Ah, Frank. Again?”
I struggled to open my eyes to that voice, but my eyelids were pasted shut. I rubbed at them with fingertips on hands that weighed ten pounds each and tried again. They went up slowly, in fits and starts. The light falling in through the slats in the blinds came at a sharper angle now, muted behind a gauzy gray layer of clouds, but it still pricked at my vision for a second or two.
Cass stood just inside the door marked Private, shaking her head at me and frowning at the empty bottle at my elbow.
“I had a feeling I was gonna findya here,” she said, “I really did. You gotta stop treating yourself that way. You aren’t a sponge, you know. Now here, put this on,” she said, holding up a hanger with a freshly-pressed shirt on it. “Make yourself look professional.”
“You keep that handy, do you?” I said, taking the shirt.
“Someone’s gotta look out for you,” she said, stepping out and closing the door so I could change, as if catching a glimpse of me in my undershirt might cause a scandal. Once I put my coat and tie back on, I’d at least be presentable. Well, apart from the bags I could feel under my eyes, and the five o’clock shadow.
“Do we have any clients today?” I asked, poking my head out into reception area while I straightened my tie.
Cass pulled a clipboard out of a drawer and gave a quick glance at the single page it held. She gave a sour little frown she clearly didn’t want me to see.
“Only Miss Gray this morning. If she shows.”
“Mm,” I grunted. “Better give the hotel a call, see if she ever checked in. Anyone else?”
“A coupl’a fellas after lunch—salesmen, I think.”
“Cancel ’em,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “I don’t wanna see anyone today who isn’t payin’ for my time.”
Cass gave a little sigh. “Yeah, I bet.”
I answered her sigh with a glare that she ignored by busying herself straightening the pencils in her pencil cup. Smiling in spite of myself, I closed the office door and settled back into my chair.
I sat back a minute, letting my fingers wander over the eighty-eight keys I sometimes imagined running along my desk, plinking out a few measures of “Aria da capo” from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I rarely got to play a legitimate piano, and music was something I pretty much kept to myself. But even letting my fingers wander through the motions tended to help me think. I suppose a lot of people listen to music for pretty much the same reason.
My fingers strolled over invisible keys; my mind drifted free. I’m not sure if my eyes slipped closed or not.
All of last night wafted through my thoughts again, like a dream, its substance unraveling under scrutiny. The mysterious Miss Gray, the west-side dive with its half-baked efforts at opulence, the music that made my skull ache, the pallid strangers inhabiting the smoke-fogged chambers. The fella staring out of the picture at me, Mr. Dapper, sultan of that cockeyed harem. Who the hell was he? I got the sense he mattered, or some people thought he did, anyway. Some instinct tugging at my gut insisted this fella was in the middle of everything, that when I figured him out, the rest of the pieces would snap into place pronto.
I hefted myself out of the chair, went into the darkroom, plucked the three good prints off the line, and slipped back out into my office. I dropped the things on my desk with a twinge of revulsion, then sat down and forced myself to study them.
If I’d expected the close up to look less unsettling in the flat light of the overcast morning, I was disappointed. Mr. Dapper’s eyes still seemed to pierce the glossy surface of the photo and dare me to meet his gaze. If I’d been a smoking man, I would’ve put those paper eyes out with a nice hot cigarette, for sheer spite. The scar on my brow itched something fierce.
I dropped the picture again, pushed the stack aside and sat back, gazing out through the blinds at nothing in particular. Outside, the mist had coalesced into something a shade thicker, and a somber rain had begun to fall.
The buzz of the intercom shocked me out of my brown study.
I sat up and tapped the respond key. “What’s the word, Cass?”
“I just got off the phone with the day manager at the Chandler. Miss Gray never showed at the hotel. You want me to check around with the cops?”
I thought about the flicker of fear in Miss Gray’s eyes when I’d suggested going to the police. Made me wonder about a few things. Might be calling in the boys in blue wasn’t such a bad idea at that; I could at least find out if there was a missing persons report matching my client’s description.
Even so, I hesitated. I had this strange and powerful feeling in my gut that if I opened the door to the cops, I’d have a mighty hard time shoving it closed again—at least not before something bad slipped through. At best, police came with all sorts of rules and protocols and paperwork. I’d left all of that behind for a reason.
And I couldn’t quite bring myself to betray those dark, haunted eyes.
“Uh, hold off on that, willya, Cass?”
I could hear the doubt in her voice, even over the coughing static of the intercom. “Sure thing, Frank. If that’s what you want.”
I let that go, too.
Then another thought occurred to me. “There is something else you can do for me,” I told Cass. “Get on the phone with the City Register’s office and see if you can track down who owns the buildings on Cocytus Street between Canal and Sunset?”
“Sure thing, Frank.”
Cass clicked off and I tipped back in my chair, tugging at my chin like maybe I could massage a few useful thoughts out of it somehow. I wanted to chase down the name of the fella in the picture. More than a few of the city’s lowlifes owed me favors, and a couple seemed the types who might recognize Mr. Dapper if they got a look.
But that would have to wait. For the moment, I didn’t want to leave the office, in case Miss Gray decided to put in an appearance. Some part of me knew it was foolishness—hell, I wouldn’t have bet even money I’d ever see her again—but the mere possibility of digging a little deeper into the mystery of her, of looking into those gorgeous, haunted eyes again, kept me rooted to my chair. Even that empty rumble in my stomach couldn’t move me just then.
I pulled the rest of the pictures out of the darkroom and pretended to study them, even though they were, every last one of them, useless, all the faces blurred or running like wet ink, unrecognizable. But even those distorted inkblot images had a creepy quality to them that made me squirm, as though they were somehow obscene, visions snatched from a twisted mind. It was crazy, sure, but I felt it all the same. After a few minutes I stuffed them all in my desk drawer and tried to pretend I’d never looked at them. I wouldn’t even let myself think how different those two prints were from what I’d thought was the same negative had turned out, or what the hell it might mean. Then I went to shuffling around some of my own paperwork I’d been putting off, and made a couple of basically pointless phone calls to some city desk and crime beat editors I knew in case anything useful had slipped past me in the papers lately. There’d been nothing.
Mostly, I tapped out soundless symphonies on my desktop, and waited.
It turned into a wasted day, but I was more anxious than angry.
I hadn’t had a trace of the erstwhile Miss Gray, and no new clients had wandered in, either. Even Cass’s hunt for the owner of Club Erebus had led to nothing but dead-ends—somehow no one held the deed, no one paid the taxes, no one even paid to keep the lights on. It was about enough to make me wonder if I’d dreamed up the whole crazy night. But the photos in my desk and the negatives in the darkroom made a pretty convincing argument otherwise.
The sun had just settled behind the jagged line of buildings to the west when I tapped the intercom and told Cass to take off.
“But—it ain’t closin’ time yet,” she said. “Still forty minutes—”
“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t think we’re getting anyone else in here today. You go on home.” For a minute I found myself wondering again what Cass did, away from the office. I couldn’t imagine it.
“If you say so,” she said, but didn’t click off. After a static-filled pause, she went on, “You ain’t gonna sleep in the office again, are you, Frank?”
“Nope,” I promised. “All outta hooch here anyhow. Think I’ll probably call it an early night myself.”
“I hope so.” She sounded relieved, but also maybe a little dubious. I’m not sure myself if I knew I was lying to her when I said it, but I think she guessed. Still, she went on, “And make sure you eat a real dinner. You gotta take better care of yourself, you know that? I ain’t always gonna be around to remind you.”
“You’re a first-class gal, Cass,” I told her. “Go home.”
“G’night, Frank.”
She clicked off.
I slouched in my chair and watched that sign on the flophouse across the way wink on and off while I listened to Cass moving around in the outer office, her chair rolling back on the rough hardwood floor, footsteps and noises I couldn’t place, then finally the front door—the one with Orpheus Investigation Agency painted in neat white letters across the frosted glass—rattling shut.
I sat back and waited some more.
I’d started giving serious thought to getting a quick bite somewhere, or maybe just picking up a bottle of bourbon and heading home, when the phone in the outer office rang, shrill as a fire alarm. I stepped into the outer office and plucked the handset out of its cradle.
“Orpheus Investigations.”
“Miss O’Clare?” asked the befuddled voice on the other end, obviously clued in to the fact he wasn’t talking to my secretary.
“This is Mister Orpheus, what can I do for you?”
“Uh, well, Mister Orpheus,” the fella on the other end of the line said, “this is Arthur Geiger, the day manager at the Chandler Hotel. Miss O’Clare said to call if a, uh, certain lady came to check in here.”
I clutched the phone a little extra-tight.
“Yeah? Well?”
“She just came to the desk, sir. She seemed, uh, a little … well, confused, if I may say so.”
“She still there?”
“Uh …” I could almost hear him craning over the desk to scout the lobby for her, “just on her way out, I think.”
“Well don’t let her go. Keep her right there—I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
He started to say he’d do what he could, but I hung up before he could finish, and was still tugging my coat on as I slipped out the door.