choirboys. It would be sad if, frankly, it were not so very funny. What sort of cases do you pursue?”
“Divorces. Ostrich abuse. Tantric bestiality.”
“Oh! A kindred spirit! A brother in the damp corridors of sexual invention and the romance of Crime! Did you hear about the Red Shoes Killer?”
“No.”
“Four crack whores found sticking out of a washing machine. Their feet had been lightly grated, and then they’d been forced to dance on a floorspace thinly dusted with finest cocaine. The killer, you see, was a lecturer in English Literature, both hedonistic and hebephrenic. Someone attempting, misguidedly, to empower childlike behavior through vice.
“Look, I have had a really shitty night. I’ve gone along with this as long as I could, because it’s basically my punishment from God or something and I’ve learned to live with and accept it. But you are just blatantly making shit up now, and I’d like you to stop.”
Falconer squared his shoulders and gave me his contemptuous profile. “If you were a reader of the
He bullshitted on the subject for a while longer. Something still felt wrong. It wasn’t the usual weirdness index of my life. Something else. A bomb not dropped.
“…the police scientists confirmed that the placenta filling the gullet of the dead girl strapped to the bed once shared a womb with the live boy who nursed his testicular wounds. It had been cleverly preserved by a master criminal for precisely this purpose—choking the boy’s girlfriend to death. Said master criminal being the boy’s mother, of course.”
“Mr. Falconer?”
“One moment, young man. As I said, both parties bore the mark of a hypodermic syringe. My supposition was that the boy’s mother entered the house while he was engaged in coitus with the young lady. She assaulted them both with a hypodermic syringe charged with a substance that made them both more…pliant. She was restrained, and the placenta shoved into her mouth. She choked to death while the mother tied him into a hard wooden chair and rrrrutted with him until blood vessels under his scrotum burst against repeated violent contact with its edge. Crime and sex are inextricably linked, I have found.”
“I was wondering—”
“I’m sure you were. You’re a bright young man. She did indeed force her son to ejaculate into a plastic drip- feed bag such as is found in medical establishments, later to introduce his vigorous sperm into her bloodstream for the purpose of youth preservation. I suspect she bred him specifically for sexual entertainment and, in her twisted mind, the production of age-retarding chemicals. The girl was killed as instruction and punishment: you belong only to Mummy. The most fascinating detail, I believe, were the ligatures on his thighs—left, quite literally, by his mother’s apron strings. I considered meeting the woman, you know. A schoolboy’s uniform and some kind of cricket box to protect my precious scrotal treasures, and I would have been in like Flynn.”
“Why are you going to Los Angeles, Mr. Falconer?”
He broke into a beatific grin. “The game is afoot, my young colleague. I have learned of a sexual demimonde in Los Angeles.”
“No kidding.”
“Oh yes. But not the usual thing, no. These aren’t pissdrinkers or vomit-fellatio specialists, no no. I am talking of parties wherein persons possessed of certain diseases have young things from foreign climes shipped in for their filthy pleasures, and then take bets on which of them will die of the transmitted infections.”
“That’s horrible.”
“And one of these persons holds in false ownership a certain statuette, avian in appearance, hailing from Malta. My services have been engaged to retrieve the bird and—”
I fished my lighter out of my pocket and passed it to him. “Hold this for a second, would you?”
“Of course.”
He took the lighter. I punched him repeatedly in the face, and then told the flight attendants and surrounding passengers that I’d seen Falconer trying to set light to something in his shoes.
By the time we began to orbit LAX, Falconer’s face looked like bad steak. Everyone had had a go, even the old lady from five rows back, who tore up a plastic drinks tumbler and slashed him like she was a street fighter. I opened up a vomit bag and pulled it over his head. Trix slept through the whole thing.
Chapter 43
Leaning over Trix, I looked out at Los Angeles. An orange bowl inverted over the city. From a distance, you wonder how anyone can live there.
Stop-start shuffling our way through LAX security into Arrivals, she spotted something and pointed to me. An Asian girl in a business suit behind the cattle-fencing human funnel that pours people out into the hall, holding a clipboard with TRIX +1 scrawled in marker on the top sheet.
Trix grabbed my hand and tugged me through the crowds to the girl. “I’m Trix Holmes, and this is my plus-one. Brom sent you?”
The girl showed us a row of bleached teeth. I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Well, hi. I’m Blair? Brom’s assistant? I’m to drive you out to the house? Follow me?”
Bone-chilling air-conditioning gave way to a sweat-and grime-laden wall of hot air as we got out onto the
