there about forty minutes while I guzzled black coffee on the corner across from the dump, wishing I'd taken up smoking again when the money came back. Brandy had, unfortunately, which only made it worse. Neither of us needed to smoke at all, and poverty had been a real good excuse to give it up, but deep down it was the
only
reason we'd given it up. It's bad for you, and antisocial these days to boot, but, damn it, we'd only ballooned out to our weights when we quit, and while I might be healthier now I sure didn't feel any better. Maybe not cigarettes, but in self-defense maybe an occasional cheap cigar or one of those curved Sherlock Holmes-type pipes. On Little Jimmy's card, naturally.

She finally came out and gave me a smile and crossed over and we walked over to a small cafe off Chestnut. "Well? Did she convert you?" I asked her.

Brandy laughed. "There were some mighty-good-lookin' broads in there, but when you got down to it they all lacked an essential ingredient, and since it's the only thing we keep you men around for anyway, why spoil it?"

"Got anything?"

"Some real interesting stuff, but it only gets crazier and crazier. This kind of shit ain't for small-time P.I.'s, honey, or big-shot feds, either. It's booby-hatch time."

"Shoot."

"Whitlock took a bunch of pills and shots and stuff, all right. Hormones, almost certainly. Kept a whole medical kit in a private locker in the back of the center, there. Whitlock money's been supportin' that place, almost. Thousands of bucks' worth. They all swear that Whitlock's a she passin' as a he, not the other way 'round, but several were there when she or he or whatever changed, and they swear there's not a scar or stretch mark on that body, and that it had all the right curves and moves, including average boobs that were strapped down in a kind of corset that also filled out the upper body, made it look muscular. I don't know much about transsexuals, but the people over there seem to know a lot, and they swear that Whitlock was as natural-born a woman as they know. What do you think of
that?"

"I don't think. Not at this stage, anyway. So if that's true, then who fathered those two kids of his? Besides, they aren't
that
old. I think Mrs. W. would have noticed a lot sooner, at least by the honeymoon. Besides, I got on the phone that he was a member of the Triangle Health Club, and that's rich men only. If he went through that kind of operation, it'd take months and cost a fortune. He couldn't cover it up that long and keep his regular schedule. Those things take months before all those hormones kick in."

"Where'd you learn so much?"

"The
National Enquirer.
So I'd bet my booties that old Martin was a man until just recently and would still be more castrated man than full-figured gal."

"They said this started more than two years ago, and they saw her then."

I nodded. "So this leads me to a deduction, Watson."

"We don't make enough to pay taxes now."

"Quiet. Us geniuses need clear heads. The only way I can figure that we have the Marty Whitlock everybody knows
and
the female Marty down here is if there isn't much kinky going on at all. You get an estimate of height and weight?"

"Hard to tell. She wore heels there, and dear old Honey noted that she wore real finely made elevator shoes as a man. They all thought it was a great scam, and they didn't look much closer because of the money."

"Few do. But the height?"

"Honey said, with heels, they were about the same height. Call it five ten."

I nodded. "Uh huh. And Marty was five ten as well. Now, if we assume that the
real
Marty Whitlock didn't wear elevators, let alone heels, we can account for maybe three inches."

"Brother and sister, maybe? Real close look-alikes?"

"Have to be real close. The trouble is, he
does
have two sisters, both accounted for and neither one likely to be able to pass for him even with Hollywood special effects working on his side."

"He could have just passed her once and seen the resemblance and got her on the payroll. He'd have a hell of a good payroll. It'd beat workin'."

I considered it. "Maybe, but it's unlikely. The clue here is that she looked enough like him to convince everybody down here that there
was
a masquerade. Remember what Joey told us? As a woman, he looked like somebody totally different, a real woman. Except for one thing, we've been led down a garden path. Not only does he vanish into this sexual anywhere, but he leads us to a point where it appears he's either a drag queen or a transsexual. Now, why?"

She shrugged. "Maybe it's because he knew he'd have to disappear someday, and he figured this was a real neat dead end. Everybody would now be looking for a drag queen or a transsexual, not for him."

"And left it in place for a couple of years?" I thought about it. "It's almost too clever. You wonder how somebody with his background would even know about these places, let alone work them out that neatly. It explains the call to his wife, though, even though it's one of only two mistakes he made. She knows what's going on. Most of it, anyway.
Damn!
This is frustrating! You don't hire somebody to go through this kind of elaborate shit for
two years
just as a blind alley, and even if you have this kind of shit going you can't buy much more time than if you got a fake passport, went up to Canada, and took the plane to Rio or whatever. No, this smells. This stinks. He did this for a reason other than to cover his tracks. This was something ongoing, something he rnaybe needed to develop so he could get out from under the Little Jimmys of the world one step ahead of the feds. Why stick around here at all? He could just as easily and untraceably have called her changing planes in Chicago."

"Unfinished business. He had to move in a hurry, faster than he figured. You said two mistakes, though."

"Uh huh. Get another description of that guy who came by to pick up her gear?"

"Yeah, it was pretty much as Joey told us. About five ten, blue eyes, long blond hair and moustache. ..."

"The operative stuff is at the start. Five ten, blue eyes. Probably a real good blond wig and a real professional matching fake moustache."

"The real Marty Whitlock," she sighed. "But why come at all? Testing out the disguise, or what?"

"Uh uh. Remember, he was spooked into moving a few days early. His girlfriend was told to stay away. Considering the trail he laid, they'd be more likely to be looking for her than him, or so he'd think. Those rich upper-class types really believe the cops are that good and that fast. But
she
needs some stuff from there, or something in the locker was traceable. So he puts on an old pair of jeans and a tee shirt, maybe old tennis shoes, and with some difficulty gets the stuff. We can forget the blond shit, though. He knows he was conspicuous, so he'll ditch 'em or at least stick 'em in the trunk and use something else. Big beard, shaved head, maybe tinted contact lenses, and he's off. Dead end, babe. We don't even know the name he was using in northeast Philly—if that was where he was doing whatever he was doing—and there's only three quarters of a million people out there. It'd take us years to canvass enough to find this pair."

Brandy grinned. "You won't have to. See, they thought she was one of
them,
and they smelled somethin' real odd about this dude even if he
did
have the handwriting and all. After all, Whitlock was their sugar daddy or mama or whatever. So when he left, they tailed him. I have the address."

I almost jumped across the table to kiss her. Naturally, this spilled my coffee and her Coke, but I didn't care. Finally I said, as the waitress and several patrons stared at us in disgust, "I think we go out there—after I make two phone calls."

"Little Jimmy and who else?"

"Agent Kennedy. I'm gonna give 'em both everything up to the sex change. If they're any good, they might get further, but maybe not. In the meantime, I'm in good with them and we'll be the first there."

There were still several hours of setup and work involved. The place was one of those older middle-class apartment houses with sixteen apartments in the place, and there was only so much you could expect even from Divine Providence. You could use a hundred scams to talk to the neighbors, but I once tried the insurance-agent ploy and half the people wanted to talk policies. It was easier just to fall back on the old reliable and flash the badge while Brandy cased the joint. It wasn't too hard to find their apartment; it was the one couple nobody knew much about and everybody thought a little nuts.

That left getting into apartment 2-09. I wasn't much good at petty burglary, but when it was clear that the place was dark and unoccupied, I turned things over to Brandy. She had that nice, big safety lock picked in about two and a half minutes of sweat. I did the sweating, of course.

At this stage, our pair had been pretty casual. They never expected to be coming back, and they never expected anybody to be able to find the place. At the end of the lease, which was prepaid only to the end of the month, the landlord would use his master, open the place up, get a cleaning crew in, and rent it out again.

These weren't furnished apartments, but it's tough to make a smooth getaway in a moving van. Most of it appeared to be rental furniture, with the stickers still on, pretty much like I figured. It wasn't terribly full of stuff, though; a couch and a couple of chairs in the otherwise barren living room, a queen-sized mattress and box spring in the bedroom, and a dresser. Most of the clothes and some of the toiletries were gone, but the small fridge was still reasonably full— fortified skim milk, Perrier, some never-to-be fondue, and even a couple of bottles of sixty-buck-a-fifth champagne. Overchilled, but not bad. Brandy took care of the small tin of beluga caviar; I never could see the appeal of solid-salt fish eggs that cost ten cents a pinhead-sized egg. Just your average lower-middle-class apartment dweller's emergency rations.

Then we started looking under mattresses and behind furniture. It didn't take very long, considering the underfurnished nature of the apartment, but we came up with a whole bunch of junk. It's amazing what falls in back of dressers, and there is some sort of law that states that anything left for any period of time will migrate to spots where you will never see it or find it. Most of it was the ordinary debris—
a
plastic hair curler, a couple of combs, some loose change, a magazine sweepstakes form, that kind of thing. One very crumpled little piece of tissue-thin paper, however, stood out and Brandy carefully unwrapped it. "Aha! The master detectives strike!" she announced with a flair and handed it to me.

It was a credit card slip.

The thing was hard to read and seemed to be fairly old, but I could read the name and the number and the expiration date, and it was still current. Amanda W. Curry, and a card good until the end of this year. Now, for the first time, we had a name and a way to track them. Whitlock just wasn't the type to go around packing suitcases full of cash, and he could hardly walk in and ask to buy two and a quarter million bucks in American Express traveler's checks without attracting a little attention. He would keep most of the money in dummy accounts probably spread all to hell and back, and contract with a money manager to pay the bills on this new set of credit cards. Little Jimmy had provided me with a sample of Whitlock's handwriting, and I took it out of my wallet and compared it. The charge slip was definitely signed in a woman's hand, yet there were certain similarities in the way the letters were formed, particularly the W. I handed them to Brandy. "If it's not the same, then they grew up together and learned from the same teacher," I noted.

She squinted, then said, "Yeah, that's right. I can't figure this out yet, but it sure is strange. Every time we figure we're dealin' with one person, we find two. Every time we figure two people, it looks like one. Don't make no sense at all."

I handed her the other prize from the junk trove, a crumpled and torn business card. She examined it carefully, but I had the strange feeling she wasn't reading it. "Just how bad
is
your vision?" I asked her.

"Good enough."

"Uh huh. Then read that card."

She sighed. "Okay, so I can't. So I'll blow some of this money on new glasses, all right?" She handed it back. "Now what's it say?"

"General Ordering and Development, Inc.," I told her. "McInerney, Oregon. Never heard of the place, but it sure doesn't sound very big. No address. Two phone numbers, though. One of 'em's been circled, sort of, in old pencil. Funny, too, there's ho name on the card. Just 'Western Distribution Center.' "

She thought a moment. "Kind of crazy, but that name seems familiar, somehow."

I shrugged. "I wonder if they call it GOD, Inc., around the plant?"

She snapped her fingers. "Yeah! That's it! The Amazing Stork Knife!"

"Huh?"

She was rolling now. "And the Motorized Minnow, and Pet-er-cize, too!"

"Slow down. If you can't manage English, try it phonetically."

She looked excited. "You don't watch enough TV."

"We hocked the TV months ago," I noted.

"Hell, this has been around for
years!
You know all those ads for all those crazy junk things that come on in the middle of the late show, or are all over cable TV? Things like pocket fishing gear, steak knives, and exercisers, disposable telephones, stuff like that?"

I nodded. "As much as I tried to avoid them, yes."

"Well, right down at the bottom they got to say who's
really
selling them. Not the TV station you send the money to or the eight-hundred number you call, but the real company, down in fine print. They made 'em do that after there were so many phonies getting into the act. Well, General Ordering and Development is one of the biggest!"

This was beginning to get interesting. "So they sell a thousand products by buying cheap, late-night ads from Hong Kong distributors and junk makers. If this is one of the biggest, then it's a multimillion-dollar company at the very least. You say it's been around awhile?"