I headed for the Marina.
I turned the radio on.
In no time at all I was humming along to some popular song that I’d never heard before. I have a very good ear for music. I pick up tunes fast. It’s one of my talents. Too bad I never learned how to sing or play a musical instrument. I might have gone far, all the way to the top if I’d done that.
I was feeling very good.
I’d made up my mind.
I was listening to some good music.
And I had the body of a dead whore in the trunk.
What more could a man want in these troubled times? I mean, the world was at war but everything was going OK for me. I didn’t have any complaints. This was my day.
As I drove up Columbus Avenue toward the Marina, I thought about being a big bandleader in Babylon with my own radio station.
“Hello, out there. This is station BABY from high atop the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. We’re very happy to bring you tonight C. Card and His Big Band,” the announcer would say. “And here’s C. Card…”
“Hello, swinging cats of Babylon!” I would say. “This is your servant of sound C. Card playing music to light your dreams by, and we’ll start out with Miss Nana-dirat, our songbird of forbidden pleasure, singing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’ ”
I was really getting the maximum amount of pleasure out of the radio. That is, until I noticed that a car was following me.
Stew Meat
The car was a 1937 black Plymouth Sedan with four black guys in it. They were very, very black and all wearing dark suits. The ear looked like a piece of coal with headlights and it was definitely following me.
Who were these guys?
How had they gotten into the picture?
My few moments of radio bliss had been totally shattered. Why can’t life be as simple as it could be?
There was a red light at the next intersection. I stopped and waited for it to change.
The black Plymouth filled with black men pulled up along side me and the front window next to me was rolled down. One of the black men leaned out and said in a voice deep enough to be on the Amos ’n’ Andy Show, “We want that body. Pull over and give it to us or we’ll razor you into stew meat.”
“You’ve made a big mistake,” I said through my partially rolled down window. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m an insurance salesman for Hartford of New York.”
“Don’t be funny, Stew Meat,” the black man said.
The light turned green and the chase was on.
It was the first ear chase I’d ever been in.
I’d seen a lot of them in the movies but I’d never been in one before. It was a lot different from the ones I’d seen in the movies. First of all, I’ve never really been a very good driver and their driver was topnotch. Also, in the movies the car chases go on for miles. This one didn’t. I made a turn a few blocks away on Lombard and crashed my car into a parked station wagon. That brought an abrupt end to the car chase. It had been interesting. Too bad it had been so short.
Fortunately, I hadn’t hurt myself.
I was shaken up a little but I was OK.
The car full of black guys pulled up behind me and they jumped out. True to their promise they each had a razor, but I had a gun in my pocket, so things were not going to be as uneven as they appeared.
I slowly got out of the car. It’s good to do things slowly when you’ve got a .38 in your pocket ready for action. I had all the time in the world.
“Where’s that body, Stew Meat?” the one who had spoken before said. He was a very tough-looking hombre and so were his three dusky muchachos.
I pulled the gun out of my pocket and pointed it in their general direction. The shoe was on a different foot now. They froze in their tracks.
“And I don’t like to be called stew meat,” I said, enjoying the situation. “Drop those razors.”
There was the sound of four razors hitting the street. I was really ahead of the game. That is, until an old woman rushed out onto the front porch of her house and inquired into why we had ruined her car. She introduced her inquiry by screaming at the top of her lungs, “My station wagon! My station wagon! I just finished paying for it yesterday. I sent the last check in.”
A dozen or so of her neighbors had poured out onto their front porches and were rapidly taking sides with the woman whose station wagon wasn’t any more.
Nobody was interested in my viewpoint. I wasn’t able to get a word in.
I figured the only way I could get some respite from them was to fire my gun into the air. That would drive them back into their houses and give me a minute or two to take command of the situation and do something because I sure had to do something and quick.
I aimed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger.
click
WHAT!
click click click, I kept clicking away.
IT WAS THE WRONG FUCKING GUN!
It was my gun, the empty one. The four black men went to the street for their razors. The woman was still yelling, “My station wagon! My station wagon!” The neighbors were busy joining in. The whole situation had suddenly turned into Bedlam on one of its bad days.
The black men had re-razored themselves and were coming at me. I reached into my other pocket and took out Peg-leg’s gun: the one with the bullets.
“Stop!” I said tp the black guys.
They looked meaner than hell except for one of them who was smiling. He was the one who’d called me “stew meat.” He had a huge smile that went ear-to-ear like a pearl necklace. It sent a chill down my spine. He should meet the neck. They’d be great friends together. They had so much in common.
I could hear somebody making the introduction:
“Smile, meet Neck.”
“Glad ta meetcha.”
If I’d been there I would have been introduced as Stew Meat:
“Stew Meat, this is Neck.”
“Hi-ya, Neck”
“My friend Smile.”
“A friend of Neck’s is a friend of mine.”
Then I was jerked back to reality by the real voice of Smile saying, “Stew Meat, you just run outa luck.”
“I’m warning you,” I said.
“Hee-hee,” Smile said.
He was still smiling when I shot him in the leg. That sent the woman who owned the smashed station wagon and all of her neighbors running screaming into their houses.
The smile didn’t leave Smile’s face but it changed from an ear-to-ear smile to a soft smile that resembled an old man getting a little Christmas present from a child. The razor dropped gently out of his hand. There was a small bloody patch on his leg that was getting bigger and bigger. The bullet had gone right through his leg about six inches above the knee. It just punched a hole in him.
The other three black men dropped their razors, too.
“Shit, Stew Meat, you just shoot me with an empty pistol,” Smile said. “This ain’t worth no fifty bucks. They say you just give us the body if we show you our razors. Shit, a bullet just went through my leg.”
I didn’t have time to console him.
I had to get out of there before the police came and brought an end to all of this. Well, my car wasn’t working any more, so that left one car that was working: theirs. “Enough of this,” I said. “All of you take deep breaths right now and don’t move. I’ll tell you when to exhale.”
They all took deep breaths and held them in.
I stepped back to Peg-leg’s wrecked car and got the keys out of the ignition.
“Keep that breath in there,” I warned them, waving the gun at them. I stepped around to the back of the car. I could see that the four black gentlemen were having trouble keeping their breaths in. I opened up the trunk.
“OK,” I said.
They all exhaled.
“Shit,” Smile said. “Shit.”
“Get this body out of here,” I said. I motioned toward them again with the gun and they stepped forward and
removed the body. “Put it in the back seat of your car,” I said. “And on the double. I don’t have all day.”
Smile was still smiling. It had grown a little fainter but it could still be classified as a smile. The closest description that I can think of would be to say that it was now philosophical.
“Shit,” he said. “First, he shoot me with an empty gun, then he make me hold my breath until I get dizzy and now he steal my car.”
I could still see him smiling as I drove away.
The Lone Eagle
I was about a block away when suddenly I made a left and drove the car around the block, returning to the scene of Peg-leg’s wrecked car and the four bad black men. I came up behind them. They were standing there staring in the direction I had driven away.
I honked and they turned around.
I’ll never forget the expression on their faces when they saw me. The three unwounded men had picked up their razors again. When they saw me the razors dropped effortlessly out of their hands and back down onto the street that was rapidly becoming their home. It seemed at this point impossible for those razors ever to make stew meat again or even come up with a shave.
They had seen their day.
The black man with the bullet hole in his leg flashed me a huge smile when he saw me. “Shit!” he said. “It’s Stew Meat again. What happened this time? You come back for our pants?”
The other three black men thought that was pretty funny and they started laughing. It was pretty funny. I couldn’t help from smiling myself. Except for their wanting to carve me up, these were good guys.
“No, keep your pants,” I said.
“You Santa CIaus,” Smile said.
“Who paid you to get this body from me?” I said. “‘That’s all I want to know.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Smile said. “Shit! that’s an easy one. A guy with a neck like a trunk and a flashy white doll who drank beer but didn’t go piss. Where’d she put all that beer? Them da boss, but you da boss now.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Shit, Stew Meat,” Smile said. “Anytime, but don’t shoot me no more. I’m getting too old for bullets. You don’t need any partners, do ya?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a lone eagle.”
This time they all waved as I drove off in their car.
A Funny Building
Now what was I going to do?
When you’re hired to steal a body from the city morgue, that’s very strange in itself, but when the people who hire you hire other people to steal the same body from the morgue and then hire some more people to steal the body from you after you manage to steal it, you’ve got a lot of weirdness going on.
Why did it have to get more complicated after I’d made up my mind to go to the cemetery and see if I could get the remaining five hundred of my fee from them?
What was my next move going to be?
I still had some time before I was to keep my appointment with those people, but I’d be a fool if I did. They definitely were not to be trusted. The only thing they had going for them was the possibility of five hundred bucks.
But of course I had something they wanted very much in their weird way. I had the dead whore’s body in the back seat of the just commandeered automobile of four bad black men.
Maybe I should start playing my cards a little differently.
I had been playing things too much their way.
I think I’II raise the ante, I thought to myself, and introduce a new game. I was going to need more money than five hundred dollars. I knew that Peg-leg was going to have a very adverse reaction to my cracking his car up. I think he was going to want a new car.
No, seeing how things were developing, five hundred was chicken feed now. If those people wanted that body, and they certainly seemed to be showing a lot of inclination in that direction, they were going to have to pay through the nose to get it.
I made a quick stop at my apartment house.
I took the body out of the back seat and slung it over my shoulder and carried it into the building. I pretended that it was a bag of laundry. My pretending didn’t make any difference because nobody was there to see me. Thank God that the landlady had croaked that day. Maybe my luck wasn’t so bad after all. I might come out of this with a lot more money than I had anticipated.
I smiled as I carried the dead whore’s body past the stairs that led up to the apartment of the dead landlady. I thought about her body being carried down the stairs a little while earlier in the day, and now here I was carrying another dead body back into the building.
This was really a funny building.
It would make a nice little extension to add onto the morgue. Bodies were coming and going in here like letters in the post office.
I took the dead whore down the hall and into my apartment. I put her body down on the kitchen floor next to the refrigerator and then I opened the refrigerator and took all the moldy food and unidentifiable objects off the shelves.
Ugh…
Then I took the shelves out.
Why not?
It was the perfect place to keep her and the last place anyone would look.
The Five-hundred-
dollar Foot
I was back in the car driving south out of San Francisco toward Holy Rest Cemetery and my “appointment” with the neck and his beer-drinking mistress. This was going to be an interesting meeting but it wasn’t going to be the way they had planned it. We were going to play by my rules now and I had a feeling that corpse back in my refrigerator was worth a lot more than five hundred bucks. I had the feeling that I now owned a ten-thousand-dollar dead body. I had stolen it and it was mine and I intended to get paid every dollar that it was worth and the sum of ten thousand dollars seemed just right to me.
I saw the light of a telephone booth ahead of me along the road. I remembered that I still hadn’t called my mother and gotten that out of the way. I’d better take care of that before I got onto more serious business. I didn’t want it playing on my mind as I was getting ready to pull off the biggest caper of my life and be put permanently on Easy Street.
I pulled over and got out.
I dropped a nickel in and dialed her number.
It rang a dozen times.
God-damn it! I didn’t get to hear her answer the phone with, “Hello?” and then I’d say, “Hi, Mom. It’s me,” and then she’d say, “Hello? who is this speaking? Hello?” and, “Mom,” I’d whine, followed by, “This can’t be my son calling. Hello?” continuing with me whining, “Mom,” and her saying, “It sounds like my son, but he wouldn’t have the nerve to call it he was still a private detective.”
By her not being home I was spared all that.
Where was she?
It was Friday and she’d gone to the cemetery to see my father that I’d killed when I was four, but I knew she was back from the cemetery by now.
Where was she?
I got back in the car and continued on my way to the cemetery. It was only about ten minutes away. Then the shit would hit the fan. I had the idea that the neck and his rich boss weren’t going to like the new change in plans and my brand-new price for the body.
Yes, they were in for an unpleasant surprise and I couldn’t think of two nicer people for it to happen to. I was very glad that I had five bullets left. That was enough to turn the neck into a little finger.
Then I remembered something.
I reached into my pocket and took out the empty revolver and put it down on the seat beside me. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. How embarrassing. That could have backfired on me if I hadn’t regained control of the situation the way I did by shooting Smile in the leg.
I’d been lucky.
Shit. Smile might have been sitting where I was sitting right now at the steering wheel of his own car with his three friends in the car, joking and laughing, the whore’s body in the trunk, and I could be lying in the street as part of an unfinished recipe. All you would need to finish
it would be some onions, potatoes, carrots and a bay leaf.
I didn’t like the idea of being stew.
The Night
Is Always Darker
It was really a dark night as I drove toward Holy Rest Cemetery. It was so dark that I thought about my serial Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots. When Professor Abdul Forsythe got the mercury crystals and was able to activate his piles of poor unfortunate shadow victims and set them marching upon the world, the results would look like this.
The Professor-Abdul-Forsythe artificial night would resemble the kind of night that I was driving through to get to the cemetery.
Then another thought crossed my mind jerking me back from Babylon. Perhaps the night is always darker when you’re on your way to a cemetery in it. That was something to think about, but not for long because my mind was immediately returned to Babylon.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
It was my beautiful eternal secretary Nana-dirat on the intercom.
“Hello, doll,” I said. “What’s up?”
“It’s for you, lover,” she said in her breathless voice.
“Who is it?” I said.
“It’s Dr. Francis, the famous humanitarian.”
“What does he want?”
“He won’t tell me. He says that he can only speak to you.”
“OK, doll,” I said. “Put him on.”
“Hello, Mr. Smith Smith,” Dr. Francis said. “I’m Dr. Francis.”
“I know who you are,” I said. “What do you want? Time is money.”
“Excuse me?” the doctor said.
“I’m a busy man,” I said. “Give it to me straight. I can’t waste my time.”
“I want to hire you.”
“That’s what I was waiting to hear,” I said. “My fee is one pound of gold a day plus expenses.”
“That sounds reasonable for a man of your reputation as a private investigator,” Dr. Francis said.
“You’ve heard of me?” I said, playing it coy.
“All of Babylon has heard of you,” he said.
Dreaming of Babylon Page 11
