The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (34 page)

That was three times this
belligerent beefcake had called me “Jack.” But I merely said
sweetly, “That would be nice.”

“
I thought it was punk kids
at first. Maybe it wasn’t.”

“
Thought what?”

“
Must’ve been kids heisted
my car. Punk kids, doped up or drunk, we’ve got them even in my
neighborhood.”

I nodded, knowing what had
to be coming next. “Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ll bet those kids stole
your Mercedes before eight p.m. last night, and you had no idea
where it was until they brought it back an hour ago, after filling
up the gas tank.”

Belking measured me with
his frog-green eyes, flicked them down and up and left them resting
on my face, in them the same cold look that must have been in those
eyes every time he shot a rhinoceros. But his voice was completely
controlled. Soft and almost pleasant when he spoke.

“
That’s about right,” he
said. “Close enough. I didn’t know the Mercedes was gone until ten
o’clock last night, which is when I phoned the Beverly Hills police
and reported it missing.” He shrugged, the heavy shoulders. “Ticked
me off a little, but it’s not like I had to walk to the Circle K.
I’ve got a dozen other cars at the estate.”

I wondered if the casual
billionaire language was meant as a veiled threat; but waited
silently as Belking finished.

“
About five or six this
morning, the car was found in Glendale, abandoned, but fortunately
undamaged. Two officers returned it to me at eight this morning.
They kept the carpeting from the floor behind the front seats
because there was a considerable amount of blood.”

“
Not surprising,” I said as
he stopped speaking. Well, Okay, the story would be easy to check,
and undoubtedly it was the only one I’d get from Belking. Maybe it
was even the truth. True or not, it was highly unlikely I’d get any
more from this guy except whatever he wanted me to hear. So I said,
“Okay, Mr. Belking. Thanks for your time.”

“
That’s it?” He seemed
surprised.

It wasn’t, but I merely
said, “I suppose I should apologize for walking in past the ‘Don’t’
signs. Sorry about that. But I had a good reason for tracking down
your Mercedes—and not ringing the front doorbell or yelling
‘Yoo-hoo.’”

“
Why not?”

“
I’ve known guys to run out
the back door and be a block and a half away before I finished
knocking the front door down.”

“
Jack, I’ve been charged by
cats, boar, hippo, rhino, even a half-drunk bull elephant—” he
slashed a thick index finger through the air toward the massive
head I knew was behind me, the centerpiece with upraised trunk and
ivory-scimitar tusks—“that bull. I never backed off from any of
them. Why would I run from you?”

“
Maybe you wouldn’t. But
you might hide.”

“
Not a chance.” He frowned,
gaze slanting down and right, apparently thinking of something. In
a moment he looked at my face again and said, “What’s your big
interest in my car? All I know is, somebody heisted the Mercedes
and before I got it back somebody’d bled on the carpet. Lamb’s
wool. Bled all over the goddamn lamb’s wool carpet.” He paused. “I
really don’t give a goddamn if you believe that or not, but it’s
the truth. And if it’s not a secret, I’m curious to know what did
happen. What came down?”

He sounded sincere. He
looked sincere. But the feeling I got was of Hobart Belking looking
sincerely at me over the ring-a-ding barrel of his four-fifty-eight
Winchester Magnum putsy putsy Boom-Boomer. I smiled
slightly.

Belking didn’t miss that.
“It’s a funny question?”

“
No.”

He waited, either
sincerely interested in learning what mysterious-to-him events had
occurred last night, or doing a good job of conveying that
impression to me. Except, of course, for that rhino-killing fire in
the ice of his eyes. But, what the hell, I told him of leaving the
Halcyon, two men silently approaching, parking-lot lights glancing
from long thin knives at the ready.

I finished it, “So I shot
one of the bastards, dumped the other guy, then called the LAPD
complaint board and went back to collect my trophies. They were
gone. By a curious coincidence, not quite gone but going in a
significant hurry, was a Mercedes sedan registered to Hobart
Belking. In or on the back seat of which, I have not the least
doubt, were the two discouraged citizens I’d left on the asphalt.
One of whom leaked some of his blood, hopefully all he had left,
onto your lamb’s wool carpet.”

“
I’ll be goddamned,”
Belking said slowly. “So that’s it. Yeah, sure explains why you
wanted to talk to me.”

He paused, and his next
comment fell oddly on my ears, like part of a different
conversation entirely. “You look like a tough baby,” he said. “But
looks don’t mean shit in the real world. On the edge, that’s where
a man proves it. So maybe you really can handle yourself, maybe
you’re as tough as you look, right, Jack?”

“
Probably not,” I said.
“But who knows? We’ll both find out if you keep calling me Jack,
Mr. Belking.”

I think he started to pop
off, crack wise, maybe even say, “Okay, Jack,” but didn’t let those
words get past his tusks. After several seconds of silence, he
looked at me nodding the big square head. “Fair enough. Bad habit
of mine, Mr. Scott. That’s all it is, just a dumb goddamn habit.
Like the way kids these days say ‘Y’know?’ nineteen times in every
sentence. When they manage to finish a sentence.” He grinned.
“Y’know?”

His grin this time wasn’t
the usual wide muscle-bunching meat-ripping display of obtrusive
incisors and bicuspids and fangs, but more a half smile, and he
looked almost pleasant. Still an eight-ton of beef and muscle,
possible malice and probable danger to anything living within a
country mile, but almost pleasant. For a moment, and really for the
first time, I wondered if I might be wrong about Belking. Maybe I’d
automatically, and unfairly, tagged him villain when he was really
just your regular old garden variety billionaire yearning to
improve himself and do good.

At the moment he was
sweeping one beefy arm in a short arc, saying, “What do you think,
Mr. Scott?”

“
About what?”

“
This joint of mine. Hobart
Belking’s Wild Animal Museum.” He hesitated, then went on, “Monday
morning the first of thousands, maybe millions, of people will
start coming through here. But I guess you’re my first customer.
You sure as hell weren’t invited, and you busted in here like a
stray moose, but you’re here, you’re the goddamn first. So, how
does it all strike you?”

I was wondering what I
could say that would be true but wouldn’t make Belking homicidal,
when he added, “Doesn’t matter to me if you love it or hate it—just
so you’re not one of those gaddamn wimp animal freaks with subzero
IQ’s who swallow oysters alive and wear cowskins and beat their
kids and picket scientific research labs, who can’t wait to get in
here and start meowing, ‘Ooh, bad man shooted and killed all those
pwetty animals to death.’”

He’d gone on long enough
for me to get my thoughts in order, but hearing that strange
unmusical squeaking coming out of Hobart Belking—he’d raised his
voice at least an octave, maybe several. I mean, it was grotesque.
Here was this big muscular two hundred and fifty pound bulging
monstrosity with his face all scrunched and his mouth puckered into
what looked like a giant rose made out of raw meat, or maybe a
mashed red octopus, going “Ooh, pwetty animals.”

I may have seen sights
more horrible in my time, but if so they have fled from memory.
Contemplating that, I merely said, “Well, uh...” Then, knowing
Belking expected an answer, I looked all around, nodding sagely,
and added, “I guess you could say I’m impressed. It’s a remarkable
exhibition of...uh....”

It was the best I could
do. That much was true, but if I had uttered even one more syllable
it would have had to be part of the first lie or else the real and
brutal truth. Because all of the frozen-in-movement figures around
me had become, and increasingly so the longer I was among them,
reminiscent of imitation men and women poised like upright corpses
in a Wax Museum, eternally rigid in mimicry not of life but of
death. And by now the sight of so many freeze-dried animals, or
former animals, was as grotesque as Belking’s “Ooh,” and
considerably more depressing.

But the man responsible
for this disaster was pleased; no, more than merely pleased. He
looked ecstatic, gazing past me and around the room at his
collection of heads and bodies, and Belking’s pride in his Museum,
in the mortal remains of the immortal beings he and others had
blown into temporal oblivion, glowed from him like
sunburn.

His eyes were almost
glassy when he pulled them from his prizes, from oryx and zebra,
tiger and gazelle, elephant and hippo, the whole animal farm of
freeze-dry taxidermy, and aimed them again at my face. “Goddamn
right,” he growled. “You’re goddamn right. They’re beautiful,
aren’t they? Goddamn beautiful?”

Maybe it was a question,
but I didn’t answer him. He probably wouldn’t have heard me anyway,
because he was going on, his voice soft, “I remember every one of
mine, every goddamn one. Location, time of day, how the sun and air
felt when I took each single prize. Fourteen of my own exhibits
here are record kills, did you know that? World records. No man
alive has more record trophies than I do. Let me show you around,
Scott. Guided tour.” He continued almost non-stop for maybe five
minutes, his voice sounding almost slippery, but never rising, as
he led me to one exhibit or display after another—a group of
antelopes, a white polar bear near the entrance doors, those
replicas of thatch-roofed native huts with gas-fed cook-fires
flickering near them and a dead antelope lying close to the flames
before one of the huts, even beneath some of those mounted heads on
the walls—telling me where he’d “taken” this one or almost got “run
down and stomped” by that one.

I hadn’t said much more
than “Hmm” or “How about that?” during Belking’s mighty hunter
monologue of trips and treks and self-praise, during which he’d
pointed out at least ten or a dozen of the “specimens” on display
and described how and where he’d taken each of them. But his
reliving of all those kills had pumped him up, gotten him into what
had to be his best mood of the day. So I figured it was time for me
to ask my last few questions, when there was at least a small
chance I’d get answers.

We’d stopped between an
exhibit of blunt-faced prickly haired javelina and a magnificent
pair of white Dali rams. Belking was pointing to the row of animal
heads I’d examined earlier on the Museum’s rear wall, and saying,
“That big oryx there, fourth from the left.”

It was a big one,
strikingly beautiful even mounted on a block of polished mahogany,
with a black splotch on the creamy-white face, pair of surprisingly
long narrow horns rising almost straight up from the head, curving
back slightly toward the wall.

“
I took that sucker from
three hundred yards,” Belking continued, “standing, with a sling. I
was carrying my .380 Winchester that day, loaded with, and fitted
with a Maxwell eight-power scope. One shot. Drilled him dead in the
heart from three hundred yards. We paced it off.”

He’d said “we,” and I knew
Belking never hunted alone, and that he’d been on trips and
expeditions not only with Wintersong and Velli but Congressmen and
Senators, CEOs of other Fortune Five-Hundred companies, a former
head of the FDA and at least one Supreme Court Judge.

“
How about Velli?” I asked
blandly. “He take any of these exhibits?”

“
Ceese got one of those
Dalis there.” He pointed to the pair of rams on our left. “Lucky
bastard killed the bigger one....” He let the words trail off,
looking directly at me for the first time in quite a while. “Why
the hell would you be asking me about Velli?”

“
Just curious. I guess
everybody knows you’ve hunted with a lot of other sportsmen, other
people. How about Dr. Wintersong? He have any luck?”

“
It’s none of your goddamn
business who I hunt with. Or what kills anybody makes.”

“
Hell, Mr. Belking, you’ve
just been telling me about shooting every conceivable animal,
vegetable, and mineral on half a dozen continents. I was keeping
the conversation rolling.”

“
Sure you were. Yeah, I’ve
gone on hunting trips with one hell of a lot of people. Including
my friend, Caesar Velli. But I’ll bet there aren’t a dozen people
who know Velli’s hunted with me. So how did you know?”

“
Picked it up somewhere. A
private investigator hears all kinds of rumbles.”

He nodded slightly several
times, looking past my left shoulder at something, or nothing, as
if his thoughts were temporarily elsewhere. Then his eyes narrowed,
his lips thinned a little, and he turned to face me squarely, head
inclined forward a bit as he looked up at me under the tangled
reddish brows. “All right,” he said, resting both his hands on his
hips. “What else has the hotshot PI got lined up to ask me? You’ve
got a minute.”

“
Nothing else,” I said.
“Nothing that can’t wait. Mainly, as you know, I wanted to ask if
you were driving your Mercedes last night.”