Over Her Dear Body (20 page)

Except, of course, that on the night Belden had been murdered I had seen them together aboard the
Srinagar.

It was well after six p.m. when I stood up and stretched, ready to be on my way. A big Webster's Unabridged Dictionary was on a stand against the wall, so I used it. I looked up
"Srinagar."
The word wasn't in the alphabetical listing, but I found it in the Gazetteer: “city of Kashmir ... on the Jhelum River.” In India.

Before leaving the office I used the still-connected phone to call the Police Building. The same sergeant I'd spoken to the last time I'd called answered, and when I asked him what was new, he told me.

“We've got that guy Lime you're so interested in, Scott. But not on the call that went out last night—he can't talk to us, either.”

“Can't—he's not dead, is he?”

“No, but you're warmer than he is. He's in Central Receiving with a couple slugs in him.” He swore softly. “This town's getting worse than Chicago in the twenties. Here's what happened.”

He told me the setup had been about like the attempt to kill me in front of the Spartan. Two men in a car had blasted Lime as he'd left a local bar, Luigi's on Virgil Avenue. They'd then raced away in a sedan, but of the two witnesses to the shooting, one said it was a green Buick and the other called it a brown Chevrolet. And that was all they were sure of.

I felt like swearing, myself. Lime was the one man still alive, of the two who'd thrown those pills at me—and now he'd gotten the same treatment he and Kupp had tried to give me. It sure seemed like a handy killing—for somebody. And I wondered if he'd been killed by that “somebody” because he'd been identified by the police and me last night, and the local and APB had then gone out on him.

I said to the sergeant, “Sounds like the guy I'm after is trying to make sure any leads to him are dead ones. How bad off is Lime?”

“He's alive. Two slugs in the back, but he's getting emergency treatment right now. He's got a fair chance.”

I thanked him, hung up and took off.

L.A.'s new Central Receiving Hospital is a two-story brick building at 500 Loma Drive. I trotted up the cement ramp and through wide glass doors into the quiet coolness of the building's interior. At the reception desk I asked the pleasant, white-uniformed nurse on duty at the switchboard what chance I had of talking to, or at least getting a look at, Leonard Lime.

“Lime?” she said, and turned to a card file on the table next to her.

“He just came in,” I said. “With two bullets in him.” I quickly explained the importance of the info to me, that I thought the man had tried to kill me last night. She pulled a card from the file. “Oh, yes. He was a stat case. We gave him plavolex and serum albumin—he'd lost a lot of blood.” Looking at the card she continued, “After emergency treatment, he was taken to the County for surgery.”

“He's already gone?”

“Yes, a few minutes ago.”

That had been efficient—too efficient to suit me. Because Lime was a suspect, he would have been removed to the prison ward of the L.A. County Hospital near Mission Road. So that's where I was going.

Without red lights and siren, I couldn't make it as fast as the Central Receiving ambulance, but I didn't waste any time. I knew the girl on duty at the information center, a gal named Molly, and after some fast words with her went on up to the fifteenth floor. I couldn't go into the operating rooms there, but Molly had told me which one Lime was in and that a Dr. Fischer was operating on him now, so I waited in the corridor outside it.

Two men came out. One of them still had on his operating pajamas and skull cap. His back was to me, and he was saying to the other man, “I did all I could. But he was too far gone when we started.”

So that told me what I'd wanted to know—or, rather, what I hadn't wanted to know. There went my last chance to find out who'd hired the bum, who'd set me up for the kill. Which, I felt pretty sure, was why he'd been killed. I started to turn and go back down to the Cad.

The doctor swung slightly to his left, and I saw the front of his surgical gown. It was a little stained. “I did all I could,” he repeated.

And then I saw his face. Somehow, maybe the combination of looking from the blood on his gown to that face was a nerve-jarring blow that froze me motionless for a moment.

Dr. Fischer was the man I'd seen last night. The heavy, bulbous-nosed guy who'd walked out of Hip Brandt's office in the
showcase.

Chapter Sixteen

So he'd done all he could, huh? I said, “I'll bet you did, doctor, I'll bet you did.”

Dr. Fischer looked at me through his horn-rimmed glasses, an expression of surprise on his face. “What did you say?”

“It—never mind. It wasn't important.” I tried to control my racing thoughts. My blood had suddenly started hammering in my temples. But I made an effort to keep my face composed, interested. “Lime didn't make it, huh?”

“The man who was shot ... no, there wasn't a chance. I did all I—”

He stopped, frowning. “What are you doing here? Who the devil are you?”

I told him, watching his face to see if I could detect any more-than-mild reaction there. “I'm Shell Scott.”

“Oh.” It wasn't a mild, soft comment, but more like a gasp. That was all, that and a sudden widening of his eyes and mouth, quickly controlled.

He turned away from me, his face puzzled. He couldn't have known that I'd seen him in the
showcase
last night; but it was possible—even probable, I thought—that he knew I'd been there. He said to the other man, who had been silently watching us, “I'll have to leave now,” and walked away.

The other man turned and went back into the operating room. I just stood there. I wasn't doing a thing except breathing and thinking, but I felt like a man running a hundred-yard dash, as if somebody had shot a hypo full of adrenalin into my veins. Keyed up, I went downstairs and walked out of the hospital. I'd parked on State Street, which runs through the hospital grounds, and as I walked toward the Cad I dragged on a cigarette, trying to put my thoughts in order. Maybe I was imagining things. I was getting dizzy, wondering what the hell was going on. I hadn't had time yet to put all this together. When I could, I felt certain I'd have something to sink my teeth into. And I sure needed it. As I looked in the direction of my car, a man walked away from it.

He seemed to appear out of nowhere alongside the Cad, and then he walked down State Street, got into a car and left in a hurry. I dropped my cigarette, stepped on it. As the car raced away I noted that it was a light-colored Mercury—and that rang a warning bell in my mind.

I had been racing so fast and furiously, first to Central Receiving and then to here, that I'd been less careful than usual. When I'd taken off from the receiving hospital, I'd noticed a car pull into the street after me. I thought I'd seen it behind me on Third, and once again later, but I hadn't thought much about it. I did now. It had been a light-colored Mercury.

Too many thoughts were cramming my head at the same time. That guy had sure looked as if he were not just near, but
at
my Cadillac. Only a few seconds had passed since the Mercury left the curb. If I snapped into it, I could still catch the car and tail it—and suddenly I badly wanted to follow that guy. I ran to the Cad, jumped in, fumbling in my pocket for the car keys. I found them, pulled them out and stuck the key into the ignition. My eye caught the ornament on the Cad's hood. It seemed higher than usual, as if the hood wasn't completely closed. I started to turn the key.

But then I stopped—my hand froze. I felt as if my blood had turned into ice water. Gooseflesh leaped out on my skin. My breath stopped in my throat and slowly, carefully, I took my hand from the key. For another few seconds I didn't move, just sat there feeling the cold sweat ooze out on my face, beading my lip, gathering on my forehead.

Then I let out my breath, carefully took the key from the ignition. Maybe I was wrong. I slid sideways out of the seat, walked to the front of the car and raised the hood.

I wasn't wrong.

There was nothing fancy about it. Just four sticks of dynamite, held together with black friction tape. With dynamite you don't have to be fancy. As I looked at it, my heart thudding heavily in my chest, I remembered a man in Las Vegas, a warm, close friend of mine, who'd started my old yellow Cad and been blown into flesh-ripped bloodiness, into ugly death, by just such a simple dynamite bomb as this. If I'd turned the key those few seconds ago, I would have ended the same way he had. And I'd been only a fraction of a second, a breath, from doing it.

I leaned closer, to the bomb, examined it carefully before touching anything. An electric detonating cap was attached to the end of one of the four dirty, brownish-yellow sticks, the cap's two wires leading up to the two ignition wires behind the switch. Turn the key, the battery's current runs down the wires, the cap explodes and sets off the dynamite, and that's all. You're dead. Shell Scott is dead.

With great care, almost certainly with more care than Dr. Fischer had used in his recent “operation,” I removed the wires from their connection to the ignition. I carried the bundle to the back of the car, opened the luggage compartment, and placed the lethal package on top of some coils of wire next to the squawk box and the infrared snooperscope. Then I closed the door.

I sat in the Cad again, behind the wheel, and lit another cigarette. My hands were shaking. My throat was dry and my suit was wet through. That near hopelessness I'd felt earlier was in my bones again, and in them cold and heavy now. Maybe part of it was because I'd come so close to turning that key; and part of it because in front of my eyes again was the face of the young guy in Las Vegas, torn flesh hanging from the skull beneath, the dead, ugly, unreal face of a man who had been my friend, a man who had laughed a lot.

Maybe that was much of it, but there was an icy hollowness in my chest and entrails, as if I were dying a little. As if I were as good as dead right now, just hanging on by luck and my teeth. It takes a lot to get me down, maybe; but I was down. I felt as if I needed a cordon of cops around me, a bullet-proof house or a tank. I needed help. And where in hell was I going to get it?

That was the low point. The lowest. And when there's no place to go but up, that's where you go. I started getting mad. It was as if the ice in my blood melted and then started to boil, and I sat there and swore at the lousy, stinking, murdering bastards. I swore at them all even if I didn't know their names and even threw in some names I knew. I swore out loud, quite loud in fact, and I imagine people heard me on the far side of the street and spun around in circles with their hands clapped over their ears. The really surprising thing was that no men in white coats came dancing out of the hospital to wind me up like a mummy in surgical tape.

It was quite an explosion. But when it was over, I was myself again. Not that all by itself that was so marvelous, but I wasn't feeling creepy any longer; I was mad. I was hot. I was two hundred and six pounds of steam, getting ready to pop the safety valve. I started the Cad and roared down the street, headed for the Hollywood Freeway and swung into it, not yet sure where I was going. All I knew was that I was in no condition to sit still, and for now it was enough to be on my way.

For a moment I wondered how the guy had managed to find me—and have that bomb so handy. Guys just don't drive around with dynamite in their laps. At least, not usually. And if what I suspected of Dr. Fischer were true, how had it been set up so fast? It was sure too fast for me to figure, too much for me; there had to be an explanation, but at the moment I couldn't figure out what it was.

I relived the episode when I'd smacked Goss in his beefy kisser and wished I were doing it again. There seemed not the slightest doubt that he was behind much of the hell thrown at me. But I couldn't get Silverman out of my mind. I could still see him tearing that manuscript. To make an “impression.” He'd made an impression, all right, and maybe I'd beat him to death with a book.

It was clear, however, that I couldn't just go around smacking people, unless it was with a warrant. For that, you need evidence, proof. And that made me think of Ralph. Arline's Ralph—Ralph Mitchell, she'd said—who'd been leaving Silverman's last night as I'd arrived. Silverman's lawyer—or at least one of them, and maybe
the
one. For crooked operations on a big scale, involving phony fronts and corporations and complicated legal maneuvers, you've got to have a man who knows about such things. And Ralph, Arline had told me, was a corporation lawyer; his most important client was Silverman. Could be. Could also be that I was clear out in left field and the game hadn't even started yet. Could be Silverman was an angel in disguise. I didn't think so. And now I knew where I was going.

Arline had also told me to call her, but she'd not had time last night to tell me where to call. At the Sunset Boulevard turnoff I left the Freeway, used a gas station's phone book to look up the name Mitchell, a sense of urgency growing in me. I had the feeling that there wasn't time to spare, that I had to wrap this mess up now, fast, or I wouldn't be alive tomorrow.

A Ralph Mitchell was listed on Maplewood Way, and I called the number at that address. The phone rang several times and I was almost ready to hang up when it was answered.

The voice was a woman's, but it sounded slurred, thick. “Arline?” I said.

“Yess. Who's it?”

“Shell Scott.”

“Ooh, Scotty. Whee.” She sounded loaded to her eyelids.

“Ralph there?”

“Ralph? No, the skunk. The stinking bum.”

“What? What's the matter? You have a falling out?”

“Yeah, a falling. And I'm out. The hell with it. I'm getting drunk. C'mon over and get drunk with me.”

“I'll be right out, Arline. But try not to get plastered, huh? I want to talk to you.”

“'I'm already plastered.”