The Kubla Khan Caper (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  “No,” he interrupted. “It was Ephrim.”

  “Sardis phoned you himself?”

  “Yes.”

  I could hear a siren. And there were voices close outside the door.

  “What time was that?” I asked Monaco.

  “About a quarter after four.”

  “Uh-huh. How long did it take you to get to the Sardis estate? You did go?”

  “Yes, of course. Ephrim said it was of the utmost importance that I come immediately. It took me twenty minutes to get there. He was dead. Shot, slumped over on his desk. At first I didn’t know what to do, then I left and drove back home . . . . Well, drove at least to Yucca Road.”

  “Where Jeanne was already dead. Why was she going to see you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “She didn’t phone you, contact you in any way?”

  Monaco shook his head. “Not unless she called my home after I’d left to see Ephrim. I was hoping you might be able to tell me why she was calling on me.”

  “We can’t ask Jeanne,” I said, “so we can only guess now. Maybe she’d spotted Jerry behind her and was just running away from him, but I doubt that. I think she was on her way to see you, and it’s my guess she was going to put the bite on you, too, before she skipped. Grab all she could and blow.”

  “You mean she might have thought I’d pay to avoid—well, difficulties, scandal, with the opening of the Kubla Khan imminent?”

  “Something like that. Remember, she probably thought you had nearly as much money as Ephrim Sardis. What else did he tell you on the phone?”

  Two men came inside. One of them carried a doctor’s black bag and, looking around, didn’t have to be told what to do. He merely glanced at Misty, briefly felt her wrist and lifted an eyelid, then walked to what was left of Jerry Vail. I saw him shake his head slightly, then put his bag down and open it.

  Monaco said in a quieter tone, “He told me it had to do with his son-in-law, and with the Kubla Khan. It was something I, as the person publicly identified with the Khan, should know before the opening. That was all, but he did stress the urgency and importance of what he had to tell me.”

  “OK. He phoned you at four-fifteen and it took you twenty minutes to get there, which means you would have arrived about four-fhirty-five. The law got their call at four-twenty-eight. Pretty close. Jerry must have called them. He should have waited a little longer but it almost worked.”

  “What almost worked?”

  “Well, you’d been inside and were already out of the Sardis house, on your way home, before the sheriff’s car arrived and the deputy spotted you. A little later and he would have caught you in there, or leaving, and your goose would have been cooked. Jerry must have known approximately how long it would take the radio car to get there, so he reported hearing a shot at a time he figured would bring the law to the house while you were in it. Obviously he wouldn’t have wanted them to get there before you drove up. But he couldn’t calculate it close enough, or maybe was just unlucky.”

  “I see.” He paused, delicate gray-flecked brows knit in thought. “You’re saying, then, that Jerry shot Ephrim—ah, you mean Jerry must have been present when Ephrim phoned me. He heard Ephrim speak to me on the phone.”

  “Of course. And therefore knew you were on your way out to see Sardis.”

  “So Jerry shot Ephrim, waited, then phoned the police at what he hoped was the appropriate moment . . . .”

  “Yeah, only he didn’t stick around by the dead body while waiting to place his call. You can bet he skipped in a hurry and phoned from someplace else.”

  Misty moved on the divan.’

  Monaco and I both stepped over by her. She sighed, blinked her eyes. She moistened her lips, then slowly her eyes opened. She looked first at Monaco, then at me. Terror and pain were still in those violet-shadowed eyes, and it was at least a minute before that nearness-to-death look faded from them. She felt her throat, swallowed a little water, and finally could speak to us in a quiet voice which trembled a little.

  We talked for a few moments, and I stood so she couldn’t see Jerry Vail—he was flat on the floor now, though it had taken two men to pull the scimitar from the wall, and from him.

  When she seemed pretty well in control, I said, “Misty, what happened before he—got violent?”

  “When he came in he wanted to talk a little. I thought . . . it was about whatever it was he’d mentioned on the phone, the special performance, whatever it—There wasn’t any, of course.” She stopped, sipped some more water. “He started asking me about Jeanne, the night she spent with me. After quite a lot of other questions, he finally asked if Jeanne had mentioned her husband’s name. Then I remembered.” She rubbed her throat gently.

  “Remembered what. Misty?”

  “That she had told me, only I guess it didn’t make much impression at the time. I couldn’t think of it when I talked to you about Jeanne last night. I told Mr. Vail—” Her eyes widened again. “Where is he?”

  “Relax. He’s . . . in good hands. Nothing to worry about. Go on.”

  “I told him I did remember her telling me. I’d heard the name but couldn’t recall it right then.”

  “Sure, but if you’d heard it he knew you’d probably be able to remember if anybody asked you the right way.”

  “Well, he asked me himself. Or told me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, he asked me if I’d heard the name Maurice Boutelle. That was it. I remembered then. So of course I told him that was the name Jeanne had mentioned. She’d said her husband, the man she was trying to make sure didn’t see her here, was Maurice Boutelle. I even remembered she laughed, as if there were something funny about it. And . . . “ Misty’s eyes darkened again, became puzzled. “All of a sudden Mr. Vail started to choke me. Why? Why did he try to kill me?”

  “Because Jerry was Maurice Boutelle,” I said. “It’s a long story. But it’s over now.”

  I got out my pack of cigarettes and lit one. “He was fighting a losing battle, anyway,” I said to Monaco. “He was already lost whether he knew it or not. He’d have had to kill two or three other people to have any hope of staying clear. Maybe Warren Phelps, for one—and me. Of course, he did try to kill me. Twice.”

  I reached up and felt the back of my head again. The bump was still there. It was a dandy—and my scalp had done some more bleeding. I’d naturally lost my turban somewhere in the last few minutes. I was feeling the sticky, already coagulating blood—fortunately, I heal fast, I heal like crazy—when Misty cried, “Shell, you’re bleeding—”

  “Yeah, I was just patting—”

  “Your leg’s all bloody . . . . Where are your trousers?”

  “Trousers?”

  Oh, boy, I thought. I’d forgotten about that. Just too damn many things to keep track of.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said to Misty, “you missed all the . . . uh.”

  About then it penetrated that she’d not said my head, but my leg, was all bloody. I looked at it. Bloody? Yuck, it was a gory-looking limb if ever there’d been one. I bent over and examined it the best I could. That one shot Vail took at me had knocked a chunk from the outside of my thigh. It wasn’t a sensational wound, but it had bled quite a lot, since I have so much blood it always seems eager to spring out of me, and then rolling around and fighting with Bull had spread the redness more than a little. It started hurting like hell as I looked at it, so I stopped looking at it.

  I wasn’t going to lose the leg—no more of it than I’d already lost—but I was sure going to have to wash it off, and put lots of iodine on it.

  “Shell, where are your trousers?”

  “Misty, don’t ask so damn—don’t talk so—you really should rest your throat, dear.”

  Then I looked at Ormand Monaco, feeling a little heat rising in me. “Well, friend,” I said, in what was not my most amiable voice, “didn’t you notice me bleeding to death? Didn’t it occur to you that perhaps some amateur surgeon had
bungled the amputation of my leg? Was it not worth mentioning that my life’s blood was dripping, dripping—”

  “Why, I thought,” he said soberly, “that Mr. Harper must have bitten your leg. While you were gouging out his eyes. And tearing his nose off—”

  “You’re a scream. OK. There seems very little more joy I can scatter here—but I’ve done what you hired me to do, Monaco. I told you something unusual might happen . . . . The hell with it. Give me my C-note and I shall remove myself from your spendid presence.”

  “C-note?”

  “Perhaps I should explain for you cultured chaps that a C-note is gutter argot for a hundred fish, ten sawbucks—my hundred dollars, which believe it or not I have earned—”

  “You have earned ten G’s, Mr. Scott,” he said quietly.

  “G’s? Where did you learn—” I stopped. “Hold it. Thanks, but no thanks. I made a deal with you, remember? The whole ball of wax by noon, and ten G’s. If not by then, a C-note a day. And the hundred fish,” I added stuffily, “should just about cover the expense of my transfusions, but I assured you I’d tap you only for unusual expenses—”

  “I made the deal, Mr. Scott. You merely agreed to it. And I assure you, sir, had you concluded this—this—this madness one second after the hour of twelve I would die . . . I would die before I would pay you one nickel more than a hundred dollars. But since you did, in good faith, if in—ah—oh—in—since you did successfully conclude the requirements for earning the ten thousand dollars, that is precisely what I intend to pay you.”

  “You off your nut?” I said. I looked at my watch. “It is now sixteen minutes after noon. If my clock hasn’t stopped. No, the little beggar’s still tick—”

  “Of course it is now well after noon. You have been standing there, in your shorts, bleeding like an oaf, for at least a quarter of an hour.”

  “Watch this oaf business, old buddy. And I shall kindly ask you to leave my shorts out of this.”

  “Will you shut up?” That look of one getting his foot caught in a bear trap, which I had spied on Monaco’s chops a time or two before, was spreading over his face.

  He went on, his tone heavy and sharp-edged, like the chopper descending in a guillotine. “When you stated that you had . . . pierced Mr. Vail with the scimitar, and that he was the guilty person, that he had killed Ephrim and the girl as well, I—unfortunately—looked at my watch. It was then just twenty seconds of noon.”

  “Twenty seconds? Of?”

  “To be precise, twenty-one seconds. Since that is the truth, the tragic truth, I must in honesty pay you the agreed sum of ten thousand dollars.”

  “Glory be,” I said. “Let’s check our watches.”

  He said, “It is twelve-seventeen and . . . ten seconds now.”

  “You’re four seconds slow. But we won’t quibble about—”

  From the doorway, a word. One word, which I had heard delivered in the same voice but not quite with the same resonance, earlier today in the lobby of the Kubla Khan.

  I looked around at Sergeant Torgesen filling the doorway; and, filling his broad face, the expression of a man with both legs caught in a bear trap.

  I grinned at him, but there was no opportunity for jolly conversation with the sergeant because I heard Monaco saying, in words as dry and cold as frozen carbon dioxide, “I do not have time at the moment, Mr. Harper, but be assured I shall have much to say to you very soon.”

  Harper? Bull Harper? Ye gods, was he still hanging around here? I had assumed he’d be a dwindling dot on the horizon by now. But—still here?

  “Misty,” I cried. “Shut your eyes! Turn away. Don’t look—get away, run, run—”

  But Monaco was continuing, those icy tones cutting through my babble. “I am delighted,” he said, “simply delighted to see that you have descended so far into stultifying convention that you are once again wearing trousers. I can think of nothing, out of literally millions of possibilities, for which at the moment I could possibly be more grateful. I congratulate you, Mr. Harper, on your hindsight. I extend to you in all sincerity the fervent thanks of the management, the staff, and notable celebrities and guests . . . of the Kubla . . . “

  He couldn’t go on. Ormand Monaco reached up and patted his face rapidly from both sides with his hands, in what I supposed was a nervous gesture. He was pulling on his cheeks now, getting them out pretty far and then letting them snap in.

  Bull was, in fact, wearing my keen trousers. They didn’t look so keen to me anymore. I walked over to him.

  “Well, you’re a real idiot,” I said cheerfully.

  He grinned. Now that I took a good look at him, it was clear he must be quite a handsome man when he wasn’t all beat up. “Your damn pants are too tight,” he rumbled.

  “The pants are perfect. You’re just too damn big.”

  “Big enough to take you. I’ll knock your head outside your ears next time.”

  “Hoo-hoo,” I laughed. “You couldn’t take me even when I was all shot to hell, weak from . . . well, from lots of things.”

  “You’re not bad,” he admitted. “For a little guy.”

  “Look, what say we call a truce? Even a temporary truce. Neither of us is going to get anything done if we keep hitting each other. Right?”

  “Well, there is some sense in what you say. But it might get over with quicker if you didn’t run so fast.”

  “Bull, there are some areas where I will not even try to compete with you, and one of them is running. I know you must have taken a shortcut, but if we must battle again, let’s agree on a time and place, and walk there.”

  He grinned again. His teeth were all red. I’d got a lip or two of his pretty good, too. Boy, my head was beginning to hurt like fury. And my leg was already starting to feel shorter than the other one. And there were great throbbing places just about every place there was a place.

  “OK. Truce. But we gonna have to talk pretty quick.”

  “Bull, I’ll talk to you any old time.”

  He looked at Ormand Monaco, the other people in the room, then strode out. I walked to the door. He strode along, almost bounced along, with a spring step. On his way back, I presumed, to Room 218.

  He started to turn his head and I ducked back out of sight, then in a few seconds poked an eye past the door frame. And grinned. Painfully, of course; for quite a while I would grin painfully. But I managed a pretty good one. Because Bull, having satisfied himself that I wasn’t watching, had put one big hand over a kidney and was walking on, bent over a bit, and lamping.

  I turned and went back by Misty. She looked better. There was color in her lovely face and her eyes once more were sprinkled with magic.

  She even managed a slow, sweet smile when I asked, “How are you. Misty? You feeling any better?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, Shell. I really am, now.”

  And—then—so was I.

  22

  It was 8:46 p.m. and 22 seconds—I had begun checking the time pretty closely lately—and I was seated on a rather rigid wooden chair in the Grand Ballroom of the Kubla Khan.

  I was showered, scrubbed, shaved, bandaged, iodined and physically enormously uncomfortable. But mentally I was in about as good shape as I get, which is pretty good.

  The ten of us—the ten judges—sat in cushioned wooden chairs along one side of the elevated runway extending among cloth-covered dining tables in the middle of the ballroom. At the dining tables, having already dined sufficiently, sat the two hundred or so guests from last night’s party, plus perhaps another three hundred who had checked in during the afternoon for the Kubla Khan’s grand-opening day.

  The beauty contest, which Ormand Monaco referred to as the “talent search,” was well under way. Opening music and songs and an en-masse parade of the lovelies had used up half an hour delightfully, and now the individual contestants were displaying their physical and dramatic assets, which was fun, since even their physical assets were immensely dramatic.

  It took about five min
utes for each girl to go through her solo parade and dramatic routine, and the third contestant, a tall, pale-skinned platinum blonde, had just completed a monologue based on Of Human Bondage—and very good she’d been, too.

  As she walked, or rather commenced slinking from the stage, Misty said to me, “Then Jeanne really was still married to Jerry Vail? So he was never Neyra’s husband at all?”

  “Well, that’s partly right, honey—he was never Neyra’s husband. But he’d never really been legally married to Jeanne, either. He’d pulled the same love-’em-and-leave-’em trick two or three times even before meeting Jeanne. With him, bigamy was a combination of fun and business, but of course Jeanne didn’t know that—she thought she actually was still married to Jerry. Or Maurice. Or whoever it turns out he really was.”

  The late Jerry Vail had surprisingly hung on to life for nearly an hour, and for ten of the last minutes he’d been conscious. Conscious enough to talk for four or five of those minutes. Enough; more than enough.

  “When Jeanne finally got to see Sardis yesterday,” I went on, “she told him she’d been working in Vegas for three months—which she had—and could get a divorce from Jerry right away. Which she was willing to do, for twenty thousand clams. No noise, no scandal, all smooth as silk. Sardis didn’t like it, but the money didn’t matter much to him, especially with the Khan on the verge of opening, so he gave her the twenty G’s. But that, not surprisingly, soured him on Jerry, so he called him in and laid down the law. When Jeanne got the divorce, Jerry and Neyra would quietly be married—legally this time, Sardis assumed. They’d remain married until the baby was born, but then there’d be a speedy divorce, so insisted Papa. Maybe Papa shouldn’t have insisted—not with a guy like Jerry Vail.”