Blood Walk Part 16

How would his request to see her be received? As a rude reminder of her past?

When he mentioned Mala Babra, however, the rich voice on the other end of the line laughed. "That crazy singer? Are things so slow for you boys that you're digging into the bas.e.m.e.nt files? Yes, I'll talk to you."

Garreth saw one problem: identification. It was all very well to tell her over the phone that he was from the police. She could call back and verify that. What did he do when she asked to see identification at her house?

His eyes dropped to the drawer where Serruta had put his badge case. His hand reached out for the drawer pull, then jerked back.You were going to keep clean, remember?

"Will this evening be convenient for you?" He would bluff his way in somehow.

"If you come before seven."

Garreth parked at the curb at a quarter till the hour. The heavy front door bore an ornate lion's head knocker in the middle. He reached out for it, but the door swung open even before he touched the knocker. A plump pouter pigeon of a woman looking the epitome of grandmother and matron studied him from the level of his shoulders.

"You're the young man who called? Mikaelian?" she asked.

"Yes. You're-"

"Claudia Thouvenelle. Well." She looked him over, relieved about something. "Please come in. Do you have a first name?"

"Garreth." He followed her to a set of double doors down the hallway.

She pulled one of the doors open and leaned into the library behind. "James," she said to the man sitting in a leather chair, "this is Garreth Mikaelian, the son of my old girlfriend Katherine Kane. You remember me telling you about her, don't you? Gary and I will be across the hall chatting if you need me."

She led an astonished Garreth across the hall to a living room and settled herself on a sofa. She met his eyes with her own, unnaturally blue-contact lenses?-and cool as ice. "I see no need to reveal the long-dead past to my husband, though understand that I'm not ashamed of it. I even find the idea of talking about those days after all these years a bit nostalgic. What do you want to know about that madwoman?"

"Everything you can tell me: who she was, where she came from, who her friends were."

She blinked, in disappointment, Garreth would have sworn. "I don't know anything except that she nearly disfigured me. She was crazy. It wasn't my fault if the naval officer preferred me to her. Who wouldn't prefer a woman-sized woman to that great gallumphing elephant?"

Garreth silently compared the matron with her blue-gray hair and sagging jowls to the slim, taut-bodied redhead who had her choice of men to bed and bleed. He could imagine that a woman so tall in those days might find the pickings a bit lean. Lane had the last laugh on her generation now, though.

"May I ask what your interest in her is after all these years?"

"We're trying to locate her. We think she has information we need on a current investigation."

"Have you checked the state mental inst.i.tutions? She was quite unbalanced and should have been confined."

Garreth wrinkled his forehead. "Then why did you drop the charges?"

"As a favor for a friend, Don Lukert, the manager of the Red Onion. He was afraid that the owners might be upset by the bad publicity, so I agreed to drop the charges if he'd fire her and use his influence to see that she couldn't find another job in North Beach. He did and I did."

Vindictive b.i.t.c.h,Garreth thought. Aloud he said, "This manager. Is his name Donald Lukert?"

"No. Eldon."

"Do you know where he is today?" Mr. Lukert might have known something about his singer.The woman shook her head. "I made enough during the war so that with some wise investments, I retired after Armistice and dropped out of my old circles. I went by the Red Onion a few years later but it had burned and another club had been built in its place. Don wasn't there. If he's still in the city, he's probably in a nursing home. He was in his late forties back then."

"Did Mr. Lukert ever talk to you about Miss Babra?"

"Oh, a couple of times, perhaps. We had some laughs over how ridiculous and grotesque she was."

Garreth decided he did not care much for Claudia Bologna Darling Drum Thouvenelle.

"She tried to make him think she was a Balkan princess. She carried the blood of ancient n.o.bility in her veins, is how she put it.

She gave him some fantastic story about having escaped from eastern Europe just ahead of Hitler's storm troopers. But she wasn't European. That Bela Lugosi accent she used disappeared the moment she started shrieking at me and before that, a client of mine I met at the club heard her speaking what sheclaimed was her language and he said it was nothing but a preposterous hodgepodge of German and Russian."

Garreth blinked. German matched Lane's choice of names, but where did the Russian fit in?Possible German and Russian community? he wrote. They would have to be groups insular enough to be speaking their own languages in addition to English.

After asking questions for another ten minutes without learning anything more that seemed useful, he closed the notebook and stood. "I think that's all I need. Thank you for your time."

She escorted him to the door, speaking in a voice pitched to carry. "I'm so glad to hear about Kate. I'd lost track of her and thought I'd never hear of her again. Give your mother a big hug for me, will you?"

Garreth sighed in relief as the door closed behind him. What luck. She had never come close to asking for his ID.Lucky cop.

Thank you, Lady Luck. Keep smiling, Lady.

7

The final, formal steps of resignation took less time and hurt more than Garreth antic.i.p.ated. Checking in all equipment issued to him by the department felt like the division of property in a divorce. Gun, theirs; holster, his. Badge and ID card, theirs; badge case, his. Call box and other a.s.sorted keys, theirs; receipt for items currently being kept as evidence, his. So it went, down to his signature on all the necessary papers and the receipt of his final check.

He put that away carefully in his billfold. How long would it last? Until he found Lane?

"Good luck, Mr. Mikaelian," the clerk said impersonally.

Mister. Civilian. Garreth turned away, biting his lip.

Cleaning out his desk felt like divorce, too . . . packing up what he felt like taking, giving or throwing away the rest. Some of it amazed him; had he really kept so much candy squirreled away in his desk? No wonder he had not been able to lose weight. And where had the Valium come from? For the most part, however, he worked numbly, feeling a chill like an arctic wind blowing through him . . . that despite the heat he had taken the past twelve hours.See the heat getting the heat.

First it had been Harry last night-someone Harry refused to identify had told him about the finality of Garreth's resignation-and then the shooting board this morning.

The officer going in the front with Harry had sighed in relief as the board ruled his shooting of Wink righteous, but no one else found any comfort. The board gave Harry and Garreth what amounted to the Starsky and Hutch Award for Hot Dog of the Month, but also named the four uniformed officers as accessories. Failure to clear the operation with Serruto headed the list of sins, followed by criticisms of the execution that left no doubt that the board felt only divine intervention prevented any loss of life.

They had reserved an entire section of their opinion just for Garreth. "Under the best of circ.u.mstances, even if all other procedure had been correctly observed, this operation would have been handicapped, if not compromised, by the presence of Inspector Mikaelian. From the evidence of his own statements and those made by Sergeant Takananda, it is clear that this officer should not have been on duty. The board questions the judgment of Dr. Charles in certifying him fit. We question the judgment of Lieutenant Serruto in accepting that certification. And in light of the particularly savage attack on Inspector Mikaelian such a short time before, its bizarre aftermath in the morgue, and the inspector's forcible departure from the hospital and refusal to return for proper medical observation and treatment, this board wonders why a psychological evaluation of this officer was not required before returning him to duty."

Behind his gla.s.ses, Garreth had glanced over to where Serruto sat with his handsome face grimly deadpan. Garreth burned in an agony of guilt. The lieutenant would be bearing the brunt of that last criticism. Under questioning, Serruto had stated that he planned to send Garreth to the department shrink, but could not explain why he had failed to do so. Of course he would not remember that the thought had disappeared the moment Garreth looked him in the eyes and declared himself fit.

In Homicide afterward, checking to be sure Garreth had all the necessary reports turned in, Serruto had said, "We can't make you see the shrink now, but you should go. Whatever brought on that attack in the restaurant and made you freeze at O'Hare's place is a time bomb ticking away inside you. You ought to have it defused.""I'm fine," Garreth had said, declining, keenly aware that the advice and its refusal would probably be noted in his personnel jacket . . . the final comments on his service.

He tried not to think of that now, as he went through his desk.

"Tea, Mikaelian?"

He looked up to see Evelyn Kolb offering him her thermos. He nodded. Maybe it would help ease the cold inside him.

She pumped him a cupful. Sipping it, he reflected on Mr. Eldon Lukert. The phone book gave no listing for him, though a call to the phone company revealed that he had had one until five years ago. The county tax rolls still carried him. Garreth had managed to learn that much before the shooting board sat in judgment. Claudia Bologna etc. might be correct in her opinion that he was in a nursing home. Garreth planned to call them all to see.

Almost before he knew it, the tea was gone and the desk cleared. The box of belongings sat filled, ready to be removed.

Reluctantly, Garreth put on his coat.

Serruto came out of his office, a hand extended. "Good luck, Mikaelian."

Garreth shook the hand. "Thank you." He thought about going around the room shaking everyone's, but a lump in his throat warned him that he might be in tears by the time he finished, so he shook just Kolb's and waved at the other detectives. "So long."

Their eyes reflected a common thought:That could be me. They said, "Good luck."

Garreth felt as though he stood on a ship pulling away fast from sh.o.r.e, watching the distance between himself and them growing ever wider. He ambled out of the room with the box, wanting to run, silently swearing at Lane.These were brothers, lady. These were my family and you took them away from me. Why didn't you just kill me straight out? Why couldn't you let me die clean?

He drove home thinking:Mr. Eldon Lukert, be good to me. Lead me to her. Please.

He started with the A's in the nursing home section of the yellow pages and worked his way through the listings, one phone call at a time. If necessary, he was prepared to call every home in the Bay Area, including San Mateo, Alameda, and Marin counties.

Halfway through the San Francisco listings, the woman answering said, "Eldon Lukert? No, we don't have a patient by that name now. It sounds familiar, though. Just a minute." She went off the line.

Garreth crossed his fingers.

She came back. "We did have an Eldon Lukert until last month . . . Mr. Eldon Wayne Lukert."

"That's the gentleman I need. Can you tell me where he went?"

She paused. "I'm sorry. He didn't actually go anywhere. He died."

8

Garreth stood at the window, staring out at the twilight-reddened sky. Lukert died last month.The b.i.t.c.h Luck strikes again.

Dead end . . . literally. Finis. He rubbed his forehead. Now what?

Out of the churning in his mind, one thought rose: Lane's apartment. It still drew him. She had lived there, called it home. Pieces of her, collected and kept over the long years and many changes of ident.i.ty, filled it. Those pieces must indicate what she was and where she had come from, if only he could put them together right.

Driving to the apartment, he approached the door with caution. He had been invited in once. Would it still hold good, as the legend said? Or would the fiery pain bar him again?

At the door, his body still felt cool and comfortable. He leaned against the door, willing himself to the other side. Still no pain touched him. There was only the wrenching that he had come to a.s.sociate with moving through barriers, uncomfortable but not painful, and in a moment he stood in the hallway.

How dark it had looked that first time he walked down it behind Lane Barber. No more. Now he saw it as gray twilight. For once he felt grateful for his vampire vision; he could move around the apartment and study it all he needed without lights to arouse the curiosity and suspicion of neighbors.

He stepped into the living room . . . and stopped cold still. It had been stripped clean! The furniture remained, but the paintings, the sculpture, the books and objects on the shelves were all gone.

Garreth ran for the bedroom and jerked open the closet. Her clothes still hung inside. In the kitchen he found the few items in the cupboards untouched, too.

He went back to the living room to stare at the empty shelves. When had she come back? Sometime in the last few days, obviously. She had come back and taken the items that were important to her. How did she know the apartment was not being watched?

Perhaps because she herself had been watching?

He sat down in a handy chair. Could it be she had never left the city at all? He bit his lip. Never left the city. Why had they not thought of that?Perhaps Serruto had and simply neglected to mention it to Garreth; after all, Garreth had not been deeply involved in the investigation since his injury. He found it easy to imagine how they missed finding her. After ridding herself of the car or hiding it, she probably checked into a hotel in some kind of disguise. With her height, she could even pa.s.s as a man.

She had stayed, and watched, and when it was safe, had picked up her belongings. This was one very cool lady. What was it her agent had said about her? All ice and steel inside. Really!

A shiver moved down his spine.The maiden is powerful. Beware of such a maiden. Made of ice and steel and with over forty years head start on him in vampirism and living experience, did he really stand a chance of finding her? What might she do if she suspected he was after her?

Then he shook his head. Personal danger should be the least of his worries. His life was already gone. All she could take away from him now was existence. On the other hand, she had the capacity to harm a great many more people if allowed to continue unchecked.

Very well, then . . . he must keep going. He needed a direction, though. Any help he might have gained from her belongings had disappeared. He had to proceed on what he already knew.

Whatdid he know?

The writing paper still remained in the desk. He took out a sheet and itemized his knowledge. She came, probably, from a Germanic background. She sometimes used Germanic names. She spoke German and Russian.

He made a note to find out through one of the local universities the location of German and Russian groups near each other in the United States around World War I when she was born.

Could any of her belongings regionalize her? Too bad he did not know rocks well enough to describe those in the type tray to a geologist. If all of them were childhood "treasures" as other objects in the tray seemed to suggest, and if two or more came from a single geographic area, it might have been a lead. All he remembered, though, was the black shark tooth. Was that something he could use?

The apartment had given him as much as it was ever going to. He left, checking out the window beside the door to make sure the street was clear before pa.s.sing through to the porch, and drove down to Fisherman's Wharf.

A few of the shops in the area remained open, catching late tourist trade. He wandered into one. "Do you have shark's teeth?"

he asked the girl behind the counter.

She took him to a section where the wall displayed small circles of jawbone lined with rows of wicked teeth. He studied the teeth. They looked to be the same shape as the teeth he had seen, but were all white, not black.

"Do you have any black shark's teeth?"

She blinked. "Black? I've never seen black ones before."

He tried a similar shop farther down the street with the same results. The two clerks and a customer there had never seen or heard of black shark's teeth, either.

The time had come, he decided, to seek expert advice. In the morning he would call one of the universities and ask them where black shark's teeth came from.

Morning. He chafed at that. Why did it always have to be during the day when he could accomplish anything? He crossed Jefferson and began wandering through the arcades of the Cannery, peering into its shop windows fuming in impatience. Nothing was open when he felt most like working. Lane had taken convenience from him, too.

Then, in the window of a jewelry shop, he saw them . . . earrings, hooped for pierced ears, with small black teeth dangling from them! The shop had closed, of course, but a light still burned and he could see someone moving around inside. Garreth rapped on the window.

A man came out of a back room. He shook his head, pointing at the sign in the window stating business hours.

"I just want to ask a question," Garreth called.