Never meet your heroes

Curry had reconstructed the material substance of Lamb’s mad-looking string map on paper, better than I ever could have, and wanted me to attest that his two dimensional replica was faithful enough that he could now pull down the real thing and transfer it into our possession. I took my time and gave it the genuine effort he deserved, checking his copy against the original point by point, until Anton came in with a pot of tea and a tray with biscuits lined up so perfectly only an elderly, queer elf could ever have pulled it off. Nan would probably rather like Anton and his fussy biscuit tray, I thought.

“I think you have the right of it,” I said finally, having made only two minor corrections to his work, and Curry beamed at me with such pleased little boyish satisfaction that I grasped perfectly why Anton had pegged me as the pragmatic one. He began pulling down the string, winding up each strand carefully and making note of which nails it was twisted round, and packing each bit away with care.

“Do you make these, or buy them?” I asked Anton after I’d eaten two of his jocolat dipped coconut biscuits. “I’ve never had anything like this before.”

“They’re from Cora’s on Flannery.”

“Oh, I know that place,” Curry said, taking a bite of his and setting it back on the plate so he could get back to extricating the map from all the nails. “I’m going to get Nan some of these,” he informed us cheerfully, with his mouth half full, which made Anton smile.

“Anton said we could go over there and have a look,” I said after a couple minutes of this. “Maybe we’ll find something that gives us an idea where to look for Lamb’s shade.”

Curry looked sharply up at this unexpected unearthing of a topic we never, ever mentioned in front of others, and then I saw him quickly put it together that apparently I had seen fit to trust Anton with this. Since one of Curry’s best qualities was that he never second-guessed my judgment in front of an audience, he simply nodded as if he found nothing unusual about this decision. “We might also find some more of this type of thing,” he pointed out.

“If the guards didn’t take it already,” I said.

Curry shrugged as he gently pulled the second to last corner of the map free from the door. “Like he said,” he replied, nodding to Anton, “on the face of it none of this looks like the kind of thing somebody gets killed over. Really, the only stand-out about all this is him keeping it put away out of sight. So if his secret project materials are this innocuous, maybe he has other stuff and the guards completely ignored it. They didn’t open up this door, after all.”

“Yeah. Probably focused on the actual scene.”

When he had the map taken down and rolled up safely to come home with us, Curry peered at Lamb’s door. “Do we know it opens from this side?” he asked Anton, who nodded.

“It does, though it isn't hinged this direction so I can't say whether there’s anything blocking it on the other side," Anton said. "But if you can unlock it, there’s nothing to the door itself that should stop you.”

Curry moved out of the way to make room for me. I got into my belt pouch and pulled out my tension key and pick wire. I was privately very pleased, since I had Anton for an audience this time, that it took barely thirty seconds until I heard the third lever click into place. But I kept my face straight, as if I had exactly expected this, when I turned the knob and pushed on the door—only for it to bump partway open into a piece of furniture on the other side.

“Damn it.” Curry made a sound of irritation. “Well. So much for that.”

“Wait, Mag,” I said. “It opens partway, I might be able to—” I left off, trying to work out whether I could squeeze through such a narrow space, then decided it was a good enough bet that I might as well try. I pulled off my belt and handed it to him, then got on the floor, tilted my shoulders, and wriggled on my side, getting my head and shoulders through with some difficulty, before realizing this wouldn’t work. “Just a sec,” I said, withdrawing and then reinserting myself with my arms over my head, squirming forward and easing myself through up to my ribcage.

“Fuzzy, I swear to Lytie if you get yourself stuck like this,” Curry began, then left off to watch with what I could only assume was horrified fascination on his side. “Are you—”

“—I think I have it,” I said, twisting to angle my hips to slither through, then dragging myself under one of the biggest, heaviest armoires I’d ever encountered. I was lucky, that it had tall legs and a good ten inches of clearance from the floor, because I could never have moved the thing on my own.

Laboriously I inched myself through the narrow opening of the door where it stopped against the back of the armoire, then over the course of several minutes wormed my way through the underside of the wooden behemoth and lay heaving for air with my legs still on Anton’s side.

“I don’t give it basically any odds I can move this giant thing to let you in,” I said to Curry on the other side, pulling my feet through and turning onto my back on Lamb’s floor to give myself a rest. “Let’s say a prayer to somebody that I can crawl back through here when I’m done looking around.”

“Fuzzy?” Curry’s voice went suddenly sharp with alarm. “I think—”

“Shhhh,” I hushed him, “yeah, somebody’s coming in!” I kicked the door shut from my side and looked desperately for a hiding spot—the underside of the armoire wouldn’t hide me well enough—and the only place I saw was a bed. I twisted and crawled free of the armoire, then rolled under Lamb’s bed just as the door opened and two pairs of legs walked in.

“You know what you’re looking for now, that you didn’t know then?” asked a vaguely familiar male-sounding voice that I couldn’t quite place.

“Simmer down, princess,” replied another voice I knew extremely well but for years had only heard in bad dreams. “Don’t get your pretty knickers twisted." He sounded agreeable, if such a thing were possible. "Lieutenant wants me to get back some files belonging to the sixth.”

“By all means, constable,” the other person said dryly to Lydell. Heart in my throat, I wondered if whoever was with him would do anything about it, if this hulking monster dragged me out from under the bed and decided I should pay a steep price for his silence. I felt a prickling on my face and scalp and realized I was physically noticing the sensation of breaking into a cold sweat. This was going to be... possibly very bad.

“Feel free to help,” Lydell drawled, yanking open a drawer in the clothes dresser, “unless you’re too good for that now with your fancy promotion.”

“Too true,” the almost-familiar voice muttered shortly under his breath, then crossed to pull open the top drawer of the bed stand, giving the contents an apparently superficial look before shutting it again.

Fuck, I thought, when I realized this person was crouching to look under the bed. I **** myself not to squeeze my eyes shut in sheer terror. Because, it wasn't Lydell looking, at least.

The almost-familiar voice belonged to Sergeant-Constable Baggett, who blinked in surprise but otherwise reacted not at all to having found me hiding under a murdered guard's bed. For a moment we met eyes and in his face I saw only mild curiosity, as if he were a little interested in something he had catalogued as none of his business.

“Anything?” Lydell wanted to know. “Or do you need me to do it for you?” He said that in a sneering tone, then took one heavy step toward the bed.

“Nope. Only dust bunnies,” Baggett said, dragging his eyes past me as if he truly hadn’t seen anything, and bracing his hands on his thighs as he straightened back up.

Lydell’s boots moved to the wardrobe, which was when Baggett observed mildly, “I’m surprised nobody thought it was worth warding a door leading into the victim’s bedroom.”

“Right, because we wouldn’t want someone sneaking in through the unused closet with a four hundred pound piece of furniture blocking it,” Lydell remarked sourly, which made me wonder whether he was the one who had secured Lamb’s apartment.

“Well-known, popular detective slain by mysterious assailant with no evident motive?” Baggett asked. “Good point. Probably no reporters or junior officers interested in rubbernecking that guy’s place. Can you move this thing?”

“Whatever you say, detective,” Lydell snorted.

“Can you move the wardrobe?” Baggett asked again. “Residential buildings in this neighborhood are too old to have built in closets. That thing probably led to another room back before this floor was busted up into apartments. Besides, who the hell puts a piece of furniture in front of a perfectly good closet?”

In answer there was only a scraping sound as Lydell pushed the wardrobe away from the door.

Gods, I really hoped Curry had closed and locked the door on Anton’s side.

When the wardrobe was out of the way Lydell pulled the door open and made a noise of apparent surprise, though I couldn’t guess whether it was simply because Baggett had correctly surmised there was no closet there, or because the open, unlocked door suggested somebody had actually been through.

“What’re all these nails?” Lydell asked in a bemused sort of tone that almost approached curiosity, assuming he were capable of that.

“Probably from a century ago,” Baggett said. “Looks like you were right on this one. See how dusty that door knob is? Nobody’s opened this thing up in the last decade or more.”

There was a long pause, then Lydell said, “I thought you were supposed to be clever, or something,” and shut the door.

“Never meet your heroes, my friend,” Baggett said easily, at which I managed somehow not to laugh aloud, then added, “Eh, I wouldn’t bother,” when I heard the wardrobe begin to scrape back across the floor. “Not worth the trouble. Some asshole like me will just ask you to move it again next time somebody wants to dig into this place, yeah?” The scraping sound stopped.

I made a mental note that I owed this Baggett guy pints pretty much until eternity, for having both pretended I wasn’t there and then going an extra step further and intentionally leaving me an easier escape route.

Lydell muttered something unintelligible in response, then opened the wardrobe and began rifling through it looking for the files he wanted. “Under the mattress,” he said to Baggett before much time had passed, in the manner of someone trying not to forget his to-do list. “We should check there too.”

Something in the way Baggett’s feet were positioned gave me the impression he was thinking the same as me: sure, because everybody hides their totally innocent borrowed police files under the mattress. “I’ll do it,” he said anyway, and commenced a theatrical but half-assed search of Lamb’s bed, avoiding doing anything that might give me away. After two or three minutes of not really doing much of genuine substance he announced, “Nothing here but a girlie magazine,” pulling said item out and tossing it on the bed.

“Anything good?” Lydell asked with apparent interest.

“Couldn't tell you,” Baggett said dryly. “Being happily married to a man, myself.”

Lydell laughed in an almost friendly, good-natured way. “Right, I forgot you’re a fag.” Baggett cleared his throat pointedly, and Lydell added with mild contrition, “Sorry. Forgot people don’t like the word fag anymore.”

Baggett made a noncommittal sound.

I heard a rustle of paper and realized with distaste that Lydell had taken the dirty magazine and was flipping through its pages.

I counted the seconds in my head while they spent what I estimated as another ten minutes searching Lamb’s apartment. Baggett deflected Lydell any time it occurred to him to look at anything near the bed, and in the end Lydell didn’t seem to turn up anything he wanted besides the pinup magazine.

“Your files probably wound up somewhere at the Fourth,” Baggett pointed out as they moved to the front room. “They can check the document repository there. Have someone send Chaudry the names for the cases.”

“Sure,” Lydell said. “Well, let’s get back.”

“Can’t just now,” Baggett said, “I have another errand. But catch me later if you need anything else from this scene, yeah?”

Lydell muttered his agreement, and I lay there listening as they let themselves out and relocked the front door. When it was quiet, I crawled out from under the bed and decided that despite what Curry had said, the fact that Baggett and Lydell hadn’t turned up anything more notable than a nude magazine probably meant that we’d already found all Lamb’s interesting stuff.

Or, that was easier telling myself that than admitting I was a coward and wanted to be done with this particular adventure.

I pulled open Lamb's door and rapped on Anton’s side for Curry to let me in. It swung open immediately. “Fuck’s sake,” Curry swore, “where did you hide? How did they not find you? I about puked I was so worried!”

“I got lucky. Baggett saw me under the bed and he kept Lydell away.”

“Speaking of,” Anton said briskly, “not that I wish to seem unhelpful, but there isn’t a city employee who doesn’t know that man’s reputation. This wasn't risky, but I'd rather not get involved with any trouble he's into. You can keep what you found—but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t turn back up or do anything conspicuous that sends him my way.”

This was a disappointing development, but what could we say? Curry and I traded a sober look and nodded our agreement.