The Boxes Where Dreams Reside by M. K. Dreysen (Neverland Disorder 6: A Detective Kelli Hench Mystery)

For this week's free story, I present Part 6 of The Neverland Disorder: A Detective Kelli Hench mystery.

Detective Hench has a problem. More than one, really.

This week's problem being a particular one: the work builds up on her desk, and sometimes clearing the mess is the best way to let the mind work.

The Boxes Where Dreams Reside by M. K. Dreysen

I should have been worrying about hotel rooms. The where was the how of it. Yolena Scruggs came to the back seat of a Rolls-Royce, faint hints of vomit on the corners of her lips, not by accident.

The cars sat on display in the third-floor meet and greet area of a very high end hotel. Sure, the cameras "just happened" to be down for that weekend. Which said something all on its own, and Russ was chasing that rabbit. But Peter Pan still had to navigate the hotel to put her where he did.

She hadn't died there, in the car. Or, at least, she hadn't begun her end there. I should have been running this through my mind.

Instead, I was chasing down comic books.

Oh my love my addiction. I once lost a year to the goddamned four-color world. Walked into a new shop, Nory had opened up his little mall store because the rent was cheap.

And because his wife had threatened his babies with a lit match. "I'm retired. And I needed something to keep myself busy."

"You needed to clean your shit out of the house before your wife murdered you and sold your collection to pay for her defense," I pointed out.

"That, too." Nory nodded at the boxes behind me. "Hunting for anything in particular?"

Maybe if I'd said "Nah, just killing time," and walked out with a glance toward the hundred and twelve Batman titles, the seventy-two Spider-man titles, the latest foil Superman stunt cover, maybe if I'd just done that, I'd have that year back.

I didn't do it. I'd flipped halfway through the '80's X-Men box when the traitor bird in the back of my brain whispered something about the Wolverine story-line I'd never finished.

Sandman. Spawn. One damned thing after another; I walked out of there, back to my shift at the Sam Goody, with a fistful of latter-day dreams and a new bad habit. A pull list to go along with the smokes.

Nory let us smoke in the back room. This was more than a few years ago. Magic the Gathering was just getting off the ground. So we'd sit in the back, open the latest decks, play cards and smoke and generally pretend for a while that the outside didn't exist.

Somehow or another, I still made my shifts slinging CD's. And I still made my classes.

I had to take out one last loan, the one I shouldn't have had to get, for that year's tuition. Which is why it's my lost year. I'm not sure just how much money I spent in those boxes where the dreams lay.

But I know how long it took me to pay off the goddamned student loans. Sure, only about a quarter of that load can I blame on my year in the smoky back room, the one with the Fantastic Four posters and the vacuum cleaner and other cleaning supplies that Nory made us use to pay the table rent.

The never-ending monthly payment was enough to remind me to stay the hell out of comic shops. Oh, I still wander through; know how easy it is to throw down a couple hundred bucks in a comic shop and never look back?

I don't keep a pull list. That's how I minimize the damage.

This file originally started a couple years back, before Peter Pan and the rest of it. Well after the eight-day wonder of Trevanian and Billings had basically been forgotten by everybody.

Outside of Will's "Attaboy" collection, anyway. But that's another story.

The Mobius Strip thefts started in Burglary, then ended up in my basket. If I reacted to the ways and means the "straight" detectives came up with to try and get my goat, I'd have gone smooth crazy years ago.

Crazier. Right, anyway, the M-Strip is a fixture of Houston's geek parade, it's been taking up its little inaccessible corner off the Loop and Post Oak since Abraham was a pup. You walk into the place and wonder most of all whether you screwed up and took a turn into one of those Halloween haunted houses.

Or the mirror maze at a carnival. The M-Strip's basically a one-way trip. Walk through the door, mind your head because the eight foot Millennium Falcon model hanging from the ceiling could come crashing down just any day now. Duck past a couple of gumball machines, a glass case devoted to mid-grade baseball cards, and then if you keep going, you're into the boxes.

The glass cases keep going, too, on your right along the walls. The grades rise as you follow the box and case lines deeper into the store. Somewhere deep in the bowels, if you make it that far with anything left in your budget, you'll find Action Comics 1 and Detective Comics 27.

I don't think they're really for sale. But they're there, to ooh and ah over. Took my dad once. "Your grandmother threw all of my Sergeant Fury comics away, when I moved out. I had a complete run, at least through to 1970."

Lonnie, the M-Strip mainstay who's been slinging books across the glass since I was in high school, at least, nodded in sympathy. "Story of my world. But that's the reason these are worth anything." He looked across his half-glasses at the boxes where Donald Duck and Howard the Duck, and all the other dreams, waited for time to make the investment. "If we'd all collected our books the way they do now, none of them would be worth anything."

Except inside our heads, I didn't say.

I keep my hands in pockets when I visit the M-Strip. Try to, always have. Oh, I flip through, always, just to let my mind simmer over it all.

The games section catches me; good as new D&D boxed sets from ye olden days. Adventure modules, miniatures. Dice and oh brother if you're a dice nerd the M-Strip's got your number. They put a bin of assorted right there at the entrance to the game shelves. Fill your fists, brothers and sisters, and then when you've filled your arms with half of Steven Jackson's beauties?

The case where you check out with your glories is full of the good dice. Metals, bone, minerals rare and common. All guarded by miniatures.

The dragons have pride of place, they sit on the glass and hang overhead. Reflect off the Franzetta posters.

Yeah, it's a dangerous place, the M-Strip. A place where you leave telling yourself that someday, you'll come back and be able to walk through there and buy whatever you want, whenever you want. When that day comes, you're gonna pull a cart through and you're gonna put whatever you see into it, and you'll neither care for the cost nor blink when the register spits out its murderous total.

The M-Strip's also the place where it started.

"It's not the original comic book" doesn't fit into the standard routine. Not by a long shot. It's too... time consuming. And expensive.

The notes in the file told me how the Burglary office caught it. Lonnie came in with an Amazing Fantasy 15. He set it on the desk, and told his story. "This is Spidey's first appearance. It's worth thousands of dollars. But something's happened to our copy of it. This isn't the one we bought."

"When did you buy the original?" the detective asked Lonnie.

"In the seventies. It's been on display in our shop ever since. The owners don't really even want to sell it."

Just like the others of the big three, Superman and Batman, that took pride of place in the M-Strip displays.

"What makes you think this isn't the book you've always had?"

"Our book was a 9.6 grade. Great book, with just a couple of imperfections. A little tear on the outside corner of page 3, and a tiny stain, probably coffee, on the last page. This one's a ten."

"Meaning?"

"It's too good, it's perfect. Like it's never been touched."

The Burglary detective, a lifer by the name of Gene Theriot, did a little work. Online searches, to find out what a book grade meant; similarly, how much this particular book might be worth. That got Theriot's attention.

It meant, if true, this was a big theft, a lot bigger than the hit and runs that made eighty percent of Gene's sixty hours.

Problem being... "You've just told me this is a perfect book. What's the problem?"

"It's a copy. A mint condition copy, but there's no way it's the real thing."

"If I pursue this, the forensics labs are going to have to test this book. That means they're going to have to remove parts of it to determine whether the paper's right, whether the ink's right. Are you absolutely, one hundred percent certain?"

One hundred percent? Lonnie put his alleged forgery back in the plastic and walked out of Theriot's office faster than... well, as fast as a retail lifer can put one foot in front of another.

Gene would have shit-canned his notes, but three weeks later, Christy came in, with a similar story. Only, her book was Fantastic Four 48, Silver Surfer, and Christy's the floor manager for the Phoenix and the Unicorn, a smaller shop a couple miles closer to downtown.

"This isn't our book. Our book graded out at a 9.4, this one's a 10."

"If I pursue this, I'll have to take the book for forensics testing. Destructive testing. Are you absolutely certain this is a forgery?"

Christy walked, too.

Dennis, from Luna City, came in with a Swamp Thing 1. JoJo, from Auntie's Emporium, brought in their prize pair, Incredible Hulk 180 and 181; same story for all three. "This is too good a copy, it's a 10."

"If I send it to forensics, they're going to have to take destructive samples."

The books went back in the plastic and the complaint drifted to my pile. With a last question from Gene Theriot, scratched on a post-it pasted on the inside of the file folder full of his notes: "Why'd they all walk?"

Shit, that one was easy. Gene's a collector, so he's sympathetic. That's why he hadn't sent his casefile to the circular filing bin. But Gene goes for old motorcycles.

The kind that come to you in pieces, piled in a crate. I worked Burglary with Gene for about three years. He waited every bit of those three years to find one particular original, as-used, Triumph clutch cover. In his world, there was no such thing as mint condition. "If it's too good, it's a copy," he'd told me.

So Gene knew exactly why the comic shop gang were all so worked up.

He just didn't make the catch as to why they'd walk. It's simple. A good grade book might be worth a few thousand.

A mint grade book might be worth a few hundred thousand, for Spider-Man at least. Multiply by ten, it's a bit like the Richter scale. If there was any chance, no matter how small, that they might be wrong, and Lennie, Dennis, JoJo, and Christy would be dividing the value of those books by five, ten. They'd be taking a chance on big money.

If it had been one, say Christy had shown up with this weird story and bailed when it came to Gene having the book tested? Gene would have thrown his notes in the trash and that would have been the end of it.

Four of them? And they none of them dared the forensics team?

Yeah, I should have been mulling over hotels and Rolls-Royces and how you get from one to another unnoticed. What I was doing instead was clearing one of the other hundred and one things on my desk. "Ok, Lonnie, spill it."

"Do I know you?"

No. Yes. Ok, so it's been a while, and there are an awful lot of geeks running around Houston. It's awfully easy, isn't it, to believe yourself more memorable than you are? "HPD, I'm following up on your theft complaint from a few months ago."

"It was more than a year ago." He rolled his eyes. "Don't you have better things to do? Apparently?"

"Let's pretend you're not actively trying to get the only cop that's interested in your complaint to walk away and forget you exist, right? How about we just talk about why you believe someone's stolen your Spider-Man?"

He'd moved the book, from the glass case to a frame hanging on the wall. Which sent my, forgive me, spider senses tingling. If the book was in the case, to the world, that meant it was a haggle away from leaving the store. On the wall, nope forget it.

Messages, in other words. Right there next to Superman and Batman resides the Spider-Man, now. What this told me was that Lonnie had hedged his bet. Sure, maybe the book was real; maybe he'd spent the past thirty years looking at the book, taking it out once every few years, noting again the tear and the stain and dreaming of what might have been...

And the whole time the book had been a 10, right? All just a figment of his imagination, that 9.6 grade. Of course, the independent grade letter sitting in the filing cabinet was one of those differences of opinion between pros. A true connoisseur would be ready to make their own assessment.

Lonnie had talked it through, and decided to take the possibility of hard feelings out of play. He'd put it on the wall. Where those who were family would know "Don't ask" because it's not for sale.

He didn't tell me this. Hell, he almost didn't tell me anything. I waited him out; probably, most likely he gave me the story just to get rid of me. Ten o'clock on a Tuesday isn't the highest traffic hour of M-Strip's week, so there were few prospects wandering the aisle behind me. "Know anything about comics?" he started.

After finding out how little remembered I was in the family, I went with it. "Let's assume the only comics I read come in the back page of the Chronicle."

So he started with grades; a perfect 10 is a book that might never have touched human hands, and it's all downhill from there. Price is sensitive to who did the grading.

"You spend a lot of time arguing over grades?" I asked.

"Does a frog bump his ass when he hops? If we try and sell someone a 10, we'd better be able to back it up."

"Wouldn't someone with that kind of money be in a position to verify the condition?"

Lonnie nodded. "Sure. Except, this book's been sitting in our cabinet with a 9.6 on it for going on twenty years. Everyone who's interested already knows what grade we've claimed. I'm stuck with a book I can't sell, because even if it's the real thing..."

I smiled, halfway. "Every buyer who knows better is going to accuse you of grade inflation to drive up the price."

"Bingo."

"So. You're the expert. Could you forge a perfect copy? Or get someone else to?"

He had to have thought about it. "Yeah. With time and effort, and a book to copy from, you could put it together."

And you wouldn't even need to go through the hassles that guy in Italy did, the one who'd "found" a lost Galileo manuscript in an old library. He'd had to come up with parchment and ink that matched the Renaissance-era chemistry.

Fifty years is a little easier gap to bridge, so far as getting the ink and the paper. And let's face it, so many comic book artists trained themselves to draw by tracing Ditko's work that finding that particular talent wasn't the hurdle it might have been.

A good forensics workup would find the clues. If it was printed, there would be little differences. The paper wouldn't quite match up, not perfectly. The lines, hesitation marks, wouldn't match the known-good versions.

Too bad Lonnie, and the other three with their similar situations, had taken that option off the table. "So you've left me with trying to catch someone and have them confess. When you won't consent to testing the book?" Meaning, "Why they hell would they even talk to me? Any lawyer worth the retainer's going to tell them to shut up and make me prove there's even been a crime committed."

"I pulled my complaint, Detective. If you manage to catch someone, that's your problem, and your wild goose chase. Not mine."

I shook my head. "Lonnie, are you seriously trying to tell me that someone has managed to pull the perfect crime? And you're going to let them get away with it?"

"See what a lifetime in retail does to you, Detective? Now, are you going to buy something or not?"

The song was different, but Christy, JoJo, Dennis, they all sang in the same key as Lonnie.

I had a whole herd of mules, caught between two hay bales and starving to death in collective. Metaphorically, at least. And why wouldn't they? These weren't books that traded hands, these weren't the true moneymakers anyone was banking their business on.

Workaday money and dreams lay in the cardboard boxes lining the aisles of their stores. Those were the golden eggs. The platinum eggs, on the walls and in the "Don't even think about it" cases were just signs that the store owners were geeks of the highest caliber. Signals, that just might part hands when the owners shuffled off the mortal coil. Not a minute before.

And when that happened... Ah. "When that happened, who's going to be left, anymore, to remember that there were once stains, tears, rips on those books?"

I was halfway down I-45, headed to Almeda Mall when the question popped out of my mouth and into my unaccompanied space.

Ever met the guitar player that can "Play every note Clapton" or Hendrix or Van Halen ever played?

Ever wonder why, if they're so good, they're not out there feeling the love? In the stage lights cashing the big checks?

Artists can be like that, as well. The ones that sat in the back of your algebra class, replicating Doctor Strange or the Hulk in painstaking detail. Only...

Like their similarity-type of guitar player, they never quite found their own inspiration? Their own sound? Just about every artist starts out copying. Most of them move past it, especially the ones who burn through the endless gates to get their own book.

Trey Wilmarado was one of the ones who didn't catch that fire. He came into Nory's place like the rest of us. Another comic fiend looking for a place to hang and talk and smoke and hide from the world. Nory put him to work making promo art. Hulk, Spidey, Dream, any character at all, and Trey could bring that character, someone else's character, to your favorite business card, your "Ten Percent Off This Weekend" ad.

And Trey ended up owning the store. I'd moved on; when I graduated UofH, the academy, and got my offer from HPD, I gave up the Sam Goody job and the daily walk past Nory's storefront with it. Chuck, Best Buy tech guru, got himself a promotion and a transfer to the Texas City store. Bea, Tailor, all Nory's regulars had drifted away on the current of the everyday.

Except Trey. He'd kept right on keeping on, covering shifts, drawing up promo art. Buying stock. Being Nory's right hand, in other words. And then, when Nory had his stroke, and Viv finally sold the store, Trey it had been who'd scraped up the loan, from somewhere, and bought the store.

"And that's how I'm still here," Trey told me, when I walked through the shop doors for the first time in damned near twenty years.

"How's business?"

"We get by," he finished.

Right. The doors were open; the Sam Goody was still open, somehow. Macy's, but Palais Royal was about done. Most of the shops in the food court were the same. But I'd be lying if I said I remembered any of the small shops. They were all different, enough that I had to hunt for Nory's, now Trey's, comic shop. It was still in the same spot, just up from what had been J.C. Penny's.

I'd moved on. I guess. "Still drawing?" I asked Trey.

"Every day." He pointed at the posters and the signs; two easels set out front every day, Iron Man and Captain America because when Marvel hands you a billion dollar wave you surf it.

I'd asked Trey, a couple times, why he never caught on with Marvel, Vertigo, somebody.

"I don't live in New York," he'd told me, the first time I'd asked. "I'm not the kind of hack they want," he'd said the second time.

I quit asking about Trey's art after that. The closest I'd ever come to that kind of creativity had been crayons and finger painting. I wasn't about to ask Trey what he was so scared of.

Something else had come out of those conversations, though. On those nights where Nory had closed up the front gates and left us to finish out whichever game we'd got caught up in.

And that was that Trey had worked a little at each of the big 4 comic shops in town. The M-Strip, the Phoenix, Auntie's and the LC. "Problem is, they're all in town," Trey said. "So when Nory opened up, it was a godsend."

At the time, Trey had a little Fiat, the X1/9. Ten years old, then, a hand-me-down from his mom with too many miles on it to brave getting on the freeway every day. That's what his excuse had been to quit UofH and go to Clear Lake, instead.

So, yeah, Nory's shop was just right for that particular comic fiend. Almeda was just a few miles from where Trey's parents lived and he wouldn't have had to get on the freeway to get there.

That part of the story I'd filed away in my memory. To surface again when I started asking myself, "How would you forge a comic book, if you really really wanted to?"

I wondered if even Lonnie knew that Trey might the only person still active in Houston's comic community to have worked for our big 4 comic shops?

And, that Trey was more than capable of copying each of those books. Not only capable.

He'd get off on the challenge of it.

Then, too, there was one other thing. Lonnie, Jo, the others, they'd been the ones who'd twigged to something wrong. Maybe I was asking the wrong question. The managers all saw the retail churn; Trey might have worked six months, if that, at any one of those places before he landed at Nory's.

Who benefited, ultimately, if the forgeries continued hanging on the walls, waiting for memories to fade, for grades to be profitably disputable ten, twenty years out? Not the managers.

Trey owned a comic shop, now, didn't he? And he'd had to borrow money, that much I knew, to buy into that club. "How often do you talk to Joy?" I asked Trey. "Or Umala?"

Owners of the M-Strip, and Auntie's, respectively.

I'd asked Trey about his art; I'd asked him whether he talked to any of the other owners.

If there was any sign that these questions weighed on him, it was that he left his bottle of Windex on the end of the glass case. He still wiped the nonexistent fingerprints. The towel still made its motions. But the spritz, and the faint ammonia hints drifting on the wind, dropped away. "Did you hear?" he asked. "About Richard?"

The owner of the Phoenix and the Unicorn. "He's not sick..."

"No, not that. Not any worse than usual, anyway. No, the rumor's that he's having money problems. Christy's been around a couple times, asking if I've got room in the shop for her."

Trey found his courage then; or, at least, he remembered his Windex bottle.

"That's a shame," I said. And it was. The Phoenix wasn't the oldest of the big 4. I think M-Strip has that honor, or Auntie's. Luna City, they'd been the ones to expand, I think Mike and them have half a dozen locations now. Auntie's and M-Strip own their buildings, that's their ace-in-the-hole against the dark times.

The Phoenix had always been the smallest, they were the shop that always seemed to be hanging on by a thread. I meant it, though. It would be a shame when the big 4 shrank to 3. "Richard's asking ya'll to buy his stock from him, isn't he?"

I got a big dose of Windex, enough so I had to wipe the mist from my face. I guess it went along with my nosiness.

Trey shrugged in partial answer. Then. "I guess, if I'm ever in trouble, I'd rather my books stay local. All in the family, right?"

That's how it turned out; a few months later, Richard's stock, really Christy's because she'd been the one doing most of the buying recently, started showing up in the other stores. Mike's shops got the lion's haul, but even Trey's shop filled out a few bins with book runs he'd been shy on. Christy landed on her feet, running the day-to-day at Trey's shop.

And wouldn't you know it? A 9.6 grade Amazing Fantasy 15 appeared in the "Expensive but it's For Sale" case at the M-Strip again.

If there's a crime there, it's an unreported one. Mike's crew don't display all of their big books. The Luna City managers rotate their prizes; I've heard them say they hope to keep the customers on their toes. Maybe next time you come in, the message says, the book you've lusted after since you were thirteen won't be there, anymore. Maybe now's the time to cash in some of that vested tech stock windfall. Before someone else does.

Auntie's, Umala's shop, you'd be hard pressed to find their "good stuff". Oh, it's there, and the regulars know it. It's just that you have to hunt for it. M-Strip, and Trey, keep the goods on front and center display. Umala makes you work for it.

And none of them have, so far, breathed a word of the scam, if that's what it is. Trey's probably no longer in debt, outside the family at least. Richard, if he was part of it, died not long after he sold his stock; he'd gone thirty years on retrovirals, long after he'd ever expected to survive.

And the grade 10 books hide away in plain sight. Tripwires, I suppose. I'm putting my notes together, here. For my successor, if they manage to outwait me. For me, if they don't. I'm sure there's some sort of agreement. Maybe Trey's paying a little money to his silent partners. Or maybe his silence, the one that came one tense moment after I asked the question "Which one of them came to you first?", is his payment.

Richard sold his stock, and managed a landing spot for Christy, before he passed. The others, will they be so lucky? One heart attack, one bad day on the slopes, and it'll be a kid or a grandkid who's looking at the Wall of Fame, thinking of the headlines that came out from the last time someone auctioned off a pristine, mint copy of Spider-Man's first appearance. And then the auction house will send their experts around to take a good hard look at this prize no one's ever known of.

I'll be there, or my colleagues will, when the wall breaks.