The Hinky Bearskin Rug (6 page)

Jewel agreed.
With a poppet in the Kraft Building, there was no longer any question whether
the place was hinky enough to be condemned. The feds had shut all of Pittsburgh
down for just a handful of these things.

Randy reached
past Jewel and casually dipped his fingers through the figure. Jewel gasped.
The poppet’s image swirled and deformed as if he had scooped up some honey.
Then, when his fingers were gone, she slowly reformed into her old shape.

“Magic,” Randy
said.

“Urk,” Ed
said.

Clay backed
up. “How did you find this?”

“Remember
O’Connor?” Ed said to Jewel. “Used to do immigration until he got too fat to
move around. Then he phoned taxis from home.”

Jewel
remembered. “He’s a wreck.” O’Connor was the kind of drunk who never actually
fell down, but he was never sober.

“He used to be
a good investigator,” Ed said. The Department was loyal to good people. “He
came in once a week to collect his check. Sometimes he sat down here all day
and played cards, shot the shit with the older guys. Smartened up the young
kids if they was smart enough to let him.”

“He’s helped
me a couple of times,” she admitted. Then she noticed the past tense. “Oh.”

“Yeah. He was
found dead in his apartment this morning. One of the guys thought he might of
left some gin money in the locker, so he bust it open.”

Jewel cracked
her first smile all day. “Let me guess. Sayers?”

“Yeah.” Ed
snorted. “Poor unlucky fuck.”

A laugh escaped
Jewel. She watched the naked girlie-girl in the locker do indecent things with
no more props than her own outrageously-proportioned body. “Did Sayers stroke
out, or just stroke?”

“Talk like a
lady, dammit.” Ed frowned. “Sayers came up and told me, like he should. What I
want youse to do is deal with this. Then go over to O’Connor’s apartment and
see if there’s any clues. Find any more of it.” Raptly, he stared. The tip of
his tongue touched his lower lip. Then he shuddered. “Just deal with it! And come
up to my office when you’re done.”

When he’d
stumped out, Jewel looked at Clay. “Any ideas?”

Clay shrugged.
“How should I know? Does it move from locker to locker? Can we just shut the
door and forget about it? How did it get down here, anyway?”

“You’re a big
help.”

“This is a
pocket zone,” Randy stated.

“Got it in
one,” Jewel said.

Clay watched
the show. “Is it alive?”

“That remains
to be seen,” Randy said crisply. He shut the locker door as much as was
possible — somebody had pried it open with a crowbar, destroying the
combination lock in the process — and opened the adjacent locker, which was
empty. Jewel watched with fascination. Randy ran his hand over the wall shared
with the infested locker, then tapped it lightly, as if testing for stickiness.
Then he opened the pocket zone locker again and stared expressionlessly at the
small, very womanly figure inside.

“Well,
Sherlock?” Clay said.

Ignoring Clay,
Randy squatted and gingerly pulled out one of the magazines stacked in the
locker. He handed it behind him.

Jewel grabbed
it before Clay could.
“Girls, Giggles,
and Garters.
What kind of magazine is that?”

Clay took it
from her. “Tame porn.” He flipped through, and she caught a glimpse of bare
skin, black lace, red lace, bold eyes, pouting breasts. “Very, very lame, very
tame porn.”

“O’Connor was
kind of a sweetheart,” she said absently. She watched Randy tease a crumpled
white bag out of the top shelf of the locker. Standing, he was much closer to
that dancing
thing
in the lower
compartment.

Jewel saw the
poppet reach for him. It put its hands right through his jeans.

“Ohmigod!
Randy!” Jewel shrieked.

Randy looked
down and backed away, far too calmly in her opinion.

The girl in
the locker pouted, looked sly, beckoned, and flirted at Randy with girl-next-door
blue eyes.

Slowly he shut
the door on her. “We must keep people out of here for now.”

“That’s a big
yes,” Jewel said. “Did you feel anything?”

Randy frowned.
“Hard to say.”

“Where the
hell did Clay go?”

“Here,” Clay
said, coming back into the locker room with a roll of gray duct tape. “Will
this do?” He tore off a strip.

Randy sealed
the gaping steel edges shut. “Temporarily.”

“Let’s get
upstairs,” Jewel said. “See what else Ed knows.”

o0o

Ed was sitting
behind his desk when they came into his office, but he jumped up, looking
relieved. “Shut the door. You’re okay?”

“Peachy,”
Jewel said. Her skin prickled. “I don’t think it can get any worse.”

“It’s already
worse. That douchebag Bing Neebly called today. OED is interested in the Kraft.”
Ed looked at Clay. “Office for Economic Development. You know how we got this
building?”

“Sure,” Clay said. “It got
torn down and then it came back like magic.”

“Don’t say
that word,” Ed said automatically. “And after all the legal shit settled, the
city gave it back to Consumer Services, because everybody else was scared to
move in. If you’d a seen the old quarters in River North, you’d understand why
the Commissioner said yes. Like a sardine can.”

“Shit,” Jewel
said, comprehension flashing on her. She turned to Clay and Randy. “This land
is worth a lot of money, developed. But like this? It’s just home to dopey old
Consumer Services. OED must be slavering to get their hands on it.”

Clay said, “So
I don’t get it. What’s the scam? We have use of the building because
everybody’s scared because it, like, magically reappeared after demolition.”

Jewel winced. “Don’t
say that word.”

“But now that
it seems to be safe, this OED wants to take it over and sell it,” Clay said.

“Right,” Ed
said.

“But it isn’t
safe.” Clay pointed at the floor and made a va-va-voom shape in the air with
his hands. “So we won’t lose the building after all.”

“Not
necessarily,” Jewel said. “OED could call in the feds and have them condemn the
building, thinking maybe they can nip in and cash in.”

“Only with a
poppet in the basement, that would backfire,” Ed said. “If it’s too hinky, the
feds don’t let you reuse the property. Could end up a bajillion-dollar hole in
the ground.”

Jewel scowled.
“I can’t believe they would do that. You can’t get taxes out of a hole in the
ground. Da mayor wouldn’t thank OED for taking a property that rich permanently
off the tax rolls.”

“You don’t
know Bing Neebly,” Ed said gloomily. “He used to work here, eight-ten years
ago. Mumped freebies and peddled influence and sold favors all day. Everybody
hated him. Then Taylor comes in and reforms the department. Neebly cried woof
to da mayor and moved over to OED just in time to avoid indictment. He’d put us
out for a bent nickel.”

“Everybody
would lose,” Clay mused, with an all-too-familiar, there’s-money-in-here-somewhere-for-me
look that Jewel dreaded. “The situation has possibilities.”

Jewel shook
herself. “Let’s get over to O’Connor’s place.”

“And bring
your hinky radar,” Ed said, pointing at Randy.

Randy looked
eager. She began to think he might earn his keep after all.

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?”