Tar Heel Dead

by Sarah R. Shaber

  “You’re not serious, Gertrude.”

  “Can’t you see it? … A cold night. The riverfront deserted. Mr. Van trussed in his wheelchair with a blanket. Why, that chair would sink like lead! What a terrible thing! That icy water. That poor helpless man.”

  “I just can’t—”

  “Now Frank is free, and he has all those antiques, and nobody cares enough to ask questions. He can sell them and be set up for life.”

  “And he tears up the will,” I suggested, succumbing to Gertrude’s fantasy.

  “Do you know what a Newport blockfront is worth? I’ve been looking it up in the library. A chest like the one we saw in Mr. Van’s apartment was sold for hundreds of thousands at an auction on the East Coast.”

  “But what about the relatives in Pennsylvania?”

  “I’m sure Mr. Van had no relatives—in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.”

  “Well, what do you propose we should do?” I said in exasperation. “Report it to the manager of the building? Notify the police? Tell them we think the man has been murdered because our cat sees his ghost every night at 8:30? We’d look like a couple of middle-aged ladies who are getting a little gek.”

  As a matter of fact, I was beginning to worry about Gertrude’s obsession—that is, until I read the morning paper a few days later.

  I skimmed through it at the breakfast table, and there—at the bottom of page 7—one small item leaped off the paper at me. Could I believe my eyes?

  “Listen to this,” I said to my sister. “The body of an unidentified man has been washed up on a downriver island. Police say the body had apparently been held underwater for several weeks by the ice. … About fifty-five years old and crippled…. No one fitting that description has been reported to the Missing Persons Bureau.”

  For a moment my sister stared at the coffeepot. Then she left the breakfast table and went to the telephone.

  “Now all the police have to do,” she said with a quiver in her voice, “is to look for an antique wheelchair in the river at the foot of the street. Cast iron. With the original plush.” She blinked at the phone several times. “Would you dial?” she asked me. “I can’t see the numbers.”

  The grande dame of cat mysteries, LILIAN JACKSON BRAUN became a North Carolinian when she moved to the mountains outside Tryon in 1989. Her day job was at the Detroit Free Press, where she worked for thirty years, eventually becoming a department editor. Her first cat story was “The Sin of Madame Phloi,” written in 1966, inspired by the death of her own Siamese cat, who fell from a tenth-story window, a victim of foul play, Braun believed. So began one of the most successful mystery series ever written, now at twenty-five novels, many short stories, and counting.

  Copyright 1964, 1988, by Lilian Jackson Braun. First printed in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1964. Reprinted with permission of Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and Blanche C. Gregory, Inc.

  Dogwalker

  Orson Scott Card

  I was an innocent pedestrian. Only reason I got in this in the first place was I got a vertical way of thinking and Dogwalker thought I might be useful, which was true, and also he said I might enjoy myself, which was a prefabrication, since people done a lot more enjoying on me than I done on them.

  When I say I think vertical, I mean to say I’m metaphysical, that is, simular, which is to say, I’m dead but my brain don’t know it yet and my feet still move. I got popped at age nine just lying in my own bed when the goat next door shot at his lady and it went through the wall and into my head. Everybody went to look at them cause they made all the noise, so I was a quart low before nobody noticed I been poked.

  They packed my head with supergoo and light pipe, but they didn’t know which neutron was supposed to butt into the next so my alchemical brain got turned from rust to diamond. Goo Boy. The Crystal Kid.

  From that bright electrical day I never grew another inch, anywhere. Bullet went nowhere near my gonadicals. Just turned off the puberty switch in my head. Saint Paul said he was a eunuch for Jesus, but who am I a eunuch for?

  Worst thing about it is here I am near thirty and I still have to take barkeepers to court before they’ll sell me beer. And it ain’t hardly worth it even though the judge prints out in my favor and the bar-keep has to pay costs, because my corpse is so little I get toxed on six ounces and pass out pissing after twelve. I’m a lousy drinking buddy. Besides, anybody hangs out with me looks like a pederast.

  No, I’m not trying to make you drippy-drop for me—I’m used to it, okay? Maybe the homecoming queen never showed me True Love in a four-point spread, but I got this knack that certain people find real handy and so I always made out. I dress good and I ride the worm and I don’t pay much income tax. Because I am the Password Man. Give me five minutes with anybody’s curriculum vitae, which is to say their autopsychoscopy, and nine times out of ten I’ll spit out their password and get you into their most nasty sticky sweet secret files. Actually it’s usually more like three times out of ten, but that’s still a lot better odds than having a computer spend a year trying to push out fifteen characters to make just the right P-word, specially since after the third wrong try they string your phone number, freeze the target files, and call the dongs.

  Oh, do I make you sick? A cute little boy like me, engaged in critical unspecified dispopulative behaviors? I may be half glass and four feet high, but I can simulate you better than your own mama, and the better I know you, the deeper my hooks. I not only know your password now; I can write a word on a paper, seal it up, and then you go home and change your password and then open up what I wrote and there it’ll be, your new password, three times out of ten. I am vertical, and Dogwalker knowed it. Ten percent more supergoo and I wouldn’t even be legally human, but I’m still under the line, which is more than I can say for a lot of people who are a hundred percent zoo inside their head.

  Dogwalker comes to me one day at Carolina Circle, where I’m playing pinball standing on a stool. He didn’t say nothing, just gave me a shove, so naturally he got my elbow in his balls. I get a lot of twelve-year-olds trying to shove me around at the arcades, so I’m used to teaching them lessons. Jack the Giant Killer. Hero of the fourth graders. I usually go for the stomach, only Dogwalker wasn’t a twelve-year-old, so my elbow hit low.

  I knew the second I hit him that this wasn’t no kid. I didn’t know Dogwalker from God, but he gots the look, you know, like he been hungry before, and he don’t care what he eats these days.

  Only he got no ice and he got no slice, just sits there on the floor with his back up against the Eat Shi’ite game, holding his boodle and looking at me like I was a baby he had to diaper. “I hope you’re Goo Boy,” he says, “cause if you ain’t, I’m gonna give you back to your mama in three little tupperware bowls.” He doesn’t sound like he’s making a threat, though. He sounds like he’s chief weeper at his own funeral.

  “You want to do business, use your mouth, not your hands,” I says. Only I say it real apoplectic, which is the same as apologetic except you are also still pissed.

  “Come with me,” he says. “I got to go buy me a truss. You pay the tax out of your allowance.”

  So we went to Ivey’s and stood around in children’s wear while he made his pitch. “One P-word,” he says, “only there can’t be no mistake. If there’s a mistake, a guy loses his job and maybe goes to jail.”

  So I told him no. Three chances in ten, that’s the best I can do. No guarantees. My record speaks for itself, but nobody’s perfect, and I ain’t even close.

  “Come on,” he says, “you got to have ways to make sure, right? If you can do three times out of ten, what if you find out more about the guy? What if you meet him?”

  “Okay, maybe fifty-fifty.”

  “Look, we can’t go back for seconds. So maybe you can’t get it. But do you know when you ain’t got it?”

  “Maybe half the time when I’m wrong, I know I’m wrong.”

  “So
we got three out of four that you’ll know whether you got it?”

  “No,” says I. “Cause half the time when I’m right, I don’t know I’m right.”

  “Shee-it,” he says. “This is like doing business with my baby brother.”

  “You can’t afford me anyway,” I says. “I pull two dimes minimum, and you barely got breakfast on your gold card.”

  “I’m offering a cut.”

  “I don’t want a cut. I want cash.”

  “Sure thing,” he says. He looks around, real careful. As if they wired the sign that said “Boys’ Briefs Sizes 10–12.” “I got an inside man at Federal Coding,” he says.

  “That’s nothing,” I says. “I got a bug up the First Lady’s ass, and forty hours on tape of her breaking wind.”

  I got a mouth. I know I got a mouth. I especially know it when he jams my face into a pile of shorts and says, “Suck on this, Goo Boy.”

  I hate it when people push me around. And I know ways to make them stop. This time all I had to do was cry. Real loud, like he was hurting me. Everybody looks when a kid starts crying. “I’ll be good.” I kept saying it. “Don’t hurt me no more! I’ll be good.”

  “Shut up,” he says. “Everybody’s looking.”

  “Don’t you ever shove me around again,” I says. “I’m at least ten years older than you, and a hell of a lot more than ten years smarter. Now I’m leaving this store, and if I see you coming after me, I’ll start screaming about how you zipped down and showed me the pope, and you’ll get yourself a child-molesting tag so they pick you up every time some kid gets jollied within a hundred miles of Greensboro.” I’ve done it before, and it works, and Dogwalker was no dummy. Last thing he needed was extra reasons for the dongs to bring him in for questioning. So I figured he’d tell me to get poked and that’d be the last of it.

  Instead he says, “Goo Boy, I’m sorry. I’m too quick with my hands.”

  Even the goat who shot me never said he was sorry. My first thought was, what kind of sister is he, abjectifying right out like that. Then I reckoned I’d stick around and see what kind of man it is who emulsifies himself in front of a nine-year-old-looking kid. Not that I figured him to be purely sorrowful. He still just wanted me to get the P-word for him, and he knew there wasn’t nobody else to do it. But most street pugs aren’t smart enough to tell the right lie under pressure. Right away I knew he wasn’t your ordinary street hood or low arm, pugging cause they don’t have the sense to stick with any kind of job. He had a deep face, which is to say his head was more than a hairball, by which I mean he had brains enough to put his hands in his pockets without seeking an audience with the pope. Right then was when I decided he was my kind of no-good lying son-of-a-bitch.

  “What are you after at Federal Coding?” I asked him. “A record wipe?”

  “Ten clean greens,” he says. “Coded for unlimited international travel. The whole i.d., just like a real person.”

  “The president has a green card,” I says. “The Joint Chiefs have clean greens. But that’s all. The U.S. vice president isn’t even cleared for unlimited international travel.”

  “Yes he is,” he says.

  “Oh, yeah, you know everything.”

  “I need a P. My guy could do us reds and blues, but a clean green has to be done by a burr-oak rat two levels up. My guy knows how it’s done.”

  “They won’t just have it with a P-word,” I says. “A guy who can make green cards, they’re going to have his finger on it.”

  “I know how to get the finger,” he says. “It takes the finger and the password.”

  “You take a guy’s finger, he might report it. And even if you persuade him not to, somebody’s gonna notice that it’s gone.”

  “Latex,” he says. “We’ll get a mold. And don’t start telling me how to do my part of the job. You get P-words, I get fingers. You in?”

  “Cash,” I says.

  “Twenty percent,” says he.

  “Twenty percent of pus.”

  “The inside guy gets twenty, the girl who brings me the finger, she gets twenty, and I damn well get forty.”

  “You can’t just sell these things on the street, you know.”

  “They’re worth a meg apiece,” says he, “to certain buyers.” By which he meant Orkish Crime, of course. Sell ten, and my 20 percent grows up to be two megs. Not enough to be rich, but enough to retire from public life and maybe even pay for some high-level medicals to sprout hair on my face. I got to admit that sounded good to me.

  So we went into business. For a few hours he tried to do it without telling me the baroque rat’s name, just giving me data he got from his guy at Federal Coding. But that was real stupid, giving me secondhand face like that, considering he needed me to be a hundred percent sure, and pretty soon he realized that and brought me in all the way. He hated telling me anything because he couldn’t stand to let go. Once I knew stuff on my own, what was to stop me from trying to go into business for myself? But unless he had another way to get the P-word, he had to get it from me, and for me to do it right, I had to know everything I could. Dogwalker’s got a brain in his head, even if it is all biodegradable, and so he knows there’s times when you got no choice but to trust somebody. When you just got to figure they’ll do their best even when they’re out of your sight.

  He took me to his cheap condo on the old Guilford College campus, near the worm, which was real congenital for getting to Charlotte or Winston or Raleigh with no fuss. He didn’t have no soft floor, just a bed, but it was a big one, so I didn’t reckon he suffered. Maybe he bought it back in his old pimping days, I figured, back when he got his name, running a string of bitches with names like Spike and Bowser and Prince, real hydrant leg-lifters for the tweeze trade. I could see that he used to have money, and he didn’t anymore. Lots of great clothes, tailor-tight fit, but shabby, out of sync. The really old ones, he tore all the wiring out, but you could still see where the diodes used to light up. We’re talking neanderthal.

  “Vanity, vanity, all is profanity,” says I, while I’m holding out the sleeve of a camisa that used to light up like an airplane coming in for a landing.

  “They’re too comfortable to get rid of,” he says. But there’s a twist in his voice so I know he don’t plan to fool nobody.

  “Let this be a lesson to you,” says I. “This is what happens when a walker don’t walk.”

  “Walkers do steady work,” says he. “But me, when business was good, it felt bad, and when business was bad, it felt good. You walk cats, maybe you can take some pride in it. But you walk dogs, and you know they’re getting hurt every time—”

  “They got a built-in switch, they don’t feel a thing. That’s why the dongs don’t touch you, walking dogs, cause nobody gets hurts.”

  “Yeah, so tell me, which is worse, somebody getting tweezed till they scream so some old honk can pop his pimple, or somebody getting half their brain replaced so when the old honk tweezes her she can’t feel a thing? I had these women’s bodies around me, and I knew that they used to be people.”

  “You can be glass,” says I, “and still be people.”

  He saw I was taking it personally. “Oh hey,” says he, “you’re under the line.”

  “So are dogs,” says I.

  “Yeah well,” says he. “You watch a girl come back and tell about some of the things they done to her, and she’s laughing, you draw your own line.”

  I look around his shabby place. “Your choice,” says I.

  “I wanted to feel clean,” says he. “That don’t mean I got to stay poor.”

  “So you’re setting up this grope so you can return to the old days of peace and propensity.”

  “Propensity,” says he. “What the hell kind of word is that? Why do you keep using words like that?”

  “Cause I know them,” says I.

  “Well you don’t know them,” says he, “because half the time you get them wrong.”

  I showed him my best little-boy grin. “
I know,” says I. What I don’t tell him is that the fun comes from the fact that almost nobody ever knows I’m using them wrong. Dogwalker’s no ordinary pimp. But then the ordinary pimp doesn’t bench himself halfway through the game because of a sprained moral qualm, by which I mean that Dogwalker had some stray diagonals in his head, and I began to think it might be fun to see where they all hooked up.

  Anyway we got down to business. The target’s name was Jesse H. Hunt, and I did a real job on him. The Crystal Kid really plugged in on this one. Dogwalker had about two pages of stuff—date of birth, place of birth, sex at birth (no changes since), education, employment history. It was like getting an armload of empty boxes. I just laughed at it. “You got a jack to the city library?” I asked him, and he shows me the wall outlet. I plugged right in, visual onto my pocket Sony, with my own little crystal head for ee-i-ee-i-oh. Not every goo-head can think clear enough to do this, you know, put out clean type just by thinking the right stuff out my left ear interface port.

  I showed Dogwalker a little bit about research. Took me ten minutes. I know my way right through the Greensboro Public Library. I have P-words for every single librarian, and I’m so ept that they don’t even guess I’m stepping upstream through their access channels. From the Public Library you can get all the way into the North Carolina Records Division in Raleigh, and from there you can jumble into federal personnel records anywhere in the country. Which meant that by nightfall on that most portentous day we had hard copy of every document in Jesse H. Hunt’s whole life, from his birth certificate and first-grade report card to his medical history and security clearance reports when he first worked for the feds.

  Dogwalker knew enough to be impressed. “If you can do all that,” he says, “you might as well pug his P-word straight out.”

  “No puedo, putz,” says I as cheerful as can be. “Think of the fed as a castle. Personnel files are floating in the moat—there’s a few alligators, but I swim real good. Hot data is deep in the dungeon. You can get in there, but you can’t get out clean. And P-words—P-words are kept up the queen’s ass.”