Kill Him Twice (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  "How long have you been carrying that?" I said.

  "The last couple days."

  "Just since you killed Finley Pike, you mean?"

  He said quietly, "That's right. Just since I killed Pike." He paused, then asked me, "How did you know about Pete Dillerson? I didn't even know his name was Dillerson. Only name I heard was Pete."

  "Joe Garella — Mooneyes — spilled all he knew and he knew plenty. Put that gun away, Slade. Killing me won't help you."

  "It will if you're the only one who knows what you've told me."

  "I'm not"

  "So you say. But you'd say that to keep me from shooting."

  "Believe it or not, I wouldn't. I'm telling you the truth. Maybe nobody else has a hundred per cent of what I do, but better than three dozen people heard Mooneyes spilling. They know enough to cook you, Slade."

  "I still think you're lying. I have to think so — what other chance have I got?" His voice was tight, even higher than usual. "I know you carry a gun, Scott." He glanced past me, then at my face again. "When they get out here your gun will be in your hand. I'll say you jumped me, pulled the gun, I was lucky enough to shoot you first." He licked his lips. "If I kill you, I'll get out of this. It'll work."

  I knew what was going through his mind. He was convincing himself it would work — and at the same time working himself up to the point where he could actually do it. Slamming Pike with a club was one thing. But to stand before a man and look in his eyes and pull a trigger and murder him in cold blood, that is another thing entirely. It would take him a little time to reach that moment of violence — unless I pushed him to it by jumping him. But I wasn't going to jump him. When he reached that moment I had one happy word with which to stop him. Or try to. One word — and I hoped it was the right word.

  In the meantime, while he still wasn't ready to pull the trigger, I meant to keep him talking. And this was a time when he would probably talk freely, be glad to talk.

  "Listen, Slade," I said quietly. "It won't work. I know you and Gant set up Nat's murder. But I was right about you and Natasha too, wasn't I? The hit-run and the rest of it?"

  "Right enough. Nat and I had a big thing going for a couple months. I wanted to drop it; she didn't. The night when I ran into Harris was the last date we had." Sweat glistened on his forehead. "But she kept calling me up. I told you the truth about going to see her Wednesday night. She called me. But it was because she'd just been slapped with the blackmail business — about the hit-run and the rest of it. Well, that was bad enough. Worse was finding out how that bald-headed bastard learned of it, finding out she'd written a damn fool letter to Pike — I mean to Amanda Dubonnet. That told me who the real blackmailer was. I chewed hell out of Nat, slapped her around a little, then took off to see Pike."

  "How come you knew he was Amanda? Not many people were in on that."

  "I owed Gant plenty and was paying him off through Pike, so I saw him pretty often. One night he let it drop about the Amanda column — just that he wrote it, not the blackmail part. Hell, I didn't know he was using the letters for blackmail until that night, from what Natasha told me, and I didn't realize Gant was behind it himself till I heard Pike talking to him on the phone."

  "Uh-huh. Anyway, you went there and banged Pike around. How come your hands weren't marked up?"

  "I knew I was going to slug him when I went there. That's why I went there. So I wore a pair of driving gloves I had in the car. It was the blood on those gloves gave me the idea to bang Waverly's hands with that idol."

  "You didn't go there to kill Pike, then?"

  "Hell, no. I went there to get that damn fool letter Nat wrote him. I grabbed the whole case of them when I found it — that was when I heard Pike on the phone. You're right about that, Scott, only I didn't just hear part of the conversation — I heard it all. It was short. I went for him, swung that idol at him, trying to shut him up before he could give Gant my name. I wasn't fast enough."

  "You mean he actually told Gant you were the guy who'd pounded on him?"

  "He sure did. I remember every word. All he said was, 'Al, this is Finley. Get Mooneyes and the boys over here fast. Slade's just beat the hell out of me. I'm supposed to be out cold and he's in the garage looking for the file.' I hit him then. Not to kill him — just to shut him up. Maybe I'd started for him and couldn't stop; it was fast. Maybe I hoped Gant might not have understood him. Anyway, I slugged him. Then . . . well, when I realized he was dead, then I had to start worrying about Gant."

  "Because if Gant knew you were the guy there in the house, he'd soon know you'd killed his boy, right?"

  "Sure, just as soon as he found out Pike was dead. I was really in a sweat — and then Waverly drove up, charged up to the door. Hell, I had to knock him out. Talk about sweat — Pike dead, Waverly on the floor, Gant's men on their way to the house."

  He stopped, his face stretched into a fascinating contortion. But I looked at him almost in admiration. I finally understood, fully, why he'd called the police then — and I had to hand it to him. I said, "So you called the cops."

  "Yeah. Called them, and lit out."

  "The cops would probably arrive before Gant's men — which meant Gant's hoods wouldn't even get inside the house, wouldn't know for a while that Pike was dead, wouldn't know the letters were gone — you did take the attaché case, didn't you?"

  "I had to take it then. The police would probably think Waverly'd killed Pike, and there was a chance Gant would think so, too. He might even think Pike had said Waverly's name on the phone, instead of mine; they sound a little alike. But I had to take the file — couldn't let the cops get it, along with Nat's letter. And Gant would know damn well Waverly couldn't have taken it. Hell, mainly I had to have time to think. I knew that bastard Gant would kill me if he even suspected I'd done Pike in or taken the file. But, later, I figured he had two good reasons not to kill me — I owed him money, and I had the letters. I was pretty sure Gant wouldn't touch me as long as I had those letters of his."

  "But if you gave them back to him — "

  "I'm not that dumb. They're still in a safe place."

  "Where?"

  He was through talking. "That's all, Scott," he said. "I hate to do this, but — "

  But he was going to do it. I saw the sudden tensing of his features, knew he was just about to pull the trigger.

  "Smile!" I shouted.

  It stopped him just long enough, the unexpected word startling him. "Huh?" he said.

  "Smile!" I said again. "You're on 'Candid Camera.'"

  "Huh?" he repeated. Then, silence.

  After a few seconds he looked past me to the cast and crew of Return of the Ghost of the Creeping Goo.

  "Yeah," I said, "you've got it. Dale Bannon is over there with a big camera trained on you, taking your picture. Ed Howell is holding a directional mike aimed at your chops. It was all aimed at me while I told you what you'd done, and it was on you while you admitted it — enough of it. More, to tell the truth, than I expected you to admit."

  He swung his head back to me. "Camera?" he said stupidly. "You mean — "

  "I mean, this time, you're the star of the picture." I smiled at him. "Which seems appropriate, at last. In all your movies, Slade, you've been the real monster."

  I was still smiling at him, but he did not return my smile. As the realization sank in that our actions were being captured on his own film, and that our words — especially his words — were being picked up and recorded, something seemed to snap in him. To snap, and bend, and sway, and crackle, and pop.

  I had seen the nearly horrifying metamorphosis of his features once before, in his library-den, but then he'd been acting. This was the real thing. This was the unwilling astronaut, not going up slowly, but coming rapidly down. There was a kind of shrieking silence echoing on his chops. His eyes disappeared completely as his eyebrow came down like a bat's wing and then wobbled in several directions. His lips peeled up and slid down and sideways. A hoarse grunting sound
snuffled from the midst of that tangled mass of tortured physiognomy. He looked — well, I can't describe it because I'd never seen anything quite like it.

  But I'll try. You know that stuff Dr. Jekyll drank? And it turned him into Mr. Hyde? Well, Slade looked like what you'd get if Hyde drank it.

  I'll admit, I got so fascinated I forgot about the gun in his hand. For perhaps a different reason, he forgot about it, too.

  He dropped the gun. I thought maybe he was going to start clawing at his throat, going "Ahcckk, orrckkk," but he didn't. He'd been had, and he knew it. And, finally, he accepted it. With, I thought, a kind of awkward grace, considering the position he was in.

  He looked past my shoulder to the movie crew, then at my face, and finally at the people and equipment on location again — as if gazing upon his handiwork for the last time.

  Then he lifted his arms and let them flop loosely, much as Tony had done earlier, back in the Hall of Justice.

  "Well," he said dully. "I guess my Goos are cooked."

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Much later that same night I was in my apartment at the Spartan. The combination of Mooneyes' courtroom testimony, repeated for the police, plus the "rushes" of the film and tape of my session with Slade, had been, as one policeman put it, "a little bit more than enough," and as a result Slade, plus much of L.A.'s hoodlum population — including Al Gant — were in jail.

  After leaving the police I had spent half an hour with my delighted client, Gordon Waverly — who, incidentally, was cheerfully picking up the tab for my courtroom scene — then I'd come home, cleaned up, cooled the gin, and called Cherry Dayne.

  Cherry Dayne had said Yes, she'd love to come over for Martinis and charcoal-broiled steaks.

  So now life sort of hung, poised, where it had been forty-eight hours before. Only there was a difference. A big difference. Instead of that blonde babe saying, "I'm hungry," it was luscious Cherry Dayne seated near me on the chocolate-brown divan saying, "My, that's a good Martini."

  "Isn't it? The third one is always better."

  We'd been talking about the case — part of the time. I'd told her some of the things that had been brought out after Slade's Hyde-de-Hyde performance, most of it at the L.A. Police Building. Now I summed it up for her.

  "Slade had been worrying about the hit-and-run accident — and his affair with Nat — even before that big-footed collector put the bite on her Wednesday night. Any kind of leak would ruin him, and he was afraid if he broke off with her she might spill to somebody. Like his wife. Then, when he found out about the letter to Amanda, he quite naturally flipped clear up in the air. Told her to go to hell, they were through, and so on, then raced to Pike's."

  I paused, thinking about some of the more significant aspects of the case, then looked at Cherry and said, "Both Nat and Slade were vulnerable to a kind of blackmail — unfortunately — even without the hit-run, you know. Even if he hadn't been married."

  "Oh?" Cherry turned the brilliant blue eyes on me, laying on me some of that electricity that makes the world go around.

  "Sure," I said. "See, here was this sour, miserable, warped Scotch-English-Norwegian-Irish-Italian-American boy, Jeremy Slade. And here was this sweet Negro American girl, Natasha Antoinette. Well, hell, they were going out together. Together."

  "How terrible!" she said in mock anguish. "They deserved to be blackmailed."

  "Of course," I said. "I think Slade even had a little Chinese in him."

  She laughed. "Now you're fooling with me."

  "Not yet . . . um. Anyway, after leaving Pike's with the Amanda file — which the police have now, by the way — he realized that possession of the letters might convince Gant he should cancel Slade's fat debt. Which Gant did, once Slade got in touch with him and saw him that night. Nat was still a danger to Slade, of course — not to mention Gant — in fact, even more so than before. Well, Gant insisted she had to be killed, and Slade went along with it. So they set it up, and you know the rest."

  Cherry asked me, "Slade went back to see Nat later? Is that what you said?"

  "Yeah. After getting away from Pike's he called Gant and arranged to meet him later, then went to see Natasha. He made sure she stayed with him — so she wouldn't talk to anybody else. I suppose it's a good thing he did, from his point of view, because otherwise I'd have been able to get in touch with her. But it didn't help him in the long run. I think he might even have killed Natasha himself that night, if he'd had the guts for it — and if he hadn't wanted to be sure she finished her part in his picture first. He was quite a son — quite a fellow."

  Maybe Slade hadn't meant to murder Pike, I was thinking; and once it was done I could understand his conking Waverly, who otherwise could have tagged him for the murder; but he had sure as hell known exactly what he was doing when he'd told Gant when his triggerman should knock off Natasha. He swore he was sorry about all of it now, very sorry. Sure he was sorry — he'd been caught.

  I finished it up, "Anyhow, Mooneyes realizes they're not going to kill him twice, or even once, but that he'll do another bit in Q. And Gant and a bunch of hoodlums are headed for prison, some of them for the gas chamber." I paused. "That is, unless some kindly old judges decide those bad boys have already suffered enough because of deprivation in childhood, or something. Ah, well, let's not worry about that tonight — at least Slade's kaput, the Goo is finally dead, and the world is saved from that."

  While we'd been talking Cherry had gotten up and been wandering around the room, looking askance at my big oil painting of nude Amelia, happily at the tropical fish. She was over near the hi-fi set now. Or, rather, the cabinet housing my stereo speakers.

  Playing at the moment was De Falla's Ritual Fire Dance, and I said, "That reminds me. Why don't I light the charcoal? Then we can dance around it letting out whoops — "

  "You're really going to charcoal those big steaks in here?"

  "Sure — ah, I went through this once before."

  "You did? When? With whom? Did you — "

  "It isn't important. But, Cherry, why not? I mean, why not cook them here? It will probably be loads of fun."

  "But there's no place for the smoke to go, Shell. Like a chimney or anything. Shouldn't — "

  "Stop it. I won't listen. I won't have negative thinking. This is my — my big chance. A challenge. My do-it-yourself fire. And there you stand — "

  "Oh, go ahead and light it."

  I doused the coals with fire juice and lit it. It got going very nicely. This was going to be grand. By the time I'd mixed new Martinis it was just a little smoky in the living room. But just a little.

  Cherry was still standing by the hi-fi speakers, peering at something. "Oh," she said, "there's a little bug. A spider."

  She didn't sound panicky, so I walked over and looked at it. "Yeah," I said. "It's a hi-fi bug." I handed her the new Martini. "I, uh, haven't swept over here for a week."

  "Swept? You sweep way up there?"

  "I mean mopped, dusted — whatever the hell you do. Actually, I haven't done anything in this whole area for . . . Want me to kill it?"

  "Goodness, no. It's sweet."

  "It is, huh? Well, in case you were worried, I wasn't going to kill it. I don't go around murdering defenseless — "

  "It's a daddy long-legs."

  "It sure is, isn't it? Fat one, too."

  "Maybe it's going to have babies."

  "No kidding. Must be a mama daddy long-legs." I shook my head. "Dear, I'm damned if I brought you up here to look at spiders. In fact, it's the first time anything like this has happened. I will kill it. I'll murder — "

  "Shell? What's happening?"

  "I'm about to kill — "

  "No, I mean — look."

  She pointed. But I didn't have to look. It was all around me. Between us. Everywhere. Smoke.

  "How in hell can that little bitty dib of charcoal put out so much — "

  "Shell, it smells like . . . could your carpet be burning?"

  "Ho
w could my carpet be burning? I didn't light the carpet. Or . . . did I? No, I couldn't have. Hey, I think we better lay off these Martinis."

  "Shell, I'd swear your carpet is burning."

  "Well, the only place it could possibly be . . . oh, oh."

  I went over to the dandy little Japanese brazier and lifted it up, and looked, and said, "How about that? The damn carpet's burning."

  I'd used a lot of that fire juice, I remembered, and possibly a bunch of it had dripped down onto the carpet. Probably. In fact, that's what had happened. I started feeling mean.

  "Well, get some water and pour it on it, Shell. Get some water — "

  "Ahhgg, you sound like — I will get some water. Just keep your pa — hold your horses." My eyes were watering. Maybe I could hold my eyes over the carpet and put the fire out. "I'll take care of everything," I said confidently, "just as soon as I find the water faucet. It's in the kitchenette. Wherever that is."

  Shell, hurry. Hurry!"

  "Will you shut . . . I'm hurrying. Here, I'm in the kitchenette. . . . Here's the faucet. Hear the water? I'm getting it now. Just don't say anything. There. Here's two glassfuls. . . . Hmm. O.K., I'll get two more glassfuls. . . . There. See, the fire's out. Practically."

  "Shell."

  "Yeah?"

  "It's all right. I wasn't hungry, anyway."

  "Well, that's a switch."

  "Maybe we can cook the steaks later."

  "Yeah. Right now, why don't we go into the bathroom and get a razor blade, and open all our vei — "

  "Oh, Shell — that doesn't sound like you!"

  "You're seeing the other me. The real me. The mean me. Let's go into the bathroom and fill the tub and — drown ourselves."

  "Oh, it's not the end of the world. We can air the place out, and in half an hour we'll be laughing about it."

  "You may be laughing. Ah, it was going to be so grand. It was going to be so — fooey. Well, no sense just standing here strangling. O.K. Let's open the windows. And the front door. And we could at least go into the bedroom and stick our heads out the window, or something, until the smoke clears."