Legally Undead

by Margo Bond Collins

  Nick watched me intently, nodding as I iterated each point.

  “And that is the ‘why’ that’s important here. Why does she feel like she has to gather all these vampires together and teach them how to feed off humans? I think it’s because every time a vampire feeds, he gets a little stronger, a little harder to kill. And the more the vampire can control the victim, the more the victim wants the vampire to suck his or her blood, the stronger the vampire gets.

  “I think that maybe vampires feed as much off the psychic energy—or sexual energy, or whatever—of their victims as they do off the blood of those victims. I don’t think Deirdre was just holding a little vampire party. I think she was arranging for her vampires to get stronger.

  “I think Deirdre is building a vampire army.”

  Nick went utterly still and stared at me.

  “I’m right about this. I’m a historian, Nick, and a good one, at that. I’m trained to look for patterns in things. I’ve been thinking about this all morning, and this is the pattern I’m seeing.”

  “I think it’s time for you to meet with Alec yourself,” Nick said. “He needs to hear your theory, if you’re willing to tell it to him.”

  I sighed. This was not going to be fun. But it had to be done.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

  Nick left without saying another word, but came back a few moments later. “Tomorrow morning at 10:00,” he said. I nodded in acknowledgment.

  *

  I ended up having to find someone to custom-make my stake knife (pun totally intended, of course). John was a big help with this. I was still running Google searches when he wandered through and asked what I was looking for. Had I been thinking about it clearly, of course, I would have gone to our in-house weapons specialist first.

  I explained what I had in mind and he pursed his lips in thought. “Yeah. That might just work. I know an old guy up in Westchester who might be able to put something like that together for us. You busy with anything else right now?”

  The last time I’d seen Malcolm, Tony had been running some sort of medical tests on him, so I didn’t feel any obligation to stick around on his account. Anyway, I was beginning to get a touch of cabin fever from having been cooped up in the shop for two solid days.

  “No, I’m not busy. Please. Get me out of here.”

  John grinned and headed off to tell Nick where we would be.

  We took the van up to Larchmont, a chichi little town north of the Bronx, wending our way through narrow streets lined with two-story colonial-style houses. We passed through the downtown area, where a small section of curving streets sported rows of artsy shops in which one could buy things like lamps imported from Morocco or chairs imported from England. Lots of imports.

  We kept going right through that section and into a slightly less reputable part of town. Not that any part of Westchester is all that disreputable, given that it’s one of the richest counties in New York state. But we moved on to the part of town that held the auto body and muffler repair shops.

  We finally pulled up in front of a worn-looking shack of a building across the street from a school-bus depot. The store had dusty windows and a hand-lettered sign in front that read “Knives Sharpened Here.”

  “Doesn’t look like your guy is terribly prosperous,” I said.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” said John, climbing out of the van and slamming the door behind him.

  An old-fashioned bell over the door jingled as we walked through. The room smelled of metal and oil. The sound of metal grinding against an electric sharpening wheel rang in from the back room and an additional smell of sparks and smoke drifted into the room.

  Behind the counter sat an old man reading the Post. He folded it with a smile when he saw John and came out from the counter with his arms spread in greeting.

  “Johnny, my boy,” he said as he took John’s hands and kissed him on both cheeks. “It is so good to see you again.” He had the distinctive accent of a New York Italian, one who had grown up speaking both English and Italian.

  “You look good, Marco,” John said. “How’s business?”

  “Ah, you know how it goes. Some days are good, others not so good.” He turned to me. “And who is this lovely young lady, Johnny?”

  “Marco Ventimiglia, this is Elle Dupree.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you,” I said. I held out my hand to shake his. He grabbed it and pulled me into a cheek-kissing greeting. I’d been in New York for years and still hadn’t entirely gotten used to that.

  “Welcome, my dear,” said Ventimiglia. He turned back to John. “What can I do for you, my boy?”

  “I need a special knife.”

  The old man laughed. “Always, you need a special knife. What is so special about this knife that you must come here?”

  “I need this knife to have a wood inlay on the blade.”

  “What? Oh, Johnny, Johnny, I make knives that cut, not knives to hang on the wall and look pretty. Why ruin the beauty of good steel by covering it up with wood?”

  “That’s why I’ve come to you. This knife has to cut, and cut well. The wood must act as part of the blade. This wood is not for decoration. It needs to slide in and back out without splintering or breaking. You’re the only person I know who could design such a knife and have it actually work.”

  Ventimiglia looked at John thoughtfully, then walked back around the counter and pulled out a pad of paper with a Henkle Knives logo across the top. He began sketching. After a moment, he spun the pad around to show John.

  “Something like this?” he asked.

  I moved up to the counter with John to look at the sketch. The knife he had drawn looked something like a Bowie knife with a serrated edge and a wrapped hilt. Ventimiglia had sketched a thin strip of wood inlay running partway down the side of the blade. John looked at me questioningly.

  “I think maybe it ought to be sharp on both sides of the blade,” I said.

  “Like a stiletto?” John asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “And the wood needs to go as far down the blade as possible—the more wood the better.”

  “The knife is for you?” Ventimiglia asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ventimiglia took the pad back and began sketching again, frowning in concentration. When he had finished, he turned the pad around.

  The picture on the pad looked like a miniature sword, long and thin and coming to a sharp point. A strip of wood, also pointed, ran down the center of the blade.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  Ventimiglia pursed his lips and tilted his head, staring at the paper. Then he wrote down a price next to the sketch.

  I felt my eyes grow wide as I realized that he hadn’t written the zeroes down—the last two numbers were not the cents part of that price. They were dollars. A lot of them.

  I looked up at John.

  “Oh. Um. I don’t think I can afford that,” I whispered, pretending that Ventimiglia couldn’t hear every word I said.

  John shook his head. “Not a problem. Put it on Nick’s tab,” he said to Ventimiglia.

  “One week,” Ventimiglia said. He didn’t even look at us as he picked up the sketch and walked out of the room, but he was humming as he went.

  *

  Nick and I got to the law offices at 9:55 the next morning. Nick sailed past the reception desk, waving to Sheila as he passed. She waved back at him and gave me a funny look, like she was trying to place me.

  I smiled at her and kept going.

  I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into that back office. I had, of course, formed a few ideas about the man. He had already been a lawyer when he had become Nick’s guardian and had been Nick’s father’s best friend, so I expected a man in his sixties or so. I was right about that part.

  It was just about the only thing I’d been right about.

  For some reason, I had apparently decided that sixty-odd-year-old lawyers were inherently portly men who smoked cigars
and had big booming voices.

  Not so in the case of Alec Pearson. Pearson was a small man with absolutely white hair and an inability to sit still.

  “Hello, Nick,” he said, standing up to greet us as we walked into the room.

  “Alec,” Nick said. “This is Elle Dupree, the woman I’ve been telling you about.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Dupree,” Pearson said, coming around the edge of his desk and shaking my hand. “Please, have a seat. Could I offer you something to drink before we get started here?”

  We took the two seats arranged in front of his desk. Nick requested coffee and I asked for water. I half expected Pearson to call someone to bring the drinks in to us, but instead he left the room for a moment and came back in carrying a cup of coffee and two bottles of water.

  “Nick tells me you’ve got quite a story to share with me,” Pearson said, twirling a pen around his fingers after he’d finally handed around the drinks and settled back into the chair behind his desk.

  “Actually,” I said. “I have some questions of my own before I tell you anything.”

  Pearson stood up and began pacing the room, picking up items on his desk and turning them over in his hands several times before putting them back down. He wore a well-tailored, dark Italian suit and spent a lot of time fiddling with the jacket, buttoning and unbuttoning it as he talked. I wondered if he had many courtroom appearances, and if so, how juries might react to all that barely contained energy.

  I had to crane my neck to watch him as he circled around behind me. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Why exactly did you ask Greg to become a vampire?”

  “I didn’t. That was his idea. I just asked him to do some research for me. By the time I found out what he was doing, it was too late.”

  Pearson picked up a paperweight from his desk, spun it around, set it back down. “I sent Nick to try to stop him, but clearly, he got there too late.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed Pearson. I was beginning to get the feeling that all that movement might be by design, that he might use his hyperkinetic energy to distract his audience from what he was actually saying. And I didn’t like the way that he managed to avoid eye contact by focusing on the objects he picked up to play with.

  “So what you’re telling me is that Greg was lying when he said that he got turned because of his job?” I sounded almost as suspicious as I felt. “Then why is he still on your payroll?”

  Pearson froze, went completely still for the first time since I’d entered his office. A look of shock—and maybe fear—flitted across his face and was gone. If I hadn’t been watching his face so carefully, I would have missed it.

  Apparently Nick hadn’t mentioned The Sting to his boss. I tried not to let my own surprise show. I very carefully did not look at Nick. I could feel him not-looking back.

  Pearson picked up a pen and twirled it across his fingers. “Greg came to me two nights later. I’d been working late on a case, and he just showed up in my office. He offered to continue working for me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Okay. I definitely didn’t believe that. This guy was too damn smart to keep a vampire on his payroll because it “seemed like a good idea.” And besides, he was afraid of something.

  I chewed on my bottom lip for a second, then just came out with it.

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  Both men stared at me.

  “What?” said Pearson.

  “I don’t buy it,” I said.

  Pearson’s eyes met mine and we stared at each other over his desk. This time when he quit moving it wasn’t out of shock. It wasn’t the freezing of a moment before—this was restraint, not surprise. I was right. All that motion was intentional. I revised my opinion of him. I’d bet that he was brilliant in a courtroom.

  He leaned back in his chair, never breaking eye contact with me.

  “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for,” he said with a tiny smile.

  “That happens to me a lot.” I didn’t smile as I said it.

  I could see him trying to decide how much to tell me. He leaned forward and looked into my eyes.

  His “earnest” pose, I thought.

  “I had Greg researching the financial dealings of a number of groups I suspected of being vampires. What he brought back to me indicated that these vampires were much wealthier than I had at first suspected.”

  I nodded. I’d seen those records. I’d stolen them, in fact.

  “And a lot of that wealth was being moved around to buy real estate all over the tri-state area. I wanted Greg to find out why. So I told him to research it some more.”

  He paused, still not breaking eye contact with me. “The last time I saw him he said he’d found something big, something having to do with the Bronx and Long Island. He didn’t want to give me any of the details until he knew the whole story. He was heading out to see what he could discover. I kept expecting him to come back. He never did.”

  “No,” I said. “Instead he joined up with Deirdre’s vamps. And kidnapped my friend and forced me to trade my blood for his freedom.”

  “Indeed.” Pearson’s voice was quiet.

  “So my question stands. Why is he still on your payroll?”

  Pearson shook his head. “It’s your turn now. I want to hear your story. Then I’ll answer you.”

  I hate dealing with lawyers. They always want to negotiate. They’re as bad as vampires.

  I stood up.

  “You know what?” I said. “I’m done here. You’re dancing around, trying to keep from answering me. And at the same time, you’re trying to figure out how much I know.” I walked toward the door. “I’m sick to death of people trying to suck stuff out of me: information, blood, whatever.”

  My hand was on the doorknob when Pearson spoke. “Wait.”

  I turned partway around, but I didn’t take my hand off the knob. Pearson and Nick were both standing. Nick was looking back and forth between us. I was having a hard time figuring out what his role in all of this was. He clearly hadn’t told Pearson everything. But he hadn’t spoken up since we’d gotten here, either.

  “Sit down,” said Pearson, “and I’ll tell you.”

  I took my seat again, but watched Pearson warily as he spoke.

  In the end, he still didn’t tell me everything, but at least it was the truth. Or rather, I’m pretty sure it was the truth.

  “Greg is still on my payroll because it’s the simplest way to keep giving him money—no tax issues that way.”

  “And why did you want to keep giving him money?”

  “Because I wanted him to hand it over to Deirdre and her vampires.”

  This time I was the one who froze.

  “No doubt—” he paused and looked at Nick, “no doubt you have heard how I found out about vampires.”

  I didn’t bother to respond; I just kept staring at him.

  “I’ve been running Nick’s group for years. And we have yet to get even close to the vampire who killed my father. Salvaggi. He’s the one I want.

  “When Greg came back with the information about Deirdre’s plan to start a vampire war, I decided to see if I could use the resultant confusion to get to Salvaggi.”

  “So you sent Greg in and pumped money to Deirdre through him.” My voice was flat. “How did you convince him to get himself turned?”

  “That was the easy part. I let him come up with the idea himself.”

  I let that hang in the air between us.

  After a moment, Nick said, “Elle, I think you should tell Alec about your experience at Deirdre’s.”

  So I did.

  Pearson sat relatively still through my narrative. At least, he didn’t get up. He went back to playing with various items on his desk, though.

  I was as graphic as I could possibly be when I described the bloodletting I’d experienced. Pearson winced when I said that Greg’s bite was something akin to rape. Good. As
far as I was concerned, all of this was his fault for getting Greg involved with the vampires in the first place.

  When I had finished the story, Pearson looked at Nick. They weren’t speaking, but I could see some sort of communication going on.

  Neither of them looked particularly happy.

  “Would you excuse us for a moment, Elle?” Nick asked without taking his eyes off of Pearson.

  Pearson nodded. “You can have a seat out in the reception room,” he said.

  I knew a dismissal when I heard one, and these two men clearly had some things to work out.

  Nick and Pearson talked for about a half hour. I spent that time in the front flipping through magazines and avoiding Sheila’s sidelong glances. She spent that same half hour watching me surreptitiously. I knew she was trying to figure out where she’d seen me before.

  I wasn’t about to give her any hints.

  When Nick emerged from the back room, he looked awfully pleased with himself. He didn’t say anything other than “Let’s go,” though, so I just dropped the magazine back onto the coffee table and smiled a goodbye at the secretary.

  I managed to contain my curiosity until we were almost to the subway stop.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Pearson’s on board. We’ve got all the financial backing we need to wipe out Deirdre’s little army.”

  “So when are we going in?”

  “Just as soon as Tony says Malcolm’s ready.”

  Chapter 21

  Tony was waiting for us when we got back to the shop.

  “Hey, Nick! Come over to the lab for a minute. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Tony hadn’t invited me, but I followed the two men into the small lab set up in one of the former examination rooms.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, pointing to a microscope. Nick peered through it, then moved out of my way so that I could look, too.

  I really don’t remember much from high school biology, and I took geology in college—I thought it would be easier than any of the other science classes. I’d been wrong. All rocks look the same to me, as the D on my college transcript proves.

  So all I could tell from looking through the microscope was that I was looking at a bunch of cells. And I only knew that because I’d seen similar things in movies.