I think Joe put something in my drink to knock me out, you say.
Yeah. It’s called alcohol. It’s morning, handsome, and your clothes are here. We had another visit from Blue and his boys last night. Time to hit the road, Phil. You’re not safe in this place.
When does a man get a breakfast in this life? you want to know, but the question is received as a gratuitous comment. You return Flame’s bloomers and pull on your own clothes, laundered, pressed, and folded: the old black pinstripe suit with the baggy knees and threadbare elbows, a white shirt, frayed but clean and crisply starched, dark tie, and black socks and shoes, holes in the heels of the former, in the soles of the other. Blanche has already folded a white handkerchief into the jacket lapel pocket, dropped a loaded bill clip in the pants. Collar and tie pins, cuff links, rumpled fedora, borrowed.45 in your trenchcoat pocket. In short, a somewhat seedy version of any self-respecting gangster’s threads.
There’s a basement link to the bookies next door, they’ll show you the safe route from there, Flame says, handing you sandwiches and a bottle in a brown paper bag and a passkey and slapping your butt affectionately. See you, baby.
WHEN YOUR LATE DEPARTED CLIENT, THE VEILED widow, turned up on your couch in your darkened office after your mazy trials in the alley, she also had a story about a brother. My brother has come to the city, she said from under her veil, peaked by the tip of her nose. He says he has come to protect me, but he is a naïve boy, easily influenced, and I fear for him here. And for myself.
The football player.
No, basketball. Does that make a difference?
His hands.
Oh, I see. His hands?
Listen, I’m bushed, kid. Mind if I stretch out there beside you while you tell me your story?
I certainly do mind, Mr. Noir. You stay where you are. My brother, as I have suggested, is a likeable easy-going fellow, a playful smalltown boy with a big heart who, in spite of our father’s stern discipline, is inclined to get into ridiculous trouble from time to time. Often this is due to his rather singular passion for hardboiled detective novels and films. He is an impressionable fellow and he likes to act out what he has seen or read, or perhaps he feels compelled to, driven by some inner need to create a persona for himself, otherwise lacking.
Well, there are worse lives to take up than a private eye’s, you grumbled, somewhat defensively. Her hands, not those of a basketball player, were folded softly on her belly. Not much flesh was visible; you had to enjoy what there was. They were crowned, as a small knoll might be crowned by a lighthouse, by her large glittering ring. A lure. For catching bigger fish than you.
I am afraid, Mr. Noir, that it excites him rather to emulate the villains. She sighed and her hands rose and fell as if lifted by a gentle wave. So he has robbed some banks, turned to gambling and easy women, killed a few people, and so on, behavior that may well be tolerated in the city, but is not acceptable in our little town. He submits meekly to our father’s chastisements after each episode, but seems drawn ineluctably toward a life of flamboyant crime. The romance novels I have bought him appear to have had no effect at all.
She was flexing her toes in her black stockings as a bird of prey might. You wondered if she painted her toenails. Her toe-flexing caused her thighs to ripple faintly under the black skirt. If she lifts one knee, you thought, she’s going to have to fight you off. So, you and your brother are not getting on, and you think—
Oh no, on the contrary. We love each other very much — too much, some say, reflecting the oppressive misunderstandings that prevail in small communities such as ours — but that’s just the point. Just think, Mr. Noir. To be the perfect villain, one would have to try to kill that which he most loves, and it would be all the more villainous to accept money from others for doing so.
Others? A rhetorical question. You knew the plot here, at least as devised or imagined by the widow. What you really wanted to know was what she and her brother were up to to set off those oppressive misunderstandings.
I have reason to believe he has taken employment with that man whose name I have given you. The one you are supposed to be following. Have you any news?
Well, I had an eye on him just now, or someone like him, but he got away.
You must be more assiduous, she said, and that wave rolled under her hands once more. I am depending on you, Mr. Noir. My life is in your hands. She turned her head to look at them, the veil flattening over her cheek and dropping off her nose, and you looked at them: gnarled, calloused, muddied by the alley muck you’d been crawling through, the fingernails filthy, the knuckles made knobby by frequent breakage. You opened them up and stared into their palms. They looked like death to you. Maybe to her, too. She was no longer looking at them, her beak poking up at the ceilinged shadows as before. It was as if she had given up on them. In one of your most celebrated cases, all you had to work with was a severed hand. From the part you were able to deduce the whole and, indirectly, solve a crime. You were younger then and drinking less. You have implied that my father may have behaved improperly with me, she said at last, and, alas, that is true. My dear sweet mother had stopped baking pies and had slipped into some crippling addiction and spent the day cursing the deity. I had no one else to turn to, so I asked my brother to hide in the closet the next time my father visited and, if necessary, to come to my rescue. But instead, he only kept watching. After that, he was always in the closet. I thought that letting him do what father did would end this perverse behavior, but it was not the sight of me that excited him. It was father.
Outside the window, the buzzing neon light blinked eerily. Wheeling police car lights flickered on the ceiling like some kind of primitive motion picture machine showing a film whose images time had dissolved. You were trying to see there what the brother saw. And the lover? you asked. What happened to him? In the darkness, her hands had faded away. You felt like you were talking to a dark shadow on the dark couch. Hello? You were talking to a shadow. There being no objection, you lay down with it.
SLEEPING WITH SHADOWS. IF LIFE IS AT BEST A SHADOW play, with what or whom else do we ever sleep, in spite of the fleshy illusions of the moment? Such was the principal burden of the Case of the Severed Hand. The hand was waiting outside your office door one morning as if it had strolled there on its fingertips. Had it been left there as a warning? An appeal for help? Did you know its former owner? Severed body parts are commonplace in the workaday life of a private dick. You picked it up and carried it into your office and tossed it in the in-box.
At the time you were on well-paid assignment from a humorless crook-backed old hock shop owner and fence for stolen goods named Crabbe. According to his story, some goods belonging to a murder victim had passed through his hands and he was being blackmailed by a bent cop who threatened to hang the murder on him if he didn’t pay up. I’m just a businessman, he growled. I have no idea what fucking murder he’s talking about, one forgettable rich bastard or another, but I know my situation ain’t good. Crabbe figured the cop was working for the mayor, known for his shake-down rackets, so he couldn’t go to the guy’s superiors. He knew you as one who took no shit from city hall and bore the scars to prove it and believed he could count on you. As Blanche, cleaning your office, liked to say: Your horror of gratuities from officialdom, Mr. Noir, is matched only by your horror of cleanliness. The cop was on his tail and your job was to tail the tail and log his movements. Presumably so Crabbe could steer clear of him and look for ways to put the blackmailer on the defensive.