I don’t know. Mister Big wanted it as a souvenir?
You are a silly man, Mr. Noir. As we know, the deceased’s husband willed the estate to the two of them with the stipulation that the estate remain intact, so before it can be finally probated, one of the two beneficiaries must relinquish their share or die. The last thing the second beneficiary would want would be to lose the corpus delicti.
So I’m doing him a favor if I find it.
You might as well ask for a commission. Unless there is something wrong with the body.
What could be wrong with it?
She’d shrugged her little dismissive shrug, pushing her glasses further up her nose. Shall I cancel the ad for the miniature soldiers? Nothing’s come of it. It’s a waste of money.
No, constable, we have not yet abandoned the field, you’d replied, taking back your trenchcoat which she had threatened to send to the cleaners. Let’s add that we can also offer a set of miniature camp followers. Action figures. Hold down the fort, sweetheart. I’m off to the hunt.
SO, SQUEEZING THE WEBBY BLACK VEIL IN YOUR pocket as though to wring knowing itself from it, you pushed off from Big Mame’s, your chin sticky with cherry sauce, to see what you could turn up. For awhile, you were literally looking everywhere, as though the corpse might be hidden under a carpet or behind the door. In flophouses, movie theaters, beer halls, public toilets, penny arcades, massage parlors, gambling dens, hock shops, gyms, and boxing arenas. You checked in with your contacts among the city’s dealers, strippers and street vendors, numbers runners, hoods and hookers, pimps, plastic surgeons, pickpockets, addicts, medics and ambulance drivers, counterfeiters, cops and con artists. There were vague rumors, they wanted to help, eager for your coin, but you got nothing you could call a real lead. A one-armed taxi driver said he picked up a woman dressed in black who had to be lifted into his hack by the two gorillas she was with and taken to a fancy block near the harbor, but added that she snored like a horse the whole way, so that was probably not who you were looking for. A newspaper vendor outside the bus station who had lost his nose in the last war and had to tape his thick glasses to his temples told you he’d seen a fat guy shoving a duffelbag that might have held a body into one of the baggage lockers. You weren’t sure how he could see anything through his thick ink-smudged lenses, but coughed up the better part of Blanche’s allowance to get the station manager to open all the lockers within the vendor’s view. There was actually a duffelbag in one of them. It was full of candy bars, jawbreakers, bubblegum, all-day suckers, and children’s underwear. You’d just helped solve some crimes you’d never get credit for, might now even be accused of, but you hadn’t come closer to finding the dead widow.
At the morgue, you took a look at Fingers’ cadaver, stretched out flat, his hunched slump ironed out by the spine-crushing blow he took, the poor bastard. Yesterday after leaving Big Mame’s, you’d stopped by the Woodshed to pay your respects. No chalk figure drawing of the victim on the sidewalk, only a bass clef like a fetus. They told you he’d been struck by a stolen taxi. The Shed’s old wooden door sits back from the street. The car that decked him had to have all four wheels on the sidewalk — and, the direction it was going, would have had to cut over from the far lane. The owner shrugged and said people had different musical tastes. He knew there were some who thought Fingers was too heavy on the left hand. You asked the Creep to see all the female stiffs and made him pull them out just far enough that you could look at the legs, more in blind hope than with any conviction you’d see anything you recognized, having to put up all the while with the Creep’s evil sniggering. I have some other pretty people here if there’s something particular you want, he whispered, and you popped him one, right on the honker, flattening it to a bloody splatter in the middle of his ugly bug-eyed face. Made you feel better, the way hitting out always does, even if it’s completely senseless. You don’t understand this need for rough stuff. It’s just something you have to do from time to time to tell the world what you think of it. Blanche is always telling you to grow up and stop hitting people, but you can’t help it, your fists have a mind of their own, you go on doing it. You might say it’s who you are, but you don’t know who the fuck you are. Just a dumb dick, sometimes full of aimless rage. After you slapped the Creep around a bit more, he admitted he’d heard about a body floating around with a price tag on it, but he didn’t know where it was. What do you mean, floating? I don’t know, he sniveled, lapping at the blood on his upper lip. That’s what I heard. You don’t want me to hit you again, do you, Creep? He rolled his popeyes up at you and grinned with swollen lips, his nose streaming. Yes, please. You left the sick sonuvabitch and stepped out into the night.
Where it was raining again. Lightly, just enough to scatter glittery reflections on the street and to drive most pedestrians inside, making the streets seem like a damp empty stage with sinister events brewing in the darkened wings. You pulled your fedora down over your eyes, doggedly continuing your search, stopping in at the aquarium, casino, the Chinese theater. On the third floor of a cheap hotel in the theater district, a silhouetted woman was undressing behind a drawn blind. Same window as last night? No, different neighborhood. The kind of movie showing nightly all across town. The movie you’re in. Chasing shadows. You paused to look into a backstreet watch-repair shop window. Old sleuth’s habit of using a window as a mirror to see if anyone’s following you. There was. Fat Agnes. Across the street. You spun around to confront him: not there. Just a blinking neon light advertising McGinty’s Pool Hall. You turned back to the window to check: Yes, that’s all it was. You were on edge. Seeing things. What you saw now through the curtain of rain dripping off your hat brim was your own reflection, staring back at you with rain-curtained eyes, cigarette glowing at the lips, the multitudinous faces of time ticking away in the shadowy background. What are you doing out here, you dumb fuck, you asked it, it asked you, the lit cigarette bobbing as if scribbling out your question. You don’t love the widow, alive or dead. That’s bullshit. You don’t love anyone, wouldn’t know what to do if you did. This is what you love. The gumshoe game. Played alone on dark wet streets to the tune of the swell and fade of car horns, sirens, the sounds of breaking glass, cries in the street, the percussive punctuation of gunshots and shouted obscenities. You nodded and your reflection nodded. You love your own bitter misery, your knotted depression. In short, you’re a fucking romantic, Noir, as Joe the bartender likes to say. A disease you medicate with booze, needing a dose now. The widow knew how to get under your skin. Denial. Frustration. Deception. Depravity. You eat it up.
Cheered by all this heavy thinking, you crossed over to McGinty’s, where you found Cueball alone at table, peering down the length of his cue the way he used to peer down rifle barrels, his eyes so close together they seemed almost to join at the bridge of his sharp narrow nose, crossing into each other as they took aim. He wasn’t always Cueball. He was once a famous hit man named Kubinsky, but he changed his name while doing time when nature changed his hair style, leaving him with a shiny white dome like one of these wigless manikins. About as much emotion in him, too. Give him a pistol, he’d somehow shoot himself in the elbow, but put a rifle in his hands and the flies on the wall ducked and shielded their eye facets. No telling how many poor suckers he’d iced before his prison vocational retraining. When he was still Kubinsky and had hair, it was said he worked on occasion for Mister Big and you asked him what he knew about the man. You were convinced that the elusive Big had something to do with the killing of the widow and probably the disappearance of the body, too, in spite of what Blanche said. Yeah, I done some jobs for him, I think they were for him, Cueball said, potting three balls with one stroke, but I never seen him. There was a bunch of guys running around town saying they was Mister Big, but none of them really was, none I met. He was quietly clearing the table on his own, there being few who dared challenge him. Cueball, like most professional killers, was a loner. No male friends and, when in need, he hung out mostly with working girls, partnered up with none of them. Except one.