I probably should have expected what happened next.
Closing time had slipped past thirty-odd minutes ago but the office lights shone through the frosted glass and the door wasn’t locked.
I opened it slowly, just in case my late-night visitor had come back and was in the mood to finish me off after all, but didn’t feel too surprised when Cass nodded at me from behind her desk.
“She’s back,” Cass said, pointing to the inner office with a slight nod. “I thought I oughtta stick around until you got here.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe I better stay ’til we’re ready to close.”
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
Cass questioned me with her eyes. I dropped my hat onto the rack by the door and went into my office, giving Cass a look I hoped put her question to rest. A moment later I thought I heard her chair rattle across the floor as she got ready to leave.
My attention fell entirely on the woman seated before my desk.
She wore what I took for expensive silk, dove-gray trimmed with red, red piping on the lapels, red pockets, red buttons, red gauze tied around her wide-brimmed hat. Her skirt rose almost to her elegantly-stockinged knees, the deep V-neck of her fine jacket disclosed a glimpse of a nicely draped silk blouse. My heart thumped a shade too hard in my chest. The erstwhile Miss Gray had impressed me with her loveliness before, but something about the figure she cut just sitting there made her seem an entirely new person, more beautiful than any woman I’d ever set eyes on.
That old familiar plea glimmered in her dark eyes, along with what I took to be a hint of alarm at the sight of me.
“Glad to see you found your way back,” I said, dropping into my chair, ignoring the crawling pains in my face, and that clawing itch.
“You’re hurt,” she said, sounding more perplexed than worried, much to my chagrin.
“It looks worse than it is,” I said. “You do remember who I am?”
“Yes,” she said, softly, her ripe red lips creasing into a vague frown. “I remember … coming here … I hired you to find out who I am.”
“Anything else?”
“I remember you took care of me.” She paused, let out a sigh that defined the word forlorn. “I remember knowing I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
I tried to ignore the ache in my chest, too.
“I was hoping for something a bit more useful,” I told her, trying to keep my voice flat, businesslike. “Your name would’ve been good.”
“If I could remember that, I wouldn’t be here.”
That stung a little, too, but all I said was, “At this point, I’d take it anyway.”
She studied my battered mug, and that frown deepened.
“Does that have anything to do with me?”
“I don’t know.” That, strictly speaking, was true. I had my suspicions, of course—strong, deep, wide suspicions—but I didn’t really know. Nothing that would’ve stood up in court, to be sure … though I had the feeling that wherever all this ended up, it wouldn’t be in court.
My client fell quiet a moment. I waited, unable to keep from gazing at her porcelain features, so pale and perfect, but cool, distant.
“How much of what I told you last night do you remember?” I prodded.
She looked into her lap and studied her lace-gloved hands. I couldn’t help wondering if she still wore that peculiar ring I’d spotted in the photos, but somehow I doubted it.
“Very little …” she answered. “I recall … there was a picture. I don’t remember the face … But … it frightened me. That much I remember perfectly.”
“The picture was of a man called Radamanthus. Does that name mean anything to you?”
I knew it did—I saw her flinch, just a little, when I said it.
“No,” she whispered, but I could see in her eyes that something deeper inside knew better. I thought for a minute of what those other pictures had shown—Miss Gray using her left hand, to drink, to pour … I thought of those anxious twitches and ticks. They’d all vanished now, but I had the feeling they lurked just under that porcelain surface.
I nodded, ready to play my hole card.
“What about someone called Mister Menace?”
The very last of the color in her face vanished, as if her features had been evenly covered under a sudden snow, and her haunted eyes shaded away into utter darkness. She winced without twitching a muscle and went granite-rigid. A breathless gasp fell from her ashen lips—two tiny, bottomless words. I thought they were Oh, God.
I let silence hang over the room for a minute, leaving the two of us alone with the grumbles and honks from the traffic in the streets below.
“I take it you know the name,” I prompted at last.
“Yes.”
I waited.
Miss Gray said nothing at all. She seemed completely lost somewhere deep inside herself, like a child in a dark mirror-maze at some cheap roadside carnival.
“How do you know that name?” I asked.
The question fell away around her like so much dust, not touching her at all.
I leaned over the desk, clutched one of her gloved hands, squeezed as tight as I could while still being gentle. That shook her out of her daze, a bit. Her dark, dark eyes focused on me, but the expression I saw in them reminded me of someone gazing at a half-familiar stranger.
“How do you know that name?” I repeated.
Her answer came in a whisper so low and breathless it might have been a dying gasp.
“He … I think he murdered me.”
An arctic chill gusted through me, but I managed to resist the urge to drop her hand and pull away from her, back to the safe side of my desk.
“You’re looking pretty good for a stiff,” I told her when I could get any words out. “If this mysterious Mister M tried to murder you, I’d have to say he didn’t do a very good job of it.”
My client didn’t respond. She’d gotten lost in that interior maze again. It left me wondering what she saw in those mirrors in her mind.
I pressed on. “Help me out here. It’s one thing to lose track of your own name. It’s another thing for a living woman to tell me she’s been murdered and not explain what she means.”
She shook her head, helpless. “I don’t know. I feel like … like a ghost, trying to remember how I died. I know that doesn’t make any sense.”
In some crazy way it did, but I didn’t care to say as much. No reason to push her any deeper into that darkness.
“I remember pain … Not exactly physical pain, but … something even worse, somehow. Like he was tearing out everything that makes me who I am. Tearing it up roots and all. Tearing apart my future, too. Erasing me. What’s that if not murder?” Again she cast those eyes on me, and again I understood what haunted really meant. “And it’s more than that. I can’t explain it to you, Mister Orpheus. I don’t understand it myself. But it’s true. He murdered me. I may walk and speak, but I’m dead, Mister Orpheus. I died by his hand.”
I hunched my shoulders against another shiver and thought about the hooch in my desk drawer.
“You’re not making much sense,” I told her.
And yet something deep inside that tangle of words seemed to make perfect sense, almost like I’d felt it all along, but hadn’t caught a glimpse of it until now.
“Nothing makes sense anymore,” Miss Gray said, in that same strengthless voice.
I decided to try another route.
“What did he look like, this murderer?” I couldn’t quite bring myself to utter the name again.
“I remember his eyes,” Miss Gray murmured. “They were black—like two empty wells. As if … as if there was nothing human behind them.” She gave a laugh, tiny and brittle and about as cheerful as a funeral dirge. “Every time I talk to you I sound like a madwoman, don’t I?”
“No, you sound like a sane woman caught up in something mad.” My voice was smooth enough I half believed it myself. “You remember anything else?”
She shook her head slightly, hardly enough to alter the shadows falling across her ivory features.
“Only those eyes,” she said.
I let go of her hand and settled back in my chair, ran my fingers through my hair. My eye went on itching, but I refused to scratch. The aches in my face had died away to a low throb, but I couldn’t wait to anesthetize myself with a glass or four of bourbon once my client was out the door. Maybe sooner.
I sat silent a minute, listening to the muttering traffic and the insect-buzzing neon and waiting for everything my client had said to sink in. Only it didn’t sink in, just lay there on my mind, too dense, too dark to absorb. I had the distant sense that if anything, rather than absorbing those thoughts, they might absorb me.
That decided it.
I tugged open the bottom drawer, planted the bourbon bottle in the middle of the green desk blotter like a graveyard monument, then put glasses on either side of it. I always kept a couple of extras around for whatever occasion might arise.
“You sound like a person who could stand a stiff drink. I know I could.”
Miss Gray didn’t answer, but after I tipped two fingers of amber liquid into one glass and pushed it her way, she wrapped her hand around it. I put three fingers in my own glass.
“Skol,” I said, lifting my glass to her, then half-emptying it in one swallow. She raised her own glass, regarded it a moment, watching the golden poison roll around and around, then put it to her red silk lips and took a sip. I’d swear that was all it was—a sip. But when she put the glass down a second later, it was empty.
I refilled hers and freshened my own.
After a couple more glasses for each of us I felt my innards starting to go loose and warm and my brain and mouth relaxing a bit. Even the aches and itches that made up my face seemed far away and unimportant.
Miss Gray rose out of her chair and drifted to the window, as if something in the dark had whispered her name and she’d recognized it instinctively. A moment later she turned, eyes downcast, hands folded in front of her, low, where her jacket buttoned. Even with the booze casting its pleasant yellow fog over my brain, I could see her laced-together fingers squirming, tugging at one another.
“I should go,” she said. Her voice had found a bit of volume and assertiveness, and I didn’t think it’d come out of that bottle growing empty on my desk.
“Oh? You have somewhere to be?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah? Where’s that?”
I said it as fast-but-casual as I could manage, thinking maybe if I caught her unaware, whatever deep-buried defenses in her brain kept the truth hidden might not have time to stop the answer from spilling out. Hoping the booze had lubricated the gears enough.
“I don’t know,” she said, smashing that hope. She moved swiftly toward the door, walking without seeming to walk at all, as if she’d stayed put and the whole world had shifted to accommodate her. “But I have to go.”
I rose, caught her as she tried to slide by, like a father catching his kid in mid-swing on a playground. I had one arm around her waist, cupping her elbow, the other around her back, my hand gripping her shoulder—again, gentle but firm.
“I can’t let you do that,” I told her. Our faces were very close, side-by-side so our profiles must’ve matched up like the ones in those pictures that look like two faces or a vase, depending on how you choose to see them. I could smell a distinct but subtle perfume on her cool silk skin. For an instant I thought I caught a whiff of something else, too, something raw and base but not entirely unpleasant. But probably it was only the smell of the worn wooden floors and the old plaster walls and that endless drizzle creeping in from off the streets. It didn’t matter half as much as those devastating eyes or those bitter-cherry lips. She turned away from me like something had embarrassed her.
I held her there firm and frozen and for a minute neither of us spoke.
“An hour ago I was ready to drop this whole case,” I told her, talking slowly. “Figured I was going someplace I shouldn’t and oughtta get out before I got lost for good. Now you come back and tell me you’re a murder victim and for some crazy reason I believe you. So let me ask you—what do you think I should do now?”
I felt her make a less than half-hearted attempt to move, maybe away from me or maybe toward me. Now she turned those dark, dark eyes on me again, black as polished obsidian. “Please,” she murmured. I wasn’t sure if she meant please let go or please don’t let go, but I held on either way. Even with her stiff and tight in my arms, she felt exactly right there, as if she’d belonged all the time.
So I told myself then, anyway.
“I can’t walk away, can I?” I asked, not really meaning for it to be a question at all. “And it’s not because of any Mister Radamanthus and not because of any Mister Menace. It’s because I couldn’t live with myself if I let you go into the darkness out there all alone.”
Her steady gaze faltered. She closed her eyes and I saw a subtle touch of color rise back into her cheeks for the first time since I’d dropped Mr. Menace’s unlikely name on her.
“You don’t owe me anything,” she said.
“True,” I said, “but at this point I guess I owe myself something. And maybe that’ll work out best for both of us.”
Now at last she moved again, shifted into my arms and nestled her head against my shoulder. I held her close and ran a hand through that long spun-silk hair. Her whole narrow body felt cool against mine, like a fresh sheet on a summer night. Without another word between us, she lifted her lips to mine and kissed me, long and deep, and deeper, deeper than I’d ever been kissed. Any pain left in my battered features faded out of existence entirely.
And somewhere in all that, I faded, too. Darkness slipped in from the shadowed corners of my office and blotted out time. I thought I heard someone say, “I have to go,” but that might be something I only told myself later, trying to fill in the gap with anything halfway meaningful.
After that, the black took over completely.