A big somebody. Size filled the door to the street. Huge, fantastic, man size. The lights behind him blacked out in sudden eclipse. I saw a hatless head, shoulders wider than the door itself, and solid blackness. That was all I had time for.
Instinctively, my hands were coming up protectively when two other hands that felt like steam shovels pushed against my chest. I shot back the way I had come. It was free sailing. There was nothing to stop me and nothing to hang on to. And I’d been shoved by an expert.
It was probably twenty feet to the rear wall of the hallway, by the staircase. But I made it flying backwards. My spine and shoulders met the wall and the bones inside of me cracked and rattled like dice. I sank to the floor on my fanny, vibrating with a bongo beat. I felt exactly like a thrown pair of dice that had come up snake-eyes. But I still went for my .45. I never made it.
And I had time to see what was coming.
The big somebody had moved into the light of the lobby. We were still twenty feet apart. But the cameras were still grinding away—my eyes and his—and the action was uninterrupted. No narration was necessary.
Steel flashed in his fingers magically and a lightning bolt left his brown fingers. It gleamed and twinkled across the twenty feet and buried itself and two inches of my gun-hand coat sleeve into the plaster wall with a thudding sound. I cursed and tried to pull away. Then I transferred my .45 to my left hand and twisted with it for a shot.
The guy in the entrance was way ahead of me. He had another lightning bolt, just as swift and blinding as the first. Suddenly, I was half sitting on the floor, both arms spread-eagled from my shoulders, both coat sleeves pinned to the wall like butterfly specimens. The pins were machetes, those long, ugly-looking knives that chop cane stalks in the tropics. I felt like a scarecrow. I must have looked like a jackass.
Talk about Edna Ferber and Texas! The giant shortened the distance between us, approaching me quietly. Soft and pantherish. He stopped two yards from me and his whole brown face caught the brilliance of his white-toothed leer. I stopped wriggling because I wasn’t accomplishing anything. It was his move and I had to wait, mostly because he’d known what he was doing with the machetes—he had an ugly mate to the other two balanced lightly in one massive brown paw.
His eyes looked sleepy in his chocolate face, and he was shaking his head.
“I’ll sign,” I said. “With me as your partner we ought to stop the show. The hand is really quicker than the private eye. But I thought the customers would rather look at a half-naked dame in a knife throwing act.”
“Mon, mon,” he said huskily in a rich, smooth, syrupy voice. “You make real nice target.” He tilted the machete between his thumb and forefinger as if he were still undecided. His fuzzy-wuzzy hairdo was a crewcut.
I gave up trying to tear my coat sleeves loose on the sly. The suit was shot as it was. I looked at the machete.
“You sure you got the right party?” I tried to keep fear out of my voice. “I never saw you before in your life.”
He laughed. Same syrupy smoothness. Except for his tweedy suit and open blue sports shirt, he looked as inconspicuous as a six-foot-six, hatless, dark brown man can look. The machete made him pretty unusual too.
“Mon.” He breathed slowly in that Jamaica-English voice you’ll hear on a Calypso record. “You right mon. Maybe I make you stone-cold dead. Somebody want you that way. Other times, you play ball. Play ball now. You live right smart, mon.”
My head was aching now. “Look, pull these pins out and I’ll talk to you about anything and everything.”
He did. He must have made up his mind hours ago. But I guessed he really loved those machetes and wanted them back. He moved into me like a big cobra and placed the third machete between his white teeth. His two big paws went up past my elbows and wrenched. The two wall machetes came away in his thick fingers. I was ready for him.
I roundhoused both my hands toward his jaw.
It just wasn’t my day. He was ready for me.
His big body shifted and ten tons of something boomed into my stomach. I found myself looking at the ceiling suddenly, trying to hold my insides together with two clawing hands made up of ten clumsy fingers. My head thundered with noise.
“Mon, mon,” he chided me softly from up there where somebody hated me. His head seemed to be touching the ceiling. I saw a fly walking right next to one of his sail-sized brown ears. “You no cooperate with me. You want to make yourself stone-cold dead, chile? You listen to Coffee, mon. He got good words for you.”
I lay there beneath him and gurgled with pain. He bent over me, his dark face pleasant and horrible all together. His thick voice spilled more molasses over me.
“Listen close, mon. You stay away from Calypso Room. No bother your head. Bad business there. Never mind Voodoo. Bad girl. Bad talk. No trouble your head. Coffee friend to you. Coffee want to keep you alive, mon.”
I couldn’t answer him. Blood bubbled on my lips. He grinned and took my head in his big mitts as if it were a handball and twisted it so that he could look right in my eyes.
His eyes were big, like the rest of him. Coffee-colored and gentle, too. Oh, yeah.
“You hear me, mon? Stay away from Calypso Room or Coffee kill you dead.”
He nodded my head with his own two hands. He liked the effect. He nodded my head again.
“Good.” He began to hum to himself. “That good. You smart mon, Noon. You make good time.” He laughed and let my head go suddenly. I rag-dolled it the rest of the way to the floor.
He got to his feet and stepped over me. The three machetes vanished somewhere beneath his tweed jacket. I looked at the back of his head through a red haze, saw the frizzy glory of his brown skull. I made a note to know him anywhere. He glided toward the street door still humming to himself. He turned just once.
“Set still, mon,” he called softly. “You know you lucky? Coffee felt like chopping this night. His three girls real thirsty. They need the red. It sure shine them real pretty.”
He looked back at me. Then he raised his head and started singing. I saw him sing and heard the words through the dull, red, aching haze. And all the time, my blind fingers were trying to find my .45.
“Mon who live his life by the gun
Better know which way he will run
Coffee coming to get him good.
For good luck, mon, better knock on wood …”
He was finding a few more fast rhymes as he disappeared into the street.
I stood where I was on the floor and tried not to faint. My stomach hurt like hell again.
Coffee was gone. And I felt terrible. Five cups of coffee had nothing to do with the condition of my stomach now. A giant Negro named Coffee had upset it with a fist as big as the RCA Building.
I wobbled to my feet and staggered to the street. It was tough going but I made it to Benny’s soft-drink emporium on the far sidewalk without throwing up.
It was a beautiful night. A big moon and a million stars. And all I could do was lie down, roll over on my back, look up at the heavens and start counting.
I passed out before I got to the tenth star.
THREE
Benny’s moon face stared into mine. He looked worried. And his eyes were twinkling stars. I was confused. I pushed away from him and sat up. His big no-design bar stole into focus. I wiped at my wet face.
“You okay, Ed?” Benny’s foghorn blasted into my ears. “You look as green as artichokes.”
We were installed in one of his cozy corner booths. I looked around feebly. One drunk was sleeping on his bar stool; otherwise the joint was deserted. Benny would never put Billingsley out of business. But his bar was like home.
I made faces as the cramps in my stomach telegraphed me more messages of pain. But they were only butterflies trying to find a place to land. I bit my teeth and grounded the butterflies with an effort. Benny was watching me with all the concern of an older brother for his troublesome blood relation.
“I’ll live,
Benjamin.” My voice had lost about a thousand vitamins. “Give me a cigarette.”
“Geez, Ed—” Benny thrust his pack at me. “When you fell on your face in front of my window, I thought you was dead. What happened—you ain’t sick, are you?”
I drew on the butt. It might as well have been burning dung. I ground it out in an ashtray.
“Stomach trouble, kid. All that rich food at the Automat.” I looked at him fondly. “Think you can whip up something for an upset tummy, Benny?”
“Sure, Ed, sure.” He winked. “Mixing drinks is only a sideline. You sit tight and I’ll have you feeling right in two shakes.” He stood up and waddled away.
I took three deep breaths, inhaling through my nose vigorously. It helped some. I fumbled in my pockets and found a pair of quarters. I made it over to the juke box and fed it metal. The selections weren’t hard. I knew what I wanted to hear.
Belafonte’s “Banana Boat” had come and gone a couple of times before Benny got back with a tall glass of a suspiciously dark color. Belafonte’s Calypsonian caress of the Jamaica-English lyrics reminded me of Coffee. The coffeeer Coffee who’d sandbagged me with his fists and knives. I struggled to piece my new jigsaw puzzle together. More Calypso music streamed out of the juke. It was all Calypso melody these days in the United States. The nation had the fever all right. Rock ’n Roll had almost fallen by the wayside.
“Here, Ed.” Benny shoved the glass at me. “Homemade, but no drugstore could top it.”
I took his bartender’s word for it. I got it down in one long gulp. It was dark and oily but warm and relaxing. I could feel all the butterflies dying on the wing, one by one.
Benny looked at me closely. “Feel better?”
I nodded. “I could take on three dancing girls and never feel it.”
He shook his chubby face. “You don’t live right, like I keep on sayin’. In trouble again?”
I smiled. “A case, Benny. I’ve got a client. For five hundred bucks. Isn’t that Calypso music pretty?”
He let me change the subject. “I can take it or leave it. Okay—you sit here a while and take it slow. Holler if you need me.” A couple of leather-jacketed wild ones had wandered into his watering hole. “Lemme see what those two Brandos want.”
Benny waddled off again. I tried another cigarette. It still tasted like dung, but it wasn’t burning this time.
The big clock over Benny’s bar was getting eightish. I sat like a stone man and waited. There wasn’t much else I could do. I was feeling lousy anyway.
I took out Voodoo’s telegram and read it for the tenth time. It still came out crazy. But my doll already had pins in it. I felt like hell.
My fifty cents’ worth of canned music had segued into silence when the party started all over again. It seemed as if you never needed an invite any more or a formal letter of invitation. And people were throwing parties all over town.
I say that because something crashed through the big plate window of Benny’s bar with a helluva symphony of breaking glass and flying noise. One of the leather-jacketed wild ones yelled a warning and his crony ducked beneath the rim of the bar. And Benny cursed at the top of his lungs. Even the snoozing drunk jerked erect.
It looked as if somebody had hurled a dead man through Benny’s bar front. By way of the big window. But it wasn’t a dead man. It was a mannequin. A store window dummy.
And it looked like me. As Benny and I reached it and turned it over in the jammed area behind his bar where it had toppled in, I could see it looked like me.
Trench coat, blue serge suit, crushed-down fedora. The face was the no-personality mass that a dummy’s face always is, but, so help me, it looked like me.
Benny whistled. Sticking out under the knotted tie at the dummy’s throat, was a knife handle. The blade had been buried up to the hilt. And the dummy was bleeding. The catsup effect was so startlingly real, I could feel my stomach beginning to flip-flop all over again. And the area under my own tie seemed to burn suddenly.
I opened the note pinned to the lapel of the trench coat before Benny could. The wild ones were crowding in, but I glared them back.
Talk about Voodoo’s telegram. This was a phone call from the depths of Nightmare Alley. It was written in red ink, like a ball point pen, and the meaning was redder and deader than the Red Plague.
Noon:
Tonight you die Calypso Room
Black doll will bring you doom.
Count Calypso
Benny watched my face. His eyes were popeyed with confused disbelief. “Jesus, Ed—you’re as white as a sheet—” He had never seen me frightened before. I must have looked frightened. I felt frightened.
I stuffed the note in my pocket and looked at my fingers. They were trembling uncontrollably. I laughed harshly and made fists with my hands.
“Bring me a Martini, Benny,” I said. “A double.”
Benny was real worried now. “Ed, what the hell is all this—”
“Hokum, Benjamin. Witchcraft, voodoo, black magic. The hex, the evil eye, sorcery, mumbo-jumbo—”
Benny gasped. “You mean—”
“In short, Benny—the bunk.”
Somebody behind me disagreed with me, in a husky, musically feminine voice. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that jazz if I were you, Noon. I wouldn’t be so sure at all.”
I turned around slowly and looked into the green eyes of the blondiest blonde since Jean Harlow. The eyes were all I had time for right then.
“Don’t tell me,” I rasped, feeling meaner than murder. “Let me guess. You want to see me and you also want to go to the Calypso Room. Isn’t that it?”
She took three beats before she answered me. And I saw more than green eyes. I saw 36 by 22 by 36. All of it curved and shapely. All of it nice.
Her blonde head wagged slowly.
“The boy’s a genuis,” she said with a Tallulah inflection. “How the hell do you do it? I got a sign on me or something?”
I clasped my stomach again and held the gnawing cramps together.
“Skip it, blondie. There’s nothing up my sleeves but arms.” I stared down at my murdered effigy and stared back at Benny. “Nice day, ain’t it?”
The blonde got mad at me. Her green eyes shot sparks, but half of her sexy attention was riveted on the dead doll-man at our feet.
“Noon,” she said crisply, “let me buy you a beer so we can talk. I can get you some big money if you play your cards right.”
I sneered. I felt like sneering.
“Even the key to Fort Knox wouldn’t interest me right now. Can you do better than that?”
Now she sneered. “How much is it worth to you to keep on breathing, Noon?”
This time I stared at her. I grinned like a skeleton hiding in the family closet. “Buy me a beer,” I said.
FOUR
Benny cleared the debris away while the blonde and I sat down in one of his booths. All things considered—what with crazy telegrams and rich redheads and six-foot-six guys who played with knives while somebody threw a murdered mannequin at you—I felt real peachy. The blonde’s making terror talk sort of topped things off.
There was nothing left to do but drink a glass of beer and die. I’d already seen Paris. I was that washed out and limp, let me tell you.
I just had one thing to say to the blonde. I said it. “You busted in on me, blondie. And I’m all fagged out, washed out and laughed out. So just keep on talking and I’ll nod here and there to show you I’m listening.”
She smiled as if she was really sorry for me.
“Don’t call me blondie. First place, I’m bleached. Second, I don’t want to be just another blonde. My name is Peg Temple.”
“Why, Shirley, how you have grown.”
Her green eyes gave me some more sparks. “Thought you weren’t going to talk? If you’re going to make bum jokes, I’ll clear out now. I get jazz from people all day long. I don’t care for it much at—” she looked at her watch—“quarter to nine in the eveni
ng.”
“No more jazz,” I said solemnly, praying that my stomach would settle down.
“Okay.” She sounded mollified. I studied her some more while she fished in her gray-and-white coat for a cigarette. Barring a shape which would have driven anything male to violent extremes, her face was a high oval neatly balanced with a nice straight nose, full cheeks, a thinnish upper lip and a sexily pushed out lower one. Her chin was the kind you like to see on a woman—delicate but determined and out front just enough. I lit the cigarette for her and watched her hands. They were small for the rest of her, but strong looking in spite of that. Also, she knew how to smoke a cigarette without looking like a tramp, the way some dames will when they’re alive looking as she was.
“Here it is, Noon,” Peg Temple said. “I’ll lay it out where you can see it. I’m publicity agent for the Calypso Room. I’d rather be an actress, but jobs don’t grow in agents’ offices any more. Anyway, the dough is good and I can’t kick. I’m twenty-three and there’s still time to cut loose. But that’s neither here nor there, right now.”
Benny was noisily quarreling with the beat cop, who had wandered in to investigate the broken plate-glass window. I started thirsting for my beer, which meant I was feeling better. Peg Temple turned at the sound of their voices. The back of her head was cute. I’d never seen a girl with a cute back of the head before. She turned to look at me and shrugged. Her breasts danced under a Chinese red sweater. The turtleneck was very becoming to her. And no turtle ever looked like she did.
“Keep talking, Peggy,” I said. “I hear you fine.”
“Peg,” she snapped. “I hate Peggy. Sounds like a kid with a runny nose.” She sighed and got hold of herself. “Okay, I handle the Calypso Room. If you don’t read any of the papers, we are currently showcasing the Duke, the Calypso Kids, and Voodoo. The Voodoo. You up on your Calypso, Noon?”
I sat up straight. “I know it’s got the country by the ears. I know it’s the entertainment of the day, if that’s what you mean.”
The Voodoo Murders Page 2
