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. 

Entry 3

I’m suffering from jet lag in a change in venue and some unwanted down time while the boss struggles with the plot points of my next case.  I wish he’d work a little faster.  It’s not easy lying back on a beach in Mexico sipping lollipop drinks when you’re a life-sized made-for-action figure.  I don’t do nothing especially well.     I’m more the shark type — got to keep moving — and I start getting stir crazy when I’m idle for too long.   I’m much better at following the bouncing ball from page to page, pointing out glaring omissions, pace-killers and missed opportunities in my cases.   That’s part of the give-and-take I alluded to in my last entry.  There’s really more than one spider weaving this web. 

It wasn’t always that way.  I started my career on shaky ground.   It was less a full partnership and more of an uphill challenge because I came so late to my role.   After hanging in mothballs for longer than my author or I would care to remember my number was finally called.   Embarrassingly, I staggered out of the gate, stiff and rusty and blinded by the bright lights when the opportunity finally came.   It took me a while to gain my sea legs and start acting like the hardass I was intended to be. 

Kane, my chief antagonist my last time out, did his best to take advantage of the situation until I set him straight.   He was used to being the center of attention and didn’t take kindly to being demoted to second-string in his own story.   But then it wasn’t his story anymore.   It was mine!   I had to work my butt off — and my author's — to finally displace the arrogant bastard and claim pride of place as my own.   Kane and I ultimately struck a deal.   He became the story’s irresistible force and I settled in as its immovable object.  Something and someone had to give when we eventually collided.   Damned if that was going to be me.  But give Kane credit.   He still haunts the story despite being dead when it starts.   

My author will candidly confide to anyone who’ll listen that a key progenitor of the character Daniel Kane was Conrad’s Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, with support from Coppola’s film adaptation of Conrad, Apocalypse Now and in similar fashion Laura from the 1944 Preminger film of the same name.  I warned you the guy mixes his drinks!   Anyway, the common denominator between the characters Kurtz and Laura, and the element author-dearest was trying to capture was what I call the black hole effect; Kurtz and Laura, like Kane, dominate their stories from the outset, bend memories and motives, if not time and space, despite being ‘dead’ or at least gone native and missing at the time.   Neither step live onto the stage of the story until it’s nearly all told.   That gravitas in absentia, that mystery and validation by proxy is what gives these characters a greater weight and importance than what they might otherwise possess.   You, the reader, can’t help but grant them exalted stature because you’ve waded through more than half the film or book marveling at the way they’ve shaped and changed the lives of those around them.  In a very real sense, they are the black holes of the story, the relentless maws churning, like a wormhole in the distance, inexorably pulling you closer despite your repulsion by the raw violence of the ever-expanding event horizon sucking you in.

That, friends, is Daniel Kane, and that was an act I simply couldn’t match at first.   Holding my own against such a force of nature required I become one of my own.   Suffice to say it took several drafts to build up my voice and my muscle to get to the point where I could trade blows and barbs with the bastard without getting my butt thoroughly kicked.   My face-off with Rio in Portrait was a cake walk by comparison.    Rio was Death dancing a samba; dangerous, but only to proverbial life and limb.   Kane was a far deeper threat, to my sense of self, my sense of order, justice and balance, my sense of trying one’s best to do right.  

It was probably my lady, Kyoko, who first posed the question: why?  Why my obsession with Kane?  What about him drove me so crazy?   Why did busting his ass become, for me, a veritable mission from God?  

There’s a reason the Norse AllFather, Odin, forbids the asking ‘why’?   He hung upside down and gave an eye for the wisdom to understand there’s never a satisfactory answer to that question, so I won't waste my time by asking.   All I know is that I’m supposed to be professional about my cases, not take them personal, but I couldn’t manage that when Kane was involved.   Ours was a personal grudge match from square one, and it’s not all that easy to explain.  

The son-of-a-bitch knew how to get under my skin, of course, and the ease with which he did it pissed me off all the more.    A good part of the agitation was what I felt was the unjustified cult of celebrity that Kane so actively cultivated and made popular.   I can remember a time when you had to earn your celebrity stripes by being especially good at something; great leaders, inventors, artists or visionaries who could touch the rest of us in some essential way, enlist us in a cause greater than ourselves and transfigure us to the point where we’d never be quite the same again.   The operative word in this context is ‘us’, not ‘them’.  People usually aren’t deemed great and worthy of notoriety if the only one they influence is themselves.  The latter more typically profile out as recluses or hermit sages; they may be geniuses or they may be manic depressives, but whatever they are isn’t our problem because they usually keep what they do to themselves.   To be worthy of celebrity used to imply you possessed the ability to shape and influence others.  In short, you had to be contagious of something.   That holds true for serial killers as much as it does messiahs.   To earn the wings of celebrity you had to be very, very good at something that could either influence or affect others.   That’s the kind of celebrity I can understand and respect.  

That’s not the kind of celebrity Kane wrapped himself in, however, and it isn’t the cult of celebrity we’re so totally obsessed with today.  I’m stretching a point here to lay the latter development at his doorstep, but he’s as worthy a suspect as any other, and more so than most.   Kane, like Warhol, changed the name of the game.   Never mind one was purely fictional.   My point is that , after Warhol, after Kane, raw talent was no longer as essential as the ability to promote its absence.   The people we now make overnight stars and viral sensations would seem to have exceedingly little to offer in the way of transformation or enlightenment.  Embarrassment, even more than entertainment, seems more their calling card.   We’re beset by a locust-like plague of new-age celebrities, vapid, would-be stars and starlets who’ll unabashedly masturbate their way into your favorite media conduit in the desperate hope you’ll confuse their come-on squeals for notable quotations.  They’re living, real time caricatures who buffoon and pimp themselves in whatever media peepshow will have them, and they race into the hot-lights of the public stage predestined to melt and fall on their face.    

That embarrassing fall, too, seems to be part of their charm.   In the not too distant past it took us a while to discover the clay feet of our heroes, and some actually seemed worthy of admiration and belief for a brief while before they tripped over their own excess and indiscretions.   The rabid media, eager to peddle its intrinsic importance in our lives as if it were deodorant or beer have collapsed that interval and begun to mistake their ‘Gotcha!’ cry for honest journalism.   Our new-age would-be celebrities come to us now already naked and lame, wearing their fatal flaws on their sleeves like neon booster buttons.  Exposing themselves in public is part of their nature.   Like Kane, they’re alchemists of the infinitely-fertile ether and can turn an embarrassing moment into a mythic rite of passage or cry for attention, spin a blatant lie or distortion of fact into indisputable gospel, and build the complete absence of discernible talent into a lifetime career and thriving cottage industry.  

When did we stand logic and value on their heads and feel that the shocking absence of talent was as worthy of recognition than its abundant presence?   Or have we become so jaded we can no longer tell the difference between the two?   

Then again, what if talent is as ubiquitous as shit, and what really matters is not how much you have but what you're willing to sacrifice for and to it?  

Be afraid, friends, be very afraid...I'm beginning to sound like Kane...again.          

Entry 2

I left off the last time warning you how hard it sometimes is to distinguish me from the bad guys.   While that’s true, there is one sure point of distinction: I carry my own bags.  I don’t expect anyone else to pick up my tab, and I’ve got a bug up my ass about those who think I’m here to pick up theirs.    If you’re trying to get off and get over at my expense or are intent on flying now and paying later then you and I are going to have a serious disagreement at some point, and I’m one badass motherfucker you don’t want perched above your door.    I don’t forgive, I never forget, and I like to stir the pot and play with fire.  It’s a game I play.   I like to compete against myself and everyone else.  Competing against myself is usually harder.

Given that attitude and my peculiar skill-set, finding dragons to slay usually isn’t difficult, but the guy who writes me thinks my antagonists and my personal demons — not always one and the same — aren’t enough to keep your interest.  He’s determined to mix-in the demons of others for good measure, which probably explains why the cases I work invariably entail not just lost and stolen art of some kind but also tend to have an occult or supernatural strand running through them.   The degree and the clarity of that strand varies — maybe the art is considered to be a religious relic by some, maybe the artifact is thought to be imbued with occult qualities, or it could be believed to be the missing key to a larger puzzle or the quest for fame, wealth or power — but whatever it is it’s always there; a recurring theme that muddies the waters and raises the stakes of the game.  

I’ve cautioned my author that such fusions of otherwise distinct and accepted genres are not necessarily the recipe for success in today’s blockbuster-driven market, which much prefers formulas that are safe and oft-times proven.   In this regard one could say I’ve been dealt a bad hand.  My author’s penchant for the epic and the esoteric has been known to keep me awake late at night!  The ancient Greeks would say he’s guilty of hubris; an overbearing confidence that he’s a puppeteer gifted enough to actually pull off such lofty ambitions.    The jury’s still out on that one, but I do know that his aura of self-confidence is pure smoke and mirrors; the son-of-a-bitch is every bit as haunted as I am — just by different things.   Truth is he’s not at all sure of himself in this or any venture, and to make things worse he lacks my hard-boiled skin.  Hell, I’ve known him to suffer each and every one of his rejection slips — he’s got folders full of them, filed by title — where I’m inclined not to give a rat’s ass about the opinions of others and would use that depressing correspondence to light my fireplace. 

Still, I have affection for him.  We’re too much alike in ways for that not to be the case.  Like me, he tends to do things the hard way, a rogue agent provocateur working behind enemy lines to restore some sense of grand cosmic order.   He sometimes doesn’t stop to think that what constitutes order to him and, by extension me and a handful of others equally twisted is probably terrifying heresy or anarchy to everyone else.   Maybe that’s why, like me, my author is given to fighting windmills and shouting at the moon.   We're a pair of updated Big Daddy's of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof fame, railing away at mendacity!  Trouble is the level of lies has increased dramatically since Tennessee's time, and it could easily become a full time job.   So, like it or not, I’ve become my author's mouthpiece — to invoke the ancient Greeks again — the dramatic mask employed in his theater of our collective absurd.   It’s a role I’m well-suited to play.   When he steps out of his own skin he slips into mine, and vice versa, so in more ways than one we’ve got each other covered.   We haunt the crap out of each other.          

Piss off if you think my waxing philosophic is out of character for your average gumshoe.      When I want your opinion I’ll grab you by the lapel and shake it out of you like loose change.   The guy at the controls fashioned that part of me in his own fractured image.   Typical of all creator’s, don’t you think?   They say power corrupts, and the ability to conjure something out of nothing has been known to go to one’s head.   Just ask Zeus, who fathered Athena, fully-formed, out of his skull.  

That’s sort of how my author hatched me — a composite of this and that all sown together in a great ball that’s one roll short of unraveling.  I prowl the surreal seam between daylight and dark energized by the danger and promise invariably released whenever opposing worlds collide.   I live in a netherworld painted in varying shades of gray, strung out in a tenuous split between polar extremes.   If you still don’t get the idea suffice to say that for me it’s always twilight time no matter what the hands on the clock say.   That might explain my fixation with balance and, by extension, my personal insistence that justice is ultimately done.   It's my only way of keeping score.   I ride the edge of the razor, and when I see something wrong I get the urge to fix it out of sense of grand cosmic order.  Some call me a Quixote-like figure.  To others I may seem to have more in common with Yudhishthira of Mahabharata fame, determined to uphold Dharma and always do what’s right.     Still others simply call me an avenging angel with an attitude and a long memory.  Who am I to argue on any of those accounts?   I’m a wise-cracking son-of-a-bitch at war with myself and a fucked-up world I largely disprove of, wearing a chip on my shoulder as big as Gibraltar and an antenna for attracting trouble the size of Arecibo.  

My clients seem to like it that way.  They pay me well to mix it up and get my nose dirty following up their pathetically poor excuses for leads.    I’m a specialized bounty hunter racking up the frequent flyer miles stalking lost and stolen art.   Smashing faces and splitting heads just happens to be perks of the job.   Just about any art —and any head— will do.  I’m not at all particular.   I’m a ‘Have Case Will Travel’ kind of guy, and there’s a healthy splash of Paladin in me.  We’re both fond of inventive solutions to problems and have our own personal sense of honor and justice that we like to impose upon the world.  

The cases I’m on are simply the backdrop to that ongoing mission.  I’m not fussy about which ones I take.   I just follow the money and the lead of my author.   If truth be known I have a decided preference for the kind of old, even ancient art they’re not making much of anymore.   Some see this as a decidedly anti-modernist, multicultural bias, but those, like so many others, are meaningless labels I can’t use.     Maybe that’s because I have an issue with labels in general, or because I don’t really have a tribe of my own, no insulated racial or ethnic stereotype to wrap around me, like a great woolen blanket, when the world gets cold and dark.   I’m a high-wire aerial act and I don’t like people who are too much of one thing and not enough of everything else.   I was made more complicated than that.   We all were, but we’re usually taught to cut ourselves short into trivial, bite-sized morsels for the sole purpose of mass consumption, playing it safe, running with the herd and acquiescing to majority rule before we know better.     

My author prefers to keep us both honest with such sobering asides tossed into this salad we’re writing as if they were seasoned croutons.   But like I said, it’s all cool.  Unlike a lot of authors I can think of, at least mine let’s me out of the box the written page can become and leaves me free to play.  As long as that’s the case I won’t dispute him his claim on some of my time.  He envisions me as some sort of recurring fictional character that leaps from story to story, case to case, with the nimble deftness of Nijinsky.  He muddies the waters with all kinds of crap — convoluted plot lines, twisted characters and the dark lure of deadly obsessions — then  tosses me in to clean up his mess and make everything turn out right in the end.

Well, fuck him on that note.   I’m no one’s housekeeper.  I take care of the heavy lifting but leave the bright work to him.   It keeps him busy, out of trouble.   I always make a point of leaving a loose end here and there just to keep it real.   I’ve got more important things to do than flash cue cards every time you get stuck and flub your lines.    Babysitting isn’t my business.  Besides, those loose ends are functional; they’re the threads I use to weave myself in and out of the fabric of my cases.   Each case always foreshadows the next one.  I’d like to think that helps propel the action forward, and it also prevents the son-of-a-bitch who writes me from locking me out of my livelihood.  After all, a man’s got to look out for his future — especially if he’s a work of fiction.            

I’m not talking about any aspiration to take a place at the dead-end of a very long line of hard-boiled private dicks, shamus’s, gumshoes and PI’s.    He might harbor that kind of idea, whimsically thinking of me as some sort of Twenty-First Century Philip Marlowe, but that’s his load to carry, not mine.   He can try to reinvent noir and give it a fresh setting, contemporary themes and a new bag of tricks, but I’ve got my hands full dancing with the bad guys and trying my best to survive from one case to the next.    

As I see it, you can root for my success or my failure; it’s no skin off my ass either way.  My reputation is that of being a mercurial claims adjuster who, despite the cultured trappings of all the art, eclectic tastes and appreciation for culture can become an explosive force of nature once he gets rolling.  Feel free to raise the ante whenever you like; just go easy on yourself — my threshold for pain is greater than yours.