Now he spun away from the desk and thrust the card face-out toward her. “Did your king have a bull’s head?” He sucked hard on the cigarette.
Plumtree had rocked back on the couch and looked away. And Armentrout coughed as much from disgust as from the acrid smoke in his lungs, for there was no animation, no identity, riding the smoke into his head—he had missed catching the Janis personality, the Plumtree gestalt had parried him.
“Hi, Doctor,” Plumtree said. “Is this a come-as-you-are party?” She stared at him for a moment, and appeared to replay in her head what had last been said. ‘Are you talking about the king we killed? Look, I’m being cooperative here. I’ll answer all your questions. But—trust me!—if you hit us with the…Edison Medicine again, none of us will tell you anything, ever.” Her shoulders had slumped as she’d been talking. “No, he didn’t have a bull’s head. He was barefooted, and had long hair down to his shoulders, and a beard, like you’d expect to see on King Solomon or Charlemagne.” She rubbed her hand over her face in an eerie and apparently unwitting re-enactment of what she had done with Armentrout’s hand. “But I recognized him.”
Armentrout knew his shielded tape recorder would be getting all this, but he tried to concentrate on what the woman was saying. You let that Tiffany girl get you all rattled, he told himself; you don’t want to eat the Janis personality, you idiot, she’s the one you want to leave in the body, to show how successful the integration therapy was. You’re lucky you didn’t get her, in the clove smoke. “You…say you recognized him,” he said, nodding like a plaster dog in the back window of a car. “You’d seen him before?”
“In that game on the houseboat on Lake Mead in 1990. Assumption—it’s a kind of poker. He was dressed as a woman for that, and the other players called him the Flying Nun. Our mental bus navigator Flibbertigibbet was trying to win the job Crane was after, the job of being the king, which is why he had us there, playing hands in that terrible game; and he didn’t succeed—and he went flat-out crazy on Holy Saturday when Crane won…it, the crown, the throne.”
“Crane?”
“Scott Crane. I didn’t know his name until we all got talking together today; I thought Flying Nun was, like, his name, it might be a Swedish name, right, like Bra Banning? He was a poker player in those days.”
“I remember another man who wanted to be this king,” said Armentrout thoughtfully, “a local man called Neal Obstadt. He died in the same explosion that collapsed Long John Beach’s lung, two and a half years ago. And Obstadt was looking for this Crane fellow back in ’90—had a big reward offered.” He looked at her and smiled. “You know, you may actually have killed somebody, ten days ago!”
“What good news,” she said hollowly.
“Whatever you did could be the cause of everything that’s been different since New Year’s Day—I thought you were just delusionally reacting, the way Mr. Cochran almost certainly is.” He held up one finger as though to count off points of an argument. “Now, you couldn’t have got through all of Crane’s defenses, and abducted his very child, as you say you did, without powerful sorcerous help; you’d need virtually another king, in fact. Who could that be?”
“You got me.”
“I thought you said you’d be honest with me here. We can schedule another ECT tomorrow.”
“I—I’m being honest. I was alone. I don’t know whose idea the whole thing was.”
“One of you might have been acting on someone’s orders, though, right? On someone’s careful instructions” He was sitting on the desk now drumming his finders excitedly on the emptied velvet box. “There was a boy around, a couple of years ago, living in Long Beach somewhere. He was a sort of proto-king, as I recall.” Armentrout wished he had paid more attention to these events at the time—but they had been other people’s wars in the magical landscape, and he had been content to just go on eating pieces of his patients’ souls on the sidelines. “His name was something goofy—Boogie-Woogie Bananas, or something like that. He could probably kill a king, or bring one back to life, even, if he wanted to. If he’s kept to the disciplines. Somebody, your man Crane, probably, brought the gangster Bugsy Siegel back to life, briefly, in 1990. You’ve seen the Warren Beatty movie, Bugsy? Siegel was this particular sort of supernatural king, during the 1940s. Yes, this kid would be fifteen or so now—he could be the one that sent you to kill Crane. Does a name like Boogie-Woogie Bananas ring any bells?”
Plumtree visibly tried to come up with a funny remark, but gave up and just shook her head wearily. “No.”
“His party had a lawyer! Were you approached by the lawyer? He had a pretentious name, something Strube, like J. Submersible Strube the third.”
“I never heard of any of these people.” Plumtree was pale, and perspiration misted her forehead. “But one of us went to a lot of trouble to kill Crane. Obviously.”
Armentrout pursed his lips. “Did you say anything to him, to Crane?”
“Sunday before last? Yeah. I wasn’t going to hurt his kid, this little boy who couldn’t have been five years old yet—God knows how I lured him out of the house, but I had the kid down on his back in this grassy meadow above the beach, with the spear points on his little neck—I suppose Flibbertigibbet would have killed the kid!—and when I found myself standing there after losing some time, I looked at the kid’s father standing there, Crane, and I just said, almost crying to see what a horrible thing I was in the middle of, I said, ‘There’s nothing in this flop for me.’” There were tears in Plumtree’s eyes right now, and from the angry way she cuffed them away Atmentrout was sure that she was Cody at the moment. “And,” she went on hoarsely, “Crane said, Then pass.’ He must have been scared, but he was talking gently, you know?—not like he was mad. ‘Let it pass by us,’ he said.”
“And what did you say?”
“I lost time then. When I could see what was going on again, Crane was lying there dead, with the spear in his throat, sticking up through his Solomon beard like a fishing pole, and the kid was gone.” Plumtree blinked around at the desks and the couch and the foliage-screened window. “Why did Janis leave, just now? You made her peel off, didn’t you?” Her expression became blank, and then she was frowning again. “And she’s crying in her bus seat! What did you do to her?”
Armentrout held up the card. “I just showed her this.”
But Plumtree looked away from it. And when she spoke, it was in such a level voice that Armentrout wondered if she’d shifted again: “Strip poker, we’re playing here?” She looked past the card, focussing into his eyes, and Armentrout saw that one of her pupils was a tiny pinprick, as was usual with her, but the other was dilated in the muted office light. The mismatched eyes, along with the downward-curling androgynous smile she now gave him, made him think of the rock star David Bowie. “I can be the one that wins here, you know,” she said. “I can rake in your investment, or at least toss it out into the crowd. Strip poker. How many…garments have you got?”