The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (3 page)

I sighed, dialed the LAPD
Motor Vehicle Division. Working the phone there was Sergeant Robert
Denn, whom I knew fairly well. So I told him who was calling and
added, “Can you run the registration for me on a new black
Mercedes, Bob? Number’s CVY176, I think it was an S600, looked like
money.”

“
Couple secs, Shell,” he
said, and I knew he was poking letters and numbers into his
computer.

While waiting for whatever
info would appear on Sgt. Denn’s monitor, I wondered again if
anything I’d done in the recent past might account for what had
happened to me tonight. It seemed unlikely that any of my actions
this day could have led to two men with glittery knives in the
Halcyon’s parking lot... but something had sure stirred up the
animals.

That thought—of stirring
up the animals—struck me as curious. Because I had taken on a new
client this morning, started a new case, and part of my job was to
find an animal. A dog, in fact, a handsome three-year-old German
Shepherd belonging to my client. This wasn’t exactly the kind of
intriguing puzzlement to which I normally liked to devote time and
energies; but there’d been nothing else of importance on the agenda
at Sheldon Scott, Investigations, and—despite the fact that a
possible murder attempt was allegedly involved—the job certainly
hadn’t impressed me as dangerous.

I hadn’t found the dog
yet. But I’d run into a few interesting characters, some lively and
some ugly, perhaps even uglier than I’d thought at the time. And it
occurred to me now that probably I should have taken more
seriously, from the beginning, the Doc’s claim that somebody had
already tried to kill him. Maybe he hadn’t been paranoid after all,
despite the many other really crazy things he’d told me.

I cradled the phone
against my shoulder, feeling sharp hot pain along the gash in my
arm, and thought briefly about the simple, ordinary, unexciting way
this job had started.

This day had begun like
most other days, with me waking up, as usual, still
asleep....

CHAPTER TWO

The second alarm went off
with an unwelcome clangor, and I gradually, carefully, opened my
eyes.

I let my lids slide down
and up a couple of times, blinked them rapidly and pushed my tongue
out, pulled it back in. Exercises over, I sat up, swung my feet
down onto the bedroom’s black carpet, and sat there unmoving for a
while.

I don’t know where it is I
go when I’m sleeping, but it must be a great place because, at
least for the first several minutes in the morning, I leave it very
reluctantly. However, twenty minutes later, revived by a
hot-and-cold shower and with a dollop of breakfast inside me, I was
filled with enough ambition to at least leave the
apartment.

About breakfast. Usually,
it is what some people call gruel. It is, in fact, my own
self-boiled oatmeal, artfully cooked so it always contains lots of
lumps. I don’t like lumps. I don’t even like oatmeal much. But it’s
better than almost everything else, including the burned toast that
goes with it. Incidentally, I don’t deliberately burn the toast
every a.m. It’s just that, like those lumps—never mind. But,
somehow, the feel of sticky gruel on my palate, and the familiar
smell of smoke in my nostrils, fills me with homey contentment.
Besides which, breakfast is so lousy it makes the strong
fresh-perked coffee taste almost like ambrosia.

So, with ambrosial coffee
gurgling in my innards, and my outards clad in a real-blue
silk-gabardine suit accompanied by white shirt and marvelous orange
tie peppered with little green somethings like...well, like little
green peppers, I was raring to go, and went.

* * * * * *

Sheldon Scott,
Investigations, of which I am the sole proprietor and investigator,
is on the second floor of the Hamilton Building on Broadway in
downtown L.A. This Friday morning, the 24th day of October, I
trotted up the stairs and stopped, as I usually do, leaning on the
countertop beyond which was the computer, large white desk,
switchboard, filing cabinets—and Hazel.

Hazel is the
super-efficient young lady who handles incoming and outgoing calls
for the Hamilton Building’s offices, updates and files our records,
and keeps track of practically everything else, including me. She
is also bright and bouncy and cute and curvy and
quick-with-the-sharp mouth and never far from laughter.

“
Miss,” I said, “has the
captain of my yacht phoned in from the Caribbean yet?”

“
No, Sir,” she replied
dryly, not turning around, her fingers going rippety-pop over the
keyboard, “but your canoe sank in Westlake Park. Again.” She went
right on, while doing mysterious things with the keyboard, “Guess
what, Shell. Yesterday I made a list of all the things you owe
me.”

“
Owe?”

“
Things you’ve promised me,
just in the last year.”

“
Oh... them...
Those.”

“
Yes, lots and lots of
thems and thoses.” Hazel spun around on her four-wheeled stool,
facing me and looking up, smiling. “Pay up and I’ll quit this job,
and go canoeing in the Caribbean. Observe,” she said, stretching
out one arm and tapping a single key with a pink-tipped
finger.

It always looks like magic
to me. But the screen began filling with large letters, forming
lines of things I “owed” Hazel, moving up the monitor’s face as
more, and more, appeared below:

$11,000,000.

A used yacht.

Three imitation-mink
coats.

Nine lobster dinners and
buckets of rare champagnes.

Pounds of diamonds
“sprinkled over your fair form like gobs of sparkling
moondust.”

“
Hey,” I said. “Quit that.
Besides, I never said gobs.”

“
Sure, you did. You say
lots of dumb things, Shell.”

“
Dumb? Dumb?”

“
Gobs and buckets and
pounds and barrels. Fair form, too.”

“
Well, yeah, I remember
that one. Yeah, well, look, you know I’m good for all that stuff.
However, though gobs of checks must surely be in the mails, I
happen to be between clients at the moment—”

“No, you’re
not.”

It didn’t register
immediately. I was thinking it was true that I had on occasion
promised Hazel—in return for special services such as helping get
me out of various pickles or jail, or phoning to wake me up when
there was an impatient client in the office—numerous little bonuses
or presents like bars of gold or tropical islands or dinner at the
Halcyon, which is a fancy and traumatically expensive hotel at the
edge of Beverly Hills.

But Hazel had been keeping
track of my pleasantries.

“
Hazel, dear,” I said,
“this sounds a little like premeditated blackmail.”

“
A lot like.”

“
Okay. I’ll give you a
blank check, signed by Blank himself... I’m not? Not
what?”

Somehow she knew what I
was talking about.

“
Not between clients,” she
said. “Not if you want to bestir yourself and call a Doctor.” She
picked up a scribbled-on memo pad and glanced at it—“Henry
Hernandez.”

She tore off the top page
and handed it to me. On it in Hazel’s neat, rounded script was
written, “Henry Hernandez, M.D. Phoned eight a.m. sharp, wishes to
employ you immediately. Dr. Hernandez has lost his dog. I told him
this sounded like a case Shell Scott could handle. Phone him at
555-9046.”

I looked sternly down at
Hazel, who was patting her splendid knees and smiling at me. “Lost
his dog?”

She laughed. “That’s what
he said.” Then she sobered, or at least got as sober as bubbly
Hazel could get. “There’s a good deal more on his mind than that,
Shell. I’m sure of it. That’s all he told me, but I got the
impression he was quite anxious.”

“
Okay.” I folded the paper
and stuck it into my shirt pocket. “Thanks, dear. For your help in
making me eligible for the P.I. Dogcatcher of the Year Award. If I
win it, I shall reward you with...with....”

She’d scooted quickly back
to her computer and had already tapped a few keys.
“Yes?”

“With a...a
banana.”

Her shoulders slumped and
she shook her head, but her fingers were rippety-popping the keys.
This time the letters were enormous, filling the bottom half of the
monitor:

AND ONE BAN-

ANA.

I searched my brains for a
witty comment. But so much time passed that I decided to think up
something later. So I sniffed and turned to go.

“
Shell?”

“
Yeah? What do you want,
two bananas?”

“
No. But I’ve been meaning
to ask you.” She was gazing wide-eyed at my chest. “Is that a tie,
and—is it alive?”

I glanced down at it,
squinting slightly.

Hazel knows I like a bit
of dashing color here and there in my apparel, and playfully ribs
me from time to time about what she pretends is a short circuit in
brain synapses activating my eyeballs. Well, the colors did seem to
be dashing hither and thither when one looked directly at them,
those little sort of glowing greenish bell-pepper somethings
dancing in what appeared to be an orange’s electrified aura.
Nonetheless, it pleased me.

“
No Hazel,” I said stiffly.
“Not any more. And I am shocked that you have so little respect for
the recently deceased.” Then I turned and stalked down the hallway,
ignoring Hazel’s queries as to whether it had died giving birth to
those square pickles, and other dumb things.

Then I unlocked my office
door, went inside, and said hello to the fish.

* * * * * *

The office of Dr. Henry
Hernandez was, to be charitable, modest.

About the only times I’ve
gone to see doctors have been occasions when I was shot, or hit
unpleasantly upon the head, and thus have gone involuntarily and
with little interest in my surroundings. Even so, I have become
accustomed to offices and medical clinics in high-rent districts,
many of them resembling small Taj Mahals or high-tech temples. But
this, if I was not mistaken, appeared to be a house. A regular,
ordinary, residential-area house.

That’s what it was. Except
for a four-foot-wide patch of recently-turned earth parallel to the
curb where I’d parked, in which brown soil several dozen little
plants of some kind were struggling to grow—and the small wooden
sign suspended from a post near the sidewalk, neatly painted with
the name HENRY HERNANDEZ, M.D., and below that the words
“Homeopathy and Preventive Holistic Medicine”—it was little
different from the other residences set back behind green lawns on
Mulberry Street.

Hernandez must not be a
very successful medic, I thought, if he couldn’t afford an office
separate from his home. But as I looked at the sign, and beyond it
the freshly painted off-white house with neat green trim, something
stirred in memory. Hernandez. I’d heard that name before, or had
read about a “Dr. Hernandez,” several months ago, in connection
with some kind of medical brouhaha or scandal.

And then I remembered
having had a brief conversation with my friend, Paul Anson, over
drinks in a Wilshire Boulevard saloon we both frequented, during
which dialogue he had mentioned something about charges of
“quackery” and “unauthorized medical treatments.” I didn’t recall
the details now, but I was fairly sure Paul had been referring to a
physician named Hernandez; and my fuzzy recollection was that Paul
had been on his side, supportive of whatever it was the doc had
been doing.

If so, that was a pretty
good recommendation, because Paul is not only my very good friend,
who lives just down the hall from me, but a physician himself. I
seldom thought of him as Paul Anson, M.D., although the name was
well known and respected among Beverly Hills hypochondriacs and
Hollywood movie people worried about their post-adolescent acne or
less-than-cosmic-orgasms—and among his medical confreres as well. I
usually thought of him simply as my good buddy Paul, a long lanky
full-of-life guy able to drink even me under the table and at least
as enamored of the loveliness of lissome ladies as was
I.

So, maybe I’d check with
Paul tonight—if Dr. Hernandez became my client. That question
wasn’t yet settled. After feeding the fish—more flashily colorful
guppies in the ten-gallon tank at my office—I’d phoned Hernandez
and learned he had more on his mind than a missing dog; Hazel had
been right, as usual. The doctor believed somebody had already
tried to kill him; but he hadn’t been able to convince the police,
or anybody else, of that alleged fact. So what I was really here
for was to determine if Hernandez was a sane and sensible guy with
a problem, or merely another paranoid weirdo picking up Martian
broadcasts through mercury-amalgam fillings in his
molars.

I left my car at the curb,
walked past the doctor’s wooden sign and up a cement walk to the
front door. Two lines of black letters on a small brass plate above
the bell said “Please enter,” and “Entrada, por favor,” so I
entered.