She looked at me from those brown eyes for quite a while. Then she said, “Suppose I thought I had some damaging information about, oh, Mr. X, but wasn't sure it was true. I wouldn't want to say terrible things about him unless I was sure. You wouldn't want me to, would you?”
I thought about it. “Frankly, yes. I would. I'd check anything you told me. So unless it was true it wouldn't hurt—Mr. X.”
“There's hurt just in the telling,” she said. “If it isn't true.” She paused and looked at me some more, then added, “I'll tell you this, Shell. There is something going on at Magna, but I'm not sure what it is. When I decide what to do, I'll let you know.”
“O.K. But if anybody is giving you a bad time, I'll consider that my own bad time.”
She smiled sweetly. “That's nice to hear. Well ... I'll tell you this, too, Shell, because I guess you're really interested. Nobody's blackmailing me. Not anybody.”
“That's a relief. Thanks, Coral.”
She frowned slightly. “I ... somebody tried ... once. To keep it completely honest. But nobody's blackmailing me—and no one ever has.”
She said goodbye, and I walked down the sidewalk to my Cad. I was puzzled. It just didn't seem that anybody was having any trouble at all—except me and my aching head. Even so, I still felt sure that where there was this much smoke there had to be some fire.
I glanced back at the little white house just before I got into the car and drove back to town. Coral stood in the open doorway. The sun was just going down. Its last red rays fell on her hair and made it look like burning blood.
I drove to Hollywood Boulevard, followed it to the freeway and then into downtown Los Angeles. The lights were on and the always surprising bustle of moving cars and people turned the streets into minor bedlam. I drove up bright and garish Broadway, past Third, and into the parking lot next to the Hamilton Building. Up a flight in the Hamilton is the one-room office of Sheldon Scott, Investigations. I went up.
After flipping the office-light switch I turned on the lights over the ten-gallon aquarium on top of the bookcase. I said hello to the twenty or thirty guppies, little fish much more colorful and garish than Broadway outside, fed them a helping of powdered crab, then parked behind my desk and picked up the phone.
When I hung up for the last time I had made a dozen calls, and I lit a cigarette, pushing a thought or two around in my brain. Numerous hoodlums and small-time thieves and even a couple of reasonably big-time crooks, would by now be riding the Earie, as the phrase goes in the argot, moving in the right places, trying to pick up a word about Magna, Magna people, or blackmail in large round numbers, anything that would help me. It was about all I could do this day; I'd push other angles tomorrow.
I locked up the office and drove back to Hollywood and the Spartan Apartment Hotel—home. A shower and clean sheets helped the aches, but didn't clarify my thoughts. I lay awake in bed awhile and thought about the case, then about Coral. Finally I pushed her out of my mind—gently—and, with room there to swing in, Suez came in, swinging her hips. Ah, lovely hips. She had more heat in her than a can of Sterno. In fact, it almost seemed that she had a can of Sterno. Especially remembering that one glimpse I'd had of it. And I wasn't about to forget it. She took some pushing, too, and there was plenty to push, but I got her out. And for just a brief moment I took another look at Johnny Palomino.
I didn't know. Maybe they were all lying to me. Except Coral; I refused to think she wasn't on the level. But wouldn't it be a laugh, I thought, if they were all telling the truth and Feldspen were lying to me instead? That proved I was really getting confused. But I was still confused when I fell asleep.
The ringing phone yanked me awake at six o'clock in the morning.
I grabbed it, half asleep. I always need about an hour and two cups of strong coffee before I wake up, and I couldn't understand why Feldspen was calling me at this time of morning.
“Feldspen?” I said. “Is that you, Harry?”
“Yes, Can you understand what I'm saying?”
“I hear you as if through a glass darkly, Harry. No, that's not what I mean —”
“Listen to me, will you?”
There was a thread of taut alarm in his voice, a shocked and perhaps even frightened note that knifed through the fog in my mind and brought me at least a little wider awake. I sat up in bed, hand involuntarily tightening around the phone. Through my bedroom window I could see the tips of trees on the grounds of the Wilshire Country Club across Rossmore. Dawn had turned the sky the cold, dull gray of lead.
“Okay, Harry,” I said. “Okay. What's the matter?”
“It's Valentine.”
“Valentine? Ted?” He pranced briefly before my eyes, twitching a little, digging at his finger, biting his lip, grimacing—and then grinning, suddenly tall and handsome. “What about Ted?” I asked.
“He's dead. He just killed himself.”
Chapter Six
I was still looking through the window, but suddenly I didn't see anything out there. I was startled into silence for a moment, then I asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes. There's no question. The police are there now—one of them phoned me.”
Even in the short hour or so we'd spent together, and despite his tortured manner and the circumstances under which we'd met, Valentine had impressed me as an immensely likable guy, a man who would be a good, warm friend and amusing companion when he got over whatever was eating him. I suppose I had subconsciously been looking forward to seeing him again, and now I felt a sense of almost personal loss. “How did he do it?” I asked Harry. “Gun?”
“No. He jumped from the roof of his hotel.”
“Jumped?” It started seeming a little sour then. “That's odd. I wouldn't have expected him to do it that way.”
“Why not? He did it, that's the important thing. I wouldn't really have expected him to do it at all.”
That was true enough. I said, “Harry, listen. Is there any chance he didn't do the job on himself. Could —”
“No, he wasn't killed or anything like that. Shell. At least not according to what the police told me on the phone. Some people saw him. Actually saw him jump. He left a note, too. I don't know what it said.” He paused and sighed heavily. “You'd better get down there.” He told me that Valentine had lived alone in the Madison, an expensive apartment building off San Vicente, in a quiet residential district near the studio.
I arrived at the scene probably thirty minutes or less after Valentine's death. Feldspen had been notified almost immediately, and he had phoned me within two or three minutes. So Valentine's body was still there on the sidewalk, though covered with a sheet. The police were just about through with their job—the photos and measurements and interrogations—and soon would be gone. The ambulance was backed up to the curb, doors open wide, and attendants were ready to put the body inside when I walked over to them.
The area was blocked off, but I knew most of the officers and was passed through. A police car sat at the curb, red light flashing atop it and a call was coming in on the radio as I stopped by the attendants. Before they put the body on the four-wheeled stretcher, I took a look at it just to be sure.
It was Valentine, all right. The dead flesh of him, anyway. He looked pretty bad. He was recognizable; there was no possibility that it was anybody else. The neat mustache was still neat, and his dark blond hair was only a little disarrayed, not bloody. But there was no longer a Cary Grant cleft in his chin.
I stood up, feeling sick. You never get used to the sight of dead men except in war, especially crushed or twisted dead men. The attendants put his body into the ambulance, got in and drove away. No siren. There wasn't any hurry.
I looked around. An officer named Dennis Lavery was talking to a man and a woman twenty feet from me, on the steps of the Madison Hotel. I walked toward him and he left the couple, filled me in on the situation. The couple were two of the three people who had seen Valentine jump. The third, a middle-aged man named Pet
er Fishbaum, was now sitting in a police car. They all told the same story.
It had just barely been light. The man had appeared at the building's edge, stood there for several seconds, then bent down and put something at or near his feet. The couple—a man and his wife—stated that they'd thought he was some kind of workman.
But after putting whatever it was at his feet, he had leaped from the roof of the building, feet first.
I said to Lavery, “What was up top?”
“Usual suicide note,” he said. “Show it to you in a minute, if you want. And the keys and things from his pockets. Wallet, comb, handkerchief, you know. Funny how they'll do things like that. Don't make any difference ten seconds later. But they do it.”
He let me read the note. It was on an almost square sheet of a heavy off-white bond paper with a visible watermark of some kind of bird, and it was short. And horrible in a way. As all suicide notes are.
The note wasn't addressed to anybody, there was no heading. It just started out: “By the time anyone reads this I will be dead. I am going to take my own life. I cannot go on any longer. Living isn't good any more. I'm sick and tired. Sick and tired of everything. God knows I tried. Sorry to cause such a fuss. Goodbye everything. May God have mercy on me...”
It was signed, Theodore Valentine. “I suppose it's his handwriting,” I said.
“Checks with the signature on his license, and writing on stuff we found in his room. It'll be gone over downtown, but it's his. Take my word for it.”
“Good enough for me, Den.”
He pointed at the note. “I've seen a dozen of these, and they're all different—and all the same. Look at it. Disjointed, rushed. He couldn't even slow down to write the note. See how the words get less legible toward the end?”
“Yeah.” The lines were less firm, more wavering.
“In a hurry, rushing too fast to get it written down. I've seen the same thing, too, in notes written by suicides who took poison, or sleeping pills. They write the note on the way out and naturally their writing gets less steady.”
We walked over to the couple. The man was about thirty, medium height, dark, with thinning hair. His wife was dark, too, and not bad-looking at all. About twenty-five. A little hard in appearance, perhaps, a little coarse. But maybe that was makeup and the cold gray morning light—and my mood.
They gave their names as Mr. and Mrs. Gene Gelder. It didn't take long to get their story; it was just as Lavery had given it to me. The woman said, “It was the craziest. I didn't know what he was doin’ up there. Figured he was a janitor or something, you know? He puts that stuff down, then boom, off he goes. I like to passed out.”
“I guess that's it. Thanks, ma'am.”
“You could hear him, you know. When he lit. Never heard such an awful —”
“Yeah. Thanks for your time.”
“Gene run into the hotel and called the cops right away. They was here in just two or three minutes, I'll say that for them.”
“Uh-huh. Incidentally, how did it happen you were here so early in the morning?”
“We're stayin’ at the Madison ourselves. Been at a party and just got home when we saw the guy up there.”
Her husband let her do all the talking. He looked and acted as if he always let her do all the talking. That was the way she acted, too. I thanked them again and went to the police car, talked briefly to the third witness, Peter Fishbaum.
He told the same story. Except that he added, “Stood up there plain as life. All alone and looking out this way. I knew he was going to jump.”
“How'd you know that, sir?”
“Just could tell. Feel it. He bent over, put something down, straightened up and waited. Knew he was going to jump. And off he went. I couldn't even move. Didn't want to watch, just couldn't help it.”
He explained that he lived several blocks away and had been walking to Hollywood Boulevard to the nearest gas station. “Guess some kids drained the tank in my old heap,” he said. “Don't mind the gas, just wish I hadn't seen this.” He paused. “The guy jumped feet first. And landed feet first.” He held his two hands in front of him about a foot apart, then slapped them hard together. “Like that,” he said. “Awfullest thing I ever saw.”
I went with Lavery to the top of the building and looked over the edge, the edge Valentine had gone over, then went back down to my Cad and drove to Magna. I found Feldspen in his big office. He was seated behind that big desk, light gleaming on his neatly-waved white hair, and he looked very much alone. His red-tanned face was drawn and lined; he looked tired.
“Hello, Shell,” he said. “What did you find out?”
“You know the important parts. He jumped off his hotel roof and killed himself. And it was Ted Valentine. I saw his body, talked to the police and witnesses.”
“Why ... why would he do a thing like that?”
“That's the big question.” I sat down in the leather chair I'd used yesterday, the one Valentine had later been sitting in after my beef with Rio and Gangrene. “Tell me. Harry,” I said. “Did you have any idea that he might commit suicide?”
He waved both his delicate hands gracefully. “He always acted as if he was just about to kill himself. Or die of something. You saw him.” He paused, stroked his cotton-white hair. “At least he'd been quite disturbed for the last few months.”
I frowned. “Is that all? I thought maybe he'd sort of grown up like that.”
“Perhaps five or six months. That's all. Yesterday was, I'll have to admit, the worst I've seen him. But he's been extremely upset for the last week. I asked him about it, but he said it was nothing, just nerves.”
“Harry, do you think Valentine might have been in a bind himself? I mean, is it possible he might have been one of the three being blackmailed here—assuming there are three?”
Feldspen blinked at me. “Why, that's ... I don't see how it could...” He let it trail off, but it seemed obvious that the thought was a new one to him, and he had to digest it a little. Finally he said, “I suppose it's possible. But I don't think it's true.”
Feldspen was quiet for a minute. Then he fumbled through a drawer in his desk and finally found a sheet of letter-size paper and started silently reading it. In a moment he said to me, “I mentioned a minute ago that Theodore had been even more agitated than usual for this past week. I thought it might have had something to do with his accident.”
“Accident? What kind of accident?”
“I don't know what kind. He didn't say—he wrote me about it last week end. This is the letter.” He waved it in his hand. “Theodore had to take a day off from work as a consequence; he wasn't here last Monday.”
That was interesting. Anything out of the unusual in Valentine's routine was interesting now that he was dead. This was Tuesday, just over a week from the time Feldspen referred to. I said, “Why did he write you? To let you know he wouldn't be able to show up?”
“Yes. He was ... quite considerate. I assumed he'd sprained his ankle or something like that—it happened at a dude ranch near Palm Springs.” He paused, then added, “Here. You can read the letter if you like.”
He was so far down that desk from me that I had to get up and walk over to him to get the letter. I read it, but there was nothing very illuminating about the contents. Valentine said he'd had a slight accident and would be recuperating for a day or two, and would miss work. He was sorry, and so on.
It gave me an odd feeling to read a letter in the same sprawling handwriting as the suicide note I'd just seen. But there was something else about that letter, something which nagged at me, bothered me, made me uneasy. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't like it.
I looked at the heading printed at the top of the heavy off-white bond stationery. Across the top, in letters drawn to resemble letters formed from new yellow rope, was the name Desert Trails Guest Ranch. Under that was a small map showing its location, a few miles off Highway 60, and the slogan, “Enough of the old West for color, enough of th
e new for comfort—Desert Trails, where the wild West is tamed, and your cares are lassoed and hogtied. Unreasonable rates.”
That didn't mean anything to me. I'd heard of the Desert Trails Dude Ranch, which was becoming quite popular with a number of Hollywood people, mainly the Palm-Springs set, but I'd never visited the place. I looked at the stationery on which Valentine had written his letter. It was heavy, and there was a visible watermark in it that looked like some kind of bird. A scrawny eagle maybe. It just didn't register right then.
I said to Feldspen, “Letter's dated last Sunday. Nine days ago. I gather, then, that he'd been especially spooked up just about since then, right?”
“I suppose we could say that.”
“And he never mentioned what this accident was, huh?”
Feldspen shook his head.
“Well, it probably isn't very...” I didn't finish it. Valentine's letter to Feldspen was still in my hand, and I'd suddenly realized why it had bothered me. I looked at it again, the color, weight, watermark, the works.
Except that this sheet was longer and had the Desert Trails heading, the paper seemed identical with that on which the suicide note had been written. It didn't have to mean a thing. But I got a sudden chill ripple up my spine just the same.
Feldspen told me I could keep the note if I wanted to. I asked him if I could use his phone and he dug a white job out of one drawer of his desk. I'll bet he had drawers in that thing for everything from golf clubs to potted plants. I called Homicide in downtown L.A. and talked to Lieutenant Perkins, who answered the phone.
He'd heard about the Valentine suicide, though Homicide wasn't interested, so he understood what I was talking about. “I'm pretty sure,” I told him, “that the suicide note was on the same paper—only with the top cut off. I'd like your lab to check them out for me, compare the two sheets. Can do?”
“We can check them, sure. Where'd you get the stationery?”
“It's just a letter Valentine wrote from the Desert Trails Guest Ranch. The only thing I'm curious —”
Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 6
