The Night Mayor (16 page)

When Daine bought the farm, he left a big hole in the City. And MacLane wanted to wallpaper me for the job.

I knew what that meant. The Big House: tear-gas clouds, blossoming over mess-hall riots, ‘the break is set for midnight’ notes, squealers ‘accidentally’ falling under trip-hammers in the workshop. Brutal guards and trusties breaking down the fresh fish. Shivs in the showers. Kids talking to pictures of Rita Hayworth and Ann Sheridan. I would be on Death Row, bar shadows permanently tigerstriping my face. An uplifting visit from Pat O’Brien in a dog collar. Then a long walk to the little room. The last-minute rumour of a pardon from the governor that doesn’t come through. A chair with lots of wires and straps. The big juice lever. And lights flickering all over the prison. Would I be tough and wise-cracking at the end, or would they have to drag me screaming through the last door like a jelly-livered rat?

‘Where d’ya get the gun, gumshoe? Why d’ya hate Daine so much? What d’he ever do to ya? Who put ya up to it? How far back did you an’ Daine go? D’ya ever work for Muni? How much d’ya get from the wall safe? Where’s ya gun? Not the one we took off ya, the one ya used on the big guy?’

Questions, questions, questions. How did you kill him, when did you kill him, where did you kill him, with what did you kill him, why did you kill him? It was easy to see what their basic assumption was.

I would have done it if I had had the chance, but somebody got there first. I had to admit that the frame was a good fit. It was one of those not very funny ironies I should have learned to accept by now. Fate: you can’t go straight, nobody ever really crashes out, they made me a criminal, nobody lives for ever…

‘MacLane, I give up,’ I croaked. ‘Tell me how I did it.’

‘Ahh.’ The cop leaned into the light, his face shadowed into a fright mask. ‘Some cooperation at last.’

‘I don’t like it, captain,’ said good old reliable Ralph Bellamy.

‘Shaddup! If he wants to confess, let him. We’re here to serve the public.’

MacLane didn’t like private detectives, I gathered. He must be for ever two steps behind them on complicated murder cases. The
Inquirer
was always running PRIVATE EYE BUSTS CASE THAT BAFFLED COPS headlines. That made him look like an idiot. He was good at that. His idiot disguise was a lulu. It would have taken first prize at the Policeman’s Ball.

‘But we know Quick, captain,’ said Bellamy. ‘He’s not a killer.’

‘Well said, that man,’ I put in.

‘You’re breakin’ my heart, Bellamy. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. But the heat is on. The big heat. The
Inquirer
dumps on Mayor Donlevy, Donlevy dumps on Commissioner Hamilton, and Hamilton dumps on me. The commissioner wants a conviction yesterday.’

Bellamy was insistent. ‘I won’t see an innocent man get the chair.’

‘Then go fishing that weekend.’ MacLane turned to me. ‘Gumshoe, you’ll sign this confession?’

‘Do I get a lawyer?’

‘
After
you sign.’

‘I’ll want Raymond Burr.’

‘Okay, all right already.’

‘Do you have a pen?’

‘Sure.’ He reached for his top pocket.

‘Well, send someone else there.’

MacLane rasped a long, annoyed sigh. He loosened his tie and looked lovingly at his hosepipe. ‘Bellamy, I don’t suppose you’d care to step out and get some more coffee?’ The honest cop shook his head, and I thanked God for typecasting. ‘I thought not. Looks like it’s gonna be a long night. Where’s the gumshoe’s statement?’

A piece of very grubby paper was produced. ‘We’ll go through Quick’s submission to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
one more time.’

Several cops groaned. I would have been smug, but my ‘pen’ gag hadn’t got any laughs. I had to be near the edge to use material like that. Bellamy drew a cup of water from the cooler and sprinkled his forehead.

‘Like I said –’ I went into my story – ‘I was supplementing my meagre twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses by working nights for the Fuller Brush Company. I figured a man like Truro Daine, who is well known for being up to his knees in dirt year in year out, would have a lot of use for their product, and decided to call on him to give a heavy pitch for the latest range of fine-bristled superswift specials. I went up to his suite at the Monogram and was just opening my sample case when, imagine my surprise…’

A telephone jangled. MacLane scooped the receiver up and grunted into it. He wasn’t happy. Life is full of tragedies like that.

‘You got lucky, gumshoe. This time. Turn him loose, boys.’

‘You mean I’m not a desperate killer after all?’

‘You make me sick. If this didn’t come all the way from the top, I’d have you walk under a squad car on the way out of the building. It happens all the time. Out there is a whole world full of garbage and it gives me ulcers to throw one more shred of scum back on the heap.’

‘I love you too, captain.’

Bellamy restrained his superior. When the captain had calmed down, Bellamy handed me my wallet, belt, tie, gun and shoelaces. I distributed them properly about my person, and put on my hat. I was helped down to street level and pushed out.

It was still raining.

I
n the square, Susan considered her next move. She walked across the grass, superstitiously avoiding Daine’s shadow. The giant fiddler was just a statue now. Truro Daine had been inside it briefly but was gone now, to some other similie. She wasn’t tired; indeed, she felt the stronger for her Frankensteinian exploits. Creating life was always exciting. And there was only her mind to wear out in this Dream. She performed a few minor alterations on her body to make her feel better. She still wanted to look as she did in waking life, but there were improvements she could make. Steel threaded through her muscles, and her senses became as sharp as a cat’s. That gave her a feeling of competence. An illusory feeling, admittedly, but illusions were as good a currency as any in the City.

The square was busy now, with circling traffic and people coming and going in and out of Police Headquarters. She saw prisoners being hauled out of squad cars up to the doors. Uniformed cops went on shift in pairs, joking, or came off singly, depressed. It would always be the partner with a wife and kids who got shot down in the line of duty, giving his bachelor buddy the chance poignantly to break the news to his loved ones. The MGM Building and City Hall were still closed for business, but Susan had a feeling they were at least peopled with night watchmen and janitors. Earlier, she had had the impression she was alone with her enemy. She made her way across the road at a pedestrian crossing, and stood in front of City Hall.

It was still as good a place as any to start. Mayor Donlevy wouldn’t be in his office at this hour, but the files should be there. She hoped his maps were more up to date and accurate than the one she had bought at the newsstand. Maps were the key to her plan.

There were two uniformed guards outside the building. She closed her eyes and rethought them, blanking their memories and recreating them from the emptiness up. They didn’t need to be rounded characterisations, just functional bit parts. She cut corners, gave them short-term memories borrowed from a pair of marshals she had Dreamed for
Neutrino Junction
, and had them limit their thoughts to immediate matters. She dropped her face into their memories and wrapped some associations around it. Neither of them knew her well, but they would recognise her as the secretary of someone important in the administration. She knit a few complex feelings around her own image, made her attractive but out of their league. Made them envy the lucky swells who would be escorting her to nightclubs and restaurants, but also gave them a sense that she wasn’t stuck up, that she was a genuine person.

The irony of that wasn’t lost on her.

She confidently walked up the steps, smiling.

‘Evenin’, miss,’ said the senior guard. ‘Workin’ late?’

‘I’m afraid so. Had to drop a date.’ She gave him a mental image of Robert Preston waiting outside a nightclub with flowers and a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

‘Cryin’ shame.’

‘The wheels of Gunmint grind on.’

He didn’t pick up her anachronism. ‘You said it.’

She was in. She wondered whether to wipe the guards again. No, she’d only have to go through the same rigmarole to get out.

If she thought about it, there’d be a private elevator to the Mayor’s office, and the key would be in her handbag.

She crossed the lobby, her heels clacking on the marbled floor, and took out her key. The elevator was waiting, of course. She pressed the only button, and the cage was drawn up into the heart of City Hall. She watched the floors go by, glimpsing the unfinished outlines of empty offices. Rows of typewriters under slipcases. Banks of filing cabinets. A few faceless mannequins at desks, waiting to be enlivened. Daine wasn’t bothering with fine detail here. No one was expected.

The office was what she had imagined. A large, badly painted portrait of Mayor Donlevy hung over the desk. He looked shifty, and the painter hadn’t known enough to disguise the bulge under his jacket which made his chain of office lie uneven. That was either a handgun or a wad of kickback dollars. The Mayor had a reputation in the City as the best politician money could buy. The floor around the wastepaper basket was littered with paper aeroplanes made out of urgent requests from various City officials. If the plane made it into the basket, the Mayor would authorise expenditure for whatever scheme was proposed. That’s why they had torn down the children’s hospital to make room for the miniature golf course. In his portrait, Donlevy was a fine figure of a man; without his wig, false teeth, heel lifts and corset, he would be a regular gnome. For a moment, Susan had an idea she knew what Truro Daine saw when he looked at anyone in the Gunmint.

The documents on the desk weren’t that revealing. There was a report from a private detective called Lloyd Nolan to the effect that James Stewart’s character was completely unblemished. He once took a swim late at night with a drunken socialite, but that had turned out to be entirely innocent and there was testimony from Cary Grant to prove it. And, although he had recently been known to talk to an invisible giant white rabbit and peek at his neighbours through binoculars, neither of these traits were deemed enough to blacken him in the eyes of the electors. The report had been scribbled on obscenely in an infants’-school hand, presumably by the Mayor himself. The top right-hand drawer of the desk contained the traditional little tin box and a pistol. She didn’t bother searching further.

The maps were in rolls on an architect’s easel in the corner of the office. She switched on an overhead lamp and unrolled them one by one. There were twenty-five, covering the entire city in fine detail. They were at rest just now, as if Daine were pausing in his expansion or had met some unforeseen check. After pushing the desk and all the other furniture to the walls, she spread out four maps on the floor, matching the edges and weighing down the corners with whatever came to hand – the wastepaper basket, the little tin box, the gun. That gave her a God’s-eye view of the centre of town. Then she laid down as many of the others as she could fit in the space. She Dreamed up a new hobby for the Mayor, collecting antique paperweights, and made good use of them. When there were still twenty square miles of maps left over after all the available floor was used up, she created a curtained alcove into which the jigsaw could extend.

Walking gingerly, so as not to disturb the maps, she trod across the City, as her make-believe monster had done earlier. She carried the Mayor’s swivel chair, put it down over City Hall, and sat in it. As she had expected, the map was vague around the edges. In places, blocks were only pencilled in. There were even areas marked ‘unknown territory’, tropical jungles in the heart of concrete and clay. She gripped the arms of her chair and relaxed a little, eyes closed. She spread herself out, descending through her body into the chair, then seeping through the map, feeling the contours of the City, spreading out like spilled water seeping into the paper.

The rough-sketched areas were an easy start. She simply sucked them blank, feeling the change through the paper, distantly aware of that part of the City being snapped out of existence as a string is snapped unknotted by a skilled conjurer. There was white on the paper, but in the City a black hole would have appeared. Take out the externals, and the darkness floods back in. She ringed the City with darkness, then crept inward, collapsing main streets and buildings as she contracted her mind, filtering the Dream through her own consciousness, ironing it out. Wherever her mind roamed, she left Nothing behind her.

It would have been easier to delete the file from the outside, but that would have mindwiped Daine, Tunney and herself. So she had to do it the slow way. She had also considered that Vaclav Trefusis would eventually get tired enough to stretch his authority and pull the plug anyway, listing his Dreamers as acceptable losses. To put that off, she needed to make headway that would be noticed in the real world.

Chinatown went, and the waterfront. Poverty Row faded. Paramount Plazas disappeared. Darkness crawled through the suburbs like a flood of black ink, washing away the empty shells of uninteresting houses. Buildings thinned like ghosts, became transparent climbing-frame constructions, and fell in on themselves. Characters were deleted, at first in twos and threes, then wholesale. Some struggled against her, but few held out for more than a moment or two. Soon, she would be alone in the Nothing, with Daine and Tunney. Then they could settle things.

Her mind was checked. Not by a character, but by a building. An insignificant building. An abandoned warehouse at 99 River Street. Susan thought all abandoned warehouses in the City were hide-outs, but this one wasn’t even that. There had been a shoot-out there once, there were bullet pocks in the walls, but it had been a very brief scene, and no one had bothered to return. Two of the interior walls were painted canvas, and the others only more substantial so they could support the catwalks necessary for the fight. A coastguard hero called Ralph Byrd had slugged and shot it out with a gang of Bela Lugosi’s thugs, and escaped from certain death by buzzsaw. That had been a long time ago. Nobody remembered.