Strip for Murder (23 page)

A bugle blew, cracking on the high note.

Laurel said, “That's the warning. Next one is the start. Get ready.” She ran away.

I looked dazedly around. Mr. Blore was already in place, and Laurel had reached the far end of the finish line. A bugle sounded again, loud and clear.

There was a monstrous, blood-chilling shriek from my left and I snapped my head around. I stared. A mountain of flesh was in motion, coming at me. At first it was a pink landslide, a volcanic lava flow of flesh rolling this way to inundate me; then I began to pick out individual segments of the mass: women. Women, all running as if each absolutely had to win, arms flying, legs pumping, everything doing something.

It was appalling. Never in my wildest moments had I ever dreamed of anything remotely like this. There was a sound of thunder like buffalo stampeding; a trumpeting as of elephants stuck in swamps.

Suddenly the race was over. I didn't have any idea who had won.

All I knew was that three figures had streaked past me—and then I was drowning in naked babes. Bedlam and Babel were right here, all around me.
Swish
and a form flew past;
whoosh
and another body veered around me. Squeals and more squeals and laughter and shouts billowed in the air.

I just lay there, my mouth hanging open like a trap door, while with something approaching horror I thought: I am losing my interest in women!

Suddenly three girls were standing over me. They were all arguing pleasantly and looking down at me—yeah, down; I was flat on my back staring at the sky—and all three said in unison, “I won, didn't I? Didn't I?”

I got to my feet and looked down at them for a change. I made a snap decision.

“You won,” I said, pointing to the girl in the middle. “You won by—er—a nose.”

She clapped her hands. The prize was a pair of silver wings for her feet, but she should have been awarded a platinum brassiere. She had practically no nose at all.

They left, the losers accepting my decision with good grace. And then Laurel was beside me. She said, “Well, that was fun.”

I laughed hollowly. All my life I had thought that something like this would be the ultimate, the crest, the absolute unsurpassable peak. Now it had happened, and it had been horrible.

Laurel said, “I'm glad you spotted the winner. Neither Mr. Blore nor I could see into the middle.”

“Baby.” My voice was thin. “I'll tell you the truth. After the first wave, the shock troops, everything went blank. I was knocked down and trampled on. They streamed by forever. You have no idea...” I stopped, then came to a decision. “Laurel, I'm going to have some more of those vegetable drippings. And I hope it
is
spiked. I hope it's poisoned.”

Laurel followed me to the punch bowl. I was scraping a cup against the bottom of the thing when she arrived. “Gone!” I cried. “All gone!” My brain felt loose inside my skull. “Laurel,” I said, “I resign. I'm done. I'm a shambles. This is the—”

A crash of sound came from the band.

"No!"
I shouted. “I won't!”

“Shell,” Laurel said sharply. “Don't talk like that. Come on.” She took me by the hand. “Hurry.”

She started pulling me after her, talking as we shoved through the milling crowd. “This is the beauty contest. It's really the most important contest of the whole day. You can't miss it.”

“Beauty contest. I was looking forward to it once. But the joy has gone out of—”

“Hurry,” she said. In moments we were there.

We were at the little platform I'd noticed earlier in the morning. It was about fifteen feet long and six feet wide, up about a yard off the ground, made of pine planks nailed together. There were no sides to it, so you could look right underneath it easily, though there seemed little point in doing it, and at each end were three wooden steps.

Laurel said, “We've got a few minutes yet. I wanted to explain the procedure. See those steps? There are twenty-two girls, one from each camp represented here. One at a time they'll walk up the steps on one side, onto the platform, then across it.”

“They come across up there on the platform?” I was silent for a moment. “Maybe I'll judge this affair after all.”

“They come across slowly to here"—Laurel pointed to the steps on our left—"and then go down the steps. We three—you, Mr. Blore, and I as last year's queen—judge them, compare our ratings, and announce the winner. I'll be right here beside you if you need any explanation. It's really very simple. Oh, here they come.”

They were on their way. A few minutes later all was fairly quiet. Mr. Blore, Laurel, and I sat in wooden chairs before the stand. The twenty-two girls lined up, one behind the other, at the right-hand steps. The whole bunch of conventioneers was scattered in back of us on the grass. The band was on the far side of the stand, playing, not just blasting away now, but playing real music. At least they were carrying a tune. After much concentration I recognized “Stardust.”

Nice. Gave everything a touch of real class. The band stopped, a bugle sounded, then the band reverted to “Stardust” again. I had calmed down quite a bit by now, but everything was a little woozy. Oh, I could see well enough. As a matter of fact, I had already picked out a little redhead who looked like a winner. And I was beginning to wonder what was going on in the outside world.

A man—an old, old man—was waiting by the phone in the event that a call came for me. But none had. Last night and again during my few unhectic moments this morning I had thought about the fact that to the killer of Mrs. Redstone and of Yates, the would-be killer of Laurel and of me, I was the one guy who still had to be knocked off. But since I was staying out of action, so to speak, I figured that this was the one place where hoods couldn't get at me, the one place where I'd be safe. No hoods, I figured, would come in
here
for me. Which just goes to show the lengths guys will go to when it's really important to kill a man. They arrived at ten o'clock, straight up.

As the first girl walked up the steps and started mincing slowly across the platform, I settled back to judge a real, down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness beauty contest. Nobody was going to tap-dance in this one. The first gal wasn't bad; she paused in the middle of the platform and turned slowly around, then went on down the steps on our left. The second girl started up. The band finished “Stardust” and swung into its opening bars again. I had a hunch I was going to get tired of “Stardust.”

I glanced at the band and noticed a guy standing near the musicians with his back to me. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but my mind was on other things, and I turned my attention back to those other things. The redhead, who, as far as I was concerned, had won, stood next in line. I don't know how I happened to notice; I just looked to my right. Two groups of people had shifted their positions so that temporarily there was an open space between them, and beyond them I saw a couple that seemed somehow different from the rest. A man and a woman were standing apart from the others, both carrying small leather bags, like briefcases. As I watched, each of them reached into a case and pulled out a piece of brown cloth. I thought: What the hell? And then I really saw something funny.

They slipped the cloths over their heads and suddenly they were wearing brown hoods with eyeholes they could look through. That was strange. A rather amusing thought struck me then. Even if they'd been friends of mine, and even if the girl had been a
very
good friend of mine, I wouldn't have been able to recognize them, or later say who they'd been. There is a kind of anonymity among nudists, and nudists with hoods on their heads are about as anonymous as you can get. It's the fault of our stuffy society, of course, but that's the way it is, and I'd never realized before how true it was. I was philosophical as the devil.

And, too, I was full of fruit juice. Which maybe is what made me think I saw the gun. The man dropped his briefcase and something tumbled out of it, a something he quickly grabbed and shoved back into the case. That gave me another chuckle. Suppose a criminal nudist, one among four or five hundred nudists, put a hood over his face and shot somebody. Off with the hood's hood, he leaves—and he's safe. Who could ever identify him? How in hell could anybody here at Fairview, say, later identify the character in court? I got a big kick out of it.

Chuckling, I looked back at my redhead—and then came the first cracked note, the first inkling of real screaming pandemonium.

“Stardust” had ended. The band was playing something different for a change. And over there near the line of girls I saw a woman's face that jarred me, though at first I didn't know why. There was something vaguely familiar about it, and also about the tune the band was playing.

What with the
oompahs
and all the rest it took me a few seconds to figure out what the melody was. And by that time it was too late to stop it, to stop anything, for that matter.

Suddenly I recognized that slow, draggy
Oompah, poo-pah-pah
and sprang to my feet. Now I knew who that big guy at the band had been. I'd seen sunlight glinting off his completely bald head—the bald head of Young Egg Foo.

And the band was playing “St. Louis Blues.”

“No! Stop the music!” I yelled.

But I was too late. The band kept playing. And there, suddenly, was Babe Le Toot.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I just stood there, paralyzed, staring at Babe up there on the platform in place of my redhead; Babe in all her glory—and drunk as a lord.

I knew, all at once, what Foo had been doing near the band, what those brown hoods were for, what had happened to those swiped admission cards. Maybe even what had happened to some of that punch. Babe was so drunk she thought the platform was U-shaped.

She was weaving around now, grinning and winking, snorting and chuckling. Any minute she was going to do some bumps and grinds. She was in her element at last, and it was a heating element. She started doing some little ones, gently, as if she were merely waving at the audience, but then she went back to the rear of the platform, raised one hand over her head and drew back her entire midsection.

It was one of those moments.

I couldn't have yanked my eyes away for anything. One of the greatest bumps ever seen was about to be bumped.

I knew, I just knew, that this was going to be an epic bump, one to cherish in memory. She was wound up to put her all into this one, years of training and “St. Louis Blues” conditioning.

But Babe was out of practice. The weight hanging in back there overbalanced her and slowly she toppled backward. She lit on her head and just lay there.

That broke the spell. I sprang to the platform, but staggered woozily, and that fool band began playing “Stardust” again.

I swung around, yelling for silence, for attention—which you can bet I was getting—and the band stopped. It was suddenly quiet and I had my chance:

“It's Foo!” I shouted. “And Babe Le Toot, too!”

The echo of my voice came back from the hills like the whistle of a faraway locomotive. People ogled me, but didn't move. The fools didn't believe me. I shouted, “It is
too,
Foo. And Toot. Ah, the hell with it. They're criminals! Who cares what their names are? They're hoods! All those guys with hoods on are hoods!”

Several people drew back from the front of the platform, then a shot rang out and everybody drew back, me included, because the slug whistled past my ear, and suddenly I was six feet off the ground, clutching handfuls of air. I never needed a gun more badly.

I ran through milling people, headed toward my cabin, where my clothes and gun were. I didn't make it. As I neared the green dressing room another hooded guy stepped through the door and aimed a gun at me. He not only aimed it, he fired it. I hit the grass hard, rolling and feeling pain slide over my arm and shoulder and inside my head; then I crashed into a table and fireworks fell all over.

As I got to my feet the guy left the doorway and started toward me, not running, just walking closer and closer. There was no need for him to hurry; he could take his time about shooting me. I turned to run in the opposite direction and saw another guy loping toward me, a gun in his right fist too. He had a brown cloth over his head, but I knew it was big Foo. Beyond him the scene was indescribable, people running left and right and around in circles, shrieking and falling down.

It was a hell of a last sight on earth, but I was damned if I'd just stand here and let those guys fire at me. Fire ... And fireworks all around me. Maybe, by God, this was already the Fourth of July. The matches were still on the table. I grabbed one, struck it, and latched onto a handful of Roman candles, lighting them all at once and grabbing more in my other hand as the fuses started sputtering.

There was a noise like
thoo
and a big ball of burning powder shot out of one of the candles almost in my face. Foo was only about fifteen yards away; the other guy was even closer and walking slowly forward. The fools didn't know I was armed. As the ball of fire sizzled into the air, the guy coming from the dressing room looked up at it. By the time he looked down again I had about a dozen of my weapons aimed at him, all of them lighted by now.

Balls of fire started whooshing out at him like shells from a small rocket launcher. Only one of the balls hit him, but he let out a yelp and fell over backward. I turned and ran straight at Foo, practically enveloped in smoke and flame. I'll swear that all of those Roman candles let loose at once and blazing pellets bounced off Foo like incandescent peanuts. I kept running as he whirled and brought his hands up before his face—but he didn't let go of his gun.

I swerved and ran to the left of him and past. Someone shot at me again and missed. I ran like a deer, still hanging onto the Roman candles, which were sputtering and fizzling. I was almost out of ammunition. A sudden staccato burst of noise rattled behind me and I thought one of the slobs had got his hands on a machine gun and was mowing me down. But nothing hit me. I glanced over my shoulder to see skyrockets zipping all over the place. Roman candles sending fireballs bouncing along the ground and flames going up from the stand where the fireworks had been stacked. I also saw
three
guys running after me now. Guns glinted in the hands of all three.