Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (3 page)

Yet there was something else going on over there. Lee dipped another cube of bread, watching it. The three other well-dressed men, for all their apparent casualness, looked stiff and strained. Their ease was artificial, applied. And the quiet-eyed man who listened to them, though physically alert and erect enough, at the same time seemed inwardly to be 
lounging
— watching their nervousness from a carefully maintained distance, aloof and ever so faintly amused. It was a look that Lee had seen before in Elves.
Hell
, she thought, 
everybody’s seen it. It’s one of the ways you tell an Elf in the first place.
 But in this Elf, 
the
 Elf, the effect was both more subtle and more concentrated. Lee looked away and speared more bread.

Gelert lifted his head from his drink, and within a few seconds—neither too quickly nor too slowly—Konrad Egli made his way over to their banquette table. Herr Egli was a great, gray, craggy block of a man, like a small Alp; forty years the master of this house and long past being ruffled by anything, even the presence of the absolute master of an entire otherworld. Mortal kings and princesses, and rock stars and politicos and chairmen of the board, all the lesser sorts of royalty, had been dining in his restaurant for years. He treated them all with the same benevolent, ruthless hospitality that he bestowed on first-timers just in off the street, and nothing any of them said or did ever seemed to catch him off guard. Now Herr Egli leaned down beside Gelert—not too far: even sitting on the floor, Gelert was tall enough to have to look slightly downward at Lee—and nodded at the empty Waterford bowl.

“Another one, 
madra
?”

“Please.”

“Konni,” Lee said, keeping her voice low, “does he come here often?” She nodded at the far side of the room, where jocund voices were rising in discreet merriment at some carefully witty remark.

Herr Egli shook his head. “A few times a year. Always business dinners, or lunches.” He glanced over his shoulder for a second, then added with a smile and a fatherly scowl, “His guests—they never seem to finish what they order.”

Lee smiled wryly. Herr Egli took his role of patron seriously, and was not above scolding his favorite customers in friendly fashion if they seemed to need it. “You notice,” she said in mock-daughterly respect, “that I ate all my spinach.”

“Good girl. Another glass of wine?”

“Yes, Konni, thank you.”

He picked up her wineglass and Gelert’s bowl and carried them away to the bar; then, at the thump the inner front door made when the outer door was opened, turned to greet an arriving guest. Lee dunked another chunk of bread for Gelert and offered it to him. He accepted it with eyes half closed, a sybarite’s lazy look, and thumped his tail gently on the wine-colored carpet as he chewed. “I’m glad we came,” he said. “Even if you think you can’t afford it.”

“Excuse me,” Lee said, ” 
you’re
 paying for this one, you said.”

Gelert grinned, exhibiting many sharp white fangs. “But Lee, my portfolio—”

“—needs a forklift to pick it up. I’d ask you how you do it, except I’d be afraid we’d have the Securities and Exchange Commission after us about ten minutes later. And anyway, you’re right, we 
do
 deserve it. We worked our butts off on that case. Here at least we can have dinner without the people from the local TV stations shoving cameras in our faces. So I will ever so gracefully, just this once, let you pay.”

Gelert was still grinning. “Oh, well…it was worth a try.”

Herr Egli came back with their drinks. “Konni,” Lee said, “the great white pig here has, I would say ‘singlehandedly’ if he had hands, finished off the fondue—”

“She starves me all day,” Gelert said, dropping his ears down flat and attempting to look piteous. “Eating out’s my only chance at sustenance. And look what I wind up with. Bread and water.”

“How you suffer,” Lee said. “Konni, how about dessert?”

“Fine. What would you like?”

“Chocolate fondue,” said Gelert.

“Gel, no. You’ll get it in your fur again…”

The argument ran its predictable course, and Herr Egli went off to have them brought coffee, and to arrange for the chocolate fondue. Lee held out the next-to-last bit of bread and cheese to Gelert, looking over his shoulder as Konni paused by that one table across the room, checking on the guests seated there. One of them, the host of the Elf-King’s party, was ordering, looking back and forth from Herr Egli to the trim blond woman in Swiss bodice and skirt who was actually taking the order. The Elf-King sat back in his chair, his malt-brown eyes shifting from one member of the party to another, lingering on them, unreadable. It was the typical Alfen gaze—that cool, easy regard, rooted in the kind of calm for which only an immortal had leisure…

Lee became aware that she was staring. Nonetheless she prolonged the examination just a bit, fascinated by the man’s remoteness, his mild amusement, his too-perfect handsomeness. Her own fascination embarrassed and puzzled her a bit; though she delighted in good looks in men, gawking was hardly her style. 
Still
, she thought, almost defiantly—and whom was she defying?—
just a little exercise of
 
curiosity on my own time
…And then her embarrassment escalated, for those brown eyes were suddenly staring right back at her, a considering look: interested, and ever so slightly disturbed.

Still Lee wouldn’t immediately look away, though she did start to blush at being caught staring at a celebrity like some tourist just in from the edgeworlds. There was something latent beneath that look of his, something rising like blood under skin, and it made her curious. Her Sight worried at it, fraying away at the edges of it, unraveling the seeming that overlay the truth. A few moments more and she would know the hidden thought, the answer to what was puzzling her—

The still, dark man wouldn’t look away, and Lee’s embarrassment finally got the better of her. She broke gaze, glanced away for something else to look at, anything, and took glad refuge in the arrival of the waitress with the coffee. 
Rude
, Lee thought, annoyed with herself. 
And dumb. What if I’d gone
 
judicial?
 Though that was unlikely. Both by training and intention Lee was enough of a professional not to look at other human beings in the normal course of daily life in the same way she looked at plaintiffs or the accused in the courtroom. Yet it was impossible ever to turn the Sight completely off, and insights did slip through…
Oh, come on
, she thought, annoyed at her own attempt to rationalize it.
Eavesdropping at a perfect stranger like that… and this one, in particular. What’s the matter with
 
me?—

But when Lee looked up again, the Elf-King had turned his attention back to his dinner companions as if nothing had happened, and business went on uninterrupted on the other side of the room. Dessert arrived, and Gelert 
did
 get chocolate in his fur, and Herr Egli scolded him goodnaturedly and sent to the kitchen for hot towels and club soda. Only much later, over the remains of the coffee and snifters of Grand Marnier, while the check was being reckoned up, did Gelert lean toward Lee, and say, “What was 
that
 about?” He flicked one ear backward, in the direction of the Elf-King’s table.

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “Curiosity.” And the first part of that was truer than the second. She snitched a final puff of toasted meringue off the dessert plate, ignoring Gelert’s indignant growl. “Come on, better dig out your plastic, or we’ll have nothing left to catch but the red-eye.”

And he did, and they did, so that an hour or so later the two of them stepped from late evening at Kennedy to summer sunset at Los Angeles Intercontinual—a late-lingering volcano sunset that lowered red hot over the Santa Susanas and turned Lake Val San Fernando to a sea of blood, flat and thick-looking under the breathless, baking air. They caught choppers for home in opposite directions—Lee, as soon as she’d recovered from the inevitable tummyflutter that gating caused her, heading eastward to the park-and-fly and her house in Pasadena; Gelert heading west to his mate and pups and their condo in a 
madrin
 coop at Malibu. Neither of them thought much of that dinner at Le Chalet in the days that followed.

But that night, as the late news came on, Lee thought about it for some time. “A fatal ‘gangland’-style shooting late tonight in the Wilshire District,” said the eleven o’clock anchor; and the camera cut from the studio to a remote of a murky scene lit in pink-yellow streetlights and the flashing reds and blues of ambulances and police black-and-whites. The on scene newsman babbled on about names and circumstances and unclear motives. But what froze Lee in horror, blocking words away, was the quick shot of the slim, well-muscled form, all the Alfen elegance and strength gone out of it now, lying sprawled face down on the pavement. Lee made a face. It was sweeps week, and all the stations’ news coverage had become unusually sensational of late. But as they maneuvered the body onto the stretcher, she still couldn’t look away from the handsome, cool, clean-chiseled face, pale and smudged with street grime, still beautiful in death. She did look away when the hastily tucked drape slipped just enough askew in the moving to show the wet pink-and-white gleam of ribs splintered by a shotgun blast to the back.

In the morning and in days to follow, Lee would read the conjectures in the 
Ellay Times
 about successful or unsuccessful attempts by the Mob to get one of the local Alfen to “play ball” in some unspecified racket. But right now Lee found herself thinking about the expression being slowly frozen by rigor into the dead Elf’s face, and how very similar it was to the way the Elf-King had looked at his poor dinner companions. That aloof, gentle immortal’s gaze; fearless, calmly certain, invulnerable to the petty machinations of those who knew far better than the Alfen how to die…

Lee breathed out and settled back to wait for the weather report.

*2*

The next morning was like most mornings the day after a court appearance: filled with paperwork and dogged by a lingering hung-over feeling that didn’t even have associated with it the guilty satisfaction of a previous night spent partying. Additionally, also as usual, the overhang wasn’t evenly distributed. When Lee got into the office, she found that Gel had been there for an hour before her even though she’d come in early.

Mass looked up from behind his plain dark desk inside their office’s little reception area as Lee pushed open the frosted glass door that said REH’MECHREN AND ENFIELD, LLP: LANTHANOMANCERS AT LAW. Massimo Alighieri had been with Lee and Gelert since a year after they started their practice, and had not changed even a hair’s worth in all that time. He still looked like a kid just out of grad school, lean, dark-haired, with huge dark eyes, a great aquiline nose, and a shock of untameable black hair that gave him the look of either a crazed composer or a mad scientist, depending on the time of day and the state of his blood sugar. Now, as Lee came in, he gave her a look that suggested the blood sugar was presently a problem. “Any messages.?” Lee said.

“DA’s Office,” Mass growled.

Lee flushed. “Oh no. Not—”

“Yup,” Mass said. “But I think it was business. He didn’t look embarrassed.”

“Hmm,” Lee said, and went on past, through the joint sitting area and into her office. It was spare enough, Lee having decided long ago to use the sheer size of the space to make whatever statements needed to be made to impress or reassure a client. Dark brown rug, the desk a six-foot by four-foot slab of goldstone with a tall-backed black leather chair behind it, and behind that, the commwall, Lee’s only indulgence—floor to ceiling, a considerable expense considering the height of the ceilings in this building. She opened up one of the storage cabinets faired into the wall, chucked her briefcase into it, and stood there brooding for a moment, wondering how long she could put off making the call.

The wall opposite the commwall depaqued, and Gelert strolled in from his own office in front of a blast of noise. His office was as luxurious as Lee’s in its own way, including a matching commwall, but Gelert’s taste ran more to what Lee liked to annoy him by calling bric-a-brac—ten pedestals’ worth of ancient art, everything from Earth Minoan sculpture to Xainese iridium-glazed porcelain six thousand years old. The other indulgence was the sound system, which (along with its necessary soundproofing) had actually been more expensive than the commwall, and which now was thundering something symphonic: literally thundering. “What is that?” Lee shouted.

Gelert sat down, and the sound diminished to a whisper. “Hovhannes,” he said. “‘Atmospherics.’”

“Sounds like rain.”

“That’s the next movement. Mass tell you who called?”

“Yes. Why couldn’t you have taken it, if you were in?”

“What,” Gelert said, “and deny you a chance for personal growth?”

“Personal spite, you mean,” Lee said. “That’s about all I feel up for this morning. All right, fine, let’s get it over with. 
Mass?
”

“You don’t need to shout, I heard you…”

The commwall in Lee’s office lit up in blue with the seal of the Ellay County DA’s Office—the un-Hoodwinked Lady, seated on the curule seat with scales and sword, and under it all, the single word HOLDING. “I bet his secretary answers,” Gelert said.

“Be nice if that happened,” Lee said. “Somehow I doubt it will.”

And she was right, for abruptly, there was Matt, looking, for him, unusually wrung out. Lee’s heart seized a little at the sight of him, a reaction that she suspected it was going to take her entirely too long to learn to control. Furious though she might be with him, heartsore and bruised though Lee might be, he looked no less handsome to her than he had the month before, and the urge to reach out and hold him and comfort him jumped right up in her as if the breakup had never happened. The reaction was infuriating, and unbearable, and she was just going to have to deal with it. “I got your message,” Lee said.

Matt sat back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair, a gesture that succeeded no more at calming it down than it ever had. “You did a nice job on the Blair thing,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Lee and Gelert more or less in unison.

“We have a little problem,” said Matt.

“The day you don’t,” Gelert said, “is the day we all go on the dole, so all I can say is, How nice. Details?”

“We had an Elf murdered last night,” Matt said, and made it sound as if the murder had been pointed specifically at him. But that was one of the reasons he’d moved up in the DA’s Office so fast: he took everything personally, and worked as if every murder or assault had happened in his own living room—with intelligence, and an odd uncalculating animus that confused and annoyed some of his coworkers.

“Dil’Sorren,” Lee said, remembering the late news. Gelert cocked an eye at her, said nothing.

“Sorden,” said Matt.

“A shooting. Messy,” Lee said to Gelert. She glanced back at Matt. “Wilshire District, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. We’re still in the early stages—”

“Eight hours on?” Gelert said. “I should think so.”

Matt bent his most furious frown on Gelert, though Lee thought he should have known it was wasted.
He’s been up all night
, she thought. 
Why would that happen on a murder this fresh?
 “We’ve been getting some grief from dil’Sorden’s employers,” he said. “They’re not satisfied with our progress.”

“After eight hours?” Lee said. “Are they nuts? You’d be lucky to have even beginning forensics done by then.”

“You shouldn’t even let them into the office so soon,” Gelert said.

Matt looked even more furious. “We can’t keep them out. They’re ExTel.”

Lee and Gelert exchanged another look. “Oh really,” Lee said. “Not our friend Mr. Hagen?”

“The very same,” said Matt, “and he’s set a fire under Renselaar, which is the reason for this call.”

Jim Renselaar was the DA, and up for reappointment this year, which had turned him into something of a firebreather in service to the Mayor’s Office…not that anyone was fooled by this: they knew Big Jim had his eye on the mayoral chain himself. 
And Renselaar can’t afford to ignore the support which a
 
locally based multinational like ExTel could lend to his campaign someday
, Lee thought. 
Not to
 
mention his campaign chest.

“The boss wants you two to come in and do psychoforensics on dil’Sorden,” Matt said. “He knows you’re sweet with Hagen after that last job you did for ExTel, and you’re in a good spot with the press right now. And batting hot, four for four…so he expects you to produce.”

“Themis does seem to have been on our side these last couple of months,” Gelert said, “but we can’t make any guarantees as regards Lady Luck…which Big Jim knows. I suspect he’s got our good relationship with Hagen more on his mind. We’re going to be, shall we say, his asbestos seat cushion.”

“
Just
 forensics?” Lee said, perhaps more sharply than she intended. “Not litigation?”

“That we’ll negotiate later.”

“Not the slightest chance, Matt,” Lee said. “We sort that out 
now
. No 
way
 are we going to do the tough spadework on this case and then hand it off to a lit team that’s going to blow all our disclosure work, or plea-bargain it off for a quick small win.”

“Lee, you know what they’re going to say—”

“All too damn well,” Lee said. “Because they were saying it on the courthouse steps, and they’re not going to stop saying it no matter how we participate in this case. The only thing that matters now is that we find out just who left that poor Elf with his insides blown out last night, and why. If we discover, we prosecute. The press won’t give a damn after you’ve leaked the salient details to them and made your boss look good. We get a kill, because you know we’re just about the best you’ve got right now. You get good PR. We get a fee commensurate with the work we 
really
did, instead of some split-fee bargain basement deal with one of the DA’s superannuated cronies. Maybe even a leg up into the Upper Bar next year; at least another rung on the ladder. And everybody’s happy. Including, we desperately hope, the soul of that poor bastard, avenged by the event; and Justice Herself, for being served. That being the reason we’re all here, or so I’m told.”

Matt looked at her—Lee counted the seconds off: she knew exactly how long he liked to hold one of these “penetrating looks”—and then made a sour half-smile. “You put your case subtly, as ever,” he said.

“She speaks for me,” Gelert said, “so don’t get personal. Say the word, Matt, and we’re on it. We’ll get on the horn to Hagen and get him off your boss’s case.”

Matt sighed. “Go,” he said. “The crime scene team wants to see you soonest. Call Parker Center, get the address, get down there and deal with them. Blessington’s handling it.”

And they were left staring at the blue screen again. Gelert gave Lee one of those big toothy grins. “What a social animal he is,” he said. “I see why you ditched him.”

His irony was showing only slightly less than it might have been. “Would it had only been so,” Lee muttered, and got up, staring at the commwall as it dissolved back to her default view. “What’s Hagen’s problem, I wonder? He’s usually been fairly mellow when we’ve worked with him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have an asbestos seat cushion,” Gelert said. “Let’s call him and find out. Mass?”

“You don’t have to shout. Got his assistant on the line now.”

“ETA?”

“He’s playing the talking-to-someone-more-important-right-now game, the little 
cucaracha
. Five minutes, because he knows his boss really wants to hear from you.”

“Gee, what would he do if this was a matter of life and death?” Lee said softly, and bent backward a little with her hands in the small of her back, trying to work out a kink. Her sleep had not done her much good last night.

“How’d you know about the murder?” Gelert said.

“The same way you would have, if you weren’t snoring within minutes of getting home last night, or playing with the pups before breakfast,” Lee said.

“Guilty and guilty,” Gelert said. “If I didn’t save the broadcast news and the papers and the online stuff for when I got to work, what else would I do in the office all day? But now I won’t bother. Why prejudice myself with some yellow journalist’s take on whatever minuscule evidence there was at that point?” He lay down on his cushion and sagged back, yawned. “So do we play this as usual?”

“We may as well start that way,” Lee said. “We’ll sniff the scene together, anyway. But after that you’d better see what you can do with prediscovery.”

“You always do this to me when Alfen are involved,” Gelert said. “I hate it.”

“You’re better at data search than I am,” Lee said. “It’s not my fault you take every opportunity to rub my nose in your competence. And with those people’s data protection laws, any tricks you’ve got, we’re going to need.”

Gelert looked glum. “Mass?” Lee said.

“Two minutes, Lee.”

“Not that. Cut a copy of the usual discovery-and-litigation agreement and sim it over to Matt’s office before he thinks of a way to weasel out of the commitment.”

“There before you, boss lady. You’re slipping.”

Lee smiled slightly. “Heads up, he’s on,” Mass said.

The commwall went bright with the view into Charl Hagen’s office. This could have been mistaken for a view of the outdoors, for Hagen was fairly “old management” in what was now the biggest of the telecomms multiuniversals, and Lee remembered her astonishment at discovering that the witness she had been dispatched to interview had not only a forest in his office, but a trout stream. Right now sun was pouring through the rooftop glass of the conservatory side of Hagen’s office, and the man himself was coming around from behind the desk. “Lee. Gelert. Thanks for calling.”

“No problem at all,” Lee said, looking Hagen over nonjudicially for a second as he sat on the front of his desk. It had been six months now since the end of the Xainacom antitrust trials, and Hagen looked a little less harried, had put on a little weight—though it didn’t show that much on his big-boned six foot two.

He was well turned out as always, in a fashionable one piece suit that nonetheless betrayed its off-the-rack origins and its wearer’s too-busy-for-fittings attitude, looking as if someone had applied it to Hagen with a shovel. The dark shaggy hair and the little, close-set, thoughtful eyes in the man’s blunt face always made Lee wonder if Hagen had any Midgarthr blood in him, and whether the human seeming might be a courtesy-covering over something more basic, a formal suit allowed to fall away for short periods when the Moon was right.

“It’s been a little while,” Hagen said. “You two been all right?”

“Busy,” Gelert said.

Hagen grinned, and again Lee saw bear, and had to put the image aside. “Here, too,” Hagen said.

Lee nodded. At the end of a legal case lasting years, Xainacom had been forced into a massive corporate divestiture in the Earth universe. The truth was that the defeat for the company was a minor one—the market in Earth’s universe being nothing like the size of those in Xainese home space, spread across thousands of planets—and when the appeals process was exhausted, the “home office” hadn’t considered the affair worth going to war over. Xainacom Earth had been fractured into a number of still-huge communications and media-related companies, and those of its competitors who had spent vast sums of money assisting with the prosecution were now circling the staggering survivors with an eye to either absorption or destruction. Of all the competitors, ExTel was by far the biggest, and it was wasting no time assuring itself of the best pickings among the divestitures. Lee could believe that Hagen, as the company’s CEO for extracontinual affairs, had been a lot more than “busy.”

“We got a call from Matt Carathen just now,” Lee said. “He suggested that you had asked for our services.”