Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 11, November 1982

“You boys are gonna get a meal you won’t be forgettin,” he said.

He was not exaggerating. We started off with Escargots de Bourgogne, proceeded to L’Oignon Gratinee, and were then served Veal Maison, with a bottle of Mouton-Routhschild to top if off. Whatever else he might have been, J.J. DuBose was not provincial in his tastes in food.

The dinner conversation was basically a monologue delivered by DuBose, broken up by occasional questions from Landry, who seemed intent on gleaning every possible bit of information from The Great Man himself. When we had at last consumed every bit of the food on our plates, and refused the Filipino’s offers of more, I excused myself and went in search of a restroom. It proved difficult to locate, and once I stumbled into a pantry and once into DuBose’s den, but when I found the correct room I stopped in my tracks and looked it over from one end to the other.

The spigots on the sink and in the sunken bathtub were fashioned from solid gold, as was the flush device on the toilet. All the rest was china, and the marbled floor and walls gleamed from having been recently scrubbed. I do not think there was a single speck of dirt anywhere in that room. The ancient cliche “the floor was clean enough to eat off of” found a curiously truthful approximation here.

By the time I returned to the dining hall our host had served brandy, and both he and Landry were drawing on two Partagas Visible Immensas fully nine inches in length. I declined his offer of one, but accepted a glass of brandy. The conversation had evolved once again while I had been out of the room, and the turn it had taken frightened me.

“So you claim no one would have the nerve to do it?” Landry was saying.

J.J. DuBose shook his head. “It’s not just a question of nerve, it’s a question of acceptin what would, from that day on, be an un-ac-cept-able handicap t’some folks, somethin a fella’d have t’live with the rest o’his days. This isn’t quite the same thing as that little test I give you back at Albert’s. Ah wouldn’t be fakin this time, cause there’s no way in hail ah could be. You’d know there wasn’t but one way the thing’d turn out. An, like a magician, ah nevah do the same trick twice.”

“And how much would you be willing to pay?” asked Landry.

DuBose drew on his cigar and considered the question a moment before answering.

“Why, a man’d be willin t’do that, why, that man’d be worth a half a million dollars, ah reckon.”

The gleam in Landry’s eyes turned my stomach. “You’d pay half a million dollars?”

The Texan nodded. “Ah would. The money means nothin t’me anymore — they’s no way ah’d ever get aroun t’spendin it. But ah’d be satisfied knowin it was bein spent by a man with the balls t’do somethin like that.”

“Like what?” I asked. I noticed my voice trembled.

Neither man took any notice of my question. Their eyes were locked, and remained that way even after J. J. DuBose rose to his feet.

“Doc Jenkins’ll be here in just a bit. You’ll be OK afterwards — he’ll see t’it.” He took a last puff off his cigar, then crushed it out in an ashtray. “We may as well git the show on the road,” he said, and turned and headed toward the door.

Landry was already out of his chair and following DuBose. I stopped him and said, “What the hell’s the idea?”

“Never mind,” Landry said. His eyes remained fixed on DuBose’s retreating figure. “Just c’mon along. I’ll need a witness.”

“A witness to what?”

He didn’t reply, but merely followed DuBose out the door that gave on a long corridor. I had no choice but to follow. We traversed the corridor. At its end was another door. DuBose opened it, and we followed him out.

We were in an enormous room I recognized at once as an airplane hangar. The air hung heavy with paint fumes and the smell of grease and machine parts, and there were paintcans and crude workbenches and shelves built into the walls on our end. In the center of the hangar, its wings spanning the width of the room itself, was an enormous biplane of vaguely pre-World War II design.

“This here’s a Martin T4M-1,” DuBose announced. His voice echoed across the walls as he strode off towards the plane. “It was built for the Navy in 19 and 27. It was a torpedo-bomber.”

When he reached the plane he pulled himself up and into the cockpit. Thus ensconsed, he called out to us, and his voice sounded more terrifying than ever, amplified as it was by the acoustics of the room.

“Here’s Doc Jenkins now.”

His announcement caused me to turn. Sure enough, a man dressed in sombre dark clothes, carrying a small medical bag, had entered the room through another door, and now stood awaiting DuBose’s orders.

“He’ll patch y’up when this is over,” the Texan said. “Wail, I guess that’s enough of the pre-liminaries. You know the arrangements as well as ah do, so what say we just go on ahaid?”

“Anytime you’re ready,” Landry called back.

J.J. DuBose smiled his crooked smile one final time, and then nodded.