The Labyrinth Of Dreams Read online

  He also was caught up in the romance of the thing, to a degree. Spade & Marlowe. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Only the best of company for Harold Parker. He didn’t have much savings but he had a pretty fair pension, so he went out, got a license, rented a cheap office that looked right, and even hired a neighborhood girl just out of secretarial school as a secretary. A year later, at age forty-six, he married her. She was already six months pregnant at the time. Brandy wasn’t his biological child, something she was kept ignorant of until she was in her late teens and he was trying to keep everything together and keep her from quitting school to help him. Her mother wasn’t there to help; she had suffered from rip-roaring high blood pressure, and after Branday’s birth, was warned not to try again. She worshipped the colonel, though, and became pregnant. The combination of that and being sloppy with her high-blood-pressure pills proved fatal. Brandy had been only ten when her mother had dropped dead of a stroke. She hadn’t even gotten to thirty.

  The colonel had set up the agency in the Camden ghetto at a time when it was rare to have a black private eye. He saw a need and filled it in the good old American tradition, arguing that black folks got divorces and skipped support payments and fooled around almost as much as white folks did. For a while it paid. Not handsomely, but when added to his retirement it was adequate—of course, his clientele then was of a higher class. When the ghetto became a place for the very poor, the paying clients went to large agencies with fancy offices and set rates, some black-owned and -operated, others the same ones that before hadn’t wanted their business. He found himself working longer and harder for a diminishing client base, and he was no youngster anymore—but he had a youngster. The paying jobs often required him to be out late, and she wound up more and more in the care of her mother’s relatives, mostly cousins and the like, who really considered it an obligation and weren’t very good at the guardian job.

  Brandy understood, but she developed a crushing case of private-eye-itus, caused by having a father who was a P.I., and by too many television shows, and she had little interest in school. She was a fat girl with no real family life and was a class wallflower, kind of like me except for the fat business—that came only from Bristol. She went a little wild as a teen. The only way to get boys to pay attention was to proposition them; the rest was taken care of by readily available drugs. She spent the rest of the time watching black-female-avenger pictures and reading lurid novels. She was a good reader because her father always was, but she got lousy grades and didn’t really care. Her father, increasingly trying to hold the business together and with his health beginning to fail, finally couldn’t help but notice and did a little personal detective work. The first thing he found out was that the report cards he’d seen had been stolen blanks. She had more absences than days present, and although he thought at sixteen she was in high school, the fact was that she was still in the ninth grade.

  Just as bad, her closest girlfriend had been dead on arrival from an overdose of drugs and pills, and never mind the two abortions. The guilt hit him like a lead weight. I kind of feel sorry for him at that point, torn between trying to force her to the straight and narrow and his guilt at letting her go off in the first place.

  I’ll never know what that scene was like, but somehow a compromise was reached. She didn’t want school and he wanted her out of that crowd, that was for sure. She dropped out and went to work for him at the agency as his secretary, receptionist, and assistant. She had promised him she’d get away from the bad crowd, stop fooling around, and in a year or so get her GED high school equivalency and even go to college. She never did, though. Of course, she was a good reader, a fast typist, and she knew the basics of math, and she was smart and could learn whatever she needed to learn. The fact was, her reading alone made her better educated than half the people I know who are college graduates, but her lack of formal schooling did have an unfortunate side effect in that she has the same inferiority streak in her that a lot of folks who never finish school have, and had an inordinate respect for anybody with a lot of education, even if they don’t deserve it and know less than she does. If she ever runs into an ax murderer who is also a college professor, we’re in deep trouble.

  The cure, at least, worked. She loved the work, had his files straightened out in no time, found out how little money they really had, but the cases he got she worked on, too, and became good at stakeouts and at making endless phone calls for data. She also went on a diet and took judo and karate lessons at the “Y” and from one of those Korean karate mills that have popped up all over. She got to brown belt, which makes her formidable and gives her confidence in the streets, anyway. All those black-female-avenger films, I guess. She’s also a very good shot, although even now she’s only licensed to carry a pistol when performing a task for a client, and then only when hired as essentially a guard.

  She saw herself in much the same way her father had seen himself and the business. He had spent his life battling prejudice and doing the best job possible, and she saw herself as showing that not just a black but a black woman was as good in this profession as any man.

  Then, one day, the case of a lifetime walked in the door in the form of a chief aide to the Reverend Billy Thomas. Thomas was one of those superman types—young, personable, golden-voiced, degrees in divinity and law, a family whose power in the black community came from decades of fighting for equal rights and justice . . . Well, you know the sort. He was in Philadelphia, and he was about to run for city council in a district that was about fifty-fifty in racial makeup but had always been represented by an Italian. He was convinced that his opponent had organized-crime ties, and that to break him loose from his sixteen-year seat they’d have to get something on him they could use in the papers. They could have hired a bunch of big shots, but they wanted to use somebody who was black and totally independent of any larger companies. If the colonel came up with something really useful, it was worth twenty-five thousand dollars to the campaign, and he got a grand as up-front expense money.

  The colonel was good at his job. If he hadn’t clung so desperately to his failing independent company and had gone with one of the big Philadelphia concerns, he could have made it big. This one, however, was different; a last miracle from heaven. It not only paid well, but if he could bring this off, the resulting publicity from his success—where bigger and better companies had failed—would bring him so much business he’d have to hire assistants and get good office space.

  For the first couple of days, he was very excited about what he was finding, but he used Brandy only as chauffeur on occasion and for random checks from cop and lawyer sources. She couldn’t follow the thrust of his investigation from that, and he was pretty close-mouthed. It wasn’t that he was trying to exclude her; it was just that this case was everything he’d gotten into the business to do, and for a right moral cause. Soon, though, his elation turned to frowns and gloom; he was finding information on the councilman’s ties far too easily and there were disturbing undercurrents. Telling her he’d know once and for all after a night’s work, he’d left.

  They found his body, with five bullets in it, floating in the Schuylkill River the next day. The cops said it was an obvious mob hit, but could not tie the councilman into it. Brandy buried her father, then went to work. She dug, probed, traced, deciphered her father’s notes; and because she knew his sources and knew how he thought, she began to reconstruct his movements and learn what he had learned. Eventually she came to the same conclusions her father had: there were clear trails to mob money on the part of the councilman—too clear. So clear you needed only a legislative aide and not a private dick to find them. The fact was, most Italian big shots, like Jewish big shots and Methodist big shots, had inevitably crossed paths again and again with bad elements. It was almost as if somebody had already traced out all those paths for the councilman and then filled in the blanks showing sinister motives when, say, the councilman met a mob godfather at a Columbus Day dinner, or belonged t
o the same Knights of Columbus lodge as a couple of mob men.

  The fact was, the old Italian wasn’t clean, but he was as clean as a city hack politician can get. There was, however, a mob connection in the race. The Reverend Billy Thomas looked very much like a wholly owned and operated subsidiary. When it was clear to them that her father knew this and only needed confirmation, they had acted, setting up an informant’s meet late that night, one that was to turn over incriminating documents. The colonel had his own sense of moral outrage, and was even more upset that this would be pulled by his own people and others he admired and trusted. He also was smart enough to know that the headlines from busting the Reverend Billy would be every bit as good as the ones from busting an Italian. They knew it, too. They hadn’t taken any chances.

  With single-minded determination and solid detective work she broke the case, and proved to the Philadelphia cops how the incriminating evidence on the councilman was manufactured. They were delighted and pulled out all the stops to do the rest. They never got the actual triggerman, but when they began to get the real goods on the Reverend Billy, he began to get the sweats. Somebody behind him didn’t trust him, either. While this was still unfolding, an armed band of intruders broke into his home and killed him—during a robbery, of course. It was only a surprising coincidence that he was to meet the next day with federal prosecutors to cut a deal.

  The results were not, however, what Brandy would have expected. She had proved herself to both herself and the world, but the only mention of even the agency in the papers was that her father had been killed by mobsters linked to the reverend. The Philadelphia cops were highly impressed with her, but it wouldn’t do to admit that a twenty-one-year-old black female high-school dropout had broken a case they couldn’t. Her own family and circle of friends, however, almost completely cut her off. She was a “traitor” to the black race; her old man deserved what he got for trying to bring down a black leader. So what if the rev was crooked? They all were. At least he was our crook. Business fell to zero. Even those who didn’t know a thing about it were not about to hire a girl like her working alone.

  Interestingly, the only people who seemed to have no ax to grind with her were the crooks. She sold the house in west Philadelphia and moved into a studio apartment in an old section of Camden near the office. She paid off a lot of bills and lived on the rest for a while. And, although it was sparse and didn’t pay very well, she actually got a few clients—all from the wrong side of the law. Loan sharks out looking for deadbeats and not able to run them down; guard jobs at illicit gambling dens; finding goods on cops who arrested the wrong people. Not big money, but it helped. The cops, too, used her on occasion, which is what had brought me there. She had deep sources among the small potatoes of the underworld, and while she was not about to squeal on them she was occasionally useful in digging for major crimes in places the cops just couldn’t look.

  When I met her, she was pulling in just enough money to keep in business, but she’d have made more by closing it and going on welfare, in real cash terms. She was her father’s daughter; she couldn’t give up the dream no matter how impossible it was, and she’d managed to make herself just useful enough to both cops and crooks that she was reasonably safe, and the local junkies knew that she didn’t have anything anyway and was a bit too dangerous to tangle with. The only thing was, the cops and crooks both knew they didn’t have to give her much; just barely enough to keep going. What kept her going was her dream, her felt obligation to her father, and the fact that she was good at the job and she knew it.

  The grimness of reality had made her withdraw into something of a fantasy shell, though. She didn’t date. She had contacts, not friends. That’s when I met her.

  Of course, it was timing on my part, too. My dad had finally died after years of inactivity, and my mother lasted only six months after that. I could have made use of the old-boy network through the synagogues and social organizations, but I hadn’t been to shul or belonged to any of those things since I was eighteen. There was nobody, really, but Uncle Max, and I already told you about him.

  So, anyway, two people who really needed somebody and were in the same line of work, more or less, but were socially unlikely to ever come together had, through the Fates, done so. I kind of got a taste of things just hitting a bar or restaurant with her and seeing the kinds of funny reactions and sideways looks. It didn’t matter if it was a black place or a white place, it was all the same.

  Oh, yeah—about that kiddie-porn and kidnap case. Well, we firmed up that the old hotel was the place where pedophiles of all races, creeds, and colors met in the area, and we linked our distributor to not only the hotel but also to, would you believe, a professional baby photographer in Cherry Hill. An undercover cop then made the connections and infiltrated the network.

  He chose the easy way, setting up a kiddie-prostitution meet and then picking one of the two we were looking for out of photos kept in a nice family album. The kid—the girl—was all fancied up and brought to the hotel, but they smelled a rat, somehow, at the last minute, and we could sense it. There were squad cars around ready to make a move on the undercover man’s signal, but it just didn’t happen.

  I was pretending to doze in the lobby, dressed like a bum and smelling of cheap booze, and Brandy was all dressed up like a hooker, all made-up and really underdressed, cigarette dangling from her lips, and perched sexily on the edge of an end table leafing through a magazine. Both of us looked totally natural in that cesspool. We saw them bring in the kid and I was shocked at how they’d made her up, and even more by her glassy eyes and automatic behavior. The undercover guy came in a half-hour later and went straight up to the room, but a lot of time passed. Too much. Finally Brandy read my mind and sauntered over.

  “You take the desk clerk and call in the Marines,” she whispered, as if coming on to me. “I’m going up and see what’s wrong.”

  I didn’t like that. “Let me go up.”

  She gave me a kiss—the first time she’d ever done that. “You just go do what I say. I’ll be all right.”

  Yeah. All right is not the word for it. She swished and swayed on too-high heels over to the old elevator and I made my way over to the desk. I hate guns, but lives were at stake. I didn’t want to risk identifying myself first; some of these places have floor buttons for warning signals.

  The clerk was sitting back in a chair next to the old-fashioned switchboard reading the racing news. I checked my back, pulled my .38, and said, “Real quiet now, you be a statue. Police.” He started to make a move and I was behind there and cracking him in the face with the gun in no time. I had been right—there were three buttons to the right of the switchboard, out of view of the desk area. He hadn’t gotten a chance to push any of them. I picked up his phone and dialed a special number. “Come on in. It’s going down wrong,” I said, and that was that. I then looked around. A half a dozen hookers, bums, and junkies were around that place and not one of them even deigned to notice what I was doing.

  The trouble was, after five minutes the cops didn’t seem to be noticing, either. I decided we’d been had and ran up the stairs. When the desk bastard woke up he could push all the buttons he wanted.

  Brandy had been listening at doors on the third floor, but just as I saw her there was the unmistakable sound of a shot from one of them and she ran to it, reaching in her purse and taking out the biggest damned handgun I ever saw. She blew the lock off, then kicked open the door but kept her back to the wall, very professionally. There were screams and shrieks inside the room, and when Brandy saw me she whirled and plunged right into that mess.

  The bastards had gone down the fire escape probably before she’d blown the lock off, leaving the kid screaming there and one very badly wounded detective. I got to him and he opened his eyes, saw me, and groaned. “Setup,” he managed. “They knew . . . They wanted me . . . Where the hell’s the backup?”

  That’s what I wanted to know.

  By now th
e hotel resembled a cemetery, and not from the bodies. At the first shot the place had erupted like Mount Saint Helens, spewing its human garbage all to hell and gone before the real cops got there. Not even the deskman was there. I got down there, called for an ambulance, then called the Vice tactical number. The sergeant seemed very surprised to hear from me.

  “What the fuck you doing there tonight?” he roared. “We got it set up for tomorrow night!”

  “Like hell! Your man was here and now he’s bleeding his guts out on the floor upstairs. We were here, and so were the bastards and the girl. I called the ambulance—I can hear it coming now. We were set up, you son of a bitch!”

  “Hey, man, take it easy! Yeah, it was on for tonight, but we got orders at roll call direct from on high that it was off until tomorrow.”

  “Then you got a high leak who might just have gotten your man blown away. Patrol units are just coming in the door now, along with the ambulance.” I told the floor and room number to them and they didn’t wait, they went right up. “You want a bad cop who’s a cop killer, you find out who was on the other end of that tactical phone number I called when this went down. You call Internal Affairs and get them moving now! Either that or you retire before you find a hole in you!”

  They got the undercover man to the hospital, and he made it, minus one lung and the use of his legs. They took the kid into Juvenile, and after a lot of questioning got much in the way of where the kids were being held and how it all worked, but in spite of fast raids they came up short. The word was out and everything had moved and dug in. Internal Affairs finally traced the leak to a desk sergeant and his girlfriend in Communications. I don’t envy them their stay in New Jersey’s less-than-luxurious prison system, surrounded by folks who just love cops. At the price of one good cop’s lung and legs we got one of the kids back, and state police finally nailed a bunch of small-fry and the photographer, but that was that. The distributor’s still in business, still living in a fancy Cherry Hill home with the twin BMWs and the ideal American family, and somewhere the other kids are still in hell. That’s the way the business goes, and why I was more than ready to quit it.