Noir

You met Flame on the same day you first met the rich widow. Coincidence? You told her the widow’s story, she had a different version, seemed to know a lot about it. Or maybe she was just guessing. Making conversation, wanting to make out. You were carrying some pedigree nose candy from Rats, she wanted to share some of it. You were there every couple of nights after that. Eased into the dark by her sultry lullabies. The night they found the body and you first saw that drawing, you dropped by Loui’s for a requiem drink and she tried to lure you into staying (Hey, if we are what we eat, baby, I could be you by tomorrow morning. .), but, still grieving, you went to the Shed instead. Bad choice. She knew that? You were back at Loui’s the next night, though, and she was waiting for you. Love? You don’t believe in love, victim of it though you too often are, so scratch that. Flame’s a working girl. Her job? She tried to tell you a story a few nights ago, but you fell asleep on it. Or were drugged. It was about twin brothers on opposite sides of the law with her in the middle, gun in hand. A gun that went “spat.” She seemed to be trying to tell you she was both guilty and innocent of something. Something she couldn’t have helped, either way. The cop was using her, but so was the badboy lover. A commonplace tale maybe of love and betrayal, doubled and redoubled, but what you want to know is, who was the cop?

HEY, BLONDIE’S BACK! FLAME SAYS, GREETING YOU LOVingly when you walk in, opening your pants to take a peek. Time passes, you say; it’s growing out. Her affection seems genuine, but what can you know? Joe pours you a double on ice, remarking that you smell like you just crawled out of a sewer, and Loui comes over to greet you, looking nervous. There’s a reward on your head, dear boy, he says. Lucky for you business has been good, or I might be tempted.

Yeah, I know, Loui. I’ve seen the movie posters. Somebody’s trying to pin a bunch of murders on me and I gotta find out who really did them before I get grabbed. Starting with that chalk drawing down at the docks.

You mean, the dead widow?

I was just down there, Loui. Sprang Rats, what was left of him after Blue’s goons had worked him over, and dropped him off in safe hands. Passed by where the body was found. All that’s left of the chalk drawing is a faded smudge of the red pubic patch. Should have paid more attention to that. That was you, wasn’t it, Flame? The artist’s model.

Blue’s undercover agent stares coolly at you a moment. She’s not as pretty as she was before. She sticks a cigarette in her mouth and Joe reaches over the bar with a lighter. I owed Blue a favor, she says.

Pretty big favor, sweetheart. Did you also model for the dog-fuck?

Sure, baby. Did you like it?

Who was the dog?

Your friend Blue. He put on a costume. Actually it was a bearskin, only thing they could find. The artist took some liberties.

So did you, sweetheart. Pour me another, Joe.

Blue’s after your pretty tattooed ass, lover. I figured if I played along I could buy you some time. She moves in between your legs. I love you, baby. Couldn’t let anything happen to you. It’s why I bought you that key to the smugglers’ passage.

Yeah? Who from?

Don’t ask. The price was high. But Blue doesn’t know about that. If he finds out, you can come looking for my body. She presses closer, whispers huskily in your ear: You’ll know it when you see it, Phil. The one with the red patch.

You glance up at the clock over the bar with its tuxedoed rumpot and windmill arms. You wonder how long you were down in the tunnels and ask Joe what day it is. Turns out it’s the day you booked the meeting with Snark at the Star Diner. That clock, like all bar clocks, always runs fifteen minutes fast, you can just make it. Got a date, you say, and down your drink, take her hand out of your pants and swivel away, but give her silky ass a farewell stroke (why not, feels good), then hit the streets again.

IT’S A PERFECT NIGHT. WIND, RAIN, GLOOMILY OVERCAST, the puddled reflections more luminous than the streetlamps they reflect. Cars and buses crash heedlessly through the puddles, forcing you against the wet buildings and blue-lit window displays. You’re sucking on a fag, hands in your trenchcoat pockets, your posterboy face hidden behind the upturned collar, thinking about Flame’s betrayal, if it was one, about Blue’s dark machinations, the mysterious widow, her unknown whereabouts, about all the bodies you’ve left in your wake. Your tattoo is itching. You reach back under your coat to scratch it with your middle finger erect, just to let whoever’s behind you know that you know. What’s Blue up to? Maybe he’s in Mister Big’s pocket, the chalk drawing part of an elaborate cover-up of a heartless murder. Thus the rush to hide the body. Blue figured he could scare you off the case, underestimating your obstinacy, your restless need to know, and what the widow had come to mean to you. Or was he using that obstinacy for some covert purpose of his own? And is Snark a pal or Blue’s agent, his underling and co-conspirator, sending you off on wild goose chases and setting you up to take the fall for others’ crimes? If so, whose? Blue’s? His and Mister Big’s? But why would the big man want to waste a smalltime ivories tickler like Fingers? Because he sent you to an ice cream parlor? Maybe. Message: Helping Noir is not good for your health. Correspondence by cadaver. Body bulletins. You hope Cueball is okay. But why shouldn’t he be? Why does it matter? To anyone? Nothing seems to make sense, but why do you expect it to? Shouldn’t you just take Mister Big’s dream warning to heart and stop trying to figure something out when there is nothing to figure? You glance up at a third-floor window over a drug store where shadows play against a drawn blind. Looks like some guy stabbing a woman. But what can you know? And why (though it will do no good, you stop at a phone booth, call the cops, give them the drugstore address, hang up before they can ask any questions) do you want to? Because the body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them. Then, once it gets started, it can’t stop. Gotta know, gotta know. It’s a genetic malignancy. Ultimately terminal. Blanche, who reads the Sunday papers, calls it the drama of cognition, or sometimes the melodrama of cognition, which means it’s a kind of entertainment. Solving crimes as another game to play; conk tickling, not to let it go dead on you. Murder providing a cleaner game than most. You start with something real. A body. Unless someone steals it. Is that what happened? Who would want it? And what for? Blackmail? Or did Rats snatch it to use as a stash bag? Happened on his turf. Is that why he was nabbed? But why that one in particular? There are bodies all over the city. Up over that drug store, for example. It’s a deranged town. A lot of guns but few brains, as someone has said. Did the widow have one in her little purse? Probably. Nested amid the bankrolls. Did she ever use it? If she had one, she probably used it. Put a heater in someone’s hands and it’s too much fun to pull the trigger and watch your target’s knees buckle. Did she use it on her ex? It’s possible. What isn’t? Taxis pass, their wipers flapping, but they all seem to be driven by guys in leather jackets with goatees and granny glasses. Can’t take risks, not enough time for that, must get to Snark, hoping only it’s not a trap. Blue could be waiting. But you and Snark have done each other enough favors through the years to create a kind of mutual dependency and you figure Snark will want to preserve that. You squeeze the widow’s veil in your pocket for luck, then remember you don’t have it anymore. Must be something else.

But though you’re hurrying along, running against the clock, it seems to take forever. Everything’s stretching out. The blocks are longer somehow, the soaked streets wider and packed bumper to bumper with blaring traffic. You have to double back, take shortcuts that aren’t short. You know the way and you don’t know the way. You find yourself on unfamiliar corners, have to guess which turn to take. Racing across a street at the risk of having your legs severed at the knees by clashing bumpers, you catch a glimpse of the pale blue police building glowing faintly in the wet night. You shouldn’t be able to see it from here, but you do. The city can be like that sometimes. Especially when you’re dead on your feet and in bad need of a drink. Joe has a story about it which he regaled you with one day over his ginger ale. This was in the afternoon before happy hour — what Joe calls feeding time at the zoo — so Loui’s was quiet. Serene. You were in mourning, not just for the widow, but for Fingers, too, so the atmosphere was right and you had more than one. More than three in fact, who was counting. Joe was not always a teetotaler, and when you asked him why he gave it up, he told you about the night the city turned ugly and nearly did him in. I know you love her, he said. But watch out. She’s big trouble. Flame, as you recall, was rehearsing a song in the background, something about a stone-hearted bitch who drives her lovers mad, in which hysteria was made to rhyme with marry ya and bury ya, but later she came over and asked why you two always called the city “she.” Well, we’re guys, said Joe. That’s the way we talk.

THIS HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO, BACK IN MY FALL-down-drunk days. I was living on the street mostly, if you could call it living, working as a bouncer, doorman, dealer, garbage collector, barman, pimp, any way to scramble together enough skins for the dog juice. Sometimes I woke up in a hooker’s bed, sometimes in an abandoned lot or a back alley, bruised and bleeding but with no memory of the punch-up, if that was what had happened. Now and then I found myself flying with the snowbirds, but mostly I stuck with the hooch. I was sick a lot of the time but sometimes I felt good, and whenever I felt good I got noisy. Sometimes the cops would take me in as a public nuisance, needing someone to pound on for awhile, but usually they let me be, doing nothing worse than push my face into my own vomit, steal my stash, or kick me into the gutter if I was blocking the sidewalk.

It was a shitty life and I began blaming it all on the city. Alkies are like that: everybody’s fault but their own. So whenever I got really juiced, I’d start railing crazily at her, calling her every dirty name I could think of at the top of my voice so everyone would know. She retaliated, seemed to, by moving the streets around. Nothing stayed in the same place, that was my impression. When I was sleeping one off, I could hear the buildings walking around, changing places. I didn’t know where I was most of the time. Of course, I was also completely scorched most of the time, so I couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t, though in a sense it was all real, because even if I was only imagining it, it was still real, at least in my own mind, the only one I’ve got. Which back then I was doing my best to burn to a cinder.

Then one night I stumbled over a loosened manhole cover and fell and skinned my nose and that threw me into a violent rage and I started screaming at her from there where I was lying. You did that on purpose! I yelled. There were noxious vapors belching out of the hole with the loose cover, so, along with all the other filthy things I called her, I cursed her out as a fucking steaming bottomless cunt, and as soon as I said that, I knew I had the hots for her, and I knew she was hot for me. That sounds crazy, it was crazy, I was crazy, I’ve said that. But I had to have her and I knew she wanted it. It was all I could think about, to the extent that I could think about anything at all. Come and get me, big boy. I seemed to hear her say that. But how do you fuck a city? The only thing I could come up with was to jerk off over a subway entrance, but when I tried to do that it just made her madder. Maybe she felt insulted or demeaned or just not satisfied, but after that she really got vicious. Mean streets? Until then I had no idea. What before had been a kind of subtle sleight of hand became more like an out-of-control merry-go-round. Whenever I stood up, I got knocked down again. The streets and sidewalks buckled and rolled like a storm at sea, pitched me around, reared up and smacked me in the face. Who knows, maybe I was driving her wild with desire and those were just love commotions of a kind, but they were killing me and I no longer had amorous ambitions. Stroking her while I was down seemed to help, but whenever I tried to stand, she started in on me again. Ever get hit by a runaway building? You don’t want that to happen to you. That’s when I knew I had to get off the sauce. Until the mob insisted on reinforced steel, Loui used to have a pebbled glass door out there. I got thrown through it. The little fat man took me in and saved my life. Gave me a flop at the back, dried me out. I haven’t stepped outside this place since.

SNARK IS WAITING FOR YOU AT THE STAR DINER WHEN you finally find your way there. Snark is depressed and drinking even more heavily than usual from the milk dispenser. His contortionist wife has developed lumbago and all she can do now is knot her arms behind her head and lace her toes, but the more useful middle part is stiff as a board. The Siamese twins got into a fight when one of them tried to run away from home and now they won’t speak to each other. They keep trying to turn their backs on each other, but they can’t quite, and that’s making them hard to live with. Also he’s in trouble down at the station because a prisoner has escaped, which in turn has led to a citywide crisis of stoned police officers and Blue is holding him responsible. The bags of shit just turned up in the holding cell when the prisoner crushed out, Snark says. Almost like that was what he was really made of and the spell wore off. Next thing you know: junkie cops. You figure this is Snark’s way of letting you know what his cover story is, for you’re pretty sure his extra ace was a diversionary tactic to help you out. He has also snuck out your fedora and your old.22. When the prisoner took a flyer, he says, some of the evidence disappeared, too.

Thanks, Snark. You’re a pal. Milk’s on me. He clinks his mug on yours, drains it, asks the pimply kid behind the counter to squeeze the tit again. Does taste good. That damned Bordox nearly killed you, this is the real thing. Your stomach is comforted by the familiarity of it. You check the inside hatband, which you often use as a crib sheet and reminders list. Or somebody does. Blanche maybe. Sometimes it says things like Comb your hair, or Button up your fly. Now it says Cherchez la monnaie. That sounds like Blanche. Also: You already know everything. Who put that there? Your initials are stenciled on the band at the back: PMN. A graffiti artist has circled the M and scribbled Meathead above it. One of Snark’s semiliterate buddies on the force no doubt, if not Blue himself. When, years ago, you told Snark what it actually stood for, he said you were in luck, with a name like that you’d never grow old. At the time you thought he meant you’d always be young; just as likely, though, he meant you wouldn’t last that long.

The panhandler is back, puffy nose flattened against the plateglass window, white hair and beard wet and stringy from the drizzle, watery blue eyes afloat in his gaunt face, staring hauntingly in at you. Not tonight. No more fucking blows to the belfry.

We know a bit more about that rube who got rubbed out with your.22 in the alley, Snark says, signaling for another refill. Seems he came from a small rural community and had a sister in the city, whom he was either trying to kill or was trying to protect, it’s not clear. Maybe both.

How’d you learn that?

Some broad called it in. Blue said it looked like a mugging. The guy’s coat pockets had been rifled, turned inside out.

That’s right. I forgot. I did that on the back stairs. You search woozily for your trenchcoat pockets which keep moving around and, when you find them, reach in and pull out a few scraps of paper, a photo, an all-day sucker, some kid’s underpants. Hey, look.

You better get rid of those.

But wait, don’t you see, it could have been the fucking Hammer who stuffed that bus station locker I tipped you about.

Yeah, maybe, but how you gonna prove it now he’s napoo? Blue has you ticketed for the hot seat, Noir. You’re the last person to have seen a lot of people still ticking. At least five, though Blue may think of more. The piano player, the whore at the Dead End, the pervert down at the meat locker, the ape in the alley, the rich jailbait. .

He doesn’t think I killed the widow?

Snark’s eyes lose focus for a moment as if in confusion or maybe he’s only working up a fart. Oh right. The widow. Six. So all he needs now is evidence you been in some little kid’s pants.

You shrug (knowledge: lighter than air; you can just blow it away), tell him to take the drawers home with him, cut an extra leghole in them and see if they fit the twins, and you poke blearily through the other stuff. There’s a city map with pier four marked on it, a pawn ticket, a clipping of one of your toy soldier ads, a prescription for painkillers, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and a bent black-and-white photo. It’s a younger Hammer sitting on the edge of what could be a park bandstand with a shit-eating grin on his mush and some doozie standing behind him, only her southern hemisphere in the photo.

Who’s the Jane with the classy shanks?

Don’t know. You study the legs, trying to keep your eyes from crossing. Those beautiful calves. The widow a few years back? The camera angle from below allows a glimpse up her skirt into the shadows past her dimpled knees. The Hammer has his hand up there behind the legs somewhere. Instinctively, you turn the photo over to look at her backside, and see written there: Today is already yesterday. You feel a certain heartache. Or maybe it’s just the chili soup. Your head’s spinning. You need some air. Anyway, Snark’s gone, you don’t remember when. He was complaining about having to give up pretzels for cold toast and filling his mug again and then he wasn’t there anymore. You unload a few bills for the night’s repast (can’t count them, the kid behind the counter seems happy enough, not yours anyway) and buy a caramel-frosted strawberry and pepper-corn doughnut for the old panhandler, don your reclaimed lid and head out into the night.

ONE THING YOU’VE DETERMINED NOT TO DO TONIGHT IS follow the panhandler on his dark drizzly route, but that is what you are doing. Trenchcoat collar turned up, fedora brim tipped toward your nose, a wet fag in your mouth, your fried head a bundle of confusions. You sidle along walls to be sure no one’s behind you, doing a sequence of spiraling 360s when crossing streets, which probably gives the impression of being staggering drunk, which you are. Blitzed. Smoked. Damn that bottomless Snark. The panhandler continues on his rounds oblivious to your boozy dance behind him, clutching his frosted doughnut. Looking for a bin to put it in maybe; trade it in for some brown lettuce or an old sock. Except for his lifting and lowering of trashcan lids, his soggy shuffle and yours are all that can be heard in the dense clammy night. The tattoo on your butt is itching but that may be because, with all your looping turns, you are in effect following yourself.

No light but for the dull yellow puddles spilled by streetlamps, the cheap rainbow glitter under stuttering neon signs advertising refuges long since shut down. Even when the sun is allegedly out, it never seems to reach back into these claustrophobic back streets, your streets, where you’ve so long plied your trade that sunnier ones now seem alien to you. You used to spend a lot of time, even when not on a case, chasing the black seam on the back of women’s stockinged legs through these streets, these streets and any others where they might lead you. Sometimes up creaky unswept stairwells into sad little adventures that rarely ended well. That was back when you were young and everything was interesting. Some days you would be so focused that all but the legs would disappear, and then they’d be gone, too, just the black seams scissoring along. When you told Blanche about this and asked if you were going crazy, she said, no, you were just a foolish man pursuing your perverse and wayward dreams, an occupational hazard that could lead to a bad ending and jeopardize your career. She recommended that, whenever it started to happen, you should stop in the nearest cafeteria and have a glass of warm milk. You told her you always drank a lot of milk at the Star Diner and it didn’t seem to do any good. Blanche’s stockings, you assumed, were probably woolly and seamless, but you never looked.

One day, when the seams scissored around a corner and you chased after, you crashed into the dolly who had been sporting them. You have been following me, she said, as though solving a case.

It’s my job, lady, you said back, picking yourself up and brushing yourself off. Private eye.

Has someone hired you to do this, Mr. Eye?

Noir, ma’am. No, just practicing as you might say. Keeping my hand in.

Your hand in where?

Wherever I can keep it warm.

But why me, Private Noir?

Just call me Phil, sister. What can I say? I like your legs.

My legs?

That’s right, sweetheart. Both of them. And everything in between.

Best you could remember, you’d never said these words before, but it felt like you had. Some kind of catechism, learned before learning. So when she shrugged and said all right, Mr. Sister, I see, if that’s what you want, and started taking off her clothes, you were not entirely surprised. This was happening at a busy intersection, the sun doing its strange blazing thing, with café tables set out on the sidewalk like in moviehouse travelogues of island resorts. She stepped out of her underpants and stretched out on one of the tables like the dish of the day. She was gorgeous, the girl of your dreams, and you knew you were suddenly and crazily in love, but out here in the middle of traffic and pedestrians, you weren’t sure you could penetrate whipped cream. Worse, you feared that’s what it would feel like. Something airy and not quite there. But, hey, life’s a mystery, what the hell. You dropped your pants and Blue, chancing by, arrested you for indecent exposure. Wait a minute, what about her? you asked, but the dame had vanished, taking her clothes with her. You seemed to remember her perfect butt, flashing in the sunshine (it had already started to rain again), but maybe you just made that part up in your head and then went on believing it, the way that hoods and killers make up their innocence and never after doubt it. Blue was still slapping you around when Blanche turned up with the bail money and a habeas corpus writ and what you wanted to know was why it took her so long.

WHILE YOU’VE BEEN AROUSING YOURSELF WITH THESE technicolor reveries, you have lost sight of the old panhandler. Maybe one of your 360s was only a 180. You pick yourself up from the running gutter where you’ve fallen and stumble into a doorway’s shadow, head spinning from your drunken revolutions, and consider your options. Also your fate. You consider your fate. It has a flophouse look about it. You take the folded handkerchief out of your lapel pocket and blow your nose in it. Fuck it, you think. You’re getting too old for this shit. Back to the office. The sofa. A friendly bottle to suck. Sanctuary. You step out, step back again. Police car. Rolling through the watery street, light wheeling. But in dead silence. As if floating an inch or two above the puddles. No, that’s right, can’t go back to the office. Blue will have it staked out. What’s that sonuvabitch up to anyway? Did he invent a body and send you off chasing phantoms, just to land you in trouble? Probably. But then what really happened to the widow? Or her remains? You wish you could talk to her again. She was afraid, seemed drawn to you. You were so slow to apprehend. Yet any move you made got you nowhere. And what does all of this have to do with Mister Big? Her dead hubby’s partner. His murderer maybe. Hers. And Blue: does he, like everybody else in this fucked-up city, work for Big? Big knows you’re after him, so Blue gets sent to nail your ass. But then, Blue has always been out to nail your ass. Is Blue Mister Big himself? Your head is aching with these insane ideas. Should just get the hell out of this pestilential hellhole, disappear into some primeval forest somewhere. But what would you do there except die? Sweating like a sick pig in your woolly pinstripes and spotted tie. No, no way out of here, not for you, mister sister. You were born in the city and are destined to live out your life in it. What’s left of it. Too little, you suppose. When you told the story in Loui’s that night of the crazy broad on the sidewalk café table, Joe the bartender said, yeah, he knew the twist, she’s happened to a lot of mugs, and so far as he ever heard, it always ends the same way. Dangerous dame. Scary. So, what would you do if she and her black seams turned up again? Same goddamned thing.

You don’t have to go on chasing the panhandler, though. You gave him the doughnut, he gummed a bite, told you a story, and shambled off, you on his tail as though you had no choice. Now you’ve lost him. Good. You’re free. So what next? You can smell the waterfront. You could follow your nose and hole out in a back room at Skipper’s. But before you can lean out in that general direction, the old panhandler shuffles by like a silent rerun, bearded chin on his sunken chest, long white hair cascading down past his face and over his shoulders, rainwater dripping from his tattered fedora brim. He clutches his plastic bag to his sunken midriff with both arms, his topcoat tails dragging through the wet street. You lose him momentarily when he turns a corner, and when you catch up to him, he is dead. Sprawled in front of an open bin, strangled, his milky blue eyes glazed and popping. A dirty yellow necktie with purple polkadots knotted around his scrawny throat. You used to have a tie like that, but Blanche made you throw it away. When you gave him the doughnut tonight, he replied as usual with a story. They was this lady walkin’ backwards wavin’ at somebody and dropped down a manhole, he said. She never come back up and nobody seen it but me, so I reckon she’s down there still. He stared up at you. That’s purty funny, mister. And you ain’t even grinnin’. He spat in disgust past the tooth in his mouth and walked away. Now you wish you’d laughed at his story, cheered the old fellow up once more before he bought it. If you’d not been so blotto, you might have. Reminded you of the old joke: Watch out for the cliff! What cli-i-i-i-ifff-ff. .? Worth at least a nod and a grimace, and you let him down. But what does it matter? Dead’s dead, no residue, all’s as if it never was. The oldtimer is still clutching the doughnut with the half circle gummed out of it. Not to waste it, you pry it out of his grip and take a bite. As you do, you get a whiff of that special fragrance. Can’t place it. But you know what comes next.

NO DREAM THIS TIME. UNLESS YOU COUNT THE THOUGHT you had in the split second between fragrance and blow, which you seemed to go on thinking after being sapped: in short, that the city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone and defenseless in it, your moves not even your own. Not much of a thought. A split second was more than enough time for it.

YOU COME AROUND WITH A HALF-CHEWED BITE OF PEPpery doughnut in your jaws and a busted head. You know where you are without opening your eyes. Call it a private dick’s hunch. There will be glass cases full of toy soldiers and a pedicurist’s chair. Welcome, Mr. Noir, says a voice. They said you wished to see me.

Not they, you say. She. When you open your eyes, you’ll finally see Mister Big. You’re not sure you want to see Mister Big. You are mad as hell. At him, at the dead widow who got you into this, at the sick city, sick world, your own meaningless fucked-up life. Your head hurts so, you almost can’t think. You’d like to kill somebody. A client, you add bitterly, spitting doughnut. Late lamented. Whose corpus delicti has gone missing. How do you explain that?

I have no idea, Mr. Noir. Is this a riddle?

Yeah. And the answer is murder. You open your eyes to see at last Mister Big himself. But: not himself. Yourself. You’re Mister Big. Gazing at you from across the room. You refuse to be surprised by anything. But you’re surprised. Mister Big looks surprised, too. You thought (whiff of cigar smoke?) you caught a glimpse, out of the corner of your eye, of Fat Agnes in his white linen suit fleeing the scene. By way of the window. Right through the heavy drawn curtains as if they weren’t there. Maybe they aren’t there. Maybe this is the dream you didn’t have.

In that case, you would seem to be the answer’s answer, says Mister Big; your other you over there. Looking surly. They tell me you’ve been on something of a spree. He speaks without moving his lips, tough-guy style. You yourself talk that way. Why do you dicks all have that granite look? a client once asked you. Do you take injections? Not only have you apparently done away with a lot of people, he says, but you’re also wanted as a thief, pederast, trafficker, and counterfeiter. The sonuvabitch looks sicker than you expected. He’s wearing a crushed fedora down over his ears. Ugly scowl on his unshaved pan, doughnut crumbs on his chin. He has stolen your chili-stained tie. There’s a twitchy flat-faced mug with a gat standing behind him, and behind the mug a painted hide of some kind in a carved wooden frame. You have the feeling there’s a mug behind you. Also twitchy. It’s like looking in a mirror. Wait a minute. You see now the backwards “4” on the hide. You are looking in a mirror.

Mister Big steps out from behind it. Stringy white hair and beard, watery blue eyes, old pants held up with a sashweight cord: the panhandler. There’s something wrong about this, but your head hurts too much to think what it is. They was this here feller come round, he says, lookin’ for a body. What’s wrong with the one you got? I ast. The feller laughed him a nasty laugh, and says, it ain’t got what I need right now, y’ole coot. He was a feller liked to talk mean and live hard and I seen he was headin’ for a bad end. His beezer was broke in so many places, if somebody’d tole him to folla his nose, he wouldn’ta knowed which way to go. He was carryin’ a filthy darkness round insida him like a canker and he was a chump for the femmes. He talked hardboiled but was really a soft egg and easy to crack. And what mostly made that feller a loser was he didn’t want nuthin’ bad enough.

You recognize now the twitchy thug with the punched-in kisser in the mirror, the one behind you with the popper pointed at your hatband. The taxi driver. Fingers’ ugly sideman. Pug. The.22 he’s holding could be yours. Things are beginning to fall into place. On the wall behind him, behind you, Michiko’s flayed hide, spread out like a mercator projection, is emitting its own messages, as if making a last effort to help Phil-san. Not easy to read. Besides the mirrored “4,” only the equator (the raccoon-dog, the bull’s eye) is at all legible from where you sit. That whiff of cigar smoke earlier: probably just stale body powder. You can smell it now. Maybe that is the message. If you wept, you might weep for Michiko, but what the hell, it’s not the worst end. Everyone croaks. The rest of us end up ash, she’s a work of art. It’s a glitzy joint with a lot of fat furniture, mahogany tables, framed paint blotches on the walls, layers of exotic rugs, figurines on the fireplace mantel, vases, pots of flowers, and glass cases full of toy soldiers. You recognize the ones you photographed. Maybe the ones. Maybe not. What do you know? If Blanche were here, she could tell you. But the light’s odd. Striped as if coming through venetian blinds. But there are no venetian blinds. Hard to focus on anything. The old scarecrow of a panhandler, as out of place in here as a ketchup stain on a tuxedo shirt — or a pearl onion on a banana split, as someone has said — seems sliced up by the light, coming apart and reassembling himself as he shuffles through it.

I tole him they was plenny a live ones out there lookin’ for a sweetie, why was he chasin’ a dead one? She paid me, he says, showin’ how dumb he was, I owe her. Mostly, though, on accounta somebody don’t want me to. Well, sonny, says I, if that somebody’s who I spose it is, you’ll be beddin’ down tonight in cold mud.

All the fleabags and flophouses I’ve bunked in, you say now, cold mud would be an upgrade. How about a fag?

There’s a brief hesitation. The old panhandler lifts his head up off his chest for a moment in what might be a nod, and as Pug reaches down with a lit cigarette, you grab the.22, wrest it away, and bust him in the chops with it, turn it on the panhandler. Who is there and not there, drifting in and out of the ribboned light. Pug is snarling at your feet. You point the gun between his eyes. His snarl turns to a high-pitched whimper. You tell him to beat it. On the double. He’s out of there on all fours. Tough guy. You throw the bolt on the door. You’re alone with Mister Big.

From somewhere, but not necessarily where the panhandler is, or isn’t, a voice says: There are at least a hundred men in the building, Noir. You’ll never get away.

Maybe getting away isn’t the big deal it used to be, pal. We got something to sort out between us. There was this sweet country kid with a rocky past. Abusive father, garbage head for a mother. Came into the city, looking for a fresh start in life, got involved with you and her hubby, got a fresh death instead.

Hard to get a bead on the drifting panhandler. Sonuvabitch never stays in the same place. In some part of your coshed brain, you understand this. And you remember what is wrong. The last time you saw the panhandler, he was dead.

She came to me, you say, picking up the lit soldier on the floor not to waste it and tucking it into the corner of your mouth, because she figured you had brought an end to your business relations with her husband the way a butcher ends his relationship with a pig, and she was afraid it might be her turn to get suicided next. When I took up her case, you turned your stooge Blue on me and had him trump up a lot of phony charges and you even conned her vulnerable kid brother into trying to get rid of me, then bumped him off when he blew it.

The panhandler has paused over near the fireplace where he’s poking about in it as if it were a trashbin. You fire a shot, shattering what turns out to be a mirror, and the fireplace disappears, revealing a billiard table behind it, the panhandler shuffling toward it. The fireplace is now seen to be opposite from where you thought it was. Maybe. Your reflection across from you looks confused. You straighten it up, switch on the hard guy again, take a drag, the butt dangling in your lips, smoke curling through your sinuses like a house burglar.

But when you iced my client, you say, something went wrong, and you had to hide the body. You stole it out of the morgue before I could get there. Now, I want that body.

Well, says the voice. The panhandler, over at the billiard table, is putting the balls into a plastic shopping bag in exchange for some rotten oranges and melon rinds. If you insist.

A shot rings out, the.22 flies from your hand, and blood appears there on the trigger finger. It’s the widow. She fires again and your hat flies off. There is a lady in the room, Mr. Noir, she says.

Yeah, well, I never was one for the niceties, you gasp, clutching your wounded hand, trying not to cry. I’ve been chasing a body around. Thought it was you.

It was. I wasn’t dead, is all.

So that’s how you disappeared from the morgue.

That’s right. I walked out. The morgue attendant tried to tell you that in his vulgar way, sealing his own fate, I’m sorry to say.

You remember this, the odd thing he said. So, you’ve known all along. Just weren’t conscious of your knowing. As she moves around through the harsh rhomboids of glare and shadow (the panhandler has vanished), she multiplies herself in the mirrors. You’re surrounded by black-veiled widows, scissored by striped light. Some of them are pointing the gun at you, some are aimed in other directions, which tells you something about which one’s the real one, but you’re tired now and don’t really want to think about it. Who knows, maybe they’re all real. Had you pegged from the start, sweetheart, you say, wrapping your bloodied finger in your lapel pocket handkerchief. A gold-digger working the street who struck on a john who wanted to knock off his rich wife. In collusion with your emasculated hometown pimp and your sinister old man, you supplied the murder weapon out of the family drug store in exchange for a marriage contract and a share of the loot. The old story.

But how did you—?

Elementary, lady. Even my office assistant figured that much out.

Your office assistant?

Yeah, Blanche. She’s a good kid but no pro at the sleuthing game. Bit of a dummy really but she makes good coffee. The mirrored widows rotate and different ones are pointing at you now. You discovered your husband had taken out a big insurance policy on you, suggesting he did not have in mind an old age together, so you moved first, drugged him and shot him. Like most dames, though, you can’t tell right from left and botched it, and there had to be a cover-up. You needed this bigtime racketeer here with his cop and city connections, so you partnered up with him, which also solved the problem of your ex pitting the two of you against each other with his pernicious will. The idea was to hitch up so you could inherit the estate intact, that’s where that big rock comes from, not from your deceased dearly beloved, but since neither of you were the type to make do with only half, it was unlikely you’d both live out the honeymoon. Mourning suddenly dead spouses is a weekend sport in your crowd. So you both started making moves. Meanwhile — it’s all coming to you now, you feel a certain exhilaration, you’re really good at this — your brother butted in, tried to get a piece of the action, you had your psycho pimp and old man take him out. Ugly back-alley stuff. Your dopey hotpants stepdaughter knew too much and had a loose mouth, so you silenced her, too. So far, except for the sex kitten, I haven’t mentioned anybody who wasn’t also one of your lovers, and who knows, maybe you’d got your talons in her, too. You’re a hot ticket and have a lot of poor suckers on the string.

And what about you, Mr. Noir? Are you on my string?

You got classy gams, baby, but I’m on nobody’s string. Besides, your lovers all end up in cold storage. Your current stud and business partner hiding behind these mirrors is next whether he knows it or not. It was why you hired me. To try to get a fix on him so you could send in your assassins. You knew the kind of ruthless sonuvabitch you’d signed up with and figured you wouldn’t be walking away from your next trip to the morgue, unless you nailed him first and went there for a goodbye kiss. My guess is, you press on, only one of you will walk out of here alive today.

You don’t know how much Mister Big is on to all this, but it never hurts to sow a little distrust. She turns as a page might turn and seems to disappear and for a moment you’re alone with your reflection. But then she reappears in the mirrored image behind you, the gun pointed at your head. You’ve got the right kind of trenchcoat, Mr. Noir, but other than that you’re a rotten detective. A blind Eye. You deserve to die. You hear the click of the safety and figure you’re a goner, but it’s your mirrored image across the way that shatters. You’re flat on your ass again, pratfelled by fear. Though of course you are fearless. You do what you can, from your somewhat awkward position, to show this. You can hear her breathing serenely above you. That and the blood pounding in your ears is all you can hear. You can smell something though. That familiar aroma. The one that drifted up your nose each time you got kayoed when tailing the panhandler. A fragrance you have smelled almost every day and should have paid more attention to.

Blanche!

That was not a nice thing you said about me, Mr. Noir.

Yeah, well, ah, I was only trying to get your dander up, Blanche. I knew all along it was you but I wanted you to give yourself away.

Really? You are so brilliant, Mr. Noir. You take my breath away.

A lotta years in the biz, kid, you say, ignoring her sarcasm. So, lemme see, what’s your angle here? You find your fallen fag beside you and, though it’s no longer lit, you straighten it out and tuck it back in the corner of your mouth. Helps you think. Blanche just turned up at your office one day and offered her services. When was that? You don’t remember. You’re not good at that sort of detail. Where did she come from? You never asked. Was the widow’s story her own? Was she leading a double life? Was the Hammer her brother, Squeaky her ex-lover? You never thought of Blanche as having lovers. Brothers either, for that matter. You try to imagine her working the streets, picking up a guy with a rich wife, seducing him into murder. You can’t imagine it. You realize your deductive powers are being tested, but your appetite for this backstreet knowledge racket is fading. Your stubborn belief that two and two will eventually equal four is probably completely naïve. Some knots, like the twist your thumped brain’s in now, cannot be untangled. You have an acute longing for your office sofa. Mister Big probably has a liquor cabinet somewhere, but you’re too weary and hurt too much to get off your heinie to go look for it. That damned Blanche can really wield a sapper. Your fedora lies on the floor in front of you with a bullet hole through it. Cherchez la monnaie, she wrote in your hatband. Maybe she was teasing you with a clue. Catch me if you can. So, all right, think about it. There’s a fortune to be had and she’s going after it. So, it’s either the double-life scenario or she knocks the widow off and takes her story on as a kind of second thread. Or maybe the widow’s already been snuffed by Mister Big or whomever, and she steps in, puts on the veil, slips into the dead widow’s history, hoping to blackmail her ostensible partner into a payoff. One reason to get rid of the body. If there was one. But then along come all those weird family members. Hers or the dead widow’s. Something has to be done about them. Something is done about them. By someone. And then there’s Blue. He’s working for Mister Big. Or for her. You’re in the middle. The sucker who gets set up for their crimes. An ignorant grunt at the Battle of Agincourt only looking for a hole to hide in. In your mouse leather brigandine. You explain all this to Blanche who is standing over you. She leans down and lights your crooked cigarette for you. It goes out. She lights it again.

When you sent me into the smugglers’ tunnels, that was just a trap.

I didn’t send you, it was your friend Flame did that.

Oh. Right. But she’s Blue’s agent. You may all be in cahoots. What upsets me most is killing my pal Fingers. Just because he tried to warn me.

He was run over. I don’t drive, Mr. Noir.

No, that’s right. You used a taxi. You and Pug.

Who?

And the morgue attendant. He tries to tell me something about a fake murder and he gets blown away. Sealed his own fate, as you said.

Sorry, but it was your widow friend who said that, Mr. Noir, if I may put it that way. But was it murder? Or was it suicide? He was a man with a fascination for extreme experiences.

Saved the best for last, you mean. Maybe. But what about the poisoned wife, your ex’ed ex, your abusive old man doling out lethal pharmaceuticals, your psycho ex-lover with the squeaky voice?

Oh, Mr. Noir. I just made all that up.

Made it up? Ah. Right. I guessed as much. Made it up. Shit. Didn’t I just say so? But who was the guy who attacked me? The Hammer? The guy I saw getting riddled in the alley?

I have no idea. One of Captain Blue’s officers? A common thief? I have found, Mr. Noir, that if you make a story with gaps in it, people just step in to fill them up, they can’t help themselves.

Your case is coming undone. You’ve sleuthed up a well-made scenario, several in fact, but your characters are leaving it. You stare at the glowing ash end of your bent butt as though looking for the last word there. You should flick it away, that’s always an impressive punctuating gesture, but it’s all you’ve got. But people have died, Blanche, you say, and tuck the smoldering fag back in your lips.

I know. They always do. They won’t be missed.

You have to admit, she’s one tough cookie. Is she telling the truth? Who knows? As some guy said, when it concerns a dame, does anybody ever really want the facts? Hey, you got great legs, sweetheart, you say, struggling painfully to your feet. Funny I never noticed before.

Sit down, Mr. Noir, she says and fires her gun and the cigarette’s not there any more and your lips are burning as when dozing off and smoking a butt to the end and you’re back on your ass again. I have some contracts for you to sign. We’re going to be partners.

I was just thinking of retiring, you grumble, licking your singed lips.

You can’t retire, Mr. Noir. You are wanted for six murders and innumerable other unspeakable crimes. I intend to help you solve all those crimes for Captain Blue and save your life. I’m afraid your choice is between a partnership or what Captain Blue likes to call his electric cure. Now sign here, Mr. Noir, and then let me fix up that finger for you. Luckily, I brought along some iodine.

WHO DO YOU LOVE, BABY? YOU ASK YOURSELF AS YOU walk through the drizzly night streets in your leaky fedora on your way back to the office with black-veiled Blanche, smoking a fag from a fresh pack still reeking of chocolate, rum, and geranium, picked up in the corner drugstore — literally: there was a holdup under way and the owner was somewhat preoccupied, so Blanche plucked a couple of packs off the shelf, gave the money to the holdup man, and led you out before you could play the hero and get into more trouble — and, you reply, silently addressing the dark naked city: You, sweetheart. Joe was right. We were made for each other. Your footsteps echo faintly in the hollow night as if the city were whispering back to you, clucking her tongue, licking her lips.

You’d wanted to celebrate the new partnership with prime rib and a few drinks at Loui’s or an in memoriam set at the Shed or at least a five-layer parfait at Big Mame’s, but Blanche wouldn’t have it, insisting you had to get back to the office before Blue caught up with you. She said she planned to dress you in her widow’s weeds until you were out of danger, and this had a certain appeal, but you agreed only so long as you could wear your own underpants. You wondered aloud if Blue was working for Mister Big and she said, no, he was a mostly honest cop. He just doesn’t like you is all. As best you can understand it, according to Blanche, she invented a widow and then Blue invented a body, and Blanche borrowed the body idea to move what she is calling the Vanishing Black Widow Caper in a new direction. Something like that.

But wait a minute. What about Fat Agnes?

The ignis fatuus? Just your overactive imagination, Mr. Noir. The risk of pursuing others is that you can also feel pursued. A hazard of the trade, I’m afraid. Rarely fatal but often disabling.

No, come on, Blanche, I saw him. He had a little cleft chin and a button nose and thin hair combed across the balding dome. He smoked cigars and wore a fob watch.

So did your father, Mr. Noir.

Ah. Did he? But he seemed so real.

You are a sensitive impressionable man, Mr. Noir. And you’ve taken a lot of blows to the head.

Yeah, right. Thanks for those.

There are other unanswered questions — like, what really happened to the panhandler? is he Mister Big? — but when you broach them, she says: Please. Don’t ask. It’s all quite simple. But sometimes not knowing is better. It’s more interesting.

She’s right. You still don’t know who did what, but as Blanche has reminded you, that’s not really the point. Integrity is. Style. As Fingers liked to say, you can’t escape the melody, man, but you can make it your own. You are moving through pools of wet yellow light, surrounded by a velvety darkness as soft as black silk stockings, and it is not the light but the obscurity that is most alluring. The mystery of it. The streets are deserted and, as you turn into them, kissed by the drifting fog, they open up before you, the buildings seeming to lean toward you. Stuttery neon signs wink at you overhead. Behind a steel chainlink fence in an empty playground, a child’s swing creaks teasingly. Somewhere there’s a melancholic sigh of escaping steam. It’s beautiful to be walking down these lush wicked streets with the widow at your side, even if knowing that it’s Blanche inside does spoil it a little. Just the same, while she’s still dressed as the widow, you wish she’d lift her skirts and show you her legs once more.

You go past a STREET CLOSED sign and find yourself standing in front of your own office building. Look, says Blanche, lifting her veil and pointing up at the office window on the second floor. BLANCHE ET NOIR, it says. PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS.

Et, you say. Is that the past tense of eat?

It could be the future tense, Mr. Noir, she says, pushing her horn-rimmed glasses up on her nose and gazing at you under the raised veil with proprietary affection, if you play your cards right.

It’s funny. While you’re working on a case, every outcome seems possible. When it’s over, it’s like nothing could have happened otherwise. You are, hand played, where you are. You’re not sure whether Blanche is a wannabe private eye or a master criminal, but with a little practice you could get used to her. As long as you have dibs on the office couch. She knows the file system, it’s her invention really, she’s able to reload the watercooler by herself, and she can sure handle a heater. Your lips are still burning. All right, partner, you say, pursing those tingling lips and popping a little kiss, while lifting and lowering your fedora, deal me in. Her veil drops as though to curtain a blush. But just one more question, you add, looking back over your shoulder. Where the hell have we just come from?

Sorry, Mr. Noir. The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow is closed.