The face that glowered at me from Cass’s compact mirror a few minutes later looked like something from a mad scientist movie, one where the crazy fella in the lab coat has sewn a monster together from spare parts. The ache had started gnawing again as Doc’s magic shot wore off, but I could live with it. Not that I had much choice in the matter.
“You sure you’re up to this, Frank? Jeez, that fella practically killed you.”
“I’m going to Nan’s, Cass, not the Black Hole of Calcutta.”
“In your shape, it’s about the same thing. Anyway, you don’t exactly look too good.”
“I’d noticed.”
“Don’t know why that cop friend of yours can’t come to the office,” Cass said, taking her compact back and snapping it closed.
“We try not to advertise our association,” I said. “Some cop on the beat sees him come into this building, maybe somebody catches on. No cop with any self-respect would show his face in Nan’s, so it’s the perfect rendezvous.”
Cass sighed, that old familiar sound. “I oughtta know better than to try to talk any sense into you.”
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging on my coat and pushing my hat down to shadow my face, “you oughtta.”
I left.
The rain coming down on the twilight streets was that sullen gray kind that gathers from the mist and falls in slow motion, the kind that can hang there over the asphalt for days. I tugged my collar up and tipped my hat forward and plunged in, the drizzle embracing me coldly. My .38, all cozied up in my shoulder holster, nudged me in the ribs with every step. I rarely carried it unless I knew I was walking into a dicey situation—but lately my entire situation seemed fairly dicey.
Even as I walked those couple of blocks to the back-alley diner called Nan’s, I couldn’t help wondering just what I was really going after. What did it matter how Hally Thersis had died, anyway? Dead was dead whether you got shot or knifed, and I couldn’t say I’d ever had any personal feelings for the man. Still, something itched at me, some instinct that whispered that Hally’s death—and especially the stuff that hadn’t shown up in black and white—was another big piece in this whole twisted puzzle. So I followed that instinct down Cora Street and around the corner into Nan’s.
The place smelled of grease and cigarette smoke, and if the tiled floor and walls had ever been white, their current jaundice-yellow made it hard to believe. Angelo perched vulture-like on a stool at the counter, his beige coat bunched up under him in a lazy clump of wrinkles. A cup of coffee sat steaming on the yellowed countertop in front of him, but he hadn’t touched it. No wonder—Nan’s had the worst coffee in town.
Angelo raised an eyebrow at me as I sat down beside him and ordered the obligatory cup myself. The stubble-faced man behind the counter offered me something that was either a smile or a sneer and tipped a cupful of black liquid into a dirty cup.
“You’ve looked better,” Angelo offered.
“Nice of you to notice,” I answered. “But we’re here to talk about our late lamented friend.”
“Real piece of work, that fella,” Angelo said.
“Mmm. So what’s the scoop, Angelo? What happened that the papers aren’t saying?”
“Messy business,” Angelo said, dumping cream into his coffee and letting it hang there like a cloud, not bothering to stir it. “Some poor chambermaid found him in a room at a by-the-hour hotel on Melinoe Street.”
I knew the area—west side, on the wrong side of the river. Same as Club Erebus. “Any record who rented the room?”
“According to the clerk, nobody did. He claims the room should’ve been empty.”
I nodded. It all sounded entirely too much like the club nobody owned.
Angelo lit up a cigarette, took a long drag then puffed gray smoke into the greasy air, a thick-bodied dragon with a leather hide and a receding hairline.
“Poor girl who found him got herself quite a shock. Old Hally was sliced up good. Looks like they pounded on him to tenderize him some, then started in with … whatever they used. Something nasty-sharp.”
The words hit me like a body blow. I could almost hear Hally talking about Mr. Menace’s hired muscle. He likes ’em to use knives, Hally’d said. Likes to make his enemies bleed.
“Far as we can tell, they started with his wrists,” Angelo went on, the same way he might talk about the weather. “Opened ’em nice and wide.” He put his right pointer finger to his wrist and drew lines back and forth across it, in a long shark-tooth zigzag. “Nothing neat and tidy. Then they opened his throat. Looks like ol’ Hally put up a fight. Blood everywhere. Except …”
“Except?”
“The coroner says not enough of it. Blood at the scene, blood in the body … all comes up damn near two pints short.”
“So he bled someplace else,” I said. “They started him somewhere and finished him off in the room.”
Angelo sighed out more smoke, shook his head in the cloud.
“Doesn’t play that way. No sign that the body was moved, and no trace of blood anywhere but in that room. Can’t see how anyone could’ve dragged him there in that shape and not left some kinda trail, no matter how careful they were being.”
I stared at the food-spattered menu board beyond the counter without especially seeing the words scrawled there in hasty chalk scratches.
“So someone … what? Removed some of the blood from the scene? Why?”
“Yeah,” Angelo agreed, absently tapping his cigarette butt into his still-full coffee cup. The ashes wandered in lazy circles across the surface of the brown liquid.
I sat back and gazed at nothing. My face had started to itch again, but it wasn’t the stitches Doc had put in a few hours back, it was that old scar over my left eye, nagging. I chose to ignore it.
Angelo sat equally silent beside me.
“Any thoughts on what the weapon was?” I asked at last.
“His wounds weren’t all that deep—just deep enough. Something short and sharp. Can’t say beyond that. Maybe the coroner will come up with something more definite.”
The obvious question rose to my tongue, but I chewed on it a minute before asking. I guessed I already knew the answer, but had to be sure.
“Any idea who did this?” I asked. “Or why?”
Angelo took a quick tug on his smoke, spat out an acrid fog.
“Nope. With Hally’s record, could be a hundred fellas for a hundred reasons,” Angelo said. “There was one peculiar thing, though. Seems someone painted a big red circle on the wall over Hally’s body. I imagine you can guess the artist’s pigment of choice.”
“I imagine I can.”
“You have any idea what that’s about?” Angelo asked, tapping more ash into his coffee.
I could clearly picture the rings with the strangely fluid red bands, the crimson circle on the secret door at Club Erebus.
“No clue,” I said.
Angelo nodded like that was all he’d expected, and all he’d wanted. He shrugged. “Don’t suppose we’ll ever crack this one.” Meaning the police precinct had written Harold “Hally” Thersis off already, foul play notwithstanding. They’d poke around enough to seem like they were doing their job, then let the matter drop so they could spend their time on more important matters—on this side of the river.
I felt my broken lips perk up in some aching version of a low-wattage smile. I couldn’t help it. Fact was, I had a better idea who’d killed Hally Thersis than the cops, and I was keeping it tucked away under my felt fedora, even if the evidence was written all over my face—or carved there, as the case might be.
My smile turned into a frown, which I directed at my own coffee cup.
If I was right, the dotted lines connected me, the photos, the shadowy Tartarus Syndicate, and Hally Thersis. In one night, Hally had been slaughtered, I’d been attacked, and the photos had been destroyed—all within a few hours after I’d pried the names Radamanthus and Menace from Hally’s lips. Fast work—scary-fast. This Mr. Menace character must’ve had ears all over town to have gotten word of what I’d been up to as quick as he had, and muscle enough to flex at a moment’s notice.
I’d wandered too deep into the dark, brushed up against powers big enough to swallow me whole. Cass had been right from the start.
It was time I got out of this game.
I dropped a fistful of change on the yellow, peeling-at-the-edges Formica counter.
“It’s on me,” I told Angelo, and slipped out into that sullen rain.