Three A.M. (6 page)

I cleaned the ten-by-ten space as best I could for about half an hour, shoving everything into drawers without the slightest trace of order. I’d been trying to arrange the photos from Eddie’s warehouse chronologically—it seemed like most of his clients were missing material from the same time, when the sky turned from haze to real fog. Hours of busy work was erased in seconds.

I grabbed two mismatched coffee mugs and a little blue plastic pitcher. I figured it would be best to seem prepared for her.

In the kitchen, I lost a point. She was short, fat, and dressed in clean, pressed clothes. Lipstick. Why she still bothered was beyond me. I tried to avoid contact with her dull, watery eyes smiling behind thick glasses, but she wouldn’t let me.

“Hi, there! How are you?”

Nappy brown hair and pudgy cheeks and that stupid smile as she filled a large plastic cup at the tap. The fuck was she so happy about?

“Morning,” I mumbled.

“Actually, it’s just past twelve, so good afternoon,” she practically beamed.

“Oh. Good afternoon,” I said, pausing after the
oh
and sounding about as pleasant as I felt.

I waited until she left with her tepid water before cleaning out the bacteria cultures growing in my mugs. I filled the pitcher with coffee from the tap in the wall and grabbed a few napkins off the counter. The coffee tap never ran dry. I never had any idea who filled whatever container it came from. It was awful stuff but par for the course no matter where you looked. All the coffee in this town must come from the same greenhouse. Gourmet had long gone.

I went back to my office, sat down, arranged the mugs and pitcher, and waited. For an hour. Then longer.

I smoked cigarettes, tossing the plain white pack from hand to hand then pausing to study it. It had the word
CIGARETTES
printed across it in black letters. There were no tobacco brands left. God save us if the liquor ran dry. Halfheartedly, I flipped through notes no longer pertinent to Eddie’s case. I got up, dumped out the cold coffee, refilled the pitcher, and then waited some more. I nodded off at some point.

*   *   *

I woke up confused. It was quiet, but I knew something had awoken me. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and shook my head to clear it. Then a knocking sounded on the door, so faint it was almost lost in the gentle hum of the building’s vents. I rose, stretched quickly, and opened the door.

Rebecca wore slim khaki pants and a conservative button-down shirt beneath a gray blazer. She was simply beautiful. Try as she might to hide beneath these clothes, she was just as pretty as when she wore that slutty red number. I stepped back into the office and wordlessly gestured for her to come in.

“It’s so strange to actually find you here,” she said quietly as she entered the room and stepped past me. I leaned close to her blond hair as she crossed in front of me and breathed in before she turned. She smelled sweet, vaguely like honey, but damp. Like everyone always does. We stood there, facing each other for a moment.

Then I turned crisply and walked behind my desk, sitting down and indicating she should do the same. “Coffee?”

“Sure. Thank you,” she said. I filled her cup and then my own and then leaned back in my chair, sizing her up. I wanted her to make the first moves … set the tone and pacing of our first official meeting. Evidently she was waiting for me to do the same; she looked up at me a few times with those pale, gray eyes, but mostly Rebecca sat, staring down into her lukewarm coffee and seeming very uncomfortable. Fuck it. I started things.

“So let’s take it from the top, huh?”

“I … yes.” She stammered, setting down her coffee mug. “I guess I just … start…” She looked at me imploringly.

“Talking,” I said softly. “You just start talking.” I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my desk drawer, took one, and offered her the pack.

“No thanks, I don’t—don’t want one. Thanks.”

Well, that was odd. She had almost covered it up.… I made my first note of the day … aside from her clothes and persistent beauty.

“Okay. Um … Okay, Tom. The dead man. Samuel Ayers. He was murdered about … two weeks ago now. Maybe twenty days. I’m not sure, but I can figure it out if you need me to.”

“I’ll need you to.”

“Right. Of course you will. He was killed in an alley off of Eighth Avenue. No witnesses, of course, and I … I don’t know a motive or anything.… I just know that the man they have in prison didn’t do it.”

“We’ll get there. Tell me more about Mr. Ayers. Everything you know.” My eyes drifted to the gentle rise of her breasts, not quite concealed beneath her jacket.

“What? Well … not much, I’m afraid. He…” She caught me staring and faltered. “He was middle aged; he worked some job for the government. I don’t know much about him.”

“Where did you get fifty thousand dollars?” I tried to catch her off guard with this. It seemed to have worked, to an extent.

“I … don’t know if that matters, really. I have the money. I can prove it.”

“Rebecca, how? How do you have it? Dirty money stains every hand it touches. I need to know about it. Now.”

She took a sip of coffee. I could see her fight not to purse her lips against the bitter, tepid beverage. “My parents were rich. They died and then I was … rich. I don’t have much left now. But I have enough to pay you and—”

“Why come right out with a number that high? Hmm? Just seems odd to me. You walk in off the street and throw that sum in my lap? Why?”

“Because … the police wanted even more to complete their investigation. I didn’t have more. So I offered you what I could. Because the police won’t want you asking questions about this. You’ll want all that money when it’s over.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.” I took a long, slow drag off my cigarette and laid it down in the ashtray. It’s pewter and shaped like a shallow bowl with a large flat lip and has only one groove carved in it to hold a smoke.

She looked away; her eyes traveled around the room, from the file cabinet to my cigarette to the door.

“Okay, who’s the guy in jail?”

She looked up at me. Sighed. Looked like she might cry for a minute. This was certainly a different girl than I had seen two nights ago. But she was smart. Deceptive. I could tell, and knew that likely—very likely—both sides of her were beards for some deeper, hidden person. Some self-serving, self-sustaining core. Hook me with a sexy red dress, soften me with moist eyes, and then snap the trap closed. My guess was that this was a no-money trap. I fucking hated no-money traps. They come, use you, and disappear into the fog. I knew she was using me but couldn’t figure out what for. I felt that maybe there was some benefit for me, even without the cash. Maybe an insurance policy. If I knew who was behind her, it might help keep my bones intact.

I repeated myself: “Who is in jail?”

“He’s innocent.”

“What’s his name, and what’s your connection?”

“His name is Fallon. We … I love him.” I leaned back in my chair, taking a drag and then stubbing out the cigarette. Well, there it was. Knew it, called it, got it.

“Right.” My face was placid. Eyes cold. It was so strange to see her here, nervous, fidgeting, dressed like a secretary and acting like a scared kid. Even if it was just that, an act, if I had met her today for the first time, I would have been sold. I pulled a pen and one of my yellow pads from a creaky desk drawer and started scratching down notes. No info on Ayers aside from middle-age and government job, police asked for large bribe, Fallon is jailed suspect, lover … I noted how she was acting and dressed … scribbled all this down for a couple minutes, letting her squirm a bit.

“Okay … how are you certain of Fallon’s innocence?”

“Well, he was with me the night it happened. Every night. And he’d never hurt a fly even if I didn’t have a perfect alibi for him. He—”

“What’s his last name?” I interrupted.

She stumbled. “He—his what?”

“His last name. What’s his last name? Shouldn’t take you so long to answer, kid.”

“Samson. It’s Samson.”

“Okay. It’s Samson,” I said, jotting that down and noting her awkwardness. “So … Fallon Samson is with you every night.… Who’s blaming him for killing people out in the fog, then?”

“I don’t know. He was arrested and they wouldn’t tell me anything, because we’re not married or anything. And you know what it’s like trying to learn about trials and get answers from the government and all these days, I’m sure.”

“Yeah. They don’t like questions, do they?”

She shook her head, smiling ruefully, and took a sip of coffee. She choked it down, looking at the dirty linoleum floor.

“Rebecca.” She looked up. “You don’t have to keep drinking that shit to be polite. I know it’s awful.”

Her smile turned from wistful to bright for a fleeting moment. She set the mug down and dabbed at her lips with a gray woolen sleeve. “It’s, um—yeah, it’s a bit rough.”

“It’s horrible. Years I’ve been renting this little box of an office, and it’s consistently the worst fucking coffee you can find in a city full of awful coffee.”

She leaned back, seemed to relax a bit.

“How did you know my bar and my drink? How did you find me?” I asked.

“I … I watched you. I wore a hat, sat there … I watched you from a booth. That’s all. I swear. Nothing sneaky, nothing—”

“Spying on me long enough to know my drink and my habits isn’t sneaky?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. There’s no one that can help people with this kind of thing anymore. You know that. You’re a dying breed, Tom.”

I nodded, looked away, and pretended to be reflective. Pretended to be satisfied with that answer. But really, I was uneasy: she had not been watching me from a booth in Albergue. I notice strangers. Always. The first time she and I had ever been in a room together, she had been a red-dressed, cigarette-smoking seductress. More lies, sweetheart. Fuck. I needed to see proof of the cash. A hefty advance. Soon.

“Okay. Fine. You watched me. How did you know I was someone worth watching? I find my clients these days; they don’t find me.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d be concerned about that. Here—” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a carefully folded piece of paper. I took it from her outstretched hand. It was yellow with age, fragile … familiar.

“No fuckin’ way,” I muttered as I gingerly unfolded it. But there it was.

THOMAS VALE

PRIVATE DETECTIVE &

CLAIMS RECOVERY

My old ad. Sure enough, there was my office number—still 1023—and the number of the phone I keep unplugged except when I want to call out. The last phone book circulated, what, five years ago? I think it was five years back … the same year I first rented out the cell we sat in now.

“Wow … there’s memory lane for you.…” I held the sheet of paper for a few moments longer and then refolded it and handed it back to her. “Same number and everything.”

“I tried to call a few times.”

“Yeah … the phone hasn’t been plugged in for weeks. Maybe months. I keep it in a drawer, in fact.” I pulled open the bottom drawer on my desk and raised the ancient beige telephone to show her, setting it down on the desk between us like some artifact to be pondered. “I plug it in only when I want to make a call and then put it away as soon as I’m done.”

She nodded. I sat still, looking at her for a few seconds. For a bit too long, actually. She makes that easy to do.

“What else do I say? I mean … where do we start? Or do you start?”

“How old are you? Twenty-six?”

Her face flushed slightly, and she swallowed before answering softly. “Yes.”

“What do you do?”

“I … I don’t, really. To be honest. I manage my parents’ estate. What’s left of it, anyway.”

I had to ask the hard question next: “Did they die when the virus struck?”

She looked down, her eyes falling, unfocused, on the phone. The moment hung heavily in the stale air. “My father did. My mother died more recently.”

“I’m sorry.” I paused. “How?”

“Is it really—?… She had a … an embolism, the doctor said.” She looked up at me while she spoke, and then away again as soon as she fell silent.

“Well, again, I’m sorry.” I lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair. “We start like this: I need to know exactly where and when Ayers was killed. So figure that out as soon as you can. I need to know how he died.”

She looked up at me as I exhaled a thin trail of blue gray smoke. “He was shot in the back. Three shots from very close range, they said.”

“The police said?”

“Yes.”

I leaned forward quickly. “Why did the police tell you a detail like that? They don’t tell me shit, and I know some of them. I served in the army with some of them, and they won’t give me the time of day when I go snooping around uptown, so how could you know that, Becca?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was flirting to get information.”

“I can see how that might work. What I don’t see is any kind of envelope or parcel or anything in your hands. One with a lot of cash in it, maybe?”

“I promise you’ll be paid. If you don’t want this, then I’ll just leave now.”

I nodded a few times and took one last, long drag before violently stubbing out my smoke. I exhaled through my nostrils. “Okay. Good enough for now. I need to know more about Fallon. How long you’ve known him. Been with him.” Her eyes darted down and to the left as I spoke his name. “I need to know everyone you’ve talked to since this shooting happened. What you were doing and who you saw in the days before. I need to know lots of things. So why don’t I go get us more shitty coffee.”

4

The orbs came alive as I walked down Seventh Ave. The fog wasn’t bad, and I could see a full three spheres ahead undulating yellow and ocher before settling into their orange glow for the night. The air was colder than it had been in days. It felt good. I buttoned my heavy gray jacket as a shiver ran through my chest, relishing the bracing temperature. It let me know I was awake, aware.

I crossed a few streets, staying on Seventh. In one of the intersections, an older guy nearly walked into me, focusing on a book he held just under his nose. He let out an awkward gasp as I stopped short to avoid a collision, then composed himself, nodded, and ambled on, eyes back on the pages. I wondered if it was a lifelong habit adapted to the mist or if the old guy had begun his literary strolls in the new world.