“I was recommended to come here by an old pal,” I said. “Spiffing fellow. Laird Brunette. Ever hear of him?”
I’d pushed the wrong button. Quasi straightened out and grew about two feet. Those moist eyes flashed like razors.
“You’ll have to see the Cap’n’s Daughter.”
I didn’t like the sound of that and stepped backwards, towards the door. Quasi laid a hand on my shoulder and held it fast. He was wearing mittens and I felt he had too many fingers inside them. His grip was like a gila monster’s jaw.
“That will be fine,” I said, dropping the flutter.
As if arranged, curtains parted, and I was shoved through a door. Cracking my head on the low lintel, I could see why Quasi spent most of his time hunched over. I had to bend at the neck and knees to go down the corridor. The exterior might be rotten old wood but the heart of the place was solid stone. The walls were damp, bare and covered in suggestive carvings that gave primitive art a bad name. You’d have thought I’d be getting used to the smell by now, but nothing doing. I nearly gagged.
Quasi pushed me through another door. I was in a meeting room no larger than Union Station, with a stage, rows of comfortable armchairs and lots more squid-person statues. The centrepiece was very like the mosaic at the Seaview Inn, only the nymph had less shells and Neptune more tentacles.
Quasi vanished, slamming the door behind him. I strolled over to the stage and looked at a huge book perched on a straining lectern. The fellow with the monocle would have salivated, because this looked a lot older than 1500. It wasn’t a Bible and didn’t smell healthy. It was open to an illustration of something with tentacles and slime, facing a page written in several deservedly dead languages.
“The Necronomicon,” said a throaty female voice, “of the mad Arab, Abdul Al-Hazred.”
“Mad, huh?” I turned to the speaker. “Is he not getting his royalties?”
I recognised Janice Marsh straight away. The Panther Princess wore a turban and green silk lounging pajamas, with a floorlength housecoat that cost more than I make in a year. She had on jade earrings, a pearl cluster pendant and a ruby-eyed silver squid brooch. The lighting made her face look green and her round eyes shone. She still looked like Peter Lorre, but maybe if Lorre put his face on a body like Janice Marsh’s, he’d be up for sex goddess roles too. Her silk thighs purred against each other as she walked down the temple aisle.
“Mr. Lovecraft, isn’t it?”
“Call me H.W. Everyone does.”
“Have I heard of you?”
“I doubt it.”
She was close now. A tall girl, she could look me in the eye. I had the feeling the eye-jewel in her turban was looking me in the brain. She let her fingers fall on the tentacle picture for a moment, allowed them to play around like a fun-loving spider, then removed them to my upper arm, delicately tugging me away from the book. I wasn’t unhappy about that. Maybe I’m allergic to incunabula or perhaps an undiscovered prejudice against tentacled creatures, but I didn’t like being near the Necronomicon one bit. Certainly the experience didn’t compare with being near Janice Marsh.
“You’re the Cap’n’s Daughter?” I said.
“It’s a honorific title. Obed Marsh was my ancestor. In the Esoteric Order, there is always a Cap’n’s Daughter. Right now, I am she.”
“What exactly is this Dagon business about?”
She smiled, showing a row of little pearls. “It’s an alternative form of worship. It’s not a racket, honestly.”
“I never said it was.”
She shrugged.
“Many people get the wrong idea.”
Outside, the wind was rising, driving rain against the Temple. The sound effects were weird, like sickening whales calling out in the Bay.
“You were asking about Laird? Did Miss Wilde send you?”
It was my turn to shrug.
“Janey is what they call a sore loser, Mr. Lovecraft. It comes from taking all those bronze medals. Never the gold.”
“I don’t think she wants him back,” I said, “just to know where he is. He seems to have disappeared.”
“He’s often out of town on business. He likes to be mysterious. I’m sure you understand.”
My eyes kept going to the squid-face brooch. As Janice Marsh breathed, it rose and fell and rubies winked at me.
“It’s Polynesian,” she said, tapping the brooch. “The Cap’n brought it back with him to Innsmouth.”
“Ah yes, your home town.”
“It’s just a place by the sea. Like Los Angeles.”
I decided to go fishing, and hooked up some of the bait Winthrop had given me. “Were you there when J. Edgar Hoover staged his fireworks display in the twenties?”
“Yes, I was a child. Something to do with rum-runners, I think. That was during Prohibition.”
“Good years for the Laird.”
“I suppose so. He’s legitimate these days.”
“Yes. Although if he were as Scotch as he likes to pretend he is, you can be sure he’d have been deported by now.”
Janice Marsh’s eyes were sea-green. Round or not, they were fascinating. “Let me put your mind at rest, Mr. Lovecraft or whatever your name is,” she said, “the Esoteric Order of Dagon was never a front for boot-legging. In fact it has never been a front for anything. It is not a racket for duping rich widows out of inheritances. It is not an excuse for motion picture executives to gain carnal knowledge of teenage drug addicts. It is exactly what it claims to be, a church.”
“Father, Son and Holy Squid, eh?”
“I did not say we were a Christian church.”
Janice Marsh had been creeping up on me and was close enough to bite. Her active hands went to the back of my neck and angled my head down like an adjustable lamp. She put her lips on mine and squashed her face into me. I tasted lipstick, salt and caviar. Her fingers writhed up into my hair and pushed my hat off. She shut her eyes. After an hour or two of suffering in the line of duty, I put my hands on her hips and detached her body from mine. I had a fish taste in my mouth.
“That was interesting,” I said.
“An experiment,” she replied. “Your name has such a ring to it. Love … craft. It suggests expertise in a certain direction.”
“Disappointed?”
She smiled. I wondered if she had several rows of teeth, like a shark.
“Anything but.”
“So do I get an invite to the back-row during your next Dagon hoe-down?”
She was businesslike again. “I think you’d better report back to Janey. Tell her I’ll have Laird call her when he’s in town and put her mind at rest. She should pay you off. What with the War, it’s a waste of manpower to have you spend your time looking for someone who isn’t missing when you could be defending Lockheed from Fifth Columnists.”
“What about Franklin?”
“Franklin the President?”
“Franklin the baby.”
Her round eyes tried to widen. She was playing this scene innocent. The Panther Princess had been the same when telling the white hunter that Jungle Jillian had left the Tomb of the Jaguar hours ago.
“Miss Wilde seems to think Laird has borrowed a child of hers that she carelessly left in his care. She’d like Franklin back.”
“Janey hasn’t got a baby. She can’t have babies. It’s why she’s such a psycho-neurotic case. Her analyst is getting rich on her bewildering fantasies. She can’t tell reality from the movies. She once accused me of human sacrifice.”
“Sounds like a square rap.”
“That was in a film, Mr. Lovecraft. Cardboard knives and catsup blood.”
Usually at this stage in an investigation, I call my friend Bernie at the District Attorney’s office and put out a few fishing lines. This time, he phoned me. When I got into my office, I had the feeling my telephone had been ringing for a long time.
“Don’t make waves,” Bernie said.
“Pardon,” I snapped back, with my usual lightning-fast wit.
“Just don’t. It’s too cold to go for a swim this time of year.”
“Even in a bathtub.”
“Especially in a bathtub.”
“Does Mr. District Attorney send his regards?”
Bernie laughed. I had been an investigator with the DA’s office a few years back, but we’d been forced to part company.
“Forget him. I have some more impressive names on my list.”
“Let me guess. Howard Hughes?”
“Close.”
“General Stillwell?”
“Getting warmer. Try Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Governor Culbert Olson, and State Attorney General Earl Warren. Oh, and Wax, of course.”
I whistled. “All interested in little me. Who’d ’a thunk it?”
“Look, I don’t know much about this myself. They just gave me a message to pass on. In the building, they apparently think of me as your keeper.”
“Do a British gentleman, a French lady and a fed the size of Mount Rushmore have anything to do with this?”
“I’ll take the money I’ve won so far and you can pass that question on to the next sucker.”
“Fine, Bernie. Tell me, just how popular am I?”
“Tojo rates worse than you, and maybe Judas Iscariot.”
“Feels comfy. Any idea where Laird Brunette is these days?”
I heard a pause and some rumbling. Bernie was making sure his office was empty of all ears. I imagined him bringing the receiver up close and dropping his voice to a whisper.
“No one’s seen him in three months. Confidentially, I don’t miss him at all. But there are others…” Bernie coughed, a door opened, and he started talking normally or louder. “…of course, honey, I’ll be home in time for Jack Benny.”
“See you later, sweetheart,” I said, “your dinner is in the sink and I’m off to Tijuana with a professional pool player.”
“Love you,” he said, and hung up.
I’d picked up a coating of green slime on the soles of my shoes. I tried scraping them off on the edge of the desk and then used yesterday’s Times to get the stuff off the desk. The gloop looked damned esoteric to me.
I poured myself a shot from the bottle I had picked up across the street and washed the taste of Janice Marsh off my teeth.
I thought of Polynesia in the early 19th Century and of those fish-eyed native girls clustering around Capt. Marsh. Somehow, tentacles kept getting in the way of my thoughts. In theory, the Capt. should have been an ideal subject for a Dorothy Lamour movie, perhaps with Janice Marsh in the role of her great-great-great and Jon Hall or Ray Milland as girl-chasing Obed. But I was picking up Bela Lugosi vibrations from the set-up. I couldn’t help but think of bisected babies.
So far none of this running around had got me any closer to the Laird and his heir. In my mind, I drew up a list of Brunette’s known associates. Then, I mentally crossed off all the ones who were dead. That brought me up short. When people in Brunette’s business die, nobody really takes much notice except maybe to join in a few drunken choruses of “Ding-Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead” before remembering there are plenty of other Wicked Witches in the sea. I’m just like everybody else: I don’t keep a score of dead gambler-entrepreneurs. But, thinking of it, there’d been an awful lot recently, up to and including Gianni Pastore. Apart from Rothko and Isinglass, there’d been at least three other closed casket funerals in the profession. Obviously you couldn’t blame that on the Japs. I wondered how many of the casualties had met their ends in bathtubs. The whole thing kept coming back to water. I decided I hated the stuff and swore not to let my bourbon get polluted with it.
Back out in the rain, I started hitting the bars. Brunette had a lot of friends. Maybe someone would know something.