So, feeling more confident about the support I was going to get from my staff, I gave Carmelita and Peggy the rundown on the Attentater and Lang murders as well as recapping what had happened early Sunday morning with Elsa and the man I’d seen in the car as she drove away. Then I showed them the picture of Frank Attentater and said, “I’m going out to do some canvasing for this guy.”
Peggy asked, “Do you have a lead on where he might be?”
“Nothing concrete. All I know for sure is that he showed up at the Rose Room a few nights ago. Maybe he’s got a thing for burlesque. I figure I’ll hit some of the other establishments in town, flash his picture around, and see if I get any hits.”
“Do you have any idea why he would have killed his wife?” Peggy asked.
I shook my head and let out a long breath. “No. My only guess—and it’s just a guess at this point—is that his brains got scrambled when his airship got shot out of the sky. He maybe wandered around Europe in the mayhem until he somehow connected with Elsa Schwartz or somebody else in the Nazi machine. Maybe with his head all wrong, he thought he was German. I mean, he is German, born there. But maybe he forgot all about being taken out of the country, raised here, signing up to fight the Nazis. And then, for whatever reason, Elsa brings him to California and he bumps into Mercy. The clash of his two worlds was too much for him.”
Even as I said this, I thought about my situation and the clashes between my world and the one I was in. That clash had led indirectly to Annabelle’s death, and realizing that the situation with Frank Attentater mirrored mine just a little gave me a morose feeling that I knew I was going to need to shake off.
“So, he killed his own wife?” Carmelita asked.
I paused a moment before answering, my thoughts clouded by the image of Mercy’s dead eyes staring up at me from her kitchen floor. Trying to push the memory aside, it blurred with the vision I’d had of Carmelita coming at me with a bullet hole in her chest. The torrent of images made me feel like I was losing control, and I had to look away from Carmelita as I managed to say, “If what I’m thinking is right, he didn’t recognize her as his wife. She would have just been a woman who stirred up hazy memories that made him question who he was, what he was doing. He snapped and took her out of the game rather than have to deal with the confusion.”
And what if the other Jed Strait is doing the same damn thing in my world, I wondered. What if he’s snapped over there and taken it out on Annabelle?
The possibility that she was dead in both worlds shook me even more deeply than I’d already been rattled, and it must have shown on my face, as Peggy caught my eyes and her face became a mask of concern.
Carmelita, on the other hand, was not as astute when it came to picking up on such clues. “But why kill the old man, then? His own father?” she asked. I made myself look at her again, staring at her and forcing myself to see not what my imagination was feeding me but rather the mechanical woman who was right in front of me.
“I don’t know,” I answered, pushing my dark thoughts down and trying to give Peggy a reassuring glance. “Elsa was watching the old man. She—or her superiors—saw him as an enemy of the Reich. Maybe she was just waiting for orders and set Frank on Klaus once they came through.” I thought again of what McNulty had said about Frank’s last name. “Or maybe she figured the connection between Mercy and Frank was going to expose whatever she’s doing, so she pulled the trigger on her own.”
“When you started digging around?”
I gave Carmelita a hard stare, wishing she hadn’t said that.
“Yes,” I said after a few seconds. “My investigation might have been the thing that tipped it from watching the old man to killing him.” My shoulders slumped as I said it, the word “complicit” echoing in my mind. “Nothing I can do about it now, though.”
“I’m sorry, Jed,” Peggy said. She clearly saw what Carmelita had missed—that I already felt partly responsible for Klaus Lang’s demise; I hadn’t needed Carmelita pointing out the connection for me.
I said nothing in response, just tapped the photo with my finger for a moment. Looking first at Carmelita and then at Peggy, I said, “In the meantime, we need to keep the business end going. Peggy, can you run up the final bill for Mullen Peale? And then can the two of you run over to Paragon and see if you can collect?”
“I was hoping to do more digging into Ginny Flynn,” Carmelita said. “I was going to ask if I could use the car.”
“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “That case is done with, Carmelita. There’s no point in tailing Flynn anymore. I mean, you said she left the state, right? All you can do at this point is tell the police what you know and let them chase her down in Arizona. If she’s already returned, they can check the airship records and pop her if they want to. Beyond that, there’s no point in pursuing it further. And no money, either. This is supposed to be a money-making enterprise, remember? We’re not in the business of chasing after people who have no obligation to pay us.”
Carmelita stared at me for a moment, blinking as she processed my words, and then said, “You gave me three days to solve this case. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not solved yet. There’s no killer and we don’t know how they played us, Jed. Are you really satisfied with letting them get away with whatever they had cooking?”
“As long as Peale pays us, yes,” I said.
“Well, I’m not.”
This was ridiculous. I was arguing with a robot, and I was damn close to telling her as much. But then Peggy stepped in.
“I can go to Paragon and present Peale with the bill,” she said. “You do what you need to do looking for Attentater, and that frees Carmelita up to follow whatever leads she wants to pursue.”
“With what vehicle?” I asked. “I’m not dipping into the budget for a taxi.”
“I’ll call Uncle Guillermo,” Carmelita said. “He can lend me his truck or take me around if he’s not too busy.”
“You haven’t had enough of that truck?” I asked, recalling our Friday night flight.
“We’ll keep the wheels on the ground.”
I sighed. She had me beat, at least for now.
“The rest of the day,” I said. “Do what you’ve got to do, and then that’s it. You get me?”
There was a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “Yes. I get it.”
“No more discussion of us being played, no more talk of you getting a raise.”
Peggy’s eyebrows rose at this, but she said nothing.
“It’s a deal,” Carmelita said.
“All right. Call Guillermo, then.”
Carmelita turned toward her desk, leaving Peggy there to give me a look that was part sympathetic understanding of my plight with Carmelita and part casual observer watching a man walking obliviously toward an open manhole. I gave her another sigh in exchange and then started gathering up what I’d need to go out looking for Frank Attentater.
“You enjoy those burlesque houses, now,” Peggy said as she headed back to the lobby.
Chapter Thirteen
The rest of the morning was a bust. All I accomplished was cruising up and down Sunset, Hollywood, and Santa Monica Boulevards, scouting out the burlesque houses and peep shows, making a list on my tablet of names and addresses. None of them were open for business yet. This didn’t surprise me, but I had hoped that there would at least be someone on staff who would let me into a few of these places so I could start flashing Frank Attentater’s photo. Instead, I got nothing.
At eleven, I called in to the office but got no answer. This told me that Peggy hadn’t returned from Paragon Pictures yet, which didn’t really mean much. It was possible she hadn’t made it back because Mullen Peale was giving her a hard time, making her wait around or stalling her in some other way. But it was also possible that Peggy had simply gotten a late start or was stuck in traffic or had actually gotten a check from Peale and had stopped at the bank to deposit it. At any rate, I wasn’t worried.
As I had expected, Guillermo was glad to see me—and the food I brought. We ate at the rickety kitchen table with Perdida circling our feet, acting like she wanted table scraps even though she wasn’t capable of eating them. After talking a bit about his projects and my cases, the conversation turned to Carmelita, who I assured him was doing just fine. There was no point in letting the old man know that his creation was still on O’Neal’s list of possible suspects for Mercy’s murder.
“Someday something’s going to go wrong with her,” he said, his smile fading.
“You think she’s going to get in trouble?” I asked, trying to keep alarm out of my voice as my mind flashed on my crossover vision from the High Note.
“Not so much trouble,” Guillermo said. “I worry someone’s going to figure her out. Then they’ll take her away for sure.”
Terrible as this sounded, it was actually a relief compared to the thought of Carmelita malfunctioning and trying to kill me. “I understand, but…as strange as this may be to say about Carmelita, in the long run—and from a legal standpoint—she’s your property. No one can just take her away, not even the police or the government. Or if they do, we’ll put up a fight to get her back.”
“You’d fight, too?”
“Of course.”
His smile widened at this. “Gracias, lobo,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
When the meal was over, he offered me a beer, which I declined. Instead, I got down to what I’d really had in mind when I’d turned my car toward the ravine. “Would you have time to hook me up?” I asked. “Send me on a little journey?”
“Sure,” he said, and I could tell he guessed what I’d been after all along.
My last two encounters with other worlds had been shaky, and since then I’d felt off my game in this world. Instinct told me things were going to get more heated with Elsa, especially if my inquiries into Frank Attentater reached her sonar. I needed to be as clear-headed as possible before that happened. There was no guarantee that another foray into other worlds and the consciousness of other Jed Straits would fix that, but I had the feeling that I needed a little jolt, a nudge back into my lane, and a better experience in another world might fit the bill. I wanted to see another Jed—no, to be another Jed—who’d gotten it right where all I’d seemed to see and be lately was a Jed who’d fallen into the muck in one way or another.
Less than five minutes later, I was hooked up and slipping into the torpor state, earphones and goggles strapped to my head in this world and soon to be forgotten in some other one.
I opened my eyes and looked around, finding myself in the bedroom of what I guessed was a small apartment. The bed was unmade, and the closet was open. The clothes in the closet and a few other pieces draped across a chairback told me it was a man’s apartment, and I assumed it was this Jed Strait’s. After the incident with the cuckold in the bar in my last sojourn, this was a relief.
Standing still for a moment, I gave a listen to see if anyone else was in the apartment with me. Hearing nothing, I did what I always did the first chance I got when I entered another Jed’s mind; I pulled out his wallet and took a look.
This Jed’s driver’s license told me right away that he was not the Jed I was after. His address was in Los Angeles, and unless something radical had occurred in the months since the big switch, I knew the Jed I needed would have a New York address. A bit disappointed at one more failure, I flipped through the business cards and photos this Jed kept in his wallet. I recognized none of the faces, no trace of Annabelle in any of the images. It struck me as a little odd that when there were women’s faces in the photos they were all a little older than any of the women I’d have gone for, and I figured for a moment that, for whatever reason, this Jed had different taste in women.
But then I noticed the hand holding the wallet.
I folded the wallet closed and slipped it into my back pocket. Then I looked at this Jed’s hand again. The skin on the back of his hand at the base of the thumb looked like crepe paper, not smooth like I had expected. Looking at the other hand, I saw a scar at the base of the index finger that I’d never seen before along with a general appearance of wear and tear.
The hands, I realized, looked old.
More than a little fearful, I walked out of the room and found a tiny bathroom on the other side of a narrow hallway. On the wall above the chipped porcelain basin was a dirty mirror, and I hesitated only a moment before looking into it.
I wanted to look away. But I couldn’t.
The Jed Strait whose body and mind Guillermo’s machine had sent me into was around fifty years old, a good twenty years older than he should have been. I stood in that little bathroom and stared at him, certain his visage revealed my future self. On the one hand, this aged version of me did not present in a shocking way; he bore no terrible scars or deep wrinkles. His difference from the thirty-year-old version of the man I typically saw in the mirror was not dramatic. But it was enough. His face looked a little wider, like the structures under the skin that held everything up had started to sag. When I looked closely, I saw crosshatches of crows’ feet around each eye, and his eyelids were puffy compared to the ones I thought of as my own. There were wrinkles in his forehead and at the corners of his mouth. His hair was going gray.
A little apprehensive, I said, “Hello, Jed,” to the reflection and was pleased to hear my normal voice, not some squeaky old timer’s croak.
I nodded to the reflection, terribly confused at what it might mean but at the same time fascinated to see this older version of myself. There was also a definite sense of gratitude I felt toward this other Jed Strait for having taken good enough care of himself—and myself—for this meeting to even be possible.
“You keep on going,” I said, giving my older self a nod. Then I turned and went back to the little apartment’s front room where I was pleased to find an acoustic guitar that would keep me amused until Guillermo twisted a few knobs in the world I’d been calling home, calling me back. This world was clearly not the one I belonged in, and I had no intention of leaving the apartment to see what other oddities this Jed’s life might present me with. The face in the mirror had been shock enough. As I tuned the guitar and ran calloused fingers over the strings, I wondered if this minor adventure had provided me with what I needed.
The thing was…I couldn’t play. I don’t mean to say that the other Jed Strait’s fingers didn’t have the muscle memory to play. They did. The problem was that I couldn’t concentrate. I’d play a few chords or run through a few riffs and then lose all sense of what came next, my mind occupied by the face I’d seen in the mirror or the way this Jed’s left hand looked when going up and down the guitar’s neck. Instead of playing, I got up and went back to the bathroom, looking at the face for longer and longer periods, going back to the main room again and again before being drawn away once more.
So, it was quite a relief when I started to feel the telltale lightheadedness that signaled the return to my proper body…if not my proper world. I remember setting the guitar in its stand and making it back to the bedroom in hopes of keeping the other Jed from feeling too disoriented when control of his body and mind returned.
I pulled the goggles and earphones off before slumping back into the little wooden chair beside Guillermo’s kitchen table. The old man sat across from me, concern on his face as it always was when I came out of these sessions, his pencil poised abo
ve his tablet ready to record whatever data I could provide.
“Was it the right world?” he asked, his tone hopeful.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Wrong city?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Los Angeles.” I watched as Guillermo wrote this information next to the coordinates he’d used to send me on my journey. “But that wasn’t the problem. Not the whole problem anyway.”
Guillermo raised an eyebrow at this, eagerness in his eyes.
“He was old.” Then I realized that to Guillermo, well into his eighties, the word “old” meant something entirely different than it did to me. “Older, I mean. Older than I am.”
“How old?”
I shrugged. “Fifties?” I said. “I couldn’t say for sure. Just older than me. How is that possible?”
By way of answer, he repeated the word “How?” back at me. His tone suggested the answer was obvious.
I didn’t get it. “I’m not time traveling, Guillermo,” I said. “These are…alternate worlds. Worlds where I—or some other version of me—made different choices, ended up in different situations. All those Jeds should be the same age as me, shouldn’t they?”
He shrugged. Without saying anything, he pushed his chair back and left the room, coming back less than a minute later with a cheaply bound little book and setting it on the table. I’d seen it before—More Worlds Than This: My Journey to the Other Earths by Cosmo Beadle.
“You’ve been reading this?”
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 15
