Kill the Clown (The Shell Scott Mysteries), page 7
“Huh?” I followed her gaze. There wasn’t anything over there except a table, chair, and a big clock.
“Goodness,” she said again, “I didn’t know it was so late.”
“It’s later that you think.”
“I’m on in twenty minutes.”
“Say that again.”
“I only have twenty minutes to get dressed, and undressed.”
“One of us is nuts.”
“Changed, I mean I’m due at the club — the band is already playing.”
“I don’t hear a thing.”
“I might even get fired if I’m late again.”
“I might get fired myself if — ”
“You’ll have to leave.”
“Leave?”
“Go away. Get out. Go home,”
“But . . .”
“I’m sorry. I have to go to the club.”
“But . . . but . . . but . . .” Nothing else came out. Her meaning was filtering in, but I was trying to keep it unaltered; then we were up off the divan, and she was saying, “I am sorry, Shell,” and I was being led in something approaching stupor to the front door, and then the door was closing gently behind me and I was staring blankly at a small beetle or something else very unexciting which was running across the hall carpet.
I turned around and said to the closed door, “But . . .” I could hear her inside there trotting around. Getting dressed, I presumed. I raised a hand in the air and said, “But . . .” and let the hand fall to my side. I wasn’t sure what had happened. Not a bit sure.
All I knew was that — somehow — she had tricked me.
Seven
I really don’t know how long I stood there. But I was still standing there, looking at the beetle. He — or she; you can’t tell about beetles — was almost to the wall, and I was wondering what good it would do him or her when it got there. And then I heard the click of the doorknob behind me.
And Lolita’s voice: “Shell?”
I swung around. “Yes? Yes?”
“You . . .” She stopped, started again. “It seems so silly. But you really think he might try to kill me, don’t you?”
I pulled myself together, took a deep breath and snorted it out. “I do. I don’t say it’s a sure thing, but he might. And if he might, there’s no sense making it easy for him.”
She sighed, moistened her felonious lips. “You really think I should stay away from the club tonight?”
“Tonight — and for many more nights.”
“Well . . . come back in, will you, Shell? Maybe you’re right. You’ve got me half convinced.”
I went back in. Two minutes later we were on that divan again, and I had the other half of her convinced.
And a little later she said, “Oh, Shell, don’t go. Don’t go.”
“Hell,” I said weakly, “who’s going?”
Before midnight we left the Whitestone. Half an hour later I parked my Cad near the Washington, a medium-priced hotel on Washington Boulevard. I’d used every trick I knew to make sure we weren’t tailed — being the last car through red lights, doubling back, going the wrong way up one-way streets and so on — and I knew we hadn’t been followed.
In a few more minutes Lolita was checked into room forty-one — not as Lolita Lopez — and I said to her at the door, “I’ll be pretty busy tomorrow, so I probably won’t get back here till tomorrow night sometime. You keep out of sight till then.”
She smiled. “I’ll even call room service for food.”
“Fine. See you tomorrow, honey.”
She nodded, looking at me from half-lidded eyes. “’Bye, Shell.”
I went back to the Cad, climbed in and headed for home.
At ten o’clock the next morning I started to get a little panicky. Because this was Monday morning and there remained exactly forty-eight hours before Ross Miller’s execution — which meant that Miller was now being taken from his cell in San Quentin’s Death Row and moved into an isolation cell. He would be moved only once again, into the gas chamber. And now I knew he was innocent, knew an innocent man was going to die — unless I stopped his execution.
But the only man who could stop that execution was the Governor of the State of California. And merely what I “knew” — tales from alcoholic hoodlums, rumbles from the city’s scum, deductions, logic, hearsay evidence — would not at all impress the Governor of the State of California.
In the next six hours I didn’t get close to anything that would help Miller, or hurt Quinn. I talked to Ira Semmelwein and John Porter, the two men Pinky told me were being paid off by Quinn. They were cordial, pleasant, but — Quinn? Who in the world was Frank Quinn? The gangster? Goodness, they didn’t know any gangsters.
That’s the way it went. Moreover, I had to move about with considerable care. I knew Quinn would try to get me again. I didn’t know where or when or how; but I knew he’d try — until I managed to stop him. So at four o’clock that afternoon I parked before the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center on La Cienega Boulevard.
The thought of actually attending Frank Quinn’s hoodlum ball tomorrow night was a prospect which still filled me with something approaching total nausea. But I had decided to make the necessary preparations for that insanity, just in case.
I got out of the Cad and walked over to the Costume Center. On display behind the window was a stately mannequin of a gal in powdered wig and fluffy silks and laces, looking much like Marie Antoinette, and with her dress scooped out even lower than today’s most daring gowns. Worn any lower it would have been merely a high skirt. I liked it a lot. Next to Marie was a guy from a different period, a Roman gladiator, who didn’t look glad about anything; he was tugging strenuously at a broad-bladed sword sticking from his solar plexus, and looking pretty uncomfortable. It was an interesting window, but of no great help to me, so I went on inside.
The inside was even more interesting than the outside, primarily because the little honey-blonde lovely behind the counter was no wax model, but definitely a model I could wax enthusiastic about, and she was wearing a harem costume that would have cremated the sultan.
I walked up to the counter and leaned over it toward her, and she batted big long dark lashes at me like a gal waving two fans in a Spanish fandango and said, “Can I help you?” and I said, “You have.”
She cooed and chuckled and made jolly noises all at once, which turned out to be quite delightful even though you may not think that possible, and I said, “I note that you are already modeling, in superlative fashion, one of this establishment’s costumes. That being the case — ”
She interrupted, grinning just as widely as I was, “The Marie Antoinette costume sells for six hundred and twenty dollars, and I don’t model that one.”
“Well, at least I knew it was Marie Antoinette. I’m not so stupid.”
“Did you want the costume?”
“No, I’m after something for me.” She coughed delicately and fluttered the fanlike eyelashes over soft brown eyes, and I added hastily, “For me to wear, I mean. I’m invited to a costume ball.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Something that will cover me all up.”
“That seems a shame.”
“Doesn’t it? I want to . . . surprise some people.”
“Oh, you don’t want to be recognized. A surprise?”
“That’s it.”
She thought a moment. And very cute, she was, thinking. It was as if she had to stretch unused muscles, creakingly, but then her soft little face smoothed out and she said, “I have it!”
“You do indeed.”
“The clown!”
“What?”
“The clown! There!” She pointed, all excited. Here was a gal who really threw herself into her work. “Isn’t it dreamy?”
I followed her pointing finger. All I saw was a stiff model wearing a black floor-length gown or robe and a black hood with eyes and mouth holes cut in it, and holding a broad-bladed axe.
“Not the Executioner, silly,” she said. “The Clown.”
Then I spotted him, another ten feet farther away. It was another figure, male this time, presumably, dressed in a baggy white outfit which droopily covered his whole body, even including the legs in somewhat the same fashion as this little gal’s harem bloomers, and which had three six-inch red buttoms down the front. On his head was a tasseled red-and-blue cap, and his face was painted white and red and black with a big blue nose stuck on for good measure. He was somewhat nightmarish, if not exactly dreamy, and he was exactly what I wanted.
“That’s for me,” I said.
“Purchase or rental?”
“Rent. I won’t need it after tomorrow night . . .” I paused, thinking. “But I’ll leave a deposit to cover the complete cost.”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary — ”
“It might. It just might.”
She went off into what was apparently the stockroom and came back with a cardboard box. While she wrote out my receipt we talked about extra items I might need, and I wound up with a kit of theatrical makeup. And that appeared to do it. All I needed now was a dozen Marines, a tank, and a flame-thrower.
The little gal handed me my receipt and I began writing a check for the required rental plus deposit, then she said, looking past me, “I’ll be with you in a minute, sir.”
I looked over my shoulder. A big ape about my size was eyeballing us strenuously. Or maybe he was just looking at the gal, which seemed likely, since a lot of the little gal was showing here and there among the filmy bits of her costume. But when I looked around he mumbled, “No hurry, no hurry,” and turned aside. I’d seen all of him I wanted to see, anyway; he had a face like a barracuda, a face that seemed to come to a point in front, studded with too many teeth.
“There you are, sir.”
I pulled my head around again. The little tomato was holding my package toward me, smiling over it the way gals smile over champagne glasses just before they say, “Oo, it tickles.”
“Don’t call me sir, please. Call me Shell.”
“Shell?”
“Uh-huh. In case I call up sometime and say ‘This is Shell’ and then make all sorts of shameless remarks.”
“Oh, that sounds like fun.”
“Who knows? We might even have our own little costume party.”
“And you a man who goes for Marie Antoinette. I can imagine the costumes.” She raised her shoulders, tilted her head to one side and stirred up the air with those eyelashes again. Then she said, “’Bye, Shell,” and turned her back on me, and walked straight ahead to the stockroom again.
It was about twenty feet to the stockroom’s door, and I watched her every inch of the way. Not only the forward inches, but the side-to-side inches. She had a walk that was one of the friendliest things I’d ever seen. Her well-rounded hips swung provocatively back and forth as if they were waving goodbye, and as they went out of sight I murmured under my breath, “Not goodbye, my dears . . . but only au revoir.”
Perhaps I was being untrue, in my fashion, to Lolita and Doris Miller — but how many days in the week do you meet a harem girl? That thought reminded me I was supposed to drop by and see Doris this afternoon, and bring her up to date on the progress of the case. Carrying my clown outfit, I headed for the Cad. I didn’t see the Barracuda. And so soon after that walk to the stockroom, it was understandable that I didn’t even think about him again, not then.
When I walked into the Royal Photo shop, where I’d dropped off my roll of exposed infrared film last night, Timothy, the technician, leered at me.
“I should of called the cops,” he said.
“Knock it off. Believe it or not, those shots constitute a lever. It was Archimedes or somebody, maybe even Einstein, who said give me a lever long enough, and a place to put it, and I’ll move the world.”
“Probably Einstein. No matter what you say, them pictures — ”
“They are a lever, Timothy, with which I hope to move a man. I hope to move him so vigorously that it will keep two people alive.”
“Two people?”
“Yeah — and one of them is me.”
“Well, in that case . . . But, man, them pictures — ”
He went off to get them. While waiting for him to come back I glanced out the front window of the shop. A long black car, looking a little bit like a hearse, went by. I felt a small, slow tightening of my spine. Not because the buggy looked somewhat like a hearse. But because, earlier this afternoon, I’d seen it before. A couple of times before.
Ever since the moment on the Freeway when that machine gun had been swinging toward my head, I had spent almost as much time looking in all compass directions as driving. And, as a matter of course, I’d managed to be the last car through several stop lights, utilized the standard tricks for shaking a possible tail. Consequently, when I’d noticed the hearselike sedan for the second time I’d taken even more care; but here was that same buggy — or one immensely like it — again. While the coincidence didn’t snap credulity, it sure stretched it.
Timothy brought back the five-by-seven enlargements in a manila envelope. I’d snapped an entire roll and Timothy had made a pair of enlargements from each of the twenty negatives. Twelve were too blurred to be of any value. Of the remaining eight, I chose two which were perfectly exposed and sharp, and in which the faces of both Jay and Mrs. Frank Quinn were easily recognizable. I kept both copies of those two, then destroyed the rest, negatives and all.
Timothy was still making mild sounds of shock and protest when I went out.
I was nearly to Doris Miller’s, looking forward to a bright spot in the day, when it happened again. It was a little before six p.m. I’d stopped at an intersection and was watching my rearview mirror when the black car appeared in it — not, however, behind me, but a block back, traveling from left to right on the street at right angles to this one. I shook my head. Either there was a mortician’s convention in town, all of the fellows driving hearses, or . . .
Then, of course, I had it.
I found the item within thirty seconds. It was under the Cad’s front bumper, held by one small metal clamp and a strand of wire. With a crescent wrench from the Cad’s trunk I loosened the bolt holding the clamp, then yanked the small box free. I got back into the Cad, put the box on the seat beside me.
The item was, familiarly speaking, a “squawk box,” more accurately a small self-contained radio transmitter. Ever since being attached to my car, it would have been sending out a constant signal on one of the many available radio frequencies; the lad in that black buggy would have with him a radio receiver tuned to that same frequency. An adjunct to the receiver would be a loop antenna. When the loop was at right angles to the beam issuing from the squawk box on my Cad the incoming signal would be strong; as it deviated from right angles the signal would weaken or fade out completely. Thus, even with only one following car containing one receiver, a man could keep rough track of me, and easily locate my Cad whenever I parked. With one or more additional receivers in other cars, and using simple triangulation procedures, my pals could pinpoint my location at any time.
I swore. That guy could have been on my tail all day. I thought back over where I’d been, the stops I’d made. Calls on Semmelwein and Porter, the Costume Center, Timothy’s photo shop, and others. There was nothing I could do about it now, except hope there’d been no real damage — at least I hadn’t been shot yet. Something else, a vague uneasiness, teetered on the edge of thought, but I couldn’t push it over, couldn’t grab it.
At least I wouldn’t have any trouble shaking the tail now, and that was the important thing at the moment. I started the car again.
It was six-thirty on the nose, already dark, when I started walking to Doris Miller’s apartment. I’d parked three blocks away, merely so my Cadillac wouldn’t by chance be seen at her place — I wasn’t worried about a tail now. I had stopped at a bus terminal and left there, in a locker to which I now had the key, my clown costume, the engraved invitation to Quinn’s party, and the extra pair of enlargements of Jay and Mrs. Quinn. Moreover, while there I had not only gotten rid of that squawk box but had high hopes I’d given back to the hearse-driver a portion of the annoyance he’d given me.
Because I had transferred that little transmitter to a Greyhound Bus — just leaving for Dallas, Texas.
Eight
Doris had on another of her getups, or maybe it was a getout, because she did appear to be trying to get out of it. This was my day of days, but I was already occupied for the night. Life is sometimes cruel.
My client smiled half-heartedly at me, but even without all the nerve and bounce in the world she was one of the most delectable creatures I’d seen. Seen this year at least. I could imagine how bright and shining and beautiful she would be with her brother safe again and out of the clink.
She mixed highballs for us and we sat on the living room couch while I told her what had been happening, just hitting the high spots. I summed it up, “So, I know very well what the truth is — that Ross is innocent, that Quinn shot Flagg, that Quinn put pressure on at least three witnesses to make them give false testimony at the trial.”
“We’ve — we’ve really known that all along, haven’t we, Shell?” She sighed. “Nothing much has changed, has it?”
“It’s changed more than it appears on the surface, Doris. For example, I know that Flagg was Quinn’s payoff man, and that Quinn had one of his hoods kill Heigman, drown him. I’ve got some names — ”
She interrupted. Not angrily, or with irritability. Just with a dullness I didn’t like to hear in her voice. “But there’s nothing you can prove, Shell. You’ve told me that. Nothing the police will accept, nothing the governor would even listen to, nothing that can possibly help Ross — ”
