Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  “He’s dead.”

  I could smell the fear on Donny: there’s an unexplained trace of canine in my chromosomes. The hairs were prickling on the back of my neck, and I wondered if Donny’s fear was of the past or for the future. The pimples stood out in bas­-relief against his pale, lugubrious face.

  “I think he was murdered, Donny. You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “Me lying?” But his reaction was slow and feeble.

  “The dead man didn’t check in alone. He had a woman with him.”

  “What woman?” he said in elaborate surprise.

  “You tell me. Her name was Fern. I think she did the shoot­ing, and you caught her red-handed. The wounded man got out of the room and into his car and away. The woman stayed behind to talk to you. She probably paid you to dispose of his clothes and fake a new registration card for the room. But you both overlooked the blood on the floor of the bath­room. Am I right?”

  “You couldn’t be wronger, mister. Are you a cop?”

  “A private detective. You’re in deep trouble, Donny. You’d better talk yourself out of it if you can, before the cops start on you.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” His voice broke like a boy’s. It went strangely with the glints of gray in his hair.

  “Faking the register is a serious rap, even if they don’t hang accessory to murder on you.”

  He began to expostulate in formless sentences that ran to­gether. At the same time his hand was moving across the dirty gray blanket. It burrowed under the pillow and came out hold­ing a crumpled card. He tried to stuff it into his mouth and chew it. I tore it away from between his discolored teeth.

  It was a registration card from the motel, signed in a boyish scrawl: Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.

  Donny was trembling violently. Below his cheap cotton shorts, his bony knees vibrated like tuning forks. “It wasn’t my fault,” he cried. “She held a gun on me.”

  “What did you do with the man’s clothes?”

  “Nothing. She didn’t even let me into the room. She bundled them up and took them away herself.”

  ’Where did she go?”

  “Down the highway toward town. She walked away on the shoulder of the road and that was the last I saw of her.”

  “How much did she pay you, Donny?”

  “Nothing, not a cent. I already told you, she held a gun on me.”

  “And you were so scared you kept quiet until this morning?”

  “That’s right. I was scared. Who wouldn’t be scared?”

  “She’s gone now,” I said. “You can give me a description of her.”

  “Yeah.” He made a visible effort to pull his vague thoughts together. One of his eyes was a little off center, lending his face a stunned, amorphous appearance. “She was a big tall dame with blondey hair.”

  “Dyed?”

  “I guess so, I dunno. She wore it in a braid like, on top of her head She was kind of fat, built like a lady wrestler, great big watermelons on her. Big legs,”

  “How was she dressed?”

  “I didn’t hardly notice, I was so scared. I think she had some kind of a purple coat on, with black fur around the neck. Plenty of rings on her fingers and stuff.”

  “How old?”

  “Pretty old, I’d say. Older than me, and I’m going on thirty-nine.”

  “And she did the shooting?”

  “I guess so. She told me to say if anybody asked me, I was to say that Mr. Rowe shot himself.”

  “You’re very suggestible, aren’t you, Donny? It’s a dangerous way to be, with people pushing each other around the way they do.”

  “I didn’t get that, mister. Come again?” He batted his pale blue eyes at me, smiling expectantly.

  “Skip it,” I said and left him.

  A few hundred yards up the highway, I passed an HP car with two uniformed men in the front seat looking grim. Donny was in for it now. I pushed him out of my mind and drove across country to Palm Springs.

  Palm Springs is still a one-horse town, but the horse is a Palomino with silver trappings. Most of the girls were Palominos, too. The main street was a cross-section of Hollywood and Vine transported across the desert by some unnatural force and disguised in western costumes which fooled nobody. Not even me.

  I found Gretchen’s lingerie shop in an expensive-looking arcade built around an imitation flagstone patio. In the patio’s center a little fountain gurgled pleasantly, flinging small lariats of spray against the heat. It was late in March, and the season was ending. Most of the shops, including the one I entered, were deserted except for the hired help.

  It was a small shop, faintly perfumed by a legion of vanished dolls. Stocking and robes and other garments were coiled on the glass counters or hung like brilliant tree snakes on dis­play stands along the narrow walls. A henna-headed woman emerged from rustling recesses at the rear and came tripping towards me on her toes.

  “You are looking for a gift, sir?” she cried with a wilted kind of gaiety. Behind her painted mask, she was tired and aging, and it was Saturday afternoon and the lucky ones were dunking themselves in kidney-shaped swimming pools behind walls she couldn’t climb.

  “Not exactly. In fact, not at all. A peculiar thing happened to me last night. I’d like to tell you about it, but it’s kind of a complicated story.”

  She looked me over quizzically and decided that I worked for a living, too. The phony smile faded away. Another smile took its place, which I liked better. “You look as if you’d had a fairly rough night And you could do with a shave.”

  “I met a girl,” I said. “Actually she was a mature woman, a statuesque blond to be exact. I picked her up on the beach at Laguna, if you want me to be brutally frank.”

  “I couldn’t bear it if you weren’t. What kind of a pitch is this, brother?”

  “Wait. You’re spoiling my story. Something clicked when we met, in that sunset light, on the edge of the warm summer sea.”

  “It’s always bloody cold when I go in.”

  “It wasn’t last night. We swam in the moonlight and had a gay time and all. Then she went away. I didn’t realize until she was gone that I didn’t know her telephone number, or even her last name.”

  “Married woman, eh? What do you think I am, a lonely hearts club?” Still, she was interested, though she probably didn’t believe me. “She mentioned me, is that it? What was her first name?”

  “Fern.”

  “Unusual name. You say she was a big blonde?’’

  “Magnificently proportioned,” I said. “If I had a classical education I’d call her Junoesque.”’

  “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’’

  “A little.”

  “I thought so. Personally I don’t mind a little kidding. What did she say about me?”

  “Nothing but good. As a matter of fact, I was complimenting her on her—er—garments.”

  “I see.” She was long past blushing. “We had a customer last fall some time, by the name of Fern. Fern Dee. She had some kind of a job at the Joshua Club, I think. But she doesn’t fit the description at all. This one was a brunette, a middle-sized brunette, quite young. I remember the name Fern because she wanted it embroidered on all the things she bought. A corny idea if you ask me, but that was her girlish desire, and who am I to argue with girlish desires?”

  “Is she still in town?”

  “I haven’t see her lately, not for months. But it couldn’t be the woman you’re looking for. Or could it?”

  “How long ago was she in here?”

  She pondered. “Early last fall, around the start of the season. She only came in that once, and made a big purchase, stock­ings and nightwear and underthings. The works. I remember thinking at the time, here was a girlie who suddenly hit the chips but heavily.”

  “She might have put on weight since then, and dyed her hair. Strange things can happen to the female form.”

  “You’re telling me,” she said. “How old was—
your friend?”

  “About forty, I’d say, give or take a little.”

  “It couldn’t be the same one then. The girl I’m talking about was twenty-five at the outside, and I don’t make mistakes about women’s ages. I’ve seen too many of them in all stages, from Quentin quail to hags, and I certainly do mean hags.”

  “I bet you have.”

  She studied me with eyes shadowed by mascara and experience. “You a policeman?”

  “I have been.”

  “You want to tell mother what it’s all about?”

  “Another time. Where’s the Joshua Club?”

  “It won’t be open yet.”

  “I’ll try it anyway.”’

  She shrugged her thin shoulders and gave me directions. I thanked her.

  The Joshua Club occupied a plain-faced one-story building half a block off the main street. The padded leather door swung inward when I pushed it. I passed through a lobby with a retractable roof, which contained a jungle growth of banana trees.

  The big main room was decorated with tinted desert photomurals. Behind a rattan bar with a fishnet canopy, a white-coated Caribbean type was drying shot glasses with a dirty towel. His face looked uncommunicative.

  On the orchestra dais beyond the piled chairs in the dining area, a young man in shirt sleeves was playing bop piano. His fingers shadowed the tune, ran circles around it, played leapfrog with it, and managed never to hit it on the nose. I stood beside him for a while and listened to him work. He looked up finally, still strumming with his left hand in the bass. He had soft-centered eyes and frozen-looking nostrils and a whistling mouth.

  “Nice piano,” I said.

  “I think so.”

  “Fifty-second Street?”

  “It’s the street with the beat and I’m not effete.” His left hand struck the same chord three times and dropped away from the keys. “Looking for somebody, friend?”

  “Fern Dee. She asked me to drop by some time.”

  “Too bad. Another wasted trip. She left here end of last year, the dear. She wasn’t a bad little nightingale, but she was no pro, Joe, you know? She had it, but she couldn’t project it. When she warbled the evening died, no matter how hard she tried, I don’t wanna be snide.”

  “Where did she lam, Sam, or don’t you give a damn?”

  He smiled like a corpse in a deft mortician’s hands. “I heard the boss retired her to private life. Took her home to live with him. That is what I heard. But I don’t mix with the big boy socially, so I couldn’t say for sure that she’s impure. Is it any­thing to you?”

  “Something, but she’s over twenty-one.”

  “Not more than a couple of years over twenty-one.” His eyes darkened, and his thin mouth twisted sideways angrily. “I hate to see it happen to a pretty little twist like Fern. Not that I yearn—”

  I broke in on his nonsense rhymes: “Who’s the big boss you mentioned, the one Fern went to live with?”

  “Angel. Who else?”

  “What heaven does he inhabit?”

  “You must be new in these parts—” His eyes swiveled and focused on something over my shoulder. His mouth opened and closed.

  A grating tenor was behind me: “Got a question you want answered, bud?”

  The pianist went back to the piano as if the ugly tenor had wiped me out, annulled my very existence. I turned to its source. He was standing in a narrow doorway behind the drums, a man in his thirties with thick black curly hair and a heavy jaw blue-shadowed by a closely shaven beard. He was almost the living image of the dead man in the Cadillac. The likeness gave me a jolt. The heavy black gun in his hand gave me another.

  He came around the drums and approached me, bull-shoul­dered in a fuzzy tweed jacket, holding the gun in front of him like a dangerous gift. The pianist was doing wry things in quickened tempo with the dead march from Saul. A wit.

  The dead man’s almost-double waved his cruel chin and the crueler gun in unison. “Come inside, unless you’re a gov­ernment man. If you are, I’ll have a look at your credentials.”

  “I’m a freelance.”

  “Inside then.”

  The muzzle of the automatic came into my solar plexus like a pointing iron finger. Obeying its injunction, I made my way between empty music stands and through the narrow door behind the drums. The iron finger, probing my back, directed me down a lightless corridor to a small square office containing a metal desk, a safe, a filing cabinet. It was window­less, lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Under their pitiless glare, the face above the gun looked more than ever like the dead man’s face. I wondered if I had been mistaken about his deadness, or if the desert heat had addled my brain.

  “I’m the manager here,” he said, standing so close that I could smell the piney stuff he used on his crisp, dark hair. “You got anything to ask about the members of the staff, you ask me.”

  “Will I get an answer?”

  “Try me, bud.”

  “The name is Archer,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

  “Working for who?”

  “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I am, though, very much interested.” The gun hopped forward like a toad into my stomach again, with the weight of his shoulder behind it. “Working for who did you say?”

  I swallowed anger and nausea, estimating my chances of knocking the gun to one side and taking him bare-handed. The chances seemed pretty slim. He was heavier than I was, and held the automatic as if it had grown out of the end of his arm. You’ve seen too many movies, I told myself.

  I told him: “A motel owner on the coast. A man was shot in one of his rooms last night. I happened to check in there a few minutes later. The old boy hired me to look into the shooting.”

  “Who was it got himself ventilated?”

  “He could be your brother,” I said. “Do you have a brother?”

  He lost his color. The center of his attention shifted from the gun to my face. The gun nodded. I knocked it up and sideways with a hard left uppercut. Its discharge burned the side of my face and drilled a hole in the wall. My right sank into his neck. The gun thumped the cork floor.

  He went down but not out, his spread hand scrabbling for the gun, then closing on it. I kicked his wrist. He grunted, but wouldn’t let go of it. I threw a punch at the short hairs on the back of his neck. He took it and came up under it with the gun, shaking his head from side to side.

  “Up with the hands now,” he murmured. He was one of those men whose voices go soft and mild when they are in killing mood. He had the glassy impervious eyes of a killer. “Is Bart dead? My brother?”

  “Very dead. He was shot in the belly.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “Who shot him?” he said in a quite white-faced rage. The single eye of the gun stared emptily at my midriff. “It could happen to you, bud, here and now.”

  “A woman was with him. She took a quick powder after it happened.”

  “I heard you say a name to Alfie, the piano-player. Was it Fern?”

  “It could have been.”

  “What do you mean, it could have been?”

  “She was there in the room, apparently. If you can give me a description of her?”

  His hard brown eyes looked past me. “I can do better than that. There’s a picture of her on the wall behind you. Take a look at it. Keep those hands up high.”

  I shifted my feet and turned uneasily. The wall was blank. I heard him draw a breath and move, and tried to evade his blow. No use. It caught the back of my head. I pitched forward against the blank wall and slid down it into three di­mensions of blankness.

  The blankness coagulated into colored shapes. The shapes were half-human and half-beast and they dissolved and reformed. A dead man with a hairy breast climbed out of a hole and doubled and quadrupled. I ran away from them through a twisting tunnel which led to an echo chamber. Under the roaring surge of the nightmare music, a rasping ten
or was saying:

  “—I figure it like this. Vario’s tip was good. Bart found her in Acapulco, and he was bringing her back from there. She conned him into stopping off at this motel for the night. Bart always went for her.”

  “I didn’t know that,” a dry, old voice put in. “This is very interesting news about Bart and Fern. You should have told me before about this. Then I would not have sent him for her and this would not have happened. Would it, Gino?”

  My mind was still. partly absent, wandering underground in the echoing caves. I couldn’t recall the voices, or who they were talking about.. I had barely sense enough to keep my eyes closed and go on listening. I was lying on my back on a hard surface. The voices were above me.

  The tenor said: “You can’t blame Bartolomeo. She’s the one, the dirty treacherous lying little bitch.”

  “Calm yourself, Gino. I blame nobody. But more than ever now, we want her back, isn’t that right?”

  “I’ll kill her,” he said softly, almost wistfully.

  “Perhaps. It may not be necessary now. I dislike promiscuous killing—”

  “Since when, Angel?”

  “Don’t interrupt, it’s not polite. I learned to put first things first. Now what is the most important thing? Why did we want her back in the first place? I will tell you: to shut her mouth. The government heard she left me, they wanted her to testify about my income. We wanted to find her first and shut her mouth, isn’t that right?”

  “I know how to shut her mouth,” the younger man said very quietly.