I’d tried to join up two days after Pearl Harbor but they kicked me back onto the streets. Too many concussions. Apparently, I get hit on the head too often and have a tendency to black out. When they came to mention it, they were right.
The Seaview Inn was shuttered, one of the first casualties of war. It had its own jetty, and by it were a few canvas-covered motor launches shifting with the waves. In late afternoon gloom, I saw the silhouette of the Montecito, anchored strategically outside the three-mile limit. That was one good thing about the Japanese; on the downside, they might have sunk most of the U.S. fleet, but on the up, they’d put Laird Brunette’s gambling ship out of business. Nobody was enthusiastic about losing their shirt-buttons on a rigged roulette wheel if they imagined they were going to be torpedoed any moment. I’d have thought that would add an extra thrill to the whole gay, delirious business of giving Brunette money, but I’m just a poor, twenty-five-dollars-a-day detective.
The Seaview Inn was supposed to be a stopping-off point on the way to the Monty and now its trade was stopped off. The main building was sculpted out of dusty ice cream and looked like a three-storey radiogram with wave-scallop friezes. I pushed through double doors and entered the lobby. The floor was decorated with a mosaic in which Neptune, looking like an angry Santa Claus in a swimsuit, was sticking it to a sea-nymph who shared a hairdresser with Hedy Lamarr. The nymph was naked except for some strategic shells. It was very artistic.
There was nobody at the desk and thumping the bell didn’t improve matters. Water ran down the outside of the green-tinted windows. There were a few steady drips somewhere. I lit up another Camel and went exploring. The office was locked and the desk register didn’t have any entries after December 7, 1941. My raincoat dripped and began to dry out, sticking my jacket and shirt to my shoulders. I shrugged, trying to get some air into my clothes. I noticed Neptune’s face quivering. A thin layer of water had pooled over the mosaic and various anemone-like fronds attached to the sea god were apparently getting excited. Looking at the nymph, I could understand that. Actually, I realised, only the hair was from Hedy. The face and the body were strictly Janey Wilde.
I go to the movies a lot but I’d missed most of Janey’s credits: She-Strangler of Shanghai, Tarzan and the Tiger Girl, Perils of Jungle Jillian. I’d seen her in the newspapers though, often in unnervingly close proximity with Pastors or Brunette. She’d started as an Olympic swimmer, picking up medals in Berlin, then followed Weissmuller and Crabbe to Hollywood. She would never get an Academy Award but her legs were in a lot of cheesecake stills publicising no particular movie. Air-brushed and made-up like a good-looking corpse, she was a fine commercial for sex. In person she was as bubbly as domestic champagne, though now running to flat. Things were slow in the detecting business, since people were more worried about imminent invasion than missing daughters or misplaced love letters. So when Janey Wilde called on me in my office in the Cahuenga Building and asked me to look up one of her ill-chosen men friends, I checked the pile of old envelopes I use as a desk diary and informed her that I was available to make inquiries into the current whereabouts of a certain big fish.
Wherever Laird Brunette was, he wasn’t here. I was beginning to figure Gianni Pastore, the gambler’s partner, wasn’t here either. Which meant I’d wasted an afternoon. Outside it rained harder, driving against the walls with a drumlike tattoo. Either there were hailstones mixed in with the water or the Jap air force was hurling fistfuls of pebbles at Bay City to demoralise the population. I don’t know why they bothered. All Hirohito had to do was slip a thick envelope to the Bay City cops and the city’s finest would hand over the whole community to the Japanese Empire with a ribbon around it and a bow on top.
There were more puddles in the lobby, little streams running from one to the other. I was reminded of the episode of The Perils of Jungle Jillian I had seen while tailing a child molester to a Saturday matinee. At the end, Janey Wilde had been caught by the Panther Princess and trapped in a room which slowly filled with water. That room had been a lot smaller than the lobby of the Seaview Inn and the water had come in a lot faster.
Behind the desk were framed photographs of pretty people in pretty clothes having a pretty time. Pastore was there, and Brunette, grinning like tiger cats, mingling with showfolk: Xavier Cugat, Janey Wilde, Charles Coburn. Janice Marsh, the pop-eyed beauty rumoured to have replaced Jungle Jillian in Brunette’s affections, was well represented in artistic poses.
On the phone, Pastore had promised faithfully to be here. He hadn’t wanted to bother with a small-timer like me but Janey Wilde’s name opened a door. I had a feeling Papa Pastore was relieved to be shaken down about Brunette, as if he wanted to talk about something. He must be busy because there were several wars on. The big one overseas and a few little ones at home. Maxie Rothko, bar owner and junior partner in the Monty, had been found drifting in the seaweed around the Santa Monica pier without much of a head to speak of. And Phil Isinglass, man-about-town lawyer and Brunette frontman, had turned up in the storm drains, lungs full of sandy mud. Disappearing was the latest craze in Brunette’s organisation. That didn’t sound good for Janey Wilde, though Pastore had talked about the Laird as if he knew Brunette was alive. But now Papa wasn’t around. I was getting annoyed with someone it wasn’t sensible to be annoyed with.
Pastore wouldn’t be in any of the beach shacks, but there should be an apartment for his convenience in the main building. I decided to explore further. Jungle Jillian would expect no less. She’d hired me for five days in advance, a good thing since I’m unduly reliant on eating and drinking and other expensive diversions of the monied and idle.
The corridor that led past the office ended in a walk-up staircase. As soon as I put my size nines on the first step, it squelched. I realised something was more than usually wrong. The steps were a quiet little waterfall, seeping rather than cascading. It wasn’t just water, there was unpleasant, slimy stuff mixed in. Someone had left the bath running. My first thought was that Pastore had been distracted by a bullet. I was wrong. In the long run, he might have been happier if I’d been right.
I climbed the soggy stairs and found the apartment door unlocked but shut. Bracing myself, I pushed the door in. It encountered resistance but then sliced open, allowing a gush of water to shoot around my ankles, soaking my dark blue socks. Along with water was a three-weeks-dead-in-the-water-with-rotten-fish smell that wrapped around me like a blanket. Holding my breath, I stepped into the room. The waterfall flowed faster now. I heard a faucet running. A radio played, with funny little gurgles mixed in. A crooner was doing his best with “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” but he sounded as if he were drowned full fathom five. I followed the music and found the bathroom.
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 s
eriously 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 favoured sharp shoulders and a veiled pillbox. 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 tangentially 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 andShe-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 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 that 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.”
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-uh.”
“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 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 Erie 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 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 s
ituation 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.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 27