Shellshock (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I thought about Kay Denver/Dark, too. And Whistler, Cimarron, others. And Spree; I thought a lot about Spree. But—aside from Romanelle himself—Andy Foster was, for a number of reasons, the person I most wanted to talk to at the moment, the reason I was prepared to sit here for hours if I had to. The cowboy, Groder, had been with Foster at the airport last night, and later at Worthington's; but only Foster had been at the Toker death scene. And there were a number of things about that scene only Foster could tell me.

  Actually, he was about the only lead, the only good chance, I had left. It wasn't likely I could get anything out of Cimarron unless I stretched him on a rack. A large rack, big enough to handle a full-grown moose. And Dr. Bliss, if not in fact “out of state,” wasn't available, his whereabouts at least for now unknown to me. The name Sylvan Derabian was just that, so far only a name.

  So I waited. Even though I wasn't yet sure how I was going to handle Andrew Foster when and if I got him. I supposed I would, as usual, just play it by ear, try to take advantage of whatever came down the pike, go with the flow.

  But at least I knew Foster was my man. And thirty-five minutes after I let myself in the back door of his condominium apartment, my man came home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I was sitting in the living room, at a spot where I could see his parking space through a curtained window. At 11:35 a.m. the red Subaru slid into that space and Foster got out, walked toward the condo with a ring of keys in his hand. He was bareheaded, wearing peach-colored slacks and an orange sweater over a white sport shirt.

  I stepped to the front wall, stood where the door would conceal me when it opened, pulled out the Smith & Wesson revolver, breathed slowly and silently through my open mouth while I waited for him.

  I heard a key in the lock. The door opened and Foster came inside. Without looking around, he pushed the door closed behind him, then took a couple of steps forward and stopped. I knew he hadn't seen me, and I didn't think he could have heard me making any noise. If he'd heard my shallow breathing, he had incredible ears. But he just stood there, looking down toward the floor ahead of him, starting to shrug out of his orange sweater.

  I took two long gliding steps right up behind him, started to jab him with the Smith & Wesson, but changed my mind. “Freeze” had worked surprisingly well last night; why change a winning game? So I leaned forward to get my mouth as close as possible to his right ear and yelled—not quite as loud as I had last night, but pretty loud — “FREEZE!"

  Four times now. Same thing.

  He hadn't known anyone was behind him, of course. That explained a lot. Still, his reaction was quite remarkable.

  He snapped his head toward me almost faster than a speeding bullet, and his eyes grew very wide when he lamped me yet again, and his eyebrows went up like jet-propelled caterpillars launching themselves spaceward from his head, and his mouth opened so wide I might have been able to put a regulation softball in it, if I'd had one, with room left over for a couple of hard-boiled eggs.

  “You're dead, turkey,” I snarled.

  Yes, I really snarled it. And even as I did it, I knew I was overdoing it. Maybe my uninterrupted series of successes in shocking the hell out of this guy had gone to my head. Maybe I'd begun thinking that merely the power of my word was enough, I wouldn't need guns anymore. Maybe part of the addle I kept putting into his noodle was bouncing back on my aura and going to my noodle.

  Maybe not, but something sure happened to Andrew H. Foster. It was not, of course, possible for him to get really pale. But his smooth brown chops did seem to kind of curdle, like when you pour soured milk into hot chocolate, and then his transfixed head—eyes wide, mouth open, brows sailing away—was sinking down, quickly down, almost out of my sight.

  He hadn't passed out. I think his knees just buckled, stopped doing their job, so naturally without anything holding him up he went in the other direction. But his great staring eyes—they, I realized, were what had made me think of hard-boiled eggs—never left my face even when the seat of his peach-colored pants hit the floor.

  After a few seconds he got his mouth closed, or partly so. Actually, his jaws were working, the way a fish goes when you keep him out of water for too long, or as though he was trying to say something but had no air coming out. Ah, two or three more tries and he got some air in there, and the word came out at last:

  “YOU!"

  “Yeah,” I snarled. “Me. And I've come to get you."

  Well, not at any other time in our whole conversation, neither before that moment nor after it, could he possibly have come closer to passing out colder than a frozen penguin than he did right then. I thought, if I took a picture of his chops at that moment, nobody would recognize it as a head.

  Only then did I become aware that his lower lip was split and puffed, the left side of his face swollen. But the time to ask him about that was not now.

  He sat there on the floor for a while, looking intently at my face, white eyebrows, short-cropped white-blond hair, and finally he said, “Are you this dude Shell Scott, or ... somethin’ else?"

  “That's me, all right,” I said. “And you're Andrew H. Foster, aren't you, Foster?"

  “I guess so. Let me think."

  “And you're going to tell me every single thing I want to know, aren't you, Foster?"

  “Tell you what? About what?"

  “Everything, Foster."

  He'd put a hand up to the swollen left side of his face and was slowly moving his jaw back and forth. Now was the time. So I said, “What happened to your face, Foster? Somebody slugged you in the last hour or so, right?"

  “Naw. Why would anybody slug me? It's just ... a boil. On a tooth, on my—um, gums. It's a gumboil. I'm swole because it's already starting to fester."

  “Listen, turkey, you start leveling with me right now or I'll slug you myself. In the same goddamn place, see? And then you'll fester faster, Foster."

  He gave me an odd look. “You hear what you just said?” he asked me.

  “Never mind that. Well ... I guess you might as well get up off the floor, Foster."

  “You mind calling me Andy? It sounds—friendlier."

  I didn't answer him until he got up off the floor and we were seated at a table—as it turned out, a table in the small kitchen, where friends so often gather—and he was ready to confess everything he knew. I hoped.

  “All right, Andy,” I said, putting the S&W back into my holster. “You know I saw you splitting from Toker's house. What you may not realize is that I went in there myself, so I know he's dead, and that you—"

  “I didn't kill him,” he said rapidly. “I only..."

  “I know you didn't kill him. What I want you to tell me is what you did with the note. And the gun."

  “What note? What gun?"

  “The suicide note. And the gun Toker used to blow his brains out."

  He didn't say anything. His brown eyes shifted from side to side, then focused on the table before him.

  “OK, Andy,” I said. “Or maybe we go back to Foster. Maybe we aren't going to be friendly anymore. I'm going to describe for you your two alternatives, the two roads you can travel from here. One road, easy, no problems, no pain, you tell me everything I want to know and you're home free, I'll let you walk. The other road, you clam, or try to con me or lie to me, and—well, Foster, I'll have to hurt you. I mean, in horrible, excruciating ways. So you should understand before making your choice that I am quite capable of violence."

  He couldn't know that the last part was baloney, that there was no way I could make myself pound on the guy, or break his legs, or otherwise torture him just to make him talk. At least, I hoped he couldn't know it. I was counting on the possibility that, having by now produced moderate to severe damage throughout his entire nervous system on no fewer than four separate occasions, I might have him conditioned like a Pavlovian pup: could be all I'd have to do was say “Boo!” and he'd babble. But you never know in advance how these things will go. All I co
uld do was give it a try and see what happened.

  Foster was nodding his head slowly. “You didn't have to tell me,” he said soberly. “If you hadn't practic'ly missed my whole head last night, I'd of been goin’ around with one of them Frankenstein plugs in my neck, assumin’ I was still goin'. Instead of haulin’ Jay down in the elevator, I'd of been took out in a hearse and a hat box—you know Jay didn't wake up till this morning? Yeah, man, you didn't have to tell me you're capable of dismemberizing me, or whatever you got in your intentions."

  “You're convinced, then?"

  “Boy, am I."

  “OK, Andy. Start with Toker."

  “Now it's Andy again, huh? I guess I'm supposed to be encouraged. Well...” He paused, rubbed his jaw, then said, “Straight goods? I spill whatever, and you'll let me walk outta here? I can get in my heap and just drive off?"

  “Not exactly. I'll be needing your car myself. I'll let you split, but you'll be on foot. When I say walk, Andy, I mean walk."

  “Huh. Gonna steal my car—"

  “I'm not going to steal it, I'm just going to borrow it."

  “Yeah, sure. That's what we all say."

  “Goddammit, Foster—"

  “OK, OK, hold it. Yeah, you got it figured. I took the note, I took the gun. But...” He paused. “Don't get mad, now. I'm gonna tell you. But—how in hell did you figure Toker blew his own conk off? And there was a note? Man, you're spooky."

  “No, it was obvious,” I said. “Except for the absence of both the gun and note, it looked as if Toker had shot himself in the head and fallen to his left out of his chair, maybe was knocked out of it by the force of the slug that blew off a bunch of his skull. He was shot at least once by somebody—himself, actually—while at the desk. There was blood spray on the desktop's left half, except for an L-shaped area where his writing pad would have been if he wrote the note there. As for the pad itself, it was clean, no marks. Maybe half the pages had been used, but there wasn't the faintest indentation from a pencil or pen. So somebody—not likely it was Toker himself—had ripped off the note and, sensibly, several of the blank pages beneath. There's more, but let's get on with—"

  “Hey, that's the way it was, it is how. That damned note was on the first three pages. But, man, there was two holes in his back. I know, I put ‘em there. And he'd shot hisself in the thinkpot clear back here, not up front or even in his temple.” Andy was pointing a rigid index finger at a point above and slightly behind his right ear. “How come you suspicioned a suicide shot hisself in the back of his head and twice in the back of his back?"

  “Andy ... Well, there was practically no blood on his shirt, just two neat holes and a little color. His heart had stopped, his nerves were kaput, he was totally dead when those two pills went in alongside his spine. I told you, somebody shot him at the desk. But not in the back, not if he was sitting in that brass-studded high-backed chair of his. As for your other point, a hell of a lot of people who shoot themselves in the head either don't aim at the temple or else miss it by a foot."

  “Miss it? How can they miss it when it's so close?"

  “Andy, if you're just trying to delay spilling your guts, I will find another way to spill them—"

  “Hey, don't—OK. I'm just, well, I'd like to know. I want to improve myself. I thought I'd confused everything perfect. Hell, Alda told me what to do, but I did it perfect. I thought."

  “Alda Cimarron?"

  “Yeah. You know any more Aldas? But, listen, how could you figure he shot hisself clear back there on his conk? How ... ?” He stopped. “You do voodoo, man? Is that how?” He nodded his head a couple of times. “Yeah, you do look like a dude who'd do voodoo."

  “A what? Andy, I do not appreciate your—never mind. OK, I'll end your confusion. I'll answer your questions ... which isn't the way it's supposed to go. But then, Andy, maybe you'll help me out a little?"

  “You bet. Glad to help. Anybody does voodoo—"

  “Stick your finger up there on your head again. On your temple."

  “This?” He held up his right hand, rigid index finger extended and thumb sticking up like a gun's hammer. “Like this?” He stuck the finger against his temple.

  “Perfect. Now, in just a minute, when I say ‘bang,’ you're going to blow your brains out—"

  He yanked his hand away, held it up before his wide eyes while he waggled his thumb a couple of times. “With—this?"

  “Well, just playacting. This is to be a demonstration of the ... the physical effects produced by vivid visualization, the awesome power of the human mind—"

  “Yeah, man, and they call it voo—"

  “Dammit, Andy, don't start that again—"

  “You're not gonna really make me do it, make me blow out my whole—"

  “Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. Dammit, do you want to do this or not?"

  “Sure. Whatever you say."

  “All right, put the gun back up there."

  He looked at his hand, gave one last little wiggle of his thumb, then stuck that stiff index finger against his right temple, a queer blend of resignation, curiosity, and sheer horror on his features.

  “Now, then,” I said, dropping my voice to a deeper and more spookily hypnotic level, “you are moments away from ending it all. Good-bye, cruel world. Your cock is gunned and loaded ... strike that. Your gun is cocked and loaded, you feel its cold cruel muzzle against your head. You are about to pull the thumb—the goddamn trigger—when suddenly, hark! It comes into your mind—which you will soon not have any more of—that killing yourself is going to hurt. It's going to hurt something awful. Maybe only for a little while, but that little may seem like forever while you're dying, while your brains and skull are blowing apart, and apart, and apart ... You want to do it. You're going to do it. Any minute now! Any second now! Ah, but how much, and for how long, is it going to hurt—BANG!"

  Boy, this guy had speedy reflexes. Simultaneously, he flipped his right hand away from him, as if flinging a gun at the wall, while both his feet came up and kicked the bottom of the kitchen table, which bounced into the air maybe six inches.

  “Andy, you went and spoiled it,” I said, disgruntled.

  “Spoiled? Spoiled?"

  He had both hands on his head now, and was squeezing it, probing it, fondling it. Looked like he was trying to stick a couple of fingers clear inside it.

  “Yeah,” I grumbled. “I wanted you to see yourself—"

  “How—"

  “I mean, become aware of where the gun was, and where your head was, when you fired."

  “I never did fire. You yelled BANG! And, man, you got a lethal pair of lungs. Like, last night—"

  “The closer you got to pulling the trigger, the more you turned your head away from the gun. You just kept leaning more and more. At the end there, your head was three or four inches away from the gun, which was pointed almost at the back of your noodle. It looked like you were trying to get your head out the door."

  “Let's not do any more of this. Why don't I just spill my guts?"

  “Now you're talking."

  And he was. After he'd spilled the first item or two, the rest of it got easier as he went along. That's usually the way it is.

  You just have to go with the flow.

  * * * *

  One of the first questions I asked Andy was, “Where's the suicide note now? And Toker's gun, for that matter?"

  “I took ‘em to Alda."

  “Why to him?"

  “He's the one sent me to find out what Toke was hung on. See, Toke was supposed to meet with Alda early this a.m. at Alda's house. Eight a.m. I think it was set up for. Anyways, he didn't show. Alda couldn't get him on the phone. Finally he calls me and says to find Toke and bring him back with me. I checked Toke's place first. And found him."

  “Why was Toker supposed to meet with Cimarron?"

  “Beats me. They don't tell me more'n they have to."

  “OK, what did the suicide note say?"

  “Wel
l, I read over it pretty fast, you understand. Even skipped some—with him layin’ there. I'm not too crazy about dead guys."

  “Uh-huh. So just tell me what you remember."

  “It was like—like a confession. He explains about doin’ the fake assay on the Golden Phoenix ore samples, sayin’ he done it for money he needed bad plus some Golden Phoenix stock, but lookin’ back it was the worst thing he'd ever did."

  I almost interrupted Andy when he mentioned “the fake assay,” but he hadn't been rolling long enough for me to risk slowing him down.

  So I held my tongue as he continued, “Then there was some technical-lookin’ stuff—I think it was maybe how he done the phoneying, and what the results really were, that he didn't mention since the entire idea was to make it sound plenty better than it was—but I skipped most of it there. Then he mentions he was sure gonna get caught, sooner or later, and some more on how dumb he was and there wasn't no way out. That when Claude was shot up, there at Medigenic, he started thinkin’ it was his turn to be next, that if it wasn't the police got him he'd get killed by the same people shot up Claude. And somethin’ about this Exposé bunch being on him, doing an interview, and it was all going to come out for sure now they were digging.