Shotgun Alley

by Andrew Klavan

  But the professor, small as she was, was not overwhelmed by any of it. She perched in her seat like an eagle in a mountain aerie, the little mistress of an epic terrain.

  “Is there anything you can tell me that might help me find this person?” Weiss asked her gently now. “Is there anyone you suspect? Do you have any enemies, for instance?”

  Brinks’s lips bunched up, a self-satisfied smile at the corner of them. “I guess it’s safe to assume you’re not familiar with my work, then.”

  As a matter of fact, as soon as she mentioned it, Weiss thought that maybe he was. Maybe he’d read about her in the newspaper or heard about her on TV or something. He had an encyclopedic memory for crimes and criminals, but this was something else, not in his line, harder to dredge up. Something about pornography, though. Sexual harassment. Censorship.

  “Wasn’t there an article about you in the Chronicle a while back?” he said, as it finally came to him. “In the Sunday magazine, I think.”

  “That’s right. Last November.”

  “Yeah, I remember now. I read it.” Actually he had skimmed it while sitting on the toilet. But the gist of it was that the professor advocated tougher sexual harassment laws and wanted pornography outlawed as an act of oppression against women. “So you’re saying you may have enemies because of your opinions.”

  “I think that’s a safe assumption,” she answered dryly.

  “November,” said Weiss after another moment. He tapped the fingers of his right hand with his thumb, counting the months. “That would be just before the e-mails started, wouldn’t it?”

  She lifted one shoulder under the straitlaced, slashing jacket. “That could be. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s what set it off. But my work is very public anyway, very controversial.”

  “Like what, specifically? Give me an example. Something you think might’ve gotten this guy started.”

  “Well…” She thought about it—or pretended to think about it. Weiss was pretty sure she already had a good idea. “What comes to mind immediately are my views on pornography—any form of expression, really, that subjects women to sexual subordination. I consider it an abridgment of women’s rights. I’ve worked hard to have it banned, and I think it’s fair to say I’ve been instrumental in rooting out that kind of harassment in our university, in lectures and texts and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if that makes some men feel…threatened, you know. Their power under attack. It makes sense, in a way, that one of them would imagine he could bolster his ego or intimidate or neutralize me by turning that particular weapon on me. Maybe he thought that by objectifying me in a sexual way he could…”

  She went on like this a while, her voice clipped and scornful. Weiss propped his elbow on his chair arm, rested his cheek against his fist, the baggy skin bunching under his eye. He took the opportunity to look her over. The cut of her suit jacket made it impossible to make out the shape of her breasts, he noticed, and he wondered idly how large they were. Not very, he decided. In fact, he suspected that underneath all the tailoring she was a little too stringy for his taste.

  Following that chain of thought, he stole a glance at her left hand. Not married—or at least, she wasn’t wearing a ring.

  He waited for her to finish, then he said, “What about your personal life?” He gestured slightly toward her ringless finger. “A former lover maybe, someone you might’ve rejected romantically.”

  She sniffed sharply. Answered tartly, “There’s nothing like that, no. Look,” she barreled on at once. “I was given your name by a colleague at Cal. She said you were very good, very discreet. She said you could probably do this electronically or something. Trace the e-mails to their source or whatever. If you’re going to go around questioning all sorts of people in my life—”

  Weiss lifted his free hand. “No, no, don’t worry. It’s nothing like that. Sometimes people come in here looking for answers they already know, that’s all. I was just trying to save you some time and money.”

  For the first time since she’d come in, Professor M. R. Brinks seemed to soften a little. She lifted her chin defiantly, as if threatening to slash him with the point of it. But she said, “Of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Weiss. It’s just very important to me that this matter remain private, that’s all.”

  “Sure.”

  “No, it’s not like that. It’s nothing personal. I’m not embarrassed or anything.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It’s just that—because my work gathers a lot of attention in the media, I have to be careful, I have to protect how it’s presented. If some television station got hold of a story like this—well, you know how they are, they would sensationalize it, sexualize it. That’s how you get the ratings, isn’t it? Appeal to the lowest common denominator?”

  “I guess so.”

  “My work is very important, and I don’t want to see it…genitalized like that. Reducing women’s issues to cheap titillation is an age-old technique for trivializing them. If I let that happen, then this person, this person who’s harassing me, will have won. That’s my concern.”

  With his high, romantic expectations of the opposite sex, Weiss was often doomed to be disappointed in actual women. And in the end, as he showed her to the door, he found he was, in fact, disappointed with Professor M. R. Brinks. It wasn’t the big attitude that bothered him, the big academic talk or any of that nonsense. It was the fact that she was lying to him, that’s what he found so disheartening. He wasn’t sure how exactly, but she was definitely lying to him, and it struck him as…unladylike somehow.

  He stood in the doorway a moment and watched her as she strode away. His sad eyes, as men’s eyes will, trailed naturally down to her backside. But the tail of her jacket was cut to cover it. There wasn’t much to see.

  He gave another heavy sigh and went slowly back to his desk.

  Seven

  Just down the hall from Weiss’s office was an alcove that served as the agency’s mailroom. There was a Xerox machine in there, a fax machine, a stamp machine, the computer mainframe. And me. Me working at my desk, licking envelopes and making copies, ordering supplies, doing research—and basically waiting around for whatever crumbs of investigative work Weiss felt willing to throw my way.

  Which had been exactly none for the last few months. Ever since I’d screwed up my first real case. I’d been assigned to do a simple background check on a priest who was giving testimony in the trial of a vicious armed robber. It was supposed to be my introduction to the business—a grounder, they call it—a simple, straightforward task. Well, I got off to a promising enough start. Right away, I sniffed out the fact that the priest was lying. Unfortunately, that meant that the armed robber would probably go free. So—also unfortunately—I decided to cover up the lie. Then—unfortunately—I felt so guilty about it that I got drunk and passed out at my desk. Which—unfortunately—was where Weiss discovered me. It was all very unfortunate.

  Now, Weiss had never mentioned the incident. He never reprimanded me or broke my magnifying glass over his knee or anything like that. I just couldn’t help but notice that what I’d hoped would be the start of my career as a hardboiled gumshoe à la the characters in the old novels I loved turned out instead to herald my inauspicious return to licking envelopes and making copies and waiting around for the investigative crumbs that never came.

  But Weiss had not entirely given up on me. He still liked to wander down the hall from time to time and visit me in my little nook. He liked to talk things over with me. I was never sure why. He always kidded me it was because I was going to write a book about him one day and he wanted to make sure I heard his side of the story—and maybe there was some truth to that. But mostly I thought it was just because I didn't count for very much in the world of the Agency. I had my highbrow Berkeley education, my big plans to return to the East Coast and become a writer: I wasn't truly part of Weiss's world. I was just passing through. So I figured Weiss felt he could talk to me with impunity, if you see what
I mean. Anything I said or heard didn't really matter. Talking to me was about the same as talking to no one at all.

  Whatever. Down the hall he came that day, bearing Professor Brinks's manila envelope.

  "Make me some copies of these, willya?" he said. "One for Hwang"—he was our computer consultant—"and one for Sissy"—she was another op. He seemed about to walk away again. But he hesitated. Hung around, as he sometimes did, with his hands in his pants pockets. "While you're at it, make a copy for yourself, too," he said after a moment. "Take a look at them over the weekend. You're a literary man. Let's see what you think."

  I don't need to tell you, my youthful heart went pit-a-pat. It seemed I was being given a second chance investigative crumb-wise.

  "Okay," I said, as nonchalantly as I could. I opened the envelope's clip, peeked in at the sheaf of papers inside. I could make out only a single sentence:

  You will be just one pussy in a row of pussies, one emptiness among many waiting desperately for me to fill you.

  "Holy canoodle," I said mildly. "What is this?"

  "E-mails to one of our clients. She's being sexually harassed."

  “I’ll say. Hey, this isn’t M. R. Brinks, is it?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know that?”

  “I saw her go into your office.”

  “You know her?”

  “Not personally. But I recognize her.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Weiss. “She teaches at Berkeley. You ever take a class from her?”

  I snorted. “Not exactly.”

  “What? You don’t like her?”

  I shrugged. But no, I didn’t. I didn’t like feminists in general. Don’t get me wrong. The way I felt, all God’s children, male and female, should be free to do whatever they wanted, whatever they could. Smoke, go to medical school, stay home and raise their children, it didn’t matter a damn to me what people did. But feminists like Brinks—these ideologues who thought marriage was oppression and sex was rape and men and women should be exactly the same—I’d only just recently escaped from academia, and I knew them well and I hated them. They were bullies and liars. They lied about history and human nature and statistics—anything that might contradict their stupid positions. And when you pointed out to them that they were liars, they tried to bully you by branding you sexist or accusing you of harassment. Then, when you pointed out that they were bullies, they suddenly went all reasonable on you and said, “Oh, surely not all feminists are bullies.” Which is like saying that not all mobsters are hit men: It only takes one or two to intimidate the opposition. The rest are free to go about the business of being ordinary thugs.

  So that’s what I thought. Which I mention not by way of convincing anyone. I just want to be clear about what my position was. Because normally I was the soul of gentlemanly good manners, truly, but my feelings about M. R. Brinks and her ilk made me just that little bit sympathetic toward this obscene e-mail guy of hers. And that, in the end, is the reason I was able to help Weiss solve the case.

  “So what’s she want you to do?” I asked. “Hunt the man down and drag him to her elfin grot? Turn him into a stag so he can be torn apart by his own dogs?”

  He laughed once. “Her elfin grot. Where do you get this shit?”

  “Or are you supposed to just hurl him into the Women’s Studies Department and bar the door?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  I hefted the manila envelope in my hand. “That’s a lot of e-mails. Why the hell doesn’t she change her address or something?”

  Weiss lifted his eyebrows. “Good question, as a matter of fact. I wondered that, too. This has been going on for nine months.”

  “Nine months? How come she’s just hiring you now?”

  Hands still deep in his pockets, Weiss hoisted his shoulders. “Don’t ask me. She says she’s being objectified or genitalized or some sort of thing.”

  “Genitalized. Gimme a break. You ever read her work? Genitalizing that broad would take a power tool.”

  “Awright, awright. Never mind,” said Weiss. “Just make the copies.”

  I began to work the pages out of the envelope. “ ‘I’ll slide my cock easy into you and rub velvety rose petals against your clit,’ ” I read aloud. “Wowser!”

  Weiss wandered back toward his office, shaking his head. “It’s no way to treat a lady.”

  Eight

  It was a funny thing really about Weiss and women. All that chivalry and romance in his heart and there was no one for him in the world. No one but his prostitutes—and Julie Wyant, who wasn’t much more than a daydream.

  There were plenty of reasons for his being alone. He was a big, ugly man, for one thing. About fifty. About six foot four. Heavyset with a copper’s paunch. He had unruly salt-and-pepper hair. Thick features that sagged like a basset hound’s. A bulbous nose. Brown eyes set in the vertical parentheses of bushy eyebrows above and wrinkly bags below. The eyes themselves were deep, weary, sympathetic, full of understanding, but they could be disconcerting, too, sometimes. Everyone lies in this life; we all try to make ourselves look good, hide our smallness, our cravings, our selfishness behind some grand philosophy or some show of charity, some swagger, some sweetness. Well, when Weiss hit you with those lamps of his, it sometimes felt as if they were shining right through all that, right through the pretty disguise to the clammy humanity underneath. So he was ugly and he could peer into people’s souls. In the relationship game, that was two strikes against him right there.

  Then—strike three—there was that baffling idealization of women. Baffling because, as I say, he’d been a cop; he’d seen all kinds of females, girls who’d sell their babies to sex fiends for a pipeful of crack, spoiled brats who’d gun down their sugar daddies so they could get it on with the tennis pro in the backseat of the Mercedes; all kinds. Still, he insisted on the natural tenderness of the sex. Hovered over women whenever he could, courtly and protective. So, of course, women reacted almost universally by either treating him like a sexless father figure or shrugging him off as a tiresome pain in the ass or occasionally both.

  He’d had a wife once—so I heard, anyway—a venomous marriage. But nowadays, there were only the whores. Outcall girls who visited him in his apartment every so often. A procuress named Casey supplied them to his specifications—and sometimes dropped by herself for a freebee, though whether this was out of affection or simply a bonus for a good customer, he could never be sure.

  It was a hell of an arrangement for someone like him, someone who probably wanted nothing more than a wife waiting in the doorway, a couple of kids causing havoc in the backyard. But it made sense, too, in a strange kind of way. It was the flip side of this idealization business. Because when it came right down to it, Weiss never really fell for a woman he knew at close range. It was only the ones at a distance he went for, the ones who couldn’t disappoint him, the ones he couldn’t have.

  Which brings us to Julie Wyant.

  That evening, when Weiss stepped out of his office building to head for home, a bad feeling came over him. A feeling that he was being watched, being followed. He’d been having that feeling a lot lately. And it was all because of Julie Wyant. Because of Julie Wyant and the man called Ben Fry.

  Fry was a killer. Julie was a whore. Fry was in love with Julie, obsessed with her. Julie had disappeared about six months ago, desperate to get away from him. Fry was willing to move heaven and earth, do whatever it took, to track her down.

  As of right now, Weiss was the only man alive who could help him do that, the only man who had any clue at all as to where Julie Wyant was.

  Now Weiss, in his days on the force and still afterward, was considered one of the best locate men in the business. He could find people, find anyone, sometimes track down in a day, in an hour, with a single phone call, missing persons whom the police had been seeking for weeks, months, years. It had to do with a quirk of his personality, an almost uncanny insight he had into the hearts and minds
of human beings he barely knew, whom he might never even have met. He could imagine them somehow, picture to himself what they were like, and then suddenly he’d be thinking with them, feeling with them, getting inside their heads. Given a single lead, he could follow their trains of logic and figure out exactly where they had gone.

  He had gotten his lead one night when Julie phoned him. It was the only time he had ever spoken with her.

  You can’t come to me, she had said. Do you understand? Do you? You would only bring him with you. You see? He’ll be watching you now all the time, every second. And if you come to find me, he’ll follow you and he’ll find me first.

  Weiss had back-traced the call to a pay phone in a town called Paradise, up near the Sierra Nevadas—that was his lead. But because of what she said, he never followed up on it. He left Julie alone.

  Still, her image haunted him. It was easy enough to see why. He could have invented her face in a fantasy. Clean and clear and gazey. With fine, tumbling strawberry blonde hair like a miser’s dream of gold. Lots of her clients went slobbery over her. Those middle-aged guys especially, with their unsung songs. For Weiss, all it took was a photograph he had of her, and a ten-second video clip he kept on his computer. He watched that video a lot when no one was looking. He knew it was idiotic of him. But he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  He couldn’t forget she was out there somewhere, running, hunted. And he couldn’t forget what she’d said on the phone. If you come to find me, he’ll follow you and he’ll find me first. The idea climbed up the walls of his mind like ivy. The more he thought about Julie, the more he could feel the man called Ben Fry watching him. The stronger the urge to find her, to protect her, to rescue her, the stronger his fear that he would bring the killer in his wake.