“Sure he does,” Piggy said from his trunk by the vanity, the lid open and one arm thrown over the side like he was taking a bath in there. “Ronny’s got a date with his right hand. I keep telling him it’s not really sex if you’re by yourself, but he don’t listen.”
Kitty laughed.
Ronny McBane smiled thinly. “That’ll be enough from you, Piggy.”
Kitty sat down and explained briefly what she wanted while Ronny listened intently. He was a tall man, narrow and reedy, but handsome in a sort of undernourished way like certain rock stars that had been hitting the needle. His hands were large, the fingers fine and delicate. The hands of a magician…or a ventriloquist. He liked to express himself with them freely.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I can, Miss Seevers.”
“Call me Kitty.”
“Meooooowwww,”
Piggy said. “Come here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty…”
Ronny went over to him, picking him up. “I’m afraid he’ll be impossible until you greet him properly.”
Laughing, Kitty went over and extended her hand to Piggy. She was amazed how good Ronny was. Piggy’s hand gripped her own. It was a cold grip, but oddly firm for a doll. Piggy bowed his head and kissed her fingers. When he was done, he made a big show of raising his eyebrows and opening and closing his mouth, making smacking sounds. “You have fish for dinner or did you just have a little itch?”
“Oh!” Kitty gasped. “You’re terrible.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Piggy said. “Ain’t it just the truth.”
Ronny set Piggy back in the box and they got down to business.
“Well, Kitty,” he said, that thin smile touching his lips again. “Where should I begin? I have no formal training in theater or ventriloquism. I’m entirely self-taught. I made Piggy myself and took some years doing it…”
Kitty listened while he prattled on, making a show of keeping notes, nodding with enthusiasm at the right moments. But the notes were mostly doodling and what she was really doing was studying Ronny McBane’s pale, dour face which was so tense and rigid it looked like it had been airbrushed onto the skull beneath. As he talked, the corners of his lips attempted that smile he emoted so well on stage. And it worked out there, but up close like this it was an upturned frown, rubbery and artificial. It never touched his eyes and their haunted depths.
It was hard to say who was more wooden…Ronny or Piggy.
“What made you get into the business?” Kitty asked.
Ronny McBane opened his mouth, but it was the dummy that did the talking. “Well, look at him, baby. He’s a fucking wreck. A nervous wreck…aren’t you a nervous wreck, Ronny? Afraid of his own shadow. If it wasn’t for me holding his dick, he’d piss down his own leg.”
Ronny tittered uneasily. The grin he offered Kitty was like an ax wound on a skull. “You keep quiet, Piggy.”
Kitty swallowed dryly, felt something fluttering in her belly. “How…how can you make him talk like that? I mean, you’re over here…but I saw his mouth move.”
“Come a little closer, sweet meat, and I’ll show you how it really moves,” Piggy said.
The sexual innuendo went right over Kitty’s head. What she was seeing…it could not be. She looked from Ronny McBane to his dummy, back again. It was a trick and she knew it was a trick, yet a gnawing chill expanded in her chest. Piggy sat there in his trunk, grinning like a death’s-head, lewd and unpleasant. He had teeth, she saw, long yellow teeth, crooked and decayed.
Since when did dummies have teeth?
“How…” Kitty mumbled.
“A trick of the trade,” Ronny said, looking almost frightened himself. But it was really hard to tell. There was so much barely-concealed torment slathered onto that face, maybe it was all her imagination.
She decided it was.
“You really had me going for a moment there,” she said to Ronny, not Piggy, trying to sound relieved, but failing.
“You want to get going?” Piggy said. “Come over here, I’ll get you going.”
“Okay, Piggy,” Ronny said. “We’ve had our laugh.”
Kitty looked from her notes to Ronny’s face, avoiding his eyes which were like windows looking into a crypt. “Is…um…is it generally just the two of you? Do you ever have another dummy involved in the act?”
“She’s talking threesome here, Ronny.”
Kitty feigned a laugh. “Oh, stop it. I’m serious.”
“So am I, lady,” the dummy said. “So am I.”
“Never. No other dummies. Just the two of us,” Ronny said.
“How about assistants? I heard you had an assistant.”
Ronny’s eyes went dark and stormy. “Once, yes. We had a…a woman working with us, but it didn’t pan out.”
Kitty could feel Piggy’s eyes burning holes into her back, but of course they weren’t really eyes, just marbles. Dead, inert marbles. Still…she could feel them, that vile gaze creeping over her skin. She turned and looked and, yes, Piggy was staring, mouth sprung open. But he was not moving.
Not at all.
When she looked back at Ronny, however, the dummy started talking again: “Maybe you ought to interview me, baby. Women make Ronny nervous, but I like ‘em just fine…if you know what I mean.”
Kitty laughed, not finding any of it funny now. She supposed all ventriloquists had unusual relationships with their dummies, used them to say things they were incapable of. But enough was enough. “Okay already, Mr. McBane. Why don’t we let Piggy rest, put him in his box or something.”
And again, that strident, unnerving voice from behind her: “Only box I want to get into is yours, baby.”
“Okay. C’mon, now. This is all getting a little crude.”
“The lady is right, Piggy.”
Piggy cackled low and dusty, but kept his mouth shut.
And that was good, because the very sound of his voice was beginning to make Kitty’s flesh crawl in slow waves. Maybe it was her, but the room seemed suddenly too close, too claustrophobic, too something. Like a coffin, narrow and moldering and airless.
“I can’t help thinking I’ve met you before,” Ronny said to her, fixing her with those eyes, that twisted mind behind them that could make dummies move from across the room.
“You’ve probably seen me in the audience,” she said. “I rarely miss a show. Particularly since this assignment began.”
“Yes, that must be it.”
Piggy started laughing. “Oh, I don’t think that’s it at all. She looks like someone, Ronny…haven’t you guessed who?”
Kitty slapped her notebook shut.
She had to get out of there, out of that damn confining room. It was like being trapped in the mind of a lunatic.
“Well, I want to thank you,” she said. “Ha, both of you.”
“Oh, the pleasure’s been ours.”
“It has,” Piggy said. “And don’t look so grim, chippy. You’ll be seeing us again, maybe sooner than you think. Keep your window open, I might come into your bedroom some night. Then I’ll show you some real tricks. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
But Kitty was certain she would not have liked that at all.
There was something positively obscene about that dummy. The idea of it creeping into her room by moonlight was enough to make her teeth chatter.
She let herself out, Ronny staring intently at the floor.
After the door closed, she could hear the dummy laughing in there.
5
It took Kitty some time to come down after that.
Truth be told, she’d always found mannequins, dolls and puppets more than a little unnerving. Ventriloquist dummies topped the list because they talked. Their mouths opened and shut. Their eyes moved. But they were only wood and plastic animated by clever artifice. The real disturbing thing about the dummies were the ventriloquists themselves who created personalities for them, imbuing them with a disturbing sort of half-life. Mostly, she knew, it was harmless. Just because they did this so effectively did not mean they were schizophrenic or suffering from multiple personality disorders. And it was only in the movies that the ventriloquist channeled his evil, subconscious, murderous desires into his dummy. That was comic book stuff.
This is what she kept telling herself.
But being that Gloria had worked with Ronny M. and Piggy just before she disappeared, Kitty didn’t necessarily believe it. There was something strange about this act and something far stranger about a ventriloquist who could make his dummy not only talk from across the room, but
move.
There was something here and she planned on finding out what.
6
Charlie Bascomb ran his agency out of a crumbling office building in the Loop. He was on the second floor, sandwiched in-between a cut-rate goldsmith and a sex novelty distributor. It wasn’t a very good neighborhood and Kitty brought along a little .32 automatic in her purse.
You just never knew these days.
There was no one in the outer office at the receptionist’s desk, so Kitty went through a door marked
PRIVATE
. Right into the lair of Charlie Bascomb, a guy who’d once handled some real talent, but these days was barely making a living keeping the after hours clubs supplied with strippers and low-rent stand-up acts.
He was on the phone when Kitty came in. He waved her into a chair. Charlie Bascomb was small and plump, but cagey-looking, predatorial. He was arguing with someone about a band he was managing, saying that the days of ten percent cuts were history. All the real agencies hacked off twenty before they even looked at a client. A moment or two later, he slammed down the phone. “And what do you want?” he said.
“Your receptionist wasn’t there, so I just walked in,” Kitty told him.
Bascomb laughed. “She’s out to lunch. Hell, even when she’s here, she’s out to lunch.” He sighed, cleared a space on his desk for his hands. He looked Kitty up and down like a dog deciding whether an available bone was worth chewing on. “Well, I’ll tell you, honey. Your tits are too small for a dancer…but you’re pretty, sultry even. You do any singing?”
Kitty laughed now herself. “I’m not here for representation, Mr. Bascomb. I have no talent, trust me.”
“Neither do my clients,” he admitted. “Okay, what do you want?”
Kitty sat there a moment, wondering that very question herself. “I understand you used to handle ventriloquists.”
Bascomb stared at her long and hard. “I did, but I don’t anymore.” He lit a cigarette, fanned the smoke away with his hand. “I’m not sure what your interest is in this, Miss—”
“Seevers, Kitty Seevers.”
“—Seevers, but I don’t mind saying between you and me and the clock on the wall, that those ventriloquists are a strange bunch. Temperamental is a word for them and so is crazy.”
Kitty nodded. “I’m actually interested in one act in particular.”
“Oh? And which one is that?”
“Ronny M. and Piggy.”
Bascomb just sat there looking at her. Looking at her and
through
her like he could see the doorway beyond right through her head. He was ruddy-faced, pink-cheeked…but the mention of those names drained all the color from him. He leaned back in his chair, that crooked smile locked on his lips. You would have needed a chisel to get it off. He brought his cigarette to his lips and his hand was shaking.
“Mr. Bascomb?”
He swallowed, kept swallowing. He looked like he’d just been told there was a tumor eating away his guts. “Who,” he began, trying to regulate his breathing, “who sent you here? Tell me who it was.”
Kitty held up her hands. “No one. I just came because—”
“Because why?” The fear or shock was gone now, what was left behind was something like anger, like hatred. “You tell me who the fuck sent you!”
Kitty thought he was going to come right over the desk at her. “Listen, Mr. Bascomb…nobody sent me. I don’t know what you’re getting so riled about…I just came to ask a few questions about an act.”
That seemed to soothe him. He pulled off his cigarette, breathing hard. “Yeah, I used to handle McBane and I don’t anymore. And that’s all I got to say on the matter.”
But Kitty hadn’t come this far to back away now.
What she needed here was bait.
So she laid it out for him, knowing she’d have to put her cards on the table, confess before she’d get a confession. “I’m looking for my sister, Mr. Bascomb. She was Ronny McBane’s assistant. That’s all I know. She disappeared five months ago and I’d like to know why.”
Bascomb softened. “Did you go to the police?”
“Oh yes, several times. But there’s nothing there. It’s not like they found her body or anything. She just disappeared, cleaned out her things at the room she was staying in and became a statistic.”
“And you think McBane has something to do with it?”
“Yes,” Kitty said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but something tells me I’m not.”
Bascomb stared off into space. “Well, I’m sorry for your sister. I really am. But what do you want from me? I haven’t handled McBane in three years, closer to four.”