by James, Terry
Copyright © 2019 by James Terry
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3108-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3109-7
Printed in the United States of America
For Deana and Marlowe
1
THAT MORNING WHEN the cops came knocking, I was dreaming that a man had shot me in the head. I saw the flash. I heard the bang. But I didn’t feel a thing. Who this man was and why he wanted me dead, I no longer recall.
I have also forgotten how I managed to make it to the door in a relatively presentable state, but I must have, for I distinctly recall Detective-lieutenant Randy Hicks of the 66th Street Division taking a long disdainful look at me before he and Detective Stiles swaggered into my apartment with the proprietorial play of the hips peculiar to their kind.
“Christ Almighty,” Hicks growled, looking around with disgust. “Smells like an embalmers convention in here.”
“Someone’s been on a holy tear,” was Stiles’s contribution.
Hicks and Stiles: grace and gentility personified. Hicks with his fat fists stumped against his sagging belt, legs planted as wide as the Colossus of Rhodes, sweat lake irrigating his shirt. Bony Stiles, flanking his commander, rubber band nervously expanding and contracting around his right thumb and middle finger in time with his gum-chewing jaw. I had the distinct impression looking at them that I was watching a couple of bad actors who had been giving the same matinee performance to empty theaters for the past decade, so inured to the stale yawns which greeted their best gags that somewhere beneath their lines they managed to carry on a conversation about their wives or the price of cigarettes or some other banal topic whose ostensible purpose was to obliterate the silence which, if left intact, would all too eloquently convey the complete absence of any fellow-feeling between them. Everything about them was a sham, their spirits ossified by daily draughts of petty power. It was impossible to imagine them ever out of their wrinkled, sweaty suits. They were born in them, yanked from the womb in tiny brown gabardine suits—porkpies, ties, and all—sweat stains already in place around their armpits. “It’s a cop!” the midwife must have exclaimed as she placed the newborn on its mother’s panting bosom.
“Some wild party,” Stiles quipped, picking up my Bix Beiderbecke and his Rhythm Jugglers LP and studying the front and back covers with evident disapproval.
Hicks was eyeballing me. “Do you know a man named Walter Morris?”
“I don’t know my own mother at this time of the morning.”
“He seems to have known you.”
I scratched the right side of my nose.
“I take it he’s dead.”
“I’d say so,” Hicks said. “Would you say so, Stiles?”
“I’d say so.”
“Yeah, I’d say he’s pretty much dead,” Hicks said. “Not much chance of his brains being stuffed back into that hole in the side of his head.”
“One funny little thing.” Stiles removed a folded-up piece of typing paper from his inside jacket pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to me. It was splattered with dried blood. Down near the bottom, like the closing of a letter, was typewritten:
Yours truly,
Eddie King
I turned it over. Nothing on the back. I looked at Hicks, then Stiles, then Hicks again. They seemed to be waiting for my confession.
“Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“You’re Eddie King, aren’t you?” Stiles said.
“One of them.”
“There’s only three in the book,” Hicks said. “And only one has a license to carry a snubnose .38.”
Stiles grinned at me. He had been waiting all morning to deliver his line. “The note was in the stiff’s lap.”
I glanced at it again then handed it to Hicks.
“That’s not all,” Hicks said. “According to the old lady someone showed up at the door three weeks ago with a gun. He was wearing a black suit and a black fedora.” He stared at me for about five seconds. “Didn’t say anything. Just flashed his gun, then left.”
“That’s your man,” I said. “Find the guy in the black suit and fedora and you’ve got your killer. There can’t be more than half a million of them out there.”
“I’d like to take a look at your piece,” Hicks said.
I nodded towards the hat rack. “Be my guest.”
Hicks walked over and unbuttoned the flap and removed my revolver from the shoulder holster. He brusquely flicked open the cylinder, peered down at the chambers for a few seconds, then raised the butt of the barrel to his nose and sniffed. He frowned. He flicked the cylinder shut and reholstered the firearm, not bothering to rebutton the flap.
Turning to face me, he replanted his fists on his hips.
“Empty chamber,” he said. “Pretty fresh by the smell of it.”
“Good nose.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“Not particularly.”
“I think you’d better.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We’re in no rush,” Stiles said.
We all looked at each other for a while.
“I need a cup of coffee,” I said. “Do you guys want one?”
“I’ll have one if you’re having one,” Stiles deferred to his superior. Hicks shook his head, leaving Stiles no choice but to regretfully decline.
I went into the kitchenette and put on the kettle and dumped the remaining few tablespoons of my last jar of instant into my Wendell Willkie for President mug. Waiting for the kettle to boil, I opened the fridge and surveyed the cold void. The real mystery was why I always persisted in believing that somehow something edible might have materialized since the last time I looked.
The kettle wheezed. I poured the water, giving it a stir with the handle of a dirty spoon before returning to my guests. A wave of wooziness coming on, I sat down on the right arm of the recliner. Hicks had moved from the hat rack and was now standing half-in and half-out of a parallelogram of sunlight, his upper body in shadow, his trousers overexposed.
Stiles stopped snooping long enough to say: “We’re waiting to be enlightened.”
The sight of two of my neckties knotted around the uprights of the bed frame revived an image from last night that I would rather have forgotten.
I scalded my tongue, winced, and began.
“I’m not one of those rare individuals who can remember his own birth, but I’m pretty sure that my memory is reliable as far back as two years old. I have a vivid image of a woman’s face looming over me, gazing down on me with eyes full of sweet pity. I always think of her as a nurse because she had a white cap of some sort on her head. She certainly wasn’t my mother. I think she was Mexican. It’s hard for me to remember anything else with any certainty until I’m about five. I’m in the back yard with my
father. It’s a sunny day. We’re throwing the slobbery tennis ball to Rex—”
“All right, wise guy,” Hicks cut me off. “If you want to play it that way we can play it that way.”
“I told you it was a long story.” I blew across the lip of my cup.
“You’re lucky the gun was in his hand,” Hicks said, “or I’d have you in the can faster than pigeon shit on a hockey puck.”
I laughed. I didn’t know what was funnier—his ridiculous metaphor, the dour look on his face, or the fact that he had waited all this time to inform me that the dead man had a gun in his hand.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Was it by any chance a snubnose .38?”
Stiles removed a handkerchief from his back pocket and noisily blew his nose. Neither of them responded to my query.
“Who was this guy anyway?” I asked.
“Some kind of ink slinger,” Hicks replied.
“Suicide,” I said. “Case closed. Ernest Hemingway. Hart Crane. Petronius. A long and illustrious history of writers offing themselves. The guy has a .38 in his hand, and you’re standing here sniffing my gun because my name is on some note in his hand. What am I missing?”
Hicks and Stiles exchanged a smug glance.
“We found a piece of dried roof shingle in the front yard,” Hicks said. “Morris’s study is on the second floor, with a window letting out to the roof of the porch. The window wasn’t locked. A section of exposed wood on the porch roof matched the piece we found in the grass.”
“And you’re telling me this because …?”
“The bullet’s missing,” Stiles said.
“Not there,” Hicks expounded. “Someone removed it from the scene.”
“There goes your ballistics report.”
“Bullets don’t just vanish into thin air,” Stiles pointed out. “Someone was there.”
“Did you look in his head?”
“There’s a hole through his head that Ben Hogan could sink a putt into.”
Hicks moseyed over to the bed and fiddled with one of my ties.
“Looks like you had some company last night,” he observed.
“An old friend stopped by,” I replied. “We had some catching up to do.”
“More like tying up,” Stiles grinned. His dentist was either blind or had a dark sense of humor.
Hicks dropped the tie and moseyed over to the recliner’s seat cushion, presently marooned in the middle of the floor with a full ashtray resting on it, two glasses either side of it, one of them smeared with lipstick. Beside it lay an empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad.
“Where were you yesterday between two and three p.m.?” he asked me.
“Entertaining my friend,” I said. “We go way back.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t recall at the moment.”
“If it were me I think I’d take soliciting a prostitute over murder,” he said, giving me the old concerned father look. “But that’s just me.”
I took a long sip. It felt good going down.
“It’s always a pleasure chatting with you guys,” I said, “but I’m running a little late this morning.”
Hicks was in no rush. He stood there looking at me, as if trying to impress upon my retinas the human incarnation of Justice. All I saw was a big, fat, sweaty crooked cop. He looked at Stiles and made a putt with his jaw towards the door. Stiles tugged at his jacket lapels and sauntered past me, treating me to a whiff of his cologne, an oddly feminine scent. At the door, which they hadn’t bothered to shut behind them, Hicks turned and eyed me.
“Open your eyes, King,” he said. “There’s blood in the streets. It’s up to your ankles.”
What the hell that was supposed to mean, I had no idea.
2
MY OFFICE IS in the Mandrake Building, an unimaginative six-story affair that I can see from my apartment if I crane my neck far enough out the window. It’s a ten-minute walk, but I prefer to drive. I share the floor with a couple of small-time lawyers, a tax guy, a dentist, a psychiatrist, various vague professional services firms and some kind of fly-by-night mail-order racket. I’ve been there longer than any of them, so the territorial instincts I feel when I push the button for the third floor aren’t without some justification.
The steak and fries that I’d wolfed down at the diner before coming in hadn’t done much for the hangover. My temples were throbbing and my skull felt as empty as my bank account. If I hadn’t had some paperwork to catch up on, I wouldn’t have come in at all.
Both windows were open, the quiet music of mid-morning traffic playing to the rhythm of the blinds tapping against the frames. I stepped over to the window behind my desk and stood there for a while looking out across the city, thinking about Hicks and Stiles and a dead writer named Morris. It looked like suicide. But what kind of a goodbye to the world was that? What was my name doing on it, if indeed I was the Eddie King he had had in mind? And what about the missing bullet?
I turned from the window and sat down at my desk. I opened the lower right-hand drawer and reached in. A wave of queasiness rolled through me as my fingers closed around the neck of the bottle. I released it and closed the drawer. I sat there for a while, staring into space, then I crossed my forearms atop the desk and lowered my head onto them.
I was just drifting off when three tentative taps sounded on the glass of the door. I raised my head to see a mosaic of a man behind the pebbled pane. I willed him to go away. He didn’t. He stood there for a solid minute before knocking again. I sat up and tried to make myself look alive.
“Yeah, come in.”
The door opened. He was a late middle-aged man of medium build, with a soft, squarish face that was hard to imagine ever being stricken with spontaneous joy. The round spectacles perched atop his clump of a nose lent him an expression of permanent confoundment. The clothes and how he wore them attested to his money—a slate-blue pinstripe wool double-breasted Kuppenheimer, wide lapels, green silk handkerchief sprouting from the breast pocket, a bluish green William Morris patterned tie, matching waistcoat with a silver watch chain dipping from the pocket, gray homburg planted squarely on his head with a dash of yellow plumage in the wide grosgrain band, sterling cufflinks—but it was the soft, doughy quality of his cheeks and his plump fingers that spoke most eloquently of a life far removed from exertion of even the mildest nature.
“Parking,” he huffed as he closed the door behind him. From his left hand hung a maroon leather attaché case. If the expression on his face as he took in the state of my office was any indication, he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the resource he had consulted.
“Are you Eddie King?” he asked, clearly hoping I wasn’t.
“That’s what’s written on the door.”
He stood there, silent, for about ten seconds, then, having apparently reached some inner compromise, he said:
“I need a detective.”
I gestured open-palmed to the seat on the other side of the desk. He remained standing at the door for another few seconds, as if telling himself he could still turn around and leave. Then he unnecessarily cleared his throat and walked up to the desk, pinched the pleats of his trousers and sat down, setting the attaché on the floor beside him.
“My name is Gordon Fletcher,” he said.
“What’s your trouble, Mr. Fletcher?”
Frowning at that word, he cleared his throat again.
“It’s about my wife.”
I nodded earnestly. The slightest hint of an ironic smile tugged at the left corner of his mouth as he glanced downward, or rather seemingly backwards in time.
“It began when I was a child,” he said as if there was a screen between us and I was his priest. “To this day I still feel the blood rush to my cheeks when I recall my mother and father embracing. I feel it now just thinking about it. I wanted my mother all to myself, you see. I used every power within me—at first with only my body, later with more subtle methods—to try to come between them. As you ca
n imagine, this didn’t make for a healthy relationship between my father and I.”
“Mr. Fletcher,” I interrupted about five minutes later. “This is all very interesting, but perhaps what you need is a psychiatrist. There’s a cheap one down the hall.”
He glowered at my impertinence, but resolved to have his say he resumed his pathetic narrative, explaining in tiresome detail how he had destroyed one relationship after another rather than admit to his pathological jealousy. Then he met his wife and everything changed. By his account, and by the photograph he produced from the attaché and handed to me, she was drop-dead gorgeous. She was tall. Thick blonde hair fell to her shoulders in metallic waves. How I knew from the black-and-white photograph that her eyes were blue I don’t know, but they promised more than a patent medicine ad. Her breasts swelled over the top of her low-cut gown. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swept into high-set hips, converged into a narrow waist. The gown looked as if one deep breath would disintegrate the whole thing. It was a studio photograph, professionally lit, the world behind her reduced by her radiance to soft, velvety darkness.
I set the picture on the desk, and Mr. Fletcher, seeming satisfied by the tenor of my silence, went on with his story. By his account, when he had first met his wife-to-be four years ago, she was enjoying the last days of her youth, in the widest sense of the phrase. If you wanted to find the hottest party in town, all you had to do was follow the bouncing backside of Heidi Malone. In the ballrooms of palatial estates, in the banqueting halls of grand hotels, on the dance floors of smoky jazz joints, wherever you saw a swirling mass of the city’s brightest luminaries, Heidi Malone was sure to be found spinning in the center of it. She was an enigma—no one knew exactly where she was from or where she lived, though it was rumored she had once been a Lord & Taylor runway girl—which made her the vessel of a thousand flights of fancy, many of which were less than complimentary. To put it bluntly, she was perceived to be a loose woman, and as such had to attend to the responsibilities of upholding that image when circumstances to her advantage called for it and trouncing it when they didn’t. For every man or woman drawn into her orbit, a dozen theories as to who she was hovered in the air around her. Her beauty alone was enough to cause the most generous women to cast aspersions on her and the most principled men to get tangled up in their own lies.
