Always Leave ’Em Dying (2 page)

It was, though, as Mrs. Gifford told me when I casually asked. I picked up the portrait and looked at it. The big eyes were dark, long-lashed, and she had boyishly short dark hair. Her front teeth were slightly crooked, but it didn't hurt her nice smile. She wore no makeup.

Mrs. Gifford closed a drawer behind me. "Here it is," she said. "Nothing on it."

I turned around and she handed me the pad. The top sheet was blank, but by holding the tablet so that light struck its surface at a shallow angle I could make out the indentations of three words, beneath which the paper was covered with marks of doodling, swirls, and circles.

I said, "Looks like she wrote down, 'Dixon—Birch and Ivy,' then tore off the top sheet. That mean anything to you?"

She shook her head, chins swaying, then frowned. "Oh, Birch and Ivy. That's an intersection a little ways from here. A block up"—she pointed—"and three down."

Mrs. Gifford looked over Felicity's belongings at my request. The girl had apparently taken nothing with her except her purse and the clothes she'd been wearing Friday night: white blouse, gray sweater and skirt, low-heeled black shoes.

Mrs. Gifford said. "You want anything else in here?"

"I'd like to look around a little more, if it's OK."

"You go ahead, Mr. Scott." She nodded, went back into the front room.

I spent another ten minutes snooping, and it was oddly embarrassing to look at Felicity's intimate belongings, books and trinkets, souvenirs. But I wanted to know as much about her as I could. L.A. is big, and a little gal could easily lose herself in it. I wanted to know as much as possible about the way she lived.

The few things I'd learned about Mrs. Gifford had told me quite a bit about what her daughter might be like; the neat, clean room told me a little more. The clothing was all drab, mostly dark blues and grays; there was one pair of brown low-heeled shoes and a brown cloth coat. The only bright colors I found were two hair ribbons, one yellow, one red. There were four school textbooks, a Bible, a well-thumbed volume of hymns, and six movie magazines. I found an almost full bottle of bright-red nail polish, but it was in a peculiar place, in the dresser's bottom drawer under some handkerchiefs. After I'd thumbed through the few snapshots I found, Felicity by herself or with other young girls plus a couple of snaps of other girls alone, I went back into the front room.

Seated alongside Mrs. Gifford again, in front of the TV set, I asked, "Is there any chance Felicity might simply have stayed at a girlfriend's house?"

"She wouldn't of done that."

"Was there any indication that she might have been planning something like this? Could she have been thinking of running away? To friends out of town, anything?"

"Why would she run away?"

For a couple of seconds I felt like giving this gal a straight answer to that question, but I let it pass and said, "She seem happy, normal? Health good?"

Mrs. Gifford thought about it. "Oh, she seemed a little nervous-like lately. Skittery. And she wasn't feeling none too well, sickly most of the time, upset stomach." Stumick, she said.

"How long had she been like that?"

"Oh, two or three months, I guess. It's hard to say, exactly, I've been feeling so poorly myself."

"Uh-huh. Had she been to a doctor?"

"No. It wasn't nothing serious, just part of growing up."

"I see." I reached for cigarettes, then changed my mind. There weren't any ashtrays in the house, and it seemed a safe bet that Mrs. Gifford didn't smoke. "Just a thought," I said, "but is there any chance that Felicity was pregnant?" I barely got the last word out.

"What a terrible thing to say!" Mrs. Gifford gasped. Her eyes got wide and her mouth got small, and through almost closed lips she said, angrily, "Why, that's impossible. Felicity don't know the first thing about . . . about sex. You shouldn't even suggest—"

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to be offensive, but I've got to ask any questions that might conceivably be important. Felicity's illness, and her—"

"Now, that's enough! She's not that kind of a girl at all. I've taken good care of her."

"Sure, Mrs. Gifford. Sorry I mentioned it. I get used to all sorts of angles in my job, and I thought maybe—"

"She's a good girl, Mr. Scott. Why, she's a Trammelite."

"She's a what?"

"A Trammelite. She goes and listens to Mr. Trammel 'most every night."

Those words rang a bell; a rather cracked bell, at that. And I didn't like the sound of it. Trammelites were devotees of Trammelism, a crackpot cult built on the mouthings of one Arthur Trammel. I knew quite a bit about Trammel, had met him, and I figured if he kept on the way he was going, he might eventually succeed in disorganizing as many minds as organized religion. Most of his followers were oddballs to begin with, and after listening to him a while, they usually wound up as warped as Trammel. If Felicity were mixed up with that bunch, I wanted to know all about it.

"Your daughter spent a lot of time at Trammelite meetings?"

"Oh, yes. She even sung in the choral group Mr. Trammel has. Only twenty of them, and she's one. They sing beautiful."

"You've heard them yourself at meetings, huh?"

"Many a time. I've gone there many a time just to hear him. Mr. Trammel is a wonderful man, isn't he?"

A wonderful man, I thought, who'll put clothes on fish the first chance he gets. "I was thinking," I said, "that some of the Trammelites might be able to help us. It's possible one of them might know something about where Felicity could be, since she spent so much time at meetings."

Mainly I was poking around for more information, but Mrs. Gifford nodded her head. "I never thought of that. But, you know, that's true. If anybody would know, it would be them. Almost all her friends and people she knows, they're Trammelites, too, the best people. And Mr. Trammel—" She stopped.

"Yes?" I tried to smile pleasantly. "Mr. Trammel?"

She nibbled on her lip, then lowered her voice. "He knows things . . . things ordinary people don't."

"He does?" I waited for more, but that was all she cared to say. I didn't like a bit of it, either. It looked as though, if I started talking to people Felicity knew, trying to hunt her down, I'd run into little but Trammelites. That could make this a tougher job than it should have been. If I banged up against a flock of Trammel's peculiar followers, anything might happen; it was even possible that their leader himself might have a stroke. I lit a cigarette, and the hell with Mrs. Gifford, while I thought a while about what this might have to do with Felicity and my search for her.

In and around L.A., there are more crackpots per square mile than in any other place you can name. We've got literally hundreds of cults—everything from John Believer's World Security Party, with its devilishly clever slogan, "Everybody Is Something," to Zoomites, complete with Head Zoom—and of all the cults, Arthur Trammel's is the biggest, best known, and most profitable. He'd been in operation only about two years, but in that short time his followers had grown from a handful to tentfuls—partly because he'd gathered around him half a dozen sharp characters who helped him run the operation and who, with Trammel, were called the Guardians, but mainly because he was such a smooth-voiced, brainy con man.

I hated Arthur Trammel. I hated his ugly face, his ugly mind, and practically everything he stood for or against or even near. He was a self-appointed and self-satisfied censor who could dream up more sins to stamp out than you could shake a naughty finger at. You know the type, one of those joyless sonsofbitches who'll make you do what they think is good for you if it kills you. I'd known enough about the guy to hate him even before I'd met him, but meeting him was the clincher.

A few months back he'd come to my office and tried to hire me. He wanted me to find a library; the Guardians' entire collection of pornography had been stolen. Trammel told me the library was maintained only as, in his own words, "a standard with which current filth in bookstores and on newsstands" could be compared. Which explained, he said, why they wanted it back; their standard was gone. Also, he told me solemnly, there was a danger that the books might fall into the wrong hands.

I laughed till I damn near slid off my chair, then told Trammel I wouldn't look for his library, wouldn't throw him a cork if he were sinking in a sewer, and that I hoped he fell down the stairs when he left my office, which he was about to do, and which he did. I hadn't seen him since. I didn't really want to.

But I said to Mrs. Gifford, "I might want to talk with Mr. Trammel. Can you think of anything else that might help me?" There was a long ash on my cigarette, so I flipped it into my coat pocket.

Mrs. Gifford gave me a couple of snapshots of her daughter and made a list for me including names of Felicity's girlfriends, her school address, and her teachers. It was a long list; maybe Felicity's friends were all girls, but she had a lot of them.

Almost as an afterthought, I told Mrs. Gifford my usual fee for a day's work, and she nearly sprang off the couch. There is no point in describing what followed, but I got the impression this flabby bag had expected to hire me for a nickel a day, or else assumed—logically enough, after twenty years of it—that the government would pay for everything out of taxes. One of the more coherent things she cried was "I got nothing but the alimony," after which we settled my fee. She could pay me "a hundred dollars at the uppermost," and I told her that was dandy, and left. By that time, all I wanted was to get out of there.

My black Caddy convertible was parked at the curb, gleaming. It purred softly as I drove away. The sky was still blue, the air fresh and clear, and it was another lousy day.

 

Chapter Three

An hour later I was in my office in downtown L.A. and had most of my lines out. I'd checked with Missing Persons, hospitals, bus and train stations, made a lot of phone calls. I'd phoned most of the people whose names Mrs. Gifford had listed for me, and learned quite a bit more about Felicity—but without getting even a hint of what might have happened to her, where she might be, or why she was missing.

Before that hour was up I had a couple of other guys working on the case for me—which bright idea was probably going to cost me at least the hundred bucks I was supposed to get for this job. It didn't make good sense, not only because that's no way to run a business, but because I hadn't even met Felicity. I was getting worried about the little gal, though.

Maybe the difference this time was Mrs. Gifford herself; maybe it was seeing that portrait of Felicity when I'd expected someone quite different. But I think mainly it was the way people spoke of her. Everybody I'd talked to on the phone obviously liked her; not one had anything bad to say about her, and most expressed quick concern at the thought that something might have happened to her.

Some of their remarks had made my mental image of Felicity more vivid, too, and I could almost imagine her rapid walk, her soft, quiet voice in conversation. I knew that she always had a scrubbed-clean look, was even-tempered and quick to smile, bit her nails, sang almost nightly in the Trammelite choir. She was brainy, too, up at the top of her class, according to a teacher I'd talked to. I'd got an overall impression of a sweet, quiet little gal, somewhat shy, keeping pretty much to herself except for her activity in the Trammelite group, which seemed to be her one big interest. I couldn't help wondering what kind of girl she must be that so many people would, without a single exception, speak so well of her.

There were a few people on Mrs. Gifford's list whom I hadn't called. I wanted to talk to some of Felicity's friends in person, so I locked the office and took off. The next hour or so, unfortunately, taught me more about Trammelites and their leader than about Felicity.

In the various L.A. cults, I'd seen practically every type of humanity imaginable, and some of them even looked normal, but there was almost always something unhinged somewhere, or they wouldn't have been cultists. Practically none of the groups I'd been up against before was like any other, but they'd all had one thing in common: They were all against sin, and none of them could define it. Naturally, they had their own sect's definition and, naturally, it disagreed with everybody else's. Most of them could beat their wives on Friday, make love to the chickens on Saturday, but be right up front on Sunday, singing "Open the Gates and Let Me In."

The Trammelites weren't an exception. I had guessed that from the tone of several phone conversations, but it was more obvious out among them. Many were pleasant, some were even enjoyable, but they were still Trammelites, and it showed. Mary Lewis was one of the milder examples.

She was a tall, slim girl about Felicity's age, with black hair pulled tight behind her head, and thin, unpainted lips. I sat in the living room with her and Mrs. Lewis, who watched me closely. Mary was saying, "I just can't understand it. I wondered why she didn't call me last night. Golly, I hope nothing's wrong."

"Did she say she'd call you?"

"Well, no, I just thought we'd be at the meeting together. We both sing in the choral group. When she wasn't there, I wondered why she hadn't called me. I thought she was maybe sick, is all. Golly."

"You didn't phone her last night?" She shook her head and I said, "Somebody did. Felicity wrote some names on a pad by the phone. Birch and Ivy—an intersection near her home—and the name Dixon. You have any idea what that would mean?"

Mary shook her head again, eyes worried.

"She act any different lately? Seem the same as always to you?"

"Just the same. She wouldn't say anything if she was dying, anyway. She's like that. But I didn't notice . . ." Mary paused momentarily, then went on: "I did see her going to the Healing Room the first of last week. I'd forgotten. She was going home with me after the meeting, but then she said she couldn't. I just happened to see her going in there. Golly."

"The what room? The Healing Room? What's that?"

Mary smiled thinly. "I keep forgetting you aren't a Trammelite, Mr. Scott." She sounded sorry for me. "The All-High receives there any of us in need of help or advice. He is always available to any of us, and no problem is too small. He is such a good man, a wise man."