The Sudden Dark

Twelve

The phone number belonged to a residential address a couple of suburbs over; I punched it into a search engine and found that it was a public rooming house. The time was touching eight at night by then, and I was wondering if my caller would've just checked out as soon as she'd hung up to cover her tracks, gone somewhere else, vanished herself into a different hotel or into a different life. I hedged my bets, and drove into the night.

The place was a cheap lodging built into a broad three-storied Tudor, laying at the outer edge of the motorway and in between the dark wedge of a car lot and a construction yard marked to become a new high-rise. I parked and knocked on the front room to find an older woman clutching a robe around herself and wearing a look of roused irritation.

'We don't show rooms outside of daylight hours, sorry,' she said without much tact in her words.

I put on a civil smile. 'I'm from the police. I just have a small inquiry about one of your roomers, if you don't mind.'

'The police? I mean...do you have a badge, or something?'

I sidestepped the question. 'This is just an informal branch of investigation—basically off the clock, which is why I'm here now. All I need to know is if you have someone named Madison Reed inside.'

She eyed me suspiciously. 'Sorry, but no one by that name is checked in here.'

I rolled a thought around my head, tightened the grip of my fist hanging at my side. 'Could be under the name Kathie Moffatt,' I said.

Well...yeah,' she said. 'There's a girl by that name still here.'

'Is she in? Could I see her?'

'I don't know, sir...I'm not sure if I'm supposed to give out information like that.' She slowly palmed the back of his neck. 'She only checked in a week ago, told me she was just a student.'

I went in for a different approach. 'Ma'am, I'm not going to tell you what that girl is wanted for, but if she flies off again, it could involve this establishment being brought up on charges of harbouring. And if you're the proprietor, you'd cop it. Would you want that?'

She bit her lip, and shook her head to let go with, 'Upstairs. Room six. Don't make too much noise. I've got a business to run here.'

I thanked her quickly and brushed through the door and up the stairs at the end of the house, pausing only briefly to consider the growing impropriety—some would say illegality—of my tactics. I still wasn't an official police detective, and had no right infringing on the privacy of a private citizen.

But, at the same time, there was one man dead already, and a whole load of secrets laying all the way from his body to that house.

I came to the second floor and found the room at the end of the hall. There were the loud murmurings of a drunken get-together in the room next door that I tried to ignore. I knocked on room six and stood back. There was a long moment without an answer.

I saw twin blocks slit the light under the door before it finally came open. In front of me was a tall girl, narrow-eyed and with her head cocked in discreet suspicion.

'Could I come in?' I asked.

She didn't move her head. 'You found out where I am,' she said plainly. 'What else do you want from me? Kit's not here.'

'I could do to check with my own two eyes, if you don't mind.'

Her face went sharper, but she stepped back from the door without a word. I toed inside the room but stayed close to guard the door.

The room was clean, almost untouched. Maddie went to the bed and sat to light a cigarette that she pulled from a slim pocketbook on the nightstand; from what I could see, it was her only possession.

'How did you know I was looking for you?' I asked, raising my voice only slightly over the rousing of happy voices bellowing from between the walls next door.

Maddie burned the cigarette and directed her lips to blow her first breath up toward the ceiling. 'Girl I know at the club—she told me a copper came by looking for me when I called to see what was going on.'

I nodded. 'She was worried about you. She didn't know where you'd run off to.'

'She's a friend. Probably the only friend I have, after Kit. And I probably won't see her again if I can make it out of the city alive.'

Maddie sat back on the bed, ignoring the ash growing on her cigarette. She had a flame of red hair tied loose above her shoulders that was the same colour as the sprays of freckles dotting her light skin, a boy's T-shirt hanging over her small torso, a short black ruffled skirt, black stockings running down her long alabaster legs.

I cleared my throat and took a vigilant step forward. 'Frank's dead already, and you're telling me you could be next, then,' I said.

She looked at me with an icy blue chill. 'If you had any doubt, what the fuck are you doing running around trying to crack the whole thing? When I looked you up to find your number, I also found out that you're on suspension. This can't be official, then, if you're working it.'

'That's right, Maddie. This is purely altruistic, if you can believe that.'

'I don't believe it. Not for a second. Nobody's ever done anything fucking altruistic for me my whole life. I've had to do everything myself.'

'Not anymore, if you tell me what the hell's going on. Something can get sorted from this whole mess, finally. Where's Kit, Maddie?'

She took another drag of the cigarette, and studied me carefully. 'Look,' she said, 'I don't know who the hell you are other than some ex-cop who must have broken one too many heads. I'm only half-certain it wasn't Frank or Clive that paid you to look for me. They could be waiting outside for all I know.'

I sighed, and took a chair at the desk on the other side of the room. 'All I can say is that it was Kit's brother who hired me,' I said. 'He wants his kid brother saved from whatever shit he's gotten himself into, and strange as it is, I want to help him. I don't want anyone else to die, and I don't want Kit to go back to prison. But you need to tell me what's what, Maddie. Who everyone is to each other, what they've done, and why they're trying to kill each other.'

'If I believe you, I might die,' she said.

'If I don't try my hardest, you might die as well. But I'm trying my hardest, Maddie. Goddamnit if I'm not trying.'

She took a long pause, silent and breathful, which she finally broke by stubbing her cigarette into a plastic ashtray on the end table.

She sighed. 'I'll make you a deal,' she said quietly. 'I'm pretty sure I know where Kit is. We paid for a flat together where we used to meet up. I think he might be waiting there for me.'

'Why haven't you been around there yet, then?'

'Because I need assurance I won't step into anything if I'm wrong. You take me there, check the place out, make sure it's really Kit who's waiting there and not anyone else, and you have access to him. And I'll tell you everything I know, too. But only when we're there.'

'Okay, Maddie,' I said, standing. 'You've got a deal, if you want to collect your things.'

'I don't have anything,' she said, already on her feet and with her pocketbook. 'After you, cop.'

On our way down out of the house and back into the rising moonlight, I said, 'You're a fan of Out of the Past, huh? Kathie Moffatt, Jane Greer—your pseudonym of choice. It's fitting.'

She didn't look at me as we walked to my car. 'Kit and I watched it together at his brother's place once. It was a good movie. It's a good memory, alright? Good memories are all I have right now.'

'That's true,' I said. 'Although, if you make it easy enough to track your trail as you did for me again, if might be deadly.'

'I know who I'm dealing with,' she said in stone. 'You don't. Remember that.'