The Sure Thing (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  “Good idea. When I started to call the cops earlier—you didn't know the phone was bugged then?"

  “Of course not. I told you, Shell, I just found the thing, a few minutes after you left."

  “Yeah. Well, put two items together. For a guy to gimmick the phone itself, he'd obviously have to break into the house to do it. During this past week, somebody broke into the house. Therefore—"

  “I don't think so. I know what you're getting at, of course, but I've a hunch the thing was in there before. Couple of weeks ago—no, more like nine, ten days—I happened to notice the phone was shinier than normal. It had been wiped clean. Figured a gal, futzing around and cleaning up, you know, they've just got to straighten the pictures and all, had helpfully washed and dried the phone, or at least dusted it heavily. But now ... I'm not so sure. Phone's nice and dirty now.” He shrugged. “Maybe I'm wrong. Hope to hell I am wrong."

  “You're having calls transferred to your mobile job? That must mean you'll be living in it temporarily."

  He nodded. “Good a place as any. All the comforts of a truck."

  “Maybe you'd better give me your mobile number in case I want to get in touch. And if you're about ready to split, I'd be glad to accompany you for a mile or so—as a sort of professional truckguard, shall we say?"

  “Suits me,” he said grinning. “If one of us has to get shot, it might as well be the one that's already half-ruined."

  As I came in at the rear of the Spartan's lobby and headed for the stairs, Eddy called from behind the desk, “Hey, Shell, a guy left some stuff here for you ten minutes ago. Package."

  “Say where it's from?"

  “Some kind of detective agency."

  “Must be the Vetterman info."

  “Yeah, Vetterman, that's what he said."

  I got the package from him—a large manila envelope half an inch thick—and went up to 212 again.

  I'd wondered if Sheikh Faisuli had waited, or, tiring of that, returned to the Casacasbah, or, tiring of even more, begun seeking his vanished harem himself.

  As it turned out, he had not only waited in my living room but, according to his own words, spent every minute there worrying with great furiousness.

  After I'd informed him that my mission had been eminently successful, that Morraigne was OK and I could get in touch with him at virtually any time I desired—though I did not tell the Sheikh where Morraigne was, nor did he ask—Faisuli clasped his strong hands together and cried fervently, “Praise Allah that allah—all—is—wells—well!"

  “You want to try that again?” I asked.

  But I accepted it completely that he hadn't been kidding me about his furious worrying and the agonizing upsetedness this day had done him.

  Faisuli was going on, still fervently but more intelligibly, “It is a blessing, he is alive, safely unendangered. Ah, if only my other agonies could so swiftly be downcast. The Texans, the other evils, these abominable shootings.... And those—these—my wives, those juicy and sensuous pumpkins, my robustly anatomical hareem—why, it may shrivel up and die of ancientness before—"

  “About that, Sheikh. It's the very next thing on my agenda, the very next. You have to admit, I've had my own problems, too. But just as soon as I go through some reports I have here, I'll get cracking on this urgency. Can't be too tough to find six babes in shazikhs and goup-goups—"

  "Ghazikhs and shoup-shoups."

  “Well, that should make it even easier. As for the rest of it, Sheikh, Dev and the doodlebug and binding agreements and such, hell, don't work yourself into an ulcer over it. After all, when you boil it down to the bottom of the pot, it's only money."

  “What do you mean, only?"

  For five minutes or so, I'd been studying the typed reports and copies of documents so efficiently assembled and speedily sent here by Red Vetterman. At first I'd flipped through the pages quickly, scanning them and moving on, although a couple of interesting-looking items caught my eye. I had just turned back to the first sheets—a four-page typed report covering what the Vetterman Agency had dug up on the backgrounds of Trappman, Banners, and Riddle, most of it devoted as I'd suggested to Arnold Trappman—when Sheikh Faisuli stood up.

  “I go,” he said. “I go forth."

  I got to my feet. “I ought to be out of here in five minutes more myself, Sheikh. And don't worry, at least keep the faith.... Well, I'm a whiz once I get started—sometimes.... And if I get lucky enough...."

  I stopped, started over. I was getting cracking on the Sheikh's job so late, the least I could do, I figured, was ooze a lot of confidence. Faisuli was probably a little disappointed in me already. So I smiled at him, confidently.

  “Where,” I oozed, “shall I bring your harem?"

  “To the Casacasbah, of course,” he said, somewhat stiffly. “If you can find it."

  “Now, Sheikh—"

  But he was gone.

  I went back to my papers. The hell with him, I thought Who did he think he was?

  It took me not five but ten minutes to go through all the stuff from the agency, and even so I was able to give only cursory attention to most of it. There was plenty of meat to chew on, however. First, I digested all the dope about Arnold Trappman. There was a good deal of information about his primary business, the Trappman Oil and Gas Company, also what appeared to be a fairly complete listing of his investments and holdings, most of it real estate.

  Trappman owned a couple of small apartment houses, an interest in a Costa Mesa shopping center, and four other buildings. One of those four was on a good corner in Glendale, but all three of the others were in the white-elephant category, costing him money instead of producing income, since one of them—in the deadest commercial area of Hollywood—was empty, as were the two listed as a “Garage” and a “Supermarket” located on the wrong side of Main Street in Los Angeles. The rest of the “real estate” under Trappman's name wasn't owned but consisted of land on which he'd obtained leases from the individual or corporate owners, granting him the right to explore for oil or gas during certain specific periods, usually for the one-year period following date of agreement. Several thousand acres were thus available to him for exploration, but I noticed that most of the leases would soon expire, many in a couple of months or less.

  Profits from the Oil and Gas Company, which included substantial income from employment of his three company-owned drilling rigs, was good—fortunately so, because the impression I got was that without it the losses and expenses from his other interests might have pulled Trappman under the financial waves. He did own a couple thousand shares of various stocks, most of them low-priced, and now, at what some observers referred to as a market bottom, worth much less than he'd paid for them from one to several years previously.

  That was enough, for the moment, as far as Trappman was concerned. The info on Easy Banners was less extensive, but much more interesting.

  I recalled Cynara's comment about Trappman, “I'd say he's a crook,” and for a moment I wished I had Easy Banner's birthdate to give her, just for fun. Because, with the info in hand, dug up only today by Red Vetterman, no horoscope was required to know Banners was a crook. He'd done time, two years at Q. And, reading the concise info on the sheet before me, I remembered where I'd seen Banners before.

  I'd almost had it earlier today in his office, when for a moment I'd seemed almost to “recognize” him from somewhere. It hadn't been personal acquaintance, but fuzzy familiarity with the much thinner and nine-years-younger face from newspaper photos, accompanied by stories about stolen securities, theft of negotiable bonds from brokers’ offices, stolen and even forged stock certificates used as collateral for loans in the million-buck category.

  Nearly four million, all told, according to Vetterman's info. Which info I wouldn't have remembered otherwise, because the crime—for which Banners and several others were convicted—occurred before I'd opened my office downtown.

  Banners had spent two years and a bit in San Quentin, which meant
he'd been out—and, presumably, reformed, having been rehabilitated in the jug—for nearly seven years. He'd been “E. Zane Banners” then, not “Easy."

  He had also been E. Zane Banners at least eight years before taking that fall here in L.A., eight years before then—or seventeen years ago.

  A bit more than seventeen, actually, and he was apparently not involved in criminal activity at that time. He was involved with Arnold Trappman, however. Which wasn't necessarily felonious.

  The involvement had appeared so innocent to Red that he'd personally scribbled a note to the effect that this was the only thing he'd turned up for the approximate time I'd mentioned, and he included it merely because there'd been brief legal action then. Which was also, apparently, how he'd managed to come up with the record.

  The lawsuit—naming Arnold Trappman as one of the defendants, and settled out of court prior to trial—had been initiated by a man named Dikes, an investor in an exploratory or “wildcat” well, one of the first drilled by the Trappman Oil and Gas Company, which had then been incorporated for only a couple of years. Dikes was the sole financial backer of the operation, and his complaint was that, although drilling of the shallow well had been “completed” eleven months prior to his bringing suit, there had been no production, no contract for sale of the crude oil, and consequently no royalty payments to him in return for his forty-thousand-dollar investment.

  It was a criminal complaint, so Dikes had been alleging fraud, but the case never got to trial. Whether it was part of an out-of-court settlement or not I couldn't be positive, but Vetterman reported—for he'd dug up some record of this transaction—that payment of an undisclosed sum, which I guessed must have been about one buck, had been made to Arnold Trappman by Mr. Dikes for all of the Trappman and Banners interest in the “Fowler Number One,” which was the name given that well for legal and other purposes.

  It was interesting, naturally, in view of the combined experiences of Gippy Willifer and Dan Corey with the “Roman Number One,” which were curiously similar, at least in part, to the earlier experience of Dikes alone. That was all, of course, just—interesting.

  Benjamin Riddle: odds and ends of colorless background, nothing very interesting there. Apparently clean, certainly no available criminal record, retired engineer, fifty-nine years old, divorced, two married children living out of state. Worth, at a guess by Red, two or three hundred thou net, not luxuriously rich, but comfortable. No help for me in the single page on Benjamin Riddle.

  I looked across the room at my frisky fish, then flipped some typed pages, wrote down the addresses of those three “white elephant” buildings, one in Hollywood and the pair in L.A., then noted the date when “E. Zane Banners” had entered Q and the day of his release, jotted “Fowler Number One” below all that, flipped my notebook shut and sat. Just sat.

  I had been a bit optimistic in telling Faisuli I'd be out of the apartment myself in five minutes, because I sat there like a colorful lump on my chocolate-brown divan thinking, not even watching the fish, for that length of time. But then I straightened up, stretched, smiling—because I had firmly concluded that this interesting situation in which I'd become involved was either horrendously complex or ridiculously simple, and I was about to start placing my bets on simple—and grabbed the phone.

  After dialing the Vetterman Detective Agency's number I checked my watch. It was five-twenty p.m., on the nose. That surprised me: a lot had happened in the last two or three hours. So much, in fact, that I seriously doubted the next two or three could hold very much of interest or excitement. But it took only the next two or three minutes for me to find out—or at least start finding out—how wrong I was.

  It took almost that long for Red's secretary to find him, but when he got on the phone I thanked him for the speedy, and excellent, job he'd done and went on, “It may not have looked like much to you, Red, but the info on that”—I glanced at the notes in my open book near me—“Fowler Number One well, seventeen years back, is on the button for me, I think. See if you can get more details on it, particularly what production turned out to be—how much oil, how many barrels a day pumped and sold—when, and if, the Fowler well ever got on line. OK?"

  “Sure. You sound eager enough to pay top dollar, so I'll spend at least a year on it, if necessary."

  “Try to find out before spring. Anything trickle in after you sent the report over, Red? Particularly on Trappman or Banners—"

  “Nothing on them, but I guess you haven't heard about Riddle."

  “Riddle? What about him?"

  “He's dead. You should kick the TV habit and start listening to radio, it was on the four o'clock news. Found him in a well—"

  “A well? Don't tell me, he fell into an oil—hell, no, he couldn't—"

  “If you don't shut up, I'll charge you for this. Not an oil well, a water well, actually it wasn't finished yet, just a hole on his property, back behind his house. And he didn't fall in, not with a bullet in his chest or in his heart, which is what killed him."

  I held the phone at arm's length and looked at it briefly, for no clearly evident reason, then put it back to my ear and said, “Police have any idea who knocked him off, or why?"

  “They aren't broadcasting it, if they do. But, since I figured you'd be interested, I called downtown and asked if they'd turned up anything yet. Nothing, just a stiff, except they'd got the slug out of him."

  “They mention the caliber?"

  “Thirty-two, but it was too mashed up to tell them much more. And there's a lot of them around."

  Lot's of .32's around, all right. Even Gippy had one. But he'd only injured a tree with his. That was bad enough—maybe trees have got feelings, who knows?—and though Ben Riddle was nothing to me, for a moment I could see those typed words on white bond again: “...retired engineer, fifty-nine years, divorced, two married children living out of state...."

  That was all the news Red had for me, so I thanked him again and hung up.

  Then, since I was now wearing electric-blue slacks, I put my debonair-blue jacket on, not for warmth, but to cover up my Colt Special and gun harness, and went out—or went forth, as Sheikh Faisuli might have said—to find and restore unharmed to him his exquisite young female wildnesses, or his unsurpassed passel of sweet plumpnesses, or a hot half-dozen of the most passionately nutritious and provocatively out-pooching cupcakes ever cooked to a sexy sizzle by the swinging Lakashami, or even Shakalami....

  Or, rather, that's—approximately—what Sheikh Faisuli hoped I would do, if I ever got started.

  What I did was set forth, once again—much as, earlier this day, I had set not very far forth—to find Sheikh Faisuli's hareem.

  In my Cad on the Hollywood Freeway, realizing I had left the Spartan without getting shot even once this trip, I recalled telling the Sheikh, “I'm a whiz once I get started—sometimes."

  It was a jolly little jest, of course. But, sometimes....

  Because this time, from start to finish—that is, once I got started whizzing—it only took me half an hour.

  Chapter Twenty

  By six-thirty p.m. on that warm Friday night in October, I was standing in a paper- and garbage-strewn alley behind the second of those wrong-side-of-Main-Street buildings owned by Arnold Trappman in downtown L.A., this the once-thriving but now abandoned former supermarket on Esther Street.

  On the way here I had stopped at the morgue to view Ben Riddle's body, his clothes and effects, after which I'd prowled the old and empty garage, half a mile from where I was now. There was little traffic in this depressed area, but I heard the hum of tires as a single car passed by on Esther Street. I'd parked my Cad out there, close enough to see the barely legible sign, Wellington, on the building's front.

  That had been a well-known name twenty years before—the three Wellington Brothers, owners of a chain of seven supermarkets in and near Los Angeles; but now all of those buildings were either used for other purposes, or empty, and all the Wellington Brothers were d
ead.

  But right then I forced such thoughts out of my mind. Probably I was a bit preoccupied with death because I had so recently been looking at the pale, white, dead body of Ben Riddle in the morgue. But if ever there was a moment above all other moments not to be thinking of dead ones, this had to be it.

  No, this was a time to whiz, whatever that was, if possible. This was a time to be thinking of harems: of pale white bodies, perhaps, but not any dead ones: of ghazikhs and shoup-shoups and hoo-hoo hotsy-totsies; and Visdrailias and Shereshims, among others—four others.

  Why, this had to be, at least for me, the case of the century, the private-eye opportunity of a lifetime! And here I stood in an alley with the papers and garbage.

  There was, of course, a reason for my being here. Or rather, several reasons. All of them good ones, too, I kept telling myself. Kept telling myself over and over, keeping it positive, because according to no less an authority, there's no such thing as a negative-thinking whizzer.

  Actually, I believed I had been led here by the most rigorous logic; still, what it all revolved around and hung upon, in a manner of speaking, was: “an affliction in Virgo."

  Earlier, my optimism had cooled somewhat during the minutes I'd spent prowling the dusty and abandoned garage a half-mile from here, prowling the emptiness and discovering only more emptiness—and three thin but lively rats, which scared me enormously, to tell the whole truth, when they ran rustling over crumpled papers near my feet.

  To the left of and adjoining the building's wall, there was a long shed, its swinging doors held closed by a rusted hasp and padlock. Standing at the alley's edge I twisted the padlock, pulled, and the old boards were so weak that the padlock and hasp, with a half-inch splinter of crumbly wood, came off in my hands.

  Inside—gleaming, highly polished, bright and new, in jarring contrast to its decaying surroundings—was a black Lincoln Continental sedan. Or, call it a limousine. Like the ones people ride in from the airport to downtown hotels.