Entry 13

Those who follow my fledgling exploits know that I more than dabble in painting in between cases.  Playing with paint on a canvas is more than a creative outlet for me; it’s downright therapeutic.  The small studio I’ve fashioned out of a room in my Greenwich Village brownstone is where I go to mend after a hard day’s night in the field; my version of a padded cell where I can smother myself in titanium white paint as if it were gauze bandage.   I spend a lot of my spare time in front of a canvas, trying to capture the images bouncing around in my head.   Just getting those images to sit still long enough to depict them is one thing, and having the skill to actually paint what I see is another.   Like a lot of my cases, my paintings don’t turn out as originally planned.      

Kyoko would prefer I spend all my time in that studio, painting, rather than chasing insurance claims down dead end dark alleys.   I’m not sure she understands how much I need the frenzied action as well as the restorative calm.  Strike that.   Who am I trying to kid?  Kyoko understands this relationship all too well and is deathly afraid of where it’s taking me.   Can’t say as I blame her.   She’s afraid that each swing of the pendulum I’m riding takes me ever-further out on a limb.  In ways it doesn’t matter much whether I’m swinging out with a paint brush or a revolver; either can be a deadly weapon in the right hands.  

Kyoko’s afraid that one of these times I’ll fly off, out of control, and plunge head-long into an abyss from which there’s no coming back.   That’s always a possibility in my line of work.    I’m a danger junkie.   Not just action, but danger.  I like it most when my ass is on the line, when the odds are stacked against me and there’s absolutely positively no way out of the jam I’ve gotten myself into.   But I’ve always been a bit thick-skulled and never have known when I’m beaten.   I don’t quit, I just keep on coming; like the dumb bunny with the never-dying batteries or Arnold in Terminator mode.   Sudden death is Hazard Time, when it’s your very best against mine.   Two men enter, one man leaves; my personal Thunderdome.  

I have no illusions about being the best at what I do.   I’m a fair hand at a good many things, but being the best at anything is such a mouthful.    There’s always someone smarter, faster, better or crazier than you out there, somewhere, and in gunslinger terms it’s only a matter of time before you meet them.  Let’s face it: having to continually prove you’re the best is a burdensome bore.  

My approach to longevity is different.   It’s been said that I have a penchant for making people around me uncomfortable because I live so far out on the ledge and rarely play true to form.   I’m the surprise in the box of cereal you’re eating, the wolf in sheep’s clothing you’ve invited to dinner, the bogeyman lurking under your bed.   I’m never what you expect, and I can tie you up in knots trying to figure me out when I want to; its part of the game of knowing, sometimes guessing the limitations of others while never loosing sight of my own.  

I’m better than good at moving people out of their comfort zone and into mine.   I may have been Torquemada in a past life for all the pleasure I get out of mind-fucking my prey while gently turning the screws.   I watch the needle of their tolerance creep into the red then amp up the volume and accelerate the action even further until it reaches a fever pitch that’s mad dog rabid over-the-top insane.  

I know I can function under those conditions, but can they?   

An eerie calm comes over me in those situations.   All the chips are in the middle of the table and I should be sweating the outcome, but I never do.   I’ve been ‘all-in’ all my life, piecing my patchwork quilt of a self together, so betting everything on a single hand has become old hat to me.   Some think I hold some sort of death wish, but quite the opposite is true.   Death and I are old drinking buddies, and as long as he and I are swapping shots at the bar I know it’s not me he’s come for.   I’ve been to the edge so many times gazing into the abyss no longer fazes me.   Can I help it if others shit their shorts and break out in nose bleeds when I lead them out onto the narrow cliff ledge I call home?  

It’s fate accompli at that point.   I know I have them when they begin to squirm and start second-guessing their judgment and their footing.   They begin to hyperventilate and want to slow the action, but I ratchet-up the pressure yet again until they begin to sweat through their clothes.   They start to stutter and repeat themselves; desperate to break the confusion and panic now gripping them long enough to find a safe way back down the mountain.    They realize that one mistake at that fever-pitch pace and high altitude is one mistake too many, so I flat-out force the issue to its moment of truth; confident that I won’t make that fatal mistake and that the other guy will.   

I’m not sure why Kyoko finds such a successful approach so objectionable.   It’s almost as if she was determined to deprive me of my fun. 

Entry 12

Every so often even a dumb gumshoe like me gets struck by lightning and listens to the voices chattering away in his head.   Those who know me will attest to the fact that hearing voices is nothing new to me, and might punctuate such a revelation with a Miles Davis-sized “So What?”  I could counter by cautioning that listening isn’t quite the same as hearing, but then we could go around in an endless dance of circles and get nowhere, and I’ve not been known to be a guy who wastes time.

So I’ll cut to the chase and call author dearest in for a sit-down.   These dissertations of ours are taking too much time to cobble together, and I also suspect they’re taking too much time to read.  I’m going by my own personal preferences, here, but I’m not fond of reading long passages of anything on a computer, let alone a smartphone, if I can avoid it.   I’ve got middle-aged eyes that predate the digital age, so I can imagine it’s probably less than inviting to have to scan the thousand-word epistles me and the guy behind the curtain patch together.   I’m not talking about migrating down to Nietzschean-length aphorisms — neither one of us pretend to be so profound — but less is more is as valid to writers as it is architects.   

Shortening these entries would at least ease the workload.  I’ve got a backlog of cases to bring up to date, and that’s only the ones I do above board.   I’ve also been known to do some moonlighting now and then, off the books and in varying degrees outside the law; special ‘favors’ for close friends who need a helping hand righting a wrong or equalizing a deck stacked against them.   I’ve been ‘moonlighting’ since my days on the force, and so have compiled quite a collection of adventures.   I don’t charge my “Moonlight Noir” clients for my services, and have been lucky to survive more than a few of these sidebars, but for a guy who likes working in shadows and settling scores they’re just what the doctor ordered.    I’ve even toyed with the idea of chronicling some of them for you, but just haven’t found the time to put pen to paper.   Like so much else, the hard part’s getting started.     

The guy at the wheel, meanwhile, is revising the structure of my next major case, Blood Rituals, to reflect changes in location and plot previously discussed.   I like where it’s going, but since I’ve been sworn to secrecy there’s not much I can say about it except that he’s moving the mayhem to the big city, and the resulting carnage brought on by the collision of stolen artifacts, drug cartels, blood sacrifices and ancient cults, to say nothing of the return of a vintage femme fatale I used to be involved with is about to complicate the hell out of my life.      

I’m a firm believer in the fact that one has to know one’s limitations, and that goes as much for writers as it does hard-boiled detectives.   I’m sensing I’m about to reach mine and in self defense will need to trim these entries down to a more manageable size.   We’ll see what that means, exactly.  Every entry, like every one of my cases, takes on a life of its own, regardless, so let’s leave form the freedom to follow function and see where that leads.    

Entry 11

Something’s been stabbing at my gut since my return from Mexico that I can’t seem to shake; the disquieting sensation of no longer being one with the city I love and have always called home.   If I didn’t know better I’d say I was in mourning, and that’s made this particular entry especially hard to jot down.    

Grappling with my emotions is not an entirely new sensation, but then neither is my growing disaffection with what I perceive has happened to New York.   I’ve been resisting a nagging sense of estrangement from it for some time, now; the way one tries to ward off a cold.   You know the feeling: you shrug off the aches, pains and sniffles as best you can, but if a bug’s persistent enough it can ultimately wear you down no matter how many drugs you drop in your system.  All of a sudden it hits you like a brick house and you’re confined to bed fighting feverish chills and the numbing banality of daytime TV.    That’s what’s happened in this instance.    The sense of detachment and alienation between me and the city that has been gnawing at my toes finally widened its jaws and swallowed me whole.   

Call it my F. Scott Fitzgerald moment, aptly reflected in his My Lost City; a piece he wrote in 1932 after climbing to the top of the newly-built Empire State Building.    It was upon looking out at the city from its then highest structure that Fitzgerald understood what he called “the crowning error of the city,” the sobering realization “that New York was a city after all and not a universe”, a realization that caused “the shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination [to come] crashing to the ground.”   

For reasons I’m at a loss to explain, I waxed nostalgic along those same lines as I gazed out at the city from the window of the plane.   Maybe it was the lethargy I still felt from all that downtime under palm trees of the Yucatan, or maybe it was the after-effects of my having lost a bet with Kyoko the night before over a bottle of tequila, and the worm I drank was still alive and turning in my entrails, but for whatever reason my resistance to sullen introspection was ebbing to an all-time low.   The landing flight path took us straight up Broadway; but my usual sense of wonderment and pride over that view immediately soured as we neared the southern tip of Manhattan.          

I got my first glimpse from the air of the newly-completed Memorial Plaza, and might as well have been gazing upon the face of Medusa.  Before I could stop it, a torrent of quicksilver memories of that September morning cut through me like Rio’s straight razor.  I felt like a kid who had just tripped and spilled his bag of marbles, and who had to frantically scurry in a vain attempt to somehow catch them all.   Only my reflexes weren’t fast enough, so I sat helpless as my Pandora’s Box of memories vomited up thick billowing black clouds of vaporized steel, glass and flesh and splattered them across my mind’s eye.   I sat, frozen, a prisoner of my own recollections, and looked on as those plumes of smoke and flame continued to churn, fuelled by jet engines, only to then abruptly collapse in a pan-caking cascade of debris crumbling towards the ground.   Finally, my self-defenses kicked-in and dissolved the avalanche of mangled debris into a gentle shower of tears pouring into the pools the footprints of the Towers had become; black granite pools plugged, like dual computer processor chips, into the earth in a vain attempt to help us calibrate and come to terms with what was lost. 

If that wasn’t disturbing enough, that somber and unsettling vision immediately collided with another as we continued north, to the cluster-fuck of meandering pedestrians cluttering the Disney-like mall we’ve made of Times Square; a swarming hive of pixies armed with shopping bag wings fluttering under lights so blinding they cowed night itself into submission.   Huge digital billboards boosted ads thousands of feet in the air, and mammoth-sized screens bombarded passersby with an endless loop of xenophobic newscasts and promos geared to wearers of disposable income in any currency known to man.  Midtown stared up at me like a painted whore plucked from the garish parlor of a border town bordello; hustling harmless thrills to the throngs of faceless, nameless tourists that even we so-called residents have become.    

Suddenly it all seemed horribly wrong and hopelessly foreign.   I had to shake and remind myself that this wasn’t a storyboard set left over from Blade Runner.    This was supposed to be New York, a city I’ve called home since my birth and fell hopelessly in love with soon thereafter, but that now seemed uncomfortably distant and alien, and I was overcome by a momentous sense of loss.   Perhaps it was the sharp juxtaposition of those two conflicting images which hit me like a runaway sixteen-wheeler.  Maybe my fatigue after the long flight home made me especially susceptible to the vagaries of an ever-changing landscape.   Maybe I was finally struck by just how much our obsession with being constantly entertained on one hand and kept safe and secure on the other has ultimately cost us, but whatever it was I sat in my seat on the plane and wondered how the city of eight million people could abruptly go missing.  

Well, perhaps not abruptly.  As already noted, my F. Scott Fitzgerald moment has been quietly rehearsing inside me for some time.   Putting things in perspective is part of what I’m suppose to do for a living, so I understand that New York has always reinvented itself and that it’s skyscrapers, like so many of its features, have perennially come and gone.   I know the grid has been erected, dismantled and built up again, generation after generation, as the city inexorably grew.   I know that the city the Dutch founded rose as an edifice to commerce, driven by the engines of self-profit, pragmatic accommodation and unbounded imagination.   New York rose on the landscape like a modern day Yggdrasil, a great, man-made world tree with deep roots anchored in bedrock and stretching out towards all horizons.   Its over-reaching branches formed a thick, protective canopy from whose boughs hung fruits both promised and forbidden in Eden.   The city was an open, limitless harbor and idyllic haven to the tallest ships and the greatest dreams.  Its towering buildings were cathedrals to the business of dauntless ambition, and its shimmering lure reduced the Atlantic Ocean to a veritable river Jordan; becoming the melting pot and chief port of entry into the Promised Land that was the New World. 

The rest of the country didn’t always like or understand the great experiment that was New York, but the best and the brightest followed the yellow brick road that invariably led here, regardless.   Who could blame them?   Only in the Emerald City could each and every one of them glimpse behind the curtain and dare become who they were.   New York became the yardstick of all effort and ambition and the one true measure of success.   Here all things were possible, and when fame and fortune was won and lost one could be consoled by the fact that, in New York at least, it could be won yet again if you were worthy.   We were the great cauldron, the world’s pressure-cooker, the personified energy and aspiration of an age, the jewel in Lady Liberty’s crown and raison d’etre for an entire nation.   Here, in the daunting canyons of New York’s towering skyline, and not in the wilting cornfields of Iowa, was America’s true Field of Dreams.     

I’m not sure exactly where and when that changed, but it has and I don’t like it.  

Being the fictional dick that I am I know a frame job when I see one, so I have no intention of laying the blame for this sad turn of affairs at the 9/11 doorstep, as if one more orphan of war.   Too much bullshit’s been swept under that rug, already.  We’ve been force-fed enough lies and misdirection as it is, so I’m not going to add to our collective indigestion.   Let’s keep it real and remind ourselves that New York has always been a target because of what it was and what it symbolized.   There’s nothing new about envy, hatred and fear, and we’ve always had more than our fair share of enemies; foreign and especially domestic.   That kind of animus comes with the territory.  We’ve always been brash, even arrogant, albeit sometimes provincial, but we’ve also always been best, and we’ve always defiantly weathered all storms and have emerged bigger, better and badder for all the sticks and stones thrown at us.     So let’s cut the crap and admit that the shock of that morning in September wasn’t that the Towers were attacked — both we and they had been attacked before — what we can’t forgive, forget or abide by is that fact that they actually fell.   I keep seeing the collapse of those ugly-duckling towers in my mind, a bad dream stuck in an endless cycle of rewind and play, and begrudgingly admit that their falling struck me like the breaking of an inviolate promise; the breach of sacred contract, a betrayal, almost and a shattering demonstration that there was indeed, as Fitzgerald saw seventy years ago, a limit to the city, it’s people and it’s power.  

It’s not our innocence that was lost on September 11 —we never had any to lose — but our collective hubris; our peculiar expression of Manifest Destiny and brazen audacity that enabled us to reach up and out and construct towers to the stars.   To be painfully honest — always dangerous — I’m not sure we still possess the energy, the audacity and the resolve to rebuild them.    

You can say I’m full of shit and I won’t argue, but that don’t make me wrong.   I look at the city lately and don’t like what I see.    I don’t like its fortress-like mentality, the constant surveillance, the barricades and check points, our bunker mentality and the Doublespeak of the media and our so-called ‘leaders’ trying to convince us that living in constant fear is natural.  New York was once the great transformer, the great shape-changer to all within its seemingly endless reach, but the tables have turned and the city has now become the thing that is routinely gutted and flayed.  I look at New York these days and see every other outlet strip mall in the country; the same fast food restaurants selling us shit we shouldn’t eat, the same retail chains selling us cheap shit we didn’t make and the same luxury stops selling quality shit most of us can’t afford.   We pay lip service to mutual accommodation and diversity, and no one knows or cares about what and who was here before them or can tell you the name of who lives next door.   New York has always been a magnet for the clash of outrageous wealth and abject poverty, but there was usually an open conduit between the two that’s now as distant and forgotten now as a decent egg-cream and the Third Avenue L.   

I’m not about to pull a Pete Hamill and reminisce on times gone-by.  He does it far better than I could, and his memory is longer than mine.   But even this native son can see we’ve become a city of transients, a stopover for both the mega-rich whose luxury condos are little more than time-shares to a bite of the Big Apple and for the growing underclass only here holding fill-in gigs en route to being something somewhere else.   We’ve become a city of tourists, hipsters, sand-baggers and day-traders profiting on playing small margins and selling each other short.   Our one and only product now is bullshit.   Everyone wants in on the action, but it’s all done by proxy and remote control, and when no one is accountable someone else is always to blame.  No one has enough real skin in the game anymore to give a “Whoop-De-Damn Do” when the cameras aren’t turning.    Everyone arrives here now primping for their close-up and their fifteen minutes of fame, and since they know all the answers they dismiss everyone else with the condescending disdain they once reserved for itinerant busboys.   They’re not content becoming part of the great melting pot; they’re all self-styled Reggie Jackson’s determined to stir the whole drink.  But if they’re that fucking smart I wonder why they had to leave home in the first place.         

My snoop’s nose tells me the tragic events of September 11 didn’t start this transformation, but they may well have marked its culmination; the shattering moment when you realize that even the greatest cities can fall down.  

That’s the F. Scott moment I had while gazing out an airplane window at the city on my way home from Mexico.   I’m not one to cut and run when things get tough, but I’m also not entirely stupid.   Next time I’ll book a seat on the aisle and spare myself the grief.      

Entry 10

It’s good to be home, though I’m not sure why the return trip — from anywhere — is always more exhausting than going there was in the first place.  Why is that?   In my case I’ve been getting lazy on a beach in the Gulf, but I’m not sure that explains why the flight home seemed as if Kyoko and I were returning from New Zealand, not Mexico.   Unlike some people, I don’t sleep well on a plane, so I used the time to give the planned revisions to my upcoming case another look while Kyoko nodded off on my shoulder.   I’m lucky she didn’t drool on my suit.  

To say I like what I see in those notes would be an understatement.   I’ll give the guy at the wheel credit: he does come up with some off-the-wall shit for me to get out of; combining an odd assortment of elements one doesn’t expect to find.   He says that’s to keep me on my toes, but I really think that’s just the way his mind works.   The elements aren’t unique or earth-shattering in and of themselves, but his choice of which ones to combine and in what way can be — providing you drink your stories dark, offbeat and somewhat twisted; just like me.   Blood Rituals promises to be no exception, but I just hope the landscape settles down enough for him to actually put proverbial pen to paper; in a purely digital way, of course.    While catching up on all the changes, though, I couldn’t help but worry that I may be in for another roller coaster ride not so much of story, but of process.   I still wake up in cold sweats about the circuitous way my last case evolved, and I’m not sure even a hard-boiled gumshoe like me would like to embark upon that kind of nightmarish journey again. 

I’ve mentioned how difficult my last case, Portrait of Deadly Excess, was to record, but I may not have been entirely forthcoming as to its convoluted gestation.   Yes, I spilled my guts about how Kane and I tussled over which one of us was going to be top dog, and may have also confided how my introduction to a pre-existing case required it be entirely rewritten with a different center and emphasis in mind.   Draft after draft typed by in what seemed an endless dance of shadows, of entrances and exits, of ever-changing roles, some expanding while others shrank, of certain angles asserting themselves at the expense of others, of whole scenes and sequences moving forwards and backwards in the structure, and in deciding how much to say and where best to say it, before the final work fell into place.  

These are universal issues every writer confronts, but the process of chronicling this particular case was further complicated by the fact that the guy at the controls decided to try his hand at adapting his own work for the screen in between his drafts of the novel and his attempts to find an agent or publisher.  He’d work on the script while marketing the novel, and then polish off the novel while trying to sell the script.    But fiction and screenplays are two very different forms, each with its own requirements, protocols and restraints.   Each required he tell the story and convey information in a different way.    He began to realize that specific passages, devices and angles that worked well in one medium did not work especially well in the other.   The back-and-forth process also revealed problems and inconsistencies in the basic plot and structure, and that required that both novel and script be fixed.      

The back-and-forth made me dizzy; like watching an endless exchange of volleys in a tennis match.  Nor did all of these changes go down with me as easy as the glass of 12 year old Michel Couvreur I’m drinking.   A lot of my introspective commentary and author omniscient narration that worked in the novel flew as far as Icarus before melting in the bright light of the silver screen.   Author-dearest realized the basic structure of the story made the often-used first person narration of some classic noir stories untenable in this instance; there were a few specific scenes of the case I wasn’t privy to because I wasn’t, couldn’t be, there.    Besides, film is a visual medium, and voiceover narration in mid-stream — even when said by the best characters/actors — can often come across as an intrusion of the visual narration one’s watching.   In film, the camera itself is the point of view, and voiceover narration, even the best — MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Mitchum in Out of the Past, Neal in Detour, and Welles in Lady from Shanghai — can call attention to itself in ways the author might otherwise prefer to avoid if only he or she could solve the problem of imparting that need-to-know info or mood in some other, purely visual way.        

Conversely, the BANG BANG action sequences which came to life so effortlessly on the screen do not work nearly as well on the written page.   Action in any written format is hard to pull off largely because the author’s process of writing action gets in the way of our imagining it.  Action voids time, collapses it into a sharp staccato of movement.  You can see something in an instant, but it can take a writer many words to describe the same motion on the page, and it takes the reader many seconds to assimilate a sentence or more.   Film eliminates that time lapse because it takes less time to show action on the screen than it does to read or write it.    It’s tempting, of course, to sacrifice character and plot to loud and explosive action sequences, and to make the wizardry of ever-greater special effects the spine on which you build whole stories, but one becomes anesthetized to pure action after a while; it’s a lot like crack and other narcotics, the more you take the more you want and the more it consumes everything else.  Hell, I’m a self-professed action-junkie, but even I know less is more sometimes.   For me it’s the characters and story that need to be 3-D, not the picture.      

It took the guy at the wheel a while to learn these lessons, just as he eventually learned that dialogue has greater stress on it in film than it does on the page.    In film you actually have a real life actor mouthing the lines, so they better POP and not come across as forced or false or contrived.   You can’t prop up weak dialogue on the screen the way you can on the page.    Unfortunately, unless you’re terribly gifted in both word and ear making characters speak as people really do in life can be like having root canal done without Novocain.   If you’re anything like most people, you don’t always say the perfect thing in any given situation.   You often walk away wondering “why didn’t I say that, instead?”   For that reason, it’s better to write dialogue as a character SHOULD speak if they had all their wits and emotions in the moment about them.  Dialogue’s a lot like makeup for the stage or screen; the lights of the medium itself are so brutal and unforgiving that you’ve got to put makeup on to look natural.  

And so on the process went for the better part of a decade.  I’ll cut the guy some slack because he was working a day job all that time, but that didn’t change the fact that I was getting moldy waiting in the wings while all this tinkering was going on.   More frustrating still was the fact that there was still no market for me in the end.   Not as a novel, not as a script.   I suspect it may have been my in-your-face attitude and mixed racial makeup that got in the way, but I’ll leave that particular rant for another time.  Even a fictional character’s feelings can get hurt by repeated rejection, but I’ve also been known to occasionally delight in proving others wrong.   My doubters made me better, stronger; they helped the guy who writes me figure out what he was doing wrong.   I was there to help.   Fictional characters do that, too, you know.   Actors aren’t the only ones who nudge, nag, and throw fits and tantrums in their dressing rooms.   Fictional characters do it, too.   If we’re worth our salt we also change lines, refuse to say the really bad ones, and have the audacity to suggest we do this instead of that.   We steal scenes, alter sequences, and point out missed dramatic opportunities.  

Despite the ego-tripping all-too-common of our so-called ‘creators’, we fictional characters have some good ideas of our own now and again.  The trick for authors is to pay attention to our kibitzing or risk having a stillborn child on their hands.       

Entry 9

Sometimes we all need a wake up call; an event or a sign illustrating that we’ve strayed off our particular straight and narrow, an indication that adjustments are necessary if we’re to salvage our objective, our case or our cause.   That goes for authors, too.    It takes a few brains and a large dose of common sense to listen to those big or little voices babbling to us in our heads,     and the sooner we listen the sooner we get those heads out of our ass and back on track where they belong.    

That might explain why I’m packing my bags while Kyoko’s calling us a cab to the airport.   I can smell the burned rubber from the tread marks left by my author’s abrupt about-face, but I’m supposed to be a nimble sort of guy who can deftly change directions on a dime.   His authorial brain is feverishly plotting out the implications that the change of scenery will have on the case, and has even stumbled on another twist in the plot that opens up an over-sized satchel worth of new possibilities that could pay off big time as the story unfolds.            

I can’t spill my guts prematurely, of course.   The devilish details haven’t been set in stone, yet, and I don’t want to spoil our collective fun of finding out what happens as we turn the page.   The guy who writes these potboilers would really be pissed if I tipped my mitt on what he has in mind.   Then again, he’d also probably take offense at my calling my adventures ‘potboilers’.  As I’ve mentioned before, he’s the sensitive sort, and likes to think he’s writing literary suspense, whatever the fuck that means.  My guess is that he thinks that using the term ‘literary’ implies he’s not an out-an-out hack and that the words, when strung together, have some value as literature beyond their more pedestrian function of moving the story along.   I’m not sure he’s gotten the memo that no one really gives a flying shit anymore.  

I say this with affection, of course, but the guy at the controls is something of an anachronism.  He’s been plugging away writing things for a very long time with barely the proverbial pot to piss in or window to throw it out of to show for his efforts, and he sometimes gets thrown by change despite his frequent embrace of it.   His thinking, especially about his art and his craft, can sometimes border on archaic.   Take this blog, for example.  He knows absolutely nothing about writing a blog or the social networking that can make it such an influential tool in both the ether and the marketplace.   Its ulterior purpose, of course, is to sell the brand I’m trying hard to become.  Hopefully that commercial intent doesn’t dampen the fun we can have together, but reality must occasionally intrude on these exchanges if author dearest is to put food on the table.   

But that’s what I don’t get about him.   To say he doesn’t always do what’s in his commercial best interest as a writer seeking an audience would be a gargantuan understatement along the lines of saying the Titanic sprung a slight leak after hitting that iceberg,   He hasn’t exactly been the best friend of his own career.   The first strike against him, besides his being a pathetically poor networker, is that he writes for himself, not a prospective audience per se.   He doesn’t stop to think what the public might want to read; he only considers what he wants to write, and he doesn’t always understand how far behind the eight-ball that puts him.  I’m not sure he understands just how self-absorbed our audience today really is.  They’re too obsessed with their own problems to care very much about the ones he would call attention to.  They’re also not all that into risk-taking.  Hell, even werewolves and vampires these days have been de-clawed and de-fanged, transformed into antiseptic creatures that live mundane middle class lives save for the curious circumstance of their particular ‘condition’; which is about as central to their being as their hair color.   They’re different, but in a pretentious, harmless, innocuous sort of way and, though looking somewhat pale or iridescent in daylight are still safe and presentable enough for teenage girls to bring home to mother.  

The second strike against author dearest is that he’s one of those writers who mix more than just metaphors in his stories; he mixes styles, traditions and genres, not to mention tenses.  My opening case, Portrait of Deadly Excess, for example, is equal parts suspense, classic noir mystery, neo-noir, genre horror, supernatural noir and attempted social commentary.   Is it any wonder traditional publishers and agents wouldn’t touch it!  They probably couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.   I keep telling him the public — and that includes the so-called gatekeepers and doyens of the entertainment industry — wants known, well-defined and tried-and-true formulas, unpredictable around the edges perhaps to give the illusion of novelty but at core conforming to dozens of books and vehicles they’ve read, represented and produced before.   People don’t want new and they don’t want different.   People want a sure bet, the homerun, the in-your-face slam dunk that brings down the house.   They want comfort amusement that mildly surprises but more importantly reaffirms and reassures.  They want more of the same, the same as themselves, the same as their next door neighbor, the same as the cardboard cutouts we call ‘celebrities’ and ‘leaders’; any bright, sparkly designer bag filled with warmed-over crap aimed at diverting us from the deeper, darker questions threatening the promised safety of our lives. 

To that overriding sentiment of today’s marketplace author dearest delivers me, a hard-assed son-of-a-bitch who threatens your safe, sanitized status quo with his very presence.   I’m an uncompromising half-breed who goes off in search of all sorts of inequities and injustices that you would prefer to totally ignore if not deny, and I also have the audacity to try to set them right against not only assorted villains and bad guys but also against known and accepted pillars of established power.  Worse still, I somehow manage to actually pull most of that off.   I challenge everything, have the ability to, like Samson, bring down roof, and I don’t even bother to pretend to offer up new idols and reassuring answers in exchange.        

Which brings me to the third strike against him as an author: he expects the reader to work and to have something invested in the story while reading it.   You’re supposed to read between the lines and make definite associations using your own frames of reference.  He expects you to understand my mixed racial identity is as much metaphor for where we’re at as a people and a species as it is a real issue in my pathetic excuse for a life.   You’re supposed to get the hint that my refusal to embrace one half of myself at the expense of the other is really a larger rejection of false opposites and an insistence that we focus on the more important subtleties of who and what we as individuals and peoples are, and not get caught up in the barbed wire of the shallow differences of ethnicity and race.   He expects you to realize it’s not simply black and white I’m rejecting, but up and down, right and wrong, good and evil, liberal and conservative, etc.   I’m calling them what they are, bullshit, deliberate lies and well-crafted prevarications, archetypal red-herrings, and a magician’s artful misdirection where a carefully planned gesture or eloquent banter distracts you long enough for the box-jumper to pick your pocket as you applaud in the dark. 

I’ve already mentioned how all the mumbo-jumbo about the power of Kane’s paintings was just another one of his metaphors taken to the extreme; the nature of art and its ability to transfigure everyone with whom it comes into contact, including the creator.   He and I were probing into the real power of art; not only over the viewer, but over the artist.   That was the real case I was working in Portrait, wasn’t it?   We were probing less what is entailed in owning art but more what is involved in creating it.   What determines artistic success, and what are artists willing to sacrifice for it?     

There are no easy, trick answers to such questions.   My author and I know what we think, but shocking as it seems, we want you to have an opinion, too.   We don’t necessarily give a shit what that opinion is, but we want very much that you have it.   Please remember we’re not writing ‘Which Way’ stories, here, where you, the reader, choose the path the story takes.   Piss on that!  Writing, like all art in general, isn’t democratic.   Author dearest has definite ideas of where my next case, Blood Rituals, is heading, but it should be clear by now that I’m following his lead about as much as he’s following mine.     

If you want to influence something in a genuine way then influence the pandering imbeciles you entrust to elected office, influence the safety and cost of the food and products you buy at market, influence the nameless lobbyists and multinational conglomerates who daily hold you and whole nations hostage, and who, like the aforementioned magicians, dangle bright and shiny carrots in your face with one hand while they steal your lunch, if not your soul, with the other. 

But leave my cases to me and the guy at the wheel.   They’re hard enough to write as it is.

Entry 8

The guy driving this bus seems to be changing his mind about which road to take to the opening of my next case.   I’m getting the feeling I may be on my way back to New York sooner than planned.  

I should have guessed as much from his delay in getting the case underway.   He’s been giving me the stall while encouraging me to amuse myself watching sunsets at this beachfront resort on the Gulf of Mexico.   Admittedly, the scenery has been picture perfect at the postcard resort, especially whenever Kyoko’s part of the view, but I was supposed to be in Mexico City by now.   A bunch of high-ranking officials in the Mexican government are curious about the quality replicas that turned up as part of a sealed shipment of Pre-Columbian artifacts sent to a museum in New York.  Those officials insist they shipped the genuine articles, so I’ve been brought in as a two-legged bloodhound to track down what got lost on the trail.   The Consortium holds the paper on the exhibit while it’s in NYC, and isn’t thrilled to be on the hook for irreplaceable objects they contend they never had.        

The forgeries are just for openers, of course; the ole MacGuffen again.   Blood Rituals — that’s the working title of my next case— promises to be a very different kind of adventure than my last.   Portrait of Deadly Excess was, as I’ve already mentioned a cut and paste job.   In a nutshell, I was the cut and paste.   Inserting me into an already finished story, as the new leading character no less, caused considerable disruption, and the reconstruction effort took almost as long as the one that followed the Civil War.    My presence, as lead, created numerous ripples in even the most innocuous backwaters and eddies of the story.   It wasn’t merely my gamesmanship with Kane that prompted those changes; it was the very nature of my presence.  I was the lead, not Kane, and not Latimore, the one originally telling the story.   Being the protagonist and a gumshoe, it stood to reason that I had to be the one tracking down the key leads and clues, and I had to be the conduit through which most information ran.   I had to be the one earning my fee, living up to my reputation and piecing the puzzle together.   The entire story had to be retold, from a different vantage point, and with a very different structure.   It was no small undertaking, and the process gave author-dearest fits.  

Blood Rituals, on the other hand, is being conceived and written from the ground up with the basic cast and plotline already in place.   The preliminary notes and outline I’ve seen of the case has me in the proverbial shit from square one, but the story follows a more traditional noir trajectory, where the private dick methodically picks the scab of what seems to be a fairly straightforward and innocuous job and, before he knows better finds himself knee deep in a classic nest-of-vipers caper that gets more complicated with every step he takes.  

I’m down with that kind of action, but if the story is to build to a boil then someone better turn on the flame.  That’s not likely to happen while I’m sitting on a veranda sipping Balvenie.   All the prolonged wait is doing is stoking my latest case of bad feelings, a nagging suspicion that our tour guide was losing his way.  We’re not talking a strobe light and siren warning, folks, but more of a quiet, unsettling feeling deep inside my gut that warned something was radically wrong.   You know the feeling.   You calmly walk down the stairs to a subway platform and see wall-to-wall people and know right then and there that the trains are all fucked up.    You don’t need to ask a lot of fool questions of strangers who know less about what’s going on than you do, or bother waiting for an garbled announcement not one of the one-hundred sixty four languages represented on the platform can clearly understand to know that your whole afternoon just dove, head-first, into the crapper.   

My own radar for trouble has been much-written about.   I seem especially attuned to things that are ‘off’, and I was having such misgivings about my extended sojourn at this resort.   I could sense it.   Author dearest was spinning his wheels.  There was a mood of indecision in the air — always as bad a sign for writers as it is for detectives.   In both professions, you either know what you’re doing or you’re lost.  

Exactly what was taking him so long? 

Well, sure enough, turns out he was having second thoughts.  Not about me, or about my next case, but about its location.   The guy who writes me seems to be debating whether I need to be or belong in Mexico at all.    Just like him to spoil my fun.   I’m not talking about my prolonged holiday with Kyoko.  She’s a Christmas gift I get to open all year round, regardless.   I’m talking about my consternation over possibly missing an opportunity to mix it up south of the border with some people whose threshold for pain — giving and receiving it — might be equal to my own.   The carnage in Mexico isn’t getting much play in the States, probably because we’re scared shitless to have a failed-state controlled by drug cartels and a cult of the dead at our doorstep, but the prospect of setting me loose in such grisly killing fields clearly came with a certain amount of risk

It was a concern over my propensity for upping the ante and causing mayhem that seems to be what gave the man behind the curtain genuine pause.  He’s afraid of what I might do, what I might have to become simply to survive in such blood-soaked surroundings; potentially taking me over the edge as a viable, somewhat sympathetic character and thrusting me into a realm of pariahs like Pol Pot and Vlad the Impaler.   I appreciate the fact he’s looking out for my interests, but he might have bothered to ask me what I thought before pulling the plug on my visa.     

When I voiced my displeasure he went on to confide that he thinks I’m intricately connected to my home turf of New York City.   He’s of the opinion everyone, us fictional characters included, are products and embodiment of their time and place; inexorably interwoven with and inseparable from their surroundings.   He invokes Philip Marlowe’s umbilical connection to L.A., Sam Spade’s to San Francisco, Jules Maigret’s to Paris, etc., etc. to illustrate his point.    He tells me I’m hopelessly bound to New York and that taking me out of my milieu and on the road will do me irreparable harm.  He thinks who and what I am, what I do and how I do it won’t necessarily translate to Des Moines — or Mexico City — and that placing me in these alien locales would be like transplanting Joe Leaphorn from the Navajo lands in the Four Corners to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.  

Author dearest may have a point.   I don’t necessarily like it because it confines me, sets limits to where I can go and what I can do, but I may have to concede the issue; although I can rattle off a list of detectives who have in some degree run away from home.   Just how well they managed  such roadshows is a topic for debate.   Truth is, even I have to admit there’s no way I could be from or of anywhere else than NY.    I need the three-dimensional world of ever-climbing skyscrapers, congested streets and dark, forbidding undergrounds of New York as my personal playground.   I need the fast pace and unbridled ambitions of the big city, need the diversity of its potential antagonists, drawn from the pressure-cooker of ethnicities as varied and as mixed as my own.  

Let’s face it: I’m a night creature even in daylight.  I feed on the competing avarice and greed of the city’s murky shapes and shadows.   Tracking their nefarious schemes is what helps define me and keep me on my toes.   I earn a living assuming the worst of people and by cutting through the crap they dress up in fancy clothes.    Why do some people think that by gilding their warts in designer labels they somehow change their nature or make them harder to see?  

My author thinks there’s enough craven insanity here in New York and that there’s no need to travel to Mexico to find it.  I humbly concede the point.   He’s afraid my own proclivity to the dark side might be excessively stimulated by the current mayhem south of the border, and here, too, I bow at the waist to his authorial wisdom.   He thinks I’m dangerous enough as it is and don’t need encouragement, and to that I’m sure Kyoko would agree. 

But let’s face it, people; I’m not as stupid as I look.   I'm as much a 'fixer’ in  my world as  author dearest is in his.   If I can’t travel to the mayhem then the mayhem will just have to travel to me.    

Now, where the hell did I put my suitcase?

Entry 7

The realization you’re working the trapeze without a net can be very liberating.  You’re not allowed mistakes so you tend not to make any, and you savor every swing of the bar because it could well be your last.   Just like every case can be your last.  Maybe that’s why Kyoko’s been trying to get me to hang up my six guns from day one.  She’s one to take chances herself, but has long thought my cases as a freelance snoop were a little too dangerous, especially for an action junkie like me.   She says I make them more dangerous than they need to be, says I push myself and the situations I find myself in too far.   She objects to my ‘Doc Holliday’ death-wish mentality of inviting disaster and risking everything on my ability to get out of tight jambs.  

I take exception to the ‘Doc Holliday’ association on grounds that, unlike Doc, I don’t really harbor a death wish.   Holliday spent most of his adult life looking for someone to kill him, but he never found anyone good enough to get the job done.  I suppose I do share the same inherent challenge of pitting my best against that of anyone else, but I’m not a hopelessly sick man in a hurry to wind up on a slab in the morgue.   I’m in perfect health and aim to stay in one piece despite my author’s machinations.   Besides, it’s only lately that the threshold of mayhem has started to ratchet-up out of control.   My early cases weren’t quite so menacing.   This or that painting was stolen so I was hired to find and reclaim it.  Straightforward enough, right?  It didn’t matter much whether the piece went AWOL from the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week during an asset inventory, stolen by the Nazi’s during the Second World War, or looted by one ancient empire in the process of conquering another; my job was to find it.  The trail could be very hot or very cold, it didn’t matter.  I sift through detritus, remember?   Finding traces of what was once but is no longer there, sniffing the ground like a bloodhound in search of a scent to follow, and tracing the faint imprint of footsteps and uncovering where they lead were what defined those early cases.   It was a lot like when I was on the force.  I was cutting my teeth, and so it’s probably a good thing that I lacked a Dr. Watson to chronicle my early missteps, and yet even though those initial exploits were never recorded they still loiter in the recesses of my memory, like so much of the exposition and background of any story or its characters looms just off-stage, on the near borders of the action.   The past crops up through the blanched topsoil of what hasn't been written and, like stubborn weeds taking root in a garden, grows to spawn shadows that haunt the words that are left behind on the page.     

That’s because the past is never far away.  Not for me, not for any of us.   Shakespeare said that “what is past is prologue”, and he usually knew what he was talking about.   I’ve always suspected that much of my past and my family history has been extensively mapped and charted by the guy who writes me for the sole purpose of it later being mined in future tales.   Those details usually work themselves into the story in subtle ways, and sometimes not so overtly that the reader will notice, but they’re there.  Take my word for it.   The guy at the wheel has written down the details of my life from birth.   He can tell you what schools I’ve gone to, what I like to eat, the clothes I like to wear, the books I read, and the music I listen to; all to help him ferret ever deeper into who and what I am so he can better animate me to himself and to you.     

Frankly, it’s a bit awkward, even embarrassing, to have all your personal shit ‘out there’; a veritable billboard advertising all your dirty linen for total strangers to gawk at.    Besides being a product of someone’s imagination I’m also a walking, talking, transparent middle-aged anachronism carrying around satchels full of crap.   Why do you think I resist carrying your baggage?   The bags I’m toting around are heavy enough; full of all the background my author has gifted me.    It’s as if I was one of Eldon Tyrell’s latest Nexus models from Blade Runner, implanted with memories not my own.  My past is precisely that kind of blatant fabrication, a composite meld of an actual childhood memory given me by my author, appropriated from other characters from a book once read or a film once seen, extracted from a newspaper or nightly news story, a line overheard in a crowded subway or otherwise grafted from a cluster of associations specifically invented for my later use; to give me greater depth, wider berth, or to amp up my already cutting attitude.  

It’s all made up, the same way all our pasts are made up despite illusions to the contrary.   Be honest: you're no less a piece of fiction than I am.   I’m not the only one treasuring old Polaroid’s in an album somewhere.  I’m a patchwork quilt sewn together from “stray associations, scalpel-sharp insights and dulled recollections — the rusted shards, bitter regrets and warmed-over remains of memories wrapped, in a great ball, like so much leftover string.”   That’s how my author put it when recording my last case, and he wasn’t describing only me when he wrote it.   Like you, I remember what I can use, discard what I can’t, and distort whatever falls in between.   It sounds like Kane all over again, doesn’t it?   I warned you I’m not the only one haunted by memories and bad feelings.   

Expressing them may come easier to me than they do you simply because that’s part of my nature.   I wouldn’t be worth spit as a character or a gumshoe if I left the reader too much in the dark.   Am I a bit self serving in the way I impart that information?   Hell yes.   Aren’t we all?  Distilled down to a pitch point even a Hollywood mogul can  grasp, my job is to bring to light what’s hidden.   I find what’s been swapped, stolen or lost.   I solve problems and, like Theseus, follow the unraveling string from one end of the labyrinth to the other; hopefully without becoming the Minotaur’s next meal.   That I’m often forced to solve my cases out of chronological sequence, sifting through snippets of information and deliberate misdirection, with hands tied behind my back, makes  my track record all the more noteworthy.   This shit isn’t easy.   I’m working under a sizable handicap here.  I not only have to track down the bad guys and see justice done, but I have to do it with considerable panache to keep your fickle attention.    Worse, I have to do it while holding your sweaty hand, walking you down every dark alley --- your personal Moose Malloy while you go searching for Velma --- and letting you borrow my size double D 13’s every so often to kick-in the locked doors of the case.    

All that and spoon you Pablum, too?  You must be kidding me!   This isn’t Alice in fucking Wonderland.    I’ve got no little pills up my sleeve to make you big or small, but one way or another you’re going down the rabbit-hole with me.   So better keep your wits about you; I have better things to do than carry your dumb ass along as dead weight.  

Entry 6

Some single malts go down smoother than others.   I’m mostly a Highlands kind a guy, and stay away from the peaty malts altogether.   Balvenie 15 is what they had at the local store, and that will work just fine.  Typical of us arrogant gringos selling Mexico short.   I, of all people, should know better.  Now where were we?

Discussing the murky lines of distinction between me and the guy I share these ruminations with.   I was about to say that he and I are both counter-punchers and veritable Jacks-in-the-boxes, meaning neither of us plays true to type and often winds up being the surprise at the bottom of the box when the shit hits the fan.   Where his calm, detached and cerebral outer crust conceals the volcanic core within, I’m the opposite, a volatile avenger eager to wage total war on the drop of a dime.  That’s often a calculated overreaction on my part that can buy me the measured detachment essential in my line of work.   He’s soft on the outside, hard underneath, where I’m the opposite: Kevlar exterior with a softer, kinder interior.   But please, keep your trap shut.   You’ll ruin my professional reputation as a hard-nosed equalizer, and I’ve still got a daughter in college and a Fat Tuesday sized mortgage on a Greenwich Village brownstone to pay off.

If you were to put me and my author together you’d probably wind up with a whole person, and therein lays the key dynamic to this duet he and I are playing in this journal.    Some would call it a variation on the ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine, or maybe it’s really more an alternating current of ‘Hide and Seek’ on one hand and ‘Show and Tell’ on the other.   Like I said, that’s for you to sort out.      

Neither one of us is so much offended by the snap judgments our outer guises prompt as we are amused by them.  Take the incident with the rookie cop I took exception with in the opening of my last case, Portrait of Deadly Excess.   I appear on the scene and instantly become a large, read threatening, black man (being half of anything doesn’t count when you’re any part black) in a predominantly white world and therefore probably guilty of something.    Why do we persist in being so inherently dishonest about race in America?  Let’s be real here for a moment and call shit what it is.     The rookie saw me as suspicious on sight simply because I was black, and took it as his personal mission from God to discover the crime I had inevitably committed.    Nothing else mattered.   Not my past, my education, my training, the fact that I was a former cop myself and close friends of the owner of the house I was visiting; only his stereotypical perception of me, and his reaction to it, entered into his ‘thinking’.  

Admittedly, I’ve been known to have that effect on people.   I take jaded pleasure in the reactions I prompt, but that’s not something my author would know much about.   Not directly, at least.      He’s a somewhat self-contained loner by nature who can fit in well enough but prefers not to.  Go figure.   He doesn’t want to run with the herd.   He’s too guarded and self-conscious in public to mix well with others, whereas I figure I’m a marked man from square one and tend not to give a shit whether you like me or not.  If I have business with you you’ll deal with me, regardless.   I’m big and bad enough to force the issue.  Guess the time I spent being a half this and half that high wire act paid some dividends after all.   I take a twisted sort of pride fucking with the heads of those who fuck with me.  Despite outward appearances to the contrary, I’m usually very much in control.  Oh, I’ve been known to teeter on the wire.  Sometimes that’s an act, inviting others to make a mistake by trying to exploit a perceived weakness, sometimes I really am damaged goods in desperate need of a pit stop, but you, dear friends, and the proverbial bad guys will never know which is which.   I’ve become adept at maintaining the illusion I’m always rock solid, a pillar of strength and stability as good as the gold sitting in the vaults at Fort Knox.   You may hurt me, but you’ll be the last one to know it, and many have learned the hard way that hurting me and stopping me aren’t the same thing.     

My balancing act sometimes makes me feel like that tightrope walker in Thus Spake Zarathustra, tenuously prancing high above the crowd.   In Nietzsche’s parable the tightrope walker was crossing over from one tower to another and ultimately fell, but that’s one of the few places where he and I part company.   Screw that!   I’m no bridge over troubled water, nor am I pretending to be a mixed-race poster child begging sympathy.   I just don’t walk the line, like some Johnny Cash wannabe, I live it.   Where I’m going is as irrelevant as where I’ve been.   It’s only where I am, here, this minute, that matters.  No origins, no destinations, just journey.   Think about it.   Given all you do and don’t know about me, could I play the hand I was dealt any other way?    

Welcome to my world, where falling down isn’t an option.    Like the self-contained chick in the Bob Dylan song, I never stumble because I’ve got no place to fall.  

How about you?    

Entry 5

I’m still biding my time on the veranda of a thatched-roof cottage overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, drinking bitter coffee, tapping my feet on the floorboards waiting for my next case to begin.   Think I’ve mentioned how much waiting ticks me off.  I watch the white waves curl into foam and tickle the sandy shore, but I’m not really here as a tourist and even with Kyoko stretched out, naked and still asleep beside me, I’m fast getting bored.  Please don’t tell her I said that.   She’d take it personal, which means she’d take it wrong.    She does that, on occasion; takes an innocuous comment personal, giving it a new and hurtful edge not intended, and I then have to exhaust myself apologizing for an offense never really committed.   Truth is I’m delighted that she was able to sneak away for a week to join me on my rest cure between jobs.    She needed a break every bit as much as I did, and I usually don’t spend as much time with her as I should.   She’s one hell of a lady — in or out of her black leather bodysuit.      

Of course, Kyoko would prefer I take a permanent holiday from freelance work and spend my time painting, period.   She’s been venturing down that thorny path with greater frequency lately, as my cases have become more complicated and the people I’m tracking more dangerous.   She was elated when I decided to leave the force for that very reason; she thought freelance investigative work would be less dangerous.   Well, I thought so, too, at the time.   

That’s how we met, you know; when I was still a detective with the NYPD.    I was working on a special task force looking to close down a major sex-trafficking ring smuggling illegals in from China; usually young, naive girls from the provinces eager to come to the dream that was America but not realizing just how expensive the passage there would be.   Once here they’d have to work as sex slaves in message parlors and escort services until their debt was paid.   Most might never live long enough to settle accounts, so the cost of the ticket was steep indeed.    On this particular occasion I was on a stakeout in Flushing, Queens with Stan Cummings; an old friend and fellow NYPD detective on loan to the task force.   We were nursing cups of coffee in a dark car in the parking lot by the Marina, waiting for a small boat full of raw conscripts to arrive.   It was cold, misty night in late April, at around two in the morning, when we noticed a shadow stalking the boats in the Marina.   It was dressed in black, like a ninja, and we thought it might be a lookout for the smugglers, working the Marina to make sure the coast was clear so they could make their drop unnoticed. 

Just then word came over the radio that the boat loaded with illegals was about a mile away, so I decided not to take the risk of any of our people being spotted by sneaking up on the shadow in black kneeling at dockside.   It wasn’t until I got closer that I noticed the figure was clad in a form-fitting leather bodysuit.  The moon was nearly full that night, and the suit caught the light in all the right places for me to quickly realize the occupant was a woman.   In her hands was a camera on a strap with a zoom lens, and she was photographing the rough bob of the boats in the water and the gentle pelt of rain dissolve into the choppy sea, in the opposite direction from where the smuggler’s launch was arriving. 

As I drew closer the figure seemed oblivious to everything save what she shot through her lens, and I took my eyes off her for a second to glimpse the boat drawing close to the nearby shore.   In that instant the woman, who had been lying prone on the Marina plank way, bolted to her feet, stepped in front of me and starting photographing the boat as it made shore and started to disembark.  

“Are you here for me or for them?” the woman asked, completely unfazed by what was going on.   She didn’t seem connected with the smuggling action, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. 

“Maybe both,” I retorted, gently pushing her to the side, then behind me.   “And you?” 

“I shoot whatever comes to mind,” she said, calmly, and was more inclined to move when I discreetly flashed my badge and drew my gun.  “What about you?”

“I tend to shoot whatever gets in my way,” I told her.  “So please, stay down and out of sight if you don’t want to get hurt.”

“Mind if I continue taking photographs while I cower?”

“Knock yourself out.  Just be sure to catch my good side.”

“I don’t know you well enough yet to be sure you have one,” she said, grinning.  

It was the ‘yet’ that made me sure I’d see this woman again.   Once we got things under control, arresting everyone who had come in on the launch and the two guys in a van that had quietly slipped into the parking lot nearby, I got a chance to see the woman’s face under a streetlight, and started to think this was too good to be true.   She was beautiful, mixed, just like me, only she was half Asian, half White, with long dark hair and darker eyes that were hard not to look into, but it was her poise under pressure that struck me most.   She wasn’t fazed by the situation.   She was also as graceful as she was tall, and moved with a cat-like precision that made her all the more alluring.   I asked her to come to the precinct so we could look through the pictures she had taken with her digital Nikon.  Some were good, very good, and could be useful in our case.   She gave us permission to use them as evidence, and made a point of writing her phone numbers and address in the release form we asked her to sign.  

“I’m something of a moving target and don’t often answer my phone.  I do freelance modeling and photography.” 

“Ah, so that explains the Catwoman outfit.”

“It’s really closer to Irma Vep,” she replied.

“The original Louis Feuillade Les vampires series or the Assayas take-off staring Maggie Cheung?”

She gazed at me for a minute, and then smiled.   “I’m surprised you know either, and impressed you know both.   You may have a good side, after all.   I’m Kyoko.  Texting is usually the best way to reach me.” 

That was nearly seven years ago, and I’m not at all sure what prompted the recollection.   It’s a bit random, and actually hasn’t even been written about anywhere before.   Guess that’s what boredom and this sort of free-form forum will do to a character and his alter-ego author.    “Leapfrogging images and piggyback meanings” was I think how he phrased it in another work, long ago.  I honestly have no idea what lily pad we’ll jump to next. 

Let’s play if safe for a change and get back to my waiting game here in Mexico.   What’s the holdup, you ask?   The guy at the controls is still working out the basic plot and structure of the story, and is the type of writer who likes to embark on his literary journeys with at least one foot on solid ground.   Given the methodical way he usually works — he prefers to steep himself in research, rough-sketch the whole story and then peck out an opening paragraph that can stand up and set the pace and tone for the pages that follow — I might need to order in a carton of smokes and a fresh supply of liquor, especially my preferred single malts.   Kyoko says I should be using this break as much-needed R & R, a respite in which to mend the wounds and bruises of my last case before rushing out to start the next one, but she knows I’m not built that way and will probably wind up doing everything but resting.        

You see, it’s really the action that grabs me; the cases I work are convenient excuses for me to spend my time on an endless safari hunting human game.   Like any self-respecting gumshoe, I’m always in a breakneck chase to find the ever-elusive ‘what’s it’, and it’s really irrelevant what’s inside the box that all the fuss is about.   Sound familiar to whether or not Kane’s paintings could do the things some claim?   Hitchcock called it the “MacGuffin’, the elusive thing that every main character has to have and that propels the story forward but which, in and of itself, may not be clearly identified, well understood or very important.  

I call it what it really is: an excuse to deal the cards.  It stands to reason that I’m more of a gambler than the guy who writes me.   He’s more of a safety-first, careful risk versus rewards type personality, whereas I like to improvise on gut instinct and play for much longer odds.  We’re both clad in the armor of detachment, but he’s more cerebral in nature; observing from a distance, assessing the direction of the wind with a wet finger and gauging the temperature of the water with a dry toe before easing himself in. 

I don’t like getting wet in stages.   I’m a jump in the shit kind of guy.  

Hold that thought for a minute.  Someone’s at the door.  With any luck its room service with my bottle of scotch.  I asked them to bring the best bottle of single malt they could find.   What was I saying about me being a gambler?          

Entry 4

I was explaining why I had such a bug up my ass about Daniel Kane when I went on a tangential rant about the relationship of talent to success.   Before I knew better I was questioning my own line of thought, not entirely uncommon, and then I abruptly ran out of gas and nodded off.   My apologies for not conducting my train of thought to station.   It was late at night, I was tired and working on one hell of a headache, and my glass of scotch was a desert past bone-dry.   Worse still, I ran out of cigarettes and had to run down to the vending machine at this seaside resort to buy some.   Gotta kick my nasty habits, but I have so many I'm not sure which one to tackle first.   Kyoko was sitting on the veranda to our cottage when I got back, and we spent the next hour or so quietly watching the moonlight shimmer off the ocean.  When I finally got to bed I didn’t go there to write.   So allow me to finish my rant here, after bacon, eggs and coffee.  

The more I think about it the more I’m convinced talent alone isn’t and has never been decisive.  Too many instances come to mind where very gifted individuals have never seen the light of day and conversely, where individuals devoid of recognizable talent have become icons of their age.   So, if talent wasn’t at the core of my dislike of Kane, what was?   Maybe it was the cult of celebrity that Kane exploited and made so fashionable; the doting public and undiscerning ‘critics’ who lavished him with attention and praise.   Maybe it was that he demanded we be complicit in his lie; not the lie about the alleged occult power of his paintings — more on that in a minute — but about the intrinsic value of his work as art.   From where I sat Kane was all hype and no substance.   Like Detective Thorn’s sobering realization that Soylent Green is people!, Kane passed off the hackneyed tripe he painted as USDA Grade A fillet.  Some forget that he became a celebrity not on the quality of his work as an artist but on the strength of his being a media bad boy whose antics made good copy and colorful lead stories on the nightly news.    Everyone was too busy making money off his antics and bullshit to worry that the emperor wore no clothes.      

Ultimately, of course, if you call enough shit steak then sooner or later you devalue everything beef.   Why go to the bother and expense of bringing anything genuine and authentic to market when people will buy the knock-off and pretend its real?   The cut of meat isn’t important so long as people buy the sizzle.  Kane’s propensity for theatrics and bad behavior made him ideal for exploitation by others even as he was exploiting them.    His entire career was a pillage and burn sort of campaign that Sherman or Attila would be proud of; he went out of his way to achieve his ends at the expense of others, and I’ve already mentioned how much that pisses me off.   Maybe we should say it was the price his celebrity exacted on those around him that offended me most about Kane, and why busting his ass became such a personal vendetta once he left me for road kill in his ascent to the top.   I warned you I have an attitude and a long memory.    

The rest is bullshit.  I honestly never cared whether the rumors that his later paintings possessed occult properties of some kind were really true.   Could Kane actually paint pictures that could somehow steal the essence of a living thing — its soul if you will, for want of a better term — and come to life, or was that, too, all smoke and mirrors?  

Does anyone really give a fuck?   The answer changes nothing. 

That may explain why the guy who writes these stories left things somewhat obscure at the close of the tale.  Oh, like other authors, he enjoys pulling the reader’s chain now and again and prefers to keep his future story options open, but more importantly he was making a statement that Kane’s mumbo-jumbo about the occult properties of his art was, like so much else concerning him, little more than the skillful misdirection of a stage magician.   Neither one of us are about to reveal any tricks of the trade. 

I’m a skeptic by nature and so the wrong person to ask whether Kane’s paintings can spring to life or not.  Some of the evidence suggested he had actually managed to pull it off, but that’s more circumstantial than cold, hard fact, and as Nietzsche repeatedly cautioned us, there are no facts, there are only interpretations.    I genuinely don’t care either way.   You could argue that, if Kane could paint canvases that came to life that would be a supreme example of the transformative power of art, replete with the ability to transform others, but I won’t buy it.   Kane’s twisted career wasn’t really about transforming others so much as victimizing them.   Kane’s art, even in its most bizarre extreme, benefited only himself.   If you’re trying to persuade me that changing a living person into a burned out shell was ‘transformation’ in the higher sense of my using the term then you haven’t been paying attention.   That sounds like an argument a Neolithic shaman might make, like a hunter eating his prey to take possession of its qualities.   I do know that Kane’s works took, they never gave; they mimicked but almost never truly created.  The only thing Kane strove to transform and enhance was himself, and he used his talents to cloud genuine insight into him and his work so as to propagate a mystique about them instead.   He deliberately obscured everything about himself and his art, and he sought to destroy what he couldn’t appropriate or distort.   

It might sound odd, but to me what Kane’s paintings could or could not do has no bearing on what they intrinsically were.   Not surprisingly, I remain somewhat conflicted and non-committal on the issue.  Besides, let’s be honest.  Why would you expect a clear and concise denouement to a story the author has taken considerable pain to paint in grayscale and shadow, and that has a central theme the reminder that nothing is ever what it seems?   And why would you expect clarity, of all things, from me — a strung-out fictional character that lives — if you can call what I do actually living — in nebulous twilight, fending off the assaults of conflicting extremes and struggling to hold his shit together long enough to make some sense of it all?    

I hate to break it to you, but if I took violent exception to carrying Kane’s luggage what makes you think I’ll carry yours?   I don’t wear a redcap.  You’re going to have to figure some of this shit out for yourself.