Armentrout’s key unlocked his office door, but he was too distracted to be pleased by the little vindication. I should have had him on hard meds, he thought as he blundered across the linoleum floor and sat down at the desk; hell, I should have given him benzodiazepine and ECT! I lost more than I gained, working them out on Plumtree, even if my—even if no distant ghost got a fix on me.
I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package. True, Armentrout thought now. But I do have a vial of your blood, Mr. Salvoy.
He stared at the two-figure mannikin appliance that was canted against the couch. With shirts, jackets, trousers, and shoes hung and hooked onto the aluminum poles, and the pair of clothing-store mannikin heads stuck on the swivelling neck-posts, the thing did look like two blandly smiling men with their arms around the shoulders of an invisible third man in the middle; and when he strapped the framework onto his own shoulders, Armentrout would become the third man, the man in the middle. A lever in the chest of the left-hand dummy permitted him to work the mechanical outside arms, and one in the right-hand dummy let him swivel the heads this way and that. And he had cored out holes in the backs of the Styrofoam heads, under the Dynel wigs, and stuffed into the holes dozens of paper towels spotted with patients’ blood samples. The thing weighed about twenty pounds and was awkward to wear, and in public it drew far too much derisive attention, but on several occasions it had proven to be an effective multi-level psychic scrambler, a terrifically refractive and deflecting mask. Even some moron with a plain old gun, Armentrout thought, would be likely to hit the wrong head.
The telephone on his desk rang, making him jump in his chair, and in the instant before he realized that the vibration in his ribs was just his cellular phone ringing too, he thought he was having some sort of cardiac arrest.
“Yes?” he said into the receiver when he had fumbled it up to his ear. Not long-distance, he thought fervently, please. Let it just finally be the cop.
And, thankfully, it was the cop.
“Doctor?” came the man’s voice. “Officer Hamilton here. Sorry it’s so late, I called as quick as I could after I got off work. Got a pencil? I’ve got the location of the place where your Appleseed girl said she killed the Flying Nun king.”
Armentrout shakily wrote down an address on Neptune Avenue in Leucadia. “And did you come up with anything about Neal Obstadt’s death two years ago?”
“More or less. Something damn peculiar was going on that week, and the L.A. cops are still trying to figure it out. Obstadt’s body was found in the water off the ocean side of the Queen Mary after some kind of bomb went off in the water there, on October 31 of ‘92, though no traces of any kind of explosive chemicals were found in the water, and no bomb fragments at all were recovered; he was blown to pieces, but they found a small-caliber bullet in his guts too. And the body of a film producer named Loretta deLarava was found up on one of the tourist decks with a .45 slug in her heart. She was filming some kind of TV special there, and we questioned a lot of her employees. Apparently deLarava had brought six people aboard at gunpoint, as handcuffed prisoners. One was that one-armed amnesiac nut you took charge of, who still had a pair of cuffs hanging from his wrist when they found him half-dead on the shore of the lagoon. And I’ve got the names of the other five, if you want ’em.”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay. Nicholas Bradshaw—he was the actor who played Spooky the ghost in that old TV show, ‘Ghost of a Chance,’ which was cancelled in 1960; a lawyer named J. Francis Strube, who spoke to detectives only through a lawyer of his own and basically had nothing useful to say; an itinerant electrical engineer named Peter Sullivan, whose twin sister had killed herself in Delaware five days previous; a lady psychiatrist who’s been wanted on manslaughter charges since November of 1990, named Angelica Anthem Elizalde; and an eleven-year-old kid named Koot Hoomie Parganas, whose parents were torture-murdered the same night Sullivan’s twin sister killed herself. All these people got free of their handcuffs, as if one of ’em had a key or was an escape artist.”
Hamilton sighed over the line. “Bradhshaw and Sullivan and Elizalde and the. Parganas kid haven’t been found since,” he went on, “even though they’re seriously wanted for at least questioning. DeLarava was offering a big reward for the fugitive Parganas boy, and the boy apparently called nine-one-one on the evening of the 27th, but the call was interrupted, and I think he’s probably dead; and the Elizalde woman apparently shot at a woman in the Westlake area on the 28th. And then after Halloween the LAPD was deluged with calls about all this—from psychics! Unhelpful.”
Elizalde! thought Armentrout with a stir of remembered admiration. What a deluded pioneer that woman was! And a dark, long-legged beauty, too—I used to see her a lot when she was on the staff at the County Hospital in Huntington Park in ‘88 and ‘89.
But the mention of one-armed Long John Beach had reminded him that the crazy old man was presently in “three-points” in the Quiet Room, and that if he was going to have to take Beach out of the hospital, it would be far easier with just the night staff to get past.
“So, have there been,” Armentrout asked, knowing that this was his main question, and not at all sure what answer he wished for, “any of the peculiarities I asked about, going on at the Leucadia address, or near it?” Do I get to go home now and catch a few hours of sleep, and visit the Neptune Avenue place at my leisure and alone, he thought—or must I rush off there now, bringing all my cumbrous psychic-defense impedimenta along?
“Well,” said Hamilton, “nobody’s reported any ‘sudden growth of vegetation’ to the cops…nor the opposite…but they wouldn’t hardly, would they?”
“I suppose not,” said Armentrout with a smile, beginning to relax and think of his bed.
“But there’ve been a whole lot of calls about crazy teenagers driving through the neighborhood honking their horns and shooting off firecrackers—guns too, we’ve found ejected shells on the street. And either them or some other crowd of teenagers has been dancing on the beach at all hours, real noisy. You did mention ‘other disturbances.’ And,” Hamilton added, chuckling through a yawn, “you didn’t ask about this, but two separate people have called the Union Tribune to announce that Elvis Presley is going to be coming to town to stay with them for a few weeks. Oh, and you know the way evangelists are always saying the world’s about to end? Well, a nut Bible church on the 101 there, one of the charismatic-hysterical types that rent space in failed laundromats, has announced that the world already ended, on New Year’s Day. We’re all living in some kind of delusional Purgatory right now, they say.”
While the man had been talking, Armentrout had abandoned all thought of going home to bed, and was now wearily planning how he would get Long John Beach and the two-figure appliance out of the clinic past the security guards.
“These…teenagers,” Armentrout said, just to be sure, “are they…dressed nice? Seem to have money?”
“Not in particular. But hey, their cars all look like solid gold! They drive anything at all, Volkswagens, beat old Fords, Hondas, see—but a whole lot of them are painted metallic gold, and they’ve got wreaths of flowers hung over the license plates; even on the back plates, which is a violation. The neighborhood residents say it’d look like a parade if they weren’t tearing through so fast. The kids on the beach, it’s hard to tell—get this, they bring big pots of white clay, and smear themselves up with it for their dancing. Can’t even tell what race they are, I gather.”