by Dan Stout
Hemingway said, “Lowell and Cordray claim they were both being blackmailed by candies, and that Haberdine was targeted as well. But, Carter—” She paused to snap her gum. “They say that it’s been going on for years. That cops with Vice were letting it happen. Helping, even.”
Myris tapped the section of the board that still had Flanagan’s name. “Didn’t Haberdine’s echo say something about a cop in the room? One big, one small. Both deadly.” She let out a dual-toned whistle. “If a dirty cop was helping the candies shake down johns and janes, then that’s gotta be who was in the room.”
Hemingway crossed her arms and scowled. “Another Flanagan,” she said. “Just what we need.”
My head was swimming. If Lowell and Cordray had turned in evidence implicating Talena and her friends, it’d just be a matter of time before someone connected it to me and my time on the Vice squad. Back then I’d turned a blind eye, thinking I was letting victims protect themselves. But it might turn out that I was very slowly laying the groundwork for my own frame-job.
It looked like they’d found their fall guy for the Haberdine killing.
I excused myself with a mumbled, “Gotta make a call,” and left Myris and Hemingway staring at the board. I made it back to my desk and grabbed the phone and the pager. I scrolled to the most recent message, the call-back number for Talena’s hospital room. I dialed and the line rang through. I had to call twice more before someone picked up.
“Hello.”
I recognized the voice. Of course I did.
It was Angus.
31
WHEN I GOT TO TALENA’S floor at the hospital, Ajax was in the hallway. He looked at me in that wide-eyed way Mollenkampi get when they’re surprised.
“I couldn’t stop it, Carter.”
“I know,” I said.
Angus’s voice echoed in the hallway as it came from farther down the hall. He stood outside Talena’s room.
“Stop what? Stop us from arresting Carter’s pet waif?”
I faced him. “Where is she? I want to see her.” I took two long steps toward Angus, and his human partner appeared from nowhere, pulling me up short. Angus held up a hand.
“She’s still in her room. Where she’ll stay until the doctors clear her for transfer.” He twisted his head to call off Bengles. “Let him go in. He can spend some quality time before saying good-bye.”
I pushed past them.
“Don’t take too long, Carter. We’ll be wanting to ask you all kinds of questions about your other connections with our murder suspects.”
Talena was still in bed, eyes big and brimming wet. Not quite in tears. She was holding those in check, like the fierce warrior she was. Her left hand was handcuffed to the side rail of her hospital bed, and when she spoke her voice was tiny.
“Carter,” she said, and she didn’t need to say anything else.
I stood there a long moment, looking at the scrawny girl lit from above by a flickering fluorescent light, her wide-eyed face set against white linens and the pale green of the hospital walls. Then Angus called to me from the hallway. I couldn’t avoid talking to him, and I couldn’t help Talena by standing there slack jawed. So I turned to leave, but when I reached the room’s threshold I paused and looked back.
“Hang in there, kiddo,” I said. “I’m gonna get this fixed.”
She nodded, the door closed, and that was the last time I saw her in that room.
* * *
Bengles leaned against the wall, her neck and shoulders touching the paint, one foot kicked back against the wall. She bounced in place, a fast tempo of nervous energy. It reminded me of how Talena used to get while watching early morning cartoons and eating bowl after bowl of Sugar Sweets cereal.
Angus examined his reflection in the glass of an in-case-of-emergency cabinet, where a fire hose lay coiled, snakelike and ready to spit.
He looked at me. “Time to talk.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and waited for him to say more.
He glanced in the hospital room across the hall from Talena. “Looks like this one’s free,” he said, and held out his hand like a waiter showing me to my table.
The room was half turned over. Sheets had been stripped from the bed, but the previous tenant’s belongings still sat around the room. A half-empty cup, a half-full bedpan. I wondered if the occupant had gone home or to the morgue.
Angus and Bengles followed me in, and Jax made a move to do likewise. Bengles blocked his way.
“No chance,” Angus told him. Jax looked to me and I nodded, letting him know it was okay. He faded back and the door closed, leaving me alone with Angus and Bengles. I stood by the window, getting a scenic view of the brick wall of the building next door. Bengles stood with her back against the door and resumed her over-caffeinated bouncing. Angus sat in the room’s lone chair. Blue vinyl upholstery crackled under his weight, decaying edges exposing the stuffing inside.
“Since you’re here,” he said, “I assume you heard about the new evidence in the Squib case.”
I kept my mouth shut. I wanted him to show as many cards in his hand as possible.
“You’ve got to talk at some point,” he said. “I don’t really care if it’s now or later, but you should know that I was told I might have to make a call to IA at some point today.”
No cop in their right mind wanted to deal with an Internal Affairs probe.
“Fine,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
“Who is this girl? Who is she to you?”
She’s everything I’m sworn to protect.
“She’s the daughter of one of my ex-girlfriends.”
“What about the father?”
“What about him?” I raised and lowered the window blinds, giving me something to look at other than Angus’s smug face. It was critical that I not lose my temper.
“Does his name rhyme with Barter?”
Behind him, Bengles mumbled something that sounded like “martyr.” Angus never took his eyes off me.
“No idea,” I said, and it was true. Talena had been six years old when I met her mother.
“I’m wondering what makes you so interested in her.”
“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Bengles grinned and bounced in place.
“How long were you with her mother?” Angus asked.
Thirteen years. With repeated breaks to build our will back up.
“Off and on. Fits and starts,” I said. “You know how it goes.”
Angus grunted. He had no idea how it went.
“Why did you break it off?”
I drank too much, she didn’t drink enough. We were doomed from the start.
“The job. Lotta stress, being with a cop.”
Angus crossed his legs. “When the girl—”
“Talena.”
“When she drank the poison,” he said, “you said it was meant for you. Is there any chance it was meant for her?”
“No. I would’ve been dead if she hadn’t shown up and drank first.”
“Convenient that she happened to be in that neighborhood.”
I slid the blinds up. I let them drop down. Using them as a metronome, I kept my breathing controlled even as my temper rose.
“She’s an activist,” I said.
“The envoys who came in today were very clear about just how active she’s been.”
“Was there a question in there?”
“Did you know she’s been engaged in blackmail?”
“I think a blackmailer would be able to afford something nicer than a seventh-floor walkup like Talena’s.”
“Answer the question,” he said.
I turned away from the window, and looked at him directly.
“How about you ask me the real question?” He didn’t respond. “Ask me about the Squ
ib,” I said.
“What about the Squib?”
My temper flared, and I fought it back down. “The Oracular Tongue nightmare we watched. Haberdine’s ghost or echo or whatever it is that said there was a cop in the room when he was killed. You gonna ask me where I was that night?”
“Where were you?”
“At a bar, waiting for my shift to end.”
Angus sniffed. “Sounds believable.”
I waited for him to turn on me, but it didn’t come. He merely looked at me, and his biting jaws clattered slightly as he shook his head.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked.
“No,” I said. He was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
“Well, whoever gift-wrapped this package thinks I am.” He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his tusks. “I don’t like you,” he said. “You’re a spoiled prima donna who thinks you’re better than the rest of the force.”
I blinked, the up-down motion of the blinds forgotten. “Prima donna?”
“Your life’s a mess, you’re a disgrace, and you use your woe-is-me bullshit to get the brass to let you slide on every regulation in the book.” His mandibles twitched violently. “If you were helping facilitate some kind of blackmail ring, I’ll put you away. And if you interfere with my investigation, I’ll roll right over you. But for someone to think I’d believe you tore apart a diplomat in a hotel room?” He looked disgusted. “Please.”
He stood up. “I’m not making the same mistake you did with Flanagan,” he said as he walked to the door. “I’m not charging an innocent man, no matter how good it might make me feel in the short term.”
Angus pointed at the hall dividing us from Talena. “Now your favorite lost cause in there? I’ve got plenty to hold her. She’ll go down for something. Maybe you will too, or maybe you won’t. But just because someone wants me to hang this mess on you doesn’t mean I’m going to do it.” His biting jaws clenched. “Don’t come back here, don’t try to make contact with my prisoner.”
Prisoner, he called her.
“And when I do break you,” he said. “It’ll be for something that sticks.”
He walked out, Bengles on his heels. I stared after them, and the weight of everything bore down on me. The murders, the Squib smell, Flanagan’s arrest and release, my humiliation in the press, my failure to protect anyone. Even Talena couldn’t depend on me to keep her safe from my own department. My head ached and I needed to sit down.
I eased myself onto the bed that had so recently held some other sickly soul, and loosened my tie and slipped off my coat. When I did, a crinkle in the pocket caught my attention. I reached in and pulled out the pamphlet I’d taken from Talena the day after Haberdine’s murder. I’d shoved it in my pocket to be forgotten, but now I flattened it out and examined it. Laid out in big bold type, it was designed to be easy, inspirational reading for her flock of addicts and candies.
Are you at your Lowest Point?
It may feel like All Hope Is Lost, but Remember:
The Richest of Treasures Are Found at the Greatest of Depths.
My mouth went dry.
It was the wording from the note at the Bell-Asandro murder site. Jermaine had quoted it after he’d killed his family, and Haberdine’s ghost had made an oblique reference to it during the Oracular Tongue ceremony. Somehow Talena, or at least her words, was connected to these killings. I looked up from the pamphlet and stared at the wall that separated me from the girl I’d helped raise.
I didn’t have access to Talena to ask her about it, and I sure as Hells wasn’t going to hand it over to Angus. There was only one place to learn if Talena had been set up, or if she was actually involved, to find out if Lowell and Cordray were now telling the truth about her, or if they were lying once again.
Gellica was stonewalling but I was going to find her, and I was going to get answers. One way or another.
32
GELLICA LIVED IN A WEALTHY part of town, close to the Mount. The kind of neighborhood where people can leave windows open without worrying that someone will come in and take their possessions. As I stared at her house, I wondered if kicking down her front door would shatter that false sense of security.
It was seven p.m., and the short-lived winter sun had long since set. Streetlights provided illumination, but I saw a shadowed path where I could walk the perimeter of her home and find a way in. The neighborhood was warm enough for shirtsleeves, but I kept my jacket on to cover my shoulder holster. If a neighbor spotted me, I didn’t want them to automatically call the patrol.
A window near the back door was unlocked, so I didn’t have to kick in anything after all. Hand to the window, I could see the status light of a security system keypad. It glowed a dim green, telling me it was deactivated. Had Gellica left it off, or was she the sort who never got around to activating it in the first place? Was she home? Truth be told, I didn’t much care either way. Someone had set Talena up for a fall. If Gellica wasn’t home, I’d toss her place looking for signs of collusion. If she was, then I’d confront her directly. In either scenario there was zero chance I’d be giving her a courtesy knock.
I let myself in and stood listening for any signs of activity. The lights were off and I heard no sound, but a television’s flickering glow came from a room at the far end of the hall. I moved through the darkened house, stepping carefully and stopping often.
The windows let long shafts of streetlight into the building, and the light splayed across the floor, creeping up the walls at twisted angles, forming distorted doorways along the blank walls. None of those doors led anywhere, of course. False exits, every one. Nothing got out of the city. Not Gellica, who’d traveled from one side of Eyjan to the other, only to get sucked back into Titanshade’s vortex. Not Ajax, who’d served in a small town and then come to the city that would eventually chew him up and spit him out. And not me, the native son who always wanted to leave, but somehow never had the guts to board a bus and ride the ice highway south, where the temperatures were warm and the jobs didn’t come with a daily dose of self-loathing. There were many ways out of Titanshade, but none of them were real. And pondering the dream doorways that marched down Gellica’s home wasn’t going to help me bring in a killer.
The hallway led into the living room, and I paused at the threshold. The room was divided into light and shadow by the flicker of the muted TV, a big-screen model that perched on the crown of an entertainment console. It was playing a movie, a trashy classic about a wandering sorcerer who drifts into a small town on the salt plains carrying only a six-shooter and flask of manna, before proceeding to clean the streets of criminals and corrupt officials. The kind of movie that rots kids’ brains and makes them think they want to grow up to be heroes.
The unmistakable tinkle of liquid on glass cut through my nostalgia. I turned my head toward the sound and saw a woman sitting in the shadow-cloaked far corner of the room. It wasn’t the woman I’d hoped to confront.
Ambassador Paulus locked eyes with me and smiled. In her hands were two ice-filled tumblers and a bottle of whiskey.
* * *
I sat in a green-cushioned chair and faced one of the most powerful women in the city, in the darkened living room of her chief assistant.
She’d moved to the couch and set the whiskey on the coffee table between us. Even from that distance I could smell the bite of its aroma. She appraised me for a long, silent moment, swirling the ice and whiskey in her tumbler. The motion left a thin sheen of liquor slowly sliding down the inside of her glass, falling toward the body of the drink. Liquor snobs call those “legs.” I call them delicious.
Paulus sniffed her drink as she reclined on the rich leather of the couch. “So tell me, Detective, why do you keep popping up to bother me?”
“I’m not here to bother you.”
“No.” Her face was heavily shadowed, the tele
vision still the only light source in the room. “You’re here to bother Gellica, aren’t you? You came into her home in the cover of night, uninvited. I wonder why that is.”
She was completely relaxed.
“Is that what you were pondering?” I said. “While sitting alone in the dark? Is this a normal way for you to spend an evening? Drinks and a movie in someone else’s house?”
“What else would I be up to? Surely you know I’m not out doing despicable things to Squibs in hotel rooms.”
“Yet somehow it always seems that you’re at the heart of things. You and Harlan Cedrow.”
“I’m at the heart of things because I’m at the heart of the negotiations.” She tapped a crimson-coated nail on the edge of her glass and let out an exaggerated sigh. “You know, the tragedy is that all I really wanted was for you to do your job. Arrest someone for killing the Squib and let the talks resume. I even tried to hand you the blackmailing candies gift-wrapped with a bow, but you insisted on running off on that idiotic chase after your old friend Flanagan. Disappointing.”
“Guess I was concentrating on the ‘upholding justice’ part of my job.”
She sniffed. “Short-sighted.”
“I prefer ‘focused.’”
“Hmm.” She tilted her head. “I suppose you’re going to ask me some dramatic question?”
“No,” I said.
“Really? You’re not going to ask me who killed Garson Haberdine?”
I was silent, giving her plenty of room to talk.
“I have no idea,” she said. “And I’d like to keep it that way. I mean, I hear that it was some junkie teenager, but obviously he wasn’t the one behind it all.” She brought the tumbler to her lips, but paused before drinking. “I don’t care who it was. My only concern is that the talks resume. I’d think you’d see the wisdom there. Peace and prosperity and all that.”
“His name was Jermaine Bell. The junkie teenager.”
“If you say so.” She took a swig of her whiskey, grimaced, then gave it an appraising eye. “That’s quite good. Bowery blend.” She glanced at the remaining glass on the table. “You don’t want any?”