A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  A man on my left yelled, “Janet! Jan!” I looked at him just as he got up off the floor, and I remembered the guy who had yelped right after that first shot. He didn’t seem to be hurt, though, because he got to his feet and started after the beautiful crazy gal.

  He was a husky man, about five-ten, wearing brown slacks and a T-shirt which showed off his impressive chest. Even so, it wasn’t as impressive as the last chest I’d seen, and although less than a minute had elapsed since I’d first seen the gal who’d been behind it, I was already understandably curious about her. I vaulted over the bar and yelled at the man, “Hey, you! Hold it!”

  He stopped and jerked his head around as I stepped up in front of him. His slightly effeminate face didn’t quite go with the masculine build, but many women would probably have called him “handsome” or even “darling.” A thick mass of black curly hair came down in a sharp widow’s peak on his white forehead. His mouth was full, chin square and dimpled, and large black-lashed brown eyes blinked at me.

  “Who the hell was that tomato?” I asked him. “And what’s happening?”

  “You tell me,” he said. And then an odd thing happened. He hadn’t yet had time to take a good look at me, but he took it now. He gawked at my white hair, my face, blinked, and his mouth dropped open. “Oh, Christ!” he said, and then he took off. Naturally he ran into the ladies’ room. It just wouldn’t have seemed right at that point if he’d gone anyplace else.

  I looked over my shoulder at Pete, whose mouth was hanging completely ajar, then I went to the ladies’ room and inside. Nobody was there. A wall window was open and I looked out through it at the empty alley, then looked all around the rest room again, but it was still empty.

  I went back to the bar and said, “Pete, what the hell did you put in that drink?”

  He stared at me, shaking his head. Finally he said, “I never seen nothing like that in my life. Thirteen years I’ve run this place, but—” He didn’t finish it.

  My hand was stinging and so was a spot on my chin. Going over the bar I had broken a few bottles and cut my left hand slightly, and one of those little slugs had apparently come close enough to nick my chin. I had also soaked up a considerable amount of spilled whiskey in my clothes and I didn’t smell good at all. My head hadn’t been helped, either, by the activity.

  Pete nodded when I told him to figure up the damage and I’d pay him later, then I went back into the Hamilton Building. It appeared Frank Harrison would have to wait. Also, the way things were going, I wanted to get the .38 Colt Special and harness out of my desk.

  At the top of the stairs I walked down to the PBX again. Hazel, busy at the switchboard, didn’t see me come up but when I spoke she swung around. “What’s with that gal you called Pete’s about?” I asked her.

  “She find you? Wasn’t she a beautiful little thing?”

  “Yeah. And she found me.”

  Hazel’s nose was wrinkling. “You are decomposing,” she said. “Into bourbon. How many shots did you have?”

  “Three, I think. But they all missed me.”

  “Missed you, ha—”

  “Shots that beautiful little thing took at me, I mean. With a gun.”

  Hazel blinked. “You’re kidding.” I shook my head and she said, “Well, I—she did seem upset, a little on edge.”

  “She was clear the hell over the edge. What did she say?”

  “She asked for you. As a matter of fact, she said, ‘Where’s the dirty Shell Scott?’ I told her you’d gone to Pete’s downstairs”—Hazel smiled sweetly—“for some medicine, and she ran away like mad. She seemed very excited.”

  “She was.”

  “And a man came rushing up here a minute or two after the girl and asked about her. I said I’d sent her to Pete’s—and he ran off.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m a little confused.”

  That I could understand. Maybe it was something in the L.A. air this morning. I thanked Hazel and walked down to the office, fishing out my keys, but when I got there I noticed the door was already cracked. I shoved it open and walked inside. For the second or third time this morning my jaw dropped open. A guy was seated behind my desk, fussing with some papers on its top, looking businesslike as all hell. He was a big guy, husky, around thirty years old, with white hair sticking up into the air about an inch.

  Without looking up, he said, “Be right with you.”

  I walked to the desk and sank into one of the leather chairs in front of it, a chair I bought for clients to sit in. If the chair had raised up and floated me out of the window while violins played in the distance, my stunned expression would not have changed one iota. In a not very strong voice I said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Shell Scott,” he said briskly, glancing up at me.

  Ah, yes. That explained it. He was Shell Scott. Now I knew what was wrong. I had gone crazy. My mind had snapped. For a while there I’d thought I was Shell Scott.

  But slowly reason filtered into my throbbing head again. I’d had all the mad episodes I cared for this morning, and here was a guy I could get my hands on. He was looking squarely at me now, and if ever a man suddenly appeared scared green, this one did. Except for the short white hair and the fact that he was about my size, he didn’t resemble me much, and right now he looked sick. I got up and leaned on the desk and shoved my face at him.

  “That’s interesting,” I said pleasantly. “I, too, am Shell Scott.”

  He let out a grunt and started to get up fast, but I reached out and grabbed a bunch of shirt and tie and throat in my right fist and I yanked him halfway across the desk.

  “O.K., you smart sonofabitch,” I said. “Let’s have a lot of words. Fast, mister, before I break some bones for you.”

  He squawked and sputtered and tried to jerk away, so I latched onto him with the other hand and started to haul him over the desk where I could get at him good. I only started to though, because I heard someone behind me. I twisted my head around just in time to see the pretty boy from Pete’s, the guy who’d left the ladies’ room by the window. Just time to see him, and the leather-wrapped sap in his hand, swinging down at me. Then another bomb, a larger one this time, went off in my head and I could feel myself falling, for miles and miles, through deepening blackness.

  I came to in front of my desk, and I stayed there for a couple of minutes, got up, made it to the desk chair, and sat down on it. If I had thought my head hurt before, it was nothing to the way it felt now. It took me about ten seconds to go from angry to mad to furious to raging, then I grabbed the phone and got Hazel.

  “Where’d those two guys go?”

  “What guys?”

  “You see anybody leave my office?”

  “No, Shell. What’s the matter?”

  “Plenty.” I glanced at my watch. Nine-twenty. Just twenty minutes since I’d first opened the office door this morning and answered the ringing phone. I couldn’t have been sprawled on the floor more than a minute or two, but even so my two pals would be far away by now. Well, Harrison was going to have a long wait because I was taking no cases but my own for a while. What with people shooting at me, impersonating me, and batting me on the head, this was a mess I had to find out about fast.

  “Hazel,” I said, “get me the Hollywood Roosevelt.”

  While I waited I calmed down a little and, though the throbbing in my head made it difficult, my thoughts got a little clearer. It seemed a big white-haired ape was passing himself off as me, but I didn’t have the faintest idea why. He must have been down below on Broadway somewhere, waited till he saw me leave, then come up. What I couldn’t figure was how the hell he’d known I’d be leaving my office. He certainly couldn’t have intended hanging around all day just in case I left, and he couldn’t have known I’d be at Pete’s—

  I stopped as a thought hit me. “Hazel,” I said. “Forget that call.” I hung up, thinking. Whitey couldn’t have known I’d show up with a hangover, but he might have known I’d be out of here soon after
I arrived. All it takes to get a private detective out of his office is—a phone call. An urgent appointment to meet somebody somewhere, say, maybe somebody like Frank Harrison. Could be I was reaching for that one, but I didn’t think so. I’d had only the one call this morning, an urgent call that would get me out of the office—and from the very guy who’d pulled the same deal last Monday. And all I’d done Monday was waste an hour. The more I thought about it the more positive I became.

  Harrison might still be waiting in the Cinegrill—and he might not. If Harrison were in whatever this caper was with Whitey and Pretty Boy, they’d almost surely phone him soon to let him know I hadn’t followed the script; perhaps were even phoning him right now. He’d know, too, that unless I was pretty stupid, I’d sooner or later figure out his part in this.

  Excitement started building in me as I grabbed my gun and holster and strapped them on; I was getting an inkling of what might have been wrong with that black-haired lovely. Maybe I’d lost Whitey and Pretty Boy, but with luck I could still get my hands on Harrison. Around his throat, say. I charged out of the office. My head hurt all the way, but I made it to the lot where I park my convertible Cadillac, leaped in, and roared out onto Broadway. From L.A. to downtown Hollywood I broke hell out of the speed limit, and at the hotel I found a parking spot at the side entrance, hurried through the big lobby and into the Cinegrill.

  I remembered Harrison was a very tall diplomat-type with hair graying at the temples and bushy eyebrows over dark eyes. Nobody even remotely like him was in the bar. I asked the bartender, “You know a Frank Harrison?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He been in here?”

  “Yes, sir. He left just a few minutes ago.”

  “Left the hotel?”

  “No, he went into the lobby.”

  “Thanks.” I hustled back into the lobby and up to the desk. A tall, thin clerk in his middle thirties, wearing rimless glasses, looked at me when I stopped.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Frank Harrison,” I said. “What room is he in?”

  “Seven-fourteen, sir.” The clerk looked a little bewildered. “But Mr. Harrison just left.”

  “Where’d he go? How long ago?”

  The clerk shook his head. “He was checking out. I got his card, and when I turned around I saw him going out the door. Just now. It hasn’t been a minute. I don’t—”

  I turned around and ran for the door swearing under my breath. The bastard would have been at the desk when I came in through the side entrance and headed for the Cinegrill. He must have seen me, and that had been all; he’d powdered. He was well powdered, too, because there wasn’t a trace of him when I got out onto Hollywood Boulevard.

  Inside the hotel again I checked some more with the bartender and desk clerk, plus two bellboys and a dining-room waitress. After a lot of questions I knew Harrison had often been seen in the bar and dining room with two other men. One was stocky, with curly black hair, white skin, cleft chin, quite handsome—Pretty Boy; the other was bigger and huskier and almost always wore a hat. A bellhop said he looked a bit like me. I told him it was me, and left him looking bewildered. Two bellboys and the bartender also told me that Harrison was seen every day, almost all of every day, with a blond woman a few years under thirty whom they all described as “stacked.” The three men and the blonde were often a foursome. From the bartender I learned that Harrison had gotten a phone call in the Cinegrill about five minutes before I showed up. That would have been from the other two guys on my list, and fit with Harrison’s checking out fast—or starting to. I went back to the desk and chatted some more with the thin clerk after showing him the photostat of my license. Pretty Boy—Bob Foster—was in room 624; Whitey—James Flagg—was in 410; Frank Harrison was in 714.

  I asked the clerk, “Harrison married to a blonde?”

  “I don’t believe he is married, sir.”

  “He’s registered alone?” He nodded, and I said, “I understand he’s here a lot with a young woman. Right?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s Miss Willis.”

  “A blonde?”

  “Yes, Quite, ah, curvaceous.”

  “What room is she in?”

  He had to check. He came back with the card in his hand and said, “Isn’t this odd? I had never noticed. She’s in seven-sixteen.”

  It wasn’t at all odd. I looked behind him to the slots where room keys were kept. There wasn’t any key in the slot for 714. Nor was there any key in the 716 slot. I thanked the clerk, took an elevator to the seventh floor, and walked to Harrison’s room. There were two things I wanted to do. One was look around inside here to see if maybe my ex-client had left something behind which might help me find him; and the other was to talk with the blonde. As it turned out, I killed two birds with one stone.

  The door to 714 was locked, and if I had to I was going to bribe a bellboy to let me in. But, first, I knocked.

  It took quite a while, and I had almost decided I’d have to bribe the bellhop, but then there was the sound of movement inside, a muffled voice called something I couldn’t understand, and I heard the soft thud of feet coming toward the door. A key clicked in the lock and the door swung open. A girl stood there, yawning, her eyes nearly closed, her head drooping as she stared at approximately the top button of my coat.

  She was stark naked. Stark. I had seldom seen anything so stark. She had obviously just gotten out of bed, and just as obviously had been sound asleep. She still wasn’t awake, because blinking at my chest she mumbled, “Oh, dammit to hell, John.”

  Then she turned around and walked back into the room. I followed her, as if hypnotized, automatically swinging the door shut behind me. She was about five-six and close to 130 pounds, and she was shaped like what I sometimes muse about after the third highball. Everybody who had described the blonde, and she was a blonde, had been correct: she was not only “stacked” but “ah, curvaceous.” There was no mistaking it, either; the one time a man can be positive that a woman’s shape is her own is when she is wearing nothing but her shape, and this gal was really in dandy shape. She walked away from me toward a bedroom next to this room, like a gal moving in her sleep. She walked to the bed and flopped onto it, pulling a sheet up over her, and I followed her clear to the bed, still coming out of shock, my mind not yet working quite like a well-oiled machine. I managed to figure out that my Frank Harrison was actually named John something. Then she yawned, blinked up at me and said, “Well, dammit to hell, John, stop staring.”

  And then she stopped suddenly with her mouth stretching wider and wider and her eyes growing enormous as she stared at me. Then she screamed. Man, she screamed like a gal who had just crawled into bed with seventeen tarantulas. I was certainly affecting people in peculiar fashion this morning. She threw off the sheet, leaped to the floor, and lit out for an open door in the far wall, leading into the bathroom, and by now that didn’t surprise me a bit.

  She didn’t make it though. She was only a yard from me at the start, and I took one step toward her, grabbed her wrist and hung on. She stopped screaming and slashed long red fingernails at my face, but I grabbed her hand and shoved her back onto the bed, then said, “Relax, sister. Stop clawing at me and keep your yap closed and I’ll let go of you.”

  She was tense, jerking her arms and trying to get free, but suddenly she relaxed. Her face didn’t relax, though: she still glared at me, a mixture of hate, anger, and maybe fright, staining her face. She didn’t have makeup on, but her face had a hard, tough-kid attractiveness.

  I let go of her and she grabbed the sheet, pulled it up in front of her body. “Get the hell out of here,” she said nastily. There was a phone on a bedside stand and her eyes fell on it. She grabbed it, pulled it off the hook. “I’m calling the cops.”

  I pulled a chair over beside the bed and sat down. Finally she let go of the phone and glared some more at me.

  “I didn’t think you’d call any cops, sweetheart,” I said. “Maybe I will, but you won’t. Quit
e a shock seeing me here, isn’t it? I was supposed to meet Frank—I mean, John—in the Cinegrill, not up here. You’re in trouble, baby.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Not much. You know who I am.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Shut up, Miss Willis. I got a call from your boyfriend at nine sharp this morning. I was supposed to rush out here for an important job; only there isn’t any important job. Your John, the guy I know as Frank Harrison, just wanted me out of my office for an hour or so. Right?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “So another guy could play Shell Scott for a while. Now you tell me why.”

  Her lips curled and she swore at me.

  I said, “Something you don’t know. You must have guessed the caper’s gone sour, but you probably don’t know John has powdered. Left you flat, honey.”

  She frowned momentarily, then her face smoothed and got blank. It stayed blank.

  She was clammed good. Finally I said, “Look, I know enough of it already. There’s John, and Bob Foster, and a big white-haired slob named Flagg who probably got his peroxide from you. And don’t play innocent because I know you’re thick with all of them, especially John. Hell, this is his room. So get smart and—”

  The phone rang. She reached for it, then stopped.

  I yanked the .38 out from under my coat and said, “Don’t get wise; say hello.” I took the phone off the hook and held it for her. She said, “Hello,” and I put the phone to my ear just in time to hear a man’s voice say, “John, baby. I had to blow fast, that bastard was in the hotel. Pack and meet me at Apex.” He stopped.

  I covered the mouthpiece and told the blonde, “Tell him O.K. Just that, nothing else.”