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Oct072010
All Hallows Eve – Guest Author: Original 4 Part Serialised Story by Sam Stone "Lead Poisoning" Part 1
When Carolyn from Book Chick City emailed me and asked if I’d like to contribute to the Halloween Special I immediately said yes. BCC is a great website, full of interesting reviews and information on all the books I enjoy. I originally planned to write some kind of Halloween Chiller – so much for the best laid plans. I was in the middle of writing stories for my collection and already had some character names and plot lines going through my head but I didn’t bargain on Lead Poisoning taking on a life of its own.
Lead Poisoning is a mystery that slowly unravels to reveal the cause of death of the starlet Karolina De Vere. There are lots of real-life influences that went into writing this. I originally wanted to set it in 1920’s Hollywood, and my movie star was going to be the star of black and white silent films which have always had a fascinating appeal. Then I realised that actually the 1970’s was when it should be set.
My main character in the story is my vampire Lucrezia, in one of her guises as a doctor in 1975 LA. Lucrezia likes and enjoys mysteries, often solving them for her own purposes. She first appears in my novel Killing Kiss, but features as the main character in the second novel, Futile Flame. She has an entire section dedicated to stories about her in my collection. So, in Lead Poisoning I have her research into the life of Al Capone. Because, the title, as you might guess, is a bit of a giveaway. I’ve always loved the old expression, or mafia in-jokes for shooting someone: ‘Filling them full of lead,’ or someone died of ‘lead poisoning’. Clearly I just had to play with that …
My short story collection, Zombies in New York and Other Bloody Jottings is being published by Telos Publishing in February 2011 and it will contain a printed version of Lead Poisoning as one of the Lucrezia’s Stories.
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Lead Poisoning – Part 1
By
Sam Stone
The year had been a whirlwind of success so it wasn’t surprising that I noticed her. She reminded me of that black and white film actress Fay Wray. You know the one: that monster King Kong had the hots for her. Blonde, waif-like; she had that certain something, a vulnerability that all good actresses had in Hollywood at that time. As Karolina De Vere walked down the staircase she was illuminated as if in stop motion, as camera flashes marked her progress. For a moment she was blinded, her beautiful eyes blinked and reflected sparks of energy back at the crowd. She stopped and posed, ever the professional, while waiting for the right moment to discourage the paparazzi nicely. She smiled, posed again to a miriad sparks of light, and then drifted down the remaining steps and into the protection of the gathered throng before being ushered into the dining room.
A few moments later she was sitting with Gerard Hampshire at the banquet, waiting for the awards to be announced. She was nominated for ‘Best Newcomer’ and the film was the usual type, boy meets girl, monster wants girl, monster dies trying to kidnap girl … I couldn’t remember the name of it: it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that she was so magnificent that all I wanted to do was scoop her up and steal her away.
But then, I am the archetypal monster, and sometimes we have to behave as expected of us.
Karolina deserved immortality like no other movie star I’d met, but there was one major flaw in this whole daydream of mine. Gerard Hampshire. I suspected she didn’t love him, despite the rumours that peppered the newspapers. I saw no passion in her eyes as they talked. When he touched her, she stiffened, ever so slightly, and her lips trembled. Ever the consummate actress, Karolina gave none of this away to the casual eye. All of Hollywood was talking of her affair with Hampshire – a relationship that was, apparently, made in heaven. Hollywood, however, didn’t have my vision. I saw through the façade. Karolina could barely stomach Hampshire and that was because he was an abusive moron. She only put up with him because he was good for her career.
Hampshire had his quirks too. He was known to be an obsessive clean-freak, always washing his hands like some wannabe Howard Hughes. That night he was wearing white gloves, the type men wore a century ago: they were a little out of place in 1975. Even so, this was an era where affectation was a must in Hollywood and partly because fashion was in something of a quandary.
It was Samhain and so I left the awards ceremony soon after Karolina’s category was read and she had won, as I knew she would. I’d known that she was going to be a huge success and she would earn her immortality on screen, just as Marilyn Monroe had before her. That night I had better fish to fry and Halloween was always a good feasting time as there were so many innocents abroad, looking for candy.
I flew out into the city and fed on a glorious young couple. She was wearing the archetypal witch costume with luminous green make-up and he was Dracula. I left them swooning in a park just off the street they’d been ‘trick or treating’. Clearly they didn’t realise that they really are monsters in the city and part of me wanted to leave them with the memory. I toyed with the idea for a while then, let them be. It was safer for me and for them if they didn’t recall a thing.
All this time I didn’t know that cameras were once again illuminating Karolina’s face and flawless complexion. This time a police photographer took her picture as she lay in the centre of an obvious crime scene. Her beautiful eyes dark and vacant. That’s when I stepped into her story in the real world, foregoing my shadowy, voyeuristic ways, and no longer observing her from a distance.
I was working in the morgue in LA, in a hospital in Hollywood. It was a job which suited me as I have an … affinity … with the dead you might say. Many aspects of working in the coroner’s office appealed to me. But nothing could have prepared me for Karolina’s body being wheeled into the morgue around midnight.
She lay still and frozen, deathly pale – and that’s not a cliché it’s a statement of fact. Karolina was exceptionally white, except for a slight tinge of blue around her mouth. I examined her quickly, looking for a visible cause but nothing was evident. There were bruises though, on her arms, torso and legs. Places they wouldn’t have been seen under ordinary circumstances, and mostly yellowing, so a few days old. Perhaps cyanosis, caused by poor oxygen circulation through her lungs … but why?
I lifted my head and concentrated, scanning the hospital. Hampshire was on the premises, I could smell him. I knew he’d done this to her and I wanted to beat the shit out of him.
‘Hey, Lucy,’ said Vance entering the morgue, all smiles and bonhomie. He looked at the body on the slab. ‘Oh my God! Is that Karolina De Vere?’
I nodded.
‘What killed her?’
‘I don’t know. Yet. Will you do her bloods for me?’
Vance got to work, drawing out several samples for analysis while I began the autopsy. I hated desecrating her perfect body but it had to be done if I was to find the cause.
‘What you got?’ asked Detective Morgan later.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But there are still a few more tests to do and not all the blood tests are back yet.’
‘She can’t have died of nothing.’
‘I know. But all her organs were functioning and intact which is really strange considering the signs of cyanosis … We’re just checking for drugs. Have you interviewed Gerard Hampshire?’ I asked.
Morgan gave me a long look. He didn’t get me. He was very curious as to why a woman like me would want to spend all my time in a morgue cutting up dead bodies. ‘Yeah. The man’s devastated.’
‘Really? She was covered in bruises … maybe you should ask him to explain that …’
Morgan’s mouth opened but he thought better of saying anything more. He turned and left my office. He was a good cop, wanted to find out the truth, but sometimes his type can miss the obvious. All he needed was a little nudge in the right direction. That, of course, didn’t solve my immediate problem of finding the cause of death.
‘Look at this,’ Vance said, entering the office and handing me the results.
I glanced down at the file, but couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. ‘This doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know.’
‘Lead? Lead poisoning. Vance, is this a joke?’
Vance shook his head.
I read the sheet again. ‘Her entire blood stream was filled with minute lead particles. But, there was absolutely no sign of them in her organs? This amount would have caused major heart failure, seizures. So it would seem to be what killed her.’
‘I know,’ said Vance. ‘But the cops say Hampshire found her dead in the living room. The only symptom was that she’d complained of stomach cramps earlier.’
‘Let’s X-ray the body – I want to see her bones. That should tell us how long this has been going on.’
Lance made a call and then wheeled the body away, down to X-ray. I sat and waited, running all manner of possibilities through my mind. Lead was extremely dangerous, we knew that, but usually there were symptoms before the poisoning became so severe that is caused to death.
Lance returned sometime later with a large brown envelope lying on top of the white sheet. I picked up the envelope as he stowed Karolina in the fridge. Then I flicked on the viewing light, clipping up the large negative.
The X-ray showed no lead on her bones. They were clear and perfect. The contamination had been in her blood stream only. This meant that Karolina’s contact with lead was recent. I examined her body again, looking for needle tracks. If the lead was only in her blood stream, then perhaps it had been injected directly, but I couldn’t find any trace of an entry point.
‘We need to test Hampshire too,’ I said. ‘If it’s something in their home, old pipes that have gone unnoticed … But none of this makes sense, Vance. If it had been ingested it would show up in the stomach as well as her other vital organs. This would seem to be a sudden influx of the poison into her blood.’
Vance nodded, and rubbed his chin, looking at my face as if searching for the answer there. Then he headed off to get the blood tests from Hampshire.
I gazed at the X-rays again. Maybe I had missed something.
‘Anything new?’ Morgan had appeared behind me. I glanced back. I had known he was there of course. No-one could sneak up on me without me knowing.
‘Vance said something about lead traces …’ he continued.
‘Did you speak to Hampshire?’ I asked.
‘Look, Lucy, you do your job and I’ll do mine.’
I turned to face him, and he made the mistake of looking into my eyes. A moment later, he began to tell me everything I wanted to know.
‘He admitted that sometimes their role-play gets a little rough … He said Karolina liked it.’
‘If only bodies could talk,’ I muttered. Perhaps they could.
I went to the fridge and retrieved Karolina’s body.
Already I could see decay appearing in tiny cracks, invisible to the human eye. Her flawless beauty was rapidly fading and there was nothing I could do now to help her. Or was there? Hampshire knew more than he was saying I was sure of it.
‘Bring him in here,’ I ordered.
‘What?’ Morgan said. My glamour was wearing off.
‘You want the truth? I’ll get it for you.’
‘Look, Lady, you’re not without charm, I’ll give you that, but what makes you think he’s gonna spill his guts to you like that?’
‘He’ll spill,’ I said, meeting Morgan’s eyes again. I gave his mind a little push; not enough to hurt, but enough to make him think the suggestion was his idea. His eyes clouded and then cleared.
‘What if I bring Hampshire in here?’ he asked. ‘Confronted with the body he might just give something away.’
‘Good plan detective.’ I smiled as Morgan went off to get Karolina’s erstwhile beau.
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Thanks Sam!
Look out for Lead Poisoning – Part 2 coming soon!!
2 Comments
Brilliant!
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Very cool! I will be eagerly awaiting part 2!
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