"I hear you." The complete anachronism of her vocal style and words—a mixture of Hippie slang and purple prose—was wearing on my nerves and ears. What the hell kind of kook was she?
The lambent lighting danced. She moved in the on-again, off-again fun house effect of it all. I hadn't touched so much as my tie yet.
"Take off your clothes," she whispered, close by. "I'm down to the buff already—"
"I'll bet. One hot little number."
"Don't be mean," she said, suddenly soft and feminine. "I will give you a performance that will astound you . . . physical dimensions have nothing at all to do with real love-making."
"You want to bet?" I cracked.
"I'm waiting. Don't make me impatient . . . I don't want to hurry . . . with you. I like you, fuzz. I really do . . . your mouth is so neat and sweet-looking. . . ."
Oh, Brother Crown, where art thou?
I restrained a shudder and started taking off my clothes. Shoes first, then jacket, then tie. I was unbuttoning my shirt and wondering how to crawl out or crawl in heroically when the lights suddenly went on again. I blinked, caught in the abrupt glare.
Truth Ruth spat out a curse that was ten words long and every one of them unprintable.
Nobody had come into the room but all of a sudden, we were in Macy's window. And she was naked and vulnerable.
The Sloppy Joe sweater and miniskirt had not lied. She was just a long anatomy outline with a flat chest, bony flanks and knobby knees. The long hair and gaunt face were still interesting but Truth Ruth had been short-changed in every other department. All the way. I would have needed an LSD trip to ever see her as a woman. The mottled marks on her wrists were enough evidence, too. She had left her last marijuana cigarette years ago.
"The bastards," she grated, her hands fumbling for the clothes on the floor where she had left them. "The dirty rotten ever-stinking bastards—"
"Who?"
She wasn't really listening to me.
"Fun and games. Oh, the bastards . . . they'll pay for this . . . and that damn Crown . . . why didn't he stop them?"
"You asking me?"
She rammed the Sloppy Joe down over her thin shoulders. She flung me a glare. "Fuzz baby, shut up. Let me think."
"Sure," I said. "Go ahead and think." I began to subtly slide into my own duds. Whatever had happened, I had got a reprieve from Truth Ruth's charms.
She growled something in her throat, grabbed her duelling pistol and headed for the door. I let her get about two yards away before I made my move. Like all real eccentrics, she didn't think or care much about other people's motives or plans. She had figured I was scared spitless and hadn't a bone left in my body.
I closed in on her from behind, planted a hand across her big, lipless mouth and pressed down. When she started to kick back in surprise, I used my other arm to lock her up tight. She could hardly make a wiggle without my snapping her like a stick. It was a strange sensation, wrestling with a dame built like an ironing board. But I managed it. The duelling pistol was a snap. I bent the wrist of the hand that held it until she had to let go. She kept on kicking and twisting as I dragged her to the door of the room. She was trying to bite my hand off and scream at the same time. Neither of which worked.
"Stop it," I whispered in the ear that was closest, "or you've ridden your last broomstick. I'm going to knock on the door for Brother Crown. Relax and I won't kill you."
She tried to kick me in the groin but I had her legs and feet scissored with my own. We swayed by the wall and I reached out with my .45 and tapped heavily on the door. Whatever the deal with the lights was, I was sure Crown hadn't left his post.
He hadn't.
He came slowly into the room. Easy and unaware until his dark eyes didn't see anybody. As he started to whirl, the grease gun coming up from an easy port position, I slammed the barrel of the .45 across his wide forehead. I got the impression he was smiling as he went down, heavily but I knew that wasn't right. Brother Crown had one of those faces that always look happy.
Truth Ruth suddenly bit into my hand. If I had doubted if she had teeth, I was past wondering. She dug right into the knuckles of my fingers. Her fangs were Dracula left-overs.
Hitting women is not one of my outstanding pursuits.
But there comes a time when you either lose a hand or skip the Emily Post routine. I belted her quick, with all I had, before she chewed off my forefinger. I laid the .45 right across her gaunt profile. She joined Brother Crown in slumber on the floor, sprawling right along his robed bulk. They looked sillier than a psychedelic pretzel.
I leaned back against the wall, ignoring the fires flaming in my damaged hand and tried to think. I felt like I was in the middle of some bad dream. I might wake up any second, getting ready to go on my date with Jean Martha. It had been a mad fandango since five o'clock that afternoon. Now, it was getting hard on eleven o'clock—twenty three hundred Army time—and I'd been slumming with maniacs all night. The Temple Kreshna-Rukka couldn't be for real. Nor could Truth Ruth or Brother Crown. And Louis La Rosa—I began to think about reinforcements somewhere in the building. Some idiot had turned on the lights, according to my skinny sex-partner. It couldn't have been Brother Crown. He had favoured Sex over Slaughter. Well, whatever, I had to get out of that damn room.
A room without furniture, a room without sense. A place where some mad Guru gathered the flock to burn incense or cut out paper dolls. Either way, I wanted Out. Crown and Truth Ruth could get married and raise a flock of Hippies for all I cared.
I started for the door. Fully dressed and in my right mind. The .45 was back in its harness bed. I was going to slip into the night like a ghost if I could.
Oh, yeah.
The merry-go-round took another turn. The screw slipped a thread lower. More marbles scattered across the floor of what was left of my brain.
There was a rumbling sound, like the pulsing beginning of a hidden dynamo. A throb and heavy purr of machinery. Well-oiled gears meshing and connecting. I jumped a little. I had to. The floor beneath my feet had begun to vibrate. Shake, slide and rattle and roll. It was moving.
I had wandered on to one of those TV shows where Our Hero is all set to get the Fu Manchu treatment. I flattened against the wall before I remembered the door and tried to get it open. It wouldn't budge. Crown's entry had locked it closed behind him and I didn't remember him using a key or anything.
And still the floor slid slowly, receding towards the wall where I stood. A dark, inexplicable nothing yawned beneath. I couldn't see a thing. I had to watch in some kind of horror as the vanishing floor let Brother Crown's bulky, robed figure drop into nothingess. Then Truth Ruths bag-of-bones plopped down into the darkness. The polished floor shot towards my toes, leaving me about seven inches of terra firma. I couldn't hear the bodies of Crown and the lady land anyplace. It had to be a long, long way down.
I couldn't scream. Men don't.
I couldn't panic. But men do.
The hidden mechanism whirred, purred and throbbed. The wall left my fingertips. I had been trying to find something to hang on to. But there was nothing. The cell-like room with its glare of electricity and naked nothingness was something I would always remember. Maybe, the last thing I would remember.
And then the floor was gone. Meeting the wall, sliding out of sight, leaving nothing but a bottomless room behind it. It was silly but I braced myself, storing up what was left of my reflexes and interior nerves. But what do you do when they pull the floor out from under your feet?
What can you do?
Nothing.
When it's your turn to fall, you fall.
I dropped like a rock into a deep, dark well.
The darkness rushed up to meet me. Shadows racing, light going, sanity cutting out.
Spikes, I thought—
Jesus Christ, I hope there aren't spikes!
Chapter Five
UPTIGHT WITH FANTASY
□ The space beneath the floor joined sides somewh
ere in the darkness and merged into a smooth chute. It was shaped like a wide cone converging towards a central exit that had to accommodate old clothes, grubby shoes and what-not. The sides of the chute were tinny, slippery and waxed. Like a slide in a Fun House or those cockeyed treadmills that plummet you wherever they want you to go. I didn't even have a second to make up my mind or try to check my fall. I rocketed like a bag of dirty laundry towards darkness and infinity. There was no sign of Brother Tod Crown or Sister Truth Ruth.
It took maybe two seconds, maybe three.
I came down into a world of Science-Fiction flatness and opaqueness. The dark world lay above me. The room had vanished. The floor could be heard grinding slowly back into position. In a flash of time and skyrocketing personal sensations, I felt my shoes smack solidly against a floor surface. And then light came with it. Blinding, glaring illumination that I couldn't take apart while I pawed around on the floor on all fours like a clumsy bear looking for anthills.
All I could think of and be grateful for was that I hadn't been dropped on a bed of spikes or some such Oriental contrivance to entertain intruders in the Temple Kreshna-Rukka. I guessed that my being with Crown and the woman made all the difference in the world. Whatever that difference was.
For the second time that night I struggled erect, muscles all aching and racked with pain. I felt like Old Man River all the way and the only rolling I wanted to do now was right into a feather bed. I was beat. And hungry. And confused. And lost among the savages. I hadn't thought about flower people or hippies much beyond a blanket condemnation, dismissing them all as a bunch of flops and whinolas, but this sudden mass organizational set-up I had dropped into had set all my senses humming. You have to take anything seriously when it has this much money and organization.
This was a side of the teen-age generation I had never known. If the explosion at the Grass Gardens wasn't enough.
These and other such amusing notions swept through my mind as I got to my feet, batting my eyes against the new glare. I still seemed to smell sandalwood in the air.
The tableau before me suddenly focused and levelled out like a distorted camera image abruptly making sense and a clear picture.
It was an evening of Disneyland and Mad Comics. And Boris Karloff and the kitchen sink.
Only all of those items made more sense than this did.
I was out somewhere on the sidewalk of the city. The lights that blinded me were street lamps, the neon fronts of stores, shops and restaurants. I could see the faces of diners and loiterers across the narrow thoroughfare. I blinked. It was like waking up in a strange city. I felt like Aladdin or Rip Van Winkle. A little bit of both. I had been suddenly plunged into the midst of humanity after a long, dark slide into nothing. I fought to get my bearings, something familiar about the block fighting to reach my conscious level. Nobody seemed to notice me or pay any attention to the fact that I had shot into view like a cork from a champagne bottle.
I turned slowly. A stone wall stared back at me. Brick, brownstone. I probed with my fingers. I could find no exit hatch or wall compartment that could have deposited me where I was standing. Yet, there had to be one. I stepped back, scanning the building. It was a five storey brownstone building. An apartment house. I looked for the number on the front door and couldn't find it. The night sky was starless. There was no moon. Only the glare of neons and the sounds of life across the street in those restaurants and shops and stores. Now, I could see they were coffee shops and Bohemian-type bars. My brain began to pick up details. The long, shoulder-length hair of some of the men in those shops. The butch-haircut women. The odd costumes of jeans, miniskirts and sloppy sweaters.
It had stopped raining and it was freezing cold, now.
And I was in—
The Village.
I was on a mad binge somewhere in Greenwich Village. Land of the Homo, Court of the Queen, meeting place of Bohemia and I-don't-want-to-be-a-nine-to-five jerk-like-you. Artists, writers, poets, rebels and losers settled down among a hard core of professional working people. The Village that had been and now never-was. I got my bearings, recognizing a side street that was just off Sixth Avenue. Maybe Minetta Lane or Mac Dougal or John Street. They all look the same after awhile and you can only pick a specific block if you know the name of a bar or a favourite eating place.
There wasn't anything I could do about the Temple Kreshna-Rukka which had to be buried somewhere in the brownstone at my back. But it had to be some extraordinary kind of complex to afford a Fu Manchu room with a disappearing floor that had a laundry chute escape hatch. And where had Tod Crown and Truth Ruth been deposited? On the sidewalk like me? I didn't think so. Maybe the chute had a couple of doors, like The Lady or The Tiger?
It was a nutcracker, all right. I couldn't stand around feeling foolish. It was a cab and home for me. Central Park West. I had to get the kinks out and do some thinking. Tomorrow morning I could call Captain Mike Monks of Homicide and ask his advice. If a raid was in order, we could do that too. Right now, it didn't mean a thing to anyone whether or not some hippie cult had tried to kill me and some guru named Louis La Rosa was missing. Who the hell would care?
I began to understand a little bit why Memo Morgan had cut out when Brother Crown had asked his famous question. Morgan must have known where the body was buried.
I still had my wallet, gun and enough sense to start walking. I cut across the street and headed for the long string of lights that dotted Sixth Avenue where it curves around the western side of the Village. There would be cabs there. And a little more sanity. You meet a harder-working class of people there too.
Older and wiser and less tempted to dive into that curious pool called Non-Conformity, which by its very isolation of definition makes more conformers than the Beatles have hit records.
My wrist watch was nosing towards twelve when I was about fifty feet short of the Avenue. I didn't see the alley between a coffee shop and a shuttered photographer's studio until I was abreast of the garbage pails. Then it was too late.
The three young kids seeming to idle there had been waiting for me. There was no mistake about that. They stepped out of the alley in apple-pie order and did a football backfield split that put all three of them in front of me. Blocking the sidewalk, just far enough from the doors of the coffee shop. Just far enough from any help of any kind.
I stopped in my tracks and looked at them.
They looked at me.
They could have been triplets. Three tall, rather gangling kids. Loose-armed, sweatered, jeaned, lank-haired. All three had matching turtlenecks, smirking eyes and switchblade knives. The knives weren't trained on me. Just held to let me know they were there. The kids couldn't have been older than eighteen and could have been younger. It's that kind of a generation, too.
"Fuzz," one of them said softly, "do you believe in the power of love?"
"Do you like to spread the power, man?" another one asked.
The last one giggled. "If you do, fuzz, you were way out trying to make it with Truth Ruth. Joe Violets don't like that. Do you, Joe?"
"You insulted Truth Ruth," the first boy said. His knife came up. "For that, you get carved. You'll look like Thanksgiving turkey when we get done with you."
I held my ground, not making the mistake of taking my eyes off them. If I'd had any foolish notions that all of this was unrelated to the nonsense at Temple Kreshna-Rukka, they were gone with the wind. The boy who must have been Joe Violets was looking at me with less than approval and something more than hate.
"You got time for a prayer, fuzz. If you're Catholic, recite a Hail Mary. If you're something else, tell me what that is before you start. No tricks, fuzz."
"Say something," one of the other two said almost pleadingly. "Or are you damn scared or something? Come on. Move, man!"
"Somebody's coming, Joe," the third one warned. "Let's do it now. We got the word, didn't we?"
Joe Violets' nod was hardly noticeable. But they saw it and I saw it. They we
re all good, fast tough punks but I'd been in the manhunt racket too long to be taken by three kids who could have been my sons.
They moved in on me. Tight, up close. Joe Violets' eyes had an almost religious look in them. Him and his Hail Mary.
I kicked him right in the groin. Not used to his targets fighting back, his face crumpled in agony. He went down, clutching his middle, dropping the knife and pawed feverishly at his crotch. I wasn't feeling very Christian or charitable at all. The unseen Temple had worked its spell.
His two partners cried out and made the double mistake of rushing me. When the opposition does that and you're keeping what's left of your thinking, they are like babies asking to be paddled. I had my .45 out and snaking.
The barrel caught one kid flush on the nose and blood spouted. He wailed in pain and fear and tried to lash out with his knife. I got him, snapped his wrist back far enough to let him make a choice and he took it The knife clattered on the sidewalk. Whoever had been coming on to the scene, had suddenly decided to take another route to Sixth Avenue. I heard footfalls running away.
The third kid, seeing Joe Violets close to the vomiting stage right on the sidewalk, held his ground and tried to circle me warily. I pointed the gun at him and cocked it. Noisily and slow, its click of life and immense bore made his eyes pop with fright. Before I could say anything, or had to, he turned tail and ran. I let him go, his lank hair flopping in the breeze.
The kid with the bloody nose and severely strained knife hand staggered after him. Suddenly the night air was bursting with noises. Running feet, people yelling from windows across the way. And Joe Violets' muttering, groaning voice. He sounded pitiful. The bravado and swagger had vanished with one kick in the groin zone.
The Flower-Covered Corpse Page 4