by Roy Huggins
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MEET
STUART BAILEY . . .
The private eye with the Ivy-League look and the dock-walloper’s punch, who operates out of that gilt-edged borderland between Los Angeles and Beverly Hills known as the Sunset Strip.
His profession may not be the oldest in the world, but it’s certainly among the most exciting.
Here is the same wry, engaging character who’s the hero of the popular TV show, tangling with assorted zany characters, and solving three supposedly perfect crimes.
77 SUNSET STRIP
by Roy Huggins
Published by
DELL PUBLISHING CO, INC.
750 Third Avenue
New York 17, N. Y.
Copyright, 1958, by Roy Huggins
All rights reserved.
Portions of this work have appeared in The Saturday Evening
Post under the titles “Appointment with Fear” and “Now You
See It,” copyright, 1946, by The Curtis Publishing Company,
and in Esquire under the title “Death and the Skylark,” copy-
right, 1952, by Esquire, Inc.
Designed and produced by
Western Printing & Lithographing Company
This is a work of fiction and all characters and events in
the story are fictional, and any resemblance to real
persons is purely coincidental.
First printing—February, 1959
Printed in U.S.A.
ONE
Sunset Strip is a body of County territory entirely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, a mile and a half of relentlessly contemporary architecture housing restaurants, bistros, Hollywood agents, and shops where the sell is as soft as a snowflake and just as cold.
There are also a few office buildings, and number 77 is one of them. I have an office there that I can’t really afford, but I keep it anyway on the happy thought that the address is good for business and the view is good for my soul.
It wasn’t yet dusk, but the lights were beginning to come on forlornly along Wilshire to the south, and the room was already darkening, which suited my mood just fine. I sat and listened to the muted sounds of the custom-built traffic on Sunset and wondered why the sense of depression wouldn’t lift. I had just finished a job that had taken too long and paid too little, but I knew that wasn’t it. It had also been dull, and dullness was an uncommon thing in my trade. Not that murder and mayhem are common, but if a private investigator keeps an open mind and avoids drafts he can learn an awful lot about his fellow man. And as long as he holds on to compassion for dear life and holds off cynicism for the same reason, it’s almost as good a way to earn a living as teaching school, and not half as dangerous.
The room was in almost total darkness by the time the fine odor of whisky and charcoaled steaks coming from Dino’s across the breezeway suggested that I wasn’t too depressed to be hungry. I got up and made my way through the dark to the outer door.
In the lobby a short, tweedy man was just leaving the building. He turned as he saw me locking my door, and walked toward me with a puzzled frown.
“Are you Bailey?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t see any lights and decided you weren’t in. My name’s Glen Callister.”
Inside the office once again I turned on the lamp, put Mr. Callister in the leather customer’s chair, sat at my desk and leaned forward to let him study my sincere, firm-jawed but sympathetic face.
“I figured you’d be an older man,” he said, and offered me a large, obviously expensive cigar. “Have a stogie.”
“No thanks,” I said politely.
“I like a man who smokes a cigar,” Callister said, putting it between his teeth. “Proves he’s a man.”
“My grandmother smoked cigars,” I said, not quite as politely.
There was a quiet moment, then Callister broke into a barrel-chested laugh. “I think you’ll do fine,” he chortled.
“Do what fine?”
With a surprised air he asked, “Didn’t you get my letter?”
Lying on the desk were the letters I’d picked up when I came in an hour earlier. I hadn’t bothered to look at them. Callister’s was there all right, delivered two days ago.
“Shall I read it?” I asked. “Or would you—”
“Read it,” he cut in.
I read it. It was written in the manner of a businessman ordering office equipment. It said that he was making a trip to Honolulu on his schooner, the Skylark, with himself as captain, and that he expected to be killed on the voyage. The murder would be attempted either by his wife or his first mate, he wasn’t sure which. He had recently discovered that they were “carrying on illicitly behind my back.” He wanted to know if I would come along and keep an eye on Madden, the first mate. If so, I was to come down and see him the next day.
I looked up and Callister asked, “Don’t you believe in reading your mail?”
“Been out of town on a job.”
“Here’s a chance to get out again. Want it?”
There didn’t seem to be any doubt about it. Callister had meant every word he’d written.
“Well,” I managed, “I would like to ask a question or two.”
“Don’t blame you.”
“The first one’s pretty obvious. If you know one of them’s going to try to kill you on this trip, why make it?”
“I never ran away from a fight in my life,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You say one of them intends to kill you. Don’t you know which one?”
“I don’t think I’ll answer that one yet.”
I let that pass. “If your first mate intends to kill you, think having me aboard will stop him?”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you want the job? You’ll have to be free to leave Friday.”
“I’m not sure I made myself clear.”
“You made yourself clear in exactly the way I hoped you would. No one could guarantee anything on a job like this. You want it? You’ll be passed off as a business associate. We don’t talk business on the Skylark, so you won’t have to worry about that.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to make the trip, but will your first mate be able to sail the boat after he rubs you out?”
Callister looked at me blankly for about ten seconds. Then he suddenly exploded m another laugh that came from the belt up. He laughed painfully for a full thirty seconds.
He stood up and, still fighting a little for breath, pulled a folded check from his pocket and laid it on the desk. It was a cashier’s check for five hundred dollars, made out to cash—a handsome and discreet retainer.
He was getting ready to laugh again. “Be there Friday morning at nine,” he managed, slapping me on the shoulder. “The Skylark, Los Angeles Yacht Anchorage —we’re going to have a fine trip.”
He didn’t wait for any further word from me, but turned and walked out of the office. I sat there feeling a little as if the whole thing had never happened.
I spent a couple of days telling myself it was something I didn’t want to be involved in—even if it did amount to a well-paid holiday in Hawaii. But by Thursday night nothing else had turned up but the bill for the office rent. Then I pointed out with telling logic that if the old boy’s fears had any foundation, my being along could make all the difference. I decided to pack a warbag, cash the check, and take an ocean voyage.
TWO
If it hadn’t been for the yachts tied up at its long row of slips, the Los An
geles Yacht Anchorage would have looked like an abandoned fish hatchery. But the yachts were there, and as I went on down the floating boardwalk looking for the Skylark I began to wonder if it wasn’t time for me to raise my rates.
“The Skylark’s a fore-and-aft schooner,” the man at the lunchroom had told me. Which didn’t really help me very much. I wouldn’t have recognized a fore-and-aft schooner if one had sailed through my living room.
But about halfway down the walk I slowed to look at a boat that seemed somehow different from the rest, set low and long in the water, with slender lines and two high masts, and woodwork that appeared to have taken the polish of loving hands for a century or so. High on the bow was the nameplate: Skylark.
I stepped down onto the narrower walk that ran alongside the ship and went on to the boarding ladder. As I climbed aboard, a man’s head poked up from the companionway and a pair of moody eyes gave me a quick sizing up.
“Mr. Bailey?” he asked, politely enough, and I was grateful to him for asking it—for all I knew Callister had supplied me with a new name to go with my status as a business associate.
I told him I was Stuart Bailey and he said he was Owen Madden and came on up to shake my hand. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and no hat. The wind had been doing just the right thing with his dark, curly hair, giving it that careless, ungroomed look that is a sheer deadfall for a certain kind of woman. He was an inch taller than I, as lean as an antelope, and wearing a tan that you can get only by mixing plenty of salt and wind with your ultraviolet. He looked about twenty-eight.
He took me below and opened a door at the right of the steps, showing me a room with two bunks, a wide chest of drawers, and not much else. “We bunk in here. The head’s just across the passage. Shower, too.”
I put my stuff on the floor and he offered to show me the rest of the boat.
The master’s cabin was at the stern, a larger room with its own shower. The Callisters had already moved in—there were some shirts and denims on top of a cabinet, not yet put away; beside them several pipes, a ball of white string, and a book on fishing.
Next we went to the lounge, which Madden called the “gingerbread hatch.” It was a large room filled with sun from a center skylight and the odor of fine scotch from a built-in bar. There were couches in soft beige on two sides of the room, a built-in refrigerator paneled in Philippine mahogany, a fireplace with a polished copper chimney, and a square grand piano attached firmly to one of the bulkheads.
The galley was next. It had a big old-fashioned wood stove in it, a large refrigerator, and space for one person—if he didn’t breathe deeply.
I looked skeptically at the stove and asked, “Who chops the wood for it? And where?”
He grinned pleasantly and said, “Burns Diesel oil,” and opened one of the doors off the galley to a small room with a bed covered by a lacy spread.
“This is where I usually hang my sack,” he said, “but I guess Callister thought I’d better bunk with you instead of with his daughter.”
“The tyrant,” I said. “I didn’t know she was coming this trip.”
“She always comes,” he said noncommittally, and opened another door in the galley bulkhead to show me a gloomy, disordered space filled with canned goods. “Crew’s quarters,” he said. “When we carry a crew, that is. There’s another hatch up there in case of emergencies.”
We walked back through the lounge and up the companionway.
“Are we carrying a crew this trip?” I asked.
“Nope. We seldom do. She’s a sweet boat, the Skylark. Bold and sea-kindly. Built fifty years ago, when they really built ’em.”
On deck, he stepped into the cockpit and, without wasting words, got down to the business of explaining what would be expected of me. He showed me how to operate what he called the “Iron Mike,” an electric pilot that did the actual work for the man on watch, and explained that each of us would do a trick at the wheel four hours, then be off for twelve or sixteen, depending on how it worked out. Callister, he said, insisted on having the 4 A.M. to 8 A.M. trick, so he could sit in his fishing seat and try to reel in an albacore or barracuda for the table.
“Ever taken a trip this long on a schooner?”
“The closest I’ve ever been to a schooner was at Joe’s Bar and Grill.”
“You’ll enjoy the trip,” he said. “I been hanging around boats for ten years—since I was fifteen—and I never saw a boat as sweet as this.”
“You’re pretty young to have first mate’s papers.”
“That’s a laugh. The skipper calls me that, and treats me like that. But I’m a seagoing bum, period.”
He went back to the briefing then, and he was showing me how to lash the wheel when a girl came aboard. I saw her before he did; she walked along the float with a long clean stride, and she was wearing white shorts and the air of easy self-confidence that you get with a figure like hers. When she came over the side Madden looked up and greeted her casually.
She smiled and said, “Hi. Everybody aboard?”
“Just me and Mr. Bailey here. This is Betty Callister, Mr. Bailey—the skipper’s daughter.”
She looked at me with a puzzled frown and said, “You’re . . . I don’t understand. Dad said he’d known you in business for over twenty years.” She paused and added dryly, “You must have started young.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought Madden looked at me sharply. I said, “The business used to belong to my father.”
“Well, I think it was nasty of Dad not to prepare me for you. Where’s Mrs. Bailey?”
“Did he tell you I was married?”
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
“Then it’s safe to tell you,” I grinned. “I’m not.”
“Maybe not so safe, either. A bachelor aboard. This is absolutely revolutionary.”
“Oh? What category do you put me in?” Owen asked lightly.
Betty threw him a quizzical glance and drawled, “Now you don’t want me to answer that, do you, Owen?”
And with that she turned and went below, leaving us standing there with nothing to say.
The morning was gone, the sun was high arid hot, and the Callisters still hadn’t put in an appearance. So I walked up to the Anchorage Cafe and had some lunch at a pale green table overlooking the Navy Yard across the way. I was just finishing the third cup of coffee and wondering if I should take time for another when Betty Callister came in, glanced around, and walked over.
She sat down without being asked, and the proprietor came around from behind the counter, saying, “Salutations, Miss Callister. What can I get you?”
“Just some tea, Harry.”
“And I’ll have another coffee,” I said.
“Maybe I oughta just put the urn on the table,” Harry said. “This is your fifth, ain’t it?”
Betty shuddered-“How much of that stuff do you drink a day?”
“Never more than twenty cups.”
“Doesn’t it keep you awake? Twenty cups?”
“Well, it helps.”
Betty laughed generously at that “Your father and mother arrive yet?” I asked, after Harry had served us.
“Don’t let Eilene hear you call her that. You’ll walk the plank. No, they haven’t.”
I waited for her to get started. She certainly hadn’t come up for tea—she hadn’t even bothered to pour any into the cup.
After a while, she said abruptly, “What’s this all about, Mr. Bailey?”
“What?”
“This trip.”
“How do you mean?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Several days ago Dad said an old business acquaintance of his would be going along—a man he’d known for twenty years or more. That was why I couldn’t go this time, he told me.”
She was waiting for me, but I didn’t say anything. “Then you turn up. I’ll give you ten dollars for every year you’re over thirty.”
“Want to pay me the twenty bucks now, ma’am,
or later?”
She grimaced and said, “I’m serious. Dad always takes me on trips, no matter what. This time I had to threaten to do something horrible before he’d agree to let me go. Why? If you’re an old business acquaintance, I’m Minnie Mouse.”
“Well, Minnie, my relationship with your father is just what he said—business. We expect to work out a very important deal on this trip.”
“You sound like you’re telling the truth.”
“I am.”
She looked at me almost searchingly for a long moment, then seemed to relax. “Then—we might be seeing a lot of you—Dad, I mean.”
“That depends on how the deal goes,” I said, and almost choked on it.
“What’s your first name?”
“Stuart.”
“Mind if I call you that?”
“If we have to be formal.”
“Well, mine’s Betty, Stuart, and I think we should be getting back.”
“Shall we take your tea with us?”
She laughed and said, “Never touch the stuff.”
She had a nice laugh, easy and soft, and it did wonderful things to her face, putting a dimple into one cheek, deepening its warmth and color, and darkening the already dark blue eyes. Anyway, that’s how it hit me as I stood there looking at her and hunting vaguely through my pockets for some change.
THREE
At three o’clock I was in my cabin putting things away. The door was closed because one of the things I had to put away was my .38 automatic and I was having trouble finding a likely spot for it. I finally settled for one of my shoes, and was just pushing a sock down over it when the Callisters arrived.
I stood up quickly, listening to the sound of their steps on the companionway. I heard a soft voice with just a touch of the lately-acquired in the accent saying, “Come on down, Owen. We’re having a few martinis first.”
A moment later Callister’s rumbling baritone echoed from the lounge with “Where’s Bailey? Hasn’t Bailey . . .?” Apparently, Betty broke into the question with the news that I was aboard and in my cabin, because five seconds later there was a brisk knock on the door.