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

  That did it. I’d had enough distraction.

  I just stared past him, letting my lower lip droop. Staring past him like that, I was looking in the mirror when the little gal with the sweet-pudding eyes and the bee-witching mouth waved a hand vigorously in front of her nose, then turned to face the big guy.

  I heard her say pleasantly, “I beg your pardon. Would you mind not doing that? It’s starting to—”

  Still leaning back in his chair, fat leg stuck out, and holding the glowing cigar between thumb and finger, he said casually, “It bother you, girlie? Well, you don’t like it you can leave. It’s a free country.”

  One of those sweeties, huh? I thought. But I told myself to sit tight, not to get involved, not to make an ass of myself—again. I sat quite still while my face got warm and a little perspiration grew on my upper lip. I knew part of the reason for the perhaps overenergetic conniptions of my various glands was undoubtedly due to the contrast between what the beefy slob had said and the way he’d said it, and my just concluded yak with the bartender.

  Maybe the chap behind the bar was not the most Herculean and Casanova-ish lad in the whole wide world and perhaps he even struck me as a bit of a cluck, but he was a nice guy and certainly meant nobody any harm. The same could not be said of that other boy. He meant some harm.

  But I was, after all, here to do a job, not to wreck the place one room at a time. And my white charger was made into horsemeat a long time ago. That’s what I told myself.

  The gal turned around, hitched her chair closer to the table—and, boy, was she burning.

  She was wearing a pale-blue cocktail gown instead of a costume, and it was cut low over high breasts, plunging just deep enough into that dark shadowed valley, and as she breathed deeply her breasts rose and fell with a rapid, sensual, rhythmic semibareness that should have had the sound of muted trumpets and a dozen alto saxes behind it. The fingers of one hand drummed the tabletop.

  Then she snapped her head around, one way, and the other.

  I couldn’t figure what she was looking for. But I did when she found it. She wanted a waitress, and got one—they all wore yellow see-through ankle-length bloomers and metallic bras with golden snakes woven around the cups, probably meant to represent the death of Cleopatra twice—and when the waitress stopped alongside her the little lovely ordered another drink.

  I grinned. Apparently She was going to sit right there, smoke and all, even if she choked. It pleased me. Of course, if she’d been here as part of a kookie sit-in in some joint where she wasn’t wanted and didn’t want to be in the first place—like if the cigar-smoker owned the hotel, for example—I might have said, “So choke on it.” But this was a little different; this time it was that big beefy slob, and a private smoke-in.

  She got her drink, lifted it to her lips and was just starting to swallow when the slob got another lungful and actually leaned half out of his chair this time, so he could get his mug a foot from her head when he blew. She got a noseful, I guess; something happened. She actually did start to choke for a few seconds, apparently from the combination of liquor in her throat and cigar smoke in her nostrils.

  She coughed, lowered her head and put a hand to her mouth, coughed against it again and once again, shoulders shaking, and the guy sucked in another big gob and got ready for the coup de grace, and I told myself weakly, “Don’t do it, Scott,” as I climbed down off my stool and did it.

  Three long steps got me there. I put my left hand high on his chest, just under the thick neck, and pushed him back solid in his seat. He was caught by surprise and wasn’t difficult to move, but when his rear end hit the chair he yanked his head up and looked at me and said, “Wha—”

  The smoke he’d had ready to go came out in a loose puff and floated around his head, between him and me. This close, I could see that except for the expression of surprise bending his chops he was a very good-looking guy. Younger than I’d thought, too. A bit too thick in the middle and head, I’d have said, but it was the kind of strong, virile face a lot of women would flip for. Deep-set eyes under heavy brows, straight nose, thick and sensual lips, a clean strong jaw. The cigar wai still in his right hand, a half-full glass of beer on the table next to him.

  I took the cigar from his fingers, picked up his glass and dunked the cigar in the beer. It went psst and bubbled a little. Then I put the glass back on the table, handed him the cigar and stood there.

  “You sonofabitch,” he said.

  “Ah-ah, careful. I’m just uneasy now. Don’t get me all unstrung.”

  “What—” He stopped and thought about it. Then he started to get up. Then he stopped and thought about that too. Finally he said, “What the hell you do that for?”

  I grinned at him. “It’s a free country.”

  I waited, but after appearing to chew on something gristly he looked across the table at his companion and said, “All the nuts are out tonight, huh?”

  So I turned around and went back to my stool.

  A couple minutes later I saw the big guy and his friend go out into the lobby.

  A minute after that, while glowering at my drink, not feeling all filled with joy and light, either, I heard a voice near my ear, a voice like the humming of honey, like hot winds in green grass, soft as the flutter of mas-caraed lashes, warm as a Martini in an empty stomach.

  And all it said was, “Hi.”

  I turned slowly, looked at her and grinned. “What did you say?”

  “Just hi.”

  Just enough. It sounded the way it used to in Southern California.

  8

  You think she’d looked good six or eight feet away? Let me tell you, that had been seeing as through a glass darkly.

  Up close she was all velvet and fire, skin like silken umber, the eyes still dark and almost brown, but with green in them, a lot of green, the color of wet moss, or the sea, or emeralds in shadow. They were big and round and that look of constant surprise in them gave her an air of virginal innocence—when you looked at her eyes. But a breath below was where the virgin died and a bawd was born.

  Those lips were the flesh of a hot, carnivorous blossom, a trap and a snare made for a man’s mouth; wild lips that silently sizzled, that moved a little, kept moving Just a little, as if in memory of long, lusty, lingering kisses; lips that were fine and moist and full, that looked soft and sweet and willing in a face that was wanton and wise. You don’t think so? Friend, you should have been there.

  There was with your face about six inches from hers. I’d climbed to my feet and was standing close to the lovely, looking down at her.

  I leaned just a little closer and, still grinning, said, “That is hi, I presume, as in hi-diddle-diddle?”

  “Like in hi-de-ho, honey.”

  “Well, crazy. You have just destroyed three thousand of my corpuscles.”

  “That is a bloody shame,” she said.

  “Lady,” I said, starting to get the rhythm, “you’re more fun that a hot transfusion, you’re really plasma. I think we could swing—if I knew the music.”

  “Easy. I’ll take the offbeat, love, and you just fake it in the middle.”

  “Hey-hoo, I think I’ve got the background. Now if I could only find the playground . . . “

  “I know where it is.”

  “So take me wherever.”

  “It’s not far from here, daddy.”

  “And that’s where the swing is?”

  “That’s where it is, that is where it is at.” She was starting to smile more widely, more hotly, and once or twice she snapped her fingers.

  So I snapped a couple myself. “ ‘School days,’ “ I yo-deled, “ ‘school days, dear old golden . . . ‘ It sounds like fun.”

  “It is fun. And it’s easy, love. You just give it a little push and it keeps going.”

  “I want one of those for my front yard. Lady, you make me feel like a little kid again.”

  “You’re a liar, daddy. I mean . . . “ She smiled like Lucrezia Borgia s
tirring the soup, and said, “I mean, you is a liah, big white daddy,” and this time she lowered her voice and kind of got it squeezed in her throat, and something in the sound as the words rasped softly through her lips sent a charge, a jolt, a kind of three-dimensional electrocution into me about midway of the midsection, and it spread out both ways from there and activated every switch I had in that whole general area.

  I gulped and said, “If you say so.”

  “What do you say?”

  “OK.”

  “By the way,” she said. “Thanks. For puttin’ out old Smokey Bear.”

  “For nothing. It was a pleasure.”

  She looked me up and down, from my gorgeous turban to my marvelous red jacket and hero medals to my dandy striped pants, and said, “My, you’re pretty. What are you, a fireman?”

  “Huh,” I said stiffly. “Huh. Any fool can see that I am a maharaja.”

  “A what?”

  “A maharaja!”

  “You’re a Mountie. With a funny hat.”

  “So it’s funny. So . . . would you settle for mahaharaja?”

  She grinned. “If you say so,” she said.

  She leaned forward; her breasts touched my chest. I looked down at them swelling against the neckline of her dress, straining against the blue cloth as if impatient with even that fragile restraint. I hoped she didn’t scratch them. She leaned even closer and those freedom-loving breasts bulged over the blue neckline, quivered, started to spill, and I said, “Baby, you’re melting my medals. Let’s . . . let’s . . . let’s have a drink.”

  I spotted the bartender, held up two fingers, pointed at the bar. He nodded, but I thought he looked panicky, as though becoming certain he should never have mentioned Cobra’s Kisses to me in the first place.

  When the drinks arrived, my new and zippy companion gazed upon them intently, and those big, round, sur-prised-looking eyes became even bigger and rounder and more surprised-looking, and she said, “Have you been drinking those?”

  “Of course. But this is only my fifth.”

  “You’ve had five?”

  “Well, yes, about a fifth. But don’t worry, I hold my drinks pretty well.” I pressed two fingers against each eye for a moment, adding, “When I’m sober, especially.”

  Then I said, “I think I’d better sit down. And get, ah, my wind back. Watch it there. I think we’d better both sit down.”

  She moved back a little more, maybe half an inch, and those innocent eyes rolled around. “Only one stool,” she said.

  “So it’s yours, all yours. Unless you want to sit on my lap.”

  She smiled again, like Lucrezia along about the third course this time. “I might,” she said, “only I’m not wearing a girdle. So I can’t do that.” She slid up onto the stool with a motion as fluid as two ball bearings rubbing together in a quart of peanut oil. “Don’t dare.”

  “No girdle?” I said in a voice ringing with joy. “No bachelor-girl’s-best-friend? No enemy of mankind? Hallelujah! If this catches on you might be the savior of civilization.”

  “You mean we’re—I mean, you mean we is in accord?”

  I got a boot out of the way she switched from the smooth, almost lilting language she ordinarily used into the calculated lingo with a rocking bounce and beat; I would have matched it if I could, but I couldn’t. She probably knew eight languages more than I did.

  So I merely said, “We is, for a fact. It so happens I am a charter anti-girdler. If I had my way I’d heist the things out of washing machines, and burn them entirely. So, Sweetpants—say, what the hell is your name?”

  She threw back her head and laughed, the smooth brown column of her throat rippling. Then she lowered her head and looked up at me from the chaste, sparkling eyes. “It’s Miss Weldon. And it’s Miss Weldon. And it’s Lyssa. So who am I?”

  “You’re Lyssa, what else?”

  “And you’re what else?”

  “Shell Scott.”

  “What are you doing here, Shell Scott? You one of the big important guests?”

  “Nope. I’m a dot—” I cut it off just in time. “I’m one of the judges of tomorrow’s beauty contest.”

  “Oooh,” she squealed. “Vote for me, vote for me.”

  “You’re in the contest?”

  “You just bet I am.”

  Now that I’d reminded myself I was, after all, a detective; and now that I was actually talking to one of the contestants, I took the opportunity to ask, “You know any of the other girls in the contest, Lyssa?”

  “I know them all. Met them all, I mean.”

  “How about Jeanne Jax?”

  “Sure, she’s a real pretty—” Lyssa stopped suddenly. “Seems funny you’d ask me about her.”

  “Why funny?

  “She was supposed to be staying with Carol, another of the girls in the contest—Carol Shearing. But Carol says die didn’t come back to their room last night. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And, besides, she was asking me a lot of questions yesterday. I think she asked some of the other girls, too.”

  “Oh? Asked about what?”

  “What we knew about this bigshot, Mr. Sardis.”

  I felt a little electric current ripple the hairs on my ears. “Sardis?” I said casually. “Ephrim Sardis?”

  “Uh-huh. You know him?”

  “Never met the man,” I said truthfully. “But I’ve heard of him. What did she want to know about Sardis?”

  “Oh, like who he was, where be lived, if he was as rich as everybody said, things like that.”

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “I told her I didn’t know much about him, but if she was so curious, ask Bull Harper.”

  “Who’s Bull Harper?”

  She frowned. “What are you so curious about all of a sudden?”

  “Curious fellow. So who’s this Bull?”

  “He’s a friend of mine, if you want to know. A good friend. He doesn’t ask me all kinds of goofy questions.”

  “Why would he know anything about Sardis?”

  She frowned more vigorously, and squirted some air out her nose. “He’s Mr. Sardis’ bodyguard,” she said. “Among other things, like driving his car and so on. And if you keep asking things like that, I’m going to get right up and leave.”

  Well, it had been a fairly profitable minute of conversation, and I sure didn’t want Lyssa to leave. For lots of reasons. So I grinned at her and said, “Well, then, let’s go back to where we were at. Ah, so you’re Lyssa Weldon? Well, I’m Shell Scott. How about that?”

  It was as if she’d never been away. She snapped her fingers and said, “Crazy. And you are the craziest-looking man. You shuah is, you shu-wah is.”

  “Ah, but underneath this rough exterior is an interior.”

  “I like it all right,” she said casually, “way it is on the outerside.”

  “Then we is in accord. Because I have been—in case you’d not noticed—so admiring your outerside that I may soon be offside. And as long as we’ve gone back, to conclude my comments on corsets, allow me to applaud your wisdom, forethought, hindsight, and stupendous anatomy. That is, if you are truly wise enough, and brave enough, not to be wearing a girdle.”

  “Feel.”

  “Huh?”

  She was seated, turned half around on the stool, and I was standing out away from the bar, but not very far away from Lyssa. And I could almost see something move deep in those brown-green eyes, a little flicker like heat lightning, as she said, “Underneath this exterior is no nothin’, just me.”

  “No girdle, no noth . . . “ I looked up at the ceiling. “No—”

  “Nothin’. You don’t believe me, feel me.”

  She reached for my wrist, pulled, put my hand on the curve of her hip, moved it down the smooth roundness of her thigh. She was warm; I could feel the heat of her body, like boiling blood under my fingertips. And she was right, there was nothing under the dress but Lyssa. The thin cloth felt
like her skin.

  Our faces were only inches apart, but something across the room caught her eye and held it for long seconds, then she looked back at me again.

  She ran her tongue over her lips and said, “I thought shu-wah old Smokey Bear was going to hit you down in the ground.”

  “I was kind of afraid he might have something like that in mind.”

  “Think he could’ve? Could’ve done it?”

  “I don’t know. It isn’t likely, but you never know. He might have.”

  “You pretty good, like in a real fight?”

  “Pretty good. Why, what the hell? What difference does it make to you?”

  “Not me,” she said, kind of sadly, I thought. “Might make a difference to you.”

  “How’s that?”

  She looked once more toward whatever it was that had caught her eye and said, back to the normal language again, “I hope you’re not merely pretty good. Shell. You’d better be better than that.”

  Well, I had a feeling.

  Yep. I had a feeling something horrible was going to happen.

  I knew if I looked something would be over there that I wouldn’t “want to see, but that I should see. And, there in one little convolution of my lamebrain those thoughts I’d earlier had about the sometimes inevitability of self-propelled events wiggled.

  I looked around.

  The first thing I saw was Jerry Vail, back at last

  But that wasn’t it.

  There was it, in the doorway.

  It was just about the biggest, blackest Negro I’d seen in my life. He was enormous.

  I knew Vail was my height, six-two, but this monster was a good three inches taller than Vail and I’d have given splendid odds he weighed not an ounce less than a thousand pounds. Well, a solid two hundred and eighty pounds, at least. Which was a good two hundred pounds more than I felt like tangling with at the moment.

  He looked big, he looked tough, he looked menacing, he looked dangerous as hell. But mainly, he looked at me.

  And to me it was plain as day, plain as the already broken nose on my face: that he had come to get me.

  Maybe it wasn’t what he’d originally intended; perhaps he’d just come here for fun, for a lark, or his girl—with my luck, that was undoubtedly it—or for booze. What difference did it make? Now he was coming to get me.