Everybody Had A Gun

Richard S. Prather

For my mother, and for Bill

Chapter One

IT'S A FUNNY THING. If you were in the middle of the African veld and heard a couple of high notes from a hot trumpet, you'd undoubtedly think it was some animal sounding off. Or if there were a python hissing on one of the top floors of the Empire State Building, you'd probably think it was an office boy whistling through his teeth.

Maybe that's why, when the first bullet whizzed past my ear right in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, it didn't make sense right away, didn't mean anything to me.

I'd just finished forcing down my usual toast-and-coffee breakfast while reading the big black headlines about L.A.'s newest murder—the killing of one Lobo Le Beau, which looked as if it might lead to violent complications. Then I'd driven up Broadway and parked my ancient yellow Cadillac convertible in front of the Hamilton Building. I sat there a second, blinking sleepily at a hazy world as gray as my gabardine suit.

It was one of those extremely dry, electric Mondays we get sometimes in Southern California after summer is over and before the rains begin, and an east wind had been blowing all morning. We'd had the wind off and on for days now, and everybody was tired of it. It was the kind of irritating breath that dries out the land and the trees, chaps lips, rubs nerves raw, and puts a sharp edge on tempers.

I blinked at Monday, got out of the car, and started angling across the wide sidewalk toward the Hamilton Building and my office, when that first whisper raced past my ear.

It didn't mean a thing. I heard it, wondered what the hell was flying around in the L.A. smog, and kept right on going.

Broadway at ten o'clock in the morning is pretty well filled with people hurrying to one of the big department store sales or stepping out of offices to get coffee, and one of the big orange and green streetcars was rumbling up toward Fourth Street clanging and making a lot of noise, so I didn't even notice the small crash and tinkle as the bullet bored through the plate-glass window of Pete's Bar, next door to the Hamilton Building.

But I took one more step and then I saw the little hole in the glass with the cracks radiating from it and all of a sudden I got it with a jolt that tingled every nerve in my body. My subconscious dredged up the memory of a hundred sounds like that nasty whisper, sounds that I'd heard when I was a Marine in the South Pacific, and I stopped thinking and let my reflexes take over. I dived for a crack in the sidewalk as if it were a foxhole, and I hit the cement rolling. This time I heard a crash as the second shot smacked into the big window over my head, and I scrambled on my hands and knees toward the alley at the left of the Hamilton Building.

It took a second or so, but it finally penetrated. Somebody was trying to turn Shell Scott, private detective, into a six-two corpse with stand-up blond hair and cold, cold blood.

I caught a glimpse of a couple of pedestrians staring open-mouthed at me as I reached the alley and slithered up against the brick wall at its edge. I got my feet under me, dug under my coat, and yanked out my .38 Special, and the guy nearest me stopped staring stupidly, let out a squawk, and disappeared. I could hear his feet slapping the pavement and a little yelp once in a while, getting fainter.

Everything had happened so fast that I hadn't had time to think about what was going on. I squeezed back against the rough brick of the wall behind me, revolver tight in my fist, and tried to look everywhere at once. A woman walking down toward Third stopped at the edge of the alley on my right and stared at me. She didn't scream or run, just stared bug-eyed at me and the gun in my hand as if she were paralyzed. The only thing that moved was her mouth. It dropped open and she pulled it shut, then it opened and shut again, as if she were chewing ten sticks of gum. I guess I looked pretty silly, but not as silly as she did. A man came up alongside her and strained his eyes at me, and I waved them both back with my left hand. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back out of sight.

I couldn't stand there all day. If somebody had taken a couple of shots at me, he was probably long gone by now. But it was time I started finding out what the score was. My Cad was parked just across the sidewalk, and if I leaned out I could see the front fender. It looked like a hundred-yard dash to get there, but I bent over and leaped toward the side of the car.

Nothing happened. I slammed into the door and huddled down behind the car, facing the window of Pete's Bar. I could see the two holes, one high up, the other near the bottom of the glass. I could see, too, where the bullets had hit Pete's display inside. He had an off-sale license, and bottles of whisky were arranged inside the window. One of them, over at the left of the bullet holes, was shattered, and the liquor had spread out over the shelf that the bottles were on. That meant that the shots must have come from the northeast somewhere, farther down Broadway and up high. Probably from one of the office buildings along the street. I slid on my fanny back toward the rear of the car, far enough so I could get the door open, reached up, and pulled on the handle, wondering if there'd be any more bullets flying my way. As the door swung open I glanced up the sidewalk.

There must have been twenty damn-fool people standing there milling around and looking at me as if I were nuts. If I had been off my rocker I could have blasted hell out of them with the gun in my hand, but there they were. All of a sudden I wondered if maybe I was nuts.

Goofy or not, I slid up into the car, then hunched over, and with the back of my neck tingling I got the car started and wheeled it around in a U turn, headed north on Broadway. I stuffed the Colt revolver back in its clamshell holster and looked down the street. There were several buildings on my right where a guy could have planted himself with a rifle or pistol and had a beautiful view of the sidewalk where I'd just been—or even where I was now. There were too many places to check, but I was going to do some prowling anyway.

Forty-five minutes later I'd done a lot of running around and asked a lot of questions and got a lot of nothing. It was hopeless to try to find an empty office or a room overlooking the street from which somebody could have sniped at me. There must have been a million places the guy could have been. I gave up.

When I got back to the Hamilton Building there was a gray police radio car parked in front. I pulled in behind it and sat in the car. A uniformed patrolman was talking to a woman in the Hamilton entrance, and a plain-clothes sergeant I knew, Danny Russo, was looking at the bullet holes in Pete's window. Pete was inside looking out, examining the damage and shaking his head. Danny turned around and saw me.

"Hi, Shell," he said. "Better watch yourself today. Some screwball's running around loose."

"Screwball?"

"Yeah." He walked over to the car and leaned in the window. "Some guy's running around waving a gun and shooting things up."

"That's me."

"Huh?" He stared at me. I was getting used to it.

"Probably me," I said. "Those holes in the window." I nodded toward the plate glass. "Somebody used me for a target. I climbed into the alley and yanked out my gun and scared a lot of people."

He kept staring, then his lean face relaxed and he grinned. "Sure. What you smoking nowadays?"

"Damn it, Danny, I'm serious. I tell you somebody took two shots at me. I've just been trying to find out where the guy could've been. With no luck."

"Fact?"

"Fact. So help me."

Danny opened the car door and slid in beside me. He pushed back his brown hat and scratched his head. "Wouldn't you know," he groaned. "They tell me this guy came panting into headquarters and said a guy had a fit down here and flopped on the sidewalk, then yanked out a gun and started shooting up the town. Guy was all out of breath—ran all the way, he said."

That must have been the character who ran away yelping. My office is between Third and Fourth Streets on Broadway, and the City Hall is a long four blocks away. Farther than I'd like to run, and I'm in condition.

Danny was grinning at me. "Get this. We got a good description of the guy who threw the fit. According to the man that ran down to tell us about it, this madman had tape over both eyes and was about five feet tall, fat, and completely bald."

I was insulted. I'm just a fraction under six-two and weigh 205 pounds right now. There's no tape over my eyes—that's my eyebrows. They slant up from the middle and then angle down at the ends of my gray eyes, and they're almost white, like my hair. Tape! And I am not bald at a mere thirty years of age. My hair's blondish and it sticks up over my head about an inch long. But it sticks up all over my head.

I said, "Well, it was me, no matter what the guy says. I was stooped over. Just don't let that description of his get around."

Danny grinned and asked me, "Who shot at you?"

"Dunno. Haven't got any idea."

"Come on, boy. Who you think it was?"

"Don't you get it? I tell you I don't know. It just happened. I damn near fell on my face when that slug whistled by my ear." I grinned. "Matter of fact, I did fall on my face."

He kept looking at me and whistled softly. "Tell me all about it," he said finally.

I told him what little there was to tell, but it didn't satisfy him. That was nothing; it didn't satisfy me, either.

He said, "You must have some idea who'd be mad at you. Don't be dumb, Shell. If somebody's after your hide, you'll need all the help you can get."

I shook my head. "That's it, Danny. That's all of it. If I knew any more, I'd give it to you. Hell, you don't think I like this?"

He got out cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth, and passed me the pack. While he lit one match after another from a book of paper matches, and while the wind swirling in the open windows of the Cad put out one match after another, he asked me casually, "Uh, Shell, you wouldn't know anything about Lobo, would you?"

The Lobo he referred to was Lobo Le Beau, the guy I'd been reading about while I had my morning coffee. He'd been found dead in a ditch a little way out of the city with three bullets in his head. There had been absolutely no love lost between Lobo and me, and as far as I was concerned, his head was a dandy place for three bullets to be.

I'd learned to dislike Lobo heartily about three months back. I was on a job for a man named Marty Sader, who wanted to know the weekly take of one of the horse parlors on Slauson Avenue. At the time I hadn't inquired into Sader's reasons for wanting that kind of info, but he informed me it wasn't information one could get by calling the place or asking the police, and he didn't want to get involved personally. He'd explained that he'd checked the local "talent," as he called it, and decided I was the best man he could hire. I said to myself, Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. Sader, but when he blew me and some tomato—whose name I've forgotten—to an evening at his night club, the Pit, and explained there was a fat fee if I got what he wanted and kept his name out of the deal, I gave it a stab—and learned nothing.

I did my best on the job, and nobody scared me off; I just couldn't figure out anything definite. But I met Lobo, who tried to scare me. I spent four days on that job, and on the second day Lobo Le Beau stopped me, said he'd heard I was snooping and asking leading questions, and for me to get the God-damn hell out of the way. I thanked him kindly for his interest and kept snooping. The next day Lobo wasn't so courteous. He threatened me some more, and when I told him it was a free country he grabbed me by my knit wool tie and started to yank me around, whereupon I broke his thumb and he let go of my tie.

The only violence after that was verbal, and Lobo told me if I didn't stop messing around I'd have to suffer the consequences. He never did tell me bluntly what the consequences might be, but he had said, as I recalled it, "Scott, you're too young." He didn't develop that, but we both knew what he meant. I hadn't liked the idea of dying that soon, but even though he'd bothered me I'd gone ahead with the investigation till it was obvious I wasn't going to get anything out of it and all my leads had dried up. I'd reported as much to Sader. I didn't get the fat fee, and Sader had intimated, not too subtly, that his feelings toward guys who let him down were not exactly cordial. Nothing I could say—not even the evidence of Lobo's broken thumb—could persuade Sader that I hadn't double-crossed him and got a fat fee for not getting the information he wanted. But he couldn't prove anything, so that was the end of it—I thought. I couldn't help wondering, though, what might have happened if Lobo and I had run into each other a time or two more. Well, with three holes in his head, he wouldn't bother me.