“What wassit you wanted?”
Holmes wheeled to point a long finger at Fisher’s Butcher Shop. “By chance, have you seen a man of short stature, who drags his left leg, enter that establishment? He would weigh approximately 130 pounds and be somewhat, ah… ill kept.”
I watched Holmes. He observed Billings like he would an insect in one of his experiments. When the rye had trickled down Billings’s neck and his Adam’s apple bobbed for the fourth time, Holmes said, “Well, sir?” Billings just returned the stare as the detective continued, “The man I seek most likely wears a blue watch cap and habitually eats fish and chips. Do you know of such a man?” Of course Billings did. He knew who gave him enough pennies for an evening’s happiness. But it appeared I had underestimated his loyalty.
“What do you want him for?” Billings drawled with a glint of avarice in his eye.
Holmes nodded. “A good question, he…”
Billings caught sight of me over Holmes’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch under my gaze, though I could see a tick begin to flutter under his left eye.
“Don’t know him!” Billings shouted. “Get out of my way.” He shuffled down the street, casting persecuted glances over his shoulder at Holmes. Perhaps he did so at both of us, since I stood just beyond the detective and behind the coal cart.
Holmes waited until Billings rounded the corner, sidestepping two policemen and an irritated horse, before following him.
“Ah. Come in, Mr. Holmes,” I called. The music flitted quietly with anticipation.
The basement door had creaked. Sitting as quiet as death, while the day turned to night, I knew each sound intimately. Moonlight filtered down from high windows like a mist, illuminating the room. Recently slaughtered cow carcasses hung in row after row, the ribboned fat glowing in the moonlight while the blood dripped crimson to the straw on the floor. The door opened another scant inch. I saw a shadow beyond it.
“Please, come in,” I said. I’d waited so long for this moment. Was it not fitting I should fork his queen while checkmating him? Yes. Logic dictates not just a move, but a reward.
A thin hand gripped the door and it swung open. With the light behind him, I could not see his features… Something seemed odd. He was of the expected height, yet… there was something amiss. He seemed to have an enormous development of the frontal lobes. Familiarity…
As he started down the stairs, the moonlight struck him fully. The music trembled in my ears.
I couldn’t believe it. I blinked again. In an instant, confusion turned to rage and the music roared.
“NO!” I shouted. The bastard. The ultimate bastard!
Holmes had assumed his final disguise, that of my dead brother Moriarity. From the dandified brocade vest, to the wire-rimmed spectacles, curled wig, and penciled brows, he
was
Moriarity. He affected his walk. He even swung his head from side to the side in the same reptilian fashion.
“Jacob?” Holmes asked. “Is that you?” The music intensified. He
sounded
like him. “Oh, brother dear? Come out where I can see you.”
I covered my ears.
He can’t do this
. The music grew angrier.
“Jacob?” Holmes repeated. He gained the basement floor. “Weren’t you expecting me?” He sounded reproachful.
Rage shook me. I lifted the revolver and drew a bead on Holmes’s back. But he turned, and even though he couldn’t see me, he smiled. It was my brother’s smile.
“I heard a click, perhaps from a revolver?” Holmes teased. “Would you shoot
me
, Jacob?”
The pain inside my head competed with the storm of music. It became a cacophony, screaming down without harmony, without pity. I tried to hold the gun, yet even with both hands, it wobbled.
Holmes stooped and came up with a lantern. He sat it on the butcher table. I heard the scratch of a match. The light hurt my eyes, and I backed further into the shadows. Holmes kicked at the bloodstained straw at his feet.
“My, this place is filthy. I’m surprised at you, Jacob. You are a scientist, not a carver of meat,” Holmes scolded.
I watched him investigate the tables, the drainage pipes, and then the trash bins. He seemed as unconcerned as a fawn that I would shoot him.
The music complained of cowardice.
“But you are a scientist, aren’t you, Jacob?” Holmes said. He’d reached a long ice box with many compartments that lined the back wall. I heard him wiggle the lock on one of the clamps. “Locked? My, my. Dear brother. What is inside?” Holmes inquired.
He waited a moment, and then began a stroll down the aisle near me. Circling closer.
“Body parts? Am I not correct?” Holmes queried. “Why, I wonder,” he mused as he fastidiously ducked under a carcass and sauntered toward me. The lantern in his hand swung with his walk. One second he was a faceless enemy in shadow. The next, he was Moriarity. Music, sweet music.
I raised the gun.
The music moaned. I wavered, and then lowered the gun. The pain deep in my head throbbed and with it the vision of my brother turned dim. Then the music returned with a plaintive vengeance, bleating furiously.
I could not think, so I retreated behind the butcher tables.
“There you are!” Like we were playing a childhood game, Holmes gave a triumphant shout and trotted forward.
I raised the pistol and fired. The shot went wide and plowed into the carcass beside his ear. The impact blew the haunch apart, splattering him in raw flesh.
“Stand back!” I shouted.
Holmes wiped gore from his face and said, “Why, dear brother?” He took another step forward.
Close up, I still couldn’t believe the likeness. From the color of his eyes, to the way he pursed his lips, he was John Moriarity.
The music quivered inside me. Could it be?
“John?” I whispered.
Holmes threw back his head and laughed.
The music exploded and I grabbed my forehead.
“Why did you murder those people?” he asked. Through my fingers, I could see Holmes as he inched closer. The revolver felt hot in my hand. “You took the best of what they had. Strong legs, artistic hands, healthy organs. Why?”
I couldn’t hear him above the music anymore. His lips moved. He was my brother.
“You’re building a man, aren’t you? A perfect man,” Holmes stated.
Involuntarily, I glanced at the ice box and then fixed a stare upon him. The music slowed. It quieted, waiting. Gentle notes calmed me. This was what I wanted, had planned for. Breathe and victory is mine. I could see clearly again.
“Yes,” I answered, pleased that my voice did not quiver. “A perfect man.”
“And you brought me here because…?” Laughter erupted from me. I could not stop it.
The release started in my gut and built up inside of me until tears streamed down my face. Through it I screamed at him, “You’re the genius! Your celebrated
brain
has brought you here! What do you
think
I want?”
Holmes frowned. I saw a flash of uncertainty cross his face. The music pulsed like a heartbeat within me. It was time.
Deliberately, I lifted the pistol and fired. The smoke blinded me. I fired again.
In his haste, Holmes dropped the lantern. The straw around us caught, then burst into flames.
“Damnation!” I screamed.
In an instant, the room was ablaze. From below, the flames licked the carcasses, scorching them until they looked like disembodied and grotesque ghosts. Smoke billowed everywhere. As the music skittered and fragmented, I turned toward the ice box, then back toward the stairs—then back again toward the ice box. I stumbled through the black smoke. Under my hands, the ice box sweated in the intense heat. Fumbling, fumbling, finally I had the first compartment unlocked, when I heard Holmes’s voice in my ear.
“Come along, Jacob. I can’t let you burn in your own hell,” he intoned.
As I struggled, he threw me over his shoulder and hastened for the stairs. When I looked back, the music solidified, taking form.
Holmes cried, “If you die, Jacob, it will be at the gallows!” He tightened his grip on my legs as he dashed through the conflagration, pausing only to vault over burning debris.
As he ran up the stairs, I looked again for my brother.
In the flames, I saw the music building, bleeding in colors up the walls. John Moriarity stood in the flames, wearing his secret smile.
He held a baton. Conducting, of course.
The mournful notes dripped like rain, hissing into the fire and lamenting my name.
T
he address turned out to be one of those Oriental rug shops down in Pioneer Square, one of those joints that, depending upon which banner hung in the window at the time, had either lost its lease, gone bankrupt, suffered smoke and water damage, or was just now in the process of retiring from the business… for the past twenty-five years or so.
A broken bell sounded as I used my knee to separate the warped door from the frame. The door came loose, shaking in my hand like a palsy patient as I looked around the place. Awash with piles of brightly colored rugs, folded back, strewn this way and that, the space smelled of dust and desperation. Movement at the back of the room lifted my eyes.
He was a short little guy, bald as an egg and shaped like one, seated at an ancient desk, up to his elbows in paperwork; he glanced up, immediately made me as a noncustomer, and went back to his paper shuffling. I ambled along the central aisle.
“You Malloy?” he asked, without looking at me.
I said I was. He sat back in the chair. His hard little eyes ran over me like ants.
“You don’t look like a private eye.”
“It’s a cross to bear.”
He considered the matter for a long moment before heaving himself to his feet and retracing my steps back to the front door, where he flicked the lock, flipped the sign to read
CLOSED
, and pulled the shade to the bottom of the glass panel. He fished a mottled handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his hands as he waddled back my way. I held my ground. He walked around me.
“I’ve got a problem,” he said.
“That’s what you said on the phone.”
He dabbed at his wet lips with the hankie. I looked away.
“My wife’s trying to poison me.”
I shrugged. “Eat out.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He repocketed the hankie.
“I need her to stop.”
“I don’t do muscle work.”
He laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
“Probably not,” I said.
Somebody tried the front door, gave it a frustrated rattle, and stalked off.
He sensed I was losing interest and reached into his other pants pocket.
He waved a wad of cash, two full inches of greenbacks, bundled both ways by a red rubber band. “I’ve got $2,500 here for somebody can get her to stop.”
I tried to stay calm. Twenty-five hundred would solve a lot of my present problems… food and rent for instance. “Why me?” I asked.
“They say you’re a hard guy.”
“They who?”
“Fella I know.”
I thought it over. “How do you know she’s trying to poison you.”
“My doctor says so. He says she’s been trying to poison me little by little over the past few months.” He let his hands fall to his side with a slap. “Some kind of algicide he thinks.”
My eyes followed the wad as he dropped it on the desk. “Call the cops.”
“I can’t. She’s my wife.”
“Get a divorce.”
“I can’t.”
I made a rude noise with my lips. “Sure you can.” I waved a hand in the air. “Even if you needed cause… which you don’t anymore… I’m pretty sure poisoning would qualify as irreconcilable differences.”
He made a face. “I’m orthodox. My religion doesn’t allow for divorce.” He caught me ogling the money. “All you gotta do is get her to stop.” He made the Boys Scouts’ honor sign, which really made me nervous. “My friend says you can be very persuasive.”
“Not to mention this is a community property state.”
His face went bland and blank as a cabbage. “Not to mention,” he said.
“And all I’ve got to do is get her to stop.”
“That’s it.”
I held out my hand. We each cast a glance at the wad on the desk.
“Later,” he said. “After I’m—”
“Now,” I countered. “I don’t want to have to come back here.”
“And if you can’t pull it off?”
“Your buddy was right. I can be very persuasive.”
He hesitated, took stock of me again, and then picked up the money, bounced it twice in his palm, and dropped it onto the desktop. He of little faith.
“Come see me when you get it done,” he said, and went back to the paperwork.
The icy rain marched across the pavement like ranks of silver soldiers. I stood in the doorway of a used furniture joint directly across the street from the address he’d given me. I fondled my pocket imagining the wad of bills weighing heavy on my hip and smiled as wide as a guy who was two months behind on his rent could manage. It was a sandwich joint, half a dozen tables and a stand-up counter, big saltwater fish tank along the north wall. The Gnu Deli Delhi. Cute. Real cute.
I’d made a quick pass an hour ago. The place was jammed.
The sign on the door said they were only open for breakfast and lunch and closed at 3. I’d decided to wait it out. It was 3:10 and the place had cleared except for the pair of girls who’d been working the counter. The sight of the girls shrugging themselves into their raincoats sent me hustling across the rain-slick street. Halfway across, squinting through the hiss and mist of afternoon traffic, I saw her for the first time, coming out from what must have been an office somewhere behind the counter, big ring of keys in her right hand, holding the door open long enough for the girls to slip out and my toe to slip in.
She looked me over like a lunch menu. “You want that foot to go home with the other one, you’ll move it.”
We were nose to nose through the crack in the door, which made her over six feet tall. Big and brassy, showing a half acre of bony chest and a thick tangle of red hair held at bay by an enormous tortoise shell clip. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t work up a picture of them as a couple.
“I need to have a word with you.”
She leaned against the door. My shoe started to fold.
“Whatever you’re selling…”
“Your husband sent me.”
It was hard to describe the way her lips moved, somewhere between a smile and a sneer… a snile maybe. She eased off on the door. “Get out of here.”
“He’s been missing you,” I tried.
“You know what my husband’s missing?”
“What’s that?”
She smirked. “A stepladder and delusions of grandeur.”
“He says you’re trying to poison him.”
She eased off on the door. My shoe unfolded. “What if I am?”
Took me a second to recover my jaw. “You’re not even gonna deny it?”
“Why should I? The world would be a better place without that little worm.”
She turned and walked back into the restaurant, leaving me standing in the doorway as the steady rain beat itself to death on the awning. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
She skirted the counter and made her way back by the meat slicer. “I asked him for a
get
.” She switched the slicer on. “He laughed in my face.” She could tell I was confused. “A
get’s
an orthodox Jewish divorce.”
“So?
Get
going.
Get
lost.
Get
down the road. No need to kill the guy.”
“And give up everything? My business… my children… my standing in the community.” She waved the whole idea off. “Not a chance. I’d be an outcast, a pariah.” She shook her head slowly. I opened my mouth but she cut me off. “If I was trying to kill that maggot, he’d be long dead.”
She pulled what appeared to be a roast beef from the refrigerated display case and plopped it down onto the slicer. I watched as she made an adjustment and began to slice.
“He says you’ve been feeding him an algicide or something.”
She glanced up at the big fish tank and smiled. “I was just trying to get his attention.” She returned the meat to the case. “I figured a couple of days in the can might help him see his way clear.” She produced a block of cheese, separated several slices. “Besides…” she said, gesturing at the tank, “the fish don’t seem to mind that stuff at all.”
“So you figured…”
She took a bite from the sandwich and grinned again. “I figured what was good for pond scum was probably good for my husband.”
I took a deep breath. “All he wants you to do is stop.”
She lifted an enormous knife from the counter.
“Fat chance,” she said around a mouthful. She waved the blade as she spoke. “What he wants… Mr.…”
“Malloy,” I said.
“What he wants, Mr. Malloy, is for me to come back and take care of him…” she sliced air with the scimitar, “clean the house… take care of the kids…”
I started to speak, but she cut me off again. “And what you want… Mr. Malloy, is that 2,500 bucks he offers every damn fool he can get to come out here and bother me.”
I felt the color rising in my cheeks. I started to protest.
“So what’s your story, Mr. Malloy? How did he talk you into this fool’s errand?”
I’d have objected but I was busy asking myself the same question.
“You behind on your alimony payments? You need to pay your lawyer?” Her voice began to rise. “Or did you just go to school on the short bus?”
My mouth moved but nothing came out.
She held up a restraining hand… went right to unctuous. “Here I am being rude,” she said. “Eating in front of guests. Can I make you a little something. A nice brisket sandwich or something? A little coleslaw maybe?”
My stomach did a series of back flips. “I’ll pass,” I replied.
Her face said that was what she figured. “You go back and tell that bottom feeder that either I get my
get
or he can spend the rest of his life sleeping on the couch with one eye open and eating take-out Chinese.”
She used the remains of the sandwich to point the way out. “Now take yourself back out of here. I’m going to close up.”
I opened my mouth again, but once more she beat me to the punch. “You tell him… you tell him… either I get my
get
or I’m going to spend the rest of my life making his existence as miserable as humanly possible.” She swallowed the remainder of the sandwich and then licked her fingers and showed her teeth. “Till death do us part.”
“Listen…” I stammered.
She picked up the knife and started back around the counter. I reached behind me and took hold of the door handle. “Easy now,” I whispered.
“Easy my ass,” she spat. She came forward, holding the knife low, making a sawing motion as she moved my way. Parts of me contracted like a dying star. I pulled open the door. She kept coming. I stepped outside and closed the door. Rain drummed the awning.
She locked the door with a smile. I’d seen that smile before. On the Discovery Channel.
Shark Week.
The neon
OPEN
sign went out.
He was still at the desk with the roll of bills at his elbow. He waited until I picked up the money to look at me. His facial features seemed to be having a meeting in the middle of his face. “You did it?” he asked.
The wad was warm in my hand. I shook my head, removed the rubber bands, and peeled off two hundred bucks.
“I’m taking two hundred for my per diem and for the aggravation.”
“Guess you weren’t as hard a guy as they said.”
“If I had to go against her every day, I’d be in the storm door and aluminum siding business.”
“So what is it I get for my two hundred bucks?” he asked.
I pocketed the bills. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said as I wrapped the rubber bands around the pile of money. “You’re not giving her a
get
…no matter what. Is that right?”
“You’re a quick study, you are.”
I cleared my throat. “And you plan on staying married to that woman and living in the same house with her.”
He nodded.
“Well then… I guess what you get for your two hundred bucks is a piece of advice.”
“Such as?”
“If… you know… sometime in the future… you think maybe she’s trying to slip you something… a little more of that algicide or something…”
“Yeah?”
I dropped the wad onto the desk. It bounced.
“Take the poison,” I said, and headed for the door.