Nighttown

Book 7: A Junior Bender Mystery

by Timothy Hallinan

Genres: Black Humor; Amateur Sleuth

Synopsis

"Exceedingly funny . . . this one's good for what ails you."—The New York Times  

Reluctant P.I. to the perfidious, Junior Bender, may be L.A.’s smoothest operator but when he breaks one of the cardinal rules of burglary (don’t take scores that you’re being paid way too much for) he finds himself once again on the wrong side of, well, the wrong side.

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well: in the criminal underworld, if you’re offered more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he’s bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash to hire a kidnapper to snatch Ronnie’s two-year-old son back from her ex. The whole thing is pretty complicated and has Junior on edge.
 
The parameters of the job do nothing to calm his nerves. A nameless woman in an orange wig has offered Junior fifty grand—twenty-five up front—to break into the abandoned house of a recently deceased 97-year-old recluse, Daisy Horton, and steal a doll from her collection. Junior knows no doll is worth 50K, so he figures there must be something hidden inside the doll that can get him in a heap of trouble. It doesn’t take long for Junior to realize he’s not the only one looking for the doll. When an old friend ends up murdered, Junior decides he will stop at nothing to figure out who the woman in the orange wig is, and why she wants the doll badly enough to leave a trail of bodies in her wake.

Release date: November 6, 2018

Publisher: Soho Crime

Print pages: 384

Sample

By way of a prelude, a few words about the dark.
      In the entire, staggering length of the Bible—Old and New Testaments combined, a total of 783,137 words—darkness is mentioned only about one hundred times, and it gets slagged almost every time. It’s identified with ignorance, hell, evil, exile, the absence of God, and other conditions to which few of us aspire. The only positive mention of darkness in the whole Book is when the Lord speaks to Moses after dimming the day to protect the Israelites from the sight of Him, and that good darkness, the one and only good darkness, is called by a completely different word, araphel, which will never be used again. Just that once. For God’s personal and merciful darkness.
      It gets its own damn word to distinguish it from, you know, ordinary every-night darkness, which is Not Good.
      According to the King James Bible, translated from a bunch of older languages by forty-seven of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the Lord gets right down to business with the very first line he speaks: Let there be light, He says. And then . . .
      And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
      And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
      Night is just what’s left over after the big chop: over here, light, which is good; and over there, dark, which is definitely not good and which will be thrown at us, regular as clockwork, every sunset through eternity to lay claim to half of our lives, whether we like it or not. And we’re not supposed to like it.
      As you can probably tell, I have a problem with this outlook.
     I make my living, ninety percent of the time, in the dark. Burglars tend to prefer the dark because, while some of us are pretty dumb, there aren’t many of us stupid enough to begin a job by turning on the lights. One iron-clad rule of burglary is to avoid unexpected interactions with others, and darkness helps to prevent them.
That was taught to me at the age of seventeen by my mentor, the late, great Herbie Mott, and he had the game down cold. Thanks to Herbie’s guidance, I’ve been at this game very successfully for more than twenty years and I don’t even have an arrest record, much less a conviction. I’m good at this, and I resent the way my old ally darkness is slandered.
      It’s not that light is useless. I’m as fond of a sunny day as anyone who isn’t prone to melanoma, but I can’t help thinking that giving the sun the night off is one of creation’s better ideas. It rests the eyes, it allows plants a chance to take a break from making sugar. It clears the landscape for a lot of very interesting animal life. Most love is made at night, at least by people older than, say, seventeen. Many of the world’s most fragrant flowers bloom at night. In place of the monochrome blue of the daytime sky, night offers us the moon’s waxing and waning face, set off against the infinite jewelry of the stars.
      If it seems to you that I’ve given this a lot of thought, you’re right. Nighttime, in a manner of speaking, is my zip code. It’s an undiscriminating neighborhood, one I share with disk jockeys, cops, ambulance drivers, insomniacs, air traffic controllers, French bakers, peeping toms, recovering drunks, speed freaks, the terrified, the bereaved, the guilt ridden, and those with the medical condition photophobia. Sure, it’s a mixed batch, but night also evens the odds for the blind and extends a hand of mercy to the odd-looking, the ones who draw stares in the glare of noon. It softens the edges of even our ugliest cities.
 
 
 
But there actually can be too much of a good thing.
      I had never really subscribed to that idea, but as I stood in the entry hall of Horton House, holding my breath and listening—which is always the first thing I do when I enter a house—I was revising my opinion. Horton House was too dark. For the first time in my perhaps four hundred burglaries, it seemed like a good idea to just blow it off and go back out into the comparative glare of a moonless night.
      And it wasn’t just the dark, which was so close to absolute that I might as well call it that. The house was noisy, in the way only an all-wooden house that’s more than a century old can be. Horton House had been built by a briefly prominent family in 1908, and every join, plank, beam, and nail was feeling its age and complaining about it. It was almost as loud as a sailboat, which (the claims of their owners notwithstanding) never stops creaking and moaning and sloshing. Horton House made so much noise that I was having trouble listening around and through all of it for the sound of something human: movement, breathing, snores, whatever. The place was supposed to be empty; in fact, a sign outside confirmed that the house was due for demolition in three days. Still, I waited and listened, as I always do, in recognition of the perpetual gulf between what I think I know and what’s actually happening.
      The most off-putting of the house’s trinity of disquieting characteristics—the one I found even more disagreeable than the darkness and the noise—was its smell. One component was a sharp-edged stink that could only be really, really old paper, and I was willing to bet that my little penlight, when I felt secure enough that I was alone to turn it on, would show me the original wallpaper, more than a century old, clinging for dear life to the walls. And running just beneath the sharp wallpaper smell, like a large but muted string section supporting a snare drum, was a pervasive, over-sweet scent with an almost physical heaviness that I first guessed as long-dead flowers, maybe tuberose or narcissus or some kind of lily. It took me a full minute to realize what it really was.
      Baby powder.
      If what I’d learned about the house was true, there hadn’t been a newborn baby here since 1921, and the thought of the smells that baby powder might have been intended to disguise in these latter days was more than a little unsettling. The “baby”—Miss Daisy, the last of the Hortons—had died upstairs, almost exactly a month earlier, at the age of ninety-six after spending almost fifty years confined to a bed on the second floor.
     Put it all together, and what it came down to was that Horton House had a certain WEEEooooWEEEoooo factor. The place absolutely hummed with malice. Miss Daisy, who had spent eighty years or so alone here, except for a skeleton staff of servants and a long and apparently unsatisfying succession of daytime caregivers, was semi-famous for hating everything. In her thirties, before the fall on the stairs that had almost severed her spinal cord, she’d been nicknamed “the Witch of Windsor Street” for her skill at terrifying children who dared to play on the sidewalk in front of Horton House. Her animus remained evident even after she gave up hoping for a cure and took to her bed: her response to the changes in her neighborhood, as the old houses went down and stucco went up to welcome an influx of new occupants whose native languages were more likely to be Spanish and Korean than English, was to put the evolving world literally out of sight and out of mind. First, she had her gardeners install the thick ficus hedge that surrounded the property and over-fertilize it until it was higher than the streetlights and the windows of the houses on either side. Second, when the home on her left was demolished to make way for a three-story apartment house with vaguely French Provincial pretensions, she covered the inside of every window in her own house with two layers of the heavy brown paper used for supermarket shopping bags. Dark as it was at night, in the daytime, the light in here in mid-afternoon must have been the rich color of caramel. I knew much of this because Miss Daisy had long been the Cruella de Vil of fading Los Angeles gentility, and as such, she’d gotten her share of newspaper space and, much later, TV time, although she was never seen on-screen.
      Apparently, one of the more enduring marks she’d left on Horton House was the odor of that damn baby powder, a kind of cloying sweetness that bordered on decay. I hated it all the way to the back of my neck, which is a part of my body I’ve learned to pay attention to. Everybody gets the prickles in different places, I guess, but I get them on the back of the neck, and my neck had essentially been calling my name from the moment I opened the gate in the center of that towering hedge.
     Which I had done with a key, by the way. The key alone should have told me from the beginning that something was off about the whole enterprise. I hadn’t even turned my penlight on, and I was already having second thoughts.