Read Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 Online
Authors: The Venus Deal
Tags: #FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General
Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (14 page)
Hickey left his car behind Rudy’s and caught a Checker cab, which dropped him, at 1:40
A.M.
, as close to the ferry landing as traffic allowed. The ferry was a shortcut across the harbor to Coronado Island, actually part of an isthmus that met the coastline twenty miles south, almost to Mexico. The ferry saved the sailors and civilian workers commuting to the air base at North Island half an hour each trip and a couple gas stamps a month.
Long after the graveyard rush, a troop of cars still backed up into Harbor Drive, and gangs of stevedores and mechanics bunched at the pedestrian turnstile. The ferry creaked and moaned as if each machine that rattled on were the last it could bear and every swell caused a pang of woe. Finally the horn bellowed. The ferry pitched into the harbor with implausible speed, heading straight for the destroyer
Alabama
as though on a ramming mission. It bounded over the wakes of patrol boats, landing craft on training maneuvers, pilot boats racing to deliver a captain or admiral who’d closed Rudy’s or the Playroom, back to his quarters on one of the dark ships that lined North Island or anchored in midharbor. When the ferry cut north to round the
Alabama
, Hickey watched Point Loma. Low on the cliffs, there were flashes like brief signal lights from where antiaircraft guns sentineled the harbor. Above them, a couple miles from Otherworld, the lighthouse glowed.
Hickey’d made his way along the rail—lined with pedestrians and drivers who relished the splash of fresh, salty, oily air—to the bow. As they turned south and passed beneath one of the barrage balloons, Hickey scanned the mile-long shoreline of dry docks and gazed around the south bay at condemned barges, homemade rafts, sailboats with rotted side planks and broken masts, skiffs tiny enough for a kid to row yet outfitted with tarps or tents—the floating squatter city of laborers from Consolidated, National Shipbuilding, or North Island.
“Hell of a mess, ain’t it?” the tremendously wide fellow beside Hickey philosophized. “We got a harbor fulla Okies. I coulda got crew chief last week hadn’t been a Okie whines to the super he’s got eleven brats, needs the six extra bucks a week, gets the job.”
His pal beside him attempted a laugh, which ended in a mighty wheeze. “You was crew chief, Gordo, Howie and me’d be snoozing all night long.”
The fat guy snatched the asthmatic’s cap and whacked him a few times as they ambled toward an old Ford, while the ferry bumped, repelled, finally righted against the dock. The asthmatic climbed into the driver’s seat.
Hickey approached and asked for a lift to North Island. He rounded the car, got into the back, and sat beside the fat guy behind a stately Negro fellow, about fifty, tall enough so the drooping headliner grazed his hair, quiet as though he were the white men’s prisoner.
They rattled off the ferry and up Fourth Street, the fat guy alternately gobbling pork rinds and peanuts and grumbling about Okies while the asthmatic wheezed and chortled at his pal’s vehemence, and Hickey sat as still and ponderous as the Negro, staring with his eyes closed at the bodice of Madeline’s red dress and the sapphire hanging there. Whenever his gaze started rising toward her face, he flinched and looked back down.
The stevedores dropped him at the main gate, showed their passes, and drove on. Hickey’s passage was about as easy as gaining admission to Betty Grable’s dressing room. He showed his guns, the permits, and the copy of his investigator’s license to the Shore Patrol guard, a boy who looked fourteen or so and seemed to move in slow motion. He called for reinforcements, a chief whose cowboy boots with three-inch heels and hair poofed higher than Billy Martino’s still brought him only up to Hickey’s chin. Barking like a terrier, the chief made Hickey repeat the whole routine before he phoned somebody who phoned Colonel Creaser’s aide, who woke the colonel, who grabbed the phone and raged at the chief, commanding him to get Hickey to runway seven on the double.
The chief gave Hickey a one-fingered salute, wheeled, and stomped away. “You got five minutes, is all,” the guard said. A minute later, a jeep came speeding that way.
Hickey bounded into the jeep beside a stocky Wave who wore goggles as though to blaze through the night in a biplane or race car, but who drove like Grandma, leapfrogging and grinding every gear, swerving timidly around the B-17 Flying Fortresses, the Mustang fighters, the biplane trainers, and a Consolidated Catalina flying boat to the Douglas DC-3 Hickey was booked on, which looked more like a dirigible with wings and had the inscription
DUMB DUCK
lettered beneath the pilot’s window.
The passenger seats had been gutted, all but a dozen removed to make way for cargo. Every space except a single aisle was stuffed head-high with crates marked
LOWRY
beside a collage of numbers and the symbol of Consolidated Air. Hickey commandeered a double seat in the rear, hidden by the crates and half the length of the craft from the other passengers. They were a trio of marine privates who’d smuggled aboard a bottle of something that pleased them enormously. Every few seconds one of them would guffaw. There were a few empty seats up by the marines, but Hickey chose solitude. He had reading to do, except that there was no light. He had sleep to catch up on, if allowed by the accommodations and turbulence—both of the sky and of his mind. And there were several matters of life and death to consider.
The plane taxied, then lurched and seesawed up and out to sea. After climbing through the fog, it swung a wide turn and headed northeast. From what Hickey could see—the crest of Mount Soledad and a few glimpses of coastline through breaks in the fog—they passed over La Jolla, where Madeline might still be with Paul Castillo. Licking his wounds.
He bounced up, grabbed a crate for balance, and staggered forward past the marines into the cockpit, where he asked the copilot—a hairy civilian with a gray-flecked beard and the gaze of a football coach looking for an excuse to launch into sarcasm—if he could borrow a flashlight. The copilot rummaged through a cardboard box and found one. On the way back Hickey nodded to the marines. They scowled as if he’d threatened to impound their bottle.
Cold was already seeping through the metal of the fuselage when Hickey put on his glasses, arranged himself crosswise on the seats, drew his knees up close, and opened the last of Cynthia’s books.
Over several pages, she described how Venus had stolen the reins to Otherworld, using her sex magnetism and reminding the Enlightened in blatant and subtle ways that Madame A had received from the master whose initials are CCB the message that she was destined to lead them. Where Madame T had been the snake charmer and lawgiver, Madame A the benevolent despot, the matriarch, Madame Esmé was a simple mystic. The previous madames had gathered a following of wealthy patrons who funded the community and its many publications and crusades. Mild, honest Madame Esmé couldn’t charm new money to the society or bully old money into staying, the way the others had. In 1925, the year Cynthia was born, Madame Esmé turned all fiscal matters over to her attorney, Henry Tucker, and to Venus.
The Bitch was almost seven, a mean one already. From birth she’d been colicky, demanding, the kind who’d tug people’s earrings or hair, gouge their eyes or bite rather than let them pet her. More and more, Venus avoided her, leaving Henry in charge. When he couldn’t stand the brat, he’d drop her at the orphans’ nursery.
Naturally, when the world got blessed with Cynthia, she was the other extreme. A lovable baby who slept through the night from her second day, such a beauty that all the women of Otherworld begged for time with her, and even Venus cherished her company. But nobody loved her the way Henry did. For hours he’d ride her around Otherworld and along the beach, on his shoulders and in his arms. At dinner she’d sit on his lap while he spooned each bite for her. If she got a mild fever, he’d stay up all night, swabbing her with cool washcloths.
The Bitch learned to hate me because Daddy loved me so. The year I was born, she’d gone to live in the Raja Yoga school. It was only two hundred yards from our cottage, but under Madame T’s system, with studies all day, arts in the evening, garden and kitchen chores in between, and since all students—except Venus when she was a girl—lived in the barracks, the Bitch only stayed with us on Sundays. At every chance she would slap or scratch me, tear my clothes. If Daddy gave me a doll, the Bitch would steal it and throw it into the incinerator.
Once she realized Daddy loved me more than her, Venus hated us both—she can’t abide sharing love, so just by existing, I turned her against me and Daddy. Before my first birthday she weaned me, though the Bitch had gotten to nurse for three years. The first time Venus slapped me for trying to suckle, Daddy says, was the same day she hung the curtain between her side of the bedroom and Daddy’s. It was heavy, like canvas, only bright royal blue. She’d always insisted on separate beds, and now she denied him the sight of her, knowing her beauty inspired him. She commanded that nobody should budge the curtain. There were doors on each side of the room, allowing her to sneak out whenever she pleased. He never caught her roaming. He never knew she’d been visiting Will Lashlee until she boasted of her whoring, that summer after Saint Ophelia first saved me.
If Ophelia had only stayed invisible like other guardian angels, who knows how different our lives could be?
The vision appeared at twilight, in August. I was splashing in the shore break below the cliffs. The Bitch swam out to deep water and waved and called to lure me out there like she always did, so she could laugh at the surf knocking me down while she pranced over it like a dolphin.
Between each wave I would splash out a little farther. I didn’t frighten as long as I could touch bottom, but I crossed a ledge, and while three swells tossed me, even my toes couldn’t reach the sand, and the ebb of each wave dragged me farther out. I screamed. With every roll and heave, I bobbed down and gulped water. Then a towering breaker whacked me squarely. I tumbled head over heels and swirled, until my back crashed on the sand in only a couple feet of water.
Venus stood at the water’s edge, gaping in horror, as if my face had gotten shredded by the sand. I leaped up, bawling, my knees slapping together.
“Who are you?” Venus yelled, then fell to her knees, head in her arms, and wept hysterically. When I touched her shoulder, she threw her head back, glaring at me, and demanded, “Did you see her?”
“Who?” I asked.
Venus sprang up, bolted to the cliff trail and ran away. I never knew why until years later when Daddy told me about the vision, how Venus had seen her dead sister Ophelia standing behind me, aglow, her fingers caressing my hair. How all that night Venus had wept and confessed to Daddy that Ophelia had returned from the dead to destroy her.
You see, Father, she believes Ophelia and I are the same spirit.
Over and over, I’ve asked Saint Ophelia why she had to appear to Venus. Nobody but me has her guardian angel materialize. Nobody else has to watch her mother run away from her in terror, to hide out in her room behind a blue curtain and hear her mother yell at Daddy, “Keep that devil away from me!”
It was fear of Ophelia that punished her with the searing headaches and fevers that had started the day of the vision and kept growing worse, so bad at the end that she’d run out at night just to wander the grounds, cursing and howling like a harpy. Two years she lived in torment, until Miss V returned from studying psychology and hermeneutics in Salzburg and hypnotized her. Only then Venus remembered how Ophelia died, and the demon headaches and fevers left her. Like Miss V taught us, demons only thrive in our unconscious. Once we raise them to consciousness, their banishment can begin. Venus banished hers by vowing that she or the Bitch would kill me.
Hickey slammed the ledger closed, slapped it down on the seat beside him. He sprang to his feet, grabbing into a pocket for the golf tee he carried, and crushed the fire in his pipe, then hurdled his suitcase and staggered down the aisle, hoping to God the pilot would let him radio a message to Leo.
At the passage to the cockpit he stopped abruptly and anchored himself to the curtain rod, to keep from teetering while he thought through the quandary that gripped him.
Even certain that Cynthia’d paid off Katoulis and sent him on his mission, Hickey’d only guessed that the mark was Pravinshandra. Almost as likely, it could be the Bitch. So he ought to send Leo to shadow Laurel. Except that he might as well ask the old guy to swim the English Channel and sink a few U-boats on the way. His partner, at times, could be shrewd enough to compensate for age and slow hands. But Donny was a genius.
Hickey staggered back along the corridor to his seat, stared at the black universe, and thought how this show could end like one of those operas Madeline dragged him to, with bodies flopped all over the stage—the Bitch and Leo murdered, Cynthia a suicide, himself gone berserk with rage in pursuit of Katoulis, guaranteeing his own swift demise.
If he could orchestrate things so that only one person had to die, besides Katoulis, Hickey’s choice would be the master. He could only think of three humans who might deserve extinction more than a murdering rapist charlatan. He could forget Denver, leave the master to his deserts, make a U-turn, go home, and cover the Bitch himself. Not likely, from a mile in the air, with a pilot who surely wouldn’t disobey orders, risking court-martial, for the sake of one girl, when there were whole continents dying. Maybe at Lowry he could phone Colonel Creaser, arrange for return passage, but it would cost him most of today.
The best he could do was give the Bitch up to fate, hope that if she took the five-millimeter slug—Donny’s favorite ammunition—between the eyebrows, he could salvage a little of Cynthia’s future by getting her to cut a deal that allowed them to fry Katoulis. Meanwhile, he’d fill and light his pipe, open red ledger number three, and lose himself reading.
Over twenty pages Cynthia relived Laurel’s attempts to kill her. By spooking the pony Henry had given her, while Cynthia rode along the cliff trail. By shoving a radio off a bathroom shelf into Cynthia’s bathwater. Each time, Ophelia saved her.
During summer, 1932, as Otherworld suffered fiscal woes and shortages after their patrons’ generosity had waned, Venus began challenging Madame Esmé’s leadership. She questioned the madame’s dogma, the curriculum of the Raja Yoga School, the expenditures for philanthropy.
Over a year of skirmishes, gentle Madame Esmé realized that to save Otherworld, she would have to silence Venus, the reason she finally called Daddy into her quarters and gave him the truth of Ophelia’s death, as she had heard it from Madame T.
“I beg your forgiveness, Henry. I should’ve told you before the marriage. Charge my failure, if you will, to concern for poor Venus. She desperately needs the stability I hoped she could find with you.”
“Venus pushed her sister?” Daddy moaned. “But under hypnosis she revealed that when her sister thrust herself off to slide, Venus lunged to stop her but missed her altogether. She was only blamed because her mother and godmother, even Madame T, mistook her lunge to save Ophelia.”
“There are men who become women under hypnosis, Henry,” wise Madame Esmé replied, “and women who believe they are elephants or onions. Ask yourself, if Venus was innocent, why did her mother and father send her away?”
There’s the evidence, Father McCullough. How many more of us will she kill, besides Ophelia, Will Lashlee, Mr. Murphy, Daddy, Madame Esmé? Look at the old photos of Daddy, then look at him now. How much evidence do they need? Why isn’t she on death row?
The day Madame Esmé told him the story, Daddy started searching for Katy the maid. You see, he is the one of a thousand people who seeks the truth no matter if it profits or ruins him. Of course, he hoped to bring Madame Esmé proof that Venus’ hypnotic recollection was true and learn that the woman he cherished wasn’t a born murderer, so the day an attorney Daddy knew located Katy in Seattle, Daddy rushed up there on the train and learned the truth.
He never told Venus or Madame Esmé, or anybody except me, and that almost nine years later. Last summer, after the Bitch killed him, he confided in me, when he couldn’t protect me any longer and he saw I would have to fight her on my own, to the death. Even Saint Ophelia never told me that Venus had murdered her. She never meant Venus harm. Her mission is to bless and protect me.
Knowing the truth only deepened poor Daddy’s love for Venus. In a fit of passion, anyone can murder, he maintains, and he believes that Venus had already paid far too dearly. He kept seeking a route to peace between Venus and Madame Esmé, which earned him Venus’ hatred.
The war escalated with Venus’ claims that the madame was losing her sense, entering her second childhood. Meanwhile, Venus would order the Bitch to take me swimming in the ocean after reports of a fierce riptide or dare us to scale the most treacherous cliffs, and each attempt I survived left Venus more terrified of me. By my ninth year she rarely touched me except by grasping my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length. While she used to gaze tenderly at me or, after the vision, stare distressed and bewildered, as though I carried the black plague, now she couldn’t look at me without her eyes blinking twice as often as they should and her mouth constricting, wormlike. Only the Bitch got her tender glances.
Hickey had filled the rear of the cabin with smoke from his pipe, attempting to counter his sleepiness with nicotine. Once he’d staggered up front and bummed a mug of lukewarm coffee from the copilot. The marines, having killed their bottle, performed a cacophony of snores as though rehearsing for the din of battle. Besides all that to keep him awake, he’d got jolted by teasers from Cynthia’s story, like her listing of Venus’ victims—Will Lashlee, Otherworld’s semifamous poet, and Mr. Murphy, who could be the realtor, Laurel’s boss. The plane clattered and sent eerie, quivering sounds coursing around its shell, like the music people got out of a saw, and Hickey’s mind kept flashing images from eleven years ago when he should’ve killed Donny Katoulis. Except he’d been a—what? A sap. Coward. On top of the rest, there was a feeling like his guts had got knotted in barbed wire from worrying about Madeline. Still, two mostly sleepless nights had caught up. His eyes kept snapping closed, his chin whacking his breastbone.
He skimmed the next few pages, on the lookout for stuff that mattered, especially the kind that might convince him that the master, or Venus, anyway not the Bitch, had to be Donny’s target. Or stuff that would help him choose between the two plans that had started congealing—basically the same except that plan X had him exterminating Katoulis
before
the murder. Plan Y incorporated a slight delay.
He read more accounts of attempted murder. The Bitch had an MO of conspiring with wildlife in her wicked deeds. She tugged little Cynthia by the arm through waist-high water to where she couldn’t miss stepping on a stingray, whose tail shot up and jabbed its tail spike into her butt, at about the same location where she’d gotten branded nine years later. The Bitch led her to a similar assault by a jellyfish. Another time she almost got Cynthia to pet a rabid wild dog that lived in the cemetery. The night of Cynthia’s first bloody flow, she was home alone with the Bitch, who ordered her to lie down, tore the panties off her and stuffed her with a dishrag, so deep it ripped her flesh and infected her, causing weeks of a high-grade fever. Enough, Hickey thought. He’d earned a respite. He staggered up front past the marines—two of whom had forsaken their seats for the floor in between and lay with arms and legs sprawled over each other—and asked the copilot for one of the blankets he’d noticed earlier piled behind the seat. The blanket was wool, from a sheep that ate brambles and thumbtacks, Hickey mused. Between scratching and analyzing Cynthia’s tale, he drifted into sleep.
He couldn’t exactly remember the dreams, but when he woke to the plane falling like a bomb through an air pocket, the dread and shame stayed with him, like before whenever his dreams recalled that he should’ve killed Donny Katoulis.
Eleven years ago. Four cops—Mouse, Smollet, Arturo, and Hickey—were playing poker at Mouse’s place, Hickey for the first time that year. Mouse answered the phone. A minute later he slammed it down, then furiously guzzled his beer and wrenched open another. The call had been from a fag bartender at Moonglow, a jazz club on La Cienaga. From a swishy but otherwise decent guy they’d nicknamed Myrtle, who snitched now and then, usually to Mouse and Hickey. Myrtle had a sister, a black-haired, lavender-eyed doll with knockers that landed a job every time a studio cast harem-girl types. Not often enough, though, to keep the wolves from her door. The latest wolf had been Donny Katoulis. Myrtle, like most everybody, hated the guy. After a month or so, he’d talked his sister into skipping town, to ditch Katoulis. Which brought Donny to Moonglow the night of Mouse’s poker game.
Katoulis backhanded Myrtle a couple times, pounded his head against the wall, and requested the sister’s whereabouts. At which point Myrtle got in a lucky kick, gaining time to draw the stiletto he carried. When Katoulis blindly flew at him, Myrtle, going for the kill, missing by a foot, sliced a lamb-chop-sized hunk off Donny’s left bicep. For half a minute the shooter glared at his arm, then checked to see nobody stood close by—the club’s entire population, bouncers included, had migrated to cower against the far wall, rather than cross Katoulis. Myrtle stood clutching the knife in one hand, steadying that hand with the other, but even so trembling like a bush leaguer pinch-hitting against Walter Johnson, while Donny leaned a little closer and flashed his toothy grin.
“You got an hour to live, big brother,” he drawled.
Myrtle used the first five minutes calling Mouse, who wasted the next few minutes relaying the story. By the time Hickey and his drunken pals had decided this was the chance of a lifetime to exterminate Katoulis, a half hour had passed. Finally Mouse phoned Myrtle and told him the plan. All he had to do was let Donny find him a mile down La Cienaga in the Chi Chi Club and run out the back door into the alley, hoping to God Katoulis wouldn’t kill him inside, in front of witnesses.
Hickey and the others took positions along the alley and waited there most of two hours. They had cut cards and Hickey’d won the honor, a spot behind a stack of milk and vegetable crates directly across the alley from the back door of the Chi Chi Club. Mouse was twenty or so feet down the alley on Hickey’s right, Arturo about the same distance up the alley to Hickey’s left, behind a broken section of slat fence. Smollet crouched at the corner of the building, hidden by what looked like half a bus bench somebody had leaned there. According to the plan, whichever of them had a clear shot when Katoulis first showed his piece was to aerate the boy’s head, preferably with one or two shots, making it look more professional, less like a gang of premeditating drunks. If the first cop missed or Donny didn’t fall, the others would finish him.
A suitable plan, except that when Katoulis ran out he didn’t show his gun. In the doorway he’d made a lunge for Myrtle and caught him by the neck. Myrtle had tripped over something and fallen into the alley. Katoulis kicked him in the face and the belly but wouldn’t draw his damned piece. Hickey should’ve blasted him anyway—what’d it matter if they had to lift the gun out from under Donny’s jacket?—but he wasn’t thinking fast enough, he couldn’t adjust. Something froze him. Instead of blasting the punk, he bounded out of hiding and barked like a rookie at Katoulis.
Donny tossed up his arms like a lazy fellow stretching. He got ninety days’ probation for assault, and Myrtle got to live until that summer when a hit-and-run driver interrupted his holiday in Santa Barbara, where he’d gone to visit his little sister.
Over the next five or so years in L.A., until he quit and moved south, every murder that looked like a pro job Hickey pinned, in his heart, on Katoulis. Therefore on Tom Hickey, for his sin of omission.
About when Hickey and family landed in San Diego, Katoulis vanished. Rumor had him living on the Costa Brava and in Athens until, in 1939, displaced by the war, he returned to L.A. and followed the Schwartz brothers to San Diego, where he became their ace property manager. Nobody stiffed him on rent more than once.
Hickey lit his pipe and sat watching the smoke. When the rising sun flashed against his window, he stared outside. The only clouds were small wispy ones that dimmed but didn’t block the view. Below them lay nothing but endless Rocky Mountains, blinding white cut by lines made of angles and shadows, like a miraculous jigsaw puzzle Hickey had pieced together. Dawn over the Rockies made everything below seem trivial and everything past feel as if it happened in another age that didn’t matter anymore because you were starting a new one. The same old lie that dawn always tells, Hickey thought, as he picked up the ledger book to finish Cynthia’s story.