A legerdemain artist can never play cards with his friends. Not if he wants to go on having friends. Even if he plays square, the doubt is always there. Did he stack the deck? Did he deal from the bottom? Is he using sleight of hand? It makes everyone too damn uncomfortable.
"Well," I said, "thanks for the Scotch. I gotta get."
"Thax." Gabby stopped me before I could get out the side door. "You ain't kidding me, you know."
I looked back at him.
"What do you mean, I ain't kidding you?"
"You've got something going in brainsvile, and I don't mean just laying Billie. I used to work for Madame Esmerelda. She made with the madball. I read you like newspaper headline."
"Don't give me that crystal gazing crap," I told him. "We both know it's as phony as a queer bill."
"Uh-huh, but there's tricks to it. You either learn how to read people or you fold up your stand. All I'm saying is, if you get in too deep, gimme the highsign. Maybe I can help you out." He paused and when he spoke again I barely caught it.
"Maybe you'll even need a gun."
I started to say my God why would I need a gun, but I didn't. I nodded and said, "Thanks, Gabby. See you."
Maybe he was right. Maybe I would.
I went around to the rear of the nautch show. My friend Jerry was there. He was walking a quarter up and down the knuckles of his right hand and he was talking to one of the nautch girls-a peroxided, overbuilt piece with a mean eye.
It wasn't any of my business. The luckboy was old enough to look out for himself. He had probably played with fire before and wore the scars to prove it. He winked at me.
"Show Bev how a real pro works, Thax. Let's see you take her bra."
"Is she wearing one?"
"I vouch for it," he said with a lazy smile. "I just felt."
"You dirty bastard," the sexpot said. She smiled at both of us-a real earthy we-know-what-god-put-it-there-for-don't-we-boys smile. She was about as tasty as they come.
Moving up next to them, I leaned myself against the board-siding on my left arm. At the same time I took her left earring with my right hand. She gave a little shriek of delight when I showed it to her, and when I handed it back I straightened up and took Jerry's belt.
They both laughed when I said, "Don't be too surprised when you let down your pants tonight, Jerry. I just lifted your shorts."
But he fell for it-his own game. I saw him feel his thigh, automatically, to be certain they were still on him.
"Ain't he the nuts?" he said to the peroxide bitch.
"Yeah," she said in a breathy voice and her mascara-blued eyes burned deep voracious holes in me.
Then I realized Billie was standing in the doorway just behind me. She was catty mad.
"Should Jerry and I go share a bag of popcorn somewhere, sugar?" she asked Bev.
Jerry made a quick smooth pass which spun Bev around and linked their arms.
"Time to stroll, doll," he said to her. He shot a last look at me over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows.
I smiled at Billie. She said, "Stupid whore," and I said, "Take it easy. My mind is still virginal." Then she started to smile and she said, "You damn fool."
"Where'll we go?" I asked her.
"I don't care. What do you want to do?"
"W-e-ll-"
"Oh honestly, Thax. Now seriously. I want to talk to you first."
I saw great hope and promise in that magical word First. I could afford to be generous with my time. I said:
"All right, whatever you say. Just as long as we don't end up in some kind of montage, like those actors used to do in the movies of the 'Thirties and 'Forties."
"Montage? What's that mean?"
"Well-you remember how an everyday slicker like Tyrone Power, say, would meet a poor little rich girl like Loretta Young, and how in one night he would show her the real and the entire soul and spirit of America, which was always exemplified by Coney Island?
"First we would see a brief shot of Ty and Loretta on the ferris wheel, which would blend into a brief shot of Ty and Loretta on the merry-go-round, which blended into a shot of Ty and Loretta eating floss candy, and so on. That's a montage. The art of arranging in one composition pictorial scenes borrowed from different sources which blend into a whole to create a single image."
Billie was watching me with a fixed look.
"Thax-how did you ever end up in a sideshow?"
"Kismet."
"No, seriously. You have brains. More than that, you have a sort of intangible understanding about people and- well-things. You shouldn't be pushing little walnut shells around."
It was a sort of lefthanded compliment. It didn't really make me feel any too good. You come right down to it, it made me feel kind of ashamed. Anyhow, I didn't want to talk about me.
"Well, it doesn't really matter, does it? Come on, now. Let's find a pint somewhere and go have our-uh, talk."
"We don't need a pint," she said. "You smell like a moonshine still as it is:, She gave me a mocking coy look.
"You don't have to ply me with liquor, you know. I'm an agreeable girl."
That sounded promising too. I grinned and took her arm.
"Where'll we go?"
"Come on," she said. "I'll show you."
The last of the marks were filing out of the lot. Their happy, or semi-happy, voices sounded thin and lonely as they trudged off into the drifting mist. Everything was closing up. Lights were going out.
One of Jerry's luckboys came by us with a mute glance, as if we were strangers. What Billie and I did was our business. He had his own problems.
Billie led me across the smoky drawbridge to Dracula's Castle, and to a side door which was like so many other doors in Neverland. It said Private. She took my hand and we went up an inky corkscrew staircase. Around and around in blackness.
I didn't make any mention of the fact that I frequently suffered from a touch of claustrophobia. Because more frequently I suffered from a compulsion of lust.
I like bed. I like the female form. I damn well like the lust of female flesh-in bed, out of bed, anywhere. I was ready to run up those stupid breakneck steps blind.
Billie opened a door. It was so goddam dark I couldn't see if it said Private or not. We stepped into a little room and it was like stepping into a page of Ivanhoe.
The floor was flagstone. There was a large Gothiclike archer-cross window in the outer wall and there was a canopy bed with high bedboards in one corner. I looked at the bed in the misty night light.
"Mr. Cochrane planned to make some kind of vampire roost out of this room," Billie said in a subdued voice. "The public isn't allowed up here yet. There aren't any lights."
Lights I didn't need. But I wondered how many of Neverland's employees had used this room for assignations. I also wondered if Billie had ever used it before. Funny how perverse the human mind can be.
"A fool there was and he made his prayer-even as you and I," I muttered.
Billie's face was a pale blur in the misty dark and her body was very close to mine.
"What's that all about?" she asked.
"An association of ideas. It's a line from Kipling's poem The Vampire." I didn't tell her what the rest of the poem was about. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.
Even as you and I, buster. We're all saps when it comes to a woman. I reached for her.
"Not yet, Thax. Talk first." She led me over to the canopy bed and we sat down in the dark. It squeaked.
"Talk about what, for godsake?"
Billie lay back on the bed and I looked at her in that weird smoky quarter light and the last thing I wanted to do right then was talk.
"Thax, how would you like to get away from all this?"
That sounded like a line too, from one of those unrealistic boy-meets-girl plays that flourished in the late 'Twenties. But I knew what she meant. The tinsel and phony glamour and the buck-grubbing and the unadmitted fear of the atomic age.
I leaned over her. "How?"
"The Wonderland Ride has a steep price tag."
"I've got the price of admission, Thax. Enough for both of us."
"You? How?"
"Savings. I'm a thrifty girl, and I know how to invest. I'm not as young as I may look. I've been coining the dollars for years."
"Still-it can't be so much that it would last us for more than a couple of years?"
"You'd be surprised," she said."Besides, two smart people like you and I can always make out. " She started to sit up.
"Thax-we could go to the Mediterranean. I've always wanted to see the Mediterranean Sea."
I pushed her down.
"Billie? Let's talk about it later? Billie-"
"Thax?" Her voice was a whisper, breathy, warm, wanton. "I've already told them-oh, honey, wait-told them I was leaving in two weeks. Are you-_oooh God_, baby, don't-are you coming with me?"
"Yeah. Yeah. Anywhere," I muttered. "Anywhere."
10
I walked Billie out to the parking lot. There were still about forty-odd cars scattered around out there and one of them was a squad car. Ferris must have been burning the midnight oil again.
Billie's car was a white Sixtyone MG. Cute little toy. I opened the door for her and she got in showing a lot of leg, which is what a girl has to do when she gets in or out of an MG.
A uniformed cop got out of the squad car and started toward us, coming in that casual, overbearing walk they use whenever they are about to give you some trouble. He pulled an aluminum-backed notebook from his hip-pocket and gave me a onceover that said "You ain't much," and gave Billie one that said "How much, baby?" I knew he and I weren't going to get along.
"What's your names?" he wanted to know.
"Why? What's the beef?"
"I said what's your name, buster?"
"Buster Thaxton," I told him. "What's the beef?"
He lowered the notebook. He was about my big except that he outweighed me with the harness and boots and badge and gun and all that nonsense. We sized each other up like a couple of surly male dogs.
"Thax." Billie laid a warning hand on my arm. "We work for Cochrane Enterprises, officer," she said.
"I figured. I still want your names." He was looking at me.
"L. M. Thaxton and Billie Peeler. She's Billie," I said.
He wrote in the notebook. "Occupation?"
"We both work in the sideshow. What's the beef?"
He wrote in the notebook. "Where do you live?"
"I live in town, officer," Billie told him. "At the Regency. Is something wrong?"
He wrote in the notebook. "You?" He meant me.
"Tarzan's Tree House." I knew he wouldn't like it.
He lowered the notebook.
"Check with Ferris, if that'll make you happy," I said. "And now maybe you'd better give me your name. I want to go see Ferris myself."
He didn't like me any better than he had a minute ago, but it gave him pause for consideration. I talked like a man who had an in with his boss. I didn't mind making him sweat. I hate those storm troopers who jump on you when you're minding your own business and start giving you a hard time and refuse to tell you what it is you're supposed to have done. It's unconstitutional.
"There's no beef," he said. "We're just supposed to keep tabs on anybody we see hanging around here at night after closing time. There's been a murder, you know."
"Honest to God?" I turned back to Billie. "I'll see you tomorrow."
She gave me a bright searching smile.
"Two weeks, Thax. Then the Mediterranean."
"Sure. Night-night."
In two weeks Ferris might have me sitting in poky with a murder charge on my back. Billie drove off across the lot in the topless MG, low and sleek and white in the fog. The storm trooper and I started back to Neverland. He was still feeling a little edgy.
"You really know Ferris?"
"Uh-huh," I said. "I'm his prime suspect."
I walked away from him. When I looked back from the main gate he was standing in the big empty smoky lot staring after me.
Right inside the entrance was a big glassed-in map of Neverland. It was done in a bird's eye view and it was very colorful and carefully detailed. It showed me something I hadn't realized before. One portion of the Swamp Ride backed up to the manmade lake. According to the map there was only a rib of land separating the large body of water from the southern loop of the Swamp Ride's figure eight pattern.
It planted a little seed of an idea in my brainsoil.
I scouted around till I ran down one of the night watchmen. He was earning his pay watching the late movie on TV in the security building, which was just a small affair built to look like a Hansel and Gretel cottage.
"Hi. I'm Thaxton. I work in the sideshow." I showed him my magical card and asked him if he had a spare flashlight he could loan me and gave him some kind of phony reason for needing it.
It was all one to him. He wasn't going anywhere if he could help it. He gave me his.
He was a lonely old cuss so I hung around for a couple of minutes and helped him watch his movie. It was Mae West's 1933 _She Done Him Wrong_ and Mae was doing a very young Gilbert Roland wrong in the scene we watched. It was in this picture that Mae was supposed to have delivered that immortal line: "Come up and see me sometime." Which sounded like a line I should use when inviting people up to my tree house.
I thanked the old guy and got out of there.
I passed a couple of sweep-up men and another watchman but nobody I knew. Neverland seemed lonely and haunted, like a long lost Aztec city brooding in jungle mist. I heard a girl's throaty giggle somewhere nearby in the dark as I walked through the central garden, and then some rustling around, and it reminded me of that moss-beard kindergarten joke about the Simple Simon who stuck his head in the bushes to ask the young couple rolling in the leaves "How far is the Old Log Inn?" and got a punch in the nose.
So I kept my nose out of their business and went on my way, thinking, kids will be kids.
The one big light burned bluewhite over the Swamp Ride's deserted dock. The little _African Queen_ type boats were all snug in their berths for the night. Nobody was around. I climbed over the rail and went along the dock to the far shadowy end and jumped down to a weedy bank. Damn near turned my ankle on a stupid rock I didn't see in the dark.
But I didn't want to use the flash yet. Like the couple who were misbehaving in the garden, this was my business. I didn't want company.
The fog was creeping over the dark water and coiling around the black roots and the whole slimy place seemed to be writhing to life around me. Once I was in there-what with the fog and the dark and the unearthly silence-it was actually like being in an honest to God swamp. I don't mean the little five acre morass, but like I had wandered into the Everglades or Okefenokee.
Tell the truth, it gave me the willies, like something monstrous was out there in the night-that even to look at was a sin, something that had the grisly feel of those man-eating plants that grow in the jungles of Malaya.
Then I remembered those goddam pet gators and I nearly turned around and took off for my nice high tree home.
Now now, silly bastard, I reasoned with myself. They won't hurt anybody. Everybody says they won't. I switched on the flash and took a hasty look around. I'd just had another sick thought.
What if they kept real snakes in there?
They didn't. I was damn well certain they didn't; but you get into a place like that at night and you get something like snakes in your mind and you just can't shake 'em out.
A mossy trunk-stump shook itself out of the gray mist like a shaggy black dog coming out of the water, and the flash hit it squarely and knocked orange glints out of the wet moss. It seemed to me the damn thing had a twisted mouth and that the mouth was grinning at me. I went around it like it was a Frankenste
in's monster in damp wood.
I kept going, sticking as close to the edge of the waterway as I could. I wanted to find that little setback where I'd fished Cochrane out of the shallows.
The setback reared itself out of the swampy shadows as if startled at the approach of light. I played the flash over the water and the bank but there really wasn't anything there I wanted to see. It was that finger of high-ground behind the setback that interested me. I started walking over it.
There were a lot of tropical ferns and flowers and saw palmettos, and in about ten-twelve seconds I came out on the opposite bank and found myself standing on the edge of the manmade lake. The distance between the lake and the waterway was about one hundred feet.
That made one thing quite clear-the manner in which the murderer had moved the body from the tearoom into the Swamp Ride without too much strain and without being observed.
He-if it was a he-hauled the body from the tearoom to the Admiral Benbow dock, put it into one of the rowboats, rowed it across the lake in the dark and landed about where I was now standing. Then he or she or they lugged the body over the rib of land and dumped it into the setback. Neat.
But could a woman do it? Lug a heavy dead weight like Cochrane that far? None of the females I'd ever known could. Certainly not May.
I retraced my path with the flash, looking for footprints or heel-grouts in the earth. I didn't find anything except some of my own prints. Some detective.
I stopped. That old sensation of eyes on the back of my neck had come to me again. I straightened up slowly. The silence was like one of those transparent jeffies you see in delicatessen windows. It seemed to hold me like the jelly holds the cooked partridge or the pheasant it is poured over.
I spun around and the flash sliced through the tropical growth. It made a white splotch on Bill Duff's face. He was about twelve feet away and was half concealed in the palmettos.
"Peekaboo at you too, Bill," I said.
He put up a spread hand to block the light.
"Turn that damn thing off, will you? You want to blind me?"
"Let's take a look at your other hand first, Bill. I'd hate to find out in the dark you had one of May's knives in it."
Carny kill Page 8
