“She did seem pretty uneasy and distracted,” Teena said. “But when we were at work I only saw her when we ate lunch together once or twice a week.”
“Is there anybody whom she might stay in touch with?” Sibyl asked. “Her family?”
Lynn looked up from her plate of strawberry and cream waffles. “Her drawing a joker freaked them out, and when she went to work for Theodorus—”
“—With a bunch of jokers like me,” Teena said.
“Well, they didn’t cope well. So she sees them for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“There is someone—” Lynn began tentatively, then stopped.
“Tell her,” Teena said.
“All right,” Siobhan said, dropping her cool reserve. “It’s her no-good ex. Cletus. Nobody knows his last name. Car mechanic, small-time MMA prize-fighter on the side. Shaved head, tattoos, black Affliction T-shirts—you know the type.”
“She dumped him,” Lynn said. “He kept stepping out on her.”
Sibyl was silent for a moment, thinking. The Waffle House air-conditioning was fighting the brutal summer steam cooker that was Charleston with equally brutal Arctic cold that felt pleasingly soothing on her shiny surface. “If they are estranged—”
“Well,” Teena said, “it’s not that simple.”
“She still sees him sometimes,” Siobhan said. “She wasn’t above the occasional late-night booty call. She likes a lot of male attention. And she really liked his.”
“Ginny liked to call him her stallion,” Teena said.
“Self-destructive behavior is not an entirely unknown thing to Ginny,” Lynn said.
“No kidding.” Siobhan sighed. “If anybody knows where she is, it’s him.”
Charleston, Bugsy thought, was quaint as hell. Especially this part of it, a ritzy neighborhood not more than ten minutes from downtown. Small, but eminently exclusive, all the homes were fenced, sitting back from the street on manicured lawns and fronted by carefully maintained gardens, now a riot of summer blooms.
It was hot and humid on the sidewalk outside this particular estate, which was the residence of Malachi Schwartz, CFO of Witherspoon Aerospace. Bugsy had not been able to get near the House Secure, Theodorus Witherspoon’s country estate, any more than any of the other journalists who had descended on Charleston from all over the country. Theodorus was not talking, and his grounds were protected by a small army of lawyers, a larger army of armed jokers and private security … and, if the tales were true, some kind of guard snails. Some of the other reporters had a good laugh at the idea of guard snails. Not Jonathan. A guy who turned into his weight in wasps was not one to laugh at killer snails.
His requests for an exclusive interview with Theodorus had gone unanswered as well. Bugsy figured they had ended up in the circular file with all the rest. But if he could not get to Witherspoon himself, there were other options. Like Malachi Schwartz, who spent more time at the House Secure than at home, but actually lived in the heart of Charleston, in a mansion that was no doubt modest compared to the House Secure, but still beat the hell out of Jonathan’s studio apartment on the fringes of Jokertown.
The building was certainly antebellum. Colonial style, maybe? Bugsy wasn’t really up on architectural styles. It was impressive, though. Two main stories, gray, with window and other trim mostly white. A two-story-tall porch wrapped around the front. The front door was off-center, with five gleaming white columns on the right side, three on the left. The top floor was similarly asymmetrical, with one large gabled window on the right side—no doubt, Bugsy thought, the master bedroom—and three smaller gables to the left denoting less lavish sleeping quarters. Between the single large and triple smaller dormers was a square tower that increased the height of that part of the manse to three stories.
Bugsy sweated bullets as he sat there on a small folding chair, an easel before him as he pretended to paint the mansion, a small but sensitive recorder in his shirt pocket that he murmured into as his troop of wasps picked up conversations scattered throughout the house. So far there hadn’t been too much of import. He had tried making an appointment, of course, but a joker who looked just like Elvis Presley (if Elvis had been made of purple Jell-O) had turned him firmly away at Schwartz’s front door. Hence the easel and the paint kit. The sidewalk was public property.
Schwartz was not presently at home, but when he returned, Bugsy would be ready for him. He had three wasps ensconced in Schwartz’s study, hidden in strategic places, and more crawling on the ceiling in the library and hidden behind the drapes in the master bedroom.
He was getting hungry and thirsty and was starting to think that this was a bad idea and general waste of time when a black limo pulled up to the gate, pushed the call button, and was buzzed into the estate.
The vehicle pulled up to the front door and the chauffeur smartly hopped out and opened the rear passenger door. One of the wasps buzzed around his head and distracted him, to give Bugsy time for a good look at the men who emerged from the limo’s rear seat. He knew the first man out: Troll, unfolding his towering nine-foot frame awkwardly from the car as he stepped onto the drive. Once he straightened, he offered a huge, gray hand to the second passenger, to help him to his feet. Malachi Schwartz.
Schwartz was an old man, somewhere in his seventies, but the nature of his joker made his true age hard to tell. His skin was light gray and smooth, with no sagging or wrinkles that would denote age, but the fringe of hair around the dome of his round skull was white. With his egg-shaped torso and hunched back he reminded Bugsy of depictions he’d seen of Humpty Dumpty in old children’s books, but he was a pretty smart cookie. Witherspoon’s right-hand man and financial wizard, he had a sharp brain and was rich as Midas. That made for a dangerous combination.
Who wears black in this weather? Bugsy thought. Fuck. That’s wool.
A manservant of some sort was waiting at the front door to usher the master and his protector in. Bugsy squirmed in his folding chair, which was beginning to make his butt ache. This might pay off after all, he thought as they disappeared into the house.
Cletus the ex-boyfriend turned out to be surprisingly cooperative and touchingly concerned about Virginia. Sibyl sometimes had trouble reading human emotions, but he seemed authentically worried about her. He gave Sibyl the address of the seedy airport hotel where he’d visited her several nights ago after she’d called him furtively and seemingly desperately late one evening. She wouldn’t tell him why she’d quit her job and why she was hiding out.
“I don’t want you involved in that,” she’d told him, but the last words he said to Sibyl were, “Please tell her I want to help.”
“I’ll let her know,” Sibyl said.
“And—”
She paused.
“You look pretty sweet yourself,” he added, taking a small notepad out of his shirt pocket. “Can I have your number?”
“Area code zero-zero-zero,” she said in her melodious contralto. “Zero-zero-zero. Zero-zero-zero-zero.”
He looked up from the pad on which he was writing to see her retreating form.
“Hey,” he called out. “That’s pretty cold.”
She kept walking.
“Turns out Virginia’s friends’ suspicions were spot-on,” she told Dr. Pretorius when she reached him at his Washington hotel. “She kept getting drunk and lonely and making booty calls to him. Also, not sleeping, which has him worried.”
“That’ll kill you,” Pretorius said. “Or at least it would kill those of us more subject to human frailty than yourself.” While Ice Blue Sibyl spent irregular periods dormant, she lacked the need for sleep as such.
“He says all she wants to do when he isn’t around is eat microwave popcorn, drink, watch soaps, and read Shakespeare stuff she downloads off Gutenberg, of all things,” Sibyl said. “She drives him crazy quoting it all the time.”
“I take it he told you where to find her?”
“He did.” She left out the part where Cletus hit on her
. “Has Flipper turned up anything in New York?”
“Nothing of note,” said Pretorius. “Dutton is out of town, we are told. Either that or laying low. Dr. Finn does not have so much as a parking ticket. I, however, am on the trail of something here in Washington. So you will forgive me if I cut this short. I have an appointment with a Chihuahua.”
Bugsy studied the study through his wasps. It was the perfect man cave for the well-to-do intellectual. The furniture was large and chunky, from an earlier age, all soft, gleaming, dark woods. The carpets on the floor were from an even earlier age, if Bugsy was any judge. Antique, though still vividly colored and rich in design. The various tchotchkes on his desk, atop plinths scattered around the room and standing in nooks on bookcases fairly bursting with old and expensive-looking volumes, were objets d’art ranging from bronze statuettes to fragments of Greek or Roman statuary to Tiffany lamps and elegant glass and pottery vases that Bugsy couldn’t identify if his life depended on it. It just oozed wealth, and, Bugsy had to admit, a wide-ranging good taste. Incongruously, however, one wall of the study was lined with computers, monitors, and television screens. Some of the equipment looked very cutting-edge; beyond Jonathan’s means and knowledge, certainly.
Malachi wasted no time. He went straight to the study and grabbed for the phone, while Troll paused in the front hall to talk with Grape Jello Elvis. Uh-oh, Jonathan thought. Am I being reported? He had no time to ponder the question. On the phone, Malachi rang the kitchen to discuss what he was having for dinner (lobster thermidor and floating islands, whatever they were). Then he rang his valet to discuss how many new shirts he needed. After that came a series of calls about price overruns, balance sheets, and recruitment for some space project, most of it financial mumbo jumbo that sounded like Greek to Bugsy. Maybe this isn’t my path to a Pulitzer after all, he thought.
Jonathan was so focused on Malachi in his study that he lost track of his immediate surroundings, which happened from time to time. Until a huge gray-green hand clapped him on the shoulder in a grip like iron, and a deep voice said, “Bugsy. I never knew you painted.”
Jonathan started so badly he knocked over his easel. Troll was looming over him, all nine feet of him, scowling. “Uh,” he said. “Hello, Howard. Fancy meeting you here.” His left ear turned into half a dozen wasps and flew away. That sometimes happened when he got nervous. “Painting, yeah … ah … I needed a hobby. What do you think?”
“I think you should stick to blogging,” said Troll. “Do you mind explaining why you are lurking across the street from Mr. Schwartz’s house?”
“I … ah … I was hoping he could get me in to see Theodorus.”
“He could, but he won’t.”
“Maybe … for a fellow joker…” Might as well use every card he had.
“There are twenty-seven joker journalists in that crowd outside the Witherspoon estate,” said Troll. “You’re not one of them. You were on American Hero. You were with the Committee. You write for Aces! magazine. You’re an ace. Go away, Bugsy. If you need a story, write that Theodorus had nothing to do with the assassination.”
When Troll let go of his shoulder, Bugsy got shakily to his feet. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said, “but there’s something dirty going on down here. I bumped into a couple of shady-looking characters at Hot Mama’s the other day. And Digger got a call from a source, a Witherspoon insider with a story to sell.”
“I know a guy saw Jetboy at the Piggly Wiggly last week,” said Troll. “Maybe you should buy his story.”
Jonathan drew himself up tall. “If there are dirty doings going on, I am going to find them.” Wasps were buzzing around his head. “The public has a right to know what Theodorus Witherspoon and Malachi Schwartz are up to.”
Troll sighed. “Go away, Bugsy. Oh, and if you got any little bits of yourself into the house, you had best pull them out, too, before I go looking for a can of Raid.”
Jonathan turned and, as casually as possible, abandoned his easel, chair, and painting paraphernalia and sauntered slowly down the street toward where he had parked his new rental car, hidden a couple of blocks away. His wasps followed.
The pictures of Virginia Matusczak that Ice Blue Sibyl had downloaded off Facebook showed alert eyes and plump cheeks. With the points of her elf-ears sticking coyly out of her bobbed brown hair, Sibyl could understand why some men found her attractive.
But Virginia didn’t look nearly so appealing when she opened the motel room door to Sibyl’s knock. She was wearing a dingy bathrobe whose indifferent fastening suggested she wore nothing underneath. Her cheeks sagged and her hair stuck out in random zigs and zags like a nest assembled by drunk crows. If Sibyl was any judge, she looked past desperate, past caring and fear.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“My name is Sibyl,” her vocoder replied in Peregrine’s dulcet tones. “I am an investigator for the Joker Anti-Defamation League. May I come in?”
Virginia’s dark, bloodshot eyes flicked furtively around the motel parking lot, which was empty but for Sibyl’s motorcycle parked before her door. “I’m gonna have to move again now,” she said. “If you can find me, he can, too.” She wheeled away and vanished into a room lit only by the muted TV conspicuously chained and padlocked to a wall bracket. Sibyl figured that was close enough to an invitation and followed her into gloom that smelled of unlaundered bedclothes and unshowered human.
The room was as seedy as Virginia’s ex had said it was. Watermarked walls, threadbare carpet whose unpleasant shades of green and orange suggested the gallons of puke Sibyl was certain had soaked into it over the years, a bed that, were it not for the solid pedestal every hotel in America had installed beneath its box springs in the 1990s, looked as if it probably had a dead hooker hidden under it. Sibyl sat perched on the edge of a chair with her leathers touching as little of its surface as she could manage.
Without looking Virginia scraped her fingers at the bottom of the microwave popcorn bag that sat beside her chair on the room’s little crooked desk and tossed some pieces into her mouth. “Are you sure you’re not a reporter? Because I’m not talking to reporters. Not unless I am paid.”
“Paid?” asked Sibyl. “Paid for what?”
“My story,” Virginia said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? The dirt. But I’m not giving it away. I’ll tell all, but first I see the green.”
Sibyl would have shrugged if she was given to human gestures. “I can talk to my boss about a payment. But unless I hear your story I won’t know what it’s worth. All we know is that you suddenly left your job as secretary to Theodorus Witherspoon’s right-hand man, Malachi Schwartz, and dropped out of sight. As if, perhaps, you were afraid of something.”
Virginia made a sound deep in her throat that might have been disgust or disbelief, or even just an attempt to clear it of phlegm. “Dammit! All kernels again.” She heaved herself up from the orange upholstered chair with clear tape patching, made a token effort at pulling her robe discreetly closed, and shuffled to the chest of drawers under the TV, where several unopened popcorn boxes were stacked. “Yes, I’m afraid. I know too much.”
“About the assassination?”
“Might be.” Matusczak was fumbling open the top of her box of microwave popcorn. “Might be other stuff. Dirty stuff. Bribes. Money laundering. All sorts of crooked stuff.” She opened the microwave door, slid a bag of popcorn inside the microwave, shut the door, and quickly punched in the heating time. “That’s all you get until I see the green, though. I’m going to get an agent. The things I know are worth a million dollars, at least.”
She hit the microwave’s start button and there was a sudden crack like miniaturized lightning. A huge blue spark leapt from the microwave and enveloped Virginia’s hand. She shuddered once with impossible violence, like a rat having its neck broken in the jaws of a terrier, then she slumped to the floor and onto her back as if her bones had dissolved within her.
Sibyl would have goggled with ast
onishment if she could. You can’t be—
“Dead,” Detective Redfern said. “Just like that, the CME says. Like flipping a switch.” He shook his head. “Nobody has any idea what made the microwave zap her like that. Or how it did it. But there’s no question that was the cause of death. The thing fried itself, too. Had to pass a really massive charge to do all that. Been working Violent Crimes for six and a half years now, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Thing is, you’d think the oven would be extra safe, on account of being a ‘smart’ microwave and all.”
“The motel was a fleabag,” Sibyl’s tab said. It was a replacement, hastily purchased by an intern from the same JADL-affiliated local lawyer who’d helped spring her earlier that afternoon. Redfern hadn’t lifted an eyebrow over its use. He was used to joker witnesses, and mostly just relieved at not having to hunt down a CPD sign interpreter. “What’s it doing with a smart microwave? And an internet connection?”
“Even ratholes got free Wi-Fi these days,” Redfern said. “How do you think the deceased downloaded all those Shakespeare plays? Plus we have learned they got these particular ranges on sale. My investigators did not fail to wonder about that detail, too, Miss Pretorius.”
“Have your keen-eyed investigators uncovered any evidence at all of violence being involved?” asked William Joe Lousader, Sibyl’s local attorney, in the rich baritone voice of a middle-aged Southern gentleman, which seemed totally discordant with his fresh, unlined, round dark face, black eyes, and straight dark brown hair. He looked all of twelve years old. Which would have worried Sibyl, if Dr. P. himself had not vouched for Lousader, when they’d called from the police station. “Or, indeed, of any crime being committed?”
“No to both,” Redfern said. “Not by Miss Pretorius, anyway. Our investigators tell me it would require an advanced electronics whiz to pull off at all. Plus there’s no physical sign the case was opened.” He drummed his fingers on the desk in his cubicle. The rest of the evening shift tapped and murmured beyond the white walls. “It’ll take a few days for the CME to type up her official report,” he said, as if reluctantly. “But she tells me on the phone she’s got to rule ‘death by misadventure.’”
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