The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  “You remember when Catherine Desmond was shot? When her kid was snatched? She says...well, she says she died. Out of body, like you call it.”

  “The tunnel, the white light, that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly.” She sighed. “You are up on this. Maybe it will be easier for you to get a handle on. It kind of blew me away. So, yeah, anyway, when she got back from, well, from wherever she was, that tunnel, she started hopping to and fro. She says she travels. In space, I mean.” She gave him a doubtful look.

  “Well, sure,” he said, “Doesn’t everybody.”

  She let that pass. “Mostly, where she traveled was to Paterson. Wherever he was at the moment. Seems like she somehow ended up linked together with him. She’s convinced she was sent back to nail his ass.”

  “And that’s how we ended up at Morning View Road,” he said. “I kind of wondered. I mean, that anonymous sighting sounded kind of flimsy.”

  She was relieved to find him taking this so easily, had half expected him to think she was nuts. Though why she should care about his opinion she couldn’t imagine. “Exactly.”

  “But, if she’s tied to him on an astral level, why haven’t we been able to catch up with him?”

  The question hit a raw nerve. It had been bugging her since their failure on Morning View the day before. She jumped to her feet and began to pace, hitting her fist into her open palm.

  “It’s my fault, is why. I wasn’t quick enough. From the beginning. I believed her, and at the same time I didn’t. It was just too far out for me. While I was waiting to be convinced they got away from us.”

  “Come on, we were plenty fast getting there.”

  “Just not fast enough. Think about it. If I had gotten to that house an hour sooner, maybe even just a few minutes, we’d have had him. She did her part, she told me where he was. If I had just been quicker out of the gate.”

  “Hey, you’re beating up on yourself unfairly.” He stood and came to her. She stopped in her pacing, looking into his face. “You can second-guess anything,” he said. “Maybe we’d have gotten him an hour earlier, maybe not. The reality is, he gave us the slip. It happens. We’ll get him. I know we will. You’ll get him. You’re the best, everyone knows that.”

  “I dragged my butt.”

  “You didn’t drag your butt.” He paused, and gave her a sheepish look. “Believe me, I’d have noticed. I’ve had my eyes on your butt.”

  His smile was reassuring. And very sexy. His eyes positively smoldered with desire. In some corner of her mind, she warned herself that this couldn’t go any further. She was Roby Chang. She didn’t need any man, and she especially didn’t need this man.

  Her body called her a liar. He put his arms around her and brought his mouth down to hers. It was like an electric contact. She could feel the heat flame up between them. She made a funny squeaking sound in her throat. Her arms lifted around him of their own accord.

  The kiss seemed to go on forever, their bodies grinding together, his hardness crushed against her belly, a potent promise of what was in store for her. After an eternity, he ended the kiss, kept his arms around her as he guided her to the bed against the far wall. They paused there, his fingers stroking her shoulders, her arms, her breasts. His lips went to her throat, her ears, her mouth again, and she felt fingers fumbling with the buttons of her blouse.

  Oh, hell. She pushed his hand away, undid the buttons herself, stripped naked in mere seconds, aware of him undressing too—he was quicker, but, crap, he had less to take off. She refused to look. Well, just a teensy glance.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and fell onto the bed, felt him drop beside her. He touched her thighs, and she reached for him and took hold of him. It was big, not enormous, just nice, rock hard, slick to the touch. It felt good. It felt wonderful. It had been a long time. Her blood simmered in her veins, reached the boiling point....

  It was violent, it was frantic, and it was fast. Or it seemed to be, she couldn’t really tell, time had stopped. She was overwhelmed, filled up in every sense with him. She ran her hands down his straining back, felt his butt. Definitely prime beef.

  “Oh,” she gasped again. “Oh.” He was driving her out of her mind, it had never been like this, she...she...she....

  She shot to the moon, did a couple of orbits, and came crashing back down to the bed, gasping for air. After a few minutes he rolled off of her. They lay side by side, regaining their breath. He reached for her, tried to take her into another embrace.

  She shoved his hand away, sat up violently. “Damn,” she swore aloud. She jumped to her feet.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, bewildered.

  “What’s wrong?” Chang snapped, struggling into bra and the men’s boxer shorts she wore for panties. “Are you fucking crazy? This is wrong. The whole damn thing. I must have been out of my mind.”

  He got up too, still half hard, she was annoyed to see, and gave her a grin that only infuriated her further. “I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was great, actually.” She snorted disdainfully. “Oh, come on,” he said, “Don’t try to pretend you didn’t get off. That was a Mount Saint Helen’s orgasm you had.”

  She reddened and stuffed her leg into trousers. “Oh, sure, and that makes it all right? Look, that was it, okay, let’s just both of us forget this ever happened. I know I am going to forget it happened.”

  “Well, I’m not. For Christ’s sake, you act like we just committed some mortal sin. I’m a man. You’re a woman. Boom, boom, boom. That’s what men and women do together. It’s just most of them don’t have it as good as we just did. Honest. I know. I’ve done it before. A couple of times anyway. Not the same. Definitely not the same.”

  “Did you ever hear of ‘don’t get your bread where you get your meat’? How about, ‘Don’t shit where you eat’?” She strapped on her shoulder holster, slid the Glock into it. Thought momentarily of shooting him.

  “My mother says the adage is the last refuge of the losing argument.”

  “Great, I should have slept with your mother.” He opened his mouth to say something. She stuck a finger in his face. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. And don’t think I haven’t heard it before, I know what the guys say about me. Any woman doesn’t fall on her back with legs open has to be a dyke, right?”

  He grinned again, which did nothing to lessen her anger. “Hell, I’ll scotch that rumor, I’ll spread the word if it’ll make you happy.”

  “What will make me happy,” she wagged her finger in his face again, “Will be for you to keep your big mouth shut. And your fly, too, at least around me.”

  “Shit,” he swore loudly.

  “My sentiments exactly.” She bent down for her shoes.

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  He gave her a naughty schoolboy grin and winked. “One more for the road?”

  She threw a shoe at him.

  * * * *

  Even with the books and some work from the office, Catherine’s day dragged on. She fixed an omelet for lunch and picked at it desultorily. She peeked at a couple of soaps, found it impossible to fathom what was going on, and to whom.

  Out of morbid curiosity, she tuned in Daffy Danny’s Alley. He was entertaining—one presumed you could consider it that—his young studio audience with hand puppets. She studied him, his exaggerated expressions, the rolling eyes, the gear-shifting of his voice from normal baritone to falsetto that sent the youngsters into paroxysms of laughter for some reason. To her mind he was a bad imitation of Pee Wee, who at least had been genuinely funny.

  Was O’Dell a child molester, an accessory, however inadvertent, to kidnapping and murder? Was he looking his little guests over while he entertained them, committing vile acts upon them in his imagination, or even planning them in reality?

  Chang came in while the show was on. Catherine glanced at her and saw the fierce jut of her chin and her eyes dark with anger.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  �
��Nothing,” Chang said sharply and added, nearly under her breath. “Men are such assholes.”

  Which probably did not require an answer, Catherine thought. She looked back at the television. Chang crossed her arms over her chest, leaned against the wall, and watched the end of the show with her. She made a grimace when O’Dell, giving two of his little friends enthusiastic hugs, blew a kiss at the screen.

  “Daffy Danny bye-bye,” he squealed in tremulous falsetto.

  Catherine punched the off button on the remote. “Now there’s a man I can certainly agree is an asshole. I can’t watch him without getting angry. Those little girls he was holding just now, I kept thinking, what if...it sickens me.”

  Chang was thoughtful for a moment, her anger with Conners—even more, with herself—giving way to her detective instincts. “You know,” she said, “I think maybe it’s time we talked to that little creep in person.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  O’Dell lived in the high rent end of Encino behind electronic gates that, to Chang’s surprise, stood open. A short driveway curved around neat lawns and planters of geraniums, shockingly red in the December weather, to some architect’s fevered dream of a Mediterranean villa that shouted nouveau-riche.

  “I’ll do the talking,” Chang said. “All I want you to do is take a good hard look at him, and assure yourself that this really is the guy you saw with Paterson out on Morning View. We don’t want to find out later that the snapshots didn’t develop right on that particular trip.” And King would tear her a new one if she landed them in hot water with this visit, but she kept that to herself.

  Bronze doors offered Biblical scenes and a choice of an enormous knocker that would have had her spanking Eve’s derriere—take that, you naughty apple pusher—or a more conventional doorbell. Chang chose the latter. Chimes somewhere within did an impressive imitation of Big Ben. After only a brief pause (had their arrival been announced, despite the open gate?) an olive-skinned young man in tight black silk trousers and a white linen tunic opened it and looked them up and down with limpid eyes that seemed not at all pleased with what they saw.

  Chang flashed her badge. “F.B.I. We’d like to talk to Mister O’Dell.”

  “I’ll see,” he said, making a question mark of it, and closed the door in their faces.

  The wait grew lengthy. Chang was about to ring again—maybe this time she would give Eve a smack—when he returned, holding the door wide for them. “This way,” he said with a slight sniff. He sounded altogether disappointed that he hadn’t been ordered to shoo them away like pesky flies.

  They followed him down a wide corridor that split the house in half. The rooms they glimpsed on either side reinforced Catherine’s impression of lots of money and less taste. Too much overdone furniture, too many too large pillows in too many colors. A white-flocked Christmas tree was trimmed all in lavender ornaments, and surrounded by a mountain of packages, all silver and lavender.

  Silk-clad hips swayed their way through doors at the far end of the central hallway and onto a Spanish tiled patio with more planters of geraniums. Enormous banana plants in terra cotta pots screened a pool that glittered blue and inviting in the afternoon sunlight. A faint mist of steam rose from its heated surface. Glowing grids on poles kept the chill of winter air at bay. It was December. Even in Los Angeles December wasn’t exactly swimming pool weather, unless you were rich enough to take charge of nature.

  Danny O’Dell was draped languidly under one of the radial heaters. Television, with its makeup, its filters and careful lighting, had been kind to him, making him appear a good ten or fifteen years younger than he looked in person. His eyes were puffy, his skin had an unhealthy yellowish pallor, and his gray-brown hair was thin and limp.

  He had swapped his nerdy television suit for bathing trunks—not the string bikini she would have guessed, but white baggies with the grinning likeness of Sponge Bob Squarepants. Empathizing with his young audience members, she speculated, just one of the kids? The legs sticking out of the trunks were skinny and white. Sunglasses and a book lay on a table close at hand, along with a tall glass of what looked to her practiced eye like bourbon. A lot of it, hold the ice.

  “Please, sit down,” he said, and gestured toward a pair of chairs next to the table. “Some refreshments? A cocktail, perhaps, or there’s iced tea if you prefer?”

  “Tea, I think,” Chang said, and Catherine nodded her agreement.

  “Sergio, do be a dear and fetch the ladies some tea.” He fluttered one hand vaguely in the direction of the house and Sergio bustled away. “Now, then, Sergio said you were police officers?”

  “F.B.I.,” Chang corrected him. “We just wanted to ask your help with a case we’re working on.”

  He looked long and hard at her. A faint sheen of sweat glistened on his brow, more than would seem justified from the heater above them.

  “Anything I can do, of course.” He reached for his glass and took a long, noisy swallow from it. Chang caught a whiff of bourbon.

  “I wonder if you’ve ever heard of anyone called Paterson,” she said.

  His eyes blinked rapidly several times. He screwed up his mouth and made a show of thinking. “Paterson? Is he an actor?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  More thinking. “I knew a Waldo Paterson, I think. Or was that Peterson? Oh, and there’s a Theresa Paterson at the station, big woman, blonde, works in publicity, I believe.”

  “This is a Lester Paterson. Sometimes goes by the name of Trash Can.”

  The eyes did their flutter routine again. He shook his head, Adam’s apple bobbing. “What a cute nickname, I wonder how that came about. No, no I’m sure I would remember anyone who called himself Trash Bag.”

  Chang took a folder from her briefcase and handed him the two different pictures of Paterson. He barely glanced at them.

  “Are there two of them? Oh, is this really the same person? How striking, I’d love to know who his surgeon is. One day soon I’m going to have to do something about these eyes.” He rolled them at her, a gesture that never failed to delight the children in his studio audience. Chang kept her face carefully bland.

  Watching him silently Catherine was thinking of the scene on Morning View Road. There was no doubt in her mind that this was the man she had seen there. She was equally certain he was lying now. Even if she hadn’t seen him with Paterson with her own eyes, she would have been convinced of that. However entertaining he might be to children, he was no actor.

  “You know,” O’Dell said thoughtfully, “Now that I think of it, he does look familiar. He’s on television, isn’t he? Oh, wait, you’re here about a case you said. Yes, that’s it, of course. His face was on television, on the news. One of those if-you-see-this-man-call-the-police things. This is who you’re looking for? But what on earth made you think I would know him?”

  “It’s routine. You’re name came up in some paperwork.”

  “My name? How peculiar. Or maybe not. I am a television personality, after all.” He favored her with what was meant to be a humble smile. She had unnerved him, this odd-looking little woman with the frizzy red hair. And the other one, silent as a Buddha, watching him and sipping her tea as if it were the blood of her enemies.

  “You think he might be one of your fans?” Chang looked skeptical.

  He laughed unconvincingly and handed the pictures back to her. “You would be surprised some of the people I hear from. Fans. You’d think that would be the most wonderful thing for an entertainer, but it’s a two-handed puppet, isn’t it? Needy little creatures, always trying to get a piece of your flesh, wanting to stand in your light. Mostly I try to keep a distance from them. These days, you can’t be too careful, can you? Since the Manson business, and the Jodie Foster thing, you just don’t know. And those eyes, he does look a mean one, doesn’t he? But, no, I’m sure I’ve never met him. Positive. But that’s not to say I mightn’t have a stalker. Stars have to worry about that sort of thing.”

  Chang
thought of the gates at the entrance, left carelessly open. Apparently he had no real concern about the possibility of a stalker, any more than she did. It was hard to imagine one of his young fans, average age seven or so, tailing him with malicious intent, though she could certainly imagine a parent or two thinking evil thoughts.

  He was talking too much and too fast and was obviously grateful when Sergio arrived with a tray holding two tall, frosted glasses which he offered to Chang and Catherine. Catherine held hers in both hands to keep from flinging it into O’Dell’s face and took a sip. It tasted of bile.

  “Perhaps Sergio...?” O’Dell held the pictures up for the houseboy’s inspection. “Does he look familiar? They think he might be a stalker. Maybe a delivery person, or someone hanging around? A would-be gate-crasher?”

  Sergio barely glanced in the direction of the pictures, gave a quick shake of his head, and hurried away, practically running.

  “Or, he might have written me,” O’Dell said. He took another long swig of his drink, nearly emptying it, and looked wistfully after his houseboy. “Sometimes they write wanting pictures for their children. At least they say it’s for their children, though I often think they just don’t want to admit it’s for themselves. You can check my mail, if you’d like.”

  Chang took a picture of Catherine’s daughter from the folder and handed it to O’Dell. “Recognize her?” she asked.

  This time his denial seemed sincere. “No.” He shook his head, looking puzzled.

  “Or him?” She handed him a picture of Steve Madison, the boy who had disappeared a few days earlier from the park. He glanced at it and looked away almost instantly.

  “No,” he said, too quickly. The picture shook. Catherine’s glass broke in her hand, startling them all.

  “Sergio,” O’Dell bellowed.

  “It’s all right,” Catherine said, standing and dabbing at the spilled tea with her napkin. She had gotten nothing more than a small cut on one finger. She put it to her mouth and sucked the blood from it, carefully avoided looking at their host.

  “I can’t imagine how that happened,” O’Dell said. “I shall have to flay that boy for bringing you a cracked glass.” He gave the picture back to Chang, put a hand over his eyes as if the sun was in them and reached for the sunglasses on the table. “Really,” he sighed, “I’m afraid I’m quite weary. Is that all?”