by Mel Gilden
'It means they come from one of the Pacific islands.'
'Hawaii?'
'Maybe.'
'Maybe my foot. This case is soaked in Hawaii. Only they don't really come from Hawaii. Not unless flying top hats have become all the rage.'
Puffy chewed on that for a moment. Dreamily, not even looking at me, she said, 'I've never heard of a blonde Polynesian, either.'
I let her dream until it looked as if she'd forgotten I was there. To snap her out of it, I said, 'Were they here?'
'Who? Oh, the two Polynesians? Yeah, they were here. Came in dressed for the big number at any Hawaiian night club and ordered one of my fancier drinks, the kind made with pineapple juice and rum and served on fire in a plastic coconut shell. And they were none too polite about it, either.'
'I'll bet that was about the time your souvenirs went into show business.'
'Actually, it didn't happen till after the two of them left.'
I frowned and said, 'Is that all?'
'Hard to say, not knowing what's important. But I serve those fancy drinks with little paper parasols and plastic mermaids. Usually people exclaim over the toys for a moment and then toss them aside, eager to get to the alcohol. But these two studied the trash as if it were the nail clippings of a dead rock 'n' roll star.'
'Hey, that's good.'
'Thanks. Anyway, they spent a lot of time with the trash and then drank up. But before they left, they bought out my entire souvenir case.'
'Even the fish paperweights?' I said, astonished.
'Don't be snobby. Fish make great paperweights.'
'If you don't mind being stared at all day.'
'Yeah, but they work for scale.'
'Huh?'
She shook her head and said, 'If you're going to make it as an Earthman, Zoot, you're going to have to learn the language.'
'I do all right.'
'He does all right,' Bill said. But he was still staring at the girls.
I said, 'If we could just kind of delicately get back to the subject. Your souvenir case is full at the moment.'
'Yeah. I had a lot of things in stock.'
'Where do you get it?'
'The Here Today—Gone to Maui Souvenir Company. Is that a clue?'
'Could be. Our two friends seem very interested in Hawaiian souvenirs. It would make sense for me to go where they might go to get a lot more of them.' I stood up and noticed that Bill's eyes were roving again, I said. 'I thought Heavenly Daise cured you of lusting after humans.'
'I'm cured, but I'm not dead.'
'Not as long as your batteries are fresh.'
I led him through the lobby, where the water in the clam shell waterfall was changing colour as it poured from shell to shell. From each colour, matching tiny birds, no more than puffs of cotton with wings, flew into the air making boisterous conversation among themselves that sounded like thousands of tiny bells ringing. It was a lot to take, but I took it. At least the mermaids and the fish weren't singing.
The Here Today—Gone to Maui Souvenir Company was in Venice, not far from Kilroy's but complicated to get to. We glided among a lot of shabby neighbourhoods chock-a-block with frame houses in various states of repair. A well-painted house with a green postage stamp of a lawn likely as not would be next door to a tumbledown place whose front yard was being used to store a rusting automobile. Though Bill was navigating, we got lost more than once. Bill was not happy about that. Even a bot has his pride.
A stiff wind was blowing the smell of seaweed in from the ocean. I wondered if the landlords included that in the rent.
After an exciting twenty minutes, I turned off Washington onto Glencoe and found that the Here Today—Gone to Maui Souvenir Company was one of a row of new warehouses, most of which were very secretive about what went on inside.
I parked in the new lot and stood a moment watching cars go in and out of the big shopping centre across the street. It was just a shopping centre, not much concerned with top hats on the beach and blonde Polynesians. I sighed. Just because trouble is your business doesn't mean you don't need a nap now and then, or the chance to visit a store just to buy something normal, not because you were shopping for clues.
The glass doors of the warehouse opened by themselves as I approached, fascinating Bill so much I could barely get him inside. A veil of soft music floated through the air without disturbing anything.
The ceiling arched in a simple curve high over a single room just small enough not to have its own zip code. The air was cold and did not smell of seaweed. It didn't smell of anything. There were cash registers in the front and wide aisles further back, just as if the place were a supermarket. One of the registers was open, with a clerk lounging at it reading a magazine. He didn't even look up as I passed him. I almost lost Bill again when we went through the turnstile.
This place would be heaven to the two Polynesians. I saw plastic mermaids in a variety of sizes and colours, napkins with clever sayings on them, coasters, plastic sticks with planets on top, glasses in more shapes and sizes than I'd have thought possible, from teardrops up to Greek columns big enough to water elephants. Plates, match books, plastic silverware. I probably missed a thing or two. In a place that size it couldn't be helped.
The place was not crowded, but it wouldn't have been crowded even if it had been only the size of the Taj Mahal. A couple of fat people of indeterminant sex—you didn't have to be a Toomler to be confused—peered over the top of a stack of white boxes loaded on a flatbed cart they pushed while referring to a shopping list and gaping at the things every good civilization needs before it can begin to decline.
Bill said, 'Let's buy something.'
'Pick something and we'll see.'
'My meat, boss,' Bill said, but even so, he seemed bothered by the wide selection.
I found a small, thin guy dressed in jeans and a Here Today—Gone to Maui shirt big enough to camp under, loading boxes of cocktail toothpicks onto a shelf. They were in assorted colours, and you could buy them in lots of twenty. He seemed awfully engrossed in what he was doing. He didn't look at me until I said, 'Isn't a cocktail a drink?'
He looked at me from under bushy black eyebrows that matched his moustache, and said, 'If you mix it right.'
'Even if you mix it wrong, you shouldn't need a toothpick in assorted colours to help you swallow it.'
He looked me over as if I were a display with a can out of place and said, 'Say, what planet are you from?'
I said, 'The planet of the inquisitive customers. Does it matter? I'm looking for spine necklaces.' I touched the one around my neck. 'Like this one.'
'Aisle seven.'
'Thanks.'
Bill followed me to aisle seven, where there was what would have been a fortune in jewellery, if it had been real. But it was more gaudy than real, and more plastic than gaudy. We walked slowly down the aisle. I don't know what Bill was looking for, but I found what I wanted. Or, I didn't find it, which in this case was the same thing.
A card in the rail said, BLOWFISH SPINE NECKLACES: $1.00/@. Over it was a lot of empty shelf. I stared at it but an empty shelf is only an empty shelf, even if it's a clue. The Polynesians had been here. I was getting closer, but I was still a half step behind them and not sure what I'd do when I caught up.
I went back to the guy stocking toothpicks and said, 'I'd like to talk to the manager.'
'Did you find them?'
'Yeah, I found them. I need the manager.'
He looked at me along his nose, suspicious-like. He didn't want anybody complaining about him. He said, 'In the back,' as if he were telling me where the dangerous drugs were stored.
I said, 'Thanks,' and strolled along the back wall until I found a pair of metal swinging doors that looked as if they'd been through an air raid, and on the losing side.
Beyond the doors was a cool room piled high with crates and cardboard boxes that gave their flat, earthy smell to the air. It was actually cozy if you liked that kind of thing. Fluorescent tu
bes dropped a harsh light sharp as broken glass and buzzed with a sound that would give you a headache after a while.
I wound between walls of boxes, following the sound of subdued voices until I found a woman not much older than one of Will's surfers. She was holding a clipboard in her hands and a pencil in her teeth, watching a very tall, brown-skinned man count packages as he touched them with a hand big enough to squeeze a cantaloupe dry. They were each wearing official shirts, but both fit better than the one on the stock clerk. The big man turned to glance at me, and something glinted on his collar. He started to count again. I waited till he was done and the woman had recorded the number.
'Manager?' I said to both of them.
'May I help you?' said the woman. She was short, compact and trim, with blonde hair that was smooth over her head and then hung in ringlets around her ears. The lipstick she wore made her look as if she'd been sucking a cherry Popsicle. Her eyes tried to look worried, but were too tired.
'I'm looking for spine necklaces.'
'Aisle seven.'
'But there aren't any more in aisle seven.'
'Oh.' That upset her entire day. 'We'll be getting an order in soon.'
'You don't make them here?'
'No. We don't make anything here. We're just a distributor. We get the spines from the Sue Veneer Novelty Company.'
The big guy who'd been counting the packages was watching me as if he didn't want to but couldn't help himself. Or maybe that was just his idea of being polite.
'Thanks,' I said, nodding. I began to walk away.
'But they won't sell them to you,' the manager called after me. 'They're a wholesale outfit.'
'That's OK. I just like to look,' I said.
Bill and I were halfway out to the Belvedere when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned just in time to see the big dark guy swing something toward where my left ear would have been if I'd had ears.
Bill squawked. There was a roaring like a train going through a tunnel, and somebody turned down the contrast on the world until it was black.
Chapter 11
A Certificate Of Authenticity
I AWOKE in the miserly shade of a small tree in the parking lot. The air was full of stars that sparked and died and sparked again. Bill was sitting next to me. He looked around when I grabbed the side of my head and moaned.
'You should carry a gun,' he said.
'I suppose so. Then I could blow my foot off just to show everybody how tough I am.' What I'd said didn't make sense, but I was pleased to be able to talk at all. I tried again by saying, 'What happened?'
'Before or after he hit you?'
'After. I'm pretty clear on what happened before.'
'He took your necklace. I tried to stop him, but he wasn't impressed.'
'He wouldn't be.'
I thought about the necklace as I touched my chest where it had so lately hung. The guy who'd stolen it could have been an alien, but I doubted it. Avoirdupois would be disappointed. This whole situation was wrong. It stank on ice. It was trying to tell me something, but I didn't feel well enough to listen.
Instead, I looked around. There were other cars in the lot, but none of them close. Anybody in the lot of the shopping centre across the street had business of their own.
It was likely that, even in daylight in the middle of a parking lot, the guy had been as safe sapping me as he would have been in the middle of Griffith Park at midnight. I love it when everybody minds their own business.
I could report the guy to the police. I could talk to the manager and get him fired. Either way, I'd have to answer a lot of questions I'd rather not have asked. Still, the guy didn't know when he hit me that I wouldn't press charges. He'd taken an awful chance for a cheap necklace just like hundreds of others in the Here Today—Gone to Maui stock. A quick check of my pockets told me he hadn't taken anything else. The guy wasn't just a thief. He was a thief with a mission. Finding out what it was would be interesting.
I knew that eventually I'd have to go see Medium Rare. But right now, it seemed like a bigger job than I could manage just to get to my feet. I was quite a guy, though. Using the tree as a crutch, I managed it. I stood there with my hand resting lightly on Bill's head. He didn't move. He was good at that. I listened to the traffic. It was a normal noise, comforting enough if you'd been raised with it. I hadn't, but took comfort where I could.
According to Bill and his bubble memory, the Sue Veneer Novelty Company was a good deal south of where we were, in Dominguez, one of the brood of independent cities that sucked up to Los Angeles and wouldn't exist without it.
I drove with one hand, the other probing the growing squash on the side of my head. Though it hurt when I touched it, I couldn't help touching it now and then. The pain made me a little sick, but I managed to keep everything where it belonged. I ran little amateur theatricals in my head in which the guy who'd done this to me was variously tarred, feathered, and hung up by his thumbs. It was nice, but not as satisfying as I'd hoped. I thought again about calling the police or getting him fired, but it still didn't seem like a good idea.
As early as it was, the afternoon rush hour had already begun; fortunately most of it was going the other way. Without braking more than a couple of times a mile, I boomed down the Santa Monica Freeway through neighbourhoods of which I saw no more than the tops of trees that seemed to move like an ocean until you saw the real ocean, a grey line at their far edge. The trees stopped abruptly, as if somebody had trimmed the forest with a scissors and soon I was driving through factory complexes that sprawled like masses of arthritic plumbing.
The sun was hurrying home through the haze by the time I left the freeway at Dominguez, the slanting rays making my headache seem more like a spike in the eye. I crossed some railroad tracks, then rode between them and a line of plain buildings whose main charm was that they weren't sure whether they were offices or warehouses.
'Here it is,' Bill said, and I pulled into a parking space in front of a candy-red truck big enough to carry my Belvedere away without even breathing hard. It seemed to be looking at me with the extra lamps that gleamed from the top of the cab. Fancy white script on the door said, 'Cash and Carry.'
The Sue Veneer Novelty Company was a big block of cement painted what might have been yellow in a former life, but now looked like the mortal remains of many years of city dirt. Bill and I went in through one side of a double glass door, and stood before a couple of crowded desks in an office crowded with papers and furniture. Maybe they just expected a lot of company, but there were three or four chairs too many in a space that could not even stand one.
The air was cool, and had the flat smell of distant, impersonal death. There was nothing on the walls but landlord-white paint.
At one desk, a harried-looking guy wearing glasses pecked at the keys of a typewriter. When he saw me, he stopped typing and began to shuffle papers that were already typed on. Behind the other desk was a middle-aged woman who thought she looked younger but wore a lot of make-up as insurance. She wore a pale blue suit with dark blue piping, and her hair—almost, but not quite, brown—was waved above a face carved from a baked potato.
She looked up from a list on which she was making check marks, and smiled as if she wasn't sure it was OK. 'May I help you?' she said in a potty voice, like a little girl being made to recite.
I smiled, hoping mine looked more realistic than hers, and said, 'I'm looking for a little information.'
She folded her hands on her list and said, 'What sort of information did you require?'
'You people make those blowfish spine necklaces?'
'Sometimes.' She watched a lot of TV and knew never to admit anything.
'Have you any idea why anybody would be interested in collecting them?'
Her eyes got furtive, as if she expected my gang to leap out from under my coat and attack at any moment. Bill was trying to see what the guy had been typing and I said, 'Stop that.' He froze, then backed off.
The woman s
aid, 'One moment please.' She cried, 'Harry,' putting a jagged hole in the air.
'What is it, Hilda?' It was a man's voice: nice, but right now a little miffed at being interrupted. It came through a short hallway that led to another office.
'Harry, there's a man out here wants to know about blowfish spine necklaces.' Her voice was loud enough to be the lunch whistle.
'What?' came Harry's voice. Maybe he was chained to the floor back there. With his fingers in his ears.
'Blowfish spine necklaces,' she said slowly, carefully pronouncing each syllable as if she were trying out for radio announcer of the week.
In the other office, squeaky wheels rolled, followed by footsteps. A tall man came up through the hall, bouncing a little with each step, and stood in the doorway with the backs of his hands on his hips, fingers out like chopped pink wings. He was dressed neatly, if casually, in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and blue pants that almost matched the piping on Hilda's dress. There was a little black left in his grey hair, like hummocks of rock under snow.
'What is it, Hilda?' he said. His chin was out, pointing arrogantly at her.
I said, 'Blowfish spine necklaces.'
He looked at me for the first time, and his mouth opened in surprise. He pointed at Hilda with one hand and played arpeggios in the air with the other. He said, 'Hilda can take your order.'
'I'll bet she can. I'll bet she's faster than a squirrel after nuts, but I don't have an order. All I have is a head holding too much pain and the name Medium Rare.'
He frowned and nodded. This was serious business. 'Come on into the office,' he said and walked back the way he had come, still bouncing.
I followed him into a sunny room that was used as much for storage as for thinking. On the walls were brass plaques and photos of boys in uniform. In each. Harry stood to one side, smiling so hard the photographer wouldn't have needed a flash. Along the baseboards were piles of paper and stacks of small boxes of white cardboard. On his desk was a card file and a heap of plastic items—novelties. I saw a comb and a clothespin you'd use to hang mouse clothes out to dry, but most of the bits were bizarre enough to be from another planet. A planet like Earth. We certainly didn't have stuff like that back on T'toom. One wall of the office was glass, with a sliding door in it. Through it, I could see a couple of men wearily carrying cardboard boxes from a loading dock into a truck that said Pantages Transport on the side.
