Mummified Noir

Look, mistakes were made, I’m not denying that.

My desire for information was now heavily outweighed by my desire to get out of the basement’s oppressive stench before whatever was infesting the nylon rug started colonizing my shoes. The client, Mark Thompson, squeezed his forehead like he was trying to extract the lingering alcohol. “Was I drunk last night?”

Did the day end in Y? “I’m sure the headache will subside with time,” I sighed. “Now, I’ve been going over your case—”

“My brother’s missing.”

“Yes.” I studied the unfocused gaze. Maybe another cup of coffee before springing any unpleasant revelations. “When you’re ready, I need to know where to find Natalie.”

Mark Thompson looked down at the floor. “Why are we in the basement?”

“I was hoping it would jog your memory,” I told him. “Clearly a naïve supposition. We can go upstairs, if you like.”

I walked behind him up the staircase, eyes on that troubling wobble he nonetheless navigated into the kitchen. Nothing in the refrigerator was under five percent ABV, but the tap had water, and I pressed a greasy glass into his hands. The boys came into their inheritance far too young to know how to manage it, and bottle by clearance-sale bottle, it was slipping away. “You remember Natalie? Kohl eyes, purple hair?”

“Uh…”

“Big pentagram across her tits?”

“Oh, yeah.” Mark sipped at the water and winced. “What about her?”

“Where can I find her?” I wanted to know. “She may have some information from the night your brother was last seen.”

“Dude, there were, like, fifty people here.”

“Yes, and she was one of them,” I agreed. “Where can I find her?”

There was an uneven blink. I was not completely without sympathy for Mark’s condition. I’d felt that pull, that irresistible whisper, the chemical promise of all those pesky problems just floating away. I knew what it was like to get sucked into that comforting quagmire, to feel a moment’s burn and then let yourself disappear. But that was not a luxury we had right now. “Come on, Mr. Thompson. Someone must know.”

He had another swallow of water, resenting it as it slid down his throat. “I think she works at the Quicklycome Inn.”

* * *

Usually, I only worked with the law firm on infidelity cases and the occasional missing heir. Missing as in ‘told their parents to fuck off and then deleted their Facebook page’, not ‘haven’t been seen since the basement floor grew that suspicious patch of blood’. Navigating my particular skill set in this new territory wasn’t as seamless a transition as I hoped it would be, but I wasn’t ready to give up at this stage. Not before I saw my star witness with the purple hair.

“Hi,” Natalie said, when I greeted her by name. “Do I know you?”

The hotel uniform concealed her pentagram, but to be honest, I’m better with faces. “Ah, no. I’m looking for a Matthew Thompson; I was told you could help me find him?”

Big eyes, trembling lips, sharp intake of breath. That’s how I spell ‘Bingo’. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I touched her arm, just behind the elbow. “I’ve been asking anybody in the party circuit who might have been to the Thompson house lately, and your name was one of several that came up. He might have run off with a girl or gone to stay at a friend’s house; we just want to see who saw him last. Can you remember the last time you went to his house?”

Natalie took a deep breath, the blush returning to her cheeks. “Oh, um…a few nights ago, I guess?”

I guided her over to the replica art deco furniture clustered by the silent flat screen playing a thriller from the 1940s. I forget what it was, but I’d seen it before. “Can you remember if anything unusual happened? Any fights? Any particularly scandalous make-outs?”

She snorted. “Oh, I don’t know! We all get so crazy at those things. Just wake up the next day and ‘Memento’ through your text messages.”

Her eyes went wide again, just for a second. They darted for the reception desk, then locked onto mine again.

I put my hand on her hand. “I completely understand. And I’m not here to tell on anybody. Can you remember who Matthew might have been talking to that night?”

Natalie opened her mouth, closed it, and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I was so wasted.”

I nodded. “Well, thank you for your time. If you think of anything…” I patted my pockets. “I am, um, out of cards. Can I put my number in your phone?”

“Uh, sure?” I followed that purple mane over to the reception desk. When she reached over and retrieved her phone, I grabbed it, grabbed the back of her neck, and breathed.

Oh, I remember. The movie was ‘Shock’.

* * *

The phone was not as useful as it could have been. I would need more than a Rosetta stone to decipher the code these toddlers use, but I could sort of glean who wanted to eggplant peach who.

The picture gallery was nice, placing my favorite lavender fringe at the party on the night in question. Apart from lop-sided selfies and ten-second videos that gave me mild motion sickness, I could see Matthew, I could see Mark, and I could see the sword. I wish I could see them all together, but at least I was pulling in the radius. My favorite shot, which I sent to myself, was Mark leading Matthew into the basement, while Matthew turned to invite Natalie, behind the camera, down after him. There were no pictures at all after that.

He had a nice smile, that boy. Such a shame.

I waited outside the hotel. The cameras wouldn’t have picked up everything, not that a security guard would understand it if they did, but I didn’t want to push my luck. As soon as those lilac locks swung into view, I called, “Excuse me! Does this belong to you?”

Natalie turned, suspicious, but breathed a sigh of relief when she saw her phone. “Oh my god, yes! Thank you; I don’t know when I dropped that!”

“Just saw it on the sidewalk,” I said. “Hey, you’re Natalie, right?”

“Do I know you?”

I shrugged. “I think we met at the Thompsons’ place? IDK, I always get so wasted.”

She laughed. “Oh my god, same!”

“Can I walk you to the bus stop?”

“Okay!” She fell into step beside me. “Are you new in town? You don’t really have the local look.”

Oh, no. “What’s the local look?”

“You know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Like, meth-head hot. Like, you know they’re trouble, but you want to fix ‘em. You look like you have your shit figured out.”

Do I? “That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“You gotta get better friends.”

No dispute on my end. “Well, Matthew Thompson’s my friend, and I’m getting kind of worried about him.”

Natalie skipped a step. “Oh? Is he missing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He won’t return any of my texts. I know he got in a fight with his brother, but Mark doesn’t remember anything about that night.”

Scratching at her pentagram, Natalie said, “Oh, he doesn’t? He was pretty drunk.”

I studied her from the corner of my eye. “You don’t like him, huh?”

The swish of violet layers. “Some people, you just can’t fix. I party; that’s what college is for. Mark is an alcoholic. And he really doesn’t give a shit who he hurts.”

“I’ve heard that,” I told her. “I’ve heard he has a fuzzy understanding of the word ‘no’.”

Natalie hugged her arms across her chest. “Don’t know nothing about that.”

“That’s what makes me so worried about Matthew,” I said, touching her arm just behind the elbow. “I want to get him out of that house before his brother can do him real harm.”

She snorted. “Bit late for that.”

“What do you mean?”

Looking up at me, Natalie jerked away from my hand. “Who are you? You’re not one of us. I don’t know your name.”

“We met at a party—”

“Call me shallow if you want,” Natalie offered. “But you’re the only mocha in a town of flat whites. I would have remembered meeting someone like you.”

I could’ve lied. Mistakes were made. “Natalie, I’m an investigator. I need you to help me, or Matthew’s murder will never be solved.”

“No!” She started marching down the glass-littered shoulder. “Fuck you! Get somebody else!”

“There is nobody else!” I wasn’t going to chase her as she walked away, but my voice carried over the passing cars. “Without an eyewitness, there’s not enough probable cause to search Mark’s house!”

“You’re the investigator!” she hissed. “Figure your shit out!”

“I’m his!” I took a couple steps after her, but I stopped when she stopped. “Mark’s representatives hired me. Officially to find Matthew, but you and I know that’s not going to happen. I can’t testify against him; I signed away that right. But with your testimony, the body, and the sword, any half-decent prosecutor could bury him.” I took one more step toward her. “I can’t officially do this. I need someone who can.”

Natalie bit her lip as she studied my face. “What if I don’t?”

I had some unpleasant options. “Then he walks.”

“What happens to me?”

“You’ll walk with him.”

Natalie watched me from kohl-black eyes, the breeze lifting her lavender tresses in a veil of mistrust. It was absolutely fair; I had lied, was lying, to her pretty young face. I had plenty of time, and I gave her all she needed.

“You’ve been to the house?” she asked.

“Unfortunately.”

“You didn’t find the body?”

I felt hollow inside. “Should I have?”

* * *

I followed the swish of a violet ponytail up the Thompson’s side path. I knew Mark’s work schedule, and the house was dark, the only movement from a slightly tipsy raccoon in the bottle-choked garbage cans. Pulling her sleeve up over her fingerprints, Natalie said, “Everyone knows about this,” before extracting a key from the grinning jaws of a plastic skull.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as she turned back the bolt. “I know that night was horrible for you. I promise, when this is over, you’ll never have to think of it again.”

“You can’t promise that.” Challenge accepted. “You know, the body keeps the score.”

I didn’t see a score card on her body, and I was really looking. “I’m not sure what that means.”

Natalie flicked on a light, waving at the flies that had taken guardianship of the sink. Though still technically a kitchen, it was starting to smell like a chemist's revenge. “I used to be a total wreck,” Natalie told me. “I’m still a hot mess, but forever I had eating disorders, a complete phobia of nudity, panic attacks at human touch. My grandparents adopted me when I was five, and they never told me that before then, my mom never touched me. And my dad touched me way too much. I was too young to handle it, so I blotted it out.”

She waved away whatever my face was. “I only started feeling like a person again after I learned the truth and dealt with it. Before then, I couldn’t move on. The wound never healed, it just scarred over, and I couldn’t feel anything. Like the walking dead.” She offered me a grim smile. “That party, the fight, that was awful. But I can’t forget it. I have to work through this shit.”

The bare bulb overhead gave her a lilac halo as she beckoned in my direction. “And then you share something personal about yourself.”

I declined. “Let’s go find a body.”

“Ah, you’re no fun.” Side-stepping an empty bottle, Natalie turned on the basement light and started down the stairs.

She stopped.

Down in the basement, sitting on the foul synthetic rug, was Mark. He had a sword in his hand, the wakizashi with its place between the katana and tanto on the wall. I’ve known swordsmen who treasured their blades with the reverence of an ancestral tomb. This set was probably eighty-nine bucks at the mall. And Mark was trying to clean it with a Lysol wet wipe.

Natalie grabbed my arm. “It’s alright,” I said, peeling her fingers away. “Just stay back.”

“No,” she breathed. “That rug wasn’t there before.”

Both Mark and I glanced down at the rug. The ambiguously-colored, amorphously lumpy rug.

“I didn’t do this!” Mark insisted, tripping a little over an unruly lump. “That wasn’t me! You can’t set me up like that!”

“No one’s setting you up,” I told him. “How ‘bout we leave the sword here. We can go back to the office and talk about what happened.”

“I don’t know what happened!” The fumes of Mark’s liquid dinner wafted over the stale air. “I can't remember! I know what it looks like! But I didn’t, I would never--!”

“It was an accident,” Natalie said. “You didn’t mean to. He just got in the way. You’d had a lot to drink.” She put a hand on my shoulder again; she kept touching me. “Everyone will understand.”

“No!” Mark lurched forward, blade first. “You don’t understand!”

“Come on, Mark,” I said, holding out empty hands. “Are we going to talk like adults, or are you gonna chase us around with a sword?”

And he stabbed me.

Right through the middle. Right through my white shirt and my camel hair coat.

I loved that coat.

I wrapped my fingers around the handle and pulled Mark closer. Natalie may have been screaming; I was focused on Mark’s shocked face. I reached out, grabbed the back of his neck. And breathed.

* * *

The part of my soul that’s missing is the ren. It’s my name, my identity, the thing that makes me who I am. And it seems inextricably tied to my experiences, my memory. The part of me that fades. The part of me that cracks and breaks away, dissolves as I move forward into whatever comes next.

The parts of my body that are missing would usually fill the space where the sword went in. No danger of piercing a liver or lung when you keep them all locked up in jars.

I have to keep feeding on fresh memories, but I know that I was reckless this time. I would not have removed Mark’s memory of that night if I knew I was robbing him of an honest confession. I wouldn’t have erased my first meeting with Natalie if I knew I would need her again. And I would not have sucked all the life out of Mark if I just had enough foresight to dodge the blade. Now, two murders would never be solved.

Natalie didn’t run. I wouldn’t have tried to stop her; it’s not the sort of story anyone would believe. She watched as I pushed back the rug, and laid Mark down next to his decaying brother. “I remember what happened,” I said. “What Mark did to you. Or, tried to do, before Matthew stepped in. You don’t have to live with this. Me, the sword-based homicide, none of it. I can take it all away.”

She shook her lavender fringe, arms crossed over her pentagram. “I can’t be fucked up for the rest of my life and not know why.”

I shrugged. “You get used to it.”

I escorted Natalie out of the basement, leaving the door unlocked for someone else to find. The night air was cool and fresh on my rejuvenated face. Natalie reached out to touch me, and I stepped out of range.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “Get attached. Watch people age and die. I won’t recognize you when you see me again.”

She took my arm anyway. “You have forever to forget me. Help me figure this shit out.”

Mistakes were made.