Dragons & Dwarves

  “Ever see this man before?”

  “I don’t know him,” I evaded.

  “Uh-huh. You’d recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “Yes.”

  O’Malley nodded and looked back up at the house. The upper windows were glowing blue with whatever the forensic mages were doing. I caught a whiff of ozone on the air.

  “Okay, Maxwell, get the hell out of here.”

  “What?” I had already figured on at least a couple hours questioning downtown.

  “Leave,” he said. “If we need you, we’ll be in touch.”

  I was actually speechless for a moment as he turned around. I did manage to shout out a question as he walked away. “Do you think this is connected to the murder investigation?”

  O’Malley stopped. He turned around with a face so stony that he looked more like a Mafioso than ever. “What murder investigation?”

  “Aloeus.”

  “The dragon was the victim of a tragic accident.”

  “Was Mr. Nixon an accident victim, then?”

  “These are two unrelated incidents. Now, if you would step behind the police line and let us do our job.”

  “What about Faust?” I asked.

  “Officers,” O’Malley called to the two nearest uniformed cops. “Please escort this man away from the crime scene.

  “Is Faust a suspect?” I called as I was hauled past the outer line of parked patrol cars. No response. I was unceremoniously deposited on one end of the blocked off street, effectively stranded since my Volkswagen was in the center of all that police activity.

  “Maxwell, when you step in it, you really step in it.”

  I turned around to see a familiar face. “Cutler?”

  Kirk Cutler was a fellow reporter. He looked like his name—beefy, crewcut, smoking like a chimney. He would never had made it as a TV journalist. He was a twelve-year veteran of print crime reporting, and he’d worked at a half dozen papers going back to when Cleveland was a one-paper town. He had come to resemble his subject matter.

  Currently I think he worked for the Leader.

  He leaned on a beat-up Oldsmobile that looked like a scarred veteran of a 1970s cop show. “You remembered,” he said from behind a cigarette, “how touching.” He smiled.

  “Nixon?”

  “Police scanner is a wonderful thing. Though Nixon is only part of the reason I’m here. That’s why I’m waiting for you, rather than wading into that mess.” He cocked his head back toward the house crawling with cops. “I got everything the police were willing to give me anyway.”

  “You were waiting for me?”

  “Uh-huh,” Cutler flung the cigarette at the asphalt by his feet and ground it out with a steel-toed work boot. “You found the body, after all.”

  I nodded, a little uncomfortable being on the other side of the journalistic fence.

  “Also, we got a mutual acquaintance to discuss.” He opened the door of the Olds and said. “So, need a lift?”

  I cast a glance at my Volkswagen and nodded.

  True to his reputation, he drove us both to the Crazy Horse Saloon. As topless dance clubs go, the Crazy Horse was fairly classy. It was downtown, and a good part of their clientele was the lunchtime old-boy network. Executives, veeps, lawyers from the Justice Center—the kind of folks that want their smut scrubbed clean. The dancers looked as airbrushed as a Playboy centerfold.

  We didn’t look like we fit in, but the extra bill I saw Cutler slip into the cover charge got us a choice table, in a private corner, with an unobstructed view of the stage.

  I ordered a Diet Coke, while he chose a “Grog,” one of the less subtle local microbrew beers. He seemed very much at home, lounging back and watching the stage. Thankfully he had the good taste not to order a lap dance.

  He yawned as the latest athlete lowered herself from the chromed pole on stage left and cleared the way for the next performer.

  Up to this point, I had done most of the talking. I’d told him about the scene at Nixon’s house, including the mage’s escape and O’Malley’s appearance. I figured that it was his turn to reciprocate.

  “You wanted to talk about a mutual acquaintance?” I prodded him.

  “Yeah,” he said, taking another swig of his Grog. The beer had an eerie phosphorescence in the black light. It swirled and made complex patterns in the bottle independent of the motion of the liquid. Cutler elbowed me as the next dancer came up on the stage. “Look at the set on her.”

  I cast the obligatory admiring glance at the stage. “So, Cutler—”

  “His street name is Bone Daddy.”

  I looked back at him, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the stage. I suspected that, if he was here alone, he’d be shoving fives and tens in the dancer’s garter. When you hit a certain age, have a decent job, and find yourself single, you tend to get weird with money. With me it was an entertainment system, with Cutler I think it was tittie bars.

  Cutler kept talking. “Given name is Caleb Mosha Washington. Rap sheet longer than Euclid Avenue. Priors—defiling a corpse, body snatching, possession of criminal tools, a few things that haven’t been crimes since the Salem Witch Trials.”

  “This is the guy who jumped out of the window?”

  “And the guy who engaged in a little clandestine chat with you in East Cleveland.”

  I choked on my Diet Coke. Coughing, I put it on the table and grabbed a napkin to cover my mouth.

  Cutler laughed. “Didn’t think I knew that, did you?”

  “How?”

  “I’ve been following something big. As big as your chicken little, maybe bigger.”

  “What?”

  “Rogue cops in the SPU.”

  “There’ve been rumors of that since they formed the unit.”

  “I got more than rumors. I got elves dealing with Bone Daddy. I got cash changing hands. I got Bone Daddy walking away from several airtight busts. They’re in each other’s pockets.” He turned to face me. “You, my friend, are gold. I trailed Bone to that little rendezvous of yours, but you were in there with them.”

  “Ahh.”

  “You see my interest.”

  “And I get?”

  Cutler laughed. “The appreciation of a colleague,” he reached into his jacket and pulled out a CD. “You also get all the background I’ve already dug up on the dirty elves and Mr. Bone.”

  I reached for the CD, and he put it back inside his jacket. “Why don’t you go first?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IT was late afternoon before I recovered my Volkswagen and had it parked across from the old Cleveland Trust Building. I was biding my time, rummaging through the contents of Cutler’s CD while I waited for the late dragon’s lawyer to show.

  Cutler had not been parsimonious with his bequest of data. I had in hand the results of what had to be several month’s worth of investigation. The linchpin of which was Bone Daddy, aka Caleb Mosha Washington, a mage of no fixed address. The history Cutler had built for the guy went back as far as the guy’s birth certificate. The notes were a combination of interview transcripts, old news articles, and public records from various sources.

  Skimming the high points, I gleaned the following;

  Bone Daddy was born to an upper-middle-class family in Shaker Heights. Father was a doctor, mother a lawyer. Their only son had been problematic early on. When he was six, he destroyed about eight grand worth of electronic equipment, including a laptop computer and three cell phones by throwing them into the pool. When he was eight, he responded to one of his mother’s business trips by slashing the tires on her BMW, and on his dad’s Jaguar. When he was twelve, he managed to call a travel agent on his dad’s behalf and successfully cancel hotel reservations, car rentals, and a return ticket from a Las Vegas convention while his dad was still on the outbound flight. At fourteen, he was stealing his parents’ cars. At sixteen, he was stealing their credit card numbers.

  Whatever point he was trying to get across was never made. At eighteen
he left.

  Once he left home, his rebellion seemed to take a different tack. From the point he left home, until about a year after the Portal opened, Bone Daddy didn’t have any trouble with the law. I was surprised, and I made the initial assumption that he just wasn’t getting caught.

  But Cutler’s bio wasn’t relying on police records. He had tracked down and talked to dozens of Bone’s associates. The fact was, during the time in question, Bone Daddy’s recreational activities weren’t illegal. Mr. Bone was a mystic before mysticism worked. He was a practicing neo-Pagan, devotee of Alister Crowley, the Golden Dawn, and a shitload of other crap that I don’t know jack about.

  Now, when the Portal opens, the power that flows out of it doesn’t care where the rituals come from. All that power is looking for is focus. Pattern. Bone Daddy had that in spades. From all accounts, the people on that particular fringe regarded him as an expert in the magical arts for two or three years before the Portal opened.

  Bone Daddy was a black-market mage before anyone realized such a thing existed. Apparently, with the newfound power came a renewed antiauthoritarian streak. While most of the mages in town, especially those at Bone’s level, were playing nice and working within the envelope provided by the Port Authority in an attempt to control what could be a very dangerous commodity, Bone would have nothing of oversight, regulation, or any legal limits on his power.

  A spell called for a human corpse? Who was he to argue? Potentially lethal alchemical components? What his clients didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Violations of privacy, curses, sales of deadly potions? It was a new world, and people who weren’t prepared to defend themselves from it had to be prepared to pay the price.

  I couldn’t help but think of Morgan and his eyeball tumors.

  What made Bone Daddy all the more interesting was, despite all his arrests—as Cutler said, a rap sheet as long as Euclid Avenue—he’d never been convicted. He’d never even had to stay overnight at the Justice Center. That spoke of one of two things. Either he was an informant, or cops were being paid off.

  Perhaps, as Cutler speculated in his notes, both.

  Cutler had compiled an exhaustive itinerary of meetings going back as far as the formation of the SPU. Even at that point, Bone Daddy was a major figure. He was in the top five underground mages. He was not the type of candidate that cops select as an informant. You were supposed to use little fish to catch big fish.

  Apparently what was happening here was the reverse.

  A small cabal of SPU officers, all elves, had been meeting repeatedly with Bone Daddy since the formation of the unit. According to Cutler’s notes and a few digital pictures, cash went both ways. From the looks of things, Bone handed rivals and minor annoyances to the SPU elves, and in return he was pretty much immune from the cops.

  It seemed off-key to me; elves have always seemed to put a lot of stock in personal honor. Like their reserve, it seemed a racial characteristic. Enough so that I found it hard to believe that a quartet of them were dirty. But Cutler’s evidence was pretty damning, even if I didn’t take my own experiences into account.

  The crowning bit, of course, was the fact that they were the same elves that’d kidnapped me.

  The most chilling part was a story Cutler included about the SPU’s founding, seven years ago. The article was content-free, avoiding the nasty feelings in the police rank and file about the creation of this departmental entity that, while supervised by a police commander, was essentially only answerable to the Public Safety Director. What got me was the picture that accompanied the article.

  It was an artist’s rendering, probably based on a couple of digital snapshots too low-res to print. It showed the ranks of the twenty-five officers that formed the initial core of the SPU. The elf-to-human ratio was nineteen to six in favor of the elves. I knew that over the next seven years the ratio would drop to nearly nil on the human end. The human cops were just too subject to the ostracism of their fellow officers while the elves could care less.

  Sitting in the back were four familiar-looking, overly tall kins-men. These were the bastards who’d kidnapped me and fed me to Bone Daddy. They had been in the unit from the start, which meant they all probably had command positions now.

  I stared into Elf Number One’s expressionless eyes. Looking down at the caption, I finally had a name to go with the face—Maelgwyn Caledvwlch.

  I preferred “Elf Number One.”

  There was a tapping on the driver’s side window, and I closed my notebook.

  Looking at me through the glass was the man I was waiting for. I lowered the window.

  “Are you Kline Maxwell?” he asked me.

  “That’s me,” I said with a smile.

  The man gave me a sour expression. His hair was white, his face clean-shaven. Narrow glasses with gold rims perched on a beak of a nose. He wore a charcoal-gray suit that could have been a twin to the one he’d worn yesterday. He still wore a black armband. “I do not appreciate blackmail,” said the late dragon Aloeus’ personal lawyer.

  I couldn’t help smiling, because what kept going through my mind was that kid Sam Barlogh saying, “You used to be big, didn’t you?”

  I let myself out of the car and looked at my quarry. His name was Jefferson Friday, and he had been a partner in one of the largest law firms in the city—one that, coincidentally, had Forest Hills Enterprises as a major client. Shortly after the Portal opened, he went into private practice which, some tentative research showed, had not hurt his standard of living despite his only having the single client. Apparently, Aloeus, Inc., paid well.

  “Mr. Friday, this is not blackmail. Blackmail involves a quid pro quo. I was just letting you know information that I’ve gathered, and I’m providing you the opportunity to comment.”

  “You can’t print things like . . .”

  “Like what?” I prompted.

  He shook his head. “Come on,” he waved me forward, “You’ll have your comment.”

  Having Friday lead me into Aloeus’ lair within the Cleveland Trust Building was no small achievement. While dragons were notoriously insular, their lawyers brought client confidentiality to a whole new level of pathology. It had taken me a few hours on the phone, sifting through what I could find of Aloeus’ employees, before I even found out who Friday was. There had been a dozen lawyers on Aloeus, Inc.’s payroll—but there was only one personal counsel to the dragon-in-chief.

  And, while Friday could quite readily stonewall the likes of Sam Barlogh and his fellows, Sam Barlogh and his fellows weren’t following quite the same paths I was. A catalog of property damage might make a splashy feature, and details of the corpse’s explosive demise might make titillating copy, but those angles weren’t going to raise Friday’s eyebrows a millimeter or encourage him to give anything but a boilerplate comment on the death of a client. However, a tastefully composed e-mail hinting at Aloeus’ powerful connections to the current administration and massive land deals with Forest Hills Enterprises, and suddenly Jefferson Friday, Esq., was a lot more interested in talking.

  We stood on one of the massive stone steps of the Cleveland Trust Building, and Friday faced the elaborate scrollwork on the heavy metal door. He made a few passes with his hand and muttered something under his breath. The metal doors silently opened, revealing a marble stairway into the soft-lit inner sanctum.

  He led me through a room that was all pillars, wood, and marble. The only furniture was that of a permanent nature, like the long marble partition that housed the darkened tellers’ windows.

  The spaces were still and silent, tomblike. The tinted windows allowed little daylight to break the gloom, and only one out of three light fixtures were in use.

  Scattered over the marble floor, leading back into the darkened areas, were Persian rugs and embroidered cushions the size of my couch. There was room down here for a dragon, but I didn’t see how it could enter or leave.

  “Did Aloeus live here?” I asked.

  “This was
his home.”

  “How did he get into the building?”

  He looked over his shoulder as he took me back to a curving staircase. “We removed a wall opposite East Ninth and Euclid.” He looked back up the staircase.

  I looked around and tried to see the exit as we ascended. I couldn’t find it. Warded and camouflaged, most probably. Wouldn’t want just any riffraff walking into your lair.

  On the second floor, we passed through a massive mahogany door into an office that overlooked the intersection of Euclid and East Ninth. He seated himself behind an acre of desk that reflected the white monolith of National City back at me in shades of rose.

  There wasn’t a chair for visitors, and I doubted he was the type to open up to someone casually sitting on his desk, so I leaned against the doorframe.

  “So,” I asked as I took out my notebook, “for the record?”

  He shook his head. “You have excessive temerity, Mr. Maxwell.”

  “I’m a journalist, Mr. Friday. My job is to report the facts.”

  “However distorted those facts are?”

  “Mr. Friday, a distorted fact is an oxymoron.”

  “And what you e-mailed me were facts?”

  “You say they aren’t?” I smiled. “Can you elaborate on where, exactly, I am mistaken?”

  “You are ready to print all about his involvement in mundane affairs. Human affairs. Nothing could be further from what he stood for.”

  “From my point of view, Aloeus was a major player in city politics. There’s legislation that wouldn’t have existed if not for him.”

  “That is my point. You do not understand. No one would.”

  I nodded. “That’s why we’re here, for you to explain it all.”

  Friday explained it for me, in depth, as if arguing his point to a judge. He began with the standard, though detailed, explanation of what was on the other side of the Portal.

  On the other side was an empire whose name roughly transliterated as Ragnan. Ragnan was a massive state that enveloped that world’s main continent the way the Roman Empire had once enveloped Europe. Ragnan was a human state, upstart by immortal standards. But upstart or not, it had about five thousand years to establish itself as the ultimate temporal power in that world.