“And had she?”
“No,” I said. It was pretty much a lie, but not entirely. I knew it was one I could get away with, though.
“What else?”
I shrugged. “He was sad that she’d been killed. It made him sentimental. He reminisced about her and his son. He died in the war. Probably a Nazi missile that took out his airship.”
She smiled at this. “Probably. What else?”
“Nothing.” As I said this, I realized that I had left my tablet on the bureau. It was right beside Elsa, and it had the word “doppelganger” written on it as well as my most recent note about hiding a book in plain sight. If she saw it, I knew the notes would open a whole new line of questioning, and I didn’t want to go there. My only hope was to keep her eyes focused on me. “Why do you care what an old man and I talked about, anyway?”
“I’m the one asking the questions. Remember? How did you come to find the old man in the first place?”
“I used my detective skills. That shouldn’t surprise you.” Having noticed some disdain in her voice when she referred to Klaus Lang, I took another shot at asking a question. “Just who is he to you anyway? Did he steal your candy when you were just a little Nazi?”
Anger clouded her face. “Klaus Lang is a traitor to the Fatherland,” she said.
“Well, he’s been here an awfully long time. You people don’t forgive and forget?”
“You’re being smug again, Jed.”
I just raised an eyebrow at this, waiting for her to say more.
She did, probably despite her best instincts not to. “Klaus Lang was a valued scientist during our first war with the rest of Europe. He stole something very valuable when he abandoned the Fatherland.”
“And you want it back?”
She smiled at this. I didn’t like her smile one bit. “He’s just a broken old man with nothing but regrets to fill his days.”
“And yet it still matters what he says to a third-rate private eye like me?”
She nodded. “You, Mr. Strait, are a meddler. You dig and you find things that don’t need to be found. It is a dangerous habit. It will likely get you killed someday.”
“Occupational hazard,” I said. “You never know what you’re going to find when you start digging.”
The smile widened. “Why is it that I find you fascinating at the same time I despise you?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I have that effect on people.”
She nodded. “Stay away from Klaus Lang. Digging there will only cause you pain.”
“I’m no stranger to pain,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got this nasty headache right now, and your disturbing my sleep isn’t making it any better.”
“Smug again.” She extended her hand, aiming the weapon more deliberately at me.
I could see in her eyes that she’d had enough of me. My arsenal of smugness suddenly empty, I was left with nothing but a cold sweat as my gaze moved from her eyes to her finger to the glass tip on the weapon.
“You don’t have to do this, Elsa,” I said.
“Oh, but I do.”
Her smiled widened into a look that was akin to sexual abandon, and then her finger moved.
I’ve never been struck by lightning, but I can’t imagine that it would hurt worse than the zap I received from that little glass-tipped instrument of torture. Electricity passed through my body, firing pain into my brain from every one of my nerve endings. The shock laid me out flat on my back, and I remember lying there twitching as the room grew dark despite the lamp not being switched off.
From somewhere far away, I heard Elsa’s voice. “Sleep well, Jed Strait. Until we meet again.”
And then I was gone.
* * * * *
She must not have bothered with turning out the lights, as I came to with the bedside lamp still burning. And despite the intensity of the pain her little zapper had hit me with, I was left with no more than a dull ache from head to toe. I took a moment to lie there on my bed and stare at the ceiling, running a quick inventory of my body. Nothing seemed broken or damaged. Then I sat up, still with my hangover headache, and glanced at the clock.
When Elsa had awoken me, it had read 3:40. We had jabbered and postured and threatened each other for a good ten minutes before she’d pulled the trigger. But now the clock only read 3:55. I doubted I could have been out for just five minutes and wondered if the clock had stopped. When I looked at my wristwatch, though, I saw that it also read 3:55.
I bolted out of bed, feeling strangely energized despite my headache.
Then I stopped, midstride, realizing that if I’d been out for only a few minutes, there was a chance Elsa was still in the house. Turning, I retrieved my .38, resolving to sleep with it under my pillow from now on. Then I turned to the door and switched off the light so I wouldn’t be a silhouetted target for anyone on the other side once I pulled the door open.
Giving myself a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, I twisted the doorknob and opened the door as quietly as I could. There were no lights on in the front room, and I could hear no sounds from inside the house. Then I heard a car door close outside and quickly covered the distance to the front door.
I still hesitated there, not wanting to get zapped again if Elsa was within range. But then I heard an engine firing up outside, and I knew I had to take the chance. Throwing the door open, I ran out into the cold night air wearing only boxer shorts. The car out front was big and black, and before I was two steps away from my porch the car was accelerating away from the curb. With my gun raised, I had a clear shot at the back window. I had only a second to decide if I should pull the trigger or not, and in that moment the car passed under the streetlight at the edge of my property. A face was staring back at me, seemingly looking right down the barrel of my gun without flinching. It was dark and the car was accelerating away from me, but I knew I was looking at Frank Attentater, and I supposed Elsa was in the backseat next to him.
The gun lowered to my side as the car shrank into the night. It was only after it reached the end of the block that I saw the driver turn on the headlights. And then it was gone.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to the darkness. Then I turned and went back inside.
My first thought wasn’t to call the police. It was to check on Carmelita. If Elsa was to have been believed, she had at the very least looked in on my companion. At the worst she had done something to harm Carmelita, and the thought occurred to me that Elsa might even have taken Carmelita away in that big black car.
When I put my hand on the knob of Carmelita’s door and tested it, I found that it was unlocked. A cold wave passed over me as I imagined the worst, picturing myself having to tell Guillermo that his greatest creation had been destroyed or stolen on my watch.
But then I opened the door and peered inside. The same streetlight that had revealed Frank Attentater in the back of the car also shone in through Carmelita’s window, illuminating the room just enough for me to see Carmelita sitting at the edge of her bed, her feet flat on the floor and her spine straight, hands in her lap. She did not move her head, nor did she make any other motion to indicate she was aware of my presence in her room.
This was what Elsa had seen when she’d opened Carmelita’s door, picking the simple lock just as easily as she had cracked the tumblers on my front door. And what had Elsa thought, I wondered. Had she spoken to Carmelita? Turned on the lights? Zapped her with that nasty little stinger? There was no way to know. I didn’t like it, though.
I considered calling out to Carmelita, waking her as it were and checking to make sure she was all right. But then I opted against it. If there was a problem, it couldn’t be solved in the night. I could bring Guillermo here in the morning to work on Carmelita if she’d somehow been damaged. And if she was fine, waking her now would just lead to a barrage of questions, along with a level of discomfort as she considered the violation of her locked door and whatever tale she told herself about the way she rested in the d
ark while the rest of the world slept. Those were things I didn’t want to face, so I left her be.
The lock on the front door appeared undamaged, so I locked it again and wedged a dining chair under the knob to deter intruders. Then I checked the back door and used another chair there. I checked the locks on all the windows and then went back to my room, telling myself I would turn off the lights and try to salvage the rest of the night with the .38 under my pillow. I was fooling myself, of course. Even if the headache hadn’t been there to keep me awake, adrenaline still coursed through my system, and it spiked again at every noise I heard from outside the house. Chirping crickets, prowling wildlife, passing cars—they were all threats, and I let every one of them play out with my hand on the revolver until I saw the dark skies begin graying with the dawn and heard Carmelita stirring in the other room.
Miserable as the night was, I told myself it was better than waking up to the terror of dreaming that my face had been melted away.
Chapter Ten
When I wasn’t thinking about grabbing my gun and making a circuit of the house during those early hours of the morning, I was vacillating about calling the police. On the one hand, I knew exactly who had broken into my house and attacked me. Even if the cops couldn’t find Elsa right away, at least reporting the crime would make things tough on her the next time she found herself in judicial crosshairs. But on the other hand, I didn’t relish the thought of dealing with a patrol officer on a graveyard shift who might not take my complaint seriously enough to see to it that anything was done about it. Added to this was the question of what such an early morning investigation would do to Carmelita. I didn’t know how deep or how essential her torpor state was. Would it be bad for her to be jolted out of it? Having an officer in the house at four in the morning wasn’t going to be quiet, no matter how lackadaisical the cop’s approach might be. And what if Carmelita didn’t wake up on her own, what if her trance state was something she couldn’t come out of until a certain length of time had elapsed? I could imagine trying to explain to an officer that my “sister” was fine, just a little catatonic. The questions that would arise, and the consequences those questions would lead to, left me sitting quietly and alone until morning, the telephone untouched.
I did have a plan for making a few phone calls, however. One would be to O’Neal. I figured it wouldn’t hurt things to share with her what I had learned from Klaus Lang and to let O’Neal know where the old man could be found. It would be best, however, to wait until Monday to make the call, as a detective with her seniority most likely had her Sundays off. I could leave her a message at the department, and it would probably get to her, but since I wasn’t going to say it was life and death, I figured I wouldn’t hear back from her until Monday anyway. And seeing as I wasn’t in the office and was without a secretary on duty today, I’d need to leave my home phone number on the message and then be tied to the house while I waited for a response that probably wouldn’t come; thanks to the lunch Carmelita had set up with Mullen Peale, I knew that wasn’t possible. So, reaching out to O’Neal would not happen until Monday. The other call I wanted to make wouldn’t have to wait that long.
Knowing a little bit about the habits of people with more money than me, I knew not to make the call too early. Ideally, I would have waited until almost noon on a Sunday, but thanks to Carmelita’s handling of my social calendar, I was going to be otherwise engaged at that time. So, the ideal wouldn’t work. Making the call around ten would have to suffice, and I spent the time after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast thinking of what I would need to do in order to get through the walls of resistance that would keep me from being successful.
Carmelita seemed oblivious to the events of the early morning hours. If she had heard anything in her torpor state, she didn’t comment on it. Nor had she seemed to notice that first an unknown woman and later her reluctant employer and provider had poked their heads into her room, opening the door she had locked before turning in and violating her privacy. It was just as well. I had no stories concocted that would sufficiently explain any of the morning’s events and figured I’d have no choice other than to tell her the truth.
My head was not as bad as it had been the night before, but it still hadn’t progressed all the way to good. I vowed, as I have done many times in my life, not to drink that much ever again, but at the same time I told myself that it had been in the service of the investigation, to maintain my cover in the Rose Room, and that this made the night’s excesses somehow almost okay. The pain in my head begged to differ.
Breakfast helped a little. A shower and shave helped a little more. I didn’t have a suit of clothes that was truly suited to a meal at Barker House, but I did my best. So, when I emerged from my room with my suit and tie on, I felt almost human despite the hangover, the sleep deprivation, and the lingering stress of having been zapped into unconsciousness by a psychotic Nazi intruder during the night.
As soon as Carmelita retreated into the bathroom to begin the charade that was her own bathing and beauty regimen, I went to the phone in the kitchen and dialed the operator, walking as far across the kitchen as the phone cord would allow. With my back to the bathroom door and my voice as hushed as I could get away with, I gave the operator the number to a phone out on Catalina Island. It was a number I had called a few times in the aftermath of my first case in LA, one I hadn’t needed to call since but still had firmly in my memory. I’ve found that it’s sometimes useful to be able to reach out to friends in high places, or at least to be able to threaten such calls. In this case, I wasn’t calling a friend, and I doubted my call would be welcomed. Still, it had to be done.
It took eight rings for someone to answer, and when the other line was picked up there were several seconds of silence before anyone spoke.
“Hello?” came a woman’s voice. She sounded far happier than I would have expected one of the denizens of the Catalina mansion to sound before ten on a Sunday morning, so I figured that for her it was just a very extended Saturday night. I imagined a vivacious young thing with lots of promise and lots of people saying “yes” to her—for now, anyway. She wouldn’t be new and interesting for long.
“Hello,” I answered. “I need to speak to Cosmo Beadle.”
“Uncle Cosmo? I haven’t seen him since…” Laughter followed.
“How about you pass the phone to someone on staff there. A maid or a butler?”
“There’s no one like that around. It’s just me and Pinky.”
I sighed. This was worse than I’d been expecting. “I need you or Pinky to find someone who can get me to Uncle Cosmo. Can you do that for me?’
“Who is this anyway?” she asked.
There were so many ways to answer, only some of which would get me results.
“I’m Cosmo’s lawyer,” I lied. “He’s going to want to talk to me. It’s extremely important.”
“But I thought Pinky was Uncle Cosmo’s lawyer.”
Trying to keep exasperation out of my voice, I said, “Yes, yes. I know. But I’m his other lawyer. He needs more than one, you know. And this is serious.”
“All right, all right. Let me find some…”
There was a thud as the phone fell.
Trying not to think of how much this call was going to cost me if the drunk woman abandoned the phone with the line left open, I stood in my kitchen and counted the drips that fell from the faucet. After the thirty-third drip, a man picked up the phone. He sounded neither drunk nor cheerful.
“Who is this?” he asked. “What’s this about?”
“Are you part of Mr. Beadle’s staff?” I asked.
“Yes. To whom am I speaking please?”
“My name is Jed Strait and I—”
That was as far as I got. “Strait!” the man said. “I’ve been so busy these last few months that I forgot I owe you a punch in the nose.”
This form of greeting took me aback, reminding me in a very uncomfortable way of the red-faced man who’d bee
n gunning for the other Jed Strait whose mind I’d occupied in the alternate world the night I’d met Mercy Attentater. After taking a few seconds to think about it, though, I realized that this situation was far different, as I was pretty sure I recognized the voice.
“This wouldn’t be Edward Ross, would it?” I asked.
“Did you figure that out because I’m the only person who owes you a punch in the nose?” the man on the line said. “Somehow I find that hard to believe.”
In my way of reckoning, I was not owed a punch in the nose—or anywhere else—but it didn’t surprise me that Cosmo Beadle’s driver held a grudge against me. He and I had met not long after I’d first come to California and we’d had a brief meeting of the minds at Beadle’s mansion on Catalina: two war veterans shooting the breeze even though I’d had to hide the fact that I was running from my first nasty encounter with Elsa Schwartz. Later, however, there had been a little altercation, and Edward had gotten the worse side of it, ending up unconscious on a fancy kitchen floor with a dozen members of the wait staff witnessing his humiliation.
“I’m sorry we had to leave things that way, Edward,” I said. “I always meant to reach out to you with an apology. If that means you owe me a punch in the nose, well…so be it.”
He ignored this attempt at reconciliation. “What do you want, Strait?” he said.
“I need to talk to Beadle.”
“About?”
“Elsa Schwartz.”
Silence met me.
“You still there?” I asked.
“Yes,” came the hesitant reply.
“Can you get him?” I asked. Then I added, “Please?”
After another moment’s silence, I heard Edward say, “Hang on.”
This time, the phone was set down gently, and I went back to counting drips as I imagined the hubbub I’d created in the cushy mansion out in the Pacific.
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 11
