Take a Murder, Darling (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  He went on to describe the item further, and it began to sound like the ultimate in girdles: It held the wearer in, down, out, and up—like being trapped inside there. Finally Ad said, “We'll run full pages in Bazaar, Vogue, Glamour, Life, Look, the works. What we want to accomplish today is to get a complete layout ready to show Gibson.”

  He paused, looked at his watch. “All right. Let's go.”

  Immediately somebody said, “Sylphlike ... sylph.” Fern leaned forward and said, “Sylph Control.”

  A third person picked it up, adding the word “perfect” to Sylph Control. Then words, phrases, lines and names came in a rush from both sides of the table. “The way to stares ... can we make that w-e-i-g-h?” ... “Hugs you like a lover” ... “Stop weeping for that willowy look” ... “Hugmetite slims you down ... slims you up and down” ... “Ecstasy marks your spots” ... “Ecstasy marks the pot” ... “Give yourself a boost—all over” ... “You'll want to hug yourself — in your Hugmetite!"...

  As the words flew thick and fast, Ad's charcoal flew over the white paper. He drew a figure or two, added words and phrases, then as the minutes went by he ripped off the top paper, held it in one hand while he transferred some of the phrases to the next sheet, then crumpled the first paper in his hand. He added more phrases, underlined, and lined words out, tore off another sheet, and another.

  I threw in a few phrases this time, too—“We girdle the earthy ... the Hogmetite, a full-size truss for the unruptured ... Chastity Curdle”—but I just wasn't with it.

  The stream of words slowed down for about a minute, then picked up again: “Touches the stars ... stares from the stars” ... “Stare-way to the Stars!” ... “Star-way to the Stares!” ... “Hugmetite—it doesn't take your breath away!” ... “Stop counting calories!” ... and so it went, on and on.

  Finally Ad turned around and held his hands over his head. “That does it. Good enough.” The group quieted down. “I think we've got it,” Ad said. “That's enough for today, anyway. We'll fix this up, but I think it will do for Gibson as is.” He indicated the rough layout.

  It was rough. But it was good. It would be improved, there was no doubt, especially when the tape recording of this session was checked; and even rough as it was now, I could imagine how compelling and eye-catching it would be when the Ad Agency's art department got through with it.

  Ad had drawn with clean simple lines the figure of a slim, long-legged, shapely woman wearing a girdle—a Hugmetite, that is—and even the drawing looked good. Ad had chosen only a few of the words and phrases, blending them with the ease of an expert. The copy read:

  “For that willowy look that takes his breath away instead of yours, for perfect sylph-control, climb a Stare-Way to Romance ... Adventure ... Ecstasy—in your new Hugmetite Foundation!”

  I had to admit it: The copy was going to sell a lot of girdles.

  I felt sick.

  After a few more words, the brainstormers were dismissed. A minute later, Ad, Fern, and I were alone in the big room, seated at the end of the table.

  Ad said, “Well, that's out of the way. You're here to find out what we know about this Zoe Avilla, huh?” I nodded, and he kept right on talking. No nonsense about this boy. He didn't even wait for me to finish nodding.

  “She came up here posing as a writer,” Ad told me. “Wanted to get background for a book on advertising, she said. Well, I showed her around a while, then turned her over to Fern.”

  “Did she say she was Zoe Avilla?”

  He shook his head. “Told us she was Gail Manners.”

  “What sort of things did she want to know, Mr. Adams?”

  “Ad,” he said abruptly. “The questions seemed sensible enough. The kind of things I'd assume a writer would be interested in. How we handle accounts, promotional techniques, chain of command, that sort of thing.”

  “Uh-huh. I suppose she asked quite a bit about your current accounts.”

  “Yeah. Including Mamzel's. That was our number-one account then—still is, for that matter. It didn't seem odd at the time, her asking so much about Mamzel's. But looking back—with her dead, and all—I guess she was more than normally curious.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “No. Maybe Fern can fill you in a little more.”

  I turned to the blonde. “When we met, we were talking about the calls this gal made to the Mamzel's offices. How did you find out about that?”

  “The next day I got a call from the Mamzel's office in Miami. A girl in that office asked for me—that is for Fern Gladd—and said she had the rest of the information that I had asked for. I hadn't made any such call, and finally figured out that the little woman must have done it, using my name. I didn't think much about it then. But when the police were here this morning they showed us the woman's photograph—and of course it was a picture of the woman who'd used my office and said she was a writer. So that made me remember the funny Miami phone call. Then I checked with our switchboard here and they had records for calls made also to all five of the other cities where Mamzel's offices are, besides Miami—and that's when I called Mr. Lawrance.”

  “You know what info Miami dug up for her?”

  Fern shook her head. “I don't remember now.”

  “Profits in Miami, maybe?”

  Fern blinked. “Why, now I remember. It was the gross of that Miami office for the previous week.”

  Neither Fern nor Ad had ever seen or heard of the woman before she'd come to the Agency, they said. And a check of the staff which they'd earlier made for the police indicated that the same was true of all the other employees. After another minute, during which Ad looked at his watch three times, I stood up. I thanked both of them for their help, and also thanked Ad for the brainstorming demonstration of what it is that makes the commercial world go round and round.

  It was all sort of summed up for me by the last question I asked him. He had in his hand the sheet of paper on which he'd drawn the rough layout of the Hugmetite advertisement, and indicating it I said, “That was an impressive demonstration. And if you want a layman's opinion, I'd say that's going to be a very effective hunk of copy.”

  He grinned. “Thanks. Matter of fact, I agree. I do think we got a good page out of that session. Good pulling power.”

  “There's one thing I'm curious about, though.” I said.

  “What's that?”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Huh?” He looked puzzled. “Believe what?”

  I indicated the rough layout again. “Do you believe what the copy says? Do you believe it's true?”

  “True?” He was really puzzled. “What's that got to do with it?”

  I left him in the big room, standing next to the long table surrounded by the super-modern chairs, with a perplexed and annoyed look on his face.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the car I sat thinking about the day's events in general, and finally my thoughts turned again to that earlier session with Roy Toby. His attempt to muscle in on Mamzel's might be just that and nothing more, the old power grab, a typical hoodlum operation. But there was a chance he had reasons for the muscle-in that I didn't know about. Apparently he'd had Ark and Flavin and Lemmy on my tail ever since the Randolph broadcast on which he'd been so vigorously panned. But it hadn't been until Ark learned I was investigating the death of Zoe Avilla that Toby had told them to kill me.

  I thought about that for a while, fished my notebook out of my coat pocket, and checked the info I'd jotted down about Zoe Avilla. I meant to visit the place where she'd been living while alive, and something about the address, 1346 Elm Street, was familiar. I hunted through my memory for a minute, and then the reason hit me. Elm Street was one of the streets Roy Toby had visited on that day when I'd followed him around town and then out among the rabbits. I started the car.

  Long before I reached the house, I was sure it was the one I'd been thinking of. I parked across the street. It was a good-sized pink stucco job, green lawn in front and
trimmed hedges at each side of the lawn. When I'd tailed Toby, he'd gone inside the house and remained for an hour, then left to go shoot at rabbits. I hadn't checked on who lived there because it hadn't seemed important at the time. Now, though, it was becoming more important—and more interesting.

  A uniformed mailman walked down the street, leather bag slung over his shoulder. He left several letters at the house next door, then walked back to the sidewalk, down to 1346, and up the steps to the door. As he deposited a letter in the box and walked back to the sidewalk again, I wondered about the number of extra miles a postman must travel in twenty years just to avoid tramping on lawns. He went on down to the corner and around it, out of sight, while I wondered about what this new development might mean, and how Toby had happened to be at this address so soon before Zoe Avilla's death. He had sworn to me, quite convincingly, that he didn't even know anybody named Zoe Avilla.

  I smoked a cigarette while I thought about that. I knew there was supposed to be an officer inside the house, and I decided to go over and check with him, and at the same time look over the place where the dead woman had lived. Right then I saw the postman coming around again. It seemed odd, but I watched him only casually.

  Then I noted that it wasn't the same postman after all. This guy was much taller. He was broad shouldered, and from what I could see of him, very good-looking. There are, of course, some tall, dark, broad shouldered and good looking postmen; but somehow this boy just didn't seem the type. And the appearance of a second postman on the block was more than passing strange. There was something familiar about him, too.

  I got out of the car and headed across the street as the postman turned in at 1346 and walked up to the mailbox. He held a white envelope in his hand and I saw him put it into the box, but then his body hid the box from my view. He turned around and walked back toward the street.

  He glanced at me as we passed, almost brushing each other, and I nodded at him. He was a very good looking guy, but he had rather hard features, and the kind of expression you might find on a professional gambler, or a union boss's bodyguard. He didn't look like a man who smiled much.

  He sure didn't smile at me. After that one quick glance, with which he seemed to catalogue everything about my appearance, he looked away from me and continued briskly to the sidewalk. I was getting puzzled and the alarm bells were starting to ring—but only starting to. There was something odd about that boy, and I knew it, but what it was just didn't penetrate.

  I stood at the door of 1346 Elm and watched the postman walk rapidly on down Elm Street, turn at the corner and go out of sight. He didn't stop at another house in the block. Come to think of it, I hadn't seen him stop at any houses before this one. The only address he'd stopped at, apparently, was 1346.

  Then it hit me.

  That was the guy who'd been tailing me in the blue Imperial.

  I swung toward the mailbox, banged it open and took out the letter in there. It had been addressed on a typewriter to, “Occupant, 1346 Elm Street, Los Angeles, California.” I held it up and looked through it toward the sun. Unless I was going blind, there was nothing inside the envelope except maybe a slip of blank paper.

  I slapped the envelope back into the box and ran to the corner. Halfway up the block was the long blue Chrysler Imperial. My “postman” was running toward it, in one hell of a hurry. He stopped at the car and looked back toward me as I broke into a run after him, then he yanked the door open and started to get in.

  I pulled out my .38 and fired one shot into the air, but it didn't stop the man. It didn't even slow him down. He was inside the Imperial and behind the wheel before I'd taken a half dozen strides, and then he ripped away from the curb. I squinted my eyes in the sun and peered at the back of the car, trying to make out the license number. I got it: HRY076. The Imperial swung right at the corner moving so fast that rubber burned off the squealing tires.

  I spun around and raced back to my Cad, jumped inside and started it, swinging around the corner with my own tires squealing. Five minutes later I quit trying to spot the sleek blue car and raced back to Elm Street.

  At the door of 1346 I rang the bell and banged on the door until it opened and a beefy sergeant stuck his head out. “What's going—oh, Scott. What's with you?”

  The officer was Cantor, a guy I'd known for several years. I said, “The phone in here still connected?” He nodded and I went on, “How about getting D.M.V. to run license HRY076 for registration? It's important.”

  He squinted at me, then swung around and went to a phone in the living room.

  While he put the call through I explained what had just happened outside. “If I'm right, it was damned clever. Whoever the guy was wanted the letter I think he took from the mailbox when he left the blank phony that's in there now. The blank was simply so he'd have an excuse to reach into the mailbox. He could have done it while a dozen people watched him—which he probably was prepared to do. He must have known there'd be an officer or two inside the house. And who would suspect a postman of stealing the mail?”

  Cantor spoke into the phone, then hung up.

  We smoked a cigarette, then the phone rang and Cantor grabbed it. When he hung up this time he had a surprised look on his face. “What do you know?” he said to me. “That plate number is for a new blue Chrysler Imperial registered to Daniel Bryce.”

  “Who?”

  “Dan Bryce. Lives in Beverly Hills part of the time, but usually he's in Vegas. General Services Enterprises.”

  That told me who the guy was. In fact, considering my business and his business it was surprising that we'd never met face to face before, because Dan Bryce was a big man in the crook business.

  I thanked Sergeant Cantor and took off after he gave me Bryce's Beverly Hills address. General Services Enterprises, headed by Dan Bryce, had its headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was also a branch office in Los Angeles. The outfit was a front for several illegitimate enterprises and, I had heard, served primarily as a clearing house for the investment in legitimate businesses of illegitimate money—money from narcotics, extortion, king-size burglaries, and other such capers. Dan Bryce was a Syndicate man; and it was well and widely known that he thoroughly hated Roy Toby, who returned the hate enthusiastically. The more I thought about those facts, and about Zoe Avilla, the more curious about her—and the more puzzled—I got.

  The address Cantor had given me was on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, in a sparsely populated area. It was a long, low ranch type house in what can best be described as California-Modern-Western. It was a combination of adobe, walnut, glass and stone, worth about a hundred thousand dollars, and it looked a little bit like a crashed space ship resting behind a split-rail fence.

  But there was no blue Chrysler Imperial in evidence. I parked in the blacktop driveway, walked to the door and rang the bell. Nothing happened, so I knocked. It seemed obvious that the place was empty, so I started looking for a way to break into Dan Bryce's house. It wasn't difficult. It never is. The luggage compartment of my car is the repository for numerous items of equipment I use in my job, and one of the handier items is a ring of keys and picks which make breaking and entering a relatively simple operation. I had the back door of Bryce's house open two minutes after I started working on it.

  A minute later I knew the house was empty. The place had the look of money—paintings on the walls, thick carpeting, what appeared to be custom-made furniture, low and heavy. I got the impression that somebody had gone through the bedroom in a hurry, grabbing items of clothing almost at random. Which, I thought, was probably what had happened. Bryce knew that I had seen him at Zoe Avilla's house, at the mailbox. No matter what his reasons for it, if he'd taken a letter from that box, he had committed a federal offense—which he knew I knew about. So it seemed very likely that he would by now be on the lam. He had probably raced here, grabbed clothing and items he wanted to take with him, and hit the road.

  In one closet in the bedroom there was a large gap among a
flock of men's suits, as if Bryce had grabbed some from the two or three dozen there. A sports jacket was on the floor and to its right was a small pile of dirty shirts. Something about the top one caught my eye.

  At first I didn't know what it was. Then I got it. I picked the shirt up, looked at the French cuffs. Both of them were soiled, stained and dirty. One of them was open, but in the other there was still the cuff link. It was about an inch square, heavy silver traced with a black design like small lightning flashes.

  I'd done it. I had found the missing link.

  I put the heavy cuff link in my pocket, continued my tour of the house. I could smell smoke. Either that or the faint odor of something burning. There wasn't a single book in the place, which might have meant something. There were plenty of guns, though. They were on one wall of the den, and the smell of smoke was strongest in the den, too.

  It came from something that had recently been burned here. A colorful ceramic ashtray sat on a table at one side of the room. In it were the powdered ashes of what I felt sure, had been the letter Bryce had lifted from Zoe Avilla's mailbox. I guessed that Bryce had come straight here from Elm Street, read the letter here or on the way, then burned it in the ashtray and left in a hurry.

  I looked around the den. Leather couch and chairs, a couple of hunting prints on the walls, several small etchings, a portable bar in the corner, five mounted heads of game—two deer, two bear, and a moose—and the wall of guns. There must have been close to fifty of them—old guns, new ones, pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, antique guns and even a couple pairs of dueling pistols.

  Each fit into what seemed its own place, and all of the places were filled. Daniel Bryce seemed to have a hobby of guns, which was an indication that he brought his work home with him. I took a small automatic off the wall and pulled out the clip; it was loaded. I checked two more guns, a revolver and a rifle, and both of them were loaded, too. I put them all back in their places. Bryce, it seemed, was ready for almost anything except the U.S. Marines. The mounted heads on the wall indicated that Bryce was one of the Mighty Hunters who kill animals for pleasure. Perhaps it is true that the animal has an equal chance, since it is in its own habitat when shot, not in the man's; but I go along with the idea that there would be less stuffed heads on walls if the animals could shoot back. I only shoot people.