Death hits the fan (17 page)

"But why did she call out my name?" I demanded, still not satisfied.

"I've got that figured out too," Ann told me, grinning even more widely. "Remember the name-recognition exercises?"

It was coming back, in nauseating detail. A weekend designed to produce successful women on the move up the career path. Lots of rah-rah and endless exercises.

"Georgette Junge," I answered automatically. She'd been the one whose name I'd been assigned to memorize. "I remembered her by thinking of Georgette of the Jungle, since she was so athletic."

"Maybe you were hers," Ann suggested. "Maybe you were Shirley's."

"You're right," I breathed. I hit my fist on the table. That hurt. I told myself not to do that again. And it wouldn't take a memory trick to remind me. The pain radiating from the side of my hand was enough. "It was Shirley Green. Now I've got it. She memorized my name by thinking of 'communi-Kate,' 'cause I talked so much—"

I heard Wayne snort down a laugh behind me.

"See, Wayne," Ann put in quickly, before I could even think of objecting to his snort, much less retaliating. "The idea was that if you used the proper mnemonics, you could remember your assigned person's name for the rest of your life."

"So Shayla did," Wayne commented somberly. "She did, with her dying breath."

That was good for a few minutes silence. But not too many minutes.

Pretty soon, Wayne and Ann were busy convincing me to wait to tell Captain Xavier why S.X. Greenfree had called out my name until he asked me again. The game plan was nonchalance, backed up by Ann's testimony.

It was a good plan. I had a second appetite, a real appetite finally, no matter how recent lunch had been, when Wayne's meal came sizzling onto our plates, vegetables and seitan full of ginger and lemon grass and chilies over soba noodles.

I let the flavors linger on my taste buds as I interrogated Ann about poisons and syringes. She didn't know much personally, but she gave me the name of an emergency room nurse who might know more. And suggested I call the poison-control center. I was just hugging her again and telling her what a good friend she was when the phone rang.

I looked at my watch. It was getting close to six, time for my tai chi class. And time for Wayne to head into the city to oversee his neglected restaurant.

Wayne gave me a quick shrug and tilted his head as if asking for permission to leave.

I nodded and took the phone call as Ann and Wayne walked out the door together.

Vince Quadrini was on the other end of the line. He had some information to share, he told me, his formal, elderly voice steady now. He asked that we come by his place of work the next day. I agreed, exchanged some polite words about looking forward to our meeting, and hung up.

Then I grabbed my purse and ran out the door to make my tai chi class. Smack into Yvette Cassell.

The impact was enough to stop me in my tracks, but it sent Yvette sprawling onto the redwood deck.

"Fu-figgin' way to go—" she began, angrily.

"What were you doing here, anyway?" I shot back.

"Well, Holy moly and howdy-hi," came a new voice into the medley. A bass to our sopranos. Felix rubbed his hands together happily as he came up the stairs. "Finally, I've got you two gonzo brains together. Now we can friggin' talk."

Yvette didn't utter a word for once. She just picked herself up off the deck and ran.

I just wished I could have run with her.

HJh-oh, Felix and Yvette weren't a match made in heaven. Or even in hell, it would seem. I wondered briefly what he'd done to her. Whatever it was, I could understand Yvette's desire to run. Felix had that effect on a lot of people he interrogated, including myself. But right then, I wanted the information Felix had never given me at our last meeting. A deal is a deal.

So I gave up on my tai chi class and invited Felix in, telling myself the verbal sparring with Felix that was sure to ensue might be considered a form of tai chi. Mental tai chi. But then my mind bounced back to Felix's sweetie, my friend Barbara Chu.

"How come Barbara hasn't called me yet?" I demanded.

"Barbara?" he repeated, stepping back on the deck. Apparently, this wasn't a question he'd expected. "Her cousin's in the hospital, man," he answered sadly, suddenly looking less like a pit bull and more like a human being. "Dude's really sick. Cancer. He's been in and out of consciousness

like a friggin' light bulb since last week. And they've got him baked on some pretty potent chemicals, so he's not even logged on when he's logged on, if you know what I mean."

I did know what he meant.

"I'm sorry," I said softly.

"No biggie for me," Felix murmured, but just the lowering of his voice was enough to tell me it was. Felix was human. And upset. "Jeez, the guy's barely old enough to vote, you know." He sighed, not his melodramatic sigh manufactured for manipulation, but a real one. He probably didn't even know he'd let it out. "So Barbara's been going to the hospital whenever she's not working. She's reading to him from Tibetan books, breathing with him, trying to guide him to the light, all that woo-woo stuff."

"Come on inside," I offered and almost reached out a hand. But even if this being was human for the instant, it was still Felix. So I just walked in and let him follow me.

He plopped into one of the hanging chairs in the living room, then looked around appraisingly.

"Hey, where's the aerobics bimbette?" he asked.

I was glad I hadn't held my hand out to him.

I lowered myself into the other hanging chair and asked my own question.

"If Barbara's been in the hospital all this time, how'd she know about Shayla Greenfree and Ann and the seminar—"

"Hey, hold it a friggin' nanosecond," Felix interrupted, throwing his hand up like a stop sign. "What seminar? What Ann? What's the scoop here?"

Damn. He hadn't known about any of it. My mistake. I shouldn't have assumed Barbara had told him. So I talked. I wouldn't resist. There was no use in resisting the inevitable. Tai chi in action. At least I made it brief. In less than three minutes, I had explained about Ann, the seminar, the mnemonic name exercise, and Shayla's last words.

I was surprised when Felix didn't jump on me immedi-

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Death Hits the Fan 147

ately with more questions. He seemed to be holding his breath. His face was certainly getting red. And then he finally exploded like an overblown hot air balloon.

"Jeez-friggin'-Louise!" he shouted, leaping from the swinging chair. It swung back and forth wildly, the wooden bar on the bottom slapping the back of his legs on the rebound. He didn't seem to notice. "I never said diddly to Barbara about this Greenfree stiff, man. But Barbara's in another time continuum altogether. She just went presto-bango-woo-woo and knew somehow. And then who does she call? Huh? Huh?"

"Ann," I suggested quietly.

"Damn-straight, Ann," he yelped. "Not me, not her everting sweetie, noooo—"

It was time for crisis intervention.

"But you love her anyway," I put in gently.

"Well, yeah," he muttered, throwing himself back in the swinging chair. Now his face was red again. But I knew Felix. Now he was embarrassed. "But still—"

"So what was the poison in the bracelet, Felix?" I demanded.

It took him a moment to reconnoiter. Then his soulful eyes took on a familiar gleam.

"Curare," he whispered. "Do you believe that, man? What a tripping story this is gonna make. And there's more. When that Greenfree woman put the bracelet on her wrist, she was okay. But when she closed the clasp, ten little whiz-bang syringes simultaneously pierced her skin. Kablooey, exit stage left for the writer. Like some friggin' James Bond gizmo-deluxe."

"But how'd the syringes hit the veins?" I muttered, squirming in my own chair, feeling the syringes piercing my own skin in spite of myself.

"That's the beauty part," he replied. "Curare doesn't have to hit the vein. Subcutaneous is plenty, honey. Man, the stuff

is powerful. Paralyzes the lungs, then whammo-kaboomo, respiratory failure."

Felix was shaking his head admiringly now. I was feeling sick, thinking of Shayla's respiratory failure in front of us all. Suddenly, I couldn't breathe either. Because none of us had helped Shay la when she'd stopped breathing. My cat, C.C., jumped into my lap and dug a tentative claw into my thigh. My thigh popped upwards without permission. Was C.C. offering comfort or a curare-dipped nail? Whatever she was offering, the sting of feline reality jump-started my breathing again. I pulled her paw back and gathered her into my arms, pressing my face into her soft fur. She yowled half-heartedly, but put up with the humiliation of public affection. For the moment.

"So, who would have access?" I asked through C.C.'s fur. That had to be the important question. I just hoped Felix had the important answer.

Felix tilted his head and stroked his mustache.

"Curare used to be a big friggin' wonder drug. Docs used the stuff for surgery. Poor suckers they worked on didn't move at all. But then the hoodoo-men found out it wasn't really a true anesthetic. That it just caused paralysis. Though the slice-and-dice docs still use it sometimes."

Damn, that made me think of Dean. I didn't want to think of Dean.

"Who else would have access?" I asked.

"South American blow-pipe wizards?" Felix hazarded.

I ran the suspects through a mental line-up. None of them were from South America as far as I could tell.

"So what else did you dig up?" I asked. Felix was on a roll and I wanted him to keep rolling.

"Vince Quadrini has more money than God," he answered. "Self-made zillionaire or something. He's a former plumber turned realtor. His wife bit the big one a few years back. He helped her with her homecare medication, if you

know what I mean." He pantomimed an injection with his hand. "Now the guy's some kind of whoopdee-do philanthropist."

"Yeah ..." I prompted. Keep his lips moving, I told myself.

"Phyllis Oberman is super-twink acupuncturist and herbalist. And get this, she used to be an emergency-room nurse." He paused. "And that little gremlin's husband, Lou Cassell, he does his time as an accountant for a chain of hospitals. And he's trained in all kinds of emergency whiz-bang.

"Then there's Dean Frazier, anesthesiologist extraordinaire." He paused dramatically.

"Give, Felix," I commanded. I had a feeling we were getting to the sparring part now.

"Dean was a friggin' paramedic in Vietnam." Felix went wild now, his hand imaginarily injecting a whole roomful of ghosts.

"And Ted Brown's kid was sick. Big Daddy spent all kinds of time in the hospital with him before he died. And Zoe Ingersoll's sick, too. Some wacko disease."

"So..."

"Man, everyone and their friggin' iguana had access to syringes," Felix summarized.

"But you want to hear the really gonzo part?" he added, smiling his Cheshire Cat grin.

I nodded nonchalantly.

Felix just kept smiling.

I hoped I wouldn't have to beg too much.

"What, Felix?" I asked softly.

"The Man himself, Captain Cal Xavier of the Verduras cop shop." He paused again. I made an experimental growling sound in my throat. C.C. leapt off my lap as Felix's smile disappeared. "Holy socks, you're getting weirder than a turtle on amphetamines," he told me.

I decided not to even try to understand his last sentence and growled a little deeper.

"Okay, okay. Don't have an exorcism or anything," he said, then smiled again. "Captain Cal is running for mayor of Verduras. It seems that the chief of the Verduras P.D. is planning to be there a long time, so Captain Cal's got no upward friggin' mobility. So the captain's just going to hop right over the chief before the chief caks in the saddle. Mayoralty is Captain Cal's game."

I nodded calmly and sagely, as my mind danced with the information. It did explain the smiles and the handshakes. Maybe.

"Does he happen to have a brother named Bob?" I asked Felix, stretching my luck. I just hoped Felix wouldn't stop to ask why I wanted to know. He didn't.

He leaned back and laughed instead. "Ah yes, brother Bob. Remember President Carter's brother Billy?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, that's brother Bob in a nutshell, or a plastic Baggie, as the legal case may be. The guy whose big brother is running for mayor ... is a lawyer. And just for extras, he's a drug lawyer. You got a little problem with your drug empire, call on Bob Xavier. Captain Cal is going out of his gourd. He'd probably take a hit out on the kid if he could."

Now that was good news. Maybe angering Bob Xavier wasn't the same as angering Captain Cal Xavier. But you never know. Family loyalty suspends disbelief sometimes.

"So what's the poop from Scott Green?" Felix asked, leaning forward, eyes gleaming. I knew then that my run of receiving information was over. I was no longer the givee. I was the giver. And Felix was the blunt object to make it all happen.

Felix Byrne had wrung my brain dry and still wanted more details by the time Wayne came home from La Fete a

L'Oiel, looking tired. He took one furrowed glance at me and my companion before escorting Felix out of the house.

I was just feeling my brain come back to life, and mumbling my thanks to Wayne for the rescue, when Ingrid walked in the door.

I tried to think of it as yin and yang. It was tai chi night after all. A balance in all things. So I didn't resist as Wayne led me gently down the hall toward bed.

Tuesday morning, at four a.m., we woke to the smell of skunk. The gagging smell of skunk, poisoning the whole bedroom.

"Arghmrmp!" Wayne roared through the pillow he held over his face.

"Yemmmyuk," I replied, holding the covers over my own head and coughing.

Some hours later, we agreed to the skunk broker's terms by telephone. He'd take our striped friends away on Saturday, he assured us. Saturday was five days too late as far as I was concerned, but the skunk broker was booked every evening until then. And as far as ethics went, ethics were gone. I didn't care if the man was just moving the skunks a block away. As long as he moved them.