“Mort Zuckerman,” McConnell said clearly. “If you think you can find him, I’d be much obliged.”
Aileen nodded thoughtfully, as though the name meant nothing to her. I had to smile—she knew her audience. Even her unnaturally white face seemed appropriately haunted in the low glow from the surrounding gas lamps (the building was fully wired, of course, but I gathered the flickering orange light was better for ambiance).
“Do you have an object of importance to the deceased?” she asked.
McConnell nodded. “His notebook.”
“Bring it to me.”
McConnell pushed his way to the aisle and handed a square object to one of the waiting attendants. Aileen handled it carefully, as though the soul of the deceased might reside in the object itself. I recognized that notebook from my encounters with Zuckerman—he had chosen odd times to write things down, as though his notes had remarkably little to do with our conversation.
Aileen rested it on her lap. “I will see if the spirits provide,” she said.
McConnell stared plaintively. The rest of the audience leaned forward with a rustle of clothes and indrawn breaths.
“The medium requires absolute silence,” said the head of the Society, quite unnecessarily. Lily tugged at my shirtsleeve, as though I were in any danger of looking away.
In the ensuing silence, Aileen began to sway, like a mother rocking a baby. Her eyes opened and closed at seemingly random intervals—too long for blinking and too short for sleep. She spoke on occasion, but the sounds were nonsense, or at least not any language I recognized.
“Think she’s on the level?” Lily whispered.
“I think so.” Just observing her slow sway raised goose bumps on my arms.
The gas lamps flickered, though the air in the room remained stiflingly still. Aileen’s voice grew louder and higher, though no more intelligible than before. The lights flickered again, almost guttering in an absent breeze. The few strands of Aileen’s hair not secured beneath the black scarf floated in a nimbus around her face. She seemed to glow with electricity instead of light.
“Mort,” she screamed, as though over a howling wind. “Will you come? Will you speak?”
It could have been a room full of vampires, so little of our breath moved the air. She rose, so fluidly it seemed she floated. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, but she held her hands before her as though moving through a thick gloom. “So far under,” she said, as though to herself. “Where have they hidden you?”
In the audience, someone whimpered. There was no way to know who; I think perhaps the same fear ran through all of us. What I was seeing here made the uncanny reading she had done for Lily the night they first met in our parlor seem like a child’s game. I might have spent the last six months avoiding my potential power, but Aileen had clearly embraced hers. I knew at once that the head of the Society had not exaggerated in her praise. It shocked me that she could have grown this powerful and I hadn’t even noticed.
“Mort,” she said, again. “Are you there? Can you hear me?” She paused and drew herself up. “He is between the veils. The one I can part, the one I cannot. But I can hear him. He has not gone too far beyond us.”
“Mort!” McConnell shouted, entirely out of order. “Who killed you? Who gave you that damned bottle, just tell me and I’ll—”
“Quiet in the hall!”
A few rows down from McConnell, Archibald Madison whispered to the man sitting beside him. With a start, I recognized the strange man who had caught me in Madison’s office and behaved so oddly—was he the one who had so worried my brother? The man nodded and left quickly through a side door. I looked behind me for Harry, but both he and Amir had vanished.
“Do you hear us, Mort?” Aileen said, ignoring the commotion entirely. Silence fell again, absolute. Aileen stayed frozen in a half crouch for nearly a minute. Then she jerked upright. The movement disturbed me, but I didn’t understand why until she spoke.
“McConnell?” she said, with a sharp laugh I had never heard her make. “This is something. Your voice sounds different in her ears. You know I’m dead?”
McConnell coughed and wiped his dripping forehead. “Sure I know,” he said. His voice shook perceptibly. “But I don’t know who killed you.”
That was not Aileen on the stage. It looked like her, even spoke with her voice, but she had been inhabited by someone else—a dead police officer who shouldn’t even have a soul, let alone conversational ability. But Aileen even mimicked some of Zuckerman’s mannerisms, like the way he scrunched in his lips as if he’d bitten a lemon. Lily kept scribbling, but her hand trembled so violently I doubted the script was legible.
“The informant gave me the bottle,” Aileen-Zuckerman said. The audience gasped—I did, too, though I had no idea who “the informant” might be.
“He forced you to drink, right?” McConnell said.
But Aileen-Zuckerman shook her head. “I tried Faust the second week it hit the streets. Everyone did. You never guessed. But McConnell, follow up with the Blood Bank—”
A commotion in the audience interrupted her. Judith Brandon, of all people, stood with a frantic expression. “Someone’s on stage!”
I caught a shadow at the edge of my vision. I turned, but it was too late: with a sharp crack, the backstage electric lights turned off, rendering me temporarily blind. Then a gunshot and a small cry and the unmistakable thump of a body hitting the floor. I ran without a thought for anyone but Aileen. The front stage curtains had fallen about halfway, so even the hazy gas lamps couldn’t illuminate the scene.
I bumped into a body with my shins and dropped to the floor. When I looked down, I could barely make out Aileen’s white powdered face.
I called her name, but she didn’t respond. I put my finger to her cloth-enshrouded neck, and was unspeakably relieved to find her pulse steady, if weak. Unfortunately, given Aileen’s taste in performance clothing, it would be difficult for me to find evidence of a wound even in good lighting. And I had not forgotten the shadowy figure from just before the lights went out.
“Zephyr!” Lily screamed. Just that, but it was enough for me to throw myself over Aileen’s body. A blow that would have hit my head connected instead with the floor beneath me. I couldn’t see my attacker very well even now—just that he seemed stocky and strong and bent on harming either me or Aileen. Neither was acceptable. I dove for his legs, hoping surprise could overcome his superior strength. He toppled to the floor like a carnival dummy, with a crash and a curse. This satisfied me even as I pressed my advantage, giving him a solid blow to the stomach. I wondered if my knife was sharp enough to do much damage to a human assailant. But I didn’t have time to hunt for it beneath my skirt. With a grunt, the man wrenched out of my one-handed grip and walloped me on the side of my head. I fell to the floor, barely retaining consciousness. From my position beside Aileen, I saw the hazy figure of a man lurch to his feet and spit perilously close to my face.
“I had to,” he whispered, and I finally recognized him as the man from Madison’s office. “She would have said everything. Didn’t mean to hit you.” I stared, baffled, and attempted to get my arms underneath me. I flopped uselessly to the ground a moment later, but thankfully my assailant refrained from further violence. He just turned around and loped away. My third attempt to rise succeeded. Almost immediately, I wished it hadn’t.
My head ached and my vision wobbled like a jelly mold. “Catch him!” I rasped.
I wouldn’t have thought anyone had heard me—especially over the screaming, shouting racket coming from the auditorium behind the half-fallen curtains. But another shadow detached itself from the wall and set off after my assailant at a dead run with a whoop.
I definitely knew that voice. I smiled. Lily, apparently having decided she was in no immediate danger, ran over.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“I think you have a scoop,” I said, gingerly touching the swelling at my temple. It didn’t feel as bad a
s I’d feared, though Lily was still in danger of getting vomit all over her haute couture. I decided it was best not to tell her.
“Ha!” Lily said, her voice shaking a little. “I think I have twenty. Is Aileen…”
We both looked over. “Aileen,” I called gently. She was breathing and her pulse was steady, but she didn’t respond to us at all. Deep in the hallway backstage, someone shouted.
“Who in the blazes was that?” Lily asked, gripping my elbow.
My smile widened. “I think we’re about to find out.”
The Society under-secretary poked her head beneath the curtain, her cheeks flushed apple-red. “Are you … Has it…”
“We seem fine,” I said, hoping my assertion made it true. “I heard a shot, but as far as I can tell, Aileen wasn’t hit.”
The woman raised her eyes heavenward and put a doughy hand over her chest. “Thank the lord,” she said. “The police are on their way. I’m sure they’ll catch whoever—”
The backstage lights as well as those in the auditorium flickered and then came back on with a high-pitched whine. I had never been so grateful for illumination: Aileen still hadn’t regained consciousness, but at least I could be sure she wasn’t quietly bleeding to death. A few seconds later, Harry came bounding back through the hall, a man slung across his broad shoulders.
Lily’s eyes went wide as she saw him: a picture of youthful vigor and beauty, a dashing curl across his forehead.
“Got him, Zeph!” Harry proclaimed, tossing the man to the floor with somewhat vindictive force. He groaned, which reassured me—I didn’t want Harry locked up for murder, even in self-defense. Daddy would cover the legal fees, but how he would complain.
The curtain was still half-fallen, but from my vantage point I could see quite a few waists drifting closer to the stage. I contemplated standing, but decided it was far more comfortable down here. The room still rocked in a manner that might have been pleasant had I been drunk.
The mayor poked his head beneath the curtain, a mere foot away from me. “Miss Hollis,” he said, a little breathlessly. “I always find you in the most fascinating situations. Is that man…”
“The culprit,” Harry said, nudging the man in the ribs with the toe of his leather boot. I wondered, idly, how Harry had managed to afford such well-tooled shoes. They were probably a present from some monogrammed letterhead or another, I decided.
The man rolled over, allowing me to see his face clearly for the first time. I had never seen him before that day in Madison’s office, and yet both times he had behaved as though he knew me. I wondered why, but the faint, shimmering haze that seemed to have settled over my vision made it difficult to concentrate.
“How hard did that bastard hit me?” I muttered.
The mayor raised his eyebrows. “Such language, Miss Hollis.”
“Such prudery, Mr. Walker,” I said.
Judith Brandon’s head joined that of her well-placed employer. “Isn’t that Madison’s man? What’s his name…”
Jimmy Walker’s sudden smile held more than a touch of schadenfreude. “Why, aren’t you right, Judith? It’s one of his foundling puppies. And it seems he assaulted a famous medium in public just as she would have divulged the identity of the vampire killer.”
I swear Walker was about to lick his well-formed lips. He raised his eyes heavenward. “My thanks, Boss,” he said, quietly.
“Mayor,” I said, aware my words were slurring and not entirely inclined to care, “you seem to like your ghosts.”
“I confess to being a convert,” said the mayor, his eyebrows raised in arch innocence. “What information the dead possess! And I have a suspicion, you see.” He ducked his head back under the curtain. “Madison!” he called, his stentorian politician voice booming like a foghorn through the continued din. “The proceedings on stage might be of interest to you.”
I looked back at Madison’s assistant, now groaning his way back to consciousness beneath Harry’s expensive shoes. I did not worry that he posed a further danger to me or Aileen. Harry was a Hollis, after all, and could do our daddy proud without my assistance.
By the time Madison himself poked his head under the curtain, the mayor was clearly not the only one wondering about his relationship with the man on the floor. But only my favorite deb reporter had the guts to say so.
“Mr. Madison,” Lily said, flipping to a fresh page in her notebook, “did your associate kill officer Zuckerman and the other vampires?”
Madison’s ruddy face turned the shade of pickled beets. I giggled.
“How dare you imply such a thing, young lady!” His voice was very loud, and a few drops of foam-flecked spittle sprayed my cheek.
Lily wiped her forehead. “Well, he did assault the medium just as she was about to reveal the identity of the killer.”
“It’s all fraud and nonsense,” Madison said, with quite unnecessary vigor.
I turned to him. “You spat in my ear.”
He stared at me like I was a statue that had inexplicably begun to talk. “I beg your pardon?” he managed.
“It wasn’t very pleasant.”
“Why … I’m quite sorry.”
From deep inside the hallway, I heard the sound of several booted feet running toward the stage. I looked between Lily and the mayor.
“Who do you suppose that is?” I asked.
“The police, I hope,” said the under-secretary.
“I’m sure they’ll sort this all out in a jiffy,” said the mayor. He pulled out a gray pocket square and dabbed at a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “I’m afraid, however, that I must depart. I have a prior engagement—”
“At the Ziegfeld, I’m sure,” I said. Judith Brandon glared at me, but the mayor just blinked in surprise and laughed.
“Everybody stay right where you are!” That was McConnell—to my surprise, I’d quite forgotten about him in the confusion. But he was at the head of a dozen of New York’s finest, crowding the stage and pointing their firearms quite indiscriminately.
“Who fired the shot?” McConnell asked no one in particular.
My brother, who has always been lacking in common sense, stepped forward. “I did, sir,” he said.
McConnell trained his gun on Harry, who didn’t look nearly as perturbed as he ought. A few feet away, the man groaned and his eyes fluttered.
“Which of them did you shoot?” McConnell asked.
At this, Harry bristled. “Neither, of course. He attacked the medium and I fired into the ceiling to scare him off.”
“Will Lady Cassandra be all right?” McConnell asked.
I checked Aileen hopefully for signs of consciousness, but she remained prone and insensate. Worry clamped my chest, and I wondered how much of her pallor could be attributed to cosmetics.
“I don’t know. I think perhaps she needs a doctor,” I said, and swayed.
Lily caught me. “Zephyr, what’s wrong with you?” she whispered.
“Just a … head thing,” I said. “Used to happen all the time in Montana. It’ll go away in a day or so.”
McConnell put away his gun and walked closer to Aileen. “Perhaps she’ll remember what Zuckerman was going to say?”
“I certainly hope so,” said Jimmy Walker. “I’m afraid the city can’t stand much more of this. But perhaps, officer, your culprit has already revealed himself?”
The mayor nodded toward Madison’s man, who blinked in the manner of one unwillingly roused from a deep sleep just as a police officer cuffed him.
“Yes, Mr. Madison,” Lily said, a hound with blood in her nose. “What about the crimes of your associate? Did you encourage him to kill unsuspecting vampires, including Officer Zuckerman?”
“I deny it completely!” he said, and wriggled awkwardly under the curtain from the theater floor until he was able to get his legs beneath him on stage. “If he committed any crimes in this matter, they are his own.”
McConnell stood his ground before Madison’s bluster. “I seem to
recall you telling your followers that it’s God’s calling to do anything to beat back the vampire scourge,” he said. “And now someone in your employ appears to have killed them. That’s a remarkable coincidence, Mr. Madison.”
“I encourage no one to break the law,” Madison said angrily, but he looked at the crowd around him like I imagined a fox might watch the approaching hounds. “I merely advocate that we do all we can to keep our city safe from them.”
“In that case, I’m sure you’ll have no objection to us searching your offices for any evidence relating to the crime?”
“You may search Brad’s desk, of course. But much of my work is of a sensitive and confidential nature, and nothing of mine would be of use in your investigation.”
Remembering what I had found in the false bottom drawer of his office desk, I could well understand his discomfort with the idea.
“We’ll see, won’t we?” McConnell said, and turned around. The man, Brad, had sat up, staring like he was more or less awake. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”
Brad blinked slowly. He surveyed the attentive crowd with a deliberate, burning hatred that made me shudder. I suddenly had no doubt that he had killed those vampires. “I don’t say anything.”
“Did you kill Mort, you—” McConnell choked back what promised to be an epithet too colorful for polite company.
Brad’s eyes darted around the room—landing on me, the mayor, Judith Brandon, and Madison before finally settling on his accuser.
“I won’t talk,” he said.
McConnell sighed. “Take this one back to the station. Get her a doctor,” he said, gesturing to Aileen. “The rest of you are free to go. We might need to speak to you for questioning later. I haven’t forgotten about you, Miss Hollis.”
Wicked City Page 15
