The Kubla Khan Caper (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  It seemed that I lay like that not merely for swift moments but for long, lazy seconds. The seconds stretched like taffy—a mental tick and a thousand thoughts and feel of earth beneath me and slow blossoming of pain and then finally another tick again—but it wasn’t that kind of time only for me, but for him, too. For him, because I saw from the corner of my eye his foot suspended in air, slowly descending, moving with the unnatural deliberation and grace of a feather in water, until it came to rest with infinite delicacy inches from my face.

  I knew that above me he held over his head the club, the weapon, and that it too in another of those stretching other-dimensional seconds would descend toward me. I was trying to move arms, legs, fingers, everything, but at that moment I stopped. With as great an effort of will as I had ever been capable of, I made myself stop those movements, or rather attempts at movement, and put all my power and all my thought into moving one finger.

  There was time, that kind of crazy time, to think, and I knew I couldn’t hit anything but earth even if I managed to pull the Colt’s trigger; but I also knew the sound of the gunshot at his feet was the only hope I had of stopping the man even briefly, of slowing him down. It was a man, all right.

  I didn’t even know I’d managed to pull the trigger. But I heard the blast of the gun and felt the .38 kick in my hand. And I saw the foot near me move, twist in the soft earth of the path.

  And finally I could move something besides a finger. Not much, and not fast, but I started to roll off my shoulder onto my back—and then the shadowy figure looming over me was gone. Feet thumped on the path. I tried to turn toward him, lift my gun toward him, and couldn’t do it. In fact, it took quite a while simply to push myself into a sitting position. And then I just sat there.

  Maybe I could have gotten to my feet sooner, I don’t know. I just didn’t much care about doing it. I felt sick. I wondered if I was going to lose my marvelous dinner, and all that splendid booze. I didn’t much care about that, either. I discovered my white turban lying on the path beside me, and realized it must have softened the blow. Because of that, I hadn’t been knocked out, not all the way, but far enough to suit me. And unless you have been slammed on the head with real, with determined vigor, you cannot possibly understand how remote from pleasure is the experience.

  So I sat there for quite a while, decided I wasnt going to lose my dinner, and possibly the preceding lunch and breakfast, and then with much care got to my feet. My assailant was long gone, had been gone for at least five normal minutes, I knew, but nobody had come tripping up this creepy lane to investigate the gunshot. Maybe only a few had heard it, and it could be those few had thought it was a champagne cork popping out ahead of the bubbles.

  No matter. My bubbling head was what mattered. While sitting on my behind, I had probed with gentle fingers and learned that my scalp, but not my skull, was split; and I had held a handkerchief on the raw spot until the blood stopped oozing. If I hadn’t been so filled with great and burning Desire, I wouldn’t have minded just sitting there till a large scab formed and fell off, but I now nurtured, almost cherished, that Desire: to get my hands on the guy who’d slugged me.

  And there were three people, at least three, I wanted to find and talk to in a hurry.

  So I turned around and around, like a dog preparing to go to sleep, got my bearings, and started walking toward the Kubla Khan.

  14

  If I could have sprung to my feet ten seconds after getting my brains beaten in, and raced like a deer about the grounds and through the hotel and in and out of rooms, I might have been able to discover who’d sapped me. But when I finally managed to totter to the Kubla Khan and start checking up on people, it was too late for anything but three aspirins, which I took.

  There was another thing, too. I was addled. My brain was bubbling. It was fizzing like a giant Alka-Seltzer. Consequently I felt like a mental giant, perhaps because I was for a change so exceptionally aware of my brain, as a man sitting in a fire is aware of his butt. That’s the ‘trouble with being out of your skull: to the addled, stupidity often appears disguised as brilliance, an epic truism which unfortunately did not then occur to me.

  My first investigative triumph soared to its dizzying shambles in the Sabre Room, which I found after some difficulty. I remembered Ormand Monaco had said he was going to be with a party in that room—though at first I got it a bit muddled in memory and barged into the Scimitar Room. Sabre, Scimitar, what’s the difference?

  But at last I found the Sabre Room and, pouncing inside, spotted Ormand Monaco. He was at a table with about a dozen men and women, some in costume and others in semiformal evening dress. But at first I saw lean, sharp-featured Monaco with only blurs around him. Monaco, in that pearl-gray dinner jacket with its zippy foulard lapels matching the gray in the hair bulging over his temples, like the head bulging at the back of my head.

  I thumped up, stopped by him, pierced him with a stern look. “So, there you are,” I said. “So, where were you?”

  All the heads at the table had snapped around to aim at me, but none more speedily than Ormand Monaco’s. “What?” he said. “What’s this?”

  “Don’t what’s-this me,” I said. “You’re not going to wraggle out of it. Wirgle ... Wroogle? Listen, I saw you.”

  There was a look of consternation on his face. That was good; I had him on the run. He looked around the table. “Governor,” he said. “Mr. Mayor. Mr. Leaf. I must apologize for Mr. Scott. I’m sorry, Mrs. Schmock,” he added, or something like that. “Mrs. Fleeb.” The names weren’t getting through to me loud and clear. “General Stonk.” Boy, my head hurt. Maybe three aspirins weren’t enough.

  Monaco was looking up at me. “Mr. Scorb,” he said in a soothing voice, the way animal trainers talk to new and toothy lions, “you have been drinking a bit, haven’t you? Your eyes are quite pink.”

  “Pink, schmink,” I said. “And pardon me if I used anybody’s name here. I’m just making a point. A point about . . . huh. I had it here a minute ago.”

  Monaco stood up and led me away from the table. “I think you should allow me and my guests to complete our discussion in private,” he said.

  “Have you left this room in the last ten minutes? Or so? Roughly. Say an hour either way.”

  He squinted at me, glanced toward the table, back at me. He looked worried, all right. “I did leave once, to look for Mr. Vail,” he said guiltily. “In fact, I returned only a few minutes ago. Though I fail to understand what concern—”

  “Didn’t find him, did you?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I did not,” Monaco admitted. “However—”

  “What about Bull Harper?”

  “What about Bull Harper?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Well, what about him?”

  “You didn’t see him either, did you?”

  “No, but why I should—”

  “It’s pretty suspicious to me, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Mr. Scott, I do not—repeat, do not—know what you are talking about.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Neither do I,” I said.

  “I suggest we continue this discussion at a later date.”

  “Yeah,” I said—I guess those aspirins were taking hold—”like next November.”

  And I left.

  I never did find Bull Harper. I knocked once on the door of Lyssa’s darkened room, number 218 at the end of the Khan’s north wing, but either nobody was home or nobody was answering the door. I did find Jerry Vail, but that also was a big nothing.

  All I knew was that somebody had clubbed me, and the clubber had intended to kill me. But by midnight I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere the way things were going. So I decided to have a drink in one of the bars.

  I was by then feeling reasonably normal except for the dull throbbing in my skull. At least the fizzing and bubbling had stopped and it occurred to me that a cool drink and a little quiet thought might prove more productive o
f results fhan had my recent activity. So I headed for the Seraglio.

  And ran into Misty Lombard.

  I didn’t run into her physically this time, just spotted her walking toward the hotel as I started to enter the lobby.

  So I waited for her and said, “Hello, hello. You were coming to see me. You missed me, so you started looking—”

  “I was going into the Seraglio for a cocktail.”

  “Where’s Mr. Leaf?”

  “Still in conference.”

  “Fool that he is.”

  “He talked to me and said it would probably go on most of the night. So I decided to get away from the crowd—it’s getting a little wild out there, isn’t it?”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I thought I’d enjoy a quiet drink before going to bed.”

  “Well, that is precisely what I had in mind, Misty. How about joining me? For the drink.”

  She bit a corner of her lip gently, cocked her head on one side, letting the heavy lids droop over her big eyes. And then she smiled and said, “Why not?”

  We sat at the bar and had a couple drinks, but I remember little of what we talked about. I know I told her of getting hit on the head, and she was marvelously sympathetic; and I asked her to tell me in more detail of her conversation with Jeanne Jax, and she did, but there was little if anything of importance that I didn’t already know. So, mainly I just sat and yakked with her, and listened to her soft, sweet voice, and looked at her, and looked.

  Finally she said, “Well, I’ve got to get some sleep. Have to be bright-eyed tomorrow.”

  “You’ll be bright-eyed every tomorrow. I’ll walk you home, that is to your suite, OK? It’s dangerous for you to be out there alone, you know.”

  “With two hundred other people around?”

  “Sure. Some of them are men.”

  “And you’ll protect me from the men, is that it?”

  “All but one,” I said.

  So we strolled from the Khan, through the lobby and out the main entrance, then over a graveled path nearly to the end of the south wing, where her suite was. At the door she turned, started to say something and stopped.

  Then she asked me, “Would you like to come in for a nightcap. Shell? If you’re not too tired—”

  “Sure. One more can’t hurt.”

  “Can’t hurt much.” She smiled. “We’ll just have one. I do have to get some sleep.”

  We went inside. The living room was small but sumptuously furnished with thick blue carpet and lighter blue draperies over the front windows, a low blue-green divan, bright oil paintings on the walls. Soft light flowed from a massive lamp with its base on the carpet at one end of the divan.

  On the right was a kitchenette and bar with two stools in front of it, and through a half-open door on my left I could see the dimly lighted bedroom, sheet and blanket already folded back by the maid, and ready tor occupancy.

  Ready for occupancy, I was thinking mysteriously, when Misty said from the kitchenette, “Bourbon and water, that’s all there is. Except for my sherry.”

  “Bourbon and water’s all I need.”

  In a minute she came back with the drinks and joined me on the low divan. While in the kitchenette she must have poked a button or turned a dial because now there was music, something pleasantly unobtrusive, with strings and muted brass and the quivering softness of vibes.

  Misty kicked off her pointy-toed shoes and said, “Oh, boy, does that feel good. Do you mind?”

  “Are you kidding? It even feels good way over here.”

  I was at least a foot from her on the divan. She laughed and took a sip of her sherry, and said, “Don’t tell me you have telepathic feelings.”

  “I’ve got something better than that.”

  She laughed, stretched out her legs and rested her jazzy feet on the antique mirrored top of a coffee table before the divan, and I leaned toward her, put my arm behind her shoulders and kissed her.

  I was probably as surprised as she was.

  It had not been a premeditated movement. Not that the thought had been at any moment far from my mind; it was just that I didn’t think at all about what I was doing. One moment I was looking at her move with a kind of fluid and animal grace, and listening to her free and throaty laugh; the next moment I was near her and her lips were beneath mine.

  She stiffened, started to pull away. But only started. Then her body relaxed and her lips became soft and moist and warm. I put my hands behind her back and pressed her close and she crumpled against me, and her arms went around my back and pulled.

  When our lips parted I said, “Misty—” and she opened her eyes wide and said, “Don’t say anything. Shell. Don’t say anything.”

  Those enormous, wonderful eyes were close to mine. I looked at them, into them, into them as her smooth lids slowly closed over their shadowed darkness. And then I found her mouth with mine again.

  Only one drink, she’d said. Actually, we never finished that first one . . .

  In the morning, after a breakfast of coffee—my usual day-starter—I drove out Desert View Drive with the Cad’s top down, sun just beginning to get warm on my still turbaned sore head.

  Still turbaned, because nearly all of last night’s party-goers would still be present at the Kubla Khan today—for the exciting ribbon-cutting at noon—and were expected to be in costume till then, to add color and magnificence to the ceremonies. Consequently, I was again in my ma-haraja outfit. Besides, I liked wearing it. Made me feel like a fireman. There was another remote possibility, too.

  Wise old doctors say alcohol doesn’t leave the drunk—or, rather, alcohol drinker—until twenty-four hours after his last belt. And it hadn’t been nearly that long since my Last Rattlesnake Bite, or whatever had been eating me last night. So, conceivably, there were still a few little asps slithering around in the vicnity of my duodenum. Whatever that is. And wherever that is.

  At any rate, I felt grand.

  It was a beautiful morning. If it had been raining and hailing it would have been a beautiful morning. For, despite getting bashed on the skull last night, after Misty and murmured words and soft lips, I felt energetic and positively euphoric.

  This was the same route I’d traveled yesterday afternoon, only a few hours ago, and as I drove I wondered again why Jeanne Jax had been on her way to Monaco’s, and who it was that had been tearing after her at ninety miles an hour. Or, rather, if the driver of that other car had in fact been racing after Jeanne.

  Clearly somebody had either been following her—or else had known in advance that she would be on the road to Monaco’s. Killers don’t just hide off the road and shoot whoever happens by. I slowed and turned off Desert View into Yucca, kept going to the tumoff up which that other car had gone yesterday, turned left there at the sign harding ranch.

  When the narrow road crested Moss Mountain I could see below and ahead for miles. There was only one place that could be the Harding Ranch, and there was simply no place else to which anybody could have been driving last night, unless out for a lark. A couple of miles or more away was a low gray-painted building, undoubtedly the Harding home or ranch house, and beyond it a circular dirt track enclosed by a white fence, and nearby what I guessed was a stable. At least there were a couple of horses standing near it in apparent boredom.

  At the base of Moss Mountain, running left and right, were two shallow ruts in the earth where a few cars had passed from time to time. Hunters, probably. Kids after rabbits, guys with rifles. And yesterday, perhaps, a man with a heavy-caliber pistol. Half a mile to the right, up over the hill and down, and he’d been ready and waiting for whoever came back along Yucca Road.

  I didn’t drive down that way—the police would have covered all this area thoroughly by now—but kept on going toward the ranch house. It was low and sturdy, built from cement blocks painted gray, and there was a big cement-floored patio in front just off the drive.

  I climbed out of the Cad and started across the pati
o, but before I reached the front door it opened and a tall, slim, middle-aged woman stepped out.

  “Hello,” she said, and looked at me with some amusement.

  “Good morning. This the Harding Ranch?”

  “Yes. I’m Mrs. Harding.”

  “Is your husband home?”

  “No, he’s in Los Angeles. Been there for the last four days.”

  “Have any sheriff’s deputies been here to talk with you?”

  “Yes, last night. A Sergeant Torgesen was one of the men.”

  I winced. I had suddenly realized I’d not yet been in to see the sergeant. As I recalled, he’d told me not to forget, adding, “I wouldn’t like it if you forgot,” or something menacing like that.

  It required only a few questions of Mrs. Harding for me to get the answers I was after, since she’d already gone over the same ground with Torgesen. She’d been alone all day yesterday, and nobody had visited her; her husband naturally hadn’t driven here, since he was in Los Angeles. He didn’t drive a dark-blue sedan anyway, but a black Imperial.

  I asked her, “Did you hear any gunshots?”

  “I did hear some—I thought they were shots. Someone hunting, I supposed. I looked outside, but I didn’t see anything. Or anybody.”

  That was about it. Mainly I’d wanted to be sure nobody had been zooming at ninety miles an hour to the Harding Ranch, and to find out if my friend in the blue sedan had been seen in the area. So I thanked Mrs. Harding and drove back toward the Kubla Khan, filing this small bit where I thought it belonged, together, I was almost surprised to note, with quite a number of other bits.

  Adding it all up, I was actually starting to make a little progress—I thought. But then I picked up the radiophone and put in a call to the Sheriff’s Department in Indio.