Nor was that the worst of it. The worst of it was this: I was scared nearly out of my mind. I’ve faced blazing guns in the hands of angry men, which is bad, and daggers in the hands of angry women, which is a thousand times worse; I was once tied to the wheel of a Packard automobile that had been parked on the tracks of a busy freight line; I have even been tossed out a third-story window. It’s been an eventful life, all right, but nothing in it had ever scared me the way the smell of that cologne and that soft footstep scared me.
My head seemed to weigh at least six hundred pounds.
‘Clyde,’ a voice said. A voice I’d never heard before, a voice I nevertheless knew as well as my own. Just that one word and the weight of my head went up to an even ton.
‘Get outta here, whoever you are,’ I said without looking up. ‘Joint’s closed.’ And something made me add, ‘For renovations.’
‘Bad day, Clyde?’
Was there sympathy in that voice? I thought maybe there was, and somehow that made things worse. Whoever this mug was, I didn’t want his sympathy. Something told me that his sympathy would be more dangerous than his hate.
‘Not so bad,’ I said, supporting my heavy, aching head with the palms of my hands and looking down at my desk-blotter for all I was worth. Written in the upper lefthand corner was Mavis Weld’s number. I sent my eyes tracing over it again and again — BEverley 6-4214. Keeping my eyes on the blotter seemed like a good idea. I didn’t know who my visitor was, but I knew I didn’t want to see him. Right then it was the only thing I did know.
‘I think maybe you’re being a little . . . disingenuous, shall we say?’ the voice asked, and it was sympathy, all right; the sound of it made my stomach curl up into something that felt like a quivering fist soaked with acid. There was a creak as he dropped into the client’s chair.
‘I don’t exactly know what that word means, but by all means, let’s say it,’ I agreed. ‘And now that we have, why don’t you rise up righteous, Moggins, and shift on out of here. I’m thinking of taking a sick day. I can do that without much argument, you see, because I’m the boss. Neat, the way things work out sometimes, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so. Look at me, Clyde.’
My heart stuttered but my head stayed down and my eyes kept tracing over BEverley 6-4214.
Part of me wondered if hell was hot enough for Mavis Weld. When I spoke, my voice came out steady. I was surprised but grateful. ‘In fact, I might take a whole year of sick days. In Carmel, maybe. Sit out on the deck with the American Mercury in my lap and watch the big ones come in from Hawaii.’
‘Look at me.’
I didn’t want to, but my head came up just the same. He was sitting in the client’s chair where Mavis had once sat, and Ardis McGill, and Big Tom Hatfield. Even Vernon Klein had sat there once, when he got those pictures of his daughter wearing nothing but an opium grin and her birthday suit. Sitting there with the same patch of California sun slanting across his features —
features I most certainly had seen before. The last time had been less than an hour ago, in my bathroom mirror. I’d been scraping a Gillette Blue Blade over them.
The expression of sympathy in his eyes — in my eyes — was the most hideous thing I’d ever seen, and when he held out his hand — held out my hand — I felt a sudden urge to wheel around in my swivel chair, get to my feet, and go running straight out my seventh-floor office window. I think I might even have done it, if I hadn’t been so confused, so totally lost. I’ve read the word unmanned plenty of times — it’s a favorite of the pulp-smiths and sob-sisters — but this was the first time I’d ever actually felt that way.
Suddenly the office darkened. The day had been perfectly clear, I would have sworn to that, but a cloud had crossed the sun just the same. The man on the other side of the desk was at least ten years older than I was, maybe fifteen, his hair almost completely white while mine was still almost all black, but that didn’t change the simple fact — no matter what he was calling himself or how old he looked, he was me. Had I thought his voice sounded familiar? Sure. The way your own voice sounds familiar — although not quite the way it sounds inside your own head —
when you hear it on a recording.
He picked my limp hand up off the desk, shook it with the briskness of a real-estate agent on the make, then dropped it again. It hit the desk-blotter with a plop, landing on Mavis Weld’s telephone number. When I raised my fingers, I saw that Mavis’s number was gone. In fact, all the numbers I’d scratched on the blotter over the years were gone. It was as clear as . . . well, as clear as a hardshell Baptist’s conscience.
‘Jesus,’ I croaked. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Not at all,’ the older version of me sitting in the client’s chair on the other side of the desk said. ‘Landry. Samuel D. Landry. At your service.’
V. An Interview with God
Even as rattled as I was, it only took me two or three seconds to place the name, probably because I’d heard it such a short time ago. According to Painter Number Two, Samuel Landry was the reason why the long dark hall leading to my office was soon going to be oyster white.
Landry was the owner of the Fulwider Building.
A crazy idea suddenly occurred to me, but its patent craziness did nothing to dim the sudden blaze of hope which accompanied it. They — whoever they are — say that everyone on the face of the earth has a double. Maybe Landry was mine. Maybe we were identical twins, unrelated doubles who had somehow been born to different parents and ten or fifteen years out of step in time with each other. The idea did nothing to explain the rest of the day’s high weirdness, but it was something to hang onto, damn it.
‘What can I do for you, Mr. Landry?’ I asked. I was trying like hell, but my voice was no longer quite steady. ‘If it’s about the lease, you’ll have to give me a day or two to get squared around. It seems my secretary just discovered she had pressing business back home in Armpit, Idaho.’
Landry paid absolutely no attention to this feeble effort on my part to shift the focus of the conversation. ‘Yes,’ he said in a musing tone of voice, ‘I imagine it’s been the granddaddy of bad days . . . and it’s my fault. I’m sorry, Clyde — really. Meeting you in person has been . . . well, not what I expected. Not at all. For one thing, I like you quite a bit better than I expected to. But there’s no going back now.’ And he fetched a deep sigh. I didn’t like the sound of it very much.
‘What do you mean by that?’ My voice was trembling worse than ever now, and the blaze of hope was dying. Lack of oxygen inside the cave-in site which had once been my brain seemed to be the cause.
He didn’t answer right away. He leaned over instead, and grasped the handle of the slim leather case leaning against the front leg of the client’s chair. The initials stamped on it were S.D.L., and I deduced that my weird visitor had brought it in with him. I didn’t win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and ’35 for nothing, you know.
I had never seen a case quite like it in my life — it was too small and too slim to be a briefcase, and it was fastened not with buckles and straps but with a zipper. I’d never seen a zipper quite like this one, either, now that I thought about it. The teeth were extremely tiny, and they hardly looked like metal at all.
But the oddities only began with Landry’s luggage. Even setting aside his uncanny older-brother resemblance to me, Landry looked like no businessman I’d ever seen in my life, and certainly not one prosperous enough to own the Fulwider Building. It’s not the Ritz, granted, but
it is in downtown LA, and my client (if that was what he was) looked like an Okie on a good day, one which had included a bath and a shave.