Over Her Dear Body (15 page)

When I had been here the previous morning I'd told the officers about the yacht party which had started all the action. A team had checked my info, talked to Goss and to party guests, but nothing they'd learned was of any help to me. A check with other known guests had failed to turn up a single person who'd seen a man even remotely answering my description of that fourth guy, the shiny white-haired mystery man. Goss had denied his presence, and there wasn't any evidence he'd been aboard—except my own uncorroborated word.

Navarro, at least, was in the soup. Because of his reaction after seeing me in the
Red Rooster
, and his immediate departure for the
showcase
, a call was out on him now. There had as yet been no trace of the “woman in white” who'd fled the house after Belden's murder. As for Belden, the police had no new leads to his killers and had so far uncovered nothing in his background which appeared incriminating.

The checkup on Goss and the
Srinagar
had been made before my second visit there, so I filled the police in on what had happened during that ill-fated trip—hitting
only
the high points—including Goss' bribe offer. And I had emphasized the fact that the shooting spree in front of my hotel had occurred right after that trip. Officers had investigated the Spartan shooting spree, but the anonymous call which had come in to the complaint board hadn't pinpointed the location, merely said it was “at the Country Club,” which covered a lot of territory. Consequently not only the gunmen but Elaine and I were out of there before the law had arrived.

But the most important thing I did in those two hours or so was to leave Homicide and put in a couple of calls to the Stuyvesant, into which Elaine had checked the previous afternoon. The first time there'd been no answer, but on my second call the voice I now knew so well spoke over the phone.

Elaine was all right. She'd seen the Beard go into his office after me, heard sounds which “disturbed” her—I told her they had also disturbed me—and, frightened, put in a speedy call to the law, then had caught a cab and gone back to the Stuyvesant. I couldn't tell her on the phone, especially in the short time I had, how important that call had proved to be for me, or how I felt. Elaine pleasantly suggested that I explain all when I could stop by the Stuyvesant. I told her I would come by as soon as I could. So I was much relieved when, after that second call, I went back up to Homicide and talked some more to Sven Jurgensen and some of the other officers there, and especially to Sam.

Sam is Phil Samson, Captain of Homicide. He'd been off duty and home when word had reached him about the action at the
showcase
, but he'd immediately come back to the Police Building, not only because he's a good, honest, hard-working cop who likes to stay on top of things in his division, but also because he's the best friend I've got in L.A.

Right now he was in the squadroom with us, behind a desk, with the almost ever-present black cigar unlighted in his mouth. He's a big, grizzled guy with iron-gray hair and sharp brown eyes, his pink face always looking as if he'd just finished shaving. He's gruff, hard, with a massive solid jaw like the rear end of a truck, but just a bit softer inside than that tough exterior would indicate—a fact which you could never tell Sam without getting your head bitten off.

I said to Samson, “I guess I haven't convinced you yet, but the guy who sicked those dogs on me at the Spartan was Robert Goss. I already told you he threatened me, warned me that this would be the day I died—if I refused to take his bribe and clam.”

Sam bit down hard on his black cigar and growled around it, “Yeah. You told us.” He rolled the cigar a little in his wide mouth. “But, Shell, I've known you so long I'm on to all your tricks.”

“Tricks? There's no—”

He went on like a steam roller, as if he hadn't heard me. “You get to talking, you can make a one-punch fight sound like an uprising of the vigilantes, or a riot seem almost like a friendly chat.” He stuck out his big chin and scratched it, adding, “Only sometimes you accidentally leave out the most important parts.” He looked across the room. “Sven, toss me that paper I brought in with me.”

When I looked around, Sven was grinning from ear to ear. I'd noticed Sven and a couple of the other boys looking at the newspaper, passing it back and forth, snorting and slapping their knees. They were starting to snort again.

Sven brought the paper over. Samson looked at it, shaking his head, then handed it to me. “I picked this up on the way downtown. Just hit the streets. I suppose you've got some perfectly sensible explanation.”

It was the morning edition of a local sheet, opened to the second page, and it didn't take me long to find the source of all the amusement. At the upper left-hand corner of page two was a story headed, “Monster Sighted in Newport Harbor.” Underneath was the byline of Hal Hannahan.

I knew what to expect then. Hal Hannahan is a reporter, a puckish friend who takes a kind of fiendish delight in pouncing upon any peccadillo of mine and enlarging upon it to the greatest possible extent. His motive goes back to an incident concerning a curvaceous tomato, and we won't go into that. Suffice to say, he pays me back at every opportunity.

The story was obviously written tongue-in-cheek, but that didn't make it better—it made it worse. The story began:

“Yesterday afternoon rumors reached this reporter, from usually reliable sources, that a strange
creature
had been observed wallowing in Newport Harbor. Descriptions varied from ‘a long snakelike thing with wavy tentacles' to ‘gruesome, almost manlike monster, dripping with muck and goo from the ocean floor.' Personal investigation by this reporter has proved the latter description to be most nearly correct. After, comparing the testimony of half a hundred witnesses, I have established beyond doubt that this gruesome, almost manlike creature was...”

I tore my eyes from the next few sentences, which included my name and the fact that I was “a local private detective,” and said, “Sam, this is not at all the way it was. It was entirely, uh ... well, not exactly like that.”

“Uh-huh. Read it all, Shell.”

The rest merely stated that Sheldon Scott had come up out of the waters roaring savagely at citizens and advanced upon them wearing shirt and tie, shorts and socks. And, “It has not yet been determined what happened to his trousers.”

Sam said, “You see what I mean about leaving out the most important parts.”

“Well, I was just giving you the facts. I didn't think it was—well, I had to jump off the boat. I had to sock Goss, and, hell, those guys would have killed me right there in the bilges or somewhere if I hadn't—”

“You socked him? You mean, you
hit
him?” Sam was leaning forward, teeth clamped so grimly on the cigar that I thought he was going to bite it in two.

“Yeah, he started to spit on me, so I lowered the boom—”

“
Wait
a minute!” Sam's expression was pained. “He started to spit on you? What kind of reason is that?”

“Okay, it sounds funny now. But he got all worked up when I wouldn't take his dough, and began getting nasty about it. He popped, and I had to let him have one.”

Sam put a hand to his forehead and slowly rubbed it back and forth. He was quiet for several seconds, then said, “Shell, I don't think I even want to talk about it any more. You're lucky the man was big enough about it not to bring charges. He could have you locked up, put away for—”

“
Big
enough? Get it through your head he doesn't want me locked up. He wants me out on the street where he can have his boys pick me off. As they damn near did.”

Sam sighed heavily. “Somebody tried to put a couple in you, that's sure. But there's no reason yet to say it was Goss. Half the time you make
me
mad enough to tell you I'm going to knock you off, but that's just the sweet way you have of making people love you.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Let's forget it.”

Some snickering noises behind me, and a look at Sven's grinning red face, told me it would be quite a while before the monster-without-pants was forgotten. I drank hot coffee from a paper cup and changed the subject. “When you get the report from SID, Sam, that should wrap up part of this.”

“The way you tell it, we don't need the report.”

“Yeah. I'd still like to be sure.”

The dead man I'd found in Brandt's office was now in the morgue. Death had been caused by a .38 caliber bullet which had driven through the pectoral muscles on the right side of his chest, broken a rib and lodged in his right lung. Earlier, when discussing the shooting in front of the Spartan, I'd told Samson I thought the slug in Kupp, the dead man, was from my .38 Colt. A test shot had then been fired from my gun into the nine-foot water tank in the Crime Lab. The lethal bullet from Kupp's lung, and the test slug from my gun, were under the comparison microscope in Firearms now.

In a little while the phone rang and Sam answered it, spoke briefly, then hung up. He looked at me. “You tagged it. The bullet was from your .38, Shell.”

“It figured. Well, I'll bet Kupp lived long enough to wish he hadn't tried to blast me. I'd give a lot to know who the other guy was, the driver of the car. And for sure who hired those torpedoes.” Something wiggled in my brain. Sam started to say something, but I stopped him. “Wait a second. I just remembered something—I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?”

“After Brandt whacked me, I came to and he was using the phone.” Everything that had happened then, in those dizzy, sliding and melting moments when I'd been regaining consciousness, was still foggy, unclear. But I concentrated, trying to remember, and said to Sam, “Brandt was talking to somebody. Apparently filling him in on me, on what had happened.”

“Maybe the one who sent those two guys after you?”

“Maybe.”

“Any idea who it was?”

I shook my head. “Only what I've told you—it almost had to be Goss.” Before he could interrupt, I went on. “But ... Brandt said something about Kupp, that I'd killed him. Then he said, ‘Lime went back.' I think that was it. I remember he said Lime. He might have meant Kupp's partner.”

“Went back where?”

“You've got me. If I knew, I'd be on my way. There's also a chance Brandt was referring to that doctor I saw, or whatever he was. The guy with the black bag. But the main thing is the name Lime. Mean anything to you?”

“Not right off. We'll check it out.”

Sam spoke to Jurgensen, asked him to check R and I, the Police Records and Identification Division, and see if there was a package on anybody named Lime. Jurgensen went out.

While waiting for Sven to come back, I thought a little more about Belden. As far as the law was concerned so far, if Belden had been involved in anything criminal, evidence to prove it seemed to have died with him. He'd been involved in one promotion after another, as Elaine had told me, but nothing illegal. For the last three years he'd been a highly successful real estate agent, a good citizen to all appearances. His office papers had been examined by the police, but seemed all in good order. Maybe too good—he owned or had made large down payments on well over a million dollars' worth of land in L.A. County and outlying areas. It was land which, in a few years, might be subdivided, used for housing projects or other developments and thus rise greatly in value. But that was just good business, speculative planning—a gamble that might or might not pan out. There didn't seem to be anything illegal about it.

But I wondered where Belden had put his hands on a million clams in the last couple of years. It seemed probable that the money had come from somebody else. Maybe Captain Robert Goss? But—still—not illegal.

Jurgensen came back in, with a folder in his hand. He said to Sam, “Think we made him. Leonard Lime. Calls himself Stash and about twenty other aliases. Looks like the man—he's been picked up with Kupp a couple times. We got a want on him now for ADW.”

ADW is assault with a deadly weapon, and that was sure what the man had done to me. That, and his previous association with Kupp, made it almost a certainty that Leonard Lime was the second of the two men who'd tried to knock me over, the driver of the getaway car. Samson looked through Lime's package, showed part of it to me.

The suspect had a record that covered nearly one and a half closely typed pages. Everything from arrests for vagrancy to suspicion of homicide, plus two convictions. Things were looking up. In a few minutes a teletype message would go out to police divisions and sheriff's departments in the local area, and an All Points Bulletin would alert more distant agencies. The police had tagged my boy—and with a little luck, before long they'd have him.

When the happy developments regarding Lime were out of the way I said to Sam, “There's something else on my mind. Is Crandall around?”

“He's off duty. You want a picture?”

“Yeah.” Crandall was the police artist. Sometimes when witnesses couldn't clearly describe a suspect they'd seen, or find his picture in the mug books, they would do the best they could while Crandall made a sketch, changing it when told, “No, his nostrils were cuter,” and so on until often a good likeness of the suspect was developed.

“Winston's available now,” Sam said. “He's good, almost as good as Crandall. Who you got in mind?”

“The man I saw on the yacht with Navarro, Goss, and Belden.”

“Uh-huh. When we talked to Goss, he said you were drunk, you know. Neither Belden or this other guy you mentioned was with him at any time that night. Belden was aboard, but nobody that looked like the other one.” He paused. “We can't get tough with a man like Goss unless he's actually pulled something. Of course,” he added sarcastically, “
you
can.”

“Think you can get Winston up here?”

Sam nodded. In a few more minutes I was describing the white-haired, smooth-looking egg as Winston sketched rapidly and expertly on a drawing pad. When we finished, the likeness, while not perfect, was close enough.