“That’s the thing. It does. Every case I’ve had since I opened up business on my own. Never happened when I worked a desk. It’s something to do with my direct interaction with the world. I’m a shit magnet. I’m everything that never happened to anyone else.
“Here’s one. I was hired on a missing-persons gig. A sixty-five-year-old terminally ill man had walked out of the hospital and vanished. The family wanted me to find him. Turns out he’s joined an old people’s suicide club called Sinner’s Gate. Sick old people intending to kill themselves to escape indignity. Only Sinner’s Gate members believe they led bad lives and have no right to a painless exit.
“I found him in a shithole off the Bowery, in a room with a vacuum cleaner. You know what degloving is?”
She shook her head, nervous of the story.
“I walked in and he put his penis in the vacuum cleaner and switched it on. Ripped the entire skin off his penis instantly. That’s degloving. The pain and shock overloaded his nervous system, causing an immediate and massive heart attack that killed him stone dead on the spot.”
“Jesus Christ, Mike…”
“Big old fat naked dead guy flopped over a vacuum cleaner that was still chewing on his dick. This is my life, Trix.”
She looked at me. Direct eye contact, a little creasing of her mouth. I realized it was pity.
“Next round’s on me, Mike.”
She came back with doubles and sank back into her chair.
“So tell me,” I said, absently calculating how much more I should have, “what’s NULL stand for?”
“National Union of Lizard Lovers.”
“I guess I could have worked that one out.”
“And you call yourself a detective. Tell me about this case of yours.”
“Promise not to laugh.”
“No.”
“Okay…I’ve been asked to find an old book that was apparently written by some of the Founders immediately after drafting the Constitution.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Apparently you weren’t supposed to. It was lost from a private collection back in the 1950s and the new holder of the collection wants it back.”
“Tell me what this has to do with NULL.”
I pulled the black handheld computer from my inside jacket pocket. “According to the very cold trail, NULL obtained it a couple of years ago while blackmailing a mayoral personage, and then traded it to a businessman in return for an infinite lease on that building.”
“Not Rudy?” She laughed.
“No idea.”
“And you know Donald Trump owns a lot of property in SoHo, right?”
“…naaah.”
She leaned in, grinning. “Damn, this is interesting, though. Where did the book go next?”
I opened the handheld and powered it up. The way she looked at it broke at least two Commandments. “That’s one of the new Sonys. You know how much those things cost?”
“Um…no. I had a Palm when I was with Pinkerton.”
She snatched it off me. The screen lit her eyes like lanterns. “It’s got a camera!”
“Where?”
“This lens in the hinge. You didn’t see it?”
“I, ah…I just thought it was, you know, a high-tech hinge.”
Trix smiled at me. “Tard.”
Her black fingernail tapped smartly on the screen four times, and then she got out of her chair and crouched next to me. The screen swiveled on a pivot hidden in the hinge, so it was facing us. We appeared in a window on the screen.
“Smile, Mike.” A flash went off in the hinge arrangement and a still photo of us resolved on the screen.
In the picture, she’s looking at the lens and I’m looking at her.
Trix got up, still clutching the machine. “So your leads are in here?” More tapping brought up the document, and she started paging through it using the Up and Down buttons on the little keyboard in the lower half of the thing.
“This is the coolest thing,” she murmured.
“The client gave it to me. It hooks into the net so he can email me updates. Not that I expect any. The trail’s all cold. All I can do is pick a point and start following it. Gather as much information as I can along the way.”
“You’re not going to just jump to the end?”
