What I hadn’t expected was the language they were talking in. Because it sure wasn’t English. The accent was a real mouthful, the words complex with plenty of rolling consonants.
Russian. I’d put two whole dollars on it.
I struck off the kitchen from my list of rooms to search. That was fine by me. Charles David had been nonspecific about what I was going to find in the house, but if you want to learn about someone and their secrets, you head for the bedroom. You’ll find all you need in there.
There was a broad set of stairs curving around the wall of the entrance hall so I took them up two full turns of the screw before I found myself on a thickly carpeted landing with too many doors. None of them were what I wanted. A house this size, the master bedroom would be about as far away from the front door as possible. Charles David would want to keep an eye on his bees, after all.
The master bedroom was at the back. The door was closed and locked, so I picked the lock and stepped in and then closed the door behind me. I took one step farther and took the scene in.
It was a mess. It was also dark, one wall of blackout drapes pulled tight. I didn’t need the light, I just turned my optics up.
The room had enough square footage to sell used cars in and most of the floor was covered with the biggest Oriental rug I had ever seen, which considering I couldn’t remember before six that morning maybe wasn’t saying so much. The bed was against the far wall and was circular, which just seemed confusing. It had on it a scattering of pillows and some blankets and sheets that were patterned. The bedding was tangled up, the bottom sheets pulled away to show the mattress beneath.
The floor between me and the bed was covered in clothes and shoes. No wonder Charles David kept the room locked. The maids would have a fit if they saw it. But I didn’t think that was all he was hiding.
Firstly, the room stank. Not just because it was closed up and warm and musty and the sheets and clothes were dirty. There was something else. The smell of a hospital, not the sharp tang of disinfectant but what lay underneath.
The scent of sickness, of blood.
Secondly, the room was hot. My Geiger counter kicked into gear as soon as I stepped through the doors, then settled into a constant but angry rattle.
Charles David was keeping his illness a secret from his staff. He was also trying to keep his staff safe from what I really hoped I wasn’t about to find.
I walked the half-mile to the bed and saw it. The sheets were Egyptian cotton with a thread count I’d need Ada to calculate. But they were not patterned. They were covered in blood. The pillows, too. Beside the bed was a pile of towels, monogrammed in gold with the initials CDW. They were dry but as stained as the sheets with blood. CDW’s, I supposed. I wondered what the W stood for. Seemed like everyone in this town had a fake name.
There was a bathroom connected to the bedroom, about an acre of black and white tile and what at first I thought was a swimming pool before I realized it was a bath. It was empty but dirty, a dark ring around the circumference and something that glistened a dark brown around the plug hole. There was more of it congealed on the floor in splashes.
I checked the cabinets. They were stuffed with junk. Headache pills. Half-done aftershaves fermenting like corked wine and blunt safety razors that left brown rust stains on the white shelves. I wondered what Charles David looked like without his beard and how long it had been since his chin had seen that famous Hollywood sunshine.
I went back to the bedroom. I opened the closet. Charles David had an expensive collection of suits and shoes. This I expected. He also had a whole section dedicated to ties and handkerchiefs, all arranged on racks like a magazine stand.
What I didn’t expect but what I wasn’t surprised to see were the black smocks and the rubber gloves. The smocks were hanging in the closet and were wrapped in plastic like they’d just come from the cleaners, and the gloves were wrapped in the same and sat on the shelf underneath. I picked up a pair of gloves and saw their plastic wrap was sealed. They were new and unopened.
I left them where they were and turned back to the bed. One advantage of the room being such a mess was that nobody would notice if I turned it over myself, so I did.
Nothing. Dirty clothes, bloodstained towels. Our movie star had been having some rough nights.
The bedside cabinet was more bountiful. There was just one, against the wall. It had a cupboard and a drawer. I opened both.
In the drawer was a notebook. It was filled with numbers written in red ink, in groups of four digits. The notebook didn’t have “CIA” printed on the front but I knew enough to see it was a codebook of some kind.
In the cupboard underneath the drawer were arranged five bottles. Two big, three small, each with a different label, each filled with pills and tablets in five different sizes and colors.
The labels on four of the bottles weren’t standard. They were white paper and there was no name or address of the patient, no drug company branding or instructions to take two with water and avoid swimming or driving forklift trucks. Instead, on each label there was just a string of letters and numbers, and underneath that another, larger number. The numbers were in sequence, one through four.
Whatever they were, they weren’t prescription drugs.
The label on the smallest bottle had plenty to say. I lifted it up to take a closer look.
“Well, that’s unsettling,” I said to nobody.
The label said POTASSIUM IODIDE and underneath that was a big, yellow, circular sticker. The sticker had a central black dot and three arcs of black floating off the middle like the blades of a propeller.
It was the symbol for nuclear energy. But that bottle wasn’t hot. Potassium was radioactive itself but only slightly. According to my Geiger counter the bottle was about as hot as a bunch of bananas, which is to say not very.
What my Geiger was telling me, as I crouched by the cabinet, was that there was a monster under the bed.
I scooped up all five bottles and spaced them out around the pockets of my jacket and trench coat. Maybe Ada would know what the pills were for and what the codes meant.
Then I ducked down to look under the bed. As I put one hand on the mattress I discovered the circular bed was on a turntable that moved under my weight.
Movie stars, huh?
The turntable had a pedestal base but was designed so you could still stow stuff out of sight under the bed. There was something stowed. I reached in and pulled it out.
It was a valise, all hand-tooled leather with fine gold stitching, the kind of bag where the label on the inside would be written entirely in Italian and if you had to ask how much it cost that meant you couldn’t afford it.
There was something soft in the bag. I unzipped it and my Geiger counter went into overdrive. I stood up and held the bag with one hand and yanked out a bundle of clothing with the other. It was a black fabric, thin and artificial, something like a shower curtain or the cape a barber might hide a customer under.
Something like the plastic-sealed smocks that were hanging in Charles David’s closet behind me.
I began to unravel the parcel. Something small but heavy tumbled onto the circular bed, making a sound as it hit the gathered blankets like a large cat jumping into a basket of fresh laundry.
I reached down and pulled a frosted glass cube from the tangle. It was four inches on each side but was heavy, like it wasn’t made of glass but of something else, like stone or natural crystal.
I held it up to a useful sliver of light coming in through the gap in the blackout blinds. The cube had something in it, a crisscrossing of filaments that looked like printed circuitry.
It was the same as the cube I’d left back at the Ritz-Beverly Hotel. Like that cube, this number was radioactive. Not enough to cook a person from the inside out, but enough to make a man very sick if, say, he slept twelve inches above it every night.
I wrapped the cube back up in the smock and stuffed the package back into the bag. Then I paused an
d unloaded the pill bottles from my pockets into it. Everything was pretty snug and nothing would get broken, and I figured Charles David wasn’t going to be asking for his secret stash anytime soon so I might as well take the whole lot back to the office.
I left the bedroom and closed and locked the door after me. I went back down the hallway and paused at the top of the stairs. Someone was still in the kitchen. There was a crinkle and crackle and this time it wasn’t from my Geiger counter. They were reading a newspaper or a magazine. From the garden out the back drifted another conversation between a man and a woman. A conversation being conducted in Russian.
I could have searched the rest of the house, but the longer I lingered, the more chance I’d be caught. And I figured I’d found just what Charles David had been talking about.
I let myself out through the garage.
21
When I got to the car, I pulled away, drove up the street a little, then turned around and found a spot closer to the David mansion. I sat in the car watching the house through the gates while I wired Ada a couple of the pictures I’d taken inside. A quarter-hour later the telephone rang in the cradle beside me.
I watched the gardener reappear through the side gate as I picked up the receiver. The gardener went inside the garage, then came out and unzipped his coveralls, then peeled the top half off and tied the arms around his waist before getting down to work at the flowerbed right bang next to the front doors. I’d left right on time.
I told Ada this and she laughed inside my head.
“You’re in a better mood,” I said.
“You gotta laugh at something, Chief.”
The gardener was getting a sweat up as the sun got higher and hotter. I zoomed in a little. He was built pretty well and his skin was slick with the results of his labors.
Underneath that perspiration was something else. Tattoos. Lots of them. An eagle and some other stuff, along with some writing. None of it in English. Cyrillic. I couldn’t read any of it and the symbols didn’t mean anything to me, but I checked how much film I had left in my chest and took a couple of souvenirs.
It sounded like Ada was pulling on a cigarette, but I knew that was my imagination. I ignored the image and told her about the contents of Charles David’s bedroom.
“Do you know what they use potassium iodide for?” she asked, blowing a lungful of imaginary smoke over my head. There was a creak like she was leaning back in the chair behind my desk again, feet up on the blotter.
The front door of the mansion opened and a woman came out. She looked like a maid and she was carrying a tray with a tall, fat jug and two glasses. I didn’t know what was in the jug but the gardener was sure as hell pleased to see her.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Radiation poisoning. Right?”
“Aw, Ray!” She laughed again, the laugh as tall and fat and cool as the contents of the jug that the maid was now pouring for the gardener. “What gave it away?”
“Just a little yellow warning sign on the outside.” I watched the gardener and the maid share a joke. “Didn’t help him much, did it?”
“Nope,” said Ada. “Charles ‘Two First Names’ David was a hot ticket, and not just at the box office. A ticket that was well and truly punched.”
The maid and the gardener sucked the last of their drinks and then they sank to the grass and started sucking on each other’s faces. I left them to it and glanced down at the valise on the passenger seat.
“So the potassium was no good?”
“It should have worked,” said Ada, “up to a point, anyway. Maybe he stopped taking the pills. Or maybe having that thing underneath him every night was just too much.”
“Maybe he didn’t know.”
“He knew enough to have a bottle of potassium iodide in the nightstand.”
“And the other bottles?”
“No idea.”
“What about the pills he spilled on our rug?”
“Well,” said Ada, “I could whip up a chemical analysis, but that would take a while. But we can compare them with the others when you get back.”
I asked about the strange labels. Ada smoked thoughtfully for a few seconds. I mentioned the codebook I’d left in the bedside cabinet.
“If TFN was a secret agent, I’d assume his masters gave him the potassium. They must have given him the other bottles, too.”
I frowned on the inside. “TFN?”
“Two-first-names.”
“Oh,” I said. “So those other bottles were other anti-radiation drugs?”
“Could be. Experimental maybe, given the coded labels.”
“Well, they didn’t do him much good either.”
It felt like Ada shrugged. The sensation made my circuits tingle across the ridge of my back.
“I did say experimental, Ray.”
“Okay,” I said, and I adjusted the car phone’s receiver and began untangling the coiled lead with my fingers. “So Charles David was badly affected while his famous buddies seem to be okay. They were all wearing that special gear at the club. Charles, too. He has a closet full of the stuff. But it wasn’t enough.”
“Right,” said Ada. “They were all exposed. Your friend Fresco had a box of pills at the club himself, if you remember.”
“You know I don’t. But I’m willing to bet they might be the same as what’s in one of Charles’s bottles. Only they didn’t work for Charles because he got closer than the others. Close enough to get sick.” I looked back at the valise. “Close enough to acquire a souvenir.”
“Because he was snooping for the CIA.”
I watched the house and the two people twisting in front of it.
“He said he was deep undercover,” I said. “I think I believe him. His personal staff all seem to be Russians.”
“Russians?”
“I’m wiring some more pictures.”
“You’re a doll, Chief.”
I considered the bag I’d borrowed again. Inside was the radioactive glass cube. Same as the one at the hotel. Charles David had a closetful of protective gear, and at the secret meeting in the basement of the Temple of the Magenta Dragon everyone wore the same. Because there was something in that basement that was radioactive, too.
I had a feeling I knew exactly what it was.
Chip Rockwell.
I told Ada the same and she made a whistling sound. “From movie producer to nuclear man?”
“Well,” I said, “he wasn’t much of a man. Just a suit and a voice.”
“And a radioactive cube?”
I shrugged in the car seat. “There could have been anything under those bandages.”
I looked up and out across that big lawn. I could see nothing but one of the maid’s feet, raised in the air, her shoe swinging off her big toe. Seemed like a nice day for some yard work and I supposed even foreign spies were allowed some downtime.
Ada made a sound that was like the stirring of a mug of coffee that only existed within the matrix of her master program.
“Has Eva called?” I asked.
“Not a word.”
No surprise there. “Have you reached the client who took out the contract on her yet?”
“No dice,” said Ada. “Feels like they went to a lot of trouble to keep themselves hidden.”
“Okay. I need to get into that basement at the club.”
“You think Rockwell is still there?”
I frowned on the inside. “He’s the key to all this and it’s time I paid a visit. If he’s both radioactive and trying to stay dead then a deep basement seems like a good place to hide.” I shifted in my seat. In an effort to avert my gaze from what was going on up on that great big green lawn I turned to look out the back window.
“Okay, Ray,” said Ada, “but be careful—”
“Hold that thought.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got company.”
A black car had pulled up just down at the bend. There was a man in the car wearing a wide-brimmed hat
. The car was still running.
I zoomed in as much as I could, but then the man changed gears and pulled the car out and around mine. He floored it and sped up the slope, the car bucking on the rear axle like a lion taking down a gazelle.
“I heard that, Ray. Who was it? Another tail?”
“Could be Charles David’s handler, perhaps. If he was a CIA asset they’ll have someone keeping an eye out.”
“A someone who will start wondering where that asset is,” said Ada.
“Or it could be more Russian agents,” I said. “Ada, I’ll call you back,” and before she could say another word I dumped the dead telephone back on the cradle that sat between me and the passenger seat.
The black car was ahead of me at the end of the street, but was still in sight. Just.
I turned the ignition and pressed my foot to the floor.
22
The man in black was good, I gave him that. Better than Charles David, anyway. The black car he was in was a pig, the suspension soft as anything, the thing pitching and yawing like a small plane about to make an unscheduled touchdown.
But he was a good driver doing his best work and he knew what he was doing. He took me out of the Hollywood Hills and back into West Hollywood. Then he took me out of West Hollywood and up into the Hollywood Hills again. After a few miles of winding left and right turns, all pretense of following him without detection was gone. We were alone up on the country roads, surrounded by nothing but sage and pine and scrub and dusty rocky hillsides.
I steered the course. The black car was never close, not really. My Buick was a good machine but it was heavy, reinforced to take the weight of its unusual driver and then heavier again with the driver in situ. All in all it was slow, but not slower than the black car in front. We were evenly matched.
Ahead he took a bend too fast and the back end fishtailed out, catching in the loose dirt at the side of the tarmac, throwing up a dust storm and a shower of gravel. The gravel had returned to Earth by the time I entered the cloud but the dust was thick and danced in the slipstream of the black car. When I came out the other side the black car was getting smaller on the road ahead.
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