The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2)

by Richard Levesque

  She raised an eyebrow at this, questions of her own clearly firing off in the web of circuits behind her eyes. “A new client?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, trying to read whether or not there was any guilt in her expression—even as I wondered if Carmelita was capable of feeling guilty. “It’s more about the business end of things.”

  “Things I could help you with if I was your partner,” she said, her tone enticing as though she were offering a child a candy bar in exchange for behaving well.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I said, forcing a smile that was meant to be disarming.

  On the other side of the door, I found O’Neal and Crashaw, as I’d expected. With them was another man, tall and well-dressed. His hair was graying and his face was long and cadaverous, with sunken gray eyes and deep lines running down the sides of his chin. My guess was that he was another detective. Although there were plenty of chairs in the office, all three were standing in a little huddle in the space between my desk and Carmelita’s.

  When the door had opened, all three turned toward it. They’d clearly been talking shop but not about anything serious, as I caught the ghosts of smiles that vanished from their faces as soon as they saw me. Three stony expressions greeted me once the dust settled, and my certainty that they’d come about Carmelita edged up another notch.

  “Hello, Jed,” O’Neal said. She held a cardboard folder with a rubber band wrapped around it. I found it difficult to keep my eyes on O’Neal’s rather than let them drift to the folder as my thoughts ricocheted with speculation about its contents.

  “Detective,” I answered, forcing a smile that I hoped would counteract the wall of seriousness I faced. “I was just going to call you.”

  She raised an eyebrow at this. “Well, I guess it’s good that we showed up then and saved you the trouble,” she said.

  “This is a level of service I’m not used to,” I replied. “Appreciated, but not necessary.”

  She nodded. “Mm-hmm. Jed, you remember my partner Detective Crashaw from the other morning. And this is Detective McNulty from the Hollywood division.”

  I nodded at Crashaw, who didn’t bother returning the gesture. To McNulty, I nodded as well and said, “Nice to meet you, detective,” as I reached out to shake his hand. He looked a little taken aback at the gesture but accepted my hand nonetheless and gave it a firm shake.

  “You’re welcome to sit,” I said to no one in particular. “Unless you think this won’t take long.” That was wishful thinking on my part, as I hoped they wouldn’t move toward any of the chairs. They would then say what they’d come to say and be on their way. I doubted that would happen, of course, and when all three started moving towards the different chairs in the room, I got a feeling for the way the morning was going to go.

  O’Neal was decent enough not to take the chair behind my desk. Rather, she and McNulty took the seats in front of the desk while Crashaw pulled out the chair Carmelita normally sat in. All three were arranged in front of my desk, an intimidating wall of law enforcement. Rather than take my customary seat behind my desk and drop to their level, I opted to move in front of them and half-sit on the edge of the desk. It was a casual posture, and I hoped it would send a message to the three detectives that I wasn’t worried about whatever they’d come here for. It also gave me a definite position of power as I looked down on the three of them and made them look up at me. If they really had come for Carmelita, they were going to have to make their case from a subordinate position. I wasn’t kidding myself that this would do any good if it came down to a question of saving Carmelita, but it was at least good for me to maintain an illusion of control—even if I knew good and well that an illusion was all I had.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked, deciding to get it over with. I still planned on springing what I knew about Elsa Schwartz and Frank Attentater, but I figured I’d hold onto that until O’Neal and her boys had shown me their hand.

  “Do you know a Klaus Lang, Jed?” O’Neal asked.

  This threw me. I’d expected her to open with something about Carmelita.

  “Well, know is a little strong. I’ve met the man, had a conversation with him, but that’s about it.”

  “When did you talk to him last?” McNulty asked.

  “Saturday night,” I said, a little quietly as I pondered the significance of the detectives’ questions. “May I ask why the interest in Lang?”

  “Because he’s dead, Jed,” O’Neal said, and I slumped a little on my perch without being conscious of the body language. “And, like Mercy Attentater, we found your business card at the crime scene. Not clutched in his hand, but on the counter next to the toaster. You’ve got a nasty little trail of corpses following you around the city. You got anyone else you’re working with who we should be keeping an eye on?”

  I thought of Felix Madrigal. Of course, he hadn’t been my client, nor had I ever met the man before his demise. Still, I was at least tangentially connected to his corpse. I opted not to say anything about him, however, and neither did I mention Ginny Flynn or Mullen Peale.

  “What happened to Lang?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you tell us what you know first?” McNulty countered.

  I sighed, then shrugged. “Sure,” I said. And, hoping I wasn’t about to say anything that would implicate Carmelita, I spilled it. “I went to the Rose Room Saturday afternoon, the place where Mercy Attentater danced. The manager wasn’t any help, said the police had already been there. I don’t know if he gave you more than he gave me, but I did get a tip from the doorman who said there was an old man who Mercy’d been tight with, that he came in most nights when Mercy wasn’t dancing and got a few free drinks before the bartender chased him out. Mercy had set that up for him, I guess. So, I hung around, spotted the old man, and followed him out. It wasn’t too hard to get him to talk.”

  “About?” McNulty asked. He had taken a tablet from his jacket pocket and was taking notes as I talked. The move reminded me of my own investigatory techniques, which I didn’t like seeing mirrored back at me.

  “It turns out he was Mercy Attentater’s father-in-law. Or adoptive father-in-law, I guess you could say. He said he got out of Germany around thirty years ago, and snuck Frank out with him, passed him off as his son. Frank grew up, married Mercy, and got killed in the war. The old man stayed close with his adopted son’s widow, took her up on the offer of free drinks, but didn’t feel comfortable going to the club on nights when she was dancing, which makes sense to me.”

  I stopped there and looked at the three detectives. McNulty was still writing, O’Neal was watching me intently, and Crashaw was scowling at the floor.

  When McNulty stopped writing, he looked at me and said, “What else?”

  “I don’t know…He wanted to know about what happened to Mercy, so I told him what I knew, including the bit about the man she’d seen who she’d thought was her dead husband.” I looked at O’Neal now and said, “Which reminds me, that was what I would have been calling you about this morning.”

  “We’ll get to that,” she said. “Let’s just finish up with the old man.”

  “That’s all there was to it. I gave him my card, told him to call me if he thought of anything else that might help us figure out what happened to Mercy. Then I left.”

  “And do you know what time that was?” McNulty asked.

  “Not exactly. I’d guess around midnight maybe. A little later?”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” I asked.

  McNulty closed his tablet and put it back in his pocket along with his pencil. He looked from O’Neal to Crashaw and must not have seen anything suggesting a reason to hold his tongue. “One of the other tenants in the building found Mr. Lang’s door open the next morning, around six. She went inside, found the place a wreck, and Lang lying dead on the kitchen floor.”

  “Cause of death?” I asked and braced myself for the answer I knew
was coming.

  “Looks like strangulation.”

  “Damn,” I said. I had not known the old man, but he’d seemed decent enough. I could tell he’d seen a lot of unpleasant things in his life and hadn’t exactly ended up in a swell spot for all his efforts. It struck me as a shame that he had to go out that way, and it bothered me even more that his end might have somehow been connected to my investigation. I looked at O’Neal before speaking again. “You’re not going to tell me you’re looking at Carmelita on this one, too, are you?”

  She gave me a long stare and then said, “No. Not for this one. But this doesn’t mean she’s off the hook for Mercy.”

  I nodded. “May I ask why you don’t like her for the old man?”

  O’Neal and McNulty exchanged glances. When McNulty shrugged, O’Neal went ahead. “It looks like Mr. Lang put up more of a struggle than Mercy did. From what Hollywood division has been able to tell, the killer wore gloves, but it looks like one of them was torn off in the tussle.”

  “You found a glove?” I asked.

  “A piece of one. We also found prints in the apartment,” McNulty said. “The victim’s, of course. And yours on a coffee cup. And one other set on several of the victim’s books, all scattered around the body.”

  I looked at O’Neal. She and I both knew that Carmelita had no fingerprints. Someone else had killed Klaus, which accounted for the absence of police at my house yesterday or questions from any of the detectives about Carmelita’s whereabouts on Saturday night or Sunday morning.

  “Any match on the prints?” I asked.

  “We figured you’d be satisfied to know they aren’t yours,” O’Neal said with a smug smile.

  “That’s not what I was asking, but thanks for volunteering that,” I said. “No, I’m wondering if maybe you could try matching them to Frank Attentater.”

  “His son?”

  “The one.”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “That’s the official line,” I said. “Given how certain Mercy was that she’d seen her husband risen from the grave, I asked Lang if the military had found Frank’s body. He said the crash site in Italy was pretty gruesome and they identified the partial remains by the dog tags.”

  “So, he fakes his own death, lays low for a couple years, comes back to the states and then kills his wife and adopted father,” O’Neal said. “Sounds plausible.”

  I gave her a cold look and said, “Yeah, when you spell it out like that, it sounds ridiculous. But I don’t think we’ve got the whole picture here. And you didn’t let me finish.”

  O’Neal raised a hand in a “be my guest” gesture.

  “I had the feeling someone was following me after I left Lang’s place. I went home and got in bed. About three o’clock in the morning I had an intruder.”

  O’Neal raised an eyebrow at this.

  “You remember Elsa Schwartz?” I asked her. “From the Masterson case?”

  “I do.”

  “She was in my room. She wanted to know what Lang had told me, made it sound like he’d gotten out of Germany after the first war with some important technology, maybe a secret weapon or something. When I told her I had no idea about any of that, she got nasty with me. She had a weapon of her own, an electronic…zapper of some kind. I don’t know what it was. All I know is it hurt like hell and knocked me out for a few minutes. When I went outside, I saw a car driving away, and when it went under the streetlight, I could see who was in the back of the car.”

  I paused for a moment to let the story sink in, planning to hit the detectives with the punchline. O’Neal beat me to it. “Frank Attentater,” she said.

  “The one.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Crashaw said, the first time he’d opened his mouth since I’d entered the room. “You said it was three o’clock in the morning? And the car was moving away from you? And you’d just been knocked out? That’s hardly solid evidence.”

  “I know what I saw,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  I shrugged. “I took a good, long look at Frank Attentater’s face in the photos at Mercy’s place. I’m pretty good with faces.” To O’Neal, I said, “I have no doubt. You might want your print boys to run the partials you got off the scene against Frank Attentater’s military records.”

  McNulty nodded. “We’ll do that. Can I use your phone?”

  “Be my guest.” I gave Crashaw a long look as I said it.

  “Do you want to press charges against the Schwartz woman?” O’Neal asked.

  “I’d love to. But I don’t know where she is. If you find her before I do, then yeah. Lock her up.”

  “And if you find her first?” O’Neal asked.

  I shrugged. “Citizen’s arrest, of course. Nothing rough. I promise.”

  We stopped speaking as McNulty got Hollywood division on the phone. Once it was pretty clear he’d been put on hold while waiting to be connected with the fingerprint lab, I said to O’Neal, “What are the chances you could slip me an extra photo of Frank Attentater?”

  “Why?” she asked. “I thought you had a knack for faces.”

  “I do,” I said. “But I’ve got a hunch I want to play, and it’ll help me if I have his face to show around.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sure. I could probably look up his obit in the Record, though. They’d probably have his picture. You could save me the leg work.”

  “Or I could slow you down intentionally.”

  “Now, why would you want to do that?”

  McNulty started talking on the phone then and asked his people to run the prints from the crime scene against anything in the records for Frank Attentater. He told them to check military records if nothing else showed up.

  I had seen that Crashaw was itching to say something while the older detective was on the phone. As soon as McNulty hung up, Crashaw said, “Sharing evidence, including photographs, is against department policy.” He directed the comment to me, but it was pretty clearly a veiled admonishment aimed at his superior.

  O’Neal didn’t take it well. When talking to me, she had looked engaged and up to the challenge of our banter. Now that Crashaw had stuck in his oar, O’Neal’s face fell; it was the look of a parent whose slightly irritating child had just proved himself to be the dolt she’d always feared he was.

  “Jim,” she said to Crashaw, “I’m pretty sure I forgot to put a nickel in the meter downstairs. Can you go take care of that, please?”

  He looked dumbfounded for a moment and then seemed to see through what she’d said. Rather than take the indirect rebuke, he stepped up to the plate and took a swing. With a smug smile, he said, “If a meter reader tickets us, we can just get it thrown out.”

  O’Neal’s expression went icy. “That’s an abuse of power, Detective Crashaw. I’d hate to set that kind of example for citizens like Mr. Strait here.”

  Crashaw said nothing.

  “Go take care of the meter,” O’Neal said, her voice tempered steel.

  Crashaw said nothing, just turned and walked out. From my vantage point in the office, I caught a glimpse of Peggy in the lobby. When the door opened, her face lit up, both with expectation and trepidation, but when she saw that it was only Crashaw coming out, her expression shifted to one of disappointment.

  It’s okay, Peggy, I thought, wishing I could send her ideas from my mind if only to ease her anxiety.

  With the door closed again, O’Neal opened the folder she’d had with her the whole time. She flipped through the materials inside for a few seconds and then stopped, looking at one of the pages before slipping a photo loose from the paperclip that held it in place. Handing it over to me, she said, “If anyone asks, this slipped out of my folder and you found it on the floor after we left.”

  I reached out and took the color photo of Frank Attentater from her. It was clearly one of the pictures that had been in Mercy’s house, liberated now from its frame.

  “Thanks,” I
said and set the photo on the desktop behind me. I caught McNulty’s smirk and said to O’Neal, “How come you keep ending up partnered with guys like him?”

  Before she could answer, McNulty jumped in. “That’s because Detective O’Neal has a reputation for getting guys like Crashaw to get in line and stay there.”

  I nodded at this. “Didn’t work so well with your last partner,” I said.

  “That’s because you killed him before I had a chance to work my magic,” O’Neal said.

  “In self-defense,” I added. “Let’s not forget that.”

  “Of course.”

  There had been no love lost between O’Neal and her last partner, and she’d known he’d been in the wrong in the confrontation that had ended up with him—and the woman I’d come to LA to reunite with—dead.

  O’Neal said nothing more. She closed the folder and looked to McNulty, who nodded his silent agreement that they were done here.

  As the older detective reached out to shake my hand once more, he said, “You were in the war?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In the Pacific?”

  “No. European theater. Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged. “I was over there, too. Ran a squad of MPs. I just figured you’d have picked up on more German if you’d been in that part of the soup.”

  “More German?” I asked. I had picked up a fair amount during my time in uniform. French, too.

  “Sure,” McNulty said. “Attentater.”

  I raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “It means assassin in German. I figured you’d have commented on that at some point.”

  “I guess that one slipped by me,” I said. The connection meant nothing to me immediately, but my wheels were spinning as the detectives left.

  * * * * *

  With the authorities gone, I called Carmelita and Peggy into my office. My faith in Carmelita—having been shaken only a little—had been restored with the information O’Neal had given me. I knew O’Neal hadn’t cleared Carmelita for Mercy’s murder only because she was a good detective and wouldn’t clear anyone from her list unless they had a solid alibi or the case came together, leading to a suspect under arrest and on the road to conviction. That didn’t matter. As far as I was concerned, Carmelita didn’t need to be cleared. There were two murders, linked by the connection to Frank Attentater; both were strangulations and one involved fingerprints that couldn’t be Carmelita’s. The only conclusion that mattered to me was that whoever had killed the old man had killed Mercy first, and since Carmelita couldn’t have committed the second murder, she hadn’t done the first either. I was certain of this—just as I was certain of the fact that I was in the wrong world.