Gun, with Occasional Music

by Jonathan Lethem

  "What about the sheep?" I said.

  She got sarcastic. "Aside from Angwine's prints in the blood we don't have much to go on. Maybe you can clear him of that one."

  "He stumbled into it, came running back to me," I said. I realized that sounded lame. "He didn't do it, Catherine. Take my word for it. It's too easy."

  "Sometimes easy means right. Jesus, Metcalf. What am I doing? I should be taking you in, or maybe letting you go—anything but sitting here giving you ammunition for this idiotic, wayward inquisition of yours." She frowned at me in the darkness. "Don't judge me, all right? You're on your track, I'm on mine. I said you could ask me questions. But that's it. Don't get me tangled up in your eccentric theories."

  I turned away, chagrined, angry at myself. I was a guy with twenty-five points of karma sitting talking to an inquisitor. Definition of a fool.

  "Sorry," I said. "I'll try to be a little more professional. What do you know about a guy named Phoneblum?"

  "I don't recognize the name."

  I thought about opening the car door again to look her in the eye, but I didn't do it. "He's in this case up to his fat neck. Kornfeld sure knew the name—it cost me twenty-five points to mention it in his presence. I got the feeling he was protecting Morgenlander from something."

  "Morgenlander was a clown," she said. "He came on way too strong. He kept filing complaints with the Main Office. Nobody could say anything around him."

  I put my hands on the dashboard, and remembered they hurt. "Morgenlander thought there was more to this case," I said. "He was trying to keep it open."

  "I know. He was doing a good job of that until the sheep turned up."

  "Too bad."

  "Too bad for you, I guess."

  I snickered. "Morgenlander wasn't exactly making my life pleasant. His nickname for me was Dickface. I don't think he saw me as an asset to his inquisition."

  She was quiet. I guess she was waiting for me to run out of questions.

  "Where are you supposed to be, right now?" I asked. "Were you staking out my lobby?"

  "I'm on my own time." It could have been encouraging except she said it so neutrally. I wanted her to be on my side in the case, and if I scratched the surface of my feelings, something I try never to do, I wanted a whole lot more. But it wasn't happening. She sensed my desire for her professional allegiance, and it made her nervous. If she sensed the other desire, she was keeping her feeling about it hidden.

  Something in the drone of words coming from the radio suddenly caught my attention. I thought I heard the name Stanhunt. Catherine must have thought she heard it too, because she turned up the volume and we both got quiet and listened.

  They gave the address of the sex club downtown, and said something about a murder, no suspect, or a suspect, no murder. I listened for a while, but the voice looped around to other things and then back to the excitement at the sex club without giving the name again. I looked at Catherine at the same moment she looked at me.

  "Maybe we ought to go have a look," I said.

  "Maybe I ought to go have a look," she said. "You should steer clear, and you know it."

  I smiled. "I'd just go in my own car, which is a waste of gas. You might as well take me."

  She sighed and turned the key in the ignition. We didn't say anything the whole way over. It gave me the chance to fantasize that we were just two people together, for no special reason except we liked it, and we were going for a drive, maybe to a show or a restaurant, maybe even into the country for some overnight deal. It wasn't completely implausible. I closed my eyes and let the image wash over me while she drove, but it was pretty effectively extinguished when we pulled up in front of the sex club amidst the sirens and flares of the inquisition.

  CHAPTER 26

  I FOLLOWED CATHERINE PAST THE BARRICADES WITHOUT anyone asking me questions I couldn't answer, and without having to flash my license even once. It took only a few words with the inquisitor watching the door of the murder room to get us inside. The club was a place where you could rent the equipment—leather stuff, chains, electronic safety devices—and a soundproof room to use it in, as well as the assurance that anything went, as long as both parties walked out more or less alive. That was what hadn't happened here, and the inquisitor at the door let us know it was Celeste Stanhunt it hadn't happened to.

  I went into the room behind Catherine. But she'd only taken a step or two inside before she turned quickly, her head lowered, hand over her face, and went back out. Which left me with nothing between me and the pile that had been Celeste Stanhunt except a short stretch of floor. The blood was on my shoes before I'd had a chance to consider staying out of it.

  Someone had started from the bottom on Celeste, which is sometimes okay, but they'd kept going long past where it was a good idea to stop. They'd done a real nasty job on her. If that sounds cold, it's the only way I can put it. She wasn't wearing any clothes, but I was going to have to rely on my Peeping Tom memories to know what she was like undressed, because you couldn't figure it out from looking at her now.

  I stood there looking and thinking, and not feeling anything at first, and then it hit me, and hit me hard. I didn't experience nausea the way Catherine had—that went away a long time ago and never came back—but I felt pretty much everything else. I started sobbing into my sleeve, the first time I'd cried in years. It went away fast, but it left me feeling like my face was a baby's behind that needed changing, diaper rash and all. I stopped being able to look at the corpse. I backed out of the room past the inquisitor at the door, and I went and leaned against a wall. I closed my eyes, but the picture didn't go away.

  My work at putting myself back together was interrupted by a familiar, if unexpected voice.

  "It's a setup," said Morgenlander. I opened my eyes. He was talking to Catherine and the inquisitor at the door "We're meant to believe she forgot to insert her death control device," he went on. "But I for one don't buy it."

  It was the same old Morgenlander, with his fat head and his black-looking teeth and tongue, and I was pretty sure he'd say something stupid when he saw me, but in a funny way I was glad to see him. He was a wretched excuse for a human being, but for an inquisitor he wasn't half bad. If Kornfeld was the robotic visage of the future of the Office, Morgenlander was a throwback. He represented the human face, for what that was worth.

  "You can file a report," said the inquisitor who'd let us into the room.

  "Fuck that," said Morgenlander. "I wasn't here."

  "I understand," said the inquisitor.

  A team of evidence guys crowded the hallway on their way into the room. I wished them luck. When they cleared out, Morgenlander caught sight of me, and screwed up his features in an expression of distaste. It wasn't a long distance for his features to go.

  "I don't believe it," he said. "The fly in the ointment. How'd you get here?"

  "Hello, Morgenlander." I wasn't really up to repartee.

  "I'm surprised you're still on the streets, Metcalf. Didn't I bill you enough karma?"

  "Plenty, thanks. I thought you were off this case."

  "The case is closed. Go home, Metcalf. Don't be stupid."

  "The case was closed," I said. "Angwine didn't kill Celeste Stanhunt too."

  Morgenlander just stood there in his baggy, disheveled suit and stared at me, as if what I'd said was something other than obvious. He moved his big jaw like he was sanding the roof of his mouth with his tongue.

  Then he shook out his sleeves the same way he did in my office the first time I met him. "Okay, Metcalf. Let's go have us a little talk. Teleprompter, bring your pal here downstairs. I'm gonna use him to bounce some ideas off of. We'll see if they knock holes in him or just leave dents."

  We all went downstairs, Morgenlander at the head, pushing through the milling inquisitors, head lowered, hands in his pockets. When we got outside, it was quieter. Some of the cars were gone, and the street was opened back up for traffic. Someone still thought it was important to flash
a light around, and when Morgenlander stopped on the pavement and turned to me and Catherine, his face was lit into a series of red masks which pulsed and faded, one after another. I guess I was in pretty poor shape, because the effect hypnotized me. I didn't notice what the man was saying until halfway into his saying it.

  "Celeste tried to call me twice," he was saying. "Wouldn't leave a goddamned message. The Office didn't tell me until about an hour ago, which is about the time she was getting cut up." He sighed. "I told them to put a trace on her. Fucking Kornfeld."

  "Last night she told me she was afraid," I said. "She didn't think Angwine was the killer. That's what she would have told you if she found you."

  Morgenlander twisted his mouth. "That wasn't what she told me when she had the chance."

  "She changed her mind a lot."

  He chewed his mouth for a minute and then spat into the gutter. "Fucking case," he said.

  "The case is closed," I said. I just wanted to be the first to say it, for once.

  Morgenlander turned to Catherine. "Where's Korn-fuck?" he asked.

  "I don't know," she said.

  "He know you're going around with this hobbyist?" He pointed a finger at my chest, came just short of prodding me with it. "Last I heard, he wanted your ass, Metcalf."

  "We're sort of steering clear of him for tonight," said Catherine.

  "Good luck," said Morgenlander. "Remember the walls have eyes. Kornfeld's eyes." He gestured past me, at the pair of inquisitors leaning against the doorway of the club. "He's got Eastbay in his fucking pocket. Hell, I don't know why I'm telling you this. Odds are you're part of the problem." He laughed his wet, ugly laugh. "It doesn't matter. I'm out of here. Someday me or somebody else is coming back to nail your little boyfriend's butt to the wall. I just couldn't do it alone. He kept me smothered in disinformation."

  I kept quiet and listened.

  "You made it tough, Morgenlander," said Catherine. "Why be surprised at the backlash? You made everyone nervous. It's been played a lot cooler than you played it."

  "Fuck you, Teleprompter. Angwine was going down, and he wasn't the first. I'm supposed to do something about it."

  Catherine made a face. "Go back and file your report, Morgenlander. Tell yourself you understood what was going on.

  Someone turned off the lights. I looked around. The cars were thinning out in the street behind us. The crew upstairs would work the body and the room over for most of the night) but everyone else was going home or back on the street to work on their quotas. You had to change a couple of hundred points of karma in a given night or you weren't doing your job.

  Teleprompter and Morgenlander just stood in the darkness and glared at each other. I had a feeling the conversation was about wrapped up. I myself would have liked to go home and curl up around a line of make, but I had another feeling there was more I should get out of Morgenlander while I had the chance.

  "You ever hear the name Phoneblum?" I asked. "I mean, from anyone besides me." I hoped he wouldn't balk at answering a question. "My job lately has consisted of tossing his name at people and watching them flinch—except when I get punched in the stomach."

  "Which do you want this time?" said Morgenlander sourly. When I didn't answer, he said, "Aw, get out of my face." He turned and walked quickly aw^y. For whatever reason, I looked down, and even in the darkness I could make out the bloody footprints he'd left behind on the pavement. I didn't check, but I knew I was making footprints like that myself.

  Catherine and I went back to her car in silence and sat down in what were now feeling like our accustomed places. I guess we would have driven somewhere if we'd known where to go. The radio was still mumbling at us, and Catherine reached and turned it off.

  When she spoke again, I could hear a tremble in her voice. The mess upstairs had unsettled her, and her neat ideas about the case were no longer looking so neat.

  "Who killed her?" she asked softly. It was like she'd decided to try believing me, to see if it felt better than buying Kornfeld's version.

  I almost blurted out: Who didn't? But it was an ugly remark and I held it back.

  When I got into this business, I had the stupid idea that my job was picking the one guilty party out of a cast of innocents. The truth was it was more picking the one or two innocents worth helping out of a cast of villains. I'd failed with Orton Angwine, and now I'd failed with Celeste Stanhunt. It was tough when the way you figured out who to trust was when they turned up hacked in half in a soundproof sex club.

  "Phoneblum's kangaroo was looking for her a couple of hours ago," I told Catherine. I tried to keep my mind focused on the specifics of the case, and blot out the guilt and outrage that made me want to do crazy things like confess to the murders myself. "For that matter, so was Dr. Testafer," I went on. "But that didn't look like the work of a doctor."

  "It looked like the work of a maniac."

  "Maybe Barry Greenleaf killed her," I said, getting silly. "I told him this afternoon I was pretty sure Celeste was his mother."

  "Were you in love with her?" Her voice was still soft I turned, but she wasn't looking at me.

  "Where'd you get that idea?"

  "It's in your file," she said.

  "I thought my file was out of access."

  "I got access."

  I allowed myself a smile. I knew now that the something I felt in the air between us was more than just my wishful thinking. I didn't know what to do about it, but I had my confirmation.

  "The file is a little inaccurate," I said. "We met twice. The first time I was drunk, and the second time she was lying. I guess I hit her once. That's about it."

  Catherine murmured, as if she understood why Celeste might need to be hit by someone, or why I might need someone to hit.

  "You and Kornfeld?" It wasn't structurally a question but I put a question mark at the end of it. "Morgenlander called him your boyfriend."

  It was her turn to smile to herself. I guess she was getting the same kind of confirmation I'd gotten. "He wanted it," she said. "But no."

  "Wanted it?" I said. "He gave up?"

  "Wants it," she said with a sigh.

  "Guess that's part of what's making my life sp fucking difficult right now, isn't it?"

  "Could be."

  I had to laugh. If Kornfeld understood the current status of my sexuality, he'd be laughing with me. I guess it wasn't in my file. She sat and listened, and if she wondered what was funny, she kept it to herself.

  Eventually I shut up, and when I did, it got quiet in the car, for a long time. We were both looking out the front window, only I was looking at the reflection of Catherine, and when I found her eyes, I could see she was looking at the reflection of me. And then we were holding hands. It was just like that; one minute we weren't and the next we were. I want to say it made me feel like a schoolboy, but I hadn't done anything like that as a schoolboy. It made me feel like someone else who had done it as a schoolboy and was being reminded of it now. It made the back of my neck flush. It made me nervous as hell.

  We held hands until our palms were sweaty. I realized that maybe it was me who was supposed to make a move. She didn't know I lacked the nerve endings for what was developing, and I wasn't about to tell her.

  "Let's go somewhere," I said. "Your place."

  "My place isn't good," she said. "Let's go to yours."

  I looked at her funny. "Isn't Kornfeld supposed to have somebody watching it?"

  "Yeah," she said. "Me."

  CHAPTER 27

  I WENT INTO THE KITCHEN TO POUR US A COUPLE OF drinks, and while I was there I laid out a line of my blend on the table. After a moment's hesitation I snorted it up with the tap running to cover the sound. I don't know where my sudden bashfulness came from, but there it was. When I went back out, she was sitting comfortably right in the middle of the couch, so whichever side I chose to sit on, I'd be close. That was okay. She looked good in my apartment, better than I did. I guess she'd had some practice sitting in it in t
he past few days.

  I handed her the drink.

  "Sit down," she said.

  I sat down. We were close, all right.

  After that I kind of lost track of the time. We just drank and talked, and after a while I got tired of going into the kitchen for drinks and brought the bottle out and put it on the coffee table. It was twelve, and it was one, and it was two, and I didn't care. We talked about a lot of stupid things, which was nice, and then we talked about a lot of nice things, which was nicer. But we never talked about the case. Not once.

  When the conversation finally lagged, I kissed her. It wasn't like kissing Celeste. It was the first time I'd really kissed a woman in years, because the other night with Celeste didn't count, didn't prepare me at all.

  We put the drinks aside and spent a while on the couch. I tried to keep us going slow, but it wasn't easy. When her breast fell into my hand, it was like the first drop of rain hitting a piece of metal so dry and rusted and hot in the sun that the water evaporates and the metal is instantly dry again. I didn't pay any attention to the pain in my fingers. It had been a long time, and a couple of possibly broken fingers was hardly enough to stop me.

  We went in and stretched out on top of my bed. I put out the light. When she took me in her hands, I closed my eyes. The sensations weren't exactly right, but it didn't matter, it finally didn't matter at all. I liked the way it felt, and if I moved my hips a little, I could detect my weight in her hand. We stayed like that for a while, and then I took myself out of her hand and leaned over and put us together. She put her arms around me, and I unfolded my legs and let my body fall slowly on hers.

  It wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Maybe it was my imagination, or the seepage of old memories into the present, but I swore I could feel her around me, the way I was supposed to. I fell out a few times, and my hips kept on thrusting before I figured it out—but I wasn't such a pro that that hadn't happened before anyway. I had her convinced that I was a man and she was a woman, and once we got into the rhythm of it, I had myself half convinced too.