Authors: Finder
Emma Bull (5 page)
A B B YY.c
She did, too. It made me fee
l better, the summer night thick with comi
ng rain yanking at my hair and
shirt
, the rubber smell and screech from the tires, the staccato of intermittent streetlights flashing o
ver
me. Loud music would have made it perfect. Loud music and different company and a whole new set of reasons for being there.
She was called Sunny, I knew from that night at Danceland. "What's your real first name?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Curious." I chose not to say anything about making us even.
She shot me a glance. "Alexandra," she said finally.
I leaned back in the seat. "Feminine form of Alexander. Means 'helper of men.' "
The glance was longer this time. "You just happen to know that?"
"I was in a private treatment center." If was called that; I've always thought of it as a reform school with pretensions. "The only book in the place that wasn't a tract for behavior modification was about the meanings of first names. I memorized it." I stared at the buildings going by until I was dizzy.
"Murder," I said finally.
"Mmm."
"Pretty steep."
It was a moment before she said, "Investigating officer's report makes the scene sound a little ambiguous. It might have been reduced to manslaughter, if there'd been a hearing. And the suspect was a juvenile, of course, which still counts for something. But since they can't find the guy…"
I had my elbow propped on the door, my chin in my fist. A parody of a relaxed pose. "Darn shame," I said across my knuckles.
"What can you tell me about Richard Weineman?"
"He's dead."
"That has a nice melodramatic ring." She stopped the car at a four-way and said, "Why don't you just tell me what happened that night?"
Air came and went in my lungs. My hand was lightly curled and resting against my lips; I could feel my thumbnail digging into the lower one. I kept my eyes on the scenery, though it was no longer moving.
"Because it's none of your business."
Her hand shot out, grabbed my wrist; she pulled my hand away from my mouth, my arm down across
my body, and held it there. "I think my business is exactly what it is. I'm a cop."
We were twisted mirror images of each other: both breathing a little too loud, staring into each other's eyes. Our hands met at the mirror plane.
A B B YY.c
"You're not asking beca
use you're a cop," I said, my voice weightless. "You're as
king because you know
I have t
o tell you. Because you're a cop."
Something happened in her face, something that was both harder and softer, and neither. She let go of my wrist and turned, eventually, back to the wheel. The car eased forward again.
"Maybe I'm asking to find out if I've got a psychopath in the passenger seat."
"I think you're safe," I said. "And so do you."
Neither of us spoke again until we stopped.
Juvenile Detention, on Water Street, was the whole of my experience with copshops in B-town, and that only from the visitor's side. This wasn't J.D. Something about the architecture suggested an old library, the comforting municipal sort that must have had columns stipulated in the endowment. Rico saw me looking and said, "Chrystoble Street Station. Sometimes known as Scotland Backyard. Come on, you'll be a nice addition to the ambience."
I followed her up the steps, through the heavy double doors, and into a surprisingly civilized room. The walls were wainscotted halfway up in oak; above that they were painted the green of a honeydew melon.
The long windows wore louvered wooden shutters, the louvers open now to encourage the hot, heavy air to circulate.
The furniture was various and battered, but well-made. There were three big dark wood tables sidled up against a wall, one of them in use—at it, a woman uniformed in silver was reading the top sheet of a pile of yellow paper. Two rows of cushioned side chairs occupied the middle of the floor, none of them matching; I thought of a dozen dining rooms like my mother's, all of them missing a chair. A little table stood between two of them, holding a chess board with an unfinished game. A map of Bordertown
covered most of one of the room's walls, and another offered quite a nice painting of the Chrystoble Bridge and the riverbank.
As we entered, an elf came out of a door at the other side of the room. He was very tall; I thought the dip of his head as he went under the lintel wasn't required by instinct alone. Age is a subtle thing in elves, but he seemed older than Tick-Tick. His long white hair was drawn tightly back and braided, which added to the length and angularity of his face, and focused attention on his eyes, warm gray and large.
On him, the silver uniform jacket seemed like formal wear. He smiled at Rico, and she returned it with a nod.
"Captain Hawthorn," she said. "What brings you to this end of town?"
"Work, Detective. Speaking of which, aren't you here a little late?"
He had a lovely broadcaster's voice without a hint of Elflands accent. I wondered if he'd been born in B-town. He seemed like the wrong generation for it, but again, I couldn't be sure of that.
"Some. Do you know if my partner's here?"
"Yes, he said if I saw you to tell you he was waiting. Nice running into you, Detective. Don't burn it at both ends, hear?" With that fatherly admonition, he went out into the night.
A B B YY.c
"Gracious," I said, lo
oking after him. "Does he always sound as if he's auditioning for 'My Three
Sons'?"
"Hawthorn's all right; he gets it from his co-workers. The Suits up on the Tooth don't exactly trust the Soho cops. Probably afraid we'll go native under stress."
She got to the door Hawthorn had come in by and stopped. "What I did, in the car," she said suddenly.
"That was wrong. I'm sorry. I'll try not to yank your chain again."
"The choice of words there is unnervingly apt."
"I know. I'm sorry about that, too. But I have to have your help."
I wasn't sure what she was waiting for, but I said finally, "Here I am." It seemed to be enough to get us through the door.
We turned corners more times than I could keep track of. At last we stopped in front of a heavy-looking door with a little window in it, and Rico knocked. Chill air hit me when it swung open.
"Hold it," I said. I had figured out where we were. "Why do we—"
"It's the only thing I have. Scared?" She sounded pleased.
Detective Linn greeted me gravely, and might even have remembered me from the Danceland business.
I remembered him. Rico's partner was sort of a cross between the King of Elfland and Mr. Spock, but he dressed better than either of them. He was sublimely out of place in the cold little room, tall and white, his almost luminous white hair freshly cropped and showing the tops of his pointed ears. He wore a dark maroon suit with an agate pin in his cravat.
"How do you get this place so damn cold?" I asked.
"Magic," he said, and didn't seem to think it was funny. "You are good to help us."
I decided I didn't have to answer that.
Linn stood by a sturdy marble-topped table that, now that I think about it, probably started work in a .commercial bakery. The thing on it was covered with a white sheet. Rico put a firm hand between my shoulder blades and got me beside the table, and Linn drew the sheet back.
After a moment I stepped away and leaned against a wall. "Long walk off a short pier," I said, when I could talk.
"And somebody drained the ocean," Rico replied. She shook two herbal rigs out of a pack, tapped them down, and handed me one. "Can you use him to find whoever killed him?" She lit for me.
"No." I rubbed a cold hand over my face. "And if I could, I'd just have a fix on another legman."
"Jesus Christ on the Tree, do you think I'd mind having a fix on a legman? I wouldn't mind having a fix on the legman's goddamn
laundromat
. Don't you understand? I don't have
anything
right now. Will you just try it?"
A B B YY.c
I looked up. R
ico wore that hungry face again.
"All right. But for God's sake, cover him up."
Linn did, except for one bare, discolored arm. I stood over Charlie's unlovely corpse, empty of anything.
Outside, people were drinking, dancing, fighting, making love. Outside was a foreign land, and there were no flights to it from here.
Who killed you, Charlie, and where is he now
? Nothing answered me. I reached two fingers out—from sheer horrified fascination, I think—and touched dead skin.
Rico had her hands under my armpits, holding me up. My legs were folded under me. Rico's face,
looking down into mine, was ashy under her tan. "What happened?" I said.
"Just what I was going to ask. You touched the body and dropped like a brick."
"Death trauma," Linn said above me, his silver eyebrows drawn down in alarm. "In Faerie, if death comes in manner sudden or suspect, one summons an adept, who by such contact with the corpse, reads the final moments of the life that's gone. If it was violent death, the mage may take the trauma on himself, and be much harmed."
I stared at him. "Why the hell don't you call somebody in and do that now?"
He looked sad. "No human corpse will give its secrets up, that we have found. And even fey flesh, in the Borderlands, is sometimes mute, or muted. Here it is not a tool that pays its use."
"Offhand, I'd guess that in Faerie you don't go to your grandmother's funeral and give her a last kiss in the coffin."
"Indeed not, if one's grandmother died by murder or mischance." He sounded as if he thought this was an inappropriate subject to discuss in a morgue. "Had illness or her great age sent her hence, one could bestow such strange salutes as that, and fear no consequence."
To tell the truth, I didn't think much of kissing dead people at funerals, either. I hung in Rico's arms, shaking, sucking down air.
"Do you remember anything?" Rico asked.
"No. If I hadn't been sitting on the floor, I wouldn't have believed it happened." She looked sour.
"Sorry," I added, as she helped me to stand. My cigarette was scorching the floor a few feet away. I started to pick it up, then decided I didn't want to put it in my mouth. I stepped on it instead.
"What about his effects?" Rico said to Linn.
"It won't help," I told them.
Linn turned to a tall chest of little handleless drawers against one wall. He spoke softly in the language of the Elflands, and one drawer slid out. This he carried to Rico.
"It won't," I repeated. "Now if you wanted me to
find
his effects, maybe I'd put you on a show. But I can't—"