The X-Rated Corpse Read online

  "That, Sir, was the general thought. But—if you will consent to leave of your own volition and not return, I will let you go under your own power. I'm afraid Homer will not be in a good mood when he wakes up. I'd rather not see you both at each other's throats. He can be very violent when the occasion demands. You do understand me?"

  "Indeed I do. Gregory Peck he'll never be. And you're a scholar and a gentleman too, Sir. May I ask one question before I leave?"

  "If I can answer it—" He still hadn't lowered the frontier model, as if he wasn't sure I was so trustworthy. Who could blame him?

  "Did Homer ever meet Violet Paris? I mean did he know her? Did she ever know him? To talk to?"

  The negative shake of the silver-haired head was dramatically affirmative. Almost regal in its scoffing hauteur. Its shock.

  "Good Lord, no! The notion is inconceivable. Apart from the fact that Miss Paris has never been in this house, she was a lady. A great lady. I cannot imagine her ever passing a moment's time of day with the likes of a Homer Danbury. We manage to get on but the lad is a bit of a roughneck. Totally without culture, you see. Why, he eats like an animal! Twice as much as he should—no, Miss Paris couldn't have ever borne him. It's quite out of the question."

  The old butler was a marvel. Ronald Colman would have loved him. C. Aubrey Smith, too. I smiled at him, admiringly.

  "You say that, Kane, knowing that Miss Paris was in that film that caused all the trouble? That she was marked as a cheap woman by your beloved B.Z.? That it is her murder that may cost you your Master? I don't get your angle."

  Now, the .45 did lower. All the way. It was pointed down at the polished floor. Kane seemed to restrain a shudder, sighing.

  "Mr. Noon, let me tell you something. You will find it very difficult to comprehend. I had no knowledge of that film, whatsoever. Not its existence or its location in this house. You understand? It was enigma to me that it should be here. Oh, I know what you're thinking. I'm being loyal to Mr. Zangdorfer by denying that film. But, as the Lord is my judge, I would swear in open court to what I have just told you—" He frowned at me, almost angrily, because I was the one who was shaking his head, now. "I don't like to be thought of as a liar, Sir. It's not my way. If you knew me better—"

  "It's not that, Kane. I want to believe you. But what about the orgies, all the women up here—the Master's reputation for wild times? You knew about those—you were his right arm. His man—"

  "Yes, Sir. I was. And I am." Kane's old eyes were flaming in on me with unarguable honesty. "And I'm telling you that the wild times you speak of took place in this house more than twenty years ago. In another time, another life. The Master is an old man, now. A bit senile. He hasn't been good for a woman for a long, long while. You will have to take my word on that. I know, you see."

  I stared down at the floor at the sleeping Homer Danbury. Again, everything was not adding up properly. Coherently. The mean young man had sold me an entirely different bill of goods. The real question was—had he told it like it was?

  I slipped the photo of Violet Paris from its plastic window and dropped the billfold on the floor. It landed with a tiny splat of sound and Homer Danbury stirred, fitfully. His groaning raised a notch, too. Kane sighed tremulously.

  "You really shouldn't remove anything that belongs to him, Sir. Unless it proves to be something that will help the Master—"

  "It could. I'll make no promises. Hope he doesn't give you a hard time when he wakes up. Tell him I flew the coop before you came in here. You've been a large help, Kane."

  "I hope so. I suggest you leave at once, Mr. Noon. Homer appears ready to rejoin us." There was a hint of laughter in the old man's voice, as if he had mildly enjoyed the Danbury fall from grace. "The Master may have murdered the lady, Sir. But there must be extenuating circumstances. You didn't know him as I do. Before he began to relive the past. A kinder more generous—"

  "Sure, Kane. I know how you feel." I headed for the archway, stepping past him and the Colt .45. There was no more time to spare. Homer was mumbling louder than ever. "And, one thing more, Kane."

  "Yes, Sir?"

  "It speaks well for your character that you don't know so much about firearms. You couldn't have shot me with Ye Frontier Model."

  "Sir?" The amazement on his face was pitiful. An old man caught in the trappings of Modern Times. And murderous devices.

  "Check the barrel of that thing. Somebody plugged it up a long time ago. It's only a dummy, now. Just a beautiful replica of another day. I could see that when you poked it in my face."

  Before he could reply, I was through the archway, heading down the long hall for the front door. I moved fast because I had a plan. One that depended on Kane not showing me out and remaining in the solarium to attend to Homer Danbury. I didn't expect Kane to have to hear the Toyota leaving the heights of the driveway to be convinced I had taken off. All he had to hear was the hard and definite slam of the front door. So I slammed it, making sure it reverberated like a barrel rolling down a flight of stone cellar stairs.

  Even as the distinctive noise re-echoed throughout the darkened house and Kane did not appear in the hallway outside the solarium, I veered sharply to my left and ducked back to the staircase rising like a curved boomerang toward the upper levels of B.Z.'s fabulous domain. I could have asked Kane's permission for what I wanted to do but as cooperative as he had been, I didn't think he would have fancied the notion. Not with Homer Danbury on the premises.

  And Homer Danbury was my prime target.

  His room, at any rate. Wherever it might be.

  A young meanie who may have lied to me about his employer's entertainment proclivities and also had a photo of a youthful Violet Paris in his personal billfold, was someone I had to know a lot more about. A ton more. He had to know where some bodies were buried.

  Bodies of the Past.

  Bodies of the Present.

  And perhaps, the Future, too.

  Either way, he was my pigeon for that evening.

  I wasn't going to go back to the Hotel Dunlap until I knew exactly where the muscle-bound weightlifter fitted into the jigsaw puzzle. If he was one of the missing pieces, at all. Or just a bystander.

  I took the carpeted, winding stairs three at a time.

  The upstairs landing was dark and silent. A monster of gloom.

  Like another world, another place apart from Laurel Canyon.

  I had my own .45 in hand. Nose up, leveled ahead.

  The time was long past for taking unnecessary chances.

  At least, I thought it was.

  With murdered actresses, lecherous old men and blind cops and bad-heart executives and wild young kids, you just never knew.

  What was next on the menu, I mean.

  I was ready to find out.

  With the unknowing help of Homer Danbury.

  I had plans for that boy. Muscles or not.

  Big plans. They didn't include swimming lessons.

  The second floor hallway was a long corridor of blackness touched only with slivers of moonlight spilling in through a tall casement window at the far end. I picked out a suitably darkened niche of wall where an abutment jutted out and waited. I didn't expect a long haul. There was no point in roaming about looking for the right room. The multiple doors along the corridor were no invitation to make like a cat burglar. I was sure Homer Danbury would show me the way. I was also sure he'd be along very soon, after he got through bawling out old Kane for not coming to the rescue. When a kid is like I thought Danbury was, he'd be too impatient to hang around very long downstairs berating an old man. Not if he had real things to do, as he had indicated to me during our war talk.

  Especially if he had secrets to hide. Dangerous secrets.

  Or things better left unknown.

  Or people. Or anything at all.

  I blended with the shadowy niche, keeping my breathing low, waiting. The luminous dial on my wrist watch said nine fifteen. I tucked my hand in my pocket so the tell-tale g
low couldn't be seen. I leaned against the wall, waiting. One more ghost in a spook house.

  There was nothing to do now but think.

  I did.

  With every sense and every faculty attuned to the quiet, palatial, murky interior of Bennett Zangdorfer's house.

  It was a graveyard watch.

  At precisely nine forty five, I heard him coming up the curving staircase. He was punishing the stairs, with loud, angry footfalls. He sounded like D-Day + One. There wasn't much light, only the silvery patches of moonglow, but it didn't seem to matter. He came marching boldly down the long corridor, sure of his way, heedless of the gloom. I edged back into the wall. Sensing he would sweep on by my location.

  He did. Still moving with irate speed. A guy in a big hurry.

  His tall, fullback-sized figure pushed on by. Shadowy. Huge.

  But not far from where I stood, holding my breath.

  He paused, crouched a little and the sound of a key rattling came quick. Score one for my side. I couldn't have entered his room, anyway. My skeleton key days are a thing of the past. The walls of the house were thicker than I thought. No sound of any vocal uproar had come from the library somewhere below. Of course, he might not have given Kane a hard time. But I didn't think so. Homer Danbury would be consistent with his image, if anything. He would never break his own mold.

  There was a second more of scratching sounds, then a rush of air and a spray of soft amber light. Followed by the muffled thud of a door shutting. With less ferocity than had signalized the coming of the brute. I inched out from the wall. It was the framed oblong of wood nearest me. On my right. That was the door Danbury had taken. A low mumble of a voice sounded dimly. I drew closer, still walking on tip-toe. There was another flurry of feedback. Another blur of talk. Deep inside my nerve-centers, something tingled. Sort of like the sensation Columbus must have gotten when he discovered America. Or Carlo got when he first saw Sophia. I know that feeling. It's a sure thing.

  It always means something.

  This one did, too.

  There was a keyhole in the door, of course.

  Without the key inserted. A dot of yellow light showed.

  Homer Danbury had not left it in the inside lock.

  No sound came from downstairs. It was as if Kane had turned in or gone to his own quiet corner of the house. As if the cicadas and the moonlight and the humming night air had taken over Laurel Canyon once and for all time. I drew closer to the keyhole, knelt rapidly and put my right eye where it would do the most good. In a peep show.

  For anxious seconds, the adjustment from dark to light was the usual contest. And then everything focussed and centralized.

  Something was blocking the view. Or someone.

  Then it moved and I realized that a man's body had walked across the view-finder of keyhole. All innocently. Without suspicion.

  I could make out the interior of the room.

  There was a bedpost, a mound of blankets, all richly silken and elegant. I strained my eye, peering as if through a jeweler's loupe. My heart was hammering like a piston.

  A head suddenly rose from the mound of blankets, popping into view, magically. A woman's head. It turned, full-profile, toward the other side of the room. The lips were moving but the words were vague and indistinct. As if the door was much too thick for eavesdropping.

  And then the head turned back toward me. Abruptly.

  Almost full-face. Framed in jet-black hair and great beauty.

  For another second, I got the crawling horrors.

  The whammies.

  The double-negative.

  Violet Paris was looking right at me. Smiling, showing a pink tongue.

  Alive and well, and living in B.Z.'s house.

  The loveliest, livest corpse in the world.

  And not dead, at all.

  Far from that, all right. Naked flesh shone. Breasts bobbed up.

  She had the complete and unmistakable appearance of a lady about to engage in the oldest and most historic pursuit in Creation.

  Making love.

  With Homer Danbury.

  Of all people.

  Slay Her as She Lays

  I knocked on the door.

  Quietly, affirmatively. Voyeurism would solve nothing.

  There was nothing to be gained by trying to hear through a keyhole. Nor was there any reason to delay any longer. Part of the answer was in that room. Maybe not the whole thing but enough for me to go on. In the vague darkness of that dimmed corridor, I knew where the body was buried, now. I didn't have to ask Homer Danbury everything. There are some things you see for yourself. Or else you're as blind as a bat. Or as blind as poor Lieutenant Oliver Ogilvie was going to be.

  There was another flurry of anxious, guarded movement behind the door. Then a long drawn-out spasm of silence. Then Homer Danbury's voice rose in a loud boom. An angry burst of petulant annoyance.

  "Whaddya want now, Kane?"

  He sounded just perfect. The bull denied his cow.

  I banked on the thick paneling to conceal whatever shortcomings I had as a mimic. As well as Homer Danbury's willing assumption that it could be no one but the old manservant knocking at his chamber door.

  "Sir, I must talk to you! It's about that Noon person—"

  "Geezis, Kane—you coulda told me downstairs—"

  The knob rattled, the latch clicked and the door slid open only a mere few inches, but it was enough for what I wanted to do. I pushed the .45 full into the piratical, bearded face blocking the opening. Homer Danbury's mouth fell open, the gimlet eyes popped and an involuntary bleat of surprise and fear blurted from his throat. I prodded him on until the door kicked back and he retreated before me, muscular arms going upward. The lady on the huge, canopied, old-style lavish bed began to pull all the bedclothes upward, as if to conceal herself with maidenly modesty. But it was more than that. She looked like she wanted to get under the covers and hide. I put my back to the door, closing it and surveyed the touching, homely scene from above the .45.

  It was nice. All very nice. If you could keep from puking.

  The room was lovely, the best that money could buy and furnish, obviously, but Homer Danbury's occupancy had turned it into a rich boy's gymnasium. Above and beyond the selection and superb taste so evident in the armoire, the Louis the XVI escritoire and fine oil paintings on three walls with the French doors on the fourth, there was the griminess and sweatiness of scattered barbells, a gym horse, a horizontal bar and a motley assortment of medicine ball, football, Scuba diving equipment and etcetera all over the place. Shining trophies and plaques, a literal bevy of them, were lined up for display.

  Danbury had transformed elegance into a locker room.

  The lady in the bed just as apparently had recently awakened from a sound beauty sleep. Fear and shock hadn't quite erased the blinking, wide-eyed quality of her eyes. She was watching me from the bed, trembling, her naked, curved shoulders enticingly sensual in spite of the situation. In spite of everything. I really couldn't take my eyes off her. She was stunning.

  And suddenly, with the impact of time and place, I knew what color Violet Paris' eyes must have been. Dark, lambent brown.

  Homer Danbury had stopped retreating only because the foot of the canopied bed was blocking his back-pedaling. His blunted face had returned to its former cruel aspect. I could see he was trying to think.

  Both he and the girl in the bed stared at me for a long time.

  She wasn't Violet Paris, of course.

  She couldn't be.

  She was years younger. No more than twenty, if she was that.

  "It is amazing," I said, "that you could look so much like her. It's more than a resemblance. It's an accident of Nature. A big joke on everybody all around."

  "You bastard," Homer Danbury finally got his senses together. But he sounded like someone was strangling him. His glower was sheer distilled venom. All primed to explode in my direction.

  "Again with the mouth, Homer? You're up to on
e, dummy. Remember what you got the last time you reached three." I moved a little further in from the door, watching them as if nothing else in Life interested me as much. "So who's going to tell it? You or the lady in the bed? It doesn't really matter, you know."

  "Oh, Ho," the girl suddenly wailed in a high, shrill voice. "I could have told you this wouldn't work! What are we going to do now? I don't want to go to jail—"

  "Shut up, you dumb cunt!" Homer Danbury snarled. "So you look like her! Big deal! There's no law against looking like someone—"

  "That's two, Homer," I said, aiming the .45 full into his ugly face. "I don't care about your lady friend, or should I say, lady conspirator, but I can't stand that kind of talk. It's one of my hang-ups. So let's skip the foul mouth and go over some facts. Okay, Ho?"

  "I don't care what you like, Noon. Screw you—"

  "Tell him, Ho," the girl gabbled, scrambling to a sitting position so that her superb young body exposed gorgeous samples of its incredible architecture. "It isn't as if we killed anyone, is it? I want out of this! Right now! We could lam down to La Jolla and forget we ever saw this place. I never cared about the bread. You know that—"

  "Go ahead," Homer Danbury whirled, snarling at her so hard that she shrank against the pillows. "Tell him everything he wants to know! You gone ape or something? Keep your trap shut! He's got nothing on us. And he knows it—" He turned back to me, a sadistic grin showing me his small white teeth. "Okay, Noon. So the old man used a double to make La Paris think he had her on film from way back when. So Pearl here is some kind of ringer for a beautiful movie star at around the same age. And so what? The Fuzz don't want that flick admitted into the evidence. So to hell with you, man! You know what I mean? Do your damnedest but it won't change anything. I'm still going to be right here waiting to make my fortune. Pearl, you keep your lip buttoned or I'll give you some scars no plastic surgeon will fix. Then maybe you won't look so much like her."

  He was incredible. Young and vicious and stupid.

  I couldn't see how he could be so stupid.

  I stared at him and tried not to go blind mad.

  He saw the expression on my face and he stopped making threats.