And now they had me.
Chapter Seven
It was about ten minutes through light traffic to get to police headquarters. I kept quiet in the back seat, uncomfortable to be sitting there next to Miller and his toothpick. Once we were parked, the detectives ushered me into the building, through a big room filled with desks and phones but not many people, and into an eight-by-eight interview room with a scarred table and three uncomfortable-looking chairs. Before they asked me to sit, they had me empty my pockets onto the table; moments later, my discharge sat next to Annabelle’s letter, my wallet, sixty-eight cents, and the key to room 412 at the Hotel Dorado. O’Neal had stopped at a desk on the way through the big room, retrieving a manila folder and a notepad from her desk. Now she tapped the tablet with the chewed end of a pencil and raised her eyebrow. I knew the real fun was about to begin.
They started with the stationery from the hotel. O’Neal had her partner lay it on the table a few inches away from all of my things; then she pointed at it with her pencil. “Care to explain?” she asked.
“It means nothing to me. I saw it painted on a wall in the alley behind my hotel. Graffiti. I think some punks put it there.”
“Do you always make a written record of the graffiti you see?”
“No. But this…” I shrugged. “It struck me as odd. Graffiti is always names or insults or marking territory. Political sometimes, especially over in Europe, you know?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But this was just weird. Plus, the same punks had a book with them, and that was on the cover.” I pointed to the symbols. “It kind of got into my head. I was bored back in my room and I just scribbled it down.”
O’Neal nodded. “And the rest of the stuff, these notes? What is Garcia Industries?”
“It’s a lead I got on Annabelle,” I lied. “Something her grandmother told me about. She said she’d gotten a postcard from Annabelle saying she was going to apply there for a job. I figured I’d head over there as soon as I got my bearings.”
I could only hope that the detectives were not inclined to contact the people at Garcia Industries ahead of me to verify the story. It all depended on how believable I’d been. When O’Neal asked her next question, it told me I’d been successful, at least with her and at least for now.
“You’re saying you’re not a Crossover?”
“A what?” I answered, and I didn’t have to fake ignorance.
She pointed at the stationery again. “I see Cosmo Beadle’s name there,” she said. “You see that painted on a wall, too?”
“No,” I said. “That book I mentioned. Who is that guy anyway? I know I’ve heard the name before.”
“Never mind,” she said, writing a few things down on her pad. Reading her messy writing upside down, I picked out the word graffiti, and something else that looked like Garcia. As she looked up again, she said, “Why don’t you start from the beginning, Mr. Strait? Tell us what you’re doing here in our lovely city. Go ahead and start with this Annabelle.”
I spilled just about everything without needing further prompting—starting with getting Annabelle’s letter. Since they had it in front of them, I couldn’t lie and say she’d asked me to come find her out west, so instead I said I couldn’t take getting dumped in a letter like that and had come out here to try and talk some sense into her—only I’d encountered that jackrabbit and been left to hoof it through the desert. I gave her my impressions of Gemma, and how things had gone when we’d reached the city. The only things I kept to myself were the bit about the gun and the fact that Gemma had walked away from me carrying that oddball case of hers. I held back on the gun just because I didn’t want them going back to the Dorado and tossing my room to find it. I also didn’t like the idea of their possibly being able to figure out that it had been fired recently—if that was what you could call it. That would open up more complications than I wanted to face. As to keeping Gemma’s contraption to myself, that just seemed like a bit of insurance. If I gave away everything and they still wanted more, I figured I could throw that last card on the table before they really put the screws to me.
O’Neal just nodded when I was done. Miller acted like I hadn’t said a word. He reached across the scarred table and tapped my army discharge.
“So, what does that make you?” Miller said “Some kind of war hero or something?”
The question caught me off guard, a complete non sequitur. “No, sir. I wouldn’t say that,” I answered after a moment’s silence.
Miller nodded. “Well, what would you say, then?” His tone was one I’d heard in plenty of bars before, coloring the words of men who were spoiling for a fight after having their inhibitions deadened by booze—which is not to say I’d been on the receiving end of that belligerence. I’d usually just been an observer, and the content of the tense exchanges I’d listened in on had never focused on slurring the military.
I didn’t answer right away, taking a moment to look into his dark eyes while trying to figure out where this anger was coming from—and where it was headed. Finally, I said, “I served in the army, and when my tour was completed they discharged me. Same as any other guy.”
There was no point in telling him I spent the last two weeks of the war in a hospital, the sole survivor of the accident that had killed Buddy Stiles and the rest of my unit. The doctors had poked and prodded, doing everything but taking me apart and putting me back together again. They hadn’t said it aloud, but I’d been able to tell from their perplexed expressions that they weren’t so much trying to figure out if I was injured but rather trying to determine why I hadn’t died like Buddy and the rest.
Miller nodded and then echoed my words. “Same as any other guy, huh? Were you over there?”
“Germany?”
The word made his expression shift, like I had just cracked a rotten egg under his nose and it was all he could do to keep his lip from curling in disgust. He managed a nod.
“Yes” I said, answering the nod. “France and Belgium, too.”
Then it came out. “So, you’re one of the guys who blew it for us.”
“Now, Deke,” O’Neal said. She had remained impassive during the exchange between Miller and me. Now she leaned forward. Her tone firm but not to the point of shutting the younger detective down, she added, “That’s not exactly pertinent to the case.”
“It might be,” Miller said. He was answering his partner, but his eyes never left mine, almost unblinking. A vein throbbed in his temple. “It might. Guy like him, scurrying around over there like a rat to avoid getting his skull full of shrapnel, comes home and keeps on going with the same plan. Just lurking around the edges while other people do the real work. And when he sees another way to take the easy way out, he does it.”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” I said, my tone icy.
O’Neal raised a hand to break it up before it really got going. “Why don’t you take a break, Deke? Maybe you could use some fresh air.”
“I don’t need fresh air. I need this deadbeat son of a bitch to tell us how he lost the war for us and how he’s come here to—”
“We didn’t lose the war,” I said. My irritation was showing, but I was past caring. “It was a truce. You know it, and I know it. They had the bomb and we had the bomb and everybody decided to stand down instead of burning the whole place to a cinder.” There was no point in spilling the other bit that I had only a guess about—that the war would have ended differently if the Allies’ last nasty weapon hadn’t malfunctioned and taken out Buddy Stiles and all the rest. Instead, I finished with what I knew Miller and O’Neal and everyone else was already well aware of. “They got a fat slice of Europe and we split Japan with the Brits and that was that. Did I sign the treaty? Did I negotiate the truce? No, pal. Sorry. You need to go to D.C. if you’ve got a kick with the way things ended. I had nothing to do with it.”
“You’re a goddamn liar,” Miller said, his voice rising.
“Deke!” O’Neal barked.
“Enough! Take a break. That’s an order.”
Miller shot his superior a deadly stare, and for a second I thought he was going to ignore the order and spring across the table at me. But then he stood up and shoved his chair back, stalking out of the room without another word.
When the door was closed, O’Neal said, “He had a brother that didn’t make it back.”
“That’s my fault?” I asked. The young detective had bugged me from the moment I first saw him in the Hotel Dorado, and now I was past being bugged. I wanted a piece of him just as much as he seemed to want one of me. The fact that he had a badge and a gun didn’t matter, nor did the fact that I was sitting in an interview room in a building filled with people who’d back him up.
O’Neal shrugged but said nothing.
“Why didn’t he go over there?” I asked. “He’s the right age.”
“Would you believe me if I said he has flat feet?”
I said nothing to this, and O’Neal just let out a sigh, probably relieved at being able to get on with things.
“Tell me more about this Blaylock woman,” she said.
I had yet to cool off, but I suppose I was glad we weren’t going to talk about the war anymore.
It was my turn to shrug. “There’s nothing more to tell. She played it pretty close to the buttons. Wouldn’t tell me where she lived or what she did, only that she didn’t want to have to answer a bunch of questions at the checkpoint. She had the story all worked out. I don’t know what she would have done if she hadn’t found me out there on the road. Probably would have taken her chances.”
“Maybe. And maybe she’d have gotten rough with the officers stationed out there.”
“Gemma?” I asked, shaking my head. “She didn’t strike me as the rough type.”
O’Neal raised an eyebrow. “I’ve got a feeling about you, Strait,” she said. Then she gave a little shrug. “Maybe I’m wrong. Your discharge papers, the rest of your story…We’re going to see if there’s any report on that wrecked car of yours out in the desert. For now, though, I doubt that there’s any more to you than meets the eye.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Take it how you want,” she said. “This Blaylock woman, though…”
She opened the folder and tossed some color photos down on the table—my ID and Gemma’s along with all the other pics the lady cop at the checkpoint had shot of the Swan and the sleeping woman in the back seat. The detective pointed at Gemma’s face on her ID. “That an accurate portrait?” she asked.
I leaned forward. It was all her—high cheekbones, full lips, dark hair worn down instead of hidden under that magenta kerchief, but definitely her. I told O’Neal as much.
She nodded. “That’s about the only legitimate thing there then,” she said. “The address is a fake, and she’s never actually applied for a driver’s license. I expect her name isn’t Gemma Blaylock either.”
For the first time, I looked at the address on the license, realizing I’d had her ID card in my shirt pocket the whole time she was riding in the back seat with her head under my hat. I could have just pulled out the card and seen where she lived without her knowing it, and she’d have been none the wiser. And damn it if I didn’t look now and see the Malibu address she’d denied having more than once. She hadn’t been lying to me about that, it seemed now. But had she expected me to look? Was that little parting shot she gave me about not living in Malibu meant to be her way of saying I hadn’t figured her out? I kept quiet about it and looked back at O’Neal.
She laid three more photos on the table. These weren’t as nice looking. They were autopsy photos of a man who looked to have been in his mid-fifties. One was a close-up of his face straight on—eyes closed and thin lips in a straight line under a pencil mustache. Another showed his head from the left side, a nasty bruise at his temple. The third showed him from the chest up. That one caught my attention the most, but I tried not to show it.
“That the guy I’m supposed to have helped her kill?” I asked.
“You didn’t kill anybody,” the detective said. She tapped the picture of the dead man. “Ever see him before?”
“No.”
“When she talked about this business deal in Las Vegas, did she make any reference to being there with a man? Or traveling with one?”
“No.”
“Any indication at all that the car wasn’t hers?”
“Not until she walked away from it.”
“And she didn’t seem nervous? Jumpy?”
“No. If anything, she was the opposite. Kind of…unnaturally calm. Calculating.”
She nodded.
“So, who’s the starch?” I asked, nodding toward the photo.
“You’ll read about it in the papers today,” O’Neal said. “But I can tell you. Lance Masterson. I expect you know the name if not the face.”
“Masterson Brothers,” I said. I’d seen the logo of their film company at the beginning of more than one Saturday’s entertainment over the last twenty years. “He’s one of them?”
“Yup,” she said. “Or at least he was.”
I let out a long breath. Then I tapped the profile pic with the unhealthy looking bruise. “Is that what did him in?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm. Blunt force trauma. At least, that’s our assumption.”
I nodded. “I have to tell you…and, I mean, I’m no expert, but the woman who was driving that Swan didn’t look like she could pack much of a wallop.”
“You’d be surprised what a woman can do once she’s got the right weapon in her hands,” O’Neal said with a hint of a smile. “And enough anger to motivate her.”
“Or fear.”
“She strike you as the fearful type? Like she’d been pushed into a corner?”
“No,” I said, recalling the impression I’d had of her as she walked away from me on Hill Street. If anything, she was the one who had done the pushing during her time with me. What had happened between her and Masterson, I couldn’t guess at. “You sure it was her that did it?”
“Not sure at all,” the detective said. “But she was driving his car, and the whole thing with having you cover for her at the checkpoint makes her someone we want to talk to, if nothing more.”
I nodded. “You mind if I ask another question?”
O’Neal shrugged, which I took as permission to ask away. I pointed at the photo of the dead man showing his upper torso and head. On the left collarbone was the same star-and-triangle tattoo I’d seen on the punk in the alley, the same design they’d been painting and that had gotten me hauled in here rather than getting questioned in my hotel room. “What is that?” I asked.
“You really don’t know?”
“I really don’t.”
O’Neal nodded and looked down at the photo. She didn’t look happy.
“You old enough to have watched silent movies back in the day?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Some.”
“Do you remember a comedian with a wonky eye?”
I thought about it for a second. The book I’d found in the alley had almost jumpstarted my brain, but there hadn’t been enough juice to make the connection. Now, O’Neal’s question served as the spark I’d needed. “Cosmo Beadle,” I said, a face rising up from the dust of memory. “He let his mustache do all the acting.”
“That’s him. Cosmo’s brand of humor didn’t translate well into the talkies, but unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he was smart with his money. They say he’s got a huge estate over on Catalina Island. About six or seven years ago, he started a little club, a little group. I don’t know what else you’d call it. Just a bunch of folks with more money than brains, really, who got caught up in the story Cosmo was telling them.”
“Which was?”
“That he could travel in time. That he’d done it twice. Once during his silent movie days and once more in the early days of the war. Not exactly travel forward and backwards like in some silly time machine story b
ut rather to what his believers call alternate timelines. And he thinks he can ‘cross over’ to those different versions of reality. Like the south winning the Civil War, stuff like that.”
“Sounds crazy,” I said, but even as I spoke the words, it occurred to me that this idea of “crossing over” had a ring of familiarity to it. Is that what happened to me? I wondered. Did I cross over into some other place, some other reality?
The thought was absurd. It was almost more comforting to consider myself crazy.
My face must not have betrayed any of my musings to the detective, as she said, “To you and me, maybe. Ol’ Cosmo’s got believers, though. A lot of them with deep pockets. It’s gotten him set up pretty nicely.”
“And the believers get these tattoos.”
The detective nodded.
“And read his propaganda.”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“These punks I saw in the alley last night, they didn’t look like they had deep pockets.”
“There are a lot of people who believe,” O’Neal said. “The little fish pay what tithe they can and do the bidding of the big fish to make up the difference.”
“Is this a criminal thing?” I asked.
“Not that we know for sure. It’s a cult thing. Cosmo’s practically set up his own religion, with himself as chief theologian and all his disciples ready to do whatever he says for their chance at being let in on the secret.”
“But if he’s only done it twice, it doesn’t sound like he’s exactly got the thing mastered,” I said.
O’Neal shrugged again. “I’m not saying it makes a lot of sense. What I’m telling you is what we know.”
“And did you know Masterson was in on this deal?”
“No,” she said. “Not until now.”
She reached forward and scooped up the autopsy photos, putting them in her folder. Then she gathered the pics from the checkpoint and the stationery Miller had found in my room.
“Is that it?” I asked.
The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1) Page 8