Irontown Blues

Nine

When faced with an unpleasant chore, there comes a time when one must gird one’s loins and spring into action. When it is time to fish or cut bait, to get moving, hie thee hence, step on it, turn on the steam. Hit the ground running, bestir oneself, get the lead out, buckle down, get the show on the road, look lively, shag ass, shake a leg. Shit or get off the pot. Carp that old dime.

So I managed to waste one more afternoon by making up that list of ways to say stop procrastinating.

Up to that point I had managed to waste a week getting very little done. Sherlock and I wrote up a lot of body-odor and environmental-stench tickets. He loves doing that, but I suspected that even he was getting impatient for me to get going to Irontown.

I hadn’t told him yet that he would not be going.

If I had really been on the ball, I would have followed her from the office or, better yet, set Sherlock on her tail. But I really hadn’t expected her to be that hard to find.

As an ex-cop, I still retain access to some policing tools. By using some friends still on the force, I was able to expand those tools beyond what a reservist would normally be able to access. I was able to gain access to the stored camera data through my contacts. Beginning the search for Mary Smith cost me the price of four dinoburgers. Extra mayo and hold the jalapeños.

I downloaded what I needed to start out, and FFed through a lot of nothing happening to her arrival outside the office. Sherlock and I watched it several times. The only thing we got from it turned out to be just about the only clue we had to follow. For a moment, after stepping off the elevator, she lifted her veil and applied some sort of cream on her ravaged skin. We never saw her whole face at one time, but that was easily solved. In the handy-dandy private-dick kit of programs I bought from an old hand at the game, I selected one that could take all the fragmented images of her face and put them together like a 3D puzzle. When it was done, there were a few blank spots, but the program found it very easy to fill them in.

I had to look away from it after I had studied it for a few minutes. There seemed no way to tell what she had looked like before the disease began to work, and what she was left with wasn’t nice to study. Sherlock kept looking at it, though, and did that sniffing thing he does when he wishes humans had invented a process of smell-o-vision. I don’t think he’s even aware that he does it.

There are apps that can take a skull and interpolate what the face had looked like. It turns out this works for disfigurement, too. The program took a few minutes of chewing over the data before it delivered a three-dimensional bust that floated in the air over my desk. It turned around slowly. There was no expression on the face.

Sherlock put his paws up on the desk and watched as the head rotated. He sniffed a few times, then returned to his blanket. I had the feeling he was dubious.

In the old detective novels, the writer usually would insert a description of the dame here. Her best features would be scrutinized by the private dick. Eye color, breast size, complexion, shapely legs encased in sheer nylon. Her clothing would be itemized, from her low-cut blouse to her bright red high heels. She would always be a stunner and either given to sultry looks or showing signs of distress.

In my world, anyone who wants to be a knockout broad, in terms of twentieth-century ideas of beauty, can be a knockout broad. It’s all up to you. This can lead to a certain sameness of face and body. If a person from 1950 were to show up in Luna in my era, he might have a hard time telling one of us from another.

There are nonconformists. Some prefer to look older and wiser. Some like to accentuate some feature, like very sharp cheekbones or a larger nose. A certain percentage don’t really give a damn and present to the world the face and body that our genes dictated at birth. Naturals.

A police report on an individual in the age of Philip Marlowe would include many things that are variables today. Myself? Okay, I’m an average-looking guy, slightly taller than the norm. Hair: brown and slightly unruly. Eyes: brown with flecks of yellow. Body type: somewhere between ectomorph and mesomorph.

But there the police report ends, and even that data is subject to change. Distinguishing marks? Seldom any scars unless the person uses one as a beauty mark, and that could be gone by tomorrow. Today, most people decorate their bodies from time to time, but they use photo-creams and project the art onto themselves. It washes off with another cream.

I could have wished that Mary Smith was a natural, but no such luck. There was nothing I could see that was really unique to her. I was pretty sure I could have picked her out of a lineup, but maybe not if I just encountered her on the street. I wouldn’t quite say the reconstruction was a generic pretty female, but it was close. There was nothing that really caught the eye, no unique mark you could hang an ID on.

Well, if it were easy, there would be no need for private eyes. Of course, Mom says there actually is no need for them. Gotta love a supportive mother, don’t you?

The next step was to track her from camera to camera after she left my office and the Acme Building. I thought it would be a piece of cake, and again I was wrong.

Catching her coming out the front door was easy enough. The opaque veil made it a cinch to track her for the first five minutes or so. She walked confidently through the crowd, back straight and head held high. She looked in shop windows, reversed course a few times, and now and then stopped and looked casually around. I frowned as I followed her. There was something going on here that I was missing. When I figured out what it was, I mentally kicked myself because it should have been obvious. She was looking for a tail. She must have thought it possible that I would be suspicious of her and try to follow her home.

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest shadower. She probably would have spotted me. It’s a lot harder than it sounds in the books, believe me.

Which means I should have sicced Sherlock on her. He never gets spotted, because he can trail somebody and stay completely out of sight.

Apparently having assured herself that there was no inexperienced shamus dogging her heels, she then changed her behavior. She walked a straight line, more or less, no looking behind, no doubling back, no watching for reflections in window glass. But she was looking up a lot. And as I switched from camera to camera as she went out of and back into range again, several times she seemed to be looking right at me.

She was spotting cameras.

What the hell was her game? Why would she care if I knew where she was going?

I got the distinct feeling that I was being played, and I had no idea why. When you find that you are in a different game than you thought you were, there’s only one wise thing to do, in my opinion. Stop playing. Take your paddle, your net, your Ping-Pong table, and your ball and go home. Either I would never see her again, or she would show up and ask me why I wasn’t working for her, in which case I would be sure to learn a lot more about Ms. Mary Smith before continuing in her employ.

That would be the wise thing to do, no question.

I knew I couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t so much that I knew none of my fictional heroes would do such a thing, though that was part of it. I mean, what would Elvis Cole say? I’d be drummed out of the Diogenes Club.

No, it was that I had developed a taste for the chase. Even though I knew most of my cases were the modern-day equivalent of finding a lost cat or collecting a bad debt. I really wanted to find this doll.

So I kept at it, and soon was even more certain that she was running some sort of game on me. She ducked into a public restroom.

It is one of the few zones of privacy left in our society, other than our own homes and the offices and surgeries of doctors and medicos. And, of course, it is a cultural relic from past days, the taboo about photographing someone in a toilet. It dates all the way back to the time when public restrooms were labeled MEN and WOMEN. Or LADIES and GENTS, or POINTERS and SETTERS. These days it’s impossible to define, so they are just single rooms with toilet stalls and urinals. Silly or not, no monitoring is allowed. So Mary Smith was out of my sight for about ten minutes.

I think Sherlock sensed my frustration. He raised his head from his fifth snooze of the day and slouched over to the screen. We both watched as I FFed through those minutes. Finally here she came, presumably having done her business.

Now she marched straight ahead, looking neither left nor right. It was easy to keep her in sight, as she never deviated. She entered a residential compound, one I wasn’t familiar with but which was just a standard habitat, nothing out of the ordinary.

And Sherlock began to get restive. He made a low whuffing sound deep in his throat. Then he made it again, then looked at me dolefully. Okay, a bloodhound’s expression is always sort of doleful, but this was even more gloomy than usual. He put his head back and let out a howl. I don’t think I have heard Sherlock howl more than three or four times in our five-year relationship. Clearly, there was something he wanted to tell me.

It is at times like this, and only at times like this, that I wished I had an implant in my brain that would allow me to interface directly with my canine partner. Still, we have always worked it out before. It’s like a game of twenty questions, but it usually takes no more than five.

“Okay, Sherlock. You’re upset. Did you see something?”

“Arf!”

Damn. I wasted a question. Obviously he saw something. I didn’t need his disdainful look to tell me that.

“Okay, sorry. Is it something she did, or didn’t do?”

He shook his head sharply, his big ears making a flapping sound. Wrong question. Hmmm.

“I’m stumped,” I admitted. “She hasn’t done anything but walk straight ahead, then go into her habitat.”

“Arf!”

“Yes? She went into her habitat?

“Arf arf!”

“No. Hmmm… well, she walked around for a while.”

“Arf!”

“Well, sure she walked. What else was she going to do?”

To my surprise, the recording started running backward, rapidly. I hadn’t done anything. Was it some sort of glitch? The playback went into forward again, and Sherlock put both paws up on the desk and actually pawed at the screen. He looked over at me, imploringly.

I watched her walk. Damn it, it was just a woman with a dark veil, walking. What was so interesting about that?

Then I saw it. The walk was all wrong. Well, not all wrong, or I would have spotted it, too. Now, I wouldn’t say that everyone has a walk that is unique. There aren’t an infinite number of ways to move along on two legs. The walk I was seeing wasn’t radically different from what it had been when she entered the restroom. But it was different enough.

“She ditched us!” I shouted.

“Arf arf arf arf arf arf!!!” Sherlock was chasing his own tail in his excitement over having pointed this out to his dumb master.

Sometimes I wonder if Sherlock thinks I’m pretty damn stupid.

Later, we watched the video outside the apartment where the bogus Mary Smith had finally gone to ground. It must have been a pretty large place because over the next few hours, we saw several dozen men and women enter and leave. No one that we saw was sufficiently close to the imposter’s walk that we could be sure it was her.

But first there was just no stopping either of us from hurrying to the place where she snookered us. Yes, us, because she fooled Sherlock for a while, too. And yes, she fooled me longer. And yes yet again, she probably would have fooled me forever if not for Sherlock. I’m not above giving a dog his due. I might still be staked out outside the apartment waiting for her to come out if not for his keen eye.

We raced down the stairs, and I started off at a jog, which of course was not nearly fast enough for Sherlock. But a trolley came along, and I flagged it down. The conductor rang his bell, and we were off.

“The game is afoot!” I cried to Sherlock, and he licked my face.

We stormed through the restroom door and looked around. It was a fairly big space, and smelled okay to me, with just the slight pong of disinfectant. It had been days. Would there still be a trace of her?

Sherlock snuffled here and there, back and forth. I could see the world narrowing for him as he took in huge snoutfuls of air. He had attracted an audience, people who had been at the sinks and were now watching him work. I think they could sense his intensity.

“Is he after a fugitive?” one man asked me.

“Let’s just say a suspicious character,” I said.

This spread a sense of excitement among our audience. It’s not often that a melodrama intrudes into our real lives.

Sherlock could not have cared less. I watched him carefully move around the room, and then as he was drawn to a ventilation grate at the back of the room down near the floor. He sniffed it a few times, then sat down and looked back at me.

“She went through here?”

“Arf!”

I knelt and examined the grate. Totally standard, about a meter wide and a little less than that high. I could see where there was a catch that would open it for servicing, but I didn’t know how to operate it. It probably needed a pass code of some kind. I pushed my hat back on my head in my frustration.

“I don’t think we’d learn much even if we could get it open,” I told Sherlock. He lifted his left forepaw and scratched at the grate in what looked like frustration. He scratched again, and the grate popped open with a twanging sound.

Even without a cyber interface, there are times when I can read Sherlock’s mind perfectly. He looked at me, and said, “Well, why didn’t you try it to see if it was locked, idiot?”

“Sherlock, you’re a genius.” I opened the grate and stuck my head in. Nothing much to see but dust on the bottom, and in the far distance in either direction, small spills of light that I assumed came from other grates leading to other rooms.

“Can you still smell her?”

“Arf!”

And he shoved past me and took off down the air duct.