by Otto Penzler
I was afraid—afraid for Trixie Meehan as I walked toward the big white shrine, the loaded club swinging in my hand and growing anger seething inside. Crackpots or no crackpots, if any harm came to Trixie I’d take the whole place apart.
The building was dark and seemed deserted. I skirted the terrace on the damp grass and made a circle of the shrine. Not a light, not a sound.
The patio entrance was open. I slipped inside and felt my way to the door through which Eddy Voss and Paige had carried the woman.
The door was unlocked. A dark hall was on the other side. Dark? It was an inky solid, with a tiled floor underfoot and rough plastered walls on either side. And the silence of a tomb.
I was wasting time. This wasn’t finding Trixie, wasn’t getting anywhere. I was sniffing unconsciously before I realized what I was doing.
The sickly pungent odor that tainted the air was familiar. Then I got it. Marijuana. So I wasn’t alone. Somebody was dragging on the weed close by. A slight draft was moving against my face and I followed it up, and almost walked into a blank wall as the passage made a sudden left-hand turn.
The marijuana fumes were stronger. A partly opened door around the passage turn let out a beam of sickly light, and a voice was mumbling in a dreamy, monotonous monotone. Hefting the club, I crept to the door and looked in.
You could have knocked me over with a marijuana weed. Father Orion was doing the mumbling. Across the room he sat cross-legged with his back to a heap of gay silk pillows. The white toga had been put aside, sandals and bullet-proof vest were gone. He wore a white loin cloth, sat cross-legged like an Oriental, holding the mouthpiece of a water pipe.
A shaded lamp on the floor showed his eyes set in a fixed dull stare. His dreamy monotone was directed into space, and the words were strange and unfamiliar.
A thousand years ago the Egyptians had smoked marijuana like this bony, rather terrible old man across the room. Only the Egyptians had called it hashish.
They too had had their fantastic dreams swirling lazily through drugged minds. And so had Father Orion. You could see it on his face. He’d been partly doped out there in the patio. Hashish gave him that piercing, dreamy stare, that remote manner.
Now he half-turned to suck at the mouthpiece. His back and chest were criss-crossed by livid weals that seemed to be scars left by whips. You could only wonder what gruesome experiences he had lived through far back in the past.
He began to mumble again as I pushed the door open.
I was inside the room before I saw the thin Oriental who had been beating the drum out in the patio. He sat back in the shadows to the right, cross-legged on the floor also, watching, listening as if in a trance.
But he wasn’t in a trance. He turned his head. For a long moment we stared at each other. His eyes were like dark bright buttons. He seemed to shrink in on himself and tense as I took a step toward him.
“What’s the idea?” I asked, jerking my head toward the old man.
The fellow was dark-skinned, wiry, middle-aged. He might have been thirty or fifty. His thin-lipped face held no expression as he stared.
Father Orion mumbled into space without noticing us.
I wanted to swear. My pulses were jumping. The white loin cloth looked brilliant against the dark, oily skin. His torso muscles had tightened, ridged, until he seemed poised with threat as he sat there cross-legged and silent to my question.
A master mind might have bluffed it out easily. But tonight I wasn’t master-minding. I was only Mike Harris, with a club in my hand and seething anger suddenly wild and reckless as I faced discovery, alarm and the blow-up of everything I was trying to do.
“Which one of you talks first?” I said.
I had started toward him when he jumped at me. One instant he was sitting cross-legged; the next he was flying through the air in an uncanny leap, white teeth gleaming and his hand flashing up from the loin cloth with a knife.
No time to talk, to dodge. I didn’t want to dodge anyway. I swung at his knife hand, hit it, smashed the hand aside. He landed like a cat, fighting and clawing. And the biggest claw was the knife which he had grabbed with the other hand.
The blade slashed my arm as I tried to parry the blow. I dropped the club and slugged him in the face with my fist. He staggered back on his heels and I jumped after him and hit him again.
He could use a knife but he didn’t savvy fists. He tried to dodge, but I’d softened him into stumbling awkwardness. His chin turned just right. I hooked one to the button—and he dropped the knife and went down, glassy-eyed and cold.
Panting, I snatched the knife and club and turned to Father Orion. And still he hadn’t noticed us, hadn’t stopped mumbling. It was enough to give you the creeps.
He started to suck on the mouthpiece of the water pipe again, and I shoved the end of the club through the middle of the beard and pushed him back against the pillows.
“Come out of it, you dope!” I panted. “Can you understand me?”
He shook his head dazedly and his eyes cleared a trifle. “Truth,” he mumbled. “Truth, Brother.”
“Truth hell!” says I. “Where did John Paige go? What did he do with that woman who shot at you?”
“Brother,” he said vaguely. “What do you desire, Brother?”
“Absolutely nuts!” I said through my teeth.
“And people who ought to be sane are looney because of you! Come out of the clouds, damn you!”
His eyes had already closed. He mumbled inaudibly as he sank back on the pillows. I knew it wasn’t any use. He was off on a nod and man nor beast couldn’t get sense out of him. I swore at him, wondering what I could do now.
Trixie Meehan’s cry of warning took care of that.
“Look out, Mike! “ Trixie’s faint cry sounded somewhere outside the room.
CHAPTER V
CAT O’NINE TAILS
I whirled around with the club and knife—and saw the man inside a doorway across the room. He was in the shadows. I saw the gun before I recognized the face behind it.
He thought I was coming at him. Maybe I was. Trixie’s voice had set me wild for the moment, and I’d gone too far now to back out.
The lick of fire from the gun muzzle, the roaring reverberations of the report, the numbing shock that paralyzed my left shoulder and arm and side, all seemed to come at once.
I staggered back and couldn’t help it. Father Orion’s companion was sprawled on the floor behind me. His hand clamped on my ankle and jerked me in a sprawling fall such as I had given him.
The floor didn’t seem hard. Maybe my mind was numb too. Trying to fight both men off a moment later was like a slow-motion picture. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. And I was waiting for the second shot and wishing I had Father Orion’s bullet-proof vest. Eddy Voss was behind the gun and I thought he was going to finish what he had started.
He didn’t. The gun muzzle tapped my head and made me foggier—and then they both yanked me to my feet.
“You want another?” Eddy Voss was snarling. “Keep quiet or I’ll blow your damn face off!”
So I kept quiet as they held me. Warm blood was crawling sluggishly down my left arm. I was dizzy, gasping for breath, sick and weak with the shock and the pain that was beginning to replace the numbness.
“Bring him in here!” Eddy gritted.
Beyond the door was a short, windowless corridor, dimly lit by a single bulb. The floor was carpeted, the walls seemed to be covered with leather over some kind of padding. There were five doors on each side of the corridor. I counted them. Ten doors, covered as the walls were. One stood partly open, and it was as thick and massive as an icebox door.
The little cell-like room inside was padded also; and as Eddy Voss jerked the door wide I saw Trixie sitting on an iron-framed couch in the center of the tiny room.
“Mike!” Trixie said, and then gasped as she saw the blood that had smeared down over my wrist and hand. “Oh, Mike, what did he do to you?”
Eddy
Voss sneered at her. “I oughta finished him off in there. So you two know each other? Ain’t that interesting?”
Trixie was pale, tiny and pretty in her helplessness as she sat there in the white robe with one of her wrists fastened to a corner of the bed by a short chain.
Chains and handcuffs hung from the other three corners of the beds, so that a person could be spread-eagled there helplessly. The low-ceilinged room seemed to crowd in and smother. Even our voices sounded flat and muted.
I felt cold enough to shiver through the pain as I realized that with the massive door closed all sounds would probably be smothered in the windowless, padded room.
“I met the lady tonight,” I said. “We talked a little. What the hell’s the idea of putting her in here?”
“Just met her tonight?” Voss said.
“That’s right.”
“So she lets out a yell when she thinks something is going to happen to you. Just met her— and she knows your voice clear from the other room. And she’s ready to faint when she gets a look at you.”
“He’s bleeding!” Trixie said unsteadily. “Why don’t you stop it before he’s lost too much?”
“Look at her,” Voss said to me. “A hard-boiled little tramp like she’s been the last half hour, getting all washy about you. Do I look dumb?”
“Damn dumb,” I said. “How much of this do you think you can get by with?”
“Plenty,” Voss told me, and he spoke to Trixie. “Maybe if we hold him here until he bleeds long enough, you’ll talk.”
“I doubt it,” said Trixie, and I could have patted her on the back for the way her chin went up and her eyes flashed at him.
We weren’t talking like crackpots now. Eddy Voss didn’t look like one, although he still wore the toga and sandals. His thin face was hard, sneering, intent as he looked from Trixie to me and back to Trixie.
“She was snooping around here trying to see what she could discover,” Voss said. “And now you show up doing the same thing. I heard you asking about that fool woman who popped off tonight. And you’re the guy who lost his memory and didn’t know what it was all about.”
“I’m learning,” says I, seeing that the amnesia role was washed up.
“Hold him, Ali,” he said.
Ali could understand English all right. He nodded and clung to my right arm while Voss frisked me and found the fat billfold.
“Christ!” Voss said under his breath when he got a look at the money. “No wonder Paige said you were his private sucker.” Voss spat and grinned as he put the billfold inside his toga. “This’ll teach him a lesson.”
Blood was dripping off my finger tips. I caught Trixie’s eyes watching it. “I’m all right,” I said.
But I wasn’t. Trixie knew it. So did Voss. He grinned again as he looked at the arm.
“You won’t last long if that isn’t fixed,” he said.
“So what?” I said.
He hit me in the face. Ali held my good arm while Voss knocked me reeling against the padded wall with blow after blow. I heard Trixie cry out, but Voss was yelling at me in a sudden fury.
“I’ll fix you, you redheaded little squirt! I’ll have you chained in a cell and let Ali work on you with one of his whips! Who else is with you? What are you here for? I’ll find out who you are and what the money’s for! Will you talk? Will you talk?”
His nerves weren’t any better than mine had been before I found Father Orion. He had me, but he was afraid of what he didn’t know. He spoke of whips—and I thought of Father Orion’s whip-scarred body and these soundproofed cells fitted up to chain people helplessly for any kind of torture.
Father Orion and his cultists were grotesque, unreal—but this was a look into depths more horrible than I could have suspected. And if I’d get what Voss was shouting, what would Trixie get? What would happen to us both if Voss was sure we were detectives?
I knew. I guess Trixie knew too. Voss probably already had his mind made up. We’d seen too much, we knew too much. There wasn’t a chance even now of either one of us getting down into Hollywood to tell our stories.
So I fainted. It’s always a good gag, whether the girls use it or Mike Harris tries it in a tight spot. Back against the padded wall I slumped with Ali still holding my arm. Eddy Voss dropped his fist.
“Damn him!” he gasped. “I—”
My foot caught him in the stomach when he got that far. Never mind Ali, never mind Eddy’s gun; braced against the wall I had the leverage I needed. The shoe went deep in his middle and hurled him back over the bed where Trixie was held.
“The gun!” I yelled. “Get the gun, Trixie!”
She didn’t need the order. Little Trixie could think faster than most men. She had the whipcord muscles of an adagio dancer. She was already grabbing at Voss as he tumbled off the bed on the other side.
Trixie had the full length of her arm and the short chain to move in. Voss’ coat ripped as she caught it and yanked. He had hardly struck the floor when Trixie was off the bed and down on her knees catching at him.
Ali uttered a gobbling, unearthly cry as he released my arm and dived toward her. I tripped him and grabbed at him. His slippery arm went out of my fingers as he fell on all fours.
I couldn’t see what Trixie was doing as I lurched down on Ali. He bounced up from under me like a ball of buttered muscles—and in the same instant Trixie raised up with the gun in her hand.
It was good to see the business-like look on Trixie’s face and to know that she could handle any gun like an expert. Ali must have sensed it, must have realized that he didn’t have a chance with the gun so close. He whirled with the startling rapidity which had surprised me in the other room and darted toward the door.
Trixie fired at him, high deliberately, and he streaked out the door and vanished.
“Hurry, Mike!”
Trixie crouched at the foot of the bed with the gun covering Eddy Voss. When I staggered to her side, Voss was holding his middle and weakly trying to sit up. He looked sick, dazed.
“Keys are in his right trousers pocket, Mike!”
I had them a moment later.
“That littlest one, Mike!”
A moment later Trixie was free and on her feet. She handed me the gun, caught Voss’ wrist, and had it in the steel bracelet before Voss could resist.
“Good work, Sweetness,” I told her.
And only then did Trixie’s voice break, quaver as she came to me.
“Mike, dear, are you badly hurt? Here, let me see!”
My lip was bleeding. My face felt like it had been jumped on. The pain had been there in my shoulder but I’d been too busy to notice it. Now I did. With clenched teeth I let Trixie get my coat off, jerk my shirt off.
The arm wasn’t pretty to look at. Trixie used the shirt for a swab.
“Can you use the arm, Mike?”
“Yes—fingers too,” I groaned after trying.
“Not as bad as I thought,” says little Trixie briskly. “The bleeding is slowing up too. I’ll wrap it quickly.”
“We’ve got to get out of here, Baby! That bird in the breech clout will have the whole place around our ears!”
Trixie ripped half of Voss’ toga off with one pull and tore strips off the edge.
“Only a minute, Mike. And that woman’s in the room across the hall. We can’t leave her. They’ll kill her.”
“I’d like to take Voss,” I said as Trixie hastily bandaged the shoulder.
Voss’ head jerked up in surprise at hearing me mention his name.
“Yes, you louse, I know you,” I said. “And the next time you won’t draw a parole. What’s the racket here?”
His face had gone pasty. He was afraid, and defiant too, like a rat in a corner.
“That’ll do for a little,” said Trixie. “Hurry, Mike. Maybe we’ve waited too long now.”
I stopped and grabbed my billfold back from the remnant of Voss’ toga.
“If we turn up without this,” I said, “we m
ight as well keep going.”
“That damn money!” Trixie exclaimed. “If you ever do a trick like that again, I’ll—I’ll—”
“I’ll do it for you,” I promised.
We were across the hall by then and I was trying keys in the door. The third one made it. The door swung out.
“Come on, lady,” I said. “We’re taking you out of here.”
She was on the floor by the bed, as if she’d rolled off and hadn’t moved after she landed. I had a premonition. Trixie beat me to it. She was pale and shaken as she looked up from the woman.
“Dead, Mike!” Trixie exclaimed.
“Murdered?” I said.
Trixie picked a little pill box off the floor and held it up so I could see the poison label.
“She killed herself, Mike.”
“I’d call it murder, anyway,” I said. “Hell, what a joint they’ve been running here right under the noses of all Hollywood. Let’s get out of here while the getting is good.”
I was afraid again, mostly for Trixie. What chance would she have if they caught her now? For that matter what chance had she had chained in that padded cell? At least we had a gun now, with a few cartridges left.
I lingered long enough to lock Eddy Voss in, and the woman too. If no more keys were handy, it would be a long time before anyone beat the police to them. And I wanted the police now. Jake Dennis, Larry Sweet and a squad of big-footed dicks would have looked sweeter than taffy on a stick.
I know! I hadn’t solved the murder that Lew Ryster had tossed in my lap. But I’d done something bigger. I’d smashed this whole vicious, gruesome mess wide open. That was enough work for one night.
And there was still more to do. There was Nancy Cudahy. A fool she might be. But also she was a dumb innocent kid with dollars stacking the cards against her.
What chance did she have against men like Eddy Voss, Paige and Father Orion? She’d lost her head in Hollywood, she’d taken a dizzy tumble, she’d fallen in love. Maybe love had thrown her off balance. They say a woman in love is just a woman, or something like that. I wouldn’t know.