Noir (11 page)

She was afraid of her parents, believing they might have had something to do with her sister’s disappearance and worried something like it might happen to her, but they were off traveling somewhere, so she was able to take you home with her to show you some photos, her sister’s diary, a glove of which the mate was missing, her sister’s perfume, her underwear, anything that might help you locate the missing girl. She told you, rather breathlessly, everything she could remember about her sister, and especially the days just before she disappeared, and, taking your hand, gazing up at you adoringly, led you room by room through the family manor according to the thread of her story. Which had to do with a row her sister supposedly had just before her parents left on their previously unannounced travels. Vague threats. You weren’t sure if the story she was telling you held together, but solving the case was no longer foremost on your mind. You just liked to hear her talk and to feel her innocent little body rubbing up against yours. Also innocent. Was the missing sister alive or dead, and, if dead, who killed her and why? You didn’t really care. Maybe her sister was not really missing and this was just a ruse to lure you here to get laid. This was the theory you favored. So when she proposed a cooling-off late-night dip in the pool, you tucked your pencil behind your ear and flashing the insouciant smile you’d been practicing in front of your mirror, said, Sure, kid, why not?

She led you out to the pool and took off her clothes and, since you were a tad slow off the mark, helped you out of yours. Did you consider the possibility that, if the sister was dead and the parents got sent to the chair for murder or failed to survive their travels, she’d inherit the family fortune? Maybe in the back of your mind, you did, but women’s pubic hair was still fairly new to you and most of your attention was focused on that. That and the slightly embarrassing evidence of your throbbing excitement. She took hold of it as she might a pump handle, triggering instant convulsions, and then, with a mischievous grin, gave it and you, laughing giddily, a push into the pool. She’s great! you were thinking as you went under. This is fun! But then you glimpsed something at the bottom of the pool that shouldn’t be there: a naked girl’s body. You dove down to it, worked the weights off the neck and ankles, and, gasping for breath, hauled her, still soft and warm, to the surface. Which was when you met Blue, then just a rookie cop in homicide, eager to show his stuff and win his merit badges. He was standing at the edge of the pool along with another eight to ten of his grinning pals with automatic rifles aimed at your head, the sex kitten in her pajamas and bathrobe weeping somewhere in the background.

You’d been in some rough street fights, but you hadn’t taken a real beating before then. Blue was nothing if not thorough. There was little of you left ignored. Coshes, fists, nightsticks, rubber hose, boots. Some of it while blindfolded, some not. Your further education. Principles of Getting Fucked Over 101. Through it all you stuck by your story because it was the only story you had. C’mon, Noir, he barked, slapping you up one side of the head, then slapping you up the other. We caught you stark naked hugging the corpus delicti. You’re a fucking necrophiliac. What more is there to know? That I’m a private detective, that I got hired by that kid to find her missing sister, that she was the one who pushed me into the pool, and that when I saw the dead girl I dove down and brought her up. I figure the kid killed her and needed a fallguy. You’re a goddamned liar, Noir. You’re gonna get the chair for this. Lie detector tests were the thing in those days. You passed with flying colors. But then so did the sex kitten. Blue never believed you, has never been able to forgive you for spoiling his first big case, still thinks of you as a pervert and a killer and maybe worse if there is worse.

SO YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER. YOU
DO
KNOW BETTER. Just the same (this kitten’s soft pleading voice, sweet milky aroma, her damp bunnies—what can you do?), you pull off her shoes and socks, her skirt, go get the pajamas. More bunnies, matching her underpants. When you peel them off her, her hand falls between her thighs like it’s always been there, and she whimpers softly. Even her whimpers are questions. You ask where her parents are while unbuttoning her blouse.

My father’s dead. My stepmother killed him. And she’s going to kill me.

Typical teenage fantasy, especially when they’re doped up and feeling sorry for themselves. Off comes the blouse. No bra. A pause to take in the sights.

She opens her eyes to watch you watching her, though they cross with her dopey sleepiness and she closes them again. Can you protect me?

I can’t protect anyone right now, kitten. I’m in deep shit and have to save my own ass first. You sound like Skipper’s parrot. You used to talk only to cops and gangsters that way. Now everybody gets the same treatment. You get her pajama top on over her curly head, but she hugs the pants like a security blanket.

Please? I’m so afraid? Stay with me? Just tonight?

You’ve never taken advantage of dolls in distress; on the other hand, if they want to take advantage of you, your resistance is low. There’s a whiskey bottle on her vanity. You pour a water glass full, savoring it as though it might be your last, thank her for it, hang your fedora on the neck of it, commence to strip down. The .45’s missing. Must have left it in the street when you bumped into her. You decide to leave your trenchcoat, jacket, shirt and tie on, studs in place, in case you have to make a quick exit. The sort of exit any sane man would be making right now.

Thanks? For—? she murmurs. I don’t drink whiskey? She opens her eyes blearily and sees your blond pubes, starts giggling. It’s so
cute
—?

It’ll grow out, you grumble, and stretch out beside her, well aware that you might be crawling into bed with a deranged killer. Well, the thrills. It’s what I’m in this game for, right? you inquire of the starscaped ceiling, and, stretching out under it, you replace the hand between her legs with your own.

Game?

You wake up from a sleep so leaden you cannot think where you are until you find the dead girl beside you, strangled with her own jammies, your hand still between her legs. Ah. There’s someone else in this house. Why did you assume otherwise? Sirens again, drawing up out front. This is not Blue’s beat, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up. You are frantically hauling your pants on, stuffing your bare feet into your gumshoes, thinking fast, as fast as you can with your stunned brain. The whiskey bottle is gone, the glass, your fedora; replaced by stuffed bunnies. There must be a servants’ back staircase. Your passkey worked on the front door, maybe there’s another smugglers’ door somewhere in the basement. You can’t find the back staircase but you discover a laundry chute and you dive down it, hoping for a soft landing. Your hopes are confounded, but your stupefied senses register only the bounce. Nor does there seem to be a door that leads anywhere but to another room. You hear the thunder of heavy boots overhead. You duck into the wine cellar to hide and discover, down behind the racks, a lock set into the brick wall. Your key opens it. An irregular section of brick slides out, creating an opening just big enough to crawl through. There’s a mystery here, but you’re a street dick, not a metaphysician, you’ve no time to muse on it, they’re already clattering down the basement stairs. You snatch a couple bottles of wine, sink them in your trenchcoat pockets, and you’re gone, pulling the bricks closed behind you.

THIS ISN’T YOUR FIRST MAD DISHABILLE DASH OUT OF A woman’s bedroom. They have mostly—your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe for the fleeting joys of romance—followed upon the unexpected arrival of a husband or lover, sometimes an irate parent or snapping dog, once even a crazed horse (don’t ask), but it has always been your practice to leave behind hot bodies, not cold ones, the only anatomy at mortal risk generally being your own. You’ve had your heels and ears clipped by flying bullets, have been knocked off the sides of buildings you were scrambling down by flowerpots and birdcages, and have taken a load of buckshot in your butt—twice, same guy, same dame, going over the same back wall; learning doesn’t come easy to you—but so far you have dodged the doom of so many of your clients’ rivals. Those poor saps you got the goods on. The closest you’ve come to buying it was during a brief torrid fling with a circus aerialist with amazingly muscular jaws, one of those slim dollies who hang ninety feet above the ground by their teeth; she had oral techniques you’d never experienced before, nor have you since, and as you are always willing to take a few risks to revel in instructive marvels, you spent a lot of time between acts in her caravan, in spite of her lion-tamer husband’s reputation for savagery. It wasn’t easy to tear away from her mid-performance, so eventually he collared you, speaking loosely. Collar-boned you, more like. His reputation was well-deserved. First, you took a lashing from his big black whip from which you still have scars striped across your backside like a stave of music, and then you were thrown raw into the lion’s cage. And this was not a lion from whose paw you’d pulled a thorn, though you did get the impression, as its lips curled back in a wet snarl, that it was laughing. Just before you could get recycled, however, you were rescued by the aerialist (another romantic) who, when the lion tamer, weary of beating her, went off for consolation from the Fat Lady, tossed the big cat a poisoned hamburger. Later, you heard, her husband got a hamburger much like it, but by then you’d stopped going to the circus.

WELL, THIS SORT OF WHAM-BAM LOVING, AS JOE THE bartender describes, approvingly, all matings, human and otherwise, has not been all of love you’ve known; though you always resist them, you’ve had tenderer feelings, too. The night the body was discovered in the docklands and then lost in the morgue, for example, you dropped by Loui’s afterwards to ease the pain of a blown case and found yourself crying in your whiskey (figuratively: you don’t cry) at the loss of your widow and of her remains as well. You had failed her, and having failed her, you knew then that you had loved her, and you probably said as much in your tough tight-lipped way, though they would anyway have known your true feelings by the way you blew your nose. All this was a bit too much for Joe, who started telling a dirty joke about a woman who dressed in widow’s weeds to bury her broken dildo, then in white to wed her new one, but who was visited on her wedding night by the ghost of her dead dildo, accusing her of negligent dildicide. Loui laughed, interrupting the joke, which, as you knew, had as dark a punchline as any in Joe’s repertoire, and said that his fourth wife, or maybe it was his fifth, used to call him, lovingly, her dildo with ears, and that she was the best wife he ever had, wives on the whole being a contentious and predatory lot.

Flame, more sympathetic, herself a sucker for impossible amours, drifted off to the floor mike and sang a song about lost love called “The Dick and the Dame.”
The dick was just a trick for a dame on the game,
she moaned in her sultry voice, so full of anguish and thwarted desire.
If the chick’s up shit creek, is the dick to blame . . . ?
Flame, you knew, would be happy to help you get through the night, but you needed to be alone. When she reached the last line about the dick’s pursuit of the ineffable (which rhymed with “his situation was laughable”), you blew her a kiss, tugged your fedora down over your brows, lit up, and, collar up, hands in trenchcoat pockets, stepped out into the grim wet night.