Dead Heat (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  But they didn’t just stand there, either. In the same instant, they moved almost as one man. Scalzo slapped at his hip and Hale bent his knees, right hand darting under his coat. But nearest me was Luke and he sprang at me, not reaching for a gun, reaching for me.

  The Colt was in my right hand and my thumb had already laid back the hammer, but Luke was almost on me. I turned toward him, raising my left elbow, pulling my hand in toward my chin and then whipping it out toward him, hand open, fingers straight and tense, thumb pulled back and cocked to tighten the ridge of muscle along my palm’s edge.

  My hand sliced under his chin and its edge thudded into his neck with the sound of a sandbag falling on a plank. It felt as if my hand had gone clear to the back of his head; I felt the gristle and cartilage of his windpipe silently crumple.

  The gunshot and the impact were simultaneous. The bullet hit my left thigh and, oddly, felt like a cold blast against my skin. There was no pain, but the blow jarred me, spun me to my left. My knee bent and I felt myself falling sideways. Hale still held the gun before him, ready to fire again. Doody was too near him, too close — but she was dropping to the floor.

  I fired and missed, landed on the carpet as Hale triggered his .45 again. The slug nipped at my coat but missed flesh. On my side, free hand against the floor, I aimed at Hale and fired. Scalzo was moving on my left, a blur, a flashing hand or arm in the edge of my vision, but I couldn’t look toward him now. I squeezed the trigger again, knew I hit Hale, fired once more and this time saw his head jerk back.

  On my left a gun cracked twice. Scalzo fired hurriedly, slower to get out his gun than Hale but quicker to pull the trigger; he must have jerked it, jerking the gun too — but he hit me. I felt the shock as metal bored through my right side.

  In the time it took Scalzo to fire twice, I turned toward him and raised the Colt, felt more than saw the snubbed barrel lined up on his chest, and eased pressure down on the trigger. I kept the gun on him, kept pulling the trigger until the Colt’s hammer clicked on an empty cartridge.

  Scalzo pressed his hands to his middle, and blood poured from his throat. He swayed on his thick legs, large gray eyes staring. It looked as if he tried to step forward but couldn’t move his legs. Then suddenly he thudded to the carpet and lay still, his shiny bald head toward me.

  Doody got slowly to her feet and stood for several seconds with one hand at her throat. Then she ran across the room, knelt by me. “Shell, are you — are you hurt?”

  I licked my lips. “I don’t know. Not badly. I don’t think so, anyway.”

  I heard sirens. For a moment I couldn’t understand why there would be sirens so soon. But then I remembered. And how I remembered.

  I felt over my body, winced when my fingers dug into a raw spot, gingerly tested my side. The worst place was from Hale’s first shot, the one that had hit my thigh. Not only had it come closest to doing real damage, but — unlike Scalzo’s smaller .38 — his gun had been a brutal Colt .45 automatic. The slug had missed bone, torn the flesh. I got to my feet. There was pain starting, but I could walk. The bullet from Scalzo’s gun, the slug that had hit my side, had gone just under the skin, and the only other mark — except from all that glass, of course — was a shallow inch-long furrow on my neck.

  “I’m all right,” I said to Doody. “I won’t go dancing for a while, but I’m all right.”

  “Thank God.” She swallowed. “They . . . they were going to kill me. They really were. It’s incredible . . .” She stared past me, lovely face still shocked and pale.

  Outside was eerie blending of wails that meant at least two or three sirens, maybe more. A not unpleasant sound for a change. Almost music. Let them come, I thought. But with the thought was something else, a vague uneasiness I couldn’t pin down, a small cold spot in my brain.

  That queer little cold spot grew larger. It seemed to happen every time I thought about cops. They were going to give me a very rough time, I knew, but I could handle it now because I could explain . . . everything . . .

  The cold spot was now not in my brain, it was my brain. It filled my skull, drooled down my spine.

  “Oh,” I said. It was a very soft sound.

  “What’s the matter, Shell?”

  I didn’t answer. I looked at the bodies. I went over to them, hunted for pulses, did not find any pulses. Not even in scarlipped Luke. My hand had crushed his neck, trachea, bone, and cartilage, sealed his throat with gristle. He was dead. So were Scalzo and Hale. I found a chair, sank into it.

  “Please, Shell, what’s wrong?”

  “Everything.” I sighed. “About a thousand cops are going to stampede in here soon. In a minute or two, maybe in seconds. And — well, you’ve been out of touch. At the moment the entire Los Angeles Police Department, and an appreciable percentage of local voters, would cast their ballots to dissolve me in caustic solutions. They desire to electrocute me, hang me, gas me, skin me alive.”

  “But isn’t everything all right now?”

  “Not . . . quite.” I looked around at the bodies. “No, not quite. Doody, for me to convince those who need convincing, I will need much more than my simple statement and a lot of dead bodies. Especially when I made the bodies dead. Even with what you can say about Luke’s snatching you, that is not enough; Luke, you see, is a corpse. Your unsupported word is not enough. My unsupported word is not enough, not by a long shot.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.”

  The sirens sounded as if they were inside the house now. A lot of sirens. I was coming unglued. “Doody, I don’t even know about Ryder — your dad — the embezzlement . . . and that’s what I was hired to find out in the first place. They thought I went too far when I plugged Deke at Hollypark, but now . . .”

  “But they were going to kill me, Shell. They tried to kill you.”

  “You tell the cops that. You tell them. . . .”

  Life stirred. My brain thawed a little.

  “Yeah, Doody,” I said more briskly, “you do that.” I stood up. “And tell it good, because I won’t be here. I hope.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Probably not, but I’m going to give it a try. After what has already happened — well, let’s say it is barely within the realm of the possible.”

  Sirens moaned in front of the house. Big feet would soon be bouncing over the lawn, and probably big clubs would soon be bouncing over my head.

  “Tell the cops everything you know,” I said rapidly. “It should at least help prepare them for my tale if I get a chance to tell it.” I looked down at her. “So, Doody, tell it good, and I’ll try to wrap up the rest of it. Somehow.”

  She was close to me, almost touching me, those unforgettable eyes fringed with lashes like black lace, lips moistly gleaming.

  Came a great hammering and banging on the door.

  “Shell,” Doody said, “I don’t really understand. But you’ll do it. I know you will.”

  Well, when a woman with a face like that and a body like that says something like that, when she looks up at you with her eyes shining, and when she speaks like that in a voice that could split your toenails — what do you do?

  Why, you kiss her, of course. You pull her close, feel her body pressed against you, molded to you, warm and soft and alive, and, yes, you kiss her.

  Sure, more sirens were swelling, there was banging on the door, there was no time. . . .

  But, friend, for that, even when there’s no time, I’ll take time. The police could have been pouring through the doors and windows, syndicate to the left of me, Mafia to the right of me, the devil himself behind me volleying and thundering — and I would still have kissed her.

  It would have been worth it, too. It was. I don’t know how long the kiss lasted. I’d say just long enough. It started out spectacular and improved steadily. This, after all, was not the batty blonde I’d once thought her, but a brilliant tomato who spoke seven languages, and she kissed me in all those seven languages
, then in Esperanto.

  Man, the lips! They were lips like wine — like booze! — like burning brandy, lips with lightning in them. They were lips that could ignite dry kindling, a whole mouthful of lips, a universe of osculatorching, an exploding pucker — words failed me, but my lips kept on succeeding.

  It ended only when the door out front crashed inward. Yeah, the door — and here I’d opened the window for them.

  But that was my signal: Go. I went.

  I turned and floated through the room, out the back door, pausing to open it instead of gaily knocking it off its hinges, and soared into the night. So there were ten thousand cops out there. Mafia, syndicate. Devil, all kinds of creeps — who cared? Nothing would stop me now. The rest of this would be a breeze.

  I knew it would be. It was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The window was open. I slid it all the way up and pulled myself through and inside.

  This was Matthew Wyndham’s home in Beverly Hills. Two hours had passed since I’d left Doody and started running.

  I’d run out the back door, past a swimming pool, through landscaped grounds, over a wall, and just kept going for two more blocks in the same direction. Then I saw the first prowl car — I’d heard it coming, siren bansheeing, and was prone behind a hedge when it went by. Another time I hid behind a tree, and once trotted into somebody’s back yard. I hadn’t made it all the way to Wyndham’s on foot, for after hiding briefly in that back yard I let myself into somebody’s darkened house.

  The only trouble I had was finding the phone. But I found it, phoned a taxi agency in Hollywood, and asked for a particular driver. He was a man I’d done a favor for in time past, a man who did not love the law but did like me, and therefore wouldn’t tip the law. I left word for him to call and stood for twenty minutes, silently, hand on the phone.

  When it rang, I didn’t have to pick the receiver off fast to still the sound. I jumped six inches in the air and the phone came up with me after hardly a ting. I told him where to pick me up, and climbed into his cab when he showed. He left me at Wyndham’s and I was on my own again.

  There were no cops at Wyndham’s. Why should there be? He wasn’t a crook. He was the respectable president of Universal Electronics; he even belonged to the Beverly Club.

  I visited three rooms upstairs and turned on three sets of lights before I found his bedroom. I was rather pleased that I hadn’t stumbled into Mrs. Wyndham’s bedroom. But I was even more pleased to find Wyndham in his bed.

  In bed, yes. But not asleep. I imagine that before I turned on the light he’d been lying there in the darkness, his eyes staring. Well, after today — and all the rest of it — I could understand why.

  I shut the door behind me, walked toward the bed. He rose to a sitting position and looked at me as if I were Death, alive and striding toward him. He stared, and choking sounds gurgled from his throat.

  Understandably, too. To begin with, it was I, it was Shell Scott, whom he did not relish seeing ever again in the first place. And in the second place I was all over blood, hastily and sloppily bandaged, limping, clothes torn, face somewhat unpleasant. And, too, I had a gun, my now empty Colt, in my hand.

  I must have looked pretty gruesome to Matthew Wyndham, virtually dismembered, certainly ghostly. Not exactly the ghost of Christmas past, maybe Halloween behind, but nothing encouraging to him. He let out his breath with a sigh and sort of collapsed.

  “Hello again, Matthew,” I said softly.

  More gurgling sounds.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and my weight pushed it down. He started to roll toward me and shrank away. I stuck my empty gun in front of his right eye and thumbed back the hammer. He closed his eyes and waited. Just waited.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Matthew,” I said. “I’m going to talk to you. More important, you’re going to talk to me.”

  After a while he opened his eyes.

  I said, “Isn’t that right?” and put the gun away.

  He licked his lips, eventually got a word out. “Yes . . . yes . . .”

  “You knew they were going to kill me today, didn’t you?”

  He shivered. “Yes, I knew,” he said. “I knew they meant to.”

  “As they killed John Kay.”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “I’ll tell you how it was. You tell me what I miss. Kay suspected, as I did, that you were meeting Scalzo somewhere, though apparently nobody had seen you two together. Kay knew, or learned, that you met at the track, and Thursday, before you or Scalzo arrived, he planted a transmitter — a microphone — in the box you used. Somehow Scalzo found out about it and sent one or two of his hoods to take care of Kay.”

  I stopped and waited and he spoke without urging.

  “Yes. Axel — Scalzo — saw Kay, and noticed something that disturbed him. He asked me if Kay had worn a hearing aid when he’d visited me in my office and I told him no, he hadn’t. That was all I did. That was all.” He stopped briefly. “Scalzo spoke to the one called Hale. I don’t know what he said. Hale looked around in their box, then in mine, and found — I don’t know what it was.”

  “I do.”

  “Then Hale and another man walked up to Kay. That’s all I know.”

  “Sure. Who was the other man? Guy with a scar on his lip?”

  “No, Deacon. Deke.”

  So Hale and Deke had done the actual killing of Kay. On Scalzo’s order, of course. Well, all three of the bastards were dead. I wasn’t sorry.

  “The last time we talked, you told me you didn’t know Ardis Ames.” When I said her name, he twitched a little. “I know better,” I said. “I know she’s in Fairlawn Cemetery. Want to tell me about it?”

  His mouth twisted, but he didn’t speak.

  “Did you kill her?” I asked.

  “No. She’s dead, but I . . . didn’t kill her.” He swallowed. “I loved her.”

  It got to me a little. He wasn’t lying; there was too much emotion and quiet conviction, too much raw aching in his voice.

  “Who did kill her?”

  “No one. Or I suppose I did, in a way.”

  He stopped and I waited silently.

  “She — she was going to have my child. But, well, it was out of the question, impossible. There was an abortion, but too late. She died.”

  “Uh-huh. It figures.”

  He had been looking at his hands. But when I spoke, he turned his face toward me. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, how do you . . .” I started over. “Did someone tell you she was dead?”

  “No. I saw her.”

  That jolted me. “Saw her? Where?”

  “In the viewing room at Fairlawn. She had died during the night. I looked at her. . . .” He was staring at his hands again. “I touched her cold breast. She was dead, Ardis was dead.” His voice was barely audible and his lips quivered. His chest rose and fell as he sighed. “I put flowers on her grave,” he said, and there were real tears in his eyes.

  I hated to keep pushing it, but I had to know it all. And I’d just had another thought. I didn’t believe, of course, that Ardis had died as the result of an abortion. But Scalzo was such a complete monster he might himself have killed her, or had her killed, because a really dead woman would serve his purpose better.

  But I decided to go at it from an angle. “Just what did Scalzo have on you?” I asked him.

  And the door opened behind me.

  I swung around. It was butler-chopped Mrs. Wyndham. She had on a nightgown that, if universally worn, would put a severe crimp in the human race. I won’t describe it. I don’t like describing that sort of thing. But, briefly, it looked as if she were moulting.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she bellowed. “What is the mean — hah!”

  She’d just gotten a good look at me.

  She reeled back a step, flinging a hand up, perhaps to shield her eyes. A killer was not only loose, but here in the house. Then she spun about. “Police!” she crie
d, as if that alone would bring them.

  I looked at Wyndham. “I can stop her. But you’d better do it. Do it or listen to me tell her the tale. She’ll know soon enough, but move, mister, or she’ll know it now.”

  His face was ashen. He sat frozen for a moment, then his jaw hardened. He got an almost fierce look on his face and, as I stood up, he swung out of bed.

  Wearing the bottom half of purple pajamas, he thumped barefoot across the room to the door. “Maude!” he yelled. “Maude!”

  She cackled something and he shouted, “Shut up!” Believe me, she screamed. Those two words, I guess, were more shocking than the sight of me, dying on Matthew’s bed. “Come here,” Wyndham said. “Come here, damn you.”

  I was seeing history in the making.

  I heard Maude approaching her husband on staggering feet. He spoke to her in a tone so low I couldn’t hear the words. But I heard one more small scream from Mrs. Wyndham. Then footsteps, a door slamming.

  Wyndham came back in. Shoulders high, step firm, teeth firmly together.

  “O.K.,” I said. “Nice work. Now let’s continue. Scalzo got his hooks in you, and after you’d looted your company for payoff money, and then more and more payoff money, you saw exposure around the corner. So you started framing Ryder Tangier to get off the hook. Temporarily, that is. Only you’re still on the blackmail hook, and it’s in even deeper now, since Scalzo not only has the original dirt on you but also knows about your embezzlement and the framing of Tangier as well. Did I miss anything?”

  “That’s preposterous,” he said. “I was not blackmailed, and I did not steal any money. I feel sorry for Ryder. But he is guilty.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed. Shoulders high, teeth firmly together.

  “Now look,” I said. “O.K., you’re a hero. You should have done it before. It would probably have prevented a lot of trouble. But don’t let it go to your head. Now spill it, Wyndham.”

  He sat there, shoulders high, and so on.

  I hated to do it, even to him. But he’d asked for it. I said, “Don’t you know yet that Dr. Noble isn’t a doctor?”