The Night Mayor Read online

  The two winos had been shocked awake by the infernal music, and scurried away from the statue.

  ‘Hey, lady,’ said one rummy, Walter Brennan, ‘wuz you ever stung by a dead bee?’

  They kept running, and were gone before Susan had a chance to figure out what that meant and whether she should answer it. The statue kept playing. The ground of the park rippled as if disturbed by colossal, underground moles. Gophers, rather: moles would be gophers here. Susan felt the power in the earth shaking up through her body.

  Out on the bay, something enormous broke the surface. Miniature tidal waves swept up against the waterfront, tearing piers and jetties away, spilling over into the maze of streets, driving a human exodus before them. Susan dipped into her new toy, seeing the City spread out like a model in front of its water-washed eyes. She roared her delight, and clapped house-sized hands in the air above her scaled head. She lashed out with her tail, overturning ships, smashing down a lighthouse. Waves surged around her gargantuan thighs as she waded towards the shore.

  Back as Susan, she heard her own voice, distorted by its passage through the cavernous reptile throat, shouting out in defiance. The ground still shook in time with the footsteps of the great beast. Whole sections of the City were trampled flat, buildings going down like balsa wood. Streets buckled, cars flew through the air like nursery toys, and matchstick model pylons flew apart.

  Susan held her hands up in the air, and felt those other, claw-tipped hands tearing down Daine’s Dream. Cuts and weals appeared where her surrogate hurt itself in its destructive frenzy, but she smoothed them away with a flick of her mind. People ran through the square, screaming in Japanese. A rag-tag convoy in half-tracks and armoured cars passed by City Hall, their outriders churning up the flower beds. No one bothered Susan. She saw Charlton Heston standing up in a jeep, dressed as a desert general, his shirt open to the waist, binoculars hanging against his hairy chest. He signed his troops to move out. Artillery batteries opened up.

  The army couldn’t stop it. A tank hurled across the square, just missing the still-fiddling statue, and crunched into the side of the MGM Building. It lodged in the shattered brickwork as a million windows fell in tinkling shards to the sidewalk. The truck-sized stone Ars Gratia Artis lion on the roof mewled and leaped for a safer perch. Gunfire sounded like Chinese fireworks, and the great beast shrugged off the hurt as if it had been inconvenienced by gnats.

  A squadron of biplanes flew low over the City, machine guns chattering. The Dawn Patrol was early. Susan heard them being knocked out of the skies. A bipedal beagle tall as a child, with a flying helmet and goggles, climbed out of a wrecked Sopwith Camel and brushed himself off, barking in pain. So much for Biggles and the Red Baron. The air force couldn’t stop it either.

  Then Susan’s monster was in the square, towering above Daine’s statue. She had seen a lot of Japanese kaiju eiga flatties as a child thanks to a quirk of her father’s, and had now been able to draw on her memories of them. For her creation she had combined Godzilla the King of Monsters, Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, Gappa the Triphibian Monster, Guilala the X from Outer Space, Gamera the Giant Flying Turtle and Hedorah the Smog Monster. The enormous hybrid flexed its non-functional wings, breathed atomic fire down on the City, and thumped the ground with its 500-foot tail. Daine’s statue shook but didn’t miss a note.

  Susan shut her eyes and saw through her monster’s. The tiny black fiddler irritated her with his scratchy, wasplike buzzing. She raised a flipper-clawed foot, and a shadow the size of a meltdown scar fell over the busy-armed figure. Susan felt something pull her tail, and was rudely dislodged from the creature. As if slapped across the face, she opened her eyes and looked up as her monster was tugged off its feet by invisible forces. She saw it struggling against a mighty wind, but unable to smite anything tangible within its reach. Its tail dangled useless, like the broken arm of a bendy rubber doll. The monster was sucked upwards. Increasing distance made it shrink as it rose, until at an unimaginable height it was not larger to her eye than a small bird. Then, tiny in the sky, it burst into a black cloud and was gone.

  Susan rubbed her smarting eyes. All was quiet now, except for the gentle rain and Daine’s music. The square was undisturbed. The MGM windows were smoothly unbroken, the lion still vigilant on the roof. The grass was level, the flower beds in order. She could see no wrecked cars, planes, military vehicles. The trill sawed to a finish, and even the echo of the notes faded. The statue was unmoving again.

  ‘What do you want to call that, Daine? A draw? Too easy. This is Susan Bishopric here. I’ve won one Rodney, and I’ll have a shitload more this autumn. 1 can Dream rings around you, and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’

  One of the statue’s black marble eyes winked at her.

  18

  I felt as if an earthquake had just hit the City. They had me in the holding cells at headquarters. Edward G. Robinson was blubbing a confession in the next cage, and George Raft was hollering for his lawyer in the one beyond that. I sat on my cot, playing cat’s cradle with handcuffs, and kept quiet. The whole building shook, and someone was running the sound-effects tracks from All Quiet on the Western Front and Hell’s Angels very loud out in the street. I asked a passing cop what was going on, but he just double-took on me and snarled, ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ Some drunk downstairs was yelling about monsters, and I figured Orson Welles had pulled another Men from Mars gag. Only this time, he had put a lot more into the production values. A lump of the ceiling fell down. Then, suddenly, everything was quiet again and you could hear the dust settling. Only then did the cops bother to send anyone up to check to see if we were okay. Sergeant Allen Jenkins was disappointed that none of us had been pancaked under rubble, but quickly learned to live with it.

  ‘You,’ he said to me, ‘Quick. They want you in Interrogation.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I’ll come quietly.’

  He rattled a huge ring of keys and let me out of the cell.

  ‘So long, fellas,’ I said to Eddie and George. ‘See you in the movies.’

  Jenkins took my arms and helped me up several flights of stairs, like a Boy Scout assisting an old lady. Headquarters was a mess. Nurses were going around putting white bandages on bruised heads, and painting iodine on open wounds. We passed the press room. The door had been knocked off its hinges. Inside I saw Joseph Cotten on the phone, rattling off some scare story about the Monster that Ate the City. He tucked the phone between chin and shoulder and gave me a friendly salute, but didn’t pause in his recitation of copy. I’d have waved back, but I still had the manacles on.

  ‘Quiet night, huh?’ I remarked. Jenkins didn’t say anything.

  Interrogation was a quiet room at the top of the building. A room with no windows and thick walls. Once the door was shut, they could have had a dance band going full blast and you’d never know it in the next room. I suppose cops get squeamish whenever they hear screams and thumps.

  ‘Hold out your hands,’ said the sergeant. Obligingly, I did, and he fiddled with the lock. The bracelets came off, and I massaged my wrists.

  ‘No funny business now, you hear.’

  ‘As if I would…’

  He prodded me through the door. The room was dark.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Jenkins shoved me into a chair, then twisted a desklamp until it shone in my face. That much was traditional. I took off my jacket and rolled up my shirtsleeves. I’d have loosened my tie, but they had taken it away along with my wallet, gun, belt and shoelaces. I wondered how easy it would be to hang yourself with your shoelaces.

  Jenkins stepped out, and two shadows moved behind the light. I remembered Captain of Detectives Barton MacLane from the Noir et Blanc. According to the papers, he hadn’t been very complimentary about me recently. The other man was Detective Ralph Bellamy, who had a reputation as a straight cop. I hoped he had earned it. MacLane hadn’t shaved in a week and listed ‘sweating’ as his hobby in Who’s Who; Bellamy radiated open-faced fri
endliness and ever so slightly dumb honesty. Nasty cop, nice cop: they were following procedure to the letter.

  MacLane lit up a cigarette and breathed smoke into the funnel of light. He offered the pack to Bellamy, who accepted one, and conspicuously failed to give me the chance to take the easy way out by tarring the inside of my lungs until I choked. That would have been quicker than shoelaces, I was sure. I drummed my fingers on the desktop. I wasn’t Gene Krupa, but I got a fair beat going before MacLane rapped my knuckles.

  ‘Can it, gumshoe.’

  ‘Gumshoe’. That comes a close second after ‘shamus’ as my least favourite euphemism. What’s so difficult to say about ‘private investigator’ or ‘Mr Quick’ or even ‘pal’, ‘buddy’ or ‘sir’?

  My hand hurt. MacLane slapped his open palm lightly with a leaded length of rubber hosepipe. Bellamy gave him a disapproving look, but he ignored it.

  ‘Okay, gumshoe, let’s get this straight…’

  ‘If you’re straight, we’ll treat you straight,’ said Bellamy.

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. ‘You mugs wouldn’t know how to treat me straight if I were a twelve-inch ruler.’

  ‘A comedian!’ MacLane did something else with his toy. ‘I love comedians.’

  Then they brought in a couple of supporting interrogators and gave me the third degree. They were good. I sweated in the spotlight and tried not to tell them anything. They prowled beyond the light like caged beasts, filling the tiny room with cop stink, barking out a bunch of unconnected questions. I think they brought in some ex-Gestapo ‘ve haff vays of makink you talk’ thug to substitute on some of the pitches. The rubber hose didn’t actually get used, but it was waved around a lot. The cops worked shifts, but I was booked in for the run. The cops got coffee and cigarettes and sandwiches, but I had to make do with inhaling their used smoke. Ashtrays got full, and paper cups got drafted. There’s no smell quite like burning butts in coffee dregs. It was two thirty in the morning, and I hadn’t slept in days. I could barely remember what a bed looked like.

  This team could have persuaded the Pope to confess that Judas Iscariot had been framed by George Washington, and that Jesus H. Christ had let Huey, Dewey and Louie take the rap for the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. If they had worked on me enough, I’d have blown the whistle on myself for the Lindbergh kidnapping, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Cleveland Torso slayings, betraying West Point to the British, fixing the 1919 World Series and souring all the milk in Salem, Massachusetts. But I had decided that I wasn’t going to wear the arrow suit for Truro Daine.

  When Daine bought the farm, he left a big hole in the City. And MacLane wanted to wallpaper me for the job.

  I knew what that meant. The Big House: tear-gas clouds, blossoming over mess-hall riots, ‘the break is set for midnight’ notes, squealers ‘accidentally’ falling under trip-hammers in the workshop. Brutal guards and trusties breaking down the fresh fish. Shivs in the showers. Kids talking to pictures of Rita Hayworth and Ann Sheridan. I would be on Death Row, bar shadows permanently tigerstriping my face. An uplifting visit from Pat O’Brien in a dog collar. Then a long walk to the little room. The last-minute rumour of a pardon from the governor that doesn’t come through. A chair with lots of wires and straps. The big juice lever. And lights flickering all over the prison. Would I be tough and wise-cracking at the end, or would they have to drag me screaming through the last door like a jelly-livered rat?

  ‘Where d’ya get the gun, gumshoe? Why d’ya hate Daine so much? What d’he ever do to ya? Who put ya up to it? How far back did you an’ Daine go? D’ya ever work for Muni? How much d’ya get from the wall safe? Where’s ya gun? Not the one we took off ya, the one ya used on the big guy?’

  Questions, questions, questions. How did you kill him, when did you kill him, where did you kill him, with what did you kill him, why did you kill him? It was easy to see what their basic assumption was.

  I would have done it if I had had the chance, but somebody got there first. I had to admit that the frame was a good fit. It was one of those not very funny ironies I should have learned to accept by now. Fate: you can’t go straight, nobody ever really crashes out, they made me a criminal, nobody lives for ever…

  ‘MacLane, I give up,’ I croaked. ‘Tell me how I did it.’

  ‘Ahh.’ The cop leaned into the light, his face shadowed into a fright mask. ‘Some cooperation at last.’

  ‘I don’t like it, captain,’ said good old reliable Ralph Bellamy.

  ‘Shaddup! If he wants to confess, let him. We’re here to serve the public.’

  MacLane didn’t like private detectives, I gathered. He must be for ever two steps behind them on complicated murder cases. The Inquirer was always running PRIVATE EYE BUSTS CASE THAT BAFFLED COPS headlines. That made him look like an idiot. He was good at that. His idiot disguise was a lulu. It would have taken first prize at the Policeman’s Ball.

  ‘But we know Quick, captain,’ said Bellamy. ‘He’s not a killer.’

  ‘Well said, that man,’ I put in.

  ‘You’re breakin’ my heart, Bellamy. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. But the heat is on. The big heat. The Inquirer dumps on Mayor Donlevy, Donlevy dumps on Commissioner Hamilton, and Hamilton dumps on me. The commissioner wants a conviction yesterday.’

  Bellamy was insistent. ‘I won’t see an innocent man get the chair.’

  ‘Then go fishing that weekend.’ MacLane turned to me. ‘Gumshoe, you’ll sign this confession?’

  ‘Do I get a lawyer?’

  ‘After you sign.’

  ‘I’ll want Raymond Burr.’

  ‘Okay, all right already.’

  ‘Do you have a pen?’

  ‘Sure.’ He reached for his top pocket.

  ‘Well, send someone else there.’

  MacLane rasped a long, annoyed sigh. He loosened his tie and looked lovingly at his hosepipe. ‘Bellamy, I don’t suppose you’d care to step out and get some more coffee?’ The honest cop shook his head, and I thanked God for typecasting. ‘I thought not. Looks like it’s gonna be a long night. Where’s the gumshoe’s statement?’

  A piece of very grubby paper was produced. ‘We’ll go through Quick’s submission to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction one more time.’

  Several cops groaned. I would have been smug, but my ‘pen’ gag hadn’t got any laughs. I had to be near the edge to use material like that. Bellamy drew a cup of water from the cooler and sprinkled his forehead.

  ‘Like I said –’ I went into my story – ‘I was supplementing my meagre twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses by working nights for the Fuller Brush Company. I figured a man like Truro Daine, who is well known for being up to his knees in dirt year in year out, would have a lot of use for their product, and decided to call on him to give a heavy pitch for the latest range of fine-bristled superswift specials. I went up to his suite at the Monogram and was just opening my sample case when, imagine my surprise…’

  A telephone jangled. MacLane scooped the receiver up and grunted into it. He wasn’t happy. Life is full of tragedies like that.

  ‘You got lucky, gumshoe. This time. Turn him loose, boys.’

  ‘You mean I’m not a desperate killer after all?’

  ‘You make me sick. If this didn’t come all the way from the top, I’d have you walk under a squad car on the way out of the building. It happens all the time. Out there is a whole world full of garbage and it gives me ulcers to throw one more shred of scum back on the heap.’

  ‘I love you too, captain.’

  Bellamy restrained his superior. When the captain had calmed down, Bellamy handed me my wallet, belt, tie, gun and shoelaces. I distributed them properly about my person, and put on my hat. I was helped down to street level and pushed out.

  It was still raining.

  19

  In the square, Susan considered her next move. She walked across the grass, superstitiously avoiding Daine’s shadow. The giant fiddler was just a statue now.
Truro Daine had been inside it briefly but was gone now, to some other similie. She wasn’t tired; indeed, she felt the stronger for her Frankensteinian exploits. Creating life was always exciting. And there was only her mind to wear out in this Dream. She performed a few minor alterations on her body to make her feel better. She still wanted to look as she did in waking life, but there were improvements she could make. Steel threaded through her muscles, and her senses became as sharp as a cat’s. That gave her a feeling of competence. An illusory feeling, admittedly, but illusions were as good a currency as any in the City.

  The square was busy now, with circling traffic and people coming and going in and out of Police Headquarters. She saw prisoners being hauled out of squad cars up to the doors. Uniformed cops went on shift in pairs, joking, or came off singly, depressed. It would always be the partner with a wife and kids who got shot down in the line of duty, giving his bachelor buddy the chance poignantly to break the news to his loved ones. The MGM Building and City Hall were still closed for business, but Susan had a feeling they were at least peopled with night watchmen and janitors. Earlier, she had had the impression she was alone with her enemy. She made her way across the road at a pedestrian crossing, and stood in front of City Hall.

  It was still as good a place as any to start. Mayor Donlevy wouldn’t be in his office at this hour, but the files should be there. She hoped his maps were more up to date and accurate than the one she had bought at the newsstand. Maps were the key to her plan.