“No. He's never been in prison. Not quite. He was indicted for fraud back in Illinois about ten years ago, but was acquitted."
“What was the fraud?"
“Basic Ponzi scheme. He and some other promoters were selling guaranteed-get-rich courses at five thousand bucks a crack. The information wasn't bad, mostly copied from Napoleon Hill, Claude Bristol, Venice Bloodworth, a dozen or so of the classics. Without credit, needless to say, and changed enough so it wasn't clear-cut plagiarism. They guaranteed to pay their ‘Investors in Abundance,’ as they called the customers, twice their five-thousand investment if they hadn't made at least twenty thousand in the first eighteen months. The eighteen months gave them time to pay off some of the original investors with money coming in from new marks, but it was the guarantee and a couple other cute angles that got them into trouble with the Attorney General. Total of maybe five million bucks involved, and the end result was seven indictments, five convictions. Cimarron, as I said, was acquitted."
I took a look at the man's file again. Each of those Exposé “packages” was very complete, including from one to several photographs of the subject, plus dossiers, newspaper clippings, copies of police reports when available. In the Cimarron file were two photos of the man, one a copy of a two-year-old newspaper photograph, head and shoulders only, the professional lighting and background tagging it as a studio portrait. The other might have been the enlargement of a Polaroid snapshot. It was in color, and showed a large man wearing a dark suit about to open the door of a black Mercedes-Benz 560SL convertible. He was looking to his left, toward the camera, the dour expression on his heavy features indicating an almost total lack of pleasure at being photographed.
I estimated his size and weight, comparing it with the Mercedes coupe, which looked oddly smaller than it should have. “Am I wrong,” I asked Steve, “or did this guy keep on growing when the rest of us stopped?"
“He's big, all right,” Steve said. “He's my height—six-four—but I'd guess he's got close to a hundred pounds on me."
“That's pretty big."
“When I was out at the Golden Phoenix property, Cimarron was tramping around in snakeskin boots and white Bermuda shorts. Each of his calves looked like a full-grown midget, and his arms are almost as big. In those shorts, and a T-shirt, the man looked unreal, like those warped reflections in a fun-house mirror."
“So I won't ask him to arm-wrestle when I call on him. He doesn't sound like a real fun-house-type guy."
“He's not. You planning to see Cimarron, Shell?"
“My next stop, right after I leave here. I've got a couple of questions for the man that he probably won't want to answer."
“If he doesn't want to, he won't.” Steve looked steadily at me from the pale blue eyes and said, “I guess you know what you're doing. But watch out for this one, Shell. He's mean."
“I guessed that from his picture."
“Wait till you see the original.” He paused, looked at me silently for a few seconds, then said, “You'll agree you know a good deal more than when you came in here half an hour ago, right?"
“Right. You've been very helpful."
“That was the agreement, Shell. You've told me you shot Fred Keats, but little else. Anything you can add to that?"
“Yeah, there is. The agreement also is that none of this is for publication, none of it goes farther than your ears unless I turn you loose."
“Absolutely."
So I told him my story from the beginning, just hitting the high points, the facts as I knew them, but without details of no value to Whistler or Exposé. For example, when I finished, he knew I had come here with Romanelle's daughter but not where she was now, only that she was still “in Arizona.” And I left out any explanation of the cover story Kay Dark had invented to justify her contacting a private investigator.
Steve leaned back, hooked one long leg over the arm of his chair, and said, “Keats had Romanelle's driver's license in his wallet, with his own picture on it?"
“Right. And his own license beneath it—that's how I knew his name."
“Which probably means Keats, or whoever he was acting for, grabbed Claude Romanelle."
“Grabbed him or killed him. The main reason I came here was on the chance I'd learn something to help me locate Romanelle—if he's alive."
He nodded. “I understand that. This other guy who was with Keats last night. He said he was Dr. Simpson?"
“Robert Simpson. No such physician listed in the phone book, or known to the state or Maricopa County medical groups. I checked that before I came here."
“Describe him again, will you?"
I repeated my earlier description of the short fat guy, adding, “Dark horn-rimmed glasses, thick enough to indicate a pretty good correction, dark eyes, bald, fleshy under the chin."
“Sounds like Bliss. Dr. Phillip Bliss. Little scar right here?” Steve rubbed a thumbnail along the left side of his jaw.
“Yeah, maybe. I think so. But I didn't spend a lot of time with him."
“And you were pretty busy.” He pulled his leg from the chair arm, leaned toward his intercom, told Helen to have Weinstein bring in the Phillip Bliss file chop-chop. In thirty seconds General Weinstein materialized with one more thick file, placed it on Steve's desk, and vanished.
Steve opened the file, pulled out a five-by-seven glossy black-and-white photograph, and handed it to me.
“That's the guy,” I said. “And he is also associated with Alda Cimarron, isn't he?"
“He is. In the Medigenic Hospital primarily. President of their Board of Directors. But he's also involved with Cimarron as co-investor in a few other enterprises, none of them illegal so far as I know. We haven't anything negative on him in the file."
“Well, you do now. And I've another reason to pay Cimarron a visit."
“Watch yourself. The man is more than just mean, I think he's a little warped. And goddamned dangerous."
“I'll watch it.” I shook Steve's hand, and was on my way.
Chapter Thirteen
A couple of phone calls to Cimarron Enterprises and the Medigenic Hospital drew blanks. Alda Cimarron was not available at either location; nor, for that matter, was Dr. Phillip Bliss—Bliss was out of state, I was told. So I drove toward Paradise Valley, and Cimarron's home, without phoning ahead. If I was lucky, the big man might be there, and if so, I didn't intend to announce my visit.
The town of Paradise Valley is sixteen square miles of mostly desert, and a majority of the people who live there want to keep it that way. Each residence must be built on a minimum of one acre, and some of the big expensive houses sit on many times that amount of land—Cimarron's, for one. I had seen, in his Exposé file, a picture of the home along with a diagram of the area, so I knew the house was on a three-acre lot that looked like ten because the site was bordered by undeveloped land that wasn't owned by Cimarron, but still gave him more privacy, more “space,” than any other homeowner near him in that exclusive area.
The address was on Desert Park Place, and with help from a street atlas I found myself on Lincoln Drive again, going west and retracing, in reverse, the route Spree and I had driven last night. This morning it was an unusual and quite pleasant drive between Mummy Mountain on the right and the greater mass of aptly named Camelback Mountain on my left, past the Mountain Shadows Resort—where I'd once stayed, during an earlier case—then El Chorro, and finally the entrance to the Camelback Inn.
I rolled on by, aware of a gentle tightening of my stomach muscles when I realized I was no more than a quarter mile from Romanelle's house, where, not Fred Keats at this daylight hour—the police had probably completed their physical investigation at the crime scene, and by now both they and the corpse would be gone—but a thick smear of Keats's blood would still be slowly drying on that off-white carpet in the empty Arizona Room.
At Tatum Boulevard I turned right, then after half a mile or so swung left into Foothill Drive. In a few seconds I'd found Desert
Park Place, slanting upward as it rose toward the low hills on my right. Soon after I headed up the narrow road, I recognized Cimarron's big beige and brown house ahead. Part of the acreage behind it constituted the base of one of the little mountains or large hills dotting the landscape out here. The house itself was situated on a gentle rise sloping up toward the craggy hill behind it, and thus was higher than any of the other nearby homes. With what I guessed would be ten rooms, on three expensive elevated acres affording a spectacular view of Paradise Valley and Scottsdale, the property was probably worth well over a million bucks.
A gray cement driveway rose alongside the house and curved around behind it. On the far side of the house, beyond what I guessed was the property's edge, a dirt road, or at least a rutted path about wide enough for a single car or truck, slanted up the hillside. Probably access to some of those still-vacant lots for a developer or property owner; or maybe just evidence that adventurous high school kids had come up here at night to enjoy the view, and other pleasures.
I drove up the driveway, parked, followed a pebbled path that led around to the front of the house and ten-foot-high double doors there, poked the inch-wide beige button that I assumed was the doorbell. Inside, a softly metallic booming sound accompanied my pressure on the button. But nothing else happened, nobody appeared. I walked around the side of the house to its rear, where there was an oval-shaped swimming pool, more desert landscaping, a couple of chaise tongues covered with brightly patterned cushions. But no people.
A narrow pathway, made of three-foot lengths of oil-stained railroad ties set in the earth, extended from beyond the far side of the pool toward the rock-covered hill behind the property. And twenty yards or so up that path was what appeared to be a separate small patio, or at least a cement deck upon which sat a low white table and three white chairs, a large black metal charcoal broiler, and a massive wooden bar with a couple of bottles in view upon it. The whole thing was covered by a canvas roof shielding it from the burning sun.
The fourth white chair had been pulled away from the table, and in it sat a large man with broad burly shoulders. He was facing away from me, unaware of my approach as I skirted the pool and walked over the railroad ties toward him. From the size of that back, and the meatiness of those shoulders, I assumed the man was Alda Cimarron. His right arm was extended but hidden by his body, so I couldn't at first see what he was holding. Then he swung that arm right, body turning slowly, and I saw the gun. It looked like a long-barreled .22 target pistol, with something odd about the barrel, but most of the weapon was concealed from my view by the man's big hand.
He kept turning, as if tracking a moving target, aiming far to his—and my—right. I glanced in that direction and saw, thirty or forty yards away on the down-slanting hillside, a puff of dirt, got a quick glimpse of something running. Out here, it was probably a jackrabbit or rock squirrel, maybe even a Gambel's quail or roadrunner making very speedy tracks.
The man was apparently shooting his odd-looking gun, occupying himself with a little target practice. But I hadn't heard any sound. None at all. No crack of gunshot or even the muted spat of a silenced pistol. It gave me a queer feeling; it was odd.
He turned back to his left again, put the gun down in his lap, doing something with it. By then I was only a few feet from the man, and as my foot scraped on the cement deck he turned his head toward me, saw me, appraised me. He didn't jump to his feet, jerk around, say anything. Just swung that big head toward me, slowly, almost ponderously, and poked me with his eyes. It was Alda Cimarron, all right, and, man, those eyes were cold. Cold as a prison camp in Siberia, friendly as measles.
I stopped a couple feet from his chair and looked down at him. “Mr. Cimarron?” I asked.
He took his time about replying. The long-barreled target pistol was in his right hand, and he'd already lifted the loading lever, dropping the base of the bolt down and exposing the rear of the just-fired cartridge case. Deliberately, with thumb and index finger, he took the case out and dropped it onto the cement deck, then uncurled the last three fingers of his left hand, exposing three .22 long-rifle bullets against his fat palm. With his thumb he separated one of them from the others and, again with thumb and finger, gripped the bullet and inserted it into the gun's chamber. Then he pressed the loading lever back down but didn't push down the smaller trigger-cock lever. So the gun was loaded but wouldn't fire, not until the trigger was set—at least, it wouldn't fire if the gun was what I thought it was.
After all that, he said, “I'm Cimarron. Who are you and what do you want?"
The voice was low, rumbling, almost metallic like that sound inside the house when I'd poked the bell. The man was big, even bigger than I'd envisioned him. A more appropriate word would have been “massive.” He was wearing the same kind of outfit Steve Whistler had mentioned seeing him in at the mine, a white T-shirt and white Bermuda shorts, and Steve had been right about those calves. They looked like flesh barrels. But they fit with the rest of him, including the barrel chest stretching his T-shirt, the almost grossly swollen thighs filling the truncated legs of his shorts, and the thick muscular neck holding up the large and apparently unhappy head.
This guy had to weigh three hundred pounds, maybe even more, and seated in the too-small chair he looked like a weight-lifting Buddha suffering from aggravated constipation. He wasn't larded with muscle, as the phrase goes, but muscled with muscle, like a pro football guard or maybe a guard and tackle squeezed together in a large squasher. That big oversize head was almost flat on top, and bald in the middle, with a crown of feathery brown hair high on his forehead and wispy around the sides over his elephantine ears.
“I'm Shell Scott,” I said. “I'm a private investigator from Los Angeles, and I flew up here to ask you a couple of questions. Among other things."
“Sure you did,” he said, in that bottom-of-the-barrel rumble. His eyes were unmoving on my face.
They were strangely mottled blue eyes, not much warmer than chips from an Arctic iceberg, with visible red veins snaking through the dull white around the irises. Below the staring eyes was a large fleshy nose with flaring nostrils, each crammed with a small jungle of tangled hairs, overflowing and drooping downward like a comically misplaced mustache. Big square teeth that showed when he said “Sure,” slightly crooked. Flushed face, ruddy complexion. Thick beige-brown brows tangled like the mustache in his nose, growing together in the middle. His left hand was relaxed in his lap, fingers curled and cupping the long-rifle slugs. His right hand, holding the long-barreled pistol, rested against his hairy right thigh a couple of inches above the knee. The gun's barrel was slanted in my direction, but not directly at me. Not quite.
And now I could see what it was that had struck me as odd about that barrel. It was three or four times as fat as it should have been, close to an inch in diameter, which probably meant that the entire barrel had been enclosed within a larger metal tube. The way Cimarron was holding the pistol, I could see the dark neoprene rubber seal at the muzzle end. And I remembered the last similarly “suppressed” gun I'd seen, a Ruger .22 long-rifle automatic pistol that had been expertly modified by a gun wizard in Florida. So, though I couldn't see them, I could guess that inside the fat barrel was a series of metal washers, each with a hole in its center to allow passage of the original—but now perforated—barrel, and in the rest of the washer a pattern of holes and baffles to swirl expanding gases around and dissipate them. A silencer. The entire eight inches in front of the gun's frame was a combination of the original barrel plus an eight-inch silencer.
“Like what?"
It seemed such a long time since his last words that I had to think back to my original comment.
“Questions about one of your associates,” I said. “Claude Romanelle. And a few other things."
One corner of Cimarron's wide mouth lifted an eighth of an inch. In almost anyone else, I might have thought it was the start of a smile. But that heavy sullen face looked as if a genuine smile would
crack it down the middle and leave the pieces dangling from those eyebrows and the hairs in his nose.
“You flew up here just to ask me P.I. questions about Claude? Bullshit."
I could feel the familiar slow flush start creeping up my neck. But I said quietly, “I mentioned that I had some other reasons for coming to Arizona. But I'm beginning to think that's the main one. Especially since the longer I'm here the more questions I've got."
“Bullshit,” he said again. Then he repeated stolidly, “Like what?"
The flush was feeling a little prickly now, reaching my ears. “Like, could you tell me where Mr. Romanelle might be now, Mr. Cimarron? Like is Mr. Romanelle still alive, Mr. Cimarron? Like, have any of your friends shot him again lately? Like, where can I find your associates, Jay Groder, or Andy Foster, or Dr. Phillip Bliss, or Godzilla? Like that, Mr. Cimarron."
It all just rolled off him. The little bunches of muscle rose microscopically at both sides of his mouth this time, and I even caught a glint of light on the lower edges of his two front teeth. It was, perhaps, the most unenthusiastic smile I had ever seen.
“Beats the hell out of me,” he said. “It just beats the hell out of me, Mr.—was it Scott?"
“That's right."
It was curious. Strange. The moment we'd looked at each other, a couple of minutes ago, even if I had never heard of Alda Cimarron, I would have been certain he knew not only who I was but more than a little about me. And wasn't overjoyed by any of it. There had been, too—and still was—between us a kind of instant and tangible antagonism, something not imagined but actually felt, a perceptible push, almost like the repulsion you become aware of when you move the like poles of two magnets toward each other.
Shellshock (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 20
