David Alexander: Masters of Noir: Volume 4

“Maybe. Hold the frying pan for me, will you?” She shook her head, grabbed the pan. I hit it vigorously with the spoon and yelled, “Chow time, everybody. Chow’s on.” Not many people paid attention to me; I hadn’t expected many to. I walked around the clearing, munching on my sloppy sandwich and saying “Chow, anybody?” to everybody. It didn’t happen till I was almost at the punch bowl. Mrs. Brevoort’s unpleasant face loomed beside me.

I said, “Hi. Wanna dance?” I blinked drunkenly at her, and nibbled at the beef. She eyed the sandwich, fascinated.

I said, “I’m sorry, but I got so starved I couldn’t wait for everybody else. Hope you don’t mind, but I carved a little meat off that pig down there in the pit.”

“You... what?” she said, and her face was already starting to get green.

I said, “I was hungry. There’s plenty more, though. You hungry, Mrs. Brevoort?”

Her mouth dropped open, her lips twitched, and her eyes rolled up in her head. Then she fainted. People around us kept dancing and going, “Uuh!” and making Hawaiian chants.

Half an hour later the police had come and gone. I’d told them on the phone to arrive without sirens, and in the meantime to check on me with the Los Angeles and Hollywood police. As a result, they handled everything quietly and took Mrs. Brevoort away with almost no commotion at all — and let me stay. She spilled everything in the first five minutes: that she knew her husband had just married her for her money and that it was her money he used for these weekly parties at which he ignored her, and everybody else ignored her, and she’d caught him on the beach tonight with a babe, waited until the girl went back alone to the clearing, then swatted L. Franklin over the head with the spit and stuck it through his throat. She’d dragged him ten feet through the sand and rolled him in onto the coals.

Elaine said to me, “I still don’t know why she fainted when you stuck that ghastly sandwich in her face.”

“She thought I was eating her hubby. She’d tossed him into the pig pit.”

“I don’t get it. Why into the pit?”

“She was all excited. People get excited when they kill people. She thought she could hide him there until she figured out what to do. And she wasn’t acting very logically anyway, it was a crime of passion. She hated parties.”

We were standing beside the melting punch bowl. Both of us had a small drink. A lot of people were still dancing — not around the pit, though. Right after Mrs. Brevoort had fainted I’d sent Elaine scooting down to the beach to make sure nobody did reach the pit; nobody had. I said, “I didn’t have the faintest idea who, of these fifty people, might have run the buzzard through. Only the person who’d killed him, though, would have known what was cooking. Well, at least it was better than having the cops haul everybody down to the station — I was damned if anybody was going to break up this fine party.”

Elaine said, “I still don’t get it all. You mean both the host and hostess are gone?”

“Yeah. They took L. Franklin away, too. So there’s nobody to call off the party. You know, this thing may last for weeks.”

“How long will you last?”

I grinned at her. She laughed softly, whirled and ran toward the beach. I waited about one second, and then turned.

I ran after her.

Cha cha cha-tiyata... cha-ta- cha ,“ her chirpy voice sang. The melodious sound penetrated the closed windows. ”Cha cha cha- tiyata... cha-ta- cha .“

In the dim old bedroom, Barton stood listening behind lowered blinds. Tall and gray in workshirt and overalls, his sinewy old body was bent forward and motionless like a taut bow and his mouth was open slightly like a crater in the dry crust of the seamy skin of his face. His big, knuckly hands were clenched and still as weights. “Cha cha cha- tiyata... cha-ta- cha .” He straightened up, moistened his lips, drew a long breath and shook his head. His hands opened. He turned and started for the door, but some counter-will in him made him veer to the bureau. He opened a drawer and took out the binoculars.

He went to the window, inched it up and raised the blind two inches from the sill, squinting briefly against the glare stripe of sunlight. He went to the chair at the end of the room, where light wouldn’t catch on the lenses, and put the binoculars to his eyes, his heart beginning to thump against his ribs. Cha cha cha- tiyata... cha-ta- cha , he whispered as the sound of her came again, louder, richer through the opening. His thick fingers became tremulous on the delicate adjustment wheel as he found her and brought her into focus, her red hair in the wind glowing like embers in a forge.

Deena May, his hired hand’s wife... the “child bride” as Barton thought of her... was hanging clothes in her yard and dancing to her own foolish, delicious music. She wore a loose, carelessly buttoned, pink house dress... and probably nothing else... and she came toward him from the clothes basket to the line, lifting her knees in quick, prancy steps. She was a pretty little thing, as lively and mindless as a bird, with a tiny waist and dainty legs. She wasn’t fully fleshed out yet and her lines were clean as stems and from the front or back or side views, the roundings of her femaleness showed clearly when the wind pressed the thin dress to her flesh.

She moved back to the clothes basket, not in a straight line, but in a prancing, dancing half circle to the beat of the “Cha cha cha- tiyata... cha-ta- cha ...” On the “tiyata” part her thin voice rose high as a cat’s, then swiftly dipped with an oddly stroking sound that was nakedly voluptuous in quality. She accompanied the sound with a tantalizing motion: a fluid roll, tilt and swish of her hips. She came back to the line with another garment... a pair of her husband’s underwear shorts... and as she pinned them up her knees flashed higher than ever, showing the smooth pale nakedness of her inner thighs. Pain stabbed at Barton’s eyeballs and he shut his eyes, resting the binoculars on his knees. Warm, warm her young body would be, warm as new milk... or cool in the fresh breeze, cool as silk. Warm, cool, whichever, whatever, it didn’t matter.

He pulled her to him again with the binoculars. She had a saucy round face with round blue eyes and a round dimple in her chin. Down in the mule country, where she came from, the dimple meant the devil was in her, Deena May said. Ignorant superstition. But Barton supposed it had been drilled into her child mind till she believed it. With her showing her flesh and singing and stepping high to the devil’s beat, anyone could believe it.

He saw she kept turning her head to her shoulder and he was so enrapt with the brilliant image of her red hair, like a wanton brand of flame on her cheek, that he didn’t realize she was looking back at the house. Then the screen door flew open and her husband Hugh charged out. Barton realized then that Hugh had been watching from inside and Deena May had been putting on the show to work him up. She whooped and shrieked and took off across the yard. He caught her by the hair in a dozen long-legged strides and dumped her. She kicked her bare legs in the air and rolled onto her knees and tackled his lanky legs and in a moment he was on the ground with her, scowling and mussing her up. She got away and he chased her out of sight around the front of the house. In awhile he came marching her in front of him, twisting her arm. She stopped every few steps and bumped her bottom back against him, a look of high glee on her excited face. She boasted how she could get him excited any time, morning, noon and night, and could wear him down to a frazzle even if she was only fourteen and he thought he was a man because he was twenty-one. Hugh pushed her inside the house with a loud spank and the screen door whacked shut. Barton lowered the binoculars, his mouth clamped in a straight line.