“The maseni have learned to live with their supernatural brothers—and vice versa,” Blake reminded Slavek.
“But they’re different,” the Count insisted. ‘They’re alien to begin with. It was a natural thing for them to establish contact with their supernatural world. But they forced this on Earth; it isn’t a natural condition here.”
“I hope not,” Blake said. “If relations between the flesh and the spirit worlds, here on Earth, become as easy as they are on the maseni home world, I’ll be out of a job.”
“You exploit other people’s problems,” Slavek said.
“Solve other people’s problems,” Blake corrected.
Grimacing to express his distaste, Count Slavek left the suite in a swirl of black cloth.
At the same moment, Renee Cuyler’s tears changed abruptly into anger, as he had expected they would. The woman ran at him, screaming, clawing with her well-manicured nails, kicking, biting, slapping.
Jessie pushed her away and, when he could not settle her with words, settled her with three narcotics pins in the abdomen. She slumped down on the thick carpet and went to sleep. She snored.
“Jesus, what a bore!” Brutus growled. He had no compunctions about using the Lord’s name, in vain or otherwise, though Blake had never heard him use it otherwise. He padded to the sofa, jumped onto it, curled up with his big, hairy paws hanging over the edge of the cushions. “It’s one infidelity case after another, these days,” he complained.
“Boring but safe,” Blake said. He went to the vid-phone, punched out the number of their office and waited for Helena to answer it.
“Hell Hound Investigations,” she said, almost five minutes later.
“You’re a poor excuse for a secretary,” Blake said. She blinked her long-lashed, blue eyes, pushed a strand of honey yellow hair away from her face. “Yeah, but I’m stacked,” she said.
He could see her swelling bosom in the vidphone screen, and he could not argue with her. He said, “Okay,” and he sat down, a bit overwhelmed by mammary memories. “We’ve got Renee Cuyler safe and sound. I want you to call her husband and send him over here.” He gave her the address of the hotel, and the suite number.
“Congratulations,” she said, smiling. She had ripe lips and very white teeth. She should have made commercials for unnatural sex acts, Blake thought. “Oh,” she said, “you’ve received four calls this morning from a potential client.”
“Who?”
“Galiotor Fils,” she said.
“A maseni?”
“With that name, what else?” she asked.
“What’s he want?”
“He’ll only talk to you.”
Blake thought a moment. “I’ll be back in the office in an hour and a half, if you get to Roger Cuyler right away. If this Galiotor Fils can be there, I’ll talk to him.”
“Right, chief,” she said.
He winced and didn’t have a chance to reply before she snapped off, her perfect face and better bosom fading from the screen.
“Looks like you got your wish—for something interesting to happen,” Blake told the hell hound.
Brutus climbed off the couch and shook his head, his ears slapping against his skull, and he said, “Did I hear right? A maseni for a customer?”
“You heard right.”
The hound said, “That’s a first. What problem could a maseni have that his own people couldn’t solve, that he’d need a human detective for?”
“We’ll know in an hour or so,” Blake said. “Let’s get our equipment out of the closet and ready to go, before Mr. Cuyler gets here to collect his wife.”
Chapter Two
With a six-inch tentacle as thick as a pencil, which passed for his forefinger, the maseni tapped the glass front of Blake’s battery calendar. He looked hard at the detective, his deep-set yellow eyes intense, his lipless mouth expressing obvious disapproval, and he said, “Your calendar ran down three days ago, sir. The date is not October 3,2000, but October 6,2000.”
“Only four days short of the tenth anniversary of the initial maseni landing on Earth,” Blake said, leaning back in his shape-changing chair and staring across the desk at the alien.
Galiotor Fils blinked, surprised. “True enough, sir. But I fail to see what that has to do with your inefficiency.”