The short hairs on my neck itched, my heart thumped faster and all the blood inside me fought for clear passage through my carcass. But I didn’t panic. With all of it as weird and as unexplainable as it was, I didn’t panic.
The tent was large and pyramidal. There were several beds of straw and bamboo. Somebody had fashioned three chairs of bamboo stalks and mangoes hardened in some manner to be ornamental as well as useful. A large pole dominated the center of the tent. From it were hung by leather thongs several curious-looking objects, all small, shriveled, burnt dark brown in color. Stringy black hair trailed off the three objects in the same unkempt, terrifying fashion. I didn’t have to examine them. I’ve seen shrunken heads before. For one crazy second, I didn’t know where I was. At that precise instant I wouldn’t have been shocked if a Jivaran headhunter had strolled into the tent to cut my head off.
But the tent, aside from the heads, smacked more of Spanish. There were bongo drums stacked in one corner, all sizes, shapes and colors. Some of the designs painted on the oval wood would have made Dali surrender.
There was a lot of other junk too. All musical. Weeds, claves, gourds, maracas and maybe a dozen other noise makers that I didn’t know the name of, and still don’t.
The tent was roomy, clean and comfortable. The only opening other than the sky was a pinned-back flap of canvas that formed a wide doorway. I didn’t dare look out yet. I had one more surprise in store.
I suddenly became conscious of what I was wearing. I was no longer the well-dressed private detective. My blue serge suit had been stolen from me someplace; I had gone native in my sleep. Short-sleeved shirt that was more of a vest, skin-tight breeches that ended under my kneecaps. And a wide black sash neatly girding my waist. I was wearing no shoes or hat—the hat was hanging off a hook on the other tent side. One of those wide, frill-edged straw things that would set me off banana-plantation style. I began to get some notion just where I was.
I sat down again and thought hard, but it wasn’t much use. Not with the drums pounding away outside drowning out the chirping birds, making night out of broad daylight. My body felt great, all right, but my head had started to come apart again with worry, fear and aggravation. What the hell was this all about and where in hell was I?
I got my answer sooner than I expected.
I sniffed the air. It was crisp, dry and salty-smelling, as if we were near the ocean. I pondered hard, but my eyes kept roving around the tent.
I finally saw a tray of food set down on the ground on the other side of my matted bed. A cocoanut neatly halved, a bottle of dark rum, a stack of mangoes, and some green leaves that didn’t fit in with anything digestible I’d ever heard of. Right away I thought of poison, but the old brain saved me and my new appetite. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to transport me someplace and change me to fit in with my surroundings. That didn’t make sense, but poisioning me under such taxing circumstances made less sense. I attacked the cocoanut and the mangoes. I saved the rum until last.
All the dark brown oil and fire in the world had been gathered in that one small bottle. My insides roared with flame and thunder, the blood rushed to my head and the tongue in my mouth danced in ecstasy. I drank half the bottle and felt as if I could have taken on ten tigers with my bare hands. It was crazy, but I felt ten feet tall. And not drunk either. I was even brave enough now to wander outside and see what gave. I leaped to my feet and headed for the opening in the tent. I was half the distance when I had visitors. I stepped back as they stepped in.
Everybody else had gone native too. My visitors were the Count Calypso and Evelyn Hart. The Count was as spidery and crawly as ever, all hooks and crags and bent formations but he had gone open-air. His fantastic physique was in tropical shorts and leather vest. A dark red cape hung from his crooked shoulders. He looked as improbable as Jackie Gleason in a loin cloth.
Evelyn Hart had changed from Park Avenue and Bergdorf-Goodman’s to what the well-dressed woman will wear on safari. But she wasn’t dressed that much for Africa. She was wearing breeches and neat handsome boots, but she was naked from the waist up except for a string of beads hanging around her lovely neck that just barely covered the tips of her breasts. The beads were as big as golf balls and just as white. I didn’t know what they were either. The lower half of her breasts were rounder and more exciting.
She wasn’t wearing a pith helmet. Her red hair was undone and pinned to the left side with a hibiscus of some kind.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I threw my head back and laughed. With all my troubles, they were two of the most mismatched people I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Hold it,” I said “What time does the movie start?”
FIFTEEN
Nobody laughed. Count Calypso scowled and Evelyn Hart shook her head disapprovingly. Still the great lady, in spite of everything.
The drums outside had quieted down to a low thunder.
I stopped laughing too. “Where’s Peg Temple?” I asked. “And what have you done with Voodoo?”
The Count clucked softly in his throat.
“The ladies are both safe, Mr. Noon. Perhaps you should concern yourself with your own skin.”
Evelyn Hart nodded and the golf balls around her neck danced. “Pay close attention, Mr. Noon. And don’t think the Count is a clown or funny or foolish, or you’ll be a dead man.”
I looked at both of them in all their mismatching glory. I showed my teeth.
“You’re right, of course. I’d hate to be found dead in this get-up. And the Count isn’t funny, but clever as hell. First he doped my coffee at the office so I’d get those stomach aches before looking up Voodoo, just to make a believer out of me. Then he worked some crazy kind of drug or gas in Voodoo’s apartment and put all three of us to sleep. Now I wake up in a jungle. No, I don’t think he’s funny at all.”
“He’s pretty much of a wizard, as you’ll soon see,” Evelyn Hart said with genuine admiration in her voice. Her eyes settled almost fondly on the hunched caricature of a man standing beside her. As for the Count, he was regarding me as if he thought I was funny. He was smiling, and I was some curious type of bug that he had to do something about. I didn’t like the way his eyes were traveling up and down my robust body. He was sizing me up the way a cannibal might.
“Where the hell am I?” I asked.
“Trinidad, Mr. Noon,” Count Calypso said. “Now you are in Port-of-Spain. The homeland will never leave your brain.”
“You’re still a minor poet,” I said. “Now let’s get down to cases. What is this all about?”
The Count pointed a gnarled finger at me. “You are needed. Therefore you live. Remain needed, and keep living.”
“That makes sense,” I admitted. “May I hear more?”
Evelyn Hart fingered some of the golf balls around her throat. The soft superb curves of her breasts throbbed briefly into fuller view. Count Calypso ran a wet tongue over his jagged teeth. The wizard was flesh-and-blood all right. Just a real clever faker. No witch doctor ever showed as much interest in a female.
The Count cackled. “All of New York is in a frenzy. The famous Calypso Room has seen a murder. Six dolls, strangely resembling live people, were found in the alley. Live people who are either dead or have disappeared. Evelyn Hart is dead. The bartender is dead. Coffee is dead. And the other three dolls can be found nowhere in New York. The papers are full of witchcraft and sensation. Anything Calypso does is now on everyone’s tongue and brain. It is good.”
I made a face. “You’re a new kind of press agent. Anything for a headline including murder and kidnaping. So Voodoo, Peg Temple and I have disappeared. So what?”
The Count wouldn’t get mad. He was too happy. Everything must have been working out fine.
“This is the week of the Bacchanal. Our famous island festival. Now the eyes of all the world are centered on Trinidad and Port-of-Spain. We are in the ascendancy. And the festival will not disappoint the world. We will make more headlines soo
n.”
I had a frightening idea of just what he meant.
“You left a trail, Count. A big trail. I left two of your knife fighters on the floor of Voodoo’s apartment. Stone-cold dead in the apartment. And there’s a smart cop named Mike Monks on this case. Don’t let him get after you. Once he’s breathing down your neck, you’re out of business.” I was talking to the Count but I kept looking at Evelyn Hart. I still couldn’t see where she fit in. And I couldn’t understand about her redheaded corpse with the face shot off in the fancy layout on Park Avenue. What was she up to, anyway?
She smiled at me vaguely and the Count caught the grin. He didn’t like it. He growled in his throat. His eyes burned at me. “You live for now. But only if you remain quiet and make no trouble. One piece of non-cooperation and you die.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Sooner than scheduled, you mean?”
He nodded. I grinned. “Okay, I’ll be a good boy. But can’t I ask some questions?”
Count Calypso drew his cloak tighter about his scrawny shoulders. His bones seemed to crack in the process. His Halloween face wrinkled weirdly.
“Listen to the drums, Mr. Noon. Listen well. They will answer all the questions you could ask.”
“I heard you the first time,” I said. Now I heard the drums again. Thucka-thucka thud. Low and deadly, like a death dirge.
Evelyn Hart looked at the Count. “Let me talk to him, Count Calypso. He will not make any trouble if I tell him exactly what is what. Then perhaps we can finish out the week without any more trouble or discomfort.”
Count Calypso clenched his bony fingers together. His tongue licked at his lips, but it wasn’t all menace. The Count seemed to approve of Evelyn Hart’s revealing dress, hands down.
“No,” he droned in his death voice. “I know what will keep Mr. Noon in a state of grace. Perhaps we should take him to visit the ladies. Then he can see for himself why it is so necessary for him to behave according to my law. The law of Count Calypso.”
“No, Count,” her voice pleaded with him. “Is that necessary, really? I’d rather talk to him—”
Count Calypso glared at her. “I am the law here. My word is your word, Evelyn Hart. Do you follow and do you obey?”
Her face went dead, all the color draining right out of it. “I follow and I obey,” she said tonelessly, like a parrot.
The Count looked pleased. But he went back to glaring at me. “Come, Mr. Noon. I will show you what your heart desires.”
The drums rose in tempo. Thuck-thucka-thucka-thud. Almost on cue. It was all well staged and professional, but it still scared hell out of me. The Count commanded unseen talent.
“See Trinidad and die,” I said without feeling.
The Count laughed and Evelyn Hart shuddered, the golf balls dancing again. The hunchbacked little man clawed his way toward the tent opening and stepped through. Evelyn Hart drew herself erect, as if she were getting hold of herself, and glided silently after him.
I had no choice. Mine not to reason why, et cetera. I walked through the tent door right on the heels of Count Calypso and Evelyn Hart into the bright Port-of-Spain sunlight.
But the day was black as death. Before midnight, there would be more corpses than you could find in the morgue at Bellevue.
Outside it was blue and magnificent. I had never seen such a view in all my life. We must have been at the very tip of the island, maybe a mile off the shore. I could see the Atlantic, blue, green and clean, swelling up against the low beach in small white-capped breakers. Far overhead against a sky as blue as heaven, gulls wheeled in lazy flight, hawking like quarrelsome women. The ground beneath my feet was sandy, dirty brown and mixed with earth, dry and relaxing to the soles of my bare feet.
We were in a wide opening about a hundred yards square, flat and level and neatly boxed and bordered by row upon row of tropical palms. Far off in the distance lying flat on the horizon, I saw land. Probably South America and Venezuela if the direction was right. Geographically, I knew that Trinidad was technically a part of the South American continent even if it was an island.
The air was warm but pleasant, fanned over with ocean breezes. It was a great day even if Count Calypso threw a black pall over it.
I watched his hunched back and Evelyn Hart’s tall superb figure as I tagged along behind. We didn’t walk far. A path had been fashioned in the clearing. A sort of pebbled walk. Only the pebbles were flat white rocks that had been imbedded in the soft ground, country-style. That was just about the only touch of civilization except for the big tent we had come out of. I kept my eyes open.
It was eerie. There was nobody else in sight except the Count, the redhead and me. And the gulls. But the bongo drums kept pounding out their jungle telegraph. And I had that unmistakable sensation that a thousand pair of eyes were fastened on us, watching every move we made.
Count Calypso suddenly turned off the pebbled walk and headed straight into a mass of green undergrowth which had been to our left. Evelyn Hart went in after him without a break in her walk, and suddenly there was an opening in the green wall wide enough to permit a man to walk through without messing his clothes. The foliage and the trees and the vegetation were all new to me; the farthest I’d ever been tropically was Florida, but green grass is green grass the world over. I walked in behind them like the ex-Boy Scout I was.
Magnificent is the only word that fits. We had entered a green paradise, green splashed through with every color of the rainbow. The area would have put a color prism to shame. Every kind of exotic flower and plant shot up all around me, bursting like gay boutonnieres in the green lapel of Nature’s big overcoat. It was awesomely beautiful.
“Here,” Count Calypso’s tomblike voice said suddenly. “Here is your answer, Mr. Noon. Perhaps now you will give us no further trouble.”
He had halted just ahead of me, hunched over something in front of him. Evelyn Hart came around to one side of him. They both were staring down at the ground. I reached them and came around Count Calypso’s right side.
Just then the drums stopped pounding. On cue again. The Count sure had a strong union. Local 802 couldn’t beat this routine.
I looked down in the direction that Count Calypso and his redheaded sidekick were looking. My brain stopped functioning for a full minute. This wasn’t funny at all. This was something that should have gone out with Fu Manchu, Dr. Caligari and those old Pearl White movie serials. But it hadn’t. Here it was staring me right in the kisser.
A pit in the ground, about ten feet by ten feet, yawned right below us, shored down on all four sides, as mathematically regular as the walls of a bedroom. But there were no beds, only hard-packed earth. And the pit was all of fifteen feet deep, so it would have been impossible to climb out unassisted. Or at the very least without a helicopter. The pit was as empty as a church collection box in a poor parish. Except for the two people that were in it.
Voodoo and Peg Temple.
And they were both naked. Naked in a terrible way.
They had been staked out on the flat ground, head to head, as if they’d been crucified. Their arms and legs spread out into feminine crosses of flesh with short stakes lashing them to the ground. I could see they hadn’t been touched. Only tied down in a humiliating fashion. It was terrible looking down at them like that. They were shocked speechless. Their eyes stared up at me laced with fright, rigid with fear and terror for a full instant. Then the solid woman that was in both of them returned and they twisted their faces to one side, like girls ashamed of their nakedness. Their bodies twisted quietly against the short stakes that lashed them helplessly. But neither of them made so much as a whimper.
Count Calypso chuckled. It was a cackling, ugly sound in the beautiful morning air.
I didn’t say anything. I thought of only two things. The bright sun edging over the forest of trees which in one short hour would be glaring right down into their faces—that and the little ants edging cautiously around the fresh earth of the pit.
; “How long have they been down there like that?” I heard myself ask in a voice I couldn’t recognize as my own. I stared at Evelyn Hart so hard and so meaningfully that she turned away with a slight gasp, the red mounting in her cheeks.
The Count jabbed me with a bony finger.
“One hour,” he wheezed. “Only an hour. It is not too bad yet. Just discomforting. But soon they will have the sun. And there is no telling when the ants will decide to dine.”
I had to fight to keep from smashing my fist into his hooked, ugly face. “You are one sweet bastard,” I said evenly.
He laughed harshly. “I have your word you will do as I say?”
“Have I got a choice?”
“No,” he admitted. “You do not. It would be easier for me to kill you, but you are more necessary to me alive. Do you understand that?”
“Okay,” I said, holding back the fury that was doing its damnedest to make me lose my head. “Get them out of there.”
“No.” Count Calypso leveled his malevolent eyes at me. “First—our bargain.”
“Okay. Okay.” I unclenched my fists. “I’ll sign. I’ll shine your shoes for the next fifty years. I’ll scratch your back forever. But get those poor kids the hell out of there.”
Evelyn Hart stirred. “Tell him, Count. Quickly, please.”
Down in the pit, Peg Temple called softly. “Thanks, Eddie.” And Voodoo moaned something in a low voice. But all I could feel was the warm sun beginning to ignite my shoulderblades. Suddenly, the ants beneath my naked feet were galvanizing into a large red army of soldiers descending into the pit on two naked, helpless women. I bit my lip.
“Okay, Dracula,” I said “What do you want?”
He stepped away from me, his cape swirling about his shoulders. He made fancy passes in the air with his bony hands. The drums came right in on cue again. Count Calypso and his Jungle Cats.
His gleaming eyes stared right into me, boring like twin diamond drills.
“Tonight you will dance. Dance with Voodoo. Dance before the audience of my choosing.”
The Voodoo Murders Page 8