“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I suppose. But…then he wouldn’t kill his wife. Not even if he didn’t remember her. Why would he? What would be the point?”
“I don’t know. You’re right that it wouldn’t make any sense. And…if it really was Frank, then it might be easier to argue that it wasn’t him who killed Mercy after all. What would be his motive? For all we know, it was a burglar or someone else who knew her from the club. There was a drunk who got a little fresh with her at the nightclub where I work last night. Maybe he—”
“Nightclub? I thought you said you were a private detective?” The anger and suspicion I’d been expecting was in his tone now. He looked down at the business card on the table, probably trying to tell if it was a novelty item.
“I play guitar there one night a week,” I said quickly, hoping to blow a bridge before his train of thought could ride over it and pick up speed. “That’s where I met Mercy.”
“Mm-hmm,” he grunted, clearly not having bought my explanation completely.
“Did you tell this detective about the drunk man?”
“I did. She’ll look into it. I’m trying to cover everything else I can think of. Just to help them along. And because Mercy wanted me on the case.” I added this last just to bolster my legitimacy.
“Yes,” he said. “I can see why she wanted to hire you. You seem like a fellow who doesn’t let go of an idea too easily. I am somewhat the same way.”
“Sometimes it gets me in trouble.”
“Me, too,” he said.
Figuring I’d gotten everything out of the old man that I could, I tapped the business card with the tip of my pencil and said, “You’ll call me at that number if you think of anything else?”
“I will. Thank you, Mr. Strait.”
“Thank you.” I stood up and moved to carry the empty cup over to the stained porcelain sink, but Klaus put his hand on my wrist to stop me; he’d clean up later. As I pushed my chair in, another thought occurred to me. “Listen, Klaus. There’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“The first night she saw this guy, this doppelganger or whatever he is, he was here in Hollywood. He might come back, just out of coincidence. If he does, if you see him, I think you’d be better off if you don’t approach him.”
“You think this man is dangerous to me?” he said, an expression on his face that I couldn’t quite place—part bemusement, part concern and part…I don’t know. If pressed, I’d say ironic amusement. It didn’t click, but it faded out almost immediately.
“I don’t know that he is,” I said, “but I also don’t know that he isn’t. I’d hate to see you get hurt in all this. If you see him, just pay attention to the details of where he is, who he’s with, if he’s driving a car that’s got a plate you could memorize…things like that. But don’t let him know you’re onto him. If you even think he suspects, then get away even if that means not getting the plate. You get me?”
“You are worried.”
“I just don’t want to see anyone else get hurt.”
“I understand, Mr. Strait.” A look of hesitation crossed his face, and after a moment, he said, “May I ask you something of a professional nature?”
“Sure,” I said, curious.
“As a private detective, if you had a client who needed to keep an item safe—from theft or even detection, say—where would you put it?”
I thought about this for a moment before saying, “It depends on how big an item we’re talking about. Something small, I’d go with a safety deposit box at the bank. Bigger…like I said, it depends.”
He nodded. “Say it were the size of…a small book.”
“A small book,” I repeated. “Well…again, small enough, and I’d say a bank vault would do best. A bigger book, a family Bible maybe or something else large like that, and your best bet might be to give it to someone you trust for safe keeping. That, or hide it in plain sight. Keep it on the shelf with all the other books. Don’t draw attention to it.”
I looked around the room at all the stacked books, wondering if one of them was the “item” the old man was worried about.
He smiled at me. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I will take your advice.”
This last exchange between us—along with my still unresolved curiosity about his true connection to Frank Attentater—had left me feeling unsettled, as though there was something important right in front of me that I was missing. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t ask about it without making the old man suspect my motives, so I kept quiet. Instead, I tapped the business card one more time, thinking of its fellow clutched in Mercy Attentater’s lifeless hand.
Then I showed myself to the door.
Between the cool night air, the strong coffee, and the time that had passed between my last drink in the Rose Room and my departure from Klaus Lang’s apartment, I felt quite able to drive again. Before going into the nightclub, I had parked in a public lot on Sunset, and I had a short walk to get through before I got back there.
It was early Sunday morning, but there was still plenty of traffic on the street and still plenty of people coming in and out of the bars and clubs along this stretch of the boulevard. Glancing to my right, I saw a line of people waiting to get into the Rose Room, men and women all dressed to the stitches. It didn’t strike me as the kind of place to take a classy date on a Saturday night, but then again I suppose I wasn’t exactly plugged into the height of fashion or the latest trends. When I turned back to face front and resume my walk to the public lot, something else caught my eye, just a movement in my peripheral vision. I knew enough not to turn all the way around and look for whoever might be lurking in the shadows I had just passed through, but that was exactly what I wanted to do.
I walked on, willing myself to hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind me but not picking up on anything. There were too many cars on the road, too much laughter and music coming out of the bars I passed.
Going past the door to one of the nightspots, I made a quick turn and ducked inside. The place was dimly lit but plenty packed with patrons. Several looked at me, but I barely registered their faces. I wasn’t here for a good time. It was maybe ten seconds later that I realized everyone in the bar was male, some of the customers in not so convincing drag. A few looked at me with interest, more with skepticism, and then it was time for me to turn around. I ducked out to the sound of laughter at my back, all at my expense, and walked back in the direction I had just come from, toward the Rose Room and my hidden pursuer.
I could see no one who looked out of place. Covering half a block back and then turning to walk past the all-male bar again, I paused at every dark alcove and peered into every parked car. And still I saw no one.
It hadn’t been my intention to spook my tail into running off; rather, I had hoped to flush the person who was following me, maybe getting my pursuer to reveal himself as he gave up the chase. But that hadn’t happened. Whoever had been walking behind me—and I was certain there had been someone—had melted into the night. I knew it as surely as I felt the loosening of the muscles in my neck; they had tensed up the moment I’d caught my tail, and with the stalker gone, my neck had relaxed of its own accord.
Instinct, I thought as I resumed the walk to my car. More than anything else—not luck or bravery or strategic cowardice—instinct was what had gotten me through the war. Guillermo hadn’t been able to program something like that into Carmelita, and I doubted she would be able to learn it on her own. Without it, she’d never be my partner. It wouldn’t be safe for either of us.
Chapter Nine
I made it home without further incident—other than suffering a return of my alcohol-inspired headache. It kicked in after I was a block away from the parking lot on Sunset and lingered the rest of the way home, a little man with a big hammer who was doing heavy labor right behind my eyeballs. Entering the house, I found Carmelita sitting in the front room. A human woman would have had music playing on the
little Bakelite radio I kept on a shelf, or she might have been reading a book or writing in a diary, maybe some other hobby like knitting or crosswords. Carmelita did none of those things. When I came through the front door, she was sitting in a chair just staring straight ahead, seemingly looking at nothing.
Maybe there were facts and figures whirring through her mechanical mind. Maybe she was doing a robot’s version of daydreaming, fantasizing about the day when she would be a partner in my business. And maybe she was doing none of those things, her mind a contented blank in the face of no stimulation and no human companion for whom she needed to go through the motions of appearing to be more than she was.
Regardless, she looked up as I closed and locked the front door. She blinked twice and got up from her chair.
“You’re home late,” she said.
“You waiting up for me?”
“No. I just finished reading a book and was getting ready to go to bed.”
There was no book anywhere in sight.
“All right, then,” I said. “Peggy got you home okay, I assume.”
“Yes. She dropped me here around five and then she went home.”
I pulled my jacket off and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. Reaching into the inner pocket, I took out the tablet with the meager notes I’d made in Klaus Lang’s apartment and scribbled one more thing—valuable book: hide in plain sight?
“Great,” I said once I was finished. “You have any more luck with the Flynn case?”
“Some. The dead man is definitely the script supervisor that Peale and Flynn work under. Worked under, I should say.”
“And how did you find this out?”
“Mullen Peale phoned the office.”
This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. My mind had been on other things, keeping me from staying one step ahead of the game on the Peale/Flynn case. “What else did he say?”
“Just that we could stop tailing Ginny Flynn now that their boss was dead. He also wants to meet with us to go over what we found.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“He didn’t say.”
I loosened my tie and said, “That’s fine. I’ll have Peggy set up a time with him on Monday.”
Carmelita blinked twice again and then said, “I already set up a meeting with him for today. Sunday. At the Barker House. Eleven o’clock.”
“Today?” I said, incredulous. At the same time, the little man behind my eyes went to town with his hammer, beating a double-time rhythm against my optic nerves. The clock on the mantel told me it was a quarter to two in the morning. While I am all for working seven days a week when on a case, I didn’t relish giving up a Sunday when there was really no reason—not to mention a Sunday that I was ushering in during the wee hours and one that I expected to spend enduring a nasty hangover. “And why the Barker House? That place has got to be five bucks a plate. They have cloth napkins, for God’s sake.”
“I’m sorry, Jed. Mullen suggested it, and I agreed. I want to get as much information on this case as possible, as quickly as I can. I’m on a limited amount of time, remember?”
“You’re not still thinking there’s something here to solve, are you? Some way to wheedle your way into that raise?”
It was a cruel way to put it. A human would likely have had an outburst at that point, but Carmelita just gave me her best mischievous smile and said, “The raise is just the beginning. Remember that I’m working my way up to partner.”
I nodded at this and smiled back in spite of myself. Choosing not to engage her in banter over her career path, I said, “I need to get some sleep. If I’m not up by nine, wake me, okay?”
“Yes, Jed.”
I hit the bathroom and swallowed three aspirin tablets, hoping they’d be a lullaby for the little man behind my eyes and, if not, that they’d at least get him to switch back to the slower rhythm with his hammer until I could fall asleep. When I came back out to the front room, Carmelita was gone, her bedroom door closed and, I assumed, locked the way it always was during her periods of down time.
Despite the throbbing in my skull, I fell asleep pretty quickly and must have gone down deep and dreamless. If I’d been sleeping lighter or fitfully, I suppose I would have heard the scratching sounds of the front door having its lock picked, the footsteps of an intruder on the hardwood floor, and the slight squeak of my bedroom door opening in the dark. As it was, my first clue that something was amiss came when I heard a woman’s voice calling me up from the depths.
“Wake up, Mr. Strait,” she said, her tone coaxing, almost seductive. “We should talk.”
A light switch beside the bedroom door controlled the cheap little lamp on the nightstand next to my bed, and it clicked on at the same time that I opened my eyes. Without taking any time to assess the situation, I made a quick lunge for the nightstand, imagining my hand wrapping around the handle of the .38 revolver I kept in the drawer. Before my hand could find the drawer pull, though, I heard the intruder say, “You don’t want to do that.”
I stopped mid-lunge and turned my head toward the bedroom door. A dark-haired woman stood in the doorway. She closed the door and walked to the center of the room, appraising me as I half sat up. She had pale skin and dark red lipstick, and she wore a tan dress with an armband I recognized immediately, a black swastika on a red background. I also saw that she held something metallic in her hand and that she was pointing it at me as though it were a weapon. I assumed it was.
The little man with the hammer must have decided to take a break while I’d been asleep, but to mark his place he had fastened a metal band around my head, and it felt about three sizes too small. The adrenaline I felt at being awoken was almost enough to make me ignore the pain, but not quite.
I had a cheap clock mounted on the bedroom wall just over Elsa’s left shoulder. It read 3:40, a miserable hour to be woken up, especially by a Nazi bearing gifts. Trying to sound unruffled, I said, “Hello, Elsa. I don’t remember setting up this meeting. You sure you got the right time?”
“Don’t be smug, Mr. Strait. It doesn’t suit you.”
“I think it actually suits me well. I majored in smug at school. The professors were envious of my natural ability.”
She shook her head and brandished the little weapon. I could see that it didn’t have a hole in its center for any projectile to come out of, but it did have a clear glass tip and what looked like a bright red button on its handle, just beside the dark-haired woman’s thumb. I didn’t think it was a safety switch.
Elsa Schwartz and I had tangled once before. I won’t say it was the first case I worked when I arrived in LA because I wasn’t really a private detective yet. But it would be fair to say that Elsa’s shenanigans partly pushed me toward my career path; I guess you could argue that she’d helped give my life purpose after feeling adrift and alone in the wrong world, with no prospects, no family and a recently deceased lover. I didn’t know much about the woman, other than that she was a Nazi scientist, that she was dangerous, and that she was bitter at the way things had shaken out at the end of the war with the dream of ultimate victory and a thousand-year empire reduced to a truce and a flaccid division of Europe that was hardly the stuff of legend. I had bested her in that first encounter, and I figured she’d had enough time to lick her wounds. Now, armed with a nasty new toy, she was ready for round two. All in all, it was shaping up to be a pretty lousy weekend.
“What did Klaus Lang tell you?” she asked.
Once again, I was caught off guard. This wasn’t a new problem I had to deal with. It was one more facet of the problem I’d been trying to unravel all the day before.
“So, you were the one following me?” I asked.
“Just answer the question.”
“He didn’t tell me much. A little family history. A nice recipe for potato salad. You want it?”
She held up the weapon so I could see it more fully, a black metal cylinder with a few little dials on it, that glass tip, an
d that intimidatingly red button. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about that ridiculous gun you used on me the morning after we met. The application was pointless, but the concept interesting.”
The weapon she referred to was a non-lethal gun that Guillermo had designed, powered by the same element that kept Carmelita going and that also gave his Patterson the ability to fly. When zapped with it, the target was knocked into unconsciousness but otherwise unharmed. Guillermo imagined its usefulness in wartime or as a tool for law enforcement with a minimum of human suffering attached. Apparently, those features weren’t highly prized by Elsa and her colleagues.
“I assume you’re offering to demonstrate your new toy on me?” I asked.
“Only if you don’t cooperate. It hurts like hell, but it doesn’t leave a mark. Completely non-invasive and non-traceable. But persuasive.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“Let’s try again. What did Klaus Lang tell you?”
I sighed, trying to weigh the damage to be done to myself or Carmelita if I spilled what I’d learned from the old man. Another option was to call out for Carmelita in the other room. I knew she wasn’t asleep, but I also wouldn’t have called her dormant state wakefulness either; as a result, I didn’t know how or if she’d respond if I called out in alarm.
Maybe I had a tell of some sort, as Elsa said, “And don’t bother calling out for the woman in the other room. She doesn’t appear to be in any state of usefulness. If we had more time, I’d want to have a whole conversation about her. Maybe later.”
I sat up all the way now, ready to spring. “Did you do something to her?” I said, my anger rising with my voice.
She pointed the weapon at me. “Ah ah ah,” she said, shaking her head and pursing her lips like she was admonishing a naughty boyfriend who wanted to play games she wasn’t in the mood for. “Your lady friend is unharmed. For now. I’m going to ask a third time. And then we get serious. What did Klaus tell you?”
Gritting my teeth for a moment, I stared at the glass tip of her weapon, wondering how seriously incapacitated I would be if she pulled the trigger. I decided I didn’t want to find out, so I let out a sigh and relaxed my jaw before saying, “His daughter-in-law was murdered yesterday. I had some questions for him about whether she’d talked about anyone she’d seen as a threat.”
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 10
