Joker in the Deck (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  It was a Saturday in June again, a week after the whole thing had started. Only a week, with the ugly memories still fresh. Even so, I felt very good indeed. For several reasons.

  For one, Jim had come through the operation in good shape the previous Monday afternoon and was resting comfortably now, getting stronger, and in a few minutes I could visit him for the first time. For another, I had a date tonight with — who else? With Laurie Lee.

  Eve was in the can awaiting trial — late Monday night Jim was able to tell the police she'd shot him — as were Lou Grecian and eleven of his "employees" who had still been alive when a whole boatload of men, including Captain Feeney, arrived at Brea Island. That's who it had been, all right, in the Coast Guard patrol boat. Captain Feeney had been along, but primarily as an observer; the men who came pouring ashore were U.S. Customs Agents along with agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

  It had taken Feeney and his men a little time to locate the spinach case which contained the can I'd switched, but when it was opened they found in it seven ounces of mashed bananas and one ounce of uncut heroin. Feeney had notified the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and from then on the L.A.P.D. stepped aside while federal agents took over. They'd piled into a Coast Guard boat and headed for the known source of the narcotics, Brea Island — and those two cases of "mashed bananas" which were still on the factory floor. Two cases, ninety-six cans — minus the one I'd lifted. Ninety-five cans, then, each containing an ounce of heroin. Ninety-five ounces, or nearly six pounds, approximately two and three-quarter kilos of pure, unadulterated heroin. And a hell of a lot of mashed bananas.

  The rest was anticlimactic, but one of the high spots of the night was the fact that Ed Klein and I got to return to the mainland — on a boat. No more planes for me.

  I parked the Cad in the lot of Drayton Memorial Hospital where Jim had been transferred from the Loma Drive Receiving Hospital, and walked through bright sunshine to the entrance. At two o'clock on the nose I walked through the door of Jim's private room.

  He was propped up in bed, not quite so deeply tanned as before, but clean-shaven, grinning at a redheaded nurse. "Oh, Jimmy," she was saying as I stepped inside, "you're awful."

  He spotted me and waved. The nurse turned and started out, blushing. I said, "He's better, huh?"

  "Better?" she said. "He's worse!"

  The door closed behind her as I grabbed Jim's outstretched hand and shook it. His grip was firm, and his blue-green eyes were bright.

  "Imagine," he said, "hard-boiled Shell Scott sending flowers."

  I had sent him a bedpan planted with sweet peas. "Better than a wreath," I said. "You look pretty good, Jim."

  "Be out in another week, they tell me." He shook his head. "I'm alive, but scarred to hell and gone. Bullets, scissors, scalpels, stitches. It will ruin me for strip poker." He scowled. "Which is probably a damned good thing."

  Jim knew only part of what had happened, and that had come at him in bits and pieces, so I went over most of it from the beginning, then said, "Incidentally, Jim, I think I know what was in your mind when you tried to tell me who'd plugged you. But I'd like to hear it from you."

  "Sure. Well, I opened the door — carefully, hand on the gun in my pocket — and saw Eve. Naturally, I wasn't worried about her."

  "Naturally not."

  "I gave her a smile, asked what she wanted. All of a sudden a gun was in her hand and she said, 'I'm not Eve, Jim. There isn't anybody named Eve — I'm Horace Lorimer's wife. And I'm going to kill you. I killed your brother.' She even told me how it was, the way she — " He cut it off.

  I said, "I can imagine. In fact, I know."

  "Well, she told me all that, smiling like an angel. I just stood there. I couldn't believe it at first. But, finally I tried to get out my gun, and wham! She shot me. I passed out, but came to once, before you showed up. I couldn't move, but I could think and I realized even if I got a chance to tell somebody who'd shot me I didn't know her name. The gal I knew as Eve Angers was undoubtedly going to suddenly disappear, maybe within the hour — and I didn't even know how long I'd been passed out."

  "She'd already disappeared by the time I talked to you, Jim. In a way. She'd checked out of the Claymore, and later met hubby at a bar. And she was scheduled for a seven p.m. flight to San Francisco." I grinned. "Which she missed."

  "It figures. Well, then you asked me for the man's name." He grinned back at me. "That shook me a little. If I told you it was Eve — and Eve had vanished — she'd get away with it. You wouldn't even know where to start looking. But I knew you could find Lorimer — and Lorimer's wife. Once you saw her you'd know the whole thing." He wagged his head. "What I tried to tell you was 'It was Lorimer's wife — Eve, but Eve's not her name.' Something like that. I just couldn't quite make it."

  "I should have been able to figure it out anyway, I guess. But I didn't until I actually found Lorimer and Eve together, and realized they were married."

  Jim mashed out his cigarette, a slight frown on his face. "Look, Aaron was killed because of the oil on Brea Island. They were after the oil, right?"

  "That's right."

  "Well, I would inherit from Aaron. I can understand they couldn't buy the island from me and then start drilling more wells, bringing in oil, because that would for sure have told me why he was killed. But what good would it do them to kill both of us?"

  "You told me yourself that day on your boat, coming back from the island, Jim. With both of you dead, the estate would escheat — that is, would go to the state. The executor might dispose of the estate in order to settle the claims of the U.S. and then California governments, and the Lorimers and Lou felt sure they could easily arrange to buy the island, either through pulling strings — of which they could pull plenty — or, if it was sold at auction, putting in a very fat bid. Handi-Foods Inc., of course, had the perfect justification for bidding big on the land. Even if that didn't work, they were prepared to forge an option to purchase — an option which would have survived the death of the owner and prevail against anybody else's claim. Or so Ralph Merle tells me. Besides, ignoring the financial angle, they couldn't afford to have anybody else setting up shop on the island, for oil or any other reason — not with the narcotics factory they had going next door."

  He nodded slowly. "What people won't do for money. Of course" — he smiled — "it's a lot of money. Incidentally, you told me about all the excitement out there and then Feeney arriving, but you never finished, pal. How much oil does it appear is out there?" He grinned. "On my island."

  "None. There isn't any oil."

  I thought he was going to go into shock, have a relapse, or a stroke, or maybe even get out of bed. But finally he simmered down and was quiet for a long time.

  Then he said, "The sonofabitch."

  "Yeah. That well was the old oil, all right, Jim. The joker in the deck. And Aaron stacked the deck. He was an oilman for a while, sure. But more than anything else, he was a con man. And that's what the well, the dirt-covered oil all over the ground, the greasy bunkhouse, the whole works was: a big, fat confidence game. In the old days men salted mines with hunks of gold then sold the 'gold mine' to the suckers. Aaron simply salted — or oiled — an oil well. A well which, of course, he never actually drilled. What he was after was four million bucks from a gang of crooks. What he got was a bullet."

  Jim sighed. "Maybe he wasn't much good at anything else. But he was one hell of a confidence man." He shook his head. "And he sure fooled me."

  "You're not alone, Jim. I fell for the con myself." I paused. "But the guy he really stuck was Lorimer. He sure did a job on him. Horace could have settled with the tax boys because he had a couple million in cash socked away, but the money was illegal profit from the sale of heroin, and he could hardly report that as income. Aaron showed him the way out, and all he asked for himself was fifty G's."

  I lit another cigarette, dragged on it. "That fifty G's was the frosting on the cake, to make the con look good. Man, it look
ed so good I'm surprised Lorimer didn't go semi-legitimate. What Aaron was after, of course — and what he got — was legal, unshakeable title to Brea Island. He leased half the island to Lorimer, the lease not including mineral rights. Not including, in a word: oil. Obviously, he'd dreamed up the whole caper even before he talked to Lorimer last summer. You might as well face it once and for all, Jim. Aaron never did intend to go straight, not for a minute."

  "He sure suckered me," Jim said. "My own brother."

  "Well, Cain clobbered Abel a long time ago. It happens."

  He was quiet again for a while, then said, "How in hell did he work it? And, by the way, how did you find out? You said oil was squirting all over the place and everything was burning like crazy — what happened?"

  "Well, Ed was on his way toward Catalina or somewhere, and I was about to follow him. Then there was this horrible glop, slup, burp sound and I turned and looked. I was looking right at the Christmas tree and the oil just went down to a little trickle — and stopped. I thought: Man, that is the dinkiest oil well I ever did hear of."

  "I still don't quite get it. Was it running from a tank on the roof or something?"

  "No, when Aaron pulled a con he did it right. We checked it the next day. He'd bought a big old steam boiler and hauled it over to the island. Dug a hole in the ground and put the boiler is it, then through a hole cut in the boiler's top dropped a length of well casing down almost to the bottom of the boiler and welded it in place. He poured in about a hundred barrels of oil, attached his Christmas tree to the casing and, through a separate valve on the boiler, crammed the air space over the oil in the boiler with air under plenty of pressure. Closed off the valve where he'd pumped in the air, covered the whole thing up with dirt, and he had a well."

  "So when you opened the valve, air pressure pushed down on the oil, forced it up the pipe and out the Christmas tree."

  "Yep. Hell, we still wouldn't know it was a con if we hadn't been so busy we didn't have time to turn off the faucet. Even Ed was nipping over the dandy well."

  "Aaron sure went to a lot of trouble."

  "Not trouble — not to a confidence man — but planning. Like hiding the Christmas tree, and oil on the ground — but not hiding it too well. Planning and effort. It cost him maybe ten, fifteen thousand dollars for the whole shebang. He was gambling for four million, after all."

  After a while Jim said, "In a way, Shell, I'm glad there isn't any oil. I'll build on that island one of these days — it's mine now, legally mine. And I'll build Paradise Island yet." He sighed. "To hell with oil."

  I grinned at him. "As a substitute, when you get out of here, we'll get oiled together. O.K.?"

  "Be my guest."

  It was almost midnight again, but a very different midnight from the one a week ago. The only similarity was that Laurie was with me. That was the same. Everything else was different. And my apartment was simply stinking with smoke.

  Laurie and I had hit some of the bars on the Strip, toured La Cienega, had a ball. But we hadn't eaten. No, I'd had plans. Hours in advance I had prepared everything — the chafing dishes and little alcohol doohickeys to bum under them, the cheese and french bread, steak, the works.

  And suitably, mildly inebriated, I had said slyly to Laurie, "Sweets, how about a late supper in my apartment?"

  And she had said gaily, "Why not?"

  It had started out marvelously. I turned the lights low and lit the alcohol doohickey, and the blue flames cast a very exciting light over everything. Up to that point it was grand. Then I started cooking. I should have known, I guess, the way my mush comes out.

  Stated simply, the cheese burned, the meat burned, and I burned. I couldn't even get the goddamned brandy to light in the glass. Finally I picked up a chafing dish and threw it clear the hell into the kitchenette. "O.K.," I said. "O.K."

  Laurie laughed, not at all disturbed, apparently. "O.K. what?" she said.

  "O.K. That's all." I glowered. "The hell with fire, anyway. I damn near got burned to a crisp on that damned island — pardon my profanity, dammit — and now, arrgh. I mean, O.K., we'll eat out. But if you order any stupid flaming — "

  "Oh, Shell, relax." She was sitting on my chocolate-brown divan, leaning back against the cushions, smiling delightfully. "I'm not hungry, anyway. Come here and relax."

  "I can't relax," I said.

  She patted the cushions beside her. "Come on, Shell. Here, by me." She moved a little deeper into the cushions behind her.

  "Well . . . maybe I can," I said.

  I found that I could, after all.

  And when I did relax I became aware of something I had never really forgotten: That this Laurie of the honey-brown eyes and devil-red lips, of the astonishing body and velvet sweetness, was something very special indeed.

  And that, when it came to fire, there was no need for alcohol doohickeys when Laurie was near.

  And that I was an absolute nut even to be thinking of burnt cheese and unlighted brandy at a time like this.

  And that, come to think of it, I wasn't hungry, either. . . .

  And a little later Laurie sighed and said sweetly, "After all, who wants a man who can cook?"

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1964 by Richard S. Prather

  Copyright renewed 1992 by Richard S. Prather

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN 978-1-4804-9880-8

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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