Dead Heat (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 8

  And held it.

  And held it.

  Finally the little black-haired gal got the message. She stopped suddenly, then clapped her hands delightedly and jumped up and down. There was a great deal of applause.

  I stopped applauding and ordered a drink from a bosomy waitress in a blue cleavage-necked blouse and blue V-sided shorts and black net stockings, as a slick-haired male M.C. stepped to stage center holding a small microphone near his rosy lips and cried:

  “How about that? Hey, how about that? Well, folks, that was Mabel, our second amateur contestant of the night — and we’ve got four more to go. Remember, your applause picks the winner, the little lady who wins the fifty dollars and a screen test from Apex Productions.”

  Apex Productions. I had never heard of Apex Productions. Probably it consisted of the bar owner and a home-movie camera.

  Then I remembered the bar owner was Axel Scalzo. And suddenly, with something like a double shock, I saw him. Double shock because he was seated at ringside, on the right edge of the dance floor, sharing a table with the tall, thin, hairline-mustached clod, Dr. Noble.

  At another table — right behind Scalzo, naturally — sat two hard-faced musclemen. One of them I knew quite well; too well. He was a tall, wide man with a flat face, a face that had been pounded much in the days when he’d been a pro boxer, and on numerous occasions since then — including a couple of times by me. He was the joker who had joyfully kicked in two of my ribs, and who now walked with a permanent limp. His name was Hale, and these days, wherever Scalzo went, there went Hale. The other man was a mug named Deke whom I’d seen with Scalzo a time or two, nearly as tall as Hale but thinner, a mean-looking hood with eyes cold and black as the edge of space.

  Scalzo and Dr. Noble were at their table alone; the blonde wasn’t with them. I hadn’t even begun wondering where she might be, since I was still busy considering the pregnant possibilities inherent in the chumminess of Scalzo and Noble, when the M.C.’s voice filtered into my thoughts:

  “. . . applause decides the winner, so let’s hear it for number three now, let’s hear it for — Nell.”

  Nell? That was funny, I thought. Two Nells in one afternoon. Would wonders never cease?

  Scalzo and Dr. Noble were beating their hands together with great vigor, Scalzo’s shiny-bald scalp gleaming in the dim light as he bobbed his head. Dr. Noble was grinning widely. I looked away from them as the spotlight changed from pinkish to pale blue and the hand swung into an oldie, “Diane.”

  The next gal was gliding onstage now, moving with slow, sensuous grace, and it was suddenly less noisy in the club. Something in the way this one came on, or moved, or looked, reached out into the smoke-filled room and grabbed attention, held it. Slowly it became quiet.

  She was about five-five or five-six, with a shockingly shapely body covered from throat to knees by a white dress that caressed every curve, hugged each protrusion and undulation. Her thick blond hair, almost silver in the blue light, hung loose and brushed her shoulders as she moved over the floor.

  She spun, glided, then stopped momentarily facing the table at which Scalzo and Noble sat, arms lifting to raise the thick hair and let it fall heavily about her shoulders.

  Then she turned, smiling slightly, and I knew that smile. I knew that face, that form, the thick hair that wasn’t really silvery but rust-blond hair, the color of falling leaves in autumn.

  It couldn’t be.

  The hell it couldn’t.

  In the silence, until then broken only by the subdued music, there was one explosive sound. I made it. It popped from my lips, flew forth from my gaping chips.

  “Doody!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  She missed a step.

  She — Doody, Nell Duden, my dopey Doody.

  Some heads turned toward me. Not many. Enough. Hers, of course. And Axel Scalzo’s. And Dr. Noble’s. Hale and Deke stood up, stared, then slowly sat down. There were others, but it was those four male eyes from the ringside table that lit on me like the bores of four .45’s.

  The two men looked at each other then, and finally turned their attention toward Doody again. So did I. I sure as hell couldn’t fade away into the crowd now. I hadn’t really intended to in the first place; but even if I’d wanted to, I sure couldn’t do it now.

  Doody missed that one step but quickly recovered, caught the beat of the music again. For several seconds she swayed from side to side slowly, looking at me in a continuation of her initial surprise — or shock, pleasure, depression, whatever it was. Then she jerked her head, rope of hair whipping, and moved into her dance.

  Well, friends, there were still three to go, but everybody in that hushed room knew who the winner was before another minute passed. This was rhythm, grace, beauty, and all of it wrapped in an aura of pulsing passion hot enough to scorch your eyeballs — yet there wasn’t a movement, a sway, an arch of waist or thrust of hips that anyone, even blue-nosed reformers or professional censors, could in honesty have called crude or vulgar or obscene. It was simply — there’s that word again — sexy as hell.

  She stripped, as had the previous girl, to brassiere and panties and high-heeled shoes, one difference being that her wispy brassiere and step-ins were white and the shoes were white, another that her movements were slow, studied, smooth.

  But the big difference was that this was Doody, and the dance was pure, packed, unadulterated sex. Sex charged with joy and free of shame, the chaste offering of an aphrodisiacally curved body, bulge of white breasts and mound of rounded hip, gleam of firm thigh moving erotically in the blue illumination. The light dimmed even more and seemed to strip her body bare. She moved, clothed but suddenly appearing unclothed, like a nude wraith or phantasm of blue smoke, as the tempo of the music increased, throbbing hotly, like a heart beating faster and faster. Her hair fell to cover her face, only to be brushed aside by her hands in a slow caress that was like the parting of a veil.

  And then she stopped, rose on tiptoe with her cupped hands reaching high above her head, body arched, taut and unmoving, flesh gleaming faintly like a blue marble statue in moonlight. The music ended. The dim spotlight winked out. Still the silence remained. The house lights came up slowly. Doody was gone.

  The M.C. appeared and cried jovially, “How about that? Hey, how about that?”

  Then — the applause. A roar, a boom, a sea of sound, beating, pounding, whistling, and whooping. I started to finish my drink and discovered that, sometime in the last two or three minutes, I had finished it and one ice cube. So I ordered another as the M.C. continued his patter.

  The girls entered from the left for their acts, and now through the drapes on the right came Doody, fully dressed in white again, and appearing even more lovely than when I’d first seen her at Universal Electronics. She walked — naturally — to the table at which sat Dr. Noble and Axel Scalzo.

  Another dancer, this time a gal named Loris, was introduced and began her amateur strip, but I didn’t look. She could have taken everything off and danced on the tables, and it would still have been an anticlimax. Not only did it seem to me there was little else to see after what I’d just seen, but while watching Doody I had not even thought about thinking. Now, though, while I sipped the drink, I wondered.

  What in hell is going on here? I wondered.

  A heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It is one of my idiosyncrasies that I enjoy few things in life less than heavy hands clopping my shoulders. Or banging me in the back, even pleasantly, or stiff fingers poking at me and such. I simply do not like guys laying bands on me, even in high good fellowship.

  So I was starting to steam a bit even before I wheeled around to look at the hard, pursed-mouthed, not-charming face and shiny-bald head of Axel Scalzo. Behind him were Hale and Deke.

  “Beat it, Scott,” Scalzo said softly.

  He had already removed his hand and now both fists rested on his hips. He stood with his legs slightly apart, looking down at me. Down at me because, though he was a co
uple of inches under my six-two, I was seated on a bar stool.

  So I stood up, looked down at him instead, and said, “Scalzo, if you lay a hand on me again you’d better make it a fist.”

  “Knock off the big-mouth, Scott. Beat it. Take a walk.”

  I had a pull at my drink, using the time to calm myself down a little. Then I said, “No, thanks. I enjoy watching the gals dance. It’s a public place, I’m quiet, peaceable — ” “Peaceable.” He laughed.

  “Yeah, peaceable — so far. Keep pushing and you’ll change all that, but peaceable so far, Scalzo. You’d pay hell calling the law to kick me out. And the only alternative is to throw me out.” I grinned past him at Hale and Deke. “Hello, Hale,” I said. “Stomped any ribs in lately?”

  If anything, his sleepy-looking eyes got even more heavy-lidded, but he didn’t speak. Deke could have been measuring me for a coffin.

  Scalzo glared at me. He opened his mouth, and instead of drool, his soft, gentle voice came out saying, “That’s the way you want it, O.K. I got no beef with you right now, Scott. Not right now. I just can’t stand your goddamn guts. But O.K., you want to stay — and you don’t cause no trouble — I won’t push it. Just don’t cause me no trouble.”

  “That depends,” I said.

  “On what?”

  “You, Scalzo.”

  He chewed on the inside of his lip, looking levelly at me from the large gray eyes under the pinkish brows. The band was playing something hot and heavy, and on the floor Loris was squealing, either in pain or approaching ecstasy. Somebody near me coughed with a honk.

  “What’s that mean?” Scalzo asked softly.

  “Well, when you sent your boys to work over Sick Eddy Sly — ”

  “Wait a minute.” He scowled. “What the hell you pulling off, Scott? I know Sick Eddy, sure, who don’t? I’m surprised he ain’t here tonight.” He paused, still scowling, and then continued, “But I never sent no boys to work him over. Who says I did?”

  “Me. The muscle guys were a hood named Foster, and another joker known to hang around with you and your boys.”

  “I don’t even know any Foster. Foster what — or what Foster? And who’s this other guy?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what Foster, or the other man’s name is. Not yet. Foster is now dead, anyway — we were trying to shoot each other, and he didn’t try hard enough — but the other mug is reputed to be one of your buddies.” I described the guy but Scalzo just kept shaking his head.

  “Whoever reputed it is full of fertilizer,” he said, not saying fertilizer at all, actually. “He’s nobody mixed up with me.”

  “Maybe not. Just one other thing, then. I find it curiously interesting that Dr. Noble over there, who was jawing with Matthew Wyndham very soon after I shot Foster and chased off his chum — neither of whom you ever heard of, of course — should then race here to the South Seas for further dialogue with Axel Scalzo.”

  “Who in hell is Matthew Wyndham?”

  “Don’t tell me you never heard of the president of Universal Electronics. I know damned well you’ve bought a hunk of UE stock.”

  “Sure, I got UE. I also got GM, AT and T, Packard-Bell, Sperry Rand — Why should it bug you?” He paused. “Yeah, Wyndham, now I know who you mean. But I don’t know him. Never met him and got no reason to.” He shook his head. “Scott, have another drink and get the hell out of here.”

  “Uh-huh. And you didn’t know that the gal with Noble is Wyndham’s secretary?”

  He blinked slowly three times. “You’re kidding.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What do you know? Who’d think a damned secretary . . .” Scalzo let it trail off, glancing across the room at Doody. “I figured she must be a ringer, a professional stripper rung in on me. The doc, now, him I know. That’s why I joined him at the table — him and the babe. But the rest of it? You’re full of fertilizer.”

  He shrugged and walked away, followed by his silent buddies. I didn’t try to stop him. Either he was lying very convincingly — no great trick for Scalzo, since lying was second nature to him — or I was in the wrong ball park.

  I finished my drink, then slid off my stool and headed for the table where Doody, Noble, and now Scalzo were sitting. Except in special situations I make an effort to stay out of places where I’m not wanted, and I’m not much of a table-hopper, but this was a special situation. So I table-hopped.

  When I stopped next to their table Scalzo half rose from his seat. “Scott, I told you — ”

  “Oh, relax, Scalzo. Just wanted to say hello to your friends.” I grinned down at Doody and said, “Hello.”

  “Shellie,” she said brightly. “What did you mean yelling at me like that? I almost jumped out of my skin . . . I mean, out of . . . well, I sure jumped.”

  “Yeah. The truth is, Doody, it wasn’t exactly a yell, but more of an involuntary screech, or whoop, or . . . forget it.”

  “It sure was that, all right.”

  Scalzo finally sat back down in his chair, looking as if somebody had slipped an egg under him. Dr. Noble had pretty much the same expression on his thin, pale face. I said to him, “This is a coincidence, isn’t it, doctor?”

  “Isn’t it?” he said flatly. He glanced up, looking as if he’d like to operate on me with a switchblade scalpel, then flicked his eyes away.

  “I didn’t know you were acquainted with Dr. Noble and Scalzo,” I said to Doody.

  “I came here with Dr. Noble,” she said. “We met when he came to see Mr. Wyndham. But I’ve just this minute, practically, met Mr. Scalzo.” She batted her big beige eyes across the table at him. “You know, he’s the owner of this place, and he’s even the owner of Apex Productions too. And do you know what? I get a — ”

  “Screen test.” I finished it for her. “Apex Productions,” I said, grinning at Scalzo. “Eight-millimeter epics in narrow screen and dying color, the apex of nadirs — ”

  “Scott — ” Scalzo started to say something, then chopped it off. His face flushed, color rising clear up into his scalp. A vein I hadn’t noticed before appeared in the exact center of his forehead. He looked past me, at the far wall — or maybe at the new dancer now bouncing about on the floor. But he wasn’t seeing her, or the wall, and there was murder in his pale-gray eyes.

  “You were wonderful out there,” I said to Doody, nodding toward the dance floor. “I mean it. Marvelous, splendid — ”

  “It was fun,” she interrupted me excitedly. “I never did anything like that before, but it was — oh, I got all goose-bumply. I was just telling Fleming — Dr. Noble, I mean — and Mr. Scalzo, I was simply perilized before my turn to do it, but as soon as I started getting started I wasn’t perilized. Once was enough, though. It’s like they say, if at first you succeed don’t try it again and again . . . or whatever it is. I’m glad I did it, though.”

  “So, I’ll wager, is everybody else. I know I wouldn’t have missed — ”

  I cut it off. Movement at the drapes behind and to the right of the stage caught my eye and I glanced up, seeing a face that froze the words in my throat. Black eyes and brows, thin nose, thick lips and a scar on that upper lip. Foster’s co-muscleman. The s.o.b. who’d pounded on Eddy — and shot me in the rear end.

  He had started into the room, but he spotted me then and his eyes widened suddenly. I started around the table after him and he jumped back through the drapes and out of sight. I wasn’t thinking about a thing except getting my hands on that bastard, and as I went past Scalzo’s chair I hardly noticed as he reached out and grabbed my coat.

  But it slowed me, yanked me around. I didn’t hesitate. I slammed the edge of my hand into the side of Scalzo’s thick neck and he let out a sharp, clotted sound. His grip loosened. I pulled free and ran through the draped archway. Backstage there was clutter and confusion, boxes piled against a wall, naked lights hanging from the bare ceiling. On my left a girl in a dark skirt and pink brassiere was holding a blouse in both hands, looking to my right
. She swung her head toward me as I heard the pounding of feet and then the slamming of a door — to my right, where she’d been staring.

  I ran that way, along a short narrow hall to a door slightly ajar, yanked it open and leaped through — and blam.

  It was like getting stepped on by an elephant.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I went down, rolling, hanging onto consciousness but with pain caroming inside my skull, dots of light and bright jagged flashes growing and crumpling behind my eyes. But I had enough sense, or instinct, to keep rolling, grabbing under my coat for the .38.

  Then I was on my side, moving my legs but not quite coordinated enough to get them under me in that first second. When I did get to my knees, then onto my feet, swaying, I heard the fading sound of shoe leather on pavement. He’d waited outside the door to slam me if I came through, but he hadn’t waited around after that. He must have been a block away by the time I got started, and it took me a little while to get up any real speed. I didn’t have a chance to catch him.

  I leaned against the side of a car parked on a street intersecting Third. I couldn’t even hear the running feet any longer. And my head felt like Ruin. I stayed against the car, found cigarettes in my pocket, and had a smoke, then walked slowly back toward the South Seas.

  Toward it. I didn’t intend to go back in it; that failed to impress me as a clever thing to do at the moment. Scalzo, let it be instantly understood, took no more joy than did I in being pawed by people, even in friendly fashion. And that hadn’t exactly been a friendly dig I’d given him.

  A trickle of warm blood ran down the back of my neck and I blotted it with a handkerchief, dabbed at my sore scalp. I made it to the Cadillac before anybody had time to wire bombs under the hood, and I didn’t see anyone nearby who looked menacing. So I got in, did not blow up, and drove away from the club.