Kill the Clown

A Shell Scott Mystery

Richard S. Prather

For three lovely ladies:

BILLIE

NICKIE

PAT

“Salud y amor y pesetas”

. . . and many birdies.

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

One

She was the only client who ever hired Sheldon Scott, Investigations — that’s me — before a word was spoken. She didn’t know it, but I had taken her case, no matter what it was, before she opened her mouth — and it was my mouth that opened first, anyway.

She came into my suddenly drab office like a Spring breeze visiting Winter, and closed the frosted glass door gently behind her. Then she walked up to my mahogany desk and I got a really good look at her.

And it was really good.

She had red hair like combed fire, lips that looked soft as whispers, and a figure that made other women seem two-dimensional.

She was a tall girl. I’m just a shade under six-two, and when I stood up behind my desk those lips were only about five inches below mine, which was five inches too far. But her blue eyes somehow seemed wrong in her oval face — a little too cold and brittle, and out of place, like ice in a just-right martini.

Maybe that should have warned me. It didn’t.

“You must be Mr. Scott. I hope you’re free to help me. I do need help.”

The voice wrapped me in a cocoon of warm words. It was like perfume made audible. It was a velvety, vibrant voice filled with promises I wanted to help her keep. My stand-up hair is white, yes; but not from old age.

“I’m Shell Scott. And I’m free. I just decided.”

I grinned at her as I walked around the desk and moved the deep leather chair closer to it, then went back to my swivel chair as she sat down. But she wasn’t in a smiling mood.

“I’m Doris Miller,” she said.

I was glad to know her name, but it didn’t ring any bells.

“Ross Miller is my brother. You probably recall his name — he’s in San Quentin now.”

That got a tinkle. This was the early afternoon of Saturday, October 28; nearly a year ago, here in Los Angeles, one K. C. “Casey” Flagg had been murdered. He’d been a partner in the law firm of Tomkins, Borch, and Flagg, and he’d had, I understood, rather a wide acquaintance among numerous city officials and local VIP’s. Flagg was shot to death early one evening in his penthouse suite in the Whitestone. The police arrived soon after, in response to a phone call — apparently from somebody who’d heard the shot but didn’t want to give his name — and found a young lawyer, recently employed in Flagg’s office, standing over the body. The suspect had, only two days before, been in a violent quarrel with the victim and had been fired as a consequence. It seemed an open and shut case of premeditated murder. And unless my memory failed me, the convicted murderer’s name was Ross Miller.

I said, “Was your brother involved in the investigation into Casey Flagg’s mur — death?”

She nodded. “They said Ross killed him, and I know all the evidence made it look bad — but he didn’t do it. Mr. Flagg didn’t want to hire Ross in the first place, he wanted another man, but his partners chose Ross. Ross thought Flagg was dishonest, practically a crook of some kind, and he said so to his face. That’s what they had the big argument about. Some other people heard them, and they just used that quarrel to help convict him. But he didn’t kill that man!”

She had half risen from the leather chair. She sat back in it and went on slowly, “Ross was convicted entirely on circumstantial evidence, and the most damaging testimony against him was given by that elevator operator, Weiss. Do you remember, Mr. Scott?”

“Uh-huh.” Chester Weiss was a middle-aged man who’d been an important prosecution witness at the trial. He operated the elevator in the Whitestone. His testimony had been that Ross Miller was the only man who had gone up to the penthouse suite that night, at least within an hour or more of the time when Flagg had been killed. Which pretty well stuck Miller with the job.

The lovely went on, “Mr. Weiss came to see me yesterday. He said he’d been forced to lie at the trial, and that my brother was probably innocent. Mr. Weiss wanted to tell me the truth, get the weight off his conscience, he said, but he wouldn’t agree to go with me to tell the police his story. He was awfully afraid of going to jail.”

“Confessed perjurers usually do go to jail.”

She nodded, light glinting on the red hair. “He did promise, though, that he would come back early this morning and give me the whole story in writing, signed by him.”

“And he didn’t come back,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“You haven’t heard from him at all since yesterday?”

“No. I called his hotel — he’s still in the Whitestone — but he wasn’t there. And I can’t wait long. I’ve got to at least get his statement today if I can.”

I squinted at her. “I can understand why you’re anxious, Miss . . . it is Miss?”

She nodded abstractedly.

“But why wouldn’t tomorrow do as well?” I was curious to know why she seemed in such a rush. She told me.

“Today’s Saturday,” she said. “On Wednesday Ross goes into the gas chamber.”

“Oh. I see.”

Wednesday. Four days from now. Less than that, actually. For many years California executions were on Fridays, but for more than a year now the courts had scheduled executions for Wednesdays at ten a.m. Which left little time.

I said, “Weiss admitted perjuring himself, huh?”

“Yes. He said he either had to lie or be killed.”

“Who was threatening him? Did he say?”

“Quinn. Frank Quinn.”

Involuntarily, I groaned. Frank Quinn was a slug-like, pasty-faced, flabby-bodied hoodlum grown big and powerful in the rackets. Oddly enough, four or five years ago hardly anyone had heard of the bum; he’d come out of nowhere, a nobody, and he quickly became a hoodlum Somebody in the City of the Angels. I’d bumped into Quinn on several occasions, and he was the only human being who’d ever made me wish I was a Martian. Or else he was the only Martian who’d ever made me glad I was a human.

Doris Miller looked inquiringly at me. “Do you know the man? His name was mentioned at the trial.”

“We’ve met.”

She made a face. “He’s . . . a gangster, isn’t he?”

Gangster. It sounded so quaint coming from those ripe, red lips. Those lips that looked as if they were always on the verge of puckering. Which is a good verge to be on. I said, “He is one of the behind-the-scenes lads you hear about occasionally. Oh, there’s no doubt he shot and slugged his share of victims on the way up, but now that he’s arrived he has twenty or thirty hoodlums to do his dirty work. He’s a successful failure.”

“He sounds dangerous enough.”

“He is. Did Weiss say why Quinn forced him to perjure himself?”

“Yes. He told me that Quinn went up to the penthouse there in the Whitestone a little while before Ross. That would have been right at the time when the murder happened. Mr. Weiss said he felt sure Quinn killed the man himself and just made it look as if Ross did it.”

“I see. And Quinn told Weiss to keep his mouth shut or he’d wind up dead, too, huh?”

She nodded. “That’s about what he said.”

One thing had been puzzling me, and I asked Doris, “How come Weiss just got around to spilling what he knew? If he was afraid of Quinn at the time of the trial, why isn’t he now?”

“Mr. Weiss had a bad heart attack recently. He almost died, he said. He told me he’d spent a lot of time since then thinking about what he should do, and decided he’d have to tell the truth. He’s still afraid of Quinn, he said, but more afraid of not telling what he knew . . . before Wednesday.”

“Uh-huh. Makes sense. Anything else you can tell me?”

All she personally knew about the murder of Flagg was what her brother had told her, which was that he was innocent. Ross had told her he’d received a phone call that night, allegedly from K. C. Flagg, asking him to hurry right over to the Whitestone. Ross went there, took the elevator with Weiss to the penthouse apartment, and walked in to find Flagg dead. And then there were policemen all over him. It was the same story he’d told at the trial, and just simple enough to be true.

“Well,” I said, “time’s pretty short, I know. But if Weiss will just do a repeat on that story of his, with witnesses, we may have it made.”

“You . . . but you haven’t even said you’d help me, Mr. Scott.”

“I haven’t? I didn’t? Well, I thought I had. I will, naturally.”

She was smiling at last. But then she must have thought of her brother breathing cyanide, and her lovely face sobered.

We settled my fee, but there was so much promise in her velvety voice, in her lips, and perhaps even ears and elbows, that money hardly seemed worthwhile any more. She wanted me, specifically, to locate Weiss and at least get that signed statement from him, or else get him to talk to the law; also, generally, to do anything else that would help save her brother. I agreed to do everything humanly possible, and perhaps more.

Usually I let clients find their own way out of the office and down to Broadway, one floor below. But this client I escorted to the door, and I watched her walk down the hallway to the elevator. It seemed a shame that I hadn’t seen her approaching.

Back in the office, I spent a little time brushing up on the facts of the case. K. C. Flagg had been shot to death on the night of November 24, last year. Miller was apprehended that same night, charged with the crime, pleaded innocent and went on trial in L.A. Superior Court in January; it was all over in two weeks. The verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.

When the case was resubmitted to the jury for sentence, Ross Miller had had it. The judge, Thornwall Smith, set Wednesday, November 1, at ten a.m., the day and time when Miller would be put to death by the administration of a lethal gas. The automatic appeal, mandatory when the penalty is death, was made, and judgment was affirmed. So now Ross Miller was in the California State Prison at San Quentin, in Death Row, where the cells are much like any other cells — except that they’re large coffins for the living.

Frank Quinn’s name was brought into the trial proceedings by the defense, which attempted — without any success at all — to show that Quinn might himself have visited Flagg’s suite on the night of the murder. It was known he’d been in the Whitestone that night, but at the time of the murder Quinn had, he claimed, been “discussing business” with a gal named Lolita Lopez, who lived on the second floor of the Whitestone. Miss Lopez corroborated that story, and the defense couldn’t shake her testimony — or Weiss’s for that matter.

Other witnesses gave testimony about what Doris called the “argument” between Ross and Casey Flagg. It had developed into more than merely an argument, starting with words and proceeding to blows. Or, rather, blow. Ross had swung at Flagg and missed; Flagg had swung at Ross and not missed. Leaving, Miller had been heard to say that he would “even things with that s.o.b. Flagg” if it was the last thing he ever did.

The only other important witness against Miller was a sixty-two-year-old pawnbroker named Heigman. The murder weapon, found by the police near Flagg’s body on the night of November 24, had been purchased on November 22, in Heigman’s pawnshop. Tuesday, November 22, was the day when Flagg had knocked Ross Miller onto his fanny. And Heigman swore that the wild-eyed young man who had purchased the gun from him was the same Ross Miller. Ross claimed Heigman was lying, but the jury was out only two hours and twenty minutes, which is not long at all.

I made a few calls trying to locate Weiss without success, so at three o’clock in the afternoon I decided to take a look at his hotel, the Whitestone. A desk clerk there, with a hangover breath and sick eyes, told me Weiss had quit his job a few days ago, but had kept his room, number 39. He didn’t seem to care if I went up, or down, or set fire to the hotel, so I went on upstairs.

The door was slightly ajar, and I knocked on it, then waited. Nothing happened. After a few seconds I knocked again, harder, and the door swung open silently.

“Weiss,” I called quietly. “Anybody home?”

There wasn’t any answer, and I stepped inside.

He was here, but nobody was home. He was lying on his back, fully dressed, on an unmade bed across the room, and I could tell by the way he lay there that he was dead.

I walked to the bed, leaned over and touched his skin, lifted one of his eyelids and looked at the relaxed pupil. He was dead, all right. There wasn’t any blood, no bullet holes or knife wounds, nothing abnormal about his face or skin; it appeared he’d died a natural death, but I wouldn’t buy that until the coroner had looked him over. Outside and inside. The timing of his demise was far too neat to suit me.

I gave the room a quick toss but found nothing of value to me, then I called Homicide. Twenty minutes later the police had finished checking the room, the crime lab boys were almost through with their job, and Weiss’ body was being rolled on a four-wheeled stretcher through the hotel lobby.

I used a lobby phone to call Doris Miller’s number. She answered almost immediately. “Yes?”

“This is Shell Scott.”

“Oh, have you found out anything yet?”

“Yeah. You won’t be seeing Weiss again. He’s dead. I’ve got a strong hunch somebody helped him to get that way, and — ”

“Dead!” she interrupted. “Oh, I knew it, I just knew something awful would . . . What will happen to Ross now? How can — ”

“Hold it. The main reason I called you is this: We won’t know for sure whether Weiss died a natural death or not until after the autopsy, but if he was murdered, the timing of his death — right after he went to see you, Doris — means he was probably tailed to your place. In which case, whoever followed Weiss and knocked him off may think you already know too much.” I paused. “Which, in fact, you do. So be careful, understand?”

There was silence for several seconds. Then she said, “I’ll be careful. But — oh, dear. What is there left to do now?”

Her voice was twisted, as if those blue eyes were about to melt into tears, and I didn’t want this lovely crying over anything. “Hey,” I said. “You’re a lot better off even now than before Weiss talked to you, aren’t you?”

She sniffled. “Yes, that’s true.”

“So take it easy. I’ve only been on the case an hour.”

“But what can you do? The only man who could have helped me and Ross is dead.”

“Not quite. We assume your brother’s innocent.”

“Of course.”

“Then there’s still the guy who really shot Casey Flagg. So I think I’ll pay a call on Frank Quinn.”

I told Doris I’d see her later and we hung up. Then I walked through the Whitestone’s entrance, climbed into my Cadillac convertible, and headed for Frank Quinn’s out-of-town estate.

Two

A few minutes after four p.m. I turned into the one-lane blacktop road that led to Quinn’s estate. A mile from the main highway I reached a heavy iron gate closed across the blacktop. Beyond it I could see a big, off-white house rising from an expanse of green lawn like a square mushroom. This was my first visit here, but I’d heard from others about the place. It was thirty rooms on several acres of ground completely enclosed by wire fencing. A couple of armed “hunters” walked the grounds day and night, just in case any rabbits tried to break in, and the gate opening on the driveway that led to the house was controlled electrically from a small shack inside the fence. It was to be assumed that Frank Quinn felt reasonably safe from interruption at home.

The gatehouse was inside the fence and on my right. As I got out of the Cad, a tall, slope-shouldered guy walked from the small shack to the gate and stood facing me. He was about fifty years old, and lean.

I slammed the car door and the man said, “You’re headin’ in the wrong direction, podner.”

He was wearing black boots chased with an intricate design of white beads, whipcord trousers, and a green-and-gray shirt. A red silk bandanna was around his neck, held together over his Adam’s apple by a silver pin. A ten-gallon, pearl-colored Stetson sat crookedly on his head. He looked a little bit like the end of the world. A double-barreled shotgun hung loosely in the crook of his right arm.

For a few seconds, I just blinked at the man, then I walked to the gate and stood facing him. I said, “Tell Quinn that Shell Scott’s here to see him.”

“He expecting you?”

“He knows me.”

“That means he ain’t expecting you. You ain’t on my list.”

“Tell him anyway, Tex.”

“Name’s Nevada.” He shifted the shotgun casually so that it pointed at my middle. What was left of my lunch stopped digesting. “They’s a big lop-eared rabbit right behind you, boy,” Nevada said. “If’n you don’t move right sprightly, I’m apt to nick you when I shoot him.”

The remains of my lunch turned into cast iron nuts and bolts, but I said as casually as I could, “You’re taking a lot on yourself, aren’t you, Nevada? Don’t you even ask the boss?”

He looked bleakly at me, deliberated, then stepped into the little house. Plate-glass windows — probably bullet-proof — were set into all four walls of the shack, and I could see Nevada pick up a phone. He spoke into it for almost a minute, then put the phone down next to a small lever on the counter, and pulled on the lever. Immediately the iron gate started sliding aside.

Nevada came out and said, with the shotgun aimed at me again, “Frank says he’ll give you a couple minutes. If you got a gun it’d be smart for you to leave it with me.”

I hesitated. I carry my .38 Colt Special in a shoulder clip practically all the time, except when I’m in the bathtub. But logic and the steady shotgun overcame my misgivings. I reached under my coat and pulled the revolver out, slowly, and with a most peaceful expression on my face.

Nevada told me to lay my gun gently on the ground, which I did. “Boys at the house would just have to take it off your body,” he said grinning. “Ain’t no way out but this anyhow — except over the fence. And they’s a little juice in the fence, boy. You try to go over it, you heat up like Palm Springs in mid-summer.” He paused and added, “Play it cozy, and I’ll give you back the little gun on your way out.”

The drive continued straight in for about a hundred yards, then swung sharply left in front of the house. I parked the Cad a few feet from the entrance, got out and went up four wide steps to the front door. They were expecting me, and a tall, wispy ectomorph with thin hips and thinner shoulders opened the door before I’d reached for the buzzer.

“C’mon,” he said, then turned and walked ahead of me.

I followed him in, down a thickly carpeted hall on our left and into a monstrous room, like a hotel ballroom. The floor was uncarpeted and slick, as if it were used for dancing. Potted plants made splotches of green all around the huge room. We marched across the slick floor to a wide staircase that led upstairs. At the top was a hall running left and right. Directly opposite the head of the stairs was a big hand-carved door, closed; a few feet to the left was a similar door, ajar. We went to the one on the left, and on into a high-ceilinged room brightly illuminated by sunlight flowing through big windows on the south side. Red draperies were pulled back from the windows, and the carpet was black. A black desk was against one wall. On a red couch at my left sat Frank Quinn.

The sallow, near-dead look of him against the red upholstery made him resemble a big maggot that had just crawled out of some dry meat. His eyes were small but very colorful, with whites that were more like reds, the irises covered with a network of veins like doodles drawn in blood. The loose flesh of his jowls dangled alongside his face, his too-red lips drooped, and deeply wrinkled skin hung underneath his wide chin. Quinn looked like a man who had tried to keep alive by eating nothing but salt pork and lard and hadn’t been able to do it.

Behind Quinn, half sitting on the back of the divan, was a normal looking guy about my age, thirty. He had no special charm, but alongside Quinn he seemed dashing and almost lovable. His name was Jay, he was one of Quinn’s few trusted lieutenants (his second-in-command, I’d heard), and the story was told that he’d killed a couple of men and done two short bits at an out-of-state prison.

The guy who’d led me in shut the door and leaned back against it. Quinn said, “O.K., Scott.”

There was no affection in his voice. The two of us hadn’t run head-on into each other before, but I’d tangled with some of his hired muscle, and as a result his staff had become less muscular. Quinn, consequently, disliked me intensely. The only advantage I had at the moment was that he couldn’t know for sure how much I knew — or even why I was here. But he had, I knew, a short-fused temper, and if I could light the fuse there was a chance of blowing some interesting information out of his mouth.

So I said, “The Crime Commission sent me out here to discover if you’re really Dracula.”

His mouth didn’t drop open for at least four or five seconds. But then it penetrated, and he got his legs under him and started to his feet, swearing every inch of the way. He called me some very ugly names, and right in the middle of one of them I said sharply, “Stow it, friend. Keep that tongue from flapping at me, or bodyguards or no bodyguards I’ll tear it out and flap it back at you.”

I thought he was going to strangle on his own words. He sputtered, but then caught himself, and with a huge effort at self-control, calmed himself down, at least on the surface.

“Scott,” he said, his voice quivering, “for this I’m going to kill you myself.”

“Like K. C. Flagg?”

“I’m clean on Flagg, you stupid jerk. But I’ll finish you with pleasure. If that’s what you came out here to say, you wasted a trip.”

“Relax, Quinn. Can’t you take it any more?” He stared at me, and I continued, “What I really came out here to see you about is Chester Weiss.”

“I don’t know nothing about what happened to Chester — ”

He caught himself, but it was too late. He should not, of course, have known that anything had happened to Chester Weiss, not unless he’d helped it happen. So his reaction told me what I’d wanted to know — that Weiss’ death wasn’t accidental, and that Quinn either was responsible for the kill, or knew plenty about it.

And suddenly Quinn was completely calm.

Slowly he said, “Scott, I guess you know you’re a little too wise for your own good.”

“Can’t we talk about Chester, Quinn?”

Blandly he asked, “What about Chester? What’s he done now?”

“Got himself killed by somebody.”

“Well, now. That’s too bad. It’s always too bad when some nice guy gets himself killed by somebody. You know, Scott, I been thinking of you as a nice guy.”

“Sure. Can’t we talk about — ”

“We can’t talk about anything, Scott.”

“Well, I’ll be seeing you, Quinn. Say hello to all the dope pushers for me.”

“You’re not going anyplace.”

“Knock it off. I just left the police with Chester’s body. I told a couple of my friends on the force I was coming out here. If I’m away too long, they’ll start wondering why. You don’t think I’d come here unless I knew I could get back out, do you?”

Quinn rolled that around in his head. It was the kind of logic that made sense to him. He knew he couldn’t keep me here, especially not with bullet holes in my skull. He could get away with plenty, but not with killing me right here on his own grounds. Someplace else, maybe, but not in a way that could be tied to him for sure.

He looked at me for what seemed a long time, then he glanced at Jay. He said, “Jay — and you, too, Cline — ” he nodded toward the other man still resting with his back against the door, “you might as well hear this right in front of Scott. We’re going to let him leave, see? But if you see his ugly face around here again, shoot it off. You get it? He likes to shoot his face off so well himself that we’re going to help him do it.”

Jay laughed heartily, and the ectomorph at the door giggled. I walked toward the door and the man there stepped aside. Nobody laid a hand on me or tried to stop me. I got back into my Cadillac with only one further incident, and that was a minor one. I was walking pretty fast down the hall leading to the front entrance when a door opened and a woman stepped out suddenly. I walked right into her.

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry.”

There was no harm done, but she looked me over good. Besides my short-cropped white hair, I’ve got whitish eyebrows goofily angled over gray eyes, a slightly bent nose, and a thin slice bullet-snipped from my left ear, so even a quick look would probably have been enough for her to remember me. But she seemed to be trying to memorize me, or else place me from somewhere. I recognized her as Mrs. Quinn.

She was a large gal, not fat, but with a splendidly Amazonian body, a surprisingly small waist for a woman so amply endowed with the feminine abundances, and she was worth a second look — depending upon where you looked. Because on top of all those undulations was a face even a mother could hate.

It was a coarse, hard-looking face, with straight lips and little caviar eyes, flyaway ears, a dry and leathery complexion. She was about thirty going on forty, say thirty-five, and she looked like a gal who would chew tobacco.

“Sorry,” I said again, and added pleasantly, “Guess I should have signaled for a collision.”

She nodded but didn’t speak, staring at me with an odd expression. I went on out to the Cad and drove to the closed gate.

Nevada, the shotgun still in the crook of his arm, took his time, but finally strolled over and handed me my .38. I stuck it back in the spring shoulder-holster as he said, “What’d you do, set fire to Frank’s pants?”

“In a manner of speaking, Nevada. Why, was he burning?”

“Called up and jest said to let you go, boy. But he sounded unhappy.”

“Too bad. He’s brought so much joy into the lives of others.”

Nevada snickered, and after a little further conversation turned his back on me and went into his little house. It took him a long time to open the gate, but finally it slid smoothly aside. I drove on through it and back down the blacktop road.

It was getting dark when I reached the two-lane road that led into the Freeway. I was pushing the Cad fast, and keeping my eyes well peeled, though I didn’t really expect any trouble for a few hours, anyway. I knew it was ten to one that Quinn would be giving me a very bad time before much longer, but I didn’t figure he’d move as quickly as he did.

I pulled up at the stop sign before the Freeway and had to wait almost a minute before I could swing into the traffic stream heading back toward downtown L.A. A motorist fifty yards down the Freeway on my left was having trouble. He’d stopped his two-toned blue Chrysler as far to the right as he could get and had his hood up, but the Freeways aren’t made for parking or emergency stops and he was in a rather dangerous spot.

Maybe it was that thought — that he was in a dangerous spot. Or maybe it was the guy peering under the Chrysler’s hood looked in my direction twice while I was waiting for a chance to pull into the traffic stream. Whatever it was, it pulled the nerves of my spine from both ends and stretched them a little. The tingle ran up my back and automatically I reached under my coat for the .38.

I squeezed it gently in my hand and glanced at it, rubbed my thumb easily over the knurled hammer and started to slide the gun back into its holster. But then I stopped. There was something wrong. I didn’t know what it was for a moment, but I looked at the Colt again. Then it was obvious. The gun was empty. The five cartridges I usually keep in the gun were gone; all six chambers were empty.

Nevada — he’d had the gun, and now I recalled how casually he’d given it back to me. After being a little too friendly and chatty, he’d turned and walked to his little house. Obviously he’d known my gun was empty. He wouldn’t have emptied it on his own initiative; that meant Quinn must have phoned him from the house and told him to do it, while I was driving to the gate, then had him stall me, slow me down. And why, I wondered, would Quinn have done that? The answer was easy.

Traffic slackened a bit and I swung right into the Freeway, leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. In a couple of seconds I’d grabbed the box of shells I keep in there and had it open on the seat alongside me. At least nobody had ransacked the car. Behind me the Chrysler was just pulling into the center lane, its engine troubles miraculously ended. It stayed a block or more behind me. I loaded the gun while I drove, then continued to steer with one hand while I held the .38 loosely in my lap. Maybe my deductions were out of line, but if trouble came from anybody in the Chrysler, he would expect me to be carrying an empty gun.

And trouble came in a hurry. The two-toned blue job picked up speed fast, got larger in my rearview mirror. As it neared me I could see that there were two men in the front seat. The Chrysler got to within ten yards of me, then swung left to pass. I thumbed back the hammer of my .38. Having the gun already cocked would save only a split second but I wanted the split second in my favor.

I was moving along about fifty, but the Chrysler must have been hitting eighty, because suddenly it was alongside me. If I hadn’t spotted the car before turning into the Freeway, it would all have been over in the next moment. But I was ready, and looking to my left — over the two-inch barrel of my revolver — as the other car came up level with me. The guy on the driver’s right, next to me, already had his gun stuck out the window — and it was a submachine gun.

He was swinging it toward my head when I fired. I pulled the trigger three times, and saw two dark spots appear on one side of his face. His head jerked back and the Tommy gun started to fall, pressing momentarily against the man’s finger around the trigger. A burst of shots cracked out harshly above the traffic noise. Heavy slugs spat from the gun’s muzzle and ricocheted whining from the highway, then the gun fell onto the street.

The Chrysler veered toward me and I had to slap on my brakes. I got one glimpse of the driver’s face as it jerked toward me and quickly away; then the Chrysler zoomed ahead and swung sharply left with its tires screaming. The driver cut across two lanes of the Freeway in the face of oncoming traffic, making a sloppy, sliding U-turn and then racing off the Freeway onto Blair Street, narrowly missing a dark sedan that skidded several feet to avoid crashing into him. I eased my foot off the brake pedal, jerked my eyes to the rearview mirror and started to turn left to follow the man. Something loomed near me and a horn blasted almost in my ear as a car began to pass on my left. As it went by the driver leaned across the front seat and yelled something at me, something highly uncomplimentary, no doubt.

By the time traffic let me swing across the Freeway and get turned in the opposite direction Blair Street was a quarter of a mile away. I shoved the accelerator down, slid into Blair. But it was too late by then, the Chrysler was out of sight, long gone.

I coasted along for a block or two, then parked at the curb. I kept telling myself that I was calm, quite cool and collected, but then I realized that when I put my .38 away, I had somehow stuck it into the breast pocket of my coat. There is something about the sight of a submachine gun aimed at you that can play havoc with cool thinking for days.

I did stop at a corner service station and put in a call to the police complaint board. The call would be “hot-shotted” — transferred onto the police radio net to units and patrolling cars even as I was speaking — so there was a fair chance the guy would be caught. Besides, the description I gave was an easy one to remember. There was probably only one two-toned blue Chrysler with a dead man in it in all of Los Angeles.

Well, I knew one thing now for sure: Something very ugly was cooking.

And I wasn’t just one of the chefs any more. I was in the soup.

Three

After phoning the law, I made a more pleasant call, to Doris Miller, and then drove over to see her.

She lived alone in half of a small duplex near MacArthur Park. When I rang, she opened the door, smiled and stepped back, and I almost leaped forward. When she had come into my office earlier this day, the visual impact was almost enough to spin my eyes smack around so they were looking at my brain, and she had then been dressed in street clothes. Well, what she was wearing now wasn’t street clothes. At least not any of the streets in this neck of the woods. They looked more like neck of the woods clothes.

I am not expert at describing women’s outer garments — or inner garments, for that matter — but I will say that Doris was crammed into turquoise blue overalls, which were over much less than all, made out of velvet and with a V-neck fashioned with a capital V in mind; they fit her so snugly everywhere that as far as inner garments go, they appeared to have gone.

“Hello, Shell,” she said. “Is there anything left for us to do?”

“I should say there is,” I said. “There’s plenty left for us to do.”

She looked at me strangely. “What? I thought you said he was dead.”

“He? Who?”

I’ll tell you, that was some garment she had on. Everything was all mixed up for several seconds, but then I gathered my dwindling mental powers into a shining point and said, “Oh, him.” I took a deep breath, and pulled myself together. “Yeah, he’s dead, all right. Weiss, that is.”

“But he was our only chance,” she said bitterly.

“Our best chance, Doris. Not the only one. There is the salient fact that a couple of Quinn’s men just tried to kill me.”

“Kill you?”

That called for some explanation. When I’d finished bringing Doris up to date, I added, “When Quinn let it slip that he knew something had happened to Weiss, it did more than just convince me he’d killed Flagg himself. The other side of the coin is that it convinced me Ross didn’t do it.”

She frowned. “What do you mean? Didn’t — didn’t you believe me? Shell, I thought you — ”

She sounded a little angry, and even a little was too much, so I said rapidly, “Whoa, wait a shake. Look, honey, when you waltzed into my office, you could have told me little green men were shooting hot rays through you and I would have taken the case. I figured something was shooting hot rays — ah, at least I’d have investigated and looked for the little men. Hell, I might have found them. But once convinced there weren’t any such, I would have dropped the case.”

She fondled her lower lip with white teeth, looking soberly at me. “You mean if you thought Ross was guilty, you’d stop trying to help him.”

“Of course I’d stop.” Her brows pulled down a little more, and I went on, smiling, “But Doris, now that I’m convinced Ross really is innocent, the discussion is academic. I’ll go all out for you. I mean him.” I paused. “Don’t you worry.”

She didn’t say anything. Then her face grew puzzled and she said, “I still — don’t quite understand what suddenly convinced you Quinn killed Flagg. I mean, more than what I told you today. Just because he said about Weiss . . .” She let it trail off.

“Look,” I said, “not even Quinn, slob that he is, knocks off guys merely for sport, or even for practice. He’d have to have a reason, and a very good one at that. However, he did tell those mugs I met on the Freeway to plant me much deeper and deader than potatoes. There’s no question about that — he obviously set up the kill try, even to having his gate guard empty my gun. So the fact that he did try to have me killed proves his guilt as far as I’m concerned.”

“But there isn’t any way to prove it to anybody else, is there?” she asked thoughtfully.

“Not yet. But the important thing about Weiss’ death is this: The only reason for killing him was to keep him from talking — to you, and then maybe to others — about Flagg’s murder. It follows that the only man with reason to fear what Weiss might say would be the man who murdered Flagg. It figures that the same guy who killed Weiss is also the man responsible for trying to kill me, and vice versa. Each time it comes up Frank Quinn. So Weiss told you the truth.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “You make it sound simple enough, Shell. But — well, frankly, what good does it do Ross and me? That’s not going to get him out of prison.”

“True. But there are still more than three days left.”

She didn’t say anything, and at that point we dropped discussion of the case. Three days weren’t nearly enough for the job of proving Quinn’s guilt. Three hundred would have been more like it. But I didn’t tell that to Doris.

We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, then she said, “I’m pretty tired, Shell. Think I’ll go to bed.”

“Oh?”

There must have been in my expression something of what flashed through my mind, because she smiled and added, “So you’d better run along. I feel wretched, really.”

“Oh.” It had quite a different sound this time, even to my ears.

She walked to the door with me and outside, and as I turned toward her to say good night, she lifted her face and looked up at me, her lips parted, gleaming, and curved slightly upwards at the corners in what might have been the start of a smile. Might have been — but I would never know for sure, because I put my hand behind her, in the small of her back, and pulled her close against me.

She didn’t resist, didn’t pull away, and I saw her eyes close, lids falling heavily as her lips parted even more, and then those lips were on mine. On mine like melting lava, hot and wetly pulsing, curling, trembling. It could have been seconds or minutes later that she pressed her hands against my chest and pushed me away from her.

“Good night, Shell,” she said softly, and then she was gone. The door closed behind her.

I turned and walked to my car and got in, and if anybody nearby had been desirous of shooting me, that would have been the best possible time for it. I drove toward town with a silly smile on my still tingling lips, and it was only when I had practically reached the Civic Center in downtown L.A. that I thought about looking behind me.

But I made it to the Police Building with no trouble, and took the elevator to the third floor. As I walked into room 314, Homicide, Sam came in the door behind me.

Sam is my very good friend, Phil Samson, Captain of Homicide. He’s a wide, hard man, with thick shoulders and big, heavy-knuckled hands. He looks a little like a tank made out of people, and he can hit a hoodlum harder with his brown eyes than most men can with a large stick.

We said hello and I asked him, “What’s the story on Chester Weiss, Sam?”

He nodded. “I hear you were the one found the body.”

“Correct. He spilled some interesting items about Frank Quinn to a client of mine, one Doris Miller.” I filled him in on the high points, then briefed him on my trip to Quinn’s and the Freeway excitement, while he nodded, grunted and knuckled his gray hair a time or two.

When I finished he said, “Yeah. The gentleman you shot in the face — ”

“Was no gentleman.”

“ — is in the morgue. Name of Arthur Hay Grant, known when alive as Turkey Grant.”

“Cold Turkey now. You found him, huh?”

Sam nodded. “We picked up the gun off the Freeway, Thompson submachine gun, no prints, no numbers. Found Grant in the car up near Brush Canyon, no driver, no witnesses. Car had been wiped clean — it was registered in Grant’s name. Criminalistics is still checking the car and gun.”

“And Weiss? I know, of course, who killed the man. But how did Quinn do it?”

“You know — of course, huh?” Sam shook his head. “He died of a heart attack.”

“Sure. That’s like saying death killed him. Come on, what really did him in?”

Samson sighed. “I just told you. Heart attack. Nothing funny about it. We talked to his doctor — Weiss was under a physician’s care, you know.”

“I heard.”

“He told us Weiss could have gone off any time. A year, month, today. So it was today. Last night, actually. Want to look at the Coroner’s report?”

“Might as well.”

Sam got the report and gave it to me. I digested it. Or, rather, tried to. Medical language is like Esperanto spelled inside out, a secret doctor-language apparently designed to make falling hair sound like a ruptured bladder. But I managed to decipher enough to discover that the P.M. showed recent heart damage, arteries plugged up like sewer pipes, and the deceased had expired as the result of a “coronary occlusion,” which sounds as if both his kidneys had exploded simultaneously, but which meant that Chester Weiss had, indeed, died of a heart attack.

“Well, nuts,” I said. “So how come Quinn knew something had happened to Weiss?”

“Maybe he didn’t — you’ve been wrong before. Or maybe he knew Weiss was dead. So what? That doesn’t mean he killed him.”

“Well, it makes no difference now, anyway. That slob tried to kill me today, and if I keep on living I’m going to get the bum.”

“Wish you luck,” Sam said. “We’d like to get him ourselves.” He paused. “Funny thing, here a few years ago this guy was a punk. Now if he gets into some kind of bind half a dozen respectable people stand up for him.”

“Yeah.” I thought about that. “Sam when did you first hear of Quinn?”

“First we had to do with him was the time of the Prentice case. Four years ago, maybe a little more.”

That was the name — Prentice. It had been tickling my brain earlier, but I hadn’t been able to pin it down. “Raleigh Prentice, wasn’t it?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “Suicide. Quinn had an appointment to meet Prentice at his home that night. When Prentice put a bullet into his head, Quinn was parking his car out front.”

“Interesting. You sure it was suicide?”

“No question about it,” Sam said. “His wife was in the hall outside her husband’s study, and saw him pull the trigger. Went into hysterics right after — but she saw it, all right. I don’t know what Quinn was doing there — we talked to him, of course, and he said Prentice had contacted him, asked him to come around that night.”

“Asked him, huh? Prentice leave a note?”

“No, nothing was found. Just left a mess in his study.”

“Wouldn’t you expect a suicide to leave a suicide note, Sam?”

“Some do, some don’t. But Quinn couldn’t have killed Prentice himself, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was definitely established, by neighbors, that Quinn was outside when the shot was fired. He heard the shot himself, and heard Mrs. Prentice screaming, went inside the house and actually calmed her down. Helped her a lot, she said.”

“A big heart, that Quinn.”

Sam grunted. “Quinn even called us from the house, reported the death. Last time he ever called the police, far as I know.” Sam got out one of his black cigars and stuck it, unlighted, into his mouth. “What got me about the whole thing, Prentice was a respected businessman, worth a million bucks or more. Why would he have asked a punk gunman like Frank Quinn to come calling that night?”

“Are you sure he did? Or is that just Quinn’s story?”

“Quinn’s. But we can’t ask Prentice.”

He started to say something else, but I held up a hand. A thought was buzzing faintly. “Wasn’t there something else around the same time, Sam? A friend of Prentice’s . . .”

“Yeah, probably his best friend. Man named Schuyler, George Schuyler. He got himself killed right after — the next night I think.”

Now it came back to me. And Schuyler’s death hadn’t been a suicide. Not unless he’d been a very speedy contortionist. He’d been shot five times, including once in the back.

“He didn’t have an appointment with Quinn, too, did he?”

Sam grinned. “Not so far as we know, Shell. He probably didn’t know he had an appointment with anybody.”

“Nobody got caught for that one, huh?”

“Nope. Not yet. Case is still open.”

I lit a cigarette, dragged on it. Then I said, “Well, that’s four-year-old history. Back to the Flagg thing, Sam. How about this Heigman, the pawnbroker who’s supposed to have sold Miller the murder gun?”

“Month or two after Miller was transferred to Q, Heigman closed his shop and went away somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I dunno.”

“Maybe he moved away like Flagg. Or — like Weiss?”

Sam grinned. “You’re reaching.”

I shrugged. Maybe I was. After a moment I said, “Sam, I’d like to talk to Miller.”

“In Q?”

“Yeah. I’d like to see the man, size him up, hear what he has to say.” I looked at my watch. “It’s only a little after six. If I can get on a jet leaving L.A. International in the next hour or two, I could be in San Rafael by nine or ten o’clock. If you’d pull a few strings . . .”

He scowled. “There’s nothing he can tell you that isn’t in the trial transcript.”

“Maybe not. But I’d like to look the guy over anyway.” I paused. “In the interest of Justice, Sam?”

Still scowling he said, “Check with the airport. If you can get a plane out tonight, I’ll arrange the rest of it.”

The United DC-8 touched down at San Francisco’s International Airport at nine-twelve that night after a fifty-eight minute jet flight from L.A. I grabbed a taxi and was inside the walls of San Quentin prison, talking to the warden, before ten o’clock. Everything was arranged, and a guard took me to an empty cell adjacent to the cell block in which Miller had spent the last months; Miller was just being transferred there as I arrived. A uniformed guard went inside the cell with me, and the steel door was closed and locked behind the three of us.

Ross Miller was a good-looking man, tall and slim, with a strong face and a lot of wavy black hair. There were fine lines around his eyes and mouth, probably put there by the months in Death Row.

I said, “I’m Shell Scott, Mr. Miller, a private investigator.” We shook hands and I added, “Your sister hired me to work on your case.”

He seemed surprised. “Doris?”

“That’s right. Didn’t you know?”

He sat down on the edge of the bunk, shaking his head. “First I heard was a little while ago when I was told you wanted to see me.”

“Well, Doris — Miss Miller — didn’t come to my office until early this afternoon. She told me everything she could, and I’ve read the trial transcript, done some other checking. But I wanted to get your story from you, personally.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, looking at me. “You’re going to try to establish my innocence? Get a stay?”

“I’m going to try.”

He started to speak, then stopped. In a moment he went on quietly, “Do you think there’s — any chance you can convince . . .” He let the words trail off, but looked at the walls around us and waved one hand in an all-inclusive gesture.

“There’s a chance,” I said. “I can’t promise anything — except that I’ll give it a damned good try.”

He looked intently at me, nodding slowly. “I’ll bet you will at that.” Then for the first time his sober, almost rigid expression relaxed as he slowly grinned. “Well, Scott,” he said, “I wish you lots of luck.”

I grinned back at him. “O.K., just start in from the beginning and tell your story.”

He went over the whole thing; there wasn’t anything new, all the important bits were identical with what Doris had told me and what Miller had testified to at the trial.

I said, “This phone call you got on the night Flagg was killed. You didn’t recognize the voice?”

He shook his head. “The guy said he was Casey Flagg, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt him — not then. He said he was sorry about the beef we’d had, we should let bygones be bygones and so forth, and asked me to come right over. He said he was leaving in a few minutes, so I’d have to hurry.” Miller paused. “I remember checking the time, and it was ten minutes after eight p.m. Maybe five minutes later I was in the Whitestone, went right up to the penthouse.”

“And Flagg was dead when you walked in?”

“Shot in the head. The door was unlocked. I went in. Casey was face down on the carpet. I turned him over — I shouldn’t have, I suppose. But, hell, I didn’t know he was dead.” Miller sighed. “He was limp, his body warm. It must have happened just a few minutes before. I was still looking at him when the police came in.”

Miller rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Scott, I still thought I’d just been talking to Casey on the phone. I must have seemed plenty dopey to the police — it wasn’t until later I realized somebody else must have phoned me, probably whoever really killed Casey. And unless Bat Man flew in the window up there and out again, it was somebody Weiss took up — before me — in the elevator. I figure it was Frank Quinn, or somebody who did it for Quinn.”

“The Lopez woman testified Quinn was with her at the time.”

“So she lied. And Weiss lied. And this I know: Heigman sure as hell lied. I never even heard of him until he was called as a prosecution witness. I almost fell off my chair. That’s when I knew for sure it was a cold-blooded frame. The rest of it might have been crazy coincidence, but not Heigman’s testimony. That was perjured testimony designed solely to frame me.”

“You didn’t buy a gun from Heigman?”

“Scott, I’ve never owned a gun in my life. I’ve never been in any pawnshop — not Heigman’s, not anybody’s.”

“Well,” I said, “if he committed perjury, almost surely Weiss and the Lopez gal perjured themselves too.” I paused. “In fact, Weiss is the reason for your sister’s coming to see me.” I told him what had happened during the day, stressing that though this was a break, with Weiss dead it wasn’t of any help to him. Not yet.

Miller was quiet for a while. Then he said, “If you can get to Heigman — that’s the weakest spot. His testimony about the gun is what really convinced the jury.”

That was about it. In another minute I got up to leave, and Miller said, “Scott.” He cleared his throat. “Thanks for coming up here. And . . . for what you’re doing.”

“Sure.” I waved a hand at him and went out.

A few minutes after three in the morning I was in my Cad again, rolling along Santa Monica Boulevard. The Turbojet which had brought me back from San Francisco had landed at Los Angeles International Airport less than an hour before, and I’d driven straight to L.A.

If I’d had any lingering doubts about Miller’s innocence, they were gone now. I believed him. Moreover, I liked the guy. “I wish you lots of luck,” he’d said. Yeah. I’d need it — we’d both need it. With Weiss dead and Heigman’s whereabouts at least temporarily unknown, that left me, at the moment, only Quinn himself and the woman who’d alibied him at the trial, Lolita Lopez. Her address was still the Whitestone Hotel. So that’s where I was going.

I knew what to expect of Lolita. Nobody who could get chummy with such as Frank Quinn would have anything in common with Snow White or Miss Universe. Not, at least, this universe. No, just as the professional criminal is ninety-nine times out of a hundred coarse, crude and callous, a being of belches and scratches, so the hoods’ women are, with rare exceptions, messes — dingy, dried-up messes with cheap clothes and too-blatant makeup, foul mouths, muddy minds, women to whom life has been not merely cruel but sadistic.

The desk clerk in the Whitestone told me Miss Lopez was in room 26. I took the stairs to the second floor. It was well after three a.m., but I preferred this hour to an earlier one. Probably the Lopez babe would be asleep. People awakened from sleep are less likely to have their guard up. And if you expect to shake anything out of the kind of women who alibi the Frank Quinns of the world, you had better catch them with their guard down. At least, that’s what I was thinking as I stopped in front of room 26.

I knocked hard and loud. It sounded pretty official even to me. I heard the sound of movement inside. It had come too soon after my knock for the woman to have been in bed, worse luck. So take it as it comes, I thought. Move in fast, hit her with the questions, keep her off balance.

The door opened.

I said, “Good — uh.” If this was a female hoodlum, I was ready for a life of crime.

“Wow,” I said, “are you Lolita Lopez?”

Four

This gal was not the gal of my deductions. This was a white-toothed Latin with luminous eyes, with long black hair hanging heavy on her neck and curling thickly forward over one shoulder, with skin smooth as cream from contented cows, breasts that were high wide and handsome, narrow waist, flaring hips, everything there, yes indeed.

“Wow,” I said again. “You can’t be Lolita Lopez — so who are you?”

“But I am Lolita Lopez.”

“No!”

“Sure I am, Daddy, honey. You want to come in or something?”

She was a criminal, all right. Her eyes were at least a misdemeanor, and those wicked lips were felonious. I looked at the ceiling. She was sensational, yes; but I was, after all, practically engaged to Doris Miller. At least we were going steady. Well, I liked her. Hell, I was working for her, wasn’t I? That was it — everything I was doing I was doing for Doris Miller; everything was my duty.

I looked at her again.

She wore skin-tight blue Capris, nothing on her feet except red nail polish, a billowy white blouse beneath which there was nothing billowing but Lolita, and all in all she was clearly the best argument against girdles since volleyball in nudist camps. And a pretty good argument simply for girls. Just standing there she looked hot enough to bake potatoes, and if she started running around the room it was eight to five she’d burn the joint down.

She was looking me over with approximately the same attention I was giving her. I get a lot of sun, and against the deep tan of my face, my white hair and obtrusive brows sometimes seem about to flee my chops and fly at people. Then there’s the slightly broken nose and snipped ear, plus the fact that I have been hit in the middle of all that with everything from brass knuckles to the right-front fender of a stolen Buick. Consequently, when a babe eyeballs me for the first time I never know what she may do.

This one smiled. “Well,” she said in a warm, husky voice, “are you just going to stand there?”

“I’m not just standing here. I mean, I’m . . . doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been thinking . . . Wow, you’re Lolita Lopez, huh?”

“I’m Lolita. So who are you, Daddy, honey?”

“Why, I’m Shell Scott.”

She inclined her head to one side and peered up at me through black lashes several inches long. Pretty long anyway. “So? Are you selling subscriptions or something?”

“Subscriptions?” I shook my head. “Forgive me, I’m not usually so disjointed . . . You see, I meant to catch you with your, uh, guard down, but you turned the tables on me, I hope to shout you did. I mean — well, you’re not what I expected; this is very unusual, like bald toupees or finding out elephants have amnesia, or . . . Well, I just didn’t expect such a girlish girl.” I stopped, took a deep breath and started over.

“Miss Lopez, I am a private investigator, and I have come here to investigate you . . . oh, fooey. It’s no use. I’ll leave and come back in five minutes, O.K.?”

“Don’t you dare leave,” she said. “Come on in, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell. We may as well start right off like that.”

“Shell, then.” She smiled. “I don’t know what we’re talking about. Haven’t the littlest idea. But it’s fun, you know? Isn’t it fun?”

“It’s pretty close.”

“Aren’t you coming in?”

Believe it or not, I was still standing out there in the hall. “Fine, yes,” I said. “I believe I will come in and just let nature take its curse.”

“Crazy.” She smiled, white teeth gleaming. “We could make beautiful music, you know? We could, Shell. I’ll bet.”

“I’ll bet. I can hear the bongos.”

“We could even make classical music.” Her black eyes sparkled.

“You like classical music, huh?”

“Sure, I really go for that jazz. Maybe you’d like a drink.”

“Would I! Do you have any bourbon?”

“Sure, I’ve got practically everything.”

“Lady, there is nothing practically about it. Wow, tell me, are you really Lolita Lopez?”

She laughed and went off somewhere, presumably to fix drinks. And I had time to think a little. And I couldn’t think even a little. But finally one thought stirred: This was the goddamndest interrogation I had ever conducted. If I was really conducting it. Well, something electrical was going on, and I was a pretty good conductor, my circuits all twanging like bowstrings in an archery tournament.

You’ve got to stop this nonsense, I told myself. And then I asked myself: Nonsense? But this girl, this Lolita, was — the enemy. I had to fight her, beat her down, overpower her, win the battle, make her talk, make her confess, hug her and squeeze her — no, I was getting it all mixed up again. Remember: She is the enemy! You’ve got to fight her, beat her down, overpower . . .

Thank goodness, Lolita came back in right then.

She was carrying two highball glasses and gave me one. I drained half of it in one mighty slurp and then cried, “Gah! What was that? That couldn’t have been bourbon and water.”

“You didn’t say water,” Lolita told me. “You asked if I had bourbon. So that’s bourbon.”

“So that’s bourbon,” I said. “Well, I don’t know why in hell I’ve been drinking it all these years. I mean, I always take it with water. Boy, it’s hot, isn’t it?”

“Take off your coat.”

“I mean the bourbon’s hot. Going down. And I mustn’t take off my coat. I know better. Probably I should take pills or something, but — ”

“Sit down here, Shell. By me.” She was on a long, soft-looking divan, patting the cushion beside her.

“No you don’t. You don’t trick me with that stuff,” I said. Then added, “I don’t think.” It was pretty tricky stuff.

I sat down on the divan — a yard or so from Lolita — then asked her if she’d pour a little water into my bourbon, about a quart or so. She walked away again, with my glass, and I carefully did not watch her slinking barefootedly over the carpet. When she came back with my glass brimful, I was just about back to abnormal.

Lolita sipped her drink. “You’re an investigator? Is that what you said?”

“Right, a private detective.”

“Is that why you came here? Because you’re a detective?”

“Right again.” I threw it all at her in a bunch, to see how she’d catch it. “It’s about Frank Quinn. Casey Flagg’s murder. Ross Miller. And you, and Chester Weiss.”

“Oh,” she said. She caught it neatly enough. The only change was a little crease that appeared between her eyebrows.

“I suppose you know Chester’s dead.”

That one she fumbled. Right in the middle of a sentence. “He is? That’s too bad, he seemed a very — ”

Bang, she stopped. Head tilted slightly, mouth open, one dark brow raised. She just froze like that. Only for a second or two. Not long. Long enough. Then she went on as if nothing had happened, completing the sentence, “ — nice little man.” She paused. “What . . . how did he die?”

“I think he was murdered.”

“Murdered? He was really murdered?”

I eased back a little. “That’s only what I think. Police say it was a natural death. Heart attack.”

I waited, but she didn’t add anything. So I went on, pleasantly, “I’ve been employed by a client who believes Ross Miller innocent. So I’m trying to contact people who gave testimony at the trial, see if I can’t dig up something — anything — which might help Miller. At least get him a stay of execution.” I paused, let the silence gather a little. “He’s going to die Wednesday morning.”

She moistened her lips but didn’t speak. I said casually, “The California Penal Code puts it simply enough. ‘The punishment of death shall be inflicted by the administration of a lethal gas.’ Sounds almost cute, doesn’t it — ‘the administration of a lethal gas’? Doesn’t sound very gruesome, like hacking a guy’s head off, say, or burning him at the stake. But it’s pretty gruesome. Take it from me.”

I lit a cigarette, let the gray smoke bubble past my lips. “The gas is cyanide, and I’ve seen people dead of cyanide poisoning. They get the most peculiar bluish color. There’s a word for it in fact, cyanosis — ”

“Don’t tell — I mean, why tell me all this, Mr. Scott?”

I smiled. “Shell, huh?”

“Yes. I meant Shell.” But she didn’t sound as if she meant it. Not any more.

I said, “I thought you ought to know, Lolita. Miller’s in prison, in part because of your testimony. And they don’t tell you, during the trial, precisely how the convicted man will die. Merely ‘in the manner prescribed by law’, or something happy like that. It sounds almost as if they’re going to put the guy to sleep, the way they kill kittens.”

Right then, for the first time, she got pale. Really pale. She closed her eyes and her lips looked dry.

I went on, “And the members of the jury, unfortunately, are not required to stand up and say right out loud in open court, ‘We are going to kill this man’. They merely say, ‘We find the defendant guilty’, and such jazz. Of course, some of the cats deserve to die; but some of them don’t. And if there’s even a chance Ross Miller is innocent — ”

“Please, Shell. This is quite unnecessary.” She looked straight at me, black eyes appearing even darker, larger, in the whiteness of her face. “If you want to ask me any questions, ask them. All right?”

“All right. Now, Miss Lopez, you testified — ”

She was game. She smiled, kept looking at me and interrupted, “It’s Lolita.”

I grinned. “Of course. Lolita. You testified that Frank Quinn was here, with you, at the time of Flagg’s murder.”

“That’s right. He was here.” She paused. “Really, I told everything I knew during the trial. There’s nothing I can add. I don’t know anything about what happened that night, who shot Mr. Flagg or anything.”

“Uh-huh. Well, Chester Weiss testified that he took Miller up to Flagg’s penthouse, and took nobody else up there. But just before he was mur — before he died, Weiss admitted perjuring himself. He stated that he took Frank Quinn up to the penthouse, right at the time Flagg was murdered. If Quinn was up there, he couldn’t very well have been here with you at the same time, could he?”

“No. So he couldn’t have been in the penthouse. I told you, Mr. Quinn was here.”

Silence, for half a minute. I pulled at my bourbon and water, and Lolita sipped at her own drink. Then I said, “That’s the way you want to leave it? There’s nothing you want to add?”

She shook her head. That thick mass of black hair flipped over her shoulder. I snubbed my cigarette out in a tray and stood up. “Well, thanks. I guess that’s all. For now.”

She walked with me to the door, opened it, closed it gently behind me as I walked down the hall.

The Spartan Apartment Hotel, on North Rossmore in Hollywood, is where I live, the three rooms and bath I call home. I went up to the second floor and let myself inside the apartment. No guys with bombs or machine guns were waiting for me, so I mixed a small drink, then fed the fish.

Inside my front door, against the left wall, are the two fish tanks, one a small guppy tank and the other a twenty-gallon community aquarium. I finished my highball, watching the mollies and red swordtails, shark-like panchax chaperii and the magnificent cornflower-blue betta, losing myself in that smaller, cleaner world for a while.

Then I waved good night to Amelia, the brightly bawdy, yard-square nude voluptuous on my living-room wall; Amelia, who looks like — and maybe is — somebody’s secret vice. Then I showered, turned out the lights, and went to bed.

It took me quite a while to get to sleep.

The next morning, Sunday a.m., I hit the joints on lower Main and Spring, in Boyle Heights, out on Central Avenue. I talked to men in bars and barber shops, cheap hotels, union hiring halls, even to businessmen, attorneys, other private detectives. All the time I had to keep looking over my shoulder, making sure that nobody was aiming at the back of my fat head. I asked questions about Quinn, Flagg, Weiss, even Heigman and Lolita Lopez. And I came up with a blank, nothing.

I did some checking on Ross Miller, learning only that the more I found out about him the more innocent he seemed. He was a law school honor graduate with a twenty-two-year-old sister, Doris Miller, which I knew, and a thirty-year-old fiancée, Jane French, which I hadn’t known. I tried to locate the fiancée, but couldn’t, so I phoned Doris. She told me Jane French had gone back to her home in Kansas City; it hadn’t seemed likely that there was going to be a wedding.

It still didn’t seem likely. At two o’clock in the afternoon, after five hours of legwork, digging, questioning, I had no more than when I’d started out in the morning. Then came the break. I’d been looking for a middle-aged ex-con named Pinky, a man who’d sold me information in the past. I knew Pinky was very friendly with a guy named Shadow, a hood on Frank Quinn’s payroll. So there was a chance Pinky might know something about Quinn that I could use. I found him in a beer joint named Jerry’s over on Figueroa.

Jerry’s was one of those places where drunks go to spend their unemployment checks, a dark, clammy dive sour with the smell of burps. Diseased-looking linoleum covered the bartop and tops of the tables, and there was either old sawdust on the floor or the termites had gone crazy down there. Pinky was sitting alone at a table, an empty shot glass in front of him.

I walked over to him and said, “Hello, Pinky.”

He looked up and waited for his eyes to focus on me. Then he smiled. One of his front teeth was gone. “Scott,” he said. “Well, ain’t this the nuts. I been wonderin’ who was gonna buy the next drink.”

I sat down, called the bartender over, ordered a beer for me and a shot of rye for Pinky. He looked the same as when I’d last seen him, two or three months before. Thin, unshaven, with unhealthy puffs like wrinkled blisters under his eyes. I filled him in, told him I was representing Ross Miller, and hoping to stick Quinn one way or another, preferably with K. C. Flagg’s murder, but that anything tying Quinn to Flagg might help.

“So far nobody’s been able to tell me anything more than that they knew each other,” I said.

“More’n that, Scott.” Pinky sipped his rye like wine, rubbed his lips together. “It ain’t generally known — which it wouldn’t be — but Casey was Quinn’s bagman.”

I smiled. A bagman is a payoff man, the intermediary who carries money — graft, loot, bribes, the proceeds of crime — between one man or group and another.

“Who got paid off?” I asked Pinky.

“Some pretty big apples, the way I get it — legit dudes.” He paused. “I can give you a coupla names, coupla guys Flagg paid off for Quinn. No skin off me — but it’ll cost you a case of Old Overholt, Scott.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Ira Semmelwein and John Porter. The payoffs were from Quinn through Casey, made once a month. Probably to plenty others, but them’s the only ones I know about.” Pinky tossed off his rye, reckless with it now that there was a whole case in the offing. “Here’s something for free,” he said. “I hear Quinn makes the payoffs himself since Casey got fanned. Way it reached me, he holds some kind of meeting with his boys every month or so, but that might be a wrong steer.”

“You know what the payoffs were for?”

“Nope. That’s it, Scott.”

Pinky had already earned his case of rye, but there was more to come. I tossed some names at him without reaction. But then I said, “A guy named Heigman testified at the trial, said he sold Miller the gun used on Flagg.”

Pinky grinned, sticking his tongue into the empty space where he’d once had a tooth. “Don’t know where you’d find him, but I know why you won’t.”

“That sounds sort of fatal,” I said.

“Sort of. You know a butcher name of Papa?”

“Papa Ryan?”

“Yeah. Well, Papa did a job of work on Heigman a few months back. So you can understand why nobody’s seen him around for a few months.”

I swore. I wouldn’t find Heigman now. Because I did indeed know who Papa Ryan was. He was a short, thick ape with a pockmarked face and muscles like the hawsers used for tying ships to docks. He was immensely strong in body, but paralyzed from the neck up, and his idea of a practical joke was encasing your tootsies in quick-hardening cement and then taking you for a swim. “Race you to the beach,” he’d say jovially, dropping you off the boat.

Fortunately, Papa was as close as Siamese twins to another ungentle character named Shadow — who got that monicker because the boys claimed he was so thin he didn’t cast a shadow until five o’clock in the afternoon — the same Shadow very chummy with my informant, Pinky. Both Shadow and Papa Ryan worked for Frank Quinn, so I could understand how Pinky was able to give me info I hadn’t been able to get from anyone else.

“My telling you this,” Pinky said, “won’t hurt Papa none, since nobody’ll ever be able to prove nothing. I’d guess Heigman’s in solution somewhere between here and Catalina. But you’ll forget I told it to you, naturally.”

“Naturally. You sure about this, Pinky? It’s important.”

“Hell, I didn’t see him do it. But I got the word he handled it. That’s all I know, Scott.”

“Handled it for Quinn?”

“That part wasn’t mentioned. It was just talk, you know, boys cutting up old touches, telling a few jokes.”

I could imagine the jokes. Like how funny the bubbles were, coming up through the deep green sea. And how soon they stopped.

Pinky had no more to tell me. When I went out the door into the afternoon sunshine, he was waving a hand at the bartender.

At five-thirty that Sunday afternoon I sat at the desk in my office, having a meal of sandwiches and milk and using the phone. Except for the information I’d got from Pinky, the rest of the day had been a bust. I knew a little about the two local men Pinky had named. John Porter was a minor city official, Ira Semmelwein was president of the Golden Coast Insurance Company, and owner of a couple office buildings on Hope Street. Each of the men had a spotless reputation.

If I’d simply been out to get Quinn, I would have been more than satisfied with the information I’d been able to get so far. But this was late Sunday afternoon, and Wednesday morning Ross Miller would start breathing cyanide. I’d picked up a lot of miscellaneous info, but there was nothing that would stop an execution — it was all conjecture, hearsay, probability and logic; there wasn’t a shred of usable, courtroom-type proof about any of it. I had decided that, with so little time remaining, it would take a miracle for me to have even a chance of clearing Ross.

And at five-thirty p.m. I got it.

The phone rang. I grabbed it and said hello, and a woman’s voice said, “Is this Shell Scott?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“I’m alone — you can talk, if that’s what you mean.”

“I know you’ve been looking into the murder of Casey Flagg. And the trial. You’d like to send Frank Quinn to prison for it, wouldn’t you?”

I sat up straight in my swivel chair, gripping the phone hard. “I would.”

“Then we’re partners. Because so would I. Frank did it, all right.”

“Who is this?” The voice was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Lolita?”

“No, this isn’t Lolita. This is Mrs. Frank Quinn.”

Five

Thirty minutes later I parked the Cad in a lot half a block from Fifth Street and started walking toward The Lantern, a bar and grill where I’d enjoyed many bourbon-and-waters and orders of rare prime ribs. I was well known there, and it was a most unlikely spot in which to be shot in the back, which was why I had chosen it.

I didn’t see any suspicious characters, or out-of-place loungers as I walked down the alley behind The Lantern. I went in through the kitchen, saying a quiet hello to Luigi, the perspiring chef. At the swinging doors leading from the kitchen into the club I paused and looked over the club’s interior, but nothing seemed out of place.

I was early, purposely. Ten minutes after my arrival, Mrs. Quinn came in the front door. She was alone. She spoke to the headwaiter, then went to one of the curtained booths on my left. I waited five minutes, but nobody else came in after her. Then I walked to the booth.

“Hello, Mr. Scott,” she said.

“Hello again.” I sat down across the table from her and said, “We meet under strange circumstances.”

“Never mind the small talk.” She was all business. “I suppose you’re willing to stick your neck out if you can get enough on my husband to send him to prison.”

“My neck’s out about as far as it can get now. Your husband’s already tried to kill me once.”

“I know. I was on an extension and heard him call Davey and Grant before you even left the house Saturday. He said for them to blast you on the Freeway, a few miles from the house.” She reeled that out casually, as if it were relatively unimportant, then went on, “I got a good look at you, but I thought it was the last time I’d see you alive. Then when Davey came in babbling that he’d left Grant stiff in the car, I decided you were my man.”

“That’s good. I guess. Your man for what?” The charm had rubbed off this gal long ago, and whatever rubbed it off had just kept on rubbing, but if she could help me get to Quinn, I could do without charm.

“My husband’s throwing a party Tuesday night out at our place. Lot of his friends are invited to celebrate.”

“What does it have to do with me? I’m no friend of his.”

“It’s a costume ball. You know, you come as your favorite history character. Or a dream. Or suppressed desire — anything. You know, Frank likes to do things big — spare no expense and all that.”

“Good old Frank.”

“Yeah. The pig. Anyway, they’ll be wearing masks and all, so you should be able to get into the house with a mask on, huh?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Have to wear a mask, all right.” She shook her head. “With that face, maybe you ought to wear two masks.”

She was a fine one to talk about faces. I said, “Look, this is interesting as can be, but I’ve a few questions: One, what good will it do me — and you — if I get into the party?; two, how do I know I won’t be shot in the back of the head if I go within eight miles of your husband’s fortress?; three, how come you claim that you’re willing to finger your own husband — ”

“Forget the number-three question. That’s my business. I just want Frank sent to college and figure you’re the man who can arrange it. A nice life sentence would suit me. The pig. As for the rest of it . . .” She paused, fumbling in a handbag the size of a briefcase, pulled out a white envelope and handed it to me.

While I was opening the envelope and taking an engraved card out of it, Mrs. Quinn said, “There’s a floor safe under the desk in Frank’s room — that crummy red and black mausoleum you were in. Nobody in the world knows the combination to the safe but Frank. Not even me. Not even his wife. How do you like that?”

I shrugged. The engraved card was an invitation stating that, “You are cordially invited” and so on. The date was Tuesday night, October 31, at eight p.m., and the address was Frank Quinn’s. The invitation didn’t look like something that could have been dreamed up and produced on the spur of the moment. But it didn’t feel right to me.

I said, “You mentioned this was a party to celebrate — celebrate what? And why a costume party? Tuesday night seems like a peculiar — ”

“There’s a couple reasons. For one, the brawl is set to last all night, until at least ten o’clock the next morning. And something kind of important to Frank is happening then.”

For a second or two I didn’t get it. The next morning would be November first. And at ten a.m. on the first, Ross Miller was to be executed. I guess, for a monster like Quinn, that was something to celebrate.

Mrs. Quinn was looking at me. “Well, don’t throw up,” she said cheerfully. “It just works out that way. Tuesday night is Halloween, see?”

I blinked. “It is?” It had been a long time since I’d rung doorbells and played trick or treat, and I hadn’t realized the witching night was so near. But she was right: Tuesday night was October 31, Halloween.

She said, “It just worked out great that way.”

“Yeah. Great. What about this safe?”

“Well, there’s enough in it to hang a dozen big stuffed shirts in L.A., see? But more important, I know there’s some things that would stick Frank good. He keeps it because it helps hold some other guys in line. You get it?” She talked like a man. But, then, she looked like a man.

“I get it.”

“Some of the stuff in there isn’t no good to Frank, but he’s fixed it so all the junk in that safe goes to his executor — you know, when he dies — and it’ll ruin some men Frank hates. He hates hard, that man. It would ruin Frank, too, see; but he won’t care when he’s dead. You get it? Just plain meanness, that’s all.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, what more do you want? All you got to do is go into the safe and drag out all the papers and whatever is in there and you got Frank tied up good. With any luck, you’ll have enough to save your boy’s skin. That Ross character.”

She stopped and glared at me as if I’d just started eating soup with my fork. I said, “Yes, ma’am. All I have to do is rip open the safe with my bare hands and get the papers and walk out with sixteen bullet holes and three knives in my back, bite my way through the fence you’ve got — ”

“Oh, knock it. I thought you had a lot of moxie or I wouldn’t have come here. I’ll see that the safe’s open at nine p.m., on the nose. If you can get in, then you should be able to get out under your own power. How you do it, that’s up to you. I brought you an invitation — and nobody, but nobody, gets in without an invitation. There’s exactly a hundred men coming, and there’s only a hundred invitations, so nobody, but nobody, crashes the party. Them invited can bring their wives and dames if they want, but that’s all. It’s set up very careful like that, since some of the boys has a little heat on them.”

A little heat. Such as warrants for first-degree homicide, robbing banks, blowing up citizens with bombs, dope pushing. It didn’t sound exactly like the kind of ball I was dying to attend.

She went on, “Since there’s no extra invitations, I had to get this one from — ” She bit off what she’d started to say. I had the feeling it was somebody’s name, but after a moment she went on, “ — one of the boys. So he won’t be able to be at the party; you’ll be at it instead of him.” She paused. “That’s about all I can do. What more do you want?”

I sighed. “That’s enough, I guess. But I confess to a little puzzlement. Why you’re doing this, for example. And how you plan to have the safe open.”

“As for the safe, I’ll have a diamond necklace Frank keeps in the safe — he’ll give it to me Tuesday sometime, I’ll decide I don’t want to wear it, just before nine, and he’ll naturally put it back in the safe. So, the safe will be open. From there it’s up to you — I don’t care if you shoot the pig in the — ”

She told me where to shoot him, but I merely shuddered invisibly at the thought of such a thing happening to me and asked her again why she was telling me all this. Mrs. Quinn merely repeated that it was none of my business.

“This could be a somewhat involved way,” I said, “to get me out there where I could be shot.”

“You’ll be shot if they lay eyes on you, all right. And I can understand why you’re suspicious. But you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or forget the whole thing. I can figure out another way to get rid of Frank without killing him. But I thought I’d be doing you a favor — and getting a good man on my side at the same time.” She paused, then added, “And to tell you the truth, I could maybe ask a friend of mine to do this job — but he might get shot. I don’t really care much if you get shot. Frank’s already trying to kill you, so what’ve you got to lose? This way you got a chance to stick him and save your neck — and maybe that Ross guy’s — all at the same time. Well, do you want to try it or not?”

“If it comes to that, I’ll give it a try. But first tell me a couple things.”

She looked at her wristwatch. “Make it snappy.”

“Maybe you can prove right now whether or not you’re on the level with me.”

“Try me.”

“When you phoned earlier, you said your husband killed Casey Flagg. Can you prove it?”

“No, and you can’t prove it either. But he did it. Maybe you don’t know it, but Casey handled certain jobs for Frank.”

“Bagman — yeah, I know it.”

She seemed surprised, but went on, “Well, Casey was in trouble with the government, which hit him for a pile of back taxes they said he owed, and had to pay or they’d send him to the can. Handling all that money of Frank’s every month, Casey started holding out some of it, I guess so he could pay off the government grab.” She paused and cocked her head on one side, as if she’d just thought of something striking. “It’s almost like the government’s in the same business Frank’s in, huh? Isn’t that funny?”

“There’s nothing funny about it.”

“Yeah. Well, it would have been better for Casey if he’d just gone to the federal jug. Because when Frank found out what Casey was pulling he hit all four walls and the ceiling.”

“How did he find out?”

“One of the boys wrote Frank a letter — figured he was being short-changed or something, I don’t know all the ins and outs of it. Anyways, Frank must’ve figured right away it had to be Casey who was breaking it off in him, and he stormed right over to the Whitestone, the way I get it. Actually — ” there was that momentary hesitation again, “actually, one of the boys told me most of this. Anyhow, Frank collared Casey there in the Whitestone, and in the middle of the beef he shot him — Frank’s got a wild temper.”

“So he has.”

“That’s what caused all the trouble, because Frank didn’t plan it like he ordinary would. Just flipped and shot the s.o.b. Then he had to work pretty fast to fix everything.”

“Did the chap who told you about this actually see Frank shoot Flagg?”

“Hardly. Frank went up to the penthouse alone. But you don’t have to see Frank blast a guy to know Frank done it. For one thing, he took one of his own guns along, and it was that gun found by the body. I know personally he had to get to that pawnbroker, what’s his name? — ”

“Heigman.”

“Yeah, Heigman. He used to be a fence Frank did business with in the old days. So Frank had that on him, but he muscled him around a little that same night, and paid him off too, to make sure he’d tell the right story when the time come.”

“Which he did. What about Weiss?”

“He’d done a few jobs for Frank from time to time. Frank just put a little more pressure on him and made him swear at the trial that Miller was the only one went up to the penthouse that night.”

“How’d Miller happen to be there?”

“Frank called him, naturally. Pretended to be Casey and the kid ran right over. By then Frank had called the fuzz. After that argument Ross and Casey had, the kid was a perfect patsy — once Frank fixed the rest of it.”

“He sure fixed it. What about Lolita Lopez?”

“I don’t know nothing about her. She was at the trial is all I know.”

“If Quinn was shooting holes in Casey Flagg, he couldn’t have been in her apartment. So what’s he got on her?”

“I told you, I don’t know nothing about that end.”

“O.K. Do you know if Quinn had anything to do with Weiss’ death?”

“Search me,” she said. “I heard Chester kicked off, but Frank didn’t say a thing to me. Did Frank have something to do with it?”

“I’m really not sure. I suppose you know he had Heigman knocked off.”

“No kidding. First I heard about it. Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be damned. Old Heigman. How about that? That lousy Frank didn’t say a word to me. The pig doesn’t tell me much of anything about his business any more.”

She said that some of her statements would probably be supported by papers in that floor safe of Quinn’s; she wasn’t sure. “But there’s all kinds of slop in it,” she went on. “Starting with whatever give him the boost up four years back, clear on to right now.”

“What was it that gave him the boost? I know he suddenly started swinging more weight around.”

“Search me,” she said again. “I knew him before then, but he never mentioned anything about it to me, he just got a lot of chips all of a sudden. We only been married three years.” She paused. “And it seems like a hundred.”

I would have been willing to bet it hadn’t seemed like a holiday weekend for hubby, either. I asked her a few more questions, but that was all she could tell me. It was, of course, enough. All she could guarantee was that Quinn would open the safe Tuesday night about nine p.m. Then I could sap him or shoot him or kick him in the seat of his pants, she didn’t care.

She was fidgeting to leave, so we said goodbye and I thanked her for the cordial invitation. Not that I actually intended to use it. Going to Frank’s party struck me as about as much fun as getting shot in the stomach.

Mrs. Quinn left. But when she left I was reasonably close behind her.

She wasn’t difficult to tail, and she apparently had no idea that I was following her. She didn’t look toward me once. She walked two blocks down to Fifth and continued straight ahead, so I turned left and ran the half block to my car, started it and pulled up to the stop sign at Fifth again in time to see her still walking ahead. I swung left and drove slowly toward her until she went into a parking lot and came out driving a cream-colored Cadillac. The car was easy to follow.

It was dark when she drove into the Sand Dunes Motel on Beverly Boulevard. I watched her park and go into the third unit in from the street, without knocking. Two minutes later I had parked and walked to the motel’s entrance. I walked past it, continued on around to the rear of that third unit. I got there about ten seconds before they turned out the lights. There were a few inches of space beneath a drawn shade, room enough for me to peer through. I peered.

“They” consisted of Mrs. Frank Quinn, and the guy I knew only as Jay. The guy I’d seen in the red-and-black room Saturday with Frank Quinn. He was Frank Quinn’s right-hand man, no doubt; but he was more than that to Mrs. Frank Quinn. He was even more than both hands.

The ten seconds before the lights went out were enough. It couldn’t have been more than three minutes all told since she had walked in the front door. But the way they were acting, even a fool would have guessed that they were old friends.

Then the lights went out.

I walked back to my Cad, climbed in and lit a cigarette. It would probably be an exaggeration to say I was as happy about what was going on back there as were Jay and Mrs. Quinn. But I felt pretty good. Because this meant that undoubtedly Mrs. Quinn’s offer of help to me made sense and was not merely a complicated way to get me knocked off. It explained who had told her some of the things she’d passed on to me — the name she’d almost mentioned a time or two. And it meant there was a little undercover friction in the Quinn menage.

I dragged on my cigarette, thinking. Maybe it meant more than that — to me.

Clearly, Frank Quinn did not know what his ever-loving wife was up to. Clearly, he did not realize that his trusted, loyal lieutenant, Jay, had promoted himself to Colonel, at least. And obviously Jay, who was second-in-command to the boss, knew a great deal about the activities of his boss. Surely it was a situation I could turn to my benefit — and Ross Miller’s.

There was a way. Yes, there was a way.

But I hesitated. It was not the kind of shenanigan I enjoy. But I was tempted.

I got out of the car and opened the luggage compartment, in which I do not keep any luggage. Instead I carry there equipment I have used, or may have occasion to use, in my work. A number of electronic items, an infrared snooperscope, walkie-talkie, about four thousand dollars worth of odds and ends, some quite odd indeed. I had to move a collapsible bamboo ladder and chest of burglar’s tools to get what I wanted, but in two or three minutes I had the items.

Item: Yashica Lynx 35mm. camera with an f-1.9 lens.

Item: Cassette of Kodak IR135 35mm. infrared film.

Item: Standard flash attachment for the Lynx.

Item: GE 5R flashbulbs.

In another couple of minutes I had the Japanese Lynx loaded with infrared film and the flash attachment fitted to the camera. With this film, and the lens set at f-4 .5, and a shutter speed of about 1/50 of a second, I could take very satisfactory pictures in the complete absence of visible light. Infrared film is sensitive to the near infrared or heat rays, lower in the electromagnetic spectrum than visible light rays. The flash attachment and 5R bulbs, when triggered simultaneously with the camera’s shutter, would provide the quick burst of heat rays; the heat-sensitive infrared film would capture the picture. And there were three or four inches of space beneath that motel-room shade; enough. It was possible, all right.

Still, I hesitated. You have to give me that.

Then a happy thought struck me. Maybe Jay felt like a winner at the moment, but I happened to know he was a two-time loser, “two-time” in this case meaning he’d done two stretches in State clinks. And right now — I grinned to myself — Jay was breaking the law! In fact, he was energetically committing at least a misdemeanor.

Perhaps, even so, I wouldn’t have done it if it had been for my benefit alone. Perhaps I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for the necessity of helping Ross Miller in a hurry.

But probably I would have.

Anyway — I did it.

Six

After dropping off the fully exposed — possibly overexposed — roll of film with a photographer who’d done work for me in the past, I used a pay phone to call Lolita Lopez at the Whitestone.

She answered and I said, “Lolita? This is Shell Scott again,” and waited to see what her reaction would be.

“Oh, hello, Shell.” She sounded quite friendly.

I said, “Have you done any thinking about our last conversation?”

“What’s to think about?”

“I guess that means you’ve nothing new to tell me.”

“Just the old things. And you already know them.”

“I’d still like to talk to you. All right if I drop by? I can be there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Sure. Fifteen minutes would be fine. I have to take a shower. But I’ll leave the door open so you can come right in.”

One of those hot flashes hit me again. “Into . . . the shower?” I said, unbelieving.

“Goodness, no,” she laughed. “You’d get all wet. I meant the front door, of course.”

“Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Yes I do — ”

“In case you get here sooner.”

“I probably will.”

“Then if I’m not ready, you can mix a drink or something.”

“I’ll think of something.”

“‘Bye.”

We hung up. Eight minutes later I tried Lolita’s door. It was unlocked, all right. I went inside and looked around and heard the sound of shower water drumming on something — let’s face it, drumming on Lolita. Then it stopped.

“Yoo-hoo,” I called. “I’m here. Here I am.”

“That you, Shell?”

“Who else?”

“Mix me a gin and tonic, will you? I’ll be right out.”

I hunted around and found the booze, mixed her drink and a bourbon and water for me. By that time Lolita had joined me in the front room, wearing a white robe.

I gave her the drink and she smiled and thanked me, then sat on the divan. I didn’t sit down. I stayed on my feet and paced the floor. This interview wasn’t going to go the way last night’s interview had gone, I told myself. No sir, this time I was going to be controlled, efficient, incisive. Aloof even. Practically nuts.

I said, “Lolita, there are a few things you should know. And, like it or not, when I get through you’re going to know them.”

“My, you sound serious.”

“I am serious. You, Weiss, and Heigman were witnesses at Ross Miller’s trial. Weiss and Heigman helped Quinn by lying on the stand and sticking a frame on Miller. You helped alibi Quinn by lying about where he was at the time of Flagg’s murder. I know damn well that Quinn shot Flagg himself. I even know why.”

I glanced at her then, but her face was calm, impassive. She stared at me from the big black eyes.

I went on, “Once Miller was stuck, and Heigman’s value to Quinn was ended, Quinn had him killed. Murdered. Right now Heigman is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — whatever the fishes haven’t eaten, that is. And Weiss is dead, one way or another. That’s how people get paid off for helping Quinn — one of the slimiest hoods alive. So why don’t you quit trying to protect him?”

“I’m not trying to protect him. He’s everything you say he is and more. But . . . Well, I have to tell the truth, don’t I? You wouldn’t want me to lie, would you?”

“I’m pretty damn sure you are lying.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

“I’m not trying to be nice. I’m trying to get you to tell me the truth so we can send that monster away to the monster farm. Look, honey, as far as I know the only people who could help Miller are the three who stuck him in the first place: you, Weiss, and Heigman. The other two are dead. You’re the only one left. And the only time you’ll be safe is after you spill all you know and Quinn’s behind bars.”

She had closed her eyes and was sitting very still. I said, “You could go like Heigman, Lolita. A hood named Papa Ryan dumped him in the drink. Alive, almost surely. Alive, sinking fast down through the sea, holding his breath a long, long time. Sometime, just for fun, hold your breath as long as you can, till your lungs almost burst, and imagine you’re Heigman going down.”

Lolita opened her eyes, leaned slightly toward me, lips parting. She hesitated, then said softly, “I really didn’t lie, Shell. But — maybe he could have done it.” She moistened her lips. “Did he really kill Heigman?”

“Had him killed. One of his punk musclemen dropped the little old man in the ocean. I was telling you the truth. Now tell me the truth, Lolita.”

“I didn’t really lie,” she said again. “I’ll just — just tell you how it actually happened.” She took a deep breath. “That night, when Mr. Flagg was killed, I was here. Mr. Quinn knocked on the door and I let him in. We talked for a minute or two and he said he’d arranged it for me to start working at the Gardenia Room. He was very jolly and friendly — and of course I was happy about the job. We were still talking when we heard sirens. It sounded as if they stopped right in front of the hotel. Mr. Quinn left to see what was wrong, and came back in a few minutes. He said a man had been shot in the hotel — it had just happened, must have happened while we were talking, and the police had already caught the fellow who did it, caught him right in the room with the dead man.” She paused. “Well, then he told me if the police found out he was even in the hotel at the time they’d make things difficult for him — just because he’d been in trouble years before, had a police record. They’d roust him was the way he put it.” She sighed. “Anyway, he asked me to say that he’d been with me from a little before eight o’clock until then, if anybody questioned me about him.”

“What time was it then?”

“About twenty-five minutes after eight. That was in my testimony.”

“I know. But he wasn’t with you until quite a bit after eight o’clock, right?”

“Shell, I’m really not sure now. Honestly. I don’t know what time it was when he came in. There wasn’t any reason for me to notice the time. Even then, though . . . I didn’t think Mr. Quinn had been with me nearly that long. But, well, it just didn’t enter my mind that he could have had anything to do with it.”

“Didn’t you have any doubts during the trial?”

“A little, when Ross Miller testified. But then there was the testimony about his buying the gun, and what Mr. Weiss said. Well, I thought it had to be Ross Miller.”

“That’s what you — and the jury — were supposed to think.” I sat down near Lolita on the divan. “Quinn shot Flagg, phoned Ross, then came to you for his alibi. All he had to do was make sure you believed he’d been with you longer than he really had been. Or, at least, would say he’d been with you longer. That, added to the testimony of Weiss and Heigman would keep him clean. Which it did. It’s not much help, but you’d better tell your story to the police anyway.”

“I don’t know, Shell, I don’t know. I’m so confused.” She shook her head, thick black hair swinging. “What good would it do now? That was all nearly a year ago, Shell, I can’t be sure about a few minutes. And it wouldn’t change anything.”

She was probably right. Even added to what Doris Miller could say about Weiss’ visit to her — which, from Doris, would be hearsay testimony — it wouldn’t carry much weight. Not with both Weiss and Heigman dead. Certainly not enough to get Miller a stay of execution. All by itself it wasn’t worth a damn, and Lolita was reluctant to tell the police the story she’d just told me, thus leaving herself open to possible prosecution for perjury, unless some good could come of it.

I said, “Honey, sometimes a half-truth is worse than a whole lie. You’ll probably have to tell your story, even if we can’t know it’ll help.” I paused. “Unless by then I’ve come up with something much better than I’ve got now, on Tuesday I’m going to the police and tell them everything I know. All the stuff I can’t prove, including the rumors, hearsay, guesses — and what you’ve told me. Then, if they want to talk to you, or get a statement from you, you give it to them. It might help and it might not, but do it. O.K.?”

She thought about it for nearly a minute, then nodded. “All right, Shell. If it has to be that way.”

“It has to be that way. And, for now, at least get out of the Whitestone. And don’t let anybody know where you’re going, especially not Frank Quinn.”

She actually looked puzzled. “You don’t really think I’m in any danger, do you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “No more than Weiss was, or Heigman, or Mrs. Bluebeard, or — ”

Her eyes flashed. “You don’t have to be mean — ”

“Mean, she says — ” I cut it off, looked at her still-flashing eyes and knitted brows, and changed the subject slightly. “You mentioned something about a job in the Gardenia Room. What kind of job?”

“I’m a singer — ballads, a few naughty lyrics, some Mexican songs.” Her eyes were still flashing.

“How come Quinn happened to talk to you about a job in the first place? And how did he know you lived here in the Whitestone?”

“I was with some friends in the club one night, over a year ago, and they talked the M.C. into letting me do a couple of numbers. Mr. Quinn was there and liked my act. He said he might be able to fix it for me to work the club if I wanted to.”

“This was before Flagg’s murder?”

“Yes, a month or so before then. Well, I’d been out of a job for a while, and it sounded wonderful to me. I told him where I lived, but I didn’t really expect to hear from him again. I thought he was the owner or something.”

“Maybe he is. He’s got pieces of several clubs in town. Where is this Gardenia Room?”

“In the Barker Hotel. It’s on Third Street — ”

“I know where it is.”

I also had a hunch I knew what it was. Rumors had reached me that the Barker, despite the fact that it was a big, expensive hotel in a very respectable section of the city, was being visited more and more frequently by the local hoodlum population. That was understandable, since the manager of the Barker was, I knew, one of Quinn’s hired hands, a big, hard-boiled ex-con named Fargo — who looked upon me as a vegetarian looks upon pork chops. I had never done anything to Fargo. I had merely, on a case for a client, helped three teams of officers working out of Burglary catch a well-organized ring of fur thieves — and sent Fargo’s father, brother, and sister to Folsom’s maximum security slammer. So, naturally, he loved me.

“Baby,” I said, “that joint should be called the Barker-Karpis. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll stay the hell away from there — ”

She interrupted. “Away? But my job — ”

“No job is that important. Quinn’s boys run that hotel, probably others live in the joint. It would be a simple matter for you to fall down some stairs and break your neck, or get hit by a car leaving the club, or fall out a window — ”

“You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m serious. Look, Wednesday morning Miller goes to the gas chamber. Until then, Quinn is going to be crawling out of his pants. No matter what else you do, stay away from the Gardenia Room and the Barker Hotel. In fact, check into another hotel and stay the hell away — ”

“I won’t, either. And stop swearing at me.”

I groaned. I held my head in my hands. I rolled my eyes up to the ceiling and asked for strength. Women, I thought. Why can’t they be more like men? But probably that wouldn’t work. I tried to convince Lolita, but she remained unconvinced. Maybe I was painting too black a picture, but I didn’t think so.

We talked for a few more minutes, and gradually the friction which had been building during the first part of our conversation lessened. It got quite enjoyable. When Lolita wasn’t discussing Quinn or the trial she got pretty animated, and simply breathing shallowly she was very nearly animated enough to blow fuses in the next apartment.

She was telling me about auditioning for the job in the Gardenia Room. “I did have to audition,” she said. “Mr. Sullivan makes all the acts audition for him, naturally. But especially the girl acts.”

“Who’s Sullivan?”

“Manager of the Gardenia Room, and he hires all the people for the shows. Sully, they call him. He’s big and bald — it isn’t that his hair’s getting thin, he says, just that his scalp’s getting thick.” She laughed. “So he wears a beret all the time. Imagine, a beret, even in the office. Always chewing a big cigar. He kept trying to get me to take off my clothes.”

“He didn’t!”

“He sure did. But I didn’t. You see, they always have one or two strip acts in the show, and he kept telling me I had the makings for a stripper.”

“You’ve got the makings, all right.”

“I kept telling him I was a singer, and I didn’t have to take my clothes off to sing. You know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said it would sure help.”

“Yeah. Help him.”

“He kept saying, ‘C’mon, baby, lessee what you got.’” She smiled. “He said a stripper who could sing too would be a sensational act — and he could even pay me for both jobs. If I’d just audition. But finally I convinced him I was a singer, period. He always auditions the girls in his office — even after the club closes sometimes. He’s a crazy one.”

“Yeah, crazy.”

We were getting pretty far afield here. Especially with Lolita dressed just in that white robe. At least I guessed that was all she was dressed in. When I thought about it. Which was quite a lot.

But I said sternly, “However, about Quinn — ”

“Oh, let’s not talk about him any more,” she said. “Let’s relax just a little.”

“I can’t relax just a little.”

“Oh.” She crossed her legs and the white robe fell away from calf, knee, gleaming thigh.

“Now, look here,” I said in a no-nonsense tone, “don’t pull that stuff on me. It won’t work, probably.”

Her black hair was loose, spread in a mass over her shoulders. She shook her head from side to side, the thick hair gently whipping. The easy movement caused ripples beneath the top of her robe, which parted in a narrow V, and then a wider U, and finally became something like a W.

“I’m sorry,” Lolita said in a glad voice, and uncrossed her long, lovely legs, only to cross them again the other way. The robe wiggled and billowed and slid.

Yeah, that’s all she has on, just the robe, I thought. Wow! I thought. Give a man enough robe, I thought. But at the same warped moment another thought was fluttering in my skull, up there with the bats. And it was: Scott, old man, you’ve got to get out of here. But he wasn’t listening.

“Oh, Shell, you’re so businesslike,” she said gayly. “Forget business for a minute, can’t you?”

I said, “It won’t work.”

She shifted her position just a bit, as if getting more comfortable. She certainly looked more comfortable. “It won’t,” I said. “I’ll give you ten to one it won’t . . . Eight to five?”

Then she shifted a bit more and said, “Let’s just talk fun, and have fun, and all. Just fun.”

“Sounds fun,” I said. “What’s it mean — ”

“Forget everything else. Just talk, have another drink, have a little party. The two of us.”

“Why not? Sure. Fine and dandy.” I didn’t even give a hoot about quizzing her any more. After all, nobody’s perfect. I have my flaws. I have my weaknesses. And my Achilles’ heel is not in my feet.

She smiled gorgeously. “You don’t have to sit clear at the other end of the divan, do you?”

“I should say not,” I said, moving as I spoke.

Lolita, still smiling, leaned back against the cushions behind her and said, “Isn’t this better, Shell? Now we — ” Then she broke off suddenly, staring across the room. “Goodness,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“Huh?” I followed her gaze. There wasn’t anything over there except a table, chair, and a big clock.

“Goodness,” she said again, “I didn’t know it was so late.”

“It’s later that you think.”

“I’m on in twenty minutes.”

“Say that again.”

“I only have twenty minutes to get dressed, and undressed.”

“One of us is nuts.”

“Changed, I mean I’m due at the club — the band is already playing.”

“I don’t hear a thing.”

“I might even get fired if I’m late again.”

“I might get fired myself if — ”

“You’ll have to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Go away. Get out. Go home,”

“But . . .”

“I’m sorry. I have to go to the club.”

“But . . . but . . . but . . .” Nothing else came out. Her meaning was filtering in, but I was trying to keep it unaltered; then we were up off the divan, and she was saying, “I am sorry, Shell,” and I was being led in something approaching stupor to the front door, and then the door was closing gently behind me and I was staring blankly at a small beetle or something else very unexciting which was running across the hall carpet.

I turned around and said to the closed door, “But . . .” I could hear her inside there trotting around. Getting dressed, I presumed. I raised a hand in the air and said, “But . . .” and let the hand fall to my side. I wasn’t sure what had happened. Not a bit sure.

All I knew was that — somehow — she had tricked me.

Seven

I really don’t know how long I stood there. But I was still standing there, looking at the beetle. He — or she; you can’t tell about beetles — was almost to the wall, and I was wondering what good it would do him or her when it got there. And then I heard the click of the doorknob behind me.

And Lolita’s voice: “Shell?”

I swung around. “Yes? Yes?”

“You . . .” She stopped, started again. “It seems so silly. But you really think he might try to kill me, don’t you?”

I pulled myself together, took a deep breath and snorted it out. “I do. I don’t say it’s a sure thing, but he might. And if he might, there’s no sense making it easy for him.”

She sighed, moistened her felonious lips. “You really think I should stay away from the club tonight?”

“Tonight — and for many more nights.”

“Well . . . come back in, will you, Shell? Maybe you’re right. You’ve got me half convinced.”

I went back in. Two minutes later we were on that divan again, and I had the other half of her convinced.

And a little later she said, “Oh, Shell, don’t go. Don’t go.”

“Hell,” I said weakly, “who’s going?”

Before midnight we left the Whitestone. Half an hour later I parked my Cad near the Washington, a medium-priced hotel on Washington Boulevard. I’d used every trick I knew to make sure we weren’t tailed — being the last car through red lights, doubling back, going the wrong way up one-way streets and so on — and I knew we hadn’t been followed.

In a few more minutes Lolita was checked into room forty-one — not as Lolita Lopez — and I said to her at the door, “I’ll be pretty busy tomorrow, so I probably won’t get back here till tomorrow night sometime. You keep out of sight till then.”

She smiled. “I’ll even call room service for food.”

“Fine. See you tomorrow, honey.”

She nodded, looking at me from half-lidded eyes. “’Bye, Shell.”

I went back to the Cad, climbed in and headed for home.

At ten o’clock the next morning I started to get a little panicky. Because this was Monday morning and there remained exactly forty-eight hours before Ross Miller’s execution — which meant that Miller was now being taken from his cell in San Quentin’s Death Row and moved into an isolation cell. He would be moved only once again, into the gas chamber. And now I knew he was innocent, knew an innocent man was going to die — unless I stopped his execution.

But the only man who could stop that execution was the Governor of the State of California. And merely what I “knew” — tales from alcoholic hoodlums, rumbles from the city’s scum, deductions, logic, hearsay evidence — would not at all impress the Governor of the State of California.

In the next six hours I didn’t get close to anything that would help Miller, or hurt Quinn. I talked to Ira Semmelwein and John Porter, the two men Pinky told me were being paid off by Quinn. They were cordial, pleasant, but — Quinn? Who in the world was Frank Quinn? The gangster? Goodness, they didn’t know any gangsters.

That’s the way it went. Moreover, I had to move about with considerable care. I knew Quinn would try to get me again. I didn’t know where or when or how; but I knew he’d try — until I managed to stop him. So at four o’clock that afternoon I parked before the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center on La Cienega Boulevard.

The thought of actually attending Frank Quinn’s hoodlum ball tomorrow night was a prospect which still filled me with something approaching total nausea. But I had decided to make the necessary preparations for that insanity, just in case.

I got out of the Cad and walked over to the Costume Center. On display behind the window was a stately mannequin of a gal in powdered wig and fluffy silks and laces, looking much like Marie Antoinette, and with her dress scooped out even lower than today’s most daring gowns. Worn any lower it would have been merely a high skirt. I liked it a lot. Next to Marie was a guy from a different period, a Roman gladiator, who didn’t look glad about anything; he was tugging strenuously at a broad-bladed sword sticking from his solar plexus, and looking pretty uncomfortable. It was an interesting window, but of no great help to me, so I went on inside.

The inside was even more interesting than the outside, primarily because the little honey-blonde lovely behind the counter was no wax model, but definitely a model I could wax enthusiastic about, and she was wearing a harem costume that would have cremated the sultan.

I walked up to the counter and leaned over it toward her, and she batted big long dark lashes at me like a gal waving two fans in a Spanish fandango and said, “Can I help you?” and I said, “You have.”

She cooed and chuckled and made jolly noises all at once, which turned out to be quite delightful even though you may not think that possible, and I said, “I note that you are already modeling, in superlative fashion, one of this establishment’s costumes. That being the case — ”

She interrupted, grinning just as widely as I was, “The Marie Antoinette costume sells for six hundred and twenty dollars, and I don’t model that one.”

“Well, at least I knew it was Marie Antoinette. I’m not so stupid.”

“Did you want the costume?”

“No, I’m after something for me.” She coughed delicately and fluttered the fanlike eyelashes over soft brown eyes, and I added hastily, “For me to wear, I mean. I’m invited to a costume ball.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Something that will cover me all up.”

“That seems a shame.”

“Doesn’t it? I want to . . . surprise some people.”

“Oh, you don’t want to be recognized. A surprise?”

“That’s it.”

She thought a moment. And very cute, she was, thinking. It was as if she had to stretch unused muscles, creakingly, but then her soft little face smoothed out and she said, “I have it!”

“You do indeed.”

“The clown!”

“What?”

“The clown! There!” She pointed, all excited. Here was a gal who really threw herself into her work. “Isn’t it dreamy?”

I followed her pointing finger. All I saw was a stiff model wearing a black floor-length gown or robe and a black hood with eyes and mouth holes cut in it, and holding a broad-bladed axe.

“Not the Executioner, silly,” she said. “The Clown.”

Then I spotted him, another ten feet farther away. It was another figure, male this time, presumably, dressed in a baggy white outfit which droopily covered his whole body, even including the legs in somewhat the same fashion as this little gal’s harem bloomers, and which had three six-inch red buttoms down the front. On his head was a tasseled red-and-blue cap, and his face was painted white and red and black with a big blue nose stuck on for good measure. He was somewhat nightmarish, if not exactly dreamy, and he was exactly what I wanted.

“That’s for me,” I said.

“Purchase or rental?”

“Rent. I won’t need it after tomorrow night . . .” I paused, thinking. “But I’ll leave a deposit to cover the complete cost.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary — ”

“It might. It just might.”

She went off into what was apparently the stockroom and came back with a cardboard box. While she wrote out my receipt we talked about extra items I might need, and I wound up with a kit of theatrical makeup. And that appeared to do it. All I needed now was a dozen Marines, a tank, and a flame-thrower.

The little gal handed me my receipt and I began writing a check for the required rental plus deposit, then she said, looking past me, “I’ll be with you in a minute, sir.”

I looked over my shoulder. A big ape about my size was eyeballing us strenuously. Or maybe he was just looking at the gal, which seemed likely, since a lot of the little gal was showing here and there among the filmy bits of her costume. But when I looked around he mumbled, “No hurry, no hurry,” and turned aside. I’d seen all of him I wanted to see, anyway; he had a face like a barracuda, a face that seemed to come to a point in front, studded with too many teeth.

“There you are, sir.”

I pulled my head around again. The little tomato was holding my package toward me, smiling over it the way gals smile over champagne glasses just before they say, “Oo, it tickles.”

“Don’t call me sir, please. Call me Shell.”

“Shell?”

“Uh-huh. In case I call up sometime and say ‘This is Shell’ and then make all sorts of shameless remarks.”

“Oh, that sounds like fun.”

“Who knows? We might even have our own little costume party.”

“And you a man who goes for Marie Antoinette. I can imagine the costumes.” She raised her shoulders, tilted her head to one side and stirred up the air with those eyelashes again. Then she said, “’Bye, Shell,” and turned her back on me, and walked straight ahead to the stockroom again.

It was about twenty feet to the stockroom’s door, and I watched her every inch of the way. Not only the forward inches, but the side-to-side inches. She had a walk that was one of the friendliest things I’d ever seen. Her well-rounded hips swung provocatively back and forth as if they were waving goodbye, and as they went out of sight I murmured under my breath, “Not goodbye, my dears . . . but only au revoir.”

Perhaps I was being untrue, in my fashion, to Lolita and Doris Miller — but how many days in the week do you meet a harem girl? That thought reminded me I was supposed to drop by and see Doris this afternoon, and bring her up to date on the progress of the case. Carrying my clown outfit, I headed for the Cad. I didn’t see the Barracuda. And so soon after that walk to the stockroom, it was understandable that I didn’t even think about him again, not then.

When I walked into the Royal Photo shop, where I’d dropped off my roll of exposed infrared film last night, Timothy, the technician, leered at me.

“I should of called the cops,” he said.

“Knock it off. Believe it or not, those shots constitute a lever. It was Archimedes or somebody, maybe even Einstein, who said give me a lever long enough, and a place to put it, and I’ll move the world.”

“Probably Einstein. No matter what you say, them pictures — ”

“They are a lever, Timothy, with which I hope to move a man. I hope to move him so vigorously that it will keep two people alive.”

“Two people?”

“Yeah — and one of them is me.”

“Well, in that case . . . But, man, them pictures — ”

He went off to get them. While waiting for him to come back I glanced out the front window of the shop. A long black car, looking a little bit like a hearse, went by. I felt a small, slow tightening of my spine. Not because the buggy looked somewhat like a hearse. But because, earlier this afternoon, I’d seen it before. A couple of times before.

Ever since the moment on the Freeway when that machine gun had been swinging toward my head, I had spent almost as much time looking in all compass directions as driving. And, as a matter of course, I’d managed to be the last car through several stop lights, utilized the standard tricks for shaking a possible tail. Consequently, when I’d noticed the hearselike sedan for the second time I’d taken even more care; but here was that same buggy — or one immensely like it — again. While the coincidence didn’t snap credulity, it sure stretched it.

Timothy brought back the five-by-seven enlargements in a manila envelope. I’d snapped an entire roll and Timothy had made a pair of enlargements from each of the twenty negatives. Twelve were too blurred to be of any value. Of the remaining eight, I chose two which were perfectly exposed and sharp, and in which the faces of both Jay and Mrs. Frank Quinn were easily recognizable. I kept both copies of those two, then destroyed the rest, negatives and all.

Timothy was still making mild sounds of shock and protest when I went out.

I was nearly to Doris Miller’s, looking forward to a bright spot in the day, when it happened again. It was a little before six p.m. I’d stopped at an intersection and was watching my rearview mirror when the black car appeared in it — not, however, behind me, but a block back, traveling from left to right on the street at right angles to this one. I shook my head. Either there was a mortician’s convention in town, all of the fellows driving hearses, or . . .

Then, of course, I had it.

I found the item within thirty seconds. It was under the Cad’s front bumper, held by one small metal clamp and a strand of wire. With a crescent wrench from the Cad’s trunk I loosened the bolt holding the clamp, then yanked the small box free. I got back into the Cad, put the box on the seat beside me.

The item was, familiarly speaking, a “squawk box,” more accurately a small self-contained radio transmitter. Ever since being attached to my car, it would have been sending out a constant signal on one of the many available radio frequencies; the lad in that black buggy would have with him a radio receiver tuned to that same frequency. An adjunct to the receiver would be a loop antenna. When the loop was at right angles to the beam issuing from the squawk box on my Cad the incoming signal would be strong; as it deviated from right angles the signal would weaken or fade out completely. Thus, even with only one following car containing one receiver, a man could keep rough track of me, and easily locate my Cad whenever I parked. With one or more additional receivers in other cars, and using simple triangulation procedures, my pals could pinpoint my location at any time.

I swore. That guy could have been on my tail all day. I thought back over where I’d been, the stops I’d made. Calls on Semmelwein and Porter, the Costume Center, Timothy’s photo shop, and others. There was nothing I could do about it now, except hope there’d been no real damage — at least I hadn’t been shot yet. Something else, a vague uneasiness, teetered on the edge of thought, but I couldn’t push it over, couldn’t grab it.

At least I wouldn’t have any trouble shaking the tail now, and that was the important thing at the moment. I started the car again.

It was six-thirty on the nose, already dark, when I started walking to Doris Miller’s apartment. I’d parked three blocks away, merely so my Cadillac wouldn’t by chance be seen at her place — I wasn’t worried about a tail now. I had stopped at a bus terminal and left there, in a locker to which I now had the key, my clown costume, the engraved invitation to Quinn’s party, and the extra pair of enlargements of Jay and Mrs. Quinn. Moreover, while there I had not only gotten rid of that squawk box but had high hopes I’d given back to the hearse-driver a portion of the annoyance he’d given me.

Because I had transferred that little transmitter to a Greyhound Bus — just leaving for Dallas, Texas.

Eight

Doris had on another of her getups, or maybe it was a getout, because she did appear to be trying to get out of it. This was my day of days, but I was already occupied for the night. Life is sometimes cruel.

My client smiled half-heartedly at me, but even without all the nerve and bounce in the world she was one of the most delectable creatures I’d seen. Seen this year at least. I could imagine how bright and shining and beautiful she would be with her brother safe again and out of the clink.

She mixed highballs for us and we sat on the living room couch while I told her what had been happening, just hitting the high spots. I summed it up, “So, I know very well what the truth is — that Ross is innocent, that Quinn shot Flagg, that Quinn put pressure on at least three witnesses to make them give false testimony at the trial.”

“We’ve — we’ve really known that all along, haven’t we, Shell?” She sighed. “Nothing much has changed, has it?”

“It’s changed more than it appears on the surface, Doris. For example, I know that Flagg was Quinn’s payoff man, and that Quinn had one of his hoods kill Heigman, drown him. I’ve got some names — ”

She interrupted. Not angrily, or with irritability. Just with a dullness I didn’t like to hear in her voice. “But there’s nothing you can prove, Shell. You’ve told me that. Nothing the police will accept, nothing the governor would even listen to, nothing that can possibly help Ross — ”

At the end her voice was gradually going up the scale in the direction of hysteria, so this time I interrupted her. “Wait a minute.” I held up both hands, smiling “It’s not quite that bad. There’s more.”

“More?” Her face brightened so, and her eyes filled with such sudden sparkle and hope that I almost wished I hadn’t spoken. Because there wasn’t really a lot more.

I said, “Maybe it’s nothing to get excited about — yet. But it could lead to a break. There’s a guy who works for Quinn, very close to him, knows plenty about the creep. If I could get that guy to talk freely, cooperate — cooperate eagerly with me, let’s say, I might get enough from him to really put the squeeze on Quinn himself. It depends on what this guy can tell me, or do, but I’m pretty sure I can . . . win his cooperation.”

Two small creases formed between her blue eyes as she looked at me. “You can? How, Shell?”

“Well, I . . .” I paused, wondering how to phrase it. “Put it like this. I’ve worked out a way to put plenty of — of pressure on this character. If he becomes giddily cooperative, fine. But if not, it’s a pretty sure thing he’ll get suddenly murdered.” I added hastily, “Not by me. But nonetheless speedily dead. So I’ve a hunch he’ll tell me whatever he can.”

Doris nibbled her smoothly curving lower lip. “But what if he can’t tell you anything that will help? What if he doesn’t know anything?”

Scowling slightly I said, “Then I’ll think of something else, for Pete’s sake.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean — ”

She was all contrite, breathing deeply, bending forward, breathing, and pressing one contrite hand against her breast, and breathing. This gal spoke volumes, not only with her eyes and mouth and lungs but with a great deal more of her, and they were the kind of volumes that come in plain wrappers. Well, I could have bitten out my mean old tongue. This poor kid had been suffering agonies of suspense and fear and worry, while I had merely been hit over the head, and shot at, and such.

So I said, my voice throbbing warmly, “Doris, dear, I didn’t mean. What I mean is, probably this character can tell or do plenty that will help us. But even if he can’t, well there’s another possibility.”

I didn’t like thinking about it, much less talking about it, but I went on. “You see, Frank Quinn is throwing a very private party tomorrow night. At his ranch. If all else fails there’s just a chance I can get in as one of the guests, and not get caught, and find info in his private safe that will wrap him up. And clear your brother.” My voice was sort of limping. “In fact, if I can somehow do it, it should clear your brother and eighteen other people.” I paused. “Of course, this is only as a last resort.” I paused again. “Well, it’s not exactly an ace in the hole, but it’s . . . at least a deuce.”

“I see,” she said, sounding as if she didn’t.

“Anyway, there really are some avenues left,” I went on. “I’ll know more about how it looks later tonight. And I’ll either come by here, or at least call you, tomorrow.” I grinned, trying to brighten the atmosphere a bit. “And I’ll give you eight to five everything is much, much better tomorrow.”

“Oh, I hope so!” Her lovely face had some of that sparkle and hope in it again, at least for the moment, and she was leaning toward me. “I want to believe you, Shell, I do. I want to . . .” She lifted one hand and let it fall gently against the lapel of my coat, and with the movement, unconsciously leaned even closer to me.

At least I guess it was an unconscious movement, but mine was plain old conscious, and when I stopped moving, her mouth was pressed against mine. Her lips were parted and moist, and so charged with heat and life that kissing her was almost like puckering in a light socket.

It seemed as if approximately two hundred and twenty volts zigzagged from my lips down to my heels and back, wreaking havoc in both directions, and when Doris pulled her lips from mine it would not have surprised me greatly if the house had been on fire.

“Oh . . . you’d better go, Shell.”

“What?”

She said it again. This was the big difference between us. One kiss and I was ready, and she was ready for me to go. I put up a pretty good argument, but she was adamant, which is Harvard for “No.”

It was just as well, actually. I was looking forward to my imminent and important meeting with Jay. So I sighed and got to my feet. It was time I got back to work. Work, that’s the stuff, I thought. None of this fiddling around when there’s a job to be done. Man of steel, that’s me. I was proud of myself. I stood a little taller.

“Shell.” Doris was on the couch, looking up at me, eyes half lidded, mouth moist and slack.

I sat down again.

“No,” she said. “Don’t . . . don’t get close to me.”

“But you said . . . ‘Shell,’ you said. I mean, I know that’s not so much, but — it was the way you said it. Or maybe it was the way I heard it — ”

“I just didn’t want you to leave thinking . . . I mean, I’d like for you to stay. I really would — if things were different. But I’m, well, all in a jumble.” She paused. “And there’s so little time.”

She was right. I stood up again. Work, that’s the stuff.

At the door, she kissed me again. You may not believe it, but it was even better than the first two times — yeah, I was keeping track. This was the third time that was the charm, an osculatory torch to cremate resolutions and inhibitions, a kiss that could melt cheap fillings and make a eunuch’s voice change overnight — and what it did to me, as the door gently closed in my face, was make me realize that if one of Doris Miller’s kisses could do all this, anything more than energetic puckering could be dangerous. Gad, it could be fatal, I thought. And then I thought: So what?

But the door was closed. And I am not a guy who breaks doors down. At least I’d never done it before. Anyway, I didn’t do it. Instead I walked back to my Cad muttering, “Work, bah, fooey, work, that’s a lot of baloney . . .”

Next on the agenda was the problem of getting Jay alone somewhere, showing him my pictures — or rather his pictures — and discussing with him the various aspects of this photographic calamity. I’d learned he seldom left Quinn’s fenced-in estate until well after seven p.m., so there was still time to pick him up on his way out.

I was driving fast toward the ranch when the shock hit me.

The shock was physical. It rammed through my nerves, stiffening my muscles, clamping my hands on the steering wheel. The car skidded, and I realized I had, in unconscious reflex, hit the brake pedal.

Earlier, when I’d found the squawk box on my Cad, I had reviewed the places I’d gone today, but there had been something else teetering on the edge of my mind. Suddenly I knew what it had been. I realized that the little transmitter might have been on my car all day, but I hadn’t throught back far enough. It could have been on my Cad last night. Last night, when I had so carefully avoided being tailed, driving to the Washington Hotel — with Lolita.

The car slid to a stop and for long seconds I didn’t move, sweat suddenly forming on my forehead, cool on my body. Then I slapped the gear shift into reverse, backed up and swung around in the street, kicked the gas pedal down to the floorboards. I didn’t let myself think, tried to keep my mind blank while I drove as fast as I could through the streets.

I parked in a loading zone before the hotel, jumped out and raced through the lobby, up the stairs to Lolita’s room and hammered on the door. There was no answer, no sound. I stepped back, kicked at the door, slammed it open and stepped inside the room.

“Lolita,” I called. “Lolita!”

Nothing. No answer. And right then I knew there wasn’t going to be an answer, knew there was no need now for hurry.

I found her in the bathroom.

She lay crumpled in the tub, her face beneath the water, long black hair loose and wet and still. For what seemed a long time, strange out-of-focus seconds, I didn’t move. I noticed my hands were balled into fists, nails cutting into my palms. My throat was tight. Then I stepped toward her, touched the skin of her white shoulder. She was cold. Her flesh had the unreal chill of death. She’d been dead a long time, for many hours.

I stepped toward the door, then turned, looked for the last time at Lolita. Crumpled, still, that thick black hair hanging in the long-cold water, like lines of ink. Then I went out and closed the door behind me, sat in a chair and smoked a cigarette. Words and movements were there with me. Smiles and shadowed eyes. I sat, and smoked, and thought about Lolita.

Than I got up and walked to the phone, feeling very tired. I called Homicide.

Nine

For twenty minutes I had been parked across the street from the Sand Dunes Motel.

The police had taken Lolita’s body to the morgue. There had been no tangible evidence of what is euphemistically called “foul play.” She could have slipped and fallen in the tub. I knew she hadn’t. The police probably didn’t believe it was an accident either, but there was no evidence upon which they could act.

Enough for me, however; enough for me.

I was over the worst shock and I slowly, deliberately forced my thoughts away from Lolita’s death. It was simply part of the case now; that was the way it had to be. The knowledge would stay with me, under the surface — but that’s where I meant to keep it, had to keep it. I couldn’t let thoughts of her murder interfere with the other things I had to do — at least until I could find the man who’d killed her.

With Lolita’s death it became even more important that I get help from Jay. By the time the police had let me go it had been too late to pick up Jay leaving Quinn’s ranch. So, figuring that if history was repeating itself tonight I had a good chance of finding him anyway, I had driven here to the Sand Dunes Motel. And, as I had hoped, the course of true love, or whatever it was, had led Jay and Mrs. Quinn straight to the motel again.

At least I’d spotted Mrs. Quinn’s big Caddy nearby, though I didn’t know what kind of car Jay might be driving. However, I figured that after Mrs. Quinn left I could easily spot Jay — or go over and brace him in the motel room. I could, I suppose, have gone over there right then and knocked on the door. But there are some things I won’t do. Besides which, as far as I knew, Mrs. Quinn hadn’t personally shot or knifed or poisoned any citizens, and there was no real need to embroil her in the upcoming indelicacy. All I wanted was to get my chance at Jay, alone, with no other eyes or ears around us. And, too, once Mrs. Quinn left, I might not only catch Jay in a weakened condition, but right at the scene of the crime.

Only it didn’t work out that way.

After twenty minutes or so of waiting, I checked the two photos again. The more effective of the two would be enough by itself, I figured, to shake Jay up like a Sazerac cocktail. In that photo, for some reason — possibly because an infrared flash not only puts out heat but a sometimes barely noticeable light — both Jay and Mrs. Quinn were looking directly at the camera, the features of each very clear indeed. He looked as if he was just starting to sing On The Road To Mandalay at the top of his lungs, and she was slightly cross-eyed but not looking cross in any other way. Jay, I felt sure, would react splendidly.

I stuck both enlargements back in the envelope, and was putting the envelope into my coat pocket again when a blue Thunderbird wheeled out of the motel’s driveway and came toward me. I almost missed it. Jay apparently didn’t believe in Ladies First — and I had been keeping an eye peeled for Mrs. Quinn to show at her Caddy. But because it had come out of the motel I took a good look at the driver as the Thunderbird zoomed past. It was Jay.

I made a fast U-turn and followed Jay to Third Street, where he turned left toward L.A. I pulled up closer behind him, waiting for a spot where I could force him to the curb. In a well-traveled area like this it would be a tricky maneuver at best, and at worst he might shoot me, but I had to get to him tonight. And the sooner the better.

There were no cars between us when he reached La Brea, but he made it past the intersection as the light turned red and I had to stop. Just past the intersection, however, he swung left and into a parking lot on the far side of a hotel on the corner. Only then did I notice, with a definite sinking sensation, where we were. The hotel was the Barker Hotel. The Barker, managed by Fargo, hangout of numerous hoodlums — possibly even including Frank Quinn.

“No!” I yelled at Jay. I stuck my head out the window and yelled, “Don’t! Don’t go in there!”

He continued on out of sight. Apparently he hadn’t even heard me. He should have. I was yelling loud enough.

Now what? I thought. The Barker didn’t look dangerous; it was a modern, attractive twelve-story building facing Third Street. I could see the entrance to the Gardenia Room down La Brea to my left. An alley ran behind the hotel from La Brea to the next street, Sycamore Avenue. Some big-leaved green plants softened the building’s base, and a clump of three graceful-trunked fan palms rose on its La Brea side near me. Their spreading green fronds were almost level with the fourth floor, and rose-colored spotlights on the ground illumined their trunks. No, the Barker didn’t look dangerous. Neither does cyanide.

The traffic light turned green. Somebody honked behind me. I mumbled unhappily, but gunned the Cad forward and then, taking a deep breath and letting it bubble through my lips, swung into the Barker’s lot and parked.

Jay’s T-Bird was in sight, but Jay wasn’t. From the lot, steps led up to a side door which opened into the Barker lobby. I went up the steps and inside, lit a cigarette and looked around. The desk was on my left, a middle-aged man behind it. A few people sat on couches in the lobby.

Everything appeared normal and pleasant — until I spotted Jay again. He stood talking to a group of four men seated across the lobby, a few feet from an arched doorway above which was a neon sign, “Gardenia Room.” As I glanced at that archway, a big red-headed guy came through it, walked to where Jay and the other guys were yakking it up, and clapped Jay on the back. In a moment he and Jay went back into the Gardenia Room. But not before I got a good look at him. Or a bad look.

He was a large, stumbling character named Blister. Blister was a red-headed creep with the florid complexion of men who fall asleep under sun lamps, and a nose which had been hit so many times with such a variety of objects that it was possible to tell only that it had once been a nose; consequently he breathed through his mouth, which was unfortunate, since he had a breath that could kill mosquitoes. Blister was a slob, true; a dim-witted muscleman and flunky — but a flunky who flunked for Frank Quinn. In addition he was very pally with the Barker’s manager, Fargo, who loved me.

I started after them anyway. Nothing really unpleasant could happen to me in a public lobby or bar, I told myself. Of course not. But as I neared the group of men Jay had been talking to I glanced at them, and my feet slowed, then stopped, as if they had minds of their own. If so, those feet had pretty good heads on them, because the four guys were four guys it made good sense to stay away from.

They were Hal the Cad, Pizza Jim, Larry Bourne, and Tiger McGoon. Little Hal and beetle-browed McGoon, I knew, worked for Frank Quinn. Maybe they all did. Not that it made much difference, since not one of them would hesitate to steal crutches from cripples, feed candied dope to teenagers, or gleefully dissolve Shell Scott in sulphuric acid. Obviously they had spotted me before I noticed them, for all of them were staring at me intently, as if unbelieving, eyes bugging way out. It was an appalling sight — four bug-eyed mobsters — and the light in those eyes was a dim light indeed.

Thirteen months ago I had sent Hal to the State clink on a one-to-ten burglary rap; he’d been out for more than a month now. Only a few months back, Tiger McGoon and another hood had jumped me in an alley; I’d left them both in that alley, the other hood deceased and McGoon bleeding from his skull, which I had opened with the bottom edge of a garbage can. McGoon would carry the scar to his grave, but carry it first if he could — so he’d since promised me — to my grave.

I got my intelligent feet moving again and they carried me past the group. Four heads swiveled as I passed; eight eyes bugged me. But, I told myself again, nothing very horrible could happen to me in a public bar. Could it? Of course not. So I walked under the neon sign and into the Gardenia Room.

The smell of hard liquor, beer, wine, mingled in the air and a four-piece combo played soft music, keyed to muted vibes, from behind a small dance floor on my right. On my left, between me and the La Brea entrance to the club, were small tables covered with beige cloths, candles in pink glasses burning at every table. The dimly-lighted club was about a third filled and conversation rippled around me.

Ahead of me, extending from near the front wall almost back to the dance floor, was the bar. I walked to it, climbed onto a stool. When the bartender came over I ordered a beer and asked him casually, “What happened to Jay? I thought I saw him come in here with Blister.”

“Yeah, they just came in,” the bartender said. “Think Jay went back to Mr. Sullivan’s office.”

Sullivan was the name Lolita had mentioned. Beret-wearing Sully, who auditioned the club’s acts in his private office. I grinned and said, “Don’t tell me Sully’s going to work Jay — or, worse, Blister — into the show. It’ll kill the dinner trade if he does.”

The bartender chuckled. “Not hardly. No, Sully isn’t here tonight. I think Jay went back there to see Fargo. Blister’s sitting over there at a table, right behind you.”

“That’s nice,” I said. I swung around on my stool, and had no trouble spotting red-faced Blister. He was at a table near the far corner of the dance floor, with another man and three women. The other guy was a Mexican wheelman named Tomás Gonzales, inevitably called Speedy. Blister was with a young girl who looked like Lady Macbeth as a boy, but Speedy was with a sharp-looking red-headed tomato who could have been front and center in any chorus line. At least those were the girls Speedy and Blister were patting and pinching with the hoodlum’s charming delicacy.

There was an empty chair at the table, and I guessed the third gal belonged with whoever wasn’t present at the moment. Jay, maybe? She was a blonde, voluptuous-looking, wearing a green knit dress which she had stretched all into shape. Suddenly she let out a little trilling squeal and I noticed that Speedy was leaning close to her. Either he’d whispered something exciting into her ear or taken a bite out of it. None of them had noticed me yet.

I was beginning to feel like a cucumber in a pickle factory, but I eased off my stool, walked to the rear of the club and stepped through heavy cloth drapes into a dimly-lighted hallway. On my right light spilled through a partly-open door. I took the .38 from its holster, stuck the gun in my coat pocket and kept my hand on it, then walked to the door and pushed it open.

It was a big room, empty. On my right, was a gray desk, a red beret on its top — so apparently this was Sullivan’s office. A couple of leather chairs were against one wall, and there was a big wooden bar aslant in the far corner on my left, that was all.

I went back into the hall. There were other offices back here, but no lights showed beneath their doors. At one end of the hallway a door led out to the parking lot; at the opposite end were stairs leading up, probably to the other floors of the hotel. But there wasn’t any sign of Jay or Fargo. Maybe they’d gone up in the hotel somewhere. And no telling where. For a moment I considered just getting the hell out of the Barker and trying to brace Jay later tonight, maybe even tomorrow. But then I thought of Ross Miller in that isolation cell, the seconds ticking his life away.

I went back into the Gardenia Room. Maybe I couldn’t find Jay, but if I stuck around for a while I had a hunch Jay would find me. I didn’t sit at the bar this time. Instead I stepped to the wall at its end and leaned against it, hand on the gun in my pocket. With such as Blister and Speedy, and my other pals nearby, I wanted nobody behind me.

And right then Blister glanced at me and started to look away, then visibly stiffened. He punched Speedy, whispered something to him. Speedy craned his head around, then he and Blister ushered the girls out into the Barker’s lobby. The gals were doing some obvious protesting, but they went. I didn’t think any of the girls saw me, or knew what the trouble was. In a minute Speedy came back alone and sat down at the same table, facing me.

I waited. The four-piece combo kept playing. A few couples were dancing, but then the band took a break. Another five minutes passed. No sign of Jay yet. Blister came back, wiggled a finger at Speedy Gonzales. I felt a little damp.

And then I got damper. What I’d expected was happening. The monkeys were drifting in from the lobby. The old, familiar, horrible faces were in evidence. Hal the Cad, Pizza Jim, beetle-browed Tiger McGoon — several more whose paths had crossed or double-crossed mine at one time or another.

And right then something about all this struck me as more than passing strange. Not the arrival of the goon squad — I’d expected that. It was that the club seemed no more crowded than before. In fact, even with all the new arrivals, the club was not nearly as full as when I’d come inside. Strange indeed.

And then I saw a very simple, ordinary thing, which nonetheless was a very chilling thing. It was merely a waiter carrying a tray on which were four plates sumptuously loaded with food. A common sight — except that he was carrying his tray back to the kitchen.

I got it then. But by the time I got it I didn’t want it.

I had been so intent on watching for Jay and spotting the new faces arriving that I had been too little aware of the old ones vanishing. At the moment, Speedy was bending over a table near the door talking earnestly to a young couple seated there. In a moment they got up and, after a brief argument, went out onto La Brea Street.

And, the final blow, Blister then stepped to the door, pushed it shut, and shoved the bolt home. So I knew those two had been the last. Especially since, simultaneously with Blister’s burning of my bridge, Jay — together with Fargo — strolled out from the rear of the club and walked toward me.

It was clear now — very clear. I was trapped. Behind enemy lines. I had time for thought to dribble through my nut: This is it . . . This is Samson rubbing hair restorer on his noodle — too late. This is Tarzan lost in Apeland, with diarrhea and laryngitis. I should have listened to my feet.

But the shock that really paralyzed my nervous system, sapped neurons, stunned ganglia, was: This collection of mongoloid idiots had outwitted me. Which said something pretty depressing about my immediate future, especially with all those guns in view. Talk about guns! There were now in sight enough guns to sink an ore barge. Everywhere I looked — guns. I couldn’t look. There were big ones, little ones, shiny one, dull ones — in fact they all looked pretty dull to me.

My nerves came all unzipped and I just stood there as Jay and Fargo stepped up in front of me.

Jay said, “I guess you’re stuck now, pal.”

I said, “Oh, boy.”

He said, “Chased all the square customers away, pal Nobody here now but us friends.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figured it out. Just.”

Fargo chuckled deep in his throat. “Hello, Scott,” he said cheerily. “It’s good to see you.”

I didn’t say anything.

Fargo was a big moon-faced man, tall and wedge-shaped, about 220 pounds — the thick chest and wide, lumpy shoulders leading to a size eighteen neck. His skin was unhealthy, blotched, mottled by faint dark spots like spreading freckles, and he wore a constant expression of distaste, as if his nose stank. That was a nose — a flaring gargantuan beak, useful rather than decorative, clearly designed for smelling.

At the moment he looked as if he were smelling something that pleased him for a change. He said, “Finally gotcha. Yeah, I finally gotcha.” He looked at Jay. “Walked right in here, didn’t he? The guy must be cracky. But I caught him.”

“You caught me?” I said.

“Well, I gotcha. And it was me thought of chasing the citizens out. And you’re caught, ain’t you?”

He had a point.

Fargo said to Jay, “I’ll give the boss a call.”

“What for?” Jay said. “He already told us what to do when we caught up with this guy.”

“Yeah,” Fargo said, “but he’d want to know about me catching Scott. I mean us catching him. Take care of him, Jay — I’ll go give the boss the picture.”

He walked away.

Jay said, “Uh, is that a heater in your pocket?”

“It is a heater.”

“Better keep it cool. You might pink me or somebody, but you wouldn’t have time to notice.” He grinned. “Pal, you have really had it. There ain’t no way out, not front, not back, not sideways.”

I was inclined to believe him. But Fargo’s last word was still twanging in my mind: Picture. That was it. The sort of dopey stupefaction which had addled me ever since I’d seen Blister close and lock the front door began melting, and I started coming back to normal. Which probably wasn’t enough.

“There’s one way out,” I said. “Except for Quinn himself, you’re probably the only guy who could walk me out of here right now. True, Jay?”

He looked puzzled. “Walk you out?” Obviously the idea was preposterous.

“Yeah. Or maybe even you couldn’t do it. Maybe the boys don’t do what you tell them to do.”

He still looked puzzled, but he said, “They do what I tell ’em. Sure, if I wanted to I could take you outa here.” He grinned again. “Only I don’t want to.”

“You’re going to, Jay,” I said. “You’re going to want to very much.” I hoped I was right. Maybe I’d figured him wrong, maybe he wouldn’t give a hoot. But I went on, “You are going to waltz me right out of this joint. Alive and jolly. And be happy to do it.”

“Yeah, eight or nine times.”

There was a little muttering form the assembled heavies; a couple of them moved a step closer. This was taking too long — from their point of view. Light glinted dully from some of the armament out there.

“Jay,” I said, “listen close. Closer than you ever listened before.” The urgency in my tone — and there was plenty — got to him. He looked almost serious, and quite attentive. I went on, “You are going to tell these musclebound slobs something like this: You, personally, are going to take me out into the hills and shoot me. You want the peculiar distinction of having, yourself, shot Shell Scott in the back of his pointed head. You’re going to tell them that because, if you don’t get me out of this trap, and I get shot, this little item here will no longer be my secret.”

I had the manila envelope in my left hand, and I waggled it gently, adding, “I mean, our secret.”

I handed him the envelope.

“What’s this?” he said. He had the queerest expression on his face. He was hooked; he really wanted to know what the hell I was talking about. But at the same time his expression said it couldn’t possibly be anything which would interest him much, nor could it possibly delay my noisy execution more than a minute or two.

He slid onto one of the bar stools next to me and repeated, “What’s this?”

“Take a look,” I said. “Couple of pictures in there. Photographs. That’s why I came here, to give them to you.”

“Yeah?” He shrugged, reached into the envelope and pulled the two enlargements out.

I said, “And remember, don’t let these slobs take me, chum. If they take me, they also take those. And I’ll bet they take them straight to Frank.”

Jay heard me, but just didn’t understand me — he hadn’t looked at the pictures yet. Smirking, he glanced at the top enlargement. And from that moment on I had no further doubts about whether Jay would give a hoot or not.

He gave an ear-splitting hoot.

It all happened very rapidly. He glanced at the top shot and his eyes focused on it, and then they unfocused. He slammed the pictures down hard on the bar top, pressed both hands over them, and simultaneously let out a sharp, barking sound of which, I feel sure, he was entirely unconscious but which was of remarkable volume. He snapped his head around at me, and I swear his eyes were peering outward in opposite directions. His mouth sagged open and then stretched wide, and he let out another of those barking noises; then he bent over, face close to the bar, and spread his fingers slowly, like a poker player peeking slyly at his one-card draw. What he saw did not reassure him. It was still there. He shook his head, rubbed the two pictures around under his nose, and just kept on shaking his head.

At last Jay looked at me, his features very mobile indeed, running the gamut from shock to utter desolation. Finally he found his tongue and cried. “What happened . . . how did — who . . . when . . . who . . . how?”

Then he forgot about me, turned to the bar again, and got his nose down there as if it wasn’t enough to see it, he had to smell it before he’d believe it. After a few moments I noticed he was tearing one of the pictures into little strips. At first I thought he’d come unglued but then I realized what he was doing. He was eating them. He was going to digest the evidence.

“Jay,” I said gently, “there are others.”

He stoppped chewing. “Others, huh?” he said, his voice muffled. “Others, huh?”

He raised his bead and slowly turned to face me. Then very slowly and deliberately he said, “A man . . . just ain’t safe . . . nowhere no more . . . doin’ nothin’!” He paused, a faraway look in his eyes, occasionally chewing unconsciously the way cows do with cuds, and finally he said, “Others, huh?”

“Yep”

“It figures.” His voice was lifeless. “It figures. I don’t know how it figures, but . . . it figures.”

After a long pause he looked at me again and said, “Who did it?”

“I did it.”

A long pause. “It figures.” Another pause. “I guess we can’t shoot you.”

“I guess not.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It is not too bad.”

“Yeah, it is. I’d give anything to shoot you.”

“Jay, I think we’d better start figuring how we’ll get out of here — ”

“I’d give anything to shoot you.”

“If we don’t hurry, one of these apes will forget — ”

“I’d give any — ”

“ — what he’s doing here and pull a trigger from force of habit.”

He nodded loosely, turned the manila envelope over and examined its front. There, after the fashion of some kidnap notes, I had pasted letters I’d cut from a newspaper, thus not only keeping my handwriting off the envelope but adding a nice touch, I felt. In wobbly block letters the address read: to frank quinn from — a friend.

“Some friend,” Jay said. “You’d really send it to him, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure.”

“He’d kill me, you know.”

“I thought maybe he would.”

“He’d boil me in horse manure.”

“He’d think of something, Frank would.”

“He’d shoot me all over the place. And you know what?” Jay’s face took on the most lugubrious, the most sad and sorrowful expression it had yet attained. “It wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Jay, don’t you think — ”

“Yeah,” he interrupted, almost briskly. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.” He pulled a small Beretta automatic from his pocket, aimed it casually at me, and told me to step away from the wall. When I did, he listlessly jabbed the Beretta into my back. “Stick ’em up,” he said.

We started walking out. Jay tossed a few words to the assembled menagerie. It was approximately what I’d suggested, that he was going to reserve for himself the pleasure of knocking me off and so on. The boys seemed disappointed, but nobody protested out loud.

We were about ten feet from the door when Fargo came barging up from behind us. He stopped between us and the door and said, “Where in hell you going?” Without waiting for an answer he said to Jay, “Boss is real pleased. Real pleased. Says go ahead like he told us. Kill the sonofabitch.”

“Sure,” said Jay dully. “Yeah. Sure.”

Naturally, Fargo had no idea of what was going on. He simply saw Jay behind me, and me apparently under control. Captive. Helpless. So he balled up a fist and took a swing at my face. It was perhaps the slowest poke ever launched at me. I could probably have ducked it in both directions, but I just pulled my head aside far enough so his fist whistled past my ear, and then I hauled off and popped him with a long, looping right that landed over his right eye.

The skin split. Blood spurted, splashing my knuckles. Fargo spun sideways, his arms flapped, and he crashed heavily to the floor, rolled onto his back. He was not quite unconscious, and moved a little down there, but couldn’t get up. After a few seconds he mumbled something. There was a stunned expression on his face. Then he mumbled again.

It would almost have been worth waiting around to find out what he was saying. Almost. But I didn’t wait.

Fargo was still mumbling on the floor when Jay and I went out to the street.

Ten

Jay and I sat in the front seat of his Thunderbird, talking. I’d left my Cad behind, and Jay had driven us to a quiet, out-of-the-way spot, just off Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

He had been, and was continuing to be, very cooperative.

I explained to him that if he extended me a helping hand, or rather two helping hands, I would destroy all the evidence Wednesday. At that time it wouldn’t make any difference; if I hadn’t cleared Miller by then nobody ever would. However, if Jay was niggardly with his cooperation, the horrifying enlargements would reach Frank Quinn within the hour.

So far in our conversation he had corroborated most of what I had already learned from others — the shooting of Casey Flagg, pressure on Heigman to make him swear falsely that Miller had purchased the murder gun, some of the other items.

I mentioned the info I’d gotten from Pinky, and Jay said, “Yeah, Papa Ryan did the job on Heigman.” He squinted at me. “But how in hell did you find out about it?”

“Never mind that. What about the bagman?”

“Casey was it, all right. But it’s like you said, since then Frank’s been handling that end personal.”

“How does he handle it? And who gets the loot?”

“You got me.”

“Jay, if you’re holding back — ”

“Dammit, Scott, I am telling you everything I know excepting only my mother’s maiden name. Which, if you got to know, was Abigail Emily — ”

“Never mind. You’re closer to Quinn than anybody else is, though.”

“Yeah, but Frank is a close-mouthed bastard when he wants to be, which is practically always. Look, he is very secret about this jazz — especially since Casey sticky-fingered part of the finances. Don’t that make sense?”

“It makes sense.”

“Hell, even them meetings he has every month is just the club, exclusive. I don’t go, Papa don’t go, nobody goes but Doodle. And he’s deef and dumb.”

“You lost me. Doodle?” I remembered Pinky had mentioned something about monthly meetings. “And what meetings are these? What goes on?”

“Nobody knows what — excepting only Doodle, who can shoot the ears off a cat at a hundred paces, and like I said is deef and dumb, so he can’t hear nothin’ or say nothin’. Frank’d probably blind him too, only then he couldn’t see to shoot nobody if it got necessary. So, excepting Doodle, only Frank and the cats he meets with know what goes on.”

It took a while, since Jay kind of lunged all around the point, but finally I understood that once each month Quinn met with a dozen or so men in an office at the rear of the Gardenia Room — the lecherous “Sully” Sullivan’s office, which I’d visited briefly earlier tonight. The meetings were held there, rather than at Quinn’s ranch, because if men were seen entering or leaving Quinn’s they might well, and with reason, be looked upon with more than a little suspicion; whereas anybody could visit the Barker Hotel, or drop in for a drink at the Gardenia Room — then slip into that back office — without anybody being the wiser.

Jay assumed that they were extremely important meetings, this testified to by the secrecy with which Quinn surrounded them. It could also be assumed that on these once-a-month occasions Quinn personally paid off his associates. Jay believed the men Quinn met with were local citizens of considerable power and influence, but nonetheless cooperating with Quinn either for profit or for some other good reason. In Jay’s words, “I’d say they must be very big apples, either on the take or else Frank’s got them by the loins somehow.” He stated it a bit more baldly, but his meaning was clear.

“When’s the next meeting?” I asked him.

“Next week. Monday afternoon. He’s sort of holding off on everything till after . . . you know.”

I knew. Till after Ross Miller’s execution. With Miller dead, it wasn’t likely that many people would be eager to have it proved that Quinn himself had murdered Casey Flagg. Not if Miller had already been put to death for murdering Casey Flagg. If Quinn made it to 10:01 a. m. Wednesday, he’d probably make it all the way.

I said, “You don’t know anybody who’s present at these get-togethers?”

Jay frowned. “I heard a couple names once.” He shook his head. “Semmelbaum . . . Semel . . . something or other.”

“Semmelwein? Ira Semmelwein?”

“That’s it. How in hell — ?”

“Anybody else?”

“A guy named Smith. Never heard his first name.”

Smith, great. That pinned it down. But Ira Semmelwein was one of the two names Pinky had given me; he was President of the Golden Coast Insurance Company in L.A. I tried the other name, John Porter, on Jay, but he’d never heard of him.

“Jay,” I said, “we’re going to try pulling a little bluff on Quinn. You’d like to help me, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure,” he scowled. “I’d get a real bang out of it.”

I went on, “When you get back to the ranch tonight I want you to tell Quinn I spilled several things to you — when I thought you were going to shoot me. Among them that I know who the people are who gather at these secret meetings. Say I mentioned Semmelwein, Smith, and Porter among others.” I thought a minute. “Tell him I even know why he holds the meetings. It might shake him up a little more, and the more the better.”

“I can do it, Scott — if he hasn’t already chopped my head off. How am I going to explain it if the corpse I killed is spotted alive by one of the boys? I got the feeling you aren’t going into hiding.”

“I’m not about to. But you’ve got the wrong idea — you don’t tell Quinn you shot me.”

“But . . . I sprang you out of the club. Frank’ll kill — ”

“Tell Frank you tried to shoot me, you tried very hard and loyally, but I jumped you and got away. Dream something up.”

“Dream something up?”

“Say your gun jammed, anything.”

Slowly he nodded. “I could do that. This rod of mine’s a foreign heater, a little Beretta. It jammed once before when we was target practicin’.” He paused. “But you’ll have to pound on me a little, won’t you?”

“Well . . . I don’t know about that. I don’t want to — ”

“You don’t get it. I want you to pound me. Beat hell out of me. If I ain’t a mess, Frank won’t believe it.”

“We’ll see. For now, just keep talking.”

He told me more of interest, some of it even good enough to give Quinn a great deal of trouble if Jay were willing to go into court with the same testimony — which, of course, he decidedly was not willing to do, not even if I had color movies of him, he said; his consuming desire was to stay alive, and testifying would get him killed just as dead.

His face took on the same lugubrious expression which had captured his features earlier when he’d cried out, “It wouldn’t be worth it!” and he said to me, “No matter what, I’m gonna get killed. She’ll kill me, or you’ll kill me, or he’ll kill me — or maybe even I’ll kill me. Scott, of all the miserable ways to stab me you couldn’t of picked a worse one. How did I get in such a mess? How? How?” He paused, shaking his head. “It ain’t only I can’t afford to let Frank — you know. But I am sick of Maude.” He started sort of moaning. “Boy, am I sick.”

“Maude?”

“Yeah, Maude. Maude Quinn, who else?”

“Maude Quinn? You’re sick of her?”

“Sick-sick-sick! You don’t know — that face of hers, like a old mud fence, is startin’ to haunt me nights. At first I didn’t even see it, you know? But now — ah, I couldn’t tell you. I can’t do nothing about it. If I tried to drop her she’d tell Frank to kill me. And he’d do it. If he didn’t, some night she’d . . . ah. Oh. Gah. You and your goddam pictures.”

Finally, after Jay had promised to phone me at my apartment if anything at all of interest occurred when he got back to the ranch, I decided to leave. We got out of the car and stood facing each other.

“O.K.,” he said after a few seconds. “Pop me.”

I balled up my right fist, then relaxed. “Jay, I can’t do it. I can’t just haul off and sock you.”

I have not the slightest reservation about slamming characters who are giving me a bad time, but simply to pound on a guy who stood there asking for it was beyond me.

“Nuts,” Jay said. “I’ll just have to do it myself somehow. Ah, come on, sock me.”

“No.”

“Please.”

It was pretty silly. I almost had to chuckle at the thought of one of Frank Quinn’s hoodlums begging me to pop him, but right then Jay raised his voice and yelled at me.

“You lousy bastard, you goddam filthy-picture peddler, you creep! So you won’t pop me, huh?” And he hauled off and socked me in the eye.

It just happened, the old nerve patterns going automatically into action, and my left hand zipped up, becoming a hard, horny fist on the way, and bounced off Jay’s chops, and I was leaning over him with my right hand high, stretched open, the thick blade of my palm almost on its way down to hack at his skull like a cleaver — when I managed to call everything to a halt.

Jay was sliding down the side of the car, slowly, his knees bending like elastic hinges, and he went all the way down onto his hind end and said, “Blah,” or something like that. Then, sort of creakingly, he got to his feet.

“That ought to do it,” he said. “That was a good one. Yeah, I think that’s enough.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think — ”

“‘Sall right, Scott. That was a good one. Yeah, that’s enough, I think.”

He climbed into the Thunderbird and looked into the rearview mirror, climbed out again. “You got my eye fine,” he said. “But Frank still won’t believe it.”

“Jay, don’t take another poke — ”

“No.” He shook his head. “You was going to kill me, wasn’t you?”

“I didn’t even think — ”

“I seen your face. It looked like you was going to eat me.” He paused. “But I guess that’ll do it, I hope.”

I said, “O.K., if you’ll drop me off in town — ”

“No, sir. I’ll walk or hitch a ride — you take the T-bird. Nobody’s going to see me with you. Besides, if you knocked me out, you’d take the heap, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s right. O.K. But don’t forget to shake Quinn up good. Tell him I’m going to blow everything wide open — tomorrow. Tell him I know the whole bit, how he shot Flagg, had Heigman drowned . . .” I stopped. “What about Weiss?”

“What do you mean, what about him?”

“Did Quinn kill him?”

“Sure. That is, he had the boys do it.”

“How?”

“Well, for a week or so before then, Frank was getting leery about maybe Weiss might spill his guts — he’d quit his job for one thing — so he had him followed. Weiss got out of line somehow, and Frank had the boys bring him out to the ranch last Friday night. They wrapped him in blankets and tied a rope around him and made him run along behind a car till he flopped. Then they did it again. Finally he just keeled over and kicked off.” Jay gently fingered his eye. “The toughest part was getting him into his hotel again, but they managed to sneak him in the back way, while it was still dark.”

I shook my head. “What a lovely group you mingle with.”

“He had a bad heart, you know.”

“Yeah. That’s what he died of. Heart failure.”

I was quiet for a few seconds, then said, my voice soft, “Now tell me about Lolita, Jay.”

His eyes flickered. “What you mean, Scott?”

“You know what I mean. Now tell me.”

He swallowed. “Well, uh, Heigman and Weiss and the Lopez chick was the only three what might’ve put a squeeze on Frank. And with Miller so near going, and you stirring up a hell of a storm the last couple days, which got Frank plenty worried — ”

“I know she’s dead. Just tell me who did it.”

“You won’t — you won’t be able to prove nothin’.”

“Knock it off, goddam you. Just tell me.”

He winced. “It was one of Frank’s boys, I don’t know which — that’s a fact, Scott. I don’t know. Last night it was, sometime. He made it look like an accident. You know, in the bathtub.”

“How’d they find her, Jay?”

“Hell, that’s all I know. Just that Frank gave out the word to do it. I got no idea about any of the rest of it.”

“Who did it, Jay?” He shook his head and I grabbed his arm, kind of squeezed it. “Who do you think it was?”

“I could be wrong, Scott. I don’t know. But — well, Papa handled Heigman, you know. And he was in on the party with Chester. So it could’ve been Papa.”

“Yeah. It could have been Papa Ryan. You find out for sure, Jay. And let me know as soon as you find out. You got it?”

“Sure. Yeah, I can get the word, Scott. O.K.”

“How come you didn’t mention it earlier about Lolita?”

“Hell, you didn’t ask nothing about it, it just didn’t come to mind. Anyways, I didn’t figure it was too important.”

“You didn’t, huh?” I stopped. In a few seconds I said, “You wanted me to slug you, didn’t you, Jay?”

“Yeah, I did — ”

If there was more, it never came out. I said, “Fine,” and hit him on the mouth, and he flew back against the side of the car, slumped to the ground. He didn’t get up this time. I pulled him a few feet to the side, left him lying on his back.

A little light fell on his face. Quinn would believe Jay’s story now.

The ringing of the phone brought me back from the edge of sleep.

After leaving Jay I’d come straight back to the Spartan, mixed a drink and relaxed on the living-room divan, wondering if Jay would call. I grabbed the phone, shaking my head hard to get completely awake. It was Jay.

“Scott?” His voice was tight. He sounded excited.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“Man, get out of there. When I told Frank you got away, he flipped. He’s gone and got all the triggers in town on your tail — he’s putting up ten thousand clams for the guy who blasts you. But that ain’t all — ”

“What? Ten thousand — ”

“ — he’s got the cops coming to put the arm on you, too.”

“Cops? Are you nuts? I — ”

“Don’t argue. Get out of there, will you? If Frank’s boys or the fuzz get them pictures . . . Scott, you ain’t got them on you, do you?”

“No, they’re in a safe place.”

“Well, you ain’t. Beat it — ”

“Slow down. How in hell did Frank — ”

“Just beat it, please beat it, will you? Look, I’m callin’ from a pay phone, which I sneaked out to. Get yourself out of your pad — where in a minute guys are gonna be shooting at you if you don’t hurry — and call me back if you want to ask questions.” He gave me his number.

I didn’t even write it down, clamped it in my mind, hung up the phone and took off. The urgency in Jay’s voice had gotten through to me.

Two hard-looking men came in the front entrance of the Spartan as I was about to leave — by the back door. They didn’t see me, and even though I didn’t know the men, I had a strong feeling it was just as well they didn’t see me. One of them was tall, moved his head slowly from side to side like a tank turret as he advanced, and wore a black suit lumpy at the left shoulder; the other was shorter and thin, with the bleached look of a grub, wearing a gray snap-brim hat and a trench coat that had been too long in the trench. Two of them — five G’s apiece?

I went out the Spartan’s rear exit and trotted four blocks to where I’d parked Jay’s Thunderbird. On my way to Beverly Boulevard, I drove back to North Rossmore and past the Spartan. A black-and-white police car was parked at the curb in front of the hotel.

I drove to a pay phone, called the number Jay had given me. He answered as soon as the phone rang.

“What in hell is going on?” I asked him.

He started talking in a gush of words, and after a few seconds of that I said, “Slow down, Jay. Start at the beginning — when you got back to the ranch — and bring me up to date in sequence.”

“O.K.” He paused and I heard him take a deep breath, let it out. “Well, when I got back and told Frank you got away, he just about had a brain blow, like I said. When he was a little calmed down, I told him what you mentioned, about you knowing practically everything except how many moles there is on his gluteus maximus. About the meetings, and who the guys is — and you was going to spring some kind of bomb tomorrow, you know?”

“Yeah. So what happened?”

“What didn’t? He looked like the shrimps he ate for dinner was alive and eating back. He got so shook he even stopped chewing me out for letting you get away, and getting myself half killed.” He paused. “It was that last one done it, Scott. I don’t hold it against you, only you might’ve pulled the punch — ”

“He swallowed the tale, right?”

“So far. After he got shook he sent me out, but I hung an ear next to the door. And what does he do but get on the phone and start calling them cats he meets with.”

“How do you know it wasn’t somebody else?”

“How I know is, he’s changing the time of the meet. Says it can’t wait till next Monday, they got to make it right away — tomorrow.”

I smiled. I didn’t know if this development would do me any good, but I knew a meeting on Monday would be of no help at all. It was hours after midnight now, already early Tuesday morning, which was cutting it pretty close, but at least Miller would still be alive when the meeting was held.

“What time tomorrow?” I asked.

“Noon, so they can all get away during lunch time. Same place — Sully’s office, back of the Gardenia Room.”

“You hear who he called?”

“Just one guy. I couldn’t ride the Earie there next to Frank’s door for long. It was Smith. But this time I heard the first name — Thornwall. Frank told him he was calling all the rest, too.”

“Thornwall Smith? But that’s Judge Smith.”

“Yeah. Ain’t it the nuts?”

Judge Thornwall Smith, a most righteous man. Judge Smith, who had presided at the trial of Ross Miller.

Jay went on, “It was when Frank was jawing with Judge Smith I heard him fix it to get the cops on your can. He told Smith to get the paperwork done, and he’d call a copper he knows and get a ball rolling there. Mainly he wanted the fuzz to have a reason for picking you up and holding you a while. You follow me?”

“Sure, hold me till Wednesday afternoon, say. But how’d he manage to frame me so fast?”

“No frame, Scott. It’s a legit beef.”

I blinked. “Legit?”

“Yeah, you’re a car thief. See, I naturally told Frank you took my heap — that’s the way we worked it out, you know. So he says for me to make the complaint, and naturally I got to do it. Frank’s figuring some other angles, but that was his first idea. It must be on the radio by this time.”

“It is,” I said unhappily, remembering the uniform car in front of the Spartan. And also remembering, with a hollow feeling in my middle, that the car in question. Jay’s jazzy blue T-Bird, was no more than ten yards from me now.

Jay said, “That ain’t all.”

“You mean the little matter of ten G’s to the guy who massacres me?”

“Yeah, there’s that — he’s got not only the professionals but even the amateur triggers in town looking for you, and he says they’re to blast you in front of the Police Building if they got to. But that ain’t what I meant.”

“You mean — there’s more?”

“Scott, Frank would sink California in the Atlantic Ocean if it’d just drown you. He thought you was done for tonight, and he’d barely started to loosen up when he finds out you ain’t dead. Well, this tightens him up so much he can’t hardly move, so he’s doin’ everything he knows how to if it’ll just slow you down.”

“Jay, what is this — this ‘something more’?”

“Well, he says at the meeting tomorrow, another thing he means them to work out is for your snooper’s and gun licenses to be no good. Invoked, or took back, or something like that.”

“Revoked.” The word fell from my mouth like a wet meatball. I said slowly, “How in hell can a slob like Quinn get my license yanked?”

“Don’t ask me, Scott — for stealin’ my car, maybe. That’s one of the things they’re going to talk about at the meeting.” He paused. “I don’t know how he does the things he does. But I’ll bet he can do it. He’s got some pretty high-powered friends scattered around the state.”

I was beginning to think they were higher and more powered than I had guessed. At least as high as Judge Smith and Ira Semmelwein — both of whom, I assumed, would be at that noon meeting. In company with several other guys I didn’t know about but whom I wanted, especially now, to know plenty about. I could probably learn plenty about all of them, too, including Frank Quinn, if I could somehow learn what went on at that meeting. And a fat lot of good that it did me. I couldn’t afford to go near the Barker Hotel again.

I couldn’t afford to stand here in this phone booth much longer, either. I glanced out at Jay’s T-bird, then said into the phone, “Is there anything else exciting, Jay?”

“No, I guess that’s about all of it.”

“There was one other answer you were going to get for me, remember?”

“You mean — about the girl?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I told you right before.”

“Papa Ryan, huh?”

“Yeah. It was Papa.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it. Uh, you still got those, uh, copies, don’t you?”

“I do. But you’ve more than kept your part of the bargain, Jay. I’ll keep mine.” I could hear him sigh. “But,” I went on, “they’ll still be intact until Wednesday — just so you don’t get any wrong ideas.”

“Don’t worry. I’m with you. Don’t worry. Just . . . be sure to take care of it Wednesday.”

“I will, Jay.” I paused. “Unless I’m dead, of course.”

There were long seconds of silence. Then he said, his voice joyless, “Scott, you wouldn’t — you wouldn’t do that to me!”

On that mutually depressing note we hung up. For a moment I thought of the 4300 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, now trying to find me and jail me. And of the word from Quinn going out over the underworld wireless, reaching into swank nightclubs and crummy dives, the floating crap games, the bookie joints, Sunset Strip apartments, downtown L.A. Hotels.

Then I took off in a hurry.

I drove a mile or so away, then started checking cars parked along the curb. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t keep driving Jay’s car. So I would have to steal another one. The first two cars were locked but the third, a three-year-old Ford, wasn’t; two minutes later I’d crossed the ignition wires and was driving the Ford down the street. The probability was that it wouldn’t be reported stolen until at least seven or eight o’clock in the morning. It was four a.m. now, so that gave me a little time.

But if Quinn managed to accomplish everything he was trying to do, I would need more than a little time; I’d need a miracle. Especially since I couldn’t ask the police for help now; whatever I did, I would have to do alone. I parked on a dimly lighted street and sat quietly, thinking. I went back over everything that had happened in the case, all I knew and had guessed, the things I knew from personal experience and the other things I’d been told.

This was a peculiar one, this case. I knew I didn’t have a thing on which the police, much less the courts, could act. Particularly in these days when so many of our laws, so much of the public’s apparent sympathy, seem directed at protecting and coddling the criminal, from the juvenile hood on up to the narcotics peddler and the Communist and professional killer. So I was in the peculiar position of knowing what the crimes were and who had committed those crimes, yet being unable to do a damned thing about it. Actually, my major concern was not to amass enough evidence to hang Quinn, but simply to get my hands on any kind of evidence which would prevent, or at least postpone, Miller’s execution.

But I had just finished going over the whole case in my mind, everything, and I didn’t have it. Not yet. So finally I faced the obvious: there were only two possible ways out, neither of them very exhilirating. One of those possibilities required my attendance at Frank Quinn’s upcoming Halloween ball for hoodlums, but until I learned how to make myself invisible — and immortal — that was going to be my very last resort. Which left only the noon meeting tomorrow — or, rather, later today — in the Barker Hotel.

I knew I couldn’t be there in person. But maybe I could bug Sullivan’s office somehow, plant a microphone — or even a small transmitter, similar to the one which was about now in Dallas, Texas. With luck I could hear what went on during the meeting, even tape it. But that wouldn’t tell me who was in attendance, what they looked like, what the men’s names were. Just knowing what was discussed might give me much of what I needed — if, of course, I could get a microphone into the Barker.

And that thought gave me a sensation of snails inching along my spine on a cold night. I leaned back on the car seat and pressed my fingers against my closed eyes so hard that I saw whirling lights and lines, like a TV test pattern dissolving against my closed lids, geometric designs of light and darkness forming and fading. Then I sat up, fumbled for cigarettes, swearing softly under my breath. I got out my lighter, started to flip it on — and stopped.

I sat bolt upright. I had it. I knew I had it.

But it meant I would have to go back to the Barker Hotel again.

Whether I liked it or didn’t.

And I didn’t.

Eleven

At four-thirty a.m. I was in another phone booth, waiting for the man I’d called to answer the ring. He was a guy named Gabe, a former client, and now a friend of mine; moreover, he was an electronics expert, a top-notch TV technician, owner of three retail television stores, two in L.A. and one in Hollywood.

I was calling him because I hoped to bug Sullivan’s office not merely with a microphone — but with television.

Gabe had become my client when he learned his teenage son was joy-popping, taking shots of narcotics for kicks; after a tour conducted by me, during which the kid saw men and boys in the agony of withdrawal, and a once-sweet-faced girl of fifteen who’d paid for her habit through prostitution, the boy hadn’t joy-popped any more, since the joy had kind of gone out of the pop. Consequently, Gabe would probably have helped me bug the inside of a blast furnace in action if I asked him to.

He answered, yawning, at about the sixth ring.

“Gabe?” I said. “Shell Scott — I need some help.”

“Shell, hi, boy. Jus’ a minute.” The phone clattered. Shortly he was back and said, “Fire away. Splashed some water on me, I’m awake now. Who do you want me to kill or kidnap?”

I grinned. “There’s going to be a meeting held today on the ground floor of a local hotel. I hope to be somewhere else — but listening to and watching what goes on at that meeting. You’re the TV expert. Can it be done?”

He was quiet for a few seconds. “Sure. I guess you want a closed-circuit TV system. Right?”

“You tell me. What would I need?”

“Well, you need a pickup camera at the source, one with a photo-conductive pickup tube, say, and transistorized if you want it small; a TV receiver to reproduce the picture; and enough cable to reach your receiving set.”

“Cable,” I said. “Cable? I thought it went through the air, or ether, or chloroform, or — ”

“Shell, we are not the American Broadcasting Company. The cable runs from the camera to your receiver, and takes the place of the modulated radio wave utilized in commercial TV broadcasting — wireless, you’d probably call it.”

“Man, whatever you said, that’s what I want — wireless. Look, Gabe, I’d better explain a little more. At the meeting of which I speak, there will be crook-types who carry guns and such instruments. And if they have the faintest notion anybody is peeking, they will use those instruments on anybody in sight. So either I forget the idea entirely, or — ”

“Yeah,” he interrupted. “Got you. One of those deals, huh? Well . . . you got a place to hide the camera?”

I’d already thought about that. When I had briefly been in Sullivan’s office last night I had noticed a gray desk, leather chairs, and a wooden bar aslant in one corner.

“I think so,” I said. “But I’ll worry about that end.”

“I take it you don’t want to be in the hotel.”

“I would like to be several blocks away, and preferably in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ll sneak in to bug the joint, but I don’t want to stay.” I paused. “Unless I have to.”

“Well, there’s another way,” Gabe said. “I mentioned the cable setup because I’ve got all the equipment you’d need at my Hollywood store, and I could get that to you in a hurry. But if you can wait a while, I’ll dig up a transistorized TV camera plus a microwave transmitter and receiver. Using a microwave frequency you’ll get both video and audio — and eliminate the need for cable.”

“Sounds perfect. But you said — if I could wait a while. How long?”

“I can dig it up later this morning. I don’t carry microwave myself. Say nine a.m. if I rush it.”

I sighed. “Gabe, I’ve got to get this stuff planted and be out of sight before the sun comes up — if I want to see the sun come up. I may be able to get in and out of the place now, but I couldn’t possibly do it when the joint is jumping. There’s, uh, a little heat on me. I should have the whole thing done within an hour and a half. Or at most two hours.”

“Then the microwave setup’s out, Shell, It’ll take me close to an hour just to pick up my stuff and get into town. You still want it — with the cable?”

I thought about it, then said, “Yeah, I want it.”

“Where’ll I meet you?” I told him and he said, “O.K., I’ll go by the Hollywood store and pick up all you’ll need. You’ll want it all transistorized — small — I suppose.”

“The size of a pea would be ideal.”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t say it. Here’s what you’ll get. A TV camera, about the size of an eight millimeter home-movie camera. For the audio, I’ve got a Shure mike, about the size of a cigar, and a Bogen p.a. amplifier. It’s, oh, half the size of a table-model radio. All right?”

“Great.”

“That’s all you’ll need except coaxial cable to run from the camera to your monitor, and a two-conductor wire to the speaker in the set. I’ll bring that along, too.”

“One more complication, Gabe. I want to tape the sound, and make a movie of the action on the TV tube — if I can.”

“Oh, brother.” He paused. “I’ve got a sixteen-millimeter Bolex, even a portable magnetic-tape recorder — but shooting a movie of a TV show isn’t like taking home movies out in the yard, pal. The picture on your set isn’t there all the time. It’s composed of scanning lines; sometimes the whole screen’s filled, but at other times only part of the screen — or none of it. Depending on when the camera shutter is open, you might get a picture, or nothing, or the scanning lines of part of the image on the tube.”

“I’d wind up with something, wouldn’t I? Pictures at least part of the time that would match the sound separately taped?”

“Yeah, but on the sound, the lip-synch requires twenty-four frames a second. Shoot on Tri-X film at twenty-four instead of sixteen, and if this Bolex of mine actually shoots at twenty-four, and not twenty-three and a half for example, you might be O.K. If we had time to test the camera — ”

“No time, Gabe.”

“I’m on my way, Shell. I know what you need now — I’ll make it as soon as I can.” He hung up.

It was that cold, raw hour before dawn, and I stood in darkness, a foot from the door beyond which was the hallway at the rear of the Gardenia Room, the hallway which passed before Sullivan’s office. The kit of keys and picks I’d gotten from a sleepy local locksmith had made short work of unlocking the door, but with a hand on the knob I paused a moment, wondering. I was wondering if I had all my marbles.

Gabe had come and gone. He’d brought all the equipment with him, packed in three small suitcases. He left one of the suitcases with me, then, carrying the other two, walked into the Barker Hotel, registered under an assumed name, insisted on an outside room, with television, at the rear of the hotel, and was checked into room 418.

From one suitcase he took his Bolex camera and several reels of Tri-X film, a telescoping tripod, a portable tape recorder, and extra magnetic tapes. From the other he took a couple hundred feet of coaxial cable and an equal length of two-conductor wire. He attached the wire to the tape recorder’s speaker, and the cable to the antenna terminals at the back of the TV set already in the room. Then he dropped the remaining cable and wire out the window into the alley beneath — in which alley I was waiting.

By then I had blocked both ends of the alley with wooden signs, borrowed from a minor excavation on Eighteenth Street, reading, “Caution — Men and Equipment Working.” They wouldn’t keep the alley empty all week, but they didn’t have to; half a day would suit me. Gabe met me in the alley, gave me the key to 418. We shook hands and, when he was sure I knew what to do, he wished me luck and left.

From the spot where the wire and cable was bunched in the alley to the window which I believed to be in Sullivan’s office at the rear of the Gardenia Room was a distance of only fifteen paces. There was plenty of cable. All I had to do was get it into Sully’s office and attached to the portable TV camera, then take up at least temporary residence in room 418 — inside the Barker Hotel.

Which was why, a moment ago, I had wondered if I was nuts. I sighed, opened the door and stepped through, closing it behind me. The hallway was dark and quiet. I waited, listening for any sound. Then, carrying the small suitcase Gabe had brought in my left hand, and in my right my own .38 Colt Special, I stepped forward.

It went like silk. I not only got into Sullivan’s office, drew drapes over the window and turned the room lights on without causing any commotion, but my first look at the bar told me it would be suitable for hiding my TV camera. It was more than suitable; it was almost ideal.

The bar was in the corner of the room to my left, a big, solid thing of sanded and lacquered cottonwood, the top an eight-foot length of log cut lengthwise down the middle. In its front were the darker rings of several interesting knots. The bar was about two feet deep, with four neatly fitted doors on its back. On shelves inside it were bottles of gin, bourbon, brandy and other liquors, glasses, a silver ice bucket with an inch of water in its bottom.

I got busy.

I opened the small suitcase. In it were the pickup camera, amplifier, and little Shure microphone, all of them surprisingly compact for the job they had to do. The camera was a Blonder-Tongue transistorized TV camera, powered by a battery pack, also transistorized, inside the camera case; it was equipped with an electric eye which would adjust the lens aperture as available light in the room increased or decreased. Attached to it was the Bogen amplifier with the plug from the little cigar-sized mike already inserted into its sound input.

The only other items in the suitcase were the simple tools I would need. In four minutes by my watch I had banged a knot out of the bar’s front and concealed my camera with its lens directly behind the resultant knothole, held steady by half a dozen nails driven into the shelf on which it sat, three at each side of the camera. It wasn’t rock-solid, but steady enough. Next to it were the amplifier and microphone, all three items occupying a space no more than a foot wide inside the center of the bar.

In another couple of minutes I’d bored a hole in the bar’s left side, next to the window opening onto the alley behind the hotel. I turned out the lights, pulled the drapes apart, unlocked the window and tugged it up, climbed through into the alley. The wire and cable hung directly beneath the window of room 418. I planted a large rock on them to keep them hanging straight down instead of at a slant across the wall — and possibly across somebody else’s window — and ran them along the alley’s edge to the window of Sullivan’s office, tossed the remaining lengths inside and climbed in after them.

I held them in place at the window’s left side with a nail pounded part way into the sill and bent over them. Then I closed the window, pulled the drapes and switched on the room lights again, cut off the excess cable and wire and ran their business ends through the hole I’d drilled in the bar’s side. In another minute or two I had the cable attached to the concealed camera, the wire fixed to the amplifier — and my closed-circuit TV-and-sound system, between this office and room 418, was complete.

And reasonably safe — if nobody wanted a drink. My equipment was in the center of the bar; I moved all the bottles and glasses to the outer ends of the cabinet and nailed the two center doors shut. And that did it — all was set for me to spy on Quinn’s secret meeting later today. The job was done. I looked at my watch. I’d been inside Sullivan’s office for seventeen minutes.

I had been working so rapidly, and concentrating so completely on the job, that for a while I’d almost forgotten where I was, and extraneous impressions had made little impact on me. Now, though, everything came back in a flood, and I realized it was the kind of flood a guy could go down for the third time in. I wondered if I’d heard something a few moments ago or not; my senses seemed very acute and I strained my ears, but there was nothing. I couldn’t hear a sound except my pulse thudding against my eardrums, my suddenly heavy breathing. Just noises inside me.

But I recalled that when I’d been outside in the alley a few minutes ago, there had been a faint, almost imperceptible lightening in the east. Dawn was near. Dawn — the time when they shoot the spies. And that wasn’t the kind of thought I wanted to come unbidden into my noodle. The job was done, and it was time to get the hell away from here.

I gathered up the tools, extra lengths of cable and wire, put everything into the suitcase and carried it over by the door. Then I walked over to the big gray desk where, presumably, Quinn would sit later today. I went through the desk drawers, but there was nothing of interest to me. Some papers, a box of cigars, a couple of red berets — Sullivan, I remembered, wore a beret to cover his “thickening scalp.” A dead, half-smoked cigar lay in a big ceramic ashtray on the desk top. Everything here in the office looked normal as could be.

By bending down I could see a faint gleam of light behind my knothole in the bar, but it looked like the reflection from a bottle, not the lens of a television camera. I was content. Now I could leave, knowing I had done all I could. I would be able to hear — and see — virtually everything that went on in this room — if the meeting were actually held, and held here instead of someplace else, and my camera wasn’t found, and the police didn’t remove my “Under Repair” signs, and nobody wanted a drink this morning, and nobody spotted the peculiar cable hanging down the building’s rear wall, and enough other ifs to turn my stomach.

It sounded as if it had just turned over. At least I’d heard something . . . unless my imagination was working overtime again. But then there was another noise. Different from the first. If these noises were inside me, that second one must have been a small bone breaking, which didn’t seem likely.

I looked at the door — and saw the knob slowly turning.

That was the little clicking sound I’d heard. A whole flock of emotions exploded in me. First, I just about jumped straight up out of my trousers. And second, I got a horrible feeling of griping, anger, frustration, and I don’t know what all. To come so far, get so close, go through all this work, and then have it blow up in my face — well, it was too much.

I yanked out my gun. The door opened an inch. I aimed at the crack, almost ready to shoot right through it.

But then — so suddenly and loudly that I jumped again — a voice yelled, “I’ll be right back, honey.” It was a woman’s voice. “I’ll only be a couple minutes.”

What in the hell? I thought.

Now, with the door cracked, I could hear answering voices — male, more than one, and apparently from out in the Gardenia Room — but I couldn’t distinguish the words, only what struck me as a horrible roaring sound. I could easily hear the woman, though, as she cried, “Don’t get in an uproar, honey. Mix me a drinkie — I’ll be right back.”

I didn’t know whether to try climbing out the window — too late for that now — or hiding behind the door, or desk, or bar, or what. There was just too much to contend with in the approximately two or three seconds at my disposal.

But at least it was a woman, and she wouldn’t be out there yelling if she had a gun and was coming in here to shoot me. There was a dandy bit of logic. If she knew me, recognized me, I was sunk. But maybe she didn’t know me.

Maybe she . . . The thought wavered, faded, came back.

I was in Sullivan’s office — maybe she didn’t know me or Sullivan. It was possible. Hell, anything is possible; some day I might be eating cheese on the moon. Some day I might go through a whole case without getting hit on the head. Some day — there wasn’t time for any more of this mental diddling. Something had to be done; she was coming in.

All I can say is, it was inspiration. Something bigger than I guided me, moved me. Maybe part of it was the thought of Sullivan in my mind, part merely an attempt to cover my white hair, but in one bound I was behind the desk grabbing Sullivan’s red beret out of the drawer and clapping it on my head, snatching his stale cigar from the tray, turning with my back to the door — just in time, just as the woman came inside — cigar visible in my left hand, the cocked Colt out of sight in my right.

I pulled my head left a little, rolled my eyes sideways so I could peer at her, see if she was alone. She was. She shut the door behind her — and giggled.

Well, that didn’t sound menacing.

“Hello,” she said. “I saw your light under the door. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind?”

“You’re Sully, aren’t you? Huh?”

I turned my head clear around and looked straight at the gal, but her expression didn’t change one iota. It remained a sort of happy, expectant, hopeful, drunk expression. She looked and sounded as plastered as a stucco duplex. I slid the gun back into its holster and turned to face her as she said, “Didn’t you hear me? You’re Sully, aren’t you?”

“Ain’t I seen you before?” I said, very friendly.

“No. Not yet, but you’re going to,” she said kittenishly. “I hope.”

I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I asked the vital question. “You mean you ain’t seen old Sully before?”

She shook her head. “No, I been wanting to. But my honey says he don’t want me in showbiz. But I want to be in showbiz. I got talent, honest.”

Showbiz, talent. Comments I’d heard about Sully came back to me. Whatever it was that had moved me just kept on moving me, and I stuck the cigar between my teeth and said: “Well, come on in, baby. Lessee what you got.”

She let out a little trilling squeal. Something had been bothering me until then, because she looked slightly familiar to me, but when she squealed trillingly I remembered. I’d seen her last night, sitting with Blister and Speedy and two other girls. She’d been the one without a partner, wearing a high-necked green dress.

Apparently she had a partner — her “honey” — tonight, and tonight she was wearing another clinging, high-necked dress, of bright orange knit wool, which was stretched all into the same shape as the other one. It was a splendid sight, even though undoubtedly tough on the wool, since she had a lot more stretchers than it had stretch. The blonde hair, which had been worn long when I’d first seen her, was piled on top of her head this time.

As her squeal ended in a little fruity sound, like a cat’s meow, she clapped her hands in front of her and cried happily, “Oh, I was afraid you wouldn’t let me.” Then she wriggled her hips and snapped her fingers a couple of times. “I’m just going to warm up a little first,” she said.

This was moving too fast for me. Maybe that whatever, which I’d thought was guiding me, had really been misguiding me. All I’d wanted to do was pass inspection from this tomato so she wouldn’t let out a yell and bring numerous boy friends and casual acquaintances in here to shoot me. And now I was remembering more that I’d heard about Sully — his hiring all the show’s acts, the “auditions” here in his office . . .

The blonde said, “O.K. I’m ready. I’ll just have to do it without music, I guess.”

“Ah, Miss, this won’t do — ”

But she went right on, “I’ll have to do it real fast, before my honey comes in here and catches me.”

“Catches you?”

“He’d kill me if he knew I was in here.”

“Kill you?”

“I sneaked away — he doesn’t sympathize with my desire for a career in the theayter. But I’ve got the whole act worked out, everything.” She was starting to emote already, but the theayter she was thinking about was not the Biltmore Theayter. “I’ve even got the name for my dance,” she went on. “The Dance of the Seven Bumps. Or is that too suggestive?”

“Baby, it’s about as crude as the oil in the La Brea Tar Pits. But I guess that’s what the public wants, hey?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she was slinking about the room, reaching back to pull down a long zipper, starting to shake out of the orange dress. Shaking . . . shaking . . .

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t . . . do it.”

“What? Don’t? Why?”

“Well, I’m — all choked up. I mean booked up. No more spots for new — new goils.”

“Oh, it’ll only take a minute. I’m already started, and maybe you’ll remember me when you’ve got a spot.” She smiled like a gal sitting on something that tickled.

I said, “This won’t do — ”

But she kept talking — and moving. “I’ve got the whole act worked out, even my name. Vava. That’s my new stage name.”

“Vava?”

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful? Sort of smooth and hot and all. And the last name — Voom!”

“What happened? Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“But you said — voom or something very — ”

“That’s my last name. Voom!”

“Good God, not Vava Voom!”

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful?”

“Good God, not Vava Voom!” I said again, unbelieving. “Why, that’s as bad as that Yaki gal, the Japanese dancer. What was it? Yeah, Suki. Suki Yaki. Good God — ”

“I thought it up myself.”

“It figures. Look, you’ve got to stop — ”

She wasn’t paying any attention to me. She let out a high, horny, squealing sound — Weeeeee — still moving a lot, and moving very fast, presumably so she could finish before Honey came in and caught her — or, rather, us — and killed her — or, rather, us.

“No,” I said firmly. “You’ve got to stop.”

“Weeeee!”

She wouldn’t pay a damned bit of attention to me. And not entirely to my surprise, I discovered that she had the bright orange dress off, and a pink half-slip off, and was now slinking about in — from the floor up — high-heeled shoes, sheer nylon stockings apparently held up with invisible garters, sheer pink nylon panties, and a sheer pink nylon brassiere, one of those low frilly ones called “Sheer Madness,” or something wild like that.

It was, I’ll tell you, something to see. But I couldn’t afford to get carried away with the vista under the circumstances, and it’s a good thing or I would have been pretty well shaken as she reached behind her back to fumble with the clasp of her brassiere, the movement causing even more stretching than ordinarily. So naturally I said firmly, “This has got to stop!”

I was speaking more and more firmly, but it wasn’t doing a bit of good. She got the clasp unhooked, let the bulging pink cloth start sliding down, down . . .

I said, “You really should stop, you know. Don’t you think . . .”

Down the pink cloth slid, down to the floor. She was moving quite rapidly now, flinging her arms around, saying, “Vava Voom, Vava Voom!” And then a particularly strenuous conniption: “WEEEEEE!”

“Weee,” I said, sort of tentatively.

Her blonde hair was starting to get loose, her arms were flying, she was rearing back, her fingers playing with the top of her pink nylon panties. “Vava VOOOM!” she cried. “Weeee . . . Weeeee!”

I suppose at practically any other time and under any other circumstances I would have heard the sound. The sound of footsteps. Footsteps in the hall, clattering closer. But I didn’t. I just wasn’t listening. That old Achilles thing again. And as luck would have it the blonde, though I wouldn’t have believed she would really get carried so far away, was actually starting to slide the pink nylon down, either carried away by the sheer joy of the theayter or determined to make sure that old Sully remembered her when he had a spot available.

And so it happened that the blonde was only seconds from the climax of her act, crying “Weeeee” over and over in a thin, high voice, sort of scrunched forward and tugging delicately, when the door crashed open.

A large ape stepped inside saying in a loud, harsh voice, “What in hell is comin’ off in here?”

It was Fargo.

His eyes fell on the blonde, and in a flash he took in the vast bare expanse of her, as well as the oddly strained position she had gotten herself into, sort of bent over and thrust out behind and slightly atilt, tugging, and if his eyes had bugged out before, it was nothing to the way they went now.

He let out a roar like a wounded bull moose. “Ba-aby. What in hell are you do-ing?”

The blonde didn’t move, just kept tugging weakly, in the other direction now but too weakly to do any good; besides which, this moment was shot no matter how hard she tugged. In a plaintive voice she said, “Oh, honey, you spoil everything.”

And I thought miserably: “Yeah, he sure does.”

Twelve

The blonde straightened up, pulling her pants on firmly, which seemed a pretty good idea, and then standing erect looked at Fargo and said plaintively, “Oh, honey, you won’t let me do anything.”

“Cheez,” he said in a disgusted tone, shaking his head. He glanced at me, then back at the blonde. “Baby Doll,” he said in a voice filled with suffering, “when is you goin’ to give up your cracky ideas about a career in showbiz?”

Then he turned, saying, “Come on, Baby Doll, the whole gang is waitin’ on you.” And he took one step toward the door.

But then he stopped.

He didn’t merely stop; he froze. He came to an absolute twanging quivering halt, like those dogs that point their noses at birds, and he held very still, and then he slowly began shaking his head back and forth.

“No,” he was mumbling. “It can’t be.”

I realized that it had finally penetrated Fargo’s seven inches of skull that the big open-mouthed chap he had just glanced at was, despite the beret and cigar, despite what his Baby Doll had been doing in front of him, not the big open-mouthed chap he had thought him to be.

He kept mumbling to himself, wagging his head back and forth like a railroad semaphore, “No. I’m wrong. I got to be wrong. It ain’t him. I won’t let it be him.” He stopped mumbling momentarily but kept his head wig-wagging loosely. “I has gone cuckoo. Baby and me, we is all alone in here. That’s it. I has gone cracky.”

Well, Fargo had been frozen there for quite a spell — longer perhaps than you may believe — but I had been frozen for a while myself. Not, however, for as long as Fargo. So as he said his last “cracky”, I was right behind him, swinging a chair. It was a heavy chair, and it landed heavily on the back of Fargo’s wagging head, which stopped wagging.

He crumpled silently to the floor, all his problems solved for the moment — which was more than I could say for me. I turned, grabbed my suitcase, spun around and started out.

The blonde was gawking. “Why did you do that?” she asked me.

I didn’t tell her; I was on my way.

I had heard those other male voices; I had heard Fargo say “the whole gang” was waiting; and I knew I had to move fast even if not far. Hoods were probably all over the joint, and I had a hunch that in about ten seconds half the goddam Mafia would be in here giving me a hand, a big black hand, and shooting bullets into my fatal wounds.

I jumped over Fargo, grabbed the door and slammed it shut as I went through — and hesitated. I had a momentary impulse simply to turn left and run out that door I’d come through earlier and keep on going. But it was only for a moment. I turned right, ran to the hall’s end and started to leap up the stairs there.

I was going up when I heard the blonde’s voice.

She yelled, “Blister! Speedy! Come here, will you? You’ll never guess what happened.”

Wrong again, I thought. I’ll bet they guess.

But by then I was at the top of the stairs, on the Barker’s second floor. I made it to the fourth floor without complication, let myself into room 418, locked the door behind me and collapsed in a chair.

Well, I’d made it to here, but I didn’t exactly feel safe. I felt more like those people who use the wrong deodorant, only half-safe. I figured that any hood in his right mind would assume I must have managed to escape from the hotel — certainly that I wouldn’t have remained in the Barker by choice. The trouble with that reasoning was the fact that many hoods are not in their right minds.

Even if I was safe here for a while, it looked as if my night’s work had gone to waste. Once word reached Quinn that Shell Scott had been surprised in Sullivan’s office, Quinn would have that office gone over inch by inch. Even a casual search would turn up my camera — or Quinn might simply transfer the planned meeting to another, uncontaminated location.

I swore, wondering what was going on down there in Sully’s office. They might at this very moment be sending goons to search the hotel. If I knew what they were up to, I might . . .

I slapped a hand against my forehead. What was the matter with me? All I had to do to find out what was happening in Sully’s office was — turn on my TV set. Moreover, I’d find out if the thing really worked.

Gabe had told me he’d left the set on Channel 12, and all I had to do was turn it on, then switch on the recorder, without necessarily starting the tape, and I’d get sound from the recorder’s speaker. I jumped up, crossed to the TV receiver and turned it on, switched on the recorder at the receiver’s base. While the tubes warned up I watched the twenty-one-inch screen, unconsciously holding my breath. Only when light flickered and a picture formed did I realize I was letting out my breath in a long sigh.

It was happening before my eyes; the thing was actually working — working beautifully, the picture perfect except for a blurred inch or two at the right of the screen. There was Fargo, sitting in the chair I’d hit him with, ugly eye, massive nose, pained and sour expression, all clear as could be. He was facing almost directly toward the bar, and alongside him with one hand on his head was the blonde.

In all the rush, she hadn’t had time to dress yet, and though she’d managed to put on the low and frilly brassiere, that was the only change since I’d been down there myself. It was something to see on television. In fact it was astonishing to see on television.

Squatting beside the chair was Speedy Gonzales, and a couple of feet behind him was another man, identifiable from his almost noseless profile as Blister. In the blurred area at the right side of the picture tube I could make out the hazy form of another woman standing near the door.

I was so exhilirated to see the actual scene, to see what was right now transpiring in Sullivan’s office and to know that this damned closed-circuit setup was no-fooling working, that I wasn’t listening closely at first. The sound from the tape recorder’s speaker was low and I turned it up.

In those first moments I’d found it difficult to believe my eyes — but now it was impossible to believe my ears. It was crazy; it didn’t make sense.

Fargo, his face angry, was saying, “. . . dammit, I tell you nothing happened. How many times do I got to tell you?”

I blinked, shook my head, turned the sound up a little louder.

The blonde said, “But — ” and Fargo yelled at her, “Shut up. I told you, keep your yap clammed . . . uh, Baby Doll.”

I felt peculiar. This was unreal. Had I truly addled Fargo when I’d hit him on the head with that chair? Or could his noodle have gone Tilt there after he’d spotted me and was wagging his head about? Maybe he had amnesia, maybe he was simply nuts, and maybe he was just confused — but if so be was no more confused than I. I dragged a chair over in front of the set, sank down in it, keeping my eyes on the picture.

Fargo winced and put one hand on the back of his head, then said to Blister, “You and Speedy go on out in the club. Baby Doll and me, we’ll be there in a minute.”

They went out and closed the door. Fargo got to his feet, turned with his back to me — to the TV camera in the bar, that is — and faced the blonde. She was saying, “What’s happening? Why’d you tell Speedy and Blister you just got dizzy all of a sudden? You ask me, you’re dizzy now. When that guy hit you — at first I thought it was because he really liked my dance, but I guess that wasn’t it. Otherwise he wouldn’t of run off like that. But when that guy hit you — ”

“Shut up. You and that yap of yours is goin’ to drive me cracky . . . uh, Baby Doll.” He paused, sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Listen to me. You know who that guy was?”

“No, but he did like my dance, though. I know, because — ”

“To hell with your goddam dance! Shut up and listen!” He didn’t even call her, uh, Baby Doll, this time. He went on, his voice low and earnest. “I know who he was. But you just forget you ever seen him, understand? He wasn’t here. Nobody was here. Understand?”

“No.”

“Well, nuts. I mean, you don’t got to understand it. Just do what I tell you. Look, it’s our secret, Sweetpants. Nobody else is gonna know. Just do that for me, huh?”

“Why?”

“Goddammit. Why? Oh, goddammit. Because I say so, goddammit. Oh! One of these days . . . Cheez. If you wasn’t so. . so . . . so . . . Uh, Baby Doll, just do it, will you, please?”

“But why?”

“Oh! You are gonna drive me — ” He cut it off, and from little twitching movements he made, it was pretty clear he was undergoing a mental struggle of some intensity. Finally he let his arms go up and flop down and then said, “O.K. O.K. Look. You don’t know what’s been goin’ on around here the last couple days. But I do — and so does Frank. Frank, the boss. Now, if he finds out what happened here tonight — well, I’ll put it simple. He will kill hell out of me. You will have no more Honey Bunny.”

I shuddered at the thought of anybody — especially any female so delectable as Vava Voom! — calling Fargo “Honey Bunny.” But no amount of shudders would have bothered me at the moment because now I understood. And it was marvelous.

He was going on, “We just got to pretend nothing happened, nobody was here tonight. If Frank ever found out I . . . did it again, he would do something terrible. He already told me if I goofed any way, he’d plant me up to my neck in the stretch at Santa Anita and let the horses run over me. Baby Doll, it wasn’t a joke, he would do it. And he’d bet on every goddam horse in the race just to make it more interesting.” He stopped, sighed a couple of times, then went on, “So don’t let a word slip about this, see? Don’t even think about it.”

“Well, I suppose so, honey. After all, you’ve been awful good to me.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been awful good to me.”

“You said that.”

“You’ve been awful good to me. All those pretty things.”

“Yeah.” There was silence for a few seconds. Fargo didn’t have the most well-oiled brain in the city. But then he got it. “Yeah! Baby, you know that mink coat you went fruit for in the store — out on Wilshire?”

“Yes. Yes, I do!” Her voice was gay again.

“Well, keep your yap — don’t spill nothing about this, and the coat is yours.”

“Oh, honey! That wonderful long coat, almost down to my ankles. You’re so good — ”

“I meant the one that hangs on your shoulders — ”

“That wonderful long coat — ”

“Don’t they call it a stole or something?”

“— down to my ankles.”

“Yeah, that long coat. That’s the one I meant.”

“Oh, honey, you’re so good to me.”

Fargo made that little flipping up and then flopping down motion of his hands again, more eloquent than words.

But this super-shapely blonde knew when words had done all they could, knew the leash that kept the Fargos in line, knew that one picture is worth ten thousand words. Vava knew when to Voom!

“We been so busy,” she said, “you haven’t even kissed me.” She reached behind her again, stretched, let the brassiere slide down her arms to the floor. “Don’t you want to kiss me?”

Well, that was a twist, I thought. Did she always do that? I had no idea, since I didn’t know much about Fargo’s habits. That is, about his good habits. But at least he, too, knew when to stop talking. In a minute they turned out the lights.

But I didn’t care. Nothing could diminish my happy mood now. Neither Fargo nor his gal would spill the story about me — and almost surely my TV camera was safe in the bar. All was set for that upcoming meeting, and I felt reasonably secure and almost snug here in room 418 of the Barker Hotel.

Everything was rosy — for everybody.

I’d got my job done, it was paying off, and I had high hopes for a real payoff later today.

Fargo was getting what he wanted — he wouldn’t be buried in the stretch at Santa Anita.

And the blonde would get her mink coat, almost down to her ankles.

Thirteen

I awoke suddenly, but without the dopiness which normally characterizes my return from wherever I go. That was probably because I hadn’t gone very far. I leaned forward, turned down the sound blasting from the tape-recorder’s speaker.

On the TV screen now, two men were placing leather chairs in a couple of ragged lines before Sullivan’s gray desk. The sound of them moving in and out, maybe the slamming of the door, had awakened me. Nothing important was happening — the important thing was that the closed-circuit system was still closed, still working admirably.

It was eleven a.m. Earlier I had made sure the camera and recorder were ready for action. The recorder was plugged in, set to record the sound from Sullivan’s office whenever I punched the “Record” switch. The movie camera Gabe had left here, a 16 mm. Bolex with an f 1.4 Switar lens, was loaded with Kodak Tri-X film and in place on its tripod before the TV screen. Everything was in readiness. However, even if all went perfectly this noon, I still had the problem of getting out of the hotel. And of acting on whatever I might learn — if anything. But I’d cross those bridges when I came to them.

Despite the lack of sound sleep I felt surprisingly alert. I hoped it lasted; I would need all the zip available to me today. For this was Tuesday, the last day before Ross Miller’s execution, the execution exactly twenty-three hours away now. It was the day of Quinn’s noon meeting, hard at hand.

It was also, if I had to think about it, the day of Quinn’s eight p.m. costume ball, his hoodlum Halloween. That was right — this was Halloween. When goons and goblins bark and witches fly over the moon. Well, I thought, Happy Halloween.

And with that happy thought in mind I sat down in the easy chair before my TV set, and waited for electronic magic — Frank Quinn and company, in living black and white.

Frank Quinn showed up on my TV screen at eleven-thirty, accompanied by a man who had to be Doodle, though I’d never seen him before. He was of medium height, the front half of his head bare of hair, his neck exceptionally long. He was wearing a dark suit, dark shirt, black tie, and looked a little like an undertaker. Which, in a way, is what he was.

An undertaker employed by Quinn, however. A solid pulse of anger started up in me at the sight of Quinn. All the hell tossed at me — and at Ross Miller, Weiss, Heigman, Lolita — was Quinn’s doing. Others had acted for him, but the real center of all the violence and blood, the focus of all the misery, was that flabby-faced, disgusting, sloppy, maggoty, bloody-eyed sonofabitch, Frank Quinn.

He had a double handful of white envelopes, and dropped one on each chair before the desk. He and Doodle went in and out a couple of times in the next few minutes, and at about fifteen minutes before twelve the guests started to arrive.

The first one inside the office was Judge Thornwall Smith. That settled that. Not only had Jay given me accurate information, but clearly Judge Smith was not all he was cracked up to be. He looked at a couple of the envelopes in the chairs, then picked one of them up and put it into his coat pocket and sat down in the chair where he’d found it. It was eight to five he’d not only found the spot where he was to sit but had just pocketed his monthly payoff.

Soon another man came in, found his chair and pocketed his envelope. He was a thin, dark-haired man who looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. After him came Ira Semmelwein, the well-to-do citizen I’d been told was getting paid off by Quinn.

By noon, apparently everybody was present, and Doodle closed and locked the door. I started my camera and tape recorder. Besides Quinn and his bodyguard, there were eleven other men present, and except for the one I couldn’t place, they were so well-known or publicized that I recognized all of them. In addition to Judge Smith, the thin dark-haired man, and Ira Semmelwein, there was the other man Pinky had mentioned, John Porter, a minor city official. Plus Phillip Brenmount, a member of the city council; James H. Trout, a well-known, wealthy contractor; a couple of L.A. attorneys, one of whom had two years ago been elected to the State Assembly; the president of the powerful local of a building-trades union; a “boy wonder” of the financial world, now forty-two and nationally known, very active in California real-estate developments; and a handsome, white-haired man, a textile manufacturer worth at least two or three million dollars, very active in politics and known to have an extremely influential voice in his party, especially in California.

After the door was locked Quinn stood in front of the desk and looked at the assembled men. I could see him clearly at the left of my TV screen, and the others’ profiles were all visible. Doodle leaned against the far wall facing the concealed camera down there in Sully’s office.

Quinn didn’t waste words. He went right to the heart of the problem. He said, “Let’s get down to business. Some of you know what’s goin’ on, but there’s some I haven’t talked to. All you need to know is we got one gob of trouble right now, and only one, and it’s Shell Scott. We got to get the bastard, by one way or another.”

He looked left and right, glaring at the men. I couldn’t tell on this set, but in color I knew his eyes would be the shade of pink bougainvillea. He explained to the group some of the things I’d been up to during the last three days, then finished it up, “I don’t know for sure how much about us he knows, but it’s too goddam much. The bum is giving me a ton of trouble. And I guess you know, if I get in trouble, then all of you gentlemen is in trouble.” Still glaring, he paused to let that sink in, then added slowly, “So we better all work together on Scott.”

Nobody spoke, Quinn stood facing the assembled men like a fighter, swinging verbal blows at them. And they took it. Which was interesting. He waited a few seconds, then said briskly, “All right. Scott’s somewhere around, but nobody’s seen him since last night. He ain’t in none of his usual spots — I got men watching his apartment and office both. Got more watching the Police Building, and he hasn’t gone in nor out of there. And I can tell you I got a lot of other men looking for him. You can see I ain’t been sittin’ on my can. So what are you gentlemen gonna do to help?”

The thin, dark-haired man shifted in his chair and I got a better look at him. Finally I placed him. And that was another shock. He was a police officer. I didn’t know him personally, but I’d seen him in the Police Building a time or two, in uniform. He was wearing sports clothes now, but it was the same man. There are, from time to time, a few bad officers in any big police department — just as there are a few bad lawyers, doctors, businessmen. But they’re rare in the L.A.P.D. and quickly weeded out when found, so to see this guy here was actually the biggest shock of the afternoon.

He was saying, “I took care of that car thing, Frank.”

“Warrant’s out, huh?” Quinn said. The officer nodded and Quinn smiled. “Good. Most of you don’t know what this is about, but it’s more added help for us. Scott heisted a T-bird off one of my employees last night, and we got a warrant out for him on that right off. Now there’s more good news. Police got another stolen car report this morning and found the car parked on Sycamore Avenue. It had Scott’s prints on the rearview mirror and a couple other places.”

I groaned. And right then the film in my Bolex reached its end. I opened the case fast, removed the exposed reel and slapped another one into place, got the camera going again, still mentally groaning. I hadn’t paid any attention to leaving fingerprints on that Ford. Hell, I wasn’t a car thief. Not really. Car thieves don’t usually leave prints.

Quinn was still speaking, “Now, Scott’s buddy-buddy with most of the fuzz, but I arranged it so the dude the car was stole from was sure to swear out the complaint, and there’s a warrant out on that for Scott now. That’s good.” He paused. “But not good enough. We got to get a real charge against him, not something he might beat in a hurry like a car rap. So right now we’re gonna dream something up.”

One of the men said, “It will undoubtedly be difficult to bring any charge that will stick — ”

Quinn cut him off. “It don’t have to stick. If it does, that’s gravy, but the main thing right now is to get Scott in the can and keep him there till tomorrow. I want that bastard in jail — if he’s still livin’ — or on the run, for the next twenty-four hours.”

One thing was certain; Quinn was in control of the meeting. He was hard-boiled, arrogant, his tone almost contemptuous, but none of these big wheels had yet told him to go soak his head. “Hey, Quinn,” I said aloud, “Go soak your head.” It gave me only a mild pleasure.

Quinn looked back and forth at the men. “And I don’t guess I got to remind you about me throwing a big spread tonight. But I’ll tell you this, I’ve went to a lot of trouble to set it up, and I don’t want nothing to interfere with it.”

There was some more conversation about how best to get and keep several thousand L.A. cops on my tail, and after a few suggestions, none of which endeared these guys to me, it was decided that a man now at Quinn’s ranch, who had no police record and wasn’t even known to be on the coast, would swear out a complaint against me for assault with a deadly weapon, claiming I had shot him in the shoulder. One of the men present, James Trout, would support the man’s story by saying he had seen me shoot the unarmed man — which bit griped me more than anything else so far in this session.

Trout protested, saying he couldn’t get away with a bald-faced lie like that. It was chilling to see how quickly he stopped protesting when Quinn said, “You do it — or else.”

Trout, Judge Smith, and the police officer got together to figure out exactly how to handle the frame, then the judge called to Quinn, “When did the victim get shot, Frank? If the wound is several days old, the police will know it. And unless we know where Scott was at all times, we could foul up.”

“He ain’t shot yet,” Quinn said. “I’ll shoot him this afternoon.”

That seemed to shock even the eleven men present, and Quinn tempered his statement a bit. “Just in the shoulder,” he said. “I ain’t going to kill the guy.” That made it all right. Except with me.

In a few moments Judge Smith said, “We’re set, Frank. We’ll get a warrant out charging Scot with ADW. With that and the auto-theft charges he’s in real trouble.”

Quinn was pleased. “Good. If he even calls his pals downtown there’ll be ten cops land on him. Good.” He paused. “Well, Scott beat up one of my boys last night, stole his car, stole that Ford, and now he’s gone and committed criminal assault, so I guess we shouldn’t have no trouble getting his PI license pulled, and his gun license, too. That’s in ease he manages to keep livin’. As long as we’re workin’ on him, we might as well cover all the angles.”

The talk went on, but I lost part of it. Because a weird feeling had crept over me. I had been watching the show as if it were a late-late gangster program sponsored by Drano or something. But this was not a show; this was the real thing. These guys were planning real crimes. And I had been watching myself get cooked more thoroughly than in a cannibal’s pot. These guys were cooking me. Not only were most of the hoods in town hunting me, but these bums were arranging it so that the entire Los Angeles Police Department would also be on my tail — not just for auto theft, but for ADW, for criminal assault. Local broadcasts would be going over the air, probably an All Points Bulletin; officers downtown, on the street, in radio cars, would be looking for Shell Scott.

But if I could get out of here with my film and tape — they would be looking for Frank Quinn. For Quinn and his council of crooks.

Someone in the room downstairs had just said to Quinn, “I was wondering about something, Frank. You say Scott stole a car and it was found — where?”

“Over on Sycamore, about a block and a half . . . from . . . here.”

He stopped, and his unpleasant expression got even more unpleasant. I’d run out of film again and had to insert a new reel in a hurry, or I might have paid more attention to Quinn’s reaction. I got the Bolex in operation once more, trying at the same time to watch Quinn as he waved at Doodle, who walked over near him. Quinn was doing something with his hands and fingers. Finally it registered on me that he was using sign language. Doodle left the room; when he returned, the talk continued.

It didn’t appear that the meeting was going to last much longer. Judge Smith and Trout had just left, and I was wondering if I should call the police while there was still time for them to break in on the meeting and catch these guys with Quinn. But I knew the call could easily be, and probably would be, traced through the hotel switchboard to my room here in the Barker; and if the police got their hands on me they would undoubtedly keep them on me. For hours, unquestionably, despite the info I now had — I hoped — on film and tape, and maybe for days. Besides, the fix I was in wasn’t as important as Ross Miller’s increasingly fatal predicament. The main thing now was for me to get out of here, keep my freedom of movement.

So I probably would have decided not to call the law.

But, as it turned out, that was one decision I didn’t have to make.

It was, I guess, my thinking about the police tracing me here that triggered the association, made me remember Quinn’s curdled expression after the man had asked him where the car I’d stolen had been found. “About a block and a half . . . from . . . here,” he’d said — then sent Doodle out of the room.

A block and half from the Barker — I should probably have parked the damned car three miles away, but I’d been in a hurry. And I’d been a little too occupied to move the thing since then. It could be, I thought, that Quinn had been wondering if I might have come to the Barker, might even now be in the Barker. Because while Quinn wasn’t bright, he wasn’t completely stupid, either. You couldn’t say he didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain; he’d get inside, all right, but he’d be damned wet.

And if I was right about Quinn’s possible deductions, I could also guess why he’d sent Doodle out of the room. Some of the hired hands just might be knocking on doors in this here hotel. I was right, too — or almost right. They weren’t knocking, they were using floor keys or master keys.

I had cleverly figured it all out, and just as I was congratulating myself on my cleverness there was a crash behind me and a voice gargled: “Up with them hands, you mizzuble joik.”

Fourteen

It was not a jolly voice to begin with, but now it sounded like the snakes in Medusa’s hair, or Death with double pneumonia, and it repeated:

“Up with ’em, or I’ll let you have one in the biscuit.”

I craned my biscuit around, looked toward the door. It was open, and filling it were two .45 automatics and Blister and the little hood named Shadow. Great. Among the many imbeciles employed by Quinn, Shadow and Blister were possibly the two farthest removed from brilliance. They were two very dopey citizens, almost literally half-wits. But that didn’t mean I could outwit them.

I got to my feet, turning to face the men. I was a little slow about getting my hands up, and red-faced, cauliflower-nosed Blister said, “Don’t try no fancy stuff with me, Scott. I’ll just haul off and shoot you in the grizzard.”

“It’s gizzard,” I said. “And there’s no such — ”

“However you pernounce it, I won’t miss it.”

He wouldn’t, either. When you shoot a guy with a .45 automatic pistol at close range, all you have to do is hit him anywhere and you ruin his grizzard and everything else.

But I kept trying. “If you shoot me,” I said, “it will make a hell of a noise. And people will hear — ”

He chuckled and waved the gun in his hand, and I noted there was a big nozzle like a hunk of bathroom plumbing on the end of it. It was a dumb-gat, a silenced pistol.

“Well,” I said, “I will make a hell of a noise.”

“You won’t make it long.” Blister jerked his head at Shadow and said, “Frisk him for his heat. He’s stupid enough he might try usin’ it on us.”

“Stay the hell away from me,” I said, my voice hard.

Blister grinned.

“Don’t try it,” I said, my voice harder.

Blister kept grinning.

I sounded pretty tough to me. But it wasn’t working. Blister said, “Don’t do that route with me, Scott. So you play it hard, so I got to shoot you.”

He aimed with a little more care, smack at my breastbone, and I’m convinced he had started to squeeze the trigger when I yelped, “Hey, hold it! That’s not — not — not the way to do it.”

“It’s the only way I know.”

Shadow stood to one side, peeled back my coat and neatly snatched my Colt. I let him do it — reluctantly, and with a vast sinking sensation in my middle, but without argument.

Shadow dropped my gun into his coat pocket and stepped back. “I guess dat does it, Scott,” he said cheerily. “But we all got to go sometime.” He laughed. Shadow had a high, weak, artificial-sounding voice, like those trained birds which squawk a few words and whistle a lot. Also he had a miserable sense of humor. The monicker, Shadow, suited him, since he was thin as a crutch, and so pale and puny the weight of his automatic bent him; I could have broken him in two with one hand — some other time, and in some other place.

Shadow kept grinning and nodding his sparrowlike head in unconscious emphasis of the words as Blister spoke to me. “I really didn’t want to shoot you, Scott,” Blister said, “since Frank sends Doodle with the word, which he writ down on a paper, for a couple of us to check out all the rooms into which any cats was registered last night. If any of us finds you, we’re to bring you down to the office, where he is at.” He paused. “Frank wants to talk to you first.”

First, huh? It didn’t look good at all, but I hadn’t completely given up hope. Mainly, I suppose, it was because both of these characters were used to having somebody tell them what to do, and making their own decisions was not a highly developed art with them. It had been rumored that Blister once sat on his bed for ten minutes trying to decide which leg to put into his pants (he finally went back to sleep), and Shadow on one occasion not only shot the wrong guy but did it in the wrong city. I knew both these guys were pretty well confused to begin with, and if I could confuse them just a little bit more, there was a faint chance I could wallop Blister with Shadow, or maybe just run like hell.

But how to confuse them? It was a very faint hope, and I wasn’t feeling optimistic about my chances, when I noticed the expression on Shadow’s face.

His mouth was open and round, his eyes were squinted, and he had his head cocked on one side. He held the pose for long seconds, then said, “Lissen. Hey, Blister, will you lissen?”

Blister listened, and on his face, too, grew an expression of marvelous perplexity.

Quinn’s voice was filling the room, his words clear and recognizable; “. . while we’re waitin’ on that, we might as well settle on who we’re gonna elect . . .”

For a moment, looking at guns and so forth, awareness of the still-functioning TV set and speaker right behind me had been pushed from my mind. I grinned, partly because of the rigid, almost cataleptic, attitudes of Shadow and Blister, but in greater part because they looked — confused.

I knew that, to these apes, television meant the Saturday night wrestling matches, and maybe the Zest commercials, but that their understanding of closed-circuit TV would be on a par with their grasp of advanced trigonometry. They thought nuclear physics was a triple dose of salts plus two Ex-Lax, and a closed circuit was when a pal got executed in Sing Sing. So, while they could understand a hidden microphone, the concept that anybody could be bugged by television — except perhaps in the sense that everybody is bugged by television — would surely prove too great a strain on their mental equipment. At least, that’s what I hoped.

The set was behind me, partly concealed by my body. I stepped aside slowly but didn’t say a word. I just waited.

Both of them lamped the scene on the little tube at the same moment, but Shadow’s reaction was first and loudest. He let out a high whistling squawk, like the mating call of a passionate macaw, and pointed speechlessly, finger poking at the TV set. By about his fourth or fifth poke, a very odd expression had captured Blister’s chops. He looked, leaned forward and looked a little harder, and his mouth dropped open and his brows pulled down in the same instant, as if his jaw hinge was attached to his eyebrows. Then his face went into reverse, jaw clicking shut and brows flying up as his eyes opened wide.

Then he pulled his head around toward me and said, “You know, I — it . . .” He stopped.

Shadow said in a strained voice, “Hey, Blister, that there actor looks like Doodle, don’t it?”

“Yeah, it do, don’t it?” Blister looked strenuously at the little screen, bent forward again, took one step closer, then another. “Man,” he said wonderingly, “if that ain’t Doodle, I ain’t Blister.”

“How can it be?” Shadow said. “He was just downstairs. And what’s he doin’ on the television? He ain’t no actor.”

“Sure he is,” I said. “He’s a bad actor.”

They didn’t appear to have heard me. Despite their fascination with the view in the little box, it so happened that when one of them was eyeballing the screen, the other was looking at me, and both of them held their guns at the ready. The time was not yet.

Shadow said, “What in hell is Doodle doin’?” and Blister echoed, “Yeah, what is Doodle doin’?”

“You jerks sound like a couple of roosters,” I said. “Who cares what Doodle’s — arrh. The important thing is that Frank is on the show. The boss. Doodle’s just there to give him immoral support.”

Shadow peered at the picture, then glanced at me. “Dere is some’p’n queer goin’ on here,” he said.

“Dere is indeed,” said Blister. “What is goin’ on?” he asked nobody in particular.

“Quinn’s this afternoon’s guest on Slob For A Day,” I said. “It’s the human counterpart of — ”

“Slob?” Blister stared at me, mouth open, lower lip hanging down loose, with the blank, empty, dopey expression of a man whose brain had just been amputated.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s sponsored by the Mafia. If he wins, they give him a chromium-plated machine gun, but if he misses a question they shoot him. That’s what Doodle’s — ”

“You’re kiddin’,” Blister said. “Frank’s downstairs waitin’ to get to kill you.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, as if amused. “How can he be? He’s on television, isn’t he? You can believe your own eyes, can’t you? Are you stupid or something?”

“No,” he said. “I ain’t stupid. But . . . but . . .”

Shadow said, “Dere is some’p’n, queer goin’ on here.”

“Look!” I yelled. “Listen! They just asked him ‘When’s Al Capone’s birthday?’ He doesn’t know! They’re going to shoot him!”

I really had Blister convinced. His eyes were poking out and he was bent far over toward the screen. “They ain’t,” he mumbled. “Is they?”

I thought for a moment I was going to make it. I had taken advantage of these last few seconds to slide my feet sideways toward the door. Both men were gawking at the screen, apparently lost in it, and I was about to leap the last few feet when Shadow straightened up and turned his head to look at me. Over the sights of his automatic. “I don’t know how you done it,” he said slowly. “But . . . I think you done it.”

I stopped moving. I almost stopped breathing.

Blister said, “Shadow, either it is or it ain’t, either Frank’s on the television or he ain’t, but this is too much for me.” He paused. “I got to find out what the boss thinks.”

Well, maybe that says something about the way Blister’s mind functioned. Or malfunctioned. But pursuing his own peculiar logic he stepped to the room phone on a table a few feet from the TV receiver, picked it up and asked for Sullivan’s office. From where he stood he could still see the front of the set.

I heard the phone ring — the phone downstairs in Sullivan’s office, heard it ring here in the room, the sound coming from the speaker. I saw Frank Quinn jerk his head toward the phone on that gray desk, then reach over and pick it up. It was fascinating to me — but not that fascinating to Shadow. He didn’t take his eyes off me. Or his gun.

Quinn’s voice barked in the room. “Yeah?”

Blister got a pained expression on his face, hearing that “Yeah?” in one ear from the phone and in the other from the speaker here. “Boss?” he said.

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Blister, boss. It’s you, all right. Is it O.K. to talk while you’re on the television?”

On the screen, Quinn pulled the phone from his ear as if it had suddenly gotten hot and burned him. He stared at it for perhaps five pregnant seconds, then stuck it on his ear again. “What in hell did you say?”

“Well . . .” Blister cleared his throat. “Ain’t you on Slob For A Day?”

That did it. Quinn’s “Whaat?” shook the walls. He let loose a stream of profanity, and finally Blister broke in with, “But boss, you is on television. Right here in the room with me and Shadow and Scott.”

There was sudden silence.

Quinn started to speak, cut it off and jerked his head, the wattled flesh beneath his chin jiggling. Then he said softly, “You’re with Scott?”

“Yeah, that’s right, boss.”

“You in the hotel?”

“Yeah, we is all up here in, uh . . . 418.”

Quinn smiled, and it was a smile I would remember in my dreams — if I ever dreamed again — and then he said, “You got Scott taken care of, ain’t you?”

“Sure. Shadow’s got his heat on him right now. You want we should shoot him?”

“Not yet. First, you can see me on television, huh?”

“Sure. You and the whole bunch with you there.”

“You can see all of us, huh?”

There was increased movement among the men, heads jerking around, some speaking to others. Two men stood up suddenly, but Quinn waved a hand at them and they sat down.

“That’s right, boss,” Blister said.

Quinn asked him, “Where am I looking at? At you?”

“No, off to the right, sort of.”

Quinn turned his head, asked the question again, and finally Blister said, “Now. Now you is lookin’ straight at me.”

Still smiling that same smile Quinn said, “Fine. That’s all I wanted to know. Now, Blister — ”

I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to say, and I was damned sure I didn’t want him to say it. “Hold it,” I yelled loud enough to make Blister yank his head around toward me. With both men looking at me, and Shadow’s gun trained on my chest, and my throat dry as bones in a graveyard, I stepped toward Blister.

“Give me that phone,” I said and extended my hand toward it.

Blister hesitated, gave me the same look he must have given his pants that morning, then decided to ask for help again. “Boss,” he said.

I clamped my fingers around the phone and yanked it from Blister’s ear. “Quinn,” I said rapidly, “this is Shell Scott. And you’d sure as hell better listen.”

Blister grabbed for the phone again, but then Quinn said, “I’m listenin’,” and Blister let his hand drop.

I said, “Blister wasn’t kidding, you’re on television all right. You and your whole gang of thieves.”

“He told me that already.”

“He didn’t tell you you’re all in big trouble. He didn’t tell you your chops are coming in on thousands of TV sets all over Southern California.”

“No, he didn’t. Is that right, Scott?”

Quinn didn’t sound very impressed. I said, “Get a set and tune in. Take a look. You and that bunch of high-class hoodlums are all stuck. Unless . . .”

“Unless?” He really sounded interested.

I had a feeling it was a losing game, but I went ahead with it anyway. “Unless you call off the heat and tell Blister and Shadow to let me walk out of here. I would then suggest that you and that whole gang head for the hills.”

He was quiet for a rather long time, staring straight at the camera hidden in that bar down there. He was so still he looked even more like fresh buzzard meat than usual, and I wondered if, unlikely as it seemed, I had shaken him up a little, wondered if he might actually let me walk out of here.

Finally he said, “Put Blister back on.”

I handed the phone to Blister and stepped back toward the center of the room, slowed down, but kept moving toward the door. Blister was saying, “Yeah, boss. What you want us to do?” and as he waited for Quinn’s answer, even Shadow’s eyes were riveted to the screen.

My heart was pounding in my chest, throat, ears, everywhere. Probably I should have known it wouldn’t work, and I guess I pretty much expected what happened, because I never stopped moving and was six feet from the door when Quinn answered.

Either he was sure I was conning him, or didn’t give a damn, or wanted me dead more than anything else in the world, or possibly just rose to his peak of murderous magnificence for the day, but he looked straight out into the room, scowled mightily, and said in a kind of high-pitched thunder:

“Blister, kill the sonofabitch.”

Fifteen

Well, that was all she wrote. That tore it.

There was no thought now of trying to save my films or tapes, or anything but my skin. Before Quinn even finished the sentence — my sentence — I was jumping through the air, grabbing for the doorknob and yanking on it. A gun blasted, loud, ear-splitting — so it was Shadow’s gun, not Blister’s — and wood splintered as the heavy slug bored through the doorframe.

I yanked the door open, bent double and jumped through into the hallway, heard a sharp spat as Blister fired at me. The bullet sang under my ear, nipped at the fabric of my coat. Then my feet landed on the hallway’s carpet and I hooked my fingers around the door’s edge and jerked it shut. I jumped across the hall as feet thumped inside the room. But I didn’t run anywhere, just hit the far wall with my hands and turned, shoving away from it the way a swimmer in a sprint kicks away from the pool’s edge, and headed back toward the closed door, right fist balled tight, hoping the door would open before I reached it. It did. It was slammed open hard and Blister loomed in it — but not for long.

I threw my right arm forward, turning my body with it, shoving with my foot and slamming every ounce of strength I had into the blow. That and the fact that I was moving forward as fast as I could turned my fist into an almost lethal club that landed on Blister’s nose with a sound that seemed almost as loud as that first shot at me. My knuckles went into his face like a plow in a cornfield, and I felt his nose gush wetness, heard cartilage crunch, felt pain like the brand of a hot poker run up my wrist through the arm and into my shoulder.

Blister couldn’t have felt anything after the first fraction of a second. His head snapped back, far back on his thick neck, and he spun as he fell. I don’t know if he literally left his feet — but I did. A blur on my right was Shadow and I dived straight past him, reaching for the floor with one hand and for his nearest leg with the other.

His gun crashed again, and I felt the sting of burning powder on one ear, but then my hand closed around an ankle so small it felt like a chicken bone. I clamped my fingers on it, held on tight as I hit the floor and rolled. Shadow’s legs went out from under him and I got both hands on that ankle, twisted, heard the sharp snap and the high yell from his lips at the same time. I got my left hand on the floor, shoved myself up with my right hand stretched open, starting to swing. Shadow’s face was a yard away, twisted, his mouth open and his eyes squeezed shut. The edge of my palm slammed the side of his jaw and he went out, his face smoothing, jaw angled incredibly far to one side.

When he’d fallen my Colt had flipped half out of his pocket. I grabbed it, jumped to my feet, took time for one sweeping glance around the room — and saw the TV screen go blank. The phone hung dangling at the end of its cord — which meant Quinn would have heard the shots, yells, sound of scuffling; there would be men running up here, charging to room 418. I spotted Shadow’s automatic on the floor and bent to grab it, then ran into the hall and turned toward the steps I’d come up last night.

But already feet were pounding on those stairs. I could hear them thundering up like a herd of bison, getting closer in a hurry. There was another way, possibly a better way. The elevator. If all of Quinn’s miserable assassins had ignored it in their hurry to get up here, and if I could get into the thing unseen, there was a chance I could take it clear down to the basement and out. It was behind me, at the other end of the hall. I spun around, raced toward it, then stopped and aimed the .45 in my left hand at the head of the stairway.

Doors were banging open and voices yelled; heads were popping out into the hallway. When I’d judged from the sound that those pounding feet were almost at the top of the stairs I fired twice, saw plaster chip and fly through the air. There was the sound of voices down there, a shout; one man, unable to stop, sprawled in the hallway but quickly wriggled back out of sight.

I squeezed off one more shot to keep those bums back for a little longer, then swung around and jumped toward the elevator. And a gun blasted at me from ten feet away.

The cage had just stopped here at the fourth floor and the door was sliding open, almost all the way open now. Two men were inside the cage, and the one on my right, the first one to see me as the door slid open, was the one who had shot at me. The gun had been aimed at my back, and only my sudden movement as I’d turned and jumped had made him miss.

He was a man I knew, a sonofabitch I knew, a broad, round-shouldered man, burly, with a pock-marked face and black hair, with a sharp widow’s peak lancing low on his dark forehead.

Papa Ryan.

It was one of those sharp moments when vision is almost too clear, perception almost too acute. I felt the rush of emotion slam through me like a sudden blow, heard with a kind of whispering sibilance in my ears the names Heigman, Weiss, Lolita, saw the snub-nosed revolver in his hand with its bore still elevated from the recoil following that shot — at my back.

It didn’t matter that he was steadying his gun to fire at me again, that a second man stood on his right, that other men were behind me, or that now I could hear the pounding of feet on the other stairway a few yards from where I stood. At least for this one moment, it didn’t matter.

I held the .45 in my left hand, aiming straight ahead, the short barrel of my Colt angling toward the floor. So I squeezed the index finger of my left hand while bringing my right arm up, saw the second man in the elevator cage jerk, his left arm flipping strangely. I’d missed Ryan, hit the other man; he banged against the back wall of the cage, slid down it. I flipped the gun’s bore right, heard the blast of Papa’s gun mingling with my own and felt the jarring slap of the slug hitting me somewhere on the left, my left side or hip.

The impact jerked me a little to the side and suddenly my leg wasn’t in the right spot and my foot was angled on the floor and I was going down. But even as I fell I knew the slug couldn’t have hit me solidly, because I could still operate, could still move when and where I wanted.

The slide of the .45 in my left hand had stayed open, so the automatic’s magazine was empty, but from down on the floor of the hallway with my left leg bent under me and my left hand propping me erect I had already brought the revolver in my right hand to bear on Papa Ryan’s chest.

But he was through by then. That last shot from my automatic had caught him somewhere in his midsection. It had caught him solidly, had probably hit bone, and slapped him against the back wall of the elevator cage. The elevator door was closing, gliding shut again. I heard his head crack against the wall, saw death spreading over his face.

But I made sure. I made sure of Papa Ryan.

I steadied my Colt, squeezed off two shots. One sliced through his skull into his brain; the other tore off part of his jaw.

There was little pain as I got to my feet, but my left side felt numb. I took two steps toward the stairway nearest me. The sound of running feet had stopped during the exchange of shots, but as I looked down the stairs one man was in sight, on the landing halfway to the floor below. He held a gun in his fist, flipped it toward me. But I fired first. The bullet hit him low in the trunk, in his stomach or groin. He went back a step, staggered, bent over and made it out of sight around the far end of the landing.

And for a moment then everything was still. It was a strange moment, the quietness accentuated by the hellish noise just ended, the odor of gunpowder acrid in my nostrils and a sharp taste in my mouth. But there wasn’t a sound. No doors were open now, and there were no heads poked into the hallway. It could have been a hotel filled with sleeping people in the early hours of a still morning.

Then there was a mild sound — as the elevator, its door closed, started down again. Somebody below with his finger on the button. Fargo, maybe. Or possibly even Quinn himself. And Quinn’s trigger-happy hoods were blocking both stairways. There didn’t seem to be any way out of here except up, and I would even run out of up much too soon.

I was going to get shot. All the evidence pointed to that depressing conclusion; I was going to get shot.

But there had to be a way out of here. There had to be — that’s what I kept telling myself. But at the same time I was also telling myself what seemed like several hundred other things. Sometimes it happens. Just as a little old lady when her house catches fire can practically carry out the grand piano and two suitcases on her little old head, so, sometimes, in moments of abnormal excitement or stress, does the human noodle get souped up unbelievably. In the space of a wink, fifty or a hundred separate pictures flashed across my mind, each picture an apparent possibility for escape — each of which turned out to be impossible.

And then — the possible one.

It was so direct, so simple, I almost tossed it away with the others. But I grabbed it and hung on. The picture was my view of the Barker Hotel two nights ago, the pattern of bright and dark windows — and the graceful trunk of three towering fan palms. Three palms with their leafy fronds almost on a level with — the fourth floor of the hotel, the floor I was on.

Only seconds could have passed since my last shot at the man on the landing below. The echo had barely died. The arrow over the elevator doors was just moving past the figure “3” going down, heading for the lobby floor. I turned, ran back toward the La Brea side of the hotel. When I reached the hallway I ran left toward the front of the hotel, knocked at the fourth door from the hall’s end. No answer, no sound from inside. I stepped back, slammed my foot near the lock, kicked the door open. The room was empty. I moved to the window in the outside wall, wrestled it up and looked out. The palm fronds were visible, a little below the level of my eyes — but they seemed a sickening distance away. Beneath those fronds the top of the nearest tree’s trunk was only seven or eight feet straight out — but eight feet is a sickening distance when you’re four stories in the air above solid pavement.

I got my feet on the base of the windowsill, leaned out into the open air with my left hand firmly gripping the base of the window behind me and slowly straightened up. Never had open air seemed so open. I made the mistake of looking down, not down at the tree trunk but at the sidewalk, but then I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again, forced myself to imagine a less squashy landing — and jumped.

One instant I had been hanging to the windowsill making a faint gassy sound. The next instant, with everything blank in between, I was getting hit in the face with stinging palm fronds and walloped in the chest by a flying tree trunk. The breath went out of my lungs with a great shoosh and then the tree trunk was racing upward raking at my hands and arms and chest and legs.

When aching clarity returned I was halfway down the palm, and below me I could see people standing gawping, a couple of men pointing up at me, one grandmotherly type pressing both hands to her cheeks with her mouth opening and closing rapidly.

But none of those people were aiming guns at me, none of them were shooting.

I shinnied and slid down the rest of the way, felt sweet relief when my feet touched the pavement, then turned and let my feet touch the pavement very rapidly. Half a block from where I’d landed I skidded to a stop as a man climbed out of a Buick convertible, keys in his hand. There was no time for the niceties or even rapid-fire explanation — later maybe, but not now. I grabbed the keys out of his hand and was in the car, had the engine started and was gunning the Buick from the curb, before that startled individual cried out, “Hey, you, stop!”

I didn’t stop. I was on my way — without my films and tapes, with everything gone to hell, wet with sweat, torn, hands on fire, body aching, blood oozing from my left thigh, head throbbing, but feeling very good and very much alive — on my way.

It was dark, and there was a chill in the air.

There was a chill in my bones, too, despite the fact that, having escaped from the frying pan, I was now going to jump into the fire.

This afternoon’s attempt to bug Quinn and his gentlemen in cahoots had been a bust. A horrible bust, in fact, since I wound up worse off after it than before. But you can’t win ’em all, and I still thought it had been a good idea, worth all it had cost — besides, I’d paid off Papa Ryan.

And I could say now that I’d tried. I’d taken my best shot, done every damned thing I could to get the job done — without having to attend Quinn’s miserable party. But it hadn’t been enough, so now I had to pay the price.

Yeah, Frank Quinn’s party. Old Buzzard Meat’s hoodlum ball. Costumed suicide. In a word: Halloween, Allhallow’s Even, the Druids’ pagan festival of the dead, night of ghosts and spooks and goblins, of masks and parties and pranks. But we would not play “bob apple” tonight.

In a small shop on a side street I had bought new clothing, a tan sharkskin replacing my torn and bloodstained suit. I had left my stolen Buick on the street, walked to a car-rental agency and rented a new black Lincoln sedan. I had visited my locker at the Greyhound Bus depot, and my boxed costume was on the car seat beside me, the engraved invitation in my pocket. A makeshift bandage was around the gouged spot on my left side — Ryan’s slug had bounced off a rib, and the wound was painful, but it wouldn’t slow me down. The palms of my hands were raw, too, but otherwise I felt all right.

Since this would be, to say the least, my last act on the case, I had phoned my client to let her know that, despite the lateness of the hour, all was not yet lost. Doris wanted me to come by and tell her everything. Remembering Quinn’s words about having places I might go watched, I was hesitant and told her I might not be able to make it. She started to cry, the sounds twisted and muffled in the phone. Finally I told her to leave the back door open and I’d come by if I could manage it.

I managed it without difficulty, parking blocks away and walking, approaching the duplex from the rear and letting myself inside. Doris was sitting in the living room; she stood up smiling when I walked in.

“Oh, Shell, I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “I was going crazy until you phoned.”

“I was a little too busy to phone before, Doris. Several, uh, kind of complicated things happened.”

“You said there was still a chance. What else can you tell me, Shell? I want you to tell me everything.”

Considering the outfit Doris was wearing this time, she was telling me quite a lot herself, if not quite everything. As that thought flitted through my mind she said, “Oh, forgive the way I’m dressed, will you? I haven’t dressed all day, I’ve just been sitting here ever since I got up.”

There was nothing to forgive. She was wearing a pale-blue peignoir over a blue brassiere and step-ins, and the fact that I was able to notice the latter should tell you quite a bit about the former. Moreover, I had seen an identical brassiere before — the same brand and style, that is — and it was an item which once seen is rarely forgotten. It was called “Booby Hatch,” and looked as if the inmates were escaping. It was really crazy.

So I said, “It’s quite all right. I can’t stay long anyway, worse luck. Ah — ”

“What’s been happening, Shell? How does it look?”

“It looks great — ah, if you’d just quit bouncing . . . walking around I mean . . . Look, let’s sit down and I’ll tell you all about it, O.K.?” I sat on the couch and she sat in a chair, and in the time it took to smoke a cigarette in fast puffs I brought her fairly well up to date. Laid out all at once it presented a dismal picture.

When I’d finished Doris said anxiously, “Is there any hope left at all, Shell?”

“There is. Don’t get me wrong — that’s all there is: a chance. Frank Quinn is tossing a party tonight to celebrate . . . That is, he’s throwing a costume ball. A Halloween party. All wrapped up as a clown, and with my face smeared with paint, I can probably manage to get inside the place. Then, with luck, I can get into Quinn’s safe. And with some more luck, there’ll be info in the safe that can hang Quinn and spring your brother.”

The furrows between her oddly disturbing blue eyes smoothed out a little, but didn’t go away. My tidings hadn’t raised her spirits to any giddy level. Dully she said, “I see. Well, maybe it will work out all right.”

The more I thought about tonight’s ball, and my planned part in it, the less likely it seemed that there would be any positive development, except my getting shot in the head, or even somewhere fatal. But I told Doris, in a confident tone, “Honey, the setup may not sound like the most perfect we could ask for — but isn’t it better than just sitting around waiting for . . . the news broadcast, say? And there really is good reason to believe that if I can get into Quinn’s safe, there’ll be everything in it but marshmallows.”

“But will it do Ross any good?”

I was getting just a little tired of this. Doris was, there is no doubt, gorgeous; but sometimes even that is not enough. I was only mildly enthusiastic about setting out tonight to get myself killed, and her rather negative attitude was not increasing my joyous anticipation of that event.

I said, “Baby, not having Superman’s X-ray vision, I do not know. If I didn’t think there was a fair chance this would save his neck, I wouldn’t be going into that den of axe murderers.” I was going to go on, but decided I was being more than a little unfair; Doris must be finding it difficult to hold any thought in her mind except the thought of that lethal gas chamber at San Quentin.

Then, suddenly, she smiled. It was a wan smile, but at least a nice try. She had been sitting in a chair near the couch I was in, but now she walked over and sat down alongside me. She took my hand and held it in hers as she said, “I’m sorry. Really. I’m just so . . . up in the air. Believe me, Shell, I appreciate what you’re doing so very much.”

“Oh . . . it’s nothing . . .” My hand was tingling already.

“But it is. You, why you might even get killed. Those — those horrid men might kill you — ”

“No, no. Not me, my sweet. Why, I’m virtually indestructible.”

She squeezed my hand in hers, leaning closer to me. She was breathing that way again. I could feel the warmth of her thigh against my knee. “You’re so brave, Shell. It really is a brave thing for you to do, going in there . . . I don’t know what I’d have done if we hadn’t met.”

I was just beginning to wonder how I could ever have been even a little bit piqued with Doris, but her face was only about six inches from mine, and she had stopped talking, and I stopped wondering about anything and leaned a little forward myself. This was no time for wondering; this was a time for action. She met me half way — and when Doris met you half way, you were meeting the half that counted. Everything in the next minute was a blur of murmured words and caressing hands, slitted blue eyes and flaming hair and booby hatches and lips that seemed to be mating independently, but it was for no more than a minute. It certainly couldn’t have been two minutes, even though I was not paying any attention to the time at all. But then she was pushing her hands against my chest again, squirming away.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“You must go, Shell. I can’t . . . we mustn’t . . . it’s — you must go, Shell.”

Well, it was almost exactly the same sensation as getting smacked in the face with a bowl of cold clams. Man, I thought, it can’t be happening again. I must live wrong. No, that’s not it — I don’t live wrong enough.

“Doris,” I said. “Doris!”

“You must go, Shell.”

I sprang to my feet. O.K., so I’d go. Who am I to sock a lady? I stood there, teeth clamped together, then stalked toward the door like Frankenstein’s monster in those moments after the lightning hit him. But Doris stopped me.

“Shell,” she said. “Darling . . .”

She hadn’t called me darling before. She had merely called me “Shell” and “You” — as in “You must go” — but never darling. Things were looking up. I stopped, turned to face her.

“Shell, darling,” she said — there it was again — “you must think I’m awful.”

“No, no — ”

“But surely you understand. It, Ross . . . well, it’s only hours away. I’ll be different, Shell, if you’re . . . successful tonight. Really I will. But right now I’m — well, I just can’t let go. You do understand, don’t you?”

“Sure, Doris.” I shook my head rapidly for a moment. “Yes, sure.” I really did understand, of course; it was just that it would have been much easier if she’d been an old hag, or her brother or something.

But I told her good night and added, “Just as soon as I can, I’ll let you know, Doris. One way or another.”

She nodded, and I went outside. I stood there on the porch, staring at a potted geranium, and it occurred to me that there was a weird sameness to these meetings of ours, a kind of pattern, almost as if they’d been planned — yeah, as if I’d planned them. Except for the endings, of course. Somehow, despite all the Saharan heat of what went before, I always seemed to be standing out here on this Siberian porch. Bah, I thought, some Halloween — all trick and no treat.

Well, I’d told Doris I would let her know, one way or another. But there was, I thought glumly, a third way she could find out what might happen tonight; that would be for somebody else to bring her the news.

Sixteen

On a little-traveled road, I stopped, opened my packages and looked at my clown suit, and the makeup kit. Then I started on my face. Fifteen minutes later I looked even worse than usual. My face was smeared with white paint, exaggerated red lips curved in a perpetual smile, and a bulbous blue nose sat in the center of all that. My normally white eyebrows were also blue, and the tasseled clown cap covered my short white hair. At least nobody could recognize me.

I climbed into the white clown suit with its three six-inch red buttons down the front. My .38 Colt Special, fully loaded, was in its holster at my left armpit, and beneath the regular clothes I wore under my costume. In one of my pockets was a leather-covered sap. I was ready to go.

Then, with my engraved invitation on the seat beside me, I drove slowly toward Frank Quinn’s home. For just a moment I let myself wonder if Mrs. Quinn had perhaps been pulling my leg, despite her carryings-on with Jay, but then I pushed that thought out of my mind for the night. If she had been, it was too late for me to start checking on her now.

I pulled up before the closed gate barring the way to Quinn’s house at a little after eight p.m. One of Quinn’s hired hands strolled over to my Lincoln and said, “Yeah?”

I handed him the invitation. He looked it over, glanced at me, nodded, then handed the card back and yelled, “Okay, Nevada.”

The gate slid aside and I drove in.

And I had crashed Frank Quinn’s exclusive hoodlum ball. As simple as that. In the rearview mirror I caught a glimpse of the metal gate closing behind me. The sight sent a small ripple, like a faint cool breeze, over my skin. It’s usually not a good idea to look back. I pulled my eyes from the rearview mirror, looked ahead down the drive, and went on up it to park in front of the big two-story house.

About twenty cars were already here ahead of me. As I got out of the Lincoln and walked toward the front door, I could hears sounds of the festivities under way inside. Music mixed with occasional shouts and laughter. Or maybe it was shots and laughter; this was a pretty rough party. Ah, well. I squared my shoulders and walked up the steps to the front door, and rang the bell.

The last time I’d been here a thin-hipped, narrow-chested ectomorph had let me in. The same guy opened the door this time. He was dressed as a court jester and had a black mask over his eyes and nose; but I recognized the shape. He checked my invitation, then handed it back to me, nodding silently.

Then he led me down the hall to our left. At its end, two doors were opened into the room that had looked to me like a hotel ballroom. I could hear bouncy music, and there was a lot of movement and color visible as I stepped into the room, then it resolved itself into the shapes of men and women drinking, standing in small groups, dancing, all of them costumed.

It was a huge room to begin with, and from the center of the high ceiling to all four walls were stretched hundreds of crepe-paper strips which formed an alternately orange and black canopy overhead. Suspended from the ceiling, dangling in the middle of the room, was an ivory-white skeleton at least twenty-five feet long, from bald skull down to bony toes. It looked as if it was made of shiny plastic, and obviously had a motor hidden somewhere in it, because the arms and legs were never still, moving in a macabre rhythm entirely unrelated to the beat of the music. The skull sockets glowed with a blue light, and the huge jaw moved, teeth clicking audibly.

Placed at random upon the walls were dozens of small three-dimensional figures — black witches on broomsticks, black cats with arched backs, Death’s heads, little goblins and ghouls, and queer little creeps. Must have cost Quinn somebody’s fortune, I thought. Spaced around the room were several miniature headstones and caskets, which added to the fun.

For this early, the place was pretty well filled. Approximately a hundred guests were present, speaking roughly, and that was the way to speak of them. About half wore masks over their faces, or at least over the eyes, but among those with bare chops I saw some features I recognized.

As I left the doorway and walked toward a long bar I’d spotted across the room, I brushed past bullet-headed Jim Lester, three times arrested on murder charges, twice aquitted, and now out on the streets after serving nearly two years of the manslaughter rap. He had, however, murdered the three people. Also recognizable were two safe men, a well-known fence, and a thin guy named Finney who was, I knew, wanted by the L.A. police right now on a burglary charge.

Halfway to the bar I walked within three feet of a small, thin guy dressed as a hospital case, on crutches, leg in a cast, hospital gown on, jaw wrapped up. It was Shadow, making his broken ankle and unhinged jaw the inspiration for his outfit. Shadow was perfect for Halloween; so thin and pale and anemic, he looked as if the vampires had been going back for seconds on him.

I shuddered. No telling what else there was under all the masks and paint and putty, but I had already seen enough to peel my nerves open like used artichokes. It was a reasonable assumption that the answers to several dozen unsolved crimes were here in the room. Of course, it wasn’t all gruesome. There was one very shapely gal who’d come as Eve. She was fun. And there were a couple of local stripteasers dressed, suitably, as things that go bump in the night. I quickened my steps anyway, needing a drink. The guy behind the bar was efficient, and quickly mixed me a bourbon and water that was mostly bourbon.

The band played loudly on my right. Beyond it, against the far wall, was the wide stairway I’d gone up on my previous visit here. Up there was Quinn’s office and Quinn’s safe, where I would have to be in — I looked at my watch — forty minutes. So I had forty minutes to kill. As I glanced up again, I got a shock that alerted every neuron in my nervous system. I raised my eyes to see the white, puffy face of Frank Quinn. It looked as if he were staring straight at me.

The sickly-looking flesh seemed to hang even more laxly from his facial bones, the lips seemed redder, the eyes smaller. It seemed a caricature of a face, a mask rather than the features of the man himself. And for a moment, while he seemed to stare at me, I felt exposed, unmasked myself.

But then he chuckled mildly, and pointed at someone or something beyond me. So he hadn’t been looking at me.

For a second or two there I had forgotten I was well hidden under blue nose and eyebrows, white and red greasepaint, and my three-button outfit. Nobody could know that Shell Scott was here, disguised as a clown. Even if Quinn had somehow suspected I might try to bust in here, he could hardly know I’d dressed as a fugitive from a circus. That thought reassured me, started me breathing normally again. But I decided that even though I was well disguised, I’d be careful to keep out of Quinn’s sight if I could.

Quinn was dressed in lush-looking robes, and on a guess I’d have said he was Henry the One-Eighth or something close to it. He turned away and spoke to a plump woman next to him. I let my eyes roam over the room. And I saw an interesting group walking across the floor in my direction, three men and three women. One woman’s costume was a gorgeous silver-blue mink coat, practically down to her ankles. That would probably have told me the men were Fargo, Blister, and Speedy Gonzales, even if I hadn’t been able to recognize them. But Fargo’s wedge-shaped chest and burly shoulders almost gave him away even without the fact that his face wasn’t covered, and you could identify Fargo by that immense, arching beak alone. He was costumed as a pirate, with a black patch covering one eye — his right eye, which I had hammered upon and damaged severely last night when Jay was leading me out of the Gardenia Room.

Blister was wearing a surgeon’s robe, stethoscope around his neck, and over his mouth and noseless nose a white surgeon’s mask, which effectively hid the even greater mess I had made of his nose. Speedy, the smallest of the three men, was wearing a matador’s “suit of lights” and probably looked splendid to everybody but me. But to me all of those guys looked like grim reapers stalking me.

They were stalking straight at me, too, all six of the group coming toward the bar. If they were thirsty, the bar was no place for me. I gulped the last of my drink and slid off my stool. The gang of six was already at the bar, practically surrounding me, ordering drinks, the girls giggling and the men snorting, having a high old time. Two of the girls ordered Stingers and Vava Voom! ordered a Martini. Fargo ordered a shot of straight gin for himself, bourbons for Blister and Speedy.

I was trying to keep from thinking about what these apes would do to me if they ever discovered I was Shell Scott, when blonde Vava, clutching her mink, looked at me and squealed, “Oooh, lookit the cute clown!”

I felt weak and dizzy all of a sudden. Fargo swung his nose around to point at me, and Blister looked glumly in my direction, and Speedy said, “Great outfit, pal. Can’t tell who you are under all that gunk, though.”

The blonde said, “Come on, honey, tell is who you are, huh?”

I gave a little hop, and another little hop, and then a great big hop, and kept going as the blonde squealed, “Ooh, isn’t he cute?”; I thought, “Oh, shut up,” and a number of disjointed things. At least that gang didn’t come charging across the floor after me to discover who the cute clown was. But, I thought dismally, give that blonde a couple more Martinis and no telling what would happen.

After that I didn’t settle down or stop in one place for long. I kept moving, brushing past men and women, picking up bits of conversation, mainly just trying to kill those minutes, one at a time, until nine o’clock when Mrs. Quinn was supposed to send her husband up to his safe. But I was getting worried — by another worry. I hadn’t seen Mrs. Quinn yet. If she’d been conning me, or wasn’t going to be here at all, I was stuck. I kept moving through the riot of color and costumes, the ballroom filled now, everybody present. Everybody, which meant exactly one hundred men, plus their wives or mistresses or keepers for the jolly evening.

Words, sentences, phrases, bounced off my ears. “Ikey got busted in Cincinnati, but he only done eight months of the bit . . .”

“. . . shot him twice in the head. Killed him dead”

“Dead, huh? Well, that’s life”

“They was all runnin’ around nekkid as banana splits when the fuzz crashed in, but after Lulu got through talkin’ to the sergeant he says — this’ll kill you — he says . . .”

I almost stopped and listened to the finish of that one, but Hal the Cad and Pizza Jim were nearby, and I wanted to keep going till they were farther away. As I passed them Jim was saying, “. . . and Shadow. But I guess we won’t be seeing Papa Ryan — I mean the late Papa Ryan.” And Hal said, “Late? What do you mean, late? He ain’t even comin’.”

I strolled on, keeping my eyes and ears peeled. And finally, at a few minutes before nine p.m., I spotted Mrs. Frank Quinn. She was dressed in an ankle-length white gown and long white gloves, and some kind of white plumes were sprouting from her hair, like mutant dandruff. Around her neck she wore a thick, glittering, heavy necklace made, according to the story she’d given me, of diamonds. I could understand why her husband would want to keep that item locked in his safe whenever it wasn’t being worn. Especially among a group of light-fingered citizens such as these.

But the sight of those rocks was corroboration of Mrs. Quinn’s story. That knowledge — plus the fact that I was still in one piece — gave me a lift like elevator boots, and suddenly I was relaxed, at ease. I felt good, and a kind of exaggerated feeling of confidence flowed through my veins. It occurred to me that I was almost casually mingling with an almost unbelievable collection of thieves and thugs, a collection unprecedented in my experience. Here were everything from forgers to boosters, from con men to killers. Here was the Syndicate, Mafia, Hoodlumdom, the riffraff of the rackets, the heirs to Al Capone and Dillinger, the monument raised to muscle. And here was I, strolling about in the midst of a hundred of the most vicious and dangerous criminals in Los Angeles, at least half of whom would take great pleasure in shooting me on sight — and I was almost enjoying it.

It was the kind of buoyant, invincible feeling that can make a guy get reckless, so I clamped down on it, kept it simmering lightly but under control. I knew it was caused mainly by the excess of hormones and fluids and juices poured into my blood because of the tension and excitement, the nearness of danger. But I figured this was the best time I could choose for my trip upstairs. It was a trip I had to make pretty quick, anyway, and there could be no better time for it than now, while I was feeling as if I could raise the house with one hand.

So I headed across the dance floor toward the stairs. When I reached them, I turned and looked at the crowd again. Either it was coincidence, or Mrs. Quinn had an idea that the blue-nosed clown was Shell Scott, but she had suddenly walked over to her husband. She stood on the far side of him from me, so that his back was toward me, and I saw her reach toward the necklace around her throat.

So the double-cross was starting.

The blood pumped a little harder in my arteries, and I turned, went up the wide stairs. I didn’t look around until I’d reached the top, but I couldn’t control the tightening of muscles between my shoulder blades and at the back of my neck. At the top of the stairs I glanced quickly below, but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. Mrs. Quinn was just handing the necklace to her husband. I turned left and walked rapidly toward Quinn’s office.

The door was unlocked. I opened it and stepped into the red-and-black room, closed the door behind me and leaned back against it. Something was wrong, out of place, and for seconds I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I realized the lights were on in the room. That seemed odd, since it didn’t seem likely that Quinn would be using this room during his party.

And then I saw the clown.

For a crazy moment I thought it was a reflection of myself. But this clown had a red nose, and blue buttons down the front of his costume, just the opposite of mine. And he was lying flat on his back next to the wall. And there was a small hole at the side of his forehead, a hole through which a little redness, and a little pink and grayish ugliness, and all his life had spilled.

The sight was such a shock that my mind stopped functioning for seconds. It wasn’t just walking in on a dead man; I’d seen enough stiffs to populate a small cemetery. It was mainly, I think, that the corpse looked so much like me. Except for the hole in his head, and the fact that he was so dead.

I stared at him, walked to him and bent over to put my hand on his face. It was white-smeared with grease paint or cosmetics, but he was still warm. He felt much more normal than he looked. His lips were slack, the mouth open, but the red-painted lips still curved in a ludicrous smile. The little hole in his forehead looked as if it had been made by a small slug, probably a .32.

I stepped back from the corpse, mental faculties starting to function again, but slowly at first. I reached under my costume and got the Colt from beneath my coat, stepped across the room to the wall alongside the door. Mrs. Quinn had just been giving her husband the necklace, I recalled; he should be on his way up those stairs by now. And if he stepped in here and saw the dead man, I’d never get that safe open. I couldn’t move the stiff very far. There was a closed door in the wall near him. That would be the room directly opposite the head of the stairs, but I didn’t know what was in there.

All I needed was one guy to spot me lugging a corpse around, or doing something else more than a little out of the ordinary, and let out a yell or a shot, and in about three seconds there’d be no way for me to go except up. Or, I thought dismally, down; about six feet down. This disguise of mine was good only as long as nobody started wondering about it.

I looked at the gun in my hand. I might get away with firing it, considering all the noise and music below. But the bang of a .38 would probably bring half a dozen wondering characters up here in a hurry. I kept a grip on my gun, but reached under my outfit again and dug out the leather sap I’d brought along, held it in my left hand, the Colt in my right. Sweat had automatically started popping out on me; my face was damp and there was wetness underneath my arms.

And who had killed the clown? Why? Who was he? A dozen questions started racing around in my brain. I looked at the dead man again. Despite the fact that I had a blue nose and his was red, that the big buttons on my outfit were red and his were blue, we looked almost alike. One clown looks pretty much like another — especially at a party where liquor is flowing freely. So it seemed fairly obvious that there was only one logical answer for the fact that a dead clown was in this room — his killer must have thought he was killing me.

It was the most likely answer, and I had a strong feeling it was the right one, but I couldn’t begin to figure how anybody knew I was dressed as a clown. The only thing I could think of was that Mrs. Quinn had double-crossed me somehow — but she hadn’t known what I was going to wear, either.

Then that closed door in the wall opened and I got my answer. I also came close to getting a .32 slug in the teeth.

It wasn’t the hall door by which I was standing, but the one across the room near the corpse, and I’ll have to admit that if we both had entered at the same time I probably wouldn’t have come out of the shock first; but I’d had time to get over my initial jarring and start functioning mentally again. So even though I still got jarred up a bit, it was nothing to the shock I gave the guy who opened that door and stepped into the room.

The man was dressed in a coal-black robe that reached almost to the floor and covered his body completely, but his face was bare, and it was the man I’d seen at the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center yesterday, the Barracuda. That suddenly explained a lot of things. He might have been merely one of the hoodlums invited to the party, picking up a costume — I remembered seeing the black robe and hood there. Or he could have tailed me there; he might have been the guy driving the hearse.

Maybe he’d known who I was, maybe he hadn’t; but whichever way it had happened, he would almost surely have reported to Frank Quinn that a big goon with white hair and fractured white eyebrows had rented a clown outfit. He might even have just finished reporting to Quinn that the big goon was dead. But if that was true, why hadn’t I been grabbed downstairs? Why let me roam around for an hour? The explanation for more funny business was tottering on the edge of my brain, but I didn’t have time to grab it right then.

The Barracuda was standing in the open doorway staring at me with his eyes getting so wide he did indeed look much like a six-foot fish, and with the breath being exhaled from his open mouth with the sound of a tire going flat. He was plainly paralyzed momentarily, but just as I started to jump for him he took a faltering step toward me, one hand coming up to point at me as he croaked, “But . . . you . . .”

He knew very well that he’d just shot me, and he appeared so transfixed to see me on my feet — and, by now, jumping toward him — that it seemed likely I could have turned cartwheels across the room to the man. But just as I reached him and started swinging the sap up at his jaw, he recovered enough to duck.

Maybe it was because I was swinging the sap with my left hand, but whatever the reason, I was awkward enough to miss him. The force of the blow pulled me off balance, but I jerked my head to the left and saw him thrust his right hand under the robe, to slap it against the little .32 he pulled out in front of him.

The funny thing was that I wasn’t really worried about getting shot, but about how much noise that little gun might make. And about the fact that Frank Quinn must be practically outside the door by now. But I had caught my balance, and the time that Barracuda had spent in reaching for his gun and pulling it out was enough for me. He’d barely got the gun clear of his robe when I whipped my left hand back toward him, the sap swishing audibly through the air and smacking hard against his gun hand.

The gun fell noiselessly at our feet, but sudden pain forced a yell from his throat. I was still swinging back, following the momentum started by my left hand and arm, and as I came around in a half circle I dropped my .38 and just let my right hand fold up into a hard fist as it kept on swinging. All I had to do was guide it a little, and my knuckles bounced off his mouth while he was still yelling.

I felt his teeth snap. His head flew back and he went down on his fanny, then sprawled out limply, his bloody mouth almost touching the feet of the man he had undoubtedly just killed. I jumped to the open doorway he’d come through, looked into the room beyond it. Nobody was in there; it was a bedroom adjoining the office. The bed was made, but rumpled. I didn’t waste any time looking the place over closely; the main thing I wanted was to get the two limp bodies out of that office before Quinn came in.

I grabbed the stiff’s legs and hauled him past the door, into the bedroom, then grabbed Barracuda’s feet and roughly repeated the operation. As I started to close the door into the office I saw that the black hood that went with the executioner outfit was still in there on the office carpet. I could see the two eyeholes in it. I was just going to grab it when I heard footsteps outside in the hall.

I didn’t even have time to close the adjoining door completely. I froze, the door still open about four inches. Without changing my position I could see Frank Quinn as he came into the office. The ornate robes he wore covered his fat body, but I could see his face clearly, the drooping jowls, the blood-stained eyes. Suddenly I remembered that my gun was still in there, too. My gun, and Barracuda’s.

If Quinn had seen any of those items there would probably have been a lot of noise all of a sudden. But he took a key from his pocket and locked the door, then turned and walked across the room toward his desk. Light flashed and gleamed from the diamond necklace he carried carelessly in one hand. Then he was out of sight. I made myself count slowly to ten before moving, eased over close to the wall, pushed gently on the door to open it far enough so I could stick my head through it. The sap was still in my left hand; I switched it to my right.

I heard grunting noises from the region of the desk. Quinn was kneeling on the floor, his left side toward me. The safe was beneath that black desk, I remembered, in the floor. I was starting to get wound up with tension; it was gnawing at my stomach, biting into my neck. It was high time, and past time, that I got out of here, and I could feel the urgency growing in me to get going.

Quinn moved with annoying slowness. He grunted again, mumbled something under his breath. Then he reached forward, tugged at the door of the safe and pulled it up and over — and I stepped into the room and moved toward him.

Seventeen

Quinn glanced up when I was two steps from him, and his face got blank, then his mouth opened wide. My right hand was already over my head and descending, but Quinn moved with a speed that surprised me. It did more than surprise me — from his knees he lunged straight at my legs, wrapped his arms around them and yanked. I was bent over, swinging the sap down at him, and his movement toward me made me miss his head. The sap thumped into his back, but at the same moment he yanked on my legs and sent me crashing to the floor.

Pain ran up my side, then spots started dancing in front of my eyes — but not from the fall. Quinn had moved like a cat, shifted his hands as I fell and slapped them around my throat. His thumbs dug into the flesh and the bone of my windpipe; his nails cut into the skin at the back of my neck. I didn’t try to grab his wrists or arms. If a man can get his hands around your throat tight enough to cut off the blood supply to the brain, unconsciousness comes in seconds.

Already my vision had dimmed; grayness swam before my eyes. I clasped my hands together, banged them up against Quinn’s wrists — but his grip stayed firm. He was faster than I’d thought, and also he was not merely fat and flabby but fat and damned strong. I could feel myself getting weaker.

I slapped my hands against his face, got one thumb in the corner of his mouth, the other in one of his eyes and shoved, twisted, tried to pull his head apart. He yelled and jerked his head back, and his grip on my throat loosened.

On my knees I swayed forward, vision still blurred, but I could see Quinn’s white throat swimming in the grayness around me. I threw my right hand forward, not in a fist but with the knuckles jutting out. The blade of knuckles mashed into his throat and he reeled backward, a harsh grating sound coming from his mouth. He was in pain, dazed, and I had time to set myself, slam my open right hand under his chin and hard against his throat. His red eyes nearly closed, he sagged limply. I slammed him again. That did it. He crumpled to the floor.

He was out, but I wanted him out for quite a while. I found the sap I’d dropped, moved back to Quinn, and swatted him in the middle of his forehead. His head wiggled a little; the rest of him didn’t. I rolled his bulk aside, got my .38 off the carpet, then leaned over the open safe. It was about a foot and a half square, and I could see money, papers, a couple of portfolios down inside it.

I pawed at it, hauled the entire contents out and threw aside the stuff obviously useless to me, like the jewelry and money. There was too much of the material to carry under my outfit, so I had to check it right here and now for the most important items. In the first ten seconds I found one beauty. It was a letter to Quinn from John Porter, the minor city official — with a spotless reputation — whose name had been mentioned to me by Pinky, the same Porter I’d seen at the meeting with Quinn earlier today. The whole letter was interesting, but particularly one paragraph which said, “After all, we agreed on 500, so in the last six months you’ve saved 1200 by sticking me. Maybe times are tough, but I got to pay my income tax too — that’s a joke.”

The tone of the letter seemed more plaintive than angry, but I was quite sure it had made Quinn more angry than anything else. Mrs. Quinn, during our talk in the Lantern, had told me K. C. Flagg had been stuffing into his own pockets chunks of Quinn’s payoffs to “The Boys” in town, and that when Quinn found out about it he’d stormed over to the Whitestone and had it out with Flagg; in addition she had told me her hubby learned of Flagg’s thieving ways when one of the short-changed boys wrote Quinn a complaining and not-too-prudent letter. Jay, too, had told me much the same story.

I had no doubt that the letter in my hand was the same one to which Mrs. Quinn had referred, the one which gave Quinn his first knowledge that he was being cheated by his bagman, K. C. Flagg. Cheated in this one case — probably only one of many — out of $200 a month.

So that made the date on the letter especially interesting. It was dated the 23rd of November. Which meant it would have been delivered to Quinn on the 24th. And K. C. Flagg had been shot to death on the 24th of November.

The letter put some unsightly spots on Porter’s spotless reputation — but it could ruin Quinn. Means and opportunity were easy; here was motive, in black and white.

I looked quickly through some of the other papers. There were a couple of the small tapes used for dictating machines, and I put them in my pile of stuff-to-take, just on general principles, along with a spool of regular recording tape. Several of the letters and papers looked extremely intriguing, and damaging to various and sundry characters, but I wasn’t interested in those items at the moment.

Maybe I didn’t have enough yet, but I had plenty to satisfy others besides myself of Quinn’s guilt. I grabbed a handful of miscellaneous papers, added my Porter letter to the stack and stuffed the crumpled wad into one of my coat pockets, under the clown suit. The one large and two small tapes I wrapped in more of Quinn’s documents, and jammed that into the other pocket.

Then, as I started to toss a letter — or what looked like a letter — aside, my eye fell on the name “Semmelwein.” I blinked, grabbed it again, started reading. It was four sheets clipped together, handwritten in a small script. The name of Ira Semmelwein was there, but only incidentally. It told a story, named names — a lot of names. I wanted to get the hell out of here, but I took time to skim the four pages until I knew what I’d found. And next to the letter from Porter, this was the prize of the package. It was a suicide note. And it was signed, “Raleigh Prentice.”

Raleigh Prentice, the wealthy and respected businessman who, on that night four years or so ago, had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It had been an open-and-shut case of suicide, but no note had been found. I remembered, too, however, that Prentice had arranged to meet a man at his home that night, but had killed himself just before the man arrived. The man — Frank Quinn.

So there had been a suicide note. And it had been found, not by the police, but by Frank Quinn — when he’d been in the Prentice home that night immediately after Prentice’s death, “comforting” hysterical Mrs. Prentice, phoning the police.

There wasn’t time to digest all the note said, but in it Prentice confessed to being a sham, a fraud, a thief. He, in collaboration with several other men, some of them city officials, had paid — and received — graft and bribes, milked corporations, profited illegally from municipal construction; they had skimmed the cream from contracts to build bridges, schools, roads, using inferior materials and pocketing the money thus saved. There was a long list of specific crimes, and the names of Raleigh Prentice’s partners in corruption were named.

Among them were John Porter, Ira Semmelwein, James H. Trout, Phillip Brenmount — every one of the men I’d seen meeting with Quinn today, while watching on my television screen. All of them, and four or five others, a couple of whom I knew were dead now. Plus the name K. C. Flagg. So here in my hand, and then quickly added to the other material in my pockets, was the answer to what it was that had given Quinn his sudden boost up the crime ladder four years ago. This letter, written by a man who was going to kill himself because of what he revealed in it, was in the hands of a man like Quinn, a blackmail weapon of immense power. Obviously Quinn had used it well, and undoubtedly added other weapons of his own as time went on.

I had enough now. With this to support what I knew but hadn’t been able to prove, it was more than enough.

I put my .38 back in its holster and got to my feet, and my eye fell on the phone on top of Quinn’s black desk. I grabbed it, reached for the dial so I could put in a fast call to the police and get a dozen radio cars on their way out here. Right now was the time when I wanted lots of policemen around me — and there was sufficient, and legitimate, reason for calling them. The papers I had in my pockets — and a dead man in a clown suit. But there wasn’t any dial on the phone.

I had the receiver at my ear and heard Nevada’s twangy voice saying, “Yeah? Yeah? Frank?”

I almost slammed the phone back on the hook but I stopped in time. That might be just enough to cause Nevada to send some of the hired hands up here checking. Instead, I said in a thick slurred voice, “Hiya, pal. Gimme Oakridge 2-2348. Somebody heisted my dial.”

“You better get the hell out of there,” Nevada said. “You ain’t supposed to be in there. Frank around?”

“He’s out. Gimme Oakridge 2-2348. Wanna talk to Mabel.”

Nevada told me to go get another drink instead, and I let him talk me out of phoning Mabel. I hung up, sweating, then got Quinn’s key, went to the door and unlocked it. For a moment I paused there, then with a last look at the havoc I was leaving behind me, I went out into the hall.

As I closed the door, I thought I heard something thump, either inside the room or nearby there in the hall. But a costumed man and woman were just coming up the stairs and looking toward me, so I stretched my painted grin even wider and walked toward them. Music floated up from the band below. The costumed couple grinned back at me and waved and pointed and did everything except dance a jig. They were drunk enough for eight people. I did a little dance step myself as I passed them, and the guy roared with happiness and fell flat on the floor.

I started down the stairs. Everything looked about the same as it had when I’d come up. There was a lot of color down there, people dancing, spinning about, guests in bright outfits standing in groups and talking. For that moment I thought I’d make it. I had lost most of the buoyant, practically invincible feeling I’d had a few minutes earlier, but there was still some of it left, and I actually felt that I was going to be able to simply stroll out of the house and away.

I got almost to the bottom of the staircase.

There were only a few steps to go, and I was eyeing a group of four men nearby, just off the edge of the dance floor. Two of them I knew well, too well. They were Hal the Cad, whom I’d sent to Q on that one-to-ten burglary rap, and Tight-Pants McGoon, the ape whose skull I had opened with a garbage can. The third man was the bullet-headed killer, Jim Lester, and the fourth guy looked like a hired gunman, too. The thought had just entered my mind that it was going to be a nice feeling to get about ten miles away from such as these, when there was an unintelligible shout from the head of the stairs behind me.

The four men jerked their heads around to look past me, at the floor above. I could see almost every head in the place swing toward whoever had yelled. I knew who it was before I looked, but I looked anyway. He was leaning weakly against the banister at the head of the stairway. He didn’t have a gun, but one hand was raised so he could point a finger at me. It was Barracuda. His mouth was red and puffed, and some of the blood had dropped down onto the long, black gownlike outfit that covered his clothing completely.

One of the four men near me said, “It’s Hacker. Look at his mouth. What the — ”

“Stop him!’ Barracuda — or Hacker — shouted, his voice hoarse, twisted as it pushed through his puffed lips. “Stop him, kill him!” He pointed that accusing finger straight at me and yelled, “Kill that clown!”

When I looked at the gathering again, almost all of the heads were turned toward me. Nearly two hundred pairs of eyes stared at me. The band stopped playing suddenly. I knew it was a forlorn, a dismal hope, but I tried to stretch my painted grin wider and hop clownlike down the last few steps, but the cause was long lost. And I knew it. I knew I wasn’t going to make it.

In the silence Barracuda yelled again, harshly, “Kill that clown! It’s Shell Scott!”

Eighteen

My name hit that gang of thieves and cutthroats like a bomb.

That name had been the center of attention for hours, for days, to most of these hoods. Many of them had been ordered to hunt for me, find me, kill me; they knew a price of ten thousand bucks was on my head; I had clanged up against a lot of them in the past, and in just the last three days I had built in several of them a hatred amounting to mania. The friends of Turkey Grant, whom I’d shot on the Freeway — and the pals of Papa Ryan. Fargo, with his own peculiar reasons, not to mention his split eye; Blister, breathing through his mouth; Shadow on crutches . . . Hal and McGoon and Speedy and more, many more, too many more.

The silence held for half a second, then was broken by a great hiss, like wind rising, the sucking of air into many throats, a collective gasp. And then the growl, the harsh, growing, ugly sound of a crowd, a mob, a murderous mob. It was an animal sound, half growl and half whine, the volume rising suddenly to a blood-curdling roar.

It happened in seconds after Barracuda’s cry. And I didn’t hesitate. Even as his words stopped bouncing off the walls and the crowd started to roar I spun around and sprinted up the stairs toward Barracuda.

Somebody behind me was almost as fast. A shot cracked out and a bullet plucked at my clothing like Death’s fingers. But then I was almost up to Barracuda, and any more shots might have hit him instead of me. With that thought in mind I ducked under Barracuda’s reaching hands, wrapped my left arm around his waist and yanked him toward me as I drove my right hand into his gut. I kept my hand open, fingers jabbing stiffly, and in the right place the blow would have killed him. But it bent him forward, air exploding from his lungs, and I grabbed him, wrestled him up onto my shoulder.

In the exertion, I felt my tasseled clown cap pulled off. It fell, a bright spot of color, to the steps. I knew that my blasted white hair, now that it was uncovered, was probably just as bright as the cap. Behind me, I heard a couple of yells from men who thought they recognized me. One of them shouted, “It’s Scott, all right! I’d know that — ”

But I missed the rest of it. At least there weren’t any more shots; Barracuda over my shoulder was a temporary shield. If we had been standing still, my colorful clown costume against his somber black would have made an easy target — but I was moving.

I ran with him, hardly noticing his weight, toward the room where Quinn and the dead man lay. Heavy feet pounded up the stairway behind me. The door to Quinn’s office stood slightly ajar. I bent forward and hit the door, let Barracuda fly off my shoulder and crash heavily against the floor inside the red-and-black room while I grabbed under my coat for the .38.

With the familiar butt of the Colt in my fist I swung around, raising the gun. Two men were at the head of the stairs. Bullet-headed Jim Lester was a step in the lead, a big revolver in his hand, and even as I spotted him he blasted one shot at me.

But just one.

I knew I’d be dead in ten seconds if I didn’t stop those bums who were running up here at me, and because it was Jim Lester, and because he was shooting at me besides, I didn’t even have to think about what I was going to do. I was already aiming at his chest when his gun blasted at me, and I squeezed the trigger gently, thumbing back the hammer and getting off a second shot moments after the first one.

Both of them hit Lester, the first one stopping him, and the second spinning him a little to one side. He staggered and the man alongside him — it was Hal the Cad — let out a yell, turned and jumped about six steps down the stairs. That wasn’t enough for me. I knew the others would be coming up again too soon if I didn’t scare hell out of them and slow them down. I had a clear shot at Hal’s legs, but he was moving fast and it was plain luck that I hit him. If I hit him. His right leg crumpled, though, just as my gun cracked, and he rolled end over end to the foot of the stairs.

Jim Lester was still turning around, easily, almost gracefully. The gun dangled from his fingers, then dropped. He stepped forward, got his foot on the first step as if he were going to walk down them. But that was the best he could do. It was queer the way he fell. His arms dropped first, hands dangling at his sides. Then he toppled forward like a tree falling. He landed heavily, and stuck there, feet on the second or third step, his face pressed against a step lower down. He didn’t roll any farther, just lay there. He didn’t move.

That would hold them awhile. But it didn’t much matter. It wasn’t going to be any help to me. I’d had it. I’d really had it, and I felt cold all over. Mentally I cursed myself for an idiot, a brainless slob, for coming here in the first place. There wasn’t a chance I could get out. Nearly a hundred bloodthirsty gunmen all dying to kill me, and an electrified fence around the place. I swore. It was that blasted woman that got me into this. That Doris Miller. It’s always a woman, I thought miserably.

But then for a moment I could see that gorgeous face before me, that sensational body, and it actually soothed my jangled nerves a bit. At least the vision changed the direction of my thoughts a little, and for a second or two I stopped thinking of getting killed and began thinking of how to stay alive. That was enough. All of a sudden it hit me. Maybe there was a way out of here. Maybe I could stay alive after all. Ah, women are good for me. No doubt about it.

I jumped inside Quinn’s office and started yanking off my clown costume, ripped it in my hurry. Then I looked out the door again. Down below, at the foot of the stairs, Hal the Cad, the man I’d shot in the leg was pulling himself over the floor like a crippled crab. Only a couple other men were in sight, the rest of them were where I couldn’t see them, or shoot them. That was fine with me.

I aimed close to one of the two men visible, and fired. All of a sudden nobody except the injured man was in sight, and then he too was among the missing. I left the doorway, jumped back into the room. Barracuda was just starting to stir, and I didn’t have time to do the thing nicely. I kicked him in the head. His gun was still on the floor, against the wall. There were only two bullets left in my revolver, so I stuck the .38 back in its holster and shoved Barracuda’s .32 into my belt, then grabbed the unconscious man.

I wrestled with him, pulled off the black robe that covered him, jumped back to the door. Already, in the few seconds it had taken me, a couple men had started cautiously up the stairway. Not cautiously enough, however. I emptied Barracuda’s .32 into them and at them. One of them fell backwards, the other ran.

It took me about five seconds to pull the black robe over me. Then I grabbed off the floor the hood which had been part of Barracuda’s Executioner costume. With it over my head I could see through the eyeholes — not well, but at least the thing covered my painted-clown face, and the white hair. Some might soon wonder why the mask was being worn, but with luck there would be too much going on in a minute for clear thinking to take place. And it gave me a chance — a pretty good chance, I was beginning to believe.

I was even feeling halfway good again. Clammy and sweaty, and unhappy at the same time, but so keyed up that I felt almost as if I might dissolve into popping atoms. A glance out the office door showed me that another brave, or foolhardy, hood had started up the stairs. Behind him were a couple others, less daring. Fine. Now they could come up and shoot me.

I was grinning involuntarily under my black hood and grease paint as I turned and jumped back into the office, and then went on into the next room where the dead man still lay. The dead clown — Shell Scott.

Somebody had already mistaken the guy for me; why not again? I’d thought for a moment earlier, when I’d first seen him, that he was a reflection of me; except for the switch in the color of his nose, and the buttons on his outfit, we had been clothed in almost identical fashion. And I was now dressed exactly as Barracuda had been, in the black robe and hood. It would have looked good, I thought, even to me.

There was so much adrenalin and thyroxin and pituitin and maybe vegetable soup in my veins by now that I lifted the dead clown clear up on my shoulder with no more effort than if I’d been lifting a sack of potatoes. Then I trotted heavily toward the door of this second room, the bedroom which opened at the head of those stairs. I got the door opened and staggered forward through it, my arms wrapped tightly around the dead clown’s waist.

Past him I could see the three men, now at the head of the stairway. They all had pistols in their hands and two of them pointed the guns at me and the clown, but the other yelled something and they didn’t fire. I couldn’t see what they did then, because as soon as I toppled through the door clutching my clown, I fell forward to the floor at the head of the stairs, rolling, holding the dead man’s arms tight to his sides.

As I reached the stairs I got my feet under me somehow and half raised up, pulling the clown along with me, muscles stretching painfully in my back and side, but I got him up far enough. His head fell backward limply, but I moved so fast that maybe nobody noticed. As his head dropped back I slammed a fist against his chin. He fell back loosely, like a rag man, toppling over the body of Jim Lester, hitting the steps and starting to roll very slowly down to the next one.

This whole operation had taken only four or five seconds, and before he rolled more than an inch my .38 was in my hand. There was a hell of a lot of noise, a real pandemonium with voices and shouts and screams, with the three men now behind me and a dozen more below coming up making a lot of racket, but at least those nearest me must have heard me shout hoarsely, with my voice as near to rasping huskiness of Barracuda’s as I could make it:

“Kill that clown! I told you he’s Shell Scott!”

And I fired my last two .38 slugs into the dead man’s body.

Before I even poured the second one into him, though, at least six other shots sounded. A lot of the hoodlums helped me kill that slob, Shell Scott. So many guns fired almost at once there that for a few moments it sounded as if somebody were letting fly with a machine gun. There was even one woman popping at me with a chromed .22 pistol and I thought, “What did I ever do to her?” But all of a sudden there was nearly complete quiet.

After the staccato bark and boom of guns, the silence was almost oppressive, heavy and thick. The dead man’s body was still moving, turning slightly as it settled onto the lower step of the stairs, but then it stopped, was still. It looked as if he had just been shot, and suddenly stopped living. Right now everybody here thought Barracuda had fought valiantly and fiercely, and just eliminated, with the help of a few other guns, that foul and much unloved private eye, Shell Scott.

In fact, one little hoodlum was looking down at the clown’s body, with his mouth hanging open, and then he said, “You know, they was times when I thought that fink, Scott, wouldn’t never get killed.”

Nineteen

I was starting to feel weak. A flush went over my skin, and then it got a little chilled. Man, my glands were about to give up in disgust. I’d no more let them get a little calmed down than something would happen to light their fuses again. And right now I was thinking about how far I still had to go to get out of this joint.

With my voice harsh and rasping in my throat I said, “Haul the jerk out back. I’ll tell Nevada what happened.”

And with that I walked on down the stairs. Nobody stopped me. I was still Barracuda, or Hacker, to them, walking out to tell the gateman what the score was. Nobody had yet asked why it was necessary for the black-robed Hacker to tell anybody at the gate anything. Or why I was wearing the hood over my head still — when it hadn’t been on at the start of my battle, when “I” had appeared at the head of the stairs shouting “Kill that clown!” Or why the corpse of white-haired Shell Scott was now wearing a tasseled clown cap, when his cap had fallen off earlier and was even now lying on the stairs. Everybody was still pretty well shaken up — and emotional rather than logical — for the moment.

I had told the men to carry the corpse out back, because I sure didn’t want them going upstairs and finding the real Barracuda — and their host, Frank Quinn — sprawled out in Quinn’s office. That was bound to happen sooner or later, but the later it happened, the sooner I’d like it. I walked through the softly muttering crowd, and my black-robed and black-hooded figure got a good many stares. Even among killers and burglars and thieves of all descriptions, a gun battle and killing is not usually the height of the festivities at a party. And all in black, I must have looked pretty creepy, anyway, like Death striding among the revelers.

But I made it to the hall and down it to the front door, and outside. The air was cool; it felt like rain. I was wet with perspiration and the chill in the air transferred itself to my skin, and then my bones. I walked toward the rented Lincoln, feeling for the keys. I couldn’t find them. In all the running around and fighting I might have lost them.

Several men had come out the door behind me. Some of the guests were undoubtedly preparing to leave, without even saying goodbye to the host — and that was just dandy with me; I didn’t want them saying goodbye to their host. It might have looked odd for the real Barracuda to hop in a Lincoln to drive the short distance to the gate. Especially if he drove a Mercury, say. But that was a chance I was willing to take. Walking out of here on foot, however, was simply asking for it. But I kept fumbling in pockets, and at last my fingers closed around the metal key; it had been buried in a mass of papers I’d stolen — at least I still had them.

In the Lincoln, I gunned to the gate and slid to a stop in front of it. A light on top of the gatehouse illumined the darkness around us for twenty or thirty yards. Nevada was just stepping out of the little house, the familiar shotgun in his hands. Only it wasn’t in the crook of his arm this time; he held it at the ready, finger curled around the trigger, both barrels pointed at my head.

I looked out the car window toward him and the gun, and he just dissolved away out of my sight. All I could see was the round ends of those two barrels, and for half a horrible second I thought he was going to shoot me. I thought he was going to blast my head off. Those two round holes of the shotgun muzzles seemed to swell in my sight until they looked like cannons aimed at me, and I kept waiting for two eight-inch shells to fly out and pop me in the kisser.

Well, I thought, what a hell of a way to go. There won’t be anything left of me. Just little shreds, and unidentifiable bits. Shell Scott will just disappear. But then I snapped out of my dizziness. There is something unnerving about a shotgun aimed at you. It can’t kill you any more than a .22 pistol can, say, but it sure gives the impression that it can kill you deader.

Dust was still swirling from my sudden stop before the closed gate. Nevada said, “What in tarnation’s goin’ on? Somebody jest called up from the house and said nobody ain’t to go in nor out.”

So that meant I wouldn’t be getting out through the gate for a while — not, at least, with Nevada’s help. Looking beyond him into the gatehouse I could see two phones sitting on a wooden counter in there. Probably at this very moment, some of the party guests were ogling the unconscious Quinn, and Barracuda. That was probably what had caused the call to the gate.

So I swung open the car door and stepped out, saying, “That’s what I came out to tell you. Keep the gate closed, Nevada, and — ”

He was squinting at me, and the shotgun was staring wide-eyed at me, and he said, “You ain’t Hacker. What’s your name, boy?”

“No,” I said. “Hacker and me wound up with the same outfit. I’m, uh, Whitey McGafford.” Then I pulled off the hood and threw it back into the car. The clown paint was still smeared on my face. It must have puzzled Nevada, but that was O.K. with me; I wanted him puzzled for the next minute or so. And I was going to try to keep him off balance long enough for me to get a phone call out of here.

“McGafford,” he said slowly. “I don’t remember no — ”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “Where’s the phone? The boss is shot up and Dinky’s dead, so cut the gab. I got to call somebody for the boss.”

“Hey, wait a minute. Who’s Dinky?”

“What difference does it make? He’s dead,” I said. And I didn’t wait. Possibly I was still dizzy from looking into those eight-inch cannons, but the shotgun was back to normal size now and I walked past it into the gatehouse. Only one of the two phones had a dial. I grabbed it, turned it so that Nevada couldn’t see the numbers, and dialed the complaint board at the Police Building.

Nevada stepped into the doorway, about two yards from me, and moved the shotgun so that it pointed at my stomach. “Who you callin’?” he asked. And he didn’t sound so puzzled now as just plain mean. “And what’d you say about the boss being shot?”

“I don’t know all of what happened,” I said roughly, “but there was a drunk in Quinn’s office, and there was some kind of beef.” Nevada’s face smoothed out a little when I mentioned the drunk. He knew I was telling the truth about that — he’d talked to the drunk himself. “Frank’s not hurt bad,” I said, “but he wants nobody but Hotshot Dutton sticking a probe into him. Bullet’s still in his side.”

“You callin’ who?” Nevada said.

“Hotshot.”

The timing was perfect.

The officer at the complaint board had just answered, and I said it again, “Hotshot!” Looking at Nevada, I added, “Doctor Dutton, to you, the guy who’s going to dig the bullets out of Frank Quinn and about a hundred other guys at Quinn’s ranch. How many times do I have to tell you?”

In the Police Building, the term Hotshot is applied to urgent calls which come in to the complaint board and are simultaneously transmitted to Homicide or Robbery and the Detective Headquarters Unit — and to the rolling radio cars — all at once, even while the call is coming in on the phone. They would all hear the next words I said — if I had made the officer understand what I wanted.

But Nevada was squinting at me again and he said, “Why didn’t you use a phone in there?”

“I told you, there was a beef in Frank Quinn’s office. They shot some clown that’s supposed to be Shell Scott — ”

“Hold it, boy.” Nevada was looking mean again. “Just you back up from that phone. Lay it down.”

He looked again as if he were going to use that double-barreled gun on me. I guessed that it was most likely loaded with double-ought buckshot, and what that won’t do to a man isn’t worth doing — if you want to kill him suddenly, that is. Each double-ought shotgun shell is loaded with nine pellets about the size of a .22 caliber slug. I thought of eighteen .22 bullets piling into my stomach, and I put the phone down, and backed up, just as he’d said to do.

Nevada held the shotgun with one hand and kept it aimed at me, then picked up the phone with the other. “Who’s this I’m talking to?” he asked.

I held my breath, and tensed my leg muscles for a sudden jump.

“Huh?” he said. He looked at me, then said into the phone, “Doctor Dutton, huh? Well, Doctor, you hold on — ”

I was almost grinning. A bright police officer on that complaint board was going to get a case of his favorite beverage from me — if I lived. And it was a big If, because Nevada had stopped talking for the same reason that I stopped almost grinning. There was a whole pile of racket from the house. I heard the sound of car engines racing — and then gunshots.

From my arrival in the Lincoln, skidding to a stop here, until now, probably only two minutes or at most three had gone by. But that had been time enough for somebody to figure out what had happened. Maybe somebody had even recognized that dead clown. Because I heard those shots hit the Lincoln. Probably whoever was shooting thought I was still in the car, because about ten slugs hit it in the space of a few seconds. The lights of another car arced through the darkness, headed toward the gatehouse.

Nevada slammed the phone down onto the hook, then swung his head toward all the noise, and the racing car. The shotgun muzzle wavered away from me, and in that moment I jumped for him.

He let out a yell and started to jerk his head back toward me, but my right fist was driving for his face and it bounced off his chin, cutting off the startled shout. He staggered backward, dropping the gun, but the blow didn’t knock him down. He was even tougher than he looked. Spitting out a mouthful of swear words he came at me, hands held in front of him the way a professional would hold them.

I didn’t have time to box or fool around with Nevada. That car was already halfway to the gatehouse. So I let him hit me as I waded into him. I knew I’d be able to take at least a couple good blows from those balled fists of his, but I was willing if I could get in a couple of my own. His left hand slammed my cheekbone like a hunk of rock; I felt the skin split and pain flamed all over the side of my face. But I was in close to him, and as his other fist loomed before me, I gave him one hand in the gut, the way I’d dug Barracuda earlier, then tried to spread my fist all over his face. He reeled backward. His eyes were wide, but glassy. He was open, unprotected, his back against the counter behind him, and I hit him so hard in the stomach I thought my knuckles were going to slice clear in and bang the counter.

He let out a funny, high sound, but he didn’t know he was making it. Nevada was still sliding down along the counter to the floor when I bent over and picked up the shotgun, jumped to the door of the gatehouse. Outside, that car was starting to swing in and stop. I raised the gun and fired one barrel, snapping the shot off without good aim. But the slugs tore up the radiator and far side of the car’s windshield.

If I hit anybody, it wasn’t the driver. He spun the wheel and slid around to the right, away from me. I could have pumped slugs from the second shell into him as he went by — but that was the only load I had left, so I held my fire. The car, a dark Cadillac, bounced off the parked Lincoln’s rear bumper but kept on going, then roared back toward the house and stopped about halfway to it.

Another car was coming toward me, and men on foot were heading my way too. From the darkness I saw fire flash as somebody shot at the gatehouse. The slug splatted against the glass — but didn’t come through. The bullet-proof glass pitted and slivered, but that was all.

I swung around, looking for the lever that controlled the gate. Only one was visible and I pushed it, then pulled it. The gate started sliding open. I looked around for a gun, any kind of gun, or shells for the shotgun. None were in sight. And there was no way, as far as I could tell, to lock the gatehouse door. Maybe the glass was bullet proof, but I wasn’t, and I had the miserable feeling that pretty soon I was going to prove it.

A couple more slugs splatted against the window. Now I could see several costumed men between the house and me. They were trotting toward me, and getting too close for comfort. There was no help for it. I had to use that last load in the shotgun. But this time I meant to aim.

I did aim. I did it fast, because I was exposed while getting the shot off, but I aimed. First I made sure the gate was open, because after my one shot the gun would be nothing but a club, and I meant to be running as lightly burdened as possible. I ripped the black robe so it wouldn’t bind my legs, then I stepped outside the house and sighted along the barrels right at the middle of the loose group of men now only about twenty yards away. As the gun centered on one man I squeezed off the shot and then dropped flat on the ground.

About five shots answered mine, but the slugs whistled over my head, one glancing off the small house. And then I was on my feet, spinning around and running, bent over, out through the gate, headed down the road into darkness. I’d started moving too suddenly after firing to keep my eyes on the target, but my aim had been good. Somebody out there behind me screamed like a terrified woman, the sound high and piercing.

That one last shell I’d used, and the man’s cry, gave me about five seconds’ start. It wasn’t much. And I knew it wasn’t going to be enough. But it got me through the gate and started out the road toward darkness, head down and legs pumping. I never ran faster. But then the firing started again. They could see me fairly well, because the light from the gate touched me still — and now I could hear a car coming at me from behind. Its lights, too, fell on me and swept past me. They just opened up all at once. One bullet, whistled by my ear. I heard another hiss along the road and whine high into the air. My lungs were burning, starting to ache. Then one of the slugs hit me.

It sliced into my leg, as if somebody had kicked me there. All of a sudden it was as if my leg was gone. I went down hard, the breath whooshing out of my mouth. My head cracked against the road. I was stunned, the hard asphalt burning into the skin of my shoulder and face, but I managed to throw my arms out and stop rolling, barely off the asphalt in the graveled dirt along its edge.

The fall, more than anything else, dazed me. My head had cracked against the street hard enough to send black and white dots swirling in front of my eyes. But I was still conscious. Half conscious, maybe, but not out. I could hear their running feet, I thought — but it seemed, too, as if I heard a siren.

I tried to remember if I’d gotten the call through to the complaint board. I was too dazed to remember. Guns cracked again and a bullet snipped at my clothing. I rolled farther from the road, trying to clear my brain and eyes, trying to see. Everything was blurred, out of focus. I knew the men were running at me, getting close; a car was coming toward me. I swore, raging, wanting my gun, wanting even that empty shotgun to use as a club. I wanted a machine gun, a bow and arrow, anything, just so I could get back at these bloodthirsty bums getting ready to kill me. But I couldn’t even get up off my rear end, couldn’t get my feet under me or clear my brain enough to know what was happening.

Lights flashed around me suddenly. I saw a pulsing red light. And then I heard the siren and knew it was a police siren, a radio car. There was another burst of gunfire, but none of the bullets seemed to come my way. My sight cleared, and my head suddenly began pounding as if Fury were in there and trying to get out. Another siren was wailing almost in my ear. One radio car had stopped near me and a second was just cutting around it, heading toward the gate.

A uniformed police sergeant loped toward me, bent over. His gun was in his right hand, glinting in the light, and pointed at me. I suddenly remembered my unrecognizable paintsmeared face and said, “Hold it, I’m Shell Scott,”

“You’re Shell Scott?”

“Yeah, I called you — ”

He interrupted me. I guess he thought from the look of my face, that I’d been shot freely about the head. But in quick sentences I told him what had happened, what was going on. He left me at the side of the road and raced to his car, said something to the driver. I heard them radioing in, but I didn’t pay much attention. Dizziness was sweeping over me.

Then the sergeant was back. A few terse questions from him got the rest of the story out of me. I told him about Quinn, the dead clown, the numerous hoods who were present even now. And about the papers I’d stuffed into my coat pocket. Some of them were still there. Others were scattered over the countryside — but they could be picked up. Sirens dinned in our ears as two more police cars approached.

I said, “About that clown, he was undoubtedly killed by mistake by a hood named Barracuda — I mean, Hacker. After he was dead, I shot him twice and a half a dozen or so hoods shot him, too. So your crime lab can compare the bullets in him with the guns on the premises and — ”

“What?”

“ — and hold those crooks for mutilating a corpse, if nothing else.” I lay down flat on the dirt. I was pooped. I was all tuckered out.

“You all right?” the sergeant asked.

“Yeah. They got me in the leg. I don’t think it’s bad.”

“Let me take a look.” He bent over me, used his flashlight. I heard cloth tearing. “Nothing,” he said. “You’ll walk on it in no time. Hey,” he grinned down at me.

“Yeah?”

“When we got here it looked like an escaped menagerie. There was some kind of Admiral, a pirate, a gladiator, Tarzan, I don’t know what all — even some sort of big shaggy animal on its hind legs.”

“Yeah, one of those apes came as an ape.”

“Well, we caught you in our headlights as we came down. Thought you were crazy. There was a car coming at you — they went off the road over there.” He pointed. “And about ten or twelve guys running at you with guns. You know what you were doing?”

“Throwing up?”

He laughed. “No, you were sitting on your fanny and throwing rocks at them. Or I guess it was those little pebbles.” He kicked some of the gravel I was lying on.

It struck me funny, and I chuckled. Then I grinned back at him and said, “Well, I knew they were going to shoot me — but by gad I was going to make them pay!”

“Sure, Scott. Take it easy.”

“And it wasn’t pebbles. You think I’m crazy? It was rocks. I took them out of my head.”

“You better just rest there, Scott,” he said, and walked back to the car.

And that’s what I did.

Twenty

That, of course, was just about all of it. Except the mopping up. I got an ambulance ride to the Loma Drive Receiving Hospital. It was possible that, in all the excitement, I didn’t explain to the police as well as I might have just what was going on at Frank Quinn’s party. But as it turned out, only one officer was shot, and even he wasn’t badly hurt. Two more of the hoodlum guests were wounded seriously enough to require hospitalization, but the rest were herded together and taken down to the police building without undue trouble.

A very large percentage of the guests were booked, on suspicion of half the crimes in the book, and there was little that even their smart lawyers could do about it, since there were already two corpses on the premises when the police arrived: Jim Lester, and the clown — who turned out to be just a poor safe-man who’d happened to wear a clown outfit. I later learned from Barracuda that the clown had been in the room adjoining Quinn’s office with a little brunette when Barracuda walked in on them; from the outfit, and the brunette, and the way they were carrying on, Barracuda had just automatically assumed that the guy was Shell Scott.

From Barracuda I also got the explanation for something else that had puzzled me. I knew he had seen me buying my clown outfit at the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center; I knew he had shot the clown, thinking it was me. What I hadn’t been able to figure out was why, if he’d told Frank Quinn that Shell Scott might show up at the party dressed as a clown, Quinn and ten other thugs hadn’t grabbed me as soon as I walked inside.

The explanation was simple. Barracuda hadn’t told Quinn or anybody else. And, really, it was Quinn’s own damned fault. He had spread the word that he would pay ten thousand clams to the guy who killed me, and the word — fortunately for me — reached Barracuda before he passed on to Quinn his exciting news. So Barracuda, sensibly enough kept the exciting news all to himself, because he wanted to keep those ten exciting G’s all to himself. Naturally, then, a good part of his shock upon seeing me after he’d shot the clown was not only the impossibility of my being alive, but also the vision of ten thousand winged clams flying away, which would shock anybody.

How come the word reached Barracuda so late? Because by the time he got back from the California border — where he had finally caught up with that Greyhound bus — the word was all over town.

Also bleeding on the premises that night when the police arrived, were Hal the Cad, whom I’d plugged in the leg, the man I’d drilled with Barracuda’s .32, and the guy I’d peppered with double-ought buckshot. In the room with the still unconscious Frank Quinn and Barracuda was, of course, Quinn’s open safe, the contents of which the police could thus quite legitimately examine. That led to a large number of indictments, among which the indictment of Quinn himself was almost incidental.

As for Jay — to whom I personally gave those last two pictures — I’m not sure whether he got off easy or not. He didn’t go to jail; but he fell heir to what remained of the mob — and what remained of Maude Quinn. I suppose, in a way, it was Justice.

My first night in the hospital, before conking out for a good sleep, I made sure that the police got the straight story on Ross Miller. The info I’d stuffed into my pockets, and the other material found in Quinn’s safe, was enough to indicate that Miller had been framed by Quinn. It was certain that in the next few days the proof one way or another would be forthcoming. You can always postpone an execution, but you can’t undo one. Under the circumstances the governor had no choice. He granted the stay.

While I was still in the hospital, some of Quinn’s associates broke down and spilled all they knew about him, including details of Quinn’s payoffs through K. C. Flagg — and his ordering the murders of little Weiss, Heigman, and the lovely Lolita. The Raleigh Prentice suicide note helped to ruin not only Quinn but more than a dozen other men, including all those who’d met with Quinn that Tuesday at noon. More careful study of the note than I’d had time to give revealed that Prentice had made the appointment with Frank Quinn on that night four years ago because he wanted a hard-boiled gunman to do a job for him — the job being the murder of his associate and friend, George Schuyler. Schuyler, after much deliberation, including talks with Prentice, had decided to break with his partners in thievery and take the consequences, confessing everything — which, naturally, would implicate his fellow thieves. Including Raleigh Prentice. Prentice was a thief, yes, but he’d never been partner to murder. While waiting for Quinn to show up that night the enormity of what he was about to do had sickened him, and he’d known he couldn’t go through with it. But if he didn’t, he knew he would be exposed, shamed, sent to prison. So he had written his note, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.

Quinn never admitted it, but it was evident that after finding the note while in Prentice’s home that night, and reading in it that George Schuyler was going to blow the whistle, he had — to keep that whistle from being blown — on the next night shot Schuyler five times, including once in the back.

At any rate, not only was the L.A. jail pretty well filled and hoodlums fleeing in all directions over the landscape, but it was also obvious that Frank Quinn was totally washed up. Not only did it look as if he would be tagged with complicity in the murders of Weiss, Heigman, and Lolita, but he was made for the killing of K. C. Flagg. And that finished the clearing of Ross Miller. The machinery for his release started grinding, and the day I got out of the hospital, he was scheduled to be freed. It seemed like nice timing.

I left the hospital, hale and hearty, on a Friday afternoon. It was a bright day, with a sharp nip in the air. Invigorating. Bracing. I felt good. And I felt like seeing Doris Miller. I drove to her apartment.

Nobody was there. And then I realized it was almost the hour when Ross Miller was to be released. Naturally his sister would be on hand to welcome him. Fortunately, so could I be, if I hurried. The prisoner had already been transferred from San Quentin to the jail in L.A.’s Police Building, from which he was about to be released. I jumped into the Cad and made time back downtown. I hurried at just the right rate of speed so that I got there as Ross Miller was enfolding his sister in his arms, while flashbulbs popped and reporters hovered. I hovered with them. Let Ross and Doris, I thought, have their moment.

But it was more than a moment, and gradually it occurred to me that this egg did not seem to be kissing Doris the way a brother kisses a sister. They came up for air, as the saying goes, and then went back down in the carbon dioxide. More flashbulbs popped.

It took a couple minutes, I guess, to work my way over close to them and attract Doris’ attention. When she saw me, her lips parted and her blue eyes got very wide. Those eyes which I’d thought a little strange when we met.

She gasped.

Ross Miller, his arms around her waist, looked at her. “What’s the matter, Jane, honey?” he asked Doris.

She didn’t answer him. Looking at my chin she said, “Shell . . . ah, I . . . there’s something I didn’t tell you.”

I got it then, finally, but all of a sudden, as if I were belatedly telepathic And, oddly enough, right at the same moment I figured out what was wrong with those bright blue eyes of Doris Miller’s — or whatever her name was; Jane French, it would be of course, the fiancée, not the sister.

She never looked at me. Never looked at my eyes, that is. She always looked at my chin, as she was doing now, or my ear, or shoulder, or off into space. Never straight and clean and true, into my eyes. Because she’d been lying to me from the beginning. There had been a weird sameness, a pattern, to our meetings — not as if I’d planned them, but because she had planned it that way. Those eyes should have told me, those eyes that broke the promise of her lips.

“I’m sorry, Shell,” she said, looking at my collarbone. “It . . . well, I had to have help. And Weiss had talked to me just the day before. I didn’t think if I told you who I really was that you would . . .”

She was having a hard time getting the words out. “Skip it,” I said. And then I added to myself, “Brother, I am sure the world’s greatest detective. I’m Sherlock Holmes and Javert all wrapped up in Li’l Abner. What a thinker! I should never have thrown away all those rocks . . .”

I went down to the street, and got into my Cad, started it and headed out the Hollywood Freeway toward home. Life, I thought, is cruel. Life is shallow. Life is lifeless. I thought all sorts of things like that until I reached the Spartan Apartment Hotel. As I passed the desk, the clerk called my name and handed me a stack of mail.

I glanced at it on the way up to the second floor. Bills mostly. Bills — there was a letter from the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center.

It was a nice, pleasant, not-very-businesslike letter saying that the firm had enjoyed doing business with me and hoped that everything was satisfactory. The last sentence was, “Please remember that we have the largest private stock of costumes in Hollywood — including many special costumes for special occasions.” And it was signed, Marie.

At the bottom of the letter was a short P.S., “As in Antoinette.”

In less than fifteen minutes I was walking into the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center. The little honey-blonde was behind the counter reading a magazine. I didn’t look at the title; enough of my illusions had already been shattered this day, and it would have been too much to bear if she had been reading about Donald Duck.

She looked up. “Well, hello,” she said musically. She was in the harem costume again. Or still. Maybe she always wore it in the shop. She did if the boss was smart.

“Hi,” I said. “I ruined the clown outfit I rented. I had a hunch that might happen, remember?”

She nodded, looking at me from those soft brown eyes. Looking at my eyes. Obviously she had nothing to hide. And she wasn’t making much effort to hide it.

I went on, “Are you Marie?”

She laughed. “Oh, you got my note. Well . . . I just signed it Marie for fun. You know, for a joke?”

“I see. That’s dandy. Yes, that’s good.”

“My name isn’t really Marie. It’s actually — ”

“Woops. What do you say, for a while anyway, we just leave it Marie?”

“As in Antoinette,” she said, and smiled.

Yes, I was thinking, I’d had it all wrong a little while ago. Life is not cruel and shallow and lifeless. It is indeed the very opposite, chock full of goodness. It’s all in your point of view. Life is exciting, exhilarating, wonderful — especially at costume parties. From now on, that is.

And, this time, I was right.

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 1962 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
Renewed 1990 by Richard S. Prather

ISBN 978-1-4804-9874-7

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