Red Delicious(11)

But you do what you gotta, misgivings or no misgivings, right?

Right.

Better to show up unannounced than be told she didn't have time to see me.

That day, a couple of wealthy South Korean patrons were getting the red carpet, VIP, all the frills, bells, and whistles in exchange for whatever they'd decided they could live without. In this life and/or the next. I was ushered into Drusneth's office by a surly pair of the se'irim bouncers she has on hand to be sure everyone stays in line. Then she kept me waiting for over an hour. I suppose I had that coming, not even having bothered to call ahead. Wasn't the first time I'd been in the room-though it was the first time I'd been in the room alone-but I was still amazed by the organized clutter of the place. Sort of like the attic castoffs of an antique dealer obsessed with Late Baroque and Rococo furniture, paintings, mirrors, a chandelier, and tchotchkes (yep, I, the dropout, once read a book on art and architecture; believe it or not, I don't care). An almost surreal jackstraw heap of chairs, tables, cabinets, cupboards, bookshelves, and footstools, that room, and I always got the feeling that it wouldn't be hard to drown in all those gilded acanthus leaves and mahogany seashells. Her desk seemed to go on for-fucking-ever, side to side, front to back, adding to the dizzying impression the room was somehow bigger on the inside than on the outside, all Tardis-like. I sat and tried not to look at the portraits, because the faces in them always seemed to be peering warily back at me.

I wanted a cigarette, but I knew better.

I waited.

I waited.

I waited some more.

Finally, Drusneth swept into the room and slammed the door behind her. I've never seen her shut a door any other way. I think she just enjoys slamming doors. That day, she was wearing the body of a pale-skinned woman. There was a scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose and beneath her beryl-green eyes. Her eyebrows and hair were honey blonde. Drusneth changes her skin just about as often as Mean Mr. B changes names. He'd told me one of the cabinets held a few hundred stoppered vials, each containing the likeness of a person she or one of her whores had stolen over the decades, pilfered from customers with more appetite than good sense. That day, she was decked out in a ball gown that would have been fashionable during the reign of Louis XIV and that couldn't have done a better job of clashing with her office's décor. The dress was a sickly yellow color, as though it were dying of hepatitis. She trailed the odor of rotting eggs-or, if you prefer, brimstone, but demons hate that word.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, taking her seat behind the gigantic desk. Her voice was simultaneously soothing and terrifying, a summer breeze and an earthquake scrambled into one incongruous omelette.

"No, no. I'm the one who should be apologizing, showing up out of the blue like this."

She smiled at me. Ain't no sort of shape-shifting in all the world can hide the wickedness of a smile like that, any more than it can hide the cruel glint in the eyes of a succubus. I couldn't have stood up and left the room if I'd wanted to. Actually, I probably did want to. But she'd nailed me to the spot. I'd come of my own accord, and there I'd stay until she was done with me. It was all I could do to keep talking.

"And just what urgent wind has blown you my way, my dear Quinn?"

I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead and upper lip. "You might have heard," I said, "that B's taken on a job for Edgar Maidstone's oldest daughter, trying to help her find her sister. Supposed to be a secret, but-"

"Yes, Quinn. The news has reached me. Only just this morning, as it happens. Though I'm not certain how this involves me." Her eyes sparkled, and I wished that I could look away.                       
       
           



       

"It probably doesn't."

"And yet here you are," she said, then made a steeple of her fingers and rested her chin on the tips.

I managed a deep breath and somehow managed to exhale. "Berenice-"

"Ever her sister's keeper."

"-said that Amity is a frequent customer of yours."

"Which gives one or the both of you cause to suspect I know what's become of Maidstone's wee slut?" She paused a moment, then, before I had a chance to answer, added a second question. "Quinn, is B aware you're here?"

"No," I replied.

"I thought not. Because I know he'd have advised against it. More probably, he'd have wisely forbidden you to disturb me and waste my time with this poppycock."

I nodded about as slowly as anyone can. I felt mired in hot tar. "No doubt," I told her.

"Which is why you didn't ask his permission."

"B has a lot on his plate just now. He put Shaker Lashly on the case before me, and Lashly turned up dead last night."

"How very unfortunate for him," she said with not the smallest trace of sincerity. Drusneth leaned back in her chair, unsteepling her hands. She flared her nostrils.

"I should go," I heard myself whisper. "I shouldn't have bothered you."

Drusneth tilted her head to one side, and her jaundiced dress rustled and twitched.

"Quinn, you are always welcome here," she said, tossing out those six words so it was clear she meant just the opposite. "If only in memory of poor departed Clemency. But I've no idea whatsoever what has befallen Amity Maidstone. True, she has visited my parlor many times. She has a reputation for exceptionally unwonted cravings, which we have been happy to sate. Alas, she's also a shrewd girl, and we've reaped far less from our transactions with her than this house would have hoped. We are unaccustomed to such acumen, but she is her father's daughter."

"Weird sisters," I muttered, though I hadn't meant to say anything at all. I realized the smell of sulfur was fading, and in its place I smelled lavender.

"Of a certain," Drusneth said. Her human face had begun fading away to a see-through mask I absogoddamnlutely didn't want to see through. "But I think it best, child, that you return to B and tell him to immediately desist from this imprudent search. He has better and more profitable avenues to travel, which, I would add, should prove less hazardous to his associates."

I heard the threat, plain as day, but the odor of lavender had become intoxicating, and I was having trouble concentrating. Still, I knew I wouldn't be exiting the place as easily as I'd come in.

"Yeah," I slurred. "You bet."

Drusneth's mask was no longer merely transparent. It had begun to melt and drip. I'll never know if that was only a hallucination; it didn't much seem to matter.

"But first, I insist you partake," said Drusneth. "I can't send you back into the cold without first having indulged in the warmth of my hospitality. Something exquisite, at almost no charge . . ."

There were other words, but I've never been able to recall any of them. The lavender fog closed over me, pushing me down, down, ever fucking deeper, it felt, into myself. Here was the demonic equivalent of having been slipped a Mickey Finn. The room around me dissolved as I sank, and when I bobbed back to the surface I was naked and tangled in the satin sheets of a bed on the brothel's third floor. Never did learn who or what I had spent that time with, or what it might have cost me. Then again, there's shit you can glady go forever without figuring out.

• • •

It was twilight-and snowing again-before I made it to Babe's. I found B in his usual booth in the back of the bar, sipping his usual Cape Cod. There was no one with him, none of the arm candy, which was a relief. Whatever had gone down at the whorehouse had left me queasy and disoriented, and I was hardly in the mood to play polite and sociable. Hell, I was hardly in the mood for B, but I knew I didn't have much choice. He'd left two messages on my phone, each one equally terse. Apparently, news of my impromptu field trip to speak with Drusneth had reached him sometime during (or maybe even before) my long blackout.

I sat down across from him, and he stopped filing his nails and gave me the sort of look you might give a pet who'd just taken a dump on your floor.

"You're playing a dangerous game," he said calmly. "And normally, love, well, that would be all your business and none of mine. However, as you're perfectly aware, in this instance you've involved me in your gamble."

He lit a baby-blue Nat Sherman and watched me expectantly through the smoke.

"It was stupid," I said, realizing I hadn't bothered to check my makeup after leaving the whorehouse, and for all I knew, my Madame Tussauds skin was on display for all to see. Then again, no one ever seemed to pay much attention to what went on in B's booth.

"No. Stupid is crossing against the light. Or drinking the tap water while vacationing in Morocco or Guadalajara. Poking around in her affairs-to her face-that's damn barmy. In fact, I would go so far as to say it's suicidal."

"Yeah, well. It's all I had to go on, and now it's done. Besides, I'm pretty sure I've already paid for my fuckup."

"Also," he said, wrinkling his nose distastefully, "you smell like pussy. You smell like pussy and lavender."

I was getting tired of him stating the obvious.

"B, she said you should drop this whole thing. Stop trying to find Amity Maidstone. Truth is, maybe I agree with her."