Gun, with Occasional Music

by Jonathan Lethem

"Not since I moved out, when Celeste showed up."

  "I can try to talk to her for you," I offered. "About what to do if they take your card away."

  "Yeah," he said softly. "That would be good."

  We sat quietly for a time. I was done with my drink and I knew it, but I lifted the glass anyway just to have something to do and licked the inside as far as my tongue could reach. I looked over at the kangaroo at the window table, and the kangaroo looked quickly back down at his drink again.

  Finally I said: "Here's the key to my office. You can stay there tonight and leave the key with the dentist in the morning. Keep out of the drawers and don't answer the phone."

  "Okay," he said, obviously surprised. "Thanks."

  "Sure, no problem." I put on my hat. "I'm leaving now, but I've got an answering machine on my home number Keep in touch."

  "Okay."

  "Take a look around when I walk out of here, and make note of it if anyone leaves right after me. Don't do anything, just make a mental note."

  "Okay."

  I pushed out of my bottomless seat and made my way on rubbery legs to the bar, trying not to look behind me. I dropped another twenty on the bar and said, "Bring my friend a drink."

  She nodded and looked over at the table. I put my hands in my pockets and left the bar. The light of the lobby made me squint, but the air smelled a little fresher. I nodded at the desk clerk and stepped out into the parking lot.

  I sat in my car for a minute and gave the pounding in my temples an opportunity to stop. It didn't take it. I didn't feel too great, but on the other hand I was being paid now for my time, by a guy who didn't have a lot of his own time left. A voice in my head suggested I go home and run some more make through my nose, but another voice said maybe it was time to do some legwork. I sighed, and decided to listen to the second voice, this time.

  So I went to have a look at the scene of the crime. The murder happened at night, and if I played my cards right, I might get to talk to the guy who found the body. When I have any luck with hotel staff, it's invariably the night shift. I don't know why. The night shift and I just seem to have some kind of affinity. If I was unlucky, the inquisitors would still have some kind of round-the-clock cordon set up, but even then I could pump the rookies for inside dirt on Office politics surrounding the case.

  Lots of fun options between me and my date with a hangover.

  CHAPTER 8

  FROM THE VISTAMONT HOTEL TO THE BAYVIEW ADULT Motor Inn was a long trip down the karmic spiral, but if Stanhunt and his killer had taken it, I could too. I pulled into the parking lot and found a space; there were four or five other cars there, and all the licenses were in-state. The Bayview was a vacation spot for people vacationing from their husbands and wives, and you didn't see out-of-state licenses in the lot because people in other states had their own versions of the Bayview for that kind of vacation. The place actually featured a nice view of the bay, but it was a view that didn't get looked at much.

  I got out of my car and stopped: there was the purr of a motorcycle or scooter slowing down behind me. I turned in time to see the bike turn the corner and disappear around the block I'd seen a single headlight in my rearview mirror on the way down the hill, and I was beginning to feel the proverbial breath on my neck, but I tried not to let it spook me into making a wrong move. A tail is like a pimple. It comes to a head in its own time. You can rush it, but it usually makes a mess if you do.

  I went up to the hotel office and looked through the window. The lobby was empty except for the clerk, and I could hear the tinny whine of a radio playing somewhere in the back. I stepped inside, careful not to wipe my feet on what was passing for a welcome mat at the door. It looked as though it might inflict serious damage to my shoes, and it certainly wasn't going to make them cleaner.

  The office was dingy. Dingy was the only word for it. The furniture was new but tasteless, and the walls needed a coat of paint. Even the music creeping out of the radio in the back sounded as if it were covered with dust. The night clerk lifted his head from what he was reading or looking at and regarded me with as pouchy and gray a set of eyes as I'd seen in forty-three years of looking in the mirror. He was maybe in his fifties, with the complexion of cigarette ash, and hair that was fighting a losing battle to cover a white pate. I shut the door, and a little bell tinkled a feeble announcement of my arrival.

  The clerk looked back down, giving his magazine clear priority. I said hello.

  "We have to see the girl," he said. "No animals allowed. If it's an animal, you'll have to take it somewhere else."

  "I'm alone," I said. "I'm an inquisitor on a case, and I'd like to ask you a few questions."

  He didn't look up. "Not without identification."

  I pulled out my photostat, and he almost looked at it. After a minute I put it away again.

  "Private," he said to himself. "No, it won't go. You can ask for the manager tomorrow morning." He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, except he barely bothered to make it. He had it down to a flicker.

  I stepped away from the desk and tried to peer into the back room. The clerk pretended I didn't exist. There wasn't any noise apart from the radio. The lights were all out, and as far as I could tell we were alone. The key rack was pretty full, and I had thè feeling I could get pretty rough in this shabby little office without attracting much attention.

  "Okay," I said, putting my hand out towards the key rack. "I guess I'll just have a look around."

  He closed his magazine and pushed it to one side, then looked up. I got another look at his eyes and understood why he was hiding them in the magazine. The motel office was bush league, and so was the clerk, except for those eyes. They were major league, maybe Hall of Fame. They were eyes that had died twice and gone on living. The part of me that was considering playing it rough began reconsidering. It wasn't that I didn't think I could take him. I was sure I could, but something in those eyes made me think he'd exact some kind of price if I did.

  "All right," he said stonily. "Fucking lay off. You've got the wrong guy."

  "It's you I want to talk to."

  "It's you I don't want to talk to." His tone was even but his hands were tapping nervously on the desk.

  I peeled the outer bill off the roll Angwine had given me and held it up so he could see it was a hundred, then ripped it in half right through the portrait. I pocketed one of the halves and threw the other onto his desk right next to his hand. He didn't move.

  "I'll reunite the twins if you give me a tour of the murder room," I said.

  He smiled, and the weird light in his eyes faded. "Whatever you say." The ripped bill disappeared into a desk drawer that locked with a key, and the key went into his pocket. He got up from the desk and shook his head as if his neck was sore, and plucked a set of keys from the wall.

  I offered my hand and told him my name. He looked at me funny and didn't take my hand, but said: "Shand." I took it for a last name, but it could as well have been a cough or a sneeze for the way he said it.

  "You on last night?" I stepped back to let him lead me through the door.

  "I guess so," he said over his shoulder.

  He led me to the room. I recognized it from the photographs, which is to say it was a hotel room like any other, with a huge video monitor on the wall and a camera perched like a vulture over the bed. The ripped curtain had already been replaced, but the coffee table had a big mark on it where they'd scoured off the blood.

  "They get a tape of the killing?" I asked.

  "Nope." Shand poked at his nose thoughtfully. "I guess that wasn't what they were here for."

  "Who?"

  "Mr. Stanhunt and whoever killed him." Shand wasn't getting trapped into theorizing.

  "Did you see him?"

  "I saw Mr. Stanhunt."

  "He registered alone?"

  "Stanhunt had been here on and off for a couple of weeks, and he always registered alone. I don't hassle the guests for fun. He paid his bills."

&n
bsp; "Yeah, he had a habit of paying his bills—maybe one bill too many. You never saw him with anyone?"

  "I told you no." Shand stayed at the door with his hand on the knob, making it clear he wanted to get back to his magazine.

  I sat down on the bed. "You found the body?"

  "Yeah. The door was open. I looked for a minute, then called the office. Didn't go in." He made it sound like a hand of gin rummy.

  "No weapon?"

  "It wasn't my job to look. If the inquisitors found a weapon, they didn't mention it to me."

  I nodded. Shand just kept looking at me with those dead eyes that had seen so much that now they didn't see anything at all.

  "You work here long?" I asked.

  "Depends on what you call long. I've worked in places like this for a long time, but I tend to come and go."

  "I guess your curiosity isn't what it used to be."

  He liked that. "That's one way of putting it." He dug in his pocket and took out a little vial. I watched as he unscrewed the top, pushed his pinky in, and brought it up burdened with a little heap of white powder. He pinched one nostril closed and pushed the powder up deftly into the other, then screwed the top back down and pocketed the vial. I imagined the powder, whatever it was—Acceptol or Avoidol, probably—filling up the space behind his nightmare eyes.

  The sound of a car in the lot made us both look up. He turned his back to me and said, "I guess that's it..."

  "Give me a few more minutes in the room," I said.

  He turned to give me one more harrowing look, then shrugged. I was being judged not worth the bother. "I'll come back and lock up," he said, and went out in the direction of the office.

  There wasn't anything specific I wanted to look at in the room. I wanted to look at the room itself, to try to see it through Stanhunt's eyes. Needless to say, it wasn't pretty. I imagined Stanhunt looking at this room the way he had looked at me, which is to say, down. Everything Maynard Stanhunt said and did was a repudiation of this motel room and the kind of life that was lived in rooms like it. But something brought him here, and brought him here more than once. Something made it worthwhile or necessary for him to lower his standards and spend part of his life in this room, and eventually made it necessary for him to spend his death here too.

  My job was to find out what that something was. I suspected it would be a simple thing, when I found it. But at the moment I didn't have a clue—literally.

  Footsteps in the hallway interrupted my reverie. I looked up, expecting Shand, but it wasn't Shand. Standing in the doorway was the evolved kangaroo I'd seen in the bar of the Vistamont. He was wearing a canvas jacket and plastic pants with a tight elastic waistband, and his paws were tucked into his pockets. He stepped into the room. I got up off the edge of the bed.

  "You're in too deep, flathead," he said. He spoke in a clipped, recitative way, in a voice that was a bit too high to sound as tough as he wanted.

  "I see," I replied.

  "I hope so, for your sake. I'd hate to have to cut your fucking balls off."

  "That makes two of us, Joey." I tried to brush past him but he moved sideways into my path, and our shoulders met.

  "Not so fast, flathead. We gotta talk. Let's find your car."

  I didn't say anything. He reached into his jacket and a little black gun appeared in his paw. He held it casually, the way you hold a candy bar or a cake of soap. Only this gun wasn't going to make anyone clean.

  He filled the passenger seat of my car pretty awkwardly. I closed my door, and the overhead light went out, reducing his form to a shaggy silhouette. I couldn't see the gun in his paw anymore, but I knew it was there.

  "Listen up and listen good," he said. His voice quavered, and I got the impression he'd been practicing his strong-arm style on his little brother, if at all. I'm no judge of age in kangaroos, at least not without getting a good look at their teeth, but it was obvious that Joey was a little wet behind the ears.

  "You're making some people unhappy," he said. "You don't know how unhealthy that could be. Angwine's bad company; you shouldn't be seen with him so often. You should lay off and go home. We'll send some divorce business your way."

  "Who's we?"

  "You shouldn't ask me questions, flathead. I'm not here to answer your pee-wee amateur eye questions."

  "Don't play human with me, Joey. I've got the same privilege with you as anybody has with a kangaroo. Who sent you?"

  In case I forgot about the gun, he stuck it in my gut. Like so many of the evolved, he didn't like being reminded of his lineage. "I work for Phoneblum, if that means anything to you."

  I played a hunch. "Danny Phoneblum?"

  He prodded at my rib cage with the gun. "That's right. You might wish you never heard the name, though. Danny got sick of you from a distance, see, and I'd feel real sorry for you if he got a look close up."

  His jabbing must have loosened the anti-grav pen in my shirt pocket, because now it drifted out and floated up into the space between us. The kangaroo looked confused for a moment, then reached up and batted it down to the floor at his feet.

  "So you and Danny are real cozy, right?"

  "That's right." He shifted in his seat, adjusting his big tail, keeping the muzzle of the gun pressed against my solar plexus. It must have been uncomfortable for him.

  "So you can get a message back to him?"

  "Yeah."

  "Tell him next time he wants to talk to me, don't send a marsupial."

  He lifted the gun from my gut, and in the darkness I didn't see where he was going with it. Then it hit my mouth hard enough to knock me back against the headrest. I tasted blood right away, but the high level of make in my system kept me from feeling much pain.

  There was a moment of unnatural quiet. He was probably as surprised as I was by the actuality of the violence. Violence isn't part of the Ping-Pong game of wisecrack and snappy comeback; it puts an awkward end to all that and leaves you wishing you'd stayed in or under the bed that morning.

  "Okay," I said through the spit and blood welling in my mouth. "You're a tough boy."

  "You think you can bluff your way through, flathead, but you're wrong. Not this one. You gotta call it quits."

  I put my hands on the wheel so I wouldn't try to put them around his thick neck. "Message received. Hop along, Cassidy."

  He opened the door and the overhead light came back on. His kangaroo mouth twisted into a ragged black smile, and above it his shiny nose twitched. "You got it right the first time, flathead. The name is Joey Castle."

  "I'll keep it in mind."

  He backed out of his seat, keeping the gun leveled at my craw, then slammed the door shut and disappeared into the darkness. I took the keys out of my pocket and started the engine, thinking of trailing him, but I was still in too much of a daze to drive.

  So I sat in the car with the motor running and the lights off. I didn't rub my mouth because I didn't feel like getting blood on my hand. When I heard a motor kick into action, I turned around, just in time to see the reflective plates of a motorcycle vanish down the ramp of the parking lot.

  I sat there for another five or ten or twenty minutes, in a dark mood. I fingered the ripped hundred in my pocket, but I couldn't bring myself to get back out of the car and face Shand with blood on my mouth.

  I thought about the kangaroo, about what a punk he was. So green he couldn't help boasting, telling me his and Phoneblum's names, and admitting to the connection between them. I'd gotten a return on my mouthful of gun.

  Fair enough. I started the car and drove back down to the highway along the bay. It was the long way, but there was something about the water at night that I needed to have a look at.

  CHAPTER 9

  I ONLY SET MY ALARM WHEN I'M ON A CASE. THAT MORNing I'd been dreaming a pleasant dream of normal, genitally reoriented sex with an idealized composite blonde—no resemblance to Celeste Stanhunt—when the alarm went off and it projected the wake-up dream into my head instead. The image this mor
ning was of a series of cartoon sheep jumping over a cartoon wooden fence against a background of ambient white. The last sheep caught its back legs against the top of the fence and came tumbling down in a clatter of splintered wood and bleating. Then a giant hand reached out of the clouds and picked up the sheep, dusted it off, and patted it on the rump to send it scurrying along after the rest of the flock. The hand turned to reveal a watch face on its wrist, and the watch face grew closer and closer and the ticking grew louder and louder until I finally woke up.

  I sat with a pad and pencil over coffee and tried to piece together my next move, but the coffee stung the fresh cuts in my gums and I ended up having to concentrate instead on drinking through only one side of my mouth. After wrestling down a second cup, I went back to the pad and wrote the name Danny Phoneblum just to have a look at it. Underneath it I wrote Pansy Greenleaf, then Grover Testafer and Celeste Stanhunt. I drew a few circles and triangles on the pad, then tore the sheet off and threw it into the wastebasket.

  After breakfast I made a call and requested an address and phone number for Testafer, which I got, and the phone number for the house on Cranberry Street, which wasn't available, even after I offered up my privilege access code. Either my code had been suspended or Celeste Stanhunt's privacy rated higher than my privilege.

  Either way, the result was the same: I'd have to drop in on the house if I wanted a word with Celeste, or with Pansy Greenleaf. And I did want a word—hell, maybe even a whole bunch of them strung together. But the day was young, for once. I had plenty of time. First I'd take a drive up into the El Cerrito hills and have a look at Dr. Testafer's fancy address. I was in the mood for scenery.

  The doctor's house was on Daymont Court, which was a public road but just barely. It terminated in a pair of drive-. ways, each barred with a gate to stop traffic. The mailbox on the left said TESTAFER. I parked to one side of the clearing and set out on foot past the barrier, walking with loud crunching steps in the gravel so I wouldn't be mistaken for surreptitious.

  The house was a botched American replica of a French country cottage, marred by aluminum storm windows and a satellite dish mounted on the shingles of the low roof. There wasn't any car in front of the house, but I went up to the front door and pushed the buzzer anyway.