The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Suddenly I glimpsed a ray of hope. I got up, leaving a sandwich and a second coffee half finished. It was as simple as ABC, so far as Mr. Bondpopper was concerned. As for Steve and Betty—well Mr. Bondpopper would have some ideas, I hoped!

  I entered this second building, and the elevator man gave me a deep bow.

  “Please tell me where I can find Mr. Taggart,” I said.

  “At this hour of the night? I’m sorry, Miss—”

  “But he’s here in the building. I saw him come in less than a half hour ago, and I know he hasn’t come out. Didn’t you see him?”

  “I do not recall—”

  “But you couldn’t help seeing him. He came in with a party of men. One of them was a cowboy. I must find Mr. Taggart, please. A friend of his needs him.”

  The elevator man gave me an arched eyebrow and smooth words. “Miss, it is possible that Mr. Taggart passed through this lobby on his way to another building. If you are his friend, you may know where his office is.” He shifted his eyes slightly to the right. That was all the cue I needed.

  To the right was the Taggart Building on the corner.

  And so for the second time this weird night I entered this corner building.

  I thought I would know exactly what I would say if I could find the man I was looking for.

  “Mr. Taggart, at your request. Mr. Bondpopper came to see you tonight. I was with him. We visited your laboratory and Mr. Bondpopper got lost. Please help me find him at once.”

  But I never got to use my speech. In the hour that remained before dawn, I came within the sound of Taggart’s voice a few times, but I never saw him. Instead, I dodged him. And for good reason.

  Everything I heard convinced me that Mr. Taggart and his men were contriving to do injury (if not murder) to the cowboy Steve.

  Steve’s fate was in the balance now. And I was in a panic. What I remember of the awful hour that followed was the confusion of racing up and down stairs, dodging persons I was afraid to see, trying in vain to get into the basement again; imploring scrubwomen frantically to let me into Taggart’s office or some other room with a telephone.

  At last I was convinced they had taken Steve to the roof to give him the works.

  I had just dodged some building inspectors who had come up to check over the pagoda on the roof. The cave-in of steps and sidewalk at the street level had evidently given them a false scare over the safety of the building.

  If my theory about Steve was right, why hadn’t they discovered him on the roof?

  Had he found his way down a fire escape or something?

  I leaned out a twenty-first-story window and peered down at the vertical wall below me. The light of dawn highlighted the projecting pagoda-style window ledges. Gray mists clung to the ground around the lower floors of the Taggart Building and the Hall of Arts.

  I glanced upward. My heart stopped. My fingers froze on the window-sill.

  The cowboy Steve was hanging over the edge of the building. He was bound, gagged, and completely helpless. All that held him was a slender rope.

  I dashed away from the window with the terrified conviction that they had hanged him.

  But no, the rope wasn’t around his neck. Or was it? You can realize what a panic I was in. I ran back to the window to make sure.

  The rope was around his waist, and he was very much alive and kicking—though I couldn’t quite see his feet for the ledges. What I did see was more of the little green demons.

  I almost reeled out of the window. Those dreadful little creatures were haunting me. If I could believe my eyes, they were clinging to the taut rope that held Steve. They were chopping at it with little axes. Tiny shreds of rope were floating down, and one caught on my sleeve.

  I ran through the hall screaming. Two scrubwomen followed me back to the window. I pointed, and they looked up. And then it happened.

  The rope snapped and he fell.

  Maybe that cowboy was a trapeze performer, or maybe he was just naturally clever. The instant his body broke free, and it seemed nothing could save him, somehow his toes hooked the narrow ledge above the twenty-second floor window.

  Consequently he swung down like a weight from a pair of hinges, cut a swishing arc through the air, and crashed headlong through the window. Broken glass clanked along the side of the building as it fell, but I never heard it strike, for I was racing to the twenty- second floor, one flight up.

  I almost knocked the door down before the scrubwomen got there to help me. They turned the key and we rushed in.

  There lay the cowboy across Taggart’s desk. His clothing was slashed and his arms were bleeding. He was groaning, and he could thank his lucky stars he was able to groan.

  He wasn’t dead, not by a long shot. He heard us coming in, and his groan changed to a grin.

  “Hi, there,” he said. “You’re the gal that don’t like cowboy music. Pardon me for intruding.”

  And then, darn it, I was so relieved from being so scared that I fainted dead away. And when I woke up I was in a hospital.

  CHAPTER X

  Steve Speaking

  It was too darned bad about this gal, Mae Wing, having a nervous breakdown.

  They say she claimed she’d seen thousands of little tiny people, and so they had to take her to the hospital and let her rest up. Her mind was misbehaving, they said.

  I felt bad about that because it was partly my fault. It was all on account of that terrific night that started with Joe and me listening to the concert and ended up with Joe in Jail and me hanging from the top of a building. On the wind-up of that wild night Mae Wing and I sort of rescued each other.

  She bound up the glass scratches on my arms and ankles. But I had to carry her to the elevator and out to the ambulance she ordered for me. For some reason she was as tired and limp as a dishrag. Why? Search me.

  She admitted she hadn’t got to bed all night. But when I tried to find out what was wrong, she started this talk about thousands of little tiny creatures.

  That was when these white-suited ambulance guys picked up their ears.

  I tried to explain. It was these turban pixies. I figured she’d seen a few of them between mirrors, probably, and thought she was seeing a whole army.

  I tried to explain. But Mae Wing could talk fast when she was excited. And her pretty black eyes were so bright you could practically hear them snap. The attendants hushed me so they could listen to her. From her talk you’d have thought she’d been through a laboratory bigger than a stadium. They began to shake their heads.

  She kept saying, “Mr. Bondpopper got lost in it. Those millions of little people must have carried him away.”

  “They’ve carried you away,” said an attendant. “You tell all this to the doctors.”

  Well, it was decent of them to fix her up for a nice, comfortable rest.

  She rested, and during visiting hours I held her hand. The doctor didn’t object.

  We talked a lot, and I admit that her story sounded pretty impossible. Not that I doubted that there were these little turban creatures. Not after being chopped down by them. Whatever her experience had been, there was something awfully strange going on in the vicinity of this Taggart fellow.

  All this week, however, I forgot to worry about anything because I was so busy getting acquainted with Mae Wing.

  “You’re the first real cowboy I ever knew,” she said.

  “You got nothing on me,” I said. “I never figgered I’d ever talk to a nightclub singer.”

  I brought her flowers and magazines and candy. The doctor didn’t object.

  I brought my guitar one afternoon and started to play her some cowboy music. The doctor objected.

  These doctors have funny notions about what’s good for patients. Now you take cowboy singing—well, for instance, I had a dog one time that lay sick for four days until I tried some cowboy music on him. Then he got right up and walked off. I often wonder what happened to that dog.

  The newspapers ran headline
s about the disappearance of Mr. Bondpopper for three days. There was no joke about it; Mr. Bondpopper was gone.

  That’s when I began to get mad at the doctors and reporters and everybody. Why wouldn’t they listen to Mae?

  “She knows something about where he went,” I declared to the doctor. “If you’d only give her a chance to talk—”

  “She has delusions,” said the doctor. “Nothing she says can be taken seriously.”

  “She was down in that big Taggart laboratory that night with Mr. Bondpopper—”

  “She thinks she was. The laboratory she imagines doesn’t even exist. We’ve checked with Taggart and his employees.”

  “Maybe they lied.”

  The doctor scoffed at such a notion. After all, Mr. Taggart was a very prominent citizen with business buildings all up and down Moon Street.

  “As long as this girl insists she has been faced with all these tiny people, she is not well,” said the doctor. “If you want to help, you must try to make her see the importance of discriminating between what is real and what is a figment of her imagination.”

  “If I want to help,” I said to myself, after leaving the doctor. “I’ll give Mae Wing a chance to prove what she believes.”

  And so the two of us began to lay a plan for her to escape and go back to look for the figments of her imagination.

  Meanwhile, Joe and I were put on a rigid schedule of rehearsal.

  Joe had been rescued soon after that momentous dawn that I viewed from the top of Taggart Tower. Monty Montzingo had gone straight to the police court and squared everything within a few minutes.

  “I’ve kept it out of the papers, boys,” Monty explained, “because I want you to make your debut in high musical society with spotless reputations.”

  “Our reputations is only jeopardized,” said Joe, “when the cops don’t give us a fair chance to fight. Now, back in my real fightin’ days when I was stealin’ horses for a livin’—”

  “Sssh!” I gave Joe a crack with my elbow.

  Monty changed the subject. He said we should all go down the street for a bite of lunch and he had something to show us.

  We rounded the Taggart corner at Park and Moon, and I sandwiched myself between Monty and Joe for safety. After what had happened to me I never went anywhere without Joe or Monty.

  You see, I had apprehensions that I was being shadowed. The way Pug Heptad and his gang had gone for me that night after the concert, I thought they’d follow through and murder me in bed.

  But something had caused them to pull their punches. Either they’d discovered that Joe and I weren’t trying to hook onto their secret turban business, or else they were afraid of our playboy pal, Monty.

  Then, too, these Taggart blocks were pretty thick with city investigators, who hadn’t satisfied themselves on Mr. Bondpopper’s disappearance. You could feel the suspicions in the air when you rounded that corner.

  Passersby would stop and point at the freshly laid slab of sidewalk and say, “There’s where it fell through. Taggart blames the city, and the city blames Taggart. And that isn’t all. Bondpopper, the big philanthropist, disappeared somewhere around here on the same night.”

  And then these idle talkers would speculate over whether the missing Bondpopper might have fallen through the sidewalk and got lost in a conduit. There were rumors, too, that a girl had gone insane that same night.

  Under the impact of all these rumors you’d have thought that Taggart’s various businesses might have suffered. I think it worked the other way. Maybe curiosity helped bring big crowds to this corner. I noticed, when we tried to get past the Oriental Art Shop that the place was lousy with customers.

  Monty took us into a restaurant and we ordered. Then he took this package out of his pocket and opened it.

  “For the two best cowboy singers west of Broadway,” Monty said proudly, “with my compliments.”

  All that flashy color in the box turned out to be a couple of silky neckerchiefs. Jumpin’ broncos! Were they ever nifties! They glistened like precious stones.

  But when Monty held them out to us we both drew back.

  “It’s all right,” Monty laughed. “They won’t bite you.”

  “That’s what I wondered,” said Joe.

  We put them around our necks in place of our old ones, and the people in the restaurant sort of opened their eyes. We were used to being looked at, since we always went around in our cowboy outfits, but these new neckerchiefs gave us that really dressed-up feeling.

  “Do you feel anything?” I asked Joe.

  “Not yet. But I’m suspicious. I know darned well that these things were designed by my girl friend, and she’s suspicious of everything Taggart made her do.”

  Joe was referring to Betty Morris, of course. Ever since he got out of jail he’d been nuts about her. He’d spend his off-hours just riding up and down the elevator, grinning at her.

  And to me he would confide the most lovesick sentiments I ever heard. Just because she’d had the nerve to come into the jail that night and hold him up with an unloaded gun, he’d doped her out to be the ideal mate for an ex-horse- thief.

  The latest was, he was writing a song entitled, “This Cowboy Traded Off His Horse, He’d Rather Ride with the Elevator Girl.”

  Well, Monty wanted us to wear these neckerchiefs, and we wore them. He said this style was all the rage this week.

  “Ain’t this pretty close to the same style as that turban that made Constanza howl?” Joe asked.

  “It’s a refinement of that design,” said Monty. “The artists and musicians are all going for it. I expect it to do something for you boys.”

  “Listen, Monty,” said Joe, gathering himself up. Then he turned to me. “You tell him, Steve.”

  “Listen, pal,” I said, tapping Montzingo’s sleeve, “in case you haven’t heard, that turban of Constanza’s was alive. It was full of wild animals.”

  “How many drinks have you had?” Monty asked.

  “Joe and I saw enough of this funny business to know what we’re talking about. Why do you think Constanza turned her song into a yelp?” I said.

  “She’s temperamental,” said Monty. “When you’ve hung around artists and musicians as long as I have, you won’t be surprised at anything. I’ve known them to get annoyed at the wallpaper and fly the track. There was one high- strung soprano with a double studio who decided she wanted the partition removed. So what did she do?”

  “What did she do?” Joe and I asked in a duet.

  “She got an ax and hacked away.”

  “It’s lucky,” said Joe, “that this Constanza didn’t have an ax when she got mad at her turban. She might have chopped off her musical career.”

  “It’s probable,” I said, “that these turban tadpoles had the axes. I’ve known them to chop at a rope that held a man up two hundred feet in the air.”

  Walter Montzingo thought he was being kidded, but he wasn’t a fellow to get sore. He passed our remarks off with a good-natured grin. He wasn’t sure whether we were born liars or born horsethieves, but he still had hopes for our musical careers.

  Well, Joe got a serious expression in his eyes and said that if Monty didn’t realize it, there was such a thing as turban creatures.

  “We’ve seen ’em,” said Joe. “Steve and I and Betty Morris and Mae Wing—all four of us could testify in court.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “They flatten themselves right into the turbans somehow, and they come out as thick as fleas.”

  “And do what?” Monty asked.

  “Ask Betty,” said Joe. “She knows a lot more about them than she dares to tell.”

  “The ones she got out of Constanza’s turban were trying to befriend her,” I added. “She must’ve known how to work ’em. They didn’t behave so well for me.”

  “I never did get the low-down on what happened to you that night,” said Monty. “You and Mae Wing must have smoked the same brand of opium.”

  “If I to
ld you all I knew,” I said, “they’d put me in the boobyhatch, too.” Walter Montzingo gave me a long and searching look, and he stopped eating. Finally he broke his silence.

  “Boys, if you’re superstitious—if you’re really afraid of these neckerchiefs, take them off. But I was trying to do you a favor.”

  Joe smoothed out the silk on his shoulders. “It feels all right.”

  “Mine is bothering none,” I said. “We could be wrong.”

  “To tell the truth,” said Joe, “the thing feels kinda good.”

  “Let’s get this dinner over,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of ideas for new songs.”

  “Now you’re talking, boys,” said Monty. “Half a thousand artists and musicians can’t be wrong. This turban design is proving its way every day. It’s magic and vitamins and sunrays and the right wallpaper all rolled into one. It’s the supreme talent magnifier.” Monty pounded the words out with his index finger.

  “What’s he talkin’ about?” said Joe to me.

  “It’s a gag,” I said. “It’s Taggart’s scheme to get a ten-thousand dollar gift out of Bondpopper to pep up all the half-baked artists.”

  “It’s no gag,” said Monty. “In a three days’ trial it has already proved itself. This design is scientifically right to stimulate your creative brain waves.”

  “What’s he talkin’ about now, Steve?” said Joe.

  Monty went on enthusiastically. “The theory is that anything that can stimulate your creative brain waves is going to give your special talents a boost. Now, suppose you two cowboys are naturally gifted at making up cowboy songs. And suppose you start wearing these Taggart neckerchiefs or turbans, like five hundred artists are doing this week. Your special ability goes right to work, double strong. Maybe triple.”

  “Honest?” Joe’s long face twisted with curiosity.