Authors: Lee Killough
Held by its flat base, its large central point and two flanking smaller ones reached jaggedly upward, like the silhouette of a mountain range. A mountain dark and glassy as obsidian. Except for size, each object in the group looked identical.
“
Shark teeth,” Mrs. Armour said.
He blinked at her. “What?”
“
Miss Barber told me those are shark teeth.”
Black? His tackle box had never held anything that exotic.
Garreth put back the tooth and turned his attention to the books. Nonfiction outnumbered the fiction, but of the several hundred volumes covering a wide range of subjects, including extraterrestrial visitors and medical texts on viruses, only music, dancing, and folklore were represented by any substantial number of books.
He glanced through the folklore. All the books contained sections on vampires.
The publication dates as a whole went as far back as 1919. A couple of children’s books — printed with large color plates tipped in and black-and-white drawings, not the large print and easy vocabulary of the books he bought to give Brian — bore inscriptions in the front:
To Mada, Christmas 1920, Mama and Papa
, and
To Mada, Happy Birthday, 1921, Mama and Papa
. The ornate penmanship looked familiar.
He went on to check for inscriptions in other books. Those that had them were clearly used books, inscribed with men’s names or pet names that would never apply to Lane and a pencilled or inked price in an upper corner inside the cover. It appeared no one except her parents gave her books.
He searched the desk. Not that he expected Harry or the lab boys to have overlooked anything useful but he wanted to make sure. He found nothing except blank writing paper and some ball-point pens...no checkbooks, canceled checks, credit card records, or copies of tax returns.
Moving on to the kitchen, he found it as bare as Harry and Serruto had described, nor did the bedroom yield information aside from the fact that she bought her clothes all over the world and with discrimination. He pursed his lips thinking of the price tags that accompanied those labels. She had expensive taste. How did she afford them on a club singer’s salary? Did she blackmail some of her “dates”?
“
Can you tell me what clothes might be missing?” he asked.
Mrs. Armour frowned. “Now, how should I — well,” she amended as he raised a brow, “I guess I did peek in once. I think there used to be a blue Dior suit and some English wool skirts and slacks hanging at the end there.” She described those and some other items in detail.
The dresser had been cleaned out. So had the bedside table and the bathroom medicine cabinet.
“
Can you think of anything usually in the apartment that you haven’t seen here today?” he asked.
From the bathroom doorway, Mrs. Armour considered the question. “I don’t know. I haven’t been here all that often, you know.”
“
Keep looking around, will you, please?”
He understood Lane destroying papers but had trouble accepting she just walked away from all her personal belongings, an accumulation she had obviously kept since childhood. She must have a few items too loved or revealing to be left behind.
He headed back for the living room. It had more of her effects than any other room. It also had the desk.
He stared at it, pulled by some magnetism he could not explain. A letter had been on that desk the first time he saw it. If only he had time to see more than the address before Lane turned out the light. He tried visualizing the envelope in his mind, picturing the ornate lettering.
He paused. That was where he had seen the writing on the flyleafs of the children’s books. It had been a letter from Lane’s mother! He ticked his tongue against his teeth in excitement.
“
I remember something,” Mrs. Armour said. “There used to be two photographs on that top shelf.”
Photographs. He turned his full attention on her. “Do you remember what they were?”
“
One was of her grandparents. She never said so, but I assumed it. It was sepia toned, and the woman’s hair and dress were World War I styles. I have a wedding picture of my parents that looks a lot like it. The other looked old, too...three little girls sitting on the running board of a car.”
An outdoor picture? “Do you remember the background behind the car”
“
Background?” She blinked. “Why, just a house, I think.”
“
What kind of house? Brick? Stone? Wood frame? Large or small?”
“
White I think, with a porch with that gingerbread in the corners between the ceiling and the posts.”
“
Was there any landscape visible?”
She stared at him. “Really, Inspector, I never paid that much attention. Is it important?”
He made himself shrug. “Probably not.” A lie. The little girls could include Lane as a child. A close look at the background might help identify where she came from...and where she came from might point him toward people who knew her well enough to suggest where Lane was now.
Garreth walked out with her, as though finished, but once she drove away he steeled himself and pressed against the door.
Wrench!
A passage as painful as ever, no matter how much experience he had accumulated passing through pier gates. Aggravated by the pressure of daylight.
He staggered into the livingroom and sat down at the desk. Was every aspect of vampire existence paid for in pain? Pain of hunger, pain of daylight, pain at dwelling doors, pain of passage, pain he caused others by bending them to his will. Did Lane experience it, too? He hoped something hurt her.
The pain ebbed and he stood to examine the room again. Books, toys, treasures. He fingered the large shark’s tooth again. Everything interesting but not very informative. He wished he could have seen those photographs.
Then again, her situation was like being under cover. One false word might betray her true age, or her true nature. Take him, looking over his shoulder, as Harry put it. Caution must become a reflex.
Not always, he suddenly realized. When booked for that assault in 1941 she gave her name as Madelaine Bieber, the same one on that envelope in her apartment. So it could be her righteous name. The assault itself suggested a woman with more temper and less caution than the one he met. Perhaps she talked about herself back then. He needed to find people who knew and remembered her.
The victim of that assault had good incentive to remember her.
He wished he had the file to study again, or at least his notebook, where he had written down some of the file details. He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the file. Oh yeah...the victim had been one Claudia Darling.
He smiled. So maybe he did not need the file after all. The name and the assault date might be enough to let him pursue other avenues to the information he needed.
2
“
I need the July 1942 edition of the
Chronicle
,” he told the librarian on duty in the microfilm section of the Main Library. He wished he remembered the exact date of that assault. It meant searching the entire month of newspapers.
He spun the film through the viewer as fast as he could and still read it. By concentrating so hard on small items, though, he almost missed what he wanted. Lane had earned herself space and a picture on the third page. There was no mistaking her, tall as the four police officers hauling her back from a woman who crouched with blood leaking through the fingers of the hand held over her left ear.
“The Barbary Coast Still Lives
,” the headline proclaimed.
Garreth thanked Lady Luck for the colorful reporting of the day. Maybe he had something here. This Madelaine with her face contorted in fury was a far cry indeed from the Lane Barber who stood him up against a wall years later and coolly proceeded to drink his lifeblood, then go back to work.
He pressed the button for a hard copy of the page and carried it into the reading room to study, underlining all names and addresses. He smiled as he read, amused at both the gossipy style of the story, laden with adjectives, and what he saw between the lines, knowing Lane to be what she was.
A woman named Claudia Darling, described as “a pert, petite, blue-eyed brunette,” was accosted in the Red Onion on the evening of Friday, October 17, by “a Junoesque” red-haired singer named Mala Babra. Lane could fill a phone book with her aliases. An argument ensued over a naval officer both had met the evening before, Miss Babra claiming that Miss Darling caused the serviceman to break a date made previously with her.
Oh how that must have frustrated Lane...supper all picked out and some other lady walked off with it.
When Miss Darling denied the allegation, the story went on, Miss Babra attacked. They had to be separated by police hastily summoned to the scene. Four officers were needed to subdue and hold Miss Babra. Miss Darling suffered severe bite wounds to one ear and scratches on the face, but “
the familiar habitue of the nightclub scene is reported to be in satisfactory condition at County General Hospital
.”
Garreth eyed the last sentence, ticking his tongue against his teeth. He sensed a sly innuendo, something readers of the time no doubt understood, but which eluded him, two generations removed. He studied the photograph: the four officers straining to hold Lane, obviously surprised by her strength; Lane ablaze with fury; and the Darling woman, showing what the photographer must have considered a highly satisfactory amount of leg as she crouched dazed and bleeding on the floor.
The bare leg caught Garreth’s attention, but the rest of the woman held it. Even with the differences in hairstyle and fashions, he recognized what she wore as just a bit flashier, shorter, and tighter than the dresses on the women in the background. Now he recognized what the reporter meant: hooker. Higher class than a street walker. Today she would call herself an “escort.”
That was a break. Being in the life, she must have been busted a few times, and that meant a record of her: names, addresses, companions.
But for that he needed access to Records. Which, unfortunately, meant going to the Hall of Justice and walking into the lion’s den.
3
Garreth twisted slowly on the spit over the fire pit. Or so it felt.
Coming down, he hoped to be indifferent to the interview. What happened to
him
did not matter. Let Internal Affairs ask whatever they liked, ascertaining the facts of the incident in order to submit a report to the Firearm Discharge Review Board, for their hearing to be held later. He just needed to give simple answers — as true as he dared — making sure as little blame as possible attached to Harry.
So he told himself walking in Homicide to face Serruto. Except, no Serruto. Belatedly he realized that being Sunday, Serruto was off. The whole office was almost deserted, only Art Schneider and Ron Cohen there. The indifference ended when Art glanced toward him and immediately away again.
Cohen eyed him coldly. “Lien keeps asking why you haven’t come to see Harry. Everyone else has. Don’t you give a damn how he is?”
That stung as hard as he knew Cohen meant it to. He wanted to yell back that of course he cared, just been afraid to ask. Now he knew Harry was at least alive! “I didn’t think I’d be welcome.” He paused. “How is he?”
“
Hanging on.” Cohen turned away.
Art looked up from his typewriter, his expression kinder. “He hasn’t regained consciousness. You need to go see him.”
Garreth’s stomach lurched. So Harry might not be safe yet? “I’ll go...after...” He pointed up.
He left them looking torn between
I hope they rake you over the coals
and
Better you than me
and took the stairs up to the I.A. office on the fifth floor.
Now he sat...had sat for days it seemed, minus his glasses, head pounding with the misery of daylight...with Sergeants Fong and “Merciless” Mercer taking him over and over Friday’s nightmare. Making him feel like the fuckup of all time. A blackboard in front of him had a schematic drawing of Wink’s hideout, marked with x’s and o’s at the front and back doors, and big X in the middle of the livingroom marking where Harry had lain bleeding. The four uniforms had already given their versions of course.
Fong said, for maybe the hundredth time...or maybe the fiftieth — he and Mercer took turns asking the questions — “You weren’t on duty at the time, were you?”
But for the hundredth time, Garreth made himself reply in a calm, even voice. “No.”
“
You were on sick leave because of the recent attack on you.”
“
Yes.”
“
And had an appointment that afternoon for a psych evaluation.”
“
Yes.”
“
Was Inspector Takananda aware of this?”
“
Yes.”
“
Tell us again, then, how you happened to be accompanying Inspector Takananda.”
A question not answerable with yes or no. “Harry had an interview with a witness in an unrelated case we had been working and I asked to ride along...not to participate, just to hear what the witness had to say. We expected to return in time for my appointment with Dr. Leonard.”