Wild Cards [07] Dead Man's Hand (3 page)

" I don't buy it," Jay said.

"If Elmo is so goddamned innocent, where is he?" Ellis asked, toying with her stapler. "We searched his room. The bed hadn't been slept in. He hasn't returned to the Palace. Where'd he go?"

Jay shrugged. "Out." She had him there, but he was damned if he was going to admit it. "Seems to me you got another candidate who's a lot riper than Elmo."

Captain Angela Ellis slammed down the stapler and blew a long plume of smoke across the room. 'Ah. Right. The ace-of-spades killer." She didn't sound impressed. "We're going to find Elmo," she promised, crushing out her cigarette. 'And when we do, five'll get you ten it turns out your dwarf pal dropped that card. You can buy a deck of playing cards at any five-and-ten. You're supposed to be a bright boy, Ackroyd. Figure it out for yourself."

"Maybe I will," Jay said.

Angela Ellis didn't like that one bit. Her bright green eyes narrowed as she stood up. "Lemme make one thing real clear. I don't like PIs. And I don't like aces. So you can probably guess how I feel about ace PIs. You start getting in our way on this one, you can just kiss your license good-bye."

"You're beautiful when you're angry," Jay said.

Ellis ignored him. "I don't like bodies cluttering up my precinct either."

"You must be unhappy a lot of the time," Jay said as he headed for the door. He paused in the doorway to study her little glass-walled cubicle. "This really where they killed Captain Black?" he asked innocently.

"Yes," she snapped, irritated. Jay figured he'd hit a sore point. Knowing the NYPD, they probably hadn't even gotten her a new chair. "What the hell are you doing?" she said.

"Getting a good picture of the place in my head," Jay said. He smiled crookedly and made his right hand into a gun, three fingers folded down, thumb cocked like a hammer, index finger pointed at Angela Ellis. "I'm a good boy, Captain. If I bump into your killer, I'll want to send him right here to you."

She looked puzzled for a moment, then flushed when she remembered what he could do. "Aces," she muttered. "Get the hell out of here."

He did. Kant and Maseryk were back in the squad room. "Captain on the rag?" Jay asked as he passed. They exchanged looks and watched him leave. Jay went out the front door, walked around the block, went back in, and took the steps down to the basement.

The precinct records were kept in a dimly lit, lowceilinged room next to the boiler, part of which had been the coal cellar once upon the time. Now it held a couple of computer consoles, a xerox machine, a wall of overflowing steel filing cabinets, and one very pale, very short, very nearsighted policeman.

"Hello, Joe," Jay said.

Joe Mo turned around and sniffed at the stale air. He was just under five feet tall, stooped and potbellied, with a complexion the color of a mushroom. Tiny pink eyes peered out from behind the largest, thickest pair of tinted spectacles that Jay had ever seen. White, hairless hands rubbed together nervously. Mo had been the first joker on the NYPD, and for more than a decade he'd been the only joker on the NYPD. His appointment, forced through under the banner of affirmative action during Mayor Hartmann's administration in the early seventies, had drawn so much fire that the department had promptly hidden him down in Records to keep him out of public view. Joe hadn't minded. He liked Records almost as much as he liked basements. They called him Sergeant Mole.

"Popinjay," Mo said. He adjusted his glasses. The milk white of his skin was shocking against the dark blue of his uniform, and he always wore his cap, night and day, even indoors. "Is it true?"

"Yeah, it's true," Jay told him. Mo had been a pariah when he'd joined the force, even in Fort Freak. No one had wanted to partner him, and he'd been made unwelcome in the usual cop bars. He'd been doing his off duty drinking in the Crystal Palace since its doors first opened, paying for every drink in a rather ostentatious show of rectitude, and collecting ten times his tab under the table for acting as Chrysalis's eyes and ears in the cophouse.

"I heard you were the one found the body," Joe Mo said. "Nasty business, wasn't it? Makes you wonder what Jokertown is coming to. You'd think
she'd
be safe, if anyone was." He blinked behind the dark, thick lenses. "What can I do for you, dear boy?"

"I need to see the file on the ace-of-spades killer."

"Yeoman," Joe Mo said.

"Yeoman," Jay Ackroyd repeated thoughtfully. It came back to him then. Yeoman, I
don't
care
for this,
Chrysalis had said with ice in her voice, that night a year and a half ago when they'd faced off in the darkened taproom of the Palace. She was always a master of understatement. "I remember," he said.

"Why, there hasn't been a new bow-and-arrow killing in more than a year," Mo said. "You really think he's the one?"

"I hope not," Jay said. Yeoman had entered the taproom silent as smoke, and before anyone even noticed him, he'd had a hunting arrow notched and ready. But Hiram Worchester had stepped in the way in righteous indignation, and Jay had gotten the drop on the guy. Suddenly Yeoman was gone in a pop of in-rushing air. Jay Ackroyd was a projecting teleport. When his right hand made a gun, he could pop his targets anyplace he knew well enough to visualize.

Only he'd sent that fucker Yeoman to the wrong damn place. "I had the sonofabitch dead to rights, Joe," he said. "I could have popped him right into the Tombs. Instead I sent him to the middle of the Holland Tunnel, God knows why." Something about his tone when he'd replied to Chrysalis, maybe, or the loathing in his eyes when he glanced toward Wyrm, or maybe the fact that he'd had the decency to hesitate when Hiram stepped forward and blocked his shot. Or it could have been the girl he had with him, the masked blonde in the string bikini who seemed so fresh and innocent.

It hadn't been what you call a deliberate, conscious decision; a lot of the time Jay just went on gut instinct. But if he'd been wrong that night, then Chrysalis had paid for it with her life. "I really need to see that file," he said.

Joe Mo made a sad little clucking sound. "Why, that file's up on the captain's desk; Jay. She sent down for it right away, soon as the squeal came in. Of course, I made a xerox before I sent it up. It always pays to make a xerox. Sometimes things get misplaced, and you don't want to lose any valuable documents." He blinked slowly, looked around. "Now where did I put that? It's a wonder I ever find anything, with my eyes."

The copies were on top of the xerox machine. Jay riffled through the folder, rolled up the papers and slid them under his blazer, replaced them with two twenties. "I'm sure you'll sniff them out," he said.

"If not," Joe said, with a wide pink smile, "I can always wait till the captain returns the originals, and xerox another set." He busied himself with some filing, but when Jay opened the door to leave, he called out quietly, "Popinjay." Jay looked back. "What?"

"Find the bastard," Joe Mo said. He took off his tinted specs, and his pale pink eyes implored. "All of us will help," he promised, and Jay knew he wasn't talking about the police.

As he drove down Route 17, alone, Brennan was already missing Jennifer. He couldn't blame her for not accompanying him on a quest to find Chrysalis's murderer. And it didn't help any that she'd been right. They had a quiet, beautiful life. Why was he so ready to return to the death waiting him in the city?

It wasn't, Brennan knew, because he enjoyed the killing and the violence. He'd rather build a garden than dodge bullets in a stinking, garbage-choked alley. It all came down to what Jennifer had said about letting things go. He just couldn't get Chrysalis out of his mind. He didn't think of her often. He was too satisfied with his life with Jennifer to dwell morbidly on what might have been with another woman.

But sometimes at night he'd lie awake with Jennifer asleep beside him and remember the crystal lady. He'd remember her invisible flesh flushed to a delicate pink with the passion of their lovemaking, he'd remember her cries and moves in the dark. He'd remember and wonder what it would've been like if she'd accepted his offer of protection and love. He would look at Jennifer asleep at his side and know that he was happy and content, but he would still wonder. The memory of her was a throbbing ache that wouldn't leave him alone:

He buried the van in the Tomlin International parking lot and caught a taxi to Manhattan, where he took a room in a cheap but dirty hotel on the fringe of Jokertown. The first thing to do, he decided, was visit the Crystal Palace. He slipped on his mask for the first time in over a year and left the hotel carrying his bow case.

3:00 P.M.

ACE-OF-SPADES KILLER SLAYS JOKERTOWN BARKEEP, the Post screamed.

The
Jokertown Cry
was less generic. CHRYSALIS MURDERED, it said beside a two-column picture. The Cry was the only paper in the city that regularly ran photographs of jokers.

JOKERS DESCEND ON ATLANTA AS DEMOCRATS CONVENE, said the front page of the
Times.
Thousands of them had headed south in support of Senator Gregg Hartmann, the presidential frontrunner. But in this year's crowded Democratic field, nobody was even close to a majority, and a brokered convention was being predicted. There were widespread fears of violence should Hartmann be denied the nomination. Already there were reports of ugly clashes between Hartmann's jokers and the fundamentalist supporters of Reverend Leo Barnett.

Jay usually ranked politicians right alongside used-car salesmen, pimps, and the guy who invented pay toilets, but Hartmann did seem to be a breed apart. He'd met the candidate a few times at the fundraisers Hiram had hosted at Aces High. Hiram was a big Hartmann supporter, and Jay never could resist the lure of free food and drink. Senator Gregg seemed intelligent, effective, and compassionate. If somebody had to be president, it might as well be him. He probably didn't stand a joker's chance of getting anywhere near the nomination.

The political bullshit took up the whole front page; he couldn't find any mention of Chrysalis anywhere. Knowing the
Times,
Jay figured tomorrow's edition would have a brief obit and that'd be it. Brutal joker murders weren't the kind of news that's fit to print. That made Jay angriest of all. "How do you know when a joker's been dead about three days?" the news vendor asked him. His voice was flat and lifeless, the voice of a man grimly going through a ritual that had lost its meaning. Jay looked up from the headlines. Jube Benson had been a fixture on the corners of Hester Street and the Bowery for as long as there had been a Jokertown. Walrus, they called him. He was a joker himself, three hundred pounds of greasy blue-black flesh, big curved tusks at the corners of his mouth, a broad domed skull covered with tufts of stiff red hair. Jube's wardrobe seemed to consist exclusively of Hawaiian shirts. This afternoon he was wearing a magenta item in a tasteful pineapple-and-banana print. Jay wondered what Hiram would say.

Jube knew more joker jokes than anyone else in Jokertown, but this time Jay had the punch line. "He smells a lot better," he said wearily. "That one's older than your hat, Walrus." Jube took the battered porkpie hat off his head and turned it over self-consciously in his thick, three-fingered hands. "I never made her laugh," he said. "All those years, I came by the Palace every night, always with a new joke. I never got a single laugh out of her."

"She didn't think being a joker was very funny," said Jay. "You got to laugh," Jube said. "What else is there?" He put his hat back on. "I hear you were the one that found her."

"Word gets around quick," Jay said.

"It gets around quick," Jube agreed.

"She phoned me last night," Jay told him. "She wanted to take me on as a bodyguard. I asked her how long and she couldn't tell me. Maybe she wouldn't tell me. I asked her what she was scared of. She laughed it off and said I'd found her out, it was just a ruse, she was really hot for my body. That was when I realized how shaky she was. She was trying her damnedest to sound wry and cool and British, like nothing was wrong, but her accent kept slipping. Something had frightened her badly. I want to know what, Jube."

"All I know is what I read in the papers," Jube said. Jay just gave him a look. As long as Chrysalis had been brokering information, the Walrus had been one of her chief snitches. All day long Jube stood in his kiosk, watching and listening, joking and gossiping with everyone who stopped to buy a paper. "C'mon," Jay said impatiently.

Jube glanced nervously up and down the street. No one was near them. "Not here," the fat joker said. "Let me close up. We'll go to my place."

Brennan watched with wry amusement as the armless joker pickpocket worked the gawkers who had gathered around the Crystal Palace. The dipper was dressed in threadbare, but carefully patched clothes. His pants were specially tailored to fit his third, centrally located leg that ended in an oddly configured foot whose toes were more dexterous than most peoples fingers. He was using this limb to pick the pockets of his unsuspecting victims.

A bright yellow crime-scene ribbon roped off the Palace's canopied entrance. The crowd gathered before it was gossipingmostly wildly and inaccurately-about the Crystal Palace and its mysterious proprietress. Newsies and street merchants were working the crowd along with the pickpocket, who suddenly turned with the sixth sense of the often-hunted and looked right at Brennan.'

Brennan nodded back and the three-legged joker cut through the crowd and headed toward him, lurching in a peculiar rocking gait, sometimes placing his third "foot" on the ground to balance himself.

"Hello, Mr. Y," he murmured.

Brennan nodded again. The joker's name was Tripod. He was a hustler, a small-time grifter who lived on the edge of the law. During Brennan's last stay in the city he'd been one of his best sources of information. He was dependable for a snitch. He didn't have a drug habit and he was loyal. When he was bought, he stayed bought.

"Pretty awful, what happened, Mr. Y," he offered in his quiet, deferential manner. If he wondered about Brennan s sudden reappearance after a year's absence, he said nothing.