51st and Fink

a modest cup of coffee, the dregs having wound up in the water, lukewarm as lutefisk on a forgotten shelf, eyes were dilated and ached with night. the nose was shaved dry and full of oil, from itself and from the thumb with which he rubbed it incessantly.
    the diner was on a freeway above the city's, or under perhaps, the city's skyline, from which cats in fedoras came and went to the edge of the horizon.
    little knots in his neurons cried out one after another, chorusing, shouting, teeth clicking against each other. a deep gold effervescence which he expected to exit his nostrils and flood the establishment at any moment.
    "Doris, fill me up or bring me a pillow. I'm running on misery over here."
    She whisked up to his table in a cloud of smoke. "Cry me a novel, Jack. The sun comes up or goes down, it don't matter, I'm still right here, filling up your damn cup."
    "And a mighty fine job ya done, too." He licked hot black off his fingers and showed her his sleeve. She shrugged and poof she had folded off to the kitchen somehow.
    Rubbing dirt from his fingernail and folding over pages of the newspaper he'd bought outside, thinking the morning away. On the table next to his aborted breakfast was a suspicious package from his mailbox, still unopened and leaking suspicious fluid. He pulled Knife from its belt sheathe and began to cut away, instead of just staring at it. Was it from Her? Who was it from?
    Inside the box, above a sad foil lining were three teeth floating in oil. One molar, a canine, and an incisor, the canine with a little bow tied around its roots like a Christmas present.
    "Golly! What's that?" Doris ventilated all over the top of his head.
    "It's my business is what it is. Scram."
    "You got some fucked up business, bub." She disappeared again, and he tried to sip his coffee without looking at the teeth. They were from three different people, and he could take a pretty good guess as to who. The molar he stuck back in his mouth with a bit of superglue. The other two went into his pocket, along with a laminated scrap of paper from inside the box.
    "Take us back home," it said.

    Outside, the cats went at each other with a pair of folding spades. No shame, those fellas, and no luck for those coming between them, so the saying went. He gave a wide birth and hailed a cab downtown with a mind to get to the bottom of something, be it box or bottle. The engine ran its cylinders round, which turned the wheels on the road. The clouds bled purple all over downtown, leaving bruises across every street and up beyond the setting sun. The canine was special. A present for him, or a present for him to give perhaps. He left the ribbon on and the cabbie shifted gears, stuck for a moment between reverse and 4th, just grinding through the intersection.

First stop took him down below downtown, a dank, brittle conservatory whose glass panes looked out on nothing but the cool dark of the understreet. Gas lamps and fungi lit Barney's pate, as he held the tooth in his tweezers, a lens squeezed over one eye.
    "Barney, what exactly are you looking for?"
    "Anything, my friend. Anything."
    "And…what have you found?"
    "Something. But it could be nothing." He stuck the tongue out one side of his mouth and chewed on it. City rats spouted obscenities at each other in the bridgework over our heads. Their paws squeaked on the glass.
    "Well?"
    "What?" 
    "Show me the something or the nothing or whatever it is."
    "There's a fracture along the front edge, though I can't be sure how old it is. Could've been before it was removed."
    "Coudla been when I smashed him in the face."
    He turned and looked at me through his eye lens, still with his tongue hanging out. "Whose incisor is this, anyways?"
    "My hunch is an old friend. But my hunches ain't served so well lately." The lab stank of mold and chemicals. I drew in a puff or two to drown them out, thought back to my days on beat with Fats. Bastard could twirl a nightstick like nobody else, and swing it too. We were blue gods of the alley back then.
    Barney made a sound as if his uvula were tickling the back of his throat. "Friend enough to mail his front tooth to you?"
    "My hunch says no."
    "...Does your hunch expect more gifts in the mail? An ear or an eye, perhaps?"
    "My hunch hopes not. I ain't got the real estate to be collecting body parts. The office is a mess as it is." I recalled vividly punching Fats right in his fat mouth, but couldn't remember why. Fats had a face like a baby's crib, but his mouth could sure make you wanna punch him in it. Out on patrol, the potshots they took at us crankin our stress knobs day after day, I didn't have to wonder too much about why I might want to crack a jaw or two.
    But as Barney hissed open the vault door and let me out into the mole tunnel back to the old subway station and up the steps to the overstreet, I wondered over and over why She would send me Fats' front tooth in the mail. And how she got her hands on it. And at what point I started narrating my story.


    The case started about two months back, the first dame in years to call for an appointment before she showed up in my closet back-alley office, the secretary out on some personal errand, and not likely coming back. The light fell on her face through a depth and looking down on me there in my leather chair, I almost reached up so she could pull me out of the golden water before I drowned. But she spoke and I could understand, sort of.
    "I need you to find somebody." Puff. "A man."
    "What'd this man do?"
    "It ain't what he did." Puffpuff. "It's what he's got."
    I sat for a minute and waited for her to go on. She didn't. "Care to tell me?"
    "Not really, no." She looked as if she wouldn't ever pull me out of the water. But I supposed her pocketbook might.
    "Might help me find him. You never know what might help, frankly."
    She rolled her eyes and put her cigarette out on my desk. "He's bald," she began, "almost totally, except at the back. Wide shoulders. About six-foot-three. Crooked nose. White. Pasty, even. Looks like a gorilla. Less hair. Better hygiene."
    I flicked her cigarette on the floor and kicked up my feet. "This gorilla got a name? Lots of bald apes in this town."
    She smiled out one corner of her mouth. It put a dimple with all the subtlety of a bullethole right there in one beautiful cheek, a dark curl falling across it. "Reggie. Reggie Finks. He worked with Finks Waste up until two weeks ago, and even his boss ain't seen him since."
    "Waste, eh? Sounds like a winner."
    She leaned on the desk, bright green eyes just barely above the waves and caught desperate in a sunshaft. "Can you find him or not?"
    "I'm on the case, babe. He'll be yours in a week. Long as you got my retainer, anyways?"
    "I pay for results, _babe_. Call me when you get some." She dropped a card on the desk, turned on a pistoned heel, and bounced. Leaving me right there in the water and the papers and the dust and the missing secretary, trapped in the sunshafts. I brought the card up into one, from between my fingers. No name, just a number. I gave it a flick with my thumbnail and let a sigh bleed out the window  and down the lane where the fixers were setting their stalls for the junky convention.

    That night he found himself in a raindrop hanging from the gutter as he slank down 51st. The sky was open or closed or whatever it was, the face of Finks Waste still hanging from the stygian window ledge a block up. The face had come to him in the cloud of its own cigar, kept locked between its teeth, down that block and up ten grimy flights of stairs.
    "Someone must be pullin the wool, I think it is they say," the face said to him.
    "Would that be you?" he said back.
    "I told ya fella, ain't no Reggie here."
    He sighed as the conversation spun back round the way it had come. "Well, how bout a month back, then? This is FINKS Waste, right? And you run the show around here?"
    "That I do. Ain't never been, nor ever goin to be no Reggie Finks here."
    "Is that so?"
    "It is."
    "So a Reggie Finks shows up here tomorrow with a P-H-D in waste and there ain't no job for him, huh?"
    "That's right."
    His brain chased its own tail for a minute before he pulled out the nameless card. "Mr. Finks, that seems mighty strange, considering this gal just let me know a Reggie Finks used to work here up till two weeks ago. Maybe you wanna give her a call and then another flip through that rolodex?"
    Finks took the card like it was white hot, and flicked his eyes across the number. The sweat that stood out on his face beaded down as his skull shook a bit when he read it. "Sir, I don't need to call no gal to know what goes on at my own company. You talk to this lady of yours about pullin wool or whatever. No Reggie here."
    "Too bad. But after all, I'm obliged to know that you know everything that goes on at your company. That sure could be a handy thing to keep in mind." He couldn't help mocking that face, wreathed in sweat and smoke and round as a gas giant in the dim office with the city lights streaming from behind. And then he was out on 51st in the rain, hat sagging and collar turned up, with the aura of the face wandering in his wake and still surly as a bag of onions.
    I strolled through the raindrops like a funhouse mirror maze, wondering about the woman who had dropped by with the attitude melting from her dress with every step. Three sheets to the wind and a mind to call her up, and who's this Reggie fellow, anyway? Old flame? I stepped into the phone booth and looked him up, all three of him. Number three picks up and I say, "Is this Reggie Finks?"
    "Whosit?"
    "It's me, Reggie! Why'd you drop out of sight like that? The old man says he ain't never heard o' you."
    "Buzz off, jerk." Real friendly like.
    I call her up, of course. No answer, of course. I can just see her there on the other end of the line, augural eyes on the receiver, attached to hands that won't never pull me out of the water.
    And I figure the flatfoots are all I got left to go on. If anyone but me and Reggie's heard of Reggie, it's them. Wonderful.

    31st precinct crouched right where I left it, a block from the docks and the stink and rot of fish, bodies, prole sweat, and all the matters and cares that flow into the sea. The rain washed it all down, localized into burning pockets like fallout. By this time, the drops were the size and weight of toddlers and they each contained me and I could see my hands pressed against their tension on the edge of breaking through, ripples carressing my fingertips.
    It smelled just the same inside, only under the fish was the familiar tinge of stale joe and desperation. The whitewashed walls were stained with generations of tobacco smoke. Fats right at the front desk exposed his underarms to a fan pointed at the door, as if warding away visitors. Then he saw me through his eyes and grinned. His tooth still in his head.
    "Couldn't stay away, huh?" he said. "Are times gettin tough for the strays out there?"
    "Heya, Fats. You're lookin well."
    "Well-fed, anyway. Ain't been shot in a while, neither." His right eye had never had an iris. Just a black orb, bloodshot like little red tentacles reaching back into his socket.
    "This ain't a social call. I got a man to find, and not much to go on."
    "An' you think I know more than the Great Private Dick, is that it? Imagine that."
    "Hey, don't push my buttons today, bud. I had enough of that for one week." I gave his sweat-soaked collar a tug, and he bobbed back and forth wearing that stupid Fats grin. "Reggie Finks. Show me what ya got, before I clock you in front of your pig buddies and lady friend over there." A frayed doll clinging to her plastic waiting chair hid a black eye behind her bangs. Cops wandered around looking busy in their suspenders, new faces all.
    "Zat right? Reggie Finks! Man of the hour." His lonely pupil twisted and focused as if a burst of light had entered the room. He slid a folder across the counter at me and chuckled. "Uptown shooting, half a month ago. You been under a rock or something?"
    "Yeah, somethin like that."
    He laughed. "Well, we got half the plain-clothes in the city after that mook. You'd better step up if you want him first, partner." I flipped through the folder and slid it back to him. "Keep it," he said. "I got these fellas to make me all the copies I want." He jerked a thumb at the cubicles behind him, then laughed, then sweated and laughed some more.
    I tucked the papers in my coat, back into the storm to the sound of his smug jowls knocking against each other.

    The way home took me along the river, where for all I knew Reggie already floated face down along with my paycheck. Right there against my chest, the folder felt warm enough to cook my ribs, calling out into the darkening rain, now like gold without its lustre. Churning the water's edge to froth, the head about to overflow and drag me down. That reminds me, I could use an eye-opener. Sorry, reminded me. I let the current drag me by its side through the dust-turned-mud of the Old Quarter, where the friendliest place in purgatory waited, doors shining open. I let it pull me in and took a booth in the back, just to relax and sink a little deeper while I peeked through Fats's study guide.

    16 days ago, Reggie strutted down the boardwalk. He smiled to show off his long and exquisite canines, polished to a shine. The ferris wheel turned down the lane, the children screamed, and his hair kept its form with martial fervor. "I don't see the problem, I don't. Whats this got to do with me?"
    At his elbow hunched a fellow in visor and glasses, a mouth that twitched to the left. "Mr. Finks, Mr. Finks assures me, um assures you that is, that matters of the utmost importance to Finks Waste are perspiring [conspiring?] to a head in  the Old Quarter this week, and furthermore is it of the utmostest importance to him that it be you to handle the work with which you have been gifted by Mr. Finks."
    "Well now, what garbage is this? Do we speak the same language, Hank?" Reggie tugged the toothpick from his gabber and flicked it at Hank's face.
    "Incidentally, sir, my name is Henry. In short, Mr. Finks is very insistent, that you, Mr. Finks, take care of this A-S-A-P."
    "Gotchya." That, he understood. He smiled bigger than ever right at Hank's cheek, which sagged horribly underneath his stare. The fellow cringed, bowed, and then faded into the crowd: he stopped and fell behind Reggie as two flappers crossed in front of him going opposite directions, shrinking into a line and then nothing between them as if he were a sheet of paper turning sideways. Reggie started at that, but then he stuck out his elbows and resumed strutting, a fresh toothpick appearing from somewhere inside his mouth.

    If I were a broad with an attitude and jet-black hair who mails teeth to people, where would I be? I wandered the all-night arts and crafts warehouse looking for tiny red ribbons. I called her up again, the number she stopped answering since that other night. I followed roundhead Reggie Sr. around for a couple days in my old bucket, waking and sleeping to the smells of leather and dirty styrofoam in the back seat.
    Fats had disappeared, along with the entirety of 31st Precinct, down to the foundations. Or maybe that at least was still there, under several tons of fresh concrete. I must've crawled under my rock again, who knows for how many years. Doris at the freeway diner, though, had the same number and pattern of wrinkles on her face as before. "Irish me up, here, Doris."
    "You're too Irish already. You want a drink, go to a bar." The woman was like a steam engine on rails between every booth, if trains were made of bats and never stopped for passengers.
    "Don't be holding out on me, today. I know whatchya got in that apron. I'm drowning over here!"
    "Alrightalright, keep your voice down. And don't get desperate. It don't suit you." She tossed a silver flask into my lap right as she chugged by. "Still stressing about them teeth, huh?"
    "Teeth shmeeth," I said.

    Had to admit, under my breath that is, that Fats and his cubicled minions had Reggie's number dialed in pretty tight. The folder told me that one day later, on the hour when night refuses to die, an old house stared up at the old moon and creaked its clapboards at the occupants, who slept soundly regardless. Reggie's big ape shoulders shone silver in what light there was. He stood tall and motionless as he burned down a cigarette. Shadows in raincoats and wet hats crept into and through the hedges all around.
    Inside, just off the kitchen, Margaret lay with a stream of drool on her pillow next to her husband, whose chronic snoring drowned out the house's complaints as it leaned back and forth in the wind.
    "Whadda we do?" One of these square-headed shadows spoke up from somewhere down by Reggie's legs.
    He took one more pull and flicked the butt at its hat. "What you think? Make it loud." His teeth were nice and bright in the moonlight.
   
    The past month lay in shambles, all mixed up like broken glass or the papers in my office with no one left to file them. Brain bits seemed to follow around every bill and case file that ended up on the floor, or in the wrong cardboard box now that all the drawers were full. I'd stopped sleeping at the apartment, or maybe at all, I couldn't remember. The leather couch did the job well enough, and anyway maybe I'd forgottten my address and had anyone changed the locks on me? It didn't matter, I still had the homely charm of Vance Investigations. Better yet, the landlord must've skipped town.
    So there I lay rubbing at my temples and mostly wondering if I'd ever trusted Fats as far as I could throw him, even in the days when he used to carry a revolver at my back. Not that it mattered much. His files were my only window to Reggie, and Reggie was my one hatch to a paycheck, and the paycheck was my door out of the water; or into it, I guess, I forgot how that works, just knew I felt drier than jerky, weak in the bones. If She, Ms. Paycheck that is, even existed anymore. Seemed I now had two people to track down instead of one.
    And my magic folder told me Maggie's house was the place to start. A cold crime scene in Old Town in the dead of night in the sleepless city.