Dead-Bang

by Richard S. Prather

  Several legal battles were begun, mainly initiated by large pharmaceutical companies that desired exclusive rights to and control of the worthless concoction. But it became unnecessary for a legal decision to be handed down by any court simply because damn near everybody soon knew all there was to know about the composition and preparation of Erovite.

  Within a week after Bruno’s death, the formula and instructions—his last will and testament, the legacy of a long, well-lived life—had been published in newspapers with a circulation of at least ten million readers. Additional newspaper stories, magazine articles, pamphlets and brochures and mimeographed flyers were to follow. The result was that—after an abortive attempt to make Erovite freely available on prescription—it was sold openly, in drugstores, along with Alka-Seltzer and Aspirin and Ex-Lax.

  Before the year was out, more than a dozen companies were producing and selling Emmanuel Bruno’s elixir. Most marketed it as one or another name brand of Erovite, but a few tried selling their brew under other names, none of which gave rise to uncontrollable excitement. The only one I recall was “The Fountain of Youthanasia,” alleged to “Close the Regeneration Gap,” but I haven’t spotted that one for months. There was even a “NEW IMPROVED Erovite,” presumably containing Mmmm!, but it didn’t catch on, either.

  Not surprisingly, as sales of Erovite increased so did sales of the Pill, despite publicity about possible side effects from its use. As one widely quoted single girl explained on the Johnny Carson Show, “I know if I take the Pill it may be injurious, but if I don’t it could be fetal.” On the other hand, many citizens grew prune-lipped and stony-eyed and quoted Scripture and cried that all the sinners were de-immortalizing their immortal souls by sinning, though they never explained precisely how this curious result was produced or clearly defined the de-immortalizing sins. These were the citizens who also refused even to give Erovite a try, but—as Doc Bruno once said to me—you can’t wean ’em all.

  Of course, within the Church and in the churches were millions of troubled, seeking, honest, hopeful, and hoping men and women looking either for answers or The Answer, but all of them—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and Infidel—were caught up and torn in the flux and ferment of the times. Many high Catholic and Protestant officials responded to attacks upon them—as though still in reaction against ancient Rome and the Coliseum—with the centuries-old technique of throwing the lions to the Christians. The greatest upheaval was in the modern Church of Rome, for—though, we had not yet seen headlines, “POPE HAS ABORTION”—there were priests and nuns not only living in sin but exclaiming, “I’ve seen the light, and it isn’t the light they told me about.”

  At any rate, before long half the country must have been consuming the stuff, because thousands of tons of Erovite had been produced and sold. It was a flourishing new business grown from infancy to monster size almost overnight—happily, or sadly, much of that which Festus Lemming feared had come upon him—and extremely profitable to many. But I suppose things have a way of balancing out, because simultaneously the sales of Alka-Seltzer and Aspirin and Ex-Lax, along with other nostrums, declined.

  It was interesting that sales of insulin, cortisone, nitroglycerine, and digitalis also slipped slightly, while the drop in gross income from barbiturates and tranquilizers was deemed catastrophic. All this was interesting but not significant—according to an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association—but it did appear there might be a lot of spontaneous remission, not to mention improvement following previous medical treatment in 1940, going on.

  However, not even Authority could now successfully indict Emmanuel Bruno as a quack or an elf, or dim the luster of his name. Not even the most exhaustive tests and analyses had revealed the presence in Erovite of anything poisonous or harmful, unless an increase of vigor, energy, libido, and love of life was harmful—which, needless to say, some continued to claim with the fervor and feverishness of constipated Savonarolas. That battle continued, and not with diminished but with increased sound and fury, especially fury.

  Most vocal and purple in the forefront of the hindmost were, as always, the Lemmings of the Lord—still going strong, membership up half a million in a year. But to the previous sacred duty of their convictions and desires had been added a new and powerful motivation, the necessity to convince others, and perhaps themselves, that they were right and in the right and only they were right. For it was a member of the Church of the Second Coming who killed Emmanuel Bruno.

  It happened a few minutes before midnight, on August fifteenth, only about an hour after I left Bruno standing in the doorway of his home. From there I had gone to Hal Prince’s cabin, and I didn’t learn of Bruno’s death until late the next afternoon. Even after that, some of the facts were never made entirely clear. The officers assigned to duty at Riverdale Estates where Bruno lived had been withdrawn when Dave Cassiday was taken into custody. So nobody saw the little man arrive, and nobody ever found out exactly how he got into the house.

  There was some evidence that he’d climbed the chain link fence, walked to the house, and entered through an unlocked window, carrying a brick he’d picked up somewhere along the way. That was the official conclusion; the little man didn’t remember very well. There’d been all that excitement earlier, for one thing. He had been among the group harangued by Festus Lemming, the group that pursued me for a while, and later, sweaty and disturbed, filed inside the church.

  During the next three hours Festus Lemming was, according to virtually all reports, at his finest, his most magnificent, his most stirring. He announced, true to his word, the time when Jesus Christ would come again in his glory—seven years in the future, exactly, on the fifteenth of August, said Festus—and among a great many other necessary things declared yet again that the Lord could return only if the world were by then swept clean of sin. It was also required that the Antichrist be overcome—quite a bit about that. Lemming didn’t even mention Emmanuel Bruno that night. But it is not unfair to assume that many in his congregation remembered the applicable name.

  After that, the little man found himself—he said—driving, then walking in darkness, and then inside Bruno’s house. And suddenly near Bruno, who was in bed, asleep. Near him, standing over him, lifting his right arm, gripping tightly in his trembling fingers the brick he’d picked up somewhere.

  That’s what he used. Not a gun or a knife. Not even something significant or “appropriate” like a bust of Giordano or one of the Doc’s small obscene sculptures. Just a plain old brick. That’s what he used. He used it to break open Emmanuel Bruno’s skull, break it open and spill from it that fine, that unique brain.

  When they apprehended the little man—a neighbor walking his dog heard thudding sounds and a man’s shrieks and screamed obscenities—he was dazed. He “knew” he must have done it, must have killed Emmanuel Bruno, but he couldn’t quite “believe” it. Even though it was done and the jelly covered brick was still in his hand, the little man could not—not quite—believe he had really killed Emmanuel Bruno.

  As far as I could determine when I checked it out—and I did the best job of it I could—the little man was indeed sorry he had committed murder. He was not, however, sorry that the person in question, the individual deceased person, was dead. For he knew that to all right-thinking men and women and boys and girls and angels singing celestial harmonies in the unearthly chorus of Heaven, and certainly to each and every good Lemming alive or half-alive, it was undeniable that Emmanuel Bruno was evil, or at least an agent—though perhaps not fully conscious of his agency—of the forces of darkness and corruption and sin.

  The little man, however, was greatly grieved that, in preserving inviolate for all mankind the First of God’s Ten Commandments, to Israel—the murderer was not, it should at least be made clear, a Jew—he had himself been forced to break the Sixth. He seemed unaware that he had broken the Fourth as well; and that this could have been avoided if he had waited until after midnight, a mere six-minu
te delay, for he would not then have done his work on the sabbath.

  It appeared—they told me; I could not make myself look at what was left—that the little man must have struck not merely one blow, or two, but many, as many as twenty or thirty or more. Every once in a while I think of that, of the small beast, its arm rising and lifting the weight up and then falling and hurling it down, again and again and again; I think of that and I hear again, very softly, that indescribably chilling sound from the hundreds of throats, feel the force that pushed outward from them and touched me, and what I hear and feel mingles with the soft squishy sound of the brick striking Bruno’s brain, striking it … striking it … and striking it again.

  But when I left Bruno—for the last time, not knowing it was the last time—I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. Hell, nobody did. And I was busy for the rest of that night, and some of the next day. Busy with a busyness which, should it have been revealed as in a vision to all the Lemmings of the Lord, would surely have struck deeply into each of their three million hearts a keen pang like unto a most curdling and painful infraction, whereupon it is possible they all would have plucked out their eyes and then in an excess of piety, and for good measure, ripped up their zippers and shredded their bloomers. For, as I’ve mentioned, I went straight to Hal Prince’s cabin, where.…

  But first, this is probably the best chance and maybe the last chance I’ll have to destroy that miserable myth I’ve mentioned, and I hope before I’m through to kill it utterly and finally, kill it deader than dead.

  Let me make it clear that I don’t really blame the first guy, probably well-intentioned and meaning no harm, who said—back there in the beginning—that it was “a dozen.” But the bigmouth who first claimed it was “fifteen” is going to get it if I ever find him. As for those imbeciles who said “twenty” and “forty-two,” and that whack now living alone in a small soft room who claimed it was “a hundred”—well, those people are so completely out of touch with reality as to be unworthy of our attention.

  I speak to the reasonable and rational among you: Who would know? Who would really know? The guy you’ve all been lying about, right? Of course. Me. I know. And I swear, and will swear again, on a short stack of Bibles if it will help: There were only ten!

  Well.…

  Maybe eleven if you count Regina. But I insist it isn’t fair to count Regina. So call it ten and a half, O.K.? And forget it.

  I’d like to count Regina—for a lot of reasons. They say that if you save even one lost soul, prevent even one person from living a life of sin, there’s a little corner of Heaven set aside just for you. And—no matter what you may think—I’d like to go to Heaven. For a visit. Just to see what’s so great. Listen to the hymns and all. And I’d like to feel that, along with all the sinful things I’ve done, somewhere along the way I helped at least one lovely girl toward the light. But in this world, the real world we all know about, things are seldom clear-cut, or cut-and-dried. Black usually has a little white in it, and vice-versa. There’s always something else beyond the final answer.…

  Hell, I’m just going to have to tell you about it, exactly the way it was, and let you make up your own minds. That’s what minds are for, right?

  So here we go. No matter what you may have heard—and I know you’ve heard some dandies—here is what really happened last year, on the sixteenth of August.…

  28

  It was a few minutes after midnight—I had stopped at my apartment in the Spartan for a quick shower and change of clothes—when, still driving Hal Prince’s car, I reached his cabin. On the way I had hoped, or kind of dreamed, that the girls would not be fast asleep, or in bad moods, or gone somewhere else, at least not all of them. And my dream came true.

  When I stopped in front of the house, every light inside the joint appeared to be burning, and I could hear that giggling and cooing and screeching egging me on.

  I was feeling pretty good, even before that, and I had a hunch some of my gradually growing zip and euphoric zing might be a result of the tablespoon of Erovite—a reasonable dose, I assumed—that Doc Bruno had laid on me. So, since the bottle he had personally given me was still in the Cad’s glove compartment, I pulled into the garage and parked Prince’s sports buggy there, then leaned into the Cad and took out my pint of Erovite, uncapped it, and slipped myself another little gulp, for if a little good is good, twice as good is better. Or so I thought then, in the days of my innocence.

  I smacked my lips, snorted through my nose, scraped my feet a couple of times on the ground, and headed for the front door.

  It opened before I got there. A head came around its edge and a female voice—it would have caused me real concern had it not been a female voice—called, “Shell? Is that you, Shell?”

  “You bet! Yeah! Here I am!”

  “Oh, good. We heard noises and were afraid it was a robber.”

  “That’s what it—I mean, it’s me. You’re all safe now!”

  As I neared the entrance she opened the door wide, and light—and noise—sort of leaped out and around and past her, fizzing over her bare shoulders and narrow waist and flaring hips on its way to me. Not until then was I able to recognize her. It was red-headed Dina. She stepped aside and closed the door as I walked past her and down into the living room.

  Standing on the thick lavender carpet at the bottom of the three steps, I looked up at scrumptious Dina. From this angle, her plump white breasts looked warm and yummy and yeastily rising, as if they’d just come out of the oven. “Some party, huh?” I said.

  “It is?”

  Her impossibly big brown eyes had sort of drifted from my face to a spot a couple inches below my ear, and she pulled them back on target, smiling ecstatically.

  “I’ll bet you’ve been drinking,” I said.

  “Sure. What’ll you bet?”

  “Oh—” I didn’t finish it.

  “Herro, Sherr!”

  “Hey, did you bring us some glothes?”

  “Man, I thought sure you’d be dead by now. Welcome home, Daddy.”

  I turned, smiling ecstatically, to gaze upon flower-faced Yumiko, white-haired and creamy-white-all-over Britt, and sweet-chocolate super-shaped charcoal-eyed Lula. “Clothes?” I said wonderingly. “Gee. No. I suppose I might have only the stores are all shut tight. But … I passed a fig tree about a mile down—”

  “Never mind.”

  “Who needs ’em?”

  “Bare is beautiful when you get used to it.”

  “What’ll you bet?” Dina asked me again. “Hey, you want a drink?” She came down the steps, stood next to the three other girls.

  “Sure,” I said. “By the way, where’s everybody else? I know there’s more. I mean, even over the music, if that’s what it is, I can hear the sound of their coo—”

  “They are swimming in the poo.”

  That was Yumiko. She, I deduced, had also been drinking.

  All was explained in the next half-minute. Following my presumably unnoticed departure earlier, after looking around—and being delighted, one and all, with the luxuriousness and comfort of Hal Prince’s cabin—the ten gals had investigated refrigerator and freezer and cooked up a picnic dinner which they’d consumed out in back by the swimming pool. The eleven, rather, not ten, because Regina Winsome had pitched in with the rest, and in fact had cooked what were described to me as “scrumptious” hamburgers.

  Later, somebody put tapes on the stereo, then mixed highballs, Martinis, and a previously unknown alcoholic invention or two, and the gals had proceeded to consume a bit of the sauce. Nobody was bombed, but all I gathered were feeling festive. All, that is, except Regina Winsome. She had not pitched in when it came to cooking with sauce.

  “Where is Regina?” I asked. “I don’t suppose she’s skinny-dipping with the other cookies? Of course, with this bunch it could hardly be called skinny—”

  “She’s taking a nap. She didn’t want anything to drink, so she decided to sleep an hour or t
wo.”

  “I’m worried about that girl. She sleeps too much. And she’s got such great potential. So, Regina sleeps, like … Sleeping Beauty? Ah, where is the prince who—”

  Looking past the gals’ heads I could see the open sliding-glass door in the rear wall, beyond which, and out of sight to my left, was the heated pool. Heated by now, surely, whether its oven was turned on or not. The door was open, and at that moment another nude lovely, short and splendidly shapely, glistening all over, shining with wetness—black-haired, busty Ronnie—came bouncing inside.

  She saw me, stopped, yelled, “Hi, there!” then she turned around, leaned out past the glass door, and shouted something. I couldn’t catch the words because of music thumping melodically from the stereo—something interesting but pretty far out, wild and sexy and mildly freaky, on the erotic scale maybe halfway between “Puberty Rites in Peru” and “Fire Drill in the Harem.” Whatever it was, I figured it was worth playing over and over.

  Of course, at that moment I was watching Ronnie as, first, she came bouncing inside; second, turned completely in the opposite direction and leaned out the door; and third, turned a hundred and eighty degrees of tropical latitude and longitude again, then walked toward the gals and me.

  Why is it, I wondered idly, that a man two feet from four stunning nude lovelies will look at a fifth naked tomato who appears twenty feet away? Perhaps … because it is there? Perhaps … there is no answer to the question?

  “Mix Shell a highball, Ronnie,” Dina called. “He drinks—” she glanced at me.