High Bloods (11 page)

“How hard can that be? I’ll find out for you. So do you think Miles Brenta wanted Artie killed?”

“The idea isn’t so far-fetched that I can dismiss it. But digging into Brenta’s affairs—business or, especially, personal—is asking for trouble. The ILC isn’t immune from political pressure.”

My hand on the cyclic trembled involuntarily. I dumped the air cushion from beneath the disk like some novice just learning to fly and we sank swiftly enough to make Beatrice yelp in alarm.

Once I had control again and we were level in flight she said, “But you’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?”

treated Beatrice to lunch at my usual hangout, Doghouse
Reilly’s, which was on the ground floor of a thirty-story condo on Pico, one block west of the Wall. Reilly’s was an old-fashioned saloon with deep cozy booths and dark oak paneling on two walls, mirrors elsewhere. There were the usual autographed celebrity photos. The beef brisket was good there, and Reilly’s had the largest selection of microbrews in Beverly Hills.

A couple of the faces in the photos I recognized as being on the vanished list. But the stars remained in a glossy state of half-life on Reilly’s walls, with the color in the photos and the stars’ allure of yesteryear both fading slowly into showbiz twilight.

Beatrice said, staring into her glass of beer, “Did you bring Elena here?”

“She always wanted to come when the Dublin Pipers were in town. Reilly’s has other good Irish bands on Thursday nights.”

“You don’t like talking about Elena. I understand. But that just makes me think about her all the more, and wonder—you know.”

“You can ask me anything about Elena.”

“She was always the Girl Next Door?”

“I remember when I was four or five rocking her in her pram. Later there were birthday parties, but little boys don’t
play that much with little girls. I think I first started paying attention to her when she was twelve or thirteen and I was getting my growth spurt and some fuzz on my cheeks.”

Bea smiled at that. I’d been a little tense at first but as I opened up and found it easier to talk I began to relax, although not without a certain heaviness of heart.

“Her father died when Elena was fourteen. Both of them took Baird Grace’s passing very hard. Ida looks and sounds a lot tougher than she is. She had a breakdown, and Elena was obliged to finish her schooling in the east and in Europe. We wrote now and then but didn’t see much of each other for a long time. While she was studying at the London School of Economics she got married—pretty much on impulse, she told me later. I tried and failed at a couple of things before I became an ILC investigator, which suited some talents I barely knew I had. Our two families had a falling-out over Ida’s second husband. Ida was obsessed with the idea that my mom stole Ray Scarlett from her. I don’t think that’s how it was, but Scarlett did go off with Pym on a months-long expedition looking for the remnant of a lost tribe reputed to be immune to Lycan Disease.”

“In Borneo?”

“Yeah. Unfortunately Ray got a fever and then his kidneys conked on him. Meanwhile Elena divorced her husband and headed home to Beverly Hills to see what she could do about keeping her kid sister on the rails. Didn’t work out: Mal went Lycan at seventeen. The only good thing that came of it was Elena and I meeting again after more than a decade. And—it was—”

“What had been simmering for a lot of years came to a boil.”

“Well, that. And by then we had the maturity to appreciate each other. We probably would have been married a month after she returned, if her family situation hadn’t been such a mess. Ida claimed she would poison herself if Lenie didn’t drop me. As
you can probably figure, I was getting most of the fallout from my mom’s adventuring with Ray Scarlett.”

Beatrice nodded sympathetically. Our lunch came. Bea poked at a salad and I ate most of my corned beef on rye.

“Elena didn’t say a word this morning when she found me in your bedroom. Just backed away and disappeared.”

“You had every right to be in there. I don’t know if I can say the same for Lenie. But it’s not going to happen again.”

“My being in your bedroom?”

I shook my head. “No, that’s exactly where I want you. From now on.”

“We haven’t had a chance to simmer, much less—”

“Two things I never argue with. Natural selection and my
cojones
. When it’s right it’s right, Bea.”

She whistled low, adding a happy, third note this time.

“I did want to hear that, although I was kind of roundabout getting there.” She looked earnestly at me. “But if Elena comes again—”

“She’s a woman in trouble, Beatrice. And we’re old friends. Last time I saw Lenie she was half out of her mind from grief. Nothing left to offer me but the bad blood in her veins. She asked me to—finish the destruction. I think she must be well over that.”

“Or she would’ve been dead long ago?”

“Yes.”

We were having coffee when Joe Cronin stopped by our booth. Not just to say hello. When lawyers in Cronin’s league pull up a chair to chat with me it’s no coincidence that we happen to be in the same place at the same time.

“The last date I brought here,” Cronin said, looking around, “thought ‘cunnilingus’ was an Irish troubadour.”

He was a slight man with a type-A personality who spent most of his days in overdrive. He ran marathons on weekends to
bleed off stress. His manner was usually chipper; but once he bore down on you his gaze could chip flint. He was tastefully dressed, as were all the fifty-odd male lawyers in his firm, like an Edwardian-era undertaker. Ah, fashion.

“Beatrice Harp, Joe Cronin,” I said.

Cronin flashed a smile of pleasure, then didn’t look at her again for five minutes. Because he was a notorious horndog, the fact that I was getting all of his attention meant that I’d probably rather be toasting my bare feet in hell.

“Understand you’re looking for one of our clients,” he said. His fists were knuckle to knuckle on the back of the chair he straddled.

“Prather Fitzhugh and Golightly has a hell of a client list,” I said.

“Bucky Spartacus.”

“Oh, Bucky. Yeah, I would like to talk to him. Know where I can find him?”

“Not offhand. He’s a busy boy these days. What’s it about?”

“I’m looking into a matter involving his girlfriend. Chickie Hickey.”

“Another of our clients.”

“Really?”

“So what is it all about, Rawson?”

“Ongoing investigation.”

He stared at me; I stared back. Since he knew me well enough to know he wasn’t going to get anything that way, he relaxed his fists and tempered his approach.

“Okay, so what has she done? Skipped her meds?”

“It may be a case of what’s been done to her,” I said.

“By Bucky?”

“I don’t know yet. Haven’t talked to him.”

Cronin tried not to look exasperated. “What has Chickie had to say?”

“Can’t find her either,” I said. “Just not my day, I guess.”

“So you have no evidence of a crime committed by either of our clients.”

I let that one go, and permitted a meaningful silence to build.

“Anyway, Bucky’s High Blood,” Cronin said. “He doesn’t come under your purview. He doesn’t have to say dick to you if he doesn’t want to.”

“It would be a courtesy,” I said.

Cronin thought about it.

“You know he’s got this gig tomorrow night. A big boost to his career.”

“I heard.”

“Right now Bucky could be doing half a dozen things. Rehearsal. Picking out some new threads at Jerry Lee’s.” Cronin smiled slightly. “I asked him one time why he wore his jeans so tight. He said, ‘Man, it ain’t rock and roll if your jeans don’t hurt.’“

“He’s not back on Molochs, is he?” Molochs was another name for crystal meth.

Cronin looked amazed and indignant.

“Hey, that was just a kid thing! Lasted a couple of weeks, then his padrone caught on and had Bucky in rehab fast-fast.” Cronin snapped his fingers twice to demonstrate just how on top of things Miles Brenta had been. “Nowadays Bucky’s clean as angels. He has a serious nature. A student of TM. So like I’m saying, if he’s temporarily out of touch it’s because, hell, he’s an artist. Needs some alone time to prepare for his gig. They’re looking for upward of forty thousand over there in Pasadena.”

“Doesn’t solve my problem. I’ll just keep on hoping I bump into Bucky before then.”

Cronin looked over my bargaining chip and decided to call.

“Okay. Just lay off a little while and I’ll introduce you to our boy tomorrow night at the fund-raiser. Once his gig is over, have a couple of beers with him. Ask him whatever’s on your mind. But I sit in, Rawson.”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

Then he took his time checking Beatrice out. Bea offered him a cool nod for his appreciation. The three of us left Doghouse Reilly’s. After promising to be in touch about my “interview” with Bucky Spartacus, Cronin dodged a westbound Pacific Electric trolley and grabbed a pedicab for the short trip to his firm’s offices on Wilshire.

Bea and I waited for the parking valet to bring my Land Rover. A street sweeper swished by. The Privilege was an immaculate place. No hoochers, curb roaches, bloodstains left by wingless angels. No dirt, bad air, birdcrap, butts, paper cups, gobs of coochputty, cracks in the sidewalks, weeds in the concrete planters. Pedicabs chirped like crickets so you wouldn’t absentmindedly walk in front of one. MagLevs hummed along. A million solar-gain windows reflected clouds. A block from us a nearly forty-foot 3-D mural of Bogart, Bergman, and Paul Henreid in the penultimate parting scene from
Casablanca
dominated our shut-in view. Other murals of long-departed stars and their fabulous films were all over town, blown up to cloud-size, relieving the stark ugliness of miles of thick concrete wall. Tourists loved them; but then all of the Privilege must have seemed like heaven for the fantasy challenged of a traumatized society.

Bea said, “I started to get this odd feeling while the two of you were talking.”

“What about?”

“Remember you told me how you bumped into Chickie at de Sade’s before you came upstairs to see the boss?”

“Yes.”

“And you scanned her.”

“After she reacted badly to my being a Wolfer.”

“So her Snitch was functioning okay?”

“She had one of the new models WEIR has just started using. A LUMO.”

“What—”

“For Lunar Module. All updated microcircuitry. Chickie’s LUMO was in perfect working order.”

“Well—when her brain signaled a changeover in the ladies’ lounge, shouldn’t her supply of TQ have kicked in immediately and suppressed it? Put her to sleep right there on the pottie?”

“Unless at some point during the thirty-five or forty minutes between the time I saw her last and the Hairball appeared, Chickie’s LUMO malfunctioned. No matter how rigorously they’re tested, new gadgets sometimes get fritzy. There’s another possibility. Someone, and I wouldn’t rule out Spartacus, popped the Snitcher out of his gal-pal with the point of a knife, then triggered the mechanism that caused Chickie to go OOPs. Then by some means she was directed to climb to the roof, jump through the skylight, and chomp Artie’s head off.”

“If Chickie could be turned on like that, then she could also be turned off.”

“Yeah. And transportation was waiting. Of course once she skinnydipped Chickie would have no recollection of what she’d been up to as a Hairball.”

“Lord above,” Bea said softly. She shuddered, although it was ninety-plus in the shade of the leaded-glass canopy above the entrance to Reilly’s. I put an arm around her.

“By now,” I said, “Joel and Tink ought to have a 3-D panel of mug shots for me to look at. The famous and the infamous who were hanging out at de Sade’s last night.”

“I should get back to work trying to make sense of Artie’s business arrangements.” Beatrice looked glumly down at the sidewalk. “Sometimes I’m bewildered by life,” she said quietly. “But I try not to live in the bewilderment.”

“About dinner,” I said. “My house. I’ll cook.”

“Oh, you cook too?” Her mood improved quickly. She gave me a cheeky grin. “How lucky can I get?”

“We’ll see,” I said, feeling really full of myself.