Dead Man's Hand Read online

  “If not,” Joe said, with a wide pink smile, “I can always wait till the captain returns the originals, and xerox another set.” He busied himself with some filing, but when Jay opened the door to leave, he called out quietly, “Popinjay.”

  Jay looked back. “What?”

  “Find the bastard,” Joe Mo said. He took off his tinted specs, and his pale pink eyes implored. “All of us will help,” he promised, and Jay knew he wasn’t talking about the police.

  As he drove down Route 17, alone, Brennan was already missing Jennifer. He couldn’t blame her for not accompanying him on a quest to find Chrysalis’s murderer. And it didn’t help any that she’d been right. They had a quiet, beautiful life. Why was he so ready to return to the death waiting him in the city?

  It wasn’t, Brennan knew, because he enjoyed the killing and the violence. He’d rather build a garden than dodge bullets in a stinking, garbage-choked alley. It all came down to what Jennifer had said about letting things go. He just couldn’t get Chrysalis out of his mind. He didn’t think of her often. He was too satisfied with his life with Jennifer to dwell morbidly on what might have been with another woman.

  But sometimes at night he’d lie awake with Jennifer asleep beside him and remember the crystal lady. He’d remember her invisible flesh flushed to a delicate pink with the passion of their lovemaking, he’d remember her cries and moves in the dark. He’d remember and wonder what it would’ve been like if she’d accepted his offer of protection and love. He would look at Jennifer asleep at his side and know that he was happy and content, but he would still wonder. The memory of her was a throbbing ache that wouldn’t leave him alone.

  He buried the van in the Tomlin International parking lot and caught a taxi to Manhattan, where he took a room in a cheap but dirty hotel on the fringe of Jokertown. The first thing to do, he decided, was visit the Crystal Palace. He slipped on his mask for the first time in over a year and left the hotel carrying his bow case.

  3:00 P.M.

  ACE-OF-SPADES KILLER SLAYS JOKERTOWN BARKEEP, the Post screamed.

  The Jokertown Cry was less generic. CHRYSALIS MURDERED, it said beside a two-column picture. The Cry was the only paper in the city that regularly ran photographs of jokers.

  JOKERS DESCEND ON ATLANTA AS DEMOCRATS CONVENE, said the front page of the Times. Thousands of them had headed south in support of Senator Gregg Hartmann, the presidential frontrunner. But in this year’s crowded Democratic field, nobody was even close to a majority, and a brokered convention was being predicted. There were widespread fears of violence should Hartmann be denied the nomination. Already there were reports of ugly clashes between Hartmann’s jokers and the fundamentalist supporters of Reverend Leo Barnett.

  Jay usually ranked politicians right alongside used-car salesmen, pimps, and the guy who invented pay toilets, but Hartmann did seem to be a breed apart. He’d met the candidate a few times at the fundraisers Hiram had hosted at Aces High. Hiram was a big Hartmann supporter, and Jay never could resist the lure of free food and drink. Senator Gregg seemed intelligent, effective, and compassionate. If somebody had to be president, it might as well be him. He probably didn’t stand a joker’s chance of getting anywhere near the nomination.

  The political bullshit took up the whole front page; he couldn’t find any mention of Chrysalis anywhere. Knowing the Times, Jay figured tomorrow’s edition would have a brief obit and that’d be it. Brutal joker murders weren’t the kind of news that’s fit to print. That made Jay angriest of all.

  “How do you know when a joker’s been dead about three days?” the news vendor asked him. His voice was flat and lifeless, the voice of a man grimly going through a ritual that had lost its meaning. Jay looked up from the headlines.

  Jube Benson had been a fixture on the corners of Hester Street and the Bowery for as long as there had been a Jokertown. Walrus, they called him. He was a joker himself, three hundred pounds of greasy blue-black flesh, big curved tusks at the corners of his mouth, a broad domed skull covered with tufts of stiff red hair. Jube’s wardrobe seemed to consist exclusively of Hawaiian shirts. This afternoon he was wearing a magenta item in a tasteful pineapple-and-banana print. Jay wondered what Hiram would say.

  Jube knew more joker jokes than anyone else in Jokertown, but this time Jay had the punch line. “He smells a lot better,” he said wearily. “That one’s older than your hat, Walrus.”

  Jube took the battered porkpie hat off his head and turned it over self-consciously in his thick, three-fingered hands. “I never made her laugh,” he said. “All those years, I came by the Palace every night, always with a new joke. I never got a single laugh out of her.”

  “She didn’t think being a joker was very funny,” said Jay.

  “You got to laugh,” Jube said. “What else is there?” He put his hat back on. “I hear you were the one that found her.”

  “Word gets around quick,” Jay said.

  “It gets around quick,” Jube agreed.

  “She phoned me last night,” Jay told him. “She wanted to take me on as a bodyguard. I asked her how long and she couldn’t tell me. Maybe she wouldn’t tell me. I asked her what she was scared of. She laughed it off and said I’d found her out, it was just a ruse, she was really hot for my body. That was when I realized how shaky she was. She was trying her damnedest to sound wry and cool and British, like nothing was wrong, but her accent kept slipping. Something had frightened her badly. I want to know what, Jube.”

  “All I know is what I read in the papers,” Jube said.

  Jay just gave him a look. As long as Chrysalis had been brokering information, the Walrus had been one of her chief snitches. All day long Jube stood in his kiosk, watching and listening, joking and gossiping with everyone who stopped to buy a paper. “C’mon,” Jay said impatiently.

  Jube glanced nervously up and down the street. No one was near them. “Not here,” the fat joker said. “Let me close up. We’ll go to my place.”

  Brennan watched with wry amusement as the armless joker pickpocket worked the gawkers who had gathered around the Crystal Palace. The dipper was dressed in threadbare, but carefully patched clothes. His pants were specially tailored to fit his third, centrally located leg that ended in an oddly configured foot whose toes were more dexterous than most people’s fingers. He was using this limb to pick the pockets of his unsuspecting victims.

  A bright yellow crime-scene ribbon roped off the Palace’s canopied entrance. The crowd gathered before it was gossiping—mostly wildly and inaccurately—about the Crystal Palace and its mysterious proprietress. Newsies and street merchants were working the crowd along with the pickpocket, who suddenly turned with the sixth sense of the often-hunted and looked right at Brennan.

  Brennan nodded back and the three-legged joker cut through the crowd and headed toward him, lurching in a peculiar rocking gait, sometimes placing his third “foot” on the ground to balance himself.

  “Hello, Mr. Y,” he murmured.

  Brennan nodded again. The joker’s name was Tripod. He was a hustler, a small-time grifter who lived on the edge of the law. During Brennan’s last stay in the city he’d been one of his best sources of information. He was dependable for a snitch. He didn’t have a drug habit and he was loyal. When he was bought, he stayed bought.

  “Pretty awful, what happened, Mr. Y,” he offered in his quiet, deferential manner. If he wondered about Brennan’s sudden reappearance after a year’s absence, he said nothing.

  Brennan nodded. “You hear the police think I killed her?”

  Tripod shrugged. It was a peculiar gesture for a man who had no arms.

  “Maybe, Mr. Y, but it wasn’t done in your style.”

  “How do you know how she was killed?”

  “Man over there,” Tripod said, gesturing at a derelict who sat on the curb by a hotdog cart, “said he saw her body when they brung her out to the coroner’s wagon.”

  Brennan glanced at the cart. SAUERKRAUT SAM THE HOTDOG MAN was lett
ered on its side. It was manned by a joker who was continuously dispensing dogs, making change, and slapping mustard, catsup, sauerkraut, and relish on waiting buns with his extra sets of arms. The derelict sitting on the curb was bloated and alcoholic, but seemed to be a nat. He’d stationed himself next to the cart to cadge coins while endlessly repeating his story to all who would listen. Brennan nodded at Tripod and they joined the gawkers who were munching hot dogs and listening to the old man.

  “I was in the back when they brung her out. I was there all right. I got a nice place to sleep right by the dumpster and the ambulance woke me up. I was scared. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about, but pretty soon they brung her out. I could see it was Chrysalis. I seen her a lot of times and it was her. She was dead, all right.” He lowered his voice and leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially to his two dozen or so listeners. “Her head was squashed. Just squashed. If it weren’t for her invisible skin, you couldn’t tell who it was. Squashed, just like a watermelon dropped from a ten-story building.” He nodded with some satisfaction at his simile. “I was there all right. I saw her when they brung her out.…”

  Brennan, impotent anger knotting his stomach, turned away from the cart as a cop came up and hassled the vendor about his license. Sauerkraut Sam complained in a loud voice with angry gesticulations of all his arms, but it didn’t seem to get him anywhere.

  Brennan and Tripod stood silently for a moment, watching the cop run off the hotdog vendor, who was wheeling his cart with four arms and still angrily gesturing with the others.

  Chrysalis had been killed by someone—an ace—strong enough to smash her utterly. That was at least a place to start an investigation. But Brennan knew he could use more information. A lot more information.

  “You seen Elmo or Sascha around?” Brennan asked Tripod, after the crowd that’d been munching hot dogs and listening to the derelict had dispersed.

  The joker shook his head. “They’re gone, Mr. Y. Ain’t seen ’em, ain’t heard of ’em all day.”

  Brennan sighed to himself. He knew, right away, that this was not going to be easy. He took two twenties out of his pocket and surreptitiously dropped them on the sidewalk. Tripod’s bare foot closed over them. His nimble toes picked them up and stuffed them in one of the pockets he’d sewn on the bottom of his pant leg.

  “Keep an eye out for them. For anything about the killing. You can get in touch with me at the Victoria. I’m registered as Archer.”

  “Yessir.” Tripod watched Brennan for a moment. “Good to see you again, Mr. Y.”

  “I wish I could say it was good to be back.”

  Tripod nodded once, then started down the street with his peculiar lurching gait. Brennan watched him go, then turned back to the Palace. The crowd of gawkers was still there. He wanted to get a good look at the crime scene, but now obviously wasn’t the time for that. He’d come back when it was quiet and dark.

  Now he had other avenues to explore. He wasn’t convinced that Kien was actually behind Chrysalis’s death, but it was as good a place as any to start his investigation. Kien, of course, wouldn’t have done the killing himself, but the Shadow Fists had plenty of hired muscle capable of doing the job. Wyrm, for example, Kien’s extraordinarily strong bodyguard, whom Brennan had witnessed threaten Chrysalis two Wild Card Days ago.

  Of course, he’d been out of touch a long time. Things had probably changed, but there were people he could talk to, people who would be willing to pass on the latest information. Brennan hefted his bow case and started down the street.

  The hunter had returned to the city.

  4:00 P.M.

  Jube lived in the basement of a rooming house on Eldridge, in an apartment with bare brick walls and a lingering odor of rotting meat. His living room featured a lot of second-hand furniture and some kind of weird modern sculpture, an imposing floor-to-ceiling construct with angles out of Escher and a bowling ball at its center. Every now and then the bowling ball seemed to glow.

  “I call it Joker Lust,” Jube told him. “You think that’s strange looking, you ought to meet the girl who modeled for it. Don’t look too long, it’ll give you a headache. Want a drink?”

  St. Elmo’s fire flickered disturbingly across the surface of the construct. Jay sat down on the edge of the couch. “I’ll take a scotch and soda,” he said. “Go easy on the soda.”

  “All I’ve got is rum,” Jube said, waddling into his kitchen.

  “Yum,” Jay said, deadpan. “Sure.”

  Jube brought him a water tumbler half-full of dark rum, with a single ice cube floating on the surface. “The papers say it was the ace-of-spades killer,” he said as he eased his bulk into a recliner, his own glass of rum in hand. His was decorated with a little paper parasol. “The Post and the Cry both.”

  “There was an ace of spades next to the body,” Jay agreed, sipping his drink. “The cops don’t buy it.”

  “How about you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He’d spent the last couple of hours reading the police file on the yahoo who signed himself “Yeoman.” Now he wasn’t sure what to think. “The M.O. is all wrong. Our friend likes to litter the landscape with corpses, but most of them have arrows sticking out of sensitive parts of their anatomy.”

  “I remember the papers used to call him the bow-and-arrow killer, too,” Jube said.

  Jay nodded. “Not that he isn’t flexible. If he can’t put a razor-tipped broadhead through your eye, he’ll strangle you with a bowstring or use an arrow with an explosive tip to blow you to hell. The cops have him down for one job with a knife and two with bare hands, but those have question marks next to them. Mostly he goes in for theme murders. He’s got a real grudge against Orientals, too, judging from the number he’s offed. But he’s not fussy, he’ll kill anyone in a pinch.” Jay sighed. “The only problem is, Chrysalis was beaten to death by someone who was inhumanly strong, and our friend with the playing-card fetish is a nat.”

  “How can you be sure?” Jube asked.

  “I took a crack at archery once,” Jay said. “It’s hard. You’d need to work at it for years to get good, and this psycho is a lot better than good. Why bother, if you’re an ace?”

  Jube plucked thoughtfully at one of his tusks. “Yeah,” he said, “only…” The fat little joker hesitated.

  “What?” Jay prompted.

  “Well,” Jube said reluctantly, “I think maybe Chrysalis was frightened of the guy.”

  “Tell me,” Jay said.

  “The last ace-of-spades murder was something like a year ago,” Jube said. “Then they just stopped. It was about the same time that Chrysalis changed. I’m sure of it.”

  “Changed how?” Jay asked.

  “It’s hard to explain. She tried to act the same, but if you saw her every night like I did, you could see she wasn’t. She was too … too interested, if you know what I mean. Before, when you came to her with some information to sell, she always acted a little bored, like she didn’t care one way or the other, but this last year, it was like she didn’t want to miss any little piece of information, no matter how trivial. And she was especially desperate for any kind of word on Yeoman. She offered to pay extra.”

  “Shit,” Jay said. This put him back at square one.

  “You couldn’t exactly tell if she was frightened, not with Chrysalis,” Jube said. “You know how she was. She always had to be in control. But Digger was jumpy enough for both of them.”

  “Digger?” Jay asked.

  “Thomas Downs,” Jube said. “That reporter from Aces magazine. Everyone calls him Digger. He’s been hanging around the Crystal Palace ever since he and Chrysalis came back from that round-the-world tour last year. Two, three nights a week. He’d come in, she’d see him, and they’d go upstairs.”

  “Was he getting any?” Jay asked.

  “He stayed past closing all the time,” Jube said. “Maybe Elmo or Sascha could tell you if he was still there in the morning.” He scratched at one of the stiff
red bristles on the side of his head. “Elmo, anyway.”

  That comment struck Jay as odd. “Why not Sascha? He’s the telepath. He’d know who she was fucking if anyone would.”

  “Sascha wasn’t spending as much time around the Palace as he used to. He’s been seeing this woman. A Haitian, I hear, lives down by the East River. Word is she’s some kind of hooker. One of the roomers here, Reginald, works night security at a warehouse near there. He says Sascha comes and goes a lot. Sometimes he doesn’t leave until dawn.”

  “Not good,” Jay said. He was starting to get an inkling of why Chrysalis thought she needed a bodyguard. Sascha had never been a major-league telepath, only a skimmer plucking random thoughts off the surface of a mind, but for years his abilities had sufficed to give Chrysalis early warning of any approaching trouble. But if Sascha had been spending a lot of nights out …

  “There’s something else,” Jube said. Thick blue-black fingers worried at a tusk again. “About ten, eleven months ago, Chrysalis had a whole new security system installed. Cost a fortune, all state-of-the-art-stuff. I know a man who works for the company that did the work. According to what I heard, Chrysalis wanted them to design—now get this—some kind of defense to kill anybody who tried to walk through her walls!”

  Jay picked up the glass. The ice cube had melted. He didn’t like the taste of rum anyway. He drained the glass in one long swallow, feeling more and more angry with himself.

  Yeoman had come in through the front door, that night at the Crystal Palace. None of them heard him enter, but when they looked up he was there. But his girlfriend, the sexy little blond bimbo in the black string bikini … she came in through a wall, stepping out of the mirror behind the bar, and ducking out the same way after Jay sent Yeoman off to play in traffic.

  “What’s wrong?” Jube asked.

  “Nothing but my goddamned instincts,” Jay said bitterly. “Did they build her the trap she wanted?”