by Johnny Shaw
—From the National Book Award–nominated novel Yearnings and Pig Iron, by Mason Caldwell (1984)
Andy regretted not bringing his beavertail. The powdered steel in his sap gloves froze his fingers and gave him a nasty chill. But when traversing Exposition Boulevard at night, it was a good idea to have something made of metal. Andy’s simple roll of nickels had gotten him out of more than one pinch. The sap gloves remained the right tool, but he needed to invest in an all-weather version.
Little had changed in the thirty years he had known the Boulevard. Prostitutes offered their wares at every street corner, the outfits more revealing but the rented commodity the same. Bums camped in the doorways of closed businesses. Feverishly scratching at their arms and chests, ghoul-like addicts ducked in and out of vacant buildings. Exposition Boulevard was as low-down as the city went. When you had reached the Boulevard, the only place lower was the sewer tunnels. And legend had it that the people who lived in the maze of the Underneath were damn near another species.
Members of the Wretches and Los Locos wore their colors, strutting with confidence, pedestrians parting to let them pass. It had been at least six years since the street gangs had consolidated, but Andy was still not used to it. He never thought it would stick. Thugs weren’t really known for their peacekeeping skills. He wondered how they made it work.
Andy passed all the stalwart landmarks. Jerome Pinkfinger’s EmPORNium II with its cartoony neon sign. A line of people queued outside Checks Cashed looking like a Soviet breadline. The narrow staircase leading to the second-story door of Panda Massage stood both mysterious and tempting. Candy Girls, Fantasy Arcade, All-American Billiards & Darts, Faust’s Inferno, and Stogie’s, the oldest bar in Auction City. Andy remembered the thick smell of beer and peanut breath from when he’d ventured in there as a kid to fetch Champ to tell her it was time for dinner.
Walking by the Apex Theater, Andy glanced at the marquee. A double bill: Sploooosh! and Into Africa. He cracked a smile. Except for the old-lady mystery novels that Champ read (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme & Punishment, anyone?), Andy couldn’t think of an industry that embraced wordplay more joyously than pornography did. If not for the rampant drug addiction, abhorrent history of exploitation, and the fluids, it would be quaint.
An old drunk stumbled toward Andy, the punge of alcohol engulfing him in a malodorous cloud. The man was clean shaven except for a gray mustache, but his face and body were filthy, smeared with mud. Andy hoped it was mud. As the drunk moved more side to side than straight ahead, his tattered trench coat made him the width of the sidewalk. Andy stepped off the curb, but the stumbling man still managed to bump into him.
The drunk grunted and staggered away. Andy grabbed his elbow.
“Pretty slick, Pops,” Andy said, “but I ain’t a tourist.”
The man looked all over Andy’s face, everywhere but his eyes. He said, “Hrrrghhfawll” or something equally incoherent. The only thing Andy caught was the man’s spit.
“Give my wallet back and we’ll call it a mistake,” Andy said, squeezing the man’s arm harder.
The drunk swayed, fell into Andy, and then abruptly stood upright, suddenly sober. “Fair enough, son. You got me,” he said, holding up Andy’s wallet. Andy made sure the contents were intact and returned it to his pocket.
“Nothing else to say?” Andy said. “No apology?”
“Just doing my job.”
Andy released him. The two men stared at each other for a moment. Slowly the pickpocket’s eyes went glassy again, his body slack. He shuffled away back in character, mumbling to himself, in search of his next mark.
Two blocks down the street, Andy realized his watch was gone. Now that he wasn’t a cop anymore, maybe Andy was a tourist, after all.
Andy pulled his notes from his pocket: scraps of paper; shredded napkins; a dollar bill with tiny ballpoint numbers on it; a matchbook with a name, phone number, and doodle of a werewolf. He reread the address, even though he had committed it to memory: 6243 Holt Avenue.
He turned onto Holt. Off the Boulevard, it got darker, the foot traffic more sparse. If someone asked for a light on one of these side streets, get ready to run, fight, or wake up wounded. The smell of garbage from a seafood restaurant almost overwhelmed Andy. It stank of salted fish, rotten cabbage, and a wrestler’s gym locker.
Two blocks down, across the street from the Church of the Seven Martyrs, Andy found the address. There appeared to be nothing special about the six-story brick building. Classic art deco architecture. Like much of the city, it looked as if it was built in the early thirties after the Flood. Windows dark, no light inside.
There was no gap between 6243 Holt and the neighboring buildings. Every inch of real estate was used. Scoping the narrow alley that ran alongside the back of the building, he found the garbage bins empty and spotlessly clean. One still had a price tag stuck to the lid. There didn’t appear to be any other way into the building other than the front door.
The buildings on either side were covered in graffiti, the familiar tags of Chaka, Lorenzo 15, and El Magnifico. In comparison, 6243 was clean, save a single piece of graffiti next to the door, an inverted isosceles trapezoid with five vertical lines in the center.
Andy recognized the glyph. It popped up randomly around the city. He had never learned its origin, probably something that tracked back to old hobo signs. Among the criminal class, it ostensibly meant “Keep Out.” He made a quick sketch of the symbol on the back of an old gas bill to remind himself to research it again.
There was nothing distinctive about the building, other than the fact that it didn’t exist. It was a ghost building.
Everything looked more glamorous on TV and in the movies. In reality, sex on the beach was sandy and seaweedy, shooting two guns while jumping through the air was stupid and dangerous, and criminal investigations were paperwork and phone calls. If you were a cop or a doctor or a lawyer, the sad truth was that you didn’t get laid nearly as often as on the tube. Andy might have been out in the field now, but it was the result of combing through volumes of documents in his apartment and in the records departments of the city and county.
The five hours downtown weren’t exactly spellbinding drama, but after a thorough document search, Andy had found no deed of ownership or any other reference to the building. Other than John Dole’s car registration, the entire lot didn’t exist on paper, not on the zoning maps or in the city assessor’s office. It wasn’t that it was a foreclosure or city seizure or in some other real estate limbo. This was a building with no history or record of existence. Unless a person stood in front of it, there was no proof that it was.
He crossed the street and walked the grounds of the Church of the Seven Martyrs. He had been terrified of the church when he was a child. The angel with a sword that guarded the doors had an angry expression that made it seem poised to attack. Andy found some shadows and settled in, shoulder to the jagged bricks. He locked eyes on the doorway of 6243 Holt.
Andy hated waiting. When he’d been a policeman, he would lose his mind sitting in the front seat of a beige sedan, eating greasy lake trout and pissing in a Gatorade bottle. He knew impatience was stupid. It was literally doing nothing, but Andy would rather do something stupid than nothing at all.
Now that he was still, the cold found its way into his bones. He stomped his feet and pumped fists in his pockets, but the breeze off the Thief River blew icy. It was going to be an arctic winter. He focused on the door, trying to ignore his runny nose and uncontrollable shivering. After fifteen minutes he’d had enough.
Andy waited for an ice cream truck to pass and then jogged across the street and climbed the steps of the building, doing his best to act like he belonged. The street was empty of pedestrian traffic. He knocked and waited. Nothing. He reached in his pocket for his lock picks, but a quick turn of the knob revealed that the door was unlocked. Not the usual modus in this neighborhood. He’d seen what the dregs of Auction City could do to an abandoned buil
ding. It always felt as though the first thing a junkie did in an abandoned building was defecate. And never in a corner. Always in the middle of the room. He swung the door open and stepped into the building that wasn’t really there.
Pulling out his penlight, Andy got a quick look around. There was no sign of vandalism. A bouquet of dead flowers in an oriental vase sat on an antique table in the center of the foyer. The fact that the vase had been neither stolen nor broken made Andy uneasy. He had expected graffiti, trash, destruction. This place was immaculate. He could make out the vacuum lines in the carpet.
Everything told him to leave. The cleanliness was chilling. The place was creepy, wrong. He shouldn’t be there in the first place, but every piece of weirdness only made the question more intriguing. Might as well keep tugging at threads until the sweater was completely unraveled. After all, he wasn’t tracking some villain, just poking around an abandoned building that some station wagon owner listed as his address.
Andy took tentative steps down a dark hallway, letting his barely effective flashlight illuminate the way. All doors appeared to have been removed. He poked his head from room to room, each fully furnished with antiques and at least one piece of taxidermy. The rooms were all strangely similar and equally functionless. Nothing practical. A series of sitting rooms. He couldn’t tell if this was a business or a home.
He opened the empty drawers of a desk that smelled of artificial pine cleaner. No personal touches. The few photos on the wall were more than a hundred years old, and if they had any association to the building, he had no clue how to connect those dots.
Heading up to the second floor, Andy stopped abruptly when he heard a faint sound. A shuffle, maybe a human voice. With one toe frozen in space above the next step, he turned off his light and closed his eyes. A scuffling came from the floor above.
Andy slowly reached the second-floor landing. Through the blackness, he caught a flicker of light down the long hallway.
“Hello?” Andy said into the darkness.
The faint sound of a voice or animal drew him closer. He tripped on the edge of a rug but caught himself. His heartbeat boomed in his head. He silently counted to ten, waiting for the consequence of his clumsiness. When nobody ran at him with a chainsaw, he took that as a good omen.
The sounds developed into whispers, still unintelligible but definitely voices. Ghostly voices in the relative darkness. The unmistakable flit of candlelight projected into the hallway from one of the rooms.
Andy stopped next to the door frame. He expected to find anything from a satanic ritual to an underground poker game. Maybe Kate Girard taking a relaxing bath with some scented candles. That, he wouldn’t mind seeing. He popped his head into the doorway.
Two naked teenagers rolled around on the ground, a candle illuminating their hairless bodies. School uniforms sat neatly folded next to them. Both wore headphones, listening to individual Walkmans. A couple of kids from the suburbs, slumming it down on the Boulevard and finding a place to bang. Outsiders that didn’t know to heed the graffitied warning. Not smart like he was.
The girl caught sight of Andy and shrieked, horror-movie high. The boy didn’t get it at first, thinking his skills had elicited the scream. It wasn’t until the girl hit the boy in the face and pointed that he got the message. But the red-faced Andy was already halfway down the stairs.
When he reached the foyer, he turned his flashlight back on. He chuckled at the ridiculousness of it all. Kids these days.
His flashlight passed over the table in the center of the room. His smile vanished. A bouquet of fresh flowers sat in the oriental vase. The dead flowers that had been there minutes earlier were gone, replaced by red chrysanthemums with a note attached. His stolen watch sat next to the vase.
Andy picked up his watch, glanced around the darkness. He reached for the note. The handwritten message read:
We see you, Destra. This is a warning. Stop digging.
He turned to the long hallway, only seeing darkness but knowing he wasn’t alone. From the shadows, someone whistled what might have been “Girl from Ipanema.”
“I don’t scare that easy,” Andy said.
He rushed into the dark hallway, ready for a fight but not finding one. A search of all the rooms came up empty. Something strange was going on at 6243 Holt Avenue, but damn if Andy could figure out what it was.
CHAPTER 4
I Auction City. I Just Wish It ed Me Back.
—Bumper sticker (circa 1978)
Andy stood in front of his wall map and stared at the address, trying to digest that note, the watch, those chrysanthemums, and that damn whistling. He didn’t buy that the ghost building actually had ghosts.
Did the pickpocket know that’s where he was going? Was he the whistler? What was his connection to the whole thing? It didn’t make any sense.
The frantic walk back from Exposition Boulevard—looking over his shoulder at every turn—got his heart racing. He hadn’t spotted anyone in his periphery, but his gut insisted that someone was watching him. He used his best evasive maneuvers, changed course three times, ducked into a few buildings, ran down deserted alleys, and got on and off a bus before grabbing the subway.
He slumped in his only chair, scanning his self-made chaos. If he chose to entertain, he’d be hard-pressed to find a comfortable place for another person to stand, let alone sit. Maybe Indian-style on the floor. On a stack of notebooks. It didn’t matter. Nobody visited.
It was times like this when a drinking problem, a recent divorce, or an estranged child would have come in handy. Wasn’t that every ex-cop’s story? If he had one of those issues, his descent into conspiracy nut would have been socially accepted. There was nothing like a destructive past to give a man carte blanche to take a trip to Crazyville. But Andy didn’t drink, hadn’t had a serious girlfriend for years, and was childless. The only thing coplike about him was his love for baked goods, but even then he preferred a croissant to a doughnut. Maybe he had been meant to be a gendarme.
In his teen years, the frustration of not knowing the identity of his parents led him down a path. Without any clues, his search transformed into a pursuit to learn everything about Auction City. The illogic being that if he examined everything, maybe he would inadvertently learn about his folks, even if he didn’t know he was learning about them. From the politics to the architecture to its history and legends, Andy absorbed himself in the city’s past. A pastime grew to an obsession, hours spent in the library or wandering the streets of the city.
When the structure of college didn’t suit him, he found a new opportunity to feed his curiosity. Against Champ’s urgings, Andy entered the police academy. As a kitchen-table historian, he knew the department’s shady past and could guess its darker secrets. That didn’t mean every cop became a part of the corruption. The police department fit his mind and allowed him to see inner workings that the public wasn’t privy to.
Joining the ACPD was also a way of rebelling against a ghost. One of the only things he knew about his father was that he was a criminal. For all his desire to learn the man’s identity, he was indifferent to him just the same. His father was the one who wasn’t there. Andy wanted to be the opposite of the man who had abandoned him.
The ACPD became Andy’s extended family. That’s what indoctrination and a chain of command did. Not exactly everyone’s brother-in-arms, he was at least their strange step-cousin-in-arms. Despite his weirdness, they accepted him. He belonged. He was good at his job. He didn’t make his superiors’ jobs harder. And he looked the other way, kept his mouth shut, and played the game. He might not have grabbed beers with the guys at the end of a shift, but they trusted him.
It surprised Andy how quickly he found ways to rationalize the side action. The political corruption, the protection rackets, the lost evidence. All in the name of keeping the city safe, is what he told himself. The truth was he was game for the corruption. He liked the loose moral latitude. And his lack of ambition didn’t threaten anyo
ne. It allowed him to investigate his personal matters without interference. He was all about the puzzles. As long as he had the challenge of a complex criminal investigation, a few kilos missing from evidence or a mysterious envelope full of cash didn’t matter to him. After all, they were the good guys.
Then it all went to hell.
In the sixteen months since his retirement, Andy had gone from twice-decorated Detective Sergeant Andrea Destra, fourteen-year veteran of the ACPD, to Crazy Andy Destra, weirdo shut-in running in terror from whistlers in empty buildings to his cramped apartment full of conspiracy theories and canned soup. He could see himself falling, but he couldn’t grab the sides.
It had started with the Chucho Montoya investigation. A run-of-the-mill case he had worked in Fraud and Pawnshops, one of the less noteworthy police divisions. Through some blind luck, he discovered a paper trail that linked Montoya, a known fence, to an enormous money-laundering operation. Andy had the structure of the network but was weeks away from attaching names and accounts to the scheme. When he submitted a request for more manpower, not only was it refused but Andy was taken off the case and transferred. The deputy commissioner had decided that the investigation was a waste of resources.
Andy wasn’t an idiot. He knew that he had gotten too close to something. Something that threatened his brothers in blue. Andy was reassigned to Juvenile Booking. A promotion in rank, but he was no longer investigating anything. Which was the fun of the job. The whole point. He didn’t become a cop to process forms and file them. Anybody who did was more insane than he was.
Andy could have let the corrupt cops have their corruption. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t even care about justice. The problem was that he didn’t know how to stop himself. He had eaten the cereal, and like hell he wasn’t going to get the prize at the bottom. He was stupid like that.
