Neil Gaiman: M Is For Magic

She smiled; my stomach twisted around once and went into orbit. “You get another two hundred if you get me those photographs. I want to be a nurse real bad.” Then she dropped three fifties on my desktop.

I let a devil-may-care grin play across my rugged face. “Say, sister, how about letting me take you out for dinner? I just came into some money.”

She gave an involuntary shiver of anticipation and muttered something about having a thing about midgets, so I knew I was onto a good thing. Then she gave me a lopsided smile that would have made Albert Einstein drop a decimal point. “First find my brother’s killer, Mr. Horner. And my photographs. Then we can play.”

She closed the door behind her. Maybe it was still raining but I didn’t notice. I didn’t care.

There are parts of town the tourist board doesn’t mention. Parts of town where the police travel in threes if they travel at all. In my line of work you get to visit them more than is healthy. Healthy is never.

He was waiting for me outside Luigi’s. I slid up behind him, my rubber-soled shoes soundless on the shiny wet sidewalk.

“Hiya, Cock.”

He jumped and spun around; I found myself gazing up into the muzzle of a .45. “Oh, Horner.” He put the gun away. “Don’t call me Cock. I’m Bernie Robin to you, short-stuff, and don’t you forget it.”

“Cock Robin is good enough for me, Cock. Who killed Humpty Dumpty?”

He was a strange-looking bird, but you can’t be choosy in my profession. He was the best underworld lead I had.

“Let’s see the color of your money.”

I showed him a fifty.

“Hell,” he muttered. “It’s green. Why can’t they make puce or mauve money for a change?” He took it though. “All I know is that the Fat Man had his finger in a lot of pies.”

“So?”

“One of those pies had four and twenty blackbirds in it.”

“Huh?”

“Do I hafta spell it out for you? I…ughh—” He crumpled to the sidewalk, an arrow protruding from his back. Cock Robin wasn’t going to be doing any more chirping.

Sergeant O’Grady looked down at the body, then he looked down at me. “Faith and begorrah, to be sure,” he said. “If it isn’t Little Jack Horner himself.”

“I didn’t kill Cock Robin, Sarge.”

“And I suppose that the call we got down at the station telling us you were going to be rubbing the late Mr. Robin out—here, tonight—was just a hoax?”

“If I’m the killer, where are my arrows?” I thumbed open a pack of gum and started to chew. “It’s a frame.”

He puffed on his meerschaum and then put it away, and idly played a couple of phrases of the William Tell overture on his oboe. “Maybe. Maybe not. But you’re still a suspect. Don’t leave town. And, Horner…”

“Yeah?”

“Dumpty’s death was an accident. That’s what the coroner said. That’s what I say. Drop the case.”

I thought about it. Then I thought of the money, and the girl. “No dice, Sarge.”

He shrugged. “It’s your funeral.” He said it like it probably would be.

I had a funny feeling he could be right.

“You’re out of your depth, Horner. You’re playing with the big boys. And it ain’t healthy.”

From what I could remember of my school days he was correct. Whenever I played with the big boys I always wound up having the stuffing beaten out of me. But how did O’Grady—how could O’Grady have known that? Then I remembered something else.

O’Grady was the one that used to beat me up the most.

It was time for what we in the profession call legwork. I made a few discreet inquiries around town, but found out nothing about Dumpty that I didn’t know already.

Humpty Dumpty was a bad egg. I remembered him when he was new in town, a smart young animal trainer with a nice line in training mice to run up clocks. He went to the bad pretty fast though; gambling, drink, women, it’s the same story all over. A bright young kid thinks that the streets of Nurseryland are paved with gold, and by the time he finds out otherwise it’s much too late.

Dumpty started off with extortion and robbery on a small scale—he trained up a team of spiders to scare little girls away from their curds and whey, which he’d pick up and sell on the black market. Then he moved on to blackmail—the nastiest game. We crossed paths once, when I was hired by this young society kid—let’s call him Georgie Porgie—to recover some compromising snaps of him kissing the girls and making them cry. I got the snaps, but I learned it wasn’t healthy to mess with the Fat Man. And I don’t make the same mistakes twice. Hell, in my line of work I can’t afford to make the same mistakes once.

It’s a tough world out there. I remember when Little Bo Peep first came to town…but you don’t want to hear my troubles. If you’re not dead yet, you’ve got troubles of your own.

I checked out the newspaper files on Dumpty’s death. One minute he was sitting on a wall, the next he was in pieces at the bottom. All the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men were on the scene in minutes, but he needed more than first aid. A medic named Foster was called—a friend of Dumpty’s from his Gloucester days—although I don’t know of anything a doc can do when you’re dead.

Hang on a second— Dr. Foster!

I got that old feeling you get in my line of work. Two little brain cells rub together the right way and in seconds you’ve got a twenty-four-karat cerebral fire on your hands.

You remember the client who didn’t show—the one I’d waited for all day on the street corner? An accidental death. I hadn’t bothered to check it out—I can’t afford to waste time on clients who aren’t going to pay for it.

Three deaths, it seemed. Not one.

I reached for the telephone and rang the police station. “This is Horner,” I told the desk man. “Lemme speak to Sergeant O’Grady.”

There was a crackling and he came on the line. “O’Grady speaking.”

“It’s Horner.”

“Hi, Little Jack.” That was just like O’Grady. He’d been kidding me about my size since we were kids together. “You finally figured out that Dumpty’s death was accidental?”

“Nope. I’m now investigating three deaths. The Fat Man’s, Bernie Robin’s, and Dr. Foster’s.”

“Foster the plastic surgeon? His death was an accident.”

“Sure. And your mother was married to your father.”

There was a pause. “Horner, if you phoned me up just to talk dirty, I’m not amused.”

“Okay, wise guy. If Humpty Dumpty’s death was an accident and so was Dr. Foster’s, tell me just one thing.

“Who killed Cock Robin?” I don’t ever get accused of having too much imagination, but there’s one thing I’d swear to. I could hear him grinning over the phone as he said: “You did, Horner. And I’m staking my badge on it.”

The line went dead.

My office was cold and lonely, so I wandered down to Joe’s Bar for some companionship and a drink or three.

Four and twenty blackbirds. A dead doctor. The Fat Man. Cock Robin… Heck, this case had more holes in it than Swiss cheese and more loose ends than a torn string vest. And where did the juicy Miss Dumpty come into it? Jack and Jill—we’d make a great team. When this was all over perhaps we could go off together to Louie’s little place on the hill, where no one’s interested in whether you got a marriage license or not. The Pail of Water, that was the name of the joint.

I called the bartender over. “Hey, Joe.”