The Shell Scott Sampler

by Richard S. Prather

  I shook my head.

  “No matter,” he continued. “I purchased the Da Vinci. It was a large, exquisite drawing, a complete study for the Battle of Anghiari. It was undoubtedly executed in 1504, and must have been Leonardo’s final conception for that magnificent cartoon which, unfortunately, is now lost to us.”

  “Um,” I said. “That one, huh?”

  “Yes. At any rate, my successful bid was two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I had the drawing specially framed and it was delivered here last week. Six days ago to be precise. I hung it there, on the wall.”

  He indicated the now bare wall. I said, “It’s been heisted? Stolen?”

  “Precisely. I want it back. But there are some unusual aspects to this situation. I want the property back not only because it is my property, not only because of the rather considerable sum of money involved—the Da Vinci is, of course, priceless—but because there is something even more important to me than the drawing itself.”

  He gazed at the glowing ash on his small cigar. “I don’t know who stole the Da Vinci. But I do know it must have been taken last night. I flew to San Francisco Tuesday morning and returned early this afternoon. The Da Vinci was on the wall when I left, and on returning I noted its absence. Thus—unless in the unlikely event that it was removed this morning, in broad daylight—the theft occurred during the night just past.”

  I nodded.

  “It is possible the thief has already disposed of the drawing. But I—we—must proceed under the assumption that he has not yet delivered the Da Vinci to its intended purchaser.”

  He paused and looked at me. Expectantly, I thought. I dragged on my cigarette. “The intended purchaser. I suppose you mean because the thing was so well known, at least among collectors, he could hardly sell it to a museum. Or hawk it from door to door like encyclopedias —”

  He appeared pained, but interrupted smoothly, “Yes. Almost surely he had a few, or more likely one, prospective buyer in mind before committing the theft.”

  Madison stood up, walked to the bare wall and looked at the brackets there. With his back to me he continued, “I would like to employ you to accomplish three things. One, recover the Da Vinci. Two, apprehend the thief. Three, and I stress that this is most important, discover who buys, or receives, the Da Vinci from the thief. That is, if indeed the buyer was aware prior to the theft that the theft was going to be committed, you are to reveal to me, but to no one else, his identity.”

  I stubbed out my cigarette; this was getting a little complicated. I opened my mouth, but Madison wasn’t through.

  After a brief pause he went on, “Additionally, this must be accomplished with the utmost … shall I say delicacy? By that I mean, without publicity, certainly without notoriety.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m not exactly notorious for my delicacy —”

  “I am fully aware of that. And I realize I am making this difficult for you. I’ve no idea how you may be able to accomplish what I ask, or if it will be possible at all. That is your problem, Mr. Scott.”

  “Yeah. It’s quite a … yeah.”

  “But that is precisely why I called you in preference to several others. Because of your peculiar skill—or luck—or whatever it may be that has enabled you to achieve results which, on some occasions at least, appeared exceedingly remote in the beginning.” He paused. “I am also aware that at times you employ methods which are … unusual. But this is an unusual affair, and I am interested solely in results. I am not concerned with what methods you may use, only that there be no outcry, no public awareness of your investigation or its results.”

  “Surely the police —”

  “The police do not know of the theft. I do not intend that they shall know. At least not until you have successfully performed the task, or failed in its performance.”

  “Mr. Madison, if a felony has been committed —”

  He swung around. “If a felony has been committed, Mr. Scott, only those responsible, and I, know of it. We, and now you. If I prefer not to make an official complaint about the theft of my own property, that should surely be my prerogative.”

  He paused, but I didn’t say anything. It seemed clear there was more to come.

  He asked me, “Under these circumstances would you like to undertake the task for me?”

  I had to think about it for a minute. It was Madison’s rather odd desire to keep the whole thing so clammed up that bugged me. But finally I said, “OK. It’s your money.”

  “Are you concerned about your fee?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “No. I was thinking about the other angles. My usual fee, and expenses, will be perfectly —”

  “The fee, too, will be somewhat unusual, Mr. Scott. Perhaps I should have mentioned this sooner.” He reached toward a small table near him and rolled ash from his cigar. “If you fail in all particulars, I intend to pay you nothing. If you fail in other particulars but do recover the Da Vinci, I shall pay you five thousand dollars. Plus, of course, your expenses. If, however, you conclude your investigation to my entire satisfaction, in all particulars which I have mentioned, I shall consider the amount legitimately due you no less than ten percent of the price I paid for the Da Vinci.”

  Ten percent made it easy to figure—$28,000. I stood up, walked across the room to G. Raney Madison, and held out my hand.

  “You talk a language I like,” I said. “A foreign language.”

  He shook my hand. “Nothing whatever, you understand, if you botch it.”

  “Please. Let’s not even think about botching it. Well, now that I’m hired, quite possibly for a fee of nothing, can you tell me why all the requirements, the secrecy and such? If I’d lost something worth over a quarter of a million bucks I’d be setting alarm bells off all over town.”

  “Yes, but the alarm did not go off.”

  I started getting it then.

  Madison explained. Cleverly concealed at a point above us in the ceiling was a cell which beamed a thin ray of infrared light—invisible to the human eye—down onto the drawing, or rather onto the spot where the Da Vinci had been. If the drawing were to be removed, the beam would be broken and a circuit closed, not only setting off a noise like noon in an alarm-clock factory, but triggering another signal in the Beverly Hills police station. There had been no alarm.

  This kind of setup wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I had recently installed a somewhat similar beam inside my apartment, aimed at the door, so I could tell if, during my absence, anybody invited himself in. Or herself—I like to be prepared for any emergency. Mine didn’t start gongs gonging, but among other things caused a little metal flag to flop down over the keyhole of the lock on my apartment door.

  “I see,” I said. “So who knew about this rig besides you?”

  “My wife and our son, and a close friend of mine, Mr. James Chance. The control switches are in this room, but I assure you only someone quite familiar with the alarm system could have found and disabled them, for the control itself is similarly guarded.”

  “Uh-huh, pretty good. So which one do you think tipped the thief? Or perhaps was the thief?”

  “Certainly not my wife or son. But…” He sighed. “Neither can I believe it was Jim Chance.” We walked back to our chairs and sat down as he went on, “I have your solemn word you will divulge nothing of what I now say to anyone?”

  “You do.”

  “It is possible a clever thief managed to get in here, and out with the Da Vinci, without prior knowledge of the alarm systems, I suppose. If so, it is beyond my understanding. It is almost but not quite beyond my understanding that Jim—Mr. Chance—provided the thief with that prior knowledge.”

  He chewed at a little piece of skin on his lip. “I must know, one way or the other. However, I must also insist there be no possibility that suspicion arise in any other mind but my own—and of course yours. Unless he proves to be guilty in fact.”

  “OK. I won’t let out a peep.”

  “I require more of you than
—” he smiled for the first time—“not peeping. Should Mr. Chance become aware that you suspect him, he might, ah, lose heart. If he is involved, and does intend to go through with this matter, I want him actually to go through with it. I want to know. I want no doubt in my mind.”

  “You’re making this pretty tough.”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

  “I mean on both of us. If I do this your way, or try to, you’re taking a fat chance of throwing the whole ball game. Including the Da Vinci. Hell, I’d practically have to catch them in the act of trading a bag full of U.S. green stamps for the drawing before you could be sure —”

  “Precisely. Understand this, Mr. Scott. I would prefer that I lose the Da Vinci than that you, by your actions, should so alarm Mr. Chance that he would, shall we say, run for cover. I might then never know if my suspicions are false or well founded.”

  “OK. That means I’ll have to concentrate almost entirely on the thief, assuming he’s somebody else. And I can’t even shake him up too much. Well, I’ll play it by ear. But here’s another thing. You can’t very well give the insurance boys this kind of —”

  “There will be no insurance investigators.”

  I blinked. “You mean the Da Vinci wasn’t covered?”

  “Of course it was.”

  “I don’t get —”

  “As you started to say yourself, I could not place such restrictions upon the insurer and expect to hold them liable if recovery were unsuccessful. Since I prefer not to reveal to anyone else what I have told you tonight, I do not intend to report the Da Vinci as stolen.”

  He paused. “But that’s academic now. Under the terms of the policy, I have already too long withheld notification, since my discovery of the loss. For —” he looked at a slim silver watch on his left wrist—“twenty minutes now, the policy has been invalid.”

  I lit another cigarette and had two big drags from it before speaking. Then I looked at Madison. “You must think a helluva lot of this Chance character.”

  “I do.”

  “Next question. If he’s such a delight, why are you ninety-nine percent convinced he’s a thief? Or the next thing to the thief, at least.”

  “Not quite ninety-nine percent, Mr. Scott. However, Jim and I have been friends for sixteen years. In the beginning we were business associates, he worked for me. I need not go into details, but fourteen years ago he stole a considerable sum of money from me—that is, from my company. I discovered the theft, but did not prosecute him. He returned the money. He straightened out, and over the years our friendship became very close and rewarding. But I was never certain he had forgiven me”—he smiled again—“for forgiving him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “My final point. At the Hall-Warner auction last month there were initially several bidders for the Da Vinci. At the end there remained only Mr. Theodore Finster, Mr. Chance, and myself. Mr. Finster quit at one-ninety, but Jim continued, bidding against me. He stopped at two-seventy, and the Da Vinci was mine for two-eighty.”

  Madison got up, began pacing the floor. “Jim was, even then, exceptionally resentful, it seemed to me. I’ve—well, I’ve always had a good deal more money than he. At any rate, there has been a noticeable coolness between us since then. I haven’t even seen or spoken to him for more than a week. The auction itself, considered not merely as an isolated event but as, perhaps, the climax to many small irritations over the years…” He didn’t finish.

  He didn’t have to. The reasons for his conclusions were Madison’s own business; my business was to do what he wanted done, if possible.

  So I got on with my own business. “Who was in the house last night, Mr. Madison?”

  “No one. That is, only Sterling. Both my wife and George, Junior, my son, went with me to San Francisco.’”

  “Sterling?”

  “My butler.”

  “Ah, the butler. Well?”

  “I don’t quite—oh. Yes, he knows of the alarm system, of course. I nearly forgot about him.”

  “The people who installed it? Unless it was a do-it-yourself job —”

  “Damn,” he said abruptly. “Yes, Ladd Electronics. Mr. Ladd himself supplied the equipment and did the work. The field is hardly narrowing, is it?”

  “It usually doesn’t.”

  We talked a few minutes longer. Finally I said, “Well, I’ll have at it your way, Mr. Madison. It still bothers me, the chance you’re taking with all that money.”

  “I’m not really concerned about the money,” he said casually. “I’m naturally anxious to get the Da Vinci back. But I’ve never been much interested in money.”

  Ha, I thought. He can afford it. Who’s interested in turkey after Thanksgiving? But then I thought, why not? Could be. Some guys don’t even like money. Some guys don’t like women. Some guys are nuts.

  Madison was going on, “It’s Jim Chance I want to know about.”

  “I hope it’s the butler,” I said. When he smiled I added, “I can’t help saying, if this James Chance did break it off in you, or put somebody else up to it, he must be lower than a snake in Death Valley.”

  He blinked. “How odd you should use that expression.” He reached to the table on his left and picked up a small brown book, half hidden behind a heavy marble ashtray. “Before I phoned you I was reading…” He flipped the pages. “This is a translation of an old, old manuscript, Mr. Scott. From Tibet, I believe. Ah, here it is. ‘The serpent loseth not his sting though benumbed with the frost; the tooth of the viper is not broken though the cold closeth his mouth; take pity on his state and he will show thee his spirit; warm him in thy bosom, and he will requite thee with death.’”

  At that moment G. Raney Madison looked all of his fifty-four years, and then some. He said slowly, “I need not, I suppose, tell you that I have been disturbed for some time, and am greatly disturbed now, wondering if I did the right thing those many years ago. It’s a long time not to be sure.”

  We were quiet for a few moments, then I said, “Well, aside from James Chance, there’s jolly Sterling, the butler, whom I’ve already met. I guess. And Ladd. Your wife and son at home?”

  “Yes, would you like to meet them?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think it wise. You may have to call here numerous times.”

  “Do they know what I’m supposed to be doing, why I’m here?”

  “No, and I would prefer, Mr. Scott, that you say nothing to them about it.”

  I smiled sadly. Pretty quick he was going to tell me to conduct a dynamic investigation, only not to do anything. I’d be like the guy who invented a perpetual-motion machine and couldn’t get it started.

  “They’re in the library. We can tell them you dropped in for a glass of sherry.”

  “For a what?”

  But he was leading the way out of his den. Into the hallway, past about five doors, around the foot of that staircase, by a half-dozen more rooms—did I say it was not a small house?—and finally through a pair of ten-foot-high carved-oak doors into an octagonal room lined on six sides with about a billion books.

  Mrs. Madison and George, Jr., were no more than fifty feet away, seated on a long, burnt-orange divan. We started toward them. I had lots of time to think of what I’d say. Man, I thought, if a guy forgot where he left his book, he’d be too pooped to read it when he found it. Then G. Raney Madison was performing the introductions, and I shook hands with Mrs. Madison and their son.

  He was younger than I’d expected, possibly not even twenty-one yet, with a look of a lad just recovering from tuberculosis. He was thin-faced, pale, soft, as if made of milk on the verge of clabbering. His hair was very long, fluffy, over his ears and on his neck.

  About that hair: we’ve apparently entered an era in which a good chunk of the young and not-so-young male population is doing its damndest to look girlish—and succeeding—while the girls are cutting their hair short, wearing unfeminine garb, and egging the girlish boys on. There are
male trios whose voiceless singers mouth the top teenage hits, all of which sound like the same song played in different keys, while wearing dirty sports shirts and velvet stretch pants and doing little bumps on the high notes and grinds the rest of the tune. Any day now they’ll appear wearing topless bikinis and pasties.

  Well, you can take it or leave it—I’ll leave it—but it’s happening, and a lot of otherwise sensible people are joining the movement. George Raney Madison, Jr., appeared to have joined up. It’s important, I suppose, to belong; but I figure it’s even more important what you belong to. Not that George Junior looked like a girl; he didn’t. But he didn’t look a hell of a lot like a dashing young man, either.

  Mrs. Madison looked like a girl, all right; or, rather, a woman. An exceptionally good-looking woman. She was no spring chicken—I guessed she was five years younger than her husband—but she still had a good figure, and a very lovely face.

  The three of us mumbled the usual inanities while Mr. Madison poured sherry from a cut-glass decanter. Ordinarily I would no more have drunk sherry at that hour than I would have stood on my head in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard during the rush hour, but this, I suppose, was to be my excuse for being here at all. According to G. Raney, at least.

  There was a rather thick silence.

  Then Mrs. Madison smiled sweetly and said, “You haven’t been here before, have you, Mr. Scott?”

  “No, ma’am. I just dropped in for a glass…”

  I couldn’t say it.

  “Fact is,” I said smoothly, “I just dropped in to chew the fat with old G.”

  Gee, it sounded good. It even felt good. Maybe it would never happen again, but here I was trading gay repartee with fifty, or maybe even a hundred, million dollars.

  Well, you could have heard a gnat’s wing drop off and thud on the floor. The silence lasted a while.

  Gulp, down went my sherry.

  The silence lasted until G. Raney Madison, Jr., said something. Just one word. But it was not a lovely word. No, not at all lovely. Actually, it was a word I never use, even when talking to myself. It’s OK for school kids, for collegiate post-adolescents, say, and boy singers who wear their hair long and do little bumps and grinds. But not for me.