by Paul Neuhaus
“Like the general. Aisling.”
Taft nodded. “Right. Aisling. They called her ‘Aja’—which is the closest Sanskrit gets to “messiah”. Anyway, it’s a latent gene kinda thing and it looks like you’ve got it. Hell, you might be the first since Aisling. Now that you’ve seen Sato walking around, I need you to promise me you’re gonna be careful. You’ve got a lot of growing left to do.”
“Who’s Sato?”
“He’s the man you saw. Verbic’s right-hand. If this were a Bond movie, Verbic would be Goldfinger and Sato would be Oddjob.”
Quinn knew what he meant immediately. “So, stay away from Oddjob…”
“Like he’s the motherfucking plague.” Darren stood—painfully—and extended his hand to help the girl. She took the hand and he yanked her to her feet with almost no effort. “God. What do you weigh, like a buck-oh-nine? I’m worried for you.”
“Can you fill in the gap between the teens and where we’re at now? I feel like I might be missing part of the picture.”
Taft nodded and mounted the ladder into his stock room. Once Quinn was also on ground level, he kicked the trapdoor shut and spoke. “Yeah, I’ll give you the abridged version. Verbic came to Los Angeles and built an empire based on corruption and greed. Asura will do that. After he was here a few years, he forged an alliance with the motion picture studios. Formed an organization within it called the Guild—they’re all predisposed toward magic-use and, for a few decades at least, they were like his loyalists from the glory days. After a while, though, the Guild soured on Verbic and decided to plot his downfall. They’ve got daddy issues so they decided to knock poppa off. That’s where you come in.”
Henaghan blinked twice. “So, David Olkin got wind of me being a lady wizard and he catalyzed me so I could pull a Vader-murders—Emperor scenario.”
“Exactly. Come on, I’ve got Temple. I need to go.” He moved through the store to the entrance and Quinn followed.
“What if— Wait, did you say you’ve got Temple? Are you Jewish?”
“Yeah, Taft is a nomme de guerre. Akhiezer is the family name. Is that gonna be a problem? Me being a heeb?”
They were out on the street by then and Darren locked the door. “No, not at all. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, what if I don’t wanna be Olkin’s assassin?”
The heavy-set man raised a finger. “There’s the rub. Ol’ Dave’s put you between a serious rock and a serious hard place. Either you attack Verbic soon, while he’s still recovering from his long winter’s nap, or you wait around until he’s back in fighting trim and he comes looking for you. The bad news is Sato’s already sniffing around which means they’re hip.”
Quinn threw back her head and said, “Fuck!” A couple of tourists walking by gave Henaghan the stink-eye.
“I know, right? That’s exactly what I’d say in your position.”
“What should I do?”
“You want my honest to God advice?”
The girl nodded.
“Get the fuck out of Dodge. If you leave L.A. and never show any interest in magic ever again, you should be fine. The Asura are powerful still, but they’re not what they used to be. I think if you left, Verbic wouldn’t bother chasing you. And Asura are so scarce these days he wouldn’t be able to send anyone from the Milwaukee Local to get you.”
Quinn stewed, saying nothing.
“I see that look in your eye,” Darren said. “You’re gonna go kick David Olkin’s ass, aren’t you?”
“I might just,” Henaghan said.
“Okay, look. You don’t have to do anything right now. You’ve got a little time, and you know where to find me. How about if I give you a little homework?” He fished around in his pockets and pulled out a ticket. “I get invited to these mixers for creative types. At the Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills. This one’s tonight, but I can’t go because I have to do the kike thing. Go. There’ll be a guy there. Has a lazy eye. Late thirties. Completely bald. Not as heavy as me but he does have a dad bod. He’s my friend Glen. I think he can offer you some special insights. Tell him I showed you the Cauldron today and it’ll perk him up. He’ll know you’re legit.”
“He’s a wizard, too?”
“He prefers the term ‘thaumaturge’ which, again, I think is froufrou, but there’s no accounting for taste.” Taft walked her as far as the corner before heading on further down Hollywood Boulevard. To the place where he’d parked his 1972 Gran Torino. Before he left, he said, “Did you say you saw David Bowie in one of your dream-visions?”
Quinn perked up. “I did,” she said. “At the Riot House. I’d say it was ’72 or ’73.”
“What was he doing?” Darren asked, awed.
“Sleeping.”
“Man, that is so rad.”
“I know!”
As Quinn took the cross street back to her Prius, she saw she’d gotten a message. She tapped the screen and put the phone up to her ear. It was Angie, Dr. Boatman’s nurse. “Ms. Henaghan, we got your blood work back and it’s, well, ‘peculiar’ is the only word. The doctor would like you to come back in ASAP so he can go over the results and recommend a specialist.”
Henaghan grinned, dropping the iPhone back into her bag. There wasn’t a specialist in the world that could deal with the disease she’d caught.
Quinn returned to her apartment to find Noah Keller’s suitcase still on her front porch. She wasn’t concerned for his welfare, just annoyed. The abandoned suitcase was emblematic of Keller and its continued presence didn’t surprise Henaghan at all. Plus, it reminded her that she hadn’t been with anyone in a good while. Stupid luggage. Triggering her.
As soon as she was inside, and she'd secured the deadbolt and chain, Quinn went right to her computer desk and the short bookcase next to it. She grabbed Annabelle’s copy of The Devil’s Garden from the desk and a book called Silver Lake Doll: The Killing of Bettie Lyman from the bookcase. Research material in hand, she went for her bed, kicked off her sneakers and plopped down.
She knew that “Silver Lake Doll” was mostly pictures so she started with it. The book was from the mid-1990s and was a large-format hardcover. It’d been out of print when Henaghan acquired it, but that was nothing Darren Taft couldn’t handle. The bulk of it was crime scene photos—of Lyman and the six later murders thought to be connected to hers.
Driving home from Taft’s Books, Quinn had had a bug in her ear. Something was gnawing at her. Flipping through the first few pages of “Silver Lake Doll”, she saw Bettie Lyman’s sorry face, mutilated so it looked like a porcelain doll—a harlequin. But that wasn’t what Henaghan was looking for. Finally, on page 32, she confirmed her suspicion. A full-page black and white from the morgue. A message was cut into Lyman’s abdomen right above her right hip. Quinn didn’t recognize the script, but that was okay, neither did the LAPD at the time. She flipped the page and reread the passage she half-remembered during the drive home. For weeks, the letters carved into Lyman’s belly were thought by investigators to be gibberish. That misconception remained in effect until Detective Bill Holcombe had the idea of bringing in a linguist. Dr. Dhanial of USC took one look at the autopsy photos and said to the boys in blue, ‘Yeah. It’s Sanskrit’. One of the officers said, ‘Well, what does it say?’ Dhanial put on his glasses, put the photo up to his face and replied, ‘Faithless.’” Henaghan remembered the rest. The five later victims all had carvings as well, but theirs were only a single character each. In order, they were the numbers 2 through 6. Also in Sanskrit. This, of course, drew a straight line to her recent vision. The one with the girl on the metal table being incised above her right hip. Quinn couldn’t say how, but she knew that vision took place in the recent past and not in the 1940s. She’d been unable to see either the killer or the incision he was making but she knew that the carving would be in Sanskrit. She didn’t know a soul in the police department, and she was sure they wouldn’t share information with her even if she did. She was certain, however, LAPD was keeping a detail about Rosebud out
of the press.
The fact that he was making Sanskrit engravings in his victims.
But that wasn’t the only thing Rosebud had in common with Bettie Lyman’s killer. Both men, past and present, took pleasure in taunting the police and the media. Anonymous notes, printed in jagged script. Others made of letters cut from magazines. Bragging and taunting.
Before she put “Silver Lake Doll” aside, Quinn wanted to substantiate one more half-remembered detail. She flipped back to the beginning of the book, to the giant photo of Lyman’s ruined face. Bettie’s eyes were open and, despite the picture being in black and white, Henaghan knew the girl’s irises were either green or blue. She flipped over the page and read the first lines of the caption there. “Bettie Lyman, the Silver Lake Doll was twenty-three years old at the time of the murder. She was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was five-foot three inches tall and had bright, naturally-red hair.” Quinn flipped the page back over again for another glimpse at the face. Looking past the grievous carvings, she saw more than a passing resemblance to Aisling, the powerful general from her dream.
Sighing, Henaghan put the book aside and picked up The Devil’s Garden. She knew “Garden” was mostly text, so she went into full research mode by grabbing her Post-it tabs, long thin Post-it notes used for marking pages in books. Quinn loved big brick and mortar stationary stores like Staples and she always kept handy items like the Post-it tabs in easy reach. Flipping to the back of Annabelle’s book, she looked up “Verbic, Reginald”; “Guild, the”; and “Sato”—the full entry for which was “Sato, Charles (Chuck)”. If the man she’d seen outside of Musso & Frank was Sato, his being a “Chuck” came as a huge surprise. Henaghan grabbed three separate colors of tab (lime green, pale blue, and pink) and assigned each one a topic. Then she tabbed all the pages cited for each subject. She was nothing if not thorough. Grabbing a notebook, Quinn went through the marked pages and copied quotes for all the facts she hadn’t already learned from either Grindle or Taft. After she finished, she put The Devil’s Garden and her supplies aside and grabbed the notebook.
Annabelle’s writing style was crisp and clean (an artifact of her years at the Sacramento Bee), but also laced with personality. Quinn knew Grindle so that had something to do with it, but she felt as though Annabelle was speaking to her. She read some of the most interesting passages aloud…
“With his thick Chicago accent and beady eyes, Charles (Chuck) Sato came off like a small-timer. He was anything but. He was short and thick, and he looked like a young Lee Marvin. Intense and removed, but always ready to pounce. Sato came to Los Angeles in the mid-teens along with Reginald Verbic. Once their operation was in full swing, Verbic hung back becoming, more and more, a shadowy figure while Sato kept his boots on the ground. He was known as, amongst other things, ‘The Muscle’, ‘The Enforcer’, and ‘The Fist’. He was a soldier, he was a diplomat, and he was a shake-down artist extraordinaire. Those in his orbit feared him only slightly less than did the crooks and business owners Sato put the squeeze on. In the teens and the nineteen-twenties, there was no one in all Los Angeles County more feared than Chuck Sato.”
“It was widely theorized that Sato was a homosexual. It was the only way Angelenos of that time could explain Chuck’s violent hatred of women. He was not known for ever having a sexual liaison with a female, but he was known for beating up cocktail waitresses by the score. Sato was not known to fraternize with men either, and I prefer to think of him as a sociopathic asexual creature.”
“Sato was, briefly, a suspect in the killing of Silver Lake Doll Bettie Lyman. However, he was crossed off the list following a meeting between Reginald Verbic and then police chief Clemence B. Horrall. Since the Doll case was never solved, we have no way of knowing whether Sato’s dismissal came about thanks to the investigation or because of more shadowy reasons.”
“In the early nineteen twenties, the film industry in Hollywood was still shiny and new, although it was clear that, given time, it would flourish. In ’22 or ’23, a meeting allegedly took place between Reginald Verbic and the bosses of the bigger movie studios. The conclave—initiated by Verbic—resulted in a business deal between Fleur-de-lys, Verbic’s corporation, and the production companies. But not just a business deal. According to legend, Verbic not only helped the movies become the US’s most lucrative export, he also forged a secret society for film people. He called it ‘The Guild’ (not to be confused with labor unions like the Director’s Guild, The Writer’s Guild of America, and the Screen Actors’ Guild). The Guild was for men only, secretive, and quasi-mystical. Throughout my five years of research on this book, I could find no one willing to discuss the Guild as it exists today. If it exists today.”
“Reginald Verbic maintained a house on Mulholland Drive—a prestigious street of celebrity homes—perched on a rise between L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. Public records for 119 Mulholland are not accessible now, and I could not determine who owns that home.”
More grist for the mill. Quinn sighed and put aside the notebook and her Pilot G2 gel pen (she was, again, very particular about her office supplies). Closing her eyes, she realized her reading had only filled in some of the lore—which, to be fair, was all it was likely to do. She didn’t have anything more she thought might be actionable.
Except for one thing.
She looked at her watch and then at the ticket Darren Taft gave her earlier. The mixer ran from seven to eleven. She had plenty of time but thought she’d get it over with early. Had it not been for a possible encounter with Darren’s friend Glen, he of the bald head and lazy eye, she would have skipped it all together.
Henaghan was weary and sore following her morning with Taft, although she couldn’t figure out why since it hadn’t exactly been a work-out. It must have been all that panic-flavored adrenaline coursing through her.
She got up, turned on the shower, and got out some Business Casual.
Between taking off her clothes and entering the shower a thought occurred to her. She picked up The Devil’s Garden again and flipped to the photo section. It had one blurry image of Reginald Verbic (wherein he looked like a taller, thinner Klaus Kinski), but there were no pictures of Chuck Sato at all. Acting on a whim, Quinn went into the living room and sat down at the iMac. A Google image search produced three black and white photos of Sato. None of them were good, but, if Quinn squinted enough, he did look like a young Lee Marvin. With one of the pictures still on her screen, she went into the kitchen and got a drinking glass. Again she placed it over the group photo in The Devil’s Garden and compared.
Damned if the guy peeking around Herman Mankiewicz wasn’t Charles “Chuck” Sato.
When Henaghan finally entered the shower, a bottle of Prell fell from a shelf above the shower head. She was rinsing her hair and had her back to the shelf. She turned, saw the falling bottle in what seemed like slow motion, and threw an invisible bubble up around herself. The Prell slid down the bubble and so did the water from the shower head. It had been a completely reflexive action. She didn’t even know she could do it. She banished the bubble and smiled to herself.
Quinn had been to film industry mixers before. She’d even gone to a couple at the Friar’s Club. When she arrived in Los Angeles, David Olkin sent her periodically, telling her the gatherings would help her career. They might’ve helped her career had she not been pathologically shy at the time. She was still shy, but she thought she could at last drop the word “pathologically” from her resume. Still, not wanting to linger, she made three rules for herself as soon as she walked in. She would only stay as long as she needed to, she would not drink (even a little), and she would not waver from her true mission: to find Glen the Thaumaturge and bleed out of him whatever “special insights” he had to offer.
The Friar’s Club was always confusing to Quinn. It felt like a series of rooms, large and small, connected to one another by curved hallways. The floor plan was a lumpy circle. Moving through the disparate crowd, she realized one thing quickly
. No one was holding a glass. Everyone held a white Starbucks cup. Had every attendee stopped at the coffee shop on their way in? Trolling her memory bank, she couldn’t even recall there being a store nearby. Finally, she asked a guy in a sweater leaning against a hallway wall. The guy was really enthusiastic. “Isn’t it awesome?” he said. “They finally did something right. There’s a pop-up Starbucks in the main room. A real Starbucks. You can even use your app.”
Before she left the man to his ecstasy she conceded that, yes, coffee was a much better idea for one of these things than alcohol. Social lubricant never seemed to loosen anyone up to where they’d either make a breakthrough or embarrass themselves enough to be amusing.
The main room was to Henaghan’s right. She decided to go left and save the coffee as a reward for slogging through a painful situation. Keeping her eyes down to discourage casual interaction, Quinn scanned the crowd, looking for someone that matched Glen’s description. Finally, after three oddly-shaped rooms full of misguided social climbers, she thought she saw him. Leaning against the far wall in that third room was a bald man with a dad-bod. Moving closer, she saw him canvassing the room with one good eye. The other drifted off hither and yon. Sidling up next to him, she said, “Darren says to tell you he showed me the Cauldron today.”
Glen’s head turned , and he looked at her long enough to process her. “Fuck you,” he said.
Quinn blinked twice. “I’m sorry… Are you Glen?”
He took a swig from his Venti. “Yeah. I’m Glen, and Glen says, ‘Fuck you’.”
“Darren sent me. He said we all… share a common interest and that you might have some special insights.”
Glen nodded. “That’s true. I do have special insights. In point of fact, I’m an incredible badass. But—and this is important, so listen up—the next time I see Darren Taft I’m gonna burn him to the ground. Fuck him, fuck you, and fuck the unicorn you rode in on.”
