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

by C. J. Henderson

  Suarez’s apartment was small, big enough for a single beat cop. Rand was right on one account. Eddie was looking for a fast path to a desk, suit, and tie. He had plans for a future that included a condo across town and a garage.

  The few books he kept had nothing on witch fire, not that he thought they would. There was nothing in the dictionary or thesaurus. Google brought up bad movies, comics and Amazon links. Jackson said Nardi was a nut job, but he seemed to be the only one with a clue.

  “It’s not your case, Eddie.” Suarez said to himself. “But if you can pull something out of your ass, the chief might take notice.” He paced from kitchen to bedroom and back. “Call Nardi or don’t?” He sat at the table and moved the cards around like puzzle pieces. One of the cards flipped over, and there was a handwritten word on the back. Product. Suarez flipped over the rest of the cards and arranged them into form until they made a sentence.

  Witch Fire is the product of a coven’s ceremony to bring back lost members. The is the and of a were together on cards. He read the cards out loud, then to himself.

  “Witches?” Suarez paced around his apartment some more. He thought back to the groups fleeing from the initial “blast” when he approached. Did they know something? They had to. The only one who talked was Rothington, and there was really nothing there to go on. Suarez jumped at the knock at his door. He checked the time on his cell phone, 2 a.m. He hurried to the living room and got out his pistol and walked heel to toe to the door.

  Suarez opened the door after looking through the curtain. It was Nardi.

  “Kind of late, don’t you think?” Nardi smirked, seeing the gun in Eddie’s hand.

  “If you had figured out the clues faster it wouldn’t be so late.” Nardi walked passed Suarez into the tiny apartment and appraised it in seconds. “Quaint place. Decent location close to the station.”

  “No, please come in.” Suarez closed the door and put the pistol back in its holster in the living room. “Can I offer you a beverage? I might have a couple colas in the fridge.”

  “No thanks. I figured you would have looked that first card over when you found it. Or the second and third cards.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Nardi? I was thinking about sleep.”

  “You’re as wide awake as I am. I can see it in you.” Nardi pulled out a chair at the table and offered one to Suarez. “Look, kid. You’re bright, energetic and do almost double the work of your partner. Right now across town another one of those holes is being scooped out of the ground.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I’m going to drive you there, right now.”

  - - -

  Suarez got out of Nardi’s car and there it was. It was still cooling and he rushed over to it. The edges were slightly lit, like a dying flashlight. He put his hand close to it: there was no heat, no fumes, and no debris.

  “Believe me now?”

  Suarez turned, hearing a faint whispering between two buildings. He drew his gun and walked over toward it. He hadn’t been paying attention during the drive. Nardi didn’t chat much on the way over. They were near the waterfront. The hole was about the same size as the last. He leaned against the side of a building and looked down the narrow walkway.

  “They’re long gone, kid.”

  “I have to call this in.”

  “The hell you do. I have my client’s interest. Then you can call it in.” Suarez walked back over. There was another ceramic pipe at the bottom. The top sheared off with a curve, almost laser-precise. It had a slight glow to it as well.

  “Do I have to go down?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “This is breaking so many laws. Not including tampering with a crime scene.”

  “It’s not a scene ’til you call it in.” Suarez checked the edge of it to make sure the sides really weren’t hot. He climbed down easily, doing his best not to disturb anything. The pipe section he could see was empty. Even using the light on his phone, it was all darkness. He checked the pipe for a date stamp or any kind of a symbol to disclose when it might have been laid.

  “What do you see?” Nardi asked.

  “The pipe is bigger than I thought originally. Might be big enough for something to crawl through.”

  “What about the inside of the pipe?”

  “Nothing I’m touching without a pair of gloves.”

  A pair of blue powder-free nitrile gloves dropped into the hole next to his feet. “Guy is prepared if nothing else.” Suarez put the gloves on and reached inside. He imagined fat gray and black rats living in the pipe, being so close to the sea. Then it raced to foot-long spiders living in the darkness, that lived off rats in the pipe.

  The pipe was empty. No sticks, no sewage, and no rocks. The fingertips of the gloves had a slight greasy residue to them. Suarez held his hand up to Nardi to get a better look.

  “Get them off, leave them inside out.” Nardi helped him climb out of the hole. They both spun at the sounds of approaching footsteps. Suarez had his gun out before his next breath. A man in dark clothes stepped out of the shadows as if they had borne him.

  “Detective, Officer.” It was Rothington. Alice was nowhere to be seen. Nardi slipped both gloves into a plastic bag.

  “What you doing, Nardi? That’s evidence.”

  “Of what?” Rothington asked. “Of a young cop who climbed into a hole?”

  “You find what you wanted?” Nardi asked.

  “Mostly,” Rothington said. “Once more we should be through.”

  Nardi called to the kid, headed toward his car. “Call it in and haul your ass over here.”

  - - -

  “Mind telling me where we’re going?” Suarez asked. He hoped Nardi would be a little chatty this time around; nothing like evidence tampering to bring two people closer. The headlights were off. Nardi was following a large red car, might have been a Cadillac. It was hard to tell.

  “Kid,” Nardi started.

  “You can call me Eddie. You know my name.”

  “The force and I differ on opinions.”

  “You take all the oddball cases.” Suarez cleared his throat.

  “Been talking to Jackson, I see.” The Cadillac stopped ahead. The driver turned to a shadowy passenger Suarez hadn’t seen before. “I take on cases that other agencies are afraid of. People seek me out because of my security people.”

  “How do you explain willfully going on this escapade?”

  Rothington turned toward the university; Nardi followed.

  “You have to accept things that may be off the usual pathways, Eddie. Things in Arkham aren’t always what they seem.”

  “Like large chunks of streets disappearing with no cause?”

  “That’s a start.”

  They stopped in the student parking lot outside the university. Nardi killed the engine. Only Rothington got out of the car. His shady passenger did not. There were several other cars there waiting. Rothington had been busy on the phone, calling people, it seemed. The light poles in the lot snapped off, and the other cars opened up. Their lights exposed maybe a dozen men and women, some of whom Suarez recognized from the first incident.

  “Stay in the car.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Because I see something in kid.”

  Nardi got out of the car. Suarez watched him walk to the group of gathered people. He pointed back once, letting them know there was a spectator. He heard raised whispers and angry hushed voices. Their spectator was a cop who had interviewed some of them, or tried. Nardi gave him the thumbs-up.

  Suarez sat in the car like a good minion, thought about calling the station or Jackson at the very least. Someone had to know what was going on besides him. Even if he used this as a boon to the chief to take the detective’s exam early, it’d still make him a witness to a crime. Suarez took out his phone.

  The others gathered in a circle and chalked an outline around them, each one of them drawing a segment until the circle was complete. Nardi
stood in the shadows, waiting. That bastard knew what was going to happen. He did say he had better contacts with the cops. But all this ceremony and magic? The circle was completed; the interior car light blinked once and went dead. Then his cell phone did the same.

  “No way,” Suarez whispered. The chalk outline started to glow, first green, then red, and then gold. “Rothington was telling the truth.” The brightness grew and the colors circulated until there was a wall of color. The brighter it got, the further Nardi slunk into the shadows of the lot. The colors merged and flared. Suarez covered his eyes. If the phone worked it would have been one hell of a video for evidence. At its peak, Suarez saw the colors dancing behind his eyelids.

  When his vision cleared to murky, Nardi was headed back toward the car. There was a glowing outline of a hole in the parking lot and where there were ten coven members, there were now nine. Nardi opened the door and the interior light blinked on. Suarez checked his phone, all was working.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “Kid. Eddie,” Nardi corrected himself. “You check out that hole and it will be the same thing. Ceramic pipe, hole cut out of it. Big enough to crawl through.” Nardi started his car. “They’re looking for something. Someone to be specific. Think of the Underground Railroad, only for witches. This pipeline was a way to safely get witches out of Arkham to the coast and on a boat away from here.” Nardi put on his directional and pulled out of the university parking lot.

  “Well, they found the pipeline.”

  “Imagine crawling miles through almost complete pitch black, in a damp pipe with god knows what living in it.” Suarez slid his phone back in his pocket.

  “What happened to the other guy? Ten people got in that circle, nine walked away.”

  “Smart kid. The price of that piece of magic.”

  “So they sacrificed one of their own to find what?”

  “The remains of the coven leader from the 1850s.” Nardi pulled into the parking lot outside Suarez’s building and killed the engine. He took out a fresh business card with no scribbles or words on the back; this time he checked. “Throw away those other cards, destroy the evidence. Leave nothing.

  “Figure out what you want to do, Suarez. I don’t usually recruit from the cops. Get paid by the job, insurance is shit.” Nardi chuckled. “And you get to see my smiling face most every day.” Suarez got out of the car and leaned in through the open window.

  “Chief is never going to believe this.”

  “No he’s not. And I’ve known him for years.” Suarez stood and folded his arms on the roof of the car. “Don’t think too long, Eddie. They’re going to trace the call for that second hole back to you and then they’ll find the third one. Best they’ll do is bust you for obstruction, and I can get that taken off your record.”

  “With magic?” Suarez scoffed.

  “No, with money and whiskey.”

  “What time do I start?”

  BONANZA

  Sam Gafford

  “Get out of Arkham and stay out!”

  The message was plain. But, just in case I hadn’t completely ‘gotten it’, several fists drove the point home. So I ran out of Arkham and slid down to Providence, R.I., where I climbed back inside a bottle.

  I’d had nobody to blame but myself. I had been a pretty decent cop in Arkham, more or less. I tried to keep my nose clean but had a few problems. When I left the force, by mutual decision, it was Tony Balnco who brought me into the Arkham Detective Agency as a stringer. That was a few years ago. A lot had happened since then. Most of it pretty bad. But like I said, it was mostly my fault.

  Like most things, it started with a woman. I’d been doing pretty good there for a while. Kept my head down and followed orders. I stayed away from the booze and the bets and even cut down on the smokes. I grew up on the north side of Arkham and never had a very good life and didn’t expect one. A guy like me, we mainly just hope for a life we can put up with that doesn’t make you want to swallow your gun.

  Her name was Anna Eliza Cordell and … well, it got pretty messy. I met her in connection with a case I was working on involving someone selling occult junk on the black market. Balnco had sent me to check with the usual fences who handled ‘special’ merchandise, and the trail had led back to her. She was something else, all right. Bright red hair, green eyes, and a figure that was full in all the places I liked. It didn’t take long for her to turn me, and before I knew it, I was working for her and ‘acquiring’ items from various places in our files. I told myself that I was in love with her, but it was more like an obsession. I came to need to be near her almost as much as I needed to breathe or, in my earlier years, as much as I needed that drink.

  I would have killed for her. I dunno, maybe I did. Some things are still a little fuzzy in places.

  Balnco had cut me loose when they figured out I was using the Agency to get leads on hot items. There was an uncomfortable meeting with Nardi in his office where it was made plain that I wasn’t welcome anymore, and that it would be in my best interest to disclose what I pinched and where the stuff ended up. I gave up the list of items, but not Anna. I pinned it on one of the less likeable fences, but I don’t think they believed me. I walked out with my skin intact but nothing else—except for Anna.

  I did not get the warm welcome I expected.

  Anna was not happy, and she made that very plain to me, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Come to find out that Anna had been syphoning all of the items to someone else. Not your ordinary fence, either. This was “Big Phil” McGurk, who was the head of a lot of the rackets in Arkham. I knew him by rep, and it was a bad rep, at that. Of course, I didn’t know that at first. I found that out when I showed up at Anna’s place, and “Big Phil” was there with a couple of his goons. Turned out that “Big Phil” wasn’t happy about losing his inside man at the detective agency, and he was concerned that I might have given Nardi their names. It took a lot of punches and blood loss to convince them I had kept my mouth shut. I’d thought I was doing it all for Anna, but somewhere during the beating she came into the room. After she said a few words, I realized how stupid I’d been. I’d been used.

  When they finally cut me loose and McGurk had warned me to get out of town, I could’ve dropped a dime on them to Nardi or even Balnco, but I didn’t. I couldn’t risk Anna being brought into it, even after everything she’d done, so I kept my mouth shut and slunk down to Providence with my tail between my legs.

  Like I said, some things are fuzzy. I was out of it for a while and flopped at the old YMCA off the highway. Sometimes I did the odd muscle job for the local guys so I’d have enough money for the booze, but I don’t remember a lot from that time. I do remember the phone call, though.

  I’d been sitting in the lobby, nursing a hangover and wondering if I had enough money left for a pint of Everclear, when the desk clerk called my name. He was a squirrely guy named Howie, but he kept himself to himself and didn’t get mixed up in anyone else’s business. He held up the phone with his thin arm and pointed at me. “You got a call,” he said and left the receiver on the counter, while he went back into his cubbyhole of an office.

  I grunted into the phone and heard the voice I never thought I’d hear again. It was Anna, of course, and she was scared. Just like that, I was stone sober, and the fog lifted from my mush of a brain.

  “Mike, thank God I found you! I need help; something bad is going to happen. Please, please come help me!”

  This wasn’t the Anna I knew. The calm, manipulative Anna. This was some little girl, scared shitless and about to break down.

  “Anna, calm down,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She cried and sobbed into the phone. I wish I knew if it was real or not. “I can’t talk about it on the phone. It’s Phil. He’s looking for something real bad, and I’m scared what he might do with it. He … he’s beaten me up pretty bad, Mike, I need your help.”

  I didn’t ask any of the questions that I should have
asked. Like how she found me and why she thought I’d do anything for her after the way she sold me out, but I didn’t, and she probably knew I wouldn’t anyway.

  All I said was, “I’m on my way.”

  “Don’t come to the house. I’m not there. Meet me at the old Derby Motel out on Route 63. I’m in number 12.”

  I hung up the phone and walked down to Atwells Avenue. I knew there’d be a good chance of boosting a car from one of the tourists on Federal Hill, and I was right. I found an old Ford without all the fancy electronics on one of the side streets and within minutes was speeding north on the highway. I wasn’t thinking. I was just moving, reacting. Anna had called and, even though I should have known better, I came running.

  Just like she knew I would.

  A couple of hours later, I was pulling into the parking lot of the Derby Motel. It was a fleabag place, usually the haven of junkies and hookers. Not the kind of place I’d expected Anna to even know about, but there were a lot of blank spaces in Anna’s past that I only suspected. The late fall dusk had already begun to stretch out the shadows by that time, and there were only a few cars in the lot. None of them looked like anything Anna would drive.

  I knocked on the door for number 12 and heard someone moving inside. Not for the first time, I regretted pawning my gun. The door flung open and Anna threw herself on me, while pulling me inside.

  She was frantic, almost manic, grabbing me, holding me tight, and screaming some type of gibberish. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Her hair was disheveled and she smelled as if she hadn’t bathed in days. I pushed her back and slapped her hard and immediately regretted it. I grabbed her and held her tight against me as she cried and punched and scratched at me until she finally used up all her energy and just sobbed.

  Silently, I picked her up and took her to the bathroom. I ran a hot bath for her and, slowly, delicately, took off her clothes and placed her in the tub. Anna didn’t resist. All she did was whimper when I ran the soap over the many-colored bruises on her back and arms. She’d been worked over good, all right, by someone who knew how to hurt without leaving permanent damage. I washed her hair, covered her with a thin excuse for a towel and put her to bed. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.