Pastore was face down in the overflowing tub, the song coming from under him. He wore a silk lounging robe that had been pulled away from his back, his wrists tied behind him with the robe’s cord. In the end he’d been drowned. But before that hands had been laid on him, either in anger or with cold, professional skill. I’m not a coroner, so I couldn’t tell how long the Family Man had been in the water. The radio still playing and the water still running suggested Gianni had met his end recently but the stench felt older than sin.
I have a bad habit of finding bodies in Bay City and the most profit-minded police force in the country have a bad habit of trying to make connections between me and a wide variety of deceased persons. The obvious solution in this case was to make a friendly phone call, absent-mindedly forgetting to mention my name while giving the flatfeet directions to the late Mr. Pastore. Who knows, I might accidentally talk to someone honest.
That is exactly what I would have done if, just then, the man with the gun hadn’t come through the door…
I had Janey Wilde to blame. She’d arrived without an appointment, having picked me on a recommendation. Oddly, Laird Brunette had once said something not entirely uncomplimentary about me. We’d met. We hadn’t seriously tried to kill each other in a while. That was as good a basis for a relationship as any.
Out of her sarong, Jungle Jillian favored sharp shoulders and a veiled pill-box. The kiddies at the matinee had liked her fine, especially when she was wrestling stuffed snakes, and dutiful Daddies took no exception to her either, especially when she was tied down and her sarong rode up a few inches. Her lips were four red grapes plumped together. When she crossed her legs you saw swimmer’s smooth muscle under her hose.
“He’s very sweet, really,” she explained, meaning Mr. Brunette never killed anyone within ten miles of her without apologising afterwards, “not at all like they say in those dreadful scandal sheets.”
The gambler had been strange recently, especially since the war shut him down. Actually the Montecito had been out of commission for nearly a year, supposedly for a refit although as far as Janey Wilde knew no workmen had been sent out to the ship. At about the time Brunette suspended his crooked wheels, he came down with a common California complaint, a dose of crackpot religion. He’d been tangentally mixed up a few years ago with a psychic racket run by a bird named Amthor, but had apparently shifted from the mostly harmless bunco cults onto the hard stuff. Spiritualism, orgiastic rites, chanting, incense, the whole deal.
Janey blamed this sudden interest in matters occult on Janice Marsh, who had coincidentally made her name as the Panther Princess in The Perils of Jungle Jillian, a role which required her to torture Janey Wilde at least once every chapter. My employer didn’t mention that her own career had hardly soared between Jungle Jillian and She-Strangler of Shanghai, while the erstwhile Panther Princess had gone from Republic to Metro and was being built up as an exotic in the Dietrich-Garbo vein. Say what you like about Janice Marsh’s Nefertiti, she still looked like Peter Lorre to me. And according to Janey, the star had more peculiar tastes than a seafood buffet.
Brunette had apparently joined a series of fringe organisations and become quite involved, to the extent of neglecting his business and thereby irking his long-time partner, Gianni Pastore. Perhaps that was why person or persons unknown had decided the Laird wouldn’t mind if his associates died one by one. I couldn’t figure it out. The cults I’d come across mostly stayed in business by selling sex, drugs, power or reassurance to rich, stupid people. The Laird hardly fell into the category. He was too big a fish for that particular bowl.
The man with the gun was English, with a Ronald Colman accent and a white aviator’s scarf. He was not alone. The quiet, truck-sized bruiser I made as a fed went through my wallet while the dapper foreigner kept his automatic pointed casually at my middle.
“Peeper,” the fed snarled, showing the photostat of my license 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 Dieudonné.”
“Geneviève,” 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 twenties. It was a bad business.”
Geneviève 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-uh.”
“The Deep Ones?”
“Are they those colored 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 would rather there were a throat in them.
“Gené?” 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 lightning 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—Reanimator’” and “‘The Rat Master’ by Greye la Spina”. All for fifteen 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 tantalising 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 organisation 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, Geneviève 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 Defense 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 thirty 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 house-keeper. 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 twenties, 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 fifteen 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.
The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 11