“What about Cthulhu, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh?”
“Gesundheit.”
Winthrop grinned, sharp moustache pointing. “No, not easy to say at all. Hard to fit into human mouths, you know.”
“He’s just a bedroom creeper,” Finlay said, “he don’t know nothing.”
“His grammar could be better. Doesn’t J. Edgar pay for elocution lessons?”
Finlay’s big hands opened and closed as if he would rather there were a throat in them.
“Gené?” Winthrop said.
The woman looked up, red tongue absently flicking across her red lips, and thought a moment. She said something in a foreign language that I did understand.
“There’s no need to kill him,” she said in French. Thank you very much, I thought.
Winthrop shrugged and said “fine by me.” Finlay looked disappointed.
“You’re free to go,” the Britisher told me. “We shall take care of everything. I see no point in your continuing your current line of inquiry. Send in a chit to this address,” he handed me a card, “and you’ll be reimbursed for your expenses so far. Don’t worry. We’ll carry on until this is seen through. By the way, you might care not to discuss with anyone what you’ve seen here or anything I may have said. There’s a War on, you know. Loose lips sink ships.”
I had a few clever answers but I swallowed them and left. Anyone who thought there was no need to kill me was all right in my book and I wasn’t using my razored tongue on them. As I walked to the Chrysler, several ostentatiously unofficial cars cruised past me, headed for the Seaview Inn.
It was getting dark and lightning was striking down out at sea. A flash lit up the Montecito and I counted five seconds before the thunder boomed. I had the feeling there was something out there beyond the three-mile limit besides the floating former casino, and that it was angry.
I slipped into the Chrysler and drove away from Bay City, feeling better the further inland I got.
I take Black Mask. It’s a long time since Hammett and the fellow who wrote the Ted Carmady stories were in it, but you occasionally get a good Cornell Woolrich or Erle Stanley Gardner. Back at my office, I saw the newsboy had been by and dropped off the Times and next month’s pulp. But there’d been a mix-up. Instead of the Mask, there was something inside the folded newspaper called Weird Tales. On the cover, a man was being attacked by two green demons and a stereotype vampire with a widow’s peak. “‘Hell on Earth’, a Novelette of Satan in a Tuxedo by Robert Bloch” was blazed above the title. Also promised were “A new Lovecraft series, ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’” and “‘The Rat Master’ by Greye la Spina”. All for fifteen cents, kids. If I were a different type of detective, the brand who said nom de something and waxed a moustache whenever he found a mutilated corpse, I might have thought the substitution an omen.
In my office, I’ve always had five filing cabinets, three empty. I also had two bottles, only one empty. In a few hours, the situation would have changed by one bottle.
I found a glass without too much dust and wiped it with my clean handkerchief. I poured myself a generous slug and hit the back of my throat with it.
The radio didn’t work but I could hear Glenn Miller from somewhere. I found my glass empty and dealt with that. Sitting behind my desk, I looked at the patterns in rain on the window. If I craned I could see traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. People who didn’t spend their working days finding bodies in bathtubs were going home not to spend their evenings emptying a bottle.
After a day, I’d had some excitement but I hadn’t done much for Janey Wilde. I was no nearer being able to explain the absence of Mr. Brunette from his usual haunts than I had been when she left my office, leaving behind a tantalising whiff of essence de chine.
She’d given me some literature pertaining to Brunette’s cult involvement. Now, the third slug warming me up inside, I looked over it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Interesting echoes came up in relation to Winthrop’s shopping list of subjects of peculiar interest. I had no luck with the alphabet soup syllables he’d spat at me, mainly because “Cthulhu” sounds more like a cough than a word. But the Esoteric Order of Dagon was a group Brunette had joined, and Innsmouth, Massachusetts, was the East Coast town where the organisation was registered. The Esoteric Order had a temple on the beach front in Venice, and its mumbo-jumbo hand-outs promised “ancient and intriguing rites to probe the mysteries of the Deep.” Slipped in with the recruitment bills was a studio biography of Janice Marsh, which helpfully revealed the movie star’s place of birth as Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and that she could trace her family back to Captain Obed Marsh, the famous early 19th Century explorer of whom I’d never heard. Obviously Winthrop, Geneviève and the FBI were well ahead of me in making connections. And I didn’t really know who the Englishman and the French girl were.
I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off reading Weird Tales. I liked the sound of Satan in a Tuxedo. It wasn’t Ted Carmady with an automatic and a dame, but it would do. There was a lot more thunder and lightning and I finished the bottle. I suppose I could have gone home to sleep but the chair was no more uncomfortable than my Murphy bed.
The empty bottle rolled and I settled down, tie loose, to forget the cares of the day.
Thanks to the War, Pastore only made Page 3 of the Times. Apparently the noted gambler-entrepreneur had been shot to death. If that was true, it had happened after I’d left. Then, he’d only been tortured and drowned. Police Chief John Wax dished out his usual “over by Christmas” quote about the investigation. There was no mention of the FBI, or of our allies, John Bull in a tux and Mademoiselle la Guillotine. In prison, you get papers with neat oblongs cut out to remove articles the censor feels provocative. They don’t make any difference: all newspapers have invisible oblongs. Pastore’s sterling work with underprivileged kids was mentioned but someone forgot to write about the junk he sold them when they grew into underprivileged adults. The obit photograph found him with Janey Wilde and Janice Marsh at the premiere of a George Raft movie. The phantom Jap sub off Santa Barbara got more column inches. General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, called for more troops to guard the coastline, prophesying “death and destruction are likely to come at any moment”. Everyone in California was looking out to sea.
After my regular morning conference with Mr. Huggins and Mr. Young, I placed a call to Janey Wilde’s Malibu residence. Most screen idols are either at the studio or asleep if you telephone before ten o’clock in the morning, but Janey, with weeks to go before shooting started on Bowery to Bataan, was at home and awake, having done her thirty lengths. Unlike almost everyone else in the industry, she thought a swimming pool was for swimming in rather than lounging beside.
She remembered instantly who I was and asked for news. I gave her a precis.
“I’ve been politely asked to refrain from further investigations,” I explained. “By some heavy hitters.”
“So you’re quitting?”
I should have said yes, but “Miss Wilde, only you can require me to quit. I thought you should know how the federal government feels.”
There was a pause.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” she told me. It was an expression common among my clients. “Something important.”
I let dead air hang on the line.
“It’s not so much Laird that I’m concerned about. It’s that he has Franklin.”
“Franklin?”
“The baby,” she said. “Our baby. My baby.”