Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (12 page)

Hickey caught his breath, kneaded his forehead, got up, and paced. At the window, he stared at the cloudless silver-blue sky above the buses and signs around Horton Plaza.
DOCTOR YALE; POSTAL TELEGRAPH
, from before Western Union had driven them out of business—and at a B-17’s menacing shadow as it crossed Broadway. He kicked the wall lightly, turned back to his desk, chewed the last bite of his sandwich, and sat for a minute envying Henry Tucker. Not because the old fool had got Venus—Hickey’d seen in the rest home what that prize had bought the man. Besides, Hickey wouldn’t have traded Madeline for Venus or anybody. What he envied was Cynthia’s devotion to her Daddy. He couldn’t see Elizabeth writing about him as a paragon, upright and pure. Not unless she ignored a ton of evidence.

He grabbed the phone, dialed his home number, let it ring a dozen times, then hung up, corked the Dewar’s, and swallowed a mouthful. After letting his brain spin a minute, he focused on the puzzles.

It looked as if Cynthia believed not only that her sister and mother had plotted to destroy Henry Tucker but that Venus and the Bitch had tried to enlist Tucker to help destroy his own daughter. A few more pages like this, Hickey figured, and he’d know how to keep Cynthia from Donny Katoulis—drag her to a nuthouse.

He’d also found two more candidates for victim. Lots of folks had murdered a brother or sister, and more cold-bloodedly than Venus had killed hers, even if Cynthia’d written the truth. There were only a few crimes older than fratricide. But slaying your mother—Hickey wondered if anybody with a piece of heart left intact could do it. “Yeah,” he muttered, “somebody could.”

He wadded the butcher paper that had wrapped his sandwich, tossed it at the trash can between the coatrack and file cabinet. Leo could’ve swished a double bank shot off the wall and cabinet. Hickey’s shot bounced halfway back across the room. He wagged his head, adjusted the glasses on his nose, and read about the morning after, how Venus wailed, wept, punched Henry Tucker in the eye, then bolted and wouldn’t get near him for weeks. She kept her door padlocked, refused to attend school. From chance meetings on the grounds, she fled as though he were a leper. Tucker, of course, spent those weeks on the edge of leaping from the cliff into the lesser despair of hell.

At last she returned to his classroom. A few days later she sat beside him at dinner. On Christmas she brought him a gift, kissed him thanks for the bracelet he’d given her, invited him to the New Year’s dance. By February she was riding along on Tucker’s excursions into San Diego and stopping at the windows of jewelry stores. The day she led him into Jessop’s on Fifth Avenue and stood admiring the rings, Henry promenaded her down Broadway and, kneeling on a harborside lawn beneath a palm tree, proposed.

Hickey laid down the book, walked out and down the hall to the rest room, wondering about the comment that a poet named Lashlee would be the Bitch’s first victim. He stood over the toilet, brooding about Emma Vidal, almost surely Miss V. Tonight, he vowed, Cynthia was going to tell him about the “avalanche.” Whatever it took, he’d convince her.

He zipped his slacks, splashed water on his tired eyes, decided to run downstairs to the drugstore for coffee. At the landing he met his partner hobbling up the stairs. Leo’s iron-colored eyes peeked indignantly out of crinkled sockets. His graying walrus mustache twitched, as though pointing at the swollen crest of his cheekbone, at the bruise that looked like somebody’d pelted him with an overripe plum and it had stuck there. His hat was off, gripped in his right hand. He slapped it angrily against his knee.

“Go ahead, chew me out, punch me in the nose, where the other guy missed. I got it coming.” Leo waddled past Hickey into the office, tossed his hat onto the rack as he rounded it, and flopped onto the love seat.

“Where’s the girl?”

“Gee, Tom, if I knew, maybe I’d be on her like I’m supposed to. In case you give a fig who slugged me, it was a Negro fella, young enough he oughta been in uniform. Wearing leathers and a Texas sombrero. Drove a limo, big silver Chrysler. I checked it out. Belongs to Charlie Schwartz. See, the limo pulls up in front of the girl’s place, she struts out, talks to the driver, and points at me. I don’t know we’re playing rough, so I leave the thirty-eight in my glove box. I get out and stand by the car. He strolls up, implores me to give the girl some privacy, then suckerpunches me a couple times, and while I’m down he snatches the keys and heaves them into a yard full of watchdogs, three man-eating German shepherds. The wise guy runs off laughing. By the time I hot-wire the Buick, they’re way the hell down India Street. I kept them in sight until they crossed Broadway. Last half hour I been driving around the Gaslamp district, looking for them, down into National City.…Wouldn’t be scotch in that bottle, would it?”

Hickey delivered the pint of Dewar’s, walked back to his desk chair, and sat down hard. “Christ,” he muttered.

“What do you figure?”

He sighed, made fists, and socked them together. “Either the girl scored the money she wants and she’s going to pay Katoulis, or Charlie Schwartz is gonna give her the money.” He stared at Leo, hoping the old guy would offer a prettier solution.

“Why would Schwartz give her money?”

Plucking the manila envelope off his desk, he slipped Cynthia’s publicity photo out, walked it over to Leo. “There’s why.”

Chapter Fourteen

At 5:15 Rudy’s salad-and-dessert cook was yelling at his assistant and the pot washer. From what Hickey made out,
borrachos
was the key word. Waiters and busboys fussed over the table settings. Castillo sat in the office, holding a pen and scrutinizing a stack of receipts. When Hickey stepped in, the Cuban leaned his chair against the wall, pursed his lips, drew his eyebrows together.

Hickey set the ledger books on the file case, draped his overcoat and hat on the rack. “You seen the girl?”

Moving his head sideways an inch, Castillo said, “Only she called me about noon. I say she don’t get no money till maybe tomorrow, the bird hangs up on me. I tell you, I don’t like how people been treating me today. First she’s waking me up, then you don’t show this morning like you said to talk with me.”

“Damned shame, partner.” Hickey was tempted to follow with an inquiry as to just how good pals Castillo and Madeline had become. But that could wait. “I’m here now. You wanta tell me something, or ask?”

Castillo ran two fingers through his slick hair, clasped his hands behind his neck, and stared like a warrior relegated to the bargaining table. “What for the girl needs this money?”

“Family business,” Hickey said. “She’s got a sick daddy in a Catholic rest home. You know Catholics, if she don’t pay up, they’re gonna excommunicate him or something.”

After a pause to calculate while he gathered the receipts and crammed them into a desk drawer, Castillo leaned forward, leading with his nose. “She wants two grand, okay, we sign her to a contract. We’re taking twenty percent, whatever she makes for two, maybe three years. You tell her. I got a dinner engagement.”

Hickey watched the man stand, edge around the desk to the door warily as if they were wrestlers and the bell just rang. True to form, Hickey thought. The girl’s in a fix, Castillo figures an angle, a way to squeeze her. There was a businessman for you, a guy who slept with his antennae out, scanning the atmosphere for chances to grab the advantage. A gambler who won’t play without a stacked deck. The kind Madeline always wanted Hickey to be.

He walked out front, told Phil, the maître d’, to look out for Cynthia and fetch him the minute she showed, and returned to the office; he sat on the desk, picked up the phone, and dialed his home number. On the sixth ring, Elizabeth answered, panting into the receiver.

“Who’s chasing you?” Hickey asked.

“The Big Bad Wolf.” Elizabeth chuckled and caught her breath. “I rode my bike to the plunge, Dad. Swam twenty laps, but I could hardly ride back. I almost stopped and called a tow truck.”

“Talk to your mom yet?”

“No, but maybe she’s here. I’ll go look. I just walked in. Ran, I mean.”

As Hickey sat waiting, lighting his pipe, the door got pounded, Hickey shouted, “Yeah,” and Romero, the dessert-and-salad chef, strode in. He was a wiry little fellow, hardly five feet including his chef’s hat, who lived inside a cloud of smoke that he constantly fed by sucking down and blowing out Lucky Strikes, consuming each one in three or four drags.

“How you like this, boss?” Romero screeched. “That
cochón
Felipe is hacking lettuce, he knocks a big head on the floor, he kicks it around the cutting table like a
fútbol
, he picks it up, he dips it in the dishwasher’s greasy water, he throws it back on the cutting board and starts hacking again.”

“No sign of her, Dad,” Elizabeth said. “Didn’t leave a note either.”

Hickey sat still a moment, making fists, flexing the muscles of his arms and shoulders, squeezing his eyes shut. Finally he barked at Romero, “So fire him.”

As Romero spun and marched out, Elizabeth asked, “You there, Daddy?”

“Yeah.”

There came another rap on the door, and Phil shouted in, “The girl just pulled up in a limo.”

“Listen, babe,” Hickey said. “Soon as you see or hear from her, call me, huh? Promise?”

“Sure. Sorry, Dad.”

Hickey said good-bye, jumped up and around the desk to the door, then remembered the ledger books. He turned back, grabbed and stuffed them into a file drawer, and hustled out front. Cynthia leaned on the hatcheck counter. She wore an emerald green sleeveless dress, a white shawl around her shoulders, and white gloves, no hat, only an orchid, ivory white and violet, pinned into her hair above the left ear. In heels that leveled her with Hickey, she glared at him, her pupils dilated.

Her voice sounded twenty years older, racked by smoke and booze. “Why’d you sick the old fat guy on me?”

Hickey grabbed her arm and whisked her across the floor, through the kitchen, out the back way to his car. She only resisted by trying to walk slow, stiffly holding onto her poise.

In the Chevy, she took a compact out of her purse, checked her makeup, dabbed a little powder onto her chin. While Hickey wheeled out of the lot and up Fourth toward Broadway, he was trying to decide where to take her. Someplace deserted, where nobody could hear her scream, where he couldn’t get pestered by Good Samaritans or the law.

She kept mute all the way down Broadway and partway up Harbor Drive. Finally she snapped, “Where do you think you’re taking me?”

“Someplace we can talk. How about the scene of the crime?”

“What crime?”

“How many you done?”

Cynthia wheeled her face toward her window. On the sidewalk beside the docks, couples strolled, a drunk staggered perilously along the rim of the harbor. A fisherman standing beside a pile of nets shoved another man, who coiled up and flew at the guy, throwing a roundhouse. Just beyond the county offices, as Hickey slowed for a stop sign, the girl flung the door open and lunged that way, but he caught her arm and yanked her back, squeezing cruelly.

She yowled, but Hickey wouldn’t let go or ease off until she got righted in her seat and had closed and locked the door.

“Bastard,” she hissed. “Get this—I’m not talking, and you better cut me loose. Drop me at the Pacific Ballroom or else. I know guys lots tougher than you.”

Hickey straightened his hat and tie. “Bring ’em on.”

Chapter Fifteen

The fog rolled in, darkening from gray to black as they crossed Point Loma. Hickey pulled in to the lot at the same Sunset Cliffs vista point where last night Cynthia had met Donny Katoulis. The only other car, a Hudson that looked like a submarine surfacing out of the fog, had steamed windows. Its radio crooned a smarmy love song.

Cynthia stared at her persecutor in bewilderment, as though he were a medium who’d just gleaned from God-knows-where the exact number of ounces she’d gained since Thanksgiving. As she recovered she gave him a sneer and a wink. “You gonna try to kiss me?” She tossed her cigarette at the ashtray. It hit the radio knob and dropped onto the floorboard. Hickey retrieved it, stubbed it out. The girl rarely smoked, yet she’d sucked two Pall Malls on the drive, rapaciously as though she’d become Romero, the chef. She lit another while Hickey walked around the car and opened her door.

“Familiar?” he asked.

She stepped out slowly, warily, checking around as if cops might spring from behind the century plants.

“What’d you think of Donny Katoulis? An old pal of mine.” Hickey ushered her ahead of him onto the narrow, slippery trail that led down the cliffside. At his mention of Katoulis, the girl’s shoulders locked, and her hair rustled as though from a shudder.

Quickly, she recovered and growled, “I can’t walk here. If I take off these stupid shoes, I’ll run my hose.”

“Want me to carry you?”

“Don’t touch me, rat,” she commanded, and walked on, teetering. The trail was a switchback, about two hundred yards bordered by ice plant and cholla cactus, that brought them to a small sandy beach at the base of the fifty-foot cliff. The waves crashed the rocks to their north and south. Cynthia paced back and forth in the sand, stumbling and snorting until finally she kicked the shoes off. One shot like a missile at the cliff. The other sailed, hovered, and plopped about thirty yards out to sea.

Hickey leaned against a boulder while the girl did a one-legged bounce, hoisting her dress to unhitch her stockings from the garters. “Now’s your chance, you old lech. Get yourself an eyeful?”

She bounced and wiggled out of the stockings, rolled them and stuffed them into her handbag, and withdrew her Pall Malls and lighter. She lit up, took a couple steps toward Hickey to see clearly into where he stood in shadow, out of the moon-brightened fog. The mist had beaded on her makeup, and it hung there like tear-shaped crystals dotting her face.

“You trying to scare me, old man? That why you brought me here?”

“Naw. Scaring won’t do any good, if playing ball with the Schwartzes and Donny Katoulis doesn’t scare you. And reasoning with you—hell, somebody pays a killer, I don’t figure they’re reasonable. Naw, those things won’t work. Guess I’m gonna have to hurt you.”

She scampered backward with tiny steps. “You won’t hurt me. It’d cost you too dear. You wouldn’t get another peep out of me, then you and Clyde might as well start peddling encyclopedias.”

“Seems I remember Clyde having an orchestra and me owning a restaurant before you flounced in. Who you trying to kill, babe?”

She paced a few steps toward the water, her heels drawing grooves in the damp sand; then she wheeled and flung her cigarette at Hickey. “Let’s see you hit me, tough guy, I dare you.”

“Maybe it’s Laurel, the Bitch? Pravinshandra? Venus? You paying Mister Katoulis to eliminate your mother?”

Cynthia had frozen with hands on her hips, her head cocked, nose wrinkled, perplexed once again by his mind reading. She strode closer, until the next step would’ve bumped him, and peered into his eyes. “What’d they tell you up there?”

Work her into a fury, Hickey thought, and she’ll drop her guard like an Italian boxer. “Ladies I talked to both said you’re nuts.”

“Ha!” She spun around, 360 degrees like a ballerina, and slung her handbag down. It hit her in the foot and she kicked it away, into the ebb tide. “And you’re stupid enough to believe the sluts. That’s what they are, the whole lousy brood. He didn’t have to rape
them
.”

Hickey rolled his shoulders, wagged his head slowly, posing his most earnest bedside manner. “Meaning he did have to rape somebody, right?”

“Good one, Sherlock.” She backed a couple steps, slowly as if she were going to run, then lunged forward again. “You saw the picture, moron. If you couldn’t see that was a rape, who’d you figure was lying at Mary’s feet in the pietà, her milkman?”

“And the one getting raped was?”

“The Bitch. The Bitch,” Cynthia growled exasperatedly as a snooty professor lecturing freshmen. Suddenly her eyes flashed like gems in a sunlit whirlpool, and a sly crack of smile appeared before she wiped it away with her arm. “You wanta hear the truth, I’ll tell you. Where do I start?” she asked, cockily, as though certain that once he’d gotten her story, he’d see that justice deemed the murder her right and duty, so he’d quit nagging her about it.

Hickey reached for his pipe and tobacco. “How about you start with the picture. So it’s Laurel getting raped, who’s doing it?”

“Him,” she snapped. “You read the note.”

“Him being the master?”

“Yes.”

“So who drew the picture, Emma Vidal?”

“Yes, yes, yes. Give me your coat.”

After moving his glasses from the coat to his shirt pocket, he tossed it to her. She laid it on a flat, footstool-high rock a few feet toward the sea from the boulder Hickey leaned against, and sat with her ankles crossed, chin in her hands, elbows on her knees, lip in such a pout that her snapshot might’ve resembled the negative of a Watusi.

“Why’d Miss V send you the picture?”

The girl sighed as though resigning herself to his stupidity. “She sent it to Daddy, not me. But Laurel had already killed Daddy. Dead people can only do their work through the living, right? He gave the picture to me and begged me to stop the Fiend.”

“Your father asked you to kill a guy,” Hickey muttered.

“The hell he did. Daddy wouldn’t kill anybody. He wanted me to give the picture to Venus. He knew what she’d do.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” the girl snapped. “Lash him to a redwood, squirt cat piss up his nose, slice off his eyelids, and cover his head with a fishbowl full of red ants. Something like that.” For a minute she stood still, breathing deliberately. Finally she kicked the sand. “But it wasn’t so easy, Tom,” she howled. “There are more damned people than one in the world. Why do I have to save everybody, smart guy? What about Miss V, when Venus found out she was a traitor, a spy, that she knew everything? What would Venus do then?” She clutched both sides of her hair, yanked them together in front of her face. “What
did
she do?” Parting the hair, she glared at Hickey, her bottom lip and cheeks sucked tight against teeth and bones.

“Venus started an avalanche?”

“Avalanche,” Cynthia groaned. She stared at the ground a minute, probably looking for a rock to heave. When she didn’t spot one, she yanked off her silver cone earrings and flung them into the sea. She whipped back around. “I was the only one who could save them. I bought the gun and went there to kill Pravinshandra, for Daddy and to save Miss V, and to stop him before he could breed a whole tribe of baby fiends like him.”

“Whoa. You’re saying all those pregnant women…” Listening to the girl’s bizarre tale, Hickey’s brain was beginning to feel like soap bubbles. A ruthless, homicidal mother teamed with a preacher who rapes, or otherwise diddles, every cutie who steps through his portals, apparently withholding the fact from said ruthless mother—or getting her permission—while the cuties, big with child, become sheep in his loyal flock.

“Naw,” Hickey droned, though he was remembering some improbable loyalties, like his mother’s to Mary Baker Eddy. No question, if Ma had been Abraham, Hickey Isaac and Mary Baker Eddy Jehovah, the old woman would’ve had the boy gutted before the Almighty got a chance to announce the reprieve. He recalled 1923 or so, the ecstatic hordes outside Aimée Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple. Driving by there one Sunday, he saw a multitude, some dancing frantically, arms flailing the air, others crawling toward the doorway on their knees.

Cynthia kept reaching behind herself as if to scratch or unsnap something. It looked as though any second the girl might leap out of her clothes and go bounding, screaming, into the sea.

“Even I don’t know which ones he raped,” Cynthia wailed. “It was the only letter from Miss V Daddy showed me, and up there she wouldn’t say much. She was trying to protect me. With Laurel and Venus already trying to kill me, I didn’t need
him
after me, too.” She caught a deep breath, blew it out, and slumped, as though settling into an easy chair, and her voice began to shift from a lunatic’s whine to a storyteller’s introspective drawl.

“If she would’ve trusted me.…Oh, Lord—she’d be alive, he’d be dead, and I…I would’ve proved I must be the world’s greatest actress, the way they fell for my pose when anybody ought to know I’d marry Hermann Göring before I’d join their nitwit gang, embrace their vile religion, but nobody caught on—Venus, Laurel, not even Miss V. Nobody had a clue I was only taking him up that mountain to shoot him in the head. You see, my plan was brilliant. I’d pretend to join their coven—”

“Whoa. Why call it a coven?”

“I’ll call it what I want. Let me talk, for Christ’s sake.” She flashed him a glare as indignant as though he’d stopped her in the middle of a song and asked her to repeat the previous verse. “To join, you have to first take communion, meaning you sit on their Holy Mountain as long as it takes until their phony masters contact you, with a message.”

The girl sighed and let her shoulders sag, as if mentioning the “communion” had cost half her blood. She stared listlessly at Hickey until he asked, “Which masters?”

“The Aryan masters,” she said dreamily. “Venus preaches that the Aryan masters, more ancient than the Tibetan masters, have been holed up around Mount Shasta since the age of the primal revelation, when the Aryans set out from their homeland in the Urals to spread the faith. This band crossed the land bridge from Siberia. They got chased ever south by hostile Indians until they finally dug into the mountain, where they still live, in a cave the size of Monaco.”

“Cave,” Hickey mumbled.

“Look, the Aryans won’t appear in the flesh, but they give signs and messages, which is what you wait for on the mountain. Get it? The gimmick is, nobody receives any lousy message, but they’re so damned tired and cold on the mountain that finally they lie just to get out of there. They make up a line of nonsense and say they received it from the masters, something like ‘Her heart had not yet opened for the one ray to enter, thence to fall as three into four in the lap of Maya.’ Then, you see, they feel so guilty and spiritually bereft—with everybody lying, and wearing her stinking lie like a silver badge, and each of them thinking she’s the only liar—they need to follow our good Master P to save their rotten souls.

“It’s a perfect setup for me to get Pravinshandra alone. All I have to do is ask to join up, agree to commune with the Aryans of Holy Mountain. It’s always three people who go up, always
him
, of course, and a woman when it’s a woman communer—or is that communicant? Or communist? Aw, why ask you? You don’t know anything.” The girl was smiling faintly now, as if she’d extricated herself from the weird story to enjoy the telling of it. “The way they do this ritual, there are three stations, little huts on the north trail, about a mile apart. He goes to the high station, the pilgrim to the middle one, the helper to the lowest. The helper and Pravinshandra are supposed to funnel the spirits toward the middle. This way. That way. Ha! Wait, oh, the helper, the one at the lowest station—really stationed there to chase back the communer if she tries to escape—has to be an apostle. That’s anybody who’s been around since the beginning, almost five years ago, who stuck by Venus when she stole the money.”

“Which money?”

“Don’t you read the news?” Cynthia snapped. “Venus embezzled seventy thousand dollars from Otherworld. That’s why—well, one reason—she killed Madame Esmé. How do you think she’s bought the Black Forest? Where was I—ah, the only women apostles still living at Black Forest are Venus, the Bitch when she’s there, and Miss V. Oh God…Miss V.” Cynthia covered her face with both hands; her fingers spread as though she were peeking, then one hand reached up and clutched her hair and raked through it, scattering the orchid and hairpins onto the sand.

The tide was rolling in closer, trickling around the rock where she sat, and the waves boomed louder against the cliffs on both sides of them. Cynthia’s voice carried over the noise, getting stronger, as though the story shot juice to her batteries.

“Of course I wasn’t going up any mountain with Venus or Laurel, so that left Miss V. Perfect. Pravinshandra up there alone with me, Miss V the only other soul on the damned mountain, except the Aryan spooks. Ha! Miss V’s not capable of violence, you see—she’s a sensitive. Madame Esmé used to call her a lotus flower. It’s why she had stuck beside Venus—a week or so on the outside, away from the insulation of Otherworld or Black Forest, she panics, runs for cover. So I don’t tell her my plan, but after it’s done, I know, she’ll help me drag him to some crevasse where they won’t find him until next summer, long after the wolves have chawed his flesh and spit out the bullets. Or they might never find him. Some ravines up there, you wouldn’t hit bottom until you landed in hell. You think the locals are going to search for
him?
Oh no. They can’t abide a man who throws blue fire.”

Hickey scribbled a note in his mind, to ask the girl later about the fire-throwing trick, but he wouldn’t stop her now, risk diverting her story.

“Naturally Miss V’s horrified that I’m going to communion. She tried to talk me into running, offers to steal me away and drive us back to Daddy, and when I won’t listen, at last she tells me what he may do. What he’s already done to the sluts. You ready, Tom?” she growled. “First he’s going to hypnotize me, the way he learned from Miss V and she learned from Doctor Murten, a student of Mister Freud. He’ll knock me out, probably using the excuse that he’s guiding me into a receptive state, which will allow the Aryan spooks to visit. He’s going to knock me out, she says, with his voice, a touch of blue fire, and our Prana Yama breathing, then he’ll give me a potion. Dope! Something that blots out memories, and finally he’ll…” Cynthia raked her hair again. “Miss V knows how desperately he wants me. Like Faust wanted Helen, he’ll bet the whole wad on me. Not like the sluts—them, he probably just snaps a finger, one blue spark, and, hocus-pocus, they’re on their backs, oozing.”