Jonathan Lethem - Gun, with Occasional Music

“Okay,” I said, putting my hand out towards the key rack. “I guess I’ll just have a look around.”

He closed his magazine and pushed it to one side, then looked up. I got another look at his eyes and understood why he was hiding them in the magazine. The motel office was bush league, and so was the clerk, except for those eyes. They were major league, maybe Hall of Fame. They were eyes that had died twice and gone on living. The part of me that was considering playing it rough began reconsidering. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could take him. I was sure I could, but something in those eyes made me think he’d exact some kind of price if I did.

“All right,” he said stonily. “Fucking lay off. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“It’s you I want to talk to.”

“It’s you I don’t want to talk to.” His tone was even but his hands were tapping nervously on the desk.

I peeled the outer bill off the roll Angwine had given me and held it up so he could see it was a hundred, then ripped it in half right through the portrait. I pocketed one of the halves and threw the other onto his desk right next to his hand. He didn’t move.

“I’ll reunite the twins if you give me a tour of the murder room,” I said.

He smiled, and the weird light in his eyes faded. “Whatever you say.” The ripped bill disappeared into a desk drawer that locked with a key, and the key went into his pocket. He got up from the desk and shook his head as if his neck was sore, and plucked a set of keys from the wall.

I offered my hand and told him my name. He looked at me funny and didn’t take my hand, but said: “Shand.” I took it for a last name, but it could as well have been a cough or a sneeze for the way he said it.

“You on last night?” I stepped back to let him lead me through the door.

“I guess so,” he said over his shoulder.

He led me to the room. I recognized it from the photographs, which is to say it was a hotel room like any other, with a huge video monitor on the wall and a camera perched like a vulture over the bed. The ripped curtain had already been replaced, but the coffee table had a big mark on it where they’d scoured off the blood.

“They get a tape of the killing?” I asked.

“Nope.” Shand poked at his nose thoughtfully. “I guess that wasn’t what they were here for.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Stanhunt and whoever killed him.” Shand wasn’t getting trapped into theorizing.

“Did you see him?”

“I saw Mr. Stanhunt.”

“He registered alone?”

“Stanhunt had been here on and off for a couple of weeks, and he always registered alone. I don’t hassle the guests for fun. He paid his bills.”

“Yeah, he had a habit of paying his bills—maybe one bill too many. You never saw him with anyone?”

“I told you no.” Shand stayed at the door with his hand on the knob, making it clear he wanted to get back to his magazine.

I sat down on the bed. “You found the body?”

“Yeah. The door was open. I looked for a minute, then called the office. Didn’t go in.” He made it sound like a hand of gin rummy.

“No weapon?”

“It wasn’t my job to look. If the inquisitors found a weapon, they didn’t mention it to me.”

I nodded. Shand just kept looking at me with those dead eyes that had seen so much that now they didn’t see anything at all.

“You work here long?” I asked.

“Depends on what you call long. I’ve worked in places like this for a long time, but I tend to come and go.”

“I guess your curiosity isn’t what it used to be.”

He liked that. “That’s one way of putting it.” He dug in his pocket and took out a little vial. I watched as he unscrewed the top, pushed his pinky in, and brought it up burdened with a little heap of white powder. He pinched one nostril closed and pushed the powder up deftly into the other, then screwed the top back down and pocketed the vial. I imagined the powder, whatever it was—Acceptol or Avoidol, probably—filling up the space behind his nightmare eyes.

The sound of a car in the lot made us both look up. He turned his back to me and said, “I guess that’s it…”

“Give me a few more minutes in the room,” I said.

He turned to give me one more harrowing look, then shrugged. I was being judged not worth the bother. “I’ll come back and lock up,” he said, and went out in the direction of the office.

There wasn’t anything specific I wanted to look at in the room. I wanted to look at the room itself, to try to see it through Stanhunt’s eyes. Needless to say, it wasn’t pretty. I imagined Stanhunt looking at this room the way he had looked at me, which is to say, down. Everything Maynard Stanhunt said and did was a repudiation of this motel room and the kind of life that was lived in rooms like it. But something brought him here, and brought him here more than once. Something made it worthwhile or necessary for him to lower his standards and spend part of his life in this room, and eventually made it necessary for him to spend his death here too.

My job was to find out what that something was. I suspected it would be a simple thing, when I found it. But at the moment I didn’t have a clue—literally.

Footsteps in the hallway interrupted my reverie. I looked up, expecting Shand, but it wasn’t Shand. Standing in the doorway was the evolved kangaroo I’d seen in the bar of the Vistamont. He was wearing a canvas jacket and plastic pants with a tight elastic waistband, and his paws were tucked into his pockets. He stepped into the room. I got up off the edge of the bed.

“You’re in too deep, flathead,” he said. He spoke in a clipped, recitative way, in a voice that was a bit too high to sound as tough as he wanted.

“I see,” I replied.

“I hope so, for your sake. I’d hate to have to cut your fucking balls off.”

“That makes two of us, Joey.” I tried to brush past him but he moved sideways into my path, and our shoulders met.

“Not so fast, flathead. We gotta talk. Let’s find your car.”

I didn’t say anything. He reached into his jacket and a little black gun appeared in his paw. He held it casually, the way you hold a candy bar or a cake of soap. Only this gun wasn’t going to make anyone clean.

He filled the passenger seat of my car pretty awkwardly. I closed my door, and the overhead light went out, reducing his form to a shaggy silhouette. I couldn’t see the gun in his paw anymore, but I knew it was there.

“Listen up and listen good,” he said. His voice quavered, and I got the impression he’d been practicing his strong-arm style on his little brother, if at all. I’m no judge of age in kangaroos, at least not without getting a good look at their teeth, but it was obvious that Joey was a little wet behind the ears.

“You’re making some people unhappy,” he said. “You don’t know how unhealthy that could be. Angwine’s bad company; you shouldn’t be seen with him so often. You should lay off and go home. We’ll send some divorce business your way.”

“Who’s we?”

“You shouldn’t ask me questions, flathead. I’m not here to answer your pee-wee amateur eye questions.”

“Don’t play human with me, Joey. I’ve got the same privilege with you as anybody has with a kangaroo. Who sent you?”

In case I forgot about the gun, he stuck it in my gut. Like so many of the evolved, he didn’t like being reminded of his lineage. “I work for Phoneblum, if that means anything to you.”

I played a hunch. “Danny Phoneblum?”

He prodded at my rib cage with the gun. “That’s right. You might wish you never heard the name, though. Danny got sick of you from a distance, see, and I’d feel real sorry for you if he got a look close up.”