Post by Admin on Apr 30, 2021 20:34:42 GMT
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Murder in the Afternoon
IntroductionA Treasure Map from a Flea Market leads to Danger and Excitement!
Setting
San Francisco, Ca : June, 1961
Flea Market Find
“Hey, Alex! Guess what I got you?” Tammi Paige yelled brightly, as she let the basement (soon to be The Sonic Rainbow Studio and Art Gallery) screen door bang closed behind her. The petite attractive brunette was wearing as little as the law would allow in public, and her waist-length hair probably provided more coverage than her bikini top and cut off blue jeans. As usual, she was accompanied by soft music, this time Surfin’ Safari.
Even though she was a bit put off by Tammi’s boisterous entrance, her roommate, Alex Silverstone, spent a few seconds enjoying her appearance. She was Alex’s favorite model, and Alex capitalized on her pixie-like appearance by placing her in a variety of fantasy-inspired settings.
‘I spent all morning working hard, and she was off at that silly flea market!’ a cross thought floated through her mind, but she quickly pushed it away.
‘Even though she knew I’d say no, she _did_ offer to help this morning. And I said no. I sure could have used her help reaching the lower part of the walls!’ Alex was tall and trim, with short-cut white-blonde hair, and she was currently dressed for painting – walls and ceilings, not portraits and landscapes. Her back was currently a little sore from bending over to get the walls between the floor and her waist, which Tammi could have reached easily.
‘On the other hand, she’d start playing with the paint and then I’d have to clean the floors and ceilings. She’s got the attention span of a 6 year old.’ And then, ‘That’s not fair. She’s always paying attention, even when she doesn’t seem to be.’ Tammi often surprised Alex with insights into issues Alex was sure she was totally ignoring. Not for the first time she asked herself, ‘How much of the airhead is an act?’
Aloud: “Hey, Tams, looks like you had a great time! Find anything good?”
She straightened, stretched the kinks out of her back, and then took a couple of steps to the table where her friend had spilled the contents of an old leather sack that looked like it had more than once had mold scraped from it, into a jumbled pile of sheets of paper, envelopes and photographs. The paper was yellowed, with some ragged edges, and was covered in small hand drawn glyphs that Alex identified as hanzi, although she couldn’t read them. The photographs were a random mix of faded sepia and blurry black and white. Alex could barely make out gray ovals that must be faces, scenes that must be city streets, and in more than a few, she could see the outlines of steam locomotives.
“Mother Gaia, what a find! You rarely see stuff like this outside of museums!” she was almost stunned at the treasure trove her friend had so casually dumped on the table. “This is fantastic! Thank you!” Alex loved old things, and she was already thinking of the paintings she was going to do with these papers and photos as inspiration.
“I knew you’d like it!” Tammi squealed in delight, bubbling over with enthusiastic joy. Yet her next words were “Gotta run! It’s time for Wee Willie Wonderful. See you later!” Willie Wonderful was a TV puppet show about a young boy who traveled with a carnival which played every Saturday at noon. Tammi had grown up in a traveling circus, and she never missed an episode. Without a backwards glance, she raced from the room.
“That’s gotta be an act… doesn’t it?” Alex asked herself with a sigh.
She wasn’t surprised when Tammi’s voice spoke softly from the air next to her ear: “Hey! I can HEAR you!” even though by now she had bounded up two flights and into the TV room.
“I know you can, you little vixen!” Alex sighed again, then laughed. “Pay attention to your TV show and leave me alone. I’ve got work to do!”
“Work work work, work work work work work! All you ever do is work work work! You should have some fun fun fun sometime…” Her voice faded, to be replaced by the faint words of the show’s theme song: “We love little Willie, we do, we do…” which then faded away completely.
“This is one of the things I do for fun,” Alex reassured herself, then picked up a photograph she thought might be two steam locomotives, cowcatcher to cowcatcher. She had an idea what event it might have showed, and she handled the ancient photograph very carefully. She studied it for a minute, then turned to section of wall she’d painted white for just this purpose. She used her power to projected an image of the picture on the wall, expanded it until it was the size of a canvas, and then started making changes to the image.
Find an edge, make it sharper. Make this area a little lighter, this one a little darker. To an observer, the similarity to a picture being developed was unmistakable – from a blurred image of blobs of dark and light, it coalesced into a crisp, clear, black and white photograph of 2 locomotives, facing one another on the same track, with a crowd of men around, on both sides of the track and hanging all over the trains. The engine smokestacks had distinctly different shapes, one being a tapering cylinder, a little wider at the top than the bottom, and the other being topped with a bonnet of some kind. She couldn’t quite make out the lettering on the coal cars, but she had seen other pictures of this event before, and the blurred lettering became ‘Jupiter’ and ‘119’.
She quickly scanned the picture and did touch ups wherever it still remained blurred. The faces and clothing were too blurred to refine to sharpness, so she made them up, fitting the blotches as well as she could. Finally she was satisfied; this picture was fully restored. She then began mentally adding color. Most of it was easy; she’d seen paintings and restored color prints of this event in an article in Life magazine a few years back, on the 90th anniversary of the driving of the Golden Spike and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Again it was the crowd that gave her the most trouble, but a few minutes later, she regarded it with satisfaction. The image expanded and now the black and white was side by side with the colorized version. The exact colors and faces might not be 100% authentic, but for an event that had happened almost a hundred years ago, it was certainly realistic enough! She did the same for two other photographs, one a portrait of an Asian woman and the other a street scene which was probably taken before the 1906 earthquake/fire disaster.
“Mother Gaia, that’s perfect!” she exclaimed with pride. “Now all I have to do is paint them… that’s all!” She paged through the letters and envelopes and one drew her eye; the rows of hanzi drawn with care, neatly aligned vertically and horizontally. The paper was old and faded, with several water spots, and it must have been written with a poor quality quill pen, as there were ink splotches in several places. She imagined she could see larger patterns among the hanzi. She let her imagination ride, joining the patterns in varying ways, much as she would look for images in clouds, and gradually, when she added in the blotches and water spots, a definite image was emerging; a magnificent Chinese dragon, the tail in the upper left corner, the snout in the lower right. ‘I can make a fantastic print out of that!’
She projected the image of the page onto the wall and began cleaning it up. There were characters in the blotched and spotted areas that were difficult to restore, but she did the best she could. Then she imagined a line drawing of the dragon, overlaid on the text, and then she began adjusting both the characters themselves and the shades of the pen strokes. When she was satisfied, she removed the overlay, and now, the dragon she’d imagined to be hidden on the page was plainly visible.
“I’ve got to start on this one right away!” she spoke excitedly. “I’ll have all four ready for the Grand Opening next week!” she vowed. “And I’ll have to invite Liling so she can read some of these letters for me.”
“Can you keep it down, down there?” Tammi’s voice sounded petulantly from the wall. “I’m tryin’ to watch some serious TV up here!”
“Good to know that you’re practicing your powers, Tuneful Titan,” she spoke very softly and chuckled, using the nickname the papers had given Miss Music, Tammi’s mystery hero identity.
Tammi’s voice chuckled back: “Ditto for you, Colorful Crusader,” which was what the papers called Alex as Palette, the other half of AVantGuard, San Francisco’s most famous mystery hero team.
“Have you changed your mind about going to the Championship Bout tomorrow?” Alex asked the air, knowing her friend would hear.
“Are you kidding? Roller Derby is as phony as pro wrestling. I’m gonna thrill some tourists and shop on the Wharf!”
“Make sure you don’t start another riot!” Alex replied with mock sternness, then continued mischievously. “Maybe Donna will be free.” The air… simply acted like normal air. Alex smiled to herself and went back to work. She rarely got the last word with Tammi.
Tammi Paige (Miss Music)
Tammi was shopping in the tourist district, dressed very conservatively (for Tammi!). With denim shorts and a scoop top white peasant blouse, her hair gathered at the neck and then hanging freely to her waist, she drew a lot of admiring glances. She enjoyed listening to the guys whisper to each other about her, and she would almost laugh out loud as the woman in a couple would scold her man for staring, as soon as they were far enough away that she thought Tammi couldn’t hear. There were a few comments she would just as soon not have heard, but she’d grown up in a circus and her parents and their friends had taught her to ignore obnoxious hecklers.
She was looking in the window of an expensive lingerie boutique, wondering what Alex would say if she bought even more lacy bits of nothing, when she was recognized. A kid about 12 yelled “Hey, that’s Miss Music!” and almost instantly she was surrounded by a group of kids, all asking for her autograph. She happily began signing, pleased at being recognized. She loved kids, and kids loved her because she was the same size as them. The crowd surrounding her continued to grow, but most of the latter arrivals were young adult males who wanted more than her autograph. She ignored them until one of them rudely pushed away the last 3 kids waiting for her autograph. She moved to her left slightly so her back was to a brick wall, not a plate glass window.
“Hey, Tinkerbabe, how about you and me get a room?”
She knew how to deal with that, too. “Sorry, bud, but I’ve got places to be.” She should have left then, but she was peeved at how rude this guy was. “And you’re definitely not my type!” she poked him in his large beer belly.
It seemed to be the right thing to say, because some of the other guys started chuckling, until someone at the back of the crowd yelled out “She thinks she’s too good for us, the butch bitch! We ought to show her what MEN can do.”
“Sorry, buddy, but I don’t see any MEN around,” she snapped back. “So why don’t you juvenile delinquents just go back home to your mommies?” At the same time, she attuned her hearing to the heartbeat of the back-row jackass – she wanted a chance to talk to him face to face after she’d cleared up this soon-to-be mess. Then she realized what he was doing as he pushed his way through the crowd, and she almost laughed. This was going to be FUN.
The crowd was pushing closer when suddenly a tiger ROARED, loud enough to cause physical pain. The front row tried to back away, and bumped into the guys behind them, and there was a zone of confusion near the front of the crowd. The roar of the lion changed to the roar of a Boeing 707, from close up, and by then, everyone nearby was clapping their hands over their ears. Tammi strode forward, projecting a focused subsonic beam in front of her while the 707 taxied to the runway. Suddenly struck by intense fear, the crowd virtually melted away before her and she quickly moved to confront the jackass, who was trying to squirm away, but hindered by the others crowded close to him. The 707 shut down as Tammi suddenly kicked, as high as she could reach, into his most vulnerable spot. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain. She kicked again, hitting him in the chin, and he collapsed onto the pavement, almost unconscious.
For an instant, the crowd of men was too stunned to speak. Then the angry mutters began. She heard “vicious, unprovoked attack”, “no girl can get away with that”, “Holy Moley, look at those legs!”, “man-hating midget”, “gonna get that witch” and various other insults, threats and growls. Even as she squatted next to the prone man, she once again attuned her hearing to a heartbeat, this time the guy who had praised her legs, as she reached into the downed man’s pockets and started pulling out wallets.
She turned to the closest guy and handed him a wallet. “I think this one’s yours; it’s the last one he got.” Once again there was silence. “This is the guy who started all the badmouthing!” she told them. “Pickpockets like nothing better than an angry crowd. And you let him lead you like sheep. Lucky for you there was only one, and lucky I bothered to stop him, after some of the things you guys said!” The crowd started closing in again, no longer threatening her as they fought for their wallets, but dangerous nonetheless.
She was relieved when two of San Francisco’s finest pushed through the ring of jabbering men to take charge of the scene – the pickpocket was starting to take damage from scattered kicks. She’d already told the cops the whole story, projecting her voice directly into their ears as soon as she’d seen them down the street.
“Thanks, Miss Music!” one of the cops shook her hand as the other started to shoo guys away from the fallen thief – and incidentally from the dispersed wallets, just to keep someone from scooping up a couple of extras. “This guy has really been wrecking the tourist trade for the past week or so. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him.”
“Thanks, boys! I really have to leave, can you help me out?”
Instantly, the two cops were yelling at the crowd. “OK, fellows, form a line near that wall. Then step forward one by one and identify yourselves and we’ll make sure you each get your own wallet back.” Tammi maybe helped them just a little by amplifying their words a bit, and adding some subsonic undertones to increase the authority projected by their voices. Everyone wanted to be at the head of that line and more than a few of them were ashamed at their earlier behavior and glad that the police didn’t seem to want to take them into custody. The crowd melted as the anxious men hurried to be first in line.
As she walked away, Tammi noticed a group of 3 dejected kids, standing nearby and scuffling their feet – the 3 kids who hadn’t received autographs before. She altered her direction and walked up to them, meanwhile pulling something out of her purse.
“That was kind of awful, wasn’t it?” she asked them softly. “Here, you guys deserve these.” She pulled 3 5×7 color photographs of AvantGuard, San Francisco’s favorite mystery hero team, Miss Music and Palette in their action outfits, from her purse. They were already autographed by both heroines, but she asked each kid for a name, and added a personal note to each photo. “My partner’s got an art studio, address is on the back. Drop round and say howdy if you’re ever in the area.”
As she turned to leave, she remembered one more thing. She turned back to the line of men and identified the one who had noticed her legs. He was surprised as could be when her voice whispered directly in his ear so that no one but he could hear it: “It was very sweet of you to notice my legs.” Then she waved at the ecstatic kids as she set off toward home.
The guy she’d whispered to turned to the next guy in line. “She sure cheered up those kids. I don’t know why stories about her always say she’s such an airhead!” By then she was so far away, she couldn’t possibly have heard him. Her chuckle must have been over something else… wasn’t it?
Alex Silverstone (Palette)
The Dolls of Doom were skating against the four-time defending champion Roller Force for the BAD GRL (Bay Area Derby Girls Roller League) Championship title. Five years ago, Alex had a very brief but highly successful stint as a jammer for the Dolls, but she’d given up the sport after her parents had passed away and focused on her career as an artist. She had two tickets in the second row, and was accompanied by her friend Donna Sparks. Donna was normally on duty at this time, but she’d swapped shifts with another cop who owed her a favor so she could attend. Donna contrasted nicely with Alex, being several inches taller, solid where Alex was slender, with long, dark brown hair compared to Alex’s blonde butch cut. And while Alex was a loud, passionate and somewhat obnoxious Dolls rooter, Donna was much more reserved.
The Force took an instant lead, and grew it slowly, helped along by blatant favoritism from the referees. “Is it always like this?” Donna asked her friend in the early minutes of the first half. “This is worse than pro wrestling!”
“That’s what Tammi says, too,” Alex sighed. “It’s never been this blatant before. This is the first time in years that the other finals team has been able to give them a game, and the league wants the Rollers to win. Lotta marketing tied up with them.” Her attention was jerked back to the track, and she yelled at the top of her lungs: “C’mon, ref, whatareya, sleeping with that #3?! How much are they payin’ you?! A blind man coulda seen that one!” as one of the Force blockers tripped her Dolls counterpart – and the fouled Dolls blocker was sent to the penalty box for a major!
After the first 3 jams, Alex was so agitated that she needed a walk, so she gave Donna a tour of the arena. In the long corridor that led from the ticket booths to the seating areas, they heard a gunshot from somewhere in front of them. Alex instantly used her zoom-in vision to get a close up of the other end, about 100 yards away, while projecting what she saw on the wall so Donna could see as well. Two masked men ran out of the door to the ticket booths, one carrying a bag and both waving pistols. Both women started running down the hall.
Donna wasn’t nearly as fast as Alex, so she gave her friend the go ahead: “Be careful – I’ll catch up!”
Alex didn’t waste breath answering, she just kept running. Of course, the presumed crooks were gone by the time she got there, but she switched her vision to the infrared, and she saw the shining blobs of recent footsteps. On the wall, she placed an image of a glowing arrow so Donna would know which way to go and kept on running. The bad guys had run down the stairs to the arena’s underground parking garage. Another arrow, and she careened down the stairs after them.
As she burst out of the stairs on the upper parking level, she heard a gunshot and at the same time was stung by fragments of concrete blasted from the wall by the bullet – which had barely missed her. She heard the doors of a car slam shut as she painfully hit the ground and rolled behind the nearest car. She took a deep breath to calm herself, and pulled up the mental image of the garage her photographic memory had captured in the half second glimpse she’d had. Two men getting into in a car right over <there>, and she didn’t need to mentally enlarge the image to see that they both had masks, and one of them had been pointing a pistol in her direction. She noted that all the windows in the car were shut. OK, this should be easy!
The car roared to life and squealed backward out of its stall – and smashed into the car behind it. The nervous driver shifted into Drive, pulled the wheel hard over… and suddenly the car was bobbing violently in a rough sea, and the horizon was rolling unpredictably as the large greenish gray waves lifted and dropped it like a cork. She'd used this illusion before - even though the car was stationary, the illusion was real enough that some people inside other cars had quickly become seasick. But she didn’t have to maintain it that long.
In his panic, the driver tried to smash down hard on the brakes, but he got the gas instead. The engine roared, the tires squealed again, and the car tried to race forward; instead it was pulled around in a tight circle, accelerating the whole time, until it smashed into one of the concrete walls. The front window shattered, Alex dropped her illusion, and when the crooks recovered enough to look around, Donna Sparks was standing not far away, her pistol leveled at them through the broken window. And then, to top it off, they went blind as Alex projected the illusion of total darkness on their faces.
“First one of you boys moves when I don’t tell him to gets a hole in him!” Donna warned him in her ‘tough cop’ command voice. “Hands up – and no guns!” Alex ordered them sternly.
“I’m blind! I’m blind!” the driver said, and groped his face with both hands, frantically rubbing his eyes. Since both hands were empty, Donna didn’t shoot. The other crook was sobbing softly. A siren was approaching them as a police cruiser raced through the garage; someone in the ticket office had called the police. Alex quickly cast the illusion of her police uniform on Donna, and wrapped herself in Palette’s yellow, paint splashed action outfit so nobody would get trigger-happy. The police car rolled to a stop as two more cops burst out of the stairway, followed by the manager of the arena. One of the cops slapped the cuffs on the bad guys, and Alex dropped her blackout.
Alex and Donna only hung around as long as it took to make statements; they had a bout to catch! Alex was not surprised to see that the Dolls had closed the score, as they were clearly the better team. A jam had just started; she looked at the clock and realized this would be the Dolls’ last chance. An outstanding, obviously legal block knocked two of the Force blockers into a tangle, and Lady Lightningstrike, the Dolls jammer, was by them in a jiffy for two points. Now outnumbered, there was nothing the other two Force blockers could do to hinder Lady L’s progress, and she flashed past them for two more points just as the bell rang to signal the end of the bout. And the Dolls of Doom were the new BAD GRL Champions! Alex and Donna left the exuberant celebration an hour later, Alex almost as exhausted as if she’d actually skated the whole bout.
“All the news stories say she’s the quiet one,” Lady Lightningstrike observed to one of her teammates. “What’s up with that?”
The Exhibition
The next Saturday, Sonic Rainbow Studio opened with a party. Alex spent the last of her inheritance on champagne and food, and a lot of people traipsed through the studio on the lower floor of Alex’s house, high on the hill in San Francisco. Many of the visitors were friends of the two young women, and didn’t have much money to spend, so they mostly looked. A good number were celebrity chasers and autograph seekers. Alex had put up a big sign over the entrance: “Today only: the only autographs we will sign today are on your Bill of Sale” but many of these ignored the sign, or figured it didn’t apply to them and asked for autographs anyway. These were escorted to the door, perhaps encouraged by subsonics and ultrasonics and maybe illusionary darkness.
There were several actual purchases; the most popular items were the restored ‘photographs’ of San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake and fire, often to older people whose parents had experienced that disaster. Alex was keeping a mental tally on receipts – she was a meticulous bookkeeper and she knew exactly how much she’d spent getting her business started, and she was thrilled when shortly after noon, she sold the painting that put her on the plus side of the ledger for the first time ever.
Alex was disappointed that her friend Liling Kam couldn’t make the opening, as she was out of the country on business. Liling also had her own business, a very successful curio store called Far Eastern Treasures, and she was something of a business mentor to Alex. Plus she was Chinese, and Alex had been hoping she’d be able to read the old letters.
But the calligraphy dragon print had a very strange experience. Early on, a man had come in, noticed the work, and stood in front of it for an hour, concentrating intensely and ignoring everything that went on around him. Shortly after the break-even point, a young Chinese gentleman came up to her, and handed her some bills. “I’ll take the ‘Driving the Golden Spike’ painting – I think I see my great grandfather in one of the groups of men!” Alex smiled at that – if his great grand had really been there, he had probably been captured in the photograph. “I’ll take the ‘Hidden Dragon Exposed’ print too.” Alex made change for him, and the walked together to take the paintings from the wall.
The intense observer was furious when she took down the print. “That one is MINE!” he insisted.
“Sorry, Charlie, but this guy just bought it. If you wanted it so bad, you should have bought it yourself – you’ve been here long enough!” In fact, she thought he might have scared away several potential buyers earlier. “I’ve got several other hanzi prints. You might like one of them.”
“No, I want that one!” He turned to the buyer. “Sell it to me! I’ll give you more than you paid for it.”
The buyer considered. This guy was rude and he really liked the print, but if this guy was willing to pay enough… “OK, $500 flat. Cash, right here, right now!”
“I don’t carry that much cash!” the other snapped. “How about $200?” The buyer shook his head. “A check?”
“I said, cash.” He turned to Alex. “Thanks very much! Your art is beautiful. Good luck!” He turned away from the obnoxious guy and walked away.
“You god%^&* ch$^!?% bastard! You’ll pay for that!”
Tammi had heard the brouhaha and now she stood next to Alex. “Get your can outta here before we get rough!” she snapped at him. He ignored her and continued to rant.
“OK, punk, you asked for it!” She filled his ears with crackling static, so loud that people across the room could hear it. He clamped his hands to his ears, but of course that didn’t work; she was creating the sound under his hands. A few seconds later, she stopped the noise. “Better be glad it’s me and not my partner – she can give you epilepsy and wreck your life forever. Now GIT!” He left, swearing and threatening to get even.
With the party atmosphere ruined, people began to leave, but then everyone stopped as two gunshots echoed up the hill. Alex and Tammi were out the door in split instants, using their powers to locate the scene of the shooting. Tires squealed, and it didn’t take Tammi’s hearing to locate the car, it was down the hill and speeding away. Alex looked just long enough to be sure she’d captured all the details for later, then used her zoom-in vision to examine the street, down the hill where the car had been racing away from.
“There’s two bodies down there!” she told her friend. She yelled back to her studio: “Call the police! There’s been a shooting!” She already suspected that it was not just a shooting, but a double murder, and her stomach was sinking as she guessed who it might be. Then she was running, and her longer legs quickly allowed her to pass her smaller friend. And when she reached the body, she was extremely saddened to find out her suspicions were right. One of the bodies was the young man who had just purchased the Golden Spike painting and the calligraphy, the other was her downhill neighbor Darrin Larson, and they had definitely been murdered! Her customer still clutched the painting but the Hidden Dragon print was gone. She hadn’t known Darrin very long, as she was still getting acquainted with her neighbors, but he had seemed like a nice-enough man. At least he hadn’t left behind a wife and kids.
SFPD Homicide Detective Hunter and his team arrived in only a few minutes. While his team was securing and photographing the crime scene, he interviewed Alex and Tammi. Alex projected the image of the car speeding down the hill, and by enlarging the image, they were able to capture the license plate. One of the cops called it in, and almost instantly learned that the car belonged to Darrin and had just been found several miles from Alex’s house, crashed into a light pole, and then abandoned. Hunter dispatched another pair of detectives to the scene. Though the police would fill in the details as they interview more witnesses, the basic story seemed clear: the young man had been walking down the hill with his purchases, when he had encountered the murderer. He’d been shot, the painting had been stolen, and Darrin had been shot so the killer could take his car.
“Here’s the guy from my studio,” Alex said grimly to Hunter as she projected that guy’s image onto the sidewalk for police photographers. “If he’s the killer, he better hope you guys catch him before we do!”
“Damn straight,” Tammi agreed in a wavering voice.
Hunter couldn’t tell if she was furious or on the edge of crying. ‘Probably both’, he decided.
“We toss the bastard out, he runs down our customer and kills him within shouting distance of our house? We owe him…” She ran down and then said very quietly: “If I hadn’t forced him out so soon…” and then broke down into a sob.
“Listen, ladies, Miss Paige, this isn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything to cause this,” Hunter stated forcefully as he tried to calm down the two heroines.
Before Alex could reply, Tammi burst out: “Well, we are going to do something to end it.” Her voice was deadly; Alex had never heard anything like that from Tammi before. She nodded in agreement.
“I know I can’t stop you two from investigating,” Hunter sighed. “But if you find him first, don’t do anything that will end up making me come after you.” This last was in his stern, command tone – he wanted to make sure these two knew he was serious.
With that warning ringing in their ears, Alex and Tammi headed for home, where Tammi bawled like an angry baby for at least an hour.
Nocturnal Adventures
It was your average boisterous night in the private after-hours club on Turk Street in the Tenderloin. The torch singer had slapped a drunk with wandering hands, starting a brawl which ended with him getting tossed out the back door, security beat up a gambler who claimed that the roulette table was rigged, two angry pool players broke their cues over each other’s heads, a couple of patrons got into a fight over the lead in the chorus line, and the beat cops dropped in ‘to keep things quiet’, have a free beer and pick up their grease. Nothing out of the ordinary… until AVantGuard paid a visit.
During the band’s break, patrons were startled to hear the opening bars theme from ‘Dragnet’, loud enough to drown the hum of conversation. “Dom da Dom Dom, Dom da Dom Dom DOM!” coming from the door, which swung open and in stomped… two dames in costumes? A tall blonde in a yellow body suit, which was speckled and spattered with paint drops, drips, and splotches of colors, and a tiny brunette dressed as a… blue, white and red drum majorette with tri-corner hat?
There was silence for a few seconds, and then the laughter started. “Must be Halloween!” “Whatsa matter, blondie, ya can’t afford clothes?” Whatzit, a parade?” A few of the patrons recognized AVantGuard, but none of them had actually encountered the Dazzling Duo before… and NO ONE had ever encountered tonight’s version.
“Shaddup!” The word blasted through the murmurs like an explosion. “Alla You, Siddown and Shaddup!” For some reason, the voice inspired awe and a little fear, and even the toughest patron sank back into his seat. Dead silence fell over the room. Miss Music toned down her words. “We’re not here for any of you guys, but fool around with us and we’ll run you in. We’re just looking for one guy, and you are going to tell us everything you know about him!”
At about that time, some of the tougher patrons were recovering. “Ain’t no g#$%^%$# pantywaist puffed up bitches with dinky playtime powers playing dress up mystery girls are gonna tell us what ta do!” He stood up and reached for his concealed weapon – and suddenly stopped moving and screamed in panic: “I’m BLIND”.
“Yeah, I forgot to tell you about that,” Miss Music laughed. “That’s one of my partner’s tricks. If you’re really really good, she’ll let you see again. And, here’s one of mine!” A beer bottle on another table exploded. “Guess you guys don’t learn? P, near the wall, under the picture…” Yet another patron started blubbering about being blind. “And behind us!”
Flashes of bright light leaked around the door frame as the entrance way virtually exploded in a riot of flashing colors. “Excuse me,” Palette asked her friend as she stepped back through the door. There were some thumps and then some louder thumps, and she was back in a flash. “Only two of them.”
“I know,” Miss Music agreed. To the room at large: “Anybody else wanna try somethin’? Just answer our questions and we’ll leave. Tell the truth; I can tell if you’re lying.”
Palette projected a larger than life picture of the suspected killer on the bar’s wall.
“Anyone know this guy? Remember, I’ll know if you’re lying!” Miss Music asked of the very quiet crowd of patrons. “Anyone?” She nodded to her partner… “Nope, nobody,” then turned back to the bar. “Anybody hear anyone talking about a shooting today, up on Lombard Street?” Nobody said anything, again.
“OK, we’re leaving. A present for you – a couple of you get your eyes back!” She turned to leave, then turned back. “Nobody follows us – remember, I know what you’re thinking!” They turned their backs on the bar, and left.
Once they were sure the two heroines were gone, one of the patrons spoke to the guy who’d tried to start something. “Pantywaist bitches, huh? Well, you got that half right, pal!”
AVantGuard didn’t make any new friends that night as they burst into shady bars, all-night pool parlors and unlicensed after-hours clubs across the city, but they weren’t interested in wasting time on pleasantries. They varied the way they made their entrance: Palette would dazzle the room with a brilliant multicolored light show or a high intensity strobe light or Miss Music would hit a room with a sonic boom or a flood of nausea-producing infrasound. They kept it up for several hours, and always the results were the same – nobody recognized the man in the image, and nobody had heard anyone talking about the shooting. Finally they gave it up – even dressup mystery girls need to sleep. Riding home on Palette’s big, virtually silent World War II era electric motorcycle, they dejectedly discussed the night’s adventures.
“Guess our bad guy’s not a crook,” Palette concluded.
“Wrong,” Tammi replied flatly. “Our bad guy _wasn’t_ a crook – but he is now. And AVantGuard is gonna get him!”
Hidden Dragon, Hidden Treasure
Alex, Tammi and Liling Kam were sitting in the office of Liling's curio store, Far Eastern Treasures, studying a projection of the Hidden Dragon print.
“My dear, you have absolutely mangled this text,” Liling Kam scolded her friend cheerfully. She spoke with an elegant British accent overlaid on the lilting rhythm of her native tongue. “It’s unquestionably a beautiful print, but less than half of the words are legible due to distortions introduced when you added the dragon. As well, it is written in the Pa-Zhu dialect, which was once used only by the aristocracy, and is as distinct from more common languages as English is from Latin. I recognize it, but only through my studies of history.” She sighed. “Without seeing the original, I can’t give you more than a general sense of what it says. And even with the original, I must consult many older reference works, and only with difficulty be able to puzzle out the full meaning and the reason it is important enough to commit murder to gain possession of it.” Sensing her friends’ disappointment, she continued “Don’t despair, young ladies. There are a few characters in beginning of the page that I believe I recognize.”
“So, tell us! What’s she writing about?” Tammi was fairly bursting to hear what it said. “Why DID someone kill for it?”
“Patience, young one,” the elderly woman chided with a smile, amused at the youngster’s impatience. She paused a moment to heighten the suspense, then took pity on her friends. “It’s an old woman, apparently writing her life story in letters. This particular letter is a map to a pirate treasure!” she announced solemnly.
Tammi pointed to a section. “Of course it is,” she said, just as solemnly. “Even I can see it. Here’s North Bay, and here’s the Golden Gate Strait, and…”
Alex cut her off. “Not funny, Tams!” but Liling chuckled at the young woman’s humor.
“Not that sort of a map, impetuous child.” Her gentle smile took the sting from her words. “A map in words; it’s the ‘start with your back to the big oak tree and follow these directions’ type of map – a puzzle map in words.”
“Oh boy oh boy oh boy, where’s this big oak tree? Let’s get going!” Tammi was fairly crackling with barely contained enthusiasm.
Alex was more skeptical. “Mother Gaia, Liling, on Fisherman’s Wharf, I can buy a hundred different pirate treasure maps! With all the treasures they lead to, plus a nickel, I could buy a cup of tea.”
“None of those are a hundred years old, Alex!” Tammi rebuked her friend. “I’ll bet they didn’t even have phony treasure maps back then!” She turned to Liling. “Did they?”
Once again, their hostess chuckled in amusement. “I’m hardly that ancient, my dear. But I don’t think this one is phony.”
“OK, so where’s the Big Oak Tree?” Tammi demanded, bubbling with enthusiasm to get started. Alex was amused that Tammi had already promoted the big oak tree into ‘the Big Oak Tree’.
“That, my young friend, I’m afraid I don’t know,” Liling replied. “As I said, I can only get a general sense of the meaning from this print. I will need to see the original to give you a better answer, and…”
Tammi interrupted her. “Why didn’t you just say so?! That’s SO easy… Alex, show her the original!” Tammi demanded.
Alex added side-by-side to her projection the images of the original faded, splotched letter and the version she’d cleaned up before she began altering to reveal the hidden dragon. As the image of the original letter popped up, an alarming thought occurred to her. “The killer may know by now that he needs the original – and we told everyone how Tammi bought these things in a flea market. He knows the original is in my studio!”
By the time she was finished, Tammi was already on the phone. “Kay, we think someone might try to break into our house today. Can you watch it until we get there? 15 minutes, max! Thanks! If you see something before we get there, stay inside and CALL THE POLICE!” She turned to her partner. “Let’s get moving!” When Alex didn’t instantly leap to her feet, she continued, more than a little annoyed. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! He might be there RIGHT NOW!”
“Mother Gaia, Tams, take it easy! Just a minute, please!” She turned to their friend. “Liling, can I bring this stuff back and put it in your safe? I can’t get to my safe deposit box on Sunday.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Just GO!” As a business owner herself, Liling understood the anxiety of being the victim of theft.
“I’m going to try to leave these images on your wall. I’ve never tried to maintain an illusion from more than a few yards away, so I don’t know what will happen.” Tammi was tugging on her sleeve. “OK, you little monster, we’re gone!” And they were.
As they sped across town, Alex projected the illusion of their costumes on their bodies, minus Tammi’s hat, and Tammi announced their coming with a loud police siren. San Franciscans were becoming used to seeing the pair flying through the streets on Alex’s big, silent bike, and they were heartened when a few people cheered as they raced by. They arrived in much less than the 15 minutes Tammi had guessed – and they were still too late!
Alex’s desk had been ripped open and several drawers spilled out on the floor. As far as they could tell, the only things that had been taken were the letters themselves – the envelopes and photographs had been left behind in a jumbled piled on the desk. The thief had stopped rummaging as soon as the letters were found – nothing else in the office or studio had been touched. Apparently the thief had come in and gone out through the back door, which had been forced, but it must have been almost immediately after they had left to see Liling, because Alex could find no trace of infrared footprints. Though she looked for fingerprints as well, there were none, but she found smudges and small fibers that suggested that the thief had worn white cotton gloves. Not much to go on.
“He was watching us!” Tammi snarled, “and we didn’t even notice! I should have listened for him.”
“I should have looked for him, too, Tams, but we had no reason to think he’d come back,” Alex soothed her partner, even as she hid her own agitation. “But he won’t get away with that s#!t again!”
“Damn straight!” Tammi replied, her tone totally unlike the happy-go-lucky airhead she’d been at Liling’s.
‘Do I really know who she is?’ Alex wondered with amusement, not for the first time, as they crossed the street to thank their neighbor. “We’ll tell the police later, Kay,” Alex assured her. “He was looking for something that belonged to me, and he found it. He won’t be back.”
The two heroines hopped back on the bike and zoomed away as they returned to Far Eastern Treasures. Now that the original map was in the hands of the bad guy, having Liling complete the translation as quickly as possible was even more important.
With Your Back to the Big Oak Tree, Face West…
“The image held for 10 minutes, then went off like a light,” Liling told them. That was just about the time Alex had become distressed over the break-in. “I’ve made some headway, but it is difficult reading. Even were your murderer a native speaker, I doubt his ability to decipher it without help.” She was already surrounded by half a dozen books of aged appearance, all of them opened, four of them printed in Chinese.
“But you can, right? Just tell me where that Big Oak Tree is!” Tammi repeated petulantly.
“Once again, I must apologize, young one. The ‘Big Oak Tree’ was only a descriptive metaphor of my own devising. The actual starting point is the base of a tower in a faraway land.”
Tammi’s mercurial focus shifted yet again. “Say, I just thought of something. The guy I bought this stuff from is pretty down on his luck and his mom is sick. He was selling just about everything that he could carry out of the house just to get medicine for her. Once we find that treasure, it’s really his, isn’t it? He can sure use it!”
“That’s only fair, Tuneful Titan!” Alex replied with a sigh. Not about giving away the treasure, though. ‘Of course, Tammi knows his life story, his name, probably his address, his mother’s name, the kind of medicine she needs, both their ages, and where he likes to go on dates. Why should I expect anything else?’
“But I don’t think we ought to tell him until we find the treasure, do you?” the petite young woman asked a little plaintively. “Don’t want to get his hopes up for no reason.” She turned to her partner. “Say, Alex, do you really think I’m a little monster? You know I hate being called little!” Then to Liling, “What do we do when we reach the tower?” Then: “Hey, hold on, a faraway land? What’s that mean?”
“She seems to be deliberately writing in riddles, Miss Paige, another reason it is difficult to interpret. So far, I still have only have a couple of lines and a word here and there. It may take me a week to give you a full translation.”
“A WEEK?! I can’t wait a WEEK!” Guess who that was?
“If it’s a riddle, Miss Impatience, we might need a week to solve it. Give us what you can, Liling, when you can.” Alex’s business side was always practical.
“Yeah, what’s the scoop-de-doo on that Faraway Land? I hope it’s not China!” She was frowning at the thought of having to go to China to find this treasure. Then she brightened. “Maybe it’s Hawaii! When do we leave?!”
Liling traced across several characters in the beginning of the text. “Here, she talks about a wreck in a faraway land.” Her finger moved to another row. “These words seem to mean ‘band of criminals who roam the oceans’, which I interpret as ‘pirates.’ This group here clearly says that many times she climbed a hill to gaze on that faraway land, but never returned there.” As she spoke, Alex modified the image by moving the rows farther apart and began inserting annotations.
She pointed to another row of characters: “A tower, a flashing light…” these words were on the same line. Much farther down: ”This is definitely the Moon, here a reference to what might be 'cave of colors', or maybe a well filled with jewelry, here a pirate treasure unclaimed.”
“So we go to this Faraway Land, find the Tower with the Flashing Light, and then look for the Cave of Colors,” Tammi already had the riddle solved, with most of the words still unknown!
Alex was more cautious. “You forgot the Moon, Tuneful Titan. But I’m pretty sure I know where the faraway land is.” She hesitated deliberately, trying to introduce some suspense, but she could sense that Tammi was about to explode. “About 30 miles west of San Francisco is a small group of small islands called the Farallons.” Tammi started to protest that she’d never heard of them, but again Alex cut her off. “I’ve seen them, Miss Dubious!”
“Boy oh boy, Farallon Islands sounds a lot like Faraway Lands! That’s where the treasure is. Let’s GO!” Hawaii was forgotten in Tammi’s enthusiasm to start tracking down the prize. Suddenly, she was a Muskrat Creek cheerleader again. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s really GO!” She finished with a perfect stag jump, swinging her arms in wide circles. Liling was momentarily alarmed about the safety of the many curios and souvenirs that covered her office desk and filled her shelves, but the cheer and jump were completed safely.
“How are we gonna get 30 miles out to sea, at the drop of a hat, on a Sunday afternoon? Neither of us can fly and it will take hours for the Alliance of Mystery Heroes to send us a flier. And what do we do when we do get there? Just start looking here and there and everywhere?” As usual, Alex was more practical, but Tammi wasn’t ready to give up.
“All we gotta do now is find The Cave! How tough can that be for US?” Tammi insisted.
Alex considered. “Well, you do have a good point, partner. Our powers make us good at hide and seek. But even a group of small islands is a big place.”
“The Cave, Alex, how hard can it be to find The Cave!” Tammi repeated excitedly.
Alex sighed. She’d already closely studied her mental photographically sharp image of the Farallon Islands. “OK, Tams, you tell me which cave is The Cave.”
She turned to another section of wall, and suddenly the three of them were looking west from the top of Hob Hill on a beautiful day. It wasn’t too difficult to make out the shape of an island, not far from the horizon, a long way away.
“That’s the largest of the Farollon Islands. Hold on to your stomachs!” The view changed; they appeared to be moving toward the island as Alex adjusted her zoom-in vision. In about two minutes, their viewpoint seemed to be about a quarter mile from the rugged, rocky island shore. Alex loved this; it was as close to actually flying by herself as she could come, and Tammi was whooping like she was on a roller coaster, but Liling was wincing and clutching her stomach.
“The tower and the flashing light!” Tammi exalted triumphantly, pointing to a lighthouse perched on the highest peak of the island. “Now we KNOW it’s the right place!”
“It may be, young one, but the problem you face has not grown simpler.” Liling pointed to the east side of the island, which was a sheer sea cliff, perhaps 50 yards high. The cliff face was absolutely riddled with cave mouths, especially closer to the waterline. And stuffed into every cave were hundreds of birds, and more were swarming in the air and floating on the ocean. “Are you perceptive enough to have ascertained in advance the very cave of which the riddle speaks?” Her voice definitely sound strained, and the Maven of Noise noticed it.
“Or do you think we should just explore every one of them?” Alex asked, a little maliciously. “I see at least 70 caves large enough for you, and I’ll bet every one of them is full of bird crap at least a foot deep! And you’ll have to explore the smallest ones alone.”
“Hey, Alex, give it a rest for second or two, OK?” Tammi broke in. “Say, Miss Kam, are you OK?” Liling nodded weakly; that was good enough for Tammi.
“Well… I guess maybe we really should wait until Liling gives us more clues,” Tammi finally agreed reluctantly. “I will explore one and ONLY one cave full of birdie poopoo – as long as I know it’s the right cave.” She could be fastidious almost to the point of obsession about personal cleanliness, and yet there were times when she loved nothing better than playing in a mud puddle. “But what if he gets there first?”
“Then we’ll find some other clue to catch him and that will save us having to crawl through some grotty old cave to get the treasure!” Alex shot back.
“Say, that’s right! Too bad one of us doesn’t have nose powers – she could just sniff him out when he gets back.”
“Umm, Tams – if my sense of smell was good enough to do that, I don’t think I would WANT to sniff out someone who’s been wading through birdie poopoo.”
The smaller woman smiled brightly. “Yeah, I guess there’s that! But we’ll find him some other way. After all, we’re AVantGuard – and nobody gets away from us! Say, it’s too bad we’re not going to Hawaii, can we do that next?”
Liling was looking rather drawn. “I say, flying without a plane at almost 400 miles an hour, followed by this talk of rooting around in the dung of birds, is playing hob with my constitution. If you don’t mind, I feel the need to retire. I will return to your puzzle anon.” She didn’t mention it, but Tammi’s constant seemingly random changes of subject were disruptive to someone, like her, who had a very-well-ordered mind and life.
Tammi opened her mouth; Alex was sure she was going to complain again and offend their friend. “We’ll call you tomorrow, Liling. Hope you feel better.” She tried to herd Tammi from the room, but the smaller woman shrugged free.
“Thanks very much, Miss Kam. You are really really swell, to help us like this!” Alex was speechless as Tammi took her hand and pulled her out the door.
Another Murder
AVantGuard spent another night fruitlessly searching for their suspect. “Well, we’ve confirmed, again, that he’s not a known criminal – not in San Francisco, at least,” Alex sighed as she flopped into her big recliner. “Another wasted night.”
“Well, not really,” Tammi disagreed. “I DID get the phone number of that cute singer in that one band. And you prevented an accident by making a green light red, and I scared away a gang of kids by being a police siren, and we got Clark Gabel’s autograph – and he wanted ours! And all kinds of other good things, as well.”
“San Francisco loves us more than ever, but we’re no closer to wrapping up this case,” Alex grouched. “I’m going to sleep in tomorrow. Leave me alone until I wake up!”
Alex was always pretty irritable when she awakened after a late night, and today was no exception. She hoped Tammi would be off somewhere doing some Tammi thing, but no such luck.
Before she could even start her morning tea, Tammi bounced into the kitchen. “Hey, sleepyhead, you missed all the fun! It was all over TV and your boyfriend Hunter called to tell you about it. Wanted me to wake you up, but no siree, I’m not the kind of girl who bothers someone who said ‘Leave me alone.’ So, I left you alone.”
Alex wasn’t getting any less irritated. “Ok, never mind. I’ll find out for myself later.” She opened the refrigerator. “Hey, who filled the fridge with chocolate ice cream?”
“What?! Let me see!” the younger woman leaped from her chair and rushed to the fridge door. For a second she was astonished and ready to dive into an orgy of chocolate. Every container on every shelf, regardless of shape or size, was a chocolate ice cream container!
“Hey, hold on! I’ve never seen a container of ice cream that looks like half a watermelon before.” She wheeled on her partner. “That was a dirty trick!” she shouted, trying to sound angry but having to hide her laughter. “So we’re even.”
“Not until you tell me what’s got you so animated today.” Fooling her roommate helped Alex feel a little better.
“Well, I found out who our suspect is. He’s Gilbert Willington, and he’s a first-year grad student at USF majoring in Chinese Language and Culture or something like that. 26 years old, single, comes from someplace like Big City, Pennsylvania.”
“OK, and why is this in the news, and why did Detective Hunter call? And, by the way,” she added haughtily, “Hunter is NOT my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, right, and Donna’s not your girlfriend, either,” Tammi giggled, then turned serious – for a few seconds. “So anyway, very early this morning, the student attendant at the USF library was slugged unconscious by an adjunct professor. When she woke up, she found Willington’s body, shot with the same gun he used to kill Ike and Darrin. There’s no trace of our letter. The police are searching for the adjunct but he’s vanished. And a handful of Chinese language reference books are missing. Officially, the police aren’t quite sure yet if the theft and the murder are related. But your boyfriend knows better.”
She paused. Just when Alex was sure she was finished, Tammi spoke again, crossly: “And don’t you DARE ask ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ I already told you.”
Alex bit back that very question. “Thanks for the update, Tams. Guess we’d better get moving and find out more.”
Once again, San Francisco’s favorite mystery heroines were burning up the road, this time to the USF library. Hunter and his team were already there, and he gave them more information. “The adjunct’s name is Max English. He works in the civil engineering department.” Tammi looked up from the kid’s picture book she had pulled from one of the shelves and started to ask him a question. “No, Miss Paige, as far as his friends we’ve talked to so far know, he is totally ignorant of the Chinese language.”
A voice whispered in Alex’s ear: “Whew, that’s a relief! It will HAVE to take him longer than it takes Liling. So we’ll get to the treasure first!” On the facing page of her book, a message appeared, in glowing red letters: “Our first priority is catching the new murderer!” And Tammi’s voice whispered back: “Once we find the treasure, we can stake it out and wait for him to show up.” Alex nodded; it was a good idea and she wished she’d thought of it first. The red letters crawling across Tammi’s book page added: “But until we get enough to go on from Liling, we look for Mr. Adjunct Professor of Engineering English.” This time Tammi just nodded.
Meanwhile, Hunter was totally unaware of this private conversation. He reported: “We’ve already investigated his apartment, and my team is locating more of his colleagues and friends even as we speak. What’s in that letter, anyway?”
Neither woman was ready to reveal the secret of the treasure. “So far, it’s a mystery,” Alex sighed. “We’ve asked my friend Liling to translate it, but she doesn’t know the language. But we’ll tell you as soon as she can read it!”
He didn’t quite believe her. “If English kills again and you haven’t told me something that would have helped us catch him first, I won’t be easy on you.” Once again his warning was stern, and both heroines knew that this threat had teeth.
A Treacherous Trail
A lot happened the next day. Zenith, one of their Alliance of Mystery Heroes teammates, piloted one of the small AMH fliers from their New York headquarters, for their use in this case. The flier was about the size of a Cadillac and Red Rocket claimed it flew by interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field – silently, smoothly, and it was very fast. The original owners, the alien invaders, were much smaller than humans, so the whole interior had been ripped out and redone, and the controls altered to fit humans. It was a little snug for Kali, but still comfortable. And she could change to Victoria for a while if she started feeling too crowded.
As she wasn’t in a hurry, Zenith changed to her other identity of Victoria Waltyngfeld, and Alex and Tammi gave her a tour of the city. Before they started, Alex asked if she wanted to be disguised. Victoria declined. She was a rising star on Broadway, used to being recognized occasionally by fans on the streets of New York, but she wasn’t nearly as popular as even the lowliest scrub riding the pine for the Yankees. Surely she wouldn’t be bothered by New York theater fans this far away.
“Not your fans – OUR fans!” from Tammi.
“Don’t you two keep your identities secret?” Vicki asked in wonder. “Aren’t you worried about bad guys attacking your friends, or burning down your house with you in it, or something like that? I feel so vulnerable sometimes as Victoria.”
“That’s a lot easier for you than it is for us,” Tammi smiled sadly. “Even if someone actually sees you change to Zenith, they still don’t believe you’re her.” Vicki wasn’t too much taller than Tammi, while Zenith was over 6' 6” tall. Even to those who knew her secret, it really WAS difficult to believe Vicki and Zenith were the same being.
Oh the other hand, Alex explained, “Well, it’s not too difficult to figure out that the tall trim short-haired blonde and her petite, attractive, bouncy friend (“That’s ME, of course!” Tammi interjected proudly) might be the same people as the tall trim short haired blonde mystery heroine and her petite, attractive, bouncy partner in domino masks.”
“I didn’t really mind at first!” Tammi added sadly. “It was fun being as well-known as a movie star. But it’s not so much fun anymore,” She frowned and grumbled. “Everybody wants something from you. And some of them get offended when they don’t get what they want. So Alex disguises us sometimes.”
“I call this guy Tom,” Alex agreed, and suddenly the tall, trim short-haired blonde woman was replaced by an equally tall, thin man with short graying hair and a pencil mustache. Alex made her voice as rough and low as possible. “Good afternoon, Miss Waltyngfeld. My name is Tom. Pleased to meet you.” He shook hands with a bemused Victoria. “Meet my friend Wahini.” Tammi’s skin, eye and hair color all changed, and the shape of her facial features, until she looked like she might be a native Polynesian.
“It would great to have you backstage at the theater,” Vicki noted. “Heavy makeup could be a thing of the past.”
Shortly after lunch, Victoria repeated her magic word and Zenith headed back for New York. Unless she had to stop and right some wrongs or perform some heroic feats of derring-do, she’d be home by dinner. Tammi excused herself – she had an errand to run. The two partners agreed to meet at Far Eastern Treasures at five o’clock that afternoon, just to check on Liling’s progress, and to remind her to have dinner.
Liling greeted them excitedly. “I’ve been trying to call you two all day!” She whisked them into her office. “I worked on your translation almost all night. After I filled in everything I could read or guess at, I read the whole thing again, trying to figure out what other words made sense with the words I already knew, and I suddenly realized that a lot of the glyphs vaguely resembled the ones I would use if I were writing the same thing. So I filled those in and suddenly, the whole thing started to make sense.”
She paused and her tone became triumphant. “They always told us peasants that Pa-Zhu was much more difficult than our own dialect, and only the aristocratic class was intelligent enough to read or speak it. But they were lying to us. Pa-Zhu is really a simplified derivative of the common tongue, with the glyphs thinly disguised and much more primitive!” She displayed a touch of anger. “Yet another attempt to keep us ‘in our place’.”
Tammi had heard enough history! “Miss Kam, please… tell us what it says? Where’s the treasure?”
Liling chuckled. She’d been teasing the younger woman by deliberately putting off the revelation. “My dear, you must learn to cultivate patience and serenity.”
“If I wanted patience, I’d be a doctor!” Tammi retorted, and her friends smiled. And Liling began her story.
“Remember, this story is a mix of translation and conjecture, and there may yet be more details or surprises hidden in the text,” she started with a disclaimer. “That being said, let’s begin.”
Tammi and Alex settled into comfortable chairs in Liling’s den. She brought them tea, and then began telling her story.
Fan Lee's Story
“This letter was written by a woman, in 1893. Nowhere on this page does she give her name, so in my mind I have been calling her Fan Lee. She is writing this letter from her prison cell, and she expects to die there. My theory is that she is writing to her daughter, a daughter she must have abandoned years before. She also dates the story, which begins in San Francisco in the spring of 1888 and she has been in prison for most of the intervening 5 years.”
“In April, 1888, Miss Fan took passage on a ship headed for the Orient. She was in disguise and fleeing the police, though she doesn’t say why. When she reached the ship she felt she was safe, as the police declined to board the ship. She was a paying customer, and the crew had no allegiance to the San Francisco police. As long as she was leaving town, she became someone else’s problem. But what happened to her next was worse than being captured by the police.”
“A few hours after they left San Francisco they spotted the lighthouse on South Farallon Island, identifiable by the flashing beacon, once every 15 seconds. The weather was rapidly worsening, and quickly developed into a typhoon which drove the ship onto the rocks on the north shore of that island. Miss Fan was knocked unconscious in the wreck, and thrown onto a small beach by the storm. At that, she was very lucky; she never after heard of anyone else surviving.”
Tammi couldn’t contain herself. “The treasure, ‘Ling, the treasure?!” Alex was looking at her in shocked disapproval, and Liling was smiling.
Alex started to scold her. “Tam, her name is…” and Liling interrupted.
“Thank you, child, it has been years since anyone has called me by that name, and I find I miss it. Sometimes custom and tradition can be so stifling.”
“Hear, hear!” Tammi almost yelled. She felt very strongly the same way, and was astonished to realize that she and Liling might be more alike than she’d realized. It was also one of the traits she shared with Alex.
“As before, have patience, young one. The castaway didn’t find the treasure right away and my story will not find the treasure right away. It will come when the time is right.” Tammi nodded reluctantly and Liling continued her tale.
“When she awakened, Fan Lee found herself surrounded by birds of many types – literally tens of thousands of birds, packed so closely that they often failed to get out of her path when she moved. This was fortunate; as long as she remained trapped, she was able to survive on eggs and the occasional roasted fowl – and rum. Almost every day, flotsam from her ship and other nearby older wrecks washed onto the beach, and she discovered several intact casks of rum, a godsend as she had no source of fresh water.”
“HEY! Who says I’m a child?” Tammi interrupted petulantly.
“Ah, Miss Paige, when one reaches my age, all young people look like children.” She paused for a second of thought, then… “though not all of them act that way.” Before Tammi could decide whether to be offended, Liling went back to the story.
“The small beach was at the end of a long, narrow fissure in the rock cliff of the island. She never knew how deeply it extended under water, but the walls above the water were perhaps a hundred feet high, and unclimbable. Even on a calm day, the water was a churning cauldron, so turbulent she couldn’t swim out or float out on a raft, but she never ceased her preparations for escape or rescue. Therefore she was ready when one day, her means of escape was revealed to her, as an unusually low tide, which she referred to as a crescent moon tide, revealed the top of the mouth of a cave that was normally submerged. She pushed off on her makeshift raft and paddled over and into that cave. It led south and sloped toward the surface. When she reached the inside waterline, she realized that if she went forward, she might never return. She made a decision she says she might not have made if her diet had included less rum, lit the makeshift torch she had brought with her, and pushed deeper into the cave, which continued to rise. Her description actually sounds more like a tunnel or a tube than a cave, though a tunnel lined with crystals, which her torch turned into fiery jewels!”
“I’ll bet it was a volcanic fumarole, exposed by whatever catastrophic geologic event cracked open that crevice!” Tammi interrupted again. Both her friends looked at her in disbelief. “What, because I’m fantastically beautiful I have to be a dunce? I spent the afternoon at the library. A volcanic event pushed the Farallon Islands above the water, and there are at least 2 ancient volcanic throats on the one we’re talking about.”
There was silence for a short while as Alex and Liling digested Tammi’s not-so-subtle rebuke, and then Liling took up her story again.
“Long story shorter, she made her way through this… fumarole.” At this point, she nodded her head at the ‘beautiful dunce’, acknowledging Tammi's contribution. “If it had been more rugged, she may not have made it. Eventually the passage opened to the surface on the top of the broad, high plateau on the east end of the island. She struggled to climb to the surface, and then had to struggle again to climb down from the plateau. Eventually, she made contact with the people who lived and worked on the island – employees of several companies that ‘harvested’ millions of bird eggs and sold them in San Francisco. Not long after that, Miss Fan returned to San Francisco, and that’s where the story on this page ends.”
“Um, Miss Kam, didn’t you miss something?” Tammi asked mildly. “Where’s the treasure?!” That was much louder.
“Oh, my, I did miss the treasure, didn’t I, dear?” Leling replied innocently. “I’m ever so sorry. As old as I am, sometimes my mind wanders. Let me see… Miss Fan found evidence that others had visited her cove before, many years previously, and had spent considerable time there: old fire pits drifted over with sand, piles of shattered glass from liquor bottles, some rotted canvas that had probably been a tent. And there was a short cave at the very end of the fissure, in which she found an old wooden chest, bound with iron straps. She battered it open with a rock, and she was stunned and thrilled to discover a pirate treasure! It had gold and silver coins, jewelry, and stuff you don’t think of as part of a pirate treasure - an astrolabe, an elaborate compass with a shattered glass, some bags of iron shot, rusted solid, a magnifying glass, thimbles and needles, among other things. She laments that she was never able to return – she ends the page by encouraging she to whom the letter was addressed to return prepared to wait near the fumarole for the crescent moon tide for her chance to reach the cove.”
“Wow, Miss Kam, you are really smart to figure all that out, and overnight at that!” Tammi congratulated her older friend. “But… we either have to swim or float through a churning cauldron of turbulent ocean, no doubt crisscrossed by treacherous currents, or explore a dank, dark, volcanic fumarole which is probably a foot deep in bird crap, and then either swim underwater through a hundred yards of even darker, wetter, cave or wait until a crescent moon tide and race through that same hundred yards of dark wet cave and probably get trapped on the other side when the tide comes in? And what the heck is a crescent moon tide, anyway? And we don’t even know if the treasure is still there? Phooey, who needs it?”
“A succinct evaluation, my young friend,” Liling agreed. “Whoever originally hid the treasure there chose an excellently safe location.”
Alex broke out laughing. “You two forget, we’ve got a flying car. We’ll just fly into the fissure well above the churning cauldron of treacherous, turbulent water, and avoid the dank dark cave of crap. And we ain’t waitin for no crescent moon, either!”
“I’m sorry, my young adventurous friends, but I have had more than my share of flying recently, with and without airplanes, and I dread the thought of a flying car. You must go without me.”
“We don’t need to pack,” Alex announced enthusiastically. “We can be there and back in an hour. Let’s go!”
Tammi unleashed her patented battle cry, which she normally used as a sonic battering ram, often subduing her opponents without even a fight. “YAHOOO! Gangway! Comin’ THROUGH!!”
At Last, the Treasure
Alex, acting as an agent of the Alliance of Mystery Heroes, had temporarily retained a small hanger at Crissy Field for storage of the air car. It only took a few minutes on Alex’s bike to reach the field, and within a half an hour, AVantGuard was on the way to South Farallon Island. Tammi was ‘at the wheel’, as their AMH training had shown her to be the better pilot. Alex was grudgingly, barely, willing to admit this.
“Say, Stretch, the AMH has a few of these babies in the hanger. Why don’t we ask them to let us have this one full time? It would make getting to meetings in New York a LOT easier.”
“They’re afraid you’d wreck it, of course. Remember, they trained us, so they know how you fly,” Alex responded dryly. “In fact, I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t nearly wrecked us a dozen times already. No Immelmanns or 'split s' turns,” she continued, maybe a little sarcastically. “No loop-de-loops, not even a barrel roll?”
Tammi glanced at her partner and noted that she had her seat belt on. “If you insist!” she replied cheerfully. “Hold on to your stomach!” She performed some magic with the controls, and suddenly the car spun around its long axis in a perfect barrel roll, and settled down into straight flight again. “Say, thanks, Alex! That was fun and it didn’t even slow us down. How about another…”
Alex interrupted quickly before Tammi could actually start the next maneuver. “No, no, no, let’s concentrate on our mission!” She actually laughed at herself – she’d asked for it, and Tammi was just getting a little playful payback.
“What if there never really was a treasure and Fan Lee made it all up?” Tammi asked worriedly. “What if English gets there before we do? What if the roof of the small cave has collapsed, or the fissure slammed shut in one of the big earthquakes since then, or it opened wider and the small cave is now underwater or…”
“We’ll know in ten minutes, Tuneful Titan,” Alex interrupted with a sigh. “Don’t get all worked up about it!”
Ten minutes later they were hovering over the ocean on the north side of the island, while Alex used her zoom-in vision to inspect the shoreline. Much of it was a sheer cliff. It would be impossible to safely land a boat, no matter how small or large, anywhere along that coast. She could see jagged peaks and giant boulders and piles of rubble from rock slides sticking out of the water, tearing the incoming waves into a frothing tumult of decimation.
“I can see why she couldn’t swim out.” Alex was astounded watching the majesty of powerful waves disintegrate into spume as they crashed into the rubble and the violence of the resulting white water. She’d gone through the Tunnel of Winds under Niagara Falls on a vacation trip with her parents years ago, and she still remembered the thunder which vibrated deep in her chest. In a way this felt similar, as she was once again reminded of the sheer power of moving water. She was becoming distracted, almost hypnotized, watching this ever changing, never changing spectacle of nature when Tammi called her back to reality.
“Hey! Stretch! It’s not there, is it?” Tammi demanded. “I knew it! I knew the whole thing was…”
“That has to be it!” Alex almost yelled with glee. “Tams, start moving the way I’m pointing but go real slow – and no stunts!”
They drifted slowly toward the maelstrom of waves and rocks and the powerful roar of millions of violent impacts became audible – to Alex, as Tammi had easily heard it from miles away. Pretty soon it would become so loud as to make spoken communication impossible, but they had long ago worked out methods of private communication utilizing their powers.
“I’m glad we’re up here!” Tammi’s voice spoke directly into Alex’s ear. “Can you imagine being tossed into THAT? Of course her shipmates died! I don’t believe she actually lived through it?!” The playfulness of voice and too-often obnoxious wisecracks and antics of her normal behavior were noticeably absent. But it WAS Tammi… “Boy, when I add these sounds to my arsenal, are the bad guys ever gonna be sorry!”
Alex spoke in her normal tone, confident that Tammi’s hearing powers would allow her to distinguish Alex’s words, even through the still-increasing roar of the surf. “Maybe a one in a million chance of survival, do you think? She was incredibly lucky!”
“That luck helped her live long enough to spend the rest of her life in prison,” Tammi retorted. “I guess that’s better than dead,” but her voice sounded dubious.
“Let’s go in about 20 feet up,” Alex suggested. Tammi had been planning ten feet, but there were a lot of breakers that would have at least rocked the car violently, and she didn't even argue. Following Alex’s directions, she carefully edged the air car into a crack in the face of the cliff that resembled the one in the story – shaped sort of like a funnel, perhaps 30’ wide at the cliff face and narrowing as it thrust inward through the rocks. As they floated past a slight bend, a small beach at the end of the crevice became visible. And there were birds everywhere!
“This has to be it!” Tammi exulted. “You know, an hour ago, I wouldn’t have believed there were this many birds in the entire world!”
As they approached a particularly narrow stretch, she brought the car to a halt and then lifted until they were above the cliff, drifted forward until they were past the bottleneck, and then slowly dropped back down, almost to water level. The bottleneck acted as a breakwater, and this cove was much less violent than the maelstrom outside.
“Just outside that narrow place is where she said the fumarole was, down about 8 feet.” Tammi recalled. “It’s deadly out there. No wonder she never found it until her ‘crescent moon tide’,” She shuddered at the mere thought of trying to brave that thundering white water.
By now, both heroines could see a small crack in the rock at the very end of the fissure, deep enough at least to be called a cave. Tammi hurried until they were floating above the beach.
“I was hoping we might see footprints in the sand if English got here before us, but all those birds would trample over and wipe out any prints almost faster than he made them. In fact, he could be in there already. Although I can’t see him in the cave.”
“Nope – no human heartbeats around,” Tammi was starting to sound cheerful again. “If he’s been here, he’s gone, but I don’t see how he could be. No way he could come in on the water, and this crack’s too narrow for a helicopter. We beat him to the treasure!”
Alex was going to point out that he could have come in through the fumarole, but she recalled the aquatic violence at the presumed cave mouth, another glance at the still frothing waters and decided otherwise. There hadn’t been any exceptionally low tides recently. “Go ahead and land, Tammeroo, but give the birds time to get out of the way.”
“I’m just gonna keep it floating, boss,” Tammi disagreed. “There are probably a lot of nests right underneath us, and the baby birds won’t be able to get away. Be careful where you put your feet!”
The two women cautiously climbed from the hovering air car and moved into the cave. Alex already knew what they would find but it took Tammi a few seconds for her vision to adjust to the lower light level.
“Well, that pretty much proves that English hasn’t been here,” the younger woman said brightly, trying to conceal her disappointment. There WAS a chest here, but it was open, empty, and partially filled with sand. There were several undisturbed nests with eggs or hatchlings, proving that the chest had been undisturbed by humans for many years. “But there’s no treasure here either. Oh, Pooters! I wanted to find a treasure!” She turned to her partner. “Partly so we could say we’d done it, and partly because I hoped it would help us catch English, but mostly I wanted to help out Woody and his mother. I’m sure glad we didn’t tell them anything about some stupid old treasure!”
“Little one, I understand your feelings,” Alex agreed sadly. “After all, we did get into this business to help people.”
Even when she was sad, Tammi was always Tammi. “Well, you did, anyway. I joined up because I can wear skin tight outfits and flaunt my body and show off and be famous!” She paused for a second, and then added, “And of course, I like helping people too.”
She turned back to her piloting, and didn’t notice the thoughtful expression that flitted across Alex’s face.
Tammi flew back to the city relatively slowly, and they discussed what English would probably do next, and how to catch him when he tried to reach South Farallon Island.
“He's either got to use a boat or a helicopter,” Tammi pointed out. “Unless he can swim like Lorelei, that mermaid friend of Stormbird's that we met at one of the AMH meetings. But the pictures of him didn't show a tail.”
“He couldn't sneak in with a helicopter,” she continued confidently. “You'd spot him 20 miles away, and I'd hear him not too long after that.”
“He might sneak in on one of the fishing boats or even the skin diving boats, and we might not spot him,” Alex mused. “So, how do we make sure we catch him when he shows up?”
“Let's park the air car on the top of the cliff, somewhere that we can hide the car, and then camp out until he shows up. Even if he finds a way in to the beach without us spotting him, once he's there, both of us will know it. We can sleep in the car, and if we need anything, I can get to town and back in only a few minutes. It will be a LOT of fun to open this thing up to top speed! GANGWAY! Comin' THROUGH!”
It was dark by the time they finally reached home, and they hit the hay, exhausted more from the disappointment than their efforts of the day.
As usual, Tammi was up early the next morning. It wasn’t usual when Alex got up at the same time, and they watched the early news together. The leading story was the capture of the murderer Max English, who had killed the presumed double murderer Gilbert Wilington.
“Well, I guess that almost wraps up the Murder in the Afternoon case,” Alex sighed. “Mark up another for Hunter and the SFPD! Those guys are very good.”
“Hey, what’s that make us?!” Tammi almost shouted. She held up her fingers and began ticking off points. “One, two people were murdered because of us, and we didn’t stop the murders. Two, we searched all night, twice, and didn’t find that murderer. Three, another murder, and we didn’t stop that one, either. Four, we didn’t find the treasure. Five, we didn’t even catch the second murderer. Six, without the treasure or a reward, there’s not even some way for us to help Woody and his mother. Seven… I don’t know what seven is, but there has to be a seven.” She tilted her head as if she were thinking, and then her face brightened as if a flashbulb had exploded in her head. “I know! That makes us… LOSERS!”
“Don’t be so sure that the Murder in the Afternoon case is closed,” Alex smiled mysteriously. “I’ve got an errand to run. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” She staunchly refused to let her partner accompany her.
Tammi was too depressed to argue. “And I’ll still be here, and still a loser,” Tammi barked back. “I don’t see what you have to smile about?!”
Who knows what Tammi did in those hours? Whatever, she survived, and managed a wan smile at her housemate when Alex returned. The taller partner was trying hard not to show her emotions, but Tammi sensed something almost right away. “Hey! You look like the canary that ate the cat. What’s up?”
“Patience, Tammi, patience,” Alex soothed her friend. “AVant Guard is needed urgently downtown. Get your costume on! We've got yet another chance to run around in skin tight outfits and flaunt our bodies!”
Nothing that Tammi said was able to dislodge Alex’s secret. They stopped in the downtown Diamond District, in front of a small store. “Better brace yourself, Tuneful Titan. This might not be easy.” Tammi screwed up her face in determination. Whatever it was, if Alex could take it, she would face it bravely, although she didn’t feel very brave right now.
“What the heck does “Philatelist” mean?” She stopped when she saw the sign over the door. “Is this another one of those kinky new age beatnik coffee and bookstores?” She hung back a little, then surged forward. “Actually, that was a fun place, wasn’t it?”
The interior of the store was dim, and even more cluttered than Far Eastern Treasures. And everywhere she looked, all Tammi could see were stamps! Stamps on the wall, mounted behind glass. Locked glass counters housing lots of colorful stamp albums, all complete. Boxes marked “seconds”. And just coming into the store behind them were her new acquaintance Woody Jurgins and a woman who must be his mother. They looked as baffled as she felt.
A small man, not much taller than Tammi, bustled out from behind a counter. “Ah, Miss Palette, right on time, very punctual. You know I abhor people who are consistently tardy, absolutely abhor them!”
Tammi could believe it. The man was neatly dressed and looked like an English businessman, with sharp creases in his dark, striped trousers, white shirt and bow tie, with a silver chain and fob hanging from the small watch pocket on his vest. ‘He’s a man who values neatness and punctuality,’ she thought to herself with a little amusement. ‘He wouldn’t last 5 minutes in a carny.’
The neat little man was still talking effusively, now to the Jurgins. “You must be Mrs. Jurgins and this your son, young Mr. Jurgins. I’m Pooley. I’m prepared to make you a substantial offer, yes, most substantial, if I must say so myself.”
“An offer?” Mrs. Jurgins had no idea what he was talking about. But before she could say more, he continued…
“I’ll give you eighty thousand dollars for the lot, yes, eighty thousand.”
“Eighty thousand dollars?!” Woody shot back in disbelief. He didn’t get to ask his next question, as the proprietor continued talking, totally misunderstanding Woody’s exclamation.
“Well, yes, I can see that you’re a very discerning young man, very discerning, yes. I can go to 95, but no higher, no, no higher.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Mrs Jurgins practically shouted. She turned to Palette. “This isn’t funny, Miss Mystery Heroine. To bring us here, knowing about our money problems, and then have someone offer us lots of money for what? We've got nothing worth 80 grand. Not funny at all.”
“Oh dear me!” Pooley was wringing his hands. He turned to Palette. “You didn’t tell them? I say, I must agree, Miss Palette, that this doesn’t seem to be a very funny joke, no, not funny at all.”
Alex was pretending to be contrite. “I guess you’re right. Not funny anymore.” Tammi could see that Alex was barely holding back a peal of laughter. “OK, I’ll tell.”
She turned to Woody. “You probably didn’t know that there was a real, honest-to-goodness pirate treasure map in all those old letters you sold Tammi at the flea market. We went on a treasure hunt, intending to give it to you, and we found the treasure chest, and the treasure was long gone. But you sold Tammi the real treasure. And she gave it to me, and now I’m giving it back to you.” She handed Woody a large envelope. “It has all of your envelopes in it - but the real treasure is the stamps.”
“Indeed, they are a treasure indeed,” Pooley spoke up eagerly. “The stamps on the envelopes are in practically perfect condition, practically perfect, and there is almost a whole set of the 1893 Columbian issue, published to commemorate the Chicago World’s Fair in that year. Almost a whole set. I have collectors who will absolutely fight over them, yes indeed!”
Tammi was finally recovering from the shocks Alex had arranged for her, and she couldn’t keep out of the conversation. “So, Pooley, why shouldn’t we go straight to the collectors? I’ll bet we could have an auction and get a lot more than you’re offering.” Tammi was an excellent negotiator, never intimidated and always with a keen eye on her profit. “I'm going to make sure they get a better deal!” her voice whispered in her partner's ear, and Alex nodded.
Pooley was distressed. “Let’s discuss this together, all of us. I’m sure we can come to a reasonable price that will satisfy everyone, yes, satisfy us all. I will save you the time and effort required to locate just the right collector. Please join me for tea and we can continue our discussion, yes, over tea.” He led the Jurgins toward the back of the shop.
“Thank you, partner!” Tammi jumped and wrapped her arms around Alex’s neck for a hug. “I can hear them haggling already. I'll check on them in a little while, but Mrs. Jurgins sounds like she'll do fine by herself. I guess our work here is done.” She dropped back to the floor. “It sure feels nice to help somebody.”
“And get to wear skin-tight costumes and flaunt,“ Alex agreed, “And now I think we can close the book on the Murder in the Afternoon case.”