Happy? Is that a word you can use about vampires, any more than you can use a word like love? What do I know? I’m only a live guy. I did the best I could. If it wasn’t good enough, she was gentlewoman enough not to let me know it.

  They make jokes about men who roll over and go to sleep afterwards. I’ve made them myself. I didn’t quite this time. I didn’t have the energy to roll over, you see.

  Next thing I knew, it was morning. The window has blinds and curtains, but light slips in anyway. I lay alone in the bedraggled bed. Of course Dora wouldn’t stick around to watch the sun rise with me.

  I got up and started setting the place to rights. Yes, I remembered what we’d talked about. I shrugged one more time. Happy? Is that a word you can use about private eyes?

  When I walked into the office, one more dead rat lay bleeding on my desktop blotter. All things considered, I was going to have to get a new one. There’s a place on Avalon called the We Ain’t Moving Stationary Store that sells me such things when I need them.

  Old Man Mose looked up at me from the couch. “This one got inside,” he said. “I found it trying to open one of your drawers there.” His copper-gold eyes swung towards a filing cabinet.

  “Was it? Did you?” That was bound to make it another spy. I could have done without the honor of so many people interested in what I was up to. “Could you find out who sent it before you killed it?” After my unsatisfactory encounter with Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson, my money was on the LAPD.

  Good thing I don’t gamble much; I would’ve lost. Mose answered, “Something or somebody called Usrubber.” Since he didn’t know what Usrubber was, he was sure it couldn’t be important to him. That’s how cats’ minds work. A good many people’s minds, too.

  I’d had my coffee, so I didn’t need long to work out what Usrubber meant. That might not be important to Old Man Mose, but it was to me. If they were anxious enough to try to spy like that, I must’ve poked a nerve.

  I phoned Dewey, Beagle, & Howe. Victor Howe didn’t take my call at first. “If I don’t talk to him, I’ll talk to the newspapers,” I told his secretary. “I mean it. He’ll like that less than he will getting his ear dirty from listening to me for a few minutes. Let him know, okay?”

  “Please hold,” she said. It was a toll call and costing me money, but I held.

  A click, and then Victor Howe: “Blackmail is a nasty game, Mister Mitchell,” he said in a voice like the last winter of the war.

  “So is breaking and entering. I’ve got the snoop on my desk, dead. She wasn’t good enough,” I answered. The rat was female.

  “You … what?” he said.

  “A rat. Before she died, she told me Usrubber sent her here. Asking what Usrubber is wouldn’t be the sixty-four dollar question—more like the two cent question, I’d say.”

  “No reputable firm would stoop to such a thing,” he intoned.

  “Yeah? How about your client?”

  He didn’t hang up on me, not quite. “I deny the imputation. On behalf of my client, I deny the accusation.”

  “That’s nice. You aren’t under oath now. Would you still deny it if you were?”

  “Haven’t you wasted enough of my time by now?”

  “Not yet. Maybe you want to think about why US Rubber is working so hard to keep me from finding out what happened to Frank Jethroe. They don’t want me in their factory. They don’t even want me in the diner across the street. And now they’re trying to find out what I know even if I can’t go into those places. What are they so scared of?”

  “You’re inventing things, spinning them up out of whole cloth,” Howe said.

  “Not me. Maybe you should look in a mirror instead. Who told me not to go into the US Rubber factory or they’d arrest me for trespassing? If that wasn’t you, somebody could win a prize for impersonating you well enough to fool your own secretary. I can prove it, too. I was taking notes while we talked.” Yeah, I lied to him. That’s what I should have done, not what I did. But he didn’t know I hadn’t. And contemporaneous notes are worth their weight in diamonds in court.

  “Is this more blackmail?”

  I laughed. “There’s a saying that goes something like, ‘This animal is treacherous. When it gets attacked, it defends itself.’ Oh, and just so you know, I don’t keep everything at the office, or at my apartment, either.” I didn’t want anybody tossing either place to find the notes that weren’t there.

  “No wrongdoing on my part has occurred,” Howe said starchily.

  “Now tell me another one. I bet I think it’s funny, too.” This time, I hung up on him. You take the small pleasures when you can find them. Sometimes they’ll come back and bite you later. You mostly take them anyway.

  I wrapped the rat in the blotter and took the whole mess out to the trash cans in the alley. Then I came back and washed my hands. Twice. And then I walked over to We Ain’t Moving Stationary and bought myself a new blotter for Old Man Mose to mess up. I’d like the place less if the dark brown widow who ran it didn’t spell it wrong on purpose.

  “How do you wear out a blotter?” She eyed me. “You don’t look like a writin’ man, either.” She didn’t say Aren’t you too light to hang around in this part of town? She didn’t say it, but her expression did whenever I went in. You look like me, you can get it coming and going. Sometimes you aren’t white enough, sometimes you’re too white.

  I scooped up my change and went back to the office feeling like a toad. Toads aren’t as good as fish in the water, and they aren’t as good as ferrets on land. They’re stuck in the middle, not all the way at home in the one world or the other. This old amphibian heard those blues in his head going along the sidewalk.

  “Why do you bother with that stuff?” Mose asked as I fitted the blotter into its frame. “What good is it?”

  “It helps me write smoother,” I said. The widow wasn’t wrong. I’m not a writin’ man, not the way she meant it. Reports for clients? Letters? I can do those all right. Anything that takes style, though? Not likely. Look at this if you don’t believe me.

  What good is it? was a bigger question, though. What good was anything? When you aren’t exactly one thing or the other, when you don’t exactly belong anywhere, you ask yourself questions like that more often than you wish you did.

  That might’ve been why Dora took up with me. She didn’t fit in Los Angeles any better than I did. For one thing, she was what she was. Live people have hated vampires and feared them since the beginning of time. Blood banks don’t wipe that away, only paper it over a little. You think white people are going to admit—admit to themselves, where it counts—black people are as good as they are any time soon? Don’t hold your breath.

  For another, if Los Angeles is about anything, it’s about tomorrow. And if vampires are about anything, they’re about yesterday. Seeing everything she’d seen over however many years she’d seen it, how strange did right this minute seem to her? As strange as it did to me, I’m sure, but not strange the same way.

  Old Man Mose distracted me again, which was bound to be just as well. He asked, “Why does it matter whether you’re smooth or not? You’re scratching either way.” Cats don’t understand writing any better than they understand reading. They’d keep us for pets if they did, same as if they had thumbs.

  But the way he’d asked the question told me how to answer it. “You know how you sharpen your claws on things to get them just the way you want them?” The things he sharpened them on included the back of the sofa where he lay sprawling, but that was an argument for another time.

  “Of course.” He seemed surprised I made so much sense. Well, plenty of others would have been, too.

  “Writing is the same kind of thing with people. It feels better when everything’s smooth and sharp.”

  He thought about that for a few seconds, shot the claws on his front feet, looked them over, and gnawed at one before letting them go back in. “These are for killing things, though,” he said. “Writing’s only a waste of time.”

  I could have told him words on paper, on parchment, on papyrus, on clay tablets, and on stone had done more killing than all the cats since the start of time. I could have told him, but I couldn’t have made him believe me.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to try. The phone chose that moment to ring. I picked it up with something approaching relief. “Mitchell Investigating.”

  “Mister Mitchell, this is Victor Howe’s secretary. I’m putting him through to you now.” Something clicked in the bowels of the switchboard.

  Victor Howe came through. “You there, Mitchell?” he growled, loud as life and twice as rude.

  Since I didn’t have time to think, I gave him a different take on the line I’d used with Deacon Washington: “Afraid not. I’m out getting a sandwich. I’ll probably be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  Some silent seconds followed while he worked through that. Then he said, as much to himself as to me, “It’s a joke.” He was slow, but he got there in the end. When he did, he focused again: “Funny, Mitchell. Very funny. You should go on the radio.”

  “Is that what you called to tell me? You want to read through my contracts when I do? How much would you charge for that?”

  I didn’t distract him for so long this time. “I called to tell you that not only does US Rubber deny ever having refused you access to their factory or any adjacent properties, they are removing that refusal and state through me that you are welcome in that area.”

  I thought about that. Then I thought about it some more. Then I scratched my head, even if Howe couldn’t see me do it. “Now you’re the one who’s joking, right?” I managed at last.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “They’re taking back a refusal to let me on their property that they say they never made to begin with?”

  “That is correct,” Howe replied.

  “How can they take back something they say was never there in the first place?”

  “They are being thorough,” he told me, as if convinced he was speaking to an idiot. To him, I was one. I should have realized right away that Dewey, Beagle, & Howe was talking, not US Rubber.

  “Okay,” I said. “And if I come out of their factory as a spare tire for a new Nash, that’s one of those unfortunate accidents nobody could expect, right?”

  “Heh,” he said. “Good day, Mister Mitchell.” All of a sudden, I heard the dial tone instead of his mellifluous voice. Let me tell you, it sounded one hell of a lot warmer and friendlier.

  As I hung up, my first thought was that I might want to go back to the diner across the street, but I never wanted to poke my snoot into the US Rubber plant again as long as I lived. Getting turned into a spare tire for a Nash was liable to be the least of my worries in there.

  I was wrong, and then again I was right.

  ​XII

  When I went out to get some lunch, there was the zombie sweeper, slowly pushing his broom along the alley. I didn’t want to look at him, even; he gave me the creeps, same as he did with Elmer V. Five minutes later, I almost choked on my hamburger. “Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, but I’m a jerk,” I said once I managed to swallow after all.

  Nobody wants to look at zombies. They give everyone the creeps. They’re worse than undead. The undead at least still have free will. Zombies have no will at all. Oh, they go off the rails once in a while—who doesn’t remember the Denver Zombie Riots of 1934? Most of the time, though, you use them the way you’d use a piece of sandpaper or a pickaxe. They’re tools with feet.

  If Frank Jethroe hadn’t got killed, if he’d got turned into a zombie instead, he could be pushing a broom somewhere like the one in the alleyway. That zombie’d been a white man, so he wasn’t Frank Jethroe, but still …

  After that occurred to me, the burger and fries didn’t taste so good any more. Neither did my after-lunch cigarette. I was going to have to visit zombie dealers. All things considered, I would’ve been happier if the angel dropped me to the bottom of Angel’s Flight. Zombie dealers made taking those photos for Lamont Smalls seem clean by comparison.

  There are dealers on Avalon, and some on Central, too. A couple have their places up in Bronzeville, but those could wait. Zombie dealers in the Negro Belt? What a surprise! Anybody’d think people who spent their whole lives getting kicked in the teeth by the world might want to quit worrying about what it’d do to them next. Surprising notion, yeah, but there you are.

  And here the zombie dealers are.

  I didn’t have to walk very far to find the closest one. It’s on Avalon, just a couple of blocks from Wrigley Field. I wondered if they got extra business from poor bastards who lost their last dime betting on the hometown heroes.

  The season was over, but the zombie place stayed open the year around. The gold letters on the front window said PERSONAL AID AND ASSURANCE. Even zombie dealers—maybe especially zombie dealers—don’t like to call zombies by their name.

  I walked past the place twice, once heading north, once south, before I could make myself go in. I hadn’t felt that way since my squad had to take one of those Italian stone barns with a machine gun chattering from the doorway.

  The man standing behind the counter was short and dapper. He was a shade or so darker than Lamont Smalls. Another, bigger, fellow sat on a chair tilted back against the wall. He glanced up from the Racing Form when I came in, then went back to it. If he wasn’t a bodyguard or bouncer, I’d never seen one.

  “What can I do for you today, sir?” the dapper man asked with a broad smile. How many of the poor jerks who opened that door had never been called sir in their lives, even once? He knew how to draw ’em in, all right.

  “I hope you can give me some help,” I said.

  “That’s what we’re here for, sir.” That damn word again. He sized me up as if he had a sorcerer’s crystal ball to help. He didn’t need one to know what I was. White folks don’t always, but he wasn’t white. Chances are he thought I’d tried passing and got burned bad. Voice syrupy and sympathetic, he said, “Whatever’s troubling you, we can ease your mind.”

  Ease it forever. Yeah.

  I stepped up to the counter and set a card on it. Then I laid Frank Jethroe’s photo next to it. “I’m a private detective. I’m looking for this man. I have reason to think he may have been made into a zombie against his will.”

  Fwup! The Racing Form hit the floor about the same time as the front legs of the bouncer’s chair came down on the worn linoleum. He’d seen plenty of sorry losers walk in to throw away their lives. He was used to that. It didn’t mean anything to him, one way or the other. It was just business. I was different, though, and different might mean dangerous.

  I made the dapper fellow stiffen, too, but only for a second. He picked up my card, read it, and set it down again. “We’re an ethical outfit, Mister Mitchell. We don’t deal in individuals who aren’t here of their own free will.”

  “That’s right,” the bouncer agreed. His voice sounded like boulders rolling downhill. Everything he said would be a threat.

  As best I could, I ignored him. “You swap back and forth with other dealers, though, right, depending on what you need? You wouldn’t have to know somebody you got didn’t want to turn zombie?” I said to the dapper man.

  His mouth went down at the corners. No, he didn’t care to hear zombies called zombies. “That’s highly unlikely,” he said. “We don’t deal with fly-by-night places that might make those mistakes.”

  As long as the paperwork they got with a new shambler looked halfway legit, they wouldn’t ask any questions. I knew that. He knew I knew. It didn’t matter. Making sure he didn’t land in trouble was also part of his job.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said wearily. “But would you check your files anyway, on the off chance somebody did pull a fast one on you? The man’s name is Frank Jethroe. He’s got a wife and two girls worried sick about him.”

  He sighed a martyred sigh. “If you insist. How far back do you need me to go?”

  “A month should do it. And could I look at the zombies in your back room, in case they changed his name on you?”

  The big man started to heave himself to his feet. “You’re pushin’ it, buddy,” he said, hands folding into fists.

  I think the dapper guy would’ve told me to go chase myself if the bouncer hadn’t gone into his act. As things were, he said, “Take it easy, Oscar. We’ve got nothing to hide. I think we can accommodate Mister Mitchell.”

  Accommodate went clean over Oscar’s head, but he got Take it easy. Muttering, “Okay, Mister Renfroe,” he sat down again. The chair creaked under his weight.

  To me, Renfroe said, “I’ll check the files. If I don’t find anything—and I don’t expect to—I’ll take you back to the lounge and let you see our current workforce for yourself.”

  Lounge. Workforce. What you call something shapes how you think about it. Or lets you not think about it. I didn’t throw up on my shoes. I don’t know how I didn’t, but I didn’t. I really am a tough guy sometimes. “Thank you, Mister Renfroe,” I answered. See? I proved it.

  Renfroe went into a back room. Oscar glared at me like a mean dog on a chain too short to let him bite. The dapper little man came back a few minutes later. He spread his hands so I could see his paler palms. “I’m sorry, Mister Mitchell, but no one named Frank Jethroe has paused on our premises in that period of time. Do you want to come back to the lounge now?”

  Did I want to? Are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind? I shook myself, the way I did when a round from that machine gun cracked over my head. Sometimes you’ve got to keep going whether you want to or not. “Let’s do it,” I said, and walked around the counter and past Oscar.

  “This does bother some people,” Renfroe said as we walked down a short hallway. We went past a couple of preparation rooms, one on either side of the hall. They had a particular smell, half spicy, half like dry dirt. I’d talked about goofer dust with Dora; now I wondered if it was one of the ingredients in the spells that robbed zombies of whatever part of the soul it is that makes people people.