The building where Martin Cousins died was a tall red-brick affair that rose higher than any of its immediate neighbours. He had been a police officer for several years, so when the murder was reported the building was pretty soon swarming with them like ants in a mound. The slim man of indeterminate age came shortly after. His name was Hawks, and Cousins had been his friend. He was dressed in a dark brown suit, with hat, and he gave the faint impression to the police as he approached that if any attempt was made to stop him from entering the building he would simply float through their grasp.
He came through the corridors quickly, his sticklike legs swinging a long stride with a slight side-to-side motion, as if he was trying to examine every inch of the hallway with his sharp, investigative eyes. They were a pale, icy blue, and they darted like small fish in a tank, never resting on anything for very long.
When Sergeant McCall turned around to see just who was making that commotion among his officers all the way through the building and saw Hawks, he smiled. He was one of very few people who did.
“Sergeant,” said Hawks quickly, nodding his head. “Here to pay my respects.”
“Don’t try to feed me a line, Elias,” McCall replied. “If you’re going to come in, come in.”
The door was busted off its hinges, crossed from top right to bottom left with a strip of tape that read “DO NOT CROSS”. McCall dipped past the tape and Hawks, who was taller, pulled it off the top right to step inside.
“Whispering is Martin was knocked off. Any truth?” Hawks said, replacing the tape carefully.
“Some sort of true,” McCall said. Hawks tried to go further in, and McCall held out a hand and stopped him. “This isn’t a usual job,” he said. “Things are at work here that don’t play nice with the facts.”
The apartment had green-papered walls and a vast, barren carpet, well worn-in by years of use. Cousins had only moved in a year prior, when his sister had fallen ill. Hawks wondered who had lived here before. A dead television set, unplugged from the wall, sat directly in line of the door. Just in front of it, Martin Cousins lay, equally lifeless. Not quite true, Hawks thought. If you plugged the television in it would show again. That was the morbid kind of thing he liked to think. He entered the apartment proper. Cousins was on his back, sprawled out. A bloody brown stain was apparent on the coffee table just above his head, and on the grey of the carpet beneath it. Must have hit it going down. But then – he would have had to jump over the sofa backwards to fall like that.
Hawks walked back and forth, eyeballing the angles of approach. Martin couldn’t move like this, not with his knee. Someone must have thrown him. But who could have thrown him like that?
“It’s worse than that,” said McCall, watching Hawks’ face. “Have a closer look.”
Hawks bent down and studied the lifeless rictus of his former friend as dispassionately as a coroner. Then his gaze went down to Cousins’ neck, which was bruised black with long, clawlike stripes from some assailant’s fingers.
“Crushed his windpipe totally,” said McCall. “He was dead before he even fell. Ain’t it a thing?” He pulled a cigarette from a pack and put it between his lips, but Hawks snatched it before he could light it. He tucked the coffin nail into his breast pocket and wrinkled his nose.
“Any of your men been smoking?” Hawks said thoughtfully.
“No. I’ve been watching over them and none of them have lit so much as a light.”
“But they are smokers.”
“That they are.”
Hawks cocked his head to one side. There was a powerful smell in the air. It reminded him of battlefields.
“How long has he been dead?”
“Can’t give you an exact number. Maybe two sunrises, maybe three,” McCall said sharply. “The medics are stuck in traffic.”
“Then why do I smell rotten meat?” Hawks said. He bent down, got to his knees and put his ear to the ground, scanning the shadowed corners of the room, and picked up something from under the sofa. The smell intensified a thousand fold, and one of the other officers threw up in a waste-paper basket.
“A finger,” said Hawks.

After being quickly ushered out of the apartment, Hawks took one last look up the building. Along the alleyway perpendicular to the street, a black iron fire-escape centipeded up the side of the building. That was the side of the building that Cousins’ apartment was on. He wondered if the police had accounted for it as a possible escape route. Presumably they would get to it eventually.

Cousins had had a regular poker game with a small group of mostly ex-cops and some others. He had invited Hawks once. Only once. But Hawks still knew the address of the former constable who hosted the game on this night of the month. He showed up on the front step like a ghost, and the constable closed his front door again as soon he opened it.
“Not you again,” he said. “Tell us when Mart gets here, but you’re not coming in.”
Hawks put his hand on the door and held it open with a surprising lack of effort. “There won’t be any Martin. He’s been murdered.”
“Jesus,” the constable, whose name was Billy, said. “Come in, then.”
Hawks ducked slightly under the doorway and entered the house. The wallpaper was peeling slightly in the smoky dining room, where three other players were sitting waiting for Billy to return from the front door. There was a large, mustachioed man wearing bright red slacks, a man with heavily lidded eyes and a cigarette burning down in a long holder, and an intense-looking man, younger than the others, shuffling his cards back and forth from one hand to the other all the time.
“There you are,” said Mustache evenly. Then, when he saw Hawks enter, he continued: “Not him again! Get him out of here!”
Cigarette’s eyes widened a little, showing flashes of white that where otherwise invisible. The shuffler stopped.
“Hawks has some important news,” said Billy carefully.
“Martin is dead. Murder.”
“Ye gods,” said Mustache.
“Hell’s bells,” said Cigarette.
“Shit,” said the shuffler.
“Yes to all of those, and more,” said Hawks. “Because the police’re not just at a loss, they’re completely lost.”
The shuffler started again, and Cigarette took a slow pull. “You think we can help you? You with the cops?” he said.
“Yes to one and no to the next,” said Hawks. “But Martin was my friend, and yours too. He talked to you about things. You may be able to shed some light on things that the letter of the law doesn’t account for. Enemies. Secret places.”
“I might be able to help,” said the shuffler, not breaking his rhythm for anything. “Although I can’t say that any light would be shed. Darkness, more like.” His voice quavered at this last, and Mustache let out a booming laugh.
“Don’t worry about our boy here, old man. He’s of a superstitious nature, on account of being raised by Aunts.”
Shuffler nodded. “Three of them,” he added. “From the maternal and paternal sides of the family.”
Hawks projected a curse word inwardly. Why could nobody else get to the point?
“Shed your darkness on matters,” he said straightforwardly.
Shuffler nodded again, gulped, and began, the shf-shf of the cards slowing atmospherically.
“When Martin last drew cards with us he was all excitements,” he said in a low, quiet voice. “He told how he was going to engage the services of a medium, a woman of learning from the upper town region.”
“Laroux is the name on the mailbox,” said Cigarette dreamily, only half-paying attention.
“Laroux, that’s it. He said it was completely hush-hush, but that making contact with another world was his object goal. Didn’t specify much besides.”
Hawks wrote down the name Laroux in his internal notebook, which had a near 100% success rate and was less eminently loseable than his actual notebook, demonstrated by the fact that he had lost one but not yet the other.
“Laroux, yes. And do you have any more idea than the upper part of town as to where to find this Laroux character?” Hawks asked, regretting the run-on sentence somewhat but finding it an unfortunate necessity as it often was in his line of work where things sometimes did not fit neatly into sentences such as was the grammatical typicality.

Hawks found Laroux the medium in the phone book under “Media”, pressed between acrylic and oil paint manufacturers. The strange game of poker that was in progress he left to its machinations, and he began to wind his way towards his office, where he would write down the approximate details of the case, and then sit in contemplation/sleep until morning. He considered dreaming to be a form of detective work, since it involved the organisation of memories into narratives. Hawks didn’t have a lot of time for narratives in waking life, other than the conventional societal ones about things like race, gender, jaywalking and violence. (in order, as Hawks understood them: Bad, good, bad, good but you shouldn’t enjoy it).
It was a long way up from the house that Quiet Billy lived in to the office. As Hawks rounded the corner at the end of the street a fist clamped about his coat collar and dragged him aside. He didn’t have time to complain any, however, as the next moment a slablike fist slammed into his chest like it had been dropped sideways and lifted him up off his feet. The impact with the unyielding concrete of the sidewalk that ensued winded him completely, and his struggling form encased in brown suit looked uncannily like a dying stick insect on the grey slab. The figure bearing over him was tall and imposing, though that might have been related to the fact that he was lying down. On drawing first breath, like a baby entering the world, Hawks was suddenly struck by a strong smell. The heady odour of a powerful aftershave was saturating every molecule he gasped into his beleaguered alveoli (his word of the month, January last year) and he found himself almost suffocating on the thick atmosphere. The figure raised a black-gloved hand, and Hawks happened to notice, in one of those curious little flashes of clarity that one has immediately before one is strangled to death, that the ring finger of the glove was loose, empty.
This was Martin’s killer!