<code> CHAPTER ONE

She had a seventy-eight-inch bust, forty-six-inch waist, and seventy-two-inch hips — measurements that were exactly right, I thought, for her height of eleven feet, four inches.

The scarlet bikini which had covered a minimum of those eye-popping curves lay crumpled on the floor at her feet, and my eyes focussed on her as glassily as did the dead man’s. He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.

Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of.

Sounds of wild and happy revelry floated up from the grounds below, shouts and shrieks and whoops and laughter. A woman laughed, cried, “Stop it, Charlie, stop it. Stop it…” and laughed delightedly some more. If Charlie really stopped it, he was a boy who would stay out in the rain. I turned away from the dead man, walked to a window and looked down two stories to the long oval pool in which twenty or thirty muscular guys and nearly naked dolls cavorted, and it seemed strange indeed to see so much life down there, while up here with me was so much death.

Me? I’m Shell Scott. I’m a private detective, and about two minutes ago I’d been down there at the pool.

I stood at the window for a few seconds more, looking at the rainbow of color, the swirl of movement and activity below. Television cameras were already set up, and TV stars, movie stars and starlets, reporters and commentators and other guests milled and splashed about.

Several miles away were visible some of the buildings of Hollywood, U.S.A., Land of Let’s Pretend. This was one of our clearest days in weeks, a Sunday almost completely free of smog, and farther away to my right I could see the blue splash of the Pacific Ocean. The sun was bright and hot, bouncing off green foliage and trees massed on the acres of junglelike estate surrounding the house and pool, glancing from the water, glinting from flesh, from the smoothly swelling curves on several of the lovelies from Mamzel’s. Even from up here in the window I could recognize little bright and bouncing Didi; soft, sweet April; luscious Elaine; Corky and Pepper and several other beauties, all of whom looked like products of a fevered imagination. Actually, they were products of Mamzel’s.

Mamzel’s — that’s what this festive affair was all about The name was known to a good chunk of the U.S. already, but this afternoon was to be the kickoff on a high-powered publicity campaign that would make Mamzel’s as well known as Mickey Mouse. The name identified the biggest and already best known chain of body contouring, or “figure artistry” salons for women in the country. Seven of them, in seven cities, were already turning flabby Twentieth-century women into firm neatly-curved gals with a Twenty-first-century Look. Tomorrow, Monday, three more of Mamzel’s salons were to open in three more cities.

The name was also applied to the owner-founder of the chain. She was beautiful and sexy, but speaking of her in those general terms was similar to saying the world is big and round. The gal called Mamzel was the flesh-and-blood original of whom an exactly twice-life-size statue had been fashioned, duplicates of which — made from flesh-colored plastic — would, beginning tomorrow, stand atop all ten of the salons in the growing Mamzel chain. And a duplicate of which was now here in the room with the dead man and me.

I turned and looked at the eleven-foot, four-inch plastic beauty again. It was overpowering. I pulled my eyes from the swelling hips, sharply indented waist, and enormous, thrusting breasts, and looked at the dead man again. This was the second really big one, the second murder that would have national — and even international — repercussions. This one was really going to rip it apart.

I walked over and knelt by him. A white cord had been knotted around his neck, but it looked almost like an afterthought. A large pair of scissors protruded from his back, and the small bullet hole in his forehead had bled very little. A bubbly froth had dried on his lips.

I blinked at the corpse, wondering why anybody in his right mind would commit such a complicated murder. Possibly there was an answer; maybe the killer had been in his wrong mind. I stood up, took a last look around the room, then went out. There was a phone downstairs, I remembered. I found it and put in a call to the Police Building in Los Angeles, got through to Homicide and Captain Phil Samson.

In addition to being Captain of Homicide, Sam is my best friend in L.A. He’s hard, competent, honest, with a tough surface over a much more gentle interior, and he is the best cop I’ve ever met, and I’ve met plenty. It was ten to one that he was chewing on a long black cigar when he spoke into the phone’s mouthpiece, and it was highly probable that he bit through the cigar when I told him where I was and why I was calling.

“Oh, no!” he groaned. “He’s dead?”

“It seems a reasonable assumption.”

“I wish you’d call up just once to say hello, or with good news,” he growled at me. Sam spoke to somebody in the squadroom, then said to me, “You know what killed him?”

“Everything except diphtheria.” I told him about the peculiar circumstances connected with this latest murder.

For several seconds he was quiet. Finally he spoke dully, “Well, that’s a new m.o. , at least. If he kills anybody else, we ought to be able to pin the job on him without any trouble at all.”

“Cheer up, Sam. I’ll see your boys when they get here.”

“You’d better. For all I know, you’re guilty. This sounds like the kind of screwy thing you’d pull.”

“Not a chance. This guy was killed by a pessimist.”

“Funny. Is that where the fancy party’s going on?”

“Yeah.”

“How many people out there?”

“About two hundred suspects. Plus gate crashers.”

“Anything that might tie this one to the others?”

This wasn’t the only murder Sam and I had discussed in the last twenty-four hours. For a while it had appeared that Sam might wind up discussing my murder with somebody else. I fingered the raw furrow on my neck, where a .45 slug had sliced open the skin. We traded unpleasantries and I told him that I would try, from here on, to mingle only with live ones, hung up, and left to do just that.

As soon as I walked out the front door I could hear a flock of people gabbling. They were all out in back, near the pool I’d looked down on from the Tower Room window, so I headed in that direction.

This was the estate of Horatio Adair, the haughty king of haute couture, designer of the Adair Line of feminine “garments.” He was the number-one male in the field of fashion design, though not so male that it would frighten you, in fact, some unkind characters called this isolated and lushly overgrown estate of his Shangri-La-La! However, he had made millions of dollars by leading the change in feminine styles each year, and by convincing women that if they didn’t have the Adair Flair, or at least a reasonable facsimile, they just weren’t there, weren’t with it at all.

Somewhere off in the bushes that happy gal was squealing gleefully again that Charlie should stop it — and it didn’t seem likely that he would now — and there were numerous other sounds of the kind made by people enjoying themselves. I walked on past a thirty-foot table loaded with cold lobster, crab, shrimp, oysters, anchovies and maybe even octopus, for all I knew, and on out to the swimming pool, where all twelve of the Mamzel girls — counting Mamzel herself and Didi, the receptionist — were gathered. I spotted the whole round dozen of them in and near the pool, and a round dozen it was, too.

Mamzel’s was a symbol of the ultimate in feminine beauty. Rather ordinary gals were supposed to go in, and glamorous sirens come out. The women who were a part of Mamzel’s, who worked there and served not only as guides but as examples and inspiration to the customers, were chosen for their outstanding beauty of face and form and then given the Mamzel treatment, the course, the gamut from Ahh-h to Z. Consequently, while all women are different from men, these gals were more different.

One of the most different swam easily across the pool, pulled herself smoothly over the side and waved at me. This one was Didi, a honey-haired honey in her early twenties and shaped like a gal with the best parts of several people. Under normal circumstances I would have stopped for a long conversation, but right now I had other things to do before all hell broke loose here. I asked Didi where Lita Korrel was and she pointed toward the end of the pool.

At the pool’s far end was another of the sensational pink plastic statues identical with the one I’d just been gandering upstairs. Identical except that this one was draped with white canvas, to keep it hidden until the upcoming unveiling, and under the white cloth the statue was supposed to be wearing a pink bikini, securely fastened on. The unveiling was scheduled to be televised, and a bikini-less Mamzel could well blow out a great number of 21-inch tubes during the moment before countless censors flipped into shock and delirium.

At first I didn’t see Lita. Then I caught a flash of pink, which I soon identified as the pink cloth of Lita’s bikini bra. That was nearly all I could see at first, because she was practically out of sight behind the statue, but then she turned and the pink grew. And grew. There was not so much of the bra, but there was a good deal of Lita.

She saw me, waved and smiled.

I walked toward Lita Korrel, and the closer I got, the better she got.

You would think — surrounded by all this flesh, this beauty, this gorgeous and superlative femininity — that I would be well prepared to resist one more assault upon my eyeballs. You would think that — after having just gazed upon Didi’s hour-glass figure in forty seconds of swimsuit — I would be relatively immune to a further abundance of charms. You would think that, by this time — what with Cecile and Yama and Misty and Yvonne and all the rest — I would give only a passing glance to another woman unless she had two fannies or something equally diverting.

You would think so, maybe; but you would be wrong.

Because Lita Korrel in a pink bikini was the eighth wonder of the world. She was a pink explosion, a three-dimensional shock, a flesh bomb, an undulating Garden of Eden.

Lita Korrel was — Mamzel.

She was the original model for that eleven-foot, six-inch, 78-46-72, plastic symbol of sex and health and beauty, which was twice life size, exactly. In every direction and dimension. Any way you look at it, that body still comes out like the one she might have chosen herself.

She was smiling as I walked toward her. It was the kind of smile that goes with extended arms and clutching fingers, though her arms were at her sides, and it was almost the same kind of bright, captivating smile she’d given me when we’d met.

That had been only yesterday morning, though so much had happened in the hours since then that it seemed at least a week had passed. It had been at the figure-fashioning salon itself, at Mamzel’s, and Lita had been wearing — not a bikini — but a white leotard.

And I remembered now that even in the moment when I had seen her for the first time, I had thought that Lita Korrel was a gal so female that she made most other females seem male.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER TWO

The way the thing started, I was feeding some fresh shrimp to the guppies I keep in a ten-gallon aquarium in my office downtown. That’s downtown L.A., on Broadway between Third and Fourth. It’s up one flight, and lettered on the frosted glass door is the legend, Sheldon Scott, Investigations. Not that I’m a legend; that’s just what’s painted on the glass. Anyway, the little brightly colored fish were tearing at the shrimp when the phone rang.

The guy on the other end of the line was Arthur James Lawrance, known to all of show business and much other business as Fabulous Lawrance. That’s about all he was ever called, even in print, which he was in often. That was his business — getting himself and his clients into print. He was a press agent, publicity consultant, career engineer. Whatever you called him, he was good. In fact, he was Fabulous.

Fabulous Lawrance is the guy, in case you didn’t already know, who originated, instead of the Grand Opening, the Grand Closing. That was many years ago for Walton’s Supermarket, and it was so successful that Walton made a lot of money on the deal, and a week later had a Grand Opening. He originated the Miss-America-of-the-Month Contest, the flexible plastic Celebrity Mask, balloon banners for advertising which floated over cities carrying slogans lauding Nekrub for sore necks, the Martini Break, and too many other firsts to mention. He had represented movie stars, TV personalities, politicians, and even other press agents. He was Fabulous Lawrance, the guy who would try anything twice, the man who could make a mountain out of any molehill.

Now Lawrance was representing Mamzel’s.

After the first few seconds of mutual identification, he said rapidly, in a sharp, staccato voice, “You did the job for John Randolph, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.” John Randolph was the nation’s Number-One TV and radio news commentator. I had spent one interesting day working for him during the past month, and picked up a quick check for five-hundred dollars, a nice day’s work.

“Good. You’re the man I want. You free to take a job now? For me, and Mamzel’s?”

“What kind of job?”

“Well, here I am alone, surrounded by all these gorgeous babes. They all look like they got caught in the bust-developing machines and couldn’t get out until it was almost too late. And we’re in trouble. Mamzel’s is in trouble. All those beautiful babes are in trouble. They may all be thrown out of work and be destitute on the streets of Hollywood, prey of producers, directors, even actors.”

“I’ll come right out.”

“How soon can you make it?”

“With no accidents on the Freeway, twenty minutes.”

“Good. See you here, Scott.”

We hung up. I was downstairs and climbing into my Cadillac before it occurred to me that Lawrance had not told me anything about the case. As I pulled out of the lot I thought about that. Maybe I was getting an inkling of why Lawrance was called Fabulous.

I made it to Mamzel’s in a couple minutes under twenty. It was on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a few blocks south of the Palladium, and nearly as big as that super-sized dance hall. It was a low, white building, modern, with the front unbroken except for massive glass-and-chrome doors at the far right over which was the one word, Mamzel’s, in foot-high red letters, done in a flowing feminine script. I parked in the lot at the building’s side, walked to the big entrance doors, and through them.

I was in some kind of reception room. Against the wall on my right were a pale green divan, two chairs in glowing gold, and a small gilt table. The carpet was an off-white, the color of rich cream with a little coffee in it, and the other three walls were all mirror from floor to ceiling. In the center of the room was the only other piece of furniture, a white desk so delicate and airy that it looked like an hors d’oeuvre for two termites. And seated behind the desk fluttering her lashes at me was a blonde beauty in mint green who apparently served as receptionist here.

It had taken a little while for my eyes to become accustomed to the dimness of the room, but it was going to take a lot longer for my eyes to become accustomed to the blonde tomato. Here was one of those gals Lawrance had told me about, the gals who had got stuck in the bust-developing machines.

As I stopped inside the door and looked at her, she smiled brightly. “Hello,” she said. And then she stood up and stepped quickly toward me.

Well, it was almost too much. With the wall of mirror behind her reflecting every move that side of her made, and me watching every move this side of her made, she seemed to be advancing from me and retreating toward me while trying to get away sideways. She looked as if a breath would bruise her, but at the same time like a gal who could climb to the top of Everest without stopping. She looked, that is, one-hundred-percent healthy, vital in every cell and jiggle, but still soft and tender and completely feminine.

As she stopped in front of me she said, “You’re Shell Scott, aren’t you?”

“Yes, and you must be Mamzel.”

“Oh, goodness no.” She laughed delightedly. “But thanks for the compliment. I’m Didi, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell. Call me Shell. How’d you know who I was?”

“Lawrance told me you’d be coming in, and how I could recognise you. That is, he tried to tell me what you look like. You’re rather overpowering, you know.”

“I am, huh?”

“Sure. Come on, I’ll show you.”

She took my hand and tugged me forward a few feet, then turned me to face all those walls of mirrors. I could see myself from all three sides, just by turning my head a little, and it was pretty horrible.

In addition to standing six feet, two inches high in my stocking feet, and weighing two hundred and five pounds, practically none of which is fat, my short-cropped hair is white. That is, it’s a white-blond, which against my sun-darkened skin appears thoroughly white, the same color as my eyebrows, which angle up from the middle and then slant down sharply over my gray eyes and have been referred to by slanderers as four eyebrows put together on the wrong head. Personally, I feel that they are rather dashing, since I am stuck with them, as I am with my nose, which was once broken and set just a little off center. And then the top slice of my left ear is gone, carried away by a hoodlum’s last bullet. Who looks at ears? Anyhow, this appearance of mine has always been the chief drawback in my job as private investigator. I cannot fade away into crowds of people and disappear. It would be easier for me to disappear among cement mixers, or Freeway accidents.

I have strong teeth, but they almost seemed to wiggle at me when I smiled at myself. I meant to smile winningly, but it turned out losingly.

Didi said, “Golly, you’re big, aren’t you?”

I smiled losingly at myself some more. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest slob of all? But enough of this — I’m supposed to see Lawrance. Where’ll I find him?”

Didi pointed to a door fitted into the wall so neatly that it was almost invisible, except for a pink doorknob the size of a grape. “Through there and down the hall to the door that says Mamzel on it. He’s in there.”

“Ah-ha! Now the truth comes out Fabulous Lawrance is Mamzel.”

She chuckled. “Hardly. He’s just using her office today. Lita Korrel is Mamzel, and she looks nothing like Fabulous Lawrance — who is probably wondering where you are.” She smiled then, and a very nice, bright smile it was. “I’d hate it if you got fired.”

I thanked her for her concern, went to the door, turned the pink grape, and walked down the hall beyond.

The hallway was lined with closed doors on the right and there were a couple of closed doors midway down the hall on my left. Apparently on my right were the Mamzel’s offices, beyond which was the parking area, and through those doors on the left was the real Mamzel’s — the machines, and weights, and steam baths, the equipment to be used for improving the gals’ equipment. Soft sounds penetrated the wall on my left and floated pleasantly up against my eardrums. I didn’t know what the sounds were, so I just let my imagination run riot.

And then I saw the word Mamzel in a feminine script written in red letters on a door to my right, a miniature of the name outside over the entrance doors. I knocked and a man’s voice said, “Come in, come in.”

I stepped inside. A guy was coming around the side of a white desk as feminine as false eyelashes, his hand extended toward me. The room was done in pastel colors, pale blue walls, pink chairs and other frilly effects, and in these surroundings almost nobody could have looked more out of place than Fabulous Lawrance. Because he definitely wasn’t the frilly type.

I recognised his features from pictures I’d seen of him in the newspapers. It was a strong face, not very good-looking, but virile and with sharply delineated features. His hair was brown with a little gray in it, though he looked too young to have gray hair. His eyebrows were straight dark lines above his brown eyes, eyes that bored into mine as he grabbed my hand firmly and shook it. He was a little under six feet, heavy set but not fat.

“You’re Shell Scott?”

“That’s right. How do you do, Mr. Lawrance.”

He steered me over toward the white desk, pointed to a pink chair near it and said, in his too-fast staccato, “Sit down in that, Scott. I might as well find out right off the bat how much nerve you’ve got. Actually, the thing is stronger than it looks. It may even hold you.” It did. Lawrance sat down behind the desk and asked me, “You ready to start working for us this morning?”

“If I take the case. What’s the trouble?”

“All kinds of trouble. Let me give you a little background first. Mamzel’s is a chain of body-contouring salons, a big name in the field — the biggest. Lita Korrel — she’s the original Mamzel, the major stockholder, and founder of the Mamzel’s chain — hired me to make the name even bigger. There are seven shops in the chain so far, and Monday we open three more. Tomorrow, Sunday, at three o’clock, there’s a big TV reception and cocktail party at Horatio Adair’s estate — reporters, TV cameras, the works — to kick off the biggest publicity campaign I’ve handled since the Medico Cigarette account. You remember that one — smoke your own penicillin, give your lungs a lift, all that. Anyhow, you can well imagine that this is the worst possible time for Mamzel’s to run into trouble, right? All clear so far?”

He got up and walked away from the desk, wheeled around, then came back and perched on the edge of his chair. Either he had so much energy it was plain leaking out of him, or his shorts were too tight.

“All clear,” I said. “Now what’s the trouble?”

“Not just one thing. That’s the hell of it. There’s this dead woman — that may turn out to be the worst of it. But … well, I’ll take it in chronological order. First, we’re having difficulty with Roy Toby. That’s not all, but it’s a good start.”

“Sounds like a bad start.”

“It is bad. One of the things I want you to do is keep it from getting worse. I called you because I gathered from Randolph’s broadcast last week that you don’t like Toby any better than I do. And that you’re not afraid of him. You’re having a fight with Toby right now, aren’t you?”

“Off and on. And with sixteen-ounce gloves, you might say. No bloodshed yet.”

“If you work for us, you may have to take the gloves off.”

“Suits me.”

“Good. Now, all I really know about your beef with Toby is what I heard on the Randolph Broadcast. You mind telling me the whole story?”

Actually, there wasn’t a great deal to it. Roy Toby was one of the biggest crooks on the West Coast, a hoodlum busily engaged in building up an empire of slobs who weren’t considered successes until they put the muscle on a grandmother, or shot holes in somebody with his back turned. He ruled over one of the slimiest, most vicious and dangerous groups of punks that had ever, so far as I’d been able to determine, been gathered together into one Southern California group. Toby should have been put out of business long ago, but except for a one-to-ten rap which he’d done in thirteen months a few years back at Quentin, he’d been free and unmolested.

One of the guys who hadn’t liked Toby’s remaining free and unmolested was John Randolph. At least Randolph, during the last couple of months had been going after Toby hard and fast. And he had the power to make it hurt. The News and Commentary of John Randolph was a must in fifty million homes, if his publicity could be believed. As part of his campaign to expose some of the lesser publicized facets of Toby’s revolting personality, Randolph had hired me to tail Toby for one complete day, in the hope that I might come up with some interesting info for his Saturday-night telecast. As it happened, the little I came up with was enough to please Randolph hugely.

This past Saturday night, Randolph had quoted over the air several lines from the informal written report I had submitted to him. My reports are almost never examples of the way reports should be written, but Randolph had read it straight. He’d said: “I quote from the report to me of Mr. Sheldon Scott, the well-known local investigator. ‘I can testify that on the sixteenth of this month Roy Hoskins Toby, otherwise known as Kid Toby, did meet and consort with Manny “Hey-Hey” Koon, unofficial undertaker for the Jack Spratt Gang, and Paul “Ice Cream” Cohen, bad-check artist who did two bits at Q for carelessly forging ahead. All three of them went hunting, and Roy Hoskins Toby thus not only handled and fired a thirty-thirty rifle but also fired six shots from a forty-five automatic which he miraculously produced from under his coat. It is probable that these bums hunted rabbit with thirty-thirty rifles, forty-five automatics, and a twelve-gauge shotgun only because they didn’t have their machine guns with them. And while Toby shot only at rabbits and hit air, it is my guess that he was merely keeping in practice for people.’”

Then Randolph had hammered at the fact that Toby, who was on parole, did consort with known criminals and possessed and fired guns — both items in violation of his parole. Randolph had dwelt at length on those points and asked why Toby was still rubbing elbows with innocent men and women on the streets of Los Angeles.

I explained to Lawrance how I’d happened to do the job for Randolph, and added that a couple of Toby’s men had called on me the day following the telecast, which had been last Sunday, and warned me to lose all interest in Toby, or simply lose all interest. Then I asked him, “What kind of trouble has he been giving you?”

“He wants a big piece of Mamzel’s, and he’s willing to pay for it — at the rate of about a nickel on the dollar. Or else. You know how he operates.”

“Yeah, with a dull knife and no anesthetic. No anesthetic except a sap on the head, that is. One of his saps comes along and bangs you on the head. Who gave you the ultimatum?”

“Toby came here himself about three weeks ago and explained that he was particularly interested in Mamzel’s since he controls Jason Fleece’s Gym. I didn’t know he was connected with Fleece’s, did you?”

“Yeah. He’s the money behind Fleece. Now, anyway; maybe he got into that business the same way he’s trying to worm into Mamzel’s. He’s got an office in the gym.”

Jason Fleece was a man built like the realized dream of a 96-pound weakling. He’d been runner-up one year in the Mr. Universe Contest, right after which he’d opened a men’s gymnasium here in Hollywood. Shortly afterward — or maybe before the opening, for all I knew — Roy Toby had become connected with the establishment. Jason Fleece’s Gym was, you might say, the male counterpart of Mamzel’s.

I added, “Maybe Toby’s trying to get a monopoly on bodies. Corner the meat market.”

“Maybe. At any rate, the or-else wasn’t spelled out. But Toby managed to make it clear to me that much unhappiness is in store for all of us connected with Mamzel’s if he isn’t made captain of the team.”

“And he wouldn’t have been kidding,” I said. “What do you want me to do? Shoot him?”

Lawrance grinned, showing crooked white teeth. “I want you to convince Toby, if you can, that it would be very unwise for him to molest anybody connected with Mamzel’s. That he would, in fact, be wise to forget he ever heard of Mamzel’s. In other words, convince him that he has more to contend with than just a bunch of shapely women — and get him off our necks. Think you can do it?”

“I can give it a try — but all the muscle in Jason Fleece’s didn’t keep him from worming in there. What I’m getting at is that I can’t actually shoot him, or just walk in and bust him one in the mush. But I can and will let him know you’re not going to knuckle in to him — and that I’m on your side.”

“Good. That’s exactly what I want.” He paused. “O.K. That takes care of the Toby mess. Now the even bigger mess. Early this morning, a woman named Zoe Avilla was found in a shallow grave a few miles out of town. Police traced her to the house she was living in, and there they found a list of some kind. Written on it were the names of practically everybody connected with Mamzel’s. So the police came here first thing.”

“What kind of a list was this?”

“I don’t know. Police asked me what it was all about. The way they glared at me, you’d think I killed the woman. Anyway, Scott, with our campaign really kicking off tomorrow, we need some help fast. I want to know what that dead woman had to do with Mamzel’s, if anything, and what all our names were doing on that list — my name was on it, too. And I’d never even heard of the woman before. Well, there’s the gist of it. You want the job?”

“O.K.” We settled my fee, and then I asked Lawrance, “Anybody here know this Avilla woman?”

He shook his head, “Nobody’s admitted knowing her, anyway.” He got up and walked halfway across the room and back. This time he didn’t sit down. He said, “Do you realize what a little beef now — when we’re just starting to let go all barrels in publicity for the chain — could do to us? It could be ruinous. This is a million-dollar operation that could turn into penny ante if we get fouled up now.”

“Back to Toby for a minute. He wanted to buy in? He mention a controlling interest or anything?”

“No amount mentioned. It was a kind of funny deal.” Lawrance sat down again. “Toby must have heard about all the preparations for the big push, the publicity kick — it’s no secret. He came here and talked to me for not more than ten or fifteen minutes. Basically, all he said was that we were going to be partners. There weren’t any ifs or buts about it. He said I could have a week or two to get used to the idea, because he preferred to do these things in a quiet way. Without violence.”

“Who shares in the profits now?”

“Huh?”

“Who owns Mamzel’s, the name, the stocks, the works. Who makes the dough?”

“Oh. Well, Lita owns sixty percent. I’ve got twenty — Lita let me buy in before the campaign, fortunately. But it cost me plenty. The other twenty percent is owned in varying amounts, by the ten girls who work here. The Mamzel girls. And Didi.”

We talked a few minutes longer, but there was little more he could tell me. I got to my feet and said. “O.K., Lawrance. I’ll move around a little and check back with you later.”

Lawrance’s phone rang. He grabbed it and said hello, then frowned. “Who in Florida?” He nodded at nothing, then looked at me, made a face and pointed his index finger at his head and waggled his thumb as if he were blowing his brains out. In the next second he smiled horribly and said, “Harry, old pal, how are ya, boy? Yeah? Swell to hear from you Harry.” He looked at me, his face sour, and shook his head slowly back and forth. I gathered that it wasn’t so swell to hear from Harry. I waved a hand at Lawrance and left.

When I swung out of the Mamzel’s lot and headed down Sunset, a blue Chrysler Imperial across the street pulled away from the curb and fell into the traffic stream behind me. The only reason I noticed was because the Imperial is a good looking car, and I admire its lines. But the Imperial stayed about the same distance behind me, even though I changed lanes a couple of times.

I wasn’t really suspicious, but out of habit I swung right off the freeway before hitting the Civic Center. Just to see what the guy in the Imperial would do.

He followed me.

Up ahead, at the intersection, was an old warehouse that blocked the view of the street to the right. There was a stop sign at the corner. I glanced in my rear view mirror and noted that the Imperial was about a block behind, then tromped on the gas and picked up speed fast to the corner. I went past the stop sign without slowing down and swung right, slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop at the curb.

The Imperial skidded around the corner after me, right through the stop sign, tires screaming. The driver was caught completely by surprise. He spotted my Cad and started to stop, then changed his mind, stepped on the gas and shot by me, on to the corner ahead and around it out of my sight. But I got a look at him as he went by. From the way he filled his side of the car I guessed that he was a big man. He was good-looking, maybe handsome, with sharp features and dark hair. I had never seen him before.

It seemed likely though, that I would see him again.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER THREE

I drove directly downtown to the Police Building, parked in the lot and took the elevator up to the third floor. In Room 314, Homicide, I found Captain Samson chewing on a long, black, unlighted cigar and staring at several papers strewn on top of his desk. Sam is big and burly, rock hard, with sharp brown eyes and iron-gray hair, and a chin like a boulder. He looked up and grunted when I came in. “Well, which one of your clients is killed now?”

“No client, Sam. Gal named Zoe Avilla got herself done in.”

“Where’d you get onto that?”

“I now represent Mamzel’s. And all the lovely lovlies.”

His clean shaven pink face grew an expression of disgust. “Mamzel’s, huh? All them women! I’ll bet you paid to get the job.” Sam shook his head. He’s a career police officer, with eighteen years in the department, thirteen of them in Homicide, and as honest as Univac. Finally he said, “There’s no secret about the Avilla thing. We don’t know much except that she’s dead.”

“How was she killed?”

“Strangled. Somebody wrapped his hands around her neck and choked her to death. Coroner’s doing a PM — should be through by now.”

“Strangled. The crime of passion, the sudden homicidal flip.”

“Maybe. It’s not always that pat. You jump to a lot of conclusions.”

“Who, me? Sam, you know I’m the Sherlock Holmes type.” He snorted and I asked him, “You got any leads?”

“One, maybe. A cuff link.” He used the phone, said, “Joe, bring that cuff link in here, will you?” and hung up.

“How’d you identify her?”

“We had her prints in the files. She fell from here.”

“What for?”

“She did a couple of a one-to-ten jolt on a five-eighteen P.C. at Tehachapi. When we knew her name, it wasn’t hard to find out where she lived. We were lucky to make it so quick, though.”

“How long ago did she get hit with that sentence?”

He told me, and when I had translated Sam’s language I knew that eight years ago Zoe Avilla had begun serving two years of a one-to-ten-years sentence at Tehachapi for extortion, since 518 is the number of the paragraph in the California Penal Code which defines extortion.

“When did she get killed, Sam?”

“It looks like she got it last night. You want to look at her?”

“Yeah. And I want to look at the spot where she was found.”

He told me where the shallow grave was located, and added, “Couple kids were out hiking early this morning and found her, found the grave with a couple fingers sticking out. Looked like a quick job of burial, somebody in a hurry. The place isn’t very far out.”

A policeman came in, put something on the desk and left. Sam pushed the thing toward me. “One cuff link,” he said. “It was found near the grave.”

I picked it up. It was big and heavy, about an inch square, apparently made of sterling silver with some black material inlaid to make a design that looked like small lightning flashes. I put it back on the desk and said, “One of my clients is Lawrance, the Fabulous press agent.”

“Yeah. We talked to him this morning. Got ants in his pants.”

“That’s him. He told me a sheet of paper was found in the dead woman’s room, and it had on it the names of a lot of people connected with Mamzel’s. What was that all about?”

“Here.” Sam pawed through the papers before him, selected one and handed it to me. It was an Ozalid copy of the paper which had been found in the dead woman’s room. Written in pencil at the left side of the sheet were several names, and opposite them were figures. The first name was “Lawrance.” After his name was the figure “5.” The second name was “Horatio,” also followed with the figure “5.” The next three names and numbers were: “Ad … 10,” “Felicca … 2.” “Gedder … 1,” and under the figures a line had been drawn and the total, “23” had been entered; a line had been drawn through this and “25” written alongside it.

Farther down on the page were the names of cities, followed by figures in the same manner: “Hollywood — 5000,” “Frisco — 2000,” “Philly — 3000,” “Chi — 3000,” “Dallas — 4000,” “NYC — 4000” “Miami — 2000.” The total of “23,000” was near the lower right of the sheet with “1,150,000” immediately underneath it. At the very bottom of the page, heavily printed, was: “Corona … 50,000.” That was all of it.

When I looked up, Sam said, “According to Lawrance and this Mamzel woman — Lita Korrel?”

“Yeah. They say the names, besides Lawrance’s and the city names, must be Horatio Adair, Bill Adams of the advertising agency, Auguste Felicca, sculptor, and Art Gedder, photographer — all of them working on the Mamzel’s publicity.”

Sam pulled a big wooden match from his pocket and started to scratch it on the underside of his desk when his phone rang. He grunted into it, said, “Uh-huh. O.K., then. That’s the way it looked. Scott’s here, by the way — Shell Scott. Uh-huh. He’ll want to take a look at her.” He hung up and said to me, “Morgue figures it the same way — she was killed last night, maybe six, seven P.M. It must have been about mealtime; her stomach was nearly empty. Besides being choked to death she had a slight concussion. You can look her over if you want to; the post mortem exam’s finished.”

He scratched the match beneath his desk, put the flame against the end of his cigar and drew on it. A cloud like burning poison ivy drifted across the desk at me.

I coughed. I pressed a hand over my eyes. “Sam. I can’t see. Where are you, Sam? Somebody lead me out of — “

“I’ll lead you out of here with my foot,” he growled. “What are you going to do on this? It would be a shame if you wasted your valuable time doing routine things the Los Angeles Police Department is also doing.”

I grinned at him. “Well, since your major clue is that cuff link, I shall look for the man wearing the other one. It seems likely that he buried the woman, and therefore is the guilty party. In other words, I am going to go out in the streets of Los Angeles, and search for the Missing Link.”

He shook his head. “It had to happen,” he said wearily. “Some day it had to happen. Shell Scott Seeks Missing Link. What a detective. What a headline. What a mess. Get out of here and let a cop do some work.”

I walked to the door and out, but as I glanced back into the office I caught Sam grinning at nothing and shaking his head. Every once in a while his gruff, hard exterior slipped a little, and gave a glimpse of the very nice, pleasant guy underneath.

I didn’t spend much time in the morgue. I never do. It is not the kind of place you want to stay in while time ticks along. Emil, the morgue attendant, has the look of a man more at home in yesterday than now, but he’s polite, efficient, quiet — if a bit distant. Emil, I have often thought, seems always to be listening to sounds or words that the rest of us are unable to hear.

This day he greeted me pleasantly as usual and, after I’d told him I wanted a look at the Avilla “deceased” — I’ve never heard Emil use the word “dead” or “corpse” — he led me through the morgue to one of the long tables set on rollers. The body bulged beneath the rose-colored spread over it, but the soles of bare feet were visible at this end of the table, a tag tied to the large toe of the right foot. They really do tie identification tags to deceaseds’ toes. I stood at one side of the table while Emil carefully lowered the cloth from her face and shoulders.

She had a hard look. Even in mottled death that face looked hard, uncompromising, coarse. It was a no-quarter, thumbs-down face. There was a chance that she had, even so, been reasonably attractive when alive, but it was difficult to be sure; when you choke somebody to death you remove most of the prettiness from their features. They had done their best here in the morgue, but Zoe Avilla was a thoroughly unpleasant sight. I nodded at Emil and he covered her up again. I said, “Remember any of the no longer vital statistics, Emil?”

He nodded gently, not looking at me. He seemed to be listening to that inaudible music. Or maybe it was conversation. Or perhaps it was a hair tickling the inside of his ear. But he said, “Five feet one, weighed a hundred and two, about forty years old, brown hair and eyes, appendectomy scar. She was small, and wasn’t a heavy woman, but there was some fat on her. Too much easy livin’ and not enough work.”

Some people can quote stock market listings, some memorize batting averages; Emil made a study of the deceased. His work was his hobby. He pursed his lips, turning his head a little to one side as if to hear better whatever it was he was listening to, then put his final stamp of disapproval on Zoe Avilla. “Her clothes was expensive, but cheap-lookin’.”

It’s funny when you stop to think about it — as Emil, obviously, often did — but when an unidentified corpse lands in the morgue, the real person is long gone to somewhere or other, and all that’s left for the Emils and police and private eyes and others to draw conclusions from is the garbage left behind, the worm food, the soil conditioner. The gift is gone, so we study the package, eye the wrappings. Emil considered clothing very important. And if he disapproved of Zoe’s “expensive but cheap-lookin’” clothes, then that probably told me quite a bit about Zoe.

I got a morgue photo of Zoe from Emil, thanked him and left. As I went out, he was leaning back against the wall and looking at the floor. He still seemed to be listening. It gave me a rather eerie feeling for just a moment, there. But then I was outside in the sunshine again.

In the Cad once more, I aimed it down the Freeway and caught the Santa Ana turnoff. About four miles ahead, according to Sam, was the spot where Zoe’s body had been found. I was just tooling along, not thinking of anything in particular, and then the thought came: Somebody’s tailing me. I didn’t know where it had come from or why. Maybe I’d been listening, like Emil, and picked up something below the fringes of consciousness. It wasn’t the blue Imperial, either. There wasn’t a car like it anywhere in sight.

The Freeways are almost always loaded with traffic, and this day was no exception. Cars swung in and out from one lane to another, speeded up and slowed down behind me. I pulled over into the right lane and slowed abruptly. Nothing much happened. Several cars passed me, naturally — but anybody smart enough to tail me this far without getting caught at it would be smart enough to know it’s almost as easy to tail another car from in front as from behind. Uneasiness grew in me. Twice in one morning was too much. I rolled on down the Freeway, and I could feel Trouble rolling along beside me.

At Emeraud Street I turned right. When I reached the empty stretch Sam had told me about, half a mile further down Emeraud, there were three cars behind me. I pulled off the road. On my right were twenty or thirty acres of land, sparsely covered with shrubs and yellowed grass. Out there was the shallow grave in which Zoe Avilla had been found.

I got out on the left side of my car, leaned back against the door and watched the cars go by. My arms were folded across my chest with my right hand underneath my coat and around the checked butt of the .38 Colt Special nestled there in its clamshell holster.

The first car was a new Ford. A middle aged man drove it, and he glanced at me, then away. The second car was an old green Plymouth; it looked as if a family was inside it headed for an outing — three kids, a man and woman. The last car was a year-old cream-and-gray Buick with white sidewall tires. I saw three men in it, and all three, oddly enough, happened to be looking to their left, their faces turned away from me, as they passed the spot where I stood.

I turned away from the road and walked around my Cad, and on another fifty yards. The grave was easy to find. Earlier this morning the police had been here, completed their work and gone. Probably a team of officers was staked out nearby, but I couldn’t see any sign of them. Which was natural. They would undoubtedly have been informed that I was on my way here, so they wouldn’t race over and put the arm on me. The grave was just a scooped-out spot in the earth, maybe two feet deep and wide, and six feet long.

I looked around. This was a sparsely settled area, but from where I stood I could see three houses, which meant that the occupants of those three houses could see me. None of which was important — except that it meant Zoe Avilla’s body had almost surely been buried hurriedly last night.

That was about all that the burial scene could tell me. Before long the winds and rain would erase all marks of the grave and there would be no visible sign that a brutally murdered woman had been dumped here in darkness. I shrugged, and walked to my car.

On the way back to Mamzel’s there was no sign of a cream-and-gray Buick with white sidewall tires, no blue Imperial, no further evidence that anybody was following me. But still I couldn’t shake the feeling. It was a feeling intermingled with the sight of Emil, his head cocked to one side, listening; with the sight of a shallow, scooped-out grave; and with the thought of cold winds sighing past a frozen cheek in the dead of night.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER FOUR

I was just about to work myself into a mood in which I would squeak back at mice, but then Mamzel’s came into sight, and I was saved. Mamzel’s was the kind of place that built just one mood in a man, and it was a mood which had nothing to do with cold winds sighing, but was more like hot breath sizzling your earlobes.

I parked and went inside, and there was Didi.

“Hi!” she cried brightly.

“Lady, you’re sure ornamental,” I said. “But what can you do?”

“Ha, watch this.” She poised her fingers over the keys of the typewriter before her, turned her head toward me and squeezed her eyes shut. “Dictate something,” she said.

“O.K.,” I said, “Take a murder, darling.”

She giggled, and I continued, “Dear Sir or Madam. Would you be interested in the invention of the century? It’s yours for only pennies a day. Send fourteen hundred pennies every day for eight months to Shell Scott, the Hamilton Building, Los Angeles.” I went on with a paragraph of nonsense, and stopped.

Didi’s fingers were flying over the keys and her eyes were still squeezed shut, and she looked cute as the dickens. She stopped, opened her eyes and blinked them at me, and heaved a big sigh. “There,” she said with finality, “ain’t I talented?”

I walked across the room and looked over her shoulder at the sheet of white paper in the machine. On it she had typed, “dytyteg gkgjghf dhdhddhttt,” and things like that several times over.

She pouted. “You peeked.”

“Yep. We’re both frauds. I didn’t invent anything, either.” I patted her on the head and went on out of the reception room and down the hall to Lawrance’s office.

When I entered he said, “Oh, hello again, Scott. What’d you find out? Nothing’s going to stop the kickoff tomorrow, is it? If anything fouled — “

“Don’t get panicky. The police have no plans to lock you all up — in fact, they know little more than we do.”

“What was all that business about our names on a list of some kind?”

I took the Ozalid copy from my coat pocket. “This is what they found. By the way, where are the Mamzel’s offices located?”

“There’s seven now — here in Hollywood, plus New York, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Dallas. Monday we open in New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Detroit. Why?”

“None in Corona?”

He shook his head. “Hardly. The town’s far too small.”

“No connections there at all?”

“None. Why?”

I gave him the sheet of paper. “There at the bottom of the page, Lawrance. It says Corona. Ring any bells?”

He looked the sheet over, then slowly shook his head. “Uh-uh. That’s just a little burg over near Riverside.” He squinted at the sheet, frowning. “What the devil would that woman be doing with this? What’s it mean?”

“You tell me.”

He looked at the paper for quite a while longer, then glanced up. “No, you tell me, Scott.” He flashed his crooked teeth in a grin. “That’s what you’re hired for — among other things. Well … she’s listed the names of all the cities where offices are now. And most of the people working on publicity. Even me.”

He repeated the information Samson had given me, that the Gedder, Horatio, Ad, and Felicca named were respectively the photographer, fashion designer, advertising agency head, and sculptor, who had been, over the last few months, preparing Mamzel’s publicity campaign. He gave me thumbnail descriptions of the men and the jobs they were doing. Then Lawrance scribbled on a paper and handed it to me.

“There’re the addresses of these people. Talk to them soon as you can. It’s likely the police have already hit them, but you might pick up something.” He waved the Ozalid copy. “You need this?”

“I’d better keep it.” I took it from him and put it back into my coat pocket. “I’ll check with these people then call on Toby.”

“Fine,” he said. “By the way, I just got a call from the Ad Agency, the agency handling our account. Police were there, and one of the gals remembered something out of the ordinary. Maybe it ties in.”

“What was it?”

“Somebody from the Ad Agency phoned all of the Mamzel’s offices except this one — New York, Florida and so on — ran up a hell of a bill, and asked a lot of questions that the agency wouldn’t have any special interest in. I’ve just been checking with the other offices by phone.”

“Questions about Mamzel’s?”

“That’s right. Gross business, expenses, that kind of thing.”

“Who did the phoning?”

“A woman who said her name was Fern Gladd. There is a Fern Gladd working at the agency, but she says she didn’t make any such calls.”

“I’ll check it.”

I started out and he said, “You meet the Mamzel gals yet?”

“No.”

“You should. You’re working for them, you know. All ten of them are Mamzel’s stockholders, and all ten are gorgeous. And, of course, there’s Lita.”

“I’m getting pretty curious about her. Where is she now?”

His phone rang and he grabbed it automatically, listened a moment and said, “O.K., put him on.” Then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said to me, “Lita’s probably in the Contouring Room.”

“The what?”

“Contouring Room — a big exercise room where the gals jump up and down and so forth. On your left as you come down the hall.”

I remembered the door I had passed midway in the hall, and the sounds of soft movement and conversation rustling beyond it. Lawrance went on, “They got everything in there except a steam roller to mash them with. I was in there once, but no more — once is all I could take. These arteries of mine can stand only so much. All ten of the Mamzel gals are in there most of the time, working with clients. Lita, too, usually. And all the clients rolling around.” He shook his head rapidly and his eyes got a sort of glazed appearance.

Lawrance listened a moment and then spoke into the phone’s mouthpiece. There was a noise behind me and I looked around. As I turned toward the door it opened all the way and a woman came in. She saw me and stopped, looked me over quickly, and smiled.

I looked her over, too, but not quickly. I would never be able to look her over quickly. She caught your eyes, grabbed them and hung on. Nobody had to tell me who she was.

This one was Mamzel.

This one was Lita Korrel.

She was a big shock of a woman, beautiful and dark, with large, soft, luminous eyes, with dark, liquid, heavy-lidded eyes, so big and dark that they were like bruises in her face. With lips so red and teeth so white they looked like blood splashed on bone. With hair the color of chestnuts in wine, or mahogany polished with umber, or the deepest brown of autumn’s softest leaves.

And the body … You don’t describe a body like that, you look at it, you wonder at it, you marvel at it.

I looked, friend. I stared. And while I stared, things started happening to my glands that endocrinologists won’t even hear about for years.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER FIVE

Her breasts were so full and firm and abundant that each of them might have been both of them, and they were made even more astounding by the tucked-in abdomen and slenderness of waist that curved almost shockingly into full, rounded hips and shapely, firm-fleshed thighs. She was Eve, Circe, Delilah, Salome — Mamzel, a woman of Now designed for Tomorrow, and she was wearing a white leotard.

A leotard is a thin garment made usually of cotton — thin cotton — which covers the female torso in devil-may-care fashion. A leotard leaves the neck bare, and the shoulders and arms bare, and the thighs and legs bare, and little to the imagination, and often does even more for the parts it covers than the parts it bares. And Lita looked like the woman leotards had been designed for. More than that — she looked like the women that men had been designed for.

She said to me, in a soft, whispering voice that sounded like Eve whispering hungrily to Adam, “You must be Shell Scott.”

“Yes, I am. And you must be Mamzel.”

“Yes, I’m Miss Korrel — please call me Lita. I’ll call you Shell. All right?”

“All right.”

Lawrance hung up the phone and, a little late, said, “Hi, Lita. This is Shell Scott — Oh, you’ve met, eh?”

We told him we had and he said to Lita, “Why don’t you show him around, honey? He’d better know some of the operation, anyway.”

She nodded, said, “Come on, Shell,” and led the way out of the office. I shut the door behind me and looked at her as she headed down the hallway. Lita held herself as straight as all those curves could get, but her walk was the kind of fluid gyration that might have been dreamed up by a sex-mad scientist. She glanced over her shoulder at me, then waited for me to catch up with her.

“So you’re the detective?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Did Lawrance tell you everything you need to know about the trouble we’re in?”

“Enough, I think.” I quickly went over the main points of our conversation, the info about Zoe Avilla and Roy Toby. She didn’t have much to add, except that everybody was worried, and she was depending on me to help.

I asked her, “Did anybody connected with Mamzel’s know this Zoe Avilla?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t found anybody who has ever heard of her.” We had walked down the hall to the pair of plain doors in the wall beyond which were the soft sounds of movement and feminine conversation which I’d earlier heard. There we stopped, Lita’s hand on the doorknob. She went on, “Of course, everything’s all up in the air. None of us really knows what’s happening, but there’s a chance one of the girls knew the dead woman and is just afraid to mention it.” She paused. “If there’s anything else you wanted to ask me, better do it now.” She smiled. “When we go into the Contouring Room, it may get a little hectic.”

“We’re … going in there?”

“Yes. Oh, it’s all right. Nobody’s nude or anything.”

“Nobody’s nude or anything,” I repeated.

“The ten Mamzel girls wear white leotards, like mine, so they’ll stand out, and all the clients wear black ones.”

“It sounds very … well, colorful.” I cleared my throat. “You might fill me in some more on the people I’m going to see after I leave here — Gedder and Felicca, and the rest.”

“Well, I don’t know anything special about them.” She went on to tell me essentially what Lawrance had said. “Ad, in particular, is a brilliant man,” she continued. “He’s developed what I think will be a positively wonderful advertising campaign to follow tomorrow’s TV reception at Mr. Adair’s estate. And, of course, everybody knows about Horatio Adair’s work.”

“I may be a little thick, but I haven’t yet figured out what a fashion designer has to do with your publicity campaign.”

“Oh, it’s not just publicity,” she laughed, “although Mr. Adair’s name certainly does have publicity value. You see, Mamzel’s has grown a lot in the last two years, and now we’re branching out into new fields. In addition to the three new shops we’re opening Monday, we’re soon going to offer for sale a line of Mamzel’s products — perfume, jewelry, clothing, all of which will bear the Mamzel name.”

“I see. And Mr. Adair is designing the clothing?”

“Yes. Lounging pajamas and a negligee. These will be modeled by my girls. Also he’s executing a design especially for me, an evening gown.”

Executing was the right word, I thought. When Horatio Adair got through with a design, he had killed it for sure. He was, I had heard, a terrible-tempered little man. A model had once tripped on an Adair design at a private showing, tearing the train of a gown he’d fashioned, and in addition to abusing and humiliating the girl before all those present, he had taken steps to see that she never worked as a model again. Maybe he fed the birds when nobody was looking, or gave anonymously to orphanages, but until I knew it for sure I would consider him one of the most petty and vengeful humans I’d heard of.

I’d heard something else about the man, too. I said, “This Horatio Adair, Lita. He, uh … well, he doesn’t fool around much with girls, does he?”

“I think that’s just part of the act. He does put on quite a show of being a creative genius, you know.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s just that … never mind. It’s not important.”

“Since this is a murder case, it might be that anything about Horatio is important.”

“Well,” she hesitated, then went on, “he and I were alone in the Tower Room — a room he works in — at his home one night two or three weeks ago, so that he could make some sketches and get measurements for some designs, and it seemed that his designs were on me.”

“He make a pass?” I said bluntly.

She nodded. “In a kind of feeble way, but he sure did. I…” she hesitated again. “I laughed at him. I shouldn’t have, I know, and I was dreadfully sorry right afterward, but it was too late. He was furious.”

“From what I’ve heard about the little man, he carries a grudge forever. He may even make everything two sizes too small just for meanness. You don’t know anything about Toby, huh?”

“Only what Lawrance told me. I haven’t met the man. What’s he like?”

“Mean, angry, fat, ugly, deadly, and other negative adjectives. A thorough crook. He’s head of a local gang of criminals and almost never goes anyplace without his two hoodlum bodyguards — sort of a head with two hoods.”

“I not only haven’t met him, but I’m sure I don’t want to meet him.”

I grinned at her. “I’ll protect you from Toby.”

She smiled. “You think I need protection from him?”

“You need protection from men.”

Lita laughed musically. “Who’ll protect me from you, then?”

While I was trying to figure out just what she might have meant by that, she went on, “I’ll give you the quick, guided tour now, Shell. You must have met Didi already.”

“I have.”

“I’ll introduce you to the other girls who work here. You should know more about the operation, anyway, since you’re practically one of the family now.”

“One of the family, huh?” I grinned at her. “Not, I hope, like a brother.”

She deliberately looked me over from my white hair to the big cordovans on my feet, and then back to my face again, and said, “You wouldn’t even be like a brother to a sister.”

Then she turned the doorknob and noise from the room beyond swelled in almost giddy fashion and fluttered at my eardrums. She didn’t say anything, but her lips were twisted in a half smile and she glanced at me from the corners of her eyes. Then she said, “Come on Shell. The tour starts.”

Lita went into the room and I followed her. She shut the door behind us, but I wasn’t watching her. This was the first split instant during which I had not been watching her intently, so that should give you a rough idea of the wild and nearly impossible vista presented to me. A weaker man than I might have turned and run. But I’m strong; especially when all I have to face is women.

And that’s what I was facing. Women.

There were about a hundred of them, in leotards. Black leotards were all over the place, and here and there was a flash of white, practically all of it in motion. This is really too much, I said to myself. I’ve been through quite enough already. What with Didi, and Lita Korrel, and driving through Freeway Traffic this morning, these tired and battered old nerves of mine have had it. I just won’t look, I won’t look.

But you know it: I looked.

We were in a huge low-ceilinged room that must have been a good 100 feet square, which would mean the room had an area of about 10,000 square feet, and I would estimate offhand that in those 10,000 square feet there were at least 1,000,000,000 square feet of women. Let me tell you. I’ve seen more women, in more sizes and shapes and poses, than is really good for a man. I have never been a guy to look in the other direction — if a babe says, “Don’t peek,” my eyes automatically spring open wide. What it all boils down to is that I like to look at women.

But enough is enough.

Out there in front of me were all kinds of tomatoes, from green to overripe, in all sizes and shapes, and they were in so many postures and poses and angles and contortions, and doing so many strange things in so many directions that they gave the impression of having just had a large bomb go off in their midst. It was a great mass of babes that seemed to be exploding. The predominant color was the color of female flesh — which makes a great deal of sense, since it was female flesh — and the rest was the black and white of leotards.

And those women in leotards were bending, wiggling, jumping, squirming, wobbling, flapping, flopping, bouncing, groaning, shrieking, giggling, and everything but dying. They lifted weights, they pulled on elastic ropes, they raised bars over their heads and stood close to machines that seemed to be attacking them. It was like a dream. That is, like one of my dreams.

Then I felt gentle fingers on my arm. Lita … ah, yes … the lovely Lita. She was leading me even deeper into the maw of it all, into the waving, bouncing, giddy, unbelievable core of it. As we walked, she was saying, “You see, Shell, one of our slogans is: ‘No Mamzel’s graduate wears a girdle!’ and here in this room we make the boast good.”

“Looks pretty good, all right,” I said weakly.

“The Mamzel girls you’ll meet this morning are naturally graduates of the course.”

“Naturally. Ah … maybe you’d better not show them to me all at once. I’ll be seeing Roy Toby later today, and I’ll need the strength I’m losing.”

“Oh, Shell!” She chuckled softly, then added, “There’s Yama.”

Yama was apparently one of what I was coming to think of as The Ten, and she wore a wispy white leotard similar to Lita’s. She was bent slightly forward, facing away from me, and to put it bluntly, Yama had a seat, so sweet, so fine, so gay, so jaunty, that it appeared never to have been sat upon. You would almost think that it had gone through the Mamzel course all by itself. I just kept on looking until Lita called the woman and Yama straightened up and turned around. Then she walked over to us. She was smiling.

“This is Yama, one of my ten girls,” Lita said. “Yama, this is Shell Scott.”

I beamed upon her.

Lita said, “Shell is a detective, Yama. He’s going to help us.”

Yama beamed back at me. “Oh, good,” she said. “And if you need any help helping us, tell me. I’ll be glad to help.” Then she frowned delicately and looked at Lita. “Help us what?”

“The investigation that the police came here about this morning, dear. Mr. Scott will probably be here quite a lot. Asking questions and all. I just wanted to tell you to give him all the assistance you can.”

Looking at me, the little lovely with the unsat-on seat said softly, “You didn’t have to tell me, Lita. My assistance is entirely at his disposal.”

Lita’s fingers were on my arm again then, gently hauling me away, and it was probably a good thing. I wandered about in a kind of daze, as Lita led me through rows and tons of babes, introducing me first to one and then to another of the Mamzel Girls. Most of it will always be wrapped in a sort of black-and-white haze in my mind, but it was certainly true that in little more than half an hour I had seen more beauty of feminine face and flesh and form than I had ever before encountered in any week. Just meeting Lita Korrel herself, and Didi, would have made that true. But in addition I had been nearly overwhelmed by all ten of the Mamzel Girls: Yama, April, Misty, Yvonne, Lois, Elaine, Frances, Cecile, Pepper, and Corky.

I showed all of them, and Lita and Lawrance and Didi too, the morgue photo of Zoe Avilla. Nobody had heard of her — at least no one admitted knowing her. Finally Lita and I were in the hall outside the big exercise room in which I had garnered so many memories.

She said, “That took a little longer than I thought it would, Shell. And I have to meet several clients who are just starting the course this morning.”

“And I’d better get out into the male-and-female world and talk to some of the males for a change.”

“I did have several other things I wanted to discuss with you. Perhaps … perhaps later today, after we close up the shop, we could get together for an hour or so.”

“That sounds wonderful. An hour, or two, or three, or four — “

She laughed. “You sound so eager.”

“That’s because I’m so eager. Shall we say Ciro’s? Mocambo? Beverly Hilton? The — “

“Oh, nothing so fancy, Shell.”

“Then my place, perhaps? There’s certainly nothing very fancy about — “

“Why not my place?”

“Why not?”

“Say seven-thirty?”

“Swell.”

“Bye, then, Shell. See you tonight.” She told me where she lived, then walked on down to her office and went inside.

It took a while for it to penetrate that I could look forward all day to seeing the lovely Lita tonight. But it penetrated, and it was a very nice event to look forward to. Assuming, of course, that I lived till tonight. And I did want to live.

As I walked out into the front reception room, Didi said, “Hi,” and waved, and I waved back and we smiled happily at each other. She still looked very good. And after what I had just been through, that was saying a lot for Didi.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER SIX

Art Gedder’s photographic studio was about half a mile farther up Sunset Boulevard. It was one of those places which have, out in front next to the street, enormous blown-up photographs of budding stars and starlets, or those who have already flowered, and occasionally even of one who has gone to seed.

Gedder was a short, thin guy. I’d phoned him before coming out, so he was ready for my questions, and said that the police had already talked to him. They’d showed him a morgue photo of Zoe Avilla and it had turned out to be a customer of his who’d given him the name Susan Roeder. She’d had Gedder do a portrait of her, and had later come by for the proofs, but had never picked up the final prints. That seemed odd enough but she had also talked to Gedder a lot about Mamzel’s.

I said to him, “How’d she happen to bring that up?”

“I’m doing the publicity pix for Mamzel’s, and I did a glamour shot of Miss Korrel that was so good I wanted to print it on people. Put a big blowup of it out front. This Roeder — or Avilla — gal asked me who the beautiful woman was. I explained, and she wanted to know all about Mamzel’s. He shrugged. “So I told her.”

“Did she seem more than ordinarily curious?”

“Looking back, I’d say she was. Real curious. And it’s a funny thing, but some of the questions she asked made me think she already knew quite a bit about Mamzel’s. It’s just an impression. Anyhow, I remember telling her that Horatio Adair was doing fashions, Felicca a statue of Miss Korrel, and about the Ad Agency handling the account.”

After another minute I asked him if he had an extra copy of the pictures he’d made of the woman. He left the room and came back with a four-by-five print which he handed to me. In this one, she looked a lot better than in the morgue picture. This was in color. Zoe Avilla — or Susan Roeder — had brown eyes and dark brown hair and an almost appealing smile on her heavy lips. In the portrait, shadows softened the sharp hard lines of her nose and jaw. I thanked Gedder for his time and the info, and took off to see Horatio Adair.

Horatio Adair was a man unloved by males, and little loved by females. In my opinion he was a well-publicized fraud with no talent but with a great deal of gall. His estate here in Hollywood was world famous, a fashion center, and Horatio’s pronouncements, which issued from it several times each year, were awaited with bated breath by women all over the world. If Horatio had said that women should wear all their clothes back to front, ninety percent of them would have done it instantly, and sneered at the ten percent who didn’t. He never had gone quite that far, however; only too far.

He raised and lowered hemlines, necklines, and waistlines. He toyed with bosoms and bustles. He pooched here, riffled there, and ruffled someplace else. The main thing was to change styles enough so that everybody would have to buy new clothes or be old hat. He was the Napoleon of Fashion, but his battles were won by surrender, not by force of arms or ideas — he won victory after victory merely by announcing that war had begun. And he made a million dollars a year.

On the way to Horatio’s half-million-dollar estate I stopped and phoned his number. What seemed to be a male secretary answered through his nose and haughtily informed me that under no circumstances could I see Horatio Adair. It was remarkable how quickly he changed his tone and mind when I mentioned “murder” and “police.” Even though I was just a private detective, there was a possibility, under the circumstances, that I could see the great man himself. I drove on out….

A metal gate barred the entrance to the Adair estate. It was a huge thing, barring a narrow drive leading off at right angles from the main road, but I almost drove past it, so thick was the growth around it. The gate wasn’t locked, but I had to stop and open it before driving through; I left it open, planning to close it on my way back.

The house was at the end of the long, winding road that curved through tall shade trees and dense undergrowth almost as thickly packed as any jungle. I could see only a few yards off the drive, then a wall of shrubs and trees, limbs and leaves and bushes, blocked any further view. But at intervals along that private road, and especially near the house, splashes of color marked beds and plantings of rhododendron, hibiscus, blue lobelia, cannas and gardenias, plus literally thousands of banana trees and Birds of Paradise.

The house was big, massive, looming up from a clearing in the surrounding Southern-California jungle. I parked and walked to the ten-foot-high double doors, pressed a button that sounded chimes inside.

The guy who opened the door looked like a man who would have the hearty voice I’d just been listening to on the phone. He was tall, thin, thin-featured, thin-lipped, and his expression of combined distaste and resignation indicated that he smelled something obnoxious and that it was his nose. But he looked at me as if I were the something obnoxious.

“I’m Shell Scott,” I said.

“Ye-es. I had guessed. You might as well come in.” Life would go on, but his day was shot.

I walked into a spacious hall, and he said, “I’m Willis. I should like to know more about this police matter.”

“I think I’d better tell it to Mr. Adair. Where is he?”

Willis nodded toward a pair of doors directly ahead of us, but he was still undecided. “I … he is creating. Creating a new design. We really shouldn’t disturb him.” Willis thought about it for almost a minute. “Is there any reason to believe that Mr. Adair is … well, in any real trouble?”

“Only with the men of America.”

He thought about that, too, for a while, then sniffed. “Oh, very well. Perhaps it would be best if you spoke with him.”

He led me to the double doors, opened them, and we stepped inside. He gently closed the doors behind us, and it took a little while for me to realize that I thus became one of the few mortals outside of Horatio Adair’s immediate circle to see him experiencing the ecstasies of creation.

The room we were in was high-ceilinged, big and draughty. Windows lined the far wall and woven tapestries hung from the wall on my left. The right wall was bare. In the room were four male wisps in business suits, one in a yellow robe, and one nude male wisp. No, it wasn’t a nude male, but a thin female, and she wasn’t even nude. As my eyes took in the tableau I noted that she wore brassiere and pants, but there really didn’t seem much excuse for either of them.

The four male wisps in business suits were all on our left and all of them had noted our entrance. Their faces reflected a growing pique, then astonishment and then horrified disbelief. The sanctum sanctorum had been invaded. The small man in the yellow robe appeared unaware of my entrance. He quite obviously was Horatio Adair, and he seemed to be in a trance. His left hand was bent at the wrist, the wrist resting against his hip. He seemed to be staring at the floor, quite motionless. He was short, thin, and very pale. He had the look of a man who kept going on transfusions. Of milk. All five of the men, in fact, looked as if they lived largely on alfalfa.

I could smell incense burning. The scent was too sweet, cloying, like sugar and spice and everything nice. From Horatio’s right hand dangled a long hunk of pale green cloth. He raised his head slowly and eyed the model. He gently waved the cloth, like a pint-size torerito trying to catch the eye of a bored bull.

The model seemed to sum up most of the things I had thought about Horatio.

It had been said that Horatio Adair hired starving women for his models, and then made them diet for a week. Two years earlier, while other designers were exalting the beauty of the bust, or the behind, or the high or low waist, Horatio had gushed forth in print with panegyrics about the “beauty of bone.” The way he went on, you would think he felt women’s skeletons should be worn on the outside. And here was a gal who seemed to be trying to do it.

She was one of those gaunt, straggle-haired and straggle-boned babes who appeared never to have tried building herself up anywhere, but had merely let nature take its curse. Anyway, she was pretty far gaunt, a tomato who had not ripened on the Hollywood-and-Vine, a sad-looking artists’ model, cold and bored. She stood in the middle of the room, with her lank arms dangling at her sides, not even trying to cover anything up, as if to say, “What’ve I got to lose?” This was September Mourn at about three a.m. the night the bars stayed open.

Somewhere in the house behind me a bell was ringing. Willis tapped me on the shoulder and whispered softly, “Please don’t say anything. Or … do anything. Until I return.” You’d have thought from his tone that we were all gathered around a casket.

I whispered back, “I won’t move a muscle.”

He moved silently out of the room. I kept watching Horatio and the four Horatio-watchers for a full minute. There wasn’t any movement. Then Willis was back. “The phone call is for you, Mr. Scott.” he whispered.

I whispered back. “Me? Nobody knows I’m here.”

“It’s somebody named Gedder.”

I nodded and followed him out of the room, remembering that I’d told Gedder Adair’s place would be my next stop, and wondering what he could want with me. We went through double doors at the left of the entrance. There a wide stairway led up to the second floor. Beneath the stairway, on a small stand, a pink French phone stood. Willis retreated a few feet as I picked up the phone.

“Hello,” I said. “Mr. Gedder?”

“Yes. Is this Shell Scott?”

“Right. What’s up?”

“I don’t know. But right after you left here, a great big ugly guy came in. Asked about you.”

“I know lots of big ugly guys. That could even have been me. Can you describe him a little more accurately?”

“He must have been six-four or -five anyway. Probably more. Bigger than you. He was heavy, too, almost fat, but it looked like fat over muscle. Let’s see … he was nearly bald, and he had a deep, scratchy voice. Probably I should have noticed more about him, but I’ll tell you the truth, Scott, he scared hell out of me.”

“Natural enough, Gedder. That’s his job.”

The description had been enough for me to be pretty sure who the man was. Ark, he was called. His real name was Hyath Arkajanian, and he was Armenian or Lithuanian or something, I couldn’t remember for sure, but I did remember for sure that he worked for Roy Toby and that he was a killer. Ark was a big, apelike man, every inch a Kong, and he looked almost as human as a gorilla. How Gedder had failed to mention the simian resemblance I couldn’t understand — if it really had been Ark.

“Gedder,” I said, “this big guy — did he look like an orangutan or chimpanzee or — “

“Yeah!” Gedder broke in suddenly, “an ape. He really looked like an ape.”

“Like the one that killed Tarzan, if it’s the boy I’m thinking of.”

“You got it. Little eyes, coarse features, big lips, big muscles, talked sort of in grunts. Who is he?”

“A hoodlum named Ark. Muscle man. What did he want to know about me?”

“Well, he asked me what you were doing in my shop, what you wanted, why you were there, everything. I — uh — I didn’t want to tell him, but…”

“Don’t worry about it, Gedder. Nobody would hold it against you for spilling everything you know to Ark. If he doesn’t get the cooperation he wants he pouts and kills you. What did he want?”

“Well, like I said, he asked me what you’d wanted with me. I told him you were investigating a murder. He asked me whose murder, and then the way he acted it was sort of funny.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I said it was Zoe Avilla’s murder. And he looked at me sort of squinting and said, ‘Zoe? Zoe’s dead?’ I told him yes, and he shook his head and said ‘So Zoe’s dead, huh?’ or something like that. Mean anything to you?”

“Yeah, quite a bit. I’m very glad you called, Gedder.”

“Uh — there’s one other thing.” He sounded apologetic.

“Go ahead.” I told him.

“Well, he asked me where you were heading from here. So I told him — I got the impression if I didn’t tell him he’d eat me or something.”

“He probably would have bitten you, at least.” I said. “No real harm’s done — they’ve been on my tail for quite a while.”

“They?”

“Have to be more than one of them — Ark couldn’t tail Marilyn Monroe through a nudist camp. Somebody else must have been handling the tail job, and Ark the scary part.”

“It was scary enough.”

I thanked Gedder and we hung up.

We had met, Ark and I, but only briefly and in passing, never in anger. Fortunately for one or the other of us. For me, maybe. I could still see that flat ugly face clearly in my memory, and feel a little of the same queer revulsion I had felt on first looking at him.

There was something wrong with the man. He didn’t seem to be all there, or at least not completely operative, as if he hadn’t been wound tight enough, or maybe wasn’t plugged all the way in. His movements were too slow, his words not crisp enough. And I remembered that when he looked at you, you got the funny feeling that his eyes were focusing somewhere inside your head. He was stupid, and maybe a little deranged, and deadly as cyanide.

That was the guy who was looking for me, and now had found me.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER SEVEN

Willis and I went back to the big room. Believe it or not, nobody in there appeared to have moved. The four men stood on my left, yellow-robed Horatio on my right, and the gal in the middle. She had not improved any in our absence.

We got a little closer to the tableau this time, and I could see her features clearly. Her hair was close-cropped over her head in the latest foreign style, and it looked like brownish fungus. Her nose was a button, her mouth a zipper of disapproval, and her eyes were blue, like the blue in black-and-blue.

Here, I thought, was one of the world-famous Horatio Adair models. Here was high fashion. Here was the idol of American womanhood. Here was a gal with sex appall. Here was a mess.

Horatio Adair waggled the green cloth gently in his hand. He seemed to stiffen ever so slightly. I had been standing inside the room again for maybe two minutes, and Horatio moved with some vigor for the first time.

“Ah! I have it!” he cried. “Vee vill emphasize zee fah-nee!”

Then he went into a veritable whirlwind of activity. He sort of loped or bounded across the space between him and Dracula and heaved the mass of cloth in his hand at her. He threw it at her and yanked it back and twisted it and went hippety-hop around her. The four male lookers-on seemed to have forgotten about me; their attention was riveted to Horatio. He whipped the cloth about, jerked it, wound some more. His frenzy mounted. Finally he stepped back three paces and clapped his hands together.

“Ooh!” he piped. “I loff myself.”

The model looked as if a camouflaged army tent had fallen on her and she’d been clapped on the head by the pole. Well, I’m such a slob about fashion, I thought he was all finished. But it turned out that he’d only begun. He went back to the attack with a little cry, smoothed cloth here and wrinkled it there. “Dot’s it,” he yelped again. “Vee emphasize zee fah-nee.”

And that’s what he was doing, I guess. He gathered a great gob of the material around the model’s lower back and sort of let it dangle there droopily, like a melting bustle. I could tell he was excited. The hot milk was really pulsing in his veins this time.

When he stepped back again even I could tell he’d finished creating. He staggered away from her with a sort of tragic air, and threw his hands over his head, letting them fall with utter finality.

“Vee vill call it Savoir Flair!”

The model still looked as if a camouflaged tent had fallen on her and she’d been clapped on the head by the pole — only now she was wearing a bustle. All four of those other eggs raced about, clapping their hands with the frenzied delicacy of moths mating, and squealing. They were squealing in French. Good old U.S.A. squeals weren’t enough for them, I guess. And it was obvious that they approved of Horatio Adair’s latest creation.

But not I. When I thought of women all over this fair land wearing that monstrosity I almost assumed a tragic air myself.

Next to me Willis whispered, “You are fortunate, Mr. Scott, to have witnessed the great Horatio Adair in the throes of creation.”

“Yeah, he sort of throes up, doesn’t he?”

Willis stared at me, his thin lips curling. I’d said the wrong thing. Those people were still racing around. The model, however, was suppressing a yawn. Horatio clapped his hands together, then unclasped them, looking around. He spotted us and advanced beaming.

“Villis,” he said, “it iss done. You love?”

“It’s adorable, Horatio,” Willis said. “Sheerly adorable.”

Horatio nodded, beaming, and looked up at me. “Good, no?”

“No.”

He stopped beaming. “Vot?” he moaned. “You don’t loff?”

“No. Not a bit.”

“But vhy? Vhy don’t you?”

“It makes her look pregnant in back.”

“Vot? You horrible — “

“Among other things. It might have been designed for a man. It looks like a long blouse made of bloomers — “

“Stop! I can’t stand it. Who let him in? Who are you? Oh, I’m dying, dying…”

He turned and started to stalk off. Willis hesitated, then stepped forward and spoke in a low tone to Horatio. It took him a minute or two, but finally Horatio came back and faced me again.

“So,” he said, in that accent which was, I felt sure, as phony as his styles, “vee vill not discuss the Adair designs. Vot’s it about somebody murdering somebody?”

I explained that a woman named Zoe Avilla had been found murdered, and that among her belongings had been a list of names, including his own.

He shook his head, “Never did I heard of her. Must be many women who puts down my name. It means nothing.”

“Most of the people worked for Mamzels. I understand you’re doing the clothing designs.”

“Yess. So?”

“Since I’m working for Mamzel’s too — “

His eyes widened, seemed to get brighter. “Ah! You vork for Mamzel’s? For Lita?”

“For Lita Korrel, yes. And others.”

He seemed friendlier all of a sudden. “For Lita Korrel,” he said. “Vhy didn’t you said so? Vot’s it you vant to know?”

I told him again. He shook his head, saying he couldn’t understand why his name was on the list. He didn’t know any woman named Zoe Avilla.

“How about Susan Roeder?”

“No.” He kept shaking his head.

Finally I showed him the pictures I had of Zoe Avilla but he still disclaimed any acquaintance with the woman. It was two-thirty p.m. I thanked Horatio for his time and prepared to leave.

He said, “My gown, still you do not like it?”

“Still I do not.”

“No matter. The women of many nations, dey will like it.”

“Maybe.”

He sounded mildly contemptuous. “And if dey do not like it, still dey will wear it.”

“I just figured you out,” I grinned at him. “You’re a bigger sadist than the Marquis de Sade.”

He grinned back at me, and it was a little like a grin in the skull of a dead sparrow. “The Marquis was a masochist, my perceptive Mr. Scott.”

And he said it without a trace of accent, without the usual half simper, looking almost gleeful. Willis blinked at him in surprise, as if doubting his ears. I left.

I drove back past the beds of lobelia, past the hibiscus and cannas and rhododendron, and the deep green of the bananas and Birds of Paradise, down the winding road to the open gate I’d come through earlier.

Only it wasn’t open.

I stopped the car but left the engine idling. Uneasiness swelled up in me. I knew that I had left the gate open on my way in, planning to shut it on the trip out. There might, of course, be a gardener or attendant who had closed it — but I knew that Ark, and at least one more man, were almost surely somewhere near here.

I opened the Cad’s door and got out, took a step toward the gate. Hair along the back of my neck was trying to rise, and involuntarily I pulled my shoulders forward and up a little, tightening the muscles. I looked around rapidly, scanning the area beyond the gate. Then I caught a flash of color on my right — inside the gate. I jerked my head around, saw the color again in the man’s shirt, his face above it, the gleam of metal in his extended hand.

As my foot hit the ground I slammed it against the dirt and jumped sideways to my left, turning, and when I hit the ground again I was sprinting, bent over, toward the undergrowth and trees at the side of the road. The movement was barely in time. The whistle of the slug past my head and the heavy bark of the gun came at almost the same instant. I dived forward, hit the ground rolling as that gun coughed again. The slug dug up dirt near me, splashed specks of earth against my face as I hit hard and rolled over and over, reaching under my coat and grabbing for the .38.

Then the Colt was in my hand and I pulled the trigger. I didn’t aim at anything, but I fired one shot anyway, just for the sound it would make. I wanted whoever was shooting at me to know I had a gun and was using it, and that knowledge alone could make his aim waver a little. And right now a little could be the difference between living and dying.

Then I was in the green, speckled shadows of the growth off the road. I ran a few steps farther, stopped, crouched over and moved slowly, and as silently as I could, deeper into its protection. I listened, but at first there was nothing. Then I heard a sound.

It was behind me and I turned slowly.

Nobody was in sight, but I could still hear the soft brushing movement. A heavy clump of some thick-leaved bush was right in front of me. I took one quick step toward it, then lay down on my back, feet pulled up so that my calves touched the backs of my thighs, gun held above my waist. From this position everything looked a little crazy, but I could see — and quickly — anything near me that moved, and in any direction, merely by rolling my eyes, or at worst moving my head a little. I pulled the hammer of my .38 back on full cock, wincing at the double click it made.

I could still hear the soft whispery sound of somebody moving near me. Then it stopped. After several seconds it started again. Farther off I heard a sudden sharp noise, as if a man had stepped on a twig. That meant there were at least two of them. The soft sound nearby stopped again. Sweat was beaded all over my face; a drop rolled past my eyebrow and into my left eye, stinging slightly, blurring my sight. I didn’t move. I blinked my eyes rapidly, rolling them from side to side, trying to watch all directions at once. Sweat bathed my body.

Then that sound came again — very near this time. I could hear a man’s breathing. I had him placed now; beyond the bush at my left, I rolled my eyes left and aimed the gun at the spot where I thought the man’s form would appear. My vision cleared. Everything seemed abnormally sharp and bright. The green leaves, patches of sky, limbs and twigs above me. And then I saw him.

He must have seen me at almost the same instant. The air hissed from his mouth and he let out a soft yell. He was bent far forward toward me and his eyes suddenly opened so wide that the whites loomed startlingly around the irises. A big shiny .45 automatic gleamed in his hand. Light bounced from it as he swung the gun toward me. It was a stretched, distorted moment, the gun occupying nearly all of my awareness, but I saw the face behind the gun and recognized the man as one of Toby’s men, and moments later I realized I was saying his name over and over as I killed him.

And I did kill him.

Before that ugly .45 could bear on me I pulled the trigger of my Colt. I didn’t have to aim. The revolver had been pointed at him already. I just pulled the trigger and then pulled it again a split second later. But, still, in that split second, there was time enough for me to note, almost coolly, that my first slug had caught him high in the chest and he had started to straighten up, bringing both his hands toward the hole in his chest, when my second slug caught him in the face.

But that was all I saw. Because when I pulled the trigger for the second time I rolled over and ran as fast and hard as I could straight ahead, parallel to the road.

I ran right into Ark.

It was like running into a mountain, or maybe a volcano exploding. Each of us saw the other only a moment before we crashed together, but he had time enough to pull the trigger of his already-cocked automatic. The slug missed me, but the bang of the explosion jarred me almost as much as its suddenness, as did the impact with Ark’s approximately 260 pounds. He let out a hoarse bellow, but then my feet went out from under me and I sprawled face down in the dirt.

As soon as I hit I rolled over, got to my feet again, the Colt tight in my hand. Trees and shrubs blurred before my eyes but even so I saw the figure of a third man about ten yards away. He was visible through a gap in the trees and brush, but I couldn’t identify him. A splash of fire jumped from his hand, and a slug jerked at the cloth of my trousers.

I snapped a quick shot in his direction. Every second I expected to hear the boom of Ark’s gun and feel the pile-driver impact of a .45 slug. I could see Ark’s bulk looming at my left, but I had to keep my eyes on the other man.

That third man still had his gun raised and pointed at me. His feet were spread wide and he fired again. The bullet smacked sharply into the trunk of a tree inches from me. I steadied myself, swung the Colt back toward him, aiming for his chest. When you’ve got to hit a man, you don’t aim at his head. And I had to hit this one.

I forced myself to aim with care, and to squeeze off the shot, not to jerk the trigger. Because an automatic counter in my brain had ticked off four shots already from my Colt, and the snub-nosed revolver had been loaded with only five cartridges when this little war started. So this was my last shot and I meant to make it good.

I did.

As the gun bucked slightly in my hand the man’s left shoulder jerked back. He cried out and kept turning. He didn’t go down, but jumped aside and ran out of sight. Ark’s big body was looming on my left, close, almost on top of me. As I pulled my head around toward him the gleam of light on metal a few feet away told me why Ark hadn’t shot me. His gun was on the ground nearby; the impact when we’d collided had knocked the automatic from his hand.

Ark landed on me like a cement mixer. It was a sensation like getting sprained everywhere at once. Like having a building jump on you, or lightning hit you. The empty gun flew out of my fingers, and my hand felt as if it were going to leave my arm, but I managed to stay on my feet. A big fist came out of the air and bounced off the side of my head. Dizziness unfocused my eyes and rang bells inside my ears. The light dimmed and shadows got darker.

I brought up a knee and ground it hard into him, slashed out with my open left hand and felt its thick side crack against flesh. My vision cleared a little and I saw his contorted features close to mine, his eyes glaring wildly, and I slammed my right hand at his face, extended fingers cutting at his eyes. Ark roared in pain and anger, throwing an arm up and rolling to the side just far enough so I could bounce a hard balled fist off his cheek.

The blow didn’t knock him down, but he stumbled — and fell, sprawling. Before I could reach him Ark recovered and got to his knees, one hand reaching toward my throat. I went back one step to place my feet solidly, then swung toward him, dropping my right shoulder and leaning my body into the blow, driving with my right leg at the same time that I slammed my right hand into his face.

I was aiming for his chin but my fist cracked against his high, bony forehead and snapped his head back. Pain exploded in my knuckles, flamed through my hand and wrist all the way up my arm. Ark’s small eyes glazed but he just shook his head and let an unintelligible sound roar from his mouth.

The blow should have knocked him flat on his back. It should have damn near torn off the top of his head. It should have pounded him unconscious, but it didn’t. It addled him all right, but he’d been pretty well addled before I’d ever hit him, and I got the frightening feeling that maybe nothing less than a bullet in the head would put him out, that you could hit him and hit him again and he’d just keep shaking his head and coming at you.

He was still on his knees in front of and below me, slumped a little, with his long arms dangling at his sides now, one of them touching the ground, and he looked as much like a great ape as anything I’d seen outside of a zoo. He grunted with a kind of short, coughing sound and jerked his hands up before his face. Then he started to get up fast, arms straightening as he reached for me.

That covered his head and face pretty well. But it left his stomach wide open. I kicked him right in the middle of his gut, the toe of my shoe going into his flesh like a leather spear, and breath and spit gushed from his mouth. He hung in the air for a moment, wide open. And I really leaned into him then, while I had the chance, while I was still alive and able to swing at him, and I brought my left fist up from all the way down and quite a distance behind me, and when it landed on his chin it made a sound like the crack a felled tree makes as it breaks loose and starts to plunge to earth. Or maybe like the crack of Doom. Because that’s what it was for Ark.

It was a helluva blow, and he must have been out then, but as he toppled back and sideways I stepped forward and spread my right hand open, fingers together and thumb pulled tightly away from them, and then slashed it like a flesh cleaver hard against the corner of his jaw. The side of my hand bounced off his face and he fell soundlessly. He hit and lay motionless. I damn near kicked him in the head.

I left him on his face and scooped up his gun, then trotted toward the first guy I’d shot. I was thinking less about him, though, than about where the third guy was, the egg who’d pumped those two or three shots at me. Then the sound of a car’s engine catching answered the question.

I changed direction and ran forward, Ark’s automatic ready in my right hand. I burst out of the trees near the gate just as the car, a cream-and-gray Buick with white sidewall tires flashed by. I got a quick look at the driver’s face. He was a punk named Lemmy, the kind of vicious, demented hoodlum who would sprinkle his bullets with salt. I got off one shot at him, but I missed even the car. It didn’t bother me; I wasn’t kicking about anything.

Then I went back and looked at the dead man. I had already identified him in the split second before pumping a .38 slug into his chest. His name was — or had been — Flavin, and he, like Ark and Lemmy, worked for Roy Toby, the man I was going to see very soon now. Within minutes if I could get to him that fast. Because these guys just worked for Toby, carried out his orders, acted like an extension of the gun he carried. He was really the man who pulled the trigger, and he was the guy I should have kicked in the teeth. Or shot in the head. Well, maybe in a little while I would get the chance to do one or the other.

Because if Toby were following his usual routine, he would be in the room he used for an office in Jason Fleece’s gym.

And that’s where I was going.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER EIGHT

I got my empty Colt and put it back in its holster, then trotted to my Cad and backed it up closer to the bulk of the unconscious Ark. I figured that I would personally deliver to the police one hood for their jail and one for their morgue. Besides, I wanted to hear what Ark would have to say in one of the Police Building’s interrogation rooms.

It took me a good five minutes to wrestle him over to the car, dump him into the back seat of the coupe and bind his hands, mouth, and feet with friction tape from the trunk. Then I hauled the dead man over and flopped him in alongside Ark. Ark looked even worse than Flavin did.

But I felt worse, I figured, than either of them. Neither of them was feeling any pain, but I seemed to have aches on top of sprains compounded of contusions. I felt sprained and bent and mashed and raw and nearly squashed, and I was all those things. So it was natural that I was learning to resent Toby with a resentment beautiful in its perfection.

I tramped on the accelerator and headed for Hollywood. As I drove, I got a box of .38 caliber shells from the glove compartment and loaded my gun again. Unless I’ve got reason to expect to use the revolver, I keep an empty chamber under the hammer as a safety measure. Now, though, I filled all six chambers in the cylinder.

The gym was on the ground floor of the Planet Building at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Edgemont, out of the high rent district, as the saying goes. I pushed open the heavy plate-glass doors and walked into a small reception room. A door in the far wall was open and through it I could see men exercising, working out with heavy equipment. At a desk near the open door a young broad-shouldered guy sat, laboriously making marks in a ledger.

I stopped by his desk and said, “Where’s Roy Toby?”

For maybe three seconds I thought he was going to give me some trouble. But he looked up at my face, then said, “You can see his office from here. That brown door in the wall clear across the gym.”

“He in there?”

“Yeah.”

I got about halfway through the big gym when it dawned on me that a large number of guys in here had stopped whatever they’d been doing and were giving me a lot of attention. I looked around more carefully.

This gym was a big open room like the one at Mamzel’s, but there the resemblance ended. Where Mamzel’s was soft and curving and scented, this joint was hard and bulgy and smelly. Muscles were everywhere I looked; I was in a sea of muscles, a sea in which a guy could drown horribly.

A number of these bulgy boys, I knew, worked for Toby; consequently they would be happy to work on me for Toby. I told myself: Under all those muscles, they’re just weaklings. But it didn’t help much.

I kept walking toward the brown door. Over on my right was a guy who, in a quick, blurry glance, appeared about eight feet tall. I took a better look at him and decided he must be about six feet, six inches tall. He was big and he was strong, beautifully proportioned and wearing only a pair of gym shorts. He was raising and lowering a barbell that looked to me as if it weighed several tons, and his biceps and pectorals and latissimus dorsi and several odd ones seemed to be writhing in anguish. I was getting sick of muscles.

The big guy kept eyeing me. He was nearly as blond as I am, but unlike my short-cropped stubble, his hair was long and almost passionately waved. As I continued toward the door he gently deposited the barbell on the floor and walked catlike to intercept me.

He caught me a couple yards from the door and clamped his fingers around my right arm like five little boa constrictors. High on the list of things which I dislike intensely is for guys to latch onto me with steely fingers. Or any kind of fingers. So I stopped suddenly, looked down at the hand wrinkling my blue gabardine coat and then at the guy’s face. Then I set my feet and drew back my balled left fist.

I was simply going to haul off and bust him one on the jaw, but he let go of my arm. Maybe he saw the smoke in my eyes. Maybe he had a change of heart. Anyway, he stepped back a pace and said, “Where in hell you goin’ in such a hurry, pal?”

“What makes it your business?”

“I’m Fleece. Jason Fleece.” He waved an arm that was like a series of graduated hams placed end to end. “I own this place.”

So this was the Golden Boy himself. His real name was Joe Yoicks or something like that, but in a muscle-man contest here a couple of years ago after he’d been runner-up in the Mr. Universe competition, he’d won the top title, “Hollywood’s Golden Boy” — Hollywood is like that — and subsequently changed his name to Jason Fleece. Hollywood is like that, too.

I said, “The hell you own it. You and Roy Toby.”

He shrugged, then grinned easily. “So I own forty percent. What’s it to you?”

“In a couple more minutes you may own a hundred percent again.” I took a step toward the door.

“Wait a second, pal,” Fleece said. “You seem kind of worked up. Who are you, anyway?”

“Shell Scott.”

He squinted. “Would you be the guy that got Toby panned on the Randolph broadcast?”

“I had a hand in it.”

He grinned. “More like a fist. I enjoyed that broadcast. Maybe we’re on the same team.”

“You can prove it. Answer one question for me. I remember when you won the Golden Boy title and started this gym. It looked pretty good for you. So how did you happen to get tied up with a complete bum like Toby?”

He shrugged. After a moment’s hesitation he said, “Toby wanted to buy in while the price was right. And he said he’d kill me if the price wasn’t right.”

“What did he actually pay you?”

“Nothing. Oh, it’s all legal. Now.” He paused. “Take it back. His bums did pay me — ” Fleece touched a thin scar bordering his left eyebrow and another alongside his nose — “with these. And scared off three of the men I’d planned to have working with me.”

I looked around. Four big sweaty guys seemed to be paying more attention to me than seemed natural, or even nice. I said to Fleece, “Under the circumstances, you should be almost as anxious for me to keep my health as I am. Seeing how sincerely I hate Toby’s flabby guts.”

“When you speak, it’s like hearing music.”

“Toby’s in his office, isn’t he?” I nodded toward the door.

“He is.”

“Any other way out of there?”

“Another door leads into the alley behind the gym.”

“Anybody been in to see Toby in the last fifteen minutes or so?” Fleece shook his head and I asked him, “You know one of his punks named Lemmy?”

“Sure. Haven’t seen him around this morning though.”

“Well, some guys I assume are Toby’s men are out in the gym now, and they just might follow me inside — and I would not feel at ease in there with Toby if they did.”

He smiled. “Toby doesn’t like us to bother him unnecessarily. So I’ll just have to try to keep people out.” He grinned. “Wait till I turn my back.”

He turned, walked over to his barbell and bent to pick it up. He straightened, lifting the bar, and flesh molehills became muscle mountains on his back and shoulders. I walked to the brown door, turned the knob and went in.

Roy Toby sat before a scarred pine desk at the right of the room. His right side was toward me and he was putting a large sheaf of currency into a metal box on the desk before him. As I slammed the door behind me he looked up, face showing sudden anger.

“I told you jerks to knock — “

He saw me and his jaw slumped, then slowly he closed it and swallowed. But along with the concern showing on his face now, there was still the anger.

There was always anger on Toby’s fat features. It was an unhealthy, unhappy, unpleasant face, a face that would always bear a grudge, a fat, floppy, red face, now getting redder. His hair was fine, reddish and wispy, his nose was large and pitted, and he had big, slightly protruding eyes with fat lids stretched over them midway down their surfaces, like flesh blobs from an unfinished operation dangling near his pupils. He was a fat man, but he was not a jolly fat man.

Toby blinked at me, winced at the sound of the door slamming behind me, then grabbed at a drawer of his desk and shoved his hand into it. But by that time I was alongside him. Before he could get his hand out I leaned over and slammed my own hand hard against the drawer’s side, crashing it shut on his wrist.

Toby let out a gasp of pain, slowly pulled his right hand up against his chest, wrapped the fingers of his left hand around his wrist. I reached into the drawer and wrapped my own fingers around an Army Colt .45 automatic there — the pistol that is almost standard equipment for mobsters and hoodlums.

I squeezed my fingers around the gun’s stock and brought it up in a tight arc and laid the barrel on the angle of Toby’s chin. He had started suddenly up out of his swivel chair, but he just as suddenly flopped back down into it, letting out a roar this time, a roar of pain and rage.

I said, “Surprised to see me alive, Toby?” I hauled the gun back again and said, “I ought to bust you wide open.”

He must have thought I was going to splinter his teeth because he shoved himself backward so hard that his chair toppled over and he went with it, crashing heavily onto his back. He grunted and gasped, started to pull his bulk up again.

“Just stay there,” I said. “Flat on your back. And thanks for grabbing this heater, chump. Since you’re still on parole, that — added to attempted murder — should be plenty for the police to hold you on.”

He stopped moving but spoke finally, the words, forced through his teeth and his anger, so distorted as to be almost unintelligible. “Scott, get out of here. Quit messing with me, or I swear I’ll have you killed.”

“Yeah, I was right. With that temper of yours, you’d better be locked up. And I’ll personally feel better with you out of circulation.”

“If the cops picked me up, I’d be out in an hour, you jerk. And a half hour later you’d be dead in an alley, you lousy — “

“Shut up, Toby. Watch that slimy mouth of yours or I’ll open your skull.” He’d spoken the truth for a change, though. Even if I hauled him to the can, he’d be sprung fast by his gang of smart lawyers.

I took a different tack. “Your boys missed me, Toby, though they tried, and hard. But you’d be a damn fool to keep on trying to kill me.”

He looked as if he were trying to pop. His face got redder and redder, but he lay quietly, not even trying to speak. He was more menacing than when he’d been snarling at me. I went on, “What you’d better get through your fat head is that Randolph only quoted a small part of my report last Sunday. If anything happened to me so soon after that telecast, ninety thousand people would be sure you were responsible. You’d practically be reserving the gas chamber in your own name.”

He said, “Nuts.”

“It’s your funeral, Toby. Here’s something else you can chew on. I’m working for Mamzel’s. One of the reasons I was hired was to stop your muscling in there the same way you did here. If we have to hire a whole army, we’ll do it — but I’ve got a hunch I can stop you just by proving you’re responsible for Zoe Avilla’s murder.”

“Who?” He didn’t even blink.

“Zoe Avilla. You heard me.”

“So I heard you. But I never heard of her.”

“Susan Roeder, then.”

“Same thing to me. Nothing.”

“Ark heard of her. Tell me you don’t know Ark.”

He chuckled but it wasn’t a happy sound. “Sure, Ark’s my boy. Where is he?”

I didn’t answer him. “Why did you have Ark and his chums tailing me?”

“To make sure you didn’t tail me, you bum.”

That made sense. After my following him around for a day and reporting all I saw to Randolph, Toby would naturally have been anxious that neither I nor anybody else tailed him. But three guys to tail me?

I waved the gun around a little, then aimed it at his bulging middle. Toby must have known there wasn’t a chance in a thousand that I would shoot him, especially not here in his own arena, so to speak. But even so, when a loaded .45 — or even .22 — is aimed at your middle, that one chance in a thousand suddenly looks bigger than the other nine-hundred and ninety-nine.

I said, “It could be, Toby, that as the surgeons say, we’re going to have to go inside.” I waggled the pistol playfully, like a blunt scalpel.

“You … but — ” Toby stopped and swallowed, jowls wiggling as his mouth stretched open and the corners pulled downward, making him look like a fat mask of Tragedy. He went on, “You wouldn’t … but what for? All I did was have them tail you. How’d you find out, anyway? I didn’t — ” He was starting to sound panicky.

“Toby, you’re a liar. Those hoods of yours haven’t had an original thought since nineteen-forty. If they’d decided all by themselves to pop me, it would have been a mental feat for them on a par with the invention of the wheel. So start telling me the story.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I’m not lyin’, Scott.”

He sounded almost convincing. I was, however, going to pursue the matter further — only there was an interruption.

I didn’t even hear the guy come in. All I heard was the quick intake of breath behind me and then, before I could swing around, the sound of the slide being thrown back on an automatic pistol. That was all.

But that was enough.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER NINE

I held the gun before me, turned my head and looked at the man. It was Lemmy, the guy I’d winged at Horatio Adair’s gate, the one who’d taken off in a hurry. He stood in front of the alley door, and held the automatic well out from his body, pointed steadily at me.

“Better drop it,” he said.

I stared at him. There was a hole in the left side of his coat along with what looked like bloodstains. A finger of reddish brown on his shirt was undoubtedly blood. I had apparently bounced a .38-caliber pill off his ribs, painfully, but without doing serious damage. A muscle at the side of his tight mouth twitched. It was a hard thing to do, but I peeled my fingers open, let the .45 fall to the floor.

Toby got up off his back. “Lemmy,” he said slowly, staring at me with hate in his thick-lidded eyes, “if this bum moves half an inch, kill him.” His face slowly got redder. “Hell,” he said suddenly, “kill him now.”

I swung my head back toward Lemmy just as he shifted the gun slightly aiming it higher on my chest. I could almost feel Lemmy’s finger tensing on the gun’s trigger. His lips pressed more tightly together and his eyes were narrowed until they were almost shut.

“What about Ark?” I said rapidly. “And Flavin?”

“Hold it, Lemmy,” Toby said. Then to me, “What about them?”

“Don’t you even want to know where they are?” I looked at Lemmy and said, “Is this the way your tubby boss treats the hired hands — including you? He doesn’t give a damn that you’re plugged, or if the other two creeps who jumped me are bleeding to death.”

Lemmy shifted his gaze to Toby, then back to me.

I said to him, “Besides, people would hear that cannon go off clear down at the City Hall. Or, rather,” I amended, “the Police Building. Where the jail is.”

Toby looked at Lemmy. “Where’s Flavin and Ark?”

Lemmy shook his head, but he didn’t explain why they weren’t with him or where he thought they might be. Apparently he had just arrived here.

I said it for him. “Lemmy wouldn’t know, Toby. I tossed a pill at him and he ran away like a rabbit.”

Toby snorted in disgust, then asked me, “Where are they? Spill it.”

“Sure. Just like that, and then you can haul me out in a canyon and finish me. I’ll tell you when I’m out of here.”

Toby glowered at me. “Cops got them?”

“Look, Toby, we don’t play guessing games. My car’s parked in front. When we get out there, I’ll tell you where your boys are — and I guarantee you’ll be able to pick them up yourself if you want to. You can have the bums back. But make up your mind.”

He thought about it.

I looked at Lemmy again. “Your boss sure doesn’t worry much about how many of you boys he loses, does he? He must consider punks expendable — “

Toby made up his mind. “O.K. At your car, Scott. I think we could knock you off here, and get away with it. Or make you spill about where the boys are. But it might take a while, at that.” He glanced at Lemmy. “And I’m more interested in helping my men than working you over, Scott.”

“Sure. Now you are.”

“It don’t make much difference anyway. You won’t be hard to find.” Toby leaned closer to me and said softly, “I’ll let you sweat a while. You ain’t gonna know when it’s comin’ or from where. You’ll just be walking along or riding somewhere — and bing — that’s it.”

We left by the back way. I went out first and down the alley. They followed me around to Hollywood Boulevard and my car. I glanced into the back seat and saw that the two bodies were still there as I’d left them. Ark was moving feebly.

“All right,” Toby said. “Where’s the boys?”

I jerked a thumb. “In the back of my Cad.”

If ever Toby came really close to apoplexy, that must have been the moment. His face got the color of Coca Cola.

“Haul your pals out, Lemmy,” I said.

I’d made sure, of course, that Lemmy had put his gun away long before we walked out onto the Boulevard. But he snapped his head toward me and his hand moved in the direction of his shoulder holster. I already had my right hand under my coat, on the butt of my .38.

“Get ‘em out,” Toby said. His voice was shaking.

Lemmy grunted and tugged and hauled and shoved Ark out after much struggle, and then dumped the dead man half on top of him. Toby was about to have a real fit. Cars continued to zoom by on the street, and several people looked at what was going on, at the two prone bodies on the sidewalk, but none of them did anything except gawk and keep on going.

I got into the Cad, started it. Neither Toby nor Lemmy said a word, and I didn’t say anything to them, either. It didn’t seem likely that we would ever again carry on two-sided conversations. Toby didn’t even swear again that he was going to kill me, which was a refreshing change.

I drove off, thinking that Toby was sure full of threats, but that didn’t mean they were empty threats. The guy who first said that barking dogs don’t bite must have been an expert on cats. Dogs don’t bark and bite at the same time, maybe, but they sure bite a lot between barks.

I phoned Mamzel’s. Didi’s delightful voice came on and we traded a little dialogue, then I had her get Lawrance for me. I went over the day’s developments, ending with my farewell to Toby and Lemmy minutes ago. I wound it up, “So that’s where it stands. I had to ad lib most of it”

“What’s likely to happen now?”

“Anything’s likely. That’s why I’m phoning. I’m going to call the police and fill them in, but there won’t be any proof that Toby’s chumps took some shots at me. Except my word. And Toby would have twenty-seven witnesses to the fact that he was in a dirigible flying over the Empire State Building or something. It might be check, but not checkmate. And it’s no good just nibbling at him — you’ve got to eat him up or he’ll just keep on being trouble.”

“Uh-huh, I see. Well…” Lawrance was quiet for several seconds, “Where do we go from here?”

“I go calling on the rest of those named in the late Zoe Avilla’s list — she gave the photographer the name Susan Roeder, by the way. Mean anything?”

“No. Never heard that name, either.”

I told Lawrance I would keep him posted as well as I could, hung up and called Homicide. I talked to Sam and filled him in on what had happened. He said he’d send a team of men out to see Toby and would haul Toby and some of his boys in for questioning — if they could be located. He also said he was about to haul me in for questioning, but I managed to change the subject and hang up. I put in one more call, to the Ad Agency, and made an appointment to see the boss as soon as I arrived.

Then I got back in the Cad and headed for Sunset Boulevard — and as I drove I tried to look to my left and right and straight ahead, and watch the rearview mirror at the same time. It seemed settled beyond doubt now that Toby would take the first opportunity to carry out the threat he’d made against me. The only question was where — and when.

And I had the dismal feeling that my luck was about used up.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER TEN

I drove to Sunset Boulevard — to the gilded and gleaming hyper-neoned sucker-trap known as the Strip. In a way it’s Hollywood’s Strip tease, because it always offers more than it gives, promises without fulfillment. In the daytime it makes me think of the city’s bones, taking on flesh only at night when the neon flickers and the pianos tinkle in the intimate clubs. The Sunset Strip. Expensive, gaudy, snobbish, designed for the upper crust — so-called, perhaps, because it’s on top of the dough. Mocambo and Ciro’s, of course. But also Crescendo, Bit o’ Sweden, Garden of Allah, Marquis, Fyell’s custom tailors. And the Ad Agency.

The Ad Agency — that was its real name — was between the Can-Can and “rachel’s — fine paintings.” The head of the agency was a man named Bill Adams, known as “Ad” Adams even before he got into the advertising business, so called because it is with artful advertising that manufacturers give consumers the business. And Ad Adams was one of the best con-men in the game that is not a game, but the deadly serious occupation of making consumers buy and consume more and more of more and more whether they like it or not, and if they don’t like it convincing them that they do.

I parked in the adjacent lot and went inside. A platinum-blonde secretary softened the glitter of glass and glass brick, chrome and copper. I told the gal I was Shell Scott and she pointed with an inch-long scarlet nail on her little finger.

I went through the door the secretary had indicated, down a polished and gleaming hall, past open offices in which well-dressed men gesticulated wildly, barked into telephones, puffed frantically on fat cigars. It was a relief to look into a room that contained only a woman, her back to me as she sketched on a large pad of white paper propped on an easel before her. I watched her for a moment. With a piece of charcoal she drew sweeping lines on the paper and stepped back. Then she glanced over her shoulder at me.

“Hi,” she said. “Come on in.”

I leaned against the side of the door. “I’m looking through this jungle for Ad Adams. Which cage is he in.”

“He’s next door. Out for a minute, though. Cage, indeed. But you’re right, I suppose.” She turned around and flashed me a smile. She was medium size, with a plain face behind black-rimmed glasses. She was a blonde, too, more yellow than platinum, and with much more intellectual expression than the receptionist’s. She said, “Emporium of the hard sell … the soft sell … and the padded sell. You’d be Shell Scott.”

“I would, indeed. How did you know?”

“Ad told me to watch for you. When he stepped out…”

“Of a window?”

“Naturally.”

“What is that?” I indicated the wiggling lines she’d drawn.

“It’s a foundation garment. The Hugmetite.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Serious.”

“Are you by any chance talking about a girdle?”

She winced. “Please. Call it that if you must, uncouthly. But, really, Mr. Scott, the Hugmetite is a foundation garment. New account. Ad’s very proud of landing it. Handled it himself. It gets top priority, right after the Mamzel’s account — you’re working for Mamzel’s, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. And you’re Miss…”

“Fern Gladd.”

“Oh.” I smiled to soften the words and said, “Isn’t that the name of the gal who called all the Mamzel’s offices and asked lots of questions?”

She smiled back. “Yes. It was that little woman, of course. The one who got killed.”

“Zoe Avilla.”

“Yes. She used my name and my phone.”

I showed her the pictures I carried and she said, “That’s the one.”

“How do you know she did she phoning?”

“She stayed in my office while she was here — with my permission. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Anyway, she must have used my phone then to call the Mamzel’s agencies around the country — posing as me so she could get away with asking questions the Ad Agency might be interested in. It’s the only logical way it could have happened, because I certainly didn’t make the calls.”

“What was she doing here in the first place? And how do you know she called all the Mamzel’s spots?”

She didn’t get to answer. From behind me a man’s deep voice said, “That you, Scott?”

I turned around. “Yes.”

“I’m Ad Adams.” He stuck out his hand and shook mine firmly. He was a pleasant looking guy about fifty, with thick brown hair and lighter eyebrows over brown eyes. He was neatly dressed in a gray suit, an off-white shirt, and maroon tie.

“How do you do, Mr. Adams.”

“Ad. Call me Ad. Everybody does.” He glanced at his watch. “Got to rush right into the brainstorm session. Sorry, Scott, I got tied up. You’ll have to wait, O.K.?”

He was already leading the way into his office. “Come along, Fern,” he called over his shoulder. As we followed him inside, he said to me, “You might as well sit in, Scott. Won’t take long. Got to get this done. Gibson’s anxious.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Sit down, Scott.” He pointed to a modern leather-and-chrome chair that looked like a small crushed airplane wing and which had probably cost about three hundred dollars. The office we were in was four times the size of the others I’d seen, and nine or ten people were already present, sitting in the crushed-wing chairs around a long rectangular table. As I watched, two more people came in.

I said to Adams, “I suppose you know I’m working for Mamzel’s.”

He nodded. “What is it you want to know about?”

“Zoe Avilla.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Cops were here, asked us about the woman.” He glanced nervously at his watch again, then said to me, “Be with you when we finish this, Scott. Won’t take a minute.”

I shrugged and as he walked toward the other end of the room I sat down at the end of the table. Fern Gladd took the seat next to me and smiled.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. Well, we sure didn’t have much of a — “

“Sh-h. Session’s beginning. Ad’s already started the tape recorder. Have to carry on our conversation when he’s through. Ad — uh — likes intense concentration from us.” She turned and looked toward the head of the table.

Adams had stepped up onto a small platform, raised about a foot off the floor beyond the far end of the table. He stood alongside an easel on which was a large pad of white paper. Then he picked up a piece of charcoal and faced the group.

“We’ll warm up on a small account,” he said, “just to limber up our mental muscles.” In his hands he held a pink brassiere. It was a narrow thing, strapless, and was apparently designed to cover only the lower half of what it was designed to cover.

Ad said, “We are to dream up, think up, brainstorm — a name for this. Or descriptive phrases, slogans. There’s not a very big budget, but the name and slogan will get national space. All right. This bra is made by Finder’s, makers of fine lingerie; it’s a built-up, or padded, bra, and it is, as you can see, especially low-cut so that it can be worn with daringly low-cut or strapless gowns. It is to sell for under five dollars. Which is to say for four-ninety-nine.”

He paused, looked around again, then said, “All right. A name for this item, and/or a slogan. See what you can do in five minutes.” He waited expectantly.

I was getting a little interested myself in seeing what would come of this. This was real life, raw and earnest, the behind-the-scenes drama of Twentieth Century Advertising. There were no more than five seconds of silence. Then a young guy a few chairs up the table said, “Hush-hush.”

I didn’t feel that he had come up with anything astounding, but maybe I was just being negative. I leaned back and listened. Three more names came in the next few seconds: Foreign Aid … Second Helping … Trade Secret.

And that seemed really to warm everybody up. For the next minute or so names and words and phrases flew thick and fast, with barely a second’s silence at a time. The excitement seemed to grow in the room, and I even got sort of caught up in it myself.

Somebody shouted, “Space Station — no, Spice Station,” and I got swept up in the enthusiasm and joined in, “Finder’s Keepers!” I cried.

Somebody said, “Twin-Pipes … ah, Twin-Pips.” And “Dual Control.”

“Peek-A-Boo-Boo!” I yelled.

A woman across the table shouted, “I’ve got a slogan — Get A Load On Your Chest.”

I sang out, “Dishonesty Is The Bust Policy.”

Then there were about half a dozen names and phrases tossed in all of a sudden, and in a short silence I called out, “Susan Roeder.”

No one even wiggled. More names and slogans flew back and forth.

Finally Ad held up his hands, brassiere dangling from one, and said, grinning, “That’s it. Good enough, ladies and gentlemen, I think that does it. You’re warmed up, I’d say. Now we really get down to business. We’ve got to dream up a complete layout for — ” he paused for several seconds and let the suspense build up — “Hugmetite!”

After listening to the expressions of almost giddy approval, Ad continued, “As you know, the Hugmetite is a quality foundation garment, designed to appeal to those women who get just a little, er, soft or heavy — a tiny bit overweight — say on crepes suzettes and caviar. We’re going to go all out on this one, play it sophisticated, rich, expensive, the quality approach. Chosen by TV and movie stars, the healthy wealthy, that sort of thing.”

He went on to describe the item further, and it began to sound like the ultimate in girdles: It held the wearer in, down, out, and up — like being trapped inside there. Finally Ad said, “We’ll run full pages in Bazaar, Vogue, Glamour, Life, Look, the works. What we want to accomplish today is to get a complete layout ready to show Gibson.”

He paused, looked at his watch. “All right. Let’s go.”

Immediately somebody said, “Sylphlike … sylph.” Fern leaned forward and said, “Sylph Control.”

A third person picked it up, adding the word “perfect” to Sylph Control. Then words, phrases, lines and names came in a rush from both sides of the table. “The way to stares … can we make that w-e-i-g-h?” … “Hugs you like a lover” … “Stop weeping for that willowy look” … “Hugmetite slims you down … slims you up and down” … “Ecstasy marks your spots” … “Ecstasy marks the pot” … “Give yourself a boost — all over” … “You’ll want to hug yourself — in your Hugmetite!”…

As the words flew thick and fast, Ad’s charcoal flew over the white paper. He drew a figure or two, added words and phrases, then as the minutes went by he ripped off the top paper, held it in one hand while he transferred some of the phrases to the next sheet, then crumpled the first paper in his hand. He added more phrases, underlined, and lined words out, tore off another sheet, and another.

I threw in a few phrases this time, too — “We girdle the earthy … the Hogmetite, a full-size truss for the unruptured … Chastity Curdle” — but I just wasn’t with it.

The stream of words slowed down for about a minute, then picked up again: “Touches the stars … stares from the stars” … “Stare-way to the Stars!” … “Star-way to the Stares!” … “Hugmetite — it doesn’t take your breath away!” … “Stop counting calories!” … and so it went, on and on.

Finally Ad turned around and held his hands over his head. “That does it. Good enough.” The group quieted down. “I think we’ve got it,” Ad said. “That’s enough for today, anyway. We’ll fix this up, but I think it will do for Gibson as is.” He indicated the rough layout.

It was rough. But it was good. It would be improved, there was no doubt, especially when the tape recording of this session was checked; and even rough as it was now, I could imagine how compelling and eye-catching it would be when the Ad Agency’s art department got through with it.

Ad had drawn with clean simple lines the figure of a slim, long-legged, shapely woman wearing a girdle — a Hugmetite, that is — and even the drawing looked good. Ad had chosen only a few of the words and phrases, blending them with the ease of an expert. The copy read:

“For that willowy look that takes his breath away instead of yours, for perfect sylph-control, climb a Stare-Way to Romance … Adventure … Ecstasy — in your new Hugmetite Foundation!”

I had to admit it: The copy was going to sell a lot of girdles.

I felt sick.

After a few more words, the brainstormers were dismissed. A minute later, Ad, Fern, and I were alone in the big room, seated at the end of the table.

Ad said, “Well, that’s out of the way. You’re here to find out what we know about this Zoe Avilla, huh?” I nodded, and he kept right on talking. No nonsense about this boy. He didn’t even wait for me to finish nodding.

“She came up here posing as a writer,” Ad told me. “Wanted to get background for a book on advertising, she said. Well, I showed her around a while, then turned her over to Fern.”

“Did she say she was Zoe Avilla?”

He shook his head. “Told us she was Gail Manners.”

“What sort of things did she want to know, Mr. Adams?”

“Ad,” he said abruptly. “The questions seemed sensible enough. The kind of things I’d assume a writer would be interested in. How we handle accounts, promotional techniques, chain of command, that sort of thing.”

“Uh-huh. I suppose she asked quite a bit about your current accounts.”

“Yeah. Including Mamzel’s. That was our number-one account then — still is, for that matter. It didn’t seem odd at the time, her asking so much about Mamzel’s. But looking back — with her dead, and all — I guess she was more than normally curious.”

“Any idea why?”

“No. Maybe Fern can fill you in a little more.”

I turned to the blonde. “When we met, we were talking about the calls this gal made to the Mamzel’s offices. How did you find out about that?”

“The next day I got a call from the Mamzel’s office in Miami. A girl in that office asked for me — that is for Fern Gladd — and said she had the rest of the information that I had asked for. I hadn’t made any such call, and finally figured out that the little woman must have done it, using my name. I didn’t think much about it then. But when the police were here this morning they showed us the woman’s photograph — and of course it was a picture of the woman who’d used my office and said she was a writer. So that made me remember the funny Miami phone call. Then I checked with our switchboard here and they had records for calls made also to all five of the other cities where Mamzel’s offices are, besides Miami — and that’s when I called Mr. Lawrance.”

“You know what info Miami dug up for her?”

Fern shook her head. “I don’t remember now.”

“Profits in Miami, maybe?”

Fern blinked. “Why, now I remember. It was the gross of that Miami office for the previous week.”

Neither Fern nor Ad had ever seen or heard of the woman before she’d come to the Agency, they said. And a check of the staff which they’d earlier made for the police indicated that the same was true of all the other employees. After another minute, during which Ad looked at his watch three times, I stood up. I thanked both of them for their help, and also thanked Ad for the brainstorming demonstration of what it is that makes the commercial world go round and round.

It was all sort of summed up for me by the last question I asked him. He had in his hand the sheet of paper on which he’d drawn the rough layout of the Hugmetite advertisement, and indicating it I said, “That was an impressive demonstration. And if you want a layman’s opinion, I’d say that’s going to be a very effective hunk of copy.”

He grinned. “Thanks. Matter of fact, I agree. I do think we got a good page out of that session. Good pulling power.”

“There’s one thing I’m curious about, though.” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Do you believe it?”

“Huh?” He looked puzzled. “Believe what?”

I indicated the rough layout again. “Do you believe what the copy says? Do you believe it’s true?”

“True?” He was really puzzled. “What’s that got to do with it?”

I left him in the big room, standing next to the long table surrounded by the super-modern chairs, with a perplexed and annoyed look on his face.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the car I sat thinking about the day’s events in general, and finally my thoughts turned again to that earlier session with Roy Toby. His attempt to muscle in on Mamzel’s might be just that and nothing more, the old power grab, a typical hoodlum operation. But there was a chance he had reasons for the muscle-in that I didn’t know about. Apparently he’d had Ark and Flavin and Lemmy on my tail ever since the Randolph broadcast on which he’d been so vigorously panned. But it hadn’t been until Ark learned I was investigating the death of Zoe Avilla that Toby had told them to kill me.

I thought about that for a while, fished my notebook out of my coat pocket, and checked the info I’d jotted down about Zoe Avilla. I meant to visit the place where she’d been living while alive, and something about the address, 1346 Elm Street, was familiar. I hunted through my memory for a minute, and then the reason hit me. Elm Street was one of the streets Roy Toby had visited on that day when I’d followed him around town and then out among the rabbits. I started the car.

Long before I reached the house, I was sure it was the one I’d been thinking of. I parked across the street. It was a good-sized pink stucco job, green lawn in front and trimmed hedges at each side of the lawn. When I’d tailed Toby, he’d gone inside the house and remained for an hour, then left to go shoot at rabbits. I hadn’t checked on who lived there because it hadn’t seemed important at the time. Now, though, it was becoming more important — and more interesting.

A uniformed mailman walked down the street, leather bag slung over his shoulder. He left several letters at the house next door, then walked back to the sidewalk, down to 1346, and up the steps to the door. As he deposited a letter in the box and walked back to the sidewalk again, I wondered about the number of extra miles a postman must travel in twenty years just to avoid tramping on lawns. He went on down to the corner and around it, out of sight, while I wondered about what this new development might mean, and how Toby had happened to be at this address so soon before Zoe Avilla’s death. He had sworn to me, quite convincingly, that he didn’t even know anybody named Zoe Avilla.

I smoked a cigarette while I thought about that. I knew there was supposed to be an officer inside the house, and I decided to go over and check with him, and at the same time look over the place where the dead woman had lived. Right then I saw the postman coming around again. It seemed odd, but I watched him only casually.

Then I noted that it wasn’t the same postman after all. This guy was much taller. He was broad shouldered, and from what I could see of him, very good-looking. There are, of course, some tall, dark, broad shouldered and good looking postmen; but somehow this boy just didn’t seem the type. And the appearance of a second postman on the block was more than passing strange. There was something familiar about him, too.

I got out of the car and headed across the street as the postman turned in at 1346 and walked up to the mailbox. He held a white envelope in his hand and I saw him put it into the box, but then his body hid the box from my view. He turned around and walked back toward the street.

He glanced at me as we passed, almost brushing each other, and I nodded at him. He was a very good looking guy, but he had rather hard features, and the kind of expression you might find on a professional gambler, or a union boss’s bodyguard. He didn’t look like a man who smiled much.

He sure didn’t smile at me. After that one quick glance, with which he seemed to catalogue everything about my appearance, he looked away from me and continued briskly to the sidewalk. I was getting puzzled and the alarm bells were starting to ring — but only starting to. There was something odd about that boy, and I knew it, but what it was just didn’t penetrate.

I stood at the door of 1346 Elm and watched the postman walk rapidly on down Elm Street, turn at the corner and go out of sight. He didn’t stop at another house in the block. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen him stop at any houses before this one. The only address he’d stopped at, apparently, was 1346.

Then it hit me.

That was the guy who’d been tailing me in the blue Imperial.

I swung toward the mailbox, banged it open and took out the letter in there. It had been addressed on a typewriter to, “Occupant, 1346 Elm Street, Los Angeles, California.” I held it up and looked through it toward the sun. Unless I was going blind, there was nothing inside the envelope except maybe a slip of blank paper.

I slapped the envelope back into the box and ran to the corner. Halfway up the block was the long blue Chrysler Imperial. My “postman” was running toward it, in one hell of a hurry. He stopped at the car and looked back toward me as I broke into a run after him, then he yanked the door open and started to get in.

I pulled out my .38 and fired one shot into the air, but it didn’t stop the man. It didn’t even slow him down. He was inside the Imperial and behind the wheel before I’d taken a half dozen strides, and then he ripped away from the curb. I squinted my eyes in the sun and peered at the back of the car, trying to make out the license number. I got it: HRY076. The Imperial swung right at the corner moving so fast that rubber burned off the squealing tires.

I spun around and raced back to my Cad, jumped inside and started it, swinging around the corner with my own tires squealing. Five minutes later I quit trying to spot the sleek blue car and raced back to Elm Street.

At the door of 1346 I rang the bell and banged on the door until it opened and a beefy sergeant stuck his head out. “What’s going — oh, Scott. What’s with you?”

The officer was Cantor, a guy I’d known for several years. I said, “The phone in here still connected?” He nodded and I went on, “How about getting D.M.V. to run license HRY076 for registration? It’s important.”

He squinted at me, then swung around and went to a phone in the living room.

While he put the call through I explained what had just happened outside. “If I’m right, it was damned clever. Whoever the guy was wanted the letter I think he took from the mailbox when he left the blank phony that’s in there now. The blank was simply so he’d have an excuse to reach into the mailbox. He could have done it while a dozen people watched him — which he probably was prepared to do. He must have known there’d be an officer or two inside the house. And who would suspect a postman of stealing the mail?”

Cantor spoke into the phone, then hung up.

We smoked a cigarette, then the phone rang and Cantor grabbed it. When he hung up this time he had a surprised look on his face. “What do you know?” he said to me. “That plate number is for a new blue Chrysler Imperial registered to Daniel Bryce.”

“Who?”

“Dan Bryce. Lives in Beverly Hills part of the time, but usually he’s in Vegas. General Services Enterprises.”

That told me who the guy was. In fact, considering my business and his business it was surprising that we’d never met face to face before, because Dan Bryce was a big man in the crook business.

I thanked Sergeant Cantor and took off after he gave me Bryce’s Beverly Hills address. General Services Enterprises, headed by Dan Bryce, had its headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was also a branch office in Los Angeles. The outfit was a front for several illegitimate enterprises and, I had heard, served primarily as a clearing house for the investment in legitimate businesses of illegitimate money — money from narcotics, extortion, king-size burglaries, and other such capers. Dan Bryce was a Syndicate man; and it was well and widely known that he thoroughly hated Roy Toby, who returned the hate enthusiastically. The more I thought about those facts, and about Zoe Avilla, the more curious about her — and the more puzzled — I got.

The address Cantor had given me was on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, in a sparsely populated area. It was a long, low ranch type house in what can best be described as California-Modern-Western. It was a combination of adobe, walnut, glass and stone, worth about a hundred thousand dollars, and it looked a little bit like a crashed space ship resting behind a split-rail fence.

But there was no blue Chrysler Imperial in evidence. I parked in the blacktop driveway, walked to the door and rang the bell. Nothing happened, so I knocked. It seemed obvious that the place was empty, so I started looking for a way to break into Dan Bryce’s house. It wasn’t difficult. It never is. The luggage compartment of my car is the repository for numerous items of equipment I use in my job, and one of the handier items is a ring of keys and picks which make breaking and entering a relatively simple operation. I had the back door of Bryce’s house open two minutes after I started working on it.

A minute later I knew the house was empty. The place had the look of money — paintings on the walls, thick carpeting, what appeared to be custom-made furniture, low and heavy. I got the impression that somebody had gone through the bedroom in a hurry, grabbing items of clothing almost at random. Which, I thought, was probably what had happened. Bryce knew that I had seen him at Zoe Avilla’s house, at the mailbox. No matter what his reasons for it, if he’d taken a letter from that box, he had committed a federal offense — which he knew I knew about. So it seemed very likely that he would by now be on the lam. He had probably raced here, grabbed clothing and items he wanted to take with him, and hit the road.

In one closet in the bedroom there was a large gap among a flock of men’s suits, as if Bryce had grabbed some from the two or three dozen there. A sports jacket was on the floor and to its right was a small pile of dirty shirts. Something about the top one caught my eye.

At first I didn’t know what it was. Then I got it. I picked the shirt up, looked at the French cuffs. Both of them were soiled, stained and dirty. One of them was open, but in the other there was still the cuff link. It was about an inch square, heavy silver traced with a black design like small lightning flashes.

I’d done it. I had found the missing link.

I put the heavy cuff link in my pocket, continued my tour of the house. I could smell smoke. Either that or the faint odor of something burning. There wasn’t a single book in the place, which might have meant something. There were plenty of guns, though. They were on one wall of the den, and the smell of smoke was strongest in the den, too.

It came from something that had recently been burned here. A colorful ceramic ashtray sat on a table at one side of the room. In it were the powdered ashes of what I felt sure, had been the letter Bryce had lifted from Zoe Avilla’s mailbox. I guessed that Bryce had come straight here from Elm Street, read the letter here or on the way, then burned it in the ashtray and left in a hurry.

I looked around the den. Leather couch and chairs, a couple of hunting prints on the walls, several small etchings, a portable bar in the corner, five mounted heads of game — two deer, two bear, and a moose — and the wall of guns. There must have been close to fifty of them — old guns, new ones, pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, antique guns and even a couple pairs of dueling pistols.

Each fit into what seemed its own place, and all of the places were filled. Daniel Bryce seemed to have a hobby of guns, which was an indication that he brought his work home with him. I took a small automatic off the wall and pulled out the clip; it was loaded. I checked two more guns, a revolver and a rifle, and both of them were loaded, too. I put them all back in their places. Bryce, it seemed, was ready for almost anything except the U.S. Marines. The mounted heads on the wall indicated that Bryce was one of the Mighty Hunters who kill animals for pleasure. Perhaps it is true that the animal has an equal chance, since it is in its own habitat when shot, not in the man’s; but I go along with the idea that there would be less stuffed heads on walls if the animals could shoot back. I only shoot people.

A car went by on the road out front and slowed momentarily as it passed. It went on, but my heart beat speeded up about twenty clunks per minute. A phone sat on a table next to one of the deep leather chairs. I called Homicide, got Samson on the line. “Shell here, Sam. I’m at Dan Bryce’s house in Beverly Hills.”

He had already been informed of my activity at Zoe Avilla’s house, and my checking on the Imperial’s license plate. He said, “I’m just sending a team of men out there. If Bryce was messing around the Avilla woman’s place, that brings us into it.”

“The L.A. department is brought into it more than you know, Sam. The mate to that cuff link you showed me is out here.”

“What?” His voice went up a few decibels.

“Yeah. In a dirty shirt. So it’s ten to one that Bryce killed the woman and buried her out there on Emeraud. All we need to know now is why. Shirt cuffs are dirty — your lab men can probably prove the dirt came from out there at the grave.”

Sam spoke to somebody in Homicide, then said to me, “Crime Lab already has the envelope Bryce left there in the box at Zoe Avilla’s house. Just a blank sheet of paper in it.”

“That figures.”

“Any sign of Bryce?”

“No. Give me a rundown on him, if you’ve got his record there, will you?”

“He’s been charged with half the book but they only stuck him a couple of times, Shell. The two convictions were on a five-eighteen eight years ago, and a two-forty-five just two years back. He did a year on the last one, and four years on the five-eighteen.”

Section 245 of the Penal Code refers to assault with a deadly weapon, and 518 is the paragraph defining extortion. I said, “How about that five-eighteen?”

“Badger game. He fell with a babe named Ann Corona. She did two at Tehachapi, and he did his four at Q.”

Behind me there was the sound of a revolver being cocked.

There is no mistaking that sound, not if you’ve heard it before. My own Colt is a double-action revolver, and it makes the same sound as that which I’d just heard, the metallic double click, a deadly sound indeed. Even as I heard it, the thought flickered through my mind that the phrase “two at Tehachapi” sounded familiar. But there wasn’t time even to think about it.

I was holding the french phone in my left hand. I tried to move my right hand quickly but unobtrusively up under my coat to the Colt Special there. I didn’t have a chance.

The voice was soft behind me, but it was a man’s voice, a hard, vibrant, no-monkey-business voice, and it said, “Don’t do it, Scott. Put the phone down. And don’t even touch that gun.”

</code>

<code> CHAPTER TWELVE

I put the phone on the table but not on the hook stretched my hands over my head and turned around. It was Dan Bryce, all right. The gun in his right hand was pointed at my solar plexus. He glanced past me and anger swept over his face. “Put that phone on the hook,” he barked. Then he changed his mind. “No, I’ll do it. Back up.”

I stayed where I was. Bryce was already rattled, and if I played my cards right there was a chance I could rattle him enough more so I’d be home free. Probably he had been close to the house, figuring under the circumstances it wouldn’t be wise to park in front, and had returned for something else he wanted to take with him. He would, of course, have seen my car in his driveway.

He said, “Back up, Scott. You can have it right now if you want it that way.”

For a second, from the expression on his hard, darkly handsome face, I thought he was going to shoot me. I said quickly, “You’re talking to Homicide.”

“What?” It puzzled him.

“You know who Captain Samson is, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything. But he knew Samson, all right. His eyes flicked to the phone.

“That’s right,” I said. “Captain of Homicide. The Police Building in downtown L.A. Pick up the phone, Bryce. Say hello to Sam.” He just couldn’t believe it. Not at first. “Bryce,” I went on, “wouldn’t it kill you? If you were to shoot me, you would probably be the first man in history to plug a guy right in the presence of the Captain of Homicide. It would get headlines all across the county, make the wire services — “

“Shut up.”

“You getting all this, Sam?” I shouted.

There were squawks from the phone. Bryce was tanned, but he actually got pale. He was as confused as I wanted him to be.

I said, “I just told Samson about finding your cuff link.”

“Cuff link?” He jerked his head toward me. From the expression on his face I felt sure he had earlier discovered that one was missing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not the one in your dirty shirt. The one you lost on the grave you dug for Zoe — or Ann or Fern or Gail or Susan — out there on Dumont Street.”

“Dumont? It wasn’t — “

He caught himself then. But it was enough. I knew that he had started to say that the grave wasn’t out on Dumont, but on Emeraud. He stayed pale, and he swallowed. I think he damn near shot me then. Instead he said, “Turn around.”

There wasn’t much I could do about it. The mood he was in, any hesitation on my part might have caused him to squeeze down on the trigger. I turned — and heard him jump toward me.

I started to swing back toward him, but too late. Far too late. I heard him grunt slightly and then what must have been the heavy butt of his gun landed on the back of my head. Pain tried to rip my skull open. I was still conscious, but I could feel my knees turning to emptiness that I fell through. Pain roared and flamed in my head and lanced down my neck, but I felt only a soft thump as I hit the floor.

I tried to turn, reaching for my gun. I could see his trousers-covered legs alongside me. I got my head back far enough to see his contorted face just as he swung the gun down at my head again. It didn’t even hurt.

Samson himself was bending over me when I opened my eyes. Lines of worry furrowed his pink face.

I started to sit up, but the sudden movement made my head feel as if somebody had sapped me again. I let out a groan and lay back down. I was on a bed, but still in Bryce’s house.

Sam said, “You all right. Shell?”

“Why, of course,” I told him. My voice was a little ragged. “All he did was beat me, kick me, shoot me, cut me in half — “

“Yeah, you’re all right. What happened?”

I told him. Then I asked, “How about Bryce?”

“He got away. I heard him sap you. Then I heard him thump across the floor and even heard the door slam as he went out. It was the damnedest situation I’ve ever been in and — “

“You heard him sap me? You heard him sap me?”

Sam grinned. “Yeah. It made a sound like an ax smacking a tree. I thought he’d split your head open with a cleaver or something.”

“And while I lay there dying, you listened to him pound on me; and run about the room — “

Sam laughed. “You’re not dying. In fact, the doc already patched up the two slight scratches in your scalp. You’re almost ready to go out and do it again,”

“Well, one thing that makes a wounded man feel good is to get a lot of sympathy. No wonder I’m getting well so quickly. Everyone is so kind, so helpful, so sadistic.” I paused. “He got away, huh?”

Sam nodded. “We got a local and an All-Points Bulletin out. And we know who he is now. But we still don’t know what it’s all about.” He paused. “You handled that bit about the cuff link very well, I thought.”

I grinned at him. “Yeah, I thought I did, too.” I reached into my coat pocket where I’d put the link. “Here it — “

“What’s the matter?” Sam asked me.

I felt through my pockets. “He rolled me for it.”

Sam rubbed his big chin. After a while he said slowly, “Well, we know it was his, anyhow. We know that much. As for proving it, we’ve got only your word. And if you get killed, the evidence is hearsay and not admissible in evidence.”

“I’m not planning to get killed.”

“Who plans it?”

What Samson had said about hearsay evidence was true enough — and it also applied to Bryce’s theft of that letter, as well as his possession of the cuff link. I was the only man alive who had first-hand evidence about those two items; everybody else had only my word for them. Consequently, if I died suddenly, Bryce would be in a much improved position. That meant the first chance Bryce got — when I didn’t have the Captain of Homicide on the phone — he would arrange for me to die suddenly.

So I could mentally chalk Dan Bryce’s name alongside Roy Toby’s — and that thought made me ask Sam, “Did your boys pick up Toby and his goons?”

“No. By the time they got out to Fleece’s gym, Toby and his hoods had all taken a powder. No corpse, either. Looks like Toby’s going to lay low for a while.” He paused. “Well, I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Back to the salt mines, hey?”

Sam shook his head some more. “Bryce didn’t hit you hard enough.”

In a few more minutes I felt almost normal. My head ached, but that wouldn’t bother me much as long as I didn’t get hit on it again. Samson went back downtown, and when I left the house the Crime Lab boys were just finishing their work. Soon the house would be empty again; I doubted that the police would even stake out the place, since there wasn’t a chance that a professional hood like Bryce would return to it now.

I climbed into the Cad and headed back toward Los Angeles.

Auguste Felicca was medium height and stocky and he needed a shave. He wore a faded blue shirt, unbuttoned, pulled around his waist and tied in front West-Indies style. His blue dungarees were rolled up to the knee, exposing muscular calves covered with a black jungle of hair. Muscles on his corded forearms made his arms look almost misshapen.

I had rung the bell of his home at 1855 Westland Avenue, on the North side of Los Angeles, and he’d opened the door and stared at me without saying a word.

“I’m Shell Scott. I just phoned you, Mr. Felicca.”

“Yeah. C’mon in.”

I went in past him and waited in what seemed to be the living room of his home. It was hard to tell; mixed with contemporary furniture was a packing crate and an ironing board. But at least it wasn’t the workroom because Felicca said, “C’mon, we’ll go out to the workroom.”

He led the way down a hall, out through a back door and across a shaggy lawn toward a wide low building separate from the house. As we walked he said, “What’s it about, this dead dame?”

“Yeah. Zoe Avilla.”

“Uh-huh. Cops were here, asked me about her. She never came here and as far as I know I never met the woman.” He glanced over his shoulder at me and white teeth showed in a quick grin. “I’m clean.”

He unlocked the door of the low building, opened it, and we went inside. As he shut the door I turned toward him and said, “You know about the list of names found in her room?”

“Yeah. And I was on it. But I don’t know how she knew me.”

I showed him the photographs I had of Zoe Avilla. He shook his head. “Cops showed me a picture of her, too, but I never saw her before.” He paused. “But, like I told them. She might have been the woman who called up and wanted to know how much I got for doing a statue like the one of Mamzel — I mean Lita Korrel.”

“Statue?”

“Yeah, the big stone job I did for the advertising campaign. This dame said she had a sensational body she’d like me to preserve in stone for her. Wanted to know how much it would cost. I told her, and she said that was too much, she’d wait a while.”

“If it isn’t a secret, how much did you tell her?”

“The truth. Two thousand dollars.”

“She give her name?”

“Might’ve, but I don’t remember what it was.”

“Well, thanks, Mr. Felicca. By the way, where’s the statue now?”

He pointed past me, over my shoulder. “Right there behind you. They’ve already made duplicates from it, identical except that they’re in plastic.”

I turned around and looked. And kept on looking.

It was a gargantuan Mamzel, naked, magnificent and overpowering, looming over us like a feminine mountain. Not quite like a flesh mountain, because the sculpture had been done in gray stone that lacked the color and tone of flesh, but it was smooth, wonderfully executed, almost real. It looked alive, like a massive Lita Korrel frozen in a moment of movement.

It was unmistakably Lita, standing straight, her head tilted slightly back, arms at the sides of her rounded hips, palms forward with fingers curling slightly. She looked as if she were just going to step forward. And that incredible body of Lita’s was paralleled by every line and curve of the statue.

Felicca was saying, “They wanted it exactly twice life size. So that’s what they got. I had to take about a hundred measurements on her.”

I couldn’t help asking. “You did this from life?”

“Partly. But she’s too busy a woman to pose much, so I did the major part of the work from photographs, sketches, and the measurements. But she posed for several hours.” He paused, “She didn’t, by the way, pose like that. She wore a bikini.”

I looked back at the statue. “You’d never know it.”

“That’s the way she looks to me in a bikini. Isn’t that the way she looks to everybody?” He grinned at me. “Besides, this is how they wanted it. The plastic jobs were cast from this — ” he pointed at the massive stone woman — “and done in pink plastic. Almost as smooth as she is. Of course, when they plant them on top of all the Mamzel’s offices they’ll be wearing cloth bikinis.” He paused. “Can you imagine how these things, even in bikinis, are going to look sticking up in the air over buildings?”

I could imagine it. I thanked Felicca for his help and got ready to leave, remembering that soon I was to call on the original of that statue. I took one last look at it before I left.

And looking at it, I thought that every woman who saw one of the plastic copies would hunger to look like it, even just a little like it. And the men, too, would hunger — but for a different reason. The same old reason. The statue was called Mamzel, but I knew what it should have been called. I looked up at her, at the broad thighs, the slightly rounded taut stomach, the thrusting jut-nippled breasts swelling from her flesh, the half-parted, full lips and the heavy-lidded eyes … and the name was Eve.

My apartment is on the second floor of the Spartan Apartment Hotel in Hollywood. I went inside, flicking on the small lamp inside the door, and said hello to Amelia, the bright and bawdy yard-square nude over my imitation fireplace. Then I walked over and peered into one of the fish tanks to the left of the door. I keep two tanks of tropicals there, in addition to the ten-gallon aquarium in my office. Watching the striking, brightly colored little fish cavort in their miniature seas is one of the best ways I’ve found for relaxing, unwinding. And you would be surprised how many gals are delighted by the prospect of coming up to my apartment for a look at the little fishes.

I sprinkled some dried daphnia on the surface of the water in both tanks and as the fish gobbled it up I took a shower, shaved, and got dressed in a new light-blue silk-gabardine suit. As I knotted my red, yellow, and blue tie which looks like a cloth volcano erupting — I like a little color in man’s dress — I thought about what had happened to me during this busy day, about Mamzel’s, Lawrance, the dead woman, Dan Bryce, Roy Toby, about Gedder, Felicca, the Ad Agency and Horatio Adair. Boy, there was a pair — Horatio and Ad. It was really amazing, I thought, the way women slavishly followed the dictates of the fashion arbiters, year after year, sheeplike, doing things the hard way, dressing only in the fashions “allowed” by the Horatio Adairs.

Then I was ready to go. I settled the .38 comfortably in its holster and took a last look at myself. Not bad, if I did say so. Actually, I wasn’t crazy about this season’s lapels, but probably I would get used to them. I did like the new sheen fabric and the thinner neckties, though. Gave a man a rather dashing look.

Lita lived in a fourth-floor suite in the fashionable Edgeway Arms. She’d given me her suite number, and was expecting me, so I didn’t phone up, just took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down to the door of her rooms. I started to knock — and stopped.

There was a note on the door: “Shell: Go in and make yourself at home — I’ll be right back. Mix us a drink. Lita.”

I smiled at the note, and took it off the door. Mix us a drink, she’d said. That was promising. I went inside, shutting the door behind me. I went down two carpeted steps into the living room. A low coral-colored divan was on the right of the room, opposite it two hassocks and a deep upholstered chair. The dull ugliness of a television set stared from one corner like a dead eye. A hi-fi set was at the opposite end of the wall from it. Near the coral divan was a small portable bar, loaded with bottles.

I mixed a stiff bourbon and water, had a gulp of it, and lit a cigarette. Might as well start dissipating now, I thought cheerily. Make yourself at home, Lita had said. While I finished the drink I looked around a little. Beyond a half-wall was a clean, gleaming kitchen. On beyond the dining room was a room I merely glanced into, but which was pretty intriguing, with a low, oversized Hollywood bed covered with a black satin spread on top of which were two coral-colored pillows and a white one. I liked it. I liked the whole place, in fact. The only thing needed to make it perfect was Lita.

I finished my cigarette and drink, sitting on the living-room divan. I got up and walked back and forth for a couple minutes, then sat down again. I was getting a little twitchy.

By eight o’clock I’d finished my second highball. Where was Lita? I was getting worried about her. Eight o’clock Saturday night; it was time for John Randolph’s weekly telecast. That would kill some time while I waited, and he might make further references to Roy Toby — maybe even to me.

I turned on the set, found the right channel. As the set warmed up I got the fuzzy picture of a man’s face, and then the sound came in as I noted that the man wasn’t Randolph. The guy was saying, “…who is usually heard at this time.” He looked pretty well shaken up about something.

The man went on, “In Mr. Randolph’s absence, the news and commentary will be presented to you by Arthur Hampton.” He smiled a tortured smile. “And now, Mr. Hampton.”

The picture of a fortyish, keen-eyed man flashed on the screen. He said “Good evening” in a booming voice and launched into a discussion of recent events in Washington. After thirty seconds or so he paused for a message from the sponsor, and I turned the set down low, wondering what had kept John Randolph from appearing before the TV cameras tonight.

As far as I knew, he had never in more than two years in this time spot missed a minute. It must have been something pretty drastic to keep him from being on time. I pushed the questions out of my mind and hunted through my pockets for a match, but I’d used the last one. Where in hell was Lita?

I roamed around looking for a light. I figured I could use the range in the kitchen to light a cigarette, and walked back toward it. But from there I happened to glance into the bedroom again, from a different angle, and a framed portrait in there caught my eye. It jarred me enough so that I walked into the bedroom and picked the picture up.

After that there wasn’t any doubt. And I just blinked at the face in the portrait, wondering what it was doing here, in Lita Korrel’s bedroom of all places, wondering what it meant, how I could fit this into all the rest that had happened. And I couldn’t make sense of it at all.

Because looking back at me from the portrait were the sharp, hard features of Daniel Bryce.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Something was ringing in my ears. I was so surprised to find Bryce’s picture here, that at first I didn’t understand what the sound was. Then I realized it was a phone ringing.

I took a last look at the portrait. There was no inscription on it, but the face was Bryce’s, sure enough. I put the portrait back on the table, walked into the dining room where a blue phone sat on a small stand. The ringing was strident, nerve-jangling. As I grabbed the phone, cutting off the shrill sound, the picture was still in my thoughts.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello. Is this Shell Scott?”

“Yeah, I’m Scott.” I frowned. How could anybody know I was here at Lita’s apartment? I hadn’t told anybody I was coming here — except Lita herself. But this was a man’s voice.

“This is Hank Rogers, Shell.”

Hank was a policeman working out of the Hollywood Division. Out of Homicide. “What’s up, Hank?”

“You better get down here, Shell. I don’t think it’s hit the news broadcasts yet, but it’s bound to before the night’s over. Somebody murdered John Randolph. Not much doubt it was a gang killing — “

I interrupted, “Randolph? He’s dead?”

“They don’t come deader. The biggest slug I ever saw damn near cut him in two.”

“What’s it got to do with me? And how’d you know where to reach me?”

“The woman told us to call you. Lita Korrel. We’ve got her here.”

“In jail?”

“Yeah. She was with Randolph when he got it.”

“With Randolph?” I was still mentally muddled. “Is she all right? Is she hurt?”

“No. She was lucky. But she’s kind of hysterical. Anyway, she said you’d help her. That you were already working for her. You’d better get right down here, Shell.”

“I’m on my way….”

They know me at the Hollywood jail, and I went in saying hello to the desk sergeant and another policeman both of whom had been expecting me. The sergeant took me down to one of the interrogation rooms and told me Lita and two officers were inside.

When I went in, Hank looked around and said, “You got here in a hurry, Shell.”

But I didn’t have time to answer him. He and an officer named Riley had been sitting at a table with Lita, and as soon as I came in she got up and half ran the few steps toward me. Then she threw her arms around me and clung to me, almost sobbing, “Oh, Shell, Shell, I’m so glad you’re here. It’s been awful!”

I put my hands easily on her shoulders and said, “Whoa, honey. Slow down. I don’t even know what this is all about yet.”

She pressed her warm, soft body against me for a few more seconds, then leaned back and looked up into my face. “I saw him killed,” she said in a flat voice. “Not more than a few feet from me. It threw him clear across the room. It really threw him, as if he’d been hit by a car or something. It even sounded like that.” Her voice was dull and her eyes stared too fixedly. She seemed still shocked, near hysteria.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I did remember that Hank had said something about Randolph’s getting hit with the biggest slug he’d ever seen. That would have to be pretty big, because Hank had been on the force for nearly twenty years.

As Lita stepped back from me, I looked at Hank and said, “Maybe you’d better fill me in on this.”

He nodded at officer Riley, then went out into the corridor with me and closed the door behind us.

“Here’s the picture, Shell,” he said. “Miss Korrel is in a pretty nervous condition. Understandably. We’ve gone over her story with her a couple of times, and it checks out pretty well. But I’d like to leave you alone with her in the interrogation room, and have you get the story from her, too. All right?”

“Sure.” I paused. There could easily be a bug, or microphone, in the room so that Hank and Riley could listen to our conversation. Which was O.K. with me. But I thought about that for a moment and said, “Just a second, Hank. You aren’t holding Lita, are you? I mean, she isn’t under suspicion, is she?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “Can’t say that she is, Shell. But use your head. This is a big mess and it’s gonna get plenty of attention. We’ve got to be real careful about every step we take.”

“That figures. But you’re not holding Lita, are you?”

“Just till we get the story straight. So far, it’s all we got to go on. That and the gun. But you better hear her story yourself. Maybe you’ll figure she ought to stay here where it’s safe.”

“Maybe. What can you give me first.”

He said, “Riley and me were cruising down Loma Drive when the call came in. Citizen had heard a shot, he thought. Hotshot call reached us just as we hit German Street — that’s where Randolph lives, you know — and we took it down Gorman, Code Three, for maybe half a mile. We were the first car there. Must’ve got there not more’n two minutes after the shot. Maybe less. First thing we saw was this dame — Miss Korrel, only we didn’t know who it was then — sprawled on the grass in front of Randolph’s place. You know that lawn there, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” It was like a putting green extending on a slight rise up from the street about fifty feet to Randolph’s two-story house.

Hank went on, “I thought at first maybe she was the one that got shot. But it seems she just keeled over, fainted. Well, when she come to she started yelling that Randolph was dead, that he’d been shot and so on. We went in and found him.” He shook his head. “He was dead all right. Blood was still oozin’ out of the hole in him. Well, that’ll give you the picture, Shell. Get the rest from her.”

He opened the door and called the other officer out, and I went on into the interrogation room. Lita was sitting at the table again. She looked up and said, “Can we go home, Shell?”

I sat in a chair next to her. “Not yet, honey. They want you to give me the story on what happened.”

“I told them two or three times already.”

“I know. And you’ll probably have to tell them again. How come you were at Randolph’s, anyway?” I grinned at her. “I thought we had a date.”

She smiled slightly. “I was looking forward to keeping it, too, Shell.” She sighed. “A while before you were to arrive, I got a phone call from Randolph. It was only an hour or two before his air time — he had a broadcast tonight, you know. At least … he was supposed to.”

“I know.”

“Well, he said he’d gotten information damaging to Mamzel’s — Shell, I don’t know if it’s Toby or not, but somebody’s trying to ruin us, put us out of business. I’m sure of it.”

“What was the info?”

She hesitated, pressing her full red lips together, then went on in a rush, as if she wanted to get it out all at once. “Randolph said he’d been informed that somebody at Mamzel’s was sneaking pictures of the clients. In the nude. You know, in some of the machines, in the showers and so on. And that they’d been used for blackmail. And even that some of the pictures were supposed to have shown up here in Hollywood.”

“Did he have any of the photos?”

“Of course not. It’s all a lie, Shell.” She bit her lip, frowning. “At least, I think it must be a lie. I don’t see how anybody could…” She let it trail off.

“But he didn’t show you any of the pictures, huh?”

“No. He didn’t have any. He just said that he’d been told about it, but he didn’t have any positive proof. That’s why he called me — to get my side of the story. Well, I was just horrified.” Lita closed her eyes and pressed a hand against her forehead. She looked pale, tired and drawn. But still beautiful.

I said, “He asked you to come over, then?”

“No. That was my idea.” She opened her eyes, took a deep breath. “At first I was so angry that I could hardly think. But I told him I was coming over, and for him to wait. I drove over right then and he was still there.” She paused, took my hand in hers, squeezed my palm with her warm fingers. “I don’t even like to think about it.”

Her hand was soft in mine. We sat so close that her knee touched mine and I could feel the warmth of it burning into my skin. Even under these circumstances, sitting in an interrogation room of a police station and with horror still reflected dimly in Lita’s big, soft, eyes, I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her to me, feel her body yielding against me.

She went on, “We talked for just a few minutes. I bawled him out for believing such an awful story about me and Mamzel’s. I think I had him convinced that he’d been given false information.”

“Did he tell you who gave him the tip?”

“No. I asked him several times but he wouldn’t say. Oh.” She seemed to remember something. “I even told him that the information probably came from Mr. Toby. But he wouldn’t say yes or no. He was getting ready to leave for the studio. I was over near the door. He’d promised me he wouldn’t say anything about Mamzel’s on the broadcast tonight.” She paused and her lips twitched a little as she thought ahead of her words. Then she went on more slowly, looking not at me, but past me, as if seeing the whole thing again.

“I … don’t really remember just how it happened. There was a window across the room. Maybe two windows. Anyway, Mr. Randolph was standing at his desk and then there was this crash. It seemed terribly loud, but maybe that was because it was so unexpected. We both looked over there, and this — I thought it was a pipe at first. I don’t know. This gun came through. It was a big rifle, and he fired. He pulled the trigger and…” She stopped. Her face was whiter, and she swallowed rapidly.

She was quiet for several seconds, then she went on, “It was a great, loud sound, and I heard something hit Mr. Randolph. The bullet. I heard it. I looked around at him and he was just … it was like he was flying through the air away from me. I remember his hands just flopped around.”

She paused again. I could almost see the man myself. And I could understand better than most why Lita looked ill, why she was having a hard time telling me the story. To see a man killed violently is one of the most bone-chilling sights in the world. I’ve seen men shot by .45 automatics, and the way they die is not the way you see them die in movies. It isn’t the way they die on John Randolph’s channel, either, or any other channel. A .45 slug hits with the impact and sound of a meat cleaver being slammed into a side of beef. Blood spurts and gushes. Sometimes men scream like tortured women. And when a man dies his muscles and organs relax completely. Violent death is a brutal, ugly, stinking, horrible thing. Especially for a woman like Lita to see. And apparently Randolph had been hit with something even bigger than a .45-caliber slug.

She moistened her lips and went on slowly, “He hit the wall and let out a funny, soft little cry. I … he didn’t even seem alive then. He fell just…” She hunted for words, her hands making motions in front of her. “All limp. Like rags.”

“What about the man at the window? Did you get a look at him?”

“Not then. When I looked at the window, he wasn’t there. The gun was gone, but the window was broken. Naturally. I guess he just didn’t see me.”

“Uh-huh. What happened then?”

“I — it’s all pretty confused from there on, Shell. I guess I sort of lost my head. I know I ran out of the house and down toward the street. All I could think of was getting to my car and driving away.” She paused. “I suppose my car’s still out there.”

“What happened after you ran? I understand the officers found you on the lawn.”

“I … well, I ran down to the street. There was a street lamp near there somewhere, and I saw a man running, too. Running away from me.”

“You get a look at him?”

“Just for a second. He must have heard me — oh, there was a car there. It came up just as he got out to the street. I was running on the lawn and saw it, and right then the big man turned and I could see his face in the light. I think he was the ugliest man I ever saw. Oh, right then I could hear a siren, too. I … he was still carrying that gun. I think he raised it and pointed it at me, but I’m not sure. I … then I must have fainted.”

“You say he was ugly. How do you mean?”

“Just big and ugly. I do know he was awfully big.”

A little bell started ringing in my head. “Was he as big as I am?” I grinned at her. “And as ugly?”

“Why, you’re not ugly.” she smiled. “You’re rather nice-looking, Shell. This man was ugly. And he was even bigger than you, I’m pretty sure.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

She nodded. “I’m sure of it.”

“Think you could identify him from a mugg shot?”

“What’s a mugg shot?”

“A police picture of him.”

“I suppose so. I got a pretty good look at him.”

“How about the driver of the car.”

“It was dark. I really don’t remember him. Maybe.”

That was about all of it. After fainting, she’d come to and found the policemen bending over her, she said.

Hank and Riley came back into the interrogation room I stepped outside with Hank and said, “You show her any mugg shots?”

“Not yet. Going to, though.”

“You know Hyath Arkajanian?”

“Sure.” He squinted at me. “What about Ark?”

“When you show her a mugg book, show her the book with Ark in it.”

“What makes you think he’s the one?”

I told him about Roy Toby’s relation to Mamzel’s — and to me. I wound it up, “Captain Samson downtown already knows about my run-in with Toby’s boys earlier today, including the party with Ark. It just could be that Ark handled another job for Toby tonight.”

Hank’s forehead was wrinkled in thought. He nodded. “Could be. And there’s something else, Shell. The gun fits a big mugg like Ark.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ll show you the gun and you’ll see what I mean.” He left for a moment and came back carrying a double-barreled shotgun which he handed me. “What do you think of it?”

“Shotgun, huh? Lita said it was a rifle, she thought. But she can hardly be considered a connoisseur of lethal weapons.”

“She named it better than she knew.” Hank held a hand toward me. In the open palm was a shotgun shell — but with a rounded slug in its end instead of merely wadding. Hank went on, “One empty in the left barrel, and that thing in the right. Somebody loaded their own. That slug in there weighs just about an ounce.”

Now I knew what Hank had meant earlier when he’d said that Randolph had been almost cut in two by the biggest slug he’d ever seen. I had never before come across an item like this; it was the most lethal bullet I’d ever had in my hand. Someone had taken an ordinary shotgun shell and loaded it with a hand-cast lead bullet, just as a man might hand load his own revolver ammunition. But any revolver big enough to hold this monster would have been too heavy for both hands. The metal slug looked almost like a lead ping pong ball.

I handed the reloaded shotgun shell back to Hank and said, “If I ever in my life saw a professional killer’s weapon, this is it. I’m surprised there was anything left of Randolph after this cannonball hit him.”

“We found the gun, still loaded with this one slug, up on the grass away from the street. He either dropped it in his hurry or tossed it away as we got near him.”

“You must have just missed him.”

He nodded. “It was close. We got the call very soon after the first shot was fired — it reached us while the man was still talking to Communications on the phone — and we started the siren immediately. Didn’t spot their car, but you can bet they heard our siren.” He paused. “And a good thing, too.”

“Miss Korrel, you mean?”

“Yeah. If he’d had more time, he might have left that other slug in her.”

I shivered, thinking what that hunk of metal could have done to Lita.

I asked Hank, “Anything else?”

He shook his head, walked away and came back in a moment carrying a pair of white cotton gloves. “Found these a few yards from the window he busted in. But that’s it. No prints on the shotgun.”

I placed one of the gloves along the palm of my hand. It would just about have fit me. Or Ark. “How about those mugg books?” I said.

He nodded. A few minutes later he and Riley and I were in the interrogation room with Lita and she was slowly turning the pages of one of the big mugg books, looking at the columns of photographs. I stood behind Lita, and the two officers sat on the opposite side of the table from her.

Lita had already gone through one of the books, and now was almost at the halfway mark in the second one. It gets rather boring after a while, looking at pages and pages of men’s pictures, and Lita’s right hand rested flat on the table alongside the book, while with her other hand she casually turned the sheets over and glanced at the faces. She was past the midway point now; a few more pages and she would reach Ark’s photo.

I knew that she’d spotted the man she had described for us even before she said a word. As she turned the page I saw Ark’s ugly, simian features and in the same instant her right hand convulsively closed. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her squeeze that hand so tightly together into a small fist that it got white around the knuckles.

Then in a queer, soft voice she said, “That’s him. That’s the man.” The tone of her voice was enough to send a shiver down your spine. She opened her right hand and pointed to Ark’s picture.

The rest of it was routine. She convinced Hank that there was no point in her looking through the books for the other man, the driver of the car. She felt sure she would be unable to identify him. And she was very tired.

It still took a long time to get out. There were statements to be typed and signed, more questions to be answered. Four more hours passed before we were allowed to leave. Some time after midnight I suddenly remembered the guy who had hired me, Fabulous Lawrance, and I put in a call to him from the jail.

He answered with sleep in his voice, having just turned in half an hour before, he said. But he didn’t sound sleepy after I told him what had happened.

“Lita,” he said. “Is she all right?”

“Yeah. Just shocked a bit, still, and tired. But nothing that won’t take care of itself in a little time.”

“What a hell of a mess! I’ll come right down, Scott.”

“That won’t be necessary. We’ll be out of here before much longer. I just thought you should know.”

“Yes, thanks, Scott. Well … tell her that I’m available, if she needs anything.”

“That I will.”

“Good Lord … Randolph. John Randolph.” He paused. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow at Adair’s.”

“That’s right. I’d forgotten. See you tomorrow, Lawrance.”

We hung up. And finally Lita and I were ready to leave. Both the police and I had tried to impress her with the fact that she would be much safer in jail, but she absolutely refused to stay in “protective custody.”

Shortly before three a.m. we walked out of the Hollywood jail and got into my car. As I started the engine Lita let her head fall back on the cushion and said, “This isn’t quite what I had planned for tonight, Shell.”

“You don’t know the half of it, honey.” I told her. “I had planned something entirely different, myself.”

She turned her head and gave me a slow smile as I pulled out onto the street. After a couple of blocks she said, “I’m starved.”

“O.K. Hamburger, or would you like something less dangerous?”

“Hamburger.” She paused and added slowly, “Without onions.”

I let out a soft, wild cry. “I’m with you!”

She chuckled and we yakked foolishly on the way to a nearby drive-in, both of us, I think, doing our best to forget the past gruesome hours. It was enjoyable, too, not only the conversation and company, but the hamburgers — without onions — and hot coffee. With a few calories in us, and after relaxing and talking together for nearly an hour, we were in pretty good spirits as I drove toward the Edgeway Arms again.

In a conversation lull, without saying anything, Lita slid closer on the seat, leaned against me and rested her head on my shoulder. We drove to her hotel that way, and it was nice. It was very nice.

When I parked at the curb before the hotel, I said, “I’ll escort you to your door, and peek under the bed, and — “

“To the door?” she interrupted me. “The bed is inside.”

“How well I know. Covered with a black-satin spread that looks as if it could be very comforting, redolent with the sweet scent of jasmine — “

“What are you talking about? I don’t have any jasmine.”

“I just made that up because it sounded so exciting. I’m not even sure I know what redolent means.”

“Dear boy,” she said gently, “I shall leave you at the door. You’re far too enthusiastic.”

“But enthusiasm is the spice of life.”

“I shall leave you at the door.”

I said seriously, “Honey, you may leave me at the door, but if you have no strenuous objections, I shall stay outside it. Ark is one of Toby’s men, and none of those guys play nice.”

She said seriously, “I was there, Shell. I saw what happened.”

Which was true. That was more of a warning than anything I might say to her. But I added, “You’re sure to be called before the grand jury, which will hand down indictments for Arkajanian and a John Doe. As a potential witness you’re extremely dangerous to the whole Toby family. And that family discourages witnesses by killing them.” I paused. “It might be a good idea for you to change hotels temporarily.”

“Don’t be silly, Shell. We’ve already discussed this. And I’m staying right here — in nine or ten hours the party starts at Mr. Adair’s, and I’ve got to be ready for that. Besides, I don’t really think there’s any danger. That man probably didn’t get a good look at me.” She patted my cheek. “Now, are you going to help me out of the car like a gentleman, or must I — “

Before she finished speaking, I was out of the car and heading around to her side. I held the door open for her and when she got out the serious mood of those few moments was forgotten. She took my arm as we walked into the hotel, and whispered, “Won’t the desk clerk be shocked to see you go up with me?”

“He’ll be more shocked when I don’t come down.”

“Oh, Shell!” She squeezed my arm, and didn’t seem at all panicked.

We took the elevator up to four. Her suite was just past the bend of the corridor, and as we went around the turn, I stopped her suddenly. The door to her suite was ajar, and I put my hand under my coat, grabbed the butt of the .38.

Lita said, “What’s the matter?”

I was straining my ears, but then I relaxed. “Nothing. The door’s unlocked — I left it that way, but for a minute there I thought somebody might have forced the lock.”

“Oh. You … frightened me a little. I’m still jumpy.”

“You should be.”

We were at her door. She turned with her back to it and looked up at me. Then she took both my hands in hers and said, “I won’t ask you in, Shell. Next time. When it isn’t so late, and when…”

“I understand, honey.”

We were both a little jangled from the mild shock we’d just had, and the fact that she was looking up at me from only inches away did not act on me like tranquilizing drugs.

“I’ll be around. Yell if you need me.” I grinned at her.

She smiled up at me, white teeth flashing behind her softly curving lips. Her liquid, luminous eyes moved over my face, heavy lids half lowered over them. We stood like that for seconds, then I slid my hands up her arms, put them around her waist and pulled her closer to me. Her arms slowly went around my neck, her eyes not leaving mine.

It was an odd, tense moment. I knew I was going to kiss her. She knew I was going to kiss her. But we were quite still for I don’t know how long, just looking at each other, with the tenseness and warmth and intimacy growing between us, and then I pulled her tight against me and her lips parted as I bent my mouth to hers. Her lips were soft, curling and moving beneath mine, sliding and clinging hotly. Her arms tightened behind my neck and I spread my hands open behind and around her small waist, slid them up her back, let my right hand glide on the smooth cloth of her dress until it touched the swelling mound of her breast.

As I pulled her to me she pressed even more tightly against me, her lips writhing more violently, tongue moving and one hand curling against the back of my head. The rest of what happened was simply indescribable.

We just sort of fused together, like people melting. It was as if she and I were two flesh magnets, and she laid her North pole up against my South pole and then turned on the juice. About 110 volts, at least, went honking along my spine and out through my ears and hair and everywhere. It was as if I lit up like a Mazda lamp, and if I could have seen myself right then I’ll bet I’d have been shocked. That kiss was a trip to a land of new experiences. It was like entering the fourth dimension, or something very close to it. Wherever this was, it wasn’t the same old world I’d been used to. I liked it here. This was where I wanted to live. And, friend, it was living.

Finally we both came up for ether. Lita’s eyes were even more heavy-lidded then they’d been a little while before, and it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit to find that my eyes had glazed over; like fused quartz. She said, “Well, that was a kiss — “

She didn’t finish it.

She looked beyond me, a little to one side, at something or someone behind my back. Her eyes slowly widened and her mouth opened, lips curling. She screamed.

It happened in about a second, but it seemed a much longer time as I watched her face. She just kept on screaming. The piercing sound burst from her throat and raked at my ears, slammed jarringly against my nerves. I could still feel the pressure of her lips that moments before had been moving against my own.

The scream shrilled in the hallway. As I started to turn she continued to stare past me, real, honest terror in her eyes.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was Ark. He loomed in the corridor no more than six feet from us. His big, ugly, apelike face showed shock and surprise, but even as I spun around and saw him his hand was coming out from under his coat. Light bounced on the heavy .45 automatic in his big fist.

He must have stepped around that right-angled turn in the corridor at almost the same instant when Lita opened her eyes and saw him. Her scream was a piercing, shrill, nerve-stretching sound, which had undoubtedly startled Ark as much as it had me — and it must have thrown his coordination off a little.

As I whirled to my right, Lita was still close to me, her arms just coming down from my neck. I thrust my left hand forward, catching her hard at the base of her throat and slamming her back against the door. That got her into a safer, less-exposed position, but it also got her the hell out of my way. Her arms flew past my face and I heard her thump against the door, but I kept on spinning toward Ark, turning fast and throwing my right foot out and slamming it against the floor, bending my knees to take me into a low squat as my right hand slapped against the butt of my .38.

Ark’s gun was already out and in his hand, but you don’t carry bolstered automatics cocked and ready to fire unless you’re suicidal, and with his left hand he slapped back the slide, cocking the gun, then flipped it up toward me and simultaneously jerked the trigger. Flame spat out of the gun’s barrel almost in my face.

How he missed me I’ll never know. If the automatic had been cocked he couldn’t have missed, not at that range, but the slug burned hotly along the side of my neck. I was down as close to the floor as I could get and still stay on both feet, leaning to my right, the gun in my hand now.

I got off the second shot. And all the rest of the shots that counted. I didn’t take time to aim that first shot, but to fire a double-action revolver all you have to do is to pull the trigger. And that’s what I did. I pulled it and kept on pulling. When you’re facing a guy like Ark, a mugg who’s trying to blast holes in you, you just keep pulling the trigger until you hear a click.

The first bullet from my gun caught him somewhere in the body and jerked him a little. My third shot caught him in the jaw. His gun boomed again then, but the slug tore into the wall, not into me.

He was a hard man to kill.

I emptied my gun into him and all six bullets slammed into his face or body. As the hammer clicked on an empty cartridge Ark’s automatic fell from his fingers and he swayed like a tall tree in a heavy wind. He rocked to one side and then the other, still on his feet and still alive with six .38-caliber bullets in him, still alive but dying. Blood, bright and thick, coursed from two holes in his face, smeared his nose and cheek and mouth. A red stain appeared on the front of his shirt under the dark coat.

Turning slowly, he raised his right hand halfway up his chest, then it dropped limply as he fell. He landed on his left side, rolled onto his stomach, one side of his face pressed against the carpet. Death isn’t often instantaneous, even when a man has been shot several times, and I hadn’t caught his heart or brain with one of my slugs. He lay there on the carpeted floor of the hallway and twitched delicately.

For such a big man, a huge man really, those tiny meaningless movements seemed unreal, false. Two fingers on his right hand moved spasmodically.

His gun lay near him. I stepped to it, kicked it down the hallway, then stepped back. I looked at Lita. It was horribly quiet. The smell of smoke was sharp around us, and the crash of shots had barely stopped echoing against the walls and ceiling. Lita was down on one knee. One hand was pressed against the spot under her throat where my open hand had struck her. But her eyes were fixed on Ark.

I could hear noise now — the sound of other people on this floor, voices, a door slamming. The sounds seemed late in coming, as if a great deal of time had elapsed since Ark had fallen.

Lita made a soft sound in her throat. She looked at me and her face was white, waxen. Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted, fell easily forward. She lay quietly.

Ark was still moving a little, with those oddly delicate twitches. One leg kicked gently and made a soft hushed sound on the floor. It was ugly. It is always ugly….

We were still in Lita’s suite. The police had arrived and seemed to be everywhere I looked. Both Lita and I had told the story half a dozen times. It was five o’clock in the morning.

Now Lita and I sat together on the divan. It was the first chance we’d really had to talk since the shooting. A uniformed patrolman stood a few feet from us.

She said, “That’s the second time in my life that I’ve fainted. And both times were tonight.” She paused. “How could he have known where I live?”

“Look, honey, you are not a complete unknown. The address would have been easy. Let’s just be thankful that Ark was one of the more stupid killers out of captivity.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The fact that he came here tonight is proof that he not only shot Randolph but got a good enough look at you out there so he recognized you. Anyone with fairly good sense would have figured you’d be on guard, so to speak. That there’d be somebody around besides you. But he came up here to kill you anyway — I told you those guys intimidate witnesses by killing them.” I lit a cigarette. “Maybe he figured you wouldn’t be alone but still took his chances. His goose was cooked if you lived, so he didn’t have too much to lose, I guess.”

“Shell, I’ve tried to thank you, but it’s just — “

“Knock it off, honey. In the first place, if I hadn’t been here, he would have killed you, and the fact that you’re alive is plenty of reward for me.”

She smiled and gently touched the raw spot on my neck where Ark’s first shot had broken the skin. I grinned at her. “That’s the second item — when that activity was going on, I wasn’t doing it all for you, my love. Ark was shooting at me.”

She smiled again and seemed to relax a little more. Then a uniformed officer was standing in front of us. “That’s all we can do here,” he said. “Come on, Scott. Miss Korrel.”

I knew what he meant. It was time for Lita and me to make our second trip to the jail. We’d both been up for nearly twenty-four hours, but that fact didn’t impress the officer. We journeyed to the clink. It took three hours this time, complete with telling and retelling the story, explaining, dictating the reports. I found out that there had as yet been no trace of Bryce, and officers were still trying to locate Roy Toby, who was in none of his usual haunts. Which didn’t seem surprising, under the circumstances.

Finally Lita and I left the police behind for the second time. I took her back to her suite. This time Lita made no objection to my accompanying her inside. Newspapers were on the streets carrying stories of Randolph’s brutal murder — and Lita Korrel’s name was prominent in all of them. Radio and TV news broadcasts already had the story of the second shooting in which she’d been involved, and she was afraid that it would all have a very damaging effect on the Mamzel’s publicity campaign due to start in a few hours. That publicity party at Horatio Adair’s was scheduled to start at one p.m., with a telecast from one-thirty until two. And it was already eight in the morning. We were both tired, and Lita looked drawn, stretched tight.

I asked her, “Is everything set for the party?”

She nodded wearily. “Yes. Lawrance is taking care of that anyway — preparations, food, catering, guests and all. Horatio’s just letting us use his estate. Of course, he’s getting a lot of publicity out of it himself.” She shook her head. “I sure feel like a party.”

“Yeah. Next week.”

“We’d better get to bed.”

I brightened considerably. “That’s a good idea!”

But there were no more of those incandescent kisses. And I suppose it was just as well, considering the weakened state I was in. Lita offered no objections to my taking a nap on the living-room divan. She even got blankets for me and a pillow, and patted my head as she undulated into the bedroom for her “twenty winks.” I watched her undulate. Into the bedroom. In there with the black-satin coverlet, and the scent of jasmine, and the rustle of sheets, and … I refused to go on.

I did drop off into slumber, though. And my final thought was that at last Lita Korrel and I were sleeping together. Unfortunately — in different rooms….

It seemed about three minutes later that Lita was shaking me saying softly, “Wake up. Shell, wake up.”

“I cracked my lids and peered blurrily around. My eyes seemed sprained. But soon they focused and so lovely a sight did I see that for a while I felt sure I was still dreaming.

Lita was wearing only what she apparently had slept in, but it was so smooth and unwrinkled, and clung so passionately to her form, that it appeared never to have been slept in. The garment was white, semitransparent, covering her from her shoulders down to her ankles. Lita was leaning toward me, one hand on my shoulder shaking me, and the motion made her breasts ripple and shudder underneath the thin cloth. The gown was so thin that I could see the outlines of those swollen-appearing breasts, their darker tips, and the line of her hip and thigh in the dim light.

I put my arm around her waist, pulled her down next to me on the divan, caught her mouth with mine and held her close. For seconds she was still, then she squirmed against me, slowly, pushing away from me with her hands and breasts and thighs, but easily, not violently.

Then she pulled her mouth from mine and looked at me, her lips slack. “No, Shell. You’ve got to get up.”

I rested my hand on her thigh, moved it upward in a long, slow caress, brushing the rounded curve of her hip, the in-curving waist, and then her full warm breast. Her eyes looked hot, drugged. With my hand on her breast I could feel its tip taut against my palm, feel the too-rapid beating of her heart.

She moistened her lips, then shook her head, pulled away from me. “Please, Shell. It’s twelve-thirty. I overslept.”

Twelve-thirty? It didn’t mean anything to me for a while. I didn’t care if it was after noon or after midnight. In fact, I didn’t even care what day it was.

She stood up. “We’ve less than half an hour.”

Then I remembered. The party, the TV cameras, people would be arriving at Horatio Adair’s estate. Lita stood before me in that filmy white gown, and she looked almost like that statue which Felicca had made, draped with gauze and given life.

I told her so and she said, “The statue’s already up at the pool — the plastic one, anyway. Not in gauze but in a pink bikini. And people will be gathering there by now. We’ve got to hurry.”

She was just out of reach. Of my hands, not my eyes. I caught her with my eyes and stored her away in my brain as she smiled and backed away from me, then turned and walked into the bedroom. I just sat there and vibrated. There was no doubt about it; from any angle Lita looked sensational. She was back in practically no time, looking fresh as a new rose, and she said, “Off we go.”

We had settled it last night that I would stick with her every minute, since she had refused to move to another hotel. She’d said there wasn’t much chance any further attack would be made on her, now that Ark was dead, and had shrugged off my reminder that the driver of the car she’d seen at Randolph’s was still alive.

I was thinking about that on the way to Horatio’s, trying to get my thoughts in order.

“Why so quiet, Shell?”

“Just thinking, honey. About Randolph and Ark, and where Toby fits into this. And Dan Bryce, too. I thought I had him figured…” I stopped suddenly. Not until now had I thought again about that photograph of Bryce in Lita’s bedroom.

But now I looked at Lita and said, “I just remembered something I wanted to ask you. What’s a photo of Dan Bryce doing in your bedroom?”

She frowned slightly, her eyes puzzled. “Who?”

“Dan Bryce.”

“I don’t know anybody by that name.” She smiled. “Why are you worrying about pictures in my bedroom, anyway?”

“I’m serious, Lita.”

Her frown came back and deepened. “I don’t understand, Shell. What’s the matter with you?”

“Last night when I was waiting for you — just before the call came from the police — I happened to see a portrait by your bed. It was Dan Bryce. I took a good look at it. Since he is one of the biggest crooks this side of prison, explanations are in order.”

“You’re the one who’d better explain,” she said. She sounded a little angry. “There’s a picture in my bedroom yes, but not of anybody named Bryce.”

“Who is it, then?”

“Tom Westland. He’s a very good … well, friend of mine. And really, Shell, grateful as I am for what you’ve done, it’s still none of your business what pictures I have. Or what friends, for that matter.”

“No matter what you call him, that’s Dan Bryce, and he’s a hoodlum from way back. In fact I’m pretty well convinced, and so are the police, that he killed Zoe Avila.”

Shock spread over her lovely face. “Tom? You mean Tom could have — “

“Dan. Dan Bryce. I don’t know what he told you his racket was, but — “

“Well, if you can call the federal income tax a racket, than he’s a racketeer.” Lita seemed shaken.

“Don’t tell me he’s a tax man.”

“He certainly is. That’s how I met him. He came out from the local office of the Internal Revenue Service, to check up on my last year’s return.”

And right then it hit me.

I almost started admiring Bryce. I was remembering Samson’s telling me that Bryce had served time for extortion. A careful blackmailer always does his best to find out how big a bite the victim can suffer without bleeding to death. Was there a more clever way for a crook to find out the exact worth of an individual or an organization he expected to blackmail?

Lita told me that she’d known Tom — Dan Bryce — for two or three months and after that initial meeting there had been no talk of business, but only of pleasure; they’d had several dates. I told Lita that Bryce was a liar and a fraud, and if she heard anything from him to tell me or the police. She said she would, but seemed still not convinced.

I said, “Honey, he is just not a safe playmate. If he got an inkling that you were on to him, he might do almost anything. Even to you.”

We left it there. And the conversation turned to lighter subjects then. Driving past that gate at the entrance to Horatio Adair’s estate, it was difficult for me to realize that it had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d been involved in the shooting here. It seemed a month ago, and I felt as if I’d been awake all that time. My eyes were grainy from lack of sleep, and irritated by the sunlight.

I mentioned the fact that I was a mess to Lita.

She said, “Oh, you’re not so bad.”

“I mean, I’m haggard and red-eyed and my clothes look as if I slept in them. Of course, I did sleep in them — “

“Oh, that.” She grinned. “It just gives you an even more rugged look, Shell. Like a crumbling mountain.”

“What a happy thought.”

“Anybody would be afraid to attack us. All you’d have to do would be to look at them and sort of sneer. It makes you the perfect bodyguard.”

“Appropriate, since you have the perfect body. How’s this?” I sneered for her.

She shrieked and threw a hand across her eyes. “I know,” she cried. “You’re a secret weapon.”

“Super-Shell!” I cried back. “I sound like a new gasoline. Actually, I’m not a new gasoline. I’m not even a secret weapon. I’m just crumbling Shell Scott.”

“Good. That’s all I want.”

“I’m yours. Take me.”

She laughed but didn’t take me. “Wow, look at all the cars,” she said.

There were a lot of them. We had to park a hundred feet from the front of the big house. Other cars arrived even as we walked around the side of the house and behind it where all the activity was.

We walked through a crowd of gibbering people and past tables groaning under the weight of dozens of different kinds of food — lobster, crab, whitefish, shrimp, ham, prime ribs, bread and buns and potato salad and green salad and what looked like fifty other dishes. And then we were out at the pool where the real dishes were.

Lita turned to me and said, “I probably won’t be able to be with you for a while. It’s going to be hectic.” She glanced at the pool, the people around it and in it, the TV cameras and lines of electrical cord that seemed to be everywhere. There must have been at least forty technicians in sight, too, in addition to many of the approximately two hundred guests. Then she turned back and went on, “I’ve got to change now, Shell. After this, well, maybe we can relax a little.”

“I’ll hold you to that. Got your bikini?”

She held up her handbag. “In here.”

“I’m supposed to keep an eye on you every minute.”

“Keeping an eye on me doesn’t mean an eye in actual contact. But come on. You can stand outside the door.”

I did. At the ladies’ section of the pool showers, she slipped inside, and in no more than two minutes came out in a pink bikini which was almost as pretty as her skin. We went back to the pool, where she left me. I felt sure she was safe here, among all these people, but I kept an eye on her most of the time just the same.

A lot of other guests were keeping eyes on her, too. There were several Hollywood people, including stars and starlets present. Near me, in fact, in one large group, were Zargreef Dakoulian, elderly white-haired ingenue, with Tab, Touch, Tick, Sock, Grab, Pow, Smack, and Feel, all those young male stars. Sitting on the edge of the pool with Tom Fong, the Chinese character actor sometimes called Peiping Tom, was Magna’s top female star, Lovey Passionella. They were watching Kip Massive, star of scores of child Westerns, who was in the water strumming his inevitable guitar and singing twangily, “…We lived so low upon the hawg … our profit was a loss … I lost my wife and maw and dawg … and wust of all my hoss…”

Then I spotted Lawrance. At about the same moment his eyes fell on me and he came racing over. He looked as if he’d been awake since I’d called him from the Hollywood jail, awake and tearing his hair.

“Scott,” he said, “what the hell are the cops doing! What’s the latest? What about Arkajanian?”

“Take it easy, Lawrance.” I brought him up to date. “From here on in, your guess is as good as mine.”

He looked sick. “Have you seen the papers? Nothing but Randolph. And the newscasts…” he groaned. “Where’s Horatio? Have you seen him?”

“No. I just got here.”

“He was supposed to be down here at one and it’s — ” he looked at his watch — “nearly a quarter after. The cameras will be on us in less than twenty minutes.”

“Horatio’s part of the show?”

“Yes. He’s supposed to put in an appearance, at least.” Lawrance rubbed a hand over his perspiring forehead. “The little phony’s probably planning an entrance.”

“I expect him to come dancing in wearing cerise tights,” I said. “I’ll look around for the little man.”

Lawrance rubbed his hands together nervously. “I wonder if this thing will go over — the telecast, I mean. With all this bad publicity, we’ve got to get some good space.” He rubbed his hands some more, looking worried. “I’ve got a million things to do. Is Lita all right? Where is she?”

“Yeah, she’s O.K.” I pointed to where she was standing, at the far end of the pool. Lawrance spun around and headed in her direction without another word to me.

At one corner of the house, upstairs and above the end of the pool, was a circular room which bulged out from the rest of the building, much like turrets on old-time castles. That, I assumed, was the Tower Room which had been mentioned in my presence a time or two. I went around to the front of the building and rang the bell. Willis opened the door.

I said. “Is Mr. Adair handy?”

“No, Mr. — Scott, isn’t it?” I nodded and he went on, “I haven’t seen Horatio since early this morning. I suppose he’s still in the Tower Room, creating. He’s spent quite a bit of time there since the Mamzel replica was delivered.”

“You mean one of those plastic statues?”

“Yes. He hoped that it would inspire him to create a new style especially for Miss Korrel.”

I remembered that Lita had made herself unavailable to the grabby Horatio, so it seemed logical that he would have substituted one of those plastic Mamzels for her, as the next best thing. It would certainly have been inspiring enough, I thought. I said, “Some of the people out at the pool are getting worried about Mr. Adair, since he’s supposed to take part in the festivities. Do you think you might pop up to the Tower Room and see if he’s available to the masses?”

“Oh, I couldn’t. Mr. Adair left word earlier this morning that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. So he must not be disturbed. He would be furious.”

“O.K. if I use the phone?”

“Certainly.” I stepped inside, and Willis went into the big room where I’d first seen Horatio Adair.

The phone was under the stairs, but I decided to use it after I went up those stairs. Maybe Horatio would be furious, but he couldn’t do more than swat me with a hunk of tulle or satin. So I went on up. There was a hallway at the head of the stairs. I walked to the end of the hall and knocked at the door on its left. The door was unlocked and slightly ajar. It slowly swung open, creaking on its hinges. I saw the pink-plastic Mamzel statue first, nude and shocking. And then as the door swung open wider I saw him.

I stepped inside, but there was no point in feeling for his pulse. It was the late Horatio Adair, and he looked like Horatio after the bridge.

I looked at him, at his small body crumpled almost at the feet of the plastic Mamzel, and from down below sounds of gayety floated up from the pool and into the Tower Room. Somewhere a woman with a high, happy voice was saying, “Stop it, Charlie. Stop it….”

</code>

<code> CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Now, as I walked along the side of the pool toward Lita Korrel, I was once more impressed with the unique and superbly impressive variety of curves that nature and her own efforts had crammed into one female body, and which had virtually stunned me the first time I’d seen her, yesterday morning. Pictures of faces and scenes I’d met within the hours since then formed a flickering montage in my memory, ending with the image of Horatio, dead, at the feet of the plastic Mamzel.

It was ironic. Horatio Adair had done more, perhaps, than any other single man to hide the loveliness of woman. And he had died at the feet of what might have been called an inflated statue of Sex. There, forever out of reach of his sightless eyes, had been all the things that in his life Horatio had tried so desperately to hide — the breasts and thighs, the flesh, the beauty and temptation and sex of woman.

The original of all that plastic beauty and temptation and sex stood next to the white-draped statue scheduled for unveiling in the next few minutes, and smiled at me as I stopped in front of her.

“Stand by me when the cameras go into action,” Lita said. “It’ll make me look better.”

“Beauty and the beast, huh?” I looked around. There was a relatively empty spot near the back of the house, several yards from the pool. I pointed it out to Lita and said, “Better join me over there for a minute, honey. Something I want to tell you, and I wouldn’t like it overheard.”

She looked puzzled. “But the television … what time is it? Have we time — “

“I’ve got a hunch there won’t be any telecast.”

Her frown deepened, but she followed me to the spot out of earshot of the others. “What is it?” she asked me. “You’re acting so funny.”

“Horatio Adair is dead.”

“Dead? What do you mean? How can he be dead?”

“He was murdered.”

She just looked blank. Her eyes stayed on my face but they didn’t seem to be seeing me. “Dead?” she said again. It was as if she had already suffered so many emotional shocks that this one just didn’t register.

I said, “I’ve already called the police and talked to Samson in Homicide downtown. He’s a friend of mine, and knows the whole story of what’s happened till now, and I explained to him that I could vouch for you and me, but not the two or three hundred others.”

She said dully, “Murdered. But … Horatio. Little Horatio. Why would anybody want to kill him?”

“I don’t know.” Why would anybody want to kill him?

My thoughts were interrupted by a flurry of activity around the far end of the pool. Plainclothes men and uniformed officers had quietly put in an appearance. A large number of Hollywood citizens leap straight up in the air when they hear sirens, and then take off in whatever direction they’re headed when they land. So the officers had acted wisely in coming out with as little fuss as possible.

There were a lot of heads turning toward the activity, and many of the guests began babbling at each other as several more uniformed men showed up. The hubbub of startled conversation swelled like a wave.

I walked with Lita toward the officers, looking around until I spotted Lieutenants Carter and Flaherty. After we’d answered all their initial questions and I had filled them in on the major points of the situation, Carter said to me, “Let’s take a look at him.” He was a tall, hook-nosed man about forty, with straight black hair and a bristly mustache.

I left Lita with a sergeant I knew, and went with Carter and Flaherty, up to the Tower Room. They blinked in sudden surprise at what they saw, even though they had been partly prepared for the sight before coming out here. Both of them ogled the plastic Mamzel; and then the dead man, and then Mamzel once more.

Carter said, “What the hell is that thing doing up here?” He pointed at the statue.

I said, “Horatio was doing some designs for Mamzel’s. This was for measurements, or inspiration, or something.”

“Yeah, or something,” Carter said. “Well, let’s get on with it.”

The Crime Lab crew came up and got busy checking for prints, taking photographs and making drawings and measurements; specimens were taken for later analysis downtown. Nobody told me to leave, so I stuck around to learn what I could. On a small table near Horatio’s desk were two glasses which had apparently contained highballs. In the bottom of one glass were a few grains of white sediment. Considering the froth on Horatio’s lips, and the fact that be was dead, it wasn’t difficult to deduce that he had drunk from that glass. A .22 caliber pistol, almost surely the one which had been used to shoot him in the forehead, was found on the floor.

After it was dusted unsuccessfully for prints. Carter held it in his hand and looked at it. He said to me, “The way it shapes up, this is his gun, the scissors in his back were his own, and the cord used to strangle him probably came from the junk up here in the room.” He paused. “This morning he told his employees here that he wanted to be left alone in the Tower Room until further notice, that they were all to stay in the back of the house so that he wouldn’t be disturbed by the slightest noise while he created. What do you make of it, Scott?”

“He was a big fraud. He couldn’t create a fire by rubbing matches together. He was all front, an act, a phony, but he got so he put on the act twenty-four hours a day. He ran around piping, ‘I am a genius,’ and ‘Oh, I’m so sweet,’ until stomachs rebelled for a hundred yards around. The idea that he needed absolute silence to create the junk he threw together was just part of the act. That’s my opinion. Lieutenant.”

“Even so, why would he shoo them all out back?”

“You’ve got me.”

A plainclothes officer handed him a yellow rectangle of paper. Carter read it, then said, “Where’d you get this?”

I moved around behind Carter and looked over his shoulder. The paper was a Western Union telegram addressed to Horatio Adair, and it read, “Subject convicted extortion eight years ago and served two years Tehachapi. Flying down tonight with photostatic proof and other evidence. Lester.” There was just time for me to note that the wire had been sent from San Francisco on the 18th, at 8:00 p.m. The plainclothes officer was saying, “Found it between blotters on his desk. Lieutenant.”

I hung around a couple minutes more, but there seemed little left except routine. Besides which, my brain was beginning to percolate.

I went out of the Tower Room and down the stairs to the phone, dialed the Police Building again. In a minute I had Captain Samson on the other end of the line. After the hellos I said, “Sam, yesterday morning when I was talking to you about Zoe Avilla, you told me she’d done time. I want to be sure I’ve got that straight.”

“She did a couple years on a one-to-ten for five-eighteen at Tehachapi.”

“That’s what I thought. And how long did she get hit with that sentence?”

“Eight years back. Got out six years ago.”

Samson might just as well have quoted the telegram I’d read over Carter’s shoulders; “Subject convicted extortion eight years ago and served two years Tehachapi.”

A lot of my questions were answered now, and I was starting to see a little light in the darkness I’d been in for so long. But at the same time I’d been presented with another question to which I didn’t have even a piece of an answer: Why would Horatio Adair have been checking up on Zoe Avilla? It seemed significant, too, that the telegram had been sent on Thursday the eighteenth, which was three nights ago — or the night before Zoe Avilla had been murdered.

I said, “How about Dan Bryce and Roy Toby, Sam?”

“They’ve holed up somewhere. We’ve brought in a few of Toby’s boys for questioning, but they haven’t helped. No sign of Bryce at all. What’s going on where you are?”

I gave him a rundown on the situation and we hung up. I went back out by the pool, found Lita and told her we were ready to go.

In the Cad, driving out the winding tree-shaded road, Lita sat motionless for a while, as if she had been drained of all her strength. Finally she spoke, “I’m going to take your advice, Shell.”

“What’s that?”

“Get another hotel. Go into hiding, I guess.”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“There’s no point in trying to go on.” It sounded melodramatic, but I knew she was serious. “After … after Randolph, and then that horrible man coming toward us with a gun there, at my apartment … I still thought it would work out, and we could go ahead with the party…” She let it trail off.

After nearly a minute she spoke again, “I was willing to keep on trying, but it’s just turned out to be too much now, Shell. I quit. I give up.”

“Wait a minute, Lita. That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Maybe it’s because I’ve changed. A person can change in a week. In a day. It doesn’t take a lifetime.” She paused. “Maybe someone is trying to kill everybody connected with Mamzel’s.”

“Now you’re striking out, honey. Unwind a little.”

“It just doesn’t make sense. None of it does. And Horatio, of all people! What does it mean?”

I didn’t answer her; I didn’t know what it meant — but I was going to learn. I was going out amongst ‘em, and if I could find Dan Bryce or Roy Toby, there would be some talking — perhaps intermingled with yelps of great discomfort, but talking.

First though, there was the matter of getting Lita settled in a safe place — and I had to be sure she was safe before I’d feel right leaving her. I started by making sure we weren’t being tailed by anybody. Absolutely, completely, one-hundred-percent sure. Then I drove to the Lassiter, a place which Lita suggested herself. It was a swank, expensive-looking building on a quiet street on the Hollywood side of L.A.

I said to Lita, “There it is. Why’d you choose this one?”

“Just because I’ve never stayed here, never have known anybody who stayed here, and there’s no earthly reason why anybody would expect me to be here. Now, give me a new name. A name to register under.” She hesitated. “I’m scared.”

I kept the conversation light. “A name, huh? Well … why not Wild? That has a nice, cozy sound.”

“All right. And for contrast, Elmer. Elmer Wild. That’s completely improbable. I like it.”

“Elmer? Honey, you may be planning to hide out, but nobody is ever going to believe you’re Elmer. Or even Elmira. I’d suggest — “

“You’re Elmer.”

“Huh? Frankly, it’s doubtful that anybody would believe I’m an Elmer. Why don’t — ” I broke it off as the implications of her remark hit me. “I … me?”

“If we register as a married couple, that should make the deception complete, shouldn’t it? Anybody looking for me would expect me to be registered alone.” She paused. “Do you mind registering for us both?”

“Mind? Lita my love, put your fears at rest. I do not mind. I not only do not mind — “

“I understand.” She gave me the first nice smile I’d had in quite a spell. “Well, come on then. Elmer.”

I grinned at her. “Elmer, huh? O.K. Wull hit’s good to git away fum the farm, hain’t it. Asoefitida? Come along, let’s git into that big barn over yonder acrost the hard road.”

She shook her head at me, then we got out and headed for the Lassiter. I detoured on the way long enough to pick up a bottle of bourbon, and some mix for Lita. Both of us felt that a highball or two would help us unwind. Ten minutes later we were alone in a lavish suite of rooms on the fourth floor of the Lassiter.

We had finished a tour of the suite and Lita was in the living room again. I stood a few feet from her in the kitchenette, complete with bar-and-lunch counter, mixing a bourbon and soda for Lita, and a bourbon and water for me. The kitchenette was just off the living room and in the wall opposite the entrance door was the door into the bedroom. A small half-bath adjoined the living room, and a big gleaming bathroom opened off the bedroom. There was even a small dining room — and the rate for the suite was almost enough to cover an installment on a small house.

I walked over to Lita and handed her the bourbon and soda, raised my glass and we had a couple glugs of the liquor.

“Here we are,” Lita said. “Mr. and Mrs. Elmer.”

“No, Wild.”

“That’s right. I forgot — it was so sudden.”

“I don’t really feel so Elmerish, but I can be pretty Wild if I — “

“Never mind. Shell.” She grinned at me and added, “But I’ll bet you can.” Then she looked around. “I think I’ll be able to relax here. Finally. Forget about all the trouble, the … killings, the job, everything. Just one thing I have to do.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll have to call Lawrance. No telling where he is now, though.”

“Do you think that’s wise?”

“Why, Shell. Don’t be silly. I have to call Lawrance. Somebody has to know I’m not going to be in for a few days, keep things going.” She paused, “I can’t just close up the shops, you know.”

“Yes, I know, but we’ve gone to some trouble to get you stashed away as Mrs. Elmer Wild, reasonably safe and secure. I’m going to have to leave you alone, and I would much prefer that nobody else know you’re here.”

She smiled at me. “There can’t possibly be any harm in just talking to Lawrance. Anyway, I’ve got to call him.”

“Don’t tell him where you are, huh?”

She gave me a surprised look, but finally she said, “All right. Well, I see you’re going to be difficult. Make yourself useful instead.”

“O.K. Where’ll I start?”

“I saw a big beautiful tub in that gorgeous tiled bathroom on our quick tour. Before you leave you can fill it up for me. Just a little over body temperature, so I can relax … relax … relax.”

She sounded actually dreamy. I said, “Consider it accomplished. Water coming up, at about two hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit.”

She blinked. “Isn’t normal body temperature about ninety-eight-point-six?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t figuring it for a normal body.” I leered at her.

She laughed. “Get on with you.”

I walked through the bedroom into the big bathroom and turned on the hot and cold water taps. The tub was big and square, a light shade of blue to contrast softly with the darker blue tile of the floor and walls. The bathroom was cool and pleasant, and it seemed nearly as big as my whole apartment.

As the tub filled, I finished off my bourbon and water. It tasted good, and I could almost feel the liquor oozing into my bloodstream. I was empty, and tired, and just the one stiff slug of bourbon in the drink gave me a nice lift. I tested the water temperature and the thought crept into my mind that here was a tub big enough for two people — and only then did it dawn on me exactly what I was doing. Only then did the whole significance of this hit me.

I was filling the tub for Lita Korrel. For Mamzel. In another minute or two she was going to come in here and take off her clothes. All of them. All off. And then she was going to step daintily into the tub and slide slowly, languorously, deliciously deep into the warmth of the water. Probably she would sigh with pleasure, arch her back, run her hands over the water-slick surface of her skin, squirming in voluptuous pleasure beneath the water’s soothing touch. Man, I was only thinking, but I am a hell of a thinker. There she was, wiggling about in the water.

And I was going to be way off somewhere looking for hoods? It just didn’t seem right. Can this be Shell Scott? I thought. I felt like stripping off my suit and climbing into the tub and calling, “Come on in, Lita, the water’s fine.” I turned off the taps and scampered back into the living room. Lita was, just hanging up the phone.

I quickly made two more drinks and handed one to Lita.

“Tub full?” she asked me.

“Well, not exactly,” I said slyly. “There’s some water in it.”

She stood up. “I suppose you’re eager to get on your way.”

“Well, not exactly,” I said again. “I mean, what’s the rush? After all — ah — I — ” I was sort of staggering verbally, so I stopped and started over in a more conversational vein. My last remarks had been more in the artery, so to speak. “How about Lawrance? What did he have to say?”

“I didn’t get him. I rather doubted that I would, but he’s sure to return to Mamzel’s before closing time or at least be there first thing in the morning. I left word for him to call me here, at this number.”

I winced. “That’s … nice.”

She smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. But I didn’t give my name.”

“Who’d you talk to?”

“Didi, of course. She usually answers the phone.”

“Wouldn’t she be likely to recognize your voice?”

“Perhaps. But what harm could there be in that?”

None, I thought. Not from Didi — lovely, luscious Didi. And probably not from anybody else in Mamzel’s either, including Lawrance, even supposing that any of them could figure out who had called, and from where. I shrugged; I was acting like an old maid. Sure didn’t feel like an old maid.

And that, of course reminded me. I said, “Lita.”

“Yes?”

“When I was filling the tub for you I made a tantalizing discovery.”

“Tantalizing?” She smiled. “What was it?”

“That tub is actually big enough for two people.”

“It is a big thing, isn’t it?” She laughed. “But what would two people do in a tub? Even a big tub?”

“Well,” I said casually, “it would, of course, depend on the two people. A couple of old men, for example, would probably leap out crackling and race to the phone and call the manager and yelp, ‘Good gracious, there’s a man in my tub!’ Something like that.”

“I see. You meant, then, that the tub was big enough for two old men.”

“No, no. Not at all. You’re really off the beam there.”

“What do you mean, Shell?”

She knew exactly what I meant. She was just leading me on. I said, “You force me to be brutally frank. I meant there was room for us in the tub. And by ‘us’ I meant you and me. Us two people.”

She finished her drink and put the glass down, a smile still playing around her lips. I wouldn’t have minded playing around her lips myself. As I drained my highball she said, “Oh, Shell. The crazy things you say. What would we do in the tub?”

“What would we do? Hell, we could scrub each other’s backs, or … I’d think of something.”

“I’ll bet you would.” She grinned. “I’ll bet you’ve already thought of something.” Then she stood up and walked to the bedroom door. “You wait here,” she said. “I’ll check the water temperature. Two hundred ten degrees, indeed.”

She went inside, and shut the door behind her.

She was gone only a few minutes. But it seemed much, much longer. If it had been hours or even days, though, waiting would have been more than worthwhile. Because when the door opened again, Lita was framed in it. And that was all Lita was framed in. We had been kidding around before, but the jokes were over. She stood there in almost the same pose as the statue of Mamzel, with her hands at her sides, head back slightly, stomach sucked in and breasts thrusting brazenly forward. She wasn’t Mamzel, nude; she was Lita Korrel, naked, wild-looking, beautiful.

I had been tantalized and tempted by almost everything except this actuality in the last day or so. By pictures of Lita, statues of her, by Lita in a leotard, a bikini, negligee, by the touch of Lita and by her kiss and caress. I had known she was beautiful, desirable, sexy and sensual.

But seeing her like this, she was more than that. She was incredible, literally stunning. It was as if all the sexually attractive attributes of woman had, in Lita, been accentuated, emphasized, made more obvious — almost to the point of excess. Almost, but not quite. It was as if every inch, every minute particle of her throbbed with life, as if the blood close beneath the surface of her naked skin pulsed more hotly and fiercely than in other women.

She stepped forward. She didn’t say anything; her eyes were on mine, and a soft smile curved her red lips as she walked toward me.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Lita walked toward me slowly, deliberately, hands at her sides, the big, heavy breasts erect but trembling, their thrusting points tracing tight patterns in the air, the thighs gliding whitely, smoothly. She came into my arms easily and lifted her face to mine, lips parting redly over her teeth, like blood on bone.

Our mouths met like a blow. My hands pressed against her back, fingers sinking into the soft flesh. And her hands touched my chest, my back, my cheeks and hair and neck, they fluttered over me as my hands glided on her skin. Then, smiling, she took my hands in hers. Facing me, she pulled me easily after her into the bedroom. As she moved backward I looked at her, let my eyes burn into every bit of her as we walked slowly into the room, ran my eyes over her like light caresses.

Inside the door of the bedroom she stopped momentarily, and let go of my hands. I pulled off my coat and dropped it to the floor. Her fingers went to my chest, plucked at the buttons on my shirt.

She raised her mouth again. I crushed her to me, her body hot against mine, moistness between our pressing, moving, sliding lips. Then she leaned away from me, her eyes open and burning into mine, her whole body moving and undulating with an almost unbearable slowness, her back arching. Then she swayed forward, her tautly pointed breasts caressing my bare chest before she took my hands in hers, backed away from me again. I could see the bed over her shoulder. Her legs touched the bed and she sank down upon it, leaned backward, still holding onto my hands, pulling me with her, against her….

It was just a couple of minutes before five p.m. I was dressed, but Lita lay in bed, only a sheet over that sensational body. I was filling the tub again for her. The water I’d drawn an hour before had cooled off more than a little, certainly more than I had. I went back into the bedroom. “All set,” I said. “Get in there.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “You can wait for me in the living room.”

“Sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“But … it seems like such a waste. Waste of you, I mean.”

“No. Go on, Shell. I mean it.” She smiled. “You just don’t understand women.”

“Not even women understand women.”

“Out you go.”

And out I went. I shut the door and heard her trot barefooted across the floor, heard the splash of water as she climbed into the tub. I sat down in one of the living-room chairs, but I had no more than settled myself comfortably and lighted a cigarette when the door chimes sounded.

Because I was still so engrossed with thoughts of Lita, my brain was not functioning with machinelike precision. For the first few seconds after the chimes sounded, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder who might be at the door, or why anybody would be there. I got up and walked across the carpet, and actually had my hand on the doorknob before the thought popped into my mind that this was strange indeed.

I took out my .38 and cocked it, opened the door part way, A man stood in the hall. He bobbed his head in pleasant fashion and smiled impersonally. He wore a dark suit and carried a light brown, zippered briefcase. He looked harmless enough, a medium-sized egg with a moon face and pink cheeks.

“Afternoon.” he said. “Tell Miss Korrel that the attorney is here, please.” He paused. “I’m Walter Edwards, of Edwards, Lane and Briston.”

He stepped forward and I automatically stepped back, opening the door a little wider. I was wondering what the hell Lita had said on the-phone earlier.

The man walked to the chair where I’d been sitting, and plunked down in it. Not until then did he notice the gun in my hand. And suddenly his cheeks were no longer pink. His whole face got a shade that was near gray, and I thought for a moment he was going to fall out of the chair. He slowly and carefully put the briefcase down alongside the chair and raised his hands over his head. “Don’t…” he said. “Don’t…”

I eased the Colt’s hammer back down with my thumb, but didn’t put the gun away. “What makes you think Miss Korrel is here? And who asked for an attorney, anyway?”

He still looked gray, but he recovered most of his composure and said, “Why, Mr. Lawrance sent me over here. I hope I — am I in the wrong room?”

“What about Lawrance?”

“I understand that Miss Korrel is to be out of town for a few days, and Mr. Lawrance will have to act in her behalf. I’m to gather her power of attorney, and she’ll have to sign a few papers.” He paused. “Who are you?”

“What made Lawrance think Miss Korrel would be here?”

He frowned. “I’m sure I don’t know. He phoned me at my office only a few minutes ago and told me to hurry over here, to this hotel, this room. Why? What’s the matter?”

Something seemed extremely phony about this guy and his power of attorney dialogue. But I didn’t know what it was. He could very well have been telling the truth. I knew Lita had phoned Mamzel’s and left the hotel’s phone number with Didi. Lawrance could easily have found out what the name of the hotel was. There was always the possibility, too, that somebody other than Lawrance had got the number from Didi. I just didn’t know, and there were too many maybes to suit me. I made up my mind.

“Let’s just say you got the wrong room.”

He looked as if he were going to protest, but then got to his feet. “I see … yes.” He hesitated. “Well … good day.” He walked to the door, opened it and went out.

I was still puzzled. I walked to the door and looked out, but he wasn’t in sight. But when I stepped into the hall I spotted him. He was clear down at the elevator, and as I watched him he rang the buzzer. That had been fast. Either something had happened to my sense of time, or the guy had actually run down the hall.

I turned to go back into the room, and spotted his briefcase. It was resting alongside the chair that the guy had so briefly sat in. Edwards was still at the elevator doors and the car was just coming up into view. I jumped into the room, grabbed the briefcase and hustled down the hallway with it just as the elevator doors slid open and he stepped inside.

“Hey, Edwards,” I called to him. “Hold it a second.”

It was almost goofy, the way he reacted. I think he had already pressed the button to take the car down, but as he looked up and spotted me he jabbed at the control panel, jabbed at it again, then stepped to the back of the elevator with his eyes wide and fixed on me.

I held up the briefcase. “You forgot this.”

I was still about fifteen feet from the elevator, and the doors were closing. He pushed himself back against the far wall, arms out at his sides and palms pressed against the wall behind him. His mouth was open, lips stretched tight in a twisted grimace. The doors were almost closed, so I tossed the briefcase past them into the elevator cage. It barely got through, brushing against one of the doors. Then they closed and the elevator started down.

I couldn’t see what Edwards did. But I heard him scream.

It was muffled by the walls and distance between us, faint, thin and thready. But it was the man screaming. The sound was a high, agonized wail, a piercing, nerve-jarring, almost unreal sound. You don’t often hear a man scream, but I was hearing it now, and that told me why he was screaming, too.

I knew perhaps two seconds before it happened. The elevator cage had moved down one floor when it went off. It was a hell of an explosion. Even muffled by the walls it banged against my ears. The floor shook under my feet and plaster cracked in the wall at the right of the elevator doors, and glass flew in a sharp jagged hail from the doors themselves.

I started forward, but then stopped, whirled around and ran back to Lita’s suite. I got into the bathroom just as she was stepping out of the tub. She was dripping, her flesh gleaming wetly, her chestnut hair wet through and hanging in thick ropes against her bare shoulders.

She looked at me with her eyes wide and staring. “What…” She stopped and started over. “What happened? What was that?”

“Some guy just tried to blow you up — or maybe me. Or more probably both of us, I don’t know. But the deal backfired. Get some clothes on — we’re pulling out of here.” I glared at her. “And I’ll pound some sense into you later.” She looked dazed. “Snap into it,” I said. “I’ll be back here as soon as I can make it — you be ready to go.”

She nodded, swallowing, her eyes still staring.

I swung around and ran into the hall, then down the stairs to the next floor. There were only two people, both men, in front of the elevator, but I could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. One of the two men turned away as I ran up, his face contorted as if he’d bitten into something rotten.

The bomb in the man’s briefcase had gone off just before the elevator reached the level of this floor, and the elevator cage had stopped about two inches above the level of the hallway. The doors themselves had been blown open and hung twisted from metal strips. Inside, most of the floor had been blasted out, but enough of it remained to support the man’s body.

He lay in the very corner at the intersection of the walls, as if he had been trying to claw his way out of that point when the bomb went off. His back was wet, a lacerated mass of red, and pulpy pink flaps, and whitish threads. But his face was turned this way, probably having turned as he slumped down the walls, already dead, and his face was quiet and calm and peaceful, as the faces of the dead always are. It was really a ghastly, incongruous sight, to see that calm face almost touching the bloody back.

For just a moment I felt sorry for him, thought of his horror at the sight of that briefcase flying through the air into the elevator with him, thought of how he must have turned and tried frantically to hide in the corner, hopelessly, with panic blooming inside him, thought of how ugly and nearly unbearable those last three or four seconds must have been for him.

But then I remembered that the explosion was supposed to have done that to Lita Korrel, or maybe to Shell Scott, and I decided the only thing wrong with Edwards’ being dead was that he’d died too fast. His name, undoubtedly, was something other than Edwards. And there almost surely was no law firm of Edwards, Lane, and Briston. But those were things I intended to find out, among a lot of other items, before much more time passed.

I went down to the Cad. In the trunk, along with a large number of strange items, I kept a Polaroid Land Camera and a pack of flashbulbs. When I got back to the third floor there were about a dozen people staring in at the gruesome sight. One of them, a tall gray-haired man appeared to be in a position of authority, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything except fluttering his hands about.

“Stand back,” I said. I had the camera ready, the flashbulb in, and the focus set at six feet. People stepped away and let me waltz right up to the edge of the elevator. Nobody would think of molesting any man who might remotely resemble a newspaper photographer. I snapped the picture, pulled the tape out and ripped it off then started back down the hall.

The gray-haired guy said, “What are you doing…” He stopped and peered at my face. “Aren’t you Shell Scott?”

I didn’t answer him, but I swore under my breath. A lot of people know what I look like, and right now there was one too many. This meant that my name would surely be given to the police, who would soon be arriving, and I would be in for hours of questioning again. Or maybe even a night in a cell, under the circumstances. But there was too much that I had to do, and I didn’t intend to spend any more time jawing with police.

I hurried down the hall and into Lita’s suite. She was dressed. It wasn’t a smooth, careful job, and her hair was really a mess, as the gals like to say, but she was covered up in the right places and ready to go. About a minute had passed since I’d snapped the picture, so I opened the back of the camera, stuck a fingernail under the edge of the print and lifted it out.

The image was sharp, perfectly exposed. The bloody mess that was the man’s back seemed less ugly in the photograph than it had actually been, but the important thing was that his face was clear, easily recognizable by anyone who had known him.

“Shell,” Lita said, “what’s happened?”

I stuck the photograph up before her face. “Ever see this guy before? You know who he is?”

Her left hand went to her throat and her face twisted. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She looked ill.

“Sorry.” I said. “But quick, do you know him?”

She shook her head. “No. I’ve never seen him. Oh, how awful…”

“Come on, we’re getting out of here. I’ll explain later. Right now we’ve got to move.”

Twenty minutes later I parked in front of the Spartan Apartment Hotel. I had told Lita what had happened at the Lassiter, brought her up to date. Now I said, “I live here, and you’re going to stay in my apartment while I’m out. I honestly think you’ll be as safe here as anyplace else, and probably safer.”

Lita had been silent during most of the drive. She looked almost asleep, worn out. She didn’t offer any objections, and a few minutes later we were in my apartment and I was telling her, “Don’t use the phone at all. Don’t call anybody, understand?”

She nodded. I used the phone myself to call Mamzel’s, but the office was long closed. There was no answer at either of the two numbers Lita had for Lawrance. I checked the phone book but there was only one number listed for him there, his home phone, which Lita had already given me.

“How about Didi?” I asked her. “Where does she live?”

“Somewhere on Denton Place.”

I drew a blank there, too. Neither the phone book or the city directory I keep in the apartment had any listing for Didi. And Lawrance and Didi were the only two people connected with Mamzel’s that I wanted to talk to now.

I put the phone back in its cradle and turned to Lita. She was slumped against thick pillows at the end of the divan, eyes closed, lips parted. While I’d been using the phone, she had fallen asleep. I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, lowered her to the bed, slipped off her shoes and pulled a blanket over her. I left Lita sleeping and went out.

In the Cadillac, I headed for Beverly Hills. I had been wanting to visit Bryce’s modernistic home again, and especially his den, and that’s where I was going. Several little bits of pieces were starting to fall into place now, and I needed only a couple more to have the whole puzzle put together. As I drove, I forced myself to relax, but weariness was starting to tug at my eyes and tie knots in the muscles between my shoulder blades.

Bryce’s house was dark. I parked a block away and walked back, went up to the front door like a friendly caller, and rang the bell. When there was no answer I got busy on the rear door with my picks. This time I was inside the house in about a minute.

I’d brought along a small flashlight and it lighted my way to the den. The house was undoubtedly empty, but there was still a crawling sensation all over my back. In the den, I flashed the light over the wall of guns. It took me only a few seconds to be certain: One of the guns was missing.

At the left of the wall there had been two rows of rifles and shotguns. In the left-hand column, a row of shotguns, with a rifle at the very top, the second space up from the floor was empty. I couldn’t remember, positively, what gun had been there yesterday, but logic said it must have been a shotgun.

And I felt more than a little sure that it was the one which had been used to pump that fat, deadly slug into John Randolph.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The next hours were busy ones. I made a tour of the dimmer, dingier, more rotten dives and beer joints in Los Angeles and even some in Hollywood. Mainly, though, I prowled Los Angeles Street, lower Spring and Main, Third Street’s skidrow. I talked to crooks, winos, prostitutes, bellboys, and bums. I asked what seemed like a thousand questions about Roy Toby and Dan Bryce. And I showed my Polaroid snapshot of that bloody back and peaceful face to everybody I questioned. But for three hours I got nothing; nobody knew where Bryce or Toby were, and nobody recognized the dead man in the picture.

The word about what I was doing was sure to reach both Bryce and Toby, because half the people I talked to would sell me out for a quarter, or half a bottle of cheap wine. While I was hunting, there was an excellent chance that I was being hunted. But finally I hit the jackpot, got two of the answers I wanted from one man.

He was a redheaded Italian hoodlum named, appropriately enough, Dago Red. Ten years before, he had been a dangerous, much-in-demand gunman for the Rice mob in San Francisco, but now he was just a short, fat booze-hound with eyes that could have served as test patterns for color TV. Through those eyes the world would always appear bloodshot, and his hands never stopped shaking.

I saw him about once a month the year round, and every time we met I slipped him a ten spot. He knew it wasn’t because I liked him; I didn’t. But it put him on my side, as much as a man like that can be on anybody’s side. I found him almost by accident in one of the crumby “delicatessens” where people go to eat when they just don’t care any more. Outside was a sign, “Soup — 5 cents” and inside, at one of the round, linoleum-topped tables was Dago Red. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, a khaki Army shirt and a stringy black tie knotted about two inches off his Adam’s apple. He was only forty-seven years old, but he looked dead and temporarily resurrected.

Red was sitting at a corner table, his back to the intersection of the walls. That was a hangover from the days when he’d been a terror with a gun, was known to have killed three men by shooting them in the back, and always sat facing entrances with his own back to a wall. Nobody wanted to kill him now, but he still sat that way, maybe out of habit, maybe because it made him feel good, remembering the bad old days. Few things these days made him feel good.

I went in and sat down at the table with him, put the usual ten-dollar bill alongside his soup plate. He grabbed the bill, stuffed it away and looked up at me. “Scott,” he said. “Good to see you. Especially this time.”

That meant he was even more broke than usual. His voice was raspy from the raw whisky and wine and beer that had poured down it in the last years, but it was still strong. He needed a shave. Black stubble overpowered the occasional white or gray whiskers that salt-and-peppered his face.

I said, “It’s good to see you getting a square meal, Red.”

He grinned. One of his front teeth was missing. “Yeah. All eight courses are split-pea soup today.” It was a dish-watery muck, thin, an off-gray in color. “That means they split one pea in it,” he said. “Usually they don’t put nothin’ in it. Just spit in the water.”

I said, “Maybe you can help me this time, Red.”

“That’ll be a twist.”

“Roy Toby’s taken a powder. I want to find him. Same goes for Dan Bryce.”

He kept spooning in the soup, but he nodded between slurps. “Yeah.” Slurp. “I can help you — ” slurp — “there, Scott. Not with Bryce, though. Don’t have no idea where he’d be. Vegas, probably.”

He scraped the last spoonful out of the bowl, then lifted it and drank the dregs. He put the bowl down on the table and said, “Lousy to the last drop.” He belched. “Toby huh?”

He was so casual about it that I found it hard to believe at first that he actually knew where Toby was. But he did. He rubbed the back of his hand over his lips and went on, “He’s out at the Ralph Gould place with a couple of his boys. Maybe more, but I figure two of his boys is there anyways.”

Ralph Gould was one of those “respectable” crooks chummy on the one hand with the local criminal gentry and on the other hand with the politicians and officials who could be had. Red told me that his house was now for sale, supposedly empty, and that Gould was vacationing in Miami.

“I was in the john at the Wagner Hotel — I like a touch of class now and then, Scott — when some guy stuck his head in the door and says, ‘C’mon, Dandy, Roy just called me. We got to go keep him company.’ Or somethin’ like that. Don’t remember exactly, but that’s close enough.”

“Uh-huh. That all of it. Red?”

“Dandy says — incidentally, that’s Dandy the Bibber, who works for Toby, which is how come I knew the Roy that other dude mentioned must be Roy Toby. And I recognized Dandy’s voice. As who wouldn’t? Anyways, Dandy says, ‘Where’s he at?’ and the other dude tells him out at Gould’s pile of rocks. Something like that.”

That’s the way it goes. For hours I had been talking to people, putting on the pressure, making threats and promises, and then I had hit the jackpot with a casual hello to a washed-up mobster. The rest of that jackpot was just coming up.

I was ready to leave, but I slid the Polaroid photograph across the table to Red. “One other thing,” I said. “You ever see this guy?”

Red looked at the picture of the dead man and said, “What in hell happened to him?”

“Bomb caught him. His own.”

“It figures.”

“What do you mean?”

“The face belongs to Joe Couch. I never saw that back before.”

“Who’s Joe Couch?”

“A wiper.” In Red’s language, a wiper was a professional killer. “Uses a lot of dynamite, and sometimes a gun. Likes a silenced twenty-two target pistol when he’s working. Either a big bang or no noise at all. Crack shot.” He grinned. “I knew him in the old days, up in Frisco.”

I grinned back at him. I had almost the whole thing figured out now, I thought. It got a bit complicated, but it was built on knowledge that Toby’s man Ark had killed Randolph, and that Toby was trying to muscle in on the profits of Mamzel’s and had been shacked up with Zoe Avilla, and that somebody at Mamzel’s had known Lawrance was to call the number Lita had left with Didi, among other things. Just to make sure, though, I said, “Who does Couch work for now, Red? Roy Toby?”

He looked at me, bloodshot eyes watering a little. “Toby? Not this one. He’s been working for Dan Bryce.”

It was nearly nine-thirty p.m. when I let the Cad coast to a stop alongside the fence surrounding Ralph Gould’s half-acre. I had driven the last couple of blocks without lights, and as the car stopped I picked up the leather-covered sap which I’d earlier taken from the luggage compartment, got out of the car and walked toward the fence. A kitten scampered from the shadows and stopped a few yards away, dim in the moonlight. The fence wasn’t designed so much for keeping people out as for decoration, and it was going to be little trouble to climb over it. The trouble was going to come inside the house, if I ever got in.

I thought about that for a while. The kitten was still sitting a few yards away, licking its fur. It was just a small, multi-colored alley cat but it wasn’t at all wild. It let me pet it, purred as I scratched it under the neck. I let it get used to me then I picked it up. I didn’t have much trouble climbing over the fence, even holding the cat gingerly in one hand, and with a small flashlight, picks and the weighted sap in my coat pockets. Then I headed toward the house, walking slowly and continuing to pet the kitten, keeping it quiet. It dug its paws into my coat and clung there, purring.

I passed the big white For Sale sign and continued on to the house without any trouble. No lights showed at the windows. I worked carefully and quietly on the front door with my picks, hanging onto the cat at the same time, and it took me ten minutes to get inside. The house was dark and silent. In the glow of moonlight streaming through the open door I could see that blankets had been hung over the windows. Before I closed the front door, I located a wide stairway leading to the second floor. Then I shut the door quietly, walked to the stairs and up them.

Standing at the head of the stairs, I could hear voices to my left. When I looked in that direction I saw a thin slit of light pushing its way beneath a door. I walked to it and listened. Voices rumbled softly inside the room. I left the door, walked both ways down the hall without finding any indication that other people were present. At one end of the hallway I found a window, pulled down the blanket over it and unlocked it, then raised it until a soft wind outside billowed the curtain inward. Then I walked back to the door from behind which the sounds came. My little kitten was resting quietly, still purring as I gently petted it. I gave it a last pat, then placed it at my feet. It stood there, looking up at me, gave itself a couple licks and looked at me again. I waited, motionless. Then finally, obligingly, the kitten mewed.

Inside the room a deep masculine voice said, “What in hell … did you hear that?”

The kitten mewed again. Feet thumped on the floor inside. And that was enough for me. I walked as softly as I could toward the open window, then around the corner and waited. Back down the hallway the door opened, light streamed out of the room and was reflected to where I stood out of sight around the corner.

A deep, masculine voice, with a tough rasping inflection boomed out, “Well, ain’t that the nuts! Lookit, it’s a little kitty.”

“A what?”

“A kitty.” The voice went up about an octave. “Here, kitty, kitty. Well, ain’t that the nuts? Here, kitty — “

“Dandy, you damned fool,” a voice cracked inside the room. “How the hell did that thing get in here?”

The voice was Roy Toby’s. I took out my .38, shifted it to my left hand, grabbed the heavy spring-handled sap in my right hand.

Dandy said, “Yeah, how’d it get in here? I locked up all — “

“Don’t just stand there. Am I gonna have to — “

“O.K., O.K.,” Dandy said. Then a few seconds later he swore. “There’s a open window. How’d it get open?”

Toby said, “That cat opened it. You damned fool, I oughtta — “

“O.K., O.K.,” Dandy said again. His feet thumped on the hall carpet as he walked toward me.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I felt something brush against my feet. There was the sound of a small mew. The kitten was down there practically on top of my shoes. I moved my foot aside, gently pushing the little thing away. Footsteps thudded on the carpet, vibrated along the floor, close to me now. I set my feet, tensed the muscles in my calves and thighs, raised the sap over my head. The kitten mewed softly again.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Dandy said in his high-pitched, rasping voice.

His voice had come from about a yard away. The next second, he stepped around the bend in the hallway. He was a little stooped over, as if getting ready to reach for the cat he’d heard, and I was swinging the sap down before he even saw me. Maybe he never saw me. Maybe he just figured that mew had come from a mad mountain lion. Anyhow, the sap landed on the top of his head with a sound like a baseball smacking into a stone wall, and he stooped over farther, and farther, and farther, and landed quietly on the carpet. He didn’t let out a peep.

I grabbed him under the shoulders and hauled him a few feet away from the corner, then left him and took up my position where I’d been before. I peered around the edge of the wall and waited.

After a while Toby yelled from the room, “Well stupid? You go to sleep out there? What the hell you doin’?”

Then Toby said something I didn’t catch, but he must have been telling the other man to go see what had happened to Dandy. I hoped there was only one other man. Then there were footsteps again. But this time the beam of a flashlight preceded the man. He walked down the hall, spotted the open window and quickly snapped off the light.

He swore softly as he moved to the window and started to lower it. I took two steps toward him and he heard me. In he faint glow of light coming from the room behind him, I saw him spin around. He let out a sudden yell that died suddenly as I swung the sap down. It caught him high on the forehead and his knees gave way. As he crumpled, I swatted him again then ran down the corridor toward Toby’s room.

There wasn’t any reason for silence and caution now. Toby would have heard that yell. I hoped he was alone.

He was. Toby was on his feet looking at the open door as I burst through it, a gun in his hand. I acted automatically, and hurled the leather sap through the air at his face. It missed him, but the sap came so close to his head that he ducked as he pulled the trigger of his gun. The gun roared almost deafeningly in the room. The slug smacked the wall behind me, and then I was next to him. I swung my gun-weighted left hand against his arm and his automatic thudded to the floor — but Toby swung at me, smashed a fist into my middle.

It was a good blow, hard and solid, and it spun me to the side. But Toby had gotten so fat and sloppy that even if he’d had the strength for one more blow, he just couldn’t have moved fast enough to get it in. I had all the time in the world to step aside and launch my balled fist up at his floppy, fat face.

My fist bounced off his chin, and Toby bounced off his fanny. He went clear back and his head thumped on the carpet, but then he started straightening up again. He wasn’t out; he just didn’t remember where he was. I still held the .38 in my left hand. I put it back into its holster, retrieved the sap and put it into my coat pocket, then picked up Toby’s .45 automatic.

He was still sitting on the floor. As I glanced at him he shook his head, the floppy skin jiggling on his ugly red face. While he was still groggy I walked to him and gave him a quick shake, to be sure he didn’t have another gun on him, then looked around the room until I spotted the empty .45 caliber cartridge case which had automatically been ejected from the firing chamber when Toby had tossed that one slug at me.

I picked up the case, took the magazine from the grip of the gun, and worked the slide to eject the live cartridge already in the chamber. Then I reloaded that ejected live cartridge into the magazine, and put the empty case at the top of the magazine. I worked the slide again and the empty was thrown into the chamber. Toby was still groggy.

Holding the gun loosely in my right hand, I pulled a straight-backed chair over near Toby and sat down facing him and the open door behind him. Those two thugs were going to be uninterested in the proceedings for quite a while to come, I felt sure, but I faced the door anyway, just in case.

“Toby,” I said softly.

He shook his head again, looked at me as if his eyes weren’t focusing yet, and started to get up. I pointed the gun at his nose and said, “Uh-uh. Sit right there, friend. Just like the last time we chatted.”

His face flushed even more, but he sat still.

I said, “Now, Toby, you talk long and hard and fast. Or I’ll pull this trigger.” I let him look right down the barrel of the gun. And almost anything is more fun than looking down the barrel of a loaded and cocked .45 automatic.

He licked his lips. “How’d you find me?”

“I’ll ask the questions. I already know most of the answers, so be sure the answers you give are straight. First, all you know about the murders of Zoe Avilla, John Randolph, and Horatio Adair.”

“All I know is that they’re dead.”

“You’re asking for it.” I squinted down the barrel of the gun.

“Wait! Wait! Hey!” he yelled at me, jerking his head aside, a thread of panic twisting in his voice.

“I told you, Toby, I’m not kidding.”

“But I don’t know nothing, Scott. So help me. I didn’t kill ‘em.”

“Maybe not. But you had a hand in it, you hired some of the work out — to Ark, for example.”

“Ark?”

“He plugged Randolph.”

“If he did, I didn’t have nothing to do with it, Scott. It must’ve been his own idea.”

“Sure. Like it was his own idea to try to kill Lita Korrel after she saw him bang Randolph last night.”

“I don’t know about that. I had nothin’ to do with any of it.”

“Just can’t stop lying, can you, Toby? Well, good by, friend.”

He didn’t get it. I shifted the gun a little and started to squeeze down on the trigger, arming at his left eye, and he got it. He started to yell just as the gun’s hammer fell on the empty cartridge case with a sharp click.

I let my face look puzzled, examined the gun. Toby was babbling something.

“That’s funny,” I said. “Maybe it’ll go off this time.” I worked the slide, ejecting the spent shell and throwing a live cartridge into the chamber, and cocking the gun once more. I aimed at Toby’s eye again.

He was yanking his head around as if it were on a string, and yelling at me, pleading with me. “Oh, God, Scott. Don’t. Please, Scott. Oh, God, don’t kill me, please, please — “

“Shut up. And quit lying to me.”

“O.K. Yes, I killed them. All of them.”

I had scared Toby a little too much, it appeared. He was ready to confess to shooting Lincoln.

I let him calm down, and while waiting for him to get better control of himself, I completely unloaded the gun, placed the empty cartridge case at the top of the clip again and slapped it into the gun’s butt. The automatic was ready for a harmless ‘firing’ once more, only this time the gun would have to be cocked first, making the routine even more effective. Toby might die of heart failure if I did it again. I did all of that right in front of him, but I might have been amputating my arm and it wouldn’t have made any difference to Toby. He just wasn’t noticing the little things at the moment.

I said, “Toby, get this straight. I hunger to hear the truth from you, but that’s all. No invention. Now, go ahead.”

He looked sick. Slowly he said, “I don’t know who killed ‘em. I didn’t spend no time with Ark after Lemmy hauled him out of your car. I had Lemmy take care of him and Flavin’s body, and I came out here on the double. Knew I’d have to lay low for a while. I didn’t even talk to Ark after that mess at Adair’s place when you shot up the boys.”

“But you did tell them to kill me when I left Adair’s, didn’t you, Toby?”

He nodded. “Flavin phoned me and said you were checking up on Zoe’s murder, I figured you had me pegged for that, so I told the boys to go ahead and…” he swallowed, not wanting to say it. Not wanting to, at least, while I held his .45 pointed at his eye.

“Told them to go ahead and kill me, you mean.”

“Yeah. I’m … glad they didn’t, Scott. I really — “

“Sure, you’re sick with joy. Toby, during the chat we had in your office at the gym you lied to me about that kill try outside of Adair’s. You said you didn’t put your boys on me. And you also said you didn’t kill Zoe Avilla, that you had in fact never heard of her.”

He nodded, looking back at the gun, then he shut his big flesh-flapped eyes. He just wasn’t going to watch. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “I lie a lot. But not now. No, sir, not now. And I didn’t kill Zoe. Don’t have no idea who killed her.”

“But you did know her.”

“Yeah. Yeah. We were shacked up. I paid the rent on her place out there on Elm. Went there that day you tailed me around town. After the Randolph broadcast I knew you must’ve seen me go there. Maybe you didn’t know why I went to the house, but I was plenty worried anyway — I’ve a wife and three kids. Couldn’t afford for them to find out about Zoe. Would of half killed them.”

“Yeah, just having you around must be misery enough.”

“Anyways, when the boys phoned yesterday and said you were asking about Zoe’s getting herself killed, I naturally figured you must think I done it.”

“So you told them to kill me because I was checking on Zoe.”

“That topped it off. I already had plenty of reason.”

“How did you meet Zoe?”

“It was in the Clarendon bar, right alongside the gym. I hang out there quite a bit, you know, and one day a couple weeks back she climbed onto a seat alongside me. Well, she wasn’t a bad looker, and we got to talking. You know how them things are. So we shacked up.”

“Just like that.”

“You know how them things are,” he repeated.

“Was this before or after you started trying to muscle in on Mamzel’s?”

“A little after, maybe a week I think it was.”

“Zoe ask you anything about Mamzel’s?”

“Yeah. Talked about it a helluva lot. Too much, I thought. We discussed my trying to — uh — invest in the place. She seemed to think it was a good idea.”

“Toby, I almost hate to add this to your other woes, but I think Zoe played you for a sucker. I think she arranged that meeting in the Clarendon because you were interested in Mamzel’s. And that’s what she was interested in, too — not you, Toby.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear I don’t know what she was doing.”

“How is Dan Bryce mixed up in this thing, Toby? He pops up all over the place — how does he fit?”

“I don’t know. I know I hate his guts. He and a couple of his men knocked over one of my joints last month, so I got a score to settle with him myself — if I knew anything, I’d be anxious to spill it. But I don’t know a thing that’d tie him to those kills.”

We talked a little longer, but Toby had nothing more of importance to add. I told him to get on his feet, then said, “Well, I hope you’ve been telling me the truth. Now we take a trip — “

“No! I told you everything — “

He thought he was taking a trip all by himself and wasn’t coming back. I said, “Relax. I’m not going to shoot you.”

He relaxed so much he almost fell flat on the floor. I kept near him walking to the bend in the corridor. The two hoods lay there but the little kitten wasn’t in sight. Well, if I were still alive tomorrow, I would come out here with sacks of the choicest cat food I could find.

Ten minutes later, with Toby and the two other hoodlums securely trussed with tape from the Cad, I called the police, told them my tale, and got out of there.

Lita was still sleeping when I let myself into the apartment. She woke up suddenly when I put my hand on her shoulder, and stared at me blankly, as if she’d never seen me before.

Then she relaxed and said sleepily, smiling at me, “You scared me, Shell. What time is it?”

I told her and she rolled off the bed, went into the bathroom and splashed water in her face. After running a comb through her thick hair, she looked completely wonderful again, a little tousled, but, as I well remembered, she looked very good tousled.

I told her the story of my trip to the Gould place and what had happened there. We were in the front room, sitting on my chocolate-brown divan, and she had made numerous comments on the items of furniture, including the fish tanks — and the inevitable derogatory remarks about Amelia, my garish nude over the fake fireplace. Amelia is, I must admit, a little brazen. I reached for my pack of cigarettes, and pulled Toby’s .45 automatic out of my coat pocket. I dropped the gun on the divan, found the cigarettes and lit one.

Lita said, “Where did you get that ugly gun?”

“It was Toby’s, honey. He tried to shoot me with it, so I took it away from him. I’ve got him and his two boys tied up in the house now, ready for delivery to the police.”

“And then what? How much longer do you think it will take to settle everything, Shell? Get back to … to normal.”

“It’s practically over, honey.”

She looked surprised. “It is? How wonderful.” She sighed, “You must have learned something important from Toby.”

“Only in a negative way, a matter of elimination.” I got up and began slowly pacing the floor, lining up my thoughts as I talked. “The main thing about Toby is that I’m finally convinced he didn’t have anything to do with the deaths of Randolph or Horatio Adair. Or Zoe Avilla’s, for that matter. One of the most important things is that I’m now sure I know exactly what the list of Zoe’s was all about.”

“You mean all those names and numbers? The names of people connected with Mamzel’s?”

“Yeah.” I stopped pacing and looked at Lita. “You see, honey, Zoe was an ex-con, a gal who’d done time in Tehachapi for extortion.”

“You mean blackmail?”

“Uh-huh. And that’s what that list of hers was all about — blackmail. Zoe took a lot of time and trouble just to find out how much the Mamzel’s operation was worth, how much everybody connected with the publicity campaign was being paid, how much the weekly gross was at each of the offices. She had all the cities listed on that sheet, with her estimate of their weekly gross, and even an estimated total gross for a year of the whole Mamzel’s operation — over a million dollars, incidentally. Thorough, she was. That’s why she visited so many people connected with Mamzel’s — the Ad Agency, Gedder, and so on. It’s why she phoned all the Mamzel’s offices around the country. It explains everything she did, even her meeting Roy Toby — when she found out he was planning to muscle in on Mamzel’s.”

Lita looked puzzled. “But why? Why would she go to all that trouble?”

“Well in the first place, it wasn’t so much trouble. She spent only two or three weeks on the whole operation. And a professional blackmailer sometimes works as hard trying to get something for nothing as legitimate people do in legitimate jobs. She wanted to know how much money was involved, how much profit she might get a slice of, so she’d be sure to ask for the maximum amount. A little extra research, spadework, legwork, might mean the difference between maybe twenty thousand dollars and fifty thousand. A gal like Zoe would have been willing to do a lot of work for an extra thirty thousand dollars. Who wouldn’t?”

Lita shook her head, that wonderful deep-autumn shade in her hair glistening under the lights. “I can understand that, I guess. Shell. But how could she blackmail anybody even with all that information?”

“Well, don’t forget that gathering all that information was primarily so she could figure out how much she could get, the proper size of the bite. Zoe must already have had the info for the blackmail play. And that goes back to an item on Zoe’s work sheet that fooled me from the beginning. Besides the seven cities in which there are Mamzel’s salons, there was another city listed, an extra one — Corona. You know where it is, don’t you?”

“About forty or fifty miles from here. Near Riverside.”

“Right. And a natural enough answer. That’s what threw me, thinking Corona was the name of another city.” I began pacing again. “Actually, it wasn’t that at all. It’s a woman’s name. It has to be. I even learned from Captain Samson that a woman named Corona — Ann Corona — did two years at Tehachapi for extortion.”

I had deliberately walked away from Lita toward a small mirror on the far wall. I timed my walk so that I could see her now, clearly reflected in the mirror. She picked up the .45 automatic and looked at it briefly, as if she had never seen one before.

She had, though. She had, and she knew how to use it. Without any more hesitation she slapped back the slide, cocking the loaded automatic.

Then Ann Corona aimed the gun straight at my back, and pulled the trigger.

</code>

<code> CHAPTER NINETEEN

The hammer fell with a dull click on the empty cartridge case I had earlier put in the clip. The case I had already “fired” once at Toby.

Lita’s lovely face was blank for a long moment, then suddenly shock spread over it, her lips twisted and her eyes almost closed. Then she smoothed her face with an effort, and acted as if nothing had happened. But a lot had happened in those few seconds. Lita Korrel’s whole world had come to an end. And a little of mine had, too.

I went on as if nothing had changed. “Another funny thing about that work sheet of Zoe’s was that almost everybody connected with Mamzel’s was named on it — except Mamzel herself. Except you, Lita. And the only other name on it that wasn’t a city where a Mamzel’s office was located, was Corona. If Corona wasn’t a city, it was somebody’s name. That — even without the info from Samson — should have told me that Corona was Zoe’s name for Mamzel.”

I had walked across the room again and now I sat down alongside her and took the automatic from her lax fingers. She was still numbed, her face pale and her lips bent by shock. She said, “Shell, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve got some crazy idea in your head, and you’re imagining — saying things you’ll be sorry for.”

I unloaded the gun completely this time, before slipping it into my pocket. Then I went on, as if Lita hadn’t spoken at all. “Some of it I’m sure of, some I’ve guessed, and some you’ll have to tell me. But I know that Ann Corona — that’s you, Lita — and Daniel Bryce were working the badger game eight years ago and got caught. Bryce went to Quentin for four years, and you went to Tehachapi for two. And here’s where it gets interesting. At about the same time, among other gals sent to Tehachapi for the same crime, was one Zoe Avilla who also fell for extortion. Maybe she started her two-year jolt a few months before you did that year, maybe later — it doesn’t make any difference. The important thing is that both of you were there at the same time. You and Zoe got to know each other.”

“This is crazy. You know it’s all a … just coincidence.” “There’s no coincidence about it. Unless you call it a coincidence that two women, both in Tehachapi for extortion, met in prison and one was named Ann and the other Zoe. The rest of it all follows logically from that meeting — all the greed and violence and murder. Even Horatio Adair found out about your prison time, Lita — I guess I’ll have to keep calling you that. I saw a telegram sent to Horatio by a man named Lester, probably a detective. The wire said that the subject did two years at Tehachapi for extortion. My mistake was in thinking Horatio was checking up on Zoe — but he wasn’t, was he, Lita? He was checking up on you.”

Lita’s face was strained, as if all the muscles and tendons under the skin were being held tighter and tighter. Those huge dark eyes looked more than ever like bruises in her face. “Shell,” she said shakily, “what are we going to do?”

“Do? Don’t you get it yet, Lita? You’re going back to Tehachapi. Or worse. They might even give you the gas chamber.” I spoke brutally, harshly. “Murder isn’t any less ugly just because a woman does the killing. In a lot of ways it’s uglier.”

She pressed both hands to her temples and said, “No, it’s not true. You’ve got to help me. Shell. And I didn’t do anything, anyway. At least I didn’t … murder anybody.”

I got to my feet. “The hell you didn’t. You want to know what I think? I think you killed all three of them. Maybe Dan Bryce helped you in a spot or two — but I think most of it was yours, all yours.” I paused. “At the jail, I remember, you said the bullet literally threw Randolph away from you. That whole story of yours was a little too detailed, too precise — “

“Stop it. You’re out of your — “

“No, baby. You don’t get off so easy. Besides the little things that might mean something and might not, like your knowing the canvas-covered plastic Mamzel was already up at Horatio’s pool and in a pink bikini — which you probably wouldn’t have known unless you’d been out there this morning to see it. And like the unwrinkled, un-slept-in nightgown you had on when you woke me up to go to the party at Horatio’s. And Bryce’s picture in your bedroom. And the fact that you must have been lying down in that big tub at the Lassiter — so you’d be even safer when the bomb went off — because your hair was soaking wet when I ran in after the explosion. Besides all of those things, there were some even more obviously murderous items — “

“Stop it, stop — “

“It had to be you who arranged for the little man with a bomb in his briefcase. It had to be you who told Bryce to tail me from Mamzel’s yesterday morning when I’d barely been hired. And what in hell do you suppose I think you were doing with that big forty-five aimed at my back just now? Why do you think I fixed the gun so you couldn’t kill me with it? You’d already tried to kill me once by blasting my back off like that little bloody man — “

She didn’t even say anything. She just came apart. She buried her hands in her hair and jerked her head down, bending forward as shrieks and sobs burst from her mouth. She fell over on the divan and pressed her long, lovely, wonderful body against it, rolling, beating the sides of her face with clenched fists, sobbing, crying, almost screaming, the horrible broken sounds exploding from her lips. From those soft, warm lips that had moved so sensually on mine not long ago, those lips that had caressed my lips, and whispered to me, and lied, and lied, and lied.

When Lita sat up again her eyes were puffy from the tears, and mascara smeared her lids and cheek. Lipstick had been rubbed across the side of her mouth and down on her chin. She was all through, finished. And she was ready to tell me anything I wanted to know.

I started it off by asking, “When did Zoe show up?” “Two nights ago. She just came out of nowhere,” Lita’s voice was dull, empty. “She waited until I was the only one left in the building. I was taking a shower before going home. She called me Ann Corona. It was the only time I’d heard my real name in years. At first I didn’t recognize Zoe. But she knew me. She’d seen my picture outside Gedder’s studio and thought she recognized me. That’s when she started checking, made sure of everything before even talking to me. She knew almost as much about the business as I did.” Lita spoke mechanically.

I said, “How much did she ask you for? Fifty thousand?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Zoe’s scratch sheet said ‘Corona — 50,000.’ It almost had to be the amount she was going to ask you for.” I paused. “So you killed her.”

“Shell, I … it wasn’t like that. Really, I got scared, lost my temper, hit her. We sort of wrestled around. But she was so much smaller than I…” The words trailed off. Then she continued, her voice soft. “We fell and I had my hands around her throat. It was so easy. So easy.” Even now, remembering, Lita looked puzzled. “I just squeezed a little. And suddenly she was still…”

Suddenly she was still. I guess that told the story.

After a few seconds of silence Lita went on, “Before it happened, Zoe told me she’d written the whole thing down, all about me and my prison record, and mailed it to herself, so if anything happened to her the police would check up and learn about me. She thought the mails would surely be safe, and so would she. I knew Dan was in town. I phoned him and he came right over, took Zoe away in his car after dark. I told him about the letter she said she’d written, and Dan said he’d try to take care of it.”

Which he had, I thought. I’d seen Dan Bryce in his postman’s uniform.

Lita had told me Saturday morning about Horatio’s making a pass at her and her sudden laughter, but then she had minimized both the extent of Horatio’s temporarily unrestrained passion and her own reaction. The story she told me now made it easier to understand why the pompous, vengeful little man must have started planning his own kind of revenge right then. In the hopes of finding something embarrassing to Lita, he had hired a detective to check into her past; the detective had informed Horatio of Lita’s prison record, and Horatio had then passed that information on to John Randolph, knowing Randolph would broadcast it and it would hurt Lita plenty.

I broke into Lita’s story. “How do you know what Horatio did?”

“He told me a lot of it himself. Just before he … died. But I didn’t know any of this when Randolph phoned me last night, when I was waiting for you. Randolph wouldn’t tell me on the phone who’d given him the information, only what it was. I denied it, of course, made him agree to see me at his home. I called Dan then, but couldn’t reach him. I knew about the guns on Dan’s wall, so I went there and let myself in.”

“You mean Randolph had to die because he might broadcast the dope about your past?”

“By then the police had found Zoe’s body. They surely knew she’d done time in Tehachapi. If Randolph — or Horatio, for that matter — had broadcast that I’d been at Tehachapi too, the police would soon have learned that I was in prison at the same time Zoe was, it’s obvious they’d have found out I’d killed her. That was why I had to kill them. It was the only way to keep the police from learning about Zoe.”

“How’d you get into Bryce’s home?”

“I have a key,” she said casually. “I knew that Dan kept all the guns in his den loaded — he said an unloaded gun was just a club. And he’d made sure none of them could be traced to him. So I just took the biggest one I could find. I thought that would make it look as if a man must have killed Randolph. I drove to his home and left the gun outside, then went in and talked to him. He admitted Horatio had given him the tip. I denied everything, but he was going to check with the prison and I knew he’d broadcast the truth. So I went outside, stuck the gun in the window and shot him. It … it was just the way I later told you it was. It was awful.”

I said, “So there never was any Hyath Arkajanian there at Randolph’s, no Ark running from the scene.”

“Of course not. I invented that. The police were there before I could get away, so I pretended to faint. That’s when I thought of saying, a big ugly man ran from the house. I knew Toby was having trouble with Randolph, and I also knew you’d had a fight with Ark — Lawrance told me what you’d reported on the phone to him.”

It was possible that Ark had followed us to Lita’s apartment from the Hollywood jail, but it seemed much more likely that he’d heard, or heard about, one of the news broadcasts that had been made by then, and called on Lita to ask her what the score was, why she had lied about him.

I said to Lita, “Ark was a good choice, but how did you manage to pick his face from the mugg books?”

“I met him once in Vegas when I was with Dan. You don’t forget a face like that.”

Or like yours, I was thinking. But I said, “Speaking of faces. When I asked you about Bryce’s picture in your bedroom — is that when you decided you’d have to kill me too?”

She didn’t answer, but I felt pretty sure that was when she’d made up her mind. Then she said, “I told you he was Tom Westland, didn’t I? A representative of the Internal Revenue Service. The detective Horatio hired came to see me and that’s the name and story he gave me. That’s how I happened to have such a glib explanation on the tip of my tongue.”

“About Horatio. The only chance you had to get at him, the way I figured it, was when I was asleep on the couch in your suite at the Edgeway Arms.” “That’s when I did it.”

Lita said that she had waited until I was asleep, taken a stimulant, and then dissolved a handful of sleeping pills in water and filled an empty perfume bottle with the liquid. Then she’d phoned Horatio, said she wanted to see him, that she was sorry about the way she’d acted before. Horatio naturally had no way of knowing Lita had killed Zoe — and by that time Randolph too — so he was willing and even eager for her to come to his estate. She’d asked him to keep his people away from the front of the house so that nobody would see her, and Horatio — expecting something entirely different from what he got — agreed.

Lita went on, “I had him get us something to drink, highballs, and poured the sleeping-pill water into his drink. It didn’t put him clear out, but it made the rest easy.”

“Why the scissors, and all those other items? Just to be sure he was dead?”

“I did that to confuse things, make investigation more difficult, and mainly so it would seem completely different from the way Randolph was killed — as if two different people must have killed them. And it was on the spur of the moment, anyway. The gun was there in his desk, it was Horatio’s own; the cord, too. And the scissors were right there on the table.”

Almost to myself I said, “And all the time I was sleeping.”

She nodded. “When I got back to the apartment I undressed and put on a nightgown so you’d think I’d just gotten up.” She paused. “Shell…” There was a new note in her voice. “You know what will happen if you tell the police about me. They’ll kill me. Legally, but they’ll kill me. Do you want that?”

It’s funny. She was turning on the sex, the charm, the heat, flaunting the famous Mamzel beauty. I knew why, and I knew, too, that she was as bloodthirsty and coldblooded a killer as I’d yet run across. And you’d think, because of all I knew about her, I would find her less beautiful. But I didn’t. Not a bit of it. Even the way she looked now, she was still one of the most gorgeous women I had ever feasted my eyes upon. She looked soft and warm and luscious, but somehow we just didn’t click any more.

“You could let me go.” She waited, and when I didn’t say anything she went on, “Do you want worms crawling in this body of mine. Shell? Maggots burrowing in my breasts?” She cupped the big warm breast in her hands, caressed them slowly and then ran her fingers down over her waist and hips. “Beetles nesting on my thighs?”

“No,” I said, mainly to stop her from going on. “However, my dear Lita, I recall that body well. When I was learning it, shall I say, you had one eye on the clock.”

“What?”

She wasn’t puzzled a bit, and I knew it. “In the Lassiter,” I said. “Just before the arrival of Dan Bryce’s messenger boy, carrying his briefcase.”

“Oh.”

“Uh-huh. We both know you’ve tried to kill me at least twice, so let’s just consider the romance over. I suppose you phoned Dan Bryce’s little man when you had me fill the tub for you, when you said you were phoning Lawrance.”

She sighed heavily. The worm and beetle bit had been the last of her ammunition. “No, I called Dan,” she said. “After he found you at his home, he headed for Las Vegas, but he called me at work first and told me what had happened. He owns a little cabin on the desert outside Vegas, where we’ve stayed before. He was at the cabin when I phoned; he’s there now.”

“Whose idea was the dynamite? Dan’s?”

“No, that was mine, too. It was a different method from the others and I thought it wouldn’t seem to have any connection with them. Besides, I knew we’d have to be especially careful with you. I saw you with a gun in your hand, you know, facing Ark. Anyway, Dan said his man would show up at exactly five o’clock, on the dot, and for me to be in another room. He told me he could work everything out by phone, and for me not to worry.”

And for her not to worry. I thought that was a nice touch.

“Lita,” I said. “there’s one other thing I’m really curious about. Before I saw Horatio’s body, I had never seen a man apparently killed in so many different ways. And since then I haven’t even had time to check on the coroner’s findings. So tell me, of those four ways, what really killed him?”

Lita was quiet for a while. Then she said, “The sleeping pills put him almost out. He was a weak little thing to begin with. He knew something was wrong, so I had to … choke him a little. Then I got his gun and shot him. I don’t think he was dead until then.” After a long silence she said dully, “If only Zoe hadn’t seen that photo of me. And if Horatio hadn’t lost control of himself that day. All he wanted was to make love to me. Maybe — maybe I should have gone to bed with him.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference, Lita,” I said. “But five ways would really have been too much — that too, would have killed him.”

She smiled then. It was the last smile I would ever get from Mamzel. And only later, on specially lonely nights, was I going to realize how important those smiles might have become….

It took the whole night to wrap it up.

The police arrived and took Lita away. She didn’t look back. She walked down the corridor between two officers, hips swinging — and not in time to any funeral march. Maybe justice is blind, I thought, but juries are not; and I could imagine Lita in the witness chair, breathing deeply. And the defense counsel introducing one of the plastic Mamzels as Exhibit Number One.

Whatever happened, it seemed quite certain that Lita would not get what she deserved.

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<code> CHAPTER TWENTY

I had to spend several hours at the Police Building, myself. It was the same old round of telling the story and telling it again, going over and over it, signing the reports. But finally it was finished.

When I left it was after eight in the morning. Monday morning. A new week starting. The sky was clear and blue, and there was an early-morning nip in the air.

I think looking at that clear blue sky brought home to me more forcibly than anything else could have just what Lita was facing now. There was a bitter taste in my mouth as I got into the Cad and headed for Hollywood. I was bone tired, and I felt miserable, sour.

As I drove up Sunset toward home I decided I would close up the office for a week, at least. I was going to sleep, and rest, and loaf, and drink a lot of bourbon and water — and try not to think about Lita Korrel.

Then I saw it. Half a mile ahead, on the right of the road, sticking up into the blue sky, was Mamzel.

It was one of the pink-plastic, twice-life-size statues of Lita, and it was mounted atop the Mamzel’s salon in which I’d met Lita herself such a short time ago. I had known they were to be mounted on all ten of the Mamzel’s offices this morning, Monday, but it was shocking to see one suddenly, now, knowing where and what she was.

I was going to drive right by, but then I realized that probably nobody at Mamzel’s yet knew what had happened. Not Lawrance, or any of the Mamzel Girls, knew that Lita was in jail, that the ball was over. I pulled into the lot and parked. It was eight-thirty a.m.

I walked in through the massive chrome-and-glass doors again, under the sign that spelled out Mamzel’s in the flowing feminine script, but this time the outer office was empty. I walked down the hall, past the door leading into the silent Contouring Room, and on to the room Lawrance was using for an office.

He was already there, scribbling something on a paper on his desk. He looked up as I entered, and smiled wearily at me.

“Morning, Scott,” he said. “You’re around early. Just got here myself.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched, bones popping. “What a mess, huh? After that hellish affair yesterday, I’ve got to try setting up a new kickoff for the campaign, maybe in a couple of weeks. It’s sure screwed up now. But I’ll work it out.” He paused, looking at me closely. “You got any late news, Scott? What’s been going on? I’m a little out of touch.”

I told him what had been happening. I told him that Lita was in a cell, and what she had done. At first he thought I was joking. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, quickly accept what I said as true. But I convinced him.

And he put his face in his hands and stayed like that while I finished the story. I left him with his face still buried in his hands. I hadn’t realized it before, but Lawrance must have been in love with Lita, but that wasn’t surprising. Everyone must have been in love with Lita, at least a little.

I was pretty well wrapped up in my gloomy thoughts as I walked down the corridor. And as I walked into the reception room I bumped into Didi. Literally. We collided with a soft thump. She reeled back from me, blonde hair swirling, then caught her balance and said, “Oh, it’s you. Hi, Shell.”

She was smiling beautifully. Until I told her what I was doing here, told her approximately the same story I had given Lawrance. When I finished, we were quiet for a while. Then I said, “So there it is. I feel like driving out into the country or something. Getting clear away from the buildings and people and smog and maybe just sitting on top of a hill.”

“And just breathing, and making pictures out of clouds.”

“Exactly. Haven’t done that since I was a kid.”

“There room for two on your hill?”

“It’s a big hill.”

“Don’t go away,” she said, then turned and went trotting down the corridor to Lawrance’s office. In a minute or two she was back, and we went out to my car together. That’s the way it was. I didn’t really invite her anywhere, and she didn’t really ask anything of me, it just sort of happened. And then we were in the car, heading up Sunset.

I drove to the Spartan, where I live. On the way, Didi told me that under the circumstances Mamzel’s would be closed for a while, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe even for good. But she was free, and her time was her own. And so was mine.

We went up to my apartment and I said, “Want to pack a lunch? Have a picnic?”

“Sure. What’ll I pack?”

“Well, you can start with bourbon. That’s always good.” A thought struck me. “Matter of fact, we could start with bourbon.”

“Right after breakfast?”

“My dear, it’s really after supper. You are confused.”

“You mean what I saw early this morning was the sun going down.”

“Exactly. Soon it will be night — “

“Oh, all right,” Didi said, smiling. “I’ll have a drink. Now that it’s practically dark.”

I let her mix the drinks while I cleaned up and shaved, then we had another drink, and a lot of enjoyable conversation. We sort of decided not to rush pell-mell out to that hill, not immediately, but it was understood that we would get there sometime soon.

But right now Didi was settled comfortably on my chocolate-brown divan and I was handing her another highball and having a healthy glug of my own. And I was starting to feel very good indeed. I had really been down in the dumps there for a while, low and brooding, with a feeling that life was rotten and miserable. But now, thanks to Didi, I was feeling flashes of the old Shell Scott. Didi seemed to be feeling flashes of the liveliest Didi. We made a pretty flashy couple.

She smiled up at me, looking even better and more appealing than she had when I’d first seen her in Mamzel’s mirrored reception room. I was becoming certain now that life wasn’t completely shattered after all, not a hopeless mess.

For just a moment the image of Lita Korrel floated up in front of my eyes. But I quickly pushed it away, fought for a moment to keep it away. And then, like a rescue party, sort of half-solid in my mind but seemingly marching right through the room, came the Mamzel Girls.

But in truth they didn’t march. They danced, pirouetted, wiggled and bobbed and spun and bent and swayed and did all sorts of fetching things. There was Yama, bending away from me as she had in that first moment when I’d seen her in Mamzel’s Contouring Room … soft, sweetly-shaped Yvonne … dangerous-looking Lois … hot-eyed, soft-mouthed April … Elaine, peering at me from beneath lowered lids … and Corky, Misty, Frances, Pepper, and Cecile.

And here, next to me, snuggling up warmly against me, was Didi.

Didi, who, as I had thought several times before, seemed to have been put together with the best parts of several people; bright and bouncing blonde Didi, who, I was discovering, could also be soft and sweet and provocatively undulating; Didi, whose lips were fire and wine, and whose eyes were a challenge and a surrender, whose breasts and thighs were white velvet, whose heart was warm and good.

No, life wasn’t ending. Not unless Didi killed me.

Life, there seemed no doubt, was just beginning.

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