by Mel Gilden
As I pulled away, he let go of me. I snapped my fingers and said, 'It's in my other pants. Come on, Bill. We'll go get it.'
'Sure, Boss,' Bill said and reached up to shake hands with the cart.
'Thank you, sir,' the cart said.
The carousel began to turn again as I rushed out of there, looking for a pay phone. I found one, dropped a quarter into it, and dialled a number.
'Ot's Pots,' a voice on the other end said. It was the cheery voice of an old man.
'Mr Ot, please,' I said.
'Speaking.'
'Mr Ot, this is Mr Cart at Sandwich Airlines. We found your luggage.'
'That's nice of you, young man, but somebody already called about that. I told him we'd be down tomorrow, when our clerk will be in.'
'Just double checking, Mr Ot. Oh, and by the way, have you had anything stolen lately? Something you brought back from Hawaii?'
'I sure did.' Suddenly suspicious, he said, 'Say, who is this, anyway?'
'Just a guy who wishes you nothing but good luck. It was a blowfish spine necklace, wasn't it?'
At the other end there was a raspy, old man's breathing. Mr Ot said, 'You know a lot for just some guy.'
'You wouldn't happen to remember who gave it to you, would you?'
'I don't know you,' Mr Ot said. 'I don't know anything about you.' He hung up the phone. I listened to emptiness and stared at the keypad because it was what was in front of me. I hung up the receiver, but otherwise, I didn't move.
In Hawaii, Mr Ot had been given a slaberingeo spine necklace because somebody wanted it transported back to LA, never mind why. If he thought about it at all, Mr Ot probably thought it was one of Harry's authentic reproductions of a blowfish spine necklace. It wasn't that plane that had bad luck. It was Mr Ot and his necklace. That's why he'd lost his luggage.
Now the luggage was back. That meant he no longer had the spine necklace and the bad luck that went with it. If he hadn't thrown it away or lost it, it had to have been stolen, probably by the person who'd given it to him in the first place, or an agent of that person. If I didn't find that person soon, Pele would destroy Los Angeles with impossible volcanoes, and Captain Hook might never again have a chance to be his normal, nasty self.
Following the signs, I got out of the airport and headed up Sepulveda. According to Bill, there was no easy way to get to Malibu from the airport, but taking La Tijera to La Cienega would help.
At the corner of Sepulveda and La Tijera, a ratty-looking guy was roaming the centre divider with a pineapple in each hand. More were piled against the stoplight pole. When I stopped for the light, he rapped on my window with his knuckles, and I rolled it down. He handed me a pineapple, and before I could ask him what was going on, the light changed and the guy behind me honked. I handed the pineapple to Bill, and turned right onto La Tijera. 'Usually those guys sell oranges,' Bill said. 'Yeah,' I said. 'And most of them don't look like Lono.' I swung the car along a side street and came out on Sepulveda again. When I got up to the corner, nobody was there but a tall, handsome black guy selling roses. I honked, and he ran through traffic out to my car. While giving him a buck and randomly choosing a pink rosebud, I said, 'Where'd the Hawaiian guy go?'
'What Hawaiian guy?' 'He was on this corner selling pineapples.' 'I'm here for three hours, Holmes, and I don't see him.' The light changed and I drove up La Tijera again, feeling something crawling across the back of my neck, Bill still held the pineapple in his hands. I said, 'I think this pineapple has our name on it.'
Chapter 25
The Show In The Oahu Room
BILL was right. Getting to Malibu was a matter of a lot of backing and forthing, but the sun had not yet set when I pulled into the garage and shut the door. In the living room, Captain Hook, the Great Hookini, was sawing Flopsie (or was it Mopsie?) in half. The rest of the surfers watched closely, and occasionally let loose a bubble of nervous laughter.
Whipper Will and Bingo followed Bill and me into the kitchen, where I handed Bingo the rosebud. She took it, smiling as if she were about to cry, and sniffed it as if breathing too hard would break it. She punched Will gently in the arm and said, 'You don't bring me flowers.'
'He will now,' I said.
Will turned his gaze to me and held it there. I smiled. He smiled back and said. 'This part of the case?'
'I guess so. Buying it bought me some information.'
'Anything to get cranked about?'
'Not yet,' I had Bill set the pineapple down on the table and said, 'I think this is a clue.'
'Gnarly,' Will said.
The pineapple sat there, not much less mysterious than the Sphinx. I hefted it, and turned it over in my hands. It was just a pineapple.
'Nobody gives away pineapples for no reason,' Bingo said.
'Yeah,' I said. 'I had the same clever thought.'
We could look at the pineapple for the rest of the day. It could decay before our eyes. We still wouldn't know anything. I found a big knife in one of the drawers and laid the pineapple on its side. Juice spurted as I carefully sliced the pineapple into wheels. I sliced it again, and again. Up toward the middle, I hit something hard—two flat wooden disks.
I carefully worked the point of the knife between the pineapple pulp and the discs, and finally dug out a small wooden statue of a guy with very big eyes and a tongue down to his belly button—a tiki. The wooden disks turned out to be the bottoms of his feet. Shoved into a space between an arm and one side was a small roll of paper.
'How'd that get in there?' Bill said.
'The science of any sufficiently advanced race?' Bingo said.
'Could be,' Will said. 'It looks enough like magic.'
I grunted and put down the knife in the puddle of pineapple juice that had spread on the table. Not surprisingly, the paper I pulled from under the tiki's arm was damp and sticky. I unrolled it and found a message handwritten in fancy script:
Zoot Marlowe:
Be in Kilroy's Oahu Room tonight at 7:30 for more information about our missing property. Ignore this order at your peril.
Pele & Lono
Will blew a long low whistle. I'd have done it myself if my nose hadn't been in the way. My hand was shaking. I rested it on the table to make it stop.
I didn't mind the Yewpitzkitziten stealing trucks and using portable volcanoes and quick-growing thorn bushes. It bothered me only marginally that they had threatened to destroy Los Angeles with some prehistoric fireworks, and could evidently make good their threat. But the insult was now personal. They'd somehow gotten a message inside an undefiled pineapple—maybe they grew it that way—and had known where to deliver it. All to invite me by name to a private party.
I wondered how many other guys in the city were sitting at a kitchen table full of pineapple juice and thinking dark thoughts. Polite applause came from the other room.
Bingo said, 'Pretty cool. Are you going?'
I said, 'If I don't, it seems an awful waste of a good pineapple.'
I left Bill home. Call me sentimental, but I had started to think of him as alive, and I didn't want him to get hurt, if there was to be any hurting done that night. Besides, I didn't need him. I knew where Kilroy's was.
When I drove into Kilroy's parking lot, I was stopped by a kid wearing a short red jacket so tight it pulled at its buttons, a matching bow tie attached with an elastic strap, and a perpetual leer. When I stopped, he leaned in and said, 'Private party tonight, bub.'
'It must be nice to be so tough on a cold night like this.'
He smiled, which didn't improve his leer, and he said, 'You'll do, bub. Got any ID?'
I showed him the tiki. He nodded once and said, 'Good luck finding a parking space, bub. We're busy tonight.' He waved me through.
He was right about the lot. It was full. I had to park halfway up a dark alley and walk back. I rounded a corner of the restaurant, and as I walked through a patch of black, I heard a mote of gravel moving behind me. I had it in mind to turn around, but befor
e I could, someone had slipped a cord around my neck, and was trying to take my head off as if it were a slice of cheese.
I squeezed my fingers between the cord and my neck, and we tussled for a bit, breathing hard and grunting, but neither of us in the mood to talk. I was about to sag into his arms, hoping to put him off his guard, when suddenly the cord began to stretch like a string of well-chewed bubble gum. I broke through the cord, and turned just in time to see somebody dressed all in black run around the fateful corner. I ran after him, but he was gone. I didn't even hear footsteps. He could have been three feet away from me, standing still as death in a shadow, and I never would have seen him.
'Anything wrong?' said a strong, manicured voice at my elbow.
I glanced to my left, and for a moment thought this was the guy I was looking for. He wore a long black cloak, and an enormous slouch hat that shaded his eyes. His lips were red, and his small teeth glistened like that of a wild animal. He evidently moved like one too. But he was too tall for my man. And I would have remembered the get-up, as dark as it was. I said, 'I thought I heard something.'
'Someone tried to kill you just now, didn't they?' 'Sure. That's why I come here. For the excitement.' His laugh was low, throaty, and more than a little nasty. 'The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. I fear we will harvest some of it this evening.' He walked quickly toward the front entrance. His black clothes made him seem to be in shadow, even when he walked through pools of light. I followed closely, but when I got inside the door, he was gone. His nasty laugh rolled through the dim hallway like the last fragments of a bad dream.
Puffy Tootsweet stood behind the display case, idly shuffling menus. Nothing was flying through the air. Nothing was singing. Somebody was putting on a show in the Oahu Room, and they didn't want anybody to be distracted.
When she saw me, Puffy said, 'I thought I might be seeing you tonight. Every other shamus in town is here. And some from out of town too. The Oahu Room's upstairs.'
I nodded, and said, 'Anybody just go by here?'
'I didn't see anybody.'
'That's not what I asked you.'
Puffy shrugged her big shoulders. 'I felt a wind. You tell me if somebody went by.'
'I guess he can cloud women's minds too.'
'As long as he pays his bar bill,' Puffy said, and laughed.
I found a stairway hung with old fishnetting, and went up it to a big room that had not been decorated quite so aggressively as the restaurant and the bar downstairs. Subdued light escaped from behind man-sized tikis in the corners. Here and there, glowing coloured balls dangled from the ceiling in nets. Each of the round tables had its own little flame in a red glass jar. At one end of the room, a bar seemingly made of yellow wooden poles was doing a brisk business. A low, carpeted stage was pushed against one wall. I did not see my overly dramatic friend from downstairs, but he was probably skulking there somewhere. He wouldn't be able to help it.
The room was crowded with people who had nothing in common but a foxy look around the eyes. Evidently the desire to be a detective was a disease that was no respecter of sex, age or money.
There was a big guy in a wheel chair speaking with a guy who could have been his twin brother. Nearby, a guy wearing shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, a baseball cap, and a number of tanned muscles was showing an ancient lady wearing tweeds to a chair next to a greasy-looking guy who had on a suit a size and a half too small, but was growing a very large and imposing moustache. The greasy guy immediately began to talk and wave his hands at the tweedy woman, while she smiled politely and began to work on the knitting she pulled from an enormous bag.
At another table, an Oriental gentleman dressed in a white suit sat lightly tapping together his steepled fingers while he watched everything. He was smiling gently through moustaches no thicker than spaghetti that dripped along his upper lip and down either side of his mouth.
At the bar, a nicely barbered man and a woman in evening clothes made comments to each other while they smoked and drank. At their feet was a small, short-haired dog looking very bored, but who perked up enough to yap at the ankles of a wiry guy, also in evening clothes, who had half a pair of glasses screwed into one eye, and slicked-back blond hair. He seemed to know the two with the dog.
I began to sidle over to two guys standing in the corner. They were as tweedy as the old lady, but seemed to be dressed for some other time or place. One of them was thin and clean-shaven, and puffed on an enormous pipe. The other one had explosions of hair down the sides of his face.
The one with the pipe shot a look at me. But it wasn't just a look. It was a stare, an analytical examination that could see inside me, that knew everything about me. It sucked at me like that for a few seconds, catalogued me, filed me, and put me away. The man favoured me with a tiny nod. He knew. I didn't know what he knew, but he knew. I was glad when the eyes went back to other business. I stopped my sidling, and studied the room again.
In the far corner, near the bar, but not so near as to be contaminated by the woman and two men in evening clothes, was a line of tall, rangy gentlemen wearing the uniform: trenchcoat, fedora, honest, world-weary expression. Each of them occasionally sipped something brown from a short, wide glass. They did not talk to each other. Each of them could have been alone in a hard-boiled universe with his hard-boiled thoughts. I sauntered across the room in their direction.
I passed a table where a middle-aged woman with short blonde hair and a perky manner said to a dark man in a very nicely tailored suit, 'I certainly admire your calm, sir. Back in Cabot Cove, if we'd been threatened with volcanoes, the exodus would have already started.'
The dark man touched the knot of his tie and shrugged with one shoulder. When he spoke it was with a reedy English accent, and with his hands in motion. He said, 'Ah, well, you must understand the psychology of the average Angeleno. They are used to earthquakes, you know. A volcano must be a nice change because you can actually see the lava coming. "I love LA," and all that.' He punctuated his patter with a smile which did nothing to increase its sincerity.
As I approached the line of guys in trenchcoats, my hearts began to beat faster. I had never met a real gumshoe before, and I didn't know how I would stack up. Was the hat OK? Was the trenchcoat properly worn? Was the patter clever enough? I walked up to a guy at random. The guy smiled a little when he saw me, but it was not a pretty thing. 'Marlowe?' I said.
'Nix,' he said. 'Spade.'
'Seen the black bird lately,' I said.
'What black bird?'
'You'll find out.'
I moved down the line to a guy who'd been watching us. He said. 'My name's not Marlowe either. It's Archer.'
'Miles?' I said.
'Lew.'
There were a few more guys I could have tried, but before I had a chance, something happened on the little stage. Grass thrust up through the pile of the pale carpeting and grew almost to the ceiling before a cloud of hot, sulphurous smoke exploded next to it and made it wither into limp brown threads, revealing Lono wearing his tuxedo. Next to him, unbothered by the heat and evil-smelling smoke, stood Pele, in her white gown looking like a dream of all things forbidden and wonderful.
They didn't have to ask for everybody's attention. They had it, and they used it, Pele said. 'We are impatient. The broadcast was a mistake. The one we seek would not respond to threats. Now we try something else.' She turned her head, seemingly meeting each pair of eyes in the room. She wasn't as good as the guy smoking the pipe, but she was good enough. She went on, 'You are all detectives. Some of you are professionals. Some of you are talented amateurs. You are all famous, your exploits told in song and story. We want you to find what is missing. The successful one will be well rewarded.'
The man with the pipe-smoking gentleman stepped forward and said, 'Excuse me, madam, but perhaps you'd be good enough to reveal what you wish us to find.'
'Jolly good, Watson,' said the man with the pipe and patted him on the shoulder.
Lono said, 'We search
for something that looks like a blowfish spine, but is not. It floats in the air.'
The blond man at the bar said, 'Did'ya say a blowfish spine that floats in the air?' He pulled the glass thing from his eye and blinked at them.
Momentary fire flared up around Pele. Angrily, she said, 'You are a fool. It looks like this spine of yours, but it is not.'
Near me, a short guy in a very dirty and rumpled trenchcoat waved one hand, writing something in the air with cigar smoke. With the embarrassment of a slow kid who knew he was slow he said, 'Excuse me, miss, but if it wouldn't be too much trouble, if it isn't a blowfish spine, what exactly is it?' His voice had the charm of a gate with a rusty hinge.
Pele raised her chin a little and narrowed her eyes. Lono opened his mouth, but whatever he had intended to say was interrupted by a shrill whistle. Somebody yelled, 'Raid!' and suddenly, the room was full of policemen.
Chapter 26
A Night Too Full Of Policemen
THE maniac who owned the whistle kept blowing it while policemen streamed into the room like a dark blue fluid, waving guns around and ordering us to keep calm. I was calm. As far as I could tell, everybody else in the room also had seen a policeman before. The only one who wasn't calm was the guy with the whistle. Pele and Lono didn't stay around to find out what was going on. In a hot flash and a cool green burst, they were gone.
Cliffy and Robinson strode into the room as if they were taking an enemy position. Cliffy looked around, disgusted for no particular reason by what he saw. He slapped Robinson in the chest with the back of his hand, and Robinson stopped whistling. The air still rang. Hustling up behind them was Puffy Tootsweet, angry enough to fry butter on her scalp. She grabbed Cliffy by the arm, spun him around and said, 'What's this raid shit?'
'Hands off, grandma. We're the police. This is a raid. Is that simple enough for you?'
'There's nothing illegal going on here.'