I woke up the next morning feeling vaguely uneasy. It was like I’d agreed to something I shouldn’t have but couldn’t remember what. It’s a common enough feeling in my line of work, but not one I’ve ever gotten used to. It was still coming down outside, shaping up to be the kind of day that seems to weigh down every thought and every move you make. I remember thinking that it seemed about right. There were people I had to talk to that sunshine didn’t favor.

I showered quickly and without enjoying it any and then put on a grey flannel suit – the kind that no one remembers the look of when asked about it later. The kinds of questions I was set to ask, it felt safer to be forgettable as possible. I neglected to shave for the same reason. Or maybe that was just the excuse I settled on for not wanting to stare at my own reflection. It gets hard to tell sometimes.

The police seemed like the obvious place to start. I headed out to central after a token breakfast of black toast and blacker coffee. The officer behind the reception desk, a bull-necked sergeant with a jaw like the front of a battleship, didn’t look pleased to see me. When I told him why I was there, his face flushed red. He glared at me.

“So what,” he said, “you just a concerned citizen, or is this what you call a professional inquiry?”

“Strictly business,” I said, and flashed my license across the counter. He didn’t like that much either.

“Run out of cheating dames and runaway deadbeats?” he said. He was trying real hard to be vicious.

I shrugged. “Something like that,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to trade insults with the doorman. “Any chance I could talk to someone in Det. Lance’s chain of command?”

I don’t think the big lug caught the tone of my voice. He still thought we were crossing swords. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but we do alright with investigations around here. Our speciality, you might call it. What do you expect to turn up that we haven’t ?” There was a smirk in his voice. The one on his face made for a matching set.

I shrugged again and offered a weak smile. “Nothing incriminating, I’m sure.”

For a second the desk jockey looked about ready to blow his stack. Veins on the side of his neck bulged like firehoses and his eyebrows shot up like window shades. But then something made him stop, and instead of exploding he settled into a grimace, looked me up and down, and then favored me with a dismissive sigh. Figured I wasn’t worth the effort, I guess. That, or I’d hit a little too close to something he’d been told to avoid by people who actually had two brain cells to rub together. “Upstairs and on your right,” he said. “Captain Stone.”

I nodded my thanks, for all the good that it did. The man was already turning to face the phone bank behind the desk and lifting a receiver to his ear.

The stairs were to the right of reception. I walked up slowly, footsteps echoing on the cool stone like a heartbeat, and came to a long, low hallway that smelled of coffee and smoke and sweat. The first door on the right had a name painted on the glass – “Cpt. V. Stone” – and below that the single word “Vice.” A yellowish light shone through the frosted glass, and I tapped out a greeting with my knuckles.

A sandpaper voice called out through the open transom. “It opens.”

Stone didn’t rise to greet me as I came in. I didn’t take it personally. I have a reputation. He was a small man, but stocky – thick around the middle, I mean. He had a round, belligerent face – all lines and knots – small, suspicious eyes, and a heavy brow that glistened with sweat in the airless atmosphere of his stuffy office. The stub of a cigar was clenched in the side of his mouth, and the glowing cherry bobbed as he spoke.

“Five minutes,” he said, and held up the same number of stubby fingers. “Don’t waste them.”

I took a seat without asking or being asked to. The chairs opposite his paper-strewn desk were old, stiff, and uncomfortable. I tried to settle in, crossed a leg, made like I was at ease. It didn’t work. I should have stayed standing.

“It’s about Det. Lance,” I said.

Stone eyed me coolly from across a battlefield of abandoned reports and half-finished memos and blew a stream of thick, oily smoke out the side of his mouth. “Don’t you read the papers?” he said.

I tossed off a shrug. “Just on Sundays,” I said. “And anyway, the kind of information I’m looking for doesn’t make the papers.”

Stone barked out a short laugh. “But I’m supposed to share it with you,” he said, “because you’re a brother shamus, right, and we’re all on the side of justice?” The smoke from the stogie stung his eyes as he spoke and made him squint. It made it so I felt like I was having a conversation with Popeye the Sailor.

I tilted my head to one side and made like I was considering what he’d said. “Well,” I answered eventually, “I was actually just going to ask real nice. But I think I like the way you put it a whole lot better.” Then I dug my hands in my pockets and tried to look serene.

The captain squinted at me some more, and then took the gnarled stump out of his mouth and ground it into the overflowing tray by his elbow. Next he crossed his meaty arms across his chest and let out a growling sigh.

“You know what really burns my ass, Parker?” he said. I was all set to answer – prayed for the day someone like him would ask me a question like that – but the man cut me off.

“It’s the way,” he said, “You P.I.’s waltz into the middle of a case like you’re the first name on the goddam callsheet. Men – good men – work longer hours for less money pouring over the details of every homicide, every burglary, every goddam house fire and stolen bicycle that goes on in this city, and still they get treated like bunglers by the private dicks of the world because they don’t have a business card or wear a $20 suit.”

For a minute I thought the good captain was going to start foaming at the mouth. So I tried to be funny. “It was fifteen, actually,” I said, and tugged at the lapel of my jacket. “The fella threw in the vest for nothing because he said I reminded him of his brother-in-law.” Looking back, it maybe wasn’t the smartest reply.

Thankfully, Captain Stone didn’t seem to be listening. “More to the point,” he said, “What did or did not happen to Walter Lance is none of your goddamn business. Whatever his sins, we look after our own around here.”

This time I managed to suppress my natural urge to needle the poor man. Instead I kept my mouth shut, and rolled my eyes around in my head, and the small, cluttered office lapsed into silence. Only the plaintive groaning of the radiator and a muffled chatter from the squadroom next door broke the muffled, stifling quiet. Stone stared at me all the while, a look of disgust and annoyance plastered all over his ugly mug.

“But then I know something about you, Parker,” he said suddenly, his voice as flat and emotionless as a bank teller’s. I looked over at the man, made like I’d forgotten that he was there.

“If I don’t give you something to chew on,” he said, “You’ll keep coming back until one of us kills the other out of sheer goddamn frustration. So,” he gestured to the door, “Read the reports, talk to the medical examiner, and then disappear.”

Half a dozen snappy replies came to mind just then, like they always did. It’s a sickness, I think. But I managed to muzzle myself a second time, and instead just nodded. “Thank you, Captain,” was all I let myself say, and then I made for the door.

Captain Stone did me one better by not saying anything at all. His attention had already shifted to whatever report was nearest at hand, and he stared into the cover sheet with belligerent intensity. I thought it best to leave him like that, alone with the heat, and the smoke, and the dust. My gift to him was never having to see me or hear me ever again, and I was happy enough to give it.

The girl behind the desk at Records & Identification – ground floor, past reception on the right – was expecting me, and wasn’t happy about it. She flashed me a glassy smile as I approached. I smiled back, and she pushed a stack of case folders across the counter.

“Captain Stone says one hour,” she announced. Her thin lips were puckered into an unpleasant-looking frown, like she’d been chewing on lemons all afternoon. I nodded to show her I understood, scooped up the files, and turned to find some place to sit. Some place turned out to be a stiff-backed wooden chair no better than the one in Stone’s office that somewhat had parked in a quiet corner of an adjoining hallway. I settled in as best I could and started in on the first folder at the top of the stack.

I can’t say that I was all that surprised by what I read, or particularly interested. Walter Lance wasn’t anybody special. He was an alright cop, as these things go, but not the best and not the worst that the city had to offer. Fifteen years on the force at the time of his death, a good clearance rate, got all the standard promotions for a guy who worked just hard enough and didn’t make waves. Not political. He’d bounced from desk to desk once he made detective, but that was normal. He was ambitious enough to seek the glitz and glamour of Vice and Homicide, but not so much that he’d ever go farther than lieutenant. His instincts were good. His interrogation technique was good. His superiors cited him for both in one evaluation after another.

All except Stone, that is. Walter spent two years under the good Captain, and in all that time didn’t warrant much more than a pat on the back now and then. A look at his arrest record with Vice showed why. In twenty-odd months the man didn’t make much headway. He brought in pushers instead of suppliers, street walkers instead of pimps. He’d lost his edge, or that’s what it looked like. After the glowing report from Galloway in Homicide that got him kicked up the ladder, Stone must had thought he’d been sold a bill of goods.

And then one day, for no reason that anyone seemed inclined to try to explain, the poor bastard ended up in the trunk of a Studebaker at the bottom of Elliot Bay. The case report was filled out from top to bottom – every piece of information where it should be – but the whole affair was lacking the sense of urgency you’d expect to find when the vic in a murder is a police detective. There were statements, and photos, and reports from the medical examiner and the evidence lab, but that was about the end of it. If Walter’s brother officers were out there shaking the trees, it didn’t show. Nothing had been added to the file in almost two weeks – no interview transcriptions, no new evidence, not a goddamn thing. I got the feeling, if I asked around, that no one would even be able to tell me who the lead was on Walter’s case.

At the time I knew there was a pretty obvious explanation for the whole thing. Walter Lance had been a decent cop on his way up the chain who just ended up making the wrong kind of friends. They convinced him to go into a second line of work as their man in Vice, in exchange for a few easy collars and what I’m sure was a health stipend, and his working life got a hell of a lot easier. And then he crossed them, somehow, or failed them, or made a nuisance of himself, and they killed him for it. So Walter’s colleagues in the department, afraid of turning up something unflattering about one of their own business partners, wagged a finger, made like they were ashamed of the boy, and shoved the whole mess into a closet where they didn’t have to look at it any more.

It wasn’t the most absurd theory, I was forced to admit. In fact, it was depressingly plausible. Not only did it line up with what Mrs. Lance had told me, but it pretty well squared with my opinion of the boys in blue. Never met a bribe or a sinker they didn’t like, and so on. But it was just a theory. And while I can’t say I take much pride in anything these days, I’ve got just enough professional integrity left to want to give people what they pay for. Deirdre Lance was paying me to investigate her husband’s death. Maybe my services weren’t the best in the business, but I was damn well going to earn what I drank.

I returned the files to my lady friend at R&I and tossed her a dime for her troubles. Her face twisted around another sour-lemon scowl, but she scooped it up all the same. I’ll bet she didn’t waste it, either. She seemed like a steady girl.

The medical examiner was next on my list. He kept his office in a little suite of buildings a few blocks away from central. I opted to walk, in spite of the rain. The streets were nearly empty, even though it was mid-afternoon. Now and then a car hissed by, sending up a thin spray in its wake as it sliced through the puddles that collected along the curbs where the sewer drains were backed up. The city wasn’t in what you’d call a cheery mood. Neither was I, but it was early yet, and I was thirsty.

The ME was an owlish little man named Mal Carruthers. He was in his office when I got there, scrutinizing a series of photographs and sipping from a beaker of grain alcohol. No one was at the front desk, so I let myself in. He didn’t seem surprised.

“Parker,” he said after taking another swig, “Right?” He glanced in my direction only briefly before returning to his photos. From where I was standing they looked like a series of exit wounds – dark, ragged slashes against milk-white flesh.

“Right,” I said. He didn’t offer me a seat and I didn’t take one, so for a while I just stood there in silence while my host muttered to himself between belts of giggle juice. I wouldn’t have minded so much, only the place started to make me feel a little creepy. It was a tight squeeze, that office, and made worse by its owner’s taste in furnishings. There were bookcases and filing cabinets against every wall, cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling, microscopes, film rolls, trays of surgical tools, and a full human skeleton hanging from a rack by the door. That last one, I’ll admit, wasn’t as bad as it maybe sounds. Its head was cocked at an angle so that it almost looked sympathetic.

The doctor, on the other hand, was something like the opposite. When I turned to face the desk again I caught him staring at me like something he’d scraped onto a microscope slide. Really, it felt like he was looking through me, or trying to calculate how many quarts of blood a man my size might contain. Too much time in the morgue, I guess. Probably he didn’t see people as people anymore, so much as interesting arrangements of torsos and limbs and organs.

“Yes?” he said eventually. He didn’t make much effort to hide the fact that he was irritated. Lucky for us both it was a tone of voice I was used to hearing.

“Walter Lance,” I said, like it was some kind of password.

“Yes?” Carruthers repeated. I guess he wasn’t in on the secret.

“I’m looking into his case,” I said, “But the reports only say so much – lots of details and no context. Makes it hard to get a clear picture, you know.”

A little smile crept across the man’s face at my willing admission of ignorance. Then he started to hum to himself as he swirled his beaker of Tennessee floor polish like it was brandy in a snifter.

“You seek the benefit of my critical eye?” he said.

If I was smart I’d have walked out right then. People who talk like that are almost never worth the time it takes for them to spit out something useful. But it was early yet – in the case, I mean – and I was willing to put up with a little bullshit here and there until I found my footing.

“Nail in the head, Doc,” I said, about as sincere as I could manage.

Carruthers nodded back, smiling wider now. Then he killed the beaker, leaned way back in his chair, and raised his arms behind his head. His eyes were closed, and he let out a deep sigh. When he spoke again a second later it was like he was reading from a script.

“Walter Patrick Lance,” he said. “Aged thirty nine years. Six feet, two inches in height, two hundred and five pounds in weight – minus the water in his lungs, of course. In addition to the fact that he was deceased, his body showed the deterioration commensurate with a man of his occupation and habits – liver damage, stress fractures, etc. He arrived fully clothed and with his personal effects intact, including wallet, keys, badge, and cigarette lighter. His sidearm was missing, but there was a switchblade in his inner jacket pocket.”

I’d started to pace around the tiny office as I listened. Eventually, without meaning to, I ended up standing in front of the thin fellow posted by the door, staring absently into his empty sockets. It was a strangely comforting sight.

“Vital stats, I got,” I said. “I’m looking for more of a play-by-play.”

I don’t know if the doctor’s expression gave anything away. I had my back to him. He packed a lot of contempt into the way he cleared his throat, though.

“Cause of death,” he went on, “Was most definitely asphyxiation by drowning. By the time the body was recovered the subject had been dead, judging by the amount of water absorbed and the state of rigor mortis, for between forty-eight and seventy-two hours. There were no defensive wounds present on the hands or forearms that might indicate a struggle, nor any signs that the subject might have attempted to escape. Also of note is that fact that the subject did not appear to have been bound at any point.”

I’d moved on to the row of microscopes that stood at attention on a low counter by the door. “I guess they just asked him nicely and he climbed in on his own,” I said, squinting at something horrible on one of the prepared glass slides.

Carruthers let out a slow hissing breath and eyed me pointedly for a while. You could almost hear the steam coming out his ears. I pretended not to notice. Eventually the man cleared his throat and continued on his way.

“There was,” he said, “On the subject’s right temple, a shallow laceration surrounded by significant bruising. And while the lengthy submersion may have washed away any possible surface clotting, the amount of subdermal bleeding strongly indicates that the blow responsible must have occurred several hours before the subject’s heart stopped beating. There were also, embedding in the skin surrounding said laceration, several small fragments of glass.”

He delivered that last line with a flourish, and then fixed me with what I figure was a sort of expectant look. I guess he was waiting for a show of ignorance on my part that he could rescue me from, or else an earnest plea to continue.

So I played along. “Don’t stop now, Doc,” I said, “It was just getting good.”

Carruthers smiled like a saint and leaned back in his chair again. He wanted to get good and comfortable. We’d gotten to his favorite part. “Considering the facts together,” he said, “A fairly obvious scenario presents itself.”

“The subject failed to report in at the end of his last shift. Nor did he return home, according to his wife. He was seen, however, entering a drinking establishment called ‘The Emerald Club’ approximately one hour before he was supposed to sign off for the night. Witness statements indicate that the subject was a regular at this establishment, and indeed had been for some time. This would not otherwise be remarkable, were it not for the fact that the Emerald Club is known to be frequented by racketeer Elis Fitzroy.”

I rapped a knuckle on a specimen jar and smirked at the doctor’s rather diplomatic description of one of our fair city’s more enterprising residents. The law may have qualified Fitzroy as a racketeer, but to John Q. Public he was a hood – a smart one, sure, and resourceful, but a hood all the same. As a rule he stayed off the police blotter and kept his crimes quiet and out of sight of the city’s better half. Mostly he was in the business of giving people what they wanted. Sometimes this meant unlicensed boxing, often it meant gambling, and always it meant prostitution. He also owned a half-dozen clubs across a handful of neighborhoods and liked to think of himself as an impresario. The Emerald was one of his.

Across the room, Carruthers was just warming up. “Now,” he said, “Considering the subject’s recently revealed connections to Mr. Fitzroy and his activities, it stands to reason that his frequent visitations to the said establishment served the purpose of keeping him in regular contact with his dubious benefactor. Thus, being called to meet there of a sudden would not seem out of the ordinary. That being said, I posit that the subject, having displeased his master, was summoned to the Emerald Club in what would have seemed like the usual manner. Little anticipating the fate he was soon to meet, he no doubt partook for his customary libation, met with Mr. Fitzroy, was struck across the temple with a glass, or paperweight – either of which, I’m sure, was readily at hand – and rendered unconscious.”

“If they’d just waited,” I said, mostly to myself, “He’d have handled that part for them.”

The Doctor couldn’t hear me. By this point he was approaching a high froth. “No doubt,” he said, “Mr. Fitzroy was well prepared for the occasion, and had a vehicle standing by that was free of any identifying marks and only recently acquired. It would have been the work of a few minutes to then divest the subject of his weapon, deposit him in the waiting trunk, and spirit him away to his watery grave. Thus, in one fell swoop, Mr. Fitzroy eliminates an apparent liability and sends a message to his allies and enemies alike: he fears no man, he tolerates no betrayal.”

Again, that last sentence was pronounced with a little added something, like it was the punchline to a joke or the last turn of a magic trick. Then the man smiled and settled into a self-satisfied silence.

Looking back, I could have walked out right there and then. He’d told me what I needed to know, given me a scenario to build off of. It was full of holes, and based mostly on the intuition of a man who doesn’t get enough sun, but it was a start. Long ago I’d discovered that I work best when I’m trying to disprove other people’s theories, and Carruthers had just given me a doozy. It was wrong in all the right ways, and I don’t doubt for a second it would have lead me where I needed to go.

But the good Doctor was too tempting as a pigeon – too self-important and too naïve to walk away from without taking a poke. So I stayed, and I started to pry. It’s a sickness, really.

“You said,” I opened, “That Lance came to you with his wallet, his keys, and his other personal effects intact. Why?”

Carruthers was still marvelling at his own God-given brilliance, so it took him a few seconds to answer. “Hmmm?” he said eventually.

“Driver’s licence, badge, money,” I said. “Why leave them for you and the fish?”

The Doctor seemed annoyed. Either it was because he hadn’t thought about it or because I’d interrupted him at his favorite pastime. So he scowled at me through narrowed, heavy-lidded eyes and made like he found me particularly exasperating.

“Why not?” he said. Mr. Fitzroy is no petty thief. He trades in vice, not stolen property.”

I shrugged, made it seem like I was conceding the point. “Maybe so,” I said, “But the driver, the heavies at the club? They don’t get paid in tips.”

Carruthers sighed and gave his head a slow, sad shake. “You focus on ephemera,” he said, “And lose sight of the bigger picture.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Me and ephemera. It’s a thing we do. But about that bigger picture – why not just kill Lance there and then?”

That really seemed to irk him, which I guess was the point. “They did kill him,” he said, “Or haven’t you been paying attention?”

Now it was my turn to deliver the lesson. “Ah,” I said, “But where? Fitzroy’s a crook, but he’s not stupid, see? If he wanted the man drowned instead of just plugged, you can be damn sure there was a reason for it. Just like he had a reason for not taking Walter aside and sweating him for a few days to see what he coughed up.”

The Doctor didn’t look impressed. His expression rested somewhere between pity and dismissal. “You give these people too much credit,” he said. “The subject got in their way, and they reacted as their kind always does: impulsively. They summoned him, killed him in the most expedient way possible, and disposed of his body in their accustomed fashion. That it was the water and not the glass that ultimately ended his life is neither here nor there. Walter Patrick Lance is dead, and this Fitzroy gentleman is surely responsible.”

The man’s complete lack of imagination was starting to get on my nerves. “You’re not talking to the paper boy here, Doc,” I said. “I know of what I speak. You don’t just bump off a cop in this town without thinking it through. That fact that Walter ended up dead tells me someone did, and was pretty sure they could get away with it.”

As I waited for Carruthers to find some new way to tell me I was wrong, I shook a Lucky free from the pack in my coat pocket and leaned down to light it off a little gas flame that had been left to burn under a beaker of bubbling goop the color of fresh bile.

“And anyway,” I said after a quick first drag, “If you’re so sure about all this, why has the case been on ice for the last three weeks?”

Carruthers didn’t seem too pleased with me. The way he glared made him look like an irritated little owl stuffed into a dingy lab coat.

“Evidence,” he said with a little wave of his hand, “Warrants, due process, and so forth. These are problems not my own. I know what happened, but my place is here.” I figure he wanted me to think he was being noble, holding back his expertise out of respect for the system. Really, though, he just sounded bitter.

I tried not to laugh in his face. I tried to look sympathetic. I don’t know how far I got with either. “Nobody asked you, did they?” I said.

I could almost hear his molars grinding together from across the room. “Is there anything else you need assistance with,” he said, “Or are we finished?” He sounded calm enough, but the veins that bulged in his temples didn’t look it.

I took another drag and glanced around the office at the specimen jars and the microscopes, the glassware, the skeleton, and the crime scene photos, and at the little man sitting in the middle of it all. He didn’t look happy. I guess that was my fault. Still, I think it went deeper than that. I don’t think he’d been happy in a long, long time. His thin lips formed a scowl too easily. And in that moment I almost – almost, mind you – felt sorry for him.

“Thanks, Doc,” I said. “I think I got what I need.”

Carruthers clucked his tongue and gave a sharp nod. Then he turned to face the cork board that took up most of the wall behind his desk. It was covered from top to bottom in glossy snaps of knife wounds, and x-rays, and hand-scrawled notes. I took that was my cue.

There was a janitor in the outer office that hadn’t been there before, a tall, reedy fellow in a green coverall who didn’t look up when I passed. Silently – you might almost say mournfully – he slid a filthy mop back and forth across the same patch of tile. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I left by the street entrance. It was still raining.

Next Chapter: Just a Little Kiss