The Sure Thing (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  He slid from the booth, went back to the phone again. When he joined me once more he merely looked at me, shaking his head.

  “There's another thing you skipped over kind of fast, Gippy. I understand you were convinced this well of yours was going to be a big one, some kind of huge gusher maybe, but you never explained why you were so certain. Or, in other words, why you're now so sure you've been screwed."

  “Well, you see, Mr. Scott,” he said seriously, “I conducted investigations of a abstruse scientific nature, which indicated to me clear as ever can be that this was a sure thing if there ever was one. Which is why, like A plus B equals C, it is obvious to anyone conversing with all the facts that there's now something fishy in Denmark. Or, ‘screwed’ is a good way to put it."

  “By scientific investigations, Gippy, do you refer to your friend Morraigne's doodlebug, and a half-baked astrologer's advice to invest your thirty thou?"

  He winced, as if a sudden pain had got him, down around the gallbladder, or in that general area. “Audie again, huh? She don't understand these things. Very few people do understand the intricaticies of these abstruse.... Audie again, huh? Did she maybe tell you I had hammerroids in the summer of sixty-seven? She wasn't aware of it herself till, like a dumb fool, I told her about it. Purple they was, purple piles. I took a mirror and looked—"

  “Gippy, if you've got to change the subject, do you have to change it so much?"

  He flapped a hand on the table top. “Mr. Scott,” he said wearily, “I don't expect you to understand. My friend you mention, Dev Morraigne, he has been laughed at more than Copernicus or Galilee, but he's the one should be laughing out both sides of his mouth. He's got a electronic instrument—I don't claim to understand how it does what it does—that indicates if there's oil, or gas, or even minerals like gold and silver and so on in the earth, and even where it's at, very close. Now, he checked out the location where our well was planned to be drilled, and I seldom saw him so excited. This was it, he told me, oil and gas both, and plenty of it, and so long as I had to drill me a well, this was the place for it."

  “Gippy, I'm not saying your friend doesn't believe his dingus works. A long time ago I stopped putting any limits on what people can warp themselves into believing, including absolute certainty that the earth is really flat as a pancake and we live in the maple syrup, but just because Morraigne believes it works—if he does—doesn't mean it works. I've seen a couple doodlebugs myself, and know there've been hundreds of others—"

  “Mr. Scott, will you for please hell quit calling it a doodlebug? Or even a dingus? It's a electronic instrument—Dev named it a Magnesonant Holaselector—that shows where there's oil and the other things I mentioned. Like—well, hell, he just got back from finding a ship that got sunk no telling when in the Persian Gulf, hundreds of years ago. He even lived in a palace over there. So if it can find a sunk ship, it can find oil and gas, and I mean it really does. It did it for me, didn't it?"

  “Not, exactly, the way I—"

  “And please don't never,” he went on somewhat heatedly, “call it a doodlebug in front of Dev Morraigne. He's a little sensitive, more than a little, about it. Man, he'd get purple piles right in front of you—"

  “Gippy—"

  “Because he knows, like I know, a doodlebug is a electronic instrument that don't work."

  I decided to drop the subject. There were other items to cover. Besides, I once spent half an hour talking to a bearded man with bloodshot eyes, trying to convince him that he was not made of glass. He kept saying he was made of glass, because he could see inside himself—for that matter, inside me—and observe veins and arteries, surge and swirl of blood, beautiful vortices of whirling power.... Long later I realized he might have been one of those rare birds who can, clairvoyantly, see such things as he'd described to me. Still, that did not mean he was made of glass.

  “What made you so high and mighty anyway?"

  “Uh?” Gippy's words surprised me.

  “Nobody, not even Audie, hired you to protect me from my stupidness. Or even talk me out of it, did they? If there's something crooked happening, swell, put the crooks in jail! Shoot ‘em! But who asked—?"

  “Well, nobody's trying—” I said uncomfortably.

  “Come on. I'm not really stupid—unless I'm so dumb I am and don't know it. I barely didn't drop out from grammar school, but that's because I got sick, nearly died — did die for a few minutes, they said—and I come back from mingling in them other dead people with a stammer, they must of scared the sh-sh—the crap outa me, but I hardly ever do it anymore. Anyways, I never went much to school after that, not steady. Stopped growing much, too. Sure, I screw everything up, yeah, I sure do. But...."

  He paused, rapped his hand on the table again. “The way you talk about my good friend, Dev, and you even called Miss Lane half-baked—what do you know about it?"

  “Uh?"

  “I never forget a thing some very smart guy whose name I forget wrote—I copied it off a long time back.” He paused, looking at me. “Sure, I skipped some of the words, and I didn't understand all he wrote about, but I understood enough of it."

  “Gippy, I didn't mean to—"

  “Forget it. I'm used to it. Anyways, he wrote about how dumb it is condemning without any investigating. Something like there's an idea that holds off every kind of information there is, that there isn't any argument can be used against it, and that it can't help but keep a man dumb forever, and the thing that does all that is condemning before investigating.” Gippy scratched his whiskery chin. “Or the way I'd say it, maybe the biggest jerk is the guy who keeps putting down what he don't know nothing about."

  I decided I could demolish astrology some other time. It was enough that I had proved to Gippy that doodlebugs don't work. “Mr. Willifer,” I said, “or Gippy, I think we have been too formal up to now. Instead of calling me Mr. Jerk, why don't you call me Shell?"

  He grinned. “Shell? Where'd you get a dingie name like that?"

  “Dingie, huh ...? Well, it's from Sheldon. I'm not crazy about dingie—"

  “Sheldon? OK, that's it. If it's OK with you. Say Mr.—Sheldon, I want to call Audie once more, then would you drive me home? If it's not too much trouble?"

  “No trouble. You don't have a car?"

  “Sure, I got a car. It makes noises no other six-cylinder Whippet ever made since wheels got to be round, but it runs half the time. Only last night when I split from the house, it did not come to me I could get to Trappman's home quicker, and shoot him that much sooner, if I rode there in my Whippet. So I ran maybe a quarter of a mile, and walked the other four and a half.” He nodded, absently. “I do things like that, no way to deny it. But, like it always does, it made a lot of sense at the time."

  Still nodding, he went to make his phone call. I got up and waited next to the booth until Gippy came back, shaking his head again.

  He remained silent, his small features sagging, unhandsome, as we walked together out of the cocktail lounge, onto Sixth Street.

  Chapter Five

  The Willifers lived on Maryon Street only about three miles from my apartment, it turned out, and once clear of downtown L.A. traffic and rolling up the Hollywood Freeway in my Cad, with the top down, Gippy talked easily, head resting on the seat cushion behind him, gazing up toward the smog-grayed blue of the sky.

  After a while he said, “I guess you figured out it was back there Audie and I had our first drink together, and talk, after meeting. Must've, since you say she didn't tell you to look there. Just three days later—someplace else, not in that dump—I popped the question. I mean, popped is right."

  He reached up and buttoned his shirt, pulled his tie into an approximation of its accustomed place. “I'd already signed the papers on the well, going into it, that same day. And I was ridin’ pretty high, floatin', thinking about since I'd got all that money so quick maybe my luck was changed for good. I'm sittin’ there lookin’ at Audie, and she's smilin', she's really so
sweet, you know, and somebody around there said, ‘You got to marry me, Audie, or I'll die.’ It couldn't of been me, I'd have thought. It just popped out."

  He moved his head on the car seat. “One of them irrevocatable blunders. But once it was committed, Audie she naturally expected we'd get hitched together, and it didn't appear there was much else could be done at that point."

  “You sure did get sandbagged into that one, all right,” I said, looking out my window so Gippy wouldn't see me smiling.

  Then I turned my eyes back to the Freeway ahead and said, “Nobody, not Audrey or you, has explained where you got all that loot, Gippy. Thirty thou, that's a fat packet."

  “I never saw, almost never heard of, so much money, Sheldon, you want the truth. I guess, like, oh, it went to my head no doubt. The noovoe rich as they say of us. And when I had it, I recalled, like they say, It Takes Money to Make Money. And, Invest in a Piece of America, and all. They say a number of things what can ruin a guy. Well, how it was, I played the horses a little in those days of my single blessingness. This particular day—it was over a year ago, in July. I was sweatin'. And losin'. Both of which I had done before. I come up to the last couple races with six dollars and maybe eighty cents, and I put two bucks on the Big Double. You know what that is, Sheldon?"

  “Sure, a real wrongo. You have to pick the first and second horses in not one but two races. Ve-ry long shot, but wild odds if you luck out."

  “Wild—crazy. I hit it, or I wouldn't be telling you this story. Two bucks, and I get back at the window—I'm shakin’ like a man on one foot in a rolly-coaster—sixteen thousand, two hundred, and eighty-six dollars, and no cents. I was the only one had a ticket on it!"

  He sat up straight. “My luck had changed sudden, right?” he said, looking across at me.

  “It would seem so."

  “What it seems is not always what it seems. I'm excited, as you can well believe, right?"

  “And how."

  “And how's a good way to describe it? It seemed only natural I should go down and salute one of them last two beautiful animals that won it for me, the win and the place horse, maybe pet them on their noses—this was even before I got the money."

  “Oh? I have a feeling ... You did get the money, didn't you?"

  “Sure—they carried me to it."

  “Carried?"

  “Else I wouldn't be walking around now on the oil millions I am temporarily keeping in my sock. To finish it quick, I run down onto the track, despite somebody who attempted preventing me from doing it, and I see my horse—the winner, name of Godolphus, why I don't know—and I run toward him yelling, ‘Godolphus, you beautiful Godolphus!’ something like that, right up next to him.” He sighed heavily. “As you could maybe guess I never did pet his nose or anything else."

  “He ran away?"

  “With my luck? You've heard the funny expression, ‘It was like getting kicked by a horse'?"

  “Yeah."

  “Well, nobody can speak about it with authority if it never happened to him. Because it isn't like nothing else that could happen to him. Least of all, is it funny. So the number who—like me—can tell it the way it is or was, is limited to only a handful of cripples or less."

  “This horse—this beautiful animal that won for you—kicked you?"

  “You must be readin’ my mind. How else could I speak about it with authority? And even I haven't got it all clear to this day. The horse, it is a large animal. With ugly big legs, and instead of feet they got huge clumps of horn, or bone, or maybe stumps ending in a boulder, besides which at the racetrack they put on pounds of iron for them to run on. Well, when I come to my senses—"

  “He did kick you, then?"

  “With everything I been telling you about. Ah, well, you see the picture, and maybe I was lucky at that since the owners of this deranged and inhuman animal didn't put me in jail but instead settled out of court, by settling on me fifteen thousand dollars, which being rich was a pittance to them, and which I told them helped some but I'd rather they broke all their horse's legs and had to shoot him.” He frowned. “Besides, they paid the hospital's bills, for the eight days and a half I was in it."

  “At least you did win, Gippy. And you did get another fifteen thou out of it. Maybe there was some tough luck mixed in, but there was a chunk of good luck, too."

  “True, I've dwelled on it often and again, thinking positive. Remember, that's how I was thinking then — like, even if I'd got my insides broke and shattered beyond repair, outside I was rich in worldy goods. It come to thirty-one thousand, two-hundred and ninety dollars, and eighty cents, counting what I had left after blowing two bucks on the Big Double."

  As he pointed to the off-ramp and I pulled right, leaving the Freeway, Gippy rested his head on the cushion again and said glumly, “I mentioned all them things they say that can ruin you. I should have remembered the one about a fool and his money being soon apart."

  We rode in silence for a minute or so. And I couldn't help thinking, with a kind of weird and irrational apprehension, that somehow I had wandered today into the cracked-mirror land of doodlebugs, and transiting cuckoos, and guys made of glass.

  Wandered only briefly, however, I reminded myself. Just far enough to feel a little trickle from the fringes of hallucination, then it was back into the real world again for me. Deliver Gippy to his year-old bride, maybe hit Arnold Trappman with a quick question or two, spend a few minutes with a couple of the other people involved in the Willifer fiasco. And then, about the first velvet of dusk, grab my apartment phone and invite someone over for fun and games, someone with almost rudely thrusting breasts, deliciously swaying hips, lovely lazy eyes, like Cronetta. No ... not Cronetta.

  Briefly mentioned by Audrey and Gippy had been someone named Benjamin Riddle and a man called “Easy” Banners, so as I turned into Maryon and drove toward Gippy's home, I said to him, “Where does this guy Riddle fit in? He an associate of Trappman's? Or did I get it wrong?"

  “You got it wrong. He popped out of nowhere last December. See, like I told you, the well come in last year, tail end of November, so by December one I was mentally conditioning myself to a new standard of living it up, you'll recall."

  “Yeah,” I smiled. “You bought a copy of Yachting Magazine, I believe."

  “Paying cash. Didn't even ask the price of it. Like J. P. Morgan said, ‘If you got to ask how much it is, you can't afford it.’ Well, this is when that crook Trappman starts sending us investors letters saying there is going to be a little delay, very little, almost invisible under an electric microscope, due to negotiations for a right-of-way over a guy's land. It turns out the guy is this Riddle, Ben Riddle, and he says go to hell, nobody is digging up his grass lawns and rosebushes to put pipes in it So this little delay comes to ten months, a little more if you want it counted."

  “Hold it a minute,” I said, “let me get this straight. Here's your well, all set to start producing oil, and all you need to do is lay pipe from it to—what is it, the pipeline connection of the company that's going to purchase your production?"

  “Well, it ain't that simple. I only wish it was. According to one of Trappman's letters to me—to all us investors—his own pipeline company's going to put in what he calls a flow line, from the wellhead to a tank battery, and then they got to muck around and get the water out and separate the gas from the oil—there's a little bit of gas, too, about what you'd get from a pound of beans, I'd persume—and.... Jesus, you want the truth, I don't know what the crud they do. It's like mating a hippopomas with a giraffe, just ain't no easy way to do it. But they got to get this pipe, or flow line, or garden hose, whatever the hell, in the ground, OK?"

  “Gippy, I'm not arguing, it's OK with me—"

  “And the only place the pipe can go is across this crook's land, OK?"

  “Sure. Swell."

  “And this crook says, no way, that pipe going in their would hurt his rosebushes’ feelings, so forget it, and other things which adds up t
o N-O. The selling, that's all agreed on, it's to a big company and they're going to pay us three bucks and a half a barrel, since it's high-class crude according to Trappman. Low sulphur, and high API something, some kind of gravity. Anyway, it's a good price. Just figure it out, Sheldon, say two thousand barrels a day at —"

  “Let's skip the J. P. Morgan stuff, huh?"

  “Well, Dev said we ought to hit at least five hundred barrels a day and maybe even—"

  “This guy, Riddle, he hadn't agreed in advance to let Trappman lay pipe over his land? Wasn't there a signed contract, a legally binding agreement of some kind?"

  “Trappman told us he had a oral agreement with Riddle but he backed out of it when it screwed us most."

  “That's odd—that there was nothing signed, I mean. What kind of man is Riddle?"

  “I don't know. Never met him—except in those wonderful letters from Trappman, who maybe even made him up just so he could screw me. Screw us. All us investors."

  “All” being a grand total of three, I knew, in this particular well, though Gippy made it sound like half the population of Los Angeles County. “Well, not having a binding agreement was stupid, maybe, but not necessarily crooked. I'll check it,” I added quickly, as Gippy's mouth snapped open. “Anyway, your well's on the line now, so obviously Trappman managed to work things out with Riddle."

  “In more than ten months. So if you figure on only a measly thousand barrels a—"

  “And Easy Banners is the guy who set up the deal right? Signed up the investors, or—how was it?"

  “Not so good. But Easy—that's from his initials, a ‘E’ and a ‘Z’—he's put together several other syndicates, drilling syndicates as he calls it, for Trappman and even other oil men. But mostly Trappman. Asks around and finds out who's interested, tells you how much has to be put in for a share of the well, explains about the leaseholder's piece off of the top, who gets what overrides, and like that. An override is some off the top, usually too much, in case you—"