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Nor would any "normal" child. Most kids wanted to be airplanepilots orrailroad engineers or cowboys or astronauts when they grew up. Many, of course, wanted to be detectives, Sherlock Holmeses, Mark Tidds (what boynowadays knewof Mark Tidd?), even Nick Carters since he had been revived withmodern settingsand plots, but few stuck to that wish. Most of the policemen andprivateinvestigators whom he knew had not had these professions as boyhoodgoals. Manyhad never read Holmes or had done so without enthusiasm; he had nevermet a Holmes buff among them. But they did read true detective magazinesand devoured the countless paperbacks of murder mysteries and of private eyes. They made funof the books, but, like cowboys who also deride the genuineness ofWesterns, they were addicted.
Childe made no secret of his "vices." He loved them, even the badones, andgloried in the "good" ones.
And so why was he trying to justify being a detective? Was itsomething tobe ashamed of?
In one way, it was. There was in every American, even the judgeand the policeman, a more-or-less strong contempt for lawmen. This lived sideby sidewith an admiration for the lawman, but for the lawman who is a strongindividualist, who fights most of his battles by himself againstoverwhelmingevil, who fights often outside the law in order to bring aboutjustice. Inshort, the frontier marshal, the Mike Hammerish private eye. Thislawman is so close to the criminal that there is a certain sympathy between thelawman and the criminal.
Or so it seemed to Childe, who, as he told himself now, tended todo too much theorizing and also to project his own feelings as those ofothers.
Matthew Colbert. Where was he now? Dead or suffering? Who hadforcibly taken him to some dwelling somewhere in this area? Why was the film sent tothe LAPD? Why this gesture of mockery and defiance? What could the criminalshope to gainby it, except a perverse pleasure in frustrating the police?
There were no clues, no leads, except the vampire motif, whichwas nothingbut a suggestion of a direction to take. But it was the only handleto grasp, ectoplasmic though it was, and he would try to seize it. At least, itwould givehim something to do.
He knew something about vampires. He had seen the early Draculamovies and the later movies on TV. Ten years ago, he had read the novel Dracula, and found it surprisingly powerful and vivid and convincing. It was far betterthan the best Dracula movie, the first; the makers of the movie should havefollowed the book more closely. He had also read Montague Summers and had been anavid reader of the now-dead Weird Tales magazine. But a little knowledge was notdangerous; it was just useless.
There was one man he knew who was deeply interested in the occultand the supernatural. He looked up the number in his record book because itwas unlisted and he had not called enough to memorize it. There was no response. He hung upand turned on the radio. There was some news about the international and national situations, but most of the broadcast was about the exodus. A number of stalled cars on the freeways and highways had backed up traffic for atotal of several thousand miles. The police were trying to restrict passage onthe freeways to a certain number of lanes to permit the police cars, ambulances, andtow trucks to pass through. But all lanes were being used, and thepolice werehaving a hell of a time clearing them out. A number of fires hadstarted in homes and buildings, and some of them were burning down with noassistance from the firemen because the trucks could not get through. There werecollisions all over the area with no help available, not only because of the trafficbut because there just was not enough hospital and police perso
Childe thought, to hell with the case! I'll help!
He called the LAPD and hung on for fifteen minutes. No luck. Hethen called the Beverly Hills Police Department and got the same result. He hadno more luck with, the Mount Sinai Hospital on Beverly Boulevard, which was withinwalkingdistance. He put drops in his eyes and snuffed up nose drops. He weta handkerchief to place over his nose and put his goggles on top of hishead. He stuck a pencil flashlight in one pocket and a switch-blade knife inanother. Then he left the apartment building and walked down San Vicente toBeverlyBoulevard.
In the half hour that he had been home, the situation hadchanged. The carsthat had been bumper-to-bumper curb-to-curb were gone. They werewithin earshot; he could hear the horns blaring off somewhere around BeverlyBoulevard and La Cienega, but there was not a car in sight.
Then he came across one. It was lying on its side. He looked downinto the windows, dreading what he might see. It was empty. He could notunderstand how the vehicle had been overturned, because no one could have gone fastenough inthe jam to hit anything and be overturned. Besides, he would haveheard the crash. Somebody--somebodies--had rocked it back and forth and thenpushed itover. Why? He would never know.
The signal lights at the intersection were out. He could see wellenoughacross the street to make out the thin dark shape of the pole. Whenhe got tothe foot of the light pole on his comer, he saw broken plastic, whichwould have been green, red, and yellow under more lightened circumstances, scattered about.
He stood for a while on the curb and peered into the sickly gray. If a car were to speed down the street without lights, it could be on himbefore he could get across the street. Nobody but a damned fool would go fast orwithout lights, but there were many damned fools driving the streets of Los Angeles.
The wailing of a siren became stronger, a flashing red lightbecame visible, and an ambulance whizzed by. He looked up and down the street anddashed across, hoping that the light and noise would have made even the damnedest offools cautious and that anybody following the ambulance would be blowinghis horn. He got across with only a slight burning of the lungs. The smog wasslowly rustingoff their lining. His eyes ran as if they were infected.
The sound of bedlam came to him before the hospital buildingloomed out of the mists. He was stopped by a white-haired man in the uniform of asecurityguard. Perhaps the old man had worked at an aircraft plant or at abank as a guard and had been deputized by the police to serve at the hospital. He flashed his light into Childe's face and asked him if he could help him. Thesmog wasnot dark enough to make the light brilliant, but it did a
He said, "Take that damned light away! I'm here to offer myservices in whatever capacity I'm peered."
He opened his wallet and showed his I.D.
The guard said, "You better go in the front way. The emergencyroom entrance is jammed, and they're all too busy to talk to you."
"Who do I see?" Childe said.
The guard hurriedly gave the supervisor's name and directions forgetting tohis office. Childe entered the lobby and saw at once that his helpmight beneeded, but he was going to have to force it on the hospital. Thelobby wasjammed and a sprawl with people who had been shunted out of theemergency roomafter more or less complete treatment, relatives of the wounded, peopleinquiring after lost or injured friends or relatives, and a numberwho, likeChilde, had come to offer their services. The hall outside thesupervisor'soffice was crowded too thickly for him to ram his way through even ifhe had felt like doing so. He asked a man on the fringes how long he hadbeen trying toget into the office.
"An hour and ten minutes, Mister," the man said disgustedly.
Childe turned to walk away. He would return to his apartment anddo whatever he could to pass the time. Then he would return after a reasonableamount of time (if there were such a thing in this situation), with the hopethat some order would have been established. He stopped. There, standing nearthe front door of the hospital, his head wrapped in a white cloth, was HamletJeremiah.