Angels and Visitations

by Neil Gaiman

  Wonder what kind of summer fruit. Raspberries? Gooseberries?

  Go and check with encyclopedia.

  Discover that the gooseberry may be white, yellow, green or red, and may have a prickly, hairy or smooth surface. Doesn’t say a word about whether it’s a summer fruit or not. Expect Alan Coren knows about that kind of thing, what with Gardeners’ Question Time and everything . . .

  Doesn’t say a lot for her buttocks.

  Give up.

  Decide to write review from memory. Fake it convincingly. Right. No problem. This philosophy professor, wants to be a private eye, name of, name of, anyway, he’s written all these books on Kierkegaard or possibly it was Wittgenstein, one of that mob, honest to goodness philosophy professor, earns good money, married with children, gives it all up, becomes a San Francisco private dick.

  Was vaguely expecting something tacky, like this book I read once, forget the title, My Life as a Private Eye Including Fifteen Surefire Ways to Cheat on Your Spouse Without Getting Caught, something like that, or else maybe subChandler stuff, “Dame walks into my office, figure that’d get Descartes to come up with a new Proposition, sent my pulse rate over the speed limit, buttocks like thrusting gooseberries,” and was pleasantly surprised it’s neither.

  Not tacky.

  Philosophy professor finds true happiness as penniless Sam Spade. Reads The Maltese Falcon a lot between cases. Good writer. Finds thirty thousand dollars of drug money under the floorboards of attic. Gets kidnapped child out of India. Tries to save fitted-up Oriental from electric chair. Or gas chamber. One of those. Forget my own head next. Decides detection is Real Life. Never happier. Photo on the cover of the book: crinkly eyes, good man in a tough spot, copy of The Maltese Falcon open on his lap.

  Wish I could remember his name. Begins with L, or S. Or P, maybe.

  Best sections are long, boring bits, sitting in cars waiting for people who never show, pissing into styrofoam cups. Convinced me I didn’t want to be a private dick. Glad someone else is doing it, though.

  Good private eye could find anything. Even copy of Gumshoe with gold cover. Probably look in most obvious place. Probably just sit down at desk, casual glance to the left, look over to stack of books writer’s promised to review at some time or other . . .

  Shit.

  Gold cover.

  Author’s name Josiah Thompson. Book called Gumshoe, though; remembered that much. Says on the cover “The best book ever written about the life of the private eye.”

  I’d go along with that.

  THE CASE OF THE FOUR AND TWENTY BLACKBIRDS

  I SAT in my office, nursing a glass of hooch and idly cleaning my automatic Outside the rain fell steadily, like it seems to do most of the time m our fair city, whatever the tourist board says. Hell, I didn’t care. I’m not on the tourist board. I’m a private dick, and one of the best, although you wouldn’t have known it; the office was crumbling, the rent was unpaid and the hooch was my last.

  Things are tough all over.

  To cap it all the only client I’d had all week never showed up on the street corner where I’d waited for him. He said it was going to be a big job, but now I’d never know: he kept a prior appointment in the morgue.

  So when the dame walked into my office I was sure my luck had changed for the better.

  “What are you selling, lady?”

  She gave me a look that would have induced heavy breathing in a pumpkin and which shot my heartbeat up to three figures. She had long blonde hair and a figure that would have made Thomas Aquinas forget his vows. I forgot all mine about never taking cases from dames.

  “What would you say to some of the green stuff?” she asked in a husky voice, getting straight to the point.

  “Continue, sister.” I didn’t want her to know how bad I needed the dough, so I held my hand in front of my mouth; it doesn’t help if a client sees you salivate.

  She opened her purse and flipped out a photograph—a glossy eight by ten. “Do you recognise that man?”

  In my business you know who people are. “Yeah.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know that too, sweetheart. It’s old news. It was an accident.”

  Her gaze went so icy you could have chipped it into cubes and cooled a cocktail with it. “My brother’s death was no accident.”

  I raised an eyebrow—you need a lot of arcane skills in my business—and said “Your brother, eh?” Funny, she hadn’t struck me as the type that had brothers.

  “I’m Jill Dumpty”

  “So your brother was Humpty Dumpty?”

  “And he didn’t fall off that wall, Mr Horner. He was pushed.”

  Interesting, if true. Dumpty had his finger in most of the crooked pies in town; I could think of five guys who would have preferred to see him dead than alive without trying.

  Without trying too hard, anyway.

  “You seen the cops about this?”

  “Nah. The King’s Men aren’t interested in anything to do with his death. They say they did all they could do in trying to put him together again after the fall.”

  I leaned back in my chair.

  “So what’s it to you? Why do you need me?”

  “I want you to find the killer, Mr Horner. I want him brought to justice. I want him to fry like an egg. Oh—and one other little thing,” she added, lightly. “Before he died Humpty had a small manila envelope full of photographs he was meant to be sending me. Medical photos. I’m a trainee nurse, and I need them to pass my finals.”

  I inspected my nails, then looked up at her face, taking in a handful of waist and Easter-egg bazonkas on the way up. She was a looker, although her cute nose was a little on the shiny side. “I’ll take the case. Seventy-five a day and two hundred bonus for results.”

  She smiled; my stomach twisted around once and went into orbit. “You get another two hundred if you get me those photographs. I want to be a nurse real bad.” Then she dropped three fifties on my desktop.

  I let a devil-may-care grin play across my rugged face. “Say, sister, how about letting me take you out for dinner? I just came into some money.”

  She gave an involuntary shiver of anticipation and muttered something about having a thing about midgets, so I knew I was onto a good thing. Then she gave me a lopsided smile that would have made Albert Einstein drop a decimal point. “First find my brother’s killer, Mr Horner. And my photographs. Then we can play.”

  She closed the door behind her. Maybe it was still raining but I didn’t notice. I didn’t care.

  § § §

  There are parts of town the tourist board don’t mention. Parts of town where the police travel in threes if they travel at all. In my line of work you get to visit them more than is healthy. Healthy is never.

  He was waiting for me outside Luigi’s. I slid up behind him, my rubber-soled shoes soundless on the shiny wet sidewalk.

  “Hiya, Cock.”

  He jumped and spun around; I found myself gazing up into the muzzle of a .45. “Oh, Horner.” He put the gun away. “Don’t call me Cock. I’m Bernie Robin to you, Short-stuff, and don’t you forget it.”

  “Cock Robin is good enough for me, Cock. Who killed Humpty Dumpty?”

  He was a strange-looking bird, but you can’t be choosy in my profession. He was the best underworld lead I had.

  “Let’s see the colour of your money.”

  I showed him a fifty.

  “Hell,” he muttered. “It’s green. Why can’t they make puce or mauve money for a change?” He took it, though. “All I know is that the Fat Man had his finger in a lot of pies.”

  “So?”

  “One of those pies had four and twenty blackbirds in it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do I hafta spell it out for you? I . . . Ughh . . .” He crumpled to the sidewalk, an arrow protruding from his back. Cock Robin wasn’t going to be doing any more chirping.

  § § §

  Sergeant O’Grady looked down at the body, then he lo
oked down at me. “Faith and begorrah, to be sure,” he said. “If it isn’t Little Jack Horner himself.”

  “I didn’t kill Cock Robin, Sarge.”

  “And I suppose that the call we got down at the station telling us you were going to be rubbing the late Mr. Robin out. Here. Tonight. Was just a hoax?”

  “If I’m the killer, where are my arrows?” I thumbed open a pack of gum and started to chew. “It’s a frame.”

  He puffed on his meerschaum and then put it away, and idly played a couple of phrases of the William Tell Overture on his oboe. “Maybe. Maybe not. But you’re still a suspect. Don’t leave town. And Horner . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dumpty’s death was an accident. That’s what the coroner said. That’s what I say. Drop the case.”

  I thought about it. Then I thought of the money, and the girl. “No dice, Sarge.”

  He shrugged. “It’s your funeral.” He said it like it probably would be.

  I had a funny feeling like he could be right.

  “You’re out of your depth, Horner. You’re playing with he big boys. And it ain’t healthy.”

  From what I could remember of my schooldays he was correct. Whenever I played with the big boys I always wound up having the stuffing beaten out of me. But how did O’Grady—how could O’Grady have known that? Then I remembered something else.

  O’Grady was the one that used to beat me up the most.

  § § §

  It was time for what we in the profession call “legwork”. I made a few discreet enquiries around town, but found out nothing about Dumpty that I didn’t know already.

  Humpty Dumpty was a bad egg. I remembered him when he was new in town, a smart young animal trainer with a nice line in training mice to run up clocks. He went to the bad pretty fast though; gambling, drink, women, it’s the same story all over. A bright young kid thinks that the streets of Nurseryland are paved with gold, and by the time he finds out otherwise it’s much too late.

  Dumpty started off with extortions and robbery on a small scale—he trained up a team of spiders to scare little girls away from their curds and whey, which he’d pick up and sell on the black market. Then he moved onto blackmail—the nastiest game. We crossed paths once, when I was hired by this young society kid—let’s call him Georgie Porgie—to recover some compromising snaps of him kissing the girls and making them cry. I got the snaps, but I learned it wasn’t healthy to mess with the Fat Man. And I don’t make the same mistakes twice. Hell, in my line of work I can’t afford to make the same mistakes once.

  It’s a tough world out there. I remember when Little Bo Peep first came to town . . . but you don’t want to hear my troubles. If you’re not dead yet, you’ve got troubles of your own.

  I checked out the newspaper files on Dumpty’s death. One minute he was sitting on a wall, the next he was in pieces at the bottom. All the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men were on the scene in minutes, but he needed more than first aid. A medic named Foster was called—a friend of Dumpty’s from his Gloucester days—although I don’t know of anything a doc can do when you’re dead.

  Hang on a second—Dr Foster!

  I got that old feeling you get in my line of work. Two little brain cells rub together the right way and in seconds you’ve got a twenty-four-carat cerebral fire on your hands.

  You remember the client who didn’t show—the one I’d waited for all day on the street corner? An accidental death. I hadn’t bothered to check it out—I can’t afford to waste time on clients who aren’t going to pay for it.

  Three deaths, it seemed. Not one.

  I reached for the telephone and rang the police station. “This is Horner,” I told the desk man. “Lemme speak to Sergeant O’Grady.”

  There was a crackling and he came on the line. “O’Grady speaking.”

  “It’s Horner.”

  “Hi, Little Jack.” That was just like O’Grady. He’d been kidding me about my size since we were kids together. “You finally figured out that Dumpty’s death was an accident?”

  “Nope. I’m now investigating three deaths. The Fat Man’s, Bernie Robin’s and Dr Foster’s.”

  “Foster the plastic surgeon? His death was an accident.”

  “Sure. And your mother was married to your father.”

  There was a pause. “Horner, if you phoned me up just to talk dirty, I’m not amused.”

  “Okay, wise guy. If Humpty Dumpty’s death was an accident and so was Dr Foster’s, tell me just one thing.

  “Who killed Cock Robin?”

  I don’t ever get accused of having too much imagination, but there’s one thing I’d swear to. I could hear him grinning over the phone as he said: “You did, Horner. And I’m staking my badge on it.”

  The line went dead.

  § § §

  My office was cold and lonely, so I wandered down to Joe’s Bar for some companionship and a drink or three.

  Four and twenty blackbirds. A dead doctor. The Fat Man. Cock Robin . . . Heck, this case had more holes in it than a Swiss cheese and more loose ends than a torn string vest. And where did the juicy Miss Dumpty come into it? Jack and Jill—we’d make a great team. When this was all over perhaps we could go off together to Louie’s little place on the hill, where no-one’s interested in whether you got a marriage license or not. “The Pail of Water”, that was the name of the joint.

  I called over the bartender. “Hey. Joe.”

  “Yeah, Mr Horner?” He was polishing a glass with a rag that had seen better days as a shirt.

  “Did you ever meet the Fat Man’s sister?”

  He scratched at his cheek. “Can’t say as I did. His sister . . . huh? Hey—the Fat Man didn’t have a sister.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Sure I’m sure. It was the day my sister had her first kid—I told the Fat Man I was an uncle. He gave me this look and says, ‘Ain’t no way I’ll ever be an uncle, Joe. Got no sisters or brother, nor no other kinfolk neither.’”

  If the mysterious Miss Dumpty wasn’t his sister, who was she?

  “Tell me, Joe. Didja ever see him in here with a dame—about so high, shaped like this?” My hands described a couple of parabolas. “Looks like a blonde love goddess.”

  He shook his head. “Never saw him with any dames. Recently he was hanging around with some medical guy, but the only thing he ever cared about was those crazy birds and animals of his.”

  I took a swig of my drink. It nearly took the roof of my mouth off. “Animals? I thought he’d given all that up.”

  “Naw—couple weeks back he was in here with a whole bunch of blackbirds he was training to sing ‘Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before Mmm Mmm.’”

  “Mmm Mmm?”

  “Yeah. I got no idea who.”

  I put my drink down. A little of it spilt on the counter, and I watched it strip the varnish. “Thanks, Joe. You’ve been a big help.” I handed him a ten dollar bill. “For information received,’ I said, adding, “Don’t spend it all at once.”

  In my profession it’s making little jokes like that that keeps you sane.

  § § §

  I had one contact left. I found a pay phone and called her number.

  “Old Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard—Cake Shop and Licensed Soup Kitchen.”

  “It’s Horner, Ma.”

  “Jack? It ain’t safe for me to talk to you.”

  “For old time’s sake, sweetheart. You owe me a favour.” Some two-bit crooks had once knocked off the Cupboard, leaving it bare. I’d tacked them down and returned the cakes and soup.

  “. . . Okay. But I don’t like it.”

  “You know everything that goes on around here on the food front, Ma. What’s the significance of a pie with four and twenty trained blackbirds in it?”

  She whistled, long and low. “You really don’t know?”

  “I wouldn’t be asking you if I did.”

  “You should read the Court pages of the papers next time, su
gar. Jeez. You are out of your depth.”

  “C’mon, Ma. Spill it.”

  “It so happens that that particular dish was set before the King a few weeks back. . . . Jack? Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here ma’am.” I said, quietly. “All of a sudden a lot of things are starting to make sense.” I put down the phone.

  It was beginning to look like Little Jack Horner had pulled out a plum from this pie.

  It was raining, steady and cold.

  I phoned a cab.

  Quarter of an hour later one lurched out of the darkness.

  “You’re late.”

  “So complain to the tourist board.”

  I climbed in the back, wound down the window, and lit a cigarette.

  And I went to see the Queen.

  § § §

  The door to the private part of the palace was locked. It’s the part that the public don’t get to see. But I’ve never been public, and the little lock hardly slowed me up. The door to the private apartments with the big red heart on it was unlocked, so I knocked and walked straight in.

  The Queen of Hearts was alone, standing in front of the mirror, holding a plate of jam tarts with one hand, powdering her nose with the other. She turned, saw me, and gasped, dropping the tarts.

  “Hey, Queenie,” I said. “Or would you feel more comfortable if I called you Jill?”

  She was still a good-looking slice of dame, even without the blonde wig.

  “Get out of here!” she hissed.

  “I don’t think so, toots.” I sat down on the bed. “Let me spell a few things out for you.”

  “Go ahead.” She reached behind her for a concealed alarm button. I let her press it. I’d cut the wires on my way in—in my profession there’s no such thing as being too careful.

  “Let me spell a few things out for you.”

  “You just said that.”

  “I’ll tell this my way, lady.”

  I lit a cigarette and a thin plume of blue smoke drifted heavenwards, which was where I was going if my hunch was wrong. Still, I’ve learned to trust hunches.