The Sweet Ride (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  “Not what?”

  “Maybe he goofed.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he sure did. Missed the boat, he did.” Yoogy opened his eyes a fraction wider. “You jawed with Fowler since I seen him, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what’d he say we talked about?”

  “Mr. G., Hugh Grimson. The Ramirez killing.”

  “Yeah. I guess you seen him, that’s what it was. So I guess you know he wouldn’t pay me nothing.”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t suppose you come here with a certify check all made out either?”

  “Well, naturally not, Mr. Dibler. I haven’t even heard your side of the story yet. However, I was sufficiently interested to consider investing ... a little of my time, at least, in checking the facts with you personally.”

  I think the word “investing” grabbed him. He started nodding, and pulled his chin up.

  “Of course, if you’re not interested—”

  “C’mon in.”

  I spent less than five minutes inside Yoogy’s house. It was more than enough. The carpet was a mottle of light gray and dark gray, the darker areas places where various fluids had apparently been spilled with some regularity. Among them, very likely, a good deal of Crocus-and-water, Crocus being a 70-proof bourbon, an empty bottle of which must have been the item I’d heard clunk when the door opened, since it rested on the floor near a not-so-easy chair with a coiled spring sticking up out of its seat.

  During those five minutes, Yoogy tossed down two shots from a nearly full bottle of Crocus, and was generous enough to say to me, “You don’t want none, do you?”

  I didn’t; it was still too early in the a.m. for me, but even had it been late I would have declined. Crocus was a brand I had seen in the booze stores, and if it’s true that you get what you pay for, I figured at $2.89 a fifth the stuff would give you a hangover before you could get a glow on.

  After a couple of minutes during which Yoogy Dibler, in response to almost no urging from me, repeated essentially the story as relayed to me by Mayor Fowler, I said, “Well, if your story’s true, that should cook Mr. G.’s goose.”

  “What d’ya mean, if it’s true?”

  “I’m not questioning your veracity, Mr. Dibler—”

  “My what?”

  “—but you’ve just told me that Mr. Grimson shot Ramirez twice, and then banged a slug into his head.”

  “Yeah ... so?”

  He’d impressed me as pretty well tanked up when he opened the door, but Yoogy by now seemed only precariously conscious. Every once in a while he pulled his mouth shut, slid his lower lip against the upper one and forward in an exaggerated pout, then let his chin drop again. But he kept his half-lidded eyes on me.

  “According to the homicide detectives, that’s about the way it must have happened. But the Medical Examiner’s report states that the victim—Ramirez—must have been shot in the head first.”

  “First? That ain’t the way I ... Why would he say that? Guy gets shot three-four times, it don’t make no difference what order he gets shot—”

  “Ah, but it does, Mr. Dibler.”

  “It does?”

  “It does, indeed. You see, once a man’s dead, all vital functions cease, since there is no longer any vitality in the vital functions. Right?”

  “I ... guess, yeah.”

  “Therefore, because there was no evidence of either arterial or ventricular osmosis, or oozing, at the sites of the body wounds, the victim must have been dead before the two bullets entered his body at those sites. Or, to put it simply, since he was dead when shot in the body, he must have been killed already. By the slug in his noodle. Which casts some doubt on your claim that Ramirez was plugged in the body first.”

  “Well ... it all happened so fast....”

  “Which was it, Mr. Dibler? First in the body and then the head, or vice versa?”

  “You—it could of gone either way, I guess. Like I said, it happened so fast, blam-blam and ... Maybe it could of been in the conk first. Yeah, it could of been. Probably was. I wasn’t even supposed to be there anyways, see—”

  “So Hugh Grimson shot Ramirez in the head. And then he put a couple more into the victim, after he was dead, just to make sure he was killed?”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “On the other hand, Mr. Dibler, the autopsy revealed that—contrary to what the M.E. originally assumed—there was seepage and even internal traumae, or black-and-blue spots, at the site of one of those body wounds, which was not as had been supposed an entrance wound but rather an exit wound. The medical clues were found at the entrance of that exit wound, or in the man’s back. Which is what confused everybody.”

  I paused, but Yoogy didn’t say anything. He lifted the bottle and poured another shot of Crocus.

  “So at that point it was clear Ramirez was first shot in the back. Then in the head. And finally in the front. Could it have happened that way, Mr. Dibler?”

  He slugged down his bourbon, clamped his jaws together, and hissed breath out through his teeth. That was all.

  I said, “I assume, for ten thousand dollars, you will testify in court to that story, Mr. Dibler? Or, rather, those stories? Or to any one or all of them?”

  He slid his lower lip forward again, slowly, smacked his chops, scraped his tongue on his teeth as though removing a thin film of mold, and finally spoke. “You,” he said mildly, fixing his half-lidded eyes on me, “are one of them smart-ass bastards, ain’t you?”

  “I suppose you could say that.” I stood up.

  Well, it hadn’t been entirely a waste. I’d learned the mayor was a good mimic. Listening to Yoogy was almost like listening to Fowler imitating Yoogy.

  I said, “Thanks for your help, Mr. Dibler,” and let myself out.

  I was half a mile from the airport when I spotted that dark sedan again. I didn’t know where it had come from or when it had appeared behind me. But that odd and almost luminescent off-black color, much like the iridescent blue-black wings of a beetle I’d once seen in a small boy’s collection of natural curiosities, tagged it as the same car for sure.

  Maybe it had just happened to wind up behind me earlier, when I’d seen it flash past Mayor Fowler’s private drive on the way into Newton. And maybe it was merely another coincidence that its driver, or even driver and one or more passengers—I hadn’t yet gotten a look at whoever might be inside the heap—was returning to the airport at the same time I was.

  Maybe.

  And if I had been planning to stick around I would for sure have made it my business to find out a great deal about the sedan and whoever was in it. But I was not planning to stick around. So I turned in the Cad’s keys, went into the airport, and checked at the Coastal Airlines desk.

  It was barely past 10 a.m., and the next flight back to L.A. took off at eleven-fifty.

  “Fine, I’ll take it,” I said to the clerk. “When will that get me to L.A. International?”

  He was giving me the exact arrival time, but I had lost interest. I checked my watch, glanced up to my left, and my eyes landed on, and kind of locked with, a pair of dark eyes with too much unhealthy looking puffy flesh surrounding them, gunning me from not more than three or four yards away. Close enough so the thin-faced stringbean could hear what I might say, should he so desire. And I got the impression he did so desire.

  He was a man about forty, nearly six feet tall, probably no more than a hundred and fifty pounds in weight, wearing a dark brown suit a little too large for him, especially in the shoulders where the cloth drooped down like soft, slanting epaulets. He was a mean-looking cat. Thin lips that looked as if they’d got that way from being pressed together in anger or bitterness for too many years. A thin straight nose with more than enough hair hanging out of the nostrils. And then the puffy eyes, like those of an ancient, dissolute, dying Pan.

  He dropped those eyes the moment my glance landed on him. Dropped them too quickly. Then he slowly raised his head, lo
oking away from me with apparent interest at something across the terminal. He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and fished out a wooden toothpick wrapped in protective paper, peeled the paper off, and casually began working on a couple of teeth. Looked away too slowly, waggled the pick a bit too casually.

  Right then, watching him poke at a tooth, suck, spit something toward the floor, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing L.A. International very early this afternoon. Maybe not till tomorrow, or even next week. Depending on how much time it took.

  I turned back to the clerk and made a few inconsequential comments, then asked him, “Where’s the bar? If I’ve got to kill an hour, I might as well enjoy the homicide.”

  “Right over there, sir. Shay’s Lounge.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, sir, straight across—”

  “I mean the name.”

  “Oh, yes. It is a splendid cocktail lounge, sir, nonetheless.”

  “Just so there’s booze.”

  During this heavy dialogue, I managed to cock my head slightly and get a fuzzy glimpse of the interested stringbean. Not so fuzzy I couldn’t tell he was looking straight at me again. But when I turned around and headed toward the cocktail lounge, Puffy Eyes had his back toward the Coastal Airlines desk, clearly a man without any interest in me.

  I went straight to Shay’s Lounge and through the double doors without looking back, but once inside I kept one of the doors cracked enough so I could peek through. My friend was talking to the clerk I’d just left, then he turned and headed toward the bar.

  I walked past tables and climbed onto a stool, ordered a bourbon and water, and paid for it. Behind the bar, a mirror reflected my image, others at the bar, the room behind me. And the double doors, one of which soon opened. I tossed down a slug of my highball. The mean-looking character didn’t come in, just pushed the door partly open, glanced around till he spotted me, then took off.

  That belt of bourbon had felt good going down. I hadn’t realized it till then, but my throat had begun getting a bit dry. So I had one more cool swallow before going back to work.

  I would have been greatly surprised, even disappointed, if my nosy new acquaintance had failed to climb into the dark sedan. He got in on its right side, and the driver immediately started the engine and took off. I wasn’t able to get a look at the driver, but there was nobody else in the Chrysler. That’s what it was, a two-year-old Chrysler Thunderbolt.

  By the time I’d arranged for transportation—which took a little longer than it might have, since for obvious reasons I didn’t want the same car I’d been driving before—my pals were long gone. But I had a hunch I could catch up with them on Mulberry Drive, and the hunch was right. Well, almost. If backward or inside-out can be considered almost right.

  I’d rented another Cadillac, this one sky-blue like my own souped-up bomb back home, but a four-door sedan instead of a convertible. Even though it was highly unlikely that the men who’d been on my tail earlier would expect me to be anywhere in the area now, switching from convertible to sedan and from dark gray to light blue gave me a little more feeling of—security, I guess.

  I was rolling along at a pretty good clip toward downtown Newton, with about two and a half miles to go, the road behind me empty. I lit a cigarette, glanced into the rearview mirror again, and there they were. The car was a couple blocks back, but there was no doubt in my slightly numbed mind: it was the Chrysler Thunderbolt I’d been speeding to catch.

  So much for security, I was thinking. And then I began getting that familiar sensation, the cool prickle like invisible icicles melting on the back of my neck, the tightness atop my spine becoming a noticeable knot. Because those guys weren’t on my tail again, weren’t even aware I was dead ahead of them. They’d merely detoured briefly for reasons of their own—a quick visit, perhaps—and were now on their way into town again.

  I’d passed a few cars, but none had passed me, and there was only one place that blue-black buggy could have come from. In the last mile or more there was only one side road into which my pals could have turned—and from which, unquestionably, they must have turned—and from which, unquestionably, they must have just come in order to pull in behind me on Mulberry Drive.

  It was the narrow private road through thickly massed walnut trees, rising slightly and then swinging left and continuing on into the oval of asphalt before the home of Mayor Everson Fowler.

  I tromped on the gas, pulled away from the boys, took a right at the first side street on the outskirts of Newton, U-turned, waited till the Thunderbolt flashed by, and then moved in behind them. Just beyond Newton’s “City Limits” sign only a couple of blocks past Oleta where I’d jawed with boozy Yoogy, I slowed down and let them stay well ahead, merely making sure I didn’t lose them.

  So my first trip into Newton wasn’t a sightseeing trip. I was barely conscious of bustle and traffic in the streets, the growing concentration of new-looking store fronts, apartment buildings, high-rise hotels, because I kept straining my eyes for a flash of blue-black at an intersection ahead of me.

  After we’d traveled entirely through the downtown business district and the traffic was lighter and the buildings smaller, I saw that flash as my boys ahead took a right.

  The street was Orange Avenue. When I swung into it the other car was two blocks ahead, with no traffic between us. Half a mile farther on the Chrysler pulled to the curb, the right-hand door opened, and a man—my man, thin, in the ill-fitting brown suit—got out.

  The Chrysler pulled away from the curb, accelerating rapidly. The driver was the man I hadn’t gotten a look at yet, which was one reason I followed him. But as I passed the spot where he’d stopped I saw Puffy Eyes just going through the door of a long low undistinguished building set back behind a now-unlighted neon sign, “Newtonia Hotel.”

  I figured we must be getting close to the city limits on Newton’s north side when, in the middle of the block ahead of me on Third Street, the Chrysler suddenly swung right and out of sight. I drove ahead, slowed crossing the intersection, Birch Street. A big two- or three-story building filled the entire block on my right, its white paint mottled, peeling in spots. Halfway up the block there was a twenty-foot gap in the curb; there the sidewalk slanted up to the building’s entrance, its heavy weighted door swung up overhead.

  As I drove past I peered inside. There was no sign of the Chrysler. It was dark, gloomy in there, but I could see a cement ramp about thirty feet back, rising upward toward the floor above. Over the gaping entrance was a painted sign, black letters on yellow: “Silvano Enterprises, Inc.”

  Or, if I recalled Mayor Fowler’s words: Silvano’s Garage.

  I drove to the next intersection, Maple Street, and kept on going. Nobody had shot at me; nobody had even hit me on the head; nothing seriously disturbing had occurred, unless it was a cold look from a pair of puffy eyes. But, clearly, something peculiar was afoot in this burg. I didn’t yet have the faintest idea what it might be, but I now had not the slightest doubt that whatever it was, I was smack in the middle of whatever it was.

  I had my flight reservation, sure; I could be in L.A. and home in a few hours, thus leaving Newton’s curiosities, and any potential lumps and fractures and possibly greater catastrophes, behind me. Or I could stay here and bumble around and conceivably get partially, even totally, ruined.

  Flying home—to Anjarene, yet—was perhaps the sane, sensible thing to do. But there wasn’t any choice, not really. Not for a man long convinced there’s no truth in the adage that what you don’t know won’t hurt you; not for a man who’s been sapped from behind as often as I have.

  So, naturally, I turned around and headed toward downtown Newton again.

  6

  The sherwood was Newton’s biggest, tallest, newest hotel. And far and away its finest.

  In it were three dining rooms plus two separate cocktail lounges, and by noon—after twice phoning Mayor Fowler’s home without getting an answer—I had visited all five r
ooms but hadn’t seen anyone I recognized. I was hoping, of course, to spot the cheerful and familiar, though not recently seen, face of Hank Wainwright.

  However, in the Lotus Room, which looked as sinfully luxurious as it sounded, I had seen a gorgeous tomato seated in a booth across from a heavyset sixtyish guy with lots of gray hair and, I presumed, lots of money. If my presumption was correct, and the lovely liked them old and rich, I got the impression she included me out of both categories, and maybe a couple others I hadn’t thought of. Because when I beamed at her with perhaps more toothy enthusiasm than necessary, she had—after a reasonably encouraging half-second-or-so glance, possibly before realizing my white hair was not retirement-white—returned my friendly ogle with the cold, fixed scrutiny of a wealthy waitress eyeing a dime tip.

  But she was a gorgeous lass. And there had, after all, been that encouraging half-second. So, not having spotted Hank anywhere else, I strolled back toward the Lotus Room to get another squint at her.

  I spotted her before I got there. She was at one of a pair of pay phones in a little alcove just this side of the dining room, jazzy profile toward me, dropping a dime into the slot.

  I walked toward her, watching as she dialed. True, she had come close to deep-freezing my spleen with that one long icy gaze, but maybe when she got a real good look at me, up close, she’d thaw. Maybe she’d keel over in a dead faint, too. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  Right then it dawned upon me that this was the first girl I’d seen since leaving L.A. I mean really seen. At least, the first real girl. And this one was really a real girl. There was, though, a kind of distant, a cool or slightly wintry—even glacial—air or aura about her, a quality not evident so much in the sculptured-ivory features or the slow and graceful and almost studied movements, but more in an intangible atmosphere, more sensed than seen, around her.