An Adrien English Mystery: The Dark Tide (5 page)

As I drew near the building, I heard two things: absolute silence from the construction crew—and Natalie screaming.

An Adrien English Mystery: The Dark Tide

19

Chapter Three

I burst through the doors of Cloak and Dagger, and Natalie, who must have seen my approach through the windows, threw herself into my arms, sobbing.

“What is it, Nat? What's wrong?”

She wept something into my shoulder, and I said bewilderedly, “What the hell happened?

Did someone…?” I looked around. Obviously it was something more than a declined credit card or a missing shipment. My imagination boggled.

There were a few alarmed customers grouped nearby. Half the plastic wall was down, and the entire construction crew stood in the opening it made. I saw shocked, even pale, faces.

Fernando called to me, “I think you better see this, Mr. English.”

“Okay.” I tried to detach Natalie. She clung harder. “Nat. Natty. I have to see this.

Whatever it is.”

“No.” She raised a tearstained face. “You shouldn't go up those stairs.”

Upstairs? I had quick, crazy visions of mysterious locked rooms and madwomen in the attic, which was ridiculous, since I'd been through the entire building and there were no boarded-up rooms or anything more sinister than mold beneath the window casings—which, come to think of it,
was
pretty sinister.

I tried pulling her arms from around my neck, and she latched back on like an amorous octopus. “Nat, there's no reason I can't walk upstairs. It's not Everest.” I peeled her arms from around me.

She cried, “
No
. Don't go up there. They found the body.”

I froze. “What body?”

“The body that old man told us about this morning. The trumpet player's body.”

Clarinet player, though he was probably past caring. I turned to Fernando, and he said apologetically, “It's true. We found a body in the floor upstairs.”

“A body in the
floor
?”

He nodded.

“There's a
body
in the floor upstairs?”

Another nod. “A skeleton. He's been there a long time.”

In the stricken silence the cat stuck a cautious nose around the nearest bookshelf, whiskers twitching. He sensibly retreated.

“A skeleton?” Not that I really thought he could be mistaken about this.

A final nod.

“It's
horrible
, Adrien,” Natalie told me. “Don't go up there.”

20

Josh Lanyon

“Which floor?”

Not that it really mattered.

“Third,” Fernando supplied.

Maybe it did matter. The third floor had been blocked off for the last decade or so. That was probably significant.

“Has anyone called the police yet?”

“We found him a couple of minutes ago,” Fernando explained. “We showed the lady…”

He let that trail, probably realizing after the fact that “showing the lady” had not been the smartest move of the afternoon.

“All right. Now show me.” I thought quickly. “Natalie, you'd better lock up for the day.”

Bodies under floorboards would not be good for business. Not even at a mystery bookstore.

She assented, pulling herself together, and shepherding the remaining—and surprisingly reluctant—customers out. They went, offering helpful advice such as telling us to call the paramedics. Personally, I thought it sounded late for that.

The workmen shuffled in silence to the side as I followed Fernando through the part of the building still under construction.

We headed up the long staircase, the crew following at an uneasy distance while Fernando explained how they had been ripping up floorboards near the window in preparation for treating the mold.

“And there he was,” he finished glumly over the crunch of our shoes' soles on bits of plaster and dust and paint.

This side of the building was three stories tall, as opposed to the two stories on the Cloak and Dagger side. We climbed slowly, Fernando clearly reluctant to return to the chamber of horrors, and me pacing myself. It was my building, and if there was a skeleton hidden in here, I was sure as hell going to see it.

Could the mystery of Jay Stevens's disappearance really be solved after all these years?

Maybe
solved
wasn't the right word. Obviously if his body had been shoved under the floor in the old hotel, he hadn't died a natural death. This discovery might open more questions than it answered.

We climbed past the second floor, and I absently noted that the crew had finished replastering the walls and sanding the floors. Nice to see that progress was being made, although this latest discovery was guaranteed to set things even further back than the revelation of a bunch of dead rats in the attic had.

Up on the third story, the renovation was much less further along. In addition to battling fungus and wood rot, the crew was still stripping wallpaper and ripping out the old wiring.

Fernando led me down the long hallway to the back. The floorboards squeaked ominously beneath our feet. We came at last to one of the small corner rooms. Water-browned wallpaper curled in sheets from the still-intact walls. The light fixture was hanging from the ceiling like a gouged-out eye. There were two double-hung windows, one with a view of the alley below and the other of the busy street to the south, where life went on as usual.

An Adrien English Mystery: The Dark Tide

21

Fernando closed the door on the crowd in the hall, and I saw the pulled-up, battered planks stacked to the side of the window. Something lay inside the gaping hole in the floor. I walked over and looked down at the raggedly clothed skeleton.

Introducing Jay Stevens?

He'd been wedged between the deep wooden joists. Then the planks of flooring had been nailed down again. Pretty simple, really. Assuming you had a crowbar, a hammer, and a chunk of uninterrupted time. If it hadn't been for the mold staining the walls and creeping into the baseboards, the construction crew would have simply sanded the floors, refinished them, and moved on to the next room. He might have rested there for another fifty years.

“Is there anything unusual about the room?”

Fernando looked at me like I was insane.

“Besides the dead guy in the floor.”

“No.” He reminded me, “This level was sealed off. Nobody used it for years.”

I nodded, unable to tear my gaze away from skeleton in the cavity at our feet: the empty, staring eye sockets, wispy, tarnished remnants of hair on the not-quite-clean skull, the yellowed and protruding teeth that gave the impression it—he—had been screaming when he died. Not an attractive sight. Natalie had been right about that.

It would have been pleasant to take an academic view, to think of this like the twelve-thousand-year-old skeleton of a natufian shaman I'd been reading about at my cardiologist's office yesterday.

“There's a suitcase in there too.” Fernando squatted down. He reached beneath and hauled out a long, flat suitcase before I could stop him. A fat spider scuttled toward my shoe, and I absently stepped on it.

The shaman had been discovered with burial offerings that included fifty complete tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard, and a human foot. This skeleton had been walled up with a vintage Samsonite that bore faded labels for Delta-C&S Airlines and a couple of eastern hotels.

Maybe it wasn't archeology, let alone forensics, but it sort of indicated to me that the dead man—man, based on the filthy remnants of the polka-dot shirt—was circa the 1950s.

It looked more and more likely that this
was
Jay Stevens.

Judging by his luggage, he had been a man who liked to travel.

“What do you think happened to him?” Fernando asked in a hushed voice.

“Nothing good.”

It looked to me like there were dark stains on the upper shoulders of the ratty shirt, and I knelt to get a better look, although, frankly, I didn't want to get too close. He wasn't the sweetest-smelling artifact to come out of this old building. Still, he didn't smell as horrifying as something newly, freshly dead. All the same, I wondered how no one had…well…noticed him all these years? Even if the Huntsman's Lodge had been pretty run-down by that time, surely the odor of a decomposing body would have made its presence known?

“He must have been here a long time.”

“Fifty years,” I said, “if he's who I think he is.”

“All this time he's been waiting here for us to find him.”

22

Josh Lanyon

Happy thought. I opened my mouth to reply, but when Fernando had leaned over the broken floor to lift out the suitcase, he must have brushed against the bag of bones, because as we were studying it, the skeleton's jaw dropped as though he were about to speak. Fernando swore and stepped back. I sucked in a sharp breath.

I turned to Fernando, who was staring at me with horrified eyes.

“Time to call the police,” I said.

* * * * *

I'd had the unique pleasure of making LAPD Homicide Detective Alonzo's acquaintance a few weeks earlier when I'd been seduced—almost literally—into getting involved in the murder investigation of a Hollywood producer by the name of Porter Jones. Alonzo had found it hard to believe that an innocent citizen could be involved in four murder cases and not be guilty, at the very least, of considerable bad judgment. I tended to agree with him.

More so after getting shot.

So I can't say that my heart exactly leaped for joy when he walked into Cloak and Dagger Books wearing that familiar cheap suit, mirrored shades, and bad attitude.

“Mr. English. We meet again.” Alonzo was showing lots of teeth, though I don't think it was meant to be a smile. He wasn't a bad-looking guy. Hispanic, midthirties, medium height, and compactly built. He scanned the empty bookstore, his gaze lingering too long on Natalie, while the crime-scene team pushed through with their usual brusque officiousness.

“It's a small world,” I said.

“About the size of a jail cell.”

“I like your optimistic spirit, but even you're going to have trouble pinning a fifty-year-old murder on me. If this case were any colder, they'd have called an anthropologist.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you think you know how old this murder is? You get your online degree in forensics or something?”

“Fair enough. I think this might be Jay Stevens. He lived at the Huntsman's Lodge back in the fifties. He disappeared, and the rumor was that he was murdered. I'm guessing the rumor was right.”

“How about you leave the guesswork to the police?”

I opened my mouth; that was really too easy a shot. And if I were honest, I didn't feel up to tangling with Alonzo again.

He must have read the thought that crossed my face. He said with grim good humor, “First thing is, we're going to have to close your shop till further notice. This is a crime scene now.”

“Further notice?” I repeated. I tried to keep my voice calm, so as not to antagonize him further. “I understand closing the bookstore for today. And I realize that construction has to stop while you investigate, but this part of the building isn't a crime scene. There's no reason we can't be allowed to open for business tomorrow.”

“You don't think so? And here you're supposed to be a famous master detective.”

“I don't consider myself any kind of a detective, and I've zero desire to get involved in another murder investigation, okay?”

“But here you are, right in the middle of another one, aren't you?”

“The crime scene is over there on the other side of the wall.”

An Adrien English Mystery: The Dark Tide

23

“And what wall would that be?”

We both looked at where the plastic divider hung, torn and drooping.

Alonzo smiled. “That's about as much protection as a condom with a hole in it. No offense.”

Was inadequate self-protection supposed to be a specialty of mine?

Actually, maybe he had a point. I said, “Look, Detective. I know you don't like me, and I know you resent the way—”

“You don't know shit,” he interrupted. “This isn't personal. This is strictly police business.”

“Then you have to know that I didn't—couldn't possibly—have anything to do with this. I wasn't even born when Jay Stevens disappeared. And this part of the building has—”

“Sorry, English,” he said with that same cheery aggression. “Rules is rules.”

He strode off but stopped as he reached the open space between the bookstore and the construction site. “Hey, give my regards to your boyfriend,
ex
-Lieutenant Riordan.”

I didn't have an answer, which clearly pleased him. He strolled away with a big smile on his face.

“What an
ass
,” Natalie muttered, joining me.

Answering was beyond me. I felt numb as a wave of fatigue seemed to roll in out of nowhere, sucking the sand out from my under my feet, nearly knocking me over. I needed to lie down. Now.

I said, “I'll be upstairs.”

“Are you okay?”

I nodded. I didn't feel okay, though. I felt nauseated, with a combination of reaction and exhaustion. I just wanted peace and quiet while I lay perfectly flat and perfectly still in an imitation of the corpse I felt like.

“Do you need any help?”

I shook my head impatiently and went upstairs. The cat appeared out of nowhere, springing along beside me—and again, nearly underfoot—equally happy to escape to the privacy of our quarters.

Closing the door behind me, I staggered into the bedroom. I kicked my shoes off and flopped down on the bed.

The next thing I knew, Natalie was bending over me saying, “
Adrien
?”

I blinked up at her worried face. “What?”

“I've been calling and calling you. Are you all right?”