Temperatures have hit a 100 degrees today. The only good thing is that they’re not likely to hit the predicted 105. We were on the tail end of that hundred mile stretch of violent thunderstorms that hit the East coast last night. We got very little rain, but a lot of heavy thunder and lightning and fifty-sixty mile an hour winds, as evidnce by my early morning journey from the house. Limbs were everywhere and the street was partially blocked by an exceptionally large one.
My sister got a text message from her oldest grandson who’s working as a councilor at the Church camp this summer before starting college in the fall. The camp, located above Roanoke was hit hard and it lost one of it’s oldest trees. Fortunately, there were no campers in attendance, check-in is on Sunday, check-out the following Friday. Most of this week’s campers were already home by the time it hit.
Back when I attended the camp, and we’re talking fifty years ago, there was a massive Oak tree we called the Big Oak. It took a half dozen teenagers holding hands to encircle the trunk. No telling how big it is now.
Since my days, the camp has grown. A farm that adjoined the camp was purchased, the owner in her will gave the camp first dips in buying it, and an Oak every bit as big as the Big Oak was found on the property. It became Granny Oak. That storm uprooted it last night.
As big as they were, I’m guessing they must be a couple of hundred years old. Now that one is down, I’m sure someone will figure out the age.
Hope things are better out there than here in North Carolina. Temperatures reached and 101 in my home town and we’re in one of the northern counties bordering the North Carolina-Virginia border. Some countuies just south of us got up to 106 today. And that’s temperature, not heat index. They’re calling for the same all weekend.
Fortunately ity’s started to back up, only 98 outside now(heh).
Ed Noon was amused at first when Lucille Prentice came up to him in Benny’s, his favorite drinking place and across the street from his office. You see, Lucille was a ten year old girl and she asked him, “Are you Mr. Noon?”
She wanted to hire him because she was afraid her daddy was going to hurt her mommy and she had money. One small hand held out $1.98 in change.
Noon liked the “little” people and decided to take her home and straighten things out.
The amusement went away when he found a woman in the apartment with her face blown away with a .45 lying beside the body. Paula Prentice had certainly been harmed by somebody.
Guy Prentice was the father and a famous actor and he had a successful play on Broadway. The cops came and Ed filled them in. Guy Prentice seemed almost unconcerned about his dead wife and said he had a show to do that night.
Noon wanted to see the show and wangled tickets to the sold-out with his usual BS. The next thing to happen is someone takes a shot at Prentice, hitting him in the leg and shutting down the show for the night.
A minor wound, Prentice seemed unconcerned about that as well. He did want to hire Noon to protect Lucille, amid protests by Wally Wilder, the play’s author and Helen Tucker, Prentice’s manager. She was one of those perfect women out of Noon’s league, exactly the kind he was attracted to. She made her dislike plain. And Wilder from comments and anger over Noon’s snappy patter was evidently in love with Tucker and he promised he would “discuss” it with the PI later.
The case went downhill fast after that.
Wilder showed up at Benny’s ready to have that “discussion” with Noon. He outweighed Noon by considerable, was younger, and probably in better shape. His problem was that he insisted on fighting fair. Noon had no such scruples.
The pair ended up drinking and talking after it was all over and Noon headed home across the street. On the third floor as he was fishing for his office door key, he was rushed in the dark, chloroformed, and thrown out the window.
Luck was with him as a clothesline strung in the alley broke his fall enough that his landing in the garbage left him with only a badly damaged knee and a headache from the chloroform.
Obviously connected, but how?
It’s soon learned that Paula Prentice was four months pregnant and Prentice admitted they hadn’t had relations in seven months. He was in love with Helen. The marriage had been a mistake to start with, a rebound after his first, to Lucille’s mother, and it was soon to be over.
Noon, bad knee and all, keeps lugging along. Another try by the two goons follows as Noon begins to figure some things out.
Glad to see the Noon series coming back as ebooks. VIOLENCE IN VELVET was the fourth(the first three I had in the original paperbacks). The family intends to bring them all back as well as three nver published Noon adventures.
Bring them on. The Michael Avallone home can be found at the MOUSE AUDITORIUM.
This was one at which I wish I could have been in attendance. I did manage to see Stevie Ray live once. Unfortunately he was opening for Huey Lewis & The News, pop favorites at the time. He only got to play for an hour.
There we were, two guys in their mid-thirties, stuck amid a bunch of teenagers who came to see Huey and were having none of Stevie. When they began booing him, my friend and I got vocal when he hit a particular song. Our yee-haw cut through the yowls of the infidels and let Stevie know there was someone who appreciated his music there. The next year when Huey came through again, He had Robert Cray as opening act. We almost went just to see the great bluesman, but finally didn’t.
This story first appeared in the anthology, HE IS LEGEND, honoring Richard Matheson. It was inspired by Matheson’s short story DUEL, which he turned into the script for a young Steven Spielberg’s first movie. You remember, the one that starred Dennis Weaver as a salesman fleeing a killer truck driver across the desert.
Here we have a bike club, The Tribe, led by Vince and Race, father and son, both vets, Vince Viet Nam, Race the Gulf. They’d just left a slaughter, a partner in a deal for a meth lab that the pair had invested in gone bad, the trailer exploding and burning the first day, their fifty thousand investment gone. Clarke hadn’t bothered to inform them, they’d had to hear it from someone else.
Oh Clarke was all apologetic, claiming he was about to hunt them up and explain. Except he’d been packing. His seventeen year old girl friend, high on meth, had pulled a pistol and started shooting. All it got her was chopped to bits by a machete and Clarke’s head caved in by a shovel.
They’d pulled into a truck stop to get something to eat and were talking about it among the big rigs parked where they’d slid in behind. One suddenly cranked and pulled out. All Vince saw of the driver was a tanned arm with a marine tattoo, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR, on the bicep.
After eating, Race wanted to visit Clarke’s sister. The man couldn’t have put all their fifty thousand into that crappy trailer. And he had been frantically talking to someone on his cell when they’d pulled up.
It was down the road a bit when they caught up with the rig, LAUGHLIN on the cab door, pulling a oil tanker. Unusual because they were only twenty miles from the truck stop and they’d been inside an hour. Had the man pulled over? Why?
They found out soon, passing him and heading on up the road, only to find him barreling at them about sixty miles an hour, they only doing forty-five, plowing through them, eating up bikes and riders.
And they didn’t even know why.
Thus begins a tense battle across the valley, the action unrelenting, the violence out there.
Loved this homage to Duel, the movie version one of my favorite TV movies of all time. Each chapter of this novella has a wonderful piece of art by Nelson Daniel heading it. Here’s an example. Cllick on the image to enlarge.
Available at a modest price on Amazon. I could not get a working link for THROTTLE for some reason and gave up after ten, fifteen times. I lost count. OK, I’n probably a moron. It’s a great story worth the price.
Bert I. Gordon was a science fiction and horror B-movie producer of the fifties and sixties. Some of his work included THE CYCLOPS, THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, EARTH VS THE SPIDER, and ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, all favorites, among so many others. PICTURE MOMMY DEAD from 1966 was a television movie and I remember seeing it once long ago. This viewing was from a recording on Turner Classics from April.
The film opens on a three year old incident, a mansion with smoke pouring from a window, the master bedroom on fire. We see a woman lying on the floor in a white gown, Jessica Flagmore Shelley(Zsa Zsa Gabor). We hear a girl’s voice singing a song and small hands coming into the picture and taking a necklace from around the neck. The song went:
“The worms go in, the worms go out, in your stomach and out your mouth.”
Then it’s in the present and Edward Shelley(Don Ameche) arrives at what is euphemistically called a convent hospital to take his daughter out. He’s with his wife, Francine(Martha Hyer), former governess to Susan and now full time golddigger. Susan(Susan Gordon, Bert’s daughter) had been found wandering the ground that night in a daze, all memory of what happened gone. She has just turned eighteen and the nun doesn’t think it will be a good idea to take her back to the house. Edward say he has no choice.
They arrive at the mansion, all of them for the first time in three years, to be greeted by Anthony Flagmore, Jessica’s cousin, and are horrified to see the right side of his face scared badly, from when he’d tried to save Jessica in the midst of the fire. He announces to Susan that he’s recreated the master bedroom exactly as it was that night and seems to take great glee in telling it.
It’s obvious the girl is still not a stable person and when the lawyer comes for the reading of the will, finally, with Susan present, they get the particulars. The house was left to the government so the family wouldn’t be stuck with a huge tax bill, Edward got all the furnishings, antiques, and the paintings and a hundred thousand in cash. Susan has a trust fund of five hundred thousand to be held until she’s twenty-five. In the meantime, she can live off the interest. And the cousin, Anthony gets five hundred in cash.
As long as Susan wants to live in the house, the government won’t take possession. And dad is pushing for her to do so. He explains he’s selling off the furnishings, he’s made some bad investments, which draws a snort from the lawyer. ” Furs, fast cars, and high living! Some investments!” If Susan stays out of the asylum-er, convent hospital, the money will go to her at the appointed time. If she should go back or die in the interim, Edward will control it. And Anthony puts on a sly grin from his scarred face. “If he dies, I’m the only blood relative left.”
Susan begins to have hallucinations. Check the clip below. She sees her mother, blood running from a portrait she’d raked her fingers across, and more.
A nice little murder mystery/horror story with a lot of suspects. Was it an accident as authorities ruled? The theory was she’d knocked a burning candle over in her sleep. Was it the golddigger? The cousin? Susan as the opening suggests?
Not a bad little film, at least for me, being a Bert Gordon fan anyway.
Not The Baseball Pitcher 