Transylvania's Most Wanted Page 3

  “But sometimes she was right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well witches are right more times than your mother, and Pricilla is right more times than most witches.”

  “I guess I’d better not sit too close to anyone then,” he joked, but Miss Kensington failed to see the humor in this remark. Something was clearly bothering her. “I guess you don’t have a photo of Pandora in you secret mug book?”

  “No,” Miss Kensington said. “But I know where you might find a picture of her.”

  “Where?”

  “Drive over to the Transylvania City Raven building on Hangman’s Street. Ask to see Lou Mitchell.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A longtime photographer for the paper. When the zeppelin from the U.R.R.K. came here twenty two years ago, a lot of photographs were taken of it and the refugees arriving here. They should have a file of them still. Lou will know where to find it. Tell him it’s a favor for Miss Kensington. Just so you’ll know and keep it under your hat – Lou’s the one that secretly takes pictures for my witches’ mug book.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Tom drove back to town and dropped Miss Kensington off and then had one stop to make before he would go to see Lou Mitchell.

  As he passed Mulberry, Tom saw the street was barricaded off on both ends of the block now and the demolition crane had been finished being put together. He was curious to know why the street right next to the TCPD building was blocked off if they were going to be working toward the other side of the block. So he decided to stop and ask when he spotted the supervisor.

  “Did they ever tell you what this crane has been brought here for?” he asked.

  “No,” he said. “My company just rents out the cranes. What they do with them is their business.”

  “Who rented the crane?”

  “Heck if I know. All I was told was to have everything ready to go by 12 o’clock. All I’m waiting on is for the wrecking ball to be delivered and to make sure whoever rented this thing, that they got a licensed crane operator to operate it. I can’t give them the key until then.”

  “Nobody has showed up yet?” Tom asked looking around.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, thanks,” he said, heading back to his car. “Good luck.”

  “It’s the oddest thing,” the foreman said looking around for someone coming to meet him.

  Tom got back in his car and drove two blocks to the City Hall building and parked. As he started up the sidewalk, he spotted Inspector McElroy coming toward him, apparently coming back from an early lunch.

  “Hey Mac,” he said. “Do you know where the office is inside here where a witch would go to get a permit to be in the city?”

  “It’s down in the basement,” McElroy said. “You want me to show you?”

  “Sure.”

  “You working on a case?” McElroy asked as they went up the steps of the building.

  “Not really. You heard about the prince and princess coming here?”

  “Every time I walk by the typist pool.”

  “Well a witch that was exiled from there twenty two years ago – her name is Pandora, Red wants me to track her down so he can talk to her.”

  “I see,” McElroy said as they went through the doors and then down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase they turned down a long hallway.

  “I heard you have security detail at the Hotel Triumph tomorrow night,” Tom mentioned. “Are you going to take a date with you?”

  “I’m thinking I’ll just go alone.”

  “Might be more fun if you asked someone to go with you,” Tom said as they entered a small, dank office with a wood counter that ran the full length of the room.

  “I wouldn’t know who to ask.”

  A young, fairly attractive girl greeted them at the counter. She smiled at them like she meant it and she just seemed to be bubbling with excitement. “We don’t get many men in here,” she said. “Especially not handsome, young ones like you two.”

  Tom showed her his detective badge. “Maybe you can help us,” he said.

  “I hope so. So you two must be from here. I haven’t met many people my age here. It seems what young men I do meet are always from out of town,” she said giggling then like there was something funny about that.

  “Yeah we’re from here,” he said glancing at McElroy. “I was hoping you could pull the permit applications of any witches that came in the past couple of days.”

  “I can do that since you’re a policeman,” the girl said like Tom wouldn’t have known that.

  She went over to file drawer and pulled out a folder. She brought it over to the counter and started pulling out forms. Finally she laid about two dozen down on the counter and Tom started looking through them.

  “Usually we only get about seven or eight a day, but since it’s Halloween tomorrow, business has picked up. I think we’ve had six come in already today,” she explained.

  Tom found what he was looking for. A form filled out by Pandora. He quickly checked her answers to the questions the form asked, but she’d left the most important box empty, the one that asked where she’d be staying.

  “Did you question her why she didn’t write down where she’d be staying?” Tom asked pointing at the empty box on the form.

  “I did,” the girl said, “but she didn’t know. You both seem awful young to be detectives.”

  “Well, both of us were officers in the war,” McElroy told her. “I think that helped.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said straightening the stack of papers before handing them back to the girl.

  “Are either of going to attend one of the fancy balls tomorrow?” she asked.

  “We were just talking about that,” Tom said, figuring he’d rib Inspector McElroy some. “Mac here’s planning on going all alone to one.”

  “Really?” the girl asked. “How come?”

  McElroy blushed with embarrassment. “Well it’s because I’m married,” he told the girl.

  “That actually sounds like a reason you should not be going alone,” the girl said. “Doesn’t your wife want to go with you?”

  “We’ll she has not passed over yet. She’s on Earth still.”

  “Oh, then you’re not really married then. Not until she arrives here and both of you determine you want to be married to each other once again. How long ago was it since you died and came here?”

  “Five months.”

  “And how old is she?”

  “Twenty three.”

  Tom could see a glimmer of hope in the girl’s eyes then.

  “So it may be forty, maybe even fifty or sixty years, before she dies. And she may remarry before then. Most likely she will,” the girl said making her argument. “That’s a long time to be all alone and I’m sure she was very beautiful and charming for you to have fallen in love with her.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “Of course she would never forget you, but fifty years is a rather long time.”

  “It is,” McElroy said, seeming confused now.

  “How long were you two married?”

  “About a year.”

  “I’m sure she will always consider that the best year of her life,” the girl said, “but I would not want someone I loved to never go out on a date again after I left. Maybe just like to see a movie, or go on a walk with or attend a ball. Did you know that you can ask the Administration if your spouse has remarried?”

  “I did ask actually,” McElroy admitted, “but they want you to wait a year first before you inquire.”

  “We’ll I can understand your reluctance not to want to be unfaithful toward her, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind you having a date for Halloween,” the girl said wrapping up. “Especially Halloween in Transylvania City. I would go with you if you wanted me to.”

  McElroy was clearly torn, he wanted to be faithful to his wife, but he also didn’t want to spend the next fifty years sitting at home every night. “Well if you’d
like to; I suppose that would be alright,” he said.

  The girl jumped a foot off the floor. “Oh thank you,” she exclaimed. “And I am an excellent dancer.”

  McElroy told her she would have to meet him at the Hotel Triumph, since he would need to be there well before the ball started, but he said he would bring her by a ticket later that day.

  They left then. Back on the sidewalk McElroy headed back toward the TCPD building while Tom headed for his car. He drove to the offices of The Transylvania Raven and at the reception desk he asked where he could find Lou Mitchell. He was told to go up to the second. Tom found him drinking coffee with some beat reporters and a couple of them seemed to know who he was.

  “How can I help you detective?” Mr. Mitchell asked as Tom approached. Tom recognized him as the photographer who had snapped his and Rebecca’s picture the day of his encounter with Stone on the Vlad the Impaler Bridge.

  “Could I speak to you in private?” Tom asked.

  “Maybe you’d like to buy me a drink at the pub on the corner.”

  “Sometime for sure,” Tom said as they stepped away from the other newspapermen, “but I’m hoping you’ll have what I need here in the building somewhere.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Photographs of the U.R.R.K. zeppelin’s arrival here twenty two years ago. More specifically a witch that arrived here on it. She would be the only witch coming from there. ”

  “Let’s see what we can find.”

  Mr. Mitchell led him upstairs to where old photographs were stored in storage room. A clerk there found a box from 1922 on a shelf, and inside was a file labeled - Grand Zeppelin visits Transylvania City.

  Mr. Mitchell dumped the file out on a table and they started going the photographs, more than fifty of them.

  “I wonder if this is her,” Mr. Mitchell said sliding one out from the pile. He handed Tom the black and white photograph.

  It was of women carrying a suitcase. The woman looked pretty, if rather ordinary. You would have never known she was a witch looking at her. She didn’t wear a pointy hat of any kind or even have much of long nose like witches usually have.

  “What makes you think that’s her?” he asked.

  “It was me that probably took that photo. I was there when the zeppelin arrived. The only people getting off it were creatures. She don’t look like a vampiress. So I figure she’s got to be a witch.”

  Just behind the woman in the picture came a golem. And while all golems are little distinguished from another, this one was rather taller and slimmer than your typical golem has more of a square shape.

  “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure, take it.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said. “I got to be going.”

  He headed for The Transylvania Cab Company then, which is known for its bright yellow cabs that are easily distinguished from The Vampire Cab Company’s cabs that are coffin black in color. He found the supervisor and showed him his identification.

  “You must keep some kind of log book when you send a cab to pick someone up right?” Tom asked.

  The supervisor nodded and then gestured for Tom to follow him. They went in to dispatch where a dispatcher talked to cabbies over a radio.

  “Where’d we send the cab?” the supervisor asked.

  “Pendle Hill, yesterday.”

  He pulled a clipboard off a hook and ran his finger down it. “We sent Willie out there.”

  “Where can I find Willie?”

  The supervisor picked up the shortwave dispatch radio and asked for Willie to answer his radio.

  “This is Willie.”

  “Where are you?” the supervisor asked.

  “Waiting in line at the Monte Christo.”

  The supervisor looked at Tom then.

  “Tell him to stay there,” Tom said. “Tell him there’s a Vlad note for him if he can help me out with something.”

  Tom drove to the Monte Christo and found Willie in the line of cabs waiting to pick up fares. He wore a bright yellow cap as part of his uniform. Tom showed him Pandora’s photograph.

  “Yeah I remember her,” Willie said.

  “You took her to get her permit at city hall?”

  “That was our first stop, yeah.”

  “Then where did you take her?”

  “Well she showed me a newspaper clipping of a goblin she said she wanted to find.”

  “A goblin whose photograph was published in the paper?”

  “That’s right,” Willie said. “You know the one that helped capture Jack the Ripper.”

  “Fixx?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Why did she want to find him?”

  “I asked her that,” Willie said. “She said she needed to find a friend of hers that she had lost touch with and she figured Fixx, being so well connected and all, would know how to find him.”

  “So where did you take her?”

  “So we made a few stops at some creature friends of mine and one of them told us Fixx was staying at the Shadow’s hotel.”

  “You took her there?”

  “That’s right. She went in while I waited and then she came back out and told me she’d found Fixx and that I could go.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said handing Willie a Vlad note.

  He drove to Murder Street and parked in front of the Shadows Hotel. It is a purposely run-down looking kind of place, with a crooked sign that had been missing some bulbs for some time now. Tom thought this was meant to give the place some kind of scary ambiance that was meant to attract tourists, but it had just the opposite effect. The place really did scare tourists off.

  A bridge troll was working the desk and Tom flashed him his badge as he approached the counter.

  “I figured you for a cop,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Only humans that come in here are either lost or they’re cops.”

  Tom placed the picture of Pandora down on the counter. “I guess you would remember her then?”

  The troll looked at the picture; in fact he brought his head down so close to it on the counter that his breath fogged it. “We ain’t got any women staying here.”

  “I think she just came in to see someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Fixx.”

  “I remember,” the troll said, nodding his bulbous head. “Yeah she came to see Fixx.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “Is it noon yet?”

  “Not just yet,” Tom said looking at his watch.

  “Then he’s in his room asleep.”

  “What room is he is?”

  The troll looked behind him where keys were hung on a board. He found the hook that had Fixx written under it. “204,” he said then.

  “You got a key?”

  The troll handed Tom a pass key and he started up the creaky stairs. He found room 204, but didn’t bother to knock; he simply unlocked the door and slipped into the room. It was a tiny room with cheap furniture. Fixx, wearing pants and an undershirt was sound asleep on top of the covers. His hat covered his face as he slept on his back. Tom went to the side of the bed and lifted the covers up, so that Fixx rolled off onto the floor. Fixx rose to his knees, rubbing his head. He looked over at Tom.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked, upset.

  “Them hell hounds nearly killed me,” Tom said. “I think you knew they were there.”

  “I tried to warn you,” Fixx said.

  “Not very hard,” he said walking around the bed to pick Fixx up off the floor.

  “What time is it?” Fixx asked as he sat on the edge of the small bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

  “Almost noon,” Tom said, pulling the picture of Pandora out of his coat. “Why did this witch come to see you?”

  “She needed some help with something and she knows me.”

  “From the paper?”

  “I knew her before.”

  “How?”

  “We both come here from the U.R.R.K.”


  “You’re from there?” Tom asked.

  “I am.”

  “What did she want your help with?”

  “She wanted to know where to find him,” Fixx said pointing at the golem in the picture.

  “Who’s he?”

  “His name is Titan.”

  “Why was she looking for him?”

  “He’s from there as well. He used to work for her family, I think.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I told her she could probably find Titan at Dempsey’s gym, Titan’s the name he adopted when he arrived here,” Fixx explained. “She didn’t know where that was so I ended up taking her there.”

  “Dempsey’s gym, what’s that?”

  “Just the gym a lot of boxers work out at.”

  “This Titan is a boxer?”

  “That’s right. He lasted almost ten rounds against Stone a while back.”

  “Did she say why she wanted to see him all of a sudden?”

  “No,” Fixx said. “But like I said, they are old friends.”

  “You said you took her there. Did you stick around, see what they talked about?”

  “They went down the hallway, but I stuck around to watch the boxers working out, and then they come back and say to me ‘hey you know Stone right?’”

  “Why would they ask you that?”

  “They wanted to know what is going to happen to him, with the charges he’s facing and all.”

  “Why would they care?”

  “I don’t know, but I told them he’s probably looking at a hundred years easy. Then they asked me if he’s allowed to have visitors.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I said I didn’t know anyone who would want to visit Stone, but I think he’s allowed to have visitors – yeah.”

  “Is there a phone around here?” Tom asked.

  “In the lobby,” Fixx said.

  “I’d like to see a shirt on you when I come back.”

  Tom went down to the lobby, called the station and asked to be transferred to the jail. When the jail answered he asked them to check the visitor log and see if Stone had any visitors the last couple of days. He was told a golem had come to see him. Titan had used a fake name, but one of the jailers, a boxing fan, recognized him.