Murder on the Astral Plane (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (21 page)
Read Murder on the Astral Plane (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Online
Authors: Jaqueline Girdner
Barbara had Zarathustra’s home address. I wish she’d lied and pretended she didn’t, but Wayne would have found it anyway, I suppose. All he had to do was ask Justine.
Zarathustra lived with his parents in a nice, white-walled, beige-rugged, neat and clean home in Novato. A definite contrast to Justine’s eclectic decor. At least it looked that way from what I could see by peering around Zarathustra where he stood in the doorway. He’d been home and answered the bell, much as I’d been hoping he’d be out.
Actually, Zarathustra was an interesting contrast to his parents’ home himself, his arms crossed, more than six feet of sullen teenager in black leather, chains, and studs. I began to wonder if maybe Barbara had been right about him after all, then shook off the thought and the goose bumps the kid gave me. Plenty of teenagers dressed funny. In fact, I’d dressed pretty funny as a teenager myself.
“So, you some kinda private dick or something?” he challenged Wayne, jutting his head forward, light glinting off the diamond studs in his cheek.
“Nope,” Wayne answered, unmoving except for a slight lowering of his eyebrows.
“You’re here about Silk, right?” Zarathustra’s voice was definitely hostile. Anger “R” Us.
“That’s right,” Wayne agreed, his own voice low and quiet.
There’s nothing like a guy who won’t talk to get the other guy going.
“Probably think I did it, right?”
“Nope,” Wayne persisted.
“Well, I didn’t,” Zarathustra informed him as if Wayne hadn’t replied at all. “Silk pissed off a lot of folks, not just me. She was—”
“James?” a voice called from another room.
“Zarathustra, Mom!” the teenager called back in exasperation.
“Right, honey,” the voice said, and a plump, pretty woman with skin the very same raisin color as Zarathustra’s walked in. But Zarathustra didn’t get his height from his mother. This woman was probably closer to five feet than six.
“Aren’t you going to invite your friends in?” Zarathustra’s mother asked in the same tone mothers have used since Adam and Eve tried to instill manners into Cain.
“They aren’t friends,” Zarathustra objected.
His mother took a breath in. I had a feeling we were going to hear a lecture. But Wayne intervened mercifully.
“Here to talk to your son about the death at your sister-in-law’s soiree,” he explained brusquely.
“Oh, my,” she murmured, shaking her head as if in memory. Then she seemed to come back to the present. She smiled. “I’m forgetting my manners. I’m Tina, Tina Howe, James’s—Zarathustra’s mom. Welcome to our house.”
We’d forgotten our manners too. The three of us all introduced ourselves hastily and shook hands with Tina, as she pulled Zarathustra out of the doorway with her other hand and gestured us into her front room.
“Would it be okay to speak to your son, ma’am?” Wayne asked politely.
There was something about Tina Howe that seemed to call for politeness. I would have bet she was a school-teacher.
“Of course,” she answered. “Anything to get this nightmare cleared up. You just all sit down, and I’ll leave you alone with Zarathustra.” Then she stage-whispered, “Having his old mother around cramps his style,” and left the room.
Justine may have been worried about Zarathustra, but his mother clearly wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what that meant, though. Who knows a child better, his mother or a psychic? Or my sidekick?
Barbara and I sat down on a beige sofa as I pondered. But Zarathustra remained standing. So did Wayne. Male bonding was fine, but I wished Wayne would take a seat.
“Wayne, don’t you want to sit—” I began.
“The cops have been all over me since Silk got herself killed,” Zarathustra burst out angrily and walked to the other side of the room.
Wayne followed him without speaking.
“Just ‘cause I’m black,” Zarathustra continued and turned to walk to the other side of the room, Wayne keeping pace with him.
“They don’t get it, man. I’m not just some street kid. I study. I know stuff. Nietzsche said the second step was to become a lion, roaring against the ‘thou shalts’ of society. That’s what Silk was doing. That’s why everybody was so pissed at her.” He came up against the wall and turned again, Wayne following him, step for step.
“Sure, the woman played some head games with me, but she was just playing. I knew that, even though she made me mad sometimes. But I wouldn’t have killed her. Or anybody. She was cool, man, really cool.”
Wayne nodded and kept walking with him.
“See, Nietzsche was a player, man. He didn’t conform. He took a stand, gave the finger to all this establishment-morality crap. And he wasn’t a racist. You can tell from his writings, if you bother to read them. He just didn’t put up with bullshit. It was his sister who made him sound racist.”
Nietzsche again. I felt my eyelids begin to droop. I’d forgotten who Zarathustra really was. But I was remembering now. Zarathustra was a tall, scary-looking, Nietzsche nerd.
“You read
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, man?” he stopped to ask Wayne.
Wayne nodded.
“Really, man?” Zarathustra demanded, looking a whole lot less scary with some enthusiasm on his broad-boned face and light in his dark eyes.
“
The Will to Power
too,” Wayne put in.
“Oh, man, that was great,” Zarathustra breathed and began pacing again.
The two males threw around some phrases like, “transvaluation of power,” and “God is dead,” for a while, actually a long while—it had to be close to half an hour—and continued to pace back and forth across the floor.
I was getting dizzy watching them, but I had to admit, Wayne had the kid’s attention, for what it was worth. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the kid had Wayne’s attention. But they were relating. And Zarathustra had dropped his street talk for the time being. I was pretty sure we were seeing the real person behind the black leather façade. Or maybe just the flip side of his personality. He could be both the black leather, angry kid and the Nietzsche nerd, I told myself, remembering Justine’s description of the many truths of Silk Sokoloff.
“It takes courage to really look at the conventions of your own society and make your own decisions,” he told Wayne. “And Silk did that.”
My eyelids stopped drooping. He was back to Silk.
“That woman found her own path in life. Not many people do. I’ll remember her.” Zarathustra’s large, dark eyes teared up then. Real tears. He raced to the next wall, with Wayne trailing behind him.
“There was no reason to kill her, man,” he told Wayne. “Hope you find out who did it.”
“Thank you,” Wayne said and stretched out a hand to Zarathustra before he reached the wall and turned again.
Zarathustra eyed the hand for a moment, then shook it.
After a brief goodbye to Zarathustra and his mother, who appeared to be well within earshot, we left the Howes’ neat house and breathed in the fresh non-Nietzsche air outside.
We walked to the car slowly, each lost in our own thoughts.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked Wayne in a whisper, once we’d reached the car.
“I think…” he began.
“Wayne?” I asked, looking up. His face was white again.And sweat was beaded on his low brow. “I think…” he tried once more, his eyes closing. “I think…” And then he fell face down onto the hood of my car.
- Twenty-One -
The next moment was excruciatingly slow. I leapt forward to grab Wayne before he slid off the hood of the car and smashed onto the pavement, all the while seeing the nonevent in living, bleeding color. Luckily, Barbara was a heartbeat behind me. I held Wayne’s torso with one arm and cradled his head with the other as Barbara managed his legs, and together, we turned him over as gently as two small women can turn a much bigger man on the hood of a Toyota. If Wayne had been conscious, he might have thought he was a particularly delicate pancake being turned without aid of a spatula. But of course, he wasn’t conscious or a pancake. The best I could say was that he was lying on his back instead of his face by the time we were through. And his face didn’t look any the worse for falling on the hood of the car. Still, it was hard to assess damage on the face of a man already equipped with a cauliflower nose and an assortment of scars.
I took a deep breath, to calm the blood dancing in my veins. I hate it when the corpuscles kick my temples.
And then Wayne’s eyes opened.
“Wayne?” I whispered, my blood dancing even faster.
“What?” he returned, looking confused for a moment.
Maybe he was wondering why he was lying on the hood of a car instead of home in bed. Or maybe he wasn’t sure who I was.
Then his eyes seemed to come into focus. He frowned my way. He definitely knew who I was. He struggled to stand up. Barbara and I hastily shifted our positions as he did. This pancake was moving. I wedged myself into his left armpit. Barbara draped his right arm over her shoulder.
“Take it easy, sweetie,” I told him. “You fainted.”
He rumbled something incomprehensible.
“What?” I asked gently.
“Did not,” he rumbled more loudly.
“He means he didn’t faint,” Barbara informed me from his other side.
“I know what he means,” I informed her back, my gentle tone turning snappy. Along with my mood. Then I looked up at Wayne’s face from beneath his armpit.
“You did too faint,” I told him. For a man in his poor physical condition, he felt mighty heavy. And for a man who’d almost given me a heart attack, he wasn’t thanking us a whole lot for our help. “How else did you end up on the hood of the car?”
“Was tired,” he growled. “Thought I’d take a nap.”
I opened my mouth to ask how often he napped on the hood of my car, then closed it again.
It was time for medical advice.
The drive to Dr. Frestansia’s office didn’t take as long as it usually did. Probably because I drove twice as fast as usual. And no one criticized me. Wayne looked positively braced by the speed of light, and a glance at the passenger-anxiety on Barbara’s face when I turned to switch lanes made the ride even more worthwhile. All the terrors of those trips in Barbara’s bug had created their own payback.
Unfortunately, Wayne didn’t have an appointment with Dr. Frestansia, a fact that the receptionist, Reva, made abundantly and repeatedly clear once we’d dragged Wayne into the office and settled him onto the flowered couch in the waiting room.
“But he’s sick,” I insisted. I bent across the desk. We were alone in the waiting room. There were no other patients to attend to. What of medical ethics? “He might have a concussion, you know. He fell. He fainted!”
“Did not,” I heard from the couch.
I ignored the patient. So did Reva.
“It’s the doctor’s lunch break,” she forced out through clenched teeth. It was pretty easy to guess that it was her lunch break too from the sandwich on her desk. I could even smell avocado over that particular hygienic scent common to all doctors’ offices. And I could see a paperback novel flattened on top of a stack of papers. I looked at the title. At least it wasn’t a Silk Sokoloff. “A very late lunch break,” she added, as if this was my fault too.
I saw movement out of the corner of my eye as I bent even further across the reception desk to escalate my attack on fortress Reva. The movement was Barbara, Barbara heading back to the doctor’s office. Reinforcements were on the way. I let my voice ease up a little.
“Well, I guess we’ll wait till the doctor’s finished with lunch,” I told Reva reasonably. “And then—”
“Mr. Caruso,” Dr. Frestansia’s voice broke in.
I turned. Dr. Avria Frestansia, almost six feet of big and beautiful, black-haired, white-skinned femininity stood next to Barbara, looking critically at Wayne. He flinched.
“Have you been resting, Mr. Caruso?” the doctor asked, accusation in her high tone.
“I—”
She pointed her finger. It was the finger of guilt.
“You’ve been running around when I told you to get rest,” the doctor finished for him. “Do you really want to go to the hospital?”
Wayne shook his head mutely, glaring past the doctor in my direction.
I was beginning to feel sorry for him, and not just because he was sick.
“There
was
a murder,” I put in tentatively.
“What do you mean, a murder?” Dr. Frestansia shot over her shoulder.
“Two women we know have been killed, and Wayne wanted to help us—” I began.
“You’re not talking about Elsa’s murders are you?” the doctor demanded, turning to me now.
“Huh?” I said, momentarily stunned. Dr. Frestansia often had that effect on me even when she wasn’t asking hard questions.
“Elsa Oberg,” Barbara hissed my way.
“Yes,” Dr. Frestansia agreed, nodding as if Barbara had been hissing at her. “Elsa Oberg is also my patient. She spoke to me of this murder.”
“What did she say?” I asked eagerly, my brain clearing quickly in the face of this unexpected source of information.
Dr. Frestansia was from Absaplania. I’d noticed long ago that the concept of confidentiality was not one that they taught in Absaplanian medical schools.
“Ah, that Elsa, she has spirit,” the doctor replied. Her gaze softened. “She said there was a murder at some kind of—how you say—séance?”
“Right,” I prompted. “That’s the one.”
“Elsa said the murdered woman practically wore a sign around her neck saying ‘Kick me.’ A most aggravating woman, Elsa implied.”
“Who does Elsa think did it?” I asked.
“She did not say. Though she was quite concerned about the death of the second woman. She says she doesn’t understand that murder at all. It upset her a great deal, this second death, more than the first.”
I thought about Isabelle Viseu guiltily. Her death did seem unwarranted. And Isabelle was so easy to forget in death, just as she had been in life. She was especially hard to remember when Silk was in the picture. Still, Silk’s death was unwarranted too, no matter how aggravating she was. Then another thought caught me short. Elsa Oberg was seeing a doctor.
“Is Elsa sick?” I asked.
“Hah!” the doctor snorted. “Elsa is strong enough to lasso cattle. She is just old.”
I wished she hadn’t mentioned lassoing. It seemed a little too close to garroting. I rubbed my neck and swallowed, imagining Elsa Oberg in action.
“But you!” the doctor declared, turning back to Wayne. “Murder or no murder, you should be in bed.”
“Right,” Wayne conceded, struggling up from the depths of the flowered couch.
“But not before I examine you,” the doctor amended, and led Wayne back to her office. She didn’t need any help supporting Wayne’s weight, whether Wayne wanted the support or not. As he passed by in Dr. Frestansia’s grip, Wayne looked at me just the way C. C. does as she’s taken into the vet’s inner sanctum.
For the next twenty minutes, Barbara and I whispered anxiously on the flowered couch as Reva finished her sandwich and glared at us.
And then Wayne and the doctor were back. I was glad to see that Wayne was standing on his own two feet now.
“But she was a good writer,” Wayne was insisting. “Her death was unjust.”
“Fah!” The doctor dismissed his words with a wave. “All death is equally unjust. Do you think it’s any better to die of cancer than to be strangled?”
“But—”
“Go back to bed, Mr. Caruso,” she ordered. “And if you’re so concerned with writing, do some of your own.”
“I’m sick of people telling me to write—”
“You are correct in one matter, Mr. Caruso. You
are
sick. You belong home in bed.” And with that, Dr. Frestansia spun on her heel and returned to her late lunch.
I drove home at a normal speed while Wayne growled and Barbara chirped. A small zoo in a small Toyota.
“Maybe Elsa killed Silk Sokoloff but not Isabelle Viseu,” Barbara proposed. “That’d explain why she’s so freaked about Isabelle but not Silk.”
“Why?” Wayne asked brusquely. He may have been conscious, but his usual good nature hadn’t returned yet.
I hoped Barbara wasn’t going to bring up any more illegitimate children theories.
“Maybe Silk was really her love child.”
I groaned and released all hope.
“So why would she want to kill her own daughter?” Wayne pressed. “And why would someone else kill Isabelle?”
“Isabelle saw something,” I heard my own voice say. I hadn’t meant to join the zoo, but there it was.
“Then why didn’t she just tell Justine?” Barbara demanded.
I hesitated before plunging ahead. “Because Isabelle was a fair woman. She wouldn’t make a public accusation without giving the murderer a chance.”
The zoo quieted down briefly.
“But who?” Barbara whispered.
Who? Who? An aviary of owls had joined the zoo.
And then we were home. I pulled into the driveway, blessing the gravel as it popped under the car’s tires. This must have been how Ulysses felt when he finally returned to Penelope. We might have been gone for decades.
As we got out of the Toyota, Barbara asked, “Did you notice that car?”
“What car?” I asked, looking behind me. There wasn’t any car visible now.
“The one that pulled in behind us on your street, and then slowed down when you slowed down to turn, but then took off when you finally did turn.”
“Oh,
that
car,” I said. But sarcasm was wasted on Barbara. “What did it look like?”
Barbara frowned for a moment.
“I think it was one of those kinda grayey-beigey type cars,” she answered finally.
“American or import?” Wayne asked.
“Um, I’m not sure.”
“Big car?” I tried.
“Not really,” Barbara told us. Then her smile returned. “But I’d know it if I saw it again.”
“Are you saying this car was following us?” Wayne asked.
“I’m not sure,” Barbara admitted, and her smile faded.
I hugged her anyway. Barbara had helped me get Wayne to the doctor’s, and for the moment, that was all that counted. Anyway, I hated it when she was unhappy. All right, I had to face it. She was my friend, even if she was as aggravating as Silk Sokoloff. Telling myself that Barbara was my friend, no matter what, was beginning to sound like a mantra, I realized. Maybe I needed a new mantra.
“Thanks, Kate,” she murmured, emerging from my arms. And then she climbed into her Volkswagen and raced it out of my driveway backwards.
I heard the sound of wheels screaming in the direction of the bug. There was no resulting crash, however. And I wasn’t in the car with Barbara. I smiled affectionately.
Wayne refused my assistance, going up the front stairs and through the house to bed. But he did go to bed. He even let me tuck the covers beneath his chin.
“It’s because I love you, Kate,” he muttered.
“I know, sweetie,” I assured him. It was easier to be reasonable now that he was in bed. I kissed him on the forehead and wished him sweet dreams. He was snoring before I left the room.
When I got back to the living room, Barbara was sitting on my couch. For a breath, I thought I’d imagined her. The ghost of the day past. But I knew she was real when she spoke.
“Hey, Kate,” she whispered, as if she knew Wayne was asleep. She probably did.
“I thought you left,” I whispered back. Affection for Barbara was easier in absentia. Even in near absentia. But here she was back again.
“I did, but then I got to thinking,” she answered. She laughed. “One of your goofy neighbors didn’t like my U-turn. But I’m here. So, anyway, Wayne has a computer, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I conceded slowly.
“Cool, then I can load my CAD program on his computer and we can get back where we started—”
“Before you killed your computer,” I interrupted.
“I didn’t kill it,” Barbara corrected me. “They’re fixing it right now.”
“Resurrecting it,” I corrected her back. “Didn’t you tell me you fritz computers?”
“Kate, do you want to solve this murder or not?” she asked.
I opened my mouth to object to breaking Wayne’s computer to do it.
“Without leaving the house?” she added.
I closed my mouth.
“I’ll be here tomorrow to install the CAD program,” Barbara promised as she rose and threw me a kiss on the way out the door.