Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

The Sleepless Soul by C. J. Harper

C. J. Harper had his fiction debut last month in EQMM. We feature him now in Black Mask because of his direct homage to Chandler: His P.I. shares Marlowe’s office building and has some thoughts on Marlowe’s susceptibilities. Being published beside Chandler is, the author says, “a dream come true... because he’s obviously been an enormous inspiration for me.”

I stood in the back room of the Sourdough Bar staring at the Lost Wall. Hollow faces stared back at me, their eyes a leaden gray. Two hundred. Maybe three. Each one different. Each one the same. All of them trapped in a black-and-white world — a black-and-white cell — bounded by thick, glossy white borders. Scores of faces, each frozen in the same moment. The moment they found themselves on skid row. The moment hope had died.

The owner of the Sourdough, a bear of a man who called himself the Pope, leaned over my shoulder. He was studying the collection of photographs he had shot and pinned to the wall over the course of a decade as if seeing them for the first time.

“Did you say he had light hair or dark hair?” the Pope said. He filtered each breath through his nose and it came out a whistle. Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” filtered from the bar through the cheap plywood door and came out flat.

“I didn’t say, but it’s dark.”

It was 5:30. I’d spent the better part of the day striking out in my search for Tommy Parrish. I’d questioned dozens of bums on the street, a handful of pawnshop owners, and the desk clerk at the Senate Hotel. None of them knew who he was. All of them were liars.

The Sourdough had been my next stop after the Senate only because it was next-door. As my eyes had adjusted to the transition from outside light to inside dark, I’d felt the bleary but suspicious gaze of a loose collection of skid-row pensioners. My twenty-dollar suit hadn’t gone unnoticed by the disheveled — and suddenly quiet — patrons. As I walked up to the bar, serenaded by a scratchy version of “Begin the Beguine” on the jukebox, I heard one mutter something about a Rockefeller in their presence.

The bartender, who wore a dirty white apron that was fighting a losing battle at restraining his bloated physique, dried his hands on a wet towel as he stepped over to take my order. “I’m the Pope,” he said. “What’s your pleasure?”

“I’m General Eisenhower. I need you to answer a question for me.” The Pope’s affability seemed to reassure the clientele, because the too-loud chatter and laughter of drunken old men returned, forcing me to raise my voice. “I’m looking for somebody.”

“Who are you?” he said pleasantly, still wiping his hands.

I kept up our game of twenty questions without answers. “Are you really the Pope?”

“That’s my nickname around here. What do people call you?”

“Darrow Nash.”

“Darrow?”

“My old man had a soft spot for lawyers and lost causes.”

The Pope nodded. “So what do you do that sends you to a place like this? You the new health inspector?”

“No. I’m in from L.A.” I moved from honesty to deception. “I’m looking for a buddy of mine from the Sixth Armored. What happened to the old health inspector?”

“Food poisoning. L.A. is a long way from here. Must be a damn good friend.”

I lied some more. “He is. What’s the best way to go about finding him around here?”

His eyes narrowed for a moment. “Why don’t you take a gander at my Lost Wall.” He gave his head a tilt in the direction he wanted me to go.

“Lots of people come down to skid row looking for somebody,” he said as he led me through drifting clouds of cigarette smoke down a hall that stunk of dry rot. He jiggled a key in a worn-out lock and opened the door. “That’s why I take everybody’s picture, or at least the ones that I can. Just in case. I been doing it almost ten years.”

“Why?” I said.

He framed his answer with a pair of shrugs. “Somebody’s got to look after these men. If I don’t, who will?” Then he’d stared at me as if I might know someone who would.

I’d shrugged back. No names had come to mind.

As we both leaned in toward the pictures, I pulled out the photograph that Dan Parrish, Tommy’s brother, had sent general delivery to the Minneapolis post office. I’d picked it up that morning after my train had backed into the Milwaukee Road Depot. It was one taken just after the war, black-and-white, just like those on the Lost Wall. Tommy looked to be around thirty and was dressed up in his uniform, his arms stiffly at his sides, his mother leaning against his left shoulder, his father against his right. Their smiles were big. His wasn’t. His hat was square and pulled low on his head, not rakish or pushed back the way most wore theirs after the war. His nose was bent to the left like a parenthesis, an old football injury according to Dan, and his eyes looked lost in their sockets. But what wasn’t lost — what hadn’t died in the war — looked scared. The kind of scared that looks permanent on some people.

Medals littered his chest.

The Pope gave a short whistle. “Look at all the hardware. That boy was a hero.” He looked at me.

“He helped liberate Buchenwald.”

“Well, that’s something to be proud of.”

“For most, maybe.” I remembered an old poem and committed the ultimate sin by paraphrasing it. “But some souls perish in that pride.”

The Pope’s eyebrows jumped up. “Wordsworth.”

Then his face turned stony and his eyes gazed off into the middle distance. “I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; / Of him who walked in glory and in joy / Following his plow, along the mountain-side: / By our own spirits are we deified: / We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”

His gaze stayed away for a moment, then came back and found me. “Wordsworth.”

I stared at him as I struggled over a suitable reply. He let me off the hook.

“I wanted to be a poet. I ended up here.” He looked around and rolled his eyes. “Cheap drinks and dirty limericks.”

“Like what?”

He told me a couple. He was right. They were dirty.

I handed him the picture of Tommy Parrish so he could take a closer look.

The Pope took in a deep breath and filled his large cheeks like Popeye. He slowly let the air out as if he was racking his brain. Then he shook his head and thrust the picture back at me. “Never seen him before.”

“Are you sure? His name is Tommy Parrish.”

“Yep.” He started for the door. His voice rose an octave. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“I only ask because he looks a lot like this guy.” I pointed to a photo near the right edge of the Lost Wall. It was a shot of Parrish after he’d passed out, his stubbled cheek flat against a wet table, his eyes closed.

The Pope stopped with his hand on the doorknob and leaned back, taking in the picture from a safe distance. “It’s hard to tell. Faces change over time on skid row.”

I held up my picture of Parrish next to the one the Pope had taken of him. “That’s true, but you don’t see a beak bent like that very often.”

“Lots of broken noses on skid row, too.”

I showed him my teeth. I wasn’t worried he’d confuse it with a smile. “We can keep up this routine as long as you want, because I know all my lines and I know yours too. But I don’t want to hear from the barkeep. I want to hear from the poet.”

His eyes hardened. “And I don’t want to hear some cock-and-bull story about looking for a war buddy. Tommy Parrish isn’t anyone’s buddy.”

We eyed each other. In that moment I realized I needed his truth more than he needed mine. “I’m a private detective working a missing-person case. Now it’s your turn.”

The Pope let his hand fall from the knob of the closed door. His voice became a whisper. “Fair enough. Parrish isn’t allowed in here anymore, so I haven’t seen him in a couple of months. I don’t know where you’d find him.”

“What did he do to make you boot him?”

He took a long breath. “Mr. Nash, have you ever met someone with so much hate that you can no longer see the soul in their eyes?”

I’d been in the war too. “Yeah.”

“That’s Tommy. He’d steal from a match girl just for the fun of it.”

“Don’t you see that a lot around here?”

“Not really. Most of the boys are harmless. They drink too much, but their real problem is that they can’t handle responsibility. They may get into fights, but they still have a heart buried somewhere beneath the dirty clothes and the scar tissue. Not Tommy. He has no heart.” He shifted his considerable weight. “But like I said, I don’t know where he is.”

“Sure you do. Everybody tracks devils like him. Mostly out of fear. Nobody wants to cross them.”

The Pope’s crimson cheeks admitted the lie. He tilted his head and scratched the side of his neck. “Most nights he’s at the Palms.”

“The Palms?”

“The Persian Palms. The biggest clip joint this side of Chicago. He goes there for the second show if he goes there at all.” His eyes squinted, showing something I hadn’t expected to see from anyone on skid row: real concern. “But watch yourself. It can be a dangerous place.”

The Pope’s words fell on deaf ears. In that way, he really was a poet.

I hadn’t eaten since breakfast on the train and it was pushing six p.m. The Senate Cafe looked passable even though it was one of those dumps where you can see the swarthy short-order cook through an open door sweating and dangling a cigarette from his lips above the food sizzling on the grill. Over the “Special” — it wasn’t — of roast pork and applesauce, I thought about Tommy Parrish’s brother.

I’d met Dan Parrish on a case last fall. I’d been lured to rural Minnesota by a client who wound up dead before my train had had the chance to give the station a whistle. Dan Parrish was the sheriff who had investigated her murder. He’d taken a bullet in his shoulder for his troubles, and I’d come to respect him. I guess he must have respected me too because he’d called me in L.A. the week before to see if I’d come to Minneapolis to look for his brother.

“Tommy hasn’t been the same since the war,” the sheriff had told me over the hissing telephone line. “Not since Buchenwald.”

The line hissed some more.

“We used to be close, but I haven’t heard from him in six years.”

“What was your last contact with him? In person? By telephone?”

“A letter. The return address was the Senate Hotel in Minneapolis. That’s skid row, Nash.”

My feet were on the desk and I was using my slouch hat as a fan. I’d stripped down to my sleeveless undershirt after the air inside my office in the Cahuenga Building had died from the heat. The phone was making my ear sweat. “But why me, Dan? What’s wrong with the dicks in Minneapolis?”

“No privacy. Everybody on skid row knows them because they get hired to find people like Tommy. You’d be anonymous. You could ask around like an old war buddy.”

“You don’t want anyone to know you’re looking for him?”

“I may be out here in Glenwood, Minnesota, Nash, but I still have a reputation to think about. I don’t want to be stuck here forever. When word gets out that a cop has a wayward brother, it affects how other cops treat you. They start thinking you’re soft. That you’re in it to make it up to your folks. Like Pat O’Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces, only with a badge instead of a collar. I don’t need that getting in the way.”

“Whether it’s true or not?”

“Yeah. It makes me look weak.”

I knew from experience that he wasn’t, but what good would that do him?

“Why now?”

The sigh he gave came through the line like a desert wind. “My father is dying. Despite my efforts to convince him otherwise, he insists on seeing Tommy before he dies.”

“Before who dies? Tommy or your father?”

There was a long pause. “Either one. I don’t think Tommy’s worth the effort, but the old man won’t listen to me. Never has. And I’m the good son.” He managed to blend irony and sarcasm into one frustrated tone.

“Did I just catch a whiff of sibling rivalry?”

His voice took on the tenderness of high-grade blue steel. “Maybe it’s just you.”

I got the message and left it alone.

Normally I don’t work for free. Too many times I’d seen my pal Marlowe, another P.I. with an office on the same floor of the Cahuenga Building, risk his life for nothing more than friendship or simple justice, and I’d told him to his face that he was a sap for doing it. But I guess I’d been in his office one too many times, because it turns out being a sap is contagious.

When I agreed to go to Minneapolis, Dan offered to pay my full fee plus expenses, but I couldn’t bring myself to say okay. It wasn’t really friendship or justice. It was my own category. Respect.

“No charge,” I’d said. Then I saw Marlowe standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, his feet casually crossed, his hat pushed back on his head. He had a smirk on his face and was using his index fingers to send me a near-fatal barrage of tsks.

I hit the Palms just as “The Sweater Girl” was leaving the stage after her second show. From the name, she was supposed to look like Lana Turner, and she did. And the stage was supposed to look like a stage, but it didn’t. It was more of a built-in corner shelf behind the bar, perched four feet above the floor on a handful of grayish four-by-fours. Neither the stage nor Lana looked terribly interested in doing their jobs. And they had one more show to go. The sign outside boasted of “3 floor shows nightly.” Everyone looked like they’d had enough after two.

A thin cloud of blue smoke hovered near the pressed-tin ceiling ten feet above the heads of a couple of dozen men and women clustered along the thirty-foot bar. A couple of sweaty thugs dressed in white shirts and aprons snarled at the customers like cornered lion tamers.

The dozen or so booths on the opposite side of the large room looked dark and uninviting. I could see in a couple of them the orange pinpoints of smoldering cigarettes held in fingers that were little more than shadows. Tommy Parrish seemed like the type to operate from that kind of setting. So I went to the bar. I knew approaching him would take some finesse.

I started with the Sweater Girl. She had climbed down from the stage and had left the safety of the lion tamers behind the bar to offer herself up to the lions. She had adopted the pose of female invitation: her back to the mirror, her elbows leaning on the bar, her hands dangling, a high-heeled stiletto propped on the brass foot rail, one naked knee covered in black nylon poking out at a seductive angle. Her dress was tight and black and cut high and low in all the right places. Her hair was Lana blond, so blond it looked white. The Wednesday night crowd had apparently seen enough of her act, because they completely ignored her. I accepted her attempt at an invitation and introduced myself.

She read my clothes before she read my eyes. “Buy me a drink?”

“Whatever you want, Lana.”

That sent a charge through her. She snapped her fingers toward one of the lion tamers without taking her eyes off of mine. “Do you see a likeness?”

“I see a lot that I likeness.”

She seemed confused for a moment, then cooed and picked up one of the twin double shots of whiskey that had magically appeared at her elbow. I reached in close to pick up mine. Her breath swept over my neck like the first hot gusts that the Santa Anas send as a warning.

I tossed back the double shot. It hadn’t come from the top shelf. My throat burned. I smiled through it with a sneer.

Lana tossed hers back, leaving off both the smile and the sneer. “Thanks. How ‘bout another?”

I felt warm inside. “Sure.” She started to snap her fingers again, but I covered her hand with mine. The move took me in close. She looked alarmed, but not panicked. “First I have a question for you. If you answer it right, you get that drink.”

She nodded, her lips apart, her breath coming a little faster, the Santa Anas building.

“I’m looking for a friend. An old war buddy from the Sixth Armored by the name of Tommy Parrish. Know him?”

Her eyes darted toward the far corner of the section of booths, then came back to mine cold and distant. The Santa Anas had died out. She pulled her hand away from mine. “Never heard of him.”

I stared hard at her. She stared back.

The silence got to her. “Besides,” she said, doing her version of the icy Lana in The Postman Always Rings Twice, “one drink is my limit.”

I could have pressed her for more information, but I’d always liked the Santa Anas and the sense of unease and excitement that followed in their wake. I wanted them to blow again.

“Thanks, Lana.” I grabbed her hand again and wrapped her fingers around a ten-spot. “Keep the change.”

Her lips parted in Lana-like surprise, but no words came out.

I left her there, her fingers weighing the scratch in her hands, her eyes weighing the darkness that lingered in the corner of one of the Palms’ simmering booths.

Like a bookie collects bets, the alley behind the Palms collected loneliness. Even though a few stray vagrants drifted by as I waited, I never felt the presence of life. The only palpable presence among the trash cans and broken glass was a late-night heat and humidity that compressed the lingering stale air into an invisible solid. Air that nearly had to be swallowed. Beyond the alley, lightning flashed soundlessly in the towering gray clouds that could be seen above the black, jagged silhouette of skid-row rooftops. A rat scrambled over my foot. The first sign of life.

I’d been staking out the alley, buried in the shadows of a second-story fire escape, since I’d left the Palms. Lana had confirmed with her eyes that Tommy Parrish was in a booth. But I didn’t go over to him, because he would have known that Lana had given him up. People pay a hard price for giving someone up. I didn’t have the heart to do that to her. But I also figured she’d tell him that I was looking for him. And I knew he wouldn’t want to be found. It was for just such a situation that bars had back doors.

Maybe twenty minutes had passed when the back door to the Palms pushed open and a man stepped out, his posture strong but wary. He took his time surveying the alley. He wore dark pants and a dark long-sleeved shirt. His hair was short, wavy, and dark, and his face was shadowed by a couple of days’ stubble. As his head turned my way, I was close enough to see even in the dim light that it was Parrish. Time had done nothing to straighten the crook in his nose.

He moved quickly but carefully past me, keeping close to the brick walls, never thinking to look up. Each step he took was a blend of confidence and wariness. He reminded me of a G.I. going house to house in Anzio.

Once he turned the corner of the alley, I swung over the railing and climbed down the ladder to where I could manage a short drop. I reenacted my own memories of Anzio, moving with cautious speed down the alley to the sidewalk.

Out on the streets, Tommy gained the full measure of his confidence. He strode with his shoulders square in a way that seemed to invite trouble. I followed him down Washington Avenue until he stopped at an unmarked door. I ducked into a recessed storefront as he looked both ways before pulling the door open. It was on a heavy spring and slammed shut behind him.

There are times, as a P.I., when you are confronted with two choices: wait for the prey to come back out, or follow the prey into an unfamiliar, potentially dangerous building. One makes perfect sense, the other doesn’t. Most people would choose the former. P.I.s, by necessity, choose the latter. If we didn’t go in, the only things we’d discover by waiting outside would be that every building has a back door and that the prey is long gone. The only thing that can keep us out is a lock. And even that’s more of a detour than a barrier.

I tried the knob of the nameless door. No detour would be necessary.

A long, narrow stairway led up to another unmarked door on the second floor. It was locked. Next to the jamb hung a round buzzer. I gave it the finger and heard a short ring beyond the door.

A wooden chair scraped on a wooden floor and a rectangle slid open on the door at eye level. Whatever goon had opened the peephole had a thick brow and eyes that were as blank as the wooden block he had removed. He regarded me as if I were overripe fruit.

“Beat it. We’re closed.”

“Then why answer the door?”

Brutus hadn’t expected such a puzzler, and it was obvious that his toughness made up for his lack of intelligence.

“I think your watch stopped,” I said. Then I held up a ten-spot. “Get it fixed.”

His dull black eyes flicked down at the lettuce between my fingers, then back up at me. He had some heavy thinking to do. Did I look like trouble? Would the boss have a conniption if I was let in? Could I cost him his job? Was ten bucks worth the risk?

It was.

He held his fingers up to the peephole. I fed them.

The lock snapped and the door backed open. His office was a vestibule of peeling green wallpaper, a battered wood floor, a wooden chair wearing his suit coat, and a silver smoking stand stuffed with butts. Brutus was bending over, stuffing the money into his sock. When he stood up, he had a buzzcut and the thick neck and battered face of a former boxer gone to seed. His white dress shirt, black tie, and black slacks were wrinkled and all a size too small, but the.45 in a shoulder holster under his arm looked smooth as silk and larger than life.

I started toward the third unmarked door of the night, toward whatever illicit activity required three doors, one of them locked, an armed doorman, and a bribe to get in, but Brutus grabbed my arm and gave it a viselike squeeze. “Don’t do nothing to make me regret this.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll respect me in the morning.”

He let go and I opened the door to a large room that made me feel like a corpuscle: red carpet, red velvet chairs, red walls, and wall sconces draped with red scarves. Half a dozen dealers wearing red suits and ties stood at red felt-covered gaming tables, dealing to maybe two dozen desperate gamblers who, under the crimson light, looked covered in blood. I glanced down at my gray suit. It looked bloody too.

Smoky music, cracked in places, drifted over the busy room. It took me a second to recognize the singer: Billie Holiday. Pain whittled down to a voice. A sleepless soul lost in the loneliness of “Lover Man.”

Tommy Parrish had found an open stool at a table in the middle of the room and was sneering at the dealer. Three other men at the table hid in the safety that came with keeping their eyes on their chips. I wandered over to within earshot. The dealer, whose face was a collection of sharp angles that ended in a V-shaped chin and who still carried signs of acne both old and new, was explaining something Parrish didn’t want explained.

“I cannot give you any chips. You need to see Mr. St. Clair.”

Parrish rose and leaned toward the dealer.

“You’ll need to see Mr. St. Clair.” The dealer’s voice was beginning to shake.

“Then get him over here where I can see him.”

“He works behind that window.” He pointed a shaky finger toward a caged window cut into a red wall at the back. The word “Cashier” written in elegant neon script hung over it like an arched eyebrow.

Parrish grabbed the dealer by the knot of the dealer’s red tie. “You get him.”

There was no need. St. Clair was already halfway to the table. He had a face that looked like it had been carved from butter, thick and pale and slightly marbled. His hair was slicked back and his red suit was adorned with a white rose that looked pink in this light. He carried with him a frustrated manager’s smile that fought the urge to turn mean. “Hands off the dealer, Parrish.”

Parrish looked at St. Clair but didn’t let go. “This pinhead won’t give me any chips.”

St. Clair stopped a good five feet from Parrish. One hand was deep in the pocket of his red suit jacket. “Mr. Baird gives out the cards. I give out the chips. You know that.”

Parrish smiled without any help from his eyes, which made it a threat. “But I don’t have to like it.”

“Show me the cash and I’ll give you your chips.”

Parrish let go of Baird’s tie and squared up to St. Clair. “Ever heard of credit?”

“Not since you walked in the door.”

I saw Parrish inflate like a cornered animal. He clenched a fist and raised it just enough to be noticed. “Want me to show you what it looks like?”

St. Clair’s arm tensed, the one that ended in his sagging coat pocket.

“I’ll cover it,” I said as I pulled out my wallet and withdrew a twenty. I looked at Parrish. “That enough?”

Parrish looked at me as if I’d interrupted his punch line. This was the first time I got a look at the dead eyes the Pope had described. Whatever part of him had looked scared in the old photograph I had of him was no longer visible. All that came through now was unmasked contempt. His gaze rolled over me with all the compassion of a German Panzer, finally settling on the double sawbuck in my hand. “Forty.”

I pulled out three more twenties and handed all of it to St. Clair. “Forty for both of us.”

St. Clair held his stiff pose for a moment, then weakened. He tried to hide it, but I spotted the relief that snuck across his face. “Forty each. Yes, sir.”

Parrish dropped back onto his red stool. His wavy black hair looked greasy but unruffled.

St. Clair looked at the man sitting next to Parrish. “Carl, you’ve been here long enough. Go home.”

Carl, who looked like a well-dressed, churchgoing politician with a predilection for sin, gladly gathered his handful of chips and headed for the caged window. The two others at the table followed suit.

St. Clair pointed at the now vacant stools and smiled at me. “A table has opened up for you, sir.”

I nodded and took my place next to Parrish. His eyes were focused on the red felt table as if he were staring into a pool of his own blood. He rested his forearms on the edge. The cuffs of his dark shirt were frayed. “What do you want from me?”

I stared into my own blood on the table. “Nothing.”

“A man wants something when he throws around money like it’s trash and asks after somebody who doesn’t want to be found.”

“It’s not me that wants something. It’s your old man.”

Parrish didn’t move.

St. Clair brought out a rack of chips to Baird, who was using a handkerchief to wipe off his forehead and his palms. The dealer then stacked two equal towers of chips in front of each of us. I wasn’t sure Parrish had heard me.

“It’s your old man,” I said.

“I ain’t deaf,” he snapped. “Deal.”

Baird tried to control the shakes that seemed to have become permanent, but failed. His hand shook as he picked up a pearlhandled letter opener and tried to cut the seal on a new deck of cards. He nearly slit his own wrists. When he finally tried to deal blackjack to us, both of Parrish’s cards landed faceup. He had a pair of jacks.

Parrish rose from his stool. “Goddamn it, you sonofabitch. You just cost me money.” He reached across and slapped Baird full on the cheek. Baird stumbled sideways from the force of the blow and whimpered. His knees nearly buckled. “Next time I’m gonna use a fist.”

“We can play it out,” I said.

“No.” He brushed the cards back at Baird and sat down.

We waited for Baird to compose himself and the cards.

“He’s dying,” I said.

Parrish’s jaw pulsed as he stared at the dealer.

Baird fumbled the cards, sending some towards us and others to the floor. This time Parrish rose and used his fist. Baird went over like a tree and hit the floor hard as blood spurted from his nose. He tried to push it back in with his hands but it oozed out between his fingers. A wet, spreading stain began to darken his crotch.

St. Clair rushed from his cage and tended to Baird. He glared at Parrish but said nothing. Apparently the Pope was the only skid-row proprietor with enough sand to kick Tommy Parrish out.

Parrish sat down. “Dying of what?”

“I don’t know. Dan didn’t say.”

“Dan.” He said it with surprise and disgust, as if his brother was someone he’d disliked but had forgotten about until now.

“Dan’s a hell of a cop,” I said.

Parrish actually chuckled, most of it through his nose.

“I’m sure he is.”

Up close to Parrish I could see the bags under his eyes. The dark circles. The shadows that lived inside his skin. They gave me an idea of how to reach him, of what we had in common.

“I was in the war, too. Third Battalion, 157^th Regiment, U.S. 45^th. I saw Anzio and Dachau.” I let that hang out there for a minute.

I knew he wouldn’t talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it either. But I knew I had to. Not because I had a job to do. My reasons went far beyond that.

“I hate sleep,” I said as I rubbed my suddenly tired eyes. “I hate it because I never sleep alone. It’s those goddamned faces. Coming at me every night. Like a carnival sideshow. Emaciated, hollow faces.” My voice began to shake. “Bodies contorted. People I never knew. Faces without names. Each one different. Each one. The same.”

I had to stop. My hands had started to tremble. Parrish noticed but said nothing. His hands were clasped together, fingers interlaced, knuckles white with the strain.

For a minute we both just tried to breathe.

“He’s dying. He wants to see you.”

Parrish turned on me, leaned in close. His whiskers looked prickly and his breath smelled of stale cigarettes. His black eyes barely contained a contempt that bordered on rage. I suddenly understood how Baird could wet himself. “Just because someone knocks, doesn’t mean I have to answer the door. Now leave me alone.”

He stood up and moved to the cashier’s window. I followed. After he collected my forty bucks and stuffed it in his pants pocket, he turned and poked a finger into my chest. “Get the hell away from me.” He started to leave but stopped. He kept his eyes on the door. “Just get the hell away from me.” Then he shook his head and left.

I cashed out and followed him, but by the time I reached the street he had disappeared. As I stood on the sidewalk, Baird burst through the door, holding his bloody nose with a bloody hand, spluttering and gasping as he pushed past me and ran down Washington Avenue. His feet slapped at the pavement as he plunged deeper into the heart of skid row. I wondered where he’d end up, just how deep into the heart of skid row all that rage and fear and humiliation would take him.

I found Lana as she was leaving the Palms. She didn’t act happy to see me.

“Go away, Nash.” She wouldn’t look at me. Her eyes stayed focused on the street. It was the seasoned look of the hunted, like a rabbit just out of the woods surveying an open field.

“You remembered my name.” I tried to make it sound like a good thing.

“It’s not hard.” She gave me an up-from-under look. “Every time I see you I GNASH my teeth.”

I answered her with a verbal rimshot. She softened with a reluctant smile.

The silent lightning I’d seen from the alley as I’d waited for Parrish to leave the Palms had found its voice. The thunder came and went at varying decibels, as if someone was fiddling with the volume control. The wind had picked up and carried with it the cool, metallic omen of rain. Flashes lit up the surrounding buildings and pavement of skid row. I thought of God trying to get a picture for his own Lost Wall, not of vagrants but of whole streets. Whole neighborhoods. Lana glanced up at the looming clouds with the same wariness she showed for the street.

“How was the third show?”

She flicked the back of her hand toward the Palms. “They’re just a bunch of animals.” She gave me a sideways glance. Like all her gestures and glances, it was straight out of a Lana Turner picture. “What do you want, Nash?”

“I talked to Parrish.”

Her eyebrows arched. “And you’re still alive? You must be a real sweet-talker.”

“No.” I thought about saying more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Anything she’d really understand.

“So what do you want from me?”

“His address.”

“You were talking to him. Why didn’t you ask him yourself?”

“I didn’t get the chance.”

She propped her hands on her hips and eyed me like I was a sidewalk preacher hawking redemption. “Why should I trust you?”

I nodded toward the Palms. “Because I’m not like those other animals.”

She thought about that for a moment. I felt a small ripple of pride that she didn’t laugh in my face.

“The Minnesotan.” She used a quick tilt of her head to indicate a brown brick hotel looming over the far corner across the street. It fronted on Washington Avenue with twin five-story wings in the shape of a U and columns of windows bracketed by beige pilasters. An enormous neon sign stood high above the roof blazing out in red letters: THE MINNESOTAN HOTEL. And below that, glowing in cool green, maybe its biggest — and least verifiable — selling point: FIREPROOF. A marquee sign over the single-floor lobby that linked the two wings advertised the “Panther Room” in red. Among the dozens of wooden, three-story firetraps masquerading as flophouses, The Minnesotan was a step up, but I wasn’t sure by how much.

“Room three-sixteen,” she said as she fiddled with an earring. “It ain’t no secret.”

Something clamped itself onto my heart and squeezed. I guess I hadn’t wanted her to know where Parrish lived, at least not down to the room number. The fact that she did made me picture something I didn’t want to see.

“You keep extra clothes there?” My teeth had stayed stuck together as I’d said it.

Her eyes turned to flint. “None of your damn business.”

I eased off my teeth. “You’re right. Thanks for the news.” I turned toward The Minnesotan and waited for a streetcar to pass before crossing the road to get to the other side.

“We live in the same building, that’s all,” she said, raising her voice so I’d hear her over the rattling roar of the trolley.

I turned toward her. The streetcar rumbled away.

She was twirling a lock of her platinum-blond hair. “I live in 401.” Then she smiled a murderous smile. “I like it that you care.”

I glanced up and down the street. The only people in sight were a couple of drunks trying to navigate the rough seas of the sidewalk. I tried to keep my wits about me, but Reason was already drifting down the block. He gave me a knowing smile and a tip of the hat before he turned and walked away, whistling a happy tune, content to meet up again later.

I gave her the toughest look I had. “It’s a dangerous night,” I said. “You should have an escort.”

She walked toward me, one high-heeled stiletto placed directly in front of the other, her eyes taking on the sharp, seasoned focus of the hunter. I never asked her for her real name and she never offered it. All she had to do was what she did: look at me like the Santa Anas had returned.

Her voice turned breathy. “You never know where you might find trouble.”

She offered me her arm and I took it. I knew I was making the wrong choice, but like following prey into an unfamiliar building through an unmarked door, sometimes you can’t help but go where you shouldn’t. That’s not just a sin that P.I.s commit.

I knocked on the peeling varnish of the door to Room 316, but I had the growing sense I’d get no answer.

I’d left Lana sleeping soundly in her bed in 401. Doing three shows a night must have exhausted her, because she’d been out the minute she’d climbed off. The whole thing had taken less than ten minutes — she had the kind of body that kills self-control — but I was beginning to feel I’d been distracted too long. The storm had pounded on her window as if raging against what was going on inside. As if it could scour away with its fury the permanent stains — the permanent sins — of skid row. Ten minutes later, it still hadn’t given up on its hopeless mission.

I tried the knob. The door wasn’t locked.

A single lamp on the table in front of the window lit a small part of the room, leaving the rest in shadows that rose and fell with the flashes of lightning that flickered through the drawn shade. There wasn’t much to light up, just a single bed, a dresser, and a padded vinyl chair that was losing its stuffing. A cigarette languished in an ashtray.

Tommy lay on his side on the floor, his front bathed in light, his blood making a black pool in front of him on the low-pile maroon rug. A pearl handle stuck out of his chest. It moved in irregular fits with Tommy’s shallow breaths.

I kneeled at his side. “Just hold on. I’ll get help.”

“No need.” He pushed out the words without any air to carry them.

“Baird?”

His head moved. It was as close to a nod as he could get. “He knocked. I thought it was you.”

He coughed up blood that oozed out of the side of his mouth. His skin was gray and seemed to be hardening. He pushed more blood from his mouth with his tongue and choked on words that wouldn’t come out. He swallowed hard, then forced out his last words on his last breath.

“I’ll wait.”

But he didn’t.

As I turned to leave to go call for the police, something over his bed caught my eye.

Taped to the thick steel crossbar of his headboard frame was a picture. It was almost identical to the one Dan had left for me at the Minneapolis post office. It was of Tommy and his parents, taken a moment before or a moment after the one I had. Everything looked the same. His parents were smiling. Tommy was in his uniform. But one important detail was different. The one that proved why you take more than one picture. At first I didn’t understand why this one was the one he’d kept for himself. But then it made perfect sense.

In this one, Tommy’s eyes were closed.

Outside, the storm raged on, still battling the sins that can’t be washed away.

Dan Parrish took the news like it wasn’t news. There was only one part that surprised him.

“ ‘I’ll wait.’ What do you think he meant by that?”

I sat forward in the battered desk chair in the back room of the Sourdough. The Pope had let me use his phone. He’d found me at eight a.m. waiting in the sun with a handful of other desperate men on the rain-scoured sidewalk in front of the bar. I took a long breath and ran a hand through my hair as I gazed at the hundreds of faces staring at me from across the room on the Lost Wall.

“All I can think of, Dan, is that he was talking about your father.”

A staticky silence filled the line.

“I think he meant that he’ll be waiting for your father in the next life.”

Dan cleared his throat. His words trembled. “He doesn’t have to wait. Pop died last night.”

My heart fell. “I’m sorry, Dan.”

“It’s like they decided to leave together. And they hadn’t said a word to each other in six years.”

We signed off shortly after that. Dan thanked me and offered again to pay for my services. Like the sap I’d become, again I said no.

The Pope came in with a bowl of beer nuts. “This is the only breakfast I can rustle up.”

I thanked him and tossed a couple into my mouth. I’d been up all night. The cops had found Baird in a Panther Room booth, unconscious, blood from his nose spilling down the front of his red gambling-house suit, both eyes swollen shut. When I’d found him there half an hour before the cops, spending the forty bucks — my forty bucks — that he’d taken off Tommy as Tommy lay dying, he’d been celebrating like it was his first day of freedom. Instead, it was his last. None of the patrons in the Panther Room could recall seeing who had given Baird such a beating. It turns out that on skid row the price for silence is a round of drinks. And I still managed to walk out with ten bucks and change.

But I can’t shake the fact that Tommy’s death was my fault. When Reason had left me behind on the sidewalk in front of the Palms with Lana, it hadn’t walked away alone. It had taken a life with it. I’d had the sense that Tommy had needed some time, but I was convinced he was coming around. Had I stuck to my job, I would have been with Tommy when Baird knocked on the door, or we might even have already been on our way to the depot and the next train to Glenwood. To his father. I would have at least been in a position to intercept Baird’s knife. Maybe even to have taken the fatal blow.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

I never told Dan that I’d been ten minutes late.

The Pope walked over to the Lost Wall and pointed at the picture he’d taken of Tommy Parrish five years ago.

“I guess I can take this one down.” He started to pull out the thumbtack that pinned it to the wall.

“Wait,” I said as I got to my feet and came up next to him. “Leave it up.”

The Pope looked at me.

I looked at Tommy’s picture, his eyes the color of slate. The color of hope that has died. “I don’t think he was ever really found.”

The Pope lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Fair enough.” He looked at Tommy and the rest of the faces on the Lost Wall. “Wordsworth.”

Then he headed back out to the bar to a jukebox that was stuck repeating the same two notes like the incessant chirping of an early morning bird. I heard the Pope give the machine a kick. The song picked up again several notes later.

I stared at the Lost Wall. Stared at all the skid-row faces. So different from the ones that haunted me from Dachau, yet so much the same.

Hollow faces with leaden gray eyes.

Lost faces.

The kind that can only be found in dreams.

© 2008 by C. J. Harper