THE INSIDE OF THE DELAHAYE smelled damper than ever. It was like something was beginning to rot, and there was a gouge down the driver’s side which Clark presumed Roger and his mates had caused. The engine didn’t sound quite right, either, as they drove past the fake palms and papier-mâché hula girls outside the new Clifton Cafeteria on the corner of Broadway and First.
Abe Penn’s offices were in a three story building set between a lower sprawl of warehouses and lots. There was a failed oil pump site and few signs of life.
“Thought you said he was up the pecking order from you, Clark,” Barbara muttered, looking up at the spackle-filled three story frontage as they climbed out.
Plates for all sorts, sizes and types of business clung to the wall outside. A chiropractor. A lonely hearts bureau. The registered offices of some oddly-named companies, amongst which was Abe Penn’s Nero Detective Agency. None of the plates looked new. The glass pane in the swing door had once had a long piece of surgical tape stuck across it to try to hold together a long crack. Once the door had stopped screeching, it felt very quiet inside. The only sound was the stick of their feet on warm linoleum and the buzz of a few flies. There was a noticeboard beside the stairs, one of those things that you slide letters in like a feelie signboard or the hymn numbers in a church. It repeated some of the names from the business plates outside, and added a few others. Abe Penn’s office was apparently up on the top floor.
There was no elevator, and the air grew even hotter as they climbed. More silent, as well—they were both almost holding their breath—apart from the continued bumble and buzz of those flies. Most of the business signs in the glass-windowed doors along the final corridor had been stuck over with brown paper or scratched out. The words NERO DETECTIVE AGENCY faced them from the far end, and Clark thought to himself as he swatted another fly and tried to peer through the glass frosting that this whole place was such a distillation of a certain kind of existence that they’d probably use it in the feelies—in the unlikely event that it ever became fashionable to work this city as a private dick, that was.
He couldn’t make anything out, and fully expected the door to be locked. But the oval handle instantly gave, and something terrible hit his senses as the door swung. With it came a rush of flies.
“Jesus. Shut the door.” He was fumbling for a handkerchief. “No—not on the outside, Barbara.” He hissed. “You’ve got to come in …”
The remains of what could only be Abe Penn depended from a rope which had been looped around the rosette of an old metal fan on the ceiling, and a swivel chair had been kicked away from underneath. Flies were everywhere. On the walls. In the air. Darkening the metal-framed windows. Seeking their eyes and mouths. Keeping close as he could to the corners of the small room, Clark went around to the far side of Abe’s desk. He used the handkerchief to work open the first window catch and a few thousand flies swarmed out, but most of the rest seemed happy enough to stay in with Abe. The other window was already half open.
“What the hell is this?” Barbara was covering her mouth with one hand, fumbling in her handbag with the other.
“What does it look like? Don’t touch anything, right?”
“As if I would…”
The roar of the disturbed flies was so loud they were having to shout. Abe looked like a large bag that had burst. His head was so ballooned and distorted, and his neck had been stretched so far by the weight of his leaking body, that it seemed that it could only be moments before the two broke apart. Clark had encountered one or two suicides before—they came with the territory when you dealt with separation and divorce—but never anything this bad. Abe must have been dead for days. No—make that weeks…
An impressive double page a day desk diary was open on the blotter for Friday June 21st, which was seven days ago. The only entry was a doodle of several breasts and the single word Haircut? Somehow, Clark found that question mark especially touching. Keeping his fingers wrapped in the handkerchief, he flicked quickly through the previous pages of the diary. More poorly done doodles of impossibly endowed broads decorated the pages, but that was all until, in the looser kind of hand someone might use when they were jotting something down whilst talking on the phone, Abe had written Lamotte. Erewhon—Stone Canyon—Lookalikes?!? and a phone number on the page for Friday June 14th.
Barbara was standing beside him now. The only other thing on the desk apart from the flies was a solitary buff gray folder. He lifted it open. Instantly the flies began to crawl over old cuttings—curled and yellowed images of Clark’s face from the middle pages of single column articles in Variety back in the days when he was just about famous—and a bigger glossy that he remembered having done at Mina’s considerable expense and never feeling happy with. Abe had also gotten hold of one of Clark’s business cards, and he looked, from the emphatic way he’d crossed out the disconnected number and the tiny breasts which decorated its edges, to have tried calling it. He’d then written another number on the back of the card which Clark recognized as belonging to a service office he’d briefly used to take messages until he decided the whole thing was a rip-off. Finally, in a fresher, crisper hand, was the number for the phone in the hall of the Doge’s Apartments, and then the words Glory Guzman?!!! deeply scored with a kind of frustration Clark could understand.
“Looks like he did try to speak to you,” Barbara muttered. “Is Glory always like she was this morning?”
“No. We got her on a good day.”
“So he chose you, and the message about the whole business didn’t get through, and then he… Do you think this is really a suicide?”
“No.” Abe swung gently in the fresher breeze from the open window. Quite a lot him had already leaked onto the floor, and was forming a black, slow-spreading pool around the chair which the flies seemed especially to love. They’d have to hurry up here, or he’d need to find somewhere to vomit. “But that’s what it’s supposed to look like.”
“You don’t say.”
No sign of a suicide note, fake or otherwise, but would this kind of guy really need an explanation as to why he’d killed himself? Clark doubted it. The cops, when someone finally got around to noticing the smell, would be happy to file a Death By Own Hand report and leave it at that. Wouldn’t ever get as far as being looked at by homicide, any more than had the death of April Lamotte.
Picking out a fly which had crawled into the edge of his mouth, Clark closed the folder. Was it so surprising that Abe had chosen him when he was asked about finding a guy who was prepared to play at being someone else’s husband for a few hours? He supposed not. After all, who else was Abe likely to think of when he was looking for a tall guy with big ears, not too many scruples, a background in matrimonial affairs, and some experience of proper acting? He checked the diary again. There was nothing else beyond that previous Friday. After that, he reckoned, Abe Penn was probably dead. Otherwise, and for all this frustrations at trying to speak to Glory, he’d have tried to get in touch again.
Clark riffled through the desk drawers. Nothing much more, beyond some copies of a business card for Nero Investigations. There was some dried-up orange peel in the bin, and a sandwich with a bite mark which the flies, with so much of Abe to go at, had chosen to ignore. Also a copy of the LA Times for that same last Friday as the diary. Abe had made a less than successful stab at the crossword.
A crackling flash detonated in the room. Every fly on what was left of Abe’s body instantly took off, momentarily revealing an anatomy squirming with millions of fresh white maggots.
Barbara thumbed on the Graflex’s winder. She paused, and looked over at Clark.
“What?”
They was no one about as they left the place. Outside, the combined city reek of horse dung, gasoline fumes, hot tar and tamarisk had rarely smelled so good. Clark stood out front of the block for a moment, looking up. Abe’s office was on this side. You could see where the window had been left half open—and the lazy circle of a few flies as they went in and out. He walked over to the spot directly beneath. No proper paving here, just gravel and dog dirt. He pushed around at the gravel with his shoe, vaguely remembering how people said the sidewalks in this town were supposed to glitter in the sun like gold. Then he saw something flash. He stooped down and picked up the broken remains of a needle-tipped glass tube.