The Kubla Khan Caper (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  “Lyssa,” I hissed. “Lyssa doll, honey, Sweetp-p-p—hey. Who—who—what is that?”

  “That’s Bull. My boyfriend.”

  “You call that a boy?”

  The subject of this jollity was staring straight at Lyssa and me, his mouth working a little, and his eyes appearing, at least from my disadvantage point, to be flashing red and pink and blue lights, and it did not help a bit that I, like the number-one champeen sap of all the world, was still standing there clutching Lyssa’s friendly rear end. Well, these friends had come to a parting of the ways.

  The big, black, flashing-eyed monster started toward me, as if fully wound up and just turned on. Probably Lyssa had turned him on. She’d turned me on—that was the trouble. Jerry Vail was standing in front of the human tank but the big ape didn’t go around, he just walked straight ahead. His shoulder hit Vail and Jerry simply spun in the air, staggered, and banged into a table to the sound of crashing dinnerware.

  Well, I thought, first thing, I’d better let go of Lyssa’s behind. I didn’t seem to be thinking with razor-sharp perspicacity, or even noodles. Bull was getting a lot closer. And bigger.

  I had time to speak to Lyssa. “Honey, it was fun,” I said, “while it lasted.”

  It wasn’t much of a line, but I put a lot of feeling into it. After all, it was a memorable moment. We’d known each other not long, but lots, and I wanted Lyssa to know, wherever I went, I’d be watching over her.

  “He’s mad,” Lyssa said. “Oh, I can tell he’s mad.”

  “Yeah? How can you tell?”

  No sense talking to her anymore.

  I turned back toward Bull. He was practically here now. I planted my feet, faced him squarely. I’d seen Jerry Vail stride across this same floor earlier, same route, same destination. But not a bit the same, really. He’d been like a Viking war barge and all that. This wasn’t. This was an earthquake rolling over the land during some thunderstorms.

  Well, I asked myself sourly, what did you expect?

  I’d had that creepy feeling. I’d had a hunch it was one of those nights. The bat-voice whispers had been filling the air all around me; I just hadn’t been listening.

  I’d gone on ahead, throwing my weight around, yak-king with Lyssa, and now look at me. Babes, I thought, they’ll be the death of me. Babes, I amended, they’ll be the death of me in a minute.

  Less than a minute. About a second.

  I braced myself. Whatever was going to happen, I suppose I’d asked for it. I’d almost heard the distant fee-fi-fo-fum. But had I played it smart? Not me.

  So here I stood—out in the rain, with no umbrella.

  9

  Bull stopped a foot away and stared at me—down at me—for a second that lasted approximately a minute, then he cranked his big head around toward my new girl.

  “Lyssa, baby,” he said. The voice was like rumblings deep in a long-dormant island volcano preparing to sink the island. “Lyssa, baby, make tracks.”

  “You just settle right down,Bull Harper. You settle down or I’ll poke you in the eye with a high heel.”

  “Lyssa, baby—”

  “Don’t you baby me. I know that look on your dumb face. You want to kill somebody, don’t you?”

  I groaned.

  Bull said, “It’s none of your business.”

  “You’re my business, honey.” She paused for a beat and said, “So’s he, you want to know it. He’s a nice man.”

  “Yeah?” He stared at her, then leaned over closer to me. “Hey,” he said. “Hey. I seen you feeling her delicate can.”

  “Oh?”

  Well, here it was. The moment of truth. What could I tell him? What could I tell him that would sidetrack his homicidal mania? My brain wasn’t going clickety-click yet, and I didn’t come up with the just-right answer immediately.

  “Well, Mr. Harper,” I said. “Or Bull. Do you mind if I call you Bull? Ah . . . Well, Mr. Harper, the—are you sure that’s what you saw?”

  “I seen it with my own eyeballs, and I know what I seen.”

  “That makes pretty good sense.”

  “Come on, come on. Was you or wasn’t you?”

  I sighed. I spread my feet a little wider. “Well, yes,” I said, “I was.”

  “Ha! I knew that was what I seen!”

  Then he did a very interesting thing. He wound four fingers and a thumb into two big fists. Then he hauled them back with the obvious intent of thundering them down on me. I got ready to duck and try to hit him eight or nine times before he could get all set again.

  And, as always at moments of real peril, my brain juice started flowing more speedily. Up there in the labyrinthine paths of my hollow-fang-filled brain, the answer hissed. All became euphorically lucid, clear and shining. What could I say to this guy at the moment of truth? Why, naturally—the truth. With, perhaps, just a little embellishment.

  “Hold it,” I said rapidly. “You know what I did, sure. But don’t you want to know why?”

  He hesitated. “Not ‘specially,” he said.

  “Of course you do. Any normal man would want to know why.”

  “I figger I know why. Why else?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking rapidly, “that . . . makes pretty good sense, too.”

  “Bull Harper, you listen to the man.”

  Little Lyssa was still in there trying. She was a doll. I flashed her a grateful look, then said to Bull, “I agree with her.”

  “Listen to what?” Bull asked. “What’s to listen to?”

  “Well, Bull,” I said, “I’ll tell you. Do you realize Lyssa does not wear a girdle?”

  “Hell, yes, I realize.”

  “I’m glad of that . . . I think. Now, pay attention. I have long been convinced that girdles are adjustable racks, expandable torture chambers not only for the women they so agonizingly encase but for the men—ah, especially the men—who must endure even greater pains than the wives, lovers, mothers, even little babes, who wear girdles only because they have been brainwashed by a great deal of eyewash. Why, I have seen women forty-five pounds underweight wearing girdles. Would you believe that?”

  “No. And the hell with it.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m trying to tell you—”

  “What’s all this noise got to do with Lyssa?”

  “What, indeed? Well, ah, umm . . . Well, I have just begun considering forming an international organization to eliminate this threat to beauty, health and sanity. Would you believe that? It will be called the Society to Abolish Girdles, familiarly known as SAG, and while I had not mentioned this to Lyssa, it is at least possible I would eventually have gotten around to it.”

  “It don’t make no—”

  “First, of course, it would be necessary to be assured that she was on my side, that she was not some kind of girdle-loving subversive infiltrating my rank—ranks. In other words, that she did not wear a girdle.”

  “I plainly don’t understand a word of it,” he said. “And I aim to teach you—”

  He was already aiming. He had hauled that big long arm and those fists back again and was just about ready to let it go, but the realization that I’d at least kept him listening instead of hitting for nearly a minute, combined with the nearness of that four-fingers-and-a-thumb disaster, provided sufficient stimulus to my glands, noodles and tonsils to steam me up enough that I kept talking and he kept listening, and I figured if I could just talk fast enough all night I might yet see the dawn.

  So as he got all set for the blow and started to grunt, I said rapidly, raising my voice a bit and turning it on like a carnival barker, “Hold it, hold it, friend, now I want you to step right up here and hang onto your earlobes because you are going to hear a tale that will make your ears fly right off your head if you loosen your grip.”

  My blood pressure was up about fifty points but, by golly. Bull hadn’t done it yet. He was actually listening. The momentary reprieve gave wings to my tongue and from then on it fairly flew.

  “It ju
st so happens,” I continued speedily, “that I am perhaps the number-one girdle-hater west of the Rockies, and when I manage to seize enough power, as president of SAG, I intend to pass laws outlawing them. In the meantime, I hope to work with entomologists to develop a bug which will eat them all up like locusts in the prairies.”

  With something of a shock I realized that the clatter and clink of dishes and drink had stopped. The men and women at tables near me were turned toward me, listening with expressions that varied from interest-to astonishment to curdling dismay.

  But I couldn’t stop now. Bull had that big hand up by his ear, but he wasn’t yet hanging onto the earlobe, so I didn’t pause or even lower my voice but just kept on going.

  “I want you to get this, Bull. I feel that every girdle should be taxed a thousand dollars for every inch of gird. If women must wear the things, it is only justice to make them pay the cost of the multiple frustrations—leading inevitably to wars and holocausts—which they unquestionably cause. Another thing: if instead of destroying them or letting the bugs eat them up we turned them over to the military, somebody in the Pentagon could devise millions of catapults which we could use against the Red Chinese in guerrilla warfare—especially from those real springy ones that never wear out; even when washed in soap.”

  Some nut yelled, “Hear, hear!” and there was even a scattering of applause. Damn, I thought, they may ruin my concentration. So I went on helter-skelter.

  “And now hear this: With a return to anatomical sanity, women will automatically become wiser. At first, of course, they may become dizzier, for when they remove the tourniquets which for so long have strangled their arteries, veins, livers, kidneys, bladders and yoohoos, there will be a great rush of blood to their brains and they may faint and fall down like stones. But in the end they will become wiser, through providing nourishment to their noodles. Right now, they are very dull in the end, as anyone can tell you who has grabbed a handful of machinery, all unsuspecting.”

  Damned if there wasn’t a great rattle of applause. From the corners of my eyes I could see guys—yeah, all of them were guys—clapping, and a couple even whistled, and one middle-aged character yelled, “You hear that, Sarah?”

  I didn’t let it bother me but continued, not merely to Bull but now to everybody else in the Seraglio. “Friends, it has happened to me, and it is like walking into a door in the darkness. Believe me, once people really get this message, it will spread from city to city, from settlement to hamlet to town to—In time it will ungirdle the earth.

  “Now, think what this means! Think of it, friends! Babes all over the place, looking real, and smiling, the lines of self-inflicted strangulation gone from their faces, rich red blood circulating and singing in the veins, not just lying there and going plop. Husbands home from a hard day at the office will find their wives springing at them from the middle of the living room. Millions of women all at once taking deep breaths for the first time in scores of bitter years may stir up enough wind to blow all the smog away! Men, are you with me?”

  That just popped out, but by golly they were—twenty or thirty voices boomed, “Yes!” From spots in the room came cries of “You know it!” and “Say it again!”

  I was really charged up now. Or crocked.

  “Men,” I yelled at the top of my lungs, “I can see the sunrise! I can see a brighter day ahead! I can see millions of men banding together in SAG—under my leadership, of course—to demand then: God-given rights! And, at last, the butt of many jokes will be enshrined, will take its proper and fitting place in our culture. Statues to old-fashioned derrieres will be erected in the halls of Congress, in major cities, even in county seats. I can see them now: Great, granite busts of fannies all over the landscape, rising like mating half-moons to the north, the south, the east, west, everywhere you look—fannies.

  “The mind goggles—boggles. Men, the certainties are immense, and the possibilities endless. In one swoop—sweep—we can eliminate girdles, wipe out aggression and guerrilla warfare, restore the health of inhibited womanhood, raise taxes, beautify the landscape, and bring back the light of radiant joy to the eyes of all mankind. So, men, I say to you: Down with Girdles! Back to Nature! Upward and Onward! And—Forward to Victory!”

  Well, all hell busted loose. Applause and shouts bounced from the rafters. Boy, they were really drunk. A dozen or more men got to their feet and beat their hands and stomped their shoes on the floor, and three women got up and walked stiffly out. They did not, of course, jiggle when they walked, which is why they walked stiffly.

  Bull was looking at me with a very intent expression on his chops. Finally he said, “Yeah. Forget all that. What about I seen you feeling her delicate fanny.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “Go ahead and hit me.”

  “Bull Harper!” That was Lyssa. “I’ll kick you in the eyes with my heels, I swear, you ever-lovin’—”

  “Wait a minute!” I yelled at Bull in sudden inspiration. I had to yell in order to be heard above the still continuing pandemonium. “Wait a minute!”

  He’d been looking at Lyssa and now he cranked his head back toward me. “Bull,” I said. “don’t you realize? You can’t hit me. Not now.”

  “I can’t?”

  “Of course not. Not if you value your life. Look around us, Bull. Can’t you see? These are my—my people. They’re with me. I’m their—their leader now. See?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If you fait me they’ll assume it’s because you didn’t like what I said. They’ll think you disagree with me. That you’re a girdle-lover. Do you want that?”

  “I guess not. But—”

  “Don’t stop to think—ah, I mean, think about it. Bull. They’d tear you to bits and pieces. They’re not individual men anymore. They’re animals, they’re an avenging mob. They’re all charged up, lusting to go out and grab girdles. If you aren’t careful, they’ll leap on you all at once, pound you, massacre you. No, Bull, the moment is past It’s too late.”

  He stared at me. Then he looked at Lyssa. “Lyssa, baby, what you think?”

  “Oh, he’s right, Bull,” she said. “No question, he’s right.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe so.” He shook his head some more. “But, I . . . got a feeling . . . “

  The shouting had died down now, and a little old man stopped next to me on his way out. He put a thin, trembling hand on my shoulder and looked up at me from sorrowful eyes. “I could have wept,” he said. He was about ninety years old—too late for him.

  I looked at Bull. “You see?”

  “Huh,” he said. Then, “Come on, Lyssa baby, let’s make tracks.”

  And make tracks they did. But when only a few feet away, Lyssa turned her head and, with heat lightning flickering in those innocent round eyes, winked.

  “You quit that,” I said.

  And then they were gone.

  10

  I just stood there, silently saying, “Glory be,” over and over, until suddenly Jerry Vail was standing next to me.

  He didn’t speak. He beckoned with a trembling finger, turned, and stalked out of the lounge, across the lobby and into his office. I followed him inside and shut the door.

  He looked at me for a while, shaking his head. Then he said slowly and deliberately, “Will you tell me what the hell was the meaning of that ridiculous exhibition?”

  “Well, for one thing, I just don’t like girdles,” I said.

  He started to say something else, stopped, did that again and once again, looking very much like a man chewing a sticky cud, and finally he said, “That’s all you’ve got to say, Scott?”

  “Hell, didn’t I say enough?”

  “I suppose you’re not interested in what is happening to Mr. Monaco.”

  “Sure I am. Indeed I am. The things I’ve gone through for that man. Well, how is he?”

  “He is, as you might be able to guess, not happy. One could even say his agitation has reached remarkable proportions. However, I
am assured he will be released within the hour, possibly in the next few minutes. He will, of course, be interested in knowing how you are progressing with the case. How are you?”

  “Fine, how are you?”

  “You imbecile, you know what I meant. I meant, how are you progressing with the case?”

  “Yeah. I knew it. I’m not quite back to normal yet. Well, you know how it is. A little here, a little there . . . “

  “In other words, you’ve actually nothing valid to report.”

  “Well, you could say that. But, Mr. Vail, it’s often that way in my cases. I go along picking up a clue here and a clue there, and half the time I don’t even know I’ve got clues. Really, it happens. Why, I’ll bet I’ve already got three or four important clues I don’t even know about. But as soon as the old subconscious—”

  “Please spare me the details.”

  He mumbled something else, but I was thinking of what I’d just told him. Come to think of it, I’d been right. I was sure I’d already learned quite a number of things of real importance, even though some of them might have bypassed my brain. Temporarily, of course. For example, there was—yeah. Those bits from Lyssa. Jeanne wanting to talk to Ephrim Sardis’ bodyguard. A guy named—uh-huh. Bull Harper. I knew I’d heard that name somewhere before.

  Well, it was a shuddering thought: I was going to have to hunt up Bull Harper and talk to him again.

  Perhaps to drive that thought out of my mind, and with the rest of what Lyssa had told me still in it, I said to Vail, “Did Jeanne talk to you or your wife about Mr. Sardis?”

  “Jeanne?”

  “Jeanne Jax. The dead girl.”

  “Her? Why in hell would she talk to us about Ephrim?”

  “Beats me. I merely wondered if she asked either of you any questions about him.”

  He stared at me for quite a while, a peculiarly intent expression on his face. Finally he said deliberately, “She did not. And I feel certain she did not ever talk to my wife. But I fail to grasp the relevance. Are you sure, Scott, that you know what you’re doing?”