The central post office huddled at the intersection of Forty-First and Elmore Streets, long and low and dark. All the white globe lights outside and in couldn’t seem to chase away the ashen shadows hanging between the big yellow stone columns, couldn’t fight off the gloom that choked the marble-floored halls. I walked inside, not bothering to take off my hat, and wandered past the long bank of mail boxes, their polished wood faces all scratched and gouged by a couple of decades of poorly-aimed keys. I ignored the crowd shuffling through the labyrinth of velvet ropes and walked straight into the enormous foyer of the main entrance. The crowd looked like the usual sort, housewives and secretaries, a few businessmen and kids running errands for their folks, but I kept my eyes peeled all the same—searching out sixty-foot-tall goons and their shadowy companions, I guess.
There were maybe three dozen faces tacked to the corkboard wall between the big doors, almost all of them grim, angry men scowling at the cameras that’d captured them. Lots of them were doubled up with themselves—front shots and profiles—and quite a few had numbers under their chins. All of them had the word WANTED hanging over their heads in thick black print you just couldn’t argue with.
I was playing another long shot, but maybe not quite as long as the one that had paid off with the newspaper photos. That other face had looked a little familiar, and not only because of the subject’s cheap effort to look like Mister Dapper’s illegitimate son. I thought maybe I’d seen it once or twice before. Here. In my business, it never hurts to take a gander at the wanted board once in a while, just to know who’s blowing in the wind.
It took a minute but then I spotted him, stuck in among all the other crooks and thugs. The fella in the picture stared straight at the camera. He was trying to look mean and dangerous, the way a lot of career criminals do in their first mugshots, but mostly he looked bored. The rap sheet at the bottom said the fella was wanted on charges of assault, larceny, extortion, and conspiracy. Great start to a promising life of crime. And, I thought, the sort of résumé a fella doesn’t get without connections. The kid had half-rate gangster written all over his sheet.
I checked the picture on the board against the one I’d copped from Evelyn Night’s place, but I didn’t really need to. I knew I had my man.
Junior Dapper’s name was Maurice Guilio, a.k.a. Marcus Giles, a.k.a. Gerry Martin.
I jotted the particulars down in my notebook, tucked that and the photo away, and strolled out of the building. I was shaking some but it didn’t have anything to do with that clammy rain coming down again, spilling out of the downspouts all along the sidewalk. I figured I knew how all this came together, but I needed to pick up a few more threads to tie it up. That meant going and sticking my nose where I’d been told to leave things well enough alone. And I could have. I could’ve turned my back on all of it and walked away, easy as that. Even now I wasn’t in too deep to pull myself out. But if I took the next step, I’d be out of the shadows and into the dark, and it might be a long time till I saw the light on the other side.
Then I thought of Evelyn Night’s eyes, the feel of her body up against mine, the touch of her lips. I thought of how all the information I’d collected today could maybe set her free, could maybe chase the ghosts out of those eyes …
I hailed another cab and told the driver to take me to the Tombs.
The cabbie let me out on the rain-slicked curb outside the nondescript brick building behind the neoclassical edifice of the City Police Headquarters and I took the wide stone steps two at a time and pushed inside. Cops milled and chatted, public defenders rushed in and out, a man I recognized as a Deputy Assistant DA drifted through, chatting with a couple of plainclothes detectives. The place had a real name—the Metropolitan Criminal Detention Center—but nobody bothered calling it that. The Tombs said it better. A dark, stinking catacomb, blank concrete and naked light bulbs hidden away behind thick wire mesh, except in the entryway and offices where a few rough jabs had been taken at making the place presentable. It was a lot closer to the cops than I’d wanted to come with this case, but I was pretty sure nobody here knew my face. Probably none of them even knew my name. Being small-time has its plusses once in a while.
I strolled up to the desk sergeant like I belonged there and showed him the forged credentials I carried for circumstances like as these.
“Fred O’Mera, with the PD’s office,” I said. “For Ander Farris.”
I remembered seeing in the papers that Farris had been busted a week or so ago. I didn’t think he was in the middle of anything, but he was the only fella I knew who might have his ear to the ground.
The cop looked like he’d been on that desk most of his career. He frowned at me and my broken face from beneath bushy gray eyebrows, frowned at my ID, frowned down at the register book at his elbow.
“What happened to your face?”
“I cut myself shaving,” I said, hoping the tone would shut down that line of questioning.
The cop grunted, looked at his book again.
“Nothin’ about a Fred O’Mera here,” he mumbled.
I rolled my eyes in fake disgust. “The clerk at the office said he’d talked to you people, told ’em I was on my way about the Farris case.”
“Sorry pal,” the desk sergeant said with a shrug of his meaty shoulders.
“Look, Mac,” I said, “I got ten other cases I gotta work today, I don’t have time to stand here gabbing with you just ’cause some pencil-pusher forgot to write down a phone message. Why don’t you give ’em a call and see if you can find anyone who knows I’m here so I can get on with my work, huh?”
I’d have some pretty explaining to do if he called my bluff and found out nobody named Fred O’Mera worked at the public defender’s office, but I guess my attitude and the phony credentials sold him, or else he was too damn lazy to care. “Sign in,” he said, and tapped a black line on a yellowed page.
I signed Fred O’Mera’s name left-handed. It had taken me a month of practice to get good at it and it was all I could do with my south paw, but it came in handy at times like this, when I needed to be someone else.
The sergeant frowned at my scrawl, his bushy eyebrows knitting together like mating caterpillars. Then, with a snort, he shoved a visitor’s pass across the desk at me.
I hooked it to my coat and walked away without giving the desk sergeant so much as a nod.
The guards scrutinized my ID again, and the pass, and made me check my piece, and patted me down to make sure I wasn’t packing anything else. They didn’t think twice about why a PD might be carrying—disgruntled former clients, angry family members of clients, angry family members of victims, whatever, PDs had damn good reason to tote some self-defense.
A minute later a big guard in a sharp blue uniform led me to a grungy interrogation room, and five minutes after that they brought in Farris. He stared at me thickly when he saw me, checking out my busted face, but wasn’t quite dumb enough to say I wasn’t really his lawyer. The guards locked Farris’s cuffs to the concrete-slab table then locked us in together.
“How ya doin’, Andy?” I asked when we were alone.
“Better than you, huh?” Farris said. “Whatta you want, Orpheus?”
He said it without the “e”—Orfus—but I was past being perturbed by things like that.
“Just some polite conversation,” I said, taking off my hat, crimping the brim into a sharper shape. “You like polite conversation, dontcha? About our mutual friends?”
Farris scowled.
“You want I should name a few names, that it? What’s in it for me?”
I leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers together behind my head to remind him I could move away from the table and he couldn’t. “You’ll see in a minute,” I promised.
Farris glowered, those beady eyes shadowed under that granite-boulder forehead.
“You know a fella named Maurice Guilio? Or Marcus Giles?”
His glower turned into a pale frown, his gaze fell away into the far corner of the room.
“I don’t think I wanna talk after all,” he said.
“Then just nod your head. You know him?”
Farris’s big head went up and down a couple of times, almost like he couldn’t help himself.
“Who’s he in with?”
Farris went white as bleached linen. “Huh-uh,” he muttered, “Nope. I go shootin’ my mouth about that, they’re gonna find me with my head on backward.”
“No one knows I’m here but you,” I said. “You just say a couple words I wanna hear and I go away and no one ever finds out we had this little chat. Otherwise maybe I start shooting off my mouth about how you blabbed it all to me, and maybe someone with big ears hears. And I’m pretty sure you know who I mean.”
“You lookin’ ta get me killed, Orfus?” I heard real strain in his voice. “That whatcher after?”
“I’ll make it easy for you,” I said. “I’ll say it so you don’t have to. He reports to a fancy-dressed fella called Radamanthus. Yes or no?”
Again, Farris’s head bobbed like it wasn’t plugged in to his will. That frown dug in deeper. I was just glad the big Bruno didn’t have the sense to call the guards and get me tossed. Best to keep him rattled and hope for the best.
“So he’s a soldier for the Tartarus Syndicate. One of Menace’s men.”
If Farris could’ve flung himself back from the table, he would’ve, but the handcuffs made it impossible.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Say that name. The ‘M’ name. Don’t. That man … hears things. You didn’t get them bruises slippin’ in the bathtub, did ya?”
I felt another chill, thinking about how fast Menace’s catspaws had gotten to me, and Hally. Seeing a big dumb thug like Ander Farris squirm like a child at nothing more than the sound that name made in the interview room tempted me to think twice about what I was involved in. Seemed more and more likely Cass had gotten it right from the start.
I shoved the thought out of my mind.
“What is it about this fella?” I asked, leaning over the table toward Farris like a conspirator, pretending the line about my face hadn’t shaken me good. “Why does his name get a big gorilla like you shaking in his shoes?”
Farris went on frowning, shook his head, but spilled his guts anyway. “He—he finds things out. Like if you say his name he can hear it ten miles away. And they say he can, he can be in two places at the same time. Like he’s … I dunno, a spook … somethin’.”
“Or the Devil himself,” I said, as much to myself as to the thug sitting across from me. All my scars ached and itched, the one over my left eye especially.
Farris snorted, tugged at his fingers. “If you’re lookin’ for that Guilio kid, don’t bother. I hear he got himself disappeared about a week ago. Permanent like. What I hear is they made it real slow so’s people around the Tartarus neighborhood could hear the screams for hours and hours, so’s they’d remember not to cross up … that man. So’s none of the other fellas in the group would make the same mistakes Guilio made.”
“What mistakes are those?”
“Got too big for his britches, ’s what I hear. Thinkin’ he could start givin’ orders. Thinkin’ he could muscle in on Radamanthus’s action. Not playin’ by the rules.”
I thought of the young fella in those pictures, trying too hard to look more important than he was. Didn’t seem hard to believe he could step on a few toes and end up paying a heavy price for having two left feet.
“Dumb bastard shoulda knowed better. Everyone knows you don’t go against … Everyone knows, you just don’t.” He shook his head in disgusted disbelief. “Anyway, I’m through talkin’.” Farris sat up straighter now, like he’d just come to his senses.
I nodded, got out of my chair and went to the door. I gave three loud knocks for the guard.
Farris’s face twisted up all of the sudden, a pretty nervous look on such a big man.
“You won’t say—”
“I was never here,” I promised. The same line I’d given Hally Thersis, for all the good it had done.
The door screeched open and I slipped out.