Chapter 14

First thing the next morning, I paid a call on Laila at her modshop on Fourth Street. The old woman was just as creepy as ever, but her costume had undergone some slight revision. She had her dirty, thin gray hair shoved up under a blond wig full of ringlets; it didn’t look so much like a hairpiece as something your great-aunt would slip over a toaster to hide it from view. Laila couldn’t do much with her yellowed eyes and wrinkled black skin, but she sure tried. She had so much pale powder on her face that she looked like she’d just busted out of a grain elevator. Over that she had smeared bright cerise streaks on every available surface; to me it appeared that her eye shadow, cheek blush, and lipstick had all come out of the same container. She wore a sparkly pair of plastic sunglasses on a grimy string around her neck — cat’s-eye sunglasses, and she had chosen them with care. She hadn’t bothered to find herself some false teeth, but she had swapped her filthy black shift for an indecently tight, low-cut slit-skirted gown in blazing dandelion yellow. It looked like she was trying to shove her head and shoulders free of the maw of the world’s biggest budgie. On her feet she wore cheap blue fuzzy bedroom slippers. “Laila,” I said.

“Marîd.” Her eyes weren’t quite focused. That meant that she was just her own inimitable self today; if she had been chipping in some moddy, her eyes would have been focused and the software would have sharpened up her responses. It would have been easier to deal with her if she had been someone else, but I let it go.

“Had my brain wired.”

“I heard.” She snickered, and I felt a ripple of disgust.

“I need some help choosing a moddy.”

“What you want it for?”

I chewed my lip. How much was I going to tell her? On one hand, she might repeat everything I said to anyone who came into her shop; after all, she told me what everybody else said to her. On the other hand, nobody paid any attention to her in the first place. “I need to do a little work. I got wired because the job might be dangerous. I need something that will jack up my detective talent, and also keep me from getting hurt. What do you think?”

She muttered to herself for a while, wandering up and down the aisles, browsing through her bins. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, so I just waited. Finally she turned around; she was surprised that I was still there. Maybe she’d already forgotten what I’d asked. “Is a made-up character good enough?” she said.

“If the character is smart enough,” I said.

She shrugged and mumbled some more, snagged a plastic-wrapped moddy in her clawlike fingers, and held it out to me. “Here,” she said.

I hesitated. I recalled thinking that again she reminded me of the witch from Snow White; now I looked at the moddy like it was a poisoned apple. “Who is it?”

“Nero Wolfe,” she said. “Brilliant detective. Genius for figuring out murders. Didn’t like to leave his own house. Someone else did all his legwork and took the beatings.”

“Perfect,” I said. I sort of remembered the character, although I don’t think I ever read any of the books.

“You’ll have to get somebody to go ask the questions,” she said. She held out a second moddy.

“Saied’ll do it. I’ll just tell him he’ll get to knock some heads together whenever he wants, and he’ll jump at the chance. How much for both of them?”

Her lips moved for a long time while she tried to add two figures together. “Seventy-three,” she whined. “Forget the tax.”

I counted out eighty kiam and took my change and the two moddies. She looked up at me. “Want to buy my lucky beans?” I didn’t even want to hear about them.

There was still one little item troubling me, and it may have been the key to the identity of Nikki’s killer, the torturer and throat-slasher who still needed silencing. It was Nikki’s underground moddy. She may have been wearing it when she died, or the killer may have been wearing it; as far as I knew, goddamn nobody may have been wearing it. It may just be a big nothing. But then why did it give me such a sick, desperate feeling whenever I looked at it? Was it only the way I recalled Nikki’s body that night, stuffed into trash bags, dumped in that alley? I took two or three deep breaths. Come on, I told myself, you’re a damn good stand-in for a hero. You’ve got all the right software ready to whisper and chuckle in your brain. I stretched my muscles.

My rational mind tried to tell me thirty or forty times that the moddy didn’t mean anything, nothing more than a lipstick or a crumpled tissue I might have found in Nikki’s purse. Okking wouldn’t have been pleased to know that I’d withheld it and two other items from the police, but I was getting to the point where I was beyond caring about Okking. I was growing weary of this entire matter, but it was succeeding in pulling me along in its wake. I had lost the will even to bail out and save myself.

Laila was fiddling with a moddy. She reached up and chipped it in. She liked to visit with her ghosts and phantoms. “Marîd!” She whined this time in the thrilling voice of Vivien Leigh from Gone With the Wind.

“Laila, I’ve got a bootleg moddy here and I want to know what’s on it.”

“Sure, Marîd, nevah you mind. Just you give me that little ol’—”

“Laila,” I cried. “I don’t have time for any of that goddamn Southern belle! Either pop your own moddy or force yourself to pay attention.”

The idea of popping out her moddy was too horrifying for her to consider. She stared at me, trying to distinguish me in the crowd. I was the one between Ashley, Rhett, and the doorway. “Why, Marîd! What’s come ovah you? You seem so feverish an’ all!”

I turned my head away and swore. For the love of Allah, I really wanted to hit her. “I have this moddy,” I said, and my teeth didn’t move apart a fraction of an inch. “I have to know what’s on it.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, Marîd, what’s so important?” She took the moddy from me and examined it. “It’s divided into three bands, honey.”

“But how can you tell what’s recorded on it?”

She smiled. “Why, that’s just the easiest thing in the world.” With one hand, she popped the Scarlett O’Hara moddy and tossed it carelessly somewhere beside her; it hit a rack of daddies and skittered into a corner. Laila might never find her Scarlett again. With the other hand she centered my suspect moddy and chipped it in. Her slack face tightened just a bit. Then she dropped to the floor.

“Laila?” I said.

She was twisting into grotesque positions, her tongue protruding, her eyes wide and staring and sightless. She was making a low, sobbing sound, as if she’d been beaten and maimed for hours and didn’t even have the strength left to cry out. Her breathing was harsh and shallow, and I heard it rasp in her throat. Her hands were bundles of dry black sticks, scrabbling uselessly at her head, desperate to pop the moddy out, but she couldn’t control her muscles. She was crying deep in her throat, and rocking back and forth on the floor. I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know what to do. If I’d come any closer, she might have clawed me.

She wasn’t human anymore, it was horribly easy to see that. Whoever had designed that moddy liked animals — liked to do things to animals. Laila was behaving like a large creature; not a housecat or small dog, but a caged, furious, tormented jungle animal. I could hear her hiss, I could see her snapping at the legs of the furniture and striking out at me with her nonexistent fangs. When I stooped near her, she swung on me quicker than I thought possible. I tried to grab at the moddy and came away with three long, bloody slashes down my arm. Then her eyes locked on mine. She crouched, pulling her knees forward.

Laila leaped, her thin, black body launched toward me.