101 Mystery Stories

1

The drive-in, all harsh glass and stiff redwood and brittle aluminum and sharp No. 7 nails, stood on the oceanside of the bright road like some undecided suicide. My carhop had a look of frozen hopefulness and the flawed walk of a windup doll with a faulty gudgeon pin. Shifting in the seat of my late-model car, I eased the barrel of my stiff black .38 Police special so that it stopped cutting off the circulation in my left leg.

“Where’s the town of San Mineo?” I asked the girl, my voice an echo of all the lost hopes of all of us.

“Back that way about twenty miles,” she said.

I’d thought so. Sometimes the intricate labyrinth that is Southern California gets one up on me. But there is, as my once-wife used to point out, an intense, harsh, sun-dried stubbornness about Ross Pewter. She often talked like that.

It was stubborn of me to drive my late-model car, gunning it too much on the sharp death-edged curves of the road that wound by the sea, twenty miles in the wrong direction. I was thirty-six now and sometimes the harsh sun-dried motor trips through the fever-heat madness that is Southern California made me feel that time’s winged chariot was behind me. Other times it was a lettuce truck. Nobody passed Ross Pewter on the road.

“Do you wish to see a menu?” the carhop asked. Her voice had the ring of too much laughter deferred in it.

“No,” I told her. I backed out of the place, afraid of the already ghost-town look of it, and cannoned back toward San Mineo and my client.

“Pewter,” I said aloud as my late-model car flashed like a dazed locust down the mirage of the state highway, “Pewter, some of these encounters you get into in the pursuit of a case seem to be without meaning.”

I would have answered myself that life itself is at times, most times, meaningless. But a Highway Patrol cycle, its motor like the throaty cough of an old man who has come to Los Angeles from Ohio and found that his Social Security checks are being sent still to his Ohio address, started up behind me. The pursuit began and I had to ride the car hard to elude it.

2

The pillars that held up the porch of the big house reminded me of the detail of the capital and entablature of the Ionic temple at Fortuna Virilis at Rome. The entablature, cornice, and architrave were encrusted with carved ornament, a motif of formalized acanthus leaf enriching the design, and the scrolls terminated in rosettes.

I almost wished this were the house I was going to visit.

Sighing, and dislodging the barrel of my pistol from a tender part of my thigh, I crossed the rich moneyed street and approached the home of old Tro Bultitude. Decay seemed to drift all around, carried like pollen on the hot red wind of this late Southern California afternoon. Even the pilasters, the balustrades, and the cornices of the sprawling Bultitude mansion seemed decayed. It sat like the waiting wedding cake in that book by Charles Dickens.

The thought of it all filled me with a sadness and the actual pollen in the air started my hay fever going again.

The butler was a heavy-set man, all thick hair and musty black clothes, and there was about him the faint smell of Saturday matinees in small Midwestern movie theaters now renovated and made into supermarkets and coin laundries.

“Blow off, Jack,” he said.

“The name is Pewter,” I said. “Tell your boss I’m here to see him.”

“Scram, Jacko. We got illness in the family. All the Colonel’s unmarried daughters are down with nymphomania.”

I didn’t speak. I just showed him the barrel of my .38.

“What’s that hanging on the end of it?” he asked.

I looked. “Some elastic from my shorts, it seems. Want to make a quip about it?”

“I’ll quip you,” said the butler, snarling. “You remind me of all the lonely self-abusing one-suited bill collectors that haunted the time-troubled corridors of my long-ago youth.”

“I’ll do the metaphors around here,” I said and went for him. I got two nice chops at his jaw and he tumbled back like a condemned building that has just been hit by a runaway truck.

“Let’s not waste any more time,” called an old life-worn voice from inside.

I vaulted the fallen butler and found myself not in a hallway but at once in a giant white-walled room. As I looked on, steam began to come from jets low in the wall.

“The name is Pewter,” I said to the crumbled old man who sat in a sunchair, wrapped in a towel as white as the flash of a .38 like mine.

“You’ve got a problem?”

“Vachel Geesewand said you’d cleared up that business in Santa Monica,” said Bultitude.

“I cleared up the whole damn town before I quit.”

“Good. My problem,” said the old man, “is simply this. About twenty-two years ago in Connecticut — the name of the town doesn’t matter — a young man named Earl K. M. Hoseblender was riding a bicycle down East Thirty-fourth Street, heading for a hardware store.”

“Go on,” I said, interested now.

“My mind wanders,” he admitted. “That isn’t the right problem. That one the police will handle. What I want you to do is find my daughter, Alicia.”

“I can do that.”

“Alicia is a strange girl,” said the old man. “For a long time she wore a false beard and hung out with the surfers at Zuma Beach. They drove around in an old ice-cream wagon they’d painted with peppermint stripes.”

“Red and white stripes?”

“You’ve guessed it,” said Tro Bultitude. “Then about a year ago there was an accident.”

“What kind of an accident?”

“Alicia never told me. I do know that the bell fell off the ice-cream wagon; she’s talked about that often. And a boy named Kip may have broken his left ankle. It was all a year ago, a long time ago for a twenty-year-old like Alicia.

“You see, Mr. Pewter, Alicia has not had an untroubled childhood. When she was four my first wife — the former Hazel Wadlow Whitney — fell unaccountably from the top of a Christmas tree and succumbed. Alicia was the only witness.” He sighed a dry dead sigh, like leaves being swept up by a slipshod gardener. “At fourteen she was unavoidably involved in a bank robbery in Connecticut. The town will be nameless.”

“Is it the same town Hoseblender was riding his bicycle in?”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s a different nameless town.”

“Do you have any pictures of your daughter?”

“Yes, but you’ll have to be careful who you show them to since they’re pornographic. Another unfortunate moment in the poor child’s past.”

“When’d she leave?”

“The day after my fourth wife — the former Hazel Wadlow Whitney— fell off the cupola.”

“I thought Hazel Wadlow Whitney was your first wife?”

“This is a different Hazel Wadlow Whitney. I have a tendency to marry women with that name. It has upset Alicia more than once. When she was fifteen she ran away to Topeka, Kansas, and was later arrested for trying to break the Menninger Brothers’ windows.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

“You might look for that candy-striped ice-cream wagon.”

I scowled at his finished old lusterless eyes. “You’re keeping something back from me.”

“Very well,” he said, making a feminine gesture. “She is not alone. There is a strong possibility she may be with her half brother. You see, fifteen years ago I discovered a foundling on my doorstep. He was nearly five years old at the time, and quite bright. The note pinned to him explained that he had an IQ of 185.”

“How does that make him a half brother to Alicia?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“A hundred dollars a day and expenses is my fee,” I told him.

“Dawes will give you an envelope full of money, Mr. Pewter. If you’ll excuse me I have to take a steam bath. I suffer from a malignant disease, and steam seems to be good for me.”

The room, now that I noticed it, was as foggy as the 2900 block on Jackson Street in San Francisco. I said goodby and went out to find the butler and my money.

3

Something old Bultitude had said gave me a hunch and I took a jet to Connecticut as soon as I left him.

The night seems timeless when you are hurtling through it at a fast clip — like a marble in some pinball machine in a grease-and-chili-smelling place on some hot, dry side street on the underbelly of Southern California. We all of us drag the past with us like one of those big silver trailers that clog the L.A. highways. Looking, all of us, for a place to pull off the road and park the damn thing but we never do it.

Spent time is somewhat like the bird in that poem by Coleridge and we carry it around our neck like a gift necktie that we have to wear to please the giver, who gave it to us like somebody passing out the second-rate wine now that the guests, who sit around like numbed patients in some sort of cosmic dentist’s waiting room, are too unsober to know or care.

I suppose you’ve felt like that when you’re flying too.

4

The cops beat me up in Connecticut. They always do. But I found out what I wanted. By noon, on a hot, dry, sticky-90-and-climbing day, I was back at the drive-in I’d gone to by mistake.

The kitchen was like all the meals they made you eat as a lonely child. It smelled of oatmeal and fried foods and stale chocolate cake.

“You,” I said to the frycook.

He was a pale youth of about twenty. His face had the worn look of one who has lost two falls out of three — lost too many battles with the dark side of himself.

“Don’t bug me now, mister,” he said. “I’ve got to fry three orders of oatmeal.”

I picked a soft spot in his belly and gave him a stiff-fingered jab there. He fell over onto the stale chocolate cake, making the silent falling sound that a giant tree does when it topples alone in a distant wood.

“I know you’re Albert B Bultitude,” I told the kid, jerking him to his feet. “Yesterday when I came in here I saw the overcoat.”

“You weren’t in this kitchen yesterday, mister.”

“Don’t mix me up while I’m trying to explain this case,” I said. “They told me some things in Connecticut.”

“Sure, they’re a knowledgeable bunch in Connecticut. You take Westport, for instance; they have a great many gifted people there.”

“Forget that,” I told him. “I know who your mother is.”

His eyes flickered like a cigaret lighter about to run out of fluid. “How did you guess?”

“She let the towel slip when she was in the steam bath and I figured it out.”

“Well, you’re right. Our mistake was keeping the past festering too long.”

“It wasn’t Hazel Wadlow Whitney who fell from the cupola; it was Tro Bultitude, pushed by you. I thought Dawes was too tough. He’s really your Uncle Brewster from Maine. Still, the whole business about the silverware doesn’t make sense to me.”

“I never heard of any silverware.”

“Good. Then I’ll leave that part out.”

“I guess you know about Alicia, too.”

“There is no Alicia,” I said. “There never was. Alicia is really Tony, your other half brother. He drove the car that time in Connecticut. The accident with the ice-cream wagon made him walk funny and then he decided to try the Alicia bit.”

“It’s odd how the past catches up with us,” said Albert.

“The only thing is,” I said, watching the oatmeal burn away to ashes, “I still don’t see why your mother hired me at all. She’s accomplished only the arrest of her son for the murder of her husband.”

“Mother’s been rather dotty since she fell off the Christmas tree that time.”

I needed a lungful of fresh air. “Let’s go, Albert. I know some cops in L.A. who aren’t corrupt and I’m turning you over to them.”

Outside, Albert stared at the bright, intense blue of the ocean. He hesitated for a long second and then waved boyishly at the mindless timeless water.

“Goodby,” he called. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing the ocean again for a while.”

He was right.