Hell You Say (Adrien English Mysteries 3)

by Lanyon, Josh

  Behind me, I heard the scrape of a sole on asphalt. I spun around as someone whispered, “Adrien…”

  Angus stepped out of the shadows of the building.

  Chapter Twenty

  My heart paused. Paused. The feeble parking lot lights swirled, and I reached out for the doorframe.

  Bad timing.

  “Adrien, it’s me,” a voice said from a long way off.

  The ground tilted back the other way. I rested my cheek against the peeling paint, breathed deeply of night air tasting of smog and trash, waiting for things to level out.

  “Are you okay?”

  I got control of myself. Opened my eyes. The continental plate seemed to have steadied once more. Look, Ma, no hands! I nodded. “Great,” I managed. “What are you doing here?”

  Angus hugged himself against the cold, his thin hands looking skeletal against the dark flannel shirt. “They released me. My alibi held.”

  “Why are you here?” I repeated.

  His glasses winked blindly in the lights above the parking lot. “I need a place to stay.”

  I stared, uncomprehending.

  “I can’t go home. It’s a crime scene. My landlord won’t let me back anyway.”

  “What about Wanda?”

  He shook his head. “She’s staying at her parents. They don’t want me.” He swallowed. “It’s over for us.”

  Welcome to the Heartbreak Hotel. I could have shown more sympathy for a fellow sufferer. I said, “There must be someone…”

  “There’s no one I can trust. Only you.”

  I wished I felt the same way.

  Moving aside, I let him into the shop. He walked onto the main floor, staring around at the tall shelves hungrily, as though he had been gone a million years.

  I shut the side door, leaned back against it. I felt shaky, but otherwise okay — all things considered. It occurred to me that I needed to get the locks changed.

  As I stood there, clearly unsure of what to do next, he said pleadingly, “Can I crash here?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “But why? You helped me before —”

  “Angus….” I raked a hand through my beautiful new hair cut. “That was before I realized that you were involved in murder.”

  “I have an alibi!”

  No protestation of innocence, unfortunately. I said, “You have an alibi for Kinsey’s death. Her murder was designed to implicate you, to punish you. It doesn’t absolve you from the other two murders.”

  “The police released me.”

  Again, no plea of innocence. Why did I always work so hard to avoid seeing what was right in front of me? Wearily, I said, “Because they haven’t been able to pinpoint the dates that Karen Holtzer and Tony Zellig died. They can’t connect you — yet.”

  He licked his lips, then gave a weird giggle. “Well, guess what, Adrien, I’m not their lone suspect!”

  “I know. And I know I have you to thank for throwing suspicion my way. You told them you thought Jake and I were involved, didn’t you?”

  “Thought? It doesn’t take a detective.” He looked away from me. “Anyway, it was that bastard Riordan I wanted to get, not you.”

  “But you expect me to put you up now?”

  He stared at me dumbly.

  “Is there a reason I should involve myself any further in this goddamned mess?”

  His pale mouth quivered. “Adrien, I’m begging you. Let me stay the night. I’m scared.”

  Me too, I thought, but I was supposed to be the grown-up.

  “Please…”

  He did look terrified, and he probably knew better than anyone if he had reason to be. “One night,” I said finally. “And you’re going to have to sleep down here.”

  “Thank God,” he whispered. He looked toward the front windows — the dark street beyond — and shivered.

  I opened my mouth, then shut it.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked finally.

  He shook his head.

  “Come on.”

  I took him upstairs and defrosted one of the steaks I’d bought for a dinner with Jake that was never going to happen.

  While the steak cooked, Angus sat at the table drinking a beer. He had lost weight in jail. He looked like an undernourished adolescent. Harmless, vulnerable.

  I asked, “What happened to Holtzer and Zellig?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  He shook his head. Wiped moisture from the corner of his eye.

  “How would you have gotten involved in that?”

  He gave me an impatient look. “Someone like you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Because I’m gay?”

  He tittered. Shook his head.

  Maybe it was a silly question. I’d learned from my research that it wasn’t only lonely, ignorant, insecure, or troubled kids who were lured in by the promises of charismatic cartoon-character-like evil. One point most of the experts stressed was that people don’t join cults, they join interesting groups that seem able to satisfy their desires and dreams. Members were recruited based on skills and abilities and the needs of the group. That’s why it wasn’t unusual to find doctors and lawyers and CEOs and movie stars involved in some of the more powerful and sophisticated cults. Cult members rarely understood the hidden agenda of their leaders. Everyone has their vulnerabilities. Cult recruiters knew exactly how to exploit them.

  I contemplated Angus. He was already tipsy with exhaustion and nerves. One beer had oiled him nicely; I was pretty sure that a second one would slide him right over the edge. I went to the fridge, uncapped another brew, and put it before him.

  He smiled gratefully.

  I let him drink a while before asking, “When you understood what was happening, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “No one would have believed me. I didn’t have any proof. Not real proof.” At my expression, he said defensively, “I tried to quit. You know that. But they don’t allow it. They can’t allow it.”

  I wasn’t buying. I wanted to. I would have felt a lot better about everything if I believed that Angus was truly an innocent.

  “You could have talked to the police. You should have talked to Jake.”

  “He thinks I’m a freak.”

  And your point is?

  But I didn’t say that. I said, “When did you realize what was really going on?”

  “Really going on? I don’t know what’s really going on. I never have. I thought we were…” He did it again, tailed off before he actually revealed any useful information.

  “You thought you were what?”

  At my tone his face quivered. Tearfully he said, “It was very powerful, very spiritual, so don’t make jokes about it. Don’t mock what you don’t understand.”

  “I won’t. I’m not.” I thought it over. “I mean, it’s not like you actually sell your soul to the Devil, right?”

  “Adrien!” he shrieked, jumping to his feet and knocking over his glass.

  I jumped too. “What? For Christ’s sake!”

  “Don’t make fun of it!”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you telling me…?” I couldn’t complete it, it was so ridiculous.

  “It isn’t how you make it sound. It’s a commitment, a pledge, an oath of honor.”

  Beer dripped onto the hardwood floor. I grabbed a towel and began to wipe the table. “You’ve got to be kidding me. And in return for selling your soul?”

  He said huskily, “Whatever you want. Whatever you need.”

  “What does that mean? What did you get out of it?”

  “You don’t get it immediately. You have to…you have to pay your dues. You have to….”

  “Work for it?”

  He glared at me. “Someone like you can never understand.”

  “Help me understand. Are you telling me you joined this group and you…sold your soul to Satan?”

  “No. Of course not. We all made a pledge to serve His Grace. In return,
He will grant us whatever we want. Money. Great jobs. Beautiful women.”

  Angus got Wanda and ten dollars an hour at Cloak and Dagger. Maybe he should ask for his soul back.

  “When you say ‘His Grace,’ are you talking about Satan or a person?”

  “His Grace,” Angus snapped. “My Lord Gremory, the fifty-sixth Duke of Hell.”

  Ah, yes. The house demon. “Gotcha. But there must be someone in charge. Someone human.”

  “Each Blade has an Adept. Only the Adept can know the Master.”

  I felt a tingle of alarm. “How many Blades are there?”

  “Three Blades edge the Scythe of Gremory,” quoted Angus mechanically. “Sable is the blade of the first cut. Silver blade cuts deepest. Scarlet is the blade that deals the death blow.”

  The smell of burning steak broke the spell. I muttered an imprecation and grabbed the pan off the burner.

  Three blades. Whatever happened to Flower Power? No, it had to be knives, blades, scythes. What was with kids these days?

  “How many members per scythe?”

  Behind me, Angus said, “Thirteen.”

  “Do you know the members of the other blades?”

  “That’s not permitted.”

  “So thirteen of you took part in killing —”

  “No! Adrien, I keep telling you I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was a rumor that got started within the group.”

  “It wasn’t entirely a rumor. Bodies are turning up.” I set his steak in front of him, and after a moment’s hesitation, dug a fork and knife out of the silverware drawer.

  “But we weren’t all involved in it. We aren’t all on the same level, you know.”

  High school, college, the office, evil cults, everywhere you go, there’s that social hierarchy to contend with.

  “But you know who’s behind it.”

  He began to carve his steak. “I don’t know who’s behind it. I’m not even sure who all took part in the sacrifices. I know that I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t be a part of that. I wanted to resign, but they wouldn’t permit it. They told me I was a traitor. Even the other ones who wanted out called me a traitor.”

  “Then why —?”

  “I made a pledge. In blood. My blood,” he hastened to add at my expression. He rested his utensils on the table edge, gazing at me earnestly. “Adrien, they think I’ll return to the fold. I won’t. But I can’t break my oath.”

  “Why would they think you might return to the fold?”

  “That lawyer. Martin Grosser. He’s part of it. He’s the one who got me off.”

  “How do you know that? Did Grosser say so?” I tried to picture that conversation.

  “Not in so many words.”

  “How many words did he use, and what were they?”

  Angus shook his head, chewing ferociously.

  “Who paid him?” I asked. “Do you know that? He must have told you.”

  “Pro bono. He said he was doing it as a favor to me. A favor to a brother of the Blade.”

  “But the Blade set you up.”

  “Blade Sable set me up. He’s not with Blade Sable. He must be with one of the older Blades. Maybe even Blade Scarlet. That’s where all the bigwigs are supposed to be.”

  I recognized that they might have a certain amount of success if they ran their group like a fraternal organization. Networking for Evil. Why not? The older, established members could help the younger to find those dream jobs and social connections. The younger members could provide whatever they had to offer: sex, drugs, cheap labor…their weekly allowance.

  Angus drained his beer. “Adrien,” he said tentatively. “Do you think you’d be able to pay me my last paycheck?”

  I thought of the eight hundred dollars I had already shelled out for the privilege of involving myself in another murder case.

  “Er…yeah. Sure. When did you need it by?”

  “Tonight.” He turned back to his dinner. “I’ll try to be gone by the time you open the shop.”

  I thought that was probably a good idea.

  When Angus finished his meal, I pulled out the inflatable mattress I kept in the disaster area I fondly called my store room. I removed a stack of blankets from the linen cupboard, following Angus as he walked none too steadily downstairs.

  He chose to sleep in the back of the store deep in the canyons of bookshelves.

  “I won’t forget this, Adrien,” he said, building a nest of blankets for himself.

  “It’s okay.” I hesitated, then had to ask. “Is Guy involved with the Scythe of Gremory?”

  “What guy?”

  “Guy Snowden.”

  He shook his head. “A couple of us met during his courses, but I don’t think…” He stopped.

  “You don’t think what?”

  “I don’t think so, but I guess he could belong to one of the other blades. I kind of wondered about that myself.”

  “Did you ever hear of anyone named Oliver Garibaldi?”

  He snickered. “No. Sounds like a spaghetti sauce.”

  “I’ll leave the bank draft on my desk in the office.”

  “Okay.” He wrapped himself in the blankets, set his glasses carefully to the side. He blinked at me. “Thank you, Adrien. For everything.”

  “Uh-huh. Sweet dreams.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I made sure to get downstairs early next morning. Even so, Angus was already gone. He had made himself coffee in the office, and taken the check from the desk. The blankets he had used were folded on the chair.

  I tidied away all traces of his visit before Velvet arrived.

  As disloyal as it seems, I hoped he did not come back. I was sorry for him. I didn’t want him punished for something he hadn’t done, but I couldn’t understand or reconcile myself to his moral apathy. Oh, I understood that he was afraid, and I believed what he had told me about not actively participating in murder. I could cut him slack for being young and being (as Guy had pointed out) a follower rather than a leader. I knew it wasn’t fair to judge when I didn’t know what in Angus’s past might have knocked his moral compass so far off-kilter. I knew — but the simple truth was, I was appalled.

  I pulled out the pictures from Gabriel Savant’s signing that I had started to sort through days ago. One by one, I flipped through them, scrutinizing each glossy candid. The place had been wall-to-wall Goth princesses and Stevie Nicks clones. So much for celebrating the individual.

  I paused at a picture of Savant giving his talk. In the background was a girl with blonde hair, feathery tips tinted black. She had turned her face at the moment the shutter clicked. I examined the next photo. A slice of her two-toned hair had made the frame, but next to her was a now-familiar mohawk and pugnacious face behind heart-shaped glasses.

  Betty Sansone.

  I laid the photo aside. Studied the next one. Well, well. A Kodak Moment.

  Kinsey Perone alive and in the flesh. A lot of flesh, as a matter of fact. It’s a wonder she hadn’t died of pneumonia.

  So, even if Betty and Kinsey had not been part of the Savant entourage, they had been at the bookstore that evening — the evening the disk disappeared. The evening that had apparently sealed Gabe’s fate.

  I reached for the phone, then stopped.

  Did this prove a connection between the two cases? If the police went to Bob Friedlander, he would show them a postcard from Gabriel Savant, claim that Savant was fine and that I was the wacko. Hundreds of people had been at the bookstore that evening. Betty and Kinsey’s presence might have been a coincidence. Not that I believed that, but the police would if Bob chose to play it that way. After our last conversation, I couldn’t imagine Bob playing it any other way.

  The desire to talk it over with Jake was nearly irresistible. But I couldn’t do that. Even if Jake and I had still been on those terms, it wasn’t his job to fix my mistakes, to absolve me of responsibility. Especially when he had been warning me from day one to stay out of it.

  I shuffled
through the photos once more. Did Kinsey and Betty’s involvement automatically intimate Guy’s guilt? Jake believed that Guy was involved. Maybe Jake was right; certainly the Amazing Kreskin had nothing to fear from my batting average.

  But Jake had been skeptical when I’d told him about Blade Sable, and I didn’t think I had learned anything that would change his mind. He would say Angus was playing me, and he could be right there too. No, I didn’t believe what I had discovered would justify the risk of contacting Jake.

  Besides, Jake might believe I was using Angus’s story as an excuse to see him again.

  If I was going to pursue this any further, it would have to be on my own. The question was, did I want to pursue it any further?

  “Hello?” called Velvet from the front.

  I shoved the photos back in their envelope, put the envelope back in the file cabinet, and relocked it.

  * * * * *

  I hadn’t put a lot of faith in Paolo’s promise to get me Peter Verlane’s private number in exchange for being allowed to texturize my hair, but midmorning he called.

  “Are you enjoying your hair, sweetness?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “I have Peter’s cell number. Do me a favor. Don’t tell him you got the number from me. He’s…quirky that way.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He quoted the number, and I wrote it out. “One other thing, sweetness. Don’t leave your wallet lying around. Not that he’s not worth every penny, but…”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “You enjoy yourself, sweetness. You so deserve it.”

  I hung up. Stared at the number. Swell. The guy was a hustler?

  Assuming it was the right Peter Verlane, wasn’t he in Germany, sharing schnapps and strudel with the folks? There probably wasn’t any point in calling.

  Unless Guy had lied.

  Did I want to know? Did I want to take this any further? It’s not like my sleuthing had resulted in universal happiness so far.

  I was still trying to come to a decision, when I realized I had dialed the number.

  “Yeah?” a young male voice inquired.

  “Peter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got your name from a friend. I wondered if maybe we could get together sometime.”