Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  The House of the Damned is Fernycroft Towers,

  situated on the highest knoll for miles around, and built of gray stone which shone like silver in the sunshine after a rain. Its architecture resembled slightly the bastard Gothic to be found in many a German schloss of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But there was a freakish motif, more ancient and more sinister. Viewing it for the first time, an observer felt oppressed. Some young people who came to stare commented that it looked to them like a bit of scenery out of a film—“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” or “The Golem.”

  The owner (though not the builder) of this monstrosity is C. A. Braithwaite, a wealthy widower and architect who “was credited with never refusing shelter and food to a genuine scientist threatened with starvation in the years of world depression, or unable to hold his usual post through a breakdown in health.” Very noble, to be sure. The only problem is, Braithwaite seems unable to tell the difference between a “genuine scientist” and a crackpot of the first magnitude. Witness the three “scientists” presently residing under his roof:

  Peter Unger, a deformed neotroglodyte who believes “that ancient lie . . . that the whole of Long Island lies over a big river flowing down from Connecticut, under the Sound” and that “some day the shell of the island would cave in”; consequently he spends most of his time in a shaft deep underground, listening to subterranean vibrations by means of a “large, rubber-rimmed horn” and muttering things like “Domus Damnatus!” to himself. He is also a member of a secret society called the Royal Chancellors, a “murder fraternity” founded in medieval times that has helped infamous people (Cagliostro, Lord Bacon, Aaron Burr) disappear by faking their deaths through an elaborate substitution process.

  Dr. Leo Spinelli, an Italian alleged by one of Braithwaite’s servants to be conducting terrible experiments involving vivisection and cannibalism, but who is actually a religious fanatic engaged in transcribing the entire Bible on a one-inch square of glass.

  And Stonewall J. “Boomalacka” Browne, a former musician and former expert radio sound man, who now professes to be blind (ah, but is he?) and who delights in performing all sorts of outlandish practical jokes with sound effects. Such as imitating the death throes of a man being executed in the gas chamber of a Nevada prison—a truly amazing feat considering that Nevada has never used that means of capital punishment.

  Rud provides no explanation as to why Stonewall J. is called Boomalacka. It may just be that Rud had an inordinate fondness for the word, both as a name and as a descriptive adjective. In his last novel, the 1941 Western, Black Creek Buckaroo, published under the pseudonym Anson Piper, he has one of the characters say, “Hell’s bells an’ boomalacka bunions!” As to what “boomalacka bunions” might be, your guess is as good as mine.

  This is what Boomalacka Browne looks like:

  [He] looked seven feet in height, framed for an instant there in the door. He was clothed all in black, in what looked like a priest’s robe, coming all the way to his feet. The cowl was turned back; and out of it projected a stalk-like neck with protuberant Adam’s apple. The neck was dead white, and so long it looked as if it might snap, like a curved, crisp leaf of endive. The staring face above it was white, too, and the irregularly dome-shaped skull was yellowish white and repulsively scaly. There was not a hair on the man’s head, not even an eyelash or eyebrow. . . . He walked with a multitude of mincing, shuffling steps. And he kept both hands and wrists buried in the sleeves of his robe, like a Chinaman!

  But these are not the only loonies connected with the House of the Damned. Another is the brash young man calling himself Nathan Ertz, who applies for the job of Braithwaite’s personal secretary by presenting him with a card on which is written, “I have decided to accept you as my employer.” (Nathan Ertz. N. Ertz. Get it?) And then there’s Braithwaite, who is not too well wrapped himself. He is engaged in designing a fantastic new style of skyscraper—“the tower of mirrors,” the model of which he intends to enter in a $100,000 contest sponsored by a New York newspaper. He believes (and Jigger agrees with him) that this skyscraper will revolutionize the building of tall buildings.

  In the tower all space required for interior lighting, beauty and strength had been given to windows and wall partitions, of course. The outside spaces between the windows, however, differed from such spaces on any other skyscraper ever imagined. They were covered neatly and completely by convex mirrors, arranged so the beams from their diffusing surfaces were directed downward!

  ‘This will make it glitter in the sun, as though shingled in newly burnished silver!” said Braithwaite, showing his old clay model to Ertz. “But more than that, it will light some of the streets below, ending canyon darkness in cities! If future builders follow the plan, the time may come when every street in downtown New York has its full amount of sunlight!”

  But all is not well (obviously) among this bevy of banana-heads. Braithwaites’s original secretary, a nondescript young woman, is hideously—and “impossibly”—stabbed to death while walking alone across otherwise unmarked snow. Since there seems to be no motive for this heinous crime, Braithwaite calls in Jigger. Owing to the fact that he is giving testimony in another case, Masters can’t look into the matter personally; he assigns one of his helpers, a fellow named Barnes, to take up residence at Ferny croft Towers as Braithwaite’s new secretary and see what he can find out. Which isn’t much. Almost immediately Barnes is blown up by a gallon jug of nitro dumped into the radiator of Braithwaite’s Chrysler—an explosion that creates havoc “comparable only to the sudden opening of a new volcanic crater.”

  Is some madman bent on murdering private secretaries? Is that what is going on at the House of the Damned? It seems so when N. Ertz, Braithwaite’s third secretary, turns up missing and is presumed murdered. But no motive so prosaic is behind these fiendish deeds, and those which follow: Peter Unger attacks Jigger, on leave from his trial testimony, and whittles him up with a jackknife. While Masters is recuperating in the hospital, Unger is murdered in his jail cell by means of a poisoned note he is instructed to eat after reading. Then Boomalacka Browne is stabbed to death in his room at Ferny croft Towers, and in the search that follows, a diabolical “murder machine” (one even more diabolical, in fact, than Frederick Eberhard’s loaded paper bag) is found under Dr. Spinelli’s bed. It is the very same murder machine, we subsequently learn, that was used to knock off Braithwaite’s female secretary in the field of unmarked snow.

  The weapon was most evidently home-made, but none the less dangerous. It resembled a crossbow in principle, with an extremely powerful coil spring taking the place of the bow.

  The missile lay on the floor beside the gun. It was a slender, hiltless stiletto with a diamond-shaped blade, and a purple stone set in the end of the handle.

  “. . . But how does it work? That fish reel thing on top of the gun?”

  “That ought to explain a whole lot,” answered the detective. “There is a loop—right here—at the end of the fish-line on that reel. Do you get it? That loop fits around the butt of the handle of this little stiletto. When the spring was set, the stiletto was placed in the groove—here.” He pointed. “Then the gun was aimed, and the trigger released. The stiletto leapt out swifter than any hand could wield it in striking. Because of its slender blade, it penetrated plenty far—going right through Sally Holworth’s neck, as you’ll recall. . . .

  “Recall the path, lined with silver cedars? The murderer . . . lay in wait somewhere at a little distance, where she would not see him. Then he shot the stiletto into her neck, seized the fish line, and yanked back the weapon. That was what made the tiny smudge of blood you discovered on the cedar. The search for footprints was made immediately around the body. No doubt by the time any one circled wide enough to find where the killer actually lurked, there were scores of lines of footprints made by the searchers themselves. At first glance it doesn’t look possible for a girl to be stabbed, when no living soul is within five yards of her!”<
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  Well, the cops arrest Dr. Spinelli (a.k.a. “the Wop”) for the murders, over Jigger’s protests that the Eyetalian is innocent. And of course Masters is right: Spinelli himself becomes the next victim, when he is dispatched in his jail cell, in this case by a silenced revolver fired through the bars of the window. Now confusion reigns. Is there a lunatic killer on the loose, bent on exterminating bunches of private secretaries and weirdo scientists? Braithwaite and the press and the general populace, understandably enough, are up in arms and demand positive action. But the cops don’t know what to do. As one of them says defensively, referring to Braithwaite’s scorn, “These darned rich people think us detectives mere ringworms on the rump of crime!”

  The cops may be baffled, but Jigger isn’t. And the killer knows it, which is why he tries to murder Masters (and Tom Gildersleeve) with a hydrofluoric acid gas bomb. When this ploy fails, his doom is sealed. Relentlessly, implacably, Jigger tracks him down and exposes him and his devilish plot.

  It seems that N. Ertz wasn’t really murdered after all; his true name is Louis LeNarre, he’s the megalomaniacal secretary to an explosives manufacturer, and his elaborate plot was conceived to murder Braithwaite and take over his identity because they look enough alike to be twins! So he joined the Royal Chancellors murder fraternity, bumped off Braithwaite’s other two secretaries so he could become the new secretary and thus study the architect’s habits and life style from within, bumped off the scientists for various (and not very plausible) reasons, and finally offed Braithwaite by “liquefying” him in quicklime and nitric acid and flushing him down the drain. After which he assumed Braithwaite’s identity and somehow managed to fool even those who knew the architect intimately—everyone, in fact, except Jigger Masters.

  As for the ingenious manner in which Ertz/LeNarre murdered Boomalacka Browne, the master crime analyst explains it thusly:

  “That slaying of Boomalacka Browne was crudely staged, yet clever. There were only two possible killers— Dr. Spinelli and the man then accepted as Braithwaite. And the latter was naked and in a shower bath. There was only one possible way by which Braithwaite could have done the deed. That was to climb over the roof—naked, and at a temperature of twenty-five degrees above zero Fahrenheit, mind you!—enter Browne’s room to wait behind the screen, and knife him. Then, still naked, to slip along the ledge to Spinelli’s room, leave the accusing evidence [the murder machine] under the latter’s bed, and dash back over the roof to his bathroom!”

  Jigger’s third case for Macaulay, The Stuffed Men, is much different in substance, if not in alternative pizzazz. This one is a “Yellow Peril” novel. For those of you with no outraged sense of literary history, Yellow Peril novels are flights of fancy in which the villains are evil Orientals bent on taking over the world, enslaving the white races, and turning them into laundrymen, servants, and coolie labor. Usually these wicked Orientals are Chinese, although the Japanese have been victimized often enough, particularly between 1936 and 1945. If there are any Yellow Peril novels in which the villainous Oriental hordes are Korean, Laotian, Cambodian, or Vietnamese, I’m not aware of them. Those folks have been getting short shrift everywhere this century, it seems.

  Yellow Peril novels are all racist, of course. But then so were a lotof people in England and the United States between the two world wars, when Fu Manchu and his ilk were at their most appealing. All bogeymen in those days had either yellow or black skin; and yellow was preferable because of the much-publicized (and specious) “inscrutability” of the Oriental races. Sax Rohmer’s first adventure about the mad “devil doctor” with the long fingernails, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu (1913), met with instant success on both sides of the Atlantic; subsequent adventures made him a best-selling author. And where best-sellers lurk, imitators and exploiters flock in droves in the hope that a smidgen or two of success—not to mention success’s filthy lucre—will rub off on them. Scores of writers tried their hands at the Yellow Peril novel in the twenties and thirties, including such alternative impressarios as Tom Roan and A. E. Apple (see Gun in Cheek). Anthony Rud, among other Macauley authors, likewise decided to cut himself a slice of the Oriental-villain pie.

  This is the slice he cut:

  In the middle of the night a couple of mysterious intruders enter the home of Ralph Marriott, a wealthy collector of Ming porcelains, throw a cloth bag “smelling musty and fetid” over his head, tie him up, set a small charge of dynamite with an “instantaneous fuse” that blows up his entire collection, and then fade away into the night. Enraged by what he perceives as police indifference to this outrage, Marriott tells Lieutenant Connor that he’ll hire a private dick to investigate and “show you up like a—a Fourth of July pinwheel trying to be an autogyro!” The private dick he hires, naturally, is Jigger Masters.

  While Masters pokes around Marriott’s house, looking for clues, the wealthy collector’s health rapidly deteriorates: he struggles to breathe, his face becomes “congested and cyanosed,” and finally he dies gasping. As a post-mortem is about to be conducted by the medical examiner, Dr. Cortelyou, “something unnatural and hideous” happens to the corpse, causing it to turn bright yellow and to bulge monstrously as if something were growing inside it. And indeed something is growing inside—strange bacteriophages, or “ciliated zoospores,” that have literally stuffed Marriott with a rampant yellow fluff. “In some places,” Cortelyou tells Jigger, “like the abdominal cavity, it’s grown so luxuriantly that it looks like fungus in a tropical jungle.”

  What is this horrible saffron substance? Why was Marriott killed with it and his Ming collection blown to smithereens? Jigger’s investigation subsequently determines that the dastards responsible are members of the Tao Tong, a Chinese secret society also known as the Illustrious Society of Executioners and the Society of Fictile Artisans. (“Fictile,” in case you didn’t know, means “molding plastic materials, precious stuff like those Ming porcelains.”) But their motives remain shrouded in mystery.

  After an attempt on Masters’s life—the Tao Tong puts a cobra wearing a collar imprinted with its seal in his bed—he finds out that a couple of other men have been stuffed with “natatory vegetables,” notably a Japanese collector of porcelains named Ichiara Kagodi, who frequented a Manhattan art gallery owned by Devereaux Yancey (who also turns up murdered, though not stuffed). And another of Yancey’s customers, it develops, is an old codger named Seth Bryson, a recluse who owns and lives in a freak Essex County house known as the Brick Wart.

  So Jigger and his assistants hie themselves off to the Wart, which is “a monstrosity, impure and sinister,” standing in the midst of a “milky yard of solid brick, where stood a white stag of solid iron, and a coterie of little, bearded gnomes play[ing] bowls like the men of Henrik Hudson.” The house itself looks “like a bubble, puffed up out of boiling syrup. There was not an angle, not a straight line to the exterior. Instead of rising sheer on a vertical basement, like any sensible dwelling, the brick floor of the yard slanted up more and more sharply, not reaching vertical until the ceiling line of the first floor was attained.”

  Inside this architectural gargoyle, Jigger finds Seth Bryson’s granddaughter, Lois Ingalls, held captive in a weird room on the second floor. He also finds a bunch of Tao Tong villains who have “hideous noseless faces” and hands that “glint brassily like the paws of an iguana lizard, clutching for its prey.” Masters attempts to rescue Lois, only to find himself trapped in the room along with her. Then the fiends spray him with a gas that knocks him out . . . and when he wakes up, he is tied to a table and vis-à-vis with the head of the Society of Fictile Artisans, the vicelord Wun Wey.

  Now Wun Wey is a very evil Chinese, one with an “ice-cold brain.” He orders two of his henchmen to rip off Jigger’s shirt and then to place an inverted silver bowl on the detective’s abdomen. Then he himself pours two or three ounces of “a pungent, colorless liquid into the recessed top of the bowl,” strikes a match, and sets the liquid on fire. Then he opens
a cage which he happens to have handy for just such torture sessions, hauls out a rat, and slips the rat under the fiery silver bowl on Masters’ naked flesh. “In a moment or two,” he says with great relish, “the creature will begin to feel the uncomfortable heat. Then he will try harder to escape his small and stifling prison. He has long, sharp teeth, of course. And the only way he could hope to chew a way to freedom, would be downward.”

  Well, you or I would no doubt feel terror in a similar situation. Even the fearless Jigger grimaces with momentary apprehension. “Was that peculiar rubbing sensation,” he thinks, “the first bite of the hot rat?”

  But no, it wasn’t. In fact, the rat never does bite our hero. When the rodent fails to perform as intended, the impatient Wun Wey whisks away the bowl to reveal a round, circular spot on Masters’s abdomen that “glows dull red from the heat,” and in the middle of the spot, the body of the dead rat. What killed the creature? Jigger’s ingenuity, that’s what. Seems that Masters, foreseeing the possibility he might be captured and tortured by the noseless monsters, had earlier applied collodion laced with prussic acid to his abdomen; the collodion had dried into a sheet “like a mustard plaster,” and the hot rat had croaked when he gnawed on it.