The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  I was already erect, trying to find the ends of my belt. As I found them and looped loose end through buckle, and gave it a yank that forced a lot of breath from my mouth, Melinda paddled into the middle of the pool, then as though dizzy or in panic spun about and paddled back.

  Hanging again onto the pool’s edge she rolled huge sapphire-blue eyes up at me and softly screamed, “What’ll I do?”

  “Why don’t you drown?”

  “I hate you!”

  “Better late than never.”

  I heard the faint squeak of brakes. Then the chunk of a car door being slammed shut.

  “I do. I hate you! Thank God he didn’t see you with your dumb pants down.”

  “Dumb is ri—what do you mean? He didn’t see me?”

  “Of course not. If he had, I would drown myself.”

  “Well. I figured nobody within three-fourths of a mile could possibly have missed it. Maybe I’m just conceited—”

  “I saw Daddy’s car through the trees, coming up the—coming up our driveway.”

  “Through the trees? Ah, maybe.... How could you tell it was Da—the mayor’s car?”

  “I couldn’t, but who else?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Besides, right after that I saw it. And he just parked it, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, I was only grasping—”

  “Anyway, he couldn’t have seen you then. Even if he had, it would have just been a blur, you moved so fast. You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”

  “Will you shut—”

  “What in the HELL is going on here?”

  “That’s ... Daddy,” Melinda said.

  “No kidding?”

  Until this point I hadn’t once looked around. Hadn’t even taken a quick peek behind me. What for? I had known what was there. Even before it was there I had known what was there.

  But at least the good mayor had not seen me at that uninspiring moment when Melinda had commenced squawking. That would help, I told myself, then I glanced down at my bare chest, and bare feet, and added to myself: help a little.

  I turned, smiling.

  It was clear that the mayor—for it was, needless to say, he; my ex-client; his naked daughter’s daddy—had moved with considerable speed, since he was just skidding to a stop two feet from me. He came to a rigid halt, inclined his head menacingly toward me, pushed his jaw forward about half an inch, and repeated, “What in the hell is going on here?”

  I said, “Now, sir, Mr. Mayor, I know you’re going to be very fair and open-minded about this. Right? Well ... this is not what it may at first blush—ah, uh—first glance—ah. Not what at first it may appear to be. No, it isn’t.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. It is ... will you give me a minute?”

  I think I could have come up with something pretty good in maybe just a few seconds, but then Melinda cried in a voice of such angelic innocence that it here, were the same guy. Sure, Yoogy’s the boy who sickened me, “Ohh, Daddy, I know you told me never to swim in my birthday suit, but—”

  I missed a word or two there, partly because painful acids were attacking my duodenum and partly because I was thinking some negative thoughts. So, that thing in which she had been swimming around, and which by now I had examined from at least half of all possible angles, was her “birthday suit,” huh? Wonderful. The way she sweetly cooed the words, as though they were hummed by a female dove who had never laid an egg, it sounded like something I not only hadn’t ever seen before but didn’t want to.

  On she went, a regular little Rebecca destroying Sunnybrook Farm. “I didn’t know what to do when this big man started taking his clothes off.”

  I groaned. I smacked my head and rolled my eyes toward Heaven, but there was no help there, either. I shouldn’t even have looked. The really miserable thing was that Melinda suddenly sounded about eight years old.

  Now, I’d had a pretty good look at her, and it was my guess she had lived at least twenty-five pretty full years, so if she’d graduated from college only last year it followed that she must be a stupefyingly dumb broad who’d flunked several semesters. On the other hand, that was not a truly logical conclusion since, judging by the performance I was observing and stuck with, she should have been able to lie herself to the top of her class and graduate in a year and a half.

  The reason I was doing all this thinking was because, even if I’d had a lot of great things to say—which I didn’t—there’d have been no opportunity for me to zing them into the conversation.

  For a good minute, the verbal rippety-pop had been bouncing back and forth solely between Melinda and Papa Fowler. It had been made clear that, perhaps by the grace of God, I had not in fact leaped into the pool and committed various vandalisms upon the person of Melinda Fowler. I had merely looked. I hadn’t really done anything physical. But I had looked.

  “Looked” was Melinda’s word, and she did as much with it as she’d done with “birthday suit.”

  There was brief silence. Mayor Fowler was staring down at his daughter from the edge of the pool directly above her. He moved a yard to the right and coldly eyed what was visible above, and below, the water’s surface. Then he moved a yard or so to the other side and studied her some more from there. Then he nodded his head significantly.

  “Melinda!” he hooted in a loud voice, waggling a rigid finger alongside his head. “Melinda!” He left the rest of it unsaid, but she understood it all.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said softly, sinking even deeper into the water until it was not quite against her eyeballs.

  It was not really the best of all possible things for me to do, but my record of doing the best of all possible things has a bunch of holes in it.

  I walked over to the edge of the pool, and smiled at her, like a man who, even before thanksgiving was over, had swallowed the wishbone, and said gently, “Thanks loads, Melinda. I don’t want you to think it hasn’t been fun. But this is—good-bye.”

  I was hoping she’d try to call me an oaf while her mouth was under water, but no such luck. She did smile, though. I could see her sharp white teeth gleaming beneath the wetness.

  “Mr. Scott!”

  I winced. Fowler’s voice had boomed too close to my ear.

  I turned and looked at him. “Hey, cool it a little, will you?” I poked a finger into my ear and wiggled it around. “You could seriously injure a guy. Maybe it runs in the family—”

  “Perhaps you can explain,” he interrupted me, “why you have dispossessed yourself of shirt and tie and coat?”

  “Perhaps? Yes ... perhaps. Dispossessed, I like that—”

  “Can you explain, sir?”

  “Well, would you believe....”

  He was looking at my nearby coat, shirt, tie. And my shoes and socks.

  “The hell with it,” I said.

  This explanation, I felt, was rooted securely in logic:

  If it is true that the best defense is a good offense, it must logically follow that if you have an immovable defense you should launch an irresistible offense; therefore, I might have to explain by socking this guy.

  But he looked at me curiously for a while. Then he said, “Mr. Scott, what are you doing here? Why are you here?”

  His tone was a bit more conciliatory, as though he had begun to feel he should belatedly give me the benefit of whatever doubt there was, if any. So I tried to reply calmly, but my remarks came out stiff as boards.

  “I’m glad you asked,” I said, glancing at Melinda who was peeking at me over the edge of the pool from eyes that appeared entirely too merry. “You may not be aware, Mayor Fowler, that your daughter possesses the gift of describing an acorn as though it is a forest of oaks. If so, you may suspect that I came howling out of the trees leading a pack of my relatives, the bull apes. Try to believe me, sir, I did not. I drove out here like any other human being, to see you. I—that is, some of your associates and I—were concerned about you. Perhaps not dismayed to the point of entering convulsions but
concerned. So you see, Mr. Mayor, my presence here is explained by motives so pure as to be practically pellucid—”

  “My associates?”

  “Huh?”

  I was still stuck there on “pellucid.” I wasn’t completely sure I knew what it meant. It sounded like something gooey and putrid, which was far from the thought I meant to convey.

  “My associates, did you say? You—have you seen them?”

  “Sure. That’s what I was—”

  “Where? How did you happen to meet them, Mr. Scott?”

  “At the Sherwood. I recalled your saying last night you were going to have lunch with them there.”

  “So I did. Then you have now met Mr. Bannister and the lovely Miss Monet?” He paused. “And your friend, Mr. Wainwright?”

  “Yes, we all spent half an hour or so together. It was Mr. Bannister’s suggestion, by the way, that I come out here again.”

  “Of course.” He nodded. “I see. They must have been exceedingly perplexed when I failed to join them. I was called away on a matter of some urgency, Mr. Scott—which we need not concern ourselves with at the moment—and neglected to inform my associates of the emergency.”

  He was silent for a few moments. “How does it happen, Mr. Scott, that you were at the Sherwood Hotel? You must excuse my confusion. I understood that you were returning to Los Angeles.”

  “Yeah, well, that’ll take a little explaining.”

  He pursed his lips, scowled slightly, and seemed to reach a decision. “Come into the house. Yes, join me inside, Mr. Scott.” That last was in a more pleasant tone, or at least without the full note of dudgeon present until now.

  “Sure. Fine.”

  It was the first thing he’d said that made me happy. I wanted to go inside, for a good reason. The good reason was that I was freezing my butt off. I estimated the temperature was only slightly above the point at which oxygen becomes a solid, and having for years been accustomed to the Southern California sun and balmy breezes I felt as if I had frost on my chest, and I wasn’t certain I had toes left.

  Mayor Fowler strode to his front door, unlocked it, and went inside.

  I got my socks and shoes on, stomped my numb feet while buttoning my shirt and knotting my tie, then slipped into my jazzy dyed-lightning jacket while I walked to where man’s nemesis, Melinda Fowler, still dangled in the water.

  It was really the water I wanted to know about.

  “Pretty chilly in there?” I asked hopefully. Actually, my teeth were beginning to chatter, and I asked if it was “ch-ch-chilly.”

  “No, they—the water’s heated. We keep the temperature at eighty degrees all the time.”

  It’s true, the mind has great control over the body’s functions. But everybody knows that. What everybody doesn’t know is that the mind has great control over the weather, too. For, as soon as Melinda said “eighty degrees,” it was suddenly at least forty, maybe forty-five, degrees colder, right there where I was. My knees started knocking. I couldn’t see it happening of course, but I could feel my lips turning blue.

  While I thus went swiftly downhill, Melinda leaned back at arm’s length, fingers lightly gripping the pool’s edge. Then, rubbing salt in my wound, she deliberately rocked her shoulders back and forth, rocked them slowly but with sufficient vigor that her full white breasts waggled and bobbered and performed several other interesting maneuvers, one of which appeared to be an unsuccessful attempt to leap out of the water entirely and smack me.

  I would have thought that Melinda, having already won the exchange hands down, though probably there’s a better way to say it, would have had the common decency to shut up. Had I then carefully considered the nature of my other recent thoughts I would have known this one wasn’t likely to be smack on the button, either.

  Wallowing around in the hot water, she burbled, “It’s too warm, really.” Waggle-waggle. “Shell, you look a lot bluer than you did before. Like your blood’s decaying. What’s the matter?”

  “You’re fu-fu-full of cu-cute questions, aren’t you?”

  Smothering laughter, she cooed innocently, “Why did you ask me if the water was chilly?”

  “Baby, you know g-g-g-goddamn well wh-wh-wh ... forget it.”

  Melinda pushed herself away from the pool’s side, and her head sank beneath the water. Some bubbles came up. Maybe she was laughing. That is not what I hoped she was doing.

  I turned to follow my host into the house. Turned quickly—while Melinda was still under water, and the bubbles were still coming up—so that if my guardian angel had not yet requested an easier assignment, that sight would be my last sight of Melinda.

  8

  By the time I finished telling Mayor Fowler what had happened since our earlier talk, my toes were beginning to tingle, and I deduced I was thawing. As I spoke, the mayor pursed his lips and nodded a couple of times but made no comment.

  I left what I considered the most important sequence of events till the last, and watched him closely while describing the car I’d spotted several times on my tail, and the appearance of the man who’d been eyeballing me at the airport.

  The only reaction I got was when I described the lean cat with puffy eyes. Fowler blinked rapidly two or three times, leaned forward slightly, and seemed about to speak, but remained silent.

  I finished it up. “I was naturally curious about these guys, so I tailed them for a change. One of them got out at a hotel on Orange Avenue, and the other drove to a place called Silvano’s Garage. But the thing that fascinated me, Mr. Mayor, is that on their way into town from the airport these two bums made a detour.”

  Fowler had started to smile slightly, and he was nodding his big head again. “Samuels and Jonah,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  His smile broadened. “Never mind. Please continue, Mr. Scott.”

  “Well ... they came here. Obviously to see you. I naturally wondered why two such unsavory characters would so speedily call upon Newton’s mayor. After tailing me around for half the morning.”

  “Two such unsavory characters? From your remarks I assumed you closely observed only one of them.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, the guy bugging me at the airport. But one was enough. He sure looked like a hood to me.”

  The mayor’s smile broadened. It made me oddly uncomfortable, like when everybody else at the party is laughing and you didn’t get the joke. I said, “Are you going to tell me I’m wrong, Mr. Mayor? That the men didn’t come here to see you?”

  “Certainly not, Mr. Scott. They were here. In truth, I appreciate their interest and concern. The men are police officers in whom—”

  “They’re what? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The mayor gave me what I can only describe as a look of excruciating bleakness. “In whom,” he concluded deliberately. “I have the greatest confidence.”

  Those bushy-browed dark eyes of his, for a moment, were colder than my toes had been. We just weren’t hitting it off well lately. I said, “You could have fooled me. How did they explain their reason for being on my tail?”

  “That is the one oddity in the situation. They did not mention that fact. They did not mention you at all, Mr. Scott. They merely came here to assure themselves that I was all right, in no difficulty. I assume they were watching my home—staked out, you would probably say—and saw you arrive, or at least saw you leave.”

  He paused. After a few seconds he went on. “There have been threats against my life, Mr. Scott, in recent weeks. Even threats telephoned to me personally in recent days. Any prominent official of a large city must expect that sort of thing, particularly in these times when we are all surrounded by raging malcontents. However, I reported these incidents to the police, and was visited at my office in the City Hall some days ago by Sergeant Samuels, one of the men who called on me briefly this morning and, apparently, led you erroneously to believe you were being pursued by demons.”

  There was a nice bite to his words, and I could have don
e without the heavy sarcasm. But I said pleasantly, “Is Samuels the boy scout I spotted at the airport?”

  “From your description, that would have been Officer Jonah.”

  “Yeah, it fits him. He looked like he’d just been puked up by a whale. Well, if they’re cops, O.K. But a thought occurs to me. I’ve been informed, and you mentioned it yourself, Mr. Mayor, that this guy Hugh Grimson has some of the local law in his pocket. Are you sure of these two—”

  “I believe I have already said,” he interrupted, “that I have great confidence in Sergeant Samuels and Officer Jonah.”

  That was clearly supposed to put me in my place. So I merely replied, “Swell.”

  Fowler pushed his lips out and played with the lower one. “I shall, of course, see to it that you are not subjected to any further annoyance.” He lifted a heavy eyebrow. “Mr. Bannister has asked you to remain for a while in Newton?”

  “That’s right. I’m supposed to call him later. Mainly to let him know you’re O.K.”

  “Excellent, excellent.” He nodded. “I am now inclined to agree that Mr. Bannister’s action was wise. Yes, I now agree....” He glanced to our right. Toward the swimming pool, I think. “With some reservations,” he added. “There are areas in which your efforts may well produce results gratifying to us all. And we cannot have our law officers monitoring your every movement, can we?”

  “I’d be happier not being tailed even unto the john, Mr. Mayor. Frankly, I’d be more at ease if Jonah was assigned to Philadelphia.”

  Those heavy brows twitched down and moved closer to each other, in what I now—having seen it a number of times—recognized as an indication, if not of real honest-to-goodness anger, at least of disenchantment.

  Mayor Fowler rose slowly to his feet. “I cannot ensure your ease by asking our chief of police to remove Officer Jonah from the planet, but I can guarantee your increased happiness, Mr. Scott. You will, however long your stay in Newton, be free from further police attention.” He glanced toward our right again, then let his dark eyes fall on me. “Assuming, of course, that you conduct yourself ... ah, that you do not commit any crimes.”