The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  Another pass, with the cape swirling. Then again, and again.

  Juliano dared a laugh. He stomped his bare foot. “Toro!”

  The seconds became minutes, and a thin haze of dust clouded the surface of the sand. Santiago turned, hooked, and the cape swept him safely past.

  “Toro! Toro!” Juliano flaunted the cape. He turned the bull in half a dozen more passes, working toward the side of the arena. Santiago was beginning to lather. It is enough, Juliano decided, and he leaped behind the barricade.

  Jose, who had watched it all from the safety of the wooden shelter, pounded Juliano on the shoulder. “You were one of them, Juliano! A real torero.”

  “I have practiced the cape many months.” Juliano was out of breath and soaked with sweat. “Now we work Santiago into the chute, back into the pen so that no one will ever know he was in here tonight.”

  Jose shook his head, still dumbfounded. “My brother—and a real live bull.”

  “Perhaps I had not only much practice but the strongest of inspirations,” Juliano said.

  “Did you not feel alone and naked?”

  “As naked as Belmonte must have felt.” Juliano’s eyes met his brother’s. “When he was a boy, the Great One would swim a river on a bull ranch at night and fight the bulls alone, secretly. It is the way Belmonte learned. He was too young to know then that he was sending many matadors to their deaths. If he had only known…”

  Juliano turned, craned, looking over the top of the barricade. Santiago claimed the center of the arena, head lifted, horns gleaming, forehoof pawing, challenging all comers.

  “When they first face a man, they think he and the cape are one. So the cape distracts them,” Juliano explained. “But the second time around—should there be one—the bull in his wisdom knows the truth. This is the reason great care is taken from the day of their birth to keep them from facing a cape, until they go into the arena. Nothing is more deadly than a cape-broken bull such as Muno Figero will face when he meets Santiago in the arena tomorrow.”

  Jose nodded in slow comprehension of truths his brother had learned while he, Jose, slept the evenings away.

  “I think Muno Figero will not live to see Mexico City,” Jose decided.

  And for once Juliano was quite certain that his duller brother was right.

  EASY MARK

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1971.

  The two youths at the front corner table marked me from the moment I strolled into the psychedelic, nether-world decor of the Moons of Jupiter.

  I was surely a sudden out-of-kilter detail on the scene. My appearance stamped me as the most reprehensible of straights: businessman, establishment man; specter from the far side of the generation gap. Fortyish, brushed with gray at the temples, lean, conditioned from regular workouts, I was smoothly barbered, tailored in a five hundred dollar suit of English cut, with coordinated shirt and necktie.

  A cool young hostess, blonde and topless, decided I was for real. She smiled a greeting to take me in tow and threaded a way through a dimly lighted, pot-smoke-hazed broken field of tables and hovering, pale faces. In passing, I drew a few glances, ranging from the sullen to the amused. Empty, bored young eyes lifted, noted the stranger, and dropped again to contemplation of existence and a world they had rejected. I was of no more real interest than the movement of a shadow—except to the pair at the corner table. They studied every detail about me as I was seated and ordering a drink.

  On the bandstand a four-piece rock group, as hairy as dusty and moth-eaten young gorillas, suddenly assailed the senses with electronic sound. The lighting came and went like a Gehenna fire, swirling faces from corpse-green to paranoid purple to jaundice yellow, cycling and recycling until the brain swam and burst from the brew of shattering sound and color.

  Throughout the hard-rock number I had the impression that I was being discussed by the pair at the corner table. Their faces in the ghoulish glows turned toward me, turned away, drew close over the table as words blanketed by the music were exchanged.

  The music shimmered to a long-drawn wail against a mad rhythmic background and slipped eerily to silence. The lighting settled to a twilight. There was a shifting of bodies and a ripple of applause.

  I lifted my drink, covertly watching the pair rise from the corner table. I sensed a decision, and my palms became a little damp as they came toward me.

  Their shadows streamed across my table. Suddenly they stopped.

  “Hi, pops.”

  The taller, huskier one had spoken. I looked up. He was a strapping youth with a heavy-boned face lurking behind a heavy growth of thick black beard and wiry tresses that fell to his thick neck. He wore nondescript poplin slacks, dirty and wrinkled, and a leather vest that partially covered his massive, hairy chest. His swarthy, bare arms were corded and muscled like a weight lifter’s.

  The companion beside him was as tall, but much thinner, a fine-boned fellow. Tangled, unwashed locks of yellow and a sparse beard graced a narrow, almost delicate face and high-domed head. The smoldering eyes of a decadent poet peered from the shadows of large sockets. The thin-lipped mouth was faintly quirked, as if sardonic amusement was a habitual reaction.

  “We sensed a loneliness,” the poet said, “and would offer a friendly ear if you’d care to rap. Peace.” He had a thin, nasal voice. His jerky delivery and the embers in his eyes were clues to a good high on drugs. Clad in a rumpled tie-dyed gaucho shirt that hung loose about greasy ducks, he slipped with unreal movements into a chair across the table.

  “I’m Cleef,” he said, “and my boon companion is known as Willis.”

  Willis wiped a palm across his leather vest and extended his hand. “Into the pudding, man.”

  I saw no alternative at the moment but to shake his hand. His grip was modestly powerful. He pumped my hand once, then eased into the chair at my left.

  “Pudding?” I inquired.

  “As your group would put it,” Cleef-the-poet said, “welcome to the club.”

  “I see. Well, thanks. Buy you fellows a drink?”

  Willis’ heavy mouth curled gently. “You’re out of sight, pops. We don’t ruin the belly with booze. But you might blow the price of a joint.”

  He lifted a muscle-lumped arm and signaled a waitress who was moving from a nearby table. She served them joints from an innocent-looking package bearing the brand name of a well-known cigarette. As Willis and Cleef fired the reefers, I ordered a second double Scotch. I figured I needed it.

  Cleef drew deeply, half closing his eyes and holding the smoke until his lungs burned for air. Willis was a more conservative pothead, less greedy, less desperate for a turn-on. He puffed, inhaled, exhaled.

  “What brings you to a place like this, pops?” Willis asked conversationally.

  My gaze roamed the unreality of the room, returned to Willis’ dark face. My shoulders made a vague movement “I’m really not sure,” I said.

  “Hung-up man, ice cream man,” the poet suggested.

  “Ice cream?” I asked.

  “Now and then user of drugs,” Willis explained. “Ice cream habit.”

  I nodded, grinned slightly. “Thanks for the translation, but I haven’t an ice cream habit. Just an occasional Scotch does it for me.”

  “Translate, extrapolate,” Cleef rhymed. “Rap across the gap.”

  Willis reached and patted the back of my hand. “We’ll try to talk your lingo, pops.”

  “Thanks. It would be less awkward.”

  The waitress came with my drink. Willis elaborately mused on her thin face and slender topless figure. The gesture on his part was almost pathetically obvious, a cover-up for his quick assessment of the thick wallet from which I paid the tab.

  I lifted the Scotch. “Cheers.” I rolled the first drops under my tongue for the taste. The liquor dispelled a little of the clammy chill inside me.

  I set the glass down and studied it a moment. “I guess it was because of Camilla,” I said fi
nally.

  “Come again?” Willis said.

  “The reason I came in here,” I said. “Dear Camilla…about the same age as some of the young women in here…early twenties…very beautiful.”

  Willis chuckled, eyes brightening. “Well, what do you know! The old boy has got himself a chick!”

  “Straight man buys anything his little heart desires,” Cleef said lazily.

  I couldn’t help the angry look I shot across the table. “It wasn’t that way at all!”

  “Easy, pops,” Willis suggested mildly.

  I lifted the glass and threw the remainder of the drink down my throat “Well, it wasn’t!”

  “So okay.”

  “I want you to understand.”

  “Sure, pops. Don’t blow your mind.”

  I took out a spotless Irish linen handkerchief and brushed the cold needles from my forehead. “Blow my mind… Sonny, that’s just what I did, with Camilla. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t live without her. Went crazy if she glanced at another man. Never wanted her out of my sight…”

  “Zap!” mumbled the poet “What a king-sized hang-up.”

  My vision cleared slightly. “At last you have voiced a truth. I became a different man, totally different, a stranger to myself.”

  “How’d you meet such a chick?” Willis asked with genuine interest.

  I drew a breath. “In a place much like this. I—my wife had died I was, you might say, in loose-ends bachelorhood One evening I was entertaining a business client and his wife.”

  “How deadly dull,” decided Cleef.

  “She, the client’s wife, had heard of a place similar to this one,” I said, as if the poet hadn’t interrupted “She wanted to see the sights. She insisted we go, as a lark.”

  “But you, not the fellowship, were the bugs under the microscope,” Cleef intoned sagely.

  “Shut up.” Willis glowered a look at his companion. “Let the man talk. Go on, pops.”

  “Go on?” I sagged morosely. “Where is there to go, after Camilla? With Camilla you have been all the way.”

  Willis’ eyes glinted with a grain of fresh respect. “Tough, pops.”

  “Lovely while it lasted,” I amended. “I met her that night, on the lark. We grooved, as I believe you would put it.” I broke off, numbly, trying to relate the experience in my own mind to the “straight” sitting at the table with Cleef and Willis. “Then she turned me off. It was nightmare. I pleaded. She reviled. I begged—and Camilla laughed…”

  “And she split the scene?” Willis finished.

  “Yes,” I said, squeezing my eyes tight and seeing her face against the darkness; lovely face, mask-like face; face that could become cruel, unendurably cruel. “Yes, she split the scene.” I wrapped it up in a whisper.

  Willis scratched his beard and gave his head a short shake. “Who’d have believed it?” He lifted his eyes and looked about the Moons of Jupiter. “So it was the thought of Camilla that brought you in tonight?”

  “You might say that,” I agreed. I washed the final drop of Scotch from the glass against my lips. “You see, after Camilla, my home town was unbearable. I left I’ve wandered, for a long way. It hasn’t been easy.”

  “Looking for another Camilla,” the poet said. “I should write about you, man, if it all wasn’t so corny.” Cleef half stood, drugged eyes flicking about the room. “Is she here tonight? Another Camilla? Do you see another Camilla, man?”

  “There will never be another Camilla, sonny,” I said. “Once is enough.”

  “So now you wander some more, pops?” Willis asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why don’t we wander together, pops? Have a ball? Cleef and I have rapped about blowing this town. We’d like to see California, New Orleans, Miami when the chill winds blow.”

  “Dust to salve the itch in our feet,” the poet supplied.

  “That’s right, pops,” Willis nodded. “We yearn to roam. You got a car and dough.”

  “Sorry,” I said, suddenly very sober, “but I don’t think…”

  “Man,” Willis said, “you just think about Camilla.” His heavy face had changed, hardened. He lifted his right hand almost to tabletop level. I saw the glint of dusky light on six inches of gleaming switchblade. I sat very still. This was the decision the pair had made when I’d strolled in and they’d pegged me for an easy mark.

  “Let’s go, pops,” Willis said.

  “All right,” I swallowed drily. “I won’t resist. You won’t have to hurt me.

  “That’s good, pops. We don’t want to hurt you. We’re not stupid. Just the dough and the car, that’s all.”

  We rose from the table and walked out of the Dantean room and onto a parking lot, Willis close behind me with the tip of the knife against my back.

  “It’s the sporty little car right over there,” I said. “Please…careful with the knife.” I eased the wallet from my pocket, stripped it of cash, several hundred dollars, and handed the money to Willis.

  His big hand closed over the bread. “Thanks, pops. And look, you ought to be more careful, wandering into places like the Moons of Jupiter.”

  “Seeking adventure, you found it,” the poet surmised.

  I handed the car keys to Willis. “That’s it. You have got it. You’ve stripped me clean.”

  “So long, pops.”

  I saw the flash of his big fist. Conditioned as I was, even after Camilla, I could have handled him—both of them, Cleef posing no problem in a rough-and-tumble.

  I took the punch on the chin, rolling with it just enough to keep from being knocked blotto. My knees crumpled. I fell on the darkly shadowed asphalt, stunned but not unconscious.

  I heard Willis say: “That’ll hold him while we split the scene.”

  I heard the poet intone: “Hail the open road!”

  I heard the rush of their feet, the starting of the car, the sigh of engine as the car took them from the parking lot.

  I got up and dusted myself off in time to see the taillights vanish around a distant street corner.

  Good-bye Camilla’s car… Bought with my money, but she’d done the shopping, chosen the model. Not even a fingerprint to connect the car to me; I’d wiped them away before entering the Moons of Jupiter.

  I strolled to the street in order to find a taxicab several blocks from the scene.

  Good-bye, Camilla…

  I still had the smallest catch in my throat. I hadn’t really meant to kill her when I struck her in that final moment of insane rage.

  Farewell, Camilla… It was hard to cover my tracks and get rid of you, the evidence. I wonder when they will find you in the trunk of the car? California? New Orleans? At some service station in Alabama when the attendant moves from gas pump to the rear of the car and catches the first whiff of the ripening smell?

  As for you, easy marks, you know not from where I came, or where I go, or even my name.

  So enjoy the ride…

  GATOR BAIT

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1971.

  Crouched on the prow of the drifting water sled under a brazen Louisiana sky, Chat felt the old dread pouring through him in sickening waves. It was an icy prickling in his clammy, sun-leathered skin. It blurred his vision so that Fornier’s Bayou seemed to swirl about him, the canebrakes, the hummocks of greasy green palmetto and saw grass, the towering fingers of heat-blasted gray cypress with their festoons of Spanish moss.

  A thin, stringy-muscled, undersized thirteen, Chat clutched the scabrous, weathered gunwales and wallowed his tongue inside his mouth, wishing he could spit out the dry, cottony feeling.

  He shivered, listening to the watery whisper as Lefevre, his stepfather, stood in the stern, poling the craft. They had inched into the bayou under power fifteen minutes ago. Lefevre had cut the throttle, kicking the air propeller to a stop in its wire-mesh cage. The slow, careful search for an alligator den had begun.

  Within five minutes, Chat h
ad spotted the wet hump, the protrusion of tangled twigs that meant ’gator. As if in supplication, a nearly naked young figure clad in tattered jeans and dingy sneakers, he’d crouched with his lips forming a silent plea for Lefevre to miss the ’gator sign. More than anything, he’d wanted to go home today empty-handed, without a wetting.

  The sled lurched from a hard jab of the pole. Chat slipped a glance over his shoulder. A big, strapping, Cajun figure in the stern, bending his dark, hairy weight against the pole, Lefevre split his tangle of black, wiry beard with a snag-toothed grin.

  “We got us a skin, boy! Get ready. That ’gator is going to shed his hide!”

  Lefevre’s words seemed to hang in the muggy, primeval stillness.

  Chat closed his eyes, the dread in him sharpening until it felt like fishhooks in his stomach.

  “Boy,” Lefevre rumbled, “what’s the matter with you? Get a move on! We got to wake that old ’gator up and get him mad enough to come roaring out of his den.”

  “I don’t feel so good, Pa.”

  “Belly hurting again?”

  “Yeah, Pa.”

  “Now, boy,” Lefevre growled, “you just cut that sissy stuff out. Hear me? Ain’t you ashamed? What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Ain’t you normal? Toutain’s boy, and those twins of De Vaux, they take to ’gator baiting like it was candy. You going to be the only yellow-belly boy in the swamp?”

  Chat clutched his stomach. “I can’t help it, Pa.”

  Lefevre cleared his throat, making it a heavy sound of disgust and disparagement “Boy, you lived on your ma’s apron strings too long, just you and a woman. It’s time you quit acting like a girl. Why, when I was your age, I couldn’t wait to go ’gator baiting. I used to beg my pa. I used to prod them out for the pure hell fun of it. You need to change your attitude, boy. It’s the greatest excitement in the world. Running a fox or treeing a coon don’t hold a candle to it!”

  “Yes, Pa.” Somehow Chat managed to rise. His knees were weak with an inner trembling, but they supported him. Sparks of panic misted behind his eyes as he saw how close the sled had moved in.