The Kubla Khan Caper (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  “What did you tell her about Sardis?”

  “Merely what I’ve already told you, Mr. Scott. That he was a friend of mine, a wealthy and highly respected member of the community, active in the background of many civic affairs and such.”

  “She seemed pretty interested, huh?”

  “Well . . . looking back on it, I suppose she did. I thought little of it at the time.”

  “I wonder who she was so interested in. Neyra, or Jerry Vail, or Mr. Sardis?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it until now.”

  “One other thing, Mr. Monaco. If I’m going to ask sensible questions about Sardis and Miss Jax, I’ll damn near have to tell a few people why I’m asking. At least, tell those persons who’ve probably already been approached by the law, or who may be.”

  He frowned. “Well, only those. And don’t tell anyone I’ve employed you. We must be as discreet as it is possible to be.”

  “I’ll keep it to a minimum.”

  “Fine.” He glanced at his watch again. “I regret that I haven’t more time to spend with you, Mr. Scott. But I could hardly have anticipated these peculiar drains on my time and energy. Have you anything else to report?”

  “Nothing important at the moment.”

  “All right, then. I’ll be with Mr. Leaf, and a small party, in the Sabre Room for the next half hour or so. After that I’m not sure, but I’ll be somewhere in the hotel or on the grounds. You can page me if I’m not immediately available.”

  “Right. I’ve some things to do myself.”

  Looking over his shoulder, I saw a compact and shapely lass with a mobile walk and fluid curves, with dark velvety skin and midnight-black hair—Lyssa Weldon, strolling away from the swimming pool where I had lately been lolling, and wherein Carol Shearing had so recently splashed.

  Lyssa, strolling—alone.

  No great big Bull steaming at her side.

  “And I’d better get busy,” I added, “while the time’s ripe.”

  13

  Lyssa was in costume now, and looked even better than she had in the Seraglio. It was the standard costume—the same one Carol Shearing and other contestants were wearing—but it sure didn’t look standard on Lyssa.

  She heard my feet thumping on the grass when I was a few feet away, and turned.

  Smiling brightly, she said, in apparent pleasure, “Well, Shell, love. I wondered when I’d see you again.”

  “Bet you knew it wouldn’t be long, I’ll bet. Well, I can see you’re still not wearing a gir—”

  “Lyssa, baby.”

  That wasn’t me. I pushed my head around until I was staring straight at Bull Harper’s nose. It was a pretty tough-looking organ, too. I would hate, I thought, even to get hit with that nose. It was big and black and muscular and, right now, possessed of flaring nostrils. No doubt about it, that was a dangerous nose.

  “You again, huh?” he rumbled. “What you after this time?”

  Bull was holding a highball glass in each hand—which probably explained where he’d been—and he was in a costume which almost certainly would have damaged a weak-eyed viewer’s retinas.

  He wore a brief jacket which exposed most of his chest and corded stomach and left his huge arms bare, the kind of thing which is open in the middle and curves down toward the sides, and which looks even better on women. It was, I assumed, the approximate shade of visual purple, though I found it difficult to gaze directly upon it; and he also wore voluminous and baggy pink-velvet pants which delivered a vaguely Oriental wallop. Around his waist was a wide leather belt from which descended an enormous, curved and thick-bladed scimitar, the blade inserted into a flashing jeweled sheath. Bull wore a turban, too, but it was green with a red jewel in it, and not nearly so dashing as mine. He looked no larger than those guys whose faces are carved on mountains, and no less resplendent than the treasure hoard of the Incas.

  “Waow,” I said involuntarily. “You stand by the tracks, you’ll stop trains.”

  “What you after this time?” he repeated menacingly. “Same thing, prob’ly.”

  I stepped back a pace, then stuck out my hand. “Well, Bull Harper,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you. We didn’t really meet, you know. No, nobody introduced us. I’m Shell Scott, and—”

  “Yeah. Lyssa told me who you are. But I still don’t know.”

  “Why, I’m a—one of the judges of the beauty contest—”

  “Ho-ho!” he said. “She didn’t tell me that.”

  “You two stop it,” Lyssa said. She moved up closer to us and went on, “I’m going to properly introduce you. Bull, this is my friend Shell Scott. Shell, this is Bull Harper, a real good friend.”

  He was “real good” and I was just a friend. Well, he’d known her longer than I had. Anyhow, it was a start. Bull kind of reluctantly stuck out his big paw. Mine was already stuck out there. We shook hands.

  “Hey,” I said, “that hurt!”

  “Bull, I’ll kick you in the eyes!”

  “Lyssa—”

  Then to me she said, “Don’t mind Bull, Shell. He’s really not as dumb as he acts. He just doesn’t make a very good first impression. Not with men. But he hasn’t got a mean bone in his head.”

  “Lyssa, I told you,” Bull said with an injured air. “I told you, quit saying that about bones in my head.”

  They went at it for a little while. It seemed to be a beautiful relationship. When there was a lull in the stormy dialogue I said, “Bull, I suppose the police have told you about Mr. Sardis.”

  He lost interest in arguing with Lyssa, turned his attention to me. “Told me what about him?”

  I shrugged. “Well, if you don’t know, then they must not have told you.” I turned casually and took a step away from them, but Bull was now interested. He was so interested he grabbed my arm and apparently tried to squeeze all the juice out of it, after the fashion of a guy squashing the insides from a grapefruit.

  “Peel your paw off my arm,” I said.

  He didn’t peel it off.

  “OK,” I said, and planted my feet, dropped my other arm. And then relaxed. He’d unwound his fingers and let go just before I got set to pop him.

  “Bull,” I told him sincerely, “I’ve no desire for us to massacre each other. But if you latch onto me again I’ll have to pop you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not overly concerned. “What about the boss? Told me what?”

  “I thought by now the police would have told you Mr. Sardis is dead.”

  His black eyes didn’t even blink. “So they told me. What got you so interested?”

  It was a good question. But I said, “He was a good friend of Mr. Monaco’s.”

  “So?”

  “So Monaco would like to know if the sheriff has any suspects. Does he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” I said, as agreeably as I could, “You killed him, huh?”

  “No.”

  He was not a very long-winded character. I said, “Any idea who might have?”

  “No.”

  “I heard one of the contestants, a gal named Jeanne Jax, was asking a lot of questions about Mr. Sardis, among others. She get to you?”

  “I don’t think it’s none of your business. No, I don’t think it’s none of your business at all.”

  I liked him better short-winded. Well, I was thinking, if I was going to get lots of information from this character, it could be I’d have to try a different tack.

  But right then Lyssa cried softly, “Oh!” and dropped her drink.

  She bent down and grabbed it right away, then looked at the empty glass and said, “Well, dam. Bull, be a sweetie and get me another drink.”

  “Huh,” he said. He wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about leaving her there alone with me, me and a couple hundred other people in the area, but after a moment’s hesitation he took the
glass and loped off.

  “Was that an accident?” I asked Lyssa.

  “No. I could tell you were getting Bull mad. And he’s no fun at all when he gets mad.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You want to know something from Bull, you’d better ask me, Shell. And let me ask Bull.”

  “You make a lot of sense.”

  “Why are you so interested, anyway?”

  “Do you mind if we don’t go into that, Lyssa? Just say I’m plenty interested—and Bull is probably on his way back here already.”

  “Probably. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, earlier, you said that you told Jeanne Jax if She wanted info about Sardis to ask Bull Harper. Did she talk to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you find out?”

  She nodded.

  “Find out what she asked him, also what he told her, OK?”

  “All right.” She paused, looking up at me from the hot-chocolate eyes. “I can understand the questions about Mr. Sardis. But why all the concentration on Jeanne?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow morning sometime. OK?”

  “Sure. Are you afraid of Bull, Shell?”

  “Not really.”

  She looked at me, wondering. So I added, “I’m not afraid of noon traffic on the Hollywood freeway, either. But I would prefer not to jaywalk through it unless I had to get to the other side.”

  She might-have started to smile. I would never know, because Bull Harper skidded up and she said to him, “Oh, Bull, you’ve spilled half the drink already,” and he bellowed, “So what? You spilled the whole damn thing, didn’t you?” and she said, “Don’t you yell at me. Bull Harper,” and then they yelled at each other for a while, as I quietly stole away.

  They sure had lots of fun, I thought. Maybe they were nuts about each other. Maybe they were nuts. And maybe, if things went on the way they were going, Bull and I were going to kill each other.

  By 10 p.m. three other girls and one inebriated photographer had fallen into the swimming pool. Nobody took photos of the photographer. By then I had talked to another dozen of the beauty contestants, and found that Jeanne Jax had talked to four of them herself.

  One of them she’d asked, Thursday morning after breakfast, about Neyra Vail. The others she’d spoken to later that morning, and had asked them questions about the now-late Ephrim. There hadn’t been anything incriminating in the questions themselves. The first gal told Jeanne that all she knew about Neyra was that she was Sardis’ daughter, and she didn’t know anything about Sar-dis himself except he was some kind of local bigshot with lots of loot. Two of the other girls hadn’t known what Jeanne was talking about, but the third one had seen Ephrim Sardis once and gave Jeanne a little more info. None of it struck me as exceptionally important, however. Not for a while.

  That last gal was a short, shapely, cheer-leader type named Lula, a soft-eyed little sweetie possibly twenty years old, and by the time I got around to her she’d put away, I guessed, about a full pint of something pretty illegal. After the preliminaries, when she figured out what it was I’d been asking, she said, “No, all Jeanne says to me is do I know this Sardis. This Ephrim Sardis. Like I said, I’d seen the fat old grampaw once, so I told her.”

  “Told her what?”

  “He was an old grampaw, fat, like two or three hundred pounds, and he looked like he was from Tibet or someplace way out, and he was rich as hell. Rich as hell. I should be so rich. A guy that rich, I could almost get married to a guy that rich.”

  “That’s what you told Miss Jax?”

  “Well, like that. I didn’t say to her I’d marry a guy that rich. I said to her, a guy that rich, even if he did weigh two or three hundred pounds, he—”

  “She ask you anything else—”

  “—looked like he was stuffed with money—”

  “What else did Miss Jax ask you about him?”

  “Oh, practically anything. Where he lived, what he did, if he was in business with anybody, like that—things I didn’t know, so naturally I couldn’t tell her.”

  “Where’d you meet Mr. Sardis, Lula?”

  “Didn’t actually meet him. It was at a party in Hollywood last month. Some of us girls who’d already become finalers—finalists in contests around, we were there. And I saw this fat old money man with his daughter and her guy, her husband.”

  “Jerry Vail?”

  “Him, and the swell owns this place, the thin one.”

  “Ormand Monaco.”

  “Ormand Monaco. Yes. Wouldn’t that name crack you? Ormand. And Monaco on top of it. Boy, it cracks me, like—”

  “They were all together?”

  “That’s what I said. Isn’t that what I said?”

  “Ephrim Sardis, his daughter Neyra, and Neyra’s husband, Jerry Vail. And Ormand Monaco.”

  “Yes, yes, yes—”

  “I’m glad we got that straight. Who else was there?”

  “Just lots of other girls. And some Hollywood people. Mostly movie people. They were all going to give us screen tests, and like that—”

  “Simon Leaf?”

  “Him, yes. And some other producers, and movie people. Movie people. And television. And Tibby Mannly, the big movie star. Boy is he cute, he cracks me, he’s cuter than pink stretch pants, I could bite his earlobes off—”

  “What were they all doing there?”

  “I don’t know. How would I know? It was just a party. Who asks?”

  “Was Miss Jax at the party?”

  “No, not her.”

  “When was she talking to you yesterday?”

  “That was around noon. A little before.”

  “During lunch?”

  “I didn’t see her when we all ate lunch. It was before that. She came to my room.”

  “Uh-huh. Did she ask you about anybody else? Neyra, Jerry Vail, Ormand—”

  “Just him. Sardis.”

  “That was the only one?”

  “That was the only one.”

  I got away from her with my earlobes intact; actually, they were never in any real danger. For good or ill, I don’t look the least little bit like Tibby Mannly. Then, still sort of smiling, and musing about the enthusiasms of extreme youth, and the extremely puky appearance of Tibby Mannly, I headed back toward the pool area.

  It was a pretty good walk from where I’d found Lula, since she’d been in the company of a gangling youth with thin eyebrows and a hairdo even prettier than Lula’s, behind a cage of parakeets, macaws, parrots and various noisy fowl, which cage was approximately a hundred yards from the hotel. Since there were all kinds of shaded nooks and creepy paths and bosky lanes on the approximately one hundred acres of the Kubla Khan’s grounds, I asked them why they had chosen a spot behind the bird cage. Believe it or not, they couldn’t tell me.

  At any rate, I took the shortest route toward the hotel, that route being along one of the creepy paths and amid the bosky lanes and such. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken that route. I should have gone along the most brightly lighted stretch of grass jumping up and down and yelling. But it had been literally hours since I’d been shot at, and I wasn’t even sure the guy had especially wanted to kill me, that is to kill me, Shell Scott; I’d been thinking the guy could have been merely a killer trying to get away from the scene of his kill; and I, being on the scene, merely happened to be a natural target.

  So I was wrong about everything.

  I think I almost knew what was going to happen five seconds before it happened.

  But “almost” is one of those sad words. “Almost” is never good enough.

  I’d noted earlier that much of the Khan’s landscaping was borrowed from a jungle. There were plenty of bushy trees, and bordering the path I walked upon were big and little shrubs, plenty of lush green cover. A few palms rose high into the night sky, and every once in a while the leaf of a banana tree or the thicker leaf of a bird of paradise brushed my trousers leg or arm. />
  I’d covered about half the distance to the hotel, and if it hadn’t been for the noise and my memory, I could have felt I was alone in a well-watered desert oasis. It was barely possible to see light from the swimming pool ahead, but I could still hear that gang of birds behind me going scrawwck, and creeawwch, and peep, and I heard something else, too. Maybe it was because of all the Jungle noises, but to me it sounded like the soft pad of a jungle cat slinking along behind me.

  But it was just before that, five seconds before that sound, when I “almost” knew what was going to happen. I didn’t see anything, or hear anything except the nutty birds, but I sure as hell felt something. Maybe it was thought; maybe it was sound perceptible only beneath my level of consciousness; maybe it was the tiniest stirring of air nearby.

  Whatever it was, a faint chill, faint but suddenly there, raced over my skin. Hairs moved like spiders’ legs on the back of my neck. There was a slight quick tightening of my solar plexus. I wasn’t alarmed; whatever I felt wasn’t enough to cause alarm. But I reached for my gun, just to feel it, the way a man will unconsciously reach out and pat his dog.

  With my hand halfway to my shoulder holster I remembered: I wasn’t wearing the clamshell holster tonight. And I dropped my arm, reached into my trousers pocket and let my fingers close around the hard, reassuring butt of the Colt Special.

  Then, that soft padding sound behind me.

  I remember thinking, very much like an idiot, “Tiger? Hell, it can’t be a tiger, but it sure can’t be a bird, either,” and that was all.

  The soft padding stopped and there was the obvious solid thump of a foot slapping the ground behind me and that grunt—that grunt, the small half-swallowed sound a man makes when he gathers his muscles and his mental strength to swing a sap or club or gun and hit you as hard as possible on the head.

  Somewhere between the thump and that grunt I started to duck, and I almost made it. I was yanking the Colt from my pocket, and starting to drop a shoulder and turn—then, splendor, pain, the stunning shock, the sudden grinding agony and incredible sound like no other sound, and I was falling.

  I not only knew I’d been hit, I knew as well as I’d ever known anything that unless I could stop it I was going to be hit again, and again if necessary until my skull was smashed or split open and I was dead—and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t get a message to arms or legs, couldn’t turn or roll. I’d felt my knees hit earth and then my right shoulder slam the ground, but I was stuck there like a man fixed in time. My right arm lay almost full length, flat along the ground, gun still gripped in the fingers. But I couldn’t raise the gun. The arm was dead.