Everybody Had A Gun

by Richard Prather

  Anxious as I was to find Iris, what I was doing seemed a bit like springing the trap with your neck in order to spare your foot. But there was always a good chance my logic was loony and my addition addled—so here I was, at Sader's home.

  I parked the Cad off the pavement on Nichols Canyon Road and walked the last half block. I'd called headquarters again and learned that Ozzie was making like a clam except when he was screaming for a lawyer and his "rights." Except for him, my only lead was Iris, and up to now my only lead to Iris was Marty Sader, so I'd then checked the phone book for the exact address of the Pit and also for Sader's home address. His home was a lot closer to where I'd then been, in Hollywood, than was the Pit, which was clear downtown in L.A. I'd decided to try his house first.

  As I walked toward the house there was a tight spot of muscle and nerve around my spine. It had been there all morning, right about where a bullet would be likely to plow into the middle of my back. I wasn't feeling particularly brave.

  Nichols Canyon Road winds up into the hills north of Hollywood, twisting and turning like a tortured snake, and the occasional houses perch on the tops of hills or cling to the side of deep slopes of land that drop suddenly away from underneath them. Sader's place was a hundred yards or more away from any other home, in one of the few spots that had room in front for a big lawn, but on each side of the house the ground sloped downward, leaving the house perched up in the air. It was one of those big, two-story frame jobs built many years before, made entirely of wood, and neither very modern or sturdy. But there was a brand-new coat of white paint over its outside and it stuck up in the air like an explosion. Actually it was a lot wider than it was deep. It spread out into two wings, one on the north, the other on the south, and there must have been twenty rooms inside. It wasn't the kind of place I'd want to own. The roof was flat, a horizontal line cutting harshly across the sky, and the house looked squat and dumpy even though there were two stories. Regularly spaced windows broke the flat front of the house, many of them open, but all curtained.

  The big white house was set back about fifty feet from the road in front, and a curving drive looped around in an arc before it. The lawn was all across the front, and tall hedges were at either side of the lawn. I sure as hell wasn't going to prance up the driveway or across the grass, so I walked to the outside of the nearest hedge and along it toward the house.

  I walked parallel to the thing till, almost at the house itself, I found a carefully cut opening in the green hedge. Before I went through the opening I pulled the .38 out of my shoulder holster and put the gun in my right-hand coat pocket. If Sader were here, this could be a damned unhealthy spot for me.

  I kept my right hand on the revolver, walked up on the wide porch that fronted the house, and rang the bell.

  I waited but nothing happened. I knocked and still nothing happened. I was jumpy anyway, and I started getting nervous. I reached out and twisted the knob on the big door and the door swung inward.

  Well, Scott? What the hell do you do now? I knew what I was going to do; I was going in. And I knew I could be making one gigantic fool of myself if Sader were completely disinterested in me or Iris Gordon. But it didn't figure that way from here, so I shoved open the door and walked inside.

  I was in a little hallway with an old-fashioned coat rack, and doors leading off from the left and right. A flight of rickety-looking wooden stairs led up to the second floor. There wasn't a sound in the house except my knees knocking. I went through the door on my left. In ten minutes I'd gone over the entire lower floor, kitchen, dining room, library, den, and others, even a bathroom, and found nothing but dust. If what I was doing was looking for Iris, I was doing lousy.

  At the foot of the stairs I paused and looked up, wondering if I could trust them to hold my two hundred plus pounds. That's how beat-up the place was. Sader seemed to have a weakness for fire traps. Maybe he was an arsonist at heart. I walked up the stairs, running my hand up the wooden banister until I saw I was picking up a mess of dirt. I hadn't noticed, but I'll bet that bathtub below had a ring in it.

  The stairway ended in a long hall running left and right from the top of the stairs. Twenty feet on my right the hallway ended at a wide window, but the hall extended about sixty feet down to the left and ended in a door that must have been practically at the end of the house. I'd have to be careful going through that one; it might be a trap. Maybe guys like me were supposed to walk through it into nothing but air.

  I still hadn't seen or heard anybody, and I'd got the feeling I should have made the longer trip directly to the Pit. But I was here, so I kept on looking. I checked all the rooms opening off the forward side of the hall—the side toward the front of the house—wondering every time I opened a door if I'd pop in on some fat old bag doing her exercises. Or maybe Marty loading a gun. Nothing. I reached the end of the hall and cracked the door at its end to see if it was a trap. There was more than air there. There was a little room and a short flight of wooden steps going up to the roof. I went up. Hell, I'll try anything. At the top of the steps there was a little hinged door in the ceiling, and I pushed it open and peeked around. This opened onto the roof, but I just glanced around without seeing anything and went back down. If this shaky old pile of timbers were to collapse suddenly, I didn't want to be up that high.

  Up the other side of the hall. Nothing. I'd been through every room in the house and found little except two bedrooms on the second floor, both with unmade beds.

  I'd wound up in the last room, the second bedroom I'd visited. It was obviously a woman's bedroom, and I was staring at the flowered wallpaper, wondering what had ever made me think I was a detective, when I heard the shot.

  I swung my head around toward the back of the house, where the report had come from. There was an open window in the rear wall, and as I took one step toward it there was another shot.

  I reached the window just as another report cracked out, and it dawned on me that the shots were regularly spaced, not fired in haste or erratically. More like timed fire at the Police Academy. I sidled up to the window and peered out and down into the grounds at the rear of the house.

  There was a lot of space behind the house, then a big wooden building like a barn, and beyond that a lot of shrubs and brush and hills and more hills. But forty or fifty feet from the back of the house was one spreading pepper tree, and, in the shade underneath it, a woman was sitting. She appeared to be a middle-aged gal dressed in a riding habit, and comfortably sprawled in a battered and weather-beaten easy chair. She held a little gleaming gun in her right hand, and as I watched her she leveled it at the back of the house down below the window where I was standing, and the little gun went crack.

  What the hell was she doing? Shooting up the house? Four or five slugs in this heap and it would fall down.

  In her left hand she held a glass. She fired one more shot at the back of the house, then put the gun on a little table beside her, tilted the glass to her lips, and glugged away. She dropped the glass on the ground and calmly began reloading the little gun from a box of cartridges on the table.

  I wasn't sure, but there was a good chance I'd found me a queer one. There was a way to find out.

  I hustled down the stairs, out the front of the house, and around to the back where the old coot was. When I got to the back of the house where I could see her, I stopped just as she saw me. She waved the gun at me in a friendly sort of way—if a gun can ever be waved at you in a friendly sort of way—and I jumped a couple inches and said, "Hi!" in a voice that cracked through three octaves.

  She bobbed her head. Finally I decided she didn't intend to shoot me, so I walked up beside her.

  "Hello," I said. "Good afternoon."

  She said, "Good aft-ternoon," in the careful voice people use when they're teetering between the edge of tipsiness and the middle of a good old-fashioned drink. That hadn't been Coca-Cola she'd been drinking. She added, "Who are you?"

  She sat in the old overstuffed chair with t
he gun in her right hand and blinked up at me from her private haze. She wasn't really middle-aged yet. She was about forty trying to look twenty, but it was a cause long lost. It wasn't even a nice try. It was like shearing the snakes off Medusa and leaving the stumps; it made a difference, sure, but it still wasn't pleasant to look at. Her hair was frizzled into a bunch of curls dyed an indigestion brown, and the best curve she had was in her lower plate.

  The riding habit she wore gave an artificial swell to her hips, but it was obviously artificial. Either that or the deep wrinkles where the pants drooped inward meant she was in even worse shape than I'd figured she was. And she'd been riding too long; she smelled like the horse. Hell, she'd been riding longer than that; she looked like the horse.

  I finally answered her question, but I didn't give her my name. I lied glibly, "I'm a friend of Mr. Sader. Is he here?"

  She blinked at me and said flatly, "How would I know? I'm only the louse's wife."

  Well, she was sorry for herself. And so, I'll wager, was Marty. She mumbled a little when she spoke, and I couldn't make up my mind whether she'd said she was "the louse's wife" or "the lousy wife." I didn't ask her.

  Instead I asked, "You're Mrs. Sader, then?"

  "Yes," she said. "I'm. . ."

  Her voice petered out and she looked past me somewhere. I glanced over my shoulder where she was looking, but I couldn't see anything except sky. For no good reason, I shivered.

  "Hello," I said softly. I didn't want to startle her. Maybe she could see things I couldn't.

  She kept on staring bleary-eyed past me. Off into space, I guess.

  "Mrs. Sader? Are you there?"

  She looked at me and blinked.

  "You are Mrs. Sader, aren't you?" I said.

  "Of course I'm Mrs. Sader." Ah, she was back with me again. She went on, "I'm Mrs. Vivian Sader. Who are you?"

  Hell, I could tell this bat; she wouldn't remember. I said, "I'm Shell Scott. Marty here?" We were right back where we'd started.

  "No," she said simply.

  "When do you expect him, Mrs. Sader?"

  "Whenever he feels like it."

  "Well, thank you, ma'am," I said. "I'll be running along now. Uh—you know where I might find him? It's really important that I find him."

  She bent over and picked up the glass from where she'd dropped it on the ground. It had picked up some blades of grass and some dirt, but what's a little dirt? She bent over to the table, and I noticed there was a bottle of Seagram's and a pitcher of water there I hadn't noticed from upstairs. She mixed up a nice little glassful of whisky, water, and mud, pulled at it, then looked back up at me.

  I'd also noticed that on the table was a pile of artillery.

  There were three guns on the table, one of them the biggest revolver I've ever seen. I guess it was a revolver. It looked like one of those cannons used to start boat races, or maybe more like part of a printing press with a hole in the end and a trigger underneath. There's no gun like that made in the States, so it was either a foreign gun or a job from a custom gunsmith, and the bore looked an inch wide. The other two were an ordinary .45 automatic and a .32 revolver. Cartridges for all the guns were on the table, including some for the little chrome-and-pearl .22 revolver she was still holding in her right hand.

  She said, "Where you find him? He tol' me he was going to the club, but he's prob'ly chippying around. He's one louse." She hiccuped. "Who'd you say you were?"

  "Name's Scott, Mrs. Sader. When did Marty leave?"

  "I dunno. Early, likely. He slept here last night. I think."

  "Well, thanks," I said. "I'd better be going."

  "Want a drink?" She smiled.

  "No. No, thanks."

  I figured it was safe to take my eyes off her, and turned my head to see what she'd been blazing away at. Piled up against the house, two on top and two on the bottom, were, of all things, four bales of dry hay probably destined for the horses I supposed were back in the barn. Or maybe she ate it herself.

  They were right underneath the second-story window from which I'd been peeking down at her. There were two bales next to the house and two this side of it, so there was no chance the bullets would go through, but I wondered what the hell was going to happen to the horses when they finally bit into the stuff. She'd potted away at the top bale till she'd clipped one of the wires holding it together, and the place was getting to be a mess. But on the bottom front bale was a big picture of Truman, well punctured with holes. There were a couple of holes in the new paint job of the house.

  I said, "Lots of fun, huh?"

  She gave me a blank look and said belligerently, "Not so much."

  She made me a little uncomfortable, so, just to make conversation, I said pleasantly, "You sure fixed Truman, ha-ha. Why him?"

  "I'm a Republican."

  That was as good an answer as any, so I let it go. She'd loaded the little gun, and now she pointed it at Truman and slammed a bullet into the ground two feet underneath him.

  This was where I came in. I said good-by to her and started off as she gave me a smile. A blade of grass clung to her upper lip. It didn't help her appearance any, but it didn't hurt it either; it was almost the same color as her complexion. I frowned and glanced up at the spot in the sky she'd been staring at, wondering if she really had seen something up there, and then I walked back to the Cad, wincing a little each time a shot cracked out behind me.

  Chapter Five

  I PARKED my Cad around the corner on Olive Street, walked down Seventh to the middle of the block, then took a left. I walked between the shoe store on my left and the cafeteria on my right, into the alley about twenty feet, and stopped right in front of the elevator door. The elevator was there on my right; all I had to do was climb inside and be merrily on my way.

  And maybe not so merrily. It occurred to me that even though I was twenty feet or so from Marty Sader's Pit, I was a long, long way from getting inside. I remembered that the elevator took a long time to get down, and there'd be plenty of opportunity for anybody inside to get ready for me if he had any such desire. I dredged up my memory of what the spot below was like. You didn't even have to turn around in the elevator, just stepped in, rode on down, then stepped straight out into the club, and you were in the main room. There were tables scattered around, a bar along the right wall—probably in front of the locked doors Mia had mentioned—and booths along the near wall on the left and right sides of the elevator. The dressing rooms, office, and whatnot were beyond the velvet-draped left wall, and against the far wall ahead of you was a little platform for a small combo, and the usual small dance floor.

  That didn't help me much, and I was still standing in the alley looking at the door to the elevator when I did the first fairly sensible thing I'd done all day. I had a very small thought.

  It was obvious that, if Sader had picked up Iris, no matter what his reason, he could have parked her almost anywhere. But the only place I knew where Sader might hang out were his home and here. I'd scratched the home off, and assuming Sader was here—and maybe Iris, too—Marty, the way I had him figured, wouldn't be in the least happy to see me. So then I had my small thought.

  I was going back over in my mind all that the nearly hysterical Iris had babbled at me, and I remembered the bit she'd blurted about being locked up. Somewhere in there she'd said she went up the dumb-waiter to someplace. To—Clark's? That was it.

  I walked back out of the alley to Seventh Street and took another peek at the cafeteria edging the alley on my left as I came out.

  Uh-huh. The sign on the windows said, "Clark's Cafeteria." And right underneath it was Marty Sader's Pit. Looking in through the glass front of the cafeteria, I could even see the right-angle extension jutting out on the left wall and extending to the back of the cafeteria. Part of that space next to the wall might be a storeroom, but I knew at least a six-by-six-foot square of it was taken up by an elevator reached from outside.

  There was a little twitch in the bunched nerve
and muscle still in the center of my back. Unless Iris was a psychiatric case, she'd sure as hell been locked up down below in the Pit just before she'd come bobbing across the street to my office.

  I was feeling fairly pleased with myself when a motion on my left made me jump. The shape I'd been in for the last four hours, just a worm turning would have made me jump. But this was a long black Plymouth sedan turning into the alley a foot on my left.

  There were two guys in the front seat and they paid no attention to me. That was O. K. I'd had more than my share of attention today. But I knew I'd seen the guy sitting beside the driver somewhere before. I stopped thinking about dumb-waiters long enough to run the thought down.

  Then I remembered where I'd seen his mug: in a newspaper story a month or so back saying he'd been picked up on a suspicion-of-robbery charge, with no subsequent conviction. That wasn't much, but the guy who'd gone bail for him was Collier Breed, the chap with his sticky fat fingers in pies, the boy to see if you wanted into any of the racket gravy around town. I didn't know for sure what the black Plymouth meant, but things were getting complicated. And I had a gruesome feeling that I was industriously working my way into the middle of the complications.

  I edged over to my left and watched the car for a minute. It pulled up in front of the elevator where I'd been standing a few minutes before. It stopped, and the guy on the right got out. He pulled a big watch from his pocket, looked at it, then stuffed it back into his pants. He said something to the driver, then crossed his arms and leaned back against the door of the car. Nothing seemed to be happening, so I walked over to the door of Clark's Cafeteria.