Supernatural Noir (5 page)

He says, “What do you want now, Danny? You want to borrow money that I don’t have? Bail you out of jail again? Go call Henry if that’s it.”

“Joe,” I say. “Hey, Joe. I got something to tell you. It’s important.”

I pause and imagine what Henry, Greg, and Mike felt after they were shot, and before they disappeared. “Hey, Joe,” I say again. “Listen carefully. I’m up in Vermont, at the old place.”

I roll down my window. Goddamn, it’s cold out. Like I said earlier, didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. Still no jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. Too bad all that stuff I left behind won’t just disappear like they did. Like I might. Three shots or four.

Winter is coming early.

“What?”

“Yeah. I’m here, by myself, Joe. The place looks fucking terrible. Rotting away to nothing.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“I don’t know. Trying to get away, I guess. Can’t, though. Doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I decided to call you. Because I’m thinking I should’ve told you something a long time ago. You listening? Here it is: Fuck you, Joe.”

I drop the phone. It disappears somewhere below me. The black gloves I’m still wearing don’t keep my hands warm. I rub my hands together, and I slouch into the seat. I’m not feeling good at all. Things getting heavy. Lake getting blurry.

The shotgun is on the seat next to me. I might pick it up, and then fade away.

——

Paul G. Tremblay
is the author of the novels
The Little Sleep
and
No Sleep till Wonderland
, both of which feature narcoleptic private detective Mark Genevich; the short speculative-fiction collections
In the Mean Time
and
Compositions for the Young and Old
; and the novellas
City Pier: Above and Below
and
The Harlequin and the Train
. His stories have appeared in
Weird Tales
,
The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three
, and
Best American Fantasy 3
. He served as fiction editor of
ChiZine
and as coeditor of
Fantasy Magazine
. He is also the coeditor of the
Fantasy
,
Bandersnatch
, and
Phantom
anthologies with Sean Wallace, and of
Creatures!
with John Langan. Paul is currently an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He still has no uvula, but plugs along, somehow. More information can be found at PaulTremblay.net and TheLittleSleep.com.

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, who, 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 seemed that she had.

While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor La Guardia 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 Beyers’ 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 P.S.: “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 midthirties—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 marshal.

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 courthouse 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 he 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 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 my 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’s 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 on 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 overreacting. Maybe I was lonely and wanted to see Bertrade.

Going down the stairs was tougher on my knee than going up them. 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 four thirty-five. 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 and 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 rundown and out of place. That’s where he turned and went in.