IT WAS SHORT, BUT IT WASN’T SWEET. I WOKE UP FEELING like I still needed the night’s sleep I‘d missed when Kornfeld took me in. They had me in a set of ugly pajamas in a room that was blank and square and white, a room a whole lot like the one I‘d been in what felt only minutes ago, with the doctors who’d readied me for the freeze.
An orderly sat in a chair in the corner, looking at a magazine. I got off the table, peeved, about to squawk about the thing not even working. Then the guy noticed that I’d come around and handed me my street clothes, all clean and folded, and I realized with a jolt that I’d done my time. The funny taste in my mouth was six years old.
I got dressed, slowly. The orderly didn’t rush me. After a while he asked me if I was ready, and I said yes, and we went out into the corridor and took the elevator up to ground level. Inside the elevator the orderly looked me over and smiled. I tried to smile back, but I was pretty confused. I wanted to feel intuitively that six years had passed, but the feeling wasn’t there.
He led me to an office where an inquisitor sat tapping something idly into a desktop console. He kept going for a minute after we came in, then he stopped and folded the screen back into the desk and smiled. I sat in a chair and waited, and while the orderly and the inquisitor initialed some paperwork and mumbled something to each other, I looked out the window at the sun glinting off the glass of the building across the street.
It was probably just a function of my newly defrosted eyes, but I swear it looked all wrong to me, the colors too bright, the outlines blurred. Like a badly retouched photo. It occurred to me that I was about to walk out the doors of the Office into that badly retouched photo forever. This was my world now, and the rest was gone. I realized that I was still all wound up inside about the case, and I had to laugh. It was pretty goddamned funny. As if there was still something to call a case.
The orderly left, and the inquisitor opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a little metal locker about the size of a shoe box, and put it on the desk in front of me. Inside was the stuff they’d taken out of my pockets six years ago, all carefully tagged and wrapped in plastic. It wasn’t much. The keys to my car and apartment, each of which had disappeared about five years and eleven months ago, when I stopped making the payments. The keys made a reassuring lump in my back pocket—I could use them to clean under my fingernails.
The rest was the ripped halves of six different hundred-dollar bills, and the anti-grav pen. I played with the money for a minute, trying to assemble something that looked like I could pass it through a bank teller’s window, or at least across a counter in a darkened bar, but apparently I’d been in the habit of pocketing the same half of each bill. Until I ran into some other guy with the opposite habit, the paper was useless. I folded it and put it into my pocket anyway.
I was pulling the tags off the keys and the pen when I noticed the inquisitor leaning across the desk and staring at me, not a little intently. I looked at him, and he grinned. He was probably in his twenties, but I got the feeling he’d already seen a lot of karmic flotsam like myself coming and going out of the freeze, and that it made him feel smug to watch me struggling with my pathetic little array of possessions.
He got up suddenly and closed the door to the hallway. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Oh, good,” I said, bewildered.
“I’ll give you fifty dollars for that pen,” he said, moving around again to behind the desk. “That’s the first of its kind.” He spoke the way you spoke to children, back when there had been children. “It’s a collector’s item,” he explained.
I had to smile. “That pen saved my life,” I said.
He took it for a bargaining position. “Okay,” he said. “A hundred.”
“It’s not for sale.”
He looked at me funny. “I’m trying to do you a favor, old-timer. Your money doesn’t look so good.”
He had a point. “Hundred fifty,” I said.
He leaned back in his chair and smiled without opening his mouth, then chuckled and took out his wallet. “I could have just taken it, you know.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I said, a little miffed. “If you could have, you would have.”
He opened his wallet, and there was music in the air, a little fanfare of horns that lasted until he gave me the money and put the wallet back in his pocket. It made my skin crawl. I hoped the music was in the wallet, not in the money.
He opened up another drawer in his desk and took out a little envelope, sealed with a plastic ripcord, and a fresh card with my name on it.
“Seventy-five points,” he said. “Best of luck.” He flashed me his idiot grin. My exit interview was over, apparently. When I pulled the little cord, the envelope turned out to be full of generic make. A touching gesture.
I put the stuff in my pockets. I had an urge to wipe that smile-colored stain off the lower part of his face, but I held it back. I flipped him his pen, and he made the adjustment in his calculation of its trajectory and grabbed it before it soared over his head. But only just. “So long,” I said, and got up and went out.
I passed through the empty lobby and into the sun. I didn’t have my next move figured out, but my feet knew enough to create some distance between myself and the Office, and they got right to it.
When I got to the corner, I felt someone come up behind me and tug on my arm. It was Surface. The ape looked small and hobbled over, but then six years had passed, and anyway I’d never seen him out of his bed before. He was wearing a dirty gray suit and a red tie with little embroidered polo ponies on it. He had a pretty nice pair of shoes, but they were buried under a couple of centuries’ worth of scuff marks.
He looked up at me. The leather of his face was wrinkled like foil. His expression was surprisingly gentle. “I saw in the paper you were listed as coming out,” he said. “I thought you might need somebody to buy you a drink.”
I was touched. I wasn’t sure I liked having someone who looked as bad as Surface feeling sorry for me, but I was still touched.
“Sure,” I said. “Lead the way.”
The old ape turned his rounded shoulders and walked up the block. I went after him. I didn’t know what time it was, but the sun was high, and it occurred to me that Surface must have gotten out of bed early to catch me. It made me feel like a stray picked up at the pound, and it made me wonder if he thought maybe I needed more than just a drink to get me on my feet.
We went around the back of the building into the big parking lot. There were just a couple of people on the pavement, apart from the inquisitors coming in and going out to their black cars. When I tried to meet their eyes, the people turned to look at their watches, or the sky, or the gutter. My paranoia was functioning as usual; at the drop of a hat, it told me that my time in the freeze had left some mark, some indefinable tattoo on my aura, which would trigger recognition until I found a way to conceal it. Then I laughed at myself. What I needed was a drink, and a line of make.
I tapped Surface on the shoulder. “Where do I go to get my license?”
He looked at me and winced. I didn’t think a face could get any more wrinkled than his already was, but it did. The wrinkles doubled in on themselves. His face practically collapsed.
“Hold off on the questions,” he said through his teeth.
WE GOT IN HIS CAR AND HE DROVE ME TO HIS APARTMENT and poured me a drink in his kitchen. The place was even more squalid than the house I’d found him recuperating in six years ago. I also didn’t see any sign of his girlfriend, and maybe one was the cause of the other, though in which direction I didn’t want to guess. The world he had built up around him then seemed to be gone. Once upon a time he’d been an ape P.I., with trimmings. Now he was just an old ape.
We didn’t talk for a while. It seemed to suit us both. The bottle he produced was half empty to begin with, and we didn’t have to struggle to finish the job. It hit my empty stomach pretty hard, but that was fine with me. I didn’t really want to see what kind of food he’d provide.
I decided to find out what make was in the envelope. It was another buffer to put between me and this new world. I was afraid that when I started asking questions, I wouldn’t like the answers I got. I wanted the make to help me forget all my questions.
I dumped the whole packet out on the table. It wasn’t enough to divvy into portions. It was hardly enough for now, whatever the ingredients. I crashed it with my thumb and rolled up the envelope to snort with.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Surface.
“I’m way past that lecture,” I said.
He gritted his teeth and pushed away his empty glass. “Slow down, Metcalf. I’m trying to tell you you don’t want it.”
“Not want,” I said. “Need.”
“That’ll give you what you’re looking for and then some,” he said. He licked his lips and spoke carefully and slowly, the second person in an hour to treat me like a child. I didn’t like it. “You haven’t got any memories to wipe out yet,” he said.
“I’ve got plenty, from the first time around,” I said. “Trust me. I can spare a few.”
“The make is different,” he said. His voice was low and insistent. “Do me a favor and skip it.”
I sighed, unrolled the envelope, and used it to scoop the make into a little pile to one side of the table. My good feeling was gone. The alcohol was already going sour in my stomach.
“Okay, Surface. I’ll do you a favor.” I looked as deep as I could into the black of his eyes, but he didn’t blink. “And you do me a favor back. Tell me what turned you into a pussy. You had more backbone lying in bed watching Muzak.” I made myself laugh to cover my fear. “If I’m about to get like you, let me know so I can put a bullet through my head while I still have the guts.”
His gaze fell, finally, and he reached for his glass, but it was empty. “You’ll have to make some adjustments, Metcalf. That’s not my fault. You just don’t walk around spouting questions anymore.”
“I mean to get a license.”
“There’s no license anymore,” he said.
“There’s inquisitors,” I said.
“No private.”
“Well, there is now,” I said, feeling full of bluster. “Here I am. There’s no other name for what I do.”
“Your role is obsolete,” he said, too firmly, his voice heavy and dead. “You were walking that line before and you knew it. It’s finished now, Metcalf. Let it go.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said, and then stopped. It was supposed to be the beginning of something snappy, but my heart wasn’t in it.
His lips peeled back in a grim smile.
“I consist solely of my role,” I said, half to myself. “There’s nothing else. I’ve looked.”
“Look again,” he said. “The role is gone. You can’t even go around talking this much. Forget questions.”
“Forget questions,” I repeated. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
I ran my finger through the pile of white powder and drew a little path of it across the table. I wanted some up my nose. “What’s wrong with the make?”
“There are no individual blends anymore. Just standard issue.”
“What’s standard issue?”
“Time-release Forgettol, mostly. It’s all the rage. Snort it if you like—just make sure you write your name and address on a matchbook cover first. In big letters.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Whatever.” He sighed. “I might as well clue you in, Metcalf. Don’t go around talking about the past. Memory is rude. That’s what this stuff is for, and everyone uses it. In Los Angeles it’s illegal to know what you do for a living. If you don’t use it, pretend you do. And if you see people talking into their shirtsleeves, they aren’t talking to you. Don’t gape.”
I waited for the rest, but his lecture was finished. He got up and went to the cupboard to rummage around, presumably for another bottle. I just sat there and let what he’d told me sink in, or tried to. It kept getting jammed about halfway down.
He located another bottle, less empty than the one we’d just polished off, but not by much, and dribbled what there was evenly into our two glasses. Then he sat down and drank his. I wondered how much alcohol it took to make his little body cry uncle, and then I figured he must have worked his tolerance up pretty high by now. When you don’t know how many bottles you’ve got, it isn’t because you haven’t been drinking.
My drug of choice was different, of course, and my eye was still on the pile of make. My bloodstream was crying for some addictol, the one ingredient no blend left out. And maybe, too, there was a part of me that wanted, finally, to let go and buy into the generic reality.
I swept the little pile of standard-issue Forgettol back into the envelope, folded the flap over, and put it in my pocket. I’d need it to bluff with, like Surface said. If the shakes got too bad, I might need it to snort, and to hell with the consequences.
Surface put down his glass. “Goddamn, Metcalf,” he said. “You know, I haven’t talked this much in years.”
“We weren’t talking, just now.”
He waved my sarcasm away. “I mean today, since picking you up.”
I felt a surge of impatience. I wanted to tell him he’d talked just fine two days ago. But of course that was irrational. Surface had been gentle with me, but I had to be just as gentle with him. Because in effect I’d escaped the decline that hit while I was in the freezer. I’d have to take care not to remind people of how much was missing now as compared to before.
“Okay,” I said. “I can take a hint. Thanks for the drink.” I polished off what was left in my glass.
“Don’t take it too hard,” he said. “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. You’ll learn the rules.”
“I’ll have my lips removed as soon as I learn a way to whistle out my asshole.”
“That’s the idea.”
I guess I was making him happy. He’d set out to save me some trouble, and I was acting like I’d gotten the message. I didn’t know whether or not to tell him the bad news—that a casual remark he’d dropped a moment ago triggered an insight, which made the whole case, six years dead or not, seem tantalizingly close to a solution. I might not have a license, but that wouldn’t stop me from finishing what I’d started.
I was pretty sure the defeated old ape across the table from me didn’t want to hear it. But the other Surface, the grizzled veteran private inquisitor I’d known six years or two days ago, might feel a different way about it, might like to think I was still on the job.
I didn’t think about it long. The Surface who would have liked to know was six years gone. I was going to have to start making the adjustment. I got up and put on my coat.
“Don’t take it too hard, Metcalf,” said Surface again.
“Sure,” I said. I wanted to get out of there, on the chance that what he had might be contagious. Besides, sitting still was making me nervous. I was thinking about the make in my pocket, and my hands were trembling.
I didn’t tell Surface to stay in touch, or take care, or anything like that. I thought he’d appreciate me keeping my mouth shut, so I just turned around and put my hand up when I got to the door. He nodded at me, and I went out and downstairs to the street. The sun was in the afternoon half of the sky now, and my stomach was beginning to chew on itself. It was about a ten-block walk to a place where I used to like to get a sandwich. Maybe it was still there. I started walking.
THE PLACE I HAD IN MIND WAS GONE, BUT THERE WAS another one just like it down the block. Apparently people still ate sandwiches. I broke the inquisitor’s fifty-dollar bill on a ten-dollar heap of bread and mayonnaise and a three-dollar cup of soda, and when the cash register opened up for my money, it performed a little burst of orchestral music that lasted until the drawer was shut again. The guy behind the counter smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world. I wanted to smile back, but the smile wouldn’t come.
“I suppose your jukebox makes change,” I said.
The guy frowned like he didn’t understand. He took a little mechanical box out of his pocket and spoke into a microphone grille on the side of it. “That thing about the jukebox, just now,” he said.
“Just a joke,” said a voice from the box.
“Oh, yeah,” the guy said, and he looked at me and laughed.
I wanted him to be kidding, but he wasn’t. I decided it must have been what Surface meant about people talking into their sleeves, and it made me shudder. I took the sandwich to a table in the back, but my appetite was gone. I ate it anyway. When I was done, I took the cup and the wrapper and put them in the can by the door. It rewarded me with a miniature flourish of trumpets, but this time I didn’t say anything. I went outside instead and spent a quiet minute on the sidewalk putting the incident carefully out of my mind. My hands were trembling, so I put them in my pockets.
The next step, as I saw it, was to acquire some kind of housing and some kind of transportation, and in my situation that meant only one thing. You can sleep in a car, but you can’t drive a room in a flophouse. I located a rental agency and forked over the hundred-dollar bill to a fat guy in a lawn chair as the deposit on a weather-beaten dutiframe with half a tank of gas. I made sure to flash the stuff that looked like a pocketful of hundreds when I handed him the intact bill.
“I need your card,” he grunted.
It was new to me to hand it over to anyone but an inquisitor, but I remembered what Surface said about keeping my mouth shut and learning the rules, and took it out. I had the funny idea he was going to bill me points, but he just looked it over and wrote down the serial number, then handed it back. I looked at the new card for the first time. It had my name on it but it didn’t feel like mine. It was too clean. Mine had the pawprints of a thousand chumps all over it, and I missed it.
That done, the guy let me sign a few forms and drive the wreck away. The hundred was my last real money, which left me with the car, the half tank of gas, and the clothes I was wearing. Plus the packet of make if I wanted to do some fast forgetting. It was looking better and better.
I drove the car up into the hills until I found a view I liked. Then I got out and looked at it. There was a wind coming up off the bay, and it brought with it a smell of salt. It made me think of the ocean, and I entertained a brief fantasy of taking the car and driving down the peninsula to find a beach where I could throw my make and the stuff that looked like money and maybe even my seventy-five points of karma into the surf and then stretch out on the sand and wait to see what happened. I played with it the way you can when you know you’ll never do it. Then I started thinking about the case again.
I got back in the car and drove to the house on Cranberry Street. I didn’t have any particular reason—I just wanted to. The case had started there, with me hired to peer in the windows at Celeste, and maybe I had the idea it would end there too. For all I knew the place was torn down by now, but I was willing to chance a little of my gasoline to find out.
The house was there. I can’t say if I was glad or not. I parked the car and walked around the back, just for the sake of nostalgia. The lot in the backyard was still empty; whoever had the blueprints drawn up six years ago had changed his mind about spending the money. I walked most of the way around the house, but didn’t bother to look in the windows. Nothing on the outside was any different.
Encouraged, I went up to the front and rang the bell. The wait was long enough that I was turning away when the door opened. It was Pansy Greenleaf, or Patricia Angwine. I didn’t know which name was righter. She looked considerably more than six years older, but I recognized her immediately. She didn’t recognize me. I hadn’t aged a day—well, maybe a day—but she stood blinking in the sunlight, drawing a blank.
“My name is Conrad Metcalf,” I said.
The name didn’t make any more of an impression than my face had. I waited, but she just stared.
“I want to talk to you,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Come in. I’ll consult my memory.”
She led me through the foyer. The house wasn’t kept up the way it had been or could have been, but when I walked into the living room to face the sun through that big bay window, it didn’t matter. The architect had designed the room to make you feel small and out of place, and it worked. Pansy still crept through the house like a burglar, and by now she’d lived here at least eight years, so I knew it worked oh her too. She brought me in, pointed to a seat on the couch, and stood for a minute studying my features, knitting her brow in a parody of thought.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. Her voice was light. She looked twenty years older, yet the pall of guilt and sorrow she had carried with her everywhere before seemed completely lifted.
I sat back on the couch and waited while she went into the kitchen. As far as I could tell we were alone in the house. The spot where I was sitting was warm, and spread out on the table in front of me was the last of what looked to have been a bunch of lines of make, and a razor and a straw. I didn’t have to guess what Pansy had been doing when I rang, the bell. The only thing I felt was a vague jealousy.
When she came back, she sat down across from me and put what looked like a pocket calculator with a microphone on the table between us.
“Conrad Metcalf,” she said into the microphone.
I almost responded, but I was cut off by the sound of her own voice coming out of the device on the table. “I’m sorry,” the voice said. “You don’t remember that.”
She looked up at me and smiled, puzzled. I tried not to stare like too much of an idiot. “I don’t recognize your name,” she said. “Perhaps you should check your memory. This could be the wrong house.”
I thought fast. “You got my name wrong,” I said. “Maynard Stanhunt. Try it again.”
“Oh,” she said, chagrined. She depressed a button on the microphone and said the new name.
“Maynard Stanhunt,” repeated the machine. “That nice doctor. He and Celeste were so nice to you, before. They’ve been away.”
“You’re that nice doctor,” she said guilelessly, as if the words hadn’t been spoken in her voice just seconds ago by the thing on the table. “It’s been such a long time. It’s nice to see you.”
I was dumbfounded, but I worked double time to cover it up. “Yes,” I said. “It’s nice to be back”
“Well,” she said. “I’m so glad.”
“That’s nice,” I said. The word was like an infection. “It’s nice to be glad.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I want to ask you a few questions,” I said.
“Oh,” she said again. “Questions.”
I guess her hand was on the button, because the thing on the table said: “Only if it’s completely necessary.”
“It’s completely necessary,” I said before she got a chance to repeat it.
She looked in confusion at the machine and then up at me. She was unsettled by my responding to the recorded voice. I guess it was impolite to admit that it was there.
“Oh,” she said. “I suppose it’s all right. If it’s completely necessary.”
“Tell me how you can afford to keep the house,” I said.
She knit her brow like a housewife whose cake has fallen in the oven. “The money for the house,” she said into the mike.
“Joey gives it to you,” came her voice right back.
“Joey gives me the money,” she said. “He’s so nice to me.”
“Joey,” I repeated. “What happened to Danny?”
“Danny,” she said to the machine.
The thing said in her voice: “Danny Phoneblum. He’s so big and fat. He used to be your best friend, practically. He got tired and went to live in the rest home. He’s very good to Joey. Treats him like the son he never had. A whiskey and soda with just a twist of lemon, that’s what he likes.”
“I guess I didn’t understand the question,” said Pansy haplessly.
I was beginning to get it. Memory was permissible when it was externalized, and rigorously edited. That left you with more room in your head for the latest pop tune—which was sure to be coming out of the nearest water fountain or cigarette machine.
“Forget it,” I said. “Tell me who got pinned with the rap for Celeste’s murder.”
“Celeste’s murder,” echoed Pansy.
“Celeste went away for a while,” replied the voice.
“Celeste went away,” said Pansy. “That’s not the same as being murdered.”
“No,” I admitted. “It’s not the same.”
“You must have made a mistake,” she said. “Consult your memory.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I made a mistake. Tell me about your brother. Is he out of the freezer?”
“My brother,” she said.
“You don’t remember your brother,” said her memory.
She looked at me and shrugged.
“Orton Angwine,” I said.
“Orton Angwine,” she said.
“The name just doesn’t mean anything to you,” said her memory.
“The name just doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” I said. I was getting tired of the conversation. The ratio of redundancy to information was a little on the high side. I’d been playing with the idea that it might be the memory machine and not Pansy herself that I ought to interrogate. Now I changed my mind. The memory had too many gaps in it. Not as many as Pansy, but too many.
“You’re so full of funny questions, Dr. Stanhunt,” said Pansy. “I wish I understood.”
“I’m sorry, Pansy. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t completely necessary.”
“You ought to use a memory.”
“I have the new kind of memory,” I said. “It’s a cranial implant. You don’t have to speak out loud. You just think, and it talks to you in a quiet little voice in your head.”
“Oh,” she said. She thought about that for a minute. “It sounds very convenient.”
“It’s great,” I said. “And I really appreciate your helping me fill in a few blank spots here and there. I’ve been away, and I guess I’ve got some catching up to do.”
“You and Celeste,” she said brightly. “You’ve been on a trip.”
“That’s right. Now tell me about Dr. Testafer. Do you remember him?”
“Dr. Testafer,” she said into the mike.
“Old Dr. Testafer,” said the memory. It sounded like the beginning of a nursery rhyme. “He lives on the hill. He was Dr. Stanhunt’s partner, but he retired. A gin and tonic on the rocks.”
“He’s your partner,” she said to me. “I’m surprised you’re not in touch.”
“I would like to be,” I said. “Is he still living in the same place?”
“That’s enough,” came a voice from behind me. Barry Phoneblum was standing in the foyer.
“Barry,” said Pansy, her voice warm and real for the first time since I’d rung the bell. “You must remember Dr. Stanhunt. Dr. Stanhunt, this is my son Barry.”
“We’ve met,” said Barry sarcastically. He was dressed pretty simply, in a neat little shirt and a pair of striped pants, and he wasn’t wearing a wig this time. He wasn’t any taller, but his face now was that of a teenager, and his vast forehead was six years more wrinkled. Veins stood out like worms under the skin at his temples.
“I want you to go upstairs, Pansy,” he said firmly. “Dr. Stanhunt and I need to talk” He was talking to her, but he kept his eyes on me the whole time. It reminded me of Celeste coming home and sending the kitten away. I was always getting caught questioning people who didn’t know better than to feed me the answers.
“Oh,” said Pansy. She scooped the memory off the table and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt. She left the razor and the straw, but I suspected she had another set upstairs. She had new stuff to forget now.
“Okay,” she said. “Good day, Doctor. Give my regards to Celeste.”
I promised I would.
She tiptoed upstairs, leaving Barry and me alone in the living room. He vaulted up into the seat across from me in one neat movement, tucking his feet under his knees so they wouldn’t dangle. I guess by now he’d had a lot of experience being three feet tall in a six-foot world. When he put his hand inside his coat pocket, I was expecting him to produce a memory. Instead he produced a gun. It performed a couple of bars of ominous, pulsing violin when it came out of his pocket, like the occasional music titled GUN for an old radio show.
“Metcalf,” he said. “The kangaroo said you were coming back. I didn’t believe him.”
“It didn’t take you long to come into the fold,” I said. “So much for evolution therapy.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “My motives are beyond your comprehension.” Fuck you was his motto now, or at least he delivered it like one.
“Try me.”
He just sneered. The phone was on the table between us, and he leaned forward and plucked up the receiver without the muzzle of the gun ever veering out of line with my heart I watched him push buttons. Whatever the number was, his little fingers had it memorized. He pinned the phone against his big ear with his shoulder and waited for an answer.
“It’s Barry,” he said after what must have been a couple of rings. “Get me the kangaroo.”
The party at the other end kept him hanging a minute or so. I made amusing faces while we waited but he didn’t laugh.
“Shit,” he said, when the answer came. “Well, tell him I’ve got Metcalf here at the end of my gun. He’ll know what it means.”
They talked a little more, and then he put the receiver back and looked at me sourly, his vast forehead wrinkled all the way up over his skull.
“You must really be a glutton for punishment,” he said.
“A gourmet, actually,” I said. “If it isn’t perfect, I send it back.”
He didn’t laugh. “What did Pansy tell you?” he asked.
“Nothing I couldn’t have learned from a brick wall. We tried to play tic-tac-toe, but she kept forgetting if she was X’s or O’s.”
Barry didn’t like that. I guess he still had some kind of proprietary interest in Pansy. His jaw tightened and his face got red where the skin wasn’t stretched white with tension. “Fuck you, Metcalf.” His voice shook. “I could blow you away right now if I didn’t mind cleaning up the mess. You wouldn’t be missed.”
“Fuck you, Phoneblum. You pull that trigger now, and the recoil’s gonna break your nose.”
He moved the gun from in front of his face. “Don’t call me Phoneblum,” he said.
“Maybe you don’t buy him ties on Father’s Day,” I said. “And maybe he never took you to see the World Series. But that doesn’t change it.”
“I’d forgotten your interest in genealogy,” he said, recovering somewhat. But there was a conflict in him between the tough-guy lingo and the babyhead talk, a conflict he couldn’t resolve. “It represents a pathetic inability to see beyond superficial relationships.”
“I know what you mean. I’m having a real problem seeing beyond the relationship between the kangaroo’s hand and the strings attached to your arms and legs.” While I talked, I inched my feet forward on the carpet and slid my knees under the edge of the big glass coffee table. “I expected more of you, Barry. You were a pain in the ass, but at least you had style.”
“You’re making stupid guesses,” he said. “I take the kangaroo’s dough so I can care for my mother. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“Your mother’s dead,” I said. “I walked in her blood.”
It was meant to make him flinch, and it worked. I jerked the coffee table up with my knees and toppled it over on him. The telephone and the razor blade slid to the floor in a cloud of make, and the table fell without breaking to create a glass wall which trapped Barry huddling in his chair. The gun was still in his hand, but he couldn’t point it at me against the weight of the tabletop.
I put my shoe against the glass where his face was. “Throw me the gun, Barry. This’ll make a big mess if it breaks.”
He started squirming in his cage, but he didn’t let go of the gun. I pushed with my foot on the glass until the chair tipped over and Barry tumbled out onto the carpet. The gun fell into a corner. The glass slid back down to rest, propped between the chair and the carpet, intact.
I went over and took Barry by the collar and shook him a little, until my anger subsided and his shirt started ripping, then I put him down. I would have hated for him to get the impression I didn’t like the way he was dressed.
When I looked up, I saw Pansy watching us from halfway down the stairs, her hands folded neatly on the railing. She didn’t look overly concerned. I had no idea what she thought was happening, or whether she still possessed the equipment necessary to speculate. I didn’t particularly want to think about that. I was ready to go. The possible imminence of the kangaroo was not the only reason.
Barry was all balled up on the carpet, looking like nothing so much as an aborted fetus. I stepped over him and picked up the gun. It played me the music again. The violins didn’t know the action was over. I put it in my pocket, smoothed down my jacket, and stepped out into the foyer. Pansy didn’t say anything.
“You ought to buy your little boy a coloring book or a stamp album or something,” I said. “He’s got way too much time on his hands. He’s liable to take up masturbation.”
As I went out the door, I heard Pansy utter “masturbation” into her little microphone, but I was gone before I could hear the answer.
I RAN INTO A CHECKPOINT IN THE HILLS ON MY WAY TO Testafer’s place. They were idling in a narrow spot on the road, and I didn’t see them until it was too late. An inquisitor waved me over, walked up, and leaned into my window.
“Card,” he said.
I gave it to him.
“This looks pretty clean,” he said.
“It’s new,” I said. I looked him in the eye and hoped he didn’t see my hands shaking on the wheel. They were shaking for a few reasons. The gun in my pocket was one of them. The make not in my bloodstream was another;
He motioned another guy to come over to my car. “Take a look,” he said. “Rip Van Winkle.” He flipped him my card. It was funny: I hadn’t felt much attachment to it before, but I experienced a sudden fondness for it seeing it in the hands of two boys from the Office.
“Beautiful,” said Number Two. “Wish I saw more like this.”
I restrained my urge to comment.
“You got papers for the car?” said Number One.
“Rental,” I said. The receipt was in the glove compartment and I got it out.
He glanced at it and handed it back.
“Where you headed?” he said.
I shrugged. “Taking a look at the old neighborhood.”
“Got plans?”
I thought about it. I wondered how hard they’d laugh if I told them I was a private inquisitor on a case six years old. “I’m still getting my bearings,” I said.
It made him smile. He turned to Number Two. “Hear that? He’s getting his bearings.”
Number Two smiled and stepped up to my car. “What did you do, Metcalf?”
“Nothing, really,” I said. “Stepped on some toes. It’s ancient history.”
“Who sent you up?”
I thought fast. In all likelihood these were Kornfeld’s boys. “Morgenlander,” I said.
They traded a look.
“That’s a tough break,” said Number Two, and there was honest sympathy in his voice. He handed me back my card. I’d said the right thing.
“Damn shame,” said Number One. “They should have sprung the last of his guys years ago.”
I put my card in my back pocket and kept my mouth shut. I was suddenly okay in their book, which didn’t mean good things for Morgenlander. It gave me a sinking feeling, one I wouldn’t have expected to feel. I shouldn’t have been surprised; Morgenlander’s days were obviously numbered even six years ago. But I guess some stupid optimistic part of me had been hoping he’d squeak through.
“Okay,” said Number Two. “Just don’t use up all your money driving around in a rental car and reminiscing. You’re a young guy. Get a job.”
I thanked them and said so long. They went back to their roadblock, and I rolled up my window and drove away.
I thought about Kornfeld, and decided I didn’t mind if a rematch occurred. I had a lot less to lose this time. I owed the guy a punch in the stomach if nothing else, and if his underbelly turned out to be six years softer, all the better.
Yes, Kornfeld had earned a spot in my mental appointment book, but Dr. Testafer came first. I wanted Grover’s help, voluntary or not, with a couple of missing pieces. I found his street and parked in the clearing at the end of the driveway. Standing in the clearing brought back memories. I’d snorted make here three days or six years ago, depending on how you counted, and it made my nose itch to think of it. I tried to put make out of my mind as I walked up to Testafer’s house, but it was tough. The issue was like a jack-in-the-box with an overanxious spring; it jumped out at the slightest prompting.
The house looked pretty much the same—the main house, that is. The little house on the left didn’t look occupied. I guess Testafer had sworn off sheep after Dulcie. I rang the bell, and after a minute Testafer came to the door.
He’d always looked to me like he’d been fifty years old since adolescence, and six more years didn’t really make him look any older. He was still red in the face, as if he’d been running up stairs, and there might have been fewer of the wisps of white that were trying to pass for hair, but given what little he was working with, he looked good, surprisingly good. Last I’d seen him, he was hiding between two parked cars, dodging bullets, a fish out of water. Up here in the doorway of his house, he looked more comfortable.
“Hello, Grover,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
I felt a fist of sudden anger curl in my stomach. He was going to pull a Pansy on me.
“Inside,” I said, growling it. I put my hands on his chest and pushed him backwards into the house, and kicked the door shut behind me. “Get the memory.”
His eyebrows arched incredulously. “Go,” I said. I pushed him, and he stumbled ahead of me into the living room. The whole thing stank to me all of a sudden, stank terribly. I wanted to hit him, but he was too old to hit, so I reached down and swept my arm across a table covered with glass and ceramic baubles, and they crashed into a thousand pieces on the floor. Testafer just kept backing up until he fell into the couch. I turned to pull down the shelf of old magazines, but it wasn’t there anymore.
“Where’s the memory?” I said. “Get it out.”
The door to the kitchen swung open and a guy came out with a drink in each hand—gin and tonic, if Pansy’s memory had it right. He was about as old as Testafer, but he was as thin and white as Grover was fat and red. It didn’t take me any time to figure it out. Testafer had a boyfriend. It wasn’t a surprise. After he quit the practice, he must have missed handling penises. In a funny way I understood.
I stepped up and took the drinks. “Take a walk,” I said.
The guy let go of the drinks like he’d made them for me. Grover spoke, and it came out a whisper.
“You’d better go, David,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
David picked hi? way quietly through the broken glass and pottery strewn across the doorway and obediently disappeared. Grover had switched from sheep that walked like men to men that walked like sheep.
When I turned back to him, he had his memory out on the couch beside him, the mike cord in his hand. I’d learned fast to despise the sight of the things. He looked at me with desperate eyes, and for an odd moment my anger abated and I felt sorry for him, but it didn’t last.
“Metcalf,” I said.
He knew what I wanted. He said it into the memory. His voice came back out quiet and slow, as if he’d spent a lot of time on this particular entry.
“The detective,” it went. “A dangerous, impulsive man. Maynard made the mistake of bringing him in, and he wouldn’t go away. Danny Phoneblum’s oppositional double, and a fundamentally undesirable presence.”
Testafer looked up at me blankly, his mouth tight, while his voice poured out of the machine. I found myself smiling. I sort of liked the description. At the very least it was reassuring to find some trace of my work left somewhere. I handed Testafer one of the drinks, and he sipped at it nervously while we waited to see if the entry was exhausted. It was.
“That’s a very old memory,” he said softly, his eyes full of fear. I studied him for some sign of genuine recollection, some hint of hostility or guilt, but it wasn’t there.
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s up to date.”
He didn’t get it, or maybe he did and it scared him. Either way the effect was the same: he sat staring at me, blankly astonished, like a baby when you make faces at it. I sat down in the chair across from him and took a pull at the drink in my hand. Gin and tonic, all right. I was running out of steam, and the liquor tasted awfully good. I couldn’t feel my anger anymore, and I wasn’t particularly trying. It seemed too much to stay angry at a guy who didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. I felt the weight of the past like bal-last, something only I was stupid enough to keep carrying, and I began to wonder if it was time to cut loose. Testafer made it look sort of good. For a moment I envied him, and began patting the pockets of my coat to locate the little envelope of make.
For a moment. Then I thought about what I was thinking, and took a deep breath and put the drink on the floor and licked my Lips clean of the taste of alcohol and forgot about the make. I carefully curled the fingers of the fist of my anger, got up from the chair, and went over and picked up Testafer’s memory. The cord to the mike stretched out between us. Testafer looked up at me, eyes wide, his mouth a little open. I felt my anger now, felt it clear and cold, and I wanted him to feel it too. I hoped it made him feel vulnerable to see his memory in the palm of my hand.
“Dulcie the sheep,” I said through my teeth.
His eyes showed maybe the first glimmer of something more than funhouse feat.
“Say it,” I said.
He said it.
“Your steadfast companion,” came his voice out of the memory. “Her life was tragically cut short. The murder remains unsolved.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “Orton Angwine was pinned with the sheep’s killing.”
Testafer looked extremely uncomfortable. The hand that held the mike was shaking. “Angwine was convicted of killing Maynard only,” he said.
“Who killed the sheep?” I said.
His eyes closed.
“Who killed the sheep?” I said again.
He leaned over and pursed his Lips into the microphone.
With his eyes closed he looked like he was praying into the device. “Who killed the sheep?” he repeated.
“The murder remains unsolved,” said the memory.
“The murder remains unsolved,” he said to me, but he didn’t open his eyes.
“I solved it, Grover. Open your eyes and tell me who killed the sheep.” I reached down and gripped his hand hard until he dropped the mike. This time he opened his eyes, but he didn’t speak.
“You don’t need this,” I said, showing him the memory. “You had me going for a minute there, but you blew it when you closed your eyes. Who killed the sheep?” I dropped the box and the microphone on the floor and crushed them under my shoe. It was all plastic and wire and chips, and it crumbled pretty easily even on the soft pile of the carpet. I kicked it, spread it with my toe, until it was mixed with the first mess I’d made there. Testafer got redder and spilled his drink trying to put it down, and I think his eyes were getting wet around the edges before he caught himself and reeled it all back in.
“I killed her,” he said when he could without choking. “Tell me how you knew.”
“That wasn’t hard,” I said. “I ruled you out at first because you hit the intestine. You didn’t need to; to kill her, and someone who knew enough would avoid making such a mess. But you’re no surgeon, and you’re certainly no veterinarian. If hitting it was clever, it almost worked, and if it was stupid, you almost got lucky. Almost.”
He didn’t tell me which it was. I guessed stupid and lucky.
“Dulcie knew things that could have broken the case open,” I said. “I didn’t get them out of her, but you didn’t know that. I left you there feeling violent and frustrated and panicked. Even at the time I wondered if you would hit her. It wasn’t too big a jump to pin you with the killing.”
I watched Testafer crumble and age on the couch in front of me. For six years he’d kept these memories from himself. It was obvious he’d been using the Forgettol and the memory device as a public front. But it was equally obvious, from the way he was deflating, that he was living through the visceral part of the memory now for the first time.
“For God’s sake,” he said through his hands. “Don’t dig it all up again.” He sounded as if he were being confronted with the carcass, literally.
“Relax,” I said. “I’m not such a stickler for animal rights. You can buy me off with the answers to a couple of questions.”
I meant it. Not that I thought he’d suffered enough—I wouldn’t presume to weigh suffering against sins. But from here on I was in this game for my own satisfaction, and as far as Testafer was concerned, I was satisfied.
I gave him a minute to dry himself up.
“Celeste didn’t go out of town eight years ago,” I said. “She came here to stay with you. You were the family doctor. You delivered Barry, and she trusted you. Phoneblum was getting abusive and she needed out.”
He nodded confirmation.
“Phoneblum didn’t introduce Maynard to Celeste—you did. You were training him into your practice, and they met and the sparks flew, despite your warnings.”
“That’s pretty much right,” he said.
“Celeste and the sheep were pals from when they lived up here together, during Celeste’s hideaway. Dulcie knew all about Phoneblum, and you thought I’d squeezed it out of her. You didn’t believe it when she said she’d kept her little black lips zippered, and you were angry at both of us, and you took it out on her.”
He only nodded.
“She did all right by you, Grover. She didn’t squeal. Maybe you would have preferred it if she never let me in the door, but she didn’t volunteer anything important.”
He was quiet. He’d sobbed once and he wasn’t going to sob again. He was going to put up a good front and answer my questions. Except I was done. That was the last piece of the puzzle. I didn’t need any more information out of Testafer, and I didn’t need to sit there looking at his fat red face while he sorted out his misery. I needed to move on, to finish the job—and I needed make, badly. I was out of my seat and about to leave, when I suddenly had an idea. The idea went like this: Testafer was a doctor and Testafer was a rich man and Testafer was a man who liked to snort something better than Office make, or had, six years ago.
“You don’t have any old make sitting around, do you?” I asked. “Something just a little less crude than the standard issue? Something without so much Forgettol in it?”
He smiled.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said.
I SAT IN MY CAR WITH THE DOOR OPEN, PUT MY HANDS ON the wheel, and watched them tremble. It wasn’t stopping. I needed addictol and I needed it soon.
I drove to the makery. The lights were on, and some tainted analog of hope stirred dimly in my heart. It didn’t seem too far-fetched that the maker might have a few old ingredients sitting around that he could cobble together into some semblance of my blend. If not, I’d be happy enough to take some addictol straight, nothing on the side, thanks, see you later. When I went in, the hope faded like it was bleached. A guy was feeding his card into a vending machine on the far wall. There was no counter, no wall of little white bottles, no friendly old maker. Nothing. The machines covered the walls like urinals in a train station bathroom, and I didn’t have to watch him get a packet to know what they were for.
I went out, feeling sick. The complimentary packet of make was burning a hole in my pocket, but it wasn’t a commodity. I could obviously help myself to as much as I liked, anytime I liked. I had a funny idea about only snorting a little, but I knew that was a joke. If I got started, I wouldn’t stop for a while.
I drove up into the hills towards Phoneblum’s old place. Night was falling over the trees and rooftops, and I tried to let it ease me out of my funk, but it was no go. My gut was clenched with need. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and tossed the packet of make into the woods so I wouldn’t be tempted. If I wanted it later, the stuff was available, but I had work to do now. And I had more than my own memory to worry about. It was obvious I was going to have to do a lot of other people’s remembering for them.
At first I didn’t recognize Phoneblum’s place. The big fake house was gone, leaving the stairwell naked on the crest of the hill. I parked anyway, feeling pretty sure I had business at this address no matter what it looked like on top. It wasn’t the kind of property that changed hands too often.
The difference no doubt mirrored the transfer of power that had obviously taken place while I was away, from Phoneblum to the kangaroo. Phoneblum was the big fake house projected on the top of the hill, all bluff and ornament, concerned with cloaking his evil in style. And the kangaroo—when I realized I was comparing a kangaroo to a stairwell I had a laugh at myself, and let it go.
I wanted to draw a bead on the kangaroo, but I wasn’t ready to tangle with him, not yet. So I turned off the engine and the lights and watched the moon come up. My hands were in motion again, the thumbs twitching, but I was getting used to it.
I always get bored on a stakeout, and this time it was no different. I thought about Maynard and Celeste and the hotel room, and I thought about Walter Surface, and I thought about the kangaroo. I thought about Catherine Teleprompter, wondered where she was and how she looked now. I thought about a lot of things. Eventually I thought about make, and I thought about it a lot, and I thought about a lot of it. Big piles. I’d laughed at plenty of junkies in my day, all the while making damn sure I had a straw for my nose when I needed it, and now I went back and apologized to each and every one of them. My system was trying to run without the fuel that had made it go for years, and it was hell. I could feel my bloodstream panhandling my fat reserves for whatever last traces of the vital addictol they had stored away, and I could feel my fat cells turning out their pockets and saying sorry pal, there’s nothing left.
I don’t know how long I sat there like that. I certainly didn’t keep my eyes on the stairwell door very long. My hands slipped off the wheel and into my lap, and I fell asleep. My dreams were murky, incomprehensible, like babyhead talk. I didn’t wake up until the sun was out again, but it wasn’t the sun that woke me up. It was the voice of the kangaroo, unmistakable, and jarringly close to my window.
I started to reach for the gun in my pocket when I realized he wasn’t talking to me.
“Get in the car,” he was saying. I poked my head up enough to see he was saying it to Barry Phoneblum and a couple of strong-arm louts from central casting. The kangaroo unlocked the passenger seat in the car in front of mine, and the babyhead clambered in. The louts got in the back, and one of them pulled out a gun and checked its load. I put my hand on Barry’s gun in my pocket and laid low.
“I told you he wouldn’t come here,” said Barry.
The kangaroo went around and got in behind the wheel. His window was up, and when he said something, I didn’t catch it.
“He’s probably got better things to do,” Barry went on.
I wished like hell I did.
The kangaroo started the car, and they drove away. It was obvious they were looking for me. I cursed myself for falling asleep in Joey’s front yard, then offered up a quick improvisational prayer to the patron saint of dumb luck and trembling junkies. I was stupid for coming here at all. When I’d waltzed in on Phoneblum, I’d had the double insurance of his concern for his various “loved ones” and his peculiar sense of class and sportsmanship. With the kangaroo I had neither. I was lucky to still be alive.
When I was sure the coast was clear, I straightened up and took a quick inventory. Both legs were asleep from being wedged under the dashboard, there was a taste like puke in my mouth, and when I unclenched my hand from around the gun in my pocket, it started shaking again. Otherwise, I was intact. I drove down the hill and found a pay phone and called Surface, collect.
It was time to stop fucking around.
THE OLD APE DIDN’T SOUND TOO ENTHUSIASTIC ON THE telephone. But when I arrived at the Office, he was waiting in front of the building, and he fell into step with me as I went up the stairs to the lobby.
“Thanks for showing, Walter,” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” he grunted.
We went in. The Office always seems caught off guard at people walking in on their own steam. They don’t have a reception area so much as they have a sort of ramp for tossing people out of the building from, and a long, clear lane for picking up speed before they get to the ramp. As for going in, they expect to have to drag you struggling through the back entrance, or unconscious on the floor of an Office van. You walk in the door, and every head turns. It was no different now.
We strolled up to what passed for a reception desk, though the guy sitting at it surely hadn’t received anything more elaborate than a delivery pizza for the boys upstairs.
“I want to talk to Inquisitor Kornfeld,” I said.
The guy surprised me by tapping the name into his console.
“Not available,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Inquisitor Morgenlander.”
We came up against the same dead end.
I got a funny feeling. Those had been the two factions when I checked out, and Kornfeld seemed a shoo-in to run things in the Office his way for a while to come. It wasn’t that they weren’t in the building that bothered me—it was that the guy needed to consult his computer for the names.
“Inquisitor Teleprompter,” I said.
His hands came off the keyboard. “I’ll see if she’s here,” he said, and for the first time looked me and the ape over carefully. I smiled for him, and after a minute he picked up die intercom and hit a couple of buttons.
“Ms. Teleprompter,” he said. “There’s a guy here at the door says he wants to talk to you.” He listened, then turned back to me. “What’s your name?”
I told him, and he said it to hen.
“Stay right here,” he said, a little wide-eyed. I guess he was surprised.
Surface and I were just stepping back from the desk to cool our heels when a cloud of Office hoods came stiff-shouldered and scowling, and bunched around us like an elastic waistband.
“Mr. Metcalf?‘“said one of them.
“Metcalf and Surface,” I said. “We’re traveling together.” The ape didn’t look exactly grateful, but he didn’t contradict me. The inquisitors took us each by the arms and steered us to the elevator. I didn’t think we could all get on, and was about to suggest that Surface and I catch the next one, but they insisted, and we managed it. The fat ones sucked in their gut, and up we went.
When the elevator stopped, on the third floor, they walked us to one of the executive offices. I was impressed, but I knew better than to think it was a good sign Catherine had moved upstairs. The game upstairs was no cleaner than the game on the streets, last I knew. Our escorts punched in a code at the door and pushed us inside, and a couple of them followed while the rest camped in the hall.
It was one of the nice offices, with a big picture window facing the bay, and a lot of pretty photographs and memorabilia pinned to the walls. Catherine was behind a desk as big as they come, looking six years older and not a day worse. The same hair was pulled back to expose the same throat, and I got lost there for a minute before I noticed her eyes were hard.
“Clean them up,” she said.
The boys worked us over. They located the gun on me and a little notebook on Surface, and they handed them to Catherine along with both our cards. She tossed the stuff in a drawer and told the muscle to wait outside.
“Sit down,” she said. We did.
“You were supposed to get out of town, Metcalf,” she said. “You know the way it works.”
I went up against her eyes, but it was a dead end. She didn’t budge. She didn’t even blink, or if she did, she timed the blinks to go with mine. The effect was impressive.
“I’m two days old, Catherine,” I said. “Give me a break.”
“Don’t call me Catherine,” she said. “By letting you and your monkey into my office, I already gave you one break too many.” Her voice was like a dentist’s drill.
Our eyes met again. I was looking at the woman I’d climbed into bed with two nights ago, but I had to remind myself she hadn’t spent six years in bed waiting for me to return from the bathroom. The deeper I buried those memories, the better.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. You’re on the inside now. Congratulations, and I’m sorry. Where’s Kornfeld?”
She didn’t flinch at the question. There was still that much between us. “Long gone,” she said. “He pushed it too far, and now he’s spending time in the freezer.” She made it sound like she’d done the job herself, and maybe she had. “If you’ve got business with Kornfeld, don’t wait underwater.”
“I’ve got a punch in the stomach that belongs to him,” I said. “It’ll keep. Who stepped into his shoes—or am I looking at her?”
“That might be accurate,” she said.
I looked over at Surface. He shot me his sourest look.
“Then you’re the one I want to talk to,” I said. “Nothing to do with before.”
“You have five minutes of my time.”
“I’m sure you’ll lose track of the time,” I said. “It gets good at the end.”
“I’ve got a short attention span,” she said.
“It’s pretty simple. There’s some murders nobody ever bothered to solve right, and a guy in the freezer who doesn’t belong there.”
“If you say the name Stanhunt, you have three minutes.”
“How about six minutes for two Stanhunts?”
“Get on with it.”
“I’ll talk fast and in a high-pitched voice, and you can record it and slow it down later. I solved the Stanhunt case. Both of them.”
Surface groaned like he was on her side.
“It’s a beauty,” I said. “A carefully balanced mechanism that faltered and collapsed in on itself. And it begins and ends with Danny Phoneblum.”
“You were obsessed with Phoneblum,” said Catherine. “I looked into it. It was hopeless. You can’t shoehorn him into the case.”
“I was obsessed with the truth,” I said. “Phoneblum is the case. Phoneblum and Celeste. The first time I met her, I could see she was trying to shake a past that wouldn’t shake. It took a while, but I figured it out. She was Phoneblum’s moll, for I don’t know how long, but for a while. He loved her, and she might have loved him back. She gave him a son. Testafer was the doctor who handled the delivery.”
“You’re straining my credulity already,” said Catherine.
“Give me a minute. The boy’s name was Barry. Phoneblum was looking for an heir, and he wanted Celeste to stick around and bring the kid up. But he was abusive, a wifeslapper, and Celeste ran away to stay with the doctor. I confirmed as much with Testafer yesterday afternoon.”
She made a face.
“She took the baby with her, and she didn’t leave Phoneblum a forwarding address. Dr. Testafer was grooming a new boy named Maynard Stanhunt for his practice, and when Stanhunt and Celeste met, the sparks flew. Testafer advised Celeste against it in private, but he didn’t bother to let his golden boy know he was romancing the estranged girlfriend of an angry gangster;”
“This is pretty tired stuff, Metcalf.”
“Get ready,” I said. “This is where the Office comes in. When Phoneblum locates his wayward madonna and child, he’s pretty steamed. He wants her back but she says no, and he gets ready to put boyfriend Maynard out of the picture. Only the fat man suddenly gets an idea. He runs a business where he defrosts karma-defunct bodies, courtesy of your old pal Kornfeld, to populate a little slavebox bordello. And he needs doctors to tend to the frostbite. So he takes the kid back and blackmails Stanhunt and Testafer into running his medical facility.”
I took a deep breath and went on. “Phoneblum has a junkie girl working for him running drugs. He buys her the house on Cranberry Street and converts her to a nanny for the kid.”
“Pansy Greenleaf,” said Surface.
“Right. So Phoneblum’s got his heir, he’s got his doctors, and he’s got Celeste back under his screws. Which by this time in their relationship is probably all he requires.”
Both Catherine and Surface were suddenly quiet and still. I had them going. I had myself going, for that matter, and now all I had to do was bring it off. I hoped I wouldn’t disappoint all three of us.
“Only problem,” I continued, “is Celeste has a habit of bailing out. She packs her bags and leaves the doctor, which makes Stanhunt and Phoneblum both pretty antsy. She’s what balances the equation between them. They put their heads together and start hiring detectives to keep tabs on her, to try and keep their little triangle intact.”
“You and me,” said Surface.
“You and me,” I said. “Only Celeste doesn’t turn out to be the leg of the triangle that gets permanently missing. When Stanhunt turns up dead in the hotel room, the balance is thrown in the other direction. Phoneblum no longer has a reason to keep away from Celeste. She knows it, and gets nervous, and mistakes everybody who looks at her funny for one of Phoneblum’s goons—me included. When she figures out I’m an independent operator, she tries to hire me for protection, and I nibble, but I don’t bite. It’s too bad too. The night she died, I ran into Testafer and the kangaroo creeping around town together on Phoneblum’s orders, looking for Celeste.”
“Celeste Stanhunt was killed by a stranger she picked up in a sex club,” said Catherine. “He raped her and killed her. She’d been asking for it and it finally happened.”
“Phoneblum found her that night and paid her back for leaving him,” I said. “There was nothing in his way once he lost the doctor. He’d been holding his rage in reserve, because of the beauty of their arrangement. And with Kornfeld and the Office in his pocket, he didn’t have to fear punishment. I can’t prove it, but that’s the way it went.”
“This case is starting to come back to me,” said Catherine. “The junkie girl had a brother. He came up from L.A. and killed Stanhunt in the hotel. He’s still guilty. The rest of this material is irrelevant.”
“Orton Angwine couldn’t have less to do with the case if he’d never come to town,” I said. “The stuff in that hotel room bugged me until yesterday morning. I didn’t spend six years thinking about it, but I might have and still not come up with the answer.”
I pointed at Surface. “It was something you said in your kitchen yesterday that did it. All the clues were in place, but I needed a little push to make the conceptual leap.”
“Jesus Christ, Metcalf,” said Surface. “You sure do like to talk.”
I didn’t tell him I was sweating out my addiction. I had too much pride. But if I’d stopped talking, I probably would have passed out.
“The two of you had my head spinning with theories,” I said. I looked at Catherine. “You had Stanhunt having the affair in the hotel, and you”—I looked at Surface—”you had Celeste doing the same thing.” I laughed. “You were both half right.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Catherine. She wanted to rush me.
My five minutes must have been over by now, but I knew I had all the time in the world.
“I’ll get there. But first I have to backtrack. There was a progression in the way Stanhunt and Phoneblum hired their private inquisitors, and it’s important. I came first, and I dealt with Stanhunt, and all he wanted me to do was lean on Celeste and suggest she go home. But hiring gumshoes wasn’t Stanhunt’s strength, and when I didn’t pan out, he turned the job over to Phoneblum. The fat man hired Walter here.” I gestured at Surface. “When the report came back that Celeste was getting some on the side, Phoneblum offered Surface good money to find the new boyfriend and put him in the ground. But Walter said no. And he left the job without ever having met Stanhunt. Isn’t that right?”
Surface grunted confirmation.
“Phoneblum was having trouble on another front. His son and protégé had gone babyhead, run away to Telegraph Avenue to sip whiskey and talk gibberish. Phoneblum still had hopes of reclaiming his flesh-and-blood heir—he was investing in a babyhead quarters for the backyard at Cranberry Street—but he was also looking around for another candidate. He found one in a young kangaroo named Joey Castle. Joey was an all-too-willing pupil.”
“I’ll buy that,” said Surface. He must have been thinking of his ribs.
“So picture this,” I said. “After Surface and me, Phoneblum is sour on the idea of outside help. He’s got a new kangaroo gunman with an itchy trigger finger. Phoneblum gives him the assignment of tailing Celeste, the same way he hired Walter—without the kangaroo ever meeting Maynard Stanhunt. And the orders were the same: Take the new boyfriend out of the picture.”
I paused for effect, and they both shot arrows at me with their eyes.
“Maynard Stanhunt was a pretty heavy Forgettol addict—at least by the standards of six years ago. The first time I tried to call him at home, he didn’t know who I was. I’d warned Angwine of the danger of tangling with people with huge gaps in their day-to-day memory, but I hadn’t really thought through the implications myself. Maynard and Celeste were both having affairs in the Bayview Motel, in the same room, in fact. With each other.”
I turned to Surface. “Walter, you saw Stanhunt, only you didn’t know it. He was the guy you spotted at the motel. Sure, Celeste had left him, but there was slippage in her resolve, as there so often is. She agreed to meet him for quiet afternoons in the motel—but his morning self, the one that hired the detectives, didn’t know about the arrangement.”
Surface just gaped.
“Yesterday you told me it was illegal now in L.A. to know what you did for a living, and that was when it clicked for me. Stanhunt was an early prototype of that. The part of him that wasn’t getting any action with Celeste was murderously jealous of whoever she was seeing in the Bayview Motel, and he told Phoneblum to have his boys blow the guy away. The kangaroo didn’t know what Stanhunt looked like any more than you did, Walter. He just did as he was told and killed the boyfriend. Stanhunt hired his own hit.”
I stopped talking and gave them some time to sort it out. Catherine’s face went through a brief series of expressions, most of them skeptical, but in the end she was too smart to pretend it didn’t have the satisfying weight of something inevitable and true. I watched her get to that point, and then I watched her remind herself that she had my card in her drawer, and that nothing necessarily had to get out of this room if she didn’t want it to. She hardened quickly—I guess she’d had a lot of practice in the intervening years. She was more changed than Barry, or Surface, or Testafer, or anyone else I’d dealt with since coming back. She went with the desk and the office with the big window now.
“It’s an interesting story,” she said. “What are you hoping it’ll get you?”
“I want to see Angwine defrosted,” I said. “I’ll make your job hell with this if he isn’t.”
She just smiled.
“Humor me, Teleprompter,” I said. “Let me think I’m a threat. It’s no skin off your nose. The guy’s harmless—and innocent.”
She punched something into her desktop monitor. I guessed it was Angwine’s file, but it could have been anything, really. Maybe just a stall for time. She squinted at it for a minute, and I remembered how she wouldn’t let me see her in glasses the first time we met.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
I thought about it. I’d come a long way on Angwine’s fourteen hundred dollars. “That’s not good enough,” I said. “I need more.”
She looked me dead in the eye. This time it was me who didn’t blink.
“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow. You’ve got my word.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank your lucky fucking stars. Take your stuff and get out of here.” She opened her drawer and gave Surface his card and his pad back, and then she gave me my card and put my gun out on top of her desk I reached for it, but her hand was still over it, and she looked at me and I looked at her and I think possibly I saw the faintest hint of a smile cross her face. The moment passed, and she let me pick up the gun and put it back in the pocket of my coat.
She leaned on the button of her intercom and spoke to the muscle waiting outside her office. “Get them out of here,” she said. “Put them on the street.”
They took it literally, bless their hearts.
THE PARKING METER OUTSIDE THE WHITE WALNUT REST Home played me a couple of bars of Hawaiian bottleneck guitar when I dropped in the quarter, but I didn’t stick around to hear out the tune. It had been a long drive up into the hills and my head didn’t feel so good. My bloodstream wouldn’t quit asking and I was running out of ways of saying no. Cold turkey was a merry-go-round I couldn’t get off, and instead of a wooden horse I was riding a porcupine.
I went inside. The place was nice and quiet, all rosewood antiques and bunches of flowers. I found the office. The woman at the desk seemed frightened by my presence, but I don’t know whether it was my red eyes and pasty complexion or the fact of who I was asking to see. Both, probably.
They had him in a dayroom, a pretty one, with windows on three sides and a collection of wicker furniture for putting glasses of lemonade on. He was watching television, or maybe I should say they had him facing the television, because when I moved around his wheelchair and stood in his line of sight, he didn’t notice, though his eyes were open. Except for the deadness in what had once been exceptionally lively eyes, he looked pretty much the same. His beard was unkempt, but he still had a full head of hair. I waved the attendant out of the room and sat down in one of the armchairs.
We sat like that for a while, me watching motes of dust float through the sunlight, him supposedly watching the television. The only sound was the rasp of his breathing. Then 1 reached over and turned off the picture.
“Phoneblum,” I said.
He murmured like he was asleep.
I got out of my chair and took the collar of his robe in my hands. His eyes brightened considerably. “Wake up,” I said. He put his big clubby hands over mine and pushed me away.
I watched as he blinked away his stupor. His forehead wrinkled like a question mark as he looked me over.
“You’re an inquisitor,” he said. The voice rolled out of him like secondhand thunder, acquired cheap. It was a voice from the past, and I was impressed at the way he could still summon it up.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Very good.” He curled a finger and rubbed at his nose with the knuckle. “Do questions make you uncomfortable? I prefer to relax the conventional strictures.”
He was running on empty, but the old routines died hard. I had to tip my hat to him. It was a bluff, but his junk was better than most guys’ fastballs. In another setting, minus the television and the wheelchair and the layer of dust, I might have bought it, might have believed he was still in the saddle. But the bright hard intelligence behind his eyes was missing. He didn’t know who he was talking to.
“Questions are my bread and butter,” I said.
He didn’t remember the answer. He just nodded and said: “Good. What can I do for you?”
“I want to ask you about Celeste,” I said.
I watched him chew it over. He obviously knew the name. It seemed to lull him back a step towards dreamland.
“You remember Celeste?” I said.
“Why, yes,” he answered. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. “I remember Celeste. Of course.”
“I’ve been working on her murder,” I said.
His eyes shot back to mine. “That’s a long time ago,” he said.
“Couple of days, to me. I’ve still got her blood on my shoes.”
I said it casually, but I could see it was having an effect. His forehead lifted.
“Yes,” he said softly. “So do I.”
“You killed her,” I suggested.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “I killed a lot of people.”
“You loved hen”
He clouded up. I waited.
“I don’t remember,” he concluded. His face fell slack.
“Try harder,” I said. “This one was special. You loved her and you killed her.” I took hold of his robe again.
His eyes cleared and his jaw set. “I suppose I did,” he said. “The two sometimes go together.” He smiled through his beard. “Women are already split in two from the floor halfway up, you know. I just finished the job.”
, That did it. I’d been arguing with myself, but now he was making it easy. I let go of his robe and stepped back and took Barry’s gun out of my coat pocket. It played the creepy violin music as it came into my hand. I opened up the safety and leveled the muzzle at Phoneblum’s big chest. He made a good target.
I watched him struggle to focus on the gun. He had to cross his eyes to do it. His fingers tightened a little on the arms of his wheelchair, but his face showed no fear.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
“I might,” I said. I wanted to. I didn’t know what was stopping me.
He squinted into my eyes. “Do I know you, sir?”
There was a long, rough minute while I tried to get myself to squeeze the trigger. The motes of dust in the air seemed to slow down and hover, glowing, in the space between the end of the gun and the beginning of Phoneblum’s giant chest. Eventually I saw that it wasn’t going to happen. I closed the safety and put the gun away.
“No,” I said, disgusted. “There was a mix-up. I’ve got the wrong guy.”
Phoneblum didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look relieved. I reached down and turned the television back on, straightened my coat, and went out into the hallway.
I passed through the lobby but I didn’t sign my name in the guest register. I wasn’t in the mood. I went out to the car and sat. It had enough fuel in it for one more trip, but I wasn’t sure I did. I thought about the little packet of make I’d thrown into the woods, and I thought about the makery. The vending machines didn’t seem so bad from this distance. I tried to tell myself the job was finished, that it was okay to let it go. I tried hard, and I got as far as starting the engine and pointing the car down the hill to the makery. But it wouldn’t take. The job wasn’t finished. I screwed the wheels around and drove across the ridge to the Fickle Muse.
I was early. I had to park in the lot and watch the sun set and wait for them to open the place. The sky looked like a bruise. When the guy showed up, I went inside and ordered a drink on the chance it might fool my nerves for half an hour. Beyond that I didn’t care. I didn’t recognize the bartender, but I didn’t have to. The face had changed but the type hadn’t.
He brought me the drink. “First customer of the night,” he said, as if it meant something.
“Guess so,” I said back.
When I got my change, I went to the corner and used the pay phone, then I finished my drink at the bar and went back out to the lot to wait. It didn’t take long. The kangaroo looked like he was alone, but I couldn’t tell for sure. He wasn’t riding a scooter anymore.
He got out of his car behind a gun. I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t care. He wouldn’t kill me until he found out what I knew and what I wanted. I just had to draw it out. He walked across the lot and came up to the window of my car.
“Get in,” I said.
He sat down beside me and put the gun hand across his lap. It was more than a little reminiscent of the first time we talked, in the lot of the Bayview Motel. I knew now that he was a neophyte gunsel that night, making a pilgrimage to the scene of his first killing. Running into me must have been his worst nightmare come true. But all I had to do was look to know that the kangaroo had come a long way since then. There wasn’t any great physical change—he might have been a little thicker around the collar, or a little yellower around the teeth—but he was different. I could read it in his eyes.
“Metcalf—,” he started.
“Don’t talk,” I said. “I know how it’ll come out. You’re the big man now, and you know how to sweet-talk. It’s your job. You’ll tell me the past is the past, that it isn’t worth it anymore. You’ll tell me idealism went out of style while I was away. You’ll mix your threats and your enticements into a nice little cocktail and pour it down my ear. I know all about it. You’re Phoneblum now.”
He curled his black lips in a practiced smile. It wasn’t part of his former repertoire, and I took it as confirmation of my guesses. “Me Phoneblum?” he said. “I guess that’s about right.”
“I’ve got this conversation memorized in advance,” I said. “You feel me out about my price tag, about what it’ll take to get me to disappear. I tell you I don’t buy. You remind me you didn’t have to come and hear me out, you could have sent over a carload of your boys instead.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I like that.”
“Okay,” I said. “I said your part. You tell me mine.”
He thought it over. “You tell me you’ve got dirt on me that counts,” he said. “I listen patiently, and break it to you slowly that you and your information are six years dead.” He paused. “See, you’re a funny kind of ghost, Metcalf. You can’t hurt me, but I can hurt you, bad. You’re insubstantial one way, the wrong way.”
“That’s pretty good too,” I said. “Except you got it all wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“It’s more like this,” I said. “I tell you it was a big mistake putting me in the freezer. The events of Six years ago are yesterday to me.”
I watched his hand tighten around the gun again. I didn’t care. He was mine now. He’d think twice about a messy murder in the parking lot of his club, and he wasn’t going to get a chance to think twice.
“I tell you that you just made the biggest fucking mistake of your life not sending those boys,” I went on. “And then I break your face.”
He brought the gun up, but I brought it back down again, hard, and pinned it in his lap. I butted his nose with the top of my head, and he panicked and tried to stand up. The rental car wasn’t big enough. I used my weight to mash him back into the seat, and pried with both hands on his trigger finger. He didn’t want it to go off in his lap, so he let go, and the gun clattered down between his legs and tail to the floor of the car.
He hit me in the jaw, but his heart wasn’t in it. He probably hadn’t been in a fistfight since our last waltz six years back, whereas my only problem was that my hands still hurt from breaking them on his jaw two nights ago. His main weapon had always been his big legs and feet, but those were wedged under the dash. It was my show. When my hands wouldn’t ball up anymore, I picked up his gun and hit him across the mouth with it a couple of times. Then I rolled down the window and tossed it out onto the gravel.
I tried to talk, but there was too much blood in my mouth. I guess he’d landed a couple of good ones. I cleared it out with my finger. Joey didn’t look so hot either. His head was flopped back over the seat as if his neck didn’t work. But when I started talking, I could see him listen.
“There’s a reason Phoneblum was frantic for an heir,” I said. “There’s always got to be someone in his role, just like there’s always-got to be someone like me.”
I wiped more blood from my mouth, then took out Barry’s gun. It played me the Danger Theme, but for once that seemed appropriate. “Don’t think this is for the Stanhunt murder,” I said. “You were suckered into pulling the trigger. I took that into account.”
Joey’s eyes were big with fear. He understood every word.
“This is because you picked up the reins,” I said. “It’s for the girls upstairs in the back room of the Fickle Muse. It’s for the six years of wrecked lives I couldn’t do anything about because of the freezer. It’s for things only you know you did, things you did because you let yourself step into the fat man’s shoes.”
“Metcalf,” said Joey. “For God’s sake.”
“I had Phoneblum in the same spot this afternoon,” I said, ignoring him. “But I was years too late. With you I’m right on schedule. Besides, I wanted to kill somebody who remembered who I was.”
I squeezed the trigger. The first shot spread his face out across the top of the seat, but his legs kept moving. I had a lot of respect for those legs. I emptied the clip into his middle, and one of the bullets found his spinal column and put an end to it. Then I got his keys and left him there, and took his car for a drive. It handled a lot better than the rental job.
THE NEXT MORNING I WAS SITTING IN JOEY’S CAR IN FRONT of the Office. I felt okay. I’d spent most of the night in the hills, looking at the moon, working the kinks out of my fingers, and apparently I’d dried out in the interval. My system was clean. I rolled down the window of the car, leaned back in the seat, and listened to the noise the new day made. I didn’t mind waiting. For some reason everything looked good to me all of a sudden. I even found myself admiring the buildings they’d thrown up while I was away.
After about half an hour Angwine came out blinking into the sunlight, fingering his new card and trying to get his bearings. I didn’t feel too bad for him. He was no more out of place here than he’d been six years ago. But I hunkered down in my seat as he passed. I didn’t have anything to say to him when it came down to it. I just wanted to have a look.
Then I locked up Joey’s car and went inside. I found an inquisitor and handed him my card and Barry’s gun, which played the Danger Theme one more time. I’d come to like it, almost.
“My name is Conrad Metcalf,” I said. “You’re probably looking for me.”
Now that I’d been cut loose, so to speak, the freeze wasn’t much of a punishment. I was like a hobo tossing bricks through shop windows to get a place to sleep for the night. If I didn’t like where I woke up next time, I’d get myself in trouble again, until I found a place where I fit in or they stopped offering me the free ride. In the meantime maybe I’d run across Kornfeld and deliver that punch in the stomach I was carrying around.
When I was in the holding area getting ready for the freezer, one of the inquisitors got friendly, the way they tend to do at that stage, and offered me a line of some make he was sniffing.
“Forgettol?” I said.
He shook his head no, indulging my question. “My personal blend,” he said. “Give it a try.”
So the makers still worked, in-house. It figured. I took the straw from him. It meant waking up with the monkey on my back, but hell, it was my monkey.
It was that rarity, an easy decision.