by Jen Klein
At long last we rumbled into a bumpy gravel lot.
I pulled out my phone. “Just a sec,” I said, tapping a quick message to Norbert:
do me a favor, k? make a list of any former clients who might have been less than satisfied w umbra. thx
It was within the realm of possibility that someone had realized they’d been conned and sent the obituary as retribution. Certainly more possible than anything else that I’d conceived of. I pressed send and turned to Sky. “Okay, how do you want to play this?”
“Let’s wing it.”
Before I could protest, Sky had already leapt from the car and was heading toward Clean Lee’s office. Cursing him, I followed at a run.
You wouldn’t expect the office of a downtown tow yard to be a glamorous affair, and you would be correct. The room was tiny and filthy and dim. A middle-aged man in a suit as gray as the walls looked up when we entered. “What kind of car?” he demanded.
“Pardon me?” asked Sky.
“What kind of car did you lose?” he said, this time more loudly.
“Actually, we’re not here for a car,” said Sky.
We’re not?
“You’re not?” said the man.
Sky stuck out his hand with such confidence that the man shook it automatically. “I’m Sky Ramsey.”
“Babe Lee.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Lee.” Sky gestured toward me. “And this is my assistant—”
“Murgatroyd Smith,” I said: punishment for calling me his assistant.
Mr. Lee grimaced at me. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Your parents are mean,” said Mr. Lee.
“Your name is Babe,” I retorted.
“My parents are fans of major league baseball,” he explained.
Fair enough.
“We’re writing an article for the UCLA student newspaper,” said Sky.
“So?” said Mr. Lee.
“It’s about top local businesses,” said Sky. I crossed my arms. I couldn’t wait to see how this related back to Todd Harmon’s car.
Mr. Lee brightened. “Yeah?”
Sky nodded. “Your company was nominated to be featured. Are you willing to give me a couple quotes, maybe some information about how you got started and why you’re so popular?”
Mr. Lee gestured across the dank room to a cluster of dented folding chairs. “Be my guest! I have lots to say about my popularity.”
I started toward a chair. Fine. I’d figure out how to work this angle. Maybe open with a question about the most common makes of cars that got towed, then somehow move the conversation toward Hondas . . . But Sky clearly had other plans.
“Murgatroyd, I am conducting the interview,” he snapped. He turned to Mr. Lee with an apologetic headshake. “She’s always overstepping her boundaries.” Before I could even glare at him, he said, “Just go outside. Get some photos of the exterior. Don’t forget shots of the cars.” He turned to Mr. Lee. “She can get into the yard, right?”
“Gate’s open.”
Nicely done. Pretty brilliant, in fact. I had to give Sky that. I threw an appreciative glance at him—he winked in return—and I hurried from the building. It wasn’t too hard to find a teal Honda Accord among the dozens of cars packed into the yard. I checked the license plate against the number Norbert had given me. Todd Harmon’s car, all right.
Unfortunately, all four doors were locked.
I leaned against the driver’s side window and shaded my eyes with my hand to peer inside. There was a backpack on the floor in the back. I was contemplating smashing the window with a rock when I realized there was also something on the front passenger seat. I went around the car to take a look. Lying there were a dozen roses that had—I think—once been red. Now they were brown and brittle, pink tissue paper crumpled around them. A rectangular card lay next to the dead blossoms, blank except for a preprinted message: I LOVE YOU. And underneath that, in small italicized font, the name of the florist: Howard’s Flowers.
A quick web search gave me the address.
*
Ten minutes later, we were back in my car and heading toward the Valley. I handed my phone over so Sky could see the photo I’d taken. “Todd bought a bouquet of roses but never gave them to anyone.”
“Weird,” he mused.
“Roses are expensive,” I said. “They’re not like chrysanthemums. They’re not like Gerber daisies.”
“I like Gerber daisies,” said Sky.
“Me too,” I said. “But they’re cheap.”
“You’re low maintenance. That’s nice.”
I ignored his comment. “Todd might have bought those roses for Corabelle, but he also could have been planning to give them to some other girl. We know he canceled his date with Corabelle on Wednesday night.”
“We know more than that,” Sky said. “We know he smelled like hellfire on Thursday morning. We also know that he drove downtown sometime between Thursday night and Friday afternoon.”
“And got his car towed,” I finished. “We need to figure out where he was heading. Right now, the last time we’ve been able to definitely place him is at his own apartment on Thursday night. Sometime between when everyone went to bed and when Corabelle woke up on Friday morning, he left and nobody knows where he was going. It could have been anything. A drug score, a booty call—”
“A succubus booty call.”
I tried very hard not to roll my eyes. I was mostly successful. “Anyway, we need to find out who Todd was going to see downtown.”
“It’s whoever he met on Wednesday,” said Sky.
“You don’t know that.”
“By all appearances, until he ran into a succubus, he was really into Corabelle.”
“People lie,” I said.
“Cynic,” Sky said, but he laughed, and I couldn’t help but laugh too.
“Meeting a succubus on Wednesday is the only reason that makes sense,” Sky went on. “Why else would Todd have canceled his date with Corabelle that night? He would have been all hellsick.”
“Hellsick,” I repeated. “Listen to yourself.”
“And tormented,” he added, ignoring my comment. “So Todd spent the night like that. Desperate. Suffering. He tried to shake it off and have a normal breakfast with Corabelle. Except he couldn’t be normal because he’d already been infected. So he didn’t talk to her all day, didn’t sleep with her that evening, and then at some point in the night or early morning, he couldn’t take it anymore. He left to find the succubus.”
I kept my eyes on the road. “You know I think that’s ridiculous, right?”
“Think whatever you want, but Todd was going downtown for someone.”
“That, at least, I can agree with. He either bought those roses for Corabelle or for a new girl he was seeing.”
“Or for a succubus,” said Sky.
“Whoever they were for, she never got them.”
I didn’t need to turn my head to know Sky was nodding. “Because before Todd Harmon could deliver them . . .”
I finished the sentence for him. “He disappeared.”
Eleven
Howard’s Flowers was in Sherman Oaks on Ventura Boulevard between a 99¢ Store and a McDonald’s. When Sky and I walked in, Howard was nowhere to be found. Unless, of course, the slim, pig-tailed girl behind the counter was Howard. Which I doubted, since her nametag said she was Susan.
“Can I help you?” she asked us.
“We’re looking for information about one of your customers from last week,” I said, stepping in front of Sky. Yes, he had done a good job at the tow yard. But this was still my case. I was in charge.
“Why?” said Susan.
“We’re private investigators,” said Sky from behind me.
Susan looked both of us over. “Really?�
��
“Junior private investigators,” said Sky.
“The customer’s name is Todd Harmon,” I told her, trying to sound as old beyond my years as possible.
“He came in on Wednesday,” said Sky.
“Maybe on Wednesday,” I said.
Susan wrinkled her nose like she was thinking really hard. “I was here on Wednesday. I worked almost every day last week because Tori had to take some time off. She caught scabies from her boyfriend.”
Apparently Susan had no problem handing out information. But that was fine. It was actually good for our purposes. My purposes.
“Sorry about your friend,” said Sky.
“Oh, she’s not my friend,” said Susan. “She’s a skanky ho.”
For once, it appeared that Sky didn’t know how to respond. I jumped in. “Speaking of skanky hos, we think this Todd Harmon guy has one on the side.”
“Assface,” said Susan.
“He bought a bouquet of roses from your store.”
With a shake of her head, Susan dove beneath the counter and came up with a vinyl bag. She unzipped it and rummaged around until she found a wad of credit card receipts held together with a paper clip. She started to flip through them. “Sorry, this is Wednesday’s pile, but there’s nothing here from Todd Harmon.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Wednesday,” I said.
“Maybe he paid cash,” said Sky.
I showed Susan the photo of Todd that Corabelle had given me.
“Does he look familiar?”
“Yep,” said Susan. “I remember him.”
“You do?” Sky and I said in unison.
Susan went back to the nose-wrinkling thing for a moment before reopening the vinyl bag. She pulled out another wad of flimsy papers. “It wasn’t Wednesday,” she said.
Of course I couldn’t restrain myself from giving Sky a smug look.
“It was Thursday morning. I remember because Wednesday night I had a blind date with this douchey actor guy who was my cousin Monica’s friend from grad school,” Susan said. “He brought three sheets filled with teeny-tiny photos of himself. Head-shot proofs. Our entire date was spent drinking gasoline prairie fires and looking at those damn pictures of him.”
I blinked at her. “And Todd Harmon was—”
“There were so many pictures. So many. I’m telling you, it was the worst blind date in the history of bad blind dates.”
“Suck,” I said.
“Big suck,” Susan agreed. “And to make it worse, I forgot to set my cell phone alarm, so I woke up late, and then didn’t know where I was. Did I mention he lived in Manhattan Beach?”
I needed to take control of the conversation, but it was difficult. “You spent the night with him?” I found myself asking.
“I had a lot of gasoline prairie fires. Anyway, I lucked out because Thursday morning traffic wasn’t too bad. I got to work only fifteen minutes late, but there were already a couple customers waiting at the door. One of them was Todd Harmon.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
Susan slipped a receipt out of Thursday’s bundle and fluttered it at me. “Look.”
Sure enough, there was Todd Harmon’s autograph, along with proof that he had paid way too much for a dozen red roses.
I forced myself to smile at Susan. “You have a great memory.”
“Actually, I don’t. It’s just that he was kinda chatty. He told me all about his girlfriend. He was supposed to see her the night before—when I was on my awful blind date—but he had to cancel at the last minute because he had a migraine.”
Sky elbowed me. “A migraine?” he asked.
“Yeah. I bet it was more fun than my date. He bought the flowers because he was meeting his girlfriend for breakfast and wanted to apologize for blowing her off. After my crappy-ass night, it was kinda nice to hear a guy talk about how much he likes his girl. I bet he never made her sit through a zillion pictures of himself.”
“Did he smell funny?” asked Sky.
I shot him a look, but Susan seemed to think that this was a perfectly reasonable question. Maybe lots of funky-smelling people came in there. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I didn’t sniff him, but he looked like the kind of guy who would smell good.”
I held my phone over the pile of receipts. Click.
“Thanks for your time,” I told Susan, grabbing Sky’s arm and hauling him toward the door.
If he thought we were going to question Susan about the scent of brimstone, he was very wrong. Once outside, I let go of him so I could fire off a quick text update to Norbert before checking my watch. Just enough time to get to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power service center to pay my electric bill in cash—if there was zero traffic. Or if I suddenly learned how to fly.
It was shaping up to be another candlelit evening.
When I reached my car, Sky was no longer at my side. He was standing on the sidewalk, looking up and down Ventura Boulevard.
“Hey!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”
He jogged back toward me. “No gas stations nearby,” he said.
“I’m not following.”
“Todd has to have gone somewhere after buying the flowers but before he met Corabelle at the restaurant. I was thinking maybe he stopped for gas or something. I wish we’d checked to see how full his tank was at the tow yard.”
“And still not following.”
Sky sounded overly patient. “He wasn’t hellsick here, but he was by the time he met Corabelle for breakfast. He had to run into the succubus somewhere in between Howard’s Flowers and the restaurant. I’m trying to figure out where.”
I shook my head. “Maybe it’s the florist herself. Did that occur to you? That little smack-talking chick back there. Maybe she’s your succubus.”
“Don’t be silly.” Sky’s voice was mild. “She’s obviously not a succubus.”
The ridiculousness never ended. “And how do you know that?”
“Easy. I didn’t want to sleep with her. Not even a little.”
My fists sprang to my hips. “That’s it?” I squawked. “That’s your litmus test? If you—you, Sky Ramsey—think a girl isn’t hot enough to screw, she can’t be a succubus?” I was more than offended; I was enraged. But part of it was anger with myself: I couldn’t stop my mind from flashing back to the moment Sky had called me beautiful.
Did that mean he wanted to sleep with me? I had never done The Deed. I hadn’t even gotten close. It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious; it was that I’d never been curious enough to actually let some dumb teenaged boy paw all over me. And, let’s be honest, it wasn’t like I had dumb teenaged boys knocking down my door. Not that any of this mattered. My virginity had zero to do with the case.
“Succubi make men desire them,” Sky said in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s how they operate. Once they kiss you, you’ve got the taste for them. It’s like a personal signature from that specific succubus. It’s not impossible to break the addiction, but it’s not easy. Todd seems like a nice guy. If it happened at the gas station, the succubus could have been at the next pump or something. Todd makes a little small talk with her, and—bam!—suddenly he’s under her spell. It takes a lot of willpower to look away from the eyes of a succubus.”
“But what about the kiss?” I asked.
Sky shrugged. “All she has to do is lean over and kiss him. Easy. The question is, where did this happen?”
I considered. Yes, Sky was insane for believing that Todd had been zombified by succubus slobber, but clearly something weird had occurred, because the guy was MIA. It couldn’t hurt to trace Todd’s steps back from his disappearance. I motioned toward my car.
“Get in,” I said. “I have an idea.”
*
Moments later, we were heading north on Sepulveda. Sky was beside me, one finger ski
mming over the surface of his phone. Corabelle’s voice was in my ear.
“It’s just east of the freeway,” she said through my headset.
“Who got there first?” I asked her. “You or Todd?”
She gasped. “Do you think he was cursed at the restaurant?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said, slipping back into Umbra Investigations mode. It felt weirdly comfortable to lie again. Familiar. Easy. “We’re trying to place the time and location of the cursing.”
“Todd was first,” said Corabelle. “When I got there, he was already sitting in a booth, staring out the window. He didn’t stand up when I found him, and he didn’t kiss me. He always kisses me.”
I was silent. Maybe there was someone at the restaurant—a waitress or another customer—whom Todd didn’t want seeing him with Corabelle. “Have you ever met any of his ex-girlfriends?”
“No.”
“Could there be a girl from his past who wants him back?”
Corabelle huffed loudly in my ear. “Anyone from his past would want him back. He’s perfect.”
Barf.
“Of course. Were you—”
“Hold on,” Corabelle interrupted me. “Another call. I have to take this.” Then she hung up.
I shot a quick glance at Sky. He was on his phone. “Not yet,” he murmured.
Our eyes met. “Hurry,” I whispered to him. “We’re almost there.”
As we crossed over Saticoy, I realized I wasn’t only annoyed that he was distracted. I had an unpleasant flickering of jealousy, wondering whom he might be talking to. Sky shook his head at me. “I need something from you,” he said into his phone. “Todd’s signature.”
Conveniently, the light at Stagg turned yellow, so I was able to slam on my brakes. I whirled to face Sky. “Are you freaking kidding me? You called Corabelle while you knew I was talking to her?!”
