Have Gat—Will Travel (16 page)

She looked well-fed but half-starved. Do you follow me?

Mrs. Loring took the checkbook and said, "Nancy, this is Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis, my daughter, Nancy Howard." I must have looked a little surprised because she added, "By a previous marriage."

I nodded moronically at Nancy while she said, "How do you do?" in a voice that rustled against my ears like a caress.

I hated to stop drooling but I had to stop nodding some time and I had an idea this screwball situation wasn't going to last much longer. I'd noticed some big framed canvases hanging on the wall so I asked Mrs. Loring, "Incidentally, how long had Mr. Loring been interested in art?"

She looked at me curiously, then smiled thinly. "Mr. Ellis," she said, "isn't that what you were supposed to tell me?"

She continued to stare at me with dawning suspicion on her doll's face as she tore a check out of the book and waved it gently back and forth. I figured the party was about over, so I stood up.

"Sorry," I said. "No check. My name isn't Ellis; it's —"

"What!" I could almost hear her girdle ripping. "But you said — you told me . . ."

I interrupted politely, "No ma'am — you said. I told you I was a private investigator, which I am, but I didn't get a chance to give you my name. I came out to investigate your husband's death."

I might have said more, but Mrs. Loring opened her mouth a couple of times to say something, then thought better of it and whirled to face the dream girl.

"Nancy," she said in a quiet, controlled voice that might have come straight from the depths of Siberia, "show this man out. Quickly!"

By the time we reached the door, Mrs. Loring had stalked into another room where she was probably quietly hating me. Nancy followed me onto the porch and shut the door behind her.

"That wasn't nice," she said. She didn't sound angry.

"What wasn't?"

"Impersonating that man."

"I didn't intend to. Your mother jumped to the wrong conclusion."

"I know. It's all right. She's naturally a little upset."

She hadn't looked particularly upset until she'd found out I wasn't Ellis. The thought must have showed on my face because Nancy said, "I suppose you think we should have been crying in our pillows."

I didn't say anything.

"Well, we shouldn't have," she continued hotly. "John Loring was no good. I don't know how mother stood him for two years."

I let it ride. "Incidentally," I asked, "who is this Ellis? Mrs Loring didn't seem surprised to find a private dick at the front door."

"That's what he is. A detective, I mean. Mother hired him a few weeks ago."

"Hadn't she ever seen the guy?"

She shook her head. "No. She arranged everything by phone. It was a little distasteful to her anyway."

"Want to tell me why?"

"Why what?"

"Why your mother hired Ellis in the first place."

She frowned delightfully and said, "It couldn't possibly have anything to do with John's death. Honestly."

"Okay," I told her, "skip it for now. Can you give me an idea why anybody would want to kill your stepfather? Any scandal? Blackmail, maybe? Had he stepped on anyone's toes lately?"

"No. Not as far as I know. Just that he was a heel."

That wasn't much help so I thanked her, said good night, and turned to go.

She stepped close to me and laid a hand on my arm. I could feel the gentle pressure of her fingers through the rough tweed of my jacket.

"Wait," she said. "If you aren't Ellis, who are you?"

"Scott. Shell Scott."

"Honestly, Mr. Scott — Shell — I'd help you if I knew anything that would do you any good. I just don't know a thing I could tell you. I would like to help. Really I would."

For no good reason I believed her. Maybe because there was no good reason not to. I said. "I've got a couple things to do. If you're not in bed, maybe we could talk later when I've got a little more on this."

"I won't be in bed."

Maybe I imagined it, but I thought she swayed closer to me. Her hand felt like a branding iron on my arm, and the dim light from inside the house spilled soft shadows on her face. She was looking up at me with her lips moist and half parted in apparent invitation. But at the same time her wide innocent eyes were screaming, "No, no. A thousand times, no!"

A hell of a note. What would you have done?

I mumbled thanks, and good night again through lips that were a little dry, and started down the steps.

Her voice rustled softly down to me: "Call me later, why don't you, Shell? I'm interested, really."

I said, "Sure," wondering just what she meant by that.

A
fter driving up a couple of one-way streets just in case a tail was on me, and checking a phone book, I found Ellis listed in a small hotel on Hill Street. It was only a little after nine-thirty p.m. but the room was dark. I rapped on the door thinking Ellis wasn't going to like being waked up.

He didn't seem to mind. The light inside clicked on and the door opened and a short husky guy in white shorts opened the door and squinted at me through brown hair hanging down over his eyes.

I asked him, "Are you Mr. Ellis?"

He brushed the hair out of his eyes and grunted an affirmative.

I showed him my credentials. "I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind."

He blinked sleepily a couple of times, then his face brightened a little. "Yeah, sure," he said more cheerfully. "Come on in. A brother peeper, huh?" He waved me to a straight-backed wooden chair and sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed.

"I hate to say it," I told him, "but you're out of a job."

"Huh?"

"I just had a little chat with Mrs. Loring. She's got a final check all made out for you."

He looked puzzled. "I don't get it. She change her mind?"

"About what?"

"Don't she want no divorce? Or am I taking too long?"

"Neither," I said. "Somebody shot Loring through the head tonight. And in my office. You can see why I'm interested."

He whistled through his teeth, "Brother! Why'd you want to see me?"

"I haven't got much to go on; thought maybe you could give me a lead."

He was cooperative enough. Mrs. Loring had wanted a divorce, but papa said no sale. Mrs. Loring thought her husband had maybe been playing around so she'd hired Ellis by phone to follow Loring and try to catch hubby with his pants down. Figuratively speaking.

Ellis had trailed Loring for three weeks without digging up anything he could take to Mrs. Loring. She'd told him to call on her when he had something; he'd never had anything, he said, so he'd never called on her.

I asked him, "Where did he go mostly? Who did he see? I need some kind of a lead." I thought for a minute and added, "And how about his artistic interests? There's some kind of an art angle."

Ellis tossed me a cigarette, lit one himself, and held a match for me. "Tailing Loring was a dull job. He played a lot of golf at the Wilshire Country Club, had all his meals either at Mike Lyman's in Hollywood or at home, spent all his nights at home. Not many kicks in his life. Now, if I had all that dough . . ." His face got a dreamy look for a minute. "Art, huh?" he continued. "Well, he bought a couple pictures at Massy's on Grand. Modern stuff like a wormhole in a apple called 'Triumph of Dawn.' You know the junk. Then he went to an art class at a walk-up on Broadway near Sixth. Least I guess it was an art class; guys went in carrying brushes and easel things."

I got interested. "What kind of a class?"

"I dunno. Some painting thing run by a guy named Fillson."

Enter Fillson again. I dug out the card I'd taken off Loring's body, looked at it and asked, "How long had Loring been going to Fillson's?"

"I dunno how long." He fumbled in his pants draped over a chair, dug out a dimestore memo book, and flipped the pages. "Let's see. I started tailing him on a Monday three weeks ago. He went to Fillson's Tuesday and Thursday at one-thirty that week, Tuesday and Thursday the next week, and Tuesday this week. He didn't go this Thursday — that's yesterday. He'd usually stay about an hour."

"Anybody else go with him, or was he alone?"

"Never with anybody. A bunch of others showed up about the same time. Around a dozen; all men about forty or fifty. Looked like they'd all probably already made their dough and were maybe taking up painting as a hobby."

"How about tonight?" I asked.

"What about tonight?"

"If you were tailing Loring, maybe you saw someone follow him to my office."

"Oh." He shook his head. "Not tonight. I been tailing that guy day after day and sitting outside that mansion half of the nights. I gotta sleep some time. Besides, Loring always stays home nights. I been in bed since four this afternoon. He was home when I left and came here." He frowned and scratched his head. "Maybe I shoulda slept yesterday."

"Maybe," I said. "What do you know about Fillson?"

"Not much. Tall, thin guy. No chin and a black mustache with about ten whiskers in it. Used to run an artists' supply store. I guess you'd say he's graduated now. Has an expensive taste in dames."

"How's that?"

Ellis held up two fingers wrapped around each other. "He's like that with Velma Vail, strip queen of the Sabre Club. Torchy and terrific." He sighed, "But terrif. For a tomato like that I could learn to like pictures of wormy apples myself."

I ground out my cigarette in a glass tray. "Anything else you can tell me?"

"That's about it. The guy didn't lead a very exciting life."

I thanked him and got out.

I
stopped at the desk and checked with the room clerk.

He told me Ellis had come in sometime during the afternoon and gone straight to his room. That was that.

In the phone booth in the lobby I checked Massy's. The only phone listed under that name was for the business downtown and nobody answered there. Nobody answered either at the number listed for Fillson's Studio or at his home. Blanks. I decided to check Fillson's place of business anyway.

At the office I grabbed a pocket flash and a ring of keys I'd collected in the course of my meanderings. Not exactly legal, maybe, but better than breaking doors. And quieter.

I left the Cad parked behind the Hamilton Building and walked up Broadway. The address I wanted was just on the other side of Sixth. I walked between a loan office and a real estate agency and up one flight of stairs and found the door labelled in simple bold letters, "S. A. Fillson."

The third key worked. I eased quietly inside, made sure the blinds were drawn, and poked around with my pocket flash. The place was really designed for comfort: one huge room that would have seemed more like Mrs. Loring's living room than a studio if it hadn't been for the strong, heavy odor of oil paints and turpentine that clung to my nostrils. There were stacks of half-finished canvases along the walls, and propped on half a dozen wooden easels, plus four or five surrealist blobs of crazy squares and circles hanging on the walls.

I took a peek at the canvases. Mostly nudes, all lousy, and a scattering of landscapes and still-lifes. The furniture, except for a few straight-backed chairs and three leather hassocks, was lush overstuffed divans and chairs done in deep reds and grays. A thick shag carpet stretched from wall to wall and I half expected to see a brace of Irish setters curled up before a nonexistent fireplace. No desk, no cabinets, no nothing to prowl through, though I hadn't the remotest idea what I expected to find if there were any.

Half a dozen big potted plants loomed in the shadows like miniature trees. I darted my flash around them one by one and caught a flash of white in the leaves of one of them. I walked over and picked up a little triangular piece of cloth that meant nothing. It looked a little like half of one of the toy parachutes I used to make as a kid out of an old handkerchief, four pieces of thread and a rock. Only it looked like three threads, half a handkerchief, and no rock. I stuck it in my pocket.

Fifteen minutes later I'd been over the whole place and found nothing more except a padlocked door in back that none of my keys would open. I started to turn away and get the hell out when light glimmered momentarily on something stuck in the back crack of the heavy door. I bent down and looked. It was a torn celluloid strip like the negatives you get back from the drug store, only much smaller.

I wormed it out and flashed my light through it and a shapely lass with her hands high over her head in the attitude of a top-heavy Balinese dancer peeped back at me. The image was too small for me to see much, but what I could see was pleasant. It looked as if she was wearing nothing except skin — altogether a delightful morsel. I dropped her into my shirt pocket, patted her gently, locked the front door behind me and left.

At the Owl Drug Store on the corner, I gave S. A. Fillson's residence another ring. I let the little buzzing noises snap out of the receiver till it was obvious nobody was going to answer, then hung up.

Outside, I lit a cigarette, ankled back to the Cadillac, and swung north into Broadway. I took a left at Second Street, followed it till it became Beverly beyond Lucas Avenue, and rolled on out Beverly Boulevard.

T
he Sabre Club is on Beverly Boulevard about a mile beyond the Wilshire Country Club. It's one of those small, intimate spots where you know everybody or nobody. There was a bar along one wall. Behind it, a mural of delicate fawns chasing equally delicate females over a grassy green field. Two white-coated bartenders were expertly mixing pink ladies and extra-dry martinis. Tables surrounded by dinner jackets and broad, padded shoulders, low-cut evening gowns and obvious white breasts.

The too smooth, faultlessly tailored headwaiter approached me and looked at my sport coat and slacks as if they were a red-and-white bathrobe. I looked over his shoulder to the small dance floor where a blonde with outside and inside curves was batting 1.000 into a microphone hanging down from the gloom of the ceiling.

I told the headwaiter, "I'm expected; I'm joining a friend."

He stared at me stonily.

Over his shoulder I watched the curvy blonde. It was easy to recognize her from the blowups outside the club. Velma Vail. And singing away like mad in a low, hot voice to a tall, thin guy at a ringside table.