High Bloods (13 page)

Bea said, “Remember that name I came up with when I was researching Artie’s holdings and participations? Dr. Chant?”

“Rings a small bell. His name was mentioned? By who?”

“Your mother.”

“What else do you remember?”

“About their conversation? That’s it. Didn’t your mother ever say anything to you about being a business partner of Artie’s?”

“I may have had three conversations with her in the past two years. And business has always been the last thing on Pym’s mind. She has money; she trusts the bank officers who handle it for her. All of her accounts are POD in my name.”

“Rich, huh?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. I’m well enough paid by ILC. As long as we’re on the subject of businesses Artie may have had a piece of, can you give me some names?”

“XOTECH and MegaGenomics, so far. The areas of research are hush-hush. So are the rosters of scientists involved. I Googled their locations. XOTECH occupies most of a large box canyon near Antelope Valley; the road in has three separate checkpoints. MEGA-G is on a small island in a chain of islands in the Scottish Hebrides, accessible only by ferry or helicopter when the wind stops blowing, which is almost never.”

My wristpac vibrated. “Rawson,” I said.

I got nothing back for a while except for some gusts of stressful breathing.

“Are we going to have a meaningful dialogue,” I said, “or can I finish cutting my toenails?”

Then a male voice, choked with grief, came through.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

I had a hunch who I was talking to. I tried raising his hologram, but he was calling me on a retro throwaway cell phone. They had become collectables.

“Is that you, Bucky?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you, son?”

“Just… tell me. Is she dead?”

“Do you mean Chickie?”

“Yes.”

“Bucky, I don’t know for sure. I thought maybe you could help me with that.”

He moaned softly. “I… I don’t know either. I don’t know… what they’re trying to
do
to us! I begged Chickie… ”

His voice broke completely. He sobbed incoherently in my ear.

“Listen, Bucky. I’m glad you called. I want to help you. But we don’t need or want to have this conversation on wireless. Just tell me where I can find you. If you’re in the area I’ll be there in less than half an hour. It’ll just be the two of us.”

“That thing they gave me… something’s wrong… I don’t feel so good.”

“Who are you talking about, Bucky?”

“I can’t… but it doesn’t matter. I’ll live with it. Everybody does. I just want Chickie back! Please tell me… she’s not dead!”

That chilled me. How much did he know? “I don’t have conclusive proof that she is,” I said. “Give me your locaton, Bucky.”

A long pause. But he was listening. Hopefully, maybe. Breathing more quietly now.

“Valdemar,” he said at last.

“The old Piers Andersson estate in the Palisades?”

“Yes. Shane L’Estrange owns it now. But… he’s on tour. Lets me hang out at the house whenever.”

“Stay put, Bucky. I’m coming.”

“Thank you,” he said, heartfelt, I thought. The connection was broken.

I looked at Beatrice and told her who I’d been talking to.

“I think he’s alone, and certainly scared. I need to get moving.”

“I’ll be okay,” she said.

“In exactly one hour,” I said, checking the time, “I’ll call you.” It was ten-seventeen. “If I don’t, notify ILC that my last location was Valdemar, and have them send a patrol.”

“Oh Jesus,” Bea said softly, snatching her hand away from the necklace she’d been toying with, as if the magical beads had given her a glimpse of the future, as I had suggested they could; and the future she saw was too hot to handle.

Valdemar was a huge Moorish-style house high in the Palisades at the head of a deep barranca with the Pacific Ocean below. The house had been built for a megalomaniacal film director (that’s probably redundant) who for thirty years held the title of Meanest Bastard in Hollywood. He also owned a couple of Oscars for his work behind the camera. He never married, lived reclusively when he wasn’t filming, and satisfied his erotic cravings with waifs of both sexes, for whom his longtime chauffeur trolled diligently on Hollywood Boulevard.

The twelve-foot-high iron gates at the end of a narrow and private road winding uphill from Sunset were standing open when I arrived. There was curling fog in the barranca that had risen almost to the level of the terrace on the side of the house that overlooked the ocean. I saw only a couple of lights inside.

If Bucky Spartacus had left the gates ajar for me, I hoped that he also had had the presence of mind to turn off the TRAD and the AUGIE brainblasters that a sign posted on the gate by Southland Security Systems warned about.

I looked for Bucky’s vintage Cadillac Escalade SUV on the motor court where it most likely would have been, but the cobbled court was empty. The garage doors, all eight of them, were closed.

I drove through the gates and stopped in front of the house. But I didn’t get out right away. Instead I was about to call Bucky’s cell number when my own wristpac lit up.

An accented voice I didn’t recognize said, “Have a look on the terrace,
jefe.
”

“Why?”

“We drop off a little package for you.”

“Who’s this?” I tried to get a look at him, but that feature of his Pac was blocked. No image, no GPS fix. And no reply to my question. But he was still listening. He had a slight wheeze. Overweight, I guessed.

I ended the call, reached behind me and pulled my reliable old short-barrel Remington 12-gauge from its cradle. Six rounds, one already chambered. Guaranteed weight loss for a fat gut; the pounds just melt away.

If someone had wanted to kill me they’d already have shot the Land Rover to pieces and added flaming gasoline. I got out cautiously anyway, stayed low and still felt as exposed as a fly on a wedding cake. I listened but there wasn’t much to hear. The scrape of my shoe on a cobble, the ticking of the Rover’s engine. The rising fog acted as a blanket, smothering the noise of unseen traffic a mile or so distant on the Pacific Coast Highway.

I moved toward the barranca and the fog, looked down. The moon, rounding to full, was high above the fog bank, adding luster to the glass of terrace doors. I walked down a dogleg of stone steps to the terrace, all two hundred feet of it.

There was a central octagonal fountain populated by marble naiads almost luminously white by moonlight, all of them un-draped and anatomically explicit, some erotically involved, others just lazing timelessly around. The package the Greaser had mentioned was there, near the dry fountain. They had dropped her off nude, barely conscious, and wrapped in razor wire. There was a lot of blood. It soaked into the knees of my khaki pants when I dropped beside her, said her name.

Her eyelids flickered.

“Hey. Rawson.”

“Who did this, Sunny? Ortega?”

“Damn. I forgot… to ask.”

“Did you find Elena? Did she have anything to do with it?”

I voice-accessed my wristpac, gave my call sign, and requested a medical team. The wristpac GPS signal would have an ILC chopper over us in less than twelve minutes.

“Limo,” Sunny said. Then, “Mal.”

“Mal? Mal Scarlett? What about her?”

Sunny was shivering. Each time she shuddered the barbs drew more blood. She licked her lips.

“Angel,” she said. “Dead drop. Handicap.”

She seemed to be talking in code. Or as if each breath she drew to speak might be her last.

“What do you mean, Sunny?”

“Angel Town.”

“Say again.”

She flinched like she was being sawn in half and cried out. I didn’t want her to hear the fright in my voice. I bit down on my tongue.

“I have wire cutters in the Rover,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I thought I saw her smile.

“Know you will,” she said faintly.

I sprinted up to the motor court and located the cutters in my tool chest. But by the time I got back to Sunny, it wasn’t any use.

unrise found me still sitting on the wall of the terrace
at Valdemar, looking out on a slate-gray sea with a sheen on the horizon, where the moon had set. Nearer the shoreline a few early-rising surfers coasted on some moderate waves. Occasional vehicles southbound on PCH all had their headlights on. There was ground fog at the bottom of the barranca and the moon was down behind some trees like an eye about to close.

Evidence Response teams had finished their work in and around the house and on the terrace without turning up anything significant. If Bucky Spartacus had been there he hadn’t left any trace behind. He had called me on a throwaway. So had the wheezing, taunting Latino it would someday be my pleasure to kill.

Raymond Chandler, poet laureate of a different L.A. in what we all nostalgically thought of as a better time, had written in one of his books that dead men are heavier then broken hearts. I looked at my bandaged hands that I had ripped on razor wire in my clumsy efforts to free Sunny and nursed my own broken heart. She had been family to me: smart, wry, a tough counter-puncher when my humor got a little too personal. Kid sister, partner, friend. I kept thinking how I’d sent her to someone or
into something neither of us had been prepared for and how her blood was still drying on my clothes. They’d killed her brutally and indifferently and I didn’t know why.

I heard my name twice before I looked up. Lew Rolling was standing a few feet away, tapping his wristpac.

“Huggins,” he said. “Do you want to talk to him now?”

Ron Huggins and his partner Wade Miller had been the agents I had assigned to the graveyard shift to keep me informed of activity at Ida Grace’s home. I nodded. Lew projected Ron’s hologram toward me.

“R, we’re so goddamned sorry about Sunny. Anything yet?”

“No.” I glanced at the top of the steps to the terrace and saw Booth Havergal starting down with one of his bodyguards. “Did Ida have a peaceful night?” I asked Huggins.

“Uh-uh. She had her chauffeur drive her to Van Nuys airport at two this morning.”

“Ida had travel plans?”

“The airport was as far as she got. Stayed in the limo when they arrived. At 0225 a helicopter showed up, one of those twelve-passenger jobs. As soon as the helo was on the ground Mrs. Grace left the limo and walked over to it. She was helped up the stairs and inside by a crew member. She stayed just shy of fifteen minutes, returned to the limousine, and was driven home. She arrived at 0300. The helicopter, by the way, is owned by Brenta Development.”

“Thanks, Ron.”

His hologram vanished. “Miles Brenta,” I said to Lew. “Funny how his name keeps coming up. Or maybe it’s not so funny.”

“How do you mean?”

Booth Havergal came over to us, and dismissed Lew with a glance.

To me he said, “I was on a call with Joe Cronin. He has not heard from their rocker client.”

“Or wouldn’t admit it if he had.”

Booth stroked his chin with a forefinger. He always looked freshly barbered no matter what hour of the day it was.

“I’m not easily lied to. I have to know that you’re absolutely certain it was Bucky Spartacus you were talking to, inasmuch as you’ve never met the lad.”

“He knew a couple of things about Chiclyn Hickey only the two of us should know. Bucky was convinced that she was dead. He said to me, direct quote, ‘I don’t know what they’re trying to do to us.’ Which to my way of thinking indicates complicity, however unwilling he might have been.”

“Go easy, R.”

I looked at the place by the fountain where each blood spot was being sampled while a couple of kneeling naiads looked on. In the mild light they seemed as if they might be mourning. I turned and leaned out over the wide flat-top railing and vomited stale coffee and what bile I had left into the barranca. I wiped my mouth on the back of a bandaged hand and stared at Booth, eyes running, trying to get my breath back.

“Easy’s over with,” I said. “I’ll build a solid case if I can. But if I can’t and it looks as if the ones responsible for Sunny might walk, then it’ll be blood for blood.”

“Take some medical days, R. Give the wounds a chance to heal.”

“No.”

“It’s not a suggestion.”

“I’m not out of control.”

“Closer than you think, fella.”

“I can deal with it. Anger doesn’t make me blind and it doesn’t make me stupid. You know that, Booth.”

He was on the verge of suspending me. He studied my face as if looking for hex markings. I couldn’t blame him. He had a shop to run and his reputation to think about. But once he made his decision reluctantly in my favor he set his jaw and nodded.

“Sunny was the best. I know what this case means to you. Get some sleep, get a tetanus booster, and I’ll see you in my office at three this afternoon. We’ll go over everything we have so far, and decide how to proceed.
I’ll
decide.”

Beatrice met me at the front door when I returned to the house on Breva Way. She took a startled step back when she saw me, as if she were witnessing an apparition at a séance. I’d called her hours earlier but I hadn’t done much explaining; she only knew that Sunny was dead.