Have Gat—Will Travel Page 6

He looked at me blankly. "Murdered? But you said —"

  "It only looked like a heart attack. Captain Wade told me the method was the same used on two murdered Commies." I went on talking but I'd thought of something possibly significant. When I'd reported to Jim Friday night and he'd said, "I've got to make a change . . ." I'd assumed he meant change in the book. But he could have been referring to a change in publishers.

  For the first time I became conscious of my heartbeat. It slowly increased in tempo, throbbed a little more heavily. Casually, I said, "Anyway, he's dead. Would you still want to publish the book? If you had the script?"

  "Pub — Of course, But that seems . . . if it's found, naturally I'll publish it."

  "Reason I asked, Jim and I were pretty close. He told me months ago," I lied, "that as soon as the pages were typed he put his originals, the first-pages, somewhere or other. I don't know where, but Jim said he'd made arrangement for them to be mailed to me — if anything should ever happen to him."

  "Splendid! Mr. Scott, get that to me and you can be sure I'll see that it's published."

  "I imagine the first draft will reach me in a day or two. I'll bring it to you just as soon as Amos Wade and I and the Homicide men downtown go over it for any leads that might be in it."

  Goodman was walking back and forth over the carpet now, right hand in his pocket. "No," he said. "Bring it here. I . . . frankly, you won't like this, but there were several local police officers mentioned in that book. I didn't see the manuscript, but learned that from Jim." His face was flushed. "I don't know who they are — he was secretive about names. Rightly so; too many innocent reputations damaged. But that script might disappear for good, if it hasn't already. You bring it here. I'll publish it, by God. We can do that much for Jim."

  He was worked up, really quite excited. I said deliberately, "I can't do that. I'd like to, Mr. Goodman, but it has to be thoroughly checked first. The important thing is to learn who —"

  He swung to face me. "The important thing is that book! You'll have to bring it to me, to the company. It's too important!" He was pointing his left hand at me, hand clenched into a fist, pointing at me with the extended little finger.

  I'd half expected it, been needling him with words because of my growing suspicion, but it shocked hell out of me anyway and I blurted, ""Lewis Tollman!"

  Even before I said his last name, his right hand came out of his pocket, a short-barreled gun gripped in his fingers. I was half out of that deep leather chair, hand slapping against the revolver under my coat, but he had me.

  And he knew it. His face suddenly looked harder, older. "You fool," he said. "You miserable fool."

  I said softly, "You killed Jim."

  "Of course." He was casual, a man talking to a corpse. "Not personally; Donna handled it, burned the manuscript and carbon. She's a real artist. You were incredibly lucky." He smiled, went on. "It was a million-to-one chance, Brandon's learning about me. Years ago arrangements were made so that if anybody ever asked at the Merriman Hospital about Lewis Tollman or Arthur Harris, the National Committee would be informed." He stopped, smiled grimly at me. "The National Committee. That's how important I am, Scott."

  I swore at him, almost ready to grab my gun in the hope I could get off at least one shot. But my movements were cramped in the deep chair.

  Tollman — Goodman — said calmly, "I prefer not to shoot you here in my home and have to drag you away. But I shall, if it becomes necessary." He paused to let that sink in, then said, "Take out your gun. Use your left hand. Just two fingers, Mr. Scott."

  I did what he said; he knew his business. He told me to stand up, clasp my hands behind my head, and I did. He had a self-satisfied, almost gloating look on his face, and he started talking to me, telling about himself. At first I thought he was just bragging, perhaps trying to build himself up in his own eyes, but then I realized that Barney Goodman had little or no opportunity to tell others what a really important man he was. Probably only a few other Communists high in the party, possibly only the National Committee, knew who he really was, what was planned for him. He must often have itched to tell others what he was telling me.

  "Lewis Tollman died the day I entered Merriman Hospital. I got a new face, younger, to match the age on my new birth certificate. My hand was operated on. I established the new identity thoroughly and came to Los Angeles. I was provided with sufficient funds to start a publishing firm. And you'll have to admit that I've been careful. Not a single flaw."

  "Wrong. You forget the guys like Jim Brandon. And the fact that you have to lie all the time. You can't help making slips — that hand of yours, for example. Besides, you're not useful until you start really working for the party. You'll give yourself away. Once you start spouting the Commie line —"

  He laughed. "Don't be naive, Mr. Scott. You know that's not true. Even if it were, a man still has a right to honest opinions in this republic." He laughed again.

  I'd just been talking, mainly for time, thinking I didn't have a prayer. But Goodman had told me to kick my gun toward him and it had been lying at his feet. Keeping his eyes on me he bent, picked my .38 up and dropped it into his pocket — and I remembered Jim's gun.

  I'd forgotten that I'd had Jim's little .32 in my coat pocket ever since leaving his house. Muscles and nerves seemed to stretch taut in my body. Just a flicking away of his eyes on me, a momentary lapse, and I meant to grab for that gun. But he kept his eyes on me all the time. I caught the flash of headlights through a window beyond him. They approached the house, started to swing in before going out of sight.

  Goodman was saying, "Besides, I'll be in the Senate soon."

  "You have to be elected first."

  "That's all settled, Scott. The number of votes I'll have to get, everything. It's planned for the next twenty years. I am elected."

  I unwound my hands from behind my head, lowered them slightly. "I think a car has just pulled in, Goodman."

  He kept smiling. I hoped I was right, that the car had come to the house. Because interruption or no interruption, I was going to dig for that .32 soon. I could imagine Barney Goodman in the Senate itself, that propaganda machine Jim had talked about booming and boosting him. Maybe more. In ten, fifteen years he might even wind up like a Lauchlin Currie, say, as a Presidential advisor.

  The front door slammed. Goodman's brows twitched, but he didn't move the gun, and he kept his eyes on me. I lowered my right hand an inch, then farther. The door to the den burst open and somebody came inside. "Barney, I've just come from —"

  Her voice stopped suddenly. Goodman turned his head to look at her. And if I hadn't been concentrating so hard on this chance I might have looked myself, because I knew that voice, that breath of brogue. But as soon as Goodman's eyes shifted I jammed my hand into my coat pocket, grabbed the gun and jumped sideways as I pulled it free.

  Goodman shouted, swung toward me and fired before I could get the .32 pointed at him, the slug ripping along my arm. Then I squeezed the trigger twice. He staggered, shot at me again and missed. Blood stained the white shirt under his coat and slowly he bent forward. The gun barrel drooped, but he managed to pull the trigger again, the slug digging into the carpet. He fell to his knees.

  I had time to aim, and my next shot caught him squarely in the forehead.

  Donna was running toward the door when I said, "Go ahead, Donna."

  She took one more step and froze, arms held out from her sides, hands opening and closing. She arched her shoulders as if expecting a bullet in the back. "Turn around," I said. "I'm not going to shoot you. You've got too much to tell us, baby."

  I sat by the phone, waiting for the police, keeping my gun pointed at Donna. There would be a lot of yelling about this, I knew, but I'd be clear. What Donna was going to tell would help. But even without her I figured I'd have no trouble. This would be listed, in the parlance of the book, as a Code 197. Goodman had been pointing a gun at me, trying to kill me.

  But even if he'd been unarmed, I tho
ught, just standing there when I'd killed him, it would still have come under Code 197. At least in my book. That's the Penal Code, Section 197 — self-defense.

  THE BUILD-UP

  MY head throbbed, a sharp point of pain at the base of my skull. When I brought my hand away from the pain, it was sticky. I forced my eyes open, saw the dark red stain on my fingers. Still barely conscious, I moved my right hand and something dropped from it to the floor. It was a gun — mine, a little .32 revolver. I'm a private eye — that's why I always carry the gun.

  Close on my left was the open window. It was screwy. I shouldn't have been sitting in an overstuffed chair next to the window. I struggled to my feet, got my hands on the sill. Six stories below was Main Street. Main Street in Altamira, California. I remembered part of it. There'd been the game here in the Raleigh Hotel. We'd been playing poker — five of us. Vic Foster, Danny Hastings, Jason, Stone, and me, Shell Scott.

  I turned around. The felt-topped table was on its side in the middle of the room, green money on the carpet, alongside it. But it didn't look like more than a thousand or so. A couple of highball glasses lay on the floor. It looked as if there'd been a fight.

  Then I saw him.

  He was flat on his back beyond the table, eyes open and staring, blood all over the front of him, his white shirt streaked. It was Danny Hastings, two bullet holes in his chest. His face was marked up, blood under his nose and on his lips. No pulse, no breath — he was dead, all right.

  The last I remembered of the game, there'd been only Vic Foster, Danny and me playing: the two others had left minutes before. Then Foster had quit, grabbed some fresh air at the window and walked behind me. Right after that, boom. The lights had gone out.

  I heard a siren, went to the window, looked down as two cars pulled into the curb. Policemen left the cars and hurried into the building. At my feet was the little .32 I'd dropped when I'd come to; I picked it up, swung out the cylinder. Two empty cartridge cases were in it.

  I didn't move for a moment, forcing myself to think. A Borneo headhunter could have figured out that Foster had killed Danny and was framing me for the murder — and Foster didn't do things halfway. That would be fixed so I'd have a fat chance of explaining to the police — especially now. For two weeks the papers had been riding the police hard about the still-unsolved murder of a union official named Tyler. Under the circumstances, they'd solve Danny's murder fast; it could even happen that they'd solve Tyler's murder fast.

  My lips were sore, puffed and bruised. I'd been slugged while unconscious. Danny's face was marked up, too; it would look as if we'd been in a fight — and that could explain the lump on my head. It didn't help that I'd knocked Danny on his fanny a week ago.

  I ran, I raced out of the room, down the stairs, and was at the third floor before I heard the heavy steps pounding upward. I didn't know how much the police knew about me — but I knew I had a murder gun in my pocket. A few feet on my right was the open door to room 302. I could see the middle-aged hotel maid putting new sheets on the bed. I jumped to the door and jerked off my coat, held it loosely in my hand as the officers reached the landing.

  I glared inside at the woman, my hand on the doorknob. The two officers stood at the head of the stairs. "Okay, baby," I shouted, "if that's how you want it, you can fry in hell!"

  The little woman's jaw dropped open and her eyes got very wide as I slammed the door shut with a crash that rang down the hallway. I swung around, putting on my coat, and walked to the stairs. The two uniformed officers were looking at me; one of them ran his eyes over my dark hair, my face, my puffed lips, checking my size and build. That probably meant they had some kind of description of the "killer."

  "Well?" I roared at them. They looked at each other. I ran a finger over my puffed lips and mumbled, "The bitch, damn wildcat," as I started to brush by them. They shrugged, went on up the stairs.

  Moments after they were out of sight the door behind me opened and the little old lady looked out. "What did I do?" she asked me.

  I was on my way to the lobby. I got there, looked around. Several shops could be reached from the hotel lobby. I walked into one of them, a florist's shop. Several thousand dollars that had been in my wallet while I was unconscious were gone, I discovered, but I found a few bucks in my trousers pocket, bought a dozen roses, and continued with them to the street.

  I was sweating, but I knew the mental storm wasn't showing on my face. Years of high-stakes poker had taught me to control my expression and bearing; but, inside, my kidneys were coming apart. Nobody stopped me while I walked to a cab a few yards away, told the driver to light out. He lit, I switched cabs a dozen blocks from the hotel, leaving my roses behind, got out of the second cab three blocks from Green Park. At Green Park I walked boldly onto the grass, picking up somebody's newspaper on the way, made a pillow of my coat and lay down with the newspaper over my face.

  I thought about the four men I'd been playing poker with until about four p.m. today, Thursday. Vic Foster was an attorney and small-time politician with big ideas who'd twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. He was a tall, bony man, thin and sagging with a craggy face. Foster looked like an old-time western sheriff relaxing after cleaning up on all the outlaws in town. By shooting them in the back. Short, fat, white-haired Arthur Jason was a circuit court judge. Bert Stone, fifty years old and six-feet-four inches tall, with a big red nose that looked as if somebody had just slugged him on it, was an electronics expert and well-to-do businessman, owner of Altamira's biggest radio and TV agency and repair business. I understand that he could be had for "special" work if the price was right. He'd been in trouble a few months ago for allegedly putting a "bug" or wiretap on a local policeman's telephone. It had been a two-day sensation in the news, but wound up "all a mistake."

  Danny Hastings, until today, had been a man with quite a bit of weight in town. A councilman, he knew most of Altamira's — and many of the State's — bigwigs on a first-name basis, and I'd picked up word on occasion that Danny was a fixer, bagman, go-between. If you wanted something fixed up for you, the word was "See Danny." But not any more.

  It looked as if there'd been a falling out among thieves — but that didn't explain why I'd been picked as the patsy. And another thing was bothering me. If the police had arrived a few minutes earlier, they'd have found me unconscious on the floor, and unconscious men don't go around shooting holes in people. How could Foster have known I'd be on my feet when the police arrived?

  I thought back to the end of that poker game. The five of us had sat around the table, well over a hundred thousand dollars in the game, a good third of it piled in front of me. Danny was dealing draw. I'd raised Foster's opening bet mainly because I was pushing a lucky streak, and then drawn one card to four hearts, getting a spade. Jason on my right was out; Stone and Danny on my left were three-card draws; Foster's craggy face had got a frown on it at my raise, but he'd called and drawn two cards. After the draw he looked at his hand, checked to me.

  Unless they'd helped, Stone and Danny, caught between me and the opener, would probably fold if I chucked it in; Foster was the only man I felt worried about. And by now I knew him pretty well. You learn a lot about men in poker games. With the ante, there was about ten thousand in the pot. So I counted out ten thousand, watching Foster from the corner of my eye. He reached up and tugged gently on his left ear lobe.

  Whenever Foster got in a tight spot, and was worried, he unconsciously pulled that ear lobe. If he'd gone in with three of a kind, that was all he had now. And his three of a kind couldn't beat my nothing, not when he played with his ear. I threw the money into the middle of the table and said, "I'll match the pot. Make it interesting."

  Stone scratched that big nose of his, then he and Danny tossed their cards into the middle of the table. Foster said, "Trying to buy it, eh, Scott? Hell, I got nothing in there." He showed two kings. "Openers," he said, and tossed in his hand. I started to take in the money.

  Foster said, "Shell, you s
till carry that little popgun?"

  I patted my left armpit. "You know it." I looked at the money on the table. "I'll be carrying over a hundred thousand when I leave here."

  He grinned. "Not unless you use the gun."

  "The way you guys play poker, I don't need it. Deal."

  He didn't deal. He said, "Yeah, you're lucky at cards, all right. Lucky at cards, unlucky in love."

  "Not always."

  "Always."

  He wasn't smiling. He was thinking about Gloria.

  Foster didn't like me a bit today — or any day; maybe he even hated me. Both of us had seen quite a lot of Gloria Meadows, only Foster hadn't seen much of her lately; I'd been holding her hand for most of the time this past month. Nobody could blame Vic Foster for resenting the switch in Gloria's attentions, because she was a dream that was still there when you woke up.

  Gloria Meadows, slim but with plenty of oomph here and there, or whatever you want to call it, and no matter what you call it, she had it. Eyes deep and dark as sin, lips with more personality than some whole people, a soft, husky laugh like a backsliding devil's. She played piano and sang at a supper club downtown, sang in her soft voice that was white fingers on your spine, that turned a pop ballad into bedroom whispers. She had everything she needed, and all that I wanted. I'm a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor; but Gloria made me feel like becoming a thirty-year-old papa. Maybe I was in love with her: I wasn't sure yet. But I was sure about Vic Foster. He was in love with her.

  Stone and Jason got up, said they'd had enough, and left almost immediately. After three more hands, Foster said he was through, then went to the window, saying he needed some fresh air. In a minute he walked around behind me. I was looking at Danny when it happened.

  Danny didn't look surprised; his eyes went up over my head, then down again, and that was all. But he must have been very surprised a few seconds later. Lying in the park with a newspaper over my face, I couldn't even remember if the blow had hurt; I knew it hurt now, though. I knew one other thing, too: Foster should have called my ten thousand. He must have known he'd get it back. But habit was too strong; a man plays poker the way he lives.