Noir

by Robert Coover

  You carry the kid inside, looking for a place to set her down, and she comes around long enough to say: Second floor? Thus, with questions, she guides you up the circular balustrade and down the chandeliered hall to her bedroom, which is itself bigger than most houses you’ve been in, with winking starlights on the ceiling, her bed the size of your efficiency flop. You drop her on it and she says: Jammies? Second drawer?

  I’ve got you this far, sweetheart. You’re on your own.

  Please . . . ?

  WHEN YOU FIRST SET OUT YOUR SHINGLE, YOU IMAGined being involved in exotic complicated crimes, having to solve them with your wits, do the hero act when things got rough, walk away from the praise after, lighting up a smoke, but in fact you were mostly hired to tail adulterous spouses and get the goods on them. You knew less about sex than you knew about sleuthing, but you soon figured out what the goods were and got them. You were not so much a private eye as an eyer of privates. Your university days. You were good at it, but even so, your clients looked down their noses at you. You were a kid and they had grown-up problems, thought they did. So you were naturally flattered to meet someone who wanted your services and looked up to you, an affectionate little sex kitten a few years your junior, ignorant of the private detective racket and willing to pay whatever you asked. And a more interesting case, too: a missing person. Her sister.

  She was afraid of her parents, believing they might have had something to do with her sister’s disappearance and worried something like it might happen to her, but they were off traveling somewhere, so she was able to take you home with her to show you some photos, her sister’s diary, a glove of which the mate was missing, her sister’s perfume, her underwear, anything that might help you locate the missing girl. She told you, rather breathlessly, everything she could remember about her sister, and especially the days just before she disappeared, and, taking your hand, gazing up at you adoringly, led you room by room through the family manor according to the thread of her story. Which had to do with a row her sister supposedly had just before her parents left on their previously unannounced travels. Vague threats. You weren’t sure if the story she was telling you held together, but solving the case was no longer foremost on your mind. You just liked to hear her talk and to feel her innocent little body rubbing up against yours. Also innocent. Was the missing sister alive or dead, and, if dead, who killed her and why? You didn’t really care. Maybe her sister was not really missing and this was just a ruse to lure you here to get laid. This was the theory you favored. So when she proposed a cooling-off late-night dip in the pool, you tucked your pencil behind your ear and flashing the insouciant smile you’d been practicing in front of your mirror, said, Sure, kid, why not?

  She led you out to the pool and took off her clothes and, since you were a tad slow off the mark, helped you out of yours. Did you consider the possibility that, if the sister was dead and the parents got sent to the chair for murder or failed to survive their travels, she’d inherit the family fortune? Maybe in the back of your mind, you did, but women’s pubic hair was still fairly new to you and most of your attention was focused on that. That and the slightly embarrassing evidence of your throbbing excitement. She took hold of it as she might a pump handle, triggering instant convulsions, and then, with a mischievous grin, gave it and you, laughing giddily, a push into the pool. She’s great! you were thinking as you went under. This is fun! But then you glimpsed something at the bottom of the pool that shouldn’t be there: a naked girl’s body. You dove down to it, worked the weights off the neck and ankles, and, gasping for breath, hauled her, still soft and warm, to the surface. Which was when you met Blue, then just a rookie cop in homicide, eager to show his stuff and win his merit badges. He was standing at the edge of the pool along with another eight to ten of his grinning pals with automatic rifles aimed at your head, the sex kitten in her pajamas and bathrobe weeping somewhere in the background.

  You’d been in some rough street fights, but you hadn’t taken a real beating before then. Blue was nothing if not thorough. There was little of you left ignored. Coshes, fists, nightsticks, rubber hose, boots. Some of it while blindfolded, some not. Your further education. Principles of Getting Fucked Over 101. Through it all you stuck by your story because it was the only story you had. C’mon, Noir, he barked, slapping you up one side of the head, then slapping you up the other. We caught you stark naked hugging the corpus delicti. You’re a fucking necrophiliac. What more is there to know? That I’m a private detective, that I got hired by that kid to find her missing sister, that she was the one who pushed me into the pool, and that when I saw the dead girl I dove down and brought her up. I figure the kid killed her and needed a fallguy. You’re a goddamned liar, Noir. You’re gonna get the chair for this. Lie detector tests were the thing in those days. You passed with flying colors. But then so did the sex kitten. Blue never believed you, has never been able to forgive you for spoiling his first big case, still thinks of you as a pervert and a killer and maybe worse if there is worse.

  SO YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER. YOU DO KNOW BETTER. Just the same (this kitten’s soft pleading voice, sweet milky aroma, her damp bunnies—what can you do?), you pull off her shoes and socks, her skirt, go get the pajamas. More bunnies, matching her underpants. When you peel them off her, her hand falls between her thighs like it’s always been there, and she whimpers softly. Even her whimpers are questions. You ask where her parents are while unbuttoning her blouse.

  My father’s dead. My stepmother killed him. And she’s going to kill me.

  Typical teenage fantasy, especially when they’re doped up and feeling sorry for themselves. Off comes the blouse. No bra. A pause to take in the sights.

  She opens her eyes to watch you watching her, though they cross with her dopey sleepiness and she closes them again. Can you protect me?

  I can’t protect anyone right now, kitten. I’m in deep shit and have to save my own ass first. You sound like Skipper’s parrot. You used to talk only to cops and gangsters that way. Now everybody gets the same treatment. You get her pajama top on over her curly head, but she hugs the pants like a security blanket.

  Please? I’m so afraid? Stay with me? Just tonight?

  You’ve never taken advantage of dolls in distress; on the other hand, if they want to take advantage of you, your resistance is low. There’s a whiskey bottle on her vanity. You pour a water glass full, savoring it as though it might be your last, thank her for it, hang your fedora on the neck of it, commence to strip down. The .45’s missing. Must have left it in the street when you bumped into her. You decide to leave your trenchcoat, jacket, shirt and tie on, studs in place, in case you have to make a quick exit. The sort of exit any sane man would be making right now.

  Thanks? For—? she murmurs. I don’t drink whiskey? She opens her eyes blearily and sees your blond pubes, starts giggling. It’s so cute—?

  It’ll grow out, you grumble, and stretch out beside her, well aware that you might be crawling into bed with a deranged killer. Well, the thrills. It’s what I’m in this game for, right? you inquire of the starscaped ceiling, and, stretching out under it, you replace the hand between her legs with your own.

  Game?

  You wake up from a sleep so leaden you cannot think where you are until you find the dead girl beside you, strangled with her own jammies, your hand still between her legs. Ah. There’s someone else in this house. Why did you assume otherwise? Sirens again, drawing up out front. This is not Blue’s beat, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up. You are frantically hauling your pants on, stuffing your bare feet into your gumshoes, thinking fast, as fast as you can with your stunned brain. The whiskey bottle is gone, the glass, your fedora; replaced by stuffed bunnies. There must be a servants’ back staircase. Your passkey worked on the front door, maybe there’s another smugglers’ door somewhere in the basement. You can’t find the back staircase but you discover a laundry chute and you dive down it, hoping for a soft landing. Your hopes are confounded, but
your stupefied senses register only the bounce. Nor does there seem to be a door that leads anywhere but to another room. You hear the thunder of heavy boots overhead. You duck into the wine cellar to hide and discover, down behind the racks, a lock set into the brick wall. Your key opens it. An irregular section of brick slides out, creating an opening just big enough to crawl through. There’s a mystery here, but you’re a street dick, not a metaphysician, you’ve no time to muse on it, they’re already clattering down the basement stairs. You snatch a couple bottles of wine, sink them in your trenchcoat pockets, and you’re gone, pulling the bricks closed behind you.

  THIS ISN’T YOUR FIRST MAD DISHABILLE DASH OUT OF A woman’s bedroom. They have mostly—your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe for the fleeting joys of romance—followed upon the unexpected arrival of a husband or lover, sometimes an irate parent or snapping dog, once even a crazed horse (don’t ask), but it has always been your practice to leave behind hot bodies, not cold ones, the only anatomy at mortal risk generally being your own. You’ve had your heels and ears clipped by flying bullets, have been knocked off the sides of buildings you were scrambling down by flowerpots and birdcages, and have taken a load of buckshot in your butt—twice, same guy, same dame, going over the same back wall; learning doesn’t come easy to you—but so far you have dodged the doom of so many of your clients’ rivals. Those poor saps you got the goods on. The closest you’ve come to buying it was during a brief torrid fling with a circus aerialist with amazingly muscular jaws, one of those slim dollies who hang ninety feet above the ground by their teeth; she had oral techniques you’d never experienced before, nor have you since, and as you are always willing to take a few risks to revel in instructive marvels, you spent a lot of time between acts in her caravan, in spite of her lion-tamer husband’s reputation for savagery. It wasn’t easy to tear away from her mid-performance, so eventually he collared you, speaking loosely. Collar-boned you, more like. His reputation was well-deserved. First, you took a lashing from his big black whip from which you still have scars striped across your backside like a stave of music, and then you were thrown raw into the lion’s cage. And this was not a lion from whose paw you’d pulled a thorn, though you did get the impression, as its lips curled back in a wet snarl, that it was laughing. Just before you could get recycled, however, you were rescued by the aerialist (another romantic) who, when the lion tamer, weary of beating her, went off for consolation from the Fat Lady, tossed the big cat a poisoned hamburger. Later, you heard, her husband got a hamburger much like it, but by then you’d stopped going to the circus.

  WELL, THIS SORT OF WHAM-BAM LOVING, AS JOE THE bartender describes, approvingly, all matings, human and otherwise, has not been all of love you’ve known; though you always resist them, you’ve had tenderer feelings, too. The night the body was discovered in the docklands and then lost in the morgue, for example, you dropped by Loui’s afterwards to ease the pain of a blown case and found yourself crying in your whiskey (figuratively: you don’t cry) at the loss of your widow and of her remains as well. You had failed her, and having failed her, you knew then that you had loved her, and you probably said as much in your tough tight-lipped way, though they would anyway have known your true feelings by the way you blew your nose. All this was a bit too much for Joe, who started telling a dirty joke about a woman who dressed in widow’s weeds to bury her broken dildo, then in white to wed her new one, but who was visited on her wedding night by the ghost of her dead dildo, accusing her of negligent dildicide. Loui laughed, interrupting the joke, which, as you knew, had as dark a punchline as any in Joe’s repertoire, and said that his fourth wife, or maybe it was his fifth, used to call him, lovingly, her dildo with ears, and that she was the best wife he ever had, wives on the whole being a contentious and predatory lot.

  Flame, more sympathetic, herself a sucker for impossible amours, drifted off to the floor mike and sang a song about lost love called “The Dick and the Dame.” The dick was just a trick for a dame on the game, she moaned in her sultry voice, so full of anguish and thwarted desire. If the chick’s up shit creek, is the dick to blame . . . ? Flame, you knew, would be happy to help you get through the night, but you needed to be alone. When she reached the last line about the dick’s pursuit of the ineffable (which rhymed with “his situation was laughable”), you blew her a kiss, tugged your fedora down over your brows, lit up, and, collar up, hands in trenchcoat pockets, stepped out into the grim wet night.

  The streets, wearing their heavy shadows as if dressed for a wake, were spookily abandoned except for the occasional loners hurrying along under the scattered lamps in the distance, huddled anonymously against the drizzly rain—other mourners, it seemed to you, like yourself. Cars passed but rarely and then as if without drivers or passengers, mere light dollies, interrogating the streets with their harsh probing glare. As you left Loui’s upscale neighborhood and plunged into the gloomier precincts at the edge of the docklands, you found yourself wading through pools of bottomless shadow, buffeted by drifting wisps of cold emblematic fog. Like a dangerous journey into the land of the dead, as some have said. Such horseshit you don’t take onboard, but you did feel your own mortality blowing foglike through you on the night and whatever you saw looked more dead than alive.

  You had decided to head down to the Woodshed, known simply as the Shed, an old teapad and gut-bucket often used for jam sessions, what Fingers and his chums called clambakes, and popular with ferry captains and wistful underdressed ladies past their prime. A romantic gesture. The widow, drifting in like a shadow, had found you there one night. She’d wanted to tell you another part of her story and was informed by someone that the Shed was where you could often be found. Maybe that was the night she told you about her grandfather, you don’t remember. What you can’t forget is the last thing she’d said: I don’t even know if all this is true, Mr. Noir. I just feel I need to see you, and to do that I have to have a reason. The light picked out her hands, dragging them out of the dark. No reason needed, sweetheart, you’d assured her, and placed one hand on hers and the light there dimmed. A reason for myself, I mean, she’d said. I’m in mourning, Mr. Noir. Hesitatingly, she’d withdrawn her hand. This is not proper.

  When you entered that night of the docklands murder and missing body, after your walk over from Loui’s, Fingers, accompanied only by a snubnosed bassist, was riffing on an old sentimental blues ballad, a tune meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty. It was late, an off night, the place was half empty. You slid into a scarred wooden booth at some remove from the drunks and ladies at the bar, but close to the little stage where Fingers was playing, tugged your fedora brim down, ordered up a double, studied the graffiti carved into the tabletop. You were one of the few who knew that Fingers got his name, not from his piano playing, but from his career as a safe-cracker. You’d once helped him beat a box job rap by convincing the District Attorney who was after him to drop the case—the D.A. was a client of a dominatrix you knew, there were photographs. Though he wasn’t there that night, you’d often seen the D.A. in the Shed thereafter, and there was a rumor there was something going on between him and Fingers.

  Blue has his docklands beat, Rats does, Loui his restaurant, Mad Meg her alleyways, but you have no turf of your own other than the city itself, which is to say, the indifferent world. Your bedsit’s like a cheap room in some sleazy railroad hotel. Even your office is a rental and you feel like an interloper in it; if it’s anyone’s, it’s Blanche’s place. Homeless, you feel as much at home in here as anywhere, but it’s not the Shed. Could be any such where. It’s the beat, the melody, the melancholy, the music. You are the music while the music lasts, it says on the scarred tabletop. That sounds familiar; maybe you cut it there. You settle into these warm illusions as into an old easy chair in the front parlor, sipping the one thing that ever really tastes good to you (you’re already on your third). The place itself is filthy, smoky, gloomy, rank. It’s you.

&nb
sp; When Fingers took a break you signaled with your glass to indicate you were buying him one. He hesitated, looked the other way as if not having seen you, then shrugged, nodded at the barman, picked up his drink, and came on over. He walked bent-backed, the way he sat at the piano, his drawn baggy-eyed pan announcing the end of the world. Day before yesterday. Eh, Phil-baby, howzit hangin’?

  Low and twisted, Fingers. Feeling bad.

  That frail in the weeds who come in here one night, the one with the sweet gams . . .

  She’s dead.

  Yeah, I heard.

  You heard? It just happened.

  Word gets around. He handed you a mezzroll and you lit up. That night the widow showed up slumming here, you offered her one. She only shuddered and stared down at her hands (probably; it was dark, she was wearing her veil) and said: Please, Mr. Noir. You don’t know who I am. Just as Fingers was staring now at his hands. Long bony fingers with dark yellow tobacco stains and blackened nails, hard sharp knuckles like rows of little brass studs. Sorry, man.

  I was down at the morgue, Fingers. The body’s gone missing. I gotta find it.

  Don’t do it, cat. Forget her.

  Can’t, Fingers, you said, sucking on your spliff. I fucked up. I owe her that much. What can you tell me?

  Nuthin’. I ain’t even supposed to be talkin’ to you.

  What do you mean, you’re not supposed to talk to me? Who says?

  Fingers hesitated, looked over his shoulder. A pale glow in the far corner faded away like a light being dimmed. Nobody. I just know, man.

  Who’s your sideman?

  Don’t know. Picked him up tonight.

  He looks like someone smashed his face in.