Trammel's head was so freakishly thin that his brain must have looked like a waffle, and wisps of graying hair rested on white scalp that looked like bone. In the narrow space between those dark eyes protruded a long, curved, grappling-hook nose.
He was staring at me the same way he had on that day when I'd kicked him out of my office. Finally, he said, "You know better than to come here, Scott. And as for any help—"
"Wait a minute. I'm not after help for me personally; this is about a Trammelite, one of your followers."
The icy look remained another second, then slowly he smiled. That was the unkindest cut of all. It was as if invisible hooks pulled one lip up and the other down, the smile of a bald-headed man who had just been bombed by an eagle. "One of my followers?" he said. "Ah, well . . . I am always anxious to help any of my children."
"I'm trying to find a girl. Felicity Gifford. She's been missing a couple of days and may be in trouble, or hurt. Maybe she's just run away from home. Anyway, nobody seems to know what happened to her, and I thought she might have talked to you—or one of the other Guardians."
I glanced around at them. The two men beside Trammel were a retired doctor and a practicing mortician. The four others were called women: Andrews, a lady lawyer with a small mustache; two maiden ladies, each of whom looked several hundred years old; and the shriveled president of an all-female temperance society that demanded temperance in everything except temperance societies. The extra guy I'd noticed, the outsider, was a man who seemed familiar in appearance. I couldn't place him, but knew I'd seen him before.
"Felicity Gifford?" Trammel said. "I can't quite—"
"She's young, sixteen. Everybody I've talked to seems to think she's tops. Sings in your choral group."
"Oh, yes. Felicity." He nodded. "One of our finest children. I recall her now, of course, but I haven't spoken to her for weeks. I'm sorry, I do wish I could help. I am always ready to extend a helping hand—"
I interrupted, knowing I couldn't last through one of his sanctimonious speeches. "The thing is, I've talked with several Trammelites who told me you often help them with their problems, advise them. One said Felicity attended your confession a week or so back. That figures, if she was fouled up in any way, and I hoped she might have told you if anything was worrying her."
"Perhaps," Trammel said coldly, "but I never know to whom I speak. Anonymity is strictly preserved. I'm afraid none of us can be of help." He glanced around the table and the others shook their heads.
That seemed to wrap it up, and I was more disappointed than I'd thought I would be. I guess I'd been hoping irrationally that here I'd get some kind of lead to Felicity, and now I was right back where I'd started. The only thing worth remembering from the whole morning was the way Betha Green had acted, grabbing her chair and, I felt sure, lying to me.
I looked at Trammel. "One other thing. Does the name Dixon mean anything to you?"
He blinked at me. "What?"
"Dixon. Probably it's somebody's name. I thought it might be a Trammelite. Conceivably it's a lead to Felicity."
Trammel said, "It means nothing to me." Nobody at the table reacted in any way. The extra guy, I noticed, had a small notebook open before him and was jotting something in it. I almost had him made, but then I became aware of Trammel sputtering beside me.
". . . so get out. We cannot offer you any assistance, and I listened to you only because I hoped to help one of my friends. If we should learn anything of Felicity—or others in distress, for that matter—we would hardly inform a man of your stripe, Scott."
I looked back at him. "Huh? What stripe are you—"
He rode right over me. Either Trammel was finally getting back at me for my attitude the other time we'd met, or he was purposely trying to make me mad. He was succeeding in making me mad. When he spouted, "There are too many decent people—" I cut him off.
"Stow it, mister. Get this through your head: I don't give a damn what your opinion of me is. I'm only interested in the girl. Otherwise I wouldn't have come within a mile of here. Felicity's a young, sweet kid, and pretty enough, and I hate to think what might—"
Trammel's small eyes lit up and he said huskily, "I know what you think. I know your kind, Scott. She is young and pretty, isn't she? I know why you're interested in her. Of course you want to find her."
"Why, you emaciated buzzard." That—even from Trammel—had knocked me for a loop. I was so stunned I let him keep on yakking.
"You'll get no help from us. And I demand that you never come here again."
"Listen, mister, don't start demanding anything."
He was almost shouting. "I further demand that you stay away from my Trammelite friends and associates! I'll not have you bothering them, talking to them, annoying them. They are fine, decent men and women, and I'll not permit a man of your disgusting morals and filthy thoughts—"
"You slimy bastard," I said, and he stopped in midsentence. I leaned forward with my hands on the table and stared at Trammel as he shrank back. "One more crack out of you," I said softly, "and you'll have teeth in your stomach. I've had all of you I can take. What the hell's the matter with you, mister? You got an old war wound or something?"
He started to sputter again, but I kept going. "Filthy, huh? I guess everything's filthy to you except the nice dirty money those ignorant Trammelites of yours toss in the kitty. You and your goddamned pea-brained guardians of everything. What's today's meeting about? Somebody say a dirty word?"
It was an effort, but I forced myself to shut my big mouth. Anything else I might have said would have been no more effective or clever than my last remarks.
The other Guardians were standing now, faces livid, arms waving. Only the extra guy was still seated, and he was grinning almost happily at me, apparently enjoying himself. The others weren't.
Trammel was still sputtering. A short stocky guy with a face like ham and eggs, big eyes yellowish in a pink face, was literally jumping up and down. Andrews of the small mustache was waggling a bony finger and crying, "It's men like you who make the rest of us bear the cross of your sins!"
I let her run down, then turned to go. Trammel shouted, "Just a minute! You animal, we'll not permit—"
"Oh, shut up." I'd intended to leave quietly, but I swung around to face him. "Quit telling me what you'll permit and what you demand, Trammel."
"You've not heard the last of this!"
"Since you mention it, you haven't either. I'll ride the bunch of you to death if I get half a chance."
Then it was quiet; nobody was speaking or even gasping. The familiar face of the other man still wore his grin. I turned and walked down from the platform.
As I started toward the tent's exit, Trammel called in a strangled voice. "You've made a grave mistake, speaking to us like this, Scott."
I kept walking but looked over my shoulder. "Sure. Incidentally, you ever find your pornographic library, Trammel?"
He didn't tell me, and I went on out.
Chapter Four
I was showering when the chimes bonged, so I wrapped a towel around my middle, picked up a bourbon-and-water highball sitting on the washbasin, and dripped toward the front door.
It was after 7 p.m. now, but the burn Trammel and his Guardians had built in me hadn't yet died completely. Since noon I'd talked to a few dozen more people, made about fifty phone calls, driven over half the town—all without getting a single lead to Felicity. The checking had kept me busy, but now that I'd had time to relax a bit, both my gripe with Trammel and my worry about Felicity were growing.
I couldn't understand how the girl could have disappeared so completely, and the more time that passed without a trace of her, the more worried I'd become. I figured she was the type to flip good if she flipped. In my job I'd seen plenty of cases about like hers, young kids, held in all their lives and kept ignorant of their own and others' emotions, who didn't know how to handle those emotions when they were brand-new and just starting to work inside them. Most
of them got hurt, some of them badly hurt, simply because they didn't know what the score was.
But those were my last thoughts of either Felicity or Trammel for a few minutes. The chimes bonged again and I opened the door and I thought: Wow!
It was a woman, a doll, a sensational tomato who looked as if she'd just turned twenty-one, but had obviously signaled for the turn a long time ago. She was tall, and lovely all over, maybe five-seven, and she wore a V-necked white blouse as if she were the gal who'd invented cleavage just for fun.
I gawked, and she smiled with plump red lips, beautiful lips that undoubtedly had said yes much more often than no, and I said, "Come in, come in, hello. Hello, miss. Miss?"
"Miss Perrine." She brought the faint scent of perfume in with her. Her hair was short and blonde, and her voice was a soft huskiness saying, as I shut the door and turned around, "My goodness, letting a girl in when you're dressed like that. Undressed."
"I didn't plan it, it—"
"Just a towel. You think you're making an impression? Well, you are. Goodness, you're big."
She rattled that off, smiling a yes-yes smile and blinking big green eyes at me. After a false start I said, "Ah . . . sit down. I was taking a shower. In the shower. Very clean fellow, clean-cut, clean . . . Can I get something . . . get you something? A drink? Cigarette? Food?"
She walked from me toward my oversized black divan and I noticed she wore a blue skirt that she also filled admirably.
"Excuse me," I said. "Won't be a minute."
I was a whirlwind in the bedroom and came back wearing cordovans, tan slacks, and a vivid red sports shirt. She was looking at my two tanks of tropical fish, one with guppies in it, the other containing a pair of neons I was trying to spawn. The guppies were sinning; the little devils are always sinning.
"Hello," I said. "Here I am. Here . . . we are."
Peering at the fish, she said, "What are these?"
"Neon tetras." She was puzzled by a square of glass hanging outside the tank, so I explained. "That's a one-way mirror. I'm trying to spawn them, and neons are tricky, don't like to be disturbed while spawning. Who does? Ha. I can peek through the mirror and see if they lay any eggs, and they can't see me, don't even know I'm out here. Good?"
She batted long lashes. "Peeking at them. How awful. You are Shell Scott, aren't you?"
"Yes, ma'am. Detective. Fish fancier. Bachelor."
"Just so you're the detective." She stopped smiling and said, "I phoned but your line was busy, so I came over. I think maybe I can help you."
"You most certainly—"
"Unless you've already found the girl."
That stopped me cold. "What girl?"
"Felicity Gifford. You are looking for her, aren't you?"
"Yeah. How did you know?"
"It's in the paper, right on the front page. I just read it. That's why I called. I really—"
"Do you know where she is? Have you seen her?"
She shook her head. "I've never even met her. I just started to say I really don't know anything for sure. Actually, I feel a little silly now that I'm here."
"Look, if you know anything at all, spit it out. I mean, tell me. No matter what it is, it's more than I've got now."
Her name was Jo, Miss Jo Perrine, and she lived here in Hollywood with her mother and her mother's brother, a rich, eccentric egg named Randolph Hunt. Her uncle wasn't a Trammelite, but he had several times gone to their tent meetings and had met Felicity. He knew her fairly well and, like almost everybody else, thought she was a little doll. An hour or so earlier this evening Jo and her uncle, Mr. Hunt, had been in the front room; he'd been reading the newspapers, noticed Felicity's name, and mentioned it to Jo, expressing surprise and the hope that she was all right. He'd finished the story, mumbled a couple of things Jo hadn't caught, and then suddenly left.
"It was funny, I guess," Jo said to me, "but I didn't think anything about it then. Later I read the story myself, and when I saw Miss Dixon's name down near the end, I started to wonder about—"
"Who? Miss Dixon?"
"Yes. That is, I saw the name Dixon. Uncle knows a woman named Dixon, and with her name and Felicity's and the Trammelites and all in the story, it made me wonder if it could have anything to do with Uncle. Besides, I thought it might be something you'd want to know."
I stood up. "You bet it is. Where can I find this Dixon?"
"I don't know, Mr. Scott. I don't know where she lives. But if it is the woman you were talking about, I thought you might find her through Uncle." She frowned and added, "I haven't even any idea where he'd be now, though."
I sat down again. The name Felicity had written on that pad might not have any connection with the woman Hunt knew, and even if they were the same, it didn't help me much. There are 258 people named Dixon listed in the L.A. phone book; that was one of the angles the two guys I'd hired were laboriously checking.
Most of the steam went out of me, because even with this info I still didn't know what the hell I could do. I asked Jo to phone her home and see if Hunt were there, but her call drew a blank, as did our next few minutes of conversation.
Finally, I thought of something that should have puzzled me earlier: How this stuff had got into the papers at all. I asked Jo and she said, "I don't know, but there's a big story. I brought my paper up with me."
"Swell. As long as I'm just sitting here, I might as well read the thing."
She reached to the divan beside her and picked up a folded copy of the Ledger, then leaned forward, way forward, and handed it to me.
I took the paper, flipped it open—and immediately understood several things: how and why the story had been written, who the grinning stranger at the Guardian meeting had been, and that the war on Shell Scott had been declared—and not only Guardians were attacking.
The stuff about me occupied the two left-hand columns on the front page under a head reading: "Detective Attacks Arthur Trammel." A subhead beneath it declared: "Shell Scott Threatens Guardians, Calls Churchgoers Ignorant." It was bylined Ira Borch—the grinning stranger, a slimy sonofabitch who'd been on my can for six months. A little too late, I'd finally placed him. Before I read a word of the story, I knew what to expect. I also knew I'd have more trouble with these guys, all of them; this was just the beginning.
Trammel had plenty of reason to hate my guts; but Borch and his rag had even more. The Ledger is an L.A. newspaper so far to the left that it might as well be published in Moscow, and Ira Borch is a new-definition liberal. For half a year, I'd been high on their smear list. Six months back I'd been investigating a Communist-dominated union and had been forced, in self-defense, to shoot an alleged Commie in his alleged brain. It had killed him, too, since in that particular instance the Fifth Amendment hadn't been any protection for him. My story of the justifiable homicide stood up, the alleged Commie, as usual, refusing to answer any questions at all, so after the coroner's inquest I was in the clear as far as the law was concerned.
You'd have thought, however, that I had set fire to the Ledger building and the editor's pants. You would have thought I'd pooped Khrushchev. The Ledger had made a big thing out of it, not quite calling the homicide cold-blooded murder, and since then had laid it on me whenever it got a chance.
It laid it on today. There was only brief mention of my "allegedly" looking for Felicity Gifford, and near the story's end was a single sentence about my having said one "Dixon" might be a lead to her; mainly the story consisted of a Borch-style résumé of my previous crimes, including the killing of a persecuted union official, plus seven quotes, one from each Guardian. Apparently the Guardians were agreed I might be the devil himself, come up here to give them hell. The story wound up in a blaze of babble about my "obscene language, threats of physical violence, and condemnation of the church."
I said to Jo, "You'd never know from reading this that I was talking about Trammel's cult, and called the Trammelites ignorant. If those characters are churchgoers, I'm the angel Gabriel."
>
"You don't have to explain to me, Mr. Scott." She smiled. "One of the reasons I came up here is because it was the Ledger that carried the story. None of the other papers did."
"I take it you don't have much use for the sheet, either."
"None, Mr. Scott."
"Baby," I said, "call me Shell. And if you ever need a detective for anything, I'm at your service."
She smiled. "For anything?"
"For anything at . . . Well."
She chuckled and said, "Oh, what would I need a detective's service for, anyway?" and the chuckle turned into a throaty laugh.
When she quieted down I said, "Jo, I'd love to mix highballs and carry on like mad here, but I'm itchy. There must be some way to find Mr. Hunt. Where does he usually go? Doesn't he have some kind of hangout where I could look for him?"
"There's no telling where he'd be. Probably with one of his girlfriends. That's about all he does. He doesn't have any vices like drinking or smoking, just women."
"That's a vice? If I have to, I'll go knock on all his girlfriends' doors. Give me some names and I'll start. Maybe one of them would know where he is, or even know this Dixon. Incidentally, you ever see her? Know what she looks like?"
Jo nodded. "She came out to the house once. About forty-something, fairly thin, big black mole on her cheek. That's about all I can remember." She pinched her chin, brows furrowed. "There's a woman named Olive Fairweather that Uncle's been seeing a lot of lately. And I just remembered he said something this morning about having a date tonight. I don't know who with."
"Think he might have gone to her place?"
"Maybe. The mushy way they act, they must like each other. I saw them together at the house once and they kept beaming at each other, winking and gurgling. He calls her Lover-gal, of all things. She's in her forties and he's fifty-four, but they act like teenagers. I think she even calls him Lover-boy when nobody else is around. Isn't that silly?"
Always Leave ’Em Dying Page 3
