“Oh, and that woman I tell you ’bout call again. She still no give her name but say how much she worry about the husband. I give number again?”
“I guess so,” he muttered, knowing what Glory was like if you didn’t humor her.
“Well, Clark,” Barbara said, still chuckling as he put down the phone. “That was an interesting glimpse into your exciting life.”
“I’m not the one who’s living in that flea pit over there.”
“Sounds like your apartment is the total height of luxury…”
The air back out in the street smelled fresher this morning after last night’s rain, and there were puddles in the gutters, but Roger and his pals were busy as ever kicking their usual tin can.
“Say…” the kid drawled, chewing what was probably an entirely imaginary piece of gum. “It’s Tim Cookson and Frederica West. That car of yours still needs looking after, you know. Get all sorts of savory types around here.”
“It’s unsavory.” Clark handed him a quarter. “Anything much you noticed out here?”
“Not out here.” Roger winked at him, then looked at Barbara, who was back to wearing her usual mannish slacks and a Fairisle sweater, up and down in a way which was far too knowing for someone his age.
Barbara sighed. “Shouldn’t you be at school? Or in a reformatory?”
“Ain’t nothing I can learn there, lady, that I can’t pick up ten timesneater on these here streets.”
With another quarter stuffed in his pockets, Roger agreed to listen out again for the phone.
FORTY FIVE
THE INSIDE OF THE DELAHAYE smelled damper than ever. It was like something was beginning to rot, and there was a gouge down the driver’s side which Clark presumed Roger and his mates had caused. The engine didn’t sound quite right, either, as they drove past the fake palms and papier-mâché hula girls outside the new Clifton Cafeteria on the corner of Broadway and First.
Abe Penn’s offices were in a three story building set between a lower sprawl of warehouses and lots. There was a failed oil pump site and few signs of life.
“Thought you said he was up the pecking order from you, Clark,” Barbara muttered, looking up at the spackle-filled three story frontage as they climbed out.
Plates for all sorts, sizes and types of business clung to the wall outside. A chiropractor. A lonely hearts bureau. The registered offices of some oddly-named companies, amongst which was Abe Penn’s Nero Detective Agency. None of the plates looked new. The glass pane in the swing door had once had a long piece of surgical tape stuck across it to try to hold together a long crack. Once the door had stopped screeching, it felt very quiet inside. The only sound was the stick of their feet on warm linoleum and the buzz of a few flies. There was a noticeboard beside the stairs, one of those things that you slide letters in like a feelie signboard or the hymn numbers in a church. It repeated some of the names from the business plates outside, and added a few others. Abe Penn’s office was apparently up on the top floor.
There was no elevator, and the air grew even hotter as they climbed. More silent, as well—they were both almost holding their breath—apart from the continued bumble and buzz of those flies. Most of the business signs in the glass-windowed doors along the final corridor had been stuck over with brown paper or scratched out. The words NERO DETECTIVE AGENCY faced them from the far end, and Clark thought to himself as he swatted another fly and tried to peer through the glass frosting that this whole place was such a distillation of a certain kind of existence that they’d probably use it in the feelies—in the unlikely event that it ever became fashionable to work this city as a private dick, that was.
He couldn’t make anything out, and fully expected the door to be locked. But the oval handle instantly gave, and something terrible hit his senses as the door swung. With it came a rush of flies.
“Jesus. Shut the door.” He was fumbling for a handkerchief. “No—not on the outside, Barbara.” He hissed. “You’ve got to come in …”
The remains of what could only be Abe Penn depended from a rope which had been looped around the rosette of an old metal fan on the ceiling, and a swivel chair had been kicked away from underneath. Flies were everywhere. On the walls. In the air. Darkening the metal-framed windows. Seeking their eyes and mouths. Keeping close as he could to the corners of the small room, Clark went around to the far side of Abe’s desk. He used the handkerchief to work open the first window catch and a few thousand flies swarmed out, but most of the rest seemed happy enough to stay in with Abe. The other window was already half open.
“What the hell is this?” Barbara was covering her mouth with one hand, fumbling in her handbag with the other.
“What does it look like? Don’t touch anything, right?”
“As if I would…”
The roar of the disturbed flies was so loud they were having to shout. Abe looked like a large bag that had burst. His head was so ballooned and distorted, and his neck had been stretched so far by the weight of his leaking body, that it seemed that it could only be moments before the two broke apart. Clark had encountered one or two suicides before—they came with the territory when you dealt with separation and divorce—but never anything this bad. Abe must have been dead for days. No—make that weeks…
An impressive double page a day desk diary was open on the blotter for Friday June 21st, which was seven days ago. The only entry was a doodle of several breasts and the single word Haircut? Somehow, Clark found that question mark especially touching. Keeping his fingers wrapped in the handkerchief, he flicked quickly through the previous pages of the diary. More poorly done doodles of impossibly endowed broads decorated the pages, but that was all until, in the looser kind of hand someone might use when they were jotting something down whilst talking on the phone, Abe had written Lamotte. Erewhon—Stone Canyon—Lookalikes?!? and a phone number on the page for Friday June 14th.
Barbara was standing beside him now. The only other thing on the desk apart from the flies was a solitary buff gray folder. He lifted it open. Instantly the flies began to crawl over old cuttings—curled and yellowed images of Clark’s face from the middle pages of single column articles in Variety back in the days when he was just about famous—and a bigger glossy that he remembered having done at Mina’s considerable expense and never feeling happy with. Abe had also gotten hold of one of Clark’s business cards, and he looked, from the emphatic way he’d crossed out the disconnected number and the tiny breasts which decorated its edges, to have tried calling it. He’d then written another number on the back of the card which Clark recognized as belonging to a service office he’d briefly used to take messages until he decided the whole thing was a rip-off. Finally, in a fresher, crisper hand, was the number for the phone in the hall of the Doge’s Apartments, and then the words Glory Guzman?!!! deeply scored with a kind of frustration Clark could understand.
“Looks like he did try to speak to you,” Barbara muttered. “Is Glory always like she was this morning?”
“No. We got her on a good day.”
“So he chose you, and the message about the whole business didn’t get through, and then he… Do you think this is really a suicide?”
“No.” Abe swung gently in the fresher breeze from the open window. Quite a lot him had already leaked onto the floor, and was forming a black, slow-spreading pool around the chair which the flies seemed especially to love. They’d have to hurry up here, or he’d need to find somewhere to vomit. “But that’s what it’s supposed to look like.”
“You don’t say.”
No sign of a suicide note, fake or otherwise, but would this kind of guy really need an explanation as to why he’d killed himself? Clark doubted it. The cops, when someone finally got around to noticing the smell, would be happy to file a Death By Own Hand report and leave it at that. Wouldn’t ever get as far as being looked at by homicide, any more than had the death of April Lamotte.
Picking out a fly which had crawled into the edge of his mouth
, Clark closed the folder. Was it so surprising that Abe had chosen him when he was asked about finding a guy who was prepared to play at being someone else’s husband for a few hours? He supposed not. After all, who else was Abe likely to think of when he was looking for a tall guy with big ears, not too many scruples, a background in matrimonial affairs, and some experience of proper acting? He checked the diary again. There was nothing else beyond that previous Friday. After that, he reckoned, Abe Penn was probably dead. Otherwise, and for all this frustrations at trying to speak to Glory, he’d have tried to get in touch again.
Clark riffled through the desk drawers. Nothing much more, beyond some copies of a business card for Nero Investigations. There was some dried-up orange peel in the bin, and a sandwich with a bite mark which the flies, with so much of Abe to go at, had chosen to ignore. Also a copy of the LA Times for that same last Friday as the diary. Abe had made a less than successful stab at the crossword.
A crackling flash detonated in the room. Every fly on what was left of Abe’s body instantly took off, momentarily revealing an anatomy squirming with millions of fresh white maggots.
Barbara thumbed on the Graflex’s winder. She paused, and looked over at Clark.
“What?”
They was no one about as they left the place. Outside, the combined city reek of horse dung, gasoline fumes, hot tar and tamarisk had rarely smelled so good. Clark stood out front of the block for a moment, looking up. Abe’s office was on this side. You could see where the window had been left half open—and the lazy circle of a few flies as they went in and out. He walked over to the spot directly beneath. No proper paving here, just gravel and dog dirt. He pushed around at the gravel with his shoe, vaguely remembering how people said the sidewalks in this town were supposed to glitter in the sun like gold. Then he saw something flash. He stooped down and picked up the broken remains of a needle-tipped glass tube.
FORTY SIX
“WE GO TO THE POLICE?”
“’Course we don’t.”
“Another suicide—but there’s no Abraham Penn on here.” They were sitting back in the Delahaye, and Barbara had unfolded that faded guestlist for the premiere of Broken Looking Glass once again.
“I think Abe was just…” He shook his head. “What would the military call it? A civilian casualty.”
“The wrong person in the wrong place?”
“Exactly.”
Poor old Abe Penn. Not that he’d known him well—not that he reckoned anyone had. Just another sleazy guy in a too-tight suit, and not particularly fragrant even when he was alive. He remembered him mostly from a case where they’d been hired by opposite sides in a divorce, which had been no problem at all. They’d gone and got drunk on the fees after the case was finished, which was when Clark had probably given him his card. Since then, he’d heard that Abe had been mostly doing freelance employee reference and insurance investigations. Basic trudgework. Abe might have had a license, but he couldn’t do a Don’t you remember me from the talkies? turn to persuade the lady clients to hire him for messy matrimonials the way Clark could.
Now the guy had gone and got sucked into this business and killed, probably for no better reason than that April Lamotte had seen one of his adverts in the cheaper rags promising secrecy and discretion. Not that Clark reckoned that Abe had ever got as far as going up to see April Lamotte. That had been someone else—whoever had listened in on her calls on a link from the automatic exchange, then staged Abe’s suicide using whatever was in those syringes, and had driven up to Erewhon themselves pretending to be Abe, and then probably delivered that unpostmarked letter to the communal postbox at the Doge’s Apartments, most likely driving a Mercury sedan.
Once again, Clark had that itchy feeling of being followed, hunted. What puzzled him most by now was how he and Barbara had managed to get this far along Dan and April Lamotte’s tracks without being killed. That, and how all the others who’d been touched by this strange affair had also made it. Kisberg. That doctor woman—if she was still living. Lars Bechmeir, even. And, yes, Peg Entwistle. He remembered again the gaps he’d noticed in Erewhon’s viewing library. Those missing feelie reels. The Virgin Queen amongst them.
“Barbara, what else have you got in that bag of yours.”
“I told you, Clark. I’m just collecting stuff that’s relevant. It isn’t as if you’ve—”
“No. That isn’t what I mean. Have you got that receipt—the big-bucks one for the feelie studio dated earlier this year?
FORTY SEVEN
THE PREMISES OF FEEL-O-REEL INC. lay only a few blocks off and along Pacific Boulevard from Abe Penn’s. But they belonged to a different world.
With its wide lots and dazzling aluminum and steel buildings, the Nueva Vision Business Park looked as if it should house the sort of technologies which Daniel Lamotte had once written about in those pulp “Scientifiction” novels. In a way, it did. If not death rays, rocket fins, instant cures for cancer and meals that came in a tablet, it did at least play host to the manufacturers of the Precious Poochie range of canine clothing, the T C Coolo automatic ice crusher (You’ll Never Choke on Another Cube) and the SeaSlooosh! pool wave-machine. In this elevated company, the activities of the Feel-o-Reel Post Production studio seemed everyday.
Inside the rollback doors, men in white suits were pushing trolleys and tending machines that looked like hi-tech spinning wheels. One of the guys saw Clark and Barbara, and signaled emphatically, without removing his cotton mask, that they should wait right where they where. Another guy then emerged from a glass-walled office.
“Sorry, but we have to be very careful about contamination. Get the slightest bit of grit in the drawing or charging processes, and a whole reels gone to waste. Don’t think I caught your names… ?”
Pete Peters—his parents must have had some imaginations—was wearing an open-neck suit, expensively tailored to look casual in an oh-this-thing-I’ve-just-thrown-on sort of way. He had a relaxed manner and a dry, quick handshake.
“This is Barbara Eshel, and I’m, ah…” They’d agreed on a spiel outside, but Clark still had to think for a stupid moment before coming up with his own name. “… Clark Gable. We’re working for someone called Lamotte. Reason we’re here is, we’re private investigators, and—”
“Of course, of course! My only surprise is it’s taken you so long to get here. Are you working for their insurance company as well, or just for Mr Lamotte in a private capacity?” Peters beckoned them back toward his glass cubical. “Might as well come in…”
His office smelled of clean machine oil like the rest of the place. It was cramped, but expensively furnished in the modern way. Even though there was no outer window, the polished glare off everything made you want to put on sunglasses.
“Know much about what we do here?” Peters asked once he’d got them seated in hard little chairs.
“Well, er…” Barbara began.
“Thing is,” Peters leaned forward across the glasstop desk, “the big feelie companies all have their own stock production facilities, but a lot of the kit they have is at least five years old. And the staff…” He chuckled. “They’re a whole lot older. So what we offer is a faster turnaround and a better, more consistent finished product. A sharper field. A bigger kick for your feelie buck. Then we get used a lot by the independents. I can get our secretary to give you a leaflet. Then, of course, we do one-offs. But you know about that.”
“You mean,” Clark asked, “like the commission from Daniel Lamotte?”
“We do all kinds of stuff. It’s still not that usual for us to do work for a private individual, but a lot of companies are getting more and more interested in feelie technology. All sorts of people you’d never even think.”
“R H Macys? Howard Johnson’s? The Liberty League? The Nazis?”
“Exactly!” Peters nodded as eagerly as Timmy Townsend had.
“Although precisely who we do business for is commercially confidential…” He trailed off, and
looked a trifle disappointed when Clark and Barbara didn’t press him. “You really aren’t the police, are you, by the way? I need to be entirely clear on that. Otherwise, my lawyer’ll kill me.”
“No.” Clark said. “We’re not.”
“Absolutely,” Barbara agreed.
“Okay. Because, well, some of the stuff we’re asked to do gets at bit edgy, if you know what I mean…”
This Peters guy was interviewing himself, the way people sometimes did when they were confronted by a private dick. Again, they both nodded. Clark knew all about the sort of bad taste that went into modern stag feelies, and certainly didn’t want to hear about anything that got more “edgy” than that.
“So I guess,” Peters asked, “you want to know the details of the break in?”
Break in? “That sure would be helpful,” Clark agreed, wishing he’d brought along a notepad to help things along, then seeing Barbara fish inside her handbag and produce one.
“Just in your own words, Mr Peterson,” she said brightly, waving a pencil. “Might as well start at the very beginning.”
“Not that much to say really. Your client Mr Lamotte came in, oh… It was in the spring. March, I think…” He reached to flick through a big Rolodex. “Here it is, the 26th. He brought in the recordings he wanted cut and mixed and transcribed with him. Said it was a surprise birthday present for his wife.”
“Got a record of what the recordings were?” Barbara asked.
“We have to. Don’t you know that everything to do with using feelie technology is licensed?”
“Of course. Silly me. So… ?”
“Well here is it.” He unclipped a card from the Rolodex and handed it to her. “Although I guess your client could confirm as well…”
Clark and Barbara studied it. The neatly handwritten list on the card which contained an order number and Daniel Lamotte’s contact details corresponded pretty much with the missing reels Clark remembered in Erewhon’s viewing library. Basically, it was a list of all the feelies for which Daniel Lamotte had written the script. The Magic of the Past was there. So were Sometime Never, Prospector, Sunday Means Tonight, Freedom City and This Point Backwards as well. So, of course, was The Virgin Queen.
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