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

  “You could say so,” she said. And before I could inquire about Carmelita, she went on. “Do you know a Mercy Attentater?” she asked.

  Relieved but also confused, I said, “Well…know isn’t exactly the word I’d use, but yes, I’ve met the woman.” For now, I didn’t feel like volunteering the fact that Mercy was on her way to my office at that very moment. And that was when I looked at the clock on the wall for the first time since the phone had woken me. Carmelita had left more than an hour ago—which meant that Mercy was more than half an hour late in arriving. Whatever grogginess I’d still been subject to vanished as the facts hit me: I was on the phone with a detective who shouldn’t have had any idea that I knew Mercy, and the call was coming in when the woman was unaccountably late.

  My stomach felt like it had just been replaced with broken glass.

  I didn’t want to ask the question that flew into my mind, but it must have wanted out pretty badly. The words spilled forth even as I wished I could pull them back in. “Has something happened to her?” I asked.

  “You could say that,” Detective O’Neal said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Last night,” I said. “At the High Note over on Eighth.”

  “Mm-hmm. Anybody see you with her?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah. Quite a few. The bartender. Valentino, the bouncer. Jingo Maxwell, too, I think.”

  “Did you leave there with her?”

  “No. Valentino escorted her out after she got into it with a guy who was trying to put the moves to her.”

  “All right, all right,” O’Neal said. She sounded impatient. “I’ll get it all down later. What about since then?”

  “What about what?” I asked.

  “Have you seen her since?”

  “No.”

  “Talk to her?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. She called me this morning. She was supposed to come to my office. What’s this all about anyway?”

  There was silence on the line for a moment, during which I imagined O’Neal weighing the costs and benefits of answering my question. Finally, she said, “Mercy Attentater is dead, Jed. Her neighbor found her just a little while ago. Funny thing is, she died with your business card clutched in her fist.”

  The broken glass in my stomach was churning now. I could almost hear the crunching sound from deep in my gut.

  “That’s…terrible,” I managed to say, my mind racing.

  “Normally, I’d take your statement down at the station, Jed,” O’Neal continued, ignoring my remark. “But I’m going to be tied up here for a while and…I don’t want to let this one get cold. Can you meet me here instead of downtown?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  I let her give me the address but didn’t bother writing it down since I’d already done that when Mercy had given it to me before, a detail I decided to keep from the detective for now—just in case. I was being overly cautious, as I didn’t really think I had anything to worry about from O’Neal regarding Mercy’s death. If she suspected me at all, she wouldn’t be inviting me to the crime scene, I thought. But when I hung up, I started wondering if that wouldn’t be exactly what she would do if she considered me a suspect—invite me back to the scene of the crime and then watch for signs of nervousness or inconsistencies in my story, the type of thing a guilty conscience might produce if a perpetrator was asked to return to the scene in front of a room full of cops.

  There was nothing for it now, of course. I’d accepted the invitation. And I had a few things going for me. One was the goodwill I’d built up with O’Neal when I’d first arrived in LA. The other was the fact that I hadn’t done anything to harm Mercy Attentater. There were no details for me to bungle since all I planned to offer was the truth.

  I called a cab, and when I hung up, I grabbed my coat and hat and passed through Peggy’s immaculate reception area, planning to head downstairs and wait at the curb for the cab. Three steps from the door, I was stopped when the phone rang on Peggy’s desk. I almost didn’t answer it but then thought better of it.

  In the sixth year of the war, I was in a rough spot in Belgium. My unit was pinned on a hillside and the enemy was lobbing mortars at us. They went off everywhere—above and below me on the hill, to the left and the right. I’m not sure how I outlived the barrage. I’m also not sure how I got off that hillside with my hearing intact. Trying to understand the shouts of my comrades and superiors with that hellish cacophony going on around us was like picking out a mouse’s fart in a wind tunnel. Trying to understand the voice on the other end of the line when I picked up Peggy’s phone wasn’t as bad as being on that Belgian hill, but it was close.

  I knew something was odd about the call the second the earpiece was against my head. It sounded like I was listening to wind, but only if wind were made of metal with lots of sharp edges. “Hello?” I offered.

  A voice, far away, came back in reply.

  Instinct more than auditory perception told me who I was hearing.

  “Carmelita?” I shouted, putting a finger in my other ear in an attempt to drown out the silence in the empty office.

  “Jed?” I thought I heard her say. I could imagine her sitting in my slightly used sedan, the roll of copper wire spooled out all around her and the end clipped to Guillermo’s strange little portable phone.

  “Yes,” I shouted. “What is it?”

  More words followed, but I was only able to pick up the word “police” and the phrase “lots of them.”

  “I can’t understand you,” I shouted back. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes!” came the definite response. She sounded louder now, maybe exasperated. It was possible, I realized, that she’d been trying to speak in a normal voice or maybe even keep her end of the conversation hushed and it hadn’t been working. Now that she shouted, I got more of what she was trying to say. “I’m on the—” she said something that sounded like “street” and after a few more garbled sounds, I also got “Flynn.”

  Okay, I thought. She’s on the street outside Ginny Flynn’s.

  “Go on,” I shouted.

  “She came home,” Carmelita yelled back. “About half—”

  About half an hour ago, I guessed.

  More indistinct sounds followed, and then I heard Carmelita say, “I heard her screaming. Five minutes later, the police—”

  Something had happened to Ginny Flynn. Maybe she’d been attacked. Maybe worse. The fact that this was happening within the same hour that Mercy Attentater had been taken out of the game gave me pause. I had to wonder if I was the common factor in whatever had happened to both women. There were too many unanswered questions, too many unknowns for me to be able to take that line of thought very far, however.

  Whatever was going on, I didn’t like the idea of Carmelita being there without me.

  “Can you leave?” I shouted. “Get back to the office. Or back home.”

  “I can’t,” she answered. She said something more, but all I got was “blocked off.”

  A barricade, I thought. If Ginny Flynn was dead, murdered right under Carmelita’s nose, it would make sense that the police would set up a barricade and search within the perimeter, looking for the killer but also looking for witnesses. It wouldn’t do to have them question Carmelita.

  I thought of calling O’Neal back and asking her if she could throw some weight toward whatever was happening on the quiet street off of Franklin where Ginny Flynn kept her modest little house. But O’Neal had her own bucket of fish to clean at Mercy Attentater’s. A phone call from me asking for a favor—especially when I was supposed to be on my way to help her out—wouldn’t go over well.

  “Stay put,” I shouted. “If the police ask you questions, play dumb. You got that?”

  “Stay put,” I heard her shout back. “And take gum?”

  “No! Play dumb! Dumb! Like you don’t know anything! Understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m going to send help.”<
br />
  “What?”

  “I’m sending help! Just wait!”

  “I’m not hungry!”

  I looked at the phone, trying to figure what she’d thought she heard. It wasn’t worth the effort.

  “I’ve got to go!” I shouted.

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  I gave up. And then I hung up.

  Immediately, I picked up the phone again and dialed Peggy. Before she could answer, I remembered the cab. It might have been downstairs by now, and it wouldn’t wait long.

  “Damn it,” I muttered.

  “You don’t have to be so sore,” Peggy said on the other end of the line, her voice as clear as an angel’s in comparison to Carmelita’s.

  “You have no idea how glad I am that you picked up,” I said.

  “What’s the emergency?”

  I rattled it off as quickly as I could—both the bind I was in with O’Neal waiting for me and the bit with Carmelita, including the lousy connection—and as I spoke I thanked whatever fateful puppeteer had steered Peggy my way just when I’d needed the world’s most loyal secretary. She didn’t balk at being called in on her day off, didn’t grouse about double-time or anything like that. Instead, she listened. When I asked her to write down Ginny Flynn’s address, she did it and said she’d head right over and rescue Carmelita even if doing so was just the other side of impossible.

  “You’re a plum, Peggy,” I said, and I meant it. Then I hung up and hustled out the door and down the stairs, glad to see the cab pulling to the curb in front of the theater. It was about the only thing that went right that day.

  Chapter Five

  It turned out that dancing at the Red Rose must have been a pretty lucrative gig—not that I was considering giving up the guitar and learning how to shimmy, of course. The address that the cabbie took me to was off of Wilshire on the west side of town, a neighborhood full of spreads that would have held five or six versions of the place I was renting in Echo Park. If things had been normal that day, I’d have asked the driver if he’d made a mistake in bringing me there, but the presence of so many black and whites—along with the somber looking coroner’s van—told me I was in the right spot.

  I went up the walkway that cut through the neatly trimmed lawn. An officer with wide shoulders and a narrow face stood blocking the front door. Flashing my ID had no effect on him, and when I told him O’Neal had sent for me, he gave me a dubious look. When I gave it right back, he told me to wait and then made a reluctant turn into the house. A minute later he was back, nodding me in without any hint of an apology.

  “Detective’s in the kitchen,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said and went in.

  Passing through the entryway and living room told me that Mercy Attentater must really have been doing well for herself—that or the late husband had struck gold somewhere along the way before he’d become enamored of the little dancer and then gone off to war. The living room had nice furniture and a big, black piano in one corner. I noticed picture frames on the black lacquered finish and—glancing around first to make sure none of the cops in the next room had noticed my presence yet—I sauntered over to take a look. Mercy was in all of them, but not in any professional capacity. No, she’d been photographed in each shot with her husband, the late Frank Attentater. Where Mercy had been short and full-figured, her husband was tall and narrow in the hips, not exactly skinny but I figured he wouldn’t have stood a chance against a strong wind. Odd as the pairing appeared, however, the couple looked happy in every photo, not just the wedding picture in which the bride wore white and the groom wore a ridiculous grin, clearly astounded at whatever good fortune had brought him the woman of his dreams.

  And now they were both dead.

  I paused another moment to get the dead man’s face etched in my mind, and then I moved on to the kitchen, where the real fun was happening.

  Three uniformed officers—a woman and two men—stood near the back door of the bright, white kitchen. Their dark police outfits made a stark contrast with the white stove and refrigerator, the white cabinets and drawers, and the ubiquitous white porcelain of the kitchen sink. A tiny table barely big enough for two to eat comfortably at was the gathering place for O’Neal and another detective who I assumed was her new partner. O’Neal’s back was to the door, so she didn’t see me right away, but her partner got the full picture as I entered the kitchen. He gave me a contemptuous glance. Maybe O’Neal had told him I’d needed to shoot her last partner in the head, strictly a case of self-defense, of course. But then again, maybe she hadn’t. One thing I’d learned about O’Neal from our past dealings was that she held onto information like currency, spending it only when she needed to. Right now, I couldn’t see how it would have been to O’Neal’s advantage to spill the whole sad story to her new partner, which meant his disapproving glare had its source elsewhere. Maybe his mother hadn’t loved him enough.

  The body lay on the floor beside the stove, and around it moved a city employee whom I assumed had arrived in the Coroner’s panel truck outside. She knelt beside Mercy, leaning down and taking pictures with a little chrome camera like I’d seen more than one cop use in the past. Mercy was lying on her stomach with her head turned so her face pointed right at me, her eyes wide open. If I was in any way the mystical type, I’d have probably said there was accusation in those eyes, or maybe a plea for justice. Mysticism and me don’t mix, though. All I saw were a pair of dead eyes that didn’t look at anything and didn’t say anything either—which is not to say I wasn’t interested in justice for the dead woman. It’s just that I didn’t feel compelled to seek it out. The room was full of professionals, whom I figured would mete out justice faster than I could break a high E string.

  “Hello, Jed,” O’Neal said when she saw me.

  “Detective,” I answered with a nod.

  “This is my partner, Detective Brady Crashaw,” O’Neal said.

  I nodded again. After a second or two sizing me up, Crashaw returned the nod, but the gesture looked empty to me. It was pretty clear he didn’t like what he saw.

  O’Neal stood, and Crashaw followed suit. The lead detective nodded toward the body on the floor.

  “Is that the same woman you spoke to at the High Note?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that’s her. Do you know what happened?”

  O’Neal shrugged. “Maybe. Why don’t you tell me what you know first?”

  “Okay. There’s not much to tell. She was in the High Note last night, sitting at the bar. I got to talking to her on one of my breaks. She looked…distracted. Turns out she’s a dancer at—”

  “We know her occupation,” Crashaw interrupted, his tone impatient.

  I raised an eyebrow at him and then got on with the story. “She said she was a widow. Her husband bought it in Italy in that whole Vatican mess. And then, a couple nights ago, a guy shows up at the Rose Room who’s the spit and image of the dead husband. She went a little crazy when the guy turned out not to be her husband, so she ended up getting suspended for a week. She was in the High Note trying to drink away her troubles.”

  “And she just let all this flow out to a perfect stranger?” Crashaw asked.

  “I’m far from perfect,” I said.

  “Just go on,” O’Neal said, shooting both of us with a double-barreled stare.

  “I told her I was a private detective, gave her my card more out of trying to be friendly than trying to drum up business. Not long after that, she got into it with a drunk, like I think I told you on the phone, and Valentino tossed her. Tossed ‘em both.”

  Now O’Neal picked up a tablet and pencil from the little table. “You know the drunk guy?”

  “No. Never seen him before.”

  “You get the feeling the fight went on once they were bounced?”

  “No idea.”

  O’Neal scratched a few lines on the tablet. Then she said, “Okay, what next?”

  I looked at the
body again, and this time I had to look away. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen my share of dead bodies—I had, enough to make the sight almost commonplace. This one was different, though, what with the struggles the woman had endured first as a war wife and then a war widow. And then to have everything snuffed out like this when she was still in the middle of putting things back together again.

  Letting out a long breath, I said, “What’s next was I finished my gig and went home. Then, this morning when we got to the office, Mrs. Atten…”

  “Attentater,” O’Neal offered.

  “Mrs. Attentater calls me and says her dead husband showed up again.”

  “Where?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “What time did she call?”

  I thought about it. “Around…nine, I’d say. Nine-fifteen maybe.”

  “Did she say anything else?” Crashaw asked.

  I shrugged. “She sounded kind of desperate, like she really needed someone to talk to about all this. Said she was going to come to my office.”

  “At a specific time?”

  “No, she just said she was on her way.”

  “So…she should have been there by…what? Ten at the latest?”

  “Sure.”

  “And when she didn’t show?”

  I let out a long breath, turning to O’Neal for a bit of understanding. “My gig kept me out pretty late last night, Detective. I’m afraid I fell asleep at my desk. Your call woke me.”

  O’Neal nodded at this but said nothing.

  Crashaw kept the questions coming. “Did anyone else witness your nap?”

  “No.”

  “Would you say she sounded distraught on the phone? Upset?”

  “Yeah. A little.”

  “And you’re the only one that the deceased could turn to in this situation? She didn’t have friends?”

  I shot Crashaw a cold stare, not liking the direction he was taking things in.

  “Look, I don’t know what this woman had and didn’t have. We had a five-minute conversation last night and then a two-minute phone call this morning. That’s it. I’m not here to explain any of it. You asked me for information, and I’m giving it.”