The Amber Effect (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  It was. What I had thought might be a revolutionary breakthrough in communications attached to the thing was merely an oddly shaped metal doohickey resting against it, as I discovered when Lindstrom picked up the phone and placed it nearer to me, the object clanking against his desktop.

  I dialed the LAPD and got Sergeant Gageron in Auto Theft again, mentioned the make I’d requested earlier and said the car might be registered to a James M. Collett, then waited slightly more than a minute for the check to be made. While waiting, I indicated the oddly curved and angled metal item on Lindstrom’s desk, saying, Interesting doohickey there. Something you’re working on? Scientific breakthrough in —

  It’s a paperweight.

  Then Gage was back on the line. Bull’s-eye; registration was 033 KDG, and the Mercedes was Collett’s. I listened to the additional info immediately available, Collett’s description, address, and such. James M. — for Madison — Collett had no police record except for a couple of minor traffic violations. I thanked Gage, hung up, asked Lindstrom if he’d supply me with Collett’s home address. He gave me the info; it was the same address Gage had given me.

  I said, I’m not sure what any of this means, Mr. Lindstrom, but at the Police Building this morning I learned that officers have been unable to locate Elroy Werzen or Al Hauk at their last known addresses, and that your employee, Mr. Werzen, has apparently been absent from his current place of residence for the past two or three days. Earlier, before I came here, I saw Collett, Werzen, Hauk, and another man chatting in front of the Weir Building, after which Werzen and Collett drove off in Collett’s car. Hauk, you’ll recall, is the guy who very likely was tooling your Lincoln around town last night. Mean anything to you?

  No, it doesn’t, Mr. Scott. Should it?

  Beats me.

  Did . . .He hesitated, then went on casually, Did you say the Weir Building? That’s on Wilshire, isn’t it?

  I nodded. You know somebody there?

  No.

  I waited, but he didn’t add anything. Collett and Werzen on vacation?I asked him. Taking some sick leave maybe?

  Neither of them showed up for work today. Or yesterday, for that matter. I have no idea why.

  About the theft of your car last night. How did you discover it had been stolen?

  I left here to go home for dinner, planning to return later. My car was not in its usual place in our parking lot. I made some inquiries among employees still in the building, but none of them knew what had happened to it, and I then phoned to report its disappearance. To be accurate, I did not then report my car as positively stolen, but merely as missing from its accustomed place.

  O.K. Just one more thing. I wonder if you know any of the other people who seem to be, or have been, involved with Werzen and Hauk.

  It doesn’t seem likely, but . . . Perhaps.

  Can’t hurt to try a few names on you then, can it? How about Virgil Kovick?

  Lindstrom pursed his lips and shook his head. He continued shaking his head slightly as I continued. Charles Ellisohn? Aralia Fields? Norman Amber? Edward Brett — or Buddy Brett?

  Nothing much happened except that at the moment when I first said Brett,he stopped shaking his head. At the same time, his brows moved closer together, a faint crease appearing at the bridge of his nose.

  I stopped speaking, and without any further change of expression Lindstrom said, No, none of those names mean anything to me, Mr. Scott.

  But I’d have bet a sawbuck to a nickel that one of those names was familiar to him. At least one of them. Edward Brett, maybe; or the previous name, Norman Amber. Conceivably, but not likely, even a delayed reaction to Aralia’s name. All I knew was that something had stuck Lindstrom.

  O.K.,I said. I guess that’s it, then. And thank you for your time and help.

  It’s quite all right.He paused, pursed his lips once more. But since I have answered several of your questions, Mr. Scott, perhaps you will now answer one of mine.

  Sure.

  Why are you interested in all these individuals you’ve mentioned?

  I thought a few seconds before answering him, but then said, Reasonable enough,and gave him the top of what had recently occurred, commencing with the appearance of Aralia Fields at my door in the Spartan. Well before I finished, Lindstrom was gazing directly at me again, and once more with that same piercing intensity I’d noted when I first saw him.

  As I stopped speaking he said, Murder? Someone really intended to murder this girl?

  Yeah, there seems little doubt about that. And not just someone, but the Buddy Brett I mentioned, who appears to have been pretty close to Al Hauk, among others, and in whose company your employee, Elroy Werzen, did time at San Quentin.

  I am astonished,Lindstrom said, truly astonished.

  Maybe he was, I thought.

  When I got up to leave, Lindstrom toyed with his interesting paperweight for a moment, then glanced up and said, Mr. Scott, I — He stopped, then continued. I . . . have a few minutes more to spare. Would you like to look around a bit at some of the work we’re doing here?

  I nodded. Sure. I’d enjoy it.But I wondered what he’d really started to say.

  We spent about fifteen minutes more together, and looked into half a dozen of the many rooms, including a couple of those I’d walked by earlier. I’d merely been making conversation when I told Lindstrom I would enjoy having a look around, but it turned out to be true. I possessed an almost total lack of understanding about what I was seeing, but it fascinated me anyway.

  Our first stop was in a very large room at the end of the hallway where Lindstrom’s office was located. The room was about a fourth the size of a football field, and, except for aisles down which the dozen or so men in view could walk, almost every square foot was occupied by machines or pieces of equipment, some of which were familiar and some of which were completely incomprehensible to me.

  I recognized motors, generators, normal-looking television receivers, and what appeared to be a twenty-foot-high Tesla coil. Among the strange items was a shiny disc, its concave mirrored face displaying an empty space in its center; it looked almost exactly like those mirrors with little holes in them that doctors wear and peek through at you for mysterious reasons — except that this one was six feet in diameter. Another interesting something stood in the center of the big room, its base a six-foot transparent cube that appeared to be filled with a bluish fluid, and from which projected toward the ceiling a cluster of spiraling glass tubes ranging from half an inch to several inches in diameter. In each of those tubes something moved, slowly, like a viscous liquid, and in each of the tubes it was of a different color.

  That grabs me,I said to Lindstrom, indicating the colorful whatever-it-was. What does it do?

  We don’t know yet,he said matter-of-factly. We know what it’s supposed to do — according to our computer model, at least — but it won’t do it. So now we’re attempting to find out why it won’t, and then perhaps we can make it do what we think it should do. Or, again, it may tell us that its true function is something else entirely, or possibly nothing. Even then, we may not know for some time, if ever, what to do with what it does.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and said, Wonderful.

  The last thing we looked at was in the room from which had come the oddly unpleasant humming or whining sound I’d earlier noted. I expected to see a two- or three-ton bullhorn, or something like that colorful apparatus in the center of the big room I’d first visited. But all the noise was produced through varying frequencies of electrical current fed into and inducing vibration in a pair of little buttonlike things six feet apart, sticking up from short metal or plastic tubes, atop a wooden table. One was the size of a boy’s marble, the other no larger than a pea.

  Lindstrom flipped a switch, played with a dial for a minute or so, talking animatedly about varying the rate of vibration to produce sounds below the level of human awareness, audible sounds, possibly even vibrations in the visible spectrum — or the production, n
ot of sound, but of light. He mentioned Nikola Tesla, and some people I’d never heard of, then flipped the switch off. All the sound ceased, the sense of inner trembling or vibration inside me stopped.

  That is, while it undoubtedly did stop, it seemed to have left behind it an echo, or almost-felt memory, of that weird and unfamiliar trembling or inner tumult. Or, as Lindstrom referred to it simply, vibration.

  Whatever it might best have been named, it stayed with me as Lindstrom escorted me down the hallway to the heavy doors, which thudded shut behind me; with me even as I walked alone to my car; and it did not entirely fade away until I was miles from Lindstrom Laboratories, nearing the street where lived James M., for Madison, Collett.

  The street, at least, on the outskirts of Hollywood where, I had been informed both by Lindstrom and the police, Collett lived. But because the alleged addresses of Hauk and Werzen had been conspicuously empty of Hauk and Werzen, I had not a whole lot of hope that I’d find Collett lolling about in his home.

  The address was a sizable and rich-looking duplex with a driveway at both ends of the building, each leading to a covered carport. There was no sign of a black Mercedes with the 033 KDG plates.

  Each half of the duplex bore a different street number, Collett’s was the farther one from me. I pulled to the curb in front of it, cut the ignition. There was a drawing tightness at the base of my skull, and I wiggled my shoulders, shook my head a bit, before climbing out of the car. It was still bright daylight, only a little past four in the afternoon, and there was no apparent reason for me to be getting uptight; maybe it was a hangover from those distressing sounds I’d so recently listened to.

  I stretched my shoulders again, then walked casually to Collett’s front door and rang the bell. Nothing. I heard the buzzing inside, but there was no response. I poked the doorbell once more, waggled the doorknob. It turned; the door opened a crack.

  I waited, telling myself that unless I thought about it for some time, I probably wouldn’t be able to come up with a single good reason for inviting myself into another man’s home, particularly a man presumably innocent of any wrongdoing.

  I glanced around. The street was empty, nobody was in sight. And I was curious to know why Collett was so chummy with lads such as Werzen and Hauk. Besides, I asked myself, merely stepping past an unlocked door was hardly in the same category as kicking the thing down, was it? Of course it wasn’t. And what harm could result if Collett — and therefore, Captain Phil Samson — never knew I’d dropped in?

  Probably plenty, I told myself.

  But I walked in anyway.

  CHAPTER SIX

  INSIDE, I closed the door behind me, stood silently in the living room, heels sinking into thick red carpet.

  In the room were a low beige-gold divan, a large chair covered in the same nubby material as the divan, and a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs. A portable bookcase stood against one wall, and a bar on rubber wheels was in a corner. Plus the usual TV set, a low table, a couple of large ceramic ashtrays with a lot of dead cigarette butts in them.

  I felt reasonably sure I was alone here, but I called, Hello! Anybody home? Hello-hello.Nothing.

  I walked over red carpet to a door on my left, opened it and peered into near darkness, the late afternoon sunlight outside blocked by heavy draperies. I flicked on a light, glanced around — bedroom, neat and clean, bed made, everything in place. It looked unused, unlived-in, almost sterile. I pushed the light switch down, stepped back, moved toward another door standing open a few feet away on my right.

  Inside this room, too, was near darkness, a kind of thick grayness in which darker lumps were dimly visible, chairs or other furniture, presumably. I stepped into the grayness, brushing my right hand over the light switch as I entered the room.

  The light flashed on, revealing a second bedroom — but this one unquestionably lived in. This one was about as far removed from neat and clean as a room could get without moss hanging from the ceiling.

  As I took my first step through the open doorway, my eyes started to separate jumble into recognizable objects — king-size bed, unmade, tangle of sheet and blanket in a lump at the foot of the mattress, crumpled pillow; bedside table and lamp, newspaper on the table, lampshade awry; overstuffed chair, and another table next to it covered with a helter-skelter array of paperback books and magazines; bureau with clutter atop it, clutter reflected in the mirror, the mirror cracked, speckled with spots of white splatter, something moving swiftly at the mirror’s edge.

  Shock rammed up through my spine, from small of back to the still-tight knot at the base of my skull, a physical clenching that pulled my shoulders inward and squeezed my head down tighter against my neck. The movement was a man — not me, not my reflection — turning, swinging something dully glittering toward my head.

  I’d taken only that first full step into the room, planted my foot, started swinging my other leg forward. When that reflection bounced from the mirror to my eyes, I wasn’t solidly balanced, had no chance to spin or jump. I let the muscles of my leg go limp, or tried to, knee bending as my body started to drop.

  Much of the tension in the long tendons of thigh and bunched muscle of calf went out of them, but not all; not enough. I felt myself falling slowly, and tried to push my head forward and to the left, thrusting against those involuntarily clenched and pulling neck muscles, and maybe all of that helped, a little; but not enough.

  He got me.

  He didn’t get me with his best shot, but whatever the man was swinging in his hand banged and scraped against the right side of my head. If he’d hit me solidly the blow would have knocked me out for minutes or even hours and maybe for good, but even that partial blow, the glancing crunch against my skull, sent me the rest of the way down and into that lumpy grayness again.

  For a second or two, perhaps longer, grayness swirled and billowed before my eyes and I felt myself hit floor that felt like mattress, knew I was turning, rolling. On my back, both elbows pushing against the carpet, I strained to see through the grayness and then, suddenly, the room was bright again and at the same moment — not until then — a shrieking pain like bruised fire exploded in one ear and half of my head.

  But I saw the man clearly, knew him, recognized him.

  Not Collett. Elroy. Puffer Werzen.

  He was bent forward, the big bald head five or six feet away, above me. His right arm was stretched across his body, a heavy .45 automatic, its blunt butt projecting past his fingers, gripped in his fist. The force of his swing had pulled him halfway around but he’d kept his red face turned toward me, eyes fixed on me.

  As I tried to roll farther left, get my elbow up off the carpet and my right arm free, I saw the widening of Puffer’s eyes and the irregular line of his lower teeth as he stretched his mouth half open and let out a soft grunt, shifting his feet, getting both legs solidly beneath him again.

  My left elbow dug harder into the carpet and I started to lift my right arm, heard the involuntary coughlike sound squeezed from my throat. The thick muscle between my right shoulder and the base of my neck felt mashed, torn, where the gun butt must have landed after ripping over my ear.

  Puffer, in a slight crouch and with his weight balanced again, pulled back his arm, slapped his hands together. I saw him fumble with the gun, get the grip back into his right fist. In the same movement he jerked the pistol toward me and pulled — or, very likely, yanked — the trigger.

  He did it all in too much of a hurry and the bullet whipped past my head as the gun’s blast banged my eardrums almost as if the slug had hit them. If he’d taken a little more time, he could have emptied the automatic into me, but he didn’t take the time. And, as he fired, my right hand slapped the .38 Special under my coat.

  I’d raised up off the floor, legs still splayed out in front of me and my hand on the Colt’s checked butt, but when that blast banged my ears I threw myself sideways, to my left and toward the floor, ripping the Colt out of its clamshell holster.

>   I don’t know whether Puffer fired again before I did, or afterward. All I know for sure is that he fired twice more and the last slug smashed through his own foot, and when it was over, my revolver was empty and I was getting to my feet — as Puffer Werzen went down.

  He went down slowly. Slowly, even with several — four, I found out later — .38 caliber pills in his stomach and chest.

  That moment, for me, was just a kind of stiff blankness following and still part of hellish noise and me pulling the trigger until the hammer clicked on an empty cartridge. Clicked not just once, or even twice; more like four or five times.

  It was his left foot he’d shot a hole in, and he went down on that side, the leg giving way just before he fell. He hit the floor with a pair of dull thumps, one right after the other, first his shoulder and then his head snapping over and hitting the carpet. There were two more very small sounds after that. He lifted his head an inch or so, silently straining, and it fell back against the carpet with a soft thud. Once more, up slightly, then down.

  That’s when he died, I guess.

  At the end his fingers relaxed, but they were still curled around the automatic’s grip. Puffer never did really let go of his gun — which was the reason I hadn’t stopped firing until my Colt was empty. One of the reasons, anyhow.

  I felt for the pulse in his throat, knowing there wouldn’t be any. There wasn’t. Then I sat down on the edge of the sloppy bed, breathing through my mouth, a thin trembling all through me, inside me — like the shivery feeling in my guts when I’d heard that goddamned humming or whining earlier today. I tried to swallow, but my throat and mouth were dry; my tongue felt as if it was sticking to my teeth.

  Why the hell? I asked myself. Why had the sonofabitch tried to kill me? He could have sapped me again, kicked me in the head — he could simply have held his heat on me and I wouldn’t have given him an argument.

  He’d known who I was, obviously. He’d known I wasn’t a door-shaker or daytime thief or guy come to pick up the TV set. No, he’d known I was Shell Scott, and he had sure as hell been eager to kill Shell Scott.