Joker in the Deck (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  "What are you thinking?" She smiled.

  "Why?"

  "You had such an . . . oh, I don't know. Such a nice look on your face. What were you thinking?"

  "I don't know the words to tell you, Laurie. But I'll try sometime."

  "When?"

  "When . . . when the time's right."

  She laughed. "My, you sound serious."

  I shook my head. "Don't I, though? Well, I didn't have any breakfast, and the sound you thought was distant thunder — "

  "Oh, don't say it."

  "Yeah, well, I'd better run. Just wanted to tell you about Laguna. Jim asked me to let everybody know."

  I went to the door, and out.

  Chapter Eight

  Back at the Spartan, waiting for Jim to show up, I phoned the police and learned that no one had been ticketed for transporting a stiff in an auto, and no dead bodies had been found cluttering up the local landscape. But I got all the info I could on the late Mickey M., because I felt pretty sure I knew why he'd been snatched last night. With no corpse available, there could be no identification of the hoodlum — and thus no link to whoever had sent Mickey M. out on last night's job.

  Of course, I did know who the gunman was. But the man who'd employed Mickey couldn't know I'd recognized the little hoodlum, nor could he know about Mickey's pinched chops on the time-lapse film Jim had shot.

  The knowledge didn't do me much good, though, because the police didn't have anything that wasn't already in my head. Police records showed that Mickey M. — full name Michael M. Grauschtunger — had last been picked up for questioning in L. A. five years ago, and released. That was about the time I'd run into the guy, and the law had nothing on him since.

  I'd brushed against Mickey when he'd been one of the youthful hoods growing into manhood in the gang headed by Lou the Greek. Lou wasn't actually a Greek; whatever his nationality, he was one-quarter slob, one-quarter ape, one-quarter sly brainy thief, and at least three-quarters sonofabitch. Lou had started his life of crime early, as a cat burglar — he stole cats — then graduated from reformatories to petty larceny and muggings, and finally gambling, the narcotics racket, and extortion. He had been sent to stir about five years back, and as far as I knew was still in San Quentin. The rest of his gang, including Mickey M., had scattered, and there'd been no official record of their movements since then. The police records did jog my memory about the other men chummy with Lou and Mickey M. in those days. I remembered Anthony Cini, known as Ants; the other three had been heavies named Blount, Fisheye, and Sneezer.

  I pushed all that out of my head and picked up the phone to call a man named Ralph Merle, formerly a CPA and now an attorney who had dug up technical info and dope from official records for me half a dozen times in the past. I filled him in, told him I wanted everything he could get on Brea Island, its history and record of ownership, and all the info he could dig up about Handi-Foods, Inc., or whatever the factory was on the island. Ralph told me he'd get whatever he could by seven tonight, and keep on the job tomorrow if I needed more.

  The chimes bonged and Jim Paradise was at the door. We climbed into my Cad and took off for Newport Beach.

  Brea Island was forty miles off the coast, but about fifty miles in a straight line from the harbor at Newport, and Jim pushed his speedy twin-screw Matthews all the way. A little after one p.m. Jim pointed and said, "There it is, Shell. Brea. Maybe, in time, Paradise Island."

  It had been a pleasant cruise to this point. For the first hour and more we'd been able to look back at the smoky pall of thin slop hanging over the coast, and free of smog for the first time in months our lungs must have been bewildered. Out here the world was fresh and new. The air was crisp, it was a bright sunny afternoon, and the horizon was a sharp, clean line. No haze obstructed our view of Brea Island, rising well out of the sea, four or five miles distant.

  We'd been sprawled on the forward deck, the cruiser on automatic pilot, and now Jim went up on the flying bridge and took over the controls himself. He swung to port, steering south, away from the inhabited end of the island, not purposely to avoid being seen coming ashore — probably the boat had already been noticed — but to head for an inlet leading to a small calm bay where a crude dock had been built. In another half hour we were tying up at the dock.

  There wasn't much on the island. Most of the land was covered with a profusion of low gray-green bushes, and some deep green shrubs bearing clusters of small pink flowers were scattered among angular rocks and low mounds and hills of earth. Jim and I walked around for half an hour or so while he enthusiastically pointed out spots where a hotel could be built, a small beach, the area where he imagined a nine-hole golf course.

  Now, though, there was only one structure on this part of the island, a small shack like an old-west cowboy's bunkhouse, maybe fifteen feet wide and twice that in length. It sat in the middle of a wide flat area of land which obviously had been leveled with earth-moving equipment; the soil was loose and rich-looking, darker than the drier, undisturbed ground around it.

  "Looks like good land," Jim said, "once it's worked and planted. Bring in a little topsoil and fertilizer, and plant some tropicals, a few palms, some ground cover, and you wouldn't recognize the place. That's what Aaron was going to do here, only . . . he never got to finish."

  This seemed like a peculiar place to plant palms and tropicals, I thought. The island was only two or three square miles in area, I guessed, and this spot was a long way from the areas Jim had designated for the projected hotel, golf course, and so on, which were close to the sea.

  I mentioned that to Jim and he said, "This wasn't to be permanent, Shell, just a sort of testing ground. We intended to bring in a lot of plants and palms and try them out, see if they'd grow well. Aaron thought we might even manage to transplant some coconut palms, the kind that're all over Hawaii. Experts claim they won't grow on the California coast, but we thought they might do O.K. here. If they did, we figured we'd put in a hundred or so near the hotel and along the beach. Make it a real — " he smiled, " — Paradise Island."

  It was clear that developing this island some day was the real McCoy for Jim, the big dream — but I wondered if it had meant the same thing to Aaron. Jim trusted Aaron's motives a lot more than I did. Of course, Aaron hadn't been my brother. And because of that, knowing his background, I couldn't help wondering, just a little, if Aaron might have been planning some new kind of complicated con game. Maybe I was being unduly cynical and unjust; but I had known a hell of a lot more con men than Jim had, and not one of them had any more conscience than you could stuff in your ear.

  "The building looks like a bunkhouse," I said.

  "That's what it is." Jim walked toward it, saying, "I told you Aaron spent a lot of time out here, had a few men working with him for a while. They'd stay here several days in a row — had to, or they'd have spent all their time cruising back and forth from the mainland — so they built a place to sleep and cook."

  It made sense, but I hadn't seen signs of any work elsewhere on this southern half of the island, and this area — not even planted yet — didn't seem like a very dynamic accomplishment. So I said, "Is that all they got done? Just building a bunkhouse and clearing off the land here?"

  Jim gave me an odd look, frowning slightly, "For one thing they surveyed the whole damned island. That had to be done before we could decide on the best spots for a hotel and the rest of it, know where heavy rains would run off. . . . Why?"

  "Just full of sappy questions," I said. Maybe I was just getting sour. In my business that's an occupational hazard — which I usually try to avoid. So I dropped the sappy questions and tried to look on the bright side of everything.

  Jim led the way into the bunkhouse and we looked around. There wasn't much to see. It was a small, almost square room, with a couple of tables and a few wooden chairs, an iron woodburning stove, and along one wall a row of six bunks covered with dirty, greasy, oil-stained sheets and blankets. The whole place was about t
he filthiest dump I'd ever seen.

  "Tidy, weren't they?" I said to Jim.

  He grinned, apparently having gotten over his slight irritation. "No showers for tidiness. For that matter, no water on this part of the island, except the ocean. Let's hope they brought along lots of ice-blue Secret."

  "They should have sprayed the joint with it." Something was puzzling me. I looked around. And then I got more puzzled. "Jim," I said, "doesn't this place seem a little small to you?"

  "Well, they didn't need much room, Shell — "

  "That's not what I mean. From the outside I thought this shack was maybe twice as long as wide. But it isn't; the room's nearly square."

  Jim craned his head around. "Does seem peculiar, now you mention it."

  I glanced at my watch. It was two-forty in the afternoon. "I'd better get over to that food factory," I said. "Or whatever it is."

  "Want me to go along?"

  "I'd just as soon we weren't both there at the same time — until I know more about it." I paused. "By the way, have you still got that .38?"

  He nodded, patting his hip pocket, and said, "I'll meet you here, then. O.K.?"

  I told him that was fine, and stepped out of the bunk-house.

  The land sloped upward to a hill several hundred yards away that blocked my view of the north end of the island, but I headed in that direction, feeling good, enjoying the bright sun and air that had real oxygen in it. On top of the gently rolling hill were two huge wooden tanks, which I presumed were reservoirs Jim had mentioned, holding rain water and water pumped from the wells which had been drilled somewhere around here, gravity feed supplying the factory.

  When I reached the hill's crest I could see below me several cultivated acres, green with low plants, and near them a long wooden building, apparently a shelter for some of the workers, a place for them to rest and sleep. Beyond all that, at the sea's edge, was the factory itself. The sight of it surprised me.

  I guess I'd expected to see something like the crude bunkhouse I'd just left, but this was a huge flat building covering a good acre or more, freshly painted, a double row of clean glass windows facing the sea and mainland, the direction from which Jim and I had come. Plumes of steam issued from two vents at the far end of the building, and I could hear some kind of machinery clanking.

  Four men stood near an open door in the building's front, all of them looking in my direction. When I reached them they simply stared at me silently, faces blank. They were pretty blank faces to begin with, and they certainly had no glad expressions of welcome on them now. All four men were dressed in gray-striped white coveralls and wore cloth-billed white caps on their heads.

  "Hello, gentlemen," I said. "The boss around?"

  "The who?" The man who'd spoken was a tall thin beanpole with bloodshot eyes and a scraggly mustache.

  "The boss, the manager. Or owner — whoever's in charge of this . . ." I looked over the door at a sign, "Handi-Foods, Incorporated," and beneath the name a trademark picture of crossed spoons on a triangular white background.

  The beanpole said, "What do you want with him?"

  Something in the way he said it scraped me a little. "That's what I hope to tell him," I said.

  He scratched his scraggly mustache, shrugged narrow shoulders, and said, "Come on in."

  He ushered me into a roomy, pleasantly furnished office. It was empty, but my escort went out through another door and left me alone. I glanced around. There was a leather couch against one wall, opposite the door a wide brown desk with a padded leather swivel chair behind it. On the desk was a triangular name plate bearing the name, "Louis H. Grecian," and several colored brochures.

  I picked up one of the brochures. It was advertising copy, and with a growing feeling of revulsion I noted that it sang the virtues of a food for infants with a brand name ghastly to contemplate: "Da Da Baby Foods." It was actually named "Da Da," and there were several varieties — strained spinach, mashed okra, green-bean, mush, various fruity concoctions. They all seemed pretty fruity to me, and for a brief moment I contemplated the advertising mind, imagined a dozen grown men sitting around a conference table, listening intently while one of them said, "Da Da. Da Da? Da Da?" But I contemplated the inspiring picture for only one brief moment, because I heard somebody behind me and turned around.

  Just about filling the doorway was a wide, slope-shouldered character with hair peeping from the open neck of his shirt, gobs of hair on his head, hair on the back of his hands. He even had hirsute ears and plenty of hair in his nostrils. He was a very hairy fellow, this Louis H. Grecian.

  I should have guessed, I suppose, when I saw the name plate on his desk. "Well," I said, "if it isn't Lou the Greek."

  "What in the crud are you doing here?" he said, and he seemed truly amazed. Lou talked like that; he had a mind like an outhouse and a mouth like a spittoon. The criminal, the individual immersed in crime and violence, often speaks in language filled with foul imagery, its emphasis on the sexual and excretory functions. Lou was no exception. About every fourth word was unmentionable, and therefore need not be mentioned.

  "I was about to ask you that, Lou," I said.

  He repeated his question, shaking his head back and forth as if there were something in it that rattled.

  I was a bit rattled myself, so I said, "Well, I'd like to look over your Da . . . uh, your baby-food factory, Lou."

  He said several unmentionables, the gist of them being that I could look over his factory when the devil strummed a harp. Clearly he was not glad to see me.

  The last time he'd seen me Lou had been handcuffed to a policeman, just before starting the scenic route to San Francisco, San Rafael, and then San Quentin, where the scenic route ended. I hadn't personally stuck him, but I'd been indirectly involved in the calamity which befell him. I had gotten the goods on a small-time pusher who had been selling marijuana to high school kids and heroin to the graduates. To the kids, that is, who graduated from joints to the hard stuff.

  There it ended for me, but the police Narcotics Division pulled several items of info from the small-time pusher, items which included the intelligence that he'd been getting his decks of H from Lou the Greek. So, in due time, Lou had been put away in the slough. He blamed me, at least in part, for his misfortune. Of course, he blamed everybody — police, "square" citizens, society, everybody — but I was included. I knew he'd been called Greasy Louey as a kid, and later became Lou the Greek; but, oddly enough, until now I hadn't known his real name was Louis H. Grecian.

  "I didn't know you'd been sprung, Lou," I said. "Are you still pushing junk?"

  It just popped out, and all of a sudden I wished it would pop back in. Lou's face became suffused with what appeared to be very sour blood, and he jammed his teeth together, and pulled rubbery lips apart until muscles bulged unpleasantly in his cheeks, and hairs wiggled all over him. But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was what started going on in my head when I said "pushing junk," and I got a very chill and queasy sensation, as if somebody had dipped my spine in cold cooking fat. Suddenly all I wanted was to be out of here and far away. There was a chance I could manage it, too; a fat chance.

  My fat mouth and I were not now in the teeming metropolis, not in Los Angeles or Hollywood. We were stuck on an isolated island. Moreover, it seemed extremely likely that it had been Louis H. Grecian who sent his old-time associate, Mickey M., to call on Jim Paradise last night . . . and Jim, too, was stuck on this island with me.

  As if that wasn't enough, several other unpleasant things were also going on in my head, but even with all that mental activity there was a separate little piece of my brain working, telling me what was going to happen next.

  And what was going to happen next was this: One of these baby-food manufacturers was going to kill me.

  Chapter Nine

  Lou the greek almost seemed to grow larger, standing there in the doorway, his face reddening and veins throbbing on his forehead.

  He was big enough to be
gin with, but looked larger than he really was, perhaps because of the hair sticking out all over him. He was five-ten and 180 pounds, with long arms, and long thin hands and fingers. His voice was like Death's rattle, and he had coarse features, a broken, flattened-out nose, and skin like the leather of an old catcher's mitt, and it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that he had six toes on each foot. He was a hard-boiled customer, no doubt about it.

  He said, "Why you blank, blank, unmentionable, jerky gahdamn blank," and I got ready to slam him one on the mouth. But then, surprisingly, Lou started calming down.

  It was an obvious struggle, but after a few seconds of silence he said, "This ain't gettin' us nowhere." He snorted air out his nose. "You always did give me pains where I never even heard of pains bein' before, Scott. You're like all the rest of the law, ride a guy forever just because he took a fall once." He snorted again. "I'm legit now. You can see I'm legit now."

  "Uh-huh. This is about as legitimate as you can get, isn't it, Lou? Frankly, I didn't expect to see you here. I merely dropped in to see the Handi-Foods manager, whoever he might be."

  "The boys — some of my workmen — seen the boat. You come out alone, huh?"

  It was as subtle as getting kicked by a horse. "No," I said, "not alone. But there's nobody here but us Marines." I smiled, hoping he thought I meant an entire division. "And the boat," I added pleasantly. "You know, with engines, and two-way radio, and life preservers and such. And the two-way radio," I said again, in case he'd missed it the first time, "which is a sort of life preserver."

  "Yeah." He paused. "Well, what'd you want to talk to anybody here for?"

  I said, "You've heard about the possibility that the south half of the island will be developed?"

  He nodded.

  "I'm interested in the development," I went on. "Came out to take a look at the site. As long as I'm here I figured I'd check and make sure there weren't any objections from the Handi-Foods people — from you people, that is."