Something More Than Night (35 page)

*   *   *

We graduated from necking to fumbling. But she was stewed to the hat. Maybe I was, too, but I’m no tomcat. Poor Bayliss, always tripping over his tattered pride.

I took her by the elbows, gently pushed her away. She fixed me with a devilish grin, thinking that I was thinking about backing her into a mattress. Maybe I was. Ignoring the invitation in her coquettishly fluttered eyelashes, I shook my head.

“Ease off, doll,” I said. “You’re piffled.”

“What a gentleman.” Her tone spoke volumes about what she thought of gentlemen at that moment.

“It’s a character flaw.”

“Yeah, it is,” she said, and made for the bedroom. Alone. I imagined wisps of smoke eddying in her wake, wafting from the ashes of her ardor.

*   *   *

A smattering of random tragedies afflicted random strangers all on the same random afternoon. And there were no survivors. Before evening fell, all the people whose nightmares Molly had banished were dead.

She had failed to protect them. All her effort for nothing. The moment she was too preoccupied to protect them … dead.

*   *   *

Night had wrestled with evening, and won, by the time flametop showed her coppery mop. She didn’t barge in by riding the shadows beneath the door. She knocked like a woman who’d been raised well. I tossed the lock and let her in.

“They’re all dead,” she said. “Those bastards killed every goddamned one of them.”

Her hair fluttered in the updraft from her rage. Floorboards darkened beneath her feet. She needed to take a breather before she torched the joint.

“Take it easy, angel. Tell it to me straight.”

But she didn’t. Instead, she looked around the ducky apartment. “Where’s Anne?”

“Relax. Your hotcha librarian is sleeping one off.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I told her about our little misadventure, the walnuts and the wine and the fumbling. The more I spoke the more flametop looked fit to lay an egg, so I kept it short. The searing
heiligenschein
faded out. She sniffled hard enough to eject a tear.

I said, “You’re looking glum, chum.” But she didn’t rise to the bait, so I asked, “You taking the night shift?”

“Fine.” Faint, that voice, as though from a very deep well. Dames.

I let myself out.

*   *   *

Molly spent the night sitting by the window, watching the empty street below. She had too many things to think about. Murders; conspiracies; the nature of reality. The way her misguided attempts to help those poor people had led to their deaths. But all she could picture was Anne and Bayliss pressed against the door with their faces mashed together. More than once she contemplated leaving, letting Anne fend for herself.

Here Molly had thought
she
was the one keeping an unconscionable secret. What the fuck, Anne?

Anne came tromping down from the bedroom loft about an hour after sunrise.

“You’re back,” she said. It didn’t come with the slow, wide grin like the last time she awoke to find Molly there. She held the greeting at arm’s length. “That’s good. We need to have a long talk.”

“Yeah, we do. How’d you enjoy Paris?”

Anne frowned. “Huh?”

“Bayliss told me about your side trip.”

“Look. I just woke up, I didn’t have any dinner, and I haven’t had any coffee yet. And I was already hella confused when I went to bed. All I know is that one minute we were having lunch at the library and then the next minute we were in fucking Minneapolis,” Anne said. She shuffled to the kitchen, opened the coffeemaker, and flung yesterday’s grounds into the composter pail. “Oh, and then I met your brother. Who seems to believe that you died months ago.”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Molly. “I guess neither one of us has been completely honest with the other.”

Anne dropped the coffee carafe in the sink. “How dare
you
accuse
me
of lying.”

“I don’t blame you for rethinking how you feel about me in light of yesterday. I honestly don’t. But throwing yourself at Bayliss? That’s a slap in the face.”

“Wait. You think—eeeeew.”

The disgust was genuine. So was Molly’s confusion. “You guys didn’t make out?”

Anne’s face twisted up. “What? Jesus! Shit, no!”

“He said—”

“Where do you get off? I resent the implication that I don’t understand my own orientation.”

“He said you went to Paris, where you guys got tipsy on wine. And that you made a heavy pass at him.”

Anne looked ill. “Paris?” She shook her head. Her whole body. “Even if I did like boys, which I don’t, he’s like a hundred years old. And he smells weird. Like cigarettes mixed with rose petals and old books.”

Molly couldn’t understand what she was hearing. “But Bayliss said—”

“I don’t care what he said. We came straight here. No Paris, no wine, no tonsil hockey. We sat here all afternoon and evening until I got so bored with his second-rate Philip Marlowe act that I went to bed.”

This was the truth; Molly felt it in her bones. Anne didn’t go for men; Molly knew this. But Bayliss had been so matter of fact about it … What a strange thing to lie about. He must have made a pass at Anne, got shot down hard, and then lied to assuage his wounded chauvinist pride.

Molly raised her hands, palm out. “Anne? I’m genuinely sorry. I apologize.”

Anne finished with the coffeemaker. She crossed her arms, leaning against the counter while the machine gurgled.

“Now that the important stuff is straightened out”—Molly winced—“I’d kinda like to know who those guys were and why we were running from them. But first, just out of curiosity, why does your brother think you’re dead?”

Here it comes.
Inhaled breath hissed through Molly’s teeth. “Promise not to freak out?”

Anne blinked. Twice. Took a step back. “Oh my God.”

Molly reached for her, but thought better of it because she couldn’t handle the sight of Anne flinching away again. “I’m still the person you met. I’m still the person I told you I was. I’m just … a little more than that.”

Molly struggled but failed to find the words that would ease an incipient spiritual crisis. Anne stared at her for the space of several heartbeats. Finally, she breathed, “This is so fucking cool.”

If she weren’t already dead, the whiplash might have killed Molly. “What?”

“Are you kidding? This is the coolest thing in the world.” Anne paced, driven into motion by the steam pressure of ideas boiling within. “There
is
an afterlife, and it’s not my parents’ fucked-up homophobic cry-fest.” She paused. Frowned. “You’re not, like, a demon or something. Are you?”

“Uh, no.”

“Didn’t think so.” Anne scratched her chin. “Wow. Just, wow. So we really do continue after we die.”

“Uh…”

Molly didn’t want to talk or even think about that. She was the only human to continue after death, inevitably isolated from other people by the simple fact of death. The afterlife was a vacuum. A burst balloon. Thinking about it made her dizzy, so she didn’t. Not right now.

Anne said, “How did you…” Her question trailed off into a shrug.

“Got run over by a train.”

Now it was Anne who flinched. “Yowch. Did it hurt?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Did you jump?”

“No. It was an accident—”

According to Bayliss.

Bayliss, who claimed that a lesbian tried to jump his bones.

Oh, no.

Molly reeled from a sudden wave of sick dread. Something cold and oily sloshed through her gut. She dropped into a kitchen chair. It took a few steadying breaths before she could dodge the curling edge of panic.

“Anne, who is Philip Marlowe?”

*   *   *

“Let me tell you a story,” said Molly. “And as I go along, you tell me if it sounds familiar. Okay?”

Anne gave a confused shrug. “Sure, I guess.”

Molly gathered her thoughts.
The story begins where?

“Okay. So, there’s this guy. He wears a fedora, he drinks rye whiskey, he lives on the edges. Not much connection to other people. But he’s scraping by. One day, he gets a telephone call—”

“And the person on the other end offers him a job,” said Anne. “He doesn’t like the caller, and doesn’t necessarily like the job, but he needs the work so he takes it anyway.”

Molly took a steadying breath.
Please let this be a coincidence,
she thought. “You’ve heard this before?”

“I’ve read a few books that start this way.”

“Huh. Does the job lead him to a woman?”

“Dame,” Anne suggested. “But yeah. It either starts with a woman or leads to a woman.”

“He becomes fascinated with her. But he senses that she’s more than she seems. That she’s harboring a big secret.”

“Of course she is. These old stories aren’t particularly enlightened, you know. Women are frequently a source of problems.”

Molly said, “Against his better judgment, he gets involved in her life—”

Anne continued in a bored monotone, “And discovers that she’s in deep trouble. In over her head.”

A tingly sense of alarm raised goose pimples on the back of Molly’s neck. This was not good.

She asked, “What kind of trouble?”

“Oh, it could be several things.” Anne counted them off on her fingers. “The detective was hired to find her because she knows something dangerous. Or she might be on the run from a gangster ex-boyfriend. Or maybe she stole something.”

“What if somebody was murdered, and something valuable went missing? And some very serious and determined people think she took it?”

Anne thought for a moment. “That works, too.”

“They want it so badly that they ransack her place.”

“Well, of course they do,” said Anne. Then she anticipated the next beat, which sent cold sweat to pool in the small of Molly’s back and trickle between her breasts. “And the detective, moved by his tarnished sense of chivalry, can’t stand the sight of a damsel in distress. So he tries to intervene.”

Molly remembered how Bayliss had looked after his encounter with the Cherubim. “They beat him up.”

“They don’t kill the detective, though,” Anne said. “Just knock him around a bit.”

Molly said, “But he isn’t intimidated so easily. So he keeps at it. While investigating the murder victim, he finds some evidence connecting the dead guy to the woman.”

“Sure he does. But he knows it’s all just circumstantial, so he hides it away.”

Yeah. At an old folks’ home …

“Even though he has a sinking feeling she’s more than she seems?” Molly shook her head, flailing for straws. Hoping this wasn’t going where it appeared to be. “That seems like a dumb thing to do.”

But Anne dashed that hope, too. “Nah, it’s part of the formula. See, by this point he’s starting to see her as a client, too. And the detective’s personal code of honor demands that until things are resolved—either she’s out of danger, or her duplicity and guilt are conclusively established—his loyalty is to his client. Even if he doesn’t trust her.”

Molly continued, “Okay. Anyway. So the detective investigates further. But when he goes to question somebody connected to the case, he finds—”

“A dead body. Duh.”

In this case, Father Santorelli. Son of a bitch.

“Geez. Don’t look so surprised,” said Anne. “Philip Marlowe practically can’t walk down the street without tripping over a stiff.” This was a pointless conversation to her. Meanwhile, though, she was demolishing the bedrock of all Molly’s experiences since she died. But what lay beneath it all?

Molly asked, dreading the answer, “What happens next?”

“Well, at some point he has a run-in with the cops. Often more than once.”

“Why the cops?”

“They’re interested in the woman, too. And they know he’s working for her.”

Molly thought about how Bayliss had described his encounter with the Thrones. “But the detective refuses to tell them anything. Why?”

“Again, that’s the sense of honor at work. To share what he knows, or suspects, would be to betray his client. So he clams up. And anyway, he’s hidden the evidence—”

“Or destroyed it?”

“—yeah, so there’s nothing solid to connect her to whatever crime they’re investigating.”

What else had Bayliss told her? Uriel.

“Does he ever get warned off a case?”

“Often. For one, the cops almost always want him to drop it. They don’t like him meddling in their affairs.”

“Anybody else?”

“Sometimes the story involves another faction, sure. Like a club owner or something like that. Who makes a few threats to try to get the noble detective to drop the case.”

“Let me guess. Because he’s asking questions they don’t want asked?”

“Pretty much.” Anne was getting annoyed. “You know, I’ve been really patient. I’m still waiting for my turn to ask questions.”

But it was terrifying, the way things fit the pattern Anne described. So Molly pressed on, desperate to find a contradiction.

“You have been incredibly patient. But please. Just a little more.” The problem with these parallels, Molly realized, was that
she
hadn’t done anything according to a script. “Tell me more about the women in these stories.”

Anne sighed. “It’s like I said. They’re rife with the sexism of their day. The women fall into a small number of categories.” Once again she ticked the points off on her fingers. “Let’s see. You’ve got your sexy dame with a mysterious past. Then you’ve got your crazy, murderous sexpot. The former often turns out to be the latter, by the way. And then you’ve got your puppyish, virginal sylph.” After a moment she counted one more finger. “Oh, almost forgot the acid-tongued harridan, too. She’s more rare.”

“And does he always get it on with one of them?”

“Sometimes, but not always. He has a complicated sense of honor. But there’s always flirtation, sexual tension. Sometimes even a subtle invitation. Or unsubtle.”

He didn’t get that from me. But the story demanded it. So when the next woman came along, he pigeonholed her role in the tale to fit that demand.

That was his mistake. If he hadn’t adhered so rigidly to the traditional story, Molly might never have caught on.