“I don’t mind,” she said.
So far as she could recall, none of the rooms she’d been groped or duped or roughed up in had had the unlucky number. Ordinary numbers were bad enough.
“It’s too close to the edge, Arthur,” said the old woman. “Be the next to go.”
“How would you like a cabin on the beach?” Arthur asked Jayne.
“Normally, that would sound nice. Just now, dry and warm is all I want.”
“It’s not nice,” shrilled Arthur’s mother. “Not nice at all. My son is trying to be funny. We sit on the cliff here and it’s crumbling away. The dirt’s no good. The rain gets in, loosens it up. The far cabins have gone over the edge. They tumble on to the beach. In pieces. You should hear the fearful racket that makes.”
Arthur blew out his lips and smiled.
“Indeed, madam. We are in a somewhat precarious position. Some might opine that my mother made a poor investment. Others might rule this our just lot. For we have incurred the ire of the Almighty, by our many, many sins. My mother, though you’d not think it of her now, was once a very great harlot. A woman of easy virtue, baptized in champagne. Powdered and painted and primped and pimped and porked and poked and prodded and paid. Showered with gifts of opal and topaz and red, red rubies. She dragged fine men to ruin. Duels were fought. Balconies jumped from. Revolvers discharged into despairing brains. Foolish, feckless and fickle were her many, many admirers. All dead now, though their sins remain.”
At this speech, the old woman cackled and grinned.
Jayne looked again at Arthur’s mother. Her skin had shrivelled on to her bones. Her face was a pattern of wrinkles and her hands were vulture claws. She smiled and showed yellow teeth. She wore a black, feathery wig which matched her dress.
“Did you think, madam, to find the notorious Birdie Hayslip sat by the stove at this stop on your journey through life? Knitting her own shroud?”
“Shut up, Arthur, you’re making her blush!”
Birdie! There was a bird name and no mistake. Walter would have loved it.
“Just sign her in, boy. Sign her in. Don’t let her get away. We can’t afford to lose customers. Not in these trying times. Income tax and the Bomb.”
Arthur took the registration book from beneath the desk. It was bound in fleshy red leather.
She hesitated before signing. She was a thief in flight, she remembered. She wouldn’t want to be tracked and traced. Her situation couldn’t be unusual. Couples who stayed in joints like this mostly passed themselves off as “Mr and Mrs Smith”. She wrote Jana Wrobel, but with a scribble - so it couldn’t be read, let alone pronounced - and gave her address as Century City, Ca.
“Madame Wobble,” said Arthur, without irony, “you shall have Cabin Number Seventeen ... come this way ...”
Reaching behind him, he took a key from a board. It was attached to a fist-sized plaster cactus.
He slipped off his high stool and came out from behind the desk.
Arthur Hayslip was not a dwarf but was well under five feet in height and balloon-bellied. His hair was thinning, though she thought him not much more than twenty. He wore a velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy jacket and child’s slacks. He was a plump, ageing baby - but precise and delicate, as if performing all his gestures for television cameras.
“Galoshes, Arthur,” Birdie reminded her son.
He slipped his pumps into waterproof overshoes, and took down a big yellow fisherman’s slicker with attached hood. The protective clothing was made for a hardy six-footer and he disappeared into it. He looked like a fairytale character, but she wished she had a more rainproof topcoat too.
“Shall we venture out, Madame Wobble? Into the storm?”
“It’s Miss Wobble,” she corrected.
“You hear that, Arthur! Miss. I saw straight away. No wedding band. She’s available!”
Birdie cackled again and the laughter turned into a coughing fit. She did not sound like a well person.
“I have to fetch some things from the trunk of my car.”
“The boot, Arthur,” said Birdie. “She means the boot.”
“You always misremember, Mahmah ... you took steps in 1939, dragged me from our native shores. When I was but a babe, the Jerries started dropping whizz-bangs. There was something in the newspapers about a war. There was a term for British subjects who fled to safer climes for the duration. Gone With the Wind Up. I am a naturalized American, a real-life nephew of my Uncle Sam ...”
He didn’t sound it.
“Or was it Uncle Irving, Uncle Montmorency, Uncle Yasujiro, Uncle Fedor, Uncle Harry or Auntie Margaret? Mahmah has never confided which, if any, of my many uncles might also have been my ...”
“Arthur, don’t be vulgar. She’s not interested. Can’t you tell?”
He took an umbrella from a rack by the desk and pushed open the door with it. The storm roared, and the waltz record stuttered after the music stopped. He opened the umbrella to shield them as they stepped outside. He had to stretch his arm like the Statue of Liberty’s to get above her head. They still got soaked.
They trudged across muddy asphalt to her car and she popped the trunk.
In the dark, in the cold, in the wet, her face still burned.
There it was. In a sack, tied like a post-bag.
Arthur reached into the trunk with his free hand and took ... not the sack, but her overnight bag. He ignored the MacGuffin.
“I’ll just bring this along,” she said, picking it up casually.
“That is your right and privilege, my dear.”
The trunk wouldn’t catch the first time she slammed it down, nor the second. Arthur had both hands full, so he couldn’t help. Finally, she wrestled it and locked it. The sack started to get wet. What was inside might be dangerous when wet.
A covered walkway kept some of the rain off. They went past the main building.
Lights were strung up, but several of the bulbs were dead. Darkness encroached. The cabins were originally in a square around a swimming pool, but - as Birdie had said - the cabins at the far edge were gone, leaving only stumps. Beyond, unseen, was the cliff. A crack ran through the concrete bottom of the pool. It could no longer hold water, though temporary puddles collected, swirling and eddying into the fissure. This was an empty pool you could drown in.
The hacienda would eventually wind up on the beach.
Her cabin was well away from the crumbling edge of the property. No immediate danger.
Arthur put her overnight bag down and unlocked Cabin Seventeen. He reached in and turned on the lights, holding the door open for her. She took her bag and walked across a squelching WELCOME mat. Arthur let his umbrella down and followed.
There were twin beds. No, two beds. One a single for a giant, the other a cot for a circus midget. Between them was a low table with a two-headed bedside lamp, a crystal ashtray that fit the definition of blunt instrument and a Gideon Bible open to the Flood.
Above the table was a picture in a heavy gilt frame. A chubby naked woman was being bothered from behind by a giant swan with human eyes.
“A classical subject,” Arthur commented. “Leda and Zeus. So earthy, the Gods of Greece.”
Other pictures hung around the room, less ornately framed, less immediately eye-catching. Slim, big-eyed women dressed in the style of the Roaring Twenties. Fringes and feathers.
“Do you recognize Mahmah? She was always photographed, at the height of her infamy.”
Jayne wasn’t even sure the pictures were all of the same woman. She couldn’t fit them over the Birdie who sat by the stove.
“The cabin has the full amenities, Miss Wobble. Through there ...”
He indicated a closed door.
“Modern plumbing, a flush toilet, wash-basins, a bath-tub ...”
“Shower?”
Arthur shrugged, non-committally.
“I could do with a long soak in a hot tub, after the rain and the dr
ive ...”
“I regret to inform you that ... temporarily, there is no hot water. It seems one can have light but no hot water or hot water but no light, and after dark the need for illumination takes primacy ... tomorrow morning, perhaps, after sun-up, something warm can be arranged.”
Jayne tried to live with the disappointment.
She wanted at least to get out of her wet clothes and towel off.
Arthur showed no sign of leaving. Did he expect a tip? His waterproof dripped on the rug. He strolled about, looking at the pictures.
“Once, Mahmah was a nymph, a naiad... now, she is a gorgon, a harpy ... time can be so cruel, don’t you think, Miss Wobble? Though it is no more than she deserves, for was Mahmah not cruel when she had the chance ... is she not still cruel, when she gets the opportunity?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Of course not. You are an innocent party in this situation ... my m-m-mother deserves to die, don’t you think? And not naturally. No, that would not be just. She is a most exquisitely m-m-m-murderable personage.”
He had worked hard to overcome a stutter, but it slipped back.
“Shootable? Poisonable?Throttlable? Bludgeonable?”
Arthur’s fat-wreathed eyes came alive. He reminded Jayne of...
“Stabbable? Slashable? Beheadable? Deadable?”
His recitative was almost a tune. Hump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump ...
He broke off.
“Happy thoughts, Miss Wobble.”
“But morbid,” she ventured.
“Practical. What do you do for a living, Miss Wobble? Presuming that you do live ...?”
Normally, she would say she was an actress - which was partially true. But that always prompted the same response. “Have I seen you in anything?” And that led, if the enquirer was at all interesting, to “If you’ve watched most of my pictures, you’ve seen me in not much of anything at all ...” Then, smiles, drinks and a happy ending.
Now, she was a thief, a saboteur. She had to be careful. Arthur was not interesting, not in that way.
“I’m in motion pictures. Make-up girl.”
“An interesting expression. Make-up girl? What do you make up for?”
“Hard nights, mostly. Filling in the cracks so the camera doesn’t see.”
Arthur unbuttoned his slicker. He took it off and hung it on a coat-tree, as if it belonged there. She hadn’t invited him to stay.
“The camera sees all, though,” he said, pointing at one of the portrait pictures. A dramatic, Satanic pose - a big-eyed vamp resting her chin on her crossed wrists, under a stuffed goat-head on a pentacle. Jayne thought she could see Birdie in this Jazz Age sinner. The eyes were the same.
“The laughter is frozen and the rot shows through,” said Arthur. “The pleasure garden in spring is a family plot in autumn. Photography makes corpses of us all. Snatches little dead moments and pins them down for all eternity. You apply make-up to the dead, too.”
“Not me. I work with actresses.”
“Actresses should be dead, don’t you think? Mahmah once called herself an ‘actress’, though she never set her dainty foot on the boards. Stage fright, would you believe? Who would you wish dead, Miss Wobble?”
Men. Hitch.
“Me? Oh, no one. I say live and let live, you know. I like love stories. Not stories with murders.”
“All great love stories end in murder, though. Or could end in murder ...”
He sat down in a cane armchair, crossing his stubby legs and settling his stomach into his lap.
His torso was like a big egg, with another big egg - his head -set on top of it. Soft-boiled, unshelled. If she had a knife, like the movie prop knife, could she cut into those eggs? Find the yolks still molten and trickling.
Arthur’s murder talk was getting to her.
“How would you like to murder my mother, Miss Scribble?”
That was like a stab to the chest.
“You couldn’t be traced. Not with your signature, your phoney address ...”
Phoney. That stood out. A wrong word. American, not consistent with Arthur’s British manner of speaking.
“I can be counted on to give a most misleading description. You wouldn’t even be a woman. You’d be a man ... a swarthy, horny-handed man ... the type my mother is attracted to, but who are no good for her, no good for anyone ... a man’s man, a man from the Isle of Man ... a man with big hands, workman’s hands, neck-snapping, larynx-crushing hands. Afterwards, we would both be free ...”
“Free?”
“Yes. I would be free of Mahmah, of this place. You would be freer, free of... of the constraints of petty Protestant morality.”
“I’m Catholic.”
“Well, easy to do it then! You sin on Saturday night, and are washed clean Sunday morning ... just take care not to die unshriven between the two sacraments. The sacraments of murder and confessional.”
“I don’t really like this, Mr Hayslip. I’m not comfortable.”
“We’re just talking, Miss Alias ... shooting the breeze, yarning away the night hours while the storm rages without ... without what, I always think, without what?”
“I’m not going to kill anyone,” she said.
“A bold, sweeping statement. Would you kill to protect yourself from, say, a vile ravisher?”
Too late for that.
“Or to secure an inheritance, a fortune which you could use on good works if it were liberated from a miser who makes no use of it?”
“Is your mother rich?”
“No, she’s strange. She hasn’t a bean, Miss Alibi. Just this place. Half on the cliff. Half on the beach. She has only her memories. Her disgusting memories.”
“I’m sure she’s not as bad as that. She’s just a woman.”
Arthur leaned forwards, eyes shining. “Just a woman? Just? Maybe ... maybe, at that... but it’s no excuse, is it? It’s no reason she should be spared from God’s judgement. Quite the opposite. It was Eve, was it not, who led mankind into Sin? Eve, the femme fatale and the farmer’s wife. Eve who brought about the Fall. Should not Eve be punished, over and over and over ...?”
A thin line of spit, like spider-silk, descended from Arthur’s wet mouth. He repeatedly slammed a pudgy, soft, tiny fist into the palm of his other hand.
It struck Jayne that Arthur Hayslip was hateful, but harmless.
If she killed this stranger’s mother, what would he do for her? What wouldn’t he do for her? Rain rattled the windows. The cabin shook, like a train compartment on an express.
“You don’t know how to do it to a woman, do you?” she said. “You blame her, your mother, but it’s your weakness.”
He drew back. “I am a man of the world, my dear,” he said. “Your sex holds no mystery for me. I know too much for that.”
She tittered. He flushed red.
“You couldn’t hurt a fly, if you wanted to. You don’t want to murder your mother, you want someone else to murder your mother. But that would be the end for you, the ending you didn’t guess was coming. The twist in the last reel. There would be nothing. Without her, you’d be a dummy without a ventriloquist...”
“Mummy,” he murmured, “Mummy’s dummy ...”
All at once, she didn’t want to press on. There was no point in it, in making an unhappy wretch more wretched. That wasn’t heroic, that was bullying. She’d been bullied enough herself to hate that.
How many times had she been stripped and stabbed this week? In play, in fun, for entertainment? She had been murdered, over and over ...
“Has he asked you to top me?” shrilled a voice from the door. “He asks all the lodgers to top me. All the ones he fancies, at least. Girlies and boysies, he’s not too particular ...”
Birdie flapped into the room, trailing a soaked shawl. Her wig shone with rainwater.
She pinched her son’s pendulous earlobe and yanked.
“Naughty Arthur, bothering t
he girlies ...”
Arthur’s face screwed up with pain.
“Lord knows I’ve tried, ducks ... but my boy’s just a nasty little shit. No other words for it. I’ll get him out of your hair and you can turn in. He tell you about the hot water?”
“There isn’t any?”
“That’s right. Pity, but there it is. Come on, Arthur ... time to say nighty-night.”
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 58
