by Various
“Peeper,” the fed snarled, showing the photostat of my licence and my supposedly impressive deputy’s badge.
“Interesting,” said the Britisher, slipping his gun into the pocket of his camel coat. Immaculate, he must have been umbrella-protected between car and building because there wasn’t a spot of rain on him. “I’m Winthrop. Edwin Winthrop.”
We shook hands. His other companion, the interesting one, was going through the deceased’s papers. She looked up, smiled with sharp white teeth, and got back to work.
“This is Mademoiselle Dieudonne.”
“Genevieve,” she said. She pronounced it “Zhe-ne-vyev,” suggesting Paris, France. She was wearing something white with silver in it and had quantities of pale blonde hair.
“And the gentleman from your Federal Bureau of Investigation is Finlay.”
The fed grunted. He looked as if he’d been brought to life by Willis H. O'Brien.
“You are interested in a Mr. Brunette,” Winthrop said. It was not a question, so there was no point in answering him. “So are we.”
“Call in a Russian and we could be the Allies,” I said. Winthrop laughed. He was sharp. “True. I am here at the request of my government and working with the full co-operation of yours.”
One of the small detective-type details I noticed was that no one even suggested informing the police about Gianni Pastore was a good idea.
“Have you ever heard of a place called Innsmouth, Massachusetts?”
It didn’t mean anything to me and I said so.
“Count yourself lucky. Special Agent Finlay’s associates were called upon to dynamite certain unsafe structures in the sea off Innsmouth back in the ’20s. It was a bad business.”
Genevieve said something sharp in French that sounded like swearing. She held up a photograph of Brunette dancing cheek to cheek with Janice Marsh. “Do you know the lady?” Winthrop asked.
“Only in the movies. Some go for her in a big way but I think she looks like Mr. Moto.”
“Very true. Does the Esoteric Order of Dagon mean anything to you?”
“Sounds like a Church-of-the-Month alternate. Otherwise, no.”
“Captain Obed Marsh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The Deep Ones?”
“Are they those coloured singers?”
“What about Cthulhu, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh?” “Gesundheit.”
Winthrop grinned, sharp moustache pointing. “No, not easy to say at all. Hard to fit into human mouths, you know.”
“He’s just a bedroom creeper,” Finlay said, “he don’t know nothing.”
“His grammar could be better. Doesn’t J. Edgar pay for elocution lessons?”
Finlay’s big hands opened and closed as if he were rather there were a throat in them.
“Gene?” Winthrop said.
The woman looked up, red tongue absently flicking across her red lips, and thought a moment. She said something in a foreign language that I did understand.
“There’s no need to kill him,” she said in French. Thank you very much, I thought.
Winthrop shrugged and said “fine by me.” Finlay looked disappointed.
“You’re free to go,” the Britisher told me. “We shall take care of everything. I see no point in your continuing your current line of inquiry. Send in a chit to this address,” he handed me a card, “and you’ll be reimbursed for your expenses so far. Don’t worry. We’ll carry on until this is seen through. By the way, you might care not to discuss with anyone what you’ve seen here or anything I may have said. There’s a War on, you know. Loose lips sink ships.”
I had a few clever answers but I swallowed them and left. Anyone who thought there was no need to kill me was all right in my book and I wasn’t using my razored tongue on them. As I walked to the Chrysler, several ostentatiously unofficial cars cruised past me, headed for the Seaview Inn.
It was getting dark and lighting was striking down out at sea. A flash lit up the Montecito and I counted five seconds before the thunder boomed. I had the feeling there was something out there beyond the three-mile limit besides the floating former casino, and that it was angry.
I slipped into the Chrysler and drove away from Bay City, feeling better the further inland I got.
I take Black Mask. It’s a long time since Hammett and the fellow who wrote the Ted Carmady stories were in it, but you occasionally get a good Cornell Woolrich or Erle Stanley Gardner. Back at my office, I saw the newsboy had been by and dropped off the Times and next month’s pulp. But there'd been a mix-up. Instead of the Mask, there was something inside the folded newspaper called Weird Tales. On the cover, a man was being attacked by two green demons and a stereotype vampire with a widow’s peak. “‘Hell on Earth,’ a Novelette of Satan in a Tuxedo by Robert Bloch” was blazed above the title. Also promised were “A new Lovecraft series, ‘Herbert West - Re-Animator’ ” and “‘The Rat Master’ by Greye la Spina.” All for 15 cents, kids. If I were a different type of detective, the brand who said nom de something and waxed a moustache whenever he found a mutilated corpse, I might have thought the substitution an omen.
In my office, I’ve always had five filing cabinets, three empty. I also had two bottles, only one empty. In a few hours, the situation would have changed by one bottle.
I found a glass without too much dust and wiped it with my clean handkerchief. I poured myself a generous slug and hit the back of my throat with it.
The radio didn’t work but I could hear Glenn Miller from somewhere. I found my glass empty and dealt with that. Sitting behind my desk, I looked at the patterns in rain on the window. If I craned I could see traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. People who didn’t spend their working days finding bodies in bathtubs were going home not to spend their evenings emptying a bottle.
After a day, I’d had some excitement but I hadn’t done much for Janey Wilde. I was no nearer being able to explain the absence of Mr. Brunette from his usual haunts than I had been when she left my office, leaving behind a tantalizing whiff of essence de chine.
She’d given me some literature pertaining to Brunette’s cult involvement. Now, the third slug warming me up inside, I looked over it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Interesting echoes came up in relation to Winthrop’s shopping list of subjects of peculiar interest. I had no luck with the alphabet- soup syllables he’d spat at me, mainly because “Cthulhu” sounds more like a cough than a word. But the Esoteric Order of Dagon was a group Brunette had joined, and Innsmouth, Massachusetts, was the East Coast town where the organization was registered. The Esoteric Order had a temple on the beach front in Venice, and its mumbo-jumbo hand-outs promised “ancient and intriguing rites to probe the mysteries of the Deep.” Slipped in with the recruitment bills was a studio biography of Janice Marsh, which helpfully revealed the movie star’s place of birth as Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and that she could trace her family back to Captain Obed Marsh, the famous early-19th-century explorer of whom I’d never heard. Obviously Winthrop, Genevieve and the FBI were well ahead of me in making connections. And I didn’t really know who the Englishman and the French girl were.
I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off reading Weird Tales. I liked the sound of Satan in a Tuxedo. It wasn’t Ted Carmady with an automatic and a dame, but it would do. There was a lot more thunder and lightning and I finished the bottle. I suppose I could have gone home to sleep but the chair was no more uncomfortable than my Murphy bed.
The empty bottle rolled and I settled down, tie loose, to forget the cares of the day.
Thanks to the War, Pastore only made page 3 of the Times. Apparently the noted gambler-entrepreneur had been shot to death. If that was true, it had happened after I’d left. Then, he’d only been tortured and drowned. Police Chief John Wax dished out his usual “over by Christmas” quote about the investigation. There was no mention of the FBI, or of our allies, John Bull in a tux and Mademoiselle la Guillotine. In prison, you get papers with neat oblongs cut out to
remove articles the censor feels provocative. They don’t make any difference: all newspapers have invisible oblongs. Pastore’s sterling work with underprivileged kids was mentioned but someone forgot to write about the junk he sold them when they grew into underprivileged adults. The obit photograph found him with Janey Wilde and Janice Marsh at the premiere of a George Raft movie. The phantom Jap sub off Santa Barbara got more column inches. General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defence Command, called for more troops to guard the coastline, prophesying “death and destruction are likely to come at any moment.” Everyone in California was looking out to sea.
After my regular morning conference with Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young, I placed a call to Janey Wilde’s Malibu residence. Most screen idols are either at the studio or asleep if you telephone before ten o’clock in the morning, but Janey, with weeks to go before shooting started on Bowery to Bataan, was at home and awake, having done her 30 lengths. Unlike almost everyone else in the industry, she thought a swimming pool was for swimming in rather than lounging beside.
She remembered instantly who I was and asked for news. I gave her a precis.
“I’ve been politely asked to refrain from further investigations,” I explained. “By some heavy hitters.”
“So you’re quitting?”
I should have said yes, but “Miss Wilde, only you can require me to quit. I thought you should know how the federal government feels.”
There was a pause.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she told me. It was an expression common among my clients. “Something important.”
I let dead air hang on the line.
“It’s not so much Laird that I’m concerned about. It’s that he has Franklin.”
“Franklin?”
“The baby,” she said. “Our baby. My baby.”
“Laird Brunette has disappeared, taking a baby with him?”
“Yes.”
“Kidnapping is a crime. You might consider calling the cops.”
“A lot of things are crimes. Laird has done many of them and never spent a day in prison.”
That was true, which was why this development was strange. Kidnapping, whether personal or for profit, is the riskiest of crimes. As a rule, it’s the province only of the stupidest criminals. Laird Brunette was not a stupid criminal.
“I can't afford bad publicity. Not when I’m so near to the roles I need.”
Bowery to Bataan was going to put her among the screen immortals.
“Franklin is supposed to be Esther’s boy. In a few years, I’ll adopt him legally. Esther is my housekeeper. It’ll work out. But I must have him back.”
“Laird is the father. He will have some rights.”
“He said he wasn’t interested. He... um, moved on... to Janice Marsh while I was... before Franklin was born.”
“He’s had a sudden attack of fatherhood and you’re not convinced?”
“I’m worried to distraction. It’s not Laird, it’s her. Janice Marsh wants my baby for something vile. I want you to get Franklin back.”
“As I mentioned, kidnapping is a crime.”
“If there’s a danger to the child, surely...”
“Do you have any proof that there is danger?”
“Well, no.”
“Have Laird Brunette or Janice Marsh ever given you reason to believe they have ill-will for the baby?”
“Not exactly.”
I considered things.
“I’ll continue with the job you hired me for, but you understand that’s all I can do. If I find Brunette, I’ll pass your worries on. Then it’s between the two of you.”
She thanked me in a flood and I got off the phone feeling I’d taken a couple of strides further into the LaBrea tar pits and could feel sucking stickiness well above my knees.
I should have stayed out of the rain and concentrated on chess problems but I had another four days’ worth of Jungle Jillian’s retainer in my pocket and an address for the Esoteric Order of Dagon in a clipping from a lunatic scientific journal. So I drove out to Venice, reminding myself all the way that my wipers needed fixing.
Venice, California, is a fascinating idea that didn’t work. Someone named Abbot Kinney had the notion of artificially creating a city like Venice, Italy, with canals and architecture. The canals mostly ran dry and the architecture never really caught on in a town where, in the ’20s, Gloria Swanson’s bathroom was considered an aesthetic triumph. All that was left was the beach and piles of rotting fish. Venice, Italy, is the Plague Capital of Europe, so Venice, California, got one thing right.
The Esoteric Order was up the coast from Muscle Beach, housed in a discreet yacht-club building with its own small marina. From the exterior, I guessed the cult business had seen better days. Seaweed had tracked up the beach, swarmed around the jetty, and was licking the lower edges of the front wall. Everything had gone green: wood, plaster, copper ornaments. And it smelled like Pastore’s bathroom, only worse. This kind of place made you wonder why the Japs were so keen on invading.
I looked at myself in the mirror and rolled my eyes. I tried to get that slap-happy, let-me-give-you-all-my-worldly-goods, gimme-some-mysteries-of-the-orient look I imagined typical of a communicant at one of these bughouse congregations. After I’d stopped laughing, I remembered the marks on Pastore and tried to take detecting seriously. Taking in my unshaven, slept-upright-in-his-clothes, two-bottles-a-day lost soul look, I congratulated myself on my foresight in spending 15 years developing the ideal cover for a job like this.
To get in the building, I had to go down to the marina and come at it from the beach-side. There were green pillars of what looked like fungus-eaten cardboard either side of the impressive front door, which held a stained-glass picture in shades of green and blue of a man with the head of a squid in a natty monk’s number, waving his eyes for the artist. Dagon, I happened to know, was half-man, half-fish, and God of the Philistines. In this town, I guess a Philistine God blended in well. It’s a great country: if you’re half-fish, pay most of your taxes, eat babies and aren’t Japanese, you have a wonderful future.
I rapped on the squid's head but nothing happened. I looked the squid in several of his eyes and felt squirmy inside. Somehow, up close, cephalopod-face didn’t look that silly.
I pushed the door and found myself in a temple’s waiting room. It was what I’d expected: subdued lighting, old but bad paintings, a few semi-pornographic statuettes, a strong smell of last night’s incense to cover up the fish stink. It had as much religious atmosphere as a two-dollar bordello.
“Yoo-hoo,” I said, “Dagon calling...
My voice sounded less funny echoed back at me.
I prowled, sniffing for clues. I tried saying nom de something and twiddling a non-existent moustache but nothing came to me. Perhaps I ought to switch to a meerschaum of cocaine and a deerstalker, or maybe a monocle and an interest in incunabula.
Where you’d expect a portrait of George Washington or Jean Harlow’s Mother, the Order had hung up an impressively ugly picture of “Our Founder.” Capt. Obed Marsh, dressed up like Admiral Butler, stood on the shore of a Polynesian paradise, his good ship painted with no sense of perspective on the horizon as if it were about three feet tall. The Capt., surrounded by adoring if funny-faced native tomatoes, looked about as unhappy as Errol Flynn at a Girl Scout meeting. The painter had taken a lot of trouble with the native nudes. One of the dusky lovelies had hips that would make Lombard green and a face that put me in mind of Janice Marsh. She was probably the Panther Princess’s great-great-great grandmother. In the background, just in front of the ship, was something like a squid emerging from the sea. Fumble-fingers with a brush had tripped up again. It looked as if the tentacle-waving creature were about twice the size of Obed’s clipper. The most upsetting detail was a robed and masked figure standing on the deck with a baby’s ankle in each fist. He had apparently just wrenched the child apart like a wishbone and was emptying blood into the squid�
�s eyes.
“Excuse me,” gargled a voice, “can I help you?”
I turned around and got a noseful of the stooped and ancient Guardian of the Cult. His robe matched the ones worn by squid-features on the door and baby-ripper in the portrait. He kept his face shadowed, his voice sounded about as good as the radio in Pastore’s bath and his breath smelled worse than Pastore after a week and a half of putrefaction.
“Good morning,” I said, letting a bird flutter in the higher ranges of my voice, “my name is, er...”
I put together the first things that came to mind.
“My name is Herbert West Lovecraft. Uh, H.W. Lovecraft the Third. I’m simply fascinated by matters Ancient and Esoteric, don’t ch’know.”
“Don’t ch’know” I picked up from the fellow with the monocle and the old books.
“You wouldn't happen to have an entry blank, would you? Or any incunabula?”
“Incunabula?” He wheezed.
“Books. Old books. Print books, published before 1500 anno domini, old sport.” See, I have a dictionary too.
“Books...”
The man was a monotonous conversationalist. He also moved like Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the front of his robe, where the squidhead was embroidered, was wet with what I was disgusted to deduce was drool.
“Old books. Arcane mysteries, don’t ch'know. Anything cyclopaean and doom-haunted is just up my old alley.”
“The Necronomicon?” He pronounced it with great respect, and great difficulty.
“Sounds just the ticket.”
Quasimodo shook his head under his hood and it lolled. I glimpsed greenish skin and large, moist eyes.
“I was recommended to come here by an old pal,” I said. “Spiffing fellow. Laird Brunette. Ever hear of him?”
I'd pushed the wrong button. Quasi straightened out and grew about two feet. Those moist eyes flashed like razors.
“You’ll have to see the Cap’n’s Daughter.”