The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Read online

  She set her glass on the bar, pondered it for a moment, and then raised it to her lips. I liked the way the liquor made her lips glisten when she set the glass down again. “What kind of job is that? Getting people out of trouble? You a fireman or something?”

  “No, not a fireman.” I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out a slightly dog-eared business card. Setting it on the bar, I slid it over to her. Jed Strait, Private Investigator, it read in bold black letters, and underneath that, in a slightly less brash font, was one more line: No Job Too Small followed by a phone number and address.

  The woman looked at the card for a moment and then snorted out a little laugh.

  “It’s not supposed to be funny,” I said and moved to take the card back.

  She put her hand on it, keeping it there so I couldn’t reel it in.

  “What do you do, spy on cheating spouses?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What else?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever people need investigated. Fraud, missing person, extortion…you name it. If it’s something that the cops won’t touch or have given up on, or something the client doesn’t want the cops knowing about in the first place…I’m your man.”

  She nodded and said, “All very nice. But you know what, Mister…” She looked down at the card again for reference. “…Strait. I don’t think you can fix crazy.”

  “Which is what you are?”

  She picked up her glass and mock toasted herself before taking a big swig. “As a coyote,” she said.

  “Funny,” I replied, drinking to her in as close to a doubling of her gesture as I could manage. “You don’t look crazy. Maybe you could try me, and I’ll see if I might help.”

  “I thought this wasn’t a sales pitch.”

  “It’s not. Just friendly banter.”

  She nodded and gave me a skeptical look. Then she tossed back the rest of her drink, raising an eyebrow at me when she was done. “All right then. See how friendly this banter is.” Raising her left hand, she splayed her fingers. “No ring, see?”

  “Yes,” I said, leaning my elbow on the bar and resting my chin on my fist, all rapt attention.

  “It wasn’t always that way. I married a nice boy from up in the San Fernando Valley and we had a pretty good time until the war broke out. And then he was gone.” She gave me that same deep look again. “And I do mean gone. His airship went down in the Battle of Rome, where the Vatican got blown to pieces. I got a knock on the door late one evening, and later on a folded flag and a gold star to go in my window. And the ring went into my jewelry box.”

  I nodded at her story. “Sorry to hear it,” I said. “For what it’s worth, I was over there for the duration. A lot of guys I knew never made it back.”

  “Everybody’s got a story,” she said, suggesting she’d heard a similar line about loss each time she’d told the tale of how her husband had died. “The thing is, though, I’ll bet you’ve never seen one of those dead buddies of yours come back to life, have you?”

  At this, I raised an eyebrow. Up to this point, her story hadn’t struck me as anything odd. With the countless number of GIs who never made it back before the truce with Germany, odds were pretty good that any single lady you ran into back on the home front was a war widow. Not that I hadn’t been sympathizing with her story until now. It’s just that it hadn’t yet delivered on her promise that there was something crazy in the tale. Now, things were getting interesting.

  “I can’t say as I have, no,” I said.

  She nodded at this and picked up her empty glass, waggling it at me like it was a lure that might be used to attract an alcoholic fish. “You still good for that refill?” she asked.

  “Sure.” I signaled the bartender over and asked him to make her another. My own, I just nursed a little longer. It had been a long day and I still had another good hour’s worth of playing left; I didn’t want to get sleepy or sloppy with the time that remained.

  “You ever been to the Rose Room?” she asked. “In Hollywood?”

  “No.”

  “Heard of it?”

  Again, I said, “No.”

  “I work there. As a dancer.” She gave me a challenging look, almost inviting me to judge her. It’s not like impassive is my middle name or anything, but I must have passed the test, as she continued talking. “The Rose Room doesn’t cater to the pin-up type. The women who dance there are more…my size. Nothing vulgar, you understand. Just red-blooded entertainment. Not a kiddy show, but we ain’t getting raided either. Anyway, that’s where me and Frank met. He was in the audience, and he found me after the show. I kept dancing, and he didn’t mind, even after we were married.” Again, she checked me with that challenging glance and then went on. “And when he had to leave, I kept it up. And when I knew he wasn’t coming back, I still kept it up. And then, three days ago, I’m dancing at the Rose Room, and I get down to…well, you can imagine. The lights go up and the little audience applauds. And there’s Frank, alive as can be at a table in back. Clear as day.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  She scoffed at this. “Sure. Unless he had a twin brother, which he didn’t. I don’t just mean it was a guy that looked like Frank. It was him. It was the way he looked at me. The same look in his eyes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I grabbed my robe from backstage and ran out there straight away and right up to him and he looks at me with this silly grin. And that’s when I see he doesn’t know me.” She shrugged at this and took a long sip of the drink I’d bought her, sucking down almost half the glass. “You maybe noticed I’m in here tonight, not there.”

  “It’s hard to ignore your presence,” I said, pretty much knowing where the rest of the story was going. “You made a fuss, didn’t you?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Big fuss.”

  “They fire you?”

  “Nah. Just told me to take a week off without pay.”

  “And the guy? Frank?”

  She shook her head. “He high tailed it when I started yelling his name. I couldn’t follow ‘cause the manager and the bouncer were both holding me back.” She showed me the knuckles of her right hand where she’d lost some skin a few days ago. “I owe the bouncer an apology and probably a few drinks.”

  I nodded and finished my drink.

  “So?” she asked.

  “So, what?”

  “So, you think I’m crazy?”

  I let the question hang in the air for a few seconds. “No,” I finally said.

  I’d seen crazy during the war, guys who flipped it when the pressure got too high and started dodging grenades in the mess hall, and the pert little dancer on the barstool next to me didn’t seem anywhere near that far gone. Furthermore, my experience with alternate realities had taught me not to judge anything as too far gone—which is not to say that I expected the mystery of the re-appearing Frank to have anything to do with the phenomenon of alternate worlds or Cosmo Beadle’s Crossover cult. Those folks all believed in the other worlds I’d been jumping to with Guillermo’s help, but as far as I knew I was the only person in this world who’d physically left his world to join this one. Now that was a crazy story.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  Instead of laying out the expertise I’d gained on battlefields both real and metaphorical, I said, “You saw something that didn’t mesh with your reality. You’re not willing to accept that.” I shrugged. “That just shows dogged determination, not craziness.” I had needed to think the same thing of myself on more than one occasion in order to be kept out of a straightjacket or two.

  She smiled at this, the first time I’d seen her ice crack since I’d sat down. Something about her had spoken to me—maybe the story, maybe her brashness, maybe the way I saw a little bit of myself in her tenacity—and I wanted to talk more even though I knew I needed to get back up on stage. I was going to ask her to stick around until my next break when we were interrupted.

  A big man, red-faced a
nd balding, inserted himself in between us. He reminded me much too much of the man who’d accused me of kissing his wife in the other world, and I almost flinched at his presence. But he didn’t attack me. It wasn’t me he was interested in.

  “Don’t waste your time with this guitar picker, baby,” he said as he leaned toward the bar to block my view of my new friend. His words were a drunken slur. “You need to come sit with me if you want to see a really good time before the sun comes up.”

  “Shove off, slunk,” she said.

  “Now, baby, that’s no way to—”

  That was as far as he got. With the big man’s shoulder inches from my face, I couldn’t see what happened, but there was a smack of flesh on flesh. The drunk straightened up and almost fell into me. I caught a glimpse of the dancer’s fist in the air and figured she’d probably just re-opened her wounded knuckles.

  And then Valentino, the High Note’s bouncer, was there on the spot. He grabbed the drunk and yanked him away from the bar. There was shouting, both from the drunk and the little dancer, who’d hopped off her stool by now and was laying into the big man with a stream of profanity I didn’t think anyone—male or female—would have been capable of. I saw that Valentino had the drunk in an arm lock and that he’d grabbed hold of the dancer’s elbow, leading both toward the exit. I was about to protest that she hadn’t done anything wrong, had just been defending herself, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  Jingo Maxwell, the High Note’s owner, stood there with her perfectly coiffed red hair and said, “Isn’t your break about over, Jed?”

  I wanted to say otherwise, but Jingo has a pretty piercing stare that doesn’t brook much dissent, so I said, “I suppose it is.”

  Turning back to the bar for a moment, I picked up my drink and finished it. That was when I saw that my business card was gone. I looked to the exit, but now there was no sign of Valentino or the drunk or the dancer. I hadn’t even gotten her name.

  With a shrug, I headed back to the stage where I launched into “Pity the Fool,” a long, sad blues that had a few of the more well-oiled patrons in tears before I was done.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, I opened my eyes and let out the first breath of the day, relieved not to have been jolted awake by one of the nightmares that had plagued me since the end of the war. The thing about recurring nightmares, though, was that even when I didn’t have one, my sense of relief was tempered by the fact that I’d already had the dream so many times that I could recall it perfectly—which I always did when I woke up without having had the dream. Still, it was easier to shake the memory of Buddy Stiles’ missing face when it was a morning where the dream hadn’t jolted me out of sleep in a panic over my own face being gone as well.

  Once I’d had my moment of gratitude, however, it was time for other worries to check in, the chief one revolving around my break with reality the night before. I worried it would happen again, and that made me worry about how strong my footing was in this world. More nagging, and more immediate, were the questions of why Carmelita had had a bullet hole in her chest, whether I’d put it there, and why she had seemed to look at me with murder in her pretty green eyes. None of these were pleasant thoughts, which made lying in bed and letting them play out feel like a rotten way to start my day, so I untangled myself from the sheets and got up.

  As with most things that seem deadly serious and worrisome while my head is still on a pillow, once I was up and sliding into the routine of the morning, the anxious thoughts seemed more like products of the night—not quite dreams, but not the sort of thing that needed immediate attention the farther the sun got into the sky. Carmelita was her normal self around the house, and my worries had pretty well faded to a background hum by the time I called Guillermo to see if he’d made any progress with the Winslow. When he told me he had, I gathered my things—and Carmelita—and we made the short trip from Echo Park to Chavez Ravine.

  When we pulled up in front of Guillermo’s little house, I saw that my car was in the driveway now, which told me the old man had gotten it to move under its own power. The kitchen door opened before I finished parking the Patterson, and I saw Guillermo come outside, his smile as wide as ever.

  “Good morning, lobo,” he said as we got out of the truck. To Carmelita, he opened his arms and she hugged him. I watched as he kissed her cheek, a sad look in his eyes as he did it, as he doubtless recalled the deceased wife on whom he’d based Carmelita’s looks, and right there I decided to keep the previous night’s experience to myself.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Me, too,” Carmelita added.

  This was a lie, of course. As far as I knew, my android assistant neither ate nor slept, nor did she need to relieve herself. Her built-in cognitive dissonance resulted in Carmelita thinking that she’d slept or eaten just recently. At night, she would retire to her room where I expect she sat dormant for a few hours, and in the morning, she’d announce that she had slept well. Whenever anyone asked if she was hungry or thirsty, she would invariably say that she’d just had something or that she would in a little while. And she appeared to believe these lies wholly. Her programming was so thorough that she would even excuse herself to hit the ladies’ at regular intervals throughout the day. Whether she slipped into a little trance at those times or actually went through the motions, I can’t say. But I’d hear the toilet flush and the water in the sink running and she’d emerge with a look on her face as human as anybody else’s—no hint of self-doubt or distraction.

  “The car fixed?” I asked.

  “Oh, si. It was easy.”

  “Great. Thanks. Are you sure I don’t owe you?”

  He waved his hands in response, and I knew there would be no arguing with him.

  Pointing back at the pick-up truck, I said, “You’ve got a little more work to do on that one now.” When he raised an eyebrow in response, I explained what had happened the night before during our unauthorized flight, apologizing for Carmelita’s impulsiveness as I went. Guillermo was dismayed at the danger his invention had put us in.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said as he walked toward the truck. “Every time I test it, it’s fine.”

  “How many tests?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Three or four,” he said, his tone suggesting he’d barely heard me. The wheels were turning in his mind as he started working on the problem, and a moment later he had the hood up. It was a good thing I hadn’t been ready to take the old man up on his offer of breakfast, as it was going to be pretty much impossible to pull him away from the truck now.

  “We’ll be on our way then,” I said as Carmelita and I exchanged smiles.

  “I’ll see you later,” Guillermo responded automatically as he pulled a rag from his back pocket and began using it to poke at things under the hood.

  It was Saturday, which for most working stiffs means a day off, maybe cut the yard or take the dog for a walk or get ready for a backyard barbecue. When you’re a PI, a day off means you’ve got no cases, or if you insist on your day of rest, it means you run the risk of not closing a case. There’s a strange inverse probability ratio that says the break you need will always come on the day you decide to catch up on your sleep instead of going on surveillance. So, the only thing to do is go to work and try to thwart the odds. Because I wasn’t entirely heartless—or made of money—I did give Peggy, my secretary, the weekends off.

  The office was on the fourth floor of one of the tall buildings on Broadway, the kind built above an old movie palace from the twenties, now sliding into shabby disrepair. On dead days, I sometimes snuck downstairs to catch a fourth-run flicker, but it was always more depressing than relaxing to sit in the threadbare seats, broken springs poking me in all the wrong spots while I watched the movie, feeling more and more tense as the reels spun out above me while I waited for the inevitable breakage of either the film or the equipment that ran it. When the collaps
e occurred (and it always did), I felt a little relief and was then able to watch the rest in peace once order was restored in the projection room.

  It was too early for the matinee as Carmelita and I made our way up the stairs, and everything in the whole building felt eerily quiet with all the other offices sitting Saturday empty. When we got to our door, I unlocked it and we went in, passing through the reception area where Peggy reigned supreme and into the inner office where I’d set Carmelita up with her own desk but no phone. She took her seat and I took mine, flipping through the file folder I’d left on my desk the day before while Carmelita laid her handbag on the desk and gave it a long stare.

  We had only one case that week, the usual crop of adulterous spouses having run strangely dry in the last month. The one we did have was a bit of a stinker, though. Mullen Peale, a third-rate Hollywood screenwriter who imagined himself at least second-rate, had hired me to tail another writer, Ginny Flynn. Peale believed Flynn was having an affair with the head of the writing division at Paragon Pictures, a quid pro quo arrangement that was resulting in Miss Flynn’s dominance in their division—or so Peale claimed. Knowing nothing about the trade, I had needed to educate myself and had learned that such dominance amounted to being awarded screen credits on projects that had been team written or chain written, a process in which a finished draft was handed off to another writer for polishing and revision before being handed off to still another, with the final writer getting his or her name on the screen. Everyone got paid. That wasn’t the issue. It was the glory. That’s what Peale felt he was being locked out of thanks to Miss Flynn’s feminine wiles. And that’s what he wanted me to prove, not an easy thing even if I could get hard evidence that his rival was slipping between the sheets with their boss.

  The main thing I’d learned about Ginny Flynn was that she was a creature of habit. She worked at the studio, went home to her little house off of Melrose, and then went back to work again. On Friday nights, she went up to the San Fernando Valley where her parents still lived and stayed the night with them. On Saturdays, she did her groceries and errands before settling in again at home. Sundays were the variable. Carmelita and I had been surveilling her for two weeks now, and one Sunday she’d gone to the Santa Monica Pier with a group of twenty-somethings and the other Sunday she’d spent at the movies and then taking a solo drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. After the first few nights of watching her house until dawn and seeing no indication that she was getting any late-night visits, I decided there was no point in keeping an eye on her once the lights went out. There seemed to be no romance in the woman’s life at all, illicit or otherwise, and I had told Carmelita more than once that I was ready to tell Mullen Peale he was climbing up the wrong drainpipe. It would be a shame to lose a client so willing to be billed by the hour, but there really wasn’t any point in continuing.