"I'm not sure I'd mind that." I couldn't stop myself.
"I'm sure you would, if you knew what I was talking about. Here." She slid my card to where it was within my reach. "I'm getting you out of my office. I can't afford to be having this conversation."
She pushed a button on her console and asked for Morgenlander: When he came on the line, she said my name and asked him to have me seen out, then broke off the connection.
"Too bad," I said. "We could have made beautiful dialogue together."
"You used to work for the Office, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Inquisitor."
"That's the only way to get licensed as a P.I."
She looked me over as if for the first time. "What happened?"
"Either it'll happen to you or you wouldn't understand the answer to your question," I said. "I'm not going to try to explain it."
There was a knock at the door, or rather a scraping of knuckles against wood. Inquisitor Teleprompter nudged a button on her desk and the door slid open, revealing Inquisitor Kornfeld, the quiet one who'd glowered around in my doorway while Morgenlander talked. Apparently he and Morgenlander were still working together, despite the tension I'd sensed between them then. He nodded his head knowingly at Catherine Teleprompter, as if I were nothing more than some kind of unwieldy parcel that needed delivering, and then jerked his thumb at me and the door, in that order.
I took my card and slipped it into my jacket pocket, where I found a few dog-eared business cards. I drew one out and put it on the desk where my karma had been sitting. "Give it a call," I said, and then I couldn't think of a reason in the world why she ever would, so I just nodded and smiled and left it at that.
Kornfeld didn't look too impressed. He held the door open so as to make it clear I shouldn't linger over farewells. Inquisitor Teleprompter looked at me without blinking and said: "Don't wait underwater;" But her nostrils were flared when she said it, and I had a feeling her legs were crossed under the desk. I'd gotten under her skin in return, at least a little.
Kornfeld almost closed the door on my heels. I was expecting the bum's rush, so it came as a surprise when he took my arm and turned towards the bank of elevators, away from the front entrance. I experienced a surge of paranoia as I realized I was being ushered into the dark heart of the Office, without knowing why. Not that the place had changed any since the days I walked the halls. It was precisely that pervasive sameness that made me want to pull my arm loose and run for the nearest exit.
We got inside the elevator. Kornfeld leaned against the wall and pushed at the buttons, and I stood against the back, thinking, my mind elsewhere. When the door closed, he turned to me and his eyes lit up for a second, and he came towards me with a fist coiled up at his waist, and smashed me right in the middle of my stomach.
It was the closest thing to language that had passed between us. I guess I should have been grateful to the guy for opening himself up to me like that. I doubled up completely, more out of breath than in pain, though there was plenty of pain. Kornfeld leaned back against the side of the elevator car, apparently finished. The guy was laconic even in his violence.
The elevator opened, and he took me by the arm again and led me down the hallway as I was, bent over and gasping for air. By the time we were at Morgenlander's door, I had managed to pull myself together, although standing upright made my face flush hot. Kornfeld opened the door and shoved me into the room.
Morgenlander was visiting brass, and he rated a nice layout, with carpeting, and a little refrigerator under the window for snacks and beer. The chair I fell into was leather or a deceptively real copy. Morgenlander didn't look any more shaven or less disheveled than when he'd come through my place. His hands were spread out on a pile of papers, and there was a pencil behind his ear. "Thanks," he said, looking up at Kornfeld. "Why don't you leave me alone with him, okay?"
There was an appreciable pause, and then Kornfeld said: "No. I can't do that." Morgenlander just nodded, and Kornfeld went over and sat in a chair against the wall. I had had Kornfeld figured for a rookie tagging along after the big man; I realized now I might not have the intricacies of their professional relationship worked out exactly right.
But Morgenlander recovered. "Funny you walking in here," he said to me. "You always seem to pick funny ways to do stuff. It's very funny." He leaned over the desk and cracked a knuckle for punctuation.
"I'm a comedian," I said. "Either of you guys want to play straight man, the part is still open."
"Funny," smiled Morgenlander, and he showed me his worn-out tongue again. "It's a good thing you're a comedian, because as a P.I. you're a pain in the ass. You complicate things. You know Angwine spent the night in your office?"
"I gave him the key."
Morgenlander smiled more, his eyes crinkling around the edges like a department-store Santa who gets a funny feeling when the girls sit in his lap. "Why are you here, Metcalf?"
"You took me off the case, but a lead came my way." I was fishing for a response, and willing to bait the hook. "I wanted to throw it to you. Don't ice Angwine until you get a handle on somebody named Danny Phoneblum."
Morgenlander didn't show any response to the name. He looked over at Kornfeld, and then back at me. "Who's Phoneblum?"
"You know as much as I do now. He's just a name that won't stop cropping up. Don't say I never did you any favors."
"Get him out of here," said Morgenlander. He leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. Kornfeld got up and put his hand on my shoulder. "In my district we don't license people like you, Metcalf. You'd be lucky to stay out of the ice wagon, where I come from." He looked at Kornfeld. "Bill him twenty-five points and put him on the street."
Kornfeld took me back down in the elevator, and this time I kept my hands folded over my stomach. He walked me through the corridors and back past the front desk and out onto the street. The rain was starting to fall, in fat oblong drops that dampened the tops of my knees and the back of my neck. Kornfeld took out his magnet and aimed it at the karma in my pocket.
"I'm down to sixty-:five," I said.
He just stood there.
"Forty's too low," I said. "You know that."
The wind took the rain and threw it sideways into my face. An Office vehicle pulled into the lot behind us, and a couple of inquisitors jogged past us up the steps of the Office, collars raised against the wind and rain. Kornfeld and I just stood there getting wet. He flicked his thumb, and I saw the little red indicator on the back of the magnet light up. "You shouldn't have mentioned Phoneblum," he said, with something resembling sadness in his voice.
"Thanks a lot, pal," I said. My fingers curled instinctively around the card in my pocket. "I'll remember this."
"You stupid shit," he said, and turned to go back into the building. "You stupid little shit."
CHAPTER 12
I GOT BACK IN THE CAR. I FELT PRETTY LOW, THANKS TO the unmagical combination of a punch in the stomach, twenty-five points missing from my card, and two or three lines of make missing from my bloodstream. What's more, there was rain in my collar and I needed a sandwich. The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated. I didn't have a clear next move lined up, and I wasn't really getting paid enough to eat lunch in the car So I drove home. I almost ran down some pedestrians coming around a corner, and when I leaned on my horn, the guy closest to my car took a big horn out of his coat and honked it right back at me. I'll admit it was a first.
I parked as close to the building as I could, but that wasn't particularly close. The rain was falling in heavy, languorous sheets, and it ran in dirty streams along the waste-clogged gutters. With my shoulders up over my ears I sprinted to the doorway of my building and stepped into the darkness under the crumbling archway, and stood there for a minute, watching the rain run off the sill over my head and splash a few inches from my shoes. I was playing
out a hunch.
The hunch was right. It took about a minute for the kangaroo to catch up with me, and he must have been pretty sure I hadn't seen him, because he strolled up to the front of the building without taking any pains to conceal himself. He was wearing a drab rain slicker and a sort of wrapped-up turban for a hat, his ears pressed down against the sides of his head by the knotted cloth. I was well hidden in the darkness of the doorway, and I got more of a look at him than he did at me before our eyes met. The second they did, I laid into him with everything I had.
My edge was surprise. I probably had intelligence and experience on him too, but in a fight with a kangaroo I'll take surprise, thanks. I made the most of it by jumping into a clinch with him, wrapping my arms around his neck, and thrusting my knee into his gut as hard as I could and as many time's as I could. I'm no athlete, but I do all right. The force of it moved us out into the rain and halfway across the pavement in front of the building.
I knew I had him, but I wasn't finished making my point. I pushed him the rest of the way across the sidewalk and backed him against a car parked at the curb, pinning him against the passenger door with my hip. My face was buried in the wet fur of his neck, and the reek of it was strong in my nostrils, but I knew that stepping away would give him room to operate with his big legs and feet, and that I couldn't afford. I brought my hands up and joined them under his chin, then smashed his head backwards against the roof of the can The cloth around his head unfurled and fell across my arms like some pathetic flag of surrender. I smashed his head back again, straining against the muscles in his neck, and then I felt his grip around my shoulders slacken and fall away.
That was the end of it. The mindlessly capable muscles of his lower body kept him standing upright, but the rest of him wasn't working too well. I put an arm around his shoulders and guided him into the lobby and pushed him against the wall, then fished in his pouch for the gun. The front door eased shut on its hydraulic hinges, sealing us off from the roar of the rain. The only sound was the throb of pulse in my temples. I found the gun, put it in my jacket, pushed the kangaroo off me, and slumped back against the banister. I'd won the thing, but you couldn't tell it from the way we were both slumped in the corridor, depleted and quiet. The puddles of rain at our feet crept across the lobby floor until they ran together into one.
I watched Joey's eyelids flicker open. "Motherfucker," he said. He reached up and felt the back of his head, and his paw came back wet with more than rain.
I took the gun out of my pocket. "Get in the elevator."
We went upstairs. The kangaroo looked pretty funny sprawled across my couch, his awkward legs crossed and his useless tail pushing up a corner of his raincoat like some kind of tumor or erection. I kept the gun trained on him, switching hands as I shook out of my jacket and locked the door. The dirty white cloth had somehow made it upstairs, and the kangaroo rewrapped it around his head, a bandage now instead of a turban. I wiped my face clean with a paper towel from the kitchen and sat down across from the kangaroo, the coffee table between us.
I emptied my jacket, putting Testafer's electric gun on the shelf behind me and the envelope full of Pansy Greenleaf's make into my shirt pocket. Then I set the gun down on the table and slid my mirror onto my lap.
The make in the packet on the mirror was my last. I shook it out and pushed it into sloppy lines with a matchbook cover, and the kangaroo watched dazedly while I snorted them up. The familiar blend took over, and reality became standardized and comfortable again. I wiped at my nose with the back of my hand, picked up the gun, and leaned back in my chair.
"I want you to take me to Phoneblum," I said.
"You're making a mistake."
"It's my mistake to make." I pushed the telephone across the table. "Call him."
He took the telephone and punched in a local number, and his red eyes worked nervously around the room as he waited for an answer. It came after what must have been the third or fourth ring.
"Yeah," he said. "This is Castle. I need to talk to Danny. It's important. Tell him I'm with the pee-eye. No, just tell him."
He moved the receiver away from his mouth and said: "You're in luck, if you want to call it luck." I smiled, and he handed me the phone. I kept the gun pointed at his heart—assuming I had the location right.
"Hello," came a voice on the line.
"Hello," I said. "My name is Metcalf. You wanted to talk to me, I guess."
There was a moment of silence. "I sent someone to have a word with you, if that's what you mean. I would have thought my message was clear."
"You sent a kangaroo to do a man's work," I said. "I don't scare as easily as Dr. Testafer."
The voice laughed. "Dr. Testafer has a stronger stomach than he's letting on, Mr. Metcalf. You surprise me. I would have thought a man in your line of work would know when he should abandon his investigations. We had another private inquisitor on this case who had to be helped to understand—"
"You would have thought a lot of things, apparently. When and where can we meet to set you straight?"
There was another silence. "I'm not sure I understand what the purpose of such a meeting would be."
"It's like this. I've got a client who's headed for the freezer, and if I can't stop it, I at least propose to find out why it's him who has to take the fall and who it is he's taking it for. You can't buy me off, and if Joey here is your arm, you can't bully me off either. Meet me or he goes over to Morgenlander. I don't think your kangaroo is ready to stand up to the Office screws, Phoneblum. If you think different, call my bluff."
"Morgenlander is a problem," said the voice thoughtfully, as though confiding in a friend. "You've got pretty much everything else dead wrong, but Morgenlander is a problem. Come and see me. We'll find out who sets who straight." He chuckled, then gave me an address in Piedmont. I set the gun down on my side of the table and wrote the address on the empty make envelope. He said seven o'clock and I said okay. Then I put the kangaroo back on the phone and started emptying the shells out of the gun.
The kangaroo said yes a few times and then hung up. "I have to go now," he said. "Give me the gun."
I pocketed the shells and tossed it to him, and he caught it against his chest. "You're a good boy," I said. "Phoneblum must be very pleased with your work. Just don't come around here anymore, okay?"
"Fuck you," he said, his eyes glaring from under the dirty white cloth. I pointed at the door.
He was on his way out when I said: "Phoneblum didn't seem overly concerned about you, Joey. Don't be surprised to find the rug pulled out from under you, if what's swept underneath it doesn't stay that way." I didn't really know anything; I was just flexing my muscles while I had the chance.
Joey screwed up his mouth, flared his nostrils, and slammed the door. I went to the window and watched him splash through the puddles back to wherever he'd hidden his scooter. When he turned the corner, I let out my breath and tried to relax, but my chest was all tight and there was a ringing sound in my ears. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe evenly for a couple of minutes, before giving it up and going into the kitchen for a drink.
I stood by the window and sipped on a glass of scotch and watched the sky darken as the sun fell behind its veil of clouds at the edge of the bay. The rain had stopped, but the sun was beaten, and it was crawling away. It had my blessings; I wanted to go with it, to some other part of the earth. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was five-thirty, an hour and a half before my meeting with Phoneblum. Then I looked at the refrigerator. I didn't have to open it to know there was nothing inside.
I had the pizzeria on the line when there was a knock at the door. "Come in," I said, figuring that anyone who wanted in would achieve it one way or another.
It was Angwine, only he looked more like a projection of Angwine than the real thing. His face was white and his voice came out a whisper. I had to calm him down to get a straight answer out of him.
"I took a cab up to see Testafer. There wasn't
anybody there that I could see, but the door to the little house was standing open. I went over to it, and there was blood on the doorknob. I may have gotten my fingerprints in it, I don't know."
I told the pizzeria I'd call them back. "What did you see?" I asked him.
"Just blood, everywhere," he said. "I didn't want to get caught there."
"What did you want from Testafer?"
Angwine looked at the floor. "I couldn't sit still. I wanted to find out what he knew about Stanhunt and my sister. I wasn't followed up there, I'm sure. They were tailing me, but I shook them."
"You're stupid," I said. I put my drink on the shelf next to Testafer's electric gun.
Angwine went and sat on my couch where just minutes ago the kangaroo had been sitting. I opened the drawer in my desk, put the pocketful of bullets, and Testafer's gun inside, then locked it. "You stay here," I said. "I'll go and have a look."
"I had to do something. It was driving me crazy."
"Shut up, okay? I understand."
He looked up at me as I went out the door, and I thought he might be about to start crying. I couldn't think of anything nice to say, so I left without saying anything.
CHAPTER 13
WHEN I GOT TO THE TOP OF THE HILL, I STOPPED THE CAR for a minute and watched the last traces of sunset dissipate into the night. It wasn't the best I'd ever seen, but it looked better than I felt. I got back into the car and drove into the lacing of streets that led to Daymont Court, where Testafer's home was waiting, mysteriously bloodied, for someone to blunder into. I figured it might as well be me. I parked a block away this time and walked through the puddles, down to the padlocked chain at the driveway. There weren't any other cars visible, no signs of the inquisitors. I was alone, if only for the moment.
In the dark the driveway seemed longer. The trees knit together over my head, and the reflections in the puddles were like a net stretched out between the clearing and the house. When I got to the end of the drive, I stopped, but there wasn't anything to see or hear. When I stepped into the moonlight in front of the house, I could see that the door to the sheep's apartment was open.
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