When I came back to myself sometime later, I stood alone in the middle of the office, as out of place there as an igloo in the Sahara. The clouds had broken wide open sometime while I drifted in the dark, and now the rain fell hard and heavy, washing over the windows in thick dirty beads. The red light splashing from the Hotel Moira sign turned the rain into runners of bright blood.
It wasn’t like waking up. I didn’t feel anything like a fella who’s been asleep, groggy and somewhat disheveled. My head was as clear as a good autumn day—even the last of the bourbon haze had burned away. I’d just gotten … lost somewhere. Lost in Miss Gray’s strange embrace, her insatiable kisses. I could still taste her on my lips, a bitter memory with a sharp edge to it, but not unpleasant. Not in the least.
I couldn’t help patting myself down, feeling for my wallet, my latchkey, the other random detritus a man gathers in his pockets … my Harpe .38. Everything I could think of was where it should’ve been, but that didn’t chase away my feeling that I was missing something, that my client had stolen something small but important from me before she’d slipped away into the night.
I wandered to the window and stared through the bead curtain of neon-stained rain as if I might catch a glimpse of her drifting away down the sidewalk five stories below. I saw cars prowling the asphalt like huge steel beetles, spotted a few pedestrians hurrying along under the batwing silhouettes of businesslike umbrellas. No trace of my client, of course. I had a good enough idea where she’d gone—back to that dark neighborhood beyond the river, back to Club Erebus and whatever waited beyond the door with the red circle painted on it. But there was no point in trying to follow. Even if I was right, and even if I went with enough green in my pocket to grease the hinges on a few dozen doors, I’d never get past that last one. And in my current state, I didn’t much feel like trying. Seemed like a good idea not to show my face—or whatever was left of it—around that part of town right now.
The itch and the aches had calmed down a bit, enough that I could ignore them without working at it too much, so I dropped into my desk chair and let my mind idle a bit.
What exactly was I dealing with in this Mr. Menace character? The mere mention of the name seemed to strike notes of terror in people, and maybe not without reason. I wouldn’t soon forget the shadow of fear that had darkened Hally’s face when I’d coaxed the name out of him; the bright panic in Miss Gray’s eyes when I’d said it to her. I also considered the fact that within hours of my getting that name from Hally, he was dead—slaughtered, if you wanted to be forthright about it—and I was wearing a roadmap of scars on my face. Whoever this smartly-named Mr. Menace was, he had good ears, and long arms.
But who the hell was he? Boss of the so-called Tartarus Syndicate, Hally’d said—thugs, pimps and racketeers of the West Side, I figured, the typical lowlifes from the wrong end of the Narrows Bridge. So how come I’d never heard of him, or them? Not that I knew every mobster in town, but I’d been in the business long enough to know most of the bigwigs by reputation, at least. And Miss Gray’s description was basically worthless. Empty black eyes. Could be anybody, or nobody. Not much chance I’d recognize the fella if I bumped into him on the street.
All at once, despite everything—despite the pain in my face, and the fear knotted tight in my gut, and the futility of the idea—I wanted to go after her. I wanted to find her and drag her out of whatever snake pit she was in right now. I wanted to rescue her from Radamanthus, from Menace. From herself. Hell, I didn’t just want it—I ached for it, like I hadn’t ached for anything in a good long time. That needle in my chest went a lot deeper than all the ones in my face. It didn’t even matter what she’d taken from me, I wasn’t looking to get anything back. Actually, I wanted to give her more. Any excuse for one more taste of those red-as-wine lips. It didn’t make any sense and I knew it, but that didn’t make the need any less real. I wanted to be near her and keep her safe, and there wasn’t anything else to it.
But that dark labyrinth of the West End stretched out between us, and the black door. And there was whoever had attacked me, and whoever had murdered Hally. Plenty to make a fella think twice.
I frowned out at the night, then turned my back on it.
What I saw when I looked back into my office was that bottle sitting three-quarters empty in the dead-center of the green blotter on my desk. I wanted it, wanted to rinse my mind clean with booze. Maybe I could wash away that gnawing desire to chase after Miss Gray. The amber liquid called to me in a sweet, subtle voice, but it wasn’t loud enough to blot out the pangs tempting me into a fruitless search of the mean streets beyond the canal.
But I thought I knew what could muffle that siren song, at least for a few minutes. Long enough to unfog my sopped-in mind and allow me the luxury of some clear thinking. I left the bottle to itself and headed out into the city, in the opposite direction of the West River Narrows Bridge and everything beyond it.
In the gloomy lounge at the Highsmith Hotel there was an old baby grand piano tucked away in a corner most of the regulars had forgotten about. No doubt some slinky girl in a fringe-covered dress had perched on its black enamel top, singing torch songs to indifferent crowds back when the Highsmith had been a classier place, but these days I was pretty sure no one tickled those ivories but the occasional drunken businessman, and me.
I walked past Johnny O, the bushy-eyebrowed fella who’d been behind the bar there for as long as I’d been coming in. I gave him the customary nod, he shot me a not-so-customary frown.
Whathahell happened t’ yer face? that look asked.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the backbar mirror and wished I hadn’t. All that wavery blue-green light playing up from the four-dozen bottles ranged along the shelf made the whole bar look like it was under water. It cast the scars and swelling and darkening bruises in a sickly glow, making them look that much more ghastly.
I gave Johnny O a look back, one that I hoped said, Don’t ask, pal.
Guess it got the point across because Johnny O shrugged and went back to wiping down highball glasses with a white towel. He didn’t bother asking what I wanted because he already knew.
I settled onto the bench in that shunned corner and put my fingers to the ivories. The pseudo-lacquer finish had chipped and peeled in places, the polish was permanently ringed with the ghost circles of beer mugs past, and the D above middle C was sour as spoiled milk, but in a joint like this nobody much cared. The thing sounded pretty good when I started coaxing Mozart’s Piano Sonata number eleven out of it. A bit highbrow for the Highsmith, sure, but neither of the rumpled suits slouched against the brass rail of the bar even looked my way. Long as their glasses magically filled up each time they emptied them, those fellas didn’t have a thing to say.
Sometime while I played, Johnny O left a glass of soda water with a twist of lime on the piano in front of me. It was a deal we had. I came to the Highsmith when I wanted not to drink. It was just as well—the hooch here was cheap, real rotgut stuff, the dregs of the dying months of the eighteenth amendment.
I wandered through the sonata, letting the notes waft through me, stilling all the things moving around in my skull. The itching around my left eye faded, and so did the hurt in the rest of my head. Even that ache of longing after the missing Miss Gray subsided, like a jagged rock slipping quietly under the surface of an incoming tide. Another soda and lime came along and I downed it to the strains of Bach’s “Invention no. 4 in D Minor,” unhurried, letting the music live at its own pace.
Somewhere inside the subtle complexities of the Bach piece, it occurred to me that looking for Miss Gray tonight was every bit as pointless as I’d told myself—but that hardly meant I couldn’t find her. If my little inspiration played out, I could maybe track her down in a much more real, much more important way. And wasn’t that exactly what she’d hired me to do? If I could put a name to that captivating face, it might be worth more than a hundred nights spent wandering the bleak back alleys of the West Side. And for all I’d found out so far—things someone obviously wasn’t happy I knew—I couldn’t see how it took me any nearer to closing the case. I’d resisted poking my nose into any of the missing persons noise going on around the police precincts in town because Miss Gray had all but sworn me to keep this away from the cops, and for some crazy reason I trusted her instinct there. Still, other options weren’t exactly dropping at my feet.
But then I should have spent less time looking at my feet and more time looking at Cass’s desk. A whole stack of possible leads landed there every morning, and every evening an hour before closing. The same package that had brought along that tidbit about good old Small Time Crook Hally Thersis. Not that there’d been anything in the newspapers lately—if there had been, from the news to the crossword puzzle, Cass would’ve spotted it. She hadn’t, so it hadn’t been there.
But what if we looked back a few weeks, or months? My Miss Gray was an uptown lady, the moneyed type, probably from a line of moneyed types. If you wanted to find someone like that in the paper, you skipped the news and browsed the society pages. If Miss Gray was what I figured, she’d be in there somewhere—her face in a snapshot from some charity gala or self-congratulation shindig, or maybe among the debutantes at a not-too-long-ago cotillion ball. There were three major papers in town, all of them eager to splash the faces of the rich and well-groomed in as much ink as they could spare. And all three archived their old issues going back years. It was a long shot—a helluva long shot, which was maybe why I hadn’t come up with it already. But sitting there coaxing that elegant music out of those yellowed keys, it was the best I could come up with.
Another notion crossed my mind then, a much darker notion.
Maybe I ought to check the obituaries.
But that was foolishness. Whatever she might have said about Menace murdering her—and however much I might have somehow believed her—she pretty clearly still hadn’t ended up in a morgue somewhere. And in any case, whose obit would I look for?
I shut the lid on the black-and-whites, dropped enough cash on the bar to cover the bubbly water and still leave Johnny O smiling, and headed home.
Sleep that night came in broken-up pieces shot through with vividly convoluted dreams of fiery hair and crimson lips and dark, haunted eyes.