The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Throughout the hard-rock number I had the impression that I was being discussed by the pair at the corner table. Their faces in the ghoulish glows turned toward me, turned away, drew close over the table as words blanketed by the music were exchanged.
The music shimmered to a long-drawn wail against a mad rhythmic background and slipped eerily to silence. The lighting settled to a twilight. There was a shifting of bodies and a ripple of applause.
I lifted my drink, covertly watching the pair rise from the corner table. I sensed a decision, and my palms became a little damp as they came toward me.
Their shadows streamed across my table. Suddenly they stopped.
“Hi, pops.”
The taller, huskier one had spoken. I looked up. He was a strapping youth with a heavy-boned face lurking behind a heavy growth of thick black beard and wiry tresses that fell to his thick neck. He wore nondescript poplin slacks, dirty and wrinkled, and a leather vest that partially covered his massive, hairy chest. His swarthy, bare arms were corded and muscled like a weight lifter’s.
The companion beside him was as tall, but much thinner, a fine-boned fellow. Tangled, unwashed locks of yellow and a sparse beard graced a narrow, almost delicate face and high-domed head. The smoldering eyes of a decadent poet peered from the shadows of large sockets. The thin-lipped mouth was faintly quirked, as if sardonic amusement was a habitual reaction.
“We sensed a loneliness,” the poet said, “and would offer a friendly ear if you’d care to rap. Peace.” He had a thin, nasal voice. His jerky delivery and the embers in his eyes were clues to a good high on drugs. Clad in a rumpled tie-dyed gaucho shirt that hung loose about greasy ducks, he slipped with unreal movements into a chair across the table.
“I’m Cleef,” he said, “and my boon companion is known as Willis.”
Willis wiped a palm across his leather vest and extended his hand. “Into the pudding, man.”
I saw no alternative at the moment but to shake his hand. His grip was modestly powerful. He pumped my hand once, then eased into the chair at my left.
“Pudding?” I inquired.
“As your group would put it,” Cleef-the-poet said, “welcome to the club.”
“I see. Well, thanks. Buy you fellows a drink?”
Willis’ heavy mouth curled gently. “You’re out of sight, pops. We don’t ruin the belly with booze. But you might blow the price of a joint.”
He lifted a muscle-lumped arm and signaled a waitress who was moving from a nearby table. She served them joints from an innocent-looking package bearing the brand name of a well-known cigarette. As Willis and Cleef fired the reefers, I ordered a second double Scotch. I figured I needed it.
Cleef drew deeply, half closing his eyes and holding the smoke until his lungs burned for air. Willis was a more conservative pothead, less greedy, less desperate for a turn-on. He puffed, inhaled, exhaled.
“What brings you to a place like this, pops?” Willis asked conversationally.
My gaze roamed the unreality of the room, returned to Willis’ dark face. My shoulders made a vague movement “I’m really not sure,” I said.
“Hung-up man, ice cream man,” the poet suggested.
“Ice cream?” I asked.
“Now and then user of drugs,” Willis explained. “Ice cream habit.”
I nodded, grinned slightly. “Thanks for the translation, but I haven’t an ice cream habit. Just an occasional Scotch does it for me.”
“Translate, extrapolate,” Cleef rhymed. “Rap across the gap.”
Willis reached and patted the back of my hand. “We’ll try to talk your lingo, pops.”
“Thanks. It would be less awkward.”
The waitress came with my drink. Willis elaborately mused on her thin face and slender topless figure. The gesture on his part was almost pathetically obvious, a cover-up for his quick assessment of the thick wallet from which I paid the tab.
I lifted the Scotch. “Cheers.” I rolled the first drops under my tongue for the taste. The liquor dispelled a little of the clammy chill inside me.
I set the glass down and studied it a moment. “I guess it was because of Camilla,” I said finally.
“Come again?” Willis said.
“The reason I came in here,” I said. “Dear Camilla... about the same age as some of the young women in here... early twenties... very beautiful.”
Willis chuckled, eyes brightening. “Well, what do you know! The old boy has got himself a chick!”
“Straight man buys anything his little heart desires,” Cleef said lazily.
I couldn’t help the angry look I shot across the table. “It wasn’t that way at all!”
“Easy, pops,” Willis suggested mildly.
I lifted the glass and threw the remainder of the drink down my throat “Well, it wasn’t!”
“So okay.”
“I want you to understand.”
“Sure, pops. Don’t blow your mind.”
I took out a spotless Irish linen handkerchief and brushed the cold needles from my forehead. “Blow my mind... Sonny, that’s just what I did, with Camilla. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t live without her. Went crazy if she glanced at another man. Never wanted her out of my sight...”
“Zap!” mumbled the poet “What a king-sized hang-up.”
My vision cleared slightly. “At last you have voiced a truth. I became a different man, totally different, a stranger to myself.”
“How’d you meet such a chick?” Willis asked with genuine interest.
I drew a breath. “In a place much like this. I... my wife had died I was, you might say, in loose-ends bachelorhood One evening I was entertaining a business client and his wife.”
“How deadly dull,” decided Cleef.
“She, the client’s wife, had heard of a place similar to this one,” I said, as if the poet hadn’t interrupted “She wanted to see the sights. She insisted we go, as a lark.”
“But you, not the fellowship, were the bugs under the microscope,” Cleef intoned sagely.
“Shut up.” Willis glowered a look at his companion. “Let the man talk. Go on, pops.”
“Go on?” I sagged morosely. “Where is there to go, after Camilla? With Camilla you have been all the way.”
Willis’ eyes glinted with a grain of fresh respect. “Tough, pops.”
“Lovely while it lasted,” I amended. “I met her that night, on the lark. We grooved, as I believe you would put it.” I broke off, numbly, trying to relate the experience in my own mind to the “straight” sitting at the table with Cleef and Willis. “Then she turned me off. It was nightmare. I pleaded. She reviled. I begged — and Camilla laughed...”
“And she split the scene?” Willis finished.
“Yes,” I said, squeezing my eyes tight and seeing her face against the darkness; lovely face, mask-like face; face that could become cruel, unendurably cruel. “Yes, she split the scene.” I wrapped it up in a whisper.
Willis scratched his beard and gave his head a short shake. “Who’d have believed it?” He lifted his eyes and looked about the Moons of Jupiter. “So it was the thought of Camilla that brought you in tonight?”
“You might say that,” I agreed. I washed the final drop of Scotch from the glass against my lips. “You see, after Camilla, my home town was unbearable. I left I’ve wandered, for a long way. It hasn’t been easy.”
“Looking for another Camilla,” the poet said. “I should write about you, man, if it all wasn’t so corny.” Cleef half stood, drugged eyes flicking about the room. “Is she here tonight? Another Camilla? Do you see another Camilla, man?”
“There will never be another Camilla, sonny,” I said. “Once is enough.”
“So now you wander some more, pops?” Willis asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Why don’t we wander together, pops? Have a ball? Cleef and I have rapped about blowing this town. We’d like to see California, New Orleans, Miami when the chill winds blow.”