The Sword of the Barbarian by Ron Goulart

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* * * *

He was alone in their beach cottage when the forger knocked on the front door. It was midday on a rainy Saturday in May.

Saturdays his wife drove over to Girlz Fitness in Santa Monica for her weekly tai chi class. Feeling a bit restless but not up to going out in the downpour, Wes Goodhill had decided to vacuum the house. The machine had just sucked up some gritty sand that had been tracked in from the beach just outside and was producing a protesting rattle, when someone tapped on the door.

Clicking off the vacuum cleaner, Wes crossed the living room and put one eye to the peephole.

A complete and total stranger was standing out there. Thin, pale, and in his early thirties, wearing a soggy, unzipped windbreaker.

Wes unfastened the chain and opened the door a few inches. “Yeah?”

“Is ... Casey McLeod in?” inquired the pale man, wheezing as he spoke.

Out on the curb Wes noticed a parked Saab, old and dented. “Casey’s my wife,” said Wes. “Her name is Casey Goodhill now.”

“Oh, that’s ... right. She ... she told me.”

“And who, exactly, are you?”

The visitor was swaying, shifting from foot to foot, looking like a man trying to master a new dance step. “Sorry ... I’m ... I’m her Cousin Andy...” He shuddered now, swayed more violently. “I came here ... to ... I have to pick up ... pick...”

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Then the front of his jacket swung open and Wes saw the wound in the man’s left side just below the shoulder. His wrinkled white shirt was bloody all around a black-rimmed hole.

“Shot ... nothing serious ... just want Casey to...” Making a sad, sighing sound, the visitor slumped to his knees on the welcome mat.

“Jesus.” Wes, bending, took hold of the kneeling man’s right arm. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I’ll go call 911.”

The wounded man reached up, taking hold of Wes’s shirt sleeve. “Listen ... tell Casey ... she’s got to hide ... the sword of ... the barbarian,” he said, gasping in air between sentence fragments. “Be ... careful of...”

“I’ll leave you here while I phone the—”

“Much ... too late.” The man died all at once. He left life behind, fell forward across the cottage threshold. The body quivered, jerked a few times, produced some unsettling internal noises, and then became still and silent.

For some reason, as he dragged the dead man into the house, Wes said, “Casey never told me she had a Cousin Andy.”

Getting the body all the way inside, ignoring the still open front door, Wes hurried over to the coffee table where the cell phone usually sat.

“Where the hell did Casey put it? She’s always straightening up things by hiding ... there it is.”

He spotted the instrument lying face up on a small, multicolored throw rug in front of the high, wide window that afforded a view of the gray, choppy afternoon Pacific.

His thumb was poised over the 9 key when he was distracted.

What distracted Wes was someone hitting him, hard, against the temple from behind.

Losing all interest in the phone, he dropped it to the floor, and then joined it.

* * * *

“Are you really sure you’re okay, darling?” Casey asked, as she helped her shaky husband toward the living room sofa. “You’re awfully wobbly.”

“I’m all right,” he assured her, settling onto the cushions. “Being wobbly is a common side effect of getting conked on the noggin.”

Sitting beside him, she took his hand. “I was really scared when I got home,” said the slim blonde. “The house ransacked and you sprawled on the floor.”

“And a corpse in the hallway,” he added, touching the bump above his ear and wincing.

Casey straightened up. “What corpse is that?”

Wes attempted to stand, then thought better of it. He gestured in the direction of the unseen hall. “Your Cousin Andy with a bullet hole in his chest.”

After a perplexed sigh, Casey said, “I don’t have a Cousin Andy, Wes, and even if I did, there’s nobody lying dead in our house at the moment.”

“Whoever slugged me,” he said, “must’ve taken the body away.”

He made another, and more successful effort to stand up. With Casey at his side and her arm around him, he made his tottering way to the hall.

“See,” she pointed out, “no corpse of any kind.”

Wes noticed that the hall closet had been opened and that two cardboard boxes, an old portfolio of his, and three badminton rackets lay on the floor near the mail table. “So somebody follows your alleged cousin here, decks me, searches our damn house, and carts the body away.”

“Seems like.”

He moved clear of her, his head producing internal bonging noises, and listened for a moment to the heavy rain pounding on the roof. “His car,” he remembered, and opened the door.

The venerable Saab was gone.

“Then a couple of goons must’ve been involved,” he concluded. “Because somebody had to make off with your Cousin Andy’s car.”

“I don’t have a Cousin Andy, remember?”

Closing the door, shivering, Wes made his way back into the living room.

The bookcase had been pulled away from the wall and a stack of animation magazines had spilled across one of the bright throw rugs.

He grimaced, sat down in an arm chair. “This guy also had a message for you, Case.”

“You mean like in a mystery novel? A dying message?” Settling onto the sofa, she crossed her long legs.

“It sounded more like a warning, sort of,” Wes told her. “Or maybe just a bit of helpful advice. Anyway, he told me to tell you to hide a weapon of some sort. A sword.”

Casey inhaled sharply. “Would that have been The Sword of the Barbarian?”

Nodding, he answered, “That’s it, yeah.”

The young woman leaned back, shaking her head and sighing. “Darn,” she said. “Then a lot of this is my fault.”

* * * *

Casey, elbows resting on the kitchen table, cautioned, “Now don’t blow a casket. After all—”

“Gasket,” he corrected. “You’re telling me I’m a cuckold, and I’m supposed to remain calm?”

“You may well be a cuckold, since I have no idea what one is,” said his wife. “But if you keep yelling like a bandit, I’m never going to get around to explaining what—”

“Banshee. It’s banshees that are noted for their wailing.” He was scowling across the table at her, ignoring the cup of hot cocoa sitting at his place. “The point is, the cause of my unease is the fact that you admit to having had an affair with this spurious, and now deceased, cousin of yours.”

She sighed. “I don’t think, Wes, that sharing a ratty apartment in North Hollywood with a fellow for about three weeks constitutes an affair,” she told him. “Not in the classical sense.”

“Right, not in the Madame Bovary sense, not in the Lady Chatterley—”

“Anyway, you and I have only been married six months, and I was briefly associated with Andrew Stebbins ... it was, oh, five years ago.”

“As I recall, and I’ll have to check my memoirs to confirm it, we lived together for several years before we officially wed.”

She sighed once more. “This occurred, dear, during one of those periods when you tossed me out in the snow, figuratively speaking, and finding myself alone in the world, I clutched at whatever straw presented—”

“You moved out. No tossing by me ever occurred.”

“I guess I was a little more temperamental in those days,” she admitted. “What I did was move in with an old friend until I came to my senses.”

“And what was this Andrew guy in real life? A garage mechanic? A biker, a pest exterminator?”

“Actually, he was in the same field as you, Wes. Andy was an animator.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was a very good background artist and worked for a couple of the big outfits. Bluth, for one,” Casey explained. “You know, when an animated character strolls through the woods, it would be woods that Andy had—”

“Let’s get to the part that explains why he died on our front stoop and why I got bopped on the sconce.”

“Well, for the past two or three years Andy’s had a sort of new profession.”

“You’ve kept in touch with the guy?”

She shook her head. “No, not at all. Far as I was concerned, Andrew Stebbins was so much water under the dam.”

“Over,” he corrected. “So how come he was posing as your cousin and, I assume, storing a sword with us?”

“I ran into him, just by chance, at an art supply house in Santa Monica,” she replied. “About three months back.”

“But you never told me.”

“Hey, do you inform me every time you bump into some old girlfriend of yours?”

“All of my old girlfriends are probably incarcerated in various public institutions. I never run into any of them. If, however, I did, I would most certainly let you—”

“I’m truly sorry that you’re overly sensitive about men I knew in bygone days,” she said. “Now let me explain this mess I think we’re now in because of Andy.”

“Okay, that would be helpful, Casey.” He hooked a forefinger in the handle of the cocoa mug.

“For quite a while Andy earned his living as a copyist.”

“Copying what?”

“He specializes in making very accurate and believable copies of popular paperback covers—artists like Frank Frazetta and Leo Hammond,” she told him. “You know, artists who specialized in covers for swords and sorcery novels years ago. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the original paintings sell for tidy sums nowadays.”

“I know, yeah. A Hammond went for three hundred thou’ at a Christie’s auction in Manhattan back in January.”

“Exactly, Wes. After Hammond died in 2002, the prices for his original cover paintings shot up even higher.”

“So what did your friend do? Forge swords and sorcery cover paintings and try to pass them off as authentic?”

She frowned. “Well, no,” she answered. “At least, I don’t think so. What he did was turn out handsome copies and sell them at sci-fi and comics conventions for a thousand bucks or so. Andy always signed his name to the copies. Fans who couldn’t afford a real Frazetta or a real Hammond were happy, and he made a living at it.”

Wes decided to take a sip of his cocoa, which was barely warm now. Then he asked, “So what’s The Sword of the Barbarian?A cover painting?”

“Right, it was the one Hammond did back in the early 1960s for the first Botok the Barbarian paperback reprint. You know, the old pulp character by Rodlow E. Hammersmith,” she said. “It was lost for decades, but turned up late last year.”

“Wait now,” said her husband. “How do you come into this?”

“He had me store a painting,” she said quietly.

He frowned across at her. “A copy he made, huh?”

Casey shook her head. “I’m starting to think it was the original.”

“How the hell did he get hold of that?”

“From the few conversations I had with him, I got the idea that some unscrupulous dealer who had the original asked him to make a couple of copies. Working from the original instead of the paperback cover, Andy could turn out a nearly undetectable forgery,” she said. “The dealer could sell one of the copies and pretend it was the original. If he was clever enough he might be able to sell two or three copies as the original and still keep it.”

“You had the original painting stored here for a while?”

Casey said, “Andy told me it was an extra copy he’d made for himself. But, considering what’s happened, it must’ve been the real Hammond.”

“Exactly why did you agree to keep anything in our house for this guy, Casey?”

“He told me that the girl he was living with was given to tantrums and had threatened a few times to slash his paintings.”

“Why you? He could’ve put the damn thing in a storage warehouse.”

“He told me he didn’t want too many people to know about it. I was an old friend, somebody he figured he could trust,” she said. “And keep in mind, Wes, that if it was actually the original and he was stealing it from the dealer, he had to stick it someplace safe.”

“You should’ve told me we had a painting hidden here.”

“I know, sure,” she acknowledged. “But since you have a tendency to doubt my word, I didn’t think you’d believe I was merely doing a favor for a friend, and suspect that—”

“The reason I sometimes tend to doubt your word, Casey, is because in the past you have concocted colossal untruths and tried to pass them off as—”

“That’s all over and I’ve reformed,” she reminded him. “More or less.”

“Okay,” he said. “Where did you stash the painting?”

“It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Andy dropped it off last week while you were at work at the animation studio,” she answered. “I hid it under the bed.”

“Our bed? The one we share each and every night?”

“The bed in our bedroom, yes.”

“That’s no doubt what the chap who coldcocked me was searching for,” he said. “I assume the package is no longer there.”

“No, I looked while you were coming out of your stupor,” she said, and then smiled. “But he didn’t actually get the painting.”

“Oh, no?”

“What he got was a decoy package,” she told her husband. “I had this hunch that what Andy had left was more valuable than he pretended. So I made up a mock package in case anybody tried to swipe it. And moved the real painting to another location.”

“This is all conjecture, Case. You really don’t know if this thing was a fake or—”

“Nobody’d kill poor Andy over a phony cover painting,” she said, ticking off items on her fingers. “Nobody’d smack you on the skull over a phony cover painting. Nobody’d ransack our cozy beachside home over a phony cover painting. Nobody’d steal a phony cover painting from under our bed.”

“Possibly,” he conceded, pausing to drink the rest of the now cold cocoa. “Oh, by the way, why did he claim he was your cousin.”

“He no doubt suspected your overly protective attitude toward me,” she suggested. “Had poor Andy come to the door and said something like, ‘Hi there, I’m Andrew Stebbins, and I shacked up with your wife in days gone by, and now I’d like to retrieve a painting that she’s got secreted under your nuptial bed and probably hasn’t told you a darn thing about. Okay?’ you’d no doubt have tossed him out on his fanny.”

“Probably so. I am easily upset.”

Casey reached across the table and took hold of her husband’s hand. “All right, okay. I should’ve maybe confided in you about what was going on. I’m sorry, Wes.”

“When the folks who made off with your dummy package open it, they are going to come back,” he said. “What we have to do is retrieve The Sword of the Barbariancover painting, turn it over to the police, and tell them what’s been happening. Otherwise, we may end up in a condition similar to that of Cousin Andy.”

“Um,” said Casey quietly, taking back her hand and looking away from him.

“What now?”

“Well,” she said, stretching out the word. “You’re going to be angry when I tell you where I moved the painting to.”

* * * *

“But your father,” Wes was saying from the passenger seat as Casey guided their red Toyota up into the rainswept hills above Hollywood. “Your father is known far and wide as the prince of thieves, the king of con men, the grifter’s grifter, the—”

“He is, trust me, on a sabbatical,” said Casey, who was hunched slightly in the driver’s seat. “Admittedly, my dad has entangled us in some enterprises that were a trifle shady, but this time he’s promised me to be on his best behavior.”

“A trifle shady? Erle Stanley McLeod, from whom I suspect you inherited your skill for bending the truth, has involved us in capers that got you kidnapped, put both our lives in jeopardy, caused—”

“We’ll just drop by this place where he’s housesitting,” cut in Casey, “collect the painting, and—”

“Why is he even in the country? I thought he was still hiding out in Lima or Rio or some other such garden spot where the minions of the law couldn’t find him.”

Casey sighed. “Apparently, things grew a bit too risky for him in South America,” she explained, as the car went splashing uphill. “So he slipped back into California. An old friend asked him to look after her mansion up here in Beverly Hills while she’s in Europe.”

“That’s another of your dear old dad’s specialties,” said Wes, watching the wipers fight against the heavy rain that was slamming at the windshield, “romancing wealthy women. Honestly, Casey, I don’t understand why you keep allowing him back into your life when—”

“It must be my sentimental side.”

“You failed to warn me he was lurking in Southern California. I could’ve sprinkled holy water on the doorstep, fashioned a necklace of garlic to wear at night, stocked up on silver bullets, and—”

“Okay, enough. I get the point, dear,” said Casey. “I didn’t mention that Dad arrived in town last month because I knew it would upset you.”

He nodded. “It would’ve, yeah,” he said. “And now it has.”

“Well, he’ll be leaving for Canada in a week or so.”

“But in the meantime, he’s sitting on a painting that may be worth three or four hundred thousand bucks.”

“Here’s how I figured it, Wes. He’s staying all by himself in this enormous house—twenty-six rooms, not counting the six bathrooms. There’s plenty of places in the mansion to hide a painting and nobody knows he’s in town. So they can’t connect him with me in any way. It seemed like a safe place to keep a—”

“To keep a stolen picture.”

“Stolen or not, it’s safer up here than it was down at our place, Wes.”

“I’m trying to pick the right folk saying to apply here,” he said, as the car climbed higher into the hills. “Right now I favor, ‘This is like hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.’ Putting your larcenous father in charge of a valuable painting is—”

“Dad would never steal from me,” she assured him.

“Maybe,” he said, after a moment.

* * * *

The hillside mansion looked like a not-quite successful merger between an old California mission and a Moorish fortress. Hurrying up the rain-spattered flagstone path, they heard exuberant jazz piano music drifting out of the big sprawling house.

“Dad’s playing his Thelonious Monk medley.” Casey smiled.

“I noticed.”

A few seconds after Casey poked the doorbell beside the redwood door, the music inside halted.

Casey’s tall, lean father opened the door wide. “Honey, what a pleasant surprise.” Just now he had a deep suntan and his gray hair was short-cropped. “Accompanied by my favorite son-in-law.”

“I’m your onlyson-in-law,” Wes pointed out as he followed his blond wife across the threshold and into the mosaic-tiled hall.

“That may account for it.” Erle Stanley McLeod led them into a vast, beam-ceilinged living room that was dominated by a white grand piano.

“From the sound of it, you haven’t had time to have that thing tuned,” observed Wes.

“Boys,” Casey suggested, sitting in a black leather chair, “we really don’t have time for you two to squabble.”

“Is there some trouble, pet?” asked her father from the piano bench.

“Afraid so, Dad.”

“I imagine it must have something to do with that trashy painting you entrusted to me.”

“How do you know what’s in the package?” Wes was standing at a leaded window. Directly uphill, on the other side of a small stand of walnut trees, rose a modern gray house perched on stilts.

“My natural paternal curiosity prompted me to take a peek, son.”

“Well, yes, Dad, it is about The Sword of the Barbarian cover painting,” confirmed Casey. She then explained to her father what had been happening.

McLeod leaned back, resting his strong chin on his clasped hands. “Sounds to me as if there might be some disagreement about the provenance of this particular masterpiece.”

Wes, turning his back on the storm, asked his wife, “Did Andy mention who the dealer who entrusted the painting to him was?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

Her father said, “The art dealer who owns this particular Leo Hammond cover painting is Moss Lengle. A quick search of the Internet gave me the name.”

“Then he’s probably the one who hired poor Andy to make a copy,” said Casey. “And the one who came looking for the original when Andy didn’t get around to returning it.”

“Your late chum stole the true Hammond work sure enough, hon,” said her father. “But, by asking a few questions of some of my former associates in and around Greater Los Angeles, I learned that the thing had been swiped from Lengle a good month ago.”

“So who’d Andy steal it from?” asked Wes.

“That I haven’t yet been able to determine,” admitted McLeod, running the fingers of his right hand along the piano keys.

“Why,” inquired Casey, “do you think they killed poor Andy? I mean, art theft isn’t a capital crime.”

Her tanned father suggested, “Your boyfriend’s demise, pet, probably wasn’t intended initially, but—”

“Formerboyfriend,” corrected Wes. “Stebbins, according to Casey, was completely erstwhile.”

“As I was saying,” continued McLeod, “the present owners of this pulpish daub no doubt tracked Stebbins down after he’d absconded, and in the subsequent confrontation, the lad managed to get shot. He was, however, able to get away and make his way to Casey’s beach house to warn—”

“Ourbeach house,” corrected Wes.

“And then expire,” Casey’s father concluded.

“But somebody was able to follow Andy,” she reminded. “And when they discover that they made off with a couple of flattened out cardboard cartons, they’re going to be pretty ticked off.”

“What we’ve got to do,” said Wes. “is collect the painting right now. Then, as I keep saying, turn it over to the police and make damn sure that the media spreads the news.”

“But if we return it to that dealer up in San Francisco,” said Casey, “he’ll pay us a handsome reward.”

“And while we’re doing that, a horde of unspecified goons may well descend on us.”

“They’d have to find us first,” Casey pointed out. “If we stay clear of our house, then—”

“Too late, Mrs. McLeod.” Two large, thickset men had appeared in the doorway. Both wore flamboyant Hawaiian shirts and white jeans. Both held rather dainty .22 pistols.

A third man, smaller and carrying only a knobby cane, stepped between them and moved into the room. About forty, he was thin and possessed a considerable amount of tight-curling, dead-white hair. “Amateurs,” he said, smiling thinly. “A cinch following you from that tatty beach shack.”

“I didn’t notice anybody tailing us, did you?” Casey asked her husband.

“Nope,” answered Wes.

“That’s because you’re amateurs,” said the man with the colorless hair. “Now tell me where my painting is.”

Casey swallowed. “Well, it’s here someplace.”

He eased nearer to her. “Where, my dear?”

McLeod hit a few keys on the white piano. “I didn’t get around to mentioning this earlier, pet,” he said, when he had everyone’s attention, “but, alas, my larcenous side got the better of me two days ago, and I sold the painting for a tidy sum.”

Casey assumed a forlorn expression. “Honestly, Dad, I’m really disappointed in you,” she said. “Here I’ve just been telling Wes that I trusted you implicitly to look after the cover painting, and then you go and do something like this.”

“She didn’t actually convert me to her point of view,” mentioned Wes. Lightning crackled outside the window just behind him.

“Children, what can I say? There are simply times when needs must—”

“Enough of Family Feud,” suggested the small man, tapping the hardwood floor with the tip of his knobby cane. “I have to point out that—”

“Well, you probably don’t put as much emphasis on family as I do,” cut in Casey. “Granted that my father is a thoroughgoing scoundrel at times, still you expect a parent to be paternal to the extent of—”

“Cease prattling.” He moved closer to McLeod, studying him with narrowed eyes. “Somehow, sir, I find myself doubting your word. I believe it’s still here someplace.”

“I’m telling the truth,” asserted McLeod. “At this moment the stolen painting is safely elsewhere.”

“What we’ll do is search this place thoroughly, top to bottom,” the whitehaired man said. “Should we not locate it, though I’m certain we shall, I’ll return to question you all further.”

“The nature of my transaction being what it was,” said Casey’s father, “I have no idea where this dubious masterpiece has gotten to by now.”

Pointing at one of the gunmen, the small man said, “You and I will hunt. Phil, stay here and watch these amateurs. Shoot anybody who makes a fuss. But not fatally.”

“I’m sorry about Stebbins. I didn’t intend to—”

“Come along.” Cane swinging, the whitehaired man and the larger of his two associates left the big living room and were soon heard climbing upstairs.

* * * *

Thunder rumbled, sounding close. All the windows rattled.

McLeod rose up for a moment, rearranged a large flowered pillow on the piano bench, then sat again. “Their hunt will prove fruitless,” he assured the guard.

The husky man gestured with his .22. “We don’t need any more conversation,” he advised.

Again lightning flashed, turning the room a brief electric blue. Then came loud, booming thunder, and the entire mansion seemed to shudder violently.

Wes spun around, staring out the window. “My God, it’s a mudslide!” he said. “That house up the hill is off its stilts and heading right for us!”

That distracted the gunman, and lowering his gun, he came running into the room. McLeod then suddenly rose and tossed the heavy pillow at him.

That knocked the gun from the gunman’s hand, and immediately after that Casey tackled him.

“An admirable diversion, Wes,” said McLeod, kneeling on the sprawled guard’s wide back while bopping him on the skull with the handle of the pistol he’d grabbed up off the floor. “I take it we’re not actually about to be struck by a runaway house.”

“Nope.” Wes crossed to them. “I thought I’d avail myself of the McLeod family tradition of bullshit.”

“Casey, my dear,” said her father as he got to his feet, “truss up this lout before he awakens. Your spouse and I will sneak upstairs and incapacitate the other two.”

Casey bent, using the unconscious man’s belt to secure his hands behind his back. “That was a pretty good diversion you tried on them, Dad, even if it didn’t quite work” she said. “Pretending the painting wasn’t here because you’d sold it.”

Smiling and starting for the door, her father said, “That wasn’t a lie, pet,” he said. “I really did unload The Sword of the Barbariancover painting two days ago.”

* * * *

Copyright © 2006 Ron Goulart