Necrophenia

  ‘She?’ asked the guy.

  ‘The dame that does me wrong. You’ve read the novels, right? Everyone’s read the Lazlo Woodbine Thrillers, right?’

  ‘From the poignant pen of Penrose? Yes.’

  ‘Well, you must then understand that you must never mess with a winning formula. All the big guys know this, which is why they are big guys. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said the guy. ‘So we sit here talking the toot until the dame that does you wrong turns up. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Right. And is this the same dame every time, or a different dame?’

  ‘Different dame.’

  ‘Right,’ said the guy. ‘Because if it was always the same dame, you’d probably be forewarned that she was going to do you wrong. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said once more. ‘So it would lack for the element of surprise. Which would mess with the format. The dame that does me wrong always furnishes me with some vital clue that is necessary to the solving of the case. But she will do me wrong, in that at the end of the chapter she always strikes me hard on the back of the head and sends me down into that whirling pit of black oblivion that all genre private eyes get sent to in that chapter.’

  ‘This chapter, right?’

  ‘Next chapter.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Don’t you mean “right”?’ I asked.

  ‘Right,’ said the guy.

  And then I saw her. And she was beautiful. She breezed into that bar like a bat out of Hell that would be gone when the morning came. But without a hint of the bat about her. By the way she walked I could tell that here was a dame who knew what the sound of one hand clapping was like. And if she wasn’t built for the pleasures of the flesh, then Rome was built in a day with a bucket and spade. She was long and blonde and when God designed her, She wasn’t kidding around.

  The guy nudged the elbow of my trench coat and asked me, ‘Is that the dame?’

  ‘I wish, kid,’ and I shook my head. ‘It’s that great fat munter behind her.’

  40

  Now, I retract that word ‘munter’. It’s a cruel word, that, and although it rarely fails to raise a titter, that’s no need to go using it willy-nilly. Especially in a derogatory fashion.

  And especially when referring to Mama Cass.

  ‘Hi there, Laz,’ said the legend from the Mamas and the Papas.

  I tipped the lady the brim of my fine fedora, told her to pull up a bar stool and park her big butt and join me in taking a drink.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ said the rather broad broad. ‘I need to use the phone. Our limo broke down and we have to get to Woodstock for the festival.’

  ‘I’m playing at Woodstock,’ said the guy, ‘with my band The Sumerian Kynges. Perhaps you’ve heard of us - we closed the Hyde Park gig for The Rolling Stones.’

  ‘Don’t go getting all bent out of shape,’ I told the guy. ‘The Rolling Stones closed the Hyde Park gig for The Rolling Stones, and I should know, I was over there on a case. And Mick Jagger let me into the green room. He’s a big fan of my work, you see.’

  ‘But—’ said the guy.

  ‘It’s a true story,’ said Fangio. ‘Tell him about the kid, Laz, the one who got really stoned on a Banbury Bloater and had to be chucked out of the green room. How uncool was he?’

  ‘What?’ said the guy.

  ‘What indeed,’ said I.

  ‘Woodstock?’ said Mama Cass. ‘You and your band are playing Woodstock?’ But she didn’t address this question to me, rather to my client, the kid.

  ‘Yes,’ said the kid. ‘I think we’re on just after you. This is a real pleasure.’ And he stuck out his hand for a shake.

  But I edged this hand aside. ‘Kid,’ I told him, ‘you’re muddying the waters here. Sending the plot off on a tangent. Lazlo Woodbine doesn’t do tangents. He’s a real straight arrow. He talks the toot, yes, but he gets right on with the job in hand. So kindly step aside and watch how the dame that does me wrong does me wrong. Pay attention, now - it will be an educational experience.’

  The guy made a noise that sounded like ‘Hmmph’ but which might have been ‘Yes, sir’ in Swiss.

  ‘So,’ said Fangio to Mama Cass, ‘Woodstock, eh? I’ve heard tell of this. An outdoor Hippy Life-Affirming Cosmic Celebration. Or as we right-minded Republicans would say, a bunch of them no-good peace-queers and drug fiends smoking reefers and supporting the cockney work ethic.’

  ‘What?’ said the guy. And I for one joined him in this.

  ‘Are you for real?’ asked Mama Cass of Fangio.

  The fat-boy felt at his person.

  ‘That is disgusting,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘It’s my person,’ said Fangio, ‘and I’ll feel at it if I wish.’ Adding, ‘And as it’s also my bar, I can propound right-wing bigotry also, if I so wish. It’s the prerogative of the barlord. That and fiddling the change.’

  ‘And skimping on the toilet rolls in the gentlemens’ John,’ I added.

  ‘That goes without saying,’ said Fangio.

  ‘So, where is the phone?’ asked Mama Cass.

  ‘Now that,’ said Fangio, ‘is a question.’

  ‘But you do have a phone?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by “have”,’ said Fange. ‘I had measles once, but I’m damned if I know whatever became of them.’

  ‘I had a lost weekend once,’ I said to Fange. ‘But I’m damned if I know whatever happened to that.’

  ‘I was with you on that weekend,’ said Fangio. ‘And I do know, but I’m not telling. Being enigmatic is also the prerogative of the barlord.’

  ‘So, no telephone,’ said Mama Cass.

  Fangio the barman shook his head. ‘Don’t you just long for the invention of the mobile phone?’ he asked. ‘Or cell phone as we’ll call it over here. Because people will use them in prisons, I suppose.’

  There was a small but perfect silence.

  ‘My mum predicted that,’ said the guy. ‘And do you know what? I miss my mum.’ And he got a rather sad face on.

  ‘You’re going off on a tangent again, kid,’ I told him. ‘Never take your eye off the ball. Except if you’re in a gay pub quiz.’

  ‘But where is this leading?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Just stick around and you’ll see.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mama Cass. ‘Well, if you don’t have a phone here, I suppose I’ll have to go elsewhere and look for one. I must get in touch with Mr Ishmael.’

  ‘Mr Ishmael? ’ went the guy. But I silenced him with a raised fist and single look so intense that it could have swallowed a pigeon, beak and trotters and all.

  ‘Mr Ishmael?’ I asked Mama Cass. ‘Who is this Mr Ishmael of whom you speak?’

  ‘You have a lovely way with words,’ said the talented, if slightly overweight, chanteuse. ‘Would you care for some free love in the back of the limo?’

  ‘Lady,’ I told her, ‘in my line of work, I don’t have time for love. I have time for danger and time for trouble. And time to talk the toot. But to Lazlo Woodbine, love is a stranger who wears a tweed jacket with ink on its right lapel. And leather patches on its elbows. Which can say so much, whilst still remaining mute, if you know what I mean and I’m sure that you do.’

  ‘Don’t get me going on tweed jacket elbow patches,’ said Fangio.

  ‘I won’t, my friend,’ I told him.

  ‘But this is free love,’ said Mama Cass. ‘It’s not like real love. In fact, it doesn’t really have anything to do with love at all, really. It’s more about meaningless sex. It just sounds nicer to call it free love. It’s one of those new buzz words, like Flower Power, that the Big Apple Corporation create.’

  ‘The Big Apple Corporation?’ I questioned.

  ‘The BAC, that’s right.’

  ‘Pray tell me, madam,’ I asked of her, ‘what do you know of this uptown organisation?’

  ‘Not very much,’ said Mama Cass. And she took the cherry brandy from my client’s hand and quaffed it
away at a gulp. ‘They’re behind the Woodstock Festival. Although they’re very secretive about it and not many people know. I just happened to overhear a conversation that Mr Ishmael was having.’

  ‘That name again,’ said I. ‘Who is this Mr Ishmael?’

  ‘The backer of Woodstock. The chairman of the Big Apple Corporation.’

  ‘This is news to me,’ said the guy.

  ‘Be still,’ I said. And I meant it. And I showed him that I did.

  ‘Mr Ishmael is the driving force behind the BAC,’ continued the ample diva. ‘And it was the BAC that came up with not only Free Love and Flower Power, but Peace and Love, Man also. And a good thing, too, because if the BAC hadn’t got the Flower Power thing going, me and my band could never have found a record label to take our stuff.’

  ‘You’re on Dunhill, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘It’s Mr Ishmael’s label really. But I must be going. I need to find a phone.’

  ‘It’s very cold out,’ I said to the girl with the golden voice. ‘What say you and I sit here and sink a few Buds, chew the fat and talk about the good old days.’

  ‘You mean memories? Misty watercolour memories?’

  ‘The very same. Can I buy you a beer? My client there is paying.’

  ‘The young guy lying on the floor next to the McMurdo?’

  ‘The very same.’ And I hailed Fangio. ‘We need some service over here,’ I hailed. ‘And none of your service-with-a-smile-without-the-smile. ’

  ‘I missed his earlier smile,’ said Mama Cass, ‘because it was before I came in. But I just bet it brought joy to the world, for it certainly did to me.’

  ‘Sister,’ I said to her, ‘you know how to talk the toot. Let’s crack a bottle of bubbly.’

  I ordered that bottle and by three of the clock that ticks out the afternoon it was delivered to us, along with a bar tab that I signed on my client’s behalf and a kitten that I petted gently and returned to Fange. Who placed it in a cardboard box to be mailed to our boys in ’Nam.

  I filled glasses and toasts were exchanged.

  ‘I have a black eye,’ said my client, rising unsteadily from the floor and viewing this in the mirror behind the bar.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.

  Fangio excused himself from a crowd of Jimbos who had recently entered the bar and returned himself to my company.

  ‘What very big women,’ he said. ‘And such deep voices. And they smell a bit iffy, too.’

  I noticed my client glance over his shoulder.

  ‘Are you okay, buddy?’ I asked him.

  ‘Jimbos,’ said my client. ‘I told you about them. At The Green Carnation Club. I think they might be undead.’

  ‘But you can’t tell for sure because you’re not on the drug, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said the guy. ‘And that wasn’t funny, what you said earlier. You weren’t in the green room at The Stones in the Park gig. I would have seen you.’

  ‘But you did,’ I told him. ‘I was in disguise.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘As whom. As Marianne Faithfull.’

  ‘I think I’m drunk,’ said the guy. ‘I don’t believe you actually said that.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Just keep telling yourself I didn’t.’

  ‘And add I must pay Fangio’s bar tab,’ said Fangio. ‘And, a little while later, when we’re all very drunk, you can sing us a song, also.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sitting around here for hours now, drinking and lying on the floor unconscious also, although I don’t remember how that happened. And I’m beginning to believe that Mr Woodbine here is just treading water, as it were, because he is being paid by the hour.’

  Things went suddenly quiet in the bar. And outside the sun went behind a cloud and a dog howled in the distance. Same sun. Different dog.

  Fangio broke the sudden quiet. ‘Out of my bar,’ cried he.

  ‘Out?’ said the guy.

  ‘Out indeed. Coming in here with your beguiling gypsy ways, disguised as a Swiss abortionist. I can stand just so much and then no more. Like Popeye. And he’s a sailor!’

  ‘But I’m the client,’ said the guy. ‘If you chuck me out then Mr Woodbine won’t have a case to work on. And I won’t come back and pay my bar tab.’

  ‘You fiend in human form,’ quoth Fangio. ‘Are there any Cosa Nostra in the bar? I must have this man killed.’

  ‘Let’s all stop there,’ I said, as ever the voice of reason. ‘We have all had something to drink and Mr Tyler, being a Brit, cannot be expected to either hold his drink or enjoy the benefits of the American dental system.’

  ‘What?’ asked the guy.

  ‘And I,’ I said, ‘feel that I am perched upon the threshold of a major breakthrough in the case. I am only moments away from this breakthrough and I for one would not wish to be denied this breakthrough, as the repercussions for the case - and in fact for humanity as a whole - are too horrendous even to contemplate.’

  ‘You don’t say?’ said Fangio.

  ‘Oh yes I do.’

  Fangio grinned and said, ‘Oh no you don’t.’

  ‘Oh yes I do.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t.’ And Fangio laughed.

  ‘Have to stop you there,’ I said.

  ‘But—’ said the guy. But I had to stop him, too.

  ‘A major breakthrough is coming,’ I said, ‘so let us not mess with the method. Mama Cass, is there anything else that you would like to tell me regarding Mr Ishmael and the Big Apple Corporation?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘Think very very hard.’

  And Mama Cass thought hard. ‘There is one thing,’ she said. ‘It seemed a trivial thing at the time, but the more I think about it, and I often do, I think that it might mean something.’

  ‘Would you care to whisper it into my ear?’ I asked Mama Cass.

  ‘I certainly would,’ said she.

  And Mama Cass whispered. And I listened hard to his whispering. And my client tried to listen too, but he couldn’t hear because Mama Cass was whispering.

  And when her whispering was done, she stopped whispering.

  ‘Your words are sweet soul music to my ears, Mama Cass,’ I told her.

  ‘You think it means something?’ she asked.

  ‘It has the case all but solved.’

  ‘Case?’ said Mama Cass. ‘What case?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘A trivial matter. But let us talk about us. You are a fine-looking woman, and I a virile man. What say we jump into the back of your limo and get our rocks off?’

  And Mama Cass cried, ‘Look, Zulus, thousands of them,’ and pointed, and I peered in the direction of this pointing. And then she hit me hard on the back of the head. And I felt myself falling, down, down into a whirling black pit of oblivion.

  And right on cue, at the end of the chapter, which worked out perfectly.

  41

  Frankly, I could do without the blow to the back of my head and the long and horrid fall into that whirling black pit of oblivion, which I always have to take at the end of chapter two in every adventure I have. Frankly, and I use that word again and advisedly, I wish that there was some other way to expedite matters with the dame that does me wrong. Because, frankly, it gives me a headache. But for we genre detectives, the tried and trusty methods are the ones that get the job done. So I guess that you just gotta take the knocks along with the good times and never say die. And never ever change format.

  I really cannot impress upon you too strongly the importance of format. A correct format, that is. A prize-winning, best-selling format. Correct format has seen me through thick and thin and no matter what kind of inexplicable conundrums I might find myself faced with, I will always stick to format and I will always succeed in the end.

  And for any of you out there who might have forgotten the format, or possibly speed-read through that paragraph because you were anxious to get to the end of
that particular chapter, probably in the hope of some really hot trench-coat action coming up in the next, I will run through the format just the once more and ask that you commit it to memory because it will prove so very important when the time comes.

  So, just the once more and no more.

  As a nineteen-fifties genre detective I work only the four locations:

  1. An office where a client comes to call.

  2. A bar where I talk the all-important toot with the barman and meet the dame who will do me wrong, who will impart important information, but will do me wrong. And strike me on the head to send me down into that black whirling pit of oblivion.

  3. An alleyway where I will get into sticky situations (this is where there will be a lot of trench-coat action).

  4. And a rooftop, preferably during a thunderstorm, where I will encounter the villain for that final rooftop confrontation. And from which the villain will take that final big tumble to ultimate oblivion.

  And that is it. That is how it works. How it has always worked and how it will always work. You can call it a tradition, or an old charter, or something, if you wish. But I just call it a perfect winning format.

  But why, you might ask, am I telling you this now? Where does me telling you this fit into the format? When would I have time to tell you this? Take my steel-trap mind off the case in hand at the present and tell you all this? When, Laz, when? I hear you ask, and the answer is oh so simple.

  Right now is that oh-so-simple answer. Now, when I am unconscious, spinning around and around and around in that whirling black pit of oblivion. And I will have to part company with you now, because I think I’m coming round.

  Wap! went a mug-load of beer to my mug and someone shook my trench-coat lapels all around.

  ‘Oh, whoa, hold hard there,’ cried I, striking away this douser of my person, unhanding their hands from my spotless lapels and making a very fierce face.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Woodbine,’ said the kid who was my client, ‘but Mama Cass lamped you one on the noggin.’

  ‘That’s no excuse to besmirch me with beer.’ I was on my feet now and wiping beer froth from my chops. And also from the shoulders of my trench coat. And that was not a good thing to be happening. Beer besmirchment of the trench coat. That was a big no-no.