Anonymous Rex (26 page)

“Do you … do you have a girlfriend?”

“No, I don’t. Listen—” The phone rings. I ignore it. “Listen,” I repeat, and the phone rings again. The message indicator light is on, and has been since I came into the bedroom. Another ring. “Hold the thought,” I say, and lift the handset.

“Holy shit, he’s home! Rubio, where the hell you been?” It’s Glenda.

“Glen, can this wait? I’m … busy.”

“So you ask my help, then you’re too friggin’ busy for the answers, right? I can take a hint—”

“Wait! Wait—you found something?”

“Not with that attitude, I didn’t.” She’s pouting now.

Sarah squirms across the bed, reaching for my arms, trying to pull me down. “Hang up the phone,” she coos seductively. “Call them back.”

Great, two dames to mollify. I hold up a finger to Sarah—one second, please, one second—and step into a darkened corner of the room. “Glen, I’m sorry, I’m just—there’s a lot going on. But whatever you got, I’d love to hear.”

“Not on the phone, you won’t. We gotta meet up, Vincent.”

“Last guy said that ended up dead.”

“What?”

“Tell you later. We gotta meet now? You can’t give me the basics?”

Glenda mulls it over, but her answer is firm. “I’d rather not. Can you get to the Worm Hole?”

“Now?”

“Now. You’ll wanna see this.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Gimme twenty minutes. And Glen—keep your guard up.”

“Always.”

I turn back to Sarah, already trying to formulate an excuse in my mind, a reason that I would have to leave her at so crucial a point in our … relationship, I guess. But as I turn around I can already hear
the patterned breathing, the light snore, and I know I can put excuses off for another time. Sarah Archer is drifting off, one hand still clutched around the leg of my pants. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

Her skin shines in the small glow cast from the living-room chandelier, creating a pale ivory surface so pure that it deserves a goodnight peck. As I lean down to kiss her cheek, Sarah’s eyes creak open, and she looks up at me with growing wonder. A hand comes up to caress my face, warmth spreading throughout each feature she touches, and Sarah says, “You … you look like someone I knew once. A long time ago.”

“Who was that?” I whisper.

But Sarah is finally asleep.

On this All Hallow’s Eve, the dino bar in the back of the Worm Hole is probably much like it always is: herbs, noise, and drunken louts. But the mammal joint up front is rocking like I’ve never seen it rock before, packed to the brim with the filthy apes, each dressed in some moronic costume or another. I press my way through bumblebees and ninjas, cartoon characters and French maids, making my way toward the secret entrance behind the rest rooms.

Glenda’s waiting for me at a back table, and as I casually stroll over, I run an olfactory scan of the room, checking for familiar scents. It’s clean—at least it’s clean as far as past assassins go. If someone’s sent out new dinos to do me in, there’s very little I can do about it at this stage of the game. I pull up a chair and order an iced tea. “No mint,” I tell the waitress.

A puzzled look from Glenda. “No mint?” she asks. “You love mint.”

I point to the three-ring binder tucked beneath her arm. “Whaddaya got for me?”

“This shit was hidden, and good.”

“Deleted?”

“I think so. But whoever wiped the stuff out either did it in a hurry, or didn’t think about the temp files. I used a file restorer to bring ’em up again, and most of the crap came through okay.” Glenda’s a whiz on the computer; at the very least, she’s more of a whiz than I am. Ernie’s dusty PC sits in my house, currently waiting to be reclaimed
by the bank, but as it hasn’t been used since he died except as another place to put my used dishes, the repo man might as well haul it away.

“Show me what we got.”

The first few sheets are Ernie’s handwritten interview notes, pages of them printed out in bold, dark ink. “He scanned them in as is,” Glenda explains. “That’s what we do at J&T—we got this crappy program that converts our handwriting into text, but it hadn’t learned his writing yet, so it left it like this.”

A lump forms in my throat as I stare at the loops, twists, and scrawls of Ernie’s fractured script. His penmanship was horrendous, and it wasn’t infrequent that he had to enlist my help in deciphering some indistinguishable part of his notes. It’s almost as if he’s sitting next to me now, passing me a pad he’s just scribbled on, asking, “Vinnie—does that say
witness claims to have hugged victim
or
witness claims to have stabbed victim?
”

“From what I could figure out from his shitty handwriting, he’d talked to a bunch of the same folks you did—Mrs. McBride, that mammal nightclub singer, a few employees, even that coroner. You can check through it, see if you note any inconsistencies.”

“I’ll do that. What else?”

“Some of the usual stuff, filed expense accounts, time sheets, a few more scrawls I couldn’t make out, appointment calendar—”

“Gimme that—the calendar.”

Glenda searches through the printouts and hands over three pages that look to have been copied out of a personal organizer of some sort. Dates are preprinted at the top of the pages (in this case, January 9, 10, and 11), the section below divided into half-hour increments with space to write. The pages are mostly empty, but a number of appointments have been scribbled in.

On January 9, for example, he met with Judith McBride and four of the McBride Corporation’s top executives. On the tenth, he saw Vallardo and Sarah, as well as a few others whose names don’t ring a bell. But on the eleventh, on the day he was killed by a hit-and-run taxicab in some godforsaken back alley, at ten o’clock in the morning, just a few short hours before his head would crack wide open on a hard city street, Ernie had an appointment with Dr. Kevin Nadel. And only three days after that, when I flew out to New York in a
drunken rage and burst into the morgue demanding to see my partner and best friend and the coroner who had so obviously pooched a simple homicide autopsy, Nadel was on a two-month vacation in the Bahamas, incommunicado.

A small, tight note is wedged in the corner of the ten o’clock appointment date, too tiny and smushed to read with the naked eye. “You have a magnifying glass on you?” I ask Glenda.

“I have bifocals.”

“Good enough.” Glenda passes them over, and I hold the small lens at the bottom of the glasses above the handwriting. Now it’s larger, still messy, but if I hold my eyes in just the right position and strain my ocular muscles to the point where they’re about to snap and go whipping about the room, I can make out the note: Pickupphotos.

Pick Up Photos.

I look up at Glenda, and she holds out a black-and-white printout of a photo set sheet. “He must have meant these.”

The McBride crime scene photos. The
real
McBride crime scene photos. No sanitary gunshot wounds, blood splattered in manageable portions along the floor—a nice, clean, wholesome death as multiple gunshot deaths go.

No, this is something else entirely. Blood fills each frame, covering the walls, the furniture, the carpeting, like an acetate tarp; beneath the crimson pools I can make out the vague shape of McBride, nearly torn beyond recognition, lying in a heap against a sofa set off to one corner, his aristocratic bearing shredded beneath what must have been a furious assault. I see bite marks, claw marks, tail lashings, and more, and I realize that what Judith McBride told me and what Dr. Nadel showed me earlier were the most bald-faced of lies.

Now I have proof: Raymond McBride was killed by a dinosaur.

“These were doctored,” I tell Glenda.

“You’ve seen the other ones?”

“At the coroner’s. He showed me one of these pictures, but most of the blood was gone, and the wounds had been … cleaned up, I guess. Made to look like gunshots, which is what Judith told me her husband died from. And the doc claimed that McBride had been hit with five different caliber weapons—”

“—which would explain the different sizes of the attack wounds,” finishes Glenda.

“Goddamn.”

“Goddamn.”

“Somebody went through a lot of trouble to make it look like a human pulled this off,” I say. “And I bet you Ernie was on to it just before he got iced.”

The waitress arrives with my iced tea, and I suck it down in one gulp. Glenda pulls her chair closer to mine, glancing nervously about the room. “I can burn these. You know that, don’t you? We can go out back, pour some lighter fluid on these puppies, and torch up. If you’re in, I’m in, but I want you to know we can walk away, and that’ll be the end of it.”

My answer is slow in coming. I want to be precise. “I watched Nadel get killed by a two-dino hit squad,” I say. “I almost got killed by them myself. Before that, I was attacked by some freak of nature in a back alley and barely made it away with my hide, and way before
that
my partner was killed in an accident that couldn’t have been an accident. I’ve been misled, laughed at, cheated—I’ve had my job, my life, my friends stripped away from me. I’ve been pushed around, and I’ve been lied to.

“And to be honest, you’re right—I should get out now. We should go out to the alley and have ourselves a bonfire with marshmallows, and I should take the next flight to the Galápagos, find a few good trees, and chew myself into a stupor.

“I’ve got every reason to leave, and it’s the smart money that runs through the open door and doesn’t look back. But it’s like Ernie used to say—it’s always the dumbest sonofabitch who finds himself sitting on top of the food chain when the meteors come crashing through.

“This time around that dumb sonofabitch is gonna be me.”

During my little speech, a grin has crept its way onto Glenda’s face. “Vincent Rubio,” she says, “it’s nice to see you again.”

Tips from doormen come cheap, especially if they’re not particularly fond of the building residents. Chet, the fellow who works the late shift at Judith McBride’s Upper East Side home, gladly tells me where to find the missus after a fin has managed to work its way into his pocket.

“She’s at a Halloween charity ball at the Four Seasons,” he informs
me, masking whatever dislike he feels for McBride with a smile. And then, still with that maddening grin, “The bitch wouldn’t know charity if it rammed itself down her throat.” I back away from Chet, into the taxi, and ask the driver to screech away as quickly as possible.

The Four Seasons Hotel is nice—if you like that sort of thing. Me, I’m a Plaza man. Glenda and I wander the opulent hallways, underdressed both for the hotel and the holiday, searching for the correct ballroom. We eventually break down and ask the concierge for directions, and he is neither as friendly nor as courteous as Alfonse, though he does lead us to the right place.

MASQUERADE FOR THE CHILDREN
, reads a great flowing banner hanging proudly over the entrance. Behind a great set of double doors, fourteen feet high and gilded to the hilt, I can hear some band swinging it loud and clear—drums, trumpets, trombones, all in a steady 3/4 upbeat. A muted voice resonates through the hallway, crooning about ninety-nine women whom he’d loved in a lifetime.

“Hang back once we get inside,” I say. “I’ll get to Judith. You …”

“I’ll steal some food.”

I grab one door, Glenda grabs the other. We pull.

And the sound hits us like a shock wave, a blast of unadulterated music spilling past our bodies, pressing us back into the open doorway. The band, the crowd, the incredible noise shuts down my thoughts for a moment, and all I can do is stare. Three hundred, four hundred, five, a thousand? How many creatures are mingling? However many it is, a goodly number of them are dinos, as once the wave of sound has subsided, the second wave of smells hit me, and past the odor of sweat and alcohol, I can make out the pine and the morning and the unmistakable drench of herbs.

Glenda manages to shake off the daze and wander into the ballroom in search of hors d’oeuvres. I set off in another direction, glancing around at the revelers, trying to locate any familiar sight, sound, or smell.

The costumes here are more elaborate than they were at the Worm Hole—these folks have the moola to spend on nonsense like that—and I’m amazed at the intricacy and craftsmanship on some of these outfits. A woman whose breath is so laced with rum I can smell it thirty yards away wobbles up to me and burps daintily in my face. She’s wearing what looks to be a large desk, with two drawers where
her stomach would be and a table just below her chin upon which she props her arms. A Bible has been glued to the bottom of one of the drawers, as have a pair of reading glasses to the tabletop.

“Guess what I am!” she screams in my ear.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” she yells.

I’m forced to join in the shouting. “I said I don’t know!”

“I’m a one-night stand! Get it? One nightstand. One—night—stand!”

If I push her, she will fall down and cause a ruckus, so I simply excuse myself and squeeze through an opening between two doughnuts in the crowd. Rhinoceroses surround me, horns sticking rudely into my side, and I spin, looking for a way out. But now there’s a contingent of aliens, black eyes wide set and menacing, reaching for me with their spindly arms and tumblers of gin and tonics. The other direction—Abbott and Costello, arguing, tumbling, pratfalling—Nixon, claiming over and over again to Abe Lincoln in a pitiful, high-pitched impression that he is not a crook—a piggy bank, replete with dollar bills pouring out of the top—

And a Carnotaur. A real, no-fooling-around, honest-to-goodness in-the-flesh Carnotaur. The rest of the ballroom drops away, falling into some visual abyss as every light swivels and fixates on the dino in the distance chatting it up with Marilyn Monroe. My first thought is that in the rush of Halloween, someone has forgotten to don their guise, much in the way that dino children, once costumed in human skin, will forget that they also need to wear clothing and walk out of the house buck naked, human naughty bits flapping in the breeze.

Without conscious effort, my feet have taken me across the room, and when I get within three yards of the dino, I can smell it—smell the oranges, smell the chlorine—smell
her
—smell Judith McBride. Unguised and chatting it up like it was the most natural thing in the world. I can understand the compulsion, the incredible
need
to be free of the girdles and the clamps and the belts, but not here, not now, not in front of mammals. Without thought as to consequences or social graces, I storm up to Judith and grab her by the crook of a well-muscled Carnotaur arm.