Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  He stopped moving. I held on another three seconds and then I let go and shoved him hard. He went sprawling onto the flagstone terrace, landing face-first behind the hot tub’s raised deck. He wasn’t even twitching.

  I knelt beside him and patted him down. Wallet, phone, car keys. A slim handgun that might have been a Walther PPK, but in the dark I couldn’t tell. In the opposite lapel pocket, there was a screw-on silencer, twice as long as the gun it was built to fit. I rolled him over and put two fingers on his throat. It took nearly a minute to find his pulse, and when I did, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just my imagination. Finally, I brought my head up and looked around. There was no one on the terrace, no one visible in the sprawling grounds to the side of the house. Up above, there were lit-up windows, but there was no one standing in them. The party was up front.

  My problem was mostly solved, but I still needed to figure out a place to stash the guy. There was no way I could drag him back to the front of the house, down the driveway, and into the Jaguar’s trunk. Not without getting noticed, anyway. I leaned over and checked the hot tub. It had a wooden lid, hinged down the middle. I unlatched the side nearest me, lifted it, and looked in. The tub was empty, but I won’t lie. If it had been full of water, I’d have gone ahead anyway. I folded the hinged lid in half, grabbed the guy underneath his shoulders, and muscled him up onto the deck. Then up over the hot tub’s lip, until gravity could do the rest. I dropped him, closed the lid, and latched it.

  I spent a moment on a deck chair, getting my wind back. Long, slow breaths. Eyes closed. Then I stood up, tucked in my shirt, straightened my jacket, and walked back around to join the party.

  Which was like nothing I’d ever attended.

  Even when I was Juliette Vilatte’s husband and I had to show up at penthouses and Marin County weekend homes and shake hands with people I had no business ever meeting, I never saw anything like what I saw that night in Meredith Miles’s house.

  I climbed up the steps to the front porch and looked around. If I’d had a camera with me, and if no one tackled me, I could have made a killing selling the shots to Just Now! There was the director, the mobster-film guy who’d started our hostess’s career. His arm was around the actress from The Scars at Night. They were talking to a woman who’d made headlines for bringing down a secretary of state. There were other faces, eight or ten, that I recognized but couldn’t place.

  “You must be one of his friends,” a voice said, to my right. “You’re not one of mine.”

  I turned and was standing face to face with a woman I’d seen on theater screens and billboards for a decade. She was barefoot, wearing a dress that seemed to consist of a small black sheet and maybe a safety pin. She had a glass in each hand.

  “White, or red?”

  “Whichever you want less,” I said. “And yeah—I’m one of his friends.”

  She handed me the glass of red wine and I clinked its rim against hers.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Meredith Miles.”

  “Lee Crowe.”

  “What do you do, Lee?”

  “Every day’s a little different,” I said. “I follow people around and take pictures. Sometimes they don’t like it, and then stuff like this happens.”

  I touched the bump on my head, and brushed my fingers along my scraped-up cheek.

  “Pictures?”

  She took a step back.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not one of them. Mostly I work for Jim.”

  “Jim?”

  “Gardner.”

  She came back. Two steps this time, so that she was closer than before. She took ahold of my elbow and dropped her voice.

  “You work for Jim? Really?”

  “Since I got out of law school. He’s been like my father—what I imagine it’d be like, having a father.”

  “He’s coming tonight?” she asked. “He said he might be here.”

  I shook my head and frowned a little. Keep it simple, Crowe. She’d know bad acting if she saw it.

  “Something came up—he’s trapped at another client’s house. He couldn’t get out.”

  “I needed to talk to him.”

  “You could try his cell,” I said, which was also true. She could try anything she wanted. “Or if he doesn’t pick up, you could tell me. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s about all this,” she said. She dropped her voice. “I’m having second thoughts.”

  “And?”

  “And I wondered what Jim thought. If he could look at the contract—is it safe? If something goes wrong, is there any recourse? Is it even legal?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the contract.”

  “Neither have I. It’s all so secretive, isn’t it?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be? It’s the chance of many lifetimes.”

  “He told you that too?”

  “Larsen?” I said. “That’s his pitch.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Jim put me in contact,” I said. “I’ve been helping streamline his organization. Trim it down. Cull the herd. However you want to put it. I can’t really get into it without breaching a client confidence.”

  “Does it touch on this?” she asked me. “On what he’s selling us? If he’s got legal problems, and it relates to . . . to whatever this really is . . . then I’m not letting him get anywhere near me. Not with a needle.”

  “You’re careful.”

  Her eyebrows arched, ever so slightly.

  “How are you going to live forever if you’re not careful? You could have all the right genes. You could get all the best upgrades. Whatever money can buy. But if you don’t look two ways before you cross the street, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Here—come with me.”

  She took my arm and led me into the house.

  We stopped three times on the way through.

  The first time, it was to say hello to a New York producer and a Spanish actress. The three of them exchanged air kisses, their cheeks half a foot apart. The producer shook my hand, and the actress simply nodded. Meredith introduced me as Lee, one of her lawyers. Not too long ago, that would have stung. Because it could have been true. I could have been Jim’s partner, and then I would have been standing here without any subterfuge. An invited guest.

  But by now I knew enough about myself to know that if I’d ever actually attained what I’d wanted, I’d have been miserable. I’d be here on the clock, taking orders from Jim. Invited because I was useful and helpful, like the caterers. I wouldn’t have arrived under a false name. I wouldn’t have a gun in my waistband and another in my lapel pocket, both of them stolen. I wouldn’t have locked a man in Meredith’s hot tub.

  I was deceiving everyone but myself. And that was just fine. I was happy with what I was doing because I was calling the shots, and interpreting the rules, deciding which ones to simply toss out.

  Meredith led me away. We made it halfway across a sunken den before she stopped a waitress, who relieved us of our wineglasses. Then we went through a showpiece kitchen where water had probably never been boiled, and through a door to a second kitchen that wouldn’t have been out of place in a busy restaurant. There were six people at work, uniformed in white. Meredith went to the largest man in the room and tapped his shoulder.

  “Harry,” she said. “I’m going to be in my study for a minute. Tell Leon if Stefan shows up, call me right away.”

  “Okay.”

  She pushed through a side door and we walked down a hallway, and then through a door at the very end of it.

  “Leon’s the guy at the gate?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’d you find him, the Chargers lineup?”

  “I don’t think he ever played football,” she said. “At least, not for money. Maybe for cigarettes, in the exercise yard.”

  She walked halfway across the study, and then stopped. She turned and looked at me.

  “The whole house is wired up. I can shout out
anywhere. Leon and Harry will come running.”

  “I see.”

  “Modern technology to get them here, but once they show up, it’s strictly fifteenth century,” she said. “Fists and knives. So who are you, really?”

  “Lee Crowe.”

  “There’s no Lee Crowe on the list—” She broke off and studied my face. “You’re not surprised I can memorize lines, are you?”

  This room was decorated with film posters. Some vintage, some from her own work. There was a drafting table in the center, unbound scripts strewn across it. A laptop computer sat in the middle, its screen dark. She’d gotten her first Oscar for acting, but her second for writing. She’d pressed on with both.

  “No,” I said. “That doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  “Whose name did you use to get in here?”

  “Jim’s—who else’s?” I said.

  “Did he send you here?”

  “Of course he did,” I said.

  Which was sort of true. Jim had told me where to go and when to be there. Perhaps in doing so, he’d been engaging in an act of emergency room triage. Or a simple weighing of interests. Olivia Gravesend and Meredith Miles were good clients, and powerful women. Stefan Larsen was throwing people out of helicopters. Jim may have lacked any sense of morality, but he understood optics. Regardless of his reasons, I needed to turn this conversation around.

  “Stefan Larsen scares you, doesn’t he?” I asked.

  “A little bit,” she said. “But that’s why you’re here?”

  “We’re worried, Ms. Miles,” I said. “And from what I’ve seen since I got here, you should be too.”

  I reached into my jacket and took out the slim handgun I’d taken off the man outside. I’d already screwed its suppressor into place. I held it on my outstretched palm, so that its muzzle faced me. Then I offered it to her.

  “What is that?”

  She made no move to touch it.

  “I took it off Larsen’s man, five minutes ago. He was on your back deck.”

  “What do you mean, you took it off him?”

  “I came up behind him and put him on the ground. And then I went through his pockets.”

  “You did what?”

  “It’s okay—he’s not getting up.”

  “You killed—”

  “I knocked him out and locked him in your hot tub. Which was empty. He won’t drown.”

  “You’re talking about the blond guy—Michael? He was here to set up the presentation.”

  “With this?” I asked. “A silenced Walther PPK? Loaded with hollow points? Larsen told you about this and you were cool with it?”

  I had no idea what kind of ammunition was in the gun. I wasn’t sure hollow points would be worse than any other kind of bullet. But they sounded bad.

  “He never told me anything about that,” Meredith said.

  “Larsen and his men have killed three people, maybe four. And that’s just the ones we know about.”

  She spent a long moment looking at me, at the gun on my palm.

  “Put that down,” she finally said. “You don’t want your prints on it.”

  “They’re all over it.”

  “Regardless.”

  I set the gun on the corner of her drafting table.

  “Did Jim really send you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can I trust you?”

  I glanced at the gun on her drafting table and took a couple of steps back. Anyone in her position knew how to handle one. Directors arranged classes with retired military guys and sent their actors out to ranges and pop-up shooting galleries, the same training courses the cops used. It was all about realism. Little details of mechanics and stance made a difference once the cameras were rolling. Or so they believed.

  “You’ve got the guy’s piece. And if you want to ask him what he was doing, he’s probably starting to wake up now. You could take Leon off his post and let him do whatever he does.”

  I still had Jim’s gun in my waistband. But I hadn’t really lied to her. There was a bottom line. She could trust me, whether or not I could explain why.

  “Leon’s good where he is. And if Larsen’s man is where you say, then he’s fine there, too.”

  I watched as she pulled a tissue from a box on the desk and, with that in her hand, picked up the gun. I must have been right about the classes, because the first thing she did was click off the safety. Then she picked up a tissue with her other hand and used that to rack the slide. An unspent bullet ejected onto the carpet.

  “You’ve got the safety off. You’re one round down, but you know from the weight you’ve got plenty more,” I said. “You’re cocked and locked. Six pounds of pressure on your index finger and you’ll put a hole through my forehead. No one will even hear it.”

  She held the gun down at her side, and looked at me. She was breathing hard, but not so hard that she couldn’t shoot straight.

  “Would you like to call someone who can vouch for me?”

  “You said Jim’s tied up.”

  “We have another mutual acquaintance. Someone you trust a good deal. And she’s got more of a stake in this than Jim.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Olivia Gravesend. She says you’ve got her number.”

  She was silent for a long moment. Her finger was still on the trigger.

  “We go back a few years.”

  “I hear you do fundraisers.”

  “What’s she have to do with this?”

  “Call her and ask.”

  She backed to the drafting table and picked up a cell phone. She used voice commands to dial so she could keep her eyes on me the whole time. She’d made the call on speaker, and I could hear the phone ringing. Three hundred miles to the north, Mr. Richards picked up.

  “Gravesend residence.”

  “Meredith Miles, calling for Olivia.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Of course.”

  They must have been standing in the same room; Olivia was on right away. He’d just handed her the phone.

  “Yes, darling,” she said. “I thought you’d call.”

  Meredith switched off the speaker and held the phone close to her ear.

  “Who is Lee Crowe? Did you send him here?”

  Then she was silent, listening. I couldn’t hear Olivia’s answer at all, but it must have gone on awhile. Meredith’s mouth compressed into a tight line. Her index finger tapped on the Walther’s trigger guard.

  “Why?” she asked.

  This answer was just a short beat, but Meredith must not have understood.

  “Say again?”

  As she listened, her eyebrows pulled together. Then she began to nod, as people do on the phone even when the object of their sympathies can’t see or appreciate the gesture.

  “Something happened to Claire?”

  Another short explanation, and this time Meredith looked up at me.

  “Olivia . . . okay.”

  She took the phone away from her ear and put the call back on speaker.

  “—​and then he killed her,” Olivia was saying. “He’ll never answer for it, because he owns more people than I do. Which is where Crowe comes in.”

  Meredith Miles considered that.

  “What would you like me to do?” she said.

  “Trust him,” Olivia answered. “Give him some latitude.”

  “I see.”

  “He’s a little rough around the edges,” Olivia said. “Not really the sort of person you’d usually want to—”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Meredith used her thumb to hang up.

  In the movies, her face was an open book. She could telegraph her emotions with a matchless luminosity, her every thought flashed to the world at forty-eight frames per second. Hundreds of millions of people probably thought they understood her.

  In real life, at close range, I was getting a different perspective.

  I was on the other end of a silenced Walther PPK, and I could
n’t read her face at all.

  “What happened to Claire?” she finally asked. “She never said how, or why.”

  “You hung up on her.”

  “Let’s hear it from you.”

  “Claire went looking for him—for Larsen. I think to confront him. But it didn’t go so well. He tossed her out of a helicopter.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “He’s got secrets. And if anyone gets close to figuring them out . . .”

  But I didn’t need to finish that thought.

  “Did Claire get so close?” she asked. “What did she know?”

  I couldn’t answer that. At that point I didn’t know exactly what he was selling. I had a lot of pieces of the puzzle but they hadn’t quite come together. There were the cloned girls and the men up at the Creekside, with their loose talk around the fire about Kennedy and Khrushchev. And then there were the scars. If Larsen had been experimenting on the girls, maybe he’d taken it a step beyond that. Maybe he was harvesting something from them.

  “Tell me this—how did you meet him, and what did he promise you?”

  “I’ve never met him,” she said. “I started hearing his name from people I trust. People in certain circles. They said he had a cure. That it really worked.”

  “A cure for what?”

  “For time,” she said. “It ticks a little faster for some of us, doesn’t it? And none of us will ever have as much as we want. The people in this house can buy anything they want, except one thing.”

  “And Stefan Larsen is selling it to you.”

  “But there are needles, and contracts, and some secret retreat up in the north where you take the treatments,” she said. “Half the people in this town wouldn’t eat a cucumber if they heard it was genetically modified. And we’re lining up for this?”

  “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “It’s either too good to be true, or it’s true and it has consequences no one’s worked out.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I want to know about Claire Gravesend. Why did he kill her?”

  “That’s part of what I’m trying to find out, Ms. Miles,” I said.