by Mel Gilden
“We’re having chicken,” Mom said. “Stay and eat.”
“Not tonight, Mom. Astraea and I have things to do.” I stood up, hoping my parents would take the hint. Dad picked up a magazine; for him Astraea and I were no longer there.
“Of course,” Mom said without a trace of sarcasm. “I understand. When you get work, you have to work.”
She walked us back to the front door, and we had almost escaped when she called out to us. “Don’t forget to pick your father up from the airport tomorrow.”
“Right,” I replied. “The mystery convention. The broom lands at four p.m.”
“If I’m lucky,” Dad called from the other room.
We all said good-bye again, and I managed to get to the car with Astraea. “Dinner?” I suggested when we were inside and the doors were locked.
“I think not. I am full of muffins and chili dogs.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “Just checking. Don’t want any of my clients starving.”
“Not likely,” she said.
We drove up to Ventura Boulevard, which was the usual conga line of heavy traffic. After creeping for a long block I found Words, etc. and was able to park in a big lot around back. It would be almost an hour before the signing began, and hanging out in my car seemed a little low-class.
As we walked to a nearby coffee joint we passed the bookstore window in which a banner announcing Vic Tortuga’s appearance that evening was displayed along with a creative arrangement of his books. Eager-looking folks were already waiting in line for him.
Inside the coffee joint we found an empty table and sat down. After we ordered, the waiter stood for a moment more than he needed to just looking at Astraea, then remembered himself and headed for the kitchen.
“So,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.”
I didn’t have to ask Astraea twice, but immediately got an earful. She had two sisters, Eunomia and Irene. Eunomia’s job was to see that laws were observed, and Irene was in charge of peace.
“Hmm,” I remarked as I built a fanciful wall from individually wrapped sugar cubes. “What do you do when you’re not running around with private investigators?” I asked.
“My sisters and I dance with the Graces.”
“That sounds like fun,” I said. “Anywhere special? Some club in Hollywood?” I immediately wanted to reach into the air and grab back that sarcastic crack, but it was too fast for me. I was glad to see that it left no mark on Astraea.
“You don’t believe me,” she said evenly. It was just a statement of fact.
“I don’t know, myself,” I said. “I saw that chair collapse under Nosmo King. Did you do it, or was I just lucky?”
“I am Justice,” she said.
“I’ve never met a goddess before. I don’t suppose many people have.”
“We’re around,” she said.
Our steaming coffee mugs came and the discussion stopped until the waiter went away, which took a while. He seemed very concerned about whether Astraea had enough cream and sugar.
“Do you know how your grandmothers chose me for this job?” I asked as I stirred my coffee with a wooden stick.
“It was fated,” Astraea said.
I nodded. Given what I knew—or what I thought I knew—about Astraea, her answer didn’t exactly surprise me.
“Well,” I said, “bringing folks to justice is my business. If you’re Justice, we’ll get along fine.”
“It’s true,” she said.
While we sipped, the counter did a swift take-out business, mostly selling to people carrying Vic Tortuga’s book. When we were done with our coffee, I paid up, and we walked down to see the man himself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MEETING THE NEW TOLSTOY
With the lowering of the sun, the day had cooled considerably. I loaned Astraea a not-very-fashionable jacket that had been balled up in the trunk of my car. She made it look like a designer original going to the Oscars.
I got Dad’s copy of The Rack of Time from the front seat, took a moment to scrawl something on the title page, then joined Astraea in the line outside the bookstore. It now extended down the block past the coffee store that was doing terrific business and a stationers that was not.
Getting into the bookstore took about twenty minutes. Before Astraea and I walked through the door three different guys asked me if I had any spare change, and a car full of college guys whistled and made remarks about Astraea as they cruised by. I didn’t have any spare change, but Astraea gave each panhandler a quarter. She smiled at the guys in the car, embarrassing them. I thought they might come around the block again, but they didn’t.
Astraea and I were quiet, but the people around us had no trouble finding things to talk about. Apparently, many of them had met Vic Tortuga before at other public events. He was something of a local character, known to have a smart mouth and quite a high opinion of himself. A tall, pretty blonde in jeans and a sweater that fit her like a second skin claimed to have had at least one run-in with Mr. Tortuga. To hear her tell it, he’d said to her, “Hey, baby, what do you say to a little fuck?” And she had replied to him, “Hello, little fuck.” She and her two male friends could barely contain their laughter until she’d finished, and when she did they howled like wild things out of the Mato Grosso.
Inside, the store had the heavy comfortable smell of new paper. It was warm, too, and Astraea soon took off the jacket I’d loaned her and hung it over one arm. The autograph line wound among the stacks, giving everyone an opportunity to get a good look at the stock. Somewhere up ahead Vic Tortuga was holding forth. He made passes at the women in the voice of W. C. Fields so that nobody would take offense. Often, laughter spumed into the air as if from a fountain.
The line curled around a bookcase, and I saw Vic Tortuga for the first time. In person he looked a lot like the guy in the photo on the back flap of the book. The main difference was that the curl of hair on the real Vic was plastered by sweat against his forehead, and his face was a little flushed with excitement. Yes, he was a man who liked to meet his public.
Another difference was that he had a companion, a tall rangy woman with short dark hair. Her jeans were fawn colored, and her blue top clung as if it were wet, though I don’t think it was. The plunge of her neckline wasn’t exactly in good taste, but it was mighty interesting. She had a hard face that was beautiful in a conventional Hollywood way. If she were in the movies, she would play the best friend of the hooker with the heart of gold.
The companion waved her hand over each book as the customer placed it on the table, causing the book to open to the title page by itself and slide across the table to where Vic could reach it. Once he asked her for a glass of water, and she made it appear from a fall of fairy dust. Parlor tricks, the kind of stuff people learn in night school.
Vic Tortuga noticed Astraea when there were still five people ahead of us in line. He kept looking up at her and smiling his most winning famous-author smile. Astraea smiled back, of course. Vic was encouraged by this. He didn’t know that she smiled back at everybody. Vic’s dark-haired companion glanced at Astraea, frowned as if she’d detected a bad smell.
When my turn came, I set the book down on the table. The companion didn’t bother to do her magic over it, and Vic had to grab it with a boardinghouse reach. “Who would you like this to?” he asked me while looking at Astraea. Then he looked down at the book. “What the hell is this?” he asked.
“Just a question,” I said. I had written “Where is Eulalie Tortuga?” on the title page just about where Vic Tortuga would normally sign his name. “Do you know the answer?” I asked.
He got a cagey expression on his face, as if he’d just thought of an angle. “I might,” he said. “Who wants to know?”
By this time the people behind Astraea and me were rubber-necking to see what the holdup was and grumbling to themselves.
“I’m a detective,” I said, “but this is not the time or the place for a discussion. You’re disappoi
nting your public.”
He looked back along the line. “I guess I am.” He nodded at Astraea. “Is she with you?”
“That’s right.”
“Lyda,” he said to the dark-haired companion, “give these nice people my home address. We’ll all have a drink together when this is over.”
“Is that wise, Vic?” Lyda asked.
“Let me do the thinking, honey,” Vic said. “Just give ’em the address.”
“Are you going to sign that guy’s book?” a man about three back asked in a high voice. Rarely had I seen a man so thin.
“I was waiting for you to sign it,” Vic said nastily, and the people in line laughed. Even the thin guy laughed. “Do you really want this signed?” Vic asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s for my father. He thinks you’re the new Tolstoy.”
“Some people are easily amused. What’s his name?”
I told him, and Vic scrawled something in the book. “Later,” he said and gestured me aside.
Astraea and I went over to where Lyda was waiting in the cookbook section. She had written an address on a scrap of paper that had been in the depths of her purse for a few months. “It’s near the top of Beverly Glen,” she said as she handed the address to me.
“Thanks,” I said. I could see something was eating her.
Lyda took a long speculative look at Astraea. “You’re the type,” she said.
“What type?” Astraea asked.
“The type,” she repeated. “His type. I’m his type, too. The world is full of his type.” She didn’t sound happy about what the world was full of.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Astraea asked. “He’ll never be lonely.”
“I guess you don’t know much about loneliness.”
“Excuse me?”
“Look, Lyda,” I said, “I don’t know what sort of cozy little setup you and Vic Tortuga have going, but we’re not here to throw any sort of wrench into it. I’m a private detective working on a case. Astraea is my assistant. We want to ask Mr. Tortuga a few questions. That’s all.”
“That might not be all Vic has in mind.”
Astraea and I watched her march back to the table where Vic Tortuga was signing books. She was not quite the stunner that Astraea was, but that didn’t mean she was difficult to look at. Walks like hers started fires.
“What was that all about?” Astraea asked.
“She thinks that Vic has a romantic interest in you.”
“Vic’s with her, isn’t he?”
“That’s right. I guess she thinks that might not make any difference to Vic.”
“It makes a difference to me,” she explained firmly.
“I thought it might. Let’s get some air.”
We left the store, and I took Dad’s book back to my car, where I locked it in the trunk along with Misty’s log. For a while we browsed up and down the shopping center. In the supermarket Astraea caused two guys to crash their shopping carts together, but that was the only excitement. After a while we wound up sitting behind Vic as he signed books for a few stragglers.
When he was done, he stretched mightily and yawned. “You have the address?” he asked.
I gave him the number. “Top of Beverly Glen.”
“Right,” he said. “You can follow me. Let’s go.”
We didn’t leave right away, of course. Vic signed a stack of books the store manager had ready for him, then the two of them spent some time pulling each other’s legs and laughing about it.
When we went out to the parking lot at last, Vic and Lyda got into a small sporty jelly-bean of a car. A moment later, two industrial strength will o’ the wisps ignited over the front bumper. Astraea and I got to my car as quickly as we could, started it, and pulled in behind Vic’s car. It had the license VT, which probably didn’t mean Vermont.
Vic took off with a roar, and for a minute or two I was close behind him. He couldn’t maneuver much on Ventura Boulevard, crowded as it was. But as soon as he turned left onto Beverly Glen, he was off like a shot. He seemed a lot more interested in showing me what a hot driver he was than in making it easy for me to follow him.
I decided that playing his game was pointless, even if my car could have kept up. Astraea reminded me of the address, and some time later we found it, as advertised, near Mulholland, which ran across the spine at the top of the Hollywood Hills. I parked. Inhaling the dry spicy perfume of the hills at night, I walked next to Astraea back along a high hedge to Vic’s house, which was just a mass of shadows against the deeper darkness of the hills. We walked up a path set with brick in a herringbone pattern to the front door, where he’d left the porch light on, which was nice of him. It illuminated the three steps up to the big wooden slab that served as a front door. I knocked.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DIALOG OVER A PB & J SANDWICH
Lyda opened the door wide and seemed not very happy to be doing it. We walked into an entryway paved with black stone and filled with soft jazzy music. Apparently speakers were hidden everywhere because the music stayed with us as we followed Lyda into the black and pink kitchen, where Vic Tortuga was standing at a counter building himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a saucer. Lyda sat down on a stool near the breakfast nook with her knees almost up to her chin, no more interested in what we said or did than she was in the social life of the paint on the walls.
The kitchen was neat, almost neurotically so, and well-lit by indirect fixtures that artistically tossed the light around. Vic ignored us while he methodically finished making the sandwich. He put away the jelly and the peanut butter and the bread, and dropped a knife and a spoon into the aluminum sink.
“You know who I am,” he said. “The cute-as-a-button lady on the stool is Lyda Firebough. And who the hell are you?”
“My name is Turner Cronyn. As I told you at the bookstore, I’m a private detective. This is Astraea Scales, my assistant.”
“Interesting name, Astraea. Greek?”
“Latin,” Astraea replied.
“Of course,” he said as if he’d known it all along.
He lifted the saucer to his mouth to catch the crumbs and took a bite out of his sandwich. “P B and J?” he offered while chomping on it with satisfaction.
“We can see that you’re busy, Mr. Tortuga,” I said. “If you’ll just answer a few questions, Ms. Scales and I will be on our way.”
Vic nodded with his mouth full and made a magnanimous gesture with one hand that I took to mean that he was ready to cooperate in any way he could.
“We are investigating the Eulalie Tortuga case. If you can tell us where she lived, we won’t trouble you any further.”
While he nodded, Vic continued to eat. He poured himself a glass of milk and drank about half of it before he answered. “Who’s your client, shamus?”
“Nix,” I said. “Confidential.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“That’s right. Except that you and Eulalie were married once. I assume you still have some feeling for her. You might want to know who made her a zombie, and why, and whether she can be cured.”
“The police are already on the case. That’s why I pay taxes.”
“I have advantages the police don’t have.”
“Such as?”
I smiled at him.
For a moment he didn’t like that. He took a lot of trouble setting the empty saucer carefully in the sink, then brushing the crumbs off his hands over the saucer. He grinned at Astraea. “Maybe advantages such as your lovely assistant?”
Now that the conversation had gotten around to Astraea, Lyda began to smolder.
I knew Vic was just shooting in the dark, but if talking to Astraea would make him more cooperative, I could go along with the gag. “Maybe. She has a strong interest in justice.”
“I see. Well.” He suddenly put his arm through Astraea’s and guided her out of the room. “I have a strong interest in justice myself.”
When
they were gone, Lyda sighed but otherwise didn’t move.
“Mr. Tortuga seems to be something of a free thinker,” I said.
“He’s free with his hands, too. And he cares more about Eulalie than he pretends.”
I was pretty sure Astraea could take care of herself, but I moseyed out of the kitchen anyway and followed the sound of their voices to the living room—a large room with an enormous TV sphere at one end. Books crowded floor-to-ceiling bookcases everywhere except where there were windows. Vic and Astraea sat together knee to knee at the corner of the big L of a nubbly maroon couch that took up most of the floor space. I sat down on a matching lounger to one side and let my fingers play with the tiny knots on the fabric. Vic and Astraea pretended I wasn’t there and I let them pretend.
“You mean she’s here?” Astraea asked, astonished.
“Of course,” Vic said. Silly Astraea.
Lyda leaned against the entry to the living room with her arms crossed. She did not give off little puffs of smoke, but she wanted to.
“May I see her?” Astraea asked.
“Come on,” Vic invited. “You, too, Cronyn.”
As he passed her, Vic tried to pinch Lyda’s cheek, but she hit his hand away. He chuckled.
Vic led us along a short hallway to a closed door. “I hope you have a strong stomach,” he said. His expression was serious now, and he was sweating as he had been in the bookstore, though the air was not warm.
I just nodded, not knowing what to expect. I guessed that he was going to introduce us to Eulalie Tortuga, but I had no idea what condition she might be in now. Astraea looked interested but untroubled. Whatever she’d said to Vic had worked. As sometimes happens, Dad had been right about bringing her along.
Vic passed his hand over the cheap interior door lock, causing it to flicker briefly. He seemed nervous about actually opening the door. I wondered if my stomach was strong enough for whatever that room contained.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AN ENTERTAINING EVENING
