Bad Blood: Latter-Day Olympians Read Free Page B

for attention, but none that I could focus on if I expected to keep up my end of the conversation.
    “That sounds fine. When would you like to come by?”
    “How about now?”
    “I’m just on my way out,” I found myself saying. “Tomorrow would be better.”
    “What time do you open?”
    After I’d hung up, I pulled the envelope from inside my jacket pocket and sat it on the desk in front of me. Somewhere along the line, my subconscious, knowing that my conscious would object, had taken Armani’s words “seals can be broken” straight to heart. I picked up the envelope again for study—sturdy, manila, a bit mangled from the alleyway scuffle, sealed solely by the gummy backing. Not exactly high security; easy enough to open and reclose with no one the wiser.
    I struggled with myself. On the one hand, the contents could have nothing to do with Circe’s murder—which nobody was paying me to investigate in any case. King was clearly surprised to hear of the death and didn’t even pretend to sorrow, which surely he would have done had he been guilty, unless he was being far too clever. On the other hand, there was that whole curiosity thing. Was I actually capable of turning it over to King without looking inside?
    I tabled the question in favor of another. Could King really believe that Circe was the Circe of myth and legend? It would explain the surprise about her death, but come on . I mean, sure, I’d flippantly thought of Circe that way, partly based on the infectious ravings of my grandmother, who fervently believed the gods walked among us, and partly because the Hollywood scuttlebutt seemed to confirm that whatever Circe was, it was both more and less than human. Still, it seemed about as likely as—well—me truly turning a man to stone. Or a scaly mutant murderer? my inner devil’s advocate taunted.
    Okay, imagining for a moment that we were dealing with that Circe, didn’t goddess-hood go hand-in-hand with immortality? I racked my brain, wishing I’d humored Yiayia a bit more when she went on and on about the Olympians. If I remembered correctly, pantheonic history, mythology, whatever you wanted to call it, was pretty inconsistent on the invincibility of gods, goddesses and their progeny. The gorgons, supposedly of my own family tree, were sisters born of the same divine mother (Ceto) and father (Phorcys), yet two were immortal and the third, Medusa, inexplicably was not. Come to think of it, Circe’s own brother Phaethon had been killed when Zeus struck him down for driving Helios’s sun chariot too close to the Earth. So, either there were levels of immortality or all it really meant was that you lived until someone was properly motivated to see you dead.
    In that case, the amazing thing was not that Circe had been murdered, but that it had taken so long. Just off the top of my head, I could think of a number of people she’d pissed off, perhaps mortally: Odysseus, who she’d held for over a year after turning his men to swine; Penelope, his long-suffering wife; Poseidon or Glaucus, depending on whose “history” you read, because Circe’d turned the beloved nymph Scylla into a multi-headed monster; Scylla herself; even Picus, who she’d morphed into a woodpecker (of all things!). But these grudges were centuries old.
    The envelope called to me. I tried to drown it out, searching the Internet for more recent references to Circe. It was fascinating reading. In the now, Circe Holland had been linked to everybody from Michael Eisner to gag-me-with-a-silver-spoon child stars Mary Jo and Katie Mann. Based on the numerous articles that took her name in vain, she’d poached stars from other heavy hitters like CAA and ICM. By all accounts, this was not a woman anyone wanted as an adversary. Her list of enemies read like an L.A. phone book.
    I’d fiddled, I’d futzed, but still the envelope called. I knew there was no way short of knockout drops that I’d be sleeping tonight without a peep at