The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

  The Sweet Ride

  A Shell Scott Mystery

  Richard S. Prather

  For:

  Lyle and Isabelle Moone

  1

  I swung left into Mulberry Drive and headed back toward town, hoping Mayor Everson Fowler’s phone call to the local law had taken Sergeant Samuels and Officer Jonah off my tail for good. I was also hoping, with slight unease, that we’d been talking about the same people.

  Those two guys—or at least the one I’d gotten an unappetizingly close look at—were sure funny-looking fuzz. And I have been very closely associated, though usually to my profit and pleasure, with one hell of a lot of fuzz.

  I was pretty far from my home base, Sheldon Scott, Investigations in downtown L.A., and maybe that fact plus the unaccustomed chill in the Northern California air was responsible for the small knot of tension between my shoulder blades, and the coolness that once in a while spider-stepped along my spine.

  There was nothing except that brisk breezy nip to give anyone goose bumps or even mild anxieties. This was the tail end of winter, one of those afternoons when spring steals a March day and shows off a week or two ahead of schedule, the air clean and clear, sun bright in a preposterously blue sky.

  I had the front windows of my rented Cadillac rolled down, and the chill breeze, strong enough to bend even my bristle of white-blond hair, felt good on my chops. I’m thirty years old, six-foot-two and two hundred and six solid pounds, healthy, whole, and generally full of vigorous beans. I should have been feeling great despite the several hours of sleep I’d lost during the past week, particularly considering how uncommonly toothsome and friendly were the tomatoes who had helped me lose them.

  But I couldn’t push that mild, constant uneasiness out of my mind, couldn’t shake the occasional prickliness that cobwebbed the nape of my neck. It had started when I first spotted that dark sedan, the odd blue-black color of a beetle’s wing, behind me early this morning. And the queer “something” had been bugging me, increasingly, ever since.

  I knew what the trouble probably was.

  In thirty years of living, and especially during my several years as a private investigator, I had been similarly bugged often enough before to recognize the symptoms. I was missing something. Most likely something very obvious, plain as a wart on a fan-dancer’s fanny, something I’d looked smack-dab at but failed to see clearly. Perhaps because, as in the case of the fan-waving dancer, I had not been looking for warts.

  I hadn’t really been looking for much else, either, not yet. I’d been hired and pleasantly but firmly fired by one client, then swiftly reemployed by one of the wealthiest and—in view of what my fee might now add up to—most generous citizens of Newton. Newton, California, toward which I was now tooling my rented Cad. A slightly offbeat beginning, perhaps, and mildly perplexing, but nothing that struck me as unusually ominous or disturbing. Not, at least, on the surface....

  The hell with it, I told myself. There had been other occasions when the “something” giving rise to symptoms of mild unease was no more than an overdose of L.A.’s smothering smog or the fact that my shorts were too tight. So I leaned forward, stretching against the too-tight seat belt, and snapped on the radio, found some music that sounded less like elephants tap-dancing to a Watusi wedding chant than do most pop arias, and made myself relax.

  Soon I felt that tight knot atop my spine loosen a little, and warm a little, like a chunk of soft ice commencing to thaw. But not for long.

  I was rolling down Mulberry a hair over the 50 m.p.h. speed limit, not more than a couple of miles from the Newton city limits, when the truck careened around a curve maybe two blocks ahead of me. It wasn’t one of those little pickup trucks, or even a bigger cab and piggy-back-trailer job for carrying furniture to warehouses or an acre of manure from the farm. No, it was a monster cab-over-engine diesel rig with attached trailer, fenders like Volkswagens, and front bumper big enough to anchor a battleship, with the driver—if it had one, which considering the erratic nature of its progress was a debatable question—perched eight or ten feet up in the air. It looked like a flying locomotive, a dozen mobile homes stacked together, like a beat-up 747 jet preparing to land on me.

  It roared around the curve coming fast from my left to right, swerved, skidded, and swung back into the left lane. His left. My lane. The one I was in.

  If we hit head on, closing at well over a hundred miles an hour, the driver of that monstrosity might be considerably annoyed but I knew there’d be nothing left of my Cad, or me, except a colorful tangle of metallic strips and chunks like the remains of a giant time-bomb clock.

  But then the truck gradually pulled over into the right lane, away from dead-ahead, and I sucked my lungs full of the nippy pre-spring air, and had time to start letting it out in a sigh of happy thanksgiving and sweet relief.

  So at least I was relieved, and almost happy, when the sonofabitch hit me.

  2

  As the happy sigh bubbled past my lips I could see Newton ahead, sprawled out less than two miles away. I was also aware that at the edge of the road on my right, beyond a few feet of rock-studded earth, the ground dropped off suddenly and then slanted downward at about a twenty-degree slope for a hundred yards before leveling off. The initial drop wasn’t great, ten or fifteen feet, but the thought struck me that a guard rail would be a good idea here, along this few hundred “dangerous” feet of Mulberry Drive.

  By that time the big diesel was so close I couldn’t see the top of its cab without bending forward. More important—suddenly and nerve-splittingly more important—the truck had edged left again. Those monster wheels were well over the white line bisecting the highway, so far over there was no way—almost no way—to avoid a collision. I didn’t have even a split second for conscious thought. There was just the visual trauma of that mass of metal hurling itself down upon me and then I was yanking the steering wheel, still aware of the short sheer drop on my right but totally unconcerned about that lesser catastrophe.

  I thought I’d made it. For a moment I was sure I had made it, maybe by only part of a thin inch but by enough. So when the left front fender of that huge rig smashed against the rear end of my Cad with a sound like metal surf crashing on jagged cliffs and my head snapped sideways as the car seemed to jump out from beneath me, even then I knew the crazy bastard must have slapped his own steering wheel over and rammed me deliberately.

  And then there was concentrated chaos, crashing and shrieking of metal and squeal of rubber shredding on asphalt and splintering of glass and a yell splitting my throat and even, strangely, in all that other bedlam, the audible hush-whish of wind swirling through the windows and pulsing against my ears and face.

  That, and sudden jarrings, wrenchings, thumping of my body against door frame, chest against steering wheel, head solidly slamming something unyielding. Landscape swirling as the car jerked and spun, rocked, reared up—glimpses of trees and earth, strip of skittering road, even that sonofabitch diesel barreling away as it slid right on the spinning earth and out of my vision, tilting crazily as though climbing the sky.

  All of that crammed into an hours-long split second yanked out of now, and then ... a flight, a soaring ... a fine gentle quietness ... and suddenly...

  The only way you learn you’ve been knocked out is when you come to, so I realized I’d been unconscious for a while when I became dimly aware that I was held around the waist by some kind of vise crushing my ribs. My skull felt split. And I was staring through slowly focusing eyes at something I had not ever seen before.

  In a few seconds I managed to move my head, saw the bent steering wheel, crumpled hood beyond sha
ttered windshield. The car had come to rest on its side, and I was hanging from the seat belt, head dangling toward the Cad’s crumpled right side and the dark earth beneath it.

  It took five minutes or more for me to get out of the car.

  When I finally managed to unhook the seat belt, I fell to the bottom of the wrecked Cad, which in this case was its side. Or—straight down, like a stone. Naturally enough, I supposed.

  Though my brain seemed to be functioning quite well for one encased in a skull that was undoubtedly split, I rested on the bottom of the car’s side for a while, groping around for my thoughts. Either I rested, or else I wasn’t quite able to move, after landing on my head for the second time in—how long?

  I didn’t know how long. I didn’t have any idea of the minutes, or possibly hours, I’d been knocked cold. I worried about that for a while, then looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes past 2 p.m., if the thing was still accurate. I found the suitcase I’d been lugging around all day, tossed it up through the left front window. After scrambling and many grunts, as I became aware of other exquisitely painful areas of my anatomy, I was on bare earth outside the wrecked car. The sun was still high. So even though I wasn’t sure what time that rig clipped me, I couldn’t have been out for more than a few minutes, half an hour at most.

  I looked around until I discovered where the highway was at. There it was, only about a hundred feet away, but a good twenty or thirty feet above me. I sighed, picked up my suitcase, started hobbling toward Mulberry Drive.

  Knowing exactly where you want to go, they say, is half the battle. Swell. I was already halfway there. But with each step I took, I could feel stretched and bruised muscles protesting in my left thigh, and a large soldering iron barbecuing what seemed to be more ribs than I’ve got. So I stopped and sat down on my rear end, which by some miraculous circumstance appeared to have escaped noticeable injury, and rested a bit.

  I was in some need of rest, true; but before casually tottering back up to Mulberry, where I had so recently been almost totally creamed, I felt it would be wise to decide, if I could, whether I had just survived an accident or a coldly calculated attempt to murder me.

  I had not the faintest idea why anybody would want to kill me. Not up here. Back in L.A.-Hollywood, yes. There were lots of Southern California losers whose chief goal in life was my instant demise. But here?

  It didn’t seem likely, but ... maybe. Because whoever had been piloting that diesel rig hadn’t even come back to say “Excuse me.” And maybe was enough for me, since when guys want to kill you they usually cling to that old if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed saw, and—if they miss—try again.

  So I sat on my miraculous rear end and mentally glanced over the several events of this day. I thought back to last night when it had begun, with the phone in my apartment ringing. And I looked rather closely at what had occurred since then, because if I found whatever the hell I was looking for I could much more confidently stagger onward and upward to Mulberry Drive.

  More, I could look forward to seeing stunningly luscious and stupendously shapely Canada Southern again. Perhaps even to the good, or possibly very bad, luck of once more glimpsing Melinda Fowler’s water-sprinkled behind, sparkling beauteously in the sunlight as though studded with understandably incandescent diamonds, an apparition nearly as mystically inspiring—in its own way of course—as two Taj Mahals by moonlight. There was even the stimulating possibility that glacially lovely Martinique Monet might melt, grow warm, conceivably commence steaming.

  It was as elementary as Dr. Watson: for all that, I had to be alive.

  In addition to all that, there was also the scheduled Grand Opening tonight—only a few hours away now—of Newton’s much ballyhoo-hooed Club Rogue. With its plush appointments, jolly camaraderie among Rogue Members and Fellows, gourmet food and stiff drinks, and the honest-to-God presence—so it had been widely though rather discreetly rumored—of twelve exquisitely good-looking and gorgeously constructed “Rogue Hostesses,” or cocktail waitresses, none of whom would be wearing any pants. So, at least, it had been rumored.

  For that, for that and more, I had to live. Most important of all, my chief goal in life—kept secret until now—is to die, at the age of not less than one hundred and fifty years, of a sudden seizure while attending solicitously to a friendly tomato of not more than seventy-nine.

  Thus fired up by all kinds of goals, I scrutinized with some care the events of recent hours, gazed again on the scenes, the people, the faces.

  Somewhere along the way, if I looked with clear eyes, perhaps I would find what I was after: that wart on the fan-dancer’s fanny....

  3

  Home is where the hearth is, and for me that’s the Spartan Apartment Hotel in Hollywood. It’s on North Rossmore, facing the Wilshire Country Club’s fenced-in green fairways directly across the street, a nine iron from Beverly Boulevard and a short drive in the opposite direction, and in a car, to the corner of Sunset and Vine.

  The more literal “hearth” of the home—that is, of my three-room-and-bath apartment on the Spartan’s second floor—is the front room’s fake fireplace loaded with very outdoorsy-looking gas logs. On the wall above, Amelia, my wonderfully bright and bawdy nude, resurrected from a pawnshop where she’d been left by some oaf who lacked culture. Nearby, squatting on the thick shag nap of my yellow-gold carpet, is a massive chocolate-brown divan which, could it speak, I would burn in the fake fireplace.

  Against the wall across the room, just left of the front door as you come in and kick your shoes off, are the two tropical fish tanks: the large one occupied by everything from vividly glowing little neon tetras up to a dashing red swordtail and the mate he dashes after, and a very fat, very gravid, black mollie; the smaller ten-gallon aquarium sparkling with rainbow-colored guppies and one-inch-long catfish.

  It was not quite 10:30 p.m. Friday, March third. And I was out of the shower, heading for bed. Early in the eve for me to be turning in, true, but on Tuesday I’d hit the sack at 3 a.m., Wednesday night I’d not slept a wink, and last night I’d gone to bed at two this morning but remained awake for an hour thinking about Wednesday night.

  Tomorrow evening, the peak of the week, I would be escorting to dinner for the first time one Anjarene Rubela, which sounds like a severe skin disease, but isn’t, and if it were I’d rub it on girls. Judging merely by the way Anjarene looked, which so far was all I could judge by, if we ate anything spicy I might not get any sleep at all from then until Monday.

  So I was already yawning, sort of psyching myself into the mood, when my bare feet hit the bedroom’s black carpet, and the phone rang.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, scowled at the bugger while it rang twice more, then shrugged, grabbed it, and said, “Hello.”

  “Hello. Is this Mr. Scott? Sheldon Scott?”

  The voice was deep, but it banged my ear with what seemed unnecessary authority, like the sound of those L.A. citizens who raise their voices when phoning Pasadena.

  “Yeah, this is Shell Scott. Who’s calling? And”—I got a fleeting vision of Anjarene, and simultaneously a sickening premonition—”why?”

  “This is Mayor Fowler, of Newton, California, Mr. Scott. Everson Fowler. The matter I wish to discuss is of some urgency, or I would not have phoned at this hour.”

  “Oh?” Usually the calls I get at night on the bedroom phone are from very close friends, or hoods, informants—or lovelies like Anjarene. “You’re a mayor, huh?”

  “Yes. Of course. Are you free? Could you come to Newton? As soon as possible—tonight?”

  “Well ... yeah. Sure. Yeah, if it’s horrendously important. I did have a little, ah, job to do tomorr—”

  “You must excuse me if I’m brusque, Mr. Scott. I am very tired, and I have little time. If it is agreeable to you, I would appreciate your coming here to conduct an investigation for a few of my associates and me. This is not strictly official city business, but it would be profitless to go into details unless I am assu
red of your cooperation.”

  “O.K., you’ve got it.” I sighed. I would not be sharing anything spicy tomorrow night with Anjarene. “Mayor ... Newton—”

  “Not Mayor Newton. Mayor Fowler.”

  “Yeah, I know. I was trying to place Newton—it’s up north, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, about fifty miles beyond San Francisco. You’re not familiar with our wonderful city? ‘Newton—the Newest, Nicest City in the Whole Wide West’? Our population has grown—”

  “You bet. Sure.” He was a mayor, all right. “Of course I’m familiar with your city, Mr. Mayor. It’s just that I haven’t been north of San Francisco for years. If you’re in a hurry, I’d better fly up.”

  “Excellent, excellent.”

  “I’ll find out when my plane gets in tomorrow and let you know. By the way, my familiarity with your city is limited to what I’ve got from newspapers or television, but could I have read a few items recently about Newton that weren’t so wonderful?”

  “Yes. That is precisely the problem, Mr. Scott, and my reason for contacting you. There is corruption here, serious corruption and criminal manipulation, malfeasance—much more serious than any of us realized until quite recently.”

  He went on for a full minute, speaking crisply and concisely, cramming a good deal of info into the time. He filled me in on one recent case of proven “corruption,” which was the word Mayor Fowler used more than any other, and told me of several areas where suspicion of payoffs, bribery, felonious extortion, and even violent assault was more than justified by the available evidence, even though that evidence was not—yet—sufficient for the issuing of indictments or hope of successful prosecutions.

  The violence, Mayor Fowler concluded, encompassed everything from mere threats of physical damage to persons or property, through mild-to-severe beatings including an assortment of broken arms and legs plus a concussion or two, to finally murder.