This is Marly Jackson PI's 5th case, "The Nightlife Case"
In order her stories are contained in:
Case Of the Missing Millionaire
The Violin Case
A Bad Case of Blackmail
Case of the Purple Rose
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I was in the middle of a dream. In it, my on again, off again lover Michael Finnegan and I were at a bar. The bar was the Purple Rose, an upscale underworld club run by Eddie Harwood, a small time gangster I'd dated briefly.
We sat in a booth with untouched drinks before us. Michael's black hair, prone to curl, was long and shaded his bright blue eyes. He wore a suit, something I'd seen him do all of twice in the 15 years I'd known him, and he glanced around with me at the mustard colored walls, dark wood paneling, and soft leather booths that made up the VIP room.
Eddie was by the bar, talking with Alabaster. Alabaster was a pimp turned heroin dealer I'd grown up with. He alone held the key to the truth of the night I was dreaming about, but Alabaster had left for France which had swallowed him whole, leaving no trace.
Was this a dream? Why had I thought that? And why did I think Alabaster was in France when he was here? My brain seemed to fog in and out and something about this seemed off, but as soon as I realized it, the thought was gone.
Eddie was his usual self; a man very pretty with delicate-looking bones, exceedingly wide shoulders, and a stout build. He wore an expensive suit, his dark brown hair slicked back and his tanned face clean-shaven.
Alabaster was reedy thin, his skin café-au-lait, his long hair oiled and pulled back into a ponytail hanging down the back of his red velvet suit, his maroon fedora at a jaunty angle as he argued with Eddie using words I could not hear.
Across from us at another table was Stormy Michaels. Porn actress superstar she worked for Finn, was dating him, and fucking Eddie Harwood on the side while Eddie and I dated...and Eddie had knocked her up.
She was tall like me, a nudge under six feet, but where my build was medium and my larger breasts natural her build was tiny and her breasts were the best money could buy, shown off in a strappy blue sequined dress. Her fake tan seemed to mimic my natural pale olive skin but her hair was bleached blonde. If I squinted I realized how much we resembled each other...if you were a drunk man with all your blood in your pelvis.
No wonder she kept nailing my ex-lovers. But wait a minute...she was dead. So was Eddie. Wait, what was that thought? I took a sip of my drink and didn't taste it, feeling a foggy headache grow.
I fought to clear it, and as I did a chill rose on my spine. Suddenly everyone turned to the doorway behind me.
I turned around, movie-dramatic-point-slow, only to see a shadow without a face at the door. He was tall and he was short, he was fat and he was thin, he was young and he was old. I seemed to know who he was and yet there was no face, no coloration, nothing by which I normally recognized a person. "Smith!" I screamed and as I did, I heard the sickening wet sound of bodies, ripe with gore, hit a hard surface.
I turned back to see Eddie and Stormy on the floor, twitching and hemorrhaging blood from old bullet wounds. As I watched they began to rot, flesh melting away, but their hands still reaching out as their decaying throats gasped for air to fill lungs completely rotted away.
Oh, God, this was all wrong, and all right! I gripped my drink white-knuckled as it dawned on me that these people were all dead or gone. Of all the players, I was the only one real, but my brain still couldn't find the sum total of the meaning.
As if cued, Alabaster dropped too, bleeding from the shoulder wound Finn have given him just days after Stormy and Eddie had died and we'd been on Smith's trail. It had lead to, and died, at Alabaster, and I turned to see how Finn was reacting.
Finn's face turned bruised and battered. He sported a black eye and a fat lip, a blood trail coming from it. That was when it hit me like a solid wall of consciousness; this was how they'd looked two years earlier.
Each bore the most serious wounds from that horrible time I tried so hard to forget. This was how they'd looked when this faceless shadow named Smith set me up to take the fall for two murders. Three technically as Stormy had been pregnant. I glanced at her rotting corpse and shuddered, praying not to see a fetus. Sensation washed over me, jerking my attention away.
There was fresh blood on my hands, flowing blood, but I felt no wounds. A slurping, slithering sound came from the floor along with scrabbling, and a low groan from Finn across from me. When I looked up all four were reaching for me, two whole human hands, and two of rotted corpses. Behind me the faceless Smith began to laugh.
I woke to my own scream and cut it off when I realized my phone was ringing. Not my cell phone, but the canny retro 1920's style I'd bought at a garage sale for my office.
It was my business line, and the clock said it was six a.m. I didn't have an apartment, slept in my office, so was used to this, but people knew not to call before nine a.m. as a general rule.
I flipped on the light and knocked the phone off the receiver stylishly and grumbled out "Marly Jackson, PI. Go," as I fumbled for my cigarettes and thought about the dream.
Many things had changed in two years. A year in court had made me better groomed: I'd cut my hair to my shoulders, wore contacts more often, and stopped chewing my nails and wearing men's clothes.
I still smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish, but not to the point of blacking out. That had been a mistake that had lead to my involvement with those two technically unsolved murders. It helped too to see my godfather and friend Buzz, a retired cop, die of cirrhosis from years of drinking, but just enough for me to cut back. He'd been a friend and a mentor, and I missed him enough to keep a photo of him, young, smiling, and uniformed, on my desk by the phone.
"Marly? It's Arthur," A high toned but smooth male voice said in my ear after a thick, pregnant pause.
I struck a match and lit my el cheapo cigarette, trying to place the name. I couldn't afford much; my legal bills were paid in free work to Montgomery, head of the Irish mob, which took up most of my days. My reputation chased away the high paying clients leaving me to normal PI shit cases and blackmail, none of them involving an Arthur. Life was like the old days, and they said you could never go home again.
"Arthur?" I blew out a stream of smoke and tried harder to remember. "I don't know any Arthur."
"Arthur Bowers," he said, and I dropped the phone and my cigarette which rolled to the floor, spilling ash and smoking itself out.
Life wasn't like the movies. Things did not always end neat and clean. At any time I could be recalled and retried for 2 counts of murder and more, that was my current shit. Arthur...Arthur was old shit. Same shit, prior day, if you will.
I collected the phone from the desktop where it had landed and slammed it down on the receiver before pulling a bottle of Jameson's from my desk and fetching my dead smoke. On good whiskey I wouldn't skimp or my few Irish ancestors would spin in their graves. I pulled straight from the bottle mindless of the early hour or the fact I was bleary eyed in a nightgown in my dirty, run-down office.
I wasn't there anymore, my mind drifted back over a decade into the past when I'd been a fresh-faced detective, selected for the rank from pure nepotism by my uncle Buzz.
I'd accepted it to get away from my beat partner Finn and a messy affair with him, and I'd been teamed with Bowers in homicide. Sometimes we had a third, but it was always Bowers and I.
He'd had a wife Liz whom I'd met and she had fed me many family style dinners at their house. Bowers and I were dirty, it was the only way to get ahead and make money in the CPD in those days. In current days I assumed little had changed, but back then in the eighties, it was rampant. The current Mayor Daley hadn't "cleaned up" the city yet and it was a blue collar town on the make, a pure harlot I loved.
Arthur had been pinned for an off-duty murder. Liz sometimes worked at the Admiral strip club for extra bucks and the story went she hooked sometimes, which I had doubted from the sweet woman I knew. Supposedly Arthur had caught her blowing a guy in an alley off Lawrence and shot him twice in the head.
The witness was another off-duty cop, one known as a boy scout, whose back window overlooked the alley. Bowers had been broke as shit when this went down, so had I.
He needed money for his trial, released without bail for being a cop with a clean-until-then record. He needed dough and needed it fast and easy, so he set out to rob a drug dealer and I was his second. I'd helped plan the job, run the radios and interference, believing in his innocence enough to take giant fucking career-wrecking risks for him. He was my partner, and that made him a friend, brother, and quasi-husband.
I had stood by him...right up until he and Liz had disappeared with the money we'd stolen. A cool million in cash and another 3.5-4 in drugs ready for the street. It tainted my career, left me stuck as a junior detective, kept me locked into a frustrated role I would ultimately run from to open shop as a PI.
Just thinking about what that had done to my life had my hand shaking as I relit the cigarette.
The sun was coming up, it was a cold spring night transferring into a cool spring day, and with a sigh I got up and put the coffee on, finishing my cigarette. I grabbed a shower and carefully dried my hair, selected a nice, tailored pantsuit that flattered, and put on makeup.
I looked good for a 35 year old alcoholic who was broke, overworked, and hadn't gotten laid in two years.
By the time the rituals of the morning were done and I sat at my computer checking emails and headlines, I pushed the call from my mind. That day I had some tracking to do for Montgomery, and that night I had a cheating spouse to tail and blackmail, though at most I'd get a grand. How far I'd fallen.
