'Then I trust you'll know how to act when we let you go.'
'I'll mind my own business,' the demon said. 'What else can I do?'
'What else indeed?' the detective asked. He turned, picked up the open Bible and began to chant In a few minutes, though all the chalk marks remained on the floor, Kanastorous had been dispatched.
As Brutus blew out all fourteen of the candles, both black and white, alternating from color to color as prescribed by ritual, Jessie crossed the room and turned on the ceiling lights, which stung both his and Helena's eyes. Brutus didn't notice. As if the lights had been a signal, the vidphone rang in the outer office.
'I'll see who it is,' Helena said.
Jessie went to his desk, which was pushed up against the wall where the robot had left it, and he got a narcotic pin gun from the center drawer. He checked the clip to be sure that it was full, strapped the holster on under his jacket and slipped the weapon into its leather pouch. From the same drawer he took a plastic crucifix and a bottle of yellowish garlic oil, which he dropped in a coat pocket.
Brutus came back from blowing out the candles and said, 'What's up? What do we do now?'
Before Jessie could answer, Helena stepped in from the front office and said, 'It's Galiotor Fils, your favorite client'
The detective glanced around, looking for his extension, couldn't see where the company robot had put it when it was moving furniture, and went into the outer office to take the call. He sat down on the edge of Helena's desk, lifted the receiver and looked at Galiotor Fils' face in the vidscreen. 'Yes, Mr. Galiotor?'
The sad, amber eyes stared back, and the lipless mouth was still turned down at the corners as the maseni said, 'I was wondering if you'd made any progress in discovering what happened to my brood brother.'
'We're working on it, Mr. Galiotor,' Jessie said. 'In fact, we've got a pretty hot lead right now.'
'You have, sir?' The maseni brightened considerably at this bit of news, his mouth leveling out, his deep amber eyes taking on a glint of life, a crinkle at the corners.
'A very hot lead,' Jessie repeated. 'And I think that you were close to the truth, when you originally came to me,' Jessie told him. 'I think your embassy people, in Los Angeles, have indeed been involved in a cover-up of some sort.'
'I knew it!' Galiotor Fils declared.
'They've tried to keep me from asking questions about Tesserax — and they've gone to the point of violence to take me out of the picture.'
'Good heavens!' Galiotor Fils said. Violence was not much a part of the maseni character.
'And they did have me out for a short time,' Jessie admitted. 'However, I intend to be more careful, now that I know how rough they're willing to play.'
The maseni made a face and said, 'What have these scoundrels been up to, Mr. Blake?'
'I can't take time to explain the situation to you now,' Jessie said. 'We have to move while that tip is hot.'
'Well, yes, I see that,' Galiotor Fils said. 'But is there anything I can do to help?'
'Nothing at the moment,' Jessie said. 'But rest assured that we are going to be digging into this affair quite deeply in the next couple of hours. We are going to dig to the bottom of it.'
'Good luck, then,' the maseni said.
'I'll be getting back to you,' Jessie said, hanging up.
'You have an absolutely fantastic knack for handling clients,' Helena said. 'It's a whole different side of you: sugar and syrup.'
'Never mind clients now,' Brutus said. 'How are we going to dig to the bottom of the Tesserax affair in only a couple of hours?'
Jessie smiled. 'We can start by tearing up his grave and finding what is at the bottom of it.'
Chapter Ten
Jessie decided they would go over the cemetery wall on a narrow alley beside the burial grounds, where there were no street lamps, and he sent Brutus through first, to check for sentries on the other side. The hell hound phased through the eight-foot-high stone wall, was gone a long moment, then melted back again.
'It's all clear,' he told them.
'I wish we could walk through walls like you,' Helena said.
Brutus chuckled. 'It isn't easy, and I can't do it very often, but it is a handy talent to have, now and again. But if you're wicked enough, and if you die and go to Hell, maybe you'll be transformed into a hell hound, like me.'
'Never mind,' she said. 'I'll just go over the top.'
Jessie faced the wall, jumped, hooked his fingers over the top edge, muscled himself up, got a knee over, twisted around and looked down at the hound and the woman. He put a hand down as far as he could reach, and he said, 'Come on, Helena.'
Hesitantly, she approached, took his hand, planted her feet against the rain-wet stones and climbed laboriously up to join him.
In five minutes, the three of them were inside the alien graveyard, where most of the city's prominent people — both maseni and human — were either buried or to be buried when their time came.
Rain had fallen while they were in the office talking to Zeke Kanastorous and to Galiotor Fils, and now the earth smelled damp, and the newly fallen palm leaves were ripe, daubing a strange perfume on the cool, night air that barely circulated around them.
In the shallow light of the big moon — almost a gibbous moon, Jessie thought — which shone through a break in the cloud cover, they could see the twin hillocks of the graveyard, though not the small ravine that lay between them much like the fold of Helena's formidable cleavage. The mausoleum stood on the far hill, a square of white stone that seemed to grab the feeble moonlight, magnify and hold it. Human and maseni tombstones, set between well cultivated shrubs and fancy palm trees, dotted the hills and disappeared into the ravine now shrouded in impenetrable shadows spilled there like puddles of ink.
'We should have asked Galiotor Fils where his brood brother's grave was, exactly,' Helena said. 'I hadn't realized that, in ten short years, you could fill one of these places to this extent.'
'People die regularly,' Jessie said.
'And a number of vampires have rented plots,' Brutus observed.
The graveyard was a ceremonial luxury that the city had been forced to do without for many years prior to the maseni landing. Since every foot of space, in those overpopulated days, was precious, none of it could be given over to the storage of corpses. Now, however, since the dead and dying Shockies, and all the potential children they never produced, were not cluttering up the place, maintenance of graveyards was again feasible. And popular. Despite the fact that there was no longer any religious bunkum that made burial a necessity, people wanted it done and paid well to have it done. It seemed, to some people, that burial carried with it a certain dignity, an undeniable status. Jessie didn't much care for it himself; he intended to be cremated and to have his ashes thrown into any convenient disposal chute or garbage can. A sentimentalist, he wasn't.
'Where do we begin?' Helena asked.
Jessie took a pair of flashlights from the satchel of tools he had brought along, handed one of them to the woman and kept the other for himself.
Brutus did not require any artificial aids to see well in the dark; when shadows pressed in, his eyes grew a deeper, smolder shade of red, and he went wherever he pleased, as if it were broad daylight.
'We should split up and take one row each, compare notes when we get to the end, then go on to three more rows,' Jessie said. 'The stones seem to be in relatively straight lines, for the most part, in harmony with the contour of the yard.'
'Split up?' Helena asked.
'Why not?'
She had changed to jeans, a sweater and a thin wind-breaker; now, she pulled the jacket's nylon collar up around her neck. 'We're in an alien graveyard at two o'clock in the morning, planning to dig up a corpse,' she said.
