Noir Read online

  When he arrived, you got him jawing about his family, station gossip (Blue was suffering a violent case of redhot hemorrhoids and was making life hell for everyone), tips on the horses, and recent crimes, mostly of the gory sort, Snark’s particular métier. Snark has an unusual family. A pair of Siamese twins for kids and a wife who’s a professional contortionist. She was working up an nightclub act with the twins that Snark said he hoped would be big enough to allow him to retire from the force. When he’s tanked enough, Snark will describe all the positions his wife can get into. Snark himself can’t touch his toes, even with his knees bent.

  After a few (it was getting ugly, he was talking about the positions the twins could get into), you told him the widow’s tale and showed him the piece of paper.

  That’s deep shit, he said, and took another slug from his mug of whiskey. Outside, an old panhandler with long white hair and beard was pressing his bulbous nose against the window, gazing hauntingly in upon your conversation. You’d often seen him out there, he was part of the scenery in his old weathered topcoat and rumpled fedora, unwashed gray-black clothing held together with frayed sashweight cord. Hunched shoulders, caved-in chest, his limp beard down to his belt, plastic bags full of dustbin debris, a living piece of the inner city. More or less living. He often had something poetical to say, like I got the city inside me, mister, it’s weighin’ me down and suckin’ up all my brain juice, or I seen a bird today with a broken wing and a cat et it and a car hit the cat. Who is this broad? Snark asked.

  Her name? I don’t know. I learned it and then I unlearned it. You tapped your own whiskey mug in explanation. You realized you’d spotted your tie with the chili. Not the first time. It’s why you wear patterned ties. Her husband killed himself. Or was killed.

  I think I know the case. He drowned himself. With his feet in concrete.

  I think it was a shooting.

  Well, maybe he drowned himself, and then shot himself. Or vice versa. I’m sure it was him.

  What I need to know, Snark, you said, scraping at your tie, is how do I get to Mister Big?

  Well, he has a weakness for pedicures.

  I don’t do toenails.

  Also toy soldiers.

  Toy soldiers?

  Yeah, they tell me his office walls are lined with glass cases full of them. He dresses up and plays out battles on his billiard table.

  Hmm. Any specialty?

  Medieval. He digs the Dark Ages.

  WHEN SNARK LEFT, YOU BOUGHT A DOUGHNUT DIPPED IN pink sugar and took it out to the old panhandler. He tipped his crumpled fedora and, staring up at you with watery blue eyes curtained by long strands of dirty white hair, said: They was a woman had a dog that done tricks. The dog got sick and died and the woman got sick and died. Don’t know which come first. But no one remembers the tricks the dog done. Just me. If you ever need to know, mister, just ask me. He put the pink doughnut in one of his plastic bags and shuffled away. Was he going to eat the doughnut? Sell it? Bury it? Where was he going? What else was in his bags? On a hunch, you followed him. What were you thinking? That he might reveal something about the city that you didn’t know. Something that would be a kind of clue. On the principle that opposites attract, you thought, he might even lead you to Mister Big. Why not. Besides, you were restless. You’d slept all day, drunk too much, needed to walk it off. Snark was heavy duty.

  The old panhandler’s route was a twisty one down bleak abandoned streets, ever narrower, darker, and more labyrinthine. A wind was blowing down them, chasing scraps of rag and newspaper, causing signs and hanging lamps to squeal and sway. Sometimes all you could see were the blown newspapers and the panhandler’s long white hair and beard flowing along in the shadows. There seemed no pattern to his wanderings, though he stopped at each trashbin and poked around, so maybe he was making his nightly rounds. Doing his collections, straightening up the city, he the only feeble sign of life within it. You’d been trailing along and no longer knew where you were. Didn’t matter. Though you wished you’d remembered to pack heat, you were at home nowhere and anywhere. And there was something about these dark nameless streets going nowhere that resonated with your inner being. The desolation. The bitterness. The repugnant underbelly of existence. Well, you’d eaten too fast. The doughnuts and chili hadn’t settled well. As the old fellow stooped over some gutter refuse, you stepped into a doorway, cupped your hands around a struck match, lit up. You smelled something familiar. And then the lights went out.

  THE CITY AS BELLYACHE. THE URBAN NIGHTMARE AS AN expression of the vile bleak life of the inner organs. The sinister rumblings of the gut. Why we build cities the way we do. Why we love them the way they are even when they’re dirty. Because they’re dirty. Pissed upon, spat upon. Meaningless and deadly. We can relate to that. Here’s a principle: The body is always sick. Even when it’s well, or thinks it is. Cells are eating cells. It’s all about digestion. Or indigestion. What in the city we call corruption. Eaters eating the eaten. Mostly in the tumultuous dark. It’s a nasty fight to the finish and everybody loses. Cities laid out on grids? The grid’s just an overlay. Like graph paper. The city itself, inside, is all roiling loops and curves. Bubbling with a violent emptiness. You have often pondered this, especially after suppers at the Star Diner. You were pondering it that night when some semblance of consciousness returned. Pondering is not the word. Your buffeted mind, its shell sapped, was incapable of pondering. It was more like an imageless dream about pain and the city. Almost imageless. You were being dragged through an old film projector. Your mazy crime-ridden gut was on view somewhere. Your sprocket holes were catching, tearing. Your head was caught in the mechanism. Fade out.

  BEFORE YOU COULD SEE ANYTHING, YOU COULD HEAR water sloshing lazily against stones like crumpling metal. The dirty spatter of rain, squawk of gulls. You were down at the waterfront. They must have dragged you here. You opened one eye. Everything in shades of gray, slick with rain. Could be twilight. Probably dawn. You were lying on your belly on wet rocks and broken concrete under an old iron bridge down in the docklands at dawn. In the rain. Everything hurt. Head felt cracked open. To rise up on one elbow took an heroic effort, but you were a hero. Your clothes were a mess. But your tie had been laundered.

  Captain Blue was sitting on an old truck tire in a police slicker and rain hat, smoking a cigarette. He tossed you the pack. It was your own. One left. You fumbled for matches but they were wet. Blue came over irritably (you were wasting his time) and let you light your cigarette off his, then he sat down again. So what are you doing down here, dipshit? he asked. They throw you out of your flophouse?

  I had a yearning for the bracing seaside air, you said, and felt your pockets.

  You were lucky, Noir. It wasn’t robbery. When we found you, you still had your bankroll.

  Oh yeah? Where is it?

  I shared it out with the guys. Reward for saving your useless fucked-up life.

  What do you mean, saving my life? What did they do?

  It’s what they didn’t do. Pretty mean old boys, Noir. Now where did that big roll come from?

  Client of mine. At the bottom of an empty pocket, a nearly empty pocket, there was a wrinkled scrap of paper. The name the widow scribbled out for you. You tried to remember that familiar smell you noticed just before they brained you, but your sinuses were clogged now with the odor of dead fish and machine oil.

  Don’t bullshit me, scumbag, your clients don’t have that kinda money. What are you up to?

  You sighed. Even that hurt. So the sigh was more like a groan. You’d smoked the cigarette down to the point where it was burning your lips, and you badly needed another. You flicked the tiny fagend toward the water where rotting pilings from collapsed wooden docks reared up out of the greasy water like ancient stalagmites, black bones, and said: Collecting for police charity.

  I oughta take you over to the station, wiseass, and work you over just for the pleasure of it. But somebody’s already done that for us.

  Who do
you think that was?

  I don’t know. My guess is you’ve picked up a tail.

  Is that a guess or inside track?

  Educated guess, let’s say. Out in the dead black water, pimpled with rain, rusting barges with angular bent-neck cranes sat like senile old geezers having a mindless bath. You don’t know why you notice such things. You’re a nosy guy, Noir, Blue said, and nosy guys attract the curiosity of other nosy guys.

  Crushed beer cans. An old shoe. Rusting hubcap. Broken crate slats. Piece of sewer pipe. Bent plastic bottles. Debris of the shore, snuggling in the rocks. Integers. Adding up to nothing. Still, you keep on doing the fucking math. You staggered to your feet, feeling like shit. Think I’m going to have to change the mattress, you said.

  Snark says there’s a woman involved.

  Yeah, my mother. She misses me. Take me home to her.

  You’ve got a head wound, numbnuts. You should go to hospital and have it treated, get an X-ray.

  An X-ray might break it. I’ve got work to do.

  Your funeral, chump. I don’t have a free car, he says, but here. . . . He peeled a tenspot off the roll in his pocket. I’m feeling flush. I’ll pay for your cab.

  BLANCHE WAS UPSET WHEN SHE SAW THE STATE YOU were in. First thing, get out of those wet clothes, Mr. Noir. You’ll catch your death.

  I caught it when I got dropped, Blanche. And I don’t have any dry ones.

  I’ll take those things down to the laundromat and put them in the drier. Hurry up now.

  You felt like you might pass out. You were making squishy noises when you walked and not just in your shoes. You managed to get your tie off while she was brewing up a cup of tea, but she had to take care of the rest. It was like peeling tinfoil off a cigarette pack. You hoped your shorts weren’t dirty. While she was emptying out your pockets, she said: It’s that woman you’re mixed up with, isn’t it? The one with the legs and the fishy story.

  Maybe. I think the cops had something to do with it.

  She sat you down on a stool and bandaged up your head. This wasn’t the first time you’d turned up after a going-over, wouldn’t be the last, it was part of the racket, so Blanche always kept a fully stocked body-repair kit in the office. She used up a whole roll of cotton bandage and when she was done your helmeted head bobbed heavily on your shoulders; you felt like lying down but you were afraid of not getting up again. You look like a swami, Mr. Noir, she said, sniffing the wet clothes, then turned to leave.

  Wait a minute, Blanche. I can’t go around like this. What if someone comes?

  She stared at you thoughtfully over her horn-rimmed spectacles, set down the wet clothes, reached under her woolen skirt. Look the other way, Mr. Noir. You sipped at the tea, careful not to tip your head back for fear of it falling off. The tea tasted good; it would have tasted better with something in it, but that was a Blanche no-no. All right, you can look now. You can cover up your unmentionables with these. You’d always thought of Blanche wearing practical white cotton drawers or one of those elastic corsetty things, but what she handed you was a pair of pink silk panties with little flowers stitched on them. The glossy silk felt good but they were a tight fit and some of your unmentionables hung out. She tried to help you push them in, and she could get one side in, but when she tried to push the other side in, the first one popped out. The whole exercise was making you lightheaded.

  Leave it, sweetheart. If anyone asks, I’ll say I’m airing out my hemorrhoids.

  She wasn’t gone five minutes, you were still staggering about the room in the tight undies with your head dipping and weaving, fighting the urge to fall out on the sofa, when the widow turned up. Mr. Noir, she said, as though somewhat exasperated. I never know what to expect. Are you really a private detective, or do I have the wrong address?

  YOU’D THINK: LIVE AND LEARN. ONCE BURNED, TWICE shy, all that. If history starts to repeat, you can stop it if you want. Bend it. Or walk away from it. But here you are again in the Star Diner, getting shitfaced from the milk dispenser with Snark after another belly-churning chili-and-doughnut repast, hurting still from last night’s waterfront drubbing and breathless from your run from your interrupted railway freight-yard meet with Rats, and listening, while the old white-bearded panhandler peers in from outside, to the newest positions Snark’s contortionist wife has treated him to.

  Sounds great.

  Yeah, except for when she gets so twisted she gets us locked up. Then it can be a long sweaty night.

  You nod, trying to imagine this (the contortionist wife is easy enough, but not Snark), and thank him for pulling you out of the drink down at pier four last night. But what was he doing down there?

  We were called there on a tip and interrupted a murder. Yours. You were completely out of it but still thrashing away, and by the time we’d got a grip and fished you out, the bozo trying to do you had got away.

  The Hammer. There’s a body down there. On a yacht.

  There are bodies everywhere, Snark says with a certain glum zest, dipping a pistachio-crusted doughnut filled with grape jelly in his whiskey, then putting the whole thing in his mouth. Last night we caught a guy having his old lady for supper, he says, his cheeks bulging with chewed doughnut and oozing purple jelly. She’d been carved up, packaged in butcher’s paper, neatly labeled and stored in the refrigerator meat drawer.

  Blue stopped by today, Snark. Wants to arrest me for stealing some toy soldiers.

  Yeah, I saw him when he left. Expected him to come back with you. Better lay low. He’s gunning for you.

  He let me go. Not sure why.

  Must have thought he could use you somehow.

  I think he did. You hit the milk dispenser again. There are a lot of things you want to know but you’re here mainly because you thought Snark might know something about the widow and what happened to her body, especially after what Rats just told you about some mystery as to where it was found, the drawing of it. But all Snark is able to tell you is that he thinks goggle-eyes down at the morgue knows something.

  The Creep? I already talked to him. He told me she had painted toenails and a blonde snatch. Not much help. Never saw either.

  Maybe you should ask him again. And as for bodies down at the docks, listen to the captain. Stay away from there.

  The panhandler, his thick nose flattened on the misty window, is gazing in at you soulfully with his watery blue eyes. You start to tell Snark about the night you followed the old fellow and got laid out and, seemingly without transition, you find yourself, as though compelled, following him again, drifting into mazy dimly-lit inner-city streets in the hapless way one drifts into a repeating nightmare. Of course, there has been a transition. You got into a slurry disquisition on the world’s inscrutability, how knowing only leads to more unknowing, the world remaining enigmatic, deceptive, dangerous, impenetrable, and Snark, scowling, said, You haven’t been messing around with my wife, have you? and lumbered out in a drunken huff, leaving you stuck with the bill. Then the doughnut-and-story routine; you couldn’t seem to resist. This time, instead of one dipped in pink sugar, you bought the panhandler a custard-filled chocolate-frosted doughnut, your feeble effort maybe at changing the trajectory. He placed it carefully in one of his plastic bags and said: One day I seen a feller jump offa that building over there. Then I seen it again, a feller jumpin’ offa that building. But I don’t know if I seen two fellers jumpin’ or I seen one feller and then my brain thinkin’ about it made two differnt fellers out of it. The next time I thought about it, I seen another feller jumpin’. Or mebbe I seen another feller jumpin’ and that made me think of the other ones. The brain’s a funny thing, ain’t it? So whaddaya think? I seen three fellers jumpin’ or I seen just one and my rememberin’ brain made me think I seen three?

  I think you saw three different guys, you said. I mean, you just thought of it again, didn’t you? Did you see a guy jump just now?

  Sure. Didn’t you?

  And then he was shuffling off, you lighting up and, one
eye on the rooftops for falling bodies, shuffling along after him, sporting a rod this time, telling yourself that you are trying to figure out what happened last time, who was there in that darkened doorway, but knowing your following is less rational than that. Knowing, in effect, you can’t stop yourself.

  You know plenty about getting sucked into stories that have already been told. You’ve used that knowledge in the past to crack a few cases, though usually too late to change anything. And it has happened to you before. This haunting widow is not the first woman to grab you by the nads and drag you into a webby plot not of your own devising. But even if the story’s familiar and you know the ending, it’s hard to step out of it. Like stepping off a rocketing train. Everybody’s on that train. Nobody’s an original. To be obsessed is to be a wound-up actor in a conventional melo, with everyone else, the lucky ones, bit players at best. So it’s not the story you’re trapped in, like everyone else, but, once aware of that, how you play it out. Your style. Class. The moves you make. Steppin’ round the beat, as Fingers used to say. How long does that matter? As long as you live. Meaning: no time at all.

  Are these twisted nameless streets the same the old panhandler led you down last time? Some corners are familiar, some not. It’s as though things have been shifted about or turned around. Different angle maybe. Or maybe just how the inner city works. A way of deflecting and confusing the outsider. The law. The tailing eye. A thin cold rain is falling. You tug your hat brim down over your eyes, avoiding dark doorways, but keeping your eye on them, watching for any movement, cigarette hanging from your lip, the butt of your pocketed .22 gripped in one hand, widow’s lacy veil in the other like a lucky charm. You figure you’re going to have to plug somebody, that’s what the gun in your hand is saying. Insisting upon. The plot-triggering stage prop, another kind of tale entrapment. Old rule of the criminologist: what can happen must happen. Why the planet’s fucked. You are more exposed out here in the wet greasy street, but the old panhandler, drifting from shadow to shadow, seems lost in his own trashbin peregrinations, oblivious to the world. You could probably walk alongside him and he wouldn’t know you were there. You realize he is not only taking things out, he is also putting things in. A kind of market transaction with the silent bins. If that’s what happens to your doughnut, next time you’ll only give him half, save the rest for a travel snack. Next time? Hmm. You pause to think about this and (a familiar smell?) the lights go out.