Love Me or Kill Me Read online

  The

  CABLE DENNING

  MYSTERY

  SERIES

  by

  James P. Alsphert

  James P. Alsphert presents

  Love me or kill me

  A

  Cable Denning Mystery

  Book 2

  Copyright © 2012 James P. Alsphert

  Published by Movies of the Mind 2018

  First paperback edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN – 13: 978-1-64056-013-0

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner

  whatsoever without the express written permission

  of the publisher except for the use of brief

  quotations in a book review.

  Movies of the Mind

  www.moviesofthemind.net

  WHY READ CABLE DENNING MYSTERY SERIES?

  The retro sound of a phone ringing, a familiar voice answers…we’re off to another CABLE DENNING adventure in the seedy underworld of Los Angeles, California ranging from 1927-1954

  Who is CABLE DENNING, one might ask? Well, first of all he is fashioned after a long-time friend of my Dad’s, named Al Newley. He was a hard-living, hard-drinking, cop-turned-private detective. CABLE DENNING was born in 1900 and was raised in the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles. Like my Dad’s friend, he is tall, handsome and women are drawn to him by his manner…he also starts out as a young, 27 year old Los Angeles cop and because of the corruption he sees on both sides of the law he quits and becomes a private detective.

  GOLDEN THROAT is where it all begins and is Book 1 in a 22 book mystery series. I invite you to read these books that follow Denning in adventures that lead him into worlds of intrigue, mystery, HOT romance, murder, international spies, spine chilling horror and all of it spiked with a little Sci-Fi. You’ll read references to historical people and events and real places in vintage Los Angeles, reminiscent of the great mystery writers of the past.

  Given Cable’s constant wrangling with the bizarre and man’s inhumanity to man, it seems walking the streets late at night, he can find solace in one of the many smoke-filled dives where he goes to hear beautiful young babes, dressed to the nines, singing the great music of the times.

  ADULT CONTENT

  Watch for Book 3, HELDENLEBEN [A Hero’s Life] Cable’s nightmare begins when, while imprisoned, he encounters an 18ft, genetically altered deadly King Cobra, then is tortured dangling from the Death Spire in Chicago, not to mention challenging occurrences involving the women in his life. He is still being pursued by the Oculus who has imposed a deadline to reveal what has been locked in his memory cells. Hitching a ride via a private plane going to a faraway land buys him some time…or does it? During the flight, he gets thrown to his death!! Does he survive? How?

  I invite you to check out my blog: www.thecabledenningfanclub.wordpress.com/

  For more information and updates about other forms in which the books are available, including dramatized audio books with actors and singers…please go to my website: www.moviesofthemind.net

  Facebook page: www.facebook.com/moviesofthemind/

  OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  CABLE DENNING MYSTERY SERIES

  Book 1: Golden Throat http://a.co/ciKcF1t

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue: AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

  All in a Day’s Work

  Chapter 1: OUR LOVE IS HERE TO STAY

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  Chapter 2: THE CURSE OF NEPTUNIA

  An Evening in Eden

  Chapter 3: THE GIRL WHO LIVED IN A SEASHELL

  Zephyr

  Chapter 4: WRAPPING TROUBLES IN DREAMS

  Chapter 5: TIE ME UP, HANG ME DOWN

  Reach of the Transeo Terra

  Chapter 6: GOR THE HORRIBLE

  Finding Goldilocks at the Teddy Bear’s Picnic

  Saturnalia and the Purple Mists

  Egrets That Die in Springtime

  Saved By the Bell of Sorrow

  Chapter 7: DEATH BECOMES HER

  A Place in the Sun

  Mors Vertit Unum Page [Death Turns a Page]

  Don’t Send Me Flowers

  Chapter 8: CAMBRIAN DREAMS

  Captain Nitwit and the Wild Gypsy Woman

  Terror at ‘The Bucket of Blood’

  The Monster of Piedras Blancas

  Chapter 9: THE CABLE DENNING SHOW

  Chapter 10: LOVE ME OR KILL ME

  The Moldering Embers of Love

  Easy Come, Easy Go

  Chapter 11: PLAY ME ON A MISTY NIGHT

  Hands Across the Table

  Chapter 12: ANOMALIES CAN BE LONELY

  Zelda the Warrior

  Little Boy Blue

  Nightmares and Bathtubs

  Chapter 13: TENDER IS THE NIGHT

  Epilogue

  About the Author & Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  ‘AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN’

  All in a Day’s Work

  It was one of those days. From my first cup of coffee to my last cigarette, it was a non-stop whirlwind. It started while I was minding my own business doing an errand downtown, when I heard a lot of sirens and then some shooting. A local bank on Figueroa was being held up. I saw the lone thief dart out of the bank with a female hostage. I drew my .38 and pursued the rather tall man. He ducked down an alley with his hostage, just before 6th Street. I was hot on his trail when a cop car screeched in after me and forced me to stop. I told them I almost had the robber and that they were stupid as hell to stop me. Just then, Lieutenant Keith arrived in an unmarked car and when I told him the situation he yelled something about having the patrolmen’s badges and sent me on my way…with the promise of himself and two other cops right behind.

  Years of experience had taught me how to figure these guys. So the first thing you ask is, up or down? A guy on the run cannot remain ground level too long. So will he hide in an attic somewhere, the top of a building, in a Ferris wheel cage at a carnival—or find some subterranean hideout where he could hang out and release his hostage without giving himself away or killing her. What was close by? Then I spotted it. The City of Los Angeles had been excavating for a new sewer-line branch on the other side of 6th Street near Spring Street. It was to intersect with the main sewer channel that eventually snaked into the Los Angeles River and down to the sea.

  I ran until my breath all but quit on me. Once in the corridor of the main sewer, I climbed down a few iron ladder rungs to its water level. There were concrete walkways on both sides of the main channel. Sure enough, I picked up two distinctly different shoe prints heading toward the river. These were the moments I lived and breathed for! When the threat of danger is high, the time gets tight and there’s a need for quick thinking and action and just maybe at the other end of the pursuit, there’s a damsel in distress to rescue. Just before the place where the sewerage channel plunges forty or fifty feet straight into the L.A. River, I caught up with them.

  He’d heard the echo of my footsteps and was lying in wait for me when I came into view of his gun sights. He fired wild and the woman screamed. I ducked behind a large cement pillar. “Hey, copper! Can you…can you hear me? Throw your gun out and the lady here doesn’t get a bullet with her name on it.”

  “Look, you idiot, I didn’t run all the way down here to give up my weapon. You send the woman over to me nice and safe ‘n sound like, and I’ll give you a chance to escape. Remember the game ‘hide-and-seek’? I’ll start counting to one hundred once she’s over here with me. By the way, how much dough did you get away with?”

  I knew I had to distract him as best I could. “How
in the hell should I know? I didn’t stop to count it! Why would you wanna give me a chance to escape, copper?”

  “’Cause I ain’t a copper, just a private investigator—probably not even a good shot,” I sort of stretched the truth.

  “Maybe I know you—what’s your name?”

  “Denning…Cable Denning…”

  “You ever a cop?”

  “Yeah, once upon a time—are you gonna hand the lady over or do I come out shooting and we both hope for the best?”

  I heard the sound of sirens echoing and bouncing up from the river. “Where in hell am I gonna go, Denning? I could jump down the water chute to the river…yeah, maybe that’ll work.”

  “No it won’t…it’s gonna be crawling with cops in about ten minutes.”

  “Why are you giving me a break—wanna share of the dough?”

  “No thanks. I guess today’s just your lucky day. Send over the lady.”

  “Any tricks and I kill her, Denning.”

  “I doubt that, Mister. I don’t think you’ve got it in you.”

  “Oh, no? Don’t push your luck, ex-copper.”

  Then in the subdued light, I saw the woman come out and start walking. As she made her way toward me, I kneeled low and kept my gun trained on where I figured the bank robber might be. “It’s okay, lady I’ve got you now,” I whispered as the shivering woman grabbed my arm. “Okay, I’m starting to count now…” I moved her out of harm’s way, completely behind the cement column. “Now, stay low and quiet, lady…and don’t talk,” I whispered to her.

  Just then, he made a break for it and went running toward the filthy waters of the city sewer system. He was never found.

  Sometimes you get lost. Sometimes life deals you out a bad hand and you lose your way. Then you find yourself in a place that goes beyond what you can handle and you dwell in a twilight world like a zombie, the walking dead…fated to numbness without real feelings inside. You kind of forget why you’re in the world, if you ever knew. But maybe even that doesn’t matter. So what does? Maybe something deep down identifies you with yourself—but you can’t be sure, because who is self, anyway? A man—a woman—a sexually acquired personality and maybe, if you’re lucky, flavored with some semblance of character and likeableness? Who really knows? At some point you find yourself sitting at your desk in the dead of night…your finger circling the rim on your gin glass and your eyes become fixed on that red glow eating its way up your cigarette…leaving just the dead ash behind—and you ask…in the end, who really gives a damn?

  So I walk the streets, listening to that distant music in the land of my head, where memory or something close to it plays ping-pong with my emotions, and a desolate, lonely sax plays somewhere beyond the next hill, over there. I was still pretty raw as I walked up Bronson Avenue toward the park and that music was tearing me apart with every step I took. It was like a melancholy blues—that haunting reed playing The Man I Love with a forlorn sadness, tracing all the hurt places in my damaged psyche, pouring its eerie call into the sky for a woman now deceased, the girl who didn’t quite make it to become my December bride. But God, that woman could sing, and it was that young, beautiful woman who sang it for this man, the crumbling quiet man who walked the trail to the top of the incline. She had only been gone a few days, but each one of those days seemed like an eternity to me and I fought tooth and nail to avoid walking into the muck of death and guilt and all the shit we pile on ourselves when finally the chips are called in and you have to face yourself. It was the advent of Honey’s death that began a lifetime trait of learning how to avoid…finding ways to compartmentalize so the left hand won’t have to know what the right hand’s doing.

  It was late October, and a slight chill wafted through the little dells of grass, brush and oak trees. I sat on a little hill up by the Bronson Caves, tossing small rocks onto the road below. A few hikers and daily walkers passed by and greeted me with a nod, but I barely noticed. An old man with a cane came along and struggled his way to the end of the box canyon, where the road ended. He rested there for a while and then started back. He stopped in front of me, and appeared to be checking me out. “It’s rattlin’ through the sky, it is—this new beginnin’. So why is it you’re a-mopin’—sittin’ there like a dead toadstool? If somethin’ be a-happenin’ yesterday, well then, let it…yesterday’s gone, it is…and it ain’t comin’ back nohow. If ‘twas money, you’ll be makin’ more of it—if it be a woman, never grieve beyond what your heart can take—if it’s your job, sure a new one’ll come…and if it be God who’s a-pesterin’ ya, tell him you’ll be comin’ home soon enough anyhow.” He drew quiet and seemed to be squinting to see me at all. “Life’s about just gettin’ on with it, lad. Humph! You’re too young for that kinda worryin’. Me? Ha! I pulled my bayonet out of the belly of my own kin in the Civil War, I did. And for what?”

  I grew a little impatient with the lecture. “Well, I do appreciate your advice, pop, but I really would like to be left alone, if you don’t mind.”

  “No ya don’t! The young never appreciate the old—and do ya know why? ‘Cause ya gotta learn wisdom for yourself, through your own experiences. But seems to me you’re stuck in the past, boy. Hell, at my age I got a right to be spendin’ my days in memory and regret—but not you—no, sir! You gotta tell the world you ain’t done yet, tell ‘em jus’ cause ya fell down, it don’t mean that ya ain’t gettin’ up, shakin’ your fists at the sky and saying, ‘Today is mine! And it’s all I got!’ The mill cannot grind with the water that’s already passed through it, son.”

  He hesitated and looked at me with old blue eyes, now covered with milky white lenses. The old man was almost blind! “How…how did you know I was sitting here when you can’t see?”

  “Who says I can’t see?—impertinent ingrate! You see here? These orbs on either side of my nose—what makes you think I can only see with them? Ah, but the eye in the middle here,” he said, pointing to a place in the middle of his forehead, “she sees the colors…of your so-called humanity.” He coughed and then spat on the ground. “Yep, I saw your dark colors, but underneath that…ha! a rainbow of goodness, lad. Come on out and live, son, the journey’s short enough as it is—” He coughed and spat once again and hobbled away, tapping his cane against the red rock road.

  I got back to my office and sat down at my desk, rummaging around a bunch of papers. I had lost several clients because I didn’t have the will to work most days. I lit up a cigarette, took a big drag and kicked back in my comfy chair. I noticed I was trembling. I got up and clicked on my little box radio. The announcer on radio station KFI made it sound like all hell had broken loose. He was broadcasting from a remote location near the new Los Angeles Stock Exchange—that was currently under construction—and kept repeating that sixteen million shares of stock had been liquidated in the past few days and the financial world was beginning to collapse. Radio Corporation of America, General Motors, U.S. Steel, Goldman Sachs and hundreds of others had taken a bath in the market place, losing 40% of their value. It was October 29, 1929, and a massive sell-off precipitated what was only the beginning of the “Black Tuesday” legacy, which was to hit bottom by 1932, losing 89% of its stock value. Suddenly it dawned on me—that’s what Crazy Jack had been talking about—it wasn’t the pigeons up there on the ledges of the skyscrapers, but men jumping from those precipices to their deaths below, men whose speculation, greed, lust for power and money, had collapsed the house that Jack built.

  And speaking of Jack, the terrible thing I realized in the epiphany of that moment was that Crazy Jack had consistently warned me to get Honey out of the Bella Notte club. Well, I didn’t heed his warning—and now she was dead—my ‘golden throat’ was dead. I turned off the radio. Why should I give a shit about what the rich and powerful do to amuse and destroy themselves? I went back and sat at my desk, opened the bottom right drawer and took out a full bottle of bootleg gin. I drank for what seemed like hours, slowly fading away in a stupor. The phone was ringi
ng, but I ignored it. Then my world started spinning and I passed out…sliding limp and crumpled, out of my chair to the floor below.

  How long I lay there I can’t say. Eventually I crawled to my bedroom and boosted myself onto my rumpled old bed. There I collapsed, neither living nor dying, lost in oblivion…descending into a dark nothingness.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘OUR LOVE IS HERE TO STAY’

  One day I awoke to see the most beautiful face I’d ever known looking down at me. She was smiling and had flashy brown eyes and lovely, shiny black hair. Her pearly white teeth glistened in the subdued light, her lips were warm and inviting. I thought I must still be dreaming. Beauty like that could only exist in celestial dimensions, far from the ugly chaos of man’s demented idea of what a world of simian creatures should look like.

  “Oh, mi hombre bonito—despierta, mi amor!” Adora Moreno cooed. The beautiful vision stood above me. I could hardly speak. My mouth was dry and my eyes almost glued shut. I felt my face. It was still there, but I had grown a beard and moustache. Adora laughed. “Ay! You look like un hombre muy malo, sí, mi desperado!” God, I loved this woman! I reached for her, but I was too weak and my arms fell to my side. She kneeled on the floor by my bed and stroked me with a warm washrag. “Bienvenido, querido. Welcome back, my pobre beloved. I am here…”

  Again I tried to reach for the beautiful young thing. “Adora…Adora…” was all my mouth could manage as I again lost consciousness. In the days that followed, I discovered this devoted angel of mercy had come to live with me. Day and night she nursed me back to health, sleeping on the floor on an old blanket she found in my musty closet. Finally, perhaps three or four weeks later, I was able to sit up and take in some chicken soup she had prepared on my little hot plate. I took in a deep breath and gazed at my caretaker. “Yes…you…thank you, beautiful Adora,” I said on that day. Then all of a sudden I began to think of practical things like money. “There’s…uh…there’s some dough hidden—out there—under the table lamp on my desk…get it…” She went out and came back with a small wad of money. “How much is there? I want you to use it—you have no money—how could you buy groceries and take care of me at the same time?”