by Colin Deerwood

I was hotter than a two dollar pistol when I stepped off the bus at the main terminal, and for a couple of reasons. The obvious one was I had gone from the fire back into the frying pan. The city was Kovic’s territory. I figured that there was still a price on my head. And the law was looking to question me about Ralphie Silver’s murder.. The Bombay mob and probably the diamond syndicate were still after their revenge and the missing rocks. The other reason was Marie Wilson, the moonshiner’s daughter.

She had flagged the bus down, endured the scolding from the driver, and lugged her suitcase back to where I was seated.

I explained to her again that she couldn’t come with me.

She said that she was going with herself and that we were just going in the same direction.

I told her that I couldn’t be responsible for her in the big city, and that I barely knew where I was staying myself which was kind of an exaggeration as I had a pretty good idea.

She replied that she had been planning this trip to the city since her last year in high school and that she would be staying with her friend, Irma, who lived in a woman’s residence while she trained to be a court stenographer, and which she deemed perfect as she herself hoped to eventually find work as a newspaper reporter like Rosalind Russell in that movie with Cary Grant. And the first thing she was going to do as a reporter was investigate Constable Thorndyke and prove that he was responsible for the disappearance and drowning deaths of those girls. She had it all planned out. She would haunt the newspaper morgues and find all the articles and notices of girls missing up in the Lakes country and then stitch together an airtight case proving that Thorny was behind it all. And anyone else who might have turned a blind eye. She was going to get revenge for his victims.

I had to tell her that revenge didn’t have a rudder or a steering wheel and there was no way of knowing where it would take you. I knew that from experience.

She was quiet after again insisting on her resolve to expose Thorny for the monster he was.

I was thankful for that and settled into looking at the countryside passing by from a corner curve of the window. I had my jar and expensive cigarettes. The bus stopped every so often along the route, picking up passengers heading into the city. An old gal in white gloves and shoes like leather bricks gave me a nasty look and asked me to put out my cigarette. Cracking the bus window open was as much as I was going to do. She wasn’t pleased with my non-reply and found a seat up toward the front after complaining to the bus driver who reminded her that it was a free country.

The motion of the ride had made Marie drowsy and she leaned her head on my shoulder, giggling and speaking random words as she drifted off. I didn’t think too much about it as I had other things on my mind like getting a new identity and finding a way to get out of the country before they reinstituted the draft. If Alice could find a buyer for Ted’s art piece, it would be easy. If not, it would be hard and I had to be prepared for that.

The rumble of the bus crossing the bridge into the city shook Marie from her snooze. She’d smiled at me, drowsily and then hugged my arm to tell me that she was going to change her name if being a reporter didn’t work out and she went to Los Angeles to become an actress. She would take my last name and call herself Eve Gardner as that Stan Gardner was the name I used when I’d introduced myself to her.

I gave her some free advice. Stay away from Los Angeles. And if she couldn’t do that, she should dye her hair brunette and call herself Ava. There were too many blondes named Eve in the movies. She showed her appreciation by stroking the inside of my thigh and nibbling on my ear.

The bus made a quick wide turn that threw us up against each other and then face to face, almost lip to lip, and I could feel her heavy hot breath on my cheek. Or was that mine. I was breaking a mild sweat and I could tell it was destined to be another hot summer day, hotter than I’d expected. But destiny often has its own wicked sense of humor.

With a hiss of airbrakes, the bus had come to a full stop at its destination. Passengers were standing and stretching, some of them glancing our way.

Marie stood up, a little flustered and, grinning in embarrassment, straightened her blouse, grabbed her suitcase, planted a kiss on my cheek, and said “Bye, Stan, it’s been nice knowing you. Don’t be a stranger.”

I banged on the door to Alice’s studio keeping to the shadows. The wrought iron fence at street level blocked the view into the alcove under the stoop. A man had died on the sidewalk on the other side of that fence, a man wearing motoring goggles, sliced to the quick by Linkov’s sword.

No one was answering the door and that had me worried. Alice was home most of the time working on her art. The last time I’d been on the other side of that door there had been a dead body, also wearing goggles, stretched out across the floor, also victim of Linkov’s rapier. Both of the dead thugs had been looking for me and Rebecca, presumably after the diamonds because, not solely by coincidence, a crew of similarly goggled robbers had descended on Herr Doktor Soloman’s apartment with guns blazing. I was pretty certain they weren’t the Thieves of Bombay, it didn’t fit with the way they operated. And it definitely wasn’t Yan Kovic’s style. Who they were was still a mystery.

I felt a presence loom over my shoulder. It was Linkov, Alice’s neighbor, the crazy Russian painter. He didn’t have his sword, but his scowl was threatening enough.

It was the beard. “Linkov, it’s me, Lackland Ask. I’m looking for Alice. You know where she is?”

He squinted closely at my mug. “Yes it is beard.” He shrugged and walked away, a finger of his hand pointing up. “Top floor skylight studio.” Linkov was never big on small talk.

Alice was happy to see me in her typically understated fashion. She had a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. “You’ve grown a beard.”

“Nice to see you, too, Al. Looks like you’re moving up in the world.”

That provoked a smile from behind a wreath of smoke. “You might say that. My friend Lee, the artist who used to work here moved to the island when her boyfriend came back from Wyoming and let it to me.” She used the paintbrush to indicate the small space with a bed and a sink and not much else. “You and Becky stayed here one night. Remember? It wasn’t that long ago.”

I glanced around the studio. It did look familiar.

“There were more canvases stacked against the wall. My watercolors don’t take up as much room.”

I remembered the skylight. And I remembered Rebecca. It was a painful memory.

“And you guys left some things behind.”

She handed me a little cigar box. Inside was Rebecca’s pistol, a Remington 51, often referred to as a purse gun, the bank deposit envelope I had placed the post office package notice I had lifted from Della’s mailbox for what I later learned was the jade, the Empress’s Cucumber, now empty, and to my surprise, the little cloth sachet that had once held the diamonds and which Becky had claimed she lost in the coalbin, also empty. Suddenly my head was spinning. Something wasn’t adding up and I had to sit down to figure out how come.

“Lack, are you ok?” Alice guided me to a chair by a table, the cigar box in my hand weighing a ton.

I had questions. For myself. Did the empty sachet mean that Rebecca had had the diamonds all along? Were they in her coat pocket when she took the plunge from the fourth floor of the Serbian Social Club? Even so, why was the bank envelope in the box and empty, the package slip gone. I knew she had it on her when we took the room at the Lattimer Hotel. So if she fell to her death how did it end up in the cigar box? She’s told me that she’s left the pea shooter behind so no surprise in finding it here. And it was loaded.

I stuck the pistol in my jacket pocket. I couldn’t decide what to do with the bank deposit envelope or the empty sachet. They were telling me something, something I didn’t want to believe.

Alice took me to see the doctor. His name was Patterson. He was a retired pediatrician and he collected art and wrote poetry. We met uptown at a gallery in a part of the city I hardly had the occasion to visit in my line of work. It was Swellsville, gilded windows and polished brass, Even the air smelled sweeter.

She’d already laid out the details of what had gone on the last couple of weeks I was hiding out in Little Lake. After the horrific attack on her by the goggle men, and the dead body bleeding out in her studio and the other one on the sidewalk out-front, and the police investigation and all the confusion of their questions, she was set upon by reporters with more questions. One of them got a look at her watercolors and liked them and he told his friend who was the art critic at the newspaper. The critic dropped by since he was visiting the loft of a big name artist who worked in the neighborhood. He loved what she was doing and introduced her to the uptown gallery owner who right away bought a sampling of her sketches and now was interested in some of her larger landscapes because he was certain he could find buyers for all her watercolors. He wanted to include her in an upcoming group show with well-known painters, and even talked about mounting a solo exhibition of her “work” as she called it.

It was as if the dark cloud of the dead bodies of the men who had attacked her had a silver lining. Suddenly she had money, or more than she’d had before. I liked her new outfit and it fit right in with the gilt and shiny black lacquer of the gallery. With the exception of the beard, I looked pretty much the same, rough around the edges in my second hand tweeds, battered shoes, fedora, and dark glasses. Bright daylight still made my eyes water and ache. I looked like a blind man beggar Alice had abducted from a street corner. Under my arm was a box containing Ted’s art piece she said this Dr. Patterson might be interested in buying.

The doctor was all smiles when he saw Alice, and held out his hand. “Alice, so nice to see you! Roland has been showing me your sketches.”

Alice returned the smile, a little embarrassed. Her popularity was still new to her. She nudged me with an elbow.

“This is Jerry. . . .”

I saw her mind go blank. She’d forgotten the alias I was going to be using for this deal. I shifted the box to my other arm and held out my hand. “Jerome Paulsen, doc, nice to meet you.”

The doctor was a clean looking older man with wire frame specs, a white collar natty tweed suit, and a perfectly tied bowtie. He didn’t hide that I wasn’t what he’d expected. “You are an art collector?”

I shook my head. “Ixnay, doc. Only this piece Ted gave me. I thought I might get into the collection business but it turned out to be more than I can afford.” I smiled to myself at the little joke that I‘d been in the collection business, but that one required a strong arm.

The doc gave me a thin lipped smile in return. “May I see the item?”

On the way to the gallery, Alice and I had gone over the way the deal could go down. I remembered what the art collector everyone hated had originally wanted to give me for it. Alice reminded me that his name was Huddington. He’d offered a grand, but Alice said that with so few pieces by Ted after the bonfire, I could probably ask more. Start at five but don’t go lower than three, she’d advised. Five grand was a lot of money but she said that for some people, it was peanuts. I wasn’t going to argue. I’d only been expecting a grand and even then I couldn’t understand why someone would pay those kind of peanuts for what was in the box.

Art, she’d said.

I was obviously in the wrong business.

The doc didn’t blink. I blinked. I think Alice blinked. He reached into his suit coat pocket and took out a thin leather rectangle.

“To whom shall I make out the check?”

I looked at Alice. Alice looked at me.

Patterson smiled and nodded like he understood. He called Roland, the gallery owner, over and they left together speaking in low voices.

I could see that Alice was going to get teary. “This was one of his favorites,” she had said when we boxed it up. I tried not to feel bad. The sale of Ted’s art piece would pay for my ticket out. I figured he’d understand.

When Roland returned with Patterson, he had a manila portfolio in his hand which he opened to display five bundles of cash, each with a picture of Ben in the oval. He gave the envelope to Patterson who handed it to me.

In return the good doctor got the box of something someone had made from bits and scraps scattered around the furniture repair shop and placed in a handmade wooden box behind a pane of glass. I still didn’t get why, but I did understand that a gallery could be a kind of bank. You could make a deposit with art and you could make a withdrawal in legal tender. This kind of collection business didn’t sound half as dangerous.

I gave Alice one of the bundles when we got back to her place. “Finder’s fee,” I said.

I didn’t expect the hug. She got tears on my lapel and wiped her eyes.

“Maybe Ted gave you this piece for just such an occasion,” she sniffed. “He knew you were a trouble magnet and you were going to need to use it someday.”

She had a point. Ted himself had even said,” Trouble finds you like gum finds a shoe.”

Alice came with me when I picked up the passport forms at the Federal building. I had to copy the information from Jerome Paulsen’s birth certificate into the appropriate boxes.

Alice peered over my shoulder. “What are you going to put down as your occupation? Peeper?” she teased.

I thought for a minute. “Optimist!”

Her laugh echoed in the small stuffy office. Heads turned. A clerk looked up with a scowl.

“Yeah, like an eye doctor, a private eye doctor.” I smiled at my joke.

“You mean an optometrist. Like Doctor Patterson urged you to see. Optimist means someone who is an idealist,”

I shrugged, “Yeah, that could be me, the optimistic optometrist”

While we had been making nice with Patterson after taking his five grand, he asked me if I’d been in a fight recently. Maybe my mug suggested the possibility although the evidence that I led with my chin was covered by a beard. He asked me to take off my dark glasses. He looked in my eyes. He wanted to know how bright light affected them. I told him it was painful and that they watered. He wanted to know if I’d been hit in the head. When hadn’t I? In my job you take a lot of lumps and it’s never a fair fight. He said I probably had a concussion. If the eye problem continued I should see an optometrist to get fit with special glasses.

“Lack, didn’t you see this?” She pointed at the bottom of the birth certificate. “Here, where it says Medical Condition.”

The doctor had recorded Jerome Paulsen as “Blind.” “So now I’m am a blind optimistic optometrist,” I joked, “Maybe I should put doctor in front of my name.”

Alice laughed but not as loudly this time. “Why not, you’ve got the beard for it. And put an O.D. after it.”

“O.D.?”

“Doctor of Optometry.”

“Doctor Jerome T. Paulsen, O.D. I think I like the way that sounds.”

What does the T stand for?”

“Trouble.”

She smirked, “Are you done filling it out?”

“Yeah.”

She looked it over. “Pretty good for a blind man.”

“You’ll have to guide me to the window.”

“Just as long as I don’t have to bark.”

---

Next Time: The Owl Unmasked