Dead Heat (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  “Did he? Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “He did,” she said. “And I’ll win this one.” She smiled. “I mean, we will.”

  I grinned at her. “Sure we will. Go on.”

  “Miss Brandt — Alice — was very close to Dad and felt sure he was innocent. Even though she couldn’t believe Mr. Wyndham guilty, either. Mr. Wyndham and I had never met, and I was able to talk Alice into quitting, so I’d have a chance to get her job. I gave her money for a trip back east. She really is back east, visiting her family.”

  “Cross off Miss Brandt.”

  “I thought the most difficult part would be convincing Mr. Wyndham that he should hire me — especially since I’d decided to become, well, Nell Duden. And Nell wasn’t the brainiest secretary in the world.”

  “No kidding.”

  “But it turned out to be easy. Five-minute interview, and I was hired. I really can’t understand it. Of course, Alice did tell me a few things about Mr. Wyndham, that he liked blondes and so forth — which is why I had my red hair lightened.” Doody’s eyes were merry, I thought. “And probably I should have dressed much more conservatively for the interview.”

  “The poor old man,” I said, rolling my eyes. “He didn’t have a chance. Dr. Noble didn’t have a chance. I didn’t have a chance. You’re almost frightening — ”

  “Anyway,” she went on, “as soon as I got the job I just left my hotel and moved into the Lanai Apartments. Some of my gowns and makeup were from Paris, some from Fifth Avenue. Well, I didn’t take a thing, not anything that belonged to Julie Tangier. And I became little Nell.”

  “Yeah. I should have noted that the date of Julie’s exit from the Watson-Parker coincided almost precisely with Doody’s employment at Universal Electronics.”

  “Oh. I didn’t think about that. I really didn’t.”

  “That helps. Well, what did you find out about Wyndham? I assume that if you had enough to really stick him you’d have gone to the police.”

  “Yes, but I haven’t learned that much yet. I do know, though, that Dr. Noble has some kind of hold over him. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the Ardis Ames you mentioned.”

  “What about her?”

  “All I know is, she’s dead.”

  I blinked. “Dead, huh?” Remembering Wyndham’s knee-buckling reaction when I’d mentioned her name, I said, “That would fit. How did you find this out?”

  “The day after I started working for Mr. Wyndham I stayed late, after he’d left, and rewired the intercom so that his set was always open. Then whenever I opened my key I could hear what was said in his office.”

  “You rewired it?”

  “Yes, it was very simple. I just disabled his on-off switch. Don’t forget, Shell, I grew up with Dad — with Ryder Tangier, I mean. Instead of teaching me ‘There is a cat, it is a Tom cat,’ he — ”

  “Don’t tell me. Don’t destroy my illusions about dumb womanhood. ‘There is a cat,’ indeed.”

  “I was exaggerating.”

  “I hope so. Dear, I fear we aren’t going to get along . . .”

  “Yes, we are,” she interrupted me gently. “Yes, we are, Shell.” And the way she said it, I believed her.

  “Go on, what’s with this Ardis Ames?” I asked. “And how do you know she’s dead?”

  “The first time Dr. Noble came into the office — I told you that was last Monday — I heard him say to Mr. Wyndham, ‘Just stay in line, Matt. Don’t forget, I’m not the only one who knows about Ardis, and knows she’s buried in that little plot at Fairlawn.’ Something like that. And he didn’t say Ardis Ames, just Ardis, but I assume it must be the same girl.”

  “A reasonable assumption. Incidentally, did you know Dr. Noble isn’t a doctor?”

  “No.” Her light-brown eyes widened.

  “Score one for me. He is a confidence man named Daniel Quick, known among the losers as Dandy Dan.”

  “Well . . . that is interesting,” she said. “No wonder he made me feel so crawly.”

  “Oh? You didn’t seem to think he was so repulsive last night. When you were ripping off your clothes, or hauling him into your apartment — oh, oh.”

  “You followed us. Why, Shell, you’re — ”

  “I followed him. He is a criminal, and it was my duty — ”

  “You’re jealous!”

  “What rot.” It didn’t come off exactly the way I’d thought it would. I tried it again. “What rot! What rot. The hell with it.”

  “If you’re interested, he left in half an hour.”

  “I know.”

  “What you don’t know is that he was furious when he left. You see, when he made the date he specifically mentioned taking me to the South Seas, and explained about the amateur strip contests. He said he had a lot of pull with the club owner, Mr. Scalzo, and could almost guarantee I’d get a screen test.”

  “‘Baby, you should oughta be in pix, kid.’”

  “That was the approach. Anyway, it told me what he expected, and I thought if I went along with it — up to a point, of course — he’d be more likely to talk freely with me. So that’s why I went to the South Seas with him. But afterward, the reason he left my apartment in such a temper, was because I asked too many questions, he said, and gave him all the wrong answers.”

  “Good for you. Good for you.”

  “He said I got him all . . . well, fermented, with my dance at the South Seas, and then led him on, and then turned him off. He talks like that.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “After all, that was the idea. And it worked — until he got furious. But before then he did tell me one thing. I said I was worried that Mr. Wyndham might fire me if he found out I was going with him, and dancing and all. And he said he had so much on Mr. Wyndham that Matt would do anything he said, even if I danced in front of the office. Matt would pay me for a year, even if I didn’t do any work — if he told him to. I tried to find out what it was he had on Mr. Wyndham, but a little while after that was when he got so furious. He wanted me to . . . dance again, and I wouldn’t.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, he got so furious he went home to his wife.”

  “Is he married?”

  “I think so. If he isn’t, he’s giving a good imitation.”

  The horses were in the starting gate now. All except one that was giving the boy a little trouble. But they’d be off and running in a minute or so. It was five o’clock on the nose.

  Doody said, “I’d hoped to learn more from him, Shell. After hearing him talk to Mr. Wyndham that way — in a really overbearing, threatening manner — I felt it was at least possible Dr. Noble was blackmailing him. And if he had been, perhaps Mr. Wyndham had taken money from the firm in order to pay him off. Almost every cent Mr. Wyndham has is in joint accounts with his wife, which means she would know if he made any large withdrawals. And she’s extremely frugal, watches what he spends like a hawk — so he told me one afternoon when he was convincing me his wife didn’t understand him.”

  “All that I can believe. I’ve met the lady. I’d say you did extremely well with your little intercom, Doody. And, uh, other factors. Anything else?”

  “Just one thing. Last Saturday a man — I don’t know who he was — phoned Mr. Wyndham. I was listening in my office. He said he had a tip on the fifth race at Hollywood Park, and hung up. It seemed odd because that was all he said. It made me wonder if Mr. Wyndham was betting on the races, so when he left the office I followed him, or tried to. I lost him in Inglewood, but it seemed certain he was coming to the race track here.”

  “So you came out alone, huh? Not with a date.”

  She nodded. “I just came in and started looking for him. I didn’t find him for almost an hour. He was sitting where I showed you — but nobody was in the other box then. I mean, Mr. Scalzo and those men weren’t there then.”

  “Probably showed up for the fifth race. Wednesday night you told Kay all this? Including where Wyndham was sitting?”

>   “Yes. I’d noticed the name plate on his box. I didn’t tell you that, Shell, because I wanted to come out, wanted to know what you were doing here.”

  “Uh-huh. Doody, you said something about not being sure your cover — the Nell Duden identity — is holding up. What about that?”

  “When Dr. Noble — Dan Quick, I mean — came out of Mr. Wyndham’s office last Monday I was listening on my intercom. Mr. Wyndham was on the phone, and I hadn’t expected anyone to come out right then. Well, Dr. Noble could surely hear Mr. Wyndham’s voice coming over my speaker. I hit my key as soon as I could, and tried to divert his attention — the way I did with you — but I’m not sure whether it worked or not.”

  “If it didn’t he’s made of sterner stuff than I am. I remember hearing Wyndham’s phone ring myself when I walked into your office yesterday, Doody. But right after that something distracted me and I plain failed to consider the significance of that bell and voice.” I grinned at her. “Something about a girdle you weren’t wearing, wasn’t it?”

  She smiled. “Something like that. There’s this too. I asked so many questions of Dr. Noble last night that once he calmed down and thought about it, there’s a possibility he started wondering why. If he has sense enough to put two and two together . . .”

  “He probably does. He’s not a dumb hood, Doody. He is a very sharp con man, not a bit stupid.”

  “Well, in that case . . .” She hesitated only a moment, then her expression changed ever so slightly, got a bit blank, and her voice went up to a higher, thinner pitch. “In that case, Shellie,” she said, “if you want to come to the aid of a lady in distress, I’m in it.”

  It killed me. It was dumb Doody in the flutter of a long eyelash, the bat of a sizzling eye. Another of those sappy Doodyisms — only not sappy. Not at all.

  Looking back at the times we’d been together, I remembered her habit of occasionally hesitating, pausing briefly before speaking. I’d felt those were the moments when her poor little mind went blank and she had to wait for the electricity to come on again. But now I realized what those pauses had meant. In those blank spaces she hadn’t been unconscious. She’d been thinking!

  “You’re a freak,” I said.

  “Well,” she said — pause — “people are so inhuman, aren’t they?”

  I looked at her, shaking my head. “Doody,” I said, “you’re marvelous, and I love you to pieces — both of you — but you are lousing me up. You are destroying my Doody.”

  She batted her eyelashes. “Better to have loved and loused,” she said sweetly, “then never to have loved at all.”

  “Quit it, will you?” I paused, thinking. I would have had a clever reply to her last comment — in about a hundred years — only right then the track announcer cried: “The flag is up!” Then, almost immediately: “Theeere they go!”

  The first subdued roar went up from the crowd.

  “At the start, it’s Thunder Boy going to the front. . . .”

  I jerked my head around and, oddly, instead of the sprinting horses I saw a face. It was a face that lit the fuses on all my glands. Striding along the cement walk behind the boxes, then leaning in to speak to Axel Scalzo, was the guy with black brows and eyes and scarred lip, the sonofabitch who’d shot me last night, then clanged me on the head. The guy who was not, if I could help it, going to get away from me again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I stood up.

  “What’s the matter?” Doody asked me.

  “There’s the mug who shot me last night. The mug who is soon going to be damned sorry he shot me.”

  Doody put her hand on my arm. “Shell, wait.”

  “Wait, hell.” I was wound up like a six-foot alarm clock, blood thumping in me, and I could feel the beat building, warming my face. I shrugged Doody’s hand off my arm and started toward the man.

  And right then he turned and saw me. Or, rather, saw me again, for undoubtedly he’d seen me earlier. Because he was looking up at me as he turned, pointing, and the whole gang was looking where he pointed. That was probably why the creep had gone down there, to tip Scalzo that he’d spotted me.

  The noise of the crowd was louder now.

  “Around the first turn, it’s Thunder Boy by one length, Stimulator second by a nose, and Silver Arrow . . .”

  I climbed over people’s feet, jumped down to the walk behind the back row of boxes. I saw Scalzo yank the man close, saying something, then the creep turned and sprinted along the walk, away from me.

  I was gaining on him as I went past Scalzo’s box, and all my attention — too much of my attention, it turned out — was on the running man. Because suddenly I stopped gaining on him. Somebody stuck out a foot and I ran into it. My legs didn’t exactly go out from under me, but they didn’t go anywhere near where I meant them to, and then the hard cement came up at me. I saw it hit my outstretched hands and keep on coming toward my face.

  I landed heavily, skidded for six feet, arching my neck and holding my pained expression up off the cement. It saved my face, but angled my head enough so it clanged into one of the round metal posts of the rail behind the boxes. The sound of my head clanging on steel seemed to echo inside my skull, getting fainter and slower like an alarm-clock bell running down. The crowd noise grew softer, then slowly started increasing in volume again.

  I got to my feet, swung around. Hale stood where he’d been when he’d hooked my ankle with his foot and tripped me, leg still stuck out in front of him. Close on my right was Deke. He held his coat in his hands, right hand out of sight. He jabbed the coat forward and I could feel what had to be a gun dig into my back. He shoved me close to Scalzo’s box. I was still dazed from the smack on my skull, not completely coordinated. Only a few seconds had passed from the moment I’d fallen until now, as I stood, head ringing, looking at Scalzo’s sour face.

  Then it was as if a valve opened in my head. The crowd noise slammed against my eardrums as my hearing came all the way back to normal. Everything got a little sharper. The track announcer’s voice boomed over the yelling around me:

  “Passing the half-mile post it’s Thunder Boy and Stimulator, Thunder Boy by a neck, Stimulator second by half a length, Go-No-Go by two lengths, and Silver Arrow . . .”

  On the edge of my vision I could see the blur of bright racing silks spread out on the far side of the track like something in an abstract painting.

  Scalzo merely glanced at me. “Get him away from here,” he said, looking past me to Deke. Then he flicked his eyes to Hale, nodded silently. I knew what that meant — or, rather, what it was supposed to mean. But it didn’t; not this time, it didn’t.

  Deke’s gun dug into my back, harder, sliding over my spine. I braced my legs, stood there.

  Scalzo moved his head, shiny scalp gleaming dully, large pale eyes staring into mine. He wore a gray coat and open sports shirt beneath it, tufts of wiry hair showing at the hollow of his throat.

  “It’s no good, Scalzo,” I said. “If you do it at all, you do it right here. Where it’ll tag you.”

  On my left, in the adjacent box, Matthew Wyndham stood, his expression one of near panic. His open mouth was pulled down at its corners, eyes wide, wrinkles in his forehead and at the bridge of his nose.

  I looked at Scalzo again. “It won’t work twice, you bastard. It wouldn’t have worked with Kay if he’d thought you were going to kill him. And it sure as hell won’t work with me.”

  Wyndham let out a sigh and sank into his seat as if his legs had become too weak to support his weight.

  I glanced around. Incredibly, it seemed to me, nobody was looking at us. All eyes were on the track and most of the people were on their feet. From their point of view all that had happened was that a man had fallen, was now standing talking to another man. There hadn’t been any real violence — not yet. And the horses were coming around the turn, heading for the stretch.

  Scalzo was silent briefly, then leaned toward me. “It don’t make no difference. You’re dead.” I c
ould see his mouth moving, forming the words, but could barely hear him over the yelling of the crowd. “So it happens right here, so what?” he went on, lips thinning. “The boys will get lost and I’ll be clean enough. A beef, sure. Nothing I can’t handle.” His eyes widened slightly and he looked at Wyndham. “Matt, get out of here. Beat it!”

  Wyndham got slowly to his feet, turned, and walked away from us, moving like a man in a trance.

  I hadn’t really been worried until that moment. It seemed almost insane to think Scalzo would have his men shoot me here, in the middle of these thousands of people, especially right next to his own box. But maybe . . .

  “Turning into the stretch . . .”

  They were in the stretch now, in the run for the wire. And a man isn’t really aware of how loud the sound is from thousands of throats, during that run for the money, unless he’s giving his attention to that sound itself instead of to the movement and action on the track. It hammered the ears, like a continuing explosion. A shot, muffled, wouldn’t be heard. Maybe not even by me.

  Earlier I’d been warm, beat of blood in artery and flow in vein flushing my skin, heating my face. But now in the space of a heartbeat I felt the chill spreading over me — a chill I’d felt before. It was like a cold breath on my skin, and with it came the familiar intensifying of sight and sound, sharpening of sense and perception.

  The crowd sound around me became not merely a jumbled roar but thousands of individual voices blending. Scalzo’s eyes were wide and staring and I could see tiny red veins in the gray iris, note wrinkles in his pursed lips and cracks at the edges of his mouth.

  On my left Wyndham was still moving, just starting up the steps. I could hear the drumming of hoofs. I could see the red and green and yellow and orange, blue and pink of the jockeys’ silks, see the number 7 on the horse in the lead. And with a separate part of my mind I knew that seven was Thunder Boy, half a length in front. Over the P.A. speaker came: “Moving up fast on me outside is Silver Arrow . . .”

  But most of my mind was filled with what I was going to do, in fact with what I was doing, because suddenly I was doing it.