“They don’t know about Strang yet, but the guy I shot was a local hood named Monk Cody. Hadn’t tied him to the two other men when I talked to Samson.”
Cassiday had tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and put the lid back on the can. He pushed the can to the edge of his desk, saying, “Well, maybe that’ll help. If the police already know who one of them was, they should be able to catch up with the other bastards. I hope they do it fast.” He licked his lips. “Last night was the first time … well, I never saw a dead man before—I mean, except laid out. Like for viewing, like at a funeral. Just dead … not dying.” He moistened his lips again. “You got any more surprises?”
I told him what I’d guessed about Regina Winsome, that the shots had been aimed at her.
“Crazy,” he said. He shook his head rapidly, poked his thumb into the pipe bowl, dug a lighter from his coat pocket. “Or maybe not so crazy. If those shots were meant for the girl, then they weren’t really very close to Lemming after all, were they? And his close but restless associate, André.… Never mind. Maybe the shooters were just lousy shots.”
“They aren’t perfect. Fortunately. They threw a bunch of slugs at me a little while ago.”
He’d flipped on his lighter and started to draw on his pipe, but when I said that he just let the lighter burn, then snapped it out. “At you? Why the hell? Why at you? You’re not important—I mean, you’ve never had anything to do with Erovite. You know, you’re just working for the Doc.”
“I know what you mean. But I have to assume they had their reasons.”
“Yeah. Man, if they shot at you.… I wonder if Doc and I should, well, sort of stay inside for a while.”
“Probably a good idea. At least till things simmer down. Incidentally, Dave, I didn’t have much chance to talk with you last night. André Strang phoned you, too, right? And I suppose he called from the church?”
“Yes, from his office, next to Lemming’s—there are several offices in the rear of the church. Told me to come down to the church. Didn’t say why, just that it was important. Of course, we know why now.”
“What time did he call you?”
“I don’t know for sure. Didn’t think much about it then.” He paused. “It was a little before seven, though. Maybe five minutes to. Services hadn’t started.”
“You get there very long before Bruno?”
“Five, ten minutes before Doc drove up. André met me outside the church, said Doc was coming and we’d have to wait for him. Then Doc showed, and you know the rest of it.”
That was about all I’d wanted to cover. Dave at long last got his pipe lit and said, “Come on into the front room. The gang’s there now—the Citizens FOR gang, I mean. Like to meet them?”
“Sure. Bruno told me a little about the bunch. They ever figure out what they’re going to do today?”
“Yes, most of it. This is the largest group in the country, you know, but it was decided instead of a big parade and all that confusion, only ten of the group—all gals, damn good-looking gals, by the way, best we could find—would march. Including an Italian girl, French, German, and so on—nice compact, cosmopolitan, and attractive selection we think. Should make a damned good impression. Some of the other members are going to picket the local FDA office, that sort of thing. Gals still haven’t decided all the details, but they’ve got a few hours left.”
He stood up behind his desk, puffed a few times on his pipe, then wiggled a finger and led me out of his den and up the hall.
I saw the girls as soon as I stepped into the living room. I simply looked to my left, toward the sound of shrieks and giggles and babblings. Well, I could forgive them even that, I decided, with a few added squeals and squeaks thrown in because though it was a feminine sound possibly permanently damaging to male eardrums it was above all feminine, and considering that from which it came, it could not have been otherwise.
When Dave said they were “damn good-looking” he had committed an understatement of wonderful proportions, for in that group was just about everything luscious, delicious, and quintessentially female discovered or developed by women since Eve first primped and puckered up under the apple tree, and each of the ten appeared to possess more of it than the other nine.
My eyes bounced over a wild-honey blonde, two flaming redheads, three umber-to-mahogany brunettes, two girls whose black locks were bright as polished coal and a third gal with hair black and wild as a storm at midnight, plus one platinum-tressed lovely with long straight gleaming hair even whiter than mine.
All ten of the ladies were seated on a big couch that curved around a low table, with a big vase of red and pink carnations on it, to form three-fourths of a circle. All of them seemed to be talking at once, and I wondered who was listening. Which possibly explained why some details were not yet firmly pinned down.
There were about a dozen men in the room as well, in separate bunches of three or four, talking. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Dave took me around the room, introduced me, then ushered me toward the squealing and squeaking couch.
As we neared it a marvelously shapely gal with plump young breasts and huge brown eyes—one of the redheads—was saying loud enough to be heard above the other comments and just plain noise, “No, no, that wouldn’t be any good, Ronnie, we probably wouldn’t even get on television. And we’ve got to get attention, make sure they talk to us, interview us, so we can explain our position on—”
The platinum blonde interrupted, in what I suspected—mainly because of her Swedish-looking hair—was a pronounced Swedish-sounding accent. “Yes, Dina, we should tell it how we feel about Erovite, about how we all used it and it helped us feel bedder, and even loog bedder—”
“If the ridiculous old FDA wasn’t all men, mostly tired old men, we wouldn’t be having any of this trouble in the first place. I say there should be a woman commissioner.” That was a black-haired lovely, about thirty years old, with heavy-lashed eyes and a low sultry voice. “We’ve got to strike a blow for woman’s equality at the same time we—”
“That’s eet! They all are men. I ’ave eet!” The other redhead, bouncing, excited, highly animated, and waving her hands. “All the televeezyun men, and newspapermen, all of the men we ’ope to anfluence, attrack, get interview wiz, they all are men. Zo ’ow do we anfluence and attrack men? Hoo! Zimple, we take our cloze off!”
“We god do dake off our glothes?”
“We take our cloze off an’ put on bikinis. Put on loose.”
“Girls,” Dave said.
“You were right the first time, honey. We take ’em off—but we leave ’em off.” The latest speaker, a tall and stupendously curvaceous black beauty—or, rather, chocolate-brown beauty, with skin the shade and smoothness of melting Hershey bars—went on in a voice soft as caterpillars curling up on peach leaves, “No bikinis. Nothing. Just what the good Lord gave us. Strip all the way and stay stripped. You want to attrack ’em, Thérèse, we’ll attrack ’em.”
“Ai, chihuahua! Hey, boy! Hot doag, Lula, I’ll do it, I’ll do it weeth you!” A warm-eyed brunette this time, silently sizzling, with lips that looked as red and hot as those scarlet peppers that burn you from your gums all the way down to your bladder. “I’ll do it,” she went on excitedly. “Chass, I will. Boy, will I? Bueno! We all do it, we all march desnudo!”
“Girls,” Dave said, “I’d like to—”
“Desnu—naked?” Another new one, a little over five feet tall but with enough curves for a six-footer and eyes big and dark as ripe plums. “Margarita, do you mean we should all march naked?”
“Chass, Ronnie—Sí. Desnudo. Totalmente!”
“Nudo?”
“Naken?”
“Naket?”
“Naked?”
“Nackt?”
“Girls!”
The lass addressed as Ronnie didn’t even look at Dave—of course, neither did anyone else—and continued, “That’s easy for you to say, Margarita, you’re a nudist. You run arou
nd naked almost every weekend. But what about the rest of us? My goodness—”
“Besides, we’d get busted,” said another. I smiled at that. This one was the wild-honey blonde, with eyes blue as the sea off Capri. “After the first block we’d all be on our way to jail. Who needs it?”
“Oh, Silvia!” the big-brown-eyed redhead—Dina, I gathered—said heatedly, “and you, too, Ronnie—”
“GIRLS!”
“We don’t have to march along Filbert naked,” said the brown-skinned beauty, Lula, who seemed to have been the first to suggest total nudity. She went on, her voice like warm fog rubbing itself dry on a velvet towel, “Maybe just up that little street, Heavenly Lane. Or we could even wait till we got clear to the end of—”
“Girls! GIRLS, HEY! HEEEEEEYYYY!”
“Dave, do you have to chout?” Margarita asked him.
“I’d like for you all to meet a friend of mine—of ours, Shell Scott. He’s on our side, and—”
“Good, we need all the help we can get.”
“So you’re Shell Scott!”
“Hello.”
“Hiyee!”
“Loog at him, will you?”
All that, plus some other comments I couldn’t decipher. I smiled and nodded and said hello and hi and hiyee, and, after a minute of fluttering confusion, had been introduced to all of the girls.
To red-haired plump-breasted Dina, sweet-chocolate Lula, short and shapely plum-eyed Ronnie, platinum-tressed Britt of the Swedish syllables. Then to a lovely little Japanese doll named Yumiko, with a face like a flower and lips like petals, who smiled at me and said sweetly, “Herro, Sherr.” To brunette Emilie, a recent Miss Germany runner-up who, in my view, could have placed second only if all the judges were Lemmings. And to redheaded, animated, rosy-cheeked Thérèse; soft and smouldering and lovely Leonore; silently sizzling pepper-lipped Margarita; and the wild-honey blonde named Silvia, with Capri-blue eyes, perfect, brilliant white teeth, and a mouth made, among other things, for laughter and smiles.
It was a remarkable group, a little UN with lots of pulchritude, and every one of the gals looked as if she’d been long overparked in the erogenous zone. More, each of them was not only beautifully sensual and vice-versa, but looked vital and healthy, crammed with energy, enthusiasm, and—I soon learned—Erovite.
After a little while longer with them, and a couple more minutes with Dave, I headed for my Cad. As I left the living room these ten lovelies were still talking and arguing and squealing about marching at least part way to the Church of the Second Coming in their stupendously provocative shapes alone.
It amused me. It was probably girlish fun for them to yak about stripping, strolling nude over the up-slanting green lawn, even perhaps to the very doors of the church, naked as jaybirds.
But, of course, they wouldn’t do it. Not really. Such things simply don’t happen. I knew that; I just knew it.
Which put me in the same class as the wizards who just knew the market was going up-up-up in 1929.
17
The next four hours were the only dull ones since Dru had rung my chimes the evening before. But after that and from then on, it got more than a little exciting.
I spent those four hours in a concentrated effort to run down or at least get a lead to, the two men who’d grabbed Bruno and Cassiday. I checked again with my two informants, phoned half a dozen more, prowled through bars and boardinghouses, talked to bellmen and waitresses, bookies, other private detectives, bartenders, and half of the crooks and ex-cons I’d had anything to do with in the last year. All of it for nothing—until almost four o’clock on the nose.
Even then the tip wasn’t from among the people I’d been questioning but from a man I hadn’t talked to for six months, who’d picked up word over the underworld wireless that Shell Scott was hot for certain information. All it amounted to was a couple of quick sentences from a small-time thief and small-luck gambler called Famous Brown—what he was Famous for I never knew, but that was his name—and it was the only useful bit of info developed from all the legwork and lines I’d put out. But all it takes is one.
I’d been unable to receive calls on my mobile phone, but had asked the operator to keep a record of the calls. When I checked from a phone booth at four P.M., in addition to some unimportant messages was one, received only minutes earlier, consisting simply of the word “Famous” and a phone number. The operator was puzzled by it; I wasn’t.
I dropped a dime and dialed the number. A male voice said, “Gilly’s.”
At first the name didn’t ring a bell, but then I remembered. Gilly’s was a small cafe with adjoining bar well out on Hawthorn Street in L.A., a couple of blocks from Figueroa. It was the kind of “restaurant” where a guy who ordered beer with his meal was considered a gourmet. The joint’s specialties were eggs, pork chops, potatoes, and ptomaine poisoning.
I said, “Let me talk to Famous. If he hasn’t eaten yet.”
“He’s inna bar.” Clatter of the phone being put down, or dropped, then a few seconds later, “Yeah?”
“Shell Scott. If you’re in Gilly’s, you must have lost the last pot, Famous.”
“And then some. This here’s the only place I can get credit. Like gettin’ a bargain at the mortuary, ain’t it?” He was speaking very softly.
“You come up with something for me?”
“Yeah, yeah. Lissen, s’pose I finger the dude you want, one with the white hairs in the middle of his conk. What’s it worth to you, Scott?”
After four hours of nothing I’d started getting flat, a little stale, but suddenly I was wide awake. I could have told Famous to name his price and I’d pay it, but the philosophy of the thief is always to grab more than he can carry. So I said, “Name it yourself, pal. But you shouldn’t have let me know you were at Gilly’s.”
“Mhuh,” he grunted. “Dumb me. Didn’t think of that. Dumb—well, it oughta be worth a couple C’s easy, ain’t it? Ain’t it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well.…” He burped hugely. It was apparent that he had not put his hand over his mouth or delicately turned away from the phone. Famous was not a delicate fellow. “There’s a game I can get well in tonight,” he said. “Gimme a C and I can sit in it.” After a pause he continued, “Dumb—I gotta have a C. But if I come up winners, I’ll give you back six—fif—forty of it. O.K.?”
“O.K. Where is this cat?”
“Right here. Out in the restaurant, I mean. Didn’t sit down to eat more’n ten minutes ago, when I rung you up. Maybe fifteen, no more.”
I looked at my watch, estimated the time it would take me to reach Gilly’s, getting a little uneasy. “The guy with anyone?”
“Come in alone.”
“He served yet?”
“You kidding? The dude ordered pork chops. Man, they got to cook it.”
“You make him?”
“Never seen him before.”
“You’re pretty sure he’s the boy I want, though?”
“Well, he’s got them white hairs, and a little mole alongside of his beak, like you mentioned. How many like that is there?”
“O.K. Thanks, Famous. In case he leaves before I get there, try to glim his heap if he’s in one, get the plates.”
“You mean for extra, if I foller him, don’t you?”
“That’s what I mean.”
I hung up.
I started to slow down on Hawthorn in front of Gilly’s, looking to my right for a parking spot, then tromped on the gas. A man was stepping through the front door onto the sidewalk, and he was my man.
Not only was the streak of white running back from the middle of his hairline visible, but no more than three or four feet behind him was tall and lean Famous Brown, determined to get into that game tonight. I should have warned him not to shuffle along behind the guy, burping on his neck. No matter, it was one of the two men I’d been hunting for. And it gave me quite a jolt when I saw him.
I guess I’d almost reached the
point where I believed I might never run down either of them, a feeling that they’d skipped, blown town. But there he was, looking to his left, then turning to walk briskly in the same direction I was moving in the Cad.
I swung around the corner, gunned halfway up the block and pulled left into an alley littered with paper, boxes, dented trash cans behind the sagging houses. Half a block down the alley, on my left, a dark blue sedan was parked. There wasn’t time to check it, but I backed into the street and straightened out facing Hawthorn, waited to see if the man turned and came this way.
He didn’t. He crossed the intersection and kept walking straight ahead, moving speedily. A bit too speedily for his determined tail, or else Famous had, unaided, come to the conclusion that he might have been pressing a little. By the time Famous crossed the street and started to step onto the curb I’d rolled to the corner and stopped close enough to his heels that he cranked his head around and gave me a very dirty look.
Then he recognized me and opened his mouth, and I winced, but he didn’t yell. Instead he stepped up to the right side of the Cad as I let the window down. I had seven twenty-dollar bills folded in my hand and I held them toward him.
As he took the money I said, “Forty back if you win, remember.”
“Man, I always lose, you know that—”
“Beat it. I’ll talk to you later.”
He faded around the back of the car. I could see my man thirty yards down the sidewalk, moving ahead—but suddenly turning to his right. There was a sagging two-story frame building on the corner near me, with a sign “Hotel Adams” in peeling gray paint over its entrance. The other buildings in the block beyond it were all smaller, ramshackle houses even more ancient and dilapidated than the hotel. The man had turned toward one of them, stepping over a strip of sidewalk bisecting patches of yellow weeds that might once have been a lawn.
I pulled around the corner, let the Cad move slowly forward while I eyed the house. As I looked at it the front door opened and a big man appeared, his bulk filling the doorway. Big and, unless I imagined it, not unfamiliar. But because he was there, waiting, I had no doubt he was the ape whose broad back I’d glimpsed as he climbed into a blue sedan—after he and his buddy had taken those several shots at me.
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