The Shell Scott Sampler (10 page)

“Bill.”

“Of course. Come on in, Bill,”

I went inside, shut the door, marched to her bedroom and found the box of Caress! When I shined my light on it the powder glowed as if alive and radioactive.

Ardith, looking over my shoulder, said, “Well, I never. Is that why it smells so good?”

“Nope.” I turned the lamp's beam on Ardith. She was wearing a simple black cocktail dress with spaghetti straps and a provocatively nude neckline, and there was a lot of smooth white skin in view. All of it glowed beautifully. The stuff was even in her eyebrows, in her hair, on arms, fingers, elbows, everywhere. Literally everywhere, as I recalled.

“Ardith,” I said, “last night at the bar before I left, you may recall I talked to you about a woman named Mrs. Ingrid Otterman.”

“I remember. Why does it shine so funny, like —”

“I also hinted that maybe your fellow—hell, let's call him Alston Spaniel, shall we?”

“I don't know any Alston Spaniel. He—my fellow—told me never,
never
to say anything to anybody who asked
anything —
”

“Yeah. It's still Alston Spaniel. I tried to tell you last night, I've a hunch he's got another tomato—girl around here. A hot-looking —”

“He doesn't!”

“I know. You're his one true love. But what if he's got
lots
of one true loves?”

“That's silly. I'm —”

“Yeah. But what if I could prove it? Would you feel more like telling me a little about Alston then?”

She didn't even deny his name was Alston. She squinted her eyes and said, “Prove?”

I pointed at the box and told her what was in it, what I'd done, explained about the lamp in my hand and why she was glowing.

“You mean … you put something in my Caress! box?” she asked me, still struggling with the problem.

“You got it,” I said. “So then you put it on you, yourself. Dear, it's all over you, wherever you powdered with that great big fluffy purple puff.”

Her green eyes narrowed. Widened. Squinted. She looked at me and said in a stony voice, “How did you know I used a great big fluffy purple puff?”

She had me there. “Well, that's a trade secret.”

It seemed to start sinking in, then, and Ardith said, “All over me?
All
over?”

She grabbed the lamp from my hand, bent over and pulled up her skirt and shined the light on her legs. Wow. Yeah, she'd gotten the legs good. Then Ardith straightened up, raised the lamp and aimed it toward the nude top of her dress. With her free hand she reached for one of her remarkable breasts. Damned if she didn't haul it out and examine its apparently radioactive gorgeousness in the infrared beam.

She stared at it, examined it closely. Which made two of us. She made a little noise, and I made a little noise.

“But—
why?
” she asked in perplexity.

“Well, it's rather complicated —”

“Will it hurt me? Is it like X-rays?”

“Goodness no, and it won't hurt a bit, dear.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm positive. It isn't hurting, is it?”

“No. No, I have to admit that.” She realized she was still holding onto her breast, and put it back where it had come from. “No, it doesn't hurt,” she said seriously.

“I'm sure glad of that.”

“But—
why?
” she said again. “Why did you put it in my Caress! box?”

“Why? Well —” I paused and collected my thoughts, then went on briskly. “You've told me several things, Ardith. That you never heard of black-haired Mrs. Otterman, and you're sure Alston—Bill, whoever he is—never heard of her, either. You're his one true love, and all that.”

“I
am
his one true love.”

“I already asked you, what if I could
prove
different?”

“You couldn't.”

“I could. And will. Let me clue you, dear. The powder which you administered to your, ah, anatomy with that great big fluffy purple puff is obviously all over you. If Alston, um, got some of that powder on his, ah, hands—and then put his, ah, hands on—um—a portion of
another
woman's anatomy, then according to the laws of magnetism, cohesion, friction—according to the laws of science, the evidence should still reside not only upon Alston's hands but upon that aforementioned portion of her anatomy.” It was a bit difficult to explain delicately.

But she got it right away.

“Why, that bastard,” she said.

“So let's go see the gal in question. Unless you want to spill to me about Alston immediately.”

“I don't know any Alston. I don't believe you. Besides, I am his one true love.”

“Yeah. Well, we'll see.”

After my thunderous knock on Mrs. Otterman's door in the Laguna Hotel, there were sudden sounds inside. Rustling, thumping, then footsteps coming toward us. The door opened and the shapely black-haired gal looked out, dark brows knit in a frown.

I pushed the door open and she said, “What's the meaning of this?”

Her face was angry—but by that time I'd poured the infrared light over her and the evidence was unmistakable. Luminous streaks on her face and throat, her bare shoulders and the upper swell of her breasts.

With the door wide, both Ardith and I could see she wasn't dressed to go out. She had a striped beach towel wrapped around her, beneath her arms and reaching down nearly to her knees, and quite clearly she wore nothing beneath it.

Ardith swept past me, and the black-haired tomato moved away from her. I stepped inside and slammed the door, then looked around and peeked into the john, but the room appeared empty except for the three of us.

Mrs. Otterman obviously didn't know what was going on, and a little fright was beginning to show on her sensual face.

I stepped close to her, letting the light pour onto her face and shoulders, and glanced at Ardith. “Maybe Spaniel isn't here now, but he sure as hell
was
here. Satisfied?”

She didn't speak to me. She glared at Mrs. Otterman and said, “You bitch! Where's Al?”

Al. She'd got it right that time.

“Al?” said Mrs. Otterman. “Who?”

These babes, they sure weren't going to admit they knew Al. He trained his one true loves well. They weren't going to talk about Al. Not much, they weren't.

“You know who!” Ardith screamed.

Then in one swift movement she reached out, grabbed the beach towel, and yanked. It
came free and Ardith threw it to the floor, pointed at Mrs. Otterman's marvelous, jutting
breasts, pointed here and there and practically everywhere, and yelled: “
That
Al,
that's who!”

Mrs. Otterman reacted automatically, I suppose.

The towel had barely hit the floor when she threw her right arm way back and out as if reaching for the brass ring on a merry-go-round, then swung it forward and thwack! She got Ardith on the cheek and knocked her halfway across the room.

But not down. Not down, and a long way from out.

“Eeee!” Ardith yelled, and charged at Mrs. Otterman. Sock,
thwack!
Slap!

“My Al!”

“
Your
Al? Why you —”

Thwack!

Friends, it was the battle of the decade. Maybe even the heavyweight championship of the century. It was glorious. Midway in the first round, Mrs. Otterman got one hand in Ardith's red hair and another wound in her black dress and tried to yank them both off. She got the dress three fourths off, but couldn't manage the hair, and by that time Ardith had kicked her in the stomach and knocked her flat on her back, going “Ooooph!” and gasping.

It was a combination of boxing, slapping, screaming and wrestling, and I saw a few blows and holds that not even I—with years of unarmed defense, judo, aikido, karate and unnamed systems behind me—had witnessed or even experimented with before.

Ardith lost the rest of her dress and finally was fighting to the death in a pair of black lace pants, which made it easy to tell her from Mrs. Otterman, who was wearing nothing except lots of Caress!

The fight ended when Ardith hit Mrs. Otterman with a ceramic lamp, then fell, exhausted, to her hands and knees. Mrs. Otterman lay flat on her back, eyes slowly opening and closing, and saying, “Gug … ahp…”

And then something sneezed, under the bed.

Something? I smiled.

“Come on out, Al,” I said.

He came out—but not like a man defeated, dejected, surrendering. He came out in a hurry, his handsome face contorted with rage, frustration—and perhaps a sense of irrevocable loss. He came out, onto his knees, up in a hurry, and at me swinging his right hand.

Even while swinging he got a glimpse of his two true loves in approximately equal states of nudity and sheer exhaustion on the floor, and he let out the cry of a wounded elk, then concentrated on knocking my block off.

But he didn't concentrate hard enough. And he shouldn't have swung that right hand at me in the first place. In fact, he shouldn't have swung any hand at me.

It was a two-punch fight. His, which whistled by my ear as I bent my knees and pulled my head aside two or three inches, and mine which cracked on his chin with the sound of a baseball bat breaking.

Then Alston was sprawled next to the wall, silent; Mrs. Otterman was gasping her last “Gug…” and trying to struggle to a sitting position; and Ardith was still on her hands and knees, breathing like a long-distance runner.

I didn't say anything for a while.

I looked at Alston, at Mrs. Otterman, at Ardith. I took a good look, since perhaps never again would such a sight present itself to my eyes, and I wanted to remember every little detail, in case I should some day write my autobiography.

Finally, having memorized all of Chapter One, clear up to the flashback, I said, “Well, girls, shall we now discuss this sensibly? Come, let us reason together….”

* * *

I caught up with Lupo—this time—in Dolly's. Not at the Happy Time. Back where it had truly started. From Dolly's, to the Happy Time, to Dolly's again. But this was the
really
unhappy time for Lupo.

On the first occasion he'd merely been scared; and of course, now, I knew precisely why. At our second meeting he'd been horrified, afraid I was actually going to shoot him in the eye. But this time the jig was up, and he knew it.

He was already in a booth. Two men sat opposite him. His back was to me, but one of the other guys saw me striding their way and apparently told Lupo that a large, white-haired, fierce-looking individual was descending determinedly upon them.

Lupo craned his head around the side of the booth and spotted me. He just looked. He didn't spring to his feet, or try to run, or do anything violent. Just looked. The Colt Special wasn't in its holster; it was in my right-hand coat pocket and my hand was around it, but as it turned out I didn't need it.

When I stopped by the booth Lupo looked up at me and said, very quietly, “Well?”

“I've got all of it, Lupo,” I said. “The Da Vinci bit, the m.o., who and why, even the phony lead to Spaniel. Hell, I even know who gave you the idea about Alston.
I
gave you the idea. Right?”

He raised one hand weakly and waved it at the two men, as though waving good-bye. Well, he was waving good-bye. They left.

I slid into the seat they'd vacated and said, “I'll tell you about it, Lupo. I'll even buy you a drink.”

“Thanks a bunch,” he said.

After the highballs arrived I said, “I'll skip the details. Just let it be said that Alston Spaniel, true to form, had two women with him at Laguna, stashed in separate pads. And both of them told me everything they could think of about Al, which was plenty. I can account for virtually every minute of his time for the last forty-eight hours and more. For example, last night he was with one of them till about eight p.m., then went directly to the other one—what a life that man leads.”

“Yeah,” said Lupo gloomily.

“For a better example, I know that on Wednesday night—when I first asked you to listen around for rumbles about an art heist in Bel Air—Alston was with one of his lovelies from about five p.m. on. At the Hollywood Roosevelt by the way, not the Westmoreland, as you told me. Around ten thirty p.m. Al got a phone call from somebody, whereupon he and the lovely packed a couple bags and headed for Laguna Beach. He was with her constantly, and did not make any phone calls or go out into the city. In other words, Lupo, he did not and could not have contacted a killer or set up a hit.
He
didn't send that gunman to blast me.”

Lupo moistened his lips but didn't speak.

“Interestingly enough, the killer didn't even say Al Spaniel sent him to plug me. What he said when I asked him who sent him was, ‘Spaniel. He told me his name was Al Spaniel.' Get that, Lupo. He
told
me, the bum said. Which means he didn't know Al by sight, but merely accepted the word of the guy who hired him.”

I grinned. “Obviously he didn't know you by sight, either, Lupo.”

He lifted his glass and I saw his Adam's apple bounce as he took three or four successive swallows. When he put the glass down there was less than an inch of liquid left in it.

I went on, “I heard Alston talking to somebody on the phone last night about a two-thousand-buck payment, but I thought he was making the payment. Hell, he was
getting
the two G's, wasn't he, Lupo? Two G's—from you, of course—for taking a quick expense-paid trip to Laguna. For leading me on a wild-goose chase. To get me out of L.A. while you disposed of the Da Vinci. Was that the whole payment, or were you going to give him enough to settle with Joe Pappa when you got your cut?”

He finished his drink, that was all.

I leaned forward. “You're going to tell me, you know.”

He swallowed. “Yeah, I know. Go on. Or is that it?”