In the Blood (7 page)

“Mistress Layla?”

She blew a plume of smoke to the side. “Who’s asking?”

We showed ID. She looked close, a careful type.

“May we come in?” I asked. “We won’t need much of your time.”

“
May
you come in?” she said. “How polite. Gentlemen are always welcome here.”

She moved like rhythmic water and led us down
a short dark hall to a small sitting area with a loveseat and a chair, passing a side door on the way; a closet, I assumed, by its proximity to the front door. The walls were flocked red wallpaper, the trim was burnished brass. Along with the cigar odor, the air smelled of incense and sweat. A velvet curtain hung behind the couch, covering the door to the arena, I supposed.

“Who else is here?” Harry asked, looking at the curtain.

“No one’s back there,” she said, sitting on the couch.

“May I take a look?” I asked. “Specialized décor has always fascinated me.”

“I’d be delighted if you would.”

I pushed through the curtain to the windowless room behind. Twenty by twenty, high beamed ceiling, three walls black, the fourth raw brick. Steel hooks and rings and loops were situated at intervals along the walls as chain-holds. One hook held leather straps, still damp with sweat. A small table held an assortment of whips and flails. Smaller tables around the room held candles. There was an antique four-poster bed in a shadowed corner, beneath it I saw a gleaming steel bedpan.

I returned to the sitting area and smiled at Mistress Layla. “The rings look very solidly anchored. The exposed brickwork is a nice touch.”

“Thank you. My dungeon always gets compliments.”

A fair amount of cops might have made snide
comments or tried to be funny, but Harry and I always tried to treat folks with respect. One, it was the right thing to do. And two, over the years it had given us a solve rate that was the envy of our peers.

“You say you’re working, ma’am?” I asked.

I saw a glance flick to the closet down the hall. She didn’t try to hide the look.

“Yes.”

“This won’t take long. We’re checking into a for-hire situation. A man hired a dom to ball-gag him, suspend him by his ankles, give him a plugging and a whip job on the back and buttocks.”

Mistress Layla stubbed out the cigar in a crystal bowl. “Your presence tells me the man must have been robbed. Or hurt.”

“He was…injured,” I said, realizing how little we could say without revealing the victim was Richard Scaler.

“We’re trying to find out how it all went down, ma’am,” Harry said. “There’s no indication that anyone is in trouble. I want to stress that. This is purely a gathering of loose ends.”

“Good to know,” she said. “Where did this, uh, event happen?”

“I can’t tell you,” Harry said.

A small smile. “When, then?”

“In the past week.”

“You want to see my appointment book, gentlemen? No names, but times. If someone was hurt, it wasn’t me. My clients don’t get anything
but what they need, which is a little time out of themselves. I’ve made my reputation on creating imaginary situations where humiliation and fear prevail, but safety is a word away.”

“I believe you,” I said. “You ever work anywhere but here?”

“Not often. All of my materials are here.”

“Have you worked off-site in the past two weeks?”

“Not in months.”

I felt she was telling the truth, further strengthened when Mistress Layla consented to giving us her fingerprints. We wiped down a Coke can, she gripped it, dropped it in an evidence bag. We’d compare them to the hundreds of prints and partials found inside the cabin, but I didn’t expect a match.

She frowned in thought as I zippered the bag.

“Did you say the client was upside-down, Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Gagged?”

I nodded. “With hands bound tight behind his back, a double knot.”

She leaned back in the loveseat, tapping her chin like an engineer presented with a structural anomaly.

“That’s not too common, being upended. It drains blood from the sexual organs and diminishes pleasure. Add the gag and bindings and it’s a position almost too helpless for most people.
Tied to a bed or wall or using a harness suspension is one thing, but everything is disoriented when you’re upside-down. There must always be the knowledge that the…
event
can be turned off in an instant. That’s the difference between pleasure and terror.”

I said, “Tell us about your competition, Mistress. I don’t expect you have many peers.”

She nodded at the compliment. “You’re very kind. My colleagues are few in number, ranging from Pensacola to Biloxi. More in New Orleans, of course.”

“We need names, ma’am. If you’d be so kind.” She raised a penciled eyebrow. “You’ll not mention my name in your travels?”

“It would be intolerably poor manners.”

She smiled and nodded, found a pen, wrote for a minute and passed us the names, a half-dozen. We walked the hallway to the door. I paused at the closed door along the side, pulled it open. Inside, on the floor, crouched a naked man in his forties, one hand in his lap. I know a two-hundred-dollar haircut when I see one, and I was seeing one.

“Hello,” I said. “You’re under arrest.”

The man looked up, breathless with fear and excitement.

“This is part of the act, right?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t Mistress Layla something?”

He moaned the word
incredible.
I closed the door and we walked outside to the car. In the next two hours we visited three local names on Mistress
Layla’s list. All claimed alibis, which we’d check, and gave us fingerprint samples to clear through forensics.

It was getting late in the day. Harry sighed and pointed the car back downtown. We went a few blocks and he brightened at the thought of something.

“Hey, Carson. We go by the hospital on the way back. How’s about we stop in and see the kid, then grab a beer. She’ll cheer us up.”

The beer sounded decent, but I’d had my fill of hospitals. I figured I’d end up sitting on a plastic couch for twenty minutes while Harry pulled faces and made goofy noises at the kid, which, being in a plastic box behind a glass window, it never even heard.

I said, “Drop me off at my truck.”

“You don’t want to check the kid, Carson? How about grabbing a beer? You’ve been looking a bit stressed out lately, so maybe some downtime would –”

“I’m not stressed, Harry. I’m simply overworked. I want to go home.”

“It’ll kind of take me out of my way to drop you at your truck then circle around to –”

I held up my hands in defeat. Harry pointed the grille toward the hospital. We found Doc Norlin at the nurse’s station conferring with an orderly. When she saw us, she brightened. Or maybe it was Harry that sparked the smile.

“I’ve got good news,” Norlin said, her hand
sliding behind my partner’s elbow as she walked him to the unit, me following, not shooting glances at Norlin’s trim backside. When we turned the corner toward the viewing window, I stopped.

“Carson? You OK?”

“I’m fine. I’ll wait here.”

Harry began waving his arms at the kid. He tapped the glass, cooed like a pigeon. I looked away, embarrassed for my partner and waiting until his initial burst of emotionalism had subsided to making kissy faces.

Norlin smiled at Harry. “Returning a nearly drowned baby to health is like a marathon,” she said. “Sometimes the runner never finishes. Little Jane pulled it off like a hundred-yard sprint. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Harry studied the kid, mumbled something, and spun away, pacing down the hall like on a personal mission. Reaching the end of the hall, he looked out the window for a few beats, still mumbling, then spun on his heel and started back. Doc Norlin’s eyes were fixed on Harry, seemingly fascinated by my outsized partner. He returned, crossed his arms, leaned against the wall.

“How about Noelle, Doc?” he said.

“Pardon me, Detective Nautilus?”

“As a name for the kid,” Harry said. “Noelle.”

“You mean like in Christmas?” the doc asked, a quizzical smile on her face.

“Like in Noah,” Harry said. “But with an
elle
because she’s a girl.”

“Moses would be better,” I suggested, “given the small boat on the water.”

Harry dismissed the notion. “You ever try and convert Moses into a feminine name, Carson? Moselle’s a German wine, Mosina sounds like crap, ditto for Mozette…”

Norlin said, “You worked all that out in under a minute, Detective Nautilus?”

“How about it, Doc?” Harry said. “Think it’s a keeper?”

Norlin smiled twin rows of luminous Swedish teeth at my partner. “I’ll talk to the administrator, but I doubt it’ll be a problem. If it is, I’ll take you along to help convince her.”

My partner grinned like a love-struck adolescent. He turned to the glass. “Noelle, Noelle,” he crooned.

Norlin studied Harry with curious eyes. “You seem quite concerned about the little lady, Detective.”

“I came in on a boat myself, figuratively speaking,” Harry said.

Doc Norlin said we could hold the kid if we put on robes and masks. Harry looked like he’d just won the Super Lotto, and I retreated to the cafeteria until he’d had his fill. We were three steps outside the hospital when Harry’s phone rang. He studied the number, grumbled and dialed.

“‘S’up, Shanelle?” he said, listening for a moment before dropping the cell back in his pocket and giving me a look that was a silent groan. “Shanelle says she remembers something weird.”

I grinned. “Like, maybe the first twenty or so years of her life?”

We were at Shanelle’s preferred intersection in minutes. She thundered to the corner like a knock-kneed Clydesdale in heat, holding her wig tight as the clogs banged pavement.

“I remembered some weirdness, Harry, right after you left. I had to tell you.”

“Lay it on me, Shanelle.”

“It was maybe two months ago. My feets was killing me and I took a break in that little park over on Walter Street. This guy was on a bench like he was reading. But his eyes was watching everything, especially people walking by. I could see he was after something that wasn’t in his book.”

“Companionship,” I said. “At least briefly.”

“The man got up and wandered over and asked could he talk to me. Then it got strange. Not the bad kind, the question kind.”

“Question kind?” Harry asked.

“Questions like he was trying to get to know me. Weird shit about my family. What race was my mom and dad, did they come from another country? I said I hardly knew either of them, and what the fuck did it matter? He asked could he put something in my mouth.” Shanelle pursed her lips in an exaggerated kiss pucker. “I said before anything gets between these lips, hon, it pays fifty bucks.”

Harry said, “And?”

“We went to his car down the street. I stretched out on the seat and let him spend his cash.”

“He, uh, put his penis in your mouth?”

“He jabbed a Q-Tip around my tongue a couple times, pulled it out.”

Harry shot me puzzled. Turned back to Shanelle.

“What happened after that?”

“He asked did I work around there. I said, ‘Sure, come back anytime, Doc, and we’ll –’”

“Doc?” Harry said. “He was a doctor?”

“He said his name but I forgot. Martin? Matthews? Murphy? I remember his last name had a M in front. I told Dr M. to come around anytime and ask for Shanelle. He said he might, depending on how things turned out, but never did. A shame. I’da loved to see him every day, Harry.”

“Why’s that, Shanelle?”

“Fifty bucks for sucking a Q-Tip?” She gave my partner’s shoulder a poke. “Harry, you don’t even have to gargle afterwards.”

Harry sighed and pointed the car back toward the station. “What do you think that was about, Carson? The doc or whatever with Shanelle and the Q-Tip?”

“Probably some social-services type doing a health survey,” I said. “Port cities are the crossroads for a lot of things, germs included.”

“So you don’t think it’s anything?”

“I just hope the Q-Tip got burned after it was analyzed,” I said, slumping in the seat. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Beer?”

I was worn through. “I ain’t into it. I’m going home.”

Harry dropped me at my truck. I headed home, pulling into my drive as my neighbor Lucinda Best walked past, something otherworldly on a leash beside her. Miz Best is seventy years old and a volunteer at the county animal shelter. She often brought canines home to gauge their temperaments.

I’d seen some odd critters at her side, but none so odd as the apparition currently pacing her shoes. Its body was thick and heavy chested, the hair tightly grained, suggesting Lab or shepherd, but the long fluffy tail hair said collie. The legs were slender but the feet were like oven mitts. The head was square and wore basset-length ears. Its eyes were huge and bright and inquisitive. The powerful body was spotted brown and white and black, though the back legs were brindled. The creature looked like a Dr Seuss character.

The animal regarded me politely, not seeming to find my stare ill-mannered. I expect the odd beast was used to being stared at.

“Howdy, Miss Best. That’s the weirdest-looking pooch I’ve ever seen. What’s the breed?”

“I call him Mr Mix-up because he’s pure Heinz…fifty-seven varieties. I expect this doggie’s got about everything in him a doggie could have, Abyssinian to Zuchon.”

I smiled. “So he’s a mutt’s mutt.”

She tut-tutted me with disapproving eyes. “Don’t say mutt like it’s a pejorative, Carson. It’s a badge of honor.”

“Aren’t pedigrees the way to go?” My knowledge of dogs was limited to the occasional amused viewing of the Westminster Dog Show. My father was an unhappy man and dogs might have brought happiness into our home, thus they were forbidden. I once had a pet hamster for about three days, a
gift from a classmate for my upcoming ninth birthday. My father found it beneath my bed and fastballed it into the dining-room wall during my birthday party.

Miss Best said, “I once heard you and Harry talking about a trip to a horse track in Kentucky, didn’t I?”