I stepped two yards from him, turned to the milling crowd, and yelled at them. I couldn't touch the Master yet, because, limbs or no limbs, his followers would fix me. But for once nobody was looking at Trammel; all ten thousand or so were eyeballing me.
And, I suppose, with reason. Every one of those people out there knew I must be alive, but they must also have wondered how I could be. I showed them.
There was so much noise that I could hardly hear Trammel myself, and I started with my eye, the dangling one. I yanked it from its stalks and threw it out into the crowd like a posy. People jerked and screamed and leaped away, and naturally more people fell down. Some of them got trampled on, but I didn't mind. In fact, I liked it; I'd have been glad to trample on some of them myself. Because a minute ago they'd been chasing me to kill me, to murder the hell out of me, and maybe in another minute they'd get me. But for right now it was my happy moment, and I was getting the most out of it.
I gave them an arm, then a leg, and I saved the long bloody leg and thigh till last. There was gasping and wailing, but I let out a whoop as I grabbed my ankle and with all my strength threw my left leg high into the air. It went away up toward the canvas ceiling, turning almost majestically, then it came down toward a pile of screaming people and landed on the floor, because though the people were still screaming, they had moved.
For just a few seconds I had a chance to make myself heard. As I ripped the moulages from my chest and head, a near silence fell. Not even Trammel was speaking.
"You saw me die!" I shouted, and they heard me. "The same way you saw Arthur Trammel die. And his death was a trick, just as mine was a trick. Take a look, you goddamned bloodthirsty beggars. Those are rubber!"
I didn't have time to get it all out. Trammel was always in there pitching, always battling, even when his back was against the wall. With that voice they had heard for so long, the lilting voice they had believed and even loved, Arthur Trammel began working upon their minds and emotions, still plunging ahead with his unswerving con, trying to gather his flock around him and knit their dream together. He talked and sighed and ranted and raved, started to weave the familiar spell over them, and the people, because they wanted so desperately to believe in him, began believing.
He was close to making them believe that this actually hadn't happened, that I didn't exist, was a hallucination. But I hadn't come here completely unprepared for this moment. From the stage I could see a number of queer faces, some of them faces I'd seen before. Part of the planning for this had been an attempt to reach and assure the presence here tonight of all the three hundred-odd leaders of other odd cults in L.A.—the men who had plenty of reason to hate and denounce Trammel. I could see some of them there below me, and I knew most of the three hundred must have responded to my invitation.
Some were coming close now, pushing toward the stage. Trammel had the edge, sure, and maybe my voice wouldn't reach to the back of the tent, but I could sure as hell make those closest hear me. And they were hearing. Because I wasn't just standing there listening to Trammel; I was yelling like a foghorn, ripping my throat, getting hoarse, but laying it all out there: Trammel's lies and sex and murder and fraud, Felicity's death and Dixon's, the tape-recorded tricks, all of it that I could get in.
There were just the two voices, Trammel's and mine. The others were listening to us, not screaming or shouting any longer. All were standing, and there wasn't any empty space at the edge of the stage; men and women were massed there, eyes raised to stare at the two of us.
The Leader appeared frightened. And I'd been trying to frighten him. When I'd realized I could reach those men and women nearest me, I'd realized I could also reach Trammel, make him hear me. Many of the words I'd shouted had been for Trammel, to let him hear how much I knew. He'd heard me, and he was frightened.
Those in the crowd hadn't yet grasped either idea completely: that I had profaned their idol, or that their idol had tricked them, lied to them, and deceived them. But they were restless. There was movement in the crowd and suppressed violence in that movement.
Trammel's voice had faltered, but in a moment when I paused for breath, he seemed to gather strength and power of mind again. He pointed at me and with his voice strong said, "You know he is mad."
That was all, but it reminded everyone here of the things they'd heard and believed of me in these last days. And all of them turned to look at me. They had followed Trammel too long, and I knew that unless Trammel himself broke, I was finished. There was movement below me as a man, one of my three hundred, stooped and picked something from the ground. I could see his fist close around it as he rose. I walked closer to Trammel, stood almost against him, and I started talking fast, directing every word at him.
"Figure it out, you sonofabitch. You're through. No matter what this bunch does to me, you're finished. Maybe not now, not even today, but tomorrow or the next day, when they aren't listening to your voice, they'll figure it out. Enough of them will."
While realization was growing in his mind, I finished it. "No matter what happens this minute, Trammel, you've got to run. Enough of them below us heard the things I said. They know about your slimy tricks and lies—enough of them do."
His face seemed to crumple, to sag. I saw the movement near us in the crowd, but I watched Trammel, and got ready to pull or shove him into the path of the missile if one came, but I didn't have to. The man below us drew back his arm and hurled a clot of earth that struck Trammel on the chest. He looked down at the mark it left on his black robe, his face ashen.
He turned his head and suddenly leaped for me, hands clutching at my face, but as he reached for me I stepped aside, shoved him, and he fell. He sprawled on the platform, almost going over its edge, as a whispering sound swelled from the crowd again. Hands reached for him. In that moment Trammel must have thought they meant not to help him, but to hurt him. He shrank back, crying out softly, got to his feet, and half ran toward the steps leading from the stage.
For a moment he paused there as sound swelled to an angry roar, and even then I didn't know if it was meant for him or me. But Trammel was unnerved and shaken, frightened, and he ran.
He ran from the tent, raced toward his Truth Room, and the crowd was still, shocked and nearly silent. For he was so obviously frightened and abject, so obviously not godlike. Either those in the crowd suddenly knew what he was or they acted without knowing, without needing to know. They ran after him. It was one man at first, but the rest of the mass surged forward then, became part of the initial movement. They were shouting, screaming. They were going to kill him.
I ran from the stage and was caught in the mass of men and women. I fought to get free, then burst from the crowd's edge, but I didn't know where Trammel was, or even if he were alive. Then I saw men pouring into the low-roofed Truth Room, and I sprinted to it but couldn't get through the bodies that jammed its door—and inside the room there was the most awful sound, the cry of voices roaring steadily, a thousand men shouting and cursing.
I reached the wall, followed it to the building's rear, and ran through the cloth-draped entrance into bedlam. I fought my way to the raised wooden podium, and from there I could see a swirl of movement in the room's center, where I knew Trammel must be. It would have been impossible to force my way through that mass of men to the one man I wanted to keep alive—but in front of me was the microphone Trammel had used here on so many nights, beneath it his recorder ready for the taped speech he had meant to deliver at this hour. I switched the microphone on, put my mouth close to it, and shouted as loudly as I could. But even my amplified voice was lost in the clamor and the words had no effect.
For seconds longer the milling and shouting continued in the crowd's center, then it slackened. Gradually emotions died, pulses beat more slowly. Finally, all motion stopped and there was silence. And in that silence, there was the high wailing of a woman's scream.
That scream started a ripple of movement, an edging away from what little was left of Tramm
el. The ripple spread, and from the raised platform I could see men draw back from a crumpled figure in the room's center. The movement spread like panic; it gathered momentum as quickly as mindless lust had gathered in the beginning. Men poured from the door and into the night, crushing against each other in their anxiety to get away.
Soon they all were gone. Only Trammel's still body and I were left. He looked small, twisted, and ugly, less a man than a bundle of bloodstained rags.
And then Trammel moaned.
I stared at him, not comprehending, because I had been so sure they must have killed him. But he moaned again, and moved.
I started to run toward him, then saw again before me, bolted to the podium's wooden frame, the recorder on which a spool of tape had earlier been wound in readiness for Trammel's Truth Room fraud tonight. I turned back to it, twisted the recorder's switch from play to record and the volume high, then turned the machine on. The small handmike was free but its wire stretched barely to the floor, still twenty feet from Trammel. I ran to him, picked him up in my arms as he gagged and a small line of blood spilled from his mouth. I carried him carefully, but not because I wanted him to live; I wanted him to talk a while before he died.
I eased him to the floor, held the microphone to his mashed lips as he moved again.
He moaned, a sigh that was barely audible. "Trammel," I said, "You're dying. Can you talk?"
The redness of his mouth moved but for long seconds no sound came from it. Then, "Yes," he said. "Yes. I mustn't die. Don't let me die." The words were twisted, but understandable.
"Then talk fast, mister. Tell me the whole thing. About Felicity, the other little Trammelites you played with, Wolfe and Dixon and the hell you gave me, the lies, all of it." I looked at his mashed face and torn body, white bone protruding from one broken arm, and I knew that he'd soon be dead.
"Help me," he moaned. "Don't let me die."
"I can't help you, Trammel."
"I . . . can't . . . can't be dying."
"You haven't got much time."
He coughed, and he must have felt the new rush of blood from his mouth. For seconds he was silent, then he said weakly, "Will you help me? If I tell you . . . will you help me? Please . . ."
"I won't promise you a damn thing, Trammel. Except that if you don't spill fast, I'll help you die. Maybe only a minute sooner than you would anyway, but sooner."
Finally, he accepted it, thinking I could help him if he told me everything, and maybe even believing that if I could help him I would. I held the microphone before his mouth. His voice whispered into it, and over the words he had recorded days or weeks before on the now unwinding tape, erasing those words as he spoke, was impressed most of what I'd wanted him to tell.
And most of it was the way I'd figured it, the way I'd told Lyn it had to be, his phoning Wolfe right after I left him that Sunday, telling him to kill Felicity, who had just been aborted of Trammel's child. That night, after Wolfe had tried to kill me, failed, and phoned Trammel, he'd been frantic, waiting for Wolfe's next call saying Felicity's body was buried, that she was safely out of Greenhaven and there was no longer anything to fear.
But instead a frightened Dixon phoned him, told him I'd killed Wolfe, and that she didn't know if Felicity's body was still in Greenhaven. Only Trammel and Wolfe knew where the grave was. Trammel knew, because that Sunday afternoon he'd dug the grave himself, then phoned its location to Wolfe, who would bury Felicity but couldn't be gone long from Greenhaven. That explained why I'd thought there'd been too little time for Wolfe to dig a grave and then fill it again; he'd merely lowered Felicity into it and covered her with earth.
Trammel's voice got fainter and there were long pauses, but he said, "I didn't know if he'd buried her. I had to know if he'd got her out, if it was all right, no worry. Dixon . . . was worried too, and she couldn't go back to Greenhaven. We both had to know. I took her with me to the grave and the girl was there."
He began speaking more rapidly, in a garbled rush, as if he wanted to spit it all out of his bloody mouth. "Everything was all right then . . . except that Dixon knew all . . . about me. She was the only one. I . . . killed her, put her in the grave."
I could barely understand him as he told me of his long-planned resurrection, feeling the time had come to go through with it. It would tie his followers tighter when he most needed them, stop me from looking for him during at least three or four days, during which I might even have been killed—and I was the only worry left for him. A bonus was the fact that the Guardians could pin his "murder" on me, and then there were all the original reasons: money, power, the love of his followers.
His voice was a whisper when he finished. "That's all. Help me. Help me. For God's sake, don't let me die . . ."
His eyes rolled in his head and he stared at me. I didn't say anything. His last words spilled from him in an unintelligible mumble. I stared at him unmoving, until his voice faltered and ended in a strangled cough. His head turned slightly and his eyes left mine, a clenched fist relaxed, and he was dead.
He hadn't spoken very long, but I thought he'd said enough. Enough to clear me, maybe, though I wouldn't ever be cleared in the eyes of many men. I couldn't be sure that even this would be enough.
But I looked at the still, thin body crumpled near me and I knew one thing for sure: Arthur T
trammel would not rise again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I was still staring at Trammel's dead body when I heard them. They walked across the floor and stopped near me as I raised my head.
There were four of them, policemen, two in uniform and two in plain clothes. Each held a gun, and one of them finally spoke. "Don't try anything, Scott. Don't move."
Another man in uniform said coldly, "Let's go, Scott."
"OK. Will you give me a minute?"
"I'll give you a—"
"Wait a shake. Give me two minutes and I'll stand you on your heads. Trammel told me before he died of how he lied about me—about everything. Even how he worked his resurrection. It's on tape here."
I think the resurrection bit was what they were most curious about. They hesitated, and I kept it going. "Hell, he planned it years ago, when he first hit the revival trail, figured out how it could be worked, how he could swing it. When he came to L.A., he picked his Guardians and selected a doctor and a lawyer, to make sure there'd be no snags—even a mortician to 'embalm' his body, keep it under cover. Greased a few palms, everything figured out years ago."
One guy smacked a fist into his hand, staring at me, but they gave me my two minutes. I told them, fast, about Felicity and Trammel's other conquests, some of whom he'd sent to Greenhaven, to Wolfe and Dixon. "They did the jobs for him—and others," I said. "But he was the star customer. A year and a half ago he paid Wolfe five thousand dollars for an abortion, only that one was for a little Trammelite girl who was going to spill the beans about the All-High, so the operation had to go wrong. It did; she died. Wolfe and Dixon split the five thousand, which was expensive for an abortion but cheap to keep Trammel's name clean. Besides, the Trammelites' offerings paid for it.
"After that, Trammel had the kill—not manslaughter, but murder, cold-blooded, for money—to hold over their heads. In a way, Wolfe and Dixon had that on Trammel, too, but nobody would have taken their word against his. Anyway, they were all in on the kill together, so when Trammel ordered Wolfe to kill again, fast, he murdered Felicity."
They were listening, and my two minutes stretched into twenty, the twenty into an hour. Shortly after the police had come in, they'd switched off the recorder and put handcuffs on my wrists. Now they rewound the tape and switched the recorder on again.
With Trammel lying dead at our feet, the four officers and I listened to his whispering voice, my questions and his answers, and heard his voice get weaker. In Trammel's words, with details that only he could have known, the story unfolded again. He told again of crushing Dixon's skull with the shovel, and he told where she and Felicity were
buried now. He told of others he'd caressed and kissed and named names—including Betha Green's. His voice faded and faltered, then he coughed and there was silence. After a minute or two the words an officer had spoken came from the speaker: "Let's go, Scott." It was quiet. Then the still unrolling tape reached the point where an officer had turned off the machine.
And suddenly, shockingly, Trammel's voice, recorded long before, burst with startling violence from the speaker, more obscene now than it had been in his life. The volume was still high and his words were shouted in the room. They came from the middle of the tape, words twisted by Trammel's then living lips, lascivious, suggestive, ugly: " . . . lusting for the flesh of the young, the innocent; for the evil sweetness of their breasts and thighs that inflame men's minds and make beasts of men—"
I shut it off.
There was shocked silence for a while. I'd told the police of these tapes, and looking at their faces now I knew that this, more than any words of mine, had convinced them of what Trammel had been.
Finally, one of the officers spoke. "Let's go, Scott." The same words, but more friendly now.
It hadn't really been so long, but it seemed as if a year had passed since Arthur Trammel had died.
A lot had happened. I'd had trouble with the police, but all was finally explained. There'd been a flurry and a holler and I'd had to do a bit in the clink, but I'd done it standing on my head, since only a few of the charges, like fomenting a riot and disturbing the peace and puncturing seventeen sets of automobile tires, had stuck. And I'd had to pay for the tetrahedron-punctured tires.
But the clink bit was mainly for clobbering Sergeant Meadows and Al, who were still on the Raleigh force. I'd probably sue the Ledger eventually, and enjoy it. They had printed a front-page retraction, which appeared, ironically enough, in the same issue that carried some editorial condemnation of "character assassination." It was not written by Ira Borch, however. He had been in a hospital at the time, wondering what had hit him.
Always Leave ’Em Dying Page 18
