I set my coffee cup down. “No. Cinnamon is in all the other rooms…cinnamon and vanilla. Augusta’s room was the only one with mint.”
He still didn’t get it. “All right. Mint.” He shook his head.
I sat back. “You can’t contain mint. It runs.”
“Flap? Is something wrong?”
I closed my eyes. “Yeah, something’s wrong: You had to be at Ruby and Teeth’s — in the backyard. It’s where you somehow got the mint all over you. It gets on your shoes and your pants cuffs — and more of your clothes if you roll around in it.”
“Ruby and Teeth have mint in their yard? Isn’t that interesting. But why couldn’t I get mint anywhere? They don’t have the only crop in town, do they?”
I shook my head. “No. But I’m not a big believer in meaningless coincidence.”
He approved. “Ah. Well. As it happens you’ve guessed correctly. I have been over in their backyard, and I did roll around a bit. Still — I’m giving you that. You just guessed.”
I tried to calm myself. I took another sip of coffee. “Why would it be in Augusta’s room? And by the way, it’s not a guess — it’s an intuition.”
“And the difference is…”
I looked into the coffee cup. “Ask Dally. She’ll be here in a minute.”
“Yes. Well.”
There was an awkward silence, shattered by the loudest doorbell I’d ever heard.
Lenny grimaced. “Ah, more guests.” He turned to me like an ice cube in a glass. “This is very exciting, isn’t it?”
“I suppose in a sort of surreal way it is.” But before I could elaborate, there was Dally in the doorway. She gave me a look that could scrape up linoleum. Right away she was hip to the strangeness of the new Lenny. Lovely Lenny.
“Ms. Oglethorpe, how fine it is to see you.” He was enchanting.
She nodded. She shot me another glance and took a seat on the sofa.
I raised my eyebrows. “Coffee? It’s Gold Coast Blend.”
She squashed her eyes up. “Ah. Well…that’d be nice.”
I poured. Lenny watched us like we were an electric train set on Christmas morning. “You two really are a pair.”
Dally took the cup I handed her. The room was still a little dark. The light of the new day had not yet reached our little corner of the galaxy. I couldn’t tell if her dress was red or burgundy.
She sipped. “I guess we’re waiting for Augusta?”
I nodded.
Lenny nodded. “In a way, that would be quite a wait. The Augusta you’re talking about — the wife of the poor little soul in the rich big house, ‘Lenny’ — that Augusta doesn’t actually exist at all, does she?”
I set my coffee cup down. “The fact is, pal, I got no idea. I’m drivin’ on faith. But I’m saying you just finished doing something very weird in order to get a trade deal between some Red Chinese guys and Cascade Art Imports. It’s for some kinda gewgaws in Tibet. Maybe it even involves the new Panchen Lama. How’m I doin’ for a slow guy?”
Lenny really looked a little shocked. “You absolutely amaze me. I would never have guessed you capable of this sort of…what did you say? Intuition?” He lit up even further. “Or is it a case of some remarkable powers of perception? Are you actually a great detective after all? Wouldn’t that be a surprise?”
Dally shook her head like she was trying to tell me to shut up. But you can’t stop the river.
I sat forward. “You fed Augusta Donne some psychological poison and got her to think, just a little bit, you’d actually made her up. You also got her to think the sex in the X-ray room was her idea.”
Dally was at sea. “Psychological poison?”
I spoke to her, but I kept my eyes locked on Lenny. “He got her to read something — snuck it into her charts at work, I think — that made her believe she had come up with certain ideas, or at least confused her good. She’s got a problem — kinda big one.”
Lenny squinted at me. “It’s just like a detective movie: ‘I guess you’re all wondering why I’ve called you here; well, I’m about to reveal the murderer.’ I wish it were midnight. That’s a much better time for this sort of thing.”
Dally set down her coffee cup on the table in front of us both. “Lenny, it’s obvious you’re not the guy we all thought you were. Whatever. Flap found your wife like you wanted him to. Why don’t you just pay up and we’ll be on our way?”
He sighed. “I’m afraid things have gone too far for that now. I need a much more…secure conclusion to my little business here.”
I have to say the phrase secure conclusion left me feeling a little tense. I finally looked over at Dally. “He’s got cops in the other room — cops that don’t like me all that much. With very little effort Lenny could see us both rotting in jail.”
He nodded. “Yeees, that’s true. I wouldn’t like to do it. Probably better just to have you both killed.” He smiled sweetly. “Or one of you. Have one of you killed and the other one blamed for the murder. That would be good. Flap, you’d play the part of the insane serial killer, and Dalliance Oglethorpe would star as the maniac’s final victim.” He shifted in his seat again, thinking. “Then, Flap, you could write about all this from prison. It’s too strange for anyone to believe — they’d think it was fiction — but you could get someone like Norman Mailer or Walker Percy or some Hollywood starling to champion your cause, and you could live quite comfortably in some maximum containment facility.” He lit up. “A place for the criminally insane! That would be too wonderful. Maybe I could even get Augusta a job as your caretaker — or our friend Horatio.”
I filled Dally in. “Teeth’s real name.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry for him.”
Lenny fidgeted. “Except he’s in jail already, so things could work out that he’s the insane killer… Maybe it would be better just to go back to option A.”
Dally was the first to say it. She picked up her coffee again and smiled very calmly. “Just kill us off.” Then she sipped.
He nodded, concentrating on the tabletop. “Exactly.” Then his concentration broke. “Well, we’ll work out the details later. Now let’s just have some fun.”
I sat back. “Feel like answering some questions? Would that be fun?”
He nodded. “Always.”
“Who is Augusta?”
He slowly leaned his head back until he was looking at the ceiling. He put his fingertips together, then brought his face straight at mine. “Augusta is a metaphor for our times. She’s nothing in herself; she’s what we can make of her, mostly through proper manipulation of words and media. Then these ideas become instantly assimilated, and she has the illusion they’re her own. That’s really the beast of mass culture, isn’t it?”
I recognized this Lenny. The knowledgeable lecturer who was trying to tell me a few nights ago that when you were talking to Augusta you didn’t hear her accent, you just saw her face: image over content — the mass-media problem. It was the same sort of problem Dally had tried to tell me about in her club when the authorship of “Mood Indigo” was in question: There’s now more available knowledge out there than anybody could ever get ahold on, so everybody ends up looking a little stupid. You can’t know everything, so you go for image over content. You end up seeing the character, not the actor playing the part. That was my immediate problem.
“Okay, so who’s Lenny?”
“Lenny? He’s my fondest creation.”
“That’s it?”
“I suppose that’s it, yes. He’s a character I like very much — and everyone seems to be taken with him. Why wouldn’t they be? He loves everything. He’s not real.”
“Okay, then — who are you?”
He closed his eyes, and you could almost hear the wheels turning in the machine he used for a brain. Then, suddenly, “I’m Proteus.” He opened his eyes. “I can be anything I like.”
That was it. It shouldn’t have made me shiver, but it did. I never heard a colder voice, and I know mortici
ans.
Chapter 21: Morning’s Light
Lucky for us the doorbell rang again, and the spell was broken. This time Lenny got up more deliberately. “The final element.” And then he gave us a knowing look and rattled off to the door.
There was a commotion, Augusta’s voice a little more shrill than I’d heard it, Tony’s a little more menacing, but we couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. When they all slipped into the den there was a big silence all over the place.
Augusta sat on the sofa beside Dally. Tony stood. Lenny went back to the chair at the top of the room — the king’s chair, despite being named for a queen. He sat like a king and surveyed his domain.
“I think we’re all here. I mean, if I were a stickler we’d have to get Horatio out of jail and fly Neena in from…Nevada?”
I volunteered. “New Mexico. Same thing. Too much sand.”
Tony shook his head. “I think in New Mexico they got white sand.”
Dally smiled. Augusta looked anxiously between all the other players, like she was afraid she’d say or do the wrong thing. Lenny wagged his head. “But we digress. I think enough of the principals are here to continue with the festivities, don’t you, Flap?”
“Absolutely.”
“So do you want to continue with your astonishing powers of intuition, or should I just blurt everything out?”
Tony shifted his weight and stared at me. “You said you knew everything, Flap.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry I gave you that impression. I can’t know everything; but here’s what I believe: Lenny Cascade killed three women and a drag queen in some very strange ways just to make a business deal go through. It would have been Augusta if she hadn’t taken a powder when she did. And it might have been Neena if her red hair didn’t come from a bottle.” I turned to Lenny. “How’m I doin’?”
He shrugged. “Unbelievably well.”
I turned back to Tony. “I don’t know what’s the deal with Ruby…”
And Lenny showed his teeth in something that was supposed to be a grin. The rest of us were quiet as the grave, staring at him. “That’s quite a joke on me.” He shifted. “It’s hard to explain, but when I’m in character, I often lose myself in the role, and you can imagine that when I’m little Lenny, I can be a little dense. Teeth, as we call him, talked endlessly about the gorgeous Ruby; he even showed me a picture — very lovely indeed…”
I couldn’t help myself. “Red hair like Lucille Ball.” He nodded. “And I never imagined, in my somewhat enfeebled state as Lenny, that Ruby was a man. I mean, when you meet Teeth in his work, the last thing you’d think about him was that he was gay. And after all, I’d only seen a photograph of Ruby. It was just a simple mistake.” He shrugged.
All we could do was stare.
He went on. “Perhaps I should start now from the beginning.” He sat back in his throne, assumed his pose as Lenny the Lecturer, and began his story.
“Taoism is perhaps the oldest religion on our planet. It’s at the heart of all mystical religions still in the world today: Buddhism — even, I’d say, gnostic Christianity. It certainly seems to predate anything we know about. Essentially it’s a prehistoric nature religion. At its best it believes in a force of the universe that works its way through everything, and the closer you can get to letting that force work in you, the happier you’ll be. Alas, this beautiful notion at its worst has largely degenerated in places like China and Japan into some kind of mystical, magical hooey, wherein practitioners believe in all kinds of alchemy, supernatural powers, mind reading, fortune-telling, hocus-pocus. That’s what a lot of people believe in today. In the ancient notion, the science of tantra seems to declare that our human body is the perfect instrument for the expression of these ideas. In the present day it’s all supposed to be something magical. Either way, the expression of it can take the form of the meditations of the lotus-legged mystic or the depraved sexual postures of the fiercest lovers. It gives one a quite remarkable power…to influence. Especially in the weak-minded and the vulnerable. It’s got something to do with the spinal cord…”
Augusta, nearly in a trance, whispered her two cents. “…chakras…”
Lenny shrugged again, impatiently, “…or some such. At any rate there are literally millions of people who actually believe this sort of thing, and the power of these beliefs can rule their lives and all their dealings.”
I chimed in. “All their business dealings.”
“Exactly. Some people in Asian countries won’t take a step out the door without consulting these powers, throwing the old I Ching, stumbling around some stupid magic ceremony. So my father thought it wise to study these things, and I did.”
I was on a kind of roll. “Here’s my guess: He got you to study all this starting about six years ago.”
He looked around the room. “How does he do it, ladies and gentlemen? And all without a net. It’s the Greatest Show on Earth.”
I kept on. “Dad reads in the paper or hears about the Panchen Lama dying. The Panchen Lama is the last stronghold of the true Tibetan Buddhism left in the country since the Dalai Lama split in 1959 when the Red Chinese invaded. The Red Chinese want to rub out religion in general, being as how it is, among other things, the opiate of the masses. Dad gets an idea. What if he can link up with the Red Chinese? Do a trade deal for some of the booty that’s sacked away in monasteries up there at the top of the world —”
But he interrupted me. “A little reverence there, Flap. We’re talking about an astonishing array of work. Some tiny little pieces, some very beautiful large things. Taken all together, quite a bounty.”
I couldn’t stand it. “But what’s all this got to do with killing these girls? Is it something…in order to put the muscle on…who? The Reds? The lower-echelon Tibetans? Somebody here in Atlanta?” I was treading water, but I had ideas.
It was Tony’s turn to be impatient. “What the hell has all this got to do with my sister?”
Dally kept her eyes on Lenny. “He’s getting to that, aren’t you, Lenny? You’re telling a story from the beginning. I admire that. Everything you’ve said so far, since I got here anyway, has been the preface.”
He lowered his eyelids. “The preface. Yes. You’re really a delightful woman, aren’t you? So, to continue, I researched some of the magic rituals on the chance that it might do us some good, come in handy for something — and because it’s really fascinating reading if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Here’s what I came up with: an ancient ritual — and I mean this one’s really old now — that insures any business dealing will go smoothly and undetected by, oh, the law and…higher forces. It’s really amazing, this childlike belief in alakazam. Luckily, it’s not so difficult to do. First you have to find three redheaded women. Of course, in Tibet — or any Asian country, I’d imagine — that’s something of a task, but here in the States it’s like falling off a log. I mean, as the saying goes, you can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting at least one redhead.”
Augusta seemed to be sinking fast. “That’s a saying?”
Lenny ignored her. “So anyway, we picked Atlanta. First, it’s got one of the larger Asian populations of any city in America; second, Dad already owned a house here for other business reasons and it’s far away from Boston — the home field; and third, until just very recently Atlanta was the murder capital of the country, so who’s going to notice two or three more dead women, especially from the…lower end of the spectrum —”
I had to stop him. “Why redheads, again?”
“Because they’re rare, because it’s the Red Chinese, because it’s the color of blood…lots of reasons, take my word. It had to be redheads.”
Augusta, more trancelike than ever, stared at Lenny. “Redheads are straw dogs. Not real. Not like us.”
Dally looked to me for explanation. I obliged, thanks to Linda the waitress. “See, it’s a sacrifice in Shinto. It’s a little dog made out of straw to sacrifice for good luck. They m
ean nothing, although I’m told they used to use real dogs.”
Dally blinked. “Nice.”
I nodded. “Exactly my response.”
He completely ignored us. “The really great part is how they’re sacrificed in the ritual. That’s the fun. Listen to this: They have to be strangled, for maximum effect, at some peak emotional moment.”
I nodded slowly. “Like fear.”
Lenny nodded.
Dally’s turn. “Because?”
“It’s all a part of this tantric energy nonsense.”
I chimed in. “It had to be exactly three women because —”
But he wouldn’t let me finish. It was his show now, and he was very excited. “Three is a magic number in all the religions. The Holy Trinity, for example?”
Tony looked like he very much wanted to sit down. “How can you believe all this?”
Lenny blew up laughing — it sounded like a chainsaw. “Believe it? God, of course I don’t believe it. But the people in Tibet who needed to be convinced, whose help we needed — both Tibetan and Chinese, not to mention my sources here — they did believe it, that’s the point. They wouldn’t help us with our…importing at all without this mumbo jumbo. Throws a real scare into a gentle people when you’re willing to sacrifice three live women. Three rare women. And millions of people around the world believe. Ruby believed. Augusta believes right now.” He turned to her like Dracula. “Don’t you, dear?”
She closed her eyes. “I…I don’t know.”
Tony took a couple of menacing steps toward our host. “Stop it, Lenny.”
Before I could even see them move, Bertrand the Veteran and Tommy the Dope flew out of the shadows someplace in the room and had Tony on the floor and handcuffed twice.
Lenny stood. “Boys, boys…a little gentler. This is my house, after all — at least for a few more minutes. Please.”
They hoisted Tony up and slung him out of the room like a giant sack of potatoes. Lenny looked at me.
“See, Flap: I can manipulate nearly anything. Please don’t force another demonstration.”
I sat back. “So did those two kill the girls?” But I was afraid I already knew the answer.
Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 1) Page 19
