The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  “Yes. Please have the sergeant come to the phone.”

  “He was here a while ago. I’ll see if I can get him.”

  Half a minute of silent tape unrolling, then, “Sam, boss. Powpow tipped me something’s up, and said you mentioned it’s the mayor. You still at Fowler’s?”

  “Sergeant? Yes, Sergeant Samuels, this is Mayor Fowler...” and on with more of the one-sided conversation I’d heard on my second visit to the mayor’s—and his daughter’s—home. A conversation doubly intriguing to me because, though I’d guessed what must have been said, this was the first time I’d actually heard the other half of the dialogue.

  Delcey leaned forward slightly, listening closely when, after it was clear that Jelly knew Shell Scott was not only still in Newton but sitting with Grimson in the mayor’s front room, Grimson’s voice concluded a sentence with, “...his movements are not to be interfered with in any way.”

  And Jelly’s voice, coming on strong, “Which must mean the opposite, make his movements stop altogether. I got it right, boss? You want me and Lou to take care of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He still driving that same Cad?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I don’t guess you can speak it out while he’s setting there. He must’ve rented another heap—is it another Caddie?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good enough. We’ll make him. Just say yes or no to this so I’m clear on how you want it handled. Should we get this guy careful, or get him as soon as we can—hell, you can’t answer it put like that. Is fast most important?”

  “That’s right.”

  “O.K. That’s the case, I’ll ... Got it. I’ll drive the big goddamn White Freightliner rig we got here in the yard, Lou up in the cab alongside me with spyglasses—so he can make sure it’s Scott. Wouldn’t want to mash up a old lady, ha-ha. When he leaves there, he’s got to go one way or the other on Mulberry, so we’ll get him either comin’ or goin’. That sound O.K.?”

  “Excellent, excellent,” plus a bit of verbal wool for my eyes, or more accurately my ears.

  The last thing Sam Jelly said was, “It’ll take me five minutes to get the rig ready and move out of here, then I got to roll to Mulberry. So hold him there a little if you can, boss. And don’t worry, we’ll massacre the bastard.”

  “See that you do, Sargent. And thank you.”

  With which ended the mayor’s helpful call to the Newton Police Station.

  Delcey was nodding. “That’ll sure help,” he said.

  I was inclined to agree with the sergeant. Of course, first we had to get our hands on Mayor Grimson.

  Not to mention Mayor Fowler.

  Delcey put down the phone, giving me a curious look. “When I gave you that little transmitter, I mentioned I had a couple men set to track its signal in case you headed for the border. As soon as we came into the Garage, and I knew you were here, and all right, I called the information in—and made sure it got to them, passed on the word we could scrub that detail. I just talked to one of the men and he asked me, if you’re with me right now, how come they tracked that signal out Mulberry Drive, apparently way the hell past the airport?”

  “Are you sure they—wait. Wait a minute.”

  I’d given him a sketchy—very sketchy—report about my piggyback ride on Martinique’s car. Now I added, “When I jumped aboard, I threw the suitcase into the back. But I was—I think I was—still carrying the transmitter in my left hand.”

  I patted my left coat pocket, all my pockets. “Sure don’t have it now. And I know I was holding it when I started running toward the car.”

  “Then that’s what happened. Got to be,” Delcey said.

  “Still there. In the back of Martinique’s car. Which means—”

  Delcey was smiling, his round cherubic face wearing an almost angelic expression.

  “Let’s go get ‘em,” he said.

  So that’s what we did.

  By the time we got there, we’d used up another half-hour but it was not yet quite dark. Behind us were two police cars filled with officers. As it turned out they weren’t really needed. It was, of course, very comforting to have them along.

  Two miles past the airport a one-lane paved road led right through another walnut grove, then on a mile and a half to where oak and spruce grew, and a quarter mile up a rutted dirt road leading left from the paved one-laner was a small cabin, two rooms plus rustic kitchen and inside john.

  Also, plus Hugh Grimson and Martinique Monet.

  It was—as so often happens when the hue and cry and races and chases are over—a simple thing from then on. Like tying up a Christmas package once all the shopping and paying and wrapping are done.

  We just peeked through a window into the large main room of the cabin, and there they were, drinking a couple highballs, and doing another thing or two from time to time. Which is to say, Martinique had on a dark skirt, but nothing of any shade except the shade of Martinique from the waist up, and she sure had a thing or two. It did bring back fondle memories, no sense denying it.

  Delcey graciously allowed me the privilege of kicking the front door in, and went around to the back. I stepped to the front door, tried the knob, and it turned. The damned door wasn’t locked. I’d really wanted to crash in with a great clatter and yell, “Hold it right there!”

  It wasn’t like that at all.

  I opened the door and walked in, gun in hand.

  Martinique saw me first, stared, chin slipping down an inch. “Hugh,” she said softly. “It’s ... him ... I think.”

  He glanced at her, followed her gaze, saw me and stared visibly, then recovered. All he said was one word, but it was a short pithy word full of meaning, and probably summed up his feelings as well as one word can.

  I frisked him for heat, but he wasn’t armed. I thought about frisking Martinique, but refrained, though thoughts about heaters began dancing like sugar plums —

  Delcey said, “Maybe you better keep one eye on Grimson, Scott.”

  “Oh, ah, the back door was unlocked too, huh?”

  “Yeah. And the mayor’s sleeping like a babe in the next room.”

  Naturally, after that—both of those—everything else was an anticlimax.

  22

  Correction.

  Not everything.

  “Canada, my sweet,” I said, “would you be good enough to serve me another pint of this sauce? You know, like a—well, as if I were a favored customer, and you were waiting on me? Hmm?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  She still didn’t get it.

  She looked great, sure—how could luscious Canada Southern do anything but?—in a ribbed white turtleneck sweater, wide red belt, brief white skirt, high-heeled red-and-white shoes—but that very attractive outfit wasn’t precisely what I had in mind.

  We were in my suite—ah, yes, I had been paid and bonused magnificently by David Bannister, and had said good-bye to my motel room, hello to a swanky spread in the Sherwood—drinking a curious concoction Canada herself had concocted, of rum and some kind of liqueur and various fruity juices. This would be our third drink, and I’d commenced hinting delicately even before she handed me the first one.

  I was wearing the last of the clothes I’d brought with me from L.A., a pair of vividly-gorgeous yellow slacks with a jazzy white-knit cardigan, white shoes and socks and belt. It was all the clothing I had left, since both suits from my two-suiter were in the trash can now, one ripped and somewhat bloody, the other very oily and stained with specks of glycerine, milk, food coloring, and Nescafé. Nescafé, who would have thought it?

  But I had at least got all the oil off me, though it took considerable time in a hot shower, and three-fourths of a bar of laundry soap. I may have felt a bit raw in spots, but I was cleaner than I had been for some time.

  Canada came back from the bar, which was out of sight in the adjacent room, carrying two large glasses with dying plant life sticking up from their tops, handed me mi
ne and sat on the off-white divan next to me.

  “Why,” I said, looking at her closely, “the divan is almost exactly the same shade as your clothing. It just sort of blends in, almost as if you weren’t really wearing a th—”

  “What happened then?”

  I’d been giving her some of the story, a little bit at a time to keep her in some suspense—which was fair, since that’s what she was doing to me—and I had just told her of how you can, with two receivers, when a transmitter off somewhere is putting out a steady signal, get a couple fixes on the signal and triangulate it or quadlateralize it—she didn’t know what the hell, anyway. And that you could thus locate the transmitter, which is how we found Martinique’s car.

  “What happened then? Well, I crashed in the door and yelled—ah, strike that. I expected to be in great danger, you understand?”

  “Of course.” She was smiling ever so slightly, those soft flame-colored lips curving sweetly, deliciously. “It must have been a terribly brave thing, your crashing in there like—”

  “Well, that’s what I was getting at. The door was unlocked.” I stopped. That sounded terrible.

  “Well, it was,” I barked.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “That’s right, you didn’t. I won’t deny it. Well, I just walked in, that’s what. And that’s all. I know it must sound dull...”

  “It was still brave.”

  “Maybe a little. Look, Grimson might have had a gun, and could have shot it at me, right? Right. And for that matter, Martinique might have distracted me, like by throwing a jug—Jesus.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. It’s jug—just that I’ve been having trouble lately keeping my mind—keeping it from careening around. It’s merely that I’ve, uhh, had a lot on it. My mind, I mean.”

  I paused. “The truth is, when I popped in on Martinique and Mr. G. I had just finished sliding through an acre of crankcase drainings twice, once on my back and then on my front, so I was simply all over oil, and I still had some food coloring and coffee on my—well, I hadn’t had time to freshen up, and I wasn’t a pretty sight. You might say my sudden appearance caught them off guard, yes, you might, and Martinique couldn’t quite decide if I was Shell Scott or a witch doctor from the La Brea Tar Pits. Anyway, she quickly admitted she’d been phoning Grimson, not the mayor, from the Sherwood Hotel while I was there yesterday, and that she herself sent Kitty Wilson out to Fowler’s house with instructions to keep me there, one way or another, until Martinique could contact Mr. G. and send him along to size up the situation himself.”

  “Kitty Wilson? But how could a girl—”

  “There we go—that’s one of those things—just part of the job. Anyway, she’s helping the police a lot, and I put in a good word for her, and she isn’t going to jail or anything, like a criminal. The important thing is, Martinique and Grimson offered no resistance when I crashed in. Besides, there were a dozen cops along with me.”

  “Did you say you slid in oil twice? How did you happen to do that?”

  “You would ask, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s another part I’m not going to tell you about. It was just ... part of the job.”

  “It must be difficult doing the job you do, Shell. I mean, always problems, problems. And a detective has to make quick decisions and all—”

  “Yeah, and just one wrong one can put you in the soup. Well, maybe more than just one. Maybe even—but you do have to keep that old gray matter bubbling up there, if I do say so myself. Ah, why should I try to kid—”

  “Ready for another drink?”

  “Sure. Of course, I’ve still got three-fourths of this one. But why don’t we save it? Sure, we’ll save this and you can serve me another. Ah, too bad about the Club Rogue, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But I’ll bet it opens up again soon. Just because Mr. Grimson is out of everything doesn’t mean it has to stay closed.”

  “I hope not. If it does open, I suppose you’ll be working there again?”

  “If they want me.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  “It’s a lovely club, and I really enjoyed working there, even for just one night.”

  “Be hell if they don’t open right away, huh? And you get out of practice?”

  That same smile again. But bigger, warmer. “I’ll mix our drinks,” she said, and walked into the next room and out of sight. I waited, expectantly, optimistically listening to little clinking sounds. Delicious sounds of warm liquors and cold ice....

  That made me think again, briefly, of Martinique Monet.

  As just about everybody who was interested knew by now, she had become possessed by the uncontrollable hots for Hugh Grimson. Not only had his hard and abrasive manliness appealed to something primitive and theretofore unawakened slumbering inside her, and not only had he molested her thoroughly and expertly even unto unprecedented fruition, but one night when she’d become somewhat snippety with him Hugh Grimson hauled off and knocked her on her versatile can.

  “He loves me!” she had—presumably—cried. Somewhere deep in a purely feminine soft spot in her brain the clunk of fist on chops had met and mated with female logic and as though from a short-circuited computer had spewed sudden Truth perceptible only to babes who have been clunked on their chops and knocked on their cans: “He hit me! He beats me! He must love me!”

  So, naturally, from then on, up to and including my own blessed meeting with her, Martinique had been madly in love with, and willing to do anything for, Hugh Grimson; here, at last, was a man who knew how to treat a woman: with respect.

  The tinkling had stopped. I could hear Canada stepping nearer, nearer. I was smiling at her before she stepped into view, carrying two fresh drinks. Wearing white turtleneck sweater, red belt, white skirt, even the red-and-white shoes.

  She advanced toward me, smiling broadly.

  “What would you think of a guy,” I asked her, “who socked you in the chops?”

  “Wha-at?”

  “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was ... Why, two more drinks I see. Splendid.”

  “You do like them?”

  “Yeah. Splendid. They get a little sweet, maybe, after the third or fourth ... yeck.”

  “We’ll have something else after this.”

  “That’ll be fun. Splendid. How about bourbon and maple syrup?”

  The smile turned into a bubble of soft laughter. “You’re so transparent,” she said, laughing.

  “Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, huh? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well, I know what you mean, Shell Scott. You’re as subtle as an avalanche.”

  “Ah, you make me sound—”

  “But, Shell, if I were dressed like the Club Rogue waitresses, you wouldn’t have told me all those fascinating things.”

  “What fascinating things? I don’t remember any—”

  “Everything that happened to you today. And you still haven’t told me what happened to the mayor.”

  “You’ve got to know, huh? You’ve just got to know, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, like I said, Delcey found him in the next room, in bed snoozing. Drugged, of course, heavily sedated—had been for more than forty hours. Friday night when Mr. G. charged out to catch an informer, he looked into the mayor’s bedroom—much as, at the end, I peeked in at him and Martinique—and saw the mayor taking the little nap he’d mentioned on the phone to me.”

  “So he sneaked in and poked a big needle into his arm—”

  Canada’s tiger-stripe eyes were bright and her lips were parted. She really did seem interested in all this junk.

  So I said, gently, “Not quite then, dear—a bit later though. What Grimson did was more in character for the slob. He sneaked in while the mayor was sleeping, all right, but instead of a hypodermic he used the hood’s anesthesia, which is to say he bludgeoned His Honor on the conk. Oh, not with a club or gun butt, he used a professional spring-
loaded sap which he had somehow happened to pick up in his travels.”

  “He really hit him on the conk—that’s his head?”

  “It sure is. Well—this is the distressing part, really. To people like you and me, I mean. Eventually Hugh called his family doctor—a guy who’d removed slugs and ice picks and such from some of Hugh’s close friends—and had him start pumping sedatives into Fowler’s arm. Repeated the process every few hours, in fact, so that not even for a minute did Fowler awaken from his snooze.”

  “That’s the distressing part?”

  “No, I hadn’t got to it yet. Before Grimson’s doc was available around the clock, Fowler started coming to. Grimson waited around so long for the informant—who, as you know, never did show up—that Hugh, in order to keep the mayor in the dark, so to speak, had to smack His Honor a good one again. Now, isn’t that distressing?”

  “It certainly is. Did he hit him in the same place both times?”

  “Beats the hell—how did you happen to think of that? He hit him on the head again, but whether—I can’t answer that.”

  “What else happened that was fun?”

  I looked at her. “Huh. Well, I got hit by the great enormous truck. How’s that?”

  She cracked up. Maybe all babes have a little bit of the dumb broad in them. Though, even in my immediate mood, I had to admit that Canada, if she had some or much, kept it well hidden. She was good at hiding things.

  “No, I didn’t mean violence. That’s not fun.” She muffled a chuckle and went on. “Like, well, didn’t Mr. Grimson know the mayor would tell everybody he’d hit him—conked him—and all that?”

  “No, and there’s the beauty of the affair, the part for which I have to, reluctantly, give Grimson pretty high marks.” I had a big glug of my drink, smacked my lips. “Splendid,” I said. “Look, Grimson knew one of his men was prepared to give Fowler info that would put Mr. G. away for a long time, if not forever. He had to stop the informant, when and if he could identify and grab him. Which he set instantly out to do. When the informant failed to show, Grimson hauled the mayor off and kept him knocked out, while trying to get to Biggers—though he still didn’t know it was Little Biggie.”