Love Me or Kill Me Read online

  “Shhhh…!” she whispered. “You do not worry, mi amor.” She counted the money. “Seventy-two dollars.”

  “Take it. Spend it on what we need.”

  “Okie-dokie,” she tittered with a smile. “You are boss man. Yo soy tu esclava—I am your slave, my love.”

  Slowly I recovered and began to pick up the pieces of my life, thanks to my luscious and intelligent Adora. She had left the travel agency to her mother and sister and essentially spent her days and nights with me in my dingy little quarters. One day I had the guts to bring up past events. “You knew…I mean, about Honey?” I asked, carefully measuring my words.

  Her eyes were soft as she came to sit on the bed beside me. “Sí, Cable, I read it in newspaper two days after. It was so horrible. I am truly sorry…I know you love her very much…but you must heal now…”

  My eyes misted a bit just remembering about my perished ‘golden throat’, the spunky, gorgeous young blonde from the country who made good in the big city. “I got lost, Adora. I’m still not sure where I am—or for that matter, who I am. I’ve let everything go, haven’t I? Do I have a business anymore?”

  She smiled and said with a little tease in her voice, “Oh…I donno…I answer el telefono calls and tell your customers I am Mexican cleaning lady and you are gone away. But that you come back soon. And I keep good registros of everything. You can build again, Cable. I will help.”

  I extended my arms to her. For the first time since I’d drifted into the land of oblivion, I felt my beautiful Adora fall onto my chest. We lay there clasped around each other for the longest time. “Adora…there is no way to repay you…except with love…I’ve always loved you…I’ve always been in love with you…always…” I said, kissing her hair.

  “Oh, mi amor!” she cried and held me even tighter, letting go of some of those tears which must have piled up through the many weeks she had looked after me. She slowly moved her face to my lips and once again I felt the inexplicable magic of her kiss. Every part of me responded to her and I could feel I was coming back to life, coming back to the world, coming back to love.

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  Adora and I spent Christmas of 1929 at my mother’s. It’s hard to describe how joy and pain can mix together when the past is being pulled out of you like an old festering sore that needs healing, while the future holds brightness and hope like a shiny new train pulling into the station, or the stockings of red and white hung from my mother’s Christmas tree. I guess it helped a lot to observe how Mom and Adora chattered on together, as if they were old friends with deep affection for each other. I sensed a warm closeness between the two women and wished I had someone like that in my life still. Mario Angelo’s death left me bereft of such a privilege. Mario and I had spent endless Christmases together and played as youngsters with the crude but new toys our parents could afford. I remember having a wooden dump truck with wooden wheels—and one year Mario got a B-B gun and shot up a whole shelf of Mason jars in the shed, for which we both got into trouble.

  Being in love with a woman changed a perspective of mine. The one that said you’re always in control of your life and you call your own shots. Adora made me see what a powerful role the female principle played in a man’s life, especially when both of them felt the same and found it hard to be away from each other. Was it a growing process or a weakness, I wondered? Or was it the fervor of youth when the fuse of sexual desire and excitement burned so bright? The few men who had influenced me in my formative years were tough as nails, independent—and thought women were born for cooking, sewing, cleaning and the birthing and rearing of children. Romantic love wasn’t an issue, only the practical everyday demands of survival figured in their equation and tenderness was a sign of a weak link in the chain of a young boy’s development. But I do remember my Dad drunk as hell holding my mother in the middle of the floor, dancing with her, laughing his big belly laugh and smiling at her as he spun her around the room. He hadn’t been afraid of affection for his mate, nor did he shun me in that department, often coming into my room in the middle of the night, his breath smelling of Irish whiskey, his speech slurred. “I love ya, son!” he’d say. “And you’re old man is a rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ son-of-a-bitch on wheels!” Then he’d hold me in his arms and slobber a big kiss all over my cheek. I was half afraid and half enjoying it as the over-stuffed galoot embraced me. Sometimes my mother would look on, smiling, but I sensed she was there just in case the old boy got a little rough with the heir apparent of the Denning clan. But when I was very small, I seemed to recall a day when something died in my mother and she seemed to shrivel and a light went out in her. So when Dad kicked the bucket, she may have missed his bigger-than-life sparkle, but I was never sure her grief was all about my father. But I missed him. Sometimes I cried when I walked through our little house listening for his wonderful, resonant voice. I think I missed his big bear hugs, too, even if he reeked of tobacco and whiskey.

  It seemed to be a time of bringing in the sheaves, as our early Christian background would have said—that time of harvesting what one has sown so far in this life. What did I have to show for my almost thirty years of existence? Since joining the police force, I‘d seen the underbelly of the world, that seedy dark side of humanity where almost anything and everything can—and does—happen. Maybe I thought I was a knight in shining armor drawing my sword and dispatching evil wherever I found it. Those who were such a scourge on society were a kind of vampire, draining the blood of the hard-working and the honest, whether they lived in a mafia stronghold or at city hall. If they were lone killers, they were easier to find and bring to justice. It was the hidden corrupt ones that were harder to weed out. The tangled web of their miscreant dealings had deep roots and without a roadmap became confusing to the knight who had pledged himself to vanquish that enemy. Mario Angelo was one that died for that cause. Maybe someday I would, too, but I knew it wasn’t today and I had some kind of magic on my side, something I sensed lived inside me, as well as beside me, and saw me through some pretty dangerous scrapes.

  I had gone out to the little patch of garden, that we called our backyard. Adora came out and put her arms around my waist. “I am so happy, Cable. Feliz Navidad. All I need is here…with you and your mamma. I care for her, as mi hermana.”

  “Yeah, I can see that, babe. We should get your Mom and sister together for New Year’s, huh? That way it would be three babes and one guy. My kind of odds.”

  She laughed heartily. “Oh, you…I am not una mujer celosa…pero, I am beside you, mi amor, porque tú eres mi corazón…”

  I turned to look at the woman standing beside me who had no clue that her beauty could have easily outshone any movie star. Yet her humble and simple nature didn’t make any such demands on her ego. She would be contented in a barrio or a mansion, for her heart would live the same way no matter the trappings of an increasingly materialistic world.

  We went inside. The Christmas meal was simple and the three of us made the best of a quiet day. But both women knew the grieving inside me was not yet over. Honey had been gone a little over two months and some raw places kept erupting in me like scathing magma pouring down the sides of a volcano into my gut. It still hurt like hell. But the worst was yet to come that day. My mother had turned the radio on for some Christmas music, but not all stations played the seasonal variety of pap which was traditionally served up on that day. The Great Depression had only just begun its slide into financial ruin and some radio stations preferred to play the music of the he and she world, perhaps thinking it would boost the sinking national morale. Because, after all, romantic love was the last remaining starship of hope in a world fragmented by greed, right? Suddenly Honey’s version of It All Depends on You came wafting across the airwaves. Both my mother and Adora looked across the table at me. I froze and closed my eyes. I got up and excused myself and went back outside. But this time I went out the front door, and down the steps onto the familiar streets of my youth. It w
as a place where brawls were fought on the sidewalks, where gangs would kill over some territory nobody would ordinarily care about.

  Someone had considerately turned the radio off, but too late. I was still crumbling inside. Sometimes realities are deceptive, like when you think you’re over the flu but it comes back, only this time like gangbusters and all but prepares you for a pine box at the local cemetery. The most terrible place for a memory to be, is in an idealized world of “what ifs” and imagined perfections. Then the measuring stick becomes that which can never be justified in the living, breathing everyday world. I would have to find a way not to idolize Honey Combes or see the vision of a beautiful blonde woman in a red-sequined gown under a bright spotlight singing her heart out at the Bella Notte, singing before adoring audiences to loud, raucous applause—singing to me, Cable Denning, ex-cop-gumshoe from the tough side of the tracks, now at twenty-nine years old, a cinder nearly burned down to the core of his paltry existence.

  Adora and I hugged my mother goodnight and we went to my ramshackle office to sleep. I felt bad that my beautiful lady had to put up with living conditions that at best could only be described as basic. But she never complained and slept beside me in quiet repose. She helped out with office work as best she could. The oncoming economic depression helped the bottom to fall out of service businesses like mine, and only the well to do could afford my services. After all, I wasn’t the local grocery store. Food, rent and utilities were the basic necessities of 1929. All that aside, I knew my life would have to change. I was made with an instinct somewhere in me, a strange siren that called to me in the night—nights that summoned me to my senses and created change and transformation. I knew I would have to build up my business. So…where would I start other than a bolder print in the yellow pages of the phone book?

  New Year’s came in with a bang. Adora, my mother and I attended a small get together at Todo el Mundo, their little travel agency on the ground floor of the Pico House near the Pueblos de Los Angeles area. Adora’s mother and sister, Elisa and Flora, hosted us along with a few other neighbors. There was one who stood out, in particular…a Señor Antonio Vargas. He was about six-feet tall with a very well-groomed moustache and dark, wavy hair. His eyes were that flashing kind of dark-brown, he spoke with a definite Latin accent and you just knew he was thinking lots of things while he pretended to be enjoying the party. Earlier in the evening he hit on Adora, who politely gave him the brush and pointed over to me as the man she was with. He deferred but kept an eye on both of us the rest of the evening. By the midnight hour Señor Vargas had mysteriously disappeared and when we began to clean up after the party, Elisa came out of her bedroom alarmed, saying it had been ransacked and things had been strewn all over the floor. Immediately, I put on my private detective hat and put two and two together. This guy had been looking for the God of Our Fathers, the famous Fen de Fuqin, now safely in the hands of its rightful owners in the land of the Cave of the Seven Truths. My earlier adventures with good vs evil nearly cost me my life and did take a terrible toll on some of the characters in the drama orchestrated by a sinister so-called “Order”, the Oculus Pyramis Mandatum. I knew they would never quit. Whoever “they” were carried a big stick and controlled the world from a secret backstage doorway.

  We helped Elisa and Flora clean things up, took my mother home and by two-thirty in the morning January 1, 1930, we were in bed, snuggling. Frankly, I don’t know what I would have done without that exquisitely beautiful woman’s love and warmth. If one were to be religious and had a bent toward the spiritual unknown, it was almost as if God had sent an angel to be with me because my loneliness would have been unbearable and I may have quickly drunk and smoked myself to death. In a way it reminded me of that Al Jolson song, Sonny Boy, the one Honey sang to me that night at the Bella Notte. “When there are grey skies, I don’t mind the grey skies, you make them blue, Sonny Boy…Friends may forsake me, let them all forsake me, you’ll pull me through, Sonny Boy…” It was Adora’s constancy that pulled me through. I knew that being in love with someone is the riskiest business in the world outside of walking into a burst of bullets from a Tommy gun. But I had risked it with Adora, and so far I was winning. I just hoped that she got enough out of the relationship to fulfill her, besides the bedroom and our day-to-day companionship. Maybe, ultimately, love is both the risk and reward in the same breath. Who knows?

  On New Year’s Day we awakened early and made love in a torrent of pent up passion. Then we slept again. Adora made our first cup of coffee and I stayed in bed looking at her curvy naked body jostling about the small room. I was thinking of a new song I’d heard recently and thought it catchy. Adora had heard it on the radio as well and hummed it a few times. I was looking at her as I began humming to the tune. “I don’t remember all the words, doll, but I wanna sing to you.”

  “You do?” she asked, raising her eyebrows and smiling. She came over to join me on the bed. “Ay señor! I think we need a bigger…uh, how you say—la cama—the bed is too pequeño for our love making.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. ‘Cause I’m really a romantic dick deep down inside, you know—that is, aside from being a private dick.”

  She tittered. “Ay…sí…you are my private dick, no, señor?”

  “Sí, señor,” I answered. And then I began to sing in my morning baritone. “Stars shining bright above you, night breezes seem to whisper, ‘I love you,’ birds singing in the sycamore tree, dream a little dream of me… Then she joined me. ‘Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you, sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you, but in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me…’ “Once again.” ‘Dream a little dream of me…’ “One more time…” We repeated the last phrase and she fell into my arms, bursting with the sunshine this love had brought into both of our lives. After all it was a gift—and no one can keep a gift like that, it was on loan and there was no payback date—just the certainty that it could not last forever. “Happy New Year, babe,” I said— holding my Adora.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE CURSE OF NEPTUNIA

  It was about eleven o’clock on January 11th and I was sitting at my desk, figuring out what to do next, when the phone rang. “Yeah, Cable Denning here.”

  “Mr. Denning. My name is Benedict Royce—you don’t know me, but you come highly recommended. I…I would like to have a private conference with you about a very, uh…..delicate subject.”

  “A conference, huh? Well, Mr. Royce, my doors are usually open roughly from ten in the morning to—well, whenever I get tired of hearing the gripes of human beings beset by their problems.”

  He laughed lightly. “Humor is very important, I would imagine, in your business. But it is not possible for me to come to you. If I pay your fee, would you be kind enough to come to my home?”

  “Well, if it isn’t too far—yeah, that can be arranged. But I don’t have an automobile, Mr. Royce. I’m still hoofing it or taking advantage of our most convenient electric trolley system here in L.A.”

  “I see…would it be convenient if I sent a car around to pick you up? I—I, uh, live in the foothills above Pasadena.”

  This guy was evidently well heeled and I needed the dough. “Yeah, that’d be fine. When do you want to, uh, arrange our meeting?”

  “This afternoon, if possible, say around two o’clock?”

  “Can do. So, uh, I’ll, uh, expect your car about an hour before?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Denning. If you’ll please wait downstairs by the curb, my man can easily identify you if you’ll describe yourself.”

  I laughed. “Well, Mr. Royce, that could be a challenge on any given day, but ordinarily I wear a trench coat, a light-brown fedora, stand about six-feet and probably will be smoking a Lucky Strike.”

  Again, he chuckled. “That sounds…uh, fair enough, Mr. Denning. I’ll look forward to meeting you. Thank you again for changing your schedule to accommodate me.”

  “No problem, Mr. Royce. Business has been
kind of slow since the stock market decided to go south for the winter.”

  “Until then, Mr. Denning.”

  He hung up and I could have done a jig. I needed that kind of money in the bank. I was down to the last thirty smackers in my pocket and nothing in my bank account. Maybe old Gianinini would give me a loan, but I’d read in the papers that Bank of America had suffered some losses back in October of last year. Well, all I could do was hustle and hope to the gods that enough dough would come my way to take care of February’s bills.

  Adora was spending the day helping her mother and sister at their travel agency. Todo el Mundo was suffering along with the rest of us, as people simply didn’t have the extra cash to take that trip to Ohio to visit Aunt Martha. Only the rich floated above the financial waters during this fateful year of 1930. Hang on to your hat, Denning, I told myself—and call upon those money angels who pour out the greenbacks from Nirvana or wherever they operate from.

  As Benedict Royce had promised, a huge black limousine drove up in front of my joint on Franklin precisely at one o’clock. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might be a trap set by my old nemesis, the Oculus Pyramis Mandatum. But it was too late and I was packing my .38 close to my chest just in case.

  We rode for about an hour and when the limo turned into a paved road with a couple of large pillars at the entrance, I knew I was in for a glance at the top of the heap in this old world. Soon we approached an imposing large estate, the kind with fifty rooms and eight fireplaces, manicured trees, shrubs and lawns and two flights of stairs leading up to the main entrance. The chauffeur let me out and indicated I should walk up the concrete steps to the entrance. I did so and used the brass knocker, which was in the shape of a dolphin. The usual stuffy Englishman greeted me with a perfunctory smile after looking me over. He must’ve thought I came from the costume department at a local movie lot. He led me to a large drawing room. From floor to ceiling, the damn place had more books filling its shelves than the downtown library. Soon another man entered and motioned me to follow him. We walked down another corridor until we stood at a huge white door engraved with a pair of golden dolphins. What was with this guy and the fish world, anyhow?