Gathering the map and Peggy’s list, I opened the door, about to tell Carmelita that she should help Peggy with the rest of the addresses. To my surprise, Carmelita stood up as I entered the lobby, grabbing her purse as though she was about to leave.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“With you, of course.”
I raised an eyebrow. Carmelita’s company was always appreciated, and there had been plenty of times where her superior brain had saved the day for me, but more often than not I found that her sometimes odd behavior slowed me down. If I was trying to interview people about Katrina Mulligan’s whereabouts, subtlety was going to be paramount, and Carmelita, as I’ve said, wasn’t the queen of subtle. “With me?” I asked. “Are you sure you’re ready for that much…public exposure? Wouldn’t you rather try out your repairs on Peggy for a bit?”
“No,” she said casually, still standing there with her purse. “I think I’m ready. Don’t you think so, Peggy?”
“I’m not getting in the middle of this,” Peggy replied and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter.
“Your silence is a vote in itself,” I said to her, “which means I’m outnumbered.” Then, looking at Carmelita, I said, “All right. Come on. But let me do the talking, all right? You’re just getting your ankles wet again.”
We left the office and went back to the parking lot, then headed west. The first address I had was for a woman named Beth Verhoeven. She lived on a quiet little street in the Wilshire Park area, just off of Olympic. The house looked pleasant enough, but when I pulled up to the curb I saw there was no car in the driveway.
“This may be a quick stop,” I said.
“Do you want to leave a note in the mailbox?” Carmelita asked. “With your business card?”
It would have been a good idea in other circumstances, but not this one. “I don’t want to give her a warning,” I said. “She’ll probably figure there’s only one thing a PI would want to talk to her about, and if she has time to think about her answers, they won’t be as useful as the ones I’ll get from her if she’s caught off guard.”
“That makes sense.”
“You taking notes?” I asked as I opened my door.
“Mentally.”
We got out of the car and started up the walkway to the front door. The house was painted light blue, and the door and trim were darkly varnished.
“Still thinking about what I said yesterday?” I asked. “About learning a new skill to get a step closer to your goal?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve thought about that a lot.”
There was something in her tone that I couldn’t trace, but I was at the door now. It wasn’t the time for probing questions—at least not any aimed at Carmelita.
Although I was expecting to walk away with nothing, the door opened moments after I knocked. Maybe Mrs. Verhoeven didn’t own a car, or it was in the garage. Either way, I faced a pleasant looking woman who seemed less surprised and less put off by my business card than Mrs. Pruitt had been the day before. Maybe they’d talked, I thought.
I ran through the whole thing—had she heard from Katrina, possible whereabouts, the works. When it came to the old boyfriend, Mrs. Verhoeven knew less than Mrs. Pruitt had—no more info on filling in the name or the location of any of his hotels. It wasn’t exactly a replay of the interview from the day before—more of an echo, really, a distant one that was hard to decipher.
“Tell me, Mrs. Verhoeven,” I finally asked, deciding to throw a new wrinkle into the sheets. “Did Mrs. Mulligan have any issues with drugs?”
The pleasant woman’s eyes went wide. “Drugs?” she asked, incredulous.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why on earth would you ask that? Is her husband saying she’s mixed up with—”
“No, ma’am. It’s nothing like that. Just a very flimsy lead I’m trying to follow along with all the others. Leave no stone, right?”
“Of course.”
I let a moment’s silence hang between us and then said, “Well?”
She tilted her head sideways, like a dog confused at its master’s strange behavior.
“Drugs?” I prodded,
“Oh! Oh, well…no. Of course not. Katrina never…I mean, one doesn’t know everything that goes on in people’s lives, of course. But…no. Not that I’m aware of at least.”
“Thank you. Ruling things out is sometimes as important as ruling them in.”
“Um…what kind of drugs?”
“I probably shouldn’t say.”
This bothered her immensely, I could see. And that was fine with me. I recognized the gossip in her, the part of her that was less concerned that her friend might be in trouble and more concerned that she’d had to hear about it from a stranger. This made me feel a little pleased as I tipped my hat and turned away from the door with Carmelita in tow.
“Was that bit about drugs true?” she asked as we got into the car.
“Not exactly. Just a hunch. Did it seem like I was making it up?”
“No. Not to her anyway. I picked up a change in your tone, though.”
“And you don’t think she did?”
“She hasn’t got my brain, Jed.”
“That is true.” I pulled away from the curb. “You’re starting to see the advantages of that thing now, aren’t you?”
“My brain?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Yes. It surprises me now on a daily basis.”
“That must be exciting.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “And sometimes, it’s kind of a burden. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know the truth about myself.”
I smiled.
“What is it?”
“That’s one of the most human things I’ve heard you say, Carmelita.”
The next house was a little farther west, almost at the southern edge of Beverly Hills. This friend of Katrina’s must have been wired into the gossip network quite well, since I got pretty much the same answers as I had with the last two women and no adverse reaction at all to the drug question. When I took it a little further and got specific with a reference to heroin, there was a moment’s pause as if the woman had just started hearing me speak a different language. And then she must have fallen back on her programming and went back to playing dumb.
Walking back to my car, I imagined the phone lines lighting up already as the gossip about Katrina kicked into a new orbit. I wondered if there was something even more outlandish I could lay on the next woman on the list, telling myself that if I was going to get stonewalled by a bunch of Hollywood housewives, I should at least have some fun doing it. The fact that I was having that thought is very clearly etched in my memory, probably because of what happened next.
One second, I was walking along the sidewalk with Carmelita, pondering gossip and what my next move should be.
And the next second, I was sitting in the passenger seat of the Winslow. Carmelita was in the driver’s seat, staring at me. We were still parked.
My adrenaline spiked.
“What just happened?” I asked as my heart started racing and sweat beaded on my forehead.
“I don’t know, Jed. Are you…are you back?”
“Are you saying I was…what? Gone?”
“No. You were here. But not.”
“Tell me,” I said, suddenly desperate. “Everything.”
“All right,” she said, the picture of calm and a complete contrast to what I was feeling. “We were walking along the sidewalk after the interview. You were quiet. And then you stopped, midstride. I looked at you and you seemed terribly confused. You looked at me and said, ‘Carmelita.” It was like you were testing the name out, like you’d just learned it.”
“What did you do?”
“I said, ‘yes, it’s me.’ I asked if you were all right and you said you thought so. We started walking again. You were looking all around, like you didn’t know where we were or what we were doing. I figured you shouldn’t drive, so I asked you for the keys. Y
ou seemed annoyed at this, like you didn’t want to give them up. But then when we got here, you looked at the car and said, ‘This one? This is my car?’ And when I said yes, you shook your head and gave me the keys.”
“Is that it?”
“You wanted to walk around the car for a minute, just looking at it. You said ‘Winslow’ once like you’d never heard of the brand. Then you shrugged and got in. You asked me what we were doing here, and I told you we were working on a case. Then you got quiet for a moment, and after that you said, ‘What just happened?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, Jed. Are you back?’ and you said—”
I put up a hand to stop her. “Okay, okay. I get it. Was there anything else?”
“No.”
“Nothing with…music or singing or anything like that?”
“No.”
I let out a long breath. Nothing like this had ever happened. I had no memory of saying any of what Carmelita had just described. If it had been anyone else reporting the facts, I would have been skeptical, but not with Carmelita. She had no reason to lie.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“All right, I think.” I cleared my throat and sat up in the seat. Taking off my fedora, I found my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my forehead. “You know how to get us to the next address?”
“Yes,” she said, “but we’re not going there.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
She started the car.
“And why not?”
“Because we have to go see Guillermo.”
“I have work to do, Carmelita.”
“We have to go see him, Jed.”
“Why?”
“Because he told me to keep an eye on you. He said to bring you to him right away if it happened.”
“If what happened?” I asked, my ire rising.
Checking over her shoulder for traffic, she put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb, answering my question without emotion. “If another Jed Strait took over your consciousness,” she said.
Chapter Nine
“I can’t believe you knew this was going to happen and you didn’t tell me about it,” I said to Guillermo, aware that I was raising my voice at the old man and not caring.
Guillermo looked pained. “I’m sorry, lobo.”
“He didn’t know,” Carmelita said, coming to her creator’s defense. “It was just a possibility. We didn’t want to alarm you.”
“Well, that’s nice of you both, but what if it had happened while I was driving a car? And the other Jed didn’t know how to drive? What then?”
Carmelita looked at me and blinked but didn’t answer.
“That was why you went with me,” I said, answering my own question. She smiled a little at this, apparently glad to see that I could still play detective and figure a few things out. “That was why you insisted on going to work today but not staying in the office.”
“It wasn’t just to save you from a wreck,” she said. “But to save you in general.”
“I wouldn’t have needed saving if one of you had just told me what you knew.”
Guillermo looked crestfallen. My irritation had subsided a little, which then allowed a flood of guilt to crest my inner walls, and I was instantly as filled with regret at getting angry with Guillermo as he must have been at keeping vital information from me.
I sighed.
We were in the workshop, just the three of us. Osvaldo was off with the crossover machine, getting it ready for my next journey. The night before, I had suggested that we move the machine to a different location, as the prospect of outrunning night watchmen every time I visited the other world was not something I looked forward to. I was glad now that Osvaldo had been given the task, as it gave me a chance to air things out in private with Guillermo and Carmelita.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper, Guillermo,” I said. “I know you were just trying to help.”
“It’s okay, lobo,” he said. “You deserve to be angry, I think.” He shrugged and didn’t say anything.
I felt awful.
“Why don’t you tell me now?” I said. “What were you suspicious of?”
Guillermo waited a moment and then said, “In the German’s journal, when he talks about getting those babies, he also says he started losing…himself, yes? The more jumps, the more it happened.”
“But what’s happening in those moments?” I asked.
“We don’t know exactly,” Carmelita said. “Klaus Lang wasn’t able to explain, but Guillermo thinks he’s figured it out.”
“Okay,” I said, eager to hear.
“When you make those little trips,” Guillermo said, “with the first machine we built from the Nazi woman, or when you have your music moments…what do you think happens to those other Jeds when you’re in their minds?”
“I don’t know. I used to worry that I was switching places with them and that they were going to mess things up here, but now I know that doesn’t happen.”
“Si. And then your trip to those worlds ends and you come back. Those other Jeds…they maybe feel like they lost a bit of themselves, yes?”
“You’re saying those Jeds have moments of lost…awareness? When I’m in their heads?”
“That’s right, yes.”
“And Lang had the same thing happen to him? Other Klaus Langs took him over?”
“He never says,” Carmelita answered. “Here’s what he wrote. I’ll translate from the German.” She paused a moment as her brain called up the files, words she’d pulled from the dead German’s coded notes and—in the original translation of them for Guillermo’s benefit—words that were now part of Carmelita’s formidable mind.
“I first lost time,” Carmelita said, no halting in her voice as she worked through the data in her brain and sent it seamlessly to her mouth, “after my second trip to another world. I was back in the lab discussing the results of the experiment when there was a gap of perhaps two minutes that I cannot account for. My assistant, Albert, said that I had started acting strangely, asking him questions whose answers should have been obvious to me. And then, just as suddenly, I was restored to my normal self with no memory of the things Albert claims I said. And by saying ‘claims’ I do not mean to impugn my assistant’s reputation, as there is no doubt his account is truthful. This phenomenon repeated multiple times in the following weeks as I continued my travels in other realities.”
She stopped, blinked, and looked at me.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“Why?” Guillermo asked.
“You’re saying…and he’s saying…that crossing over leaves the traveler…what? Susceptible? Vulnerable? To being crossed into after he’s made a few of these jumps?”
“Si, si. But physical jumps, yes? Not the same as the mind-jumping you do with the music.”
“Right, right,” I said. “That part I get. But, Guillermo…I’ve already made a jump physically. The first one, remember? When I got sent to this world in the first place during the war. If what you’re saying is true, then I should have been having these moments of lost time all along.”
He smiled at this, and I was glad to see the curve in his lips and the twinkle in his eyes again. “You weren’t paying attention to Carmelita,” he said. “The German lost time after his second physical trip, yes? When you came to this world, that was just your first trip. You see?”
“And when I crossed over last night, that was my second trip.” It made a little more sense now. “But I still don’t understand why.”
Carmelita jumped in. “Guillermo’s theory is that the more you physically travel between worlds, it creates an instability in your existence. It’s like you’re no longer securely anchored in the world you’re physically occupying.”
I nodded. It was as good a theory as I could have come up with.
“But what are those other Jeds doing?” I asked. “Like that Jed today who ended up sitting in the car with Carmelita instead of me. What
could he have been doing on his side of the fence that made him slip into my consciousness?”
“Who knows?” Guillermo asked. “Next time it happens, one of us should ask you. Or…him. Maybe…maybe he has the same thing with music as you?”
“Or maybe he has his own Guillermo,” Carmelita said. “With a machine that lets him see other worlds.”
I put my head in my hands. “You’re saying that right now there could be another Guillermo and Jed in some other world trying to figure out the same things we’re working on?”
“Why not?” Guillermo asked.
“And those Jeds are slipping into me and I’m slipping into them?”
“You were slipping into them. Now you’re crossing over for real.”
“And weakening my anchor in the process so these other guys can drop in and say hello. Did Lang say if it ever went away? Or am I stuck like this?”
Guillermo put his hand on my shoulder, a comforting pat. “It goes away, lobo. He said so. Once he stopped crossing over to get the baby hims, it went back to normal.”
That, at least, was some good news.
“You still could have told me,” I said.
Guillermo shrugged. “Conditions are different. Our machine is powered differently than his. Maybe it wouldn’t happen.”
“We saw no point in worrying you unnecessarily,” Carmelita said.
“I understand. Next time, though, worry me, okay?”
“Si, lobo. Of course.”
I looked at my watch. It was almost time to go and meet Sherise. Almost, but not quite. Time for one more question.
“Last night, when I told you about Jetpack Jed on the other side…have you given his story any thought? You think there might be a bit of truth in it?”
“Oh, sure,” Guillermo said. “And maybe not. Maybe he’s just a good liar. But if it’s partly true…”
“What then?”
He shrugged. “Maybe…maybe there’s some coincidence with what happened to you, yes? Maybe him and you got sent to new worlds around the same time. Maybe the exact same time.”
“You’re not saying Jed and Jetpack Jed traded places, are you?” Carmelita asked.
“No,” Guillermo said. “The Jed who was from this world and our Jed…” Here he patted me on the shoulder again, but now it was almost a gesture showing possession. “Those two switched. I’m sure of it. And, maybe, that other Jed, he didn’t do so good, yes? Maybe he died.”
The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4) Page 9