Noir (17 page)

ALL OVER TOWN AS YOU WALK THROUGH IT, YOUR MUG glowers darkly on WANTED posters. They’ll never recognize you. You’re prettier than that. Something wrong with the picture, though. What is it? You put yourself in Blanche’s shoes. Well, for one thing, you’re wearing a fedora on the poster, Mr. Noir, and you don’t have that any more. And there’s no folded handkerchief in your jacket breast pocket. That’s not even your pinstripe suit. Blanche thinks you’re too unobservant for a private dick. She likes to set little tests for you, moves things around in the office, adds an ornament to your desk, hangs a new picture, paints the walls a different color, then asks you what’s changed. The only thing you ever notice is if she moves the sofa because when you go to lie down on it you hit the floor. You use the forest-and-trees argument: when you’re on a case, you’re focused, see what’s important, but too many details are irrelevant and clutter your vision. She says there are no forests, that’s a false and undefinable category, there are only trees. When you described the chalk drawing to her, she wanted to know if you could see the victim’s ears. You didn’t remember but said probably not, why did she ask? The outlined body you described, Mr. Noir, was a naked one. Your client was never naked, but men like to draw women that way. So, unless it was somebody else like one of your waterfront floozies, you can ignore everything about the drawing from the neck down. But men are never interested in women’s heads and would just draw what they saw. So, was the dead body wearing a widow’s hat and veil or was her head bare? That would be the clue. If you’d only been paying attention.

Well, there
was
a clue, but you didn’t recognize it as one at the time and didn’t tell her about it.

You met Flame on the same day you first met the rich widow. Coincidence? You told her the widow’s story, she had a different version, seemed to know a lot about it. Or maybe she was just guessing. Making conversation, wanting to make out. You were carrying some pedigree nose candy from Rats, she wanted to share some of it. You were there every couple of nights after that. Eased into the dark by her sultry lullabies. The night they found the body and you first saw that drawing, you dropped by Loui’s for a requiem drink and she tried to lure you into staying (Hey, if we are what we eat, baby, I could be you by tomorrow morning . . . ), but, still grieving, you went to the Shed instead. Bad choice. She knew that? You were back at Loui’s the next night, though, and she was waiting for you. Love? You don’t believe in love, victim of it though you too often are, so scratch that. Flame’s a working girl. Her job? She tried to tell you a story a few nights ago, but you fell asleep on it. Or were drugged. It was about twin brothers on opposite sides of the law with her in the middle, gun in hand. A gun that went “spat.” She seemed to be trying to tell you she was both guilty and innocent of something. Something she couldn’t have helped, either way. The cop was using her, but so was the badboy lover. A commonplace tale maybe of love and betrayal, doubled and redoubled, but what you want to know is, who was the cop?

HEY, BLONDIE’S BACK! FLAME SAYS, GREETING YOU LOVingly when you walk in, opening your pants to take a peek. Time passes, you say; it’s growing out. Her affection seems genuine, but what can you know? Joe pours you a double on ice, remarking that you smell like you just crawled out of a sewer, and Loui comes over to greet you, looking nervous. There’s a reward on your head, dear boy, he says. Lucky for you business has been good, or I might be tempted.

Yeah, I know, Loui. I’ve seen the movie posters. Somebody’s trying to pin a bunch of murders on me and I gotta find out who really did them before I get grabbed. Starting with that chalk drawing down at the docks.

You mean, the dead widow?

I was just down there, Loui. Sprang Rats, what was left of him after Blue’s goons had worked him over, and dropped him off in safe hands. Passed by where the body was found. All that’s left of the chalk drawing is a faded smudge of the red pubic patch. Should have paid more attention to that. That was you, wasn’t it, Flame? The artist’s model.

Blue’s undercover agent stares coolly at you a moment. She’s not as pretty as she was before. She sticks a cigarette in her mouth and Joe reaches over the bar with a lighter. I owed Blue a favor, she says.

Pretty big favor, sweetheart. Did you also model for the dog-fuck?

Sure, baby. Did you like it?

Who was the dog?

Your friend Blue. He put on a costume. Actually it was a bearskin, only thing they could find. The artist took some liberties.

So did you, sweetheart. Pour me another, Joe.

Blue’s after your pretty tattooed ass, lover. I figured if I played along I could buy you some time. She moves in between your legs. I love you, baby. Couldn’t let anything happen to you. It’s why I bought you that key to the smugglers’ passage.

Yeah? Who from?

Don’t ask. The price was high. But Blue doesn’t know about that. If he finds out, you can come looking for
my
body. She presses closer, whispers huskily in your ear: You’ll know it when you see it, Phil. The one with the red patch.

You glance up at the clock over the bar with its tuxedoed rumpot and windmill arms. You wonder how long you were down in the tunnels and ask Joe what day it is. Turns out it’s the day you booked the meeting with Snark at the Star Diner. That clock, like all bar clocks, always runs fifteen minutes fast, you can just make it. Got a date, you say, and down your drink, take her hand out of your pants and swivel away, but give her silky ass a farewell stroke (why not, feels good), then hit the streets again.

IT’S A PERFECT NIGHT. WIND, RAIN, GLOOMILY OVERCAST, the puddled reflections more luminous than the streetlamps they reflect. Cars and buses crash heedlessly through the puddles, forcing you against the wet buildings and blue-lit window displays. You’re sucking on a fag, hands in your trenchcoat pockets, your posterboy face hidden behind the upturned collar, thinking about Flame’s betrayal, if it was one, about Blue’s dark machinations, the mysterious widow, her unknown whereabouts, about all the bodies you’ve left in your wake. Your tattoo is itching. You reach back under your coat to scratch it with your middle finger erect, just to let whoever’s behind you know that you know. What’s Blue up to? Maybe he’s in Mister Big’s pocket, the chalk drawing part of an elaborate cover-up of a heartless murder. Thus the rush to hide the body. Blue figured he could scare you off the case, underestimating your obstinacy, your restless need to know, and what the widow had come to mean to you. Or was he using that obstinacy for some covert purpose of his own? And is Snark a pal or Blue’s agent, his underling and co-conspirator, sending you off on wild goose chases and setting you up to take the fall for others’ crimes? If so, whose? Blue’s? His and Mister Big’s? But why would the big man want to waste a smalltime ivories tickler like Fingers? Because he sent you to an ice cream parlor? Maybe. Message: Helping Noir is not good for your health. Correspondence by cadaver. Body bulletins. You hope Cueball is okay. But why shouldn’t he be? Why does it matter? To anyone? Nothing seems to make sense, but why do you expect it to? Shouldn’t you just take Mister Big’s dream warning to heart and stop trying to figure something out when there is nothing to figure? You glance up at a third-floor window over a drug store where shadows play against a drawn blind. Looks like some guy stabbing a woman. But what can you know? And why (though it will do no good, you stop at a phone booth, call the cops, give them the drugstore address, hang up before they can ask any questions) do you want to? Because the body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them. Then, once it gets started, it can’t stop. Gotta know, gotta know. It’s a genetic malignancy. Ultimately terminal. Blanche, who reads the Sunday papers, calls it the drama of cognition, or sometimes the melodrama of cognition, which means it’s a kind of entertainment. Solving crimes as another game to play; conk tickling, not to let it go dead on you. Murder providing a cleaner game than most. You start with something real. A body. Unless someone steals it. Is that what happened? Who would want it? And what for? Blackmail? Or did Rats snatch it to use as a stash bag? Happened on his turf. Is that why he was nabbed? But why that one in particular? There are bodies all over the city. Up over that drug store, for example. It’s a deranged town. A lot of guns but few brains, as someone has said. Did the widow have one in her little purse? Probably. Nested amid the bankrolls. Did she ever use it? If she had one, she probably used it. Put a heater in someone’s hands and it’s too much fun to pull the trigger and watch your target’s knees buckle. Did she use it on her ex? It’s possible. What isn’t? Taxis pass, their wipers flapping, but they all seem to be driven by guys in leather jackets with goatees and granny glasses. Can’t take risks, not enough time for that, must get to Snark, hoping only it’s not a trap. Blue could be waiting. But you and Snark have done each other enough favors through the years to create a kind of mutual dependency and you figure Snark will want to preserve that. You squeeze the widow’s veil in your pocket for luck, then remember you don’t have it anymore. Must be something else.

But though you’re hurrying along, running against the clock, it seems to take forever. Everything’s stretching out. The blocks are longer somehow, the soaked streets wider and packed bumper to bumper with blaring traffic. You have to double back, take shortcuts that aren’t short. You know the way and you don’t know the way. You find yourself on unfamiliar corners, have to guess which turn to take. Racing across a street at the risk of having your legs severed at the knees by clashing bumpers, you catch a glimpse of the pale blue police building glowing faintly in the wet night. You shouldn’t be able to see it from here, but you do. The city can be like that sometimes. Especially when you’re dead on your feet and in bad need of a drink. Joe has a story about it which he regaled you with one day over his ginger ale. This was in the afternoon before happy hour—what Joe calls feeding time at the zoo—so Loui’s was quiet. Serene. You were in mourning, not just for the widow, but for Fingers, too, so the atmosphere was right and you had more than one. More than three in fact, who was counting. Joe was not always a teetotaler, and when you asked him why he gave it up, he told you about the night the city turned ugly and nearly did him in. I know you love her, he said. But watch out. She’s big trouble. Flame, as you recall, was rehearsing a song in the background, something about a stone-hearted bitch who drives her lovers mad, in which hysteria was made to rhyme with marry ya and bury ya, but later she came over and asked why you two always called the city “she.” Well, we’re guys, said Joe. That’s the way we talk.

THIS HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO, BACK IN MY FALL-down-drunk days. I was living on the street mostly, if you could call it living, working as a bouncer, doorman, dealer, garbage collector, barman, pimp, any way to scramble together enough skins for the dog juice. Sometimes I woke up in a hooker’s bed, sometimes in an abandoned lot or a back alley, bruised and bleeding but with no memory of the punch-up, if that was what had happened. Now and then I found myself flying with the snowbirds, but mostly I stuck with the hooch. I was sick a lot of the time but sometimes I felt good, and whenever I felt good I got noisy. Sometimes the cops would take me in as a public nuisance, needing someone to pound on for awhile, but usually they let me be, doing nothing worse than push my face into my own vomit, steal my stash, or kick me into the gutter if I was blocking the sidewalk.