I stared at my sidekick, willing it to chirp. I’d already tried watching the door, but no one had even breathed on it. I could’ve been writing up the Rashmi Jones case, but then I could’ve been dusting the office. It needed dusting. Or having a consult with Johnnie Walker, who had just that morning opened an office in the bottom drawer of my desk. Instead, I decided to open the window. Maybe a new case would arrive by carrier pigeon. Or wrapped around a brick.
Three stories below me, Market Street was as empty as the rest of the city. Just a couple of plain janes in walking shoes and a granny in a blanket and sandals. She was sitting on the curb in front of a dead Starbucks, strumming street guitar for pocket change, hoping to find a philanthropist in hell. Her singing was faint but sweet as peach ice cream. My guy, talking ’bout my guy. Poor old bitch, I thought. There are no guys–not yours, not anyone’s. She stopped singing as a devil flapped over us, swooping for a landing on the next block. It had been a beautiful June morning until then, the moist promise of spring not yet broken by summer in our withered city. The granny struggled up, leaning on her guitar. She wrapped the blanket tight around her and trudged downtown.
My sidekick did chirp then, but it was Sharifa, my about-to-be ex-lover. She must have been calling from the hospital; she was wearing her light blue scrubs. Even on the little screen, I could see that she had been crying. "Hi, Fay."
I bit my lip.
"Come home tonight," she said. "Please."
"I don’t know where home is."
"I’m sorry about what I said." She folded her arms tight across her chest. "It’s your body. Your life."
I loved her. I was sick about being seeded, the abortion, everything that had happened between us in the last week. I said nothing.
Her voice was sandpaper on glass. "Have you had it done yet?" That made me angry all over again. She was wound so tight she couldn’t even say the word.
"Let me guess, Doctor," I said, ‘"Are we talking about me getting scrubbed?"
Her face twisted. "Don’t."
"If you want the dirt," I said, "you could always hire me to shadow myself. I need the work."
"Make it a joke, why don’t you?"
"Okey-doke, Doc," I said and clicked off. So my life was cocked–not exactly main menu news. Still, even with the window open, Sharifa’s call had sucked all the air out of my office. I told myself that all I needed was coffee, although what I really wanted was a rich aunt, a vacation in Fiji, and a new girlfriend. I locked the door behind me, slogged down the hall and was about to press the down button when the elevator chimed. The doors slid open to reveal George, the bot in charge of our building, and a devil–no doubt the same one that had just flown by. I told myself this had nothing to do with me. The devil was probably seeing crazy Martha down the hall about a tax rebate or taking piano lessons from Abby upstairs. Sure, and drunks go to bars for the peanuts.
"Hello, Fay," said George. "This one had true hopes of finding you in your office."
I goggled, slack-jawed and stupefied, at the devil. Of course, I’d seen them on vids and in the sky and once I watched one waddle into City Hall but I’d never been close enough to slap one before. I hated the devils. The elevator doors shivered and began to close. George stuck an arm out to stop them.
"May this one borrow some of your time?" George said.
The devil was just over a meter tall. Its face was the color of an old bloodstain and its maw seemed to kiss the air as it breathed with a wet, sucking sound. The wings were wrapped tight around it; the membranes had a rusty translucence that only hinted at the sleek bullet of a body beneath. I could see my reflection in its flat compound eyes. I looked like I had just been hit in the head with a lighthouse.
"Something is regrettable, Fay?" said George.
That was my cue for a wisecrack to show them that no invincible mass-murdering alien was going to intimidate Fay Hardaway.
"No," I said. "This way."
If they could’ve sat in chairs, there would’ve been plenty of room for us in my office. But George announced that the devil needed to make itself comfortable before we began. I nodded as I settled behind my desk, grateful to have something between the two of them and me. George dragged both chairs out into the little reception room. The devil spread its wings and swooped up onto my file cabinet, ruffling the hardcopy on my desk. It filled the back wall of my office as it perched there, a span of almost twenty feet. George wedged himself into a corner and absorbed his legs and arms until he was just a head and a slab of gleaming blue bot stuff. The devil gazed at me as if it were wondering what kind of rug I would make. I brought up three new icons on my desktop. New Case. Searchlet. Panic button.
"Indulge this one to speak for Seeren?" said George. "Seeren has a bright desire to task you to an investigation."
The devils never spoke to us, never explained what they were doing. No one knew exactly how they communicated with the army of bots they had built to prop us up.
I opened the New Case folder and the green light blinked. "I’m recording this. If I decide to accept your case, I will record my entire investigation."
"A thoughtful gesture, Fay. This one needs to remark on your client Rashmi Jones."
"She’s not my client." It took everything I had not to fall off my chair. "What about her?"
"Seeren conveys vast regret. All deaths diminish all."
I didn’t like it that this devil knew anything at all about Rashmi, but especially that she was dead. I’d found the body in Room 103 of the Comfort Inn just twelve hours ago. "The cops already have the case." I didn’t mind that there was a snarl in my voice. "Or what’s left of it. There’s nothing I can do for you."
"A permission, Fay?"
The icon was already flashing on my desktop. I opened it and saw a pix of Rashmi in the sleeveless taupe dress that she had died in. She had the blue ribbon in her hair. She was smiling, as carefree as a kid on the last day of school. The last thing she was thinking about was sucking on an inhaler filled with hydrogen cyanide. Holding her hand was some brunette dressed in a mannish chalk-stripe suit and a matching pillbox hat with a veil as fine as smoke. The couple preened under a garden arch that dripped with pink roses. They faced right, in the direction of the hand of some third party standing just off camera. It was an elegant hand, a hand that had never been in dishwater or changed a diaper. There was a wide silver ring on the fourth finger, engraved with a pattern or maybe some kind of fancy writing. I zoomed on the ring and briefly tormented pixels but couldn’t get the pattern resolved.
I looked up at the devil and then at George. "So?"
"This one notices especially the digimark," said George. "Date-stamped June 12, 2:52."
"You’re saying it was taken yesterday afternoon?"
That didn’t fit–except that it did. I had Rashmi downtown shopping for shoes late yesterday morning. At 11:46 she bought a $13 pair of this season’s Donya Durands and, now missing. At 1:23 she charged 89¢ for a Waldorf salad and an iced tea at Maison Diana. She checked into the Comfort Inn at 6:40. She didn’t have a reservation, so maybe this was a spur of the moment decision. The desk clerk remembered her as distraught. That was the word she used. A precise word, although a bit highbrow for the Comfort Inn. Who buys expensive shoes the day she intends to kill herself ? Somebody who is distraught. I glanced again at my desktop. Distraught was precisely what Rashmi Jones was not in this pix. Then I noticed the shoes: ice and taupe Donya Durands.
"Where did you get this?" I said to the devil.
It stared through me like I was a dirty window.
I tried the bot. I wouldn’t say that I liked George exactly, but he’d always been straight with me. "What’s this about, George? Finding the tommy?"
"The tommy?"
"The woman holding Rashmi’s hand."
"Seeren has made this one well aware of Kate Vermeil," said George. "Such Kate Vermeil takes work at 44 East Washington Avenue and takes home at 465 12th Avenue, Second Floor Left."
I liked that, I liked it a lot. Rashmi’s mom had told me that her daughter had a Christer friend called Kate, but I didn’t even have a last name, much less an address. I turned to the devil again. "You know this how?"
All that got me was another empty stare.
"Seeren," I said, pushing back out of my chair, "I’m afraid George has led you astray. I’m the private investigator." I stood to show them out. "The mind reader’s office is across the street."
This time George didn’t ask permission. My desktop chirped. I waved open a new icon. A certified bank transfer in the amount of a thousand dollars dragged me back onto my chair.
"A cordial inducement," said George. "With a like amount offered after the success of your investigation."
I thought of a thousand dinners in restaurants with linen tablecloths. "Tell me already." A thousand bottles of smoky scotch.
"This one draws attention to the hand of the unseen person," said the bot. "Seeren has the brightest desire to meeting such person for fruitful business discussions."
The job smelled like the dumpster at Fran’s Fish Fry. Precious little money changed hands in the pretend economy. The bots kept everything running, but they did nothing to create wealth. That was supposed to be up to us, I guess, only we’d been sort of discouraged. In some parts of town, that kind of change could hire a Felony 1, with a handful of Misdemeanors thrown in for good luck.
"That’s more than I’m worth," I said. "A hundred times more. If Seeren expects me to break the arm attached to that hand, it’s talking to the wrong jane."
"Violence is to be deplored," said George. "However, Seeren tasks Fay to discretion throughout. Never police, never news, never even rumor if possible."
"Oh, discretion." I accepted the transfer. "For two large, I can be as discreet as the Queen’s butler."
2
I could’ve taken a cab, but they’re almost all driven by bots now, and bots keep nobody’s secrets. Besides, even though I had a thousand dollars in the bank, I thought I’d let it settle in for a while. Make itself at home. So I bicycled over to 12th Avenue. I started having doubts as I hit the 400 block. This part of the city had been kicked in the head and left bleeding on the sidewalk. Dark bars leaned against pawnshops. Board-ups turned their blank plywood faces to the street. There would be more bots than women in this neighborhood and more rats than bots.
The Adagio Spa squatted at 465 12th Avenue. It was a brick building with a reinforced luxar display window that was so scratched it looked like a thin slice of rainstorm. There were dusty plants behind it. The second floor windows were bricked over. I chained my bike to a dead car, set my sidekick to record and went in.
The rear wall of the little reception area was bright with pix of some Mediterranean seaside town. A clump of bad pixels made the empty beach flicker. A bot stepped through the door that led to the spa and took up a position at the front desk. "Good afternoon, Madam," he said. "It’s most gratifying to welcome you. This one is called . . ."
"I’m looking for Kate Vermeil." I don’t waste time on chitchat with bots. "Is she in?"
"It’s regrettable that she no longer takes work here."
"She worked here?" I said. "I was told she lived here."
"You was told wrong." A granny filled the door, and then hobbled through, leaning on a metal cane. She was wearing a yellow flowered dress that was not quite as big as a circus tent and over it a blue smock with Noreen embroidered over the left breast. Her face was wide and pale as a hardboiled egg, her hair a ferment of tight gray curls. She had the biggest hands I had ever seen. "I’ll take care of this, Barry. Go see to Helen Ritzi. She gets another needle at twelve, then turn down the heat to 101."
The bot bowed politely and left us.
"What’s this about then?" The cane wobbled and she put a hand on the desk to steady herself.
I dug the sidekick out of my slacks, opened the PI license folder and showed it to her. She read it slowly, sniffed and handed it back. "Young fluffs working at play jobs. Do something useful, why don’t you?"
"Like what?" I said. "Giving perms? Face peels?"
She was the woman of steel; sarcasm bounced off her. "If nobody does a real job, pretty soon the damn bots will replace us all."
"Might be an improvement." It was something to say, but as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. My generation was doing better than the grannies ever had. Maybe someday our kids wouldn’t need bots to survive.
Our kids. I swallowed a mouthful of ashes and called the pix Seeren had given me onto the sidekick’s screen. "I’m looking for Kate Vermeil." I aimed it at her.
She peered at the pix and then at me. "You need a manicure."
"The hell I do."
"I work for a living, fluff. And my hip hurts if I stand up too long." She pointed her cane at the doorway behind the desk. "What did you say your name was?"
The battered manicure table was in an alcove decorated with fake grapevines that didn’t quite hide the water stains in the drop ceiling. Dust covered the leaves, turning the plastic fruit from purple to gray.
Noreen rubbed a thumb over the tips of my fingers. "You bite your nails, or do you just cut them with a chainsaw?"
She wanted a laugh so I gave her one.
"So, nails square, round, or oval?" Her skin was dry and mottled with liver spots.
"Haven’t a clue." I shrugged. "This was your idea."
Noreen perched on an adjustable stool that was cranked low so that her face was only a foot above my hands. There were a stack of stainless steel bowls, a jar of Vaseline, a round box of salt, a bowl filled with packets of sugar stolen from McDonald’s, and a liquid soap dispenser on the table beside her. She started filing each nail from the corner to the center, going from left to right and then back. At first she worked in silence. I decided not to push her.
"Kate was my masseuse up until last week," she said finally. "Gave her notice all of a sudden and left me in the lurch. I’ve had to pick up all her appointments and me with the bum hip. Some days I can’t hardly get out of bed. Something happen to her?"
"Not as far as I know."
"But she’s missing."
I shook my head. "I don’t know where she is, but that doesn’t mean she’s missing."
Noreen poured hot water from an electric kettle into one of the stainless steel bowls, added cool water from a pitcher, squirted soap and swirled the mixture around. "You soak for five minutes." She gestured for me to dip my hands into the bowl. "I’ll be back. I got to make sure that Barry doesn’t burn Helen Ritzi’s face off." She stood with a grunt.
"Wait," I said. "Did she say why she was quitting?"
Noreen reached for her cane. "Couldn’t stop talking about it. You’d think she was the first ever."
"The first to what?"
The granny laughed. "You’re one hell of a detective, fluff. She was supposed to get married yesterday. Tell me that pix you’re flashing ain’t her doing the deed."
She shuffled off, her white nursemate shoes scuffing against dirty linoleum. From deeper in the spa, I heard her kettle drum voice and then the bot’s snare. I was itching to take my sidekick out of my pocket, but I kept my hands in the soak. Besides, I’d looked at the pix enough times to know that she was right. A wedding. The hand with the ring would probably belong to a Christer priest. There would have been a witness and then the photographer, although maybe the photographer was the witness. Of course, I had tumbled to none of this in the two days I’d worked Rashmi Jones’s disappearance. I was one hell of a detective, all right. And Rashmi’s mom must not have known either. It didn’t make sense that she would hire me to find her daughter and hold something like that back.
"I swear," said Noreen, leaning heavily on the cane as she creaked back to me, "that bot is scary. I sent down to City Hall for it just last week and already it knows my business left, right, up, and down. The thing is, if they’re so smart, how come they talk funny?"
"The devils designed them to drive us crazy."
"They didn’t need no bots to do that, fluff."
She settled back onto her stool, tore open five sugar packets and emptied their contents onto her palm. Then she reached for the salt box and poured salt onto the sugar. She squirted soap onto the pile and then rubbed her hands together. "I could buy some fancy exfoliating cream but this works just as good." She pointed with her chin at my hands. "Give them a shake and bring them here."
I wanted to ask her about Kate’s marriage plans, but when she took my hands in hers, I forgot the question. I’d never felt anything quite like it; the irritating scratch of the grit was offset by the sensual slide of our soapy fingers. Pleasure with just the right touch of pain–something I’d certainly be telling Sharifa about, if Sharifa and I were talking. My hands tingled for almost an hour afterward.
Noreen poured another bowl of water and I rinsed. "Why would getting married make Kate want to quit?" I asked.
"I don’t know. Something to do with her church?" Noreen patted me dry with a threadbare towel. "She went over to the Christers last year. Maybe Jesus don’t like married women giving backrubs. Or maybe she got seeded." She gave a bitter laugh. "Everybody does eventually."
I let that pass. "Tell me about Kate. What was she like to work with?"
"Average for the kind of help you get these sorry days." Noreen pushed at my cuticles with an orangewood stick. "Showed up on time mostly; I could only afford to bring her in two days a week. No go-getter, but she could follow directions. Problem was she never really got close to the customers, always acting like this was just a pitstop. Kept to herself mostly, which was how I could tell she was excited about getting married. It wasn’t like her to babble."
"And the bride?"
"Some Indian fluff–Rashy or something."
"Rashmi Jones."
She nodded. "Her I never met."
"Did she go to school?"
"Must have done high school, but damned if I know where. Didn’t make much of an impression, I’d say. College, no way." She opened a drawer where a flock of colored vials was nesting. "You want polish or clear coat on the nails?"
"No color. It’s bad for business."
She leered at me. "Business is good?"
"You say she did massage for you?" I said. "Where did she pick that up?"
"Hold still now." Noreen uncapped the vial; the milky liquid that clung to the brush smelled like super glue’s evil twin. "This is fast dry." She painted the stuff onto my nails with short, confident strokes. "Kate claimed her mom taught her. Said she used to work at the health club at the Radisson before it closed down."
"Did the mom have a name?"
"Yeah." Noreen chewed her lower lip as she worked. "Mom. Give the other hand."
I extended my arm. "So if Kate didn’t live here, where she did live?"
"Someplace. Was on her application." She kept her head down until she’d finished. "You’re done. Wave them around a little–that’s it."
After a moment, I let my arms drop to my side. We stared at each other. Then Noreen heaved herself off the stool and led me back out to the reception room.
"That’ll be eighty cents for the manicure, fluff." She waved her desktop on. "You planning on leaving a tip?"
I pulled out the sidekick and beamed two dollars at the desk. Noreen opened the payment icon, grunted her approval and then opened another folder. "Says here she lives at 44 East Washington Avenue."
I groaned.
"Something wrong?"
"I already have that address."
"Got her call too? Kate@Washington.03284."
"No, that’s good. Thanks." I went to the door and paused. I don’t know why I needed to say anything else to her, but I did. "I help people, Noreen. Or at least I try. It’s a real job, something bots can’t do."
She just stood there, kneading the bad hip with a big, dry hand.
I unchained my bike, pedaled around the block and then pulled over. I read Kate Vermeil’s call into my sidekick. Her sidekick picked up on the sixth chirp. There was no pix.
"You haven’t reached Kate yet, but your luck might change if you leave a message at the beep." She put on the kind of low, smoky voice that doesn’t come out to play until dark. It was a nice act.
"Hi Kate," I said. "My name is Fay Hardaway and I’m a friend of Rashmi Jones. She asked me to give you a message about yesterday so please give me a call at Fay@Market.03284." I wasn’t really expecting her to respond, but it didn’t hurt to try.
I was on my way to 44 East Washington Avenue when my sidekick chirped in the pocket of my slacks. I picked up. Rashmi Jones’s mom, Najma, stared at me from the screen with eyes as deep as wells.
"The police came," she said. "They said you were supposed to notify them first. They want to speak to you again."
They would. So I’d called the law after I called the mom–they’d get over it. You don’t tell a mother that her daughter is dead and then ask her to act surprised when the cops come knocking. "I was working for you, not them."
"I want to see you."
"I understand."
"I hired you to find my daughter."
"I did," I said. "Twice." I was sorry as soon as I said it.
She glanced away; I could hear squeaky voices in the background. "I want to know everything," she said. "I want to know how close you came."
"I’ve started a report. Let me finish it and I’ll bring it by later. . . ."
"Now," she said. "I’m at school. My lunch starts at eleven-fifty and I have recess duty at twelve-fifteen." She clicked off.
I had nothing to feel guilty about, so why was I tempted to wriggle down a storm drain and find the deepest sewer in town? Because a mom believed that I hadn’t worked fast enough or smart enough to save her daughter? Someone needed to remind these people that I didn’t fix lost things, I just found them. But that someone wouldn’t be me. My play now was simply to stroll into her school and let her beat me about the head with her grief. I could take it. I ate old Bogart movies for breakfast and spit out bullets. And at the end of this cocked day, I could just forget about Najma Jones, because there would be no Sharifa reminding me how much it cost me to do my job. I took out my sidekick, linked to my desktop and downloaded everything I had in the Jones file. Then I swung back onto my bike.
The mom had left a message three days ago, asking that I come out to her place on Ashbury. She and her daughter rattled around in an old Victorian with gingerbread gables and a front porch the size of Cuba. The place had been in the family for four generations. Theirs had been a big family–once. The mom said that Rashmi hadn’t come home the previous night. She hadn’t called and didn’t answer messages. The mom had contacted the cops, but they weren’t all that interested. Not enough time would have passed for them. Too much time had passed for the mom.
The mom taught fifth grade at Reagan Elementary. Rashmi was a twenty-six year-old-grad student, six credits away from an MFA in Creative Writing. The mom trusted her to draw money from the family account, so at first I thought I might be able to find her by chasing debits. But there was no activity in the account we could attribute to the missing girl. When I suggested that she might be hiding out with friends, the mom went prickly on me. Turned out that Rashmi’s choice of friends was a cause of contention between them. Rashmi had dropped her old pals in the last few months and taken up with a new, religious crowd. Alix, Gratiana, Elaine, and Kate–the mom didn’t know their last names–were members of the Church of Christ the Man. I’d had trouble with Christers before and wasn’t all that eager to go up against them again, so instead I biked over to campus to see Rashmi’s advisor. Zelda Manotti was a dithering old granny who would have loved to help except she had all the focus of paint spatter. She did let me copy Rashmi’s novel-in-progress. And she did let me tag along to her advanced writing seminar, in case Rashmi showed up for it. She didn’t. I talked to the three other students after class, but they either didn’t know where she was or wouldn’t say. None of them was Gratiana, Alix, or Elaine.
That night I skimmed The Lost Heart, Rashmi’s novel. It was a nostalgic and sentimental weeper set back before the devils disappeared all the men. Young Brigit Bird was searching for her father, a famous architect who had been kidnapped by Colombian drug lords. If I was just a fluff doing a fantasy job in the pretend economy, then old Noreen would have crowned Rashmi Jones queen of fluffs.
I’d started day two back at the Joneses’ home. The mom watched as I went through Rashmi’s room. I think she was as worried about what I might find as she was that I would find nothing. Rashmi listened to the Creeps, had three different pairs of Kat sandals, owned everything Denise Pepper had ever written, preferred underwire bras and subscribed to News for the Confused. She had kicked about a week’s worth of dirty clothes under her bed. Her wallpaper mix cycled through koalas, the World’s Greatest Beaches, ruined castles, and Playgirl Centerfolds 2000-2010. She’d kept a handwritten diary starting in the sixth grade and ending in the eighth in which she often complained that her mother was strict and that school was boring. The only thing I found that rattled the mom was a Christer Bible tucked into the back of the bottom drawer of the nightstand. When I pulled it out, she flushed and stalked out of the room.
I found my lead on the Joneses’ home network. Rashmi was not particularly diligent about backing up her sidekick files, and the last one I found was almost six months old, which was just about when she’d gotten religion. She’d used simple encryption, which wouldn’t withstand a serious hack, but which would discourage the mom from snooping. I doglegged a key and opened the file. She had multiple calls. Her mother had been trying her at Rashmi@Ashbury.03284. But she also had an alternate: Brigitbird@Vincent.03284. I did a reverse lookup and that turned an address: The Church of Christ the Man, 348 Vincent Avenue. I wasn’t keen for a personal visit to the church, so I tried her call.
"Hello," said a voice.
"Is this Rashmi Jones?"
The voice hesitated. "My name is Brigit. Leave me alone."
"Your mother is worried about you, Rashmi. She hired me to find you."
"I don’t want to be found."
"I’m reading your novel, Rashmi." It was just something to say; I wanted to keep her on the line. "I was wondering, does she find her father at the end?"
"No." I could hear her breath caressing the microphone. "The devils come. That’s the whole point."
Someone said something to her and she muted the speaker. But I knew she could still hear me. "That’s sad, Rashmi. But I guess that’s the way it had to be."
Then she hung up.
The mom was relieved that Rashmi was all right, furious that she was with Christers. So what? I’d found the girl: case closed. Only Najma Jones begged me to help her connect with her daughter. She was already into me for twenty bucks plus expenses, but for another five I said I’d try to get her away from the church long enough for them to talk. I was on my way over when the searchlet I’d attached to the Jones account turned up the hit at Grayle’s Shoes. I was grateful for the reprieve, even more pleased when the salesbot identified Rashmi from her pix. As did the waitress at Maison Diana.
And the clerk at the Comfort Inn.
3
Ronald Reagan Elementary had been recently renovated, no doubt by a squad of janitor bots. The brick façade had been cleaned and repointed; the long row of windows gleamed like teeth. The asphalt playground had been ripped up and resurfaced with safe-t-mat, the metal swingsets swapped for gaudy towers and crawl tubes and slides and balance beams and decks. The chain link fences had been replaced by redwood lattice through which twined honeysuckle and clematis. There was a boxwood maze next to the swimming pool that shimmered, blue as a dream. Nothing was too good for the little girls–our hope for the future.
There was no room in the rack jammed with bikes and scooters and goboards, so I leaned my bike against a nearby cherry tree. The very youngest girls had come out for first recess. I paused behind the tree for a moment to let their whoops and shrieks and laughter bubble over me. My business didn’t take me to schools very often; I couldn’t remember when I had last seen so many girls in one place. They were black and white and yellow and brown, mostly dressed like janes you might see anywhere. But there were more than a few whose clothes proclaimed their mothers’ lifestyles. Tommys in hunter camo and chaste Christers, twists in chains and spray-on, clumps of sisters wearing the uniforms of a group marriage, a couple of furries and one girl wearing a body suit that looked just like bot skin. As I lingered there, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shade of a tree. I had no idea who these tiny creatures were. They went to this well-kept school, led more or less normal lives. I grew up in the wild times, when everything was falling apart. At that moment, I realized that they were as far removed from me as I was from the grannies. I would always watch them from a distance.
Just inside the fence, two sisters in green-striped shirtwaists and green knee socks were turning a rope for a ponytailed jumper who was executing nimble criss-crosses. The turners chanted,
"Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
there sits Stacy pretty as a rose! She sings, she sings, she sings so sweet,
Then along comes Chantall to kiss her on the cheek!"
Another jumper joined her in the middle, matching her step for step, her dark hair flying. The chant continued,
"How many kisses does she get?
One, two, three, four, five. . . ."
The two jumpers pecked at each other in the air to the count of ten without missing a beat. Then Ponytail skipped out and the turners began the chant over again for the dark-haired girl. Ponytail bent over for a moment to catch her breath; when she straightened, she noticed me.
"Hey you, behind the tree." She shaded her eyes with a hand. "You hiding?"
I stepped into the open. "No."
"This is our school, you know." The girl set one foot behind the other and then spun a hundred and eighty degrees to point at the door to the school. "You supposed to sign in at the office."
"I’d better take care of that then."
As I passed through the gate into the playground, a few of the girls stopped playing and stared. This was all the audience Ponytail needed. "You someone’s mom?"
"No."
"Don’t you have a job?" She fell into step beside me.
"I do."
"What is it?"
"I can’t tell you."
She dashed ahead to block my path. "Probably because it’s a pretend job."
Two of her sisters in green-striped shirtwaists scrambled to back her up.
"When we grow up," one of them announced, "we’re going to have real jobs."
"Like a doctor," the other said. "Or a lion tamer."
Other girls were joining us. "I want to drive a truck," said a tommy. "Big, big truck." She specified the size of her rig with outstretched arms.
"That’s not a real job. Any bot could do that."
"I want to be a teacher," said the dark-haired sister who had been jumping rope.
"Chantall loves school," said a furry. "She’d marry school if she could." Apparently this passed for brilliant wit in the third grade; some girls laughed so hard they had to cover their mouths with the backs of their hands. Me, I was flummoxed. Give me a spurned lover or a mean drunk or a hardcase cop and I could figure out some play, but just then I was trapped by this giggling mob of children.
"So why you here?" Ponytail put her fists on her hips.
A jane in khakis and a baggy plum sweater emerged from behind a blue tunnel that looked like a centipede. She pinned me with that penetrating but not unkind stare that teachers are born with, and began to trudge across the playground toward me. "I’ve come to see Ms. Jones," I said.
"Oh." A shadow passed over Ponytail’s face and she rubbed her hands against the sides of her legs. "You better go then."
Someone called, "Are you the undertaker?"
A voice that squeaked with innocence asked, "What’s an undertaker?"
I didn’t hear the answer. The teacher in the plum sweater rescued me and we passed through the crowd.
I didn’t understand why Najma Jones had come to school. She was either the most dedicated teacher on the planet or she was too numb to accept her daughter’s death. I couldn’t tell which. She had been reserved when we met the first time; now she was locked down and welded shut. She was a bird of a woman with a narrow face and thin lips. Her gray hair had a few lingering strands of black. She wore a long-sleeved white kameez tunic over shalwar trousers. I leaned against the door of her classroom and told her everything I had done the day before. She sat listening at her desk with a sandwich that she wasn’t going to eat and a carton of milk that she wasn’t going to drink and a napkin that she didn’t need.
When I had finished, she asked me about cyanide inhalers.
"Hydrogen cyanide isn’t hard to get in bulk," I said. "They use it for making plastic, engraving, tempering steel. The inhaler came from one of the underground suicide groups, probably Our Choice. The cops could tell you for sure."
She unfolded the napkin and spread it out on top of her desk. "I’ve heard it’s a painful death."
"Not at all," I said. "They used to use hydrogen cyanide gas to execute criminals, back in the bad old days. It all depends on the first breath. Get it deep into your lungs and you’re unconscious before you hit the floor. Dead in less than a minute."
"And if you don’t get a large enough dose?"
"Ms. Jones . . ."
She cut me off hard. "If you don’t?"
"Then it takes longer, but you still die. There are convulsions. The skin flushes and turns purple. Eyes bulge. They say it’s something like having a heart attack."
"Rashmi?" She laid her daughter’s name down gently, as if she were tucking it into bed. "How did she die?"
Had the cops shown her the crime scene pictures? I decided they hadn’t. "I don’t think she suffered," I said.
She tore a long strip off the napkin. "You don’t think I’m a very good mother, do you?"
I don’t know exactly what I expected her to say, but this wasn’t it. "Ms. Jones, I don’t know much about you and your daughter. But I do know that you cared enough about her to hire me. I’m sorry I let you down."
She shook her head wearily, as if I had just flunked the pop quiz. One third does not equal .033 and Los Angeles has never been the capital of California. "Is there anything else I should know?" she said.
"There is." I had to tell her what I’d found out that morning, but I wasn’t going to tell her that I was working for a devil. "You mentioned before that Rashmi had a friend named Kate."
"The Christer?" She tore another strip off the napkin.
I nodded. "Her name is Kate Vermeil. I don’t know this for sure yet, but there’s reason to believe that Rashmi and Kate were married yesterday. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Maybe yesterday it might have." Her voice was flat. "It doesn’t anymore."
I could hear stirring in the next classroom. Chairs scraped against linoleum. Girls were jabbering at each other.
"I know Rashmi became a Christer," she said. "It’s a broken religion. But then everything is broken, isn’t it? My daughter and I . . . I don’t think we ever understood each other. We were strangers at the end." The napkin was in shreds. "How old were you when it happened?"
"I wasn’t born yet." She didn’t have to explain what it was. "I’m not as old as I look."
"I was nineteen. I remember men, my father, my uncles. And the boys. I actually slept with one." She gave me a bleak smile. "Does that shock you, Ms. Hardaway?"
I hated it when grannies talked about having sex, but I just shook my head.
"I didn’t love Sunil, but I said I’d marry him just so I could get out of my mother’s house. Maybe that was what was happening with Rashmi and this Kate person?"
"I wouldn’t know."
The school bell rang.
"I’m wearing white today, Ms. Hardaway, to honor my darling daughter." She gathered up the strips of napkin and the sandwich and the carton of milk and dropped them in the trashcan. "White is the Hindu color of mourning. But it’s also the color of knowledge. The goddess of learning, Saraswati, is always shown wearing a white dress, sitting on a white lotus. There is something here I must learn." She fingered the gold embroidery at the neckline of her kameez. "But it’s time for recess."
We walked to the door. "What will you do now?" She opened it. The fifth grade swarmed the hall, girls rummaging through their lockers.
"Find Kate Vermeil," I said.
She nodded. "Tell her I’m sorry."
4
I tried Kate’s call again, but when all I got was the sidekick I biked across town to 44 East Washington Avenue. The Poison Society turned out to be a jump joint; the sign said it opened at nine pm. There was no bell on the front door, but I knocked hard enough to wake Marilyn Monroe. No answer. I went around to the back and tried again. If Kate was in there, she wasn’t entertaining visitors.
A sidekick search turned up an open McDonald’s on Wallingford, a ten-minute ride. The only other customers were a couple of twists with bound breasts and identical acid-green vinyl masks. One of them crouched on the floor beside the other, begging for chicken nuggets. A bot took my order for the 29¢ combo meal–it was all bots behind the counter. By law, there was supposed to be a human running the place, but if she was on the premises, she was nowhere to be seen. I thought about calling City Hall to complain, but the egg rolls arrived crispy and the McLatte was nicely scalded. Besides, I didn’t need to watch the cops haul the poor jane in charge out of whatever hole she had fallen into.
A couple of hardcase tommys in army surplus fatigues had strutted in just after me. They ate with their heads bowed over their plastic trays so the fries didn’t have too far to travel. Their collapsible titanium nightsticks lay on the table in plain sight. One of them was not quite as wide as a bus. The other was nothing special, except that when I glanced up from my sidekick, she was giving me a freeze-dried stare. I waggled my shiny fingernails at her and screwed my cutest smile onto my face. She scowled, said something to her partner and went back to the trough.
My sidekick chirped. It was my pal Julie Epstein, who worked Self-Endangerment/Missing Persons out of the second precinct.
"You busy, Fay?"
"Yeah, the Queen of Cleveland just lost her glass slipper and I’m on the case."
"Well, I’m about to roll through your neighborhood. Want to do lunch?"
I aimed the sidekick at the empties on my table. "Just finishing."
"Where are you?"
"McD’s on Wallingford."
"Yeah? How are the ribs?"
"Couldn’t say. But the egg rolls are triple dee."
"That the place where the owner is a junkliner? We’ve had complaints. Bots run everything?"
"No, I can see her now. She’s shortchanging some beat cop."
She gave me the laugh. "Got the coroner’s on the Rashmi Jones. Cyanide induced hypoxia."
"You didn’t by any chance show the mom pix of the scene?"
"Hell no. Talk about cruel and unusual." She frowned. "Why?"
"I was just with her. She seemed like maybe she suspected her kid wrestled with the reaper."
"We didn’t tell her. By the way, we don’t really care if you call your client, but next time how about trying us first?"
"That’s cop law. Me, I follow PI law."
"Where did you steal that line from, Chinatown?"
"It’s got better dialogue than Dragnet." I swirled the last of my latte in the cup. "You calling a motive on the Rashmi Jones?"
"Not yet. What do you like?" She ticked off the fingers of her left hand. "Family? School? Money? Broke a fingernail? Cloudy day?"
"Pregnancy? Just a hunch."
"You think she was seeded? We’ll check that. But that’s no reason to kill yourself."
"They’ve all got reasons. Only none of them makes sense."
She frowned. "Hey, don’t get all invested on me here."
"Tell me, Julie, do you think I’m doing a pretend job?"
"Whoa, Fay." Her chuckle had a sharp edge. "Maybe it’s time you and Sharifa took a vacation."
"Yeah." I let that pass. "It’s just that some granny called me a fluff."
"Grannies." She snorted in disgust. "Well, you’re no cop, that’s for sure. But we do appreciate the help. Yeah, I’d say what you do is real. As real as anything in this cocked world."
"Thanks, flatfoot. Now that you’ve made things all better, I’ll just click off. My latte is getting cold and you’re missing so damn many persons."
"Think about that vacation, shamus. Bye."
As I put my sidekick away, I realized that the tommys were waiting for me. They’d been rattling ice in their cups and folding McWrappers for the past ten minutes. I probably didn’t need their brand of trouble. The smart move would be to bolt for the door and leave my bike for now; I could lose them on foot. But then I hadn’t made a smart move since April. The big one was talking into her sidekick when I sauntered over to them.
"What can I do for you ladies?" I said.
The big one pocketed the sidekick. Her partner started to come out of her seat but the big one stretched an arm like a telephone pole to restrain her.
"Do we know you?" The partner had close-set eyes and a beak nose; her black hair was short and stiff as a brush. She was wearing a black tee under her fatigue jacket and black leather combat boots. Probably had steel toes. "No," she continued, "I don’t think we do."
"Then let’s get introductions out of the way," I said. "I’m Fay Hardaway. And you are. . . ?"
They gave me less than nothing.
I sat down. "Thanks," I said. "Don’t mind if I do."
The big one leaned back in her chair and eyed me as if I was dessert. "Sure you’re not making a mistake, missy?"
"Why, because you’re rough, tough, and take no guff?"
"You’re funny." She smirked. "I like that. People who meet us are usually so very sad. My name is Alix." She held out her hand and we shook. "Pleased to know you."
The customary way to shake hands is to hold on for four, maybe five seconds, squeeze goodbye, then loosen the grip. Maybe big Alix wasn’t familiar with our customs–she wasn’t letting go.
I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a missing hand intimidate me. "Oh, then I do know you," I said. We were in the McDonald’s on Wallingford Street–a public place. I’d just been talking to my pal the cop. I was so damn sure that I was safe, I decided to take my shot. "That would make the girlfriend here Elaine. Or is it Gratiana?"
"Alix." The beak panicked. "Now we’ve got to take her."
Alix sighed, then yanked on my arm. She might have been pulling a tissue from a box for all the effort she expended. I slid halfway across the table as the beak whipped her nightstick to full extension. I lunged away from her and she caught me just a glancing blow above the ear but then Alix stuck a popper into my face and spattered me with knockout spray. I saw a billion stars and breathed the vacuum of deep space for maybe two seconds before everything went black…
