Ryan Jahn - Low Life

‘Christopher Watkins.’

‘One minute, sir.’

‘Okay.’

There was the sound of fingers tapping away at a keyboard.

‘I have it, sir. Would you like me to connect you?’

‘Yes, please.’

Silence as if the line had been severed, then a dial tone, and then the phone began ringing. It rang four and a half times.

‘Hello?’

The voice sounded groggy, full of phlegm.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘Simon?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hey, man, what’s going on? It’s like eleven-thirty.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s all right. What’s up?’

‘I need to ask you something.’

‘Ask away.’

‘When you watched the special about UFOs – what did it say about the eyes?’ Simon knew he was grasping at straws, but ever since he left Burbank that private detective had been on his mind and he couldn’t figure out why, but something in the back of his mind had put him and Kate together in some way.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The UFO special you mentioned. On TV.’

‘Oh, that’s on tomorrow night.’

‘What are you talking about? We talked about it at lunch over two weeks ago.’

‘Nope.’

‘Is it a repeat?’

‘No, man, they been pushing this thing like it’s cocaine. It’s brand new.’

‘That doesn’t – okay. I gotta go.’

He put the phone into its cradle.

‘Bye,’ he said to the empty room.

He walked to a liquor store on the corner and bought a bottle of whiskey. He drank it and watched TV till very late. He wondered if when this was over he might be able to get his old job back. He’d not called Mr Thames again after that first time. He was certain he’d been fired. But maybe he could get his old job back. He’d been a very good employee right up until—

He walked to the phone and dialed the office number and the extension and got the answering service. He rambled into the phone for a while and then hung up. He walked to the bed and lay down and by the time he was asleep he didn’t even remember he had done it.

He woke up with two things – a hangover, and the knowledge of where the private detective and Kate fit together. The guy’d been tailing him on Monday night when he met up with the woman impersonating Kate Wilhelm. If she really was dead. Maybe it had been her. Maybe Mr Wilhelm had been lying. He didn’t seem to be, but—

He’d remember it. The detective. And if it was someone impersonating Kate, maybe he knew something about her real identity.

He grabbed his keys and headed out.

He unlocked the front door and stepped quietly into the foyer. He hadn’t seen any cop cars, unmarked cars, or anything that seemed suspiciously out of place, but even so, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find cops waiting for him. They weren’t. It was almost disappointing.

Samantha’s car was in the driveway, but the living room was quiet and empty.

Her purse was sitting on the couch.

He walked to it and started digging through it, looking for that private detective’s business card.

‘Jeremy?’

He looked up. Samantha was standing in the entrance to the hallway in a pink silk nightgown, arms wrapped around her body. Her hair was a tangle and her make-up was smeared – she must have gone to bed without washing her face – but she still looked beautiful.

‘Where is it?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘His business card. Where is it?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The private detective you hired to follow me. I need to talk to him.’

‘Why?’

He threw the purse to the ground.

‘Just tell me where he is!’

The detective’s name was Adam Posniak and he had an office in a street-front strip of beige stucco on Washington Boulevard just east of La Brea. Simon pulled the Saab into the gray asphalt parking lot, found a spot, and slipped the car into it.

He recognized the car to his left. It was a black Cadillac, dented up from a recent accident.

The private detective’s office was between a barbecue place and a manicure-pedicure place. There was no sign on the tattered green awning above it. The door said only

no name, and the glass was soaped so you couldn’t see inside, as was the glass in the windows to the left and right of the door. Simon pushed his way inside.

A blonde woman – maybe twenty-five – sat behind a gray metal desk facing the door. A cone of incense burned on a metal plate on top of a waist-high bookshelf to her right and beneath the scent of incense there was an odd vinegar smell. Behind her head was a very bad painting of Santa Monica Pier, the Ferris wheel shaped like a deflated basketball. Her eyelids were painted blue, eyebrows plucked thin and then penciled back on again, lips the color of raw meat. Her fingernails were green but the polish was chipped off the top and the nails had grown half in new since the last time they were painted. There was a white scar that puffed out like foam on her chin. It was shaped like a check mark. There was a laptop computer on the desk, but she was typing out a form on a metallic-blue Remington Letter-Riter typewriter as the rusted bell above the door gave its choked impersonation of a ring. Then she looked up from what she was doing.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I need to see Posniak.’

‘He’s not in at the moment. I’d be happy to take a message.’

‘His car’s here.’

She made a tight-lipped pinch-nosed face – like she had just smelled something unpleasant, Simon perhaps – and then, after a pause, said, ‘But he’s stepped out.’

‘Well, if he’s on foot he’s not far. I’ll wait.’

She sighed.

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘I didn’t.’

She gave him a deadpan, and then said, ‘What is it?’

Simon hesitated, wondering what he should say, and decided on, ‘Jeremy Shackleford.’

‘Just a second.’

She picked up the phone and put it to her ear, whispered, cupping her hand over her mouth, looking at Simon with her hazel eyes. She hung up the phone.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘He’s not available at the moment. But he’d be happy to schedule an appointment to talk about—’

‘He’s available.’

Simon walked to the door in the left wall and grabbed the knob, figuring it’d be locked and he’d have to push it in. He just hoped the thing was set loose in its frame and it wouldn’t be difficult. Instead the door swung right open and Simon stepped into the office and slammed the door on the protesting secretary, who didn’t get out more than ‘Hey wait a—’ before the swinging slab of wood silenced her. The smell of vinegar was much stronger in here, and beneath it a strange chemical stench that Simon couldn’t place.

He locked the door behind him.

Adam Posniak was at his desk. A smoke-blackened spoon and a lighter and a small bag of brownish powder were on its surface. His coat was off and his left sleeve was rolled up and a rubber hose was wrapped around his bicep, one end gripped in his teeth and pulled tight. In his right hand was a syringe, his thumb on the plunger. The needle was still inches from the soft flesh on the inside of his elbow, which was dotted with scars and wounds like bad acne. One brown but blackening hole looked – to Simon’s untrained eye – like it might be infected. It was a mountain of red flesh topped with an oozing brown scab. In his eagerness Posniak had already begun pressing the plunger and a few drops splashed from the end of the needle and onto the pale flesh on the inside of his arm.

Posniak let the hose fall from his mouth and set the syringe on the desk. His pale face was covered in beads of sweat. He opened the top right drawer, and simply laid his hand in it. Simon guessed, but wasn’t certain, that the hand was resting upon a gun of some kind.