Supernatural Noir

In the Beyers’ presence I walked tall. But I still have metal fragments in my knee. With the clients gone I limped a bit on my way back to the desk.

I took a sheet of paper and a plain envelope out of the desk, stuck in a high-school-yearbook photo of Hilda, scribbled a few lines about the case, dated and signed it. Then I felt the intrusion and added the P.S.: “Some stray elf or fairy just got into my memories.” On the envelope I wrote Bertrade’s full name and her address in the Kingdom.

The phone rang and a woman said, “Sam,” and nothing more. She sounded tired, flat.

“A

“Not feeling great, Sam. We wondered if you could handle the Culpepper case today.”

“We” meant that A

“Sure I’ll do it. Nothing changed from Jim’s report yesterday, right?”

“You’re a saint, Sam.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the Up to the Minute Answering Service. Gracie was on duty. Behind her I could hear half a dozen other girls at switchboards.

“Doll,” I said, “I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Anyone wants me, I’ll be back after six.”

Under her operator voice, Gracie talks Brooklyn like the Queen speaks English. “Be careful, you,” she said. She gets her ideas of private detectives from paperback novels.

We’ve never met. Going down in the elevator, I thought of Gracie as being maybe in her midthirties—which seems young to me now. I imagined her as blond and nicely rounded, sitting at the switchboard in a revealing silk robe.

I imagined the other Up to the Minute ladies sitting around similarly dressed. This is the privilege of a divorced and decorated veteran who once got kissed by a French field marshal.

My office is on the fifth floor. With a couple of errands to do, I crossed the vestibule and stepped outside. They tore down the elevated line before World War II, but better than a decade later, Sixth Avenue still looked naked in the October afternoon sunlight.

Across the way, the women’s prison stood like a black tower as all around it, paddy wagons unloaded their cargo. Some parents find out their daughters have run off to Fairyland. Others discover them at the Women’s House of Detention.

They use the old Jefferson Market courthouse next door to the prison as the police academy now. Sergeant Da

As I headed towards the subway, I saw the headlines and front pages of the afternoon papers. My old pal MacArthur had landed at Inchon a couple of weeks before. Maps of the Korean Peninsula showed black arrows pointing in all directions.

On the subway stairs, I felt something like the opposite of forgetting. A stray sprite with nothing better to do had tried to probe me. The mental image of Bertrade appeared and whatever it was immediately broke contact. I continued down the stairs, stuck a dime in the slot, and got on the uptown A train.

Early in life I heard about fairies. My mother’s mother saw leprechauns in the coal cellar and elves under the bed. Mostly I ignored her once I turned into a hard guy at the age of eight.

My mother was born and raised in the Irish stretch of Greenwich Village. She learned stenography, got a job in an import-export office, and married late. Sam Grant Senior was part Irish and not very Catholic. He had been on the road as a salesman for many years before my mother forced him to settle down. I was the only kid.

I remember my old man a little sloshed one night, telling me about having been on the night train to Cinci

I heard about the Kingdom beneath the Hill a few more times over the years. As a legend, it was slightly more believable than Santa Claus and a bit less likely than the fabled speakeasy that only served imported booze.

Then almost ten years ago, an elf almost killed me, and a couple of fairies saved my life. One of them was Bertrade.

The two errands I had were within a few blocks of each other. I rode the A train up to Pe

Inside under the high vaulted ceilings were big posters commemorating the pilots who had died flying mail planes thirty years back. I walked past the window that said Overseas Mail to the small window that said nothing.

It was there that I always mailed my letters to the Kingdom. The man on duty had a slight crease on the left side of his head—a veteran of something, I thought. I’d spoken to him a couple of times, asked him questions, and never got more than a shrug or a shake or nod of the head.

He took the letter. Right then, another mind touched mine, saw the image of Bertrade that I flashed, and bounced away.

The clerk’s eyes widened. He’d caught some of it, too. I took back the letter, picked up a pen, and wrote, “Urgent—contact!” on the envelope. The clerk nodded, stuck on a stamp I’d never seen before—one with a falcon in flight on it—turned, and put it down a slot behind him.

“They’ll have it by midnight,” he said in an accent I couldn’t catch. “Keep your head down. Tall elves are questing today.” Then he stepped away from the window.

I waited for a minute for him to come back. When he didn’t, I turned and walked the length of the two-block-long lobby all the way to Thirty-First Street. Maybe it was just an elf, lost and a stranger in the big city, who kept trying to bust into my head, and I was overreacting. Maybe I was lonely and wanted to see Bertrade.

Going down the stairs was tougher on my knee than going up them. I walked two blocks south on my errand for Jim and A

Just west of Sixth Avenue on the south side of Thirtieth Street stood the Van Neiman, a nondescript office building. Across the street was a luncheonette. The only other customer was hunched over his paper; the counterman and waitress were cleaning up.

I ordered coffee, which was old and tired at this time of day, and sat where I could await the appearance of Avery J. Culpepper, CPA. His wife, Sarah, a jealous lady out in Queens, was convinced that he was stepping out on her.

Private investigators in one-man offices, like Jim Toomey and me, need to form alliances with other guys in similar circumstances. For the two of us it went beyond that. In France I was the one who got to smell the mustard gas, take out the machine-gun nest, and get my leg chewed up. For me, the real war lasted about two weeks. I got decorated and never fired another shot for Uncle Sam.

Jimmy passed unharmed right up through Armistice Day, won few medals, got to see every horror there was to see. I was hard to deal with when I got back, and my marriage to the girl I’d left behind only lasted as long as it did because she was very Catholic.

But Jim still woke up at night screaming. It drove A