The Shakedown Shuffle: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 3), Page 2

  Carmelita’s room had not struck me as particularly small before that morning, but with four people in there, it felt rather crowded. Even so, I was needed, at least to help get things started, so I stayed rather than give Guillermo and his helper some space. I’d been right about the challenge of moving Carmelita. Her metal frame made it difficult to get her all the way onto the bed, and it took both Osvaldo and me to lift her legs while Guillermo pulled at Carmelita’s shoulders. I hated the sight of the young man’s hands on her legs and had to remind myself that Carmelita’s body was all gears and rods and wires, covered in a fleshy rubber topped with synthetic skin, all Guillermo’s design. It didn’t help.

  After a few minutes of struggling, we succeeded in getting Carmelita onto the bed and turned on her stomach so Guillermo could access the back of her head. The old man knelt on the bed beside his greatest creation, the toolbox on the mattress next to him while he directed Osvaldo to come around to the other side of the bed.

  I kept waiting to see how Osvaldo’s odd tool was going to figure into the process of repairing Carmelita, but it appeared pretty quickly that the device was extraneous to Guillermo’s procedure. Osvaldo had set the gizmo down on the bed while helping to move Carmelita and then picked it up again right away, the way a kid would hold a security blanket or favorite toy.

  From my standpoint behind Guillermo, I was able to see Osvaldo’s expression while Guillermo went to work. Carmelita’s head was turned on the bed, her face toward the wall and the young man who’d been brought in to help revive her. In that instant, Osvaldo went from neutral to high gear. Where his eyes had looked dull a moment before, lacking in engagement and confidence, they now came fully alive when they met Carmelita’s visage; it was like a switch had been flipped. Light came into his eyes and a hint of a smile curled his lips. He looked less like a lost and confused man-child and more like what Guillermo had described him as—a competent but misunderstood genius who needed nothing more than guidance and compassion.

  It was more than that, though. I’d seen the look before when men’s eyes lit on Carmelita’s beauty, when they caught the slightly aloof tone of her voice and were determined to break down her defenses. Osvaldo Marquez had just fallen in love with Carmelita Garcia. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name, as surely as I knew I’d been in the wrong world since just before the end of the war.

  The only difference between this blossoming of infatuation and the others I’d observed during my time with Carmelita was that those other men who’d been so completely taken with the depth of her wideset green eyes had all been convinced that Carmelita was a flesh and blood woman with all the benefits, challenges and rewards that came with that designation. These would-be lovers were, of course, bound to be disappointed—even if Carmelita reciprocated in her own way. There was a limit to the degree to which she replicated perfect femininity, after all, and even if there hadn’t been such a limit, she had built-in safeguards meant to keep her from discovering the truth of her lack of humanity, safeguards that, I’m sure, had thus far kept her from getting into any intimate situations where the truth would be exposed. In Osvaldo’s case, however, there was no such illusion about Carmelita’s seeming female perfection; he knew the truth—that she was a mechanical woman—and yet he apparently was smitten just the same.

  I cleared my throat, hoping to distract Guillermo into looking up so that he might see the new light in his assistant’s eyes, but it was no good. The old man was in his element, completely intent on solving the problem I’d put before him.

  He’d already started peeling Carmelita’s scalp up from the base of her neck, her hair folding over itself as he pulled upward on her synthetic scalp, exposing the metal skull underneath. There was a little access panel at the base of the skull, the sight of which made me uneasy. It was bad enough watching Carmelita’s body being handled so roughly and then seeing her hair separated from her head the way I expected the same process might be handled in an autopsy, but now seeing that Guillermo was about to open her skull and start probing around inside, I’d had enough.

  “Do you need me, Guillermo?” I asked.

  He looked up, a screwdriver poised above the access panel. “I don’t think so,” he said, nodding toward Osvaldo. “We’ve got it.”

  “You’re sure it’s just the power source?”

  He shrugged and indicated the screwdriver. “I’ll know in a minute, lobo. You want to see?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’ll leave it to the experts.”

  Guillermo smiled at this. He clearly saw through my desire to be away from the process he was about to engage in. “Go ahead,” he said. “You going to be at the office?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “At least for a little while.”

  He nodded. “Okay. If I get any surprises in here, I’ll call you.”

  “Surprises?”

  He tapped the metal skull. “Inside. If it’s not just the power source. Otherwise…” He shrugged. “You want me bring her to work when we’re done with her?”

  “She’ll be back to normal?” I asked.

  Guillermo shook his head incredulously at the question and didn’t bother answering it, his body language saying something along the lines of “You do know who you’re talking to, don’t you?”

  He had every right to be confident. The man was a genius—mechanically and in many other ways—and though he was usually self-deprecating, there was a certain rapport he and I had achieved where a bit of braggadocio might slip into our banter.

  “Point taken,” I said. But then I thought of something else and added, “Won’t she wonder why you’re here when she wakes up? And why I’m not here?”

  Guillermo shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Why don’t you leave her a note that you had to leave early? When we’re done here, I’ll set her to sleep. Then we go outside and knock on the front door to wake her up, yes? I can see that way if everything’s normal.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “Tonight, when she shuts down to re-set, I’ll come in and adjust. But I doubt I’ll have to. I expect she’s fine.” He reached into the toolbox and held up a little tin box with wires trailing from it; the box was about the size of a pair of dice. “This is all she needs.”

  “That’s got the Chavezium inside it?” I asked.

  “I added a little extra to give her more life this time around. Should be good for at least six months.”

  “Great,” I replied, just to have something to say. I didn’t really know if it was great or not.

  “Before you go,” Guillermo said, “I’ve been working on the machine. The last bit was confusing, but I got it now. Your dead German’s notes…very hard to figure out in parts, but I think it’s figured out now, yes? Soon, you go over to the other side for real.”

  His eyes lit up with pride at this, and I gave him a smile in return.

  “Terrific,” I said, and I hoped the response sounded genuinely enthusiastic. I still hadn’t figured out how to tell Guillermo that I was starting to feel comfortable in this version of California, especially given the relationship I’d been building with Sherise. Part of me knew Guillermo wouldn’t really mind the shift in my priorities, but I still hesitated to tell him that I was growing less and less enthusiastic about our endeavors to find my proper world, especially since he’d been putting so much effort into helping me. Any inventions that our explorations yielded would still be there regardless of my continued involvement, but I felt bad about the sacrifices and energy the old man had put into a project I was no longer committed to. Even so, I knew that I needed to tell him sooner than later; the longer I let it go, the worse it would be for both of us.

  “You come see me soon,” Guillermo said. “I’ll show you where I’m at. Very exciting.”

  “Okay,” I said. “As soon as I can.”

  He nodded and turned back to work, aiming the screwdriver at Carmelita’s exposed skull. I turned away, still feeling like it would be somehow indecent to watch Guillermo open the pa
nel and expose the workings inside. It was bad enough that Osvaldo was going to be privy to secrets not even Carmelita was aware of, but that was Guillermo’s call, and he didn’t appear to be second-guessing any of this. The repair job seemed no different to him than swapping out a busted tail light in his pickup truck. I realized that it should have been no different to me, either, but it was.

  Am I getting soft? I wondered as I passed out of Carmelita’s bedroom. A backward glance showed me that Osvaldo was still looking into Carmelita’s face with that same rapt stare, apparently oblivious to the work Guillermo was doing, and which Osvaldo was ostensibly there to help with. Guillermo seemed not to have noticed Osvaldo’s trancelike disappearance from the situation, his attention entirely on the screw he was removing from Carmelita’s head. I knew Carmelita was going to be all right, but Osvaldo still made me uncomfortable, even more so now that he looked like a schoolboy staring at the pin-up model he’d become smitten with.

  “Call me if anything’s strange, okay?” I said as I turned from the scene again.

  “Si, si,” the old man said without looking up. I had to wonder if my request had even registered with him but let it go. Guillermo had never let me down before, and I knew that his obsessive attention to detail, especially when he was tackling a problem, had led to more inventions than I could imagine. Carmelita was in the best hands possible.

  And as for Osvaldo…we’d have to wait and see. Guillermo was pretty old, after all. If something were to happen to him, there would be no way for me to figure out Carmelita’s workings on my own. And the time would come, of course. It was inevitable—unless Guillermo had already invented a way to live forever, which I doubted. Some things were beyond even his abilities. I would have preferred if he’d chosen a successor who was a little less difficult to relate to, but maybe with time Osvaldo would come around. Maybe his being in love with Carmelita would pull him out of his shell a little.

  These thoughts did little to comfort me, however. I grabbed my coat from its hook on the front door and headed out, the tall buildings of downtown LA calling to me the way they always did. I had work to do, and worrying about my mechanical assistant, Guillermo’s mortality, or the trustworthiness of Osvaldo Marquez wasn’t going to help me get it done.

  Chapter Two

  Having left Echo Park later than normal, I found the traffic on Broadway a little heavier than I was used to. This irritated me some, but I managed to make it to the parking lot where I normally left my car and then up to the office in time to be only a little bit late for the first appointment of the day. Normally, that would not have been a problem, but my first appointment was with a new client. Some clients you can bend things with, keep them waiting just a little, and I can usually size up the ones who’ll tolerate a little tardiness. A new client, though, is something else. Give them an excuse to think you don’t value their time, and they’re likely to bolt.

  That situation was even more likely this morning, as it wasn’t a cuckolded husband coming to me with his hat in his hands and a hangdog look on his face. No, my client this morning was a little more high-class than that, an actress named Leonora Rigsby. And by “actress,” I really mean “movie star.” How she’d gotten my number, I didn’t know. I normally didn’t attract that kind of clientele. The how didn’t matter, though. The why was all I cared about. Even more important would be my response to the why. I had to sell her, just as surely as a used car salesman has to convince a buyer that leaving the lot without signing on the dotted line is going to be the worst mistake imaginable.

  Trying to balance keeping my composure without being any later than I already was, I took the stairs two at a time and then, when I got to the third floor, stood at the landing for several seconds to catch my breath before sauntering down the hallway to the door with my name on it.

  As always, Peggy, was at her station in the outer office. My secretary looked up from her typewriter, clearly surprised to see me walking in alone.

  “Did Carmelita need an oil change?” she asked, a mischievous smile on her lips. Peggy was one of few people who knew the truth about Carmelita, and though she wasn’t above a snarky jab like this one when the two of us were alone, I knew she could be trusted with keeping the secret—even from Carmelita.

  This morning, Peggy’s innocent gibe at Carmelita’s expense struck a little close to home. “Not funny,” I said.

  The smile went the way of the California Grizzly, replaced by alarm.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, her tone now serious. I had just watched her shifting gears, out of office banter mode and into crisis control. It was one of the reasons she fit in so perfectly at my struggling little P.I. business.

  “Nothing Guillermo can’t fix,” I said. “But I do need you to call Carson Mulvaney and see if you can push him back half an hour. I’d been planning on letting Carmelita finish up with Miss Rigsby while I dealt with Carson, but now I’ve got to do both.”

  “I’m on it,” she said, reaching for the phone.

  “Is she here already?” I asked, nodding toward the closed door to my inner office.

  “About five minutes ago. I told her you might be a few minutes late.”

  “How’d you know?”

  She shrugged, a pencil’s eraser end dropped into one of the holes on the phone’s dial as was her habit when making calls. “Instinct, I guess.”

  “Thanks, Peggy,” I said. “You’re a plum.”

  As far as I knew, I’d never seen one of Leonora Rigsby’s movies, so I didn’t know ahead of time what I was going to get when I walked through the door. Stepping into my office, though, I got a real surprise, and it wasn’t the actress’s face. The woman sat with her back to me, and the sight of her sent a sword with an icicle blade right up my spine. The actress did not turn at my entrance, just sat still, offering me the back of her perfectly coiffed blonde head, her hair piled up tight to expose a long, graceful neck—the same one I’d seen on the dead woman in the world I’d slipped into less than an hour earlier.

  You might be thinking that one woman’s graceful neck is the same as the next one’s, but no. Not in this case. Her neck was straight, the exposed skin looking like vanilla ice cream and promising to be just as smooth and sweet. It looked much better alive than dead. And while a dozen women in this town might have had the same grace and poise as they sat in my lousy chair or lay face down, dead on a bed, I knew this was the same woman. I felt it in my gut, sorry now that I’d made the effort to fill my belly this morning. Those eggs weren’t sitting so nice now.

  Leonora was smoking a cigarette with a fancy ivory holder, and it looked like she’d just tipped her ashes into the tray on the edge of my desk. As I clicked the door closed behind me, she half turned in the chair, regarding me with a cool smile as I fought to regain my composure.

  I didn’t know what had led to this woman being dead in that other world, or what had led another Jed Strait to be standing over her body. What I did know was that I didn’t want to end up in that situation in this world, and the one way to make sure I stayed out of the corpse’s company was to turn away Leonora Rigsby’s business before she even offered it. Now I regretted my run up the stairs to avoid being any later; if I’d been a little slower, I might have insulted her enough to prompt her to quit me before I’d gotten through the door.

  And that was when I thought of the bills my fledgling business owed, the red numbers Peggy had shown me in the books, and I knew I couldn’t turn this woman away. Even if this ended up being Leonora Rigsby’s last day in this world, I knew I needed to relieve her of at least a little bit of cash before she left. If I could keep her alive in the bargain, so much the better.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Miss Rigsby,” I managed to say as I circled around to offer her my hand, slightly trembling. I knew she’d put it down to my being star struck. “Jed Strait.”

  She transferred the cigarette holder to her left hand and then extended her right, giving me a limp handshake that was little mo
re than a touch of her fingers. Lackluster though the handshake was, her smile seemed genuine enough, her lips red and her make-up flawless. She was definitely alive.

  I’d run into more than my share of Hollywood types during my short time in California, and many of them seemed to have a zone of impenetrability around them. This did not appear to be the case now. Instead of keeping me at a distance—the way the wealthy might do with the rest of the help—the twenty-something actress looked straight at me with bright blue eyes that sparkled as she said, “Thank you, Mr. Strait. And please call me Leonora.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said as I worked my way around the desk, trying to shake the image of her dead on the bed, pills strewn around her and the remains of her last cocktail soaking into the bedspread.

  Business as usual, I thought. Over and over, a mantra. Business as usual. Sitting down, I opened a drawer and set a yellow tablet on the desktop before reaching for a sharp pencil and forcing myself to say, “So, how can I help you today?”

  The smile faded at this question. I watched as she drew on the cigarette and then tilted her head up to blow a cloud of blue smoke into the space above our heads, her lips a perfect O. Then she tilted her head down again and looked me in the eyes.

  “I need to be sure that everything I say to you is in absolute confidence,” she began.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  Unless you’re planning on calling in your markers and leaving the game permanently, I thought. If that was the case, I’d have to tell somebody.

  “Even though I haven’t signed anything or paid you yet?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, glad to hear some confidence in my voice. Things still seemed weird, but it felt like I was back on familiar ground again, answering this new client’s questions like I would any other’s. There was a bit of a script with new clients, and as I slipped into it, I felt my level of disquietude dropping a few notches back toward the normal garden variety uneasiness that was a general condition of my profession. “Nothing you say will leave this room. Unless you want it to, of course.”