here's chapter two. I still don't own anything or any one.

Chapter Two- Marginalia in the Books of the Dead

Carl Kolchak, reporter for the International News Service, spoke into his handheld tape recorder:

"I should have suspected something when I realized that things had been too quiet for the last several months or even longer. Things in the newsroom were suspiciously calm, my boss Tony Vincenzo had been in an unusually good mood, and no one or nothing had threatened my life or soul in at least a year. I should have known it was too good to last, but I was still taken by surprise when Tony called me into his office."

Chubby, balding Tony Vincenzo, with his customary expression of long-suffering harassment, leaned out of the door to his glassed in office and into the newsroom.

"Kolchak! Get in here now!"

Kolchak looked up, instantly wary. Tony's tone of voice, not angry, but trying to be wheedling, boded ill for Kolchak's future. "In a moment, Tony." He glanced towards the door to the hall, planning his escape, but Tony was too fast for him.

"Now, Carl. This is important." Uh oh, thought Kolchak, It's really bad news when he uses my first name.

Grumbling, Kolchak made his way into the office.

"Hi Tony, you called?"

"Carl, you'd like to go back to California, wouldn't you?"

"California? Would I!" Kolchak smiled in reminiscence. The only place he'd rather go would be back to New York. Then his sense of self-preservation cut in. "Whoa. Hold on, Tony. The only place in California that has an INS bureau office is Los Angeles, and if I go back there, they'll hang a murder charge on me." Not to mention the assorted other charges. Unfair, and unjust. Staking a vampire wasn't murder, and the police had known it quite well. But the facts had all been neatly covered up to hide the truth that the public couldn't face.

"Calm down, Carl," Tony said soothingly, which automatically made Kolchak start worrying more. "No one's expecting you to go to Los Angeles."

This could be bad. "Who's expecting me to go where, Tony?"

"Well, you see, Carl, the bosses in New York have decided to open a new office in California, and until they can hire staff to run it, they want all the other bureaus to loan people to the new one for six months."

"You want to send me out on a loan, Tony?" Kolchak was outraged. "Where are they starting this new bureau, any way, San Francisco? Shouldn't you send Updyke? It's more his homeland." When Ron Updyke had come out of the closet a few years before, the only surprise it had been to anyone was the improvement it made in his personality. The officious little twit was now almost endurable, except for those moments when he started giving Kolchak deep soulful looks.

"They asked for you particularly." Tony smiled ingratiatingly. "It seems that Monique put in a good word for you with her Uncle Abe." Monique Marmelstein was the niece of Abe Marmelstein, the head of the news service. Monique herself, after a bad beginning at the Chicago office, had turned out to be a pretty good reporter, and had been in Los Angeles for several years now. She and Kolchak had kept in touch, but obviously, Kolchak thought, not closely enough if she thought this was a good idea. Or maybe it was a long deferred revenge for the time he had locked her in the trunk of his car.

"Oh she did, huh? I'll have to remember to thank her for that," he snarled.

"And it isn't in San Francisco anyway," Tony continued. "It's in Bay City."

"Bay City?" Kolchak yelled indignantly. "Bay City! Why in hell would they put a bureau in Bay City, the armpit suburb of Los Angeles? Tony, I am NOT going to Bay City!"

"It seems that Bay City is having an upswing in major crime in the last few years, and the main office thinks it's worth it to put a subsidiary bureau there. Don't ask me, Carl, I only work here. As do you, and because you do, you ARE going to Bay City," Tony concluded emphatically.

"Oh no, Tony. It's out of the question. You aren't sending me to Bay City." Kolchak was equally emphatic.

"Now come on, Carl." Tony put on his best pleading tone. "It's only for six months. Then you'll be back here. And they aren't making it optional. Either you go, or they fire you. And maybe me too. And I'm too old to start over, Carl."

"Oh no you don't, Tony." Kolchak wagged an admonishing finger at his boss. "They aren't going to fire you, don't try guilting me on that."

"They might, Carl. And who else would hire me at this point? Or you for that matter?"

Kolchak shrugged and made a non-committal noise.

"And, Carl, they said something about a bonus, to make the relocation worthwhile."

"Oh, a bonus... why didn't you say so, Tony? That's different. Bay City, here I come!" Kolchak snapped sarcastically. "What are they offering, bubblegum? Baseball cards?"

"Carl...!" Tony said warningly.

"OK, Tony, I'm going, I'm going..." Kolchak stormed out of the office, muttering under his breath "Bay City! My God!"

Kolchak continued speaking into his recorder:

"Once it became obvious that I was going to have to go, I started getting ready. I had no information sources in Bay City, so trying to find leads to some was my first item of business. The first thing I did was ask all my street snitches if they knew anyone in Bay City. Bay City being the far end of Nowheresville, most of them didn't. Fortunately, with The Monk, I got lucky."

The Monk, so called for his usual manner of dress, not for any evidence of a religious vocation, had chosen, as usual, to meet with Kolchak in one of Chicago's darker alleys, in the middle of the night.

"So what do you have for me?" Kolchak asked.

The enigmatic figure in the brown robes gestured him closer. "Huggy Bear," he whispered. "The Bear knows everything that happens in Bay City."

"Huggy Bear! What kind of a name is Huggy Bear?"

The Monk shrugged. "No one knows his real name. He runs a bar called The Pits. You can find him there. But Kolchak, be cautious. He will check on you before he helps you. And he has family here in Chicago. Some that you know."

"Oh yeah? Who that I know?"

"His cousin, Sweetstick Weldon."

Kolchak felt his heart sink. Bernard "Sweetstick" Weldon had hated Kolchak ever since Kolchak's exposé article back in 1974 had called him "the duke of the numbers racket on the South Side, and an all around civic headache." Their last encounter had left Kolchak nursing a bruised abdomen from being punched out by one of his goons. If this Huggy Bear was close to his cousin, it could be a serious problem.

"They aren't tight, and he doesn't approve of Weldon's activities," The Monk went on, anticipating Kolchak's question, "But rumor has it that the Bear has a strong sense of family, so be careful in your dealings with him. He will check you out so don't try to conceal the connection."

Kolchak nodded. It seemed worth taking the risk anyway. "Anything else I should know?"

The Monk shook his head. "Nothing." He held out his hand for the second part of his promised payment. Kolchak handed it to him, and The Monk melted off into the night.

"I also wanted to get a source for other kinds of knowledge. For several years I had been relying on Maria Hargrove and her ever-helpful grandmother for insight into some of the more unusual occurrences that I had encountered over my years in Chicago. Hopefully she'd be able to tell me the name of someone in Bay City who could do the same."

"I don't know, Kolchak," Maria said, settling comfortably into her seat in the Little Romney Tearoom and sipping the cup of tea she held in her exquisitely manicured hand. "I don't know anyone. Maybe my grandma does. But then I'll have to go up to the nursing home and see her. Take a lot of time."

Kolchak sighed. "How much do you want?" Maria was nothing if not predictable.

Maria smiled sweetly. "A hundred in advance should make it worth my while."

"A hundred bucks!" Kolchak squawked indignantly. "For a name I don't even know if you can get? That's highway robbery! What if your grandmother doesn't know anyone in Bay City?"

She shrugged. "You take your chances."

"I can take my chances on finding someone myself when I get there. Fifty in advance, another fifty if you come up with someone."

"Make that fifty in advance, fifty if I get someone, and twenty-five even if I don't, just for going, and you have a deal." Maria pouted. "You don't know what my grandmother's like."

Kolchak sighed. "You drive a hard bargain. When can you have it by?"

"Come by next Monday. For now, cross my palm with silver. The foldable kind." She held out her hand.

Grumbling, Kolchak gave her fifty dollars.

The next Monday, she gave him the name "Mary Polanski". "My grandma says she knew her grandmother back in the old days. She's somewhere in Bay City, uses the name 'Madam Yram'. I don't know how good she is, but Grandma had only good things to say about her grandmother. Says she still keeps in touch with her off and on."

"Then why doesn't she give me the name of her grandmother instead?"

Maria sighed. "She's been dead for years, Kolchak."

"But you said your grandmother was still in touch with her!" Kolchak objected.

Maria just looked at him.

"OK, right, right. Sorry I asked." He dug in his pocket. "Here. Fifty dollars. This better be worth it, Maria."

"Or what, you'll put a gypsy curse on me?" Maria laughed sarcastically.

Kolchak just sighed and left grumbling.

"But my greatest stroke of luck, if you can call it that, was when I remembered something that a stewardess I had gone out with a few times, Kathy Marshall, had said, something about having dated some Bay City police officers. I called her apartment and was lucky enough to get hold of her while she was on a layover between flights."

"Kathy? It's Carl. How are you doing?"

"Carl? Gee, if you're calling to ask me out I'd love to, but I already have a date tonight."

"Darn." That was real. The bubbly brunette was a lot of fun, a good dancer, and didn't worry about being much younger then the men she dated. "Maybe another time. But for now, I wanted to ask you something."

"Sure, anything."

"Didn't you mention to me once that you knew a couple of cops out in Bay City?"

"Sure. Starsky and Hutch. That's Dave Starsky and Ken Hutchinson. Why?"

"The news service is sending me out there, I was hoping to know a few names... hey, wait a minute!" Something clicked in Kolchak's memory. "I know those names! Last year... Kenneth Hutchinson. He's the one who took down James Gunther! After his partner David Starsky was shot. Those guys! You know them?"

"Yeah, that's them. Poor Starsky. I visited him in the hospital once after he was shot. What a mess. I've called them up each time I was out there since, but they haven't been interested in going out. The last time I was there I kinda' got the idea that they weren't on the market anymore."

"You mean they've both got girlfriends?" The more he could learn about them in advance, the better.

"Well actually, Carl, I was kinda' wondering if they were involved with each other, you know what I mean? They were always so close. We'd even done threesomes, you know? But I didn't want to come out and ask. That'd be a loss to the female population of Bay City if it was true."

On the other hand, there was such a thing as too much information. "Maybe they should have sent Updyke after all," Kolchak muttered under his breath. "Well, can you give me an address or phone number anyway?" he added more loudly to Kathy.

"No problem. They've been living together while Starsky's recovering. I have the phone number here somewhere..." There was a rustling as she shuffled through papers. "OK, here it is." She read it off to him. "Tell them I say 'hi', OK?"

"So, provided with as much information and as many sources as I could gather, I packed my car and set off on my way."

Kolchak put away his recorder.