Deadly Quicksilver Lies Read online

  “Not that kind of prison.”

  I stuffed my face and let that old vacuum suck more words out of her. I don’t deal well with metaphor.

  “I can leave any time I want, Garrett. I’ve been encouraged to leave. Often. But if I do, I lose everything. It’s not really mine. I just get to use it.” She gestured around her. “As long as I don’t abandon it.”

  “I see.” And I did. She was a prisoner of circumstance. She had to stay. She was an unmarried woman with a child. She had known poverty and knew rich was better. Poverty was a prison, too. “I think I’m going to like you, Maggie Jenn.”

  She raised an eyebrow. What an endearing skill! Few of us have sufficient native talent. Only the very best people can do the eyebrow thing.

  I said, “I don’t like most of my clients.”

  “I guess likable people don’t get into situations where they need somebody like you.”

  “Not often, that’s a fact.”

  9

  The way things started, I became convinced that a certain eventuality had been foredoomed from the moment I’d opened my front door. I’m not a first date kind of guy, but I’ve never strained too hard against the whims of fate. I especially don’t struggle to avoid that particular fate.

  Dinner ended. I was unsettled. Maggie Jenn had been doing these things with her eyes. The kind of things that cause a bishop’s brain to curdle and even a saint’s devotion to monasticism to go down for a third time in those limpid pools. The kind of things that send a fundamentalist reverend’s imagination racing off into realms so far removed that there is no getting back without doing something stupid.

  I was too distracted to tell if the front of me was soaked with drool.

  There had been banter and word games during dinner. She was good. Really good. I was ready to grab a trumpet and race around blowing Charge!

  She sat there silently, appraising me, probably trying to decide if I was medium or medium well.

  I made a heroic effort to concentrate. I managed to croak, “Tell me something, Maggie Jenn? Who would be interested in your affairs?”

  She said nothing but did the eyebrow trick. She was surprised. That wasn’t what she’d expected me to say. She had to buy time.

  “Don’t try to work your wiles on me, woman. You don’t get out of answering that easily.”

  She laughed throatily, exaggerating that huskiness she had, wriggled just to let me know she was capable of distracting me as much as she wanted. I considered distracting myself by getting up and stomping around to study some of the artwork decorating the dining chamber but discovered that rising would be uncomfortable and embarrassing. I half turned in my chair and studied the ceiling as though seeking clues amongst the fauns and cherubs.

  She asked, “What do you mean about people interested in my affairs?”

  I did pause to reflect before I gave away the store. “Let’s back up some first. Did anybody know you were coming to see me?” Of course somebody did. Else Winger wouldn’t have come to me first. But I needed Maggie’s perspective.

  “It wasn’t a secret, if that’s what you mean. I did ask around once I decided I needed a man of your sort.”

  Hmm. What was a man of my sort?

  This was not an unfamiliar phenomenon. Sometimes the unfriendlies get the jump because they hear about my client asking after someone who can help. “Next step, then. Who would be bothered if you started looking for your daughter?”

  “Nobody.” She was getting suspicious.

  “Yeah. It would seem like nobody ought to care. Unless maybe they were to give you a little support.”

  “You’re scaring me, Garrett.”

  She didn’t look scared. I said, “Might be a good idea to be scared. See, I knew you were coming.”

  “What?” She was troubled for sure now. She didn’t like that at all.

  “Just before you showed up, a friend who’s in my racket stopped by to warn me you’d be coming.” Saying Winger and I are in the same business is stretching a point, maybe. Winger is into anything likely to put money in Winger’s purse, preferably fast and easy. “He thought you were coming to buy a hit. That’s why he warned me.” Catch that clever misdirection. Not even a dead Loghyr often mistakes Winger for male.

  “A hit? Me?” She knew the argot. She was off balance but coming back fast.

  “He was sure of it.” But I wondered. Winger took shortcuts. Big, slow, lovable, goofy, crafty, bigoted, and lazy Winger. She was confident that anybody she couldn’t sweeten with reason she could bring around with a good old-fashioned ass-kicking. She was just a big old simple country girl with simple country ways — if you accepted her the way she wanted to be taken.

  I was going to have words with Winger about Maggie Jenn. If I could find her. I didn’t think that would be tough. The big goof was bound to turn up on her own, soon. Probably before I was ready.

  I said, “Then somebody followed me here.”

  “What? Who? Why?”

  “Got me. I only mention it to show you that somebody out there is interested.”

  Maggie shook her head. It was a fine head. I was starting to lose my focus again. I concentrated on describing the villain who’d followed me.

  Maggie smiled wickedly. “Garrett! Don’t you ever think about anything else?”

  “Lots of times.” I thought about starting a little contest in which we would see who could run the fastest.

  “Garrett!”

  “You started it.”

  Unlike many women, she did not deny her complicity. “Yeah, but...”

  “Put yourself in my place. You’re a red-blooded young man who’s suddenly alone here with you.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.” She chuckled. Ouch! This was getting painful. “You do dish up a ration of shit, don’t you?”

  I chuckled right back and put myself into my own place, assuming she meant to put herself into her own place and things would proceed to proceed. But after a painful pilgrimage to her side of the table all proceedings proceeded to grind to a halt. Reluctantly — it seemed — she slipped away from me. I muttered, “We can’t keep on like this if you want to sell me on looking for your daughter.”

  “You’re right. This is a business arrangement. We can’t let nature get in the way.”

  I was willing to let nature play havoc, but I said, “Durn tootin’. I don’t sell that way, anyway. I sell on logic and facts. That’s me. Just-the-facts-ma’am Garrett. How about you start giving me some of those instead of using all your energy on those come-hither eyes?”

  “Don’t be cruel, Garrett. This is as difficult for me as it is for you.”

  10

  So, eventually, we reached the suite belonging to Maggie’s daughter Emerald. “Emerald?” I asked. “What happened to Justina?” Emerald. Wouldn’t you know? Where are all the lovely Patricias and Bettys?

  “I named her Justina. Emerald is what she uses. She picked it, so don’t give me that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The one that says you’re shitting me. She picked it. She was fourteen. Everyone else went along, so I use Emerald sometimes myself.”

  “Right. Emerald. She insisted.” Of course. That’s what became of Patricia and Betty. They started calling themselves Amber and Brandi and Fawn. “But she might be going by Justina. When life gets serious, they fall back on their roots. Anything I need to know about the suite before I start digging?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Am I going to find something you think needs excusing ahead of time?”

  Wonder of wonders, she understood. “You might. Only I never go in there, so I don’t know what it might be. Yet.” She gave me a strange look. “Are you looking for a fight?”

  “No.” Though maybe, unconsciously, I didn’t want her hanging over my shoulder. “Back to that name. Might as well go after this by the numbers, find out everything you can tell me before I start looking for things you don’t know.”

  She gave
me that look again. I was a bit testy. Had I developed that strong a dislike for work? Or was it because I knew she would lie and distort and whatever else it took to shape reality to her own vision? They all do, even when there’s no hope they won’t get found out. People. They do make you wonder.

  “Justina was after my grandmother.”

  I understood from her tone. Never was a kid who did not resent hearing how he or she was named after some old fart they never met and couldn’t care less about. My mom played that game with me and my brother. I never figured out why it meant anything to her. “Any special reason?”

  “The name’s been in the family forever. And Granny would have been hurt if...”

  The usual. Never made sense to me. You sentence a kid to a lifetime of misery on account of somebody might get his feelings hurt if you don’t. Three rousing oriental cheers, say I: foo-ee, foo-ee, foo-ee. Who is going to be upset the longest?

  You entered Emerald’s suite through a small sitting room. There you found a small writing desk with its chair, in blond wood. There was an oil lamp on the desk. There was one more chair, a storage chest with a cushion on top, and a small set of shelves. The room was squeaky clean and more spartan than it sounds. It did not look promising.

  I hate it when they clean for company. “Your daughter ever take a powder before?”

  Maggie hesitated. “No.”

  “Why did you hesitate?”

  “Trying to decide. Her father kidnapped her when she was four. Some friends convinced him that a child is better off with her mother.”

  “Would he try something like that today?”

  “Probably not. He’s been dead eight years.”

  “Chances are he wouldn’t.” As a rule, the dead don’t get involved in custody disputes.

  “She got a boyfriend?”

  “A girl from the Hill?”

  “Especially a girl from the Hill. How many does she have?”

  “What?”

  “Look, believe it or not, it’s easier for Hill girls to slip around than it is for downtown girls.” I offered examples from my own cases, one of which had featured a bevy of Hill girls working the Tenderloin just for the thrills.

  That stunned my Maggie Jenn. She had a blind area, an inability to believe her baby could be anything less than the absolute image of what she desired. It hadn’t occurred to her that Emerald was going to break her heart. Plainly, she didn’t understand that people sometimes did the wicked stuff for other than survival reasons. Whoring as an amusement was a concept too alien to encompass.

  Only the classes in between don’t believe in whoring.

  “You didn’t grow up on the Hill.”

  “I admit that, Garrett.”

  I had the suspicion that my pretty Maggie had maybe had to make ends meet to make ends meet during the hiatus between husband and crown prince. I didn’t need to know about that, though. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later, if it began to look like the past had some bearing. “Plant yourself on a chair. Talk to me about Emerald while I work.”

  I prowled.

  11

  Maggie said, “To my knowledge she has no boyfriends. Our circumstances don’t let us meet many people. We aren’t socially acceptable. We form a class unto ourselves.”

  A very classy class it was, though Maggie Jenn and her kid weren’t its only members. The sisterhood of mistresses is quite large. At these rarified heights, a man is expected to have a mistress. It demonstrates his manhood. Two is better than one.

  “Any friends at all?”

  “Not many. Girls she grew up with, maybe. Maybe somebody she studied with. At her time of life, kids are real status conscious. I doubt anybody would let her make any strong connections.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “Me, twenty years less shopworn. And wipe that silly grin off your mug.”

  “I was thinking how looking for you twenty years younger would have me hunting somebody barely out of diapers.”

  “And don’t forget that. I want my baby found, not —”

  “Right. Right. Right. Any special stress between you before she disappeared?”

  “What?”

  “Did you have a fight? Did she stomp out yelling about how she was never coming back in ten thousand years?”

  “No.” Maggie chuckled. “I had a few of those with my mother. Probably why she didn’t squawk when my father sold me. No. Not Emerald. This kid is different, Garrett. She never cared about anything enough to fight. Really, honestly, swear to whatever god, I wasn’t a pushy mother. She was happy just to go along. Far as she was concerned, life is a river and she was driftwood.”

  “I maybe lost something in all the excitement. Or maybe I’ve started remembering things that never happened. I could have sworn you were going on about her having fallen in with bad companions.”

  Maggie chuckled. She snorted. She looked uncomfortable. She did it all fetchingly. I tried to imagine her as she might have been in Teodoric’s day. I was awed by the possibilities.

  She stopped wriggling. “I fibbed a little. I heard about you having a relationship with the Sisters of Doom and figured you were a sucker for a kid in trouble.” The Sisters of Doom is an all-girl street gang. The girls were all abused before they fled to the street.

  “It was a relationship with one Sister. Who left the street.”

  “I’m sorry. I overstepped.”

  “What?”

  “It’s obvious I just stomped on some tender feelings.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Maya was a pretty special kid. I messed up a good thing because I didn’t take her serious enough. I lost a friend because I didn’t listen.”

  “Sorry. I was just trying to find a sure hook.”

  “Did Emerald see anybody regularly?” Business would take me away from memories. Maya was not one of my great loves, but she was pretty special. And both Dean and the Dead Man had approved of her. There had been no separation, she just didn’t come around anymore and mutual friends all hinted that she wouldn’t unless I grew up a little.

  That don’t punch your ego up, considering it traced back to a girl just eighteen.

  Emerald’s writing desk had numerous cubbies and tiny drawers. I searched them as we talked. I didn’t find much. Most spaces were empty.

  “She does have friends but making friends doesn’t come easy.”

  That wasn’t the story as it was told a few minutes ago. I suspected Emerald had troubles that had nothing to do with social status. Chances were she was lost in her mother’s shadow. “Friends are where I’ll find her trail. I’ll need names. I’ll need to know where I can find the people who go with them.”

  She nodded. “Of course.” I slammed a drawer, turned away from her. I had to keep my mind on business. The woman was a witch. Then I sneaked a peek. Did I really want to leave all that, to go hunting somebody who probably didn’t want to be found?

  Ha! Here was something. A silver pendant. “What’s this?” Purely rhetorical. I knew what I had. It was an amulet consisting of a silver pentagram on a dark background with a goat’s head inside the star. The real question was, what was it doing where I had found it?

  Maggie took it, studied it while I watched for a reaction. I didn’t see one. She said, “I wonder where that came from?”

  “Emerald into the occult?”

  “Not that I know of. But you can’t know everything about your children.”

  I grunted, resumed my search. Maggie chattered like the fabled magpie, mostly about her daughter, more in the way of reminiscences than useful facts. I listened with half an ear.

  I found nothing else in the desk. I moved to the shelves. The presence of several books brought home how much wealth Maggie stood to lose. Because a book takes forever to copy, it is about the most expensive toy you can give a child.

  I grunted as I picked up the third book. It was a small, leather-bound, time-worn thing with a goat’s head tooled into its cover. The leather was badly foxed. The pages were barely readable.
It was one old book.

  My first clue was that it was not written in modern Karentine.

  Those damned things never are, are they? Nobody would take them seriously if any schnook could pick one up and decipher the secrets of the ages.

  “Check this out.” I tossed the book to Maggie. I kept one eye on her as I resumed my search.

  “Curiouser and curiouser, Garrett. My baby is full of surprises.”

  “Yeah.” Maybe. That whole visit was full of surprises. Including those tree-sized fingers pointing at witchcraft of the demonic sort.

  The bedroom and its attached bath yielded more occult treasures.

  Much later I asked, “Is Emerald especially neat?” Neat would not describe any teen I knew.

  “Only as much as she has to be. Why?”

  I didn’t tell her. I had gone into full investigator mode. We crack first-line investigators never answer questions about our questions, especially if those are posed by our employers, lawmen, or anybody else who might help keep us out of the deep stink. Fact was, though, that Emerald’s apartment was way too neat. Compulsively so. Or nobody lived there. My impression was of a stage set. I was wondering if it might not be exactly that, carefully primed with clues.

  All right, I told me. Get busy deducting. Clues are clues to something even when they’re artificial or false.

  I was not that sure. What I had was some inconsistent indications of witchcraft — which did little to amaze, dismay, alarm, or otherwise excite my new employer.

  Maybe I was going at this from the wrong end.

  Tap on the shoulder. “Anybody in there?”

  “Huh?”

  “You just froze up and went away.”

  “Happens when I try to think and do something at the same time.”

  She did her eyebrow trick. I distracted her by flashing her back. I told her, “I’ve got enough to start. You give me that list of names. As soon as we settle the finances.”

  We had no problems there till I insisted on half my fee up front. “It’s an inflexible rule, Maggie. On account of human fallibility. Too many people get tempted to stiff me once they’ve gotten what they want.” But that was not the only reason I pressed.