Great, the guy really was crazy. "How dangerous are you?"
"To you, at least during the day, I might prove to be very deadly.""
He was perfectly right. He knew my hotel and might have means of finding out where I"d go should I decide to bolt for home, or I could walk in and grab my earth and discover the hard way what he had under the paper.
He watched me thinking it out. "I only said that to keep you here; I"m hoping you"ll understand I need not be an enemy."
"What are you, anyway, some kind of-Van Helsing?" I nearly said Renfield and changed it only at the last second.
He was amused. "So you"ve read Dracula!"
"Yes, and seen the movie." - "What did you think of it?"
"They could have done worse.""Was it very accurate?"
"In what way?"
"Concerning yourself, of course."
"I have yet to stalk around in a cape and tuxedo and drool over feminine throats."
"But you do have to drink blood?"
I found that very difficult to acknowledge.
"Why are you so uncomfortable with that concept?"
"Why are you so d.a.m.ned nosy? What do you want?"
"I apologize. I am being frightfully rude to treat you like a lab specimen. Please don"t be offended that I got carried away."
The man seemed genuinely sincere. I shrugged. "I"m a journalist, I know how it is."
"Thank you. What paper do you work for?"
"I don"t. I quit the one I worked for in New York and came here."
"And?"
"And nothing. I"ve been too busy to look for a job."
"How odd you should need one. I would have thought that over the years you would have acc.u.mulated sufficient funds to be very comfortable."
"You haven"t quite got the right idea about me."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I"m still new at this; I"m just four days old."
That made him pause. "You"ve been a vampire for only four days?"
"Nights, if you want to be accurate."
"How utterly fascinating."
"If you say so."
"Could you tell me how you came to be this way? Were you attacked by a vampire?"
The melodramatic question made me smile. I shook my head. "It"s kind of a long story..."
He took the hint. "May I have your word that you won"t tear me to pieces if I ask you in?"
"It"s not worth much since you don"t know me."
He shrugged. "You took a chance coming here. I"ll risk it."
A crazy man or a brave one. "You got it. Besides, this is my last good suit, I don"t want to ruin it."
If the joke was funny, he didn"t laugh. "Very well, Jack, enter freely and of your own will."
"Don"t you think that sounds a little corny?"
"It does at that, but does it work?"
I walked in slowly, making a show of it. His heart was going like a hammer, but his face was calm; a frightened man, but good at hiding it. The idea that I was the inspiration for all this fear made me uncomfortable and nervous, so I"d have to put us both at ease. I stuck out my hand.
"Jack Fleming."
He carefully switched hands under the paper and gripped mine briefly. "Charles Escott."
"Glad to meet you."
"Please sit down." He again indicated the chair next to his desk. Good Lord, but we were so polite and formal.
I sat and tried to look harmless. After a moment, he sank into his own chair, his eyes never leaving me. Whatever he expected me to be like, he"d apparently overestimated my ferocity. I hadn"t been ferocious in years. Escott"s heart slowed down and I breathed a mental sigh of relief.
"It must be obvious that I am intensely curious about you," he said. "I would very much like to hear your story, if you don"t mind telling it."
I chewed my lower lip and did my own sizing up of him, look for look and his surroundings. There were two doors: the one I used and another behind Escott. The walls were bare of any kind of decoration but white paint. The place gave no clue to his personality, the man himself was the only clue. Piercing, intelligent eyes, thin lips, nervous hands; he reminded me of one of my long-ago college professors. His clothes were neat and nondescript; not expensive, not cheap, ordinary and therefore unnoticeable. I"d already figured he"d been following me around. He must have been good at it since I"d been looking over my shoulder all evening."Do you plan to shoot me with whatever you have under the paper?""
"Sorry, I"m just naturally cautious." He drew the paper away to reveal a c.o.c.ked crossbow.
This time the man knew his stuff. If anything could hurt me, it would be the wooden shaft lying ready in the contraption. I regarded it with some respect. "If it makes you more comfortable, you can keep it, just don"t shoot me."
Escott"s brows went up, surprised that I had given him such permission. It indicated that I could take the thing away from him if I chose. I was sure I could, but not anxious to force the issue. He took his hand from the trigger, but left the weapon within reach.
Having come to a sort of mutual truce, I felt more like talking.
"It started in New York a couple years ago. There was a big publicity build for the movie Dracula. It was quite a hit, women fainting in the aisles and that sort of thing.
My editor sent me down to interview people who"d seen the show, and write up about how scared they were. It was all pretty predictable stuff, but then I met this girl who thought the whole thing was terribly funny. She was really beautiful. We got to talking about the supernatural. At first I thought she might be into spiritualism or astrology or some other silliness, but she wasn"t. She was like a b.u.t.terfly collector I once knew.""
Escott made an expression indicating he needed that one explained.
"He had hundreds of b.u.t.terflies, he knew all about them, and was willing to learn more, but he never actually wanted to be one. She was like that. She knew a lot, liked to talk, but didn"t believe in it for a minute."
"I see. I gather you liked her."
"I fell in love the second I saw her." I left it at that, not knowing if Escott could possibly understand. I drew more air and went on. "We dated, just like a couple of kids, and one night she asked me over to her house. We ate dinner, at least I did. She never ate with me when we were out; I thought she was just kidding me along because of the movie. It was a private joke for us, you know? After dinner we listened to the radio, danced a little..." My voice was getting thick, I couldn"t help it.
"Mr. Fleming, if this is too personal to you, you needn"t go on."
I pulled myself together. "Thanks. You get the idea of what it all led up to, going into details-"
"I understand." He sounded as though he really did.
"After that, we were together all the time, at least at night. It was no joke, she really was a vampire, but it didn"t seem to matter much. I was in total possession of my faculties, too. I did research on the subject, of course, and talked to her about it.
None of the books I found on vampirism remotely mentioned anything about what we had or felt for each other. They were full of a lot of stories of helpless victims and bloodthirsty attackers; kind of sick stuff, really. If you want to get psychological you could call it symbolic rape. When you get into the Freudian end of things it really gets weird, but none of that had anything to do with the reality we shared."
"During this relationship did you-was there ever an exchange of blood?" He kept his voice carefully neutral.
"Yes," was my brief reply.
"The purpose of this exchange was to eventually make you like her?"
"If it worked."
"Worked?"
"She said it didn"t always work or else the world would be hip-deep in vampires.
Almost everyone is immune to it, you see. It"s like a very rare disease: some people can"t catch it even if they want to."
"You wanted to?"
"For us to always be together, yes, and she did what she could toward that end, but it was never certain. We"d have no way of knowing until the day I died, but at least until then we"d always be together."
"But something happened?"
The words were sticking in my throat. "We had a date. I went to her house to pick her up and she wasn"t there. She didn"t have a lot of possessions, but a few clothes and toiletries were gone and she left the rest of her stuff like she meant to come back.
Later I got a card in the mail. She said she was having some trouble, that some people were after her because of what she was, and to look out for them. She"d come back when it was safe. That was five years ago." I left unsaid the weeks of worry, fear, and frustration and the months spent trying to find her. In five years the pain had not faded and the wound was still raw to touch.
He saw it on my face. "I"m very sorry."
"I think... maybe they found her." I got up suddenly and paced around the room, trying to work off the build of emotional energy. My back to him, I paused to look through the blinds at the empty street below. "You"re the only one I"ve ever told the whole story to."
"I apologize for forcing the confidence. It shall not be repeated to anyone."
I believed him. "Thanks." After a while I got control again and sat down. "Life went on, I guess. I finally decided to leave New York. Last Monday I breezed into town, found a flop for the night, got a phone call and walked out. Sometime Thursday night or Friday morning last I woke up dead on a beach just west of the city.""He took a moment to digest it. "Who called you?"
"I don"t know, it might be someone named Benny Galligar."
"How did you die?" He made it sound like an ordinary question.
"I was shot. Before that I was beaten up badly."
"Who did it? Why?"
"I don"t know!"
"You don"t- "Between Monday afternoon and Friday morning I can"t remember a d.a.m.ned thing."
"How extraordinary."
"If you say so." Then I finished the rest of my story.
"How utterly extraordinary."
"You"re repeating yourself."
"Yours is a fascinating case."
"You sound like a doctor. What are you, anyway? It"s your turn to talk."
"Certainly I owe you that. I"m a private agent; people bring me their problems and I try to help them. The vernacular here would be private investigator, but I find that particular label and its attendant connotations can give people the wrong idea about my work."
"You mean you don"t do divorces."
He stifled a smile and leaned forward clasping his hands together. "Mr. Fleming, if you have no objections, I"d like very much to help you discover what occurred to you in those missing days-to help you solve your own murder, if you will."
"Well, I don"t know-"
"We could be of great help to one another."
"I"m listening."
"For instance, you"re a newcomer to the city, but I know it very well. I know the people who run things and the people who control them. Capone may be gone now, but the gangs are still active and they are very powerful. Frank Paco heads one of them. If he had you killed he must have had a very good reason."He straightened, reaching for the crossbow. I tensed and then relaxed. He"d been looking for a pipe that had gotten shuffled under the paper. "Do you mind?"
"No, go ahead."
"It sometimes helps me to think, mostly it keeps me awake." He tilted the chair back after the pipe was drawing, and stared at the ceiling. I stared at my shoes and thought about getting another pair the next night. These looked like something off a b.u.m, but worse. The pipe smoke gradually added a pungent flavor to the air, but for some reason it made me uncomfortable and I considered pulling the blinds up to improve the air circulation.
He was staring at me with open curiosity, and I was beginning to think it was his favorite expression.
"Excuse me, but are you breathing at all?"