“Don’t make waves,” Bernie said.
“Pardon,” I snapped back, with my usual lightning-fast wit.
“Just don’t. It’s too cold to go for a swim this time of year.”
“Even in a bathtub.”
“Especially in a bathtub.”
“Does Mr. District Attorney send his regards?”
Bernie laughed. I had been an investigator with the DA’s office a few years back, but we’d been forced to part company.
“Forget him. I have some more impressive names on my list.”
“Let me guess. Howard Hughes?”
“Close.”
“General Stillwell?”
“Getting warmer. Try Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Governor Culbert Olson, and State Attorney General Earl Warren. Oh, and Wax, of course.”
I whistled. “All interested in little me. Who’d ’a thunk it?”
“Look, I don’t know much about this myself. They just gave me a message to pass on. In the building, they apparently think of me as your keeper.”
“Do a British gentleman, a French lady and a fed the size of Mount Rushmore have anything to do with this?”
“I’ll take the money I’ve won so far and you can pass that question on to the next sucker.”
“Fine, Bernie. Tell me, just how popular am I?”
“Tojo rates worse than you, and maybe Judas Iscariot.”
“Feels comfy. Any idea where Laird Brunette is these days?”
I heard a pause and some rumbling. Bernie was making sure his office was empty of all ears. I imagined him bringing the receiver up close and dropping his voice to a whisper.
“No one’s seen him in three months. Confidentially, I don’t miss him at all. But there are others...” Bernie coughed, a door opened, and he started talking normally or louder. “...of course, honey, I’ll be home in time for Jack Benny.”
“See you later, sweetheart,” I said, “your dinner is in the sink and I’m off to Tijuana with a professional pool player.”
“Love you,” he said, and hung up.
I’d picked up a coating of green slime on the soles of my shoes. I tried scraping them off on the edge of the desk and then used yesterday’s Times to get the stuff off the desk. The gloop looked damned esoteric to me.
I poured myself a shot from the bottle I had picked up across the street and washed the taste of Janice Marsh off my teeth.
I thought of Polynesia in the early 19th century and ofthose fisheyed native girls clustering around Capt. Marsh. Somehow, tentacles kept getting in the way of my thoughts. In theory, the Capt. should have been an ideal subject for a Dorothy Lamour movie, perhaps with Janice Marsh in the role of her great-great-great and Jon Hall or Ray Milland as girl-chasing Obed. But I was picking up Bela Lugosi vibrations from the set-up. I couldn’t help but think of bisected babies.
So far none of this running around had got me any closer to the Laird and his heir. In my mind, I drew up a list of Brunette’s known associates. Then, I mentally crossed off all the ones who were dead. That brought me up short. When people in Brunette’s business die, nobody really takes much notice except maybe to join in a few drunken choruses of “Ding-Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead” before remembering there are plenty of other Wicked Witches in the sea. I’m just like everybody else: I don’t keep a score of dead gambler-entrepreneurs. But, thinking of it, there’d been an awful lot recently, up to and including Gianni Pastore. Apart from Rothko and Isinglass, there’d been at least three other closed casket funerals in the profession. Obviously you couldn’t blame that on the Japs. I wondered how many of the casualties had met their ends in bathtubs. The whole thing kept coming back to water. I decided I hated the stuff and swore not to let my bourbon get polluted with it.
Back out in the rain, I started hitting the bars. Brunette had a lot of friends. Maybe someone would know something.
***
By early evening, I’d propped up a succession of bars and leaned on a succession of losers. The only thing I’d come up with was the blatantly obvious information that everyone in town was scared. Most were wet, but all were scared.
Everyone was scared of two or three things at once. The Japs were high on everyone’s list. You’d be surprised to discover the number of shaky citizens who’d turned overnight from chisellers who’d barely recognise the flag into true red, white and blue patriots prepared to shed their last drop of alcoholic blood for their country. Everywhere you went, someone sounded off against Hirohito, Tojo, the Mikado, kabuki and origami. The current rash of accidental deaths in the Pastore-Brunette circle were a much less popular subject for discussion and tended to turn loudmouths into closemouths at the drop of a question.
“Something fishy,” everyone said, before changing the subject.
I was beginning to wonder whether Janey Wilde wouldn’t have done better spending her money on a radio commercial asking the Laird to give her a call. Then I found Curtis the Croupier in Maxie’s. He usually wore the full soup and fish, as if borrowed from Astaire. Now he’d exchanged his carnation, starched shirtfront and pop-up top hat for an outfit in olive drab with bars on the shoulder and a cap under one epaulette.
“Heard the bugle call, Curtis?” I asked, pushing through a crowd of patriotic admirers who had been buying the soldier boy drinks.
Curtis grinned before he recognised me, then produced a supercilious sneer. We’d met before, on the Montecito. There was a rumour going around that during Prohibition he’d once got involved in an honest card game, but if pressed he’d energetically refute it.
“Hey cheapie,” he said.
I bought myself a drink but didn’t offer him one. He had three or four lined up.
“This racket must pay,” I said. “How much did the uniform cost? You rent it from Paramount?”
The croupier was offended. “It’s real,” he said. “I’ve enlisted. I hope to be sent overseas.”
“Yeah, we ought to parachute you into Tokyo to introduce loaded dice and rickety roulette wheels.”
“You’re cynical, cheapie.” He tossed back a drink.
“No, just a realist. How come you quit the Monty?”
“Poking around in the Laird’s business?”
I raised my shoulders and dropped them again.
“Gambling has fallen off recently, along with leading figures in the industry. The original owner of this place, for instance. I bet paying for wreaths has thinned your bankroll.”
Curtis took two more drinks, quickly, and called for more. When I’d come in, there’d been a couple of chippies climbing into his hip pockets. Now he was on his own with me. He didn’t appreciate the change of scenery and I can’t say I blamed him.
“Look, cheapie,” he said, his voice suddenly low, “for your own good, just drop it. There are more important things now.”
“Like democracy?”
“You can call it that.”
“How far overseas do you want to be sent, Curtis?”
He looked at the door as if expecting five guys with tommy guns to come out of the rain for him. Then he gripped the bar to stop his hands shaking.
“As far as I can get, cheapie. The Philippines, Europe, Australia. I don’t care.”
“Going to war is a hell of a way to escape.”
“Isn’t it just? But wouldn’t Papa Gianni have been safer on Wake Island than in the tub?”
“You heard the bathtime story, then?”
Curtis nodded and took another gulp. The juke box played ‘Doodly-Acky-Sacky, Want Some Seafood, Mama’ and it was scary. Nonsense, but scary.
“They all die in water. That’s what I’ve heard. Sometimes, on the Monty, Laird would go up on deck and just look at the sea for hours. He was crazy, since he took up with that Marsh popsicle.”
“The Panther Princess?”
“You saw that one? Yeah, Janice Marsh. Pretty girl if you like clams. Laird claimed there was a sunken town in the bay. He used a lot of weird words, darkie bop or something. Jitterbug s
tuff. Cthul-whatever, Yog-Gimme-a-Break. He said things were going to come out of the water and sweep over the land, and he didn’t mean U-Boats.”
Curtis was uncomfortable in his uniform. There were dark patches where the rain had soaked. He’d been drinking like W.C. Fields on a bender but he wasn’t getting tight. Whatever was troubling him was too much even for Jack Daniel’s.
I thought of the Laird of the Monty. And I thought of the painting of Capt. Marsh’s clipper, with that out-of-proportion squid surfacing near it.
“He’s on the boat, isn’t he?”
Curtis didn’t say anything.
“Alone,” I thought aloud. “He’s out there alone.”
I pushed my hat to the back of my head and tried to shake booze out of my mind. It was crazy. Nobody bobs up and down in the water with a sign round their neck saying HEY TOJO, TORPEDO ME! The Monty was a floating target.
“No,” Curtis said, grabbing my arm, jarring drink out of my glass.
“He’s not out there?”
He shook his head.
“No, cheapie. He’s not out there alone.”
***
All the water taxis were in dock, securely moored and covered until the storms settled. I’d never find a boatman to take me out to the Montecito tonight. Why, everyone knew the waters were infested with Japanese subs. But I knew someone who wouldn’t care any more whether or not his boats were being treated properly. He was even past bothering if they were borrowed without his permission.
The Seaview Inn was still deserted, although there were police notices warning people away from the scene of the crime. It was dark, cold and wet, and nobody bothered me as I broke into the boathouse to find a ring of keys.
I took my pick of the taxis moored to the Seaview’s jetty and gassed her up for a short voyage. I also got my .38 Colt Super Match out from the glove compartment of the Chrysler and slung it under my armpit. During all this, I got a thorough soaking and picked up the beginnings of influenza. I hoped Jungle Jillian would appreciate the effort.
The sea was swelling under the launch and making a lot of noise. I was grateful for the noise when it came to shooting the padlock off the mooring chain but the swell soon had my stomach sloshing about in my lower abdomen. I am not an especially competent seaman.
The Monty was out there on the horizon, still visible whenever the lightning lanced. It was hardly difficult to keep the small boat aimed at the bigger one.
Getting out on the water makes you feel small. Especially when the lights of Bay City are just a scatter in the dark behind you. I got the impression of large things moving just beyond my field of perception. The chill soaked through my clothes. My hat was a felt sponge, dripping down my neck. As the launch cut towards the Monty, rain and spray needled my face. I saw my hands white and bath-wrinkled on the wheel and wished I’d brought a bottle. Come to that, I wished I was at home in bed with a mug of cocoa and Claudette Colbert. Some things in life don’t turn out the way you plan.
Three miles out, I felt the law change in my stomach. Gambling was legal and I emptied my belly over the side into the water. I stared at the remains of my toasted cheese sandwich as they floated off. I thought I saw the moon reflected greenly in the depths, but there was no moon that night.
I killed the engine and let waves wash the taxi against the side of the Monty. The small boat scraped along the hull of the gambling ship and I caught hold of a weed-furred rope ladder as it passed. I tethered the taxi and took a deep breath.
The ship sat low in the water, as if its lower cabins were flooded.
Too much seaweed climbed up towards the decks. It’d never reopen for business, even if the War were over tomorrow.
I climbed the ladder, fighting the water-weight in my clothes, and heaved myself up on deck. It was good to have something more solid than a tiny boat under me but the deck pitched like an airplane wing. I grabbed a rail and hoped my internal organs would arrange themselves back into their familiar grouping.
“Brunette,” I shouted, my voice lost in the wind.
There was nothing. I’d have to go belowdecks.
A sheet flying flags of all nations had come loose, and was whipped around with the storm. Japan, Italy and Germany were still tactlessly represented, along with several European states that weren’t really nations any more. The deck was covered in familiar slime.
I made my way around towards the ballroom doors. They’d blown in and rain splattered against the polished wood floors. I got inside and pulled the .38. It felt better in my hand than digging into my ribs.
Lightning struck nearby and I got a flash image of the abandoned ballroom, orchestra stands at one end painted with the name of a disbanded combo.
The casino was one deck down. It should have been dark but I saw a glow under a walkway door. I pushed through and cautiously descended. It wasn’t wet here but it was cold. The fish smell was strong.
“Brunette,” I shouted again.
I imagined something heavy shuffling nearby and slipped a few steps, banging my hip and arm against a bolted-down table. I kept hold of my gun, but only through superhuman strength.
The ship wasn’t deserted. That much was obvious.
I could hear music. It wasn’t Cab Calloway or Benny Goodman. There was a Hawaiian guitar in there but mainly it was a crazy choir of keening voices. I wasn’t convinced the performers were human and wondered whether Brunette was working up some kind of act with singing seals. I couldn’t make out the words but the familiar hawk-and-spit syllables of “Cthulhu” cropped up a couple of times.
I wanted to get out and go back to nasty Bay City and forget all about this. But Jungle Jillian was counting on me.
I made my way along the passage, working towards the music. A hand fell on my shoulder and my heart banged against the backsides of my eyeballs.
A twisted face stared at me out of the gloom, thickly-bearded, crater-cheeked. Laird Brunette was made up as Ben Gunn, skin shrunk onto his skull, eyes large as hen’s eggs.
His hand went over my mouth.
“Do Not Disturb,” he said, voice high and cracked.
This wasn’t the suave criminal I knew, the man with tartan cummerbunds and patent leather hair. This was some other Brunette, in the grips of a tough bout with dope or madness.
“The Deep Ones,” he said.
He let me go and I backed away.
“It is the time of the Surfacing.”
My case was over. I knew where the Laird was. All I had to do was tell Janey Wilde and give her her refund.
“There’s very little time.”
The music was louder. I heard a great number of bodies shuffling around in the casino. They couldn’t have been very agile, because they kept clumping into things and each other.
“They must be stopped. Dynamite, depth charges, torpedoes...”
“Who?” I asked. “The Japs?”
“The Deep Ones. The Dwellers in the Sister City.”
He had lost me.
A nasty thought occurred to me. As a detective, I can’t avoid making deductions. There were obviously a lot of people aboard the Monty, but mine was the only small boat in evidence. How had everyone else got out here? Surely they couldn’t have swum?
“It’s a war,” Brunette ranted, “us and them. It’s always been a war.”
I made a decision. I’d get the Laird off his boat and turn him over to Jungle Jillian. She could sort things out with the Panther Princess and her Esoteric Order. In his current state, Brunette would hand over any baby if you gave him a blanket.
I took Brunette’s thin wrist and tugged him towards the staircase. But a hatch clanged down, and I knew we were stuck.
A door opened and perfume drifted through the fish stink.
“Mr. Lovecraft, wasn’t it?” a silk-scaled voice said.
***
Janice Marsh was wearing pendant squid earrings and a lady-sized gun. And nothing else.
That wasn’t quite as nice as it sounds. The Panth
er Princess had no nipples, no navel and no pubic hair. She was lightly scaled between the legs and her wet skin shone like a shark’s. I imagined that if you stroked her, your palm would come away bloody. She was wearing neither the turban she’d affected earlier nor the dark wig of her pictures. Her head was completely bald, skull swelling unnaturally. She didn’t even have her eyebrows pencilled in.
“You evidently can’t take good advice.”
As mermaids go, she was scarier than cute. In the crook of her left arm, she held a bundle from which a white baby face peered with unblinking eyes. Franklin looked more like Janice Marsh than his parents.
“A pity, really,” said a tiny ventriloquist voice through Franklin’s mouth, “but there are always complications.”
Brunette gibbered with fear, chewing his beard and huddling against me.
Janice Marsh set Franklin down and he sat up, an adult struggling with a baby’s body.
“The Cap’n has come back,” she explained.
“Every generation must have a Cap’n,” said the thing in Franklin’s mind. Dribble got in the way and he wiped his angel-mouth with a fold of swaddle.
Janice Marsh clucked and pulled Laird away from me, stroking his face.
“Poor dear,” she said, flicking his chin with a long tongue. “He got out of his depth.”
She put her hands either side of Brunette’s head, pressing the butt of her gun into his cheek.
“He was talking about a Sister City,” I prompted.
She twisted the gambler’s head around and dropped him on the floor. His tongue poked out and his eyes showed only white.
“Of course,” the baby said. “The Cap’n founded two settlements. One beyond Devil Reef, off Massachusetts. And one here, under the sands of the Bay.”
We both had guns. I’d let her kill Brunette without trying to shoot her. It was the detective’s fatal flaw, curiosity. Besides, the Laird was dead inside his head long before Janice snapped his neck.
“You can still join us,” she said, hips working like a snake in time to the chanting. “There are raptures in the deeps.”
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