Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  Fanta shook her head. “You’re not thinking like a lawyer. This isn’t Chicago 1929. One body’s bad enough: Grundage wouldn’t be so anxious to meet if Hunter weren’t a serious inconvenience. A second body—or a mysterious disappearance—would turn up the heat, although maybe not enough to stop him from acting the way thugs act from instinct. A third might give him pause. It tips the odds more in Val’s favor.”

  Broadhead unscrewed and reassembled his pipe, often a sign he’d found need to attempt a puzzle he couldn’t handle comfortably. “But who? We’re two academics and a lawyer. Not exactly Friend material on Facebook.”

  Someone tapped on the door. The professor barked an invitation.

  Jason Stickley opened the door and poked his head inside. He wore his mysterious costume, complete with chain and padlock dangling outside his Victorian morning coat and top hat, with an assortment of gears and cogs attached to the crown and his eyes obscured behind a pair of black rubber goggles. The young intern peered from face to face, as if the scratched and discolored eyepieces made it difficult to distinguish one from another. At last he focused on Valentino.

  “Ruth said you were in here,” he said. “I’ve got another party, but there’s time, if you need me for anything.”

  Fanta and Broadhead glanced at Valentino with significance.

  He said, “How important is this party?”

  **

  “Awesome.”

  Valentino smiled to himself. He’d wondered if youngsters still used that word.

  “I hope it’s anything but. I’m counting on racketeers being more civilized these days. But Professor Broadhead and his fiancée insisted I don’t go down there alone.” He was driving, the young man seated beside him with his tricked-out top hat in his lap. The compact’s low roof allowed no room for it on his head.

  “That’s an interesting couple, those two.”

  “Not as interesting as how they became a couple.”

  “I really want to hear it, but can you drop me off at the party for just a minute? I was supposed to bring— something, and they’ll have to send someone else.”

  “Keg, or twenty-four pack?” Valentino grinned at the windshield.

  “Um.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t bust you. I’m grateful you agreed to come along. Where’s the party?”

  Jason directed him into a neighborhood he hadn’t known was there, made up of rows of industrial-looking brick buildings sharing common walls, with panes missing from gridded windows set too high up to provide a view from inside. “People live here?”

  “No. We all chipped in and rented a place for tonight. They made buzz-saw blades there in the olden days.”

  “I’ll reimburse you for your part.”

  “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Valentino. This is going to be way more interesting.”

  “Again, I hope not.”

  At length they drew up before a building that looked like all the rest. The year 1909 was chiseled in the yellowed cornerstone. With all the constant razing and rebuilding, it was astonishing to be in a part of L.A. that predated Hollywood.

  “Be just a sec.” Jason got out and put on his hat. Climbing the concrete steps to the door, frock coat draping his scarecrow figure, he looked like an undertaker in a Poe film.

  The door opened, letting out light and loud, discordant music that Valentino decided had been composed by a Russian modern master to celebrate tractors. He wondered, with amusement that would scandalize his ultraconservative department head, if Jason Stickley and his friends were communists. Another young man dressed similarly, in a formal cutaway over a starched white shirtboard and a bowler hat crusted over with machine parts, threw his arms around the newcomer and they retreated inside. The door closed, shutting off the music.

  Valentino’s cell rang. It was Harriet.

  “So what do we need to talk about?” she said sprightly.

  “How’s the conference?”

  “Swell. Jeff’s on a panel tonight, about the history of crime-scene equipment. He’s brought some stuff from his own collection. I can’t wait.”

  “They have panels at night?”

  “All day, and practically all night. It’s a big do. They have to run concurrently to fit everything in. We’re lucky when we get to eat before midnight.”

  That would explain her being up until almost dawn that morning, but he wasn’t sure if she was telling him the truth. Cautiously he said, “I hope the LAPD is paying you overtime.”

  “You said you wanted to talk?”

  “I’m at a party,” he found himself saying. “I think it’s going to get noisy. If you can’t reach me later, it’s because I won’t hear the phone.”

  He hated lying, and he wasn’t doing it because he didn’t believe what she’d said about the convention program. If he told her what he was up to, he knew she’d try to talk him out of it, and probably succeed. It didn’t make him feel any less guilty.

  “Since when do you go to noisy parties?”

  “You know how much I love Halloween. Anyway, it gives me something to do besides miss you.”

  “That’s sweet. Trying a little too hard, but sweet. What are you going as?”

  At that moment, a young woman (he assumed it was a woman) came along the sidewalk wearing a Victorian wedding gown and a deep-sea diver’s brass helmet. She hoisted a long train of ivory-colored lace over one arm and went up the steps to the party. “Madonna.”

  He’d always liked Harriet’s laugh. It was a flat-out guffaw, lusty as a man’s. “Which one, Truth or Dare or the mystic Jew?”

  “Virgin.”

  “That’s getting to be a long time ago. Do you think anyone will recognize it?”

  “Well, if they don’t, I’ll be in disguise, so I won’t embarrass myself.” The door opened again and Jason came out. “My host is coming over. I’ll call you later. Enjoy your thing.”

  “You, too. Just don’t get carried away and start singing.” They exchanged endearments and the conversation was over. Jason slid into his seat as Valentino was clapping shut the phone. “Miss Johansen?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say about our adventure?”

  “She told me to enjoy myself.”

  “Awesome. If I had a girl I bet she’d bust my chops over it.”

  “Bust your chops?”

  The boy blushed and smiled. “I like saying old stuff like that. Old stuff’s da bomb.”

  Valentino didn’t know where he stood now in the matter of understanding Jason’s generation. Was he talking to him in the language of his contemporaries, or parroting something that was utterly passé? The archivist pulled away from the obsolete factory, passing a group of young men and women in outrageous costumes, but all part of a theme he’d begun to recognize, if not identify. He knew where they were headed.

  “It’s none of my business, but my curiosity is burning a hole through me.”

  “The clothes?”

  “You don’t have to answer if I’m prying.”

  “No problem, sir. Sometimes it’s just hard for people who aren’t into it to understand.” He rumpled his black hair. The hat was on his lap again, his black rubber goggles loose around his neck. “It’s steampunk.”

  “Steampunk?”

  “Yeah. I guess you’d call it kind of a backlash to the whole ‘information superhighway’ deal. What it is, it’s Queen Victoria and steam engines.”

  “Uh-huh.” Although he wasn’t following, not at all.

  “See, at the same time people were wearing high stiff collars and bustles, the Industrial Age was chugging along, eating coal and pouring out big clouds of steam and smoke and making a racket. What gives us steampunks a charge, I guess, is that— that—”

  “Juxtaposition?”

  “Yes!” He flashed Valentino a look of gratitude mixed with astonishment. “The contrast. So what we do, we dress and act like people did back then—society people�
�but we mix it up with cogs and chains and old-time factory stuff. These parties, they’re not really costume things, not just. When the budget will stand it, we eat things like roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, using all the right forks and like that, but the centerpiece is a bouquet of pistons.”

  “But what do you get out of it?”

  “Well, I can only answer for me, but I don’t know how a computer works, do you?”

  “I don’t suppose anyone does outside technicians.”

  “I’m not so sure they do, either. Oh, they know how to operate them and fix them, and some even know how to build one from scratch, but I’m not sure they know how it actually works, how it does what it does. But you can look at a steam engine, see the flywheels spin and the belts turn and the drive rods move up and down and figure it out. That’s, well, it’s—”

  “Reassuring?”

  “Reassuring, that’s it. The rest is just kid stuff, I guess.” His voice trailed off on a slightly sullen note.

  “I must be a kid, then. It makes perfect sense to me.”

  Jason turned to him, and his grin was so broad it threatened to split his narrow face straight across. “I sort of thought— I hoped you’d say something like that. I’ve got a hunch you’re one of us.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think I’d be comfortable lugging all that on top of my head.”

  The boy examined his hat. The interlocking gears attached to the crown created the illusion, when he wore it, that they were the machinery that raised and lowered his pipecleaner limbs. “I lucked out at the junkyard. I paid them just over scrap price for the guts of a grandfather clock. You can go broke if you don’t know how to shop. What I meant was, this Frankenstein deal, for instance. Everybody in that movie had an English accent and drank tea, all veddy veddy proper, and here’s this guy stirring them all up with his flat head and bolts in his neck. And that laboratory, which is seriously cool, all those things spinning and spitting sparks and the operating table going up and down on pulleys.”

  “Steampunk.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I guess it’s better than sprockethead.” Valentino swept up the ramp and entered Interstate 5 heading south to San Diego.

  **

  CHAPTER

  14

  THE GROTTO WASN’T as seedy as Valentino had expected. Located directly on San Diego Bay with a dock in back where boaters could put in to replenish their stock of refreshments, it had a faux stone facade, a bar and restaurant on the first level, a second story reserved (according to a sign) for private parties, and a rounded tunnel-like entrance with waterfalls on either side bathed in colored lights. Tawdry was the word that came to mind.

  Before they went in, Jason Stickley asked Valentino if he should leave his top hat behind and remove the padlock and chain hanging around his neck. Valentino considered, then shook his head. “The more attention we attract going inside, the better chance we have of coming back out.”

  The boy’s smile was sickly. Here in actual enemy territory, they both found it difficult to laugh their adventure off as melodrama.

  “You can stay in the car if you like,” Valentino said. “I wouldn’t go in myself if it weren’t for that damn film.”

  “I’m fine, sir. Just a little stage fright.”

  “Were both being silly. It’s people who know too much who get hurt, and we know less than nothing.”

  Passing between the ever-cycling waterfalls, he wondered who was waiting at the other end: a mug from Central Casting with a blue chin and a lethal bulge under one arm? Even the most tattered cliché from the bottom half of a double bill made sense in those surroundings. Out under the last rusty glow of the sun, the Pacific rolled on and on over bones that had never been found, weighted down with cement, and those same waves lapped conveniently at the back door.

  “Valentino.” Not a question this time, uttered in the same cold flat tone he’d heard on the telephone.

  Standing just outside the end of the tunnel, Big Tony Grundage’s son was smaller than he appeared in photographs and on the TV news, a dark, compact presence with narrow, serious features, dressed in the West Coast business uniform of sport-coat, black T-shirt, casual slacks, and glistening loafers. He was clean-shaven, with splinters of gray in his two-hundred-dollar haircut. His eyes were wolflike, brown and slanting. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “Yes. This is Jason Stickley, my assistant.”

  Belatedly, Jason swept off his hat, holding it in front of him at waist level as if to deflect bullets. Mike Grundage didn’t look at him. “You didn’t say you’d bring company.”

  “You didn’t say I couldn’t. It’s a long drive, and I have to go back tonight. He can spell me at the wheel.” He’d had this explanation ready.

  “If you trust him. You’ve met Horace.”

  Valentino was enormously relieved to recognize the attorney, whom he hadn’t seen in the dim light until that moment. Respectable lawyers made it a point not to be present when their clients committed transgressions such as homicide. Lysander, carefully dressed as ever, shook his hand without smiling.

  “These days I don’t say a word, public or private, without him in the room. Let’s go upstairs.”

  Grundage led the way through a room crowded with customers dining and drinking, towing a banner of silence through the buzzing conversation. Everyone appeared to recognize him, and to be curious about who was with him. What was that line about gangsters in Goodfellas? “Movie stars with muscle.”

  At the top of a carpeted staircase flanked by underwater photography on the walls, the atmosphere changed. This was where the private parties took place, in a large quiet room with long cloth-covered tables and comfortable-looking chairs. Lysander, bringing up the rear, paused to snap a velvet rope into a ring, with a sign reading INVITED GUESTS ONLY across the landing. Valentino wondered what other menial tasks the officer of the court performed for his notorious client. His unease returned.

  The big room was unoccupied. They passed through it and into a curtained alcove, sealed off by the attorney once again when he twitched loose two ties, allowing the curtains to fall together. The room was just large enough to contain a small covered table, laid out sumptuously for a meal, and three chairs. “Please, Horace.” Grundage nodded toward a fourth chair in a corner, which Lysander dutifully moved to the table.

  “I ordered,” said Grundage when they sat down. “There’s Chicken Cordon Bleu for all of us. I always make sure there’s enough for seconds.”

  Valentino said, “Thank you. I’m not sure we’re hungry.”

  “You don’t break bread with thugs, that it?”

  The vitriol of the response emboldened more than intimidated him. If this man was determined to behave according to type, there was little that would change his mind. The die was cast. “For someone who’s so careful about what he says, you jump to conclusions easily. A friend of mine was found murdered on these premises. It doesn’t do much for the appetite.’’

  Most of the room’s illumination came from an electric candle glimmering in a glass vessel on the table. It reflected off his host’s eyes in lupine fashion. “The ocean’s twenty feet from the kitchen, friend. If I wanted to ditch a stiff, I wouldn’t do it in my own toilet.”

  “Mike.” Lysander’s sleek bald head moved infinitesimally from right to left. Grundage held up a hand, stopping him in mid-shake. All his attention was centered on Valentino, who said:

  “I’m not accusing you. Frankly, I wouldn’t need much persuasion to decide you’re not responsible. That’s for the police to prove, one way or the other. Tonight I’m chiefly interested in what happened to the Frankenstein test.”

  The wolfish eyes fixed him for all of twenty seconds, an eternity. “Well, we’ve got that much in common.”

  Just then, as waiters will, one arrived with their meals, which he propped on a folding tray and set out before them, guests first, host last. A warm,
tantalizing aroma issued forth the moment the covers were removed, setting Valentino’s stomach juices to riot. He realized he hadn’t eaten in hours, and that Grundage was truthful about one thing at least, that the Chicken Cordon Bleu served in The Grotto was second only to the original, if indeed it didn’t surpass it. Why did criminals and ruthless dictators dine better than the virtuous?

  Grundage took the tall slender wine bottle from the waiter the moment it was uncorked. “California Riesling’s the best in the world; don’t believe anything the krauts tell you.” He tilted it toward Valentino’s glass.

  The archivist covered it with his hand. “None for me, thanks.”