'Wonderful! Do you know if she's doing anything Friday?'
'Myer, you ought to know that Helena is an unabashed sexist. She can't seem to establish a normal relationship with a man, because she thinks of us as sex objects and nothing more.'
'Great, great!' Myer said. 'About Friday now—'
Behind Jessie, Brutus howled long and low, and Helena cried out in what sounded like pleasure.
'Brutus, for God's sake, control yourself while I'm on the phone, would you?' Jessie asked.
Myer looked shocked. 'You mean the three of you… That she lets Brutus… I mean, that she…'
'Like many modern women,' Jessie patiently explained, 'Helena has catholic tastes. She goes for flesh-and- blood lovers and for a few supernatural ones as well.'
'But
'Myer, let's get back to business,' Jessie said, scratching his bare, hairless chest. 'You got something for me?'
Hanlon looked at some notes on his desk top. 'Not much,' he said. Clearly, his mind was still on Helena.
'Tell me anyway.'
'Well, you wanted to know if anyone had come to me about a missing maseni diplomat named Galiotor Tesserax, and you said you'd pay for the information. That right?'
'Twenty credits,' Jessie said.
'I was thinking more like forty,' Myer said.
'Go ahead and think forty. It's not worth more than twenty. Should I credit your accounts with twenty, then?'
Myer hesitated only a second. 'Okay.'
Jessie lifted the lid on the computerized banking keyboard set in the top of his desk, and he typed out Myer's name. 'What's your account number?'
'It's 88-88-34-34567,' Myer said.
Jessie typed that out next, then punched twenty credits worth of buying power to Hanlon's account, closed the lid and looked back at the vidphone screen. 'Now, what have you got?'
'Well,' Hanlon said, 'nobody's been to me about this Tesserax fellow. However, I have been approached by a maseni named Pelinorie Kones and asked to locate his brood sister, Pelinorie Mesa. So it looks like there's more, than one missing diplomat.'
'This missing woman — she was in the L.A embassy, too?'
'Yes,' Myer said. He was a short, heavy-set man who usually perspired quite a bit. Now, sitting there thinking of Helena, he was running with sweat, and he was steaming up his video pickup.
'How have you come on the case?'
'Less than nowhere,' Hanlon said. 'Every potential source of information clams up when I approach them. I've been threatened twice, and told to give up on the case or else.'
'Are you giving up?'
'The threats were pretty detailed — and awful,' Hanlon said.
'Then you have given up.'
'Let's just say I'm not putting my heart into it, anymore.'
'When did this Pelinorie come to you?'
'A week ago,' Myer said.
'And his sister had just disappeared?'
'A week before that, two weeks ago.'
'Anything else for me, Myer?'
'Not that I can think of. Look, Jess, are you working on something similar to this Pelinorie thing?'
'Would you really like to know?' Jessie asked.
'Credit my account with forty units, and I'll tell you exactly what I've got going.'
Myer scowled. 'I don't want to know that much, but thanks just the same. But, Jess—?'
'What is it, Myer?'
'Would you ask Helena about Friday?'
'Speak for yourself, John.'
Hanlon scowled again, the lines in his cheeks deeper, his lips pursed in a bow. 'John?' he asked. 'Who's John?'
'Never mind, Myer. I only meant you will have to speak to Helena herself. She's a very tough number, and she doesn't like oblique approaches.'
'Maybe I'll call her tomorrow,' Myer said. Jessie nodded and hung up.
When he turned around in his chair, he found Helena lying in the middle of the bed, a broad smile on her face, her hair in complete disarray. Brutus was curled up in one of the easy chairs, his big head on his paws. 'I think we have a lead,' Jessie told the hound. He explained what Hanlon had said. 'If it were a single case of foul play, an isolated incident, it'd be hard to crack. But if other maseni, besides Tesserax, have disappeared, there's more of a chance of a leak in the embassy security.'
'The bigger a secret, the harder it is to keep it a secret,' Brutus agreed, snuffling like a horse to clear his black nostrils of a white mist which rose over him and hung in the air like thick smoke. 'Excess ectoplasm,' he explained.
Helena sat up in bed and said, 'Speaking of excess ectoplasm, I want you to trim those claws.'
Brutus examined his claws with his fierce, red eyes, and he said, 'I need them.'
'No, you don't, either,' Helena said. 'You can grow them or shrink them at will, so don't try to hand me a line like that. You're basically a sadist, Brutus. But I'm no masochist.'
Brutus grinned broadly. 'Well, now, I think I would disagree with that. I think you've got a little bit of—'
'It's 1:30 in the morning,' Jessie interrupted. 'If we get moving, we can squeeze in a few hours work before quitting time.'
'I think this is a case we can work on even after dawn,' the hound said. 'There's a strong flesh-and-blood element involved here, as well as a supernatural one.'
'You're right,' Jessie said.
'We going to see this Pelinorie Kones?' the hound asked.
'I think that'd be a dead end,' the detective said. 'We'd just be taking on another client.'
'Well,'' Helena said, 'if you aren't going to start out right now, you've got time for a little bit of day-bed exercise, haven't you?' She was grinning more wickedly than Brutus ever could.
'I suppose I do,' Jessie said.
'I'll watch,' the hell hound growled.
'Damn straight you will,' Helena said. 'At least until you do something about those claws.'
Chapter Four
When Jessie and Brutus arrived at the Four Worlds Cafe shortly before three o'clock in the morning, a group of Pure Earthers was holding a protest march in the street. There wasn't anything unusual in that: Pure Earthers were always holding some sort of demonstration in or around the Four Worlds. They were as much a part of the cafe as its maseni home world rainbow-stone front and the four big palm trees that grew on its flat roof. Here, the flesh-and-blood and the supernatural creatures of two different planets met to imbibe, talk, and make contacts of all sorts. In all of L.A. no place rivalled the mixture of types that patronized the Four Worlds: maseni men and women, human men and women, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, banshees in their quieter moments, golemns, witches, ghouls able to control their more disgusting habits, and a wide variety of maseni supernatural beings. Of course, the crusaders, the fanatics like the Pure Earthers, zeroed in on the Four Worlds like greedy lawyers flocking to a fluttercar accident.
'You aren't going in that place, are you?' someone asked, grabbing Jessie's arm.
He looked down and saw a sweet, gray-haired old woman in a silk dress patterned with sunflowers. She belonged in the last century somewhere. He smiled and said, 'I was, yes.'
