A Suspicious-Looking Individual

Hanging above the mantel was an elvish sword of great antiquity.

That told me everything I needed to know about the client, right there.

Snap judgments and stereotypes might not be fair.  Funny thing about stereotypes, though: they’re usually right.  That’s why you probably know all *you* need to about the client now too.  But hey, if you don’t, let me point out a couple other things about this scene: threadbare, but clearly very old and very expensive Oriental rug, and, I shit you not, a trophy case.  An actual goddamn giant *trophy case*, full of shiny-looking trinkets and gewgaws, and this putz standing in front of it, wallowing in the warm torrent of his own logorrhea.

Also a huge carved wooden door, once nailed shut, now shattered by something charging straight through it into the living room.  That was a little odd.  Burglary?  Burglars don’t generally smash doors.  Pick locks?  Sure.  Break the door around the bolt?  Yeah.  Rip the hinges? OK.  But put a nine-foot hole right through the middle of the damn thing?  That’s a bit much.  I mean, that hole was troll-sized; no, larger–cyclopean, even.

Anyway, it couldn’t have been a burglary: there was that sword.  Hell, there was a trophy case full of stuff, and even at a quick glance I could see that some of it looked pretty spendy.

By this point I’d pretty much shut off my brain.  Some little bit of it was keeping enough track of what he said that I could pretend to be paying attention.  Hell, if he’d stopped and asked me what he was saying, I could have played him back the last thirty seconds verbatim. Didn’t mean I was actually listening.  That’s a skill I learned during my marriage; don’t say I never gave Sharon credit for anything. Actually, a lot of the skills I learned during our six years together proved to be very useful for my career: pretending to listen, pretending to care, holding very very still in the frigid night, and putting up with boundless amounts of idiocy, to name just a few.  So–and this is for the record–thanks, Sharon.  I owe you.

And let me tell you, that last technique was coming in handy.  He was still blithering on.  Christ, he loved to hear himself talk.  That kind always does.

As he continued to burble, I eyeballed the sword.  There was only so much I could see before I’d break even *his* self-absorption, but the weapon looked genuine, and genuinely antique.  My estimation of the guy went up just a little bit: it wasn’t showy or gaudy, but–if it was real–it was a damn nice piece.  I’m talking museum-quality.  The sword was simply a couple feet of Elvish steel, runes incised lightly along the blade, brass guards with delicate inlaid bronze leaves.  It had been reasonably well maintained; the steel was darkened and pitted in places, the bronze had gone green, but nothing worse than cosmetic marring.

I nodded encouragingly at the client and, covering my hand with a handkerchief, gently lifted it down.  He didn’t break the flow of his monologue in the slightest.  The grip–pale soft gray suede–was slightly damp.  I sniffed it.  Sweat, pretty fresh.  I turned the blade to the light.  There was a new nick along the blade, bright silver of the notched steel gleaming against the dark patina.  Now that I knew what I was looking for, I scraped at the runes with my fingernail. Unmistakeably dried blood.  Smiling grimly to myself–an effect completely lost on my host–I replaced the sword on its hooks.

Well, that changed things a little.  Breaking and entering is one thing.  Murder?  Quite another.  What *was* this guy’s angle?  Maybe if I’d been listening, I’d’ve known.

But then, shit, what did it really matter?  I cast a jaundiced eye at him.  Nicely tailored sports jacket, thousand-dollar leather shoes, golfer’s tan, heavy gold wristwatch, manicured teeth.  I knew his type. For much of my early life, his type had been the goons holding my head in the toilet while they flushed it.  Fuckers.  I glared at him with renewed hatred.

Those teeth.  That blinding white of C.H.I.P.S., Pepsodent commercials, and irritating dentistry paid for by the kind of insurance I’d never be able to afford.  If was sure that I looked closely enough I could see their crocodilian points.  I turned my back on the man, ostensibly to minutely study a corner of the rug, and took another warming belt from my flask.  If I didn’t have a few drinks I knew I’d wring his neck right there.

I recapped the flask, slipped it back into the pocket of my threadbare jacket, and ostentatiously unwrapped a stick of gum.  I popped it into my mouth and chewed vigorously to cover the stench of cheap whiskey.  I crumpled the gum wrapper and dropped it on the rug.  If he noticed, the guy didn’t even bother to flinch.

He was still explaining something, gesticulating at the trophy case, his jaws working and noise tumbling out.  I meandered over to the smashed door: scraps of cloth–faded blue cotton, it looked like–clung to the splinters at eye level.  Strange.

Now the man was pointing at a pull-cord hanging from the ceiling.  I looked.  Weighted attic stairs.  I shrugged and hauled on it, and the stairs obligingly dropped down.  I climbed a few, far enough to get my head into the attic and see that it was completely dark.  I’d had enough run-ins with grues last time I was in Paris.  I couldn’t afford that sort of thing on what I was making these days, so I stepped back down to the living room floor.

I didn’t have all day.  I crossed my arms and regarded him with my best dead-fish stare.  After a minute or two, my unblinking gaze began to make the client uncomfortable, and the gushing sewer of his discourse slowed to a runnel, a trickle, and then ceased entirely.

“So what’s my role in this, Mr. Blank?” I asked.  Yeah, that was another thing: the schmuck had insisted on being known as “Mister Blank.”  I think he’d seen too many spy movies.  Although if there’d been a murder committed with that sword, maybe the man had his reasons for wanting to maintain his anonymity.

“Weren’t you paying any attention at all?” he whined.  I suppose an objective observer might have heard that as a snap; I chose to hear a whine.

“No, not really,” I confessed.  “Something about forced entry, your stuff disturbed, yadda yadda.  I kind of tuned out about then.  But I gotta say: that trophy case looks pretty packed.  Was anything actually stolen?”

“That’s what I was telling you!  I don’t see the brass lantern that used to be here.”

I nodded.  “So, you’ve lost a lantern.  What was it worth?  Maybe fifty bucks?  I take it this is, ahem, not your primary residence.”

“No.  Just a little hunting cabin.  I come up here some weekends, when I get the chance.”

I blinked.  “Let me get this straight, Mr. Blank.  You come up here and use this place as a base camp for your hunting expeditions.  Yet you leave a damn nice rug on the floor, an Elvish sword that, if it’s a fake, is a shockingly good repro, and, oh yes, a brass lantern, with which someone has absconded, but left the expensive stuff.”

He nodded, uncertainly.

“And that’s not to mention, if you will pardon my crassness, a trophy case–do you think this cabin is a high school, maybe?–with…”  I peered into the case, blinked slowly twice, shook my head, and continued, “…a full-size gold coffin, a matching crystal skull-and-trident set–seriously, who the hell makes these things?–a silver chalice, a…no, that can’t possibly be what I think it is.”

I wrapped the handkerchief around my hand again, opened the case–no lock–and reached for the bar.  It wasn’t very big, but even so, its weight half-shocked me, even though I was expecting what I found.  I raised one eyebrow.  “Mister Blank, I sincerely hope this is platinum. If it’s not, it’s probably something much worse, like enriched uranium, and I assure you, I do not want to know what you’re doing with it.  In either event, it’s enough to buy this house and, say, the surrounding half-mile of countryside.”

He was stammering now, and looking at his expensive shoes.

I had him flustered, which relieved me, as either he was one of the biggest idiots on the planet, or he was going to realize any minute now that I knew far too much and would have to try to murder me as well.  I continued.  “So you expect me to believe that someone forced his way into your house, stole a brass lantern, and left, conservatively, a couple hundred thousand dollars of loot just sitting in your completely unsecured trophy case?”

He shook his head.  “That’s what I was trying to say.  Was saying, if you’d been listening.  The trophy case was always empty before.  I’ve never seen any of this stuff in my life.”

What *was* he trying to pull on me?  I stared at him in utter bewilderment.  “Excuse me?  You’re telling me that you called me and retained my services because someone just, out of the blue, broke into a house you don’t live in, and swapped a lantern for a pile of riches you didn’t know existed?”

He nodded.  He started to blush.

I took four careful steps back, and thrust my right hand into my right pocket.  My fingers closed around the comforting steel of my snubnose .32 pistol.  He looked at the trophy case, then at me, then at my hand, and his face went from red to white in a heartbeat.

“Please put your hands up and keep them where I can see them, Mr. Blank.”

He complied immediately, which was gratifying.  “Don’t worry,” I continued.  “This isn’t a stickup.  I just want to figure out if you’re really as dumb as you seem.  If you’re running some game here, I don’t feel like playing.  This whole setup makes no sense at all, and I’m not planning on being your patsy for whatever ass-brained scheme it is you’ve concocted.”

“Seriously, Mr. Blank,” I went on, pulling the gun from my pocket and pointing it at the floor near his left foot, “why did you call me?  Why did you let anyone else at all know about this?”

He stammered, “Because someone’s broken into my cabin, and Jer–um, a friend told me you knew how to get to the bottom of things like that, that you could keep your mouth shut, and that you worked cheap.”

“So it just never crossed your mind to wonder whether it was odd that someone had broken in and *left* a whole bunch of treasure?”

He shook his head impatiently.  “Well, I’ve never seen it before.  It must be stolen goods.  *I* sure don’t know how to fence antiquities, even if I weren’t a good law-abiding tax-paying citizen, which I of course am.”

“I haven’t heard of any big thefts recently, and some of this stuff looks unique enough that *if* it had been heisted from someone’s collection, I’d know.  I’ll grant you that it is mighty funny that one of the biggest scores of the last couple decades has mysteriously ended up in your hunting cabin.  You can relax a little: if it’s hot, it’s not stolen from anyone around here, anyway.”

He began to smile, so I figured I’d knock him back off guard before I had to look at those teeth again.  “Furthermore, *if* you are insinuating that I *do* know how to dispose of stolen goods, I resent the implication.”  Of course, given that he’d heard about me from Jerry, he knew damn well that I knew the secondary market in hot items, since that was, in a nutshell, how I’d found out where Jerry’s stolen diamond-encrusted golf clubs were being sold, and been able to recover them with only a few broken fingers and smashed kneecaps, none of which, for a change, had been mine.

He apparently knew better than to argue with a man holding a gun, so he wasn’t quite as idiotic as he seemed; he just bit his lower lip, shook his head, and stared at his shoes.  I transferred the gun to my left hand and lowered the pistol.  With my right hand, I retrieved the flask from my jacket, squatted down, and slid it across the floor to him.

“Want some rye?  ‘Course you do!”

He still stood there with his hands in the air.  “Go ahead,” I told him.  “Take the goddamn flask.  Just don’t make any sudden moves.  I wouldn’t want your liver to suddenly feel a draft.”

He bent over and picked up the flask, and then unscrewed the top with shaking hands.  Fortunately, I’d had the presence of mind to invest in one of those flasks with a hinge that held the screw-top so you couldn’t drop and lose it.  I’m very practical about certain things.  I watched him take a gulp and then make that face that inexperienced drinkers make when drinking whiskey.

“Smooth,” he croaked, and tried a ghastly attempt at an ingratiating grin.

I rolled my eyes.  “No, Mr. Blank, it isn’t.  It’s rotgut rye.  It’s what I drink.  It is many things, including an effective arson
accelerant, but smooth, it is not.”

He took another swig.  After a bit of gasping, he upended the flask for a third, and as he did, I asked him, “What do you want me to do about the murder weapon?”

Fortunately I was not in the line of fire as he sprayed rye across the room.  After he finished choking, he managed to whimper, “The what?”

I pointed at the sword.  “The hilt’s sweaty.  There’s blood caked into the runes and spattered on the guard.  That sword’s been used to cut living flesh in the last day or two.”

He sank to the floor with his back to the wall, put his head in his hands, and began to rock back and forth.

I pointed at the shattered door.  “And what’s through there?”  He shrugged, helplessly.

“Are you a fucking moron?” I barked.  “You buy a house and it never occurs to you to wonder what’s behind the gigantic boarded-up door in it?  You *idiot*!” I shouted, and stomped my foot by way of emphasis. Instead of the expected thump, a dull, hollow boom rang out.  I gave him another look; this one was, if I gauged it correctly, about thirty percent pity and seventy percent contempt.  It didn’t matter; he wasn’t paying attention to me anymore.

I kicked the rug out of the way.  Of course.  A goddamn trapdoor, with a heavy iron ring.  One good yank and it was open.  Rickety wooden stairs descended into darkness; the unmistakeable reek of trollish blood, acidic and heady, wafted up.

The man stared fixedly at the trapdoor in horror.  “What’s down there?” he quavered plaintively.

“I dunno, pal.  It’s your goddamn house.  Why don’t you go down there and find out?”  I casually waved the pistol at the stairs.

His eyes widened in sudden panic.  “But…but…grues!” he managed to choke out.  I couldn’t help laughing.

“No, you got me all wrong, buddy.  I’m not actually brandishing the gun and telling you to go down there.  It’s a good thought, though.  Let’s go with ‘you got me mostly wrong, buddy.'”  I turned my attention to the trophy case.

“Tell you what,” he whimpered.  “How about you take any four things from the case you want.  Then you go home, because I’m sorry for wasting your time.  You leave me here with that flask of rye, and none of this ever happened.”

I thought about it for a minute.  “Six.  The flask isn’t going to be enough, but I’ve got most of a bottle in the trunk.”

He shrugged.  “Do you smoke?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Mind leaving your lighter and a pack of smokes behind as well?”

I grinned.  “Yeah, that seems like a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.  I’m very sorry about your hunting cabin, Mister Blank.”

I inspected the case.  I wanted stuff that would be hard to trace back to me, just in case this asshole called the law after I was gone, although I didn’t think he would, or in case the law arrived after he screwed up his little bonfire, which on the other hand seemed pretty likely.

I ended up with a bag of coins, the platinum-I-hoped bar, a trunk of jewels, a diamond, an emerald, and a pot of gold.  I’d have to sell it off slowly, and there’d be some risk, but at least I wasn’t trying to unload the unique art stuff, like the oil painting, or the jewelled sceptre.  If I were a wise man, I’d never have to work again.  I figured I’d at least just bought myself a nice long vacation someplace sunny with plenty of rum-and-fruit drinks.

Now we seemed to have a standoff.  I wasn’t going to walk back in; he probably had delusions of badassery and was waiting for me, lurking in the shadows with that sword.  I’d be silhouetted against the door, and I couldn’t see where he was in the gloom.

I stood on the porch and spoke loudly.  “Can you hear me, Mr. Blank?”

From somewhere inside came a cautious “Yes.”

“That’s good.  If there’s a fire, eventually there’s going to be some investigation.  It won’t be hard to find out you called me and asked me to meet you here today.  I didn’t try to cover my tracks on the way out, and I doubt you had the presence of mind to call me from somewhere difficult to trace.”

Silence.

“So, here’s what happened, if anyone asks.  You married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Is this any of your business?”

I sighed.  “Look.  I don’t care whether or not you’re gay, but we need
to make our stories agree.  Is it going to be about a dude or a chick?”

“Girl.”

“OK.  So.  You’re worried that your sweetie is cheating on you.  You wanted to talk to me about tailing her, getting photos of her and her lover, the usual package, and you wanted to have that conversation somewhere private.  I got out here to your hunting cabin; it had been broken into and the door smashed, and there was, inexplicably, an empty trophy case in the living room.  No sword, but there was a ratty rug on the floor.  Anyway, it turned out you didn’t have anything much to go on, and really just wanted to rant a little.  I see a lot of this in my line of work.  I shared some whiskey with you, let you get drunk and rave about the cheating bitch, and left you passed out on that rug in there.  You know how it can go with sloppy drunks and cigarettes.”

Silence from inside.

“I’m going to put the bottle, the cigarettes, and the lighter here on the porch.  Come get them whenever.  Good luck, Mr. Blank.”

So I left.

I never saw or Mr. Blank again.  For a while I vaguely wondered whether he’d gone through with it and burned the place, or if his greed had gotten the better of him and he’d ventured into the darkness and met an unpleasant but richly deserved fate.

I kept an eye on the papers for a few days, but I didn’t see any items saying anything like “Rich schmuck, 32, burns to death in alcohol-fuelled cigarette tragedy.”  No cops stopped by to ask me what I knew about that little white house in the woods, Mr. Blank, or a sudden glut of Quendorian antiquities on the market.  They say God protects fools and drunkards.  Maybe we’d both gotten off easy.

It turned out the bar was platinum.  The other stuff was real, too. 

That set me up pretty nicely.  Nicely enough that I didn’t take a vacation.  I was able to vanish.  I didn’t have family, employees, or, really, any friends to worry about.  Other than leaving five C-notes under my glass at Lou’s Place the night before I left town, I didn’t do anything extraordinary.  I knew Lou would keep his mouth shut.  One morning, I just wasn’t there anymore.

A few months later I was living someplace cheap with much better weather.  The money I had would probably outlast my liver down here.  I had a new name, and a vague but plausible story about an unspecified industrial accident that left me unable to work coupled with a settlement that left me unwilling to work.  It was the sort of place with plenty of old men with stories just like that, and plenty of people who’d accept those stories uncritically as long as the cash held out, which was part of the reason I’d picked it.

So I was a little surprised one day when I wobbled back to my apartment, bleary-eyed after a morning of fishing followed by an afternoon of drinking at one of the ubiquitous beach bars, to find a brown paper sack propped against my door.  I picked it up: there was evidently a full bottle inside.  I may not know much, but I do know what a fifth of whiskey in a brown paper bag feels like.

I took it inside and dumped the contents on the kitchen table and took inventory.  A new disposable lighter.  An unopened pack of cigarettes–the brand I’d smoked back in the Old Country, although they were pretty expensive here, so I’d switched.  A full bottle of cheap rye–not available here at all; it’d never been meant for the export market.  I drank a lot of rum these days instead.  Finally, a note.  It was one of those office memo forms.

The memo just said “When I borrow a ride, I like to return it with a full tank.”  The To: field had my old name scribbled in it.  The From: section?  “This space intentionally left blank.”