Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

“It’s broke.”

Charlie Freeman looked around at the bulging walls, the fake antebellum furniture, the cases of plastic flowers, the green globs of goop circulating in a huge lava lamp. A man appeared in the open doorway behind the counter. He was wearing a Braves cap, a T-shirt and shorts. His face was pudgy and pugnacious, the skin riddled with broken veins.

“We’re full,” he said, as if for the first time.

“You the manager?”

The man’s glaucous gray eyes curled up the way slugs do when you salt them.

“This about the fire code? I told the guy already, we’re going to upgrade same time we do the roof, right? Damn, all we’re trying to do here is turn a buck and promote tourism.”

Charlie Freeman laid his ID on the counter and extracted two glossy six-by-eights from the manila envelope.

“I’d just like for you to take a gander at these pictures, tell me if you ever saw either of these individuals, then I’ll let you get back to the game.”

The manager picked up the photographs.

“Damn, looks like they had a rough night,” he remarked lightly. “I seen this one here. He in some sort of trouble?”

“He’s dead,” said Freeman.

The manager’s eyes widened.

“Dead? Damn.”

“When did he check in?”

The manager tapped at a computer keyboard.

“He was in 118, right?” he murmured. “Arrived the tenth.”

“Name?”

“John Flaxman.”

“Address?”

“Didn’t give none. But I got some scoop on his girlfriend, if that’s any use to you.”

Charlie Freeman tucked one of the photos back in the envelope and slipped the other into his jacket pocket.

“Can’t hurt,” he said.

“She come by this morning, said her friend had left but she wanted to keep the room for a while and pay with a card. Gloria Glasser’s the name, 2344 East 19th, Hopkinsville, Kentucky.”

He handed a smudgy carbon copy of the credit card imprint to Freeman, who studied it briefly.

“Thanks now,” he said, handing it back. “Appreciate it.”

He walked along the line of cabins to 118 and rapped at the door. It opened almost immediately. The face that appeared was young, pale and drawn. Seventeen, maybe eighteen at the most.

“Gloria Glasser?” he said.

A momentary delay, a sudden obliquity of her gaze, confirmed Freeman’s suspicions.

“Uh huh?”

“I’m from the police, ma’am. You called in about a Dale Watson?”

“You heard something?”

Her whole face was transformed.

“I come in?” said Freeman.

The room inside was a shade classier than the one at the Central Hotel, but a whole lot sadder. The other had just been a single guy’s flop. Here something was missing, something which had been found and then lost again. The sense of that loss was as thick as the tobacco fumes in the air.

The girl closed the door and lit another cigarette.

“Want one?” she asked Freeman.

“Thank you kindly.”

She gave him a light from the tip of her own, just like they’d been best buddies for years. Cute little thing, thought Freeman, even if her name wasn’t Gloria.

“So how can we help you?” he asked brightly.

“You said you had news,” the girl replied, her manner hardening up.

Freeman shook his head.

“You asked. I didn’t say nothing.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed.

“How do I know you’re who you say? Show me your badge.”

Freeman did so.

“How about you?” he asked.

“Ain’t no law that says I have to show you ID,” she retorted with a defiance as thin and hard as enamel.

“That so? But there is a law against using a credit card that ain’t yours.”

“Who says it ain’t mine?”

There was real apprehension in her voice now. Freeman gave her the eye.

“Honey, Gloria Glasser’s held that card since 1988, it said on the printout. You’d still’ve been in grade school then. Am I right?”

The girl bit her lip.

“It’s my mom’s. It’s OK, she’ll pay the bill.”

“And you are?”

“Cindy.”

“OK, Cindy. I’ve already got a pile of work right now, ’sides which it goes against my nature to be ugly to a young lady. So you just answer my questions fully and frankly, I could overlook this little credit card matter. Deal?”

She glanced at him once or twice, then nodded.

“OK I sit down?” asked Freeman, doing so.

The girl perched on the edge of a chair covered in a heavy crimson acrylic weave.

“Now then,” Freeman said, “why don’t you tell me about this Dale Watson?”

Disjointedly, the girl related the whole story-how she’d met this guy on the bus, how she had nowhere to stay so she’d ended up coming here with him, how he was looking for work, how he’d gone out the night before and not come back.

“And then I heard on the news about this shooting, and it was where Dale said he was going, and I got thinking maybe something happened to him.”

“He tell you what kind of job this was he was applying for?”

The girl shook her head.

“And he said his name was Dale Watson?”

“Uh huh.”

“Only he signed the register as Flaxman. John Flaxman.”

She shrugged.

“Maybe he didn’t want to use his real name.”

“And he was from St. Louis, you say?”

“That’s where the bus was coming from. But he’d been on the road a whiles, he said. Oh, and one time he mentioned Seattle.”

“Seattle?”

Like she’d said Seoul or Sydney.

“But I don’t know if he was from there. He didn’t let on too much about that kind of thing.”

Freeman eyed the girl in silence.

“You know what’s happened to him?” she asked haltingly.

“I ain’t even sure we’re talking about the same person yet,” he said, taking out the photograph and passing it to her.

It was a head and shoulders shot, taken at the morgue. They’d done a pretty nice job. No injuries were visible, and the face appeared peaceful and indifferent.

“That’s him,” the girl said with a lift in her voice that wrenched at Charlie Freeman’s heart. “Where is he? What happened? Is he bad off?”

ROSA MORRISON WAS working on a lead article about racial integration in inner-city high schools when the call came through.

The piece was fascinating but an absolute bitch to sub: high-profile, extremely sensitive and site-specific. The two reporters who had researched and written it had done a good job, but the fine-tuning was down to her as assistant city editor. If she got the balance wrong, the various pressure groups involved would get on the case and the shit would hit the fan. On the other hand, if she watered it down into a feel-good McArticle, readers would complain that the paper was dodging the issues.

To make matters worse, this wasn’t just a think piece. These were local schools. People whose kids went to them were bound to have their own opinions which they would feel outraged to find ignored or contradicted. Plus the whole thing had to be written as an inverted pyramid in case it got picked up by another paper and needed to be cut to fit around an ad for pantyhose or something.

So when the phone went with some gofer saying he had a guy on the line who wanted to check on a news item, Rosa’s first impulse was to push the thing off on one of the other ACEs, only neither of them were at their desks. Bill was over by the water fountain flirting with Lesha Roberts, while Jodie was probably outside on the fire escape sneaking a cigarette. There were sometimes more people hanging out on that metal staircase than there were in the office. One of these days someone would drop a smoldering butt into one of the garbage Dumpsters below and start the biggest blaze since Sherman torched the city.

Rosa sighed and said to put the caller through.

“Atlanta Journal-Constitution city desk Rosa Morrison speaking how may I help you?” she recited all in one breath, highlighting a potentially inflammatory subordinate clause onscreen and blowing it away with the delete key.

“I wanted to check on a news story?”

The caller was male, youngish, with a Yankee accent. Midwest maybe, Rosa couldn’t exactly place it.

“Uh huh,” she said noncommittally.

“See, I live out of state. Arizona? There was like a report in the paper here about a shooting at a house on Carson Street. I have relatives there, like on the same street, and they haven’t been answering the phone and I’ve been kinda worried, you know? I was wondering if you like had any more details.”

Rosa tapped a few keys, calling up a window with the library screen. She typed FIND “SHOOTING.”

“What did you say the street was called?” she asked.

“Carson-322’s where my folks live.”

Rosa typed CARSON STREET and hit ENTER. Short high-pitched cries punctuated the fuzzy silence on the telephone line. They made her think of summer holidays at Palm Beach, all those years ago, before her father backed the wrong investment and pissed away the family fortune. She could still feel the hot squishy sand between her toes and see the vast indolence of the Atlantic stretching away before her like her own future.

The blue display flickered as the database responded, SHOOTING: 1047. CARSON STREET: 2. TOTAL: 0.

“We don’t seem to have anything,” she told the caller. “When did this happen?”

“Pretty recently. Last couple days.”

“I’m showing two mentions for Carson Street, but nothing involving a shooting.”

“Really? Well, I guess I …”

Jodie’s head had appeared over the divider between their desks.

“Hold on a minute,” Rosa said, twisting the microphone of her headset aside.

“Was that something about a shooting on Carson Street?” Jodie asked.

“That’s right.”

“I just subbed the story Bottom of D2.”

Pecking away at the keyboard, Rosa killed the library window and got back into tomorrow’s edition. There it was, a short news item tucked away in the local section.

“I’ve got it,” she told her caller, scanning the text. “Correct, there was an incident last night in Carson Street. Not at a house, though. Two men killed, another in critical condition. One of the victims named as Vernon Kemp, fifteen, of 611 Garibaldi Street. The other two victims not yet identified. That’s about it. We got it off the police blotter, didn’t send a reporter out.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?” said Rosa.

“The other two guys,” said the voice at last. “You know anything about them?”

“Hold on a second.”

She leaned over to Jodie.

“Have you got the blotter report on this?”

Jodie hunted around amongst the papers on her desk, coming up with a stapled sheaf of fax pages which she passed to Rosa over the divider.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

Rosa shrugged.

“Some guy”

She quickly found the police report of the incident, which Jodie had highlighted in fluorescent pink.

“OK, let’s see. Blah, blah, blah. ‘The unidentified white victim was in his late twenties, five eleven, one hundred eighty pounds, light brown hair cut short, scar on left cheek.’ Looks like he was packing a.22-caliber revolver. The guy they took to Emergency was also white. Nothing more on him. ‘A suitcase recovered at the scene was found to contain some pairs of handcuffs, a roll of tape and a video camera.’ That’s it. Hello? Hello?”

The phone had gone dead.

“Well, thanks a whole heap!” Rosa said savagely, cutting off the phone. “Asshole!”