Ripper (36 page)

"Colby and I. A small generator powers our summer place."

"Hard to get it going?"

"No," Smith said flatly. He was mesmerized by the body hanging in the stairwell, one of those gazes that takes a fingersnap to bring around.

"He's dead, Colby," Leech said. "Concentrate on the question. The officer wants to know what we did in the. shed?"

Smith came around with a shudder.

"The island uses a World War II surplus relic," said Leech. "Thirty kilowatts housed outside. Should have been a son of a bitch to get going, but someone had cleaned the fuel system, refilled the tank, oiled the valves, and installed a new battery. All we had to do was crank it over, tug the compression release lever so the engine could build up speed, then let the lever go, and presto, there was light."

"Check the junction box?"

"No need to. Lights were on in the house by the time we returned from the shed. We met the others in the bath and you came up."

"Anyone know where the junction box is?"

"Yeah," Devlin answered. "We passed it when we carried Cohen to the far end of the cellar."

"Okay," Zinc said. "Here's what we do. Devlin, Bolt, catch the body when I cut it down, then carry Quirk and his chair to the upper floor. The rest of you—except Leech and Smith—wait in your rooms. Don't discuss either death among yourselves. I want each person's recollection untainted by what anyone else recalls. As planned, I'll be up shortly to question you. Those afraid to be alone, band together. Doctor, it's obvious, but please confirm Leuthard's dead. Then we'll take him to the cellar and check the junction box. Any questions? Good. Let's go."

Bracing one foot in the open trapdoor and gripping the banister, Zinc leaned into the stairwell to cut Leuthard down with his pocketknife. The man's head lolled like a rag doll's as he dropped. Bolt and Devlin caught the dead weight. Holyoak pronounced him dead from a broken neck, then followed the wheelchair upstairs to tend to Quirk's wound.

A candle before him to light the way, Chandler led Bolt, Devlin, Smith, and Leech down the cellar steps, each man lugging one of Leuthard's limbs. The makeshift morgue was against the chipped-rock wall beneath the west end of the Ballroom where the cold wind off the ocean chilled the cliff. A concrete pillar ten feet square ran from the cellar's floor to its ceiling, under the hooves of the Satan idol by Zinc's reckoning. They placed Leuthard's body beside Cohen's corpse in the narrow space between the pillar and the wall.

The junction box was near the angle where the Ballroom joined the Banquet Room. Five wires fed into the box from the generator shed. Someone had installed a switching device between two of the "hots," which, touching the wires together, had shorted the circuit before it reached the fuses. The short had sent flames and power arcing back to the generator to burn out its guts. The short had been tripped, Zinc had no doubt, by the toggle switch recessed in the post of the dogleg stairs.

"Can it be fixed?"

Leech and Smith shook their heads.

"So we're without power for the rest of the time we're here?"

"Yep," Leech said.

"You got it," Smith agreed.

And anyone on the stairs could have killed the lights,
thought Zinc.

Booby Trapped

8:39
P.M.

Al Leech and Colby Smith were a modem Ellery Queen, two men who created one alter ego: Whip Calhoun. But Calhoun, unlike Queen, didn't also double as their hero-sleuth, a task that fell to identical twins: Rip and Cal Sanders. Rip, the gay, and Cal, the straight, ran The Eyes Have It Detective Agency in San Francisco, the city Leech and Smith also called home. Like Spade, Marlowe, Archer, McGee, Warshawski, and Millhone, their tough private eyes related their adventures in the first person: Calhoun's gimmick being the twins got alternate chapters in which to do it. The success of the novels lay in the fact every social setup was assessed from both gay and straight points of view, the twins using this double-barrel to catch the bad guys in a crossfire of perspective. Smith was gay and Leech was straight, according to Elvira's thumbnail sketch in the cab.

"I need a drink," Leech said as the five men climbed the stairs to the Kitchen from the "morgue" in the cellar.

"Me, too," Smith said, casting a resentful eye at the bottle of Cragganmore tucked in Bolt's belt.

"Not enough here to go around," Bolt said. "But there's a bar in the Drawing Room."

"Poor idea," Chandler said. "Could be poisoned."

"I know my booze," Leech said. "If the seal's been tampered with, it'll squeal to me."

"I want to question you sober."

"Then do it quick. And do it at the bar. I plan to lock myself away and drink this nightmare out. With me, Col?"

"Damn right," Smith said.

"Glen? A quick one?"

"A quick two or three," Devlin said.

"Lou?"

"Never been accused of turning down a drink. World's become a clutch of wine-sipping wusses. Y'ever see Bogey or Mitchum snub a belt? Coming, Officer? Men from the boys."

The Drawing Room was dark, lit only by the candles burning low in Chandler's hand. Devlin thumbed his Zippo to enhance their glow, light enough to see the bottles calling them like Sirens from the bar across the room, tucked in the far corner beyond the fireplace that backed on the Ballroom. Monet's "The Women in the Garden" graced the mantel.

The floorboards creaked as Leech traversed the room, the carpetless planks of the same blond oak as that wainscoting the walls, pegged in the manner of a more artistic era. Near the bar stood a pedestal with a metal vase on top, no doubt once filled with fresh flowers like those festooning the ceiling moldings and patterned on the sofas.

What happened next seemed to Zinc to happen in slow motion, every detail seered into his long-term memory, Leech ahead with Smith, Bolt, Devlin, and him behind, Leech going wobbly-kneed as he reached out a shaky arm, playacting a wretch fresh from the desert who stumbles across a bar, head turning to flash them a ham's grin then turning back again, one foot on one plank as his other stomped the next, that floorboard supporting the vase and pedestal at its end, when suddenly Leech's ankle sank into a hole. For a moment Zinc thought the wavering light was playing tricks on his eyes, seeming to levitate the vase and pedestal in the air, arcing them in a trajectory toward Leech's face, until he realized the plank wasn't pegged to the floor but hinged instead on a fulcrum like a teeter-totter. Leech's foot stomping this end had launched the vase like a catapult, liquid in the container splashing his face an instant before the metal rim smashed his mouth.

The screams . . . the shrieks . . . the gibbering could only mean . . .

ACID!

Sulphuric acid or nitric acid would have been bad enough, but this was hydrofluoric acid in concentrated form. Were it not for the murkiness shrouding the room they might have seen the mist, rising from the vase like miasmic breath. More akin to thin oil than water, the acid that burned

Leech's flesh and eyes was a clear viscous liquid stored in metal because it eats glass. HF is usually used to clean cast iron, copper, and brass, or to etch fancy patterns on windows. What it does to human flesh—was doing to Leech right now—is an abomination unfit for human eyes.

At least
he
didn't see it.

His eyes were dissolved.

"AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!" Leech bellowed, thrashing about on the floor, his face fuming and blistering as if sloughing off. "UUUUURRRGGGGG!" as great gobs of flesh were clawed from his cheeks by his nails. Acid inhaled down his windpipe and throat while gasping from the double whammy of shock and being hit in the mouth was causing rapid necrosis of his esophagus and lungs, mushing them soft and squishy until Leech could no longer scream. Zinc saw patches of skull peeking through the bubbling porridge.

The acid smelled of almonds.

He'd never eat almonds again.

"What's that!" Devlin blurted, swinging his Zippo around.

"Where?"

"There. In that hole."

"I don't see a thing."

"It's gone, but I'm sure I saw someone's eye!"

A peephole was drilled through the wall between the fireplace and the bar. Devlin ran toward it, but Smith got there first. "You killed my partner!" he shouted, flattening himself against the wood to peer into the hole, while behind him Leech convulsed and did just that, dying when the acid corroded too much meat from his bones. The ravenous liquid literally ate him to death.

Fffichunkk! Fwwwappp!
Zinc heard the sounds before he saw the blade, then Smith went into spasms and sank halfway to his knees, shakin' all over like he was in tune with a fine riff of rock 'n' roll, stopping there, not crumpling further, because the scythe blade slingshot through the hole spiked from the back of his head like a shark's fin.

"No, Devlin," Zinc yelled as the young man kicked the wall, the fury in the blow causing the wainscoting to jump, then
Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!
a line of scythes burst through the boards at chest level.

Devlin was almost impaled. Smith stopped shaking.

The booby traps are booby trapped,
Chandler thought. As Bolt—the tough guy—threw up.

Mother Mask

Saturday, December 5, 1992, 12:25
A.M.

When Captain Cook passed Deadman's Island in 1778, heading east to Friendly Cove at Nootka Sound, the island was a native burial ground. Hence its aboriginal name translates as Deadman's Island.

Of all the native cultures in the Pacific, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth—the Nootka—developed the most spectacular sea-hunting techniques. Hunting whales was a dangerous job that required the help of magic, so Nootka shamans built a Whalers' Washing House at Yuguot, their name for Friendly Cove. The Washing House drew its power from grave-robbing and ritual sacrifice. Tsaxwasap, a shaman of great magic, was one of the first to use the Whalers' shrine. The Washing House he inherited had only four skulls, so he intensified the power of this magic place by stocking it with corpses, skulls, and kidnapped babies. The magic worked for many whales were lured to Nootka harpoons by the power of the dead.

The Whalers' Washing House at Yuquot was used for 300 years. Post-Tsaxwasap ritualists added carved wooden idols to the shrine: frowning, laughing, singing human-shaped deities and a pair of cedar whales. The shrine was "bought" under cover of night in 1904 by George Hunt, a collector with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Never displayed, the Washing House now gathers dust in a Manhattan storage cellar.

Sometime in the 1840s, the offshore graveyard became taboo. Believed to be haunted, the island was shunned after boats of mourners who rowed here to bury their elders never returned, and the same fate befell a party dispatched by the chief to investigate why. What actually happened was a

Washing House shaman succumbed to a coma and was thought to be dead. Tree-buried on the island, he later revived, and here, marooned and demented, built his own Washing House in the blowhole cave. His secret shrine was powered by skulls from the island's many graves, and the sacrificing of those he ambushed when they landed to bury their dead. With all B.C. to plunder as a new colony, the British ignored this barren hump of rock in the sea, so Angus Craig I had no trouble buying it from the Department of Indian Affairs in 1903. By then the demented shaman was dead, and none but the Craigs and Demoniacs ever knew the secret Washing House was here . . .

Here beneath Castle Crag where crashing Pacific waves hurled spray through the blowhole at the foot of the cliff. . .

Here where the wind whined across the black lagoon to rock the cave idols like Frankenstein Monsters coming to life . . .

Here where Craig II's stuffed hell-hags perched on the carvings to add a little Black Magick to this Magic Place. . .

Here where the Ripper's trunk brought from the Mainland by two of the sleuths waited for Skull to reprise Miller's Court.

It was after midnight and Zinc Chandler sat alone in the room he'd shared with Yates. The deaths of Cohen, Leuthard, Leech, and Smith had freed up enough rooms so each of the remaining sleuths (except Katt) had their own. "When you get to be my age," Wynn had said, before he hobbled off toward Elvira's room, "you live each day as if it's your last. The way things are going, that may be true, so if the Reaper wants me, he'll find me with her." "Chivalry lives," Zinc said, tipping a pretend hat. "Hell no," the old man said. "I want
her
to protect
me."
His parting words were: "If you haven't read Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by your age, I'd advise it . . . if we survive."

Between then and now, Zinc had interviewed each sleuth in turn, searching every bedroom under the pretext of looking for traps. He'd hoped to find a cooler in which ice could be stored, or something indicating one of the guests had been to the island before, but in the end all he found was another puzzle. Somehow the black deed-trunk Melbum and Devlin had lugged up from the cove had vanished. It was in none of the bedrooms, and no one claimed ownership. As all the baggage had to be humped from the beach to the house, and some of the sleuths had trouble enough getting themselves up the slope, the two men had grabbed the nearest items, and that was one. So where was the missing trunk now?

In searching Luna and Katt's room, the Mountie had checked the canopy over the four-poster. The Wilkie Collins story mentioned by Wynn in mind, Zinc didn't want the mother and daughter smothered in their sleep. The canopy, however, was a flimsy affair: little more than a crocheted sheet stretched under the overhead frame. As a hidden weapon, this terribly strange bed was pretty mundane.

Now Zinc sat on the edge of his bed hoping to get some sleep,
(". .. avoid alcohol and sleeplessness. And never—I repeat
never—
miss taking your drugs . . ."),
a chair wedged under the door handle because none of the locks had keys, while he stared at the shrinking guestlist—Katt's name added—that Franklen gave him on the plane: