Normally, that is.
Unfortunately, this was no find-the-hidden-bank-account/trace-the-stolen-property/locate-the-missing-person kind of investigation; it was more of a figure-out-why-the-dead-guy-saved-my-ass-and-what-protecting-his-daughter-was-all-about kind of case.
Complicating everything was the fact that there were vampires in town—emphasis on the plural.
A year and a whole lifetime ago I didn’t believe in vampires. Or ghosts. Or a whole raft of night-creatures that had heretofore been relegated to fairytale stories and B-minus cinema. That was before a detour through Weir, Kansas resulted in an episode of “lost time” and the onset of a peculiar wasting disease that dulled my appetite and sharpened my sensitivity to sunlight. Although it seemed to be stealing my life, it also made me highly resistant to death. The automobile accident that killed my wife and daughter landed me on the morgue’s autopsy table, where I woke up and proceeded to scare the bejezus out of the coroner and a hospital janitor.
Not to mention myself.
Maybe I didn’t really die in the crash: my heart still beat, though with a vastly different rhythm, and I still required air—but having one foot in the grave and the other in the land of the living made these distinctions moot. If the necrotic virus from Dracula’s transfusion didn’t actually kill me someday, it still seemed destined to drive me mad. Half-believing that Jennifer’s spirit remained behind to “haunt” me was just the earliest stage of its effect on my cerebral cortex. What would come later? Would I become another soulless vampire predator? Or would I become something more monstrous? More evil?
More like my ancient forebear?
Generations of inbreeding certainly set the stage for the madness to come at the close of the sixteenth century. Erzsébet Báthory’s neurological problems manifested at an early age with seizures and blackouts when she was just four or five. A sadistic, bisexual aunt and a schizophrenic uncle provided perverse tutelage at an impressionable age. And then there was Lord Acton’s axiom: spoiled, wealthy child of privilege raised by a series of governesses employed to cater to her every need—it would have been a miracle if her relationships hadn’t been dysfunctional to some degree.
And what’s easier to forget in this kinder, gentler world that we oh-so-civilized folk now inhabit is that she was very much a child of her time. Hungary was experiencing a turbulent period in its already tempestuous history. It had served as a battleground between the Turkish forces of the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburg armies of Austria and there were continuous and mostly ineffectual efforts to send the Turks back home—or at least keep them at bay. War, battle, death, and retribution unfolded all around her on a regular basis. Life was harsh and the administration of justice—or, rather, rule—was even harsher.
As a young girl Erzsébet witnessed numerous punishments and executions, including numerous whippings, floggings, hangings, forced cannibalism, and burnings at the stake. Three peasant boys were accused of trying to rape her when she was eight years old. She had a front row seat when they were publicly castrated.
A fanatical Lutheran called Preacher Hebler was one of her childhood tutors. He tried impressing upon his young charge the importance of piety with vivid and heartfelt stories of the horrors of Hell and the tortures of the damned. As gruesome as the churchman’s imaginative parables were they proved no match for the every day brutality that was up close and impersonal. In later years these stories may have actually provided inspiration for her own appalling “hobbies.”
One night, while still in the formative years of her childhood, Erzsébet was taken from her bedchamber to witness a special execution. A gypsy had been accused of selling children to the Turks and his sentence was offered as public entertainment. Who knows what emotions filled her young breast as she watched? A horse was brought forward and pulled to the ground where its belly was sliced open. Did the dying beast scream more pitifully? Or the accused while he was stuffed, struggling and shrieking, amid the steaming entrails? Did she clutch at the arms of her velvet chair in dismay as the equine guts were closed and sewn shut? Or in excitement during the delayed and drawn out suffocation that followed such a gory entombment.
One might guess at her emotional bent by now but the intellectual lesson was unavoidable: if you were noble-born, commoners might be abused or disposed of with impunity and without fear of retribution. Could I depend upon my civilized upbringing, the lateness of my infection, to make me a more civilized monster? Or did the same dark blood that burned in her savage breast lie dormant in our shared genetic codes? Would that viral key eventually unlock my own murderous id and send it rampaging through the twisted convolution of sulci, gyri and fissures in my cerebellum to mirror her dark acts? How would I know until it was too late?
Maybe it already was.
The phone rang, interrupting my mental detour-de-force.
I picked up the receiver and announced: “After Dark Investigations.”
“I would like to speak with Mr. Haim.” The voice was familiar. As were the subvocal stressors.
“Speaking.”
“Mr. Haim? This is Susan Sinor.”
Ah. “Yes, Mrs. Sinor. How is your husband?”
A pause. “He’s dead, Mr. Haim.”
My turn to pause. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Sinor. Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes.” She drew a deep and ragged breath. “The police told me he died at the scene.”
So much for my assurances that he would call from the hospital. “I didn’t realize that his injuries were so serious.”
“They were serious, Mr. Haim. He died in the crash.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Medical Examiner thinks it might have been a heart attack. We will have to wait for the autopsy to be sure but he’s sure that my husband was already dead when the impact threw him out of the car.”
“I—I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, say something, Mr. Haim. Tell me how my dead husband got up and walked all the way up to your house, called me from your telephone, and then ended up back down at accident scene when the police arrived! Can you explain that?”
I couldn’t, of course. Other than to suggest that the M.E. must be mistaken. It wasn’t a satisfactory explanation but it was better than the alternative.
She was sobbing when I finally hung up and I cursed myself for picking up the office phone during the day. I had a secretary for that at night and an answering machine for during the day. Another good reason I shouldn’t even be here (or anywhere) during the day.
The phone rang again. I sat and stared at it, rethinking my communications strategy: e-mail, I thought; sever all relations with Ma Bell and only deal with people on-line.
The answering machine picked up. “After Dark Investigations,” it announced in Olive’s chipper tones, “Samuel Haim, licensed private detective, and associates. Our office hours are eight p.m. to two a.m. You may call back or leave a message at the beep.”
Please, I thought, be anything but a divorce case.
It was.
Not a divorce case, that is.
My secretary’s voice continued to come over the machine’s speaker but it was no longer a recording: “Sam, this is Olive. I’ve left a message on your machine at home but, just in case you miss it, I’m leaving one here at the office, as well. My sister is at the hospital and needs me to sit with her. I don’t know how long we’ll be there so—”
I picked up the receiver. “Olive? Sam here.”
“What are you doing in so early, boss?”
What was I doing here? Oh, yeah . . . "Meeting with a client.”
“Must be some client.”
“Must be,” I agreed. “Is everything all right?”
The barest of hesitations for my ebullient secretary spoke volumes. “It’s my sister’s boy. . . .”
“Jamal?” I had used Olive’s nephew on several cases involving daytime surveillance, including the Snow Queen’s “alienation of affliction.”
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“It’s the flu.” She said it as if the boy had been diagnosed with cancer.
“They had to hospitalize him?”
“Maybe you haven’t heard but there’s a particularly virulent strain going around.”
I remembered that Robert Delacroix’s fatal coronary was occasioned by the flu. Of course, Jamal was young and healthy and whoever heard of a nineteen-year-old dying from the flu in these early years of the twenty-first century?
“Anyway, I wanted you to know that I may be late or even absent tonight. If that’s all right with you.”
It didn’t matter whether it was all right with me or not. It was family and that mattered more than showing up to sit by a drowsy telephone for my little fly-by-night detective agency-cum-hobby. Olive was just being polite and I completed the formalities by saying “that’s all right” and “take all the time that you need.”
“Thanks, Sam. I’d better get going.”
“Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do?”
Again there was that quarter-beat hesitation, imperceptible to anyone else.
“What?” I pounced. “Tell me, Olive.” And knowing she was too proud to ask any favors, I pushed. Mental Domination is not a simple process in face-to-face encounters and I had only tried “pushing” over the telephone once before. It hadn’t proved effectual in getting my cable installed any quicker.
“My car’s in the shop,” she finally admitted. “I need to call a cab.”
“Cancel the cab,” I said, “I’ll drive you.”
* * *
Despite Olive’s protestations that it was a sunny day and I should stay inside, I picked her up forty-five minutes later.
She was fully signed on to my explanation about extreme susceptibility to skin cancer. It was certainly true that I had developed a few epidural carcinomas before I figured out that my stopover in Weir had effectively cancelled my membership at the tanning salon and necessitated a career move to the night shift. But what she didn’t know was that cancer was only a secondary issue.
Sunlight made me sick. It sapped my strength, clouded my mind, and made me itchy and jittery, and downright nauseated. Wearing hats and long-sleeved shirts and wraparound shades and slathering on a ton of SPF100 sunblock served as talismans against the tumors.
But there was always that nagging apprehension that, one of these days—just like the undead whose blood I shared—I was going to spontaneously combust.
Olive didn’t know anything about my preternatural biology but she kept apologizing as if she knew the gamble I took to chauffeur her across town. The Merc’s heavily tinted windows made the trip bearable but I was on the verge of developing a nervous tic as we approached the hospital.
“Forget it,” I said for the fifth time. Obviously five had not proved sufficient so I added: “I actually have business at Greenwood so it’s no inconvenience at all.” That seemed to help, but now I would have to park the car and go inside for a little while, wander around as if I actually did have someplace to be.
At least it beat tailing Hyrum Cummings to evening City Council meetings.
The closest available parking slot was a good two-block walk from the visitors’ entrance but I smiled, crossed my fingers, and trusted my fate to Coppertone. Outside the car the solar radiation staggered me, the light bearing down with a palpable weight on my back and shoulders. I immediately slapped a straw fedora on my head—a Dobbs’ Palmer with a moderate brim—but my scalp itched and tingled throughout the long walk to the hospital’s entryway.
A double-set pair of sliding doors formed an airlock that kept the lobby cool and soothed my buzzing nerves and twitching skin. It didn’t do anything for the fresh migraine simmering at the back of my brainpan like the embers of a banked fire. I took my sunglasses off before my eyes had time to recover and nearly ran into a potted plant and then a trashcan on the way to the elevators.
Olive—at least I assumed it was Olive—laid a hand on my arm. “Are you okay, Boss?”
I tried a grin and attempted to put reassurance in the middle of it. “Well, if I’m not, I’m certainly in the right place.”
“Maybe you better let me drive you home.”
“Seriously, Olive, how are you getting home?”
“My sister will drop me off.”
“I can wait.”
“I won’t leave while she’s here. If necessary, I’ll be her excuse to go home before she’s totally exhausted.”
I reached out, located her shoulder, squeezed gently. “How bad is it?”
I think she shook her head. “It’s killing black people.”
“What?”
“Mr. Haim!” A new voice derailed the conversation before I could make sense of what I thought I had just heard.
“What do you mean—” I was saying when another dim blob emerged from the haze. As my hand left Olive’s shoulder, it was enveloped by another and shaken vigorously.
“Lou Rollins, Mr. Haim; I sent you a letter last week!”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“BioWeb Industries,” the voice continued, filling the emptiness of the corridor like an auditory tidal wave. “My people are very keen on joining your client list!”
“Client list,” I repeated.
“Sam, I’d better get upstairs,” Olive said, excusing herself.
Lou Rollins maintained a firm grip on my hand. He added another to my upper arm. “I’ll check in on you before I leave,” I called after her retreating form.
“Say, this is perfect!” Lou-from-BioWeb exclaimed. In fact, every sentence from Lou’s lips had sounded exclamatory so far. “I’m on my way up to Pedes to work another handshake deal and this way I get to kill two birds with one stone!”
Two birds with one stone. I grew less fond of that old saw with every passing day.
“Let’s walk this way . . .” He released my hand but steered me toward the elevators with an arm that hovered dangerously close to my shoulders. “Now, the area hospitals pay you how much per unit of blood?”
Ah. A light clicked on at the end of my tunnel vision. “Mr. Rollins—”
“Lou!”
“Lou,” I amended; “that is privileged information between my blood bank and my clients. And the client-list is very short because I simply don’t do enough volume to service all of the local hospitals. We’re really more of a boutique as blood banks go.”
“We can help you change that!”
The elevator doors slid shut behind me as I pondered that. My Glock was neatly holstered and zippered and locked in the glove compartment of my car while, for the briefest of moments, I considered the odds of being trapped in this metal box with a homicidal maniac.
“Oh, Sam—may I call you Sam? Your expression!”
I could now see that Lou Rollins had a face like my Uncle Harry: round and capped with a fringe of curly brown hair, large eyes with smile crinkles at the corners, and a wide mouth that perpetually alternated between laughing and grinning.
I never did care much for Uncle Harry.
“I’m talking about a combined fundraiser and blood drive!” he continued. “BioWeb is hosting a big bash at its conference center this weekend and I think you’ll find it very profitable to come on board with us!”
“What does your company want with my blood bank?”
“Product, of course! Blood!” The doors slid open and I stepped out, not caring if this was the right floor or not. “We do research, Sam, and we’ve embarked upon some new trials that require more than double—nearly triple the volume of blood, plasma, and platelets that we utilized last year!”
“Well, Mr. Rollins—”
“Lou!”
“As scarce as my resources are, I would rather my ‘product’ go to the people who need it the most: the sick, the injured, the dying.”
“I respect that, Sam, I really do! But let me tell you a little story . . .”
With some alacrity I suddenly realized t
hat I wasn’t so much affecting a retreat from Lou as he was herding me toward his destination.
“Once upon a time there was this town that was situated near a cliff that overlooked the sea. Now, from time to time—on a pretty regular basis—people would get too close to the edge of the cliff and fall off. The fall usually wasn’t enough to kill them but it would bang them up pretty good! So the town council held a bunch a’ meetings and came up with two plans.”
“I think I’ve heard this,” I said.
“The first involved getting a fancy ambulance and parking it at the bottom of the cliff. It would be outfitted with all the trimmings: life-saving gear, specially trained paramedics, the works! And a specially paved road that would get the ambulance up to the hospital in record time! That was Plan A!” Dramatic pause. “And do you know what Plan B was?”
“A wall,” I answered.
“A wall!” he continued with no indication of having heard me. “A plain and simple wall to be built so as to keep people from getting too close to the edge at the top!”
“Prevention versus treatment,” I observed. “With the town choosing the more expensive and painful back-end solution.”
“So, with the estimates running to five-thousand dollars for the wall and five-hundred-thousand for the ambulance and stuff, which do you think the town council decided to fund?” He looked at me expectantly.
“Lou,” I said, “I think you’re telling me this story to try to make the point that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and that your research is going to save a lot of lives down the road. Of course, to make the analogy more truthful you’d have to add the stipulations that the ambulance could be in place tomorrow while the wall couldn’t be built for another year or two.”
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 8
