The Labyrinth Of Dreams

by Jack L. Chalker

  Paoli was an all-right sort of guy with some people, but he had certain strong dislikes that you might call hatred. He hated Jews, for example, even more than he hated blacks, and he hated the idea of mixed marriages even more than both of those groups. These paled only in comparison to his total and complete hatred of all private investigators. The word to cooperate might have originated with Little Jimmy, but I’d bet my life it was delivered in Italian.

  Brandy and I stopped by a shopping mall before going into Philadelphia, and spent some time there, and a fair amount of Little Jimmy’s dough. In fact, I was beginning to think that if we recovered all two and a quarter million, we’d still owe the big weasel money. Still, with me there to try things on, I had clothes now that looked decent and fit me, and Brandy had almost a wardrobe. It was the first time she’d done much with cosmetics and jewelry since she played that hooker, and even though this was understated and looked real good, it still didn’t seem natural looking to me after all this time. After a nice, expensive charged lunch, we drove over to see Sergeant Paoli.

  He was a thin, dour-looking man of maybe forty-five going on sixty, with less hair than I had, all gray, and one of the biggest noses this side of the ocean. Had a desk out in the middle of a combined office, but ushered us back immediately to a small private office obviously used in interrogations. The look of total disgust on his face was undeniable. Shoot somebody, yeah. Frame ’em, sure. Take bribes, screw your fellow officers, fine. But we were garbage.

  “I need some reliables in the Sansom Street district,” I told him. “Ones who might know the transvestites and the queens equally well, and know where they hide out in the daytime.”

  “Thinking of coming out of the closet?” he shot back like he meant it. “That’s a pretty closed society in there, even harder because it’s quite small. Most of that sort aren’t downtown, they’re down in south Philly.”

  “Either who I’m looking for is there, or he goes through there to make his changes,” I responded. “He’s real good at covering his tracks and he’s now on the lam from You-Know-Who, and maybe the law as well.”

  “You want to give me a name?”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Whitlock. Martin Whitlock.”

  “The banker? Well, I’ll be damned . . . He’s hotter than the Fourth of July right now. The feds are in. I can’t do nothing about the feds.”

  “Screw the feds. I want him, and when I’m through they can have what’s left. I’ve already got a deal with them, so don’t think of getting into this thing yourself. I guarantee it’ll just give you a choice between a bullet or ten years’ hard time.”

  “It’s your funeral,” he replied, making it sound more like a wish than a warning. “All right, I’ll give you a couple of names and places. You’ll have to track them down yourself. You can use my name to open the door, but after that, you don’t ever use it again.”

  That was fair enough. I was fascinated by the fact that although we both sat there, he had refused not only to address Brandy but to even acknowledge her existence. We didn’t like to stay where we weren’t wanted, and we got out of there as quickly as we could.

  “He don’t like us much,” Brandy noted. “I guess he likes the old days when everybody was named Capone, or Banana-nose, or something or other. Well, Lone Ranger, what we do now?”

  “We park the horses, Faithful Indian Companion, and we leg it.”

  Joey Teasdale, Paoli’s first suggestion, wasn’t hard to find if you were patient, had a lot of twenty-dollar bills, and didn’t seem to be cops. We were all three, although we must have walked three miles and spent a couple of C-notes before we found him sitting at a table in the first joint we’d covered. He was almost your stereotypical queen, with loud clothes, high-heeled boots, earrings, and more perfume than Brandy had worn in a lifetime. At least you felt reasonably safe with him; he sure wasn’t any threat to Brandy, and I sure as hell wasn’t his type. He was, however, extraordinarily courteous to Brandy, which was more than Paoli had been.

  How long you been off the gooseberry lay, son?

  “Paoli sent us. We’re looking for somebody,” I told him.

  “You cops?”

  “Private. The man lifted something of value from somebody you should never, never steal from, and split. He’s hot and we need him before the good guys get him.”

  Teasdale whistled. “That hot, huh? Who?”

  “Whitlock. Martin Whitlock, the banker.”

  “Him? What makes you think he would come through here?”

  “Look, we got no time for games,” Brandy put in. “We got money ’cause the Man got ripped and he don’t care what it takes to get even. You got it? Now, those who make themselves useful earn big brownie points with the Man. Those who don’t, well, that goes in the report, too.”

  That hit home. “Yeah, okay, he comes through here regularly,” Teasdale said with resignation. “Been coming down here for years. Not the usual kind, though. I mean, I’m a man, wouldn’t be anything else. No offense, dear lady. We get a lot of those kind of guys who have a wife and kids and position because that’s important to them, and then they come down here sneaking around to make little liaisons, if you know what I mean. He’s not that kind. When he’s down here, it’s total. Looks, acts, sounds all girl, if you know what I mean. Even gets the voice soft and sultry. The drag queens, they just like the pretending. They’re good, but they’re acting and they always know they’re acting. Not him. It’s like they were two different people, one male, one all female. I sometimes had the idea he’d gotten the operation. Become a she, if you know what I mean, and that the man part was the acting.”

  I exchanged glances with Brandy and knew that we were both thinking the same thing. Suppose Joey Teasdale was right? It would explain a lot about why he and his wife hadn’t had a real marriage in a long time but might still care for one another. It would also explain some of the long absences and why a guy like that would need enough money to be into the mob. If so, there might be nothing short of fingerprints that would nail him.

  “You got any line on him?”

  “Not immediate, but he never played around. Oh, he’d come into a place now and then, but mostly he didn’t stick around here. He had a regular thing with somebody up in northeast Philly, I’m pretty sure. Only saw the guy once, when he came down to Honey’s to get some of her—Whitlock’s—things and they wouldn’t let him in the door. I happened to be passing by and played kind of Sir Galahad; got somebody who could go get what he wanted.”

  “What’d he look like?” Brandy asked.

  “I dunno. Average height and build, I guess. The only thing I remember clearly is he had long, flowing blond hair and a bushy blond walrus moustache and really gorgeous blue eyes. Looked kind of like an overage drummer from some rock band. Dressed that way, too. He was quite attractive, but it was kind of funny.”

  “Yes?”

  “You sometimes get a sixth sense about these things. It can’t be, of course, but I’d swear he wasn’t the least bit gay.”

  I nodded. “When was this?”

  “Just day before yesterday. That’s why I remember him.”

  That was about all we could get from Joey, but it was both valuable and puzzling. Now we had at least one other player in Martin Whitlock’s bizarre double life, and that player was a total unknown.

  Honey Rodriguez was the second and last name on our list, and was also the one referred to by Joey Teasdale. This was strictly Brandy’s to handle now, for the same reason that our mysterious blond man couldn’t get in to get Martin Whitlock’s things, although it was frustrating to me. They just didn’t let men in the Center City Lesbian Center and Coffee House without a warrant.

  She was in there about forty minutes while I guzzled black coffee on the corner across from the dump, wishing I’d taken up smoking again when the money came back. Brandy had, unfortunately, which only made it worse. Neither of us needed to s
moke at all, and poverty had been a real good excuse to give it up, but deep down it was the only reason we’d given it up. It’s bad for you, and antisocial these days to boot, but, damn it, we’d only ballooned out to our weights when we quit, and while I might be healthier now I sure didn’t feel any better. Maybe not cigarettes, but in self-defense maybe an occasional cheap cigar or one of those curved Sherlock Holmes-type pipes. On Little Jimmy’s card, naturally.

  She finally came out and gave me a smile and crossed over and we walked over to a small cafe off Chestnut. “Well? Did she convert you?” I asked her.

  Brandy laughed. “There were some mighty-good-lookin’ broads in there, but when you got down to it they all lacked an essential ingredient, and since it’s the only thing we keep you men around for anyway, why spoil it?”

  “Got anything?”

  “Some real interesting stuff, but it only gets crazier and crazier. This kind of shit ain’t for small-time P.I.’s, honey, or big-shot feds, either. It’s booby-hatch time.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Whitlock took a bunch of pills and shots and stuff, all right. Hormones, almost certainly. Kept a whole medical kit in a private locker in the back of the center, there. Whitlock money’s been supportin’ that place, almost. Thousands of bucks’ worth. They all swear that Whitlock’s a she passin’ as a he, not the other way ’round, but several were there when she or he or whatever changed, and they swear there’s not a scar or stretch mark on that body, and that it had all the right curves and moves, including average boobs that were strapped down in a kind of corset that also filled out the upper body, made it look muscular. I don’t know much about transsexuals, but the people over there seem to know a lot, and they swear that Whitlock was as natural-born a woman as they know. What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t think. Not at this stage, anyway. So if that’s true, then who fathered those two kids of his? Besides, they aren’t that old. I think Mrs. W. would have noticed a lot sooner, at least by the honeymoon. Besides, I got on the phone that he was a member of the Triangle Health Club, and that’s rich men only. If he went through that kind of operation, it’d take months and cost a fortune. He couldn’t cover it up that long and keep his regular schedule. Those things take months before all those hormones kick in.”

  “Where’d you learn so much?”

  “The National Enquirer. So I’d bet my booties that old Martin was a man until just recently and would still be more castrated man than full-figured gal.”

  “They said this started more than two years ago, and they saw her then.”

  I nodded. “So this leads me to a deduction, Watson.”

  “We don’t make enough to pay taxes now.”

  “Quiet. Us geniuses need clear heads. The only way I can figure that we have the Marty Whitlock everybody knows and the female Marty down here is if there isn’t much kinky going on at all. You get an estimate of height and weight?”

  “Hard to tell. She wore heels there, and dear old Honey noted that she wore real finely made elevator shoes as a man. They all thought it was a great scam, and they didn’t look much closer because of the money.”

  “Few do. But the height?”

  “Honey said, with heels, they were about the same height. Call it five ten.”

  I nodded. “Uh huh. And Marty was five ten as well. Now, if we assume that the real Marty Whitlock didn’t wear elevators, let alone heels, we can account for maybe three inches.”

  “Brother and sister, maybe? Real close look-alikes?”

  “Have to be real close. The trouble is, he does have two sisters, both accounted for and neither one likely to be able to pass for him even with Hollywood special effects working on his side.”

  “He could have just passed her once and seen the resemblance and got her on the payroll. He’d have a hell of a good payroll. It’d beat workin’.”

  I considered it. “Maybe, but it’s unlikely. The clue here is that she looked enough like him to convince everybody down here that there was a masquerade. Remember what Joey told us? As a woman, he looked like somebody totally different, a real woman. Except for one thing, we’ve been led down a garden path. Not only does he vanish into this sexual anywhere, but he leads us to a point where it appears he’s either a drag queen or a transsexual. Now, why?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it’s because he knew he’d have to disappear someday, and he figured this was a real neat dead end. Everybody would now be looking for a drag queen or a transsexual, not for him.”

  “And left it in place for a couple of years?” I thought about it. “It’s almost too clever. You wonder how somebody with his background would even know about these places, let alone work them out that neatly. It explains the call to his wife, though, even though it’s one of only two mistakes he made. She knows what’s going on. Most of it, anyway. Damn! This is frustrating! You don’t hire somebody to go through this kind of elaborate shit for two years just as a blind alley, and even if you have this kind of shit going you can’t buy much more time than if you got a fake passport, went up to Canada, and took the plane to Rio or whatever. No, this smells. This stinks. He did this for a reason other than to cover his tracks. This was something ongoing, something he maybe needed to develop so he could get out from under the Little Jimmys of the world one step ahead of the feds. Why stick around here at all? He could just as easily and untraceably have called her changing planes in Chicago.”

  “Unfinished business. He had to move in a hurry, faster than he figured. You said two mistakes, though.”

  “Uh huh. Get another description of that guy who came by to pick up her gear?”

  “Yeah, it was pretty much as Joey told us. About five ten, blue eyes, long blond hair and moustache . . . ”

  “The operative stuff is at the start. Five ten, blue eyes. Probably a real good blond wig and a real professional matching fake moustache.”

  “The real Marty Whitlock,” she sighed. “But why come at all? Testing out the disguise, or what?”

  “Uh uh. Remember, he was spooked into moving a few days early. His girlfriend was told to stay away. Considering the trail he laid, they’d be more likely to be looking for her than him, or so he’d think. Those rich upper-class types really believe the cops are that good and that fast. But she needs some stuff from there, or something in the locker was traceable. So he puts on an old pair of jeans and a tee shirt, maybe old tennis shoes, and with some difficulty gets the stuff. We can forget the blond shit, though. He knows he was conspicuous, so he’ll ditch ’em or at least stick ’em in the trunk and use something else. Big beard, shaved head, maybe tinted contact lenses, and he’s off. Dead end, babe. We don’t even know the name he was using in northeast Philly—if that was where he was doing whatever he was doing—and there’s only three quarters of a million people out there. It’d take us years to canvass enough to find this pair.”

  Brandy grinned. “You won’t have to. See, they thought she was one of them, and they smelled somethin’ real odd about this dude even if he did have the handwriting and all. After all, Whitlock was their sugar daddy or mama or whatever. So when he left, they tailed him. I have the address.”

  I almost jumped across the table to kiss her. Naturally, this spilled my coffee and her Coke, but I didn’t care. Finally I said, as the waitress and several patrons stared at us in disgust, “I think we go out there—after I make two phone calls.”

  “Little Jimmy and who else?”

  “Agent Kennedy. I’m gonna give ’em both everything up to the sex change. If they’re any good, they might get further, but maybe not. In the meantime, I’m in good with them and we’ll be the first there.”

  There were still several hours of setup and work involved. The place was one of those older middle-class apartment houses with sixteen apartments in the place, and there was only so much you could expect even from Divine Providence. You could use a hundred scams to talk to the neighbors, but I once tried the insurance-agent ploy and half the people wanted
to talk policies. It was easier just to fall back on the old reliable and flash the badge while Brandy cased the joint. It wasn’t too hard to find their apartment; it was the one couple nobody knew much about and everybody thought a little nuts.

  That left getting into apartment 209. I wasn’t much good at petty burglary, but when it was clear that the place was dark and unoccupied, I turned things over to Brandy. She had that nice, big safety lock picked in about two and a half minutes of sweat. I did the sweating, of course.

  At this stage, our pair had been pretty casual. They never expected to be coming back, and they never expected anybody to be able to find the place. At the end of the lease, which was prepaid only to the end of the month, the landlord would use his master, open the place up, get a cleaning crew in, and rent it out again.

  These weren’t furnished apartments, but it’s tough to make a smooth getaway in a moving van. Most of it appeared to be rental furniture, with the stickers still on, pretty much like I figured. It wasn’t terribly full of stuff, though; a couch and a couple of chairs in the otherwise barren living room, a queen-sized mattress and box spring in the bedroom, and a dresser. Most of the clothes and some of the toiletries were gone, but the small fridge was still reasonably full—fortified skim milk, Perrier, some never-to-be fondue, and even a couple of bottles of sixty-buck-a-fifth champagne. Overchilled, but not bad. Brandy took care of the small tin of beluga caviar; I never could see the appeal of solid-salt fish eggs that cost ten cents a pinhead-sized egg. Just your average lower-middle-class apartment dweller’s emergency rations.

  Then we started looking under mattresses and behind furniture. It didn’t take very long, considering the underfurnished nature of the apartment, but we came up with a whole bunch of junk. It’s amazing what falls in back of dressers, and there is some sort of law that states that anything left for any period of time will migrate to spots where you will never see it or find it. Most of it was the ordinary debris—a plastic hair curler, a couple of combs, some loose change, a magazine sweepstakes form, that kind of thing. One very crumpled little piece of tissue-thin paper, however, stood out and Brandy carefully unwrapped it. “Aha! The master detectives strike!” she announced with a flair and handed it to me.