“Detective O’Neal?” I said as we started down the stairs, keeping my voice as close to a whisper as I could. She just looked at me in response, and I continued. “When Carmelita gets to the station, I would consider it a great favor if you would interview her yourself.”
“That’s my plan,” she said, making no effort at matching my whispered tone. “So, it’s not really doing you a favor, is it?”
“I suppose not. If you put it that way. But maybe…maybe you could fingerprint her first,” I said.
“We don’t normally do that if we’re just bringing someone in for questioning.”
“I understand. If you did, though, it would provide some answers for you before you even start. But…and maybe this is the favor…it would be best if you handled the fingerprinting yourself and then, if there’s anything surprising about them, you could just keep that to yourself.”
She stopped on the stairs, one step above me, and put a restraining hand on my elbow. Carmelita, unaware of what was going on behind her, kept going down with the others. O’Neal waited just long enough for Carmelita to have completed half a circle on the spiral stairs, and then she said in a sharp whisper, “What the hell are you talking about, Strait? I’ve got two dead bodies up there, and one of them’s my partner. Do you get that? And I’ve got another dead man shipped in from the Vegas morgue with more power in this town than you or I will ever be able to dream about, and now you’ve pulled in his wife and Cosmo Beadle? I don’t have time for favors, and I sure as hell don’t have time for games. Give it up. What are you sitting on, Strait?”
When she put it that way, I didn’t see much point in being secretive. If Carmelita had still been in earshot, I would have found another way, but as it was, I didn’t see the harm in spilling it to the detective.
I took a deep breath, taking a moment to recall all the weird traits I’d noticed about Carmelita when she’d been passing herself off as Gemma Blaylock, as well as the other oddities I’d encountered with her uncle—from the rustic prototype of Joaquin Murrieta, Jr. to little Perdita with her too big eyes. Then I said, “This may sound crazy, Detective, but I’m about ninety-nine percent sure that Carmelita Garcia isn’t a human being.”
She raised that skeptical eyebrow again. I could have predicted it.
“That’s about the wildest thing I ever heard,” she said.
“For a cop in California, that’s really saying something.”
We just stared at each other for a few seconds. Then she said, “If she’s not human, then what the hell is she?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know the exact term for it, but I’d say she’s some kind of robot, an automaton. But…incredibly sophisticated. The man she thinks is her uncle actually …invented her. Or built her. I don’t know the right term.”
“And how do you know this?”
“There are a lot of things,” I said. There wasn’t time to go through them all for the detective, so I gave her the part that had clinched it for me. “That gun, the non-lethal one, it dropped Miller like a punctured airship, but it had no effect on her whatsoever even though Miller was farther away from the gun when I fired it. It should have dropped her, too. It would have if she’d been human, but she’s not.”
Her incredulous expression had not melted. “That’s it?” she asked.
“There’s more. It’s not like there’s a single thing that marks her as non-human, more like a lot of little things that add up. I can’t explain it all right now. Her uncle will be able to explain it all better if you ask him to come into the station. The thing is, though…I don’t think she knows.”
“She thinks she’s human.”
I nodded. Then I called down the stairs. “Gemma?” Turning back to the detective, I whispered, “The name she prefers right now.” More loudly again, I added, “Can you please come back up here?”
O’Neal and I waited as Carmelita ascended the stairs. She looked perfect—perhaps a bit disheveled from her ordeal but still an ideal specimen of feminine beauty and a long way off from Joaquin Murrieta, Jr., her more primitive cousin back in Chavez Ravine. Guillermo had certainly done a good job, and now I remembered that he had named her after his late wife. I expected that if I ever got the privilege of seeing a photo of Mrs. Garcia, the resemblance to Carmelita would be uncanny.
When she got within a few steps of us, she stopped and gave me an expectant look.
“I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” I said.
“I’m fine,” she answered.
“Good. I know there was some rough stuff that happened when Miller came to your uncle’s house. And then I suppose he might have forced you when it came time to hook you up to that machine upstairs.”
“He was rough,” she said, “but I’m okay.”
“Do you mind if I…?” Reaching out a tentative hand, I touched the waves of her dark hair just above her left ear. When she didn’t flinch, I pulled the hair aside. There was nothing obviously wrong there. I moved my hand to the other side and moved the hair there, too, leaving it pulled aside only long enough to glance at O’Neal. When her expression told me that she saw the dent in Carmelita’s temple, I pulled my hand away and said, “I see you’re right. Thanks, Gemma. We’ll be down in a second.”
She turned and made her way down the stairs again. When she was gone, I said, “Mrs. Masterson caught them together, just like I said before. And she wanted to kill them both—didn’t plan it, or she’d have had a gun of her own. But she found Carmelita’s gun and probably tried to make it look like a murder suicide with Carmelita as the shooter. For all we know, she thought she’d done it right. The concussion might have knocked Carmelita out of commission for a while, maybe even scrambling her memory. I can’t say about that. But I expect Mrs. Masterson would have thought she was dead. When Carmelita woke up, she found Masterson dead, grabbed the gun and his keys, and hot-footed it back to California.”
“Picking you up along the way.”
“That’s right.”
“And Mrs. Masterson thought she’d gotten away with it.”
“Until her husband’s Swan showed up in Los Angeles,” I said. “Miller was on the alert, probably caught wind of the murder from Beadle after Mrs. Masterson spilled it to him. Then I spilled my bit about Annabelle in front of Miller, who knew her from Uncle Cosmo’s soirees. For all I know, Miller had his eye on Annabelle. I didn’t exactly buy the story she told of how wholesome and pure the whole ‘friend’ thing is among Beadle’s followers.”
“I still don’t get how you know it was Mrs. Masterson who killed her husband,” O’Neal said.
I pictured my run-in with Geneva Masterson in the other world—the jilted wife hell bent on putting an end to her husband’s wicked ways and ready to take a hammer to the head of his latest conquest in the bargain. Only in that world, it wasn’t Gemma Blaylock in a Vegas hotel room. It was Veronica Clark, probably in the Mastersons’ own bed. There was no way O’Neal was going to buy the connection or my story of having crossed over to other world, though.
“That,” I said, “was just a hunch. Driven by a well-developed sense of irony.”
“Irony?”
“Sure. The straw that broke the camel’s back—or in this case the chippie who proved one too many for Mrs. Masterson to stomach—was actually the one woman her husband couldn’t possibly succeed in seducing.”
“You sure?” O’Neal said. “Everything else looks pretty realistic to me.”
Thinking of Guillermo Garcia and his infectious, ever-present smile, I said, “I’m sure, Detective. Her inventor isn’t interested in that side of things. He’s an old man who’s just trying restore some things that were lost to him.”
She nodded. “Well, I suppose you could say that about most of us,” she said.
“I suppose you could,” I said, and then we started down the stairs together.
Chapter Nineteen
O’Neal proved herself to be a decent individual. Once we got to headquarters, she insta
lled me in an interview room similar to the one she and Miller had had me in, but this time she ordered in sandwiches and a pot of coffee for me to work on while I waited for all the dust to settle. She also sent for a nurse who tweezed all the splinters out of my hand while another officer was charged with scaring me up some clothes I could change into. As a result, I was able to get through the rest of the day without Annabelle’s blood all over me; I had also shed everything I’d come to California with except for my wallet, discharge papers, and the letter from Annabelle that had started me west in the first place. These two things I put in my wallet with my last two dollars, and then I waited for the whole process to play itself out.
With time to myself, it was tough not to replay Annabelle’s last moments. Neither anger at Miller nor any sense of satisfaction I could find in having drilled him could mitigate the black pit of emotions I was staring into and trying to keep myself out of. All the good memories from before the war came echoing through my mind, and they pushed all the negative thoughts away. If things had gone differently in that tower room, I doubt things between us would ever have been the same, not with Beadle having his hooks so deeply into her. Even so, I realized how much of my mental space had been taken up with thoughts of her for a long, long time.
The question I kept coming back to was this: Why had she jumped forward when she saw Miller pointing his gun at me? Was it to save me? To warn me? Had the realization that she was about to watch me die been the thing that broke through the layers Beadle and his “friends” had built up between us? There was no way to know, and there never would be. I recognized that I was going to have to live with not knowing, and it wasn’t going to be easy. At the same time, I knew that there were other branches, other worlds where it had been me who died instead of her and still others where we both left that tower room alive, maybe together and maybe not. Those other worlds were inaccessible to me, but I took a little comfort in knowing they were out there somewhere.
It didn’t make things any easier to know that in this world she’d been taken out by a bullet meant for me. I’ve never asked anyone to sacrifice anything for me, and it pretty much killed me there in that quiet room to think of what she’d been willing to do despite all the manipulation she’d undergone in the company of her new friends. I guess you could say the hooks I had in her ran a little deeper than Beadle’s, and I’d always known how deeply Annabelle had had her hooks in me. In my earlier anger at her betrayal of me, I’d told myself those hooks were out, but they hadn’t been, and I knew I was going to feel them still for a long, long time.
When the police were finally ready for me, it didn’t take as long as you’d think. O’Neal and another detective came in with a tape recorder, and I spilled it. This time, I told them about finding the gun and following it to Guillermo. By the time I was finished, they also knew all about Carmelita, about Elsa’s movie machine, and I even told them about the flight pack in the hope that they’d find it at the mansion and return it to Guillermo.
I did hold back on a few things, though. If they found out about Guillermo’s blue crystals, they didn’t find out from me. I’m sure they could’ve disassembled his gun and the flight pack, too, if they were lucky enough to find it, but even then, they wouldn’t have all the answers and would need to make things right with Guillermo if they were going to do anything with his technology. I also kept my vision of the other world to myself; they didn’t need to know about Roosevelt dimes, a President named Truman, or clunky looking cars with names like Ford and Buick emblazoned on their fenders. And they certainly didn’t need to know how Geneva Masterson had threatened and assaulted me over there or how her deceased husband was such a lothario that his urge to stray from the marriage bed had apparently infected him in more than one world. I supposed that if Lance Masterson had ended up a mechanic or a forest ranger in some other world, he’d still have had a hard time staying faithful to whoever ended up being Mrs. Masterson. But those kinds of suppositions were all beside the point and would only have muddied things up if I’d thrown them into the mix in the interview room with O’Neal; quite possibly, they would have prompted a few phone calls to the state hospital up in Camarillo, where a nice room could easily have been arranged for the remainder of my stay in California.
After I was finished answering all of the detective’s questions, she took a minute to read through her notes. Then she gave me a long, cold stare that finally broke into a look of resignation as she said, “I’m going to let you go now, Mr. Strait. But I recommend you leave here as quickly as possible.”
“Los Angeles?” I asked.
She shook her head. “The police station. I’m going to let it be known that Deke Miller was playing his own game and that the shooting was clean. Self defense. This is based on what Dr. Schwartz and Mr. Beadle told me in separate interviews, corroborating your story. But I have to tell you that, dirty or not, Miller had friends on the force, and some of them would enjoy taking you for a ride if they get hold of you. Have you got somewhere you can go for a few days until things settle down around here?”
“I don’t,” I said. So much had changed since the morning she and Miller had come knocking on my door at the Hotel Dorado. I wasn’t sure which way was up. “I’ll figure something out.”
“See that you do. But don’t make yourself too scarce. You may still be needed at Mrs. Masterson’s trial.”
I nodded, hoping she’d say more but nothing else came of it. After a moment’s silence, I said, “So, does this mean you’re dropping the other charges against me? My unlawful entry?”
“There may still be a fine,” she said.
I read something in her expression. The fine—both the amount and the question of whether there’d be a fine at all—rested on how cooperative I continued to be. I could live with that. I wanted to ask if there was a chance Guillermo could get his bail money back, but I decided to ask something else.
“What about Carmelita?” I ventured as I stood up from the uncomfortable wooden chair in the interview room.
O’Neal sighed, which worried me. “That’s uncharted ground, Mr. Strait. This…mechanical woman. I’m convinced she didn’t kill Lance Masterson. I’m also convinced she thinks she’s a human being. But…is it safe? For the public, I mean. Safe to have this…machine moving among them, a machine that doesn’t even know what it is?”
I imagined a room not unlike the one where Lance Masterson’s autopsy had been conducted—men in lab coats standing around a table where Carmelita lay under a sheet with bright lights beaming down on her. Only instead of holding scalpels and bone saws, the men held screwdrivers and blowtorches as they prepared to disassemble Guillermo Garcia’s greatest creation, and the one that meant the most to him. I made the whole thing harder on myself by imagining Carmelita’s eyes open as the men pondered her destruction, a version of fear in each precise blink.
“You don’t have anything to worry about from Carmelita,” I said. “Mr. Garcia’s bound to keep a better eye on her if he gets her back.”
“You said yourself that she left his place of her own accord, that she insisted on going out in the world.”
“Maybe he can make some adjustments,” I offered. “Make it so she’s satisfied to be…more of a home body.”
O’Neal nodded. “We’ll have to see.”
Imagining Guillermo’s heartbreak if the scenario I’d imagined actually came to pass, I said, “I could…keep an eye on her myself if that helps.”
I didn’t know what that meant or if I was even going to be capable of keeping an eye on myself with my resources as depleted as they were. Still, I said it, and I meant it.
“Let me think about it.”
I was grateful that she walked me out of the interview room and down a corridor to the public lobby; more than one detective caught my eyes as we went, and I saw that O’Neal had been right—it was pretty obvious that most of them wanted a piece of me. One or two also looked at the detective who escorted me, contempt in their eyes. Th
ey couldn’t see how O’Neal was sanctioning my release, I knew, letting me walk out of the station without at least getting a little tune-up. When we got to the lobby door, I turned to offer her a handshake and my thanks, but she kept her arms crossed. Maybe she’d be willing to make nice later, or maybe in private, but not now and not here. I nodded, hoping to convey that I understood, and went through the doorway.
I found Guillermo sitting in the crowded lobby. His omnipresent smile had finally taken a vacation, and instead of looking cheerful the old man gave the impression he was being eaten by worry. He sat there with a battered old hat in his hands, his fingers worrying their way around the brim. His expression did lighten when he saw me approaching, and he left his seat to meet me halfway across the room, tossing the hat onto the chair to hold his place.
“Are they letting Carmelita go?” he asked as we shook hands.
“Not yet. I was just talking with the lead detective. She has some concerns, but I think she’ll come around.”
He nodded at this, but I could still see the apprehension in his eyes.
“Do you think I could talk to this detective? Maybe I could convince her to let Carmelita go.”
“Maybe. But she’s got her hands full, Guillermo. It’s probably going to be a late night for everyone involved. I’ve already put in a good word for Carmelita. A few good words, really. I’m pretty sure O’Neal—that’s the detective—I expect she’ll come around. You’re going to need to be patient.”
“I’m worried Carmelita might not be so patient.”
I gave him a long look of appraisal then but kept my thoughts to myself. “Let’s hope for the best,” was all I said in response. Then I added, “I hate to bring this up now after everything you’ve already done, but…could I persuade you to take me back to your place? I don’t want to be around here any longer than I have to be.” The doorway that separated me from those angry eyes seemed like a pretty flimsy barrier. I wanted some space between me and anybody with a badge.
The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1) Page 23