I grabbed his arms, got my fingers around his biceps as Lydia yelled, “Rotty! Stop it!”
“Yeah, Rotty,” I said. “Stop it.”
But he was swinging and snorting, completely out of control. I’d managed to ward off all the blows so far, but there were so many it was quite an operation. I was sort of winded from all that bouncing anyway.
“Look,” I said. “It’s all right, pal. Relax. Just a little trick.”
“A trick!” he roared. “I’ll trick you!”
“Dammit,” I said. “If you don’t watch out, you’re going to hit me, and then there’ll be hell —”
I knew it. Right then he sneaked a hand loose and got me a good one on the eye.
There was no help for it then. I stopped trying to hold him, ducked a roundhouse right and tapped him one. It wasn’t an especially hard blow, but it landed on his kisser, which for at least a week was going to be of no use to him for kissing.
He sailed back and landed on his rear pants pockets and sat there with a pained look on his face.
Lydia raced over to him, knelt by him and said, “Rotty, darling, are you all right? Where did you come from? Oh, I’m a nervous wreck!”
He blinked at her. “You’re a nervous wreck!”
“What happened?” she said. “What happened?”
He said, “I’ll ask the questions. What happened?”
Then, as he stared at her, his brows pulled down and down and down, until he appeared to have very hairy eyes, and he looked her over carefully, and he looked me over carefully. Then he said in a dull voice, “Something is cuckoo here.”
“Lydia.” I cleared my throat. It was time for the explanation, and I wasn’t exactly sure how Lydia would take it. “This will require your undivided attention for half a minute,” I said. “A sort of generous, what-the-hell attitude would help, too.”
She straightened up and stood looking at me, a puzzled expression on her face. Not that her expression had changed much during these last few minutes.
“You see,” I went on, “the problem was to find out who planted that item under your bed, who was the guilty party. There were several long-drawn-out ways to check the thing, but I had a feeling the villain was Rotty dear, here. I had a hunch he didn’t trust you to the ends of the earth, and his ‘business trip’ might merely be an excuse to check into the Montclair where he could keep a beady eye—or ear, if you’ll accept the phrase beady ear—on you. So I cooked up this little episode on the fifty-fifty chance it would pop him out of hiding.” I paused. “I had no idea it would shoot him out of a cannon.”
“I don’t…” She frowned. “I don’t quite understand.”
“You will. Just take your time. And remember I did only what you employed me to do. If I’d told you what I was up to, you wouldn’t have believed me in the first place; and in the second place, you sure as fate wouldn’t have cooperated with me in the gambit. So I just played it by—by ear. Incidentally, Lydia, you did splendidly. In fact, I hope he really has it recorded.”
“Recorded?” It sank in part of the way then. She glared at me. “Why, you beast. The very idea! You beast —”
But then it sank the rest of the way in. The first part had been merely my deviltry—or whatever Lydia might have preferred to call it. But the second part was the Rotty part.
Slowly she swung her gaze from me to him, then finished what she’d started to say. Only this time she was speaking to Rothwell Hamilton Fish. “You beast!” she cried. “The very idea!”
Rotty was just struggling to his feet, poor chap, when she hauled off and socked him right in the chops. Not just once, but several times, moving with much agility.
Rotty went down again, clear onto his back this trip.
Slowly, very slowly, he clambered to his feet. He knew the jig was up, but at the last there he said something that almost got him onto my good side.
He glanced at Lydia and shrugged, then looked at me.
“Hell,” he said. “I can lick her. She just hit me with eight or ten lucky punches.”
Then, without another word, he turned and walked out of the bedroom and through the living room and out the front door, never, I felt sure, to be seen in these parts again.
For maybe a minute Lydia and I stood there in the bedroom, not saying a word. We gazed around the room, at chairs, the dresser, at the broken bed, at each other.
I waited.
But finally the suspense was too much. I was, after all, greatly interested in what her reaction would be. So at last I said, “Remember, I did only what you employed me to do. So, baby, you’d better not try socking me.”
And at last she smiled. Gently at first. But then a little more warmly. And with this tomato, a little more warmly was like the house burning down.
“Shell,” she said, “I’ll bet you did kill those elephants with rocks.”
I sighed, and relaxed, and grinned. “Not really,” I said. “In fact, elephants scare the devil out of me.”
“They certainly didn’t scare it all out.” She kept smiling.
“Well, they were small elephants. Hardly more than babies. The worst part was the burning swamps and creeping —”
“Shell,” she interrupted me, “I suppose you did me a favor.”
“Time will tell.” I grinned. Not for any special reason. I just felt like grinning.
“But what made you think it was Rotty?”
“Oh, a lot of things—mainly you.” I grinned some more. “But just his name alone should have warned you, Lydia. Imagine going through life with a name like Rotty Fish. Bound to mix a man up. He was irrevocably doomed on the day when he failed to insist that you call him Rothwell.”
Lydia walked over to the dresser and peered into the mirror, patted the tangled black hair, smoothed a hotly curving eyebrow. “This must seem like an odd case for you, Shell. Different, anyway. No murder, no kidnaping—nothing even criminal.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Bugging bedrooms must be at least a misdemeanor. Besides, what I did to Rotty—that was criminal.”
She smoothed the other brow.
I said, “Well, I suppose I’d better get back to the office. I suppose. Feed the fish or something. I have guppies, you know. Uh…”
She turned, leaned back against the edge of the dresser, fixed the tawny brown eyes on me. “You’ve done enough work for today, haven’t you?”
“Why, if you want the truth, I’ve done enough work for a week.” I cleared my throat. “Besides, my office guppies are very well fed. Almost obese.”
“Stay a while, then,” she said. “We’ll talk a little.”
“OK.”
Her brows creased slightly. “That reminds me,” she said.
She walked to the bed, bent down and reached under it, stood up holding the little transmitter. Without a word she went to an open bedroom window, peered out and looked down, apparently to make sure nobody was below, then tossed the transmitter vigorously out the window. I heard it crack on the cement.
Then Lydia turned around, smiling, and walked toward me.
“There,” she said. “Now we can talk. Or—Shell, what would you like to do?”
She stopped in front of me, looking up at me, close enough to scorch, those incandescent lips slightly parted.
I grinned down at her. “Well,” I said, “for a start—how about a hot martini?”
The Live Ones
I had left Sheldon Scott, Investigations—My Downtown Los Angeles office—about three p.m., so I reached my Hollywood apartment earlier than usual; I went in, closed the door, and stared at the naked blonde on my divan.
I blinked and shook my head like a maraca. There are good days and dandy days, but this was unbelievable.
“Woops,” I said, “pardon me, ma’am,” and went out again and looked carefully at the number on the door. It was my apartment, all right. I went back in.
She was still there, still sprawled on the chocolate-brown divan as if she lived on it—and I kind of wished she did live on i
t, since she was a busty beauty with the longest white-blonde hair and most golden sun-bronzed skin since Lilly Christine—but I’d never met this one before.
There was something familiar about her, and I was so delightfully dazed that for a moment I thought maybe it was that her hair was the same color as mine, and her skin was about the same tanned shade as mine—but there I stopped. She didn’t look anything like me.
Right then there was a big flash. I thought: My brain has burned out! But then there was another flash, so I knew it wasn’t my brain. Not even my brain could do that twice—and besides, the pulse of light had come from the bedroom. The blonde hadn’t moved, except to let her mouth sort of hang open loosely. I jumped past her and into the bedroom. There was another blonde on my bed. Dressed exactly like the first one.
But she wasn’t alone. Close on her left was a short, husky guy with a camera looped around his neck, and on my right was a big ugly ape named Agony, swinging a sap down at my head. I bent my knees and threw my left arm up, my forearm blocking Agony’s descending wrist, then I was straightening up with my right fist slamming toward his stomach. The blow landed and bored in, and then I led with my right a couple more times, but the last one Agony knew nothing about. Before he hit the floor I spun around toward the other man.
The guy hanging onto the camera with its strobe-light flash attachment was a local photographer named Lomey Fain. He jumped away from me, letting out a surprised yell. Ordinarily, I don’t slap medium-sized guys like Lomey around, since I am six-two and 206 pounds, but Lomey was a punk who did work for the syndicate and the private eyes who peer through keyholes, and also he was in my bedroom and I’d about figured out why, so I hit him on the mouth and it suddenly looked the way a mouth must look to teeth, all red and ugly. Lomey sailed back through the air, out cold for a while.
The pale white gal on the bed let out a little scream and jumped off it, and the sun-bronzed blonde from the front room came racing into the bedroom. Why? How would I know? Maybe to talk with the other blonde. Maybe anything. Why do gals run to bedrooms?
Both of them were running about stark staring naked—they were stark, and I was staring—and they looked at the two unconscious men, and sort of jumped up and down making wailing sounds, and I stood pretty still making a sort of low wailing sound myself, and then I heard the shower running.
I groaned, then ran to the bathroom, threw open the door, stepped in and pulled the shower curtain away from my combination tub and shower. Sure enough, there was the third gal. A real dish, this one. A redhead with saucy white breasts and flaring hips, water streaming over her in glistening rivulets, and a wide-eyed startled expression on her striking face.
She squealed, “Who are you!”
“I’m Shell Scott, and —”
“Oh, you’re Shell Scott!” She beamed at me, happily.
“Arrgh,” I growled in frustration and wheeled around and ran out. Be calm, I told myself. Think. Think! That was the hell of it. I was thinking.
One thing was sure: I had to get rid of these women fast. I groaned again. Here I was in my own apartment with three beautiful nude tomatoes and all I could think of was getting rid of them. Life can really be cruel sometimes.
From where I was standing I could see out the living room window down to North Rossmore. A flash of white caught my eye.
A Los Angeles police car had just pulled up to the curb below. Another car was behind it. Across the street was the rest of that flash of white I’d seen—an all-white Lincoln Continental that belonged to one Victor Grieg. It was ten thousand dollars’ worth of car driven by a two-bit slob. Maybe four-bit, since Grieg was one of the top racket boys in L.A., but still slob.
There wasn’t going to be time for me to get rid of these gals. I was trapped here with them. I thought: I’m dead. This may be living, but I’m dead. If I knew Grieg, in addition to the policemen he’d have some reporters along and maybe even a judge and jury, and when they all swarmed in here it would be the end of Happy-Go-Looky Shell Scott.
In my mushy mind my license took wings, my mind took wings, everything got dizzy. I jumped to the door and locked it, then turned around with my back against the door, feeling breathless. And at the sight which met my eyes I got even more breathless.
All three babes were greatly excited, and running about every which way, and all sorts of things were flying about helter-skelter, through the air, up, down, even sideways. Man, it was wonderful. But then they seemed to become aware of me standing scrunched against the door, and I guess they decided to get out.
They all turned, as if with one mind, and ran at me.
Well, you know how it is with just one nude woman running at you. My brain sort of wobbled, and I thought: How’d this happen?
It had started happening with a phone call from the wife of the late Judge Phineas Latham. The judge had died recently in an apparently accidental fire, but Mrs. Latham thought he’d been murdered. She’d hired me to check it. Nearly a month of investigation had convinced me she was right. And every lead I followed up pointed to a shadowy racket boy named Victor Grieg.
Grieg’s motto must have been, “To Victor belong the spoils,” because he was so rich he had TV in the john, and it seemed he was involved in practically every crime except suicide. But I couldn’t yet prove it. I was getting close to him, though, and he knew it. The fact that many of my friends in the L.A. Police Department knew I was trying to get Grieg made it almost impossible for him to have me shot in the head without virtually naming himself as responsible. So one day Grieg phoned and asked me, politely, to call at his office. I went.
I got there sooner than I’d expected to and glimpsed a long-limbed bleached blonde leaving Grieg’s office. She walked with a loose-limbed sway that, combined with her yellowish hair and a kind of meat-hungry look on her face, made me think of a tired tiger.
Victor Grieg himself was about forty or forty-five, with black hair and heavy brows, and he looked like what he was: a tough customer. His words slid down icicles at me. It was a long session, but what it boiled down to was that Grieg couldn’t buy me off, or scare me off, and at the present time it would be inconvenient for him to have me killed. His last remark was, “If you don’t lay off, I’ll squash you like a bug. I’ll get you one way or another, and even if I got to do it legal, I’ll do it legal.”
I grinned at him and left. Two days later a friend called from Sacramento and told me there’d been pressure brought, unsuccessfully, to have my state investigator’s license revoked. If Grieg could get my license jerked, it would be like pulling my fangs, and that should have warned me….
My brain continued to wobble, but gently now. The three nude babes were all over me, screeching and pawing at me, and trying to get through the door. As I broke out in a cold sweat, I realized what Grieg’s next move had been.
There is a section of the California Penal Code, referring to private investigators, which states that the applicant for or possessor of a license must be “of good moral character and temperate habits.”
Well, it is widely known that I have an eye for the women. As a matter of fact, it is pretty well known that if I had eight eyes, I would have eight eyes for the women. But my morals aren’t any more questionable than anybody else’s. Than any red-blooded man’s, anyway. Well, any lusty red-blooded man’s. At least, nobody could prove anything. Not until now, I thought gloomily.
Finally the gals calmed down. Apparently a couple of them had got the impression that I was a strange man who’d wandered in here and started knocking people unconscious. Once I made it clear that I lived here, sanity returned. All three were familiar in appearance, and now I recognized two of them—the white-blonde with the bronze tan, and the saucy redhead from the shower—as lovelies who had often posed for pictures in the slick men’s magazines. But the third one, the pale-white blonde, had me puzzled for some seconds longer. Then I recognized her. She was the tired tiger.
This was the long-limbed gal I’d seen so briefly out
side Grieg’s office. A few fast questions of the other two verified my suspicions. The two models had thought they were merely modeling for Untamed magazine’s monthly feature, “Apartment of the Month,” and they’d been told the owner—Shell Scott—knew all about it. They had been getting ready to leave when I’d arrived.
It looked very much as if, with them gone, I was to have reached home, here to be sapped neatly by Agony. Next Grieg’s bleached blonde was to have taken over, thus, like a dragon with halitosis, adding insult to injury. Lomey was handy to record all these reasons for revoking my license. Arrival of the law and reporters would have smeared the three of Grieg’s playmates along with me, I thought—but Grieg undoubtedly had convinced them their sacrifice would be worthwhile. Probably he had agreed to let them stay alive. Only my coming home early had fouled up the plot.
I explained my suspicions to the redhead and tanned blonde, and the blond lovely exploded with anger, picked up an end table and swatted the tired tiger over the head. She went out cold. It happened so fast I couldn’t have stopped it, but it did fit in with my plans.
I said, “We’ve got maybe two minutes, girls. Here’s what we do….”
I guess they had to break the lock to get in. Anyway, they made plenty of racket. I was in the shower singing at the top of my lungs, which is pretty loud, when they came in. In front were two plainclothes detectives from downtown, Flannery and Wilkins. I knew very well that they were here only because they had to be, and given half a chance would be on my side.
Behind them, in the next room, were a man and a woman, reporters from L.A. newspapers. Grieg had stayed below. Apologetically, Flannery showed me a search warrant.
“Where are they, Shell?” he asked me.
“They?” I peered around the shower curtain.
“Well, we heard there was … an orgy going on up here.”
I laughed. “You did, huh? Heard from whom?”
“Grieg. Victor Grieg.”
“That slob.”
Flannery shrugged. “Grieg said he got word all hell was coming off. Somebody’s supposed to’ve phoned him from here—rape, murder, sex, I dunno. Everything. We got to look around, anyway.”
The Shell Scott Sampler Page 2
