Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Courting Rites.pdf

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Courting Rites
By: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
* * * *
Humphrey Bogart used to star in the sort of hard-edge, black-and-white film that
“Courting Rites” could easily be made into. But let’s cast Lauren Bacall or Mary
Astor as the detective this time (if we don’t opt for Kathleen Turner as V.I.
Warshawski)—a gumshoe who isn’t as tough as her trade, but who’s as smart as
any of the movie detectives who wait behind those glass doors for clients to walk in
with problems that are always, always more than they seem. Maybe even smarter.
Those detectives usually turn up in Los Angeles and New York. Ms. Winters works
out of Nevada, where the rents are cheap.
From this winner of the John Campbell, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy
Awards, we have the tale of the hard-boiled detective with a heart that’s soft—but
not that soft.
* * * *
I should have known the case would be difficult from the start. He walked into my
office, sure as you please, confident he could charm any woman within range.
Maybe he could have once; he had a face that even at his age registered beauty.
Problem was, the face should never have grown old. His silver hair and startling blue
eyes only accented the idea that this man should have died young.
“Miss Winters?”
I nodded. I allowed men of his age certain liberties when it came to addressing
me. Any man under forty-five would have been reminded curtly that the proper title
is “Ms.”
“How may I help you, Mr.”—I glanced at the appointment book—”Silas?”
He smiled. “Silas is my first name.”
“And your last?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He took the chair in front of my desk. His clothes, dated
and slightly formal, carried the faint scent of pipe smoke. It added an exotic feel to
my rather staid office.
There are, perhaps, a thousand P.I.s in LA, which is why I left. I took all my
ready cash and set up shop in Nevada, where the land and the rents are cheaper by
hundreds—sometimes thousands—of dollars. I set up a fancy office—plush blue
upholstered chairs, matching carpet, framed prints on the wall, all-important
air-conditioning, and room for my part-time secretary in the months I needed her. I
had hoped it would give clients the idea that I was well-off—a woman who knew
 
what she was doing. It helped with tourists. But I got the sense that this man was not
a tourist.
“So,” I said again. “How may I help you?”
“You may find my banjo.”
Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t this. “Your banjo?”
“It may sound trivial to you, Miss,” he said. “But to me, it is of the utmost
importance.”
I folded my hands on my clean desk. I hadn’t had a client in weeks, and the
last had been a skip-trace out of Vegas. Certainly not the most interesting kind of
case, nor the most lucrative. “What is it, a collector’s item?”
kind.”
He smiled, and I saw a flash of that once-powerful charm. “It’s one of a
“Pictures, records, serial number?”
“No, none.” He waved a hand, dismissing my comment. “It was made by my
grandfather. The banjo looks like a normal banjo, but when you touch it, it feels
warm—elastic, as if a live thing were stretched across the drum instead of dried skin.
It will not play for you. In fact, it will not play for anyone except the person who
owns it.”
I scrawled notes, pleased that I also had the tape running inside my desk. I
couldn’t decide if this man was a nutcase or not. He seemed rational, but then, so
did Ted Bundy. “So what happened to it?”
I expected him to shake his head. Instead, his entire expression softened. “It’s
a bit of a story,” he said. “I fell in love.” He took a picture out of his wallet and slid
it across the desk. A professionally done job: black windblown hair, wide painted
eyes, and a glossy mouth. A beauty.
“Her name is Mariah Golden. She lived at Fifth and Fremont. I had occasion
to visit next door. We struck up an acquaintance, and eventually, she convinced me
to stay with her. A week later, I awoke one morning to discover that she and the
banjo had disappeared.”
“Not kidnapped? No ransom?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “And the police say they can’t do anything.”
“I suppose not.” I tapped my pencil on the desk, then quit when I
remembered the tape recorder. “I take a $500 retainer, and charge $25 per hour, plus
expenses.”
He took the money—cash—from his wallet, and set it between us. “I’m
 
staying in her house, waiting for her. You can reach me there.”
I nodded, knowing I should have asked a dozen more questions, but deciding
that I would rather wait until later. Until I had investigated a bit on my own.
He got up, straightened his pants legs, and nodded once.
“Tell me,” I said. “What is the importance of this banjo?”
He walked to the door, as if he hadn’t heard me, then paused. When he
turned, he watched me for a moment, as if he were assessing me. Finally, he said,
“I’ll die without it,” and then let himself out of the room.
No chemicals bleached the Nevada sky. The sun was pure here, hot and
radiant. The highway looked like a sharp heat vision against the desert brown. Even
my new car, with its fancy air-conditioning system and loud-playing stereo, faded a
little in the heat.
I came out here once a day to view the vast emptiness. The desert reminded
me of life—little patches of growth fighting against an overwhelming army of death.
Death and I were constant companions. In LA, it was part of my job—always a
gunshot away. And here, here my finger rested on the trigger.
I pulled to the side of the road, and shut off the car. Whirling dirt surrounded
me—not a dust storm— just dust devils, playing with my mind. The way that man
had, Silas, the one who wanted the banjo.
He probably wanted the woman, too.
I got out, stretched, and sucked in the dry air. The desert consoled me. It was
the only place where I could admit my unhappiness. I had run away to this small
Nevada town. I had left LA not because of those thousand other detectives, but
because I got to the point where I imagined Death beside me.
It happened late one afternoon, in an alleyway near Graumann’s Chinese. I
had cornered a young pimp who wouldn’t let me take a fourteen-year-old girl— the
one it had taken me nearly a month to find— because, he said, she was his best
“lady.” He was mouthing off to me when I pulled out my pistol. The gun didn’t
make him quit—maybe he thought a lady wouldn’t use one—so I let a shot ricochet
off the wall. The second wasn’t as well-timed—the pimp let out a grunt and slid to
the garbage-strewn pavement.
Then everything froze. Street noise I hadn’t thought I heard disappeared. Cars
stopped in their tracks, and the pimp paused in mid-groan. A man stood over the
pimp, a slender man, longish dark hair and startling blue eyes. A man who hadn’t
been there before.
“I’m going to stop this,” he said. He had the most beautiful voice I had ever
heard. “You’re way past your limit.”
 
He ran his hand over the pimp’s wound. A gout of blood and pus leaked out,
followed by the bullet. The wound closed itself, leaving only a scratch. The man
smiled, tipped his hat at me, and then the sounds came back—the honking horns,
blaring music, nattering tourists. The pimp completed his moan, touched his
shoulder, and looked surprised when no blood coated his fingers.
The man had disappeared.
I cuffed the pimp, left him, and took the girl home. She ran away again, not a
week later. Maybe the vision had been right. Maybe I killed too many and had
sympathy for too few.
I came to Nevada to find solace. Instead, I found a loneliness so deep that not
even the desert would soften it. I would dream of the man in black, his beautiful
voice and his striking eyes, and in the morning, I would wake, my gun clutched in
my hand, wondering how the barrel would taste against my tongue.
The dream hadn’t come in nearly a month.
I missed it.
The heat made my skin prickle. I watched the dust devils swirl around me,
wondering if they were lonely, too. Finally I decided they weren’t—they always
worked together, in company of two. I went home to an empty house. No one had
kept me company for a long, long time.
Mariah Golden spent her days at the hospital, holding the hand of an old man
dying of cancer. His room had that putrid stink of flesh gone bad, but she didn’t
seem to mind. She read to him, watched television with him, or sat quietly beside
him, a presence, nothing more.
I had no trouble finding her. She lived in the family home just outside of
town—alone, from what I could tell. She used her credit cards regularly to send
flowers to the old man, and she made no effort to hide her appearance around town.
Odd thing for a thief, but then, a banjo was an odd thing for a wealthy woman to
steal.
I waited until she went on one of her hospital runs, then used the lock set to let
me into her house. The security alarm was a familiar one—I had been the consultant
for the LA firm that developed it—and so I knew I had thirty seconds to disable it
before the cops arrived, guns in hand.
It took me fifteen.
Two steps down let me into the sunken living room, done in cream with
Navajo blankets for color. Designer books stood on the wall, a framed Chagall hid
from the light. I assumed the small objets d’art decorating the tables were also worth
a small fortune.
 
I took two steps back up and stopped in the dining room to admire the
stained-glass chandelier and the mahogany table. The dishes in the hutch were
Wedgwood—predictable, I thought—and a Dali original dominated that room.
No banjo.
Not that I expected it to hide in plain sight.
The walls were thin. Neither the bookcase nor the painting could hide more
than a shallow money safe— and money didn’t concern me. I glanced in the kitchen,
approving of the stove island, the expensive hanging pots, and the more reasonably
priced (and obviously used) stoneware. The stereo lived in this room, which was
probably where Mariah spent most of her time.
I went out the side kitchen door and into a narrow hallway, lined with track
lighting focused on more framed, expensive art. The master bedroom looked as if no
one lived there. The bed had a regulation military feel to it, and nothing cluttered the
end tables. I opened closets and drawers, finding nothing except men’s
clothing—much of it silk, and much of it dated.
The master bath smelled dry and even lonelier than the bedroom.
Across the hall stood the only other bedroom. It was small, and lived in.
Clothes scattered all over the chair and desk, empty hangers in the closet, an unmade
water bed in the corner, and well-thumbed paperbacks stacked on the headboard. I
searched this room slowly, careful not to disrupt the mess.
Nothing.
The trapdoor to the attic delivered dust and mice droppings. The attic itself
was empty, as was the crawl space under the house. I walked back to the sunken
living room, turned and surveyed the place, worried that I missed something.
My search was fine. If Silas had been right, and she had stolen his banjo, she
certainly wasn’t hiding it here.
I sighed. I had more questions for him.
* * *
He looked even older when he answered the door at the house on Fifth and
Fremont. His hands were palsied, and age spots had appeared on his skin. His
beautiful silver hair was thinning.
“Come in,” he said, as if my presence annoyed him.
I stepped into the house and saw that the same person had decorated both
houses. They shared a creamy, expensive Southwestern look, a taste in modern art,
and a penchant for exact detail.
 

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