Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I bound her arm with my handkerchief. Hope kept telling me it was nothing. The cop said we’d have to all go downtown.

  And then, while I was still working on his sister, Charlie broke. It didn’t happen slowly, it happened all at once. He started to cry, and the wracking sobs tore at his body. Figuring Abbamonte was gunning for him hadn’t broken him, a talk with the Senator hadn’t and I hadn’t been able to do it. But now, watching me bandage his sister’s arm, where he had shot her, he suddenly got down on his own knees near Hope and cradled her head in his arms and cried into that jet-black hair of hers. Finally the cries became words and he said, “Forgive me ... swear to God ... didn’t mean it...”

  “I know you didn’t, Charlie,” Hopes said softly. “I know it was an accident.”

  He stood up, the tears running down his cheeks. He blew his nose noisily. “Glasses and Rover called in from the Parkway Monday night,” he said. “They needed a tow-truck. They were in trouble. Me, I been on Abbamonte’s list for years. He’s into me for a couple of G’s. Hope ... there was business college ... clothes ... she wasn’t gonna be no cheapie, not my sister, and I ... well, he was into me and I got them the tow-truck.”

  “But they were working for Holt at the time, weren’t they?” I asked.

  “Sure. So what? Abbamonte hadn’t made his big play yet. Holt, Mike Sand, Abbamonte—it was all the same to Glasses and Rover then. Holt figured Mrs. Sand was coming East with help for her husband. He got the word from a hood named Roe Mink out on the Coast and he figured if he could win her confidence, him and Happy Jack Ragen would have Sand and Abbamonte by the short hairs. So he set up this phony snatch, only it backfired on him.” Harsh laughter tore from Charlie’s throat. “You got there before he did, Mr. Drum.”

  “That made up Mr. A’s mind for him,” Charlie went on. “If Holt was already in Happy Jack’s camp, Mr. A figured he could make the move to take over on his own. He tried to get Nels Torgesen to cooperate, but Torgesen, he was still—like living in the past. He still saw Mr. A. as a fat, sweaty bookkeeper who also did some loan-sharking which kept the boys in line. He had this diary, though, and Mr. A. wanted it. So he sent me out there to Front Royal, and when I walk in, Holt’s on the floor with his head bashed in.”

  He looked at the cop suddenly. “I didn’t do it! Jesus, I didn’t do it!”

  The cop shrugged. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, mister.” His eyes caught mine. “Shall I call downtown?”

  “Call the Sheriff’s office. Tell them we’re bringing Charlie Derleth into protective custody.” I stared at Charlie. He nodded slowly. “With Dr. Frost’s papers?” I asked him.

  His eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Instead he looked at Hope. Her face was pale. She smiled at him.

  “With the works,” he said.

  And Hope went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

  While Charlie dressed, the cop called the District Sheriff’s office. Then I called Senator Hartsell at home and told him we had Charlie Derleth ready to cooperate and some or all of Gideon Frost’s papers. The Senator was ecstatic. The subpoena for Charlie Derleth, he said, would be waiting for us at the Sheriff’s office.

  Then Charlie came out of the bedroom with a slim blue portfolio in his hands. “Here they are,” he said, but he didn’t give the portfolio to me. He gave it to Hope. Just a gesture, really, but it was symbolic of the decision he had made.

  At nine-fifty we all went downstairs and outside, where the cop’s patrol car was waiting.

  A gray four-door sedan was just pulling to the curb across the street. The sidewalk was deserted, the air cold, the sky bleak and threatening. Charlie walked ahead of me toward the patrol car, the cop at his side. Hope walked with me, holding my hand, the blue portfolio tucked under her other arm.

  Three men had got out of the sedan across the street. They looked at us and started running.

  “Hey!” the cop shouted, clawing for the revolver at his side.

  The lead figure sprinting toward us wore glasses and a hat pulled low over his face. Still running, he reached under his coat. Then he had both hands on a stubby black tommy-gun. Then his arms began to shake and the sound burst explosively on the silent Sunday street as the tommy-gun chattered and roared and slugs clanged and whined off the metal of the patrol car.

  The cop fell first, spinning completely around and landing heavily on his shoulder. Hope screamed. I dove after the cop, grabbed for his revolver and ripped it loose from its lanyard. Another burst from the tommy-gun split the cold air.

  “Get down behind the car!” I yelled at Hope.

  Charlie lurched against the rear fender of the patrol car. When the tommy-gun chattered again, he folded and staggered back as if someone had used a sledge hammer on his middle. Crying out, Hope ran to him with the portfolio still under her arm.

  Glasses reached her before I did. He chopped brutally with the barrel of the tommy-gun at the side of her head. She fell into him and with both arms around her waist he pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger.

  It merely clicked. The pan was empty. Because he held Hope in front of him, shielding his body, I couldn’t use the revolver on Glasses. I moved toward him. He backed into the street with Hope, dragging her.

  A shotgun roared from across the street. Pellets hailed on the patrol car and I dove behind its fender, but got up fast and fired three times. A big man was standing in the middle of the street with an automatic in his hand. A smaller man was lounging against the open door of the gray sedan. He had gone back there, probably, for the shotgun. They hadn’t expected this much trouble. They had expected to take Charlie in bed. One of my bullets hit the man with the shotgun, and he sprawled in the street. The big one, who was Rover, backed slowly across it with Glasses and Hope.

  If I fired again I might hit Hope. If I ran after them, Rover would cut me down with his automatic. I crouched behind the patrol car. The cop groaned. Then Glasses and Rover and Hope were in the gray sedan, and the doors slammed.

  I started running.

  I heard a window bang in one of the apartment buildings on they side of the street. A man shouted something. The guy I had hit was the kid, Morty. He got to his knees and pointed the shotgun at me. Then he collapsed, falling forward, and discharged the second barrel at the street.

  The car started with a lurch. I hurled myself at it, got my feet on the rear bumper and the weight of my body on the trunk-lid. I saw Hope’s face in the rear window, three inches from mine. Rover was sitting next to her, looking out at me. He said something. The car picked up speed and began to swerve. I couldn’t find anything to hold onto, felt myself slipping. When they took a corner fast, I was in the air suddenly. And then the street came up fast and hard, hitting me and spinning me. I jolted against the curb and lay there breathing like a man who had tried to run a three-minute mile.

  Someone helped me to my feet. There were faces going in and out of focus and voices first soft then loud then soft again. I went back to the police car. The cop had dragged himself into it and was gasping into the shortwave mike. His right aim hung at his side; he’d been hit in the shoulder.

  I went to where Charlie had fallen. He lay on his back, in a pool of blood, the whites of his eyes wide and reflecting the gray of the sky. Slugs from Glasses’ tommy-gun had stitched across his middle, almost ripping him in half. He was dead.

  I got up. Staggered across the street to Morty. His eyes looked up at me.

  “Where’d they go?” I said.

  He mouthed two unprintable words, but no sound came from his lips.

  “Where’d they go?”

  His eyes shut slowly and his face went slack. He had long eyelashes that curled almost like a girl’s.

  The cops came in two riot cars.

  Morty died on the way to the hospital.

  They took me to the hospital. I had bruises on my arms, legs and chest but nothing had been broken and I kept telling them I felt all right. They wouldn’t let me go for an hour, and whe
n they did, a cruiser took me to police headquarters. They asked me questions. Nothing tough, no leaning on me, I was one of the good guys and had my credentials to prove it. But they kept asking the same questions over and over again and I kept answering them and kept saying “You don’t understand. Hope. They’ve got Hope.”

  At two o’clock, the Senator came for me. He drove me home and waited while I changed out of my ripped suit. He oo’d and ah’d at the bruises. I felt all right, I said. He shook his head, and we drove to his office.

  Ballinger had delivered the last of my property from Front Royal. It was the .44 Magnum in its shoulder rig, and I strapped it on and headed for the door.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  “I don’t know. They’ve got Hope. I have to find them.”

  “Sit down. Here.”

  What he gave me was raw whiskey. I drank it down. He gave me more. I drank that down too. There was only a watchman at Brotherhood headquarters on Sunday, he told me. No help there. They checked out home addresses for Abbamonte and Mike Sand. Two more blanks. Ballinger was called, but the Torgesen place in Front Royal wasn’t occupied and hadn’t been for almost twenty-four hours.

  We looked at maps, close-scale maps of Tidewater Maryland. “This is the area,” Senator Hartsell said, jabbing a big finger at one of the maps. “The Quaker School, the Congregational church half a mile down the road, then a row of bungalows on the beach, boarded up this time of year, then some sand dunes and scrub pine, then Haycox Airport, then more scrub country and a really big development of those beach-shacks, also deserted this time of year.”

  A flag on a high pole, a cyclone fence, an old garage...

  “They’ve got to have taken her there,” I said. “They killed Charlie and she has the papers and maybe they think there are other things she can tell them and—Alexis Sand!” I shouted suddenly. The Senator looked at me. I picked up the phone on his desk and called the Statler, but the Sand suite didn’t answer.

  “What about the Maryland State Troopers?” I asked the Senator.

  “You tell me what about them. If we had one shred of real evidence to show Hope Derleth had been taken there, the State Troopers might cooperate. With a really large-scale search they’d probably be able to find the place.” The Senator scowled over a cigar. “But let me tell you something, if you won’t jump down my throat. In a way I’m glad you don’t have that kind of evidence, not yet. I want them to have their meeting, Chet. I want them to try to cut each other down to size—Sand and Abbamonte and Ragen from the Coast if he’s there—all of them. Because, maybe, one of them will crack. And boy, if he does, we’ll have them.”

  “And they’ll have Hope.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. I looked down at the map, lit a cigarette, put it out immediately, rolled the map up and said, “Is it okay with you if I go out there looking? I mean, I wouldn’t want to bust up this meeting too soon to suit you.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Chet. Everyone’s got a lot at stake in this.”

  I shoved the rolled-up map under my arm. “As much as Hope?”

  He stood up suddenly. “I’m going to make a speech. Hell, boy, that’s what they pay me for. Maybe Hope Derleth’s the salt of the earth. I only met her once, and I liked what I saw. But do you think she’s the only innocent person given a rough time by the Brotherhood? Don’t you think there are good men all over the country who died because they tried to buck the union? Don’t you think a guy like Braun Thorn out on the Coast, who got more than a little fed up with the way they use the Brotherhood Welfare Fund out there, had people who cared when they shot him in cold blood? Don’t you—”

  “I met his sister,” I said.

  “Don’t you think it’s going to continue, business at the same old stand as before, with a new set of leaders, unless we give them enough rope to tie themselves in knots? Do you suppose if the hearings fail and we don’t lean on them as heavily as the law will permit—do you suppose for a minute there won’t be other killings?”

  “That’s enough. Senator. I see your point. But I’m going out there. I’ve got to.”

  “Of course you are. I never said you shouldn’t. But call out the Troopers and make a frontal attack on them today and they’ll burn every record they have and we’d be right back where we started.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  And, “Okay,” he growled, and we shook hands and I got out of there with the map.

  It was after four o’clock and beginning to snow.

  All I had to do was comb a couple of dozen square miles of Tidewater Maryland, find the Brotherhood hideout, bust in on them single-handed and somehow come out alive with Hope and without upsetting the Senator’s applecart.

  Snap your fingers. Like that.

  SHELL SCOTT AND CHESTER DRUM HIT IT OFF

  Tidewater, Maryland, 10:00 P.M., Sunday, December 20

  Shell Scott

  My joyously anticipatory emotion was all shot to hell.

  It was late Sunday evening; and for hours I had been driving, first through rain and now sleet, getting more and more frustrated and all out of sorts. If there had been any more sorts to be out of, I would have been out of them, too. A little more of this and I would go to the cops, let them toss me into the house of many slammers, and take over the search themselves.

  They would toss me into the slammer, for sure. Heat had pursued me from Los Angeles, and though there was as yet no definite news that Shell Scott—or Ragen—was in the D.C. area, radio and television reports had wafted word of that bilious possibility eastward.

  After the jet had landed at Washington National Airport shortly after noon Saturday, I had rented a Chevy and started looking. Mink’s last words had told me Ragen was flying here for a Sunday night meeting with Sand and Abbamonte, and he’d used the words, “showdown ... settle,” so I knew it would be a good-sized gathering—not one of that ugly trio would meet the others privately without several personal gun bearers along—and that they were probably gathering right now. But Mink hadn’t told me enough of the where, just “South on Ben...”

  Saturday I had phoned the Automobile Club, asked questions at gas stations, even checked fruitlessly with Trucker Headquarters, pored over maps, traveled over half the area in and near Washington. Mink hadn’t said “D.C.,” though; his exact words had been “Out of D.C.” And a map had showed me that Maryland Avenue in D.C. became Benning Road, and crossed the state line into Maryland.

  So now, late Sunday, I was in Tidewater, Maryland. On Benning Road this tune, driving up and down Benning Road. I had checked on Sand, Abbamonte, and Drum, knew the year and make of the cars they drove. But neither that info nor anything else had paid off, and my mood was beginning to match the weather.

  All afternoon the sky had darkened, the wind had increased in intensity until now, in the black night, it was almost blowing a gale. Icy sleet whipped by the wind slapped against the windshield, to be swept away only momentarily by the clicking wipers.

  I had slowed to swing around a curve, peering through the windshield, when something across the street was briefly etched in my headlights. It was a man running. Behind him was a small, brightly lighted cafe, a big truck-and-trailer rig parked on the asphalt before it.

  The man was running from the cafe’s door, sprinting toward a car. I couldn’t see him clearly through the fogged glass, and so I rolled down the window on my side.

  Just before he jumped into the car, I got a good look at him.

  Chester Drum

  A flag on a high pole, a cyclone fence, an old garage.

  An old garage, a cyclone fence, a flag on a high pole.

  A cyclone fence, an old garage...

  I sat hunched over the counter inside an all-night truckstop on Benning Road with those words turning over in my brain, chasing each other down dark blind alleys in which there were no answers, just questions.

  I had driven back and forth along Benning Road from the Anacostia River bridge to
the Chesapeake shore, had explored side roads, had poked around the scrub-pine country and the boarded up beach-shacks, had prowled through the rain and the sleet and the wind. I was wet, tired and pessimistic. It was ten o’clock, Sunday night. In this weather, Benning Road was almost deserted. A single trucker, his big diesel rig parked outside near my Chrysler, was fighting a pinball machine at the back of the truckstop. An old geezer in a soiled apron was reading a paper behind the counter while I drank strong coffee as black as my mood. I spread Senator Hartsell’s topographical map out on the counter and stared stupidly at it.

  Keep trying?

  There wasn’t anything else I could do. They were out here somewhere. They had Hope.

  The old geezer, pawing lazily at the counter with a limp rag, stared at me and the map. “You from that development commission, mister?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Fellers out here Friday. Had a map like yours. Gonna see about developing some of that there scrub country, they said.”

  I nodded, hardly listening. Those would have been some of the Hartsell Committee people, on the same fruitless search I was on.

  “Making a mistake,” the old geezer went on dogmatically. “Five, six years back, when we had us an airport over to Haycox, maybe then they could of made something out of the scrub country. They got a big airport over to Chesapeake City now, though. From here to Haycox these days,” he said regretfully, “scrub pine and dunes is all we got, and all we’re gonna need, I reckon.”

  “I was out here the other night,” I said. “Went somewhere and can’t find the place now.” My bleak mood made me imitate the clipped drawl which characterizes Tidewater Maryland speech without meaning to. “All I can remember was a flag flapping in the wind on a high pole, an old garage, and a cyclone fence.”

  “Flag, mister? You must have the wrong stretch of tidewater. Got us no flags here. None all along Benning, far as I know. What’s so special about it?”