Noir (12 page)

The streets, wearing their heavy shadows as if dressed for a wake, were spookily abandoned except for the occasional loners hurrying along under the scattered lamps in the distance, huddled anonymously against the drizzly rain—other mourners, it seemed to you, like yourself. Cars passed but rarely and then as if without drivers or passengers, mere light dollies, interrogating the streets with their harsh probing glare. As you left Loui’s upscale neighborhood and plunged into the gloomier precincts at the edge of the docklands, you found yourself wading through pools of bottomless shadow, buffeted by drifting wisps of cold emblematic fog. Like a dangerous journey into the land of the dead, as some have said. Such horseshit you don’t take onboard, but you did feel your own mortality blowing foglike through you on the night and whatever you saw looked more dead than alive.

You had decided to head down to the Woodshed, known simply as the Shed, an old teapad and gut-bucket often used for jam sessions, what Fingers and his chums called clambakes, and popular with ferry captains and wistful underdressed ladies past their prime. A romantic gesture. The widow, drifting in like a shadow, had found you there one night. She’d wanted to tell you another part of her story and was informed by someone that the Shed was where you could often be found. Maybe that was the night she told you about her grandfather, you don’t remember. What you can’t forget is the last thing she’d said: I don’t even know if all this is true, Mr. Noir. I just feel I need to see you, and to do that I have to have a reason. The light picked out her hands, dragging them out of the dark. No reason needed, sweetheart, you’d assured her, and placed one hand on hers and the light there dimmed. A reason for myself, I mean, she’d said. I’m in mourning, Mr. Noir. Hesitatingly, she’d withdrawn her hand. This is not proper.

When you entered that night of the docklands murder and missing body, after your walk over from Loui’s, Fingers, accompanied only by a snubnosed bassist, was riffing on an old sentimental blues ballad, a tune meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty. It was late, an off night, the place was half empty. You slid into a scarred wooden booth at some remove from the drunks and ladies at the bar, but close to the little stage where Fingers was playing, tugged your fedora brim down, ordered up a double, studied the graffiti carved into the tabletop. You were one of the few who knew that Fingers got his name, not from his piano playing, but from his career as a safe-cracker. You’d once helped him beat a box job rap by convincing the District Attorney who was after him to drop the case—the D.A. was a client of a dominatrix you knew, there were photographs. Though he wasn’t there that night, you’d often seen the D.A. in the Shed thereafter, and there was a rumor there was something going on between him and Fingers.

Blue has his docklands beat, Rats does, Loui his restaurant, Mad Meg her alleyways, but you have no turf of your own other than the city itself, which is to say, the indifferent world. Your bedsit’s like a cheap room in some sleazy railroad hotel. Even your office is a rental and you feel like an interloper in it; if it’s anyone’s, it’s Blanche’s place. Homeless, you feel as much at home in here as anywhere, but it’s not the Shed. Could be any such where. It’s the beat, the melody, the melancholy, the music. You are the music while the music lasts, it says on the scarred tabletop. That sounds familiar; maybe you cut it there. You settle into these warm illusions as into an old easy chair in the front parlor, sipping the one thing that ever really tastes good to you (you’re already on your third). The place itself is filthy, smoky, gloomy, rank. It’s you.

When Fingers took a break you signaled with your glass to indicate you were buying him one. He hesitated, looked the other way as if not having seen you, then shrugged, nodded at the barman, picked up his drink, and came on over. He walked bent-backed, the way he sat at the piano, his drawn baggy-eyed pan announcing the end of the world. Day before yesterday. Eh, Phil-baby, howzit hangin’?

Low and twisted, Fingers. Feeling bad.

That frail in the weeds who come in here one night, the one with the sweet gams . . .

She’s dead.

Yeah, I heard.

You heard? It just happened.

Word gets around. He handed you a mezzroll and you lit up. That night the widow showed up slumming here, you offered her one. She only shuddered and stared down at her hands (probably; it was dark, she was wearing her veil) and said: Please, Mr. Noir. You don’t know who I am. Just as Fingers was staring now at his hands. Long bony fingers with dark yellow tobacco stains and blackened nails, hard sharp knuckles like rows of little brass studs. Sorry, man.

I was down at the morgue, Fingers. The body’s gone missing. I gotta find it.

Don’t do it, cat. Forget her.

Can’t, Fingers, you said, sucking on your spliff. I fucked up. I owe her that much. What can you tell me?

Nuthin’. I ain’t even supposed to be talkin’ to you.

What do you mean, you’re not supposed to talk to me? Who says?

Fingers hesitated, looked over his shoulder. A pale glow in the far corner faded away like a light being dimmed. Nobody. I just know, man.

Who’s your sideman?

Don’t know. Picked him up tonight.

He looks like someone smashed his face in.

Fingers grunted. That dude was born ugly, he said, getting up to go. Thanks for the jittersauce, my man. Then, holding the glass to his lips as if to finish off the drink, his bent back to the room, he growled: Check out Big Mame’s.

The ice cream parlor?

He winced, as though to say, Shut up! Plant you now, dig you later, man, he declared aloud, and drifted away, tossing off a Let it wail, baby! over his shoulder.

THE NEXT DAY, EN ROUTE BIG MAME’S, YOU STOPPED in at the office to pick up another cannon, but before you could leave, Blanche brought in dossiers of three possible new clients, all lucrative, all boring. She said she was sorry about the previous client, the poor silly mixed-up thing, but she was glad all that was over. Well, you said, it’s not over, and over her protests (This is a detective agency, Mr. Noir, and it is not supported by dead clients!) you stepped past her, tipping your fedora with a deadpan wink, and ankled on over to the ice cream parlor, head ducked against the blinding glare of the wet streets. There were a couple of kids in there sucking at a milkshake with two straws. The place was irritatingly cheerful and stank of milk and bubblegum. Like the morgue: sweet rot. You stared at the kids for a moment. They were blowing bubbles at each other in their shake and giggling. It was like they lived in a different world. They
did
live in a different world. It was called daytime. The parlor was otherwise empty. You could hear Big Mame at the back, ordering up bananas, nuts, and maraschino cherries. Over by the window: a table with eight or nine empty banana split bowls, one chair. You knew who’d been there. He’d left a cigar butt and a newspaper behind. You glanced at it. The usual miseries. Wars and threats of wars. Murders, robberies, crimes by the column. More rain on the way. Slumping economy. Accusations of corruption and crackdowns on juvenile troublemakers. The latest humiliating defeat of the city baseball team. Your horoscope for the day suggested that to play it safe it was better to spend the day in bed. Watch out for falling meteors, it said. Then you saw it. Bottom of page seven, the obits page: Fingers was dead. Run over by a hit-and-run driver who jumped the curb and clipped him on the sidewalk last night as he stepped out of the Woodshed.

That was when you decided to look up Rats to see what he knew about missing bodies and drive-by assassins, ended up in Skipper’s sleazy waterfront den instead, got rescued from Blue’s goons by Michiko and sent back to Loui’s by the note she handed you.

YOU LEAN AGAINST A ROUGH WALL, LIGHT UP A FAG, THE match’s flame blinding in the coalpit dark, realizing now where you’d seen before that pug-faced cabbie who delivered you to the dead sex kitten’s pad: in the Shed. Fingers’ ugly sideman on bass. What’s the connection? No idea. Connections probably an illusion in such a fucked-up world as this. Why you’re down here. Illusory connections. Until it burns your fingers, you hold the match to the wall to read the graffiti: Your future is all used up, it says. Swell. Your belly’s growling, the only thing besides the scurrying vermin that breaks the silence. You’ve long since consumed Flame’s provisions. You still have the bill clip in your pocket, but it isn’t clipping anything. The big bills are gone as well and you’re even out the taxi fare. Twixt twos and fews, as Fingers would say. On the nut. Sometimes you can stand up in here in the smugglers’ tunnel, sometimes not. Standing or on all fours, you have to feel your way. When you pulled those bricks closed behind you, except for the basements you pass through, that was the end of any light. It’s a kind of entombment, but you feel at home here, trapped in some nameless dark corner of the world and no way out, burrowing through a black night, not knowing where you’re going or why, but somehow impelled to get there, the condition you were born to. The guys who built these routes must have worked their butts off. They were smalltime crooks, trying to get something for nothing, but they were heroes, too, in their way, pitting their strength and wits against the odds, and less pernicious than the grubby boiled hats on top who bully the world out of its goods, then pass laws to protect what they’ve stolen, hang those who try to take it back.

The impenetrable darkness reminds you of the widow. How little you knew of her. Was she just an innocent kid from the sticks who found herself helplessly drawn, through loneliness and love, into a big city plot of deceit, greed, and murder? Or was she herself, as Blanche believes, a ruthless streetwise killer, bewitchingly beautiful maybe, but all ice inside? A sexy hooker who landed a rich cokehead and bumped him off? This isn’t the tender sophisticated lady you know and love, but of course her own tale addenda seemed to put the lie to her innocence. When she admitted to having been raped by her father and you said that was a rotten way to lose your cherry (there are probably nicer ways of putting it, but you don’t know them; or if you know them, they don’t roll out past the stones in your mouth), she confessed that her father was not her first lover, her grandfather was. She truly loved him, she said. He was so noble and handsome. He awakened dormant desires and taught her about her body. Made her feel beautiful. But which was the lie, the idyllic rural village where they sold cotton candy in the park on weekends, or the sexy grandfather? She often seemed to be crafting her confessions, if they were that, for you. As if, all along, she were trying to reach you, read you, tell you what you wanted to know. Her father, later, was in such a hurry, she said, but her grandfather was gentle and took his time. They spent a whole day just touching each part of each other’s body and talking about them, without even kissing them. Who was that for, if not for you, you randy old lech? And your own attraction to her: Did it matter whether she was the abused virgin from the back country or a vicious scheming assassin? Well, it probably affected the way you’d have touched her, if she’d ever have let you: lacing fingers tenderly or grabbing her wrist with the gun in it; but, no, whatever, you were hooked. And, except for the Creep’s nasty remarks and the legs she showed, you don’t even know what she looked like. Although now, in the deep dark, as, crouched under the low roof, you stumble along (you can’t hear your own footsteps: the walk of a dead man, as they say), you can almost see her. Smiling at you behind her veil. Sweetly. Wickedly.

And then—a thin light, a locked door that your passkey opens—you do see her. Nearly knocks you to your knees. Veiled, dressed in black, black-stockinged, standing in a mostly naked crowd. Of manikins. You’re in the basement of a women’s dress shop, filled with manikins and parts of manikins, one of them decked out in widow’s weeds. There’s a bride, too, a swimmer, a woman in jodhpurs, others in underwear or night-gowns or business suits. Most of them are bare or mostly bare, most bald as well, some half-disassembled, armless, headless. In the dusty penumbral light, there’s an eerie sensuality about them with their angular provocative poses, their hard glossy surfaces, their somnambulant masklike faces, features frozen in glacial eyeless gazes. In short, not unlike most of the women you’ve known. You know you’re in trouble because they look good to you. You pass among them, stroking their sleek idealized bottoms, their hard shiny breasts. Why are they so beautiful? You peel down undies, lift skirts. Nothing underneath of course. Just a lot of rigid bare bodies, dressed in their absence of definition, yet, in a chilling way, they excite you. You touch the hard lumps between their legs, thinking about the soft wet pussy of the little sex kitten, the one who asked you to protect her and whom you failed, poor thing. So alive. What did the Creep say? Like wet velvet. Though he was talking about a dead woman. Wasn’t he? Or. . . . You hesitate before the manikin widow, feeling confused, chastised. Like you know something you don’t know, or shouldn’t. You take hold of the black skirt hem, drop it. Not right. Can’t look under the veil either. You don’t want to see that cold blind deadpan face.