Kill Me Tomorrow

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Kill Me Tomorrow

A Shell Scott Mystery

Richard S. Prather

FOR TINA

who helped more than she knows
.

CHAPTER ONE

She was a full-lipped and -hipped Italian tomato with Rome burning in her eyes.

Tall, with long firm shapely legs, a waist hourglassed by a swinging Mother Nature, and an improbably extravagant bosom carried with the flirtatious yoo-hoo that glazes male eyeballs and ripens fruit in the trees, she had the look of Carnival in Rio, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or bullfights in Spain, or Saturday night in my apartment.

My apartment was a long way from here—here being the cool, quiet cocktail lounge of Del Webb's luxurious Mountain Shadows resort hotel, nestled between Mummy and Camel-back Mountains in Paradise Valley, lush oasis on the edge of Scottsdale, Arizona, in the Valley of the Sun.

My apartment is a bachelor's Hollywood pad in the Spartan Apartment Hotel—on North Rossmore, a couple of near-wrecks on the Freeway from my downtown L.A. office,
Sheldon Scott, Investigations
—but I was taking a week's vacation from the Los Angeles smog and rumble and clatter, a hiatus from the hoods and heavies and grifters with whom I normally rub elbows or bump heads. I was here to soak in the pools and sweat in the heat, to laze and loll, to booze a little and unwind a lot. So, for the last hour, or since three
P
.
M
. of this steaming Friday in July, I had been sitting at the bar doing part of what I was here for.

I'd yacked with the two bartenders, peeked at a couple of Eddie's enchanting pictures and informed him that he was under citizen's arrest, and listened to several of Fernando's unbelievably atrocious jokes at which he—he alone—laughed uproariously, and I had jollied the three bouncy and good-looking waitresses, Harriette and Vera and Lou.

But now I sat with my fingers touching the moist glass holding my half-finished bourbon-and-water and wondered what Lucrezia Brizante was doing in Scottsdale, Arizona.

That was her name: Lucrezia Brizante.

I didn't hear her come in. Maybe I felt her. Or sensed the heat she seemed to bring in with her from the sun-burned desert outside. I wasn't the only one.

It was suddenly quiet in the bar. There had been the murmur of conversation, clink of ice on chilled glass, ripples of soft laughter, and then suddenly it was still.

I knew who she was. Who didn't?

Dressed entirely in white, from high-heeled pumps, to high-on-thigh minifrock with low-on-loveliness neckline, to ridiculous puff of feathery hat on her hell-black hair, she lit up the room. She lit more than that. Standing motionless inside the doorway gazing at the men and women seated at tables behind me, she was a white-sex explosion, a fragment of Neronian orgy or solo Saturnalia momentarily held still and hugged by time.

Then her glance fell on my face like the brush of a soft, warm wing. Her lips curved slightly, as if remembering a smile. And then she walked across the room toward me. Straight toward me.

Well, maybe not straight, exactly.

She moved in a direct line, true; but that movement in space was merely the invisible axis for a whole Ferris wheel of feminine goodies—Ferris wheel, hell, it was an entire circus of sensuous ripples and shimmers and tremblings—that notorious thrust of breast and swoop of waist and flare of hip so emphatic she appeared to be shaped in several more than three dimensions, obviously crammed with all the familiar female hormones plus aphrodisiac juices previously unknown.

This was the first time I'd seen her in person, rather than brightening a magazine cover or in photos or on film, and for a moment I thought that a woman who looked so unbelievably good must be half real and half mirage, like those heat-wave oases that shimmer in hot sands. But I thought that only for a moment; because by then Lucrezia Brizante was halfway across the room and still coming toward me.

Me? I thought. Why should the glory of the entire Italian peninsula want to see Shell Scott, private eye? Maybe it's a horrible mistake; maybe she thinks I'm Grandpa Willie.

Don't get me wrong. You will never see me on television, advertising toothpaste which—in ways mystifying to all mankind—smacks gooey kisses upon male chops; even so, I do not look at all like Grandpa. The thought had occurred to me simply because, on rare occasions, strangers glimpsing me from a distance have gotten the impression I might be an octogenarian, or at least more ancient than the lively lad of thirty years which I am, since my hair, which sticks straight up into the air for half an inch or as much as an inch when I let it grow to pot, is as white as bleached bone-slivers—this once leading an unbelievably dumb broad to comment that my skull appeared to be unraveling—as are the up-slanting and bent-down-at-the-ends brows over my gray eyes.

But it is my eyes, not my hairs, that are gray; and since I am a six-foot-two ex-Marine with a broken nose and other visible and invisible testimonies to public and private wars, and weigh two hundred and six solid pounds, and am tanned approximately the shade of a ripe banana, that impression had not yet persisted in a viewer's mind when he, or she, lamped me from less than ten feet away.

And Lucrezia Brizante was now only a foot and a half from me. Then I was standing, looking down at her, and she was at least a foot closer. And you can bet she knew I wasn't Grandpa Willie.

“Mr. Scott?” she said.

“Yes, ma'am. I'm Shell Scott.”

“How do you do?”

She extended her hand, and I shook it gingerly, and even with that very casual touch she turned my thumb and four fingers into five little erogenous zones. A mere half-dozen words she'd said to me, but in them were the Thousand Nights and a Night in the Garden of Kam—that perfumed garden of sensual delights where the flesh burns forever with shameless desire—because they were breathed in a voice a man hears in his inner ear, if he dreams of houris and wantons and bawds.

“I'm so glad I found you here, Mr. Scott”—sweet, scented breath warmed that inner ear, and before the inner eye nubile maidens undulated, busily flinging off diaphanous veils—“I need your help.”

“Lady,” I said, “you've got it.” And I meant it both ways.

She smiled like a woman getting chewed on the neck by Pan. It was a nice smile. I liked it. It went in my eyes and reamed out my arteries and steamed my blood and opened up half a dozen glands like cooked lotus blossoms.

“But you don't even know what I want you to do, Mr. Scott. It might be dangerous—”

“Dangerous?” I laughed lightly. “Miss Brizante, you speak of danger—to me? Why, I am the man who parachuted alone into Red China armed only with poisoned chopsticks—which were made in Japan, at that. I am the man who fed peanuts to King Kong. Who twice addressed the Legion of Decency in his shorts—”

“Really?”
Her lips curved slightly.

“Well, not
really
. I was just trying to impress you.”

She looked up at me. “You are rather impressive, in an … unusual way. The word Harry used was ‘batty.'”

“Harry? Batty?”

“Shall we find a booth where we can talk, Mr. Scott? I would like to tell you about it.” She was glancing around. “How about over there?” With a nod she indicated a booth near which no other customers sat, a spot where we'd be assured of some privacy. Not much. I said, “Splendid,” anyhow, and steered her past a couple of tables and into the booth. I'd brought my half-full bourbon-and-water from the bar, so I asked Lucrezia if she'd like a drink.

“Yes, I would, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell?”

She dropped her gaze to my mouth, then returned it like a gift to my eyes. “I'd like something cool and frosty.… Make it a Margarita, Shell.”

I caught Vera's glance—stare, it was, really—and she took the order, looking long at Lucrezia, briefly at me, and then apparently at something invisible which gave her a stomach ache. While waiting for the drink I took a long look at Lucrezia myself. If she'd been heat in the doorway, she was fire and brimstone this close in the booth. Her skin looked softer than the fuzz on baby chicks, the lips were provocatively pouting and pagan, and those black-velvet eyes could have burned holes in wet blankets.

“Well,” I said, “here we are. I don't know anything about the case yet, of course. But let's be optimistic and suppose we get it all settled nicely in a day or two, or less. If so, how about dinner some night—soon—Miss Brizante? Lucrezia?”

The question caught her off guard. “No,” she said.

“No?”

“Harry said you'd be like this. I'll have to insist that we remain … businesslike, Mr.—Shell. I really do need your help. I think.”

There was Harry again. “Harry who?”

“Feldspen.”

Ah, I thought.
That
Harry. Harry J. Feldspen was a longtime friend and sometime client, a man small in stature but very big, in Hollywood terms supercolossal, in moviebiz.

He was head of Magna Studios, producers in the last two years not only of
Sins of Sheba
—advertised almost entirely by life-sized photos of abundantly endowed Sarrah Starr wearing what appeared to be a fig leaf left behind by the locusts—which had grossed forty-seven million dollars worldwide, but also of the Oscar-winning
Wagner
, which despite the presence in it of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Pops and three hundred flautists playing golden flauts grossed under six million.

Since Harry Feldspen, though himself a classical-music buff and enamored of critical acclaim, was also a man wise in the ways of the millions, and since he had lost five hundred thou on his earlier
Beethoven
, he did not now plan to produce
Respighi
, or even
Mozart
, not as long as he lived.