Evelyn Hart squeezed into the pilot’s chair and took the controls. I sat right beside her and watched through the windows, the gun ready. The island behind us was ablaze with light now. My little brush fire had turned into a major conflagration. I still couldn’t understand the Count’s lousy interpretation of my moves.
All of this was too good to be true.
So it wasn’t true.
Evelyn Hart was pumping starters and starting pumps or something and the motor was wheezing into life when the whole mess started all over again.
The sky ripped apart directly in front of us and a million splatters of illumination pierced the night. A flare. It blazed into life igniting the concrete runway as brightly and brilliantly as a table lamp in a bedroom. We were on television and in the movies. And as nakedly defenseless as a bare body turning on a spit over a blazing fireside.
And the Count Calypso’s crooked body, a flowing crimson cape surrounding his scrawny frame bobbed into view in the plexiglass windows. He was standing on the runway two hundred yards before us, his bent fingers cradling, of all things, a sub-machine gun. The drum and the outline was unmistakable.
He was alone. But sitting there in the plane we were clay ducks in a shooting gallery in a penny arcade on Broadway.
“DIE!” he shrilled. “DIE NOW! BIRDS WHO FLY WAY UP IN THE AIR WILL BE SHOT DOWN SOMEWHERE NEAR THERE!”
He was nuts. He was crazy. He’d lost everything. But he was going to take us with him. And he had the gun to do it with. He opened up on us, the Tommy gun chattering away like a typewriter.
I pushed Evelyn Hart’s numbed fingers back to the controls.
“Give ’er the gun, sweetheart,” I said.
Evelyn Hart responded.
Something in the lady was steel. She didn’t freeze, she didn’t whimper, she didn’t bat an eye. The propellor whirled in a dazzling orifice of light and sound. The motor throbbed and hummed and The Evelyn started to move forward.
The flare was still falling and the Count Calypso’s machine gun was thundering the night apart with flame and noise. Lead whined and hummed all around us. But the redhead’s hand was steady on the wheel. With a burst of speed, the tail of The Evelyn left the ground and the light monoplane surged forward with a dazzling burst of forward motion.
The crooked, caped figure of the Count Calypso loomed through the plexiglass window, outlined in the glare of the rocket, illuminated by the orange gun-fire spouting death from his hands. Behind us, on the floor, the girls huddled together, not knowing what was going on. There was no time to compare notes.
We bore down on the Count Calypso, tail lifted, gaining in flying speed. His fantastic figure crouched on the runway before us. As ugly as a tarantula sitting on a white tablecloth.
The machine gun thundered. Bullets thudded into the silver body of the plane. I could hear their leaden noses dig in and whine off somewhere. And the Count held his ground. Firing in one long steady stream. The bursting flare was settling down now, still blazing and beginning to flicker and sputter out.
The yards between the nose of the plane and the Count Calypso disappeared as The Evelyn raced forward. The plexiglass window in front of me shattered magically, the fiberglass splintering in a myriad of crystals. I brought the .357 Magnum to bear. One last shot. The only shot I had left. But it was a near impossibility to fire.
Still, you have to do something sometimes. Anything.
More lead, in bursts, smacked into the nose of the plane, missing the prop. No telling what damage had been done. And the Count wasn’t through yet. The machine gun bucked and roared in his bent fingers.
We reached him in an instant.
For a full second, he loomed before us. Bent, crooked and twisted, his bald skull gleaming in the moonlight and the dying flare. The machine gun in his hands tilting up at us. Almost in our faces. The mad gleam of his eyes was something you wake up in the middle of the night screaming about.
The Count Calypso. A hopelessly insane doer of bad things. A maker of Black Magic, a doll killer. A man killer. A great corrupt, twisted leader of men. A misguided genius.
Evelyn Hart never batted an eye. Unflinchingly, she pulled the wheel back ino her lap. And the nose of The Evelyn lifted off the ground and I felt the wheels come away from the asphalt. With the Count Calypso directly to the left of the whirling arc of silver-tipped propeller.
One second, his startled mad face took on a split-second’s worth of sanity. He tried to duck, the machine gun dropping from his nerveless fingers. But it was the late second. The no good second. His face whipped past the nose of the ship out of sight and he flung himself to one side like a wild man.
Too late.
The rising left wing of The Evelyn caught him right where his neck met his scrawny impossible body.
And cut his head off. As neatly and as cleanly as a machete can slice through a pineapple.
The machine-gun had gone silent, the flare had died with a fitful burst of sparks and down behind us, the wall of trees vanished beneath the wheels of the silver bird as it rose into the sky.
We soared aloft as light as a carefree bird, straightened in a gentle bank and roared off. Dead North. I looked out the side window. Below us, the fire marked the island as surely as a big X on a small map. The ground was ablaze with light. And the harrow long white ribbon of runway faded from view.
A runway with a dead spider on it.
I tried to shake the sound out of my ears. But I could still hear the drums. Thucka-thucka thud. Thucka-thucka thud.
My stomach righted itself. I had a bad taste in my mouth. Behind me, I could hear Voodoo crying and Peg Temple shooshing her in a motherly way. I felt lousy. Alive but lousy.
“Ed,” Evelyn Hart said in a meek, got-to-get-hold-of-myself voice. “Just take the wheel will you? Just hold it steady and keep your eye on the compass. Due north.”
“You all right?” I peered at her. Her queen-like profile was firm but the color of her face was turning a ghastly green.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’m just going to be very, very sick for a few minutes.”
I took the wheel and watched the compass and held The Evelyn on a Due North reading away from Port-of-Spain. Toward New York. Away from burning trees to burning neon. Back to Sanity. My kind, anyway.
Evelyn Hart got sick. In a very unlady-like way.
We raced on through a deep blue sky playing tag with the big, silvery moon.
Heading home. Home where the cops were.
TWENTY-TWO
Benny’s funeral was on Wednesday. I brought flowers with me, had a drink in silent memory and went home. Mike Monks had cleaned up things with me the day before. And took care of all the official rules and regulations to square things in Trinidad. Technically, Count Calypso was responsible for Benny and Coffee and the phony Evelyn Hart murder. As for the redhead, she drew a one to five prison sentence as accessory after the fact. But with her connections, I didn’t expect her to do more than three weeks of the penalty. Peg Temple and I had put in about a thousand good words for her.
I was sitting in Benny’s bar going through his papers and things to clear his business up when Peg Temple found me. She was bright and beautiful in her two-piece tailored outfit and I was glad to see her. Her smile would brighten up any funeral.
We talked about things in general and she told me how the notoriety of our famous Trinidad adventure had landed her a fat part in an upcoming Broadway musical with a Calypso background. It developed that she had a singing voice that might worry Judy Garland. I was glad for her, of course, but she still wanted to talk about the Calypso Caper. What with the murders and the riot in Trinidad that came out when Evelyn Hart dropped down at La Guardia out of the blue, the papers had been full of nothing but. The Voodoo Doll scare had been front page stuff for days as it was. And our fantastic experience coming right on top of it had really whipped the town into a lather. I’d turned down three television offers as it was. Benny’s funeral had sobered m
e up plenty. It wouldn’t have seemed right to capitalize on something that had gotten him killed.
And I was sick of private investigations. Sick of getting hit over the head. Sick of being stared at like I was a freak. I didn’t mind Peg Temple though. She didn’t bother me at all. She was one blonde that appealed to me.
I mixed her a drink from Benny’s bar and had one myself. The place was closed for business and we had the joint all to ourselves. Far from prying eyes.
“So what is it, Ed?” Peg Temple asked me for the ninetieth time. “This Hart dame wanted to sell a lot of dolls and she ran into this nut called Count Calypso. So then what?”
I toasted Benny again to myself for the sixth time.
“Newspapers sell things. Calypso is big stuff now. Evelyn wanted to start a scare. Voodoo dolls. Fill the papers. Then she’d come out with a Voodoo doll. Modeled after our dancing friend. She might have made a million bucks. But she never figured the Count for a nut who was looking for a rich backer like her. She never figured on murder.”
Peg Temple’s eyes were puzzled.
“What I still can’t figure is why a dame like Evelyn with all those good looks and all that dough should want to get mixed up in crazy shenanigans anyway.”
I shrugged.
“The way of our nice little world. Poor little rich girl has everything. Doesn’t need a damn thing. Except kicks and laughs and hot thrills. So she tries anything new. The nuttier the better. The Count, for all his ugly qualities must have fascinated her Park Avenue brain. He was a big thrill. Something out of a book. So Evelyn Hart mixed with him and plotted with him. Subconsciously, she probably knew she was dead wrong from the beginning. But once the thrill had her, it had her. When she gets out of jail she ought to go see a head shrinker. A prison stretch isn’t going to do her any good at all. But I’m sure glad she came to her senses before Voodoo carved me up for the vultures.”
“Keep talking,” Peg said. “I’ll mix the drinks.”
“Well—” I lit a cigarette. “She came to me because she started to worry about his plans. She didn’t know about how the Count wanted Voodoo for his very own. That ugly little man worshipped a lovely woman. He could kill everybody else. But he couldn’t kill her. So he wanted her to come to the Bacchanal so he could rig up his private wedding. Kill two birds with one stone. Get the woman he wanted and make a symbol for his followers. But he went nuts and made New York his playground. He worked fast too.”
“I don’t get you,” my blonde said, handing me a tall glass with an olive in it.
“He made dolls quick to order. Me, you, Benny, Coffee, the works. As soon as we all stepped into the picture. Mainly because he believed in the stuff himself. And also he was trying to sway Evelyn Hart to his will. It scared the hell out of everybody didn’t it? It scared me. He knew about Voodoo and Coffee and when she sent out an S.O.S. he saw a chance to have some of his own copyrighted fun. And turn it into profit.”
She nodded. I caught my breath. The martini made me feel lighter.
“So Evelyn panicked a little. Called me in to see what was what and maybe help her out. And the Count started. Somebody doped my coffee. Result—stomach aches. He made a doll out of me and threw it into Benny’s store. You walked in. Now a doll for you. The redhead was worried now. And before she came to see me, the Count called on her. He must have hypnotized her good because she tried to convert me into a corpse with her convertible. Now, he’s really having a ball. And the redhead is getting scareder by the minute. The money will be falling out of her hands in a jiffy. The Count didn’t care about selling dolls. He was making New York Voodoo conscious. And he wanted Voodoo. She’d be a big asset on the island where he was playing God.
“And then Coffee looms into the picture. Coffee is killed, dolls are spread in the alley and Evelyn Hart drops out of sight. Now the fun starts. To make it stick, this menace—this hex, evil-eye junk—they kill Benny and hide him in a refrigerator at the club., Voodoo is out of her mind with fear and now the Count shows up. Convinced she’s scared enough to join him, keeping things hopping with the cops and baffling murders that will fill the papers. For Evelyn Hart, he has a topper. He murders some poor dame that looks like her, rigs up the phony dental charts and the cops forget about the rich redhead. Who is now in up to her wealthy elbows and has to play ball with the Count. Yourself and me, you know about. Where we come in, that is. Now will you leave me alone so we can do some real serious drinking?”
She stared at me over her glass, her blue eyes soft.
“All of this just because somebody wanted a cute promotional idea to sell dolls. What a world.”
“Here’s to Benny,” I said aloud. I drained my glass.
Peg Temple brightened. “Say, look. You’re beat. How about we take a night out together? We could go to the Calypso Room. They’ve got the Duke again. And Pearl Gonzales and Montego Joe. It’s sort of a contest tonight. Ought to be a lot of jazz.”
I shuddered.
“No thanks. I don’t want to hear another bongo drum for ninety years. Let’s go downtown and see if we can catch a Rock ’N Roll show.”
She laughed. And I did too. Our voices seemed to blend well in the dim bar. We sounded good together. I liked the idea.
“Well,” she shrugged. “You just going to sit here and feel sorry for yourself? Let’s go someplace and do something. What do you say, Ed?”
I looked at her mouth. It was red and sensational. And something I could understand. Benny being dead and me sitting in his bar going over his faded, painful memories didn’t make sense somehow. It couldn’t bring him back. It wouldn’t bring him back. Even if I owed it to him.
“You’re absolutely right, Miss Temple.” I stood up and raised her to her feet. I hooked her arm in mine and walked her unsteadily for the front door.
“That’s more like it, Ed. Where we going?”
“Up to my office,” I said. “For coffee.”
She made a face and unhooked my arm gently from hers. She looked annoyed with me again.
“Coffee?” she echoed bitterly.
“Coffee,” I said. “And—”
I took her in my arms and kissed her.
THE END
The Voodoo Murders Page 13