Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  Phil Samson is the best kind of modern cop, familiar with everything from legwork through interrogation to the latest wrinkles in scientific investigation, honest, dedicated, proud of his job and good at it, overworked, always behind but always trying to catch up, and ready to lay his life on the line if “the job” required it. He’s one of the many police officers with only ten fingers for a dozen holes in the dike, and a long-suppressed desire to go to the can, which is what’s on the other side of the dike. He maintained, as well, a not unreasonable conviction that without him and men like him no other citizens, including those who called him and his fellow officers pigs, could walk the city’s streets alone and unarmed by day, much less after dark.

  Sam finished grinding out his cigar. A couple of short black butts, ends well chewed, were already in the tray. Then he looked up and glared at me for a few seconds before saying, gently, “Good of you to come, Shell. What news of great cheer do you bring me?”

  “Nothing special, Sam. Just happened to be in the neighborhood—”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  When I finished, I swallowed the last of my coffee, crumpled the paper cup, and tossed it into his wastebasket.

  Sam scowled for a while, made some notes on a yellow pad. He put down the pencil, opened a desk drawer and got another of his long black cigars, stuck it unlighted between his teeth. He chewed on it for a few seconds, heavy jaw wiggling, then he asked three questions and made one statement.

  “What made you think Lemming could help you find the man you were looking for?”

  “Information my client gave me. I didn’t get any help from Lemming—the contrary, as you know—but I had to check it out.”

  “This guy, already dead when you crashed into the house, they shot something into him, then cut his leg and just let the man bleed to death?”

  “That’s right. At least, it’s the story I was given, and there’s no reason to doubt it. All that blood was from him, and I don’t have any idea what they squirted into his arm.”

  “When those two shots were fired at Lemming, you were with your client’s father, nowhere near the church?”

  “That’s right, Sam. He and I were driving to the gal’s apartment in L.A.—of course, the father’s also my client, now. Anyhow, we weren’t even near Weilton. Left there right after called you.”

  “O.K. About that call, and those shots at the church. You missed something there, Shell. Your call came in at eleven-oh-three P.M. Officers entered the house, eleven-twelve P.M. Your two hoods could have fired the shots, or they could have moved the bodies from the house, but they couldn’t have done both.”

  I thought about it, nodded. “You’re right. I did miss it. But, Sam, that’s only because I had not yet carefully considered every little detail—”

  “Just one more thing. Give me the names you left out and you can go.”

  “Names? Sam, you know—”

  “The names. Your client, her father, the guy held in the house with him, and the man who bled to death. Just those four and you can be on your merry way.”

  “Sam, you wouldn’t hold me just because of a little—”

  “I would.”

  “You’d put the arm on your old buddy! Clap your pal in a cell and leave him—”

  “I would.”

  “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod, just chewed his stinking cigar—stinking when lighted—and let the sharp brown eyes stick me. After all, he’d told me twice, and usually he told people only once. Besides, this was, unquestionably now, a police matter; further, if Bruno and Dave had been in danger before, they remained in at least equal danger—which was not going to be lessened when news of André Strang’s murder was noised about. So I gave Samson what he wanted, or at least as much of it as I knew.

  He was scowling and shaking his head when I finished.

  He tore the top sheet from his pad and jotted a few lines on the next one while mumbling, “It couldn’t be something simple, could it? Of course not. You’ve got to get between two goddamned armies. King of the sex kooks on one side, high priest of the holy on the other, and you in the middle, a white-haired clown in No-No Man’s Land waving a banner with a strange device—”

  “Hey, hold it. Clown you can get away with—this once—but what’s this king of the sex kooks? Emmanuel Bruno is, just to begin with, a hell of a man. Plus brilliant scientist, dedicated—”

  “I know who he is. His real alias is Ponce de León, and he’s put the Fountain of Youth in bottles at forty bucks a pint, or three hundred and twenty clams a gallon, which comes to maybe sixteen, seventeen thousand bucks per barrel of snake oil.”

  “Sam, you’re wrong. You’re getting cranky in your years of senility. What you need is Erovite. I tell you, this guy—”

  “Erovite. You’ve tried it? And now you sleep two hours a night but waken with a magical brew singing in your blood, power purring in your brain, the surge of hot-diggety-dog in your loins? Casey!” he yelled out the door, beckoned with a waggling index finger, then looked at me. “You testify to this wonder from your own experience, your personal rebirth?”

  “Hell, no, you know I haven’t tried the stuff—and will you quit yacking like Big Lord Fauntleroy? All the reports about Erovite—a lot of them, anyhow—mention the slow but steady, and in the end sometimes almost miraculous, increase of health, energy, well-being. And Bruno himself said—”

  “He said. Some of the reports. Hearsay. Right, Shell? Hearsay testimony, pure and simple. After all this time, you’d still expect to put that kind of evidence in the record?”

  “This isn’t a court, Sam.” I would have said more, but a plainclothes detective came in and Samson handed him the yellow sheet of paper on which he’d jotted some notes, including my secondhand description of the two men who’d snatched Bruno.

  “See if you can get any kind of make on these guys, Casey,” he said. “This is all we’ve got right now. Not too many left-handers, start with him.”

  The detective nodded and went out.

  After we’d jawed another minute or two, Samson said, “O.K., on your way, Shell. But keep in touch. No tricks—and no more commotion. No more. This town’s ready enough to explode without your lighting fuses. You read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Sam,” I said, and left.

  Dru opened the door and smiled. “That was pretty fast, Shell. I’m glad you didn’t have to spend the night in jail.”

  “Me, too. I’d much rather spend the night … out of jail. Hey,” I said as I walked inside and she closed the door, “I like that—outfit.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what to call it. She’d changed into some kind of flowing white garment that covered her from throat to ankles, smooth over breasts and hips and belted with a length of braided cloth at her narrow waist. It could have been either some kind of filmy nightgown or a long dress to be worn to formal parties tossed by broad-minded people, but it looked good and it looked Grecian, much like something Aphrodite might have worn at her peak. Dru, too, looked good and much like Aphrodite might have looked at her peak.

  “I hoped you would,” she said.

  She preceded me to the divan, and we sat where we’d been little more than an hour before. After a few seconds of silence, I said, “Well, here I am. Here we are. How about that? Was there any special reason you wanted me to come back? You know, to … help you move the furniture, maybe? If so, let’s get it done, and maybe we’ll have time—”

  “Yes.”

  “The furniture?”

  “No.”

  “I was hoping that wasn’t it.”

  “The reason is, well, partly the way you’ve acted all night, Shell. Of course, I could be wrong. And it has to do with something Dad said, too.”

  “Dad?”

  “It’s because …” A very small smile curved her full red lips, and the lazy gray eyes seemed more heavy lidded, almost slumbrous. She took a deeper breath, and beneath the s
mooth white cloth her breasts rose, and rose, and when she breathed out, her smile broadened as she finished in a soft warm voice, “… because I’m so yin … and you’re so very yang.”

  13

  I was tall, very tall, billions of light-years tall, and I lay on a bed of stars with my love of the latest millennium. In fact, I was kissing Andromeda on her neck.

  She didn’t seem to mind. To the contrary, there was little doubt that she thought it a splendid idea. In consequence, Nature took its course, and we sinned.

  One would think, however, if one were dumb enough to think at such a time, that this was the thing to do. For everyone else and everything else, here and below and above and everywhere you looked, was doing precisely the same thing. We lay, Andromeda and I, in the approximate middle of a writhing, seething, boiling and churning immensity absolutely crammed with Nature doing what comes Naturally, for both here and in the macrocosm above and the microcosm below, outside of us and inside of us, the almost identical play was being acted and acted again. Everything was having a swell time.

  But then God, in hobnailed boots, came crunching over the stars. He was not pleased. He looked very much like Festus Lemming. Or else Lemming came crunching, and he looked very much like God. He was very thin, whoever he was, with lips like ashes and eyes like night and a long gray beard and the sour and cramped expression of Infinity with an upset stomach. He lifted a Leg, swung a hobnail-booted Foot, preparing to kick me out of Heaven.

  In the millennia before God’s Boot landed, I caught a glimpse of something beyond and behind and around him, faintly luminous, indistinctly glowing, a wondrous nebulousness which neither eye nor mind could enfold or comprehend, a something truly wonderful and awesome, a magnificence incomprehensible, a fire infinite in which all else burned—a something I couldn’t quite make out but which was much larger and grander even than God. Or … could it have been a something larger and grander than Lemming, who looked as if he were God and sounded as if he were God and acted as if he were God?

  The luminousness grew brighter, the nebulousness was shot through with flame, the answer was nearer, ever nearer as the flames burned brighter, and I had begun to wonder about that Foot, and the Boot upon that Foot, both of which were also getting nearer and nearer, and I realized with a terrible and horrifying and chilling fear that I was doubting the divinity of that Foot and Boot, and knew if they were of Lemming and Lemming was God I was going to Hell … Yes! … to Hell … Yes! … and burn forever for my sin of doubt, and that fear, and fear of doubt, froze my thought.

  So even though the flames grew so blindingly bright that I knew the answer was there, it was too late, because—whumpf—God Almighty’s Hobnail-Booted Foot caught me with Infinite Force squarely on my petrified ass and kicked me out of Heaven, and I spun, falling, fearful and frozen and aching, knowing I was eternally damned for indulging in sinful and shameful pleasure, and I could hear Andromeda, for she had been sinful and shameful, too, screaming.…

  I came up out of sleep with a growl in my throat and, in my mind, the most horrible thought that had ever been in it: What if Festus Lemming is God? Or even if he isn’t, quite, what if he’s right?

  And then my eyes were opened, and I saw Drusilla Bruno. Or, I saw Drusilla Bruno and my eyes were opened.

  She was leaning over me, and the sound that I had thought was Andromeda screaming was Dru, merely whispering. Her bright hair was tangled and wild, eyes heavy with sleep and love, her magnificent breasts naked and brazen, curve of waist and swell of hip and sweetness of thigh a gift and blessing for my eyes, and I knew in an instant, without need of confirmation by anyone or anything else that Festus was a freak and what for a fearful moment I had thought damnation was merely life, or Nature, or love. No, not sinful, not shameful, unless beauty is sin and desire damnation.

  “What a heavenly sight,” I said, “but you’re light-years away.” Dru smiled and leaned closer, and I kissed her lips, felt her smile melt beneath my mouth, and her body merge with mine.

  So it came to pass that—joyously—we shamefully sinned.

  Again.

  By ten o’clock of that bright morning, the fifteenth of August, I was tooling along the freeway once more, top down on the Cad, feeling fine and frisky and energetic, full of magical beans.

  I had checked with my informants and got another zero for my pains. There wasn’t a rumble about the two men I was trying to find. I’d had a hunch before, and was now reasonably certain they weren’t local hoods. But I still felt they were hoods, pros, men well acquainted with guns and brutality and death—if only because of what had happened to Strang.

  I had also phoned Emmanuel Bruno, who asked if I could stop at his home—which was where I was going, full of beans. Bruno had been interrogated at some length by the police, and though he’d not enjoyed it much, he seemed not overly displeased this morning that I had spilled the whole story to Samson last night.

  He lived in an exclusive development called Riverdale Estates—though there wasn’t a river within miles, or a dale, either—and I had to stop and be okayed by a guard at the gate before driving in. It was a lovely development. There were many trees, much grass and shrubbery and greenness, and the widely spaced houses were set well back from the winding streets.

  Bruno’s home—small, for a man who drove a convertible Silver Shadow—was centered in a full acre, landscaped so heavily that the house wasn’t visible from outside the grounds. I’d driven him home last night, but in the darkness had not been able to appreciate the virtual jungle of citrus and nut trees, eucalyptus and oak, and dozens of strange-looking trees and shrubs I couldn’t identify.

  I parked in front of the house and started toward the door when Bruno called to me. “Sheldon. I’m over here.”

  He was stretched out in a hammock tied between a couple of pecan trees, but as I turned and walked toward him he rolled out and sort of spilled, loosely and easily, to the ground. Smiling, he came forward to shake my hand, then led me back to a rough-hewn wooden table with four primitive-looking but very comfortable chairs around it.

  We sat down and he said, “One reason for my wanting to see you this morning, Sheldon, is that I feel we should discuss my dialogue with the police.”

  “Yeah, as I mentioned on the phone, it was either level with Sam or spend a night—or nights—in the can, so I chose what seemed the lesser evil. What I didn’t mention is that the captain told me he was going to have a team talk to you, but hinted that if I tipped you he’d have me analyzed a pound at a time in the crime lab. Sorry I couldn’t fill you in before the officers showed up, Doc, but Sam was not at his most relaxed—”

  “That’s quite all right, Sheldon. I realize you must have been subjected to considerable pressure. I assume, under the circumstances, you held nothing back?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Bruno nodded. “Fine. From the officers’ questions and attitude I felt they already knew a good deal, and it must have been necessary for you to inform your friend of most or all that occurred last night. So I simply told them everything I knew myself. Therefore, our stories should be identical. If they had not agreed, I would guess your friend might have taken further action by now.”

  “That’s not a guess, Doc. It’s a statement of fact. Actually, it’s a good thing Sam and the police do know.”

  He nodded again. “Yes, my major concern was the effect on the public, particularly Lemmings of the Lord, of news about André’s death. But there appears to have been no commotion.”

  “That’s because the police haven’t, as far as I know, found the bodies yet. When they do, the news will be made public.”

  Bruno stood up. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to see you, Sheldon. The other is—excuse me a moment. I have something for you.” He walked to his house and disappeared inside, came back in about a minute carrying something in his hand. “Catch,” he said, and tossed it to me.

  I grabbed it, fumbled it, finally got a grip on the bottle—for that�
�s what it was, a round brown pint bottle filled with liquid, but without any label on it.

  “Erovite!” said the Doc grandly.

  “So this is it, huh? This is what all the fuss is about. Looks harmless enough.”

  “It is, it is, Sheldon. Harmless, at least, for those who desire health, energy, more of life. For those who believe life is best when lived least, why, undoubtedly it is iniquitous, a corrosive poison. Therefore, and quite properly, they are justified in their efforts to prevent everyone from poisoning themselves with an excess of life.”

  “Somehow I get the impression you don’t have a very high opinion of the mass of mankind, Doc.”

  “I have an astonishingly low opinion of the mass of mankind. But only because they have earned it.” He sat down again, across the table from me, and studied his long thumb.

  “Erovite merely improves the function of the physical man, his glands, nerves, blood, cells, lymph, and so on. However, I believe mind, and whatever is spirit for that matter, and I suppose some might even say whatever is God—you need not agree with me, Sheldon, this is merely my opinion—resides within every cell and atom of man’s body. Thus to improve man’s cellular, muscular, glandular, nervous, and other functions is to at least make more possible, more probable, parallel improvement in the functioning of brain, of mind, perhaps even of spirit.…”

  He folded up his thumb and glanced at me. “Be that as it may, Erovite’s enemies, in the main, oppose it because it isn’t spiritual enough.”

  I blinked. “Come again? Neither is aspirin. Or how about vegetable soup—”

  “I may have misled you. We are not speaking of pills to suppress symptoms or even overprocessed foods to keep the body in a state of suspended animation. We are speaking of … well, of life, and that more abundantly. There is no question that Erovite stimulates, energizes, improves the physical body of most men and women who use it—I stress the physical—the flesh, the carnal, the animal body of man. Including, as we have discussed, as you know, the sexual or most ‘base’ part of his nature.”