The Hell You Say (22 page)
Lisa made whisking motions toward the den.
I went down a long hallway paneled with photographs of the Dauten girls through years of bangs and braces and bustiers.
The den was neither immaculate, nor beautifully decorated. It was a barn-sized room with a TV that took up an entire wall, two recliner chairs, and a long sectional sofa in a muted plaid. A book shelf held a collection of beer steins and golf trophies.
Emma knelt at a huge coffee table littered with chicken wings and an assortment of dips and chips. She was laboring over a pile of colored pencils, rulers, and what looked like a Spirograph. Dauten lounged in one of the recliners. He held the TV remote control in one hand, a beer mug in the other.
“Crrrrap!” he howled. “Go around the end! You idiot!” He glanced my way and said pleasantly, “Hello, Adrien. Grab a beer and pull up a chair.”
I sat on the sofa, which was as wide as a twin bed. Emma looked up at me from under the fringe of dark bangs.
“Hello. Who do you want to win?”
“Hello.” I reached over and selected a barbecue chip. “I don’t care.”
Her mouth dropped. Her eyes popped. I opened my mouth to retract this unsportsmanlike sentiment, but she giggled and returned to her squiggles. I realized that a twelve-year-old had successfully yanked my chain.
Natalie slipped into the room, deposited a bottle of Carlsberg and a frosted pilsner on the table in front of me, gave me thumbs up, and slipped out again.
I stared at the screen watching the burly ant figures race up and down the green field, my thoughts on the brief visit I’d paid the Library of Congress Web site before driving over.
Robert M. Friedlander, born in 1954, had several literary works to his name. Unlike the early efforts of G.O. Savage, Friedlander wrote “beautifully written, critically acclaimed literary fiction that no one wanted to read.” He had stopped writing in 2000, which coincidentally was when Gabriel Savant had appeared on the literary scene with The Illuminati Initiative, which had rocketed to the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list.
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Josh Lanyon
So you had two capable, but not particularly successful writers who had given up writing at approximately the same moment that the immensely successful Gabriel Savant had appeared on the scene with his “handler,” Bobby Friedman.
Gabriel Savant’s prose reflected none of the literary flourishes of Robert M. Friedman or the pulpy excesses of G.O. Savage. It was fast-paced, easy-reading, well-researched mass-market fiction. But the thing that truly set these books apart was the author himself. By all accounts Savant was a marketing genius. He was tireless and inventive. He was handsome and charismatic. He was a publisher’s dream come true -- and he managed to turn out a book every nine months like clockwork, while constantly touring and promoting.
I remembered my first visit to Friedlander at the Biltmore. He had been printing off his laptop. His world disintegrating around him, his author-charge MIA, Friedlander had been running off a manuscript. Now who did that sound like? It sounded like 99.9% of the writers I knew.
Emma spoke, interrupting my reflections.
“Did you ever notice,” she said, tucking her long, dark hair behind her ear, “that if you change the ‘p’ in pink for an ‘o,’ it spells oink?”
“No.”
“It looks really funny.”
“I bet.”
“Halftime.” Dauten snorted. “They call this excuse for a Las Vegas floor show halftime?
Emmy, do not look at this TV.”
“Do you know what?” Emma said, fixing me with those doe eyes. “Santa spelled backward is Satan.”
I did a double take. She continued to look at me, all rosy-cheeked and innocent. I mean, come on. What was I thinking. Damien?
“It spells Atnas, doesn’t it?” I objected.
She frowned at her paper. “Oh, yeah. It’s a mammogram.”
I narrowly escaped spilling my beer in my lap. “Anagram, maybe?” I suggested.
“Umm-hmm,” Her tone implied that this is what she had said. She went back to working on her crossword or Da Vinci’s code, or whatever the heck she was scribbling at so earnestly.
* * * * *
Yeah, I did, but that wasn’t possible.
The Hell You Say
137
So I took a chance and went to see if Bob Friedlander had already checked out of the Biltmore Hotel.
I didn’t bother inquiring at the front desk. He was either there, or he wasn’t. I didn’t want to give him a heads-up.
The elevator opened onto the hushed hallway. There wasn’t a soul to be seen. I walked slowly to the room, thinking they could use more lights up here.
He took a long time to answer my knock. I began to fear I’d missed him, when I heard the bolt slide.
The door swung open. I had a glimpse of a tidy and impersonal hotel suite. No printer, no clothes strewn about, no booze, and no gun as far as I could see -- which wasn’t that far.
Bob appeared to be packed and ready to go.
“Adrien!” Bob exclaimed with a distinct lack of pleasure. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“No.” I hadn’t wasted time on social niceties. Neither did Bob. “I don’t have time.” He started to shut the door. I reached out to stop him.
I said, “Bob, we both know Gabe isn’t staying out in Malibu. They have him, don’t they?”
“Be quiet,” he said fiercely and grabbed me by the front of my jacket, dragging me into the hotel room. I didn’t resist; I wanted into that room.
The hotel door slammed shut. Bob let go of me, breathing hard. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“You’re going to get us both killed.”
Same old song, same old story. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll go away. Who or what is Blade Sable?”
“I don’t know!”
“Bullshit. You have to have some idea.”
“Why the hell can’t you leave this alone? What the hell does it matter to you?”
Not a bad question, but moot.
I didn’t move, didn’t speak, just waited him out. Jake had pulled that trick on me a couple of times, so I knew it was effective.
After forty seconds (which is a sizable stretch of silence when you’re mad enough to throttle someone), Bob burst out, “Blade Sable was Gabe’s project. How many times do I have to tell you? Gabe was doing his own --” He stopped.
“Gabe was doing his own thing,” I said. “And that isn’t how it works, is it? Gabe is the front man. You write the books. It’s a partnership, but not an equal partnership, because you do all the work, and Gabe gets all the glory.”
His face, already flushed with anger, turned a medic-alert shade of puce.
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Josh Lanyon
“What do you know? That’s the way we wanted it! We started out trying to write together, but it worked better this way. I don’t want what you call “the glory.” I don’t want to get out there and meet my public -- our public. You saw those freaks. You think I want to rub shoulders with that?”
“Okay, so it’s a real partnership. But Gabe decided he wanted to write this book, this exposé.”
“He’s always taken this stuff too seriously. The occult. He had to dabble -- he had to experiment.”
In other words, It’s his own damn fault.
I guessed, “But then he connected with Blade Sable.”
He ran his hands over his sparse hair. “He went to a party the last time we did LA. That was a year ago in October. I remember because we were doing a lot of Halloween tie-ins for Vertex of the Vampyres. Anyway, something happened. He saw something or overheard something. Whatever it was, it terrified him. I’ve known him twenty years, but I’ve never seen him like that.”
“You have no idea what?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know the details, because he never shared any. Though he was scared, he kept poking, kept prying, kept trying to find out more. He thought it was huge, that it reached all the way to City Hall and beyond. He thought there was a book in it.”
He added bitterly, “A book for him, not us.”
“Where was the party held?”
“I don’t know. In Los Angeles, I think.”
I took a random shot. “Pacific Palisades? By the ocean?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did he say who was at the party? Did he ever mention any names?”
“I told you, I don’t know the details.”
“Did he write the book?”
“I think so. He must have written a lot of it.”
“Was it on that disk that disappeared?”
“I think so.”
“He must have had a couple of backups.”
“I’m sure he did, but they wouldn’t be where I would find them. He didn’t want me to know what he was doing.”
“The panic over the lost disk was because he was afraid this group or this person would find out what he was writing? He was afraid of them.”
Bob nodded.
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Then why the hell had Savant brought that disk with him? Why had he told these people about it -- because he must have told someone. I didn’t believe they saw it in a crystal ball.
I turned my attention back to Friedlander. “What was the deal with that postcard?
Why did you try to convince me that Gabe was safe when he’s still missing?”
“They told me to. They told me to let it go. They said a postcard would be coming from Gabe and that it would prove he was alive. They said if I didn’t play along, he would be dead, and I’d be next. They said the police didn’t believe me, anyway, and it’s true. The police didn’t believe me. Or at least they pretended not to.”
“Who told you all this?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see them. They called from a phone inside the hotel. They knew my room. They knew everything.”
“When did they call you?”
“I don’t remember.”
I was tempted to prompt him, but I knew better. “Try,” I said.
He thought hard. “Last Wednesday, I think.”
“The day I came to see you?”
He looked confused, then nodded. “The first time, yes, that’s right. They said to call you and tell you that it was all okay, Gabe was safe --”
I interrupted, “They said to call me? They mentioned me by name?”
“Yes. They said you were nosing around, that if you kept it up, they’d kill Gabe and then me.”
I put that aside to consider later. “So what happens now?”
He couldn’t meet my eyes. I said, disbelieving, “You’re walking away from this?”
“What am I supposed to do? Getting myself killed won’t change anything. Gabe is dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
He looked up then. Though he shook with anger, I understood that the anger was not truly directed at me. “They couldn’t let him go. He knew too much.”
“You don’t even know what it is he knew -- knows.”
“Whatever it was, it was too much.”
“So you’re going to pack up and fly out of here and…you think no one is going to notice when bestselling author Gabriel Savant never shows again?”
“They won’t find him, and anyway, I have the postcard. The police are the ones who decided he left by his own volition. I did what I could.”
“Bob…” I gave it up as I read the stubborn fear on his face.
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He said, “Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself.”
* * * * *
Then, like that, the rush was over, and the place was a boneyard. I washed down half a chicken salad sandwich with a can of cold Tab and was lugging coffee-table books the size of paving stones back to their shelves, when Jake walked into the shop.
I smiled, then stopped smiling at his expression.
“I need to talk to you.”
I nodded. “We’re alone,” I said, turning toward the office, but he walked toward the front of the shop, so I followed. We stood in the alcove that faced the street. His face looked like granite as he stared out the window trimmed with the fake pine boughs he had helped me hang so short a time ago.
Had he found out about my trip to Pacific Palisades? I’d realized that he might be pissed. But no… This was different. My stomach churned, waiting for whatever was coming.
He met my eyes levelly. “I’m telling you first. Kate and I are getting married.”
I had known it was coming, but that didn’t make it any less painful. My throat closed, so I nodded.
He folded his lips tightly. “I want this marriage to work. I want it to be a real marriage.”
“I figured.”
Then he seemed to run out of words. We stood there. I was afraid my face would give me away, so I stared out the window at the cars flashing by down the street. Red, white, white, green….
“I’m not going to try to explain or make excuses,” Jake said, and his voice sounded too loud, like if he didn’t speak strongly, it would shake. “This is my chance for a normal life. I’m taking it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to apologize. You knew the score going in.”
I lifted a shoulder.
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There were things I might have said. Maybe even things I should have said. But I knew they wouldn’t change the outcome, and I wasn’t sure I could say them and keep control of my voice and face. Right now, keeping control in front of him seemed like the paramount thing.
“It’s not because of your health.”
“I know that.” Hostility turned my gaze back to his. He looked away from me.
“I know that asshole you were with in college --”
“Can we leave that asshole out of it?”
Please, gentlemen, one asshole at a time.