Hard Case Crime: Shooting Star & Spiderweb (24 page)

The Professor’s hand descended to Mrs. Hubbard’s head. It rose again, clutching a brown-bunned wig. We gaped down at a fat, bald-headed man who gripped the edge of the table and cursed like the producer of a sustaining show.

Professor Hermann ignored his victim as he turned to us with a little bow.

“My friends,” he said. “I think our little session with the supernatural is over.”

We drove Lorna Lewis home. It was hard for me to remember that I was “Judson Roberts” and that I was under a vow of silence. But the Professor was in the driver’s seat. He drove, I fidgeted, and Lorna Lewis babbled.

“You were so right,” she sighed. “And I’m so grateful to you. If that racketeer had found out about me—I mean, if I’d trusted him and really told a lot of things I need advice on—”

She shivered. It felt good against me.

Professor Hermann smiled. “Perhaps in the future you will be more discreet. Only a reputable consultant should be trusted with your intimate problems.”

“That’s what Mike tells me.” She lit a cigarette, and it was agony for me to sit there and smell the smoke flaring from her mouth. “About Mike—there’s something I must know.”

“Bothering you, is he?”

“Yes. And I want you to help me. I can trust you, now. When could we talk about it?”

“Miss Bauer makes all my appointments. Call her at my office whenever you wish.”

He left it at that when we dropped her at the house. She said goodbye to me and hoped we’d meet again. I nodded calmly. As her peach-colored posterior wiggled its way up the walk, I was tearing open a package of cigarettes, fumbling with the matches. I got a light as we drove west.

“Can I talk now?” I asked.

The Professor nodded.

“I don’t get the pitch yet, but I can see that you’ve sold her a bill of goods.”

He smiled.

“That was a sweet idea, using the magazine cover. But what if it had been some other racket—were you sure of being able to expose it anyway?”

“Certainly. There is no possibility of failure, the way I operate. You will learn that in due time.”

“Where are we going now?”

“You shall see.”

“When are you going to tell me about those plans of yours?”

“Soon.”

I shut up and watched the lights of Santa Monica flash by. We kept going, hugging the edge of the ocean where, hours before, the sun had dropped into the water like a big California orange.

A lemon moon was in the sky as we neared the flickering street lights of Long Beach. The Professor parked on a side street and led me down a ramp to the boardwalk. We jostled through the late evening crowd and emerged on the midway.

“Follow me,” said the Professor, and led the way to a stand down the line.

Sideshow banners proclaimed the presence of
SEERO THE MYSTIC—SECRETS OF PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
. Gaudy horoscopes decorated the sides of the ticket booth. A horse-faced woman with yellow hair and teeth to match smiled at us from behind the glass.

The Professor greeted her. “Is he here yet?”

“Just came in a minute ago. You can come in. There’s nobody with him now.”

We entered the pitch, going through a short passageway and emerging into a darkened, banner-draped room. A man sat behind a covered table, peering into a crystal ball. He wore a bathrobe and a turban. When he saw us he stood up, went to the door, latched it and returned to his seat at the low table.

No one spoke for a moment. I stared at the mystic and wondered where I’d seen that fat face before. He must have caught my thought, because he took his turban off and laid it down on the table. I recognized his bald head and then I knew.

The man was “Mrs. Hubbard.”

“You got here quick,” he said.

“I always keep my promises.” The Professor smiled. “Is everything all right, Jake?”

“Yeah, sure. All fixed but the payoff.” Jake gave me the kind of stare that would have cracked his crystal ball. “Who’s the savage?”

“This is Judson Roberts, my new associate. He’ll be working with me from now on.”

Jake now favored me with his normal smile, which would scarcely have wilted a flower at three hundred paces. “Please to meet up with you. You a dummy?”

“I can talk,” I said. “But I learn more from just listening.”

“A wisey, huh?” Jake swung around to the Professor. “Say, Rogers said for me to collect his split, too.”

“Very well.” Professor Hermann reached for his wallet and laid three engraved portraits of Benjamin Franklin on the table. Jake covered them with one big fist.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You did a good job. I’m glad the Lewis question came out before my envelope.”

“Kept my eye on it,” Jake answered. “I could of given her a cold reading if you’da let me.”

“None of that, if you please. Just follow orders when you work with me. I shall call you for something else in a few days. Meanwhile, stick to your pitch here. Forget the Mrs. Hubbard angle. It’s washed up. Too risky for such small stakes.”

“Gotcha.”

“And that goes for Rogers, too. He has other assignments to carry out for me.”

“Yeah. Well, be seeing you.”

We left. The Professor walked out to the beach and headed for the water’s edge. Surf lathered the tan cheek of the beach. He stood frowning off into the darkness.

“Now I understand,” I said. “You couldn’t possibly fail, could you? Because you rigged it all from the beginning. You planted a phony medium just to pull that stunt, so there never was a chance of anything going wrong.”

The wind tore the chuckle out of his mouth and carried it away across the water. “Of course. I never permit any margin for error. And this little affair tonight was more important than you know. Lorna Lewis had to be convinced. She is my opening wedge into the movie colony and the big money beyond that.

“You will find that I plan my projects perfectly. Everything we do will be carefully calculated in advance. That way we cannot fail. I will want your complete confidence. And I shall pay for it. Not with hundred-dollar handouts. I’m talking about real money now—thousands, perhaps millions. For me. For you.”

His white face stared up at me. “We can take over this town, you and I. Not with a phony cult or a fly-by-night racket. We’re going after the top, the cream. We’ll get next to them, get under their skin, get into their minds. We’ll start out by advising and analyzing them—but we’ll end up running their lives. We’re going to own them, body and soul!

“Today you saw me arrange events so that Lorna Lewis would ask me for help. If my plans work out, six months from now, I’ll order her to do anything I wish. And she’ll do it. She and dozens of others like her.

“That’s why I need you. That’s why I found you. Because this calls for a front man—young, good-looking, persuasive. He’ll work directly with the women and with the men, too. Of course, you must be trained for the role and that will take time. It will not be easy, for there’s so much to learn. The arts of social presence. Metaphysics. Psychiatry. Theology. Your personality must be molded for aggression and command. I am the guiding hand—you will be the instrument, ground to perfection for our work.

“I shall demand strict obedience, insist that you follow the program I lay down for you. But in return, you will receive everything you’ve always wanted. Fame, wealth, power.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I can sense it in you—that drive, that urge for power. Power over them all: the sleek, slim women you’ve never been able to have, and the hard, smug domineering men who’ve always ignored you. You can rule them if you wish, make them do anything you desire. Judges, doctors, politicians, financiers—the whole pack will come fawning at your heels, licking your fingers and whimpering for what you can give them.”

The surf lashed at my feet, the wind tore at my face, and his voice rode the surf and the wind to beat me down. Darkness and a white face and a voice that hinted and promised...

I had to say something. “But look, you can’t do this to people. Maybe they’ll fall for a line, but sooner or later they find out. I don’t feel right, selling them something phony.”

He laughed. “And yet you wanted to be a radio or television announcer.”

“That’s different—”

“Is it? Is it any more honest to read off gaudy lies about the nonexistent benefits of soap and toothpaste than it is to advocate self-help? You’d be perfectly willing to tell millions of pimply, bloated hags that they can become lovely and alluring if they buy a cake of perfumed fat to drop into their bath water. Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Well, not exactly. I mean—”

“Be honest with yourself, now. You’d have no scruples about trying to run people’s lives as a radio announcer, would you? You’d sell anything, use any threat or method. Fill poor little adolescent know-nothings with self-conscious fear, droning horrible warnings about acne and bad breath and perspiration odors. Frighten old folks with grave hints about the dreadful dangers of constipation and upset stomach. You’d promise wealth, success and happiness by inference to anyone who obeys your commands—runs down to the corner druggist, the neighborhood grocer, buys this, uses that, eats whatever you want to sell. Yes, and if your studio handed you the script, you’d use your best voice to shout the merits of a crooked politician, the virtues of a dishonest business policy. And yet you’re squeamish!”

I nodded. “Maybe you’re right, when you put it that way. But I still don’t think you can get away with your plans. There may be a few idiots who want to be fooled—who go for all the isms and ologies that come along. But most people are fairly sensible, after all. And I don’t see—”

“You will. Come along and I’ll show you.”

He led the way back across the beach. We nearly stumbled over a couple huddled on a blanket. The unshaven man in the T-shirt was fumbling at a high-school girl. Without removing his hands he raised his head and said, “W’yncha watch where tha hell ya goin’ta, ya dumb basserds?”

The Professor nodded and whispered. “We’re back in the world of normal people, my friend. Look at them.”

I looked.

The beach came alive all around me. A brawny, tow-headed man passed me, brushing so closely in the darkness that I could see his tattooed arm and smell the stench of tobacco from between his rotted teeth. He was grinning down at a giggling girl whose voice rose to a shriek as he dragged her into the water by her ankles.

“Oooooh, Ernie!” she yapped. “Oooooh, ya
dog!
”

A cannibalistic circle huddled around a small fire, gorging on half-raw weenies and rancid dill pickles. Troglodyte faces gaped in the firelight. A wrinkled, wizened old man’s head: white, bushy hair and beetling black brows that moved convulsively as he chewed with his whole face. There was a fat, blobby woman with stringy hair and a red neck; the rest of her flesh hung in dead white folds, broken here and there by bulging purplish veins that stood out like mountain ranges on a relief map. She slapped at a screaming brat with one beefy hand, slopping beer from a punctured can clutched in the other. A bullet-headed youth squatted next to a portable radio, fiddling with the volume control and scratching the hairy recesses of his armpits.

“Welcome to the world,” whispered the Professor.

A big kid hit a little kid. A broad-shouldered man whose back was covered with black fur now stood on his hands and walked over a group of three tittering girls who lay on a blanket exhibiting their charms—shaved armpits, vaccination scars, flabby breasts, hennaed curls on pimple-pitted foreheads. Two hulking sailors hurled a beach ball into the group, growling with oafish laughter to compel attention. A baby began to whimper in the darkness. We moved on, away from there.

I had sand in my shoes. I was hungry. I stepped through a tangle of crumpled paper, greasy cardboard plates, broken pop bottles. A small dog rushed up and nipped at my ankles, yapping hysterically.

“You see?” murmured the Professor. “Here are your normal people.”

“All right,” I said. “I don’t particularly care for them. But that doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t prove they’ll fall for a line of phony advice about their lives and futures.”

The wind sent a dirty newspaper flying against my leg. I bent down and pushed it away, glimpsing the red letters of the headline:
SEX MANIAC SOUGHT IN HATCHET SLAYING.

“Perhaps this will help to make you understand,” Professor Hermann told me. We turned onto the midway again.

Fluorescence and incandescence blinded me. My lungs gulped in popcorn oil, lard, the reek of frying meat, the stink of decayed fruit, and a rancid stench composed of tobacco, sweat, cheap perfume and whiskey.

Banners swirled all around me—before me, behind me, on either side, overhead.
CONGRESS OF FREAKS. FLEA CIRCUS. ARCADE. EATS. FUN HOUSE. LEARN YOUR FUTURE. THREE SHOTS FOR A DIME. PLAY THE WINNERS. MAN-EATERS. RED-HOTS.
A dozen jukeboxes blared and boomed, a merry-go-round seethed; against this background rose the whirling, rattling, clanking and grinding of the Whip, the Dodger, the plane rides and the roller-coaster. The sharp crack of rifles echoed from the shooting gallery. Barkers shouted in command, and amplifying systems carried their exhortations, roars, and raucous bawls of invitation. From the rides overhead I heard screams, shrieks, wails, and high, hysterical laughter.

“Close your eyes,” said the Professor. “Don’t look at them. I won’t even ask you to look at them. Just listen. And what do you hear?”

I closed my eyes and stood there, jostled by the crowd.

The harsh music suggested bands, and the boom-boom beat was a marching tempo. I thought of war. Yes, war—with rifle-shots and shouted orders. Grinding machinery: tanks, planes and armored cars, artillery wheeling up for action. And over that, the screams. The screams of the wounded and the dying. The screams of the killers, boring for blood with their bayonets.

Then the Professor was whispering again. “Normal people,” he told me. “Normal world. They’re out for entertainment tonight. Forgetting their troubles. Having fun, as they call it.

“Having fun! Look at them! Paying money to be locked in cages and whirled through the air upside down. Bolting themselves into cars that lurch and sway until their stomachs turn inside out and the blood churns in their stupid brains. Standing up in roller-coasters and risking death to attract attention. That’s all it is, you know. The shouting, the laughing, the posturing and screaming—it’s a cry of ‘Look at me! Look how brave I am, how important! See what I’m doing, I’m having a good time!’ And watch them smash into each other with the cars when they can, watch the play of sadism and masochism that passes for amusement.