When Graveyards Yawn by G. Wells Taylor (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕
I pulled my bottom lip. "Looks like the bastard shot you from behind, too."
Billings made fists of his dead hands and pounded the arms of the chair. "I want him!"
Chapter 3
"All right," I said. "How'd it happen?"
Mr. Billings looked uncomfortable as he squeaked around in his seat. I knew the look; he was about to be fairly dishonest with me.
"You must realize the importance of--confidentiality." His eyes did a conscientious little roll of self-possession until they came to rest on me again, quivering and uncertain like bad actors. They were indefinite and restless on either side of his hatchet nose. Perfectly unconvincing so far.
"You may not believe this, but under all this makeup, I'm a god-damned angel," I sneered. "Besides, there are few people who take my word seriously." I flashed him a quick idiot grin.
"May I ask?" The dead man nervously pulled out a package of ci
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“Hello,” I said to the guard’s belly. It had appeared at the window over Elmo’s shoulder. The guard bent low. He looked at Elmo first, stared at my partner with his mirrors until the dead man trembled. When my happy reflection appeared in the glass, I knew he was studying me.
“What the hell have we got here?” He smiled beneath his nasty blood-streaked nose. “Looks like a circus.”
“No, not a circus.” I could feel Tommy rise toward the surface like a wave of nausea. “I’m Wildclown, a private investigator. I’m here to see Robert Hawksbridge, 41 Arcadia.”
The sarcastic smile melted. His face went blank and for a moment he silently regarded us both. “Just hold on a minute.” He sauntered back to his little guardhouse. I watched him through the tiny arrow slit of a window. The guard held a phone to his face and clenched his jaws behind it mumbling. He watched us without expression. He put the receiver down, walked out of the guardhouse and stood in the doorway for a minute, just staring. Then he walked back in, and out of sight. There was a groan, and the loud whir of an electric motor. The scene of iron Eden slid slowly out of sight on a track. The guard reappeared, walked toward us, this time to my window.
“It’s okay, you can go on in.” He squatted by my door. “Listen, tell me. I used to do a little private investigating myself.” He scratched the side of his head. “What the hell is with the makeup?”
“It’s a customer-relations thing. I found if you keep them happy, they keep coming back.” I smiled, then motioned for Elmo to drive ahead. We left the security man scratching his head at the gate.
The asphalt in the Arcadia Residential Complex had an oily, freshly scrubbed sheen as it wound in and around a national debt’s worth of stately homes. The sky was its usual overcast, but for some reason, everything looked a little brighter and cleaner here. Huge oak trees reached out to make a green promenade of the road. Lawns, finely clipped and manicured, grew out to lightly stroke sidewalks as white as marble. A pair of old women in gaudy, floral-print dresses doddered along in sun hats, of all things. I watched their old hands move fluidly, and their rouged lips jerk mechanically around tired old stories. Some brownstone salesman had made a killing here, because the majority of the homes were built of the impressive stone.
House after house, crisp in new paint and gardening—walled in like monetary gulags. Enormous black limousines sneered as they passed the Chrysler. Watching the noble elegance in the architecture of Arcadia, I felt uneasy. Despite their impressive and monolithic qualities, they had an element of the transparent to them—an ephemeral aura that all their weight could not deny. I felt that I could walk up to a house, open its ornately carved door and find nothing but an empty lot inside—like you would find in the imagined western streets in Movietown. The trees, though beautiful, shimmered like a special effect in the nonexistent light. I got the feeling that if I were to approach one of the front lawns, I could lift it like indoor-outdoor carpeting, and view the struts and buttresses of construction underneath. I felt that if I looked past that I could find the long dead faces of ghosts of the Industrial Age—these homes and the illusion they represented were built upon the unstable ground of exploitation. I shook my head, and flicked my cigarette out the window. My mood was a little off.
Long, dull Authority vehicles, black as an overcast sky at night cruised the streets. There was a lot of money in the New Garden District. And there were rules hanging from every tree. Rule number one: if you don’t have money, you won’t be staying long. Rule number two: see rule number one. New Garden sickened me. It was an example of greed that transcended the mere pedestrian greed. New Garden hadn’t changed much since the Change, and that was what brought on the nausea. They had enough money here to maintain the simplicity of the Old World. The doggy on the leash, a cat wetting in the garden, here grandma could set the apple pie on the sill to cool off. All this normal day-to-day—this incongruous mediocrity—while the bulk of humanity continued to struggle in the violent current of its impulse towards extinction. New Garden was just the same denial that had so long plagued the world. If you had enough money, and the power that went with it, the world was and always would be the same lovely place. Death, sickness, and poverty were merely the plot devices for a novel or a really good film. More illusions.
I lit another cigarette and watched with hazardous expectation, as though the mere knowledge of the illusion would cause it to shimmer and disappear. My thoughts spiraled downward. It was the case, and my own struggle against forces beyond my control. I was being pushed along, and I had been used. Not only did that gall me, it frightened me—though such an admission runs contrary to the detective handbook. If I didn’t soon get control of this case, it would kill me.
A rhinoceros head looked dumbly at me from where it hung on the wall. It sprouted from the center of a shield-shaped sheet of polished mahogany. The thick lips were twisted into an embarrassed grin. That didn’t bother me half as much as the stork, whose snaky neck deposited its head—beady eyes like pellets of glass—six inches from my face. The bird had been stuffed then placed beside the large, olive, wing-backed chair where I was parked. Its spear-like beak was half-opened, poised for a fish or frog. Why the owners of the house had pointed it at this chair, I didn’t know. I was just glad they had nailed the crocodile to the wall where it menaced an ancient black and white family portrait. Apparently, there had been a hunter in the Hawksbridge family. The entire house was filled with stuffed animals. Out in the hallway I had passed a cramped looking lion in a case. Its dead eyes held a forlorn expression staring four inches from the glass. One of the eyes was milky.
Elmo and I had arrived only moments ago. I had told him to wait in the car, and then sauntered up to the large oak door of 41 Arcadia. A handle, like a miniature doorknob, grew out of the wall beneath an oval stained-glass window. I had pulled it, and was alarmed by a deafening school bell clang inside. It was a large house, 41 Arcadia, with a long semi-circular driveway, so that no one would have to wear himself out shifting into reverse. It was brownstone, as I had suspected, and wore about forty glittering windows in its face. A butler had answered the door, by his voice the very one I had spoken to. His face was ancient, two tufts of fur at his temples was all that remained of his hair. The old eyes had bulged momentarily at me, before he slipped into his long practiced professional courtesy. He had asked for identification, and I showed him my license. As a compliment to him, he handled it all very well. This Jeeves remained professional and courteous despite the fact that a large clown displaying an ugly sidearm showed up at the door when he had expected a Bogie character with khaki-colored trench coat and low-slung fedora—with bullets instead of eyes and a punching bag instead of a face. Well, I was wearing a trench coat, and I did have a hat on. The rest was extra.
He showed me to the wing-backed chair and stork to wait while the seconds ticked by. I sat in the midst of the menagerie and smoked a cigarette, as Noah must have done after dinner on the Ark. I couldn’t help but wonder if the old boy had felt it a little close amongst all those animals, maybe on the thirty-third day or the thirty-third night. I also had to wonder what could have possessed an elephant to donate his foreleg to serve as the ash stand on my left.
The doors opened. The butler shuffled in and announced in his best voice. “Mr. Hawksbridge will join you shortly. Business has delayed him.”
I waved my cigarette, smiled as the butler backed out of the room and let my eyes rove over the animals again. I wondered if Grey sat in the same chair and whether the dead animal zoo had impressed him or if he had found the glass-eyed menagerie depressing too. He had been hired to find a missing girl who was pregnant—an impossibility in the world after the Change. He would have been filled with a general skepticism like I was. If I suspended my disbelief for a moment, a pregnant woman—even a woman threatening to be pregnant—would be hot property among the special interest groups Willieboy went on and on about. I also had to admit that I had only scratched the surface, so far as crazy baby religions and cults were concerned. There were all kinds of people who would want a pregnant woman. Alan Cotton was working for the King of the Dead. Both of them would like to get their hands on a baby—Cotton was dead and gone—but, the King had control of people in Authority, he was out there somewhere. Even Richard Adrian of Simpson’s Skin Tanning and Preservation for the Deceased would have coveted such a property—if he hadn’t been filleted. First, if he had heard about Regenerics, and secondly, because a real live baby might mean the end of business for him. What else was there? The business with the Twelve Stars Group and the fifth horseman mentioned in Grey’s journal. I had this terrible feeling that I would soon find out more about Twelve Stars than I wanted. Cane was a member. The door opened.
Mr. Robert Hawksbridge was a shorter than average man. He had stiff iron-gray hair that was meticulously groomed and polished. He had a large, hatchet-nose and deep circles under his eyes that, at first glimpse, might be taken to be the result of too many sleepless nights. Upon closer examination, I saw that the brow of his nose peaked far out from his face; the result was that his cheekbones slid away beneath his eyes almost unnoticed. This phenomenon caused the permanent bags and appearance of insomnia. He stared at me quickly with fine blue eyes, then whipped them away to guide him toward the chair behind his desk. He wore a dark blue, cotton suit with a deafening yellow tie. Mr. Hawksbridge dropped into his chair, put his left elbow on the arm, made a fist of his hand and then set his weak chin delicately upon it. His lips worked as he studied me.
“I see the ‘clown’ in your name represents more than a state of mind.” His voice was grave with precipitous depths to it.
“Yes, Mr. Hawksbridge. The makeup is part of my detective shtick. Some use deerstalker caps, others, sword-canes and exploding cars.” I pressed my cigarette into the elephant’s foot.
“You misunderstand me, Mr. Wildclown. I was not attempting any judgment. I may live in New Garden, and enjoy its protected confines, but I understand the changes that have come to the world without.” He repeated his chin-resting procedure with his right arm. “We all survive as we can.”
I smiled because I hadn’t expected that. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your sister, Julie—her disappearance. I’m investigating a murder that might be related. Did you know Owen Grey?”
“Ah, I see. No
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