“You pick the damnedest times to—”
“Please.”
We were back to the point where I couldn't finish a sentence. And right then I wondered if there might be any reason other than the apparent one for her wanting to be with me all the time. So maybe she thought I might get myself shot in the head and wanted to finish the waltz with me before it happened. It was flattering. Goofy, but flattering. But I have, in my time, been mixed up with a lovely or two who turned out, to my dismay and disappointment, to be lovely only on the outside. Inside, they were ugly—inside they were blackmailers or liars, even murderers.
So I said, “Elaine, honey, tell me this. Is there any other reason, anything you haven't told me, for your wanting to be with me? To go into the showcase with me? Anything connected with your brother's death, or what he was doing ... anything at all?”
She looked straight at me out of those dark Indian eyes, those warm, soft, lovely eyes, and for a moment I didn't think she was going to answer me. But even in the dim light, I could see the sudden moistness, the welling of a tear, the quick blink with which she fought it back. She turned her head a little, as if to hide her face, and said, “No.”
That was all. But her voice was small, different, hurt—almost like the voice of a girl. Suddenly I was sorry I'd asked.
She turned her head a little farther away, looked out the window for a moment, then turned back toward me. She was normal again, composed and quiet.
I don't know. I can get hit on the head, even shot, and recover. I pop people in the teeth, and sometimes leap into the lion's mouth and bite back. When I have to, and I'm charged up or jazzily stimulated, I can practically lift a house to get it out of my way. But some things I'm not strong enough to do.
“Well, come on,” I said. “They tell me this showcase is crazy.”
We got out, but before going to the club I opened the luggage compartment and started fumbling around in it. Elaine said, “What are you doing?”
I found what I wanted, a box in which I keep three or four hats, dark glasses, cigars, pipes, items like that. Sometimes when tailing a man on foot you can—by changing from cigar to pipe, from bareheaded to a man wearing a hat—by such minor changes lessen the chance of being picked out by the tailee.
As I straightened up and closed the trunk again I said to Elaine, “Mainly I want to cover this white hair of mine. But, also, this should make me look like a regular customer.”
As I spoke, I put on, at a rakish angle, the dark blue beret I'd dug out of the box and stuck an eight-inch-long cigarette holder into my mouth. Elaine said, "That should make you look like a regular customer? What kind of place is this?”
“You'll see. It would help if you'd part your hair in the middle and comb it straight to the sides, sort of scraggly.”
She didn't argue, but went to work on her hair. When she got through, her hair looked weird. It was perfect.
“Here we go,” I said, and we walked to the club. Just before we went inside I stopped her and said, “This is all against my better judgment—and sometimes even my better judgment is pretty lousy. So promise me one thing.”
“All right.”
“If this goes smoothly, I won't mention it. But, if I tell you to blow, get lost, leave. And in a hurry.”
“All right.”
“If we, uh, get separated. I'll come to your hotel later. The new one you checked into today.”
“All right.”
That settled that. I opened the door and we went into the club.
Chapter Eleven
Inside was a damp, gloomy-looking flight of stairs which led down below ground level somewhere; this was what is often called a cellar club.
I'd heard much about the showcase, and seen half a dozen dumps like it. It was one of those phonily “artistic” dives, where pale poets quote blank verse to blank people, where bands honk “modern” dissonances as background to sonorous verbiage. Here gathered painters and writers and poets and sculptors and all sorts of people who talked in lower case, like the showcase sign outside. It wasn't much of a place for laughs.
Elaine and I went down the cement steps and stopped at the bottom. The place was dimly lighted, but I could see a long bar stretching from a point directly ahead of us to our left for about forty feet. The wall facing the bar, the wall alongside which we stood now, was covered with paintings and drawings, and beyond the far end of the bar at our left were more paintings.
On our right was a small room in which couples and groups sat around tables covered with black-and-white checked cloths. Candles stuck in empty wine bottles provided wavering illumination. Straight ahead of us, at this end of the bar, was an open doorway. I could look through it into a big, dark room where wooden chairs were lined up in rows before a small raised stage, bright in the glare of a spotlight. Something was going on in there now. Over the door was a sign proclaiming the room to be the "showroom” — in lower case letters, naturally—and listing the names of several people who were to provide entertainments during the night.
I didn't see Navarro anywhere.
Elaine said softly, “It's kind of creepy, isn't it?”
“That it is.”
There was something unpleasant and clammy about the place, a feeling I couldn't put into words, as if everything were a little out of focus, the colors not quite right, as if something were decaying here in the room but the odor hadn't quite reached my nostrils. It was a scabious room in which people might breathe pure carbon dioxide and drink bat's blood from little wine glasses.
Two people were sitting at the table nearest us in that room on our right, but they were drinking ordinary highballs. They were near enough so I could hear their conversation. The guy was reading something from a paper in his hand, and no doubt they were regular customers.
The gal looked like a woman of the world, but not this world. She looked as if she'd had her face lowered, a grossly fat gal who hadn't let herself go, but had kept it all. She fluttered what almost appeared to be eyeless lashes at the man and said, “That was beautiful, Ilyich. Beautiful.”
"Yes! Yes!" he cried, eyes glazing. "Yes! I feel it now. I feel it.”
He was no prize, himself. He wore a mustache so long it drooped down at the ends. Unfortunately, it drooped about two inches extra at the left side, which made it appear that the highballs had gone to his mustache. It sort of destroyed the dashing look.
The girl said, “It was a beautiful poem. All the dying and all. Beautiful. It was sheer ... sheer poetry.”
“I feel it!” he cried.
I was beginning to wish he'd stop feeling it.
“I feel it!” he yelped, sort of all agog. “I shall achieve immortality—at least, for a little while.”
Elaine and I looked at each other, but didn't speak. I guess we just didn't feel it. This joint made me uncomfortable from my toes up—and I was tense and on edge to begin with. In a place like this I could almost feel my luck running out.
And then I saw Navarro.
He had been standing inside the door of the showroom, out of my sight. But he moved into the doorway, his back to me, and I could see that he was talking to a tall man with wide square shoulders and a black mustache and short beard. The mustache was heavy and ragged, and it curved down into the beard, becoming a part of the beard itself. He was looking intently at Navarro, thick brows knitted like black ropes.
I lit a cigarette in my long holder, made sure the beret covered my hair, then took Elaine's arm. We walked to our left, along the wall facing the bar, pretending to examine the pictures. The back of Navarro's coat was still visible to me when we stopped halfway down the long bar.
“What in the world is it?” Elaine said to me.
“Huh?” I turned to look at her. She was staring at a painting on the wall. This obviously had the place of honor here. It was by itself, with a lot of clear space around it, whereas elsewhere the paintings and other exhibits were almost side by side. It looked like a soft-boiled egg colliding
with a green octopus. Of course, I could have been wrong. All I really know about art is that I like the calendars you see in garages.
Elaine said, “I think I know what it is.”
“That's the gimmick—it's whatever you say it is. Here, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Like a splinter, you know.”
“Seriously, I believe it's the sun rising over something green and gooey.”
I glanced at Navarro, still in the doorway, then said to Elaine, “My dear, you must take a course in the appreciation of appreciation. This is clearly the portrait of an omelette laying a hen. But it's in the fourth dimension. You can't appreciate it unless your eyes are in the fourth dimension.”
She smiled. “Of course. Now I feel it.”
There's no way of knowing where we might have gone from there, to what dizzy heights we might have soared, but in our moment of discovery Navarro wheeled around and started walking toward us. The bearded man was right behind him.
For a second I thought they'd spotted us. Joe looked right at me. I flipped ashes from my cigarette holder, and Joe looked at me—and away. As the other man came up alongside him, Navarro swung his head toward him, talking earnestly. I turned toward Elaine as the men came nearer. They walked past, only a foot or two behind us, and from the corner of my eye I saw them walk to the end of the bar and then go out of sight on my left.
I followed them, Elaine at my side. The two men had gone through a gaudily painted door, splashed with much purple and black and with a gaudy bloodshot eye melting in its center. The door was closing as we neared it.
I looked around. Opposite the melting-eye door, in the far wall, was another entrance into the showroom. From beyond it I could keep a lookout for Navarro or the other guy while Elaine and I remained out of sight. And I didn't want to barge into that room until I knew more about what was going on. We went into the showroom, stopping to give a woman at the entrance the three dollars required for admission.
We stood at the rear of the room, and I kept looking out into the room we had just left, glancing occasionally at the spotlighted stage where a tall, thin, angular girl was saying something about doing away with “all the machines, the warmongering machines.” Perhaps fifty people were sitting in wooden chairs, soaking it all up.
The melting-eye door in the other room opened, and a man came out. I'd never seen him before. He was about six feet tall, possibly thirty pounds overweight, neatly dressed, carrying a black bag. It was the kind of case doctors carry. A medical bag. Horn-rimmed glasses rested uneasily on his very small but bulbous nose. Apparently he was a doctor; and I wondered what a doctor had been doing in that room.
As the door opened and closed I'd gotten a brief glimpse at the room's interior, but it hadn't told me anything. The bearded guy was in sight, looking at something or someone out of my range of vision. Nothing happened for a while.
Onstage the tall girl finished her lecture, or whatever it was, and somebody announced that Mike Kent would recite his latest poem—composed this very evening during Miss Glidenwell's just completed and stirring declaration. The poem was entitled, “End of World in Atomic Holocaust with Blast and Fallout at the Ultimate Atomation.”
A big boar-faced man with hair hanging over his ears took the stage. A group of musicians at the rear of the stage made a lot of noise, building up finally to a great clatter. Listening to them was like facing the music. Here, at last, was poetry-to-jazz.
The music stopped. The boar-faced poet shook all over, threw his hands into the air over his head, fingers waggling like crazy. In the silence he threw back his head and yelled as loud as he could:
“POW!”
There was a great deal of applause.
I whispered to Elaine, “Good stuff. Starts out almost like Shelley, what?”
“I lean toward Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she said.
“Fine start, anyway. But how's he going to top it?”
He didn't top it. That was the poem. Being one of the uninitiated, I had thought he'd have to go on. And I didn't even applaud.
Elaine looked at me, her face blank. “Isn't this ... well, kind of silly?”
I grinned at her. “This, sweetheart, is the opiate of the masses. But you mustn't call it silly. That exposes your warped perception.”
She made a face.
Somebody else took the stage, but I paid no more attention. A few more minutes passed, then Navarro and the Beard came out of the melting-eye door. They spoke briefly, walked back toward the club's entrance. I stepped to the door, and watched them. Navarro said something to the other man, then went up the cement steps.
I hesitated, wondering whether I should follow Navarro, but decided against it. He'd probably done his bit for the night, by coming here—undoubtedly either to tell the Beard he'd seen me alive, or to ask why I was still alive. That “why” was the one that bothered me, too. I knew a lot of what was going on, but not why it was happening—not enough of the why, at least.
The Beard stepped back into the showroom, where he'd been earlier, on the opposite side of the room from us. I turned to Elaine, put my lips close to her ear and whispered, “I'm going to move around a little. This may go smoothly, in which case we can leave together. But if trouble starts popping, you beat it in a hurry.”
She said she would. I squeezed her arm and walked out of the showroom. Nobody was seated at this end of the bar, but the bartender was fixing setups and he glanced at me. I walked to a stool and sat down, ordered a bourbon and water and played with it until he walked to the far end of the bar. Then I picked up my drink and went over to the wall, glanced at more weird prints and collages and paintings, watching the bartender and crowd at the same time. When I thought nobody was looking in my direction, I slipped around the corner of the wall and walked to the garishly colored door.
It wasn't locked. I put my right hand under my coat, on the .38 but not taking the gun out, twisted the door knob and stepped inside the room.
At first I thought it was empty. A light still burned, and as I closed the door I could see that this was some kind of office, with a battered desk, papers scattered over its top, and a swivel chair before it. On my right was another closed door. It, I guessed, would open into the parking lot alongside the club. On my left, against the wall, was a wooden cot covered with blankets.
A man lay on the cot, one blanket half covering him.
He didn't move. The man appeared to be in almost as bad shape as the paintings outside. His arms and chest were bare, and red ugliness bloomed on the right side of his chest. He looked dead.
I walked to him, touched him. He was dead.
The flesh was still warm, but there was no pulse, no heartbeat. I pulled up one of his eyelids and looked at the dull dead eye. This guy had been among the living not long before, but he sure wasn't now.
I didn't know who he was. But I had a hunch. I had a hunch that I might have seen him before, though not clearly. This explained what the doctor had been doing here; but there was a chance it explained a great many more things.
Earlier I had fired three or four slugs at a man behind a rifle, a guy shooting at me. I knew I'd hit him, and at the time I'd hoped I had killed him. Maybe I had. The dead man's presence here, at the spot to which Navarro had rushed in such a hurry after seeing me alive, was almost enough by itself—this was probably the slob who'd tried to kill me.
His bloodstained coat and shirt hung over a straight-backed chair next to the cot. I went through the coat fast, found the dead man's wallet. There wasn't much in it, but a driver's license told me his name was Herbert M. Kupp, he was twenty-eight years old and lived in Los Angeles. He'd held a card in the Teamsters Union, and had a Standard Oil Credit Card in his wallet. I stepped to the other closed door and tried the knob. It was locked, and I started going rapidly through the Beard's desk.
I was bent over the middle drawer, starting to look through a small book listing phone numbers, when the faint sounds from the showroom swelled a little louder. I didn't get i
t soon enough. Engrossed in the list of numbers, I thought for half a second that the last act must have been sensational. Just half a second, but it was enough. By the time I realized the increase in sound could have been from that melting-eye door opening behind me, it was practically over.
Not quite over, but close enough. I had time to start swinging around, time to feel the first solid blow crash down on my head. But from then on I was just one of the also-rans, a man falling through pain with something exploding in my skull. My head split open and spread out toward the horizons, and then as the pain subsided the floor came up against me like a feather pillow.
Something dug hard into my side. I wasn't quite out, and I tried to reach for it and felt the cloth of a man's trousers jerked from my fingers. Then that foot slammed into my side again. There was a blow on my arm, something cracked against the side of my head.
And then everything went black and blue ....
Consciousness was pain returning slowly, nibbling at my flesh. A sensation like fire coursed along my side; my head throbbed achingly; something inside me felt twisted, as if it were pulling itself apart. I bit back the involuntary groan, lay still, trying not to change my breathing.
For a while I couldn't remember what had happened or where I was. All I knew was that I had to lie quietly, unmoving. I could hear movement, then a ticking sound. It didn't make sense. There were several clicks, a pause, several more clicking noises. Then a voice.
“Bob? Brandt here. You alone?” In a few seconds he went on apologetically, “I know ... yeah, but I thought you'd want me to call under the circumstances.”
Fog swirled before my closed eyes. I concentrated, tried to clear my mind of jumbled thoughts. Finally I realized what the clicking sound had been—a man near me had been dialing a number; he was using the phone now. I tried to crack my eyelids, move my hand easily, slowly. But nothing worked, my eyes stayed closed, I couldn't even figure out where my hand was. It was as though I'd lost all feeling through my body, all awareness of separate parts, except for the points of fire and pain.
Over Her Dear Body Page 10
