Farther down on the page were the names of cities, followed by figures in the same manner: “Hollywood—5000,” “Frisco—2000,” “Philly—3000,” “Chi—3000,” “Dallas—4000,” “NYC—4000” “Miami—2000.” The total of “23,000” was near the lower right of the sheet with “1,150,000” immediately underneath it. At the very bottom of the page, heavily printed, was: “Corona ... 50,000.” That was all of it.
When I looked up, Sam said, “According to Lawrance and this Mamzel woman—Lita Korrel?”
“Yeah. They say the names, besides Lawrance's and the city names, must be Horatio Adair, Bill Adams of the advertising agency, Auguste Felicca, sculptor, and Art Gedder, photographer—all of them working on the Mamzel's publicity.”
Sam pulled a big wooden match from his pocket and started to scratch it on the underside of his desk when his phone rang. He grunted into it, said, “Uh-huh. O.K., then. That's the way it looked. Scott's here, by the way—Shell Scott. Uh-huh. He'll want to take a look at her.” He hung up and said to me, “Morgue figures it the same way—she was killed last night, maybe six, seven P.M. It must have been about mealtime; her stomach was nearly empty. Besides being choked to death she had a slight concussion. You can look her over if you want to; the post mortem exam's finished.”
He scratched the match beneath his desk, put the flame against the end of his cigar and drew on it. A cloud like burning poison ivy drifted across the desk at me.
I coughed. I pressed a hand over my eyes. “Sam. I can't see. Where are you, Sam? Somebody lead me out of —”
“I'll lead you out of here with my foot,” he growled. “What are you going to do on this? It would be a shame if you wasted your valuable time doing routine things the Los Angeles Police Department is also doing.”
I grinned at him. “Well, since your major clue is that cuff link, I shall look for the man wearing the other one. It seems likely that he buried the woman, and therefore is the guilty party. In other words, I am going to go out in the streets of Los Angeles, and search for the Missing Link.”
He shook his head. “It had to happen,” he said wearily. “Some day it had to happen. Shell Scott Seeks Missing Link. What a detective. What a headline. What a mess. Get out of here and let a cop do some work.”
I walked to the door and out, but as I glanced back into the office I caught Sam grinning at nothing and shaking his head. Every once in a while his gruff, hard exterior slipped a little, and gave a glimpse of the very nice, pleasant guy underneath.
I didn't spend much time in the morgue. I never do. It is not the kind of place you want to stay in while time ticks along. Emil, the morgue attendant, has the look of a man more at home in yesterday than now, but he's polite, efficient, quiet—if a bit distant. Emil, I have often thought, seems always to be listening to sounds or words that the rest of us are unable to hear.
This day he greeted me pleasantly as usual and, after I'd told him I wanted a look at the Avilla “deceased”—I've never heard Emil use the word “dead” or “corpse”—he led me through the morgue to one of the long tables set on rollers. The body bulged beneath the rose-colored spread over it, but the soles of bare feet were visible at this end of the table, a tag tied to the large toe of the right foot. They really do tie identification tags to deceaseds’ toes. I stood at one side of the table while Emil carefully lowered the cloth from her face and shoulders.
She had a hard look. Even in mottled death that face looked hard, uncompromising, coarse. It was a no-quarter, thumbs-down face. There was a chance that she had, even so, been reasonably attractive when alive, but it was difficult to be sure; when you choke somebody to death you remove most of the prettiness from their features. They had done their best here in the morgue, but Zoe Avilla was a thoroughly unpleasant sight. I nodded at Emil and he covered her up again. I said, “Remember any of the no longer vital statistics, Emil?”
He nodded gently, not looking at me. He seemed to be listening to that inaudible music. Or maybe it was conversation. Or perhaps it was a hair tickling the inside of his ear. But he said, “Five feet one, weighed a hundred and two, about forty years old, brown hair and eyes, appendectomy scar. She was small, and wasn't a heavy woman, but there was some fat on her. Too much easy livin’ and not enough work.”
Some people can quote stock market listings, some memorize batting averages; Emil made a study of the deceased. His work was his hobby. He pursed his lips, turning his head a little to one side as if to hear better whatever it was he was listening to, then put his final stamp of disapproval on Zoe Avilla. “Her clothes was expensive, but cheap-lookin'.”
It's funny when you stop to think about it—as Emil, obviously, often did—but when an unidentified corpse lands in the morgue, the real person is long gone to somewhere or other, and all that's left for the Emils and police and private eyes and others to draw conclusions from is the garbage left behind, the worm food, the soil conditioner. The gift is gone, so we study the package, eye the wrappings. Emil considered clothing very important. And if he disapproved of Zoe's “expensive but cheap-lookin'” clothes, then that probably told me quite a bit about Zoe.
I got a morgue photo of Zoe from Emil, thanked him and left. As I went out, he was leaning back against the wall and looking at the floor. He still seemed to be listening. It gave me a rather eerie feeling for just a moment, there. But then I was outside in the sunshine again.
In the Cad once more, I aimed it down the Freeway and caught the Santa Ana turnoff. About four miles ahead, according to Sam, was the spot where Zoe's body had been found. I was just tooling along, not thinking of anything in particular, and then the thought came: Somebody's tailing me. I didn't know where it had come from or why. Maybe I'd been listening, like Emil, and picked up something below the fringes of consciousness. It wasn't the blue Imperial, either. There wasn't a car like it anywhere in sight.
The Freeways are almost always loaded with traffic, and this day was no exception. Cars swung in and out from one lane to another, speeded up and slowed down behind me. I pulled over into the right lane and slowed abruptly. Nothing much happened. Several cars passed me, naturally—but anybody smart enough to tail me this far without getting caught at it would be smart enough to know it's almost as easy to tail another car from in front as from behind. Uneasiness grew in me. Twice in one morning was too much. I rolled on down the Freeway, and I could feel Trouble rolling along beside me.
At Emeraud Street I turned right. When I reached the empty stretch Sam had told me about, half a mile further down Emeraud, there were three cars behind me. I pulled off the road. On my right were twenty or thirty acres of land, sparsely covered with shrubs and yellowed grass. Out there was the shallow grave in which Zoe Avilla had been found.
I got out on the left side of my car, leaned back against the door and watched the cars go by. My arms were folded across my chest with my right hand underneath my coat and around the checked butt of the .38 Colt Special nestled there in its clamshell holster.
The first car was a new Ford. A middle aged man drove it, and he glanced at me, then away. The second car was an old green Plymouth; it looked as if a family was inside it headed for an outing—three kids, a man and woman. The last car was a year-old cream-and-gray Buick with white sidewall tires. I saw three men in it, and all three, oddly enough, happened to be looking to their left, their faces turned away from me, as they passed the spot where I stood.
I turned away from the road and walked around my Cad, and on another fifty yards. The grave was easy to find. Earlier this morning the police had been here, completed their work and gone. Probably a team of officers was staked out nearby, but I couldn't see any sign of them. Which was natural. They would undoubtedly have been informed that I was on my way here, so they wouldn't race over and put the arm on me. The grave was just a scooped-out spot in the earth, maybe two feet deep and wide, and six feet long.
I looked around. This was a sparsely settled area, but from where I stood I could see three houses,
which meant that the occupants of those three houses could see me. None of which was important—except that it meant Zoe Avilla's body had almost surely been buried hurriedly last night.
That was about all that the burial scene could tell me. Before long the winds and rain would erase all marks of the grave and there would be no visible sign that a brutally murdered woman had been dumped here in darkness. I shrugged, and walked to my car.
On the way back to Mamzel's there was no sign of a cream-and-gray Buick with white side-wall tires, no blue Imperial, no further evidence that anybody was following me. But still I couldn't shake the feeling. It was a feeling intermingled with the sight of Emil, his head cocked to one side, listening; with the sight of a shallow, scooped-out grave; and with the thought of cold winds sighing past a frozen cheek in the dead of night.
CHAPTER FOUR
I was just about to work myself into a mood in which I would squeak back at mice, but then Mamzel's came into sight, and I was saved. Mamzel's was the kind of place that built just one mood in a man, and it was a mood which had nothing to do with cold winds sighing, but was more like hot breath sizzling your earlobes.
I parked and went inside, and there was Didi.
“Hi!” she cried brightly.
“Lady, you're sure ornamental,” I said. “But what can you do?”
“Ha, watch this.” She poised her fingers over the keys of the typewriter before her, turned her head toward me and squeezed her eyes shut. “Dictate something,” she said.
“O.K.,” I said, “Take a murder, darling.”
She giggled, and I continued, “Dear Sir or Madam. Would you be interested in the invention of the century? It's yours for only pennies a day. Send fourteen hundred pennies every day for eight months to Shell Scott, the Hamilton Building, Los Angeles.” I went on with a paragraph of nonsense, and stopped.
Didi's fingers were flying over the keys and her eyes were still squeezed shut, and she looked cute as the dickens. She stopped, opened her eyes and blinked them at me, and heaved a big sigh. “There,” she said with finality, “ain't I talented?”
I walked across the room and looked over her shoulder at the sheet of white paper in the machine. On it she had typed, “dytyteg gkgjghf dhdhddhttt,” and things like that several times over.
She pouted. “You peeked.”
“Yep. We're both frauds. I didn't invent anything, either.” I patted her on the head and went on out of the reception room and down the hall to Lawrance's office.
When I entered he said, “Oh, hello again, Scott. What'd you find out? Nothing's going to stop the kickoff tomorrow, is it? If anything fouled —”
“Don't get panicky. The police have no plans to lock you all up—in fact, they know little more than we do.”
“What was all that business about our names on a list of some kind?”
I took the Ozalid copy from my coat pocket. “This is what they found. By the way, where are the Mamzel's offices located?”
“There's seven now—here in Hollywood, plus New York, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Dallas. Monday we open in New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Detroit. Why?”
“None in Corona?”
He shook his head. “Hardly. The town's far too small.”
“No connections there at all?”
“None. Why?”
I gave him the sheet of paper. “There at the bottom of the page, Lawrance. It says Corona. Ring any bells?”
He looked the sheet over, then slowly shook his head. “Uh-uh. That's just a little burg over near Riverside.” He squinted at the sheet, frowning. “What the devil would that woman be doing with this? What's it mean?”
“You tell me.”
He looked at the paper for quite a while longer, then glanced up. “No, you tell me, Scott.” He flashed his crooked teeth in a grin. “That's what you're hired for—among other things. Well ... she's listed the names of all the cities where offices are now. And most of the people working on publicity. Even me.”
He repeated the information Samson had given me, that the Gedder, Horatio, Ad, and Felicca named were respectively the photographer, fashion designer, advertising agency head, and sculptor, who had been, over the last few months, preparing Mamzel's publicity campaign. He gave me thumbnail descriptions of the men and the jobs they were doing. Then Lawrance scribbled on a paper and handed it to me.
“There're the addresses of these people. Talk to them soon as you can. It's likely the police have already hit them, but you might pick up something.” He waved the Ozalid copy. “You need this?”
“I'd better keep it.” I took it from him and put it back into my coat pocket. “I'll check with these people then call on Toby.”
“Fine,” he said. “By the way, I just got a call from the Ad Agency, the agency handling our account. Police were there, and one of the gals remembered something out of the ordinary. Maybe it ties in.”
“What was it?”
“Somebody from the Ad Agency phoned all of the Mamzel's offices except this one—New York, Florida and so on—ran up a hell of a bill, and asked a lot of questions that the agency wouldn't have any special interest in. I've just been checking with the other offices by phone.”
“Questions about Mamzel's?”
“That's right. Gross business, expenses, that kind of thing.”
“Who did the phoning?”
“A woman who said her name was Fern Gladd. There is a Fern Gladd working at the agency, but she says she didn't make any such calls.”
“I'll check it.”
I started out and he said, “You meet the Mamzel gals yet?”
“No.”
“You should. You're working for them, you know. All ten of them are Mamzel's stockholders, and all ten are gorgeous. And, of course, there's Lita.”
“I'm getting pretty curious about her. Where is she now?”
His phone rang and he grabbed it automatically, listened a moment and said, “O.K., put him on.” Then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said to me, “Lita's probably in the Contouring Room.”
“The what?”
“Contouring Room—a big exercise room where the gals jump up and down and so forth. On your left as you come down the hall.”
I remembered the door I had passed midway in the hall, and the sounds of soft movement and conversation rustling beyond it. Lawrance went on, “They got everything in there except a steam roller to mash them with. I was in there once, but no more—once is all I could take. These arteries of mine can stand only so much. All ten of the Mamzel gals are in there most of the time, working with clients. Lita, too, usually. And all the clients rolling around.” He shook his head rapidly and his eyes got a sort of glazed appearance.
Lawrance listened a moment and then spoke into the phone's mouthpiece. There was a noise behind me and I looked around. As I turned toward the door it opened all the way and a woman came in. She saw me and stopped, looked me over quickly, and smiled.
I looked her over, too, but not quickly. I would never be able to look her over quickly. She caught your eyes, grabbed them and hung on. Nobody had to tell me who she was.
This one was Mamzel.
This one was Lita Korrel.
She was a big shock of a woman, beautiful and dark, with large, soft, luminous eyes, with dark, liquid, heavy-lidded eyes, so big and dark that they were like bruises in her face. With lips so red and teeth so white they looked like blood splashed on bone. With hair the color of chestnuts in wine, or mahogany polished with umber, or the deepest brown of autumn's softest leaves.
And the body ... You don't describe a body like that, you look at it, you wonder at it, you marvel at it.
I looked, friend. I stared. And while I stared, things started happening to my glands that endocrinologists won't even hear about for years.
CHAPTER FIVE
Her breasts were so full and firm and abundant that each of them might have been both of them, and they were made even more astounding by the tuc
ked-in abdomen and slenderness of waist that curved almost shockingly into full, rounded hips and shapely, firm-fleshed thighs. She was Eve, Circe, Delilah, Salome—Mamzel, a woman of Now designed for Tomorrow, and she was wearing a white leotard.
A leotard is a thin garment made usually of cotton—thin cotton—which covers the female torso in devil-may-care fashion. A leotard leaves the neck bare, and the shoulders and arms bare, and the thighs and legs bare, and little to the imagination, and often does even more for the parts it covers than the parts it bares. And Lita looked like the woman leotards had been designed for. More than that—she looked like the women that men had been designed for.
She said to me, in a soft, whispering voice that sounded like Eve whispering hungrily to Adam, “You must be Shell Scott.”
“Yes, I am. And you must be Mamzel.”
“Yes, I'm Miss Korrel—please call me Lita. I'll call you Shell. All right?”
“All right.”
Lawrance hung up the phone and, a little late, said, “Hi, Lita. This is Shell Scott—Oh, you've met, eh?”
We told him we had and he said to Lita, “Why don't you show him around, honey? He'd better know some of the operation, anyway.”
She nodded, said, “Come on, Shell,” and led the way out of the office. I shut the door behind me and looked at her as she headed down the hallway. Lita held herself as straight as all those curves could get, but her walk was the kind of fluid gyration that might have been dreamed up by a sex-mad scientist. She glanced over her shoulder at me, then waited for me to catch up with her.
“So you're the detective?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Did Lawrance tell you everything you need to know about the trouble we're in?”
“Enough, I think.” I quickly went over the main points of our conversation, the info about Zoe Avilla and Roy Toby. She didn't have much to add, except that everybody was worried, and she was depending on me to help.
Take a Murder, Darling (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 3