Gun, with Occasional Music Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  PART II

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  Copyright © 1994 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,

  Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lethem, Jonathan.

  Gun, with occasional music/Jonathan Lethem.—1st Harvest ed.

  p. cm.—(A Harvest book)

  ISBN 0-15-602897-2 (pbk.)

  1. Private investigators—California—Oakland—Fiction.

  2. Oakland (Calif.) I. Title.

  PS3562.E8544G86 2003

  813'.54—dc21 2003047827

  Text set in Minion

  Designed by Scott Piehl

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2003

  G I K J H F

  For Carmen Fariña

  There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

  —Raymond Chandler

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  II WAS THERE WHEN I WOKE UP, I SWEAR. THE FEELING.

  It was two weeks after I'd quit my last case, working for Maynard Stanhunt. The feeling was there before I tuned in the musical interpretation of the news on my bedside radio, but it was the musical news that confirmed it: I was about to work again. I would get a case. Violins were stabbing their way through the choral arrangements in a series of ascending runs that never resolved, never peaked, just faded away and were replaced by more of the same. It was the sound of trouble, something private and tragic; suicide, or murder, rather than a political event.

  It was the kind of musical news that forces me to perk up my ears. Murder doesn't get publicized much anymore. Usually it's something you hear in an after-hours place between drinks—or else you stumble across it yourself on a case, and then you're the lone voice at the bar, telling a story of murder to people afraid to believe you.

  But the violins nagged at me. The violins said I should get up that morning and go down to my office. They said there was something like a case out there. They set my wallet throbbing.

  So I showered and shaved and got my gums bleeding with a toothbrush, then stumbled into the kitchen to cauterize the wounds with some scalding coffee. The mirror was still out, with fat, half-snorted lines of my blend stretching across it like double-jointed white fingers. I picked up the razor blade and steered the drugs back into a wax-paper envelope, and brushed off the mirror with my sleeve. Then I made coffee, slowly. By the time I was done with it, the morning was mostly over. I went down to the office anyway.

  I shared my waiting room with a dentist. The suite had originally been designed for a pair of psychoanalysts, whose clients were probably better able to share than the dentist's and mine—back when telling other people about your problems was the rage. I sometimes thought it was ironic, that the psychoanalysts had probably hoped to put guys like me out of business, but that in the end it had been the other way around.

  Myself, I couldn't see answering all those personal questions. I'm willing to break the taboo against asking questions—in fact it's my job—but I'm pretty much like the next guy when it comes to answering them. I don't like it. That's just how it is.

  I bustled past the dentist's midday patients and into my office, where I lowered my collar and relaxed my sneer. I'd been away for almost a week, but the room hadn't changed any. The lights flickered, and the dust bunnies under the furniture pulsed in the breeze when I opened the door. I couldn't see the water stain on the wall because of the chair I'd pushed up against it, but that didn't keep me from knowing it was there. I burdened the hunchbacked hat tree with my coat and hat and sat down behind the desk.

  I picked up the telephone, just to check the dial tone, then set it back down: dial tone okay. So I tuned in my radio to hear the spoken-word news, assuming there was any. All too often the discordant sounds of the early report are all smoothed over by the time the verbal guys get to it, and all you're left with is the uneasy feeling that something happened, somewhere, sometime.

  But not this time. This time it was news. Maynard Stanhunt, wealthy Oakland doctor, shot dead in a sleazy motel room five blocks from his office. The newsman named the inquisitors who would be handling the case, said that Stanhunt had been separated from his wife, and that was it. When it was over, I switched stations, hoping to pick up some other coverage, but it must have played as the lead story all across the dial, the moment the morning ban on verbiage lifted, and there wasn't any more.

  My feelings were mixed. I hadn't figured on knowing the victim. Maynard Stanhunt was an arrogant man, an affluent doctor who'd built up a pretty good surplus of karmic points to match what must have been a pile in the bank, and he let you know it, but in subtle ways. He drove an antique name-brand car, for instance, instead of the standard-issue dutiframe. He had a fancy office in the California Building and a fancy platinum blonde wife who sometimes didn't come home at night, or so he said. I probably would have envied the guy if I had never met him.

  I didn't envy Stanhunt because of the mess he'd made of his life. He was a Forgettol addict. Don't get me wrong—I'm as deeply hooked on make as the next guy, maybe deeper, but Stanhunt was using Forgettol to carve his life up like a Thanksgiving turkey. I found that out the night I tried to call him at home and he didn't recognize my name. He wasn't incoherent or groggy—he simply didn't know who I was or why I was calling. He'd hired me out of his office, probably because he didn't like the idea of a shabby private inquisitor tracking mud over his expensive carpets, and now his evening self just didn't know who I was. That was okay. It was justified. I'm a mess, and I imagine Maynard Stanhunt kept his home pretty nice. Everything about Maynard Stanhunt was pretty nice except the job he hired me to do for him: rough up his wife and tell her to come home.

  He didn't come right out with it, of course. They never do. I'd been in his employ for almost a week, working what I thought was strictly a peeper job, before he told me what he really wanted. I didn't bother explaining to him that I went
private partly because I didn't like the part of the job where I bullied people. I just refused to do it, and he fired me, or I quit.

  So now the golden boy had gone and gotten himself nixed. Too bad. I knew that the coincidence of my working for the dead man would earn me a visit from the Inquisitor's Office. I didn't relish it but I didn't dread it. The visit would be perfunctory because the inquisitors had probably already settled on a suspect: if they weren't about to break the case with a flourish, they never would have let it get all over the verbal news.

  For the same reason I knew there wasn't any work in it, and that was a shame. The whole thing would be crawled over by the Office, and that didn't leave enough room for a guy like me to work—assuming there was a client. It was probably an open-and-shut case, and the one poor soul who was client material was probably also guilty as hell. Murder earned you a stay in the freezer, and the guy the inquisitors had in mind was likely no more than a few hours from cold storage.

  It wasn't my problem. I switched back to the musical news. They were already comforting the populace with a soothing background of harps playing sevenths, and the rumble of a tuba to represent the inexorable progress of justice. I let it lull me to sleep on the desk.

  I don't know how long I slept, but when I woke, it was to the sound of the dentist's voice.

  "Wake up, Metcalf," he said a second time. "There's a man in the waiting room who doesn't want his teeth cleaned."

  The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my Wooden desk.

  CHAPTER 2

  "MY NAME IS ORTON ANGWINE."

  He was a big sheepish-looking kid with a little voice. It probably wouldn't have woken me; he would have had to step around the desk and shake my shoulder. But the dentist saved him the trouble, and I was already rubbing my bleary eyes with my thumbs and gathering saliva in the back of my mouth to talk with, so he just stood there gaping stupidly while I put myself back together. I motioned for him to sit down when I saw he wasn't going to do it without an invitation. Then I looked him over.

  I often try to guess a person's karmic level before they even begin talking, and I was quickly working up a pretty low estimate for this guy. His eyes were sunken, his sandy-colored hair was pasted across his forehead with sweat, and his bottom lip was tight across his teeth. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five, but he'd obviously lived enough to have things to regret. He looked like he'd taken a long fall a short time ago. Pieces of the man he'd been were jumbled up with the new guy, the lost soul. My guess was he'd been that better man as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

  "My name is Orton Angwine," he said again, in a voice that sounded like it had been washed with too much bleach.

  "Okay," I said. "My name is Conrad Metcalf, and I'm a private inquisitor. You knew that. You read it somewhere and it gave you hope. Let me tell you now that it'll cost you seven hundred dollars a day to keep that hope alive. What you'll get for that money won't be a new best friend. I'm as much of a pain in the ass to the people who pay me as I am to the guys I go up against. Most people walk out of my office knowing things about themselves they didn't want to know—unless they leave after my first little speech. See the door?"

  "I need your help and I'm willing to pay for it," he managed when I finished. "You're my last chance."

  "I knew that already. I'm everybody's last chance. How much karma do you have left?"

  "Excuse me." He crossed his legs.

  It was the standard response. In a world where it was impolite to ask your neighbor the time of day, I was rudeness incarnate, and I was used to prodding or pushing people out of their initial discomfort with it. That was how I made my living. Angwine had probably never answered a straightforward question before—except one asked out of the Inquisitor's Office. Those were questions everyone answered.

  "Let's get this straight," I said. "What you're paying me to do is ask questions. That's the effective difference between us; I ask questions, and you don't. And I need your cooperation. You can lie—most people do—and you can curse me afterwards. But don't get all goggle-eyed. Now give me your card. I need to know your karmic level."

  He was too desolate to work up a real sense of outrage. He just dug in his pocket for the plastic chit and passed it across the desk, avoiding my eyes while I ran it through my pocket decoder.

  It came up empty. The magnetic stripe on his card was completely wiped out. He was at zero; it meant he was a dead man. I assumed he knew it.

  When the Inquisitor's Office set your card at zero, it meant you couldn't get caught slamming the door to a public rest room without sinking into a negative karmic level. The sound of that door slamming would be the last anyone heard of you for a long time, or maybe ever. I hadn't seen a card at zero for a long time, and when I had, it was always in the trembling hands of a man about to take the fall for a major aberration.

  It was a formality—it said the case against you was all but sewn up, and they were going to let you roam the streets for a day or two more, a walking advertisement for the system. You could try to raise your karmic level helping old blind nanny goats across streets, or you could go to a bar and drink yourself stupid—it didn't matter. There was a heavy iron door between you and the rest of your life, and all you could do was watch it swing shut.

  I handed the card back across the desk. "That's big trouble," I said, softening my tone a bit. "I'm usually not much use when it gets like that." The least I could do was be honest.

  "I want you to try," he said, his eyes pleading.

  "Well, I've got nothing better to do," I said. Nothing better than taking the money off a walking corpse. "But we'll have to work fast. I'm going to ask you questions now, one after another, probably more than you've ever been asked before, and I'll need a straight answer for each and every one of them. What is it you're supposed to have done?"

  "The Inquisitor's Office says I killed a man named Maynard Stanhunt."

  I felt like a fool. The news had caused a picture to form in my mind, of a man who, right or wrong, was about to go to the freezer to make the Office look good. Yet I hadn't recognized the guy when he walked right into my own office.

  "Forget it," I said. "Here—forget it on me." I opened my desk drawer and took out a packet and handed it across the desk. It was a sample of my own blend of make, a blend I personally thought could do a doomed man a lot of good. "Take the drugs and get out. Nothing I do is going to make the least bit of difference for you. If I set my foot in the Stanhunt case, I'll be committing suicide for both of us—sort of a lover's leap. I worked for Stanhunt a couple of weeks ago, and it's going to be hard enough keeping my hair clean of the Inquisitor's Office without your help. No thank you very much." I took out a razor blade and dropped it on the desk next to the packet of make.

  Angwine didn't take the packet. He just sat there, looking sad and confused, and younger to me by the minute. I waved my hand dismissively and reached for the packet myself. If he didn't want it, I did.

  I spread the powder out sloppily on the desk and chopped it up with the blade, unmindful of the amount I was wasting by grinding it into the wooden desktop. Angwine got to his feet and shuffled out of my office. I expected him to slam the door, but he didn't. Maybe he thought I was a real inquisitor instead of a P.I., and that I would penalize him for it. I understood. The guy didn't have any karma to spare on dramatic exits.

  My blend is skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments. I snorted a line through a rolled hundred-dollar bill, and pretty soon I was feeling the effects. It was good stuff. I toyed with my blend for a few years, but when I hit on this particular mixture, I knew I'd found my magic formula, my grail. It made me feel exactly the way I needed to feel. Better.

  Or at least it usually did. A guy in my line of work can't afford to snort much F
orgettol, and I played it safe by not snorting any. But just this once I could have used some, because the Angwine sequence was gnawing at my gut. I don't suppose you could call it conscience, just the nagging feeling that for a guy who billed himself as everybody's last chance I wasn't living up to my own hype. I was just another inquisitor closing my eyes to Angwine's plight; it didn't matter that I was private instead of working for the Office.

  If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, right?

  I snorted another line and sighed. It was worse than stupid to get involved with the Stanhunt murder. Yet I was experiencing that sense of inevitability that always comes at the start of a new case. I'd woken up with the feeling, and it hadn't gone away. When you're young, you think falling in love means meeting a beautiful stranger. The feeling I'd had when I heard the musical news was like that. But then you find yourself getting involved with your best friend's kid sister, the girl who's been underfoot all along and who's already seen you at some of your worst moments.

  My new case was kind of like that. I wiped the desk clean with my sleeve and put on my hat and coat and went out.

  CHAPTER 3

  MAYNARD STANHUNT'S OFFICE WAS IN THE CALIFORNIA Building on Fourth Street, near the bay. I drove down and parked my car in Stanhunt's space, figuring he didn't need it anymore, and went into the lobby and waited for the elevator Things in the building looked pretty much the same as before—but then the murder hadn't happened in the California.

  I rode up in the elevator with an evolved sow. She was wearing a bonnet and a flowered dress, but she still smelled like a barnyard. She smiled at me and I managed to smile back, then she got off on the fourth floor. I got off on the seventh and pressed the doorbell at the offices of Testafer and Stanhunt, urologists. While I waited, I mused on the ironies of life. When I walked out of this office two weeks ago, I hadn't expected to set foot in it again, or at least not until I developed prostate trouble. The buzzer sounded, and I went in.