The Case of the Vanishing Beauty (16 page)

Eggs. My stomach went plop.

I got out of there and went back to the divan. I crooked a finger at Lina. "'Mere."

She came over and sat down. I said, "Thank you. Thank you very much for the eggs." Ugh. "But I forgot to tell you. In the morning I'm somebody else. I'm weak. I…No eggs."

She lifted her eyebrows a little. "I am sorry. What shall I fix?"

"Nothing. Coffee. Mush, maybe."

"Mush?"

"Mush."

"This mush…like pablum?"

"Like mush. Oatmeal. Coffee. That's enough for now. Toast and coffee."

"You feel all right?"

"I feel horrible."

She went back into the kitchen, presumably to put on mush. I hugged the blanket around me and made it into the shower. I turned the water on cold, full blast, gritted my teeth, and jumped in. No blanket.

I woke up. I turned on the hot with my left hand, kept my bandaged right hand outside the spray, soaked a little, finished up with a cold spray, and rubbed down awkwardly with a thick towel. I was whole again.

In the bedroom I traded the blanket for tan slacks, a brown tweed coat, white shirt with a Windsor collar, a maroon wool tie looped in a thick knot, wool argyles, and cordovans. I pranced into the kitchen.

"Morning, pepper pot. Where you been?"

"Cooking mush. You are awful."

"Careful, honey. Don't antagonize me till I've had my coffee."

"Now you want eggs?"

I winced. "No. Still no eggs. For lunch, maybe. For dinner, maybe. Not for breakfast. Never."

She shook her head, black hair swirling, and sat down at the little breakfast nook.

I sat down opposite her at the place she'd fixed for me and said, "I like your hair down."

She smiled, her lips curving deliciously around her white teeth. "So? Thank you, Shell. You do not like it up?"

"I like it up. I like it down. Any way."

She smiled deliciously some more.

I ate my mush.

"A big man like you," she said. "Eating mush."

I paused, holding a spoonful of the stuff in my left hand. "Can't help it. Constitutional weakness. Inbreeding or something. Later I'll have red steaks, and chops, and mountains of spuds. Not for breakfast." I stopped for a minute, surprised. "What time is it?"

"Twelve o'clock. Noon it is."

Come to think of it, I hadn't had anything to eat since Saturday night at El Cuchillo, except the stew that the Seipels had given Tracy and me on Sunday morning, and I hadn't eaten much of that—and here it was noon on Monday. I had an idea I'd be sinking my teeth into a two-inch steak in about an hour.

I polished off two quick cups of coffee and got up. "Do the dishes, woman," I said. "Sweep the floors, get the ring out of the bathtub, feed the fish…Murder! Did you feed the fish?"

"But yes. I gave them one of those little boxes."

"Boxes!"

"Not the box. Only what was in it."

"What was in it! I charged into the front room, Lina on my heels. The box of blue crab meat was empty beside the big aquarium. She'd given them enough food to last them six months. The fish were frisky as pups, though, and the banquet hadn't seemed to hurt them. A big pile of uneaten food lay in the bottom of the feeding ring. I dumped it out in the kitchen sink and put the feeding ring back in the tank.

"Did I do wrong?" Lina asked.

"Uh-uh. It's O.K. Thought maybe you gave them something else," I lied. "Well, honey, I think before long you can get out of here."

"Perhaps I do not wish to get out of here."

"Don't argue, sweetheart. I think pretty soon there'll be no reason for you to stay."

"No reason?" She tossed her head a little and laughed that liquid gurgling deep in her throat.

I leered at her, walked over to the couch, sat down, and dialed Homicide.

"Don't you ever leave?" I asked Samson. "Wife kick you out?"

"She will," he grumbled. "I suppose you just got up." I told him I had, and listened to him groan. "The automatic I sent down last night, Sam. The slugs in it check with anything?"

"Not a thing, Shell."

"I, uh, thought maybe it might fit the bullet in Georgia."

"Nope. She was killed with the same caliber gun, but not that one."

"O.K., Sam. What about the prints?"

"Got some good ones. A little smudged, but good enough. Why don't you come down and chin about it?"

"What for? Don't you know who they belong to?"

"Yeah, we know. That's what's funny. A con man—guy named Walter Press."

"What's funny about that?"

"This Press—he's dead."

I held the phone out at the end of my left arm, looked at it stupidly, blinked, and stuck the phone back on my ear. "Say that again."

"This Press guy. The guy that belongs to the prints. He's dead. Been dead over a year."

I said, "Maybe you're right. I'll come down and chin with you. See you in twenty minutes, Sam."

I hung up, told Lina I'd see her later, and took off for the L.A. City Hall.

I gunned the Cad straight up Rossmore and took a right on Sunset Boulevard, shifting with the heel of my bandaged right hand. Fifteen minutes later I turned right on Main Street and went down to First, found an open parking space, luckily, and snared it. I walked back half a block to the cement steps of the Main Street entrance, climbed them, went inside, and took the elevator up one floor.

Sam, I was pleased to see, had his cigar already lit, so I wouldn't have to go through the sometimes agonizing suspense of waiting for him to light it. Could have been, though, that the suspense would have been preferable to the dense clouds of foul-smelling smoke that billowed over his desk.

"That's where the smog comes from," I said. "You, and guys like you, smoking dried leaves and llama dung."

He bit into the cigar and lifted his upper lip. "Hah. Takes a real man to smoke one of these."

"Takes a real man to watch one smoked. What's the inside on this Press guy?"

Sam looked at me. "How's the hand?"

"Not bad. Doc fixed it up. Didn't bleed at all, hardly."

"Umph. Should have been your throat. Well, we wired those prints to the FBI—nothing here in the files—and they check back that they belong to Walter Press, supposed to have been killed in an accident in September of last year. Over a year ago."

"Supposed?"

"Yeah. They find him in his car at the foot of a cliff, burned all to hell-and-gone. Identified by rings, car, personal belongings. That kind of a deal. Which is why his prints weren't in the dead file. Yeah, I know what you're gonna say—it could have been somebody else." He ran a hand through the fringe of his iron-gray hair. "If it wasn't somebody else, how the hell did his prints get on that glass?"

An idea started growing. "This Press. What did he look like?"

Sam picked a paper off his desk and read briefly from it: "Walter L. Press. Description: Male, White, American, thirty-nine years, five feet seven and one-quarter inches tall, hundred-thirty pounds, medium complexion, brown eyes. He's bald, with a fringe of brown hair, and he has no identifying marks or scars. What's that give you?"

The idea stopped growing and went away. "Nothing," I said disgustedly. "Not a thing. Give me that height and weight again."

Sam rolled the ash from his cigar into a big glass ashtray. "Five-seven and a quarter, hundred and thirty pounds.. What you think, Shell?"

"I'm damned if I know what to think." I lit a cigarette and played with ideas for a couple of minutes. "Sam, either Press was the guy in the car or he wasn't. Brilliant, huh? Anyway, if he was, then how the devil those prints got on a glass in Narda's room, I can't figure. If he wasn't the guy, it still doesn't add up fight. What else you got on Press? You said he was a con man. How about that?"

"Well, we've been doing a lot of checking since the dope came from the FBI—trying to make it fit. Not much so far, but we know from the information we picked up that he worked the confidence games, made a few touches—none of 'em very big. He wasn't an especially good operator, it seems. It looks like he got in some kind of a jam. Can't get the straight of it yet, but he was working with another character and they made a big haul. Got a lot of dough from some guy. The pay-off is, Press skips with the load, the whole roll."

"Interesting. Then he's found dead, huh?"

"Not yet." Samson stuck out his heavy jaw and grinned, his cigar sticking up at an angle past his nose. "Not often I get a chance to surprise you, Mastermind."

"Oh, you're going to surprise me now?"

"Maybe."

"Surprise away and be damned."

"Walter Press is the guy that originally started what they call the Inner World Society of Truth Believers."

"The hell! Explain it."

"Not much to explain. We get it little by little, and we'll get more, but that much is sure. Not much else. It stacks up like so: Press was some kind of a gum-game artist, a salesman. Then back around the middle of summer—that's last year—he pops up with this IW Society. Right around then, too, he makes this touch with some other guy—don't know who, yet—and doesn't split."

"And then he has an accident and gets all burned up."

"Something like that. But don't jump to conclusions, Shell. We don't know the exact dates of anything except when he's supposed to have died."

"When's that?"

"September twelfth. Last year, up in Oregon."

I said, "How about some of the people Press knew? Guys he worked with or ran around with, or people that started this IW racket with him. A little chat with some of them might be real interesting."

"Funny thing about that, too. Seems like Press went along with this cult thing a while, and then, bang, he gets rid of everybody connected with it. We talked with one of the gals—woman named Lucille Stoner. That's where we got the dope about Press firing everybody. We're looking for a couple of the local men he's supposed to have worked with on the con games.

I got the three names from Sam, including the woman's address, and we chewed it around some more. While we chewed it, I briefed Sam on everything that had happened to me up till now, except my swiping Narda's registers, which he didn't know about. Well, almost everything. Stuff concerning the case, I mean. We always wound up guessing about those prints, so I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up.

"Time I was moving, Sam. Thanks for the info. I've got some ideas, but I've also got a feeling they all stink. Figured I was coming along pretty good for a while there." I thought a minute. "Say, this little guy, Press—you know if he ever operated down in Mexico?"

"Uh-uh. Not so far as we know. What's that got to do with it?"

"Nothing, I guess. Just an idea."

Sam ground out his cigar and leaned back in his chair

"I'm picking up this Narda," he said. "We'll find out who the hell he is then—and what those two hoods were doing out at his place. You should have spilled that sooner, Shell."

"Yeah. Uh, Sam. I got something cooking. If you can hold off a little, I'd like to go out with you when you pick him up. I'll be back up here later if you can wait. It might be important. Won't hurt anything, will it?"

He frowned. "Guess not. What you thinking?"

"Hell, I hardly know myself right now. But I'll come back in later. O.K. by you? Maybe I'll have something."

He was still frowning; but he said, "O.K. Only don't wait all night."

I beat it.

Chapter Fourteen

I WAS SO HUNGRY I was shaking like a butterfly with delirium tremens. I stopped in Mike Lyman's and ordered prime ribs of beef au jus. While I worked on the shrimp cocktail, left-handed and awkward, I tried to make sense out of everything that had happened since Saturday. I didn't get very far. Always pieces missing, something off key. It was making me dizzy.

The prime ribs came and I lost myself in the delicious morsels and succulent juices. Before I was half through, I knew one order wasn't going to be enough, so I flagged the waiter and sent him off for more. It was one-thirty before I was back in the Cad, but I felt as if I could wrestle gorillas.

I drove back down to Broadway, took a left past Fourth, and swung in behind the Hamilton Building. I parked and went up to the office.

There wasn't anybody there, and the gal at the PBX in the employment office down the hall told me nobody'd left word for me, but I did have some mail. None of it was important except the message from Mr. Martin. It wasn't a letter, just an oblong slip of paper signed by Cornell Martin: a check made out to me for ten thousand dollars. I hoped I was earning it. I addressed a stamped envelope to my bank, scribbled a note that I stuck in with the check, left the envelope with the gal at the PBX, and was off to see people.

The people I wanted to see are the backbone of any kind of investigation—official, unofficial, private, what have you. Informants. Guys who got around where they might pick up information I could use. Some of them were personal friends of mine; some of them were just willing to pick up a buck the quickest way. Nearly all of them came in handy one time or another. I almost struck out, though, before I had any luck.