The Trojan Hearse (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 14

  Right now he was saying, “It will be a new age, my dear friends, a glorious age—an age without disease or want, with every need filled. Your vote for me means a vote for security, for safety—for you, your loved ones, your little babies."

  And then he stumbled just a little, a thing which Horatio Humble seldom did in a speech. He misread a word. He was going on about Medicare, denticare, momma-and-poppacare and kiddiecare; then he said. “This is the truth, the simple truth,” but it's a little difficult to say.

  And it came out, “This is the truth the thimple truth."

  He said it almost right but kind of bass-ackward, like Mordecai Withers’ “Shtop your silly-sallying,” and for a moment it sounded as if he were lisping. Like Ulysses Sebastian, for example, or like —

  I was on my feet. Rigid. Staring. All of a sudden I had it. Had it all, everything—it had all been in my dream. That apparently senseless nightmare had, after all, included all the answers.

  All of it had been in verse, in rhyme—like songs. It had, in fact, been sung.

  Sebastian had been the judge and jury, even though hoodlums sat in the box and carried out his sentences.

  I hadn't seen Johnny Troy.

  I'd seen Gary Baron, appropriately as court reporter, treating the farce as a serious trial.

  When I protested my innocence, Sebastian's voice came out of my mouth.

  There was more, but it all added up to the answer. The so-simple answer.

  When Johnny Troy, America's most popular, most loved singer of songs, thrilled the world with those songs, Francis Boyle stood smiling, handsome before the world.

  But Charley White sang.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It swept over me. I wallowed in it.

  I knew it was true. I hadn't put everything together yet to prove it, but I knew I could.

  At first I didn't even wonder about proof. I just thought: Why not? Wasn't that the official philosophy of the country? If you can't earn it, steal it. Nobody put it quite that simply, but from Washington, D.C., on down to your little old TV set, that's what it boiled down to.

  No?

  There were the TV stars who blandly urged their audiences to “Eat Yummies, I do"; or “Smoke Philters, it's my smoke"; or “I wouldn't be without my Sinkleen.” He didn't; it wasn't; the hell she wouldn't. Incidentally, Sinkleen isn't for sinks.

  There were ghost-written books and ghost-written speeches, the bald lies on movie-mag covers, a thousand examples of phony advertising, laugh tracks, unions striking for better featherbedding. There were guys like Ronald Langor; the axle-and-toilet-bowl sculptor; the puke painter—hundreds of them, all blown up and bowed to by certain “critics” and by all the duerfs.

  And that's only scraping the surface; there was more, a lot more, and now—almost inevitably, maybe—Johnny Troy.

  Lip-syncing was an old story. We'd come a long way from the day when a film star's voice was played back to her, while she mouthed the words, so she could sing well and dance at the same time. Next was somebody else's voice dubbed in for the star. Then duets sung by two other people.

  And you can do just about anything with today's sound tape—cut it like ribbon, splice it, take out, or add, as little as a single note, or even a piece of a note. An expert could take raw sounds and put them together to manufacture recognizable speech. That's almost the way some of those pop singers I've mentioned, who came along in the late fifties and early sixties, were manufactured. And when you can choose the best bits from maybe a hundred tapes of a song and put them together for the master, even Bozo the Chimp wouldn't sound too bad.

  So take a real singer. A man with a magnificent voice—like Charley White, making his first record under the name Johnny Troy. “Johnny Troy” sounds better than “Charley White.” And a hell of a lot better than Francis Boyle. Grab him up; sign him. Man, what a voice! Wait till we tape, splice, improve, and all that jazz.

  But he's a funny-faced little fat guy. Where's the sex, man? Where's that old pizzazz, the sock, the babe-appeal? This kid is only five feet, six inches tall. Can you imagine him crooning to American Womanhood? We've got to stir them up, heat their hormones. But with him? Charley White?

  So: Take an Adonis, a guy with real fire, hot blood, magnetism. He's handsome, the face and physique combined. So he can't sing; so what? Man. Daddy, I got the greatest idea since bathtubs. We'll clean up.

  Then the boom and buildup, the press-agentry; in a word, the high-powered Sebastianizing.

  If Charley White had made that first record, “Annabel Lee,” it explained a lot of things. It explained the widely circulated, and of course completely phony, Sebastian-spread story about Troy's “hysterical paralysis” of the throat. It explained why Troy—Boyle that is—and Charley were always together, including in the recording studio. “Yeah, Troy can't sing unless Charley's around.” I hope to shout he couldn't. It explained—well, the whole bit. No need to go over it all.

  “Annabel Lee” had been made by Johnny Troy in March, 1961.

  But “Johnny Troy,” or Francis Boyle, had been doing that P.S. 487 bit in the San Francisco can, the car-theft jolt, from February through July, 1961. He'd been in the slammer all during March.

  So obviously handsome Francis Boyle couldn't have made the record. But the record was made by Johnny Troy. The real one.

  I was all keyed up, heart pounding, face a little warm. Something else was trying to break through, something.... Other bits were slipping into place—the fact that Charley White had been born and grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and that Imperian Records was in Chicago, Illinois, for example. But that wasn't it. It was ... sure. Of course.

  Slowly it came. Johnny Troy was the biggest fraud in the history of entertainment. He—or, rather, they were Sebastian clients. Clearly Sebastian not only had to know of the fraud, but more: No other conclusion was possible except that Sebastian himself had engineered the fraud.

  No wonder I had to be destroyed, ridiculed, discredited—killed if possible. I had wondered why there was so much heat on me, so much sound and fury, attacks from so many different people and places. Well, Sebastian had a lot of friends, one hell of a lot, many of them in positions where they could influence hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people—which was how he'd sold Johnny Troy, among others. And there it was, there was the sensitive center of it.

  If the Johnny Troy fraud was exposed—by me—then Ulysses Sebastian would be exposed as a fraud, too. Exposed as the initiator and architect of the enormous deception. But more: If it became public knowledge that Sebastian—with the help, often innocent, but still help, of his wide network of associates and mouthpieces, his friends and those beholden to him—had foisted one fraud upon the public, why not others? “Johnny Troy” had at least been possessed of real talent, the magnificent façade of Boyle and the glorious voice of White; but what of men like the painter of “Life and Death,” the author of Lie Down and Die, the sculptors whose creations were both literally and figuratively junk? What of them and scores of others?

  All those Sebastian clients had traveled the same route, had been built up and boomed by the same claque, lauded by the same critics, given essentially the same saturation treatment—until others, not even remotely connected with Sebastian, were swept along, picked up the cry and added their applause, almost in the way that one or two men who start clapping loudly in a theater can sometimes start a thunderous ovation.

  Well, enough. Undoubtedly only a handful close to Sebastian knew the whole truth about Johnny Troy. The rest went along with Sebastian for a variety of reasons. But the great mass, the people at large, believed in and loved Johnny Troy. They believed in and at least admired, respected, Ulysses Sebastian. Probably they didn't know much about Langor, Dalton, and the rest, but assumed that where there was so much critical smoke there must be the fire of genius.

  But if I spilled the beans?

  Oh, brother.

  No wonder I was as good as dead. Most of those howling for my sc
alp had good and honest reason to do so—until and unless I proved the truth to them—but at least three sonsofbitches had lied, and lied, and lied: Ulysses Sebastian, Gary Baron, and Mordecai Withers. Three—think of that; it only took three to start it. Even if all the rest who'd jumped on me before any of the facts became known were completely honest, if they had believed Sebastian, Baron, and Withers, they had believed in and were acting on lies. The honest ones wouldn't like that. And nobody was going to like the truth about Johnny Troy.

  If I spilled that, the reaction could be like the toppling of a row of dominoes, one going down and knocking down more and more. It could take Sebastian down, and maybe much of his empire with him, from his tight-pants poets to guys like Gary Baron.

  I was pacing the floor, nerves on edge, thinking. Finally I stopped, plopped down in a chair before the TV set, lit a cigarette.

  Humble was saying, “Let us be logical. If it is true that the brotherhood of man includes all men, not merely some men, it includes our brothers behind the so-called iron curtains and bamboo curtains. We have no quarrel with the peoples of Red China or of the Soviet Union."

  True, I thought, puffing furiously on my smoke. We don't have any quarrel with the victims of kidnapers, either. It's the goddamn kidnapers we're after. But I didn't think that was what Humble meant. Nope, it wasn't.

  He continued, “They are, in the larger humanitarian sense, just as much our responsibility as the poor and needy here among us. We must aid them whenever and however we can.” There was some more blah, then he said, “In the field of foreign affairs we must continue our realistic policy of accommodation with the Soviet Union, Red China, Red Cuba, and Red Latin America. This policy, which has worked so well in the past, must not be abandoned now when we are so close to victory. Our ultimate aim is to see that these Communist nations eventually become members of the world community, through a process of peaceful evolution. Our aid to them can speed the fulfillment of this humanitarian dream."

  I didn't quite follow it all, but it sure sounded nice.

  And then the horrifying thought struck me.

  I was thinking, almost idly, as he spoke, that all the polls, all the odds, even my non-Humble opinion, indicated that Humble would be the next President of the U.S.A., particularly if he carried California, as expected. And I was imagining how pleased Ulysses Sebastian was going to be, because nobody had worked harder for Humble than Sebastian himself—and, of course, his whole apparatus, the gang that had built up the tight-pants artists and such. Humble in the last couple of years had been given, in addition to a lot of help from other sources, the Super-A-Number-One Sebastian Treatment.

  Just like Johnny Troy.

  And that was when I thought:

  When Horatio M. Humble opened his mouth—whose voice came out?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Well, it rocked me.

  But it didn't knock me dizzy. I guess some such idea as that had been under the surface of my thought ever since I'd first heard Humble yacking about. “Not the fear of death but the death of fear,” and “not a want of freedom but a freedom from want.” and “we must be held together by love or torn apart by hate.” Because those phrases bore the unmistakable stamp of the speech writers who had written the speeches and “extemporaneous remarks” for the man who'd preceded Humble as his party's candidate for the Presidency.

  Those twists and alliterative reverses simply tumbled out of them. The phrases didn't actually mean much, but they sounded pretty. And they were easy to write; they didn't require much thought; they were kind of duerfy. But hurled from on high in the stirring, ear-lovin’ voice of a Horatio Humble, they sounded deep.

  It seems to be getting old-fashioned to believe that when a man makes a speech—and acknowledges the cheers, bows to the applause—he shouldn't be reading the words, thoughts, phrases, and philosophy that somebody else wrote for him. Somebody probably not even known to the people, the voters in the case of a politician.

  But it also seems that few politicians worthy of the name—the name “politician”—write their own speeches, voice their own thoughts these days, any more than the man we called Johnny Troy sang his own songs.

  Francis Boyle, handsome, charming, magnetic, had been the perfect front for Charley White's voice.

  Horatio M. Humble, handsome, charming, magnetic, would make a perfect front for—whoever might be behind him.

  I knew who had been behind Troy.

  I didn't know who might be behind Humble.

  And I never would know unless I could somehow get out of my pickle. Neither, for that matter, would the voters, who would probably elect him President or something tomorrow. That is, elect those invisible men behind him, by voting for Humble.

  Of course, maybe I was clear out in left—make that right—field. Maybe I was all wrong about Horatio Humble. Maybe he was a rugged individualist. Well, I did know plenty—plenty that was fact, not conjecture. And I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell the whole cockeyed world about it. But these days the world wasn't listening to me. And with every minute that passed, my situation got worse.

  Humble was just finishing his speech. He wrapped it up expertly, and his last words were, “Remember that at the polls tomorrow, fellow Americans. Humble can do more for you.” He smiled, beamed, and looked very confident.

  Then, commercials. A toothy announcer was smiling, and smiling, and smiling, and saying, “Folks, you'll be glad to know that New Improved Old Reliable has been improved again. It's at your supermarket now. Just ask for new New Improved Old Reliable."

  Then that same gal in the same bathtub. Same soap. Man, it was some soap. If she didn't watch out, she was going to get pregnant.

  David Emerson's speech was scheduled for another channel, and I started out of my chair toward the set. Something must have told me to move right then. One second later would have been too late.

  I didn't hear the door open. I didn't hear a thing—unless maybe it was the hushed spat as the gun was fired. But I felt the bullet go past, nicking my chin just enough to bring blood, and I heard it smack into the wall.

  The rest happened in two or three seconds. I didn't think at all. It was as if I moved in frozen silence, reacting automatically, squatting, then uncoiling my legs and leaping sideways, turning in the air, hand jumping beneath my coat and grabbing the .38 there.

  I was still in the air, turned toward the door with the gun in my hand and still turning, when he fired again. I didn't hear the sound this time, either, but I felt the slug rake my ribs. I saw him. Inside, with the door just closing behind him. I was spread out in the air with my feet slanting toward him and lower than my head. But my arm was pointed at him, gun at its end, and I jerked off one shot, then hit the floor hard, skidded and flipped over onto my belly, swinging my arm back toward him again.

  But I didn't fire. He stood in the same spot, but he was leaning back against the door. The gun was in his hand—a revolver with a long tube extending forward from its muzzle, a dumb-gat, a silenced pistol. But his hand was jammed against his chest. The gun wasn't pointing at me.

  He made a sound. Not a word but a muffled half-cry, half-cough, and bent forward a little. It was Tony Anguish, teeth shoved together, lips parted, pain squeezing his eyes nearly shut.

  I scrambled up, jumped forward, and slapped the gun from his grip. When I hit his hand he turned slightly, fell heavily to his knees.

  From there he twisted his head up toward me and said through his teeth, “You bastard. You bastard. You've killed me. It's—” and the words choked off in a grunt. Blood was pouring through his fingers now, over the hand pressed against the hole in him.

  I shoved my gun back in its holster. “I'll call an ambulance. You don't deserve it, you sonofabitch. But I'll call. Only don't expect me to stick around and—"

  “It don't make no difference.” He'd sunk down on his haunches, both arms wrapped around his chest, hands squeezing his ribs. He wasn't looking at me, but past me. “Don't make no dif
ference,” he said again. “That one did it. I know—"

  His voice was still strong enough; he just stopped in the middle of the sentence. His eyes were bright and staring, like the eyes of a man with high fever. I saw it happen. I've seen it before. Enough times that I've wondered what really goes on in the mind of a man when he knows, knows for sure, that he's dying.

  It wasn't much. It just seemed that the fever went out of his eyes, and they got cold. And he shivered. His head jerked a little.

  Then he said quietly, almost as if we were having a friendly conversation, “Joe sent us boys out. Six of us. Twenty-five G's to the guy that gets you. Never seen him in such a sweat. All of them looking for you, every cop in town, half the goddamn jerks in the country looking, and I'm the lucky one who finds you. Twenty-five—never been so close to twenty-five G's in my life—oh."

  His features contorted as a spasm of pain gripped him. “Oh, Jesus."

  “I'll call—"

  “Skip it.” It looked as if he tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth didn't turn up. “I only got a minute,” he said. “Want to tell you. Jesus, here I'm turning fink at the end. Who'd of thought—Oh, goddammit. I didn't think it'd hurt so goddamn much."

  I put my hand on his shoulder, steadied him. “Joe?” I said. “Joe Rice?"

  “Sure, Joe Rice. We missed you on Benedict Canyon, but it wasn't so important then. Now it's important. You wouldn't believe how important."

  I glanced at the door, closed now. I must have left it unlocked after tossing the paper out there and ducking back inside. Apparently nobody had noticed the one shot; at least, there wasn't any commotion. But if Tony had made it to here, soon others would, too.

  “How'd you find me?” I asked him.

  “Knew you might check into some place to stay. The six of us took different parts of the phone book, started checking. I got the first part of the book."