High Bloods

by John Farris

  “He asked for water,” I said. “I gave him some. I hope that was okay.”

  Max Thursday had put his head against the back of the rocking chair. His eyes opened and closed, but he didn’t appear to be in distress. Nonetheless Fran took a reading of his blood sugar. The level was within parameters and she seemed relieved. She pinched one of her grandfather’s cheeks lightly.

  “Max? You with us, darling?”

  He focused on her with a dawning look of pleasure. “Is lunch ready?” he said.

  “Almost.” Fran glanced at Luz Marie, who ambled away. She looked at me.

  “Obviously you put my grandfather under stress. I don’t suppose you would mind leaving now.”

  “We just chatted,” I said. I smiled at her but didn’t move. “He thought you were someone else,” I said, to see what that would get me.

  “Did he?” There was something guarded in her eyes. Her lips parted, then closed on an unasked question. She looked at her grandfather again, with fondness and regret. “He gets this way. As we all will.” Then she said, mostly to herself, “The years just vanish. Like flies in a sandstorm.”

  “Is it time for you to go back to work?” Max Thursday asked her in another moment of disconnect.

  “Not yet, Max. We haven’t had our lunch yet.”

  “Do you work near the ranch?” I said.

  Francesca shrugged, maintaining patience. Just.

  “I’m not far. San Jack Town.”

  Max looked at me. “I didn’t ask them to stay for lunch,” he said. His mind seemed to be clearing up.

  “They won’t be,” Fran said, her hand on her hip again, fingers curling the way a jungle cat’s tail twitches as she prepared to stare me down.

  “What is it you do, Miss Obregon? Secretarial?”

  That nettled her. “Hardly. I’m an executive of Brenta International. CEO of Nanomimetics, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, Miles Brenta. Do you see much of the big boss?”

  “At board meetings.”

  “Not on social occasions?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “You’ve been asked to leave,” Max Thursday said, energized by the hostility flowing my way. He tried to rise from the rocker. I lent a helping hand. Francesca moved to his other side.

  “Who’s Carlotta?” I said to her.

  “Get out, Mr. Rawson. I mean business.”

  Beatrice came toward us and laid the silver knife on the deal table. She had sheathed her knife.

  “Thanks for showing me this,” she said to Francesca, and looked at me with a hint of pleading in her eyes. “We really do have to go.”

  I nodded amiably to Fran, who turned her back on me and guided the old man toward the doorway with the beaded curtain.

  I heard Max say, “I’m not going to be in trouble, am I?”

  The beaded curtain clacked softly behind them. Parrots squawked in the dimness beyond. Otherwise there was silence.

  We walked outside. The Mexican kid looked up from a white wheelbarrow filled with geraniums he was watering and sprinted to the golf cart.

  As we went down the steps Beatrice took a firm grip on my arm.

  “Oh boy,” she said, almost whispering. “Do I have something to tell you!”

  “Okay.”

  “Not here. The farther we are from this place, the better.”

  I tried to find out why she was agitated, or what had spooked her. But on the trip back to the helicopter she shook her head resolutely and kept mum. She looked back twice at the house, as if checking to see if we were being watched.

  I humored her. Once I had the helo airborne and we were headed west Bea let out her breath and opened up.

  “There’s no way I could actually prove this a hundred percent,” she said. “And since my fingerprints are on it anyway… but I don’t think I’m wrong. Francesca has my knife! The knife we last saw sticking out of the Hairball’s throat in Artie’s office!”

  “It’s a custom job?” She nodded. “Do you have your initials on it somewhere?”

  “No, damn it. And I’m not saying there couldn’t be a few thousand knives around that aerodynamically are virtually identical to mine.”

  “Then what makes you think—”

  “I had the knife for five years almost! And I practiced with it a lot, at least three times a week at the Beverly Hills Knife and Gun Club. The handle is all silver. Nicks and scratches are unavoidable. But there’s one particular deep nick where the ball of my thumb rested so that I knew each time my grip was right and my throw would be good. I made it myself with a nail file.”

  “It’s not much to go on,” I said. “We’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I still want my knife back,” Bea said, glowering. “And now I know where it is.” She was quiet for a time. “What did you think of her?”

  “Mucha mujer,” I said, and pretended to dodge her look of displeasure.

  “Is she High Blood?”

  “She wasn’t registering Lycan on my scanner.”

  “But that doesn’t eliminate rogue.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But almost always when I run into a wild one, I know. It’s an instinct that has saved my life a couple of times.”

  I gained some altitude to put plenty of room between us and a trio of ultralights that were like migrating butterflies.

  “There are lies in that house,” I said. “But they aren’t about family bloodlines.”

  Bea said, “You know that old man was lying, don’t you? He’s far too feeble to go fishing in the mountains by himself. He was there when they were shooting werewolves. And who do you suppose he had Francesca confused with?”

  “Carlotta might be someone in Thursday’s extended family who resembles Fran. If not her twin.”

  “There were at least a dozen beautiful women in those portraits hanging in the parlor,” she said. “A lot of resemblances, now that I think about it.” She watched me fly for a couple of minutes. “I don’t see how you keep us in the air. Your hands barely move the controls.”

  “If I wagged the cyclic or collective enough for you to notice, we’d be all over the sky. It’s a matter of feel, maintaining steady pressure. Want to try the controls yourself?”

  “No, thanks. Flying makes me nervous as it is. It’s like a circus up here; I keep looking for Dumbo.” After a few moments she made another approach to what was on both our minds. “I know I’m not wrong about my knife. But that means Francesca had to be there last night.”

  “Or afterward, when Chickie’s body was dumped.”

  “I guess so. If she was there at de Sade’s, then she could’ve seen me. And she wouldn’t have been so quick to hand over the knife.” She shuddered slightly. “If she recognized both of us, she’s really great at keeping her cool. Some psychopaths are adept at that, aren’t they? This is getting complicated. I don’t like complicated, and it scares me.”

  “Whether she was at de Sade’s or not, Francesca is connected to both the mal de lune hunt and Artie’s murder.”

  “Oh my God! I was hoping you were going to tell me not to worry!”

  “When the name ‘Carlotta’ came up at Thursday’s house, it helped me to tie some loose ends together.”

  “How?”

  “Chickie Hickey and Bucky Spartacus are, or were, protégés of the same very wealthy man who likes to dabble in moviemaking. Miles Brenta is also, as you heard Francesca say, chairman of the company she works for. Brenta was, and I believe he still is, married to a woman who survived a werewolf attack. Which is rare enough to be called a miracle.”

  “And she’s the Carlotta Max Thursday was talking about? What was it he said—’I’m doing this for Carlotta.’ Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. What I would like to know meanwhile is how Carlotta Brenta and Fran Obregon are related.”

  “How hard can that be? I’ll find out for you. So do you think Miles Brenta wanted Artie killed?”

  “The idea isn’t so far-fetched that I can dismiss it. But
digging into Brenta’s affairs—business or, especially, personal—is asking for trouble. The ILC isn’t immune from political pressure.”

  My hand on the cyclic trembled involuntarily. I dumped the air cushion from beneath the disk like some novice just learning to fly and we sank swiftly enough to make Beatrice yelp in alarm.

  Once I had control again and we were level in flight she said, “But you’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?”

  7

  treated Beatrice to lunch at my usual hangout, Doghouse Reilly’s, which was on the ground floor of a thirty-story condo on Pico, one block west of the Wall. Reilly’s was an old-fashioned saloon with deep cozy booths and dark oak paneling on two walls, mirrors elsewhere. There were the usual autographed celebrity photos. The beef brisket was good there, and Reilly’s had the largest selection of microbrews in Beverly Hills.

  A couple of the faces in the photos I recognized as being on the vanished list. But the stars remained in a glossy state of half-life on Reilly’s walls, with the color in the photos and the stars’ allure of yesteryear both fading slowly into showbiz twilight.

  Beatrice said, staring into her glass of beer, “Did you bring Elena here?”

  “She always wanted to come when the Dublin Pipers were in town. Reilly’s has other good Irish bands on Thursday nights.”

  “You don’t like talking about Elena. I understand. But that just makes me think about her all the more, and wonder—you know.”

  “You can ask me anything about Elena.”

  “She was always the Girl Next Door?”

  “I remember when I was four or five rocking her in her pram. Later there were birthday parties, but little boys don’t play that much with little girls. I think I first started paying attention to her when she was twelve or thirteen and I was getting my growth spurt and some fuzz on my cheeks.”

  Bea smiled at that. I’d been a little tense at first but as I opened up and found it easier to talk I began to relax, although not without a certain heaviness of heart.

  “Her father died when Elena was fourteen. Both of them took Baird Grace’s passing very hard. Ida looks and sounds a lot tougher than she is. She had a breakdown, and Elena was obliged to finish her schooling in the east and in Europe. We wrote now and then but didn’t see much of each other for a long time. While she was studying at the London School of Economics she got married—pretty much on impulse, she told me later. I tried and failed at a couple of things before I became an ILC investigator, which suited some talents I barely knew I had. Our two families had a falling-out over Ida’s second husband. Ida was obsessed with the idea that my mom stole Ray Scarlett from her. I don’t think that’s how it was, but Scarlett did go off with Pym on a months-long expedition looking for the remnant of a lost tribe reputed to be immune to Lycan Disease.”

  “In Borneo?”

  “Yeah. Unfortunately Ray got a fever and then his kidneys conked on him. Meanwhile Elena divorced her husband and headed home to Beverly Hills to see what she could do about keeping her kid sister on the rails. Didn’t work out: Mal went Lycan at seventeen. The only good thing that came of it was Elena and I meeting again after more than a decade. And—it was—”

  “What had been simmering for a lot of years came to a boil.”

  “Well, that. And by then we had the maturity to appreciate each other. We probably would have been married a month after she returned, if her family situation hadn’t been such a mess. Ida claimed she would poison herself if Lenie didn’t drop me. As you can probably figure, I was getting most of the fallout from my mom’s adventuring with Ray Scarlett.”

  Beatrice nodded sympathetically. Our lunch came. Bea poked at a salad and I ate most of my corned beef on rye.

  “Elena didn’t say a word this morning when she found me in your bedroom. Just backed away and disappeared.”

  “You had every right to be in there. I don’t know if I can say the same for Lenie. But it’s not going to happen again.”

  “My being in your bedroom?”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s exactly where I want you. From now on.”

  “We haven’t had a chance to simmer, much less—”

  “Two things I never argue with. Natural selection and my cojones. When it’s right it’s right, Bea.”

  She whistled low, adding a happy, third note this time.

  “I did want to hear that, although I was kind of roundabout getting there.” She looked earnestly at me. “But if Elena comes again—”

  “She’s a woman in trouble, Beatrice. And we’re old friends. Last time I saw Lenie she was half out of her mind from grief. Nothing left to offer me but the bad blood in her veins. She asked me to—finish the destruction. I think she must be well over that.”

  “Or she would’ve been dead long ago?”

  “Yes.”

  We were having coffee when Joe Cronin stopped by our booth. Not just to say hello. When lawyers in Cronin’s league pull up a chair to chat with me it’s no coincidence that we happen to be in the same place at the same time.

  “The last date I brought here,” Cronin said, looking around, “thought ‘cunnilingus’ was an Irish troubadour.”

  He was a slight man with a type-A personality who spent most of his days in overdrive. He ran marathons on weekends to bleed off stress. His manner was usually chipper; but once he bore down on you his gaze could chip flint. He was tastefully dressed, as were all the fifty-odd male lawyers in his firm, like an Edwardian-era undertaker. Ah, fashion.

  “Beatrice Harp, Joe Cronin,” I said.

  Cronin flashed a smile of pleasure, then didn’t look at her again for five minutes. Because he was a notorious horndog, the fact that I was getting all of his attention meant that I’d probably rather be toasting my bare feet in hell.

  “Understand you’re looking for one of our clients,” he said. His fists were knuckle to knuckle on the back of the chair he straddled.

  “Prather Fitzhugh and Golightly has a hell of a client list,” I said.

  “Bucky Spartacus.”

  “Oh, Bucky. Yeah, I would like to talk to him. Know where I can find him?”

  “Not offhand. He’s a busy boy these days. What’s it about?”

  “I’m looking into a matter involving his girlfriend. Chickie Hickey.”

  “Another of our clients.”

  “Really?”

  “So what is it all about, Rawson?”

  “Ongoing investigation.”

  He stared at me; I stared back. Since he knew me well enough to know he wasn’t going to get anything that way, he relaxed his fists and tempered his approach.

  “Okay, so what has she done? Skipped her meds?”

  “It may be a case of what’s been done to her,” I said.

  “By Bucky?”

  “I don’t know yet. Haven’t talked to him.”

  Cronin tried not to look exasperated. “What has Chickie had to say?”

  “Can’t find her either,” I said. “Just not my day, I guess.”

  “So you have no evidence of a crime committed by either of our clients.”

  I let that one go, and permitted a meaningful silence to build.

  “Anyway, Bucky’s High Blood,” Cronin said. “He doesn’t come under your purview. He doesn’t have to say dick to you if he doesn’t want to.”

  “It would be a courtesy,” I said.

  Cronin thought about it.

  “You know he’s got this gig tomorrow night. A big boost to his career.”

  “I heard.”

  “Right now Bucky could be doing half a dozen things. Rehearsal. Picking out some new threads at Jerry Lee’s.” Cronin smiled slightly. “I asked him one time why he wore his jeans so tight. He said, ‘Man, it ain’t rock and roll if your jeans don’t hurt.’“

  “He’s not back on Molochs, is he?” Molochs was another name for crystal meth.

  Cronin looked amazed and indignant.

  “Hey, that was just a kid thing! Lasted a couple of weeks
, then his padrone caught on and had Bucky in rehab fast-fast.” Cronin snapped his fingers twice to demonstrate just how on top of things Miles Brenta had been. “Nowadays Bucky’s clean as angels. He has a serious nature. A student of TM. So like I’m saying, if he’s temporarily out of touch it’s because, hell, he’s an artist. Needs some alone time to prepare for his gig. They’re looking for upward of forty thousand over there in Pasadena.”

  “Doesn’t solve my problem. I’ll just keep on hoping I bump into Bucky before then.”

  Cronin looked over my bargaining chip and decided to call.

  “Okay. Just lay off a little while and I’ll introduce you to our boy tomorrow night at the fund-raiser. Once his gig is over, have a couple of beers with him. Ask him whatever’s on your mind. But I sit in, Rawson.”

  “Looking forward to it,” I said.

  Then he took his time checking Beatrice out. Bea offered him a cool nod for his appreciation. The three of us left Doghouse Reilly’s. After promising to be in touch about my “interview” with Bucky Spartacus, Cronin dodged a westbound Pacific Electric trolley and grabbed a pedicab for the short trip to his firm’s offices on Wilshire.

  Bea and I waited for the parking valet to bring my Land Rover. A street sweeper swished by. The Privilege was an immaculate place. No hoochers, curb roaches, bloodstains left by wingless angels. No dirt, bad air, birdcrap, butts, paper cups, gobs of coochputty, cracks in the sidewalks, weeds in the concrete planters. Pedicabs chirped like crickets so you wouldn’t absentmindedly walk in front of one. MagLevs hummed along. A million solar-gain windows reflected clouds. A block from us a nearly forty-foot 3-D mural of Bogart, Bergman, and Paul Henreid in the penultimate parting scene from Casablanca dominated our shut-in view. Other murals of long-departed stars and their fabulous films were all over town, blown up to cloud-size, relieving the stark ugliness of miles of thick concrete wall. Tourists loved them; but then all of the Privilege must have seemed like heaven for the fantasy challenged of a traumatized society.

  Bea said, “I started to get this odd feeling while the two of you were talking.”

  “What about?”

  “Remember you told me how you bumped into Chickie at de Sade’s before you came upstairs to see the boss?”