“No, I didn't. Something puzzles me, Nick. You had Flint tell Feldspen on the phone that there was thirteen million tied up in unreleased films. The only way it comes out that way is including Coral James’ two pictures—but she wasn't paying off.”
“No, she wasn't. But I still had some dirt on her; she wouldn't pay to hush it, but maybe H. J. would.—Besides, thirteen million sounds a lot better than five million especially when I was asking for a cool million.” He chuckled. “I mean, a hot million.”
Then he stopped chuckling, looked at the phone in his hand and slammed it violently back in the cradle, anger suddenly darkening his thick face. “What in the hell's with that dame? She off the switchboard again? Can't get a thing. Phone's dead or something.”
I swallowed. “What did you have on Valentine, Nick?”
He kept on scowling, but he said, “Not such a hell of a big thing. Just enough to get him started—but after that, of course he was a blackmailer. And I had that on him. I planned this around Valentine, Scott. First I learned from one of Flint's friends that Johnny Palomino was on M.” I remembered Palomino's pinpoint pupils. “That gave me the idea. I figured out that Valentine would probably be the best bet to dig up dirt on other stars. So I really did a complete check on Valentine. The only thing I came up with was that he'd done a year and a day for clouting a car when he was twenty-one. But it scared him.” He shrugged. “Besides which I scared him another way; said I'd kill him if he didn't do the job for me. Or Flint told him for me. Flint did all the contact work—even phoning H. J. Feldspen—except Viper picked up the cash.” Nick paused, brow furrowed in thought for a moment. “Valentine almost broke it off in me at that,” he said.
“Yeah, he set it up pretty well,” I said, “considering the fact that he decided to kill himself sort of on the spur of the moment, and thought he'd be dead in a few minutes. Actually, Nick, he made only one mistake.”
“What was that?” Nick looked puzzled.
“He didn't die. If he had died when he took those pills, his confession would have been mailed to the D.A., you'd have been named as the would-be blackmailer of Magna—none of this would have happened.”
“Yeah. But it did happen.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “Too bad about Val in a way. I made him pull some tricks, but he wasn't such a bad head.” He grinned. “On the other hand, he was not Prince Val.”
“No. But, then, you're not Saint Nick, either.”
He shook his head. “Man, you're a cool one. And you're going to get a lot cooler.” Nick stood up suddenly, those hard bright eyes boring into mine. He transferred my gun to his left hand and picked up my sap from the desk top. “Too bad about you, too, in a way, Scott.”
It looked to me as if the talk was over. That was all right. It was fine, now. The rest of it could come out later—and I had a hunch that in just a minute Nick wouldn't care much what he said. Right now I wanted out of here and on my way to Coral.
Nick said, still glaring at me, “You should never have tapped me with this, pal.” He wiggled the sap. It looked shrunken in his big fist. “Maybe you better turn your back. You won't want to watch this.”
He walked around his desk and started toward me. Probably he meant to beat my skull in, or brains out, and then yell out the door for one or more of his boys, since something was wrong with his phone.
I let him get just around the desk and then I said, “Hold it there, Nick.”
He looked at me, startled. There was a new sound in my voice, and it got through to him. “What?” he said.
“Just stand there, friend. I'm going to tell you the facts of life.”
His face flushed. He didn't like my attitude a bit, or my tone, obviously. He started to take another step.
“Hold it, Nick,” I told him. He stopped. I said, “Think back to what we've just said, friend. Do you think maybe you spilled enough to wrap you up in Quentin? I mean, if some cops and numerous other people were listening, could that maybe get you a one-way trip to Q?”
It really puzzled him. “What the hell —”
“Answer me, Nick. I'm serious. Pretty soon you'll know how serious.”
He actually appeared to think back over what he might have said. Then he grinned. “Maybe if I'd said it all in one of the ‘I’ rooms at the Police Building in L.A., I'd have a twinge of worry. But I don't get you. Nobody's listening.”
“That might mean something if you were in your office, Nick.”
“In my office?” He looked around. “Where do you think we are. You out of your skull, Scott?”
“We're both in Hollywood, Nick. On a sound stage at Magna Studios.” I grinned at him. “These walls are just thin plywood, paneled. You could push them over yourself. In fact, there's a big boom outside right now, with a hook on cables that will lift all four walls twenty feet in the air if I give a yell.”
“What?” He thought I'd gone crazy. “Boom?”
“You know, a winch pulling a cable attached to these walls. This whole place is practically portable. It's just a set. I'll bet there's twenty or thirty people right outside, including a few police officers, listening to everything we say.”
Suddenly Nick laughed. “I've got to admire you, Scott. Really I do. I've heard that you could talk yourself out of eight dungeons in a row, but not this time, pal. And not even you can expect me to believe anything as silly as that.”
“Take a good look friend. Take a good look at this office of yours.”
He turned those hard blue eyes on me. The muscles in his jaw were starting to work. He looked at the walls, the pictures on them, then he stepped to his desk. Something about it was wrong. When he looked back at me there was an expression I had never seen in those stainless-steel eyes before. It was fear. Just a trace, and just beginning, but it was there, in the eyes of Nick Colossus.
I said, “I told you how I got into your suite of rooms at the Desert Trails. What I didn't tell you was that after I sapped you, I carried you out back and to a helicopter there, and flew you to Hollywood. We're in Sound Stage Three at Magna right now. Nick, it's simple—you went to sleep at the Desert Trails and woke up at Magna.”
It was beginning to get to him that maybe I wasn't kidding.
At least not about all of it. And he was starting to look like a man shot full of novocaine.
I said, “This is just a duplicate of your office. Don't you suppose an expert movie-production crew could build something like this in twenty-four hours? I can understand your doubt, Nick. Even Feldspen himself thought I was a little crazy until I reminded him that he had destroyed Atlantis and recreated ancient Rome, among other things. So take your time, Nick. It'll get to you.”
He stared at me for about a minute. After that he stepped behind his desk and jerked open its middle drawer. Then, frantically, he slammed the rest of the drawers open and shut.
When he looked up at me again his face was ashen. “But ... but...” He was sputtering. Nick had never, so far as I knew, sputtered before. Calm always-in-command Nick wasn't in command any more. “But ... it's impossible.”
“Not impossible, killer. Not even difficult. In fact, the only difficult thing was thinking of it in the first place. Only the idea was tough. Nick—after that, it was just a matter of careful planning, and spending a lot of money. Fortunately the money was available—from the man you tried to tap for a million dollars. From the President of Magna—and here we are at Magna. Nice, huh, Nick? Almost poetic?”
He was shaking his head. “You couldn't have.... How ... you're lying, you lousy —”
“Let me lay it out for you fast, Nick. The dimensions of the room, structure, all that part of it we got from the original architect, the man who designed Desert Trails for you—Andrew T. Jameson of Las Vegas. He was glad to cooperate with Harry Feldspen, boss of Magna Studios. As was Dee Mintino—she's the interior decorator who did the hotel for you, including your office, the couch and desk and chairs. Feldspen simply got duplicates of the items and ‘aged’ them a
bit. The pictures on the wall? And the gold-coin ashtray and desk calendar? I took them from your office after I sapped you. I brought them along when I brought you. Get it through your head, we're in Hollywood. You're on a Magna sound stage right now.”
He still didn't, or wouldn't, believe me. Somehow, some way, I was trying to trick him. I leaned forward, “Nick, old pal,” I said softly, “when this really hits you, it's going to very nearly kill you. You've just confessed to half the crimes in your history, including murder and murder again—complete with details only the killer himself could have known about—to members of the Los Angeles and Hollywood police departments. I don't know how many are outside in the sound stage there, right outside that door now, but I know there'll be more than one or two.”
He was still shaking his head. He was finally starting to believe it all. So I broke off the last of it in him then, at what really did seem the psychological moment. “And one more thing, friend. I so admired the beautiful way you framed me for your murder of Lou Rio, that perfect frame which got—not the police so much—but all of Rio's men hot after me, that I made sure at least a couple of the late Lou Rio's boys would be present outside tonight.” I paused and grinned at him while he actually got a little paler under that bulletproof skin, then I went on, “I wanted them to hear you tell me just why and how you killed Lou.”
It was quiet then. Nick knew I'd told him the truth. The real proof was just coming up, but now he believed me without it. He looked like a man being hit on the head with a giant invisible hammer, like a man whose pants had fallen down on the boulevard, like a man whose brain had just rolled out of his ear.
I raised my voice and yelled, “Lift it up, Harry.”
I had been telling Nick the truth about the winch ready to lift the “office” walls up into the air above us, but there wasn't any sudden whisking away of the walls and miraculous transformation of this room into no more cluttered floor space. There wasn't even anything especially dramatic about it. The walls slowly started rising; I could hear the powered winch turn, and slowly the walls were raised up into the air a foot, then two.
The really dramatic thing wasn't the movement, but a complete absence of movement—Nick's absence of movement. He stood frozen, rigid, staring, looking as if he were going to go right out through his eye sockets. He didn't move as the walls went up high above us and lights flooded the entire interior of the sound stage around us now.
I got a pretty good shock myself. I had expected to see perhaps twenty people out in the room. There must have been two hundred or more. I didn't have any idea where they'd all come from. There were many more uniforms than I'd expected to see, too. Some of the uniformed men were only a few feet from us, on the other side of where the walls had been. But they didn't move forward just yet. Obviously Nick was in no shape to resist them.
My gun still dangled from his fingers. I stepped to his side and took it from him, put it into my holster. He didn't resist. Nick looked pretty bad. His jowls actually sagged, as if some of the vital force had already gone out of him. And probably it had, because finally, maybe for the first time in his life, he knew he was licked, really licked. This one was the big entry in the books; this one was the big X after his name, the red ink, the line drawn through Nick Colossus.
He moved then, reaching out as if grasping for something on which to steady himself, but nothing was there. His hand pawed aimlessly, almost comically, at the air—but there wasn't really anything comic about it. Not even Nick, blackmailer, thief, murderer, not even Nick was comic while he died a little.
He seemed to shrink, to shrivel, to become less bulky, less of a man. But there was still a little of the old Nick Colossus left, the tough, grinning, gravel-voiced Nick. Just a little. He turned and looked at me and put on half a grin and said to me, “You sure put the blocks to me, pal.” He paused, swallowing, and said, “I—got to hand it to you.”
Then policemen were all around us. I saw Rawlins from Homicide downtown. He said to Nick, “You shot Lou Rio yourself, huh?”
Nick nodded. There wasn't much point in holding back anything now, and obviously he didn't mean to. “Yeah.” He straightened himself slightly and squared his shoulders. “Yeah, but he was no loss. No talent anyway, not Rio. A bum with lots of know-who, that's all. Sure, I burned him. Next question.”
He was trying to carry it off with a flair, do it big and he almost made it. He did fairly well, considering the fact that he must have been thinking of the gas chamber up at San Quentin.
Well, it was over. This part of it, anyway. I found Rawlins, and gave him the four-page confession Valentine had written; I'd left it in the helicopter during the night's flying about. Rawlins told me that the whole session just ended had been recorded, besides which a police reporter had written down the salient bits of Nick's unwitting confession in Nick's own words, and Nick had already signed it. Nick had, as the phrase goes, had it.
Several reporters and newscasters and some photographers were present, a number of whom I knew, and all of them were trying to talk to me at once—it was just beginning to dawn upon me what a big thing this really was, with Nick Colossus involved, and Harry Feldspen, and Magna studios, and blackmail of budding starlets and budded stars, and this windup here at Magna—and it seemed that half of the newsmen and newsgals were congratulating me and the other half were trying to get me to say something for the record.
But I had to tell them all that I would talk to them later, then Rawlins and I got Nick to a phone. A real, usable phone this time, and I had him use it—to call the Desert Trails.
I said to him, “Ask for Flint, Nick. Tell him and Shortcake that I'll be there in an hour or so—for Coral.”
He nodded, dumbly.
I went on, “Tell Flint to pass the word around. She'd better be all right, unharmed in any way—and all your boys are to stay out of my way and my hair. Will they do it?”
He filled his enormous chest with air. “They'll do whatever I tell them to do.” Nick was getting over much of his shock; but he wouldn't beat this rap and he knew it. “I'll tell them,” he said, and managed another grin. “What have I got to lose?”
He spoke to Flint. Apparently Flint argued—naturally enough, considering the fact that I had just been at Desert Trails causing great pandemonium, and that Nick was ordering him to let me walk around living—but Nick said, “Shut up. Do what I tell you, Flint. And knock off the questions.” He listened, said “Okay,” and slammed the phone down into the cradle.
He looked at me. “Flint said you shot hell out of the place already. And he wanted to know where I was. I'm damned if I was going to tell him. But he'll go along with everything the way you want it.”
“She's there then? She's all right.”
“Yeah.”
“They haven't hurt her?”
“No, they haven't hurt her.”
I left him with half a dozen officers.
There was a small hitch—from Lieutenant Rawlins. At first he felt that I shouldn't leave, that I couldn't just walk out in the middle of the act so to speak. There were a lot of people down at the Police Building who wanted to talk to me. Just routine, now, but it had to be done.
I said, “And it can be done later, friend. Say tomorrow at noon in the Police Building cafeteria. I'll bring the pink tights.”
“Pink...” He looked absolutely stricken, remembering. “...tights.”
“Yeah. For your coochie dance. Isn't that what you said, Rawlins? Coochie?”
And then I was on my way—immediately after I promised Rawlins that between here and the Desert Trails I would forget any promise he might ever have made to me.
Harry Feldspen stood by the helicopter as I prepared to get into it for the third time tonight. I had thanked him profusely, and he had returned my thanks for saving him a million dollars, among other things, and said there would be a grossly fat check for me in the mail tomorrow.
I said to him, “Harry, tell me. Where did all those people come from?”
“Everybody who worked on the ‘Colossus’ set wanted to see the results of their work.” He hesitated, then smiled. “In fact, I insisted. You see, Shell, if word had gotten out about what we were doing, and had reached Mr. Colossus...”
That would have blown up the party before it started. I hadn't even thought of it. I thanked Harry again and he said, “Besides those people, after the first officers arrived several more officers came. Just to witness the proceedings, I believe. Some of them were off duty, I know. And you asked me to get two or three of Mr. Rio's men here, but at least a dozen showed up.” He smiled again, and then got off the closest thing to a gag I'd ever heard him say. “If I had just known how popular this show was going to be, I could have sold tickets.”
And on that line, I left him. Malcolm Waters looked at me with a kind of weary tolerance, and lifted the helicopter into the air. This time I enjoyed the smooth soaring toward the sky, the dwindling of the buildings and streets and lot, the emergence of the brilliance and sparkling beauty of the city below us as we got farther and farther from it.
That is, I enjoyed it until I remembered one question I hadn't asked Nick. About that towel found in the Oasis, and the stain on it. The bloodstain.
Nobody had yet explained the blood.
Chapter Twenty
This time we landed right in front of the hotel, near the end of the bar and smack before the Desert Trails entrance. There were quite a number of people near the bar and pool, and they ogled us strenuously as we landed. But I didn't see a single one of the red and white uniforms, nor any faces recognizable as employees of Nick's.
I hadn't thought about it before, but once I'd managed to get away with their boss, the remaining hoodlums would quite naturally have begun feeling somewhat ill at ease. If that could happen to the boss, no telling what might happen to the underlings. Maybe this was a new kind of raid; maybe a jet-propelled jail would drop out of the sky and surround them all. The law was already interested in most of them, anyway; and with what Nick could spill, if ever he began spilling, their continued freedom must have seemed increasingly unlikely.
Slab Happy (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 22