The Labyrinth Of Dreams

by Jack L. Chalker

  I found myself, at the end of that wild night, just sitting there on that creaky couch in the lobby and trying not to think. Brandy came up behind me and began massaging my shoulders. “Want to go get a drink?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Any distilleries nearby?” I still looked like a bum and she looked like a hooker, but there were several diners with bars attached in Camden where even that wouldn’t attract attention if you showed money, and she picked one.

  “Who did you think you were up there?” I grumbled. “The Ebony Avenger or maybe Super-girl? They pay cops to do that, and train them.”

  “I’m just now getting the shakes over it,” she admitted. “Still, those cops they pay weren’t there, and that little girl and that undercover cop were. It just sorta clicked and I didn’t even do no thinking about it. The truth is, even though I’m scared about it now, I really enjoyed it. I mean, I—we—saved two lives tonight. That’s more than I done in this job in all those years. I don’t know. Maybe I should just get my diploma and be a cop.”

  “It’s just as boring as what you’re doing, only it pays regular,” I told her. “For the pay and perks, though, you spend ninety percent of your time playing politics or getting stepped on.” I paused. “You did good tonight, kid, even if you did scare me out of a year’s growth and make the bald spot bigger.”

  “Huh? I did? Scare you, I mean? Why?”

  “ ’Cause you’re one of the good guys in a world full of garbage,” I responded. “Maybe because you’re making about thirty cents an hour out of my payoff fund for this and you still put those lives over your own.” The booze was getting to me a little, and I was bolder than usual. “Maybe it’s because in that outfit you’re the cutest, sexiest black bombshell I ever seen.”

  Well, you can figure the rest. We went back to her place, and went at it all through the night. I had to. She pointed out that her conscience wouldn’t allow her to throw any white man out in that neighborhood at that hour.

  Even though the case was wrapped, I only lived and worked an hour or less away, and we kept seeing each other. It was amazing how well we meshed, considering just how different our backgrounds had been. Oh, sure, she loved to dance and I couldn’t dance a step, but that was minor. She liked the Phillies and hated basketball, same as me. Neither of us could ever get worked up over which dumb millionaires with glandular conditions could put a ball in a basket without jumping. My taste for jazz was matched by her fondness for blues music. We both liked spicy ethnic foods and neither of us could get excited over a fried chicken. We even liked the same kind of books—murder mysteries and detective novels, I admit, both old and new, where detectives did the kinds of things real detectives only dream about.

  The truth was, I couldn’t think of much but her when I wasn’t with her, and she was getting the same way about me, as it turned out. She couldn’t move in with me, though, because she couldn’t be a long-distance call from her office and her contacts and stay in business at all, so we found an old but serviceable one-bedroom apartment in the old suburbs of Camden and moved in together; but my hours plus the commute and her erratic schedule didn’t leave us much time together. I tried to get her to quit, since with her overhead, small as it was, she wasn’t bringing in much money anyway, take the high school equivalency exam, and maybe go to college, but she would have none of that. And that’s how I wound up quitting the Bristol police and becoming a full partner, such as it was, in Spade & Marlowe.

  We got married shortly after that in the courthouse, and honeymooned as fancy as we could afford—Atlantic City. The moment they discovered that I’d married a shvartse, my old friends always had something else to do and never called. Her few friends weren’t much different, particularly the men. Uncle Max never returned another phone call. Even the Associated Jewish Charities stopped sending form letters asking me to contribute. She also took my last name; something that pleased my ego, although it wasn’t anything I was hung up about or even expected. She just loved the idea of somebody who looked like her being Brandy Horowitz.

  We did get some new friends, though. Every time we came across another salt-and-pepper couple there seemed a kind of instant bond, although the nature of the bond was never mentioned. The fact is, though, that in the five years we’ve been married I’ve never been unfaithful to her and never really wanted anybody else. We were like two kids and we didn’t give a damn. Even the looks don’t bother me anymore. Knowing just how hand-to-mouth life would be, and how insecure it would be, I’d still do it all over again with no regrets.

  The funny thing is, after I came on with the agency, business picked up. Not great; maybe we cleared fourteen grand a year the best year after expenses, but it picked up. I don’t know what it is, but poor black people want a white when they have trouble with the authorities. I guess it’s just because the system is run by whites and they figure (wrongly) that a white guy can talk their language and cut through the bullshit, but it picked up. The usual stuff of real P.I. work—divorces, money transfers, security analysis for the little businesses, that kind of thing. Noting that you can reduce holdups by half by just painting the curb in front of a store yellow, for example. The city never knows if it’s legit or not, but while it doesn’t help crooks fleeing on foot, or local burglars, it sure as hell makes holdup men uneasy to park in a yellow zone waiting for a getaway. That cops notice. So, instead of taking a risk, you hold up the drugstore down the street without a yellow curb.

  That kind of stuff is readily available to franchises and chains, but little mom-and-pop stores never think that way and it’s cheap to pay a fee to somebody like me to show it to them. They save more than my small fee in the first holdup they don’t have.

  So now Brandy’s out in the twelve-year-old rustbucket that’s all the transportation we have, looking over clerks at 7-Elevens, and I’m sitting there getting worried. It wasn’t that she was out alone; she was pretty well equipped to take care of that. The fact was, she had really poor vision for somebody that young, poor enough that I wouldn’t let her drive me to the hospital if I were dying, and certainly poor enough that the next time she had to take a driver’s eye test she’d flunk, and I just knew that sooner or later she was going to crack up the car and herself with it. She has a pair of glasses but won’t wear them, and they’re out of date anyway.

  Finally, the phone rings, and I pick it up, thinking by now it’s the cops or the morgue.

  “Hey! I got him!” she said excitedly. “That asshole who gave us the tip don’t know a Seven Eleven from a Wawa Thrift Market, that’s all!”

  I was relieved, but I didn’t want to show it. “So where are you now?”

  “Down halfway to the airport. How much cash money you got?”

  I checked. “About twelve bucks. Why?”

  “ ’Cause I’m blowin’ my last nine on gas and I’m starving. Pick you up in, oh, forty minutes and we’ll hit a drive-through or something. Guess that’s all we can afford on that money. All the Jews in the world and I got to pick the one with twelve bucks. Gotta go or I won’t be able to pay for this call and get ’nuff gas to get there. Bye.”

  I sat back and sighed. Two days of combing those stores, and after expenses we might get a hundred bucks out of it. Worse, there wasn’t anything else ongoing at the moment. Things had been slow, real slow, for months now and we were up to our necks in debt, and behind in almost everything. We needed to clear about two grand a month to keep up and still survive at the poverty level; the past four months we’d made a total of about three. We’d had slack times before, but we always had a little money from my withdrawn pension funds or something to cover things, but they were all gone now. There was nothing wrong with us as detectives, but things were so low-class now that it’d take a big chunk of dough to pump new life into the agency. One of us would eventually have to take a job outside the business; we couldn’t even afford to get sick at this rate. Brandy had looked around, but found offers only for menial jobs, cleaning and fast food and that kind of th
ing, all minimum wage and no benefits. Me, I was more than ten years her senior, and there wasn’t much of a job market these days for a guy my age whose only qualifications were being an ex-cop and a failed P.I. Somehow I felt I’d go on welfare before I’d get a job selling shoes.

  The time was coming, though, when we’d have to grow up and be adults. It might already have come. Being good wasn’t enough. It had never been enough. It was who you knew and what you had that counted. More than once I wished the Air Force had decided to make me an accountant or a medic or something. Right now I could forget the twin BMWs and the big house in the suburbs. I wasn’t ambitious and material things had never much mattered to me; still, I’d settle for being lower middle class.

  I figured we’d talk it out tonight. It wouldn’t be the first time, but we’d never been this far down and this behind before. We were approaching the point where we could never catch up, and fast.

  2

  Something Big

  Sitting around a little apartment-building laundry room in your underwear on a hot, muggy night at about three in the morning feeding quarters into a Korean War vintage washer and dryer and watching the moths dive-bomb the lone light bulb was not exactly the most romantic of situations, but it increased my already deep depression.

  One of the craziest curses of being poor is that you get fat. That’s because the kind of stuff that’s cheapest to buy is full of fat and starches. Most of me stayed automatically thin, so it all went to the gut. I had three rolls of fat there, which I named Goodyear, Firestone, and Michelin. Brandy was five five and admitted to weighing two-twenty, all of it in her breasts, hips, and thighs. I didn’t mind—she was still sexy to me—but neither of us had any clothes that really fit or any money to get new ones. My shirts were on their third set of buttons and still opened themselves when I sat down, and I split my pants so much there’s nothing in the seats but repairs. I wasn’t sure I could even get into my one old suit if I had to. Brandy’s whole wardrobe consisted of jeans she could barely get into and tee shirts so faded you couldn’t tell what color they started out being, and that old hooker’s outfit she’d used way back when (but since, only over my dead body). It wasn’t that we were so poor we couldn’t spring for new clothes, it was just that at twenty bucks a shirt, thirty bucks for pants, never mind her wardrobe, we’d be up around five hundred bucks, and when you start thinking that way the money goes elsewhere.

  I sighed. “Babe, we got to talk.”

  “You got that surrender look in your eyes,” she said accusingly.

  “Yeah, but a good general knows when. We owe Corbone Properties seventeen hundred bucks for back rent and utilities on the office. We owe this dump about seven hundred more. The car’s so bad, if we take it to the mechanic’s he’ll pronounce it dead—that is, if we paid him what we owed him so he’d even look at it. We got another two, three thousand bucks in other bills, and we got eight hundred and fifty-two dollars in the bank. And none of that counts what we owe the IRS. It’s over, babe. I got the word today. End of the month, pay up or out at the office. End of the month, pay up or out here. Peter Pan time’s over. They’re ordering us to grow up.”

  She sat down and put her arms around me. “I know. I didn’t know ’bout the landlord, but I knew the rest. Can’t run even what we have, with no phone and no office. I guess I knew it was comin’ all along. I just kept hopin’, somehow, that something would walk in. Something big, you know? It ain’t gonna walk in, though, is it?”

  I shook my head. “No, something big wouldn’t even find the address. I got a call from Joe Wilkins down in Cape May County the other day.” Joe was one of the salt-and-pepper brotherhood; he was black, his wife was white. The difference was that Joe was an accountant and had a real-estate license. “He knows what shape we’re in, and he remembered us. They’re opening one of those fancy beachfront condo developments down on the Delaware shore, and they’re looking for a resident security supervisor. It only pays about fifteen grand a year, but it comes with a furnished two-bedroom apartment, medical plan, all that. It was designed with an older couple in mind, but he thought of us. It isn’t bad. On the water, and the only expenses would be food and clothing.”

  She thought about it. “Where’d you say it was?”

  “Just north of Rehoboth Beach. South Delaware shore.”

  “I never been down there, but I guess it’s like Wildwood or something. Pretty seasonal.”

  “Yeah, five months of intensive activity and seven months of presiding over a pretty morgue, although there’ll be a few permanent residents—well-heeled retirees and the like—and some sailor nuts will be there on the weekends even in lousy weather.”

  She sighed. “Not much for me down there, though. Funny—I never thought of myself as a housewife. Not ’til recently, anyway. Still, I been doin’ a lot of thinkin’ lately, and maybe it ain’t so bad. I look around that old neighborhood and this dump and I ask what I been clinging to all this time and what do I got to show for it? I shoulda dropped it all six years ago, when we first moved in together. We’d have a nice apartment, maybe a couple of kids, and you’d still be a steady cop. Who am I kiddin’? You ain’t my daddy, and I ain’t, neither. His dream was worse than dead before he was. It was worse than that. It was out of date, like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op. Like Shaft and Magnum and all them others. All I did was drag you down here with me.”

  I hugged and kissed her. “You didn’t drag anybody. I came because I met the prettiest, sexiest, smartest lady I ever knew who had the same crazy dreams I did and I fell in love with her. I still am.” I kissed her, and we got real passionate for a while.

  We took the clothes back up to the apartment and flopped down on the bed. “You’re taking this better than I thought you would,” I noted.

  “I—I been doin’ a lot of thinking lately. I saw the bills, I saw the bank account, and I know what business we don’t have. I been tryin’ to sort things out in my mind, you know. There’s some that can be Supergirl, but maybe I’m just not one of ’em. Just goin’ through Philadelphia suburbia, I got to lookin’ at nice houses and apartments, seein’ families in the stores, like that. I got a great husband I’m in love with, and I never really saw how important that was to me. You gave it up for me, now I’ll give it up for you. Ain’t no big sacrifice anymore, anyway. This don’t sound like much work. We’ll be together most of the time, nice apartment near the ocean.”

  I looked her in her big brown eyes. “What do you really want me to do, babe? I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “I want to be with you. I want to be your wife and have a whole passel of black Horowitzes that’ll confuse the living shit out of people. I think I always really knew that. I just wanted to make a go of it, just for a while, to see if I could really do it. Ever since I nailed Daddy’s killers, I been really scared to be anything else. I—I never told you this, but I got that hooker outfit one time because I was down this low, and I thought that might have to be what I’d do. Johnny Redlegs—you remember him—he was workin’ on me when you showed up, and I was almost desperate enough to take him up on it. You and that case were the only things that kept me out of it.”

  I remembered Redlegs. He was a pimp who gave new meaning to the word stereotypical. Pink Cadillac, fur coat, floppy hat, and a fairly big stable. About the only thing that set him apart from his competitors was that he had a reputation for not being violent with the girls and depending on heroin to keep them loyal subjects. I tried to imagine Brandy out there now, age twenty-seven, turning two or three tricks a night for her daily fix, and the trouble was, I could imagine it.

  I could also, for the first time, really understand her almost instant attraction to me. I was a savior whose background and tastes reminded her of her father, and I was there in the nick of time.

  “I’ll call Joe,” I told her. “Then we’ll spend the rest of the month packing up and cleaning up the few loose ends of the business, and put the agency in bankruptcy, where at
least we’ll get out from under those debts. We’ll get some new clothes and pay up on this dump if they let us out of the lease, and then that will be that.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “That will be that.”

  It was about nine days later and we were well along. There wasn’t much salvageable in the office, but there were old client files to either destroy or put in a safe place—we decided to give them to those we could find and to burn the rest—and a few other details to go through. The place in Delaware wasn’t finished yet, but we were welcome to come down the first of the month and they’d put us up in a motel until the first units were ready, about twenty days after that. It had originally been scheduled to open in the early spring, but somebody had forgotten what the sea does to beaches in winter storms.

  Brandy actually seemed more cheerful than she had in a long time. She was almost a changed woman, but that wasn’t a big surprise. She might brood and worry and think everything through a hundred times, but once she decided something, that was it, and she’d decided she was going to be Mrs. Horowitz by the seashore. For the first time, she was cutting loose from the burdens of her father’s dreams, and it didn’t seem so painful. I wasn’t overjoyed—I still would have preferred a marginal business of my own in the city to something like this—but the agency wasn’t even close to the margin.

  And then, almost at the last minute, Something Big walked through the door.