I spotted him after I'd reached the bar. I ordered a bourbon-and-water and asked the bartender if he knew Dr. Clark. He did, but said he hadn't seen the doctor this afternoon. I turned to look over the view in and around the pool. But between the bar's end and the pool, on a rectangle of grass, were a couple of small tables and several chairs, and there at the tables were several beefy guys and two or three wispy ones. Whitey was standing at the edge of the group, his profile toward me. We had met, sort of anti-socially, a time or two and neither of us had any use for the other. I didn't know what he would do if he turned and saw me; but I knew I would prefer it if he didn't see me at all, because he just wasn't charming.
In fact he was quite a bit less than charming. Whitey was slow, vacuous, fleshy, and when he grinned it was like a giggle. His lips looked as if they had been designed only to slobber, and he had a face that looked fermented. The name he'd been tagged with didn't tell much about him, but I knew the lad. It was said that Whitey stuck pins in people and noted with mild amusement the effect on their waxen images. He pulled wings off flies and then ate the wings. He wrote letters to himself in invisible ink. He should have had his head in a splint. He was a heavy, a torpedo, a man who killed for money, a killer for hire, a wiper. He was the kind of man juvenile punks-with-knives want to grow up and be like. And they make it. He was an unsolid citizen, and I didn't enjoy being this close to him.
Or this close to some of the others, for that matter. Sitting down was another heist man named Albert something-or-other, who loved to sap people and was called, for fun, Albert Anesthesia. Standing by him were a couple of torpedoes named Jabber and Shortcake, and two others I didn't know. Jabber was a mean-looking guy now wearing one of the gay red-and-white outfits, and thus obviously employed at the ranch in some unusual capacity. Unusual for him. Any kind of non-violent employment was unusual for him.
While looking at all that menace, I had finished my drink, so I ordered another. I intended to wander down to the far end of the bar out of sight of all of those characters, but some sudden activity among them caught my eye.
Shortcake whispered into Jabber's ear, then bent down and removed one of his brown shoelaces. Jabber moved unobtrusively over to Whitey and whispered in his ear. Whitey grinned loosely and, I believe, slobbered. Jabber caught the eyes of a couple of the others and pointed to Shortcake, who now had the long narrow shoestring in his hand. They all grew facial expressions of fiendish delight.
I had to stop and watch. Something was sure going on here, and I was interested. It looked as if five of the six eggs were in on whatever was up, because the sixth, a short and fragile-appearing guy, had his attention on a sporty-looking blonde sporting at the edge of the pool and had missed all the signs, whispers, and muffled chuckles.
Then Shortcake yelled, “Viper! Viper, look out!”
The guy stopped watching the blonde and turned around with his eyes bugging and mouth dropping open. “Haw?” he yelped.
Shortcake had bent over as if picking that shoestring off the grass and he yelled, “Snake! Viper, it's a snake!” Then he straightened up and threw the shoestring at the man called Viper.
It did look a little bit snakelike as it flew crookedly through the air, and a man with a good imagination might have thought it all wriggling and scaly, but Viper reacted as if it were nine feet long and rattling.
He let out a honk like a Greyhound bus, and his eyes bugged out unbelievably. I swear it looked as if he went straight up in the air for about six feet, like a man rapidly learning levitation, and he managed somehow to get practically turned around in the air. When he lit, he was running. That honk had turned into a piercing high keening sound and he just took off.
He ran into the pool and sank.
He just went down out of sight, and the five remaining hoods were about to kill themselves laughing. Shortcake fell clear down onto the grass and sat on his hind end, holding his knees and rocking back and forth choking with laughter. Whitey made pleased gooey sounds and Jabber slapped his thigh.
“Hey,” said one of the men, “Can Viper swim?”
Shortcake strangled happily. “No!” he chortled. “Can't swim —” he choked some more—“a stroke!”
That set them all off again. Man, it was fun. A guy was really going to drown. Just big overgrown boys. They needed understanding. And I understood them.
This had caused a bit of commotion, especially since Viper had been fully clothed when he'd leaped into the pool. Some of the swimmers got out of the water, and a number of spectators gathered at the pool's edge.
Somehow Viper reached the edge of the pool himself, perhaps by crawling along the bottom; it was possible that the weight of iron undoubtedly under his arm anchored him down. He managed to clamber out and walked dripping toward the group of his pals again. And I have seldom seen a sadder specimen of homo sap. He was so sad he was almost tragic.
He had not been any Gregory Peck to start with, and now he was something for the book. The comic book. He was small, very small, one of the wispy ones. His eyes nearly met in the middle of his forehead, slightly atilt, with a mildly stunned expression in them, as if they had caught themselves peeking at each other. He had protruding and sort of upswept lips, the lower one gently nudging the upper, as if he were puckering to kiss his nostrils. And of course he dripped. His matted black hair dripped, his nose dripped, his chin dripped, water dripped from his soggy and loosely-hanging clothes.
He stood there with his arms at his sides and said sadly to the chortling hoods, “You did it again. Yep, you did it again.” He shook his head. Then he lifted his arms from his sides and let them drop. They slapped soggily against his legs and he said, “Did it again.”
The hoods howled and choked. I didn't get a chuckle out of it, largely because I was thinking that if this was what they did when they were almost deliriously happy, what might they do when they got irritated? I went quickly down to the far end of the bar.
The bartender there didn't know Dr. Clark. I finished my drink and went back into the hotel lobby again. Those two bourbons on my empty stomach had warmed my face quite a bit. No more for me here, not with the hoods so gay and the pool so handy. The clerk saw me and waved me over to the desk.
“Hey, I remembered something,” he told me. “Dr. Clark and his wife are probably out riding. Forgot about it before. They go for a gallop practically every afternoon.”
“On horses, huh?”
“We ain't got no kangaroos.”
“I just didn't see any of the toothy animals when I drove in.”
He smiled and nodded. “You drove right past them. The long low building on the left as you come in.” He squinted out one of the big plate glass windows. “There's the doc now. Just coming in from the stables.”
I followed his gaze and saw a tall gray-haired guy and a slim brown-haired woman walking diagonally from the stables toward the cabins. Both of them wore checkered shirts and blue jeans. I found another twenty and gave it to the clerk, saying, “I'd appreciate it if you forgot I asked you any questions at all.”
He grinned and nodded, and the twenty disappeared magically, the way they always do. I went out of the front door and caught up with the man and woman a few feet from Cabin 26.
“Dr. Clark?” I said.
He and the woman turned. “Why, yes,” he said in a pleasing baritone. Then he frowned slightly. “Have we met?”
“No, sir. Frankly I'm just playing a hunch. I thought you might know a man named Theodore Valentine.”
His face stayed blank. “No. I don't think so.”
So that was that. But I said, “He was here last weekend, when you checked in. Tall guy, dark blond hair, nice looking.” I went on to describe Valentine as best I could.
The doctor smiled. “Oh, that must be the chap I treated here last Sunday. It always happens on vacations.”
“Treated?”
He nodded. “Yes. For an overdose of sleeping pills.”
Bang, there it was. Sometime
s you can travel a thousand miles, spend two weeks working, and come up with nothing. I'd driven a little over a hundred miles, asked half a dozen questions, and got it all. I felt good.
I said, “You have no idea how interesting that is to me, doctor. Would you mind telling me a little more about it?”
“Not at all, Mr....”
“Scott.”
“Come inside, won't you?”
He introduced me to his wife and the three of us went into his cabin. In two minutes he'd told me all there was to it. “When you come right down to it,” he said, “I didn't really finish treating the man—the house doctor took over.”
“But the man did take sleeping pills.”
“Entire bottle, apparently.”
“How did it happen he was found alive?”
“A maid went in to make up the room, thinking it was empty, and found him.” He pointed through the front window and said, “The fellow's cabin was 24 there, directly across from ours. So when the maid ran out of 24 she saw the rear end of my car in the garage here, facing her. She saw the caduceus on the rear bumper.”
“That's the emblem with the snakes wiggling around a staff or something?” I couldn't help thinking of Viper when I said “snakes.” I wondered if he was still out there flapping his arms against his sides and saying sadly, “Did it again.”
Doctor Clark smiled gently. “Yes.” He went on to say that, seeing the caduceus, she had known a doctor must own the car, so she banged on the door and told him a man was unconscious in the opposite cabin. He'd gone over there with his ever-present black bag, injected stimulant and done what he could. Before he'd finished, a couple of red-uniformed men and the Desert Trails’ resident doctor had come in. He added, “The doctor took charge of the patient, and then a veritable giant of a man came in. He thanked me and showed me out.”
Veritable giant of a man. That would have been Nick Colossus himself. I said, “Did you see any kind of note, doctor?”
“I'm afraid I was much too busy to notice anything except the condition of the patient, Mr. Scott.” He paused. “What is your interest in the matter?”
I said, “I've been called in as a consultant on the case.” That was true enough. But I didn't want to answer any more questions, so I got up.
Doctor Clark said, smiling. “Oh, you're a doctor?”
“Not exactly.” I grinned. “Sometimes I patch up problems. But my operations are usually, well, sort of unusual. You might call me one of the unorthodocs.”
That puzzled him just enough so I got out of there without having to answer any more questions. I just thanked him for the info, and took off. And I took off for the parking lot, because now I wanted to be far, far from here, and soon. I had what I'd come for, even full measure, and I wondered how long this luck was going to last.
I made it to the parking lot. When I was almost to the Cadillac I glanced at my watch. It was four-thirty p.m. Even if I hurried, I was going to be a little late for that visit with Coral. I warmed a bit inside, thinking of her. I wondered what it was she'd wanted to tell me.
And then I stopped wondering. That warmth in my middle turned to ice. I felt a chill sweep over my face and down over the skin of my body. Suddenly I knew what it was that had nagged at me there in the park where the kid and his killer had died, what it was that had nagged at me for brief moments since then.
I knew, because of the kill attempt there in the park when I'd met my caller, that my phone was tapped. Because of that tap, whoever had been listening had caused Dodo to be sent out after the kid and me—because we knew or had guessed that Valentine had been murdered.
But Coral had phoned me right after the kid had.
She had called; she'd talked about Valentine, too. I mentally squeezed my brain, trying to remember exactly what she'd said. But whatever it was she had told me on the phone—and I knew she had mentioned Valentine—it would all have been heard, probably recorded, by whoever was listening. By whoever had sent Dodo out to murder two of us. Maybe he, or somebody else, had been sent to take care of three, not just two.
Maybe right now, lovely, warm fiery-haired Coral was—I forced the ugly thoughts from my mind, turned and started to run back to the hotel. From here I could at least phone her, hope to find her alive and warn her. Coral had said for me to meet her at six p.m. She would be home by then, and was going to be at Magna until about five p.m. It wasn't yet five—I could still catch her, keep her from going to her house.
Because that's where, they'd probably wait for her, if they were waiting anywhere. It would be in her house, ready as she stepped in the door. That phone call was suddenly the most important thing in my life. And, I thought, in Coral's.
I'd spun around near the Cad and had taken about two long strides toward the hotel. I was just getting a good start. And that's when they got me.
Chapter Nine
There were three of them. Whitey and Jabber, from among those who had been at the pool, were two; the third was a man who hated my guts, a man named Flint, gray-haired and thin, and just as hard as the name sounded. He was Nick Colossus’ right hand man, his close friend and second-in-command.
I stopped in a hurry, my foot sliding over the surface of the ground.
The two from the pool stood behind me. I guessed that they'd stepped out from between cars near mine, where they'd been waiting. They had Army Colt automatics in their hands, held carelessly the way men very familiar with guns sometimes hold them; but Flint just held a cigarette between long fingers and looked at me with cold eyes. Those eyes looked more deadly than the .45's.
Flint was his real name, and it fit him. Hard and gray and rough and cold, he was. Under six feet, wiry, quiet. A face that looked as if it had just come out of the freezer, a face that was never going to thaw, with a heavy tight-clamped jaw that always looked like a vise screwed shut, and pale gray eyes as cold and moist as fog. I would have guessed that no matter what Nick might ask him to do, he would do it. Or die trying. And maybe except for Nick himself, they didn't come any tougher.
Flint spat on the ground. There was a short, unpleasant silence. Then he said to me, in a voice like ice breaking up on the river, “Make me happy, Scott. Try something.”
“This isn't very smart, is it, Flint?” I said. “If I made a break you couldn't plug me here—not with fifty guests within earshot.”
He didn't answer me—except indirectly. He looked at Jabber and Whitey and said, as calmly and flatly as if he were telling them to go buy some peaches, “If he acts itchy, shoot him. But plug him low. Nick wants some words with him.”
Well, anybody who didn't believe he meant every word he said just didn't hear him. I believed him. And I would have itched to death before I'd have scratched.
So Nick wanted to talk to me. We had talked before, on several occasions. Never socially, but never with real violence or anger, either. I had in the past gone after one or two of Nick's boys, but I'd never gotten anything on Nick himself, never really banged head-on into him—until today.
The last time I had seen him had been while testifying before that State Senate Committee, during which testimony Nick had merely sat quietly in the audience, staring at me. Maybe Nick wanted to talk to me, but, especially after the recent session at York Park, I didn't want to talk to him at all. In fact, if I could have listed the one hundred things I would least have liked to do right then, talking to Nick Colossus would have been about number three on the list, right after being eaten alive by buzzards, and dipped into a vat of boiling horse manure.
So I said, and meant it, “Okay, Flint. Tell the boys to stop squeezing so hard on those triggers. I'll go along to see Nick quietlike.”
“I've got your word on that, Scott?”
“You've got it”
All the hoods who know me or know about me, including Flint, know that when and if I give them my word I'll keep it. I don't usually give them any words except swear words, but these boys, Whitey especially, might accidentally, really accidentally, bear
down too hard on a trigger. It doesn't make any difference if you die of an accident or a plan, the important thing is that you have lost the world. Besides that, there was the thought of Coral in my mind. Maybe, just maybe, if I was agreeable, and easy-going, I could get out of here in time to make that call.
I didn't move as Jabber took the .38 from my holster and gave it to Flint. Flint pointed delicately with his cigarette toward the main hotel building. The two men put away their guns, and we walked right by the pool which Viper had entered so eagerly and left so dismally, on past the bar. The combo was playing Red River Valley, which was written for guitar and drawl, and it sounded weird from trumpet, clarinet, bass and piano. Or maybe anything would have sounded weird to me then.
We went right into the lobby, up the stairs to the second floor and a long hallway; at its end a curtain billowed inward. A babble of cocktail conversation poured from an open door a few feet away. Halfway down the hall, Flint produced a key and opened an unnumbered door. Behind it was a steep flight of stairs. And that told me, finally, where we were going.
I remembered the rectangular, or boxlike, protrusion perched on top of the Desert Trails’ main building, jutting up from the roof. I'd seen it as I'd started down toward the ranch, and had wondered what it was. It had been just about the right size for a suite of rooms, I now realized—and I couldn't think of a better spot to assure Nick of the privacy he considered essential. Lieutenant Perkins had mentioned to me that Nick had spent a fortune making sure he was safe here, assured of privacy, able to talk freely and without fear of hidden microphones or people.
At the top of that steep flight of stairs Flint knocked, and a voice said, “Come in.”
I knew the voice. Imagine a cast iron throat and steel tonsils and you'll have a rough idea. It was like a truck dumping gravel, or an old Ford crashing into a pile of bricks. After all this time, Nick Colossus and I were going to meet again, face to face. It didn't seem likely that this would be a happy time for me.
Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 9