Dreaming of Babylon. Richard Brautigan

You fought for those fucking Communists in Spain and got shot in the ass. It serves you right, too. How did you get shot in the ass?”

      I returned the conversation to its original subject. I didn’t have all day to spend with this joker.

      “I need six bullets,” I said. “My gun’s empty. I don’t think my client would want to hire a private detective who carries an empty gun. Don’t you have a gun you keep here in case stiffs get up and and start chasing you with axes?”

      “Not so loud,” Peg-leg said, looking around, though there wasn’t anybody else in the room. He had taken Sergeant Rink’s advice about not telling people about the ax-murderer incident very seriously. I was one of the few people that he had told about it. We were pretty close friends until I started borrowing money from him and couldn’t repay it. We were still friends but he wanted his money, so there was kind of like a short wall between us. It wasn’t serious but it was there.

      “Well?” I said.

      “Yeah, I’ve still got it here. You never know.”

      “Will you loan me some bullets, then? Six would do fine.”

      “First, you start out borrowing tens, then you switch to fives, then it’s ones and now you want the bullets from my fucking gun. You take the cake. You are a loser. A real loser.”

      “I know that,” I said. “But I need some bullets. How can I ever pay you back if you don’t loan me enough ammunition so that I can go to work?”

      Peg-leg looked slightly disgusted.

      “Oh, shit,” he said. “But I’m not going to give them all to you. I’m going to keep three of them for myself just in case something weird happens around here again.”

      “You still think that was real, huh?” I said.

      “Watch it, ‘Eye,’” Peg-leg said.

      He took another look around the room. We were still alone. He pulled the drawer of his desk out very cautiously and removed a revolver. He opened up the cylinder and took out three bullets and gave them to me. Then he put the revolver away.

      “Deadbeat,” he said.

      I looked at the cartridges in my hand. Actually, I was staring at them.

      “What’s wrong?” he said.

      “What caliber are these?” I said.

      “·32s,” he said.

      “Ah, shit!” I said.

       ·38

      “You’ve got a ·38, right?” Peg-leg said.

      “How did you guess?”

      “Knowing you it wasn’t hard.”

      “What am I going to do?” I said.

      “Why don’t you get a job?” Peg-leg said. “A lot of people work. It’s not like leprosy.”

      “But I’ve got a client,” I said. “A real client.”

      “You’ve had clients before and you’ve been fired before. Face it, pal. You’re not any good at this private detective business. If my wife was cheating I’d hire Donald Duck to find out who she was doing it with before I’d hire you, and I’m not even married. Why don’t you buy some bullets for your God-damn gun?”

      “I don’t have any money,” I said.

      “Not even enough to buy some bullets? Hell, they only cost a dollar or so.”

      “I’ve fallen on hard times,” I said.

      “I think the only good times I ever saw you have was when you got hit by a car last year,” Peg-leg said. “And some people don’t consider being hit by a car and breaking both your legs good luck.”

      “What am I going to do?” I said.

      Peg-leg shook his head and smiled painfully.

      He opened the desk drawer and took out his gun and handed it to me.

      “If some dead stranger comes back to life and throttles me while I’m trying to wash their face, it’ll be your fucking fault and I’ll come back and haunt you. You’ll never get a decent night’s sleep again. I’ll be flapping my sheet right up your asshole. You’ll be sorry.”

      I put the gun in my coat pocket that didn’t already have a gun in it.

      “Thanks a lot, Peg-leg,” I said. “You’re a true-blue pal.”

      “You’re a total fuckup,” Peg-leg said. “I want to see that gun back here tomorrow morning.”

      “Thank you,” I said, feeling like a real private detective with a loaded gun in my pocket. My luck was definitely changing. I was on my way up.

       The Morning Mail

      Peg-leg walked me out to the front door. He moved quickly and gracefully for a man with a peg-leg. Did I mention that before? I don’t think I did. I should have. It’s kind of interesting: a man with a peg-leg taking care of dead people.

      Then I remembered something that I was going to ask him.

      “Hey, Peg-leg,” I said. “Did you see that blonde who came out of here a little while ago? She had short hair, a fur coat, real good-looking.”

      “Yeah,” he said. “She was here visiting one of my clients: the good-looker that somebody used as a substitute because they couldn’t wait to open their morning mail.”

      “What?” I said.

      “The letter-opener job.”

      “Did you say a letter opener?” I asked.

      “Yeah, the girl who was killed with the letter opener. The blonde saw her. She said she thought the girl might be her sister. She read about it in the newspaper but it turned out she was the wrong girl.”

      “That’s funny,” I said. “She was crying when she went out the door.”

      “I don’t know anything about that but she wasn’t crying when she left me. She was very unemotional. A cold fish,” Peg-leg said.

      The letter opener!

      Now I remembered.

      Sergeant Rink was playing with the letter opener that killed the girl I had just seen Peg-leg drooling over. I knew when Peg-leg first mentioned a letter opener that it rang some kind of bell and this was it. The letter opener was the murder weapon.

      A bunch of amateur coincidences for no particular reason, I thought, but they don’t have anything to do with me.

      “Good-bye,” I said.

      “Don’t forget to bring the gun back tomorrow morning,” Peg-leg said, peg-legging it back into the morgue.

       The Boss

      Hurray, I had a loaded gun! In a few hours I would be able to meet my client with confidence in my step. I wondered what they wanted me to do that required a gun. Oh, well, beggars can’t be choosers. I really needed the money.

      I was going to ask for fifty dollars expense money. That would go a long way in changing my circumstances. I could get the landlady off my back with a few bucks. I didn’t think that story I fed her about oil wells in Rhode Island had much longevity. I figured by the time I got back to the apartment, she’d be howling away like a banshee.

      I had some time to kill, so I walked up the street to Portsmouth Square and sat down on a bench near the statue dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson.

      A lot of Chinese were coming and