Kill Him Twice (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

"Wasn't a woman here? Natasha Antoinette, perhaps?"

  "No, he was alone. At least when he ran out. Why did you mention Natasha Antoinette?"

  "I thought she was with Mr. Waverly when he phoned me."

  "I wouldn't know about that. I was just sitting here. When Mr. Waverly works late, he keeps me on handy, in case he wants . . . like to dictate letters or find something in the files, or . . . Like that. Someone might have been with him — they don't have to come in the front-door entrance."

  "Well, since Mr. Waverly left no instructions for me, I'll take independent action. Like trying to find him. Would you give me Mr. Pike's address?"

  Zip, she punched a button on a little box, and something flipped up, and she said, "It's twenty-two-seventeen Gable Avenue." She was efficient too. "That's north of Hollywood, up in the hills a little," she said.

  "I'll find it. Thank you, ma'am."

  "It's miss, not ma'am. You're welcome."

  "Thanks."

  We seemed to have gotten that backward, but in this heady atmosphere it somehow seemed right. I left. The doors sighed, pooh-pooh-poo, behind me.

  FOUR

  It was only about a mile to Finley Pike's address. Down Hollywood Boulevard to Gable, then straight up the tree-lined road to the twenty-two-hundred block. But well before I got there it became apparent that more than Gordon Waverly was ahead of me.

  A police cruiser sat at the curb, red light pulsing above its windshield. Another radio car was parked in a white cement driveway next to a brown frame house. I couldn't see the number yet, but I had a hunch it would be 2217. More than a hunch. Lights were on over the front doors of nearby houses, and knots of people huddled together on the sidewalks.

  I didn't like it. The people who thus spontaneously gather seldom gather to beam upon young lovers, or ex-caterpillars testing iridescent wings, or birds' beaks cracking small blue eggs, or any kind of lovely or happy thing; they swarm to fire and disaster, gaze entranced at gruesome messes, and especially are they drawn to mayhem and destruction, the dead and the dying. No, I didn't like it at all. It was as if, with a kind of psychic nostril, I could smell blood. And the back of my neck got a little colder, just a little.

  Because I was thinking these somewhat uncharitable thoughts, the other car almost slammed into me. It was a big black Imperial sedan, coming like a singed bat out of hell toward me from my left. I was starting into the intersection when the flare of its lights hit my eyes.

  I snapped my head left, then yanked the steering wheel and hit the brakes, skidded, tugged the wheel back just before banging into the curb. The Imperial was swinging left into Gable, tires shrieking as they slipped sideways on the asphalt, now skidding almost parallel to me. I fought the wheel and at the same time managed one quick glimpse at the other car — and in the fractional moment somehow saw, and recognized, two faces.

  Both faces were turned toward me, mouths open and eyes probably as wide as my own, features twisted in sudden alarm. But I made them both. There were other guys in the back of the Imperial, but these two men were in the front seat, the guy nearer to me a slick-fingered ex-cannon who, unlike most others of his trade, had switched from boosting wallets and jools to squeezing the trigger of a .45-caliber banger, and the other — in the driver's seat — a well-nigh brainless wheelman who, despite his paucity of other talents, could drive a car clear around the Indianapolis Speedway, through traffic, backwards, without scraping a fender.

  He didn't even scrape the fender of my Cad, which was at least a minor miracle. Both cars came to shuddering stops. The Imperial was sideways in the middle of the street, and my Cad was to its right, almost touching the curb. I moved. Without thinking — at least without conscious thought.

  I knew there was some kind of trouble close ahead, and I also knew those two faces belonged to hoods who themselves belonged to an enormously tough customer named Al Gant, and I knew very well that Al Gant would cheerfully haul out my guts and wrap them around my neck and strangle me with them, should the opportunity ever arise.

  But that awareness was only in the back of my head if anywhere in it, and I simply slapped the Cad's gears into low and pulled ahead until I was in front of the other car, blocking it. Then I got out and stepped over to the Imperial, leaned on the open window, and eyeballed the pockmarked face of J. B. Kester, usually called J. B., ex-pickpocket turned killer.

  "Hello, J. B.," I said. "Al send you?"

  "Al who?"

  "Capone, of course. Hell, Al Gant."

  "Al? You got rocks in your head, Scott. We're just — just drivin' around lookin' for girls."

  I had to laugh. "Sure. I can see you, drinking beer and whistling at the skirts. What's all the excitement here at Pike's? Al send you to kill somebody?"

  I bent my knees a bit and peered past J. B. at broad, heavy, fat-faced Joe "Mooneyes" Garella. Ordinarily a hood with a name like that would have been called Joe Gorilla, but "Mooneyes" was a natural tag for this slow and sluglike citizen. His face was pinker than Inside's outside, and except for a small squashed nose and fat red lips and wisps of red hair in disarray on his scalp, his face seemed mostly eyes. Two large, blank, watery, and lashless eyes paler than fog at dawn dominated his face, seemed to possess it. He looked like a guy turning into an owl.

  "Hi, Mooneyes," I said. "Where's the fire? Who're you supposed to burn?"

  "Scott, damn your guts," J. B. said, not pleasantly, "can the stool. I told you — "

  "Yeah, girls."

  But he wasn't listening. The whole gang in the car seemed only now to have become aware of the commotion directly ahead of us. The knots of people. The cars. The red lights flashing. In a word: cops!

  "Fuzz!" squawked J. B. He jabbed a thumb into Mooneyes' ribs, and almost before I could move my feet so they wouldn't get run over, the car had been swung back in a speedy arc, forward in a reverse arc, and was purring off the way it had come.

  Here in a hurry. Gone in a hurry. And all of them Al Gant's boys. Something for me to think about — but not at the moment. I started the Cad and moved it ahead a few yards, parked at the curb opposite the scene of the commotion. The number was 2217, all right.

  As I got out of the car a spot of white ahead of the right front fender caught my eye. It lay in the street, a foot or two out from the curb. Anything fluttering about at "the scene of the crime" may be worth picking up, and I was by now at least half convinced this was the scene of some kind of violation more serious than spitting on the sidewalk. So I picked it up.

  It looked like a page from a letter, but when I'd read a few lines I began wondering if it might not be, instead, part of the first draft of a story for True Agony Confessions Magazine. Written by an idiot. To be read by people who gather in knots at mayhems.

  The part my eye fell on was kind of interesting. It was near the bottom of the sheet: ". . . knocked up with a pregnancy right there on his damn couch! Anyways so I had the kid and he dont know it yet. Should I tell him? I cant help it bothering me some. Maybe he ought to be told but he don't deserve no special considerations the way I see it. But of course I kept the money for the abortion. But I never had no idea when I went for help — help! ha-ha! — to Dr. Willim — " And that was the end of the page.

  Al Gant's boys. Now this. But first, whatever was going on across the street.

  At the entrance, broad shoulders blocking the door, was a ham-handed and rock-muscled police sergeant named Ken Carver. A solid, dependable, quiet-talking policeman, comfortable and competent in his job. In the vernacular, "a good cop" — but most of them are.

  He raised a thick eyebrow when he saw me. "Boy, you got a nose like an anteater, Scott. How'd you smell this one?"

  "I didn't, Ken. I was — well, I guess I was hired by Mr. Gordon Waverly earlier — "

  "For what?"

  I shook my head. "I don't actually know yet. All I know is, I was to meet him at his office, learned he'd come here, and came here myself to find him. Maybe you can tell me."

  "Maybe. Gord
on Waverly, huh? You guess you were hired by him? You don't know?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Well, you better make up your mind exactly." Ken jerked a thumb. "He's inside. Looks like he killed a guy named Finley Pike."

  FIVE

  It looked like it, all right.

  Because I knew Ken and was also a long-time friend of Lieutenant Bill Rawlins, who was inside the house, I was permitted go in and look around.

  One thing was certain. If the guy on the floor was Finley Pike, Finley Pike was dead.

  The little man sprawled face down on the carpet might have had a good head of hair earlier this evening, but now it was a head of blood and bone and pulpy pinkish-grayness. Several feet from the body a marble or ivory idol lay in a small spot of stickiness.

  Nothing had been moved yet; the Crime Lab crew had just arrived from SID. A technician was dusting for prints, and Rawlins was standing on my right talking to a man seated in a purple overstuffed chair. The man was lean, tanned, with a sharp-boned, almost stern face, gray hair brushed straight back over his head and full at the temples.

  We'd never met, but most of Hollywood knew that face: Gordon Waverly. My client. Or, rather: my client? It remained to be seen.

  A flashbulb popped as the police photographer shot another picture, and in the glare I saw a thin curving line of red on the side of Waverly's head, running down below the gray at his temple.

  After ushering me inside, Ken had gone over to speak with Rawlins. Now the lieutenant glanced around, then said something to Waverly and walked across the room to me.

  "Hi, Shell. What's this Ken tells me about you and Waverly? Are you or aren't you working for the guy?"

  I grinned. "Ken knows nearly as much as I do, Bill." I told him about talking to Waverly on the phone and added, "I checked his office and was told he'd come here. So I buzzed out myself. That's it."

  "Interesting. You don't know what he wanted you to do?"

  "Nope. Something about the possibility of a big scandal, that's all. Too hush-hush for the phone, I gathered."

  "Well, this is going to be a pretty good scandal. Hardly seems likely he'd try to get you on his side and then come here and kill this guy."

  "Hardly. Did he kill Pike?"

  "Not much doubt about that. When we got here the victim was — " he nodded toward Pike's body — "like that, where he is now. Waverly was conscious, on his feet, standing looking down at him."

  "Don't tell me he was clutching the murder weapon and — "

  Rawlins cut me off with a grin. "No, not much doubt that idol caved in Pike's skull. But it was lying where it is now, several feet from the victim's body. Waverly claims he was knocked out and came to there where the idol is, right next to it. Barely got to his feet when we came in. Says he must have been clubbed with the thing, too."

  "What else does he say?"

  "That's about it. Came here to see Pike, no answer, door was unlocked, and he walked in. Saw Pike on the floor, and a leather case — attaché case, he thinks — open near him. Filled with some kind of papers."

  "Just some kind? Or was he more specific?"

  "He doesn't know what kind, just papers. He walked over to Pike and bent down by him, and boom. Slugged. That's all he knows — except he didn't do it. At least that's his story."

  "He say what he wanted to see Pike about?"

  "No."

  "What brought you here so quickly? Anonymous phone call?"

  Rawlins looked at me steadily for several seconds, without speaking. Then he said slowly, "You sound like you're already working for the man."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. But I'd like to talk to him. How about it?"

  He chewed his lip. "O.K. Make it fast."

  "All right if I talk to Waverly alone?"

  "Not a chance. Not even you, Shell. Right after this we're taking him downtown and booking him. He's it. You want to talk to him, O.K. But right here, with me."

  "Fair enough. What did bring you guys here, Bill?"

  "You tagged it. Phone call, no name, allegedly from a neighbor. But — get this — the call came from here. From twenty-two-seventeen Gable."

  "The hell. If the call was anonymous, how come you know it was from this phone? Don't tell me you were able to trace — "

  "No. We had a bit of luck there. After the call came in to the complaint board we checked the phone company. Routine, didn't expect anything. But the operator who handled the call was able to pin it down for us. The phone had been off the hook for two or three minutes. Then somebody — Waverly, undoubtedly — jiggled the hook, got the operator, and called us."

  "Why Waverly undoubtedly?"

  "Who else?"

  "Do you really think he'd kill Pike and then call the law to come arrest him?"

  "Knock it off, Shell. Why wouldn't he? Way it looks, he didn't plan to kill the guy. If it's Murder Two, after he cracked Pike he knew he could be placed here — by his office; even you could have pinned it down, as it turned out — so he dreamed up his cock-and-bull story and called us. Not a new story, by the way."

  "True. So who clobbered him on the head?"

  "It's a big lump, but nothing he couldn't have done all by himself, Shell. Probably figured that would make the picture look better."

  "Motive?"

  "That's the only thing we haven't got. We'll get it." He glanced at Waverly. "He's been stewing for a while now. Give me a minute with him, then come on over."

  "Good enough."

  I looked around some more. There was quite a bit of police activity, but that wasn't anything unusual, so I gave most of my attention to the room. The walls and ceiling were cream color, but the rest was done primarily in reds and purples, which is a combination that often blends very well. Not this time. This was the red of bloodshot eyes and the purple of bruises, and it looked like a drunk after a fight.

  It struck me that the comparison was apt, since the joint looked as if there might have been a little knock-down and drag-out in it. A red end table lay on its side next to a purple divan, and a red and purple lamp — the guy had been nuts about red and purple — was a foot from the small table, its base cracked. An overstuffed chair, mate to the one Waverly was sitting in, was turned so it faced the wall. My deduction was that either somebody had banged into the thing and spun it about, or Pike had enjoyed looking at walls. Which, in this room, would have made a lot of sense.

  Garish abstractions in gold frames were on two of the walls, and in addition to the small figure which had been used as the blunt instrument, several other idols or art objects were in various places about the room, including a six-inch-high figure that looked Indian, with its tongue stuck way out, and an oddly shaped receptacle closely resembling a ceramic chamber pot.

  What kind of man, I wondered, could leave that orgiastic pink office and then come home to this?

  More important, what kind of man was Gordon Waverly?

  As far as reputation goes, he was cleaner than the gals who do those TV commercials in showers. The main reason for the almost automatic initial acceptance of his weekly, Inside, and the current respect for the accuracy and balance of its contents, was because of Waverly, himself. I guess he'd been in publishing most of his adult life. Writer, editor, publisher of a slick-paper short story magazine, then into book publishing. He was still the major stockholder in Waverly and Smith, Inc., the publishing company he'd founded fifteen or twenty years ago. In the fifty-odd years of his life he'd never been involved in a scandal. He was well liked, a member of numerous civic organizations, active in local politics — he'd even been asked to run for mayor, but declined — and of course he knew most of the "names" in Hollywood.

  That did not mean, however, that he hadn't crushed Finley Pike's brainbox.

  Rawlins turned, crooked a finger at me.

  When I stopped in front of him, Gordon Waverly rose a bit unsteadily to his feet and stuck out his hand. I shook it as he said, "How do you do, Mr. Scott?" The voice was mellow, rich, and deep. "I had not anticipate
d such distressing circumstances when I asked you to meet me."

  "Let's hope not." I glanced at Pike's body. "You kill him?"

  "No."

  That was all he said. Just the one bald word. He paused, then continued, "I phoned you regarding another matter. We'll forget that for now. But — did my receptionist give you the check?"

  "Yes, she did."

  He nodded. "Then I ask you to accept it as your retainer and endeavor to help me prove I did not kill Mr. Pike — and, of course, attempt to learn who the murderer truly is. Will you?"

  No pleading, no big song and dance. I liked that. Assuming, of course, he hadn't pounded on Pike's head and was now sincerely pulling my leg out of its socket. I said, "I'm not certain what I'll do yet, Mr. Waverly."

  "You'll have to give me your answer very soon. Before we leave. I'm to be charged with this crime."

  "I know. What happened here? What's your story?"

  He repeated exactly what Rawlins had already told me.

  I said, "If you were standing by Pike's body and got clipped, how come you came to several feet away instead of next to Pike?"

  "I was not standing, but kneeling. Why I came to my senses where I did, I have no idea. I remember nothing after the blow. . . . In fact, I do not now even recall the blow itself. Perhaps I staggered, crawled — I simply have no idea."

  So far, so good. I said, "This little case on the floor near the body. You just glanced at it, and the papers? You weren't curious about it?"

  "Of course not. It was simply an attaché case, apparently. It was lying open on the carpet with papers in it and spilling from it, as if it had been dropped. Mr. Pike was lying on the floor. I feared he had become ill, fainted, perhaps even suffered a heart attack or stroke. I assumed he had been carrying the case and dropped it as he fell. I also assumed, quite naturally I think, that he was merely unconscious. I had no idea. . . ." Waverly stopped for a moment, and his lips twitched slightly. "Then I saw his head."

  Still pretty good. I said, "What about Natasha Antoinette?"

  "I have nothing whatever to say about Natasha Antoinette."