“Laird Brunette has disappeared, taking a baby with him?”
“Yes.”
“Kidnapping is a crime. You might consider calling the cops.”
“A lot of things are crimes. Laird has done many of them and never spent a day in prison.”
That was true, which was why this development was strange. Kidnapping, whether personal or for profit, is the riskiest of crimes. As a rule, it’s the province only of the stupidest criminals. Laird Brunette was not a stupid criminal.
“I can’t afford bad publicity. Not when I’m so near to the roles I need.”
Bowery to Bataan was going to put her among the screen immortals.
“Franklin is supposed to be Esther’s boy. In a few years, I’ll adopt him legally. Esther is my house-keeper. It’ll work out. But I must have him back.”
“Laird is the father. He will have some rights.”
“He said he wasn’t interested. He … um, moved on … to Janice Marsh while I was … before Franklin was born.”
“He’s had a sudden attack of fatherhood and you’re not convinced?”
“I’m worried to distraction. It’s not Laird, it’s her. Janice Marsh wants my baby for something vile. I want you to get Franklin back.”
“As I mentioned, kidnapping is a crime.”
“If there’s a danger to the child, surely…”
“Do you have any proof that there is danger?”
“Well, no.”
“Have Laird Brunette or Janice Marsh ever given you reason to believe they have ill-will for the baby?”
“Not exactly.”
I considered things.
“I’ll continue with the job you hired me for, but you understand that’s all I can do. If I find Brunette, I’ll pass your worries on. Then it’s between the two of you.”
She thanked me in a flood and I got off the phone feeling I’d taken a couple of strides further into the LaBrea tar pits and could feel sucking stickiness well above my knees.
I should have stayed out of the rain and concentrated on chess problems but I had another four days’ worth of Jungle Jillian’s retainer in my pocket and an address for the Esoteric Order of Dagon in a clipping from a lunatic scientific journal. So I drove out to Venice, reminding myself all the way that my wipers needed fixing.
Venice, California, is a fascinating idea that didn’t work. Someone named Abbot Kinney had the notion of artificially creating a city like Venice, Italy, with canals and architecture. The canals mostly ran dry and the architecture never really caught on in a town where, in the twenties, Gloria Swanson’s bathroom was considered an aesthetic triumph. All that was left was the beach and piles of rotting fish. Venice, Italy, is the Plague Capital of Europe, so Venice, California, got one thing right.
The Esoteric Order was up the coast from Muscle Beach, housed in a discreet yacht club building with its own small marina. From the exterior, I guessed the cult business had seen better days. Seaweed had tracked up the beach, swarmed around the jetty, and was licking the lower edges of the front wall. Everything had gone green: wood, plaster, copper ornaments. And it smelled like Pastore’s bathroom, only worse. This kind of place made you wonder why the Japs were so keen on invading.
I looked at myself in the mirror and rolled my eyes. I tried to get that slap-happy, let-me-give-you-all-my-worldly-goods, gimme-some-mysteries-of-the-orient look I imagined typical of a communicant at one of these bughouse congregations. After I’d stopped laughing, I remembered the marks on Pastore and tried to take detecting seriously. Taking in my unshaven, slept-upright-in-his-clothes, two-bottles-a-day lost soul look, I congratulated myself on my foresight in spending fifteen years developing the ideal cover for a job like this.
To get in the building, I had to go down to the marina and come at it from the beach-side. There were green pillars of what looked like fungus-eaten cardboard either side of the impressive front door, which held a stained glass picture in shades of green and blue of a man with the head of a squid in a natty monk’s number, waving his eyes for the artist. Dagon, I happened to know, was half-man, half-fish, and God of the Philistines. In this town, I guess a Philistine God blended in well. It’s a great country: if you’re half-fish, pay most of your taxes, eat babies and aren’t Japanese, you have a wonderful future.
I rapped on the squid’s head but nothing happened. I looked the squid in several of his eyes and felt squirmy inside. Somehow, up close, cephalopod-face didn’t look that silly.
I pushed the door and found myself in a temple’s waiting room. It was what I’d expected: subdued lighting, old but bad paintings, a few semi-pornographic statuettes, a strong smell of last night’s incense to cover up the fish stink. It had as much religious atmosphere as a two-dollar bordello.
“Yoo-hoo,” I said, “Dagon calling…”
My voice sounded less funny echoed back at me.
I prowled, sniffing for clues. I tried saying nom de something and twiddling a non-existant moustache but nothing came to me. Perhaps I ought to switch to a meerschaum of cocaine and a deerstalker, or maybe a monocle and an interest in incunabula.
Where you’d expect a portrait of George Washington or Jean Harlow’s Mother, the Order had hung up an impressively ugly picture of “Our Founder”. Capt. Obed Marsh, dressed up like Admiral Butler, stood on the shore of a Polynesian paradise, his good ship painted with no sense of perspective on the horizon as if it were about three feet tall. The Capt., surrounded by adoring if funny-faced native tomatoes, looked about as unhappy as Errol Flynn at a Girl Scout meeting. The painter had taken a lot of trouble with the native nudes. One of the dusky lovelies had hips that would make Lombard green and a face that put me in mind of Janice Marsh. She was probably the Panther Princess’s great-great-great grandmother. In the background, just in front of the ship, was something like a squid emerging from the sea. Fumble-fingers with a brush had tripped up again. It looked as if the tentacle-waving creature were about twice the size of Obed’s clipper. The most upsetting detail was a robed and masked figure standing on the deck with a baby’s ankle in each fist. He had apparently just wrenched the child apart like a wishbone and was emptying blood into the squid’s eyes.
“Excuse me,” gargled a voice, “can I help you?”
I turned around and got a noseful of the stooped and ancient Guardian of the Cult. His robe matched the ones worn by squid-features on the door and baby-ripper in the portrait. He kept his face shadowed, his voice sounded about as good as the radio in Pastore’s bath and his breath smelled worse than Pastore after a week and a half of putrefaction.
“Good morning,” I said, letting a bird flutter in the higher ranges of my voice, “my name is, er…”
I put together the first things that came to mind.
“My name is Herbert West Lovecraft. Uh, H.W. Lovecraft the Third. I’m simply fascinated by matters Ancient and Esoteric, don’t ch’know.”
“Don’t ch’know” I picked up from the fellow with the monocle and the old books.
“You wouldn’t happen to have an entry blank, would you? Or any incunabula?”
“Incunabula?” he wheezed.
“Books. Old books. Print books, published before 1500 anno domini, old sport.” See, I have a dictionary too.
“Books…”
The man was a monotonous conversationalist. He also moved like Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the front of his robe, where the squidhead was embroidered, was wet with what I was disgusted to deduce was drool.
“Old books. Arcane mysteries, don’t ch’know. Anything cyclopaean and doom-haunted is just up my old alley.”
“The Necronomicon?” He pronounced it with great respect, and great difficulty.
“Sounds just the ticket.”
Quasimodo shook his head under his hood and it lolled. I glimpsed greenish skin and large, moist eyes.