** Ruth E. Weissberger, M.D.: The Cure for Remembering, Melville House, $22.95. In a short first novel set in 1991 New York, internist Dr. Nora Sternberg discovers that her elderly aunt, a former nurse who died suddenly after apparently successful surgery, was only one of several retired medical personnel to suffer the same fate. The plot, resolved by an institutionalized-relative-ex-machina, is thin, but the easy, humorous style and warts-and-all insider's view of the medical business give hope for future cases.

  ** Claudia Bishop: The Case of the Tough-Talking Turkey, Berkley, $6.99. Upstate New York veterinarian and retired academic Austin McKenzie in-vestigates the murder of a much-hated local turkey farmer. If not quite up to the standard of his first case, the droll first-person narration and outsized characters continue to please.

  No longtime reader of this magazine will seriously dispute that Michael Gilbert was ar-guably “one of the greatest crime fiction writers of the twentieth century,” as averred by Tom and Enid Schantz in introducing his 1947 first novel Close Quarters (Rue Morgue, $14.95). Introducing his 1952 whodunit set in a World War II prisoner of war camp, The Danger Within (British titleDeath in Captivity; $14.95); the Schantzes recount Gilbert's ex-periences as a POW in Italy. A lighter Rue Morgue offering is the 1942 satire The Widening Stain ($14.95), a limerick-strewn academic mystery by Cornell University literature scholar Morris Bishop, writing as W. Bolingbroke Johnson. Rob Pudim's Thurber-inspired cover is an added inducement.

  Other reprints include a pairing of two excellent pure suspense novels by Bill Pronzini, Snowbound [and] Games (Stark House, $14.95), first published in 1974 and 1976 respectively, with appropriately appreciative introductory remarks by Marcia Muller and Bob Randisi; and Lawrence Block's last Evan Tanner novel, the sleepless agent's 1998 comeback Tanner on Ice (Harper, $7.99), joining the earlier novels with an entertaining afterword on the history of the series.

  (c)2008 by Jon L. Breen

  * * * *

  Classic Cover

  As a tie-in to our Black Mask series, EQMM will be reprinting some of the original Black Mask covers, including the one we've used this month by famed pulp artist Norman Saunders. Known for the speed at which hecould produce his cover paintings (often two a week!) and his skill withaction scenes, Norman Saunders illustrated for all genres—science fiction, adventure, and fantasy, as well as crime and detective fiction. He even worked on comic books, baseball cards, and “wacky packs"! According to his son, David Saunders, “he branded [his work] with his owndynamic design ... and a solemn belief that life is tough.” He was an artist, in other words, whose take on life coincided with that of the creators of the new hardboiled detectives that first saw life in Black Mask, and Saunders did many covers for Black Mask over the pulp's lifetime.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Black Mask: The Sleepless Soul by C. J. Harper

  C. J. Harper had his fiction debut last month in EQMM. We feature him now in Black Mask because of his direct homage to Chandler: His P.I. shares Marlowe's office building and has some thoughts on Marlowe's susceptibilities. Being published beside Chandler is, the author says, “a dream come true ... because he's obviously been an enormous inspiration for me."

  I stood in the back room of the Sourdough Bar staring at the Lost Wall. Hollow faces stared back at me, their eyes a leaden gray. Two hundred. Maybe three. Each one different. Each one the same. All of them trapped in a black-and-white world—a black-and-white cell—bounded by thick, glossy white borders. Scores of faces, each frozen in the same moment. The moment they found themselves on skid row. The moment hope had died.

  The owner of the Sourdough, a bear of a man who called himself the Pope, leaned over my shoulder. He was studying the collection of photographs he had shot and pinned to the wall over the course of a decade as if seeing them for the first time.

  "Did you say he had light hair or dark hair?” the Pope said. He filtered each breath through his nose and it came out a whistle. Glenn Miller's “A String of Pearls” filtered from the bar through the cheap plywood door and came out flat.

  "I didn't say, but it's dark."

  It was 5:30. I'd spent the better part of the day striking out in my search for Tommy Parrish. I'd questioned dozens of bums on the street, a handful of pawnshop owners, and the desk clerk at the Senate Hotel. None of them knew who he was. All of them were liars.

  The Sourdough had been my next stop after the Senate only because it was next-door. As my eyes had adjusted to the transition from outside light to inside dark, I'd felt the bleary but suspicious gaze of a loose collection of skid-row pensioners. My twenty-dollar suit hadn't gone unnoticed by the disheveled—and suddenly quiet—patrons. As I walked up to the bar, serenaded by a scratchy version of “Begin the Beguine” on the jukebox, I heard one mutter something about a Rockefeller in their presence.

  The bartender, who wore a dirty white apron that was fighting a losing battle at restraining his bloated physique, dried his hands on a wet towel as he stepped over to take my order. “I'm the Pope,” he said. “What's your pleasure?"

  "I'm General Eisenhower. I need you to answer a question for me.” The Pope's affability seemed to reassure the clientele, because the too-loud chatter and laughter of drunken old men returned, forcing me to raise my voice. “I'm looking for somebody."

  "Who are you?” he said pleasantly, still wiping his hands.

  I kept up our game of twenty questions without answers. “Are you really the Pope?"

  "That's my nickname around here. What do people call you?"

  "Darrow Nash."

  "Darrow?"

  "My old man had a soft spot for lawyers and lost causes."

  The Pope nodded. “So what do you do that sends you to a place like this? You the new health inspector?"

  "No. I'm in from L.A.” I moved from honesty to deception. “I'm looking for a buddy of mine from the Sixth Armored. What happened to the old health inspector?"

  "Food poisoning. L.A. is a long way from here. Must be a damn good friend."

  I lied some more. “He is. What's the best way to go about finding him around here?"

  His eyes narrowed for a moment. “Why don't you take a gander at my Lost Wall.” He gave his head a tilt in the direction he wanted me to go.

  "Lots of people come down to skid row looking for somebody,” he said as he led me through drifting clouds of cigarette smoke down a hall that stunk of dry rot. He jiggled a key in a worn-out lock and opened the door. “That's why I take everybody's picture, or at least the ones that I can. Just in case. I been doing it almost ten years."

  "Why?” I said.

  He framed his answer with a pair of shrugs. “Somebody's got to look after these men. If I don't, who will?” Then he'd stared at me as if I might know someone who would.

  I'd shrugged back. No names had come to mind.

  As we both leaned in toward the pictures, I pulled out the photograph that Dan Parrish, Tommy's brother, had sent general delivery to the Minneapolis post office. I'd picked it up that morning after my train had backed into the Milwaukee Road Depot. It was one taken just after the war, black-and-white, just like those on the Lost Wall. Tommy looked to be around thirty and was dressed up in his uniform, his arms stiffly at his sides, his mother leaning against his left shoulder, his father against his right. Their smiles were big. His wasn't. His hat was square and pulled low on his head, not rakish or pushed back the way most wore theirs after the war. His nose was bent to the left like a parenthesis, an old football injury according to Dan, and his eyes looked lost in their sockets. But what wasn't lost—what hadn't died in the war—looked scared. The kind of scared that looks permanent on some people.

  Medals littered his chest.

  The Pope gave a short whistle. “Look at all the hardware. That boy was a hero.” He looked at me.

  "He helped liberate Buchenwald."

  "Well, that's something to be proud of."

  "For most, maybe.” I remembered an old poem and committed the ultimate sin by paraphrasing it. “But some souls perish in that pride."

  The Pope's eyebrows jumped up. “Wordsworth."

  Then his face turned stony and his eyes gazed off into the middle distance. “I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; / Of him who walked in glory and in joy / Following his plow, along the mountain-side: / By our own spirits are we deified: / We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

  His gaze stayed away for a moment, then came back and found me. “Wordsworth."

  I stared at him as I struggled over a suitable reply. He let me off the hook.

  "I wanted to be a poet. I ended up here.” He looked around and rolled his eyes. “Cheap drinks and dirty limericks."

  "Like what?"

  He told me a couple. He was right. They were dirty.

  I handed him the picture of Tommy Parrish so he could take a closer look.

  The Pope took in a deep breath and filled his large cheeks like Popeye. He slowly let the air out as if he was racking his brain. Then he shook his head and thrust the picture back at me. “Never seen him before."

  "Are you sure? His name is Tommy Parrish."

  "Yep.” He started for the door. His voice rose an octave. “I've got to get back to work."

  "I only ask because he looks a lot like this guy.” I pointed to a photo near the right edge of the Lost Wall. It was a shot of Parrish after he'd passed out, his stubbled cheek flat against a wet table, his eyes closed.

  The Pope stopped with his hand on the doorknob and leaned back, taking in the picture from a safe distance. “It's hard to tell. Faces change over time on skid row."

  I held up my picture of Parrish next to the one the Pope had taken of him. “That's true, but you don't see a beak bent like that very often."

  "Lots of broken noses on skid row, too."

  I showed him my teeth. I wasn't worried he'd confuse it with a smile. “We can keep up this routine as long as you want, because I know all my lines and I know yours too. But I don't want to hear from the barkeep. I want to hear from the poet."

  His eyes hardened. “And I don't want to hear some cock-and-bull story about looking for a war buddy. Tommy Parrish isn't anyone's buddy."

  We eyed each other. In that moment I realized I needed his truth more than he needed mine. “I'm a private detective working a missing-person case. Now it's your turn."

  The Pope let his hand fall from the knob of the closed door. His voice became a whisper. “Fair enough. Parrish isn't allowed in here anymore, so I haven't seen him in a couple of months. I don't know where you'd find him."

  "What did he do to make you boot him?"

  He took a long breath. “Mr. Nash, have you ever met someone with so much hate that you can no longer see the soul in their eyes?"

  I'd been in the war too. “Yeah."

  "That's Tommy. He'd steal from a match girl just for the fun of it."

  "Don't you see that a lot around here?"

  "Not really. Most of the boys are harmless. They drink too much, but their real problem is that they can't handle responsibility. They may get into fights, but they still have a heart buried somewhere beneath the dirty clothes and the scar tissue. Not Tommy. He has no heart.” He shifted his considerable weight. “But like I said, I don't know where he is."

  "Sure you do. Everybody tracks devils like him. Mostly out of fear. Nobody wants to cross them."

  The Pope's crimson cheeks admitted the lie. He tilted his head and scratched the side of his neck. “Most nights he's at the Palms."

  "The Palms?"

  "The Persian Palms. The biggest clip joint this side of Chicago. He goes there for the second show if he goes there at all.” His eyes squinted, showing something I hadn't expected to see from anyone on skid row: real concern. “But watch yourself. It can be a dangerous place."

  The Pope's words fell on deaf ears. In that way, he really was a poet.

  * * * *

  I hadn't eaten since breakfast on the train and it was pushing six p.m. The Senate Cafe looked passable even though it was one of those dumps where you can see the swarthy short-order cook through an open door sweating and dangling a cigarette from his lips above the food sizzling on the grill. Over the “Special"—it wasn't—of roast pork and applesauce, I thought about Tommy Parrish's brother.

  I'd met Dan Parrish on a case last fall. I'd been lured to rural Minnesota by a client who wound up dead before my train had had the chance to give the station a whistle. Dan Parrish was the sheriff who had investigated her murder. He'd taken a bullet in his shoulder for his troubles, and I'd come to respect him. I guess he must have respected me too because he'd called me in L.A. the week before to see if I'd come to Minneapolis to look for his brother.

  "Tommy hasn't been the same since the war,” the sheriff had told me over the hissing telephone line. “Not since Buchenwald."

  The line hissed some more.

  "We used to be close, but I haven't heard from him in six years."

  "What was your last contact with him? In person? By telephone?"

  "A letter. The return address was the Senate Hotel in Minneapolis. That's skid row, Nash."

  My feet were on the desk and I was using my slouch hat as a fan. I'd stripped down to my sleeveless undershirt after the air inside my office in the Cahuenga Building had died from the heat. The phone was making my ear sweat. “But why me, Dan? What's wrong with the dicks in Minneapolis?"

  "No privacy. Everybody on skid row knows them because they get hired to find people like Tommy. You'd be anonymous. You could ask around like an old war buddy."

  "You don't want anyone to know you're looking for him?"

  "I may be out here in Glenwood, Minnesota, Nash, but I still have a reputation to think about. I don't want to be stuck here forever. When word gets out that a cop has a wayward brother, it affects how other cops treat you. They start thinking you're soft. That you're in it to make it up to your folks. Like Pat O'Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces, only with a badge instead of a collar. I don't need that getting in the way."

  "Whether it's true or not?"

  "Yeah. It makes me look weak."

  I knew from experience that he wasn't, but what good would that do him?

  "Why now?"

  The sigh he gave came through the line like a desert wind. “My father is dying. Despite my efforts to convince him otherwise, he insists on seeing Tommy before he dies."

  "Before who dies? Tommy or your father?"

  There was a long pause. “Either one. I don't think Tommy's worth the effort, but the old man won't listen to me. Never has. And I'm the good son.” He managed to blend irony and sarcasm into one frustrated tone.

  "Did I just catch a whiff of sibling rivalry?"

  His voice took on the tenderness of high-grade blue steel. “Maybe it's just you."

  I got the message and left it alone.

  Normally I don't work for free. Too many times I'd seen my pal Marlowe, another P.I. with an office on the same floor of the Cahuenga Building, risk his life for nothing more than friendship or simple justice, and I'd told him to his face that he was a sap for doing it. But I guess I'd been in his office one too many times, because it turns out being a sap is contagious.

  When I agreed to go to Minneapolis, Dan offered to pay my full fee plus expenses, but I couldn't bring myself to say okay. It wasn't really friendship or justice. It was my own category. Respect.

  "No charge,” I'd said. Then I saw Marlowe standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, his feet casually crossed, his hat pushed back on his head. He had a smirk on his face and was using his index fingers to send me a near-fatal barrage of tsks.

  * * * *

  I hit the Palms just as “The Sweater Girl” was leaving the stage after her second show. From the name, she was supposed to look like Lana Turner, and she did. And the stage was supposed to look like a stage, but it didn't. It was more of a built-in corner shelf behind the bar, perched four feet above the floor on a handful of grayish four-by-fours. Neither the stage nor Lana looked terribly interested in doing their jobs. And they had one more show to go. The sign outside boasted of “3 floor shows nightly.” Everyone looked like they'd had enough after two.

  A thin cloud of blue smoke hovered near the pressed-tin ceiling ten feet above the heads of a couple of dozen men and women clustered along the thirty-foot bar. A couple of sweaty thugs dressed in white shirts and aprons snarled at the customers like cornered lion tamers.

  The dozen or so booths on the opposite side of the large room looked dark and uninviting. I could see in a couple of them the orange pinpoints of smoldering cigarettes held in fingers that were little more than shadows. Tommy Parrish seemed like the type to operate from that kind of setting. So I went to the bar. I knew approaching him would take some finesse.

  I started with the Sweater Girl. She had climbed down from the stage and had left the safety of the lion tamers behind the bar to offer herself up to the lions. She had adopted the pose of female invitation: her back to the mirror, her elbows leaning on the bar, her hands dangling, a high-heeled stiletto propped on the brass foot rail, one naked knee covered in black nylon poking out at a seductive angle. Her dress was tight and black and cut high and low in all the right places. Her hair was Lana blond, so blond it looked white. The Wednesday night crowd had apparently seen enough of her act, because they completely ignored her. I accepted her attempt at an invitation and introduced myself.

  She read my clothes before she read my eyes. “Buy me a drink?"

  "Whatever you want, Lana."