* * *
Carter took a call from Detective Harrelson, and they arranged to meet in the same not-a-cop-bar where they had met last time. Harrelson sounded distracted, perhaps even worried on the phone, so Carter decided not to ask for details beyond what the cop was prepared to give without prompting, “More weird shit happened.”
* * *
Harrelson was already nursing a beer when Carter arrived. Carter got one for himself at the bar and sat down in the booth with him.
“The way Belasco died was off, right?” said Harrelson.
Carter didn’t know why Harrelson might need reassurance on this point, but offered it anyway. “You know it. Whatever happened to him, somebody made it happen. I don’t know how, but he was murdered.”
Harrelson took a long drink from his glass, and Carter saw that he wasn’t just distracted, or even worried. Harrelson actually seemed afraid.
“There’s been a death in New Jersey. Atlantic City. Every cop on the eastern seaboard has already heard about it, and it’ll be all over the media soon. The brass will spin it, try to make it seem weird, but not
weird
, if you understand me.”
Carter shook his head. “Slow down, man. I’m not following you? Who died?”
“Pit boss at the Oceanic.” Harrelson opened a battered satchel on the upholstered bench beside him and took out a scene photograph. “He was alone having his dinner. Calls for help, they get there and find this.” He slid the picture across the table.
Even before Carter tried to interpret the image, his first impression was that there was a lot of red in it. He looked at it in silence for almost a minute as he tried to understand what he was looking at. There was a desk, covered in what he had to assume was blood, and ragged organic shapes. It was what was behind the desk that confused him. Rationally he knew that people sit behind desks, but this wasn’t a person. It was organic and malformed, lots of blood, and massive. It was like a beached whale. He tried to work out what exactly it was, like teasing the correct image out of a puzzle picture. Even when he understood, it took several more seconds to accept the conclusion as anything other than a random, ridiculous passing thought.
“What,” he said slowly, “the actual fuck?” He looked up at Harrelson. “This is a man? He’s huge!” He was too aghast that anything that massive could be human to even start to think about how the man had died. “I’ve seen some fat fuckers in my time, but … And he was a pit boss?” His understanding of the workings of a casino had taken a knock. While the bosses might spend more time looking at camera banks than they might once have, they would still have to walk the floor pretty frequently. The corpulent body in the picture looked like mere human legs could never hope to lift it.
“Bernie Hayesman, pit manager. That’s what they call them now.”
“And what the hell happened to him? Looks like somebody went in his ribs with a chainsaw.”
Harrelson shook his head. “No. No one else was there. Floorman got the call that Hayesman was in trouble and started running to get to him. She was there inside a minute. Just before she reached the office, Hayesman”—he tapped the picture for emphasis—“
blew up
.”
Carter raised his eyebrows. “There was a bomb?”
“No. Maybe. If there was, it was inside him. He exploded.”
“Jesus,” said Carter. He’d heard of cows farting so much methane that a stray spark could blow up the barn, but he’d never heard of anything like this. He looked at Harrelson suspiciously. “Why did you think I’d be interested in this? I mean, yeah, it’s got gawk value, Christ knows, but what does this have to do with Belasco?”
Harrelson took another picture from a folder in his satchel. It was a driver’s license record. Carter read the name—
Hayesman, Bernard
—and then looked at the picture. Hayesman was in his early fifties, hair well receded, tired eyes, and looked at worst a little fat in the face.
“How did he get from this to that?” asked Carter, indicating the file picture in his hand and then the death scene.
“Yeah, well, there’s the thing. How did he get from that to that in half an hour? Because somehow he managed to put on maybe seven hundred pounds in that time. His clothes were torn, the chair was pretty much grown into him. I don’t
know
what this has to do with Belasco, but two guys die in really strange ways—really,
really
fucking strange ways, you understand me?—within a week of each other, my ears go up. So”—he leaned back—“now you scratch my back. Have you got anything to go on with Belasco?”
Carter considered being evasive, and decided against it. Nobody was paying him for the Belasco investigation, so anything that could kick it into police hands was in his interest. Maybe if there was anything in all this and Harrelson came out smelling of roses, it could only help Carter’s standing with him. Having a friendly cop was a good situation to be in for a PI, after all.
“Maybe. There’s a student at Clave, a postgraduate. Had some kind of disagreement with Belasco. I don’t have anything solid, though. Just some loose ends and strange behaviors I don’t like the look of. I’ll e-mail you what I’ve got, but there’s not much there.”
Harrelson gathered up the pictures and put them away.
“There’s not much of anything in this. Not so far. Just two dead guys who shouldn’t be dead, and no good explanation of what happened to them. Took two trucks to get all the meat from this poor fucker to the morgue. It’s like Belasco all over again; the examiner’s taking a long time to submit his report because, well, holy shit, what can you say about a thing like that?”
“This hasn’t just happened?”
“Nah. They kept a lid on it for as long as they could, and to be honest, I’m impressed they even managed to keep it quiet for four days.”
“Four days?” Carter thought of Waite’s Bill and the world unwinding around him. “What time?”
“The poor son of a bitch was having ribs for his dinner, so … dinnertime. Sometime around dusk, I guess. It’ll say in the report.” He looked curiously at Carter. “Does that mean something to you?”
“Not really. Just a coincidence. Oh, and it means the guy I’ve got eyes on wasn’t in Atlantic City when Hayesman died. I know
exactly
where he was at the time.”
* * *
Later that day he sent Harrelson a few scraps of information: Colt’s name, a couple of photographs, and a little about how Belasco had lost his temper with Colt.
An hour later Harrelson e-mailed back to say mention of a guy who did too well at roulette and had been expelled from the Oceanic had come up in the Hayesman investigation. The description sounded like Colt. The security cameras on the parking lot hadn’t gotten a clear view of the man’s license plate as he drove off after being kicked out, though.
“Does he drive a red Mazda?” wrote Harrelson.
“Fuck,” said Carter when he read that.
A REMINISCENCE OF BERTRAND RUSSELL
Lovecraft seemed quite subdued by her standards when Carter told her what he was working on the next day, and the way it was working out. He didn’t mind giving her details—client confidentiality wasn’t a problem when he was his own client, as had been pointed out—and he needed someone smart to act as a sounding board. Sometimes just talking to somebody about things could help him see them in a different way, even if they didn’t say a word. Just accessing that little part of the brain that wonders how somebody is interpreting what you say can be enough to give a new perspective. In this case, however, he was too distracted by Lovecraft’s silence to gain much by it.
“I can’t see what you’re getting out of this,” she said after some prompting. “Maybe you should walk away from it.”
“You’re kidding? Two men are dead, and I’m involved. I don’t know how I’m involved, but that call from Belasco’s phone means I am.”
“You’re only involved because somebody involved you. That’s not the same thing at all. You haven’t found anything to connect you and Belasco, or with this guy in Atlantic City,
or
with that mathematician. There’s nothing, Dan. Not a damn thing.”
“Nothing I can see yet.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to see. You need to look at this in terms of profit and debit. On the downside, this is occupying your time, wasting your resources, and might just get you killed in some gross and eldritch fashion. On the plus side”—she shrugged—“what? I can’t think of anything.” She noticed him looking at her. “What?”
“‘Eldritch’? Like the guy out of The Sisters of Mercy?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. ‘Eldritch’ means ‘weird.’ Old man H. P. L. was fond of the word. Read much of his stuff and you find yourself using it.”
“What’s it like having somebody famous as an ancestor?”
“Underwhelming. Hey, you said you’d get me a copy of your family tree. Have you got it yet?”
“Oh, right. Yeah.” He took a flash drive from his pocket and handed it over. “Can I have that back when you’re finished with it? It’s a nice one.”
“Sure.” She plugged into the laptop she had behind the counter and waited while the anti-virus software automatically scanned it. “You could have just sent it in an e-mail, you know.”
“I could’ve, but that’s how my aunt sent it to me and as I was coming here anyway, it seemed pointless to.”
Lovecraft looked at him over the top of the monitor, her skin underlit by its glow. She looked smart, bookish, and, Carter realized with a small shock of revelation, attractive.
In his teens, he’d gone through a brief stage of what he had thought of at the time as sensible concerns about race, but which he now saw to be the bigotry of a boy who was frightened about the future, and not sure what about it frightened him so much. The subsequent career at the pointed end of society in the police force puts a man under pressure, and he can either let his prejudices sink in deep, or he can look at society as a pretty flaky machine that is, nevertheless, all we have to be getting on with. In that with machines, the color of the cogs has less to do with things than where they are. He’d taken a step back, and he was glad he did.
He still got a momentary spark of something stupid in its reflexiveness sometimes when he read a news story where some black kid had done some kind of stereotypically black thing that gave a certain strata of white folk a hard-on of righteousness, a spasm of old prejudices. The thing was he knew it, and recognized it as an ugly artifact and not a sincere impulse. It was like having an aging Nazi living in the attic of the mansion of his mind. Occasionally he would hear the thudding of a walking stick on bare floorboards from that part, and a croaking rant about the superiority of the white race. He ignored it every time, and slowly the voice grew weaker and more infrequent.
A small but appreciated bonus of his determined walk away from instinctive racism was that the world had so many more women to appreciate. Once he would have had trouble getting past Lovecraft’s skin. Now, in the glow of the laptop’s screen …
“Why are you staring at me?” Lovecraft’s eyes were visible over the screen top, and they were narrowed.
“I wasn’t. I was just thinking, and my eyes had to be pointed in some direction. Sorry, didn’t mean to stare.” He nodded at the computer. “Find anything to link me with Alfred Hill?”
She didn’t answer for several seconds, concentrating on the genealogical chart. Her eyes weren’t scanning, only fixed on one part of the screen. “No,” she said suddenly. A click of the track pad and the file was closed. “No Hills at all.”
She seemed relieved when the door clicked open and the bell rang. For no reason he could fathom then or later, Carter found the sound of the bell threatening, reminding him specifically of the time when it had rung despite the door being locked. That time, and not the many other times he’d heard it ring normally. There was something mocking in its note, which he knew was subjective but nonetheless caused his hackles to rise.
Lovecraft ignored him, smiling at the customer and tacitly dropping Carter from her attention. Nodding a little ruefully to acknowledge his dismissal, he turned to leave.
William Colt was standing in front of him.
* * *
Colt ignored Carter, and it took a massive effort for Carter to reciprocate, allowing his gaze to swing past Colt and onto the bookshelves. His heart was abruptly hammering with the adrenaline of surprise. Already he could feel a cold, breathless hollowness inside him. Colt had made him somehow, that much was clear. At first Carter thought that was impossible, but then pulled events together and came up with a feasible scenario: Colt had seen his car when it was parked off Waite Road, probably when Carter was unconscious, Colt had noted the license number and then had a PI check it out. It was likely this hypothetical investigator would have turned up anything recent with Carter’s name on it, which would have included Alfred Hill’s will when it was registered for probate, and the will led to the bookstore.
Carter found himself staring at a shelf of books on art history without seeing them at all. There were three shelves of political memoirs at head height, which seemed out of place, but he wasn’t much interested in the vagaries of Lovecraft’s shelving organization right that moment. His full attention was on listening to anything Colt had to say to Lovecraft. If he had read Colt’s character at all correctly from what he had learned of him from others, whatever he had to say was going to be arch and superior. Carter was not to be disappointed with this analysis.
“Hi,” said Colt, smiling broadly at Lovecraft. “I’m looking for a book.”
Lovecraft sensibly eschewed any variation of “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” and instead asked did he have any particular book in mind?
“Yes. It’s by Carl Jung.
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
. Earliest edition you have, please. It was published originally in 1960, I think.”
He continued to smile the whole time as if citing a book was mildly flirtatious. Carter could only see the side of his face, but he could see Lovecraft fully, and her responding smile was not in any form sincere. Colt made her nervous.