The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

“Well, Yoogy had that much right.”

  “The rest of it’s right, too, take it from me. And if we could prove it, I think I’d die happy. Hell, even if we got Grimson on fraud or extortion charges, that wouldn’t put him away long enough. But murder one would be about right.”

  “If I want to brace this smoothie, which I do, where would I find him? Fowler said Grimson might be a little difficult to locate.”

  “He told it the way it is, Shell. Grimson’s got two or three apartments, drops in on businesses he has absolutely nothing to do with, makes a lot of trips out of town, sometimes visits Silvano’s—hard to say. But when you want to meet him, I’ll make sure we know where you can find him.”

  After another minute I asked Hank what Bannister had been talking about when he’d suggested I go to some kind of club opening with him tonight, apparently in Hank’s place.

  There was a flash of that quick grin again, and Hank explained to me, with interesting details and asides, about the Club Rogue.

  I said slowly, “You mean they’re going to stroll around up there bare—naked?”

  “So it has been alleged, asseverated, stated, hinted, promised, promulgated, and avowed.”

  “All that? Must be something to it. What are these gals, tired old hags fired from Wally’s Diner?”

  “Not exactly.” He smiled, looking past me. “Judge for yourself, pal. Here comes one of those tired old hags now.”

  I glanced up. Maybe it’s enough to say that from the moment when I saw her approaching our booth, to the moment when she went through the Lotus Room door and out of sight, I did not glance away once.

  She was fairly tall, perhaps five-eight, and unfairly fashioned, that is, she was shaped in a way unfair to others of the fair sex, swooping, thrusting, curving, fantastic, stupendous, almost unnerving. It wasn’t that incredible body alone, for with it was a face of unforgettable beauty, all of it, face and form combined, presenting a vision of eye-blistering beauty as she walked smoothly nearer, stopped next to our table.

  “Hello, Hank,” she said in a low warm voice.

  She hadn’t even taken a peek at me yet, so far as I could tell. I would have noticed.

  “Scotch on the rocks for you tonight?” she continued.

  “Ah, Canada, this will be a terrible disappointment to you, I know, but I will not be present at the Club Rogue this evening. In my place will be this large, dull individual here, Mr. Sheldon—”

  “Oh, Hank! I am disappointed. It’s going to be such fun.”

  “He was about to tell you about me, Miss—” That was as far as I got.

  “You can say that again,” Hank said to the lovely, grinning. “That is, if the reports are true.” He leaned over the table toward her and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Canada, we’ve known each other long enough so you can level with me. You know what they say about the outfits the cocktail waitresses will be wearing.... Ahm, is it true?”

  “What are they saying?” Right then she glanced around again and must finally have become aware that someone besides Hank was in the area, “Oh, hello,” she said pleasantly, and instantly looked back at Hank.

  I got up quickly. “Hi,” I said. “Well, I—”

  “You know,” Hank said. Then he noticed me making faces and waggling my hands. “Canada, this seriously disturbed old-timer here—he can’t help all that waggling, something to do with his nervous system—is Sheldon Scott. Shell, Miss Canada Southern.”

  This time she took a good look at me. At least, a reasonably long look. Long enough for me to say hello again, and shake her hand, and to hear her say, “How do you do, Mr. Scott?” and for me to memorize her face.

  It was topped by thick swirls of blonde hair—blonde, that is, with traces or streaks of darker tones in it, kind of a blondish goldenness touched with accents of tan or beige. Dark brows, smoothly arched over light-brown eyes, almost beige or tawny eyes with little flecks of color like bits of a tiger’s stripe in them. Straight nose, smiling mouth, lips red and undeniably warm or even hot, full lips that might have had their bright redness sprayed on from little flamethrowers.

  She was wearing a rust-colored sweater of epic dimensions, a skirt the same shade clinging to rounded flaring hips, a necklace of small metal links and circles worn in several loops around her neck and resting on swelling breasts that should have melted them down to nuggets, and a beige belt of rough leather, three inches wide, snug around a waist my two hands could almost have enclosed, which struck me as a splendid idea.

  Hank was saying something to her, and she looked at him, saying, “I just came down from the top floor. The other girls and I were up there for an hour making sure we’re all set for tonight.”

  Hank said, “All set—like what you’ll wear, I suppose?”

  “Well, I’ve got to run.” She turned and looked at me again. “I’m glad we met, Mr. Sheldon.”

  “It’s Scott. Scott. Sheldon—you can call me Shell—Scott. Huh. Mr. Sheldon. It’s—”

  She was laughing silently.

  “I know it’s Mr. Scott,” she said, smiling deliciously. “I just said that to see if you’d waggle your hands and make those faces again.”

  “Ah, you noticed!”

  She didn’t reply, just stood there, for not more than a second or two. But I’ll take an oath, during that brief tick-tick there was more sparkle and bubble and merry effervescence silently sizzling in and from Canada Southern than there is in a ton of Alka-Seltzer.

  Then she was walking away, moving smoothly among the tables in the Lotus Room, through the doors, and out of sight.

  It was twelve-forty, and for the next five minutes Hank and I didn’t say much, each of us presumably thinking his own private thoughts. After two or three minutes I did ask him about the police officer he’d mentioned.

  “Did you say his name is Delcey?”

  Hank nodded. “Sergeant Oren Delcey. He was a lieutenant until a year or so ago. Pushed Mr. G. a bit too hard, and Mr. G. pushed back. So he’s a sergeant again, works out of Homicide.”

  “If he’s part of your group, he should be one cop I can trust for sure up here.”

  “He’s that. There are plenty of others, Shell. But plenty we’re not sure about, too. Lot of money’s involved.”

  There wasn’t much more. At fifteen minutes till one I phoned Mayor Fowler’s home again. No answer. So at the entrance to the Lotus Room I caught Hank’s eye, gave him a small salute, and took off.

  This time when I reached the end of the mayor’s private drive, there was a car parked near the edge of the asphalt circle. It was a flashy little red Jaguar convertible, which didn’t look like the mayor’s mode of transportation to me. I walked over the graveled path to the front door again, poked the button, and heard the faint sound of melodic chimes playing some kind of tune, vaguely reminiscent of “Hail to the Chief.”

  That was the only sound from inside the house, so I tried the door and was not greatly surprised to find it locked. And then I heard another vaguely familiar sound that I wasn’t immediately able to identify. It was a thumping or clunking followed by a sort of liquid kerplunk.

  It was a puzzler. But only briefly. Because a few seconds later I heard a rhythmic splashing, a period of silence, then the former puzzler repeated. The sound had come from my left, and I recalled Mayor Fowler telling me something about his swimming pool out there. So even before I began walking along the front of the house toward the pool I realized the sound had been made by someone—not the good mayor, I had a hunch—bouncing on a diving board and then going kerplunk into the water.

  I was right. Both times.

  It was someone diving into the pool.

  And it was not the good mayor.

  7

  As I walked past the side of the house and got a clear view of the swimming pool, she—it was, unquestionably, a she—had just stroked her way to the ladder at the pool’s far end. As I watched, she climbed up the ladder, paused a moment while she bent forward to shake bright sparkles
of water from her hair, then stepped onto the cement deck and turned toward the board a few feet away on her left.

  I guess the first thing I noticed about her was that she didn’t have anything on. In fact, I know that’s the first thing I noticed about her. All by itself that was enough to sort of rivet my attention. But also, when she’d leaned forward to shake her head vigorously, the very act of protruding her head in one direction had caused her derriere to protrude in the other direction, which is to say toward me. It seemed briefly to float there, glistening in the sunlight, sparkling with a kind of gay insouciance I had never associated with a hind end before.

  She stepped onto the board, placed her feet, took the three measured steps forward that are typical of professional and good amateur divers, and bounced. The next bounce, normally, would have been the big one, the bounce that sent her soaring gracefully into the air. But while still rising upward from the impetus of the little bounce she spotted me—I could see her eyes; as they slowly rose and paused briefly in the air and then started sinking down again, get very wide—and she let out a strange high fluttering sound.

  When she came down onto the board, therefore, she did not spring briskly up and away. Instead she landed sort of flat-footed with her knees bent, and the board vibrated fiercely with a barrungarrung sound, transmitting such vibrations up through her legs and rear end and fore parts that I feared for a moment she might lose a thing or two of great value.

  Gradually all that fascinating movement ceased. For a memorable moment all was still. Then the very shapely and very wide-eyed young gal, still in something like a quarter-crouch, flung one arm over her bare breasts and flipped her other hand out and down and in with such a sharp slap that for a weird instant I got the impression of a living G-string running amok, but then she smiled weakly and said, “Oo—ah—ooh. Well ... hi?”

  She really did make it sound like a question. That part was easy. But if that was a question, what was the answer? I managed to get my mouth open. That was all I managed.

  So I stood there for several seconds, with my mouth open, wondering. How do you answer “Hi?” while the lovely little gal remained on the board, but then she made my reply unnecessary.

  With great presence of mind, she jumped into the water.

  Well, all I ever need is a little time to gather my thoughts, so by the time she’d popped to the surface and swum over to the edge of the pool just below me, I was back to normal.

  “Don’t panic,” I cried, yanking off my coat, “I’ll save you.”

  She laughed. “You gave me an awful shock,” she said, hanging onto the pool’s edge. “I don’t know you, do I?”

  “Not yet. In fact, I’m sure I never saw.... This is Mayor Fowler’s house, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. You don’t think I’d be swimming in the nude anywhere else, do you?”

  “Beats me. Is there something special about—”

  “Don’t tell Daddy you caught me. He doesn’t think it’s ladylike to go skinny-dipping. Even when you’re alone.”

  “When you’re alone it can hardly be called—don’t tell who? Did you say Daddy?”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you mean, Daddy? Like in—father?”

  “Sure. I’m Melinda Fowler. Who’re you?”

  “I’m Shell Scott. You wouldn’t be the mayor’s daughter, would you?”

  “Sure I’m his daughter. Who did you think I was? His mother?”

  “Don’t be ridic—look, I only came out here to see the mayor, and ... he isn’t around here anywhere, is he?”

  “No. I’m—I mean we’re—all alone. I only got here an hour ago. I’m home from school for the weekend—”

  “From ... high school?”

  “That’s silly. I graduated from college last year. I’m taking some postgrad courses at S.F.U. High School! How silly can you get? Anyway, Daddy wasn’t here when I got home, so I took my clothes off—”

  “Yeah.”

  “And ... well, here I am.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you just going to stand there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that all you can say, just ‘Yeah’? You sound like an oaf.”

  “Listen, baby, I know what an oaf is, and if you don’t want to get whacked—”

  “Don’t get so hot. I was just having some fun with you. What did you say your name is? Shell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “Listen, baby—”

  “Why don’t you come in the pool and join me? After all, Daddy isn’t here. I wouldn’t ask you if he was. I wouldn’t even think of it.”

  “You and me both.”

  She had at the beginning of our getting-acquainted dialogue rested her arms on the pool’s edge, but after the first sentence or two she’d pushed herself out at arm’s length, even kicked her feet and thrashed her legs and stuff around a little, and toward the end she let go and spun around in the water a couple of times before dogpaddling back to the edge near me.

  I undoubtedly do not need to remind you that she was naked as a plucked jaybird, and that water is transparent, and that I am not known as a man who would look away from such a combination should it appear simultaneously amidst floods, earthquakes, and typhoons. So when the fetching Melinda said once again, “C’mon in and join me, Shell ... unless you’re an oaf,” I said: “I’ll show you who’s an oaf.”

  I yanked off my shoes and socks, ripped off my tie, peeled off my shirt. And paused, thinking.

  I had earlier wondered, because of Mayor Fowler’s air of uptight tension and the fact that he appeared later to have skipped lunch, if someone else might have been in the house with him this early a.m. I had, indeed, briefly entertained such ridiculous thoughts as the possibility that a dangerous crook, possibly even one of Hugh Grimson’s hoods, could have been holding a gun on him from behind a cracked doorway or heavy draperies, the way villains do in movies.

  But now, somewhat charged up, my thinking was so clear I knew there was hardly one chance in a million there could be any truth in such wild suspicions. Still....

  I said, “Melinda, when you arrived home—from school, for the weekend—you must have entered the house. And roamed around inside a bit? And thus know the house is empty, right?”

  “Are you out of your maracas? Of course I went in the house—where do you think I left my clothes? Do you think I’d be skinny-dipping in the pool with you—with you, if you ever get in it—if anybody was in the house?”

  “That makes sense.”

  I had to admit there’d been another silly thought in my mind: maybe there was a dead body in the house. Even a dead Mayor Fowler. What rot, I said to myself and then, to Melinda, “O.K. Here I come, ready or not.”

  “What do you mean, ready or not? I asked you—hey! You aren’t going to jump in with your pants on, are you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Why, you’re all crouched down like you’re getting cranked to jump clear over the pool. You look like you’re ready to beat on your chest and—”

  “Melinda, that’s enough. Well, I guess I really should take my pants off. Yes. Incidentally, how do you know that’s not what I was about to do?”

  “You were about to broad-jump back over the house, if you ask—”

  “Melinda, we’re not going to have any fun at all if you keep bugging me. O.K., I’ll be honest about it. I did have it in the back of my mind that I might, sort of, start out with my pants on. I know the house is empty, and we’re isolated and alone up here, and there is nobody else about, but I have this nagging little ... nag. I’ve got this queer feeling—”

  “Queer. Queer, eh? O.K., keep ‘em on—”

  “Melinda, that’s unkind. Little do you know, babe—look. At certain times I do have a kind of psychic ESP, and right now I’ve got a profoundly uneasy conviction that the very instant I get my pants off—”

  “Shorts, too.”

  “Shorts, to
o?”

  “Maybe I’d better explain what skinny-dipping is, Shell. Mr. Scott. Sir. The word skinny in skinny-dipping doesn’t mean you go on a diet, it—”

  “You do not,” I said stiffly, “have to explain it to me.”

  “Anyway, you don’t want your shorts to shrink.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You know what happens to men who wear too tight hats all the time. They get bald.”

  “The shorts have got to go.”

  I unbuckled my belt, saying, “What I was getting at, Melinda, is that I have this queer—this peculiar—sense that no sooner do I fling my garments to the winds than a whole crowd of beady-eyed people will rise up out of nowhere clicking Polaroid Land Cameras and—”

  “You’re stalling. You’re scared. You’re chicken.”

  “That does it,” I said.

  Soon I was bent way over and was preparing to pluck one bare foot out of a bunch of clothing bunched around my ankles, when Melinda made the odd noises.

  She had already made a couple of odd noises, but they were soft little noises. These were bigger ones, much louder and of a different nature entirely.

  “OH!” she yelped. “There’s hyu—whoo—hah—hee—”

  “What?”

  “It’s—he—he’s here.”

  “He, huh? Who? He?”

  It was, as they say, a rhetorical question. I knew already. She didn’t have to tell me. I knew. But she told me anyhow.

  “Daddy.”

  “Daddy ... huh? How about that?”

  I didn’t say it with huge shock. I didn’t say it with consternation. I didn’t say it with anger, nor even with surprise. I said it merely as a man commenting, after the fact, upon the inevitable catastrophe. True, I spoke with some sadness.

  It did not help that I was bent forward, clutching two handfuls of clothing bunched around my ankles, and that in this marvelous position I could not possibly have presented a picture less striking than had lovely Melinda atop the pool ladder. Rather less enchanting, it goes without saying; but not one whit less remarkable.

  “Hurry, hurry!” Melinda yelped.

  “Ah, shut up.”