Innocent Blood (13 page)

Margot let out a sound that would have been a scream if she had had any air in her lungs. Instead it was a high, wavering gasp.

‘It's Danny,' Frank heard himself saying, as if he were somebody else.

‘Stay still,' Nevile warned him. ‘Don't go any nearer. He's shocked enough already, we don't want to scare him.'

‘But we have to let him in,' begged Margot.

‘It's his spirit, Margot. It's his resonance. It's not his physical self. If he wanted to come inside, he could, and he would.'

‘Danny,' Margot pleaded. ‘Danny, can you talk to me? Oh, Danny, I love you so much!'

Danny continued to stare, but he didn't speak. Frank said, ‘Danny, can you hear me? I didn't know that you were hurt. If only I'd known . . .'

‘Your mom and dad love you, Danny,' put in Nevile. ‘Why don't you tell them that you love them, too?'

Almost a minute went past with Danny's image staring at them, unmoving.

‘Danny,' said Nevile, ‘do you understand what's happened to you? Do you know where you are?'

It was then that they heard a thin, muffled voice, which seemed closer than the image on the patio. ‘
He didn't care
.'

‘Who didn't care?'

‘
My dad. I was dying and he didn't care
.'

‘Danny,' said Frank, ‘I swear to God that I didn't know you were hurt so bad. I swear it.'

‘
I was dying and I called you and I called you but you didn't hear me and you didn't come back
.'

‘Danny . . .' Frank started, but it was all he could do not to choke.

‘
You want me to forgive you but you didn't care and I will never forgive you, ever. I hope you see my dead face every day until you die, and when you die I hope you go to hell.
'

‘Danny, for Christ's sake . . .'

‘
For nobody's sake, Dad. For nobody's sake but your own. You took my whole life away from me because you didn't care, and not caring is the greatest sin of all
.'

Frank took a step toward the windows. Margot snatched at his sleeve and said, ‘No, Frank,' but he pried himself free and carried on, until he was close enough to touch the glass. Danny stayed where he was, out on the patio, white-faced, staring.

Nevile said, ‘Careful, Frank. He's totally traumatized by what happened to him. You don't want to make things worse.'

‘How can I make things worse? I let him die and he won't forgive me.'

‘Not yet. But give him a little time.'

‘Time? What time? I took all his time away from him.'

‘Frank . . .' Nevile cautioned him, but Frank took hold of the door handle and unlocked it. ‘Frank, maybe you don't want to do that.'

Frank rolled the door to one side. And there, out on the patio, was nothing at all. Nothing but the breeze, and the gloomy afternoon light, and the pungent smell of eucalyptus.

‘Danny, I didn't know,' Frank whispered. Thunder rumbled over the San Gabriel Mountains. ‘I'm so sorry, Danny. I didn't know.'

He turned back into the living room. Margot was standing on the opposite side of the room with her back turned. Nevile was sitting next to Lynn, holding both of her hands.

‘What do I do now?' Frank asked.

Nine

‘
D
anny
will
forgive you, you know, given time,' said Nevile.

Frank finished writing his check on the roof of Nevile's Mercedes, signed it, and handed it over. ‘I can't say you didn't earn it.'

‘I don't know, Frank. I still have the feeling that something wasn't quite right. Of course I've had visual manifestations before, but this is the first time that anybody else has been able to see them.'

‘Well, maybe we ought to try it again, when Danny's been laid to rest. You know, maybe he might have learned to accept it.'

‘When's the funeral?'

‘Wednesday morning, at Oak Lawn. You're welcome to come if you want to.'

‘Maybe I will. Thanks. And thanks for the . . . um . . .' He held up the still-drying check.

He drove off, and Frank watched him go. As he turned back to the house, he saw Margot and Lynn coming out. Lynn had her handkerchief pressed to her mouth, and Margot gave Frank a look that meant,
don't even come near us, OK?

‘I'm taking Lynn home,' she said, ‘and then I'm going to see my parents.'

‘All right. What time do you think you'll be back?'

‘I don't know. Maybe I'll stay overnight. There's some leftover pasta in the fridge if you're hungry.'

‘Margot . . .'

‘There's nothing to say, Frank. I can hardly believe what happened today, but it did, and I need some time to think about it.'

‘You heard what Nevile said. Danny's traumatized. He doesn't know what he's saying.'

‘He's
dead
, Frank, and he
still
doesn't forgive you. Doesn't that tell you something?'

Frank didn't know what to say to that. He stood on the porch while Margot backed her car down the driveway, turned in the street with a protesting squeal of tires, and drove off toward Hollywood Way without looking back at him once.

He was about to go back into the house when a gray Ford Taurus appeared around the corner and parked right outside. Lieutenant Chessman climbed out, followed by Detective Booker.

‘Mr Bell! Glad I caught you at home!'

‘Hi, there, Lieutenant. What can I do for you today?'

Lieutenant Chessman came up the driveway and took his notebook out of his coat pocket. ‘I hope I'm not interrupting anything, but I still have one or two loose ends to tie up, and I was hoping that maybe I could jog your memory a little more.'

‘Lieutenant, I told you everything I saw.'

‘You did, yes. But I'm still having difficulty locating this woman you say you met immediately after the explosion. I've identified and talked to every other eye witness, and pinpointed their exact whereabouts immediately prior to the explosion, and also immediately after. But this one woman remains a mystery – Ms X. I don't know who she is, or what she was doing there, or what she might have seen.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Frank. ‘I don't see how I can help you. I asked her if she was OK, and she asked me if
I
was OK, and that was about all we said to each other. I gave my address to one of the officers at the scene, and when I turned around she was gone.'

‘Was there anything memorable about her? Anything at all?'

‘She was about five-four, mid-twenties I guess. Short hair.'

‘What was she wearing?'

‘Just a plain, ordinary dress. Yellow, or cream, as I recall.'

‘And one shoe? Did you notice what kind of shoe?'

‘A sandal, I think. One of those strappy things. Brown.'

‘OK. And that's all you remember? She wasn't wearing any distinctive jewelry? She didn't say anything that struck you as odd?'

‘No, sorry.'

Lieutenant Chessman laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Very well, Mr Bell. Thank you for your time. If possible, I'd like you to try to think back to that morning, and visualize that young woman, and if anything at all comes to mind – and I really mean
anything
– please give me a call.'

‘She's not a suspect, is she?'

‘Oh, no. This is just for the sake of completeness. In investigations like this, we're very great sticklers for completeness.'

When Lieutenant Chessman had left, Frank went back into the house. He stepped out on to the patio and looked around, but of course there was no trace at all that Danny had been here. Danny, or his psychic imprint, or his ghost, or whatever it had been. The skies over the mountains were beginning to clear, and suddenly the sun appeared, but Frank shivered.

He had the nagging suspicion that something was happening in his life that he didn't fully understand. He felt almost like a cheated husband who comes home early and finds an unfamiliar set of car keys on the table in the hall, or answers the telephone only to have the caller hang up. Everybody seemed to know more than he did. Why was Lieutenant Chessman so intent on finding Astrid? What was it that Nevile thought ‘wasn't quite right?' Why wouldn't Astrid tell him who she really was?

He could have told Lieutenant Chessman that he was seeing Astrid.
Should
have told him. But Astrid's identity was the only thing that he knew that nobody else appeared to know, and although he didn't know why, he wanted to keep it to himself, for the time being at least.

The phone rang. It was Mo.

‘How's it going, old buddy?'

‘About as crappy as it gets.'

‘Did you hear the news? Those Dar Tariki lunatics have demanded that all TV shows with any kind of immoral content have to be taken off the air, otherwise they're going to stage the biggest act of terrorism since September 11.'

‘They've demanded
what
? This is insane. What the hell do they mean by “immoral content”? Just about every TV show has some kind of immoral content. Soaps, cop shows, everything. How can you show good defeating evil if you can't show evil?'

‘Nevertheless, old buddy, that's the ultimatum.'

‘So how has the network taken it?'

‘Think “headless chicken.”'

Frank drove to Sherman Oaks to see his sister Carol, who lived with her husband, Smitty, and their three children in a large, scruffy house on the corner of Stone Canyon Avenue. The front lawn was always strewn with scooters and Action Man toys and Smitty's lime-green '68 Plymouth Barracuda was always jacked up in the driveway, in varying degrees of dismemberment.

He walked in to find Carol in her saucepan-cluttered kitchen, trying to make
estofado
. She was a hopeless cook, which was one of the reasons why Frank didn't visit very often. The last time he had come round to dinner she had cooked chicken breasts in chili cream and he had spent the next day crouched on the toilet with his teeth chattering, praying for death. How Smitty and the kids had survived for so long he couldn't imagine.

‘You look like shit,' Carol told him, slicing up green and red capsicums. She was a big woman, three years older than him, with the same brown eyes, but a very much rounder face, and a pudgier nose, and wild brown curls that looked as if she chopped them into shape herself.

‘I think this has finished us off,' he said. ‘Margot and me. I think it's
kaput
sville.'

‘Hey – you're still in shock, both of you.'

‘All of us.'

‘
All
of you?'

‘Me and Margot and Danny, too. We held a séance today. You've heard of this British guy, Nevile Strange, the psychic detective? The one who's been helping out with the investigation into these bombings?'

‘You held a
séance
? For Christ's sake, Frank. I didn't think you believed in any of that crap.'

‘I don't. I
didn't
. Not until today. I saw Danny, sis. I actually saw him, and I heard his voice, too.'

Smitty came into the kitchen. He was about two inches shorter than Carol, with thinning blond hair that stuck vertically up in the air, bright blue eyes and a permanently surprised face. He was wearing a T-shirt that read
PROFANITY IS THE LAST RESORT OF THE INARTICULATE.
He hijacked a slice of red pepper from the chopping board and crunched it between his highly irregular teeth.

‘Did I hear séance?'

Frank said, ‘That's right. I met this guy Nevile Strange when he was looking around The Cedars. He said he could get in touch with people who had passed over, so I asked him if we could talk to Danny. I guess I wanted to hear Danny forgive me. Well, that isn't strictly true. I wanted
Margot
to hear Danny forgive me'

‘What's to forgive?' Smitty protested. ‘A bomb went off, for chrissakes. Besides, these séances, what a phony!'

‘I don't think this one was phony.'

‘Oh yeah? My old lady went to a séance after my old man kicked the bucket. This medium told her that my old man was waiting for her in heaven so that they could dance the night away just like they always did. Total baloney, of course, because my old man lost both his feet at Inch'on. Stupid palooka stood too close to a tank.'

Carol flapped her hand at Smitty in irritable dismissal. ‘You really
saw
Danny?' she asked Frank.

‘Standing in the back yard. As clear as I can see you now. We all saw him.'

‘You're serious?' asked Smitty, crunching another slice of pepper.

‘He said it was all my fault that he was dead and that he wanted to see me in hell.'

Smitty emphatically shook his head. ‘Nah, you don't want to take any notice of that. You didn't see nothing. That was a . . . what . . . an optical delusion. That's what these mediums do. They delude you. Optically. And financially. You didn't
pay
this guy, did you?'

They sat in the swing in the back yard in the last warm light of the day, drinking beer and eating pretzels. Carol's three boys were rolling around on the crabgrass, playing space ninjas.

Carol said, ‘You won't lose Margot, believe me. But she's always been kind of private, hasn't she? She needs some time to work things out inside of her head.'

‘I guess you're right. But I feel like something's gone out of our marriage. Something we can never get back.'

‘That's life, Frank. We're always losing things we can never get back.'