Everybody Had A Gun (2 page)

Even before he got his holes, though, Lobo hadn't impressed me as the type of muscle who diagrams the plays, but rather as the kind who carries the ball for somebody else. And I knew one more thing about him. He was, or rather had been, right-hand man to Collier Breed, a big man in L.A. Breed was big around the middle, but he was also big in that he had his fat fingers in a lot of pies, legal and illegal, all up and down the West Coast. Some came right out and said Breed was the West Coast representative of a national "combination" that controlled most of the rackets. Breed had been up before the U.S. Senate Crime Investigating Committee, but he'd claimed he was simply an honest businessman and nobody had yet proved any different.

Lobo had been very close to Breed—until this morning—and thinking about that reminded me of what might yet be the most important result of my thumb-breaking altercation with Lobo. About a week after that, word had filtered down to me that Breed, the big man himself, wanted it impressed upon me that, and I quote, "If that ass Scott sticks his nose in my business just once more, he'll be the late Shell Scott." That told me two things: the business I'd been sticking my nose into was Breed's; and he didn't like me worth a damn.

Danny was on his fifth match so I said, "Here, let me light that damn cigarette for you. And, no, I wouldn't know anything about the job on Lobo." I dug into my coat pocket and hauled out my pride and joy: one Zippo "one-zip windproof lighter" that the winds of the last few days had forced me to buy. I guess the ads had sold me: "Why, zip, zip, zip. . .when one zip does it!"

I went zip and stuck the torch against Danny's cigarette, blackening half of the end of it, and added, "All I know is what I read in the papers, Danny. And all I know about Lobo is that somebody punctured him. Not much loss."

"Not to L. A., maybe," Danny said, "but Breed won't be happy."

I lit my own cigarette, took a drag on it, and blew smoke out my nose like Bogart. "So what's that got to do with me? I didn't know anything about it till an hour or so ago."

"O.K. Seems funny you don't have any idea who shot at you."

"Yeah. I think it's funny, too. I'm in stitches." I thought about it a while and said truthfully, "Look, Danny. I've helped send a few local boys up for stretches, but they're all safely tucked away. That's straight. I honestly can't think of a single damned reason why anybody would shoot at me."

"Somebody did."

"Agreed," I said. "Somebody did." He didn't say anything, so I added, "About Lobo—well, we had a run-in a while back, but it blew over."

"What kind of run-in?"

"Job I worked on. Nothing came of it. I couldn't get enough info to help my client. Lobo thought I should lay off. Seems I was tromping on his toes, or somebody's toes."

"I heard something rumored about that. You lay off?"

"You nuts, Danny? Hell, no. I couldn't find anything, is all. Anyway, I didn't knock off Lobo, so we're getting nowhere."

"You've got no idea at all who blasted at you?"

"None. That's all, period, Danny."

He looked at me a while. Then he said, "All right, Shell. You want some protection?"

"Uh-uh. Not till I know more about this thing. Maybe it was a backfire."

He looked over at the bullet holes in the window. "Sure. That's it. Why didn't I think of that?"

We grinned at each other, pretending we were happy, then got out of the car. I didn't stand around in front of the building, but waved to Danny and the patrolman, went inside, and took the self-service elevator to my office, on the second floor. I looked at the printed letters on the window of my office door, "Sheldon Scott, Investigations," wondering if somebody would be scraping the paint off in a few days for a new name and a new occupant. With that cheery thought I unlocked the door and went inside.

I peeked before I barged in, just to be sure there was nobody waiting for me, but the only life in the office was on top of the bookcase to the right of the door. That's where I keep the ten-gallon tank and the guppies. That's fish. Little lusty tropical fish with color like surrealist prints and rainbows and vegetable soup. I pushed the door shut behind me, walked over to the bookcase, and said, "Hi, guppies," which was just about as foolish as I could get, but I was still a bit unstrung. The guppies flipped their tails and ogled me, and a few of the more enterprising males seized the diversion to make sneak attacks on the females. Not that they needed a diversion. I checked the water temperature to make sure it was around seventy-four degrees, dropped a little crab meat into the feeding ring for the mammas and papas, and sprinkled some baby manna and grated shrimp on top of the green Riccia floating at the top of the water so the babies could sneak up and grab an occasional mouthful.

If you have guppies, you have baby guppies. Like people, guppies are always having babies like mad, but guppies, instead of holding wars, keep the population down by eating their babies. Hence the Riccia for the babies to hide in. If only people had Riccia; I could have used some myself.

I relaxed, watching the colorful little fish cavort around the tank for a while, then walked over to the big window that overlooks Broadway, and stood at the side of it eyeing the citizens and wondering about that whisper past my ear.

Violence is part of my trade and I've been shot at before. I've been a private detective in Los Angeles ever since shortly after the end of World War II and my discharge from the Marines, and I've had several slugs tossed my way. As a matter of fact, one slug snipped off a small slice from the top of my ear, causing many people since to ask stupid questions like "Wha hopen your ear?" I tell everybody that a girl bit it off. The ear, coupled with a nose that got busted on Okinawa and still slants a little—a very little—gives me a slightly menacing aspect that hasn't scared anybody yet, but that takes me out of the boy-model class.

Like I said, I've been shot at before, but almost invariably I either knew who was doing the shooting or had an idea who it was and why. This time I knew absolutely from nothing. L.A. has its share of murders, but as far as I was concerned, Lobo Le Beau was L.A.'s quota for the day.

There were some odd angles to that killing. Even the newspaper story describing Lobo's sudden demise had been concerned less with Lobo himself than with two other guys: Collier Breed, Lobo's fat boss, and Marty Sader, the boy who'd started me on the job that tangled me with Lobo—and that, in itself, was interesting, now that I considered it. Since that job I'd done a little checking on Marty Sader, out of curiosity, and I'd heard from some of the characters I run into in my business that Sader was a citizen with big ideas and little principles. It seemed that the night club at which I'd spent that one bibulous evening was, though profitable, only part of Sader's money-making enterprises. It seemed, further, that the club was probably the only legal enterprise.

The newspapers had hinted that Marty was muscling in on somebody else's "territory," and without actually saying so, they'd managed to put across in a couple of well-chosen paragraphs the idea that the territory was Breed's. There was beginning to be a pattern somewhere in all this, and now Breed's boy was killed off and I smelled trouble in the morning air.

Danny's asking me if I knew anything about Lobo's killing had started me along this line of speculation, but I shoved it out of my mind. At least I tried to. That trouble I smelled was one deal I wanted no part of. At first glance it didn't appear likely I'd get any: Boys like Breed and Sader have other methods of settling their differences than hiring private detectives. Such cute methods as bombs, cement, and sawed-off shotguns.

But the more I thought of that "muscling-in" rumble that was spreading, and the longer I considered how soon after Lobo's murder somebody had taken two near-lethal shots at me, the less I enjoyed the skittering flights of my morbid imagination. In that little altercation with Lobo three months back, I'd been squeezed a bit between Sader and Breed; and I couldn't help wondering if somehow I'd got squeezed into the middle again. Now I was getting morbid, and I told myself the hell with it.

I was standing at the side of the window, keeping fairly well out of sight in case people still wanted to shoot me, when I saw the girl. Or, rather the woman. By no stretch of an elastic imagination could she be honestly described as a girl I'd just about decided to shake my mood by going back to the bookcase and digging out a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, given me by a guy named Garvey Mace to replace some Frank Harris books that a couple of Mace's goons ripped up a while back. I was going to settle down in my swivel chair, prop my Cordovans on my mahogany desk, and reread some of those liquidly flowing Miller passages. But when I saw the woman I forgot all about Miller, which may be some indication of the kind of woman she was.

The first thing I noticed was the way she was dressed. She had on a pair of boyish, dark blue slacks and a fuzzy, light blue half sweater, and she was wearing her tummy bare in the breeze. She was on the far side of the street in the doorway of a shop, but even from that distance she caught my eyes and tugged. Her face wasn't clear, but I could see she had red hair that was worn long the way it should be: the kind of hair a man means when he speaks of woman's crowning glory. And even from there I could see she was slim, but with bold breasts that had a happy tilt, and a woman's hips in her boyish slacks.

Even if she hadn't been such a lush gal I'd have watched her because she was acting funny. She kept looking up and down the sidewalk and keeping back in the doorway, where it would be hard for anyone on the street to see her. And at first I thought I was imagining it, but I got the impression she was looking up toward my window, toward where I was standing.

And then I was sure of it. She looked up toward the window, took a couple of hesitant steps as if she were going to cross the street, then went back to where she'd been standing and looked up at my window again. I got so interested I forgot about keeping pretty well out of sight, stepped out right in plain view, and stared down at the gal.

She spotted me and straightened up. Then damned if she didn't start waving at me and making gestures with her hand. My mouth must have dropped open like the people who'd gawked at me a while earlier, and it dropped even farther in the next second.

She kept looking up at me, left her spot in the shop doorway, and started running straight across the street, jiggling like crazy. Man, it was pretty.

Traffic was heavy, but she must either have forgotten about it or ignored it, because there was the squealing of brakes as a guy screeched to a stop barely short of her, and there was a bang as the car behind him slammed into his rear bumper.

The noise startled her and she stopped suddenly and put one hand up against her face and looked around. Guys in the cars were staring; this was the nicest thing they'd seen in a long time. One vulgar lout even stuck his head out a car window and gave the whistle. I couldn't blame him.

I might even have whistled myself, except that it suddenly occurred to me I made a beautiful target standing where I was. And it also occurred to me that just possibly I was looking in the wrong direction—out the window instead of toward the unlocked door leading into my office.

Only I got both my bright ideas too late. I hadn't even started to turn around when trouble came in the door behind me.

Chapter Two

THE TROUBLE was in the person of a little skinny guy about forty years old with a great big gun in his right fist. I knew the gun—a .45-caliber automatic pistol—but I didn't know the guy. What's more, I didn't want to know him.

He said, "Come on, Scott. We're leaving."

"Leaving? For where? What's—"

"Don't stall, mister," he snapped at me. "Right now. Hurry it up." He wiggled the gun a little.

It was getting to me. Somebody was real mad at me and was going to a lot of trouble to prove it. Well, I was convinced. I didn't argue any more. I kept my hands in plain sight and moved around the desk toward him. When I was four feet from him he said, "That's close enough. Put your hands behind your head. Lace 'em tight."

I did exactly as I was told.

He said, "Don't try anything, Scott," then pointed the automatic at the middle of my chest and reached out easily with his left hand and slipped my gun out of its holster. Then he slipped my Colt in his pocket and stepped back away from me. He jerked his head toward the door. "O.K., out ahead of me."

I walked to the door and stopped. He walked up on my left and said quietly, "Hurry it up. You want lumps on your head? Snap into it."

"How about a rough idea?" I asked. "What's up? You the guy that took a shot at me?"

He shifted the gun a little in his hand and the corners of his mouth pulled down. He was a real tough guy. He was a couple of inches over five feet high, but the gun in his hand made him nine feet tall. He was a giant while he had that gun pointed at me.

He said softly, "You must not have heard me right, Scott. I said hurry it up. Now move!"

I was slow this morning and it had taken a little while, but I was starting to burn. I'd have loved mashing this nasty character's face into a block of cement. He was about three feet from me, just to the left of the door. So close I could reach out and touch him. But I didn't. He was ready for anything I might pull, and I didn't know any way to distract his attention.

He clamped his teeth together and his jaw muscles bulged. I unwound my arms from behind my head and started to reach for the doorknob, and then I heard it. We both heard it. The click-click of high heels hurrying down the hall outside.

I let my right hand fall back to my side and looked toward the little man. He licked his lips as the click-click got louder. This might be the first hitch. He shrank about a foot.

I said, "We'd better wait and see. . . ."

He didn't answer me, but he kept looking at me, and the muzzle of the .45 kept looking at me.

The click of the high heels came rapidly up to the door of the office and stopped. The doorknob rattled.