I tried on the tinted glasses. The night rendered them hazardous and I returned them to my pocket and continued on, inspecting the cars. Average cars. No vans. A few lights shone from neighbors' windows but most were dark. Night wind had blown away some of the smog, and blades of view between the properties sparkled. As I got closer to Zena's house, I heard music.
Calypso, just like in the bookstore.
Bongos and happy vocals. Just another hillside party.
Who were these people? How many of them, if any, were killers?
Murdering out of some warped notion of genetic cleansing? Or just for fun?
Or both.
There was precedent for that kind of thing. Seventy years ago, two young men with stratospheric IQ scores had stabbed to death an innocent fourteen-year-old boy in Chicago. Motivated, they claimed, by the challenge of pulling off the perfect “motiveless” crime.
Leopold and Loeb had been sexually twisted psychopaths and I was willing to bet the DVLL crimes had roots in something beyond intellectual exercise.
I'd reached the white-and-blue house. Lights poked through drawn drapes, but barely. Turning, I sighted down the road, at the line of parked cars.
Had Milo already arrived? Copied down license numbers, sent them along to Daniel for a quick screen?
Calypso shifted to Stravinsky.
The exact same tape from the bookstore.
Frugal? Probably cheap booze, too.
No matter; I wouldn't be drinking.
The door was locked and I had to ring several times before it opened. The man in the doorway was in his middle thirties with a bushy, wheat-colored beard and a crew cut. He wore a gray sweatshirt and brown pants, was holding a glass of something yellow and filmy.
Small, alert eyes. Small, unsmiling mouth.
He held the door open just wide enough to accommodate his wiry frame. Rough hands, dirty nails. Behind him, the room was dotted with a few colored lights but otherwise dark. I caught a glimpse of faces, moving mouths, but the music pounded, blotting out conversation.
“Yes?” I saw the word, couldn't hear it.
“Andrew Desmond. Zena invited me.”
He held up a finger and closed the door. I stood there for several minutes before Zena came out. She wore a full-length dress, royal blue silk crepe, printed with tangerine-colored orchids. Long-sleeved, low neckline, no waistline, generously cut. I supposed it was a muumuu, probably vintage. On a large woman it might have looked tentlike. But the filmy fabric flowed over her tiny body, heightening a sharp pelvis and somehow lengthening her, making her appear taller.
Loose and flowing… easier access to the precious parts?
“I was starting to wonder about you,” she said. “Fashionably late?”
I shrugged, looked down at her feet, again in high-heeled sandals. Pink toenails. Three-inch heels. She was able to kiss me without straining.
Just a peck. Her lips were supple. Then she took my chin as she had in the restaurant and her tongue impelled itself between my lips. I offered some tooth resistance, then let her in. Her hand dropped, cupped my butt and squeezed. She moved back, taking my hand, twisting the doorknob. “All those who enter, abandon all hope.”
“Of what?”
“Boredom.”
She took my hand. The house was packed, the music well past loud and into painful. As she led me through the crowd, I tried to look the place over without being obvious. Just past the entry were two doors- a bathroom designated LE PISSOIR by a computer-printed sign, and an unmarked one that was probably a closet. An unrailed staircase led downstairs. Like many hillside homes, bedrooms on the lower floor.
A gray-haired woman in a black dress with a white Peter Pan collar waited edgily near the lav, not looking up as we passed. The jam of bodies was bathed in Stravinsky and barely illuminated. Some people danced, others stood and talked, managing to communicate despite the din. The colored lights were Christmas bulbs strung from the low-beamed ceiling and they did little but blink in opposition to The Rite of Spring. I saw shadows rather than people.
No other signs or banners, nothing identifying it as a Meta bash. What did I expect?
Zena dragged me forward. The other partygoers moved aside with varying degrees of cooperation but no one seemed to notice us. The house was smaller than I would have guessed, the entire second floor just one main room, a waist-high counter sectioning off a two-step kitchen to the right. Every inch of counter was filled with plastic soda bottles, bags of ice, beer cans, packages of paper plates, plastic utensils.
What I could see of the walls was hung with prints in metal frames. Florals, nothing telling. It didn't seem like Zena's style, but who knew how often she reinvented herself?
One thing was certain, she wasn't into decorating. The few pieces of furniture I saw weren't much better than Andrew's, and the books that filled two walls sat in flimsy-looking shelves nearly identical to his.
Spooky prescience on Daniel's part. If he ever tired of police work, a career as a matchmaker awaited.
Zena's hand burned my fingers as she continued to guide me past a long folding table covered with white paper. Behind it were yet more people, eating and drinking.
Then, the only feature elevating the house above low-rent crackerbox: glass doors onto a balcony, beyond them a symphony of stars.
Man-made constellations twinkling from houses half a mile across a darkened ravine and the real stuff set into a melanin sky.
Drop-dead view, a real-estate agent would claim, working mightily to show the place at night.
As we neared the food, I played passive and managed a rough body count. Sixty, seventy people, enough to congest the modest room.
I looked for Farley Sanger. Even if he'd been there, I'd have been unlikely to spot him in the darkened crush.
Sixty, seventy strangers, as average-looking as their cars.
Men seemed to outnumber women. The age range, thirty to mid-fifties.
No one particularly ugly, no raving beauties.
It might have been a casting call for Nondescript.
But an active bunch. Fast-moving mouths, a mass lip-synch. Lots of gesturing, posturing, shrugs, grins, and grimaces, finger-stabs of emphasis.
I spotted the thickly bearded man who'd answered the door off in a corner by himself, sitting on a folding chair, holding a can of Pepsi and a paperback book, worrying a fold of his sweatshirt.
He looked up, saw me, stared, returned to reading with the intensity of a finals-crammer. Nearby, two other men, one in a baggy tan suit and plaid tie, the other wearing an untucked white shirt and khakis, sat at a tiny table playing silent chess and smoking.
As my eyes accommodated, I noticed other games going, on the edges of the room. Another chess match- a woman and a man- moving pieces quickly and fiercely, a minute-glass filled with rapidly sifting white sand next to the woman's left hand. A few feet away, yet more table warfare. Scrabble. Cards. Backgammon. Go. Something that resembled chess but was played on a cubelike plastic frame by two bespectacled, mustached men wearing black who could have been twins- three-dimensional chess. On the near side of the kitchen partition, two other men did something intense with polished stones and dice and a mahogany chute. How did anyone concentrate with the noise?
Then again, these were smart people.
We made it to the drinks. The white paper was a butcher's roll cut unevenly. Soda, beer, bottled water, off-brands of scotch, vodka, bourbon, corn chips and pretzels, salsa and guacamole and shrimp dip still in plastic containers.
Zena used a chip to excavate the avocado paste, came up with a healthy green blob, ate, scooped again, and aimed the construction at my mouth.
“Good?” she mouthed.
“Excellent.”
Grinning and fluffing her bangs, she blew me a kiss, reached out and took hold of my belt buckle and tilted her head at the glass doors. Her eyes were the brightest thing in the room.