It was plenty late but I didn’t go home right away. Instead, I stopped off at the Cain Building and used my passkey to let myself into the little darkroom adjoining my office. Maybe I felt guilty and needed to do some kind of penance by working myself all night, or maybe I just wanted to get this case over and done with as soon as possible. Either way I knew I wasn’t about to get any sleep until I had the things hung and drying, ready to print and study in the light of day.
I poured the chemicals then killed the overhead light. I’d done this kind of work dozens of times, but tonight the perfect darkness of the room and the eerie quiet of my empty office got to me in a way it never had before. I kept imagining I could still hear that skin-crawling music from Club Erebus—but the place was dead silent except for my own breathing. Even the sounds of traffic five stories below didn’t make it in here. No light, no noise, hardly even a sense of up and down. I felt like a man swimming in a sea of India ink.
Working blind, I popped the film out of the camera, prepped it, dropped it into the developing fluid and sealed the tank. Then I clicked the light back on, set my little egg timer, and paced until it rang.
Developing fluid out, stop bath in, shake like a watered-down martini—I knew the routine by heart. All the shots I’d snapped over the years of insurance cases whose injuries miraculously healed when they thought no one was looking, of cheating spouses and their paramours, of businessmen meeting with the wrong people in the wrong places—the vital tools of my trade, and not exactly the sort of stuff you trusted to the corner drugstore. Still, in all my years I’d never been quite so crazy to get my hands on the finished product, and even now I can’t say exactly why.
I swapped stop bath for fixer, shook up the canister again and then dumped the last of the chemicals out and gave the negatives a good long shower under the tap. Then at last I hoisted the strip and pinned it to the line strung over the counter to dry. I thought about digging out the loupe I’d acquired from a grateful jeweler not long ago (it’d turned out his brother wasn’t swapping phonies for the real things), but I knew that it wouldn’t be enough to reveal much detail in the tiny frames of the government-issue film. I’d have to wait until the negatives could go into the enlarger—a few hours at least, if I didn’t want to risk scratching the not-quite-dry emulsion.
The pricey timepiece on my left wrist informed me that midnight had already come and gone. A smart man would’ve headed home, caught a couple dozen winks, and come back rested and ready to solve the world’s mysteries in the morning.
Instead, I shambled out into my office, dropped myself into my desk chair, put my feet up on the big paper blotter, and shut my eyes for a while.
Sleep kept drifting close, but my mind was too occupied by everything that had happened the night before for it to take hold. In the dark behind my eyelids I re-watched the events from the moment Miss Gray showed up to the minute I’d climbed into that cab headed away from the club where she and the rest of the strange party had disappeared through the door with the red circle on it. The more I pushed the pieces around in my brain, the less they added up to a picture I could make any sense of. She clearly knew those folks—Mr. Dapper and the undertaker and the harem—but didn’t know herself? Hard to buy. But then why pay me to look into her doings? I couldn’t figure. Some kind of game, or a plot to tangle me up in something ugly? Who’d bother? Sure, I had a few enemies—probably two dozen angry wives, husbands, and various lovers who’d been less than happy with the results of work I’d done at some time or other, and a fistful of conmen I’d caught in the act. But the trap scenario didn’t play. Anyone who really wanted to give me the kiss-off would just show up at my office with a Roscoe in his hand and take his frustrations out with a few rounds of hot lead. As far as I could tell, that left me with two possibilities. Either the poor girl was plain crackers, or I’d gotten myself into something much weirder than anything I’d ever seen before. And thinking of her face, her voice, her eyes, I felt sure as ever she wasn’t crazy.
Those eyes … Lord help me.
The first light of morning sneaking in through the Venetian blinds roused me from my nap. I sat up blinking, my stomach grumbling. The Half Moon Diner a block away would already be slinging hash and pouring strong hot joe, but hungry as I was, I didn’t even think about leaving.
I dragged myself out of my chair and shuffled back into the darkroom. In the gore-red gloom of the safety light, I plucked the negatives from the line and gave them a quick look, but the tiny images, light swapped for dark, were no more than meaningless semi-transparent shapes, ghosts spied through a keyhole. I dropped some photo paper into the enlarger and fed in the negatives.
A dozen sheets of photo paper and a lot of chemicals and water later, I had my eight-by-tens.
The first shot was nothing but shadows, a bunch of black and gray with no meaningful shapes to be seen. Ditto the second. The third had some hints of light in it, but nothing I could make any sense of. The fourth was better. The fifth was pitch black.
I played with the timing, I underexposed the print sheets. I adjusted and readjusted. Images swam out of the dark, but mostly nothing more than vague blurs, shapes that were probably faces hovering over a candlelit table, but not so’s anyone could recognize them. But there was that one. The one good print of the bunch.
That one bugged me.
In it I could pretty much make out the girls, all gazing raptly at the spruced-up sultan in the middle of their queer little harem, those same vapid smiles etched on their waxen features. But the fella himself, good ol’ Mr. Dapper, was a blur, his features smeared as if he’d shaken his head wildly the second I’d snapped the picture. That didn’t track with anything I’d seen of the fella—seemed to me he’d hardly batted an eyelash the whole night, except when he’d bent to one of the ladies to indulge in a long hungry kiss. I frowned at the picture, at the various others dangling from the drying line. So many meaningless smudges of light in pools of dark, all of it painted blood-red by the darkroom light. For no good reason I thought again of that endlessly thumping music, and the stale stink in the air of that grim gin joint, and my stomach flopped. All at once I wanted to get out of the darkroom almost as much as I’d wanted to get out of that club, pretend I’d never seen those crazy photos, maybe come back in the bright light of day and take them all out and dump them down the incinerator chute. Or better, have Cass do it for me, and never have to look at them—never have to think of them—again.
I closed my eyes and tried to rub the exhaustion out of them while I breathed slow and deep. The fumes from the chemicals got inside my head, made my thoughts swim. I wanted a breath of fresh air more than anything in the world, but I knew damn well if I walked out of that darkroom I wouldn’t walk back in unless it was with a book of matches. So instead I opened my eyes and shoved a negative into the enlarger and set the focus and exposed it.
It was the same one I’d just done, I thought, but as I watched the image come together out of the chemical bath, it looked like the damn thing had changed. Now the girls’ faces blurred into uselessness, seemed almost to melt toward Mr. Dapper in the center of the shot. This time, it was him I could almost make out, face turned about one-quarter profile toward one of the indistinguishable girls. And something else that got those short hairs on the back of my neck prickling all over again, something I thought I saw but couldn’t trust my tired eyes to tell me truthfully. There was a kind of ripple to the image I couldn’t account for—bad chemicals? bad light?—but I was pretty sure I could make something out of this shot. I reset the enlarger to its highest magnification and arranged everything how I wanted, then printed another copy, and another.
It took me four tries, but I finally managed to get the damn thing sharp enough to use, and I could clearly make out the detail I thought I’d seen in the regular-sized print: Mr. Dapper’s face was turned toward the ladies on his left, but his eyes looked straight into the camera. His gaze was raw hatred carved in obsidian.
All a bunch of coincidence, I knew. There was no way he’d seen me, or my little spy camera, I’d happened to catch him as his eyes shifted. But the illusion was damned convincing—that icy stare might have been meant just for me. The glow of the safety light made the whites of his eyes look like he’d burst some blood vessels, like a prizefighter I’d once seen after an especially brutal bout, and I couldn’t shake the feeling they were watching me, as if he could see right through that picture and into my skull.
Who the hell was this man, and why was my Miss Gray mixed up with him?
I snapped the photo up on the line to dry and got the hell out of the darkroom.
In the outer office I stopped a minute, lingering over Cass’s desk, not sure why I was doing it. Her workspace was immaculate, as always—everything lined up just so, pens standing at attention in their brass fixtures, tidily-typed invoices stacked up neat as could be in her OUT basket. That one picture standing alone at the corner, her mother all silver hair and pearls, a subtle hint of a smile on her lips. I wondered for a minute what Cass was doing right then. Maybe just putting a coffee pot on the stove, fixing herself some breakfast before getting ready to come in to work. I tried to picture her place—something small, given what I could afford to pay her, but cozy, and every bit as shipshape as her desk, chintz curtains and lace doilies on the tables. It was funny—all the time we’d worked together, I couldn’t think of a single time I’d ever seen her outside the office. That one lone framed picture could’ve belonged to anyone—or no one.
Still, some part of me couldn’t help asking those questions I’d never bothered to ask before. Who was Cass O’Clare, after she left suite number five-thirteen in the Cain Building? Did she have a fella? Did she even want one? And—why would I find myself asking now, after all this time? I kept seeing her expression when she told me there was something different about this case, kept recalling the hint of a shadow in those always-bright eyes, a tiny suggestion of what I’d seen in the mysterious Miss Gray’s eyes. Something about it …
I sighed, raked a hand through my hair. It was too damn early and I’d had enough of shadows. I thought about the wrinkled sheets on my shut-up Murphy bed, twenty blocks uptown. If I could catch a cab at this hour, I could get home in time to catch half an hour’s sleep before I had to come back and open the office for the day.
Then I remembered the fifth of bourbon stashed away in my bottom desk drawer. A minute later I was slumped in the hard wooden chair behind my desk with the bottle in my hand and a fire burning its way down my throat to my gut. For a while after that I didn’t think about funny pictures or too-dark bars or Miss Gray or Cass O’Clare or much of anything else.