Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 924 & 925, September/October 2018

The Man With Two Grins by Richard Helms

Richard Helms’s first story for us, 2010’s “The Gods for Vengeance Cry,” featured unlicensed P.I. Pat Gallegher. The tale was nominated for the Macavity and Derringer awards and won the International Thriller Award. Gallegher has also starred in four well-received novels, and will appear again soon in the novel Paid in Spades. Meanwhile, here he is in another thrilling short case.

Langston Hughes once wrote, “Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.” There are some dreams which should never be trampled upon. Dreams deserve treatment reserved for the delicate and precious things they are.

I imagine Claire Sturges felt the same way before the dangerous, smooth-talking stranger named Baxter Flatt walked into her life on a bright summer morning in Jackson Square.

Claire was Cully Tucker’s friend. Cully is my attorney, sort of, in the sense that I call him whenever my infrequent dangerous adventures land me in jail. He’s a small-time ambulance chaser with self-esteem problems, but his heart is in the right place, which is probably why he showed up at Holliday’s, a bar off Toulouse Street in the French Quarter. I play a cornet at Holliday’s, and I live in an apartment on the top floor. I also do favors for friends, so Cully brought his sad-looking friend Claire to see me on a warm afternoon in October.

“Mr. Gallegher,” she began, “I don’t want you to think I am a foolish woman. I’m forty-two years old, and until last June I led a very stable life. I went to good schools and made some very prudent investments with the money I inherited from my parents. I’ve never married, though I’ve had a number of offers. I have a good job as a management consultant with the firm of Sanders, Boynton, and Simms on Canal Street. Now, I’m afraid I’ve done something quite stupid and embarrassing.”

She looked like a forty-year-old virgin I knew once when I was a professor at a university in New England. She put great store in her stability and in her propriety. If her slip were showing she would be thrown into a tizzy.

“I was spending a Saturday morning in Jackson Square watching artists paint. A young man who called himself Baxter Flatt walked up to me. He seemed nervous, and was perspiring profusely. He begged me to walk a short distance with him, and he said that ‘they’ were after him. I asked who ‘they’ were, but he said the less I knew, the better. He appeared at his wits’ end, and I must admit quite frankly that I was intrigued. My life to that point had been so ordered and planned that the prospect of a dangerous encounter was, if I may say so, romantically appealing. I walked with him until he was several blocks away from the square. He appeared to relax, and asked if he could buy me a drink. Mr. Gallegher, I normally do not accept such invitations from people I’ve just met, but he seemed so genial, and, as I’ve told you, I was quite distracted by the romantic nature of our meeting. I accepted, and he told me the most amazing story.

“He said that he was an operative for an obscure government agency, and that his identity had been discovered by what he called ‘deep covers’ in New Orleans. These ‘deep covers’ were afraid that he would expose them, and they wanted to kill him.”

I interrupted. “Did you ever see these people he described?”

“No, but Baxter... Mr. Flatt claimed to see them several times that day. I let him drive me home in my car. He took a crazy, circuitous route, driving back and forth, and around blocks two and three times. Finally, he said he had lost them, and he was safe, temporarily. He said he needed to find a safe place to hide and asked if I could drop him off at the next comer. I was frightened, but terribly excited, so I told him he could hide at my house.

“He stayed there, off and on, for almost two months. At first it was a completely impersonal arrangement. He would disappear for three or four days at a time, then reappear looking ill and exhausted. He would tell the most harrowing stories of being followed and attacked, and of hiding in the vilest places. Once he indicated that he had even been forced to kill one of the people pursuing him.

“I was so taken in by the danger and the romance and the intrigue that I believed him. He told me that he had been placed ‘out of sanction’ by the agency he worked for, which meant they didn’t trust him anymore, and they would not protect him. He said he had arranged to buy a new identity, but he needed ten thousand dollars to pay for the identification cards and papers. I acted foolishly. I gave him the money. He left, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Did you notify the police?”

“After three weeks. I was afraid that Baxter had been killed. I talked with a detective named Nuckolls.”

“Farley Nuckolls,” I said, “I know him. Good cop.”

“He told me I had been swindled. It seems Baxter Flatt is some kind of mentally ill person. A paranoid schizophrenic. He is convinced that he is being persecuted by some unknown, unseen enemy, by secret agents from unnamed countries. And, I’m sorry to say, I’m not the only woman he’s fooled.”

I rose and went to the refrigerator for a Dixie beer.

“Ms. Sturges,” I asked as I sat back down, “what would you like me to do?”

“Mr. Tucker told me that you might be able to help me find Baxter. He mentioned you worked at one time as what he called ‘muscle’ for a gangster to whom you owed money.”

“That would be Leduc,” I said, glaring quickly at Cully. There were some things he was not supposed to discuss. This was one of them.

“He told me Leduc died, and since then you do occasional work helping people who are in trouble.”

“Did he tell you that I have scruples?” I asked, then took a long pull on the Dixie for emphasis.

“He said that you always tell the police if you run across something they should know.”

“Soon as I get around to it. Is that a problem?”

“Of course not! I want you to tell them. Find Baxter Flatt, Mr. Gallegher. Please. Turn him in to the police. There’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest, I’ve seen to that. I want him to get the help he needs.”

“Do you have any idea where he might be?” I asked.

“I know where he was two weeks ago. I was back in Jackson Square yesterday, looking at some prints by a young photographer. There was one picture in particular, a shot of an apartment on Royal Street, the type of photograph the tourists like to buy. The photographer caught Baxter standing in front of the building. I bought the print and asked the photographer when he took it. He said it was about two weeks ago, during a walk in the French Quarter.”

She took a sloppily matted eight-by-ten matte print out of her oversized handbag. It was a nicely composed shot of one of the older wrought-iron bedecked apartment buildings, the type that would have made Tennessee Williams sob with envy. A lean, haggard man who looked forty going on eighty stood in front of the building with his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans, staring out at nothing in particular.

“I know this building,” I told her, “The Flanders Arms. It was rebuilt right after the Great Fire, then gutted around nineteen forty for internal refurbishing. You think Flatt is staying there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been afraid to check. If he were to see me, he might run away again, and I’d never find him. Tell me, Mr. Gallegher. How much do you want to find Baxter?”

Here is where things always get sticky. I’m not a private detective. I’ve never been a private detective. What I am is big and menacing, and pretty smart to boot. And I’m lucky as hell. Luckiest guy you ever met, at least so far. It served me well when I was shaking down gamblers for overdue vigorish. After I left that part of my life behind, it has also been an advantage in my infrequent adventures finding lost people and objects for people who either can’t go to the police or have found the police unhelpful. After a few uncomfortable moments of negotiation, we arrived at fair compensation for my time.

Something about Claire Sturges’s story resonated with me. There was a time, half a life ago, when I was a forensic psychologist assigned to assist a police department in New Hampshire. That turned out badly, which is one of the reasons I now make my living as a jazz cornet player at Holliday’s. During the time I worked with the police, I came into contact with more than my share of psychotics. Something in Claire’s description of Baxter Flatt just didn’t fit. I couldn’t put my finger on it, precisely, but something was definitely out of kilter. Since she had already consulted with Farley Nuckolls, I decided to pay him a visit.

Farley Nuckolls, New Orleans police detective, has few — but well chosen — words for me in general. He detests what I do, but he can’t prove a thing. All he knows is that I frequently pop up with some piece of information that makes his case, and I occasionally present him with a grisly little problem which falls under police purview.

Nuckolls is a gaunt broomstick of a man with a hawk nose and no chin but lots of turkey wattle. His shoulders are stooped. He resembles nothing so much as a cartoon turtle. He has a lisp, the kind of sound made when you talk without moving your upper lip. Beyond that, he is the best detective I’ve ever met — tenacious, intuitive, and dedicated. That’s probably why he constantly teetered on the brink of burnout.

“What do you know about this case, Gallegher?”

“Just what Claire Sturges told me. The guy wheedled his way into her life, took ten thousand dollars from her, and disappeared.”

“What about the story he gave her?”

“From what I heard, I can come up with a couple of possibilities. I don’t think this Flatt character is schizophrenic. He’s just a bit too intact. He could have bipolar disorder, stuck in a particularly lengthy episode of mania, or he could simply be a psychopath.”

“Psychopath,” he echoed.

“A guiltless wonder. He would take advantage of anyone to get what he wants. Lie, steal, forge, whatever it takes.”

“I know what a psychopath is, Gallegher.”

“Psychopaths are generally very intelligent people who never, for some reason, develop through the moral stages like the rest of us. Because they’re typically so smart, they make great bogus-check passers and con men.”

“Are they normally paranoid, though?” he asked.

“Absolutely not. That’s the problem. Most of these guys are so convinced they’re head and shoulders above the rest of us that they never bother to look back to see if anyone’s catching up. They’re too cocky. If a psychopath wants something, he generally finds some way to get it, regardless of how it hurts others. Find yourself a psychopath who thinks he is in danger, that he’s being persecuted and threatened, and I hate to think what could happen.”

He fiddled with a couple of paper clips on his desk, and asked, “You said you could think of a couple of possibilities. What was the other one?”

“That Flatt’s exactly what he says he is, and he’s built one hell of a cover for himself pretending to be a nut. That would make him twice as dangerous, because he has more to lose. According to Ms. Sturges, Baxter Flatt said he had been placed ‘out of sanction.’ Have any idea what that’s about?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I do, unfortunately. And I’m surprised you don’t. Don’t you read spy novels?”

“Did Marcel Proust write any?”

“Operatives are placed out of sanction if they’ve turned, or if their control thinks they are going to turn.”

“You mean defect? And what’s a control?”

“A control is just that — another operative who gives directions and orders to a deep-cover field agent. ‘Controls’ him. Sometimes, they’re called ‘handlers.’ And an operative doesn’t have to defect to ‘turn.’ He could simply start acting as a double agent, or turn completely renegade. It’s happened.”

“What happens if you’re out of sanction?”

“Nothing good. They could put out a contract on you, if you’re important enough, or simply leave you out in the cold. A field agent, even a deep cover like Flatt claims to be, makes a lot of enemies on each side. Their game includes extortion of the sleaziest variety, and there’s not an operative in the world that thirty people wouldn’t love to see dead. Or worse.”

I gave Farley my most suspicious look. “You didn’t learn all that from novels.”

He smiled. “Sure I did. Got the James Bond decoder ring to prove it.”

He clearly didn’t want to discuss his past, so I thanked him for his time and begged off. It was time for my gig at Holliday’s.

My six hours on stage passed like kidney stones, as my mind was full of Baxter Flatt, and all of the alternate realities his story presented. Kook or spook, he had taken ten grand from Claire Sturges and disappeared, and she was paying me a damn sight more than a P.I. would charge to recover it and get him the help she felt he needed. Whoever Flatt turned out to be, he had her money, and that was reason enough for me to track him down. Whatever happened after was none of my business.

I had told Claire Sturges that I knew the Flanders Arms. It’s across the street from the hangout of a street musician named Petey. He stands on the sidewalk across Royal Street from the Flanders and conjures heaven and earth out of the cauldron of his bari sax. Some nights, when I’m not playing at Holliday’s, I like to walk down Royal, stand in the shadows at the Flanders, and listen to Petey’s fingers make love to the ivory-inlaid keys. I never leave without dropping a ten in the open sax case at his feet. When I’m bucks-up, he gets a twenty.

I owe Petey. Back in the bad old Leduc days, the boss sent me to the wrong side of the Quarter to collect on an overdue chit. I was younger and greener then. Leduc had only recently pressed me into indentured servitude to pay off an enormous gambling debt I knew I’d never make good. I leaned on the wrong person for information, and wound up facing down four golem-sized Cajuns with big frowns and bigger knives. The look in their eyes made it clear they would take the utmost pleasure in carving little fleshy pieces of confetti out of Leduc’s big dumb collector.

I can run faster than any other six-and-a-half-foot husky guy you ever saw. I proved it that night. The Cajuns were gaining, though, until I ducked down a dead-end alleyway. Petey was playing across the street. I’m sure he saw me huff and puff down the cul-de-sac, but when the Cajuns asked him which way I had gone, he pointed off in the direction of Canal Street. He’s made more than a thousand dollars off me since, in ten- and twenty-dollar drops. I offered to get him a gig at Holliday’s once, but he seems to prefer the streets, wailing away for nickel and dime donations. Go figure.

If Baxter Flatt was staying at the Flanders Arms, Petey would have seen him come and go. Petey doesn’t miss much. I showed him the picture Claire Sturges had given me. He squinted and wiped his mouth, then his yellowed eyes brightened.

“Yeah, I know this cat. Sneaks around a lot. Walks in the shadows. But he’s not at the Flanders, nope. Next door, at the Duvalier. Don’t know which floor.”

I thanked him, pressed a twenty into his gnarled hand, and crossed Royal to the tattered awning of the Duvalier Apartments. A quick check of the mailboxes raised some concern. No Baxter Flatt listed. A second perusal revealed a B. Flagg in room 209. It fit into a nice open space on my puzzle. Flatt would probably use a fake name.

I try to stay away from guns. I believe the brain shuts down about the same time the safety clicks off. Guns have the power to make ordinarily smart people do really dumb things. I do carry a weapon, though — a foot-and-a-half ebony dowel drilled out and filled with lead shot. It’s easily hidden, and won’t result in an arrest for concealment as readily as a nine-millimeter automatic.

With my fingers coiled around my improvised billy stick, I walked nonchalantly through the lobby to the stairway. It was an old building, and the steps remained uncarpeted. My size-thirteens clopped loudly on the varnished hardwood. It was a tradeoff. If Flatt was who he said he was, and if he expected trouble, he might have memorized the footsteps of all the regular tenants. On the other hand, a person pleasantly stamping up the steps would likely be considered a harmless visitor, while an untoward creak of the floorboards could signal danger sneaking up the stairs.

I reached 209 and knocked on the door. It swung open slightly, raising a little red flag in the back of my head and setting off a warning siren in my ears.

You never lead with your head. That rule makes perfect sense in boxing, and even more in whatever it is I think I’m doing. Sticking your head through an open door invites the type of unpleasantness that befell Anne Boleyn. Instead, I stood on the hinge side and slowly swung it open. No sound came from the dimmed room beyond the jamb.

I stole a quick glance through the doorway, but saw nothing save for the decrepit rent-included furniture. He had the shades drawn. The spill of light from the fringe left the room with a dusky illumination. I quickly slid inside and flattened myself against one wall. Suddenly I felt very insecure. I could see two options. In the first, Flatt had stepped out for a quick bite at the neighborhood Takee-Outee. In the second, he was behind the next door with a nasty present for the cornet player.

There was a third possibility I hadn’t considered. I glanced through the crack between the hinge and jamb of the bedroom doorway. Flatt was there, sitting in a wing chair. The first thing that struck me was the double grin. I rubbed my eyes, but it was still there — the grin formed by his open mouth, and the second one, just below it. It took me a few seconds to figure it out, and the realization made me queasy.

Someone had garroted Flatt savagely, splitting the skin from ear to ear, forming the second malevolent crimson grimace. There would be no need for Claire Sturges’s warrant. I pulled myself together enough to make a rapid search.

I was looking for anything with a name on it, or photographs. I got lucky. There was a small spiral notebook in his jacket pocket, with a number of times and schedules in it, like a record Flatt might have kept if he had been tailing someone. And there were four names — Clyde Gilstrup, Ted Forde, Jackson Rogers, and Robin McLean. I stashed the notebook back into his pocket and decided it was time to call Farley Nuckolls.

I was reaching for the phone when something hard and heavy slammed into the side of my head, right behind the left ear. It was a professional blow, calculated to stun me without doing any appreciable harm, and it worked. I fell to my knees, clasping my star-filled cranium between my arms to fend off any more approaching line drives. None came. I slowly rolled over onto my back. Four hands grabbed for my jacket lapels and boosted me into a hard desk chair. Someone turned on the reading lamp and pointed it right into my eyes. It hurt almost as much as my head.

“Okay,” someone said, the voice of a cultured and refined man. “Who are you?”

“Gallegher. Pat Gallegher. A lady asked me to find the guy in the bedroom. She said his name was Baxter Flatt. The name on the mailbox downstairs said B. Flagg. You’re going to tell me it’s something else?”

“We’re not going to tell you anything. Why did this woman want you to find him?”

“She was worried. The police told her that he was a psychotic. She wanted him to get help. So, I found him.”

There was a long silence, broken only by an occasional whisper, during which I hoped fervently that I had made all the right guesses. Finally, the light snapped off. I rubbed my eyes, trying to massage away the burned spots on my retinae.

The first voice said, “We don’t know the guy in the bedroom. We don’t know who killed him. We don’t care. We’re just a couple of concerned citizens who dropped in to check out what was happening. What you do about him is your business. We’re going to leave now, and go about ours. Don’t count on seeing us again. In fact, it might be a good idea to forget about seeing us at all. Understood?”

“Clearly,” I replied. They left a moment later. I never heard them hit the stairs. They were professionals, in every way, and they made me feel like the amateur interloper I was.

I had been right, though. Flatt was exactly what he had claimed to be. If the guys who clobbered me had sliced his neck, then I’d be dead too. They were covered, though. The police already had Flatt pegged as a mental case. He’d have no relatives, no claimants. He’d languish in the city morgue until the city decided to bury him in as businesslike a manner as possible. Whomever he had worked for would have no further problems with him.

I’m not a policeman or a private investigator. I don’t carry any license, and I have no badge to flash to get information. I’m just a big galoot who was forced by a smarmy little shylock to learn some distasteful methods for extracting what I want from people. This particular job had entailed a minimum of unpleasantness, and that suited me straight up and down the line. Claire Sturges had paid me to find Flatt. I had done so. Signed, sealed, delivered, thank you, ma’am, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you, call again soon.

Ms. Sturges had other ideas. After calling the police with an anonymous tip about a disturbance at the Duvalier, I made my lumbering way to Poydras Street and called her from a Stand ’n’ Snack on the ground floor of her office building. I asked her to share a bite with me.

“The poor, poor man,” she sniffled, after I’d related the story, sans the grisliest details. “He died all alone in the world. No one will claim his body. How... dismal. It isn’t much to show for a lifetime, is it?”

“No,” I said, mostly to comfort her. Flatt had likely lived four or five times the life of any three people Claire Sturges knew.

“Find out who did it, Mr. Gallegher,” she implored.

I should have seen it coming from downtown, “No, I don’t think... I mean, the police have the case now, and I’m sure—”

“But you said they probably wouldn’t do anything, that they’d just write it off. Does that mean whoever killed him will go without punishment? Is that right?”

Damn her. Whether intuitively or by chance she had pulled just the right string, the one that invariably propels Pat Gallegher, unlikely knight errant, into abrupt, energetic, frequently effective action. She had appealed to my most conventional feature: my outmoded, Hammurabian, antiquated need to feel that — if only in an ironic sense — justice has been served. Justice was probably going to receive the short end of the stick in the case of Baxter Flatt. Somehow Claire Sturges had intuited that this little loose end would prompt me to accept her kind offer to put my butt on the line. It was not a nice thing to do to a peace-loving man.

“Will you require more money, Mr. Gallegher?” she asked, heaping guilt upon subtle emotional coercion.

“No!” I replied, perhaps a little too quickly and enthusiastically. “I’ve done damned little for your money as it is. I’ll speak with Detective Nuckolls this evening. If, as I expect, he plans no major investigation, then I’ll look into it. Unofficially, of course. Remember, I’m an amateur in the eyes of the law.”

Farley was not happy to see my face. He didn’t care for what I said either.

“I suppose that was you who called in the murder at the Duvalier,” he said, as I walked into his office.

“I can neither confirm nor deny...” I started.

“Bite me. I’m off in fifteen minutes. Make it quick.”

“I was wondering about the disposition in the Baxter Flatt case.”

He got up and left the office. He returned several moments later with a file folder, already open, which he was reading so vigorously that I was surprised his lips weren’t moving. Finally, he put the folder down and leaned forward. “When you report back to Miss Sturges, please tell her the case has been closed. It has been ruled a suicide. We do not anticipate any further investigation. Thank you for dropping by.”

“Wait a minute,” I interjected, “How could you rule it a suicide? Has the coroner already done an autopsy? That’s pretty fast for a drifter-psycho case like this, isn’t it? Why the priority?”

“Slow week. I really have to ask you to go.”

“What was the cause of death?” I demanded.

“It was a suicide. That’s all I’m at liberty to divulge. Now, please...”

“You want to tell me how some guy garrotes himself, but has the presence of mind to get rid of the wire before he dies?”

“So you were there!” he said, slapping his hand on the desk.

“You know damn well I was. You knew it the minute those two guys told you I was there.”

His momentary look of interrogative triumph came to a screeching halt. His face went blank.

“What two guys?” he asked.

“The two guys who rousted me at the Duvalier. The government spooks.”

He stood, crossed his office, and closed the door. Without returning to his desk he stared me down. “Listen to me. I’m only saying this once. Walk away. This is the first I’ve heard about the two guys you describe, but I know their type. They’re in place to make problems disappear. I mean, like in the ‘was never seen again’ sense. These are not people you want to screw around with. Forget Baxter Flatt and go to work at that shit-box bar tonight grateful that you still can.”

I didn’t give him a chance to ask me again. The fix was obviously in, and nothing I could do or say was going to wedge any more out of Nuckolls. Someone had leaned on the parish, pushed it to make quick work of the Flatt affair, to sweep it under the bureaucratic carpet.

Claire Sturges had said it all. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair, and it got my dander up. That’s good. I work better when I’m personally involved. I had four names — the names written in the spiral notebook in Flatt’s pocket. Four starting points.

When it comes to drilling down into people’s lives, like really deep down, I don’t fool around. I go straight to church.

Quentin Wardell is a genealogist at the New Orleans branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons take genealogy seriously, as they maintain that if they can convert you to the faith, they can also retroactively induct all your forebears. In order to do that, they need to know who your ancestors were, and they maintain one of the largest genealogical databases in the world. One side effect of such a huge system is that you can also find out all sorts of things about people who are still breathing.

Quentin is in his mid eighties. He has spent most of his life surrounded by books and computers. He doesn’t get out much. A great deal of his enjoyment late in life revolves around listening to my stories of derring-do, which enable him to vicariously experience a more action-packed existence. In return for my tales, he provides me with information. If you want to go data mining, Quentin Wardell is the head digger.

“You have a story for me today?” he asked, as I settled into a comfy chair in his office.

“Have I told you the one about the kidnapped poodle and the heiress?”

“No.”

I told him the story, which ended with me getting six bones in my hand broken. He hung on every word like a five-year-old listening to a bedtime fable. When it was finished, he clapped his hands in delight and asked how he could help me.

I handed him the list of names I had found on Baxter Flatt: Clyde Gilstrup, Ted Forde, Robin McLean, and Jackson Rogers. He went to work, and in less than a quarter-hour he had all the information I needed.

“One of these is not like the others,” I said, as I looked over the results. “Three businessmen and a soldier.”

“A Marine,” Q countered. “They are rather adamant about the distinction.”

Clyde Gilstrup owned a chemical company that provided materials for oil fracking in Third World countries. Ted Forde was an investment banker heavily leveraged in the former Soviet states. Robin McLean was an advertising media consultant with ties to Arab-language radio networks in the U.S. All three, like Flatt, were single. There was no evidence that any of them knew the others. None of them seemed in a position to provide anything of consequence to a foreign agent. There was nothing in any of their histories that indicated they’d be capable of anything approaching the violence that had been visited on Flatt.

Jackson Rogers was the odd man out. Career military, retired as a captain. Huge gaps in his military record, weeks and even months during which details of his work were unavailable. Rogers’s history suggested he might have information to peddle. Flatt had somehow compromised Rogers into divulging that information. It didn’t have to be earthshaking. I knew enough about how the intelligence jigsaw puzzle works to reason that you make the big picture out of all the tiny jagged pieces. It would be easy for a supposedly bona fide U.S. intelligence operative to set up an unwary soldier. The fact that Rogers was a Marine also made him the odds-on favorite to be the one who put the piano wire to Flatt’s throat.

I drove my dilapidated Pinto to Metairie, parking it around the corner from Rogers’s home. He lived in an unassuming ranch, the type of place one might afford on a military pension. It had a long gravel driveway and signs of construction in the backyard. It seemed Rogers was putting in a swimming pool.

One issue troubled me. Assuming I could get Rogers to admit to killing Flatt, what then? Should I call Nuckolls and tell him I caught the guy who killed his suicide? If Flatt had been leaking secrets to the other guys, maybe Rogers had done a service by turning out his lights. It was moral ambiguities like this that sometimes drove me nuts.

I snuck around to Rogers’s back porch and fitted a pry bar into the jamb of the sliding glass door. It gave with only a little resistance. I hoped I hadn’t set off any silent alarms. After closing the sliding door behind me, I checked for security-system wires and was relieved to find none. I had waited to make certain that Rogers was away from the house. I wanted time to look around a bit.

I found his pistol more or less where I had expected. Humans are creatures of habit and conditioning. We have learned from movies and books that the best place to keep a gun is near the bed, where we are most vulnerable. Most people keep guns in a bedside table or clothes closet. Rogers had been cagey. I found his in a holster taped to one of the bed slats.

As I’ve mentioned, I don’t care for guns. I especially dislike them in the hands of people who might want to do me some mischief.

I put the pistol inside a couple of self-sealing plastic sandwich bags from the kitchen and stashed it in the toilet tank of the hallway bathroom. I could always call Rogers anonymously later and tell him where I put it. The rest of the house was spotless, except for the usual smattering of bills on the study desk. It reflected his military mind — clean, ordered, disciplined. No allowance for luxury or extravagance. He had no need for accoutrements. His world was functional and direct. I wondered what Flatt had on him to make the captain break and spill the family secrets. Fifty-two years old, unmarried, no little black books lying around. Fairly striking, if the photograph I found on his desk was any indication.

My reverie was cut short by the sound of his car as it crunched its way up the gravel driveway. I heard the garage door open to admit him to my parlor. I positioned myself behind the kitchen counter, across from the door leading in from the garage.

Rogers walked in, all six-plus feet of him. Straight pewter hair cut close and plastered flat from years of training. Thick chest and flat washboard of a stomach. Next to him I looked sloppy and porcine. I had him by several inches, though, and about a hundred pounds, so I thought I could take him.

A quick flick with the billy flattened him in dazed prostration long enough for me to pounce on him and pin his arms behind his back.

“Don’t make me hit you again,” I said.

“Deal,” he mumbled back.

I straddled him, my feet planted firmly in the thick-pile shag, my hands holding his arms behind him, my weight pressing down on his wrists.

I told Rogers, “I’m going to let you up very slowly and lead you to the sofa. You’ll sit and talk with me for a while. I’ll be standing behind you the whole time, ready to smash you into the middle of next week if you so much as sweat heavily. Understood?”

“Loud and clear.”

After sitting him on the couch, I said, “I’m going to tell you a story. All you have to do is nod, and then answer some questions. There was a man named Baxter Flatt. He worked for a government agency as an intelligence operative, until he turned. He started selling secrets to another government. He approached you one day, either claiming to need help in the national interest, or threatening you with something so embarrassing that you had to comply. He asked you to give him information of a sensitive nature. You did so, and kept doing so, endangering your freedom each time. Finally, when you could take no more, you slipped into his room at the Duvalier and put a long thin gouge in his throat with a fine piano wire.”

Either he was very fast or I was way off guard. He flipped from a sitting position over the back of the couch, smashing his forearm into my throat as he came to his feet. My larynx spasmed, choking off my breath temporarily. Something like a bulldozer slammed into my kidneys, and I went down in a useless protective crouch, waiting for my body’s all-systems-go alert. It never came.

Something hard and fast took off the top of my head, scattering consciousness all over the living-room floor and down the hallway.

I wasn’t out long, just enough for Rogers to pick me up and dump me onto the sofa. When I was alert enough to remember my name, address, and dire straits, I found him standing over me with an automatic pistol — not the one I had stowed in the toilet tank. I had been sloppy, and stopped looking for guns when I found the one strapped to his bed slats.

“You’re really stupid, mister,” he scowled.

“It’s Gallegher,” I told him, the words echoing off what was left of the top of my skull and setting off little thuds of agony. “What in hell did you hit me with?”

The room swam in and out of focus. I had a concussion, probably a dilly. I’d be months recovering. Somehow, in the present circumstances, the notion seemed quaint. I had a feeling I’d be lucky to see nightfall.

He pointed at the shards of a broken porcelain vase on the floor. I saw a smear of blood on one fragment and reached back to palpate the back of my skull. I drew it away and saw blood on my fingers. That wasn’t good.

“Gallegher. Okay. What did you think I’d do? Roll over and spill my guts just because you whacked me behind the ear?”

“It’s worked before.”

“Let’s say your story was correct. Where would that leave me? Whatever Flatt might have had on me, you can bet I’d still want to keep it a secret. You didn’t think this through entirely. If I killed Flatt to keep a secret, what would stop me from doing the same to you?”

“You’re saying I was wrong?”

“Dead wrong. It was a good story, though. Only you had it backwards. I turned, not Flatt. He was a pretty respectable sort, working as a clerk at Langley CIA. That boy was a box full of nasty secrets. Flatt needed an extra closet for all his skeletons. Leading a sordid, debauched life might not be a big deal in the civilian world, but they still frown on it in the intelligence community. It offers the opportunity for someone like me to come along and exploit it. I used him to cull information on satellite tracking systems for my control. That’s a—”

“I know what it is, thank you.”

“Then Flatt disappeared—”

“—and resurfaced in New Orleans with his own cover story about being an out-of-sanction operative,” I finished. “He was trying to find you, to put you out of action before you could get to him. It’s a great story, you two stalking each other all over the Quarter. Just one question. Why?”

“Why do you think? The money. I busted hump fighting bad guys all over the world for truth, justice, and the freakin’ American Way. What did it get me? A pension that just barely pays for three hots and a cot. Nobody hires a fifty-year-old guy whose primary skills are killing people and breaking things. I cashed in. It was a survival thing. You dance with the one what brung you. I don’t have to like it. Fact is, most nights I can’t get a dab of sleep. Doesn’t mean I can quit. You get in as deep as I am, there’s no walking away. I’m strapped in for the whole ride, like it or not.”

“You killed Flatt to protect your little slice of Hell.”

“He wanted to get in the game, but he forgot the most important rule. You lose, you lose it all.” He pulled the hammer back on the automatic. It clicked with a sinister sound that raised my blood pressure several thousand points. “You lost, Gallegher.”

“So I lose it all. Yeah. I get it.”

“Now, if you’ll be cooperative, I’d like you to step into the hallway bathroom.”

“The bathroom?”

“You don’t expect me to shoot you out here, do you? I’d have to replace the carpet and furniture to hide the bloodstains. The bathroom is neater. In the tub, I think. I’ll be several paces behind you, to keep you from trying anything sneaky.”

I stood, and immediately dropped to my knees. It was only half fake. The room spun and my head pounded. It was hard to gain my balance. I held up a hand. “You scrambled my brain, dude. I have a concussion. It’ll take me a minute to get to my feet.”

Slowly, I pulled myself up on the arm of the sofa, and half shuffled, half stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom. When I reached the doorway, I placed a hand on my forehead and swayed a little for effect, as if I were about to fall backward. I heard Rogers step back, and I jumped inside the bathroom, slammed the door behind me, and locked it to buy myself a few seconds. There was a caned chair next to the sink. I grabbed it and wedged it between the sink pedestal and the door. It shook as Rogers slammed against the door.

“This is really dumb, Gallegher!” he shouted. “There’s no window out of there. I can wait all week for you to give in!”

I lifted the lid to the toilet. The automatic I’d taken from Rogers’s bed slats was still there. I took it out of the plastic bag and checked the safety.

I haven’t been in many gunfights, and I didn’t care for the ones I’ve had. Killing is no joke. It leaves a hollow in my stomach and an ache in my head that won’t go away, and it’s hell on the other guy. I got down in the steel bathtub, in case Rogers took a notion to start taking potshots. The automatic was in my right hand, hard and heavy and ugly. It was a Desert Eagle, one of the big weapons designed to do absurd amounts of damage. Rogers would be directly in front of the door, from the sound of his voice, completely unaware of the firepower at my disposal. I took a deep breath, and positioned myself to shoot. My hand trembled with an adrenaline rush.

I never found out if I could do it. There was a crashing sound, a couple of shots, and lots of shouting.

“Freeze, Rogers!”

“On the floor!”

“Got it all on tape?”

“Loud and clear!”

“Where’s Gallegher? Where is he, Rogers?”

“Bathroom.” It was muffled, as if coming through an inch of shag carpet.

I dropped the revolver on the floor and slowly opened the door. One of the intruders saw me and braced his pistol in front of him.

“Wait!” I yelled, my hands in the air, “I’m Gallegher!”

“McNalley, FBI. Are you okay?” The voice was that of one of the guys from the Duvalier.

“Not even close. What’s going on?”

It was over in moments. McNalley and his partner, a man named Jennings, had been trying to find Flatt — that was his real name, after all — for weeks. Every time they’d gotten close, he’d run off. That accounted for his story about being followed. Poor Flatt — he’d been pursued all over the Quarter, both by Rogers and the people who were trying to help him. The FBI became aware of what was happening early on, but they had no idea who was steering Flatt. When they finally found him at the Duvalier, he was stone cold and in the company of a large jazz cornet player who failed to fit their scenario at all. They decided to set me loose on a short, imperceptible leash. I was bait to get Rogers to admit what he was doing.

As for Gilstrup, Forde, and McLean, they had been recruited by Flatt just as he had drawn in Claire Sturges. Flatt had been rotating between the four homes and the Duvalier while in New Orleans, providing him with several burrows to run down in case he was cornered. The fellows from the FBI had found the pocket notebook on Flatt too, and had already cleared the three covers, leaving only Jackson Rogers as a suspect. They had finished wiring his home for sound only hours before I did his back door a disservice with my pry bar.

“That’s it,” McNalley finished, “I trust you’ll keep this confidential. It would be the safest thing to do.”

I thought it over. My anonymity is important to me. Save for a small circle of friends, a growing concentric circle of clients, and one disgruntled police detective, everyone considers me a simple, if overeducated, bar musician. I like it that way. Jackson Rogers was going away for a long, long time, whether I charged him with the attempted murder or not. Espionage, extortion, murder — it all added up to several life sentences. I declined to press charges.

The doctor at the hospital told me I got my bell rung but good, and ordered me to stay off my feet and out of fights for at least six weeks. I discovered almost immediately that blowing out a scale on the comet nearly put me into a coffin, so I decided to take his advice. Claire Sturges felt guilty for endangering my life and took it upon herself to be my on-call nurse.

She’s sitting across the room now, as the replacement musician downstairs does something magical and iridescent with “What a Wonderful World.”

I told her the entire story, of course, swearing her to secrecy in the name of national security. She was thankful, and has brought me food from local restaurants every night as I’ve slogged through my recovery.

Sometimes, the look in her eyes belies my earlier impression of staid, proper, stable, unapproachable Claire Sturges. And what the heck? She’s really an attractive woman. When I can stand on my own without swaying, and I reach the point where I don’t see three of everything, I might just ask her out.

Yes sir. It’s a wonderful world.