Weird Detectives (43 page)

They had both served in something called The War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.

Her war occurred at about the same time as WWII and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic: getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends with enemy minds in theirs who tore their own throats out. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it and I knew it made her sad.

For other guys maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me it was like a daydream became real.

She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me which I thought about as I walked to work that day was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.

Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.

At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.

The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few flyers and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.

I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man, I think it was her husband, was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”

“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.

I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get . . . ”

“I was going to volunteer. How’s Jim? The operator says he was shouting at you.”

“He’s quiet right now. Sam, this whole case is strange. I’ve tried half a dozen times to call Mrs. Culpepper, you know while her husband’s at work. No answer. They’re not listed in the telephone book. Jim’s the only one she’s talked to. And he’s . . . not good. Last night he was talking, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. And he told me someone was in his head. He’s been saying that for the last couple of days. It’s never been this bad.”

“Was it more than just shouting at you, Anne?”

She said, “This is what I’ve been afraid of.”

“Anne, I’ll be out there as fast as I can. Is there some place you can go meanwhile?

“My aunt’s a few blocks over.”

“Go there right now. Don’t talk to Jim. Just leave. Understand?”

Anne said she did. I doubted her.

Then I made a call to Police Chaplain Dineen. Young private Kevin Dineen served as an altar boy in France for the famous Father Duffy of the 69th. He came back home and found a vocation. It was said that Father Dineen spiked the sacramental wine with gin and he was reputed to get a bit frisky with the widows he comforted.

But it was Dineen who got called when O’Malley at the Ninth Precinct, a fellow vet, was at the Thanksgiving table eating mashed potatoes with the barrel of his loaded revolver while all his children looked on. Dineen got O’Malley to hand the weapon over and had the kids smiling at the game he and their daddy were playing.

When I explained as much of the situation as he needed to know all Dineen asked was, “Do we need an ambulance or a squad car?”

“Both,” I said. Before going downstairs to meet the chaplain I took my service .38 and holster out of the locked drawer, cleaned and loaded the revolver, buckled on the holster. It seemed I remembered doing the same thing in my dream the night before.

I called Up to the Minute and told Gracie I wouldn’t be back until late and not to wait up. She laughed. As I adjusted my hat and went out the door, I remembered something from the dream. Bertrade lay among pillows and bedclothes, looked right at me and spoke about bait and traps.

Ten minutes later Father Dineen and I were in his brand new Oldsmobile four-door headed through the drizzle for Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn. His car had a siren and a flashing light. We went through red lights; traffic cops waved us on at intersections. Dineen was on the radio to a squad car out in Park Slope as we crossed the Bridge with a motorcycle escort and he cursed because we weren’t going faster.

Anger was what I felt: anger at the one who had maybe screwed around with Toomey’s mind and caused Anne pain. They weren’t even the object of this operation. I probably wasn’t either. It struck me that they and I were just bait in some game the Gentry were playing.

When we arrived at Sixteenth Street, a crowd had gathered in the drizzle and homicide was out in force. Anne Toomey must have tried one last time to talk to Jim. She was at the bottom of the stairs. Jim had stood halfway up when he shot her twice in the face before pumping two shots into his open mouth.

For the young homicide detective who took my statement this was open-and-shut murder/suicide. The second bullet in the shooter’s mouth was nothing more than a dying twitch, not the sign someone else was operating Jim’s hand. And this young man was confident his career was not going to end like Toomey’s or mine.

What I wanted to tell him was, “The creature that had James Toomey in its control used Toomey’s own hand to eliminate him and cover its tracks.” My actual statement stuck strictly to the facts with nothing more than a brief mention of the Culpepper case.

Father Dineen drove like a cop—that is, as if he owned the road. He knew something was up but not even a couple of belts from the ecclesiastic flask made me talk. An image of Anne and Jimmy dead in their house was burning a hole in my brain.

It was very late afternoon that the chaplain dropped me off in front of the Main Post Office, told me to go home and get some rest.

On the ride back from the Toomey’s I’d thought about the dream and Bertrade. Usually dreams are vivid when you wake up but as you try to grab them they turn to nothing and disappear. This one started out vague but seemed to linger.

Climbing the post office stairs I remembered another fragment. Bertrade, lovely as I’ve ever seen her, wore nothing but a silver moon on a chain around her neck and touched my arm. So slippery was the memory that I began to wonder if this dream might have been something planted in my head by an enemy.

The little unmarked window was where I always picked up mail from the Kingdom Beneath the Hill. And I wanted to talk to that clerk and find out what he knew. The window was shut, which had never happened before.

The guy at the Overseas window didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about the window next door. He said this wasn’t his regular assignment and that I should try the next day.

Walking slowly across that lobby, I thought of the ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I was a letter being sliced open and I felt real small and insignificant. But I started to put things into some kind of order.

The elves had set up Jim and Anne Toomey as bait for me. First they invented the Culpepper job and hired Jim, who needed the work. Then they made sure he couldn’t function and put it in his head and Anne’s that they should ask me. And I was the bait to lure Bertrade.

Taking my seat in the coffee shop across from the Van Neiman Building, it occurred to me that maybe on our first encounter Bertrade and Darnel had used me as bait to catch the elf. Knowing the ways of the Gentry, that seemed quite possible.

The waitress and counter man didn’t notice that I was a repeat customer. I figured that the elves wouldn’t probe as long as I was doing what they wanted. They didn’t have to worry. My memory of Anne and Jimmy had burned a hole in my brain. And that may have been what the elves expected when they killed them.

That they were keeping me in play, letting me stay alive, could mean they’d made Bertrade aware that I was in danger. And it would also mean they weren’t sure where she was or what she was going to do. That Bertrade avoided direct contact with me was a sign that she relied on me to play my part, walk into the trap, and ensnare the trapper. It would also mean she knew that the spell that shielded my thoughts could be broken by the enemy.

Just then Culpepper, whoever he was, came through the doors of the Van Neiman Building with his briefcase. I got up and followed him. It went like before. He walked west and I followed on the other side of the street. I wondered how much Culpepper knew, what promises and rewards had they made to him?

Seeing him go through this routine reminded me of seeing the enemy in France, just before we saw action. I saw a couple of German prisoners, starving, flea-bitten men, cramming army rations into their mouths while our guys stared like they were exhibits in a zoo. That sight took away all of the enemy’s mystery.

I stopped on the east side of Tenth Avenue, watched from a doorway when Culpepper crossed and went into the apartment building. As I waited, a light went on in the third floor window.

A rhythmic pounding came from over on the river. It sounded like they were driving piles. The earlier drizzle had become rain. Workers headed home at a brisk pace. The streets were getting empty.

Stake-out work is fine, outdoor labor, good for the health and spirits. But I’d noticed a bar on the corner with a clear view of the apartment house.

It was a Wednesday night with a moderate-sized crowd and a cowboy movie on the TV above the bar. The guys drinking spotted a cop and looked away when I stepped inside. I ordered a rye and water and kept my eye on the apartment house doorway.

I was pretty sure they wouldn’t leave without me. There was a good chance I’d be dead before long. But death hadn’t yet happened and I’d given it several very good chances.

In the dark, a long freight train ran south on the elevated tracks. When I looked further west beyond Twelfth Avenue the pier at the end of the street seemed lit up.

About the time I began to wonder if I was crazy and Culpepper really was just a guy stepping out on his wife I saw through someone else’s eyes. They were moving uptown along the river’s edge, I saw a pier and a big yacht all lit up. Suddenly that disappeared. Was this skirmishing between elves and fairies?

Like it was a signal, the one called Culpepper came out the door of the apartment house. He carried an umbrella and held it over Mimi White. The game was on. They headed west and I followed them.

A good detective recognizes a pattern. Once more I was heading onto a pier at night to encounter one of the Gentry.

As we crossed Eleventh Avenue a big ocean liner sailed up the Hudson with every light on board shining. It looked like a floating city block. The tugboats guiding it honked at each other. I saw the liner and then for an instant I saw it again from the viewpoint of someone down at the river. The pile driving paused briefly and all was as quiet as Manhattan ever gets.

Approaching Twelfth Avenue I saw that the old freighter from the day before was gone. In its place was the ocean going yacht with lights on deck that I’d seen through another’s eyes.

At certain moments time gets fluid. At Aisne-Marne, the platoon was pinned by machine gun fire. The gunners had waited until we were within a hundred yards. The lieutenant was dead. Someone was screaming. Later I found out the whole company was pinned; the battalion had gone to earth. The minutes we were down went by like hours.

The machine guns fired a short burst right over me; fired a burst to my left, another further along. I knew that it was rat-like little guys going through the motions. It would be a bit before they’d come back my way.

I pulled a pin with my right hand. I jumped up with a grenade in my left. The Krauts were firing from a gap in an embankment a hundred yards away. I’d hurled dummy grenades in practice, knew their weight. I judged the arc and tossed. “Get down,” someone yelled. The grenade hit the side of the gap, bounced in the air.

As I dove for cover I was knocked flat and the cold knife raced up my leg. A muffled bang sounded, a man screamed, another cried out, the machine gun fire stopped and my war was over.

Crossing Twelfth Avenue, walking into the trap, I told myself that all I needed was a few seconds of clarity, like I’d had thirty-two years before.

Maybe Bertrade had given me up. But I was going to deal out payment for Jim and Anne. All I needed was those few seconds.

Culpepper and Mimi stopped just inside the gates at the end of the pier. A couple of hundred feet beyond them the yacht had lights on the gangplank, atop the cabins, shining through the portholes.

A figure—tall and thin, wavering slightly—stood on the deck leaning on the rail. He was faced away from me. But I could recognize one of the Fair Folk, whether elf or fairy. He was too far away to hit with a hand gun. I wished I had a grenade.

A scream in the night came from downriver. At almost the same moment the pile driver started up out in the water. Distant sirens sounded but they were on fire trucks and going the wrong way. The Fair Folk didn’t want any human interference.

A breeze blew the rain in my face as I crossed the Avenue with my raincoat open. My arms were at my side. The .38 in my hand was hidden by the coat flapping.

The ones I knew as Culpepper and Mimi faced me as I approached. I was going to tell them to get out of my way before they got hurt.

But their eyes were blank. For an instant I saw myself from their viewpoint as I walked past them. Someone was looking out through them like they were TV cameras. Someone was in my head.