Matt Danger & the Bound Angel Ch. 01.5

(Matt dropped off this manuscript after I’d already written up his story of “The Case of the Bound Angel”. It includes a scene with the gardener Miyoko that he hadn’t told me about before, so I present it here as Chapter 1.5 of the story for all the people who have shown such a gratifying interest in Mr. Danger’s modern techniques of scientific crime-solving.—dr.M.)

Buddy was conked out and snoring to beat the band by the time I got downstairs, which was okay with me, because I didn’t know just what I’d say to a guy whose wife was still lying upstairs naked licking my come off her face. The liquor cart girl was sitting in a chair nearby, doing her nails, one long, slim leg crossed tightly over the other the way women do when they’re wearing skirts that end about a quarter inch above their crotch, making sure there’s no line of sight. She looked bored.

I stopped in the hallway and lit a square.

“He always drink like that?” I asked her.

She didn’t look up. Apparently her cuticles were a lot more interesting than me. No answer.

I walked over to her so that my shadow fell in her manicure light and she finally raised her face to me.

“You know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to water down his hootch a little bit.” I said, “His liver might thank you for it.”

“Why don’t you go piss up a rope?” she asked me.

I assumed it was a rhetorical query, but it wasn’t a real promising note.

“Just doing my job,” I said. “Someone ought to cut him off before he hurts himself. Or is that the whole point?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“It means that there’s a lot of crap that’s going on here right under his nose, and he’s too lushed up to see it. I’m wondering if maybe that’s what you’re paid for.”

“I’m paid to do what Mr. and Mrs. Tremaine tell me to do.” she said. “And I do it. And if you had any brains, that’s what you’d do too, instead of going around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.” She looked at me, then down at my crotch. “Along with some other things.”

So she was wise that I’d just boffed the old lady. Well, you didn’t have to be the Amazing Randi to figure that one out. I still reeked from Felicia’s perfume and cunt-butter.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

She stared daggers at me but I met her gaze. I’d just fucked her boss and I was feeling pretty cocky.

“Beverly,” she said with a little shrug. She figured she could give me that much.

It occurred to me then that Beverly must also be fucking her boss—her boss being Felicia—and that she must be one of Felicia’s muff mafia. And I have to admit, as totally fucked out as I was right then, the thought of the two of them going sixty-nine brought a little thrill to Matt Jr., who raised his head like a good little dog when his name is called. It was a waste of good talent as far as I was concerned, but even so, what a twosome they would make.

“So tell me, Beverly,” I asked, “What do you know about this business with the daughter?”

She picked up her emery board again and started lazily filing her nails.

“Like I said, I just do what I’m paid for. I keep my nose out of everything else.”

A couple of good remarks concerning where her nose might be of an evening flitted through my brain, but this kind of palaver wasn’t getting me anywhere. Beverly obviously wasn’t going to talk. Besides, I wanted to get out of there before Mrs. Tremaine got her shit together and came after me.

“Well, nice talking to you,” I said as I crushed my butt out in the onyx ashtray.

“Yeah,” she said. “A real slice of heaven.”

I showed myself out and stood for a moment on the veranda out front, just drinking in the landscape. It was so green and so well-manicured that I could have been looking at a video game. The pretty Japanese gardener was still mucking around at the edge of the pond, pulling out weeds and throwing them on the shore. She had very long legs and a tight, high ass, and wore a white hapi-coat sashed around her waist that showed a lot of skin as she bent over to pull out the weeds. A very un-oriental body.

I got into my car and cruised down by the pond, then cut the engine and got out.

“Hi,” I said as I walked over.

She looked up at me and wiped the sweat from her head with the back of her wrist. She smiled, only the second warm smile I’d seen since I got her. Hers had been the first too.

“Hello,” she said. She was wearing white cotton gloves that were covered in mud, so she didn’t extend her hand.

“My name’s Danger. Matt Danger. Mr. Tremaine just hired me to find his daughter. Okay if I ask you a few questions?”

Unlike everyone else in the house, she seemed to be guileless. Everything she felt was right there on her face: polite interest, alarm when I mentioned Beth, and then cautious openness. So much for oriental inscrutability.

“I’m Miyoko Tiramiso,” she said with an automatic little bow. If she’d bent any lower, no doubt her big tits would have fallen right out of the robe-like hapi-coat she had tied under them. As it was, standing in the sun I could see the engaging little shadows caused by her puckered nipples against the white fabric. “I am just the gardener, though. You are a policeman?”

“Private detective,” I said, handing her one of my cleaner business cards. “I just thought, working outside and all, you must see pretty much everyone who comes and goes in the house. I wondered if maybe you’ve seen Beth or anything weird in the last week or so.”

Her open smile vanished as she got frightened. The poor girl didn’t even have the sense to hide it. I’d hate to see her play poker.

“No. Nothing. I really see very little. Just my plants and the flowers. That’s all. Nothing else. It keeps me very busy.”

I could see her eyes flicking past me to look up at the house. That’s where the fear was coming from.

“Well, thanks all the same Miyoko,” I said. I moved around a little so that my bulk shielded her from the house and I held out the card. She took off her muddy glove and took it, handling it with her fingertips, as if it were hot to the touch. “If you think of anything, anything at all, just give me a call. There’s some stuff I’d like to know about the Tremaine’s and I’m having some trouble getting a straight answer. You could be very helpful. And I’m very discrete. No one will know. I promise.”

She smiled politely and nodded but it was obvious she was scared and operating on automatic.

As I left her I shot a look up at the house and saw Beverly standing in the library window clear as day, staring daggers at us.

I drove back to town and went to my apartment to stash the blank check Buddy had signed. I didn’t intend to cash it just yet, not until I had some idea of how much I should write into it

So I know, Philip Marlowe or Ellery goddamned Queen would have got down to the bottom of the whole thing in less than ten pages, but me, I really saw no reason to hurry this case along. After all, I was getting paid by the day plus expenses, and no one but Tremaine seemed to be on my ass to get results, and at the moment he was totally involved in metabolizing about half a liter of grain neutral spirits and couldn’t be disturbed. I decided what this case needed was some very thorough brainstorming and meditation. Don’t want to act too rashly when something like this falls into your lap.

My favorite phrontistary is George and Bill’s Amiable Club, right down the street from my office, so I hied myself over there, ordered a beer and a bowl of chili and would have gone over my notes if I had any notes to go over, but in this case I didn’t have any written notes, and to tell the truth, I wasn’t really very interested in this case. Obviously it was all a set-up, a clumsy attempt to extort money out of a Buddy who was too inebriated to know fuck-all from fireworks. I figured Felicia was behind it, because she seemed to be the only one who knew where her ass was in relation to her head, but anyway, I didn’t give much of a toad fart about the Tremaines and their self-inflicted delusions. I was more interested in finding the best angle to play my next shot from, Matt Danger-wise. A sweet job like this doesn’t come your way every other day.

Still, my admittedly avaricious ruminations kept on being interrupted by thoughts of Felicia: about how smooth her belly had been, and about her remarkable pole-riding talent. I know that women who have their kids young can often escape the worst of the attack of the stretch marks, and there was no doubt she would have had to have been awfully young to have a twenty-year old daughter, but still, it was pretty hard to believe she’d ever been a mother. And the way she threw that ass around in the bedroom: that was more than just raw talent. She’d been to school, and I was pretty sure that Buddy hadn’t been the teacher.

My office is a few blocks off the usual commercial beaten track, and I got there just as the sun was going down and those melancholy summer shadows were stretching over the empty streets, and as I keyed my lock I was shocked to hear my phone ringing. Two calls in one day. I might have to open another office if this kept up.

“Matt Danger and Associates. Confidential Investigations,” I said, burping a bit of chili.

“Mr. Danger? It’s Miyoko Tiramisu, the gardener from Mr. Tremaine’s? Mr. Danger, I must see you. It’s very important.”

I was instantly sober. Well, okay, I wasn’t instantly sober. But I stopped belching.

“Miyoko? What’s up? Where are you?”

“I’m just off work. I can’t talk. They might be listening. Can I come to your office?”

“Well, sure, but…”

“Good. In an hour then.” And she hung up.

An hour gave me enough time to catch a couple Z’s, then get up and splash some water on my face and some scotch into a coffee cup, and by that time the sun had gone down and the walls of my office were starting to glow red from Wing Yee’s Oriental Garden’s big neon sign that hung outside my window. My office is in a quieter part of town and the streets empty out early. It was so quiet outside that I could hear Miyoko’s heels rapping on the sidewalk half a block away. I stood in the shadows and watched her come. She wore a scarf over her head and dark glasses. I guess she thought she was in disguise. Like dark glasses at twilight would hide her identity. Like any male who saw her in that tight, tight white dress wouldn’t have her image permanently seared into his brain. The dress clung to her smooth thighs as she walked and I could only imagine what her as must look like from the other side. From up in my window I could see every jiggle of her ripe and sumptuous rack as her feet hit the concrete. To these not inexperienced eyes it looked like her dress was doing double duty as a bra too. Caged birds don’t swing as sweet.

“Mr. Danger!” she said when I opened the door for her, “Thank heavens you’re here!”

I got a chance to really look at her now. That white dress was some sort of jersey material, very stretchy, and now having its stretchiness tested to the utmost. For an oriental girl, she had a body that was pure corn-fed American beef, with long legs and generous hips and high, proud tits. Not too big, but sassy as hell. Her dress ended awfully far north of her knee and south of her neck—just a little sundress, really--and the foothills of those breasts were quite visible, crowded together like two cannonballs trying to hide under a handkerchief.

I let her in and stood close enough so that I could catch a whiff of her scent. Nothing much, just the smell of sun-ripened flesh and clean-scrubbed woman. A quick glance at her nails convinced me that gardening wasn’t Miyoko’s primary duty out at the Tremaine spread.

“Please, lock the door,” she said. “I’m afraid they might have followed me.”

“And who would that be?” I asked her.

“Felicia,” she said, looking nervously through the blinds. “Or maybe Beverly. They’re the ones who are behind this. I’m sure of it.”

I followed her into my inner office, closing the door behind me. She pulled off her scarf and let her rich black hair cascade around her neck., then took off her dark glasses. Whatever the emergency had been, Miyoko had found time to put on make-up, and she’d done a very good job of it, not that she needed any. She’d come to pitch a little woo, I guessed. I prepared to catch.

“So Beverly’s in on this too?”

It made sense. Beverly was obviously a part of Felicia’s Flying Gyno Circus, and was furthermore given the job of Buddy’s private booze-cart caddy, hired to make sure he got all the lush he could handle, and then some. The idea was to keep him too shit-faced to notice whom was taking what from his pocket.

“And why would they want to follow you, Miyoko? You’ve got something you want to tell me?”

“Yes,” she said, sitting down in the leather arm chair in front of my desk. Then, “No. Oh, I don’t know. I’m frightened, Mr. Danger. Mrs. Tremaine is a very dangerous woman. She can hurt you: cause you a lot of trouble. And Beverly is even worse.”

I parked half my ass on the corner of the desk and looked at her. “So how can I help, Miyoko? What do you know about this business with Beth’s disappearance.”

“Nothing. Not really. People come and they go all the time there. I can’t keep track of them. I don’t even try. Anyhow, I’m sorry, Mr. Danger, but that’s not really why I came.” She had her little handbag in her lap and was worrying it so much I thought she might bend it in half.

She took a deep, shuddery breath and I saw the gleam of tears in her deep, brown eyes “All right. All right, Mr. Danger, I’ll tell you why I came to you,” she blurted out “I came to ask for your help. You’ve got to get me out of there. They’re bad people, Mr. Danger. They do evil things, and they’re trying to suck me in. It’s a long story and…” Her voice trailed off and she lowered her face.

“Fine,” I said. “I like long stories.”

I walked around and sat down in my desk chair, reached into the lower right-hand drawer and pulled out a bottle of Jamesson—the good stuff I use for clients—and a couple of reasonably clean glasses I’d nipped from Wing Yee’s Oriental Garden. “Drink?”

Miyoko was perched on the edge of the chair across from me, her knees together like a good girl. I poured the Irish and pushed a glass towards her but she shook her head.

“Very well,” she said, her eyes in her lap. “I’ll tell you. I’m not really a gardener. I’m a music student. I play the marimba and vibraharp, and I’d won a scholarship to study music at the American Conservatory downtown. It’s a very great honor. An important scholarship.”

“The marimba?” I asked. “Isn’t that that thing they use in mariachi music? They give scholarships for that?”

She nodded quickly. “That was where I first met Beth Tremaine. At a recital.”

“The Tijuana Brass. They used a marimba, right? Like a xylophone?”

“Please, Mr. Danger. I think I’m in grave peril.”

“You play with two sticks in each hand and all that? Tijuana Taxi? Songs like that?” I was very impressed. I’d never known anyone who played the marimba. I couldn’t believe that they gave scholarships to people who could play Spanish Eyes and The Lonely Bull.

“It was Beth who first invited me to her family’s house. They have a vibraharp in their music room. They have everything out there, as you well know. She seemed sincere. I came to visit her, to play a little. Vibraharps are not very common, and the American Conservatory only has two. It’s difficult to practice. You have to sign up ahead of time. Beth thought her mother might be willing to sell theirs cheap, or at least let me practice there.”

I reached over and took her drink. Hell, she wasn’t using it. “Her mother?” I asked, tossing it back. “You mean Felicia?”

“Yes. That’s when I first met Mrs. Tremaine: Felicia. She said that she couldn’t sell it, it was a family heirloom, but that I was welcome to practice on it whenever I wished. In return I offered to help her out with a few things around the place.”

“Like gardening?”

“Yes,” she said. “My mother’s American, but my father’s Japanese. Very traditional, very conservative. He’s a gardener in California, a landscape limnologist. He specializes in aquaculture, ponds and the like, and I grew up around aqueous plants. They needed some help with their pond.”

“Wait a minute. A ‘landscape limnologist’?” I’d never heard of such a thing. This was a very talented girl. “So that’s why I saw you out mucking around in the mud?”

“Yes. Mucking around in the mud. Oh Mr. Danger, that’s so apt!”

She lost it then, and started crying onto the back of her hand. Unlike most private eyes, a woman’s tears don’t bother me much, so I let her cry while I concentrated on keeping a sympathetic look on my face. I wondered if her faith in me would be shattered if I poured myself another slug of booze.

Miyoko got herself under control pretty quickly and looked regretfully at her empty glass, which I’d just downed, so I poured her another slosh, a healthy one. I like to see pretty women drink, and she was worth it.

She wiped a tear away and took a tentative sip, then another. “This isn’t easy,” she said. Then she just took the glass, put her head back and tossed off the rest of the whiskey like a Russian sailor. She hardly blinked. I wondered whether all marimba players drank like that.

“My family must never know what I’m about to tell you, Mr. Danger. It must never leave this room. I can trust you?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I lied.

“It’s very shameful. My father would take it very hard. He has a weak heart. It might kill him.”

I tried not to look too eager. I knew we were getting to the good stuff and I knew it was going to be something dirty. I made a moue of sincerity, but I was already trying to figure how I could play whatever shot Miyoko was about to give me into a way to get into her panties.

“I am a woman who has a weakness for…certain unconventional activities,” she said hesitantly

I didn’t think she was talking about marimba playing and landscape limnology this time.

“What sort of activities?”

She covered her face with her hand. “Hope,” she said.

At least that’s what it sounded like she said. She said it into her hand with her face down, so quickly and softly that I couldn’t be sure.

“Beg your pardon, Miyoko?”

“Rope,” she said this time. “For sex. Rope excites me. What they call bondage. It’s the only way I can get sexually…aroused.”

I felt a nasty little thrill right down in my nasty old testicles looking at this shy and gorgeous woman sitting across from me.

“Beth first found this out,” she said. “Fool that I was, I trusted her. It was a girl-talk kind of thing. They befriended me—she and her mother--and plied me with liquor. They found out my secret. But that’s not all.” She looked at me uneasily and I tried to look sympathetic.

“They are lesbians, Mr. Danger. They engage in sexual acts with one another, mother and daughter both, and they’ve ensnared me into their evil web of depravity.”

That’s what she said: “evil web of depravity”. Pretty girl, plays the marimba, and she talks like that too.

I cleared my throat. “Well, why don’t you just tell them to screw off? I mean, there must be other vibraharps in the world.”

She held her empty glass up to me. The tears were gathering again. I poured her another splash but she just looked at it and put it down on the desk and covered her face with her hands.

“They have photographs,” she said through her fingers. “Shameful photographs of me. And they’ll show them to my father. It will kill him, Mr. Danger. I know it will.”

“What sort of photographs?” I could already imagine, but I thought it would be a cheap thrill if I could get her to describe them to me.

No such luck. She waved her hand vaguely in the air, took the drink and threw that one down too.

“Uh, you want some water with that Miyoko? Maybe a coke?”