Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (19 page)

I flinched as if at incoming artillery when something big moved at the edge of my vision.

“Get a grip on yourself,” said Norm.

“Shut up,” said Calabash.

It was a woman posting by on the back of a beautiful black horse. She too was beautiful, though I only caught her profile. She didn’t even glance our way, service employees here to do something with the amphibian corpses in the swimming pool.

We circled the bottom of the hill before we climbed it toward the front door, an enormous red thing that would barely have
covered the entrance to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but we stopped short of that, in front of the white picket fence. Birds flitted and chirped in the Norfolk pines.

We climbed out of the van. Calabash opened the rear door, pulled out the pool gear, and placed it on my shoulder—he wanted to leave his gun hand free, I realized. Adrenaline was blasting though the passages of my body like the Columbia River. My knees were rubbery. Unbalanced, the pool tools kept sticking in the grass ahead, bringing me to comedic halts. Operational, I felt like an idiot. But Calabash and Norm looked strong, eyes darting alertly from side to side. They opened the gate. Into the valley of the shadow of death. We sank to our ankles in the luxurious lawn. Every blade of grass was uniform. Tiny’s gardener probably plucked out the aberrants on his hands and knees.

The water was roiled, as if someone had just gotten out of the pool. Calabash and Norm spotted her. I’d missed her entirely—a woman in her twenties wearing a tiny bikini, her body lithe and athletic. She had been lying on a bath towel along the edge of the pool, but at our approach, she sat up. Her perfectly shaped breasts made all effort to escape their tiny triangles. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “We’re with Posh Pools. Is Henry here?”

“Somewhere. Is it the frogs?”

“Yes. It is. The frogs.”

“Good. Henry’s got a frog up his butt.”

“Hey, look at this,” said Norm, pointing. “There are frogs.”

I looked into the pool. So did Calabash and the woman in the bathing suit. Four large ones, legs outstretched behind, lay on the blue concrete bottom in a ring around the drain grate as if it were a poisonous trough from which, having supped, they’d dropped simultaneously dead. I thought it one of the saddest sights I had ever seen.

“About fuckin’ time.” It was Henry, coming up behind us in his thong suit. The woman wrinkled her nose as if Henry stank and went back to her beach towel. “I been on the horn all
morning to Posh. I got better things to do. There’s a pant load of pool firms out there. You can’t deal with the frogs, we’ll find one that can!” The muscles in his face twitched and jerked as if little animals were running in panic beneath his skin.

“I hear ya, dude,” I said. “Those frogs, they’re history.”

“Yeah, well, you keep an eye on that big nigger there. It’s well known niggers is scared of frogs.” Henry turned to walk away—

But before he completed one whole step, there came a terrible flash of movement, a dull thunk, a sweeping follow-through; it had a grandness about it, like the calving glaciers you see on the Discovery Channel. Henry took another step and a half before his knees packed up. His body remained upright for a moment, wavering left, then right, head lolling, before he keeled forward. The impact must have done some nasty work on his nose.

“Well sapped,” admired Norm.

“Only way to reason with fooking racists.”

The woman in the bikini leapt to her feet. Reflexively, she covered her breasts with her arms. “Please don’t hurt me—”

“We’re not going to hurt you,” I said.

“You’re not?”

“What do you do here, sweetie?” asked Norm in a gentle voice.

“Nothing. I don’t do anything, and I don’t know anything. I’m decoration. I mean, I’m really an actress, but times are tight. Tiny pays good money for me to sit around his pool in a bathing suit. No sex. He’s just trying to impress his guests that he has friends.”

“Where are the guests?” Norm seemed to have taken over the questioning.

“They’re not here yet.”

“Who’s in the house?”

“Tiny. He’s there. The housekeeper’s there, but she’s like a hundred and six.”

“Anybody else?”

“Two of his stooges just left. Look, I’ll vanish, I promise. I’ll move to Helsinki, Norway, anywhere, you’ll never see me again—”

Calabash edged over to the house, peeked in the first window, then the next, his right hand thrust into his jacket.

“What’s your name?”

“Cecily.”

“Mine’s Norm. We’d appreciate it, Cecily, if you’d just sit down like nothing happened. As far as you’re concerned, nothing did.”

She squatted tensely on her towel, terrified that we were there to kill Tiny and, having done so, couldn’t leave her alive to testify. But what could I do to reassure her just then?

“We’d also appreciate it if you’d call Tiny outside.”

“Oh, Jesus—”

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to hurt him.”

“I don’t care what you do to him. He probably deserves it. Just don’t do it to me. Please!”

“Call him out, Cecily.”

“He doesn’t come when I call.”

“You’re an actress. Pretend Henry just had a heart attack,” I suggested, “and you’ve got to call for help.”

“I probably wouldn’t.”

“Then pretend it’s your father who had a heart attack.”

Her eyes looked off into the sky. She was preparing. She screamed. All three of us hunched our shoulders against the piercing blast. She let fly another that set us back on our heels. Norm was grinning broadly. Calabash was sneaking along the side of the house to the sprawling screened porch, which was elevated about six feet above the lawn. A heavy door slammed somewhere in the house, then a screen door, closer—

Tiny, wearing a dark blue three-piece suit with a cravat, appeared on the porch, waddling full speed.

Calabash would be behind him when he emerged into the pool area. The woman had closed her eyes. She didn’t want to
see what the impact did to Tiny. But she let out another throat-scarring scream. I hoped that would be the last. Tiny hotfooted it down the stairs, onto the lawn, and through a gate in the picket fence. “What—!”

Tiny froze when he saw Henry facedown on the concrete. He glanced from me to Norm, back to me, then behind, but too late. Retreat was now blocked by Calabash towering over the fence, staring at him.

“Hi, Tiny,” said Norm.

“Who’s that? That’s not—?”

“Sure is.”

“Norm? Norman Armbrister?…But you’re—”

“Go ahead and say it. I love when they say it.”

“—dead?”

“This is Artie Deemer. He wants his girlfriend back. And the gentleman behind you, he wants to eat your young.”

Tiny nodded. He got the picture. “What do you want, Norman?”

“The tape.”

“The tape?”

“Where,” I insisted, “is Crystal?” I didn’t want this to degenerate into a quarrel among spooks and bankers and conspiratorial assholes over a tape. We were here for Crystal—

“You’ve got balls, Norm,” said Tiny, “coming to me about the tape, when you’re the one who made the thing in the first—”

“I did not—”

Calabash kicked the gate open. “Fook da tape, I’m gonna crush dis guy—”

Slack-jawed, Tiny looked up at personified doom approaching and screamed, “Noooo—!”

Calabash grabbed Tiny, spun him around, and enfolded his neck from behind in great rippling ebony arms. “I’m gonna snap dis guy’s neck for kidnapping Crystal, den I gonna t’row him in wid de frogs—”

“Haaa! No, Deemer, tell him
no!
”

“He doesn’t answer to me. He does what he feels like. He feels like snapping your fat neck.”

“I didn’t hurt her! I didn’t hurt her! A few tranquilizers is all! Please—!”

Norm, I suddenly noticed, had vanished.

“I’ll show you! She’s fine!”

“Is she
here?
” I screeched. I was about four inches off the ground, I was flying downstream on Class-6 adrenaline rapids. There was no turning back now. There was a crazy sharp-edged clarity to all I saw—the house, the trees, the pool, the woman in the bathing suit, prone Henry, Tiny’s terrified face—

This might actually come off! She was here! I felt on the verge of a semihysterical giggling fit. “If you take us to her, we’ll drive away with her and we won’t hurt you!” I was shouting. I had to get a grip on myself.

“What about Norman?”

“What?”

“Will he kill me? He’s a psychopath, you know. You ought to watch who you hang around with. Do you want a job with me—?”

“Look, I told you—I want Crystal. I better start seeing her or he’s gonna twist your head off!”

“The garage apartment! She’s in the garage apartment!” He pointed to a building out beyond the picket fence on the edge of the great lawn.

I bolted in that direction—

“Artie, wait.” It was Calabash. He was right. I was getting giddy. He escorted Tiny toward the fence, whispering something in Tiny’s ear. Whatever he said made Tiny’s eyes bulge.

“No, no, no tricks, I swear!”

“Somebody’s out dere, Artie. I saw somebody move.”

We edged toward the fence, looked out…

Norm. He was loading two bulging garbage bags into the van.

I could barely keep myself from sprinting down the hill. Finally we were there. The garage door was raised. There were no cars inside, just a sit-down lawn mower. Tools for gardening, auto repair, and home maintenance hung on pegboards along the wall, all neat and clean. There wasn’t a drop of oil on the concrete floor. A flight of carpeted stairs led up to the apartment. Calabash called me away from them.

Norm jogged up, big grin. “I’ll take Tiny off your hands.”

Calabash released him to Norm and stood at the bottom of the stairs with a gun in his hand. His other hand made the
shhh
sign at us.

“Here,” Norm whispered to Tiny, “come sit on this tractor.”

“What?”

“Come sit on the tractor, take a load off. Handsome machine. What is that? Is that a Toro Lawn Doctor?”

Tiny waddled over and after two false starts managed to hoist himself astride the tractor. He gripped the handlebars and peered up from under his bushy brows with frightened deer eyes. His jowls trembled.

Calabash cringed with each creak as he cautiously climbed the stairs. All eyes were on him. He was reaching for the doorknob—

Norm, meanwhile, was screwing the cap off a gallon can of gasoline, but that didn’t really register then. I was concerned with the door. What would we find behind the door? Calabash slowly, silently turned the knob, then shoved. The door banged against its stop. I bolted up the stairs without touching a one of them and followed Calabash inside.

She was asleep. She looked like a little girl, curled on the bed in a loose fetal position. She wore the same clothes I’d last seen her in, seemingly months ago. I dropped to my knees beside the bed and put my cheek against hers.

Gun leveled and cocked, Calabash went to search the bathroom.

“Crystal,” I whispered, “it’s Artie. We’re here to take you home.” I felt like a fairy-tale prince.

She moaned.

I brushed a shock of hair from her eyes. They opened and immediately closed again.

Calabash returned from the john with a warm, wet towel, which he handed to me. He leaned over to see her face. “Can she walk? We better be gone.”

“I’ll carry her,” I said. “Crystal—” I swabbed her brow. Her eyes opened and stayed open.

Her head rose. “Artie!…It’s you?”

“Absolutely.”

Smiling, she sagged back onto the pillow. “What happened to your hair?”

“It’s a disguise.” I picked her up. She hugged me around the neck and hummed in my ear as I carried her to the head of the stairs. I hoped I could make it down. They were steep. That would be a hell of a note, rescue Crystal only to fall down the stairs and break both our collarbones.

The stench of gasoline hit us in the face like a wet mop, but I tried not to question the reason for that until I navigated the stairs, tried not to look at Tiny sitting absurdly on the Toro Lawn Doctor. My legs were shot at the bottom of the stairs. I needed to sit for a minute.

The Toro, I realized, was soaked in gasoline, and so was Tiny’s lower body. His chinos were dark with it. Norm stood nearby, same grin, puffing deeply on a fat black stogie. The end glowed in the gloom of the garage.

I carried Crystal away from the scene.

“I’m gonna barf,” said Tiny from the fumes.

I had brought a sleeping-bag pad, a pillow, and a blanket and had already made them into a bed in the back of the van. There
was a sweet smile on Crystal’s face as I laid her down. She held me around the neck, so I lay down beside her.

Calabash climbed behind the wheel. “I told dat freaky spy I leavin’ in thirty seconds, no matter what.” I cringed as he turned the key. It started on the first crank. Relief. I’d pictured us putt-putting out of there on the Toro Lawn Doctor.

I looked out the back door to see Norm sauntering across the lawn toward the van. Over his shoulder I saw Tiny roll off the tractor like a bag of water and crawl away from it on his belly. Then I pulled the door shut. Calabash had us going before Norm shut his door.

“Stop,” said Norm at the foot of the driveway.

“Why?” asked Calabash as he stopped.

Norm reached into a bag on the floor between his little feet and extracted from it a nasty star-shaped object, like a Christmas-tree decoration. He placed it on his palm. The thing had five brutally sharp points. I understood its design: no matter how it landed, one of those points would stick straight up. Norm got out of the van and spread the stars all over the driveway behind our van.

SEVENTEEN

A
W, SHE’S PRETTY,” said norm, leaning over his seat to look back at Crystal. “Sleeping like that, you know, she reminds me of my daughter. My daughter married an ophthalmologist, lives out in Scottsdale, Arizona, a fine upstanding family, Rotarians. Personally, I’d commit suicide first. But who am I to criticize? You won’t need to hide out after all.”

“What? We won’t? Why?”

“I made a deal with Tiny. Back there astride his steed. I told him you have no knowledge of the tape. I mean, so you told me, and so I told him. He agreed to leave you alone. You two can get on with your love affair. Tiny’s not such a bad sort, as these wealthy patrician criminals go. He swears he didn’t make the tape. He assumed I had. So who did? Trammell? Danny Barcelona?”