Merntice gave them the address of O’Connor’s apartment, and Jewel phoned ahead to the landlady, who sounded hysterical. The address was a yellow brick two-flat on north Kedzie in a formerly Bohemian neighborhood. The landlady and her husband met them on the front steps.
“Thank God you haff came. My husband had heart attack,” she said. “I don’t know vot to do!”
“I did not have a heart attack. You had a heart attack when you saw that thing. ’Cause you’re a prude,” her husband said.
“We’re not paramedics, ma’am,” Jewel said. “Do you want us to call you an ambulance?”
“No, no, ambulance already came and took away Mr. O’Connor.” The landlady flipped her apron up to cover her eyes. “Go look. Up there. I give you the key.”
“I’ll show ’em,” her husband said.
“You vill not! It’s disgusting!” his wife said. She retreated behind the screen door of the first-floor flat.
Her husband gave a growl and mounted the stairs to the second floor with the key in his hand and Jewel’s team on his heels.
“Whoa,” Clay said, first through the door. “Funky.”
Jewel pushed past him. It was beyond funky. The bachelor smell of old sweat socks and stale beer thwapped her like a county-jail pillow in the face. Magazines and newspapers were piled everywhere. Girlie posters wilted on the walls in the August heat. Jewel wouldn’t have sat on the sofa for money, though clearly it had been O’Connor’s favorite spot.
Over the funk, she smelled a sweet, flat, musty odor she recognized from hospitals, the smell of death. O’Connor had died here. She remembered him as a shapeless old fart hanging around the coffee station upstairs, and then, later, never getting above the basement lair where the other senior investigators gathered to play cards. He’d always winked at her. She hadn’t minded.
“He was a great reader,” Randy said, reaching for a magazine on a stack.
“Don’t touch that!” she said too late.
As he lifted the magazine, another poppet sprang up. She looked just like the first one, blonde and wholesome, with innocent blue eyes, and a very naked body that she twisted and stroked. Jewel wanted to look away, but the poppet was too — too much. She felt herself blushing. She wished the landlord would stop leering at the damned thing and go downstairs.
“More smut,” Randy said, leafing unconcernedly through the magazine. He turned it sideways, tipping his head at the fold-out. “Remarkable.” He flipped past the centerfold.
Jewel eyed the poppet nervously. “Will it hurt us, do you think? Hey, Lord Perv. Can we do some work here?”
He looked up. “This is abysmally badly written.”
Clay turned from picking over the piled bills on a huge wooden spool table. “You’re reading the porn?”
Jewel rolled her eyes.
“Aubrey! You are coming down here!” the landlady screamed from the bottom of the stairs.
“You can go now,” Jewel said to the landlord. He went.
Randy still couldn’t get over the stories. “Moreover, this is grossly improbable. One would suppose, if they had nothing but sex to write of, they could make it plausible.”
Clay said, “That’s that lame porn again.”
“What makes it lame?” Jewel said, to talk about anything except the teasing, flaunting pin-up poppet.
Clay said, “It’s tame. It’s old-fashioned. It’s, like, porn for prudes. Nipples! Big whoop.”
“And unlifelike drivel to boot.” Randy rolled up the magazine, stuffed it in his back pocket, and squatted to face the poppet. “Nothing unlifelike about you, is there?” he murmured.
Jewel squinted at him. “This from the guy who did me on the porch of the Field Museum in the snow by moonlight?”
Clay glanced up suddenly from tossing through an overflowing wastebasket.
Jewel bit her lip.
“I,” Randy said, without looking away from the poppet, “can make the impossible completely real. Not only do these illiterates have no imagination, but I suspect they don’t even like sex.” He reached out a finger and the poppet leaned forward to rub her round little breasts against it.
“You’re pretty critical for a guy who would rather read porn stories than look at the pictures,” Clay said unpleasantly. “You couldn’t do any better.”
“On the contrary,” Randy began haughtily.
“I’m not staying here to listen to your antlers clashing.” Jewel went into the kitchen.
Clay followed her. “You indulge him. He’s getting unmanageable.”
“Not like you. Good grief, look at this mess.” The kitchen was worse than the living room. “Didn’t the old guy eat anything besides danish?”
Clay closed the fridge. “Don’t look in there.”
“Why?” Her blood ran cold. “Is there another pocket zone?”
“No, but it’s really gross. Randy’s a good guy and all but I get the impression he misinterprets our role. I mean, he’s not even a city employee.”
“And you behave like such a good citizen,” she snapped. “Don’t forget, you’re getting him some fake ID papers.”
“Now, is that what a good citizen does?” Clay said.
“The way you’ve taught him to drive, he could get arrested or deported, or worse!”
“Okay, okay,” Clay said, soothing. “Consider it done.”
The landlady came up the back stairs. “This is horrible. Ve wanted to move up here so ve could renovate first floor. Now ve can’t use second floor!” She peered through the kitchen door into the living room. “It is still there?”
Jewel took a deep breath of stale danish and re-entered the living room.
Randy was walking from pile to pile of the magazines, tapping them. Poppets sprang up wherever he tapped. “Interesting. My touch seems to summon the apparition.”
Clay said, “Could that be because you’re, uh—” He glanced over his shoulder at the landlady. “English? Jewel, you try.”
“No thanks.”
The landlady said tremulously, “Have you look in bedroom?”
Euw. Jewel got the icks just trying to imagine the bedroom. “Clay, how about you look?”
“I’ll save you, little lady,” Clay said in a deep voice. He threw his shoulders back and opened the bedroom door.
“They persist as long as one engages with them,” Randy said thoughtfully.
“What do you mean, engage?” Jewel said.
At the bedroom door, Clay gasped.
“What?” She came to stand behind him.
“It’s — it’s full of—” Clay turned away, pushing her back.
Randy straightened.
“What?” Jewel demanded.
Clay pinched his nose. “Sweat socks.”
She shoved past. The bedroom violated the Clean Air Act, but Clay was right. It was G-rated. Dirty laundry lay ankle-deep, but she saw no girlie posters, porn, or poppets.
She came out and stood looking around at the stacks of porn and their dancing, twirling, teasing, laughing poppets. She turned to the landlady. “Do you have a dumpster? Or just those little garbage cans?”
“Deli on the corner hass dumpster,” the landlady said.
“When do they swap out for a new one?”
“I ask my Aubrey!” The landlady went downstairs.
Jewel called a huddle. “Randy, what do you mean they persist if you engage with them?”
“I believe your term is ‘interactive.’ They are autonomous but responsive only. That signifies a message of some sort.”
“So?” Jewel said.
“So if one doesn’t ask them to appear, they will not appear. Probably. If one ignores them, they subside — vanish. O’Connor must have known what would happen, for he never threw away the old magazines.”
Jewel bit her lip. “So did he, like, make them appear? I mean, did he make this happen?”
Randy looked around the room. “I don’t know.”
“I know something else you don’t know,” Clay said.
Jewel looked at him impatiently. “Yes, Mr. Comic Relief? You have a contribution?”
“These bakery bags.” Clay took a white ball of paper out of the overflowing wastebasket and uncrumpled it. “Have you looked at the address?”
“Hoby’s,” Jewel said. “My favorite.”
Clay yanked the rolled-up magazine out of Randy’s back pocket. “They’re from the same place as this lame porn.” He flipped through the magazine and pointed at fine print. “Nine sixty west Washington Boulevard.”
“I’ve seen that address recently.” Jewel frowned. “Huh. Obviously we’re gonna have to pay this porn company a visit.” She licked her lips. “And buy some pastry while we’re at it.”
While Jewel phoned in their discovery to Ed, Randy gathered up armloads of magazines and hauled them to the dumpster behind the corner deli, and Clay got the landlady and her husband to show him around O’Connor’s apartment and describe how they were going to redecorate. As the magazines went away, the landlady cheered up.
“Ve never haff cockroaches, you know.” She dug Clay in the ribs. “That’s something, in neighborhood vit deli. Plus Mr. O’Connor vas no neatnik.”
Her husband came up beside her and put his arm around her waist. “That certainly was something,” he said sadly, watching the magazines go out the door in Randy’s arms.
“Oh, you.” His wife slapped him gently on the hand.
Jewel pushed the moment while they weren’t fighting. “Tell me, have you been approached by anyone else from the city about — about all this?”
The landlord pinched his wife on the behind and she squealed. “Nope. You’re it. I’m thinkin’,” he said to his wife, “we put the bed in this room, eh, honey? It’s bigger and it gets more light.” He bumped his shoulder against his wife’s and she giggled.
They got personal. Jewel looked out the window.
Clay came upstairs with his phone in his hand. “Ed says we can go over there tomorrow.”
“What about my other job?” Jewel said, air-typing.
Clay shrugged, stuffed his phone in his pocket, then did a double take at the landlord and his wife, locked in a clinch. “Whoa.”
“Let’s give ’em their privacy. Randy’s done here.” She led Clay downstairs. “That was interesting. Randy isn’t scared of this stuff at all.”
“Randy’s hinky to the bone himself,” Clay said. “Why should it scare him? Come to think of it, that could be a decent job for him.”
“Removing hinky stuff to disassemble pocket zones?” Jewel nibbled her lip. “I’d feel better if I had the slightest clue how they worked or what makes ’em.” She glanced up the stairs in the direction of the now-porn-free apartment. “Do you suppose it’s safe for them to move in there?”
“I’m sure it won’t hurt them,” Clay said.
Jewel wasn’t sure at all, but she didn’t know how to find out. And she didn’t know how to protect them without taking their home away from them.