Hell's Detective Read online

  I left Sid to work on his act and cut left onto Fortune Hill. The road wound up a steep incline, and it was twenty minutes before I sat on a rusty bench in a park, my blouse sodden. It wasn’t much of a public space: a patch of piebald grass, a few stunted cacti, and a jumble of empty wine bottles in place of a rockery, all crammed along a thin ridge. The park didn’t even have a name. By day, in the real world, parks meant relaxation with the progeny—Frisbees tossed, kites flown, dogs walked, and balls kicked. By night, parks served as dark corners to indulge in illegal or shameful activity. But this city was one big dark corner, shame was in short supply, and there wasn’t a single person under sixteen—here, traditional man-woman fucking produced no offspring, and the young seemed to be spared judgment for their sins. There wasn’t much call for parks.

  What the rundown strip did offer was solitude and a bird’s-eye view. The sun, bloated like an overripe blood orange, was kissing the ridges of the hills in the west now. The highway ran through the desert like a knife wound, piercing the scrublands that ringed the city. Where the Styx plunged from the cliffs to the desert plain, spray misted up and glowed red. The watercourse encircled the tower in a wide moat and snaked through the city to the sea in the east, which shimmered off to the distant horizon. The eye couldn’t parse the individual houses and blocks that lay low and flat in the deepening gloom, delivering up a pixelated panorama of urban sprawl. Only Desert Heights in the northwest and Avici Rise in the northeast peaked above the peripheral districts, which seemed to be keeping their heads down in the hope of going unnoticed. Downtown, in the financial district, the windows on the upper levels of the tall buildings shone with ethereal orange light. They were midgets compared to the tower, which ascended until it dwindled to a sharp point. The shadow stretched across the length of the city and far out into the sea. I had no idea if the tower ended or if imagining a peak was the sole way my brain could make sense of its vastness.

  I didn’t know how many times I’d sat upon the bench. Like I told Franklin, I’d lost count. The world upstairs was moving on, but I never asked the newcomers what the date was. If anybody tried to volunteer the information, I put my fingers in my ears and went “lalala.” Embracing the fuzziness of time was the only way to stay sane. The uniformity of life helped. There were no seasons here; every day the sun came up at six AM, baked everyone to a crisp, and set at eight PM, as regular as a health nut on an all-bran diet. In the real world, people marked time in their bodies’ decay: gray hairs and saggy breasts, chronic aches and pains, and wrinkles added year by year like rings on a tree. Aging didn’t apply in Lost Angeles. I was forty-two when I put a bullet in my brain, and that’s the way I stayed. Sure, you could grow fatter or thinner depending on how much you enjoyed the sin of gluttony, and if you were careless enough to lose the odd body part without going so far as dying, it stayed off. The moment you died, though, back you went to the form you arrived in.

  Then there was the city itself. There were no industries to develop new technologies and no raw materials to do so anyway. Lost Angeles was sealed off, and the gatekeepers controlled what came in. We had what we were allowed to have, nothing more. And what we had, if you discounted attempts at building homemade gadgets, was all early fifties era—from the cars to the telephones to the double-reel motion picture cameras Hrag used to shoot his movies. As we reset, so did the city, as if it were alive itself. Sure, Desert Heights had appeared to be crumbling in my first weeks, but I’d been back since and found the ruin had advanced no further. If fire gutted a building, the next day it returned to normal. Nothing aged or broke down. My car had never gone on the fritz, even though I’d ridden it hard for longer than I cared to remember. Water flowed in the taps, though there were no reservoirs. Electricity crackled in the outlets, though there were no power plants. Only superficial changes took. Bullet holes chipped out of walls remained. If I scratched my name into the bench, it would be there the next day.

  This reality had initially presented me with another major head fuck. I died in 1978, so I’d been startled to find that not only was I now in Hell, but I’d traveled over two decades back in time. Nobody knew why Lost Angeles had stopped developing. The city had once moved with the times, according to the few historical documents available. It felt like a moth-eaten movie set, a backdrop against which the sinners acted out a never-ending immorality play for an unseen audience.

  That isn’t to say things didn’t change. Petty empires rose and fell. People went, some of them no doubt to a living hell at the pleasure of some shady character or other, the rest to a more uncertain fate. The Penitents, as they liked to call themselves, believed these vanishings were the result of sinners being elevated to Heaven. They also recommended scourging, self-mutilation, and starvation as a means of drawing God’s attention to their contrition, so I didn’t take their opinion seriously. My theory on where the disappeared went was less optimistic. And, of course, the parade of sin on Earth ensured plenty of fresh meat. These sinners brought notions of being able to re-create their modern lives. They always failed. That was it for progress. For a society to develop, it needed more than the materials and ideas to do so. It needed hope. It needed the possibility of a brighter future for the current generation and their descendants. It needed the belief that people deserved better. Nobody was suffering under any of those illusions in Lost Angeles. We were lost souls stumbling through an endless desert, afraid to look up and realize the distant horizon was never growing closer.

  A blanket of dread had settled over the city, and now the faintest sliver of sun crowned the hills to the west. People would be locked away, muttering feverish prayers to the gods who had forsaken them and hoping that, for once, the wings would beat over their bolt-holes without stopping. I fixed my gaze on the tower and prepared to face my sin head on.

  The hills gobbled up the last bite of sun, and the tower seemed to dissolve, dark edges bleeding out into the gloom. It stayed that way for a few seconds. Then, like startled flies taking wing from a corpse, the Torments exploded over the city in a swarm, eating up the gunmetal sky and blotting out the last dregs of light. The leading edges of the expanding cloud dropped black rain on Desert Heights. The screams began, rising above the sibilant hiss of beating wings. There was a beauty there, if you made yourself look: swirling ropes of darkness, knotting and unknotting, unfurling across the sky in incomprehensible complexity. My heart raced, urging the blood through my veins so I could run, hide, or fight. I forced myself to sit still, watching as the cloud reached Providence and Torments peeled off to slather the rooftops.

  The swarm was overhead now, the wind stirring my hair as wings frothed the air into a near-solid mass. A single Torment arrowed down so fast that it looked like a widening smudge on the impressionist chaos of the sky. It thudded to the grass ten feet away, spewing up gouts of dirt. It was humanoid in form, the slender body utterly smooth and as black as the tower. The Torment took two steps on clawed feet and raised its head. In the half-light of dusk, its face was a perfect ovoid upon which the blank surface swirled like an oil slick on a swelling ocean. My reflected features emerged: hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, sucked-in lips, and furrowed brow. It was a face excavated of all hope, a black mirror of my soul, my very own Picture of Dorian Gray.

  I knew the drill. In a few seconds, the Torment would hurtle inside me and show me what I really was. Now I did close my eyes, my fingers clawing the bench so hard that a fingernail snapped. But the shock of shifting planes didn’t come. The bench creaked as a weight settled next to me. That was new. I opened one eye. My Torment was still there, back in a crouch, its face returned to rippling blankness. Its head was cocked as if looking at the person sitting next to me through unseen eyes.

  “Smashing view,” Laureen said as the Torments fanned over the remainder of the city. “Shame about the weather.”

  I looked around, searching for the nightmare with her name on it. The park was empty, present company excepted. She looked like she was about to whip out
a picnic basket. Nothing was coming for her.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I shouted.

  “Well, that’s gratitude for you,” Laureen said, brushing a speck of unseen dust from one polished nail. “Here I am, throwing you a bone, and all you can do is potty mouth me.”

  “Pardon me if I’m feeling a touch astonished,” I said after taking several shuddering breaths in an effort to recover some semblance of composure, “but you can stop them.”

  “Ah, the legendary powers of observation at work. Impressive.”

  “Who are you?”

  Even as I asked, I realized who, or what, she was. Even though we never saw them, we knew they were there, just as we knew air was there when it filled our lungs. Laureen and her ilk filled the city’s lungs, supplying the Trustees with the raw materials that sustained our vices. They had created this city and put each and every one of us in here. There were various nicknames for them—the Architects, the Wardens, the Fuckheads—but they were officially known as the Administrators. This title was nothing but pretty pink paper wrapped around a steaming dog turd. Laureen was a demon. A hot one with a killer dress sense, and not what I’d expected, but a demon all the same.

  “I’m Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all rolled into one,” she said as my brain fumbled for the strings that worked my mouth. She got up and scratched the Torment’s neck. Its blank face nuzzled her wrist. “Here’s the deal. I need my missing doodah back, and I believe you’re the person most likely to get it for me. Since you won’t accept money, I’m going to sweeten the pot, much as I’d prefer not to. In return for your services, I’ll stop your nightly visits for the duration of the investigation. If you recover the item, I’ll stop them for good. What do you say?”

  I gaped at her standing there, the creature snuggled against her thigh while the city shrieked. My head was buzzing, my extremities numb as the fight-or-flight reflex receded. I would have accepted a thousand extra punishments for the chance to take back what I did. But I couldn’t change the past. I would have taken a hundred physical torments—a decade on the rack, a century in flames, a millennium of needles in the eyeballs—rather than the one I’d been given. All I had to do was nod my head. But I hesitated. The deal seemed too good to be true, the payment too high for a simple case of missing property. More than anything, I didn’t know if I could trust her to pay up—she was a demon, for Christ’s sake.

  “Better the devil you know. Is that it?” she said as I remained silent. “Then let me give you time to think my offer over.” A card appeared in her fingers, an act of prestidigitation any shabby street magician could have pulled off. It was somehow more impressive coming from her. She tossed it at me. “When you’re ready to talk, come see me.”

  She took her hand off the creature’s head, and my features once more bubbled up on the oil slick of its face. The fight-or-flight response kicked in again, and I realized what a fool I was being. Anything was better than what I was about to face, even if the offer of respite only lasted a few days. I jumped up, the word “yes” rising in my throat. I was too late.

  “She’s all yours,” Laureen said.

  Then the Torment was in me.

  4

  Los Angeles, November 26, 1978

  The Nimrod Motel was so seedy that it could have planted an entire field with enough left over for a brownstone full of spinsters’ window boxes. It was one of those U-shaped affairs, thrown together from bargain-basement building materials. The closest it came to a swimming pool was a sprawling, axel-cracking pothole in the car park, which the evening’s earlier downpour had filled to the brim. The puke-green motel sign reflected in the rippling rainwater as I splashed toward room number three.

  My target was an amateur blackmailer who’d gotten his paws on compromising pictures of a high-society trophy wife—two blurry Polaroids from a soft-porn movie audition before she’d snared an aging Casanova with a membership at Hillcrest Country Club. The blackmailer wanted five thousand bucks. My client could have paid up from the change that had rolled down the back of his Chesterfield sofa, but he’d amassed his wealth by being a tightwad. He engaged me for two hundred a day plus expenses.

  It didn’t take long to identify the perp. He worked as a barman at the club and had wormed his way into the wife’s boudoir while the old man was slicing balls around the greenery. She showed her lover the pictures to add a splash of spicy gravy to the cuckold roast. He filched them. The husband knew about the porn career and the pictures. He’d seen the one movie she starred in and figured he’d grab himself some of that action for his own bedroom. He’d bought the pictures and all the copies of the film—he didn’t want the set he ran in to know about his new wife’s past—but insisted on keeping them instead of doing the smart thing and burning them. He thought somebody had pinched the pictures from the house. I heard this from the wife, who begged me not to tell the old fart the truth. I complied. She’d put so much work into hauling herself up from the streets that I didn’t feel like kicking the ladder out from under her. I knew from experience how hard it was for a woman, no matter how capable, to make it in this town.

  All I’d ever wanted was to be a cop, like my father. It wasn’t hero worship, not entirely. My mother worked as a secretary at a law firm. She was smarter than the blowhard men—all slick suits and strident voices—who fronted the operations. Yet there she sat, looking pretty in front of a typewriter, every clack of the keys marking the death of another brain cell. It shrunk her and prompted the gin habit that killed her. My father, though—he came home full of pride and tales of catching bad guys. He drank because he enjoyed it, not because he needed a crutch to lean on. He slept like a baby, while my mother sat up late into the night, draining bottles that she hid down at the bottom of the trash. I wanted what he had.

  By the time I joined up, in 1955, I knew how tough it would be. But I needed to escape the roles my gender circumscribed for me or end up like my mother. I thought I could get my foot in the door, prove my worth on the desk, and become the first woman on patrol. With the naïveté and blind conviction of a nineteen-year-old, I refused to believe that the men who ran the force could be dumb enough to ignore my talents simply because I lacked a pair of balls to trouser juggle while leaning by the coffee station and shooting the shit. I learned quickly. The captain laughed every time I asked to hit the streets, while the beat cops kept offering to provide the hard fuck I obviously needed to convert me from the raging lesbian my aspirations to a man’s job told them I must be.

  I could see change was slowly coming. A vanguard of women was forming associations and pushing for the right to do real policing. But I also knew that, after one ass pat too many, I would brain somebody with my heavy typewriter. I quit after two years and did the next-best thing. I became a private investigator. My time on the force wasn’t a dead loss; I’d learned a lot of the tricks through eavesdropping and amassed a network of female dispatchers who passed tips my way. But I still had to work five times as hard to prove myself, even though I was ten times wilier than the male investigators, who relied on thuggery to get the job done. I was dirt poor for years, but I stuck it out. Self-respect mattered more than a full stomach.

  My situation only started to improve when I focused on infidelity. The wives liked dealing with a woman, presupposing more empathy than they got from male detectives—who for all they knew were fucking around themselves. The husbands thought that, being a woman myself, I would better understand the conniving female mind. As I got results, and America’s attitude toward uppity women gradually softened, my portfolio diversified. By the early seventies, I finally rose above the breadline. But to get there, I still felt the need to play down my feminine assets. I made myself more mannish in appearance, mannerisms, and speech so I wouldn’t be dismissed as just another pretty face.

  At first I hated myself, and the world, for it. Then I realized I liked wearing my hair short. It saved me precious time each morning, requiring only a quick finger comb. I lik
ed wearing suits. They were easier to run in, and I didn’t have to adjust my skirt demurely when I sat down. Plus I looked damn good in them. Above all, I liked being able to say whatever the hell I wanted, and screw whether it fit society’s definition of femininity. In trying to become someone else, I became myself.

  This particular wife didn’t have the option to do what I’d done. Given the angles she was pursuing, it wouldn’t have paid dividends. So she worked with what she had: shapely pins and a back-achingly huge pair of breasts. Anyway, I wasn’t in the kind of business where I could afford to judge people’s morals. And even though she’d been doing the dirty behind her husband’s back, she clearly made him happy. When the truth hurt, it was better to run with the fiction.