High Bloods (10 page)

“Where do you usually do your fishing, Mr. Thursday?”

“Got me a place in the San Gabes on the Hawknail River. Don’t get up there often enough nowadays. Haven’t been this year at all.”

Beatrice and I looked at each other.

“Was there anything else?” Max asked me, and then to Beatrice, “You’re a very pretty girl. You come again sometime. Always room in my house for a pretty girl.”

“Thank you,” Beatrice said, and with another, brief glance at me she turned to watch the approach of the biker.

“Ain’t noontime yet,” Max Thursday said, squinting at the sky. “Reckon why she’s home early today.”

“Is that Francesca?” I said.

It was Francesca. She sat idling twenty thousand worth of BMW road rocket near the steps to the porch and looked up at us from her bronze-tinted face shield before she killed the 1300 cc engine and swung a long leg out of the saddle. Halfway up the steps she took off her helmet and paused to shake out her thick mahogany-toned hair. She was smiling. Beatrice whistled softly, just for me to hear and interpret.

“Company, Max?” Francesca said, looking us over.

Introductions again. Francesca’s last name was Obregon. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed. But with many beautiful Hispanic women it could be hard to tell. She might have been as old as forty-five. Her cheekbones were so prominent they made the rest of her face look almost gaunt. She had bold dark slanting eyebrows and in the clear light of day her eyes looked as black as hot black coffee. She had a sharply notched upper lip and a full underlip; there was a certain proud as opposed to sullen stubbornness in the set of her mouth. She had the kinetic attitude of zest for risky things that went with the expensive hog she rode.

It was the cheekbones, the body language, the toss of her lovely head that prompted a sharp jab of recognition, the certainty that I knew her from somewhere.

“Call me Fran,” she said, her free hand on her hip. Not quite a challenge-to-combat stance. “ILC, huh? What’s it about this time?”

“Routine,” I said, trying to look benign.

Fran shrugged slightly but with unmistakable disbelief and took Bea’s measure, her eyes lingering on the throwing knife in Bea’s scabbard.

“Hunky,” she said. “For show?”

“No damn way,” Bea said, as she looked at the silver handle of the knife Fran wore. She blinked a couple of times. “Yours looks kind of neat,” she said slowly.

Almost in sync the two women drew their knives and offered them hilt-first to each other for inspection.

“They were just leaving,” Max said, taking a couple of steps toward me with hands upraised as if to shoo me off his porch. Then he stumbled. I caught him. He felt as frail as a paper lantern in my grasp.

“Max, did Luz Marie check your blood sugar this morning?” He mumbled something unhelpful. To me Fran said, “Would you mind helping him inside?” And with swift concern she went into the house first, leaving Bea holding both of the throwing knives.

Max Thursday wanted to shake me off, protesting that he could walk five miles by himself anytime he wanted, but right now he wasn’t able to keep his feet from crossing, so I kept a hand on his elbow and guided him across the threshold, then into a partly shuttered parlor with eighteen-foot ceilings and three paddle-bladed fans going overhead. He sank into an old rocker with a Navaho blanket thrown across the high back and looked vacantly at the floor while he breathed through his mouth. His spotted hands grappled weakly with each other.

Fran had disappeared momentarily, through an arched doorway where a beaded curtain was moving. Somewhere in the house parrots squawked, birds twittered; it sounded like a distant aviary. Bea stood by a stone fireplace studying pictures on the walls: horses, dogs, ancestors, portraits framed like museum pieces.

I watched the old man. After a little while he looked up at me.

“How do you do, sir.”

“Doing okay. Can I get you anything?”

“A drink of water.” He nodded his head toward a deal table where there was a pitcher and glasses. I poured some for him. He was looking around now, but seemed far from alert.

“Carlotta may have my room,” he said. “She’ll be more comfortable there.”

“All right,” I said. I helped him drink some water.

“Where did she go? She was just here, wasn’t she?”

“Fran?” I said.

His brows knitted in feeble asperity. “No. Carlotta. I’m doing this for Carlotta.”

“I see,” I said.

Fran Obregon returned to the parlor followed by an anxious Mexican woman as plump as a bumblebee. Fran had a diabetics’ kit with her. Luz Marie dithered.

“I check him at nine-thirty this morning. He okay then.
Dios mio.
”

“He asked for water,” I said. “I gave him some. I hope that was okay.”

Max Thursday had put his head against the back of the rocking chair. His eyes opened and closed, but he didn’t appear to be in distress. Nonetheless Fran took a reading of his blood sugar. The level was within parameters and she seemed relieved. She pinched one of her grandfather’s cheeks lightly.

“Max? You with us, darling?”

He focused on her with a dawning look of pleasure. “Is lunch ready?” he said.

“Almost.” Fran glanced at Luz Marie, who ambled away. She looked at me.

“Obviously you put my grandfather under stress. I don’t suppose you would mind leaving now.”

“We just chatted,” I said. I smiled at her but didn’t move. “He thought you were someone else,” I said, to see what that would get me.

“Did he?” There was something guarded in her eyes. Her lips parted, then closed on an unasked question. She looked at her grandfather again, with fondness and regret. “He gets this way. As we all will.” Then she said, mostly to herself, “The years just vanish. Like flies in a sandstorm.”

“Is it time for you to go back to work?” Max Thursday asked her in another moment of disconnect.

“Not yet, Max. We haven’t had our lunch yet.”

“Do you work near the ranch?” I said.

Francesca shrugged, maintaining patience. Just.

“I’m not far. San Jack Town.”

Max looked at me. “I didn’t ask them to stay for lunch,” he said. His mind seemed to be clearing up.

“They won’t be,” Fran said, her hand on her hip again, fingers curling the way a jungle cat’s tail twitches as she prepared to stare me down.

“What is it you do, Miss Obregon? Secretarial?”

That nettled her. “Hardly. I’m an executive of Brenta International. CEO of Nanomimetics, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, Miles Brenta. Do you see much of the big boss?”

“At board meetings.”

“Not on social occasions?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You’ve been asked to leave,” Max Thursday said, energized by the hostility flowing my way. He tried to rise from the rocker. I lent a helping hand. Francesca moved to his other side.

“Who’s Carlotta?” I said to her.

“Get out, Mr. Rawson. I mean business.”

Beatrice came toward us and laid the silver knife on the deal table. She had sheathed her knife.

“Thanks for showing me this,” she said to Francesca, and looked at me with a hint of pleading in her eyes. “We really
do
have to go.”

I nodded amiably to Fran, who turned her back on me and guided the old man toward the doorway with the beaded curtain.

I heard Max say, “I’m not going to be in trouble, am I?”

The beaded curtain clacked softly behind them. Parrots squawked in the dimness beyond. Otherwise there was silence.

We walked outside. The Mexican kid looked up from a white wheelbarrow filled with geraniums he was watering and sprinted to the golf cart.

As we went down the steps Beatrice took a firm grip on my arm.

“Oh boy,” she said, almost whispering. “Do I have something to tell you!”

“Okay.”

“Not here. The farther we are from this place, the better.”

I tried to find out why she was agitated, or what had spooked her. But on the trip back to the helicopter she shook her head resolutely and kept mum. She looked back twice at the house, as if checking to see if we were being watched.

I humored her. Once I had the helo airborne and we were headed west Bea let out her breath and opened up.

“There’s no way I could actually prove this a hundred percent,” she said. “And since my fingerprints are on it anyway… but I don’t think I’m wrong. Francesca has my knife! The knife we last saw sticking out of the Hairball’s throat in Artie’s office!”

“It’s a custom job?” She nodded. “Do you have your initials on it somewhere?”

“No, damn it. And I’m not saying there couldn’t be a few thousand knives around that aerodynamically are virtually identical to mine.”

“Then what makes you think—”

“I had the knife for five years almost! And I practiced with it a lot, at least three times a week at the Beverly Hills Knife and Gun Club. The handle is all silver. Nicks and scratches are unavoidable. But there’s one particular deep nick where the ball of my thumb rested so that I knew each time my grip was right and my throw would be good. I made it myself with a nail file.”

“It’s not much to go on,” I said. “We’ll keep it in mind.”

“I still want my knife back,” Bea said, glowering. “And now I know where it is.” She was quiet for a time. “What did you think of her?”

“
Mucha mujer
,” I said, and pretended to dodge her look of displeasure.

“Is she High Blood?”

“She wasn’t registering Lycan on my scanner.”

“But that doesn’t eliminate rogue.”

“No, it doesn’t. But almost always when I run into a wild one, I know. It’s an instinct that has saved my life a couple of times.”

I gained some altitude to put plenty of room between us and a trio of ultralights that were like migrating butterflies.

“There are lies in that house,” I said. “But they aren’t about family bloodlines.”

Bea said, “You know that old man was lying, don’t you? He’s far too feeble to go fishing in the mountains by himself. He was there when they were shooting werewolves. And who do you suppose he had Francesca confused with?”

“Carlotta might be someone in Thursday’s extended family who resembles Fran. If not her twin.”

“There were at least a dozen beautiful women in those portraits hanging in the parlor,” she said. “A lot of resemblances, now that I think about it.” She watched me fly for a couple of minutes. “I don’t see how you keep us in the air. Your hands barely move the controls.”

“If I wagged the cyclic or collective enough for you to notice, we’d be all over the sky. It’s a matter of feel, maintaining steady pressure. Want to try the controls yourself?”

“No, thanks. Flying makes me nervous as it is. It’s like a circus up here; I keep looking for Dumbo.” After a few moments she made another approach to what was on both our minds. “I know I’m not wrong about my knife. But that means Francesca had to be there last night.”

“Or afterward, when Chickie’s body was dumped.”

“I guess so. If she
was
there at de Sade’s, then she could’ve seen me. And she wouldn’t have been so quick to hand over the knife.” She shuddered slightly. “If she recognized both of us, she’s really great at keeping her cool. Some psychopaths are adept at that, aren’t they? This is getting complicated. I don’t like complicated, and it scares me.”

“Whether she was at de Sade’s or not, Francesca is connected to both the
mal de lune
hunt and Artie’s murder.”

“Oh my God! I was hoping you were going to tell me not to worry!”

“When the name ‘Carlotta’ came up at Thursday’s house, it helped me to tie some loose ends together.”

“How?”

“Chickie Hickey and Bucky Spartacus are, or were, protégés of the same very wealthy man who likes to dabble in moviemaking. Miles Brenta is also, as you heard Francesca say, chairman of the company she works for. Brenta was, and I believe he still is, married to a woman who survived a werewolf attack. Which is rare enough to be called a miracle.”

“And she’s the Carlotta Max Thursday was talking about? What was it he said—’I’m doing this for Carlotta.’ Doing what?”

“I don’t know. What I would like to know meanwhile is how Carlotta Brenta and Fran Obregon are related.”