Stephen King "Umney's Last Case"

 The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood

 hills you can see snow on the high

 mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that

 specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins

 are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are

 beginning to bloom.

 Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

 I. The News from Peoria.

 It was one of those spring mornings so L.A.-perfect you keep expecting to see that

 little trademark

 symbol--(R)--stamped on it somewhere. The exhaust of the vehicles passing on Sunset

 smelled faintly of oleander, the

 oleander was lightly perfumed with exhaust, and the sky overhead was as clear as a

 hardshell Baptist's conscience.

 Peoria Smith, the blind paperboy, was standing in his accustomed place on the corner

 of Sunset and Laurel, and if that

 didn't mean God was in His heaven and all was jake with the world, I didn't know what

 did.

 Yet since I'd swung my feet out of bed that morning at the unaccustomed hour of 7:30

 a.m., things had felt a little

 off-kilter, somehow; a tad woozy around the edges. It was only as I was shaving --or

 at least showing those pesky

 bristles the razor in an effort to scare them into submission--that I realized part of

 the reason why. Although I'd been

 up reading until at least two, I hadn't heard the Demmicks roll in, squiffed to the

 earlobes and trading those snappy

 one-liners that apparently form the basis of their marriage.

 Nor had I heard Buster, and that was maybe even odder. Buster, the Demmicks' Welsh

 Corgi, has a high-pitched bark

 that goes through your head like slivers of glass, and he uses it as much as he can.

 Also, he's the jealous type. He lets

 loose with one of his shrill barking squalls every time George and Gloria clinch, and

 when they aren't zinging each

 other like a couple of vaudeville comedians, George and Gloria usually are clinching.

 I've gone to sleep on more than

 one occasion listening to them giggle while that mutt prances around their feet going

 yarkyarkyark and wondering how

 difficult it would be to strangle a muscular, medium-sized dog with a length of pianowire.

 Last night, however, the

 Demmicks' apartment had been as quiet as the grave. It was passing strange, but a long

 way from earth-shattering; the

 Demmicks weren't exactly your perfect life-on-a-timetable couple at the best of times.

 Peoria Smith was all right, though--chipper as a chipmunk, just as always, and he'd

 recognized me by my walk even

 though it was at least an hour before my usual time. He was wearing a baggy CalTech

 sweatshirt that came down to his

 thighs and a pair of corduroy knickers that showed off his scabby knees. His hated

 white cane leaned casually against

 the side of the card-table he did business on.

 ``Say, Mr. Umney! Howza kid?''

 Peoria's dark glasses glinted in the morning sunlight, and as he turned toward the

 sound of my step with my copy of the

 L.A. Times held up in front of him, I had a momentary unsettling thought: it was as if

 someone had drilled two big

 black holes into his face. I shivered the thought off my back, thinking that maybe the

 time had come to cut out the

 before-bedtime shot of rye. Either that or double the dose.

 Hitler was on the front of the Times, as he so often was these days. This time it was

 something about Austria. I thought,

 and not for the first time, how at home that pale face and limp forelock would have

 looked on a post-office bulletin

 board.

 ``The kid is just about okay, Peoria,'' I said. ``In fact, the kid is as fine as fresh

 paint on an outhouse wall.''

 I dropped a dime into the Corona box resting atop Peoria's stack of newspapers. The

 Times is a three-center, and

 over-priced at that, but I've been dropping that same chip into Peoria's change-box

 since time out of mind. He's a good

 kid, and making good grades in school--I took it on myself to check that last year,

 after he'd helped me out on the

 Weld case. If Peoria hadn't shown up on Harris Brunner's houseboat when he did, I'd

 still be trying to swim with my

 feet cemented into a kerosene drum, somewhere off Malibu. To say I owe him a lot is an

 understatement.

 In the course of that particular investigation (Peoria Smith, not Harris Brunner and

 Mavis Weld), I even found out the

 kid's real name, although wild horses wouldn't have dragged it out of me. Peoria's

 father took a permanent

 coffee-break out a ninth-floor office window on Black Friday, his mother's the only

 white frail working in that goofy

 Chinese laundry down on La Punta, and the kid's blind. With all that, does the world

 need to know they hung Francis on

 him when he was too young to fight back? The defense rests.

 If anything really juicy happened the night before, you almost always find it on the

 front page of the Times, left side,

 just below the fold. I turned the newspaper over and saw that a bandleader of the

 Cuban persuasion had suffered a heart

 attack while dancing with his female vocalist at The Carousel in Burbank. He died an

 hour later at L.A. General. I had

 some sympathy for the maestro's widow, but none for the man himself. My opinion is

 that people who go dancing in

 Burbank deserve what they get.

 I opened to the sports section to see how Brooklyn had done in their doubleheader with

 the Cards the day before. ``How

 about you, Peoria? Everyone holding their own in your castle? Moats and battlements

 all in good repair?''

 ``I'll say, Mr. Umney! Oh, boy!''

 Something in his voice caught my attention, and I lowered the paper to take a closer

 look at him. When I did, I saw

 what a gilt-edged shamus like me should have seen right away: the kid was all but

 busting with happiness.

 ``You look like somebody just gave you six tickets to the first game of the World

 Series,'' I said. ``What's the buzz,

 Peoria?''

 ``My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana!'' he said. ``Forty thousand bucks! We're

 rich, brother! Rich!''

 I gave him a grin he couldn't see and ruffled his hair. It popped his cowlick up, but

 what the hell. ``Whoa, hold the

 phone. How old are you, Peoria?''

 ``Twelve in May. You know that, Mr. Umney, you gave me a polo-shirt. But I don't see

 what that has to do with--''

 ``Twelve's old enough to know that sometimes people get what they want to happen mixed

 up with what actually does

 happen. That's all I meant.''

 ``If you're talkin about daydreams, you're right--I do know all about em,'' Peoria

 said, running his hands over the back

 of his head in an effort to make his cowlick lie down again, ``but this ain't no

 daydream, Mr. Umney. It's real! My

 Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest'y afternoon. He brought it back in

 the saddlebag of his Vinnie! I

 smelled it! Hell, I rolled in it! It was spread all over my mom's bed! Richest feeling

 I ever had, let me tell you--

 forty-froggin-thousand smackers!''

 ``Twelve may be old enough to know the difference between daydreams and what's real,

 but it's not old enough for that

 kind of talk,'' I said. It sounded good--I'm sure the Legion of Decency would have

 approved two thousand per

 cent--but my mouth was running on automatic pilot, and I barely heard what was coming

 out of it. I was too busy

 trying to get my brain wrapped around what he'd just told me. Of one thing I was

 absolutely positive: he'd made a

 mistake. He must have made a mistake, because if it was true, then Peoria wouldn't be

 standing here anymore when I

 came by on my way to my office in the Fulwider Building. And that just couldn't be.

 I found my mind returning to the Demmicks, who for the first time in recorded history

 hadn't played any of their

 big-band records at full volume before retiring, and to Buster, who for the first time

 in recorded history hadn't greeted

 the sound of George's latchkey turning in the lock with a fusillade of barks. The

 thought that something was off-kilter

 returned, and it was stronger this time.

 Meanwhile, Peoria was looking at me with an expression I'd never expected to see on

 his honest, open face: sulky

 irritation mixed with exasperated humor. It was the way a kid looks at a windbag uncle

 who's told all his stories, even

 the boring ones, three or four times.

 ``Ain't you picking up on this newsflash, Mr. Umney? We're rich! My mom ain't going to

 have to press shirts for that

 damned old Lee Ho anymore, and I ain't going to have to sell papers on the corner

 anymore, shiverin when it rains in

 the winter and havin to suck up to those nutty old bags who work down at Bilder's. I

 can quit actin like I died and went

 to heaven every time some blowhard leaves me a nickel tip.''

 I started a little at that, but what the hell--I wasn't a nickel man. I left Peoria

 seven cents, day in and day out. Unless I

 was too broke to afford it, of course, but in my business an occasional stony stretch

 comes with the territory.

 ``Maybe we ought to go up to Blondie's and have a cup of java,'' I said. ``Talk this

 thing over.''

 ``Can't. It's closed.''

 ``Blondie's? The hell you say!''

 But Peoria couldn't be bothered with such mundane stuff as the coffee shop up the

 street. ``You ain't heard the best, Mr.

 Umney! My Uncle Fred knows a doctor up in Frisco--a specialist--who thinks he can do

 something about my eyes.''

 He turned his face up to mine. Below the cheaters and his too-thin nose, his lips were

 trembling. ``He says it might not

 be the optic nerves after all, and if it's not, there's an operation . . . I don't

 understand all the technical stuff, but I could

 see again, Mr. Umney!'' He reached out for me blindly . . . well, of course he did.

 How else could he reach out? ``I

 could see again!''

 He clutched at me, and I gripped his hands and squeezed them briefly before pushing

 them gently away. There was ink

 on his fingers, and I'd been feeling so good when I got up that I'd put on my new

 chalk worsted. Hot for summer, of

 course, but the whole city is air- conditioned these days, and besides, I was feeling

 naturally cool. I didn't feel so cool

 now. Peoria was looking up at me, his thin and somehow perfect newsboy's face

 troubled. A little breeze--scented

 with oleander and exhaust--ruffled his cowlick, and I realized that I could see it

 because he wasn't wearing his tweed

 cap. He looked somehow naked without it, and why not? Every newsboy should wear a

 tweed cap, just like every

 shoeshine boy should wear a beanie cocked way back on his head.

 ``What's the matter, Mr. Umney? I thought you'd be happy. Jeepers, I didn't have to

 come out here to this lousy corner

 today, you know, but I did--I even got here early, because I kinda had an idea you'd

 get here early. I thought you'd be

 happy, my mom hittin the lottery and me gettin a chance at an operation, but you

 ain't.'' Now his voice trembled with

 resentment. ``You ain't!''

 ``Yes I am,'' I said, and I wanted to be happy--part of me did, anyway--but the bitch

 of it was that he was mostly

 right. Because it meant things would change, you see, and things weren't supposed to

 change. Peoria Smith was

 supposed to be right here, year in and year out, with that perfect cap of his tilted

 back on hot days and pulled down low

 on rainy ones, so that the raindrops dripped off the bill. He was always supposed to

 be smiling, was never supposed to

 say ``hell'' or ``frogging,'' and most of all, he was supposed to be blind.

 ``You ain't!'' he said, and then, shockingly, he pushed his card- table over. It fell

 into the street, papers flapping

 everywhere. His white cane rolled into the gutter. Peoria heard it go and bent down to

 get it. I could see tears coming

 out from beneath his dark glasses and go rolling down his pale, thin cheeks. He

 started groping for the cane, but it had

 fallen near me and he was going the wrong way. I felt a sudden strong urge to haul off

 and kick him in his blind

 newsboy's ass.

 Instead, I bent over, got his stick, and tapped him lightly on the hip with it.

 Peoria turned, quick as a snake, and snatched it. Out of the corner of my eye I could

 see pictures of Hitler and the

 recently deceased Cuban bandleader flapping all over Sunset Boulevard--a bus bound for

 Van Ness snored through a

 little drift of them, leaving a bitter tang of diesel fumes behind. I hated the way

 those newspapers looked, fluttering

 here and there. They looked messy. Worse, they looked wrong. Utterly and completely

 wrong. I fought another urge, as

 strong as the first one, to grab Peoria and shake him. To tell him he was going to

 spend the morning picking up those

 newspapers, and I wasn't going to let him go home until he'd gotten every last one.

 It occurred to me that less than ten minutes ago, I'd been thinking that this was the

 perfect L.A. morning--so perfect it

 deserved a trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had things gone wrong?

 And how had it happened so

 fast?

 No answers came, only an irrational but powerful voice from inside, telling me that

 the kid's mother couldn't have won

 the lottery, that the kid couldn't stop selling newspapers, and that, most of all, the

 kid couldn't see. Peoria Smith was

 supposed to be blind for the rest of his life.

 Well, it's got to be something experimental, I thought. Even if the doctor up in

 Frisco isn't a quack, and he probably is,

 the operation's bound to fail.

 And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down.

 ``Listen,'' I said, ``we got off on the wrong foot this morning, that's all. Let me

 make it up to you. We'll go down to

 Blondie's and I'll buy you breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into a

 plate of bacon and eggs and tell me

 all ab--''

 ``Fuck you!'' he shouted, shocking me all the way down to my shoes. ``Fuck you and the

 horse you rode in on, you cheap

 gumshoe! You think blind people can't tell when people like you are lying through

 their teeth? Fuck you! And keep

 your hands off me from now on! I think you're a faggot!''

 That did it--no one calls me a faggot and gets away with it, not even a blind newsboy.

 I forgot all about how Peoria

 had saved my life during that Mavis Weld business; I reached for his cane, meaning to

 take it away from him and

 whack him across the keister with it a few times. Teach him some manners.

 Before I could get it, though, he hauled off and slammed the cane's tip into my lower

 belly--and I do mean lower. I

 doubled up in agony, but even while I was trying to keep from howling with pain, I was

 counting my blessings; two

 inches lower still and I could have quit peeping for a living and gotten a job singing

 soprano in the Palace of the Doges.

 I made a quick, reflexive grab for him anyway, and he brought the cane down on the

 back of my neck. Hard. It didn't

 break, but I heard it crack. I figured I could finish the job when I caught him and

 ran it into his right ear. I'd show him

 who was a faggot.

 He backed away from me as if he'd caught my brainwave, and threw the cane into the

 street.

 ``Peoria,'' I managed. Maybe it still wasn't too late to catch sanity by the

 shirttail. ``Peoria, what the hell's wrong

 with--''

 ``And don't call me that!'' he screamed. ``My name's Francis! Frank! You're the one

 who started calling me Peoria!

 You started it and now everyone calls me that and I hate it!''

 My watering eyes doubled him as he turned and fled across the street, heedless of

 traffic (of which there was currently

 none, luckily for him), hands held out in front of him. I thought he would trip over

 the far curb--was looking forward

 to it, in fact--but I guess blind people must keep a pretty good set of topographical

 survey maps in their heads. He

 jumped onto the sidewalk as nimbly as a goat, then turned his dark glasses back in my

 direction. There was an

 expression of crazed triumph on his tear-streaked face, and the dark lenses looked

 more like holes than ever. Big ones,

 as if someone had hit him with two large-caliber shotgun rounds.

 ``Blondie's is gone, I toldja!'' he screamed. ``My mom says he upped and ran away with

 that redhead floozy he hired

 last month! You should be so lucky, you ugly prick!''

 He turned and went running up Sunset in that strange way of his, with his splayed

 fingers held out in front of him.

 People stood in little clusters on both sides of the street, looking at him, looking

 at the papers fluttering in the street,

 looking at me.

 Mostly looking at me, it seemed.

 This time Peoria--well, okay, Francis--made it as far as Derringer's Bar before

 turning to deliver one final salvo.

 ``Fuck you, Mr. Umney!'' he screamed, and ran on.

 _______________________________________________________________________

 II. Vernon's Cough.

 I managed to pull myself erect and make my way across the street. Peoria, aka Francis

 Smith, was long gone, but I

 wanted to put those blowing newspapers behind me, too. Looking at them was giving me a

 headache that was somehow

 worse than the ache in my groin.

 On the far side of the street I stared into Felt's Stationery as if the new Parker

 ball-point pen in the window was the

 most fascinating thing I'd ever seen in my life (or maybe it was those sexy imitation-

 leather appointment books).

 After five minutes or so--time enough to commit every item in the dusty show-window to

 memory--I felt capable of

 resuming my interrupted voyage up Sunset without listing too noticeably to port.

 Questions circled in my mind the way mosquitoes circle your head at the drive-in in

 San Pedro when you forget to

 bring along an insect stick or two. I was able to ignore most of them, but a couple

 got through. First, what the hell had

 gotten into Peoria? Second, what the hell had gotten into me? I kept slapping at these

 uncomfortable queries until I got

 to Blondie's City Eats, Open 24 Hrs, Bagels Our Specialty, on the corner of Sunset and

 Travernia, and when I got that

 far, they were driven out in a single wallop. Blondie's had been on that corner for as

 long as I could remember--the

 sharpies and the hustlers and the hipsters and the hypes going in and going out, not

 to mention the debs, the dykes, and

 the dopes. A famous silent-movie star was once arrested for murder as he was coming

 out of Blondie's, and I myself

 had concluded a nasty piece of business there not so long ago, shooting a coked-up

 fashion-plate named Dunninger who

 had killed three hopheads in the aftermath of a Hollywood dope party. It was also the

 place where I'd said goodbye to

 the silver-haired, violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I'd spent the rest of that lost night

 walking in a rare Los Angeles fog

 which might have only been behind my eyes . . . and trickling down my cheeks, by the

 time the sun came up.

 Blondie's closed? Blondie's gone? Impossible, you would have said-- more likely that

 the Statue of Liberty should

 have disappeared from her barren lick of rock in New York Harbor.

 Impossible but true. The window which had once held a mouth-watering selection of pies

 and cakes was soaped over,

 but the job had been done indifferently, and I could see a nearly empty room through

 the stripes. The lino looked filthy

 and barren. The grease-darkened blades of the overhead fans hung down like the

 propellers of crashed airplanes. There

 were a few tables left, and six or eight of the familiar red-upholstered chairs piled

 on them with the legs sticking up,

 but that was all . . . except for a couple of empty sugar- shakers tumbled in one

 corner.

 I stood there trying to get it into my head, and it was like trying to get a big sofa

 up a narrow flight of stairs. All that

 life and excitement, all that late-night hustle and surprise--how could it be ended?

 It didn't seem like a mistake; it

 seemed like a blasphemy. For me Blondie's had summed up all the glittering

 contradictions that surround L.A.'s

 essentially dark and loveless heart; I had sometimes thought Blondie's was L.A. as I

 had known it over the last fifteen

 or twenty years, only drawn small. Where else could you see a mobster eating breakfast

 at 9:00 p.m. with a priest, or a

 diamond-decked glamorpuss sitting on a counter-stool next to a grease-monkey

 celebrating the end of his shift with a

 hot cup of java? I suddenly found myself thinking of the Cuban bandleader and his

 heart attack again, this time with

 considerably more sympathy.

 All that fabulous starry City of Lost Angels life--do you get it, chum? Are you

 picking up this newsflash?

 The sign hung in the door read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON, but I didn't

 believe it. Empty

 sugar-shakers lying in the corner do not, in my experience, indicate renovations in

 progress. Peoria had been right:

 Blondie's was history. I turned away and went on up the street, but now I walked

 slowly and had to consciously order

 my head to stay up. As I approached the Fulwider Building, where I've kept an office

 for more years than I like to think

 about, an odd certainty gripped me. The handles of the big double doors would be

 wrapped up in a thick tow-chain and

 held with a padlock. The glass would be soaped over in indifferent stripes. And there

 would be a sign reading CLOSED

 FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON.

 By the time I reached the building, this nutty idea had taken over my mind with the

 force of a compulsion, and not even

 the sight of Bill Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going inside could quite

 dispel it. But seeing is

 believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no chain, no sign, and no soap on

 the glass. It was just the Fulwider,

 the same as ever. I went into the lobby, smelled the familiar odor--it reminds me of

 the pink cakes they put in the

 urinals of public men's rooms these days--and glanced around at the same ratty palm

 trees overhanging the same faded

 red tile floor.

 Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, world's oldest elevator operator, in Car 2. In

 his frayed red suit and ancient

 pillbox hat, Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris bellboy and a rhesus

 monkey which has fallen into an

 industrial steam-cleaning machine. He looked up at me with his mournful basset-hound

 eyes, which were watering

 from the Camel pasted in the middle of his mouth. His peepers should have gotten used

 to the smoke years ago; I

 couldn't remember ever having seen him without a Camel parked in that same position.

 Bill moved over a little, but not far enough. There wasn't room enough in the car for

 him to move far enough. I'm not

 sure there would have been room in Rhode Island for him to move far enough. Delaware,

 maybe. He smelled like

 bologna which has spent a year or so marinating in cheap bourbon. And just when I

 thought it couldn't get any worse, he

 belched.

 ``Sorry, Clyde.''

 ``Well, you certainly ought to be,'' I said, waving the air in front of my face as

 Vern slid the gate across the front of the

 car and prepared to fly us to the moon . . . or at least to the seventh floor. ``What

 drainpipe did you spend the night in,

 Bill?''

 Yet there was something comforting about that smell--I'd be lying if I said there

 wasn't. Because it was a familiar

 smell. It was just Bill Tuggle, odoriferous, hung over, and standing with his knees

 slightly bent, as if someone had filled

 the crotch of his underpants with chicken salad and he'd just realized it. Not

 pleasant, nothing about that morning's

 elevator ride was pleasant, but it was at least known.

 Bill gave me a sick smile as the elevator began to rattle upward but said nothing.

 I swung my head in Vernon's direction, mostly to get away from the smell of overbaked

 accountant, but whatever small

 talk I'd been meaning to make died in my throat. The two pictures which had hung over

 Vern's stool since the

 beginning of time--one of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee while his boatbound

 disciples gawped at him and the

 other of Vern's wife in a buckskin-fringed Sweetheart of the Rodeo outfit and a turnof-

 the-century hairdo--were

 both gone. What had replaced them shouldn't have been shocking, especially in light of

 Vernon's age, but it hit me like

 a barge-load of bricks just the same.

 It was a card, that's all--a simple card showing the silhouette of a man fishing on a

 lake at sunset. It was the sentiment

 printed below the canoe that floored me: HAPPY RETIREMENT!

 You could have doubled the way I felt when Peoria told me he might see again and still

 have come up short. Memories

 flickered through my mind with the speed of cards being shuffled by a riverboat

 gambler. There was the time Vern

 broke into the office next to mine to call an ambulance when that nutty dame, Agnes

 Sternwood, first tore my phone

 out of the wall and then swallowed what she swore was drain-cleaner. The ``draincleaner''

 turned out to be nothing

 but crystals of raw sugar, and the office Vern broke into turned out to be a highclass

 horse parlor. So far as I know, the

 guy who leased the place and slapped MacKenzie Imports on the door is still receiving

 his annual Sears Roebuck

 catalogue in San Quentin. Then there was the guy Vern cold-conked with his stool just

 before he could ventilate my

 guts; that was the Mavis Weld business again, of course. Not to mention the time he

 brought his daughter to me--what

 a babe she was!--when she got involved with that dirty-picture racket.

 Vern retiring?

 It wasn't possible. It just wasn't.

 ``Vernon,'' I asked, ``what kind of joke is this?''

 ``No joke, Mr. Umney,'' he said, and as he brought the elevator car to a stop on

 Three, he began to hack a deep cough I'd

 never heard in all the years I'd known him. It was like listening to marble bowling

 balls rolling down a stone alley. He

 took the Camel out of his mouth, and I was horrified to see the end of it was pink,

 and not with lipstick. He looked at it

 for a moment, grimaced, then replaced it and yanked back the accordion grille. ``Thuhree,

 Mr. Tuggle.''

 ``Thanks, Vern,'' Bill said.

 ``Remember the party on Friday,'' Vernon said. His words were muffled; he'd taken a

 handkerchief spotted with brown

 stains out of his back pocket and was wiping his lips with it. ``I sure would admire

 for you to come.'' He glanced at me

 with his rheumy eyes, and what was in them scared the bejabbers out of me. Something

 was waiting for Vernon Klein

 just around the next bend in the road, and that look said Vernon knew all about it.

 ``You too, Mr. Umney--we been

 through a lot together, and I'd be tickled to raise a glass with you.''

 ``Wait a minute!'' I shouted, grabbing Bill as he tried to step out of the elevator.

 ``You wait just a God damned minute,

 both of you! What party? What's going on here?''

 ``Retirement,'' Bill said. ``It usually happens at some point after your hair turns

 white, in case you've been too busy to

 notice. Vernon's party is going to be in the basement on Friday afternoon. Everybody

 in the building's going to be

 there, and I'm going to make my world-famous Dynamite Punch. What's the matter with

 you, Clyde? You've known

 for a month that Vern was finishing up on May thirtieth.''

 That made me angry all over again, the way I'd been when Peoria called me a faggot. I

 grabbed Bill by the padded

 shoulders of his double-breasted suit and gave him a shake. ``The hell you say!''

 He gave me a small, pained smile. ``The hell I don't, Clyde. But if you don't want to

 come, fine. Stay away. You've

 been acting poco loco for the last six months, anyhow.''

 I shook him again. ``What do you mean, poco loco?''

 ``Crazy as a loon, nutty as a fruitcake, two wheels off the road, out to lunch,

 playing without a full deck--any of those

 ring a bell? And before you answer, just let me inform you that if you shake me one

 more time, even a little shake, my

 guts are going to explode straight out through my chest, and not even dry-cleaning

 will get that mess off your suit.''

 He pulled away before I could do it again even if I'd wanted to and started down the

 hall with the seat of his pants

 hanging somewhere down around the level of his knees, as per usual. He glanced back

 just once, while Vernon was

 sliding the brass gate across. ``You need to take some time off, Clyde. Starting last

 week.''

 ``What's gotten into you?'' I shouted at him. ``What's gotten into all of you?'' But

 by then the inner door was closed

 and we were headed up again--this time to Seven. My little slice of heaven. Vern

 dropped his cigarette butt into the

 bucket of sand that squats in the corner, and immediately stuck a fresh one in his

 kisser. He popped a wooden match

 alight with his thumbnail, set the fag on fire, and immediately started coughing

 again. Now I could see fine drops of

 blood misting out from between his cracked lips. It was a gruesome sight. His eyes had

 dropped; they stared vacantly

 into the far corner, seeing nothing, hoping for nothing. Bill Tuggle's B.O. hung

 between us like the Ghost of Binges

 Past.

 ``Okay, Vern,'' I said. ``What is it and where are you going?''

 Vernon had never been one to wear out the English language, and that at least hadn't

 changed. ``It's Big C,'' he said.

 ``On Saturday I catch the Desert Blossom to Arizona. I'm going to live with my sister.

 I don't expect to wear out my

 welcome, though. She might have to change the bed twice.'' He brought the elevator to

 a stop and rattled the gate back.

 ``Seven, Mr. Umney. Your little slice of heaven.'' He smiled at that just as he always

 did, but this time it looked like the

 kind of smile you see on the candy skulls down in Tijuana, on the Day of the Dead.

 Now that the elevator door was open, I smelled something up here in my little slice of

 heaven that was so out of place it

 took a moment for me to recognize it: fresh paint. Once it was noted, I filed it. I

 had other fish to fry.

 ``This isn't right,'' I said. ``You know it isn't, Vern.''

 He turned his frightening vacant eyes on me. Death in them, a black shape flapping and

 beckoning just beyond the faded

 blue. ``What isn't right, Mr. Umney?''

 ``You're supposed to be here, damn it! Right here! Sitting on your stool with Jesus

 and your wife over your head. Not

 this!'' I reached up, grabbed the card with the picture of the man fishing on the

 lake, tore it in two, put the pieces

 together, tore it in four, and then gave them the toss. They fluttered to the faded

 red rug on the floor of the elevator car

 like confetti.

 ``S'posed to be right here,'' he repeated, those terrible eyes of his never leaving

 mine. Beyond us, two men in

 paint-splattered coveralls had turned to look in our direction.

 ``That's right.''

 ``For how long, Mr. Umney? Since you know everything else, you can probably tell me

 that, can'tcha? How long am I

 supposed to keep drivin this damned car?''

 ``Well . . . forever,'' I said, and the word hung between us, another ghost in the

 cigarette-smokey elevator car. Given a

 choice of ghosts, I guess I would have picked Bill Tuggle's B.O. . . . but I wasn't

 given a choice. Instead, I said it again.

 ``Forever, Vern.''

 He dragged on his Camel, coughed out smoke and a fine spray of blood, and went on

 looking at me. ``It ain't my place

 to give the tenants advice, Mr. Umney, but I guess I'll give you some, anyway--it

 being my last week and all. You

 might consider seeing a doctor. The kind that shows you ink-pitchers and you say what

 they look like.''

 ``You can't retire, Vern.'' My heart was beating harder than ever, but I managed to

 keep my voice level. ``You just

 can't.''

 ``No?'' He took his cigarette out of his mouth--fresh blood was already soaking into

 the tip--and then looked back at

 me. His smile was ghastly. ``The way it looks to me, I ain't exactly got a choice, Mr.

 Umney.''

 _______________________________________________________________________

 III. Of Painters and Pesos.

 The smell of fresh paint seared my nose, overpowering both the smell of Vernon's smoke

 and Bill Tuggle's armpits.

 The men in the coveralls were currently taking up space not far from my office door.

 They had put down a dropcloth,

 and the tools of their trade were spread out all along it--tins and brushes and turp.

 There were two step-ladders as

 well, flanking the painters like scrawny bookends. What I wanted to do was to run down

 the hall, kicking the whole

 works every whichway as I went. What right had they to paint these old dark walls that

 glaring, sacrilegious white?

 Instead, I walked up to the one who looked as if it might take a two- digit number to

 express his IQ and politely asked

 what he and his fellow mug thought they were doing. He glanced around at me. ``Hellzit

 look like? I'm givin Miss

 America a finger-frig and Chick there's puttin rouge on Betty Grable's nippy-nips.''

 I'd had enough. Enough of them, enough of everything. I reached out, grabbed the quizkid

 under the armpit, and used

 my fingertips to engage a particularly nasty nerve that hides up there. He screamed

 and dropped his brush. White paint

 splattered his shoes. His partner gave me a timid doe-eyed look and took a step

 backward.

 ``If you try taking off before I'm done with you,'' I snarled, ``you're going to find

 the handle of your paint-brush so far

 up your ass you'll need a boathook to find the bristles. You want to try me and see if

 I'm lying?''

 He stopped moving and just stood there on the edge of the dropcloth, eyes darting from

 side to side, looking for help.

 There was none to be had. I half-expected Candy to open my door and look out to see

 what the fracas was, but the door

 stayed firmly closed. I turned my attention back to the quiz-kid I was holding onto.

 ``The question was simple enough, bud--what the hell are you doing here? Can you

 answer it, or do I give you another

 blast?''

 I twiddled my fingers in his armpit just to refresh his memory and he screamed again.

 ``Paintin the hall! Jeezis, can't

 you see?''

 I could see, all right, and even if I'd been blind, I could smell. I hated what both

 of those senses were telling me. The

 hallway wasn't supposed to be painted, especially not this glaring, light- reflecting

 white. It was supposed to be dim

 and shadowy; it was supposed to smell like dust and old memories. Whatever had started

 with the Demmicks'

 unaccustomed silence was getting worse all the time. I was mad as hell, as this

 unfortunate fellow was discovering. I

 was also scared, but that was a feeling you get good at hiding when carrying a heater

 in a clamshell holster is part of the

 way you make your living.

 ``Who sent you two dubs down here?''

 ``Our boss,'' he said, looking at me as if I were crazy. ``We work for Challis Custom

 Painters, on Van Nuys. The boss is

 Hap Corrigan. If you want to know who hired the cump'ny, you'll have to ask h--''

 ``It was the owner,'' the other painter said quietly. ``The owner of this building. A

 guy named Samuel Landry.''

 I searched my memory, trying to put the name of Samuel Landry together with what I

 knew of the Fulwider Building

 and couldn't do it. In fact, I couldn't put the name of Samuel Landry together with

 anything . . . yet for all that it

 seemed almost to chime in my head, like a church- bell you can hear from miles away on

 a foggy morning.

 ``You're lying,'' I said, but with no real force. I said it simply because it was

 something to say.

 ``Call the boss,'' the other painter said. Appearances could be deceiving; he was

 apparently the brighter of the two, after

 all. He reached inside his grimy, paint-smeared coverall and brought out a little

 card.

 I waved it away, suddenly tired. ``Who in the name of Christ would want to paint this

 place, anyway?''

 It wasn't them I was asking, but the painter who'd offered me the business card

 answered just the same. ``Well, it

 brightens the place up,'' he said cautiously. ``You gotta admit that.''

 ``Son,'' I asked, taking a step toward him, ``did your mother ever have any kids that

 lived, or did she just produce the

 occasional afterbirth like you?''

 ``Hey, whatever, whatever,'' he said, taking a step backward. I followed his worried

 gaze down to my own balled-up

 fists and forced them open again. He didn't look very relieved, and I actually didn't

 blame him very much. ``You don't

 like it--you're coming through loud and clear on that score. But I gotta do what the

 boss tells me, don't I? I mean, hell,

 that's the American way.''

 He glanced at his partner, then back to me. It was a quick glance, really no more than

 a flick, but in my line of work I'd

 seen it more than once, and it's the kind of look you file away. Don't bother this

 guy, it said. Don't bump him, don't

 rattle him. He's nitro.

 ``I mean, I've got a wife and a little kid to take care of,'' he went on. ``There's a

 Depression going on out there, you

 know.''

 Confusion came over me then, drowning my anger the way a downpour drowns a brushfire.

 Was there a Depression

 going on out there? Was there?

 ``I know,'' I said, not knowing anything. ``Let's just forget it, what do you say?''

 ``Sure,'' the painters agreed, so eager they sounded like half of a barbershop

 quartet. The one I'd mistakenly tabbed as

 half-bright had his left hand buried deep in his right armpit, trying to get that

 nerve to go back to sleep. I could have

 told him he had an hour's work ahead of him, maybe more, but I didn't want to talk to

 them anymore. I didn't want to

 talk to anyone or see anyone--not even the delectable Candy Kane, whose humid glances

 and smooth, subtropical

 curves have been known to send seasoned street-brawlers reeling to their knees. The

 only thing I wanted to do was to

 get across the outer office and into my inner sanctum. There was a bottle of Robb's

 Rye in the bottom lefthand drawer,

 and right now I needed a shot in the worst way.

 I walked down toward the frosted-glass door marked CLYDE UMNEY PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR,

 restraining a

 renewed urge to see if I could drop-kick a can of Dutch Boy Oyster White through the

 window at the end of the hall

 and out onto the fire-escape. I was actually reaching for my doorknob when a thought

 struck me and I turned back to

 the painters . . . but slowly, so they wouldn't believe I was being gripped by some

 new seizure. Also, I had an idea that

 if I turned too fast, I'd see them grinning at each other and twirling their fingers

 around their ears--the looney-gesture

 we all learned in the schoolyard.

 They weren't twirling their fingers, but they hadn't taken their eyes off me, either.

 The half-smart one seemed to be

 gauging the distance to the door marked STAIRWELL. Suddenly I wanted to tell them that

 I wasn't such a bad guy

 when you got to know me; that there were, in fact, a few clients and at least one exwife

 who thought me something of

 a hero. But that wasn't a thing you could say about yourself, especially not to a

 couple of bozos like these.

 ``Take it easy,'' I said. ``I'm not going to jump you. I just wanted to ask another

 question.''

 They relaxed a little. A very little, actually.

 ``Ask it,'' Painter Number Two said.

 ``Either of you ever played the numbers down in Tijuana?''

 ``La lotería?'' Number One asked.

 ``Your knowledge of Spanish stuns me. Yeah. La lotería.''

 Number One shook his head. ``Mex numbers and Mex call houses are strictly for

 suckers.''

 Why do you think I asked you? I thought but didn't say.

 ``Besides,'' he went on, ``you win ten or twenty thousand pesos, big deal. What's that

 in real money? Fifty bucks?

 Eighty?''

 My mom hit the lottery down in Tijuana, Peoria had said, and I had known something

 about it wasn't right even then.

 Forty thousand bucks . . . My Uncle Fred went down and picked up the cash yest'y

 afternoon. He brought it back in the

 saddlebag of his Vinnie!

 ``Yeah,'' I said, ``something like that, I guess. And they always pay off that way,

 don't they? In pesos?''

 He gave me that look again, as if I was crazy, then remembered I really was and

 readjusted his face. ``Well, yeah. It is

 the Mexican lottery, you know. They couldn't very well pay off in dollars.''

 ``How true,'' I said, and in my mind I saw Peoria's thin, eager face, heard him

 saying, It was spread all over my mom's

 bed! Forty-froggin- thousand smackers!

 Except how could a blind kid be sure of the exact amount. . . or even that it really

 was money he was rolling around in?

 The answer was simple: he couldn't. But even a blind newsboy would know that la

 lotería paid off in pesos rather than

 in dollars, and even a blind newsboy had to know you couldn't carry forty thousand

 dollars' worth of Mexican lettuce

 in the saddlebag of a Vincent motorcycle. His uncle would have needed a City of Los

 Angeles dump truck to transport

 that much dough.

 Confusion, confusion--nothing but dark clouds of confusion.

 ``Thanks,'' I said, and headed for my office.

 I'm sure that was a relief for all three of us.

 _______________________________________________________________________

 IV. Umney's Last Client.

 ``Candy, honey, I don't want to see anybody or take any ca--''

 I broke off. The outer office was empty. Candy's desk in the corner was unnaturally

 bare, and after a moment I saw

 why: the IN/OUT tray had been dumped into the trash basket and her pictures of Errol

 Flynn and William Powell were

 both gone. So was her Philco. The little blue stenographer's stool, from which Candy

 had been wont to flash her

 gorgeous gams, was unoccupied.

 My eyes returned to the IN/OUT tray sticking out of the trash can like the prow of a

 sinking ship, and for a moment my

 heart leaped. Perhaps someone had been in here, tossed the place, kidnapped Candy.

 Perhaps it was a case, in other

 words. At that moment I would have welcomed a case, even if it meant some mug was

 tying Candy up at this very

 moment . . . and adjusting the rope over the firm swell of her breasts with particular

 care. Any way out of the cobwebs

 that seemed to be falling around me sounded just peachy to me.

 The trouble with the idea was simple: the room hadn't been tossed. The IN/OUT was in

 the trash, true enough, but that

 didn't indicate a struggle; in fact, it was more as if . . .

 There was just one thing left on the desk, placed squarely in the center of the

 blotter. A white envelope. Just looking at

 it gave me a bad feeling. My feet carried me across the room just the same, however,

 and I picked it up. Seeing my

 name written across the front of the envelope in Candy's wide loops and swirls was no

 surprise; it was just another

 unpleasant part of this long, unpleasant morning.

 I ripped it open and a single slip of note-paper fell out into my hand.

 Dear Clyde, I have had all of the groping and sneering I'm going to take from you, and

 I am tired of your ridiculous and

 childish jokes about my name. Life is too short to be pawed by a middle-aged divorce

 detective with bad breath. You

 did have your good points Clyde but they are getting drownded out by the bad ones,

 especially since you started drinking

 all the time. Do yourself a favor and grow up. Yours truely, Arlene Cain P.S.: I'm

 going back to my mother's in Idaho.

 Do not try to get in touch with me.

 I held the note a moment or two longer, looking at it unbelievingly, then dropped it.

 One phrase from it recurred as I

 watched it seesaw lazily down toward the already occupied trash basket: I am tired of

 your ridiculous and childish jokes

 about my name. But had I ever known her name was anything other than Candy Kane? I

 searched my mind as the note

 continued its lazy--and seemingly endless--swoops back and forth, and the answer was

 an honest and resounding no.

 Her name had always been Candy Kane, we'd joked about it many a time, and if we'd had

 a few rounds of office

 slap-and-tickle, what of that? She'd always enjoyed it. We both had.

 Did she enjoy it? a voice spoke up from somewhere deep inside me. Did she really, or

 is that just another little fairytale

 you've been telling yourself all these years?

 I tried to shut that voice out, and after a moment or two I succeeded, but the one

 that replaced it was even worse. That

 voice belonged to none other than Peoria Smith. I can quit actin like I died and went

 to heaven every time some

 blowhard leaves me a nickel tip, he said. Ain't you picking up on this newsflash, Mr.

 Umney?

 ``Shut up, kid,'' I said to the empty room. ``Gabriel Heatter you ain't.'' I turned

 away from Candy's desk, and as I did,

 faces passed in front of my mind's eye like the faces of some lunatic marching band

 from hell: George and Gloria

 Demmick, Peoria Smith, Bill Tuggle, Vernon Klein, a million-dollar blonde who went

 under the two-bit name of

 Arlene Cain . . . even the two painters were there.

 Confusion, confusion, nothing but confusion.

 Head down, I trudged into my office, closed the door behind me, and sat at the desk.

 Dimly, through the closed window,

 I could hear the traffic out on Sunset. I had an idea that, for the right person, it

 was still a spring morning so

 L.A.-perfect you expected to see that little trademark symbol stamped on it somewhere,

 but for me all the light had

 gone from the day . . . inside as well as out. I thought about the bottle of hooch in

 the bottom drawer, but all of a sudden

 even bending down to get it seemed like too much work. It seemed, in fact, a job akin

 to climbing Mount Everest in

 tennis shoes.

 The smell of fresh paint had penetrated all the way into my inner sanctum. It was a

 smell I ordinarily liked, but not

 then. At that moment it was the smell of everything that had gone wrong since the

 Demmicks hadn't come into their

 Hollywood bungalow bouncing wisecracks off each other like rubber balls and playing

 their records at top volume and

 throwing their Corgi into conniptions with their endless billing and cooing. It

 occurred to me with perfect clarity and

 simplicity--the way I'd always imagined great truths must occur to the people they

 occur to--that if some doctor

 could cut out the cancer that was killing the Fulwider Building's elevator operator,

 it would be white. Oyster white.

 And it would smell just like fresh Dutch Boy paint.

 This thought was so tiring that I had to put my head down with the heels of my palms

 pressed against my temples,

 holding it in place . . . or maybe just keeping what was inside from exploding out and

 making a mess on the walls. And

 when the door opened softly and footsteps entered the room, I didn't look up. It

 seemed like more of an effort than I

 was able to make at that particular moment.

 Besides, I had the strange idea that I already knew who it was. I couldn't put a name

 to my knowledge, but the step was

 somehow familiar. So was the cologne, although I knew I wouldn't be able to name it

 even if someone had put a gun to

 my head, and for a very simple reason: I'd never smelled it before in my life. How

 could I recognize a scent I'd never

 smelled before, you ask? I can't answer that one, bud, but I did.

 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 outmy 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 L.A., 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.

 He was wearing blue jeans pants, for one thing, and a pair of sneakers on his feet . .

 . except they didn't look like any

 sneakers I'd ever seen before. They were great big clumpy things. What they really

 looked like were the shoes Boris

 Karloff wears as part of his Frankenstein get-up, and if they were made of canvas, I'd

 eat my favorite Fedora. The

 word written up the sides in red script looked like the name of a dish on a Chinese

 carry-out menu: REEBOK.

 I looked down at the blotter which had once been covered with a tangle of telephone

 numbers, and suddenly realized

 that I could no longer remember Mavis Weld's, although I must have called it a billion

 times only this past winter. That

 feeling of dread intensified.

 ``Mister,'' I said, ``I wish you'd state your business and get out of here. Come to

 think of it, why don't you skip the

 talking and just go right to the getting-out part?''

 He smiled . . . tiredly, I thought. That was the other thing. The face above the plain

 open-collared white shirt looked

 terribly tired. Terribly sad, as well. It said the man who owned it had been through

 things I couldn't even dream of. I

 felt some sympathy for my visitor, but what I mostly felt was fear. And anger. Because

 it was my face, too, and the

 bastard had apparently gone a long way toward wearing it out.

 ``Sorry, Clyde,'' he said. ``No can do.''

 He put his hand on that tiny, cunning zipper, and all at once Landry opening that case

 was the last thing in the world I

 wanted. To stop him I said, ``Do you always go visiting your tenants dressed like a

 guy who makes his living following

 the cabbage crop? What are you, one of those eccentric millionaires?''

 ``I'm eccentric, all right,'' he said. ``And it won't do you any good to draw this

 business out, Clyde.''

 ``What gave you that ide--''

 Then he said the thing I'd been dreading, and put out the last tiny flicker of hope at

 the same time. ``I know all your

 ideas, Clyde. After all, I'm you.''

 I licked my lips and forced myself to speak; anything to keep him from yanking that

 zipper. Anything at all. My voice

 came out husky, but at least it did come out.

 ``Yeah, I noticed the resemblance. I'm not familiar with the cologne, though. I'm an

 Old Spice man, myself.''

 His thumb and finger remained pinched on the zipper, but he didn't pull it. At least

 not yet.

 ``But you like this,'' he said with perfect assurance, ``and you'd use it if you could

 get it down at the Rexall on the

 corner, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, you can't. It's Aramis, and it won't be invented

 for another forty years or so.'' He

 glanced down at his weird, ugly basketball shoes. ``Like my sneakers.''

 ``The devil you say.''

 ``Well, yes, I suppose the devil might come into it somewhere,'' Landry said, and he

 didn't smile.

 ``Where are you from?''

 ``I thought you knew.'' Landry pulled the zipper, revealing a rectangular gadget made

 of some smooth plastic. It was

 the same color the seventh-floor hall was going to be by the time the sun went down.

 I'd never seen anything like it.

 There was no brand name on it, just something that must have been a serial number: T-

 1000. Landry lifted it out of its

 carrying case, thumbed the catches on the sides, and lifted the hinged top to reveal

 something that looked like the

 telescreen in a Buck Rogers movie. ``I come from the future,'' Landry said. ``Just

 like in a pulp magazine story.''

 ``You come from Sunnyland Sanitarium, more like it,'' I croaked.

 ``But not exactly like a pulp science-fiction story,'' he went on, ignoring what I'd

 said. ``No, not exactly.'' He pushed a

 button on the side of the plastic case. There was a faint whirring sound from inside

 the gadget, followed by a brief,

 whistling beep. The thing sitting on his lap looked like some strange stenographer's

 machine . . . and I had an idea that

 that wasn't far from the truth.

 He looked up at me and said, ``What was your father's name, Clyde?''

 I looked at him for a moment, resisting an urge to lick my lips again. The room was

 still dark, the sun still behind some

 cloud that hadn't even been in sight when I came in off the street. Landry's face

 seemed to float in the gloom like an

 old, shrivelled balloon.

 ``What's that got to do with the price of cucumbers in Monrovia?'' I asked.

 ``You don't know, do you?''

 ``Of course I do,'' I said, and I did. I just couldn't come up with it, that was all--

 it was stuck there on the tip of my

 tongue, like Mavis Weld's phone number, which had been BAyshore something-or-other.

 ``How about your mother's?''

 ``Quit playing games with me!''

 ``Here's an easy one--what high school did you go to? Every red- blooded American man

 remembers what school he

 went to, right? Or the first girl he ever went all the way with. Or the town he grew

 up in. Was yours San Luis

 Obispo?''

 I opened my mouth, but this time nothing came out.

 ``Carmel?''

 That sounded right . . . and then felt all wrong. My head was whirling.

 ``Or maybe it was Dusty Bottom, New Mexico.''

 ``Cut the crap!'' I shouted.

 ``Do you know? Do you?''

 ``Yes! It was--''

 He bent over. Rattled the keys of his strange steno machine.

 ``San Diego! Born and raised!''

 He put the machine on my desk and turned it around so I could read the words floating

 in the window above the

 keyboard.

 ``San Diego! Born and raised!''

 My eyes dropped from the window to the word stamped into the plastic frame surrounding

 it.

 ``What's a Toshiba?'' I asked. ``Something that comes on the side when you order a

 Reebok dinner?''

 ``It's a Japanese electronics company.''

 I laughed dryly. ``Who're you kidding, mister? The Japs can't even make wind-up toys

 without getting the springs in

 upside down.''

 ``Not now,'' he agreed, ``and speaking of now, Clyde, when is now? What year is it?''

 ``1938,'' I said, then raised a half-numb hand to my face and rubbed my lips.

 ``Wait a minute--1939.''

 ``It might even be 1940. Am I right?''

 I said nothing, but I felt my face heating up.

 ``Don't feel bad, Clyde; you don't know because I don't know. I always left it vague.

 The time-frame I was trying for

 was actually more of a feel . . . call it Chandler American Time, if you like. It

 worked like gangbusters for most of my

 readers, and it made things simpler from a copy-editing standpoint as well, because

 you can never exactly pinpoint the

 passage of time. Haven't you ever noticed how often you say things like `for more

 years than I can remember' or

 `longer ago than I like to think about' or `since Hector was a pup'?''

 ``Nope--can't say that I have.'' But now that he mentioned it, I did notice. And that

 made me think of the L.A. Times. I

 read it every day, but exactly which days were they? You couldn't tell from the paper

 itself, because there was never a

 date on the masthead, only that slogan which reads ``America's Fairest Newspaper in

 America's Fairest City.''

 ``You say those things because time doesn't really pass in this world. It is . . .''

 He paused, then smiled. It was a terrible

 thing to look at, that smile, full of yearning and strange greed. ``It is one of its

 many charms,'' he finished.

 I was scared, but I've always been able to bite the bullet when I felt it really

 needed biting, and this was one of those

 times. ``Tell me what the hell's going on here.''

 ``All right . . . but you're already beginning to know, Clyde. Aren't you?''

 ``Maybe. I don't know my dad's name or my mom's name or the name of the first girl I

 ever went to bed with because

 you don't know them. Is that it?''

 He nodded, smiling the way a teacher would smile at a pupil who's made a leap of logic

 and come up with the right

 answer against all odds. But his eyes were still full of that terrible sympathy.

 ``And when you wrote San Diego on your gadget there and it came into my head at the

 same time . . .''

 He nodded, encouraging me.

 ``It isn't just the Fulwider Building you own, is it?'' I swallowed, trying to get rid

 of a large blockage in my throat that

 had no intention of going anywhere. ``You own everything.''

 But Landry was shaking his head. ``Not everything. Just Los Angeles and a few

 surrounding areas. This version of Los

 Angeles, that is, complete with the occasional continuity glitch or made-up

 addition.''

 ``Bull,'' I said, but I whispered the word.

 ``See the picture on the wall to the left of the door, Clyde?''

 I glanced at it, but hardly had to; it was Washington crossing the Delaware, and it

 had been there since . . . well, since

 Hector was a pup.

 Landry had taken his plastic Buck Rogers steno machine back onto his lap, and was

 bending over it.

 ``Don't do that!'' I shouted, and tried to reach for him. I couldn't do it. My arms

 had no strength, it seemed, and I could

 summon no resolve. I felt lethargic, drained, as if I had lost about three pints of

 blood and was losing more all the time.

 He rattled the keys again. Turned the machine toward me so I could read the words in

 the window. They read: On the

 wall to the left of the door leading out to Candy-Land, Our Revered Leader hangs . . .

 but always slightly askew. That's

 my way of keeping him in perspective.

 I looked back at the picture. George Washington was gone, replaced by a photo of

 Franklin Roosevelt. F.D.R. had a grin

 on his face and his cigarette holder jutting upward at that angle his supporters think

 of as jaunty and his detractors as

 arrogant. The picture was hanging slightly askew.

 ``I don't need the laptop to do it,'' he said. He sounded a little embarrassed, as if

 I'd accused him of something. ``I can

 do it just by concentrating--as you saw when the numbers disappeared from your

 blotter--but the laptop helps.

 Because I'm used to writing things down, I suppose. And then editing them. In a way,

 editing and rewriting are the most

 fascinating parts of the job, because that's where the final changes--usually small

 but often crucial--take place and the

 picture really comes into focus.''

 I looked back at Landry, and when I spoke, my voice was dead. ``You made me up, didn't

 you?''

 He nodded, looking strangely ashamed, as if what he had done was something dirty.

 ``When?'' I uttered a strange, croaky little laugh. ``Or is that the right question?''

 ``I don't know if it is or isn't,'' he said, ``and I imagine any writer would tell you

 about the same. It didn't happen all at

 once--that much I'm sure of. It's been an ongoing process. You first showed up in

 Scarlet Town, but I wrote that back

 in 1977 and you've changed a lot since then.''

 1977, I thought. A Buck Rogers year for sure. I didn't want to believe this was

 happening, wanted to believe it was all a

 dream. Oddly enough, it was the smell of his cologne that kept me from being able to

 do that--that familiar smell I'd

 never smelled in my life. How could I have? It was Aramis, a brand as unfamiliar to me

 as Toshiba.

 But he was going on.

 ``You've grown a lot more complex and interesting. You were pretty one-dimensional to

 start with.'' He cleared his

 throat and smiled down at his hands for a moment. ``What a pisser for me.''

 He winced a little at the anger in my voice, but made himself look up again, just the

 same. ``Your last book was How

 Like a Fallen Angel. I started that one in 1990, but it took until 1993 to finish.

 I've had some problems in the interim.

 My life has been . . . interesting.'' He gave the word an ugly, bitter twist.

 ``Writers don't do their best work during

 interesting times, Clyde. Take my word for it.''

 I glanced at the baggy way his hobo clothes hung on him and decided he might have a

 point there. ``Maybe that's why

 you screwed up in such a big way on this one,'' I said. ``That stuff about the lottery

 and the forty thousand dollars was

 pure guff--they pay off in pesos south of the border.''

 ``I knew that,'' he said mildly. ``I'm not saying I don't goof up from time to time--I

 may be a kind of God in this

 world, or to this world, but in my own I'm perfectly human--but when I do goof up, you

 and your fellow characters

 never know it, Clyde, because my mistakes and continuity lapses are part of your

 truth. No, Peoria was lying. I knew it,

 and I wanted you to know it.''

 ``Why?''

 He shrugged, again looking uneasy and a little ashamed. ``To prepare you for my coming

 a little, I suppose. That's what

 all of it was for, starting with the Demmicks. I didn't want to scare you any more

 than I had to.''

 Any private eye worth his salt has a pretty good idea when the person in the client's

 chair is lying and when he's telling

 the truth; knowing when the client is telling the truth but purposely leaving gaps is

 a rarer talent, and I doubt if even the

 geniuses among us can tap it all the time. Maybe I was only tapping it now because my

 brainwaves and Landry's were

 marching in lock-step, but I was tapping it. There was stuff he wasn't telling me. The

 question was whether or not I

 should call him on it.

 What stopped me was a sudden, horrible intuition that came waltzing out of nowhere,

 like a ghost oozing out of the

 wall of a haunted house. It had to do with the Demmicks. The reason they'd been so

 quiet last night was because dead

 people don't engage in marital spats--it's one of those rules, like the one that says

 crap rolls downhill, that you can

 pretty much count on through thick and thin. >From almost the first moment I'd met

 him, I'd sensed there was a violent

 temper under George's urbane top layer, and that there might be a sharp-clawed bitch

 lurking in the shadows behind

 Gloria Demmick's pretty face and daffy demeanor. They were just a little too Cole

 Porter to be true, if you see what I

 mean. And now I was somehow sure that George had finally snapped and killed his wife .

 . . probably their yappy

 Welsh Corgi, as well. Gloria might be sitting propped up in the bathroom corner

 between the shower and the toilet

 right now, her face black, her eyes bulging like old dull marbles, her tongue

 protruding between her blue lips. The dog

 was lying with its head in her lap and a wire coathanger twisted around its neck, its

 shrill bark stilled forever. And

 George? Dead on the bed with Gloria's bottle of Veronals--now empty--standing beside

 him on the night-table. No

 more parties, no more jitterbugging at Al Arif, no more frothy upper-class murder

 cases in Palm Desert or Beverly

 Glen. They were cooling off now, drawing flies, growing pale under their fashionable

 poolside tans.

 George and Gloria Demmick, who had died inside this man's machine. Who had died inside

 this man's head.

 ``You did one lousy job of not scaring me,'' I said, and immediately wondered if it

 would have been possible for him to

 do a good one. Ask yourself this: how do you get a person ready to meet God? I'll bet

 even Moses got a little hot under

 the robe when he saw that bush start to glow, and I'm nothing but a shamus who works

 for forty a day plus expenses.

 ``How Like a Fallen Angel was the Mavis Weld story. The name, Mavis Weld, is from a

 novel called The Little Sister

 By Raymond Chandler.'' He looked at me with a kind of troubled uncertainty that had

 some small whiff of guilt in it.

 ``It's an hommage.'' He said the first syllable so it rhymed with Rome.

 ``Bully for you,'' I said, ``but the guy's name rings no bells.''

 ``Of course not. In your world--which is my version of L.A., of course --Chandler

 never existed. Nevertheless, I've

 used all sorts of names from his books in mine. The Fulwider Building is where

 Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe,

 had his office. Vernon Klein . . . Peoria Smith . . . and Clyde Umney, of course. That

 was the name of the lawyer in

 Playback.''

 ``And you call those things hommages?''

 ``That's right.''

 ``If you say so, but it sounds like a fancy word for plain old copying to me.'' But it

 made me feel funny, knowing that

 my name had been made up by a man I'd never heard of in a world I'd never dreamed of.

 Landry had the good grace to flush, but his eyes didn't drop.

 ``All right; perhaps I did do a little pilfering. Certainly I adopted Chandler's style

 for my own, but I'm hardly the first;

 Ross Macdonald did the same thing in the fifties and sixties, Robert Parker did it in

 the seventies and eighties, and the

 critics decked them with laurel leaves for it. Besides, Chandler learned from Hammett

 and Hemingway, not to mention

 pulp-writers like--''

 I held up my hand. ``Let's skip the lit class and get down to the bottom line. This is

 crazy, but--'' My eyes drifted to

 the picture of Roosevelt, from there they went to the eerily blank blotter, and from

 there they went back to the haggard

 face on the other side of the desk. ``--but let's say I believe it. What are you doing

 here? What did you come for?''

 Except I already knew. I detect for a living, but the answer to that one came from my

 heart, not my head.

 ``I came for you.''

 ``For me.''

 ``Sorry, yes. I'm afraid you'll have to start thinking of your life in a new way,

 Clyde. As . . . well . . . a pair of shoes,

 let's say. You're stepping out and I'm stepping in. And once I've got the laces tied,

 I'm going to walk away.''

 Of course. Of course he was. And I suddenly knew what I had to do . . . the only thing

 I could do.

 Get rid of him.

 I let a big smile spread across my face. A tell-me-more smile. At the same time I

 coiled my legs under me, getting

 them ready to launch me across the desk at him. Only one of us could leave this

 office, that much was clear. I intended

 to be the one.

 ``Oh, really?'' I said. ``How fascinating. And what happens to me, Sammy? What happens

 to the shoeless private eye?

 What happens to Clyde--''

 Umney, the last word was supposed to be my last name, the last word this interloping,

 invading thief would ever hear in

 his life. The minute it was out of my mouth I intended to leap. The trouble was, that

 telepathy business seemed to work

 both ways. I saw an expression of alarm dawn in his eyes, and then they slipped shut

 and his mouth tightened with

 concentration. He didn't bother with the Buck Rogers machine; I suppose he knew there

 was no time for it.

 `` `His revelations hit me like some kind of debilitating drug,' '' he said, speaking

 in the low but carrying tone of one

 who recites rather than simply speaking. `` `All the strength went out of my muscles,

 my legs felt like a couple of

 strands of al dente spaghetti, and all I could do was flop back in my chair and look

 at him.' ''

 I flopped back in my chair, my legs uncoiling beneath me, unable to do anything but

 look at him.

 ``Not very good,'' he said apologetically, ``but rapid composition has never been a

 strong point of mine.''

 ``You bastard,'' I rasped weakly. ``You son of a bitch.''

 ``Yes,'' he agreed. ``I suppose I am.''

 ``Why are you doing this? Why are you stealing my life?''

 His eyes flickered with anger at that. ``Your life? You know better than that, Clyde,

 even if you don't want to admit it.

 It isn't your life at all. I made you up, starting on one rainy day in January of 1977

 and continuing right up to the

 present time. I gave you your life, and it's mine to take away.''

 ``Very noble,'' I sneered, ``but if God came down here right now and started yanking

 your life apart like bad stitches in

 a scarf, you might find it a little easier to appreciate my point of view.''

 ``All right,'' he said, ``I suppose you've got a point. But why argue it? Arguing with

 one's self is like playing solitaire

 chess--a fair game results in a stalemate every time. Let's just say I'm doing it

 because I can.''

 I felt a little calmer, all of a sudden. I had been down this street before. When they

 got the drop on you, you had to get

 them talking and keep them talking. It had worked with Mavis Weld and it would work

 here. They said stuff like Well,

 I suppose it won't hurt you to know now or What harm can it do?

 Mavis's version had been downright elegant: I want you to know, Umney--I want you to

 take the truth to hell with you.

 You can pass it on to the devil over cake and coffee. It really didn't matter what

 they said, but if they were talking, they

 weren't shooting.

 Always keep em talking, that was the thing. Keep em talking and just hope the cavalry

 would show up from

 somewhere.

 ``The question is, why do you want to?'' I asked. ``It's hardly the usual thing, is

 it? I mean, aren't you writer types

 usually content to cash the checks when they come, and go about your business?''

 ``You're trying to keep me talking, Clyde. Aren't you?''

 That hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, but playing it down to the last card was

 the only choice I had. I grinned and

 shrugged. ``Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I really do want to know.'' And there was no

 lie in that.

 He looked unsure for a moment longer, bent over and touched the keys inside that

 strange plastic case (I felt cramps in

 my legs and gut and chest as he stroked them), then straightened up again.

 ``I suppose it won't hurt you to know now,'' he said finally. ``After all, what harm

 can it do?''

 ``Not a bit.''

 ``You're a clever boy, Clyde,'' he said, ``and you're perfectly right --writers very

 rarely plunge all the way into the

 worlds they've created, and when they do I think they end up doing it strictly in

 their heads, while their bodies vegetate

 in some mental asylum. Most of us are content simply to be tourists in the country of

 our imaginations. Certainly that

 was the case with me. I'm not a fast writer--composition has always been torture for

 me, I think I told you that--but I

 managed five Clyde Umney books in ten years, each more successful than the last. In

 1983 I left my job as regional

 manager for a big insurance company and started to write full-time. I had a wife I

 loved, a little boy that kicked the sun

 out of bed every morning and put it to bed every night--that's how it seemed to me,

 anyway--and I didn't think life

 could get any better.''

 He shifted in the overstuffed client's chair, moved his hand, and I saw the cigarette

 burn Ardis McGill had put in the

 over-stuffed arm was also gone. He voiced a bitterly cold laugh.

 ``And I was right,'' he said. ``It couldn't get any better, but it could get a whole

 hell of a lot worse. And did. About

 three months after I started How Like a Fallen Angel, Danny--our little boy--fell out

 of a swing in the park and

 bashed his head. Cold-conked himself, in your parlance.''

 A brief smile, every bit as cold and bitter as the laugh had been, crossed his face.

 It came and went at the speed of grief.

 ``He bled a lot--you've seen enough head-wounds in your time to know how they are--and

 it scared the crap out of

 Linda, but the doctors were good and it did turn out to be only a concussion; they got

 him stabilized and gave him a pint

 of blood to make up for what he'd lost. Maybe they didn't have to--and that haunts me-

 -but they did. The real

 problem wasn't with his head, you see; it was with that pint of blood. It was infected

 with AIDS.''

 ``Come again?''

 ``It's something you can thank your God you don't know about,'' Landry said. ``It

 doesn't exist in your time, Clyde. It

 won't show up until the mid-seventies. Like Aramis cologne.''

 ``What does it do?''

 ``Eats away at your immune system until the whole thing collapses like the wonderful

 one-hoss shay. Then every bug

 circling around out there, from cancer to chicken pox, rushes in and has a party.''

 ``Good Christ!''

 His smile came and went like a cramp. ``If you say so. AIDS is primarily a sexually

 transmitted disease, but every now

 and then it pops up in the blood supply. I suppose you could say my kid won big in a

 very unlucky version of la lotería.''

 ``I'm sorry,'' I said, and although I was scared to death of this thin man with the

 tired face, I meant it. Losing a kid to

 something like that . . . what could be worse? Probably something, yeah--there's

 always something--but you'd have to

 sit down and think about it, wouldn't you?

 ``Thanks,'' he said. ``Thanks, Clyde. It went fast for him, at least. He fell out of

 the swing in May. The first purple

 blotches-- Kaposi's sarcoma--showed up in time for his birthday in September. He died

 on March 18, 1991. And

 maybe he didn't suffer as much as some of them do, but he suffered. Oh yes, he

 suffered.''

 I didn't have the slightest idea what Kaposi's sarcoma was, either, and decided I

 didn't want to ask. I knew more than I

 wanted to already.

 ``You can maybe understand why it slowed me down a little on your book,'' he said.

 ``Can't you, Clyde?''

 I nodded.

 ``I pushed on, though. Mostly because I think make-believe is a great healer. Maybe I

 have to believe that. I tried to get

 on with my life, too, but things kept going wrong with it--it was as if How Like a

 Fallen Angel was some kind of

 weird bad-luck charm that had turned me into Job. My wife went into a deep depression

 following Danny's death, and I

 was so concerned with her that I hardly noticed the red patches that had started

 breaking out on my legs and stomach

 and chest. And the itching. I knew it wasn't AIDS, and at first that was all I was

 concerned with. But as time went on

 and things got worse . . . have you ever had shingles, Clyde?''

 Then he laughed and clapped the heel of his hand to his forehead in a what-a-dunce-Iam

 gesture before I could shake

 my head.

 ``Of course you haven't--you've never had more than a hangover. Shingles, my shamus

 friend, is a funny name for a

 terrible, chronic ailment. There's some pretty good medicine available to help

 alleviate the symptoms in my version of

 Los Angeles, but it wasn't helping me much; by the end of 1991 I was in agony. Part of

 it was general depression over

 what had happened to Danny, of course, but most of it was the agony and the itching.

 That would make an interesting

 book title about a tortured writer, don't you think? The Agony and the Itching, or,

 Thomas Hardy Faces Puberty.'' He

 voiced a harsh, distracted little laugh.

 ``Whatever you say, Sam.''

 ``I say it was a season in hell. Of course it's easy to make light of it now, but by

 Thanksgiving of that year it was no

 joke--I was getting three hours of sleep a night, tops, and I had days when it felt

 like my skin was trying to crawl right

 off my body and run away like The Gingerbread Man. And I suppose that's why I didn't

 see how bad it was getting with

 Linda.''

 I didn't know, couldn't know . . . but I did. ``She killed herself.''

 He nodded. ``In March of 1992, on the anniversary of Daniel's death. Over two years

 ago now.''

 A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, prematurely aged cheek, and I had an idea

 that he had gotten old in one hell of

 a hurry. It was sort of awful, realizing I had been made by such a bush-league version

 of God, but it also explained a

 lot. My shortcomings, mainly.

 ``That's enough,'' he said in a voice which was blurred with anger as well as tears.

 ``Get to the point, you'd say. In my

 time we say cut to the chase, but it comes to the same. I finished the book. On the

 day I discovered Linda dead in

 bed--the way the police are going to find Gloria Demmick later today, Clyde--I had

 finished one hundred and ninety

 pages of manuscript. I was up to the part where you fish Mavis's brother out of Lake

 Tahoe. I came home from the

 funeral three days later, fired up the word-processor, and got started right in on

 page one-ninety-one. Does that shock

 you?''

 ``No,'' I said. I thought about asking him what a word-processor might be, then

 decided I didn't have to. The thing in

 his lap was a word-processor, of course. Had to be.

 ``You're in a decided minority,'' Landry said. ``It shocked what few friends I had

 left, shocked them plenty. Linda's

 relatives thought I had all the emotion of a warthog. I didn't have the energy to

 explain that I was trying to save myself.

 Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book the way a drowning man would grab a

 life-ring. I grabbed you,

 Clyde. My case of the shingles was still bad, and that slowed me down--to some extent

 it kept me out, or I might have

 gotten here sooner--but it didn't stop me. I started getting a little better--

 physically, at least--right around the time I

 finished the book. But when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must have been

 my own state of depression. I went

 through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of

 loss . . .'' He looked directly at me and

 said, ``Does any of this make any sense to you?''

 ``It makes sense,'' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.

 ``There were lots of pills left in the house,'' he said. ``Linda and I were like the

 Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde--we

 really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very

 close to taking a couple of double

 handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't in terms of suicide, but in

 terms of wanting to catch up to

 Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.''

 I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we'd said

 toodle-oo to each other in

 Blondie's, I'd found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the

 center of her forehead. Except it had been

 Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of

 flexible bullet to the brain.

 Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired- looking man in the hobo's

 pants, was responsible for

 everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting

 saner all the time.

 I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw

 somehow did not surprise me

 in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars,

 buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in

 their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could

 not be bothered with animating

 much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his

 own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky

 to still be breathing myself.

 ``So what happened?'' I asked. ``How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do

 you mind?''

 ``No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very good answer, though, because I don't

 exactly know. All I know for sure is

 that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically

 was, `Clyde Umney would never do

 this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out.' ''

 I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible

 ailment in the face--Vernon's

 cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son--I might make an

 exception, but take the pipe just

 because you were depressed? That was for pansies.

 ``Then I thought, `But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a

 figment of your imagination.' That

 idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world--politicians and lawyers,

 for the most part--who sneer at

 imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or

 feel it or fuck it. They think that way

 because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I

 knew better. Hell, I ought to-- my

 imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or

 so.

 ``At the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the

 real world,' by which I suppose we

 all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place

 left where I could go and feel

 welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here--Los

 Angeles, in 1930-something. And

 the person was you.''

 I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't

 turn around.

 Partly because I was afraid to.

 And partly because I no longer knew if I could.

 _______________________________________________________________________

 VI. Umney's Last Case.

 On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look

 at the woman on the corner, who

 was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a

 momentary length of beautiful

 leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy

 was holding out his battered old

 baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating

 six feet above the street like a ghost

 called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from

 Peoria Smith's overturned table.

 Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold,

 the recently deceased Cuban

 bandleader below it.

 Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.

 ``At first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward,

 thinking I was you, but that was all

 right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you

 see? And then, gradually, I began

 to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way

 I could actually . . . well . . . slip all

 the way in. And do you know what the key was?''

 ``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget

 revolved, and suddenly the

 newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two

 later an old DeSoto rolled

 jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the

 baseball glove, and both he and

 the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled

 halfway to the gutter, then froze solid

 again.

 ``You do?'' He sounded surprised.

 ``Yeah. Peoria was the key.''

 ``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.

 ``I keep forgetting that you're me.''

 It was a luxury I didn't have.

 ``I was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter

 One six different ways to Sunday

 before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.''

 That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!''

 ``I didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all

 along. I don't want to convene the lit

 class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the

 first person is a funny, tricky

 business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a

 series of letters or dispatches from

 some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this

 case I did. It was as if your little part

 of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--''

 ``I never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.

 ``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria

 Smith.''

 Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken,

 although the sky was cloudless. The

 Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment

 there was just a hole where it

 had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Déjeuner with a

 window full of ferns. I glanced up

 the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old

 ones with silent, spooky speed.

 They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something

 else, as well--there was probably

 not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and

 tells you He's decided he likes

 your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?

 ``I junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's

 death,'' Landry said. ``It was

 easy--poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it .

 . . can you guess, Clyde?''

 ``Sure,'' I said, and swung around. It took all my strength, but what I suppose this

 geek would call my ``motivation''

 was good. Sunset Strip isn't exactly the Champs Elysees or Hyde Park, but it's my

 world. I didn't want to watch him

 tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wanted it. ``I suppose you called it Umney's

 Last Case.''

 He looked faintly surprised. ``You suppose right.''

 I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I managed. ``I didn't win the Shamus of the

 Year Award in 1934 and '35 for

 nothing, you know.''

 He smiled at that. ``Yes. I always did like that line.''

 Suddenly I hated him--hated him like poison. If I could have summoned the strength to

 lunge across the desk and choke

 the life out of him, I would have done it. He saw it, too. The smile faded.

 ``Forget it, Clyde--you wouldn't have a chance.''

 ``Why don't you get out of here?'' I grated at him. ``Just get out and let a working

 stiff alone?''

 ``Because I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted to . . . and I don't.'' He looked at me

 with an odd mixture of anger and

 pleading. ``Try to look at it from my point of view, Clyde--''

 ``Do I have any choice? Have I ever?''

 He ignored that. ``Here's a world where I'll never get any older, a year where all the

 clocks are stopped at just about

 eighteen months before World War II, where the newspapers always cost three cents,

 where I can eat all the eggs and

 red meat I want and never have to worry about my cholesterol level.''

 ``I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.''

 He leaned forward earnestly. ``No, you don't! And that's exactly the point, Clyde!

 This is a world where I can really do

 the job I dreamed about doing when I was a little boy--I can be a private eye. I can

 go racketing around in a fast car at

 two in the morning, shoot it out with hoodlums--knowing they may die but I won't--and

 wake up eight hours later

 next to a beautiful chanteuse with the birds twittering in the trees and the sun

 shining in my bedroom window. That

 clear, beautiful California sun.''

 ``My bedroom window faces west,'' I said.

 ``Not anymore,'' he replied calmly, and I felt my hands curl into strengthless fists

 on the arms of my chair. ``Do you see

 how wonderful it is? How perfect? In this world, people don't go half-mad with itching

 caused by a stupid, undignified

 disease called shingles. In this world, people don't go gray, let alone bald.''

 He looked at me levelly, and in his gaze I saw no hope for me. No hope at all.

 ``In this world, beloved sons never die of AIDS and beloved wives never take overdoses

 of sleeping pills. Besides, you

 were always the outsider here, not me, no matter how it might have felt to you. This

 is my world, born in my

 imagination and maintained by my effort and ambition. I loaned it to you for awhile,

 that's all . . . and now I'm taking

 it back.''

 ``Finish telling me how you got in, will you do that much? I really want to hear.''

 ``It was easy. I tore it apart, starting with the Demmicks, who were never much more

 than a lousy imitation of Nick and

 Nora Charles, and rebuilt it in my own image. I took away all the beloved supporting

 characters, and now I'm removing

 all the old landmarks. I'm pulling the rug out from under you a strand at a time, in

 other words, and I'm not proud of it,

 but I am proud of the sustained effort of will it's taken to pull it off.''

 `What's happened to you back in your own world?'' I was still keeping him talking, but

 now it was nothing but habit,

 like an old milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy morning.

 He shrugged. ``Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really have left a physical self--a husk--

 sitting catatonic in some mental

 institution. I don't think either of those things is really the case, though--all of

 this feels too real. No, I think I made it

 all the way, Clyde. I think that back home they're looking for a missing writer . . .

 with no idea that he's disappeared

 into the storage banks of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't

 care.''

 ``And me? What happens to me?''

 ``Clyde,'' he said, ``I don't care about that, either.''

 He bent over his gadget again.

 ``Don't!'' I said sharply.

 He looked up.

 ``I . . .'' I heard the quiver in my voice, tried to control it, and found I couldn't.

 ``Mister, I'm afraid. Please leave me

 alone. I know it's not really my world out there anymore--hell, in here, either--but

 it's the only world I'll ever come

 close to knowing. Let me have what's left of it. Please.''

 ``Too late, Clyde.'' Again I heard that merciless regret in his voice. ``Close your

 eyes. I'll make it as fast as I can.''

 I tried to jump him--I tried as hard as I could. I didn't move so much as an iota. And

 as far as closing my eyes went, I

 discovered I didn't need to. All the light had gone out of the day, and the office was

 as dark as midnight in a coalsack.

 I sensed rather than saw him lean over the desk toward me. I tried to draw back and

 discovered I couldn't even do that.

 Something dry and rustly touched my hand and I screamed.

 ``Take it easy, Clyde.'' His voice, coming out of the darkness. Coming not just from

 in front of me but from

 everywhere. Of course, I thought. After all, I'm a figment of his imagination. ``It's

 only a check.''

 ``A . . . check?''

 ``Yes. For five thousand dollars. You've sold me the business. The painters will

 scratch your name off the door and

 paint mine on before they leave tonight.'' He sounded dreamy. ``Samuel D. Landry,

 Private Detective. It's got a great

 ring, doesn't it?''

 I tried to beg and found I couldn't. Now even my voice had failed me.

 ``Get ready,'' he said. ``I don't know exactly what's coming, Clyde, but it's coming

 now. I don't think it'll hurt.'' But I

 don't really care if it does--that was the part he didn't say.

 That faint whirring sound came out of the blackness. I felt my chair melt away beneath

 me, and suddenly I was falling.

 Landry's voice fell with me, reciting along with the clicks and taps of his fabulous

 futuristic steno machine, reciting the

 last two sentences of a novel called Umney's Last Case.

 `` `So I left town, and as to where I finished up . . . well, mister, I think that's

 my business. Don't you?' ''

 There was a brilliant green light below me. I was falling toward it. Soon it would

 consume me, and the only feeling I

 had was one of relief.

 `` `THE END,' '' Landry's voice boomed, and then I fell into the green light, it was

 shining through me, in me, and

 Clyde Umney was no more.

 So long, shamus.

 _______________________________________________________________________

 VII. The Other Side of the Light.

 All that was six months ago.

 I came to on the floor of a gloomy room with a humming in my ears, pushed myself to my

 knees, shook my head to

 clear it, and looked up into the bright green glare I'd fallen through, like Alice

 through the looking glass. I saw a Buck

 Rogers machine that was the big brother of the one Landry had brought into my office.

 Green letters shone on it and I

 pushed myself to my feet so I could read them, absently running my fingernails up and

 down over my lower arms as I

 did so:

 So I left town, and as to where I finished up . . . well, mister, I think that's my

 business. Don't you?

 And below that, capitalized and centered, two more words: THE END.

 I read it again, now running my fingers over my stomach. I was doing it because there

 was something wrong with my

 skin, something that wasn't exactly painful but was certainly bothersome. As soon as

 it rose to the fore in my mind, I

 realized that weird sensation was going on everywhere--the nape of my neck, the backs

 of my thighs, in my crotch.

 Shingles, I thought suddenly. I've got Landry's shingles. What I'm feeling is itching,

 and the reason I didn't recognize it

 right away is because--

 ``Because I've never had an itch before,'' I said, and then the rest of it clicked

 into place. The click was so sudden and so

 hard that I actually swayed on my feet. I walked slowly across to a mirror on the

 wall, trying not to scratch my weirdly

 crawling skin, knowing I was going to see an aged version of my face, a face cut with

 lines like old dry washes and

 topped with a shock of lackluster white hair.

 Now I knew what happened when writers somehow took over the lives of the characters

 they had created. It wasn't

 exactly theft after all.

 More of a swap.

 I stood staring into Landry's face--my face, only aged fifteen hard years--and felt my

 skin tingling and buzzing.

 Hadn't he said his shingles had been getting better? If this was better, how had he

 endured worse without going

 completely insane?

 I was in Landry's house, of course--my house, now--and in the bathroom off the study,

 I found the medication he took

 for his shingles. I took my first dose less than an hour after I came to on the floor

 below his desk and the humming

 machine on it, and it was as if I had swallowed his life instead of medicine.

 As if I'd swallowed his whole life.

 These days the shingles are a thing of the past, I'm happy to report. Maybe it just

 ran its course, but I like to think that

 the old Clyde Umney spirit had something to do with it--Clyde was never sick a day in

 his life, you know, and

 although I seem to always have the sniffles in this run-down Sam Landry body, I'll be

 damned if I'll give in to them . . .

 and since when did it hurt to turn on a little of that positive thinking? I think the

 correct answer to that one is ``since

 never.''

 There have been some pretty bad days, though, the first one coming less than twentyfour

 hours after I showed up in the

 unbelievable year of 1994. I was looking through Landry's fridge for something to eat

 (I'd pigged out on his Black

 Horse Ale the night before and felt it couldn't hurt my hangover to eat something)

 when a sudden pain knifed into my

 guts. I thought I was dying. It got worse, and I knew I was dying. I fell to the

 kitchen floor, trying not to scream. A

 moment or two later, something happened, and the pain eased.

 Most of my life I've been using the phrase ``I don't give a shit.'' All that has

 changed, starting that morning. I cleaned

 myself up, then climbed the stairs, knowing what I'd find in the bedroom: wet sheets

 in Landry's bed.

 My first week in Landry's world was spent mostly in toilet-training myself. In my

 world, of course, nobody ever went

 to the bathroom. Or to the dentist, for that matter, and my first trip to the one

 listed in Landry's Rolodex is something I

 don't even want to think about, let alone discuss.

 But there's been an occasional rose in this nest of brambles. For one thing, there's

 been no need to go job-hunting in

 Landry's confusing, jet-propelled world; his books apparently continue to sell very

 well, and I have no problem cashing

 the checks that come in the mail. My signature and his are, of course, identical. As

 for any moral compunctions I might

 have about doing that, don't make me laugh. Those checks are for stories about me.

 Landry only wrote them; I lived

 them. Hell, I deserved fifty thou and a rabies shot just for getting within scratching

 distance of Mavis Weld's claws.

 I expected to have problems with Landry's so-called friends, but I suppose a heavyduty

 shamus like me should have

 known better--would a guy with any real friends want to disappear into a world he'd

 created on the soundstage of his

 own imagination? Not likely. Landry's friends were his son and his wife, and they were

 dead. There are acquaintances

 and neighbors, but they seem to accept me as him. The woman across the street throws

 me puzzled glances from time to

 time, and her little girl cries when I come near even though I used to baby-sit for

 them every now and then (the woman

 says I did, anyway, and why would she lie?), but that's no big deal.

 I have even spoken to Landry's agent, a guy from New York named Verrill. He wants to

 know when I'm going to start a

 new book.

 Soon, I tell him. Soon.

 Mostly I stay in. I have no urge to explore the world Landry pushed me into when he

 pushed me out of my own; I see

 more than I want to on my once-weekly trip to the bank and the grocery store, and I

 threw a bookend through his awful

 television machine less than two hours after I figured out how to use it. It doesn't

 surprise me that Landry wanted to

 leave this groaning world with its freight of disease and senseless violence--a world

 where naked women dance in

 nightclub windows, and sex with them can kill you.

 No, I spend my time inside, mostly. I have re-read each of his novels, and each one is

 like leafing through the pages of a

 well-loved scrapbook. And I've taught myself to use his word-processing machine, of

 course. It's not like the

 television machine; the screen is similar, but on the word-processor, you can make

 whatever pictures you want to see,

 because they all come from inside your own head.

 I like that.

 I've been getting ready, you see--trying sentences and discarding them the way you try

 pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And

 this morning I wrote a few that seem right . . . or almost right. Want to hear? Okay,

 here goes:

 When I looked toward the door, I saw a very chastened, very downcast Peoria Smith

 standing there. ``I guess I treated

 you pretty bad the last time I saw you, Mr. Umney,'' he said. ``I came to say I'm

 sorry.'' It had been over six months,

 but he looked the same as ever. And I do mean the same.

 ``You're still wearing your cheaters,'' I said.

 ``Yeah. We tried the operation, but it didn't work.'' He sighed, then grinned and

 shrugged. In that moment he looked

 like the Peoria I'd always known. ``What the hey, Mr. Umney--bein blind ain't so

 bad.''

 It isn't perfect; sure, I know that. I started out as a detective, not a writer. But I

 believe you can do just about anything,

 if you want to bad enough, and when you get right down to where the cheese binds, this

 is a kind of keyhole-peeping,

 too. The size and shape of the word-processor keyhole are a little different, but it's

 still looking into other people's

 lives and then reporting back to the client on what you saw.

 I'm teaching myself for one very simple reason: I don't want to be here. You can call

 it L.A. in 1994 if you want to; I

 call it hell. It's awful frozen dinners you cook in a box called a ``microwave,'' it's

 sneakers that look like Frankenstein

 shoes, it's music that comes out of the radio sounding like crows being steamed alive

 in a pressure-cooker, it's--

 Well, it's everything.

 I want my life back, I want things the way they were, and I think I know how to make

 that happen.

 You're one sad, thieving bastard, Sam--may I still call you that?-- and I feel sorry

 for you . . . but sorry only stretches

 so far, because the operant word here is thieving. My original opinion on the subject

 hasn't changed at all, you see--I

 still don't believe that the ability to create conveys the right to steal.

 What are you doing right this minute, you thief? Eating dinner at that Petit Déjeuner

 restaurant you made up? Sleeping

 beside some gorgeous honey with perfect no-sag breasts and murder up the sleeve of her

 negligee? Driving down to

 Malibu with carefree abandon? Or just kicking back in the old office chair, enjoying

 your painless, odorless, shitless

 life? What are you doing?

 I've been teaching myself to write, that's what I've been doing, and now that I've

 found my way in, I think I'll get

 better in a hurry. Already I can almost see you.

 Tomorrow morning, Clyde and Peoria are going to go down to Blondie's, which has reopened

 for business. This time

 Peoria's going to take Clyde up on that breakfast offer. That will be step two.

 Yes, I can almost see you, Sam, and pretty soon I will. But I don't think you'll see

 me. Not until I step out from behind

 my office door and wrap my hands around your throat.

 This time nobody goes home.