Dragons & Dwarves

  “She’s being irrational. She wants me to lock myself in your condo until I take my return flight.”

  “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”

  “You think so? I said I wanted to see the Portal, and she went nuts. She almost tore up my boarding pass . . .”

  “Sarah, there’s no reason to bait your mother like that.”

  “I have a right to see you, Dad—”

  “Correction. I have a right to see you. You have a right to do whatever your parents tell you.”

  “Dad.”

  “Don’t ‘Dad’ me. Just because your mother has buttons doesn’t mean you have to push them. Just be happy she’s letting you come here for once.”

  “Okay, but you don’t have to live with her.”

  At this point, that was probably a good thing.

  “Anyway, I got a surprise for you, Dad.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “Hey, that would be telling.”

  The paternal instinct kicked in. “Is this a surprise I’m going to like?”

  “Uh-huh . . .”

  “Why do you sound uncertain about that?”

  “It’s just . . . I haven’t told Mom yet.”

  Okay, now I was really worried. “Tell me.”

  “I wanted to tell you in person—”

  “Honey, unless you want me to have nightmares about you eloping with a biker with a ring through his nose, tell me what it is.”

  “Ick. Okay, if you promise not to tell Mom.”

  “Sarah, you know I—”

  “I’m going to tell her, I just need to let her calm down first.”

  “What is it?”

  “I got an acceptance letter from one of my college applications.”

  “Hey, that is good news. Congratulations!” As I said it I began to realize that there was more going on here.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  She sucked in a breath and said, “It was my application to Kent State.”

  “You applied to Kent?”

  “And Oberlin.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “And Antioch, and Case Western . . .” She rattled off a list of a half dozen other schools.

  “Is there a university in Northeast Ohio you didn’t apply to?”

  “Cleveland State.”

  I placed my hand on my forehead. “Did Margaret let you send out those applications?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Did she know you applied to these places?”

  Silence.

  “Honey, you aren’t eighteen, wasn’t a parent supposed to sign your applications?”

  “She did . . . sort of.”

  “You didn’t forge your mother’s signature, did you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sarah!”

  “I filled out a stack of twenty or thirty, Dad. I just slipped a few more in when she was signing them for me. Can I help it if she wasn’t reading closely?”

  I tried to stifle a laugh.

  “Dad?”

  I gritted my teeth and said, “You have until this weekend to come clean with your mother.”

  “You’re angry with me?”

  “I will be if you continue this feud with your mom. Think of who’s going to be paying for half of this education. She has a right to be part of that decision.”

  “You know how she feels—”

  “And you’re making assumptions. If you don’t want me talking to your mom, do it yourself. She might surprise you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Perhaps, but you’re a year away from having the right to make those decisions unilaterally.” I walked away from the window, holding the phone.

  “Okay, I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “Honey?”

  “—ble hearing you, Dad.” Her voice was small and weak. I could hear the distance in it now.

  “I think we’re losing the connection.”

  “—is weekend—ve you, Dad.”

  “I love you, too.”

  A rattle, a hiss, and a shaking dial tone. I turned off the wireless and tossed it on the couch.

  “Kent State?” I muttered to myself, smiling. I was going to catch hell from Margaret about this one. She would think I put our daughter up to it. And, knowing my daughter, I doubted that there was anything Margaret would be able to do to keep her from moving up here.

  There were God knows how many parents of God knows how many teenagers living perfectly normal lives here. More all the time.

  However, despite all the times I had told my ex that things were okay up here, now that the possibility was staring me in the face, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AS soon as I hit the office, I spread the competition across my desk. The Herald, the Leader, and the Plain Dealer, all had at least some ink devoted to the late Mr. Ossian Parthalán. The Plain Dealer had little more than a police blotter, but the other two pretty much confirmed what Commander Maelgwyn Caledvwlch had told me.

  At Club Nazgûl, at about six-thirty yesterday, they found the corpse of our dwarf. The one detail I picked up from the stories that Caledvwlch hadn’t volunteered was the fact that the “authorities” who broke in on our decedent were FBI agents, not local cops.

  Of course, the glaring omission in every story was what Federal agents were doing there in the first place. After plumbing the record, such as it was, I decided to check the Press’ own resource.

  Reggie Sommers had been a veteran of the crime beat longer than I’d been paying attention to politics, much less covering it. He’d been a rookie back in the Danny Greene era and probably had the numbers of more mob guys in his head than were in the Youngstown phone book.

  He looked like the guys he covered; squat, beefy, snow-white hair, with a cigar—always unlit in the nonsmoking building—clamped in his mouth.

  He looked up as I stopped in front of his desk. “Hey, Maxwell, what brings you to my side of the tracks? Another kickback story?”

  “No.” I pulled up a chair. “Murder, actually.”

  Reggie arched an eyebrow and took the unlit cigar out of his mouth. “A little off your beat, isn’t it? They didn’t find another dragon, did they?”

  They’re probably going to carve that story on my tombstone.

  I shook my head.

  “Thank God for that.”

  “No,” I said, “this was a source. Well, he might have been a source. . . . Someone killed him before we met.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I want to know if you heard anything. I got a feeling that the FBI might have had my guy under surveillance.”

  “This guy wouldn’t have just turned up dead in a Goth night-club, would he?”

  “Ossian Parthalán.”

  “Holy crap. I knew I had a bad feeling about that one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The guys I usually talk to, they might hire mages here and there, but they have a good Catholic fear of the kind of voodoo that flies out of the Portal. The nasty stuff, they don’t want to touch.”

  “A ritual killing, you think?”

  Reggie laughed, “You see any crime scene pictures? Kind of thing that can make a forensic mage lose his lunch. This was a dwarf thing, and the dwarves in this town are up to their little skulls in the nasty stuff.”

  “I thought dwarves weren’t involved in magic.”

  “Well, I can’t count the stories of guys who crossed the wrong dwarf and ended up like your friend Parthalán. Guys a century removed from the old country will give you the evil eye if you mention dwarven business.”

  “So no one’s talking about Parthalán?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So what have you heard?”

  Reggie leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Now, I didn’t hear this from who I heard it from, and you didn’t hear it from anyone. The wise-guy gossip is that your dwarf had left the reservation. He was sell
ing out someone, and this was payback.”

  “Who?”

  Reggie shrugged. “Someone involved with the clans, and big in the dark side of things.”

  “Things a good Catholic mobster doesn’t mess with?”

  “You got it.” Reggie looked at me with a little concern. “And, frankly, if he was talking to you, I’d watch your back.”

  I grunted a “Thanks,” and changed the subject. “So you have any idea what the FBI was doing there?”

  “I haven’t got a clear answer from anyone, but there are rumors about some sort of dwarven smuggling operation.” I thought of the little plastic bag of white crystals. “My guess is they were tailing the dwarf, and considering how he was cut up, probably a good chance that he was about to become an informant, if he hadn’t already.”

  I nodded.

  “So want to tell me what he was a source on?”

  After a long conversation with Reggie, I slipped out to have lunch with one of the few good, reliable contacts I had on the investigative side of law enforcement.

  Like any good reporter, I cultivated cops for sources. But I’m a political reporter, and that skews the people I cultivate. All the cops I dealt with were either in the city administration or in the union hierarchy. Basically old guys with a lot socked away for their pension and within spitting distance of retirement. Folks whose secure position made them reluctant to openly criticize anything, but, ironically, made them more likely to be my unnamed source. The guys I usually talked to weren’t going to be the first ones—or the last ones—at a crime scene.

  However, there was one guy I knew who was still actively involved in criminal investigation more than politics. The guy wasn’t even a cop. His name was Dr. Russell Kawata, and he was a forensic pathologist. I’d met him over a liquor store shooting a few years ago. It wasn’t something I normally get involved with, but it was a high profile case with some racial overtones—which meant that someone decided to make political hay out of what happened. Speeches, public trial, all very ugly. Kawata had been offended at the way some public figures were misstating the facts of the case, and fed me details on what really happened.

  It wasn’t often that a political reporter needed the help of a forensic pathologist, and it had been over a year since I talked to him about a story, but, thankfully, he was free for lunch at a small deli downtown. He was waiting for me when I walked in.

  “Maxwell, how’re you doing?”

  “Good. Thanks for meeting on such short notice.”

  He held out a beefy hand and I shook it.

  Kawata was dark and round, with black hair and Asiatic features. He spoke with an accent unfamiliar to most Midwesterners. He told me once that about half the people he met thought he was Indian or Pakistani, the other half thought he was some weird Puerto Rican half-breed. He actually was a full-blooded native Hawaiian. I never asked why he came to Cleveland, but I suspect it had something to do with the Portal.

  “No problem, Maxwell. I was thinking of you the other day. I saw the story about the bar.”

  I nodded. “I was hoping that you could do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  I pulled out my letter, contained in its Ziplock bag. I placed it on the table. “You do drug tests when you do an autopsy, right?”

  “Yes?”

  “So if I asked you to, you could identify what’s in this envelope?”

  “If there’s enough for a spectral analysis.” He picked up the bag. “We just got a new toy. They finally bought us a mass spectrometer that gives accurate readings.”

  “There was a problem with the old one?”

  “I never told you? Same problem every TV had. Analog signal. Up to now we had to ship tests to an out-of-state lab, or take about twenty-five readings on one sample and average out the noise. Got a brand-new machine now, though, does all that for us.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Only took a decade . . .” Kawata held up the bag and looked at it. “Addressed to you?”

  “Someone sent me a present.”

  Kawata nodded. “You know, all I’m competent to do is a chemical analysis. If you want anything more thorough—handwriting, fingerprinting . . .”

  “I have a good idea who sent it.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you should probably treat it like crime scene evidence, just in case.”

  He lowered the envelope. “Is it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  When I got back to the office, I tried to research what I could about Ossian Parthalán. Mazurich aside, Ossian Parthalán’s life and death already counted as a minor news story even if he was just a dwarven conspiracy buff blowing smoke out his ass.

  I sat at my desk, running searches through my computer through periodical databases at the Press, at the local library, and at two subscription services, as well as the basic Internet search engines.

  The pickings were slim. In two hours of searching, I only had three solid hits, and only one of them directly concerned the dwarf in question.

  The direct hit was a minor story from about three years ago about a legal battle between my Mr. Parthalán and State Farm insurance. It seems that Ossian Parthalán made a trade out of auto bodywork. He worked out of a small garage on the near West Side called Thor’s Hammer. State Farm wasn’t compensating my dwarf for work he did because, apparently, he did too good a job. State Farm thought the claims were fraudulent. Their adjusters were convinced that, based on the damage done to the cars involved, they wouldn’t be salvageable.

  Mr. Parthalán won that case.

  The first indirect hit was from almost ten years ago. It was someone’s attempt to do a story about dwarven politics. My caveat about reporters on the outside looking in applied here in spades. The article was mostly a description of some sort of dwarven council meeting that was held in the Tower City Hilton, the mechanics of which the reporter obviously wasn’t privy to. The whole story amounted to little more than saying: “the dwarves here have a clan-based system that has something to do with blood relation, and after a lot of raucous infighting, one of these clans is dominant.”

  The picture accompanying the story showed a half dozen dwarves yelling and pointing at each other around a circular meeting table. By the caption, third from the left was my guy, Ossian Parthalán.

  So my guy was active in dwarven politics at one point. I wondered at what point that interest carried over into Cleveland City Council.

  The second indirect hit was from one of my Internet searches, and at first look the Web page seemed to have nothing to do with my dwarf at all:The Dwarven Armorer:

  Highest quality arms and armor. Serving the Midrealm for ten years. If your marshal doesn’t pass it, we’ll take it back!

  Specializing in:• Full Plate

  • Chain Mail

  • Functional Historic Reproductions

  Gauntlets to Gorgets and everything in between. Reasonable prices, financing, Master Card and Visa accepted. Prop. Sir Thorndyke of Dover (mundanely Teaghue Parthalán)

  It was located at another West Side address. I would have passed it off as simply a coincidence of names, but the address was only a block or two from the Thor’s Hammer body shop, and—when you think about it—there is some similarity between making plate mail and doing auto bodywork.

  At least there seems to be, to a reporter looking for leads and who knows nothing about either.

  There is some truth to the argument that once you cross the Cuyahoga River you are entering a different city. When Kipling wrote, “West is West and East is East,” he could have very well been talking about my hometown. A lot of people simplify the thing by pointing out the racial fault lines. It’s easy to do, since Cleveland is—even post-Portal—one of the most segregated communities north of the Mason-Dixon line. But the differences go a lot deeper than that.

  The histories of the two halves of Cleveland over the past hundred years have been radically different. The East Side had the race riots
in the ’60s, while the West Side had its working class communities plowed under and split in half by interstate construction. Almost every museum was built east of the river, every factory built on the west. The East Side has Case Western and University Circle. The West Side has the airport. Hispanic people drift west. Middle Eastern people drift east. Rayburn was a solidly West Side mayor, and Gregory Washington was firmly East Side.

  On the East Side we’ve got elves.

  The West Side got the dwarves.

  I was thinking of the Portal’s contribution to the yin-yang nature of this city as I left the Shoreway and started looking for The Dwarven Armorer.

  It was hard to miss.

  If the heraldic banners flapping in front of the doorway didn’t give it away, the suit of plate mail standing in front of the shop was a dead giveaway. I found a parking spot across the street and looked at the building. It wasn’t a regular storefront. The building was a low red-brick structure with large garage doors set in the side. A small lot on one end was surrounded by chain-link. The snow-covered lot was piled high with scrap metal of every description—old plumbing, wheel rims, twisted rebar still dangling fragments of concrete, and the occasional engine block.

  We were obviously zoned for light industrial here, and I wondered what the building used to produce. I suspected that it was a machine shop of one sort or another, which probably closed up when this town’s last steel mill shut down for good, about twenty years ago.

  I got out and walked to the door and its metallic guardsman.

  I was impressed. I’ve seen the medieval armor displayed at the art museum here, the best collection in this half of the world, and you could place this guy’s work right up there with it. All it lacked was the patina of age.

  Teaghue Parthalán also did something a bit unusual. Every suit of armor I’d ever seen had been in a static upright display. This one was mounted on some sort of articulated skeleton that allowed it to be posed in the midst of delivering a blow to an unseen attacker. It helped show off the mail underneath and the way the joints moved.