When Sherise turned, I caught sight of her one piece of jewelry—a little gold hoop that was not fixed in her earlobe but rather through the side of her nose. It was a little odd, but the hoop held my gaze for only a second as my eyes dropped to the tattoos beneath her bare collarbones—a lacework of spider webs that extended down to the swell of her breasts and continued beneath the material of her outfit. With the nose ring, black costume and tattoos, she looked like a version of the devil’s bride; the unconcealed freckles were the only crack in her armor.
Conscious that I was staring, I reeled my gaze back up to look her in the face, locking onto her bright red lipstick for a moment before traveling the rest of the way up to her blue eyes.
“Nicolai says you’re looking for a bad boy,” she said.
Hearing her voice made me feel like someone had just dropped a piano on my head, opening my mind to the woman I was speaking to in a way that simply looking at her had not done. In my defense, the make-up and hair were different, and the tattoos and nose piercing added to the distraction—all of which added up to keep me from recognizing her right away. The voice, though, locked things into place, something about the cadence and tone, the hint of a Midwestern accent. This was the same dark-haired woman who had pointed a gun at me in another world on Friday night, the club girl whose relationship with that other Jed Strait hadn’t been entirely clear but whose gun had saved him (and me) from the wrath of the angry red-faced husband who feared the other Jed had cuckolded him.
So stunned was I at this connection that I didn’t respond to her comment right away. When I saw her raise an eyebrow at the audacity of my silence—which she probably read as a lascivious appraisal of her form—I remembered myself and managed to answer, “Yes, ma’am.”
Fumbling a bit, I proffered the picture of Frank Attentater, wondering how the other Jed had met this woman and what I should make about their connection.
She looked at the photo for a few seconds and then said, “Sure. He comes in here.”
“Frequently?” I asked, telling myself I needed to focus on this world, not the one where this woman and I apparently knew each other very well.
“Once or twice a week.”
“Do you know the last time he was here?”
She thought about this for a moment, considering the photo again, and then said, “Saturday night.”
“Great,” I said, imagining him moving from this place to the Speckled Hen or vice versa. “Do you know if he’s ever given his name?”
“Not that I know of.”
I nodded. “Okay. Do you know what time on Saturday?”
“Around ten, I’d say. He caught my second act, I think. He tips well. You sure he’s a rough guy?”
“That’s…what I’m told,” I said. Consulting my notebook, I saw that my informant at the Speckled Hen had put Attentater there at the same time Sherise was putting him here at Let There Be Darkness. “You’re sure about the time?”
She raised the same dark eyebrow again, giving me a taste of the acumen that must have gotten her this far in her industry.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just trying to establish a timeline.” I scribbled the time in my notebook along with the club owner’s name. “Does he come in alone or with other people?”
“He’s alone. Most of our clients come in alone.” She brushed a bit of hair from her forehead before adding, “It’s a lonely place.”
I nodded and felt myself wanting to say I was sorry to hear it but kept the thought to myself.
“Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything unusual about him or anything that makes him stand out from your other patrons?”
She shrugged. “Like I said, he’s a good tipper. I can’t say that about everybody.”
“All right. Thank you,” I said. Then I fumbled for one of my cards and traded it for the photo. This time, I didn’t bother giving her the bit about a reward if she should see the man again. Instead, I said, “I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about with your man Nicolai out front, but…this guy’s bad news. I wouldn’t recommend taking any chances with him.”
She looked at my card. “I don’t take chances, Mr. Strait. But thanks for the advice.”
“Certainly.”
I watched as she reached toward her desk and found a business card to hand me. “If this fella turns out to be the rough guy you say he is, I’d like to know about it. Will you call me?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said as I took the card. It was more an advertisement for the business than a personal card. “Let There Be Darkness” was printed in a heavy font. Under that, it said, “Where There’s a Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain.” Beneath that: “Sherise Pike, Proprietor” along with the club’s phone number and address.
I didn’t want the interview to be over, wanted instead to ask Sherise more questions about herself in order to give myself a sense of how a different version of her might have ended up linked to another Jed Strait. I knew there was no point in that, however. Instead, I had her card and she had mine, which meant two possible ways our paths might cross in this world, the one where I could do something about it if it came to that. That was the best I could hope for, at least right now.
So, instead of asking obviously ridiculous questions that would do nothing more than put her off, I gave her a nod, thanked her for her time, and turned to go. As I was pulling the door closed, I chanced a glance back into the office. She had her back to me again and her delicate hands were once more at work on her cheeks, but her eyes found mine in the mirror for just a second before they looked away. The dank hallway seemed much warmer to me as I made my way back to the main room where Slim Catbone’s guitar was still screeching about mama not having the blues anymore, the hidden record player probably set on repeat so Nicolai wouldn’t have to bother changing the disk.
Chapter Fifteen
Back in my car, I sat looking at my notes for several minutes, trying to push my thoughts about Sherise Pike out of the realm of fascination, over the border to professional interest where they belonged. It was no easy task, but I forced myself to try reconciling the contradictory timeline information I’d gotten in the last two clubs I’d been in. I also ran my eyes over the list of the other establishments I’d planned on visiting. Nothing was clicking, though, possibly because my eyes kept going back to the business card, which I had laid on the car’s dashboard, above the heating vent. Telling myself I needed a drink, I was about to turn the key when I heard a muted buzzing sound and narrowed my eyes, trying to figure where it was coming from.
I rolled down the window to see if the noise was coming from the street, but that just let in the sounds of traffic, obscuring the buzzing. With the window rolled up again, I leaned forward in my seat, trying to pinpoint the noise. Then it stopped.
Shrugging, I went to turn the key again, and the buzzing resumed.
“What the hell?” I muttered. Whatever was making the sound, I determined it was coming from the glovebox. A little nervous that I was about to set free a dozen wasps, I flipped the latch on the compartment door, and was rewarded with the sight of Guillermo Garcia’s portable telephone. Carmelita had left it in the car the night before after being out on her surveillance of Ginny Flynn.
I picked up the box, trying to remember how the phone worked. Once I got the cover to pop open, I found the speaker and the microphone, and when I removed them the little bell inside the box started ringing properly. The phone’s components inside the box had been muting the bell, I saw. However, I still didn’t know how to answer the phone, nor did I figure it out in time to make a connection before it stopped ringing again.
“Damn it,” I said to the empty passenger seat.
And then the phone started ringing a third time. I was ready to throw it. But then I felt a button on the back panel and pushed it.
The ringing ceased mid-vibration.
Realizing that I had just answered the phone, I grabbed the earpiece and microphone, saying “Hello?” as I
did.
There was nothing but static. And then, faintly and sounding very far away, I thought I heard a voice. It sounded female and frustrated, but that was all I got.
“The antenna!” I said, recalling the coiled wire.
Leaning forward, I rummaged in the glove compartment and found the little spool of copper wire with the lead attached to the end of it. Clipping the lead to the phone the way I’d seen Carmelita demonstrate, I unwound the wire as quickly as I could, letting it spread out in the car. I felt very quickly like I was caught in one of Sherise Pike’s spiderwebs.
The spool mostly unfurled, I picked up the receiver and microphone again. “Hello?” I offered.
“Jed?” I heard on the other end.
“Carmelita?”
“Yes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s not dark yet,” she said.
“That’s not what I asked you. Are you okay?”
“Yes. Listen. Ginny Flynn is a twit.”
“What?”
“Ginny Flynn.”
“What about her?”
“She’s a twin, Jed. A twin.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“She has a sister. A twin sister.”
I sat there for a moment, trying to understand why this information should matter.
“How do you know?”
“I’m at….records. I looked up the house where…lives. It was originally owned by Virginia and Minerva Flynn. They had joint…Then Ginny bought her sister out.”
Virginia and Minerva, I thought. Ginny and Minnie. Lovely.
“Why does any of this matter?” I asked.
“The woman I followed to the airship station. It wasn’t Ginny.”
I thought about this for a few seconds before responding. “So, it turns out Ginny really is following the instructions from the cops?” I asked.
“Yes, but…”
Whatever Carmelita said in response, it was lost in static.
“I didn’t get that,” I said.
“Ginny’s been hiding her sister,” she said. “What else has she been hiding?”
I shook my head and said, “You’re jumping to conclusions. Just because no one told us about her sister doesn’t mean Ginny was hiding her. And it doesn’t mean anything else.”
“It does, though. I know it.”
I wanted to get off the phone, mainly because something had clicked for me while we were talking—my memory of Mercy Attentater saying the man she’d met at the Rose Room could have been her dead husband’s twin, if not for the fact that he hadn’t had a twin. But how could Mercy have known that? Frank had been adopted, spirited out of war torn Germany by Klaus Lang. Who was to say what Frank’s birth family had consisted of? Certainly not Mercy. And if she’d asked Frank, he might not have known. Klaus might have known, but he might not have told, or he might not have told the truth. I realized there was a real possibility that I wasn’t looking for the actual Frank Attentater but rather his twin, somehow entangled with Elsa Schwartz. What if this was the man who had killed Mercy and Klaus? And what if he had committed the murders to keep Mercy and Klaus from exposing his identity?
But why? That was where I was stuck. What was it about the connection between these brothers—if that were in fact the case—that could drive the surviving twin to kill in order to keep that connection secret?
I shook my head, my mind a blank in the face of the possibilities.
“Are you still there?” Carmelita said through the static.
“Yes,” I said. “Tell me, how did you find out about the twin sister?”
“I already told you. I’m at the Hall of Records.”
She hadn’t exactly told me. Or, rather, the message hadn’t quite gotten through. I pictured her spending the day hunched over file folders and index cards, wading through land records to find the history on Ginny Flynn’s house and, once she’d figured out there was a sister, digging into birth records to discover that the sisters were twins.
“That’s good work,” I said.
But it was good work on a case I didn’t care about, not really.
What I needed was a lead on Elsa Schwartz.
I remembered what Cosmo Beadle had said about finding an unscrupulous real estate agent willing to tell me where Elsa was living in exchange for a bribe.
Maybe I didn’t need a bribe. I had Carmelita.
“Can you get records of who’s renting property?” I asked. “Or just sales and deeds?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out?”
“I’ll try.”
“Okay. Look and see if you can find any transactions in Hollywood for Elsa Schwartz.”
“She’s the woman who broke in?”
“Yes. If you can’t find anything on rentals, look to see if she’s bought any property in the last six months. Have you got that?”
“Yes, but what about Minnie Flynn?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Right now, I need to track Elsa down. Can you do this for me?”
There were a few seconds of dead air, during which I pictured Carmelita’s gears turning as she tried to convince me of the utility of the information she’d found. Finally, I heard her say, “I’ll fall back when I find out.”
I knew that what she’d said wasn’t the same as what I’d heard, so I let it go and hung up. Waiting in the car for the phone to ring again, I took a minute to rearrange the antenna so it wasn’t as likely to garotte me if I moved the wrong way. Then I sat and watched the entrance of Let There Be Darkness, wondering what the chances were that Attentater—or his brother—might come back to the club when I happened to be on the lookout for him. Slim to none, I told myself.
Pencil in hand, I read over my notes and made a few new ones. After a while, I ran out of things to write and let the pencil stray across the bottom of the page, not thinking about it as I replayed my conversation with Sherise Pike, all the while telling myself I should really be replaying the scoop Carmelita had gotten about the Flynn sisters and what that information might mean about the death of Felix Madrigal or the ways Mullen Peale might have played me. Those were dead ends in my mind, however, questions that I couldn’t focus on even when I tried.
When the phone rang, it jarred me out of my wandering thoughts, and I fumbled for the button again to stop the little bell inside the case. As I did, I noticed that the absent-minded scribbles I’d been making on the tablet had taken the form of spiderwebs, not unlike those tattooed on Sherise Pike’s chest.
“Hello?” I said when I got the speaker to my ear.
“There’s nothing on quartz,” Carmelita said through the static.
“Did you say Schwartz?”
“I did.”
“All right. You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
If nothing else, I knew that Carmelita was thorough. To say that she went at things with machinelike precision would have been overstating it, but it was also kind of true.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for trying.” About to release her to whatever she had planned next for herself, another thought occurred to me. I had been imagining Elsa and Attentater holed up in an old Hollywood mansion, just like Beadle had told me. But what if he had been lying? Or partly lying? Though the old silent screen actor spent most of his time at his estate on Catalina, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he still had properties in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. He probably would have thought it a great joke on me to point me toward the exact sort of place where Elsa might be hiding out but withhold just enough information to keep me in the dark about exactly where she was.
“Carmelita,” I said, “those records are searchable by name, right?”
She hesitated a second, maybe trying to decipher what I’d just said. Then she said, “Yes. Of course.”
“Can you search for Cosmo Beadle? Get me a list of properties he owns on the mainland?”
“All right.”
> I could tell that she was growing irritated with tasks I was throwing at her, the kind of legwork suited to an assistant rather than a future partner. There was nothing I could do about it, though.
Again, I hung up and waited. This time, I didn’t let myself scribble on the tablet while the minutes ticked by, not wanting to see what else my subconscious would come up with.
When the phone finally rang again, I answered with, “What have you got?”
“Well…to you, too,” Carmelita said.
“Sorry. Did you find anything on Beadle’s properties?”
“There are several.”
“Go ahead,” I said as I got ready to jot down the information.
I strained to listen through the static, knowing that mis-hearing or misunderstanding even one number in an address would likely wreck my afternoon and evening. There were six properties in the city—four in the Hollywood Hills and two farther west in Beverly Hills. I wrote them all down and repeated them to Carmelita. There were a few rough spots with information traveling through the air, but I felt reasonably sure that I’d gotten everything from her.
As I was about to hang up, I heard her say, “And none more.”
I dropped my hand from the button.
“Did you say none or one?” I asked.
“One.”
“What is it?”
There was just static for a moment, but I thought I heard her say “city.”
“I missed that. Try again,” I said.
“It’s not in the city.”
“Okay. Where is it?”
“Somewhere called Gold Rush Gulch,” she said.
My pulse kicked into a higher gear, and my heart hadn’t bothered using the clutch.
“What?” I asked just to be sure the static wasn’t playing a trick on me.
“Gold Rush Gulch. It’s a ten-square-acre parcel. The deed says he bought it from Paragon Pictures in 1932.”
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 17