Anno Dracula (54 page)

‘I don’t think so,’ said Geneviève, gingerly moving around the room, trying not to step in or brush against anything that might be mentioned in court. ‘The limp on-the-couches positions of the bodies indicate a leisurely moment of communal relaxation interrupted by an armed visitor or visitors who unloaded before this krewe could respond. See: all the bullet holes are on that side of the room, away from the hall door. Note firearms still in waistbands, pockets or on side tables. At a guess, Fortunato was upstairs sleeping or in the can at the time of the surprise visit. He made a vain attempt to use his track skills to get away. Unless they bumped a head on a lintel, your doer or doers probably got in and out without sustaining a scratch. This was a murder raid.’

The black detective thumped his partner’s arm with a told-you-so grin.

‘I still don’t understand why you asked for me,’ Geneviève said.

‘Coupla things... the teeth, the claws, the eyes.’

She had noticed what the detectives meant. She’d need them naked on a table under a good light to be sure, but the corpses all looked dhamp. Sharpened teeth and nails. Bleeding gums and cuticles which weren’t yet accustomed to popping fangs or talons. One had an elongated neck, which could have been congenital. Again, this wasn’t too surprising. Drac was the drug flavour of the new decade. Cocaine cartels and poppy growers were hurting.

‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘A drac angle doesn’t make this vampire related. I’ll have Scheiner briefed when these bodies come in...’

‘These bodies?’ said the Jewish detective. ‘You thought we’d called you to look at
these
bodies? Oh, no no no... wrong end of the stick, meet Geneviève Dieudonné. If you’ll kindly step this way, through the beaded curtain charmingly redolent of the summer of love, you shall find the reason you and only you are the ME for this...’

He held the curtain aside.

Geneviève passed through and into the next room — a kitchen.

Only one dead person was here, a very fat man in very tight scarlet underwear. Most of the back of his head missing.

GSW, again. Nothing unusual.

Light was low, but something glittered on the linoleum. An antique carved box lay upside-down, lid open. Small white objects scattered.

‘Are them what we think them is?’ asked the black detective.

Geneviève opened her bag and found the proper implement. She crouched and picked up one of the objects with a large pair of tweezers.

It was a fang. A vampire tooth.

There were thirty-eight fangs, presumably not all from one victim — though, since vampire teeth grew back if pulled or broken, it was just conceivable they’d sprouted from the same jaw. Incisors, canines, biters. No molars. A couple were grossly oversized specimens — three-inch tusks. One had a black diamond set in it.

‘Another Poe killing?’ she asked.

Staging murders in imitation of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe was an odd fad which had caught on lately, especially in Baltimore. In 1849, Poe had died here during a ballot-stuffing bender and been buried (by a nasty irony, prematurely) in a churchyard on West Fayette Street. A headstone still stood and someone’s bones lay under it. The poet was supposedly exhumed and reburied in 1875 and Walt Whitman (who attended the ceremony) claimed he recognised Eddy by the distinctive forehead of his skull. Whitman was mistaken. Another unknown egghead lay in the grave. Poe was still around as a vampire, squirming on
Oprah
or
The Jerry Langford Show
whenever another ardent fan sicced an orang-outang on his girlfriend’s mother or rigged up a basement pendulum to bisect a vacuum-cleaner salesman.

The black detective looked blank.

‘“Berenice”,’ said his partner. ‘In that
conte cruel
, first published in the
Southern Literary Messenger
in 1835, the perverted perp Egaeus keeps his cataleptic cousin Berenice’s gnashers in a box, much like the one these spilled out of.’

And the body outside,’ said Geneviève. ‘His name was Fortunato...’

‘Just like the victim in “The Cask of Amontillado”. Probable coincidence. Poe killers usually go the whole hop-frog. Wall up their Fortunatos and Madelines... hearts under the floorboards... plague bacillus spread through the prom. They all have pet ravens or oneeyed cats. I can’t recall a Tale of Mystery and Imagination in which a melancholy protagonist muses on the loss of a pale young woman and opens up with an Uzi to ventilate a roomful of sleazoid drac-heads. Of course, I’ve not kept up with the latterday
oeuvre
.’

‘None of the Poe killers count the recent books,’ she said.

‘I like Ed McBain,’ said the black cop. ‘No hump ever kills another hump because he read an 87th Precinct paperback.’

Geneviève stood. She had an urge to collect the fangs and put them back in the box. The crime scene needed to be undisturbed a while longer.

‘Edgar Allan Poe is a special case,’ she said. ‘A vampire writer.’

She’d seen Poe from across the room a couple of times, when they both had an Italian period. He’d been there in 1959, the night Dracula was killed. They’d not actually met, but she had followed his career.

A few years ago, Alexandra Forrest, a New York editor, sunk her claws into the author and struck a deal for a series of saga-length sequels to his most famous works.
The Usher Syndrome, The Dupin Tapes, The Valdemar Validation, The Pym Particles.
Poe blew the advance on ‘golden’ - high-quality human blood Geneviève could seldom afford on her salary - and a tabloid sensation marriage to a warm groupie who turned out to be thirteen years old, then failed to deliver. Forrest, it was rumoured, did something terrible to Poe’s cat. The books eventually came out with Poe’s notorious name huge across the covers and tiny footnotes about less-regarded co-authors. Jack Martin, her one-time Hollywood source, was the actual writer of
The Mentzengerstein Factor.
He was also the ‘as told to’ on the title page of freshly annulled Lydia Deetz Poe’s tell-all memoir
Eddy Dearest,
which Geneviève, guiltily, had relished. Now, there was a film out, with a starved-to-a-skeleton Dennis Quaid and black lace-wreathed Winona Ryder.

Poe was in Hollywood too, working for John Alucard. All monsters together. She had a pang at that, reminded of her exile. It had been ten years. She could probably go back. She was, after all, a government employee now. Still, what was there in Los Angeles for her?

‘Who’s the tooth-collector?’ she asked. ‘He isn’t called anything like Benny Egaeus, is he?’

‘No, worse luck,’ said the well-read detective. ‘Though his name is a literary reference, intentional or not. The rotund, scatter-brained gent is Wilkie Collins, rising captain in the Barksdale organisation. Risen as far as he can, now. Fallen, too.’

‘This is a Barksdale house?’ she asked.

‘Yes, indeed. The Avis of Baltimore drug-dealing concerns. They try harder, because they’re number two...’

‘Which means your prime suspect is Number One...’

‘...with a bullet,’ said the black detective. ‘Luther Mahoney.’

‘Charm City’s own Kingpin of Krime-with-a-K,’ said his partner. ‘The Napoleon of Narcotics... the Diocletian of Drac... There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity...’

‘Not that he pulled the trigger. Too busy shooting hoops with the Mayor at a rally for underprivileged youth. This bloodbath is absogoddamnlutely Mahoney, but we ain’t gonna put it on Luther. He be the Untouchable Man.’

Geneviève understood from Dan Hanson — Lorie’s on-off boyfriend, a crime reporter — that the Mahoney organisation was Baltimore’s outstanding supplier of drac, crack and smack. Dan said they probably also dealt in horse, whores and s’mores. If Mahoney let competition stay in business, it was because scrabbling for small change was beneath him. Recently, Barksdale, another family concern, had made aggressive moves into the market, absorbing a succession of Mom and Pop drug dealerships into a loose affiliation. This sort of shift in the city’s criminal geopolitics entailed bodies getting dropped. Mahoney was big on endowing community centres, free clinics, playgrounds and cultural events with some of his cash backwash, but he really ought to bestow an additional wing to the city morgue.

Mahoney wasn’t a vampire. But he had vampires on his krewe.

If anyone pulled their fangs, he’d be pissed.

Rumour had it that Luther Mahoney was seven feet tall, an African-American albino, an avatar of Baron Samedi. Dan said he was just a smarter-than-average, smugger-than-hell regular gangster. Besides an office building and a palace on the harbour, Mahoney owned a bank on Grand Cayman, a fleet of limousines, a private jet, some major Modiglianis, the bones of Mighty Joe Young and a great deal of Fells Point real estate.

A uniform, Turner, came into the kitchen. She was tall, trim, short haired — the sort of look seen more often on the cover of work-out videos than at squad room roll-call. Both detectives straightened up when Turner was around, but she was all work.

‘You’ll want to see the basement,’ she announced.

The detectives looked at each other. Turner wasn’t saying any more.

While Geneviève had been yakking with homicide, uniforms and CSI had been going through the house. Burke and Grimes were still waiting to get the meat in the wagon and back to the morgue.

‘Any more bodies?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly...’ said Turner.

‘Bodes ill.’

There was a classic door-under-the-stairs basement entrance. A set of rickety wooden steps led into the darkness. She trusted they weren’t going to find a mummified Moms Barksdale down there.

Geneviève let the detectives go first. They had to do their job before she could start hers. If she even had a job here.

For some reason she didn’t want to think about, her fangs had inched out and were sharp in her mouth.

Of course it smelled bad in the cellar.

Flashlight beams played across coils of rusty wire, old bicycles, bundles of the
Sun
, a shopping trolley full of looted copper pipes. A headless torso provided a momentary scare. It was a wasp-waisted dressmaker’s dummy.

Turner showed them a path through the treacherous piles of oddments.

The rear of the basement was where Poe killers liked to put up their new walls. Here, there was a separate room.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Serious security.’

The door was open, but it had several locks, some shiny and new.

‘A stash?’ she ventured.

Turner shrugged.

‘Let me guess,’ ventured the black detective, ‘the goods is gone...’

‘So this was more than a murder raid,’ said Geneviève. ‘A heist?’

‘Look inside and draw conclusions...’

The windowless room was lit by fluorescent tubes in wire-mesh cages. Scatter-cushions on the concrete floor, stained with newish and oldish blood. A sink, half full of rusty water.

She knew from the smell that someone had been living here.

A chain ran from bolts in the wall to a shiny shackle. It had been sheared through. Still-slick blood glistened on the links.

Someone had been
kept
here.

‘That silver?’ asked the black detective.

‘Looks like...’ said Geneviève.

She touched the metal as lightly as possible with the pad of her little finger, and pulled back as if she’d pressed against a hot stove.

‘...and is,
ouch.
Silver.’

A vampire had been imprisoned here.

Silver was too soft and pricey to chain the warm, but handy for anyone who wanted to add a vampire to their collection. Sporting goods stores sold silver fishnets, barbed wire, man-traps and bullets for ‘home protection’. Such transactions were protected under the second amendment. God bless America. Many more wooden pickets were sold than there were picket fences, too.

‘Whoever the Barksdales’ unwilling anchorite was, they’re in the wind now...’ said the Jewish detective.

‘Or someone else has them in another basement,’ she said.

She looked about the small room for traces of the occupant. Above the sink was a lighter patch of plaster where a mirror had been bolted. A corner still attached showed that it had been smashed. Thumbtacked up were magazine photographs of nude black women with huge afros and defiant stares. A psychedelic astrological chart included unfamiliar houses like Dentalium, Hirudo and Ophiuchus. Hirudo (the leech) was a recent zodiac adoption, the star sign of the vampire.

A Dansette gramophone was plugged in. On the turntable was ‘Supernatural Voodoo Woman (Does Her Thing at Night)’ by The Originals. A selection of super 70s soul singles was stored in a toast rack.

The detectives found a pile of fifteen-year-old
Playboy
magazines and went straight to the centrefolds. The nudes’ necks had been scribbled and scratched...

‘Perhaps
not
purchased for the enlightening interview with Kurt Vonnegut or the darkly witty cartoons of Gahan Wilson,’ commented the Jewish detective.

The decor, magazines and music suggested the Barksdales wanted to at least try to keep their captive entertained. The pin-ups implied he was a he. The bloodstains indicated he’d been fed or bled. Probably both.