16515--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 15)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.
Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 15

After some fast-talking, attentive forensic support and more than a few aspirins, the police finally seemed satisfied that Alex Gold hadn’t died when they originally thought he had, but instead when I put a stop to him. They almost seemed to pretend to care about that and the murders he had committed. They knew how dangerous an insane idealist could be and I was sure they were really glad that I’d done their dirty work for them. Just to be thorough, I intended to attend the cremation and make sure he stayed gone. I had the feeling Gold would’ve appreciated that himself.

“Well,” Jonni said, closing the wine bottle and the bone chalice into their fitted oak case, “at least you ended up with another trophy I can decorate your place with.”

“Yeah, and a rare antique, too,” Harmony added. “You ended up with something cool out of this after all, Brick.”

“No, cash is fine, really,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Brick,” Harmony said. “I know this whole mess was all headache and no payday, but you saved my life and I do appreciate it.”

“Stone,” Pete Moss said, barging into my office with Helen Blazes at his heels.

“You look familiar,” I said. “Captain of the Titanic, right? You driving that beast till it hits bottom?”

“With your help,” Moss said, “we expect to keep that from happening. We heard about what happened with Gold yesterday. What were you able to learn from him?”

“Before we get into that,” I said, “let’s get something else straight: I don’t talk to the dummy.”

“What?” Moss asked.

“Ladies, have you ever seen one of those ventriloquist acts where the audience gets all worked into it and people start arguing with the dummy?” I asked. “Well, I‘m not one of those people. If you want to know something, ask me yourself Helen.”

“Well, as long as we’re being direct, I need that money, Brick,” Helen responded, pushing Moss aside and stepping forward. “The reports of Alex Gold’s actual death have been all over the news, which means Corvus is, too. There are a lot of questions to answer and Corvus needs that money.

“Not to mention the Conditum Paradoxum,” I said.

“You found the--! *ahem* I mean, the what?”

“Fine, pretend you don’t need that, too,” I said. “Gold told us enough to make it clear that you’d be better off with it than without it, though, Jamal Qadish would rather be paid off with cash than with a magic bottle of wine, I‘m sure.”

“The wine would make life easier, to be sure,” she admitted. “For now, just tell me about the money.”

“Gold didn’t know where it was,” I said. “I haven’t seen it and I don’t know that I’d tell you if I had.”

“What?” she asked, seeming to be genuinely surprised. “I mean, I thought you and I had hit it off so well. We had such chemistry--”

“That you thought I’d be putty in your hands? You didn’t level with me,” I said. “Since then, I’ve heard more than enough about what you do with chemistry.”

“Gold had plenty to say about Project: Snugglebunny or whatever you’re calling it, you monster! He told us about that and a whole lot of other depraved things Corvus is up to,” Harmony said harshly. “There should be laws against what you’re doing!”

“Fortunately, the mad scientist lobby is far too vocal for that to happen anytime soon. As long as people want death rays, killer robots, high-grade wacky putty, an obscenely comfortable couch or a hundred new recipes for llama or trilobite and they don‘t care where it comes from, research that pushes the envelope of good taste and reason will continue.”

“Well, the public certainly won’t like what you’re up to,” Harmony said. “We are talking about cuteness, after all.”

“You are so getting coal in your stocking,” Jonni said, pointing accusingly with the Wayfarer‘s Arcanum. How long had she been holding that thing?

“I would like to know,” I said, “just out of curiosity, how Moss slipped up.”

“How do you mean?” Helen asked.

“Well, I’m assuming that he was actually in charge at some point,” I explained. “Gold certainly thought so. He hated him and, unless it was you making him express it, Moss was harboring some mutual ire for him, too.”

“Fair enough,” Helen said.

“So how did he end up as your bitch-boy?” I asked her.

“It was the money problems,” Helen said. “The company took to paying more and more of my salary and benefits with stock options. As the average IQ of the accounting department continued to plunge, they lost track somewhere and I ended up owning the lion’s share of the company.”

“So?” Jonni asked.

“I became Corvus, dear,” Helen said. “The magic behind the restored dead recognized me as the head of the company.”

“And who are you to argue with a giant brass crow that screams inside your head?” I asked.

“You heard it scream?” Helen asked with some surprise. “You shouldn’t touch the crow, Brick.”

“You’re telling me.”

“And you were getting after us about touching stuff,” Jonni said. “How about that?”

“I got onto you two about insanely touching a specific, very dangerous item. Completely not relevant.”

“Did you two need a minute?” Helen asked.

“Sorry. No, I think we’re good,” I said. “Do continue.”

“Anyway, I let him keep on directing things for awhile, but he didn’t seem to get any smarter,” Helen said, “so--”

“You had your zombie minions do him in,” Harmony accused, “and seized the reins of power!”

“How sinister,” Helen said calmly. “Your mind does dwell in dark places, doesn’t it? There was a lab…incident which appeared to trigger a fatal heart attack in poor Director Moss. Thanks to Corvus, through the Society of Crows, it’s as if it never occurred.”

“That’s a health insurance plan?” Jonni asked. “I’ll be good with major medical, Brick.”

“You’ll get an hour for lunch and like it, doll,“ I said. “So, Helen, you keep Moss walking and talking and when the house of cards crashes down they’ll still be looking for him and not his charming executive secretary.”

“And he even does all the paperwork,” Helen said with a self-assured smile. “Whatever happens, I’ve made arrangements. One should always plan for the future.”

“And that about sums it up,” I said. “Now get your assets out of here.”

“You’ll never see a day’s worth of work from anyone I know, Brick.”

Or Helen naked. I sighed. Why did dames have to be so much trouble? Why did water have to be wet? “Keep making threats and I’ll go back over there and blow a hole in your big brass bird. I’ll bet your puppets won’t stay too mobile with their strings cut. Of course, my bank account’s gonna be in the black long after people are still saying ‘Corvus who?’”

“Even if he were broke and starving,” Jonni added, “he wouldn’t take business from you! He’s got too much class!”

“Out, Moss,” Helen commanded sharply, as she moved toward the door. “It’s so sad, Brick. We could’ve been magic together.”

“I’ve seen your magic. I have special bullets for that, thanks,” I said. “I’m so glad they stopped by. Good laughs.”

“Was there smoke coming out of her ears?” Harmony asked with a giggle.

“Brick, you’ve had a look in your eye,” Jonni said with a knowing smirk. “You’ve had an extra day to reflect, so where do you think the money went?”

“Oh, do enlighten us, Brick. I want to be able to sleep tonight.”

“OK, but this is merely speculative,“ I said with a smile. “Sheila told Gold that he’d taken the coins with him, even though he denied knowing anything about where they were.”

“One of the puzzlers that led to her death,” Harmony said.

“She was playing with ‘You can’t take it with you.’”

“Just like she thought it was funny to meet with Gold in the cemetery.”

“Sure,” Jonni said, “so we’re getting some shovels and heading for the cemetery? Where do we keep the shovels, boss?”

“Not today,” I said. “According to the records, while Gold had a nice memorial service, whoever’s body was used in place of his was cremated. Among the personal items Sheila kept in her hotel suite at the Ambassador was the urn that was supposed to be Gold’s. That’s where she kept the gold coins until she decided to start hiding them in plain sight.”

“You think she had the coins turned into jewelry or some kind of art maybe, Brick?” Harmony asked.

“Actually, I think she laundered it through her husband’s nightclub, The Looking Glass, when she started doing the books there. The cash infusion could’ve easily helped them turn the place into one of the hottest spots in town.”

“On top of that, she’d stolen the Conditum Paradoxum from Corvus,” Jonni said.

“Yeah, I was wondering about that,” Harmony said. “Her husband said she drank from it almost every day. I thought it was for keeping the Corvus puppets from falling over. What would it do for her?”

“I looked up the name in one of my books,” Jonni said. “It means ‘wine of spice and surprise.’”

“You’ve got research books, too?” I asked. “You are so overqualified.”

“Thanks, Brick,” Jonni smiled.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” I told her. “What kind of surprises do we get from magic wine? No hangovers?”

“At the least,“ she replied. “This stuff hasn‘t been made since before the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“So it should be well-aged by now,“ I said.

“The enchantment refills the bottle everyday so it never runs out,” Jonni said. “That’s how Corvus was able to keep giving the wine to their recycled labor force to keep them from breaking down and falling over dead again. Being alive, though, Sheila was being juiced full of vitality, luck and all the best of life, but it only works when drinking the wine from the bone chalice. The magical rewards for her probably spilled over to the nightclub and the people closest to her.”

“Then, she realized she was being followed,” I said, “so she separated them, keeping the chalice at home and the wine at the Ambassador. As the pressure mounted, she had to stop going to visit the hotel. Without continuing to drink from the wine, the benefits faded.”

“Like sobering up backwards?” Harmony asked.

“Which meant bad luck and diminishing capacities for her,” Jonni said, “until she was killed.”

“Gold was a mental case and not too bright,” I said. “She should‘ve known better than to aggravate him the way he said she did, but she probably got overconfident in thinking she could keep him under control.”

“So what’re you going to do next, Brick?” Harmony asked.

“About what?”

“The money, the magic wine, Corvus…”

“Well, Helen‘s right, Corvus isn’t breaking any laws we know about,” I said, “so the company gets left to the mercy of public opinion and creative finance…and Jamal Qadish.”

“Right, Fenrir‘s son,” Jonni said with a shudder. “I don’t think I’d wish that on anyone. Well, wait a minute, there was this guy--”

“Hey, they brought that on themselves. No one forced them to make a deal with him,” I pointed out. “She seems to think she’s got her ass covered, anyway, so I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that either. The magic wine seems better off out of circulation and it didn’t come with anybody’s name on it. So, I guess that stays with us, especially since it looks like the only payment I‘m gonna see out of this and that‘s one thing the handbook is very clear about: always get paid.”

“And the money?” Harmony asked.

“What money? I’m no accountant. I didn’t find any money. I was just speculating.”

“I see.”

“I don’t work for bunny killers,” I said.

“And I work for a cool boss,” Jonni said with a delighted smile. “Let those Corvus bozos find their own money.”

“I’m glad you’re not just out for money, Brick,” Harmony said. “You’re a good man. I’d make you dinner, but I’m leaving this crazy town and heading back to San Francisco.”

“You sure you want to trade this crazy town for that crazy town? It’ll be a tough time finding dates.”

“No, remember, Brick,” Jonni whispered at me, “she’s a thespian.”

“And you’re leaving me to this.”

“I’ll write.”

“Show-off.”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m going to visit my family, Brick, so I’m not supposed to enjoy myself either,” Harmony said, giving us hugs and heading for the door. “You two take care of each other and let me know if you ever find out anything about Ausparlous.”

“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid.”

“Yup,” Jonni said with a beaming smile.

“You hungry? I’m buying.”

“Your place. I’m cooking.”

“I don’t think there’s food there. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I usually keep around.”

“I thought I saw…something there.”

“You may have cleaned the wrong apartment.”

“I want to show you how your apartment looks now,” Jonni said, pulling me to my feet. “We’ll get take-out if we have to, maybe from The Looking Glass.”

“I’ve seen my apartment before,” I told her. “A couple of times it was even in focus.”

“You’ve never seen it while having dinner with me before,” she told me, smiling coyly as she twirled the Wayfarer‘s Arcanum like a cheerleading baton. “Besides, we have lots to talk about.”

“All true,” I agreed. “Your choice of walking stick, for example.”

“I guess it would make a good one, wouldn’t it?” she pondered as she touched a rune and made it grow a foot longer. “Oh, yeah, I could plan an outfit around an accessory like this.”

“Well, someone’s been busy with research time.”

“Yeah, I think I even figured out how to mix some of those weird drinks you like.”

Drinks and a blonde? “Wait, this sounds familiar. Isn’t this how I lost three days before?”

“I checked your calendar,” Jonni said. “Your secretary says you’re free.”

“I’m going to have to have a talk with her,” I said, “about my scheduling in accordance with the guidelines of the standard issue Official Private Eye Handbook.”

“As luck would have it,” she said, “she’s already scheduled to attend that same dinner meeting.”

My karma from burning the handbook was obviously catching up to me. “Lucky me,” I sighed.

She smiled, saying, “You don’t know the half of it, boss.”

16508--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 14)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.
Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 14

It seemed to take awhile. I certainly walked past a ridiculous number of mirrors, but I never got tired or lost the spring in my step. I’d have to get confirmation to be sure, but I was willing to give the Wayfarer’s Arcanum credit for that.

Being damp was nothing new to me and I knew I’d get dry eventually. I’d dried a lot during my walk in the hall of mirrors, so I didn’t stop to change clothes. In spite of my assistant’s protests, I only took time enough in passing through my apartment to get the name of the hotel where I was headed. I entrusted the Wayfarer‘s Arcanum to Jonni and made the rest of my trip the way that suited me best.

The rumble of the Charger’s engine shook through me like electricity. It was always invigorating, jolting me to life every time I shot off in another pursuit. Anyway, I finally made it to the Ambassador Hotel. The golden griffins were standing guard out front just like Richard Taylor had said. The place looked so ritzy I’d have bet that even paying by the hour was pricier than a whole night in most other places. When I pulled up to the front, three valets fought to get to park the Charger.

“You want to be helpful?“ I asked them. “Any of you recognize her?“ I asked holding up one of the pictures of Sheila Taylor and Alex Gold.

Two of ’em were silent, but one couldn’t hold back a “Well…”

Even a bad gumshoe knew what that meant. I waved off the other two valets as I climbed out of the car and flashed a sovereign at the third. The look in his eye told me that the gold was already working its magic on his conscience and loosening his tongue.

“That’s Ms. Farr,” the valet said, his eyes darting from side-to-side. “Sheila Farr. Real nice lady, but I haven’t seen her in a few weeks, I swear.”

Farr? Probably a maiden name. Whatever, it was a start.

“Her friend, though, I don‘t know his name,” the young man continued. “Most of us just call him…‘Grumpy’, but please don’t tell them.”

“My lips are sealed, bud,” I assured him. “How long since you’ve seen him?”

“About…thirty-five minutes ago…with another woman.”

“Thanks, kid,” I said. “Keep the car close.” I grabbed an envelope from the valet station and went inside to the concierge. With a quickly borrowed pen, I wrote Sheila Farr‘s name on my envelope while I waited for some assistance.

“I have an important message for Ms. Farr,” I said, handing over the envelope.

“I show that she‘s out,” the clerk said, “but I‘ll see that she gets it.”

“Thanks,” I said, watching the clerk put the envelope into one of the numbered mailboxes. Hmmm…tiny numbers. “I said Ms. Farr.”

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “Sheila Farr, 1102.”

All too easy. “Oh, I see. My mistake. Thanks.”

An eleven-story elevator ride later found my dainty left foot kicking open the door to suite 1102 and letting my gun barrel lead the way inside. “Freeze, Gold!” I shouted.

“Brick!” Harmony called out, battered and a bit disheveled, but sounding better than she looked. “You found me!”

“What? No! You drop your gun and get in here!” he counter-offered, grabbing Harmony’s arm and pulling her in front of him. “Do it now or I’ll blow her head open!”

“I’m coming,” I said, letting the door close behind me. “Calm down.” Harmony had a shiner turning purple above her left cheek and there was a trail of blood running from her pouting lips. Even with the psycho holding her up, the wobble in her legs said she was having trouble standing.

“Drop the gun!” Gold commanded again. “And don’t tell me what to do!”

“Oh, I thought we were giving each other instructions,” I said. “Well, if you’re not calming down, I’m not losing the Roscoe, so that doesn‘t really improve our situation.” The first part of the suite, the receiving area, was a well-decorated, tidy living room, but a glance told me the master bedroom wasn’t faring as well. My nose insisted that either it or Gold himself was getting more than a little ripe. “Maybe you’d settle for cracking open a window and giving us a little fresh air.”

“Funny guy, huh? Well, I’m not playing around! I just want to know where the money is.”

“The money you stole? What kind of an idiot are you?” Harmony asked him. “You really don’t know?”

“No, I don’t,” he admitted.

“Maybe you quit your day job too soon,” I told him. “Larceny is obviously not one of your strengths.”

“Just tell me where the money is!”

“We thought you would know,” I said.

“Damn!” he shouted. “Sheila had it. She was supposed to keep it safe.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have shot her,” I said.

“She was laughing at me!” Gold said.

“Well, in all fairness,” I said, “I’m barely holding it in myself. You‘ve got to learn to lighten up, man, or stop being so amusing.”

“You really shot her?” Harmony asked. “Wow, good call, Brick. You‘re a lot better at this than Lew…was.”

It had been a lucky guess, but I’d take it.

“Yeah, freaking brilliant. Now, you were working for her,” Gold said, “so I thought you might know what she‘d done with it. She must’ve hidden it somewhere she could keep an eye on it and that it couldn‘t be traced. She brought the Conditum Paradoxum here to keep it safe, so if she didn‘t hide it at home--”

“Wait. The what?” I asked. “C’mon, man, that’s not even English!”

“I didn’t work for her,” Harmony said. “I worked for the other guy you killed, Lew Manning.”

“Who?” Gold asked.

“You lost track? How many people have you killed?” Harmony asked.

“He dressed like us,” I said. “He took lots of pictures…”

“That guy? I thought he was with the Crows,” Gold said.

“Who?” Harmony asked. “What crows?”

“The Society of Crows,” Gold said. “From Corvus? They have the weird eyes.”

“Oh, them,” Harmony said. “The creepy stalkers.”

“Crows are carrion eaters,” Gold said. “The society uses the dead.”

SOC. Society of Crows. Got it. “No, he wasn’t with them. You’re just paranoid. Well, overly paranoid, anyway.”

“Oh, God,” Gold said. “Well, then, who are you two?”

“Brick Stone,” I said. “She hired me to keep her safe from creepy guys. What‘s the story on the crows anyway? Something to do with reanimating the dead?”

“Corvus has been trying to save money for years,” Gold explained. “Since most of the day-to-day functions that are performed in the company are simple and repetitive, the executive director realized that he could cut expenses if he could find a way to get the work done with an army of robots. Robots are expensive, though, so--”

“So they came up with a way to turn people into zombie office workers?” Harmony asked.

“Yeah, that big, brass crow in reception has something to do with it,” Gold continued. “It gives Moss control over legions of simple-minded reanimated workers.”

“That can shake off bullets,” I pointed out.

“No, that’s the Conditum Paradoxum talking,” Gold said, pointing out a bottle of orange wine and the jeweled wine glass from Taylor’s on a table in the corner. “It’s enchanted. When the reanimates drink the wine from the glass, they become…like, super zombie soldiers.”

“Weird,” I said. “And if they don’t drink it?”

“Then they stiffen up and die all over again after awhile,” Gold said.

“I knew there was something Moss wasn’t talking about,” I said. “Since you took the wine, he’s having to keep getting new candidates. If it’s any consolation, your old boss is getting desperate over at Corvus. The money they borrowed is running out and they really want back what you took. At least now I have a better idea why.”

“Wait, if you’ve got the wine glass…Did you kill that sad Mr. Taylor, too?” Harmony asked.

“No, I went back there to search again and see if I could get anything out of him,” Gold said. “He wasn’t home when I shot Sheila and now that I’ve had a chance to talk to him I still don’t know who’s got the money!”

“That does seem to be the missing piece of this oddball puzzle,” I said. “She didn’t tell you anything at all?”

“Sheila? Tell me anything?” he asked, getting even more frustrated. “That bitch? That bitch! It was always jokes with her! Always so clever…so very clever…Look, before I faked my death, Sheila converted the cash into a dozen old, gold coins. Gold for Gold, see? That was her sense of humor.“

“And then, you shot her,” I said. “I can see that.”

“Not then, later. All she was supposed to do after my fake death was hide them,” Gold continued, “and keep them safe. Was that asking so much?”

“No, of course not,” Harmony said.

“When I asked her about them, she said I’d taken them with me,” Gold said angrily, “but she’d never tell me more than that. Funny for her, but torture for me. I didn‘t know where they were, but I was supposed to have them. I was keeping them safe, but I had no idea how!”

“From the looks of things,” I said, “I’d guess that you stopped buying new clothes.”

“Or throwing out old ones,” Harmony said.

“It meant not throwing out a lot of things,” Gold told us bitterly, “and searching everything…over and over and--”

“Crazier and crazier?” I whispered to Harmony.

“Then, she said she was going to move it,” Gold continued. “She said it would be better to hide it in plain sight, whatever that means. I have no idea! Oh, but she thought it was soooo funny! Always laughing, laughing, laughing! I’ve been here going out of my damned mind, but she’s been living it up and happy as can be!”

“Till you shot her.”

“Yes! Yes, I shot her!” he admitted again. “I killed her! And she still got the last laugh because I don’t know where the money is or why she--”

“Hold on. Why did she even help you steal from the company in the first place?” Harmony asked. “It couldn’t have been to live a life of insanity in the shadows.”

“I stole the money for the same reason she helped me cover it up and stole the Conditum Paradoxum later! Corvus had to be stopped,” Gold explained. “Their evil plans were…just so evil!”

“Wow,” Harmony said, “you were right again, Brick.”

“What plans?” I asked. “What were they doing?   Enslaving people as corporate drones wasn‘t enough?”

“Mad science! The way Corvus reanimates the dead they aren’t technically zombies. The reanimates don’t fall under the anti-zombie codes, so their use isn’t technically classed as evil here just distasteful misuse of the dead.”

“OK, no active decomposition,” I conceded, “and no cannibalistic rampaging. I suppose I can see that. Still…”

“Corvus was going where we weren’t meant to go, doing unspeakably inhumane experiments,” Gold went on. “Isolating the shaving cream molecule wasn’t enough for them. They were working on isolating cuteness!”

“Cuteness?” Harmony asked.

“Yes, the very essence of what makes things cute, cuddly and adorable,” Gold said. “If they could synthesize it and infuse it into other things, they could manipulate masses in undreamed of ways! They were doing experiments on bunnies, kitties…all sorts of cute, little things. And that was only the start! They‘re planning addictive, mind control chemicals to put in foods, low calorie snacks made from sawdust…oh! Oh! How do you feel about the hypertrophied organs from lab animals being treated with radioactive isotopes and reconfigured for marketing as cream cheese?”

“Glad that I don’t eat cream cheese,” I said, “but still a bit ill over the concept.”

“The fiends!” Harmony said in disgust. “How could they? It sounds like they‘re one step away from dredging the sewers and feeding the sludge back to their customers.”

“Moss glossed over the bits of information that painted them as psychotics when we talked,” I said. “I guess he couldn’t bring himself to speak of the unspeakable either.”

“Pete Moss is a corporate drone!” Gold said. “He’ll burn with the rest of them. Without that money they’ll go down hard and if the public ever gets evidence of how evil Corvus truly is, they’ll never get back up again! Now, who wants to die first?”

“Not it!”

“Oh, thanks! I don’t want to die at all!” Harmony protested. “I thought we were talking here. We were getting to know each other. What happened to that?”

“Well, that leaves you, Al,” I told him. “First one in, first one out. We‘ll be on our way and just send a maid to tidy up after you.”

He started turning his gun toward me again and his eyes hadn’t gotten any less crazy.   Fortunately, I was faster than the smelly lunatic and a .44 magnum slug in the chest was enough to drop him and keep him down.   I took the fact that he stayed down as a good sign that he hadn’t been dragged into the Society of Crows.   “You OK?”

“Yeah, thanks. I think he’s dead this time,” Harmony said, looking down on the body as she wiped the blood from her mouth.

“He’d better be,” I said, holstering my gun.   “I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

“And those bullets aren’t cheap,” Harmony pointed out.

“Yeah, it‘d be bad for business if I had to start charging extra for re-shooting guys.”

16501--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 13)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.
Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 13

Even though I got back home as fast as I could, I found the door to my new apartment already open, something I never liked. Inside, I found Berlin sitting on my couch holding a bag of frozen peas to the back of her head.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “You OK?”

“Getting there, I guess,” my assistant reported. “Thanks for asking. You just missed three guys hitting me on the head and dragging your client out of here, though.”

“Dark eyes? Kinda zombie?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Acquaintances or angry clients?”

“More SOC stalkers,” I said. “They’re some sort of reanimated dead. They seem alive, but they’re missing pieces.”

“Souls most likely,” Jonni said. “They looked like they were missing a layer and I thought they smelled funny.”

“OK,” I told her. “If they’ve got her, they’re gonna be taking her to Corvus. Hey, where’d you find peas?”

“In the freezer.”

“Not my freezer.”

“I put them there,” she said. “No, I didn’t open the deadly box,” she assured me, rolling her eyes.

“OK, then, keep on not doing that,” I told her, walking over to my desk.

“What’re you going to do about the incredible wailing woman?” Jonni asked me.

I sighed and opened the center desk drawer. I reached in, ignoring the pens, paper clips and other random items to take hold of the rune-covered, circular rod. “Something drastic,” I responded. “Probably something I’m going to end up regretting.”

“Brick?” Jonni asked, no small concern in her voice. “Why does it look like you’re holding a magical rod?”

“Because I am,” I sighed again as I crossed the room and went around the dining table, to the large blank section of wall between the balcony and the kitchen.

“What is that?” my assistant asked, rising from the couch to follow me. “New toy?”

I touched a specific rune on the rod and then touched one end of the black metal rod to the wall. A heavy 8’x8’ mirror with an ornately crafted frame became manifest against the wall.

“Ooh, impressive,” Jonni said. “That really opens up the room.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Berlin,” I told her as I tapped the end of the rod against the looking glass. The surface of the mirror began to ripple like a pond. “It’s called the Wayfarer’s Arcanum.”

“Oh, that does sound majestic,” Jonni said. “It has sort of a poetic flair.”

“Sure, whatever,“ I told her.

“Really? Then let me borrow your glowing heart pendant,” she said. “I want to do some research.”

“It’s…special,” I said, handing over the rock. “Be careful. Keep the door locked. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.” With that, I walked through the mirror and found myself in a reflected version of my own living room. Though the scenery was different from my last visit through the darkly reflected realm, the large wooden crate of precious metals was still about where it was before, relatively speaking, just about ten feet in from the mirror. Following the pattern I had learned before, I crossed the room and went through an opening in the wall into darkness.

Breaking up the featureless blackness, there was a seemingly endless line of mirrors to my right and, to my left, a dirty stone floor where a sprawling craftsman’s workshop had been staged for who knew how long. Hard at work at his blazing forge, the lean, tall dark elf known to me alternatively as Teng Rovo-something and as Smith, stood sweating in the hot air as he used his tongs to manipulate something in the hot coals.

Teng looked at me sternly, then back to his forge. Pointing at the bellows with the index finger of his heavy-gauntleted right hand, commanding, “Hotter!” In response to his barked order, the bellows pumped hard, forcing more and more air into the forge. Apparently satisfied for the moment, the mighty smith walked at me with purpose, his long white hair flowing behind him. He pulled off his left gauntlet as he approached and tucked it into his leather apron. “Welcome, Wayfarer. Finally have someplace you need to be?”

“Yeah, that kind of day,” I replied, handing over the Wayfarer’s Arcanum. “Sorry for the interruption.”

“No bother,” he said to my surprise, though still gruffly. “I needed to see you anyway.” He handed over a small wooden box as he said, “Here’s some bullets for you to test. They’re similar to the sample you gave me, but I added some magnetized iron and some extra powder.”

“Yeah, heavy,” I said, taking one out to feel. “I like it. This is great work, Smith. Or do you prefer ‘Teng‘?”

“Either’s fine,” he told me. “Stop trying to make me blush and tell me where you’re going.”

“Corvus Building, downtown,” I said, following him as he bolted off for a mirror before I could even finish speaking. “So you know where it is?”

“What floor?” he smiled.

“Top, thanks,” I told him as he used the obsidian rod to make the rippling mirror show us a bathroom inside the corporate target. “Now, do I need to come back through the same place I go through? I opened a hole in a wall once before.”

“You opened a passage through a wall,” he corrected me. “Use a reflective surface to get back to the mirror hall.”

“Oh, so I made a hole in the wall, like in a cartoon?”

“Sure, I suppose,” he said.

“What if I tap the rod against someone’s head?”

“The Wayfarer’s Arcanum is a finely crafted tool of subtle and ancient magic,” Teng explained, handing it back, “so it will certainly smite your villains mightily, especially when it is applied…upside the head.”

“’Upside the head‘?” I asked in disbelief. “Pick that one up around the forge?”

“Did I use that wrong?”

“No, surprisingly well actually,” I told him.

“Be sure to keep a good grip and remember your follow through. Go forth with confidence and stealth, Wayfarer.”

“On my way,” I said. As I’d arrived, I was off again, stepping through another mirror and back to Corvus. Certainly, it was nowhere near the top of my list of places I wanted to hurry back to and I definitely would’ve been happy about having time to plan, but there were times when evil activities just couldn’t wait to be stomped.

Taking advantage of my speedy travel and the privacy of the bathroom, I pulled the SOC card from my jacket pocket. I took a deep breath and let it out as I whispered, “Murder of crows.” The card began to glow in my hand.

The whispers began at once. A torrent of voices rushed through my mind, a chaotic noise of messages to and from Corvus. Standing still, it seemed that relaxing and clearing my mind would allow me to begin to make some sense of the crosstalk. I also discovered that some of the messages were flying in the form of images. With a little more effort over several minutes, guiding the imagery I paid attention to showed me where to find Harmony inside the Corvus office building. As expected, she’d been brought to the top floor for interrogation.

The Corvus puppet masters were desperate, but they couldn’t lobotomize her and hope to still get the information out of her that they wanted. My best estimation said there was little danger of them dragging her into the ranks of their mindless legions. On top of that, what Harmony and I knew and they didn’t, was that they could spend all night cutting off her fingers and toes without ever getting the info they wanted from her. Neither of us knew the secrets that would save Corvus. They needed to talk to Alex Gold. Harmony needed me to get in and get back out with her. If I was going to have any chance at getting her out whole, it was going to have to be done quickly.

On my last visit, it looked like the heaviest security was down on the first floor. Telling them that I was hired by Moss would’ve gotten me upstairs easily enough. Making up some story about finding their money might even have been enough to get me in the same room with Harmony. After all the effort they’d gone through to get her and bring her in, though, I had the feeling I wasn’t getting her away from them except at gunpoint. On any other job that would’ve given me a big, happy, warm puppy feeling, but I had no idea how many single-minded, reanimated guards and stalkers they might have had that I might not have been able to shoot down even with my shiny, new customized bullets.

Rather than have things play out like a bad zombie movie, I decided to use a technique that had gotten me out of a couple of tight spots before. I climbed up on a sturdy, flipped over trash can and took a disposable lighter to the sprinkler sensor. “What was the name of that restaurant?” I was asking myself when the alarms started blaring. I was soaking wet before I had my feet back on the hard tile floor.

There were only a couple of women screaming and squealing out of the half-dozen running for the stairs. Everyone else I could see was eerily calm, almost sleepwalking away from their cubicles, evacuating in a calm and orderly fashion. Well, at least they knew enough to go…or maybe they were only following an order. Either way, good for me. I didn’t have to kill the lights and the low-light goggles could stay in my coat pocket.

As I moved back through the cubicle maze, I heard a woman yelling from Moss’ corner office. I was surprised I could hear it as far away as I was and in spite of all the relentless noise of the alarms and hiss of the artificial downpour. It had all become unbelievably loud to me. I picked up my pace and stopped at the open doorway. It seemed crazy how very loud everything was. Helen Blazes was standing over Director Moss. I could tell that the office had been wrecked--smashed table, overturned chairs, papers and office supplies strewn about the floor--even before I’d started the water works.

“Get up! Get up!” Helen yelled at Moss as she tried pulling him to his feet. “He’s getting away with her!”

“Stone,” Moss said, hurriedly buttoning his suit jacket to cover a blood stain on his white shirt.

“Brick,” Helen beamed in as charming a tone as I’d ever had thrown my way, “what’re you doing back here so soon? Don‘t tell me you missed me already,” she said, trying to strike a casually sexy pose in a clinging wet dress while the chaos continued around us.

It was almost creepy. “Alright,” I said, “so we’re just pretending that the alarms and the indoor rainstorm aren’t happening? Is that it?”

“I hired Mr. Stone onto the case,” Moss said, sweeping his soaking wet hair back off his face. “Good timing, Stone. That bastard Gold was just here. He made a mess, kidnapped a girl and ran back out again.”

“You just missed him,” Helen added, pointing at the office door.

“So, if I hurry, I can catch him? Got it,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”

Undaunted by the downpour, I raced back to the elevators. By the time I was stabbing at the call button, my mind had been doing flips trying to figure out how I was going to find a homicidal Alex Gold with a captive Harmony Storm. By the time I reached the lobby, it was thick with sleepwalkers filing out the front doors. It felt like I was the only one in a hurry, pushing and squeezing my way through the slow-moving pack. Beyond the doors, I could hear fire engines getting closer and as I made it to the sidewalk along with scores of other people of questionable body temperature the sirens were about two blocks away.

I heard an engine revving and tires squeal nearby. As I continued to push through the mire of drones, I saw an old yellow sedan pulling off from the curb. Alex Gold was in the passenger seat. Well, they were found. That just left catching him and rescuing her. With violent suddenness, more noise and effort, the car swung a U-turn and sped back past the building. Harmony was the driver.

“Brick!” Harmony shouted as they passed.

I could hear the fear in her cry. My heart hammered hard in my chest and my politeness and restraint went for a walk. I started fighting my way forward trying to chase the car. I was pushing and shoving and knocking to the ground people whose only offered resistance came from the inertia of their complete lack of drive to move. Conversely, I was like a lunatic shopping after dark on Christmas Eve and that crappy car was the last of the must-have items on my list.

I felt my hand tighten its grip on the sturdy metal rod it carried as the impulse formed deep in the ancient lizard section of my brain to start swinging at every skull around me. Then, muscles tensing to begin my first assaults, I saw myself. There I was in a frozen moment of rage about to explode, my reflection captured in a window. Weight lifted from my chest and shoulders as I shoved people aside, sweeping them left and right to clear myself a path to the glass just a few feet away. I could just barely see the ghostly image of myself as an image in the glass and began tapping the window with the Wayfarer‘s Arcanum on the chance that it would be a reflective enough surface to get me to where I needed to go.

I fell out of a mirror. To me, it was a random mirror that looked just like any of the countless others that stretched off into featureless black on either side of the one I’d just tumbled through. I picked myself up from what passed for floor and looked to my left and to my right. I saw black and I saw mirrors, but no indication of the fire from Teng’s forge nor the sounds of his work. I had to find him or, at least, the master mirror that would get me home. The rod glowed. Why’d the rod glow? Because I thought of the master mirror? It glowed a little more brightly. Of course, it can point me to the master mirror.

I held the glowing rod to my right and said, “Master mirror,” but the glow faded as I felt only a slight tug to my left. I turned to my left and said, “Master mirror,” again, picturing the huge thing back in my apartment. That time I felt a stronger tug from the rod as it glowed brightly. I started walking. I wasn’t sure how far it was to my reflected living room, but at least I was going the right way.

I had to get on to my next move. It looked like Gold had Harmony driving uptown. The fact that Gold was still alive was becoming less of a secret every passing day. Too many of the wrong people knew he was breathing, in fact, so he couldn’t have been trying to keep Harmony quiet. That ship had sailed. He may’ve finally snapped, but like the folks at Corvus, he must’ve thought she knew something important. Like them, it would make sense that he’d take her to whatever he was calling home to squeeze info out of her…What was the name of that ritzy hotel again?

16494--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 12)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 12

Driving in the general direction of home, I stopped at Gina’s Place to get a tall glass of lemonade and something to eat. Gina’s Place was half-restaurant, half-bar and run by a guy named Hugo who made a fantastic lasagna. It was a nice enough place to sit and take the edge off my hunger. I tried to think about eating at home, but I could only see myself being greeted with green eggs if there was any food left there at all.

Hugo steered me to a table where I could sit with my back to the wall. We talked about my culinary needs while I took off my private eye coat and hat (both standard issue). He left me with some water and a basket of bread while I waited and didn’t try to bother me with a bowl of rabbit food. I liked that Hugo took the interest in waiting on me personally because it saved me a lot of time and unnecessary talking. To Hugo’s benefit, taking care of me himself kept his waitresses from making a scene and, since his waitresses were his daughters, avoided a whole lot of other complications that could end with having poison mushrooms added to my lasagna.

“Here’s for you,” Hugo said, sliding a hot platter and a cold glass onto my table.

“Oh, this smells great, Hugo,” I told him. “I smell spicy sausage in there.”

“Extra spicy for our favorite detective,” Hugo smiled. “Mangia!”

“Four cheeses?”

“Five! And a new sauce,” Hugo smiled proudly. “You let me know how you like.”

“I will,” I said distantly. “Thanks, Hugo.”

“What’s amatta, Brick? You sound so sad.”

“I’m just trying to get some useful insights from the random puzzle pieces of this case I’m working on.”

“Why you don’t use your standard issue Private Eye Handbook, Brick?”

“Funny story,” I replied. “I can’t find it.”

“Oh, yes, I remember you say you burn it up a couple nights ago.”

“Burn? Burned? What? When?”

“You come a-staggering in for food,” Hugo explained. “You say you was atta party and you burn you book.”

“Me? I did that?”

“Sure. You tolda me dat. You girl think it was real funny,” he said.

“Swell,” I said, dropping my head to the table. I was gonna hear about that. I didn’t know what the penalty was for burning the handbook, but it couldn’t be good because then it wouldn‘t be a penalty. The writer/publisher had earned a reputation as a bit of a hard-ass, which wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone who knew that he’d been worshipped as a god several thousand years ago. Times changed. His followers died out, but he was still used to getting his way and being listened to even if he didn’t carry the market share of newer religions.

Still, my getting help from the book would‘ve been a longshot, anyway. The publisher, Crom (“Crom and his devils”, technically), hadn’t strayed far from his old attitudes of valuing courage, tenacity and overcoming adversity, so he was a pretty straightforward fellow. Given the handbook’s straight and narrow approach to dealing with things, I‘d never seen anything in it as weird as what I was mixed up investigating and I hadn‘t seen a single butler to pin any of it on.

“I’m su-prise you up ana workin’ again so soon,” Hugo said with his boisterous laugh. “You still strong like a bull. Hercules!”

“Well,” I began, sitting upright again, “I spent some time in bed and got some sleep in my office this morning. I’m feeling better. Right now, I’m just hungry again. A box of doughnuts will only keep you going for so long.”

“Ay! That’s no way to eat! You come here when you hungry,” Hugo said. “You know we take good care a you.”

“And the next time you decide to spend the night in a different bed--”

“Ay! What?” Hugo jumped like he’d grabbed a live wire.

Gina, one of Hugo’s sexier daughters, had made her way toward the table. I smiled, but pretended to try to ignore her for her father’s sake.

“You no bother Mr. Stone!” Hugo ordered, taking the curvy brunette by the shoulders and steering her away from me. Gina was giggling at the reaction she’d caused in her old man and flashing me a mischievous smile over her shoulder as Hugo continued talking to her. “You got lotsa work to do way over here and inna back, out inna kitchen. Go helpa you sisters!”

Even without the book, I was pretty well convinced that Alex Gold was actually alive, well and still making trouble. Stuffing the unidentifiable, charred remains of a body into what’s left of your car was a great way to make people think you were dead. After being gone for three years, what would make somebody like that come out of hiding? Money. Embezzling big business bucks, though, was nothing compared to multiple murders. Did his decision to disappear have something to do with Corvus supplementing its workforce with idiot zombies? Or was there something even worse the company was doing that drove Gold to do what he did with the response at Corvus being the recycled labor program? I needed to find him in a city of millions. I was definitely going to need lunch first.

I leaned back a bit and closed my eyes, trying to relax for the first time in hours. Drawing in a deep breath through my nose, I could practically taste the garlic, the different cheeses and real butter on freshly baked bread. The more I relaxed, the more I could picture every delicious dish I was smelling.

“No sudden moves, varmint,” a man’s voice said from my right with a heavy Texas drawl.

I opened my eyes and, where I was half-expecting a dwarf with a red handlebar mustache and six guns, I saw the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun with Stark White staring at me from the other end. Apparently, his work clothes of choice were the white suit, white gloves and white shoes I‘d seen him in before. For a second, I felt like I was being mugged by Ricardo Montalban.

“Let’s get them hands up on the table where I can see ‘em, pardner.”

“You’re doing it wrong,” I told him.

“What in the Hell are you talkin’ about, son?”

“That’s a shotgun. You’re supposed to say, ‘Hewwo, wabbit’ and laugh,” I told him. “And now I say, ‘What’s up, doc?’”

“I see the problem now,” the strawberry blonde sniper said. “You are flat-out a crazy man.”

“And I’m available for kids parties,” I added on. White looked confused. He was obviously unfamiliar with the effect of my methods for dealing with being on the business end of a firearm. Whenever I found myself on the wrong end of a gun, I found it to my advantage to interfere with the other person’s ability to think straight.

“You been out in the sun too long without y’hat, son,” White decided, stepping closer to my table. “I got something special to help you t’cool down.”

I don’t know where it came from, but he suddenly had a decent-sized snow globe in his hand that he was giving a shake and then slamming down on the table in front of me with a firm THUD! He smiled at me.

“And I didn’t get you anything,” I said, trying to look sad.

“The weather outside is frightful,” he said as he took a few steps back.

A cold breeze whipped through the restaurant accompanied by an unmistakable torrent of big, fat snowflakes. I started to try to stand, only to realize my legs weren’t working. A quick look under the table revealed that a large snowball was growing up beneath my chair where my feet used to be. I remembered once more just how I hated magic. “I’m gonna feed you your nuts, you sick jackass!”

“So, I have your attention,” he said from beyond the perimeter of the swirling blizzard. “Would you believe I picked this up at a yard sale of all places? Old geezer didn’t want to sell it, but I was extra-per-suasive. Now, assumin’ you got any rightful idea which way is up, you need t’commence findin’ your way out of my business dealings. I work for a right powerful sorcerer. My business is his business and he don’t take kindly to anybody messin’ with his business.”

“So was ventilating my lady-friend his business or yours?” I asked as my lap vanished in snow. “I’m only curious so I know whether to budget for one bullet or two.”

“I can understand you feelin’ a certain way about that, Stone,” White said. “She did appear to be a fine bit o’sweetness. Truth t’tell, if our positions were reversed, I might be a bit raw ‘bout the whole thing m’self. As things stand, however, she and her partners agreed t’pull a job for my boss. They paid the consequences of havin’ second thoughts after bein‘ paid in advance.”

“Because he don’t take kindly to people messing with his business,” I said. “Got it. The scary sniper man shot a girl from hiding to make a point.” And the others weren’t killed by a curse or a chatty piece of plastic? Fascinating lunch chat.

“An’ if’n he didn’t have a plan in the works for you,” White continued, “you’d be makin’ funeral arrangements now. As it is, in fact, you choose t’keep wastin’ your time with me and you might find y’self short of a few more friends.”

“Threats don’t bother me, White,” I said firmly, “not from you or your boss.”

“Well, I reckon not,” White said with his evil smile, “since you’re still here.” He started to laugh as he turned and walked out.

“Yeah, I--You mean now? Asshole!” I shouted after him. He was taunting me, I realized as I pulled my magnum and aimed it at the snow globe. One hot bullet shattered the glass with a thunderclap. The table was wet, the floor was wet and even the air was cold, but the snow had largely vanished, the flakes popping like soap bubbles. White had dangled the clue that, as real as it seemed, the globe’s effect was primarily an illusion, probably based partly on my believing it to be real.

I bolted up from my chair. I could still hear him laughing, driving my adrenaline, as I grabbed my private eye hat and coat (both standard issue) and ran for the door. White was really going out of his way to earn himself an extra bullet.

16487--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 11)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 11

 Clues were pointing to the mysterious Corvus company being involved with more than just corporate nastiness. Special Operatives Corvus? Secrets of Corvus? Steak or Chicken? “Murder of crows” was the trigger for the card. Maybe it was Society of Crows. Whatever it was, if they were behind chasing Harmony Storm around town, there was sure no need to deliver her to their doorstep. I hadn’t figured out why she was being chased, but I wasn’t gonna help get a dame roughed up…or drop her in the lap of zombies or ghosts or whatever, even if she wasn‘t paying me.

One of the Corvus elevators took me to the top floor. Off the elevator and I wasn’t sure whether I’d walked into a reception area or a fashion photo shoot. The top floor was obviously closer to Heaven than I’d thought. Whatever was going on, I couldn’t complain about the scenery. I almost didn’t notice that the centerpiece of the room was a brass bird, a crow or a raven I was pretty sure, that stood about two feet tall and rested on a white marble pedestal that was about three feet tall. At the base of the bird was a plaque that read “Corvus Corax”, Latin for “Don’t touch our big brass bird”, no doubt.

“Can I help you, handsome?” asked a beautiful blonde.

“If you can’t,” I told her, flashing a little bit of a smile, “I’m already dead.”

“I’m about to start my break,” offered a curvy redhead with smoldering green eyes, “and I’d be happy to take you down to the nurse’s office for a complete physical.”

“Hi. I’m Sharon,” another blonde chimed in, grabbing at my left hand and scribbling in it quickly with a felt-tipped marker. “Call anytime.”

“Haven’t enough men done that already?” another woman asked.

“Never enough for Sharing Sharon,” another said.

“Ladies, all I need--”

“I know what you need.”

“You need a good lunch, big man.”

“I need the head man’s office,” I said. “I’m here to discuss important banking business with him and when duty calls my hunger has to wait.”

“This is still a work day, ladies. Right this way, sir,” the shapely redhead said, an enthusiastic gleam in her eyes as she grabbed me away from the others. “If you’ve got an appointment with Director Moss, we don’t want to keep you waiting.”

Her full, coral-painted lips kept moving, but the only talking I was paying attention to was coming from her hips. “Well, I don’t have an appointment,” I confessed, “but I don’t usually let that sort of thing stop me.”

“Don’t worry about it. I make his schedule,” she told me confidently. “If I say you have an appointment, then you do.”

“You run him as well as you do the flock out front, don’t you?” I asked. “And he probably thinks it’s all him.”

“Well, aren’t you perceptive?” she asked.

“Occupational hazard,” I said. “And I had a good breakfast, too, so that helps. Still, something about you told me you were something special as soon as I saw you.” That was an understatement. Something about her made me feel like I’d grabbed a live electric wire, but I tried to keep my cool.

“I see. What do I call you: tall, dark or handsome?”

“Stone. Brick Stone,” I told her.

“Oooh, I like it,” she said as we walked, her eyes playing a flirty game with mine. “A strong name for a strong man,” she said, squeezing my arm. “You do feel strong. What‘re you…six feet tall, about two hundred pounds?”

“Two twenty-eight.”

“Oh, my…I may swoon, tough guy,” she teased. “I didn’t know they grew bankers so big.”

She smiled at me as we stopped at the office door. Her smile made me feel like she’d just lit a fire inside my private eye hat (standard issue). “Thanks for the walk. I should let you get back to work.”

“Oh, I never stop working it,“ she bantered. “You look like a man with too many questions on his mind.”

“Story of my life,” I told her. “Goes with the job. Question number 1: is the personnel department only hiring models? Question number 2: how does Moss get any work done in such a…distracting environment?”

“I keep distance between him and the cubicle drones, no matter what they look like. I’m Helen,” she told me with a smile and a chuckle. “Helen Blazes. If you still have any questions when you come out, stop and see me. If you need anything later on,” she said, her voice dropping to a sultry whisper as she tucked a business card into my shirt pocket, “just let me know.”

I only had a second to glance at it as it passed, but I couldn’t help noticing that the card she slipped me wasn’t black. I watched her walk away, hips swishing profoundly, and mumbled something to myself just to make sure my voice was still working. Then, making sure my private eye hat (standard issue) was firmly in place, I kicked in the big double doors. I was obviously feeling better. As I barged in, the wrinkled desk jockey went from slack-jawed to indignant.

“Who the devil--? What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

“Brick Stone, private eye,” I replied. “Hey, those’re nice. Are they oak?”

“Get out of here before I call security!” he ordered as he picked up his phone.

“Does that line ever actually work? Go ahead and call ‘em in, Petey,” I told him, taking a seat in one of his guest chairs. “We can all talk about Alex Gold together.”

“You…What do you know about Gold?” he asked, suddenly very nervous as he put the phone back into its cradle and sank back to his chair.

“He had a serious talk with another ex-employee a few days ago,” I said, “that didn’t have a particularly favorable outcome for her. Apparently, she wasn’t as good at evading an early death as Mr. Gold.”

“What? That son-of-a-bitch isn‘t dead?” he said in a strangely distant manner.

I remembered something Harmony had said about the strangeness in the eyes of her stalkers. The ones at the train station wore sunglasses, but they moved and acted oddly. Moss had something to his eyes almost like he was looking through me. Also, his words and his tone didn’t match up. They were missing something…an emotional content. It was sort of like being in a show with a bad actor.

“He’s supposed to be three years gone and six feet under,” Moss went on. “If he had gotten away clean, why stick his head up now to--? An accomplice perhaps? Who did he kill? What else do you know?”

“For now, that’s for me to know and you to tell me why you care,” I said.

“Alright,” Moss conceded. “Gold didn’t like some of the company’s activities and vanished with significant corporate assets. The misappropriation wasn’t discovered until after his apparent death in a horrific automobile accident. There was very little left of him after that,” he said. “At any rate, our very young company would’ve suffered greatly had the knowledge of the monetary loss become public. Our stock would’ve plummeted.”

“Effectively killing Corvus.” When is a murder not a homicide?

“Yes. So we tried to keep things quiet, selling some assets and juggling some things in the books to keep the company afloat,” Moss continued, “but it wasn’t enough. We had to borrow heavily, hoping to buy time for the stolen assets to turn up following Gold’s death.”

“But it never did.”

“No, it still hasn’t and the interest on the loans has become quite burdensome. We’ve found…creative ways to cut costs, but those measures only carry us so far and can only be sustained for so long. Without the return of everything Gold stole, the demise of Corvus is only a matter of time.”

“Maybe you should be selling off your bird collection,” I suggested, noticing a slightly smaller version of the one from reception standing proudly near the corner office’s corner window.

“Are you trying to be funny, Stone?” he asked, his dark eyes narrowing at me. “The raven is Corvus. The organization would be long gone without it.”

“Yeah, I’m sure your lucky charm is the glue holding the place together.” Even with the missing emotional component, I was picking up on some serious desperation. “I can’t imagine why some pushy bankers or the possibility of restructuring…or even waves of layoffs would be that big a bother to you,” I said, scrutinizing his face from under a raised eyebrow. “It isn’t the banks, is it? You went to the streets on this, didn’t you?” He looked at me with dark eyes, bordering somewhere between fear and anger. That and his silence said enough. “Who was it?” I pressed. “Santini brothers? Rumplestiltskin? Tell me it wasn’t Rumplestiltskin.”

“Qadish,” he said with a shudder. “It was Qadish.”

“Jamal Qadish? Son of Fenrir, Jamal Qadish?”

“Yes,” Moss confirmed. “He’s been taking over most of the city’s alternative financing business.”

“Wow, you were desperate. I assume your uneasiness means you’re aware that he will literally bite your ass off if you breach your deal,” I said to the sweating businessman.

“As I said, no one has come up with the missing assets yet, but a fresh perspective on the case couldn’t hurt at this point. Who knows? One more investigator might make the difference.”

“Having the right investigator makes the difference.”

“Does that mean you’re taking the job?”

“You’re hiring me?” That was a first. I was pretty sure I’d never been hired by a guy I was shaking down for info. It was either his latest desperate move or he was trying some weird reverse psychology to save his ass.

“If you can find what Alex Gold stole,” Moss said, “we would certainly make it worth your while…in future security contracts and the like.”

“I see.” I saw the potential for great stretches of future tedium. “I should be in touch soon, Pete,” I said, heading back toward the exit.

“I certainly hope so, Mr. Stone,” he replied.

I wasn’t used to that. Most people weren’t too happy to hear from me a first time, let alone a second.

I left the big shot’s office and started out past a sea of identical cubicles staffed by joyless people shuffling papers and tapping on keyboards. There weren’t as many phones ringing as I would’ve thought. That made me think of the phone number that had been written on my palm a few minutes before. Finally, taking a moment to look at it, I saw that instead of a number she had written “Let me die”. That was at least mildly disturbing. On the brighter side, unless she was a total nut, she couldn’t expect me to call her. I guess it depended on whether she knew what she was writing or if she actually thought she was writing a phone number and the words came out instead.

Could I look casual and find her before I made it back to the elevators? What was her name? I was pretty sure she was the one they called “Sharon”, but Helen had been so distracting that I really hadn‘t paid much attention to what Sharon looked like. It was so strangely quiet I started to wonder if most of the folks had left for an early lunch or were taking naps. Looking around as I walked, I began to realize that I didn’t see any co-worker chat going on. There were no clusters of people laughing and talking or interacting with each other at all. Did they really run that tight a ship at Corvus? I’d never worked in a standard office job, but I’d heard people did lots of socialization at them. Then, I almost tripped over the latest gorgeous brunette.

She looked like she was in a rush, carrying some files somewhere, and paying no attention to me at all. Something about the swish of her hips, though…I watched her turn down another aisle and caught a look at her face. I almost tripped over my own feet when I saw her. She looked so much like Heather Morgan that I had to make sure it wasn’t. Having people I’ve killed getting back up and walking around could be bad for my rep, not to mention the census. When I shot trouble makers, I was used to them staying shot. It was a system that had always worked well for me.

I followed her and when she sat I walked into her cube and crouched beside her. “Hey, crazy pants,” I said. “Remember me? Busy day?”

She turned toward me in her swivel chair and smiled at me with a weird half-smile. She had those same eyes, dark and distant, looking through me like Moss. “I’m sorry, sir. Is there anything I can help you with today?”

There was zero recognition and that same lack of emotion, which was a seriously drastic shift from the Heather I‘d briefly known. It was her, though. I felt as sure as if I was looking at my own face in a mirror. She’d become one of the pod people. There was something weird about her eyes, though. Something was wrong…with her…eyes were black. “Heather, your eyes are black.”

“Yes,” she said vacantly, swiveling back to face her desk. “Thank you for noticing, sir.”

“Yeah, they’re supposed to be hazel,” I said, remembering back to the night I had met her and ended up killing her. “Would you happen to have a scar about the middle of your chest?” By all rights, it should’ve been a hole, but I figured that would hardly do in an office setting. They needed to rename the place Stepford.

She looked down into her scoop neckline, then reached a finger into her dress. She searched her flesh with her fingers, finally stopping and saying, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Fascinating,” I said. “Do you happen to remember how long you’ve been here?”

“Hmmm…How long…? No, I don’t…I…I…Can I help you with something, sir?”

It was looking like I was overloading her. There didn’t seem to be any more info to be mined from her. “No, thanks,” I told her. “Thanks for your time.” She turned back to her typing, paying me no more attention. I stood and took a quick look around before heading back to the elevators.

I was trying to put together the pieces I’d picked up, figuring where they belonged in the bigger picture. My encounter with Heather had given me a headache, but I also ended up with an answer about Sharon: she probably had no idea what she had written. If Heather was an example, there was a good chance that Sharon was supposed to be dead and probably neither of them was going to be winning any chess games this week. It was looking like a really good time to get going.

Back in reception, as I came up on the company’s lucky charm, I felt compelled to reach out and touch it. I was experiencing a moment of defiance, most likely. Whatever the reason, I rubbed the big, brass raven. It shouldn’t have surprised me, considering the day I’d been having, but it was warm instead of cool and, far more strangely, it talked to me. More accurately, it screamed…and not so much to me as at me. It was a desperate, pleading voice that sounded like what Harmony and I had heard before when we activated the black cards. Over and over, I kept hearing “Let me die!” in my head. I took my hand away from the bird. It was definitely time to go. The next time I saw a sign that said “Don’t touch our big brass bird” I was definitely paying it more attention.

16480--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 10)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.
Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 10

Harmony was right when she said that Corvus needed further scrutiny. What she needed, though was a break from looking over her shoulder and maybe even some sleep if she could get it. I took Harmony back to my apartment. Letting Berlin babysit her had to be better than following me onto unknown turf.

My new assistant was adjusting my recently acquired and emptied treasure box on a small pedestal on the far side of the living room. So far, though, the box had seemed to be more of a treasure than the curious contents.

“What happened in here?” I asked as Harmony and I took off our private eye hats and peeled off our private eye trench coats (all standard issue, of course).

“She’s been cleaning, Brick,” Harmony said. “Remember? We talked about this.”

“I don’t think I like it,” I sneered. “It looks…unnatural.”

“Do you have any more souvenirs, Brick?” Jonni asked.

“Souvenirs?” I parroted. “Is that what you think that box is? That thing’s been nothing but a pain in my ass for days. What makes you think I want to keep it around?” I was reminded of the warm plastic square I had in my pocket. My hand drifted there to make sure it was still where I’d put it. It was, which meant it still hadn’t incinerated me and I still had to figure out what to do with it. I sighed. “We got the…whatever it is out of it and we don’t need the stupid box anymore.”

“It’s like a trophy from your adventures,” she said. “It makes a nice decoration. If you have some others, I can rework the whole living room around them. Doesn’t that sound great?”

“She wants a ‘yes’, doesn’t she?” I asked Harmony.

“Brick Stone,” Harmony scowled, “you be nice. She’s trying hard for you.”

“She’s trying alright,” I said. “She’s very trying.”

“Do you think this would look better closed or open?” Jonni asked, stepping up to the leather-trimmed box and quickly opening its lid. “Wha--?”

“I think it would look better out in the alley,” I said. “If there’s anything here that I’ve had more than a week, it’s because it got pulled out of the remains of the war zone that my last apartment turned into. Thanks for the happy memory, though.”

“What’s the matter, Jonni?” Harmony asked, starting to walk toward her.

I was just starting to notice that she was standing still and staring into the box, almost frozen and slack-jawed. She had a more puzzled look than usual on her face.

“I thought you said that this thing was empty,” Jonni said, “and your little card was the only thing--”

“What’re you talking about?” I asked. “Are you saying there’s something else in there? No way! It was empty!”

“Let me see,” Harmony said, craning her neck to see past the box lid as she moved around the furniture.

“Is that a…cooler?” Harmony asked.

“Looks like,” Jonni said, reaching out a hand to it. Before I could say anything to stop her, she lifted the lid on the plastic cooler to find, “It’s full of flats of eggs.”

“Green eggs,” Harmony said.

“Well, there’s something you don’t see everyday,” Jonni said. “You know, unless you’re Dr. Seuss.”

“Sounds like something I don’t need to see any day,” I said, walking their way.

“Hand me that glass, would you please?” Jonni asked Harmony as the curious blonde picked up an egg about the shade of broccoli.

Harmony grabbed the tumbler from my squarish dining table behind them and took a couple of hurried steps to hold it out to Jonni. Jonni promptly cracked the eggshell on the rim of the glass and opened the egg over it. The contents of the shell flowed down from her hand as normally as I could’ve expected from any normal egg. In the case of the egg dropping into the glass before us, though, the "white" was mint green and the yolk was deep forest green.

“Wow,” Harmony said, taking a step back with her eyes fixed on the glass.

“This does not bode well,” I said, pulling the idiot plastic card from my pocket. “Where’d those things come from?” I asked it.

>Where’d what come from?

“The green eggs,” I said.

>What green eggs?

I should’ve known better. I honestly didn’t know why I had bothered.

“Oooh, I have got to cook some of these up!” Jonni said with a sudden burst of excitement. She grabbed at the sides of the cooler and lifted it out of the box, looking to me and asking, “Do you have any ham?”

“OK, I don’t think I like where this is going,” I told her, but apparently I was the only one still listening to me. The box lid fell shut again, jostled by Jonni as she dragged the cooler out of the box.

“I’ll be in the kitchen!” Jonni called out as she turned and hurried off.

“I am not eating that!” Confident in my practiced skills of observation, I was certain I’d have noticed the presence of a cooler that nearly filled the box. It wasn’t in there before.

I didn’t notice until too late that Harmony had set the glass back on the table and turned back to the box. She was opening it again before I could ask, “What the Hell?”

“Oh, Brick, look,” Harmony said with awe, reaching in and gently picking up what looked like a small spice rack.

“That’s not looking,” I said. “That’s touching. When did you lose your mind?”

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she asked, whispering as she gazed at the several small vials of a faintly glowing turquoise liquid, each stopped by a cork.

“Beautiful? What is it?” I asked. “Never mind. Set it down.” I looked back into the box. Thankfully, there was nothing el…No, there was a small piece of paper. I picked it up and read, “Love Potion: Do not use in combination with prescription medications, country music, or peanut butter."

“Really?” Harmony asked. “Oh, lord! It smells awful!”

“Wha--“ I looked to see that she had removed one of the corks as a noxious odor, similar to burning hog fat, assaulted my nose. “Oh, my--Why did you open it?” I asked as the bottle started to glow brighter, bubble and shake. “Never mind!” I said, taking the vial from her and putting it back in its space on the rack. I quickly picked up the whole rack, put it back into the box and slammed the lid shut. We took a couple of steps back as the box shuddered. Then, I noticed the smell was gone and all was quiet. I could smell eggs cooking in what had been alleged to be my kitchen.

Feeling that the box seemed safe enough to approach, I considered dropping it out my window. Instead, I lifted the lid to see what had happened. For just a second, it felt almost like I was experiencing that moment when one cautiously lifts the seat of a gurgling toilet to see if it was going to overflow.

“Well?" Harmony asked.

“Weird," I said, fully lifting the lid. “It looks like a map."  I had joined the others in Crazytown, obviously. Maybe the map could help me find my way back.

“Is that leather?" Harmony asked, feeling the map as I picked it up to examine.

“Yeah, it’s the skin from something alright,” I said. “Where do you suppose…Ausparlous is?”

“Never heard of it,” she said, pointing at the lower right corner of the map, “but it looks like G.X. Horace managed to find it in 1937.”

“Indeed,” I said, continuing to look over the map of the unknown land. A large arrow pointed upward on the right side of the map, reading "Great Western Shaft to the Upper World." “Hmm…underground, maybe,” I said, handing Harmony the three-foot by two-foot piece of leather. I noticed a ball in the box. I picked up a metal sphere, about the size of a softball, perfectly round and seamless. I wasn’t sure what the metal was, but the surface was smooth, a little cool and had a slight purple tint. From inside, I could hear a rattling sound, as if something smaller was contained within the hollow sphere.

“Hollow?” Harmony asked.

“Sounds like,” I said. “Aha! Another note.” Within the crate was a small piece of wrinkled note paper. Scrawled in faded black ink, it appeared to be part of someone's notes: "...has proven resistant to the steam drill, as well. I held it against the thing until it broke down, but not a scratch is upon it. Tomorrow, must try the hydraulic press... Can any force reveal the contents?"

“Oooh,” Harmony said, grabbing at the metal ball and shaking it. “Spooky weird.”

“We got lucky,“ I said as I closed the box. “There’s obviously a lot more to this box than we thought.”

“Listen to you. You just always expect the worst!“ Harmony said, flipping the box lid back open. “Nothing bad has happ--”

I tried to stop her, but even though I pulled her away from the box, she still managed to get the lid open. I pulled her back just as a hail of arrows came flying out of the box and up into the ceiling. We could hear the sounds of battle--shouting and screaming and crashing metal--from inside the box.

“OK,” Harmony said, “I stand corrected. Does that sound like it’s getting louder to you, Brick?”

“Seriously?” I asked, peeking over the edge of the box top. I actually wasn‘t surprised when I seemed to be looking down on an active battlefield rather than seeing the interior of an empty box. “Like we haven’t been shot at enough today?”

“Sorry,” Harmony said.

I side-stepped around the box and reached out to knock the lid shut. Then, grabbing a blanket from the couch, I opened it and threw it over the box. “No more playing with the box,” I said. “Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Harmony said softly.

Jonni returned from the kitchen with a plate and a fork, already eating as she hurried into a seat at the dining table.

“Berlin! No more messing with the box,” I said. She looked at me curiously, one of her cheeks puffed with food as she chewed. I pointed up at the ceiling. She looked up at the cluster of arrows.

“Got it, boss,” she said, resuming her chewing. “These are great, by the way. Oh, you’re out of ham.”

“Thanks for the update,” I said. “Can we get back to work?”

“Sure,” Jonni said. “Say, where’d you disappear to before?”

“I think I caught a timeslip when some insistent acquaintances magicked me away for a pointless meeting,” I explained. “They were actually interested in this stupid box.”

“Somebody else is after our eggs?” Jonni asked. “We can’t just let them have them! They‘re ours!”

“I’m not sure they knew about the eggs,” I told her. “From my experience, they’re much heartier eaters than that.”

“Who are these people?” she asked.

“They wouldn’t give their names,“ I said. “They were rakaraka…or something.”

“What?”

“A talking tiger-guy, well, two this time,” I explained.

“A what?” Harmony asked.

“You heard me. He was in a red silk kimono and smoking a pipe.”

“A rakshasa? Two rakshasas? You should stay away from those, Brick,” Jonni insisted. “They’re deadly. You have to know that.”

“You’re telling me? You ever seen them eat?”

“They’re cunning and evil and really tough to kill.”

“Well, so far, they’ve only tried to talk me to death,” I told them. “Oh, and they were with this dwarf wizard, Tillmaren.”

“Tillmaren? They were with Tillmaren?” Jonni asked, getting agitated again. “You met Tillmaren?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know him? He‘s somebody special?”

“Who?” Jonni asked. “Just kidding. No,” she said, “I don’t know him, but I’ve heard of him. He‘s a powerful wizard.”

“And they want the box,” Harmony said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess they do.”

“With Tillmaren involved, boss,“ Jonni said, “you may want to consider giving them what they want.”

“I’ll make a note,” I said. “It goes on the back burner for now, though. I’ve got some other bushes to beat first. Make sure she gets some rest.”

“So thoughtful,” Jonni said with an admiring smile. “A good man with such a great heart.”

“Berlin!”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Jonni said, continuing to work on her plate of green eggs. “Don’t forget the ham.”

16473--Similarities to Persons Living or Dead (Ch. 9)

Happy Thursday. To help keep my own feet to the fire, I'm using Thursday as my public accountability day. That means, posting a bit of coherently creative output for you to read and feedback on every week. If I perform according to my own intent, what I put here will be available as a whole elsewhere at the same time or shortly after appearing here.Similarities to Persons Living or Dead is currently available as a part of The Official Private Eye Handbook, first book in the CITY OF MAGICK series. Please, feel free to take a look here, though, and at subsequent chapters. Let me know how you feel about it. For those of you finding your way here relatively late, no problem. The start of the story is just a click away.

SIMILARITIES TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD

Chapter 9

Harmony and I drove from my office to the shop of Declan Forester. I introduced her to Forester. While the little hermit was distracted, I snuck into his bathroom. Happily relieved, I picked up my order of custom bullets he’d made for me. Of course, I had to let him take a few extra minutes to regale me with the intricacies of his creation of the bullets, inlaying the different metals upon each other in their delicate patterns and the blessings and spells. A lot of it was very fine, detail work that looked like tiny magic symbols to me, but it seemed like a good idea considering we might be dealing with undead stalkers.

From Forester’s, it was a short trip to Richard Taylor’s so we could shake him down and see what fell out. Like in most homicides, Sheila Taylor’s spouse was a primary suspect, of course, but the police cleared him. They bought his alibi, but I knew how lazy the local lawdogs could be. I was going to see how well Taylor’s alibi held up under the pressure of actual scrutiny. Either way, it had the possibility to lead somewhere and if he got out of line, I could always blow a hole in him.

Of course, if I disregarded the fact that Alex Gold was supposed to be dead, focusing on the fact that he’d been seen as recently as a week ago, he would’ve made a great suspect in Sheila Taylor’s murder, too. He was looking lively enough in the photo of him and Sheila, then she and the photographer ended up dead. There were lots of questions that needed answering. Something suspicious was definitely afoot. I let Harmony knock on the front door of the townhouse. It was a very sad-faced man who answered. He was unshaven and his hair was uncombed. His clothes looked like they’d been slept in and I was sure he could’ve smelled better.

“Richard Taylor?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“My name is Brick Stone. This is Harmony Storm. We’re sorry we have to bother you, but we have some follow-up questions--”

“--about Sheila. Of course, come on in,” he said, moving aside to let us in. “I want to help any way I can. I want her killer found.”

“We understand,” Harmony said as we followed him into the living room. “Losing a loved one like that…It’s just so terrible.”

“Please, sit,” he offered, guiding us to the couch and then sitting across the coffee table from us in one of the expensive-looking chairs. “Excuse the boxes. They’re all over. I was just…putting away some of…Sheila’s things.”

“That must be hard for you,” Harmony said. “The two of you obviously made a beautiful home here.”

“Thanks,” he said, pouring himself more wine. “I’d offer you a drink, but it‘s early and you‘re working.”

In fact, there wasn’t anything I’d seen in the place that made it look like they had gone the discount route on decorating, certainly not the Persian rug or the fancy French chairs or the expensive collectibles. Even the wine glass Taylor was using to embalm himself looked like it was part of an expensive set. “No problem. I plan to be shooting people soon.”

“I’m not sure I follow. Oh, my goodness! Are you following some dangerous lead?”

“Possibly,” I told him, “but I just always plan on doing some shooting. Making room for some action in my daily schedule keeps the blood flowing--mine, at least, and sometimes other people‘s, too.”

“I don’t mean to get off-track, but I’ve never seen a wine glass like that before. Is that part of a set?” Harmony asked.

“It’s unique, actually,” Taylor said, holding it up. “It’s hand-carved from a single piece of bone, polished to be smooth as glass and there’s a ring of tiny, square-cut onyxes around the top of the stem.”

“It’s beautiful,” Harmony said. “It looks so elegant.”

“I know,” he said. “It was Sheila’s. She used to drink from it every day.”

“So you can drink to remember and forget at the same time,” I said. “Convenient. Where‘d she find it?”

“I really don’t know. Antique shop?” He took a sip and said, “I like port, but her favorite drink was this old spice wine. It was Roman, I think. I don’t know how she managed to find the stuff, but she loved it. It smelled like flowers and honey.”

“Sweet,” I said, looking around the room. “You collect coins, too?”

“What? Oh, no,” Taylor said, realizing I had noticed the different books on the coffee table and in one of the open boxes nearby. “Those were Sheila’s books. She didn’t actually start a collection, just did research a long time ago. She had a few different hobbies, liked to collect things.”

“That must make this all the more difficult for you,” Harmony said softly. “How long were you two married?”

“Three years,” he said sadly. “Three wonderful years. I swear she had to have been the funniest woman I‘ve ever known.”

“And yet, in spite of all the joy and laughter, you hired Lew Manning to follow her,” I said. “What made you think she was picking up outside action?”

“Well, just odd behavior, I guess,” he said. “She didn’t seem as happy as usual, very stressed and tense. She seemed preoccupied, started making mistakes and forgetting things. There were strange phone calls and she started getting more secretive about how she was spending her time. I got concerned, at first, and then suspicious…afraid that…Well, none of that seems to matter so much anymore…now that she’s gone.”

“Believe me, it ain’t over yet,” I told him. “Manning’s dead, too, and we’re trying to figure all this out before someone else ends up in the morgue.”

“You think his death had something to do with Sheila? How?”

“That’s part of what we’re working on figuring out,” I said. “Whatever was going on, though, my instincts give me a pretty strong feeling that it was more than just some cheap affair.”

“You mean, my Sheila wasn’t cheating on me?” he asked with a glimmer of confusion and wide-eyed optimism.

“Well, I can’t really rule it out yet,” I told him. “The pictures of her at the fancy hotel sure don’t help.”

“The hotel? You mean, the Ambassador?” he asked. “We have a special deal with them. We keep rooms rented there for visiting performers and such.”

“Had any of your VIPs in town in the last couple of weeks?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” Taylor said. “We had five or six in the last month.”

“And Alex Gold was among them?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“The pictures you hired Manning to take put them together,” I said, “and if she wasn’t stepping out on you, I’m betting that whatever was going on, there was also a lot of money involved.”

“Money? How do you mean?”

“What did Sheila do with her days and nights?” Harmony asked. “I mean, the parts you knew about. Did she work?”

“With me,” Taylor said. “We own…I own The Looking Glass. Sheila came in a couple of years back and started doing the books.”

“Aha! So, suddenly you were losing money! She was cooking the books and feathering a love nest with some other slob! You couldn’t take it when you found out, so you iced ‘em both!”

“Uh…What? No. No!” he insisted. “Actually, its one of the busiest restaurant nightclubs in The City. It’s very successful and only seemed to get better once Sheila left her old job and we started working together. I’ve never seen better kept accounting records than hers. She was positively meticulous. I mean, look at this place. Try to ignore the boxes and my stumbling through here in a half-lit, grieving stupor. She was so great. I don‘t think…the club would be where it is today without her. I wouldn‘t be what I am…I don‘t know how I…”

I could see he was about to start blubbering again. That was about all I could handle of that touchy-feely nonsense. I could feel my hand reaching for my gun when I asked, “Hey, what was her old job? Where was she working before?”

“She was at…at…Corvus,” he said. “She was in their accounting department.”

“Corvus. Corvus,” I said, prodding at my brain. “That sounds familiar.”

“Don’t they do a bunch of weird sciencey stuff?” Harmony asked.

“That’s it!” I remembered. “They isolated the shaving cream molecule!”

“Oh, yeah,” Harmony said. “There was a thing on the news. They just moved that guy out to Wardenclyffe with the mad scientists.”

“Umm…I don’t watch the news much,” Taylor said. “Really, I was never sure what they did, but I always got the impression that they did good things.”

“Why?” Harmony asked.

“Well, because they said they did, I guess.”

“Sound business theory,” I said. “Doing good by using your resources to tell people you’re doing good.”

“What?” Harmony asked me.

“It’s like giving somebody money for food,” I explained. “You may doubt that it’s actually going for food, but if you can convince yourself that it is, then you feel better about it than if you believe it’s for booze and drugs. That makes you feel better about giving your support.”

“So people feel better about dealing with a company they believe does good things,” Harmony said. “So even if they spent all their money telling people about the good things they did, they’d be doing good just because they told people about it.”

“Wouldn’t that mean that they’d also be doing a public service by keeping any bad stuff they did covered up?”

“Sure,” I said. “A big company doing big things is gonna have big secrets. If they’ve got big secrets, it means they’d go to great lengths to keep them. Someone in accounting could‘ve found the clues of a trail that others might not.” And if I’d been able to find my copy of the Official Private Eye Handbook (standard issue), I could’ve shown them some blurb about how bean counters rather than cops brought down Al Capone.

“Sounds like Corvus could stand a closer look,” Harmony said.