The Night Mayor (11 page)

From the dry-out farm, Tunney had moved down to the border, mooched around in cantinas for a while, then left the country two steps ahead of the sheriff of some Rio Grande jerkwater. I followed by car and
burro
, tracking him from town to town. The bottles marked his way through the desert, like cat’s-eyes down a street. I made some deposit money back on as many as I could carry. The rest I left out there with the bones of prehistoric animals, as a sign for future generations that there had been civilisation in the Americas.

Tunney had made a lot of friends along the way, until his travelling money ran out. After that, he made a lot of enemies. I interviewed some of them. Three beer-befuddled construction workers played softball with my head in a backstreet on the mistaken assumption that I
was
Tom Tunney. With the bruises and a three-day beard, I was told I looked even more like him than I had done. Lissa’s money gave out, and she told me over an international phone hook-up that she wasn’t interested any more. She was remarrying – to a war hero, of course, just like all the girls that year – and didn’t want to know either way about her former husband. ‘He was just a no-account,’ she told me, ‘a Dreamer.’ But I was too far along to drop it that easily. I’m a detective, so I feel obliged to detect.

I was finding out more and more about my quarry’s life. From the witnesses, I picked up details about his work, his friends, his childhood, his Dreams. And, with each scrap of information I unearthed about Tom Tunney, I seemed to forget something about myself. I found myself using his name on hotel registers, in barroom conversations. I realised, with a shock, that I was drinking almost constantly. One evening, I sat in a cantina with a row of bottles on the bar, and tried to remember absurdly small things about my own life. I couldn’t remember the make of car I drove, how my girlfriend looked naked, what I had done before I got my PI licence, what shape my bathroom was, my parents’ names. I knew more about Tom Tunney than about Richie Quick. The man I had not found yet was real to me, but I was a phantom, as flat and one-sided as Dick Tracy or Steve Canyon.

I was staring at a wall-sized mirror when he walked into the bar. Over my own shoulder, I saw his face come out of the shadows. For the briefest of instants, I was standing up looking in the mirror at the face of a man at the bar…

Then the curtains parted, and I was back in the City. Back in the night. Back in the pain.

‘Heavens be praised, my boy,’ said Carradine. ‘I thought you were dead for sure!’

I opened my eyes, was assaulted by the light, and shut them again.

‘Easy now,’ said the deep, resonant voice. ‘Step by step.’

I opened my eyes again, less painfully. I was still on the floor of Kelly’s, surrounded by smashed tables and bulletholes. I was sitting in a congealed pool of stickiness. I felt myself for wounds, and couldn’t find any. The mess was just spilled ketchup. Maybe my luck was changing.

‘Not a mark on him,’ said Thelma, ‘saints be praised!’ She had a rosary out, and was knotting it around one hand like a beaded bandage.

Carradine helped me up. I was unsteady on my feet, and my head felt like a leftover battlefield, but everything seemed to be in more or less working order. There was ketchup on my trench coat, but it would wash off in time.

‘Looks like you’re right about there being a new man at the top,’ said Carradine, ‘and he’s just paid you his friendly compliments.’

Kelly grunted, seemingly no more upset by the destruction of his diner than he would have been by a broken plate. He was in a grimy apron, sweeping up. There were fresh bullet scars on the walls, like the ones in Daine’s penthouse. Exactly like, I could see the same patterns – faces, almost – in the damage.

‘Marvin and the others must have set you up. They’ll all be with the new man by now.’

Things had changed while I was out, but I couldn’t tell how yet. I had the memory of a headache now, but my head was clear. That felt like a first.

‘We’d best be out of here, Richie,’ Carradine said. ‘They might come back.’

It took me a moment to realise he was talking to me. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about the mess, Kelly…’

‘That’s okay,’ the chef said dully, ‘it’s been worse before. When the Muni Mob and Jimmy Cagney had a gang war, they tossed in hand grenades every twenty minutes.’

Carradine helped me get out of the diner, but I didn’t feel so bad. Some of the earlier aches had faded, and the new ones hadn’t had time to get settled in. It was still raining, but it was a hard, fast, clean downpour now, washing garbage off the sidewalks.

‘We better get you off the main streets, you’re a target…’

It hit me. ‘John, what happened to the pidgin Shakespeare? You sound almost Hemingway. Well, maybe Steinbeck.’

His long face was quizzical. ‘I guess it wore off. It’s been a funny kind of an evening. I feel like I’ve just woken up after a long dream.’

‘I know how you feel.’

‘It’s as if only the last few hours of my life were real. I could tell you my story up until then, but it happened to someone else, an imaginary character.’

We walked a couple of blocks, looking in vain for a cab. Carradine struck me somehow as unusual, even for the City. He was spilling over, out of his stereotype, confused about his role.

‘I’ve got things in my head that came from nowhere,’ he said, ‘things that don’t make sense to me. Clues, I guess you’d call them.’

‘Clues? Like what?’

‘The World Tree,’ he muttered, ‘something about the World Tree, Richie. No, that’s not it. Damn it, but it’ll come to me in a moment. I’m sure it will.’

‘Yggdrasil,’ I said, ‘the World Tree.’

‘That’s it. Yggdrasil. Queer sort of a word, isn’t it?’

I remembered Yggdrasil. The wooden fist of Viking legend, wrapped around the world, extending its branches everywhere. Only my Yggdrasil wasn’t wood, but something else alive. In my mind, I had a crazed vision of a composite creature, with iceboxes and radiograms and vacuum cleaners and electric chairs and telephone exchanges for nerve endings, trucks and aircraft and cranes and streamlined trains for limbs, and perhaps a Bomb for a brain.

‘It has something to do with Daine, and the way he ran the City. It’s not much to go on, but it’s a start.’

I knew where to go now. I started steering Carradine, rather than him supporting me. He hesitated, but followed my lead. I guessed he wanted the answers too.

‘We’ll have to find out who Daine’s heir is. Or maybe it’s not an heir, exactly. Maybe we’re after his ghost.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I saw him dead. There’s no doubt about that. And things have changed since he got remaindered, but I’ve got this feeling – call it a detective’s intuition – that he left something of himself behind. The City’s still his in some way, held in trust.’

It was in a sleazy neighbourhood, but then again so were most places in the City. We approached it cautiously, in case the cops had it staked out. I had Carradine walk up and down the street several times, acting suspiciously. Nobody came for him. He stood on the steps outside the building, tattered cloak flapping like a scarecrow’s nightshirt, and signalled to me.

Then we went up to my office to do some serious detective work.

I
n my office, Carradine cat-napped, snoring vigorously, hammocked between two chairs. The irritating neon sign outside the window strobed the room, broken Venetian blinds breaking the light into bright bars. I had the radio on low, in case they interrupted the broadcast with any bulletins that might lead me to the new Night Mayor. Meanwhile, I went through my files.

I call it an office, but it’s also an apartment. I was sure I lived there, but I couldn’t remember if there was a bedroom attached. If there was, I couldn’t find it now. There were plenty of filing cabinets, with half-full bottles, and an empty water cooler that I evidently kept as an excuse to have a tower of paper cups. While Carradine slept, I tried to take away the taste of defeat and Kelly’s coffee with a shot or fourteen. It was supposed to be good whisky, but the thin layer of dust in the bottom of all the cups didn’t improve the taste any. Daine’s booze had tasted like sugared water, mine was like sugared water with added grit. I licked my teeth, and started digging.

At some earlier, more enthusiastic, stage in my career as a detective I had compiled dossiers on everyone of any importance in the City. Cotten of the
Inquirer
must have helped me out, because every file was complete with news clippings and candid photographs. Those friends on the police force who would doubtless fail to remember me these nights had even let me have carbons of a few rap sheets. I considered calling up one of contacts and declaring my innocence, but decided against it. Until I had myself out of the frame, it wasn’t a good idea to drag anyone into the case who wasn’t there already. Besides, I had had time to pick up the late edition. PRIVATE EYE SOUGHT IN DAINE SLAYING was the headline, and Cotten’s byline was over the story. The way he wrote it, I guessed he was as sure as anyone that I had been the trigger man. All my friends would be busy with their ink erasers trying to scrub me out of their address books. Especially my cop friends.

I trusted Carradine because he was different, but trusting him led to mistrusting everyone else. ‘It’s like being a reverse zombie,’ he said, ‘I’m alive, but everybody else is dead.’ Enough people were after me. The fewer who knew where I was, the better.

Someone had been at the office, of course. The door had been kicked in, and the chaos rearranged. They hadn’t found anything, and had gone back to their usual haunts. Cops or hoods, it didn’t matter. They had probably both paid a visit. And they’d call again later, which was why I was working by a single-bulb desk lamp, quickskimming the liquid and document overflow from my filing cabinets. The frosted glass panel with my name on it had been cracked, but that could have happened at any time.

I pulled the Daine file first. It was the thickest. There he was in all his splendour, gazing blithely out of society-column illustrations, going into or coming out of some swank nightspot or other, with a gorgeous girl on either arm. Socialite Lyn Bari, nightclub
chanteuse
Lizabeth Scott, ecdysiast Rita Hayworth, fiery
senorita
Dolores Del Rio: they had all been names in his little black book. No wonder he looked so smug in most of his photographs. Recently, his ‘constant companion’ had been Rhonda Fleming. In one shot, Daine could be seen in the background while Rhonda was trying to scratch out the eyes of a competitor for his attentions, Arlene Dahl. The headline was CAT FIGHT CUTIES! Wealth, power, dames: Daine couldn’t have Dreamed up a better situation for himself in the City if he had been trying.

Most of the clippings were boring stories about charity functions, civic balls, philanthropic gestures, patriotic speeches or War Bond drives. There were endless party guest lists, with Daine’s name – and certain others – circled. There were even inventories of his collection, with fabulous sums paid for a succession of sculptures, paintings, original scores and manuscripts or items of historical interest. In one picture, Daine was showing off his most prized trophies – the longbow with which Errol Flynn had driven the Normans out of Sherwood Forest, Leslie Howard’s Ku Klux Klan hood and the original telephone invented by Don Ameche. There were gossip-column items, too, about such-and-such an amusing practical joke played on William Powell or this-and-that fancy present given to Carole Lombard. All very innocuous stuff. I had underlined the few shady connections which made it into the open.

Daine’s closest pals were Claude Rains, the radio criminologist, and Otto Kruger, who was some sort of phony-baloney mystic. They were part of the Cicero Club, a society which met once a month or so to discuss famous unsolved mysteries. I had made notations by the Cicero Club stories. There must be something spicy in that combination: Daine could have solved at least three quarters of the crimes in the City just by owning up. And in their own dossiers, I found a few suggestive hints to the effect that Rains and Kruger were hardly spotless. Nothing overt, of course, but a few too many underworld contacts, a few too many mysterious bequests. Rains and Daine had owned a piece of Kirk Douglas, a promising young heavyweight whose career had been ended by a ‘cerebral haemorrhage’ in the ring, just in time for Kruger and a few others to collect a parcel by betting against him. And who was the bruiser who gave Kirk the big headache? Our old friend Mike Mazurki. When Daine had first come to the City, he had – I knew for a fact – taken over a large proportion of the vice business that had been run by Paul Muni, a mobster whose empire had fallen thanks mainly to the investigative efforts and single-mindedness of – you guessed it – criminologist Claude Rains. I had been trying to get a membership list for the Cicero Club, but the only other name I could come up with was George Macready, a scarfaced iceman who had a profitable share of the City’s gambling and was best known for his sword-extruding walking stick. Nice people.

There were other possibles – mostly underworld figures – but I discounted them as red herrings. Sydney Greenstreet was too old to be taking much of an interest, and had in any case become obsessed with some obscure quest of his own, neglecting his ‘business’. Whoever the new man at the top was l would have staked plenty that his first move would be to squeeze Sydney out and add his former holdings to the pot. A chubby young man called Laird Cregar appealed to me as a suspect, if only because he had the habit of being seen loitering around places where beautiful women had just been strangled. But his plump face and crazed eyes suggested he was merely a psychotic. A more refined psycho than, say, Lee Marvin or Neville Brand, but a crazy’s still a crazy and I didn’t think someone that far gone could take up where Daine had left off. Cregar might lounge in silk pajamas and stuff himself with Parisian chocolates, but he was still a supporting heavy, a cringing underling who’d never last at the top of the criminal tree. George Sanders was out of the running now, having been hauled in as an enemy spy, but I’d be interested in knowing who precisely had tipped the Feds off to his brokerage for state secrets in the suburbs. Orson Welles was too busy with his radio show, Bela Lugosi could never get any master plan together beyond his next insane experiment, Vincent Price wouldn’t rank with the major bad guys until horror pictures caught on again, and Zachary Scott’s thin moustache betrayed his lack of substance as a mastermind.