“Okay,” she said, her tone tentative.
In my previous visit to this world, I had found that I knew some things almost naturally, as though I really were this Jed Strait. I knew Peggy’s name, and I knew that this Jed went down to the street every morning to get a paper around the same time. Now, I’d just discovered that I knew the office phone number without really knowing it. And then there were things I didn’t know—like the geography of where I’d been dumped or who those actors on the theater marquee had been when I’d seen their names before getting scooped up by Geneva’s muscle. Trying to figure out the difference or why things fell into one category and not the other was pretty much pointless, especially when I still had a job to do and couldn’t know how long I’d be able to stay in this Jed’s world.
“Is there a cop I’m close to?” I asked. “Someone I can count on to be a straight shooter, not steer me wrong?”
“Did you get hit on the head or something?”
“Actually…yeah. But that’s beside the point.”
“Jed, I don’t like the sound of—”
“Just help me out here, Peggy.”
“When you go to the cops, it’s always Detective Miller.”
I felt a chill at that.
“Deke Miller?” I asked, not wanting to hear her answer.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Isn’t there anyone else? A woman? I think her name’s O’Neal?”
Peggy let out a little laugh on the other end of the line. “Now I know you’re putting me on,” she said. “A woman cop? That’s a laugh.”
“I guess so,” I said, wondering what was wrong with there being a woman on the force.
“If there were lady cops, you know I’d be the first to sign up.”
“And you’d put all the rest to shame,” I said. After taking a moment to think through my options, I decided I didn’t really have any, so I said, “Listen, go ahead and call Miller. Tell him to meet me at the filling station on the corner of Sunset and Beverly Glen. That’s…I’m at Sunset and the Pacific Coast Highway now. How long do you think it’ll take for a cab to get me to Beverly Glen from here?”
“Umm. I don’t know. Twenty minutes?”
“All right. Tell him to meet me there in forty. It might take a while for me to get a cab to come get me out here.”
“You want me to come?”
“No. You stay by the phone in case I need you. Look, I need you to tell Miller that he’s going to need to bring a search team. We’re going up to a house in Beverly Hills.”
“He’s going to want to get a warrant, won’t he? He’ll need the address.”
“I don’t know it. And as for a warrant, remind him he’s the LAPD,” I said, recalling O’Neal’s words from my own world. “He can do anything he wants.”
“Jed, you know that won’t fly.”
“All right. Tell him I was assaulted and I’m leading him to the perpetrators. I want to press charges. And tell him there’s one, maybe two people in immediate danger.”
“Are there really?”
“If you call already being dead immediate danger, then yes, but you don’t have to tell him that.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“There’s one other thing.”
“Go ahead.”
“Again, this is going to sound like I’m losing my mind here, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Is there a movie studio called Masterson Pictures?”
“Masterson?” There was a pause on the line. “Maybe one of the lousy independent studios over in Gower Gulch, but if so I’ve never heard of it.”
I didn’t know what Gower Gulch was but had no intention of asking.
“That’s all right. Do you have the Virginia Clark file handy?”
“I do. Hang on.”
I waited a few seconds, and when she was back on the line, I asked, “She works for which studio? I can’t remember.”
“Columbia.”
Columbia, I thought. Never heard of it.
Keeping that to myself, I said, “Can you do a little digging and see if there’s an exec there named Lance Masterson? If there’s not, then I’m barking at the wrong cat.”
“You’re…are you all right, Jed?”
“I’m fine. Just get me that information. I’ll call you again when I get to Beverly Glen. I’m pretty sure there’s another service station there, and I’ve got at least one more dime.”
“Okay, Jed. I’m on it.”
“You’re a plum, Peggy,” I said.
“What?” She sounded shocked, and I realized that the expression meant nothing in this world.
“Sorry,” I said. “That bump on the head, you know?”
“I’m getting you to a doctor when this is all over.”
“Please do.”
I hung up and then looked in the phone book for the number of a cab company. I was a little disappointed to see there was no listing for anything resembling “Big City, Little Cab”—as it would have been good to run into Margaret West again. A minute later, I had a cab on the way from a different company. With nothing left to do but wait, I reached into the inner pocket of my jacket and found a pencil and a pad of paper. I had known they’d be there, this Jed Strait apparently being meticulous about notetaking during his investigations.
Leaning against the wall, I started scribbling.
Hello, Jed, I wrote. I’m guessing that you’ve been feeling a bit disoriented lately. That would be my fault. You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but I’m also Jed Strait, a different version of you. I don’t understand it all, but it would seem that I live in an alternate world from yours. In my world, the war ended in a tie and FDR is still President. We have lady cops, and there’s no such car as an Oldsmobile. I slipped over into your world with the help of a crazy machine on my side of the fence, and when I did, I guess I took over your body and mind. I don’t know where you went during that time. For all I know we switched places and you’re in my world now. I have more questions than answers, and I’m sure you do, too.
The point is that I think I’ve solved your case with the missing woman, Veronica Clark. I’m pretty sure she was murdered by Geneva Masterson, whose husband I’m guessing was fooling around with Veronica. My theory is Mrs. Masterson killed them both. She’s also responsible for the bump on your head, which she felt motivated to give you since she’s got a hunch you’re close to breaking the case. You’re going to face some questions from the cops on how you figured out that she’s the killer, and I didn’t want you to think you were going crazy. I picked up some clues on the other side that helped me make sense of the case you’re working over here, and I wanted to help you out before Mrs. Masterson decided to pull your plug permanently. Of course, you can’t tell the cops this and still stay out of the nuthouse. Even so, I figured that as long as you knew the truth, you’d be able to spin a believable lie and get yourself out of any messes I’ve gotten you into.
I don’t know how long I’ll be in control here, and I apologize for having taken over without asking. I guess it’s just the way things work. Best of luck with everything—and watch out for Detective Miller. He may be a good guy here, but he wasn’t so good over on my side. He might have a bad streak in him here, too.
Yours (literally),
Jed Strait
Before writing the note, I had thought about how best to handle the subject of Detective Miller, what to say and not say. I decided to leave the bit about him in the past tense so the other Jed would get the hint that Miller had met his end in my world. This would be better than saying it outright in case someone other than my alter ego got hold of the note and decided to use it to cook up some trouble, maybe something along the lines of conspiracy to kill a cop. It definitely wouldn’t do to admit on paper that I had killed Miller in the other world, even if the cops on my side of the fence had already cleared me of any crime related to the shooting.
When the taxi pulled into the parking lot, I
tore the note free of my tablet, folded the paper in half, and stuck it in my pants pocket where I knew the other Jed would find it pretty quickly if he shared my habit of walking with hands in pockets, especially when deep in thought. The cabbie took me through the hills and toward the wealthy enclave of Beverly Hills. He didn’t talk much, and I didn’t initiate much conversation, content to take in the sights of this other world. Whether in this version of the universe or my own, Sunset Boulevard was not a street I was familiar with, so I tried committing to memory as much of what I saw as possible in case I got the opportunity to compare notes when I got back to my proper world.
The taxi reached the intersection at Beverly Glen faster than I’d anticipated, and I got out, glad that this Jed Strait had plenty of cash in his wallet so I could pay the cabbie. When he was gone, I walked to a phonebooth at the corner and dialed my office again.
“Have you got anything for me, Peggy?” I asked when my secretary answered.
“Miller said he’d come, but he didn’t sound like he was in too much of a hurry. He said you’ve used that bit about pressing charges over an assault one too many times to get him to move any faster than he wants to.”
“But he’s coming?”
“Says he is.”
“What about Masterson?”
“He’s an executive at Columbia, kind of a bigwig. Want a list of his credits?”
“No, that’s fine,” I said. I had no idea what a bigwig was, but I figured it must mean Masterson was pretty important in this world, or at least pretty rich. This information gave me something to chew on; as was true of this Jed Strait and myself, the two Mastersons shared some traits but not others. There was no Gemma Blaylock for him to fool around with here, but there was a Veronica Clark. What else, though? It was possible, I supposed, that the Geneva in this world was chasing after a different philandering husband, not Lance Masterson at all, in which case I’d get a nasty surprise when I took the police to this world’s version of the Masterson estate in the hills of Beverly Glen. There was nothing for it, though. That house was my only lead, and I had to go with it.
“Anything linking him to Veronica Clark?” I asked, hoping for a solid connection.
“Nothing I could find just from a phone call to the studio. You think they were canoodling?”
I could only guess at what canoodling was, but I was pretty sure I had it right. “It seems pretty likely. And if what I know about Mrs. Masterson pans out, he’s canned his last noodle.”
Peggy let out a bit of a giggle and then reeled it back in. “You’re saying the funniest things today, Jed. You should get kidnapped and assaulted more often.”
“Will you work on arranging that for me?”
“I will.”
“Hey, Peggy?” I said when I’d been just about to hang up.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For everything. I can tell you’re pretty special.”
“Thanks, Jed. That’s…sweet, but an odd thing to say, too. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Positive.”
“Because it sounds almost like you’re getting ready to say goodbye or something. And I don’t just mean hanging up the phone.”
“No, no,” I said quickly, worried that I’d already said too much. “No goodbyes. I’m looking forward to getting back into the office as quickly as I can. You’ll see. It’ll be the same ol’ Jed.”
“Same ol’ Jed,” she said. “Nothing but trouble.”
“The way you like it.”
“It’s never boring,” she replied.
“All right. Bye, Peggy.”
We hung up. I was left to wait for Detective Miller alone, something I was dreading since I knew it was going to be tough to look the man in the eye and talk to him without imagining the bullet hole I’d put in his forehead or the way he’d killed Annabelle while aiming for me. I tried to distract myself by watching the cars that drove by on Sunset, looking for anything that was a familiar model. But nothing—neither the sleek sports cars and convertibles nor the stodgier sedans—looked like anything I knew from my world, and when I started to find the differences to be more depressing than stimulating, I stopped looking and walked around the filling station, staring at the ground.
Miller finally arrived with two other squad cars trailing behind. He parked diagonally across the driveway, effectively blocking other vehicles’ entrance, and got out of his car with a sour look on his face, a toothpick protruding from between his lips. “This had better be good, Strait,” he called out when he was still several yards away from me.
“It will be,” I said, willing myself not to recall the shocked look he’d still had on his face when O’Neal and I had finally turned away from his corpse.
“What gives?”
He drove an unmarked car and had no partner with him, so I was able to ride in the front seat beside him as we left Sunset Boulevard behind and rolled into the pricey real estate of Beverly Hills with the other police cars behind us. I gave him the rundown on the Clark case—or at least the parts that I knew about—and then told him what had happened when I’d gone down to the street to buy a paper this morning.
“It was a woman named Geneva Masterson behind the veil,” I said. “Her husband’s an exec with Columbia, which is where Veronica Clark also works.”
“You’re sure it was Masterson’s wife who nabbed you?”
“Absolutely sure,” I said despite the nagging misgivings I still harbored about the differences between this world and mine.
“And you’re sure how?”
“I’ve seen her picture in the paper. Those little beauty marks are pretty distinct,” I lied.
Miller looked at me for a moment, a hard stare before turning his attention back to the road. I must have passed the test, as he said nothing to challenge me on identifying Geneva Masterson.
“You want to file an assault charge?” he asked.
“If that’s all we can get. I expect there’s more.”
He nodded. “You think Masterson and this Clark chippie were going behind the missus’ back?”
“Sure of it.”
Some things change, I told myself, and some things are universal. It was Packards on one side, Swans on the other, yes. But if Lance and Geneva really were married in both worlds, then Lance apparently behaved the same way regardless of which world he was in.
In other words, if I really was chasing after the right people, the universal truth appeared to be that Lance Masterson couldn’t keep it in his pants on either side, and his wife couldn’t help putting an end to things when she found out. The warning she’d given me in her car this morning had come because this Jed Strait was getting too close to the truth, and the truth had to do with Veronica Clark stiffing a filling station attendant who fixed her flat before she disappeared for good up Beverly Glen. Maybe one of Geneva’s thugs had been doing some canvassing of his own and had gotten the attendant’s story as well as finding out about a PI who’d been asking the same questions. A little pressure on Mr. Clark, or maybe a little payoff, had gotten my name into the mix, and that had been that. Of course, I wasn’t one-hundred percent certain about Veronica and Lance Masterson being dead at Geneva’s hands in this world, but reasonably certain was good enough for now, and it was good enough for me to feel all right about keeping Miller moving forward.
The detective shook his head. “Kind of risky on her part if that’s the case,” he said. “If she really did him in, she’s got to know we’ll suspect her and go over that place with a fine-tooth comb.”
“True,” I said after taking a moment to process the expression. “But what if her plan is to lay low, not report him missing? Not for a while anyway. That way there’s no investigation while she gets everything else lined up. Maybe she’s looking for a window of opportunity to clear out the bank accounts and get an airship to Rio or something.”
Miller chewed on this like he chewed on his toothpick. I directed him to make a turn, remembering the streets from my ride her
e with Margaret West in another world, and after he’d straightened out the wheel again, the detective said, “Maybe. We’ll see. If there’s nothing to this, though, Jed…I’ll make you sorry.”
“You won’t need to.”
I hoped I was right.
We reached the house, and I directed Miller through the gates that Margaret had driven me to hours earlier in my proper world. It felt strange to be here again; the house still had its tower and I assumed there was still a private lake visible from those high windows. The other two squad cars followed us in and parked behind Miller’s car.
Before opening the car door, I said, “Miller…how well would you say you know me?”
He gave me a quizzical look. “You, Strait?” He shrugged. “Well enough. Why?”
“There’s something that’s been bothering me. Ever since I came to, there’s been a name buzzing around in my head, and I just can’t figure why.” I hesitated; then I said, “Annabelle. You ever hear me mention that name before?”
Miller shook his head, his expression smug. “Sorry, Strait,” he said. “I haven’t known you to share that kind of information. Probably some floozy who got into your head a little more than she got into your bed.”
I didn’t know what a floozy was, but I could guess. And I didn’t like Miller talking about Annabelle that way, either, but I told myself I had to let it go. He hadn’t meant anything by it, after all, and he couldn’t have known what Annabelle had meant to me, not in either world. Our connection had helped get Miller killed in one world. I figured I should be glad he was still alive in this one, being on my side the way he seemed to be.
“Guess you’re right,” I said.
Then we got out of the car, and I hung behind the detective as he went to the door, his subordinates between us.
I expected a servant to answer, but after some delay it was Geneva herself who came to the door. This gave me some relief, as I had known it was entirely possible someone else owned this house in the world of this Jed Strait. Even so, it wasn’t all the relief I was looking for. Geneva looked pretty together, but I guessed she had needed a few minutes to compose herself before coming to the door. She looked at Miller and the other uniformed officers with some surprise. When her eyes passed over me, I detected not the least bit of a reaction to my presence, no hint that she’d had me kidnapped, knocked out, and abandoned on the beach earlier that day. She was good. I told myself this might be tougher than I’d been expecting.
The Blacktop Blues: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 1) Page 25