father’s chastisements after each episode, but seems drawn ineluctably toward a life of flamboyant crime. The romance novels I have bought him appear to have had no effect at all.
She was flexing her toes in her black stockings as a bird of prey might. You wondered if she painted her toenails. Her toe-flexing caused her thighs to ripple faintly under the black skirt. If she lifts one knee, you thought, she’s going to have to fight you off. So, you and your brother are not getting on, and you think—
Oh no, on the contrary. We love each other very much—too much, some say, reflecting the oppressive misunderstandings that prevail in small communities such as ours—but that’s just the point. Just think, Mr. Noir. To be the perfect villain, one would have to try to kill that which he most loves, and it would be all the more villainous to accept money from others for doing so.
Others? A rhetorical question. You knew the plot here, at least as devised or imagined by the widow. What you really wanted to know was what she and her brother were up to to set off those oppressive misunderstandings.
I have reason to believe he has taken employment with that man whose name I have given you. The one you are supposed to be following. Have you any news?
Well, I had an eye on him just now, or someone like him, but he got away.
You must be more assiduous, she said, and that wave rolled under her hands once more. I am depending on you, Mr. Noir. My life is in your hands. She turned her head to look at them, the veil flattening over her cheek and dropping off her nose, and you looked at them: gnarled, calloused, muddied by the alley muck you’d been crawling through, the fingernails filthy, the knuckles made knobby by frequent breakage. You opened them up and stared into their palms. They looked like death to you. Maybe to her, too. She was no longer looking at them, her beak poking up at the ceilinged shadows as before. It was as if she had given up on them. In one of your most celebrated cases, all you had to work with was a severed hand. From the part you were able to deduce the whole and, indirectly, solve a crime. You were younger then and drinking less. You have implied that my father may have behaved improperly with me, she said at last, and, alas, that is true. My dear sweet mother had stopped baking pies and had slipped into some crippling addiction and spent the day cursing the deity. I had no one else to turn to, so I asked my brother to hide in the closet the next time my father visited and, if necessary, to come to my rescue. But instead, he only kept watching. After that, he was always in the closet. I thought that letting him do what father did would end this perverse behavior, but it was not the sight of me that excited him. It was father.
Outside the window, the buzzing neon light blinked eerily. Wheeling police car lights flickered on the ceiling like some kind of primitive motion picture machine showing a film whose images time had dissolved. You were trying to see there what the brother saw. And the lover? you asked. What happened to him? In the darkness, her hands had faded away. You felt like you were talking to a dark shadow on the dark couch. Hello? You were talking to a shadow. There being no objection, you lay down with it.
SLEEPING WITH SHADOWS. IF LIFE IS AT BEST A SHADOW play, with what or whom else do we ever sleep, in spite of the fleshy illusions of the moment? Such was the principal burden of the Case of the Severed Hand. The hand was waiting outside your office door one morning as if it had strolled there on its fingertips. Had it been left there as a warning? An appeal for help? Did you know its former owner? Severed body parts are commonplace in the workaday life of a private dick. You picked it up and carried it into your office and tossed it in the in-box.
At the time you were on well-paid assignment from a humorless crook-backed old hock shop owner and fence for stolen goods named Crabbe.
She was flexing her toes in her black stockings as a bird of prey might. You wondered if she painted her toenails. Her toe-flexing caused her thighs to ripple faintly under the black skirt. If she lifts one knee, you thought, she’s going to have to fight you off. So, you and your brother are not getting on, and you think—
Oh no, on the contrary. We love each other very much—too much, some say, reflecting the oppressive misunderstandings that prevail in small communities such as ours—but that’s just the point. Just think, Mr. Noir. To be the perfect villain, one would have to try to kill that which he most loves, and it would be all the more villainous to accept money from others for doing so.
Others? A rhetorical question. You knew the plot here, at least as devised or imagined by the widow. What you really wanted to know was what she and her brother were up to to set off those oppressive misunderstandings.
I have reason to believe he has taken employment with that man whose name I have given you. The one you are supposed to be following. Have you any news?
Well, I had an eye on him just now, or someone like him, but he got away.
You must be more assiduous, she said, and that wave rolled under her hands once more. I am depending on you, Mr. Noir. My life is in your hands. She turned her head to look at them, the veil flattening over her cheek and dropping off her nose, and you looked at them: gnarled, calloused, muddied by the alley muck you’d been crawling through, the fingernails filthy, the knuckles made knobby by frequent breakage. You opened them up and stared into their palms. They looked like death to you. Maybe to her, too. She was no longer looking at them, her beak poking up at the ceilinged shadows as before. It was as if she had given up on them. In one of your most celebrated cases, all you had to work with was a severed hand. From the part you were able to deduce the whole and, indirectly, solve a crime. You were younger then and drinking less. You have implied that my father may have behaved improperly with me, she said at last, and, alas, that is true. My dear sweet mother had stopped baking pies and had slipped into some crippling addiction and spent the day cursing the deity. I had no one else to turn to, so I asked my brother to hide in the closet the next time my father visited and, if necessary, to come to my rescue. But instead, he only kept watching. After that, he was always in the closet. I thought that letting him do what father did would end this perverse behavior, but it was not the sight of me that excited him. It was father.
Outside the window, the buzzing neon light blinked eerily. Wheeling police car lights flickered on the ceiling like some kind of primitive motion picture machine showing a film whose images time had dissolved. You were trying to see there what the brother saw. And the lover? you asked. What happened to him? In the darkness, her hands had faded away. You felt like you were talking to a dark shadow on the dark couch. Hello? You were talking to a shadow. There being no objection, you lay down with it.
SLEEPING WITH SHADOWS. IF LIFE IS AT BEST A SHADOW play, with what or whom else do we ever sleep, in spite of the fleshy illusions of the moment? Such was the principal burden of the Case of the Severed Hand. The hand was waiting outside your office door one morning as if it had strolled there on its fingertips. Had it been left there as a warning? An appeal for help? Did you know its former owner? Severed body parts are commonplace in the workaday life of a private dick. You picked it up and carried it into your office and tossed it in the in-box.
At the time you were on well-paid assignment from a humorless crook-backed old hock shop owner and fence for stolen goods named Crabbe.
Similar Books
