I looked at him. He was crazy. Crazier than anyone I’ve ever tangled with.
“You’re nuts,” I said. “I’ve got two left feet. I only look like Gene Kelly. The resemblance ends right down there.” I pointed down to my bare size elevens.
He didn’t know from Gene Kelly. He hopped on one foot in a weird little two-step and waved his hands again. “But you will dance, I say. Or the ladies remain where they are. Will you dance?”
He was the piper and he was calling the tune. “I’ll dance,” I said. “Now get them out of there or the deal’s off.”
Count Calypso laughed loud and clear. That should have warned me. Should have put me on my guard. But it didn’t. I was thinking too many things, planning too many things. And all my logic was blinded by the two lovelies stranded in a hole miles away from the better way of life.
Evelyn Hart shuddered, the golf balls clacking together almost musically. She started to say something, then bit her lip.
I turned on the Count. “Come on. Get them out!”
Evelyn Hart screamed as the Count Calypso suddenly thrust his hands into the small of my back with all the force of a jet-propelled battering ram. Just as suddenly, I wasn’t standing on good old terra firma any more. Down I went, into the pit. I dropped like a rock, with two naked ladies-stretched right below me.
SIXTEEN
Peg Temple and Voodoo screamed simultaneously, like two girls caught swimming in the nude by a peeping Tom. You couldn’t exactly blame them.
I didn’t have much time for fancy tricks or anything. Just fifteen feet of free fall. But I didn’t want to land on top of either Voodoo or Peg Temple. My one hundred-eighty pounds of male beef would have flattened either of them like pancakes. They wouldn’t have been pretty any more.
Back in Roosevelt High, I used to work out on the parallel bars quite a bit. Handstands, back flips, the works. I wished my old gym teacher, Mr. Saltzman, could have seen me now.
I made up my mind in nothing flat. Feet first would have been uncontrollable. I doubled up and came down on my hands right in the small area between the two girls. But I didn’t come up standing. I went right into the opposite wall of the pit like a runaway beer barrel. I twisted just in time to save my face, but the rest of me slammed hard, like a door being thrown back. I collapsed in a heap on the ground, breathing hard, every muscle in my body yammering with strain.
There was a moment of silence broken only by Count Calypso’s harsh laughter and Evelyn Hart’s voice going away. She sounded bitter and protesting. But the Count’s stern voice cut her off. Then silence again.
Down in the pit I could hear myself breathe. Could feel the confining nearness and closeness of the place in spite of its ten-foot squareness. I could also feel the warmth, like bricks baking in the sunlight feel. And every muscle in me was crying for sleep and comfort. I had lost the pleasant feeling of the tent.
I undoubled myself and got slowly to my feet. The rim of the pit was a good nine feet above my head. It was hopeless. I fought off claustrophobia and a sensation that my screws were getting loose.
On the ground, Peg Temple looked up at me boldly. I kept my eyes on her face, ignoring her from the neck down deliberately. It was a very hard thing to do.
“Our hero,” Peg Temple said in her old familiar voice. “Well, at least you can untie us. I’m getting bedsores.”
I scrambled past her head and worked on her hands. The stakes were low in the ground, thick bands of sisal cord pinning her wrists. I had a hard time with the cord. I needed a knife to undo them, but I had only my fingers. It seemed a year before I untied even one hand. Then she worked on her other one while I attacked her feet. When she was finally undone, I went to work on Voodoo.
Voodoo could only stare at me wordlessly, her eyes two mirrors of shock and fright. Fear had her; the island had her. This place was her birth, her roots, and now it looked like her death too. She seemed to understand that, and she wasn’t fighting it. She had given in to her fate. But she was still scared. There was hope yet. The fear showed she was still living. Still feeling.
“Easy, lady. Sit up and rub yourself. Get that stiffness out. Then we’ll think of something.”
She nodded and sat up. Her hands started to rhythmically knead her arms and legs. She was a magnificent nude all right. Her body was a fantasy of perfect contour and slender wonder. In ebony, she was twice as stupifying.
My admiration must have showed.
“Put your eyes back in your head, Noon,” Peg Temple snapped behind me. “We got things to talk about.”
I turned around. Peg Temple was sitting on the ground with her legs crossed, Indian-campfire style. Her eyes mocked me. Look, they said. Look all you want. What the hell can I do about it? But something in her face also pleaded with me. Said be a nice guy and pretend not to notice. I can play this out, but give me a break and meet me halfway.
“Maybe we can find something to cover you two—” I started to say lamely. It was silly to ignore it completely.
“Forget it,” Peg Temple said. “There’s nothing down here but the dirt and the ants. You’re lucky, Noon. Stuck in a hole with two naked broads.”
“Sure I am,” I grinned. “But it ain’t easy. You two are making my head swim.” Miss Temple did not have to take any back seat to Voodoo in any department. The Miss America figure that dresses had hidden was even more electrifying in the flesh. I tried not to think about it.
“You’re still staring,” she reminded me.
“Sorry, Peg. Only human, I guess.”
“Forget it. Did they leave you your cigarettes?”
I shook my head. “This get-up came like this. No pockets. No nothing.” I looked at Voodoo. She was still massaging her ebony body, but her large eyes were staring at both of us.
“What are they fixing to do with us, Noon?” Peg Temple’s voice was breezy, but she wasn’t kidding me. She was scared too.
I looked at her. “I expected you to answer that. I’m a stranger here myself.”
She grinned. “You aren’t any more. The Count has made you his own special boy. I heard him ask you to dance tonight.” She shook her head and laughed. “Gene Kelly. That’s a laugh. You really can make bum jokes.”
“Sure I can. But I ask questions too. Lots of them. And I’ve got about five hundred to ask you. Be smart and tell me the truth. This is as hot as the water can get. We have to cooperate with each other.”
Voodoo said something in her throat. I looked at her, but she was looking at Peg Temple.
“Oh, yes, Peggy. Yes. Tell him everything. So we can get out of this terrible place. Please, Peg. I beg you—”
Peg Temple’s nice face softened. “Sure, I will, honey. Now take it easy. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Everything’s going to be all wrong if you steer me crooked again, Miss Temple,” I said evenly.
Her green eyes flashed back at me. “That sounds like a crack, Noon.”
“It is. Why did you tell me that you worked in the Calypso Room? You don’t.”
“Says who?” she glared.
“Says me, and Mike Monks of Homicide. After Coffee’s murder, he checked. Nobody named Peg Temple ever worked in the Calypso Room.”
She shrugged. “Okay. So I didn’t. So what?”
I put my hand on her knee. “Look, Peg. Tell me where you fit in this. What do you say?”
Voodoo added her voice to mine. “Peggy, we will die if you don’t. We need Mr. Noon. Count Calypso is a very bad man—”
Peg Temple waved her down. “Okay, okay. But I don’t see what good it’s going to do the cowboy here. So what if he knows that you and I were pals, very good friends? So what if I told him a phony yarn about working for the club just to make him listen to me? I was just trying to save your skin, honey. You and that crazy boy friend of yours who was always making trouble for you. I don’t know what he held over you but he sure worked a charm. Coffee brought you nothing but hard times, Voodoo. And now he’s dead.”
“Yes,” Voodoo said very soberly. “Now he’s dead. But we are alive. And maybe with Mr. Noon’s help we will stay that way. Peggy, please.”
“All right, I said,” Peg Temple shrugged wearily. She eyed me speculatively. “Go ahead with the questions. You’ve got a fan.”
I dove right in now that the wrangling was done.
“Everything you told me about being an actress was true?”
She nodded. “I’m crazy, but an actress. You want to be an actress, it helps if you’re crazy.”
“You just mentioned being an agent for the club because you thought it would swing more weight with me?”
“On the nose. I hated to see Voodoo making all kinds of trouble for herself. I knew what Coffee would do if he knew she sicked a private cop in. So I fed you a line to show you how featherheaded she was. I hoped you’d ignore it. But you didn’t.”
I sniffed. “When I was in the club with Evelyn Hart, the waiter seemed to know you. When I asked for you, I got you. How come?”
“Plain luck. I know most of the waiters there anyhow. Me and Voodoo are pals.”
“Who slugged me, Peg?”
She shook her shoulders. “It wouldn’t have happened, except my waiter pal lost his head. You jumped up when Coffee got knifed, and he thought you had something to do with it. You look like a troublemaker, you know. So he crowned you.”
“I see,” I said.
Her eyes were apologetic now. “So I hustled Voodoo back to her place and locked her in. I didn’t want her or me to mix with the cops. I was behind in the rent as it was.”
“And then what happened?”
She rubbed her knee where I had placed my hand. It was tough talking to her with her still as naked as September Morn. But I kept my mind on business.
“I went home and cleaned up. Some mug jumped me and roughed me up. I think he wanted to kidnap me, but I fought him off with a lot of screaming and yelling. Then I figured if they wanted me they sure, as hell were after Voodoo too. So I borrowed my landlord’s gun and dashed over to Voodoo’s without changing my clothes. That’s when I busted in on you and those characters. That Count Calypso—my God, what a ghoul he is!” She shuddered, and her firm erect breasts bobbed up from her stomach wall. I took my eyes off them.
I looked at her. “Didn’t you believe that Voodoo was in real trouble? She must have shown you those love letters that the Count sent her?”
“She did. But Voodoo’s a character.” She grinned at Voodoo, a smile that would have led a thirsty horse away from water. “She’s led a weird, colorful life. I could expect anything from her.”
Voodoo was smiling, too. I guess any change was welcome. The tropic air was quiet above us, broken only by a shrill, occasional scream of some bird or animal. The bright sun was beginning to edge into the pit. It wouldn’t be too serious now. But it wouldn’t be too comfortable either.
“Voodoo,” I said softly. “Why is it so important that you be here for this Bacchanal?”
Her dark face didn’t know. I could see that. “I do not know, Mr. Noon. The Count is a terrible man. When I was little, living here in Port-of-Spain, I heard so many times of his strange ways, of his terrible life. He is a legend in Port-of-Spain. A legend that will never die.”
“He’s flesh and blood, Voodoo. If he cuts himself when he shaves, he’ll bleed. Take my word for it.”
She shook her head. “You do not know, Mr. Noon. You do not know. He is Calypso. The real Calypso. The heart of this island.”
“But he’s bad. All bad. He can’t be the spirit of this island. My idea of Calypso is a happy one. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”
She had nothing to say to that. She stared at her toes and her hands played idly with the ground beneath us.
Peg Temple spoke softly. “God—what I’d give for a smoke.”
“We don’t have any, and stop reminding me,” I snapped. I could have used a carton myself.
We settled down without further comment for a few minutes. It was nuts. Here I was. Ed Noon, dressed like an islander, buried in a hole in Trinidad, waiting for the night to come so I could dance for my supper. Buried with two of the loveliest ladies in the world for company. Two of the loveliest naked ladies. And sex was a million miles out of my head. It had to be, because death in drum-tempo was staring me right in the eyes. I couldn’t figure it. I couldn’t figure any of it.
The pit got hotter as the direct rays of the sun drew closer. I was acutely aware of the perspiration that began to bathe my body. Voodoo and Peg Temple glistened like lovely wax mannequins in the sunlight.
Mannequins. Wax dolls. Voodoo dolls. I pushed the image out of my mind before I got any nuttier. Seeing things wouldn’t help anything.
It was maybe five minutes later that the articles came sailing down into the pit. Voodoo cried out and scrambled for cover. But it wasn’t necessary. It was nothing but the most important thing in the world right then, as far as the girls were concerned, that is. The things that had been dropped into the pit were articles of clothing. And the good Samaritan who’d tossed them in hadn’t hung around waiting for thanks.
It was pathetically funny the way Peg Temple and Voodoo squealed with delight and divided the treasure up between them. Just like any two other girls anywhere in the world.
The clothes weren’t much—just wrap-arounds of dotted silk, but between the two of them, Peg and Voodoo fashioned a pair of Bikinilike suits that would have done credit to a film about Samoa. They looked like nine million bucks, because they were their own women again and not naked to my roving male eyes.
Voodoo had undressed for money all her life, but this had been different. I could see the difference now because of the happy light in her eyes. Peg Temple, my hard-boiled sweetheart, now looked almost demure with her clothes on, even to the point of being sweet and coy. Dames. You figure them out.
Getting the clothes meant everything to them. They had completely ignored the most important thing about getting them—who had given them so freely in direct contradiction to the Count Calypso’s orders and wishes.
It meant a lot to me, though. It meant one hope of getting out of that pit and off that island alive. We had one friend in the enemy camp. Evelyn Hart? I didn’t know. But it sure looked like it.
I stopped thinking about it, because something else had started. As quickly and as abruptly as a tropical storm.
The drums thumped loudly again, in a concerted, rising leathery chorus of noise.
Far above the pit, voices raised in a jungle chant. The chant grew louder, almost thundered, but the words came to us clearly and distinctly above the shouting. And every one of the words hammered a nail down into our coffins.
A love song from the Count Calypso to us:
Tonight before the moon is full
Three will die on the horns of a bull
The voodoo Dancer and the green-eyed blonde
Will sink with the eye in the deep blue pond.
It was a helluva lot more attention-getting than “Now Hear This” had ever been. I shivered in the hot sunlight. And Voodoo and Peg Temple stopped being so cheerful about their new wardrobes.
Count Calypso had a habit of keeping his promises.
SEVENTEEN
Night came. Trinidad, Port-of-Spain night. The moon was bigger than seven million silver dollars all pounded down into one lovely, round shape. I could see the green tops of the trees leaning over our hole in the earth, like beautiful willowy girls playing coquettishly. The air was ocean-cool, and you could feel much better about everything.
The day had been torture. The sun had whipped us, squeezing every last drop of moisture out of our bodies. We had practically dehydrated, and if Peg Temple and Voodoo hadn’t been sheltered by their polka-dot Bikinis, I would have had two sick dames on my hands. As it was, they didn’t let out a whimper.
The damn drums hadn’t let up; all day long, their insane rhythm dominated the world of the hole. You could hear the crazy bastards for miles anyway,
so having them right on your doorstep made it worse. There was no interruption in our prison stay except one basket of food that was lowered down to us about five in the afternoon by a husky African whose glistening black arms reminded me of the Atlas body-building course. The food was more welcome than an increase in your salary. Even if it was the same old coconuts and mangoes and a bottle of rum.
The girls dug in as if they’d been eating out of garbage pails all their lives. And I really appreciated the rum. It took the enamel off your teeth, but it sure cheered you up.
Staring at Peg Temple for hours must have affected my senses. She was starting to look a helluva lot like Kim Novak to me. More and more. Same hairdo, same eyes, same nose. I made the big mistake of telling her she looked like Novak.
Her answer was what I expected. “You remind me of those stories about Marines stuck on the islands. The native girls started to look better and better every day.”
My usual good humor deserted me. It must have been the hole, the drums and Count Calypso getting to me. But it sure seemed hard to pay people compliments these days.
“Forget it,” I said. “I thought you’d be flattered.”
She didn’t miss the sound in my voice. Her eyes softened and she put her hand on my shoulder. It burned. “I am, Ed.” She smiled. “I just didn’t want to hear more jazz. I’m sorry—she’s a swell-looking dame.”
I got hold of myself and grinned. “Course you look like Peg Temple too, which to my practiced eye is even better.”
She was immediately sorry she’d been nice to me. Her eyes flashed. “There you go again. More jazz. Always making wise cracks.”
Voodoo interrupted us by asking me to pass a coconut slice. I could see she was smiling too. Her dark face had lost some of the fear that had put lines around her beautiful eyes.
Peg Temple changed the subject too.
“What do you think the Count is up to, Ed?”
I put the cork back in the bottle of rum. “Dracula is capable of anything. And your guess is as good as mine. I know one thing, though.”
The Voodoo Murders Page 9
