Dark Whispers & Other Stories

Dark Muse

I've always enjoyed a certain kind of melodramatic pulp writing, especially the sort found in Fifties paperbacks. The late Peter Rabe called it “The Grand Opera style of pulp.” I don't enjoy it very often, as either writer or reader, but when I'm up for it, I'm really up for it. As here.

Hanratty came in that rainy Thursday afternoon and found what he’d dreaded he’d find.

Another song waiting for him on the battered Steinway that provided half the entertainment in Kenny’s Lounge; the other half being Hanratty’s cigarette-raspy forty-two-year-old voice. Hard to believe anything that rough sounding had ever sung “Ave Maria” at St. Mallory’s Catholic High back in Shaker Heights.

Another song.

He lit a cigarette and sat down at the Steinway and started playing the notes and singing the words that had been left there for him. This one was a ballad called “Without You” and it was so heartbreakingly good that even the janitor, turning the chairs back up and polishing the floors, stopped to listen. As did the bartender shining glasses.

When he finished, Hanratty’s entire body was shaking and tears collected in silver drops in the corners of his blue eyes.

It wasn’t just the song that had gotten to him — though God knew it was beautiful enough — it was the mystery behind the song.

For the past three months now Kenny’s Lounge (if you were wealthy and inclined to cheat, then you knew all about Kenny’s Lounge) had been enjoying standing-room-only business and it was exactly because of all the new songs that Richard Hanratty had been introducing here.

There was only one trouble with all the adulation being bestowed on Hanratty. He didn’t deserve it. Literally. Because he wasn’t writing the songs.

Once a week he’d come into work — he was never sure which day it would be — and there on the Steinway up on the circular little stage with the baby blue spotlight that made him look a little less fleshy and a little more handsome than he was... waiting for him there on the Steinway would be a brand new song all laid out in perfect form on sheet music in a very precise and knowing hand.

Hanratty had no idea who was leaving these songs for him.

Hanratty said, “You think over my offer?”

Kenny Bentley said, “You want a lot, Richard. Too much.”

“You think they’re coming here to see you — or hear me?”

Kenny Bentley sighed. He was forty-one, slender, and had apparently taken as his hero one of those gangster B-movie actors from the Forties who never seem to be out of tuxedo or into daylight. He wore his dyed black hair slicked back. He wore contacts so dark his eyes sparkled like black ice. He carried a gun in a shoulder rig in an obvious way. It added to the sense of danger he liked to create right down to the small jagged scar under his left eye which Hanratty felt sure Bentley had put there himself for effect. Bentley — even that was phony, Hanratty learning from the bartender that Bentley’s real last name was Conroy.

They were in Hanratty’s dressing room. It smelled now of mildew and martini, the one drink Hanratty allowed himself before going on. The walls were covered with big black and white blowups of movie goddesses from the Thirties and Forties. Hanratty’s favorite was of Rita Hayworth in a silky, sensual slip. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a more erotic woman. The rest of the room was taken up by a couch, a full-length dressing table with bubble lights encircling the mirror and various kinds of makeup strewn across the chipped and faded mahogany surface. He was secure in his masculinity. Wearing makeup had never bothered him.

He said, taking a slightly defensive tone that sickened him to hear, “I’m just asking for my fair share, Kenny. Business has nearly tripled, but you’re paying me the same.”

“That another new song I heard out there?”

“Is that an answer to my question?”

Bentley smiled with startling white teeth a vampire would envy. “I still can’t figure out where you got so much talent all of a sudden.”

“Maybe my muse decided to pay me a visit.”

“Your muse.” Bentley bit the words off bitterly. “You’re a lounge piano player for twenty-some years who’s had three bad marriages, ten cars that the finance company has repossessed, and you’ve got a drinking problem. The few times you ever played your own compositions before, the whole crowd went to sleep and I had to force you to go back to playing standards. But then all of a sudden—” He took out an unfiltered cigarette from a silver case that cost as much as Hanratty’s monthly rent. The smoke he exhaled was silver as the case itself. His hair shone dark as his eyes. He gazed suspiciously at Hanratty. “Then all of a sudden, you start writing these beautiful, beautiful songs. I don’t understand and something’s damn funny about it. Damn funny.”

“Maybe it just took time for my talent to bloom,” Hanratty said. There was a note of irony in his voice. He was uncomfortable talking about the songs. They weren’t, after all, his.

A knock sounded on the door just as Bentley was about to say something else.

Bentley went to the door, opened it.

She stood there, Sally Carson, looking as overwhelmingly voluptuous as ever — almost unreal in certain ways — spilling out of the tiny pirate’s costume all the waitresses wore at Kenny’s Lounge. She was six feet or better, with a breathtaking bust, and perfectly formed hips and legs. She also owned one of those tiny overbites that add just the right sexy bit of imperfection to a beautiful woman’s face. Only one thing was wrong with Sally and that was all the makeup she wore around her right eye. It looked as if she’d put it on with a spade and Hanratty knew why.

She was Kenny Bentley’s current girlfriend and Kenny Bentley, a man who brought new meaning to the term insanely jealous, had obviously worked her over again last night. If you looked carefully at Sally — as Hanratty did dreamily many times — you also noticed that her nose had been fractured right up on the bridge. Another memento from Kenny.

“What the hell is it?” Bentley demanded. “We’re talking business.”

Sally suddenly lost all her poise and confidence. She shied back and said, “You said to tell you when the Swansons arrived.”

“Oh. Right. Thanks.”

And with that, Bentley slammed the door in her face.

Hanratty said, “You shouldn’t treat her like that, Kenny. She’s a hell of a nice woman. Smart.” He wanted to say too smart for you but he knew better.

Bentley stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ll go half your demand, Hanratty. Half but no more.”

Hanratty shrugged. “I’ll have to think it over, Kenny.”

“You do that.” The suspicion was back in his eyes. “In the meantime, I’m going to find out what the hell’s going on here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that no broken-down lounge singer suddenly comes into talent. There’s just no way, Hanratty, just no way.” He started toward the door and paused. “In college did you read a book called WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Well, you know how Sammy Glick steals that poor jerk’s movie scripts and sells them as his own?”

Hanratty felt his face redden and his hands fold up naturally into fists.

“Well, something like that’s going on here, Hanratty. Something very much like that.”

With that, he was gone, the sound of the slamming door reverberating like a gunshot.

Hanratty smoked a cigarette, just one of the innumerable vices he’d never been able to give up, and tried to calm down. He thought of how ironic it was that he’d just become so self-righteous when Bentley had accused him of using somebody else’s material. Wasn’t that exactly what he was doing?

He thought again of the tentative call he’d made this morning to a New York song publisher. Inquiring about how you went about selling songs... but then he’d backed off and told the woman he’d call her back soon. Without knowing where the songs came from, it would be a dangerous thing to start peddling them... at the least it could lead to embarrassment, at the worst to prison.

He jabbed out his cigarette and went over to the walk-in closet to select one of four lamé dinner jackets. There was a green one, a red one, a blue one, a black one, festive and tacky at the same time, and just what you’d expect from somebody who had spent his life — despite big gaudy dreams of being a star in his own right — singing other people’s material, tapping parasite-like into creativity not his own.

As usual, the smell of moth balls startled his senses as he pushed the sliding closet door back. It always reminded him of his parents’ attic back in South Dakota. He reached in for the blue jacket and felt another familiar sensation — a slight draft, one whose source he’d never been sure of. He’d never checked it out but tonight, with twenty minutes to go and no desire to sit at his dressing table and brood, he decided to get on his hands and knees and find out just where the draft came from somewhere in the darkness at the east end of the long closet.

He had just gotten down on his hands and knees and started to crawl into the closet, the draft becoming stronger and colder the more deeply he went inside, when an abrupt knock came on his door. Instead of responding to the knock, he decided to go a few feet closer to the wall. He put his hand out and felt for the first time a piece of plywood about three feet by three feet that had been nailed against the wall itself. Given all the nailheads his fingers found there in the gloom, Hanratty could tell that the plywood should have been firmly affixed. But it wasn’t. Not at all. It almost came off in his hands. He put fingers on either side of the plywood and felt an opening, a wide piece of duct work now closed off for some reason. He wondered where it led and why it had been closed off. Then, just as he sensed a sweet odor — perfume coming from duct work? — the knock on his door became adamant. He reaffixed the piece of plywood as well as he could, crawled backward out of the closet, and then went to answer the door.

There, in his standard white bartender’s uniform, stood David Sullivan. David was twenty-four, a former second-string tackle for the Browns, and now a guy trying to get himself an MBA at the local state university while working nights here. Sullivan was big, as you might expect, and handsome in the way a somewhat forlorn St. Bernard is handsome. Hanratty knew why he was forlorn. Sullivan was in love with Sally Carson.

“I talk to you a minute, Richard?”

Sullivan was a good kid and Hanratty both liked him and felt sorry for him. “Sure. Come in.”

Sullivan did so, closing the door. His brown eyes watched curiously as Hanratty wiped closet dust from his hands. Hanratty thought of explaining, then saw that Sullivan’s business seemed to be a lot more urgent.

“What’s going on?”

“You saw Sally?” Sullivan said. His voice was trembling.

“Yeah, kid, I did.”

“That bastard. That’s the third black eye in less than two months.” He made a fist the size of a melon. “You know what I want to do—”

Hanratty lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke. “Look, kid, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but remember the last time we had this conversation?”

“I remember, Richard. You told me that if she really wanted to get away from him she would.”

“That’s right.”

“Not any more.”

“Oh?”

“She snuck over to my place about dawn this morning and really broke down. Just laid on my couch and cried and cried. She was really scared.”

“Of Bentley?”

“Right.”

“Why doesn’t she just leave him?”

Sullivan said, “She thinks he’ll kill her.”

Hanratty frowned. “Look, I take no back seat in my loathing of Kenny Bentley. I know he likes to cheat his employees every way he can, and I know he likes to harass and debase people every way he can, and I know that he gets some kind of sick kick from beating up his woman-of-the-moment. But I can’t say that I see him as a killer. Not on purpose anyway.”

“She thinks he may already have killed one of his women.”

“What?”

“Two years ago. She ran into a waitress who used to work here and the waitress told her that there was this really gorgeous but very quiet waitress named Denise Ayles who worked here while she was going to the Harcourt Academy. She got involved with Kenny very briefly but started to back away once she saw what he was like. Only he wouldn’t let her back away. He kept coming at her. Then she just vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Right. Vanished. The waitress said she called the police and had them look into it, but all they concluded was that Denise Ayles, for reasons of her own, just took off.” He made a melon-sized fist again. “You know damn well what happened, Richard. He killed her and got rid of the body.”

Hanratty’s jaw muscles had began to work. “I guess that wouldn’t be out of the question, would it?”

“Not with Bentley.”

“And the cops lost interest?”

“Bentley had an alibi. He was in Vegas.”

“Then maybe he didn’t kill her.”

“You know Bentley’s friends. He could buy an alibi with no problem.”

“I guess that’s true.”

Big, shaggy Sullivan looked sorrowful again. “I don’t know what to do about Sally.”

“Just kind of ride with things, kid. See what happens.”

“If he lays a hand on her again, I’ll break his neck, Richard. That’s a promise.” The cold rage in his otherwise friendly gaze told Hanratty that this was no idle threat. Not at all.

Hanratty reached up and put his hand on Sullivan’s shoulder and said, “Let’s just see what happens, all right? I don’t want to see you or Sally get into a jam, okay?”

Sullivan sighed, calmed down somewhat. He even offered a quick flash of smile. “I don’t know why you stay here. Especially since you got hot as a songwriter the past few months. You ever think of selling your songs?”

Hanratty wanted to say: Kid, I’d love to. If they were really my songs.

He played the new song for them that night, “Without You,” and you could sense how the audience liked it. Enough to set down their drinks; enough to quit copping cheap feels in the shadows; enough to quit shedding tears over lovers who were never going to leave their spouses. How intent they looked then, sleek pretty people in sleek pretty clothes, the sort of privileged people Hanratty had always wanted to be — and now, as always when he played one of the songs left so mysteriously for him — now he was one of them.

By the time he got to the payoff, his voice straining just a little to hit the final high notes, he could see their eyes shine with the sadness of the song itself. The lyrics got to Hanratty, too and always did. Whoever was writing them knew the same kind of tortured loneliness Hanratty had felt all his life but had never been able to articulate, not even to himself. But it was there in the majestic melancholy of the music itself, and only reinforced by the words.

They applauded till their hands grew numb.

A few of the drunker ones even staggered to their feet and gave him an ovation.

And there was one more phenomenon Hanratty took note of — the look certain of the women had been giving him. Not as if he were a too old, too chunky, too clichéd piano bar man but instead a very desirable piece of work. The same kind of looks the bartender David Sullivan was always getting.

Finished with “Without You,” and realizing that he had now run through the six songs that had been left to him over the past few months, he sat down and began playing the standards Kenny Bentley insisted on, everything from Billy Joel to Barry Manilow, with a few Broadway tunes thrown in to give the proceedings a more metropolitan air.

And he lost them then, as he always lost them then.

They started talking again, and grabbing cheap feels, and giggling and arguing.

Without the six original songs composed for him by the phantom composer, Richard Hanratty’s act had gone back to what it had always been — background music.

Three hours later, finished for the night and sitting in his dressing room with a scotch and water and a filter cigarette, Hanratty stared at the six pieces of sheet music that he felt could secure him the sort of future he’d always wanted. If only he could be sure that once the songs became hits nobody would show up to claim them...

He got the chills, as happened many times after the show, because even playing ballads you worked up a sweat. He needed to get out of his jacket and shirt, wash up in the basin in the corner, and put on a turtleneck and regular tweed sportcoat.

He splashed water on his face and under his arms and then slapped on Brut and deodorant. Feeling much cleaner, he stepped to the closet and picked out the turtleneck he’d worn to the show tonight.

Because the club was so quiet — the unregistered aliens Bentley liked to hire for less than minimum wages sweeping up the floor now, David Sullivan preparing the bar for tomorrow — he was able to hear the whimper.

His first impression was that it belonged to an animal. A cat, perhaps, caught somewhere in the walls.

Then he remembered the piece of plywood over the duct opening in the closet wall. A cat lover, he wondered if a feline of some kind might not be caught down there.

He went over to the drawer and took out a long silver tube of flashlight and then went back to the closet and got down on his hands and knees and put his hand on the plywood rectangle again.

Still loose, it was easily pulled away from the nails mooring it.

He pushed the beam inside the wide mouth of the dusty metal duct and then poked his head inside.

He saw what was down there instantly and just as instantly, he recoiled. His stomach knotted, he felt real nausea, and he banged the crown of his head pulling it from the duct.

He’d seen what had made the whimpering sound, all right.

My God had he seen it.

After he had composed himself, and still armed with the flashlight, he replaced the piece of plywood, moved backward out of the closet, stood up, Finished dressing, and then went out into the club to speak with David Sullivan.

“Bentley around?” Hanratty asked.

Sullivan sighed. “No, he and Sally split already.”

“Good.”

“What?”

“Oh. Nothing.” Instinctively, Hanratty knew enough to keep what he’d seen to himself. “I’m going down to the basement.”

Sullivan grinned. “It’s okay, Richard. We’ve got a bathroom up here.” Then, more seriously, “What’s down in the basement?”

“A sub-basement, if I remember right.”

“Yes. We’re dose enough to the river that the sewer system runs right next to the sub-basement, which used to be kind of a retaining wall before this part of the city burned down in the early part of the century.”

Now it was Hanratty’s turn to grin. “How do you know all this stuff, kid?”

Sullivan snapped his white bar towel like a whip. Hanratty had no doubt who the kid was whipping. “Well, when the woman you love spends all her time with a jerk like Bentley, you’ve got a lot of time to read.” Then he shrugged. “Actually, I heard it on the news the other night. This whole area of the sewer system has become a refuge for some of the homeless who are wandering around.”

“Poor bastards,” Hanratty said. He nodded to the fifth of Chivas sitting next to the register. “How about a shot?”

“Sure.” Sullivan poured and handed the shot glass to Hanratty. “It’s on Bentley.”

The first level of the basement was what you would expect to find — essentially a storehouse of supplies to keep the lounge running, everything from large cardboard boxes of napkins and paper plates to crates of glassed olives and cocktail cherries. The majority of the storage room, naturally enough, was taken up by tall and seemingly endless rows of brand name booze. The basement walls had been finished in imitation knotty pine and the floor had been given a perfunctory coat of green paint. Everything was tidy and dry and smelled of dust and the vapors of natural gas from the large furnace unit in the east corner.

Duct work of various types ran everywhere. It took Hanratty ten minutes to figure out which of the pieces of silver metal fed into his closet. Once he concluded that he’d found the right piece, he found its track along the ceiling over to the door to the sub-basement, which was just where he suspected it would lead.

He had not forgotten what he’d seen in the duct work earlier. He would never forget.

It waited for him on the other side of the sub-basement door. He could sense it.

He clicked on the flashlight, felt his stomach grab in anticipation, and put his hand on the door leading to the sub-basement.

It was locked.

He spent the next five minutes trying everything from the edge of a chisel to a screwdriver — he found a tool kit in the corner — but nothing worked. The lock remained inviolate.

He raised his head, finally, and shone the light along the duct work leading over the door and beyond. He needed to find a section he could pry open.

This time from the tool kit he took a hammer and an even larger screwdriver. He went to work.

In all, it took twenty minutes. He cut his hands many times — he’d done sheet metal work two summers in college and it had always been a bitch — and he was soaked and cold with sweat.

His work complete, he took two cases of Cutty Sark, piled one on the other, and used them as a ladder.

Then he crawled up inside the duct work and started his inching passage down the angling metal cave till he reached its end.

His first reaction, once inside, was of claustrophobia. He thought of all those horror films he’d seen over the years about being buried alive. What if he never got out of here...?

He kept moving, knowing that was his only hope.

Fortunately, the passage was straight, no sudden turns to block or trap him.

After five minutes he began smelling more than dust and sheet metal and the rat droppings that he crushed beneath his hands and knees. He began smelling — river water.

Then the duct ended abruptly and he let himself drop from it into a huge concrete tunnel that was obviously the sewer system David Sullivan had been talking about. Everything smelled fetid. As he played the flashlight around on the walls, he saw red, blue, yellow and green obscenities spray-painted on the filthy gray arching walls. Rats with burning, hungry eyes fed on the carcass of what had apparently been an opossum. Broken soda bottles, crushed cans, sticks with leaves that trailed like dead hair all floated in the foot of filthy water that ran down the curving floor of the sewer.

He spent the next few minutes getting oriented, moving the beam around, fascinated and sickened at what he saw. To think that people actually lived here...

Then he heard the whimpering again and when he wheeled around he saw, high up on this side of the wall, a ragged hole in the concrete.

The creature he had earlier glimpsed was, Hanratty was sure, inside that hole.

Steeling himself for his second glimpse of the thing, he walked through the dirty water until he was directly beneath the hole.

“Why don’t you come down?”

Nothing.

“Why don’t you come down?” Hanratty said, his voice reverberating off the peaked ceiling and the vast stretch of concrete cave.

Still nothing.

“I won’t hurt you. I want to help you.” He paused. “You’ve been leaving those songs for me, haven’t you?”

The whimpering sound — this time it was more like mewling — began again.

He stood on his tiptoes and played his light inside the dark hole a few feet above him. The opening made him think of a bird’s nest. The reeking dampness choked him.

The opening was perhaps four feet deep and three feet high. Inside he saw a six-pack of Coke, a loaf of Wonderbread, an open package of Oscar Meyer luncheon meat, several magazines including Vogue and Harper's and then female clothes of all kinds, from undergarments to dresses and sweaters. Spread across the floor were several mismatched blankets. At this point he raised the beam and waved it in the rear of the opening, where it angled down sharply to meet the retaining wall behind.

This was where he found her.

This time her face wasn’t deeply pitted with what appeared to be radiation burns of some kind. Nor was her head sleek and bald and likewise tufted with terrible burns. No, this time she wore a mask to cover her hideousness, a rubber Cinderella mask from the Disney version of the classic fairy tale.

She said something he could not understand. The mask made her words incomprehensible. She tried again and this time he heard, “Stay away.”

“I want to help you. You’re the one who writes the songs, aren’t you?”

“Stay away.”

Despite her face, the rest of her was a quite beautiful woman with perfectly formed wrists, ankles and neck, and a pleasing swell of breast beneath her ragged man’s work shirt and heavy blue cardigan and baggy jeans.

“You live down here, don’t you?”

She cowered in the rear of the opening, covering the eye-holes in the mask as his beam bore in.

“Why do you live down here?”

But as soon as he’d spoken he knew exactly why she lived down here. Her face. Of course. That horribly scarred and boiled face. “Would you come out of there so we can talk?”

She shook her head.

He went back to asking questions. “You work your way up the duct work and leave the songs on my piano in the middle of the night when nobody’s there, don’t you?”

Faintly, she nodded.

“But why? Why do you want me to have them?”

Once more she spoke and once more he had a difficult time understanding what she was trying to say. Finally, finally, he heard properly. “Turn out the light.”

“Why?”

“I want to take this mask off so you can hear me more clearly.”

“All right.”

He clicked off the light, lowered the long silver tube of flashlight.

He heard the rumple of rubber being pulled off. The opening was now a black pit with no detail whatsoever.

From the gloom, she said, “At night I lie here and listen to you play the piano and sing. You have a very sad voice.”

He laughed. “ ‘Sad’ as in pathetic.”

“No, ‘sad’ as in troubled. Hopeless. And that’s why I write the songs for you. Because you and I share the same kind of pain.”

“You could make a fortune with your songs.”

Now it was her turn to laugh, but when she did so it sounded morose. “Yes, I suppose I could get my face on the cover of People.”

“No, but—”

She sighed. “I write for my own pleasure — and yours, I hope.”

“Believe me, I love your songs.”

“You may have them.”

“What?”

“I’m making a gift of them to you.”

“But—”

“That’s a very serious offer, Mr. Hanratty. Very serious. Now, I’ve talked enough and so have you.”

“But I’d like to help you in some way.”

She sighed once again, sounding old beyond imagining. “You can’t help me, Mr. Hanratty. Only one man can. Only one man.” She paused and said, “Now go, Mr. Hanratty. Please.”

Her voice was resolute.

“I appreciate the songs.”

“If they make you wealthy, Mr. Hanratty, promise me just one thing.”

“What?”

“To never fall in love as foolishly as I did.”

“But—”

“Leave now, Mr. Hanratty. Leave now.”

He heard a rustling sound as the woman crawled to the back of her lair, lost utterly in the darkness.

He stared a moment longer at the wall of gloom keeping her hidden from him, and then he jumped down to the watery floor, and started his way back through the duct work.

In the morning, he called New York and a music publisher who at first would not even take his call. But finally, adamant, he convinced the secretary to put him through to her boss, who turned out to be a woman with a somewhat mannered accent and a strongly cultivated hint of ennui in her voice.

He made the call from his small apartment cluttered as usual with scabrous cardboard circles from delivery pizza, beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. Grubby overcast light fell through the cracked window and fell on his lumpy unmade bed.

She was about to hang up when he said, “Listen, I’m sure you get thirty calls like this a week. But I really do have songs that could make both of us really wealthy. I really do.”

“That will be all now,” the woman said. “I’m very busy and—”

“Two minutes.”

“What?”

“I just want two minutes. I’m sitting at an upright piano and all I need to do is set the phone down and play you one of these songs for two minutes and—”

A frustrated sigh. “How old are you?”

“Huh?”

“I asked how old you are.”

“Mid-forties. Why?”

Her laugh startled him. “Because you’re like dealing with a little boy.” She exhaled cigarette smoke. “All right, Mr. Hanratty, you’ve got two minutes.”

So he played. With fingers that would never be envied by concert artists. With a voice that not even the raspiest rocker would want. But even given that, even given his hangover, even given the grubby winter light, even given the mess and muck of his apartment — even given all that — there was beauty that morning in his apartment.

The beauty of the deformed woman’s pain and yearnings and imprisonment in a face few could stand to gaze on.

He played much longer than two minutes and somehow he knew that the woman on the other end of the line wouldn’t hang up. Because of the beauty of the melody and the poetry of the words.

By the time he finished the song, he’d forgotten where he was. He had given himself over completely to the music.

When he picked the receiver up again, he was sweating, trembling. “Well?” he said.

“How soon can you catch a flight to New York?”

“A couple of hours.”

“I’ll have a car waiting for you, Mr. Hanratty.” As hard as she tried, she could not keep the tears from her voice. The tears the music had inspired.

Hanratty went to New York with a checking account of $437.42. He returned with a checking account of $50,437.42 — and a contract that promised much, much more once Sylvia Hamilton, the music publisher, interested top recording artists in these properties. She was talking Streisand, for openers, and she was talking quite seriously.

As he deplaned, he caught the white swirling bite of the blizzard that had virtually shut the city down. He had to wait an hour for a taxi to take him directly to Kenny’s. Bentley had not wanted him to leave in the first place and told him that if he took more than two days off, he’d be fired. In an expansive mood now, Hanratty planned to finish out the week at the lounge, and then head immediately back to New York where Sylvia (not a bad-looking older lady whom Hanratty felt he was going to get to know a lot better) was already finding an apartment for him.

Coming in on the crosstown expressway was an excruciating crawl behind big yellow trucks spewing billions of sand particles beneath whirling yellow lights into the late afternoon gloom and watching the ditches where overworked and weary city cops were checking to see that the people who’d slid off the road were all right. Fog only added to the air of claustrophobia Hanratty felt in the back seat of the cab that smelled of cigarette smoke and disinfectant.

He saw the red emergency lights a block before the Checker reached the lounge. They splashed through the blizzard like blood soaking through a very white sheet. His stomach tightened the way it always had when he’d been a little boy and feared that a siren meant that something had happened to one of his parents or to his brother or sister.

Something was wrong at Kenny’s.

The police already had sawhorse barricades up, but in this kind of weather they were almost pointless. It was too bitterly cold to stand outside on a night like this and gawk at somebody else’s misfortune.

He paid off the cabbie and fled the vehicle immediately.

A tall, uniformed officer tried to stop him from going into the brick-faced lounge but after Hanratty explained who he was, the cop waved him in.

“What happened?” Hanratty said, his voice tight.

“You better ask one of the detectives.”

What surprised him, two steps across the threshold, was how strange the familiar place appeared. Violence had a way of doing that — of altering forever a setting one once took pleasure in.

From behind, a voice said, “May I be of any help?”

He turned to see a gray-haired detective in an expensive gray suit and a regimental striped tie step forward. He wore his ID tag pinned to his left lapel.

Hanratty once again explained who he was.

“You’re the piano player.”

“Yes,” Hanratty said. “Why?”

“Sullivan said you’d vouch for him.”

“David? The bartender?”

“Right. We’ve got him in custody.”

“Custody.”

The detective, who looked as much like a banker as a cop, nodded. “For killing the owner of this place, Kenny Bentley.”

Hanratty felt shock travel from his chest all the way out to the ends of his extremities. He could easily enough imagine the scenario Detective Keller (that being the name on the ID) had just sketched out. Sally Carson had come to work beaten up once again and David, unable to control himself, had grabbed Kenny and—

“Stabbed,” the detective said. “In his office.”

Hanratty was jarred back into reality. “You said stabbed?”

“Yes.”

“No way.”

“What?”

“David might beat him to death. Or choke him. But stab him — no way.”

“You may be a great piano player, Mr. Hanratty, but I can’t say that I put much stock in your abilities as a detective.”

As he finished speaking, a white-coated man from the crime lab came out of Kenny Bentley’s private office and drew Keller aside.

Hanratty looked around again. The chairs had not been taken down from the tables. The lights behind the long, elegant bar had not been lit. The stage seemed ridiculously small and shabby. Even the Steinway lacked sheen.

“I need to go have one more look at the body, Mr. Hanratty,” Keller said. “You’ll excuse me.”

Without quite knowing why, Hanratty said, “Mind if I go?”

Keller offered a bitter smile. “You hated him, too, and want to make sure he’s dead?”

“Oh, I hated him. But that isn’t why I want to go.”

“No?”

“No. I just can’t believe David is the killer.”

Keller shrugged and exchanged an ironic glance with the crime lab man. “Well, if you enjoy looking at corpses, Mr. Hanratty, then I guess I can’t see any harm in your coming along.”

The office showed virtually no sign of struggle. The flocked red wallpaper and gaslight-style wall fixtures and huge leather-padded desk all suggested Kenny Bentley’s fascination with the Barbary Coast of the 1900s.

Bentley’s face was down on his desk. A common wood-handled butcher knife protruded from the right side of his spine. It had not been pushed all the way in, a good three inches of metal blade still showing.

Hanratty said, “Even if David had stabbed him, you don’t think he would have pushed the knife all the way in — with his strength and his anger?”

Keller’s eyes narrowed. Obviously Hanratty’s comment had made sense to him.

Hanratty moved around the desk. Kenny Bentley’s body already smelled sourly of decay.

“Hey,” Keller said, “don’t touch anything.”

“I won’t.”

Hanratty examined the proximity of a pencil to Bentley’s right hand. He leaned over and stared at a single word scrawled in a dying man’s clumsy script.

The word was “Harcourt.”

Keller must have caught Hanratty’s surprised expression. “Something I might be interested in, Mr. Hanratty?”

Hanratty shook his head. “Guess not.” He took his cigarettes from his trench coat and stuck one carefully between his lips. “Maybe I’ll go have myself a drink.”

Keller, no longer so unfriendly, said, “Maybe seeing him dead proves you didn’t hate him quite as much as you thought, huh?”

“Oh, no,” Hanratty said. “It proves that I hated him even more than I thought.”

“What?” Keller said.

But Hanratty didn’t answer. He just went out of the office and across the small dance floor to the bar where he had himself several good belts of Chivas while the police finished their work.

Two hours later, Keller came over and said, “Afraid we’re going to have to throw you out, Mr. Hanratty. We’re closing down for the night.”

The ambulance people had come and gone, as had at least a dozen other people. Now Kenny Bentley was headed for the morgue.

Hanratty set down his drink and said, “Fine.”

He went outside. The wind and snow whipped at him. Whatever kind of drunk he’d been building was quickly banished by the chill. He walked ten blocks, along a black wrought iron fence on the other side of which was the sprawling river, its pollutants frozen for the moment by ice.

When he figured he’d walked half an hour, he turned around and went back the way he’d come, back to Kenny’s place.

He had a key to the back door so getting in was no problem, even if the police signs warning of CRIME SCENE were ominous. Inside was shadowy and warm. He went to the dressing room. He took off his trench coat and went immediately to the closet where he lifted off the plywood rectangle that covered the duct.

This time, he made the trip in less than fifteen minutes.

When he’d constructed another jerry-rigged ladder and gotten up on it and clicked on the flashlight, he got a brief glimpse of her without the Cinderella mask. She must have been sleeping and he’d surprised her. The lair was the same as before, reminding him of an animal’s cave.

This time he recognized the horrible raw burns for what they were. Not radiation, but acid.

As she grappled on the mask, he said, “I know who you are.”

“I knew you’d figure it out.”

“You worked for Kenny Bentley two years ago and went to the Harcourt Academy, which is a music school for particularly gifted people. Kenny got jealous of you and threw acid on you and you were so ashamed of your looks that you took up living down here where nobody could see you.”

“Please turn out the light.”

“All right.”

Once again, he spoke to her in darkness. The sewer system echoed with their voices. The amber eyes of rats flicked through the gloom.

“I went to doctors,” she said. “But they couldn’t help me.”

“Why didn’t you turn Kenny in?”

“Because I wanted my own kind of vengeance. Just seeing him go to prison wouldn’t have satisfied me.”

“They think somebody else killed him. A nice young kid named David Sullivan.”

“I know. I crawled up the duct and heard the police talking and then arresting him.” Pause. “Get ready to catch something, Mr. Hanratty.”

From the blackness a small white oblong of paper drifted down to his hands.

“That’s a complete confession, Mr. Hanratty. Your friend will be freed as soon as you hand it over to the police.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You know something, Mr. Hanratty, I sincerely believe you are.”

The gunshot came just after her words, deafening as the noise of it bounced off the walls of her small lair, acrid as the odor of gunpowder filled his nostrils.

“My God,” he said. “My God.”

He stood there on his rickety makeshift ladder for a long time, thinking of her hideous face and her beautiful songs.

When he jumped free of the boxes and stuffed the envelope into his trousers, he realized he was crying, the way he sometimes cried when he played her songs.

He paused for a moment and angled the flashlight beam up the wall and across the dark opening again.

Finally, he did the only thing he could do. He walked away, the sound of his footsteps softly splashing through the fetid water.

He kept trying not to cry; kept trying.