Blues in the Night

by Dick Lochte

  There was a quick chuckle, then, ‘What they call you?’

  ‘Leander.’ The name had popped into his head, no doubt a reference to the despised racist political boss of the Delta, Leander Perez. ‘Well, Lee Ander. Come on in.’

  The gate swung open and Mace entered the brightly lit flagstone path to the garage, which was now closed. The two cars that had been there earlier in the day were both missing. He hoped the Mustang was in the garage.

  He got out of the truck and removed the suitcase.

  As he carried it to the castle, he was aware of the thump-thump-thump sounds of synthesized rock-rap. Guests seemed to be enjoying themselves, wandering in and out of the tent, splashing in the lagoon. He had no idea what passed for fashion on the coast, but these people were wearing clothes that looked suspiciously like outfits designed for the bedroom, not a party. The men were in pajamas and robes, the women in frilly peignoirs or less. They were young, mainly. Glitter people. Tattooed, pierced. Stoned. Poor Wylie would have loved the place.

  Even before Mace pressed the buzzer beside the back door it was opened by the same black bodybuilder, only now dressed in baggy tiger-striped pajamas. ‘Took yo’ time, Lee Ander,’ he said. ‘Got folks in here in need.’ He took the suitcase from Mace. ‘Be right back,’ he said, and closed the door.

  Mace realized that, at a party where bedroom dress was in vogue, his sport shirt and slacks stood out like, well, an uninvited guest. He walked quickly to the one place where he thought he could find some camouflage – the lagoon where nudity seemed to be encouraged.

  There was enough mist rising from the water to indicate that a heavy-duty heating system was keeping the naked bodies splashing around in it safe from the goose bumps of a typical chilly Southern California midnight. Exotic birds in golden cages chirped their alarms as Mace moved swiftly through the cabana, trying not to disturb the fornicating couples as he searched for nightwear that would fit his frame.

  He settled on a pair of black silk pajamas that smelled of some musky cologne, which he hoped would dissipate as the night wore on. He removed his pants and shirt, folded them and placed them beneath a pile of colorful cushions on the straw mat floor. He wore the borrowed pajamas over his boxers and did not bother to replace his shoes and socks. He emerged from the lagoon area feeling foolish and oddly vulnerable but less noticeable.

  The first thing he saw was the black man in tiger striped pajamas searching the crowd.

  Mace ducked back into the lagoon area and watched as the big man stormed toward the tent. Less than a minute later, he emerged and, running now, headed for the castle.

  Mace made his way to the tent.

  This was the party’s main dining area, judging by the food counters along one wall, staffed by sleepy men in rumpled white coats and sagging toques, and the tables and chairs being bussed by a team of servants in livery. Fewer than a quarter of the tables were still in use. The trays of food were down to the dregs. A tiny hamburger here, a boiled shrimp on a toothpick there.

  The ice sculpture, which Mace suspected had been designed in the image of their illustrious host, was now barely the size of a snow cone resting in a puddle of water. The most active display table currently was at the rear of the tent filled with desserts, including a chocolate fountain and fresh strawberries.

  Some sixth sense told Mace to take a seat at the nearest table. It was occupied by a couple nibbling on brownies and one another. They pulled apart when he joined them. The male was Mace’s age at least, paunchy and balding in what looked suspiciously like a toga. The female was barely in her twenties, a full-bodied platinum blonde wearing a black see-through bra and silk panties. They didn’t seem to mind the interruption. They grinned at him, obviously somewhere in the outer zone.

  The male squinted his eyes and said, ‘I know you.’

  Mace was sure he’d never seen the guy before in his life.

  ‘You’re the dude on Mad Men. Dude fucks anything that walks. What’s your name?’

  When Mace didn’t reply, the balding man turned to the girl. ‘What’s his name, Trink, the dude on Mad Men?’

  Trink was squinting at Mace, too. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What’s Mad Men?’

  From the corner of his eye, Mace spotted tiger-striped pajamas standing at the entrance to the tent with two guys in a different sort of costume. Security guards.

  ‘Some goddamn great party, huh?’ Mace said, moving closer to the couple, turning his back on the hunting crew.

  ‘You got that right,’ the balding man said. ‘So, wha’ do ya think of my girl, Mad Man? Fuckable, right?’

  ‘And then some,’ Mace said.

  The girl giggled, leaned forward and fell on to his lap, almost sending him and the chair over backwards. He managed to stay upright even when she pressed her lips against his. She tasted of gin and brownie and something mildly medicinal. It was a pretty good kiss, all things considered, and he let it continue while the hunting party moved slowly past their table.

  ‘Hey,’ the balding man complained, ‘save some for Uncle Ralphie.’

  Uncle Ralphie had to wait until Tiger Stripes and the security guards left the tent.

  ‘Here she is,’ Mace said. ‘Good as new.’

  ‘Not fair, dude,’ Uncle Ralphie said. ‘You got that beautiful blonde wife and you still screw around.’

  Mace had no idea who the balding man thought he was. Nor did he care.

  ‘You guys keep the party going,’ he said, and left the table.

  At the entrance to the tent he saw the hunting team heading toward the lagoon where a naked guy his size was waving his arms and yelling. Not good. On their next round, the hunting party would know which color pajamas to look for.

  He crossed the lawn at a modest pace and strolled through the open doors of the mini-castle. What may have been a living room and dining room had been combined and transformed into one huge ballroom. Most of the furniture had been removed, except for a few suits of armor and some original art on the paneled walls.

  Thankfully, the level of lighting was low enough that Tiger Stripes would have to be right on top of him to make an identification. Adding to the room’s invisibility quotient was a round, disco ball spinning near the ceiling, its tiny mirrored surfaces reflecting little shards of light that were sent around the room in almost dizzying patterns.

  A pop band, five musicians of undetermined gender, was playing discordant music at the far end of the room. They were dressed in black, men’s pajamas, like Mace, but their faces had been painted white with black lips. Their name, if the logo on their drum skin was to be believed, was Dr Caligari.

  Some of the ballroom crowd were trying to dance to music that was basically undanceable. Others merely groped one another. A few groped Mace as he looked for Angela Lowell among the dancers.

  His attention was caught instead by a flash of light in the next room.

  It was a smaller ballroom. Just as dark, and without a disco ball. As he entered, another flash brightened the room. Its source was Simon S. Symon gleefully aiming his camera at a buxom woman with wild red hair who was standing at the edge of a spotlight trained on a huge fishbowl full of rainbow-colored pills.

  She was an actress, popular enough that even Mace recognized her. She had evidently consumed a fair amount of Jerry Monte’s mind-altering answer to Skittles. That face that looked so stunning, was now splotched and sagging. Her eyes were glassy.

  A male guest laughed and yanked down the top of her peignoir and her large breasts bounced free. ‘No,’ she screamed and tried to cover herself, but not before Symon had captured the moment.

  Mace moved toward the photographer. But the ever-watchful Symon spotted him and backed away, bumping against guests in his hurry. Mace closed the gap.

  At arm’s distance, he reached out to grab the little man. But Symon brought up his camera and Mace was blinded by the flash. In the moments it took for him to regain his sight, he lost track of the photographer.

  He t
ook the nearest door and entered a vestibule where three men in business suits were entering an elevator. He blinked away the effects of Symon’s flash just as the elevator’s door was sliding shut. He recognized the trio. The tall, brown-skinned man with the goatee, he’d only seen in newspaper photos. The other two had been in Paulie’s office. Corrigan and his stooge.

  Just before the elevator door slid shut, the stooge smiled and raised a hand to point a thumb-and-forefinger gun at him.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Mace moved back into the room where he’d lost Symon. The dynamic seemed to have shifted and he quickly realized why. Tiger Stripes and the security guards were going through the crowd with penlights, checking faces.

  Mace departed the room through yet another door, this one placing him in a short corridor. To his right was a walk-in closet housing two vacuum cleaners, a floor waxer, and an assortment of soaps, clean rags and liquid wax. To his left was a closet with linens and towels. That narrowed his path of escape to a pebble-grained glass door at the end of the corridor.

  Taking it, he stepped into a puddle of water and an atmosphere so humid you could almost drink it. The water and the humidity were caused by an open sauna door. The sauna was large with more than enough space to handle the two young men and three young women who were obviously planning on using it.

  The women and one of the men had removed their clothes, which they’d draped on wooden benches. They were waiting for the other man to remove his shoes. They seemed to be body-proud, with figures that were too perfectly sculpted to have occurred in nature. Two of the women and the male who was finally shoeless displayed body art – blue and red and green swirls and curlicues, some covering a shoulder, some forming a ‘V’ on the lower back.

  They welcomed him with nods and smiles. ‘Room for one more.’ The invitation came from a brunette whose perfect figure nearly convinced Mace to go off game. But whatever parts of his body were saying, his mind was dealing with the reality of his present situation. He’d allowed his infatuation for a woman he barely knew to put him in jeopardy. True, when he made up his mind to crash the party, he’d thought he’d be dealing with your typical celebrity, admittedly one with considerable clout.

  He’d assumed the worst that would happen if he was caught would be a beating, maybe, or a couple of days jail-time. But the presence of Corrigan and his sidekick, not to mention the man with the goatee, meant that he’d underestimated the danger. Ergo, his capture could have consequences much too serious to risk by having a fling with a brunette. Even one with the body of a goddess.

  ‘I may join you in a minute,’ he said. He pointed to the only other exit. ‘Any idea where that goes?’

  ‘We just came from there,’ one of the men said. ‘It’s a tunnel. Goes to the pool.’

  ‘The lagoon,’ one of the women corrected.

  ‘The lagoon,’ the guy repeated, sarcastically as he playfully slapped the woman on her naked rear.

  ‘Later,’ Mace said and moved slowly toward the tunnel door. But he didn’t use it. Instead, he waited for the quintet to enter the sauna and close the door behind them.

  He moved back to the bench and picked up a pair of pale blue pajamas one of the men had been wearing. He left the dark pajamas in exchange.

  He followed the brightly lit tunnel to its end and emerged maybe ten feet from the lagoon. A security guard stood sentry duty there with a communication device stuck in his ear.

  Mace joined a group of partygoers who were walking in the direction of the tennis courts. As they neared the garage area, he saw that more guards had been stationed at the se–rvant’s gate. The Honeymoon Drugs van was no longer in view. Had it been put in the garage? Had someone driven it back to the store? Not that it mattered. He’d be leaving on foot. If he got the chance.

  The apparent leader of his new-found group, a man in his fifties with a sharp profile and half-lidded eyes, was regaling his mainly youthful admirers with stories about someone named Charles who’d taught him everything he knew about acting. ‘We’re talking television acting, of course,’ he qualified.

  ‘Theater is something else entirely. The broad gesture. Acting for the camera, TV or film, is . . . subtle. The flicker of an eye. The faint hint of a smile.’

  Mace was trying to place the man. He looked familiar. Had he seen him in something?

  ‘Are you an Elgin Blake fan, Mr Mason?’ someone whispered behind him.

  He turned to find Angela Lowell.

  She was wearing a thin, tight halter of some metallic silver substance that barely covered her breasts and gauzy pantaloons that looked like those worn by a pasha’s concubine. ‘I gather he was a secret agent on TV in the sixties,’ she said, ‘before my time.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Mace asked.

  ‘It’s the talk of the party.’

  ‘Hard to believe,’ he said. A man in a suit and tie emerged from the castle, not playing the pajama game. Corrigan’s thug. He scanned the area and zoned right in on Mace.

  ‘You know this place pretty well?’ Mace asked Angela.

  ‘Pretty well.’

  The raw-boned thug was heading their way.

  ‘Can you get me away from here?’ Mace asked.

  ‘I think some people want to talk to you,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to them.’

  She turned, saw Corrigan’s man, saw the look on his face. She took Mace’s hand and said, ‘Why don’t we talk first?’

  He let her take him in the direction of the lagoon.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Angela’s destination was the cabana.

  They moved through it quickly, then entered what appeared to be a changing area, done up in Hawaiian tiki style. Lots of bamboo and carved wood and exotic plants.

  At a far wall, Angela unhooked a bamboo panel and moved past it. He followed and she closed the panel behind them.

  They were in a small chamber lit by a recessed halogen bulb. The walls and ceiling were painted a flat black.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, heading toward what looked like a wall. It was, but angled so that it allowed entry to a tunnel that joined the one Mace had used to leave the castle. Now, it took them back, past the sauna and then up three flights of stairs to a hall with a thick Oriental runner.

  ‘Where are we headed?’ he asked.

  ‘To a safe harbor.’ Angela approached a door that had a combination lock. He watched her punch the numbers 2-4-4-5-7-9 and the door clicked open an inch.

  They entered a brightly lit windowless room that belonged in some other building. Perhaps some other universe. It reminded Mace of the decks of spaceships in science fiction movies. It was all white. White ceiling. White walls. White tile floor, a portion of which was covered by a white rubberized pad.

  To their right was a sort of space age workstation. Two ultra-modern white, molded plastic chairs faced an assortment of instruments with glowing dials that rested on top of a white metal counter that ran the length of one wall. Above the counter and instruments was a long wide-screen monitor on which the phrase, ‘This is Jerry’s Room’ appeared in 3-D, disappeared and was replaced by another comment, ‘Jerry is a genius.’

  Several feet from them, a white leather sofa and two matching chairs faced a wall filled with nine flat screens, which, though dark, reflected the bright glow of the overhead halogen lights.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Mace asked.

  ‘Jerry’s retreat,’ she said. ‘The game room. Let me show you.’

  Angela moved to the sofa where she found a white plastic remote. She pressed a button on it and one of the nine screens came to life with a view of the main party room below. ‘The film director who built this monstrous castle in the thirties had secret peepholes drilled into the floor so he could secretly watch his guests,’ she said. ‘The more things change . . .’

  She pressed another button and a second screen was filled with a rear-of-the-house panorama.

  It wasn’t until she’d turned on the fif
th screen that she got what she was after. The scene was a comfortable room with dark wooden bookshelves lining walls of a flat ivy green color. It was decorated with heavy, masculine furniture constructed of oak and soft leather and brass fittings. The floor was covered by Persian rugs of subdued hues. It was a Hollywood set designer’s idea of an Edwardian men’s club. But, instead of British actors sunk down in plump chairs discussing wagers or time travel, Jerry Monte, wearing a black silk dressing gown over his flame red pajamas, Corrigan and the brown-skinned man with the goatee sat at a green, felt-topped, octagon-shaped card table.

  They were not playing cards. Nor were they paying attention to the giant snifters of some sort of liqueur, probably cognac, resting before them.

  ‘Rub-a-dub-dub,’ Mace said.

  ‘Shhh,’ she said and turned up the volume. There was the hiss of white noise but no conversation. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘I was hoping we could hear if they were still talking about you. Jerry must’ve turned off the sound. He does that sometimes.’

  ‘When?’ Mace asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When does Jerry turn off the sound?’

  ‘Oh. When he’s into something that he doesn’t want people to hear, I guess. Usually, he makes video and audio copies of everything he does.’

  The conversation in the Edwardian room seemed to be growing heated.

  ‘What were they saying about me?’ Mace asked.

  ‘The stocky man . . .’

  ‘Corrigan.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Corrigan. You know him?’

  ‘We didn’t actually meet,’ Mace said. ‘But I know him.’

  ‘He asked Jerry why he’d invited you to his party. And Jerry seemed surprised and said, “People get invited,” or something equally vague. Then he asked Mr Corrigan to describe you, which he did, only neglecting to mention how handsome you were. And Jerry said that sounded like the guy Rufe told him had crashed the party.’

  ‘Rufe being a big black man wearing tiger stripes?’

  She smiled and tapped her nose. ‘Then Mr Corrigan told his associate – I believe his name is Drier – to assist the people who were looking for you. And Jerry suggested I go have fun while they discussed business. So I came up here and used the wonder wall to find you.’