The Wailing Frail (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Read online

  I pulled the chair over the carpet and right up alongside the desk and then I said, “Sit down. Tell me about it.”

  I watched her walk over and sit, then I got behind the desk as she said, “I really was afraid you'd be dead. And I do need help desperately.”

  “You've come to the right place, Miss—Miss?” I looked for rings, but I couldn't see her left hand.

  “It's my father,” she said. “He's—” she broke off, hesitated, then went on rapidly. “They've put him into a hospital for the mentally ill, and he's normal. Just as normal as you are.”

  That, it seemed to me, was a poor choice of words. But I said, “I see. When was this? When did it happen?”

  “I guess it must have just happened.”

  “Must have? Don't you know?”

  She shook her head. “I've been abroad for nearly a year now. I just got home and found this letter in the mailbox.” She rumbled in her handbag. “Here it is.” She handed it to me.

  I took the envelope and pulled the single sheet of white paper from it. It was to “Barbara,” and was a short, odd sort of letter. It said that the writer was all right, happy, in Ravenswood, well taken care of and there was nothing to worry about. And that Barbara should stay away. It was signed, “With love—Dad.” That was repeated a couple times.

  I looked at the girl. “I'm afraid I don't understand.”

  She said, “I'm so upset—I thought I'd told you. Under the flap. Under the flap of the envelope.”

  The envelope hadn't been opened with a knife or opener, and the flap was still attached and could be pulled up. I raised it and saw scrawled, almost illegible writing there. The first two words were my name, Shell Scott, and after a minute I'd deciphered the entire message: “Help me, I'm sane. Your life in danger, they'll kill us both—$10,000 for you, come here, but be careful—letter true—” and it ended that way, abruptly.

  I blinked at it, then looked at the girl. “Why is this written to me?”

  “I don't know. I don't know what's going on, Mr. Scott. I'm just frantic! Dad's in Ravenswood and I guess he doesn't want even me to see him—it's some kind of plot, something's terribly wrong—”

  “Hold it,” I said. “Let's take it easy, and maybe we can figure out what the score is. This is strange, though.” I smiled at her. “Nobody's tried to kill me for months. At least, not that I—” I paused, thinking of the accident on the Freeway. I wondered ... But then I shook my head; I was probably imagining things.

  The phone rang. As I reached for it my eyes fell on the letter and envelope before me. Something about the round, looped handwriting jarred me. I looked at the envelope as I put the phone to my ear. The letter had been addressed to 954 Fern Road in Los Angeles, but it was the name that smacked me hard—Miss Barbara Todhunter!

  I looked at the lovely, worried face near me and asked, “Is your name Todhunter?”

  Her face smoothed and she smiled then. “Yes. Barbara Todhunter.” The smile got wider, brighter, more provocative. “You can call me Toddy, though, if you want. A few of my friends call me that.”

  The only thing I could think of was those three crazy letters from Gordon Todhunter.

  “Miss Tod—Toddy, what's your father's name?”

  “Gordon Todhunter.”

  The phone was still against my ear, and somebody had been saying hello at the other end of the line for several seconds. I said, “Hello. Shell Scott here.”

  The man speaking was my insurance agent. I'd called him right after the accident this morning. He said, “What kind of deal was that crackup?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This Robert Gates, guy you claimed banged into you—or you banged into, whichever way it was. I can't find anybody with that name—none in the phone book, or city directory either.”

  “There must be. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-four or -five—”

  “Look, I checked the address he gave you on Garden Street. That address is phony. It's a vacant lot.”

  I told the agent to forget about the claim, because he'd never collect it, and hung up.

  “Toddy,” I said, “from here in I'll listen a little better. I think somebody did try to kill me this morning.”

  I stopped as a thought struck me. If that had been an attempt at murder, if it hadn't been an accident, then it meant that somebody with a lot of time and money and imagination was trying to knock me off. And that was a damned dangerous combination.

  As a murder method it would have been tricky and, difficult of execution, which explained why it had missed. But if I had been killed this morning, if I'd moved half a second later, then nobody on God's green earth would ever have suspected murder. Not when the dead man, me, had obviously driven his car into the back of a truck. That's the number-one cause of accidents on the Freeway, anyhow.

  Another thought puzzled me for a moment. What if I'd been killed? The truck driver would surely have been held, at least for a while. The truth about his fake name and address would have come out and he'd have been in the soup. The only explanation I could think of was that he must have been prepared with two sets of identification—maybe one of them in the truck—with his real name and address in case I was killed, and he was held; and a phony set in case the try backfired.

  Toddy had a shocked expression on her face. “This morning?”

  “Yeah. We almost didn't meet.” I grinned at her. “And, believe me, that would have been almost as sad as the dying.”

  She threw back her head and laughed softly, then looked at me. It was as if she had a rheostat somewhere that could step up the voltage of those brown eyes whenever she wanted to, because they bored into me like arc lights for a moment. “I'll take that as a compliment,” she said.

  “That's what was meant.”

  Then she sobered, turned down the rheostat. “What about my father?”

  “Well, I—” I didn't know whether to tell her about those goofy letters or not. The guy quite obviously was way off the beam. But under the flap of that letter he'd said that somebody would try to kill me. They apparently had. If Todhunter knew who was trying, I wanted to see the man even if he talked gibberish on every other subject.

  “I'll check up,” I told her.

  “Oh, I'm so glad. I hoped you would. It's all so strange.”

  We spent a few more minutes talking. Toddy hadn't seen her father in nearly a year, she said; she'd returned home only yesterday, right on schedule. She'd got the letter then, and since had been trying to find out what had happened. There had never been anything even slightly peculiar about her father; he was sane, normal, and of course he'd never been fanatical about anything. This morning she'd found out where the Shell Scott mentioned under the envelope's flap was, and driven downtown to see me.

  “So I really know little more than you now, Mr. Scott.”

  “Shell.”

  “Shell. You will help me, won't you?”

  “I'll do the best I can.”

  She reached into her bag again. “I've a couple pictures of Dad here, Mr.—Shell. I thought you'd want them, so I brought them along. Here.” She handed me two snapshots.

  One of them showed a tall, dark-haired, fairly rugged man of about forty-five or so, a lean man with a sharp, angular face. The other was a snap of the head and shoulders of the same guy. I put the snaps into an envelope, and the envelope in my pocket.

  Toddy gave me a thousand-dollar smile, and a hundred-dollar retainer. I explained that I'd give the case whatever time I had left after my committee work. Before she left, Toddy told me she had a reservation at the Biltmore and would be staying there. She urged me to come by if I had anything to report. She'd leave the latchstring out, she told me.

  Chapter Six

  After toddy went out the door, I sat at the desk for a couple minutes just thinking about her. Then I called around till I located Joe Rule. I asked him, “What happened on your check of those Todhunter letters, Joe?”

  “Don't you remember my telling you?” />
  “What are you talking about?”

  “We were both pretty busy that day. I told you that the eighty-year-old lady who ate spiders’ eyes would be writing no more letters because she'd been committed to the crazy house. Anyway, you said that seemed sensible, and great work.”

  I groaned. “How in hell was I supposed to know—Never mind. What did you find out, in plain English?”

  “Well, the guy's been put away.”

  “Yeah. When did this happen?”

  “Just a day or two after you gave me the letters. I checked up on him. He used to be an attorney, but he retired pretty young. Anyway, I found out he was going to be committed to a hospital for the mentally ill. So, just to follow it all the way, I was in court when they held the sanity hearing before Judge Sweet.”

  “You saw the man then?”

  “Yeah. Real tall guy with a lot of brown hair with a little gray in it. Been a fine looking man if he'd had all his marbles.”

  “How'd he act during the hearing?”

  “Hell, how do you expect? Crazy. Real gone.”

  “Listen, Joe. It's important. Is there any chance the guy could have been sane?”

  “Not a chance. Not sane, not faking, nothing. He was gone—eyes rolling, trying to hide, talking gibberish some of the time. Medical diagnosis was schizophrenia, but in any language the verdict was non compos mentis.”

  I thought a minute, trying to reconcile what Joe had said with the note under that flap, and what Todhunter's daughter had just told me. “You got anything else, Joe?”

  “Not much. Odds and ends. You want it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Rule was young and full of hell, but he was as thorough and efficient as they come. If there were anything worth knowing about the man he could probably tell me.

  He said, “Nothing else except a little history, Shell. But here it is. Gordon Raymond Todhunter. I told you he'd been an attorney. He's now forty-seven years old. He married and divorced one Margaret Bruce. Daughter Barbara, twenty-two—she's not around, off galivanting I think—Todhunter's worth plenty, but I didn't try to examine his tax returns.”

  “I'm surprised. Thanks, Joe. Nobody could ask for more than that.” We hung up.

  It looked as if it were time for me to take a trip to Ravenswood, but my car was in the garage, so I called a cab. While I waited, I took the .38 Colt out of the spring shoulder holster in which I carry it, and looked at it. Usually I keep an empty chamber under the hammer. But I got an extra cartridge from a box in my desk and put that sixth slug into the cylinder. Somehow I felt better.

  It was the cab driver's first trip to Ravenswood and he was happy. It was a good fare, a round trip of over twenty miles. He exuded a stream of inconsequential chatter all the way up Eucalyptus to the turnoff which led to Ravenswood. Eucalyptus is one of the most heavily traveled streets other than the Freeways, but the turnoff was merely a narrow dead-end dirt road that had been put in privately for traffic to and from Ravenswood only. There wasn't another car in sight on it.

  We went up the dirt road for four or five miles, then came out of a grove of eucalyptus trees into view of the hospital. The road looped around behind the building and came back to join itself like the noose on a lariat, but went no farther than this somewhat isolated spot.

  It seemed more isolated than it really was. Four or five miles from us was the roar and bustle of frenzied activity, but we might have been a thousand miles from civilization. Ravenswood seemed peaceful. But, then, death is peaceful.

  It was a gloomy day to begin with; the air was muggy, heavy and still, leaves drooping on the trees and the sky gray and low. It was the kind of day that makes a man feel uneasy, depressed, melancholy.

  I could see activity, people moving around a big two-story building as white as bleached bone, but for some reason I was reminded of little live things crawling upon something dead. There was green grass around the building, but it wasn't green enough, not a healthy green, and faintly yellow patches of incipient decay dotted its surface like the pockmarks of disease.

  The cab driver stopped before the hospital's entrance and said, “Want me to wait, Mac?”

  “You'd better.” I got out and went up four cement steps to the small landing before the wide double doors. They were closed but not locked, and I walked inside. A few yards down a waxed and polished corridor, on my right, there was a counter, behind which a young man was writing something. I stepped to the counter and he looked up, then came over to me.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I'd like to see Mr. Todhunter. Gordon Todhunter.”

  He looked at me for a while, then said, “Your name?”

  “Shell Scott.”

  “Hmm.” He looked at me some more. “One moment, please.” He walked out from behind the counter and down the corridor and into another room. Shortly he came out with another man who stopped before me while the first one went back behind his counter.

  This new one was an older guy, about fifty, with graying hair and small sharp eyes. He was three or four inches shorter than me, and much heavier through the middle. His voice was very deep when he spoke, mellow, soothing.

  “You're Mr. Scott?”

  “That's right.”

  “And you'd like to see Mr. Todhunter?”

  “That's right.”

  He smiled gently, like a man smelling a rose and at peace with the world. Nothing would disturb him, it seemed, unless you began cutting him open with an ax.

  “I am Dr. Beecham, the director,” he said. “Please come into my office, sir.” His voice poured over me like syrup.

  In his office he sat behind his desk and I used an upholstered leather chair. He wanted to know my reasons for desiring to see Mr. Todhunter. “You must realize that you can't simply pop in and see one of our patients,” he said.

  “Do you mean I can't see him?”

  “Not today.”

  “Why not?”

  “He's a very sick man. Suffering from schizophrenia. He's completely withdrawn, uncommunicative. We're preparing him for electro-shock treatment today.”

  “Just what does that do, Doctor?”

  “We apply a very small electric current to the brain. It produces convulsions. Like epileptic convulsions.” He spoke very slowly. “From this apparent brutality, comes—sometimes—light into a darkened mind. We hope that Mr. Todhunter can be made accessible to treatment. Right now he is completely inaccessible.”

  “I'd like to see him.”

  “That will be impossible.”

  “When may I see him?”

  “I'm afraid not for several weeks. It will be—”

  “Just a minute,” I interrupted him. “I'm afraid several weeks won't do. Today or tomorrow would be about right. Perhaps I didn't mention that this is, well, an official visit. I'm employed by the Fact-Finding Committee of the California state senate, and I merely wish to determine if Mr. Todhunter can discuss a matter with me.”

  He was shaking his head. “Mr. Todhunter is in no condition—”

  “Whatever his condition, I would like to see him.”

  “I'm sorry—”

  “Doctor, I am going to see him.”

  He looked at me for several seconds, then he said quietly, “You really mean it, don't you.”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. He was quiet for a few more seconds. “Very well. Tomorrow, Mr. Scott. Tomorrow morning at ten. Will that be satisfactory?”

  “All right.”

  The director added, “Perhaps today's therapy will help Mr. Todhunter. I sincerely hope so.”

  I don't know why, but this Beecham impressed me as phonier than a crooked politician two weeks before election.

  The door opened and a white-uniformed nurse stepped inside. The doctor looked up and said, “Yes?”

  “Doctor Beecham, what about Mr. Howard? Dr. Mellor was going to handle his insulin shock. But he's not here today.”

  The director said,
“Yes. Well, get Doctor Gant. He's free this afternoon.” The nurse went out and Beecham turned to me, “You can see I'm very busy, Mr. Scott.”

  “Just one more thing.”

  “Yes?” He had looked down at a paper on his desk. It seemed to take him half a minute to get his eyes pointed to me again. He would run the hundred-yard dash in about eight years.

  “Who's paying Todhunter's bills?”

  “Bills?” he said. “That is hardly any concern of yours.”

  “Believe me, it is.”

  “What makes you think anybody has to pay his bills?”

  “This isn't a state hospital. It's private. Somebody's paying.”

  “I can't divulge that information.”

  “Okay. I'll be back in an hour. Then you'll tell me.”

  He looked at me, mentally sniffing his rose. “You are a violent man,” he said. “Well ... Doctor Parka. Los Angeles.”

  “He pays the bills?”

  “He pays the bills.”

  “I'll see you tomorrow at ten, Doctor. Thanks for the information.”

  He smiled sorrowfully. “I'm delighted to have been of help.”

  I left. The cab driver drove me back to town where I checked a phone book for Dr. Parka's address, then visited his office. Ten minutes there wasn't much help. Dr. Parka said he'd been treating Todhunter for over a year. Todhunter was not only a patient, but a friend. They'd been friends for many years. But he hadn't seen him for two or three months until just before the commitment. Dr. Parka suddenly realized he hadn't seen Todhunter around for quite a while, dropped in to see him, and found him in a terrible state.

  “Dirty, hungry, the house a mess.” He stopped and grimaced. “I made arrangements for his commitment to Ravenswood right away, of course.”

  “What about his daughter? Toddy. Wasn't she informed?”

  He blinked. “Barbara? Frankly, I don't even know where she is. Last I heard, she was traveling around Europe, I think. This all happened rather quickly, you understand. Had to, for Tod's own good.”

  “Uh-huh. I was just out at Ravenswood. Not the cheeriest place in the world, is it?”

  “No. I find it a bit depressing myself—from the outside.” He paused. “Ravenswood does have an extremely well-qualified staff. Was there anything else, Mr. Scott?”