Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson

by C. J. Henderson

  “Please don’t,” the boy whimpers in the second before the gun’s report. A hint of red stains the ground. Nardi howls in rage and agony as we run down Washington, find the dog again. With the artifact secured in our canine mouth, we make our way to the morgue. Lots of vessels there, for the trip back home. Back to good old Blightey and the Bureau, where men of knowing will poke and prod at the Bible and then put it someplace where no one will ever see it again.

  From time to time, we catch the faintest memory of Nardi, cursing us through the fog of the past. Cursing Nerea Yeboa, who made him a murderer. Cursing himself, for not being able to hold his own against us. In time, he will forgive us. After all, Arkham will need us again, when doomsday looms once more.

  FAMILY TRADITION

  Edward Morris

  1.) Call

  P.I.s never make much money. There’s always that bond. But what we do at my gig is more of a curse than an angle, really. Except that we’re good at it. I learned it on 911 Dispatch even before I worked Homicide with that mordant, precise gore-crow Galtoni and, eventually, the human juggernaut, the unsinkable Frankie Nardi. And poor Tony, man. What can anyone do?

  I never thought we could replace Tony Balnco. We couldn’t. There was no coming back for the fourth founding member of our little Sunday School we have going here. Don’t get me wrong, Balnco was back. In bed. With psych meds as heavy as the dope. No coming back. You come by and visit that. That doesn’t come back to work

  Tony’s permanent stand-in’s name is John, and he speaks the truth. But the truth in New York is not the same as it is up here. Up here, the truth is often too damned weird.

  Det. Johnny Thunstone’s what they call Big and Tall, like his Tennessean grandfather, with close-set eyes as black as anthracite that get very bright very fast, and a bristling mustache of similar hue that’s somehow not at all ironic or out of place on his chiseled granite mug.

  Thunstone’s a negotiator, not a thumper, when it comes to most things. Like many Southerners I’ve known, he oozes class. I knew that from the first, back when we were just Nardi Security (with no fancy-schmancy name, no desperate Arkham housewives pointing me toward the cold spot in the cellar, and not by the hand …)

  Back in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, when the Haitians and Dominicans had that Obeah gang-war that not even the Post would mention (it was all over a book. I don’t want to so much as say the book’s name, not even now). Thunstone was the mop for all that blood, and he did it with erudite gravity under fire of several different kinds. That was our first case of this kind, back in the day.

  Johnny’s a fair man, but hard in the end where it matters. Some things are irreducible to him, but only the ones that should stay in the dark. Johnny said his pappy taught him that when his namesake only came up to the great investigator’s knee.

  But Frankie and Johnny were out at Lombardo’s for lunch when I fielded the latest client. They always take forever over there. Something about old dudes from New York and good Italian food, like Frankie’s version of the Tea Ceremony in Japan. You have to drag Thunstone away, too. I’ve seen those Godfather flicks. I think I get it.

  They’re cued to use those places to talk business, but they can range out and take their time because there’s seven million courses and bread and wine and you can take nine hours like Da Boss takes with everything. Gives me time to catch up on everything else. We tango, Frankie and me. Our instincts tango, and gods help me I’ve become more like him than I ever wanted to be (please don’t tell him that, or I’ll have to muss ya up).

  Every detective has their own different learning style. Our newest recruit … who is not all that new, and kind of makes me feel like a new recruit in my own eyes (he’d have none of such a thing) socialized through books, when he was growing up in the Ozarks, and learned so much about our profession from them (hell, his daddy kept everything the legendary Jules de Grandin ever annotated) that he’s always coming up with the loopiest cross-references to some Joseph Campbell-difficult bit of arcane lore that works perfectly in a crisis.

  Sounds funny. It’s not. Johnny’s a tank. Makes me feel right safe, as he’d put it himself. I’m so glad we have him, up here far away from the comparative sanity of the worst bloodbath in Manhattan, where we shovel insanity and rake death and skewer our jack o’lanterns on the spikes of the proverbial white picket fence.

  We New Yorkers have a certain indifference to the awful. What we see anywhere, the worst of the worst … Somewhere, there is an antecedent in our own borough. We have a corner on the worst, and the weirdest. Or we think we do. Enough to charge into darker ones, where the angles don’t quite add up, and sometimes come out another side we didn’t see.

  In the beginning, when I was just working Homicide, bucking for a promotion (and moonlighting a desk for Nardi’s new private security company until such time as Tons of Fun thought I was ready for more), the whole idea gelled in my head in many parts. Police psychics. Ghostbusters 1 and 2 and that Lord of Illusions comedy with Scott Spatula, back in the day. A pro ghost-hunter I once knew who used old, janky electronics for his work, ones whose various frequencies were sometimes sufficient to clear a house, and the stories that Mickey the Bug (his street-name in Upper Manhattan) told when you got a few beers down that gutterpunk’s neck and reminded him.

  Stuff like that. Hunters of the Wily Cold Spot, priests of the backmasked recording and the Kirlian photograph. In the beginning, I didn’t believe. I hadn’t seen. Oh, seen and seen.

  In a way, it’s all procedure. Even bringing Madame Renee along behind police tape. When people see what she does, and how she does it, they tend to shut up (I had no idea where she was, just then, either. Someplace not precisely On the Clock, or she would have been flitting around).

  I had one in the Inbox. Thunstone spoke redneck. But this one was all mine. Because I’m lucky like that. Specifically, this big bridge-and-tunnel local in a mesh-backed baseball cap reading PENNZOIL and a tan denim Carrhart work-jacket that had a whole bunch of stains I didn’t want to know anything about.

  Whateley, Dennis W. was standing there in the waiting room when I got back, looking kind of like what happened when Wolverine met Jerry Reed and yomped through a mile of pig shit or something.

  Big beast of a guy, a moose with a goat’s eyes, knuckles that might drag on the ground, and a prognathous jaw, like Rondo Hatton in an old movie, that you could almost make out behind the nearly plaited ginger scruff of beard that continued into the collar of his red flannel shirt. His plain warehouse-worker-type glasses were thick enough to start a fire with a sunbeam.

  “Junior got Daddy,” he twanged, wheezing in something that was almost English. “Junior got Daddy and he ate him dead. I … I think we got rid of him, but … It’s weird up there now. Suppose we need yuh to come an’ look.”

  “Mark Berkenwald,” I said with a big professional smile. I always get the fun ones first, I thought sourly, reaching for one of the ancient carbons of the Nardi Security Occult Clearance Waiver, World Without End, Hallelujah, Amen, the only one with the correct legalese for the approximate type and depth of shitstorm that something told me had just blown in while our two best brawlers were still out slopping up linguine carbonara when I got back from picking up my takeout breakfast-for-lunch from Paulie’s (don’t ask, I have my idiosyncracies. It’s not morning until I’ve slept).

  It got funnier when Farmer John just kept looking past me and wheezing, muttering, but I made the smile leave my face. It was just for me. I shut the door behind him, and the simple, tasteful Art Deco letters on the plate glass reading ARKHAM DETECTIVE AGENCY turned backward again.

  There was nothing on that glass that read WALK-INS WELCOME, but that was just the client for you. Always Right. Ha. Always out of breath. Always making their lack of prior planning our emergency. Always … Well, okay, not always this. The particulars exploded the stereotypes. Occupational hazard.

  I looked longingly at the take-out carton in my hand. It was warm. They finally reme
mbered how to fry bacon long enough to get the edges crunchy, down at Paulie’s Café on Angell Street. God damn it. The carton left my hand and made it to the desk surface. “Dead,” I repeated. “Tell me more.”

  “Denny Whateley.” He shook my hand perfunctorily, with a firm grip that trembled nonetheless, and felt somehow squicky (there was hand-sanitizer on my desk, also mandatory for the gig. I was glad of that). “I, uh … Not yet. Ruther with everybody in the room. Sorry I … come over funny, there.” He kept looking past me. “I got to … get m’breath, some. Yuh. Whaah’s the old guy? The Dago?”

  My lip began to bleed when I bit the inside, hoping he didn’t hear me snort. “Mr. Nardi will be back to this office in just a few minutes,” I said truthfully. “He’s out on a site. Not long. Coffee?”

  Jedediah McNeckBeard shook himself like a big yard dog at the word, puzzling at it, remembering what it was. “Oh. Yuh. Go down a right smart. Much obliged.”

  I took that as a yes. The Braun at Galtoni’s desk was still hissing. I poured Whateley the bottom-of-the-pot battery acid into one of Galtoni’s mugs, the white one that just says PHUQUE. He took it and wrapped both his hands around it like a little kid with a cup of cocoa.

  It would have almost been endearing, in a strange way. But those eyes. Those goatlike eyes. Like a goat trying to mug like a kid. “So you know the D—er … the Detective … Nardi.”

  “Ayuh.” He was staring at the steel toes of his Herman Survivor boots. Were his eyes really yellow? They seemed to be. “He was up to Dunwich, a few years back, asked me questions about … alla them Delapores. We don’t talk to them. I was a younger man. Glad to help out. For—“ He looked around, mouth pursing. “For the family.”

  “Ah.” I looked back at my laptop, troubled, closing down the IM app before things got any stranger. Work-related or not, for this I would need both my eyes.

  Then the cavalry rolled in, and Improv got easier. That big, familiar Foghorn Leghorn voice boomed up the stairs:

  “We’uns are not gifted in the same manner as your Gypsy gun-molly, Frankie, and you know it just as well as me. We do not have the Sight, the Touch, or the Craft. We have the scientific method and all its applications in forensic detection. Unlike the law and the grand jury, Science can be effectively applied to the para- … I never say ‘super—’ … normal, the paranatural—”

  But Thunstone’s big bull-fiddle voice was drowned out by Da Boss: “BER-KEN-WAAAALD!”

  Detective Frankie Nardi, NYPD Homicide, Retired, shook the new plate glass in its seal when he stormed in like Sherman took Atlanta, with Det. Thunstone lagging way behind, wide-eyed and wary. Frankie was wide the way Johnny was tall. Not morbidly obese, at least not yet, just big. And when he bellowed, every head turned.

  “God damn it, Mark, I said no appointments today!”

  I just beamed. “Detective Nardi will see you now, Mr. Whateley.”

  Denny rose to his full height, which was considerable. “Ayuh. He’s it. ’Lo,’tective.”

  “That means—“ I began translating, but Nardi looked at me as though he wanted to club me like a baby seal. Thunstone came in next, just then, wanting to speak but following the cues of what he saw. Da Boss was already dialed in.

  “Whateley. I knew I hadn’t heard the last of your clan.” He bulled past me to look Farmer John up and down. “I’m billing you from the moment you stepped foot in here. What do you want with me?”

  Even standing near Thunstone and Nardi, Denny still looked big. Scary-big. Was he growing? I pegged his jaw and hands for acromegaly or some pituitary hooraw of like kind, but there was more. The more I sized the big moose up, the more it sank in.

  A waxen mask fell over Whateley’s scruffy, misshapen face. The Coke-bottle glasses could have come off to reveal blank flesh or black sockets. Boy, was he throwing some kind of strange energy-field (we all do, but some pass strange, many times. Renee showed me how to see them, if I look. I just don’t go on and on about it).

  He removed his hat, keeping it in both hands. His western-Masshole twang got thicker when he got emotional. Nardi sized him up more, as he continued, humbly enough, “May we talk … back in your office, just at first? Bit peaked. Questions.”

  “Mark, you—”

  “Already did.” I pointed to the open file on my laptop, back at the desk. It was newly saved. Next week’s Prep sheet for the Thursday gig (a Big Maybe, that one, if the client even followed through with Madame Renee about the initial house-cleansing).

  Nardi harrumphed. That means Thank You. “Mr. Whateley, I do remember you specifically. That scar on your cheek. Hope you fixed your roof. Come on in the back, if you would, please.”

  Denny Whateley and his coffee followed like a big meek German shepherd, and the inner door softly closed (Nardi never could abide slamming doors. None of us could).

  Johnny sighed at me, sinking into the nearest chair. “My Pappy knew a Whateley,” Thunstone scowled. “I … don’t … like..that. Whateley on the other side of the sheets, a Diabolist from Scotland name of Rowley Thorne. They were strung through the Beane side, somehow, you mind, the—”

  “Sawney Beanes,” I got it. “Hold the long pork. Yeah, every headbanger in the Pine Barrens has a copy of some Thorne book or other, and they misquote half of it. Thorne preached about cleansing the blood of the votary and such while he was banging junk in his arm and buggering his way across half of Asia—What. I said something funny?”

  Thunstone was purple. He fumbled out a big silk hanky and honked his big whelk nose. “Berkenwald, my pappy put it in nearly those exact words.” He didn’t have to follow that up with anything. I got it. Part of our profession. Our tradition.

  I heard both of their voices behind the unmarked maple door to Frankie’s office. Thunstone was at his own desk by the window, and his head wouldn’t stop coming up. For a while, we both sat and listened.

  2.) Response

  … It says it right there in that one old book, the one about the worms … No, wait, Olaus Wormius, not De Vermis Mysteriis, don’t you listen to me. Just like in Thucydides, when he said you have to get the sense of what happened, the scope of it, more than the details. Didn’t have n’Fox News or CNN or what have ya, back then.

  Oh. You don’t know Thucydides. Hmmph. All that guff about Athenian Courage and what not.

  Heh. Thought I was just some yokel, you did. I can see it. We didn’t talk that much … and, hell, that was nigh ten years gone, wannit?

  Haw. Hell. City people. Townies. All of you got a kill-switch on your brains when you hear the vulgare eloquentia. Meanwhile, we’ll steal a march on you, sonny-Jim. Yuh. Folks from around here, I mean. Not just book-talk that makes a man smart. Accent don’t make a man stupid. It’s what he says when you listen.

  When you listen.

  Daddy used to tell me I was stupid, but in a different way. Like, “Yuhstupid.” Just like that. But what Daddy meant was to prove him wrong, or he’d take me apart until I did.

  Daddy had Thucydides, and Herodotus, and most of those old Greek and maybe sometimes Roman historians down in the front parlor. He kept the good books in the spare bedroom, and would he take his tool-belt off and lay blue stripes on my ass if I ever went up there? Called me everything but ‘white’ and ‘a boy’ … when I was too young to understand what I was even reading.

  Daddy said he had to scare me into ‘comprehending their gravity.’ He talked like that. But he took me downstairs to whale the tar out of me. “Can’t be gittin’ your blood up around some of them books, Denny. Things happen that ain’t … natural.”

  He let me back there when I’d worked for him for about a year. By then, I was about fourteen. Said I was big enough, then, and stayed out of trouble long enough for him to not hang me on the coathook, the way he used to.

  One time, he put me on that hook for about a week. But I’d paid him mind long enough when we did work on the property that I understood the old man had a certain way of doing things. His own way. His way is j
ust nigh the Highway, yuh see, Took me a few tries to catch on. But in the end, Daddy treated me like just another contractor and not his only boy.

  That’s how you make a good contractor. Good sacrifice, too, or a dedicant. I know. I learned. Daddy learned, in the end, too, didn’t he?

  - - -

  What the ACTUAL fuck? I mouthed at Thunstone. Still typing left-handed at the desktop PC he kept in immaculate condition, yellowed case and all, he cocked his head and considered this. “All those Whateleys,” he muttered back sotto voce. “Born to be hung, most of them. In a tree. For Halloween.”

  Coffee came out my nose. We tended to produce that response with each other a lot when we were bored and snarky. I held up one hand flat, palm out, and jerked my head back at the door. Thunstone chuckled indulgently and nodded, getting back to whatever he was annotating.

  - - -

  “Mr. Whateley, tell me again about what got loose? In your … in your time, sir. Yes, you can smoke in here. Uh … oh. Well, I suppose. I thought that was a cigar …”

  (something inaudible) “I remember that sheet rock me and Daddy hung. Daddy and me and Bobby built that upstairs part on our old barn, the one that’s almost like an apartment, but … ain’t.”

  - - -

  Galtoni came back in. I didn’t need to shoosh him. He was rapt, like a little patent-leather ferret in a preacher’s suit, chewing through that door with his eyes. Thunstone was, too. He’d switched to a steno-pad now, and was glued nowhere else. That old relic desktop was ringingly still.

  - - -

  “That’s where we kept Junior. Junior, well, he kind of got home-schooled, we told the census takers when they come round, and the lady from the Board of Education. Home-schooled on account of he’s got that real violent Ass Purger’s Syndrome on top of autism, I think they said, and I got to damn near wrestle him to the ground and pin his arms back when he has him one of his spells.”