Free Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon

unconscious mind to another, messages passed in total darkness as it were, where not a soul is watching, except perhaps for a few detectives, like you and me.”

17
    AS INSTRUCTED, I RETURNED to Ramona Doon’s cottage the next day and parked outside. Subject still nowhere in sight. But there was action in number five: a woman I’d never seen before, in sweats and plastic yellow gloves, was carrying a big bag of garbage out the door. What the hell, I decided. Time to play detective for real. I got out and strolled on over.
    “Excuse me, Ma’am,” I said, as if tipping an invisible hat. “Is Ramona Doon available?”
    She looked me up and down. “Who’s asking?”
    I decided to win her over, like Bogey and the bookstore girl in The Big Sleep. Of course he is Bogey, and like all bookstore girls, when she lets down her up-do and takes off her glasses, she is a knockout and he offers her a drink from the bottle of rye in his glove box. My costar had a gray crew cut and bifocals on a beaded chain around her neck, so I just tried to stand like him and said, “Well, to be honest, I have some important papers for her to sign. They say it’s urgent.”
    “Papers? Where’s your briefcase then?”
    “Oh.” That was a good question. “In the car?”
    “Debt collector or process server?” She shook her head and I thought I’d lost her. “Figures. Though she seemed more like the rich girl type. Anyway, she’s gone.”
    “Gone?”
    “Moved out last night. Called up and told me to keep the deposit. After only one month too.” She shrugged. Through the open door behind her I could see the same furniture.
    “But what about all her stuff?”
    “That’s my stuff. I rent the place furnished short term. Her personals are in this bag. Just papers and crap. Anyways. Good luck. I guess sometimes those rich kids are the worst at paying bills.”
    She shouldered her trash bag and swayed off. I considered sneaking in, but she didn’t seem the type to trifle with, and besides, the “personals” were in the goody bag, so I walked back toward my car in slow motion and then, when I saw she was gone, I circled around to the trash Dumpster and went fishing. The landlady hadn’t been lying. It was indeed crap: used coffee filters caked with brown grime, banana peels and eggshells. Old magazines and empty toilet paper tubes. A torn dirty pink sock that I could have added to the panties, but I decided I wasn’t ready to move up to that level of detection quite yet.
    I called Lonsky and reported in. He felt my garbage picking showed initiative, although I left out any mention of the sock, fearinghe might send me back to scrounge it up like a truffle. Then he got deep on me.
    “A detective finds clues,” he boomed at me over the fuzzy cell connection as I bounced along Franklin Boulevard, swimming in the gray wake of a gardening truck, a rattling wooden wagon piled stories high with branches, dead grass, and leaves, and with several grinning Mexicans riding on top and no exhaust pipe. I tried not to breathe. “Sometimes those clues are around us, in the street, in the garbage. Sometimes within. Look within, Kornberg.”
    I thought, Thanks, Obi-Wan, but audibly agreed to do a top-to-bottom search within. Then, with no real job, no real wife, and no real life to distract me, I went home and wrote a novel.

18
    IT WAS IN MY TEENS and twenties that I first absorbed the great works of experimental or avant-garde or whatever, advanced, modern fiction: Ulysses of course, which I read twice, back to back, as if unable to quite believe what had just happened; the mad Austrians, The Man Without Qualities, The Sleepwalkers, The Demons, and their German cousin, Berlin Alexanderplatz; Biely and Bulgakov, Russian time travelers from a lost future that never arrived; those witchy vitchs, Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz—mind-bending Warsaw weirdos—and Bruno Schulz, the Jewish point to the Polish Holy Trinity, his pure, clear light snuffed out by the