Royce Mullins and The Case of Virtue's Burn, A Novel: Chapter 10

by Jeff Hart

Wayne Maker had inspired me. I’d calmed down, centered myself with an entirely improvised breathing exercise, and had choked back the overwhelming desire to flee New York. When the diner ceiling had collapsed above Paul Fennel and I, it’d been the second time in as many days that the sky had opened at the will of God and dumped trash at an uncomfortable proximity to my person. I’d argue that I had good reason to be a little shaken; that maybe my instincts were as blunted as Dot had warned, that I wasn’t up to juggling homicidal marines, ingratiating self-help gurus, and a variety of supernatural warnings that two days ago I would have brushed off, but that now seemed like existential bullets aimed at a soul I wouldn’t admit to having. I needed to keep it together. Fennel was right, I was the knot that inexplicably bound this case and so, after wandering only three blocks from where Wayne Maker had dropped me, I’d already sharpened the edges of a plan to cut myself loose.

Step one was to exploit some homeless.

I found my guys in Tompkins Square Park, rummaging through the Chinese garbage that clogged the dog run.

“How’d you gentlemen like to clear a quick twenty bucks?”

They looked at me with petulant skepticism. I realized I couldn’t have appeared much different from one of their own. It no doubt would have amused Claudette that I was now mistaken so easily for a vagrant. As one of the other life-affirming decisions I’d made in the afterglow of my meeting with Wayne Maker was to never return to the stale futon and pile of dirty clothes I’d once called an office and, more recently, my home, I suppose the bums’ assessment wasn’t that off the mark. I was, in point of fact, homeless.

But I still had a car, and I needed these filthy hobos to dig it free of the trash-drifts for me. I might’ve been in a state of dislocation, but I’d be damned if I’d be plunging into any more garbage piles. At least willingly.

I smoked a cigarette on the front steps of my building while my new hires freed my car of garbage, irresponsibly relocating it to a nearby fire hydrant. I didn’t comment on their methods or the begrudging slowness of their movements — it was the body language of the underpaid, and I knew it well.

I felt sentimental for the office upstairs, for the things I was leaving behind. But that place had been thoroughly corrupted by the recent incursion of marines and, long before that, the unexpected retreat of Claudette. It was long past time to get free.

A man without purpose is no man at all.

“I brought you this,” said Claudette, her arms clasped around a potted plant. “It doesn’t need much water. You should be able to handle it.”

I’d been smoking a cigarette, watching the foot traffic. I patted the step next to me and she sat, leaned against me.

“How long have you been sitting out here?”

“Not sure,” I replied. “Most of the day.”

“What’s the point?”

“Let the neighborhood know I’m open for business. Sort of like hanging a shingle.”

“People don’t hang shingles anymore, Royce. They go on the internet.”

“Not everybody. Not the people that’re looking for a guy like me.”

She studied my face and I pretended not to notice. Took a drag off my cigarette.

“You’re just content to let life pass you by,” she said, without malice. She wouldn’t always say it that way.

Five years later, the step next to me was empty. One of the bums waved his hand in my face.

“We’re finished,” he grumbled.

I paid him and headed down the street to Ahmet’s.

“You look worse than usual,” observed Ahmet, glancing up from the sports section as I entered his store.

“Thanks,” I grunted. “You mind?”

I trudged toward Ahmet’s office without waiting for a reply. For the time being Ahmet’s closet-sized back office would have to serve as the official nerve center of my palsied operation. It wouldn’t accommodate a futon, but at least it had a landline. Regardless, I wasn’t long for the Lower East Side.

Ahmet stopped me in the doorway.

“A weird kid dropped this off for you,” he said, handing me a key. “Forgive me for saying, but he seems a little delicate for you.”

“He say anything?”

“Yes,” said Ahmet, thinking. “He said he was sorry.”

I’d counted on Paul Fennel leaving me a way to track him down. The key belonged to a seedy motel room in Long Island City. I knew the place. It’d been a lucrative destination for me, the perfect spot to climax the many cheating spouse cases I’d worked over the years. So that’s where Fennel had been hiding out, communing with God on a mattress stained from any number of broken commandments.

“I don’t even want to know what you’re into,” said Ahmet.

“Nothing good,” I replied. “In fact, might be headed down a dangerous road and I’m packing a little light.”

Ahmet made a quick appraisal of my face and figured me for serious.

“Maybe I can help,” he said, and reached under the counter. “I keep this for protection.”

He handed me a dusty can of pepper spray. I laughed.

“This? You use this to ward off robbers?”

“Who would want to hurt Ahmet?” he shrugged, and then flashed me a pointed look. “I mind my business.”

I pocketed the spray and ducked into Ahmet’s office.

Last night, Yossarian had made it clear that my continued existence depended on my turning over Paul Fennel to him and his disquietingly silent partner Pilgrim. If I was going to free myself of this entanglement, it seemed like Yossarian’s string was the first in need of snipping. I called the cell phone number he’d shoved into my shirt pocket.

He answered on the first ring.

“Mr. Detective,” said Yossarian, his voice as smooth as bourbon cut with arsenic, “How does this fine morning find you?”

“Save it, hillbilly. I’m meeting with Paul tonight. You come scoop the kid up, and then we’re done.”

I gave him the address and hung up.

Outside, my car lurched into gear with a troubling cough. I was leaving the Lower East Side, maybe for good. The pain in my back had mellowed to an easily ignored ache. So this is what it felt like to be a man of action.

I drove toward higher ground.

Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.