The Kubla Khan Caper (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 8

  “As sure as I ever am.”

  He ran a hand through his wavy golden hair, mussing it up a lot. Then, briskly, he told me what he’d been doing. He had phoned Monaco’s attorneys, talked to the police, done all he could. His wife was home, under sedation. He’d been going crazy trying to accomplish all that and still stay on top of arrangements for the party. He intimated that my activities were not helping him to hang onto his remaining shreds of sanity. I had to admit that he did look pretty well shot.

  “The reason I arrived here later than I expected,” he went on, “is because two sheriff’s deputies called at the estate and talked to Neyra and me. It was inevitable, I suppose, and justifiable. But it would have to be tonight, of all nights.”

  “Inevitable is the word,” I agreed. “The law was certain to talk with you and Mrs. Vail, and anybody else close to Mr. Sardis—anybody very chummy with Jeanne Jax, for that matter. Which is something Mr. Monaco doesn’t seem to have considered closely. How he expects to keep the mess quiet even overnight is beyond me.”

  Vail cocked his head on one side. “The officers did ask me and Neyra not to mention their visit—not to mention her father’s death to anyone, for that matter. Ormand does know a few strings to pull, and I presume he’s been pulling them.”

  Then he looked at his watch and said, with some agitation, “The party’s starting right now. I have to check the kitchen. And I suppose you’d like to get something to eat.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably time I put something solid in my stomach.”

  “I’ll see you later, then,” he said, thus dismissing me.

  I was hungry, at that. So out I went, headed for tile food—and the action.

  There was sure plenty of both.

  One of three huge buffet tables was set up at an end of the pool—which I’d seen sparkling outside when I was first in the Kubla Khan’s lobby—and that’s where I went. There were about two dozen kinds of salads, a lot of cold cuts and fish, beans and garbanzos and olives and such. Plus a dozen steaming hot dishes—lobsters and oysters, steaks, prime ribs, ham, chops, casseroles.

  After gorging myself on tossed green salad and rare prime ribs, I looked over the area, beginning to realize that preparations for this weekend had been no less than Herculean. Monaco had obviously spared no expense, and the total effect approached the fantastic. In addition to silken streamers in every color of the rainbow rippling in a crosshatch pattern overhead and fluttering from tall poles, red and blue and green and yellow lights bathing the palms and shrubbery, and brilliantly costumed guests and waiters and attendants in abundance, there was also what amounted to a zoo.

  Yeah, a zoo—animals. And I mean animals.

  In cages placed about the grounds were three Bengal tigers; between the pool and a small tent, in which a band played and where some of the guests were dancing on a temporary hardwood floor, was a magnificent cheetah on a leash—held by his trainer, I presumed and hoped; there were two screened cages filled with colorful and rather raucous birds, a cage occupied by suspicious-looking monkeys, and one lone zebra tied to a stake. There were also, and I kid you not, two elephants in a grassy clearing. A big elephant and a little one, though the little one was not so little I would not have noticed had he stepped on me.

  This place was the Kubla Khan and a carnival, Xanadu and Barnum and Bailey, a Mardi Gras and cocktail party and a seminudist camp and a good chunk of Hollywood Boulevard rolled into one. All that was needed was Pan playing his pipes and this could turn into the Thousand and Second Night.

  As I strolled around I saw several familiar faces, some of them familiar not only to me but to much of the planet’s population. Movie stars and TV personalities, a few politicians, a couple of reporters I recognized from L.A., the polished and witty host of a late-night TV talkathon, a magazine writer or two. There were also numerous photographers—one from Playboy, though he was not costumed as a bunny—and at intervals flashbulbs flared brilliantly, and ladies squealed in feigned dismay.

  I wandered back to the main swimming pool, which was the center of much of the most interesting activity, and spotting an unoccupied chaise longue, occupied it. After five minutes of relaxation I figured I’d get busy and solve the case, maybe. Or at least hunt up Bull Harper and Lyssa again. Or at least Lyssa. And I wanted to find Carol Shearing, the late Jeanne Jax’s roommate for a night, too.

  There was lots I wanted to do. But for five minutes I was simply going to let some of my tossed green salad and prime ribs digest—shouldn’t work immediately after eating—and gaze upon sights I might not in this lifetime see again.

  The snake-charmer band was still playing, flaming torches flickered in the warm wind, and I could smell the scent of sage and jasmine. Several couples were dancing near the band, lovely tomatoes jumped and bobbed and swam in the briefest of brief bikinis, and across the pool from me, on the blue-tiled deck, several superbly stacked nautch girls wiggled, doing what comes nautch-urally . . . .

  11

  It was just 8:30 p.m. when I managed to run down Carol Shearing.

  Lyssa had told me she was the gal with whom it had been intended that Jeanne Jax share a room, but Lyssa hadn’t told me what she looked like. However—only a few minutes after somewhat reluctantly forcing myself from my poolside chaise longue—I learned from an Amazonian lovely dressed in very little, whom I encountered staring at an elephant and saying “Ohmigawd,” not only that Carol was present but where she was.

  The lovely pointed her out, merely by facing in the general direction of a curvy blonde wearing one of the nautch-girl or temple-dancer costumes, which apparently were the official garb of the beauty contestants. “That’s Carol,” she said. Then she turned to point at the elephant. “What is that gross thing?” she asked, in a tone full of wonder.

  “That is an elephant.”

  “I thought they were extink.”

  “No. At least that one isn’t. Large beast, isn’t he?”

  She nodded and looked me up and down. “So are you. What are you, his trainer?”

  Caveman, truck driver, elephant trainer—what would be next? “You,” I said with dignity, “are several sheets to the wind, aren’t you?”

  She smiled ecstatically, and I stalked away.

  Carol Shearing was talking to a heavy-set hulk, rather broad of beam, and as I walked toward them I heard him say, “Well, thanks, doll. See you around.”

  He’d been facing away from me, but as he turned and walked toward the hotel he glanced at me from deep-set eyes under tangled, heavy brows. I’d seen the guy someplace, but at first couldn’t remember where.

  The girl turned and headed toward the swimming pool. I fell into step beside her and said, “Hello; you’re Carol Shearing, aren’t you?”

  She smiled automatically. “Yes. Yes. Hello.” She seemed to be quite keyed up, her pretty face flushed and glowing.

  “I’m Shell Scott. Have you got a minute?”

  “Just about. I have to go fall in the pool. You can walk with me, though.”

  “You have to what?”

  “Fall in the pool. It’s my publicity man’s idea. He’s a genius.”

  “Must be. Well, I won’t keep you from the works of genius, Miss Shearing. Just wanted to ask if you’ve any idea where Jeanne Jax is.”

  She frowned a mite. “Why’s everybody so interested in Jeanne?”

  “Everybody?”

  “Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But the fellow I was just talking to, and now you.”

  “Oh? What did he want to know about her?”

  “Just where she was. I’m supposed to be her roomie, but I don’t even know where she is. That’s what I told him.”

  “Who was—” Then I remembered.

  I guess I hadn’t recognized him without his cigar. It was the beefy character who’d been blowing smoke in the Seraglio. I looked around but he was already out of sight, swallowed up somewhere in the crowd. I was tempted to chase after him, but I didn’t want to chop off the co
nversation with Carol now I’d found her. Besides, if the guy had known Jeanne was dead, he would hardly have been asking where she was. Of course, that’s what I had just asked Carol.

  She was saying, “He didn’t tell me his name or anything. Just asked about Jeanne, and when I told him I hadn’t seen her, be left.”

  “You hadn’t seen the man around before?”

  “No.”

  “Uh-huh. You say Jeanne’s your—your roomie?”

  “Supposed to be. Most of us got here Wednesday, you know, and Jeanne and I were roomies that night. But I didn’t even see her yesterday, except once, and she never did show up last night.” She rolled her eyes as if doing exercises to strengthen the little muscles, and added, “So I had to sleep all alone.”

  “A fate worse than insomnia,” I said. It was a bit difficult to get teeth into the conversation, because we were still walking, and Carol was stepping along at a very speedy clip. Anxious to fall into the pool, I guessed. Unless I was far, far off the mark, her publicity man and nine or ten photographers would just happen to be present when she rose, dripping, from the clear waters.

  It was going to be something to see, undoubtedly. Merely looking down at Carol alongside me was itself something to see, for the gauzy outfit offered very little either of concealment or restraint when not even damp. The bloomer affair was completely transparent, and bystanders were spared being spun into shock merely by a wisp of opaque underthing under the thing, while the top was no more than a sort of half-blouse made of thin cheesecloth over a brassiere woven, presumably, from seamless sixty-gauge nylon. Since the bra was not nearly sturdy enough to hold down a tent in a gale, and fine print could have been read through that blouse if the moon was full, speedily moving Carol provided nearly as much activity and excitement as cavalry attacking the Indians.

  “Uh, what say we slow down?” I said to her.

  “Golly, I don’t have time,” she said. “Oh—here, hold my watch, will you?”

  She slipped a little dinky gadget off her arm and handed it to me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I peered at the watch and said, “You’re late, huh? How can you tell?”

  She just kept tripping along.

  “Carol, what did you mean, you didn’t see Jeanne yesterday except once. What was the once?”

  We had reached a wide cement apron around the swimming pool’s tiled deck and Carol angled left to get around a group of men and women. There was some kind of musical group playing on a raised platform near the pool now, and she had to raise her voice a bit to compete with the oddly melodic and almost dysrhythmic music. It sounded like something to charm cobras with, and a couple of other nautch girls on the blue tiles were making some very snakelike and charming movements.

  Carol stopped and looked around, apparently caught her publicity man’s eye and nodded. Then she said to me, “Oh, that was yesterday afternoon sometime. I was over by Misty’s suite, big movie star—she gets a suite, not a two-to-a-room like us. Of course, she’s lovely, and awfully nice.” Carol looked at the pool’s waters and, after thinking briefly, went on, “Of course, a movie star deserves a suite.”

  “Misty?”

  Carol continued, rattling on breathlessly, “Misty opened the door for somebody and I looked inside to see what the suite was like, and Jeanne was in there.”

  “Misty Lombard?” I said.

  Carol blinked up at me. “Of course. Misty Lombard. Oh, well, that Jeanne was stuck up, anyway, if you ask me. Pretty enough, but not very friendly—” She broke off, having apparently caught a secret signal. “Oh, here I go!”

  “Hey, wait a minute—”

  Not a chance. Not when this was Carol Shearing’s first step on her Stairway to the Stars.

  She walked over by the pool, then turned and sort of strutted along near its edge, turning to wave and laugh and blow a kiss at somebody in my general area who had clearly amused her a great deal. Clearly it wasn’t me. And then—tragedy.

  Somehow one of her high heels—upon which she had recently been racing like a mountain goat at approximately twenty miles an hour—got twisted beneath her and she started to fall backward, plummeting toward the water—at the shallow end of the pool, I noted—screaming very piercingly.

  It wasn’t really an unpleasant sound. About like a trained soprano’s A below high C, I guessed. But it was piercing enough to attract plenty of attention.

  The dunking of lovely hippily-hipped and bosomy-busted Carol Shearing—soon to be known to millions of fans as Sherry Carroll—was a triumph of drama, feminine art and ballistics. She lit just right and sank just deep enough and hit a clear sweet A nuzzling high C, and bounced up very bouncily with the water streaming from her and churning passionately midway of the curving hips, and didn’t even get her hair wet.

  “Oh!” she cried in pretty embarrassment.

  Hell, it wasn’t pretty; it was gorgeous.

  It was as though water was a magic elixir which dissolved the half-blouse and bloomers entirely, and I knew as I watched her climb gracefully from the drink after one more lilting cry of frustration—a rising “Oh, oh, oh!” this time—that I had seen TV and cinema history in the making.

  Carol Shearing, costumed like all the other beauties as a slightly naughty nautch girl, fell into the pool; but from it, her sensational nudity concealed only by what appeared to be the cellophane from three cigarette packs, rose Sherry Carroll.

  I had to wait while maybe a hundred flashbulbs flashed and for the conclusion of at least one brief interview, but finally I was not only at Sherry’s side but had one-tenth of her attention.

  “Miss Shearing, please.” Yakketa-yakketa-yakketa. “Miss Shearing! Carol. Hey, you’re going to be a star.” That got her. She looked at me, still hiding both beautiful breasts behind her little fingers, and cried, “I’m so ashamed!”

  “Yeah. Baby, I’m the guy holding your watch.”

  “What? Oh. Oh, good grief.” She looked all around and hissed at me, “Look, keep your mouth shut, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Please?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll do anything.”

  “Sure. I mean, don’t worry.”

  “I was so excited, I guess I didn’t know what I was saying to you. You will—”

  “Yeah, just give me one minute from your crowded schedule, OK?”

  “Of course, honey. Just keep your mouth shut and I’ll do any—Say, you’re not in pictures, are you?”

  “No,” I said, a little sadly.

  We found a spot momentarily free of people who might overhear us and I said, “If I heard you correctly, you told me you saw Jeanne Jax in Misty Lombard’s suite yesterday afternoon.”

  “Yes. She was sitting in there smoking a cigarette. Why are you so interested?”

  “Just believe I’m interested. And I’ve got nearly a minute left.”

  “Take all the time you want, honey.”

  “When was this, exactly?”

  “After dinner, I think. Oh, sure, that’s how it was. Misty opened the door for a boy from room service. At least, he was carrying a tray, I remember. I thought probably it was from the dining room.”

  “You mean Misty’s been eating in her suite?”

  “Oh, she ate in the Mandarin Room. I saw her there when I had dinner.”

  “No kidding. Interesting.”

  12

  It was a kissing booth, all right.

  The thing was merely an open-to-the-air frame structure built on the order of a temporary fireworks stand—which struck me as rather appropriate—and at its top was a sign—kisses for sale!—in lipstick-red letters on a creamy background, the exclamation point followed by the figure one and two zeros.

  Gad, I thought, only a buck? Hardly seems enough. Not with all these rich guys around. The poor girls could wear out their chops, lose all their pucker, get limp like old bicycle tires. Ah, but there were two booths, I noticed.

  In one of them, however, a flaming redhe
ad was selling little Eastern pastries, like paclava, or Balaclava, or whatever they call those thin-dough and sprinkled-nuts and cooked-honey cookies, but I sprang right on by that booth and stopped at the second one.

  A sweet-lipped brunette stood inside the booth, just beyond a four-foot-high wall of pink-painted boards—pretty thick boards, too—and on this side of the wall—my side—stood luscious Misty Lombard.

  When we’d first bumped into each other I had been so magnetized by her eyes, and lips, by the scent of her and the sweet sound of her voice, I had barely seen the rest of her, noting only that she was wearing something white and exceptionally shapely. But now I noticed the rest of her, and how I noticed the rest of her.

  She wore a shimmering gold-lame brassiere, in approximately the size not made by Magicbra for the 32 bust, and it was much more opaque than several thicknesses of air, but not too much, and it was cut at the top down into an incurving V which revealed a searing vista of that which some Mohammedans expect to find in their heaven and for which they thus sometimes willingly, happily, even hurriedy die.

  Beneath the narrow waist and smooth bare midriff, low on her splendidly swelling hips, a tight gold band two inches wide held loose and billowing folds of more gold lame which formed harem-type pants a little like, but only a little like, those worn by numerous other lovelies here at the Khan. These fastened tightly above brightly colored shoes with long pointed toes which curled up into the air and back toward her slim ankles. From top to bottom, and even farther than that, this gal had everything.

  The fact that she was not inside the booth didn’t quite penetrate at first; all I knew for sure was that there she was, with those magnificent eyes and lips and all those other things, and I cried, “Misty! I’ll take—a dozen!”

  She turned her head, saw me and smiled. “Oh, Shell, hello . . . . A dozen what?”

  “What have you got?”

  She glanced at a sign over our heads. kisses for sale! “You must mean kisses,” she said. Then she laughed. “They’re a hundred dollars, you know.”