by John Farris
“I’ll be okay,” she said.
“In exactly one hour,” I said, checking the time, “I’ll call you.” It was ten-seventeen. “If I don’t, notify ILC that my last location was Valdemar, and have them send a patrol.”
“Oh Jesus,” Bea said softly, snatching her hand away from the necklace she’d been toying with, as if the magical beads had given her a glimpse of the future, as I had suggested they could; and the future she saw was too hot to handle.
Valdemar was a huge Moorish-style house high in the Palisades at the head of a deep barranca with the Pacific Ocean below. The house had been built for a megalomaniacal film director (that’s probably redundant) who for thirty years held the title of Meanest Bastard in Hollywood. He also owned a couple of Oscars for his work behind the camera. He never married, lived reclusively when he wasn’t filming, and satisfied his erotic cravings with waifs of both sexes, for whom his longtime chauffeur trolled diligently on Hollywood Boulevard.
The twelve-foot-high iron gates at the end of a narrow and private road winding uphill from Sunset were standing open when I arrived. There was curling fog in the barranca that had risen almost to the level of the terrace on the side of the house that overlooked the ocean. I saw only a couple of lights inside.
If Bucky Spartacus had left the gates ajar for me, I hoped that he also had had the presence of mind to turn off the TRAD and the AUGIE brainblasters that a sign posted on the gate by Southland Security Systems warned about.
I looked for Bucky’s vintage Cadillac Escalade SUV on the motor court where it most likely would have been, but the cobbled court was empty. The garage doors, all eight of them, were closed.
I drove through the gates and stopped in front of the house. But I didn’t get out right away. Instead I was about to call Bucky’s cell number when my own wristpac lit up.
An accented voice I didn’t recognize said, “Have a look on the terrace, jefe.”
“Why?”
“We drop off a little package for you.”
“Who’s this?” I tried to get a look at him, but that feature of his Pac was blocked. No image, no GPS fix. And no reply to my question. But he was still listening. He had a slight wheeze. Overweight, I guessed.
I ended the call, reached behind me and pulled my reliable old short-barrel Remington 12-gauge from its cradle. Six rounds, one already chambered. Guaranteed weight loss for a fat gut; the pounds just melt away.
If someone had wanted to kill me they’d already have shot the Land Rover to pieces and added flaming gasoline. I got out cautiously anyway, stayed low and still felt as exposed as a fly on a wedding cake. I listened but there wasn’t much to hear. The scrape of my shoe on a cobble, the ticking of the Rover’s engine. The rising fog acted as a blanket, smothering the noise of unseen traffic a mile or so distant on the Pacific Coast Highway.
I moved toward the barranca and the fog, looked down. The moon, rounding to full, was high above the fog bank, adding luster to the glass of terrace doors. I walked down a dogleg of stone steps to the terrace, all two hundred feet of it.
There was a central octagonal fountain populated by marble naiads almost luminously white by moonlight, all of them un-draped and anatomically explicit, some erotically involved, others just lazing timelessly around. The package the Greaser had mentioned was there, near the dry fountain. They had dropped her off nude, barely conscious, and wrapped in razor wire. There was a lot of blood. It soaked into the knees of my khaki pants when I dropped beside her, said her name.
Her eyelids flickered.
“Hey. Rawson.”
“Who did this, Sunny? Ortega?”
“Damn. I forgot… to ask.”
“Did you find Elena? Did she have anything to do with it?”
I voice-accessed my wristpac, gave my call sign, and requested a medical team. The wristpac GPS signal would have an ILC chopper over us in less than twelve minutes.
“Limo,” Sunny said. Then, “Mal.”
“Mal? Mal Scarlett? What about her?”
Sunny was shivering. Each time she shuddered the barbs drew more blood. She licked her lips.
“Angel,” she said. “Dead drop. Handicap.”
She seemed to be talking in code. Or as if each breath she drew to speak might be her last.
“What do you mean, Sunny?”
“Angel Town.”
“Say again.”
She flinched like she was being sawn in half and cried out. I didn’t want her to hear the fright in my voice. I bit down on my tongue.
“I have wire cutters in the Rover,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I thought I saw her smile.
“Know you will,” she said faintly.
I sprinted up to the motor court and located the cutters in my tool chest. But by the time I got back to Sunny, it wasn’t any use.
9
unrise found me still sitting on the wall of the terrace at Valdemar, looking out on a slate-gray sea with a sheen on the horizon, where the moon had set. Nearer the shoreline a few early-rising surfers coasted on some moderate waves. Occasional vehicles southbound on PCH all had their headlights on. There was ground fog at the bottom of the barranca and the moon was down behind some trees like an eye about to close.
Evidence Response teams had finished their work in and around the house and on the terrace without turning up anything significant. If Bucky Spartacus had been there he hadn’t left any trace behind. He had called me on a throwaway. So had the wheezing, taunting Latino it would someday be my pleasure to kill.
Raymond Chandler, poet laureate of a different L.A. in what we all nostalgically thought of as a better time, had written in one of his books that dead men are heavier then broken hearts. I looked at my bandaged hands that I had ripped on razor wire in my clumsy efforts to free Sunny and nursed my own broken heart. She had been family to me: smart, wry, a tough counter-puncher when my humor got a little too personal. Kid sister, partner, friend. I kept thinking how I’d sent her to someone or into something neither of us had been prepared for and how her blood was still drying on my clothes. They’d killed her brutally and indifferently and I didn’t know why.
I heard my name twice before I looked up. Lew Rolling was standing a few feet away, tapping his wristpac.
“Huggins,” he said. “Do you want to talk to him now?”
Ron Huggins and his partner Wade Miller had been the agents I had assigned to the graveyard shift to keep me informed of activity at Ida Grace’s home. I nodded. Lew projected Ron’s hologram toward me.
“R, we’re so goddamned sorry about Sunny. Anything yet?”
“No.” I glanced at the top of the steps to the terrace and saw Booth Havergal starting down with one of his bodyguards. “Did Ida have a peaceful night?” I asked Huggins.
“Uh-uh. She had her chauffeur drive her to Van Nuys airport at two this morning.”
“Ida had travel plans?”
“The airport was as far as she got. Stayed in the limo when they arrived. At 0225 a helicopter showed up, one of those twelve-passenger jobs. As soon as the helo was on the ground Mrs. Grace left the limo and walked over to it. She was helped up the stairs and inside by a crew member. She stayed just shy of fifteen minutes, returned to the limousine, and was driven home. She arrived at 0300. The helicopter, by the way, is owned by Brenta Development.”
“Thanks, Ron.”
His hologram vanished. “Miles Brenta,” I said to Lew. “Funny how his name keeps coming up. Or maybe it’s not so funny.”
“How do you mean?”
Booth Havergal came over to us, and dismissed Lew with a glance.
To me he said, “I was on a call with Joe Cronin. He has not heard from their rocker client.”
“Or wouldn’t admit it if he had.”
Booth stroked his chin with a forefinger. He always looked freshly barbered no matter what hour of the day it was.
“I’m not easily lied to. I have to know that you’re absolutely certain it was Bucky
Spartacus you were talking to, inasmuch as you’ve never met the lad.”
“He knew a couple of things about Chiclyn Hickey only the two of us should know. Bucky was convinced that she was dead. He said to me, direct quote, ‘I don’t know what they’re trying to do to us.’ Which to my way of thinking indicates complicity, however unwilling he might have been.”
“Go easy, R.”
I looked at the place by the fountain where each blood spot was being sampled while a couple of kneeling naiads looked on. In the mild light they seemed as if they might be mourning. I turned and leaned out over the wide flat-top railing and vomited stale coffee and what bile I had left into the barranca. I wiped my mouth on the back of a bandaged hand and stared at Booth, eyes running, trying to get my breath back.
“Easy’s over with,” I said. “I’ll build a solid case if I can. But if I can’t and it looks as if the ones responsible for Sunny might walk, then it’ll be blood for blood.”
“Take some medical days, R. Give the wounds a chance to heal.”
“No.”
“It’s not a suggestion.”
“I’m not out of control.”
“Closer than you think, fella.”
“I can deal with it. Anger doesn’t make me blind and it doesn’t make me stupid. You know that, Booth.”
He was on the verge of suspending me. He studied my face as if looking for hex markings. I couldn’t blame him. He had a shop to run and his reputation to think about. But once he made his decision reluctantly in my favor he set his jaw and nodded.
“Sunny was the best. I know what this case means to you. Get some sleep, get a tetanus booster, and I’ll see you in my office at three this afternoon. We’ll go over everything we have so far, and decide how to proceed. I’ll decide.”
Beatrice met me at the front door when I returned to the house on Breva Way. She took a startled step back when she saw me, as if she were witnessing an apparition at a séance. I’d called her hours earlier but I hadn’t done much explaining; she only knew that Sunny was dead.
“Your hands—”
“Not as bad as it looks. Some gouges and scratches. I cut her out of the razor wire because I didn’t want anyone else to see her like that.”
“Oh God! Who could do such a vicious thing?”
“The world’s full of them. I need a shower.”
I started down the black slate hall, pulling off my shirt as I went.
Bea said, “Your neighbor’s here.”
“Who do you mean?”
“Ida Grace. I think. She wouldn’t tell me her name, or much of anything else I could understand.”
I went back to her. “Where is she?”
“I tried to make her comfortable in the tea room. I hope that’s okay. It was a little past four, I think. I heard someone walking around outside, talking. Scared me. But when I looked out I saw it was only a small old woman in her dressing gown and slippers. She wasn’t trying to get into the house. She sounded incoherent. I went out to the lanai and invited her in. She seemed in shock, but when I coaxed she followed me. She kept saying in this earnest, pleading tone, like she was answering a voice in her head, ‘How could you? She’s all I have left.’“
“Uh-huh,” I said, neither making sense of that nor wanting to see Ida Grace myself right now.
“I looked in on her just a few minutes ago,” Bea said. “She’d finally stopped talking to herself. Her eyes were closed. Maybe she fell asleep.”
“Let her sleep,” I said. “Give me twenty minutes. I could use something to eat. Toast, cereal. No coffee.”
When I was out of the shower I put some adhesive bandage on my hands, enough to cover the worst of the gouges without impeding my fast draw. I dressed and took the bowl of oatmeal and sliced bananas Bea fixed for me into the tea room. Ida Grace’s eyes were still closed, but the veined grayish lids twitched and a slippered foot jumped while I looked her over, noting smudges on her housecoat and pajamas, a tear at one elbow. I figured she had climbed over the eight-foot wall between our properties. No razor wire there, but a lot of climbing roses.
I wondered what had compelled her to try a stunt like that at her age, what she’d been escaping. I reached down and nudged Ida awake in the lyre-backed Chinese Chippendale chair.
“Uhh!” she exclaimed, knocked loose from the grip of an intolerable dream. She breathed harshly through her mouth for a few seconds as if she were still climbing the garden wall. She looked up at me, looked around the tea room.
“Just as I… remember it,” she said.
I put my bowl of half-eaten oatmeal aside. My stomach felt better for having given it something to work on.
“Who did you meet at the Van Nuys airport?”
Ida licked dry lips. Beatrice gave me a barbed look and said, “You might at least offer her a cup of tea first.”
Ida looked at her with a faint grateful smile.
“Yes. Tea. If it’s no bother. I don’t recall your name?”
“Beatrice. And it’s no bother.”
So we waited until Ida sucked up half a cup of green tea. Which did serve to steady her, and brought a trace of color to her cheekbones.
“Now then,” I said. “You got some bad news a few hours ago, and you’re here to see if I can do something about it.”
“I thought… I could deal with the situation myself. After all… she did owe me. I could have betrayed her to her husband. I chose at the time not to… make a fuss, for all our sakes.”
She looked at me as if all that were perfectly clear. I shook my head slightly.
“Of course you wouldn’t know anything about it. Although I’m sure it isn’t news that… my husband was a philanderer.”
“Which husband?”
“Raymond. Scarlett.” She looked around the tea room again, made a nervous gesture. “It must have been going on here too, under this roof.”
“Alleged infidelity,” I said. “My mother has better sense.” I almost said, And better taste, but that would have amounted to piling on, and I didn’t want to antagonize Ida unnecessarily. “It would help if you could tell me who you visited in the Brenta helicopter at Van Nuys airport.”
She looked at me as if she were disappointed in my powers of perception.
“Carlotta, of course.”
“Miles Brenta’s wife.” I saw Bea purse her lips, but she didn’t whistle. I said, “How long ago did Ray and Carlotta have their affair?”
“Oh—quite a long time. I married Raymond twenty-five years ago. He’d had roundheels long before I married him. Don’t know what made me think marriage would change him. But if there were others besides Carlotta—I cast a blind eye on that side of our relationship.”
“So Ray Scarlett had Car Brenta as one of his lovers. This would have been well before she was chewed up by a werewolf, and that was—ten years ago?”
Ida quivered and slipped a little sideways in the chair.
“I never imagined that she would agree to see me. But Lenie had said that Carlotta was the one I must talk to. Only Carlotta could give Mal back to me. So I contacted her. To my surprise she—she seemed almost delighted to hear from me. At least that’s how I interpreted her lengthy response to my e-mail message. I felt greatly relieved and encouraged. I had no way of knowing until I met with Carlotta in the—in person, that she is probably insane.”
“As a result of the attack?”
“I believe so.”
“Then why is Miles Brenta letting her run loose at two in the morning instead of keeping her under watch in a plush sanitarium like Lodge Pine or Quail Woods?”
Ida reached out and almost knocked the cup and saucer off the little table next to her. Bea rescued both and poured more tea.
“But she was watched. Discreetly, by young men I took to be male nurses. They must be a necessity. When I saw her, even in the low light of the helicopter’s cabin—dear God, the damage! She had had her hair done. It wasn’t much help. She was almost too talkative and animated, as if s
he were in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.”
Ida blinked several times. After the last couple of blinks there were tears clinging to her eyelashes.
“Carlotta was wearing a black veil, much like a mantilla. And oh, she smelled. She smelled like a wretched excess of cheap perfume. But at the same time she also smelled of decay. An overpowering rottenness. She held out her hand to me, although she couldn’t rise. I had to take her hand even though I was stifled by her lurid odor. The hand was dry and cold and had no strength in it.
“She said, ‘So delighted to see you again, Ida. I sent flowers. Ray will always live in my memory.’ She was talking about the service for Ray as if it had been only last week. Her voice was odd and slurred, she could barely pronounce some of her words. One of the attendants aboard the helicopter offered me brandy. I thought I had better have it to keep my gorge from rising. After it was brought to me I asked Car why she wasn’t having one as well. That’s when she pulled her veil aside and showed me her face. Obviously plastic surgeons had done their best. But severed nerves are beyond a surgeon’s ability to repair. Car’s lips are twisted and don’t meet on the right side of her face. She drools constantly, into a towel that is wrapped around her throat. That was the smell all of her perfume couldn’t mask. ‘I drink through a straw,’ she said. ‘And I have trouble swallowing. Yet in spite of everything I have managed to keep up my appearance, don’t you think?’ “
Ida wiped at the tears on her cheeks.
“Once I thought I hated her,” she said quietly.
“All right,” I said. “What does Car Brenta have to do with Mallory?”
“I asked her if she’d seen my daughter. That didn’t help, but when I described Mal she said yes, she thought she had seen her recently. ‘Pretty young people come to our parties all the time,’ she said. ‘Miles invites them because he knows that I like to watch young people having a good time.’ “
“Kind of a surreptitious social life,” Bea observed. “But I guess one look at Carlotta would chill the party.”
I said to Ida, “You told her Mal was missing and possibly has committed a class-three felony?”
“No! What do you mean, a felony?”