Lady, Go Die! (24 page)

In that book were pencil drawings as skillful as they were horrific, scenes sketched at murder sites for the carver to take home and work from at his leisure. Some were not violent at all, rather scenes of victims taken from afar, as his subjects sat at outdoor cafes or went swimming or (framed in their bedroom windows) undressed. He had stalked his prey and prepared for his art, but for every exquisite carved shell of horror there were half a dozen sketches from various angles, capturing moments of stark terror in the faces of his “models.”

And among the preliminary sketches of those models, among the life studies that the artist prepared before the death studies to come, were half a dozen sketches of Velda. In some she was with me (though my face was barely sketched, of no interest to this Michelangelo) as we ate, or strolled on the beach, or when she sunbathed alone or...

I slammed the book shut.

And when I opened the other cabinets, I was not surprised to find neatly stacked, an assortment of clothing of the type females like those coeds, Doris Wilson, and, yes, Sharron Wesley might have worn. But also the feminine clothing of seven other, as-yet-unidentified, victims.

Little Poochie the harmless. Little Poochie the victim. Little Poochie the beachcomber, the dimwit, the idiot savant.

Little Poochie the homicidal maniac!

I rushed out of the shack onto the beach and the moon was gone, clouds had drowned it, and nothing was left but a gray shadow-torn stretch of sand and an ocean whose raging waves were the color of gun metal, foaming like a rabid animal.

Where had the bastard taken her?

My eyes searched the outside of the shack for a clue. I understood the rowboat now—he had strangled Sharron Wesley, then stuffed her in his patch-up rowboat and gone out as far as he dared, which had not been far, and dumped her. Then when she washed up a week later—on this same beach where he scavenged for shells and driftwood—he had taken the opportunity to create another artistic masterpiece using the same model. He had stuffed her bloated body, like the carcass of a mermaid flung to shore, into that old wheelbarrow and rolled her down the quiet, pre-season beach to where the park provided him with the perfect possibility for an artistic subject.

Lady Godiva by Stanley Cootz.

Goddamnit, if I’d only had the foresight to ask Pat to run a check, who knew what that name would have brought up?

But Poochie was too smart for me. He knew just how to hide. He created this moron persona and became a sort of invisible man.

How many beachfront communities had he drifted into, to take up residence in a shanty and play nonentity, while he stalked beautiful women and pursued his psychopathic art?

How many unsolved murders out there bearing his distinctive flourish of a signature would we discover in the aftermath?

But this was not the aftermath
.

Right now we were very much in the midst of Poochie’s grisly artistry. Somewhere
this minute
he was staging a ghastly tableau with Velda as his model, his subject,
and I didn’t know where the hell he had taken her!

Then I noticed it. The clouds slid by and revealed the moon
and the moon revealed that thing that is the hardest of all to notice: an absence of something.

The cats.

Where were those sickly, scrawny cats? Those cats, one of which had torn my pant leg and the flesh beneath, were nowhere to be seen. They must have followed their master to the scene of his next artistic triumph.

And then I remembered: back at the Wesley place, those cats scrounging around those garbage cans; I’d seen them when I pulled into the drive and went after Dekkert. The mansion had been dark but the cats had been lingering around the edge of it, scavenging like their owner, waiting for him to finish.

I ran as fast as the sand would allow, skirting the dead boxer that had been mean to Poochie’s cats, getting its neck broken like its mistress, and then cut up through the trees and toward the house, where dead men sunned themselves in the moonlight, and a safe full of money sat with its door yawned open and nobody giving a damn, the coppery scent of blood in the wind with a cordite chaser and the acrid after-stench of bodies that had soiled themselves as the sorry souls within had left this world.

The big colonial house loomed before me, a hulking dark shape like a crouched beast about to strike. No lights on. No sounds. Then the screech of one cat protesting the actions of another sent me scurrying closer, staying down, .45 tight in my fist. The felines were skulking around outside the garage now, fighting over the remains of some week-old bony half-eaten fish.

The garage door, I remembered, was the roll-type and it made a certain amount of noise. So I opened it slowly and eased it up just
enough to throw myself under, rolling to a stop near the parked Cadillac. Sharron Wesley’s fancy private ride.

I stayed silent, waiting for a reaction—a light to go on, a shot to be fired, a shout, anything.

Nothing.

I got up and leaned against the hood of the car and it was hot. As if I’d touched a stove, I brought my hand away, knowing that this vehicle had been recently driven, and noticing that it faced with its tail to the garage door.

And when I had seen it a few days ago, the Caddy’s nose had been pointing that way.

Now a puzzle piece slid snugly into place. Chief Chasen at Wilcox had said of the two missing coeds: they had been seen
“piling into a fancy car...”

And Poochie, the ragged little next-door neighbor in the shack down the beach, the nuisance who spent way too much time around the Wesley grounds, would be in a perfect position to keep track of the comings and goings of Sharron Wesley. Likely her trips to the city were in the company of Deputy Dekkert, and her “fancy car” had been left behind.

Sharron, remember, had a habit of leaving the keys in the glove compartment. That’s where they’d been the other day and that’s where they were now.

And Poochie could drive all right. Just because he was a “dimwit” beachcomber, that didn’t mean he couldn’t handle a vehicle. Hadn’t he told me that he helped Sharron Wesley’s party guests get their cars out of the sand, for tips? And that sometimes he wasn’t strong enough to push, so he would get
behind the wheel and
they
would push?

He sure as hell hadn’t used his trusty wheelbarrow to haul Velda over here. He had grabbed her out of that phone booth, slugged her or chloroformed her or some goddamn thing, and brought her over in that Caddy, the very one sitting with its engine hot right now. All this after finally slipping out from under Doc Moody’s watchful eye, faking his own kidnapping to explain his absence and throw more suspicion on Dekkert.

I slipped under the garage door and moved around the freestanding garage for another look at the house, gazing up at windows, checking for light, seeing only darkness. An artist, even as unique a one as Stanley Cootz, needed light to create his masterworks. I made a full circuit and was ready to say the hell with it, and just go in and take my chances, when I saw it.

At one end of the second floor, red light was bleeding from the windows of what I knew to be the ballroom. A deep red, a scarlet that recalled the lights the old-time prosties used to stick in their windows.

This trip I didn’t bother with checking for the alarm device on the back door—if a loud blare sounded out, that was fine. It might spook the son of a bitch, and maybe spare Velda. If on the other hand the alarm was silent, and went off at the Sidon police station, for once I would be glad to see those sad sacks show up.

But Poochie had already unhooked the device—he really
did
know his way around the Wesley manse.

This time I didn’t have a flashlight with me. But I remembered the lay-out well enough, and moved through the big kitchen and into the bigger casino room. A row of windows with the curtains back let in the moon reflecting off the choppy sea. You could
hear the wind whistling and bitching as it tried to squeeze its way in, and shutters shook and trees rustled and the whole haunted house shebang might have rattled me, if I hadn’t been so grateful for the moonlight. That made child’s play out of maneuvering in and around the maze of craps and roulette tables.

Then I moved through the bar, which lacked windows to guide me, and knocked into a chair, scraping the floor. I froze, waited, watched, listened.

No response.

Nor could I hear any sound from upstairs. That might mean anything, including that Velda was dead already. If that was the case, Poochie would die one bloody inch at a time. I would find a knife and I would make a carving out of his sorry flesh that he could spend eternity envying in Hell.

Finally I found the hallway off of which were the front door, the cloakroom, and the stairway up to whatever madness was occurring up on the second floor. More moonlight came in from somewhere and let me see perhaps half of my way up the stairs, and when I reached the top, I could not see but could feel the thick Chinese rug under me, relishing how it muffled the sound as I moved down the corridor to that ballroom.

Its double doors were closed, but beneath them an edge of scarlet beckoned and pulsated—there was an almost liquid-like shimmer to it, as if a slaughterhouse on the other side had leaked its butchery under.

I opened the door slowly, cautiously, with my left hand on the knob, my right shoulder against the wood, the rod ready in my right fist. The door creaked, but I was in.

She hung upside-down on the stage, all the way down at the other end of the chamber, strung up naked by her ankles like the girls in that barn, swaying, swinging ever so gently, held up high enough that her bound wrists did not touch the flooring but her long locks flowed down behind her head to brush the stage while her beautiful, terrified, topsy-turvy face stared with wide eyes over a dirty rag of a gag. Stage lighting painted her and the entire tableau blood-red, turning the ebony of her hair scarlet, the signature of her sex a crimson pyramid, and as hideous as this humiliation was, Velda remained a beautiful creature, gravity failing to defeat the thrust of her breasts, the upended sweep of her body from the prominent ribcage to its narrow waist, from the jut of hips to the long, fully fleshed legs with their rope-bound ankles, making of her a sleek abstract shape, a flow of femininity that could not be made grotesque however evil the intent.

The rest of the ballroom glowed red as well, though not as intensely. Lights in the ceiling, caught by a mirrored, turning globe, flashed and reflected as if the room itself were blinking, as if this garish nightmare were shorting in and out, like a faulty circuit.

I didn’t see him at first. The room seemed vast and empty.
Had he gone? Where was he?

No matter. There was Velda to save.

“Velda!” I cried.

Did those wide eyes register that she had seen me, or was she in shock? Had this monster drugged her, and she didn’t know what she was seeing? I couldn’t tell, even as I ran and drew closer, if I was really getting a reaction.

But my cry did raise Poochie.

From the wings of the stage he emerged, his face a mask of confused interruption, but this was not the ragamuffin
beachcomber I’d known, this was a different Poochie entirely.

This was a demon, small and red under the stage lights, an imp as naked as Velda, a hairless, bony, baby-bellied child man, with the under-developed, barely formed genitalia of an infant, his tiny member standing tall and defiant and pathetic.

Bare-ass and barefoot, the little red devil lacking only horns stood there with something other than a pitchfork in his hand—
what? Gun? Knife?
—glowering in dismayed shock as I barreled toward him.

Yet he had the presence of mind to fly to Velda, to crouch beside her, like an evil gnome, with his tiny sex dangling like unripe fruit with that little stem extended, and he held to her throat his carving knife, that shoemaker’s blade he had used to fashion his intricate shells, and to slash those poor coeds hung by their ankles in that barn.

Like Velda.

And now the blade was dimpling the flesh next to Velda’s throbbing jugular and her brown eyes were beacons of terror blazing into me.

I froze.

Poochie’s smile was boyish. “Mike... Mike... you don’t wanna make me kill the nice lady, do you?”

There was nothing different about his voice. Nothing new and demented to fit this evil dwarf, crouching there as if perched on Satan’s armrest.

I had been wrong thinking Poochie had created a moron persona to hide behind. He was a moron all right, but a moron with a streak of obsession married to evil genius.

I paused at the edge of the stage, looking up at this obscene Halloween pageant. The .45 was in my hand. A head shot could take him out. That was my best bet—a head shot. His motor skills would shut off like I’d thrown a switch. But I could give him no indication of my intent.

Not with that blade so close to her jugular.

“I’m not a bad person, Mike... but I have desires... I have visions... dark ones. People think I’m stupid, but I have a
gift
, Mike. A gift to make the girls I choose seem real to me, and me to them... and then? Then I make them live forever! Don’t you think so, Mike? Don’t you think my work will be in a museum someday?”

“Poochie,” I said, “I’ve been your friend. So has Velda. Just let her go.”

His smile was gleeful, his eyes dancing with reflected red. “And you’ll let
me
go? Or... get me
help
? But I don’t want help, Mike! I like how I am. Most of the time, I don’t bother people. I just go my way. I feed my cats and catch my fish and find my shells. I don’t bother nobody. But when I get the feeling, the urge, I follow it. What’s wrong with that? It seems right. It seems natural.”

“It isn’t, Poochie. You’re sick. You’re like a mad dog.”

“What do they do to mad dogs, Mike? What do they do?”

In a moment I would cut Velda down. I would hold her and comfort her, and take her out of this chamber of horrors, and we would gather that fortune waiting out there on the beach among the dead men, and she would laugh when I told her we wouldn’t have to worry about me taking on so many cases for free anymore, not for a while anyway, and we would leave Sidon hand-in-hand and know better next time when somebody suggested a weekend away from dangerous New York City.