The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy Read online

  Tastes change; so had she. She’d filled out nice, real nice. She was still trying to play the innocent, though. That was a laugh. If there was ever a tough cookie, she was it, and believe me, I know tough cookies.

  She finally found her tongue. It was right there in her own mouth. For a change.

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. I managed not to laugh. “Even if you are . . . who you are, I still want you to take my case. I came here because a friend of mine – one of the other girls down at the La Zazz Club – gave me your name. The one on your door, I mean.”

  “The La Zazz Club,” I repeated. The name rang a bell – it was a notorious jive joint – but that was all. I tried to think if I ever had a client who worked there.

  I get quiet when I’m thinking. My visitor didn’t like things quiet. She started yakking to fill up the silence: “My friend said you helped her out of a tough bind. She said you got the job done and you didn’t ask the wrong kind of questions to do it. She said she’d trust you with her life, that you’re the best in the business.”

  “Flatterer.”

  “I mean it!” She slammed a fist down on my desktop so hard it made my glass clink against the bottle. I took this as a sign to fill it up so it wouldn’t make too much noise and upset the neighbours. “I’ve got a real problem. I need help.”

  This time I sipped my drink slow. “Keep talking.”

  “It’s my brother. He’s disappeared.”

  I thumbed back the brim of my hat and set down the empty glass. “Some reason the cops can’t handle this?”

  She didn’t say anything. That said it all.

  “In case it’s slipped your pretty little mind, sweets, my past association with your family hasn’t exactly been a romp in the forest. I wasn’t looking for you to show up on my doorstep, but Destiny’s a funny dame. She’s got a way of giving you the brass ring with one hand and ripping your heart out with the other. You want me to go out there, pound shoe leather and get my Sunday-go-to-meeting broom all dusty looking for your brother? Trying to find him? I’m about as interested in finding that scrawny little bastard as Japan is in giving back Mongolia. Find yourself another sucker.”

  That was when she turned on the faucets. I watched her smear her mascara into skid marks for a while, and when I saw she was crying real tears I reached up my sleeve and tossed her a handkerchief.

  “Please, don’t turn me down,” she begged, dabbing at her eyes. “You can’t; you’re my last hope.”

  “That so?” I thumbed my hat back again, only this time I pushed it too far. It fell off my head and rolled around on its point until the cat jumped on it and crushed the brim. I lost my patience and turned him into a toad. He gave me this ominous croak that as good as told me he was going to accidentally-on-purpose use my shoes for a litter box as soon as I turned him back. I’ve lived with worse threats.

  “Your last hope, well, well,” I repeated as I grabbed my hat off the floor and put it back on. The toad hopped away to sulk in a corner. “And here you were just now, saying I was your first choice. Either the honeymoon’s over already, or you’re not playing it square with me, sugar. I wouldn’t recommend that.”

  “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath. It did things. “I lied.”

  “I’d like to say I’m surprised, cupcake, but since it’s you . . .” I shrugged. “Tell you what, you give me the facts in the case, I listen, and maybe I take it. Maybe not. No promises. Okay, one: You lie to me again, you’re out of here on your cute little bustle. Got it?”

  “Got it.” She sniffled one last time, but the fire was back in her eyes. She got out her compact and started repairing the damage while she told me the whole story:

  “It’s been two weeks since I heard from Hansel. That’s not normal; we’re close. Usually he calls me every other day, or I call him. We get together on the weekends, catch a movie, maybe take a drive up the coast.”

  “With the war on?” I gave her a warning look. “What’s your car run on, Coca-Cola? Even I can’t make gasoline out of thin air.”

  She shrugged, but she didn’t back-pedal. “It’s his car. I guess I never thought to ask him where he got the fuel for it. It’s a fancy ride, powder-blue Packard sedan, white leather seats.”

  I snorted. “The Easter Bunny bring it? No one makes cars that look like that!”

  “You got enough money, you can always find someone to make you anything you want,” she said. She talked like a woman who knew.

  “So your little brother did all right for himself, and pretty fast, too. The pair of you couldn’t have been in this country much longer than me.”

  “We came over in ’38.”

  I whistled, low and long. “That is fast for someone to make good; especially for a johnny-come-lately punk like your brother. I’m impressed. What’s his racket?”

  “I don’t know. He never told me.”

  I got up and went for the office door. I threw it open and told her: “Get out.”

  She didn’t move a muscle. “It’s the truth. The one time I asked, he gave me the brush-off. Said something about being in public relations.”

  “The kind the cops run you in for when they catch you trying it in Griffith Park?” I would’ve laughed, but I sort of forgot how.

  She stood up. “You said you’d listen. I said I’d tell the truth. So far I’m keeping up my end of the deal.”

  If she was waiting for an apology, she was going to be twice as grey and wrinkled as me before she got it. Still, I closed the office door. “All right, sweets, you made your point. I’ll listen.”

  She gave me a look like ex-wives give their husbands when the bastards swear the cheque is in the mail. “Like I said, my brother and I have always been very close, but that doesn’t mean we’re all over each other’s business. Ever since our mother died, we looked out for one another. Daddy never had time for us; he had to earn a living, put food in our mouths. Being a woodchopper’s no ball.”

  “Can the sob story and cut to the chase,” I told her.

  “I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

  She had me there. Last time our paths crossed, she almost took care of me. Permanently. I went back to my desk and motioned for her to go on.

  “Like I said, he calls me a lot, so when I didn’t hear from him for two weeks straight, I got worried. I went over to his place, the Chez Moderne apartments.”

  The Chez Moderne . . . Ritzy name for what was basically a run-down old hotel so far downtown that the cockroaches had to take the streetcar. Not the address I’d expect of the man who owns his own powder-blue Packard. I shot her a searching look but it bounced right off. If she’d ever wondered about why her brother drove that but lived there, she didn’t let on.

  “I had the extra key, so when no one answered my knock, I let myself in.” She shuddered, remembering. “The place looked like an earthquake hit it. Someone had been there before me and they tore it up, top to bottom.”

  “You sure? Maybe your brother just wasn’t a very good housekeeper.” Her eyes poured me a double dose of arsenic, straight up, so I stopped trying to pass for one of the Marx Brothers.

  “Everything was ruined. Whoever’d done it even sliced up the mattress and ripped the lining out of the drapes. The bathroom floor was wall-to-wall pills, all the empty bottles smashed in the bathtub.”

  I didn’t like to bring up what could be a pretty ugly possibility, but I had to ask: “Any blood?”

  She shook her head. “I was thankful for that much. My first instinct was to go to the cops, but when I got home, there was a letter waiting for me. It was from my brother.”

  I held out my hand, waiting for her to cough it up. I kept on waiting.

  “I burned it,” she explained.

  “How convenient.”

  “You don’t understand: I had to!”

  “Why?”

  “Because he told me to. He didn’t want me getting involved. It was too dangerous. I
f they got their hands on that letter—”

  “Not so fast. Who’s ‘they’?”

  “He didn’t name names. The same creeps who wrecked his place, I suppose.”

  “Tough call. What else did the letter say?”

  “It said that he was going away for a few weeks, maybe a few months, on business. He didn’t come right out and say so, but he hinted that this was it, the big score, something that was going to put the two of us on Easy Street for the rest of our lives. He said he’d be in touch, and for me to sit tight until I heard from him again.”

  “Did he say how he’d contact you?”

  She shook her head.

  “So tell me this, cupcake: If you’re such a good little girl – keeping your nose out of your brother’s business, not asking questions, burning that letter strictly on his say-so – then why are you here? Why aren’t you back in your own place, sitting tight like he told you?”

  There were tears starting up in her eyes again. “Because he’s not the one who wrote that letter.”

  “Not his handwriting?”

  “Nothing that amateurish. But I could tell. Someone dictated every word he wrote; it didn’t sound like him at all. That was when I decided to get help. That was when I came to you. Will you help me? Please?”

  I wrinkled my nose. Her story smelled worse than Fisherman’s Wharf, up Frisco way. This dame was spinning a yarn with more loose ends than Rapunzel’s marcel wave and expecting me to buy it. She had brass, but all the nerve in the world can’t make up for being stupid. Trying to play me for a fool is real stupid.

  She’d done that once before, in the Old Country, her and her rotten little brother. I didn’t see so good back then – try to find a decent eye-doc in the sticks – but so what? There’s not much worth looking at in the heart of the Black Forest. You seen one squirrel, you seen ’em all. That was how those brats managed to give me the runaround. Every time I told the punk to stick his finger through the bars of the cage where I had him locked away to fatten up, he’d stick out a chicken bone. The gristle should’ve tipped me off. Too soon old, too late smart, like they say.

  As for her, I had hopes: She was a sweet little thing and I was lonely. If they ever made a movie of my life, the screenwriters’d have to call me an old maid or a career gal or just not the marrying kind because the truth would bring the Hays Office down on their necks faster than a well-oiled guillotine. And before you get all hot under the collar, thinking she was just a kid and I was some kind of monster, let me clue you in on something not everyone knows: She and her brother were no babes in the woods, no matter how they twisted the story later. They might’ve looked like kids, small and scrawny on account of growing up at the Hard Knocks Hotel, but they were both safely past the age of consent when they came nibble-nibbling at my door. And believe me, she let on like she would consent any day, if I didn’t pull a Betty Crocker on her. So that’s why he was in the cage but she had the run of the place. Oh yeah, she played innocent-but-willing-to-learn, and she played it good.

  That’s why I believed her when she said she didn’t know how to tell if the oven was hot enough. That’s why I stuck my head in first, to show her how it’s done. My head was full of Stardust, dreams of her and me in that kitschy little woodland cottage, me with my feet up on the pile of kiddie bones, her by the oven, baking gingerbread, everything strictly Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Next thing I knew, my face was full of live coals. She’d shoved me into the oven, locked the door, freed her brother, and beat it.

  I’d be a pretty poor witch if I didn’t keep an escape spell on the tip of my tongue at all times. But she didn’t know that. By the time I got myself out of the oven and under the pump, drenched but extinguished, those two were long gone. Them and my life’s savings in gold.

  Like I said, we had a past.

  That’s why I didn’t have any second thoughts about nailing her with the same toad spell I used on the cat. It was sweet: One minute she was standing there trying to work the bunco, the next she was squatting on the floor, brown and lumpy as a bowl of boarding-house oatmeal.

  I picked her up easy and dropped her on the desk, then poured myself another drink. This time I got out some cookies to go with all that milk. One chopper left in my head and wouldn’t you know it’s a sweet tooth? In between sips and swallows, I told her the score:

  “Next time you want to work the old shell game, sister, make sure you’ve got a real chump on the line. That, or get your story straight. First you act all surprised to see a woman gumshoe, then you say your friend gave you the lowdown on me. And she didn’t mention that little detail? Next we’ve got the little matter of your brother’s fancy car and his invisible means of support. A smart cookie like you wouldn’t grill him for some answers there? I’m not buying. As for that letter you say he sent you, the one you knew he didn’t write . . . Why’d you act like it was the real McCoy when it came to doing what he said, burning it, only the next words out of that pretty little mouth of yours were ‘I knew it wasn’t really his’? Your story’s got more holes in it than Dillinger. I think you need a little time to think over what a bad girl you’ve been. You sit right there while I do some digging on my own. Okay, cupcake?”

  I wasn’t dumb enough to expect an answer. Toads talk less than Charlie McCarthy when Bergen’s in the can. I left her with the empty milk bottle and nabbed her purse from the floor. When I dumped it out on the desk, she jumped off and flopped around my ankles, croaking like crazy, but she couldn’t do a damn’ thing to stop me.

  I found what I was looking for inside a little plaid change purse. It was a piece of onionskin paper, folded up small. Dear Gretel, it said. You were right, Mr LeGras doesn’t really care about me, no matter what he says. I’m just another one of the hired help to him, and now he’s come back from San Francisco – one of his “business” trips – with that so-called English valet, Carlisle. English! The closest that dog biscuit’s been to England is the seat of Mr LeGras’s tweed pants.

  When I told Mr LeGras how I felt, he gave me the brush-off, said it was all my imagination, threw me some extra scratch and told me to go out and buy myself a good time. No one treats me like that and gets away with it. I’m getting the hell out of here, but before I go, I’m going to leave Mr LeGras something to remember me by. Or should I say I’m going to take something?

  The black bird.

  Yes, that black bird. The one I told you about, the one you say can’t possibly be real. But it is real. Real enough to be the source of Mr LeGras’s fortune. Real enough to do the same for us.

  Think of it, my dearest sister! No more warbling your heart out in cheap dives like the La Zazz for you, and for me, no more faking that a pig like Mr LeGras is my maiden dream of love.

  I looked up from the letter. “The black bird,” I said aloud. “That’s a step up from stealing gingerbread.”

  The brown toad gave an inquiring croak from the floor.

  “Don’t tell me you never heard of the black bird, sugarplum,” I told her. “Every two-bit hustler and small-time hoodlum in this town knows about the black bird. You want I should draw you a map or just write you a screenplay? Get your hands on the black bird and you’re set for life, and I’m not talking ration books, I’m talking gold; solid gold.”

  I went back to the letter: I’m going to make the big touch soon, this week. If I don’t, I might wind up plugging Carlisle first, making the snatch second. It’s easier for me to hide a bird than a body, ha, ha. Soon as I knock over the bird, I’ll get word to you. When that happens, meet me up at the place on Lake Arrowhead and we’ll blow this popstand. I’ll be waiting. Love, Hansel.

  I folded the letter and put it back in her purse. “I love the way he keeps calling him Mister LeGras,” I told her. “Even when he’s talking about playing him for a sucker. That’s class.” I crossed my arms and stared down at her. “So you did like he told you: You waited for word, but the week went by and all you came up with was a goose egg. You went over
to his place, maybe thinking he lost his nerve and hadn’t done it, maybe scared he had, and then decided not to cut you in on the score after all. When you found his place wrecked like that, you must’ve figured that he did pull off the heist, only sloppy. LeGras caught wise before Brother Dear could make his getaway, but not before the goof managed to hide the swag. So LeGras hired some muscle to get back his property, probably told them that if they wanted to practise their tap-dancing on the little creampuff’s face, he wouldn’t mind.”

  The toad launched a rapid-fire burst of angry croaking, slapping its feet on the linoleum floor. I clucked my tongue.

  “Hey, I’ll talk about your brother any way I want, angel-cake. You think he walks on water? He’s still a weasel, a slimy little gunsel who got in too deep and who might be getting in deeper as we speak, courtesy of a pair of cement overshoes. Hard to walk on water then.”

  The toad made a mournful sound and turned its back to me. Its lumpy little shoulders were working like an oil rig in a dry hole. I didn’t know toads could sob. Against my better judgement, I felt like a heel.

  “Can the waterworks, sweets,” I said, squatting down in front of her. “I’ll help you, only not the way you asked. We don’t need to find your brother. We need to find the bird.”

  The toad anted up a croak that was as good as a question. I got her drift. “Because if his place was torn up as bad as you say, I’m willing to bet they were after a clue to where he stashed the bird,” I explained. “Maybe they found one, maybe not. If they did, well, it’s lights out for Hansel; nothing I can do. But if they didn’t—” The toad looked hopeful. “—Then he’s still alive. LeGras wants his precious tweetie back; he won’t let his goons kill the rat until it squeals. If we can find the bird before before Junior cracks, we’ve got a bargaining chip that just might save the little reptile’s bacon.”