The Scrambled Yeggs (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I said, “Aren't you going to take me down to Pershing Square where you sent Kelly? Down to that statue of Mozart?”

  “You're goin’ somewhere else, brother. And you ain't very educated; it ain't Mozart, its Beethoven.” He said it like beet, Beetoven.

  I didn't think it would do any good, but I asked it anyway. “Which one of you guys did the job on Tommy Kelly?”

  “You're funny,” he said. “You ask more questions than he did. Now, shut up.”

  I drove slowly to La Cienca, up it to the Sunset Strip and past the Mocambo and Ciro's, following the wide curves of the winding road where the money plays and sometimes people get shot at.

  Jug wiggled the revolver a little when we were almost at the city limits. “Climb off Sunset. Straight ahead up Doheny Road.”

  We reached an unlighted stretch of quiet, dark road and I knew if I didn't do something quick, I'd never get another chance. I moved slowly and let my left hand rest lightly on my lap.

  Jug looked at me. “Both hands on the wheel, brother. Both hands.”

  I put my left hand back on the steering wheel. I'd have to chance it. And quick. The speedometer hung steady on twenty. I glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw the lights of the black job following closely.

  I took a deep breath and slammed on the brakes with all my strength and let the downward thrust of my legs raise my hips from the seat of the car. In the same, sudden movement, I slapped with my left hand for the gun under my left hip. I got my hand on the butt of the gun as the tires squealed and the car shuddered from the sudden clutch of the brakes. Jug's gun vomited flame almost in my face and the heavy slug smashed past my head into the window. He was sitting sideways, facing me, and the sudden stop threw him against the dash of the car.

  I squeezed the butt of the .38 in my left fist and whipped it around toward the little guy. I wanted to get him in the face. His gun was leveled again at my teeth and I was staring at the black hole in the muzzle. Before either of us could fire, the black Lincoln behind us jarred into the rear of the Cad. The muzzle of his revolver danced before my face and flame spurted out of its mouth again.

  I barely felt the burn of the slug across the skin of my throat and the faint sting of hot specks of powder on my face and neck, then I was pulling the trigger. I pumped three slugs into his chest from a foot away, as fast as I could jerk the trigger, and the little guy relaxed and sank to the floor of the car and died in a twisted heap, the back of his head still pressed against the dash of the car.

  The door of the car behind me slammed and I twisted my head back over my shoulder. My eyes seemed dimmed a little from the flashes of the shots fired, but I dimly saw the white blob of the big guy's face and snapped a shot at a point two feet below the pale smear. I knew I'd missed as soon as I squeezed the trigger, but the big guy dropped to the street out of the line of fire.

  I scrambled over the body of the little guy and dived out the right door of the car. I lit on my hands and knees, clutching the gun in my right hand, flipped back toward the street and slammed down on my belly. I stuck my right arm straight out in front of me, aimed under the frame of the Cadillac and darted glances back and forth under the car.

  An angry, red arrow of fire lanced out at me from the point where the fat guy had dropped to the street and I felt a bullet rip through the cloth of my left sleeve and slice through the flesh of my shoulder. I gritted my teeth, angled the .38 toward the flash and eased down on the trigger. I heard the solid smack as the 158 grain lead bullet smashed into flesh. I eased the barrel of the gun down and squeezed again. The slug ploughed somewhere into his fat body and I heard him grunt, then moan.

  I got to my feet, crouched and moved up beside the hood of the car. I felt in my coat pockets and dug out a half full book of matches. My left shoulder hurt like hell, but the bone was okay, the arm worked as it should. I ripped off one of the matches, lit the rest and threw the book into the street. Crouched behind the hood of the car, gun ready, I could see in the bright, brief flare of the matches the sprawling body of the big guy flat in the street. He was moving slightly, but the gun had spilled from his lax fingers and lay a few inches from his outstretched right hand.

  I walked over fast, kicked away the gun and grabbed him by the collar of his coat. I rolled him over on his back and hung onto him. His eyes were open, but blood trickled from his mouth and ran down the side of his chin in a black stream. The slugs I'd thrown into him had gone down through his shoulder muscles, probably penetrating his lungs or slicing an artery on the way down into the vastness of his body.

  I snapped at him, “Talk, you bastard! Where's that wired room where you take the suckers? Where'd you take Kelly last night? Who's the boss?”

  He didn't say anything, but his eyes blinked at me. I jammed the muzzle of my gun between his teeth without worrying about the enamel and hissed at him, “You ought to be dead. You might pull out of this if you spill, but, so help me, talk or I'll blow your brains all over the street.”

  I jerked the gun out of his mouth with part of a tooth and he coughed blood on the front of his coat He said like a man gargling, “Third ... Witmer.”

  “Who's the boss?” I yelled. “Give it to me straight or you're dead. Who's the big boy?”

  He stared at me emptily, vapidly, like an idiot. His jaw hung slack and blood glistened faintly on his chin. His body hung heavy from the coat bunched in my straining left fist. Whatever there was inside him that made him move and think and talk wasn't there any more. He was dead. They were both dead. And all I had was a burning furrow in my left shoulder, a burning fury inside me and a mumbed “Third ... Witmer,” that might mean something and might not.

  I kneeled in the middle of the street for a minute, then I got up and shoved the .38 back in its holster. I carried the little guy out of my car and draped him in the back seat of the Lincoln. I lifted the dead fat one out of the street and dumped him on the floor in back with the little guy who'd spit in my face, climbed into the Cadillac and made a U-turn. Third and Witmer. It was worth a look.

  I hot-rodded back down to Sunset, swung left through the Strip again and got on the Freeway headed for downtown L. A. and the Hamilton Building.

  In the office I took a look at the shoulder. It wasn't bad, so I wrapped it up and traded the bullet-torn coat of my suit for an old tweed jacket hung over a chair against the wall. I reloaded the .38 from a box of shells in my desk and fed the guppies some dry food—there was still a little of the shrimp dangling from the string in the tank. I rummaged around in the desk till I found a ring of keys and a pencil flash and stuck them in my pocket. Then I put a call through to the complaint board at headquarters, reported two dead guys in a black Lincoln on Doheny Road and was on my way to be illegal if I had to.

  On the four corners of Third and Witmer were a drugstore, a small neon-lighted bar, a service station and a long, low building extending down Third. The building was dark and it looked like what I wanted. I parked on Witmer and walked up to the front door of the darkened building. On the glass was painted in small black letters, “J. E. Moffet—Real Estate.” I got out my ring of keys and started working on the door, hoping Mr. Moffet, if he existed, was home in bed.

  The fourth key worked and I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. I was in a small office with one desk, one chair and Venetian blinds on the windows. I made sure the blinds were drawn and clicked on the pencil flash.

  The desk was as dirty as a censor's subconscious and empty as a dead man's eyes. Apparently, real estate was slow. A door at the back of the room led into a hall fronting three more rooms. I gave them all a quick once-over from the doorways and that was all there was in the building.

  I went through the rooms one at a time. Nothing. Not a stick of furniture, no wires, no speaker, no mike, no nothing. If I'd been given a fast shuffle, it was too late to get the right dope now; my informant was as dead as he'd ever get.

  I went back over the rooms and finally I found in the middle room, in the cor
ner an inch or two above the floor, two round holes bored through the wall. Right at the edge of one of the holes was a little curled piece of rubber like the stuff that insulates electrical wiring. Above the holes, about seven feet up the wall, a small metal hook was still screwed into the wood. This was undoubtedly the room where Kelly had made his fatal recording.

  But the place had been emptied and fast. It must have been getting too warm and guys as careful as these guys had apparently been wouldn't wait long to move if there was a chance somebody might walk in on them. At least I knew that some kind of organization existed and I was damn sure the two stiffs in the Lincoln weren't the brains of the outfit. But who was? And how did I get to him?

  I went back into the office, sat down behind the desk and in the darkness I did some concentrated thinking. I went back over it all from the time, two nights before, when Victor Peel had called me into his night club; through the business in Dragoon's office; the talks with Robin, Sara, Samson, Zerkle and all the rest; clear up to the moment when the two hoods had picked me up outside Mrs. Kelly's door.

  That was funny. I thought about it for a minute. The two goons had been waiting for me to come out. They knew I was inside, obviously, and were just waiting till I left to pick me up. I could have been tailed; I hadn't paid much attention to the road behind me on the way out to the Holloway Hotel, but that was a little screwy. If Dough-Face and Jug were the boys who worked over Kelly, they couldn't very well have been tailing me at the same time—and Samson told me on the phone that the Kelly kill had come off just before I called him. It would have been a neat trick for the hoods to finish with Kelly and then just happen to pick me up. The only person who knew I was heading out to see Kelly's wife ... Samson. But that was completely nuts. Unless maybe he'd let the dope drop to somebody else.

  I knocked ideas around for another ten minutes, then I got up and headed for the Caddy. I had a headful of ideas, a handful of answers and I knew where I was going.

  I parked at the curb and went inside. I didn't say anything to Maxine and I ignored Gloria's squeal of, “Scottie.” The red-nosed Charlie stood in front of the velvet-draped archway with his hands folded across his chest.

  I stopped and went back to the check room, on the way calling to Gloria, “Sit tight, sweetheart. See you later.” She smiled and nodded.

  I stopped at the check room, picked up a full book of matches and said, “Maxine, do me a favor?”

  She started to smile, then looked at my face and said, “Sure. What is it?” No hesitation, no questions.

  “Charlie. The big guy. I want him away from that archway for a minute or two.”

  She pushed her lips together and thought for a minute. “Can do, I think. Now?”

  “Soon as I get over there and start talking to him. Won't get you in trouble, will it?”

  She shook her head and I walked over to Charlie.

  He said, “Hi, shamus.”

  “Hello, Charlie. Back again. I think I'm keeping you in a job.”

  He grinned and started to say something, then looked over my shoulder. Maxine came up and said, “Hello, Shell.” Then to Charlie, “There's a plastered wolf out here giving me some trouble, Charlie. How about helping me get him out of the check room?”

  Charlie grinned and turned to me. “This'll only take a minute, shamus. Be right back.”

  I said, “Go ahead. I'll have a drink and check with you later.”

  He ambled toward the front of the club flexing his muscles and I quickly slipped through the archway. Nobody seemed to pay any attention. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, reached up and stuffed it into the buzzer on the wall, then walked down the hall and gently tried Peel's door. It was locked, so I knocked softly.

  Victor Peel opened the door and stared at me impassively from his ice-blue eyes. I went inside and shut the door behind me.

  “Surprise,” I said.

  He didn't say anything, just walked back and sat down behind his desk. I walked over and pulled out my wallet. I dug out the ten hundred-dollar bills and tossed them at him.

  “I'm pulling out,’ I said.

  He squinted at me. “I'm afraid I don't understand, Mr. Scott,” he said steadily. “What strange reasoning prompts that decision?”

  I leaned over the desk and growled at him, “The reasoning is, you black bastard, you murdered a nice young kid named Kelly.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  HE SAT behind his big, expensive mahogany desk and looked at me. Apparently calm, unruffled, but his jaws were clamped tightly together and the little blobs of what looked like fat at the back of his jaws turned into hard, lumpy muscle. He still needed a shave.

  “You're insane,” he said slowly. “You really should be put away, Mr. Scott.” One hand rested out of sight in his lap, the other lay on top of the big desk. His fingers drummed noiselessly on the desk, the brown, wiry hairs wiggling as his fingers moved up and down.

  I sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the desk from him and said, “No good. Peel. Not good at all. You fit and you're the only one that fits. It took me a while, but it came through. It started with just a vague, pointless wondering why you really hired me to check on Joe. Then, along came Gloria. I'll tell you why that was funny, too, in a minute.”

  Peel leaned forward till his coat was pressed against the desk. He pulled his lips back from the strong, crooked teeth. “I suppose you know this is idiotic, Scott. You're making a fool of yourself.” His voice was still low, deep and steady. “I've been here in the Seraglio since before four o'clock this afternoon. I couldn't have killed anybody. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave.”

  “Uh-uh. I'm not leaving. Not yet. When I do you're coming with me. And who said Kelly wasn't murdered at three o'clock? No matter; you know damn well you didn't have to leave the club. You just had your boys get Kelly—the same boys that were supposed to get me but didn't. The same boys you use for murder, for hit-and-run murders when somebody hires you to get a guy out of their hair.”

  His eyes looked more like chips of ice now than ever. He stared at me from under the straight, bushy eyebrows, then glanced at the door behind me and frowned. I said, “Charles won't be coming in, Peel. He's been detained. Just you and me, Peel. Just us, killer.”

  He glared at me a moment and said, “You must be mad, Scott. Go on. I may as well hear what you have to say.”

  He was still going to brazen it out. That was all right with me.

  “Stop bluffing,” I said. “I know the whole play: the kills, the lop-eared goons you had for trigger-men, the recordings. I even know about the Moffet Real Estate front you just finished cleaning out.”

  He shook his head. “From what peculiar recess of your brain did these preposterous ideas come?”

  “Okay,” I said. “After I got to wondering just why the hell you hired me, your luscious little chum, Gloria, really started me going, Peel. I got to asking myself why she'd take one quick look at me and suddenly decide I was Casanova and then get high on two silly drinks. I'm not that good, much as I'd like to think so. That reminded me you'd practically dumped her in my lap, set me up for a big party. Funny, that. Here I've got ten C-notes of yours in my pocket and another four grand of yours I'm supposed to be earning and you acting like you want me to play games. Not right.

  “More likely there was a chance I might turn up a little dope you wouldn't want turned up, and you wanted somebody on my neck I might drop it to. Somebody who might be able to get me spilling my guts, then relay the dope to you so you could fix my wagon before anything popped. Somebody like Gloria. There was a chance, a small one, that you might have had something there, but I didn't go back. She did what she could though, Peel. She tried. I just wasn't spilling.”

  I stopped and lit a cigarette while he watched me narrowly. “It's like this,” I said. “All you need is something to start you thinking, something that doesn't fit, doesn't jibe, something a guy wouldn't ordinarily do. Then you wonder why and you knock it around and finally yo
u get the idea. And maybe it fits. And you hang some more on it and that fits. And pretty soon you get it. By the way, lover. How nice was Gloria supposed to be to me? I noticed she had a picture in her bedroom. Hot number, that Gloria. Really hot!”

  That brought him out in the open. The muscles jumped back in his jaws and a vein I didn't know he had bulged out in the middle of his forehead and froze there like a miniature snake. His mouth got ugly and he brought his right hand up slowly from under the desk.

  I didn't move. There was still one thing I didn't know and Peel was going to tell me. He took about a second to get his hand over the edge of the desk, but it seemed longer. His fist practically buried the squat little .32 automatic that came up with it and pointed at my throat.

  When he had the gun steadied on my jugular, he squeezed some words between his teeth. “I keep this in a clip under my desk, Scott. Any time since you've been in here I could have squeezed the trigger and you'd be dead. I wanted to hear you talk. Now you're going to talk some more.” His finger tightened against the trigger. “Talk!”

  I didn't wait for him to say it again. I spit it out fast “Joe was putting the squeeze on Eddie Kash. Blackmail.”

  His finger eased up a little on the trigger and I breathed again. I kept it going, “You found out about it only you weren't sure it was Joe, and you had to know who it was. You not only had to know who, but how the guy knew enough to make the squeeze work. So far, all you know was that Eddie was getting squeezed and that was one of the worst things that could possibly happen from your point of view, the one thing you didn't want happening.

  “You're the hit-and-run boy, king of the kill racket. And you've got a tape recording on everybody who ever got in touch with you to hire you for a job. At first, I thought that was really tops in a sweet blackmail racket, but after I banged that around it didn't look so good after all. You've got a profitable racket, murder comes high. And there's nothing to use for blackmail after the job's done. You've got your dough. You could squeeze some more out of whoever hired you, but why stick your neck out? The more you mess around with the guys you do the jobs for, the more chance for a snag that gets you some free gas. In California, you get maybe one-to-ten for extortion; for murder you're apt to get gas on the stomach.”