Devil Red

by Joe R. Lansdale

  He didn’t respond.

  “You have this thing for hats, Leonard, but you are not a hat person … Look, you can wear it in the car. The car only. Got me?”

  Leonard put on his seat belt, rested his hands in his lap, and stared straight ahead.

  “Outside the car, you got that thing on I might have to kill you.”

  14

  First on our list was Ted’s sister’s house. My idea of a really neat house is one that doesn’t have to be held up with a stick, and there are no burnt cans in a pile in the driveway or an old Dodge on blocks with chickens roosting under it.

  This house was way past that. It was so cool and connected to the center of the universe it stopped raining when we got there. It was behind a fence and a barred gate. As we cruised up, through the gate, we could see there was enough green yard to play the Super Bowl. Even the colorful leaves that fell from the trees and blew across the grass seemed embarrassed by the intrusion.

  We parked in front of the gate. I rolled down the window and pushed a button on a metal box inside a brick indentation. There was a buzz and a long silence. I was about to push it again when a snappy female voice with an accent south of the border asked if she could help us.

  I explained who we were and what we were doing and that June’s mother had hired us to look into something for her. The voice went away. I turned and looked at Leonard. He was still wearing the deerstalker.

  The voice came back, said we could come up, but the tone now was sharp and hard enough to clip paper dolls from cardboard. I guess she had hoped we would be rejected.

  The gate slid back and we glided in. The driveway was a big loop of shiny wet concrete in front of a yellow adobe house with a Spanish tile roof. The house was big enough and tall enough to hold all of Noah’s animals and a spare woodchuck. You could have driven four horses running abreast through any of the windows, and the doorway was tall enough and wide enough to accommodate at least one war elephant if it bent its head slightly and went through politely.

  No one rode out to meet us in a golf cart, so after I made Leonard take off his hat, we got out and stepped up the walk. When I looked back at my car, it looked unnatural in the driveway. That driveway knew and adored limousines and sports cars, not functional metal, plastic, and glass. I leaned down by the side of the walk and felt the grass. Damn if it wasn’t artificial.

  Leonard wanted to ring the doorbell, so I let him. I wanted to ring it too, but sometimes you have to give in to the children. You could hear it chime throughout the house.

  No one inside made a rush of things. Of course, a house that big, you might have to pack a sandwich before you went to answer the door.

  When the door was finally opened it was the woman that went with the voice over the intercom. She was a petite Hispanic woman in her late twenties and she was actually wearing a maid outfit, just like in the movies. She had beautiful black hair and great skin and lips that looked like they would have been fun to suck on. Because of her stern voice, I had somehow expected her to look like the ass end of a mule and be built like a linebacker.

  We were invited inside. I tried not to rubberneck. I had been in government buildings that size, but not a house, and the government buildings weren’t so well furnished.

  The maid hustled us along a long wide hall with blue and white tile floors. The walls had paintings on them that looked like they had been painted by madmen and recently. I liked them.

  We were led off the hall through another war-elephant-size door and into a library that made the one downtown look like a used-book store. The books smelled of leather and old paper and more knowledge than could be acquired in three lifetimes, plus a whiff of cigar smoke covered in a light overcoat of air freshener. The place had a masculine feel about it, with leather couches and chairs and sliding ladders to climb onto to look at books on the upper shelves. There was a large window at the back and looking through it we could see a shiny pond out there, recently swollen by the rain. Beyond that was a wall like out front.

  The maid told us to make ourselves comfortable and went away.

  We sat on the couch and Leonard said, “Can you believe this is in the center of town? Hidden up here in the trees?”

  “I can’t believe a place like this is anywhere,” I said. “I thought they made this stuff up for the movies.”

  “The movie screen wouldn’t be wide enough to hold this place,” Leonard said. “It might take a few theaters just to get that hallway in frame.”

  A moment later a woman came into the room. She was some woman. She looked like she was dressed to go out on the town, and not our town. Someplace in Manhattan, perhaps Paris, London, or Rome. Her long blonde hair was waved and she wore a pantsuit of shimmering white and she had a small glass in her hand and it was half-filled with a golden liquid that I knew wasn’t fruit juice.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. It was a nice voice full of pep and insincerity. “I’m June. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t offer you a drink. I thought we could race through this rather quickly.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  She came and sat in a leather chair across from us and put her drink down on the wooden coffee table between us, no coaster. It was a heavily stained table and it was the only thing in the room besides the books that looked old.

  “So, you’re private detectives,” June said, smiling. She had nice teeth and just the slightest bit of an overbite.

  “We’re not exactly private detectives,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “We’ve still got the training wheels on,” Leonard said.

  “So should you be on the job?” she asked.

  “We’ve had a lot of experience,” I said. “We’re just not what you’d call official. We’re operatives. We work for a private detective.”

  “So someday you may get a little badge, a whistle, and a canteen,” she said.

  “Our boss,” Leonard said, “he started with Where’s Waldo books to sharpen us up, but now we’ve moved on to interviews. We mostly ask short questions.”

  “I see,” she said. She grinned and leaned back and sipped her drink and studied Leonard, then me. Her eyes were very green and very penetrating.

  “You boys look a little rough,” she said. “Like you’ve been around the block a few times.”

  “Maybe more than a few,” I said.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it. I like the way you look. Most of the men I know use skin cream and have straight noses and the most violent thing they do is grunt playing table tennis. Sometimes, in their sleep, they fart dramatically. Oh, I’m telling, aren’t I?”

  She moved her head slowly, so we could have a look at her profile, and then she moved it back and sipped her drink.

  “It’s just that I don’t know why my mother is bothering with all this, or why she would send you to talk to me. There’s nothing I can add. Ted and his girlfriend were murdered for sex and money. Though they didn’t get the sex, and my guess is they didn’t get much money.”

  “Do you know what was actually stolen besides his ring?” I asked.

  “Well, he may have had money in the wallet,” June said. “But I don’t know.”

  “Credit cards?”

  “Most likely. Several. Mostly filled to the brim and leaking over, would be my guess.”

  “Did the police say anything about anyone trying to use them after his death?”

  “No. I know you’re thinking that might mean the robbery was a sham. But I think whoever did it panicked and took what was in the wallet and was afraid to use the cards. Afraid they’d be tracked. Or maybe the cards got canceled before the killer could use them, and they just disposed of them.”

  She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long panted legs and dropped her head slightly. I was sure she knew the effect this had; the way her hair fell across one eye, and the way she looked when she lifted her head and smiled that sexy beaver-toothed grin.

  “Look,” she
said, “my brother, he and I weren’t close. I’m sorry about what happened to him, but it was an unfortunate accident. Wrong place. Wrong time. I suppose it could have been someone who knew him, knew he was going to be there, thought he had money, and jumped him, but I think he was a victim of opportunity.”

  “What about the girl?” I asked.

  “She was a tramp. And in case you’re vague on that, let me translate. She was Miss Insert Slot B.”

  “That covers a lot of ground,” I said.

  “And a lot of ground was covered,” June said.

  “Only thing that surprised me about her was that she got killed in the daytime.”

  “Beg your pardon?” Leonard said.

  “She didn’t go out in the daytime.”

  “Fear of skin cancer?” I said. “She freckled?”

  “Nope … Wait for it … She thought she was a vampire.”

  15

  “Big teeth?” Leonard said. “Bite your neck, suck your blood? Wear a cape? Turn into a bat?”

  “I doubt she turned into a bat,” June said. “A bitch maybe, but not a bat.”

  “So, you’re not denying the cape?” he said.

  She smiled at Leonard.

  “You knew Mini, then?” I said.

  “Some. Liked to wear black and her hair was dyed so dark it looked like strands of shadow. She mainly went out at night. Claimed the sunlight made her weak, unless she needed to go out, and if she did, she seemed spry enough. She was out that day, wasn’t she? The day she got popped. She was said to drink blood. Mostly it was her who said it. She was a goddamn nut. Being a nut was kind of her hobby. Some people collect stamps or keep a diary, she practiced doing nutty things.”

  “It probably has nothing to do with anything,” I said, “outside of it’s just weird as all daylights and I want to hear about it, but could you give us some more background on her?”

  “I didn’t know her well. I didn’t want to know her well. But she told me a few things when she got out of jail.”

  “Jail?” I said.

  “Yeah. She and my brother dated for a while, and I was trying to patch things up with him, because, as I said, we didn’t get along. So, in the process, me and her hung a little and she talked a lot. I picked up other bits of her story here and there. Mini roosted with a really screwball crowd. Especially Evil Lynn.”

  “You’re yankin’ me?” Leonard said. “She had a friend named Evil Lynn?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of yanking you.”

  She smiled at Leonard seductively. I thought: Lady, you are wasting the possibility of a few wrinkles around your mouth on someone who is seriously batting for another team. Look this way.

  She didn’t.

  “Was Evil Lynn her real name?” I asked.

  “Of course not. Her last name was Gonzello. I called her Godzilla, not Evil Lynn. I can’t remember Godzilla’s first name. Cassie. Candy. Canola. Something like that. Only met her once, at my brother’s place, and that was enough. There were several of them, actually. Vampires I mean … Let’s walk outside. My husband used to smoke cigars in here, and I can still smell them, and him. Both stink.”

  We walked through the hallway, outside into the backyard. There were trees and a few leaves, and there was a man in work clothes walking around with a stick with a point on the end of it. He was stabbing the leaves and putting them in a big, black plastic bag he was dragging.

  “I know a guy works doing special effects in movies,” she said. “I’m thinking about having plastic trees put in. These are so messy.”

  Leonard looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I looked back and tried not to laugh. Plastic trees?

  Underneath one of the pesky real trees was a stone table with a bench on either side. We sat down there.

  June rattled the ice in her glass, looked at what was left of her drink as if it were the last of all sunshine, and said, “This is what I know, and all I know. And when I tell you what I know, I don’t want to talk about it again. I’m all through. Just thinking about her and her nutball friends makes my ass tired.”

  She shifted her tired, but very nice, ass on the bench and looked at the pond. There was a big insect, a dragonfly, cruising over the water. She put her focus on that for a while. Maybe she was thinking about having it killed and crucified on the edge of the pond as an object lesson, then having the yard sprayed with insecticide. She could always get her special effects friend to make her a robotic dragonfly, maybe some birds. She drank and moved the liquid around inside her mouth in case her teeth were in need of a whirlpool bath. The man with the pointed stick and the bag full of leaves moved across the yard and around a corner of the house and out of sight.

  June swallowed loudly, said, “Mini hooked up with Ted because they were both a little freaky. Ted, he was into anal, and she didn’t mind it. His girlfriend before, Lori, not so happy about it. She had two kids, and she told me all Ted wanted to do was crawl up her poop chute. It’s all he talked about. Had videos and magazines and a game plan in bed that always, if you’ll pardon the pun, ended the same way.”

  I wasn’t sure where this was going, and maybe it was going a little too far south, but Leonard and I let it go. I kind of like nasty stories.

  June said, “She started thinking, from the way the kid’s toys smelt and felt, that while she and the kids were out, Ted was greasing up and shoving toys up his ass.”

  “Ouch,” Leonard said. “Hope one of those toys wasn’t a bicycle.”

  “So, she confronts him, and he admits it, and she is major pissed off, and he says, ‘Hell, just wash them off.’ He wasn’t concerned. It was all about his ass, his fetish.”

  “And that was, rim shot, so to speak, the end of the relationship,” I said.

  “Not yet. She thought maybe he could change. We always think our men can change, and they can’t. Assholes at birth, assholes at death. A motto I live by. Anyway, one day she comes home, and she’s got the children with her, and what does she find but a drunk and drugged-out Ted passed out in the living room on the rug, naked, with the engine of a hard plastic toy train up his ass, the rest of it dangling out, all the way down to the caboose, like it couldn’t make the hill.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “That had to hurt.”

  “Yep. Bled on the carpet. Children were traumatized, and no one wanted to play with the train thereafter. And she’d already dealt with him and a rubber duck and a twirler’s baton, so she’d had enough. The train set was expensive. You can buy a duck or a baton anywhere and mostly cheap, but not those buddies. She was fed up with him, and she liked that carpet. Moroccan. Way more expensive than the train. So, it was choo-choo-choo-cha-boogie, you are gone, baby. So, that leads him to Mini, who is connected to Godzilla and a couple other girls who drink blood. Good thing for Ted is, Mini didn’t have a problem with the ass business.”

  “Will there be more trains and tunnels in this story?” Leonard asked.

  “No. We’re switching tracks,” June said. “I’m just trying to say nuts attract nuts. Now we’re going to the Children of the Night. That’s what they called themselves. Is that hokey or what?”

  The maid, as if on cue, came out with another drink, set it on the table in front of June, and without a word went back to the house. I watched her swing away with more than a bit of pleasure. Being male is a full-time, and sometimes tiring, job.

  “You like that maid outfit?” June said to me.

  “I don’t think it would fit me,” I said, “but it’s very nice. I don’t have the legs for it either.”

  “You ought to see me in one,” she said.

  “And what days do you wear it?” I asked.

  She snorted and sipped her fresh drink. She was starting to get pretty lit, though she was an experienced drunk and wasn’t losing her focus on the story, and the words came out clear, if slightly spaced, as if they had to stop and rest before going on.

  “I don’t know why Mini felt she could talk to me, but she did. Maybe
she needed to get away from all weird all the time. Also, she was drunk and at a party here at my house, and she was fresh out of jail and no one else wanted to talk to her. Word gets around. Had I not been drunk, I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to her myself. She told me she and these other girls, Godzilla, as ringleader, would go out to the cemetery and have ceremonies, reading spells out of witchcraft books, lighting candles, that kind of crap, calling on Satan to come on up and see them sometime. Then one night, Godzilla’s girlfriend … Let’s see … She was called Trip. I don’t know what her real name was, but she was called that … So, one night, they’re in the cemetery, and they’re doing some ceremony or another, and it leads to Trip letting Godzilla cut her neck a little with a pocketknife and suck blood from the wound. And then everyone has to have a taste, so there’s more cutting. Everyone giving up a little blood, except Godzilla. They all take turns sucking neck, which I figure is pretty damn unsanitary.

  “Godzilla and Trip, who were lesbian lovers, end up making out. Then the nonlesbians say what the hell, and they’re all making out, followed by more blood sucking. Anyway, they’re sucking blood and suckin’ whatever, and Godzilla, who was a pretty tough-lookin’ broad, or seemed that way the time I saw her … I figured about three feet of chain and two stiff drinks and I could have whipped all of them.”

  “And without the chain?” I said.

  “Might have been touch and go,” June said.

  “So you were saying?” I said.

  “Well, they were doing vampire things, I guess. But Mini, she tells me that the night in the graveyard when everyone got naked and tried to find a place to bite, Godzilla started talking about killing people. Feasting on their blood, as she put it. Mini thought it was cool talk, but just talk. Like you know, when you say you’re putting a band together in your garage and you’re going to cut a record and go all the way to the top, and you know you’re not, and the best that happens is you end up playing a bad version of ‘Wipe Out’ or ‘Free Bird’ at a bar for tips. Anyway, Mini claimed she was just playing along. Told me she thought she was a vampire on the weekends and late at night, and the rest of the time, she had to work at RadioShack. The other girls, they all had money and time to waste. Harder to be a vampire when you have to be nice to customers and earn a paycheck.”