Hard Fall: A gripping, noir detective thriller (Thomas Blume series of Hard-Boiled Mysteries, Book 1) (2 page)

I checked the pictures and saw that I had more than enough now.

“Thanks,” I said. “As you were,” I added as I left I placed the “please make up room” card on the door handle.

I then turned my back and headed towards the parking lot. I heard the man yelling after me. I doubted he would pursue. He looked overweight and not exactly the confrontational type, more a soft middle manager with an easy office job. Besides, he was naked. Not many folks were eager to come running across a rain-slicked parking lot with no clothes on.

I got back to my car and had cranked the engine to life by the time to the woman had come to the door, wrapped in a sheet. She was screaming for me to stop, but I paid her little attention. She was pretty — about 150 lbs, long blonde hair, and breasts too perfect to be real. I wondered what had driven her to this, and beyond that, I pitied the man she was with and more so the man I would be meeting in about an hour.

As I pulled out of the lot, I looked back and saw her staring at me, crying in the rain. The man stood behind her like some idiot sentinel.

Hearts were going to be broken over this, but that wasn’t my problem. I was already thinking about how I would spend the money that was coming to me. I’d have it within two hours and in three, I’d be at The King’s Head down the street.

I looked back in my rearview, but the hotel parking lot was out of sight. All that remained was the dreary East London suburb… and pain. I needed a drink, but one man needed these photographs more.

TWO

Anthony Taylor was broken.

Forty minutes later, I was sitting in my cramped little office space that doubled as my apartment looking across the cluttered desk at the man I had just destroyed. He was quiet, sitting in my guest chair and looking up at the ceiling as if he were waiting for it to mercifully collapse on top of him. I followed his gaze, but for a different reason. There were water stains along the ceiling and a few places where fissures ran like stray hairs along half of the ceiling. The office was a dump (as reflected in the cheap rent), but it contained all the equipment I needed for my work.

When Anthony started to cry, I wasn’t surprised. I was sure he would. Even though he was a well-to-do stockbroker with a sharp suit and more money in his savings account than I would ever see in my entire life, he was still a man. He was also the man who had married the woman in the photographs.

The pictures on the camera that I had just showed him was proof of this. I had taken on other cases like this one, getting the proof that a spouse was cheating. In almost every case, there was anger first and then the sadness. It was like the two emotions towed one another, the anger speeding forward to the surface with the sadness lurking in its wake.

Anthony had skipped the rage. He had known it was coming, but when he saw the pictures of his wife bent over naked in front of another man, a moan of pleasure on her face and a smile on her gasping mouth, the depression and sadness had come right away like rising waves from his stomach.

I watched him crying, close to hysterics, and knew that I should interject somehow. It would have been the kind thing to do. But I was hardly one to offer advice on emotional stability. Hell, I had no idea where to even start. So I just watched him and waited for him to get his shit together. After all, this was a business. There was no room or reason for me to get overly sympathetic with my clients.

It took a while, but Anthony finally came around. He wiped his eyes and then pushed the camera back over to me.

“Sorry,” Anthony said. “That was embarrassing.”

“I’ve seen worse,” I said. It was a lie. Anthony Taylor had fallen to pieces right in front of me, and I didn’t think it was a moment I’d forget anytime soon.

“So who’s the guy?” Anthony asked.

I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Could you find out? If I paid you more money, could you find out?”

I rubbed my jaw, feeling stubble. The question on the tip of my tongue was
How much more?
But I swallowed it down and shook my head. “No. I mean, I probably could, but I don’t think it’s the best idea.”

“Name your price,” Anthony said, sitting forward and trying his best to look all business like, but the puffy red eyes and glistening snot under his nose betrayed the attempt.

“I can’t help you,” I said. “Sorry.”

Anthony then stood up and looked like he wanted to take a swing at me. For the briefest of moments, I wanted him to. I probably deserved it. Punishment for my sins. I was looking for an excuse to knock someone’s lights out — and the hell of it was that I wasn’t even sure why, exactly. I’d been feeling that way for a few weeks now.

“Why not?” Anthony said.

“What good will it do if I find out who he is?” I fired back. “What are you going to do? Rough him up? Use it as ammo against your wife? Trust me. I’ve been doing this for too long. It won’t do any good. You might feel better for a few days, but eventually, you’ll regret it.”

He was still fuming, but I could see his posture relaxing. Within a few seconds, he collapsed back into the chair in defeat and rubbed at his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I would do. I just wanted…I don’t know…”

“Look,” I said. “Sleep on it. Think about what you’d actually do if you knew who he was. It’s for the best.”

He gave a nod and then got back to his feet. He looked dazed, like a sleep-walking man. He stumbled to the door and gave me a half-hearted wave. I thought I should say something…maybe anything, to lift his spirits. But the pictures he had paid me to take, the information he had paid me to collect…it had leveled him.

Besides, what was I going to say: “
It’s been a pleasure ruining your life
?”

Never again,
I decided.
I’m done with these jobs.

All I could come up with though was, “See you.”

Taylor gave a thin, featureless smile and then walked out of the door.

When it closed behind him, I eyed the envelope he had handed me when he had walked into my office. I looked through, thumbing the seven hundred pounds. I felt dirty… but not dirty enough to not spend it.

I was still thirsty, still feeling the smoke at the fringes, still haunted by the need for a drink that had struck me while I sat in my car in the rain, waiting for Anthony’s wife to show up and bang some random dude in a hotel.

I took the cash out, folded it, and placed it in my front pants pocket. I locked up the place – glad to be heading out for the day because the office was depressing the hell out of me – and headed back out to the tight London streets where the rain had turned from speckled patches to steady stream.

***

As it turned out, the thought of Anthony Taylor’s despair wouldn’t leave me alone. It hovered over me while I downed a beer at the old-fashioned pub on the corner near my apartment. The idea of what Anthony might be feeling curbed my need for another. Well, in truth, it was partly that and partly the fact that I was missing my wife and son. And Anthony’s whole situation was making it all that much worse.

So after a single drink, I paid my tab and walked down the windings streets and cobbled alleyways back to my apartment. It was a shabby two-room deal situated above a Middle-Eastern restaurant in Central Hackney. The apartment always smelled like bread and some sort of spice, coriander, maybe, or some kind of clove. I kept my office at the front of the apartment, separated from the rest of the place by a slim room divider that was really nothing more than a stiff curtain standing in the center of the living room.

I sat in my tattered recliner, sipping on a tumbler of whiskey that I had no taste for but seemed fitting, nonetheless. The glass was a comforting sensation in my hand.

I thought of Sarah and Tommy. I thought of how they had been taken from me and how that had set the course for the rest of my life. I was a different man now, living a different life in a different world. And men like Taylor affected me in a way I was not used to.

I thought about Anthony and his cheating wife a lot that night. I almost reconsidered Anthony’s follow-up offer. I felt like I owed him something, and if that something was finding out more about the man who had been sleeping with his wife, then so be it.

But something inside told me to let it go, and focus on the real reason I was in this country. I fell asleep in the recliner with that thought in my head, lured into a restless doze by the sound of the rain against my windows. I was here because had a killer to find.

THREE

The months weighed heavily.

I woke up early the next morning. In fact, I woke up early most mornings. If I slept more than five hours, I was useless the next day. It probably came down to my body’s confusion. In New York, my go-to drug of choice had been caffeine. Sarah had always called me the Man with the Styrofoam hands because I always had a cup of bitter precinct coffee in my hands.

I ate a quick breakfast of dry toast and coffee and reminded myself to buy some butter. I brushed my teeth and looked in the mirror.

Jesus, I looked like crap.
I’d once been called “handsome,” by a female D.A. back in New York
.
The boys in the precinct had found it hilarious. But those days were just a memory now. Echoes of former glory etched by history, my face was worn by deep creases and hair flecked gray at the temples. I wasn’t the man I used to be, and I had never thought that
he
was up to much.

Moving into the stale office, I was smacked by memories of the day before.

I looked outside and opened the window a crack onto the sort of moist atmosphere that seemed to pervade the capital. People were coming and going, surrounded by the morning smells of London — baking bread, tea and coffee, car exhaust, and the after-scent of rain
. In the distance, tower blocks clawed at the gray sky. Beneath my window, narrow roads crowded with pedestrians and black cabs signaled the start of another day.

It was all pleasant enough, but I simply couldn’t let myself be swayed from my somber mood.

I’d been in this dark place for a while now. Most people told me that the best way to overcome it was to think of the great memories I had of Sarah and Tommy, but trying to do that only reminded me of how badly I missed them.

I had come to London with the express purpose of finding out what had happened when my family had been murdered on the wrong side of the world. Six months later, those thoughts still burned in my mind.
Murdered
. Even now I could barely believe it was true, or perhaps some part of me just didn’t.

Remorse ambushed me again.

I had let Sarah take the job in London while I had remained in New York to finish my night course at Columbia University. I had been gunning for Captain and the forensics qualification was my ticket.

I had encouraged her to go for the temporary Editor position and had even agreed to her taking Tommy over the summer to see her home country. 
I had. Me.
I had sent my wife and son 3,500 miles away for a “temporary situation.”

Now they were dead and there was nothing temporary about it. They were never coming back.

I could remember the night I found out like it was yesterday:
a knock at the door. An officer’s voice on the other side.

“Thomas Blume?
I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

The memories threatened to break me again, so I collapsed into the chair behind my desk and looked around, desperate for a distraction that didn’t come in a bottle. The tiny office space looked quaint enough, cluttered with papers, files, magazines, and folders. The beat-up laptop on my desk should have been euthanized years ago; I had no idea how it had survived this long…at least nine years. I sat down behind it, but rather than power it up, I reached for my digital camera, still sitting in the middle of the desk from yesterday’s meeting with Anthony.