There was a knock on the door, and a neatly attired waiter rolled in a room service cart containing his steak. Extra rare. Palmer always prepared himself for a night on the prowl by eating his fill of red meat. It put him in the proper mood for the hunt.
“You know this guy?”
It was roughly the four hundredth time Palmer had asked the question that night. His feet were tired and his bladder ached from too many beers.
The man with the anarchy symbol chalked across the back of his black raincoat glanced first at Palmer then the snapshot. He took a swig from his beer and shook his head.
“Sorry. Can’t help ya.”
“How about you? You know this guy?”
The slightly built youth seated on the opposite side of the anarchist craned his head over his companion’s shoulder in order to look at the photo of Chaz.
“He don’t know him, either,” snapped the anarchist in the raincoat. “He don’t know nobody I don’t know, do ya?” he told the twink seated next to him.
The youth cringed, smiling nervously at this friend. “Course not, Nick. I don’t know nobody.”
“Fuckin’ A you don’t.”
Palmer cursed under his breath and headed for the men’s room. This wasn’t the first time he’d run into such aggressive ignorance. He’d come close to getting somewhere at least twice, only to have the parties in question clam up on him. As he relieved himself at the urinal, he heard the rest room door open and close behind him.
“Hey, mister?” Palmer recognized the voice as belonging to Nick the Anarchist’s companion.
“What is it, kid?”
“I know that guy. The one in the picture.”
“Yeah? Then what’s his name?”
“Chaz. He’s from England.”
Bingo, Palmer smiled to himself. “So how come your friend out there didn’t want you talking to me?”
“Nick’s just jealous, that’s all,” the boy giggled. “He and Chaz crossed swords a couple of times, so to speak.”
Palmer shook off and made himself presentable before turning around. The kid couldn’t be more than seventeen, his strawberry blonde hair worn in a Bieber cut that made him look even younger. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Terry.”
“Look, Terry, do you know where I could possibly find this Chaz? I’ll make it worth your while...” He produced a twenty from his pocket, holding it up so the boy could see it.
It was obvious the boy was interested, but his eyes flickered away whenever Palmer tried to look him in the face. “Is this Chaz a friend of yours? Are you afraid you’ll get him in trouble by talking to me?”
Terry snorted in amusement. “Chaz? A friend? That creeper? Nah, no one’s seen him in almost a year. Not since what happened to the Blue Monkeys.”
“The Blue Monkeys?”
“Yeah. This gang Chaz used to hang with. Bunch of real hard-asses. Used to dye their hair blue. He was friends with ‘em...but they only hung with him for the drugs he always had on him.”
“Where can I find these Blue Monkeys?” Palmer asked as he handed Terry the folded twenty dollar bill.
“You can’t,” he replied as he quickly pocketed the money.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re dead.”
“Dead?”
“Well, not all of them. But enough were killed off that it deep-sixed the gang.”
“What happened?”
“No one’s real sure. It got hushed up pretty quick. But there was this gang war, or something, in the back of some bar. Those that weren’t killed got crippled up bad. You could ask Jimmy.”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
“That was the kid Chaz was fooling around with. He was the only one that didn’t get killed.”
“Where can I find him?”
Terry grinned and stuck out his hand, like a kid asking his father for the keys to the car. “That’s worth more’n a twenty, dude.”
“Mrs. Eichorn?”
The woman peering at him from the other side of the burglar chain scowled at him, as if deciding whether she made a mistake opening the door. “Whatcha want? You from th’ Welfare Department? If so, it’s too late for a wellness check!”
It had taken him a couple of hours to find the right house, as Terry’s instructions had been off by a few blocks. It was long past Palmer’s supper time and his scar was giving him trouble. He’d been forced to climb five narrow, badly lit flights of stairs, the smell of human piss and old garbage pungent enough to make his gorge rise.
“Mrs. Eichorn, do I look like a fuckin’ caseworker?” he snapped, unable to hide his temper.
Apparently there was no such thing as a rhetorical question as far as Mrs. Eichorn was concerned. She quietly took in Palmer’s close-shaved temples and narrow goatee, lingering on his wavy, gray-shot hair, which was combed straight up from his head, a holdover from his days, decades gone, spent in the mosh pits, before finally shaking her head ‘no’.
“I’d like to talk to Jimmy, Mrs. Eichorn. Is he in?”
Mrs. Eichorn blinked in surprise. “Yeah, he’s here. He’s always here. Whatcha want with my Jimmy?”
Palmer slid a crisp twenty through the crack in the door. “I just want to talk to him, ma’am.”
Jimmy’s mother hesitated then closed the door, taking the twenty with her. A second later the door reopened, allowing Palmer a better view of both her and the apartment. Mrs. Eichorn was an unsmiling woman with pale, washed-out hair, pasty skin, and eyes so light a shade of blue they seemed to lack any color at all. Palmer was reminded of a photograph left to bleach in the sun. Deep lines creased the corners of her mouth, which was painted with a purplish-red lipstick. She wore a much-washed waitress’s uniform with the name “Alice” stitched across the bosom in red thread. The few items of furniture in the living room looked as worn and poorly used as their owner.
“Whatcha want with my Jimmy?” She asked as she pulled a filtered cigarette from her apron pocket. Palmer wrinkled his nose in distaste. Funny how other people’s smoking got on his nerves. “You better hurry it up, whatever it is. I gotta leave for work in a few minutes.”
“Mrs. Eichorn, was your son a member of a gang called the Blue Monkeys?”
The look she gave him was hard enough to cut glass. “You a cop? None of that was his fault, y’ know.”
“No, ma’am, I’m a private investigator. Al I know is that there was a gang war-”
Mrs. Eichorn snorted smoke from her nostrils. “Massacre is a better word for it.” She gave him another look, this one not quite as hard as the last. “You’re not from around here, are ya? Shoulda figured when you asked if Jimmy was in.” The creases at the corners of her mouth deepened.
“Can I talk to him?”
“You can try.”
She led him down a narrow, unlit hall and opened a door with a Metallica poster tacked on it. It was dark in the small room, although enough illumination spilled through the window facing the street to allow Palmer a quick glimpse of the narrow bed in the corner and heavy metal posters plastered on the cracked and peeling walls. Jimmy Eichorn sat in a wheelchair, staring at the world beyond his windowsill.
“I left the room the way he had it.” Mrs. Eichorn’s voice dropped into a lower, softer register, as if she was in church. “I think it makes him happy.” She went and stood beside her son’s wheelchair, one hand absently stroking the back of his head. “The blue’s almost grown out. I hated it when he dyed it that crazy color. He always had such pretty hair, don’t you think so?”
To Palmer’s eyes, Jimmy’s hair was the same mousy non-color as his mother’s. The boy slumped in the wheelchair looked to be eighteen years old, although his slack features made him seem even younger. He was dressed in a pair of pajamas, a blanket draped over his lap. Jimmy ignored the adults standing to either side of him, his attention fixed on the street below.
“Jimmy? Jimmy, look at me, sweetheart.”
Jimmy took his eyes away from the
lamppost across the street and tilted his head in order to stare at his mother. After a couple of seconds his lips pulled into a smile, drool wetting his chin. He reached up and clasped his mother’s hand. Mrs. Eichorn smiled indulgently and brushed the hair out of his eyes.
“Jimmy? This nice man wants to talk to you.”
The boy’s eyes flickered toward the window then shifted to Palmer. They were the eyes of a preschooler, wide and clear and uncertain of strangers.
“Go ahead, darling. It’s all right.” Mrs. Eichorn said, squeezing her son’s hand.
Palmer pulled the photo out of his jacket and held it up so the boy could see it. “Do you know where I can find this man, Jimmy? Do you know where Chaz is?”
A muscle in Jimmy’s face jerked. Palmer couldn’t tell if the boy had shook his head “no” or suffered a muscle spasm. Before he could press the issue, Jimmy gave out with a weird, high-pitched squeal and began to twitch. Palmer stepped back in disgust as the boy voided his bowels. Jimmy’s eyes rolled in their sockets and then glazed, staring at some unknown, fixed point.
“Get out!” snapped Mrs. Eichorn.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—”
“Just get out! I can’t deal with him with you in the room!”
Jimmy began to claw at his own throat, as if trying to pull an invisible attacker from his windpipe. Palmer glimpsed what looked like puncture marks in the shadow of the boy’s chin before his mother forcibly propelled him out of the room.
He made his way back to the Eichorns’ drab front room, listening to the mother soothe her son. Palmer looked down at his hands and noticed they were shaking. A few moments later
Mrs. Eichorn returned, lighting up yet another cigarette. Her hands were trembling as well.
“He was such a happy baby. He used to laugh like nobody’s business,” she said wistfully. “His daddy thought the world of him, because of that laugh. He stayed around a couple of years longer than he would have if Jimmy had cried like most babies, I guess. Jimmy was just five when he run off. That’s when things changed. I was just fifteen when I had him. What did I know about bringing up a kid, right?” She looked at the cigarette in her hand then glanced at Palmer, as if daring him to say otherwise. With a start, he suddenly realized this hopeless, washed-out woman was younger than him. “It’s not my fault he got like this... someone did that to him. He wouldn’t be like that if he hadn’t been with the gang that night. I asked him to quit the gang, but he wouldn’t do it. He said being a Blue Monkey was important to him than anything. He was proud of being a Blue Monkey.” She shook her head in disgust. “I told him that night I didn’t want him hanging around that bar with those scum. I told him that if he went there he better not come home. And you know what he did? He cursed me out! His own mama! And then he went anyway.” Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, but her cheeks remained dry.
Mrs. Eichorn... I’m sorry; I didn’t realize my questioning your son would... upset him like that.”
“No way you could know, mister. It’s funny what sets him off sometimes. But there was no need to show him that picture. I can tell you where to find Chaz.”
“You know who he is?”
She snorted again, shooting smoke from her nostrils like a dragon. “I knew him. Jimmy brought him by once or twice. I figured him for a dealer. He’s dead. Died the same night the Blue Monkeys got into trouble.”
Upon hearing of Chaz’s fate, Palmer’s heart began to sink. “How’d he die?”
“I heard a rumor he was bumped off. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true. Chaz liked to cross people just for kicks.”
“Mrs. Eichorn, this is real important: Did Jimmy ever mention if Chaz was traveling with a woman?”
She shook her head. “Not that I recall. But Jimmy and I didn’t exactly talk a lot at that point.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Eichorn. I don’t want to delay you anymore than I already have. I appreciate everything you’ve been able to tell me,” he said, slipping a couple of fifty-dollar bills into her apron pocket.
“You know something?” she said as she opened the door for him. “It’s funny, but, in a way, I got what I wanted. I got my little boy back. Don’t you think that’s funny?”
Palmer simply nodded and hurried down the stairs, pausing on the third landing to pop a pain pill. By the time he reached the street, his ribs no longer felt like they were being cracked open with a lobster mallet. He did not look up to see if Jimmy was still keeping watch.
That night Palmer dreamed he was in a wheelchair, being pushed down a long, poorly lit corridor. The wheelchair needed to be oiled and squeaked whenever it moved. Everything seemed so vivid, so real, at first Palmer thought he was back in the infirmary. Confused, he twisted around to find out who was propelling the wheelchair. Lola smiled back at him, looking sexy and menacing in her starched white nurse’s uniform. Palmer was acutely aware of the erection tenting his hospital johnny.
“Did you miss me, darling?” asked Lola, her lips painted the color of fresh blood.
He hated to admit it, but he did miss her, no matter what she’d done to him. It made him feel stupid, powerless and degraded, but his dick was hard enough to cut diamonds. “Yes. Very much.”
“I missed you, too,” she smiled. “But I won’t this time!”
Lola halted the wheelchair at the top of a flight of stairs that seemed to stretch, Escher-like, into another dimension. Palmer’s head began to swim. He tried to stand up, but his arms and legs were strapped to the wheelchair. He twisted his head around, hoping to catch another glimpse of Lola. Instead, he found himself staring down the bore of his own gun.
He knew then that he was dreaming, and knew what would happen next. He also remembered an old wives’ tale—or was it a disputed fact?—that if you dreamed you were killed, you died in your sleep. Surely even an imaginary Lola couldn’t miss at this range.
Palmer threw himself headfirst down the warped, endlessly replicating stairwell ahead of the gunshot. Miraculously, the wheelchair remained upright as he caromed off gothic arches and past half-glimpsed crumbling facades. He could hear Lola shrieking obscenities from the top of the stair, accompanied by the sound of receding gunfire. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but at least it was away from Lola, with her bleeding mouth and stolen weapon.
For a brief, giddy moment, Palmer knew what it was like to be free. Then he saw the massive brick wall blocking his way. And in front of the wall, standing in a policeman’s firing stance, both hands wrapped around the handle of the gun, was Lola.
“Fooled you!”
Palmer looked at the rows upon rows of cold marble and granite then back at the map the cemetery’s caretaker had given him. According to it, Geoffrey Chastain, better known as Chaz, was buried in Sector E-7. Most of the headstones in the area were newer, the names and dates still sharply defined and easy to read. It would be several decades before the wind and the rain made the inscriptions as vague as those on the older stones.
It was early February and frost crunched under his heels as he made his way among the stones. Palmer was cold, despite his anorak, and his mood had not been helped by the nightmare that had jerked him awake, sweating and shivering and reeking of piss, at four that morning. Since then he’d been unable unwilling to go back to sleep, and his surgery scar throbbed like a bad cigarette burn.
He rechecked what little information he’d been able to get from the caretaker’s files as he trudged along on his search. Chaz’s plot had been paid for in cash by an anonymous benefactor. According to the records, he had originally been interred in Potter’s Field, then dug up and replanted in a proper grave, complete with headstone, a couple months later. Palmer was certain Sonja Blue was behind Chaz’s postmortem change of address. But why? Was it out of guilt? Sense of duty? Love?
He looked down to find that his shoes had become entangled in the faded remains of a funeral wreath. To keep from falling, he leaned against a nearby tombstone to disentangle himself. Once he succeeded in fr
eeing his feet, he turned around and realized that he had been resting his butt on Chaz’s monument. Palmer stepped back and stared at the nondescript granite marker. All it said was: GEOFFREY ALAN CHASTAIN. There was no other information, sentiment or religious symbol on its chill face, not even the year of his birth and his death.
Palmer cursed himself, the self-deprecations rising from his lips in puffs of steam. What had he expected to find out here in the first place? The missing heiress’s forwarding address chiseled into her dead lover’s tombstone?
Then he saw the flowers. At first he thought they were part of the same wreath he’d originally tripped over; then he realized what he first thought were long-dead flowers were relatively fresh black roses. He picked up the bouquet from its resting place and set it atop Chaz’s grave. He handled the bouquet gingerly, as were full of thorns. For the first time in days, he allowed himself a smile upon seeing the florist’s name was stenciled onto the broad, flat ribbon wrapped about the bundled stems.
As he pulled the ribbon free of the dozen black roses, one of the thorns bit into the meat of his thumb. He stared at the bead of blood—as shiny and red as a freshly polished ruby—for a long second before bringing it to his mouth. As he sucked at his wound, he glanced up and saw a gaunt, haggard-looking man dressed in an unseasonably light jacket watching him from a few yards away, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips, the odor of burning clove carried on the crisp morning breeze. But when Palmer looked again, the man was gone, although the scent of his cigarette still hung in the air.
Palmer was sure he’d seen the stranger’s face before. Was it possible he was being followed? Pocketing the florist’s ribbon, he turned and hurried back towards the gates of the cemetery. He wondered where the man could have gone so quickly. Even if he wasn’t spying on him, Palmer wondered how the stranger could tolerate hanging around a graveyard on an overcast February morning in nothing warmer than a silk jacket.
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