Yeah? Who from?
Don’t ask. The price was high. But Blue doesn’t know about that. If he finds out, you can come looking for my body. She presses closer, whispers huskily in your ear: You’ll know it when you see it, Phil. The one with the red patch.
You glance up at the clock over the bar with its tuxedoed rumpot and windmill arms. You wonder how long you were down in the tunnels and ask Joe what day it is. Turns out it’s the day you booked the meeting with Snark at the Star Diner. That clock, like all bar clocks, always runs fifteen minutes fast, you can just make it. Got a date, you say, and down your drink, take her hand out of your pants and swivel away, but give her silky ass a farewell stroke (why not, feels good), then hit the streets again.
IT’S A PERFECT NIGHT. WIND, RAIN, GLOOMILY OVERCAST, the puddled reflections more luminous than the streetlamps they reflect. Cars and buses crash heedlessly through the puddles, forcing you against the wet buildings and blue-lit window displays. You’re sucking on a fag, hands in your trenchcoat pockets, your posterboy face hidden behind the upturned collar, thinking about Flame’s betrayal, if it was one, about Blue’s dark machinations, the mysterious widow, her unknown whereabouts, about all the bodies you’ve left in your wake. Your tattoo is itching. You reach back under your coat to scratch it with your middle finger erect, just to let whoever’s behind you know that you know. What’s Blue up to? Maybe he’s in Mister Big’s pocket, the chalk drawing part of an elaborate cover-up of a heartless murder. Thus the rush to hide the body. Blue figured he could scare you off the case, underestimating your obstinacy, your restless need to know, and what the widow had come to mean to you. Or was he using that obstinacy for some covert purpose of his own? And is Snark a pal or Blue’s agent, his underling and co-conspirator, sending you off on wild goose chases and setting you up to take the fall for others’ crimes? If so, whose? Blue’s? His and Mister Big’s? But why would the big man want to waste a smalltime ivories tickler like Fingers? Because he sent you to an ice cream parlor? Maybe. Message: Helping Noir is not good for your health. Correspondence by cadaver. Body bulletins. You hope Cueball is okay. But why shouldn’t he be? Why does it matter? To anyone? Nothing seems to make sense, but why do you expect it to? Shouldn’t you just take Mister Big’s dream warning to heart and stop trying to figure something out when there is nothing to figure? You glance up at a third-floor window over a drug store where shadows play against a drawn blind. Looks like some guy stabbing a woman. But what can you know? And why (though it will do no good, you stop at a phone booth, call the cops, give them the drugstore address, hang up before they can ask any questions) do you want to? Because the body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them. Then, once it gets started, it can’t stop. Gotta know, gotta know. It’s a genetic malignancy. Ultimately terminal. Blanche, who reads the Sunday papers, calls it the drama of cognition, or sometimes the melodrama of cognition, which means it’s a kind of entertainment. Solving crimes as another game to play; conk tickling, not to let it go dead on you. Murder providing a cleaner game than most. You start with something real. A body. Unless someone steals it. Is that what happened? Who would want it? And what for? Blackmail? Or did Rats snatch it to use as a stash bag? Happened on his turf. Is that why he was nabbed? But why that one in particular? There are bodies all over the city. Up over that drug store, for example. It’s a deranged town. A lot of guns but few brains, as someone has said. Did the widow have one in her little purse? Probably. Nested amid the bankrolls. Did she ever use it? If she had one, she probably used it. Put a heater in someone’s hands and it’s too much fun to pull the trigger and watch your target’s knees buckle. Did she use it on her ex? It’s possible. What isn’t? Taxis pass, their wipers flapping, but they all seem to be driven by guys in leather jackets with goatees and granny glasses. Can’t take risks, not enough time for that, must get to Snark, hoping only it’s not a trap. Blue could be waiting. But you and Snark have done each other enough favors through the years to create a kind of mutual dependency and you figure Snark will want to preserve that. You squeeze the widow’s veil in your pocket for luck, then remember you don’t have it anymore. Must be something else.
But though you’re hurrying along, running against the clock, it seems to take forever. Everything’s stretching out. The blocks are longer somehow, the soaked streets wider and packed bumper to bumper with blaring traffic. You have to double back, take shortcuts that aren’t short. You know the way and you don’t know the way. You find yourself on unfamiliar corners, have to guess which turn to take. Racing across a street at the risk of having your legs severed at the knees by clashing bumpers, you catch a glimpse of the pale blue police building glowing faintly in the wet night. You shouldn’t be able to see it from here, but you do. The city can be like that sometimes. Especially when you’re dead on your feet and in bad need of a drink. Joe has a story about it which he regaled you with one day over his ginger ale. This was in the afternoon before happy hour — what Joe calls feeding time at the zoo — so Loui’s was quiet. Serene. You were in mourning, not just for the widow, but for Fingers, too, so the atmosphere was right and you had more than one. More than three in fact, who was counting. Joe was not always a teetotaler, and when you asked him why he gave it up, he told you about the night the city turned ugly and nearly did him in. I know you love her, he said. But watch out. She’s big trouble. Flame, as you recall, was rehearsing a song in the background, something about a stone-hearted bitch who drives her lovers mad, in which hysteria was made to rhyme with marry ya and bury ya, but later she came over and asked why you two always called the city “she.” Well, we’re guys, said Joe. That’s the way we talk.
THIS HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO, BACK IN MY FALL-down-drunk days. I was living on the street mostly, if you could call it living, working as a bouncer, doorman, dealer, garbage collector, barman, pimp, any way to scramble together enough skins for the dog juice. Sometimes I woke up in a hooker’s bed, sometimes in an abandoned lot or a back alley, bruised and bleeding but with no memory of the punch-up, if that was what had happened. Now and then I found myself flying with the snowbirds, but mostly I stuck with the hooch. I was sick a lot of the time but sometimes I felt good, and whenever I felt good I got noisy. Sometimes the cops would take me in as a public nuisance, needing someone to pound on for awhile, but usually they let me be, doing nothing worse than push my face into my own vomit, steal my stash, or kick me into the gutter if I was blocking the sidewalk.
It was a shitty life and I began blaming it all on the city. Alkies are like that: everybody’s fault but their own. So whenever I got really juiced, I’d start railing crazily at her, calling her every dirty name I could think of at the top of my voice so everyone would know. She retaliated, seemed to, by moving the streets around. Nothing stayed in the same place, that was my impression. When I was sleeping one off, I could hear the buildings walking around, changing places. I didn’t know where I was most of the time. Of course, I was also completely scorched most of the time, so I couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t, though in a sense it was all real, because even if I was only imagining it, it was still real, at least in my own mind, the only one I’ve got. Which back then I was doing my best to burn to a cinder.