Dead Heat (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  If Scalzo was around tonight I wouldn’t have any trouble spotting him. He was maybe six feet and about my weight, with a high forehead that went clear to the back of his neck, very large gray eyes, and sort of pinkish eyebrows. I guess he’d once been a redhead before all his hair had absconded with his waves, and he had the fair, sun-tender complexion of many redheads. He had a long, narrow chin that seemed to dangle and he sort of kept his lips pushed together like a guy with his mouth full of spit. Whenever he opened his mouth to say something stupid I expected a bunch of drool to puddle out. You get the picture: no more charm than a hyena.

  He was a surprisingly mild and soft-spoken cat, but his purr could be deadly; he had claws. Without proof, I guessed he was responsible for at least two or three murders in the city of L.A., and numerous lesser crimes. Actually, most of what I thought about Scalzo was conjecture, opinion without evidence approaching proof, because the man was unlike most of those I considered hard-core hoods in that he was remarkably clean — that is, his record was. As a kid he’d done a bit for stealing an auto, but since then there’d been only one arrest — for allegedly fixing a horse race four years ago — and no convictions. He moved with “good people,” as well as numerous shady characters, drank and dined at the best spots, owned a good deal of property, and occasionally spoke at testimonial dinners for one politician or another.

  He wasn’t actually considered a gangster or syndicate man — except maybe by me and a few police officers in the Intelligence Division — but he had a wide acquaintance not only among certain political operators and respectable people, but also among the lower strata of city life, the creeps and heavies who pull the jobs, carry the guns, heist the loot, and bop people on their skulls. Some of the latter, undoubtedly, would be in the South Seas tonight.

  The club was on a corner lot. The entrance was at an angle so that it faced the intersection, and was reached by walking down a narrow path under a green awning. Australian tree ferns and a few scraggly banana trees grew on both sides of the path. Inside, I let my eyes grow adjusted to the dimness, then walked to the long bar paralleling the left wall for half the club’s length. Farther back, on the right, was a piano bar with stools around it, and the rest of the room — except for a small dance floor before a bandstand at the club’s rear — was crammed with little round tables. Four papier-mâché palm trees — thin, so they wouldn’t obstruct the view at show time — sprouted in the room like large, rangy artificial flowers.

  Seven o’clock was early for the South Seas — the show didn’t begin until 9 p.m. — and only a few customers were visible in the dimness, most of them at the long bar. I didn’t see Eddy.

  When the bartender stopped in front of me I ordered a bourbon-and-water in a tall glass. I didn’t really want a drink but needed something to play with until Eddy showed. Fifteen minutes later I’d finished the long highball but there was still no sign of Eddy Sly. And that puzzled me.

  Eddy was a good many things he shouldn’t have been, but one of the things I liked about the guy was that he did what he said he’d do. He had always kept his word, at least to me, and when he’d said he would meet me here at seven, I knew he had fully intended to be here at seven.

  Apparently he’d been delayed unexpectedly — assuming, of course, that he’d gotten out of his room in the first place. If he’d fallen asleep with a sock in his hand, Eddy was going to be damned rudely awakened.

  I slid off my stool, went out the club’s entrance, and trotted to my Cad. Two minutes later I’d parked in the lot next to the Gable Hotel and was taking the stairs three at a time to the third floor. Eddy’s room was 304. I stopped in front of it, raised my hand to knock — and stopped. There were muffled sounds from inside, not the sounds of a man tossing in his sleep. And there were soft voices, more than one. Then there was a solid smack, unmistakably the sound of a hand or fist striking flesh.

  I felt the muscles tensing in my back, thigh tendons tightening. I pulled the .38 from under my coat, put a hand on the doorknob, and turned it easily. The door was locked. And suddenly all sound inside the room stopped.

  Somebody in there must have noticed the knob turning.

  The rest of it I did without much thought; it just happened.

  Whoever was inside the room already knew somebody was standing in the hallway. So I knocked a jazzy tattoo on the door and stepped back to the middle of the hallway, saying, “Hey, Eddy, you home?” and then lunged forward, slamming my right foot against the door near the lock. The jar ran from my heel up to my spine and kind of lifted my head a little, but the wood splintered and the door flew open. My momentum carried me into the room, bent forward and stumbling. There was a lot of movement in the room right then, but for a moment it was all sharp and clear in my eyes.

  On the bed at my left sprawled Eddy Sly, his face raised toward me — a puffed and bloody face. Redness glistening from his nose to his chin made his mouth look like hamburger drowned in ketchup. Near him stood a short wide-shouldered stocky man half turned toward me. A second man was at the right side of the room, his body half out an open window, feet touching the fire-escape. I got a quick, vivid impression of black-browed dark eyes, a sharp nose, thick lips with an angled red scar in the upper one. In his right hand he held a heavy automatic pistol. The gun was aimed toward the floor but as I burst in he flipped it up toward me.

  I let my weight drop, trying to grab the carpet as the automatic blasted, the sound so loud it was almost like a solid blow. Before I hit the floor something slapped my hip, then my chin and chest bounced on the carpet. As I skidded forward I got my right arm stuck out toward the window and fired twice, rolling onto my side. I didn’t even hit the window, much less the man scrambling backward out of it; both my slugs smacked into the plastered wall. I rolled completely over, came up onto my knees.

  The man near the bed was in a slight crouch now. His hand came away from his hip, light glancing from metal. The gun was pointed at my body, the man’s elbow pressed against his right hip, when I fired. He was good enough, and fast, but not quite fast enough.

  I fired three times. I saw his left ear disintegrate, part of it suddenly gone; then I saw a hole leap into his left cheek. His head snapped back. My third slug tore into the soft flesh beneath his chin, then sliced through his brain and hit the solid bone of his skull. He straightened, was lifted upward two or three inches, as if he’d been hit by a hammer.

  He seemed to hang there, like a man suspended from a hook. I snapped my gun toward the window and fired again. My aim was better, much better than before; only nobody was there. I heard the clatter of feet on the fire escape’s metal rungs. On my left the man I’d shot was falling. I jerked my head back in time to see him crumple, almost gently, to the floor. There didn’t seem to be any sound at all now, just the memory of shockingly loud gunshots.

  Eddy stared at me and moved a hand — very slowly, it seemed — over the smear of blood on his mouth. I jumped to the window, leaned out. I heard him running before I saw him. A big man in tan jacket, brown trousers, bareheaded, racing toward a car parked at the alley’s end. I sighted over the Colt’s short barrel, aimed at the middle of the tan jacket, and squeezed the trigger. Only a click this time. The gun was empty. He jumped into the car, a gray Chrysler, and was gone. I didn’t get the license number. I’d never seen the man before. But I’d know that face if I saw it again.

  I pulled my head back into the room, stuck my empty gun into its clamshell holster, walked over to the bed. Eddy was sitting up now. He wore a gray suit, white shirt, stringy blue tie. Blood smeared the tie and stained the white shirt.

  “Waowoo,” he said.

  His left hand rested in his lap, two of the fingers twisted, obviously broken. The whiteness of snapped bone showed through the torn flesh of his second finger.

  “Eddy,” I said, “you all right? You O.K.?”

  He ran his good hand over his mouth again, smearing away most of the blood. Then he looked straight at me, scowling, and said, “
What in hell kind of question is that?”

  I grinned. It wasn’t the kindest thing to do under the circumstances, but Eddy’s remark snapped the tension in me. Eddy’s characteristic — almost healthy — comment shifted time and space back to normal.

  “Boy,” Eddy went on, “am I sick! Man, they beat hell out of me. I know I got internal injuries. I can feel somethin’ oozin’ around my spleen. . . .”

  I let him talk. If Eddy was moaning about his fatal wounds, it was at least eight to five that he had no fatal wounds. So now I took another look at the dead man, wondering.

  Wondering about a lot of things. Because, though I hadn’t known the guy who’d beat it out through the window, I knew the guy who’d left through the top of his skull. He had a macerated ear, a hole in his cheek, and a cave furrowed through his brain, but the features were unmistakably the same.

  The guy Doody had called Foster.

  Foster, the stubby cat who had almost bumped into me when I’d first seen him, when he’d been leaving Matthew Wyndham’s office in such a hurry.

  Odd, it was. Three times I’d seen him, and each time he had gawked at me with an expression of vast surprise — when he’d burst from Wyndham’s office, when he’d eyeballed me at the phone booth, and finally just now when I’d crashed through Eddy’s door. From the birth of our acquaintance to its death, surprise, surprise, surprise.

  I had, of course, wondered why; maybe now I was getting an inkling.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I’d put in a call to the complaint board, told my story, and asked that an ambulance be sent to the Gable Hotel. A call would be out on the gray Chrysler, but I didn’t expect any help there.

  In the meantime Eddy had washed his face, and except for a split lip and several lumps, plus the two broken fingers, he seemed little worse than usual.

  I said, “What happened, Eddy? All of it, from the beginning.”

  “I come back here about quarter to seven,” he said. “Was gonna put on my good rags before going to the South Seas. Them muzzlers was here waitin’ for me.”

  “You know them?”

  “Don’t know this creep,” he said, nodding toward the man on the floor, “but the other bird is a butcher been hangin’ around with Scalzo and his boys the last couple months. Don’t know what he’s called.”

  “Scalzo, huh? That’s interesting. What’d they want?”

  “That’s the kicker. They wanted to know what you wanted.”

  “How’d they know I’d been talking to you, Eddy? You didn’t accidentally let that drop to anybody this afternoon, did you?”

  “You think I’m nuts or somethin’? After you was here I hit some of the joints, and sat around in Casey’s book for a while, jawed with some of the boys. But I sure as hell didn’t mention you.” He touched his lips, then probed various portions of his anatomy, grimacing and making weak sounds. “First damn thing them two muzzlers asks me when I got back here — after they bashed me a couple times — was what you was talkin’ to me about, what was it you’d been after. And, bang, right off the bat, they asks me if you’d mentioned John Kay.”

  “Had you dropped his name to them, Eddy?”

  “I hadn’t said a peep but ‘ow’ till then. They asked me who you were working for, and if it was somebody called Gabriel Rothstein — who I never heard of. Well, Scott, about then I told them everything they wanted to know, and maybe even made up some. As long as I was talking they stopped pounding on me. So we got no secrets from those boys — the one left, anyways. I’m sorry — ”

  “Never mind that, Eddy. Just give me the rest of it.”

  “Well, I spilled my guts, kidneys, and gall bladder, and they kept asking me more, and finally they says, ‘did Scott say anything about Ardis Ames?’”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I said. I said, ‘Who?’ and they said, ‘Ardis Ames, goddamn you, you fink,’ and unpleasant things like that, and I said, ‘Man, you got me hung on one I can’t get off of, I never heard of the bag.’ So they dropped that, and tried to tear off a couple of my fingers, and started over the whole bit again. I had begun to fear for my knockers when you come flyin’ through the door like Peter Pan.” He groaned again and said, “I feel faint. I think I’m dyin’, Scott. I think I’m startin’ to go. . . .”

  “Hang on, Eddy. I can hear the siren now.” The unearthly wail was faint, but getting louder.

  “I guess I’ll have to go to the hospital, huh?” he said hopefully.

  “Oh, sure. You’ll have to get those fingers set, if nothing else.”

  “What do you mean, if nothing else? Man, I’ll bet they got to operate. Every time I check into a hospital, the docs shake their heads and say, ‘Well, we’re gonna have to operate,’ like they’ll lose their license to practice if they don’t get some of my insides out.” He shook his head sadly. “There ain’t much left in me, though, I’ll tell you. Not any more. The sawbones done everything to me but take out my female organs — and I think they hunted for them. Scott, one doc was even tryin’ to cut off my hypochondria. I told him, you lay one hand on it and I’ll — ”

  “Eddy,” I interrupted, “have you told me all that happened with those two guys?”

  “Yeah, you got it.”

  “How about earlier? You pick anything off the wire?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “That’s pretty good. If Foster and his pal had left you alone, I’d still be in the dark. But instead they spread a little light, for which I thank the live one and the dead one.”

  “You mean their comin’ here and half murdering me helped you out?”

  “It helped plenty.”

  “That’s nice. That’s wonderful. I’ll go get myself killed so you’ll be real happy — ”

  “You know what I mean. I’ll make this up to you, Eddy.”

  I’d been sitting on the side of the bed. Now I stood up and said, “Oof. What the hell?” I had experienced a sharp shooting pain where people sometimes get sharp shooting pains. I clapped a hand to my hip and it came away with blood on the fingers.

  Just sitting talking to Eddy I hadn’t felt any pain, but now I remembered that first shot from the guy in the window and something slapping my hip. It had, of course, been the bullet from the man’s gun.

  “Yeah,” Eddy said. “I got to admit you sure stuck your neck out, coming in here like that.” He chuckled. “How about that? You stuck your neck out and got shot in the — ”

  He stopped as feet pounded down the hallway outside. The siren had sighed to a stop a few seconds earlier; this would be the police, and ambulance attendants.

  The wound Eddy had been referring to wasn’t serious, and would hardly affect my walking. But it was damned embarrassing. And that black-browed, scar-lipped slob was going to be mightily embarrassed when I caught up with him.

  I opened the door and let the people in.

  When the routine was about finished, and Eddy was preparing to leave for Central Receiving Hospital — and I had a neat bandage covering my embarrassment — I said to him, “Thanks again, Eddy. I’ll check with you later. Seriously, how do you feel now? Think you’re going to be all right?”

  He considered the question soberly, mentally rummaging around from point to point inside himself, then looked at me. “I guess so, Scott.” He sighed. “I guess there’s always a chance of livin’, as long as you’re still dyin’.”

  I grinned at him. “Spoken like a true optimist,” I said, and left.

  * * *

  When you drive from L.A. out Beverly Boulevard, just before you reach the Beverly Hills city limits you come to several acres of green lawn and lavishly landscaped grounds, in the midst of which is a large, low, white building set back about a hundred yards from the street. That is the Beverly Club, which will welcome anybody as a member — if he is in the painful tax brackets, is nominated by three members, is not blackballed by anybody, and welcomes the opportunity to pay an initiation fee of four thousand dollars and dues of five hun
dred clams a year. It may amuse you to know that I’d never even been this close to the place before. This close being the white-cement driveway, headed for the entrance.

  In talking to Doody over our prime ribs and crab Louie, part of the idle conversation had been about Matthew Wyndham, and his comment that he was taking his wife to a dinner-dance at the club. Doody had mentioned that his club was the Beverly, which explained why I was here for the first time in my life.

  I left the Cad with an attendant near the club’s entrance, walked up three wide steps and along a petunia-bordered path to enormous double doors with a carved letter B on each, through them and into the murmuring, heady richness of the Inside of the Beverly Club. Music floated in the air — a lot of strings and muted brass playing “How About You?” I walked ahead over spongy carpet, down a short hallway, and into a large room.

  On my right was a bar, curving around the corner and out of sight. Farther right I could see the edge of a dance floor, black-suited men dancing with women in long, colorful, and flowing gowns. The men wore dinner jackets. I had stopped at my apartment for a shower and shave and a fresh suit — black, nicely tailored, and worn with a silver-white tie — but I had no fancy lapels, no little black tie. I might get tossed out of here yet.

  Ahead and to my left were tables covered with pale-pink cloths. At most of them members or guests were seated, many of them eating. From here, counting the little slice of dance floor I could see, I guessed a hundred people or more were in view. I looked around but didn’t see Matthew Wyndham.

  A red-jacketed waiter walked by me carrying a silver tray laden with undersized chickens and I stopped him.

  “Where’ll I find Mr. Wyndham?” I asked him.