Falls the Shadow

by William Lashner

  It was late already by the time I figured it out. Beth was gone, my secretary, Ellie, was gone, it was just me in the office, the sole representative of the law firm of Derringer and Carl, but I was enough. I sat in Ellie’s chair, took out a blue-backed document, rolled it into the typewriter my secretary used to fill the blanks in preprinted documents, hunted and pecked, whited out the mistakes, hunted and pecked some more.

  And then I put on my jacket, stuffed the document into my jacket pocket, and drove out to the Great Northeast to have myself a drink in the shadow of the King.

  16

  King’s Dominion was not the kind of joint people stumbled into by mistake. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never find it, but then again you wouldn’t want to.

  I parked in the lot of a small shopping center just off Roosevelt Boulevard. There was a Radio Shack, a T.J. Maxx, a dry cleaner, a vacant storefront, a CVS, a dollar store. Scintillating, no? The number I was looking for was taped onto a glass door next to the dollar store. I pushed open the door and was immediately hit by a deep throb of bass that resonated in my bad tooth. As I climbed the stairwell, I passed a series of signs tacked to the wall.

  NO SNEAKERS

  CHECK ALL GUNS

  PEANUT BUTTER AND NANNER SAMMICH—75¢

  Not my kind of place, exactly. I just hoped they served Sea Breezes.

  Beside the closed door at the top of the stairs, an old man sat on a stool, clipboard in hand. He was tall and stooped, his shoes were white patent leather, and it looked like a gray poodle was perched on his head. When I tried to walk past him, he shot out a bony arm and stopped me cold.

  “What’s your song?” he said.

  “I’m just here to see a Detective Gleason,” I said. “Has he shown up tonight?”

  “Do I look like a matchmaker?” he said.

  “Hello, Dolly,” I said.

  “The name’s Skip.”

  “Kept that from summer camp, did you? I like your shoes.”

  “Dancing shoes. I know a guy what knows a guy what gets them direct from Hong Kong.”

  “Maybe he can get me a pair.”

  “You want a pair?”

  “Nah. So is Gleason in?”

  “Yeah, he’s in.”

  I gave the old man a wink, and started again for the door, and again the bony arm barred my way. I looked at it for a moment and then at the old man.

  “What, is there a cover?”

  “No cover,” he said. “But it’s karaoke night.”

  “Just my luck. I should have come tomorrow.”

  “It wouldn’t do no good,” said the old man. “Here, every night is karaoke night. What’s your song?”

  “I don’t sing.”

  “Sure you do, if you want in. Everyone sings, at least once. Makes you part of the show, keeps it festive.” He cocked his head, the poodle shifted, his eyes brightened crazily. “It’s karaoke night.”

  “I know ‘Feelings.’ Should I sing ‘Feelings’?”

  He looked at me, looked at his clipboard, paged through the pages, looked back at me. “We don’t got it.”

  “How about ‘Kumbaya’?”

  He looked back at his clipboard. “We got ‘Kismet,’ we got ‘Kiss Me Quick,’ we got ‘Ku-u-i-po,’ which is pretty close, but no ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

  “ ‘Satisfaction’?”

  “None.”

  “You don’t got much, do you?”

  “Only everything he ever sung.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Now I get it. Why don’t you pick something for me.”

  “How’s your pipes?”

  “Not so good.”

  “Then stay with something low, something easy. I got one here that usually works for first-timers. There’s a slow part you can talk your way through.”

  “Done.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Franz.”

  “Funny,” he said as he pulled a white slip from his clipboard, filled it out, handed it to me, “you don’t look like a Franz. That will be ten bucks.”

  “Ten bucks a song?”

  “Just for the first song. After that’s it’s free.”

  As I pulled out my wallet, I said, “Good thing you boys don’t charge a cover.”

  I stepped through the door and into a neon-lit room, ringed with everything Elvis. Velvet paintings glowing with black light, guitar clocks, gold records, ceramic busts, framed photographs from each Elvis era: Elvis impossibly young, Elvis impossibly handsome, Elvis impossibly svelte in black leather, Elvis impossibly bloated in a white jumpsuit. There were tables, about half full, in the center, bars around the edges, booths in the back. Waitresses dressed like schoolgirls with high hair carried drinks on circular trays. On a narrow stage in the front, a redhead in a ruffled shirt, looking a little like Ann-Margret, belted out the first verse of “Viva Las Vegas” as the words rolled up a television screen and the crowd hooted and clapped along.

  A man in dark glasses greeted me with a bright smile. “Welcome,” he said in a deep voice. “Slip?”

  I handed it over. He gave it a look.

  “Good choice, Franz,” he said. “You want some company tonight?” He thumbed toward a trio of women at the bar with bouffant hair and low blouses. They were nice-looking women once, but once was enough.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I already had my fiber today.”

  I scanned the scene, found whom I was looking for in a booth in the back. He was sitting alone, hunched over a drink, something dark and almost gone in his glass. He wasn’t viva-ing to Ann-Margret. I wondered if my visit that afternoon hadn’t ruined his day. Knowing what I knew now, I didn’t doubt it.

  Gleason glanced up when I sat down across from him, didn’t seem one bit surprised to see me. “How’d you find this place?” he said.

  “Torricelli.”

  He nodded, he understood. Torricelli hadn’t just told me about the bar, he had told me about the shooting, too. “I should hang up a sign,” he said. “Do not disturb.”

  “You know that piece of gum you step on and can’t get off your shoe?” I said. “It ends up on your hand, your other hand, your nose. That piece of gum? That’s me.”

  “I was thinking of something else that sometimes gets on my shoe. What do you want?”

  “I want to know if you were the one to teach Seamus Dent karate.”

  His eyes widened a bit, as if he were about to say something, but just then one of the waitresses with the schoolgirl skirt and high hair came to our table. Her eyes were rimmed dark, her lips were red as paint.

  “Anything, boys?” she said.

  “My treat,” I said.

  “Wonder of wonders,” said Gleason. “I’ll have another bourbon, neat.”

  “Can I have a Sea Breeze?” I said. “With lime?”

  “Closest thing we have is a Blue Hawaii,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Vodka, pineapple juice, crème de coconut, and blue Curaçao.”

  “Aloha,” I said.

  “Thanks, Priscilla,” said Gleason before she swished away.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Priscilla?”

  “They’re all Priscilla,” he said. “How’d you know about the karate?”

  “It made sense. From the stories I’d been hearing, Seamus Dent, big as he was, was never a fighter. Then suddenly he starts giving side kicks like he’s Jackie Chan. Somehow he learned. And then you have this whole Elvis thing going with the sideburns, the little southern twang you give your voice even though you grew up in Manayunk, not Memphis. And the way you described Seamus’s fight with that drug dealer. You seemed to even know the type of kick he used to send him to the ground. It just added up.”

  “Aren’t you clever.”

  “Well, you know. Deal with cops long enough, it rubs off.”

  “Why the hell do you care so much about Seamus?”

  “Because he testified against François Dubé.”

  He stared at me for a while, saw somethi
ng in my eyes that made him turn to look at the stage, where the woman was swinging her arms as she wailed the final chorus.

  “She’s not bad,” I said. “And she does look a little like Ann-Margret.”

  “But not the Ann-Margret of Viva Las Vegas, more like the Ann-Margret of Any Given Sunday.”

  “Can’t have everything.”

  Okay, folks, said the DJ, the man who had taken my slip, speaking from off the stage, so his voice was like a disembodied presence. Let’s hear it for the scintillating Elvira. The audience cheered. Next up, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, doing a little blues number from 1957. A young man with blue-black hair in a duckbill and a face like a punching bag stepped up to the stage, took the microphone off the stand, cleared his throat, mumbled, “Let’s get it this time.” After a short blues intro, he started in with a gravelly rendition of “One Night.”

  “It wasn’t like your partner was saying,” said Gleason after we both listened a bit to Harvey from Huntingdon Valley, who was not too awful at all. “There wasn’t anything sexual about it.”

  “You don’t have to hitch up your pants and talk about the Eagles. It doesn’t matter much to me.”

  “But see, that’s the thing. Everyone thinks they understand when they think the worst. But the worst isn’t always the truth.”

  “So what was the truth?”

  “He was a kid in trouble. I was trying to help.” Gleason finished off his bourbon. “And that, my friend, is the whole sordid story.”

  There was something in his voice that didn’t seem to care whether I believed him or not.

  “How’d you meet him?” I said.

  “There was a killing in Juniata. We crashed a drug house, looking for a witness. Seamus was cowering in a room up the stairs, hugging his guitar. I put away my gun, asked him if he could play that thing. He showed me.”

  Priscilla came back with our drinks. I told her to make up another round and to run a tab. Gleason took a gulp of his bourbon and winced, more from the memories, I thought, than the drink. The Blue Hawaii was cold and too sweet, but it looked good in the glass. The thing I love about a blue drink is that it isn’t pretending to be anything other than a prissy, made-up concoction for people who can’t drink their whiskey straight. A cocktail with the courage of its lack of conviction.

  “Was Seamus good at the guitar?” I said.

  “Better than good. You ever hear any recordings of Robert Johnson playing his old Kalamazoo archtop?”

  “No.”

  “Then you wouldn’t understand. Physically he was a mess, filthy, strung out, a black eye, but he could play some blues. So I took him out of there and bought him a cup of coffee. He told me all about the drugs, the things he had done with those friends of his, everything. It was a brutal, sad story, but I saw something in him. He was really sorry. In my racket it’s rare to see it like that, sincere and not put on as a show for a judge. So I got him treatment, got him a job running files. And when it started working out, I helped him even more. Let him stay at my place. We used to play guitar and sing together. Spirituals, believe it or not. I did what I could for him.”

  “Like fixing his teeth.”

  “God knows he needed it. I found a dentist to do it for free. Some guy who had come to the station, passing out his card, looking to do a little public service.”

  “And the karate?”

  “A boy that big, not able to defend himself. It wasn’t right. I asked myself, what would Elvis do? He’d teach him karate, so that’s what I did. I’m a third-degree black belt, I help out at an inner-city dojo on weekends. I brought him along. After enough years in homicide, you get tired of helping corpses. It was nice to help a boy with still some hope. And I was helping, I could tell. He cleaned up quick.”

  How to get down with the King, Harvey from Huntingdon Valley. There was clapping, whistles. Next we have a first-timer. Let’s hear a warm welcome for Franz. Come on up, Franz, and do your thing.

  “If he was so clean,” I said, figuring I could ignore the DJ, “what was he doing in the crack house where he was killed?”

  Gleason closed his eyes for a moment. “I don’t know.”

  “You ever find out?”

  “I tried.”

  Come on, Franz, no hiding. Let’s hear it for Franz, everybody. The crowd started chanting, “Franz, Franz, Franz!” Where are you, Franz?

  “It’s hard to find the truth with a bullet,” I said.

  “I didn’t go out there to kill that man, not that he didn’t deserve it. I was just looking for answers, but maybe, yeah, I was looking a little too hard. I saw Seamus’s body and I went a little over the edge.”

  There you are, Franz. Sitting with our own Patrick Gleason. Franz, Franz, Franz. Come on down, Franz.

  Gleason looked at the stage, then at me. “You’re Franz?”

  “That’s my nickname in the lawyers’ bund.”

  “It’s your turn then, big boy. Go on up.”

  “I didn’t come here to sing.”

  “You don’t have any choice,” said Detective Gleason. “Everybody sings. It’s karaoke night.”

  17

  I was caught in a trap. I couldn’t walk out. So instead I snatched down the rest of my Blue Hawaii, marched right to the stage, hopped on up, grabbed the mike, shielded my eyes from the spotlight. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but barrel forward with misplaced confidence.

  “This is for the ladies out there,” I said, loosening my tie. “Just toss on up those hotel keys.”

  That got a laugh, which was good, because then the music started.

  A numb, dumb silence fell across the crowd at the first note. Jaws dropped and stayed dropped, eyes glazed, thumbs reached for ears. I don’t know if it was the beat, the tone, the key, maybe it was the lack of all three, but as I sang out on “Suspicious Minds,” I could feel the recoil of the audience. And there were grimaces of horror when I shook my hips, gut-wrenching, bladder-loosening horror. I was the Texas Chain Saw Massacre of karaoke night. At one point, during the chorus, I thought a cat was screeching somewhere in the corner of the room, and then I realized it was my voice coming out of the speakers.

  Thank you, Franz, for that interesting rendition of a number one hit from 1969, said the DJ as the music faded out. It used to be one of our favorites.

  I again shielded my eyes from the spotlight. “That seemed really short, didn’t it?”

  Not to us it didn’t, Franz, said the DJ as heads shook in agreement across the club. Thank you so much for coming on down, and take care of that head cold.

  “But there are more words scrolling up on the screen,” I said. “And what about the slow part? I was really looking forward to that slow part.”

  And so were we, Franz, but trust us, there’s only so much damage a song can take. Next, all the way from Mantua, singing one of the good old old ones, and good advice for Franz on his singing career, let’s hear it for Marvelous Marv, performing “Surrender.”

  An old bald man with a bent back and gnarled hands climbed onto the stage. His ears came up to my hip. He grabbed the mike out of my hands, shooed me away. “Get off my stage, you butcher,” said Marv in his rasp of a voice. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

  And he did, the little crapper.

  When I got back to the booth, Gleason was collapsed on the table, his head resting on his arms. I thought for a moment he had passed out, drunk with sorrow over the sad fate of Seamus Dent, but then I noticed his shoulders shaking with laughter.

  “I told you I didn’t come here to sing,” I said.

  “Is that what you call it?” He lifted his head, his cheeks wet with his tears.

  “Was it that bad?”

  “Like the bleat of a goat in heat.”

  “Cute. You ever bring Seamus here?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He smiled at the memory.

  “How’d he do?”

  “Seamus could sing. He did a version of ‘American Trilogy’ that would send you right straight to th
e army recruitment office. And his ‘In My Father’s House’ would bring even an atheist to tears.”

  “So what happened? What was he doing with Red Rover? What was the fight about?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gleason. “I just don’t know. I traced that bastard Red Rover back to his mother. I went alone, that was my mistake. My partner was on something else, and I should have waited, but I wanted to know. I knocked on the door. The mother answered. I was just identifying myself. Next thing I know, the bastard runs over me on his way out. I charge after him. He stops, whirls, pulls something out of his waistband. I didn’t have any choice.”

  “Was there an investigation of the shooting?”

  “There always is.”

  “What did they find?”

  “I came up clean.”

  “What did he pull out of his waistband?”

  “A knife.”

  “And you standing there with your revolver.”

  “He whirled. He pulled something out of his belt. I wasn’t waiting to see if it was a cell phone. I came up clean.”

  “But still you’re in the auto squad.”

  “It made the papers, the shooting, and Internal said I was wrong to have gone there without backup. The brass transferred me to the auto squad to get the stink out of homicide. So now I chase cars. Like a dog.”

  Just then Priscilla returned to the table. “Nice job, cowboy,” she said as she placed another Blue Hawaii in front of me.

  “I’ll be here all week,” I said.

  “Let’s hope not,” she said. “It would be hell on tips.”

  I took a long draft of the blue drink, winced.

  “What’s the matter?” said Gleason.

  “I got this tooth….”

  “You ought to get that looked at.”

  “So I been told.”

  “The guy who took care of Seamus did an amazing job.”