Red Delicious Page 5

  “People, they get ideas in their heads,” she said, sounding almost like someone talking to herself. “About my family. All manner of horrible, unsavory ideas.”

  “You lot do bring dead people back to life. You get paid to bring dead people back to life, often for pretty shady reasons. Unless I’m mistaken.”

  “You’re dead, Quinn,” she smiled. “And I expect you know we’d have done a better job with your reanimation than any vampire could have.”

  “I’m just unlucky that way.”

  “We provide a service to the community. No different, really, than your Mr. B. People come to us with their dilemmas, and we resolve those dilemmas.” She continued to play table tennis with the paperback.

  “I’m not judging, okay? Just saying, that’s all.”

  “Unless I’m mistaken, you’re not here to editorialize about the Maidstone éclat. You’re here to help me find Amity. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Something in her voice had changed. It was a subtle shift, yeah, but enough it sent a chill up my spine all the same. That’s doesn’t happen very often, which, I suppose, is saying a lot. Props to creepy Miss Berenice.

  “Point taken,” I said, realizing I was having trouble taking my eyes off the book.

  “Apology accepted,” she whispered, and batted the paperback extra hard and moved both her hands away from the tabletop. But the book didn’t go sailing to the floor. It simply fucking vanished.

  Parlor tricks. Probably, she had it in her head I’d be impressed. I wasn’t. I dropped the butt of my third Camel to the floor and ground it out with the toe of my sneaker.

  “Okay, so . . . where exactly do you suggest I start?”

  Berenice didn’t answer me right away. She was staring at the spot where the book had winked out of existence, like maybe she expected it to come back. Then she blinked a few times, tugged absentmindedly at her braid, and said, “There’s a bordello in the—”

  “Old Drusneth’s whorehouse?”

  Berenice scowled. “I’m not personally on a first name basis with the proprietress. Not my scene.”

  “But it’s your sister’s?”

  Berenice made an annoyed expression and started to answer, but I cut her off.

  “Never mind. I know the place, a dump down on Cranston Street.”

  I’d made Drusneth’s acquaintance not long after going to work for B, but before Mercy and Grumet had put the bite on me (ha-fucking-ha). For a succubus, Dru isn’t such a bad sort. As demon whorehouses go, she runs a clean joint. She makes sure her customers don’t get in over their heads, that they understand the cost of a lay (their souls, a memory, a firstborn, etc.) before a transaction takes place. I’d made friends with one of her girls, a tall violet-skinned creature with a flare for the ironic; she’d called herself Clemency Hate-evil, a good old-fashioned Puritan name. During the week or so I’d spent trying to save my skin and figure out just what the Bride of Quiet was playing at, vamping me and all, Clemency had done me a small favor. And it had gotten her . . . well, probably not killed. Probably, it had gotten her something considerably less enjoyable than killed. You won’t catch me trying to hide the fact that I am what I am, but I’m still capable of feeling an ounce or two of guilt now and then. And I didn’t exactly savor the idea of visiting Drusneth, who, by the way, likes to call herself Madam Calamity. Demons, as is more or less widely known, aren’t so big on using real names in their dealings on this material plane.

  “Are you thinking she might have made a bad bargain?” I asked. “Started thinking with her clit?”

  Berenice deflected my question by making the paperback reappear a foot or so above the table. It hovered there a few seconds; then gravity did its gravity thing and the thick book landed with a thud.

  “You think you’re in danger, too,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but you’re hiding out here with zombie bodyguards. You sent that ridiculous, annoying child to meet me today so you wouldn’t have to leave your bunker. B didn’t say so, but I’m betting she’s also the one approached him last night about working this case.”

  “And this is your business why?”

  My phone hummed loudly from my jeans pocket, and Berenice frowned.

  “You mind?” I asked her. “I ought to take this. Sometimes they’re actually important.”

  “No,” she said, and began flipping through the pages of the paperback. “Go ahead. There’s nothing much left I can tell you, anyway.”

  I pulled out the phone, and when she saw the Hello Kitty case, all those rhinestones sparkling in the dim lamplight, she snickered.

  “It was a goddamn gift, okay?”

  “Well, I think it’s terribly sweet,” she said, then laughed again. I gave her the finger, which only made her laugh that much harder.

  The call was Mean Mr. B, which really came as no surprise whatsoever. The bastard had probably been sitting at Babe’s for hours, nursing Cape Cods and waiting for me to check in.

  “How’s it going, kitten?”

  “It’s going,” I replied.

  “Are you playing nice?”

  “Natch, Bosco. You know me.”

  “I do, kitten. That’s why I worry so.”

  There was a pause, then the sound of him taking a drag on a cigarette, the soft whoosh as he exhaled.

  “Our client here isn’t exactly shitting useful information,” I told him. “Oh, and did I neglect to mention I’m not a detective?”

  “Make the most of the least,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to what I’d learned from Berenice Maidstone or his need to rely on my obvious lack of acumen as a junior shamus. Whether he was speaking to me or to himself . . . or both.

  “Regardless,” B continued, “if you’re asking after the whereabouts of Mr. Lashly, you needn’t bother yourself with him any further.”

  “How’s that? You find him?”

  “No, no. I didn’t. But the police did. They fished his body out of the river this afternoon, just below the Point Street Bridge. Someone decided to put a couple of bullets in the poor sod’s brain. An interesting turn of events, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Fuck me.”

  Berenice, who’d just made Nora Roberts vanish for the second time, looked up at me.

  “Now, dear,” B said, “you know I don’t swing that way. Still, it’s a kindly offer.”

  “Okay, so what do you want me to do now?”

  “I’d like to know how Shaker got himself into that dreadful fix. I rather liked the fellow. He’ll be missed. And, of course, it’s possible there’s a party, or parties, who doesn’t wish us poking about into these troubles of the sisters.”

  “Right,” I said. “The fun never ends.”

  “That, love, has been my experience.”

  He hung up.

  “Have you found her?” asked Berenice.

  I just shook my head. “We’ll be in touch,” I said. “Meanwhile, you hiding out here might not be such a bad idea after all. And if you happen to know any wards to fortify this shithole, any abracadabras that you haven’t already raised, I’d advise you do use them.”

  She furrowed her brow, then shouted at the zombies in French, and I got my parka and cap back.

  “Just fucking sit tight,” I told her. She nodded, and one of the dead guys escorted me back to the door. Outside, it had begun to snow again, and the sky was the color of a Dreamsicle. I’ve always hated those things.

  CHAPTER THREE

  QUINN’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO-GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

  You might find this strange, but I hate morgues. So, set aside the stereotypes, slam-dunk those assumptions that vamps are, by definition, morbid. Because I hate morgues. Not only are they filled with dead people—whose company I rarely enjoy—they’re full of dead people in various stages of rot, mutilation, and postmortem slice and dice. Not my scene. I hate the smell, and I hate the bright fluorescent lights.

  However, after I left Kinsley Avenue, I
knew B expected me to swing by the city morgue and have a look at whatever was left of Shaker Lashly. No, B didn’t say it in so many lines, but when talking with that cocksucker you gotta learn to read between the lines. And between the lines, he’d said, in no uncertain terms, “Oh, and do please drop by the municipal meat freezer and have a look see at the earthly remains of our dearly fucking departed.” Which is what I did.

  Mean Mr. B has contacts just about everywhere in Providence that there are contacts to be had, fingers in lots of pies, which should come as no sort of a surprise. Besides all the creepsome sort, I mean. The cops, hospitals, the fire department, the city council, the planning commission, judges, the mayor’s office, newspapers, the goddamn DMV, etc. and etc. And the Office of State Medical Examiners. Coroners. Which is why no one protested my showing up after hours at the last gasp saloon, expecting access to the corpse of my choice. Doc Tillinghast was even waiting up for me. What the hell, though; he could write it up as overtime. Tillinghast, a short man in his late fifties, bald as a baby’s ass, was both an inveterate necrophile and a groupie.

  But he was the sort of groupie who had the smarts not to make a nuisance of himself and interfere in the doings of the nasties he admired. This, coupled with his cooperation and occasional usefulness, had kept him alive. The pathologist was waiting for me in the basement amid those tile-covered walls and stainless-steel operating tables, the bone saws, skull chisels, and rib cutters. When I came through the doors, he was watching Tex Avery cartoons on his laptop and eating a corned beef on rye.

  He looked up at me, not the least bit startled by my entrance, a dab of mustard on his chin. The thick lenses of his spectacles always made his eyes look comically huge.

  “Ms. Quinn,” he said, actually sounding glad to see me. Hardly anyone’s ever glad to see me, and the exceptions always throw me for a loop.

  “Yeah,” I replied, taking in the row of bodies tastefully hidden beneath their white sheets. I’d say I already wanted to be out of there, but, fact is, I’d wanted to be out of there before I went in. “How’s it hanging.”

  He blinked at me with his magnified eyes, and I could tell he was disappointed I was wearing all that MAC concealer and the hazel-green contacts.

  “Can’t complain,” he said.

  “Is it bad?” I asked, and pointed towards the bodies. I didn’t have any idea which one was Shaker’s.

  “For a floater? Nah, not really. He hadn’t been in more than a few hours, and with the river mostly frozen over, helped retard the decomp.”

  “Small mercies.”

  Tillinghast shut off the cartoons and set aside what was left of his dinner. “Third down,” he said, and followed me to the table. He pulled back the sheet and yep, it was Shaker Lashly, all right. There was a perfectly centered bullet hole between his eyebrows.

  “Point-blank entry wound,” Tillinghast said, pointing at the hole with a scalpel. “See the abrasion ring? The seared edges? And how much cordite and gunpowder residue—”

  “Yeah, I see it.” There was also an imprint from a pistol’s barrel.

  “Poor son of a bitch also took a couple to the belly, from farther away. But this is the shot killed him. It’s a clean through-and-through.”

  “The exit wound?”

  “Wanna see it?” Tillinghast asked, clearly eager to do just that. “I can roll him over. Or pull up the photos on the computer.”

  “You’ve got mustard on your chin,” I told him, and I put the tip of my right index finger on the hole. I pushed it a little ways inside.

  The doc leaned over and used one corner of the dead man’s shroud to wipe his chin. “Well, okay. It’s not an especially impressive exit. A bit disappointing, really.”

  “Doc, you are one sick-ass dude.” I removed my finger from the hole in Shaker’s face. “And the gun?”

  “The cartridges I took out of his gut were both nine-by-nineteen-millimeter Parabellum.”

  I covered Shaker’s face again, and stood there, massaging my temples a few moments. I was getting a headache, and I blamed B and the fluorescents. I wasn’t going to learn anything here could have learned over the telephone.

  “Do the lights have to be so bright?”

  Tillinghast glanced towards the ceiling. “I’ve never thought about it,” he said. “It’s usually the cold bugs people.”

  “Nine-millimeter Parabellum,” I sighed. “That so does not narrow it down.”

  “Sic vis pacem, para bellum. ‘If you seek peace, prepare for war.’”

  “Listen, professor, it’s been an especially shitty day, and I don’t need a goddamn lesson in Greek. I need to know who killed him and why.”

  Tillinghast corrected. “It’s Latin, Quinn. Not Greek.”

  I squinted at him over my shoulder. “I hit a defenseless goth chick this afternoon. So I got no problem whatsoever hitting a loud-mouth canoe maker.”

  He grinned. Hardly the reaction I’d expected.

  “Canoe maker,” he said, nodding his bald head. “You’ve been watching cop shows.”

  “Helps pass the time.”

  I turned back to the body beneath the sheet. I wondered if B would even pay for a decent funeral, or if the disposal of Shaker Lashly’s cadaver had become the state’s problem. Either way, not my goddamn problem. None of my business. For the time being, I’d done my duty. Time to go home and get some sleep, turn off my phone, and let B sit and spin until morning.

  Now, right about here, someone might inquire why a gal in my position didn’t just find a handy necromancer to wake the corpse up long enough to tell me whatever he knew about the identity of his murderer, or maybe a medium who could hold a séance and get him on the line that way. Fair enough. Another time, I might have done just that. I’m a big believer in shortcuts. Only, everyone had made it clear this mess was all hush-hush, top-secret, cloak-and-dagger shit. I start hauling in spiritualists and sorcerers and . . . did I mention how nasties and their buds gossip? Besides, the only decent necromancers in the neighborhood were the Maidstones. So, why didn’t I just ask Berenice to give it a shot? Would have made sense, right? Right. Well, fuck me if I can remember. But I didn’t.

  “You’ve got B’s number,” I told Tillinghast.

  “Maybe we’ll get something useful from ballistics.”

  “Not gonna hold my breath. Finish your sandwich. I’m going home.”

  “You hold your breath?” he asked. “I mean—”

  “Good-bye, Doc. I’ll be sure to tell B you were lots more helpful than you were. Also, fuck that Tex Avery crap. Stick to Chuck Jones.”

  And then I showed myself out, same as I’d shown myself in. “I’m not a goddamn detective,” I muttered to myself as I headed for the stairs.

  • • •

  Back in the apartment I shared with house centipedes and innumerable dust bunnies I couldn’t be bothered to sweep up, I switched on the television. The channel didn’t matter. Animal Planet and a pack of hyenas appeared on the screen, and that was fine by me. Just something, anything, for the comforting drone of background noise to keep me company. The visit to Tillinghast’s morgue had left me jumpy, on edge. I went to the bathroom and removed the contacts from my aching eyes, glad to see those black amber-threaded eyes staring back at me from the medicine cabinet. A few drops of Visine took away most of the pain, and then I washed the makeup off my face, exposing the alabaster waxiness underneath. I washed the fake teeth and put them in a cup of the store-brand, overnight denture-cleaning crap I bought at Walgreens. The water fizzed and, from the front room, a pack of hyenas barked their weird, chirping bark that doesn’t sound half as much like human laughter as some people seem to think it does.

  Before I’d come up the stairs and through the front door, all I’d been able to think about was bed. Now I was too restless for sleep. I went to the kitchenette and got a Narragansett from the fridge, then collapsed into the recliner I’d scrounged off a sidewalk near Brown just before the holiday break. End of the semester rolls ro
und and lots of students drop out—or get evicted—and leave all sorts of perfectly good shit behind. Since the summer, I’d scored a good mattress that way, and my dresser, too. The dresser had been painted so many times its original color was anyone’s guess; the latest coat was a grody yellow, peeling to reveal patches of avocado green and carnation pink underneath. But, hey, it had drawers and held clothes and shit, which is what dressers do. No one needs them to win beauty pageants.

  I sat in the recliner, drinking my beer and watching hyenas dismember a wildebeest carcass. But my head was still in the morgue, still on that hole between Shaker Lashly’s eyebrows. Shaker hadn’t been such a bad guy, decent enough I’d often wondered why the hell he’d ever gone to work for B. More than likely, blackmail was involved. Maybe B had paid off some debt or another and saved his skin from one of them fates worse than death. Sure, that might have been how it had gone. I never asked. None of my beeswax. Back in the ’90s, he’d come up to Rhode Island from Mississippi and had carried the accent to prove it. He knew about a thousand dirty jokes. He was aces with a single-shot bolt-action rifle. I’d once seen him take down a troublesome night gaunt with a Mauser SR-93. From half a mile away. Without a scope.

  “Fuck it,” I mumbled at the TV and the squabbling hyenas. “Dude got sloppy. Was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Probably did something stupid, and it got him killed.”

  Give us enough time, we all make that sort of fatal, final mistake. He’d stood his ground when he shoulda run, or he’d ducked right when he shoulda dodged left. Or the sorta nasty had caught up to him ain’t no dodging or ducking. Some monsters get your number, that’s all she wrote.

  I finished my Narragansett and set the bottle on the floor beside the chair, figuring I could at least doze awhile in the chair before Mean Mr. B called and sent me back out to chase after Amity fucking Maidstone and/or Shaker’s murderer.

  But . . . um . . . no. Wasn’t gonna happen. Fuck all forbid.

  I’d just shut my eyelids when the door burst open with enough force that the wood splintered straight down the middle and the damn thing was left hanging on its rusty hinges. And there was Rizzo, brandishing a new cross bow in one hand, and a big-ass, double-barrel shotgun in the other. By the way, all shotguns look big ass when someone’s pointing them at you. That’s some sort of universal law.