Carlyle smashed the receiver on the phone, bit down on a cigar, whatted away some guy who had just knocked on his door, did something else that deputy police chiefs do, though in an unnecessarily violent manner, and rounded on the other person in the room.
“What’s the word from Mojave?”
The other person was Lieutenant Greggs, homicide detective.
“We left him a message. Still no word,” she said from her corner near the file cabinet. Then, looking up from the linoleum: “Sir, they’re our best chance.”
“We’re the San Francisco Police Department,” Carlyle grunted. “We do not outsource.”
“Precisely because we’re the police, there are things we can’t do. They can.”
Carlyle Hindenburged into his chair, chugging out black smoke like a coal refinery. He knew Greggs believed in Dirty Harry types: passionately homicidal cops who skip over the chain of command and bend rules for the greater good. She saw these lone wolves as a necessary stopgap for an imperfect system. Maybe she had dreamed of being the first lone wolf on the force since Harry Callahan minted the role, but the truth was she believed in that kind of officer only in theory; she knew the difficulties it posed to try to be one, especially for a first-generation African American woman. It was obvious to her that white males were given much more leeway: when she tried the same approach to police work it took only three days to earn her first disciplinary action, with Carlyle doing the whole I’ll take your badge and weapon routine in that very office. To this day she still indulged in the odd reckless behavior or merited a reprimand for breaking the occasional rapist’s arm in more pieces than could be fixed, but no one considered her a rogue officer. And unlike the white male lone wolves, she was a parent too, so facing gunmen without backup or a suspension without pay was no laughing matter. But she still believed in creative workarounds to the rules, or she wouldn’t be in Carlyle’s office right now.
Carlyle squished the cigar in his ashtray, or somewhere in its suburbs.
“Where’s that wonder duo now?”
“Demoines is taking their statement,” Greggs said. She considered adding something else at that point but she bit her lip. It was better to wait.
Carlyle interlaced his sausagy fingers and leaned back in his chair, framed by the bright city skyline behind his desk like a late-night talk show host. To his right, a map of the Bay Area hung voodooed by a hundred colored pins. The pins were part of a case closed in 1975, but they were kept there to reinforce the impression that a lot of work got done in that office. Carlyle himself stayed fat, hypertensive, and divorced for the same purpose.
“All right,” he puffed, slapping some indiscriminate object on his desk. “Let’s go see them.”
Greggs reined in a victory gesture. The hardest part—towing Carlyle out of his office—had been accomplished.
They stepped out into the bullpen, spread out under cigarette fog and fluorescent lights. Jacketless cops pulled their feet off their desks or hurried through personal phone calls as the party of two walked past their cubicles, Carlyle filling both lanes of the hallway and forcing the mail boys to take alternate routes. The low-tar air teemed with analog phone rings and yapping typewriters.
At an intersection, they caught sight of Detective Ted Demoines, from the Narcotic and Vice Division. He did not see them, but the guy behind him did. At first glance, Carlyle dismissed him as a lingering detainee from some raid at the harbor on the night shift: nothing to shock a veteran officer, although there was something about that skinny, overexplicit body that made the chief scowl. Perhaps it was his bearing, or the way he moved like an emaciated marionette. On instinct, Carlyle checked the ceiling for the operator’s strings. His clothes (somehow not enough to fully dress the wearer) were all in black and white: tight pants, a tank top, and a silly little waistcoat, open. His hair reminded Carlyle of hay, and his face of a carnival in Venice. He seemed to be speaking to Demoines, complaining about some handcuffs (his wrists were not cuffed), when he halted upon seeing Greggs—more accurately, the head stopped first, then the rest of the body followed—and immediately changed directions to greet her.
“Gre-e-e-eggs!”
He hugged her like French people hug on train platforms. Greggs didn’t seem off-put; she patted the marionette’s back like she would an overexcited dog.
“Hello, Zooey, hello.” Then she pushed him away a little, as if to reckon how much he had grown, but she only said, in a different tone, “Adrian.”
“Lieutenant,” the marionette replied, solemnly. “How’s the kid?”
“Fine. Thanks for faking interest.”
“The handcuffs on Green Teeth Murdoc—they’re mine, I want them back!” he whined, pointing at Demoines, who had joined them.
“I’ll tell the morgue,” Greggs promised. “We need to talk. Care to come into my office?”
Carlyle noticed the marionette registering him out of the corner of its eye—a furtive golden-brown eye, half hidden behind a sideswept bang. The rest of the mannequin didn’t speak to or acknowledge him, but that spying pupil made him feel exposed, naked. Something neither he nor anyone on that floor cared to imagine.
He followed Greggs and Demoines and the marionette into a smaller office than his own. A few Himalayas of case files and manila envelopes stood tall in the perimeter of the room. An overpopulated corkboard on one wall and several swarms of sticky notes here and there gave the impression that even more work got done here, which incidentally was also true. The lieutenant started vacating furniture; the marionette seized the first available seat.
“We missed you,” said Greggs. “So nice of you to come see us.”
“I know,” the marionette said, mouth wide open like one of Jim Henson’s Muppets. “I could’ve come earlier, but I was in a ladyboy all week.” There was a pause for laughs, but Greggs wasn’t listening, Demoines barely needed to suppress a chuckle, and Carlyle had nothing to suppress. The marionette sat staring at the last with strangely disjointed eyes, legs obscenely spread apart. “I meant to say I was having sex with her. Not that she’d swallowed me whole. (Pointing at Carlyle’s belly.) As you seem capable of doing.”
Carlyle scratched his middle chin, then queried Greggs, who had finished emptying seats, and Demoines. The latter had nestled in a corner, arms crossed, and would say nothing. He was blond, a Quebecker, and exasperatingly timid.
“So?” the chief prompted. “Do the P.I.s come after the drag queen’s routine or what?”
There was a sort of Mexican standoff of dodgy stares. Greggs’s and Demoines’s seemed to drift toward the marionette, who now appeared to be wildly interested in the fluvial system of veins in his arm.
The synaptic spark made Carlyle wince. “No way. This Tinker Bell is a P.I.?”
The Tinker Bell in question bent in a silent Harpo Marx laugh.
“Sir, he’s got experience—tons of it,” Greggs jumped in. “He’s run his own practice in North Beach for quite some time.”
“Four days,” the marionette refined, brimming with pride.
“He had others before this one,” Demoines assisted.
“Where were you four days ago?” Carlyle inquired.
“Green Teeth Murdoc’s poker night.”
“And before that?”
“Claymoore.”
“Claymoore, as in Claymoore Psychiatric Hospital?”
The marionette nodded its big, lolling head.
The chief fell silent. It was only eleven a.m., and already he was regretting not being hit by a trolley on the way to work.
“Okay. Where’s the other one?”
Greggs bit her lip again.
DEMOINES: (Pointing at the marionette.) It’s…(Beat.) It’s him as well.
GREGGS: Her.
DEMOINES: Them.
Now the marionette looked bored.
Carlyle sat in silence for a while and then rose and snapped his fingers.
“Outside. Now.”
They left the P.I. wrapped like a boa constrictor around the rotating desk chair; they could still see him/her/them through the window.
Carlyle closed the door and shot a .44 Magnum index finger at his subordinates: “Forget that PC bullshit and someone tell me who the fuck that clown is.”
Greggs volunteered for the first round. “Sir, it’s…Look, you know how a fetus grows in the mother’s womb? Sometimes, if two blastocytes merge—”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Lieutenant?!”
“Wait, Chief, it’s easier than that,” Demoines interceded, waving the conversation back to a civil volume. “You know about conjoined twins? Babies joined at the torso, or two bodies splitting out of one pair of legs?”
“Road show freaks,” Carlyle summed up.
“Yeah, in Dust Bowl–era lingo, but yes,” Demoines conceded. “Okay, now picture conjoined twins that share every part of one body. Not only one torso, but one head, two arms, two legs…But they’re still two people.”
He gestured toward the window like a zoo guide pointing at the aquarium. Inside, the marionette sat idly feeling their earlobe with a stapler while studying the conspiracy mural on Greggs’s corkboard.
Carlyle suggested, “So, he’s got split personality?”
“No,” Greggs refuted. “Split personality is a psychiatric disorder, and as a matter of fact, virtually every studied case has been ruled a hoax. Kimrean doesn’t have split personality; they are two people. It’s called genetic chimerism: looks like one individual, but it’s actually a mosaic organism made up of two people’s cells, each with its own DNA. Two siblings. In one body.”
Carlyle watched the fish in the aquarium. A soft undulation of ribs could be discerned under the armpits. He got the uncanny impression that the scant clothes didn’t actually hide anything, that beneath them the marionette would be all smooth like a Barbie. Or a Ken.
“In a man’s body, or a woman’s?”
“Well…” Greggs began, and hesitated again, this time almost splicing her lip open.
“Both,” Demoines said. “They’re brother and sister.”
Carlyle turned from the glass, dragging a hand over the scalp that several mornings like this one had contributed to despoil.
Demoines went on, if only to shorten the pain: “The funny thing about Kimrean is that most genetic chimeras are not proportional. It happens throughout the animal kingdom: your arm or your pancreas may actually belong to a twin brother who fused with you before the embryo stage. You, Greggs, me—any of us here could be a mosaic, and we wouldn’t know. For practical, psychological, legal purposes, we are only one person: the one who owns the brain, the one who is self-aware. But Kimrean is a bit of an oddity.”
“You don’t say,” the chief retorted.
Greggs tagged herself back in: “In Kimrean, their brain is shared as well. Each sibling owns a half. They both have self-awareness, a voice, and control over their body.”
“Relatively speaking,” Demoines said. “It’s…like having a pilot and a copilot.”
“More like two pilots fighting for the throttle.”
“As far as we know, Adrian holds the left hemisphere, the analytic brain. He has an IQ over one eighty, photographic memory, encyclopedic culture…He’s the internet with Asperger’s syndrome.”
“Zooey is the right hemisphere, the creative brain. She paints, writes, composes, plays several instruments…She’s also hyperactive, a nymphomaniac, and an addict to every substance she’s tried once.”
Beyond the glass, Carlyle watched the subject, or subjects, pushing off the floor and spinning on Greggs’s chair like a top, arms and legs spread out. After nine or ten full spins, they collapsed on the floor, toppling a couple of Doric columns of case files on their way down.
When Carlyle finished massaging his brow, he was six months older than the last time he’d spoken.
“We are about to close the biggest joint narcotics op in twenty years. We are working with another sixteen law enforcement agencies. We’ve got the executed son of a drug lord, an impending gangland world war…not to mention an undercover officer sitting like a duck in the middle of Pearl Harbor. And your solution is to bring in this…(Points at the glass.) These…This pair of screwballs?”
A few nearby paper pushers who were distractedly eavesdropping on the conversation gravely pondered the question.
“Actually, we want to bring in Adrian,” Demoines pointed out. “Zooey just comes in the package.”
Greggs stepped forward: “Sir, I know they seem…” She stopped, restarted: “Okay, are—they are weird. But I know them, Mojave knows them, half this department knows them. They’re the best. And their…singularity, so to speak, is an advantage. Lyon badly needs a detective, but he’ll want no business with anyone remotely seeming to represent the law. And you know the P.I.s in the Bay Area—trench coats, suspenders, they walk into a bar and people ask them how’s the new Dick Tracy film going. A.Z. doesn’t have that issue. His—I mean, their—appearance, their demeanor, everything about them is so unconventional, the last thing anyone thinks is that they’re a private eye.”
“Private eyes,” Demoines fixed. “The grammar’s a little tricky.”
An officer interrupted to announce a phone call for Lieutenant Greggs. She sneaked into a cubicle; Carlyle and Demoines stood by, gazing at the aquarium.
“You really want to use this nutjob,” Carlyle said. It was not a question, more like a vain attempt to persuade himself.
“Sir, had I known they were back in business, I would’ve called them myself. They’re a gift from above. Quite literally—there’s a wrecked cruiser outside that can bear witness to that.”
“Of all the P.I.s in the Bay Area…”
“Chief, do you have any brothers or sisters?” Demoines actually waited for an answer; Carlyle passed. “I am the fourth of five. Let me tell you: God, or Mother Nature, or whatever there is, didn’t create siblings to keep us company. It did to make us compete and succeed at each other’s expense. Adrian Kimrean has spent all his life, from the very first minute, since before the first minute, competing against Zooey. Fighting for a body of his own, for a life of his own. They are both compelled to be the best at everything they do.”
“But…why P.I.s?” Carlyle moaned.
“I’m not sure. Adrian sees it as a purely intellectual craft. And Zooey likes the aesthetic cliché, I guess.”
“I hate clichés,” Police Deputy Chief Carlyle grunted, scratching his big belly and biting on a hapless doughnut that was grazing near the water cooler. “No way am I bringing that clown into this mess.”
“Sir.” It was Greggs, pulling a handset from the phone in the next cubicle. “Mojave.”
Carlyle snatched the receiver from her. “Danny. Good work, son. Listen to me, you give the signal, I can pull you out of there in one hour, okay? Soon as—”
He cut himself off, as if something unexpected or viscous was pouring out of the handset. Out of focus, Greggs gave Demoines a conspiratorial nod.
“Danny, you’re not thinking clearly,” Carlyle said.
It was the last full sentence he would be able to squeeze into the conversation. He babbled a couple promises, said good-bye, and handed the phone back to Greggs. He laid a hand on the aquarium glass.
“He wants him,” he mumbled. “Them.”
On the other side, the grinning marionette waved.
All three cops marched back into Greggs’s office, hands in their pockets.
“Okay,” the chief said, brushing up on his apologetic tone. “Your agents here told me you’re a regular sleuth. Two sleuths, as it happens.”
“A sleuth and his comedy sidekick, all in one,” Kimrean rephrased, neutral.
“Yes, I heard it’s a little…complex.”
The heterochromatic eyes were still unsettling, but somehow he knew to address the golden-brown one. The green one, half veiled by the bangs, gazed in the same direction, shone just as brightly, but somehow seemed permanently distracted.
“I apologize about the language before. The Tinker Bell thing, I mean.”
“Oh, it’s okay. I don’t think much of that PC bullshit either. I too am a bit of a fat, white-privileged, dick-dangling, baby-dipping douchebag that way.”
Greggs, ever the mediator, stepped between Kimrean and the chief before the joke even landed; there was barely any time for turmoil to build up.
“Okay, point made, Zooey. Siddown,” she begged, pushing the contenders apart—those who could be parted, that is.
“It wasn’t me,” Zooey proclaimed naively. “But I agree with everything he said.”
“Adrian, Zooey,” Demoines roll-called. “Maybe we started on the wrong foot here. This is Deputy Chief Llewelyn Carlyle. He needs a favor.”
“I’m not doing anything for the deputy chief,” Kimrean said. “At best, I’ll do it for Danny Mojave.”
That successfully cooled down the tempers. In fact, it flash-froze the room. Carlyle checked Greggs, Demoines, then the brown eye, then the green one, then anything inert in the office that might provide an answer.
“How does he know about Mojave?” he barked. “Only three people outside this room know about him!”
“Plus anyone that walks into this office and notices that the fourth guy from the right in Greggs’s graduation photo on her desk is the same guy on the board in that picture with Victor Lyon, supreme ruler of the San Carnal drug cartel,” Kimrean inserted, pointing at the walls on each side. “In other words, you guys managed to plant a narc in the home of the evil lord who runs San Carnal. The Ciudad Juárez this side of the border. The city where Sudanese war refugees once refused to stay because it didn’t feel safe. Good job. Anyone called dibs on Danny’s condo yet?”
“You been to San Carnal lately?” asked Demoines.
“Naaah,” Kimrean bleated. “Not my kind of town. All glass towers and synthetic lawns. Even the trash cans come in rose gold. It’s like the golf of cities: only appealing to the wealthy and easily challenged.”
“Would…you like to go?”
“You couldn’t drag me there pulling me by my nose hair,” they said, without a hint of irony. “Is that all? Cool; as soon as I get my handcuffs I’ll be on my way.”
Greggs prodded them back to the chair as she approached the corkboard, ready to give the lecture.
“You’re right: we did plant Danny Mojave in the Lyon’s org—and he bloomed. Started undercover among Lyon’s men at the harbor and now he’s practically the old man’s right hand. He’s become the fulcrum of this state-level op to topple the cartel and the whole kleptocracy running San Carnal. We’re weeding out the city. We share intel with DEA, FBI, you name it—but Danny’s still our man. Last spring, Lyon assigned him to his youngest son, Mikey, who’s in line to inherit a third of the family business. Part of the old man’s legacy will be this alliance with the Red Chrysanthemum Clan—the Japanese yakuza that’s spreading in the south, running the local gangs out of L.A.”
“I know all that.”
“Okay, this you may not know: as of this week that alliance is falling apart.” Greggs pointed at some photos brimming off the periphery of the board. They showed a parking lot in the desert, cordoned off with black-and-yellow tape. “Mikey committed a bit of a diplomatic faux pas.”
“Do you usually collect over a hundred bullet casings in a faux pas scene?”
“Sadly, it’s not infrequent for San Carnal. Mikey lost one soldier in the shoot-out: Cuban gunslinger by the name of Tomás Hilfiger. He was left wounded at the scene, died in the hospital.”
“Heh. Tommy Hilfiger? That’s one off my to-do list,” Kimrean said.
“Danny was there when it happened; according to him, it was all a misunderstanding. The Japanese didn’t speak good English.”
“Damn immigrants, coming over here and stealing our crime syndicates.”
“Danny was confident that talks between both clans would resume…until this happened.”
She handed Kimrean a last photograph, one that still hadn’t made it to the board. It had been taken at a crime scene with a phone camera. The man in it bore an evident resemblance to Victor Lyon. Only younger, with higher cheekbones and a broken nose, a burst lip, and an extra orifice in his face. The body lay in a pool of blood, ruining a leopard rug. The right hand rested on the chest, fingers wrapped around the stem of a red flower.
“Mikey Lyon,” Greggs captioned. “Beaten up and shot in his father’s residence, Villa Leona.”
“Breaking and entering plus homicide in San Carnal?” Kimrean exclaimed. “There must be a mistake.”
“The problem,” Greggs resumed, “is that before we find out who did it—”
“The Japanese,” said Kimrean.
“Yeah, well, before we know that—”
“You know, ’cause I just told you: the Japanese.”
“Before we can confirm that,” Greggs italicized, “Lyon is going to retaliate like this was a declaration of war.”
“It was!” Kimrean shouted. “And guess who from!”
“It wasn’t the Japanese.”
That was Carlyle’s line, straight from the back row. He was sitting on the radiator, back against the window. Those had been his first words since the exposition began.
Kimrean read the silent agreement in the room, then ventured, “I’m assuming that’s not based off the ruling of the local police inquiry.”
“San Carnal Police is Lyon’s third arm. Or his fourth,” Demoines said. “The whole department is coming down with him.”
“Then how do you know…” Kimrean began, but those five words were enough. They smirked, lipless mouth skewed toward the right side of their face. “No shit. You have a mole inside the yakuza too?”
“Not us—that one’s LAPD, but yes,” Greggs explained. “We’re pooling resources, you see.”
“But their mole could be wrong; there could be rogue soldiers operating on each side,” Kimrean argued, sounding out everyone in the room. “But you don’t believe that. You believe it, but you rather wouldn’t. Because if it’s the yakuza, they just started a gang war.”
No one needed to answer.
Suddenly Kimrean went off in their seat.
“Well, fuck them! You guys said it—another day in San Carnal—who gives a paragliding shit? It’s an artificial oasis for people with broken moral compasses! It’s Sin City in Technicolor, it’s Biff Tannen’s 1985, it’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of California—and I’m saying this from San Fran-fucking-cisco! It’s a money Laundromat, an evil interior designer’s sandbox, a playground for coked-up mortgage brokers and semen-choked spring breakers scripted by Bret Easton Ellis, ruled by John Grisham villains, roamed by SUV-driving Ayn Rand cultists, and sponsored by kingpins, sex traffickers, and sports execs with their chipped trophy wives who home in from all over the country attracted by this beacon of phallic skyscrapers, pubescent prostitutes, and glittery toilets! Christ—I am a multiple-drug-addict hypersexual felon and it repulses me!”
The audience waited respectfully for Kimrean to collapse back in the chair, panting away what was left of their fury. After that, Greggs stepped in and picked up the thread.
“This situation you so graphically described, Zooey, will continue after a gang war. Best-case scenario, one side wipes out the other, buys the bureaucrats cheap, and it’s another year in Gangsta’s Paradise.”
“The casualties of that war would be us,” the chief said, with unsurprising empathy. “For two years, twelve counties and five state agencies have cooperated to bring down the cartel—gathering evidence, tapping phones, building cases against every gun, every punk, every corrupt public servant. We are on the brink of cutting off all of the hydra’s heads at once.”
“The hydra would just grow twice as many heads—not a good analogy,” Kimrean judged.
“Gang war doesn’t help, and you know it,” Greggs insisted. “Even if every cartel soldier went to jail for pulling a trigger, they’ll take all the blame; they have to, or they die. Unless we take down the bosses, all bosses at once, it’s all in vain.”
“That’s what it will be,” Kimrean said, “unless the San Carnal coroner rules that Lyon’s son tripped and landed on a bullet on the floor.”
“We’re not counting on the coroner,” Demoines said. “We’re counting on you.”
There was no automatic reply to that.
Greggs added, “Lyon trusts very few people, but Danny is one of them. Danny can convince him that the Red Chrysanthemum didn’t kill his son, but he’ll need proof.”
“Otherwise, Lyon will go to war with the Red Mums, and he’ll lose,” Demoines predicted. “The man thinks himself stronger than he is: too many enemies. He will fall. And Danny will fall with him.”
“Pull him out of there,” Adrian urged, coldly.
“He doesn’t want us to. He’s been there for a year and a half, he’s way too invested. He thinks he can stop this war.”
“He’s wrong. It’s not his call to make.”
“He just made it anyway,” Greggs said. “He called ten minutes ago. He wants you, Adrian.”
Kimrean stayed silent, their stray gaze flown out the window. Flat geometric rooftops shone dazzling white against a deep blue, almost indigo sky.
The left hand was twiddling with some paper clips on the desk. The right one distractedly lurched toward Greggs.
“Cuffs,” Kimrean whispered, so soft that Carlyle had to lean closer.
Greggs sighed, went to pick up the phone: “I’ll tell forensics to bring them.”
“Not mine,” the marionette grunted through a slit mouth, both eyes fixed on the window, left hand sneakily pulled to join the right one. “Yours. Now, before Zooey finds out.”