The Shell Scott Sampler (14 page)

But that was as far as he got. Rawlins grabbed him, and Rose seemed to wilt. An officer led him, drooping, away.

Soon, then, the area was empty except for Rawlins and me. He looked at the lavender-dotted pool, at the sky, then at me.

“Shell, will you just for hell tell me —”

“Ah, ah. No questions. You agreed to that, remember?”

“Yeah, yeah, but tell me this. How in hell did you know it was Wallnofer? Not just some guy named Schultzbinder.”

“I didn't. But I knew
somebody
did all those things I mentioned. And it looked much like Wallnofer for the reasons you heard me give him. Besides, you can't play it safe all the time, and I was in a hurry. What could I lose?”

“Uh-huh. You knew somebody did those things.” He squinted at me. “There really was a witness, then? You weren't just making it up?”

I smiled. He frowned.

I walked to the cabaña, and in a small locker found feminine clothing—some of it black and wispy—plus a handbag. I grabbed the stuff and headed for my Cad. Rawlins was still standing by the pool. As I walked past him he scowled at the items in my hands, and at me, swearing colorfully.

I grinned, trotted to the car, started the engine and headed for home.

As I drove, odd thoughts and symbols drifted through my skull. Ah, I thought, the marvels of Science and the Advertising Mind: SX-21 … GL44 … Contains Bacillaurum! … Hyperoricrud … and a half a hundred others, including Hydroatomalkafluorium, the
most
-secret secret ingredient of them all. Probably, I thought, it was old crankcase drainings.

I thought of Louis Thor strangling—ah, how men initiate their own ends—on Zing!

And I thought of all the women bathing all across the land—some hopefully, some giddily, some cautiously—on Zing!

And I thought of one particular woman bathing … under waterfalls … in lavender pools … in a tub at the Spartan Apartment Hotel.

But by then, because I had been tromping on the accelerator, I was
at
the Spartan Apartment Hotel.

As I got out of the car I glanced at my watch. Nine forty p.m. Exactly. From the Spartan and back to the Spartan in half an hour. Probably the speediest case of my career.

But after all, I thought, I'd had
incentive.
And that's the secret ingredient.

The Cautious Killers

Her name was Jasmine, but she had asked me to call her Jazz.

Both names fitted her well enough, I supposed. Anybody with eyeballs could tell she looked very
jazzy
indeed; and I could personally attest that she smelled splendid.

I knew she smelled splendid, because on two previous occasions within the past week, both of them at her soon closed—and locked, and probably barred—apartment door, I had managed to get a sniff of some kind of aphrodisiac which she dabbed behind her ears.

Whether she dabbed the stuff—Sortilège, I think it was—anywhere else, I hadn't the haziest idea. And to a thirty-year-old bachelor named Shell Scott—that's me—smelling ears is not exactly the high point of a wildly exciting evening.

Consequently little Jazz had begun to strike me as a bit waltzy. But this was our third joint expedition into the night life of Hollywood, and Jazz had hinted that tonight's foray might be even more orgiastic than the first couple. At least, she had if you can call unbelievably steamy glances from hot brown eyes a hint. Or the implied promise of tomato-red lips on the verge of spontaneous combustion. Or occasional deep breaths of such magnitude that the next might split and even remove entirely the form-fitting blue-silk cocktail gown clinging, strapless, to her 38-23-36, which was higher mathematics for a gal only five feet, three inches tall. But I was only guessing, since it was pretty hard to tell for sure, when she was putting away a meal which would cause a horse instantly to founder.

This gal ate like a couple of longshoremen. Not indelicately, no; merely with absorption, determination, gusto, persistence. And, of course, appetite. It is a fact that she could put away more goose liver and steak and potatoes and salad and vegetables and crepes suzette and café diablo than anybody of her size—and especially shape—that I'd ever seen. I could understand how Jazz got that dandy shape, but not how she kept it.

She sighed passionately once more. “Oh, my!” she said. “That was good. That
was
good, Shell.”

We had just finished dinner at a restaurant called the Hideout. Though not far from downtown Hollywood, it was secluded, resting alone atop a hill overlooking the several million lights of Hollywood and its suburbs, like L.A. It was somewhat more expensive than a beanery, but considering the artistry of the chef not unduly so. An ordinary meal, complete with oddments à la carte, would run about fifteen bucks; Miss Jasmine Porter's snack came to forty-two sixty, which I had a faint feeling was impossible.

Fortunately, I could afford a little Jazz this week. I had recently concluded a profitable job for a wealthy client—“Shell” is from the Sheldon in Sheldon Scott, Investigations—and could thus even have bought myself a forty-two sixty meal if I were nuts, and if it had been possible for me to cram that much food into my six feet, two inches, and two hundred and six pounds, which it wasn't.

I said, “You want another?”

“Another what?”

“Another meal.”

“Of course not. That was plenty.”

I smiled. “Well, then, what would you like to do now, Jazz? Take a nap for a few hours? Drive up into the hills and snooze on Lover's Lane? Go watch birds at the aviary —”

“Goodness, no. Shell. I told you tonight was going to be
different,
didn't I?”

“Yeah, that's why I thought maybe you'd like another dinner. That would be diff —”

“That's not … quite … what I meant.”

Boy, when she turned it
all
on like that—the hot-whispery voice and steamy eyes and conflagration of lips—it was a kind of Sortilège ravishment of all the known senses, and I smiled very widely and said, “Then follow me, dear. Out there”—I pointed toward a tall, wide window and the brilliant lights beyond—“is romance, adventure, danger, even booze. I refer, of course, to my apartment.”

“Wonderful!”

I got up, dropped approximately a pound and a half of money onto the waiter's tray and the check, slid the chair out from under Jazz's inimitable 36, let her drape a hand on my arm, and we started out.

We almost made it.

Just inside the front door and at one end of the long view window filling the front wall of the dining room, a man and woman were seated at a table for two, drinking some kind of liqueur from thimble-sized glasses.

I knew the guy, a local attorney named Vincent Blaik, but since he was merely an acquaintance I nodded and was going to walk right on by.

But Jasmine recognized the girl. “Lynn!” she cried in the tone of approaching ecstasy women generally use when greeting any other female who isn't a total stranger. “How nice!”

The lovely called Lynn—and she was a lovely—looked up and smiled. But the smile appeared to begin and end on her lips. “How nice,” she echoed. “Jasmine! It's so good to see you.” She sounded as happy as a sore loser halfway through hara-kiri.

Then they went into the How've-you-been? and It's-been-too-long bit. I sighed.

“Hi,” I said to Blaik.

“'Lo, Scott. Sit down, join us.”

“Thanks, but we were on our way out.”

He lifted an eyebrow, glanced at the two girls and back at me. “Were is right.”

“And then Suki—you remember Suki, don't you?” Jazz was saying. “Well she and Jim went out onto the patio and —” She leaned over and mumbled something which, try as I might, I couldn't catch.

“No!” said Lynn.

“Yes!” cried Jazz.

“Hey!” said I. “Jazz. The romance, and adventure, and danger, remember? And —”

She rested the brown eyes on me. “What's the hurry?”

“— booze. Out there in the wilds…. What do you mean, what's the hurry?”

“It'll still be there. Shell.”

“Yeah. But maybe we won't.”

She wasn't listening. I lifted my hands up and let them flop.

Blaik grinned, and repeated his offer. “Care to join us for a drink, Scott?”

“Why not?” I said glumly. “At least, I will. Jazz may join us after a while, OK?”

“Fine. What are you drinking?”

I told him, pulled over a couple of chairs, and sat down. Blaik gave a nearby waiter the order.

When the drinks came Jazz was seated, leaning forward a bit and saying, “It was Suki, all right. But you know Jim.”

“Just
don't
I?” Lynn said, rolling her eyes.

They were very pretty eyes. Large, wide-set, green. A moist, dark green, the color of bruised mint leaves. She was leaning back in her chair, not saying much, apparently content to let Jazz do most of the talking. The quiet type, I supposed, though she didn't look like the quiet type. I guessed she was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old, but she looked pretty flamboyant to me.

Part of it had to be those eyes and the sensual, crushed-looking lips. But another part was the dress she wore, a soft, shimmering cloth as black as her short-cut and casually tousled hair; the cloth lay so close and smoothly against her skin it might almost have been black dye spilled over her full-curved body.

It took about five minutes, but by then the girls had covered the essential trivia and we'd even had time for introductions.

The quiet but flamboyantly dressed lovely was Lynn Duncan. I already knew, from listening to Jazz's volubility and Lynn's monosyllabic comments, that until six months ago Lynn had lived in Miami, Florida, and since moving to Hollywood had been working at some place called the Skylight, was single, drank Kahlua after dinner and straight bourbon the rest of the time, liked the new hip-length dresses but hadn't dared to wear one yet, and was wild about the latest boy-singer singing rage, Weenie Latour.

When Jazz informed her that I was a private detective Lynn looked at me long enough and intently enough to know I have stick-up-in-the-air hair that is white, as springy as thin quills, and just about as long as the equally white hair in my peaked eyebrows; that my eyes are gray, my chops deeply tanned, my chin at least resolute if not ponderous; that my nose has been broken no less than twice and amusingly set once; that there's a small scar over my right eye and a piece cut or bitten or sliced or shot—shot's the one—from the tip of my left ear; and that the total gorgeousness of my features often gives rise to suspicion that they may have been caught in an avalanche, or been struck with determination by lots of knuckles.

I looked out at the view. For almost half a mile there were only scattered lights, but then the real sparkle and brilliance of the city below began, white and frosty and red and blue and green, individual dots blending into an abstract mass of color farther away.

There was only one road up to the top of the hill where the Hideout sat, and the view had been selected so diners could not only get the full impact of the city at night but also see arriving cars come up the two-lane asphalt road to the circle before the restaurant's entrance. The circle where, with military snap and dispatch, two attendants magnificently attired in dove-gray dinner jackets opened doors, whisked cars away to the large parking lot on the right.

It was said that many ladies, and even some of their escorts, enjoyed knowing that numerous curious—and, hopefully, envious—eyes could note their arrivals. On a good night, at least. But this was Tuesday, only a little after seven thirty p.m., early on a slow evening in September, and there weren't more than a dozen eyes in the joint.

Another car was coming up the road. Its headlights silvered the black asphalt, but at the top swung left toward the darkened lot rather than into the brilliance and uniformed-attendant splendor before the entrance. This one apparently preferred parking his car himself, rather than leaving it with an attendant and later buying it back.

A miser, forced to bring his wife to the Hideout? I wondered. A guy with a gal wearing one of the old-style dresses, with its hem almost down to her kneecaps? A gay with somebody else's wife? Or quite possibly, I thought more generously, a high-school kid with his sweetie, doing optimistic addition and subtraction in his head.

Jazz appeared unaware that I was still only about six inches from her ear. I could smell the Sortilège again.

Suddenly the gals stood up simultaneously and murmured they'd be back “in a jiffy.” Neither of them had mentioned it. Just
click,
and they were on their way. I presume it's telepathy. Or perhaps a certain strained expression undetectable by males.

Blaik said, “Gorgeous little gal, Jasmine.”

“Yeah. So's your Miss Duncan.”

“Not
my
Miss Duncan. She's just … well, call it combining business with pleasure.”

I grinned. He could call it business if he wanted to, but it looked more like pleasure to me.

Vincent Blaik was a bachelor, like me, only he was five or six years over my thirty. He was a solid five-ten, a bit chunky at a hundred and ninety pounds or so, with a square face, muscular cheeks, brown hair several inches longer than mine and wavy, combed straight back from the slightly-off-center widow's peak like a little comma punctuating his hairline.

For several years I'd been hearing about Blaik and reading of his brilliant courtroom strategy and techniques—he was a much-sought-after attorney for the defense, with his own offices and staff. But this was the first time we'd actually sat down and talked. He struck me as a much nicer chap than I'd assumed he would be, because among the things I'd heard were rumors that his ethics and morality were not exactly above reproach.

He had a long string of courtroom successes, and a few flops, behind him; but I'd heard that some of those successes might have been achieved with the aid of such illicit techniques as jury tampering, bribing, and even—perhaps—intimidation of hostile witnesses. He was also alleged to have an abundance of political pull which he was not averse to using, too-close connections with a couple of Superior Court judges, and intimate acquaintance with a number of the kings and princes of hoodlumland.