Game?
You wake up from a sleep so leaden you cannot think where you are until you find the dead girl beside you, strangled with her own jammies, your hand still between her legs. Ah. There’s someone else in this house. Why did you assume otherwise? Sirens again, drawing up out front. This is not Blue’s beat, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up. You are frantically hauling your pants on, stuffing your bare feet into your gumshoes, thinking fast, as fast as you can with your stunned brain. The whiskey bottle is gone, the glass, your fedora; replaced by stuffed bunnies. There must be a servants’ back staircase. Your passkey worked on the front door, maybe there’s another smugglers’ door somewhere in the basement. You can’t find the back staircase but you discover a laundry chute and you dive down it, hoping for a soft landing. Your hopes are confounded, but your stupefied senses register only the bounce. Nor does there seem to be a door that leads anywhere but to another room. You hear the thunder of heavy boots overhead. You duck into the wine cellar to hide and discover, down behind the racks, a lock set into the brick wall. Your key opens it. An irregular section of brick slides out, creating an opening just big enough to crawl through. There’s a mystery here, but you’re a street dick, not a metaphysician, you’ve no time to muse on it, they’re already clattering down the basement stairs. You snatch a couple bottles of wine, sink them in your trenchcoat pockets, and you’re gone, pulling the bricks closed behind you.
THIS ISN’T YOUR FIRST MAD DISHABILLE DASH OUT OF A woman’s bedroom. They have mostly — your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe for the fleeting joys of romance — followed upon the unexpected arrival of a husband or lover, sometimes an irate parent or snapping dog, once even a crazed horse (don’t ask), but it has always been your practice to leave behind hot bodies, not cold ones, the only anatomy at mortal risk generally being your own. You’ve had your heels and ears clipped by flying bullets, have been knocked off the sides of buildings you were scrambling down by flowerpots and birdcages, and have taken a load of buckshot in your butt — twice, same guy, same dame, going over the same back wall; learning doesn’t come easy to you — but so far you have dodged the doom of so many of your clients’ rivals. Those poor saps you got the goods on. The closest you’ve come to buying it was during a brief torrid fling with a circus aerialist with amazingly muscular jaws, one of those slim dollies who hang ninety feet above the ground by their teeth; she had oral techniques you’d never experienced before, nor have you since, and as you are always willing to take a few risks to revel in instructive marvels, you spent a lot of time between acts in her caravan, in spite of her lion-tamer husband’s reputation for savagery. It wasn’t easy to tear away from her mid-performance, so eventually he collared you, speaking loosely. Collar-boned you, more like. His reputation was well-deserved. First, you took a lashing from his big black whip from which you still have scars striped across your backside like a stave of music, and then you were thrown raw into the lion’s cage. And this was not a lion from whose paw you’d pulled a thorn, though you did get the impression, as its lips curled back in a wet snarl, that it was laughing. Just before you could get recycled, however, you were rescued by the aerialist (another romantic) who, when the lion tamer, weary of beating her, went off for consolation from the Fat Lady, tossed the big cat a poisoned hamburger. Later, you heard, her husband got a hamburger much like it, but by then you’d stopped going to the circus.
WELL, THIS SORT OF WHAM-BAM LOVING, AS JOE THE bartender describes, approvingly, all matings, human and otherwise, has not been all of love you’ve known; though you always resist them, you’ve had tenderer feelings, too. The night the body was discovered in the docklands and then lost in the morgue, for example, you dropped by Loui’s afterwards to ease the pain of a blown case and found yourself crying in your whiskey (figuratively: you don’t cry) at the loss of your widow and of her remains as well. You had failed her, and having failed her, you knew then that you had loved her, and you probably said as much in your tough tight-lipped way, though they would anyway have known your true feelings by the way you blew your nose. All this was a bit too much for Joe, who started telling a dirty joke about a woman who dressed in widow’s weeds to bury her broken dildo, then in white to wed her new one, but who was visited on her wedding night by the ghost of her dead dildo, accusing her of negligent dildicide. Loui laughed, interrupting the joke, which, as you knew, had as dark a punchline as any in Joe’s repertoire, and said that his fourth wife, or maybe it was his fifth, used to call him, lovingly, her dildo with ears, and that she was the best wife he ever had, wives on the whole being a contentious and predatory lot.
Flame, more sympathetic, herself a sucker for impossible amours, drifted off to the floor mike and sang a song about lost love called “The Dick and the Dame.” The dick was just a trick for a dame on the game, she moaned in her sultry voice, so full of anguish and thwarted desire. If the chick’s up shit creek, is the dick to blame. .? Flame, you knew, would be happy to help you get through the night, but you needed to be alone. When she reached the last line about the dick’s pursuit of the ineffable (which rhymed with “his situation was laughable”), you blew her a kiss, tugged your fedora down over your brows, lit up, and, collar up, hands in trenchcoat pockets, stepped out into the grim wet night.
The streets, wearing their heavy shadows as if dressed for a wake, were spookily abandoned except for the occasional loners hurrying along under the scattered lamps in the distance, huddled anonymously against the drizzly rain — other mourners, it seemed to you, like yourself. Cars passed but rarely and then as if without drivers or passengers, mere light dollies, interrogating the streets with their harsh probing glare. As you left Loui’s upscale neighborhood and plunged into the gloomier precincts at the edge of the docklands, you found yourself wading through pools of bottomless shadow, buffeted by drifting wisps of cold emblematic fog. Like a dangerous journey into the land of the dead, as some have said. Such horseshit you don’t take onboard, but you did feel your own mortality blowing foglike through you on the night and whatever you saw looked more dead than alive.
You had decided to head down to the Woodshed, known simply as the Shed, an old teapad and gut-bucket often used for jam sessions, what Fingers and his chums called clambakes, and popular with ferry captains and wistful underdressed ladies past their prime. A romantic gesture. The widow, drifting in like a shadow, had found you there one night. She’d wanted to tell you another part of her story and was informed by someone that the Shed was where you could often be found. Maybe that was the night she told you about her grandfather, you don’t remember. What you can’t forget is the last thing she’d said: I don’t even know if all this is true, Mr. Noir. I just feel I need to see you, and to do that I have to have a reason. The light picked out her hands, dragging them out of the dark. No reason needed, sweetheart, you’d assured her, and placed one hand on hers and the light there dimmed. A reason for myself, I mean, she’d said. I’m in mourning, Mr. Noir. Hesitatingly, she’d withdrawn her hand. This is not proper.
When you entered that night of the docklands murder and missing body, after your walk over from Loui’s, Fingers, accompanied only by a snubnosed bassist, was riffing on an old sentimental blues ballad, a tune meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty. It was late, an off night, the place was half empty. You slid into a scarred wooden booth at some remove from the drunks and ladies at the bar, but close to the little stage where Fingers was playing, tugged your fedora brim down, ordered up a double, studied the graffiti carved into the tabletop. You were one of the few who knew that Fingers got his name, not from his piano playing, but from his career as a safe-cracker. You’d once helped him beat a box job rap by convincing the District Attorney who was after him to drop the case — the D.A. was a client of a dominatrix you knew, there were photographs. Though he wasn’t there that night, you’d often seen the D.A. in the Shed thereafter, and there was a rumor there was something going on between him and Fingers.