The Cockeyed Corpse (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I know.

  He just got here today.

  Here today, gone tomorrow. Did you see him with any of the hard boys you mentioned?

  No. Only when he registered, Shell.

  Another guy registered with him?

  No, he was alone. Why?

  There was another cowboy with him when I shot him. They were both, just for the record, shooting at me when this happened.

  Russ was silent for a while. Then he said, Come on. Well lay him out in one of the horse stalls for the time being.

  Which we did. We dumped him in an empty stall and Russ put the horse Hooper had been riding — a nag named Sugarfoot, it turned out — in his own stall. Then we went to Russs suite, behind the hotel and separate from it, and phoned the nearest office of the Sheriffs department. It would take the deputies an hour to get out here, but they would soon be on their way.

  We sat on a leather couch in his sparsely furnished but comfortable living room, and I asked Russ if Hooper and another man might have taken out horses at the same time, thinking I might get a lead to the second cowboy, but there wasn’t any help from that angle. A couple dozen people had been out riding, singly and in pairs, and Hooper had gone out alone.

  Finally I said, O.K. What else can you tell me about this Jeanne Blair, the dead girl?

  He got up and walked to a kneehole desk in the comer, rummaged in the top drawer, then came back and handed me a sheet of paper. Wrote this down for the police, Russ said. All I was able to find out. And I added there on the bottom what the police told me. Not much.

  There wasn’t much. Jeanne had been only twenty-three years old at the time of her death, home address an apartment hotel in Hollywood, occupation actress. Death accidental, due to a fall from horse. Nobody had seen her riding alone, that Sunday morning; nobody had seen her fall. Shed been found dead about ten a.m. by a young married couple out for a gallop, and Vixen had been standing quietly a few feet away from her body. Jeanne had arrived at the Sun and Sage on the previous Friday, eight days ago, along with four other girls and Ed Finch, the entire male complement of Edben Productions present. So Ed, apparently, was director, cameraman, and maybe even film developer for all I knew. So he was either non-union, or about to have lots of union trouble. I had, of course, met those four other girls.

  At the bottom of the sheet was a small list of films, most of which I’d never heard of, in which Jeanne Blair had appeared. As I was looking at them Russ handed me a photograph of the dead girl, and something clicked.

  The photo was a clear Polaroid snap of Jeanne standing by a horse and smiling, very shapely even in the concealing white blouse and dark jeans, her head lifted and tilted a bit to one side. I’d seen that face before, and glanced back at the list of film credits, my eye falling on Hang Your Clothes on a Hickory Limb. Sure. Now I remembered.

  As anybody with half an eye is aware, to the movie industry of these Soaring Sixties something nude has been added. A whole gang of independent film-producing companies has sprung up turning out low-budget high-profit movies dedicated to the proposition that the best part of a woman is all parts, the intent being to show as much of said parts as the law allows, and sometimes a little bit more.

  From the day when a photograph of an ankle clad in a black sock was considered an orgy, we have arrived at the acreage of epidermis displayed in such productions as The Immoral Mr. Teas, Once upon a Knight, and Her Bikini Never Got Wet. And, obviously. The Wild West. Whether this is an improvement upon the black-sock days, I’ll not say. But the films are very successful, and someone once cleverly said: Find a Need And Fill It.

  Jeanne Blair had appeared in Skin Game, Weekend of a Nudist, and Hang Your Clothes on a Hickory Limb. In that last one, she and two other beauties and draped their clothes on a limb and gone for a swim, whereupon an evil character swiped the garments, forcing Jeanne and the other girls to race nude about the countryside, the evil character in hot pursuit — much in the manner of Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy, only with much clearer photography. It was a lousy story, no plot — although the girls had very meaty parts — as I can attest, since I sat through it twice.

  And that, I recalled, was also where I’d seen lovely April. She and Jeanne had both been in Hang Your Clothes, and that was why April had looked so intriguingly familiar to me earlier today.

  There seemed no motive for murder in all this, however. Quite the contrary.

  I said to Russ, I was inclined to think this Jeanne merely fell on her head, but maybe your hunch is right — at least somebody didn’t want me to show up here today. Incidentally, who besides you could have known I was coming? Did you tell anybody?

  He shook his head. No, but . . . when Mr. Freedlander phoned I was in my room, but I took your call in the lobby last night. Someone might have heard me. I dont know. He paused. I didn’t even think —

  Never mind. No real harm done. Except to Hooper. Well, there’s probably nothing to see there now, but I’d still like to have a look at the spot where Jeanne died.

  Russ nodded, looked at his watch. I was about to leave when you showed up, Shell. The Rolling M is buying two of my Brahma bulls, and well be loading them into vans in a few minutes. One of them, a He’ll of a big sonofagun, busted clean through the corral and I have to shoot him. Come along with me and on the way back I’ll show you where the woman was found.

  Sure. Youre going to — shoot a bull?

  Yes. This particular Brahmas always been full of He’ll. He’ll probably hold up loading for an hour — not to mention tearing the van apart — if I dont shoot him first.

  That went right by me. Shoot him? Just for raising a little He’ll? That didn’t sound like Russ — but probably he was pulling my leg, I thought. So, O.K., I’d go along with the gag. Shoot a bull, indeed.

  We wont have time now, Russ said, but I’ll fix you up with some Western clothes later. Youre not exactly dressed for riding.

  That’s because I’m not exactly about to go riding. You know how I feel about —

  Dont be silly. 1ll let you ride Vixen. Vixen, ha —

  Because she really is the most easy-going mare on the ranch, Shell. If six-year-old girls can handle her — I dont care if two-year-old — — and we can’t go out there in a car. Come on. I scowled. Russ knew very well — because he was present when it happened — that the first time I got on a horse I wound up looking at his tail. How come? How in He’ll do I know? The damn horse tricked me, that’s all. But Russ insisted this was the only way, and in another couple of minutes we were at the stables again looking at two black horses, side by side in adjacent stalls.

  They looked just alike, both glossy black, except that the one on my left had a white patch or blaze on it’s nose. I started to pat the all-black one on my right, just to show I was a friend, and Russ cried, Dont touch him, Shell. He’s just mean enough to bite your hand off.

  I turned and grinned at Russ. Knowing how I am about horses, he was always kidding me. Then, CLOP! I felt the hot slobber and steamy breath on my fingers. That goddamned horse had tried to bite my hand off!

  I leaped a couple yards backwards, staggered, kept my balance. Russ was laughing, slapping one skinny thigh. I should have warned you sooner, he said. I’m going back to the hotel —

  He wont hurt you if you stay away from him, Shell. I’ll stay away from him all right. I’ll stay so far away — That’s Diablo, Vixens brother. This is Vixen, the one youll ride.

  The He’ll with Vixen, too. Very funny. I’ll ride Vixen if you stick your hand in Diablos mouth.

  Oh, come on, Shell, youre not afraid of horses.

  Who says I’m not?

  Diablo was looking right at me. Trying to hypnotize me. He laid his ears back, snorted and bobbed about menacingly, rolling his red eyes and baring his huge, sharp, white choppers. Why dont you call him White Fang? I asked Russ. How many people has he eaten?

  He chuckled, having a fine time. Hasn’t eaten anybody. But nobody rides this one — nobody can. Some have tried, some cr
ipples. Cripples? Before or . . .

  After trying to ride him, of course. Last one, Diablo tossed him and stepped on him and then kicked him in the head. Didn’t kill the man, but he’s never been quite right since.

  That’s odd. Why do you keep the assassin around? Why dont you break his leg and shoot him?

  He’s got wonderful blood; too valuable not to utilize; good stock. I keep him for stud.

  A dirty trick to play on a mare, I thought. But we jawed a little while longer, and finally Russ got me up on Vixen. It turned out to be easy; nothing to it after all. Russ mounted a gray gelding and we walked the horses to one end of the stables, where he went inside a small office. I saw him take a rifle from pegs on the wall, then grab a box which apparently contained cartridges. He mounted the gelding again, put the box in a saddlebag and slipped the rifle into it’s scabbard. It gave me a peculiar feeling. Maybe he really was going to shoot that bull. But then I grinned: the phrase shoot the bull was the tipoff. Some kind of gag.

  We headed away from the ranch, going north, first walking and then trotting. I did pretty well, except that I bounced a lot, and most of the time when I was coming down the horse was going up. After twenty minutes of this the thirty-three vertebrae I’d started out with were trying for sixty-six, but then we reached a rough wooden corral at the base of a low hill. Half a dozen lean men were near the corral apparently repairing part of it. A big enclosed truck was backed up against a wooden ramp that slanted down inside the corral. Russ dismounted, talked to a couple of the men. They pointed, and he climbed onto the gelding again.

  Come on, he said.

  We galloped off — that is, he galloped and I trotted — about a quarter of a mile and reached a group of perhaps twenty cows and one enormous black bull with wicked-looking horns, a big hump above his shoulders and a lot of loose skin dangling under his chops.

  There’s the devil, Russ said. Boys had him in the corral but he busted right through that tough mesquite wood. Strong as a . . . bull.

  No kidding, I said.

  Boys started fixing the corral and sent word to me. Russ pulled the rifle from it’s scabbard, got the ammo box and took some kind of slug from it, loaded the rifle and snapped it to his shoulder, aiming at the bull.

  Russ, I said aghast. Dont —

  Then the gun went spah. Almost no noise at all.

  I didn’t speak, just stared wide-eyed at the bull, waiting for him to fall over. But he didn’t. Instead he wheeled around and glared at us — much in the manner of Diablo — squirting air out of his big snorty nostrils and banging the ground with a massive hoof.

  After a few minutes Russ said, He’ll calm down pretty quick.

  I should hope so, with a rifle slug in him.

  Russ glanced at me, and really seemed surprised. He raised his eyebrows, and then showed his crooked teeth in a grin. He’ll, you didn’t think I shot him, did you?

  Unless something is wrong with both my ears and eyes —

  Here. Russ tossed the rifle at me and I caught it, then caught the box of cartridges which followed it through the air. The gun looked normal enough on first glance; it was a plain old pump-action rifle — I thought.

  But the bullets were goofy little items about the size of a .30- .30 cartridge, with a tuft of feathery stuff at one end and a big ugly hollow-pointed needle sticking out of the other.

  Keep forgetting youre a city boy, Shell. Russ was saying. This is a well-established technique in the cattle industry now. This heres a gas-powered gun — you pump it, like a BB gun — and we dont use bullets; but darts filled with drugs or tranquilizers — whatevers required.

  The He’ll you say.

  Yep, I do. A lot of ranchers shoot their cattle with serums or drugs or hormones. Like stilbestrol, say — a hormone, stimulates growth, fattens the cows up faster — which brings the rancher a fatter price in the market. I dont do it, since people will be eating the meat, which might have traces of stilbestrol still in it. But we do use the tranquilizer-filled cartridges — little plastic syringes, actually — once in a while, especially when shipping the bulls. Like now.

  I smiled. That’s what you shot the bull with? One of these little rockets filled with a tranquilizer?

  Yep. That wild bull now has a good 10 c.c.s of meprobamate, circulating wildly in his bloodstream.

  Well, he doesnt look so wild, I said. He didn’t. He had been furiously pawing the earth; but now he was merely patting it occasionally. He opened his mouth and let out a noise, not the savage bellow of before, but something much more like a moo.

  Thatll fix him, Russ said. He turned in his saddle, waved a hand at the men by the corral, and added, Boys wont have any trouble with him now. Come on, I’ll show you where the girl was killed. Or died, he added.

  The spot was about two miles from the ranch, on a well-worn path beaten into the earth by hundreds of hooves. A yard off the path near a stunted, crooked-branched mesquite tree, was a jagged rock, little more than a foot in diameter. Still visible on it was a dark stain.

  There it is, Russ said.

  Uh-huh. Only rock for twenty yards on either side. Pretty bad luck for her to fall in that exact spot.

  If she fell. He’ll, she was a pretty good rider to begin with. And I’ve told you about Vixen.

  Yeah. Shes Diablos sister?

  Right. Only difference in them is that white blaze on Vixens forehead. That and their temperament. And sex, of course.

  Of course. Vixen had certainly been mild enough while I’d been on her. I clambered to the ground and looked around for a few minutes, but there was nothing to see. Investigators — and then curious guests — had tramped all over the area since the accident, anyway, so I hadn’t really expected to find anything.

  O.K? Russ asked. I nodded, and he said, Lets go then. Youll give the place a bad name wearing those clothes, you know. I’ll get you some sensible duds when we get back to the hotel.

  When we did get back to the hotel the sheriffs men had arrived. There wasn’t much to it, surprisingly. I spent twenty minutes with one of the deputies — a heavy, sloppy-looking man of about fifty, who needed a shave and probably wouldnt have been ruined by a bath — going over my story and writing out a statement. I’d half expected to be taken to the sheriffs office for further questioning, but the deputy merely said he’d check with Los Angeles — and Captain Samson in Homicide there, whose name I gave him — and I’d hear from him again. It helped that Karl Hooper was known to have a record as long as an orangutans arm.

  The deputy had also been out here on the Jeanne Blair death. I asked him and another sheriffs investigator about their findings, but they had no more than I did; shed fallen off a horse, so what? Yeah, I agreed mildly, so what?

  A few minutes after five p.m., then, I was installed in one of the two fifty-buck-a-day suites, the Phoenix. Russ had told me a man named Simon Everett was in the other, the Tucson — and also that he was one of the three hard-looking men who had been at the Sun and Sage for nearly a year; the other two were Thad Gray — or my buddy, Tay Green — and somebody whose name I didn’t recognize, but whose description sounded suspiciously like Farmer. That I intended to check later, but at the moment I was admiring myself in the bedrooms full-length mirror. Russ had provided me with a whole closet-full of sensible clothes, and I was now almost as pretty as the hotels desk clerk.

  I wore a fawn-colored shirt and trousers, a wide heavily-tooled belt with big silver buckle, yellow-silk bandanna around my neck and with the ends pulled through a silver gadget which resembled a hollow cow skull: on my feet were white cowboy boots, and a white Stetson was on my head. I looked ridiculous. But this was the way almost everybody dressed up here, and unless I went along with custom I would — like the girl wearing a bikini bottom in the nudist camp — be the object of all eyes. And I was already the object of more eyes than I liked. So a cowboy I was.

  My suite was very comfortable — spacious living room with a small wood-burning fireplace, two couches and a couple o
f massive rough-wood chairs; bedroom with king-sized bed, dresser, big closet; bathroom with both bath and shower; and off the living room a small patio or Western lanai, enclosed by crooked mesquite-wood fencing. There were two ivory-colored phones, one in the bedroom and one in the living room, each equipped with a twenty-five-foot cord so guests could converse on the phone while wandering about the suite, sitting outside, or even, should one so desire, while in the john — talk about class. And it was all free, part of my vacation.

  I put on my gun harness, including the fully loaded Colt Special, then slipped an ivory-colored jacket of soft tanned leather over my shoulders, hiding the gun. I felt like a drink or two. Besides, Delise, April, Choo Choo, and Zia were supposed to meet me in the bar about six.

  And before I could face those gals in this outfit, I had to have a drink.

  chapter six

  The two wings of the Sun and Sage stretched out to the north and south, so the first rays of the rising sun would fall on the hotels face, and the two wings were referred to, not surprisingly, as the North Wing and the South Wing.

  In the South Wing, besides rooms on part of the lower and all the upper floor, were the main portion of the lobby, the card and game room, and a dining room the guests could use when they werent eating outside at tables fronting the hotel, or around the pool — or at one of the nightly barbecues held near another building called the Cactus Corral. In the North Wing was the Sun and Sage Saloon, a cocktail lounge with all the comforts of a Sunset Boulevard bar, but done in a determinedly Western decor.

  My suite was about fifty yards from the hotel building, opposite the end of it’s North Wing, and I walked along a curving path, headed for the bar. The sun was low, and the air was tangy with the ever-present, slightly bitter aroma of sage. This was sure a pleasant, peaceful hunk of desert, I thought — or it could be. But at one of the tables before the hotel sat three men. Two of them I didn’t know, but the third man I not only knew, I wasn’t likely to forget.

  His name was Dodo. At least that’s what he was called; I never had known his real name. He was a hood, of course, one of the musclemen whod muscled me. Formerly one of Jules Garbin’s boys. I was starting to wonder if maybe he was one of Hal Calvvin’s boys now. I had been developing some interesting ideas about Hal.