Have Gat—Will Travel (8 page)

Goodman was saying, "Besides, I'll be in the Senate soon."

"You have to be elected first."

"That's all settled, Scott. The number of votes I'll have to get, everything. It's planned for the next twenty years. I am elected."

I unwound my hands from behind my head, lowered them slightly. "I think a car has just pulled in, Goodman."

He kept smiling. I hoped I was right, that the car had come to the house. Because interruption or no interruption, I was going to dig for that .32 soon. I could imagine Barney Goodman in the Senate itself, that propaganda machine Jim had talked about booming and boosting him. Maybe more. In ten, fifteen years he might even wind up like a Lauchlin Currie, say, as a Presidential advisor.

The front door slammed. Goodman's brows twitched, but he didn't move the gun, and he kept his eyes on me. I lowered my right hand an inch, then farther. The door to the den burst open and somebody came inside. "Barney, I've just come from —"

Her voice stopped suddenly. Goodman turned his head to look at her. And if I hadn't been concentrating so hard on this chance I might have looked myself, because I knew that voice, that breath of brogue. But as soon as Goodman's eyes shifted I jammed my hand into my coat pocket, grabbed the gun and jumped sideways as I pulled it free.

Goodman shouted, swung toward me and fired before I could get the .32 pointed at him, the slug ripping along my arm. Then I squeezed the trigger twice. He staggered, shot at me again and missed. Blood stained the white shirt under his coat and slowly he bent forward. The gun barrel drooped, but he managed to pull the trigger again, the slug digging into the carpet. He fell to his knees.

I had time to aim, and my next shot caught him squarely in the forehead.

Donna was running toward the door when I said, "Go ahead, Donna."

She took one more step and froze, arms held out from her sides, hands opening and closing. She arched her shoulders as if expecting a bullet in the back. "Turn around," I said. "I'm not going to shoot you. You've got too much to tell us, baby."

I sat by the phone, waiting for the police, keeping my gun pointed at Donna. There would be a lot of yelling about this, I knew, but I'd be clear. What Donna was going to tell would help. But even without her I figured I'd have no trouble. This would be listed, in the parlance of the book, as a Code 197. Goodman had been pointing a gun at me, trying to kill me.

But even if he'd been unarmed, I thought, just standing there when I'd killed him, it would still have come under Code 197. At least in my book. That's the Penal Code, Section 197 — self-defense.

THE BUILD-UP

M
Y head throbbed, a sharp point of pain at the base of my skull. When I brought my hand away from the pain, it was sticky. I forced my eyes open, saw the dark red stain on my fingers. Still barely conscious, I moved my right hand and something dropped from it to the floor. It was a gun — mine, a little .32 revolver. I'm a private eye — that's why I always carry the gun.

Close on my left was the open window. It was screwy. I shouldn't have been sitting in an overstuffed chair next to the window. I struggled to my feet, got my hands on the sill. Six stories below was Main Street. Main Street in Altamira, California. I remembered part of it. There'd been the game here in the Raleigh Hotel. We'd been playing poker — five of us. Vic Foster, Danny Hastings, Jason, Stone, and me, Shell Scott.

I turned around. The felt-topped table was on its side in the middle of the room, green money on the carpet, alongside it. But it didn't look like more than a thousand or so. A couple of highball glasses lay on the floor. It looked as if there'd been a fight.

Then I saw him.

He was flat on his back beyond the table, eyes open and staring, blood all over the front of him, his white shirt streaked. It was Danny Hastings, two bullet holes in his chest. His face was marked up, blood under his nose and on his lips. No pulse, no breath — he was dead, all right.

The last I remembered of the game, there'd been only Vic Foster, Danny and me playing: the two others had left minutes before. Then Foster had quit, grabbed some fresh air at the window and walked behind me. Right after that, boom. The lights had gone out.

I heard a siren, went to the window, looked down as two cars pulled into the curb. Policemen left the cars and hurried into the building. At my feet was the little .32 I'd dropped when I'd come to; I picked it up, swung out the cylinder. Two empty cartridge cases were in it.

I didn't move for a moment, forcing myself to think. A Borneo headhunter could have figured out that Foster had killed Danny and was framing me for the murder — and Foster didn't do things halfway. That would be fixed so I'd have a fat chance of explaining to the police — especially now. For two weeks the papers had been riding the police hard about the still-unsolved murder of a union official named Tyler. Under the circumstances, they'd solve Danny's murder fast; it could even happen that they'd solve Tyler's murder fast.

My lips were sore, puffed and bruised. I'd been slugged while unconscious. Danny's face was marked up, too; it would look as if we'd been in a fight — and that could explain the lump on my head. It didn't help that I'd knocked Danny on his fanny a week ago.

I ran, I raced out of the room, down the stairs, and was at the third floor before I heard the heavy steps pounding upward. I didn't know how much the police knew about me — but I knew I had a murder gun in my pocket. A few feet on my right was the open door to room 302. I could see the middle-aged hotel maid putting new sheets on the bed. I jumped to the door and jerked off my coat, held it loosely in my hand as the officers reached the landing.

I glared inside at the woman, my hand on the doorknob. The two officers stood at the head of the stairs. "Okay, baby," I shouted, "if that's how you want it, you can fry in hell!"

The little woman's jaw dropped open and her eyes got very wide as I slammed the door shut with a crash that rang down the hallway. I swung around, putting on my coat, and walked to the stairs. The two uniformed officers were looking at me; one of them ran his eyes over my dark hair, my face, my puffed lips, checking my size and build. That probably meant they had some kind of description of the "killer."

"Well?" I roared at them. They looked at each other. I ran a finger over my puffed lips and mumbled, "The bitch, damn wildcat," as I started to brush by them. They shrugged, went on up the stairs.

Moments after they were out of sight the door behind me opened and the little old lady looked out. "What did I do?" she asked me.

I was on my way to the lobby. I got there, looked around. Several shops could be reached from the hotel lobby. I walked into one of them, a florist's shop. Several thousand dollars that had been in my wallet while I was unconscious were gone, I discovered, but I found a few bucks in my trousers pocket, bought a dozen roses, and continued with them to the street.

I was sweating, but I knew the mental storm wasn't showing on my face. Years of high-stakes poker had taught me to control my expression and bearing; but, inside, my kidneys were coming apart. Nobody stopped me while I walked to a cab a few yards away, told the driver to light out. He lit, I switched cabs a dozen blocks from the hotel, leaving my roses behind, got out of the second cab three blocks from Green Park. At Green Park I walked boldly onto the grass, picking up somebody's newspaper on the way, made a pillow of my coat and lay down with the newspaper over my face.

I
thought about the four men I'd been playing poker with until about four p.m. today, Thursday. Vic Foster was an attorney and small-time politician with big ideas who'd twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. He was a tall, bony man, thin and sagging with a craggy face. Foster looked like an old-time western sheriff relaxing after cleaning up on all the outlaws in town. By shooting them in the back. Short, fat, white-haired Arthur Jason was a circuit court judge. Bert Stone, fifty years old and six-feet-four inches tall, with a big red nose that looked as if somebody had just slugged him on it, was an electronics expert and well-to-do businessman, owner of Altamira's biggest radio and TV agency and repair business. I understand that he could be had for "special" work if the price was right. He'd been in trouble a few months ago for allegedly putting a "bug" or wiretap on a local policeman's telephone. It had been a two-day sensation in the news, but wound up "all a mistake."

Danny Hastings, until today, had been a man with quite a bit of weight in town. A councilman, he knew most of Altamira's — and many of the State's — bigwigs on a first-name basis, and I'd picked up word on occasion that Danny was a fixer, bagman, go-between. If you wanted something fixed up for you, the word was "See Danny." But not any more.

It looked as if there'd been a falling out among thieves — but that didn't explain why I'd been picked as the patsy. And another thing was bothering me. If the police had arrived a few minutes earlier, they'd have found me unconscious on the floor, and unconscious men don't go around shooting holes in people. How could Foster have known I'd be on my feet when the police arrived?

I thought back to the end of that poker game. The five of us had sat around the table, well over a hundred thousand dollars in the game, a good third of it piled in front of me. Danny was dealing draw. I'd raised Foster's opening bet mainly because I was pushing a lucky streak, and then drawn one card to four hearts, getting a spade. Jason on my right was out; Stone and Danny on my left were three-card draws; Foster's craggy face had got a frown on it at my raise, but he'd called and drawn two cards. After the draw he looked at his hand, checked to me.

Unless they'd helped, Stone and Danny, caught between me and the opener, would probably fold if I chucked it in; Foster was the only man I felt worried about. And by now I knew him pretty well. You learn a lot about men in poker games. With the ante, there was about ten thousand in the pot. So I counted out ten thousand, watching Foster from the corner of my eye. He reached up and tugged gently on his left ear lobe.

Whenever Foster got in a tight spot, and was worried, he unconsciously pulled that ear lobe. If he'd gone in with three of a kind, that was all he had now. And his three of a kind couldn't beat my nothing, not when he played with his ear. I threw the money into the middle of the table and said, "I'll match the pot. Make it interesting."

Stone scratched that big nose of his, then he and Danny tossed their cards into the middle of the table. Foster said, "Trying to buy it, eh, Scott? Hell, I got nothing in there." He showed two kings. "Openers," he said, and tossed in his hand. I started to take in the money.

Foster said, "Shell, you still carry that little popgun?"

I patted my left armpit. "You know it." I looked at the money on the table. "I'll be carrying over a hundred thousand when I leave here."

He grinned. "Not unless you use the gun."

"The way you guys play poker, I don't need it. Deal."

He didn't deal. He said, "Yeah, you're lucky at cards, all right. Lucky at cards, unlucky in love."

"Not always."

"Always."

He wasn't smiling. He was thinking about Gloria.

F
oster didn't like me a bit today — or any day; maybe he even hated me. Both of us had seen quite a lot of Gloria Meadows, only Foster hadn't seen much of her lately; I'd been holding her hand for most of the time this past month. Nobody could blame Vic Foster for resenting the switch in Gloria's attentions, because she was a dream that was still there when you woke up.

Gloria Meadows, slim but with plenty of oomph here and there, or whatever you want to call it, and no matter what you call it, she had it. Eyes deep and dark as sin, lips with more personality than some whole people, a soft, husky laugh like a backsliding devil's. She played piano and sang at a supper club downtown, sang in her soft voice that was white fingers on your spine, that turned a pop ballad into bedroom whispers. She had everything she needed, and all that I wanted. I'm a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor; but Gloria made me feel like becoming a thirty-year-old papa. Maybe I was in love with her: I wasn't sure yet. But I was sure about Vic Foster. He was in love with her.

Stone and Jason got up, said they'd had enough, and left almost immediately. After three more hands, Foster said he was through, then went to the window, saying he needed some fresh air. In a minute he walked around behind me. I was looking at Danny when it happened.

Danny didn't look surprised; his eyes went up over my head, then down again, and that was all. But he must have been very surprised a few seconds later. Lying in the park with a newspaper over my face, I couldn't even remember if the blow had hurt; I knew it hurt now, though. I knew one other thing, too: Foster should have called my ten thousand. He must have known he'd get it back. But habit was too strong; a man plays poker the way he lives.

From the park I went to the Dormann Hotel, directly across Main Street from the Raleigh. At the desk, a small gray clerk looked at me with no sign of recognition. There was one room available, on the sixth floor, facing Main Street; a "Mr. Brown" had checked out an hour or so ago. But his description was three or four inches over six feet, lot of bushy gray hair, big fat nose. "Brown," then, was Bert Stone. I paid for one night.

In the room I put a quarter in the radio and went to the window. Straight across the street was room 612 in the Raleigh. I could still see the overstuffed chair I'd been propped in while unconscious. The radio warmed up on what sounded like a news broadcast. I heard the words, "Shell Scott."

Your own name can always stop you, but especially if your first name is Shell and you'd like to keep it a secret. I'd missed the description of the murder scene, apparently, but the announcer went on to describe me very well, including "armed and dangerous." Then there was some interesting information. Victor Foster, Judge Jason and Bert Stone had told the police they'd been in a jolly "friendly dime-and-dollar" poker game with Danny Hastings and Shell Scott; the three of them had left together, leaving Scott alone with Danny Hastings. That was all they knew. But they were prepared to testify to that much, willingly, as good honest citizens interested in law and order.