Jonathan Lethem - Gun, with Occasional Music

I took a deep breath and went on. “Phoneblum has a junkie girl working for him running drugs. He buys her the house on Cranberry Street and converts her to a nanny for the kid.”

“Pansy Greenleaf,” said Surface.

“Right. So Phoneblum’s got his heir, he’s got his doctors, and he’s got Celeste back under his screws. Which by this time in their relationship is probably all he requires.”

Both Catherine and Surface were suddenly quiet and still. I had them going. I had myself going, for that matter, and now all I had to do was bring it off. I hoped I wouldn’t disappoint all three of us.

“Only problem,” I continued, “is Celeste has a habit of bailing out. She packs her bags and leaves the doctor, which makes Stanhunt and Phoneblum both pretty antsy. She’s what balances the equation between them. They put their heads together and start hiring detectives to keep tabs on her, to try and keep their little triangle intact.”

“You and me,” said Surface.

“You and me,” I said. “Only Celeste doesn’t turn out to be the leg of the triangle that gets permanently missing. When Stanhunt turns up dead in the hotel room, the balance is thrown in the other direction. Phoneblum no longer has a reason to keep away from Celeste. She knows it, and gets nervous, and mistakes everybody who looks at her funny for one of Phoneblum’s goons—me included. When she figures out I’m an independent operator, she tries to hire me for protection, and I nibble, but I don’t bite. It’s too bad too. The night she died, I ran into Testafer and the kangaroo creeping around town together on Phoneblum’s orders, looking for Celeste.”

“Celeste Stanhunt was killed by a stranger she picked up in a sex club,” said Catherine. “He raped her and killed her. She’d been asking for it and it finally happened.”

“Phoneblum found her that night and paid her back for leaving him,” I said. “There was nothing in his way once he lost the doctor. He’d been holding his rage in reserve, because of the beauty of their arrangement. And with Kornfeld and the Office in his pocket, he didn’t have to fear punishment. I can’t prove it, but that’s the way it went.”

“This case is starting to come back to me,” said Catherine. “The junkie girl had a brother. He came up from L.A. and killed Stanhunt in the hotel. He’s still guilty. The rest of this material is irrelevant.”

“Orton Angwine couldn’t have less to do with the case if he’d never come to town,” I said. “The stuff in that hotel room bugged me until yesterday morning. I didn’t spend six years thinking about it, but I might have and still not come up with the answer.”

I pointed at Surface. “It was something you said in your kitchen yesterday that did it. All the clues were in place, but I needed a little push to make the conceptual leap.”

“Jesus Christ, Metcalf,” said Surface. “You sure do like to talk.”

I didn’t tell him I was sweating out my addiction. I had too much pride. But if I’d stopped talking, I probably would have passed out.

“The two of you had my head spinning with theories,” I said. I looked at Catherine. “You had Stanhunt having the affair in the hotel, and you”—I looked at Surface—”you had Celeste doing the same thing.” I laughed. “You were both half right.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Catherine. She wanted to rush me.

My five minutes must have been over by now, but I knew I had all the time in the world.

“I’ll get there. But first I have to backtrack. There was a progression in the way Stanhunt and Phoneblum hired their private inquisitors, and it’s important. I came first, and I dealt with Stanhunt, and all he wanted me to do was lean on Celeste and suggest she go home. But hiring gumshoes wasn’t Stanhunt’s strength, and when I didn’t pan out, he turned the job over to Phoneblum. The fat man hired Walter here.” I gestured at Surface. “When the report came back that Celeste was getting some on the side, Phoneblum offered Surface good money to find the new boyfriend and put him in the ground. But Walter said no. And he left the job without ever having met Stanhunt. Isn’t that right?”

Surface grunted confirmation.

“Phoneblum was having trouble on another front. His son and protégé had gone babyhead, run away to Telegraph Avenue to sip whiskey and talk gibberish. Phoneblum still had hopes of reclaiming his flesh-and-blood heir—he was investing in a babyhead quarters for the backyard at Cranberry Street—but he was also looking around for another candidate. He found one in a young kangaroo named Joey Castle. Joey was an all-too-willing pupil.”

“I’ll buy that,” said Surface. He must have been thinking of his ribs.

“So picture this,” I said. “After Surface and me, Phoneblum is sour on the idea of outside help. He’s got a new kangaroo gunman with an itchy trigger finger. Phoneblum gives him the assignment of tailing Celeste, the same way he hired Walter— without the kangaroo ever meeting Maynard Stanhunt. And the orders were the same: Take the new boyfriend out of the picture.”

I paused for effect, and they both shot arrows at me with their eyes.

“Maynard Stanhunt was a pretty heavy Forgettol addict—at least by the standards of six years ago. The first time I tried to call him at home, he didn’t know who I was. I’d warned Angwine of the danger of tangling with people with huge gaps in their day-to-day memory, but I hadn’t really thought through the implications myself. Maynard and Celeste were both having affairs in the Bayview Motel, in the same room, in fact. With each other.”

I turned to Surface. “Walter, you saw Stanhunt, only you didn’t know it. He was the guy you spotted at the motel. Sure, Celeste had left him, but there was slippage in her resolve, as there so often is. She agreed to meet him for quiet afternoons in the motel—but his morning self, the one that hired the detectives, didn’t know about the arrangement.”

Surface just gaped.

“Yesterday you told me it was illegal now in L.A. to know what you did for a living, and that was when it clicked for me. Stanhunt was an early prototype of that. The part of him that wasn’t getting any action with Celeste was murderously jealous of whoever she was seeing in the Bayview Motel, and he told Phoneblum to have his boys blow the guy away. The kangaroo didn’t know what Stanhunt looked like any more than you did, Walter. He just did as he was told and killed the boyfriend. Stanhunt hired his own hit.”

I stopped talking and gave them some time to sort it out. Catherine’s face went through a brief series of expressions, most of them skeptical, but in the end she was too smart to pretend it didn’t have the satisfying weight of something inevitable and true. I watched her get to that point, and then I watched her remind herself that she had my card in her drawer, and that nothing necessarily had to get out of this room if she didn’t want it to. She hardened quickly—I guess she’d had a lot of practice in the intervening years. She was more changed than Barry, or Surface, or Testafer, or anyone else I’d dealt with since coming back. She went with the desk and the office with the big window now.

“It’s an interesting story,” she said. “What are you hoping it’ll get you?”

“I want to see Angwine defrosted,” I said. “I’ll make your job hell with this if he isn’t.”

She just smiled.

“Humor me, Teleprompter,” I said. “Let me think I’m a threat. It’s no skin off your nose. The guy’s harmless—and innocent.”

She punched something into her desktop monitor. I guessed it was Angwine’s file, but it could have been anything, really. Maybe just a stall for time. She squinted at it for a minute, and I remembered how she wouldn’t let me see her in glasses the first time we met.