“Mr. Smith?” said the proprietor. “Who dat?”
“The typewriter I used to have,” she said, sighing. “I had the most beautiful ideas but on that typewriter they came out just simply horrid. All sex and—er—you know.” She sighed again. “I made half a million dollars on Mr. Smith, but what’s money, anyway? Now I can really express my beautiful thoughts.”
Marlboro’s heart was beating at the rate of ninety words a minute. “I beg your pardon,” he said, removing his Brooks Brothers, “but your words interest me strangely. You had a typewriter you called Mr. Smith, that wrote—er—commercial trash, let us say?”
She lifted her purple eyes to his. “I beg your pardon?” she said, her voice distant.
“Your typewriter,” he blurted out. “Did you leave it here? I mean—well—”
Before he knew it, they were both sitting in a booth at Dinty’s with gin on the rocks, and Marlboro learned that her name was Loretta Peyton and that someone had stolen “Mr. Smith” and that she had never sold a word since. “But ah,” she sighed, “so what? All my life I wanted to put down my beautiful thoughts and with my first typewriter I couldn’t write at all and then when I got Mr. Smith all this frightful stuff came out that sold like mad and then someone stole Mr. Smith and I found this perfectly lovely typewriter at the pawnshop. Of course, its letter ‘e’ was missing but that just inspired me with more lovely thoughts. In fact,” and she dimpled prettily, “I wrote one whole book without a single “e” in it!”
“Not really!” breathed Marlboro. “And did you sell it?”
She drew back, affronted. “Sell it!” she echoed coldly. “Certainly not. Who cares about that?”
Well, of course, it finally dawned on both of them that they were talking about the same typewriter except that Marlboro, being ‘Marlboro, called it Elsie; and Loretta, being Loretta, called it Mr. Smith. And of course she had latched onto his “e”-less typewriter, which constituted a strong bond between them. “And now,” she said sadly, “ifs so old that all its teeth—keys, I mean—have fallen out and I am desolated. I fear that I shall never write so beautifully again.”
“How much did you make last year?” Marlboro asked bluntly.
“Oh, a few paltry dollars,” said Loretta, “but not, of course, writing. My art is worth more than all the gold in the land.”
“Well, where did the dough come from, then?” Marlboro persisted.
Miss Loretta Peyton blushed and Marlboro, fortunately, did not pursue the subject. “Where do you live?” he demanded, and she blushed again. “In a dear little hideaway called Kelly’s Basement,” she said. “Shall we go there?”
Marlboro shuddered. “I remember it well,” he said. I lived there myself in the days before Elsie. No, let us go to my penthouse.”
And so they went to his penthouse and Loretta gave the mordant typewriter a thorough going-over. “Hmm,” she pondered. “You said coffee was Mr. Smith’s undoing?”
“Coffee,” said Marlboro. “Black. And she is Elsie, not Mr. Smith.”
“Black? Oh, that makes all the difference in the world. Now I know what’s the matter with him! He isn’t dead, he’s drunk.”
“Drunk!” Marlboro exclaimed, rocked back on his heels. “On coffee?”
“Certainly,” she said simply. “It’s just a matter of reversal. Look at it this way: He reversed what both of us were trying to say when we wrote on him, didn’t he? Filthy creature,” she added disdainfully. “So naturally he works in a reversed way in all respects. Now, tell me this. When you, let us say,” she added delicately, “take on a load of cognac, for example, what do you do to bring yourself out of it?”
“Why—” said Marlboro, thinking. “Coffee, I guess. Black.”
“Exactly!” cried Miss Loretta Peyton triumphantly. “So Mr. Smith works in reverse, as I said. You spill coffee on him, he gets drunk; you pour cognac on him and he sobers up.” Whereupon she picked up one of the many numerous flasks that decorated, like flowers, Marlboro’s sumptuous quarters, and dumped it on the typewriter. “Now try him,” she demanded.
Marlboro sat down, typed a few lines and came up with: “Passion rocked them like a hurricane in Florida, it tore at their vitals until they were fainting with the violence of their desires—”
“See?” said Loretta. “He’s sober again. He only writes my kind of tripe when he’s drunk.”
“You mean,” cried Marlboro, delighted, “that she’ll be as good as ever now?”
“Better,” said Loretta coldly, “although how any decent, civilized man would be willing to consort with the type of thing that Mr. Elsie Smith puts out—”
“That reminds me,” said Marlboro. “Let’s consort.”
The strange thing about it all was this: As they lay clasped in each other’s arms, Marlboro, to his astonishment; found himself whispering, “My darling, your beauty is as crystalline in its purity as the dark fandangoes of the mystic universe…”
While Loretta, in her turn, clasped him to her more tightly and in dulcet tones murmured, “Look, kid, let’s cut the gaff and get on with it, shall we?”
The Live Ones
Richard S. Prather
I had left Sheldon Scott, Investigations—my downtown Los Angeles office—about three p.m., so I reached my Hollywood apartment earlier than usual; I went in, closed the door, and stared at the nude blonde on my divan.
I blinked and shook my head like a maraca. There are good days and dandy days, but this was unbelievable.
“Whoops,” I said, “pardon me, ma’am,” and went out again and looked carefully at the number on the door. It was my apartment, all right. I went back in.
She was still there, still sprawled on the chocolate-brown divan as if she lived on it—and I kind of wished she did live on it, since she was a busty beauty with the longest white-blonde hair and most golden sun-bronzed skin since Lilly Christine—but I’d never met this one before.
There was something familiar about her, and I was so delightfully dazed that for a moment I thought maybe it was that her hair was the same color as mine, and her skin was about the same tanned shade as mine—but there I stopped. She didn’t look anything like me.
Right then there was a big flash. I thought: My brain has burned out! But then there was another flash, so I knew it wasn’t my brain. Not even my brain could do that twice—and, besides, the pulse of light had come from the bedroom. The blonde hadn’t moved, except to let her mouth sort-of hang open loosely. I jumped past her and into the bedroom. There was another blonde on my bed. Dressed exactly like the first one.
But she wasn’t alone. Close on her left was a short, husky guy with a camera looped around his neck, and on my right was a big ugly ape named Agony, swinging a sap down at my head. I bent my knees and threw my left arm up, my forearm blocking Agony’s descending wrist, then I was straightening up with my right fist slamming toward his stomach. The blow landed and bored in, and then I led with my right a couple more times, but the last one Agony knew nothing about. Before he hit the floor, I spun around toward the other man.
The guy hanging onto the camera with its strobe-light flash attachment was a local photographer named Lomey Fain. He jumped away from me, letting out a surprised yell. Ordinarily, I don’t slap medium-sized guys like Lomey around, since I am six-two and 205 pounds, but Lomey was a punk who did work for the syndicate and the private eyes who peer through keyholes, and also he was in my bedroom and I’d about figured out why, so I hit him on the mouth and it suddenly looked the way a mouth must look to teeth, all red and ugly. Lomey sailed back through the air, out cold for a while.
The pale white gal on the bed let out a little scream and jumped off it, and the sun-bronzed blonde from the front room came racing into the bedroom. Why? How would I know? Maybe to talk with the other blonde. Maybe anything. Why do gals run to bedrooms?
Both of them were running about stark staring naked—they were stark, and I was staring—and they looked at the two unconscious men and sort of
jumped up and down making wailing sounds, and I stood pretty still making a sort of low wailing sound myself, and then I heard the shower running.
I groaned, then ran to the bathroom, threw open the door, stepped in and pulled the shower curtain away from my combination tub and shower. Sure enough, there was the third gal. A real dish, this one. A redhead with saucy white breasts and flaring hips, water streaming over her in glistening rivulets, and a wide-eyed startled expression on her striking face.
She squealed, “Who are you?”
“I’m Shell Scott, and—”
“Oh, you’re Shell Scott!” She beamed at me happily.
“Arrgh,” I growled in frustration and wheeled around and ran out. Be calm, I told myself. Think. Think! That was the hell of it. I was thinking.
One thing was sure: I had to get rid of these women fast. I groaned again. Here I was in my own apartment with three beautiful nude tomatoes and all I could think of was getting rid of them. Life can really be cruel sometimes. From where I was standing I could see out the living room window down to North Rossmore. A flash of white caught my eye.
A Los Angeles police car had just pulled up to the curb below. Another car was behind it. Across the street was the rest of that flash of white I’d seen—an all-white Mark V Continental that belonged to one Victor Grieg. It was ten thousand dollars’ worth of car driven by a two-bit slob. Maybe four-bit, since Greig was one of the top racket boys in L. A., but still slob.
There wasn’t going to be time for me to get rid of these gals. I was trapped here with them. I thought: I’m dead. This may be living, but I’m dead. If I knew Grieg, in addition to the policemen he’d have some reporters along, and maybe even a judge and jury, and when they all swarmed in here it would be the end of Happy-Go-Looky Shell Scott. In my mushy mind my license took wings, my mind took wings, everything got dizzy. I jumped to the door and locked it, then turned around with my back against the door, feeling breathless. And at the sight which met my eyes I got even more breathless.
All three babes were greatly excited, and running about every which way, and all sorts of things were flying about helter skelter, through the air, up, down, even sideways. Man, it was wonderful. But then they seemed to become aware of me standing scrunched against the door, and I guess they decided to get out.
They all turned, as if with one mind, and ran at me.
Well, you know how it is with just one nude woman running at you. My brain sort of wobbled, and I thought: How’d this happen?
It had started happening with a phone call from the wife of the late Judge Phineas Latham. The judge had died recently in an apparently accidentally-started fire, but Mrs. Latham thought he’d been murdered. She’d hired me to check it. Nearly a month of investigation had convinced me she was right. And every lead I followed up pointed to a shadowy racket boy named Victor Grieg.
Grieg’s motto must have been, “To Victor belongs the spoils,” because he was so rich he had a television in the john, and it seemed he was involved in practically every crime except suicide. But I couldn’t prove it. I was getting close to him, though, and he knew it. The fact that many of my friends on the L.A. police force knew I was trying to get Grieg made it almost impossible for him to have me shot in the head without virtually naming himself as responsible. So one day Grieg phoned and asked me, politely, to call at his office. I went.
I got there sooner than I’d expected to and glimpsed a long-limbed bleached blonde leaving Grieg’s office. She walked with a loose-limbed sway that, combined with her yellowish hair and a kind of meat-hungry look on her face, made me think of a tired tiger.
Victor Grieg himself was about forty or forty-five, with black hair and heavy brows, and he looked like what he was: a tough customer. His words slid down icicles at me. It was a long session, but what it boiled down to was that Grieg couldn’t buy me off, or scare me off, and at the present time it would be inconvenient for him to have me killed. His last remark was, “If you don’t lay off, I’ll squash you like a bug. I’ll get you one way or another, and even if I got to do it legal. I’ll do it legal.”
I grinned at him and left. Two days later a friend called from Sacramento and told me there’d been pressure brought, unsuccessfully, to have my State investigator’s license revoked. If Grieg could get my license jerked, it would be like pulling my fangs, and that should have warned me…
My brain continued to wobble, but gently now. The three nude babes were all over me, screeching and pawing at me, and trying to get through the door. As I broke out in a cold sweat, I realized what Grieg’s next move had been.
There is a section of the California Penal Code, referring to private investigators, which states that the applicant for or possessor of a license must be “of good moral character and temperate habits.”
Well, it is widely known that I have an eye for the women. As a matter of fact, it is pretty well known that if I had eight eyes, I would have eight eyes for the women. But my morals aren’t any more questionable than anybody else’s. Than any red-blooded man’s, anyway. Well, any lusty red-blooded man’s. At least, nobody could prove anything. Not until now, I thought gloomily.
Finally, the gals calmed down. Apparently a couple of them had got the impression that I was a strange man who’d wandered in here and started knocking people unconscious. Once I made it clear that I lived here, sanity returned. All three were familiar in appearance, and now I recognized two of them—the white-blonde with the bronze tan, and the saucy redhead from the shower—as lovelies who had often posed for pictures in the slick men’s magazines. But the third one, the pale-white blonde, had me puzzled for some seconds longer. Then I recognized her. She was the tired tiger.
This was the long-limbed gal I’d seen so briefly outside Grieg’s office. A few fast questions of the other two verified my suspicions. The two models had thought they were merely modeling for Untamed magazine’s monthly feature, “Apartment of the Month,” and they’d been told the owner—Shell Scott—knew all about it. They had been getting ready to leave when I’d arrived. It looked very much as if, with them gone, I was to have reached home, here to be sapped neatly by Agony. Next Grieg’s bleached blonde was to have taken over, thus, like a dragon with halitosis, adding insult to injury. Lomey was handy to record all these reasons for revoking my license. Arrival of the law and reporters would have smeared the three of Grieg’s playmates along with me, I thought—but Grieg undoubtedly had convinced them their sacrifice would be worthwhile. Probably he had agreed to let them stay alive. Only my coming home early had fouled up the plot
I explained my suspicions to the redhead and tanned blonde, and the blonde lovely exploded with anger, picked up an end table and swatted the tired tiger over the head. She went out cold. It happened so fast I couldn’t have stopped it, but it did fit in with my plans.
I said, “We’ve got maybe two minutes, girls. Here’s what we do…”
I guess they had to break the lock to get in. Anyway, they made plenty of racket. I was in the shower singing at the top of my lungs, which is pretty loud, when they came in. In front were two plainclothes detectives from downtown, Flannery and Wilkins. I knew very well that they were here only because they had to be, and given half a chance would be on my side.
Behind them, in the next room, were a man and a woman, reporters from L.A. newspapers. Grieg had stayed below. Apologetically, Flannery showed me a search warrant.
“Where are they, Shell?” he asked me.
“They?” I peered around the shower curtain.
“Well, we heard there was…an orgy going on up here.”
I laughed. “You did, huh? Heard from whom?”
“Grieg. Victor Grieg.”
“That slob.”
Flannery shrugged. “Grieg said he got word all hell was coming off. Somebody’s supposed to’ve phoned him from here—rape, murder, sex, I dunno. Everything. We got to look around, anyway.”
“Go ahead.”
As the two officers went out,
both reporters came into the john. You know how it is with some reporters, nobody has any privacy any place. The gal had a thin body, thin lips, thin brain, a face like those pictures on poison packages, and straggly hair done in a bun. It looked like a bun with a couple hot dogs in it.
I said, “Ma’am, was there something you wanted to use in here?”
She frowned and said slowly, “There were supposed to be some naked women…” She sounded disappointed.
I reached for a towel and wrapped it around me, then pulled the shower curtain about halfway back and stepped out onto the floor. Right toward the female reporter. Keep them off balance, I say. Don’t retreat, attack! She retreated.
Flannery and Wilkins came out of the bedroom wearing frowns. They hadn’t found anybody. I’d known they wouldn’t. I dripped into the front room and looked out the window. I coidd see Grieg sitting in his Continental. And then came my best break of the day. Around the side of the building staggered the tired tiger, with one hand pressed against the side of her undoubtedly aching skull, and not a stitch on. She saw the white Continental, shook her head, and then loped toward it She had regained consciousness at precisely the right time.
“Well, look at. that, would you?” I said to Flannery.
He stepped alongside me and looked, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes got wide and then glazed over as if somebody had spilled milk in them. He let out a sort of tooting sound. Wilkins took a look and his eyes got about the same as Flannery’s.
The Comfortable Coffin Page 12