Billie opened a door. It was so goddam dark I couldn't see if it said Private or not. We stepped into a little room and it was like stepping into a page of Ivanhoe.
The floor was flagstone. There was a large Gothiclike archer-cross window in the outer wall and there was a canopy bed with high bedboards in one corner. I looked at the bed in the misty night light.
"Mr. Cochrane planned to make some kind of vampire roost out of this room," Billie said in a subdued voice. "The public isn't allowed up here yet. There aren't any lights."
Lights I didn't need. But I wondered how many of Neverland's employees had used this room for assignations. I also wondered if Billie had ever used it before. Funny how perverse the human mind can be.
"A fool there was and he made his prayer-even as you and I," I muttered.
Billie's face was a pale blur in the misty dark and her body was very close to mine.
"What's that all about?" she asked.
"An association of ideas. It's a line from Kipling's poem The Vampire." I didn't tell her what the rest of the poem was about. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.
Even as you and I, buster. We're all saps when it comes to a woman. I reached for her.
"Not yet, Thax. Talk first." She led me over to the canopy bed and we sat down in the dark. It squeaked.
"Talk about what, for godsake?"
Billie lay back on the bed and I looked at her in that weird smoky quarter light and the last thing I wanted to do right then was talk.
"Thax, how would you like to get away from all this?"
That sounded like a line too, from one of those unrealistic boy-meets-girl plays that flourished in the late 'Twenties. But I knew what she meant. The tinsel and phony glamour and the buck-grubbing and the unadmitted fear of the atomic age.
I leaned over her. "How?"
"Let's run," she said softly. "Let's run away and not stop till we find a place so remote, so divorced from worldly problems that we'll think we're in Wonderland."
"The Wonderland Ride has a steep price tag."
"I've got the price of admission, Thax. Enough for both of us."
"You? How?"
"Savings. I'm a thrifty girl, and I know how to invest. I'm not as young as I may look. I've been coining the dollars for years."
"Still-it can't be so much that it would last us for more than a couple of years?"
"You'd be surprised," she said."Besides, two smart people like you and I can always make out. " She started to sit up.
"Thax-we could go to the Mediterranean. I've always wanted to see the Mediterranean Sea."
I pushed her down.
"Billie? Let's talk about it later? Billie-"
"Thax?" Her voice was a whisper, breathy, warm, wanton. "I've already told them-oh, honey, wait-told them I was leaving in two weeks. Are you-_oooh God_, baby, don't-are you coming with me?"
"Yeah. Yeah. Anywhere," I muttered. "Anywhere."
10
I walked Billie out to the parking lot. There were still about forty-odd cars scattered around out there and one of them was a squad car. Ferris must have been burning the midnight oil again.
Billie's car was a white Sixtyone MG. Cute little toy. I opened the door for her and she got in showing a lot of leg, which is what a girl has to do when she gets in or out of an MG.
A uniformed cop got out of the squad car and started toward us, coming in that casual, overbearing walk they use whenever they are about to give you some trouble. He pulled an aluminum-backed notebook from his hip-pocket and gave me a onceover that said "You ain't much," and gave Billie one that said "How much, baby?" I knew he and I weren't going to get along.
"What's your names?" he wanted to know.
"Why? What's the beef?"
"I said what's your name, buster?"
"Buster Thaxton," I told him. "What's the beef?"
He lowered the notebook. He was about my big except that he outweighed me with the harness and boots and badge and gun and all that nonsense. We sized each other up like a couple of surly male dogs.
"Thax." Billie laid a warning hand on my arm. "We work for Cochrane Enterprises, officer," she said.
"I figured. I still want your names." He was looking at me.
"L. M. Thaxton and Billie Peeler. She's Billie," I said.
He wrote in the notebook. "Occupation?"
"We both work in the sideshow. What's the beef?"
He wrote in the notebook. "Where do you live?"
"I live in town, officer," Billie told him. "At the Regency. Is something wrong?"
He wrote in the notebook. "You?" He meant me.
"Tarzan's Tree House." I knew he wouldn't like it.
He lowered the notebook.
"Check with Ferris, if that'll make you happy," I said. "And now maybe you'd better give me your name. I want to go see Ferris myself."
He didn't like me any better than he had a minute ago, but it gave him pause for consideration. I talked like a man who had an in with his boss. I didn't mind making him sweat. I hate those storm troopers who jump on you when you're minding your own business and start giving you a hard time and refuse to tell you what it is you're supposed to have done. It's unconstitutional.
"There's no beef," he said. "We're just supposed to keep tabs on anybody we see hanging around here at night after closing time. There's been a murder, you know."
"Honest to God?" I turned back to Billie. "I'll see you tomorrow."
She gave me a bright searching smile.
"Two weeks, Thax. Then the Mediterranean."
"Sure. Night-night."
In two weeks Ferris might have me sitting in poky with a murder charge on my back. Billie drove off across the lot in the topless MG, low and sleek and white in the fog. The storm trooper and I started back to Neverland. He was still feeling a little edgy.
"You really know Ferris?"
"Uh-huh," I said. "I'm his prime suspect."
I walked away from him. When I looked back from the main gate he was standing in the big empty smoky lot staring after me.
Right inside the entrance was a big glassed-in map of Neverland. It was done in a bird's eye view and it was very colorful and carefully detailed. It showed me something I hadn't realized before. One portion of the Swamp Ride backed up to the manmade lake. According to the map there was only a rib of land separating the large body of water from the southern loop of the Swamp Ride's figure eight pattern.
It planted a little seed of an idea in my brainsoil.
I scouted around till I ran down one of the night watchmen. He was earning his pay watching the late movie on TV in the security building, which was just a small affair built to look like a Hansel and Gretel cottage.
"Hi. I'm Thaxton. I work in the sideshow." I showed him my magical card and asked him if he had a spare flashlight he could loan me and gave him some kind of phony reason for needing it.
It was all one to him. He wasn't going anywhere if he could help it. He gave me his.
He was a lonely old cuss so I hung around for a couple of minutes and helped him watch his movie. It was Mae West's 1933 _She Done Him Wrong_ and Mae was doing a very young Gilbert Roland wrong in the scene we watched. It was in this picture that Mae was supposed to have delivered that immortal line: "Come up and see me sometime." Which sounded like a line I should use when inviting people up to my tree house.
I thanked the old guy and got out of there.
I passed a couple of sweep-up men and another watchman but nobody I knew. Neverland seemed lonely and haunted, like a long lost Aztec city brooding in jungle mist. I heard a girl's throaty giggle somewhere nearby in the dark as I walked through the central garden, and then some rustling around, and it reminded me of that moss-beard kindergarten joke about the Simple Simon who stuck his head in the bushes to ask the young couple rolling in the leaves "How far is the Old Log Inn?" and got a punch in the nose.