Have Gat—Will Travel (11 page)

She pulled me inside and slammed the door. Some women take off their towel and they are merely nude; Gloria looked as if she'd just stepped out of a black-lace negligee. It was wondrous, it was tremendous, it was marvelous. It was Gloria's.

She grabbed me and said, "Oh, I was worried. But it's all right now."

"I can stay only a minute. Got to see Billings."

"Oh, honey, no."

"Got to get downtown . . . to police . . . headquarters . . ."

"Honey, honey, honey . . ."

Poor old Billings. I didn't get downtown until Saturday.

TROUBLE SHOOTER

I
looked around the office wondering where to start. It wasn't a pleasant moment. I didn't want to start at all, didn't want to leave. But this was like a lot of Hollywood offices — lavish, expensive, all front, and a broke tenant.

The tenant — that's me, Shell Scott. And it looked as if Shell Scott was Hollywood's latest casualty. It had been great for a year, anyway. This one I'd liked. After the advertising agency, the stint on a newspaper, the odd jobs around Hollywood, I'd wound up a private investigator — I owned the license. Three years of it I'd had now, the last year in my office here on the Sunset Strip. That's right, the Sunset Strip.

A private detective is supposed to be unobstructive, a man who can fade away into the shadows. But this is Hollywood. The clients I want, the men and women of the movie industry, don't feel right hiring somebody who can fade away into the shadows. They don't want a shrinking violet, but a blooming eucalyptus with morning glories springing out all over it. So, after two meager years in downtown L.A. I'd bloomed and sprung out. On the Sunset Strip — the expensive Sunset Strip. Expensive, like Mocambo, Ciro's.

The office, like the address, is front. In Hollywood you have to have a front. A producer working on a two-million-dollar comic-strip-with-people doesn't — if he's in trouble and needs some kind of troubleshooter — get into the right mood, the paying mood, when he leaves his walnut paneled office, his mahogany desk, his pith helmet, his blonde, and enters a one-room office complete with green wooden filing cabinet. So, I've got the place fixed up to sock out the proper impression. Both rooms. Take a look at it. Squint, though, or close one eye.

In front is a wide, shallow office with black carpet, over-stuffed red-and-gray chairs, white desk at which sits — all in black — Yolanda. Yolanda, of whom more later. Then through the connecting door into the next room, my office. Desk made from the stump of a mangrove tree from Florida's Okefenokee Swamp, complete with roots. Zebra-striped chairs. Red chaise lounge. Scattered around, or hanging on the walls are my own pith helmet, blowgun, pictures of some stars and directors and Hollywood people, and many pictures of Shell. Shell — with an elephant gun in Africa, in mountain gear climbing an Alp, skiing at Sun Valley, and so on. When a potential Hollywood client walked into my office, he knew I was good.

Several clients had been satisfied this last year, too, but I hadn't had a real smash case for three months. Three months without a hit. Two months without even a divorce investigation. Just about everybody in the movie industry knew my name, but I was, as actors say, between engagements. Hollywood has a short memory. What counts is now, not then. You've got to keep producing.

Finally I started packing by gathering up the pictures, stacking them on my Okefenokee-Swamp-mangrove-tree-with-roots desk. Not another one in Hollywood like it. Then Yolanda came in. That's not quite right. Yolanda doesn't come in. She walks, she floats, she soars, she dips and dives and gyrates and wiggles and flows — in a word, Yolanda enters. Yolanda entered.

"We should have a wake or something, Shell."

"We should have some money."

"You're really moving it all out today?"

I nodded, looking at her. Yolanda, tall, black-haired, lithe and luscious, white-skinned, full red lips and huge nearly black eyes. In this town, where front is so important, Yolanda had it made. She also had it made behind and sideways, and in any town. I hated to give up the office, true; but most of all I hated to lose Yolanda.

She's my girl Friday, my secretary, phone-answerer, confidante, pal and what-not. She'd come to Hollywood to crash the movies, a dream she still clung to, but she couldn't act. She can't type either, can't take shorthand, but you can't have everything. The chaise lounge in my office is for her; that's where she takes dictation. Yolanda doesn't know Gregg, but she can invent pothooks like crazy, and the faster I talk, the more she squirms on the chaise lounge. I've had directors, writers, even producers, watching open-mouthed as I dictated a hundred and fifty words a minute, not hearing a word I said.

"Seems a shame," Yolanda said, her voice poured through honey.

"It is a shame."

"Isn't there anything we can do? Can I help any way, Shell?"

"All we need is several thousand dollars for rent and beans. I thought about putting on a turban and becoming a high-priced mystic. Records playing 'Swami River,' and all that."

She made a face. "A very bad idea. Also unfunny. You're just discouraged."

"I'm never discouraged. You don't appreciate me."

"Yes, I do. So much, that as long as you're taking down the pictures I'd like the one of you with the elephant gun. You're magnificent in that one. Did Bruno take it?"

"Nope. It was taken in Africa. Just after I shot an elephant."

"Really? You should have saved the tusks for this museum." She indicated the office. "Or maybe the whole head. Or the whole elephant —"

"I missed him."

"You missed an elephant?"

"I'm a lousy shot."

"It's a lousy day." I knew what she meant. We both looked around us, at the gorgeously ugly office.

C
himes played a soft, minor chord. That meant the door had opened out front. Yolanda and I looked at each other. It was only seven-thirty a.m.; usually we opened the office at ten. Yolanda swung around and entered the front office.

In a minute she returned. "Mr. Scott, I know you're busy, but Mr. Jay Kennedy is in the outer office. Can you see him for a moment?" She winked.

The door was naturally cracked so the words could be heard in the outer office. I'm always busy. "Why yes," I said. "My appointment isn't for a half an hour. Show Mr. Kennedy in, please."

Could I see Jay Kennedy? He was only a couple million dollars on the hoof, an independent producer who'd recently turned out a fine Western called Wagon Wheels.

He came in and shut the door behind him, a tall, erect man with gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses on his sharp nose, wearing a well-tailored gray suit. Even his face looked gray, drawn and worried.

He said, "Mr. Scott, I'll get straight to the point. I've heard a lot about you, and I need a good man to investigate a murder."

He stopped and the word hung there. None of my clients had brought me a murder case before. "Murder?" I said. "The police —"

"Hang the police! You'll understand why, in a moment. . . ."

Last night there had been a small party at the home of Bill and Louise Trent in the Hollywood hills. All ten persons present were connected with the movie Wagon Wheels, which Kennedy was currently co-producing with A.A. Porter, another well-known name. The party had been a wild-type party, which was one big reason Kennedy was here; he wanted the thing hushed fast. Kennedy had left early with one of the female stars of the movie, later returned to the address and discovered a young and lovely starlet named Melba Mallory face down in the swimming pool, dead, and the star of Wagon Wheels, Alan Grant, lying on the grass nearby, dead drunk. A few feet from him had been an empty whisky bottle, cracked, a smear of blood on it.

I said, "You're sure the girl was dead,
Mr. Kennedy?"

He grimaced. "Yes, I . . . She was close to the edge at the shallow end. I touched her, lifted her a little." He swallowed. "She was dead, all right. Been hit over the head, cut there. Then in the water all that time . . ."

"Why did you say you went back to the Trents' home?"

"I didn't say. Alan was supposed to call me this morning, early. At five. We were doing some retakes today and I wanted to try to keep him reasonably sober. He's a terrible lush, you know. When I couldn't reach him at his suite, I assumed he was probably still at the party and went there." He sighed. "Alan couldn't tell me anything. He's the star of Wagon Wheels. And we've got another of his movies not yet released. I want this murder solved fast, before scandalous rumors spread. And if there are any more delays on this film I'll have to dig up more money — which I can't do. A few thousand left, naturally —" he smiled — "for your fee."

I smiled.

Still smiling, I said, "Ah, yes. Let's talk about that." We did. The upshot of it was that if all went well and Kennedy wasn't ruined, I'd be able to pay my rent for several months in advance.

Kennedy said, "All I want's the truth. And fast action. If Grant did it, then that's that. I don't think he did. I hope to God he didn't — he's a drunk, and weak, but not a murderer." He paused. "And almost anybody might have had reason to kill that little — that Melba."

"You say she was in the picture?"

"Yes. That was one of the conditions A.A. insisted on himself — A.A. Porter, co-producer with me." Kennedy's voice became more anguished. "Wagon Wheels is the biggest thing since Cimarron, a Birth-of-the-Nation Western in Deep Screen, Technicolor and CinemaScope, and A.A. insisted Melba play in it. Minor role, but she stank up every scene she was in." His face got bleak. "Supposed to be a poor ranch woman. She acts like Mata Hari spying on the cactus. We've cut out all we could without ruining the continuity, but it's not enough. I'd shoot Melba's scenes over with somebody else, if I had any money left, and if A.A. would allow it — which he wouldn't. But, then, she's dead now, isn't she?" Kennedy ran his hands through his graying hair. "Ulcers," he mumbled abstractedly. "Pills . . . worry. Sometimes I think maybe it isn't worth it."

"What isn't?"

He stared at me as if I'd asked a very stupid question. Lovingly he said, "Money. Yes, sometimes I . . . good heavens!" Kennedy was looking about in dazed fashion. He'd finally got a real penetrating look at my office. Now was the time to clinch the deal, while he was dazed; I always clinch my deals while the clients are dazed. I rang for Yolanda, and she entered.

"Take a memo," I said. She advanced to the chaise lounge and poised a pencil over her memo pad. I said, "Agreement between Mr. Jay Kennedy of Gargantua Productions and Shell Scott, Investigator, dated . . ." Yolanda began making pothooks and wiggling. Kennedy was middle-aged, getting younger. I stepped up my delivery and named a figure two thousand dollars higher than anything Kennedy had mentioned. His mouth sagged open. Just for fun, as I sometimes do, I threw in, "And the party of the first part agrees with the party of the second part, agreeing to pay the third part all the other parts plus a million dollars." Kennedy didn't hear a word. They never do, not when I'm dictating two hundred words a minute to Yolanda. With my brain I should be a millionaire.

A
lan Grant was unconscious in his suite of rooms on the fourth floor of the Graystone. But he was becoming conscious. I had him in the shower and was pouring it to him, hot and cold, then hot and cold again. Kennedy hadn't called the police earlier, so I'd told him to take care of that detail and then join me here. He arrived just as I hauled Grant out of the shower.

Kennedy said, "I phoned the police. Didn't mention my name. They'll get to me soon enough. Too soon." He glanced at the bed on which I'd dumped Alan Grant.

Grant mumbled some swear words. I'd fixed hot coffee, and started pouring it down him. "While we're waking this guy up," I said, "you'd better give me a list of everybody at the party, what they do in the movie, where they live, if you know, and so on."

He got pencil and paper and began writing. Ten people had been at the party, all of them in some way connected with Wagon Wheels. Bill Trent was director; he and his wife Louise had been the host and hostess. Alan Grant had taken Melba Mallory to the party. Kennedy and Porter, co-producers, had gone to the party alone; so had the two feminine leads, Miss Le Braque and Evelyn Druid. The two others present had been Simon French, who'd done the Wagon Wheels screenplay, and his wife, Anastasia.

From Kennedy I got a pretty good mental picture of the murder scene. The swimming pool was beyond twenty yards of lawn at the rear of the big house in the Hollywood Hills. Kennedy had found Alan Grant passed out on the lawn at the base of some thick bushes about ten yards from the pool. Between him and the pool's edge had been the whisky bottle.

I said, "About that bottle, Mr. Kennedy. Looks as if Melba could have been slugged with it and then pushed into the water. Maybe the glass has fingerprints on it that the police can bring out. Might make everything simple."

He smoothed his gray hair. "I won't try to make excuses. I . . . I got a little panicked, I suppose. Wiped the bottle off and threw it into the pool. I was afraid then that Alan had . . . Anyway, that's what I did."

"Oh." After digesting that I went on. "Before long we'll know the approximate time Melba was killed. Might be a good idea if I knew where you were at the time of the murder."

He thought about that for a while, then said, "As I have intimated, the party last night was somewhat . . . abandoned. Consequently I left early, about midnight, with Miss Le Braque. Went to her apartment and had a drink or two. She'll tell you the same thing. Keep it to yourself. Business, you understand. But keep it to yourself, anyway."

Across the room there was a deep sighing sound. Grant said, "What's going on here?"

It took ten more minutes of coffee, conversation, and threats from Kennedy, to get any kind of story from Grant, and even then it wasn't very coherent. Grant swore he hadn't known Melba was dead, he positively hadn't killed her, hadn't even touched her. He'd seen her with somebody, though. Alan Grant was the tall, rangy rawboned type that looks good whispering sweet nothings to a horse, but this morning the horse would have run away neighing. The flesh hung slack on Grant's face, sagged and spread; his eyes were two small sunrises in a field of putty. His curly brown locks had become unlocked.