Box Office Poison (Linnet Ellery) (23 page)

I began to reel him in. Then Vento leaped sideways, and I fought to maintain my seat. My intestinal tract seemed to be somewhere in the vicinity of my throat as I looked around wildly for what had spooked him. I spotted a dark figure vaulting over the rail and rushing toward me, hand outstretched toward the bridle. Vento took umbrage at that and went hopping backward.

The figure was now close enough that I could recognize David. “You’re not helping!” I yelled, and he put on the brakes. A second later Vento was standing quietly, though I could feel his sides heaving against my legs, and his breath sounded like a bellows. He swung his head back toward me then looked at David with what I could only interpret as disapprobation.

“Sorry, I guess I spooked him,” said the vampire.

“Do you think?”

“Sorry,” he repeated.

“Why did you run at us?”

“I thought you were in trouble … I was trying … it was stupid.”

“Agreed. Don’t you know anything about horses?”

“Not really.”

Which was another clue to the cypher that was David. He clearly wasn’t as old as many of the vampires of my acquaintance since he wasn’t conversant with horses. I turned to a more pressing question.

“What are you doing out here? And more to the point, where the hell were you yesterday?” The fog was condensing on the brim of his fedora, threatening to become actual droplets of water. His face was a pale oval in the darkness.

“I wanted to check in with you. I heard what happened in the arbitration yesterday.” I tensed waiting for a reprimand. “You did good.”

It wasn’t what I expected. “Thank you.”

“You sound surprised.”

“You guys tend to be a little stingy on the compliment front.”

“You proved yourself. It’s why I decided to help you with the Securitech case,” he said.

“Okay, I call bullshit. You started helping me as a way to get back at Ryan.” I said, laughing.

David stiffened. Vampires hate to be laughed at, but he again surprised me. “All right, that’s true, but once I started to work with you I saw your quality.”

“What exactly does quality mean?”

He gave me a quick smile. “I’m not going to pander to your vanity, and I need to keep you striving to impress me.” There was the echo of laughter in his voice

“And I need to head back to the barn.” I jerked my head behind me. “Want a ride?”

He stepped in close and put his hand on the pommel of the saddle. His arm rested against my hip. I kicked my foot out of the stirrup so he could use it. He looked up at me. I looked down at him. Then he abruptly stepped back and shook his head. “I’ll walk.” We started back toward the barns. “Your horse doesn’t seem very alarmed.”

“Not now. You’re no longer a scary, shadowy figure in the darkness.”

“Most animals object to my kind.”

“They sense you’re a predator and…” I tried to think of a more tactful way to say dead.

“Not alive,” David supplied.

“Yeah.”

“The staff reports you weren’t in the office today,” David said as we walked across the Equestrian Center.

“I was off interviewing the Human First people, and while I don’t like them I just can’t see them engineering something like this. Really wish I could talk to Jondin so I could compare her statement to Kerrinan’s.”

“Linnet, I want you to be careful with this.”

“It won’t have any effect on the arbitration.”

“That’s not what I meant. People have been killed.”

We reached the barn, I kicked loose my stirrups and jumped down, and found David’s arm closing around me to help lower me gently to the ground. “He’s not that tall,” I said, indicating the horse. “But thank you. And thanks for the concern, but our two murderous Álfar are locked up.”

“There are a lot of Álfar in Hollywood.”

“Now you sound like you’re channeling Human First.”

It felt cozy inside the barn and out of the fog and the dark. I put Vento in the tack-up area, pulled off his saddle, and began brushing him down. The smell of hay, dust, and horse was calming, and he was warm beneath my hand.

David leaned his shoulders against the tall wood divider and said, “I’ll see what I can do about seeing Jondin, but don’t expect it to work. It might be easier to get your gnome in to see her.”

I looked over my shoulder at David. “Gnome? Really? I call that tall-man bias. And I think Maslin’s a good height for a shrimp like me.”

“You make up for the lack of inches in attitude.”

I returned the dandy brush to the tack box and said carefully, “Okay, now you really are starting to freak me out with all the compliments.”

“You’re showing live-person bias.”

It wasn’t all that funny, but it still made me chuckle. “Okay, now I know you’re sick. Humor is not your strong suit.”

“Vampires in general or me in particular?”

“You in particular. You must have supped from a drunk.”

“Well, if you’re going to be insulting, I’ll leave you. See you tomorrow.”

For an instant the tall, broad-shouldered figure was silhouetted against the doorway of the barn, and then he was gone. Then I realized he never had answered the second question. So where had he been?

16

Even though intellectually I didn’t agree with Cartwright’s final words, they stayed with me. Maybe that’s what makes demagoguery work. Why had the Powers gone public? Historians argued that it was the times—the 1960s was a time of social and cultural turmoil. I wasn’t sure that held together. Sure, groups had been looking for a place—African Americans, women, gays, young people—but they were, for the most part, the disenfranchised. The Powers had a place—they were in charge. The vampires and the hounds had been pulling the strings from behind the scenes for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and it had worked really well for them. Why reveal themselves?

I sat on the sofa in my apartment, elbows on knees, chin in hand. The winter night had crept in while I sat staring morosely into the fireplace, and I hadn’t really noticed. The only light was provided by the gas flames licking fitfully around the fake logs.

I forced my thoughts back to the Álfar. They hadn’t been deeply involved in human affairs prior to 1963. Oh, they occasionally stole a human child or led an unwary human away into the Fey, but after the Powers went public they began spending more and more time on our side of the reality divide. So far their deep involvement had been just in the entertainment industry, but what if they decided to move into the political arena? If they could use their preternatural charisma to win parts, why not to win a seat in Congress? Or the White House?

There was something in my last thought that had me straightening and considering, but before I could quite grasp it there was a knock on my door. I jumped because I wasn’t expecting anyone. I stood, hesitated, staring at the door. The knock came again. I stood on tiptoes and looked through the peep hole. It was Qwendar. I removed the chain and opened the door.

“Pardon me for calling so late. I was hesitant to disturb you, but I wondered how your inquiries were proceeding?” He stood, holding his hat.

For a moment I just stood and blinked at him. How had he gotten my home address? And even though he wasn’t an actual party to the arbitration, this was pretty irregular. Then the slump in his shoulders and the deepened lines in his face penetrated. He looked exhausted, and I felt bad for my suspicions and rudeness. I stepped back and opened the door wider.

“Please come in. And you’re not disturbing me. I won’t go to bed for hours yet. Can I get you anything?”

“If you are going to have something.”

“I thought I’d make hot chocolate.”

“That sounds lovely.” I busied myself in the kitchen with a box of cocoa, sugar, and milk.

“You don’t use a mix?” he asked, taking a seat at the small bar that divided the kitchen area from the rest of the apartment.

“No, they’re too sweet.”

“That would never be a problem for my kind. We love all manner of confection.”

“The Álfar have a sweet tooth. Who knew?” I began to stir the milk to keep it from scorching. “I visited Human First.”

“And?”

“And … nothing. I don’t think they’re behind it. Oh, they’ll make hay over what happened with Kerrinan and Jondin, but I can’t see how they could have caused it.” I frowned.

“You seem perturbed.”

“I thought I had a train of thought that was going someplace, but…” I shrugged and mixed the chocolate and sugar paste into the milk.

“And then I disturbed you, and you lost it,” he said rather ruefully.

“It was probably just smoke.”

“Why don’t you talk about it. It might help you pursue it to a conclusion.” I started to shake my head. “Linnet, our goals are the same. We joined this arbitration so I could try to protect my people. You think my people are being targeted and you’re trying to help them. Wouldn’t it make more sense if we pooled our information? Worked together?”

I blew out a breath, pushed back my hair with my forearm. “Okay. I was just reflecting how the other Powers—vampires and werewolves—had been affecting human events from behind the scenes, and now that they’re public they’re still doing it, just making no bones about it.” I filled two mugs with the bubbling chocolate. “But the Álfar haven’t really done that, and when you did decide to enter human society your people ended up in entertainment.”

“Meaning?” he probed.

“That’s the problem, I don’t really see where this is taking me. Other than the fact that vampires and werewolves have enormous influence over law and commerce, and the Álfar are actors or singers, and yeah, art and culture have a powerful impact on society, but it takes time. Vampires and werewolves are having a lot more immediate impact. So why target you guys?” I shrugged and sipped my hot chocolate. “And werewolves marry human woman too, and Human First isn’t going ape-shit about that. Wish I’d thought to say that to Belinda Cartwright.” I shook my head. “See, I’m just nattering, and it’s going nowhere.”

Qwendar drained his mug and set it aside. “Perhaps we are both simply, what do you humans say … paranoid? Perhaps there’s nothing more here than simple jealousy.”

“Doesn’t feel right. What makes two people go suddenly nuts within weeks of each other? Can you do the Álfar whammy on each other?”

“The glamour works much better on humans. And we use it to make people like us … or love us.” He slid off the bar stool. “And vampires can mesmerize too, and blood is certainly an essential component in their existence.”

“Interesting. I just can’t see why they’d want to make the Álfar look bad.”

“It’s puzzling, yes. Well, thank you for the chocolate. I’ll leave you to your evening now.”

I walked him to the door. He took my hand. “There is something here, I just can’t quite bring it into focus.” I gave his hand a squeeze. “We’ll figure this out.”

“I believe you will.”

*   *   *

The arbitration resumed the next day. LeBlanc, realizing that Campos, the director, hadn’t actually helped her all that much, had a new expert witness. Unfortunately he was in New York City, which meant an AV expert had joined us in the conference room to handle the linkup. Computers had been placed strategically to create the illusion that Ashley Schultz was seated at the front of the room near to David and me, and our seats had been moved since we couldn’t look sideways at a computer screen. LeBlanc moved along the table handing out a sheaf of papers. They were emblazoned with a heading that read “Q Squared” in a logo that had overtones of an Escher drawing.

The big thirty-six-inch screen went from black to gray, then stabilized, and I saw a man in his thirties with slicked-back black hair, a pair of coolly appraising gray eyes, and an understated but very good suit. He was fiddling with a tiny microphone, trying to clip it onto his shirt collar. One of the assistants in our Park Avenue office in New York was trying to help him. I recognized one of the conference rooms.

Chuck, our AV guy, said, “Mr. Schultz, can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear, but I can’t see you.”

Chuck made grumbling noises that almost became words and fiddled with the console. “Yes, that’s got it,” Schultz called. Like many people using a video link he seemed to think he had to speak louder than normal and enunciate very carefully.

I looked down and referred to the witness profile that LeBlanc had provided. Ashley Schultz owned Q Squared, a marketing and research company that specialized in taking the temperature of the public about everything from television shows to computers.

“Are we ready to begin,” David asked, his tone huffy. I wondered if it was because of the intrusion of the computer equipment, never a vampire’s favorite thing. Chuck gave him a thumbs-up and adjusted his headphones. David nodded at LeBlanc. “You may begin.”

“The pages I’ve just handed out are last month’s Q scores for every Álfar actor currently working. The second section is the Q score for every human actor currently working. If you’ll take a moment to glance over the figures, my point will become immediately apparent.”

David and I looked at each other and started flipping through the pages. From the corner of my eye I could see Gabaldon doing the same. I didn’t need to be a statistician or a marketing analyst. The numbers were boldly clear. The human actors consistently scored twice as high as the Álfar actors. I remembered Campos’s words:
they’re just pretty dolls.

After having allowed us all to fully digest the numbers, LeBlanc turned back to Schultz’s image on the screen. “I hired you to run a Q rating for me, didn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And whom did you test?”

“Casting directors, producers, and directors, but only those who have actually used Álfar actors,” the marketing man answered.

“And what did you find?”

“That the Álfar scores—”

There was a sudden screaming burst of feedback from the speakers on the computer in our conference room. People jerked, clapped hands over their ears, and erupted into a few exclamations and curses.

“New York, it’s on your end!” Chuck was yelling into his microphone. We saw the technician come scurrying into range of the cameras in New York and rip off the microphone. Chuck was frantically dialing down the volume. The awful sound ended, and people pulled their hands away from their ears.