“Jimmy’s Detective Agency. This is Johnny.”
“Ohthankgod.”
Her voice jabbed at my ear, like a cloying violet blooming in a stone quarry. Or maybe a minefield. I gripped the telephone receiver tight, like I was strangling someone, as I pulled my chair closer to my office desk. I knew that voice. At first I though I had heard it in a car commercial. Then I realized it was my cousin Sue – the one I made out with at the family picnic, the last summer before the war
“Johnny,” she mewed.
“Sugar,” I said.
“I need your help. It’s urgent. Pick me up at this address-”
“Hold on, pumpkin,” I barked, recognizing the voice at last. She was a sweet, troubled kid, the kind of girl who sees the world as shades of innocent sepia. I had a bad feeling in my gut. It was my peptic ulcer hemorrhaging again, and I cursed the world for not making mucous membranes like they used to. “Let me grab something to write down the address with.”
“Hurry.”
“I don’t want to forget, cupcake,” I told her. “I’d regret it for a year or two.”
My hand swiped across the desk, brushing aside empty gin bottles and scratch-off stubs. I needed a pencil bad. A number 2. I could even have tolerated a softer lead, just for that one night, for that one phone call. I woulda grabbed a soft-leaded sissy-stick and scraped it across a scrap of dog-eared 8 ½ by 11 like a man. A pale, sensitive, art-student man, but still a man.
“Johnny, I hear footsteps.” Sue’s voice again. No pencil in sight. No pencil in the whole goddamn office. No time to run out and get one.
“Sit tight, angel face, I’m almost ready.” A lie. Obviously. She tasted it on my breath, straight through the twisted phone line, that’s how much I reeked of lie. I’m good at it – that’s the problem. My living is lying to cops, or to faded-flower spouses who hire me to catch cheating lovers. I lie to make people happier. I lie because they want me to, and because it makes me feel less hollow inside. But this girl, poor Sue, smelled my lie, and knew I was pathetic. I had maybe fifty bucks to my name, with an office on the wrong side of the tracks and a dubious reputation. She called me to save her life, and brave, strong Johnny didn’t even have a pencil to write down her address…
A pencil. All I needed was a pencil. Or even a pen, or a piece of chalk, a diarrheic child’s crayon, or one of those flaky grease pencils from Telegraph Supply. Everyone has a pencil. The crackwhores and the tramps in the roper yards have pencils. My mother has a pencil. And she’s dead.
A bottle of scotch sulked behind a carton of lo mein. A loose woman had dropped it off this morning in exchange for some services rendered. I snatched it up, checking to see if it was any good. No. It was kerosene-cheap, with a similar pine-pitch taste. Flammable.
I poured some into the bottle-green ashtray, and sloshed it around. The scotch soaked up the rancid ash, swirling and gathering darkness and color. I tried dipping my finger into the stuff, and writing on the back of a tax return, partially completed. No luck, and time was running out. I needed to write down her address fast.
“They’re at the door, Johnny”
“Is it still locked, muffin?”
“Yes.”
“Pretend you aren’t home.” I didn’t have time for her caterwauling. I yanked my pistol out from my shoulder strap and cocked the gun religiously. Aimed at the ashtray. Prayed to a false idol. Pulled the trig.
Pow.
The ashtray exploded into bottle-green brimstone, and the heat from the .45 ignited the spilled scotch on my old oak desk. Quickly, I thrust the partially completed tax return into the flame, thinking I could make a piece of charcoal like some mangy collier.
“What was the address again?” I shouted into the black plastic phone, now slippery with sweat. The flames licked dangerously close to the rubber chord. She muttered some words that sounded like a street name. Maybe she shouted. I scrubbed the blackened wad of tax return on the surface of the desk, trying to scrawl the address into the oak, which was beginning to ignite, the shellac peeling back with the dancing orange.
“Oh god. They’re inside.”
“Get down, buttercup!”
“Oh my god!” screamed the woman, and I heard a gunshot. And another. The shots rang with scratchy echoes as they bounced through the telephone wires.
I had to take drastic measures to save her. It was my duty. With a jagged piece of ashtray glass I sliced open the blue vein in my wrist. The blood spurted out, hitting my eye. I dabbed my finger in it, and smeared the address on the wall behind me. The blood dripped on the wainscoting, but remained legible. Then my eyes began to tingle, and I coughed from the acrid smoke, tinged with scotch and cigarette butts and marine shellac from the surface of my bloodied, burning desk. Splotches of blackness swam in front of my nose as my grip on my bleeding wrist loosened and my arm went slack. I fell to the floor like an Olympic diver doing a belly flop – graceful, frustrated, sneered at by German judges.
As my congealing red life bubbled out of me, I thought of the maid, who I hadn’t paid in three weeks. I thought of the rent, also unpaid for the aforementioned three weeks. And I thought of Cousin Sue, whose only mistake was ringing me up on the one day that six thousand years of humans using tiny shapes to represent language utterly failed. The phone lay next to me on the floor, the dial tone buzzing in my ear for what seemed like forever. Eventually it fell quiet as the office and the desk burned away, and I no longer heard anything at all.
