We emerged into the moldering lobby of the hotel. The windows were boarded up, but enough light leaked through for me to tell that what felt like moss under my feet was actually rotting chunks of old carpet, and what felt like rain on my shoulders was spiderwebs. I was a decade or so early—rain and moss would make their appearance here, just not yet. I paused at the elevators, but the babyhead went on, to the stairwell, and started waddling up the steps. Either the elevators didn’t work anymore, or the babyheads weren’t tall enough to reach the buttons.
I followed him through the hotel to a room on the second floor. There were four of them inside, including the kid with the fish on his jumper who’d taken my license, and a couple that looked like girls. I went in. The one lying stretched out on the bed picked up his head and stared at me, and I recognized him immediately from my days of peeking in the window at Cranberry Street.
For a second I thought he had a full head of hair, but then I saw it was a woman’s blond wig cut so short that it stood out like a ragged, overgrown crew cut. It didn’t fool me long. I don’t even think it was meant to. Underneath it Barry Greenleaf was as bald as the rest of them.
No one said anything. I tried my best to find a resemblance in his features to Pansy Greenleaf, Maynard Stanhunt, or just about any of the other principals in the case, but I came up empty. The distortion of the evolution therapy had warped any resemblance beyond recognition.
The other babyheads were sitting in a loose circle by Barry’s bed, and they scuttled away on their haunches to make a space for me in the middle of the room. Barry propped himself up on one side, his head braced against his arm, and the matted’blond wig slid sideways, covering his ear. There wasn’t anywhere for me to sit except the floor, and after taking a good look at that, I opted to stay on my feet.
“Hello, Barry,” I said. “My name is Conrad Metcalf. I’m working for your uncle Orton.”
“Uncle who? I don’t think I know who you mean.” His voice was soft but it dripped contempt.
“Orton Angwine, Pansy’s brother—”
“Okay, okay. What do you want?”
“I’m working on your family tree, only there’s a couple of missing branches. Who’s your father, Barry?”
“I don’t have a father.”
“Is it Maynard Stanhunt?”
“My father’s Dr. Theodore Twostrand. That’s the inventor of evolution therapy. He’s everybody’s father” He turned to his little audience. “Who’s your father?” he asked.
“Dr. Twostrand,” echoed one of the other babyheads obligingly.
Barry looked back at me. “He’s everybody’s father.”
“I was visiting an architect this morning,” I said. “He’d drawn up plans for a babyhead quarters for the backyard at Cranberry Street. Somebody paid him to do it, and I don’t think it was Dr. Twostrand.”
“Go ahead,” said Barry. “Make your point.”
“Somebody cares about you, Barry. Somebody thinks you’ll come back home and is willing to spend a lot of money making sure you’ll want to stay when you do. I knew Maynard Stanhunt. He had plenty of money, but it doesn’t fit. I don’t see him spending it all on you.”
Barry pretended to yawn.
“Who’s your father, Barry?”
“The architect, probably. What’s your theory?”
“The closer I look, the more connection I see between Danny Phoneblum and the Cranberry Street property. His name was on the blueprints, not Stanhunt’s. Pansy is supposed to have worked for him, but nobody will say what she did. Maybe carry the big man’s baby, that’s my guess. She bore him a son and got paid off with a house and a lifetime supply of illegal make and needles.”
It was only a theory before I said it, but once it was out, it sounded good. Good enough to work with, anyway. I probably couldn’t get confirmation from the kid, though. The more relevant question was whether he even knew.
“You’ve got all the answers,” said Barry. “What do you need me for?”
“You’re a member of a family, Barry. It may not be much of a family, and you may want nothing to do with it, but that doesn’t change anything. You’re right at the heart of this case. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to make a move, but you’re still a player. When I find out more, I’ll be back. In the meantime, here’s my number.” I handed him one of my business cards. He took it without looking at it and tucked it under the bare mattress.
I turned to leave. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d found Barry, and now I had an angle I could work from. I was eager to get to it. But when I reached for the door handle, Barry said: “Wait a minute. I want to ask you a couple of questions.”
I turned. “Yeah?”
“Who’s paying you?”
I thought about it. “No one, anymore.”
“What happened to my uncle what’s-his-name?”
“The Office took him away.”
“You don’t like the Office much, do you?”
“I don’t like the Office,” I said. “But maybe I don’t like it in a different way than you don’t like it.”
He chewed on that for a minute, then let it go. “Is Pansy very unhappy?”
“You should ask her yourself.”
“Maybe I will.” He looked down from the bed at his balloon-headed compatriots. “What about it? Anybody want to go for a picnic in the fancylands?”
“If that’s it, I’ll leave,” I said.
“One more question,” said Barry. His eyes lit up, as if they were opening for the first time, and I had a glimpse of some demonic intelligence at least glancingly in residence there.
“Yeah?” I said.
“How’s it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?”
CHAPTER 21
BARRY’S FASCINATING QUESTION TURNING ITSELF OVER IN my brain, I went downstairs, passing back through the dark back room and the dilapidated bar—where I forked over the other half of Angwine’s hundred—and out into the afternoon sun on Telegraph Avenue. It was time for me to go find Walter Surface, the detective who’d stepped into my shoes in the Stanhunt case—the first Stanhunt case. He might turn out to be Phoneblum’s stooge, and he might not, but either way he was sure to supply some interesting answers, provided I could come up with the right questions—and get my foot in the door long enough to ask them.
His address and phone number were listed in the public directory I kept in my car trunk, but when I pulled up alongside a phone booth, my search for change on the floor of my car turned up nothing but some empty packets of my blend and the anti-grav pen the kangaroo had slapped out of my shirt. I considered stopping at one of the storefronts on Telegraph for change and then decided not to bother. If a private inquisitor couldn’t drop in on another private inquisitor without calling ahead, who could?
Surface’s office was on the top floor of a seven-story building on the edge of the warehouse district. It was the kind of neighborhood where you give your car a little involuntary glance back over your shoulder after you park it, and if you have any doubt whether you locked it, any doubt at all, you walk all the way back just to check From the look of the neighborhood, Phoneblum had managed to dig up the one P.I. in the book in worse need of a buck than me. It made sense. Desperation was a quality Phoneblum obviously prized when he found it—and cultivated when he didn’t.
The voice that called me in from the hallway was female, and I figured it for a secretary, which was a happy surprise in my otherwise low estimation of Surface’s setup. But there wasn’t anything behind the door beyond a single office, and the woman had her feet up across the only desk. The office was a little smaller than mine, a little uglier, a little dirtier: That was the way it went in my head. I compared his office with mine, and I knew that when I met Surface, I’d search his features for clues to the face I saw when I looked in the mirror;