Then I went over and took a look at the other guy. When I rolled him onto his back, the coat of his dark suit fell open. Two red spots had bloomed on his white shirt, merging into a single wet stain shaped like an irregular figure eight. One of my slugs had hit his breastbone, squarely in the middle; the other was less than an inch to the right. I hadn't ever done any better—or luckier—shooting. Either one of the bullets would have torn up his heart.
I knew him. I knew the big ape, too, for that matter. But before even trying to figure out what all of this might mean, I used the phone under the Cad's dash to call the police.
Then I sat down on the ground, and shook a little.
* * * *
Before the police arrived from the Valley Division, I had checked both the temporarily and the permanently unconscious men, finding no more guns or anything else of importance. But I knew them. The machine gunner was a hood called Snag, presumably because he had one eyetooth that stuck straight out as if he were eating a small unicorn. It had given him a permanently sneering expression in life. And now in death.
The other guy was also a hoodlum gun-and-muscle man—which I could most likely have figured out, even if I hadn't known him. His name was Booby. At least, that's what his buddies on the turf called him. One story was that his real name was Robert and he was called Bobby, and because he wasn't so bright you could see him glowing on a moonless midnight, Bobby had become Booby.
The other story, which I liked better, was that when the woman who was later to give him birth discovered she was pregnant, she had said to her hubby, either with a verbal stumble or unconscious precognition, “Darling, we're going to have a booby.” Whereupon hubby—acting not quite like those movie and TV hubbies who, on learning of the imminent blessed event, start rolling their eyes as if to say “How clever of you, darling!”—had said, “I oughta bust you right inna mouth!” And proceeded to bust her right inna mouth.
Whatever was true, however Booby got his start, he grew up to be a lip-thinker, which is a guy who moves his lips when he thinks. And he didn't wiggle them much at that. Which meant this party hadn't been Booby's idea; he hadn't any ideas. And Snag wasn't exactly the mastermind type.
I happened to know, incidentally, that Booby was still on probation, and Snag had just waltzed out of San Quentin after serving nine whole months of a one-to-ten felony rap. That's one to ten years. Just think; he could have been kept up there in Q for a little longer. I'll go along with some of the do-gooders’ moist-eyed compassion for guys who have “gone wrong,” but when those snuffle-noses start saying the boys are merely sick and should be given a large dose of loving-kindness instead of a long—repeat, long—jolt behind bars, they and I part company with absolutely amazing rapidity. If these bastards had been in the slammer, where they'd both been before and should have been right now, they wouldn't have been trying to kill me. And on that point there was no doubt. They had sure as hell been trying to kill me.
Well, somebody had planned this operation with reasonable care. And if not Snag or Booby, maybe the third man? The one who'd taken a fast powder? Not likely. The planners usually let other people do their dirty work, and stay out of the line of fire themselves. Besides, I thought I might know that third man as well. Might. When I'd spotted him I'd been too busy to study his expression intently. But he'd been small, thin, with a sharp-featured face, and I had got a look at him from fifteen yards or so away.
I wasn't sure, but I thought he was a man named Antonio Anguinacio, known as Tony Anguish. If so, we'd locked horns before. More important, I knew the man he worked for. He didn't just work for him, either; he was the hood's specialist in murder—murder plain and murder fancy, the artful suicide, the fatal accident, everything from a shotgun blast to poison to an icepick six inches deep in an eardrum.
The citizen he worked for was a man named Joe Rice—not the name he was born with but, like Tony's, the Anglicized version of something less pronounceable. And Joe Rice was the local boss of the Cosa Nostra, the L.A. capo. In other words, the big cheese hereabouts of the Mafia.
Mafia. What the hell? I thought.
Not that Rice and I were strangers. We sure weren't friends, but we weren't strangers, either. We had tangled, obliquely. During my years in L.A., I had twice become involved in cases which eventuated in the sending of minor mobsters to the clink, said mobsters having been, allegedly, employed by Joe Rice. Rice was never tied in legally, not in court, since knowing a thing to be true and having legal proof of its truth are two different things—especially in courtrooms presided over by certain tenderhearted judges. But I knew Rice had been the boss man in both cases. So did the police.
It wasn't enough. Not nearly. To get a man like Rice, you have to have an airtight, leakproof, foolproof case. If not, the bleeding hearts often set up such a wail that the case is dismissed and a few witnesses surprisingly develop holes in their skulls; or the defendant winds up out on probation, shooting at you—like Snag and Booby. That's another thing: I wouldn't object to the bleeding hearts so much if they used their own blood.
Anyhow, one of those cases had been an extortion job. Half a dozen high-salaried Hollywood people were being shaken down; some underlings wound up in San Quentin but the overling wasn't touched. The other case was narcotics smuggling. I knew damned well Rice had been the prime mover in the operation; everybody knew that fourteen kilos of nearly pure heroin, all of it H from Red China—easily identified because we'd seen so much of it—had appeared in Los Angeles and that half of it had been cut and pushed. Again, underlings went in but Rice stayed out.
All of that, however, had been in the past. What might I have done to stir Rice up lately?
The only thing I was working on now was the simple—at least simple on the surface—death of Charley White. I couldn't figure out where a Mafia boss fit into that. And my last couple of cases hadn't got me wandering in Rice's territory. At least not so far as I knew.
Well, maybe when I talked to Johnny Troy he could shed some light in the darkness. I figured I'd just keep going through the motions and see what happened. And try to stay alive while doing it.
Then I heard the sirens.
CHAPTER SIX
It was nearly 4 p.m. before I finished with the police. There was the gathering up of the bodies and ejected cartridges and guns and such, and bringing Booby back from unconsciousness. Once he got back, it wasn't much different from when he'd been gone. Naturally he didn't have anything helpful to say.
All he knew was, “I only done what Snag told me.” Tony? He didn't know any Tony. Tony Anguish? Nobody's got a name like that. Nah, he wasn't going to shoot Scott, he just wanted to hit him. He liked to hit white-haired guys.
That's the way it went. After which Snag went to the morgue, Booby to a private cell, and I, after stopping in at the Valley Division, drove on into downtown L.A. and trotted up to the third floor of the Police Building.
Central Homicide is on the third floor, room 314, and in the squad room I had a cup of coffee while I talked to Sam for a few minutes. Sam is the familiar name for one of the best cops who ever pounded a beat in L.A., an officer who worked out of Robbery, Narcotics, Bunco-Fugitive, Homicide, and rose to be what he is now: Phil Samson, Captain of the L.A. Central Homicide Division, and my best friend in town.
Sam is big, solid, hard-boiled, efficient, and quietly dedicated to his job. An honest man, and a fair man. He never slugged a whining hoodlum around, but he never gave one what is called a “break,” either. Instead he gave them justice, exactly what they'd earned; he figured they should pay the price for what they'd bought. But about all he would ever say was, “If a guy's a crook he ought to be in the can. If he doesn't want to be in the can, he shouldn't be a crook.” I've heard the opposite viewpoint, in ten thousand words of Harvardese, but I'll still buy Sam's.
He was chewing one of his big black unlighted cigars. He is always chewing a big black unlighted cigar. I seldom see them lit because when he lights one and the stink begins,
I leave. Now he rubbed a big hand over his iron-gray hair, shifted the cigar from one side of his wide mouth to the other, and said, “We'll get nothing out of Maxim, Shell. His kind can go for days without even asking where the john is."
Maxim—Robert Maxim. Booby. “Even when he does talk it's no help,” I said. “That guy can't even understand the conversation when he's talking to himself. Anyway, the guy I want is Tony."
“Yeah.” Sam bit into his cigar, his big jaw wiggling. “If he's the one you saw, he won't likely be out in the open. And you're not sure, anyway, Shell."
“That's the hell of it. All I really remember is that the guy was very unfriendly. But I'd give eight to five it was Tony. He's very unfriendly."
“Well, we've got a local and an APB out on Anguinacio. Maybe he'll turn up."
So far there wasn't anything to tie Booby or Snag in with Joe Rice. Nothing new had developed in connection with Charley White's death. But I'd told my tale; so I finished my coffee and left to see Johnny Troy.
I was going to be more than an hour late. Maybe he wouldn't let me in.
He didn't. But somebody else did. I almost wished it hadn't happened.
* * * *
The Royalcrest was on Hollywood Boulevard, west of La Brea, a luxurious eight-story apartment hotel in a quiet residential district with lots of trees and big green lawns, but still near the heart of Hollywood.
The lobby was spacious and cool, comfortably furnished with soft, modern-looking divans and chairs. I used a house phone to call the Troy suite and somebody told me to come on up. I went up to the top in the elevator, found the door, and knocked.
Whoever let me in, it sure wasn't Johnny Troy. At first I thought it was a girl, but not my kind of girl. I hope to shout it wasn't my kind of girl; it was a boy. He opened the door, gave me a casual wave, and without a word went back into the dimly lighted room. He wore a flowing white shirt with extremely long collars and a V front, tight black stretch pants—you got it: stretch pants—and dark cloth slippers.
As I followed him inside, little question marks tumbling about among my little gray cells, he threw himself dramatically down on a poufy red-satin-covered pillow near a guy in T-shirt, blue jeans, and the kind of big brown high-topped shoes I call clodhoppers. The rugged guy badly needed a shave. They looked like Beauty and the Beast, and I guess you know who was Beauty, don't you?
A Johnny Troy record was playing softly. It was one I didn't have—or recognize. Something about “loved with a love that was more than love....” It was a little scratchy.
I was in a big room like the lobby of a small hotel in the high-rent district. A lot of pillows were on the floor, and half a dozen people were on the pillows. A beautiful low divan covered in metallic gold fabric of some kind was across the room on my right; three fellows sat on it, and near the divan, leaning against the rough black lava-rock face of a huge wood-burning fireplace in which a log now glowed and crackled, was Johnny Troy.
There were perhaps a dozen other people in the room, some of them pretty good-sized, and a few clad in jazzy garb, but Troy made the rest of them look like colorless midgets. It wasn't that he wore outlandish clothing, either; he had on a blue coat, shirt and tie, cream-colored trousers. It was simply that the guy really did have something, a special presence, a tangible warmth, as if he generated an electricity peculiarly his own. There are some people who apparently have little if anything to distinguish them, but when they walk into a crowded room all eyes turn to them as if drawn by a magnet.
Johnny Troy had that kind of magnetism, but he had the outstanding physical attributes as well. First of all, he was six feet, four inches tall, and handsome as a Greek devil. His golden-blond hair stood out like a spot of light against the black rock of the fireplace, and as he spoke to the group on the couch he emphasized a point with a stabbing motion of a pipe in his hand, a movement as graceful as the lunge of a fencer.
He turned, saw me, and immediately strode over the thick carpet toward me. He held out his hand, smiling, and said, “Mr. Scott?” I nodded as we shook hands, and he went on, “Ulysses called and said you'd be by. I expected you sooner or I'd have met you at the door myself."
“Sorry, I'm late, Mr. Troy. I had a ... little trouble on the road."
“Oh, it's quite all right. Hope you don't mind the gang.” He waved a hand, indicating the people present. He started to go on, then paused briefly. “By the way,” he said, “some of them are rather ... unconventional. Don't let it throw you off stride."
He grinned at me and I grinned back. “It won't."
“Good. We're all friends. Most of them are Sebastian clients. I imagine you know some of them, at least by reputation."
I had recognized several familiar faces or reputations. On the gold divan was Gary Baron, the local TV announcer and part-time writer. He was easiest to recognize because of the white streak in his black hair. His eyes were cold, but apparently out of them he saw all sorts of hot stuff nobody else could see, which he duly reported nightly on his ten-minute “Top of the News” segment of the hour-long ten-o'clock news. The white streak made him look very dashing, which he was; he was always dashing about the world, reporting “from the thick of things,” which often got pretty thick, I thought.
Next to him was thin, pale, poetic-looking Ronald Langor, who had written the season's most highly acclaimed novel, now in its eighteenth week on The New York Times' best-seller list, which meant it was selling in twenty-seven bookstores, or something like that. I'm not especially literary.
Langor was the kind of writer you always call an author, and there had been so much bubbly sound and fury about his book. Lie Down and Die, that I'd read the thing myself—all the way through, too, despite the fact that its first line was: “Pursued in the cacophony of silent twilight by my incestuous desire for Roric, I knew the shock of unreality when first I saw Libida.” It turned out that Libida was a seventy-six-year-old ex-prostitute from whom the teen-age hero learned about sex. He didn't like it. And—as a perceptive critic wrote about another writer—by the time he got through with it, nobody else liked it, either.
The guy who'd let me in was some kind of poet, though I couldn't remember his name, and the clodhopper type was a famous sculptor. I'd seen a photo of his last bit of sculpting, which consisted of half an automobile axle, a rag doll, and a broken toilet bowl. It got some kind of prize, but I can't recall what it was. Or what for.
Johnny Troy said, “I need another drink, Mr. Scott. Then I shall place myself entirely at your disposal. Join me? Vodka? Scotch? Bourbon? There's—"
“Bourbon's fine, with water. Thanks."
Troy steered me across the room and picked up an empty glass from the flat stone hearth before the crackling fire. Then we walked to a bar in one corner. The mumble of conversation stopped for a few seconds, and all eyes followed me. It wasn't my irresistible magnetism, either; the looks were cool, almost hostile. Well, maybe it figured. I didn't belong. Of course, I didn't want to join, either.
With our glasses full, Troy said, almost apologetically, “Usually there aren't so many people here, Mr. Scott. But since...” He paused, then went ahead with it. “Since Charley died, I haven't wanted to be alone. It's been ... empty. I'm sure you understand."
He didn't wait for my comment, went on, “You want to ask me about Charley, is that right?"
“Right. Hope you don't mind."
He smiled a bit tightly and answered, “Frankly, I do. I don't want to talk about it or even think about it. But as Ulysses said to me, it's done. I can't pretend it didn't happen.” He swallowed two or three fingers of his drink, a tall vodka-and-orange-juice. It struck me he'd had quite a bit already. “Well, what's first?"
“I'd like to take a quick look at Charley's suite, if you don't mind. And the balcony he fell from."
“Follow me,” he said, and led the way out of the living room, through a bedroom, down a hallway to a door which he unlocked. We went through into the extension of the hallway. Charley's suit
e was the same as Troy's except that the plan was reversed. Where Troy's living room looked up Hollywood Boulevard with the city's lights on the left, Charley's was on the opposite end of the building, facing the same direction, but with the Hollywood Hills looming close on the right.
In the bedroom were several framed photographs, about a dozen of girls, very pretty and shapely girls, one of Charley himself, several of him with Johnny Troy. In one of the latter he was standing with Troy in front of a nightclub, Troy's arm resting over his shoulders. Charley had been only five feet, six inches tall and in the photo he was literally dwarfed by big Johnny Troy; more, Charley wasn't at all handsome—in fact, he had the round, fleshy face and sorrowful eyes of a clown—but Judging by the pictures of the gals in here it was a good way to look.
But I wondered how he'd felt inside, being constantly with tall, handsome, dynamic, supremely popular Troy. Wondered, as I had when talking earlier today with Sylvia White, if a little boil of resentment might have come to a head in him.
We walked through the apartment, into the empty, quiet living room, through sliding doors onto a balcony at its side, which faced west. The sun was dropping behind the horizon, and purple shadows were sliding over the low hills; it was colder now, and the sky looked like grease.
“Here's where it happened,” Troy said quietly. “They found him down there."
We stood leaning against the black wrought-iron rail, and I looked down. Down eight floors to the sidewalk.
The rail hit me just above my belt. And I'm six-two. I suppose a man eight inches shorter might manage to fall over the rail; but it seemed to me it would take some doing.
“Anything else you want to see here, Mr. Scott?"
“No, but I've some questions."
“Let's go back to my place.” He turned, walked abruptly into the living room.
“Be better if we stayed here, Mr. Troy. I'd much rather talk to you in private."
The Trojan Hearse (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 6