"Good," Finn said. "I wouldn't want you doing too much moving until that rib knits. You're very lucky, Mr. Ackroyd. A few more inches, and the bone might have punctured a lung."
"What about my head?"
"The X-rays show only a very mild concussion," Finn. told him. Nothing to worry about, as long as you take it easy.
"Might as well," Jay said, "can't dance."
"Too bad," Finn said. He grinned and did a quick little four-legged softshoe. "I cut quite a rug myself."
"I'll just bet. Do I get anything for the pain? This headache would be killing me if I wasn't so distracted by my rib."
Finn took a pad out of his pocket and scrawled a prescription. "Here," he said, ripping off the top sheet and handing it to Jay. "This ought to help."
"Thanks." Jay hopped down off the examination table. It was a mistake, and the broken rib let him know that right away. "Oh shit," he said, gritting his teeth.
"Don't want to go around jarring yourself that way," Finn said, altogether too cheerfully for Jay's taste. "I wouldn't drive in your condition either. Do you have a ride home?"
"I'll take a cab," Jay said. Charles Dutton had taken him to the clinic, after he'd satisfied himself that Jay had nothing more of value to tell him, but he didn't imagine that the joker had hung around in the waiting room. Even if he had, Jay figured he'd had more than enough of Dutton and the Oddity for today. "You did the autopsy on Chrysalis, didn't you?" he asked.
"Yes," Finn replied. "The police always call us in on joker autopsies. The coroner doesn't feel qualified to deal with our unique joker physiology." The little centaur looked away and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. "A terrible thing. We see a lot of murder victims here in the clinic and it's never pretty, but the way her body was mutilated…" Finn shook his head.
"Yeah." Jay touched his bruised and swollen face, thinking that he knew just how she must have felt.
5:00 P.M.
Brennan awoke still soaked with sweat and numb from a half-remembered dream in which all of his friends and lovers were killed slowly and excruciatingly by some unseen agency he was powerless to stop. He was reassured somewhat when he spotted Jennifer sitting in the room's only chair, listening distractedly to the transmitter they'd planted on Quasiman. She heard Brennan stir, turned to watch him sit up and run his hands through his hair.
"About time you woke up," she said. "I'm suffering from terminal boredom listening to Quasiman stumble through his day."
"Nothing to link him to the murder?"
She shook her head. "Either he's incredibly clever, which frankly I doubt, or he has no connection with Barnett's crowd."
"What'd he do today?" Brennan asked.
"Got up early. It took him a while to figure out how to use the mop, then he washed the church's floors. Went up on the roof for a coffee break and forgot to come down. Father Squid called up to him to remind him to mow the lawn in the graveyard. That was a tough one. By the time he figured out the lawn mower, it was lunch. He spent the afternoon mowing and trimming. Once the transmitter stopped sending for forty-five minutes. I think it accompanied Quasiman into whatever alien dimension it is that he slips into."
"You ask me, he's just what he appears to be. A sweet, terribly afflicted church handyman."
"Figures." Brennan picked his jeans up off the floor and slid into them, then rummaged through the bureau for a fresh T-shirt. "I got a possible line on Sascha this morning from Tripod. It seems he has a girlfriend-"
He stopped and stared at the plain white envelope that was lying on the worn carpet just inside the door to the hotel room.
"How long has that been there?" he asked Jennifer. She turned, looked at the envelope, and frowned. "I don't know. I didn't notice it before."
Brennan crossed the room and picked up the envelope. It was unsealed and unaddressed. He opened it and took out the single piece of paper it held with a message scrawled in a familiar childish hand.
"Sorry how things turned out befour," it read. "I only want to help you. If you want to find a reel rap-head, go to Chickadee's."
"Damn," Brennan muttered to himself. "Just what the hell is going on here?"
6:00 P.M.
"Jesus," Digger said. "What's wrong with your face?" Jay closed the office door behind him and looked down at the reporter. Digger was almost eight inches tall now. In a couple more days he might be able to pass for a dwarf. "I'm disguised as a guy who got the shit beat out of him," he said. He moved slowly across the office and sat down. The radio was babbling something about the convention. It made his head hurt even more. He turned it off.
"God, it hurts just to look at you," Digger said. "You realize that half your face is purple?"
"Good thing I don't wear a tie. The colors might clash."
"Don't worry about it, in a day or two the swelling will go down and the bruise'll turn green." Downs sounded like a man who had been there himself; sometimes the public didn't appreciate crusading journalists. "Where the hell you been?" Sleeping," Jay said. The painkillers made him groggy. "Sleeping? Jesus, Ackroyd. All hell is breaking loose down in Atlanta, Hartmann's something like three hundred votes from the nomination, and you decide to take a nap?"
"Downs," Jay warned, "I just woke up, my head feels like it's stuffed with cotton, I've got a concussion and a broken rib but I don't dare take any more painkillers because I can't think straight when I do, and I lost the goddamned jacket, so if you don't shut the fuck up right now, I'm going to pop you to the middle of the Holland Tunnel to play in traffic, okay?"
Digger made a noise like a man whose aged grandmother had just been run over by a semi. "You lost the jacket!" he screeched.
Jay sighed. "Dutton destroyed the damned thing before I could get to it," he said wearily.
"Jesus," Digger said, his irritating little voice in a panic. "Jesusjesusjesus, what are we gonna do?"
"We're running out of options," Jay admitted. "Not to mention time." He tried to think. It wasn't easy, the way his head was pounding. "Look, maybe Kahina had something else beside the jacket. Blood tests. Letters. Anything. I know, it's a long shot, but what else is there? How much do you know about her?"
"I did a little digging after… after she died," Digger said. "Very low key, y'know? I didn't want to stir nothing up. The chick was in the country illegally, I know that much. With her background, I didn't think it was likely she smuggled herself in, so she must have had help, but whoever did it was a pro, covered up her trail real nice."
"What about after she got here?"
Digger shrugged. "She was living in Jokertown under an assumed name. You shoulda seen where she was staying, a real dump. The girl had guts, I'll give her that, but it wasn't like she knew what she was doing. She couldn't of been more conspicuous if she tried. The day she arrived, she was even wearing one of them black Moslem things, you know, whatchacallit, a chador. She switched to American clothes pretty quick but it didn't help much, she was still the only nat in the hotel, and it was obvious she just loathed jokers."
"Then what the hell was she doing working with Gimli and Chrysalis?" Jay said bluntly.
"She wasn't working with Chrysalis," Digger said. "That was Gimli's idea, Kahina was against it all the way. They had some huge fight about it. They fought all the time. Religion, politics, strategy, they didn't agree on anything." He shrugged. "Hey, politics makes strange bedfellows, right?"