Part 1

DOUBLE IDENTITY

By Charles F. Myers

Grant Dermitt's stories showed remarkable creative ability. His hero, Fleetwood Cassidy, was the greatest fictional character--alive!...

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy June 1951 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

_He demonstrated again that rangey reach of his and slammed a fistful of hard knuckles into the putty face in front of him. Mario went down on the thick carpet, his fat nose spurting blood like a drinking fountain for vampires. He was just another one of those larded slobs and, true to the type, he began to blubber. The blonde in the corner froze in place like a lead statue in a snow storm._

_"Wait!" Mario whined. "Wait a minute, Cassidy. I'm not stalling. I just want to make a deal, that's all."_

_"You've made a deal," Fleetwood snapped. "How do you like it, fat boy? Now where's the stuff?"_

_Mario lolled his head to one side, holding his hand to his nose. Fleetwood raised his foot, and he came around fast._

_"Don't!" he said. "Over there on the mantle, in the ivory box."_

_Fleetwood kept them both covered and crossed to the mantle. He picked up the box and flipped back the lid. Expensive fire, the cold kind of fire that comes from stones, flashed out at him. He closed it again and dropped it into his pocket._

_"Look, Cassidy," Mario said, still sitting on the floor, "look, I took the rocks, I admit that, but I didn't rod Blanchard. Somebody else cooled him before I ever got to the dump...."_

_"Sure, Mario, sure," Fleetwood nodded, "you're the neat type. You just ran over in your dust cap to tidy up the death room. My client will be tickled to pieces to find out what a nice orderly vulture you turned out to be." He swiveled around toward the blonde. "And you'd better get yourself a new playmate, lamb-chop. This one won't even be able to keep you in rompers from now on." He gave Mario one last glance, to warn him to stay down, and legged it for the door. This was the kind of place and the kind of people he loved to leave behind._

_She must have pole-vaulted across the room to have made it so fast; he was just reaching for the knob when her perfume pressed in on him from behind. He turned around, left his hand resting on the knob._

_"Yeah?" he said._

_"What you said," she drawled in a lazy, boudoir voice, "I mean about me getting myself a new playmate. You're right about that, Cassidy...." She held the idea out to him, waiting for him to take it up on the beat. He let it lay. She smiled, but her eyes turned as hard as a bride's biscuits. "Anyway, you could be right."_

_"And so...?" Fleetwood asked._

_The smile stayed fixed, but she shrugged. "So maybe the music we'd make together wouldn't exactly be Brahms. But it wouldn't be Guy Lombardo, either. You've got the rocks, but your client doesn't know a thing about that unless you tell her. I have ... other things. And I can be sweet when I want." She moved closer and planted an arm around his neck, leaning in to make herself comfortable. "I can be so sweet you almost couldn't stand it. Almost."_

_"So can a cyanide soda," Fleetwood said dully. "Sweet and final." He lifted her arm away from his neck, and it might have been a noose. He let it drop._

_When he went out the door her smile had got itself all bent._

* * * * *

The hallways of the Grande Apartments were carpeted as thickly as the living quarters. It was the only place in town where you could sneak up on someone at a dead trot. Fleetwood plushed along in the direction of the elevators. He was nearly there, just abreast of a drinking fountain, when it hit him, just like it had those other times before. He stopped and reached out a hand to steady himself against the fountain.

In a moment his head began to clear a little and he straightened, running a lean, trembling hand through his carrot-colored hair. Even so he clung to the fountain a bit longer and when he finally let go it was only to free his hand so he could check his pulse. The attacks were coming closer together now, he reflected. But so were the events which usually led up to them--the incidents of violence, the sight of blood.

It was crazy, a sort of general softening and mellowing, the kind of thing that makes you bait for the boys with the cushiony couches and the expensive ears. It was downright absurd. He had to get hold of himself.

He searched his mind warily for his own thoughts, as an agent might search for saboteurs. He looked for those innermost stirrings of the soul, the ones that breathe of fear and anxiety. But there was nothing. And that was crazy too. It was as though he'd never had a thought in his life, or even an experience from which to draw a thought. It was like amnesia, and yet it wasn't amnesia at all. He knew that he was Fleetwood Cassidy and he knew that he was a private investigator who worked independently. But that was where he ran into the wall. But the really frightening part of it was the veiled feeling that even if he should manage to scale the wall and look behind it, he'd find--exactly nothing!

Of course, he told himself, the thing to do was to think back to that place in time where the spells--the softening--had begun. There lay the real clue. But it was so much easier said than done. He could project his thoughts backwards, after some effort, to the day before when he had jumped into a taxi, shouted to the driver to "follow that car," then found himself in a nervous panic lest they were travelling at a rate of speed in excess of the legal limit. But that was just another small, humiliating example--by no means the beginning.

* * * * *

He forced his thoughts back still farther, but it was rather like ramrodding a rifle with a ballbat. He arrived finally, by dint of the most extreme concentration, back in the apartment of that sloe-eyed, full-lipped and tempestuous beauty, Dolores Nobella. He had given her a hundred dollars for evidence against her mother, and she had lifted her skirts with a graceful, crimson-taloned hand and inserted the bills deftly in the top of her stocking. All of a sudden it had come to Fleetwood that Dolores, even for a girl with long legs, wore disturbingly tall stockings--and he had turned away, coloring at the collar. He, Fleetwood Cassidy, had blushed, and what was more, now that he thought of it he blushed again.

That was the end. Or rather the beginning--the beginning of Fleetwood's strange new emotional pattern.

At any rate he felt better having at least established the point of departure, even if it didn't make the riddle of his growing metamorphosis one whit clearer. He boosted himself away from the drinking fountain and continued along the hallway with the eerie feeling that he was moving toward some prearranged meeting with Destiny.

He was still a soul adrift, so to speak, when he pushed his way out of the Grande and stood pondering in the afternoon sun. The sidewalk, the street, the traffic, the confused and crowded skyline--all of these things, in turn, presented new problems of identification and orientation, as though he was seeing them all for the first time and didn't know quite what to make of them. And yet.... And yet--what? It was as though his mind had made another sudden turning and again brought him up against the blank wall. The past, even the immediate past that included the events in the Grande Apartments, slipped away from him and were lost. When he tried to think back there were only words in his mind in place of faces, places, events--words like caper, rod, dame, murder. They brought with them no mental association with anything real or experienced. He passed a hand slowly over his eyes. Surely he was losing his mind.

With heavy concentration he forced his attention to the row of automobiles along the curb. He had the feeling that one of them belonged to him, but he hadn't the slightest idea of which one it might be. He closed his eyes and waited. The spell would pass. The others had.

* * * * *

He opened his eyes and hopefully surveyed the row of cars for a second time. There was something about the blue convertible. He moved forward, thinking to check the registration slip, when a smart-looking woman in green tweed walked up to the car, got inside, glanced at him curiously and quickly started the engine. He edged back, coloring about the neck and ears.

He waited a bit longer but the lost feeling didn't leave him. If anything it only grew stronger. He turned aimlessly back toward the Grande Apartments, then started with a gasp of dismay.

The Grande Apartments were gone, and in their place was an establishment called The Handy Drug Store! Fleetwood tried to think clearly, more clearly than he ever had before. It wasn't any good; there wasn't any logical answer. Warily, he approached the store and went inside.

He by-passed the cigarette counter and the magazine racks, noted their contents curiously, and climbed aboard a stool at a long counter. At least it was a place to sit down and rest. A girl approached from the other side of the counter and made a quick pass at the area in front of him with a paper napkin.

"Yes?" she inquired.

Fleetwood turned and looked at her, and it happened. His eyebrows shot up, his heart stood still. He felt faintly ill in a surprised, elated sort of way. Never had he dreamed that there could be such a creature. This girl, this ... this fragment of heaven! She couldn't possibly be real. She was so extraordinarily ordinary!

"What would you like?" the girl said, and Fleetwood tingled anew just at the sound of her voice; its tone was so enchantingly flat and nasal. Never had he dreamed that it was possible for any woman to speak with so little innuendo. He was shaken to the very core. He realized that because of this girl something very important was happening to him, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. The mystery of the disappearing Grande Apartments faded from his mind.

"I beg your pardon?" he murmured in an effort to induce the girl to speak again.

"I said, what do you want?" the girl repeated, and her grey-brown eyes looked into his unconcernedly.

It was too good to be true! Here she was, this extraordinary female person, apparently eager, even impatient, to fulfill his slightest wish, just for the naming. Fleetwood took a firm grip on the edge of the counter. If this was a dream he didn't want to interrupt it by being too rash. His eyes dwelt on her hair, tabulating the exact measure of its fascinating dullness.

"Bourbon and water?" he said cautiously. "Double?" He couldn't remember exactly what it meant, but it seemed a likely entry.

"Huh?" the girl said. "What was that?"

* * * * *

Fleetwood's heart sank; he'd said the wrong thing, and the first crack out of the box, too. Obviously, he had blundered somehow into a strange land where people spoke in prepared dialogues, and the moment he'd opened his mouth he'd gone up in his lines. There was a proper response to the question, "what do you want?" but "bourbon and water" was not it. He glanced around nervously as two young women arrived at the magazine racks behind him and simultaneously picked up copies of the _New York Toast_. Neither returned his glance or even gave the slightest indication that they were aware of his existence, much less his dilemma. He looked back at the girl who had now begun to eye him rather curiously. Plainly she was waiting for him to get on with it; he had to try again, no matter how much he might disappoint both of them.

"Scotch and soda?" he offered timorously.

"Gosh," the girl said, "where do you think you are?"

"I don't know," Fleetwood said and attempted what he hoped was the sort of glance that pleads understanding. "I mean to say...."

"Are you being funny about a cup of coffee, or do you really think you're in a bar somewhere?"

"Coffee?" Fleetwood said. He seized upon the word as a drowning man might snatch at a drifting life preserver. Besides, it dinged a small bell of recognition somewhere in the back of his mind. "Yes," he murmured, "coffee, please."

"Okay, then," the girl said, and left.

Fleetwood reflected on this exchange in a thickening mood of perturbation. Retracing, haltingly, its tangled bypaths, it seemed to lack in retrospect those bright glimmerings of reason that one looks for in a friendly conversation. The end result appeared to be that he was merely about to receive coffee, which his confused faculties identified only as something murky and brown, of undetermined usefulness. He had hoped for more. As he thought on it, however, voices reached to his inner ear. The girls at the magazine racks had tuned up conversationally. Chit-chat was their medium, of the sort that, for all its lack of substance, takes on a certain penetration after a time. In the end, Fleetwood found himself slipping, no matter how unwillingly, into the role of the eavesdropper. As it was, though, he couldn't have selected a more illuminating moment in which to fall from grace.

"I've been following him for years," one of the girls said as Fleetwood dialed in full strength. "I watch for him every time he comes out."

"Fleetwood Cassidy?" the second girl responded. "Oh, sure. I'm always watching for him."

* * * * *

At this exchange, the back of Fleetwood's neck could not have bristled more smartly had someone begun currying operations with a pair of spiked boots. He straightened rigidly on his stool, twitched significantly about the ears and nose and, in short, affected all the most usual aspects of a beagle alerted to the first whiff of a super-scented fox. Coming as it did in the exact moment of his greatest befuddlement, this overheard snatch of conversation had a telling effect. All at once it posed questions, suggested half-answers and plunged him headlong into a whole new field of bewildering conjecture. It all came too suddenly, however, for him to know how to react to it. For a moment he simply froze to his stool and stared straight ahead like a hypnotized hen.

It was this reactional delay, then, which bogged him down at the decisive moment. By the time he jarred himself into action and twisted around on the stool, the girls had already moved away. One of them, in fact, was well along in the act of handing over the cash for a copy of the _Saturday Morning Call_ to the cashier by the door.

"Hey!" Fleetwood said weakly. "Here, there...!"

But time had drained out. The girl completed her transaction with the cashier, joined her friend at the door, and the two of them legged it in unison out to the sidewalk and into the burgeoning sunset. By the time Fleetwood had reached the doorway they had lost themselves in the crowd.

"Hey," Fleetwood murmured with limp regret and turned back to find that the girl had returned to the counter and placed a steaming cup at his place. She was watching him with worried interest.

"You want this joe, don't you?" she asked as he returned.

"Yes," Fleetwood said, settling himself and gazing dully into the cup. "Yes, I want it." He lifted the cup and sampled the coffee which suddenly tasted quite familiar to him. But the greater part of his mind was concerned with other things. He looked up at the waitress who was still standing before him.

"I wonder," he said, "did you notice those two young women who were just here? The ones standing there at the magazine racks?"

The girl inclined her head thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

"Clare and Connie?" she said.

"You know them?"

"Uh-huh. Sort of."

"Who are they?"

"Who _are_ they? Clare and Connie?"

"Yes. What about them?"

"Well, that's their names, Clare and Connie," the girl said. "That's all I know."

"But what do they do?" Fleetwood said, trying it another way. "Have you ever heard?"

"Oh," the girl said. "They're telephone operators. They come in here all the time."

"Telephone operators?" Fleetwood did his best to digest this patently indigestible piece of information. No matter how he chewed it it still didn't fit with what had just happened. He drummed his fingers on the counter for a moment. "Are you sure you couldn't be mistaken?" he asked. "It couldn't be that maybe they work for some sort of investigator or the government, could it?"

"Oh, no," the girl said positively. "Why should they do that?"

"Well," Fleetwood said, watching her closely, "I overheard them talking just now, and they were saying something about following someone called Fleetwood Cassidy."

"Oh, sure," the girl said and smiled in a way that didn't in the least degree mar her expression of profound placidity. "Everyone follows him."

Fleetwood gaped. "Huh?" he said.

"Uh-huh," the girl said. "The _Call_...."

She broke off as an elderly man hailed her from the other end of the counter. "Hey, Kitty," he pleaded. "I haven't got all night, you know."

"Sure, Max," Kitty answered amiably, and departed.

"Wait!" Fleetwood said, but she didn't turn back.

* * * * *

Fleetwood furrowed his brow and pondered her last words. The call ... she had said. The call. The call of what? The call _to_ what, for that matter. Then it struck him like a coarsely threaded bolt flung out of the blue.

The _Call_! Of course! The _Saturday Morning Call_! The very magazine which one of the girls, Clare or Connie, had bought and tucked so conspicuously under her arm on leaving the store. Fleetwood's mind raced. It was perfectly plain, cut and dried like an apricot in season. The _Call_ was the signal, the emblem of some secret society or organization which, for their own sinister purposes, was keeping tabs on him. The members made themselves known and communicated with each other through displaying the _Call_ under their arms. But why? It was absurd; by his very profession he was supposed to be a watcher, not a watchee.

As he pondered this latest and newest equation he turned his gaze automatically to the magazine racks and the several issues of the _Call_ which were on display there. He looked, and fell back aghast, unable to believe his eyes But there it was nonetheless, in spite of his disbelief:

BEGINNING IN THIS ISSUE! the banner across the cover gasped breathlessly, FLEETWOOD CASSIDY AND THE KIPPERED CAPER!

As well he might, after taking this in, Fleetwood went limp on his stool, washed through with conflicting emotions. It was plain that either he or the world had lost all sanity. He closed his eyes and commanded his head to stop reeling. Even so, it was some moments before he regained sufficient composure to reopen his eyes and bend down to take up one of the magazines for a closer inspection. And when he did, it rattled and flapped about in his grip like a struggling egret in a blizzard.

He maneuvered the magazine to the counter and eased an elbow onto it to hold it still. He gazed at it hollowly for some moments before, taking his courage in his hands, he opened it and churned through it to the first page of THE KIPPERED CAPER.

He stared in silent wonder. There, rendered in natural tints, staring back at him with all the sweep and grandeur purchaseable from the hand of a top flight commercial artist, was his own face.

"Awrr!" said Fleetwood. "Uphh!" And for the moment that comprised his entire comment on the discovery.

Time lost all meaning to Fleetwood. For all he knew whole hours might have slipped by as he sat there staring down at the illustration. There was one thing, though, about which he was positive; he had never posed for the portrait in the magazine. But then how could they have gotten such an exact likeness? And there was his name too. Something more than weird coincidence was involved here, he was certain of it. He started violently as the voice sounded in his ear.

"More coffee?"

The girl Kitty was standing before him again, the _Silex_ poised expertly over his cup. Fleetwood stared up at her with haunted eyes. His mouth worked loosely for several moments before he produced intelligible sound.

"L--look!" he said, twisting the magazine around in her direction. "Look at that!"

Kitty put down the _Silex_ and studied the picture with grave interest. "Seems familiar," she murmured. Then she made a quick clucking noise of recognition. "Of course! That's Fleetwood Cassidy, the fellow in the story. But just for a moment it looked like somebody else I've seen around...." She looked up at Fleetwood. "It's you, isn't it? You pose for Fleetwood Cassidy!"

"No," Fleetwood said despairingly. "That's just the trouble. I don't pose for Fleetwood Cassidy. I've never heard of Fleetwood Cassidy. I mean I _am_ Fleetwood Cassidy. Anyway...."

* * * * *

But Kitty's attention had already gone back to the illustration. "I always thought this fellow, Grant Dermitt, just made you up out of his head. You a good friend of his?"

"Grant Dermitt?" Fleetwood asked. "Who's he?"

"The guy who writes about you," Kitty said. "Oh, you know; you're kidding me." She smiled down at the illustration, unaware that just beyond her nose its flesh-and-blood counterpart had become distorted with a look of slack-mouthed stupefaction. "Just listen here to what it says about you." She began to read from the page opposite the illustration:

_Fleetwood shoved Caroline away from him, and she plumped down on the sofa like a mail bag heaved off a passing train, soft and sullen._

_"Save it for the next sucker," he drawled. "When I'm ready to go shopping for coffins I'll let you know. But I'm not ready, not just yet."_

_Her face became a white mask of anger. "I'll kill you, Cassidy!" she shrilled. "You can't push me around and not bleed for it sooner or later. I'll kill you, damn you!"_

_"You'll try," Fleetwood nodded with a wry smile. "But take a tip, sugar, when you come gunning for me don't wear that negligee. It doesn't give you any place to hide the weapon. In fact it doesn't give you any place to hide anything."_

_When he sauntered out the door she was still staring at him, her face twisted and mottled in the firelight like an artist's paint rag._

"Gosh!" Kitty said, looking up from the magazine. "Gee!"

But Fleetwood didn't hear her. Suddenly a lot of things were falling into place and it was like deciphering a coded letter only to find out that the message you'd been working so hard to unsnarl was one telling you you'd never been born, that you were just a figment of your own imagination. He remembered the face in the firelight--and the negligee--and all the rest of it. But it wasn't a _real_ memory. It was only the shadow of something that hadn't really happened at all, merely the phantom remembrance of a reverie or a dream.

* * * * *

Suddenly a dazed, trance-like expression clouded his eyes. He shoved himself away from the stool, turned and started toward the door.

"Hey!" Kitty yelled. "Hey, just a minute! You owe me ten cents!"

But Fleetwood continued to the door, stepped out to the sidewalk, and glanced purposefully down the row of parked cars....

"Just imagine!" Kitty breathed. "Just feature you being real!"

"No," Fleetwood murmured. "No." He looked up at her, beyond her, his eyes filled with a shocking realization. "No, I'm not real. I...."

* * * * *

_The grey coupe ground to a stop in the drive and Fleetwood got out. As he rounded the shrubs he could see that there were lights on in the house. That was good; Evelyn was home. It was a nice lay-out, swank and beautiful but very refined, like Evelyn herself. He could hear the wash and roll of the ocean from somewhere beyond and below. He patted his pocket, felt the box, and legged it up the steps._