Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  The thing about senior investigative officers is this; like stallions or bulls, it’s never a good idea to put two of them in the paddock at once, so when Tim Loory walked into the bar a few minutes later, I got an unfocused bad feeling. This jacket had clearly landed on Coughlan’s desk, not Tim’s, so why was he here? I mean, it might’ve been a coincidence—cops have got to drink somewhere—but he was looking right at me like I was the guy he was looking for; and while the expression plastered on his big stupid Irish face was perhaps intended to be unreadable, I was pretty sure he hadn’t shown up here to tell me he’d just heard from Bay Meadows that my horse had come in at twenty-to-one.

  “Steve,” he said.

  “Tim,” I said, and waited for him to tell me I was still the king of the snappy comeback. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything, in fact, for a good three seconds, which is a hell of a long time for we who banter.

  “You’re waiting for Mike,” he said eventually. Not a question.

  I didn’t answer. Just looked at him until his mouth twisted in what, for a cop, passes for sympathy.

  Ah hell, I thought, and asked him if it was quick.

  He spared me the bullshit. “It was not,” he said and pretended to look at the painting behind the bar to prevent me reading just how not quick it had been.

  “Out by the old railroad cross?” I said and then, off his nod, “Let’s go.”

  “You don’t want to see it,” he said.

  “The hell I don’t,” I said. I took a last belt from my drink and reached for my hat.

  Tim didn’t move, other than to point at my glass, a stunned expression on his face. “What in God’s name is that?” he said.

  “It’s a drink, Tim,” I said, planting my hat pointedly on my head. “We’re in a bar.”

  “It’s pink,” he said.

  “We should go.”

  “It looks like something they’d reward Little Lord Fauntleroy with for finishing in first place in his dance recital.”

  “We should go.”

  He came out of his trance and looked at me again, sympathy for the loss of my partner back in place. “You don’t want to see it,” he repeated, and this time there was something in his tone that actually slowed me down.

  “On account of . . .?”

  “On account of it makes what happened here look like a pat on the cheek in the kind of third degree we reserve for people with a long history of generous contributions to the Policeman’s Benevolent Fund.”

  I waggled my hand like I was going to have to deduct a point or two. “A little elaborate,” I said, not without gratitude for the distraction.

  Tim’s shrug was implicit. “My wife’s cousin?” he said. “The head doctor? Last time he was around for Joan’s veal Parmesan, he volunteered the opinion that I take refuge in colorful simile and metaphor because I’m uncomfortable with my emotions.”

  I gave it a moment while we headed for the door.

  “This cousin of your wife’s,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You let him have it once she wasn’t looking, right?”

  “She knows better than to leave him alone with me,” he said, and I followed him out to the street.

  As he drove us over to the old railroad station—the one that still did some storage business, but hadn’t seen a train since they cut the big red ribbon at Downtown Union—Tim did his best to talk about other stuff and I appreciated the effort, even though he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t have to try for too long—even though we were heading way across town, the trip took barely five minutes. Which might sound impressive to you, but then you’re probably someone who doesn’t have a siren sitting in your glove compartment for whenever you feel like cutting through traffic.

  Mike, or what was left of him, was underneath the pedestrian bridge, mercifully hidden from the sight of casual passersby. Jesus Christ. It looked like something had clawed its way out of him, something powerful and frenzied. Like someone had force-fed him a mountain lion and then whistled it to come home.

  Mike and I had never done well enough to afford an honest-to-God fulltime receptionist, but Mike’s sister’s youngest came in two afternoons a week for pin money, and to let us look like a going concern for clients to whom that kind of thing mattered. It was she who’d told me yesterday that Mike was following up on a lead for a potential new client.

  “What kind of client?” I’d asked.

  “You know what kind,” Valerie had replied, with a sparkle in her seventeen-year-old eye that would have been a great disappointment to the holy sisters back at her parochial school.

  “Was it the kind that has a name?”

  “It was,” she’d said. “Kelly Woodman. Miss Kelly Woodman.”

  “That your stress or hers?”

  “Oh, hers,” Valerie’d said. “She was very emphatic about it.”

  All of which meant nothing more than that I had a name, which was something, but it wasn’t likely to be enough.

  Mike had never been great at the administrative side of the business. Stuff like filing receipts or keeping notes or making entries in a phone-log cramped what he liked to think of as his style. Fortunately, his aristocratic disdain for keeping house also meant he rarely cleared out the trashcan under his desk, and I found what I needed in there.

  It was a napkin bearing the logo and address of a residential hotel, to which someone had added a handwritten room number. Someone—presumably the same someone—had also left a small and perfectly formed crimson lip-o-graph next to the number. Might’ve merely been happenstance—napkins were invented because people have to dab their mouths now and then, even people who wear bright red lipstick—but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was also something to ensure that Mike was kept at full attention.

  The Hotel Montana, which was apparently where Miss Kelly Woodman hung whatever hats she had, was the kind of residential hotel that didn’t have lobby security—just a bellboy with his feet up on the front desk. And, if his employers had any of the usual disapproval of gentlemen callers, they certainly hadn’t bothered to let him know about it. I made it all the way to the elevator without his eyes once raising from that month’s Terror Tales.

  Her apartment was on the fifth floor, and her door had its own little bell. I gave it a push.

  When she opened the door, apparently fresh from the shower, she was still tying the satin belt of her satin bathrobe. I couldn’t help but feel that that was all part of the floorshow, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it.

  She gave me a brief appraising look and then cocked a loaded finger at me. “Mike’s partner,” she said, like I was not only the answer to the puzzle, but the lucky winner’s grand prize.

  “Steve Donnelly,” I said.

  “You found me, Steve Donnelly,” she said. “Aren’t you clever?”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “You want to play hard to get, don’t leave your address in a detective’s office.”

  “Now don’t be cruel, Steve,” she said, then cast her eyes down demurely and gave a half smile. “At least, not yet.”

  Jesus Christ. Mike must’ve been putty in this one’s hands.

  “Come on in,” she said, and stepped aside—but not too far aside—to let me pass.

  “You’ll take a drink?” she said, once we’d managed to reach her living room without anyone getting pregnant. Her question about the drink wasn’t really a question. She may have been polite enough to make it sound like one, but the door to her cocktail cabinet was open long before I could actually answer.

  “It’s eleven-thirty in the morning,” I said. “Not exactly sundown.” It wasn’t like I didn’t feel that I could use a drink, just that I thought a mild protest was appropriate. After all, I didn’t want Miss Kelly Woodman thinking I was easy.

  “You know, Steve,” she said, “one of the most pleasant revelations of my life was the moment when I found out that all that stuff you can do after sundown, you can do before sundown too.�
�

  “Really?” I said. “What was the occasion?”

  “I was having my dress taken off by my best friend’s husband,” she said. “Bourbon or vodka?” She was holding up a bottle in each hand and wiggling them at me.

  “Those are my choices?”

  “What did you have in mind?” she said. “I like to be accommodating.”

  I gave a brief hopeful glance into the cabinet.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, her voice full of teasing delight. “Mike told me. You like that cute little drink that sounds like—”

  “Mike told you what I like to drink? How the hell long were you with him? I thought it was a half an hour?”

  “Time is relative,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?” She made a show of looking into the cocktail cabinet. “Anyway, looks like I’m all out of cotton candy or sugar plums, so there goes that concoction.” Her hands made the bottles of vodka and bourbon sway at me again, slow as a hula dancer’s hips. “I’m afraid you’re just going to have to go for the blonde or the brunette.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll take a vodka rocks.”

  “There’s a big boy,” she said and then, while pouring the vodka over the ice, “I heard about what happened to Mike, by the way. I’m so very sorry.”

  She didn’t sound all that broken up about it, to be honest, but I tried not to hold it against her. She’d only known him half an hour, which works out pretty much as half an hour, however relative time might be.

  “And all so unnecessary as it turned out,” she said, handing me the drink. “If we’d known you were already on the case, we wouldn’t have had to approach Mike in the first—”

  “Hold on,” I said, cutting her off. I put my drink down untasted on a side-table next to her white leather sofa. I saw how she threw it a quick glance, as if bothered that something wasn’t quite going to plan, but I had other questions first. “What are you talking about, I was already on the case? And what makes you think—”

  It was her turn to interrupt me. “You were in the bar,” she said, and gave me a look like I was either screwing with her or had just had a small stroke. “Last night.”

  Well, that made things interesting. An old-timer from the Confidential Agency whom I’d got to know when he was just a few months shy of retiring had once said to me, “You’ll find, kid, that when you’re looking into something, there’s no such thing as an unrelated incident.” It was the kind of observation he liked to toss around when he figured he had a receptive audience, the sort of homily with which canny old operatives in love with their own legend like to dazzle the young and impressionable. The more kindly disposed among us like to call that sort of thing mythmaking, though I believe the actual scientific term is horseshit. But maybe the old Confidential Op had been smarter than I thought.

  Before I could ask about the bar and what it might have had to do with whatever she’d been to see Mike about, the doorbell of her apartment rang. I felt the germ of a suspicion that it was not an unrelated incident.

  Kelly made a tutting noise. “Look at me,” she said. “Nearly noon and still half-naked.” She turned and headed for what I presumed was her bedroom door. “Could you see who that is, Steve? I need to slip into something a little less comfortable.”

  I opened the apartment’s front door to find that Miss Kelly Woodman of the Hotel Montana had another gentleman caller. That bellboy downstairs, I decided, was really not doing his job.

  The new arrival was not much taller than me. He was, however, about three times as wide. And all that width was encased in a coruscating cashmere robe that seemed to billow and undulate around him despite the hotel corridor’s surprising lack of gale-force winds. It was the kind of thing one would wear to an afternoon soirée at an opium parlor in a Cairo bazaar, I figured, though I should tell you right now that I’ve never been to Cairo, know nothing of its bazaars, and certainly have no idea whether or not they feature opium parlors. It was just what came to mind at the sight of the fat man and his vast and absurd caftan.

  “Garland,” he said, smiling at me. “Constantine Garland.”

  “Steve Donnelly,” I said. “You here for Kelly?”

  “Indeed,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I didn’t know it was a party.”

  He leaned a little to his right to cast a somewhat theatrical gaze over my shoulder and down into the length of the apartment. “Really?” he said, looking back at me. “Even though you were not the first guest to arrive?”

  I half-turned and looked back behind me. Kelly had come out of her bedroom again and had brought a little surprise with her. Jerome Cadiz. The peacock from the bar who’d taught the unfortunate Albie a lesson in magic. Neither of them had a gun on the other, though both of them had guns. Both of them were smiling, too, and Kelly’s smile was almost as unsettling as his.

  I turned fast, ready to push my way past the fat guy and at least get his bulk between me and whatever bullets might soon start flying, but it turned out I was a tad optimistic. From somewhere within the labyrinthine folds of his ridiculous robe, Garland had already pulled out a nasty little hammer, raised it way above his head, and was swinging it heavily down toward the center of my brow.

  I didn’t even remember the moment of impact, let alone hitting the floor and being carried back into the living room.

  By the time things swam back into focus, I was propped up in a perfectly comfortable chair sitting across from Constantine Garland, who was taking up most of Kelly’s white leather sofa and who was beaming at me with the kind of benevolent indulgence he’d show to an old friend with whom he’d been enjoying a quiet hand or three of pinochle and who’d decided to take an unscheduled break to indulge in a little nap.

  Kelly was sitting at a small letter bureau. She had the bureau’s writing-lid down and was shuffling a pack of cards on it. Her eyes were on Garland and me and she was shuffling blind, but it was smooth and beautiful and expert enough to make it clear that should she ever find herself in Monte Carlo she’d have very little reason to starve. Cadiz was leaning against the doorjamb with a kind of louche elegance, as if waiting for a society photographer to immortalize his moment and passing the time until that happened by giving me the ambiguous benefit of his fishy stare.

  Garland registered my return to the land of the conscious. “T’reh faghul al aklo?” he said to me. “Thepha cantro? Cantro?” Well, let me be a little clearer: I of course have no idea what the hell he actually said, but that’s approximately what it sounded like. Once he was done, he looked at me with an optimistic inquisitiveness that was as meaningless to me as the nonsense that had been coming out of his mouth.

  “How hard did you hit me with that hammer?” I asked him, tapping at my forehead with a couple of careful fingers. “My Pig Latin skills seem to have deserted me.”

  His eyes clouded briefly as if he suspected me of either lying or mockery, and his fat little fingers twitched instinctively, as if eager to reach for his hammer again. I could imagine how fully at ease he was using it as a tool of persuasion or punishment, so was relieved when I saw the moment pass, saw him choose to believe that I wasn’t just playing dumb.

  “So you are not of the elect, Mr. Donnelly,” he said. “One always likes to be sure. I take it then that your interest in the spoils of the Stella Noctis is purely financial?”

  “You got something against money?” I said. Other than the fact he was now speaking English, what he was talking about was still meaningless to me, but I’ve never found that admitting ignorance is a good way to get people to open up.

  He gave a throaty little chuckle. “Against money?” he said “No indeed, sir. It is, after all, what makes the world go round.” He gave a sidelong glance to Kelly. “At least for now,” he said to her like a stage aside, like they had a little secret, and a glint of excitement came into her eyes, an excitement that didn’t have a lot in common with the expert come-hither crap with which she dazzled saps like me or
Mike.

  “Let’s say my interest is financial,” I said. “How interested are you willing to make me?”

  “You have it?” he said, suddenly eager. “You have the statue?”

  “Never mind what I have or don’t have,” I said. “Let’s just say my ship came in.” I was taking a shot. I’d remembered that that’s what the late lamented Albie had said to the late lamented Ruby, and figured that the Stella Noctis that Chubs here had referred to was very possibly the literal ship in question.

  The anticipatory sigh that came out of Garland, and the way Kelly suddenly set her pack of cards down, told me that I was perhaps after all not as dumb as I look. Also, it wasn’t as if I didn’t have something. I just had no idea what it was for and why I had it. But, given that all this circling wasn’t doing any of us any good and—as it surely wouldn’t have taken them much longer to realize I had absolutely no idea what the hell any of us were talking about—I played the only card I had.

  “Lookit, fats,” I said, hoping he’d be offended enough to assume I must have a bargaining chip if I was willing to risk mouthing off like that, but not offended enough to take another swing with his hammer. “Let’s get something straight. I don’t give a shit about you or your little green god. I just want to know what you know about the key.”

  There was a moment of complete silence. Just long enough for me to wonder if I’d overreached. I’d been playing the same kind of association game that had scored me a significant point with the ship thing. Shard of the God, Albie’d called his small fragment of green stone. You have the statue? Garland had asked. So the Donnelly brains trust had put two and two together and risked making five by presuming that this week’s trigger for the criminal lunatic population of the city to run around trying to kill each other was a green statue of a god of some kind. The silence can’t have lasted more than two seconds, but I really felt I owed Kelly an apology for my earlier skepticism about time being relative.