The Wailing Frail (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  “No. And thanks very much, Doctor.”

  “Not at all.”

  It was dusk when I paid off the cab at the Biltmore Hotel. His fee was a healthy chunk to deduct from my income tax. I called Toddy from the lobby. The first thing she said was, “How about Dad? Did you get to see him?”

  “No, but I have an appointment for tomorrow morning. I did talk to the director, and to your father's doctor.”

  She asked me to come on up. She didn't have to repeat the request. Toddy opened the door and stepped back as I walked into one of the Biltmore's big, high-ceilinged rooms. She was dressed in a simple blouse and skirt, but on her it looked like a negligee.

  She waved me to a chair and said, “What did you find out, Shell? Is he all right? Have they hurt him?”

  “Toddy, this is a screwy deal.” I told her about my visit to Ravenswood and I added, “I'll see your father in the morning. You see what I mean, don't you?”

  She bit her lip, slowly shook her head, looking at me. “You think he's crazy.”

  “Now, Toddy, I don't know what—”

  “I tell you, he's perfectly normal. There's nothing wrong with him—look at that note he wrote. Dad must have had to write it in a hurry, yes. But it made sense as far as it went, didn't it?”

  “Well, I suppose so.” I paused. “The director told me they were preparing him for electro-shock treatment, and—”

  “Electro-shock?” Toddy jumped to her feet. She seemed very agitated, and I took her hands in mine, tried to calm her down. Finally she said, “Don't you understand? He's completely normal; there's nothing wrong with him. Can't you imagine how horrible it would be for a sane man to be in a hospital for the mentally ill? An asylum?” She paused. “And what would electro-shock do to a sane man?”

  Not only her words, but the urgency in her voice hit me. I said, “Toddy, relax a little. Another thing. I talked to Doctor Parka. He told me he'd been treating your father for a long time, and that when he found—”

  “Who?”

  “Parka. Doctor Parka, your father's doctor.”

  “What are you talking about? I never heard of Doctor Parka!”

  I blinked at her. “That's funny. But you told me you've been away, traveling, for almost a year. Couldn't he have started going to Parka in that time?”

  She frowned. “I don't know. It doesn't—seem right. And I've told you, and told you—he's all right. There's nothing wrong with him!”

  She was in a pretty edgy state. I couldn't blame her. But I told her that I'd come to see her the next day the minute I had anything new to tell her. She went with me to the door.

  She looked up at me and said, “I'm sorry if I've been—oh, kind of making a scene, Shell. It's just that I'm so worried.”

  She looked as if she were going to cry. We were facing each other, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to step close to me, lower her head and press it against my chest. I put my arms around her, pulled her gently to me. That was all. I didn't mean to do anything else, wasn't even thinking of it.

  But then Toddy raised her head and looked up into my face. “I'm so scared,” she said. “For Dad. You'll help him, won't you, Shell? Help me?”

  I nodded.

  She kept looking at me, her lips parted and trembling. Her breasts were pressed against my chest, her arms partly around me. “Oh, Shell,” she said softly, and again, “Oh, Shell.”

  A steel statue would have kissed her, and I am no steel statue. I pulled her tight, feeling her thighs pressed against mine and I pressed my mouth to hers, to those trembling lips. They seemed to keep trembling under my mouth, her lips and tongue sliding against mine as if they possessed a hot independent life of their own. Her arms went around my neck and that magnificent body moved against me.

  It was a kiss that melted on my mouth like liquid velvet, warm and infinitely smooth. It was a kiss in a class by itself. After this, kissing other women would never be the same. It would be as if other women kissed with their ears.

  Toddy broke away and stepped back. Her breasts were heaving and her big dark eyes were wide. “Well,” she said. “That came out of nowhere. You'd better go, Shell,” she added softly.

  I would have much preferred to stay, but Toddy made it plain that she did want me to leave. I went out, but I could taste her lips, feel them, feel the warmth and softness of her body, all the way to my Hollywood apartment.

  But as the cab neared the Spartan Apartment Hotel, I forced my thoughts back to Gordon Todhunter, and that note under the envelope's flap. The hell of it was, if the man weren't crazy, then I simply couldn't afford to miss a trick anywhere. Not if he had information about people trying to kill me. And, of course, there were plenty of other good reasons. The cab dropped me off almost in front of the Spartan and across the street from it in near darkness. I paid the driver and watched him start to pull away from the curb.

  My mind must have been soaking up impressions right then, impressions of little things I wasn't consciously noticing, getting ready to ring the alarm bell in my brain. I watched the cabbie pull away and go around the corner, then I turned and took one step toward the Spartan's entrance.

  The feeling started with a funny coldness quivering on my spine. No real warning, nothing but a sudden premonition. The whole thing took maybe half a second. Between my first and second step I felt that coldness, then a series of sights and sounds seemed to repeat themselves in my brain, more urgently then when I must actually have heard and seen them.

  There was the almost inaudible purr of a car's engine running; the darker mass of it farther down the street, the shifting of it as it started to move, the quiet fact of an automobile parked but then moving without lights; and something else that I couldn't name, more of a feeling than anything else. A sudden feeling of urgency, fright, tension. And I knew there was something on my right.

  The Spartan faces the unlighted grounds of the Wilshire Country Club. The area isn't very bright, but it isn't completely dark, either. There wasn't anything I really saw that made me move. But I knew suddenly that I had to move, and fast.

  I'd just started across the street toward the Spartan, and as my foot hit the pavement on that second step I jammed it down and shoved my body aside, threw my weight to the left. There was a hell of a booming sound. Light flashed on my right. I hit the hard cement of the street with a breath-pounding jolt, and rolled, digging under my coat for my gun. There was another boom and something jerked at my coat, burned across my wrist and arm.

  The sound and flash had come from my right, and ahead of me, near the corner of the Spartan. It had surprised me more because of the location than the fact of noise and light. Until that last fraction of a second I'd been expecting some kind of noise or trouble from the quietly moving car. My hand wrapped around the butt of the .38 and I yanked it free, thumbing back the hammer as I rolled onto my back, then got to one knee.

  In the dim light a man was running from the spot near the building where he must have been waiting, toward the car that was now racing up the street, getting close, its engine whining. I jerked up the gun and snapped a shot at the running man, but missed.

  He ran into the street, angling away from me toward that car. The car's lights came on as I steadied my gun on his running figure again. Its beams flashed into my eyes and made me squint, but they fell on the running man, too. He was carrying a big double-barreled shotgun in one hand, but the light fell on his face, too, and maybe that's what made me miss. Because I recognized him.

  It was the same man who'd almost killed me on the Freeway, the guy with two fingers gone on his left hand, the man who'd said he was Robert Gates.

  Chapter Seven

  I got off two shots as the car slowed and its door swung open for the man, but he leaped inside without hesitating a moment. And then the car jerked a little in the road as the driver pulled on the steering wheel, straightening it out and aiming it at me like a two-ton bullet.

  The headlights half-blinded me and the
car suddenly looked like a four-story house flying at me. My first impulse was just to run, get the hell out of there. I even got both feet under me, spun away from the car and started to sprint down the street. But then I grabbed onto my nerves again. All that would get me was a couple of tire tracks over my back. I slammed my feet against the asphalt, swung around, raising the gun in my right hand.

  The car was about ten yards away, but it was coming fast. It looked as if it were already climbing up me, but I managed to keep my feet planted squarely on the ground for a second longer. Long enough for me to try to kill somebody.

  The sound of the car engine grinding up the scale as the driver jammed the accelerator down built to a high whine that banged almost solidly against my eardrums. My right arm was extended in front of me as if it would touch the car's hood. I squeezed the trigger twice. Two holes appeared, one right after the other, three or four inches apart in the windshield where the driver should be sitting, hunched over the wheel and trying to run me down.

  The car was so close that it seemed like part of me. It was almost touching me; the headlight beam hit me like something solid. But as that second, shot left my gun I straightened my bent legs with all my strength and leaped to my right, both feet leaving the asphalt. I would never have made it except that the car lurched suddenly, jerked to its right, away from me. I heard the bang and scrape as it hit something, but I couldn't see what it was. Pain leaped through my right shoulder as I hit the asphalt street again. Fire seared my right leg, the cloth of my trousers tearing, the flesh of my leg scraping against the asphalt.

  As I rolled and slammed a hand down to steady myself, I raised my right hand, still clutching the gun and saw the car sliding against the curb. It straightened, slowed, then began to pick up speed. I pointed my gun at it and fired once; then the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder. I kept pulling the trigger. I could feel my jaws working, but it was seconds before I realized I was swearing, cursing, shouting epithets and threats and just words, any kind of hot, angry words after the disappearing car.

  A man raced up from somewhere. “What happened? What—Can I help?”

  “Get the hell away from me!” I broke it off. I was squeezing the butt of my gun so hard that it shook visibly; muscles in my hand were pulled painfully tight. The man stepped back, started to turn. “Wait a minute,” I told him. I apologized for yelling at him, told him everything was all right.

  He started off. I didn't move for a moment, but shook my head hard, trying to clear the red film of anger and pain from behind my eyes. Then I got my feet under me and straightened up, my right leg almost buckling. It felt as if somebody had poured gasoline from my thigh to my ankle and then lit it. And then I heard sirens.

  In fifteen minutes I'd told my story three or four times, and one of the officers in the radio unit had called the information in to Communications. Before it was all over, three radio cars had arrived, and the inevitable gaping citizens.

  Right in the middle of all that, somewhere, I stopped suddenly and thought about Gordon Todhunter. And at that moment I got the conviction that he was just as sane as I was, and maybe even a little more so. But whether that was true or not, I did know that, without his warning under the flap of that envelope this morning, without my thoughts being turned to what he'd said about somebody's going to try to kill me, I would right now be lying in the middle of North Rossmore with a heavy load of buckshot in my guts.

  So it really didn't make much difference now whether Todhunter was sane or not; I owed him plenty. More than I could pay, maybe.

  The sergeant from one of the radio cars was named Kinnins. He worked out of Homicide. He said, “Nothing you've left out, now, huh?”

  “No, Sergeant. That's the works.”

  “You did recognize this man.”

  “Uh-huh.” From a pipe-loaded truck to a double-barreled shotgun was quite a switch; but it had been the same would-be killer, a young, heavy-set, one-hundred-per-cent sonofabitch. And give me time, I said to myself, and I am going to kill me a young, heavy-set, one-hundred-per-cent sonofabitch.

  I said, “Sorry I can't do better on the make of car, Sergeant. But frankly it never even entered my mind to examine it closely.”

  He grinned and looked me up and down. I was a mess, with one leg of my trousers ripped partly off, my coat torn, two holes from buckshot pellets in the coat's fabric, and one unimportant furrow in my arm.

  I'd been given treatment for the minor gouges and scratches, so all that was really wrong with me was the two burns; the burning on my leg and arm, on the outside—and the burn inside.

  The sergeant turned his head to listen, then walked to his unit, which was parked at the curb near us. A calm feminine voice was repeating his call letters. He leaned inside, picked up the mike and acknowledged the call, talked a few seconds, then waved me over.

  “Get in, Scott. Another unit located a new blue Ford coupla miles from here. Abandoned.”

  “Was it a Ford I shot up?”

  “It was, Scott. New Ford, and a guy about thirty-five years old. Dead man in the car, Scott—hole in his throat.”

  It was a big, jagged hole, bigger than you'd think a .38 caliber bullet would make. But after I'd fired it, the slug had passed through the windshield, and maybe nicked the steering wheel before tearing through his neck. The slug had apparently sliced a carotid artery.

  Anyway, there was blood all over. It had splattered the windshield, the steering post, the dashboard. And of course it was all over the front of the dead man's body. I'd never seen him before, but the beam of a flashlight showed him to be a small man with buck teeth and a black mole alongside his mouth.

  I called Sergeant Kinnins over. “Remember when George Stone got hit?”

  “Stone? Yeah, I was filled in on it.”

  “Remember the waiter's description of the short guy that asked about Stone just before the shooting?”

  Kinnins nodded. “Sure, but what's that—” He looked at the dead man's face. “See what you mean.”

  He called in. The police would have come up with the connection in another hour or so, maybe less. But it was no great trick for me to get ahead of them. I had a lot more reason for remembering.

  A fingerprint man finished dusting the glove compartment, then opened it. There were two guns inside it, plus some ammunition, and after the print man had checked the guns, Kinnins looked them over. He showed them to me. One of them was the standard heavy gun, an Army .45 automatic. But the other gun was a real cute one.

  It was a .22-caliber target pistol with the outside of its barrel threaded. There wasn't any silencer on it now, but the threads for one were there.

  Sergeant Kinnins's words were anticlimactic. “We'll get this down to the crime lab. But I can tell you without waiting for the ballistics check—here's the baby that killed Stone.”

  One hour later, just to wrap it up, I was in the morgue with Kinnins and other officers when the headwaiter from the Melody Club was brought downstairs in the Hall of Justice. He was shown the body. He looked at the man's white face for several seconds, then he said, “Yes. That's the man. He's the one that asked about Stone.” The head-waiter shook his head, cleared his throat and added, “He looks different.” He swallowed. “But that's him.”

  He looked around and his eyes fell on me. “Why hello, Mr. Scott,” he said. “I haven't seen you—” He fainted.

  That was about it. I stopped by Homicide for half an hour and dictated the report, and then Kinnins drove me back to the Spartan Apartment Hotel. Nobody shot at me this time. I went up to my apartment and to bed.

  But I lay awake for a while, putting bits and pieces together. Big deal, this one tonight. Odd, too. A couple of men out to kill Shell Scott. One of them was a guy who had almost certainly killed George Stone; the other man had probably been in on the Stone murder, and had already tried once before tonight to kill me, in more complicated but no less messy a fashion. Drowsily I thought that this certainly tied something together, pulled two
pieces of a puzzle side by side. I'd sure worked myself into the middle of something.

  In my mind other thoughts and pictures drifted, trying to join together in some kind of sense. An investigating committee. Beautiful, beautiful women. Crazy letters, and a warning on an envelope. Ravenswood. Finally they all went together and shrank to a point and started spinning around, and I was asleep.

  In the morning I staggered out of bed, wincing at the new aches and burns, showered, then groaned through breakfast. Except for occasional twinges I felt pretty good. I would see Todhunter today, and I had the irrational feeling that much would then be explained.

  I called the garage, but my Cadillac wasn't ready. A new windshield had been put on, but there was work to do on the steering post and also on the front of the car. Nothing was seriously wrong, and I could pick it up this afternoon. So it was another cab for me.

  It was a different driver, and we went by a different route this time. He drove down a street paralleling Eucalyptus until he came to a blocked road with a couple of detour signs, arrows pointing to the right. My driver swore fluently, explaining that he was an old hand, but this was a new detour. I barely heard him jabbering, concerned with my own thoughts.

  The .38 was cleaned and loaded, comfortably heavy against my left armpit. I didn't expect to be using it this soon after last night's party, but there were again six slugs in the chambers. There was a little tingle of tension winding itself through my nerves and muscles. I thought about Todhunter. I hardly knew what to think about that man, but I did know that if Todhunter knew anything about the identity of the men out for my blood, or why they wanted to kill me, then the most important move I could make was to talk to him.

  I had called Toddy just before leaving for Ravenswood in the cab. Her voice had been thick, slurred with sleep, and the husky half-formed words and phrases had sent a hot hunger for her through my body so sharply and suddenly that it surprised me.