Dead Mans Hand

"Yeoman? He's history," Elmo said bluntly. "He's been gone for, what, a year now? Nobody knew where, not even Chrysalis. She tried like hell to find him. I think she was afraid the Fists had iced him. There was bad blood between Yeoman and the Fists. But it couldn't have been him. He was only a nat."

"The Oddity?" Jay asked.

Elmo shrugged. "If they had dealings, it wasn't anything she told me about."

"Who else?" Jay asked. "Enemies, rejected lovers, greedy heirs, anyone who had a reason to want her dead?"

"She had a silent partner," Elmo told him. "A joker named Charles Dutton. He helped her buy the Palace, way back when she started. I guess the joint is his now"

"I'll talk to him," Jay promised. "Anything else?" Elmo hesitated.

"C'mon," Jay urged. "Spill it."

"I don't know what it means," Elmo said, "but last year, in the spring, I had to get rid of a body."

"A body?" Jay said.

Elmo nodded. "A woman. Young, dark-ski

"What did you do with the body?" Jay asked.

"Put it in a garbage bag and left it in the basement. The next morning it was gone. The neighbors-"

They both heard the footsteps at the same time. "The neighbors?" Jay prompted.

"Next door," Elmo started to say as a key turned in the lock. "Any bodies we left for them. They were good at stuff like that." He shut up and looked sullenly at the floor.

The cell door swung open. Next to Maseryk was Captain Ellis herself, puffing on a cigarette and bouncing from heel to heel. "Get the hell out of there."

"I was just leaving," Jay said. He gave Elmo a reassuring pat on the arm as he walked past. The dwarf didn't even look up.

"I want you to know that Maseryk made this little arrangement without my permission," Ellis snapped. "But now that it's done, you damn well better deliver that name, and it damn well better pan out, or you and your friend Elmo could be sharing a cell."

Jay couldn't even work up the energy to sass her. "Daniel Bre

Maseryk shot him a look like someone had just slipped an ice cube down his pants. Ellis just snorted, and wrote down the name. "Have a nice day," Jay told them, walking out.

There were no walls, fences, or other barriers to keep Bre

He finally broke through the screen of trees and found himself facing a rolling lawn that was as smooth as a putting green. Past the beautifully manicured lawn was an extensive flower garden. Past the flower garden was a high hedge. Past the hedge was a house, two stories. The first floor was hidden by the hedge, but four windows on the second floor looked directly upon the lawn.

Bre

He scuttled into the garden in a crouch, keeping out of sight of the second-story windows, recognizing many of the flowers as he moved through the garden. There were roses and chrysanthemums, snapdragons and sunflowers, but planted side by side with them were poppies, like those he had seen growing in plantations in Vietnam and Thailand, and datura, which he recognized from his boyhood days in the Southwest, and, in cool, deep-shaded bowers, mushrooms of a dozen colors and shapes, none of which looked suitable for sauteing and eating with steak.

The i

Like the four-foot-high concrete mushroom and the hookahsmoking caterpillar curled up on it. Not your typical garden ornament, certainly, but it fit the theme of this one.

Bre

"Welcome to the magic kingdom," it said as Bre

8:00 P.M.

The cops had the funeral home staked out to hell and gone. Jay spotted the first one selling franks from a pushcart on the corner, two more sitting in a parked car halfway down the block, a fourth on a roof across the street. Either they weren't completely convinced that Elmo was their man, or they were hoping for Yeoman to show up and pay his last respects.

Cosgrove's Mortuary was a sprawling three-story Victorian monstrosity that looked like a shipwreck from another time. It had a great round turret in one corner, a tall Gothic tower in another; a wide wooden porch that girdled the entire house, jigsaw carpentry everywhere. Chrysalis would have loved the place.

He was climbing the steps when the door banged open and Lupo came stalking out. "A bloody farce, that's what it is," he snarled when he saw Jay. His ears were flat against his skull in anger. "Who the hell does he think he is?" He didn't wait for an answer. Jay shrugged and went on in.

The foyer was darkly papered and full of antiques. The daily directory, in a glass case mounted on the wall, a

Jory in the West Parlor, Moore upstairs in the Round Room. Jay realized that he didn't know Chrysalis's real name.

"Oh," said a soft voice beside him. "Mr. Ackroyd, it's so good of you to come."

Waldo Cosgrove was a round, soft man in his seventies, bald as an egg, with tiny moist hands. Waldo dressed impeccably enough to please even Hiram, smelled like he'd bathed in perfume, looked like he'd been rolled in talcum powder. Jay had done some work for him the year before, when a pair of particularly grotesque joker corpses had been stolen from the mortuary. The whole thing had upset Waldo dreadfully, and Waldo wasn't used to being upset. Mostly Waldo was sorry. He was better at being sorry than anyone Jay had ever met. "Hello, Waldo," Jay said. "Which one is Chrysalis?"

"Miss Jory is laid out in the West Parlor. It's our nicest room, you know, not to mention the largest, and she had so many friends. I was so sorry to hear about this dreadful business."