by F P Adriani
“The thing is,” he said now, “I’m getting old, Pia.”
At first I wondered what the hell he was talking about. Then a thought struck me and my eyes lifted to his. “Is this job too much for you now?”
His gray-blond head shook fast. “No. I just mean…life’s going by so quick. I don’t like living alone.”
“But there’s Jamie,” I said.
Roberto looked at me. “Jamie’s a guy. I’m talking about a woman.”
“But she isn’t the only woman in the world,” I pointed out.
“I know. But it’s like you with Tan—I really like her….”
“Roberto, I’m sorry for what’s happened. …And I don’t know what else to say. I never do in these situations.”
Heaving a big, from-the-gut Roberto-sigh, he plopped down in one of the two armchairs near my desk, and I went back to watching my search results pop up. And pop up they did—a lot of results this time. But still none quite matched what I was looking for. “Was Arlene bullshitting me?”
“What?”
“I’m looking for the address on the envelope—possibly a place on Diamond called Spoonville.”
“Oh, Spoonville—I know there.”
My head shot up to him. “You do?”
“It’s a small town—I think? I had a friend who lived there once.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “Nothing.”
I thought this was a weird conversation…. Could Roberto, possibly, be some kind of connection here?
I looked at his big open face, and I hated myself for having any suspicions about him or anyone near him. But I just couldn’t be sure….
I thought of something. “So what’s up with Paulie? He seems like, well, like he’s a bit off or something.”
Roberto’s open face closed up into a frowning face. “Boss, I can’t talk about it; Paulie doesn’t want people talking about his past. It’s not something he wants to think about either.”
Well, for sure, I knew how Paulie supposedly felt there. But, I wasn’t “people” to Roberto. We’d gotten to know each other pretty well. Or so I had thought….
He must have noticed something not-quite-right on my face. And I had been staring at him.
His wide brow and cheeks now twisted in an ironic way. “Pia, you’re giving me that look.”
“What look?”
“The look that says, ‘I wouldn’t even trust saints’.”
“Well,” I said, “Well.” And then my face twisted like his because he was…right. “I don’t even trust myself right now. For all I know, I have an alter ego who’s sending me these threats. But I really just wanted to know how you know Spoonville.”
“I told you—I had a friend there!”
“I’m sorry, Roberto, but I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here. Then there’s your new-found cousin’s strange husband—”
“So what? The guy got injured, a head injury, then chemical poisoning—his brain tunes-out sometimes—okay? That’s all. Don’t tell him I said nothing. And I said my friend lived there. You think I’d send you that crap!” His hand shot toward the letter. “What’s next, Boss—you won’t trust Tan?”
Now I could feel my ironic face turn into a red face. “But I hump Tan.”
“So?” Roberto said. And he had no idea just how true that “so” was when applied to my having humped someone. That definitely didn’t mean anything, as I’d learned the hard way….
Nevertheless, Tan was Tan, and I wasn’t that paranoid.
“Roberto,” I said then, running a hand over my forehead, “I do think I’m losing my goddamn mind.”
“It’s understandable, Boss. Really. You’ve been feeling the strain lately.”
A sudden tinkling sound—the net-search’s end. My eyes quickly scanned the latest results.
“Paydirt,” I said.
Roberto got off his seat and came behind me. “What have you got?”
My finger touched the computer screen. “The exact address! And it’s for a place called Jericho Hydro.” I frowned. “That doesn’t sound familiar to me.”
“To me either.”
I sighed, hard. “It could just be a dummy address after all. What the fuck is going on.” I slammed my right palm down onto the desk.
“We’ll find out, Boss,” Roberto said.
I looked at his suddenly confident face. “Yeah, okay: we will,” I said, nodding. “Let’s get going on that—right now.”
I turned off my computer and grabbed my case.
*
Outside the office, I gave Roberto Vervais’s address and told him to drive us in his car.
I stashed my case inside his trunk. Then, my portable in my hand, I pressed the button for Nell’s house as I said to Roberto, “Nell’s supposed to be coming by the office, but I’m telling her not to.”
Nell answered on her end just as I sat down in the car and closed the door beside me. When I told her something had come up and I couldn’t meet her at the office, her normally bold voice deflated.
“But I want to see you!” she said.
“I’ll try to make it tomorrow. But I’ll let you know if the sky falls on my head by then, goddammit. And one of these years—or centuries—you’ll get your beads.”
“Shit—why the hell did this have to happen? I feel out of the loop on MSA and YOU….”
“I don’t have time to talk now, Nell. But I need you to just continue working the phone. I got a call for another job. I kind of rushed the woman off the phone yesterday! If you could take care of giving her a call-back with the usual outline of our services, that would be great. I programmed her number in my phone—hang on….”
When I got off the line with Nell, I told Roberto, “Spoonville’s far. I’d have to take a flight there, and that might wind up being for nothing. Right now, I need more info. I want you to take care of that by tomorrow—use the public computer down at the library near you, and see what you can find out about Jericho Hydro.”
“Will do, Boss. You sure you can trust me?”
I pulled a face at him, one that wouldn’t question the virtue of saints. If such people existed.
*
When we reached the street where Vervais lived, I made Roberto make two passes along there—the first one fast, the second one slow.
“What are you looking for?” Roberto asked as he drove the slow one.
“Just getting a feel of the place.”
Going on the address I’d written down and the actual building’s multiple front doors, Vervais lived in a long sprawling brown building with a bunch of apartments inside. A big park seemed to run behind the place.
I told Roberto to stop the car farther down the road, on the side street that led onto the park.
This apartment-building shit could get bad. I couldn’t very well expect total privacy there and, legally, I had no right to even question the guy. But the guy also had no right to send me death-threats.
“Wait here,” I said to Roberto as I opened my door.
“Why!”
“Because. I’m just gonna stroll the park and see where it leads. I’ll be right back.”
I did as I’d said: I just casually walked on the seedy path beneath the seedy trees in the seedy park. This wasn’t exactly a great area of Diamond; half the scrawny red palella trees around me looked like they were either dead or would be if I blew on them. Beneath them, sealed gray garbage bags full of who-knew-what had been carelessly thrown around.
Years ago someone had sprinkled some maple trees inside the park, and though most were pathetic-looking specimens, one had grown big enough to somewhat conceal me as I stood behind one of its heavy low-lying limbs and eyed the back of Vervais’s grimy brown building.
Cooperson had said Vervais lived in “the back,” but I had no clue about exactly where: the apartments didn’t seem to have external numbers, all the doors were closed, and all the small windows had curtains or blinds.
I was sighing as I walked ba
ck to the car.
“We’re screwed,” I said to Roberto as I got in and slammed my door closed. “Of course the scumbag Cooperson didn’t say this was a fucking apartment building. It looks like there’s at least twenty apartments there. I can’t start banging on doors.”
“Why don’t we both just go back to the park and wait and see what develops?”
I looked at him. “All right.”
From MSA’s fridge earlier, Roberto had taken a bottle of water and the only bottle of fruit juice left; we now brought those with us, feigning that we were just going for a stroll and a drink.
“Do you think we look like a couple?” Roberto suddenly asked.
“Yeah, a couple of fools.”
The sky was cloudy, the air soupy with moisture. I imagined it weeping over the sickly-looking trees. I wondered if this whole area had been contaminated, like from old-mining operations. That kind of thing didn’t happen on Diamond as often as it had on Earth, but it still happened here sometimes….
I was standing beneath the cover of that same large maple limb when I noticed some motion behind the building: a woman walking there—a woman with a kid. The woman was fat and the kid was very small. I did not want to do this, but I had no choice.
I walked out of the park and up to the woman. “Excuse me,” I said, and her blond head snapped up at me.
I must have looked suspicious or she was a suspicious person (or both), because she yanked the kid closer to her. “What do you want?” she demanded in a loud voice. “Leave me alone. This is a private respectable residence.”
I blinked at her. “I’m looking for someone—Ed. Ed Vervais.”
“Well, you would be,” she said, her voice turning snide now and her nose wrinkling, as if she’d just smelled the skankiest, moldiest piece of feces.
“I don’t know him,” I said. “I just need to talk to him.”
She pointed over her shoulder. “He lives over on the end there—the blue door. Now leave me alone or I’m calling the cops!” She rushed off with the kid and disappeared around the other corner of the building.
My face was flushing badly as Roberto walked up to me. “This isn’t ideal,” I said.
“No kidding.”
“Let’s go.”
We walked up to the end apartment and I knocked on the blue door…which opened slightly, as if it had been unlocked or the lock had been broken. Oh christ…why had this door-opening shit happened?
My gun was in my holster beneath my black jacket, and now I dropped my drink bottle onto the ground and pressed my hand on my gun as the door swung open wider—and a smell hit me: the rank odor of a dirty house and a dirty person inside. Rotten food, bitter piss and stale fecal matter—ugh.
“Hello,” I called as I stepped onto the threshold.
“Heya…” someone mumbled from inside. “You want?”
“What?”
“What you?”
I suspected the muffled voice coming from the other end of the half-dark room meant “What do you want?” But his words were slurred, maybe from booze, maybe from something else.
The outside light coming from behind me brightened the inside more, and I finally spotted the guy across the room. He sat curled against the base of a wall. He was brown-haired, young; his chest was too thin, and he was wearing stained (ugh) underwear only.
“Ed Vervais?” I said.
I heard a “Mm.” Then a “Me.” And I thought, This is my enemy? This decrepit junkie? And he was a junkie; it was so damn obvious.
Cocaine imported from Earth was pretty popular on Diamond, but when Vervais began rising from the floor, I could tell by the paralytic, sluggish way he moved that he probably wasn’t on cocaine.
I stepped into the apartment, hearing Roberto say from the doorway behind me, “Damn—oh, it stinks in here!”
“Who you,” said Vervais, before falling back against the wall. Apparently, the guy couldn’t even form correct three-word sentences. But he was the author of the full-sentence threats to me?
I pulled out my gun, and his green eyes seemed to brighten with fear then.
“Close the door,” I said over my shoulder to Roberto.
“Hey, hey,” Vervais said, trying to stand up again, but then failing again. He did manage to raise a hand at me—or, more correctly, at my gun. Then he waved his hand there. “Not allowed that.”
“Ooops—you forgot to ask me if I fucking care,” I said, still holding my gun.
“What want!” he said now, suddenly sounding nervous.
“I’m Pia Senda. And you’ve been sending me letters.”
He just stared at me as if he really didn’t know what I was talking about—and, in his current state, he probably didn’t know.
I stepped closer and finally noticed the peculiar greenish-looking tint to his chest skin, to his lips.
And, apparently, Roberto had finally noticed that too. “He’s strung out—look at his skin! I’ve seen that shade of green before: algae dots from Keron’s seas. They destroy your brain. He’s useless, Pia!”
“Who you,” Vervais mumbled again.
“Goddammit,” I replied.
*
I made Roberto put him into the apartment’s bathroom tub, a full-of-brown-grime bathroom tub.
“Dammit, Pia, this is disgusting,” said Roberto through a face twisted with disgust.
“Just run the cold water on him!”
“But if it’s algae dots and he just popped them, he won’t be aware enough for days maybe! What the hell’s on his underwear?!?”
“I. don’t. want. to. know,” I said.
“But IIII gotta do this!?”
“You’re a guy; he’s a guy. Do the math. And what would my guy say if I bathed this guy’s prick?”
“Dammit, I’m NOT bathing his prick,” said Roberto as he dumped the contents of a grimy-looking bottle of liquid soap on top of Vervais’s head.
“Oh-oh,” said Vervais, and he kind of laughed a squeaky infant-laugh, in between struggling as if he did have some level of awareness that two strangers had just barged into his house and were now effectively giving him a bath, something he seemed to have lost acquaintance with weeks ago….
Roberto suddenly reached down and slapped him right across his greenish face.
My shocked mouth fell open. “What the hell are you doing—”
“It should help counteract the drug,” Roberto said, his blue eyes turning to me. “You wanna question him, no?”
I nodded. And Roberto slapped the guy on the neck now.
“Ow!” he pouted.
“Be glad it’s him slapping you and not me,” I growled at Vervais.
Innocent, drug-cloudy green eyes stared up at me.
Roberto continued his hand-slapping and his cold-spraying with the faucet sprayer, and after about ten minutes of that, the guy did look cleaner. He might have smelled cleaner too, but who the fuck could tell when the air still stunk from the dirty apartment.
Vervais finally began to stand up in the tub, and I turned around and walked into the living-area.
My eyes roamed the mess there: a couch, a table, a chair with a broken seat, paper bags filled with garbage. There were plates covered with old moldy food lying around, and some papers on the couch cushions. I walked over there and picked up a piece of paper—nothing interesting. I rummaged through the rest, found junk-mail, unpaid bills.
Then I moved to the table where there was an even bigger pile of random shit. I found an ID in there, a photo ID for a mall cleaning-staff position. Yikes. This dirty guy was a janitor? He’d surely contaminate everything in his “cleaning” path.
I took a book from the pile and two pieces of paper fell out: seven-year-old release papers from a prison on Keron….
I heard movement behind me, turned around and saw Roberto give Vervais a shove out of the bathroom.
“No right,” Vervais said to me, sounding a little more lucid now.
“Neither do you, scumbag. Threatening me.�
��
“Who you,” he said.
“It’s ‘who are you’, or can’t you speak correctly?”
He didn’t respond at first. He and his skinny body stood shivering inside a big blue bath towel, and, oddly, the towel looked pretty clean. “I’m calling police,” he finally said.
I pulled out my portable phone and held it out to him. “Go right ahead. Save me the trouble. And while you’re at it, ask them what the punishment is for sending death-threats through the mail.”
He didn’t respond once again, and this time it seemed he wasn’t going to ever respond.
I held up the prison papers and shook them. “What’s this?”
He still remained silent, so I threw the papers in his direction; they fell onto the floor and he bent over to look at them. “Oh,” was all he said then. But as he bent forward, the towel opened and his bare shriveled penis popped out and hung down at the floor.
“You should have dressed him,” I said to Roberto.
“What am I—his valet?” Roberto replied in a crabby voice.
I turned back to Vervais. “What were you in jail for?”
“Drugs, drugs.”
“What a surprise. You know, algae dots are illegal.”
He was shivering again. I felt an urge to sit down as I questioned him, to give him the feeling that I would make myself at home for as long as it took to get what I wanted. But, I didn’t want to sit on his filthy furniture.
My eyes fell on Poor Roberto—his white shirt was stained a yellowy brown, so were his beige pants. I suddenly felt really bad about the whole situation….
“I’m going to make this brief,” I said to Vervais now. “We’re not leaving till we get what we came for. You’ve been sending me letters.” I pulled the second threat envelope from my jacket and held it out.
Vervais—gingerly—stepped forward and took it. His eyes widened in acknowledgement, and then he gave the envelope back to me, wrinkled from his damp hand. “Didn’t,” he said.
But my brain only barely registered the word because it had noticed something about the envelope: the white paper beneath the words was wet from Vervais’s hand, but the black writing hadn’t blurred or bled into the damp at all. Suddenly the glare on the words just didn’t look like the glare from writing ink….
