The Vampire Files - Art In The Blood Part 21

Not waiting for a reply, he led the way down the corridor to a s.p.a.cious room with one wall composed mostly of windows. Chairs and tables dotted the polished floor at frequent intervals, and a row of wheelchairs were stored in a far corner. During the day the place would have been flooded with sunlight, but now it was gloomy and strangely isolated. He didn't bother turning on the high overhead lamps and was content to remain in what for him would be darkness.

"It's like your studio, isn't it?" I asked.

He arrested his move to pull a chair from a table and glanced around. "Yes, it is...

I'd wondered why Hiked this place."

"And you prefer sitting in the dark?"

He got the chair the rest of the way out and sank gratefully into it. His movements were slow and careful, an indication of the stiffness lingering in his shoulders and back. "I don't mind. It softens reality and makes the impossible more acceptable."

"Me, for instance?"

"Yes." He brought out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one onto the table, but didn't fire up his match. Perhaps even that tiny spark would have made things too real for him. "I meant what I said last night, I won't tell anyone about you-or about what I just saw."

"Thanks."

"I have a lot of questions, though," he added.

"I might not answer them."

"You've a right to your privacy." He played with the cigarette, turning it end over end between his index finger and thumb. "Were you born with your abilities or were they acquired?"

"Acquired."

"Are there others like you?"

"I know of only two others."

"What are you?"

I considered that one seriously for a few seconds, then started to laugh. I couldn't help myself. Adrian looked vaguely insulted at first, then broke into one of his sudden smiles. It was brief, on and off again, but he meant it.

"Sorry," I said.

He shrugged it away and finally lit his cigarette, blowing smoke up into the still air. "Yes, I can see I'm ridiculous.""Not you, the situation. Wanna change the subject?"

"By all means."

I broke away from the door and took one of the other chairs at his table.

"Sandra."

Muscles on both sides of his neck tightened into iron. "No."

"Have to."

"Why? No... never mind, it's all too obvious. As with Evan, you want to know if I murdered her."

"You need to be eliminated from a list of possibles."

"Same thing, nicer phrasing." He looked directly at me, his eyes and voice like ice.

"Ask."

I did and got the answer I expected. While I had his attention I asked my other question. "Did you kill Celia?"

His reply was slow in coming, so slow in fact that he woke out of my influence in his fight to hold it in. His walls were back up again but not as solid as before. When he took a puff from his cigarette I noticed the slight tremor in his hand. "I did not kill my wife," he whispered. "Not directly."

"How, then, indirectly?"

He was quiet for so long I thought I'd have to give him another nudge. "My work,"

he said finally, his tone so faint I might have imagined the words. "Always my d.a.m.ned work."

I waited until he'd smoked another half inch. "Your work?"

"What I have is not artistic talent, it's addiction. It's always been there, all my life. The silence and total solitude are utterly necessary for me to produce. Not many people can understand that, least of all Celia. She did try, and G.o.d knows she loved me, but it must have been the bitterest thing of all for her to realize she would always be second to the art."

I knew how bitter it had been for Barb Steler.

"I believe that all people have the need to create, and consciously or not they find outlets for it. They paint or write, they marry and have children. Celia had no such outlets for herself, but the need was there, so eventually she found one."

"What do you mean?"

"Another man. I really don't know how long it went on. She had the most miserable excuses for being out and sometimes she couldn't keep her stories straight. Even now I'm not sure if I was being selectively blind or just stupid, probably a bit of both. She wanted me to find out, like a child who does something bad for the sake of getting attention."

"Did you?"

"Yes. Sooner or later every sleeper wakes. I think she was glad when it happened.

It was quite an explosion on my pan, but it proved to her I could still be hurt-that I still loved her." Some of his inner agony welled up, constricting his throat, thickening his voice. "Two days later she went out to the garage and started the car."

He drew deeply on the cigarette to distract himself and coughed a little on the smoke. If there was a suppressed sob hidden in that cough, I pretended not to notice.

"I was on the other side of the house in the studio and heard nothing. I'd been avoiding her by working on another d.a.m.ned magazine cover. We'd talked divorce, neither of us really wanted it, but we didn't know how to return to each other. I didn't know how to forgive her. She broke it off the only way she felt she could." He stared out the tall windows, seeing nothing. "That's how I killed her."

"Did Sandra know about this?"

"No. I wanted things to be different for us. She would have always been first-I would have made certain of it. We never had the chance."

"Who was the man?"

"Celia never told me."

"Could it have been Evan?"

He was almost amused. "No, of course not. He talks a lot of charm to a lot of women, but has the sense to stay away from the married ones. Besides, at that time he was happily involved with a little blond model named Carol."

"Have you ever figured out who it was, or guessed?"

He shook his head and stubbed out the cigarette in a tin ashtray. "I used to think of nothing else and now it hardly seems to matter anymore."

"You've no idea?"

"None." He ticked at the ashtray with an idle finger and nearly sent the dregs flying. "I think I'll look in on Evan now."

"He's going home with Reva and Leighton tomorrow."

"I thought they might make the offer, if only to spare him from my cheerful company. They did the same for me when Celia died, but I knew I'd smother beneath all their concern for my well-being. Evan's the type to respond to such care, though.

Perhaps it's what's best for him.""I hope so."

"Good night." He walked out slowly, hardly making a sound.

"... so if Charles is still up when I go home he'll be getting an earful."

Bobbi half reclined on her couch, her feet curled under her and a small coffee in her hand. I sat opposite her on the edge of a low table, rubbing my right fist into my left palm.

"You think Celia and Sandra are connected?" she asked.

"They were both involved with Alex Adrian."

"He really got to you, huh?"

"Because of losing Maureen, I see myself in him. I know how he feels."

"You want to help, but you can't."

"In a nutsh.e.l.l," I said, sighing. "Your phone back on the hook?"

"Not yet, you need to use it?"

"No, I'm just noticing the quiet a lot for some reason."

"Stop carrying the world on your back and things will get a lot noisier for you."

She raised a smile out of me again. "Want to go to a movie?"

"How 'bout a western with a nice cattle stampede?"

That made me blink, until I figured out what she was getting at. "Been thinking about visiting the Stockyards?"

"All day."

"If you're sure..."

"Not yet, but you said I should watch what you do."

"I know. I think you have less problems handling it than I do."

"We can find out."

"Okay. Go put on something you don't mind getting dirty. That place ain't exactly Michigan Avenue, you know."

Ten minutes later we were cuddled up in the front seat of my car. Bobbi wore some battered Oxfords, a dark sweater, and a matching pair of wide-legged ladies'

trousers. Her bright hair was covered by a black cloche hat she said she hated, but hadn't gotten around to throwing out yet. We didn't talk much, but it was a companionable silence. I drove sedately and parked fairly close in.

The air vibrated with the lowing of hundreds of animals, and their organic stench flooded over us. Normally I wouldn't have parked downwind, but it was convenient.

The car would air out when we left. I glanced at Bobbi to see if she was ready to chicken out. She seemed to read my mind and shook her head with a smile.

"How do we get inside?"

"I usually disappear and float in, like I did the other night through Evan's door.

This time we'll climb a fence."

She opened her handbag and pulled out a tattered pair of black cotton gloves.

"Just as well I came prepared. I don't want to pick up any splinters." She pulled them on and tossed the bag under the car seat. "Ready?"

"You been studying for this?" I had a lot of time to think about it."

Picking a long, dark stretch between streetlights, I led the way in and helped her climb up and over. No one was around in notice our intrusion, but I didn't want to take any chances by hanging around too long. We went to the closest occupied pen and scrambled over its thick timbers.

Bobbi stared at the three cows huddled in the far corner and they stared unenthusiastically back. "Big, aren't they?"

"They stink, too."

"But you put your mouth-"

"Baby, I get so hungry, it just doesn't matter." A lazy stream, a wind from a distant slaughterhouse carried a breath of the bloodsmell over us. Bobbi couldn't pick it up, but I could and it stirred dark things within me.

"Are you hungry now?"

"I'm getting there." I'd fed last night, but a person can be full of food, walk past a restaurant, and still salivate. The same principle applied now. I made myself breathe regularly to catch more of the smell and centered my attention on the nearest animal.

The process of hypnotizing people is fairly simple, but different rules apply to animals because they have less intellect and better defensive instincts. I didn't entirely understand how to make an animal stand still for me, it was on the same level as my ability to disappear: I'd think about it and it happened, like flexing an invisible muscle. Maybe the animals could sense it somehow; it didn't matter much to me as long as it worked.

I closed in on the cow and ran my hand lightly over a big surface vein. It remained still, as though I weren't there. Bobbi tiptoed closer to see things better."This is where I usually go in," I told her, keeping my voice low and even. She nodded her understanding.

"What about your teeth?"

My canines had not yet emerged. I wasn't really all that hungry, nor was I s.e.xually aroused to any great degree. "I'm having a problem there."

"Maybe I could help?" Her intuition was working again. That, or she correctly read the look in my eye.