“These two Chinamen belong to that Red Dragon Lady, no doubt. But why would she double-cross Denning? He told me they were on good terms and delivery was imminent.”
“Was what—imminent?”
“Imminent means it’s coming down the pike, inevitably. I get impatient with uneducated rabble like you and your two-syllable thugs . Deus Patrum Nostrorum represents the best the mind can be in this or any other world. If the Oculus doesn’t get it back very soon, I will begin to hold you responsible, Jack Dragna, and start eliminating your happy little family of dummy hoodlums. Do you comprehend that?”
“Stop threatening, Ravna. So I’m working with you, okay? You can call me all the names you like after I’ve collected my cool million bucks right off Uncle Sam’s press. So, in the meantime, what’re we gonna do about these stiffs on the floor?”
Ravna bent down to look at the bodies. “Leave them for now. Denning’s got to come back sooner or later. He’s a cop. He’ll get his people to clean it up and keep it hushed.”
“Yeah, you hope. So what’s next? We still haven’t got the object of your affection, Ravna.”
“For the moment, I’ll let Denning buy some time. He’s…he’s never far away from…from my thoughts,” Ravna said pensively, taking a final look at the remains of the Hatchet Man and his goon.
They left and closed the door behind them. “How in the hell did you do that?” I asked Toggth, marveling at the invisibility act.
“Redistribution of energy is relatively easy. You see, objects that can be seen must generate or reflect light. When no light is present emanating or reflecting from them, they’re invisible. Very simple, as I see it.”
“To you. It’s way above my head, I’m afraid.” Then I sat on my bed as the little creature stood by, his eyes were glued to watching me. “So here’s how it has to go, old boy. First, we gotta get rid of these bodies. I don’t want them hanging around smelling up my rug. So, either I get the police involved, call Lei-tao and tell her what happened or—”
“—or the fleshy dead things can simply disappear,” Toggth said, snickering a little under his breath.
“Disappear? Another one of your magic tricks?”
“Sort of, I would venture to say. Why don’t you let me take care of it? No traces, the less you will be—how is the American colloquialism—bogged down.”
“That’d be swell. Okay, that’s taken care of.” I got up, took out a Lucky Strike and lit it. Toggth coughed.
“How can you suck that poison into your breathers? You humans are intentionally self-destructive now, aren’t you?”
“You might say that, Mister. But for me, it’s always been booze, broads and cigarettes—and oh, yeah, music. I wouldn’t wanna live without music.”
“Tones…frequencies…harmonic combinations, ah yes…health-stimulating sounds with rhythmic patterns…good for you. Better than that terrible stuff you inhale into your breathers.”
“Yeah, well, my ‘breathers’ are doing okay. You keep to your job and I’ll do mine, okay?” I was a little impatient with his nattering. The overload on my person at this particular juncture of my earth life made me feel like a pack animal ascending a mountain loaded down with three times my weight! “So, now, the matter of your precious golden capsule. It just so happens, my girlfriend—”
“—one of your girlfriends. You mustn’t forget the attractive Mexican woman and the little mountain girl—you even made overtures to someone you could never have, my Lei-tao—”
“—hey! Whose life is it here, anyway? Can you mind your own business?” I went to my little kitchen and grabbed a bottle of gin and poured a big one. “You like a drink?” I asked the little humanoid creature.
“That is also a poison. Especially, how you make it. Sometime I will make you up some genuinely pure spirits.”
“Like the kind Lei-tao drinks—the stuff that disappears before it hits your gullet?”
“Yes, something similar. So…you were saying…?”
“Yeah, by odd coincidence, Honey is going with this movie actor character, Charlie Chaplin and a group of movie stars to Hearst Castle up north, on the coast. You do know the rest?”
“No. Was I supposed to?”
“You mean you don’t know where the damned thing is hidden?”
“Lei-tao did not confide that to me. I suppose that was her way of keeping fewer beings in the equation. But she told you, obviously?”
“Yep. So I pose as a bodyguard and tag along boyfriend when we go to San Simeon. I grab the capsule, get back, you contact me, and forge the replacement thing you talked about—I get it to Ravna, he pays Dragna—and bingo! we’re home free!”
“Seems simple. The trick is, as Lei-tao must have explained to you, getting the gold-etched microfilm out of the capsule and replacing it with the Tone of Creation—counting on the fact that wherever Ravna has hidden it, when it goes poof! disappears, it will not be detected for some time to come. In the meantime, as you say, Mr. Dragna and his underworld people will be a million earth dollars richer. One thing remains unsettling to me.”
“And what might that be?” I drank down a big slug of gin. I made a terrible face the stuff was so bad. Bootleg hooch was a concoction of poor grade juniper berries, rye flour and a few herbs that were available, tossed into a tub of cheap, raw alcohol. The damned stuff wasn’t even distilled. I had a tough gut, but every now and then it would burn the crap out of my stomach.
“The Church. It is very powerful, Mr. Denning. When they know Damianos is dead, theirs is an anger to be reckoned with.”
“Call me Cable. I hate formality when I have to converse with someone long term. So as far as Damianos’ Catholic Order is concerned, we’re just gonna have to cross that bridge when we come to it. If I think about it now, I’ll go more nuts than I am already.”
Chapter 10
A CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS
Honey was still gone, but I had to get out and go down for a breath of fresh air after I said my good-byes to Toggth. I had to run away from a world that bound and strapped me to the seat of conformity, took my wild and free spirit and pressed it like a dead flower between the pages of my life. And nothing quite did it like the sound of a pretty babe singing a Gershwin tune backed up by a sexy sax, a tinkling piano and a warm bass tying it all together. I thought I would head up to Hollywood Blvd again to the Café Montmartre where I had taken Adora dancing…and for a moment I lingered on the memory of how luscious she felt in my arms that first time I held her. I’d also heard that radio networks were trying to establish a phone line feed to broadcast live from locations like this. But what really piqued my interest to go was I’d heard there was a hot new singer there tonight, by the name of Misty Sheridan, who sang with the band at the microphone, looking like every guy’s fantasy in a low-cut dress.
It sounded like the perfect alibi for me to escape from the dead creeps in my room and for Toggth to do his thing and get rid of them for me. So I took a streetcar into Hollywood, got off at Hollywood and Highland and crossed the street to 6757 Hollywood Boulevard. There was still a pretty good crowd filing through the entrance.
The Montmartre took up the whole second floor of the building. I found out that it had been purchased and built in 1923 and was pretty much responsible for starting the Hollywood nightlife, much to the chagrin of many of the local residents who didn’t want movie-types makin’ hay in their town after the sun went down. The interior was all marble with Spanish tiled floors, a potted palm on the right at the foot of a stair case and on the left, a glass cabinet with a combination of figurines and expensive liquor bottles. People usually came with their own flasks…but I heard there was a bootlegger on-hand in case the flasks went dry. The marbled stairs led up to an arched shaped doorway with ornate openwork wrought iron and the name Montmartre across the top. The ceiling was slightly domed with carved wood. The inside was classy alright, with textured wallpaper, imported carpeting and chandeliers. The tables went right up to the dance floor, which wa
s already pretty crowded with folks kicking up their heels. The area of the dance floor had a suspended square shaped cover with draped fabric in robin’s egg blue with gold drapes to the floor at each corner. The band was at the back of this area sounding in good form. The place was crowded at the tables too and noisy with laughter, talking and smoke clouds roiling up into the air. Then the band stopped and an announcer asked everyone to take their seats, which they did obediently, knowing something special was coming. The lights went down and a quiet anticipation fell over the place. Then a single blue spotlight shone on the center of the dance floor where a microphone stood alone. Then from one side, one of the most striking women I had ever seen, walked into the spotlight and took her place at the microphone. Misty Sheridan stood statuesque in a dark pink tight-fitting dress that was cut so low a full fifty percent of her upper bosom was exposed. I sized her up to be about my age or a little younger, she stood about five-foot six and had blue eyes that smiled on one hand, but carried in them a sullen sensuality. The drummer started in with a quiet snare beat and then the band began to play the introduction to what I recognized as Irving Berlin’s All By Myself, so I stood in the back of the room and just listened.
One could just tell this babe’s life was a bit out of joint, something in her tone, something told me a restless, searching heart pumped under her marvelous breast. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew it was there and that’s what made her, at least in part, a mesmerizing songstress. By the time she had sung ‘I’m growing so tired of living alone, I lie awake all night and cry…nobody loves me, that’s why…' I was sure every guy in the joint wished he were in Misty Sheridan’s bed and taking care of her loneliness. I was no exception. But I had my hands full right now and so I could enjoy the lady’s talents without secretly panting for the dame when she wasn’t looking.
As she finished, the well-deserved response rang out with whistles and enthusiastic applause. But as soon as they cleared the dance floor, the band started back up and people went back to dancing and smoking, drinking and blabbing at their tables. I made my way to the bar. The least I could do was to buy the fine young woman a drink. I asked the bartender how I could manage it and he told me frankly that I should buy the drink anonymously and I’d be better off. I asked what her favorite beverage was. I winked at him, full well knowing no alcohol was served in the club—legally. “Aged Kentucky whiskey with a twist of honey and boiling water in a snifter on the side,” the bartender said. “That’ll be six bucks, Mister.” I thought the price excessively high but paid it and let it go at that. He told me he’d deliver it to Miss Sheridan before she went into her last set for the evening.
I’d been standing at the bar next to a handsome but somewhat life-worn woman of about fifty, I guessed. She was looking at me. Obviously she had been drinking some of that Prohibition hooch that polluted the brain and gave one that glassy stare with a kind of inarticulate, stammering English prattle. “It was the shots that killed him, you know,” she was saying, as if I had known who ‘he’ was. “Two and a half years without a man in your bed is a long time, Mister. Do you have a man in your bed?”
“No, lady, I’m not into men. Who are you talking about?”
“My husband. He served in the war. Healthy—healthy a man as you ever want to see, ten years ago. During the plague of 1918 they…they started shooting him with something that eventually… killed him.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. I had heard of the for-profit drug companies stuck with so much vaccine stock after the Great War that they spent big money to throw fear into the population to get inoculated before the next Spanish flu epidemic. Trouble was, a lot of people didn’t need the damn shot and the result was often a terrible disease as a side-effect. “What, if I may ask, did your husband come down with?”
She took a stiff drink as if girding herself for what followed. “He…he began to get headaches and threw up in the morning. Then…then he started being mean and irritable, listless…you know, no energy for work, job, even sex with me, his wife. It was like his brain was going away along with his body. It was called…some terrible…thing…I’m trying to remember…I’m sorry…I’ve been drinking, you know. Another one of the government’s mistakes you encounter ev—everywhere. And you can have all the booze you like, if you can afford it. Hic! How’s that for corruption, Mister?”
“Yeah, I’m a cop. I know. I see it every day, lady.”
“Joyce…my name is Joyce. But I donno where the joy part is in Joyce anymore…do you see it in my aging face?”
I felt sorry for the broad. I looked at her kind, light blue eyes. The pain of too much too soon was written all over them. “No, Joyce…you look fine, just take it easy on that poisonous hooch you’re drinking.”
“You’re a cop and you’re not going to…to arrest me—hic! from drinking illegal alcohol here—here at the club?”
“The world’s illegal, Joyce. You can call me Cable, if you like. I think your husband’s disease might have been post-vaccinal encephalitis.”
“Yeah! That’s it…Cable…what a strange name…but I like it…I don’t suppose you’re interested in a drunken old broad who’s lost her way now, are you? I’m probably rusty, but I might be pretty good—pretty good in bed.”
“Well, thanks all the same, Joyce. But I’ve got my—my, uh, hands full with girlfriends lately.”
“Well, I’m too old for you anyway—that’s—that’s what you’re really saying, isn’t it? I’m too damn old—I’m even too damn old for…for me!”
I had noticed that the bartender had been good to his word and brought Misty the drink I had bought her. She was sitting with some of the band members. One of the guys was familiar to me. I’d seen him around town a lot. He was a black man…brilliant and though he was young, he seemed to be a well-respected jazz piano player and was always in demand. Soon, as Joyce continued to hold me captive, I watched the beautiful Misty get up and walk over toward the bar. She moved like a proud cat, smoothly with those great buttocks doing all the right moves inside that skin-tight silken gown. She came up to the bartender with her drink still in hand. “Who…who bought me the drink, Charlie?” she asked him. The bartender reminded her he preferred to keep the secret admirer anonymous for fear fifty guys would be hitting on her all at the same time, which the management discouraged.
For whatever reasons, I spoke up, revealing my identity. “I—I, uh, confess, Miss Sheridan. It was I—my name is Denning…Cable Denning…and I’m a cop moonlighting tonight as an appreciator of great music well performed. I—I, uh, truly liked your Irving Berlin.”
She looked at me strangely. Her voice was soft, feminine with a nice breathiness to it. “You…you even know the composer?”
“Yep. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been in love with music—some people take drugs—well, I do smoke, drink and chase skirts—but no dope does it like music for this guy.”
She seemed intrigued. “It’s nice to know, Mr. Denning, at least some of my audience is educated.”
“Oh, he’s educated all right, young lady,” my inebriated bar companion spoke up. “He even knew what killed my late—late hus—hic!—husband! Post-some-or-other enceph...iss. They shot him…shot him to death…with medicine. Now, tell me, doesn’t that strike you….strike you as being very—very strange…when a government kills people trying to prevent a disease?”
Misty Sheridan had no idea what we had been talking about. “She lost her husband a couple of years back. She’s still grieving—and claims that the ‘cure’ in the form of inoculations actually killed her husband,” I explained.
“It really doesn’t surprise me. My aunt lost her husband the same way. He got back from the war, they told him he’d avoid the Spanish flu of 1918 and so when he took the shots it killed him.”
“You see? I told—I told you so, Cable Denning.” She looked the two of us over. “I—I have to go home now. The house is empty and lonely, but I have to sleep. Will I see you again here, Cable? I li
ke you—you’re—you’re a good man, even for a cop—cops are crooked in Los Angeles—are you a crooked cop? I hate crooked cops…you never feel…feel safe anymore…”
“Yep, I’m afraid so, Joyce. I’m as rotten as they come, drink gin and tonic, smoke too much and chase pretty women when I can.”
She laughed. “Oh! I’ll bet you’re not that bad…if I were younger…I’d like you…in my…life…Cable…lady….good-night now…” She grabbed her purse from off the bar and disappeared into the crowd.
“Well…” Misty Sheridan said, studying my face. “So you’re a cop moonlighting as a customer, huh? I haven’t seen you in here before.”
“Oh, I’ve been here once or twice before, Miss Sheridan, but on the nights they only had dancing. I do need to say how much I enjoyed your singing—and all the rest of you that comes in that package you’re wearing.”
She laughed. “I can see you’re a man who says what he feels and doesn’t mince words, uh, was it Denning?”
“Cable…call me Cable.”
“I’ve got to go, now. I have another number coming up. Will I see you again sometime? I always like it when I’ve won over a new fan.”
“Well, you sure won me over tonight. When you’re up there singing, a guy can take that ride to fantasyland…imagine all the dreams he ever dreamed with a babe can come true with you, because he can feel it…feel the electricity run through him as you sing…right down to his shoes and make him feel his life’s been incomplete until now. Then he wants to take you home, own the heart and body that lives underneath that dress you’re wearing, tear down the walls of pretend and become a haunted thing of desire and passion, longing and lust.” She looked away for a minute, searching over the crowd as she leaned against the bar. She was breathing deeper and that ample bosom of hers heaved right along with those wonderful lungs.
Golden Throat (Cable Denning Mystery Series Book 1) Page 23
