“Maybe they will,” I said. Neither one of us believed it. We told each other goodbye. We were probably both relieved to hang up. I know I was.

  After that, I didn’t see much point in sticking around the office any more. No, let’s talk straight—I wanted to get the devil out of there. So I made sure Old Man Mose wouldn’t starve to death or be reduced to brigandage before I came back, and then I headed down to Vampire Village.

  The wind snapped at my cheek when I went outside. People go on and on about how wonderful Southern California weather is, and they’re right … most of the time. Everyone knows it can get too hot in the summertime. But nobody talks about how it shows its teeth during the winter. This was one of those times. That breeze was cold, and sharp as if it carried a switchblade. I had to grab at my hat to keep it from blowing away, too.

  And grabbing at my hat was lucky—it made me jerk my head to one side, which meant I had to look at the copies of the Mirror on a rack beside the door to a little grocery. They had a screamer of a headline: “POLICE SCANDAL!” I grabbed one, gave the nice lady in the store a nickel, and tried to read and walk at the same time.

  Even before I knew anything about the story except those two words in big type, I wanted to lean back against a telephone pole and laugh till I sagged to the sidewalk as if the pole weren’t there. What had I been thinking? That it would take arresting every crooked cop in town to keep them off my back. And here they’d gone and done it!

  Well, pretty close. And, as with horseshoes and hand grenades, close counted. They’d indicted Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson; and Lieutenant Rudy Wellpott, who was Jackson’s boss in the Vice Squad; and Captain Jack Donahoe, who was Wellpott’s boss; and Assistant Chief Joe Reed; and Chief C.B. “Cowboy” Horrall his very own self. Horrall had resigned. The charges were bribery and corruption and perjury.

  The more I read, the more amazed I got. There was at least one cop on the LAPD who hadn’t gone along with picking up extra cash in exchange for looking the other way at this, that, and the other thing. On the LAPD? Whoever’d hired him had to be looking for other work right now. But he’d got hired, he’d seen what was going on, and he’d talked to a grand jury.

  Mayor Bowron denied knowing anything. Well, anybody who knew Mayor Bowron even a little could’ve told you he didn’t know anything. But he was running for reelection again, so the timing couldn’t’ve been worse for him.

  Dora was up and about when I let myself into her apartment. “Hey, beautiful!” I said, and waved the newspaper at her.

  She looked annoyed, as if she didn’t already know she was beautiful. But then she noticed the paper. “What is so important there?” she asked. I told her. I hadn’t seen her surprised very often, but I did that time. “They arrest police officers?” She sounded as if she’d never dreamed such a thing was possible.

  I couldn’t blame her; I hadn’t dreamed it was possible, either. “All I know is just what I read in the papers,” I said.

  She knew who I was stealing from. “I listened to him on the radio. Even for a live man, he died too soon,” she said.

  “He did, yeah.” That was half a lifetime ago for me. I mostly remembered my folks being broken up about it. To Dora Urban, it probably seemed like the day before yesterday. The older I get, the more everything seems like the day before yesterday. And she had a big head start on me.

  Like any vampire, she also had an eye for the main chance. They are nothing if not self-centered. “What does this do for you?” she asked.

  Not as if I weren’t wondering about that myself. “I hope it’ll get ’em off my back for a while. I don’t know that it will, but I hope so. At least till somebody else starts looking through the files … or until these bastards get off the hook.”

  The grand jury’d done its job. It indicted a bunch of crooked cops. But how often does a regular jury ever convict a cop of anything, no matter how guilty he is? You know the answer to that as well as I do.

  We celebrated. No, not like that. We went from one club on Central to another. We left one in a hurry when I saw that Jonas Schmitt was part of the combo backing up a visiting fireman from Chicago. I didn’t think he knew who I was, but I didn’t want to find out I was wrong.

  As we were walking up the street, Dora said, “Jazz was something new to me. It is much less ordered, less put together, than the music I was used to in the land where I grew up.”

  “I can see how it would be, yeah,” I said.

  “It is the music of the hunted, not the hunter,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “The underdog, not the top dog,” I put in.

  Again, I might as well not have bothered. She kept on talking: “Where I come from, the Roma and the Sinti and the Jews made hunted people’s music, but no one who mattered paid much attention to it, except to borrow a clever phrase here and there for a proper composition.”

  When she said borrow, she meant steal, only she didn’t know it. Well, music always steals from other music; that’s part of the game. So I couldn’t get too upset there. But she did sound like a society lady sniffing at jazz and not quite noticing she’s tapping her foot at the same time.

  Then I found out I wasn’t being fair to her, because she continued, “I have always been a hunter. You will understand this, I think.”

  “Could be.” Of itself, my hand went to those nicks on my neck. As fast as one set healed, I got myself another. They reminded me what she was. She couldn’t be anything else.

  “After things fell apart, though, I was hunted more terribly than I had ever been before,” she said. If she was talking about what I thought she was, that would’ve been about the time I was born. Quietly, she finished, “I was lucky to come to myself here one day, so lucky. Too many of my kind are but ash on the wind, ash from the White Fire, these days. This music speaks to me now in ways it never would have, never could have, before.”

  “That’s … interesting,” I said. And damned if it wasn’t. I’d wondered now and then what white folks saw in jazz. It wasn’t theirs, not till they started lifting it. It was underdogs’ music, the way I’d told Dora. And how could white people be underdogs? They were white.

  But now I saw there were degrees to everything. Sure, white people could look down on the ones who lived in the Negro Belt. The cops’ name, not mine. Still, if you had no job or a lousy job and you were broke all the time and your boss wouldn’t stop giving you grief, weren’t you going to think of yourself as an underdog? Would you be wrong if you did? Especially if you looked at things the way a white person would.

  I started to laugh. Oh, not the way I had when I saw those policemen’d landed in hot water, but I did. Dora gave me a quizzical look. “Where is the joke?” she asked. Yes, she was a hunter, or she wouldn’t have put it that way.

  “You know I’m not quite black and not quite white?” I said. She nodded; she knew, all right. I went on, “I may not be quite one or the other, but the more I think about it, the more I see I’m liable to be a Red.”

  “Do you enjoy being hunted?” To her, the idea had to seem unspeakably perverse. “I will not betray you, but you may not be so lucky with others.”

  “Uh-huh.” Are you now or have you ever been? was hunters’ music, sure as hell. I looked around. We were in front of the Last Word, across the street from the Club Alabam. Buddy Collette and the Stars of Swing were playing. “Want to?” I asked. Dora nodded again. We went on in.

  Next morning, I made myself get moving pretty early. When I left the apartment, I blew the coffin a kiss. I wondered how I would’ve explained that to my mother. Well, I didn’t have to.

  I rode the Red Line downtown. O’Flannery and Muldoon had their offices in a building only a block away from City Hall. Anybody surprised at that shouldn’t have been. Thieves always get together to split the loot.

  The morning Times had headlines about the dirty cops, too. That was something. You bet it was. The Times was the kind of paper that thought the fylfot boys didn’t go far enough half the time. But it couldn’t ignore what lay right under its nose, no matter how much it might’ve wanted to. Lay stinking under its nose, I should say.

  A smiling, blue-eyed receptionist at O’Flannery and Muldoon greeted me with, “How can I help you this morning, sir?” The smile and the sir told what she thought she was seeing.

  I set a card on the counter. This time, I had the sense to use one with a name and address that weren’t mine. “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking into the disappearance of a man named Frank Jethroe. I have reason to believe he was made into a zombie against his will, and that your company is using him in a labor gang.”

  The smile disappeared. “What do you mean, you have reason to believe?” The sir vanished, too.

  “His file says he was leased to O’Flannery and Muldoon,” I answered.

  Luckily, she didn’t ask how I’d got hold of the file. She stood up. “Wait here,” she said. No please now, either. She hustled into a back room.

  I had time to smoke most of an Old Gold before she came back, followed by a middle-aged man in a quiet tweed suit that cost more than I wanted to think about. “Good morning, Mister Michaels,” he said, using the alias on the card. “I’m Gerald Gallagher, assistant chief counsel here. What seems to be the issue?” I told him the same thing I’d said to the receptionist. He frowned. “Why don’t you come back to my office? We can talk there.”

  So I came back to his office. He had a desk that could have landed dragons when we were fighting the Knights of Bushido in the Pacific. When I sat down on the far side of it, he looked about a mile and a half away.

  He drummed his fingers on the polished mahogany. “You realize, I’m sure, we don’t keep track of unsouled laborers”—he didn’t like saying zombies, either—“by name, since they have no ability to keep track of their names themselves. So, even assuming everything you told me is true, tracking down your Mister, uh, Jethroe, did you say, will be difficult if not impossible.”

  Since I’d been thinking of the Pacific a second before, I answered with the motto of the Conjuring Battalions there: “ ‘The difficult we do at once—the impossible takes a little longer.’ ” Gallagher frowned again; I hadn’t thought he’d appreciate getting the Seabees thrown in his face. I went on, “O’Flannery and Muldoon leased him from the zombie dealership down on Jellison that calls itself Personal Assistance, Personal Assistants.”

  One more frown. He was good at them, I admit. I wondered if he practiced in front of a mirror. “Jellison?” he asked.

  Okay. It isn’t an important street. He might not know offhand where it was. I did my best to help him out: “It’s not far from the big US Rubber factory on Scrying Crystal Road, where Mister Jethroe worked and where he disappeared. His number at the dealership was 5149. Can you track him down with that?”

  He didn’t frown when I mentioned US Rubber. He winced—not very much, but he did. He hadn’t expected it, or I don’t suppose he would have. He rallied fast; he gave O’Flannery and Muldoon their money’s worth. “You will understand, Mister Michaels, that even if, hypothetically, things are the way you describe them, that we had no knowledge he became unsouled in any way other than through the prescribed legal process.”

  Some of the Lightning Rune people said things like that after they got caught. We didn’t know what was going on. We just did what they told us to do. We could prove they were lying, and they paid for it. Some of them did.

  I couldn’t prove anything with Gerald Gallagher. Not without subpoenas and truth geases I didn’t have and couldn’t get, I couldn’t. So I answered, “I’m not saying you did. But if he didn’t want to become a zombie, you don’t have any business profiting from his labor.” Sure enough, the more I talked, the Redder I sounded.

  Gallagher looked at me. “How will you be able to demonstrate that he became unsouled involuntarily?”

  I’d been thinking about that myself. “How’s this sound?” I said. “When you find out where you’ve got him digging and hauling for you, let’s go out there and use a sorcerer to bring him back to himself. Then we can ask him. I’ve got twenty bucks to put on what he says, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m not a gambling man, thanks.” He gave me a very thin smile. “But if he is resouled and you prove wrong, he’s unlikely to want to return to his previous state, and we would lose the benefits we gained under the lease agreement.”

  “Will it bankrupt you?”

  “No, of course not, not by itself, but—”

  He’d given me an opening, and I pushed through it: “Not by itself, huh? Hold on for a second. Why do you think he’s not the only zombie who doesn’t want to be one you’ve leased ‘by mistake’?” I made sure he could hear the quotation marks. “If you’ve got dozens of them, what will that do for O’Flannery and Muldoon’s good name? Everybody’ll love you as much as people love the Los Angeles police right now. You’ll have more lawsuits than you know what to do with, too.”

  He looked as if his stomach pained him. Then he got to his feet. “Make yourself comfortable here. I may be gone a little while. First, though, you’re acting only on behalf of this Frank Jethroe?”

  “For now, that’s right.”

  “That will do.” Out he went. I had time for two or three cigarettes before he came back. In his wake followed a skinny, disheveled-looking fellow with a sorcerer’s carpetbag. “Mister Michael, this is Robert Grau, one of our staff wizards. Robert, John Michaels.”

  “Call me Jack,” I said as we shook hands. I didn’t want to worry about who the card said I was.

  “Then I’m Rob,” Grau said. “Not Bob, if you please. A bob is what you use inside a toilet tank.”

  Gallagher looked impatient at the byplay. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Up to where they’re pushing the Hollywood Freeway north past the Cahuenga Pass,” he answered. “That’s where this … unsouled individual has been working. My car is in the lot next door. I’ll drive.”

  Grau and I followed in his wake as he headed for the elevator. I kept sneaking glances at the wizard. If he was going to bring Frank Jethroe back to his normal self, it would be good if he had at least one drop—to give him a kind of feel for the business, if you know what I mean. He didn’t look as if he did, or talk that way, either. Of course, you never can tell. Take me, for instance.

  Gallagher drove a Cadillac—last year’s, not a brand new one. He’d had that suit a while, too. He bought top quality and hung on to it. He and Grau rode up front; I sat in back. No, not like that, or I don’t think so. They knew each other. I was the stranger, the nuisance. When Gallagher turned the key, the engine was so quiet, I hardly noticed.

  We got on the Hollywood Freeway and zipped northwest up to the Cahuenga Pass. They were pushing the freeway toward the Valley now. Pretty soon, it would go down to downtown, too. Red Line tracks ran between the lanes going one way and those going the other. We went past a trolley as if it were standing still. If you had a car, and if it wasn’t rush hour, the freeway was the way to go.

  Pretty soon, we passed signs that said things like CONSTRUCTION AHEAD and PREPARE TO STOP. Most cars got off the road. Gerald Gallagher kept going till a workman in overalls flagged him down, barking, “What the hell you doin’?”

  “I’m Gallagher, from the office,” the lawyer answered, and the guy waving the red bandanna came to attention as if Gallagher were a colonel or a general. He went on, “Hop in. We need to check on a laborer. Point us at the people who keep track of them.”

  The man hopped in. I scooted over to give him room. We nodded at each other. He told Gallagher, “That tent about a quarter mile up. Go slow—the paving ends right after it.” He pulled out a pack of Luckies. I gave him a light.

  We stopped by the tent. The fellow who’d flagged us down beat it. I looked ahead. After the paving ended, they were laying the base for more. Some of it was bulldozers and dump trucks. Some was skilled artisans pouring and grading concrete over steel reinforcing bars. But an awful lot was pick-and-shovel work, digging and hauling, the kind of thing you could train a chimpanzee to do. Or a zombie.

  I didn’t have long to see if I could spot Jethroe (I couldn’t). Gallagher ducked into the tent. Rob Grau and I followed. A guy in a suit who also wore an aluminum hard hat with EDDIE stenciled on it looked up in surprise from whatever he was doing at a card table. “Jerry!” he said. “Who turned you loose from your desk?”

  Gallagher jerked a thumb at me. “This fella here. I need you to fetch me Unsouled Number 5149, quick as you can. There seems to be some problem with his recruitment. We’ll bring him back to the way he was beforehand, see if we can get to the bottom of it.”

  “He won’t wanna go back after you do,” Eddie predicted morosely.

  “I know, I know. We’ll be down one, that’s all,” Gallagher said with a resigned wave. “But have somebody fetch him back here, and make it snappy.”

  Eddie gave me a dirty look, but he nodded. “What was the number again?” he asked. Gallagher told him. He sent a young guy in chinos, a shirt and tie but no jacket, and a hard hat with TAD on it off to do the actual work.

  He didn’t come back and he didn’t come back. I was wondering what had gone wrong when he finally did. And I will be damned if he didn’t have what was left of Frank Jethroe with him.

  ​XV

  “This the one you’re looking for?” Gallagher asked me.

  “That’s him,” I answered, even if I wasn’t better than two-thirds sure. Jethroe didn’t just look as if he’d been worked like a machine with two legs for too long, though he looked that way, too. But his face …. If you’ve ever seen a zombie, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, I’m not sure I can explain it. Even though he’d shambled in under his own steam, he looked deader than most corpses. His eyes were open, but I don’t think they did him much good.