The Love-Haight Case Files (24 page)

“Bella. She is my world. Sure. Sure. You get me home, please.”

“We have to talk about the evidence—”

Thomas drifted closer and joined Evelyn on the bench. His ghostly closeness lowered the temperature and Evelyn shivered.

“Mr. Vujetic,” Thomas interrupted.

“Dimitar, please.”

“Dimitar. Evelyn is right. We do have to address the evidence. But before that, I’d like to know a little more about you.”

Evelyn could’ve kicked herself. Sure, she’d graduated with that coveted four-point-oh, knew the law well—having worked in law offices since she was a teenager, but sometimes she got so wrapped up in paperwork and filings that she didn’t think about the “human” element. That was going to have to change.

“You want to know about me, Mr. Brock?”

“Yes. What you do, where you live, how you—”

“Live? I do not live, Mr. Brock. I exist. You, more than most people, should understand that I do not live. Though, unlike you, I am able to change clothes. I can touch, and I can smell. But I cannot cry. Inside I cry, but no tears come. I exist.”

Chapter 3.5

The room fell quiet. The sound of wheels from a cart clattering on the level above followed by the ratcheting sound of a cell door opening and closing somewhere, penetrated the silence. Evelyn was the only one in the room that was breathing.

“Aunt Milka,” Dimitar continued. “She made me and Javor like this, vampires, back home in Zarozje. Me and Javor and her two children. Sava, the first vampire, made Milka, and Milka had wanted a family to share her condition and be with her through the centuries. She did not want to be alone.” He brought his hands in close and patted his stomach. “Milka, she made me like this forever. And she made it impossible for me to cry.”

So what you were in life, you were stuck with if you became an undead, Evelyn thought.

“In Zarozje, I ate too much. I had a bakery and ate what did not sell. Now I do not eat, and yet I have this.” He grabbed a roll of fat and wiggled it. “Milka, she cursed me to be like this forever.” He leaned forward so he could tug on his hair. “This I have … forever. If I cut it, my hair, it will not grow back. My hair is dead, like me.”

“Where is Milka now?” Thomas asked. “Is she in San—”

“Dead,” Dimitar said. “Truly dead. Like her children, truly dead many, many years ago. Forever dead. Vampires were hunted in Serbia back then. Hunted now, too, though not like then.” He paused. “Hunted here sometimes. Yes, even in San Francisco. An inmate, three, four days ago, stabbed me, but he did not pierce my dead heart, and so I healed. I want to go home, please. The guards, they do not like me either. But then some people hate all vampires.”

Evelyn thought about how pop culture had made teenage girls swoon over vampires—
Twilight
and
Buffy.

She took a turn. “Dimitar, you and your brother came to America a long time ago.”

“Sure. Sure. To start anew,” he said. “To avoid the vampire hunters in Serbia.” Finally he smiled. He had only one fang, the other was blunted at an angle, broken off. “Land of milk and honey and opportunity, these United States, my brother told me. Gold in them thar hills. Beverly Hills. Swimming pools and movie stars. Texas tea, eh? Black gold. Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, dem golden slippers.” A stoic expression took over. “I like this city well enough. I have family here, my brother, some cousins. And I have friends, other vampires in the Tenderloin, Mrs. Miller, the neighbors in my apartment building, and some humans at the church. I am a good man.” He paused and stared directly at Evelyn. “But not all the vampires in the Tenderloin are nice like me and my brother.”

Evelyn opened her mouth to ask a question, but Dimitar continued.

“My brother, when he called last night he said you ran from him in the Tenderloin. He said that he chased you down and brought you back to his restaurant, so the two of you could talk. You were not wrong to run. My brother, he is a decent man. He hires respectable people, though only a few of them are human. But most of the vampires in the Tenderloin … from them you should indeed run, and run very fast. Those are vampires that it is all right to hate.”

Thomas leaned forward. “When did you move to San Francisco, Dimitar?”

“In nineteen hundred something. The years, they blur. You should ask Javor. He keeps track of such things. We made some money in the gold rush. Javor, he invested his share. He is very, very wealthy. He owns lots of places in the Tenderloin and elsewhere.”

“But not you,” Evelyn said. “You are not wealthy.”

He smiled broadly. “The expression is what—I live hand-to-mouth. Always have, always will. I have a low-rent basement apartment three blocks from the blood bank on Ellis, not far from Glide Memorial. That church, it has evening services, and I go, even though it is not Catholic. I give some of my money to the church; I tithe. Spend the rest of my money on DVDs, clothes from the Big and Tall catalog, books I mail order from Edward R. Hamilton, and things for Bella. Eh … I save some for public transportation because I do not drive. Otherwise I spend it all. My pension from the subway covers my rent.”

“Pension?” Evelyn mused aloud.

“Sure. Sure. That is why undead like me cannot get full-time jobs anymore I think, employers and the state … they fear paying pensions for a very long time. Paying two, three, four pensions maybe all for one person. Only just now are they passing laws limiting the number of pensions one person can get.” Dimitar looked serious now. “My dog, Bella. Mrs. Miller, she is my neighbor. Javor says she is taking care of my dog. She walks Bella during the day, when I cannot go out because of the sun. Will you check on my dog? Make sure Mrs. Miller is doing a good job?”

Evelyn nodded. A thought flitted: did he keep a dog so he could drink its blood?
Don’t ask that
.
Don’t go there. I don’t need to know, don’t want to know.
Though she supposed she’d find out when she looked in on the animal.

“Mrs. Miller, you get a spare key from her. She will open my apartment for you. And you check on my Bella.”

“You worked in the subway a while back? Long enough to get that pension?” This from Thomas, redirecting the conversation.

“Sure. Sure. I worked a lot of places, at night, or underground. I can work underground during the day, never make much money at these places, just enough for the DVDs and stuff and my dog. The subway? That was the only place I work full-time and long enough to get a pension. Sure. Sure. I worked there. And I worked in sewers a lot of years, though all part-time. The living? They don’t like that sort of work, the sewers and subway. Most of the living do not like the deep dark.”

“Why didn’t you go into business with Javor?” Evelyn wondered. “You wouldn’t need to worry about money.”

He shrugged and the gesture made the bench creak. “I told you I ran a bakery when I lived. I do not want to be around food now, Mrs. Love. And whatever I made with Javor? I would have tossed it away, as I said. It is my nature.”

“Ms.
Ms. Love.”

Another shrug. “Do not want to be around food. Just what I buy for my dog,
Ms.
Love.”

“But blood,” Thomas said.

Evelyn saw what Thomas had done, learned a little bit about Dimitar, got him to talk and relax—he was not fidgeting near as much, and now was swinging the conversation around to the heart of the matter.

“You drink blood,” Thomas continued.

“Sure. Sure.”

“That is food to you.”

“Sure. Sure. But I do not need much blood to survive. Once, twice sometimes a week is all I go out and buy for. Here in jail, they provide me blood once a day, a small bag.”

“And you worked at a blood bank,” Thomas said. “Part-time, right? Four nights a week?”

A new expression crossed Dimitar’s face: mean, ugly, angry, suspicious. Evelyn saw all of those things. She also saw him clench his fists, the knuckles turning bone-white.

“I do not get my blood there, from the blood bank. Well, I do … but I don’t. I told Ms. Wyndam-Smyth that. I told the judge that. I explained it all. My blood, I buy it from Type-O-To-Go on Geary near the Alcazar Theatre, the blood store in the Tenderloin. My brother buys there, too. The prices are good … animal blood, human blood, sometimes fey blood … but that is too expensive for me, and I do not care for it anyway. My brother, he likes fey blood, though. They also carry corpses and assorted body parts for the ghouls and zombies. It is all regulated. They have a business license.”

“Is that the only place you went to buy blood for drinking?” Thomas asked.

“Sure. Sure. But I know what you hint at. There are other places in the Tenderloin, places where the living people go to get their blood drained, to get high from the experience, euphoric. Some say it gives them a sexual buzz. Some of the living people go to those places looking to be made a vampire. But those places are not legal, Mr. Brock, no those places are not. People, they can die in those places. And those looking to become one of us … it does not always work. The police, they raid those places when they find them. I do not go there, and I do not think my brother goes there either. We obey the law,
Ms.
Love, Mr. Brock. We respect this country and all of its many, many laws.”

“Tell us more about the blood bank,” Thomas coaxed.

Dimitar tugged on the chain, and the post in the center of the table wiggled. “The blood bank I worked at … it supplies hospitals. It is closely regulated, the blood carefully tested and typed. Not like at Type-O-To-Go and other such stores. Those stores never test the blood. They just buy it from those who roll up their sleeves. They are not required to test it. For us? For vampires, it is not necessary to screen the pints we drink. Blood is blood. But bad blood leaves a funny taste sometimes.”

Evelyn intended to write all of this down the moment she left here. Thomas had suggested she not take notes during the first meeting, just rely on her memory, make a judgment on whether she would take the case, and schedule a second meeting to follow up for more details.

“At the blood bank,” Evelyn nudged. “What was your job there?”

“I worked in the lab at night, four nights a week. But sometimes three. It depended on the schedule. They always kept me under the full-time mark so I would not qualify for insurance and benefits.”

“So you have had lab technician training?” Evelyn pressed.

“No.”

“Then what, precisely, did you do in the lab?” Thomas leaned halfway into the table. “Your employment record says technician.”

This time when Dimitar shrugged the bench groaned ominously. “I am a taste-tester, Mr. Brock. But the blood bank, I do not think they want the hospitals or the public to know that.”

Evelyn sucked in a breath. “You
taste
blood? For the blood bank?”

“Sure. Sure. That job … that was the reason I only bought a pint of blood from Type-O-To-Go once or twice a week. I was taste-testing enough to keep me filled. See, all those tests they run on blood with microscopes and whirr-machines, they are not perfect. Sometimes,
Ms.
Love, sometimes a donor is so recently exposed to something that it doesn’t show up in the blood right away—at least through the usual testing methods. You see, those tests and the whirr-machines do not pick up the early-early diseases, which can get passed along through transfusions. But I can pick up the early-early diseases. My palate? It is so refined I am better than all those machines and microscopes. Not all vampires have such a refined palate. I am a bit of an exception. Perhaps my years in the bakery helped. So, like I say, I was testing so much blood I never had to buy a lot for myself. I was the only vampire working at that blood bank. They had a few zombies, though, in the cleaning crew.”

“And you tested every sample?” Evelyn asked.

“Sure. Sure. Just a teaspoon’s worth is all I’d need to check. I’d usually find bad blood a couple of times a week. And the bad stuff? They let me have that. I drank it on site, never took any home. Most of the blood, though, most coming in was good and safe for the hospitals. And before you ask, no, I do not know if other blood banks in other places use vampires for taste-testers. And, no, I did not ever say that blood was bad just so I could have it. I do not lie.”

Evelyn sat back. HIV was still prevalent in San Francisco, and she guessed that was primarily what Dimitar was talking about. If someone had just been exposed and had given blood, standard testing methods might not reveal that.

“HIV.” Thomas voiced her thoughts. “You test for HIV-tainted blood.”

“And hepatitis B and hepatitis C, too. Those are the most common blood-borne pathogens, Mr. Brock. Bacterial contaminations too, though not so often. But every once in a while a … oh, what do they call it … component. Sometimes a ‘component’ will become contaminated during collection or processing, and it isn’t caught until someone receives a transfusion and has a reaction. I taste for all of those things. I keep people from getting sick with bad blood.”

“Wow,” Evelyn said. “Important work.”

“So I did not do this thing they say. I did not steal blood. Why would I need to, Ms. Love? And why would I? Thou shalt not steal.” Again he made the sign of the cross. “My boss, Ginny Sams, she wants me cleared so I can go back. She came to visit me yesterday. You talk to her. She will tell you I did not do this thing.”

Evelyn consulted the papers in the folder. On the floor above, a wheeled cart clattered by again and another cell door ratcheted open and closed.

“Fahim Yar’Adua, one of the evening shift lab technicians, documented blood missing on three consecutive shifts that you worked. He claims he saw you stuffing pints in your backpack on one of those nights and slipping out the side door. He’s the one who went to the police.” Evelyn closed the folder. “That’s basically the extent of the evidence. That, and a police search of your apartment yielded a dozen empty pint containers stamped with the blood bank logo.” The report also said there were no fingerprints found on the containers, something she found suspicious but did not mention to Dimitar.

“Fahim Yar’Adua tells lies,
Ms.
Love. I do not. And those containers? Someone put them in my apartment. I think the word is planted, yes?”