Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

MORTAL BAIT Richard Bowes

When I think of death what comes to mind is the feel of an ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I’m a letter being sliced open. When that happens in my nightmares I wake up. In real life, just before the blade of ice reached my heart, the medic got to me where I lay in that bloody field at Aisne-Marne, tied and tightened a tourniquet above my left knee and stopped the flow before all my blood ran onto the grass.

That memory of my war came out of nowhere as I sat in my little office in Greenwich Village on a sunny October afternoon. It felt like someone had riffled through my memories and pulled out that one. Beings that my Irish grandmother called the Gentry and the Fair Folk walk this world and can do things like that to mortals. A shiver ran through me.

My name’s Sam Grant and I’m a private investigator. Logic and deduction come into my line of work. So do memory and intuition. My grandmother always said a sudden shiver meant someone had just stepped on the spot where your grave would be.

I could have told myself it was that or a stray draft of cold air. But I’d felt this before and knew what it meant. Some elf or fairy had shuffled my memories like a card deck. And that wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

At that moment I was writing a letter to my contact, Bertrade le Claire. It was Bertrade who had worked a magic to shield me.

An intruder would see her image, her long dark hair, beautiful wide eyes—a face that seemed like something off a movie screen. She wore a jacket of red and gold and a look that said “Step back!” She was a law officer in the Kingdom Beneath the Hill.

The letter I was writing concerned new clients, the Beyers, a couple from Menlo Park, New Jersey. He worked for an insurance company; she taught Sunday School. In my office she talked; he studied the photos I keep on my wall and they both clung to hope and the arms of their chairs.

They were the parents of Hilda, a junior at Rutgers and currently a missing person. Hilda, according to her mother, was a sensitive girl who wrote poetry, was due to graduate in June of 1952 and become an English teacher. She’d had a few boyfriends over the years but nothing serious as far as anyone knew. Not the kind of young lady to run off on a whim. But four months back it seems that she did.

While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor LaGuardia with his honor mugging for the camera as he shook my hand and thanked me for civilian services to New York City during the Second War to End All Wars.

The one where I’m getting kissed by Marshal Foch I leave in the drawer because some guys in this neighborhood might get the wrong idea.

But I display Douglas MacArthur, executive officer of the Rainbow Division in 1918, pinning a Distinguished Service Cross on the tunic of a soldier on crutches. I’m not that easy to make out. But Colonel MacArthur with his soft cap at a jaunty angle and a riding crop under his arm, you’d recognize anywhere. I figure it’s got to be worth something that I served under Dugout Doug and lived to tell about it.

Mrs. Beyer told me how the New Jersey cops couldn’t find a lead on Hilda. After other private eyes struck out, my name came up.

Mrs. Beyer paused then said, “We have heard that she could have gone to another . . . ” and trailed off.

“ . . . realm,” I offered and she nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. Mr. Beyer’s eyes widened at hearing a man who’d been decorated by MacArthur say he believed in fairies.

After that we closed the deal quickly. My initial fee is $250. It’s stiff but I think I’m worth it: especially since I wore my good suit and a fresh starched shirt for the occasion. I didn’t promise them their daughter back. I did promise I’d do everything I could to find her. On their way out, I shook hands with him. Put my left hand on hers for reassurance.

Playing baseball as a kid, I was a switch hitter and I could field and throw with both my right and my left. I even learned to write with either hand. These days the left’s the only thing about me that still works the way everything once did. And I tend to save it for special occasions.

In the Beyer’s presence I walked tall. But I still have metal fragments in my knee. With the clients gone I limped a bit on my way back to the desk.

I took a sheet of paper and a plain envelope out of the desk, stuck in a high school yearbook photo of Hilda, scribbled a few lines about the case, dated and signed it. Then I felt the intrusion and added the PS, “Some stray elf or fairy just got into my memories.” On the envelope I wrote Bertrade’s full name and her address in The Kingdom.

The phone rang and a woman said, “Sam,” and nothing more. She sounded tired, flat.

“Annie.” Anne Toomey is the wife of my buddy Jim. He and I were in France together. “How’s Jimmy?” Since she was calling I knew the answer. Knew what she was going to ask.

“Not feeling great, Sam. We wondered if you could handle the Culpepper case today.”

“We” meant that Anne was doing this on her own.

“Sure I’ll do it. Nothing changed from Jim’s report yesterday right?”

“You’re a saint, Sam.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the Up To the Minute Answering Service. Gracie was on duty. Behind her I could hear half a dozen other girls at switchboards.

“Doll,” I said, “I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Anyone wants me I’ll be back after six.”

Under her operator voice Gracie talks Brooklyn like the Queen speaks English. “Be careful, you,” she said. She gets her ideas of private detectives from paperback novels.

We’ve never met. Going down in the elevator I thought of Gracie as being maybe in her mid-thirties—which seems young to me now. I imagined her as blond and nicely rounded sitting at the switchboard in a revealing silk robe.

I imagined the other Up To the Minute ladies sitting around similarly dressed. This is the privilege of a divorced and decorated veteran who once got kissed by a French Field Marshall.

My office is on the fifth floor. With a couple of errands to do, I crossed the vestibule and stepped outside. They tore down the elevated line before World War II but better than a decade later Sixth Avenue still looked naked in the October afternoon sunlight.

Across the way, the women’s prison stood like a black tower as all around it paddy wagons unloaded their cargo. Some parents find out their daughters have run off to Fairyland. Others discover them at the Women’s House of Detention.

They use the old Jefferson Market Court House next door to the prison as the Police Academy now. Sergeant Danny Hogan was showing a couple of dozen cadets in their gray and green uniforms how to write out parking tickets. Hogan and I did foot patrol in the old Fourteenth Precinct back when we were both starting out. He spotted me and rolled his tired eyes.

As I headed towards the subway I saw the headlines and front pages of the afternoon papers. My old pal MacArthur had landed at Inchon a couple of weeks before. Maps of the Korean Peninsula showed black arrows pointing in all directions.

On the subway stairs, I felt something like the opposite of forgetting. A stray sprite with nothing better to do had tried to probe me. The mental image of Bertrade appeared and whatever it was immediately broke contact. I continued down the stairs, stuck a dime in the slot and got on the uptown A train.

Early in life I heard about fairies. My mother’s mother saw leprechauns in the coal cellar and elves under the bed. Mostly I ignored her once I turned into a hard guy at the age of eight.

My mother was born and raised in the Irish stretch of Greenwich Village. She learned stenography, got a job in an import/export office, and married late. Sam Grant Senior was part Irish and not very Catholic. He had been on the road as a salesman for many years before my mother forced him to settle down. I was the only kid.

I remember my old man a little sloshed one night telling me about having been on the night train to Cincinnati with “the crack women’s apparel salesman on that route.”

This guy was very smashed and told the old man how he’d gone down the path to Fairyland when was young, stayed there for a few years, learned a few tricks. My father told me, “He said some of the ones there could read your mind like a book.”

I heard about The Kingdom Beneath the Hill a few more times over the years. As a legend it was slightly more believable than Santa Claus and a bit less likely than the fabled speakeasy that only served imported booze.

Then almost ten years ago, an elf almost killed me and a couple of fairies saved my life. One of them was a young lady named Bertrade.

The two errands I had were within a few blocks of each other. I rode the A train up to Penn Station and used the exit on Thirty-third and Eighth. First I went to the General Post Office. The place is like a Mail Cathedral. I climbed the wide stairs and the knee complained.

Inside under the high vaulted ceilings were big posters commemorating the pilots who had died flying mail planes thirty years back. I walked past the window that said “Overseas Mail” to the small window that said nothing.

It was there that I always mailed my letters to the Kingdom. The man on duty had a slight crease on the left side of his head—a veteran of something I thought. I’d spoken to him a couple of times, asked him questions, and never got more than a shrug or a shake or nod of the head.

He took the letter. Right then another mind touched mine, saw the image of Bertrade that I flashed and bounced away.

The clerk eyes widened. He’d caught some of it too. I took back the letter, picked up a pen and wrote, “Urgent—contact!” on the envelope. The clerk nodded, stuck a stamp I’d never seen before, one with a falcon in flight on it, turned and put it down a slot behind him.

“They’ll have it by midnight,” he said in an accent I couldn’t catch. “Keep your head down. Tall elves are questing today.” Then he stepped away from the window.

I waited for a minute for him to come back. When he didn’t I turned and walked the length of the two-block-long lobby all the way to Thirty-first Street. Maybe it was just an elf lost and a stranger in the big city who kept trying to bust into my head, and I was overacting. Maybe I was lonely and wanted to see Bertrade.

Going down stairs was tougher on my knee than going up stairs. I walked two blocks south on my errand for Jim and Anne. Thinking it was good to have a simple assignment to occupy my mind I bought a late edition of the Journal American. It was 4:35. Some people were already heading for the subway.

Just west of Sixth Avenue on the south side of Thirtieth Street stood the Van Neiman, a nondescript office building. Across the street was a luncheonette. The only other customer was hunched over his paper; the counterman and waitress were cleaning up.

I ordered coffee, which was old and tired at this time of day, and sat where I could await the appearance of Avery J. Culpepper, CPA. His wife, Sarah, a jealous lady out in Queens was convinced that he was stepping out on her. Private investigators in one-man offices like Jim Toomey and me need to form alliances with other guys in similar circumstances.

For the two of us it went beyond that. In France I was the one who got to smell the mustard gas, take out the machine gun nest, and get my leg chewed up. For me the real war lasted about two weeks. I got decorated and never fired another shot for Uncle Sam.

Jimmy passed unharmed right up through Armistice Day, won few medals, got to see every horror there was to see. I was hard to deal with when I got back, and my marriage to the girl I’d left behind only lasted as long as it did because she was very Catholic.

But Jim still woke up at night screaming. It drove Anne crazy and it broke her heart but she stuck with him. For a while things got better. Lately they seemed to have gotten worse.

I thought about that as Avery J. Culpepper, wearing a light gray suit, a dark felt hat, carrying a briefcase and looking just like the photos his wife had supplied came through the revolving door of the Van Neiman Building. A punctual guy Mr. Culpepper: in his late thirties and in better shape than your average philanderer.

This was the first time I’d tailed him. Twice before Jim Toomey had followed Culpepper and ended up riding the crowded F train all the way out to Forest Hills. When Jimmy talked to me about it on the phone even that routine assignment had him ready to jump out of his skin.

The time with me was a little different. Mr. C came out the door and headed west along Thirtieth Street. I followed him for a few blocks through the rush hour crowds pouring out of offices and garment factories.

He turned south on Ninth Avenue then turned west again on Twenty-ninth. These blocks had warehouses and garages, body shops, but also some rundown apartment houses. Here the crowds heading east for the subways were longshoremen, workers from the import/export warehouses. I stayed on the other side of the street, kept an eye on him and watched the sky, which was getting dark and cloudy.

Culpepper crossed Tenth Avenue. A long freight train rolled over the elevated bridge halfway down the block. On the North corner of the avenue was an apartment house that must once have been a bit ritzy when this was mostly residential but now looked run down and out of place. That’s where he turned and went in.

I glanced over as I passed to make sure he wasn’t lingering in the entryway, waiting to pop out and give me the slip. As I did, a light went on up on the third floor. I noted it and wondered if that’s where he was. Then I continued walking till I was under the train tracks. Already the streets and sidewalks were getting empty.

At the end of the next block, beyond Twelfth Avenue, was a pier with a tired-looking freighter moored and beyond that the river. A string of barges each with its little captain’s shack went by pulled by a tug.

It was growing dark and all the warmth had been in the sun. I paused and turned like I’d forgotten something. Culpepper had not come out of the apartment house.

I crossed the street then walked back to the building he’d gone in. I spotted no one watching me. The outer door was open. One side of the entry hall was lined with mailboxes—twenty-four of them. I took out my notebook and copied the names. Many times when the husband strays it’s with someone the wife already knows.

The third floor was where I’d seen a light go on. So I gave those mailboxes my special attention. Apartment #15 in particular had a recently installed nameplate. Mimi White it read. If that’s where Culpepper was, the name seemed too good to be true.

Somebody upstairs had the news on the radio. In the first floor back, the record of “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake” got played a few times.

As I finished copying the names, an old lady came in carrying an armload of groceries. Like the building itself she looked like she’d seen better days. I held the door for her, said my name was Tracy, that I was from the National Insurance Company, and was looking for a Mr. Jameson who was listed as living at this address in apartment #15.

She thought for a moment then said #15 had been occupied for years by an Asian couple. They had moved out and it had stayed empty for a while. A young lady had moved in just recently. I thanked her and noted that.

As she headed upstairs, I heard footsteps and voices coming down. I went outside, crossed the street, turned and walked slowly back towards Tenth Avenue. I noticed the third floor light was off.

When I paused on the corner I saw the couple. Mr. Culpepper had left his briefcase upstairs. The lady he was with wore a short camel hair coat, a nice black hat set on her blond hair and high heels. She looked like her name could easily be Mimi and that you could take her places.

Culpepper glanced neither left nor right as they walked to the corner and he hailed a cab. In my experience, a guy stepping out with a good-looking woman usually wants to see who else notices. Culpepper apparently was made of sterner stuff.

Walking back across town, I was amazed at how easy this assignment was and wondered why that bothered me. I’d detected no presence of the Gentry in the last couple of hours. That probably meant the one or ones I’d felt earlier had found whoever they were looking for.

Or maybe they had discovered I was right where I was supposed to be and doing what they wanted me to. Being involved with the Fair Folk had always left me feeling like a dollar chip in a very big game.

I remembered a face, elongated and a little blurred, that I’d once seen. It was a tall elf with a smile that said, “How stupid these mortals are.”

On the A train downtown, I got a seat and thought over that first time I felt an alien presence and how close I came to dying from it.

In ’41 I did undercover work, none of it strictly official. My old regiment was the 69th, “The Fighting Irish,” and our colonel was Donovan—the one they called “Wild Bill.”

Later he was the guy who started the OSS and became the U.S. intelligence chief in World War II. But even before that war he had connections in Washington and an interest in foreign espionage in New York City. He got to do something about it.

The colonel remembered me. I got called down to his office on Wall Street. Right then my marriage was over and there was a limit to how long the wedding of the Police Department and me was going to last.

So, I got seconded to Wild Bill along with half a dozen other chewed up old vets on the force. Most of what we investigated turned out to be minor stuff: crazy little Krauts up in Yorkville who wore Kaiser Wilhelm helmets and sent out ham radio reports about freighters leaving the port of New York, German bars out in New Hyde Park on Long Island where the neighbors reported the patrons said “Sieg Heil,” gave the Nazi salute, and had pictures of Hitler up above the bar.

Rumors and stories about mysterious strangers came in from all over the city. We went crazy trying to keep up with them. Then we stumbled on a sleeper operation out on the Brooklyn waterfront. They were accumulating operatives, waiting for the great day when we’d be at war and they could start blowing up bridges. We nabbed a couple of them. But the rest melted away.

Right after that a call came in one night about activity on a pier in Red Hook. We were stretched thin. I had no backup. Maybe I was tired and that made me careless. Maybe part of me wanted to use up whatever leftover life I had. But I went out there without even a driver.

The one who’d made the call must have dreamed about someone like me showing up: a dumb asshole with plenty of information about Wild Bill and his band of veterans. The gate on the street was open. A long wooden shed stood on the pier. A dim light shone in a window. I knocked. Nothing. I tried the door and it swung open. A light shone somewhere at the end of an empty two hundred foot shed.

I took a step inside. Someone had me by the throat and started to choke me. I spun around. No one was behind me. I drew my .38. Something knocked me flat and the gun fell on the floor. My arm could as well have gone with it. I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t make it move.

That long face with that amused smile flickered. It wasn’t a thing I saw with my eyes. It was inside my head. And I felt every bloody memory get sucked out of me: Colonel Donovan, the other cases I’d worked on, friends and family, the telephone number of a waitress I was seeing, my batting average when I played twilight baseball as a kid in 1914.

When the one that had me found all it wanted, my lungs stopped, my lights started going out. I wasn’t coming back, and thought I was stupid enough that I probably deserved to die. But to go like this pissed me off royally.

A little later I came to and found myself in a movie. The light was dim and this woman and guy, tall and slim, who looked like the stars of this movie, crouched over me, elegant and seeming to flicker slightly around the edges.

As that came into my mind they looked at each other and smiled. I realized they knew what I saw and thought. Her name was Bertrade and his was Darnel. I knew all that without being told. Still being mostly numb probably made everything easier to accept.

“You’ll be well,” she said. There was an accent I couldn’t place. “We have taken care of your friend.”

Bertrade turned her head and somehow I had a glimpse of what she saw. The one who’d attacked me, a tall guy with his head shaved, sat on the floor, leaned against the wall glassy eyed. I understood they had him under a kind of spell.

“An elf on a mission,” Darnel said, “And a mutual enemy.” I knew without them speaking that they were Fey, loyal subjects of the King Beneath the Hill. They were lovers, tourists in the city. Even half in shock I knew that the first was true and the second was a cover. They were operatives.

Things weren’t good between their people and The King of Elfland. My city, my world was a kind of buffer between the two countries. Elfland favored Germany in the war going on in Europe.

They’d been watching our elfin friend when I showed up and they nailed him as he smothered me. From thinking this was a movie, I gradually decided it was a dream and a crazy one. I tried to push myself up.

As a kid I’d thought I was right handed. Then I broke some fingers when I was maybe twelve and learned I was better with my left. Now it was like the left arm was gone. I fell back and banged my head. “I’m useless,” I said.

They touched my memories of my short, bad war and long lousy marriage. She frowned and shook her head at my misfortunes. “I’d want you to be in any unit where I served,” he said. First Darnel and then Bertrade touched my dead arm, quietly spoke words I didn’t understand. The two said good-bye and that we’d meet again. Then they were gone and the elf with them.

Feeling came back and my arm was better than new. I never told anyone else what had happened that night. Walking up Sixth Avenue to the Bigelow Building ten years later it felt like a movie and a dream.

I let myself into my office, sat down and called the answering service. It was night now and Gracie was off duty. The young lady who answered gave me a few messages. A call about a case that was going nowhere, one from somebody who wanted to sell me things, a couple of calls from people who wanted me to pay them: all calls that were going to wait.

Then there was a message from Anne Toomey asking me to call. I looked over my case notes, scribbled a few more details, and dialed the Toomey’s number. I let it ring three times and three more to be sure. They didn’t have an answering service and I decided they could wait until tomorrow.

Instead I went out and had a bite to eat and a drink or two at McNulty’s where the cops go. After that I spent some more of the Beyers’ fee at Moe’s on Third Street where the cops and the hookers go. I finally settled in at the Cedar Tavern over on University Place because Lacy Duveen who tends bar there would rather talk to me than listen to painters arguing.

Lacy got his nickname for working over Tiger Shaughnessy’s face with the laces of his gloves after Tiger hit him in the groin during a preliminary bout at the Garden. He and I go back to when we played pick-up ball games on the East River as kids.

We talked about the time he was catching, and all the way from deep center I tossed out a skinny Italian guy at home plate. It was twilight baseball, the light was fading and the other guy claimed I hadn’t thrown anything and that Lacy had pulled a ball out of his pocket. In fact I’d thrown a perfect left-handed strike right over the plate. Naturally, it ended in a fight that we won.

Next morning I woke up in my room with that throw on my mind. I’ve awakened in worse shape and there was still a bit of the morning left. I’d had a dream of Bertrade that got away from me as I grabbed for it.

Out the window I saw it was a chill drizzling day on Cornelia Street. When I had washed and shaved and dressed, I put on my trench coat and wide-brimmed fedora.

When I came downstairs Mrs. Palatino, the landlady, had her door on the first floor open and her television on as usual. She liked to show off that TV. Some guy in a chef’s hat was chopping celery and talking in a French accent.

Mrs. Palatino knew my late mother from church and that’s why she rented to me even though I’m not Italian. She sat on the couch in her robe and slippers and looked at me long and hard. This was a woman who thought the worst of everyone and never saw anything that made her doubt her judgment.

“You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino died some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.

On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.

For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed and Darnel wasn’t with her.

They had both served in something called The War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.

Her war occurred at about the same time as WWII and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic: getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends with enemy minds in theirs who tore their own throats out. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it and I knew it made her sad.

For other guys maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me it was like a daydream became real.

She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me which I thought about as I walked to work that day was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.

Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.

At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.

The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few flyers and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.

I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man, I think it was her husband, was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”

“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.

I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get . . . ”

“I was going to volunteer. How’s Jim? The operator says he was shouting at you.”

“He’s quiet right now. Sam, this whole case is strange. I’ve tried half a dozen times to call Mrs. Culpepper, you know while her husband’s at work. No answer. They’re not listed in the telephone book. Jim’s the only one she’s talked to. And he’s . . . not good. Last night he was talking, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. And he told me someone was in his head. He’s been saying that for the last couple of days. It’s never been this bad.”

“Was it more than just shouting at you, Anne?”

She said, “This is what I’ve been afraid of.”

“Anne, I’ll be out there as fast as I can. Is there some place you can go meanwhile?

“My aunt’s a few blocks over.”

“Go there right now. Don’t talk to Jim. Just leave. Understand?”

Anne said she did. I doubted her.

Then I made a call to Police Chaplain Dineen. Young private Kevin Dineen served as an altar boy in France for the famous Father Duffy of the 69th. He came back home and found a vocation. It was said that Father Dineen spiked the sacramental wine with gin and he was reputed to get a bit frisky with the widows he comforted.

But it was Dineen who got called when O’Malley at the Ninth Precinct, a fellow vet, was at the Thanksgiving table eating mashed potatoes with the barrel of his loaded revolver while all his children looked on. Dineen got O’Malley to hand the weapon over and had the kids smiling at the game he and their daddy were playing.

When I explained as much of the situation as he needed to know all Dineen asked was, “Do we need an ambulance or a squad car?”

“Both,” I said. Before going downstairs to meet the chaplain I took my service .38 and holster out of the locked drawer, cleaned and loaded the revolver, buckled on the holster. It seemed I remembered doing the same thing in my dream the night before.

I called Up to the Minute and told Gracie I wouldn’t be back until late and not to wait up. She laughed. As I adjusted my hat and went out the door, I remembered something from the dream. Bertrade lay among pillows and bedclothes, looked right at me and spoke about bait and traps.

Ten minutes later Father Dineen and I were in his brand new Oldsmobile four-door headed through the drizzle for Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn. His car had a siren and a flashing light. We went through red lights; traffic cops waved us on at intersections. Dineen was on the radio to a squad car out in Park Slope as we crossed the Bridge with a motorcycle escort and he cursed because we weren’t going faster.

Anger was what I felt: anger at the one who had maybe screwed around with Toomey’s mind and caused Anne pain. They weren’t even the object of this operation. I probably wasn’t either. It struck me that they and I were just bait in some game the Gentry were playing.

When we arrived at Sixteenth Street, a crowd had gathered in the drizzle and homicide was out in force. Anne Toomey must have tried one last time to talk to Jim. She was at the bottom of the stairs. Jim had stood halfway up when he shot her twice in the face before pumping two shots into his open mouth.

For the young homicide detective who took my statement this was open-and-shut murder/suicide. The second bullet in the shooter’s mouth was nothing more than a dying twitch, not the sign someone else was operating Jim’s hand. And this young man was confident his career was not going to end like Toomey’s or mine.

What I wanted to tell him was, “The creature that had James Toomey in its control used Toomey’s own hand to eliminate him and cover its tracks.” My actual statement stuck strictly to the facts with nothing more than a brief mention of the Culpepper case.

Father Dineen drove like a cop—that is, as if he owned the road. He knew something was up but not even a couple of belts from the ecclesiastic flask made me talk. An image of Anne and Jimmy dead in their house was burning a hole in my brain.

It was very late afternoon that the chaplain dropped me off in front of the Main Post Office, told me to go home and get some rest.

On the ride back from the Toomey’s I’d thought about the dream and Bertrade. Usually dreams are vivid when you wake up but as you try to grab them they turn to nothing and disappear. This one started out vague but seemed to linger.

Climbing the post office stairs I remembered another fragment. Bertrade, lovely as I’ve ever seen her, wore nothing but a silver moon on a chain around her neck and touched my arm. So slippery was the memory that I began to wonder if this dream might have been something planted in my head by an enemy.

The little unmarked window was where I always picked up mail from the Kingdom Beneath the Hill. And I wanted to talk to that clerk and find out what he knew. The window was shut, which had never happened before.

The guy at the Overseas window didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about the window next door. He said this wasn’t his regular assignment and that I should try the next day.

Walking slowly across that lobby, I thought of the ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I was a letter being sliced open and I felt real small and insignificant. But I started to put things into some kind of order.

The elves had set up Jim and Anne Toomey as bait for me. First they invented the Culpepper job and hired Jim, who needed the work. Then they made sure he couldn’t function and put it in his head and Anne’s that they should ask me. And I was the bait to lure Bertrade.

Taking my seat in the coffee shop across from the Van Neiman Building, it occurred to me that maybe on our first encounter Bertrade and Darnel had used me as bait to catch the elf. Knowing the ways of the Gentry, that seemed quite possible.

The waitress and counter man didn’t notice that I was a repeat customer. I figured that the elves wouldn’t probe as long as I was doing what they wanted. They didn’t have to worry. My memory of Anne and Jimmy had burned a hole in my brain. And that may have been what the elves expected when they killed them.

That they were keeping me in play, letting me stay alive, could mean they’d made Bertrade aware that I was in danger. And it would also mean they weren’t sure where she was or what she was going to do. That Bertrade avoided direct contact with me was a sign that she relied on me to play my part, walk into the trap, and ensnare the trapper. It would also mean she knew that the spell that shielded my thoughts could be broken by the enemy.

Just then Culpepper, whoever he was, came through the doors of the Van Neiman Building with his briefcase. I got up and followed him. It went like before. He walked west and I followed on the other side of the street. I wondered how much Culpepper knew, what promises and rewards had they made to him?

Seeing him go through this routine reminded me of seeing the enemy in France, just before we saw action. I saw a couple of German prisoners, starving, flea-bitten men, cramming army rations into their mouths while our guys stared like they were exhibits in a zoo. That sight took away all of the enemy’s mystery.

I stopped on the east side of Tenth Avenue, watched from a doorway when Culpepper crossed and went into the apartment building. As I waited, a light went on in the third floor window.

A rhythmic pounding came from over on the river. It sounded like they were driving piles. The earlier drizzle had become rain. Workers headed home at a brisk pace. The streets were getting empty.

Stake-out work is fine, outdoor labor, good for the health and spirits. But I’d noticed a bar on the corner with a clear view of the apartment house.

It was a Wednesday night with a moderate-sized crowd and a cowboy movie on the TV above the bar. The guys drinking spotted a cop and looked away when I stepped inside. I ordered a rye and water and kept my eye on the apartment house doorway.

I was pretty sure they wouldn’t leave without me. There was a good chance I’d be dead before long. But death hadn’t yet happened and I’d given it several very good chances.

In the dark, a long freight train ran south on the elevated tracks. When I looked further west beyond Twelfth Avenue the pier at the end of the street seemed lit up.

About the time I began to wonder if I was crazy and Culpepper really was just a guy stepping out on his wife I saw through someone else’s eyes. They were moving uptown along the river’s edge, I saw a pier and a big yacht all lit up. Suddenly that disappeared. Was this skirmishing between elves and fairies?

Like it was a signal, the one called Culpepper came out the door of the apartment house. He carried an umbrella and held it over Mimi White. The game was on. They headed west and I followed them.

A good detective recognizes a pattern. Once more I was heading onto a pier at night to encounter one of the Gentry.

As we crossed Eleventh Avenue a big ocean liner sailed up the Hudson with every light on board shining. It looked like a floating city block. The tugboats guiding it honked at each other. I saw the liner and then for an instant I saw it again from the viewpoint of someone down at the river. The pile driving paused briefly and all was as quiet as Manhattan ever gets.

Approaching Twelfth Avenue I saw that the old freighter from the day before was gone. In its place was the ocean going yacht with lights on deck that I’d seen through another’s eyes.

At certain moments time gets fluid. At Aisne-Marne, the platoon was pinned by machine gun fire. The gunners had waited until we were within a hundred yards. The lieutenant was dead. Someone was screaming. Later I found out the whole company was pinned; the battalion had gone to earth. The minutes we were down went by like hours.

The machine guns fired a short burst right over me; fired a burst to my left, another further along. I knew that it was rat-like little guys going through the motions. It would be a bit before they’d come back my way.

I pulled a pin with my right hand. I jumped up with a grenade in my left. The Krauts were firing from a gap in an embankment a hundred yards away. I’d hurled dummy grenades in practice, knew their weight. I judged the arc and tossed. “Get down,” someone yelled. The grenade hit the side of the gap, bounced in the air.

As I dove for cover I was knocked flat and the cold knife raced up my leg. A muffled bang sounded, a man screamed, another cried out, the machine gun fire stopped and my war was over.

Crossing Twelfth Avenue, walking into the trap, I told myself that all I needed was a few seconds of clarity, like I’d had thirty-two years before.

Maybe Bertrade had given me up. But I was going to deal out payment for Jim and Anne. All I needed was those few seconds.

Culpepper and Mimi stopped just inside the gates at the end of the pier. A couple of hundred feet beyond them the yacht had lights on the gangplank, atop the cabins, shining through the portholes.

A figure—tall and thin, wavering slightly—stood on the deck leaning on the rail. He was faced away from me. But I could recognize one of the Fair Folk, whether elf or fairy. He was too far away to hit with a hand gun. I wished I had a grenade.

A scream in the night came from downriver. At almost the same moment the pile driver started up out in the water. Distant sirens sounded but they were on fire trucks and going the wrong way. The Fair Folk didn’t want any human interference.

A breeze blew the rain in my face as I crossed the Avenue with my raincoat open. My arms were at my side. The .38 in my hand was hidden by the coat flapping.

The ones I knew as Culpepper and Mimi faced me as I approached. I was going to tell them to get out of my way before they got hurt.

But their eyes were blank. For an instant I saw myself from their viewpoint as I walked past them. Someone was looking out through them like they were TV cameras. Someone was in my head.

Figures moved in the darkness beyond the lights. Fair Folk were out there. For an instant I caught an image of long, thin figures on a small power boat.

The lights on the yacht flickered for a moment. The tall elf on the deck looked my way. He seemed amused. Bertrade’s image telling intruders to stay out got knocked aside like it was cardboard. He was in my mind. My feet moved without my willing them and my body shambled forward to the foot of the gangplank.

I saw myself in his eyes, an old man—stunned and confused in a trench coat and battered hat—staring up at him. He sent that image out in all directions. The elf knew I had the gun and knew I was in his power.

Then the lights flickered fast. Out in the dark amid the noise of the pile drivers there were cries and gunshots. Suddenly Bertrade was inside me, “My lefthand man!”

Under a spell my arm moved. The elf couldn’t stop it. The left arm was magic. He blocked my breath and sent a bolt of pain through my head, stopped my eyes from seeing. But the arm rose. I couldn’t see him but I fired. Nothing. My head spun.

For an instant my sight cleared. I saw the elf. I squeezed the trigger as my sight went dark. Nothing happened.

Blind, I fired to the left and there was a scream. My breath came back. My sight returned. Up the gangplank the elf grasped his shoulder. I felt him stop my heart. But I blew his jaw off and my heart started again. I shot him in the head before I passed out.

The morning was long gone and done when I came home. Mrs. Palatino had actually turned off her television, put on street clothes and was headed out to Thursday afternoon bingo at Our Lady of Pompeii Church. She gave me a look full of disapproval and shook her head.

I needed to go upstairs and change my clothes, stop around at the office. In my jacket pocket was a letter to the Beyers from Hilda, saying she was alive and well and thinking of them.

Bertrade had brought that with her from the Kingdom Beneath the Hill. Our business relationship was still intact.

We’d parted half an hour before. That night was spent at the Plaza: part of our reward for smashing the elf and his espionage crew. After he went down, three of his fellow Gentry came out of the dark and surrendered to Bertrade and her friends.

Culpepper and Mimi and a couple of other mortals the elves had recruited bore the body into the back of a panel truck.

That dream I’d half-remembered had been sent by Bertrade. In the game of cat and mouse she and the big elf had played, some of his magic was stronger than hers.

“Askal is his name. We met in the Kingdom,” she said, “and he was able to read me enough to know how I felt about you. He wanted to use you to draw me. I wanted to use that magic arm Darnel and I gave you to do away with him.”

It seemed to me like the kind of game in which mortals were just breakable objects. Bertrade winced when I thought that.

Askal, of course, didn’t completely die. I heard him shrieking; saw his shadow moving around the pier after his corpse had been taken away in the truck.

It isn’t likely I’ll ever go back to that spot on the Hudson. And it isn’t likely I’ll ever completely trust Bertrade. What I feel for her may not be love. But I know that when I’m with her this mortal life of mine gets torn open by magic, and when she’s gone that’s all I remember.

But when we parted outside the Plaza that morning and kissed, she told me she’d be back before long. And I look forward to it.

Tomorrow evening Jim and Anne Toomey will be waked out in Brooklyn. Their connection with me is what killed them, and I’ll think of that.

My life may not run out of me into a big red puddle, but someday my life will run out. And before that happens in this world of bait and traps I’ll see Bertrade again.

Richard Bowes has won two World Fantasy, an International Horror Guild, and Million Writer Awards. His new novel Dust Devil on a Quiet Street will appear on May Day 2013 from Lethe Press, which is also republishing his Lambda Award-winning novel Minions of the Moon. Additionally two short story collections will be published in 2013: The Queen, the Cambion and Seven Others from Aqueduct Press and If Angels Fight from Fairwood Press.

Recent and forthcoming appearances include: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Icarus, Lightspeed, and the anthologies After, Wilde Stories 2012, Bloody Fabulous, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, Handsome Devil, Hauntings, and Where Thy Dark Eye Glances.