by Mel Gilden
The main street of the village wandered off into the shadows. Below us, the ocean grumbled and crashed against the pier’s pilings. I was suddenly taken with the immensity of the job I wanted to do. “This is a big place,” I said, sounding worried even to myself. “Louie could be anywhere, if he’s here at all.”
“He’s here,” Astraea said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Close,” she said.
Encouraged by Astraea’s certainty, I knocked over a big metal drum full of trash. It clattered, breaking the night into a million pieces. Or maybe it just made a loud noise. A sheet of old newspaper skidded down the street like a crippled ghost and wrapped itself around a drainpipe. Astraea followed me when I strolled down a path whistling “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I stopped at a door or two and shook each one by the handle, then knocked like a brush salesman with a quota. I looked around and saw nothing but the old buildings and my will o’ the wisp and Astraea. Standing still, and in that light, she didn’t just look like a goddess, but like a statue of a goddess—unchanged and unchanging after a thousand years.
We passed a rollercoaster that had cars like little rowboats lined up at the bottom, and a restaurant in the shape of a whale. At the far end of the street was a rail fence and beyond that the wet blackness of the big petulant ocean. As we passed a carousel decked with seahorses a raspy voice called out to us.
“Hey, you.”
I turned slowly, my body suddenly icy. Standing next to a yogurt shack was a short man wearing red pants and a white shirt open at the neck. He had spiky hair, a red face, and a cauliflower nose. He held no weapon in his hands, but he didn’t seem to be afraid.
“Louie ‘The Mouth’ Stuckler,” I said.
He reeled back into the shadows as if I’d struck him, but was back in a moment. I was very careful not to have moved. Astraea had not moved either—a statue again.
“Says who?”
“My name is Turner Cronyn. I’m a detective. Lyda Firebough sent me.”
He smiled. “You know Lyda? Gee.”
“Yeah, gee,” I agreed. “This is Ms. Scales, my associate.”
He enjoyed taking a good long look at her.
“Can we go somewhere and talk?” I asked.
He nodded, hooked a thumb and walked off without waiting to see if we would follow. My will o’ the wisp bobbed along next to me while we hurried to keep up with him. “Don’t I know you?” he asked over his shoulder.
“We met a couple of times,” I said. “Once outside the administration building of Stilthins Mort, and the other time just outside Misty Morning’s apartment after she was murdered.”
He stopped and looked at us with shock that seemed real enough for the emotion to be genuine. “Somebody whacked the babe?” he asked. He made wet noises with his mouth. “Who done it?”
“I thought you done it,” I said.
He stared at me, then looked away immediately. He eventually led us to a high clapboard fence and pushed near the top of one of the boards. The bottom pivoted upward and he ducked under. The will o’ the wisp and Astraea and I followed him.
The will o’ the wisp made sharp sinister shadows in the area beyond the fence, a giant’s playground of half-demolished buildings. Scattered around were mounds of dirt, stacks of splinter-like lumber, and piles of bricks with the corners broken off. Ancient pipes stuck out from the piles like the bones of prehistoric birds. I was glad for the will o’ the wisp as we followed Louie along a downward-slanting path into a hovel beneath a mountain of rubble that looked as if it might collapse at any moment.
Actually, Louie’s quarters were rather nice for a hovel. They contained a wing-backed chair designed to look as if it were made of coral, and a dinette set that had been new when Formica was the latest thing. Near the dinette set was a stove made from a big iron fish, and across from it was a huge soft bed that was lumpy with pillows, each of which had the sentiment “I Got Dunked At SNAP” stitched on it. The colors of anything were impossible to determine. The will o’ the wisp made no headway against the light coming from a TV set that faced the coral chair. On the screen, shapely women in a rainbow of short snug dresses were dancing with enthusiasm to an orchestra that had been wound up too tight. The place smelled of steamed cabbage and wet earth.
The will o’ the wisp floated over to the far wall where the entrance to a huge pipe made of corrugated metal led back into the mountain of rubble. Like a curious animal the will o’ the wisp looked into the dark tunnel and lit the first few feet of it.
“Get away from there,” Louie shouted in a voice much too loud for that small room.
I waved a hand, said a spell, and the will o’ the wisp dissolved into the air with a small sigh.
With the will o’ the wisp gone, the TV seemed much brighter. Louie stared at the TV sadly for a moment, then made a dismissive wave in its direction causing the picture to collapse and the music to stop in mid-squeal. With the TV off the room went black for a moment, and I stiffened, but then Louie stirred up his own will o’ the wisp, which cast watery yellow light from its place in the center of the ceiling. He swaggered to the coral throne, leaving Astraea with one of the kitchen chairs. It swayed a little as she sat down, but it held her. I stood behind her.
“How is Lyda?” Louie asked.
“Pretty good, I guess. She’s living with Vic Tortuga.”
“Who’s that?”
“Some writer.”
He nodded as if I’d really explained. “I love musicals,” he said with the enthusiasm of a man who could eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “The one I had on was ‘Feathers.’ Do you know it?”
“No.”
Astraea didn’t know it either.
Our answer disappointed him. His face curled up as if he was wondering if he could talk to people who didn’t know their musicals.
“Look, Louie, I want to talk to you about Misty Morning.”
He nodded, suddenly serious. “The dead babe. What is she to you?”
“I was hired to protect her, but I kind of muffed the job. Finding out who killed her seems to be the least I can do. How well did you know Misty?”
“I didn’t know her at all.”
His answer surprised me and I watched it drop to the floor like a rock. Astraea glanced around at me, eyebrows up. “Then why were you stalking her?” I asked.
Louie got comfortable on his throne. My line of questioning didn’t seem to upset him. Maybe he hadn’t killed her after all. “I wasn’t stalking her, not exactly. I was just watching her.”
“Why?”
“I was hired by a guy. He paid me off in musicals. I used to didn’t know ‘The Rains of Ranchipur’ from ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ He gave me the good stuff. You know ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ miss?”
“I may have seen it once or twice,” Astraea said. “Tell us about the man who hired you.”
Louie shrugged. “The guy seemed to know me, but I never seen him before.”
“What did he look like?” she asked, doing pretty well for a woman who claimed not to know anything about detective work.
Louie thought for a moment. “Just some guy,” he said.
“Tall, short?” I prodded. “Fat, thin? Did he have a mustache or beard? Was he bald? Two heads? Three eyes?”
Bewildered by my rapid-fire suggestions, Louie tried to tie his fingers into knots. “Just some guy,” he said again, this time with less certainty.
Lyda had been right: Louie was no brighter than a guttering candle. But I was already here, so I kept pitching. “Does this guy have a name?” I asked.
“Probably. Everybody has a name, huh?”
“You got me,” I admitted.
“You wanta see the end of ‘Feathers’?” Louie asked after a quiet moment during which no good ideas came to me. He stood up and stepped toward the TV.
“No, thanks. I won’t be in your way much longer. Do you know Eddie ‘The Ender’ Tips?”
<
br /> “Sure. Everybody knows Eddie.” The thought pleased him.
“If you didn’t kill Misty, maybe he did it.”
“Neither one of us killed nobody,” Louie stated.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because keres don’t kill people. It ain’t our job. You know what a keres is?”
“Sure. Ms. Scales told me,” I remarked. “Ms. Astraea Scales.”
“Astraea?” he said as if I’d confused him again. He stared hard at her. “It is you, ain’t it?” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she said.
“I didn’t recognize you at first. I guess nobody expects to see no celebs in their own neighborhood.”
“No need to apologize,” she said kindly, and waved away his discomfort.
He smiled shyly and looked at the floor.
“I hired Mr. Cronyn to find out how Eulalie Tortuga became a zombie,” she explained.
“You know,” Louie said, “just like I know. To make a zombie you have to remove the soul of a person who ain’t scheduled to die and somehow keep it removed. It ain’t possible.”
“You sound like a man who’s tried,” she remarked.
Louie said nothing, but looked mournfully at the blank TV screen.
“Eddie found a way,” I said.
“Yeah, right.”
“He killed Misty Morning to get her Blue Diamond, a dingus that makes what Misty called a knot. You shove a soul into the knot and it doesn’t come out.”
“Really?”
“It’s a theory, anyway.”
Louie considered the possibilities. “Eddie might have taken the Blue Diamond thing, but he didn’t kill Misty. No keres could. I told you that.”
“They can’t or they wouldn’t?”
“We can’t. I told you it ain’t our job.” Louie sounded pretty certain of this. And though he wasn’t very smart, the chances were good that he knew a lot more about his own business than I did. Besides, I didn’t think he had the nerve to lie about it in front of Astraea. “Misty ain’t a zombie, is she?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “She’s just dead.”
“Then somebody else musta killed her.” Louie was thinking hard, now. He used a forefinger to slowly stroke a nonexistent mustache. “Maybe Eddie was assigned to pick up Misty’s soul when a human killed her. He might have arrived a little early and seen Misty using the Blue Diamond. After somebody else killed her, he took her soul and the Blue Diamond, too.”
Maybe Louie wasn’t as stupid as I thought. He’d figured the situation pretty much as I had. “Okay, I like that fine. And I know that Eddie stole Eulalie Tortuga’s soul because she rejected him.”
“Could be,” Louie said. “He didn’t like it when she told him to get lost.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why Eddie is stealing the souls of guys who look like me.” It seemed needlessly complicated to explain the spell Lord Slex had put on my face.
“He’s doing that?”
“Unless there are two Blue Diamonds.”
“You think?”
“No. Yes, Eddie is making zombies out of guys who look like me.”
Louie continued stroking the space between his nose and his upper lip. “You never crossed Eddie, did you?” he asked.
“Not that I know of, but apparently he thinks I did, or would. He came after me and demanded I stay out of his way. To that point I didn’t even know he existed. Even now I have no idea what he wanted me to do or not do.”
Astraea was looking at me with interest. She hadn’t heard this part of the story before.
“Do you know what Eddie wanted?” I asked.
Louie shook his head slowly, more confused than ignorant. “Eddie’s a funny guy,” was all he said.
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“Eddie? Naw. All us keres keep pretty much to ourselves: no meetings, no conventions, no dinners.” He shook his head as if it were a sad old world and he knew it. “I hate renegades. When keres go bad, they stink on ice. They spoil things for everybody.”
“You’re right about that,” Astraea said.
I tapped Astraea on the shoulder and she stood up. “Thanks for your help, Louie,” I said.
Louie nodded as if he were thinking about something else. “You know about Merlin?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Lyda told me.”
“You might try talking to him. He and Eddie were pretty tight for a while back in Prohibition days.”
It seemed like a good idea except that I didn’t know Merlin’s real identity, or even if he was still alive. “Do you think Misty found out who Merlin was?” I asked.
“If she knew,” Louie said, “she was the only one.”
“You don’t know who he was?”
“No. Never. Unless he was Brent Martin. That’s who Merlin looked like. But I never saw him dance or sing or nothing like that. Sure you guys won’t stay to see the end of ‘Feathers’? Lotsa good dancing.” Louie was almost pleading.
He was obviously a lonely guy and I hated to turn him down, but I had a lot to do. “No, thanks,” I said.
“Perhaps some other time,” Astraea said.
“Can you guys find your way out?” he asked, his hand already raised, fingers extended, ready to gesture the TV back to life.
“We’ll be fine,” Astraea said.
I conjured up a will o’ the wisp and it led us out of Louie’s hovel. We walked back through the fishing village with the wind off the ocean pushing us along.
“So you’ve seen Eddie twice now,” Astraea remarked.
“Yes. The first time in Harold Silverwhite’s lab. I don’t know why he was there. If keres can’t kill people, he wasn’t there to kill me. And he didn’t have the Blue Diamond yet, or he would have stolen my soul.”
She nodded but remained calm. “Perhaps he was just trying to frighten you into cooperating.”
“Perhaps. If that was his intention he did a piss poor job of it. Even if I wanted to cooperate I couldn’t because I didn’t know what he wanted me to do.” I stopped and snapped my fingers. “I bet he didn’t know either or he would have told me.” I smiled, liking this new notion. “Any idea what a keres would want from a mortal such as myself?”
For just a moment she looked as confused as Louie. Being a goddess, she might have reasons for not telling that I had no way of guessing. “No,” she said at last. “What will you do now?”
We walked through the tunnel and back out into the open. The chain link fence was before us, and beyond that my little Puck. “I’ll drive you home and then go home myself. When I get there, I’ll—well, I’ll do what needs to be done. I can’t put it off any longer. I just hope I live through it.”
“You’ll live.”
“Is that official?”
“No. Just a wish.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
A VERY SPECIAL INDIVIDUAL
We got our beautiful drive at last. If I’d had a rag top, I would have lowered it then. In many ways that late-night drive along Highway 1 was a classic Los Angeles experience involving a beautiful blonde, her hair blowing in the wind, sitting next to her handsome boyfriend, both looking out at the calm ocean, moonlight glinting off the scalloped edges of the waves. It was a perfect fantasy come true except that the beautiful blonde was a goddess with a predilection for virginity, and her handsome boyfriend was a cheap shamus. Not to mention that I couldn’t lower the top on my car without a machine shop. Besides, I had a lot on my mind. Try as I would, I couldn’t quite manage to feel wild and unfettered.
I took Astraea back to Enough Rope. We sat in the car for a moment before she went in. “I think I’ll visit Lord Slex tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe invite Vic Tortuga and Lyda Firebough, and the other lords, too. Want to come?”
“You know who killed Misty Morning?” Astraea asked.
“Let’s say I have a suspicion.”
“And why Eddie ‘The Ender’ Tips bothered to make those three other men into zombies? And why the
attempt on your father?”
“Not to mention why Eddie threatened me. I have no idea,” I admitted. “But I think we’ll find all that out tomorrow, too.
“Very well,” she said as she cracked the door on her side. “I will drive over to your apartment in the morning.” And then she was gone, like a deer leaping from a patch of moonlight. No kiss again, but I was getting used to it now.
It was late when I got back to my apartment complex, the kind of lateness that doesn’t come in clocks. I was still muddled by thoughts of Astraea and Misty’s murder and so on, so I had to go back to my car to get Misty’s log book out of my trunk. I carried it against my chest as I took the elevator to my floor and let myself into my apartment.
Later, wearing nothing but a terrycloth robe of uncertain age, design, and color, and formerly white cotton socks, I sat down at my desk with Misty’s log. If Harold Silverwhite couldn’t make anything of it, I don’t know why I thought I could. Still, I felt obligated to try.
I admit that it was past my bedtime, but that fact alone shouldn’t have accounted for the impenetrability of Misty’s notes. I should have recognized words, symbols—something. But the twisted ink scribbles continued to make no more sense than snippets of barbed wire.
I stared at the stubborn pages for almost half an hour, flipping through them now and then, hoping to see some kind of pattern that Silverwhite may have missed. I was reminded unpleasantly of the homework I used to attempt for my Stilthins Mort classes. Then an idea came to me that made me smile. Fanning myself with the log book, I marched to the bathroom, and held the pages up to the mirror. I assumed that like Leonardo da Vinci, that other famous southpaw, Misty had written the log in mirror-writing. But no, even in reflection the writing remained chicken scratches. I closed the toilet cover and sat down with the log book in one hand.
