Water To Burn Part 9

"Well, it was probably just the stocking he wore." She squirmed in her chair like a schoolgirl who's forgotten a crucial answer on a test.

"Your impressions could be valuable," I said. "No one will make fun of you."

"Thanks." She gave me a weak smile. "But you know, it never looked like he had features, facial features, I mean. His head seemed to be this smooth-" She gestured with her hands, a motion that defined a cylinder. "This smooth, well, thing under all the cloth."

"A mask, maybe?" I said.

"Or some sort of helmet." She looked away, then shuddered. "It made a very unpleasant impression."

Ari leaned forward and asked, "Did you know about the heroin traffic?"

"I did not!" Her nostrils flared, and her blue eyes opened wide. "I never would have stayed if I'd known that awful man was selling drugs."

"Which awful man?" Ari said.

"Well, both of them, really, Doyle and Johnson, but-" She paused again, and her hands began to shake even though she'd twined them together. "You're the officer who killed one of them, aren't you?"

"I'm afraid so," Ari said. "In the line of duty and all that."

"You deserve a medal," Mr. L put in. "In my opinion, anyway."

Mrs. LaRosa's facade cracked. Tears ran down her cheeks, tears gray with eyeliner that plowed little furrows into her foundation. LaRosa leaned over, put his hands on her shoulders, and rubbed them while he murmured a helpless "there, there, I'm sorry" over and over.

"I'm not upset over Johnson." Mrs. LaRosa choked out the words. "I keep thinking of Elaine, dying like that, and she loved him so much, Doyle, I mean, she really did, and he killed her."

She turned half away, then reached inside her shirt to pull a tissue out of her bra with delicate fingers. I waited until she'd gotten herself back under control.

"If there's anything else you can remember about Belial," I said, "when you're feeling less stressed, please call Lieutenant Sanchez. He'll see that I get the message."

"I'll do that, yes." Mrs. L forced out a smile. "I do want to know the truth about this. I feel so foolish, now, that I trusted them."

Agreeing with her would have been too rude, even though I wanted to. I stood up, and Ari followed. "We'll leave you alone now," I said. "Thank you for the information. And remember, if you think of anything to add, no matter how trivial it seems, please call homicide detective Sanchez down at the Police Department."

"We will," Mr. LaRosa said. "You can count on that. And they can always reach us by phone, even in Provence. I'll leave the numbers before we go."

We showed ourselves out. While we walked uphill to the spot where we'd parked, Ari stayed silent. Once we'd gotten into the car, he turned toward me.

"Do you think Belial was a human being?" he said.

"You're getting the hang of this, aren't you? At the moment, no, I don't. The question is: if not, then what?"

"I don't suppose there are actual demons involved in this case." He paused to buckle up his seat belt. "Um, is there such a thing? As demons, I mean."

"Well, it depends on how you define demon. What looks like a demon to some people might be a perfectly natural being in its own world. For all we know, Chaos masters live on some other world."

"You're having a joke on me, aren't you?"

"Unfortunately, no."

"Father was right." Ari rolled his eyes. "I should have been an insurance adjuster."

"You couldn't carry a gun everywhere if you were an insurance adjuster."

"I'll admit it; that was one of the things that influenced my decision. But these Chaos masters. I'm a.s.suming they'll bleed if I have to shoot one."

"As far as I know, yeah. But then, I don't know much."

"How rea.s.suring."

I smiled and started the car.

I've always hated the term "Chaos masters." It sounds like something from a golf tournament. For all we know, these "masters" don't exist as sapient beings. We may simply be personifying little vortices or knots of energy that strive to break up stagnant situations and other overloads of Order gone wild. The energy, however, is definitely real. It can form waterspouts and whirlpools of disruption that suck in the vulnerable and force them to do things that, left to themselves, they'd never even consider.

Like jumping into the bay fully clothed.

Still, in this particular case, we faced someone, human or not, who could pull a stocking over his face and put on a ritual robe. Whether he was a master or a minion-in fact, whether he was a "he" in any sense we'd recognize as a gender-were big questions.

We continued searching for answers that afternoon by interviewing the coven member called "Sweetie," or, in more ordinary terms, Caroline Burnside. She lived in the Cole Valley neighborhood on the uphill edge of the old Haight-Ashbury. As usual, parking there proved to be an aggravation and a half. Eventually, we found a spot of sorts. I could just squeeze the rental car between a monstrous black SUV and a pickup truck.

"By the way, I'll be getting the new car on Tuesday," Ari said. "I'm not sure if it'll be easier to handle or not."

"Am I going to be allowed to drive it?"

"Oh, yes. I made sure to ask."

We walked a couple of blocks to Burnside's address, a big white corner building housing a pair of flats above a laundromat. As we headed for the street door, I noticed an obvious unmarked squad car, black and bulky, parked nearby. A man in a sports jacket and open-throated white shirt sat behind the wheel and read a newspaper. Ari glanced his way.

"Sanchez's man, I a.s.sume," he said.

Since Ari stood between me and the car, I could throw an un.o.btrustive Chaos ward. It bounced off the car door with no effect. "Yeah," I said. "Must be."

When we rang the doorbell, Caroline Burnside buzzed us in. A narrow flight of stairs, covered in ratty brown carpet, led up to the landing where she stood waiting. I'm not sure what I expected Sweetie to be, but it wasn't the amazon who greeted us. Dressed in a black tunic, caught with a silver concho belt at the waist over a long black skirt, she stood at least six feet tall, and was heavyset without being fat, with broad shoulders and long legs. She had a shoulderlength mop of curly blonde hair which she wore pulled back from a square, strong-jawed face. Her voice, however, was high and girlish, though I put her age at about forty.

"Hi," she said, "I'm Karo. That's what everyone calls me, Karo like in the syrup."

Hence the nickname of Sweetie, I a.s.sumed. Ari and I brought out our IDs, which she inspected with some care.

"Looks like you're real cops," she said. "Come in."

She ushered us into a room crammed with brightly colored stuff. It took me several minutes to sort out the sight-piles of books on the floor, knickknacks and more books on shelves and the mantel over the gas heater. Blue-andyellow paper lanterns, some with sun-and-moon faces, hung from the ceiling. Patchwork pillows lay piled on the two wicker chairs, on the floor in corners, and on the long cedar chest that sat in the big bay window, which was partly covered by green-and-purple brocade swags of curtain. Karo waved vaguely at the chairs.

"You can sit there, I guess," she said. "Just throw the pillows on to the floor if there's too many."

There were, and we did. Karo pulled over a huge red-and-blue paisley floor pillow and sat on that.

"So," she said, "what do you want to ask me about? Bill?"

"Evers, you mean?" I said. "How deeply addicted to heroin was he?"

Karo grimaced and looked at the floor. "Real bad," she said. "He kept fooling himself, saying he could handle it, because you snort Persian instead of shooting it, but he got to be a world-cla.s.s junkie by the end."

"Do you think that's what prompted his suicide?"

She looked up and considered me. "I don't think he committed suicide." Her voice rang with defiance. "I think he was murdered. I just can't see how they did it."

"They?"

"Whoever it was." She shrugged. "I don't mean 'they' like in 'I know who it was and there were a couple of them.' Just they."

"Okay. What about this Brother Belial?"

"Bill told me he'd spilled the beans about that."

"He did, yeah. Celia LaRosa wonders if Brother B was really human."

"I heard her say that maybe a hundred times, but I didn't buy it. I think he was loaded, is all, and talked funny. And he always hid his face and wore gloves, so it was easy to make up stuff about him and what he must have looked like under all of it. Doyle always said Belial had a phobia about germs, but then, you couldn't trust a d.a.m.n thing Doyle said, so who knows."

"I can see why everyone speculated about Belial."

"Elaine agreed with Celia, sort of. They used to like to scare themselves, giggling about demons." Her voice abruptly cracked. "G.o.d, poor Elaine! Last night I couldn't sleep, you know? I kept thinking, they got Elaine and now Bill, and what do you bet I'm next?"

I looked at Ari, who nodded a yes when I raised a questioning eyebrow.

"You've been given police protection," I said. "If you look out the window you'll see a plain black sedan-"

"The unmarked car, you mean?" Karo managed to smile. "They're always so obvious."

Ari winced.

"I thought they suspected me of something, like the drugs," Karo went on. "But I guess not."

"You know," I went on, "you can ask to be put in the witness protection program if you receive any sort of threat or see any signs of threats. If you feel you're being followed when you go out, for example."

"You think Bill was murdered, too, don't you?"

"Yeah." I saw no reason to lie. "But it's only a secondary theory at the moment in official circles. I'm not a member of the San Francisco police force."

"I noticed that from your ID, yeah." She turned slightly to look up at Ari. "Interpol, huh? There must be something real big behind all this, then."

"Heroin trafficking is always big," Ari said. "Especially high-grade heroin sold to middle-cla.s.s customers."

"Oh. Yeah, I guess it would be. I wish Bill had never touched the s.h.i.tty stuff." Karo paused to rub her face with both hands. "We used to fight about it, but Doyle-G.o.d, that creep Doyle, and what he did to Elaine! They said on the news that Johnson shot him. The one decent thing that super creep ever did in his life."

For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she swallowed a couple of times and looked at me dry-eyed. "I bet you're wondering how I met Bill. It was through Elaine. I'm a tarot reader, and I did the cards for her a lot when she was getting her divorce, and so she invited me to the meetings." She paused for a twisted little smile. "Elaine kind of collected unusual people. But she was nice about it. It wasn't condescending. I think she was mostly real bored. Too much money, and everything was too easy for her."

"Do you know how she met Doyle?"

"In a singles bar on Union Street. She was real flattered that he was interested, because he was so much younger than her."

Nothing occult or unusual there. I realized I'd been hoping for some weird detail that would give us a new line of inquiry.

"Was there ever someone named Caleb a.s.sociated with the coven?" I said.

"I never heard about any Caleb." Karo caught her upper lip between her teeth, thought, and let the lip go again. "No, sorry. It's a name I'd have remembered. You don't hear it much."

"All right. Anyone else?"

Karo looked away and thought some more. Finally, she shrugged and looked back at me. "Doyle did mention one other guy, but only in a real vague way. Something about the man who spoke to the Peac.o.c.k Angel. You know about Tawsi Melek, right? It was on the TV news about the Silver Bullet Killer."

"Yes, we do know about the cult. Do you think it's satanic?"

"No. I wouldn't have had anything to do with that. It's stupid, Satanism."

"I was wondering if you'd ever heard anything about sacrificing children to this Tawsi Melek."

Karo's expression changed to authentic revulsion, wide-eyed and lip-curling. "No," she said. "I wouldn't have stuck around if they'd talked about that." She shuddered, then went on. "No, this angel was supposed to be G.o.d's right-hand man. Someone on the side of the Good and the Lovely, anyway. Doyle said there was someone who spoke to him and looked for converts. A missionary, kind of like those Mormons who show up at your door and won't go away."

I wondered if this missionary lived in our world or on Interchange, where Doyle came from. I suspected the latter. "Did he ever mention a name?"

"No. Sorry. But if you're looking for a suspect, I'd put my money on Brother Belial. He was the guy in charge."

"I'll take that under advis.e.m.e.nt."

I considered asking her about Evers and blackmail, then decided to leave that to Sanchez. I stood up, and Ari followed my lead.

"Thanks for your cooperation," I said to Karo. "If you think you've spotted trouble, call the police. Lieutenant Sanchez of Homicide is the name you want to invoke."

Karo laughed and scrambled to her feet. "Invoke," she said. "I like that. I'll keep it in mind. Don't worry."

As we were going down the stairs, I realized that of the three coven members we'd interviewed, only Evers had recognized me from the ceremony I'd spied upon. He must have possessed a certain amount of psychic talent. Most likely, that very talent had made him vulnerable to whatever ensorcellment had driven him to his death.

A fourth coven member had survived, of course: Brother Belial. I could only hope that he, whatever he might have been, would fail to recognize me, too.

CHAPTER 5.

WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT, Ari called Sanchez to tell him what we'd learned from the coven members. LaRosa had impressed both of us as an investigative dead end, but Karo interested me. Since people tell their tarot readers the d.a.m.nedest things, she had plenty of chances to supplement her income by blackmailing her clients, some of whom she shared with Evers. On the other hand, I'd received a strong sense of honesty from her. Beyond the SPP, even, I couldn't see a criminal type living in a toy box like her apartment.

Sanchez would either hand this information over to the correct department or suppress it, depending on how much pressure the local powers that be put on him. Not my problem, either way, though Ari reported on the situation to Interpol, just in case there were "ramifications," as he called them.

"A great many people have been pressured into spying for one government or another," he said, "by blackmail."