Glide leaned back and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Enough to try to stay the hell away from it,” he said. “Roland Blue has extremely bad karma, right? He saw Karen at some industry thing, a party, whatever, and wanted her. Son of a bitch practically licked his chops. By then, Karen was already using way too much—molly, blow, lots of booze, lots of weed—and Blue got her onto smack. Like I said, this business isn’t full of Sunday school teachers, but some of us have a line we don’t cross, and that’s one of them for me. He recognized that Karen was … special, you know all that, right? I’ve heard of you, Mr. Ballard, and you have the same kind of reputation as Blue, not very savory. Blue recognized Karen’s potential for grotto, the kind of clients and audience she could attract. I mean how much would you pay to watch a faerie princess get busy, right? Blue runs a freak show, a carnival of occult sexual oddities—”
“Not ‘freaks,’” Dragon interrupted, “just different, still thinking, feeling, beings, locked up in a world too dogmatic and frightened to even try to understand them, let alone accept them.”
“Right, right,” Glide said nodding, “of course, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that big old judgmental hammer down. That’s not my scene at all! I’m just trying to say that if you want to know what finally became of Crystal Myth, my best guess would be to ask Roland Blue.”
Glide stood, and a few of his production people barraged him immediately with questions and clipboards. He politely stepped through them to shake our hands again. Vigil refused, and Glide steepled his fingers and bowed slightly to the knight, seemingly not disturbed in the slightest by the snub. “If I can be of any additional help to you, please, reach out,” Glide said as he accompanied us to the edge of the pavilion. “If you find her, please give her my love.”
“We’ll be in touch,” I said. “Thanks for your time. Have a nice day.” Glide ignored my smart-ass remark. He looked past me out to the landscape behind me, as barren as an alien world. The sun was beginning to dip, and the shadows lengthened across the land, cut and shaped by the rocks into skeletal fingers reaching, grasping.
“I love it out here,” Glide said, talking less to us and more to himself. “My grandfather found great spiritual enlightenment in this place. He used to race dune buggies out here when he was young. It’s so pure, so … beautiful in its annihilation, and yet life clings to death, almost like a parasite, thrives at the edges, in the cool shadows. The place fills up your soul even as it tries to destroy it.” Then he looked back to me, his eyes focusing again. “Safe journey back, Mr. Ballard. I hope you find your answers.”
* * *
The sun died in majestic 3D IMAX as we headed back for L.A., bleeding out across the horizon in currant, orchid, and fire. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” was playing on the radio. Dragon was the first to speak.
“What do you make of him? Glide?” she asked.
“He’s covered in more slime than a Nickelodeon game show, but he thinks he’s Gandhi,” Vigil said. “Smug, self-righteous, believes because he does yoga, drinks fair-trade coffee, and contributes a little of his blood money to benefits for the Dalai Lama, he’s clean.”
“Not an unfair assessment,” I said. “He may also be a wizard of some stripe or other. I felt a little current coming from him.”
“Really?” Vigil said. Dragon kept her eyes on the road, but she nodded.
“I got a little sizzle off him too,” she said. “It could just be he’s a dabbler in mysticism who’s got some natural aptitude. I’ve run into my fair share of those out here.”
“Could be,” I said. “He knows more about the Life and grotto than he’s letting on, though.”
“He hates Roland Blue,” Vigil said. “That much was pretty obvious.”
“Lots of people do,” I said, “for all kinds of reasons, but in Brett’s case, maybe he’s the one who fed Crystal to Blue, once he realized how valuable she could be for Blue’s business.”
“Maybe things got out of hand with Blue, and Glide’s pissed he lost his meal ticket,” Vigil said.
“An old-school motive,” Dragon said. “Greed. How novel. Usually, these cases involve sacrifices to elder gods, ancient Armageddon-causing artifacts, or reincarnated lost loves, that sort of thing. I think I understand why cops like simple answers.” I said nothing. “You obviously are not a fan of simple answers,” she said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror, “you never were.”
“Just a feeling.” I held up the plastic water bottle, still holding it by the neck. “Let’s swing by Elextra’s place and see what she’s got for us. Then I want Grinner to run Glide’s prints off of this and see if anything interesting pops up.”
I tried calling Elextra Dare, aka Peggy, several times on the scrambled phone Ankou had given me. No answer. Finally, she responded to one of my texts around nine, saying that she and George were home and to come on over. She misspelled a few words, used abbreviations, and ended her text with a little smiley face and a heart emoticon. She signed the text “Nancy Drew.” I couldn’t help but smile and shake my head. We made it back into town around nine-thirty and pulled into the drive of the porn diva’s ranch home close to ten. The headlights of Dragon’s jeep caught the back of George’s dark green Porsche coupe, including his vanity tag HRNDAWG. Classy. We
