Lust Is No Lady

by Michael Avallone

  LUST IS NO LADY

  Michael Avallone

  Ed Noon Mystery #14

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  BEVERLY HILLS

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Susan Avallone and David Avallone. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author.

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  For Sam Post

  Who almost makes me change my mind

  about editors

  1

  I was fifteen miles out of Rock Springs when the front tire blew. The highway was wide, the ground was macadam and I was doing seventy-five. Not bad for a ’53 Buick that had lost some of its assembly line zip in three collisions. But when a front tire blows, past performances don’t mean a thing. I fought the wheel, feeling the Buick buck like a stallion. I didn’t get it straightened out until I was a good half mile further in my journey. Five minutes later I was standing on Highway 40, looking down at the rubbery cruller of what’s usually listed in the catalogues as Front Tire, Left. I loosened my tie and took my jacket off.

  The Wyoming sun was beating the hell out of everything in sight. Everything being pretty much of the same thing. Long, endless, dreary stretches of prairie without even a billboard to liven things up — a sea of grass which had been flowing since Adam bit the apple. Off to the west, telegraph poles lined the Union Pacific railroad ties just to remind me I was still in the United States. There wasn’t a car in sight for miles, much less a streamliner. Nothing but the plains, dead tumbleweed and my three-wheel Buick.

  “God bless us one and all,” I said to no one in particular. Feeling more like Scrooge than Tiny Tim, I rummaged in the trunk compartment for a jack. I started to roll up my nice white shirt sleeves, feeling the way a guy will when he has to change a tire in the middle of nowhere. I was still rolling up my sleeves when the plane zoomed down out of the blue afternoon sky.

  It was a monoplane. A Piper Cub. Trim and neat, looking as light as a corn flake. But it was traveling like a bullet. Straight down toward me and the Buick. I shaded my eyes against the glaring sun. Buzzing cars is a specialty with fly-boys. Looking up, I waved hello. I should have run for cover.

  Like 1944 all over again. Wyoming had become Germany in two seconds flat.

  The Cub had come down within rope ladder distance of the car, then climbed like an elevator before it whipped by. But not before releasing some Forget-Me-Nots — a falling mass of objects that gave me a terrible three seconds before I realized they weren’t bombs. They were too square to be bombs. I scrambled under the Buick without stopping to figure it out.

  The falling stream of square objects banged, hammered and thundered all around me. The roadside came magically to life in showers of dust and chips. On the roof of the car, a big hammer sledged away with shattering thumps. I unholstered my armpit .45. The noise and the roar of the plane went away as I craned my neck beneath the car for a look. Not that I could do anything. I was more astounded than scared. The area around my stopped Buick was chock full of scattered, broken, brown fragments. More red than brown. But I was concentrating on the Cub and where it had gone.

  Gone but not forgotten. There it was in the east, climbing out of its dive and banking sharply for another try. I buried myself under the Buick again. I could hear the Cub coming back, motor roaring with proximity. I braced myself, keeping my face to the macadam roadbed, smelling oil and grease and gasoline, just like a mechanic down at Dinty’s Garage. All I could do was sit this one out.

  The Cub whistled and whined as it dived. Thumpada, thumpada, thump, thump! The Buick shuddered, shivered and rocked as the square objects thudded into the hardtop. All around me, dust showered and fragments scattered like falling hail. Suddenly, it was all over. Quick silence and the Cub had gone away again.

  I rolled from under the chassis and watched the Cub rocket overhead, streak like a greyhound toward the horizon that had all those telegraph poles parked under it and bank north for another try. But I was wrong. The pilot wasn’t going to break the bank this time. The Cub kept heading north. Pretty soon, I lost it in the glare of the day. The sky was quiet after that.

  The Buick was a mess. Huge dents and tears had redesigned the body. The roof looked exactly as it would if King Kong had tried to put his fist through it. The radiator wasn’t much better, either. One of the falling square objects stove in the hood as easily as you fold a newspaper. Water was steaming out of the radiator cap like an overworked teakettle. I examined the thousands of brown-red fragments that littered the highway like peanut shells. In my fingers, some of them were sharp and hard; others came apart like powdered rock. It was nuts, it was screwy and completely improbable but I had just been bombarded with bricks. Bricks. Plain, ordinary, brick-by-brick bricks. It was hard to tell how many the Cub pilot had tried to kiss me with but his accuracy would have been the envy of a Norden bombsight. I’d been plastered but good. I sat down on the rear fender to think about it.

  I lit a Camel with a wooden match. When the cigarette was half-smoked, I still couldn’t understand it. I would have passed the Cub off as plains heat and prairie mirage except for the condition of the Buick and the thousand bits of evidence messing up the highway.

  I forgot about the radiator and went back to changing the tire. Work is good medicine when you can’t make heads or tails out of problems.

  I was screwing the last nut home when I heard the motorcycle. I dropped the wrench, whirled and pointed my .45. I had a quick impression of a bicycle, helmet, goggles and scarf fluttering in the wind. Then the motorcycle slowed, cut over to where I was parked and put-putted to an easy, smooth stop. It leaned to one side as the driver braked a jodhpured, booted leg to the macadam.

  “Marlon Brando himself,” I said to myself and holstered the .45. I put by back to the sun and squinted at the new arrival.

  “Hi,” the driver sang out as if it were Merry Christmas. “Been in an accident?”

  I nodded. “I didn’t stop to enjoy the scenery.”

  “I’ll say. You got clobbered good, didn’t you?”

  My eyesight came back. It wasn’t a Brando at all. More like a Marilyn Monroe version of the wild one. And the sort of scenery men always pause in the day’s occupation to enjoy. She was breathtaking even in the dry Western air that left you no breath at all.

  “Town’s about fifteen miles off. There’s a garage you could use. Hop on the back. Let Jingo pick your car up.”

  “It’s okay now,” I said, climbing in behind the Buick’s wheel and kicking the starter. The dream on the motorcycle wrinkled her nose. I kept looking at her even as my hands glided through the routine of getting a car in motion. The motor whirred but did nothing else. I cursed under my breath. I’d forgotten about the smashed radiator.

  The dream walked her bike in closer, peering at me through the open door. “Stuck, huh? You gotta ride in with me now. Scared of bikes? Some people are.”

  I switched the ignition off, still looking at her.

  “Sure. I fold up if the radio is playing too loud. Look, Miss —”

  “Mary Lou,” she said promptly. “Folks call me Mary Lou. You from New York?”

  I smiled. “All of me. I guess you’re Rock Springs born and bred.”

  She matched my smile. “All of me. You look like a New Yorker at that. Never get much sun down there, do you?”

  Looking at her was pleas
ant. All of her was as blonde as a girl can possibly be without breaking the law. Golden, sun-splashed blonde that didn’t freckle or boil or curl up in the heat and die. She was bottled sunlight, condensed gold, packaged honey. The riding outfit of helmet, black steerhide jacket and jodhpurs were as fashionable as a Fifth Avenue shop window. And clean, too. I made her out as about twenty. The rest of her was easy. Something like 36-24-36. And long of thigh and limb. She had Monroe’s way of wetting her mouth and squinting when she talked. I liked her right away. Understatement of the year.

  “C’mon. Hop on. Jingo closes at six something. We can just about make it —”

  She made room for me on the bike. I swung a leg and mounted behind her. The leather saddle was as wide and stiff as frozen underwear. But I was smack up against a great rump of curves. Mary Lou wasn’t bothered by my nearness. Maybe nothing ever bothered Mary Lou.

  Her gloved hands twisted the handle throttle as she revved the engine. I put my arms around her waist and hung on. It was a small bike. An Indian not-built-for-two. My mouth was a kiss away from her right ear.

  “Jingo’s the town mechanic, Mary Lou?”

  The helmet nodded. Suddenly, it turned and I was looking in her blue eyes. “Say — you carrying a gun or something? What’s poking into my shoulder?” She sounded worried.

  I laughed, realizing she hadn’t noticed my hardware because I’d put my jacket on before we’d traded a single syllable. Guns lead to too many questions. They frighten people as they should.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m a detective. Name’s Ed Noon. I carry a .45 in my line of work —”

  Me and my big mouth. Me and my line of work. Mary Lou mumbled something and started cranking and twisting her handlebars like she wanted to rip them right off the frame. I don’t know that much about motorcycles. I thought she was having some trouble with her engine.

  All I do know is that Mary Lou No-Last-Name had suddenly spun around, slapped my face resoundingly and shoved me with both gloved hands hard against my chest. She had surprise and strength on her side. I had exhaustion and confusion on mine. I wound up on my fanny in the roadbed.

  Before I could unscramble and put myself together, her machine was in motion, whizzing off like the mechanical rabbit at a dog race.

  One of the most confusing moments I’ve ever spent in my lifetime was sitting on my rusty dusty in the middle of that Wyoming nowhere watching that strange, beautiful girl disappear down the long ribbon of highway on her motorcycle. I was going out of my head faster than my critics had estimated. First the bombarding Piper Cub and now this runaway blonde on a bike. Too much sun. Too much everything.

  I heaved a long, unhappy sigh and got to my feet. My rump hurt, my spine ached. It was fifteen miles to Rock Springs and it was getting late in the day.

  I rolled up all the windows on the Buick, locked the doors and doublechecked the trunk. I had two suitcases and a wardrobe worth protecting against other hitchhikers and bums.

  The long walk toward town had all the aspects of a headache. Detectives were sure popular in these parts. It couldn’t have been me. I’d never been in this part of the country in my life. I’d just been driving through on my way to California. I was going to Hollywood because I thought the trip would do me good. Fun in the Sun and all that kind of stuff. The place in the shoulder with the .45 calibre hole had healed pretty good but the doctors had suggested a long vacation far from smoky New York. Far from bullets, trouble and cases that didn’t pay enough. So here I was, walking in the blistering sun and having a helluva good time.

  The Buick became a speck on the highway behind me. But the plains around me got no smaller. And it was hot. Damn hot.

  “I love the life I lead,” I said out loud as I swiped at a bomber-sized bee that made a pass at my sweat-salted right ear. I told that to the plains, the sun and the telegraph poles. I was mad enough to kick little children.

  I never did get to Rock Springs that day. Maybe I would have if I hadn’t seen the vultures. I might have gotten a lift from a passing car within the hour or eventually I would have made the distance by hoofing it.

  But the vultures changed everything.

  It was an hour later that I heard their awful cries. As tired as I was it was enough to make me stop and look. I was still on the highway, following its hard, fast straightness when the road suddenly bore away from the plains and dipped slowly toward a low range of hills.

  Even in the dazzling glare of the sun, there was no mistaking the five or six ugly black birds in the sky. Wheeling and swooping in low, long circles over something I couldn’t see. They were close enough for me to hear them, about two hundred yards or less. Close enough for me to recognize their black undertaker’s wings, pink bald heads and fierce, hooked beaks. Close enough to realize that their meal wasn’t on the table yet. But suppertime was close.

  I left the highway and stumbled toward the hills. I was probably wasting my time. It could be anything from a dying jackass to a sun-stricken cow. Or a broken-legged horse or a wounded coyote.

  But it wasn’t any of those things.

  The meal had two legs. Not four.

  2

  It wasn’t far to walk. A short stumble over rough ground that featured a boulder, plenty of bushes and a rising ridge that suddenly fell off into a superb view of half the state of Wyoming. There were endless miles of prairie stretching away until the land met the sky. The highway lay behind me.

  Below my feet, before the grass sea began, was a hollow depression in the rocks, indiscriminately bordered with low humps of earth that looked like ant hills. The vultures were circling one hundred feet in the air above this particular piece of real estate. My eyes looked over the ground quickly. It had been a long, long time since I’d had to scout Mother Nature for clues. Asphalt and buildings were my business. Not rocks and grass.

  It didn’t take long.

  I would have seen the girl right away if she’d had some clothes on. But being naked the way she was, she merged with the brown of the copper-colored rocks perfectly. The boiling afternoon sun had helped things considerably. You had to strain your eyes to see. What it had done to her body I could only guess.

  She was thirty feet below me, laid out between the humps of ground that looked like ant hills. From where I stood she represented a perfect X. She was either staked down or had fallen in that position. But I didn’t think so and I wasn’t waiting to guess about it while I could find the answers myself. The damn vultures bawling overhead were wearing my nerves to a frazzle.

  I unhooked my .45, pointed it at the nearest, meanest-looking one and pulled the trigger. The slug seemed to roar with the violence of a longe range cannon in the country air. I didn’t expect to hit anything. I didn’t. I fired two more times. The vultures took the hint. They screamed, babbled and cried insanely but I had the pleasure of watching them swoop off in wide tangents until they regrouped in a formation at a considerable distance away. I lost sight of them as I scrambled down the hill toward the girl. I wouldn’t need much time anyway.

  The girl, as the saying goes, was more dead than alive.

  Somebody had staked her out on a small patch of brown earth just big enough to accommodate her and the four wooden pegs that held her to the earth. Cruel rawhide strips had bound her wrists and ankles. They were stained with blood where she had twisted and strained in an effort to get free. She hadn’t had much luck. I had to refrain from cursing as I bent over her.

  The sun had beat at her unprotected eyes and flesh so long that even her native coloring hadn’t helped. She was an Indian or a Mexican girl or something in between but her new redness wasn’t natural. She had been unable to cry out because somebody had also wadded a handkerchief in her mouth and lashed her jaws with a filthy bandana that once had been polka-dot. Even with the raw-red condition of her skin and face, I could see she was a beauty. High cheekbones, chiseled nose, full lips and long, straight, black hair that fanned over the ground like a shroud.

  She was uncons
cious and probably half out of her head. She was also a scant five feet, not bigger than a child, but it was a woman’s body. No kid could ever boast of hips and breasts so womanly.

  I had a moment’s panic, realizing I had no water for her and no chance of finding any. I knew how far away the town was and how nonexistent the traffic had been all morning except for my girl friend with the motorcycle. But there were other things I could do. I did them.

  I cut the rawhide bracelets with my pocket knife. I removed the bandana after some trouble with the tight knots behind her head. The wad came out of her mouth gently enough but its sudden removal sent the air rushing out of her lungs. She groaned and twitched violently as if she were still lashed to the ground. The movement almost rolled her over completely. She started to cough and gag and spit up blood. I held her naked brown shoulder lightly and almost burned my hand. The sun had made a barbecue of her body.

  I watched her small lovely back heave. Her long black hair hung dry and brittle as it fell past her shoulders. She was coming out of the nightmare slower than a turtle climbing a river bank. Those things always take time.

  She’d been staked out since early morning by my calculations, when I’d been serenely breezing down Highway 40 toward my date with a flat, a Piper Cub and a female bike rider.

  I put my hands on the hard muscles of her back and began rubbing them. Easily, gently, until she could feel some blood again. She shivered. For somebody who’d had all that sun, she shivered. I got up and went around to look at her. She was huddled on the ground, brown legs drawn under her, breasts throbbing with her irregular breathing. I kneeled to let her look into my friendly eyes. There was no telling how she might react after the ordeal she’d just been through.

  I saw her eyes for the first time. Black, wondering, frightened eyes. She was staring at me dumbly, as if I were the ghost that walked. I didn’t know much about my red brothers or sisters — if she were an Indian. She certainly looked like an Indian. Central Casting would have given their payroll for a heroine like her. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. She’d had enough sun for one day.