Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

Drum interrupted her. “It was the diary, wasn’t it, Alexis? Nels Torgesen’s diary?”

  “You’re insane—”

  I said, gently now, as gently as Dr. Frost had spoken, “If it wasn’t the diary, Alexis, you’re in the clear. No harm’s done. If it was, lady, you killed Townsend Holt.”

  She tried to interrupt again, but Drum bored in. He said, “Between the Statler in D.C. and Ragen in Blue Jay that little book went someplace else. But it couldn’t have gone far. Not far at all.” He kept his eyes on her but spoke to me. “Where did she go, Shell?”

  “Only the john in the Statler. Where else? She even took the bag in there with her. That’s when and where it had to happen. Frilly and gauzy things, indeed.”

  Drum looked at Alexis. “Well?” he said.

  I said, “We can search you, or you can tell us about it.” I glanced at the ropes binding her. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  She didn’t fall to pieces or anything like that. Her face just got a little harder. Those blue eyes had always carried a little ice in them; now they merely froze solid.

  “All right,” she said flatly. “It’s—under my girdle.”

  And that was the unkindest cut of all. She wore a girdle.

  Chester Drum

  Alexis licked her lips. She was beautiful. That hadn’t changed. It probably wouldn’t change in death-house denim either. Until they strapped the electrode to her lovely leg.

  “Listen,” she said, staring at Scott, her big eyes gleaming. “There’s still time. I can get away.”

  Scott didn’t say anything.

  Alexis turned to me. “Can’t I?”

  Dr. Frost hadn’t even known Alexis had taken his papers to Washington. I told him now, and he stared at his daughter as if he didn’t know her. Then I fingered the little black leather-covered book. A has-been’s diary. But once Nels Torgesen had been top-man on the Brotherhood totem pole. A lot of what he’d written there, saving it for a rainy day, would match the Frost papers and other stuff which Abbamonte had crammed into his briefcase. The briefcase, the book and the tapes would do Senator Hartsell’s job for him. Naming names. Implicating men all across the country who, until now, were socially above reproach. And, of course, implicating Alexis.

  “I have a lot of money,” she said.

  My answer was the same no answer as Scott’s.

  Sure she had a lot of money. It came out, later, at the hearings. Through Sand she’d picked up the papers of three big trucking firms, one on the Coast and two here in the East. She had close to a million bucks in liquid assets, and several times that in what had been the good will and business potential of the three trucking outfits.

  Alexis turned those lovely eyes on her father. “Daddy,” she said, not the seductive woman now but the small girl turning to her protective parent, “I was worried about you. I hired Shell to find you. I never told anyone. I even denied it to Chet. I thought my husband would—”

  He slapped her face. His own face was a study in tragedy. “I never would have gone to Blue Jay if I didn’t have you to worry about,” he said. “My own daughter. How could I implicate my own daughter? But you even stole my papers for that hoodlum you married.”

  “She implicated herself,” I said, “in Front Royal.”

  “But don’t you see?” Alexis cried desperately. “Ragen had ordered Holt to get the diary at all costs. Torgesen was boasting about how it would give him the whip hand over Ragen and Abbamonte and even my husband. I had to get the diary before Holt did. He ... he got there before I did. We ... struggled.”

  “You hit him with the poker,” I said.

  “And got the diary,” Scott said.

  Dr. Frost turned away. He didn’t want us to see his face.

  Distantly, beyond the wind and the rain and then a part of them and then closer, drowning them out, I heard the wail of a siren. I went to the hatch of the DC-3. In a little while I saw the headlights and the revolving red dome-light of a police cruiser. It pulled up in front of the administration building.

  Scott and I untied Alexis and helped her and Dr. Frost out of the Dakota’s hatch. I felt Alexis’ pliant body against my hands. Her breast leaned on my arm.

  “We could—” she began.

  “Skip it.” I took her elbow in my hand, holding it harder than necessary. The four of us walked across the tarmac. I identified myself to a sergeant of the Maryland State Police. The Senate op ID card impressed him.

  “How’d you get here so fast?” Scott asked.

  “Through all that rain,” I said.

  We were both being sarcastic. We’d had a hard night. But then we smiled sheepishly at each other. I think the Trooper missed the sarcasm entirely.

  “What the hell, we’re glad to see you,” I said.

  “Three punks in a car,” the sergeant said. “Speeding. They skidded into a light pole on Benning Road. Came out with guns in their hands.”

  Another Trooper was busy at the car radio. Pretty soon three more cars and two ambulances came in along the secondary road. Before they arrived, I went down to the cellar and got Hope. They gave her first aid. They flushed Sand and Eric Torgesen and the few hoods that were left out of the administration building. There was some sporadic gunfire far across the tarmac, but the Troopers were here in force now and Ragen’s leaderless goons didn’t have a chance.

  A medic worked over my face and Scott’s. He put a temporary bandage on my right hand and Scott’s side.

  “You two look like you fell into a cement mixer,” he said.

  We didn’t argue with him.

  SHELL SCOTT AND CHESTER DRUM

  Washington, D.C., 8:15 A.M., Monday, December 21

  Well, that’s the way it was when Chet Drum and I met.

  If it ever happened again, I was going to make very sure he was on my side from the beginning. I had been wrong about other people in my time; but never more wrong than about Drum.

  It was right now.

  I felt pretty good. If a man with aches in every bruise and a bullet slash on his left side, and a half-fractured skull can feel pretty good, then I felt fine.

  I was at Washington National Airport again, this time going home. Really going home. Chet and I had said our too-terse good-by, and I’d waded through reporters to get here. The reporters seemed pleased with the story they had, and a British chap mumbled something about our being bloody heroes. Maybe we weren’t heroes, but we were sure bloody.

  I’d left Chet at the Senate Office Building with Senator Blair Hartsell. Dr. Frost was there, too. He had originally decided not to testify because, from the tapes and other information, he had known he would have to involve and hurt Alexis “a little.”

  But with Alexis tagged for murder, and her confession already taken down by a police stenographer, nothing the good doctor might say would make much difference to Alexis. Actually, he had even more reason now for testifying, and when Drum delivered him to the Senator, Frost had indicated he would pour it all out for the Committee. It was going to be hard for him, though. He loved Alexis very much.

  Ragen was in the hospital. From there he’d be taken back to California and prison, if not to the gas chamber at San Quentin. The guns, choking, car banging into him, hadn’t killed him. But he would never walk again. Not on his own legs.

  Before my plane took off, headed for home, I made two calls from the airport to L.A.. The first one was for Tootsie. Big, fat, sweet Tootsie Mellerbam. She had sure earned a call. She just about gushed all over the phone, and seemed delighted not only at the news, but at hearing from me. And suddenly, right in the middle of a sentence, I stopped. Remembering.

  Remembering the help she’d freely given me. Remembering her saying, “If I come up with something good ... what’s in it for me?” smiling all over her face, which was a lot of smile. My saying, as a joke, that I’d take her to see Cesare Lombardi in The Dying Gladiator, and her surprised, serious, “Oh, would you?” The hints since then, like, “Did I come up with something good, Sh
ell?” Hints which had bounced right off my thick skull.

  And I remembered the look on her face that day when some of the hints had bounced—the last hints there were going to be. Remembered thinking she’d felt a small, sharp pain, as if a tooth were hurting her. It hadn’t been a tooth that was hurting. It had been Tootsie.

  I finally finished that sentence I’d stopped, but I’ll never know what it was. The rest of the conversation was just as awkward. But I managed to struggle through another minute of it and hung up. I stared at the phone. Too bad she was so fat.

  But then I made the last call, the big one, the important one—to Kelly Thorn, my Kelly. Her voice came sweetly over the miles to me, cool and soft, a throb in it, a heart-tugging sob in it that finally turned to laughter. Everything was all right now, really all right.

  In my mind I could see her misty green eyes, her fiery red hair and lips, as I said, “Gotta run, honey. Can’t miss this flight.”

  “When will you be here?”

  “Tonight. Actually the jet puts down in Inglewood at five p.m. So—”

  “Wonderful! Then I’ll see you tonight!”

  “Well ... not tonight. Tomorrow, Kelly. A lot of tomorrows.”

  “I like the sound of that, Shell. I like it a lot. But why not tonight?”

  “Sorry, my sweet.” For a moment I thought of that awkward last minute on the phone, just completed. Awkward, but it got the job done.

  “Tomorrow, Kelly,” I said again. “Tonight ... I have a date with Tootsie.”

  Chester Drum

  After Scott left Blair Hartsell’s office next morning, the Senator, needing a shave but looking as happy as I’d ever seen him and sounding twice as happy as that, alternated between reading some of the stuff we’d brought and slapping my back with his hard, heavy hand.

  Earlier, Scott had told me, “I never did like saying good-by.”

  “You’re a pretty good detective,” I said.

  “So are you—for a D.C. man.”

  “Stick around a couple of days? I owe you about a gallon of drinks.”

  “I’ll buy the second gallon. But I’d better take a raincheck. Got to get back to the Coast. Business,” he said, and winked at me.

  “That Kelly’s all right.”

  “So’s Hope.”

  We shook hands. I had to use my left. My right, in splints now, was as swollen as Scott’s jaw—or mine, for that matter.

  Most of the rest, if you follow the papers, you know. The only big one who got away was Nels Torgesen. They didn’t find him for six months and then they did find him in the Dominican Republic at the wrong end of a gambling debt. He’d been shot dead.

  The Hearings, after our night at Haycox Airport, were only a formality. The Hartsell Committee asked Dr. Frost to head a commission to work out the arrangements with the A.F.L-C.I.O. for a new truckers’ union. Alexis’ first murder trial ended in a hung jury. There’ll be another one.

  There was a lot in the papers about the gangland convention at Haycox Airport that ended in a gangland war. Police all over the country have been rounding up small-fry hoods for weeks. The roundup is still going on.

  Hope’s emotional scars are healing. She’s been building an image of her brother far enough removed from the truth so that it won’t hurt her. I’ve seen her a few times.

  Scott?

  Business as usual on the West Coast.

  But I’m a pretty mobile guy with a penchant to hop on the nearest plane to anywhere.

  My cases take me out of the D.C. area and, often, clear out of the country.

  I have a hunch I’ll meet Scott again.

  With both of us sneering in the right direction this time.

  It ought to be fun.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1959 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1987 by Richard S. Prather

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN 978-1-4804-9892-1

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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