Death hits the fan (26 page)

The "meeting room" was a dark and smoky lounge with a bar, buffet, and scattered tables. The only thing interplanetary about it was the profusion of glowing beer signs and mismatched barstools and tables. And the writers. They weren't dressed as aliens, but they seemed as mismatched as the furniture: in torn jeans, cocktail dresses, beards, suits, overalls, jewels, cornrows, flattops, and bouffants.

Wayne and I stood for a moment by the door, surveying

the mixed crowd, searching for Yvette's pointy little head, and listening to the flotsam of babble floating our way.

"So my editor tells me space-time continuums aren't enough anymore, not with virtual reality . .."

"Done before ..."

"Heard the one about the agent and the nun . .."

"Plagues, you gotta have plagues ..."

"Hey, you guys, over here!" Yvette hailed us from a round table with three other humans. I hoped.

We elbowed our way through the mass of animation blocking us until we were at Yvette's table. She was dressed in a green sari, her narrow face bright with energy. She introduced her companions. I never caught their names in the overload of surrounding chatter, but nodded at an elderly woman with silver-and-purple hair, a middle-aged man whose features were covered by a blond beard, and a younger, good-sized woman in a red minisuit.

"... tell you what you need to know," Yvette was shouting. "See you guys later." And then she was gone into the fuddin' crowd.

The older woman with the colorful hair motioned us toward the two remaining chairs at the table. I sat down carefully, wondering if my chair had a short leg the way it was wobbling. I took a deep breath, then thought better of it as I coughed recycled smoke.

"Okay to ask you some questions—?" Wayne began.

"Have to yell!" the older woman shouted in a good example. "Can't hear for all the freaks!"

So Wayne shouted out a request for some information about Shayla Greenfree.

"Too successful to hang out with us anymore," the younger woman in the red suit responded. Her voice was plenty loud, though she didn't seem to be shouting. Maybe she'd taken acting lessons and learned how to project.

"Ooh, that Shayla," the older woman added. "Had an ego

on her once the green stuff started rolling in! She sure chose the right name."

"But she was good," the bearded man put in, just loud enouglvto be heard.

"How about Ted Brown!" I threw into the stew of sound.

"Haven't seen much of him either," the bearded man replied, turning his head away as if uncomfortable. Uncomfortable about Ted Brown, or talking about colleagues, or—?

"Probably can't afford the twenty bucks!" the older woman added helpfully.

"His big New York publisher dropped him," the younger woman explained. "Now he's with a small press—"

"Small press!" the silver-and-purple haired woman yelped. "Great if you want earnest, dedicated staff, and doo-doo for money."

"Don't quit your day job," the three chorused in unison.

"Yvette?" Wayne bellowed.

"Nuts," the older woman summarized. "But she's doing pretty good for money."

"A true alien life form," the bearded man added, smiling a little now.

"Ted or Yvette a killer?" Wayne bellowed again when no one else added anything about Yvette.

The three of them just chuckled.

"Writers kill enough people on paper," the younger woman explained. "I've killed off whole planets. Don't have to do it for real."

That was pretty much it for the informational part of the science-fiction writers' meeting. We helped ourselves to some food from the buffet. Unfortunately, the colors of the vegetables weren't nearly as bright as the beer signs. After a few bites, we ditched our plates to mingle and ask about the three authors. One thing was for sure, I decided as we made our last round searching for Yvette, no one seemed to be mourning Shayla Greenfree very seriously. A few people

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seemed to feel her loss as a good writer. A few others were interested in her way of passing. But no one was missing her as a best friend.

Yvette found us just as we'd decided to leave.

"Well?" she said, crooking an eyebrow over her tinted glasses.

"Well, what?" I shouted back.

"Okay," she said, slapping my back. "Keep it to your fud-din' selves. We'll talk later."

We took the stairs back down to the street slowly in the faint light, then stepped outside into the bite of cold air. And breathed in big, grateful gulps.

Finally, we started walking back to our car. No matter how good the cold air felt, it was starting to rain. So we hurried around a man holding a large sign on a stick. It wasn't until we got in front of him, that I recognized the man as the one who'd been picketing Fictional Pleasures the night of the signing. I took a closer look.

It was him, all right. He had the same long beard, the same burning blue eyes, and the same sign.

The sign that read "Science Fiction = Demonic Poison-ing.

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Hley!" I shouted, conditioned into high volume by the bar upstairs. "Weren't you at Fictional Pleasures the night of the big signing?"

"Fictional Pleasures, must take measures," the man carrying the picket sign replied, staring back at me—through me—in the rain. "Books are the pleasures of Satan, creating disharmony where harmony reigned. Turning, churning, burning."

I took that for a yes. The raindrops were plopping down for real now. Maybe they followed the picketer wherever he went. And here we were, with him. Lucky us.

"The Bible is a book," Wayne put in, peering into the man's face.

"The Bible is the Book. No other need to look. Harmony, peace, salvation beyond—"

"And a good plot," I cut in.

He turned to me angrily, water spraying off his sign.

"God's truth has no plot. Only man's lot."

Uh-oh. That didn't sound like good news for man's lot, or women's for that matter.

"Did you know an author died that night?" I asked before he started up again.

The picketer's burning blue eyes didn't flicker. Only his mouth moved.

"Death, dying, lying. Mocking our Lord."

"She was poisoned, you know," I told him, upping my volume again. I wiped the raindrops out of my eyes. I wanted to see his reaction. "Was it demonic poisoning?"

"Poisoned?" His blue eyes finally flickered. He even stepped back. Had he really not known? He stared up into the wet sky as if for an answer.

"God is good," he concluded finally. "God is not fiction. God is kind, not of mind. Satan is fiction—"

"But if poisoning was God's work—" Wayne proposed, his voice deep with authority.

"No, no!" the picketer yelped, spinning toward Wayne, the sign spraying me once more, across the face this time. "It's Satan's work, not God's, poisoning our minds."

He must have been rattled. His words weren't rhyming anymore.

"But poisoning our bodies," I put in. "Wouldn't that take human intervention?"

"No, demonic intervention!" he shouted. I wasn't even sure he'd understood the question. Or any of our questions, for that matter. "God is good. As it should ..."

We left him, versifying God's praise frantically in the cold, drenching rain. If I'd known how, I would have prayed for him in his own particular way.

My hair was as soggy as my brain by the time we made it back to the Jaguar's sumptuous embrace. I sank into the leather seat, feeling grateful I wasn't out in the wet anymore. And feeling guilty at the same time. Warmth came purring from the heater vents and I rubbed my icy hands together.

I'd make another donation to a homeless shelter when I got home. Visiting the city was getting more expensive all the time. Every time I saw someone on the street—

"Could he have killed her?" Wayne asked, interrupting my train of guilt.

"He was there, but he wasn't inside," I answered after an instant of reflection. "Was he?"

I assigned myself more homework. Beginning with a piece of paper labeled "nameless picketer, suspect."

"The man equates science fiction with the devil," Wayne muttered.

"And Shayla was a science-fiction writer, a famous one, it's true," I agreed slowly.

Motive filled itself in easily. But still, means and opportunity weren't so simple.

"He wouldn't have been able to get near the authors' table without attracting notice," I argued. "A lot of notice. And where would he get the bracelet?"

"And does he have the ability to plan ..."

We talked about the possibilities all the way home. And by the time we got there, I wasn't even sure the man with the picket sign warranted his own suspect-sheet.

We walked in the front door and turned the lights on. Wayne let out the tiniest whisper of an indrawn breath, a gasp from anyone else. My body went rigid. Who lay in wait for us this time? But Wayne's indrawn breath wasn't about who was there. It was about who wasn't.

"Ingrid?" Wayne murmured, pointing to the empty living room.

I blinked, then grinned, remembering.

"Ingrid doesn't live here anymore," I told him.

His brows went all the way to the top.

"Was it the skunk broker?" he asked, and for a moment I thought he was serious. Maybe he was.

I never got to ask him, though. He had me in his arms and

was carrying me down the hallway before I could speak, whooping like it was New Year's Eve. Maybe it was New Year's Eve somewhere. And even if it wasn't, there was no one else home to dispute our early celebration.

Saturday morning I woke to the smell of Soysage, fresh-baked dairy less Danish, and stuffed apples. No Whol-ios in sight. And Wayne had already reassembled the living room, our old denim-and-wood couch back in its place of honor between the swinging chairs, the futon neatly folded across from it. Now it felt more like Christmas Day than New Year's.

I sat down at the kitchen table, stuffing my face as I filled Wayne in on the details of the Fenestry Society.

The phone rang mid-laughter, and I wondered if Christmas was over. Ingrid may have been gone, but Shayla's and Marcia's ghosts weren't.

"Vince Quadrini here," the voice over the phone informed me. Christmas was turning into Boxing Day now. And yes, the ghosts were alive and well, and living in my stomach along with all that good food Wayne had cooked. "I would be very pleased to have you and Mr. Caruso visit my home today."

"Yeah ..." I murmured tentatively, waiting for more.

"Certain information has come into my hands that may be of use to you," he obliged.

"Well, I suppose—" I began.

"I'll send a driver within the hour," he told me. And then he hung up before I could even consider saying no, much less voice the word.

So Wayne and I finished our breakfast and our laughter, got dressed, and waited for Vince Quadrini's car.

And here I'd thought Wayne's Jaguar was embarrassingly ostentatious. Vince Quadrini's "car" turned out to be a limousine, driven by a taciturn white-haired man who couldn't

have been much younger than Vince Quadrini himself. Wayne and I sat in the rear and amused ourselves looking at the little bar and the little computer and the little phone, careful not to actually touch anything. By the time the car climbed the last long slope to reach its destination, the word Mafia had crossed my mind more than once. But the word rich was probably more to the point.

I wasn't sure about the first word, but at least the second one was proved correct when we stepped out of the limousine and were escorted up the marble steps to Mr. Quadrini's immodest mansion in the hills of Marin. Which hills, I wasn't exactly sure. Maybe that's why the limousine's windows were tinted, outside and in.

I took a moment at the entrance to glance at the formal garden surrounding the house, thinking that this estate really belonged in the English countryside, and then we were escorted past the fluted columns, through the double doors, to the foyer inside. Marble; scattered thick carpets; and spotlighted country prints from earlier centuries dominated the spacious room. I turned and took a step forward to look at one of the prints. Were they numbered? But our chauffeur shepherded us all too effectively, keeping us moving across the expanse of the foyer without any further dallying. Finally, he knocked on a thick wooden door and we were admitted to Vince Quadrini's private study.

Mr. Quadrini's study looked very much like his office, complete with a rosewood desk the size of a small soccer field and his honor guard of cats arrayed precisely in front of it. He clearly moved with his troops. But there were more country prints here, more books, more cat hair, and chairs upholstered in tapestry rather than leather. The room smelled pleasantly of must and potpourri. We quickly lowered ourselves into the tapestried chairs upon Mr. Quadrini's invitation.

Or had it been an order? I looked into the realtor's states-

manlike face and wondered if we had just been kidnapped. Damn. And I hadn't even thought to ask exactly where we were going in that limousine. As the thick wooden door shut, I realized the study we were in was probably soundproof. I couldn't hear traffic, or children's voices, or dogs barking, only the steady breathing of the humans and felines in the room and the even steadier ticking of a clock behind me. Hadn't Barbara told me to be ready? And now that In-grid had left, there was no one to say where we'd gone. Not that she would have told anyone, anyway.

"Please forgive me for inconveniencing you on a Saturday," Mr. Quadrini began smoothly. Were those the words of a kidnapper? That rich tone the voice of a murderer? "But I had information I thought you might use in your investigation."

I opened my mouth to say we weren't investigating and then just shut it again. If Mr. Quadrini wanted to think we were investigating, I had a feeling we weren't going to stop him.

"You probably know already that curare was the poison used in the bracelet," he stated, as if for the record. He might have been a senator starting in on a cabinet appointee. A senator from the opposing party.

I nodded.

His gaze grew more intense on my face.

"Police contacts," Wayne explained quickly from my side.