The Cheim Manuscript (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  It was the phone in the living room. The listed one.

  The illuminated dial of the clock by my bed told me it was 10:50 p.m. Id slept a whole twenty minutes.

  I got a light on, stumbled into the front room, grabbed the phone. Yeah? It wasn’t a very jolly sound, even to me.

  Neither was what came back. Scott? Jesus, I’m in trouble, I mean trouble. I got to see you.

  I thought it was Kiffer, but I wasn’t certain. The mans voice was quavering, shaking. Yeah, this is Scott, I said. But I’m not sure I know who you are.

  Its Mac. Kiffer, dammit. Listen, I spotted a couple of them bastards on my tail, but I think I shook em. Hell, I’m not even sure of that, calling from a pay phone, got the door open so there’s no light —

  Slow down. What do you want me to do?

  Come out here — not here, someplace else. I . . . maybe we can make an easier deal. I can maybe soften my end of it a little. I’ve got to leave my heap. They spot that again and I’m dead. I tell you, those bastards are going to kill me.

  Mac, calm down. And slow down. You want me to meet you? Why don’t you come here to the Spartan —

  Man, you don’t get it. When I drove to my house I seen a car parked across the street, couple guys in it. I couldn’t make them right off, but I was pretty sure they was Eddys boys — they was, all right. I swung over so the headlights hit em and, goddamn, it was Luddy and Burper. I kept goin like it was Indianapolis, but I seen them wheel around and come after me.

  He stopped, breathing heavily. I lost the cruds. I thought. Then they show up behind me. Twice I shook em, and twice they got back on my butt. I think maybe they tagged the car earlier, bugged it, you know —

  I know what you mean.

  So the bastards could be just tunin in on me, wherever I’m at. Anyhow, there’s no goddamn time to be crawling under the car and lookin around for I don’t know what. I’m parked here in a gas station, way the hell out on Cypress Road. Stations closed, but there’s a pay phone, I’m in it now.

  He was still almost incoherent, and I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted. So, again, I asked him about that.

  Look, Scott, for crissakes just come out here and pick me up, will you? Not here; I’ll hotfoot down the road half a mile, place there we can meet. I cant stay here with my heap. . . . He spat out his four-letter word again, adding, I got to get outa here!

  OK, I’ll meet you. What then? Drive around? Go to the Police Building, let you sleep in a safe cell?

  Well . . . maybe we can go to the LAPD. Mainly I’m tryin to stay alive. Look, I’m no good to you and the fuzz if I aint alive, am I?

  That’s the truth. Where do I pick you up?

  He told me, in short sentences punctuated by heavy breathing. It was a lonely area, a quiet — and, at night, dark — tree-lined road not much used since the landscape had become plastered with freeways.

  I said, Mac, just so I can be sure it is you, tell me what we talked about earlier. He hit a couple of small items and I said, Convince me this way, Mac. Who was the guy sold the dope to Mr. E, then skipped with the stripper?

  Silence.

  Sam and I already know, I said. It wasn’t too tough to figure out. But Id be impressed if youd tell me.

  More silence. But finally he said, It was the Ogre.

  And he skipped with Scarlett OHarem.

  Yeah. He sounded startled. You wasn’t kidding, was you?

  No, I wasn’t. One more thing and I’ll be on my way.

  Hell, its enough I —

  You just might have been pulling my leg a little earlier this evening. And Captain Samson is most concerned about this bit. The evidence, Mac. The proof of your story. Without that everythings zero. So what is it?

  I cant spill that, Scott —

  Hurry it up. Unless you’ve got all the time in the world.

  More silence.

  Then, the four-letter word. Twice. But after that he said rapidly, Ogre wrote the whole thing down in his own writing. Names, who it was, what he done himself, everything — me included. My names on the damn paper, too. Which is why I got to get a deal fixed. He names Eddy and — well — the whole works. On account of putting his own name in it, that was another reason he had to lam out, see?

  Uh-huh. Even that might not be good enough. Its just a piece of paper with a story on it. And the guy who wrote it — or allegedly wrote it — has skipped to nobody knows where. Maybe the things faked.

  Don’t kid yourself. The dude he sold it to wasn’t no dumb crud. He made Ogre write it in his own writing with his prints on top of some of the writing — and besides that put his fingerprint on the bottom and sign his signature over his print. Its absolute cold. It even says where — where the guys at we buried. Hell, you got Hennys prints — even his writing — downtown. There’s plenty to check out.

  Sounds better. Whos Mr. E? Who did Ogre sell his info to?

  No, goddammit, no. No! I give you any more and I’m up the creek, I got nothing left to bargain with. No.

  All right, Mac. I’m on my way.

  Oh, Jesus, he said softly.

  Give me five minutes to dress, twenty-five, maybe twenty minutes to get there, pushing it a little. That makes it . . . eleven-thirty p.m. at the latest.

  I waited for him to say something, like Make it eleven-twenty, anything. But he didn’t.

  Mac?

  Nothing.

  Then — not before, while I was talking to Kiffer, or a man I felt pretty sure was Kiffer — the phone was hung up.

  It wasn’t hung up with a click. The connection simply ended, as though a finger had gently pressed down the receiver.

  I looked at the phone in my hand for a moment, dropped it into the cradle. But then I moved. In three minutes Id dressed, a bit sloppily but complete with gun harness and Colt. Then I hustled down the stairs, and headed the Cad for Cypress Road.

  And — I hoped — Mac Kiffer.

  Cypress Road was a dark, two-lane strip of somewhat bumpy asphalt. It was little used, and I had some doubts about whether I should be using it myself.

  On the way here Id phoned Homicide and filled Samson in on Kiffers call. He had asked me the same question that was in my mind — whether I was sure Id been talking to Kiffer. I told him Id let him know when I got back. He cheered me with his closing comment: Don’t you mean if?

  It was his closing comment because I hung up on him. But the word stayed with me, that miserable little if.

  The dark shapes of trees on both sides of the road loomed in the beam of my headlights, rushed toward me and then brushed past, whispering, falling rapidly behind. I passed the gas station from which Kiffer said he was phoning. It was a black night — this was the first night of the new moon — and the stations lights were out. But I could dimly see the rectangular shape of a phone booth, a sedan parked beyond it. That would be Mac Kiffers Lincoln.

  So far it checked. So far.

  Kiffer had said Id be able to recognize the spot where he would wait for me by the snapped-off trunks of half a dozen small trees and, beyond them, the scarred two-foot-thick trunk of a tall eucalyptus which had been hit a few months back by a hopped-up sports car, in which a young guy and his girl had been racing, presumably happily, toward sudden death.

  The incident was of no real importance to me at the moment, except as a way to identify the spot chosen for the meet. But the brief thought of what had happened there in a jarring, deadly second or two crept into my mind, lingered.

  I spotted the small tree stumps on my right, snapped off close to the ground, and the mangled surface of the eucalyptus beyond them, deep scars of near white still slashing the bark. I kept driving. I didn’t see Kiffer, but he’d told me he for sure wouldn’t be standing out in plain sight but back behind the scarred tree. A mile farther on I doused the Cads headlights, U-turned and drove back, shifting into neutral and coasting to within a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, yards of the meeting place.

  I didn’t open the car door and climb out — th
e inside lights go on automatically when the door opens. Instead I got a flashlight from the glove compartment, then hoisted my bulk through an open window, crossed the street, and in the earth alongside the asphalt walked as quietly as I could toward the spot where those two young lovers had died.

  Death was in my mind, but not only because of that remembered crash. There was the way Kiffer had sounded; the possibility that his panic had been an act to get me out here; and, aside from that, merely the thought of two names: Luddy and Burper. Clarence Ludlow and Francis McGee. When you thought of those two you quite naturally thought of death.

  A good twenty yards from the scarred tree I angled away from the road, walking slowly, placing my feet carefully. A cricket chirped not far away, and in the distance a frog croaked at regular intervals. The Colt, hammer thumbed back, was in my right hand, flashlight in my left.

  Every few feet I stopped, listening. The last time I was only about six feet from the tree, and a dry twig snapped under my foot with a crack in the near silence like a small firecracker going off.

  Instantly the cricket stopped chirping. But I heard something else. On my left. Close on my left. It was the most incongruous of sounds, a sound which — at another time and place — might have struck me as humorous, even hilarious.

  It was a burp.

  That’s not quite correct. It was more than merely a burp, much more. It was a remarkable rumbling and churning, soft at first, as though from agonized innards far off in the distance, innards in which tainted turbulence was slowly swelling and rising, and then — as though coming nearer, ever nearer, getting louder, ever louder — a fluttering, a muffled booming. . . . Well, it was simply not accurate to call it a burp.

  It would be more accurate to describe it as a symphony of incompatible gasses, or a Homeric hymn to indigestion, even an entire Black Mass to Gas. It was a whole concert of squeakings and hissings and boomings and bubblings which were themselves merely the overture to a gaseous explosion of such prodigious volume, resonance and duration as to be unique in the entire history of heartburn.

  Who else but Burper McGee? Who else in the whole world could have produced such a previously unheard of sound? And why would Burper McGee be out here in the woods perfuming the pre-midnight air? This was a moment of great stress for McGee. Assuredly he had for long been standing here under the new moon, taut, tense, twitching, nerves tingling in anticipation, gas preparing to rise, as he awaited . . . me.

  I have mentioned that when suffering undue emotion Burper became — well — more truly Burper. And Id never had a calming effect upon him even when merely waving Hi from across the street. It was thus clear that he must have been for some time all aflutter in anticipation of the increasingly imminent opportunity to kill me. And, now that the golden opportunity was at hand, he had — well, whatever it was he had done. It was probably, under the circumstances, an inevitable happening, a consequence as certain as the sunrise.

  You should not assume that all those squeakings and such had consumed, say, a minute and a half. No, a second and a half would be more like it. Maybe even less. Because as that at least superburp began its tortuous route from Burpers cavernous gut up toward his esophagus and beyond, I started moving.

  Even before that final explosion I had whirled toward him, squatting low, flicking on the flashlight held at arms length away from my body and leveling the gun toward the spot from which I thought the sound had come.

  And, incidentally, was still coming.

  But Burper was ready, too. He had been ready for quite a while, ready for me, and he fired before I did.

  But as he fired and the blast slammed my ears I got a glimpse of him in the edge of light from my flash — eyes wide and shiny in the glow, mouth open, round belly protruding, gleam from the gun held before him. Simultaneously I felt a blow against my left hand, the light went out, the flashlight spun through the air, thudded against a tree.

  He’d fired at the sudden beam of light and hit the flash or my hand. I didn’t know which and I didn’t worry about it then. I knew where he’d been standing. And I fired at that spot four times, as fast as I could pull the Colts trigger.

  I heard all four slugs hit him. It was a sound like a meat ax slamming four times into a thick sirloin steak. And I heard Burper grunt, groan and fall. So I fired again, at the spot where I thought he had fallen.

  I waited. Maybe ten seconds. Then I moved forward. He was still alive; I could hear him breathing, hear his bubbling breath. I fumbled in my pocket, brought out my cigarette lighter, flipped it on — gun ready, one last cartridge still ready, too, in its chamber.

  But that last one wouldn’t be needed.

  Burper lay on his back with one leg caught beneath his fat body, the other angled out and bent sharply at the knee. One of my slugs had ripped open his cheek. The rest were in his body somewhere. His .45 automatic was a couple of feet from his angled leg and an unused flashlight lay on the ground almost touching his left hand.

  He died within three or four seconds after I snapped on the lighter. In the illumination from the flame, held close to his face, I could see the last movement of his lips, hear the last little purping sound that was pressed between them.

  Then all his muscles relaxed, his head tipped a little farther to the side. His popeyes still stared. I left the corpse of Burper McGee where it lay, picked up his gun and flashlight, and started walking back to my Cad.

  I started walking — but very soon I was running.

  Because I could hear the whine of a cars engine rising in the scale and getting louder. Lights flashed suddenly on my left, the headlights of a car already traveling close to fifty miles an hour. It roared past me, still rapidly accelerating, as my feet hit the dirt edging the asphalt. I thumbed on Burpers flashlight, but even then, in the darkness behind the cars headlights all I could see was one figure — or possibly two — in the front seat of the sedan.

  I was moving pretty speedily myself by the time I reached the road, but I thought I saw somebody behind the wheel and another form on the drivers right side, either falling forward or ducking out of sight. I didn’t slow down. I made it to the Cad in fifteen or twenty seconds, sprinting. Inside, I dug the keys from my pocket, got them in the ignition, started the engine. I put the Cad in gear, whipped the wheel left — then changed my mind and straightened out.

  Before Id be able to get up any real speed that car would be nearly a mile ahead of me. And less than a mile down the road was an intersection at Coral Drive. I wouldn’t know if the driver had turned left or right on Coral or gone straight ahead on Cypress. I gunned the Cad toward the gas station Id passed earlier, reaching under the dash for the Mobile phone. My left hand was a little numb, but not cut or bleeding; Burpers slug hadnt hit it.

  I put a call in to the LAPD complaint board and asked the officer to hot-shot it. I told him I was Shell Scott, sketched in the situation, said, Dark sedan traveling west on Cypress Road, close to the intersection of Cypress and Coral Drive right now. Driver probably Clarence Ludlow, known as Luddy. Possibly in the car is Mac Kiffer, maybe alive, maybe dead. Hold on, I’ll be back in ten seconds.

  While talking Id swung into the gas station and started skidding to a stop. The car Id earlier noted parked near the phone booth was gone. But I let the Cad roll past the station building and behind it — where it would have been hidden from me when I drove by earlier — was another car, a two-year-old Chrysler.

  I dropped the phone on the seat, slammed the Cads door open and trotted to the Chrysler carrying Burpers flashlight. I leaned in the open left-hand window. I couldn’t read the registration slip, reached for it, grabbed it and yanked it out. The car was registered in the name of Francis M. McGee. I swept the flashlights beam around the cars interior but it was empty.

  I jumped back to the Cad and grabbed the phone. Shell Scott again. That sedan is a new four-door Lincoln, dark blue, registered in the name of Mac Kiffer. I spelled the name, mentioned the possibility that a radio transmitter was attach
ed to the car, as I fumbled in my coat pocket and got my notebook, flipped it open, then read from its last entry. Registration on the Lincoln is HFZ440. That’s it.

  I broke off, waited a few seconds, placed another call to the Police Building. This time I got Homicide, but had to hold half a minute before Samson came on the line.

  Shell, Sam. I told him of my call to the complaint board and went on, If Kiffer was in on this, he’s jamming with Luddy. If not, Luddys driving Kiffers car and Kiffers either beat to hell or dead. And Id say dead.

  You didn’t meet Kiffer?

  No. Kiffer wasn’t waiting for me. Burper was. Burpers dead, by the way. But the important thing is to spot that car of Kiffers before Luddy can ditch it, or there’s nothing but my word to say he was ever out of downtown LA.

  How do you know its Kiffers car?

  I’m going along with what he told me on the phone. He parked his heap near the booth he called me from. The car was there a few minutes ago, but its not now. A car registered to Francis McGee is here, though. While tailing Kiffer, Burper and Luddy were in the same car, obviously McGees. So the only buggy left for them to be in is the one Kiffer drove out here.

  Well send an ambulance for McGee. Wheres he at? Better start at the beginning and tell it all.

  As I began talking a police cruiser went by, heading west. Code Three, red light flashing and siren wailing. It didn’t take long to tell my story, but by the time Id finished, an event of considerable import had occurred.

  Sam was agreeing that the most likely explanation was my assumption that Luddy and Burper had caught up with Kiffer while he was in the phone booth. The last words Id heard from Kiffer, the soft, Oh, Jesus, could well have been the moment when he’d seen Luddy and Burper looking in at him, smiling, over their Colt .45 automatics. Id thought it was simply an expression of relief, a sigh of release.

  But I wasn’t sure — not for another ten seconds.

  Because Samson broke off briefly and, when he came back on, said, Team in a radio car was on Cypress when you called in. They didn’t spot the car, but theyve got Kiffer.