A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “I’m his new psychiatrist,” I said, and she laughed, and then she lost interest in us as the dark heads bobbed and the white teeth flashed all around her. She lapped up male adulation the way a thirsty kitten laps up milk.

  Pretty soon Spinner told me, “Gonna hit the sack. It’s no use. You’ll keep an eye on her?”

  I said that was why I was here, and he lurched across the lounge toward the companionway that led to the Hellas de luxe staterooms. A while later Carole Frazer got up and stretched like a cat, every muscle of her lithe body getting into the act. The Italians and Greeks went pop-eyed, watching. She patted the nearest dark head, said, “Down, boy,” and, “Arrivederci” and went in the direction her husband had gone. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was going to find him. After all, her leading man Philip Stanley was aboard too.

  Finishing my ouzo, I went in search of the purser’s office. It was located in the first class entrance foyer. A kid in a white uniform sat there reading a letter and sighing.

  “What’s the number of Carole Frazer’s stateroom?” I asked him.

  “Kyros,” he said smoothly, “the next time you see the lady, why not ask her?”

  He smiled. I smiled and studied half a dozen travel brochures spread out on the counter. I picked one of them up. In English, French and Italian it described the delights of a motor trip that could be made from Athens to Delphi and back in a day.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Depending on whether you wish a chauffeur or a self-drive car, kyros—”

  “No. I mean the brochure.”

  “That is free, kyros, compliments of the Adriatic Line.”

  I pocketed the folder and dropped a fifty drachma note on the counter. “Fifty?” I said. “That seems fair enough.”

  “But I just—” he began, and then his eyes narrowed and his lips just missed smiling. “De Luxe Three, starboard side,” he said without moving his mouth, and returned to his letter.

  The starboard de luxe companionway ended at a flight of metal stairs going up. At the top was a door and beyond that a narrow deck above the boat-deck, with three doors numbered one, two and three spaced evenly along it. There were wide windows rather than portholes, all of them curtained and two of them dark. Faint light seeped through the third. It was Carole Frazer’s cabin.

  Looking at it, I liked the setup. Door and window both outside, on this deck. If I spent the night here, nobody could reach Carole Frazer without me knowing it. I listened to the throb of the ship’s engines and looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one. I sat down between the door and the window of Carole Frazer’s stateroom. The bulk of the Magnum .44 in its clam-shell rig under my left arm was uncomfortable. I shifted the holster around a little, but that didn’t help. No one has ever invented a shoulder holster that is comfortable, just as no one has ever invented any other way of wearing a revolver the size of a Magnum and hiding it when what else you are wearing is a light-weight seersucker suit.

  For about an hour I kept a silent vigil. Nobody screamed, no Vomero swiftly came stalking up stairs, nothing happened except that the Hellas covered another twenty-five miles of Adriatic Sea.

  And then I heard voices. The only thing that wasn’t de luxe about the half-dozen de luxe state rooms aboard the Hellas was the sound-proofing. Well, you couldn’t have everything.

  “Awake?” a man asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Like another drink?”

  “My head’s spinning right now.”

  “Just one more? With me?”

  “All right.”

  Silence while Philip Stanley and Carole Frazer had a post-nightcap nightcap. Like any private dick, I’d been called a peeper more than once. Like any private dick, I’d never liked it. I’d done my share of peeping—or anyway listening—but never outside a woman’s bedroom. The one kind of work I don’t do is divorce work. But if the hired gun was going to make his move, it figured to be during the night. “Peeper,” I muttered sourly under my breath, and remained where I was.

  “Oh, Phil,” Carole Frazer said, and her voice was more throaty than it had been in the lounge. “When you do that—”

  “What’s wrong, don’t you like it?”

  “You know I do. I love it. But I’m so—drunky. Head going around and ’round.”

  Another silence. Then he laughed, and she laughed and said: “Phil, you amaze me.” She called him a brief Anglo-Saxon word that is usually not a term of endearment, but her voice made it sound endearing. Then she laughed again, deep in her throat, and then she said, “You keep this up, you’re going to screw yourself right into the wall,” and then after that there was silence for a long time.

  I must have half-dozed. I blinked suddenly and realized that the night had grown cooler and I had grown stiff from sitting in one position for so long. I glanced at the luminous dial of my watch. After three o’clock. It would be dawn before long, and still no sign of the Vomero swifty.

  There was a faint click, and the stateroom door opened enough for Philip Stanley to poke his head out and take a quick look to left and right. The one way he didn’t look was down, where I was sitting. His head popped back inside, and the door shut softly. I remained where I was.

  The door opened again. This time Stanley came out. He was carrying a suitcase, and from the way his shoulder slumped it looked heavy. He took it to the rail, set it down and placed a coil of rope on top of it. I froze, absolutely still. If he turned right on his way back to the stateroom he would see me. If he turned left, he wouldn’t.

  He turned left and went inside again. What the hell was he up to?

  In a few seconds he reappeared with Carole Frazer cradled in his arms. He was fully dressed. She wasn’t dressed any way at all. She mumbled against his ear. He set her down, gently, next to the suitcase. For a while longer I sat there like someone who had walked in on the middle of a movie and didn’t know what the hell was happening on the screen or why. Stanley tied the rope to the handle of the suitcase, uncoiled the rest of it, took two turns around the suitcase, passed the rope through the handle once more, took four or five turns around Carole Frazer’s body under the arms, passed the rope through the handle a third time and knotted it.

  Carole Frazer mumbled again, faintly complaining. She was as drunk as Bacchus. He ignored her until she said, “It’s cold out here. I’m cold. What’s the matter with you? I don’t—”

  He clipped her once, behind the left ear, with his fist, just as I started to get up in a hurry. I had the Magnum in my hand.

  “Need some help with your package?” I said. “Kind of heavy for one man to get over the rail.”

  The gun meant nothing to him. He cried out once, hoarsely, and came for me. The big Magnum could have ripped a hole the size of a saucer in him, but I didn’t fire. When you get trigger happy you’re not long for my line of work, despite any evidence to the contrary on TV.

  Stanley lunged as a bull lunges, horns and head down, going for the muleta. I took his head in chancery under my arm, and his weight slammed us both against the wall. I jarred him loose. I was stiff from my long vigil, and he was fighting for his life. What I’d seen was attempted murder, and he knew it. He butted me. My teeth clicked and my head jolted the wall a second time. He stepped back, almost gracefully, and kicked me in the gut. Right around there I began to wish I had used the gun.

  But by then it was too late. We hit the deck together, Stanley on top, me trying my best to remember how to breathe and Stanley clamping a hand like a Stilson wrench on my right wrist so I couldn’t use the Magnum. I cuffed his head, somewhat indolently, with my left hand. He cuffed mine, harder, with his right. I tasted blood in my mouth. At least I had begun to breathe again, and that was something.

  All of a sudden the Magnum went off. The big slug hit the window of Carole Frazer’s stateroom, and glass crashed down all around us. I judo-chopped the side of Stanley’s neck. His weight left me as he went over sideways. I got up before he did, but not by much. His ey
es were wild. He knew that shot was going to bring company.

  He swung a right that sailed past my ear, and I hooked a left that hit bone somewhere on his face. He dropped to his knees and got up and dropped to them again.

  I heard footsteps pounding up the metal staircase. Stanley heard them too. Two faces and two white, black-visored caps appeared. Stanley did not try to get up again right away. There was a dark and glistening stain on the deck below him. He stared down at it, fascinated. He touched his throat. Blood pumped, welling through his fingers.

  The two ship’s officers saw the gun in my hand and remained where they were.

  A shard of flying glass had hit Stanley in the throat. The way the blood pumped, an artery had to be severed.

  “There a doctor aboard?” I said, going to Stanley. “This man needs help in a hurry.”

  But he got to his feet and backed away from me. Who knows what a guy will do when he’s little drunk, and half-crazy with fear, and in danger of bleeding to death?

  “Keep away from me,” he said.

  “You crazy? You won’t last ten minutes bleeding like that.”

  Smiling faintly he said, “I’m afraid I wouldn’t come on very well as a convict, old boy.”

  Then he took a single step to the rail and went over.

  They stopped the ship. They always do, but it rarely helps. We covered another mile, and turned sharp to port, and came back. Three life-preservers were floating in the water, where the ship’s officers had thrown them. But Philip Stanley was gone.

  On deck after lunch and after I’d made and signed a deposition for the Hellas’ captain, Spinner said: “I don’t get it. You think I’m nuts or something? There was this little swifty in Vomero. I know there was.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Stanley hired him, but his job ended in Vomero.”

  “Stanley hired him?”

  “To make you think you’d hired yourself a killer. If your wife had disappeared during the crossing, you’d have kept your mouth shut about the possibility of foul play if you thought your own man had done it.”

  “Why did Stanley want her dead?” Skinner squealed.

  “Because the picture was more important to him. He got scared they’d never finish it, the way Carole was carrying on.” I lit a cigarette. “Hell, he told me last night how he wanted Carole’s understudy to take over. She almost did.”

  Carole Frazer joined us on deck. She was wearing a bikini and stretched out languidly in the bright, hot sun. She didn’t look at all like a girl who’d almost been murdered a few hours ago.

  “Watch the sun,” Spinner warned her. “La Lucrezia’s pale, baby.” He sighed. “That is, if you’re gonna do the picture after what you been through.”

  “Do it?” Carole asked sleepily. “But of course I’ll do it, darling. The publicity will be marvelous.”

  It was, and after our night aboard the Hellas, Carole Frazer settled down to work. They made Lucrezia Borgia with a new leading man. Carole Frazer’s up for an Oscar.

  RICHARD S. PRATHER

  Richard S. Prather (1921– ) was one of the great pulp treasures of the fifties and early sixties. Sensing that the private eye form was ripe for spoofing, he created L.A. gumshoe Shell Scott. Where most fictional private eyes lived by Raymond Chandler’s naive code—justice, bourbon, and self-pity—ole Shell had dedicated his life to the other things—chicks, broads, and tomatoes. Yes, he would eventually get around to solving the crime, but the fun was watching Shell sleep his way through a couple dozen girls per book (or so it seemed). There’s been an attempt, in these politically correct times, to denigrate his contribution. But the Scott novels are first-rate stories and first-rate fun, even despite Shell’s sometimes wearying right-wing politics. Prather is the forgotten superstar of the first wave of “paperback original” novels.

  The Double Take

  This was a morning for weeping at funerals, for sticking pins in your own wax image, for leaping into empty graves and pulling the sod in after you. Last night I had been at a party with some friends here in Los Angeles, and I had drunk bourbon and Scotch and martinis and maybe even swamp water from highball glasses, and now my brain was a bomb that went off twice a second.

  I thought thirstily of Pete’s Bar downstairs on Broadway, right next door to this building, the Hamilton, where I have my detective agency, then got out of my chair, left the office, and locked the door behind me. I was Shell Scott, the Bloodshot Eye, and I needed a hair of the horse that bit me.

  Before I went downstairs I stopped by the PBX switchboard at the end of the hall. Cute little Hazel glanced up.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “I know. I think I’m decomposing. Listen, a client just phoned me and I have to rush out to the Hollywood Roosevelt. I’ll be back in an hour or so, but for the next five minutes I’ll be in Pete’s. Hold down the fort, huh?”

  “Sure, Shell. Pete’s?” She shook her head.

  I tried to grin at her, whereupon she shrank back and covered her eyes, and I left. Hazel is a sweet kid, tiny, and curvy, and since mine is a one-man agency with no receptionist or secretary, the good gal tries to keep informed of my whereabouts.

  I tottered down the one flight of stairs into bright June sunshine on Broadway, thinking that my client would have to wait an extra five minutes even though he’d been in a hell of a hurry. But he’d been in a hurry the last time, too, and nothing had come of it. This Frank Harrison had first called me on Monday morning, three days ago, and insisted I come right out to his hotel in Hollywood. When I got there he explained that he was having marital troubles and wanted me to tail his wife and see if I could catch her in any indiscretions. When I told him I seldom handled that kind of job, he’d said to forget it, so I had. The deal seemed screwy; he’d not only been vague, but hadn’t pressed me much to take the case. It had added up to an hour wasted, and no fee.

  But this morning when I’d opened the office at nine sharp the phone had been ringing and it was Harrison again. He wanted me right away this time, too, but he had a real case for me, he said, not like last time, and it wasn’t tailing his wife. He was in a sweat to get me out to the Roosevelt’s bar, the Cinegrill where we were to meet, and was willing to pay me fifty bucks just to listen to his story. I still didn’t know what was up, but it sounded like a big one. I hoped it was bigger than the last “job,” and, anyway, it couldn’t be as big as my head. I went into Pete’s.

  Pete knew what I wanted as soon as I perched on a stool and he got a good look at my eyeballs, so he immediately mixed the ghastly concoction he gives me for hangovers. I was halfway through it when his phone rang.

  He listened a moment, said, “I’ll tell him,” then turned to me. “That was Hazel,” he said. “Some dame was up there looking for you. A wild woman—”

  That was as far as he got. I heard somebody come inside the front door, and high heels clicked rapidly over the floor and stopped alongside me. A woman’s voice, tight and angry, said, “There you are, you, you—you crook!” and I turned on my stool to look at the wild woman.

  I had never seen her before, but that was obviously one of the most unfortunate omissions of my life, because one look at her and I forgot my hangover. She was an absolutely gorgeous little doll, about five feet two inches tall, and any half-dozen of her sixty-two delightful inches would make any man stare, and all of her at once was enough to knock a man’s eyes out through the back of his head.

  “Oh!” she said. “You ought to be tarred and feathered.”

  I kept looking. Coal black hair was fluffed around her oval face, and though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old, a thin streak of gray ran back from her forehead through that thick glossy hair. She was dressed in light blue clam-diggers and a man’s white shirt which her chest filled out better than any man’s ever did, and her eyes were an incredibly light electric blue—shooting sparks at me.

  She was angry. She was so hot she looked ready to melt. It seemed, for s
ome strange reason, she was angry with me. This lovely was not one I wanted angry with me; I wanted her happy, and patting my cheek, or perhaps even chewing on my ear.

  She looked me up and down and said, “Yes. Yes, you’re Shell Scott.”

  “That’s right. Certainly. But—”

  “I want that twenty-four thousand dollars and I’m going to get it if I—if I have to kill you! I mean it!”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s just money to you, you crook! But it’s all he had, all my father’s saved in years and years. Folsom’s Market, indeed! I’ll kill you, I will! So give me that money. I know you’re in with them.”

  My head was in very bad shape to begin with, but now I was beginning to think maybe I had mush up there. She hadn’t yet said a single word that made sense.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “You must have the wrong guy.”

  If anything, that remark made her angrier. She pressed white teeth together, and made noises in her throat, then she said, “I suppose you’re not Shell Scott.”

  “Sure I am, but I don’t know what you’re babbling about.”

  “Babbling! Babbling! Ho, that’s the way you’re going to play it, are you? Going to deny everything, pretend it never happened! I knew you would! Well—”

  She backed away from me, fumbling with the clasp of a big handbag. I looked at her thinking that one of us was completely mad. Then she dug into her bag and pulled out a chromed pistol, probably a .22 target pistol, and pointed it at me. She was crying now, her face twisted up and tears running down her cheeks, but she still appeared to be getting angrier every second, and slowly the thought seeped into my brain: this tomato is aiming a real gun at me.

  She backed away toward the rear of Pete’s, but she was still too close to suit me, and close enough so I could see her eyes squeeze shut and her finger tighten on the trigger. I heard the crack of the little gun and I heard a guy who had just come in the door let out a yelp behind me, and I heard a little tinkle of glass. And then I heard a great clattering and crashing of glass because by this time I was clear over behind the bar with Pete, banging into bottles and glasses on my way down to the floor. I heard the gun crack twice more and then high heels clattered away from me and I peeked over the bar just in time to see the gal disappearing into the ladies’ room.