Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  For nearly that long I’d had varying degrees of trouble with one or another element of the Truckers union here—sluggings, acid and stench bombings, even a couple of murders. So on my way to Brotherhood Headquarters I thought of what I knew about the local and its president. Ragen and the L.A. Truckers represented, in miniature—as, on a larger scale, did Mike Sand and his hand-picked friends of labor in D.C.—virtually all the things the Hartsell Committee was fighting, what Braun and a lot of other good union men had been fighting.

  A crook works or slugs his way up in a union organization until he’s near or at the top, surrounds himself with crooks, rigs the constitution and election machinery so it’s impossible to vote the incumbent officials out of office, especially when the votes are counted by those incumbent officials in a locked room filled with large wastebaskets. The rank-and-filer who protests, or demands a foolproof secret ballot—as Braun had—is often met by goons armed with saps and sawed-off baseball bats; when that rank-and-filer gets out of the hospital, he usually clams. Sometimes he winds up in the morgue, clammed permanently.

  That, in capsule, was the history of Truckers Local 280, and John Ragen, the man I was on my way to see.

  No lights showed in the Brotherhood’s headquarters when I reached it. The building was one-story, modern, low and wide, facing Olympic behind a row of royal palms and a long strip of well-tended lawn. The main parking lot was at the building’s right, a smaller one behind the building for the union’s top officials. I parked in the empty main lot, got out and went up the tan cement walk fronting the building, to the wide entrance doors. They were locked, but the doors were thick glass and by peering inside I could see a faint glow at the far end of the hall.

  I went around to the rear lot. Two cars were in it, a dark green Cadillac and a pale blue Lincoln. The Cad was Ragen’s. Light showed behind drawn draperies of one of the headquarters’ windows, and from my previous visits here I knew that was John Ragen’s office. Neither of the cars was the one which had been following Alexis Frost this morning, but I checked the Lincoln’s registration slip. The car belonged to Norman Candello. I shut the Lincoln’s door and started toward the rear entrance as a phone rang.

  The sound had come from Ragen’s office. I reached the partly open window as a man said, “This is him. I’m Ragen.”

  There was a pause. I couldn’t see through the thick drapes into the room, but I could hear the words, soft and muffled, but still understandable. And the voice had been Ragen’s, all right; strong, vibrant, not very musical, but with bulging muscle in it, a voice to knock you down with.

  Then I heard him say, “Yeah, hello, Townsend. How’d it go?” He listened, then swore viciously. After a string of four-letter words he said angrily, “Who? Chester Drum? What the hell do you mean. Drum fouled it up?”

  He listened quietly for a minute. The name Townsend didn’t mean anything to me, but Chester Drum did. He was my counterpart in Washington, D.C., a well known private investigator. I’d never met the man, but knew him by reputation, and he was definitely not the type to be chummy with hoodlums like Ragen. On the contrary, he was considered one of the best men in the business. It puzzled me, but while I was wondering about it, Ragen spoke again.

  He spoke suddenly. His voice was hard. And when John Ragen’s voice got hard it came out as if breaking his teeth. “You stupid chump. Am I gonna have to come there and do everything myself?” A pause again, then, “Yeah. Call me in the morning.” He slammed down the receiver.

  Another man inside said, “What was that, John?” and Ragen answered, “I’ll fill you in at the house. Let’s go.”

  I sprinted to my Cad, started it and drove into the rear lot, parked next to the Lincoln. My headlights fell on Ragen’s window as the office lights went out. Immediately they flicked on again.

  I got out, slammed the door hard. I took the .38 Colt Special from under my coat, checked it, put it back in the clamshell holster. Then I walked to the rear entrance.

  The glass doors were locked. I banged on them. Lights came on inside and over my head, others flooded the lot. I could see straight through the building to the front entrance, and only a few feet ahead of me an intersecting hallway led off to my right. It passed, I knew, in front of the main offices back here. In a moment a short thin guy appeared from that other hall on my right, stopped suddenly and looked me over.

  His oily black hair was flat on his skull, and he wore a dark suit with white shirt and tie. I couldn’t tell from this distance, but you wouldn’t lose money betting the shirt was dirty. I knew him; he was Roe Mink. He knew me, too, and I saw his oddly thick lips form a short, ugly word. He turned quickly and went out of sight. In about a minute he came back and unlocked the doors.

  “Yeah, Scott?” he said, not very pleasantly.

  I brushed by him and he said, “What the hell you want?”

  “In.”

  I walked past him, turned right, and started down the hall toward John Ragen’s office.

  Behind me I heard Mink slam the door shut. And lock it.

  I made the turn into that intersecting hallway. Mink’s feet slapped the polished floor behind me. He caught up with me before I reached John Ragen’s office, grabbed my arm.

  One of the things for which I have an enormous dislike is being grabbed by guys, especially by hoodlums like Mink. I stopped, turned toward him.

  He wasn’t pleasant from ten feet away, but this close he was hard to take. He was only about five-seven and his face was very thin, as if it had been squashed in from the sides. It was the kind of face you would like to squash in from the sides. That oily black hair was combed straight back from his high, white forehead, and his greasy-looking dark eyes were narrowed now. His surprisingly large lips seemed to protrude from his mouth, not prettily. They pooched out even more than usual when he was irritated, and Mink was irritated. High on his left cheek was a bruise, discolored and a little swollen.

  He said, “Not so fast, Scott. It’s pretty late—”

  “The hand.”

  “Huh?”

  “The hand. You want to take it away and keep it? Or do you want me to take it away and keep it?”

  He jerked his arm back. “You seem in a hell of a hurry, Scott. You can’t just bust in.”

  “Okay. Announce me. I want to see Ragen.”

  He walked to the door of Ragen’s office and opened it, stuck his head in and said, “The jerk ain’t said what he wants. He don’t seem to like me.” He laughed softly.

  Ragen said, “Bring him in.”

  Mink looked over his shoulder at me and shoved the door wide. I went in. The room was rich, comfort piled on luxury. The carpet was thick, and the walls were walnut-paneled, lustrously polished. On my left was a big, curving desk, its convex edge toward me. Behind the desk in a swivel chair sat John Ragen. Happy Jack.

  He looked about as happy as he ever looked. As if he’d just been shot in the stomach. Ragen was forty-five years old, a little over six feet tall, wiry as a whip, with a hooked nose and slate eyes. The skin of his face was dark, rough, and leathery. A scar on his upper lip and several smaller scars pockmarked his left cheek. I thought of it as olive skin with the pits still in it. Curly brown hair was tight over his head like a hairy skull-cap.

  He motioned toward a heavy modern chair which probably had cost three hundred dollars, or a year’s dues and assessments from five of the rank and file. “Sit down, Scott,” he said.

  The chair was on my left, with its back to the door. I grinned at him, stepped to a similar chair on my right, swung it around to face the door and sat.

  Ragen said, not in a friendly tone, “Okay, Scott. What the hell do you want this time?”

  “I’m trying to find out who killed Braun Thorn,” I said casually. “Who specifically, that is. I think I already know why.”

  Mink pushed the door shut then, and I glanced his way. Candy leaned against the wall next to Mink; he’d been out of sight behind the door when I walked in. Mink was sort of i
nsignificant to begin with. He always wore dark, somber suits as if ready to be laid away, a kind of clothes hearse, half embalmed and still moving. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. When he came back, you didn’t know he’d been gone. But next to Candy he seemed almost invisible.

  Candy was a young guy named Norman Candello, and if you took just a fast look at him, you’d say he should be in Hollywood, bringing movies back. But I’d taken some slow looks at him. Besides, I knew him, knew his record. He was a young hoodlum, only twenty-four, but he had terms in two reformatories and a year in San Quentin—for armed robbery—behind him.

  Physically, he was everything Roe Mink was not. Candy was clean, strong, good-looking, with regular features and big strong white teeth, with a lot of thick healthy dark hair, carefully waved, that came down in a sharp widow’s peak on his forehead. He was notoriously successful with the ladies, but it hadn’t stunted his growth. He was at least six-three, maybe a little taller than that, and weighed about two-hundred and thirty pounds.

  He and Mink were both looking at me. Candy said softly, “I heard Braun got killed, Scott. Too bad.”

  “Yeah. When did you hear it?”

  He shrugged, smiling. “Oh, this afternoon some time.” He was handsome when he smiled.

  I said, “And here I thought maybe it was early this morning you heard it.”

  “How could that be?” he said pleasantly. “The news is Braun got hit about that time. Man, I was sleeping like a baby all along in there.”

  You couldn’t ruffle Candy, not easily. I was wasting my time with him. But Ragen and Mink had shorter fuses. They’d be the ones who would pop, if anybody did.

  Ragen’s musclebound voice bounced against my ear. “What do you mean, you know why that punk was pushed?”

  I grinned at him. “Watch it, Ragen. Don’t speak ill of the dead. The same thing could happen to you.”

  Those dull slate eyes dug into mine and his face got uglier. He was a mean one, meaner than Mink and Candy put together, which, if you knew Mink and Candy put together, would seem impossible. He reached up slowly and fingered the scar on his lip. Ragen did that when he got hot, really hot. Slowly he said, and his voice could have made tender ears black and blue, “You ain’t saying I could get killed, Scott. You ain’t saying that.”

  “Of course you could get killed, Ragen. But that’s not what I said. Something’s wrong with your ears, too, not just your mouth.” His eyes got even hotter, but I went on. “You have to listen close to the words, Ragen. That’s why I’m here. So you can listen close to the words.”

  His finger moved on the scar. It ran from his left nostril down to the corner of his mouth. When he’d been starting up in the labor rackets he’d been badly beaten and that scar was one of the souvenirs. About a dozen other small purple scars, looking as if they’d been made with the point of a nail, peppered the left side of his face. The same guy who’d given him the lip scar, so the story went, had ground his face into gravel, then had taken off for somewhere three days later, and, oddly, hadn’t come back since. Those days were long behind Ragen now, but the scars kept them fresh in his mind.

  And while he fingered the scar, he looked at me as if thinking I should join that guy who hadn’t come back since. Finally his finger stopped moving. He said, “I’ll give you one more try, Scott. Then out you go on your ear.” He didn’t say “ear.”

  “One more try, hell. You can listen to it from me or go around with the fuzz. Take your pick.”

  “The cops ain’t got nothing to talk to me about.”

  “Try Braun Thorn.”

  He spit out a four-letter word, then said, “I didn’t kill the punk, if that’s what you’re pushing around. It’s out of my line, Scott.” He paused, then added, too gently, “And the boys, they wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  “That’s because they don’t have fleas.” I looked at Mink. “At least Candy doesn’t.".

  Mink’s full lips suddenly pooched out even more and he looked greatly like a camel about to spit, and that’s not good. And this, I thought was far enough to push these guys. So I looked at Ragen and said, “You want to hear it? The way it happened to Braun? And why?” He listened. So he was at least interested. Maybe even a little worried.

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  “Braun was trouble to you from way back. He wanted the Truckers officials’ income tax records made public, audit of the pension and health and welfare funds, all that foolishness. So it started then. But it came to a head when Braun busted in here late Saturday night and lifted some of your records. He hightailed it, got away—” I glanced at Mink—"after slugging that flea-bitten character there, and rented a green Ford from the Sunset Agency.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  Here it came. I said, “Yeah?”

  “You say Thorn busted in here, into this building, and stole something?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And where’d you get that, Scott?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Ragen was quiet for a while. “He stole something, huh? Like what?”

  That was the hell of it. I didn’t know like what. I kept on playing it by ear. “Truckers records, stuff Hartsell could slug you with, records Hartsell wouldn’t have got his hands on otherwise. Don’t tell me you’re going to deny it, Ragen.”

  He was silent for what seemed a long time. I didn’t know whether he was thinking, or just glaring at me, or both. But finally he seemed to come to a decision. He relaxed and said calmly, “You seem to know all about it anyway. Why should I deny it?”

  So there it was. Part of it. I went on. “Braun rented the Ford. He was in it when your boys cut in on him, forced him off—”

  Ragen stopped me. “Not so fast, Scott. Thorn busted in here, sure. And he stole some records. It happened, so why deny it? Anyway, it ain’t no secret now. But it was the same way that punk done everything else. A bust. How in hell would he get to anything important?”

  I didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “Spell that out,” I said.

  “Sure he took some stuff. Junk.” Ragen grinned at me unpleasantly. “You think—if there was anything I was worried about, which there ain’t—I’d leave it laying around? Thorn went through a couple filing cabinets and messed up the records some, and that’s all he done. You think I had him knocked off because he stole some junk? You think I’m that crazy? With me going up in front of them Hartsell guys in a week? I figure you for a lot of things, but I never figure you for a halfwit.”

  “Braun ran into Mink, didn’t he? That night? Don’t tell me Mink got that mouse from a door. Or did he maybe get it this morning.”

  I glanced at Mink, who rubbed a hand over the dark bruise on his cheekbone. I turned back to Ragen as he said, “Where’d you get this, Scott? How come—” he stopped. Slowly he turned his head and looked at Mink and Candy. “Yeah. The punk must of phoned this guy after he took off. Or probably phoned that sister of his—” He stopped again.

  And this time something had happened. He was quiet for only about two seconds. Candy stood a little taller against the wall. Tension in the room seemed to build up, become tangible.

  Ragen went on as if he hadn’t paused at all, his voice level. “So he run into Mink, slugged him and run. Lit out through the parking lot.” He turned the slate eyes on me. “By the time Mink got up front he was gone.”

  “Up front?”

  “We was having a little meeting in the hall. You know where the hall is, don’t you?” His voice was sarcastic.

  The big hall was just inside the front door of the building. Kelly had said that Braun had told her something about a conference Ragen and other union officials were supposed to be having Saturday night. The logical place for such a meeting was the hall here in the Truckers Building. It all checked.

  I said, “Junk, huh?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” His voice was no less sarcastic. “The way you been throwing it around, I figured you knew everything.�
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  “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  He grinned again. “Correspondence,” he said. “Routine records. Plus a stack of cancelled checks he probably thought was payoffs to the Mafia or something. Junk.” He drilled those hard eyes into me. “Don’t get the idea I was happy about it, Scott. I looked for him. But I didn’t find him. If I had, I wouldn’t have pushed the punk.” He stood up. “In fact, I wish he was still alive.”

  “Sure.”

  Ragen walked to the door, jerked his head at Mink and Candy, went outside with them. In a few seconds he returned, closing the door. He walked back to his desk and sat in the swivel chair behind it.

  He told me, “I said I wished Thorn was alive, and I meant it. So I could send the punk to the slammer.”

  “Sure.”

  Out back, in the parking lot, a car started. In a moment I heard the car pull out of the lot, moving fast. I said slowly, “What’s with the boys?”

  “The boys? What do you mean, what’s with them?”

  “Where would Mink and Candy be going all of a sudden?”

  “I told them to blow. Weren’t you through playing detective with them?”

  I said, “The way I hear it, they stand outside the shower and hand you the soap. How come your protection suddenly blows?”

  “Yeah, I made a bad mistake. I can see that now. I really should of kept them here to protect me from you.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, dull eyes leveled on me. “Get this, Scott,” he said, and his voice might have chipped a tooth or two. “I let you walk in here and play the heavy tonight. Don’t get the idea you can make it a habit. I don’t need to explain nothing to you. The only reason you ain’t out of here on your ear—” he didn’t say “ear"—"is on account of them damned senators putting on their show next week. Understand? I give you a little of my time so you’ll stay the hell off my back. You got it now, Scott?”