Weird Detectives (41 page)

Hardin was making wild claims—the girl had been careful and the physical evidence was scant. They might not find the bolt cutters, and the salt thing was pure television. And while Hardin might scrounge together the evidence and some witness testimony, she might never convince the DA’s office that this had really happened.

Teresa looked stricken, like she was trying to decide if Hardin was right, and if they had the evidence. If a jury would believe that a meek, pregnant teenager like her could even murder another person. It would be a hard sell—but Hardin was hoping this would never make it to court. She wasn’t stretching the truth about the self-defense plea. By some accounts, Teresa probably deserved a medal. But Hardin wouldn’t go that far.

In a perfect world, Hardin would be slapping cuffs on Dora Manuel, not Teresa. But until the legal world caught up with the shadow world, this would have to do.

Teresa finally spoke in a rush. “I had to do it. You know I had to do it. My mother’s been pregnant twice since Ms. Manuel moved in. They all died. I heard her talking. She knew what it was. She knew what was happening. I had to stop it.” She had both hands laced in a protective barrier over her stomach now. She wasn’t showing much yet. Just a swell she could hold in her hands.

Julia Martinal covered her mouth. Hardin couldn’t imagine which part of this shocked her more—that her daughter was pregnant, or a murderer.

Hardin imagined trying to explain this to the captain. She managed to get the werewolves pushed through and on record, but this was so much weirder. At least, not having grown up with the stories, it was. But the case was solved. On the other hand, she could just walk away. Without Teresa’s confession, they’d never be able to close the case. Hardin had a hard time thinking of Teresa as a murderer—she wasn’t like Cormac Bennett. Hardin could just walk away. But not really.

In the end, Hardin called it in and arrested Teresa. But her next call was to the DA about what kind of deal they could work out. There had to be a way to work this out within the system. Get Teresa off on probation on a minor charge. There had to be a way to drag the shadow world, kicking and screaming, into the light.

Somehow, Hardin would figure it out.

Carrie Vaughn
is the author of the
New York Time
s bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, the most recent of which is
Kitty Rocks the House.
She’s also the author of young adult novels (
Voices of Dragons
,
Steel
) and contemporary fantasy (
Discord’s Apple
,
After the Golden Age
). A graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, she’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.

The Case:
Hilda Beyers, a junior at Rutgers, has been missing for four months . . . Sarah Culpepper thinks her husband, Avery, is cheating on her . . . but that’s far from all . . .

The Investigator:
Sam Grant, a New York City private investigator, former cop, and decorated veteran of World War I
.

MORTAL BAIT

Richard Bowes

When I think of death what comes to mind is the feel of an ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I’m a letter being sliced open. When that happens in my nightmares I wake up. In real life, just before the blade of ice reached my heart, the medic got to me where I lay in that bloody field at Aisne-Marne, tied and tightened a tourniquet above my left knee and stopped the flow before all my blood ran onto the grass.

That memory of my war came out of nowhere as I sat in my little office in Greenwich Village on a sunny October afternoon. It felt like someone had riffled through my memories and pulled out that one. Beings that my Irish grandmother called the Gentry and the Fair Folk walk this world and can do things like that to mortals. A shiver ran through me.

My name’s Sam Grant and I’m a private investigator. Logic and deduction come into my line of work. So do memory and intuition. My grandmother always said a sudden shiver meant someone had just stepped on the spot where your grave would be.

I could have told myself it was that or a stray draft of cold air. But I’d felt this before and knew what it meant. Some elf or fairy had shuffled my memories like a card deck. And that wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

At that moment I was writing a letter to my contact, Bertrade le Claire. It was Bertrade who had worked a magic to shield me.

An intruder would see her image, her long dark hair, beautiful wide eyes—a face that seemed like something off a movie screen. She wore a jacket of red and gold and a look that said “Step back!” She was a law officer in the Kingdom Beneath the Hill.

The letter I was writing concerned new clients, the Beyers, a couple from Menlo Park, New Jersey. He worked for an insurance company; she taught Sunday School. In my office she talked; he studied the photos I keep on my wall and they both clung to hope and the arms of their chairs.

They were the parents of Hilda, a junior at Rutgers and currently a missing person. Hilda, according to her mother, was a sensitive girl who wrote poetry, was due to graduate in June of 1952 and become an English teacher. She’d had a few boyfriends over the years but nothing serious as far as anyone knew. Not the kind of young lady to run off on a whim. But four months back it seems that she did.

While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor LaGuardia with his honor mugging for the camera as he shook my hand and thanked me for civilian services to New York City during the Second War to End All Wars.

The one where I’m getting kissed by Marshal Foch I leave in the drawer because some guys in this neighborhood might get the wrong idea.

But I display Douglas MacArthur, executive officer of the Rainbow Division in 1918, pinning a Distinguished Service Cross on the tunic of a soldier on crutches. I’m not that easy to make out. But Colonel MacArthur with his soft cap at a jaunty angle and a riding crop under his arm, you’d recognize anywhere. I figure it’s got to be worth something that I served under Dugout Doug and lived to tell about it.

Mrs. Beyer told me how the New Jersey cops couldn’t find a lead on Hilda. After other private eyes struck out, my name came up.

Mrs. Beyer paused then said, “We have heard that she could have gone to another . . . ” and trailed off.

“ . . . realm,” I offered and she nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. Mr. Beyer’s eyes widened at hearing a man who’d been decorated by MacArthur say he believed in fairies.

After that we closed the deal quickly. My initial fee is $250. It’s stiff but I think I’m worth it: especially since I wore my good suit and a fresh starched shirt for the occasion. I didn’t promise them their daughter back. I did promise I’d do everything I could to find her. On their way out, I shook hands with him. Put my left hand on hers for reassurance.

Playing baseball as a kid, I was a switch hitter and I could field and throw with both my right and my left. I even learned to write with either hand. These days the left’s the only thing about me that still works the way everything once did. And I tend to save it for special occasions.

In the Beyer’s presence I walked tall. But I still have metal fragments in my knee. With the clients gone I limped a bit on my way back to the desk.

I took a sheet of paper and a plain envelope out of the desk, stuck in a high school yearbook photo of Hilda, scribbled a few lines about the case, dated and signed it. Then I felt the intrusion and added the PS, “Some stray elf or fairy just got into my memories.” On the envelope I wrote Bertrade’s full name and her address in The Kingdom.

The phone rang and a woman said, “Sam,” and nothing more. She sounded tired, flat.

“Annie.” Anne Toomey is the wife of my buddy Jim. He and I were in France together. “How’s Jimmy?” Since she was calling I knew the answer. Knew what she was going to ask.

“Not feeling great, Sam. We wondered if you could handle the Culpepper case today.”

“We” meant that Anne was doing this on her own.

“Sure I’ll do it. Nothing changed from Jim’s report yesterday right?”

“You’re a saint, Sam.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the Up To the Minute Answering Service. Gracie was on duty. Behind her I could hear half a dozen other girls at switchboards.

“Doll,” I said, “I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Anyone wants me I’ll be back after six.”

Under her operator voice Gracie talks Brooklyn like the Queen speaks English. “Be careful, you,” she said. She gets her ideas of private detectives from paperback novels.

We’ve never met. Going down in the elevator I thought of Gracie as being maybe in her mid-thirties—which seems young to me now. I imagined her as blond and nicely rounded sitting at the switchboard in a revealing silk robe.

I imagined the other Up To the Minute ladies sitting around similarly dressed. This is the privilege of a divorced and decorated veteran who once got kissed by a French Field Marshall.

My office is on the fifth floor. With a couple of errands to do, I crossed the vestibule and stepped outside. They tore down the elevated line before World War II but better than a decade later Sixth Avenue still looked naked in the October afternoon sunlight.

Across the way, the women’s prison stood like a black tower as all around it paddy wagons unloaded their cargo. Some parents find out their daughters have run off to Fairyland. Others discover them at the Women’s House of Detention.

They use the old Jefferson Market Court House next door to the prison as the Police Academy now. Sergeant Danny Hogan was showing a couple of dozen cadets in their gray and green uniforms how to write out parking tickets. Hogan and I did foot patrol in the old Fourteenth Precinct back when we were both starting out. He spotted me and rolled his tired eyes.

As I headed towards the subway I saw the headlines and front pages of the afternoon papers. My old pal MacArthur had landed at Inchon a couple of weeks before. Maps of the Korean Peninsula showed black arrows pointing in all directions.

On the subway stairs, I felt something like the opposite of forgetting. A stray sprite with nothing better to do had tried to probe me. The mental image of Bertrade appeared and whatever it was immediately broke contact. I continued down the stairs, stuck a dime in the slot and got on the uptown A train.

Early in life I heard about fairies. My mother’s mother saw leprechauns in the coal cellar and elves under the bed. Mostly I ignored her once I turned into a hard guy at the age of eight.

My mother was born and raised in the Irish stretch of Greenwich Village. She learned stenography, got a job in an import/export office, and married late. Sam Grant Senior was part Irish and not very Catholic. He had been on the road as a salesman for many years before my mother forced him to settle down. I was the only kid.

I remember my old man a little sloshed one night telling me about having been on the night train to Cincinnati with “the crack women’s apparel salesman on that route.”

This guy was very smashed and told the old man how he’d gone down the path to Fairyland when was young, stayed there for a few years, learned a few tricks. My father told me, “He said some of the ones there could read your mind like a book.”

I heard about The Kingdom Beneath the Hill a few more times over the years. As a legend it was slightly more believable than Santa Claus and a bit less likely than the fabled speakeasy that only served imported booze.

Then almost ten years ago, an elf almost killed me and a couple of fairies saved my life. One of them was a young lady named Bertrade.

The two errands I had were within a few blocks of each other. I rode the A train up to Penn Station and used the exit on Thirty-third and Eighth. First I went to the General Post Office. The place is like a Mail Cathedral. I climbed the wide stairs and the knee complained.

Inside under the high vaulted ceilings were big posters commemorating the pilots who had died flying mail planes thirty years back. I walked past the window that said “Overseas Mail” to the small window that said nothing.

It was there that I always mailed my letters to the Kingdom. The man on duty had a slight crease on the left side of his head—a veteran of something I thought. I’d spoken to him a couple of times, asked him questions, and never got more than a shrug or a shake or nod of the head.

He took the letter. Right then another mind touched mine, saw the image of Bertrade that I flashed and bounced away.

The clerk eyes widened. He’d caught some of it too. I took back the letter, picked up a pen and wrote, “Urgent—contact!” on the envelope. The clerk nodded, stuck a stamp I’d never seen before, one with a falcon in flight on it, turned and put it down a slot behind him.

“They’ll have it by midnight,” he said in an accent I couldn’t catch. “Keep your head down. Tall elves are questing today.” Then he stepped away from the window.

I waited for a minute for him to come back. When he didn’t I turned and walked the length of the two-block-long lobby all the way to Thirty-first Street. Maybe it was just an elf lost and a stranger in the big city who kept trying to bust into my head, and I was overacting. Maybe I was lonely and wanted to see Bertrade.

Going down stairs was tougher on my knee than going up stairs. I walked two blocks south on my errand for Jim and Anne. Thinking it was good to have a simple assignment to occupy my mind I bought a late edition of the
Journal American
. It was 4:35. Some people were already heading for the subway.

Just west of Sixth Avenue on the south side of Thirtieth Street stood the Van Neiman, a nondescript office building. Across the street was a luncheonette. The only other customer was hunched over his paper; the counterman and waitress were cleaning up.