by John Farris
Mal Scarlett had been the surprise offspring of Ida’s second marriage, when Ida was fifty-one years of age. Mal was born two weeks after my father died. Now at seventy-four Ida was spare of motion, finely eroded, but still erect. She had put down her sable brush just as I walked into the glass-walled orangerie. She stared at the canvas on her studio easel, ignoring me.
I made myself at home on a two-piece wicker lounger and waited to be acknowledged. She was, as always, painting butterflies and hummingbirds and big splashy crimson flowers. The garden outside was filled with all three.
“I thought maybe by now you would’ve taken a whack at abstract expressionism—like Jackson Pollock’s stuff,” I said, just to get the conversational ball rolling.
“Those paintings are as ugly as bug guts on a windshield.”
Ida turned then, slowly, with a certain arrogant tilt of her head, looking at me as if I were an afterthought. She had a butch haircut and a tough flat face, the ashen lack of expression that of a martyr who has long since squandered all of her passions but one. I thought she probably despised me, but that was nothing compared to how she felt about my mother.
She had a smudge of blue oil paint next to one flared nostril. I helpfully pointed that out to her. Ida sniffed contemptuously and glared at me.
“Well, then. Is she dead? Is that what you’ve come to tell me?”
“Pym? No. I don’t think so. Although she’s been out of touch for a while.”
“Still searching for the magic cure, is she?”
“The secret of immunity she thinks is out there, just one more isolated, dawn-of-history tribe away.”
“So if she isn’t dead, this is going to be something likely to spoil my day,” Ida said, with an understated smile of malice.
“Ida, why don’t you let up on Pym? She didn’t steal your husband. I don’t think she slept with him either. They did go off together on an expedition. He admired—”
“Admired? Worshipped her, you mean. He was utterly spellbound by her fame. As for the sexual relationship you deny—my husband may have been a weak man, but he was damned attractive.”
“I think he just wanted to accomplish something worthwhile in his life.”
“Pitiful,” she sneered. “Off on a jaunt, cavorting through jungles, hoping to discover—himself. I told him more than once. Only in relentless self-appraisal can one fashion character strong in purpose, touched by grace.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “you just may drive yourself to drink.”
She studied me, something heavy in each of her dark eyes, like unshed tears lethal as mercury. I had been momentarily pissed at Ida, but I relented.
A fly buzzing near her unfinished painting distracted Ida. She swiped at it with her right hand, then began searching through a tall jar of brushes on her worktable.
“I suppose the real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons,” she said. Quoting Jean Renoir.
Before she could decide I wasn’t worth any more of her time I said to Ida, “Where’s Elena?” My pulses were racing.
Her back was to me as she selected the brush she wanted. I couldn’t tell by her reflection in one of the tall orangerie windows if there was a change of expression. But she might already have had a premonition of why I’d come calling, and had prepared herself for the question.
“How should I know? I suppose if she cared to see either of us she would have, years ago.”
“Bullshit, Ida. Elena was here. Around sunrise. Maybe she called you first. You know I can find out. But she also came to see me. I wasn’t home. She gave my houseguest a good scare. Elena’s spoor was all over my bedroom, in the garden, right up to the wall between our properties.”
Ida turned to glare at me.
“Sorry,” I said.” ‘Spoor’ is Wolfer talk. I should’ve used a different terminology. Still, what Elena left behind was as obvious to me as my own face in the mirror. Her specific energy pattern. Vibes. You know.”
“More of your vaunted ‘Sixth Sense’?” she said, with an attempt at a sneer.
“It’s nothing that all other human beings don’t have. I’m just better able to tune in to the electrical fields connecting living minds. Or dead ones, in some cases. The newly dead.”
Having selected the brush she wanted, Ida changed her mind about going back to work and put down her palette.
“There are seven gateways into Beverly Hills,” I reminded her. “They’re all monitored. Profilers, Snitch readers. Even though Lenie’s not a registered Lycan, I won’t have to go to any trouble to learn where she came in and what name she’s using. So stop stalling me.”
Ida crossed bare arms over her fin de siècle painter’s smock, as if in response to an inner Arctic chill.
“I hadn’t seen her for many months. She always—she shows up unannounced. Fugitive. A little frightened.”
She was a fugitive. As are all rogue werewolves. But I didn’t press the point with Ida, because I’d seen a moment of anguish spark in her desolate eyes, grief for a once-beloved child.
“Elena was alone?”
“No. She came with two—friends, I presume. On motorcycles. Bikers, is that what they’re called? They wore identical jackets, a lot of silver around their necks, piled on their wrists.”
“Were they Diamondbackers?”
“I wouldn’t know. The dogs didn’t like them. They kept their distance while Elena and I—Diamondbacker?”
“For the snakeskin tats they all have on their backs.”
“Is that a club, or something more sinister?”
“They’re the worst. Since all drugs were legalized they’ve made their livings by snatching celebrity Lycans for ransom. Or else they’re werewolf killers, claiming the fat bounties some High Bloods are willing to post.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said unconvincingly. “I pay little attention anymore to what goes on out there.” Ida nodded, agreeing with herself, with the propriety of her reclusive life, while she looked around at small beautiful objects on display in her orangerie, favorite paintings, the walled garden outside that protected her secular nunnery. “Does it really matter who she is with, what sort of life she leads now?”
Ida was giving me a headache. “Here’s the reality. If Lenie’s passing herself off as High Blood, she couldn’t be in with a worse crowd.” Although I couldn’t figure that one out, what Elena’s motive might be in running with Diamondbackers. “I’m not the only animal psychic around. If I can sniff out a rogue werewolf off-Observance, there are others who can do the same. Maybe in one of the Diamondbacker chapters. You don’t want to know what they’ll do to her if—”
That was nearly too much for Ida.
“No! I don’t want to know! Because for seven years she has been as good as dead to me. Do you think I get any pleasure from her surreptitious little visits? Oh, she tries to put such a good face on her tragedy! Her efforts only serve to remind me of who she was and what I hoped she might become in spite of the iniquities of a maddened world. But there can be no hope, neither for Elena nor for Mallory—although Mal, if she possesses any self-awareness apart from vanity, must know she has gotten just what she deserved.”
One of the mastiffs responded to her shrill tone with an anxious whine. Ida seemed momentarily as blind as the Sphinx, half buried in stifling drifts of old angers and recrimination.
“Speaking of Mal,” I said, “she went off-line early Saturday morning.”
Ida blinked a couple of times. She was lightly misted with perspiration around her eyes, at her temples.
“Oh?” she said vaguely.
Other than her eyeblinks she didn’t move or betray any comprehension of what I was talking about. But the heavy beat of a pulse in her throat told me she already knew about Mal.
“Have you spoken to her lately?”
Ida roused herself from her sere purview and returned to form.
“She only calls when she needs more money.”
“But she hasn’t—�
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“I do not encourage Mal to visit either. We have nothing to talk about. Except, perhaps, her father. Whom, I suppose, she misses. They were always—she adored—”
Ida seemed suddenly dazed. Too much vitriol was bad for aging hearts. There were a couple of crystal decanters on a low table in a part of the orangerie that contained a well-lighted reading corner and bookshelves of first-edition classics. I poured a snifter a quarter full of Armagnac and took it to Ida.
She found the fumes bracing; her eyes began to clear.
“Stop waving that under my nose,” she snapped. She unclenched her hands, took the glass with a look of surcease and drank, her eyes closing as she did so. Then she breathed deeply and looked at me.
“Why don’t you have one too?” she said grudgingly. “I feel shameful, drinking all by myself at this hour.”
So I poured another shot. Seemed the right time for a strengthener. And some codeine to dodge the headache.
“I don’t suppose you can find her,” Ida said casually.
“Mal? We’re looking, but—”
“Once that sensor is no longer embedded beneath her clavicle it can be difficult. I, ah, suppose.”
Something in my glance disconcerted her.
“I learned about that watching a television program.”
“Oh.”
“I’m quite fond of the Discovery Channel.”
“Sure.” I wanted to talk about Elena. The fact that she was passing for High Blood off-Observance was neither the best nor the worst news I’d had since her disappearance. I was only glad that she was still alive.
“How did she look this morning?” I asked Ida.
“Elena?” Her expression softened almost impalpably. “As lovely as the day she had to leave me.”
“Hard to believe.” I was familiar with the ravages done to the human personas of werewolves who haired-up at each full moon.
“True.” There was something malicious in the frankness of Ida’s gaze. “How does that feel?”
“Like a kind of death.”
“Good. You never deserved her, you know.”
Not a topic for argument. Not now, anyway. “Why was she here? Something special about this day?”
“I’ve told you. Elena just turns up. I never know when that may be.”
“But today was different from the other times. Because today she also paid a call on me. Except I wasn’t there. What’s going on? What did she have to say to you, Ida?”
“Nothing that would be of interest to you. Her visit was brief.” Ida paused. “I asked her never to come again.”
Like all poor liars—or those forced into a lie—Ida Grace spoke with an excess of conviction.
I didn’t believe her. But there was no point in challenging her either. I finished my Armagnac. One of the mastiffs got up from the orangerie floor and went outside to pee in the garden. Two hummingbirds were visiting the feeder near the open door.
“Might I get back to work now?” Ida said with an edge of sarcasm. She was watching the tiny hummers, the speed of their wings like flashes of pale fire against the deep green backdrop of photinias.
“Thanks for your time, Ida.”
I was giving up too easily; Ida knew it. That worried her. And if she was worried, it meant that next time I was going to see Elena and not just the vagueness of her doppelgänger haunting my house. I very likely would be seeing her soon.
Before I returned to Beatrice I ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance on Ida’s house and on Ida herself.
On the short walk to my own doorstep I tried putting together some vague pieces of information I’d heard or intuited during my half hour with her.
There was what I considered to be the urgency of Elena’s visit and her desire to see me—by climbing over the eight-foot wall in our secret place to my backyard. Which could have meant she didn’t want her biker escorts to know where she was going. And she wasn’t just taking a nostalgia trip. Elena had startled the half-awake Bea in my bedroom but said not a word to her. Hey, sorry, kid; just wanted to say hello to R. And she had left no message for me, either.
I now had good reason to believe that Mallory Scarlett was actually missing, in the bad sense of the word. It was a good bet that her Snitcher had been surgically removed. Elena knew that, and, I thought, she must also know why. Was Mal just another hostage for ransom, and had Elena been dispatched to pick up a gym bag full of money from their mother?
But I couldn’t believe Elena would have any part in a kidnap plot involving her sister.
If it wasn’t a kidnapping for profit, then it was something else that might have to do with a much larger sum than they could hope to wring out of an old lady. Even a Beverly Hills old lady.
Something much worse.
I took pity on Ida then, because it appeared both of her daughters were in some sort of jeopardy—estranged from their mother, of course, but still embedded deeply in her heart and soul where the good times and special moments remained, no matter how crushed she was by emotional hardship.
When I walked into the kitchen where good things had been prepared in the double ovens, Beatrice smiled shyly at me. She’d made huevos rancheros and guava popovers. I realized I was starved. We sat outside in the courtyard where the morning glories were just folding up for the day. I ate a lot and drank two cups of fresh coffee. My headache, or Ida-ache, had dulled down. Bea only nibbled while I finished telling her about Elena.
“You probably know from Artie that there is a major black market in the blood business.” She nodded. “The big profits that used to come from the drug trade now attract the same racketeers to bootleg blood. Probably more than half of Off-Blooders can find themselves desperate to ensure a continuous supply. At any price. Particularly if they’re a rare type like AB negative. A prosperous man such as Artie Excalibur must have had two or three blood cows for his exclusive use.”
Beatrice nodded again.
“A woman in Thailand and a Danish avant-garde composer. I oversaw all of the purity evals for Artie. Each of his High Bloods receive a hundred thousand a year for their donations.” She looked confused, frowning. “What does this have to do with Elena Grace?”
“Before I became a deputy director of ILC SoCal I worked undercover busting gangs who peddled tainted or artificial blood in bulk to Offs lacking Artie’s bankroll. People who couldn’t be all that choosy about the source of their refills, couldn’t afford the rigorous screenings to detect a thousand and one viruses that could kill them in a few days. A risky way to live. So was the work I was doing. Especially when there was another Intel guy willing to break my identity to the wrong people to improve his career prospects.”
Beatrice folded her lower lip between her teeth, afraid of what she imagined was coming next.
“Elena didn’t know about my double life, of course. She trusted me in all things. I trusted myself to keep her safe. But I should have stayed away from her until I was rotated out of our bloodleggers unit.”
“You were in love, so—” Beatrice shrugged. “You had to see her.”
“Yeah. I had to see her. In little hideaways here and there. But after I was betrayed, four members of the gang caught up to us at a bed-and-breakfast near Ojai. I killed two of them. The other pair kicked my head in”—I tapped the slight indentation on my forehead beneath which lay a silver plate—”and were pouring gasoline on me when an off-duty CHP interrupted their play. They got away with Elena. She turned up three days later on a foggy stretch of Carillo beach, barefoot, half naked. They had raped her repeatedly. The one who spoiled her blood was a cousin of the gang leader, who hadn’t showed up for my barbecue. I guess he planned to watch the DVD later. Anyway the rogue Lycan invited for the fun was named LouLou Morday.”
“Oh God. So awful.”
“I was in a coma for ten days, in the hospital three months. Spent more time recuperating at my mother’s lodge up at Big Bear. Talking to the squirrels until I could recognize the sound of my own voice. I forced m
yself to walk until I could manage a mile without my right foot starting to drag. I had the kind of headaches steel-toed boots can give you. I still do. More months passed without a word from Elena. She never came to the hospital. Of course for a long while she was in miserable shape herself.
“Ida held me completely responsible for the attack on her daughter. She wouldn’t tell me where Elena was. It was Mal who tipped me that she was in a psychiatric clinic in Canada, near Banff. With all of my resources at ILC I still couldn’t get in to see her. So once I was ninety percent recovered and hoping for the best for Elena’s sake, I turned to other matters.”
It must have been the look on my face. Beatrice said, “You don’t have to—”
“Why not? You want to know me, this is part of it. First I tracked down LouLou Morday and fed small chunks of him to a flock of wild geese. Until there wasn’t much left that was essential to his continued existence.”
Beatrice swallowed hard and got up quickly from the table, went to a far corner of the courtyard and made gagging sounds. Nothing came up. I guess it was for the best she hadn’t eaten much breakfast.
“I was a little upset with him,” I explained. “As for the guys who fled that night with Elena, a routine spike job was enough for them. By then I’d mellowed.”
“What’s a—No, don’t tell me.”
Bea got her composure back and came slowly to me. She stood behind me and put a hand lightly on the back of my bowed head. A blessing of sorts. My overheated blood drained slowly from my face.
“The gang leader, the one who planned to watch my immolation in the comfort of his Woodland Hills rec room with a bowl of popcorn and some cold brew, him I haven’t been able to lay a hand on. His name is Raoul J. Ortega. He is, I’ve been told, important to ILC Intel. They want him alive and working at his game, whatever it is currently. But someday Raoul J. Ortega will be expendable to ILC. Raoul and I both know that. Knowing may give him some anxious moments. Because I can wait, and I’ll never forget.”
“And you never saw Elena again?” Beatrice said after a few moments.
“Only once,” I said.
