Somewhere in that opiate sleep, I found dreams. Maybe there was one, maybe several washed together, swimming in and out of one another. I can’t recall any of it clearly anymore. I vaguely remember walking empty, rain-slicked streets, the air ripe with decay. Seeing myself from somewhere outside my own eyes, in a dark place, but not alone. My mystery lady rises from a shadow; she wears a smile that casts no light in her haunted eyes, a smile that chills me. But when she comes to kiss me, I respond in kind. Of course I do. There’s a chill to her embrace that makes me try to squirm away, but I can’t, don’t really want to after all. I feel eyes on us, but can’t see who’s watching, and don’t care. Let them watch, let them ogle, if it gives them even a tiny taste of what I’m feeling, that crazy dark thrill …
I drifted out of my haze, my head bobbing like a balloon on a long string above my neck. Cass and the Doc had deposited me on the battered sofa that Cass always urged me to replace because it was an eyesore and didn’t do much by way of impressing clients. I told her my clientele wasn’t typically all that concerned with furnishings and the thing did just fine thanks. It was lumpy as hell but in the lingering cocoon of the morphine it felt great. I silently thanked a God I didn’t much believe in for Doc’s tendency to play a little loose with the pharmaceuticals. I supposed the men he usually patched up didn’t have many scruples when it came to those kinds of things. I wondered how many of his “patients” got this kind of treatment just by asking for it, probably with cash.
Then something broke the surface of the murky waters that filled the back of my brain, and I sat up and nearly flopped onto the floor. I knew why Miss Gray’s behavior the other night had looked so maddeningly familiar—my profession had taken me into enough opium dens and drug alleys to recognize a junkie who needed a fix.
I rubbed my eyes, my face tingling wherever my hands touched, and tried to piece it all together—thoughts and face both. My nameless client didn’t strike me as a user—not that pricey clothes and nice manners meant anything there; rich folks get hooked the same as anyone else, just on more expensive junk. Still, something in those eyes made it hard for me to think of her as the type. But I couldn’t ignore the evidence my own eyes had already found—the pale skin, the strange way she’d acted, the dubious company she kept in bad parts of town. I thought maybe I’d stumbled across an answer to at least a few of the questions that had dragged me into all of this.
As it turns out, I was a lot more wrong than right—and wrong in ways I could never have dreamed, not in a year of nightmares.
“Welcome back to the world.”
Cass’s voice swam to me through the lingering mist of blunt force and swirling morphine.
“Thanks.”
“How you feelin’?”
“Not,” I said. “Not much, anyway. Thanks to Doc.”
“I don’t like that man, Frank. I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him, which ain’t too far if you haven’t guessed.”
“Me either, but I know he won’t get the cops involved in any of this. That’s what matters for now.”
Cass sighed with unmistakable reproof. She wanted to say again how she’d warned me this case would be trouble, and remind me what a thick-headed fool I was, not getting the cops in on this, but she was nice enough to let it go.
“Frank, I been wonderin’ … What were you doing here so late, anyhow?”
I hadn’t thought about that much since that truck had hit me last night, but now I saw those tattered pictures again, and the details I’d managed to salvage before it all went bad—the evidence that proved the midnight insight that had dragged me here in the first place. There had been that shadow on her ring finger, for one thing. Not enough detail for me to say for certain, but I would’ve been willing to bet good cash it was that strange ring with the red vein running through it. But that intrigued me a lot less than the main attraction—the trend I caught running through the images that had come out at all. My client hoisting a wine glass in the one clear picture, taking a drag on a long cigarette in one of the blurred shots—always with her left hand. I’d watched her in my office, at the hotel, watched her take my card, watched her sip her tea and handle the photo of Radamanthus, and do it all with her right hand. I supposed she might be ambidextrous, but that didn’t really wash either, since I’d only seen her use one hand at a time. I wondered a minute if maybe I’d flipped the negatives when I printed them … but no, I remembered seeing the other fella, the gaunt lackey Hally’d called Ferryman, sitting on the same side of things in the picture as he had been in the club. The photos had been all right. It was my client who was all wrong.
I considered sharing some of this with Cass—I generally found it to be good policy to keep her informed—but dismissed the thought without asking myself why.
“Just catching up on business,” I told her. Not a lie, exactly, just a good deal less than what she deserved of the truth.
She sighed again, to say she wasn’t happy with me playing coy—but I also sensed something else in that sound, something that made me pick up my head a bit.
“Something on your mind, Cass?”
“Well …” She hesitated, and I managed to open my eyes and give her what I hoped was a hard-edged glare. “It’ll wait until you’re feelin’ a bit better.”
“I think I can handle it now.”
“If you say so,” she said. “This was in the evenin’ paper. I just saw it a few minutes ago, while you were still out.”
I winced, stared at the window. Sure enough, it was evening already, and swiftly darkening toward night—the Hotel Moira sign was flashing its crimson smile again, like a cheerful warning. Cass handed me a copy of the news, folded open to the story she meant.
Small Time Crook Murdered
the headline said.
I shook my head, knowing well enough what was next.
Police went to Melinoe Street late last night responding to a call reporting a murder. There they discovered the body of Harold “Hally” Thersis, obviously the victim of foul play …
The story didn’t say what “obviously the victim of foul play” meant, but it did go on to mention that Hally had been associated with any number of disreputable people and businesses in his younger days, and said the cops hadn’t picked up on any suspects yet. I figured Hally’s past being what it was, the police wouldn’t exactly be working overtime to nab whoever’d put him on the slab.
The story, I saw, had been interred on page sixteen. Buried in obscurity just as Hally was likely to be. Somehow I doubted he’d mind.
I dropped the paper on the sofa beside me and watched the red neon splash across the office windows and vanish, splash and vanish. It was almost hypnotic.
So: I was a mess, and Hally had finished up dead. A sudden queasiness went through me as I put the pieces together and asked a question I’d never know the answer to but had to ponder anyway: had he given me up before his killer started pounding on him, or did the goon beat my name out of him before finishing him off? I hoped for Hally’s sake he’d coughed up my name at the first hint of trouble, and that things had proceeded quickly from there. That the end had at least been quick.
I’d taken Hally’s paranoia for the jitters of an old man with a rough past, but clearly I had to rethink that now, had to consider what I was tangling with in this Tartarus Syndicate, and this Mr. Menace.
All I know is his name makes some pretty mean fellas break out in a cold sweat, Hally’d told me. And within a few hours, he was dead and I was in danger of following him to the morgue.
It made me wonder why they hadn’t killed me, too. But I suspected I knew. After all, it was one thing to rub out a nobody like Hally who’d lived his whole life on the wrong side of the law and didn’t have a real friend in the world. But a fella like me … I may walk that line sometimes, maybe I even tripped over it once or twice, but I’m a mostly-respectable businessman in a decent part of town, and if I wound up “the victim of foul play” the way Hally had, the police might take it a bit more seriously. I felt pretty confident Cass would make sure they did. The Tartarus Syndicate could take Hally out without calling any real attention to themselves, but that wouldn’t be quite as easy with me. Better just to clean me out of evidence and scare me off if they could. And I had to say—at that minute, sitting there thinking of poor Hally and of that blade sweeping down toward my eye, I was plenty scared. Ready to throw in the towel kind of scared. Miss Gray fascinated me, and I felt for her, a bit too deeply. And she paid well, thanks. But none of those things matter to a fella who gets what Hally got.
Still, if they could get to Hally that quick, and end him so fast, what might they do to Miss Gray? I was a sap and I knew it, but the thought of anyone marring those perfect features in even the slightest fashion made me furious enough to punch a bull between the eyes.
Taking a few long, deep breaths to steady myself, I perused the article again, thinking mostly about what it didn’t say. Hally’s remains had been found on the West Side, just beyond the river. That put the whole thing in the one-three precinct.
I tried to stand, but my legs weren’t having any of it. They felt like two sausage-casings stuffed with clay. My whole body felt as dull and heavy as a damp sandbag.
“Dial a number for me, will you, Cass?”
“Yeah, of course. What number?”
It took me a minute to dredge it up from the murk of my brain, but at last I rattled off a string of digits that sounded about right. Cass handed me the receiver and I stuck it up against an ear that was numb as a clump of cauliflower. The phone felt like about twenty pounds of cold dead weight in my hand. It rang twice at the other end before someone snatched it up. A voice told me I’d reached the Homicide Division. I told the voice my name was Ernest and I wanted to talk to Sergeant Angelo. A minute later, Angelo’s gravel-rough baritone sounded in my ear.
“What’s the story, Ernie?” Ernest was the name I used when I didn’t want to advertise the fact I was plucking fruit from Angelo’s grapevine. Sometime back I’d done him a couple of big favors and he still owed me a few small ones.
“I hoped you could tell me,” I said. “You see the little item on page sixteen, about our old friend Hally Thersis? I figured your boys caught that one.”
“Yup,” Angelo agreed in a dead-flat voice.
“So what’s the dirt, Angelo?”
“You have a personal interest in this one?”
“You could say. I need to know the stuff that didn’t make the papers.”
“Nan’s,” Angelo said. “Three hours.”
“Sure,” I said, and Angelo, never a man to mince words, hung up.