“We’ve gotta get down to that basement.” I couldn’t keep my eyes off the curly haired dead man. I saw now what Sylvain was capable of and it certainly didn’t bode well for either Jean or Kate. From Chang’s body language he saw that my plan didn’t bode well for him.
“Most honored Mister Plush, may I suggest instead we find the front door?”
The frightened chauffeur seemed about ready to take off in that very direction.
“Move another inch and you’re actually fired. Also, I’ll kill you.” He didn’t need to see the gun pointed at the back of his head. He knew me.
“This is a very bad idea. Very bad. This mansion is a dangerous place and there’s only the two of us.”
“Make it three,” said Mittens, running to my side.
“I’ll need you to get Sylvain away from his zombie slaves.”
“I think I know just how to do it,” said Mittens, “he seems to think he’s a pretty big wheel, right?”
“He is a pretty big wheel,” Chang replied, “even the dead respect him.”
“Well, there isn’t a man alive who thinks he’s too important to talk to the press…” Mittens began to explain.
“With one exception of course,” Chang interrupted.
“Of course,” said Mittens, rolling his eyes, “nobody talks to him. He’s the evilest man in town.”
Chang nodded in agreement.
“Much more evil than Sylvain.”
“Yes, much more.” I wanted to move this along so pretended I knew who it was they were talking about. I’d have to ask Chang sometime.
“At any rate,” said the frustrated kitty, “I’ll give him an interview.”
I patted his head. I didn’t know if it was polite, patronizing or a homosexual advance, but I felt as if he deserved it.
“You’re a good kitty, Mittens.”
We fell silent like nothing existed but us three and the gravity of the situation. And this was a grave situation. The gravest I’d been in since I woke up as Jimmy Plush. Mittens stared at me in that way that only a cat could. It stung. He broke the silence.
“I’m in whatever this is until the end, but you’re going to be sorry if you mess this up. You’re the worst person I know and two women love you in spite of it. Do you know what happens to a man like you when he loses two women that love him, maybe that he actually loves?”
I could only shake my head “no”. No it can’t happen. No, I don’t want to think about it. No, I can’t imagine it. No, I don’t know and I hope I never do.
“Neither do I, Plush.” He walked off to find Sylvain. Chang and I blended in with the crowd as best we could, but kept our eyes and ears on him so we’d know when to follow him and make our move. A loud cat reporter in a tuxedo can get attention like few things in existence.
“Hey, Sylvain!” he shouted about two feet closer to the guy than would warrant shouting. Sylvain responded with a laugh and a big, dumb grin. Some voodoo priest he was.
“Well, hey yourself, little kitty. Is there somethin’ I can do for ya? You want some milk?”
“Yes, Mister Sylvain, there most certainly is. I’m Mittens O’ Hara from the Nero City Plain Dealer Gazette and I’m hoping to get an interview with you.”
Sylvain’s eyes and mouth grew.
“Shucks, me? Well that sounds just fine!’
“Excellent. Let’s go someplace private,” Mittens leaned in a bit closer, “I’m afraid your friend can’t come with us.”
Sylvain made an unpleasant face.
“Mister Rigatoni goes everywhere I go,” Sylvain insisted, “with no exceptions.”
“I’m afraid it’s against Writer’s Guild regulations to have an outsider present while doing an interview. I could lose my reporting license.”
Sylvain hanged his head.
“Well, gee, I’d hate to get you in trouble, kittycat.”
“So you’ll do it?”
Sylvain rubbed Mittens’ chin.
“Of course I will. Mr. Rigatoni, stay.”
The Italian did just that, to startling effect. He could have easily been mistaken for a wax museum exhibit on organ grinders. Mittens and Sylvain headed for the coatroom and because the Italian had been told to stay, we walked past him without him so much as batting an eyelash.
As soon as all three of us were in the coatroom with Sylvain, we jumped him. He might have learned voodoo in the West Indies, but he didn’t learn fighting anywhere. He literally fought like a girl with limpwristed slaps and clumsy, flailing kicks. He hit the floor fast and was undressed and searched for weapons just as quickly. Not so much as a pocketknife. We tied his hands together with his sock garters and took turns headbutting him in the face. After one round of this, he was gettin’ awfully dizzy, very close to blacking out.
“Alright,” he moaned, “I’ll talk. What do you wanna know?”
“You can start with why you’re doing this.” I punched him in the gut to make sure he knew just how serious I was.
“I’m not doing this,” he answered, “I don’t know the first thing about voodoo. Up until a few days ago, I didn’t know how to spell it. There’s no voodoo goin’ on here. It’s somethin’ different. I’m Larry Schultz. I’m an actor you’ve never heard of.”
His story half checked out. I’d never heard of him. I still didn’t understand.
“Would you mind clarifying that?’
“I’ve always wanted to be an actor ever since I saw Zeppo Marx in a movie. I always thought he was the funny one…”
I punched him in the gut again for that.
He had to take a little while to catch his breath.
“I wanted to be an actor but I could never get any good parts. I felt like a real loser, like I oughta put an end to my life. I realized that that pain was a lot like the pain Hamlet felt, you know, To Be or Not to Be and all that jazz. So I auditioned to play Hamlet. I wasn’t so great. So, I went to the roof of the theater to jump off and kill myself. The director talked me down by sayin’ he had a part for me. In Hamlet! I was hopin’ for Horatio or Claudius but instead he cast me as the Frigidaire. I didn’t even know there was a Frigidaire in Hamlet.”
“There was one in Othello,” said Mittens.
“That was a washing machine,” I corrected him.
“My mistake.”
“Everybody knows Hamlet’s the one with the Frigidaire,” Chang chided him.
I punched Larry Schultz in the gut again for his ignorance regarding the works of The Bard.
“Oof…please stop…let me finish, please. So, I’m playing a Frigidaire in Hamlet and there in the front row I see Miss Hall. And like I said, she sends me. But, what am I gonna do? I’m just a failed actor playing an appliance in a pretty poor production of Hamlet. Seeing happiness right in front of my eyes and knowing that it will never be mine is awful lot to take, so I climb to the theater roof again.”
“Really? You seemed so cheery.”
He smiled.
“Well, yeah, cause my life turned around. I was up there on the roof, thinkin’ about how I had no prospects when a strange foreign man yells up at me. He says not to jump. He says he loved me in Hamlet and he says he’s got a job for me. The role of a lifetime. I get to play the villain and still get the girl. Not an actor alive could turn down a choice part like that. Before you know it, the mayor’s a zuvembie slave that signs anything, I got a marriage certificate and life is just fine. Bein’ Sylvain beats bein’ Larry Schultz any day!”
The end of his story actually proves helpful. I can finally put two and two together.
“Foreign, eh? Did he sound like he was Chinese? Chinese, but not Chinese?”
A perfect plan. I don’t know how he managed to make the zombies but that doesn’t matter. Everything else comes together. Getting rid of a whore that might prove to be a breach of security one day, making two henchmen that already have no brains into mindless slaves, controlling the mayor, taking the last little piece of the city he didn’t have. Clever for once, Vic
, clever. But you didn’t count on your actor singin’ like a canary.
“Nah,” he answered, deflating my solution to the case, “he wasn’t a Chinaman. He was from someplace else. I think it was…”
Before he could finish his thought, somebody was banging on the coatroom door.
“Just hang it on a chair!” I shouted at the rude son-of-a-bitch outside. Whoever it was must have been a real stickler for etiquette, since shortly after I said that, the door came crashing down revealing that Mr. Rigatoni and the curly-haired now faceless rapist were doin’ the knocking and knocking down alike. They weren’t alone. Standing right behind the two was a curvaceous mystery woman proudly sporting a crisp new tuxedo over her foxsuit and carrying Kate Hall over her shoulder.
“Help!” Kate screamed, “Mister Plush, save me!”
The zuvembie Jean didn’t give me time to react. She only wanted to stand in the doorway and show me that they had Kate Hall and would probably kill her. Moving far faster than her brain-dead brethren, Jean and Kate were gone as fast as they came, leaving Rigatoni and the faceless rapist to deal with us. I had a sinking feeling that they might not have much trouble with it either. A feeling confirmed when the blonde came charging at me. Even though he was honking that goddamn horn of his, I still didn’t have time to get out of the way and ended up feeling something pretty similar to the sensation the poor bicycle messenger must have felt earlier in the night, particularly as he ripped open my new stitches and began yanking stuffing out of my stomach.
Meanwhile, Chang was attempting to bring down Rigatoni before he could grab Sylvain. He came at the Italian with the Gilded Battleaxe Fist, a martial arts move known to make the strongest men drown in their own vital fluids. Hadn’t seen anyone too tough to drown before, but there’s a first time for everything. Chang hit two things during the early moments of the scrap—Rigatoni and the floor. Mittens surveyed the fight and did the logical thing, though probably for the wrong reason. Chang was full of blood which is hard to replace. I was full of stuffing and there were several sacks of it in the trunk. When it comes between seeing a man die and a toy break, it’s obvious what people will choose. His hatred of me still had no small part in his choice. He dove onto Rigatoni’s back, driving his claws as deep as he could. Rigatoni kept right on choking the Chinaman, which was not particularly shocking since he’d just taken a Gilded Battleaxe fist like it was nothing.
Sylvain wouldn’t have been much good in the fight, even if he wasn’t tied up. He was busy crying and soiling himself, filling a room that reeked of the stench of failure with the stench of human waste as well. I had been hoping perhaps he would be sensible enough to try and untie himself and dash out the door so he could provide me with some details on the goddamn mastermind behind this mess, which would not have been too much to expect of someone. He was only tied up with sock garters and that was almost entirely for dramatic effect. Sylvain instead twitched and cried and agitated the situation by vomiting at the stench of his shit. The faceless rapist let go of me, ran and honked his way over to Sylvain, threw the shit-stained naked actor over his shoulder and ran out the door. I was too busy recovering the stuffing I’d lost and shoving it back into me to do anything about it. On the plus side, Rigatoni shook Mittens off his back, let go of Chang and joined his friend on his trip to the basement. Not our finest moment.
“Come on! We’ve got to follow them!” It wasn’t in our best interest but it was in Kate’s. Jean was gone and I couldn’t let her turn into one of those creatures too.
Chang laughed nervously.
“That’s not such a good idea, Mister Plush. Following them might lead to catching up with them and we all know what happens then. Chang is loyal to the end but Chang is not stupid. I stay here.”
Mittens gestured with a clawed paw.
“You’re either a man or a mouse and you know what I do to mice.”
“The Chinese do not fear cats,” said Chang, folding his arms obstinately and holding his chin up in the air.
If I was to get him to come with me, I would have to use my superior mind.
“Come on, Mittens, let’s go and leave him alone up here to wait for them to come back for him.”
“Sounds like a plan, Plush,” said Mittens with a wink, “let’s leave the scaredy-cat alone.”
“We’ll deal with the zuvembies, Chang, you wait around here to deal with the ghosts.”
Head hanging in resignation, the reluctant and frightened chauffeur joined our pursuit of Rigatoni and the faceless rapist. We trailed the two to a large library where they weaved through a maze of bookshelves until they came upon a statue of Spaulding, the famous mustachioed explorer of the Dark Continent. A fatter, balder man with a less impressive moustache stood beside it waiting. The man waved hello to Rigatoni and the faceless rapist. They did not wave hello back. He pulled down on the statue’s mustache and a cage came down from the ceiling. Inside the cage was an emaciated old geezer, naked as a jaybird. He reached down his throat, gagged and vomited up a key, which he gave Rigatoni.
“Now bring it back when you’re done with it,” the old geezer said, wagging a bony finger.
The two wandered the surprisingly vast hallways of the mansion until they came to a door marked with a grinning skull. They put the key in the keyhole and opened it. The door led to a long, dark spiral staircase. I rushed down, accompanied by Mittens and Chang, not knowing how I would get Kate away from the zuvembies when I got there and not caring that I didn’t know.
In the basement, a number of stiff socialites were gathered around four dead clowns lying on their stomachs. Strapped to the dead clowns were Kate, Sylvain, Johnny and Skinny. They were all wearing gas masks and all hooked up to a big machine shaped like a laughing devil’s face, which was in turn hooked up to a big glass canister full of swirling mist, which was in turn hooked up to a console of some kind. Standing at the console, working its various levers was Professor Blasko, a mad scientist I had crossed swords with during my first case as Jimmy Plush. He looked pale and greenish but was otherwise the same crotchety-looking, hook-nosed darkeyed widows-peaked European I’d met before.
“Ah, Mister Plush, you have come to witness my final triumph!” Blasko laughed and pulled a switch, which jolted Johnny and Skinny with electricity.
“Help us, Plush!” Hideous wailed as the current sizzled his body.
“Yeah, help us!” Skinny echoed. He didn’t look like he was holding up very well.
“The time has come to admit defeat,” Blasko declared with a flourish, “the woman you love is one of my zuvembie slaves and your fiancée will soon join her!”
I observed the situation, took all of the factors into consideration and decided that the only course of action was to pull my gun. It was usually part of the solution to most of my problems. There were at least fifteen of them and we’d had trouble with two. A gun couldn’t hurt, especially if it could hurt the zuvembies.
“Shooting me won’t stop my plan, Mister Plush!” Blasko gloated, “My zuvembie slaves have been taught to make Kate Hall into one of them if anything happens to me. When she is one of my slaves, I will order her and the whore you once loved to tear you to pieces and rip the stuffing from you!”
It was time to seek less orthodox solutions.
“And what if I shot that suspicious looking glass canister?”
“Then you would be a fool!” Blasko shouted. Blasko did a lot of shouting. “The Hall family once ran this mansion as a hospital for bearded babies and their unquiet, bearded souls have haunted the Halls for generations! The machine agitates their etheric energy, using it as a power source for my Relivineating gas, which I have used to create my zuvembie slaves. Breaking open that tank of ghosts would be foolish even for you.”
“I think you’re bluffing,” I said nonchalantly and shot the tank. He wasn’t. Who could have seen that coming? Men in that position are usually bluffing. The bullet made a little crack but little cracks in things like a glass canister or a relationship
or a man’s heart grow big fast. And when a big crack grows, it reaches everything and when everything’s cracked and there’s no time to fix it, it ain’t long before everything’s broken. And when a heart or a relationship or a glass canister get broken, things spill out into the world.
There were about a dozen babies—little, round and terrible things. They had beards—big, black, furry Cossack affairs, thick and crawling with maggots. Their eyes had rotted from their sockets but behind there was a glow—a glow of terrible wrongness and blinding hate. They first flew to the zuvembies, who they looked at as a travesty of death. They grabbed their heads, turning them with a strength you really wouldn’t expect from babies and screwing them off as if they hadn’t been put on tight enough. When the heads were detached, still bearing the same blank, stupid expression the babies squeezed them and they popped, making a disgusting mess worse than that made by Hideous when he tossed the faceless rapist against the wall. They squealed and cooed and clapped with pleasure at the destruction they’d caused.
When they got to Jean, it was too much. I knew what was underneath the foxhead wasn’t Jean, but it hurt anyway. It hurt not just because I was seeing a woman I’d once loved turned into a bloody gooey mess by bearded phantom babies but because I was reminded that this was one of the few times I could tell what was inside of her head and what had been inside of that suit. I didn’t have any time to grieve. From what Blasko had said about the ghosts, I knew who they’d be after next and I couldn’t let them get her.
I ran like God, the Devil and the IRS were at my back, then made a flying leap that took full advantage of my lack of mass. I covered most of the distance I needed. Most of it. By the time, I made it to the clowns the ghosts had done it. For ages, they’d longed for the blood of the Hall family and they got it. I was just in time to get splattered with bone fragments and blood from my fiancée’s head . My brain slipped away from me, my perceptions clouded over. I did something only someone confused, numbed by grief and desperate for some kind of familiarity would do—I saved the lives of two bastards I hated.
Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective Page 5
