Have Gat—Will Travel Read online

  It couldn't have taken more than a couple of seconds, but we crowded a lot into it. A lifetime. I swung the door open and saw the young guy standing there, saw the odd-looking gun pointed at my head, and almost instantly automatic reflexes sent me slamming sideways against the door.

  There was a little popping sound and then my gun was jarring the palm of my left hand. I wasn't conscious of lifting my arm and pulling the trigger, but I saw the guy jerk, heard the meat-ax smack of bullets into his chest. I emptied the revolver into him.

  Doors slammed, people came into the hall, a woman screamed. I was standing over the man's body, breathing as if I'd run a mile. The gun lay beside him and I picked it up. A perforated metal tube stuffed with cottony material was screwed into threads on its barrel — a pistol with a silencer. My neck was stinging and my hand came away from it stained with blood. Whoever was after me, they weren't trying to drug me now.

  Inside my apartment I called the police. Jim was overdue and I phoned him, but there was no answer. Officers arrived and got busy, but Jim still hadn't shown, so on my way to Homicide, downtown, I stopped at Jim's small house on Rockledge Street.

  There wasn't any answer to my ring. The door was unlocked and I went inside. He was in bed, covers part way down his tanned, well-muscled chest, mouth open.

  I grinned, stopped beside the bed, grabbed his shoulder and shook him. "Wake up, you lazy —"

  I jerked my hand away. A man's skin isn't ever that cold, not when he's alive. My throat seemed to close up. "Oh, God," I said. "Not Jim."

  I've seen more dead men than I like to think about, but I had to leave the house and stand outside for ten minutes before I could go back into the bedroom. Then I looked the place over. Next to Jim's bed, in the drawer of a small night stand, was his gun, fully loaded. He always kept it handy; but he hadn't ever used it. I looked at the small .32 nestled in my palm, then dropped it into my coat pocket. Maybe I'd use it.

  In the closet was a woman's coat and scarf, but I recognized them as belonging to Jim's fiancée, a lovely little redhead named Gale Winter. They'd been engaged for a year. Gale had seemed right for Jim too, typed clean manuscript for him, kept the coffee pot on when she was around, gave him a lot of love and encouragement. She'd been impatient about getting married, but Jim had known what he wanted most — or at least first — and that was his book in print. He'd had a special reason, more need to write his book than the average writer would have. Jim was not only an ex-newspaperman, but an ex-Communist. Ex-everything, now.

  I had already phoned Homicide, so I headed for City Hall. I'd looked all over Jim's house without finding even a trace of his manuscript. I knew much of what was in it, and I drove slowly toward downtown L.A., thinking about Jim, the book itself, and wondering if that book was why he'd been killed.

  Years before I met him, Jim Brandon had been a reporter on one of the New York dailies, and had wound up joining the party. He was intelligent, hard-working, and had a free-and-easy way with words, so he'd landed in a professional group with other newspapermen and writers, plus a couple of radio commentators. They studied the technique of artful lying, how to combine emphasis with omission to create an impression contrary to fact, how to turn black into gray and sometimes — all the liars working together — black into white.

  Jim went up fast in the party, and faster in the writing game. Fellow Communists promoted him and praised him publicly, and when he wrote his first book, a party-line novel, the Communist cabal applauded and it sold well.

  Jim broke with the party, in 1945, right after the Duclos letter, and endured the standard smearing, went to the FBI and appeared before Congressional committees. The James Brandon who had been white became black overnight. Following the often-repeated pattern, he somehow became separated from his union, and his job, whereupon he came to the Coast and began writing what he somewhat facetiously called his "exposé." Naturally he wasn't really facetious about it.

  The book dealt with the Communist party's huge propaganda machine in the United States, specifically with Communists in a large segment of the publishing industry — books, magazines, newspapers. His own story was in it but, more important, he'd done monumental research, named names, dates, places, quoted from Congressional documents and party literature. It was a kind of "interlocking subversion" in the brainwashing field, Jim had said.

  Well, James Brandon was dead, and his book didn't seem to be around. Perhaps there was no connection.

  This time I waited in the morgue. Amos Wade had come over to the Hall of Justice as soon as he got the word, and half a dozen of us stood together in a small group. Behind me the door opened and a deputy coroner came inside.

  He said to me, "He'd been drinking a little, but death was due to cardiac — well, call it heart failure."

  He pursed his lips, frowning. I felt stunned. It simply hadn't occurred to me that Jim might have died a normal death.

  But the coroner's deputy was going on, "An extremely thin hypodermic needle inserted through the center of the left nipple, between the ribs, and directly into the heart muscle. A massive dose of digitalis injected, and — heart failure." He shook his head, still frowning. "We wouldn't have found it, not this soon, except that we had a couple of others killed the same way."

  It was quiet for a long time. Then I said, "A couple of others? Who were they?"

  He jerked a thumb at Amos. "He can tell you about them."

  Wade's face was slack. "Both local Commies," he said quietly. "Apparently they got into trouble with the party." He paused, brow furrowed, then suddenly snapped his fingers and spun on his heel. "Come on to my office, Shell."

  We went back to City Hall. It took fifteen minutes for Amos to find what he wanted; then he grinned at me. "Five-nine, bad acne scars . . ." He went on giving me the description of the man I'd shot. He phoned the "I" room and Homicide. Soon a man came in with a glossy photo. Amos glanced at it, handed it to me. "Otto Rheims," he said.

  "That's the guy. Another one?"

  He nodded. "His description rang a bell, but it wasn't until Jim that it hit me. Otto was in here once on a bunco rap and I checked his record. Twenty-four front organizations, May Day Parade, CP nominating petitions." He grinned wryly.

  "Yeah," I said. "Amos, I didn't see Jim's manuscript in the house. He told me the only other people who'd seen it were you and Gale. Remember anything in it that looked important enough to cause this?"

  "Sure. The whole thing. But I saw only a few excerpts, Shell. I don't remember anything specific."

  "Screwy way to be killed. Especially three men."

  Amos said, "Maybe the answer to why it's been used three times — three we know about — is that we've kept the story in the department. Could be the killers think those deaths passed as natural — which they almost did."

  I swore. "How in hell could you stick a hypo into a man's chest without getting shot or knocked around? He'd put up a fight, maybe get marked up. I suppose you'd have to drug him first . . ." I stopped. Involuntarily I stood up, and cold seemed to start in my throat, spread to my heart and ripple over my body. "Drug him," I repeated. "In liquor, maybe. Or coffee."

  Driving toward Gale Winter's home, I knew that I wasn't going to work on anything else but Jim's death until I found out who'd killed him. Our friendship would have been clear enough reason, but it was also clear that I'd have to learn who had murdered Jim before I'd know who was trying to kill me. And if I didn't learn fast the next time they tried they might get me. I thought of a thin, hollow needle. . . .

  Somewhere in the pages of Jim's manuscript, or in what I knew of that book, or maybe in those conversations we'd had, there must be an answer; somewhere in what I knew of Jim. And the party. I thought back over the two years I'd known Jim, letting my mind brush the high points.

  There was the night when he'd first told me about having been a Communist. It had been winter then, raining, and logs were burning in the small fireplace in his front room. Jim overflowed with nervous energy and
he was pacing the room while he talked. We were drinking beer from cans and he'd just told me about joining the party, meeting with the pro group, finally getting fed up.

  He ran a hand through his thick black hair, a quick, nervous movement that was typical of him. "I broke with them right after the Duclos letter," he said to me. "Christ, you should have seen the comrades, running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The new line hadn't come down from Moscow and nobody knew what to do, including me. Well, I'd been kidding myself for six months, pretending I was still making up my own mind, no matter what, but that finished it for me. I grew up in two days, walked out and never went back."

  He shrugged. "Guys join the party and leave it. Guys get sick, too, but that doesn't mean they die. Some of us get well. That's why the comrades hate us ex-Commies, Shell; we're experts at diagnosing the disease. That's also why they have to kill us off." He was silent a long time before he added, "One way or another."

  Maybe Jim had expected what had happened. Maybe. But the only time I'd seen him look scared had been in connection with an investigation I'd run off for him, the one that took me to Boston. That had come up during the last week.

  He'd been saying about the book, "It's going to raise some hell, if I do say so, Shell. When you write a book attacking a segment of the publishing world, you've got to find somebody in the other segment who'll print it. I damn near didn't find a publisher — Barney Goodman here in L.A.'s the only man I've found willing to put it out. Barney's got a lot of guts, since I'm probably going to wind up with half a dozen libel suits."

  Barney Goodman was the head of a small publishing house in Los Angeles. In addition, Barney was active in political affairs locally, a magnetic speaker who'd been on TV forums numerous times in the last year. He was only thirty-eight, but there was already talk about his running for the U.S. Senate in the next elections.

  I said, "Barney's seen the manuscript?"

  "Nope. Just Amos and Gale. Besides what you've read. But I told Barney the gist of it, what he could expect. Didn't scare him." He grinned. "But he's our next Senator — and we need some more like him."

  "Okay, I'll vote for him. And if I ever write my memoirs I'll send them to Barney."

  Jim went out for beer, and apparently got to thinking about something while in the kitchen. He was more sober when he came back, frowning, which was unusual for him.

  "There's just one thing," he said, and stopped. After almost a minute he said, "Shell, remember when I told you about being in that pro group in New York?"

  "Sure."

  "There was a guy in the group named Lewis Tollman; he'd be about forty-five now, a real go-getter, intelligent, worked night and day for the party. The word went around that he was being groomed for big things. Seems he was that rarity, a guy who'd never been finger-printed. Little while later he was in an auto accident and wound up in the hospital. Point is, that's the last any of us heard of him. I assumed he'd died. It's — an important part of the book."

  He swigged some beer. "He had a crippled hand, all closed up into a fist, something wrong with the nerve or muscles. Sometimes when he'd get excited, he'd point that fist at you with the little finger sticking out; only finger he could point with. Real odd thing, not something you'd forget. Well, a few days ago I was talking to a man and he got excited, raised his fist and pointed that little finger at me."

  "Same guy?"

  "No, that's the point. Didn't look at all like Lewis. Nothing wrong with his hand, either. I suppose a man could have a hand fixed and still, because of a thirty- or forty-year habit, use it in the same old way once in a while. But this guy was entirely different in appearance. Can't possibly be the same man." He paused. "The FBI's caught up with some comrades, though, who don't answer their descriptions — had some plastic surgery. And they do go underground, new faces, new pasts, have nothing to do with party activities — until they're needed for something big. By which time, of course, they're not suspect."

  The upshot of it was that, because Jim wanted to know about Lewis Tollman for sure, I hopped a plane two days later and flew to Boston, then took a bus to the small city where the Merriman Hospital was located. Jim had given me a wealth of information from his files, date of the accident, description, all I needed.

  With that information I didn't have to spend much time at the hospital. Half an hour after I'd arrived, a clerk was looking at a card in his hand and saying, "A patient answering that description, shriveled hand and all, was in here on that date. He hadn't been in an accident, however. There's no record of a Lewis Tollman."

  "Who's your record of? And what was he in for?"

  He looked at the card. "Mr. Arthur Harris. Doctor Zerek's patient. Doctor Zerek was our plastic surgeon."

  "When can I see Doctor Zerek?"

  He shook his head. "I'm afraid you can't, sir. Doctor Zerek died several years ago. He had a bad heart."

  "Heart attack, huh? Would you know offhand when he died?"

  "Why . . . just a moment." He went to another filing cabinet, fumbled through a drawer and read off a date to me. Then he looked around. "Odd you should have asked. He died less than a month after Mr. Harris was treated by him."

  "Yeah," I said. "It is odd."

  The next day I arrived back in L.A. When I gave my report to Jim his face got almost chalk-white. He licked dry lips. "That does it. I'll have to make a change . . ." He stopped. "Kind of late, now. God, I wouldn't have believed it. Not him."

  That was all he'd say. We had arranged to get together Sunday, today — and now he was dead. If he'd made any last-minute change in the book, I wanted to find out what it was. Gale should know, since she'd typed it all.

  She lived in a big two-story house with her parents and a bachelor brother, Fred, several years older than herself. Fred met me at the door, led me into the front room where Gale sat on a couch. He sat beside her and she looked up at me, eyes puffy from crying.

  She spoke dully, but she answered my questions. "There were so many things in the book, Shell. A lot of names and case histories, stories about Communists getting into places where they could hire others, things like that."

  "Can't you think of any specific thing that might explain —"

  She winced. "No. It was all jumbled, Shell. I never typed more than a few consecutive pages at a time. Maybe from the middle or the end or front, I don't know. It's all mixed up."

  "Remember anything about a man named Lewis Tollman?"

  "The name sounds familiar, but . . . no."

  I looked at her brother. "Fred, did Jim ever talk —"

  He interrupted, shaking his head. "I don't know anything about the stuff. Don't want to know."

  I turned to Gale. "You haven't the manuscript then?"

  "No, I typed the original and a carbon, gave him the final pages last night."

  "Final — you mean the book was finished?"

  She bit her lip. "Yes. Finally. I'll . . . never forget what he said. I handed him the last ten pages and he grabbed me, and gave me a big kiss. The papers got all wrinkled." Two big tears welled up in her eyes, slid down her cheeks. "Jim looked so happy. He said, 'Sweetheart, that's it, that's the last. Wh-what do you say we get married?'" She sobbed, bent her head forward and cupped both hands over her eyes, shoulders shaking. Fred put his hand on her arm. I got up and left.

  Barney goodman opened the front door of his modernistic home on the outskirts of Hollywood, smiled that warm smile of his and told me to come in. After leaving Gale's I'd phoned Goodman, asked if I might see him. I hadn't wanted to go into detail over the phone.

  He shook my hand firmly, grinned his boyish grin and said, "This is a pleasure, Mr. Scott. You're the first private investigator I've met. At least — you're not investigating me, are you?"

  "No. The main reason I'm here is to find out if Jim Brandon delivered his manuscript to you yet."

  We had walked into a paneled den and he pointed to one of two deep leather chairs near each other. As we sat in them he said
briskly, "Not yet, but I expect it soon. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day."

  "Jim's dead," I said. "And the manuscript doesn't seem to be around. It's gone. I hoped he'd already delivered —"

  Goodman leaped to his feet and stared down at me. "Dead? Why, he can't be. He — the manuscript's gone? What do you mean, the manuscript's gone?"

  I got the queer impression he was shocked a little too much, but that was probably because of the great sadness he seemed to feel at Jim's death. I said, "It just hasn't been found."

  "That's it. He must have hidden it somewhere. It's dynamite, you know. Jim looked all over for a publisher, but nobody would handle it except me. Can't blame them; he said frankly that he'd left himself and his publisher open for libel suits. I'm probably a damn fool to take the chance." He stood straighter, and squared his shoulders. "But somebody had to take the chance." Light glistened on Goodman's thick hair, cast bold shadows on his angular face. He looked like Washington crossing the Delaware, and I figured he could land in the Senate without kissing a single baby. But then he spoiled the fine impression he was making on me by adding, "The publicity would have been worth a million dollars."

  After a moment he looked down at me and said slowly, "Is Jim really dead?"

  "Yes." I couldn't help adding, "And the manuscript's gone. The only other people beside me who saw parts of it were his fiancée and Captain Amos Wade. Neither of them has any idea where it is."

  "Unfortunately, I suppose they know you're here."

  "'No; I talked to Jim's fiancée, then decided to check with you." I stopped. Why the hell should Goodman care if anybody knew where I was? Nobody did know, come to think of it.

  "How did Jim die?" he asked me.

  "It looked like a heart attack —"

  "Dead," he blurted. "My God. How terrible!"

  "Worse than that. He was murdered."