High Bloods (14 page)

“Your hands—”

“Not as bad as it looks. Some gouges and scratches. I cut her out of the razor wire because I didn’t want anyone else to see her like that.”

“Oh God! Who could do such a vicious thing?”

“The world’s full of them. I need a shower.”

I started down the black slate hall, pulling off my shirt as I went.

Bea said, “Your neighbor’s here.”

“Who do you mean?”

“Ida Grace. I think. She wouldn’t tell me her name, or much of anything else I could understand.”

I went back to her. “Where is she?”

“I tried to make her comfortable in the tea room. I hope that’s okay. It was a little past four, I think. I heard someone walking around outside, talking. Scared me. But when I looked out I saw it was only a small old woman in her dressing gown and slippers. She wasn’t trying to get into the house. She sounded incoherent. I went out to the lanai and invited her in. She seemed in shock, but when I coaxed she followed me. She kept saying in this earnest, pleading tone, like she was answering a voice in her head, ‘How could you? She’s all I have left.’“

“Uh-huh,” I said, neither making sense of that nor wanting to see Ida Grace myself right now.

“I looked in on her just a few minutes ago,” Bea said. “She’d finally stopped talking to herself. Her eyes were closed. Maybe she fell asleep.”

“Let her sleep,” I said. “Give me twenty minutes. I could use something to eat. Toast, cereal. No coffee.”

When I was out of the shower I put some adhesive bandage on my hands, enough to cover the worst of the gouges without impeding my fast draw. I dressed and took the bowl of oatmeal and sliced bananas Bea fixed for me into the tea room. Ida Grace’s eyes were still closed, but the veined grayish lids twitched and a slippered foot jumped while I looked her over, noting smudges on her housecoat and pajamas, a tear at one elbow. I figured she had climbed over the eight-foot wall between our properties. No razor wire there, but a lot of climbing roses.

I wondered what had compelled her to try a stunt like that at her age, what she’d been escaping. I reached down and nudged Ida awake in the lyre-backed Chinese Chippendale chair.

“Uhh!” she exclaimed, knocked loose from the grip of an intolerable dream. She breathed harshly through her mouth for a few seconds as if she were still climbing the garden wall. She looked up at me, looked around the tea room.

“Just as I… remember it,” she said.

I put my bowl of half-eaten oatmeal aside. My stomach felt better for having given it something to work on.

“Who did you meet at the Van Nuys airport?”

Ida licked dry lips. Beatrice gave me a barbed look and said, “You might at least offer her a cup of tea first.”

Ida looked at her with a faint grateful smile.

“Yes. Tea. If it’s no bother. I don’t recall your name?”

“Beatrice. And it’s no bother.”

So we waited until Ida sucked up half a cup of green tea. Which did serve to steady her, and brought a trace of color to her cheekbones.

“Now then,” I said. “You got some bad news a few hours ago, and you’re here to see if I can do something about it.”

“I thought… I could deal with the situation myself. After all… she did owe me. I could have betrayed her to her husband. I chose at the time not to… make a fuss, for all our sakes.”

She looked at me as if all that were perfectly clear. I shook my head slightly.

“Of course you wouldn’t know anything about it. Although I’m sure it isn’t news that… my husband was a philanderer.”

“Which husband?”

“Raymond. Scarlett.” She looked around the tea room again, made a nervous gesture. “It must have been going on here too, under this roof.”

“Alleged infidelity,” I said. “My mother has better sense.” I almost said,
And better taste
, but that would have amounted to piling on, and I didn’t want to antagonize Ida unnecessarily. “It would help if you could tell me who you visited in the Brenta helicopter at Van Nuys airport.”

She looked at me as if she were disappointed in my powers of perception.

“Carlotta, of course.”

“Miles Brenta’s wife.” I saw Bea purse her lips, but she didn’t whistle. I said, “How long ago did Ray and Carlotta have their affair?”

“Oh—quite a long time. I married Raymond twenty-five years ago. He’d had roundheels long before I married him. Don’t know what made me think marriage would change him. But if there were others besides Carlotta—I cast a blind eye on that side of our relationship.”

“So Ray Scarlett had Car Brenta as one of his lovers. This would have been well before she was chewed up by a werewolf, and that was—ten years ago?”

Ida quivered and slipped a little sideways in the chair.

“I never imagined that she would agree to see me. But Lenie had said that Carlotta was the one I must talk to. Only Carlotta could give Mal back to me. So I contacted her. To my surprise she—she seemed almost delighted to hear from me. At least that’s how I interpreted her lengthy response to my e-mail message. I felt greatly relieved and encouraged. I had no way of knowing until I met with Carlotta in the—in person, that she is probably insane.”

“As a result of the attack?”

“I believe so.”

“Then why is Miles Brenta letting her run loose at two in the morning instead of keeping her under watch in a plush sanitarium like Lodge Pine or Quail Woods?”

Ida reached out and almost knocked the cup and saucer off the little table next to her. Bea rescued both and poured more tea.

“But she
was
watched. Discreetly, by young men I took to be male nurses. They must be a necessity. When I saw her, even in the low light of the helicopter’s cabin—dear God, the damage! She had had her hair done. It wasn’t much help. She was almost too talkative and animated, as if she were in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.”

Ida blinked several times. After the last couple of blinks there were tears clinging to her eyelashes.

“Carlotta was wearing a black veil, much like a mantilla. And oh, she
smelled
. She smelled like a wretched excess of cheap perfume. But at the same time she also smelled of decay. An overpowering rottenness. She held out her hand to me, although she couldn’t rise. I had to take her hand even though I was stifled by her lurid odor. The hand was dry and cold and had no strength in it.

“She said, ‘So delighted to see you again, Ida. I sent flowers. Ray will always live in my memory.’ She was talking about the service for Ray as if it had been only last week. Her voice was odd and slurred, she could barely pronounce some of her words. One of the attendants aboard the helicopter offered me brandy. I thought I had better have it to keep my gorge from rising. After it was brought to me I asked Car why she wasn’t having one as well. That’s when she pulled her veil aside and showed me her
face
. Obviously plastic surgeons had done their best. But severed nerves are beyond a surgeon’s ability to repair. Car’s lips are twisted and don’t meet on the right side of her face. She drools constantly, into a towel that is wrapped around her throat. That was the smell all of her perfume couldn’t mask. ‘I drink through a straw,’ she said. ‘And I have trouble swallowing. Yet in spite of everything I have managed to keep up my appearance, don’t you think?’ “

Ida wiped at the tears on her cheeks.

“Once I thought I hated her,” she said quietly.

“All right,” I said. “What does Car Brenta have to do with Mallory?”

“I asked her if she’d seen my daughter. That didn’t help, but when I described Mal she said yes, she thought she had seen her recently. ‘Pretty young people come to our parties all the time,’ she said. ‘Miles invites them because he knows that I like to watch young people having a good time.’ “

“Kind of a surreptitious social life,” Bea observed. “But I guess one look at Carlotta would chill the party.”

I said to Ida, “You told her Mal was missing and possibly has committed a class-three felony?”

“No! What do you mean, a felony?”

“Deliberately going off-line is just that. But if Mallory’s Snitcher has been removed without her knowledge or consent, then someone else has committed a felony.”

“Without her knowledge?” Ida said, surprised and alarmed. “But how could that be?”

“Maybe she’s fallen in with a bad crowd. Like some of the people Elena is running around with. Kidnappers. Bloodleggers. Murderers for fun and profit.” A grisly image of Sunny Chagrin hit my mind and I couldn’t chase it away. I didn’t as yet understand what the profit motive was in her death. But there would be one. Diamondbackers, like a lot of businessmen, were rigorous in their fidelity to greed.

Ida said, “It was Elena who told me—”

“Yeah, to try to get information from Car Brenta about Mallory. Implying two things: that Elena had reason to believe Carlotta might know something useful, and that Mal is in real jeopardy. But Lenie might not realize just how off in the head Carlotta is. I wonder—”

Beatrice had to give me a hard nudge; I had been staring holes in Ida while a far-fetched notion pinballed around my brain trying to find another, cockeyed notion it wanted to mate with.

“Wonder what?” Bea said.

“What other kinds of parties Miles Brenta likes to throw to keep his wife entertained.”

That prompted a small gasp from Ida.

“When Carlotta spoke of pretty young people she also said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice while she drooled into her towel and looked at me with such lifeless, haunted eyes, ‘But as I said to Francesca, so many of them deserve to die, don’t you think?’“

I couldn’t sell it to Booth Havergal.

“
If
Mal Scarlett partied recently at Miles Brenta’s house, there is no reason to assume it has anything to do with her disappearance. Hearsay and speculation by no means justifies trying to get through Miles’s phalanx of lawyers to question him.”

“There’s a likely tie-in between the
mal de lune
shoot at Max Thursday’s place a few months ago and Brenta himself,” I argued.

“If you’re talking about Francesca Obregon—” Booth shook his head.

“The Bleat blogs have linked them. And we know from a genealogy Website that Francesca and Carlotta are first cousins.”

I composited the virutal reality images of Francesca and Car Brenta, before the werewolf attack on Car. Two beauties who easily could have been mistaken for each other. “And it wouldn’t surprise me to know Francesca was quick to assume Carlotta’s wifely duties in her husband’s big brass bed.”

“I wouldn’t begrudge Miles whatever happiness he was able to find following such a tragedy,” Booth said with a hint of cynicism. He iso’d Fran in the display. “She is a marvelous-looking woman. And very important to him in the business as well. WEIR just received a very large shipment of the LUMOs her firm designed and manufactures. Three million units initially.”

Limo
, Sunny had whispered to me as she was dying. Or was it more like
LUMO?
I hadn’t thought about it again until now.

“As for Miles being involved in something like a
mal de lune
, however comfortably removed from liability he might be, well, he always has been a sharpshooter. Business or pleasure.”

“You know him better than I do,” I said. The Lunarium in Booth’s office was reading fifty-seven hours and a couple of minutes to the next Observance. Mentally I felt hog-tied; physically I wanted to grab a couple of people and shake some truth out of them.

I had turned off my wristpac voicecom for the meeting with Booth, but I had a text message.

“Bucky Spartacus showed up for the sound check for tonight’s big bash, and is currently sacked out in a borrowed starbus,” I told Booth.

“So he’s planning to go on tonight.”

“Yeah. I’ll be talking to him after his gig. Cleared it with Joe Cronin.”

Booth was staring out a window, hands clasped behind his back. In the space between us, the VR heads of the women revolved slowly.

“Somewhere in all of this, werewolves amok, the murders, the disappearances, a motive must lie.” When Booth was stressed he could sound like Hercule Poirot in an old Agatha Christie novel. “None of it is as random as it might seem. Let’s crack on, then. Bring me evidence, R.”

“Lew’s trying to find out who Sunny was in touch with yesterday. But we don’t know where her ride is and her wristpac’s missing, so—Booth, about Sunny. The arrangements.”

“I spoke to both of her parents this morning. Unfortunately they’re too infirm to travel to SoCal for the departmental service; I’ve arranged for them to see it on a satellite feed. Then we’ll send her body home.”

Beatrice had spent a couple of afternoon hours shopping for an outfit to wear to the concert in Pasadena. When I picked her up at the Radcliffe she was wearing a cream-colored Capone with twenty-inch-wide cuffs and brown striping, a white shirt with a high collar that flattered her long neck, a plain black tie, and a high-crowned cream fedora with about four inches of black band. The brim of the fedora riding rakishly low, covering the tops of her ears.

She struck a pose, hands in her pants pockets, for me to admire.

“Priority hunk,” I said. “But I thought we were going bowling.”

“I really splurged,” she said a bit ruefully. “Don’t know what I’ll do for a job now that Artie—” Her ebullient mood palled somewhat. “By the way, I made funeral arrangements. Cremation, once his body is released. His lawyer confirmed; it’s in his will. He has no survivors that we know of.”

“Where’s his cash going?”

“Hospitals, orphanages, nursing homes. All of them listed as ‘Pay on Death.’“

“You could run de Sade’s,” I said. “If and when it reopens.”

She shrugged.

“Might as well. I was mostly running things anyway while Artie took his litle trips and holed up making mysterious phone calls.”

“What kind of mood was he in after he talked to Pym last week?”

“Lous-y. He was, in fact, being a mean little prick. He’d get that way, out of frustration, I guess. More and more often during the last three months.”

“Did he make any references you might not have paid attention to at the time?”

She was still thinking about that when we boarded the chopper at ILC along with Lew Rolling and two more agents, Ben Waxman and Harry Stiles. Lew had the controls. Bea and I sat together in the back.