Doug Allyn - v108 n03-04_1996-09-10

He took a step backwards. And heard a noise.

It was not the kind of noise you wanted to hear in the kind of place he was hearing it in. It was sort of frictional, like wood being dragged across wood, as in, say, a coffin lid being dragged off a coffin. Also it was so loud you couldn’t pretend you hadn’t heard it, though he was doing his best.

Then came a second sound, this one human, like a gasp, or a groan, perhaps even a yuck!

Joe went cataleptic for thirty seconds, or it might have been thirty minutes. When the power of thought returned, he wished it hadn’t, for it was a funny thing, but now that he was really scared, there was no choice but to go forward and take a look. Something wrong there, surely?

A lesser man might have used this interesting psychological contradiction as an excuse to stand still and ponder, but Joe’s anti-intellectual feet were already carrying him steadily down the dark corridor. As he moved, he felt his senses sharpened by fear. He could feel the sensuous curve of the urn he was still carrying like a cupped breast; he could hear smaller sounds, rustling, heavy-breathing sounds; he could see the outline of the door behind which they were being made, and he could smell a whole complex of smells. In it were woodshavings and embalming fluid, the things you’d expect in such a place, plus a heavier, muskier, and somehow familiar perfume. And finally, as he gently pushed on the unresisting door, blotting all these out completely, he was hit by the foul and fetid stench of rotting flesh!

On the last turn of the hinge the door squeaked, and so did the redheaded woman standing by an open coffin with a funerary urn in her hands, and on her handsome face, lurid in the light of a fluorescent lantern perched on a workbench, an expression of mixed shock and guilt.

“Hello, Mrs. Levine,” said Joe. “Still looking for talent?”

She recovered quickly, you had to give her that.

“Jesus Christ, it’s you, the baritone blackbird! What the hell are you doing here? Not where you work, is it?”

As she spoke she put the urn on the workbench and from a large canvas toolbag removed a long slender screwdriver which glinted like a stiletto in the light. Joe eyed it uneasily.

“No,” he said. “Actually, I’m a P.I., a private investigator.”

And not someone you should mess with was his intended implication, but instead it sent her into peals of laughter.

“Hey, that makes you the Singing Detective,” she gasped. “Even better billing than the Baritone Blackbird. Why don’t we clear up here and go somewhere to talk about your career?”

“First you tell me what makes you so keen to take a last look at your friend, Mr. Tallas?” he said.

She smiled and glanced fondly into the coffin.

“David and I were once very close. Arnie never knew — he’d have killed me if he’d found out. So you see why I wanted to pay my last respects alone.”

It was clearly crap, but spoken with such sincerity that Joe wasted a second working out the odds it was the truth. His abacus mind had difficulty computing the figures, and the effort of concentration must have switched off his fear-heightened senses for a second because it was a change in Mandy’s expression rather than what must have been the not inconsiderable noise made by a man walking on crutches that alerted him to the danger behind.

He twisted round, fast enough to see but not to avoid the blow from the crutch handle. But at least the movement diverted it from the back of his head where it might have produced unconsciousness, to the side of his face where it just felt like he’d been kicked by a misanthropic mule. As he fell back, the man swung a plaster-cast leg at him. Joe scrabbled backwards across the tiled floor, and more by chance than judgment his left foot hooked around the man’s other crutch, now bearing all his weight, and pulled it from under him. The man teetered for a moment and Joe, supine, hurled Mr. Tooley’s urn at his chest.

There wasn’t enough force in the projectile to do any damage, but the impact was enough to tip the balance and with a shrieked word which Joe didn’t recognize but which sounded like an oath, his attacker fell backwards like a felled pine.

Joe closed his eyes in relief and opened them again to find the gleaming tip of Mandy Levine’s screwdriver poised three inches above the left one, of which, being the stronger, he was particularly fond.

She was holding the implement in both hands and he did not doubt that the full weight of her generously structured upper deck could drive it via his eyeball into his almost paralysed brain.

But she wasn’t looking down at him, she was looking towards the fallen figure of the intruder. Joe did not dare raise his head to follow her gaze, but his straining ears could hear no sound to indicate the man was preparing to return to the attack.

Then the bright blade wavered and the woman rose. Joe sat up quickly too, and winced as he found that Mr. Tooley’s urn, as though in revenge for being so impiously misused, had rolled back between his legs. Holding it, Joe got groggily to his feet.

Mandy Levine was kneeling by the fallen man.

“Bring the light,” she commanded.

She was, Joe guessed, a woman accustomed to being obeyed. He, being from long practice a man accustomed to obeying women accustomed to being obeyed, swapped the urn for the lantern and carried it over to her.

Expertly she raised the man’s eyelids, examined his eyes, felt for a pulse in the neck, and said flatly, “Dead. You’ve killed him. Cracked his skull.”

“Hang about,” protested Joe. “It was an accident. He’s dead, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t my fault. Who the shoot is he, anyway?”

He knew the answer before she said it. Sometimes the impossible is also the inevitable.

“Tallas,” she said. “David Tallas.”

Joe went to the coffin and shone the lantern into it.

“Shoot,” said Joe. Mirabelle’s soapy-mouthwash aversion therapy had made this his strongest oath, but under provocation he could utter it with an intensity that would have won him style points in Billingsgate.

The coffin was a showy mahogany affair, with ornate gilt handles and the kind of brocade silk upholstery which, even though ripped so that the stuffing trickled through, must have cost an arm and a leg. Of arms there was no trace, but there were legs aplenty, four to be precise, all belonging to a deceased and decomposing goat.

It wasn’t very big, barely more than a kid, but its bouquet was enormous.

“Mrs. Levine,” said Joe, gagging. “Maybe you ought to tell me what’s going on.”

The woman slowly rose. Her foot kicked against one of the crutches. She picked it up and held it two-handed as she eyed Joe calculatingly.

Joe would have liked to be sure she was merely working out what to say to him, but the memory of the screwdriver poised over his left eye was still strong, and he had an uneasy feeling that she was still weighing war against jaw.

Words won, temporarily at least.

“I’ll give it to you straight, Joe,” she said in that husky, caressing voice. “The reason David here went to Greece was as agent for a little syndicate put together by my Arnie and his friends. He was good at that sort of thing, David. Could sell false teeth to tigers, and buy their stripes at the same time. There was a fair amount of money involved, hard cash money which he took with him, so imagine how Arnie and the others felt when they heard the news. David, driving from the airport in a hire car, had swerved on a mountain road to avoid a goat, bounced down the hillside, got thrown out, hit a rock, broke his neck, while the car had gone up in flames. Nothing left but unidentifiable ashes.”

“To avoid a goat?” said Joe, glancing at the coffin.