Drumbeat Erica

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Is it poisonous?”

  “This is one snake that spits bullets,” she said. “You know something? If I pulled the trigger now, I could actually see them. Slow-motion bullets. I could see them hitting you. That would really be something.” She waved her left hand, the finger spread wide, in front of her dark glasses. “I just turned you into Ahmed Shiraz,” she said, giggling a little.

  “That’s why I came here,” I said quickly. “To talk about Shiraz.”

  She took three slow steps that covered half the distance between us. She was a little thing. The top of her head would barely reach my chin if I were standing. “You carrying a gun?” she asked.

  I mulled that one over for a couple of seconds. “Uh-huh,” I admitted. “Much bigger than yours.”

  “Where?”

  “Shoulder holster under my left arm.”

  She licked her lips. “First you raise your hands,” she said. “Then you stand up slowly. Then I take the gun, and then we talk. You got it, man?”

  “I could give it to you. Be easier all around,” I suggested.

  “Very funny. Okay now, hands up and stand up.”

  My upraised hands just missed scraping the low ceiling as I followed her instructions. She came close to me. “You’re a big bastard,” she said, and made the mistake of keeping the gun in her right hand and crossing her arms to get at the shoulder holster with her left. When her hand started prowling around under my lapel I took the gun away from her. That startled her for an instant, but she got over it. She threw both her arms around my neck and came close and got up on tiptoe and kissed me hard. That startled me for an instant, and when I got over it she stepped back with the little gun in her possession again. The .44 Magnum remained in my shoulder holster.

  We looked at each other. A grin was tugging at her pretty mouth. “You’ll never guess what I was thinking when I started to go for your gun,” she said. “I began to wonder if you were ticklish. I guess I’m not much of a gunman.”

  “Nope. Built all wrong. What are you doing with a gun anyway?”

  “It’s a long story. My dopey brother’s a Green Beret. Or was. He doesn’t like his sister living alone in New York like this. We’re from Upstate. He brought me the gun once.”

  “Do you pull it on whoever rings the bell?”

  “I—I don’t even think it’s loaded, if you want to know the truth. How do you find out?”

  “You push the little rod there and take a look.”

  She did. “What do you know, it is loaded.”

  Suddenly she swayed. I moved toward her and caught her. She clung to me, her long dark hair cascading over my arm.

  “I am definitely not going to faint,” she said distinctly against my shirt front. “Would you be a sweetheart and sort of lead me over to the sofa? I’m just a little bit wobbly.”

  I got her to the sofa and sat down next to her. She leaned forward to place the revolver carefully on the cocktail table in front of our knees. Our thighs bumped.

  “Cut that out,” she said.

  “Cut out what?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” Her recent strenuous activity had made the dark glasses ride low on her nose. Despite the dimness in the room, she was squinting behind them. “It’s all Uncle Gerald’s fault,” she said suddenly.

  “You have some family. First your brother and that gun, and now Uncle Gerald. What did he go and do?”

  “He’s not really my uncle anyway. Are you a friend of his?”

  “Whose?”

  “Uncle Gerald’s. I thought you said you were a friend of his.”

  “Sure, okay. I’m a friend of his.”

  “Is he your travel agent too? I’m on a trip right now. You ever take a trip?”

  At first I didn’t get it, and then I did. Taking a trip was a euphemism in certain circles, those circles being people who had taken trips, for flying high on LSD. If Linda Budd was on LSD, pumping her would be like trying to pump air into a blown-out tire. There was no doubt about it, either. She showed all the symptoms—the dilation of her pupils that made it necessary for her to wear dark glasses even in the dim light of the Emu bar and here in her apartment, her slow-motion movements, the way she’d hallucinated the gun into a snake, the way she’d made a pass at my face and turned me into Ahmed Shiraz.

  “Not me,” I said. “The only kind of trip I ever took was geographical.”

  She gave my hand an eager squeeze. “I’ve got some left. Right here, man. Want to try it? Want to go on a trip with me?”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  She shrugged and looked at me contemptuously, like a true believer whose attempt at proselytizing had been spurned. “Then like get lost, man. You’re kind of spoiling my trip.”

  “Tell me about Uncle Gerald,” I suggested.

  But for a moment she had lost interest in me. She was leaning forward and staring raptly at the revolver on the cocktail table. “It’s changing,” she said, licking her dry lips. “It’s melting. All golden and beautiful. It’s—now it’s turning rosy flesh-colored. It’s—” She blushed and glanced quickly away from the images she was conjuring. She managed to smile. “Old Dr. Freud would have loved that one.”

  “Uncle Gerald,” I persisted.

  She came into a new focus, suggested by the mention of his name. “Uncle Gerald’s a real sweetheart of a travel agent. At first you don’t want to go anywhere—physically, I mean. Why should you? Everything’s so beautiful, so damn beautiful it makes you want to cry. You can hear colors. You can see sounds. Say something, will you?”

  I was still fascinated. “Hello,” I said.

  “Your voice is like dark blue. I like your voice. Like a forest of dark blue cypress trees. Then later on, after a few trips, you can go places if you want. The acid’s consciousness-expanding, but you can keep it all inside yourself. You get all grateful to Uncle Gerald. You do what he wants.”

  “What did he want you to do?”

  “The cypresses believe in God,” she said dreamily.

  “What did Uncle Gerald want you to do?”

  “Things,” she said. “Like this movie actor. He really is a movie actor.”

  “I know,” I said. “The big guy you called Sailor, was he taking a trip too?”

  “Sailor? Don’t be ridic, man. He was like a happening. Purely coincidental. Pick him up, Uncle Gerald said. I think it was Uncle Gerald. It wasn’t my brother, was it? Sometimes I get confused. Was it my brother?”

  “Pick up who, Sailor?”

  “No. Shiraz. Pick him up and drink with him. I kept turning him into what’s-his-name—that Arabian playboy who died—Aly Khan. But sometimes for fun I turned him into a basset hound named Benny we used to have back home. His voice was sort of a rusty red just like Benny’s bark. Poor Benny, he got run over when I was a little girl. Maybe that’s why I colored the whole thing murder. Sort of free association, you know, but it was pretty scary there for a while. I turned this man on and then he got shot before I had time to turn him into Benny too, lying on the ground in the snow dead. The car skidded. I ran away and cried.”

  “Where can I find Uncle Gerald?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to, man. I told you I have some acid right here.”

  “I want to see him about something else.”

  She gave me a long, slow look. “What else is there?”

  “Tell me his full name, Linda. Uncle Gerald’s.”

  “He’s a teacher.” She corrected that. “Used to be.”

  “Where?”

  “Psychology course I took a million years ago in another incarnation on a small planet third from the sun in a city called Nuevo York where there was no bull fighting but all the little boys were beautiful. Olé.”

  “N.Y.U.?” I suggested.

  “I won’t tell you. They fired him anyway. They wanted to send him to jail. He tricked them, though. He turned me into Mata Hari. He’s God, you know. Really and truly.”

  She had been going in and out of focu
s, hallucinating more and more until the real world was a few hundred light years distant. She covered her face with her hands, knocking her dark glasses off, and started to cry. She bent forward from the waist, fell across the cocktail table and bit into her right wrist. The revolver landed on the floor.

  “I want to go to sleep now,” she said, knuckling her wet eyes. “Honest I do.”

  When I tried to move her she was as limp as a rag doll. I managed to stretch her out on the sofa. She was smiling at something in a dream I couldn’t see. I went into the bedroom, yanked a blanket off the unmade bed, returned to the living room and covered her. Her right hand made a pass in front of her face, languidly. Her left hand caught my wrist. She opened her eyes.

  “There,” she said dreamily, her voice barely audible. “You’re all undressed. I just undressed you. Now you can come down here to me. Where are you going?” She was drifting far away, where I couldn’t reach her. Her eyes closed and her breathing became deep and regular.

  I picked up the little revolver, unloaded it, pocketed the bullets, tiptoed around the room shutting off lights and got out of there.

  The cops had ticketed my car at the fireplug.

  4

  EARLY RUSH-HOUR traffic was flowing the other way on the Long Island Expressway when I drove out to Oyster Bay. Looking a little beat after what had been, in my fashion, a night on the town, I pulled around behind the big colonial house where Amos Littlejohn was dying.

  It was one of those lucky old houses that had managed to survive the relentless subdividing that was well on the way to turning Long Island into one vast Levittown. It stood well back from a country road a couple of miles from the Expressway, hidden behind a forest of tree-sized rhododendrons on ten acres of gently rolling land. I decided it was facing the wrong way: from the back driveway there was a view of Long Island Sound and a low blue haze across the water that was Connecticut.

  A colored maid in a crisp white uniform admitted me. “Goodness, it’s the detective fellow again,” she said.

  “Is Mr. Littlejohn up yet?”

  “It’s barely eight o’clock, but he’s awake. He don’t sleep much at all, poor man. Come in and have some coffee.”

  She was drinking hers at a long counter in the big kitchen. She poured a cup for me and left the room for a moment. I heard her voice faintly, speaking on the house intercom. She came back and said, “Be ten minutes. He’ll see you then.”

  “How is he this morning?”

  “Going to have a good day, I hope. They fewer and fewer.”

  We drank our coffee in silence for a while. “You certainly got to hand it to him,” she said. “A man dying like that, he usually bite your head off for nothing. But not Mr. Littlejohn, he’s a gentleman. Sometimes he joshes me, that’s all. It’s good for him. The doctor, he thinks Mr. Littlejohn don’t know, but he knows all right. I can tell. More coffee, Mr. Drum?”

  When I shook my head, she began to prepare a tray for the sick man—orange juice, a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of warm milk. “We can go up now,” she said, and I followed her up the back stairs and along a hallway to Amos Littlejohn’s room. A gaunt, bespectacled nurse was just coming out.

  “I’ll take it in to him,” she said.

  “Let Janice bring it, if that’s my breakfast,” Amos Littlejohn’s voice called out, and the nurse shrugged and kept walking.

  I followed Janice into the room. It looked out through two big windows at a view of the Sound and the low threatening clouds that scudded across it in a stiff wind.

  “Not much of a day for sailing,” Amos Littlejohn said. He sat partially erect in one of those electric-powered beds. He pressed a button on a gadget attached to wires and there was a hum and the bed sat him up straighter. He cast a jaundiced eye at the tray Janice was carrying.

  “Am I a two-year-old child?” he asked her.

  She winked at me. “No sir.”

  “Then am I ninety-two?”

  “No sir.”

  “How the hell old am I?” he shouted.

  “You in the prime of life, Mr. Littlejohn,” Janice said, smiling at him.

  “Then what’s the idea of that gunk in the bowl?”

  “Dr. Moran’s idea, sir. He put it on the list of—”

  “Shove the list,” Littlejohn bellowed. “Prime of life, you said so. I want some kidneys. I’m going to have some kidneys.”

  “No sir. Ain’t no kidneys in the house anyway. Now you eat your breakfast. Dr. Moran, he—”

  “Fornicate Dr. Moran,” Littlejohn said, using a shorter form of the verb. Janice laughed. Finally Littlejohn laughed too. “You’re a good girl, Janice,” he said.

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes, Mr. Littlejohn. Want to see an empty tray.”

  Littlejohn frowned at the invalid food. “I’ll do my best,” he said, and Janice left. Littlejohn began to sip his orange juice without enthusiasm.

  A couple of months ago, according to the pictures I’d seen in the papers from time to time, he had been a big, beetle-browed, craggy-faced widower who was pushing sixty and looked forty-five. He had still been shooting eighteen holes of golf here on Long Island, light-tackling bonefish out of the Gulf-Stream-warmed shallows off Bimini, and sleeping with a couple of chorus girls he kept in an apartment on Central Park South. He had also been a semi-retired speculator who still dabbled in financial ventures that caught his fancy, still owned the controlling interest in the second largest hotel chain in the world and, through a bunch of salaried flunkies out on the Coast, still ran Littlejohn Films Inc., where Ahmed Shiraz had gotten his start. Shiraz wasn’t working there any more, having received the boot at LFI the day he announced his intentions to marry Littlejohn’s daughter. He had recently done so.

  Now Littlejohn was a man waiting to die in a mechanical bed. He looked eighty. He had lost thirty or forty pounds. The neck that emerged from the collar of the silk dressing gown looked like a plucked rooster’s. The wasted face had no flesh on it, and the firm straight line of the mouth had sagged. He was dying of leukemia.

  This was my second meeting with Amos Littlejohn. The first one, less than a week ago, had been preceded by a phone call to my Washington office.

  “This Drum?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Amos Littlejohn, Oyster Bay, New York. I’ll expect you here tonight. Seven o’clock all right?”

  “All right for what?”

  “I’m hiring you.”

  “To do what, Mr. Littlejohn?”

  I didn’t like his attitude, and I was up to my ears trying to reorganize the Washington office. On the Continent I work alone, but I have a three-man staff in Washington. My best op had quit on me and gone into business for himself, taking an armful of case files with him. I wasn’t in the mood for Amos Littlejohn of Oyster Bay, New York, and for once I didn’t particularly need the dough.

  “To do what?” he repeated. “What difference does that make, long as I pay you?”

  I hung up on him. A minute later the phone rang again. “Wait,” Littlejohn said. “Don’t hang up this time. Axel Spade * said you were a cocky bastard. He also said you were the best private detective on two continents. I need you.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Not on the phone. You’ll understand why when we get together this evening. It’s urgent and I have very little time.”

  I didn’t know then that he meant he was dying.

  Axel Spade’s recommendation worked both ways. I said I would catch the shuttle and be there by seven.

  The first thing Littlejohn did was show me a newspaper clipping torn from the classified pages.

  The incongruous diaper service ad was the tip-off. I had seen it a dozen times before while browsing through the international edition of the New York Herald Tribune over an apéritif in Paris or Geneva.

  “Classified pages of the Paris Trib,” I said, handing the ad back to Littlejohn. He grabbed it with a quick impatient movement of his emaciated arm.

  “Looks
silly, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  “I’m a little jealous. What are their rates?” I said.

  He didn’t smile. “Astronomical. I can afford them. What I want to know is, are they for real or was I taken?”

  “You hired them?”

  “A couple of months ago I was in Paris—right before this goddam thing hit me and put me flat on my back. I saw that ad in what you correctly surmised was the international edition of the Herald Trib. I answered it.”

  Littlejohn produced another exhibit, this time a sheet of plain white stationery, hundred percent rag content, with no letterhead, no dateline and no salutation. A few lines had been typed on it, neatly centered. I read:

  We will undertake your mission and request payment in two equal parts, the first on receipt of this letter and the second on satisfactory completion of the mission. Your approval of these terms will be indicated by a deposit of twenty-five thousand dollars or their equivalent in pounds sterling, Swiss francs or Deutschmarks in account HN 138 269, Union Bank of Switzerland, Geneva.

  The signature was an indecipherable scrawl.

  “Neat,” I said. “A secret account in Switzerland and a Paris Trib classified box number. They wouldn’t touch a case in France, of course. There’s no way anything can be pinned on them. Did you pay the first installment?”

  Littlejohn didn’t answer me. “I asked you a question before. Are they real?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I could probably find out in Europe. Not here.”

  “The case will take you to Europe,” Littlejohn said, and produced exhibit three. It was a page torn from View magazine’s point-of-view section. Across the top was a wide-angle shot of a man and a woman skiing. SHIRAZ AND SUZANNE ON THE SLOPES ABOVE GSTAAD, the caption said.

  Even sophisticated Gstaad, skiing headquarters of the jet set, the text read, found this ménage-à-trois intriguing. Academy Award Winning Actor Ahmed Shiraz, 38, spent most of his time on the slopes skiing with former wife Suzanne while Fiancée Carol Littlejohn, only daughter of Movie and Hotel Mogul Amos Littlejohn, watched from the terrace of her Gstaad Palace Hotel suite.