Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  In mini-skirts or out of them, like the two-piece ensemble of skirt and Sloppy Joe sweater, albeit of the finest cashmere, she was a stunning young lady.

  Terry [Sheldrake’s daughter] was like a proud young stallion with nervous thoroughbred lines; Sheldrake was cool, seasoned and almost weatherproof. But in the mold, the dye of heredity, lay the identical chin, the straight nose, the wide-set, serious eyes, the lean parallel of masculinity and femininity that still somehow sets one human being off as a woman, the other as the man.

  He didn’t fit anymore; he didn’t belong. He was as out of step as the cake walk.

  There were still people to thank, congratulate and conspire with for their unstinting and very necessary help in building the steamroller that had launched Sheldrake toward the Presidency.

  For all their matching smiles, Thomas Teller and his wife, Clara, had been arguing. You can tell by the withdrawn pallor of the former Vice-President’s face.

  She was proud of her breasts. The bra wasn’t built that didn’t have its cups filled to contain her.

  At no one time in the nearly two-hundred-year history of the United States had the eyes of its citizens witnessed such an assault on the senses.

  There was no longer any rain. The gleaming, shining streets of the nation’s capital were scrubbed clean by the heavenly tailors, but heavy, buffeting winds swept down from the north and in its purifying, icy wake, insanity, bedlam and hysteria stood up to be counted.

  “One thing more we cannot rightly rule out,” Kinley amended his remarks. “A man, acting strangely and far off his norm, can have a lot happen to him in the five minutes he is out of everyone’s sight. Suppose Sheldrake bumped his head on a door, or cracked himself with a shoe falling off a closet shelf—well—there’s a possibility, too. We have to look into every angle because if we don’t find out what happened to him real soon, this country could go to the dogs.”

  Benson was prune-faced and durable as a sequoia, but you could always see the eagles in his eyes. . . . He was no lily of the valley.

  General Hilary Benson called for a five-minute break. The table didn’t make a move to break away. No one had to go to the men’s room and somehow the problem had rooted everyone where they sat.

  Di Mallella laughed again and his cigar barrel-rolled in his mouth.

  It was a precedent-shattering kind of stillness.

  The Senate was as silent as the Grant Memorial on Sunday. You could have heard a Republican change votes.

  The nurse, tall, silent, starchy, administers another needle into a defenseless left arm as it lies fanned out over the coverlet of the bed.

  The Fat Death (1972)

  In which Noon deflowers a beautiful virgin fashion designer; has his mind boggled by a guy calling himself the Slim Saviour who drops leaflets on New York City telling people to “Beware the Fat Death, Don’t Eat Yourself into the Graveyard”; gets smacked around by a couple of tough Italians, one of whom is a “pint-sized female with startling dark eyes and a bust right out of Vesuvius”; watches a porno movie starring the virgin he deflowered; survives a fire; and once again announces with self-effacing charm that “the plot thickens and gets worse all the time.”

  It was really her nose that got me. It was ruler straight with the barest pinch of reality in the nostrils.

  [The seven-foot-tall man] sat down, a long drink of ink under control.

  The right arm that left his shoulder should have been labeled greased lightning.

  He had recovered from the knockout with class and no complaints but he didn’t react too kindly to my prying into his unconscious pockets.

  Monks grunted. . . . “He didn’t last longer than two seconds. [Stabbed in] the heart. Bull’s-eye. The blade didn’t touch a bone.

  “A coronary conclusion,” I said.

  Her eyebrows climbed like lovely sparrows.

  We stopped kidding around. Her eyes collapsed and my face broke as we melted together.

  Alberta Carstairs had won the day. The private detective sitting next to her with rainbows in his eyes and fever in his blood didn’t ask her a single valid question about a murder case. I should have remembered my business but I didn’t. I was too busy estimating the depth of blue in Alberta’s eyes and the degree of tonality to her fresh, vibrant skin.

  My face was a poker game. It told her nothing of what was eating me down to the bare bones.

  Her movements were almost lethargic, charged with that sensual laziness that might precede the brief interval before the enjoyment of one’s most abandoned dreams are about to be realized.

  Her breasts were rising and falling like a sighing wind.

  The eightball that all Negroes live behind had blinded her common sense.

  Her gasp almost blew the door down.

  Before I could protect my defenseless skull, somebody found a nice convenient place on it to park something heavy. Real heavy. It felt like all the cedar chests in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  “Si!” she screamed, the words [sic] a torrent of high-pitched fury from the depths of her soul.

  She stared at me quietly, her violet eyes almost glazed. There wasn’t a ripple of anything on the waters of her face.

  His craggy face suddenly looked as ineffectual and as malleable as butter.

  The Hot Body (1973)

  In which our esteemed president sends Noon to Fort Lauderdale to prevent Helen Friday, “the wife of an American ex-President, the widow of a man assassinated while holding office, the former First Lady of the United States,” from carrying out a mad plan to defect to Cuba. Noon is at his most ineffectual here, poor lad; he lets a couple of Castro’s goons (and Helen Friday, too) mistreat him rather badly, and instead of saving the day himself, has it saved for him by the fortuitous arrival of none other than Robert L. Fish’s Brazilian cop, Jose da Silva (disguised as a “jet piloto”). The real brilliance of the plot, however, lies in the fact that more than half of the book (seventy-one pages) takes place in La Friday’s Lauderdale hotel room! Proof positive that the Big Guy can pull off any sort of fictional coup when he sets his fertile brain to the task.

  Pulling back quickly, a fluttering arm gestured toward me and then disappeared. Nerves taut and keeping my brains together, I took the cue and marched in. Eyes peeled, hands close to the heat I had to carry and it only took a second.

  Unbelievably, I heard the rustling sounds recede backwards, lost the scent of her aura, her personality. It was as if I could really feel the empty space behind me. I waited, not daring to turn, not wanting to break the slender, hairline mood and rhythm of the entire room. The total set piece between us. Woman-with-gun-holding-up-man-in-quiet-hotel-room-five-floors-above-the-Lauderdale-real-estate.

  Beretta behind me, twin double-derringers in front of me, I was boxed in better than I ever had been before.

  By two perfect strangers, to boot. That was a kick.

  He had all the hallmarks, the staples, that characterizes the secret agent species.

  Miguel de Domino tied me up.

  And gagged me.

  Like he had promised, it was the meanest tie of them all.

  I’d never been tied like that before.

  The Marquis de Sade would have been proud of him.

  In or out of the Spanish Inquisition. The man was an expert.

  There was something new under the Florida sun. A rope trick.

  The gag cloving to the roof of my mouth, filling my jaws, tasted no better than it had. Chandler’s classic plumber’s handkerchief came back with a vengeance.

  Helen Friday was already well on her way to Fort Lauderdale Airport. And I was stuck in Room 443 where I might rot until anyone came to do the room.

  The sound [of a telephone falling off a table onto a carpet] was something like hearing The Stars and Stripes Forever in the middle of a prisoner of war camp. Along with a cease-fire announcement.

  There are many things that are confounding and confusing about this cockeyed caravan they call Life but the topmost, pinna
cle feature has got to be the utter unpredictability of everything.

  We are a long time dead, when we’re dead.

  [The man with the gun’s] mouth gaped . . . his instincts recoiled.

  It was only for a second or two, the barest fraction of diversion. But for the man who is waiting for an opening like that, any opening at all, it was more than enough. It was a veritable bonanza. A coffee break.

  When the woman is Helen Friday and she has what Helen Friday had, there is only one thing that can be held out to a man as the greatest gift. The beyond-price token of gratitude. That something that made Adam lose his fig leaf.

  Below us, far below, was nothing but the endless blue-green of the Atlantic Ocean. One of the big drinks. Enough water to sink the entire population of the world. And then some.

  No person’s death diminishes you as much as your own does.

  You can tell John Donne I said so, too. Him and his tolling bell.

  Hail to the chief!

  12

  The Alternative Hall of Fame, Part II; Or, “Inspiration Splattered Me In the Face Like a Custard Pie”

  I cold-eyed him back, my mind chasing its tail around in my skull trying to measure him for the right pattern. He was a type of dick I’d never met. He wasn’t following Lesson I in the police manual’s chapter on grilling suspects. I’d have felt better if he’d huffed onion breath in my face and gouged my eyeballs.

  —Michael Morgan,

  Nine More Lives, 1947

  Holliday smiled, a dead man’s grin, all teeth and anguish. In his hands the Uzi looked like some deadly kitchen instrument, the latest thing in noodlemakers gone wrong.

  —Arnold Grisman,

  The Winning Streak, 1985

  Way back in Chapter 1, as you’ll recall, I inducted a number of novels published between 1910 and 1940 into the Alternative Hall of Fame. In this chapter, the inductees will be novels published from 1945 to 1985. As with those earlier enshrined, these classics “shine like a balefire in the dark forest of mediocre mystery, dull deduction, and static suspense.” Boy, do they!

  Three Short Biers, JIMMY STARR (1945)

  Murray & Gee, the short-lived Culver City, California, publisher that gave us Milton M. Raison’s splendid mysteries (among them Murder in a Lighter Vein, about which see Gun in Cheek), is likewise responsible for two of three detective romps by Hollywood publicity agent and gossip columnist Jimmy Starr. Murray published Starr’s maiden effort, The Corpse Came C.O.D., in 1944. This novelistic silly-symphony was filmed three years later under the same title, with George Brent and Joan Blondell, which fact may have encouraged Starr to write Three Short Biers, another silly-symphony that was never filmed. Nor could it have been, except perhaps by the Marx Brothers in conjuntion with the Society of Little People.

  This and Starr’s other two mysteries (the third, Heads You Lose, was brought out by Frederick Fell in 1950) showcase the antics of a tough, wisecracking newspaperman named Joe Medford, “Hollywood’s Number One Reporter,” a.k.a. “Cinemaland’s Cunning Casanova.” Medford chases as many babes in his adventures as he does clues (with remarkable success), and downs bucketsful of Martinis and such other concoctions as the combination of milk, ground coconut, and a double jigger of rum. And he narrates each case in a brash, breezy style typical of Hollywood mystery novels of the period—a style spiced by Starr’s own brand of dumb repartee, inventive said substitutes, and vaudevillean humor. As in these examples from Three Short Biers:

  “Well, boys, this is your unlucky day. I’m hungry!” she said, biting a piece out of the large menu. “Shucks! I always like menus when they’re toasted, or they are delicious when accordion-pleated with crushed cherries.”

  “Pardon me while I call up the insane asylum and reserve a room,” Sam flipped and got up to use the phone.

  “You know anything about midgets?” I asked.

  “I had an Austin once,” she said.

  “Sweetie Pie, I’ll wait for you until the cows come home—and then we could have cream with our corn flakes in the morning, couldn’t we?”

  “Swell, Baby,” I said, “stir up a bucket of Martinis and I’ll be there in a jiffy.”

  “I thought you drove a Chrysler,” she flipped.

  “Oh, if you want to get corny,” I said. “You’re driving me nuts!”

  “Now that I have acted as hotel mistress for your strange friends, may I have my key?”

  “You don’t mean that. I might find some other strange friends.”

  “You annoy me!”

  “No, you annoy me—it’s more fun that way.”

  “Joe, you’re impossible!”

  “You’re lovely.”

  “I’m a fool!”

  “I know, but you’re a lovely fool.”

  “Oh, go on your silly picnic! I hope the ants eat you up!”

  “Do I look like a peanut-butter sandwich?”

  Medford and Starr are alternatively delightful in all three of their homicidal capers, but in this mighty midget of a novel they have their finest hour. For midgets is what Three Short Biers is all about. A trio of them to be exact: Ena, Meena, and Mina, the Diminutive Dolls of Divertissement. And a short bier is what each of them gets before the final curtain on this slapstick farce rolls down.

  Now why, as one of the other characters asks Medford, would anybody want to knock off a midget? Especially three female circus midgets who are “lending their singing and dancing talents to Busby Blanchard’s lavish musical, ‘The Devil’s Angels,’ the story of two wealthy Texas girls who took over their father’s circus and got government permission to present it at the various army camps.” But that’s just what is happening. Ena is the first victim, found hanging some seventy-five feet above the soundstage at Silverstein Studios with a wire twisted around her little neck. Meena is dispatched not long afterward, also by means of strangulation. And that makes it obvious that Mina, too, is marked for a date with the Grim Reaper.

  All sorts of other bizarre and frenetic happenings thicken the plot stew. Before the first murder a fun-loving director named Madison Samson, a.k.a. “Mad Sam,” who liked to play practical jokes (such as “annoying writers at the studio by padlocking wastebaskets to the lapels of their coats, then . . . throw [ing] the keys in his swimming pool”), hired a broken-down actor named Clinton Hogarth to deliver a trio of “caskets for kids” (i.e. miniature coffins) to Busby Blanchard. Then, after Ena’s death, Mad Sam himself is killed in an apparent automobile accident that turns out instead to have been murder by rifle shot. The three short biers inexplicably disappear. Medford, who is a pal of studio boss Moe Silverstein and therefore just happens to be on hand at the time of Ena’s murder, begins poking his snout into both cases—a nose job that does not sit well with such minions of the law as police dick Dick Martin, D.A.’s investigator Harry Dunn, and coroner’s assistant Docky Wocky Corrigan. Joe also manages to run afoul of (and to later play foul with) a gorgeous rival reporter named Debby Long.

  When Meena is strangled Medford is again on the scene, arriving just in time to get himself conked on the head and weakly framed for her murder. One of the missing caskets turns up in Blanchard’s garage. The last remaining midget, Mina, along with her normal-sized companion and nurse, Nell Rand, is spirited away by the fuzz to Dr. Abbott’s sanitarium in Glendale for safekeeping. But another coffin soon turns up there (or is it the same one from Blanchard’s garage?), and Joe then kidnaps Mina and Nell from the sanitarium to save them from the murderer’s clutches. After which he rents an armored car (!) for Nell and the midget to live in (!) while he continues on his quest for answers. (At the rental agency where he obtains the armored car, the clerk at first looks at him askance, silently questioning Joe’s motives. Whereupon Medford utters a now-famous disclaimer: “I am not a crook,” he says.)

  Back at Silverstein Studios, publicity director Norman Burns is poisoned by a bogus benzedrine capsule containing bichloride of mercury. The three missing caskets turn up on the floor of Medford’s
office at the Los Angeles Evening Post. Back at the studio again, somebody tries to ventilate Joe’s head with a bullet after Joe sees a strange woman skulking around the dead Burns’s darkened inner sanctum. Down the coast, the armored car is forced off the road by the same mystery woman, a deliberate “accident” in which poor Mina is killed (and for which Medford, who thought up the screwy armored car angle, takes no responsibility whatsoever).

  Finally, in a superbly conceived anticlimax, the mystery woman is captured offstage and revealed to be Sarah Denton, Burns’s secretary, who in reality is Madame ZigZag, “the Modern Annie Oakley,” a former circus trick-shot artist who “took her name from her peculiar zig-zag type of shooting.” Her motive for all the carnage? She became mentally unbalanced when her six-year-old daughter died of an infection caused by a gunshot wound, the result of one of the Diminutive Dolls of Divertissement (who were also working in the circus at that time) having accidentally discharged the mother’s six-shooter; and so she (Madame ZigZag) set out to bump off the midgets one by one in glorious retribution. She murdered Samson because Clinton Hogarth, the man Mad Sam hired to deliver the three short biers to Busby Blanchard, is in fact Madame ZigZag’s exhusband. “Although they had been divorced since shortly before the death of their daughter, Hogarth was trying again to woo his wife. That was why the cruel Samson had picked Hogarth to deliver the caskets. Sarah obviously resented Samson’s interference and his knowledge of her past, so he, too, was marked for death.” She murdered Norman Burns purely by accident, the poisoned benzedrine capsule being intended instead for Joe Medford, whose meddling was leading him too close to the fact that Sarah Denton/Madame ZigZag was only pretending to be a publicity director’s secretary so she could carry out her little vendetta. As for the disappearing and reappearing coffins, that was all Hogarth’s doing: “He was in deep now, and evidently thought he could get in good with Sarah by helping her.”