Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I was about to go in through the door marked H.J. Feldspen when it opened suddenly, and a girl stepped into the hall right in front of me. For just a moment we stood face to face looking at each other. Both of us were surprised at the suddenness of our meeting, but I was more than surprised by this one. I was stunned. This one had it. This one had it all.

  Not quite a redhead, not quite what I used to call a strawberry blonde, her hair was a beautiful fiery glow that swirled around her head like a net for men's eyes. She was just tall enough to reach me, and reach me she did. She reached way in and warmed my insides, including my heart, and she made that heart kick up several extra beats a minute in the time it takes for a double-take. She had pornographic eyes and wise warm lips and a body that would make a burlap bathrobe look like an Arabian nightgown.

  Over come-hither breasts and slim waist and sensual hips, she wore a sleek white nylon jersey dress which looked indecent, but wasn't—it wasn't that the dress was revealing, though, but just that she had such a revealing body. This one was unique; this one was special. She was saying something in a soft low voice, but I didn't make out the words, just the music.

  I said, “I beg your pardon,” and stepped back.

  She said smiling, “It's lucky we didn't run right into each other.”

  I grinned. “Lucky for you, maybe.”

  “Oh-ho. One of those fresh ones.” She was still smiling.

  “No. Not really. Just—yeasty.”

  “Oh,” she said with mock solemnity. “Yeasty's all right.”

  Then she smiled sweetly, with her lips closed and slanting upward from the middle like smooth red wings, and blinked her big brown eyes at me, then walked on down the hall. It is proof that I was still in a state of pleasant shock, that she got away. Ordinarily, too, I am not a guy who goes ga-ga on lamping a babe, even though, like this one, she may make it appear that other gals run on gas and she's an all-electric model. Usually I am reasonably swift on the uptake and recovery, and in anything like my usual state of alertness I would have found some logical reason for detaining the lovely.

  But I just watched her go. She walked all the way down the hall without looking back. She went to the double doors and pushed them open. She stepped outside. And then she looked back. She looked back at the office and smiled when she saw me still standing there. Then she shut the door and was gone.

  Gone, but not for good, I told myself.

  That one, I'd find; that one, I would for sure see again.

  Then I went into Feldspen's outer office. His secretary, Marie, was a very nice, curvy blonde seated at a desk on my right, but after the visual wallop of the last few seconds, she was just another blonde. We said hello, she spoke into an intercom, then she waved me with long red fingernails toward the door of Feldspen's private office. I went in.

  Two men were already in the large room, and one of them was Harry Feldspen. I don't know quite why it was, but you always noticed Feldspen first, even when he was in a small crowd. There wasn't any single thing to make him stand out, but it somehow all added up to an impressive package.

  He wasn't a big man, maybe five-nine and slim. About sixty, with tightly waved cotton-white hair and a ruddy sun-lamp tan, delicate, graceful hands and a friendly white smile. He wore expensive clothing with casual grace and always looked very neat and clean. Feldspen wasn't like a number of the studio heads and individualistic producers who are seldom found in offices without their “props,” the props which scream—it is hoped—This man is an eccentric genius. He had no polo mallet or riding crop or sawed-off tennis racket, nor did he wear a riding habit, dickie, or kilt. All he had was a fourteen-foot-wide desk. He sat behind that extraordinarily wide and tall desk on an especially high easy chair, with one light fixed in the ceiling above him dropping a flattering glow on him as if on an old master in a museum. When you walked into Feldspen's office you felt only a little like a midget in a world designed for giants, and he looked only a bit like the lord high executioner prepared to sentence you to death by pinpricks.

  Actually, he was a kindly man, and it may well have been that the stage setting was necessary in order to give him the appearance of unearthly authority needed when dealing with many of the highly emotional Magna emoters.

  Harry Feldspen showed me that white friendly smile and even stood up behind his huge desk as I entered. The smile was just a bit strained today, though; Harry had things on his mind.

  “Shell,” he said in his soft voice, “You wasted no time. I appreciate it.”

  I had come in quite a hurry. But when he'd phoned me a few minutes ago, Harry Feldspen had sounded like a man who'd taken four ounces of castor oil and couldn't find the john; there had been a tightness in his voice I'd never heard there before. He hadn't told me what was wrong, just that there was trouble.

  I said, “You sounded as if you were going up in a leaky balloon, Harry. What's up?”

  Feldspen looked at the other man in the room with us. “Theodore, I should have warned you about this —” he waved a hand gracefully in my direction—“this rather blunt-speaking, and blunt-looking individual. Theodore, this is Sheldon Scott.”

  I looked at the man, a tall guy, as Feldspen said, “Shell, Theodore Valentine.”

  “Ted,” he said to me and grinned, and I said, “Shell here,” and we shook hands.

  When he smiled the man was handsome, with a most engaging assortment of features including dark blonde hair, pale blue eyes, a small neat mustache and a Cary Grant cleft in his square chin. But when he stopped smiling and glanced back at Feldspen, his face got a pinched look. There were furrows corrugated between his brows and in his forehead, and his eyes looked tired. When he glanced back at me, his face solemn again, those eyes held an expression that you might see in the eyes of a fox hunted by red-tongued hounds and red-coated beasts. He looked hunted and harried himself, tired and drawn, somehow pinched all over, as if his skin didn't fit.

  Feldspen seated behind his big desk again, said suddenly, “I'm being blackmailed. It's monstrous.”

  “What's the man got on you?” I asked. “Is it a man?”

  “It was a man who phoned me. And, actually, it's not anything I've done. In fact, it's Magna that's being blackmailed.”

  “Magna? That sounds like a neat trick. Like blackmailing General Motors, or the British Empire.”

  He indicated a heavy leather chair with short silver legs and flat silver buttons set in the arms. “Sit down, Shell.” I sat and he made a steeple of his hands, glanced at Valentine and then back at me. “I've already told Theodore—who, incidentally, is my right-hand man. He is appalled.”

  On my last two or three visits to Magna I'd seen only Feldspen himself, but though I hadn't met Valentine before, I'd heard the name a time or two. If I remembered correctly, he'd been in this spot a year or more.

  Harry went on, “Here is all I know. Two hours ago a man phoned here and asked for me. I don't know who it was, but the voice was a man's. He said that I should listen carefully, that he would say his piece just once.”

  I interrupted. “Say his piece—was that his phrase?”

  “Yes. I believe his exact words were, ‘I'll say the piece just once, H.J.’ “An expression of distaste flickered briefly over H.J. Feldspen's red-tanned features, then he went on. “He said that he, or rather the individual he represented—he was just a go-between—was at this very moment actually receiving payment, payoffs, from three Magna people, stars in soon-to-be-released films. He said that he would prefer one large purchase to several little installments—again his words as near as I can recall—and that for a million dollars he would cease all his activities and turn over to us the materials which supported those activities. He didn't actually use the word blackmail, but he might as well have.”

  “Wait a minute.” I stopped him again, but this time because I was slightly incredulous. “Did you say a million dollars?”

  “I did. There was no chance of an error on that point—he repeated it two
or three times.”

  I whistled softly. I have been a private investigator in and around Hollywood and Los Angeles for a long time, and I have become involved in some fairly high-powered cases including almost the gamut of extortion, but I had never become involved in a case with a million-buck bite. The only case I'd even heard about with a bite near that size was one involving another private investigator, a guy named Chet Drum. But he was a Washington D.C. man. As far as I knew, this was a record even for Hollywood.

  I lit a cigarette and said to Feldspen, “That sounds to me like the biggest extortion this side of the Federal Income Tax. Are you sure the guy was serious?”

  “He seemed quite serious. He stated that he would give me—me personally—one week in which to get the money. Money—cash. Nothing larger than a hundred-dollar bill—why, it's preposterous. Except...”

  He paused and I prompted him. “Except what?”

  “Except that he did seem to know exactly what he was talking about, and if so it would be worth a million dollars to avoid all the eventualities of which he spoke. He said that the million dollars ‘insurance’ would among other things spare Magna Studios enormous financial damage, loss of the services of three of our top stars, decreased revenues from their unreleased pictures, and unbelievably nasty publicity in all communications media.”

  Feldspen paused, ran a hand lightly over the tight waves in his white hair. “At the end of a week he is to phone me here again and tell me how to handle payment of the money. Why, it's ... it's like a kidnapping.”

  I said, “Do you think he's really got something on three of Magna's stars?”

  Feldspen shrugged. “I don't know. That's one of the things I hope you can find out. But if he does, it could be disastrous. The man mentioned also that a million would be cheap in view of the fact that we've got thirteen million invested in unreleased films featuring them.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “I don't know. I don't know anything except what I've told you.”

  Valentine, who had been silent until now, spoke to me. “Except his alternative. If we don't pay he'll release whatever information he has to the press, all the wire services, radio and TV—the works, everything he can hit, including the slime magazines. That would, of course, end his blackmail, the ‘little installments’ he mentioned, but at the same time it would hurt, perhaps ruin those three lives—certainly the three careers. Not to mention Magna's financial loss.”

  I said, “Did you talk to the man?”

  “No.” He gestured jerkily toward Feldspen. “Harry filled me in just before you arrived.” He nibbled on his upper lip.

  “Any idea who the three are?”

  He shook his head. “No. It's difficult to say. And we're still ... rather unstrung by the suddenness of this.”

  Feldspen spoke again, “I don't want the police in this, either, not now at least. If there's anything to what the man told me, it's possible one or more of his victims is, well, breaking the law. Involved in criminal activity. That means the police, if they found out about it, would probably put the individual concerned in jail.” He shuddered. “We can't have that, either.”

  It was quiet for several seconds. I smoked my cigarette. Feldspen said to me, “I know it isn't a great deal to go on, but do you think you can help?”

  “I can try, and I will. I can start by talking to some of your people here on the lot. People being blackmailed sometimes get sicker than dogs when you ask them if they're being blackmailed. So I'll ask a few.”

  Feldspen slid a red-bordered card across his desk. “This pass authorizes you to visit any place on the lot.”

  I grinned. “Another dream come true,” I said, but Feldspen wasn't listening. He looked up and said, “It's rather a dilemma. To pay would probably only lead to more paying.”

  “You can make book on that.”

  “Not to pay, though, seems horrid, considering what it might possibly do to those three people—assuming all this is true.” He paused, shaking his head. “All this comes at an especially bad time, too.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Financially speaking. Profits are way down—not just at Magna, but all through the industry. Television has hurt us badly, no question of it. We'll profit in the long run, immensely, I'm sure. But it's difficult right now.”

  Valentine said gloomily, “All the new movies sold to television have cut box office even more. I don't see how we're going to combat that.” He chewed on his lip and scraped at one finger with his thumbnail.

  A thought crept into my skull. I pushed it around, and it kept looking better, so I tried it out. “Harry, you say the guy mentioned thirteen million tied up in unreleased pictures?”

  “That's right.”

  “And you also said you didn't know how he got the info. Well, if he is blackmailing three of your people, those people could—and would—tell him the budget or cost on each or all of their films. So that would explain how he might wind up with that exact figure, right?”

  “Right. But...” Feldspen's face sagged. “Oh. You mean that makes it appear his information is authentic. True. That he is, in fact, already blackmailing them.”

  “Uh-huh—but more than that. If you have three or four films in the can, or nearly completed—involving three top stars—films on which production costs total thirteen million bucks, wouldn't that tell you who the three people are?”

  There was silence for about five seconds, then Valentine snapped his fingers. “Of course. Harry—we should have thought of that ourselves.” He paused, digging at his finger with his thumbnail, chewing on his lip, blinking rapidly, and in general giving the impression of a man with a mouse inside of him eating its way to freedom. This guy had nerves with individual breakdowns, or else his skin was creeping up on him. Something was obviously eating the life out of him, and if it was Hollywood or the movie business, it was time he began selling grass skirts to Polynesian tomatoes. He wouldn't last much longer in this business.

  He snapped his fingers again, and said, “It would have to be three from among not more than six people. And James would have to be one, there's eight million right there.” He glanced at Feldspen; “They'll finish retakes on Howdy, Stranger with Palomino this week—and there's three million dollars more in that one.”

  Palomino could only be Johnny Palomino, star of nearly all of Magna's big-budget westerns. He was a big name for sure, a well-established star; I didn't know who the “James” was.

  Valentine seemed to be under considerable stress. He chewed on his lip some more, pulled pad and pen from his pocket and scribbled something, scribbled some more and lined something out. After two or three minutes he said, “That—does it.” He looked at me. “I'm indebted to you for the insight, Mr. Scott.”

  “Shell, remember.”

  He grinned again, and was handsome, almost placid again. An extremely pleasant-appearing egg when he wasn't in the process of going to pieces. “Yes—Shell,” he said. “But you were right. Three stars, four pictures—thirteen million.” He looked toward Feldspen. “With the two James’ films, it comes out Howdy, Stranger and the Suez. Only way it adds up.”

  Feldspen slowly nodded.

  I said, “What would that mean to me, Ted?”

  He turned, blinking. “We've got three million in Howdy, Stranger, starring Johnny Palomino. The big item is two films both starring Coral James, each of them in at about four million. A period picture called Sins of Pompadour, which we've held up until now, and one set in ancient Rome called Sins of Messalina. We've just completed Night Wind with Suez, a beautiful young girl starring for the first time.” He held up his open hand and counted them off on his fingers, “Coral James, Johnny Palomino, Suez. Thirteen million.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “I know Palomino when I see him. I'll shake him up a little and see what falls out of him. What about this Suez and Carol James? And it's Suez what?”

  “Just Suez,” Harry Feldspen said wearily. “We're identifying her with
the single name, hoping it will attract more attention to her. She's probably on Sound Stage One right now.” He paused, sighed, then went on, “As for Coral James, you must have seen her.”

  “Seen her? What do you mean?” I knew what was coming, and I didn't want him to say it.

  He said it anyway. “You couldn't have missed her. She left the office just before you came in.”

  Chapter Three

  Harry noticed the expression on my face and said quickly, “What's the matter?”

  “It's just ... you startled me with that one. You mean, Coral James is that luscious, sort of reddish-haired gal who waltzed out of here...”

  “Moments before you came in. Do you know her?”

  “Only from now on. She registered on my retina like a sock in the eye, I'll admit.”

  “Yes, she does that to everyone.” Feldspen grimaced suddenly. “Oh, dear. She's one of them. One of the three. I ... hate to think that.”

  Valentine broke in. “Well, I could be wrong. I don't really think I am, but...”

  “I'll check it,” I said.

  The conversation limped a bit after that. Valentine and Feldspen got into a discussion of money and money troubles, which was of little interest to me. I let my thoughts turn again to Coral James. But in a minute I heard something which pushed thoughts even of that lovely out of my mind. It jarred me, pulled me to my feet.

  I almost sprang out of my chair. Looking from Feldspen to Valentine, I asked them, “What did you say? Who?”