Shellshock (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  Exposé, now in its third year of publication, was headquartered in Scottsdale, and during its first year had concentrated primarily upon action in Arizona. Since then, the thrust had become national in scope. It was expensive, three hundred bucks a year, and available by subscription only, not for sale on newsstands. To the best of the Gazette reporter's knowledge, Exposé was itself legitimate, very professional, and performed a valuable service.

  He added, “I know and admire Steve Whistler, the publisher-editor. He's a go-go dynamo and a man with a lot of balls. Necessarily so, guy like that makes some heavy enemies."

  “I'd guess he would,” I said. “Their info's pretty good, then? Not just a rehash?"

  “Damned good. The Gazette's Arizona's financial newspaper, you know, and we've got excellent sources. But a couple times a year those guys break a story we've barely started sniffing after. They've got good people here in the Valley, correspondents in several other states. I'd say, judging by some of the stuff they've come up with, they might have a line into organized crime as well. Maybe even an undercover man or two."

  “That's ... very interesting,” I said slowly. “You got any documentation on that? Or names?"

  “No, this is just the opinion of one financial reporter reading between Exposé's lines. They've come up with stuff that wasn't available even to us, and we're not amateurs. Could be a lot of other explanations."

  I said, “If the publication knocks a company and its stock takes a dive, anybody knowing about the story in advance could make a bundle by selling the stock short. Other side of the same coin, they give a good guy a boost, any insiders—which primarily here means Exposé people—could maybe take a ride up with the shares. Any evidence that kind of thing happens?"

  “Not so far. Or if there is, I don't know about it."

  “They ever get sued?"

  “All the time, Shell. You intimate a crook's a crook, or come right out and say so, you're gonna get slapped with papers—at least papers. But they haven't lost any yet. If I was them, I wouldn't worry about lawsuits so much as I would about getting blown away."

  When I hung up the phone, I got Claude Romanelle's driver's license from my coat pocket, sat down at the small table again. My reporter acquaintance hadn't been able to give me any startling info about Romanelle or Frederick Keats, although he'd “heard about” Romanelle's being shot last week. Obviously he hadn't—yet—heard about Keats being shot by somebody last night. So I carefully pulled the photo of the late Frederick Keats from Romanelle's license. Something like rubber cement had been used, and its residue came easily off the plastic when I rubbed it with my thumb.

  And there he was. His face, anyway. He appeared to be more youthful than a man fifty-eight going on ninety-nine. High wide forehead, wedge-shaped, almost pointed chin, straight brows over large dark eyes—large, like Spree's.

  There was indeed a slightly satanic cast to his features, but he wasn't a bad-looking man at all. He really didn't look a bit like Keats when the two pictures were placed side by side.

  I passed the plastic rectangle over the table to Spree, saying, “Claude Romanelle's driver's license. I got it from the dead guy's wallet when I went back into the house last night. So that's what your dad looks like."

  She studied the small photo for a long time. “I like him a lot better than the man who said he was my father,” she said finally. Then, softly, “I wonder if he's still ... alive."

  “I think he probably is. Don't ask me why. I haven't put much of this together yet. But I'll do my best today to find out, try to locate him."

  “Have you any idea where to look, where to start?"

  “I've got a couple of ways to go. And I'll find some more. Well, I'll phone you when I can—you stay here in the suite, Spree."

  “I will. And you be careful. Shell."

  “Never fear. I'll be invulnerable now that I've had my coffee."

  I guess I was fully awake at last, because I looked again at Spree and, finally, really saw her.

  She was wearing low-heeled sandals, a bright banana-yellow skirt, and a wonderfully voluptuous white blouse, no “cover-up” this morning, and she was fresh, impossibly beautiful, warm, glowing. Makeup had been expertly applied. Her lips were red as strawberry wine, her eyes that middle-of-the-rainbow green, her golden hair combed with sunshine. She looked like the spirit of spring or the dreams of summer, and she took my breath away.

  I smiled at her. “Where were you when I woke up?"

  This one was bright on the inside as well as the outside. Besides, she'd been up for two hours. “I was out feedin’ the chickens, Paw,” she said, “so they'd lay lots of yaller aigs. I suppose you'll be leavin’ me, now all the chores is done."

  “Now all the chores are did,” I corrected her. “But I'm afraid you're right, child. Wish I could stay. Wish I could stay with you."

  “So do I. Maybe tomorrow."

  “There's always tomorrow,” I said, and left.

  * * * *

  The offices of Exposé occupied one wing of a small business complex on Hayden Road between Osborn and Thomas. When I parked in their lot, it was 8:35 a.m.

  I walked in through double glass doors under two-inch-high white letters on a black base spelling out “Exposé, Inc.” A long counter was before me, a hinged wooden gate at its left providing entry to a large room visible beyond the counter. At the rear of the room, along the entire width of the wall opposite me, were three separate offices, paneled in wood for the first four feet up from the floor and with glass extending from that point to the ceiling. From here, anyone sitting down in those offices was out of sight, but the head and shoulders of people standing could be seen. Only three individuals were standing back there, a very tall man in a white dress shirt open at the collar, talking to a shorter man in the central office, and a middle-aged lady in the office on the left.

  Between those offices and me were at least a dozen desks at which employees wrote in ledgers, studied computer screens, tapped away on keyboards, even used old-fashioned clattering typewriters. The entire wall on my far left was lined with six-foot-high green metal filing cabinets. It looked and sounded like a busy place.

  Behind the counter, at a small desk, sat a dark-haired woman about thirty, with bright blue eyes and a button nose. As I leaned on the counter she got up from her desk and walked over near me.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I'm here to see Mr. Whistler,” I said briskly, all business.

  “Do you have an appointment?"

  I took a chance. There were only two men visible in those three offices at the building's rear, both in the central or presumably “main” office. “Say, that's Steve back there now, isn't it?” I said, nodding past her. “Tall man in the white shirt?"

  She looked around, back at me. “Yes. If you'll give me your name—stop! You can't do that!"

  But I had already done it. I was through the little hinged wooden gate and on my way into the big room. The blue-eyed receptionist scurried to her desk and pushed a button on a desktop intercom about six inches from her already-open mouth.

  Just before I reached that middle office I saw the tall guy lean over his desk, depress a switch, and listen, undoubtedly to that open mouth beneath the button nose. He glanced into the room and his eyes fell on me. He turned back to his intercom, then his head snapped toward me again in a classic double take.

  I'd left my wide-brimmed hat in the Mercury, so my white hair and brows were just as obtrusive and visible as they usually were. That, plus my size, was more than enough to ensure that anybody who'd seen me or my picture could identify me with a quick glance, much quicker than the long stare the tall man—Steve Whistler, apparently—was giving me as I opened the door to his office, stepped inside, and came to a stop looking at him from six feet away.

  He spoke into his intercom, “It's all right, Helen. No problem.” Then he looked at the short heavyset man who'd been talking to him and said, “That's all for now, Bren."<
br />
  The short man hesitated, looked at me, back at Whistler. “You sure? If you want me to stick around—"

  “No problem. We'll finish it later, Bren. Out. On the double."

  The guy did what he was told. With everything else taken care of to his satisfaction, Whistler turned his attention, finally, to me. With one long arm he indicated an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair before his desk and said, “Please sit down...” He hesitated briefly, pulling at his lower lip with two fingers, apparently came to a decision. “Please sit down, Mr. Scott.” With that, he sat down himself.

  I perched on the edge of the wooden chair, leaned forward with both my elbows on his desk, smiled without an overabundance of joy, and said, “OK, you know who I am. And I know you're Steve Whistler. Why don't you tell me—just for openers—who Kay Dark is?"

  He raised an eyebrow, nodded slowly. “That's pretty good,” he said. “My information indicated that, as an investigator, you aren't too shabby, Mr. Scott. But I'll admit I'm surprised you asked me about Kay Dark instead of Kay Denver."

  “Why don't you tell me about both the darlings?"

  He smiled. “I think I will. But...” He paused, rolled his eyes up and to the right for three or four seconds, looking as if he was gazing at a far horizon, then came back to me. “I think, though, that we should first come to an agreement about a trade."

  “What does that mean?"

  “A trade of information. I can answer many of your questions. But I have a lot of questions, too. That's my business: questions—and answers that most people can't get. The way to get the right answers is to ask the right questions of the right people. You're the right man to tell me several things I very much want to know."

  “Like what?"

  “Glad you asked.” He grinned. It was a wide, pleasant, happy kind of grin. “By way of foundation. I expected to see you here—eventually. But not this soon. That impresses me. As I mentioned, my information is that you're a good investigator, unorthodox, creative, tough when necessary, you've closed some pretty big ones including two or three here in Arizona. But most important to me, you're afflicted with an old-fashioned integrity, you're honest. You might lie to protect a client, but never to protect yourself at the expense of the client—or of anyone else, for that matter. Obviously, you are seriously retarded. You appear to think there's still some virtue in virtue, that a man should pay his own way, whatever the coin. How am I doing?"

  “I'm not so sure about retarded."

  He laughed.

  “Go on,” I said. “I'm fascinated."

  “Well, as I told you, I expected you to get here, maybe in a week or two. Not so damned soon. You must have arrived yesterday afternoon, right?"

  That was his first direct—or, rather, indirect—question. I thought about it. Maybe he already knew, for sure, precisely when I'd arrived. Maybe not. But a number of people did know. The bad guys knew, whoever they were. If Whistler was one of them, my answering his question wouldn't tell him anything he wasn't already aware of. On the other hand...

  I nodded. “That's right,” I said. “So?"

  He reached for a gold lighter on his desk, next to a pack of Tareyton Long Lights, picked them up, and looked at me. “You mind?"

  “Not at all. Use them myself."

  He lit one of the cigarettes, slid the pack across the desk to me. “Go ahead, if you'd like,” he said.

  I took one of the smokes, ignoring the Surgeon General's horrendous warning on the pack—which I figured, in fairness, the Surgeon General should also arrange to have printed on hormone-fattened meat, pesticide-sprayed vegetables, polluted drinking water, nuclear power plants, the earth and the seas and the smoggy skies—and in the midst of my mental meanderings Whistler leaned forward, flicked on his gold lighter, and lit the Tareyton for me. In a strange, slightly uncomfortable way, it seemed that we'd almost come to some kind of agreement in that moment.

  He took a drag, blew out smoke, and said, “To answer your question, which I believe was, ‘So?’—so you can tell me if you are, as I strongly suspect, the man who shot and killed Keats last night."

  A lot of things spun through my head in the next second or two. If he was not somehow allied with Keats and Andrew Foster and the cowboy, Jay Groder—the only names I was sure of so far—then this guy's sources of information were stupendously good ones. But if he was so allied, that was a question he obviously wouldn't need to ask.

  I tried to keep my expression only mildly interested. But I don't think I succeeded. For one thing, my hand holding the cigarette stopped halfway to my mouth for a long second before I got it moving again.

  I took a closer look at Steve Whistler. I knew, from the fact that he'd been a little higher in the air than I when we were both standing here in his office, that he was about six-four, and I guessed he'd push the scales to about one-eighty, maybe a little more. He wasn't lean, but neither was he wide except in the heavy shoulders. I guessed his age at maybe thirty-five, give or take a year. The face was smooth except for deep lines curving from his straight nose down to the corners of his mouth, ending at pads of facial muscle that bunched up when he smiled. It wasn't a handsome face, but it was pleasant. And strong. He had a lot of slightly wavy dark red hair and oddly light brows over eyes an almost pastel blue.

  He was relaxed in his chair, right elbow on the desk, hand bent easily at the wrist and holding his cigarette, no evidence of strain. I got the impression of a lot of controlled energy under the surface of the man, power in reserve, like banked fires or steam under pressure in a boiler.

  Finally I said, “Interesting question. I can think of a lot of possible answers. Like, ‘Keats? Keats who?’ Or maybe, ‘Not me, I'm the guy who pulled Shelley's heart from that bonfire on the beach—‘"

  He winced. “I wish you hadn't said that. I'll just assume we're both fond of Trelawney. OK, how about this? I'll tell you what I'm sure you want to know. And then—if I convince you we're on the same side of the table, that we can help each other by sharing information and working together—you answer my questions. Fair?"

  “Fair enough. Meaning, if we get to that point, I'll then answer questions that don't compromise my old-fashioned integrity. And if my answers—assuming there turn out to be any—go no farther than you, nobody else."

  “I'll buy it,” he said, leaning back and propping one shoe on a corner of his desk. “Here at Exposé, we make it a full-time job to go after crooks, rip-off artists, primarily in the business and investment communities."

  “I know a little about what you do,” I said. “Not much, but I'm more interested—"

  “I'll get there,” he said pleasantly. “What I want you to understand is that we're good. I think we're the best private organization doing this kind of work—there aren't many. But we're also better than a lot of public crime fighters. You like the sound of that, crime fighters?"

  “Knocks my socks off."

  “We're computerized, hooked into database networks that give us access to nearly five thousand periodicals—newspapers, magazines, newsletters—which means access to one hell of a lot of good research we don't have to do. And we do plenty ourselves. In five minutes I can give you a printout on almost any sizable U.S. corporation you can name, most of the little ones, and a rundown on nearly everyone from their CEOs to the building efficiency superintendents, or janitors. Or a dossier on a private investigator named Sheldon Scott."

  I opened my mouth, but he went racing on. “Four former FBI agents work here, two are in the building now. Plus five former police officers, two of them with a combined total of twenty-six years in police intelligence. I pay good money to six of the best writers and reporters available at any price, including my latest find, Kay Dark, brilliant small-town reporter who rose to become the until-recently-anonymous crime reporter/author of ‘After Dark’ for the Chicago Free Times. You've heard of ‘After Dark'?"

  I hadn't, but I said, “I've heard of Kay Denver."

  “Then I have your attention?"r />
  “I'd say so."

  “Recently a man named Claude Romanelle was shot and wounded here in the Valley. We know that Mr. Romanelle owns a sizable number of shares in a company called Golden Phoenix Mines, a curiously vigorous mining company which is right here in Arizona, in Maricopa County. I have visited the site, and it is a mine, a mine actually producing gold, not merely a staked claim or a puffed-up paper description. However, the price of Golden Phoenix shares, traded over the counter, has risen from twenty cents three years ago to four and one-eighth asked at the beginning of this year, to about fourteen dollars now. It may go to forty. Most of that spurt has taken place in the last month fed by rumors and possibly solid inside information, plus in particular the release of a truly sensational assay report almost two weeks ago, of which assay I shall make further mention if you happen to be interested."

  “I'm interested."

  “I thought you would be.” Whistler pulled his shoe from the desktop, sat up straight, and leaned forward. “Now we get to you."

  “Good."

  “Well, almost. Soon. Exposé—which is to say, me, but also nearly everyone else here in the shop—is very interested in Golden Phoenix, for which the front, or president, is a slick-smooth, possibly dangerous man named Alda Cimarron, in whom we are also much interested. We're also aiming at a man named Sylvan Derabian, called Mr. Arabia by his fellow felons—"

  “Felons? He's done hard time?"

  “Two years only, and that more than twenty years ago."

  “More than twenty ... Arabia?” I stopped, chose my words with some care as I went on, “I recall something about an old Illinois case involving one Keyser Derabian. I think he had a brother named Sylvan, but I don't know what happened to him. That was all ... a long time ago."

  “I sense the dawning of a small light. Mr. Derabian—I'm referring to Sylvan now—was indeed the younger brother of Keyser, who expired in the slam. We may safely say, then, that both Keyser and young Sylvan were, those many years ago, associated with our mutual acquaintance, Mr. Claude Romanelle."