The Devil's Pour

The rain in Los Angeles does not wash things clean. It just makes the dirt shiny. I knew this by the third week of working for Morris, and I wrote it in a notebook that I kept locked in his desk, in the compartment beneath the lock that Morris thought only he could open. He was wrong about that. I had been picking locks since I was eleven, which is to say since the day they put me in the orphanage and I realized that the world was a place where doors existed and not everyone got a key.

Morris was a medium-sized Jew with a medium-sized office and a medium-sized reputation, which in the detective business means he was adequate at finding missing husbands and not adequate at finding missing truth. He had me type his reports at seven dollars a week, which was generous for someone who was not generous, because he made me do more than type. He made me listen. He made me watch people through windows and report what I saw. He made me deliver envelopes to women who did not want to receive them and men who did not want to give them. He made me be useful, which was the closest thing to kindness he knew how to offer.

The call came on a rainy Tuesday. The phone rang while I was typing a report about a missing cat in Echo Park, which was the kind of case that made you question why the world needed detectives at all if cats were the biggest mystery it contained.

The voice on the other end was male, flat, with the kind of accent that could be anything from anywhere. "Is this Morris?"

"This is his office."

"Is he available?"

"He is available. Who is this?"

"The one who does not matter."

"I will take that as a no."

I put the phone down and told Morris about the call. He was sitting at his desk, eating a sandwich that looked like it had been made by someone who hated bread. He chewed slowly, listened, and said, "Who gave the number?"

"I did not ask."

"You should always ask."

"I will ask next time."

"There will not be a next time. People who say they do not matter always matter. That is how you know they are dangerous."

He was right about that. I learned the dangerous thing about dangerous people: they announce themselves by pretending they do not exist.

The next day, Morris gave me an envelope. It was thick, which meant it contained either money or information, and in my experience information was worth more than money because information kept you alive and money just kept you comfortable, and I had been comfortable once, in the orphanage, before I realized that comfort was just another word for being forgettable.

"Take this to an address," Morris said, and wrote it on the back of a business card. The address was in the middle district, near the warehouses and the bars and the places that sold things you did not ask about at dinner. "Deliver it. Do not open it. Do not talk to the person beyond handing them the envelope. Do not look them in the eye for longer than three seconds."

"Why three seconds?"

"Because after three seconds, you start seeing things you should not see, and seeing things is the first step to knowing things, and knowing things is the first step to getting yourself killed. I do not want to get myself killed. I am too old and too fat and too Jewish to die for a living."

I took the envelope. I put it in my coat pocket. I walked four blocks in the rain, which was generous for Los Angeles, because rain in this city was something that happened occasionally and dramatically, like a guest who shows up uninvited and stays for three hours and makes you feel guilty for not having prepared anything to offer.

The address was a warehouse on a street I did not know, flanked by two other warehouses that looked exactly like it, the way identical twins look exactly like each other until you learn to tell them apart. The door was open. I went inside.

He was there. A man standing by a table stacked with bottles. Whiskey bottles. Real ones, not the bathtub poison they sold on corners. He was tall and narrow, with the kind of face that people describe as hard, which is a polite way of saying it had been punched and had not broken. He was not drinking. That was the first thing I noticed. In a room full of bottles, a man who does not drink is either a liar or a saint, and I had learned early that saints were rarer than people who claimed to be one.

"You are the girl," he said. It was not a question.

"I am the messenger," I said. "The envelope."

He wiped his hands on a rag and took the envelope from me. His fingers did not touch mine. Good. Touch was information, and I did not need more information.

"Tell Morris the file is received," he said.

"What file?"

He looked at me for four seconds. He had broken the three-second rule without knowing it. In those four seconds, I saw something in his face that was not hardness. It was exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying something too long and too heavy and pretending it does not weigh anything.

"The file that does not matter," he said, and that was the second time someone had said those words to me in forty-eight hours.

I walked back to the office in the rain. I told Morris the exchange was complete. He nodded, ate another bite of his sandwich, and said, "Who was he?"

"The messenger did not look him in the eye for longer than three seconds."

Morris smiled. It was not a nice smile. "I like you, Vera. You are going to get yourself into trouble because you are too curious for your own good. But I cannot fire you. You are the best I have."

That was the inciting incident. The thing that sets the wheel turning. I started watching him three days later. I told myself it was because Morris asked me to. He did not ask me. I told myself it was because the envelope was interesting. It was not. I told myself it was because I wanted to know who he was. That was the truth. I wanted to know him the way you want to know a locked room: not because you trust what is inside, but because the lock means there is something worth finding.

His name was Dex Mercer. I found that out from a barkeep who knew everyone who worked the middle district pipeline. Dex was a former Marine, discharged after the war, working private transport, which is a polite way of saying he drove trucks full of whiskey for people who did not want to drive them themselves. He was not a drinker, which was a red flag in a town built on drinking. He worked for Louie Moretti, which was a bigger red flag, because Moretti was the kind of man who owned things that should not be owned and protected things that should not be protected.

But Dex was more than a driver. I found that out by following him for a week. He went to a warehouse at midnight. He came out at three with a duffel bag. He went to a hospital every afternoon at four and sat in a room at the end of a hall that smelled like antiseptic and boiled vegetables. Good Samaritan Hospital. He talked through a glass partition to a girl who looked maybe twelve, with hair that was too thin and a face that was too pale. She was sick. He was paying for someone to keep her alive. This was the part of the story that made you want to like him, and I had learned in the orphanage that wanting to like people was a liability. It made you careless.

I talked to him on the seventh day. He found me following him outside the warehouse, which means he knew I was there the whole time and let me follow him, which means either he was arrogant or he did not care. In the noir world, those two things are the same.

"Follow me all you want, lady," he said. He was not angry. He was tired. The exhaustion was back, sitting on his face like a heavy coat he could not take off. "It won't change what I do."

"No one is asking you to stop," I said. "I am just asking you to tell me why."

He did not answer. He took an umbrella out of his coat pocket, which he had been carrying but not using, and handed it to me. "Take this." And then he walked into the rain without an umbrella, which is the kind o

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