For
ART and ARLY JACOBS
Chapter One
The more some things change, as the saying goes, the more they stay the same. For example — just for fun — take sex.
Here I was, standing near the swimming pool clutching a bourbon-and-water highball, and over by the snack bar were Adam and Eve.
This Eve was a long-legged, voluptuous-looking, slinky, busty, hippy bomb, an Adam bomb, and the very male male was Adam Preston, and this was the twentieth century — so it was the twentieth century: he still looked like a man gnashing fig leaves and it was eight to five she was giving him that old Garden-of-Eden applesauce. The way they were carrying on you just knew those original sinners must have had a pretty good idea in the first place. At least, I’d say so.
But I’d say so anyway; I’m Shell Scott.
I’m a private detective, but for a change I wasn’t detecting much of anything, except what was going on over by the snack bar, which even a blind non-detective couldn’t very easily have missed. Instead, on this balmy Saturday night, the fifteenth of June, I was sixty miles from Sheldon Scott, Investigations — my one-man office in downtown Los Angeles — enjoying myself in Laguna Beach at the newest and jazziest land development on the explosively booming Southern California coast: 1500 acres stretching from the sea up into the low Laguna hills, complete with paved roads, underground utilities, an eighteen-hole golf course, subdivisions containing hundreds of king-size lots, and two dozen model homes ready and waiting for anybody with lots of money.
The whole thing was the joint project and promotion of the aforementioned Adam Preston, and my long-time friend, drinking partner, and lively companion, Jim Paradise. Since Jim, who had invited me down here tonight, was the prime mover and major investor in the project, it was called, appropriately enough, Laguna Paradise.
Jim and I were standing among fifty people or so on the cement deck of a blue-lighted swimming pool before one of the luxurious model homes, and three or four hundred more citizens were milling about on the grounds nearby. Two hundred yards west was the ocean, and midway between the crashing surf and the spot where Jim and I stood was the main sales office of Laguna Paradise.
Atop the office was a large plastic map of the entire development, illuminated from inside, and whenever a home or lot was sold the corresponding section of the map lighted up brilliantly — while at the same time head salesman Wally West cried joyously over a public address system that “Lot number sixteen has just been sold to DANIEL GRAYMOUNT, the well-known movie producer,” or named whoever had made the purchase, repeating the person’s name loudly numerous times, much to the delight of said person, who sometimes became so delighted he went back to buy another lot.
Both before and after such exciting comments a five-piece combo played everything from Dixieland to the Twist and its successor, the Grump, which is a combination of bumps and grinds and almost total capitulation. Down on Coast Boulevard three arc lights swept the sky, telling everybody for miles around that something jazzy was going on in the Laguna area.
In addition to all that razzle-dazzle, Jim Paradise and Adam Preston had employed, cleverly I thought, a half-dozen models from Hollywood’s top emporium of feminine pulchritude, Alexandria’s. These six — one of whom was Eve, tall, busty Eve Angers — suitably briefed and clad in suitably brief outfits, were available to answer the questions of potential customers. Since the outfits were high-heeled shoes, net “showgirl” hose, snug white shorts and fuzzy white sweaters, a lot of people asked questions, and a couple of guys even got their faces slapped.
A minute ago Jim had left to get us a couple more bourbon-and-waters. Now he headed back from the bar, nodding to people, waving, flashing his quick grin at others. Jim Paradise was so crammed with energy and male hormones and vital juices you half expected him to glow in the dark, a tall handsome man who looked half pirate and half Apollo. Several people watched him as he walked back, and there had been some eyeballing from the citizens earlier when Jim and I had been standing together. Probably because we’re both pretty big, but also because of the contrast between us.
I’m six-two and weigh two hundred and six pounds after three bourbon highballs — which I’d just had — and Jim was twenty pounds lighter but an inch taller. My short-cropped hair is as white as the angle-iron brows which shoot up and out over my gray eyes and then slant sharply down like the contrails of pooped rockets, while Jim’s hair was coal black and his eyes were the blue-green of deep water.
Both of us got a lot of sun, but Jim was even more bronzed than I. He looked like a tall, civilized devil, burned brown by those flames down where they toast people. There was even a kind of satanic cast to his features, the dark eyes bold, nose straight and a little sharp, a mouth I’d heard women describe as “reckless,” and a go-to-hell grin.
He handed me my drink, gulped a slug of his own and said cheerfully, “Shell, this sure as hell looks like success. What does a guy do with a million dollars?”
“Why, he saves it,” I said. “What else?”
He scowled. “I never thought of that.”
“You wouldn’t want to spend it on riotous living — ”
“I wouldn’t?”
“Wine, women and song — ”
“The hell I — ”
“ — or such foolishness.” I grinned. “After all, a million saved is a million earned.”
Jim nodded vigorously. “That makes no sense at all. By God, you’re right! I’ll save it!”
“And live a sane, sober life.”
“A sober life,” he said solemnly. “I’ll drink to that.” He had another belt of his bourbon and went on dully, “Here’s to sobriety, piety, chastity, insanity, stupidity — ”
I didn’t hear the rest of whatever he was drinking to. I wasn’t listening. I was looking — at something which would cure diplopia at thirty paces, at a woman who had just come to the top of steps which led up here from a landscaped patio below, a woman who was now walking toward Jim and me. She was wearing the Alexandria’s outfit, obviously one of the models, and obviously one of the two or three I hadn’t met. But I was going to meet her, if I had to walk barefoot through snapping crocodiles.
“Jim,” I said, “who is she? Some pal — why didn’t you tell me? Who — ”
Ignoring my question he said sadly, “And so we drink to chastity. Yes, we’ll have a chastity belt; then a snort to — ”
“The hell with that noise. I’ve given up all that. Jim, dammit, who is she?”
A quick rough guess at those smooth curves, the color and sizzling impact, would have been: About five feet, five inches tall; an incredible 37-22-36 that was much more than the sum of its parts; a puff of blonde hair, impish red lips, sparkling eyes — evolution’s end, no matter which end you were looking at.
“You refer, I presume, to Laurie,” Jim said.
“Laurie? Ah. …” It was the face of a wise warm angel, plus a body that was the ultimate in feminine voluptuousness, a combination to turn idle glances into double-takes and double-takes into stares.
“Laurie Lee,” Jim went on. “I guess you noticed she’s a girl. I guess you want to meet her.” Without waiting for my answer he called, “Laurie!”
She stopped, turned her head, smiled and stepped toward us. “Hi, Jim,” she said. “Going great tonight, isn’t it?”
Up close she was even better. She glanced at me from light honey-brown eyes, then looked back at Jim, but that quick glance went into me like a knife into soup. It was a face to stop a heart, a body to make vegetarians eat meatballs.
“Hello!” I said. “Hello there. How do you do? I’m delighted — ”
“I haven’t introduced you yet,” Jim interrupted. Then he bowed slightly and said, “Laurie, this ape is Sheldon Scott. Shell, Laurie Lee. He’s a private detective, and you should stay away — ”
“What do you mean, ape?” I said. “You selfish — ”
“How do you do, Sheldon?” Laurie said, and smiled. The voice was sweet and warm and the glance she gave me could have roasted weenies.
“Hot dog!” I said. “I mean, that’s not what I meant. My mind was, uh — call me Shell, please. Nobody calls me Sheldon. Not even my enemies.”
“I’ll bet,” she said, as if she didn’t, “you’ve got simply ferocious enemies.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Jim broke in again. “That’s what happened to his face. The broken nose, that fine scar over his eye, the small piece missing from his left ear, that’s how ferocious. Well, now that you’ve seen the havoc wrought by saps, brass knuckles, husbands, turn your pretty head away — ”
But Laurie had stepped close to me, was leaning even closer. “Why, you do,” she said. “You do have a bit gone from your ear.” She sounded delighted.
“If it will make you any happier I’ll snatch the rest of it off, like Gauguin — ”
“Van Gogh,” said Jim.
“ — like that nut,” I continued. She was very close, looking up at me, breath warm on my cheek.
“How did it happen?” she asked, then suddenly said, “But that’s none of my business, is it?”
“Of course it is,” I said, friendly as could be. “Anything, everything — ”
“Then how did it happen?”
“Oh, that. A little gunman took a shot at me and missed — almost missed, that is. He nipped my ear.”
She laughed merrily. “Oh, you men! You’re worse than Jim.”
I’m not exactly the haughty headwaiter type, and probably she thought I’d caught my ear in some gears while working in the corner gas station. The funny thing was that a little hood did shoot it off. And it was the last ear he ever shot off.
Right then a strange thing happened. At least it was strange that I should see the guy when I was casually thinking about guns and gunmen. I’d turned my head the other way for some reason — actually, if you want to know, so Laurie could see my good ear — and a not unfamiliar face came into view.
It was a thin face, on a short, thin guy who was standing about where Eve had been earlier. He was leaning against the snack bar, talking to Adam Preston and stuffing bite-size sandwiches into his mouth. I couldn’t remember where it had been, but I knew I’d seen him before.
And a nerve in my noodle wiggled: Trouble.
Chapter Two
This guy had the mobster look, anyway. Dark blue suit, expensive, but a little more extreme than was currently fashionable, cut a bit wide in the shoulders, snug in the middle. Pointed black shoes polished to a high gloss. A black snap-brim hat on his head. He turned, glanced this way, and I saw the pinched features, the coldly uncommunicative eyes. Trouble, all right, some kind of trouble. But I couldn’t make him, and it bothered me.
Laurie was saying something. I turned toward her.
“Got to run,” she said. “If I goof any more, the boss might fire me.”
“Fat chance,” said Jim.
As she started off I said, “Laurie, since quitting time is ten, maybe we could continue the conversation then. I’ll tell you about the time the Mafia stuck me in cement and dropped me in the ocean.”
“Did they really do that?”
“Not really, but it’s a whale of a story.”
“Well …”
Jim said, “Why not? Maybe we could make it a foursome.” Laurie seemed agreeable to the idea and he continued, “In Hollywood, maybe? You girls all live there, don’t you?”
Laurie nodded, and said she lived at the Claymore, which was only a block from Alexandria’s. Jim asked, “Any of the other girls live there?”
“Only Judith. Oh, Eve too, now — she joined the agency a day or two before we were sent out on this job and asked me if I knew a nice place to stay. I told her about the Claymore, so she moved in there, too. The other three girls,” she added with a smile, “live with their husbands.”
Jim winced, and said he’d seen Eve go into the model home behind us a few minutes before. He left and soon returned with her. He was, apparently, still trying to convince her, and she, apparently, remained unconvinced.
“It sounds fun,” Eve said. “I can’t, though. Really. I’ve got to …” She paused for a few seconds, thinking, then said, “But maybe — can I tell you for sure in half an hour or so? There’s something I have to, well, check on.”
Probably, I thought, it was two or three other guys who’d asked her for dates. For nights in L. A. Or weekends in Bermuda. Or simply no telling. Because there was a lot of this Eve Angers and not a bit too much.
Laurie was maybe five feet, five inches tall and marvelously proportioned, but she looked almost diminutive next to Eve, a tall lass of five-nine or so, a big woman with soft, flowing curves, long lovely legs, and a superbly abundant bosom actually astonishing in the fuzzy white sweater.
Laurie was tanned, active, energetic, while Eve’s skin was smooth and pale and she moved with a slow grace, deliberately, languorously. Eve’s eyes were the pale green of a Burmese cat’s, slanted, oriental, dangerous-looking eyes, and her hair was thick, loosely waved, a glossy black, with little-girl bangs in feathery arcs inky against the white of her forehead. The bangs seemed out of place on Eve, because there was nothing else little-girl about her. Her eyes and brows were heavily made up, and orange-red lipstick outlined her wide, sullen mouth. Salmon-colored polish glittered on her long fingernails. Except for the black hair she seemed a woman of pastels — pale eyes and mouth and nails and smooth white skin — but hot pastels.
Jim told Eve that was fine, but to let us know as soon as she could because the suspense was killing him. She nodded, smiled, and began slinking away. We watched the long lovely legs depart, hips swaying seductively above them, and it was a stimulating vista. Laurie said she’d check with us later, and followed Eve, and watching Laurie was even more stimulating.
I said to Jim, “Who’s the cat talking to Adam?”
He looked, shook his head. “Nobody I ever saw before. Why?”
“Just curious. I’ve seen him somewhere.”
Jim hied himself to the bar for more bourbon. I walked to the snack bar, loaded some of the little sandwiches, and hunks of cheese, turkey, lobster, onto a paper plate.
The little man was saying something about “Brea,” I thought, and then he added, “You better change your mind, pally — tonight. Matter of fact, it’s got to be tonight.”
Adam laughed, as if vastly amused. “You give me a pain in the coccyx, my dear fellow. There’s really nothing further to discuss — ”
“Don’t give me that high-toned lip. You ain’t dealing with no little old ladies from Pasadena. And this is goddamn important to my people — ”
“The hell with your people.” Adam’s voice had changed, lost its light bantering tone, gotten lower and harder. “And the hell with you. They know my terms. They can take it or shove it.”
The little creep started to speak, then shut up. Seconds later I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and the creep was standing next to me.
He poked me with a stiff finger and said, “Do I know you, pally?”
“I kind of hope not.”
“Lissen — ” He started to poke me again.
“I’ll break it,” I said pleasantly.
“Huh? You’ll what?”
“The finger. You poke me with it again and I’ll break it off.” I smiled at him.
He didn’t smile back. But neither did he pursue the subject further. Instead he said flatly, “Next time. Next time, pally.”
Then he turned, said to Adam, “That’s it, huh?” and Adam said, “That’s it.” The unpleasant little man left.
“What was that all about?” I asked Adam.
He shrugged his wide, heavy shoulders. “Nothing I can’t handle. It’s not important.” His tone said the subject was closed, so I left the lid on it, deposited my plate of food on the bar and followed the creep.
He walked to a blue Ford Galaxie parked in the street before an empty lot, climbed in and drove off. I saw his lights turn right on Coast Boulevard and he headed north. Nothing, maybe; but that Trouble nerve still wiggled.
Walking back I passed within a few feet of Eve. She was standing in front of a model home talking to one of the potential customers. Men and women, singly and in pairs, some with screeching children, moved in and out of the house. The man with Eve was a large chubby fellow who looked a bit like a beardless Santa Claus, a modern Santa in brown gabardine, smoking a cigarette in a short holder. They were silhouetted against a brightly lighted view window and Eve, in profile, was damn near unbelievable. I waved at her but she didn’t notice me, and I went on back up by the pool.
Jim and I ate my plate of goodies, and Adam joined us for a drink. He seemed to have forgotten the peculiar altercation with Creepy and was laughing, high-spirited, his normal self again.
Adam was about my height, but even heavier than I, with big bones and big hands, a massive neck and deep chest. He was forty-one years old, his dark crew-cut flecked with gray at the temples, and with greenish-blue eyes much like Jim’s. He was square-jawed, square-headed, with a face as open and honest as the plains of Texas from whence he hailed, and he looked strong enough to pick up a grown ox.
Adam and Jim made a good team. Jim, despite his penchant for high life and lovely ladies was the drive guy, the man who finished whatever he started come hell-fire or flood. Adam, though even more eager than Jim in pursuit of the female, was less intense, more relaxed, yet highly creative. “A man,” Jim had told me, “with a million ideas — at least a hundred thousand of which might work.” Adam had dreamed up the lighted map, the P.A. system, suggested the gals from Alexandria’s, while Jim had made the ideas work, handled most of the physical details, arranged needed loans and financing.
They were not only a good team but good friends; there was an evident though not overly obvious closeness between them, an easy familiarity much like that between Jim and me.
Adam glanced at his watch. “You want to close up tonight, Jim?” he asked. “Or have Wally do it? I’ve got a date.”
“Sure.” Jim grinned. “I’ll have Wally do it.”
Adam said, “You’re a sly one, James,” and waved a hand. “See you tomorrow.” He nodded at me, said, “Glad you could make it out here, Shell,” and left.
As he walked away Jim glanced around. The crowd was thinning out. “Looks as if we might swing it this time, hey, Shell? If it goes like this another week or two … Well, it’ll feel damned good.”
I knew what he meant. I wasn’t aware of how much money Adam had contributed to the project, but I did know Jim had poured in every cent he owned, plus mountainous mortgages, and if Laguna Paradise flopped, Jim would go down with it. Right now, though, on the sixth day of the operation, it looked like a sure winner.
Jim stretched, then frowned and said, “What in hell’s happened to the gals? If I’ve been stood up — ”
“Ha. How can you be stood up when you don’t have a date yet?”
He glowered, then his gaze went past me and his face lighted up, and I guessed, correctly, that he’d seen Eve and Laurie approaching.
The girls marched up to us and said in unison, “Why not?”
Well, friends, unless you have heard at least one tomato as well-ripened as these crying with gay abandon, “Why not?” you won’t know what I’m talking about — and maybe it’s just as well. But the total atmosphere changed in that one twanging moment. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, try jumping from a cold shower into a hot tub.
“Hey-hey,” said Jim eagerly. “This is sure the night for it!”
“For what?” Laurie asked, perhaps a bit dubiously.
“Well, ah … ah …” said Jim.
“I’m with you,” Eve said, smiling more broadly than I’d ever seen her smile before. Then she put her hands on her ample hips, and pulled her shoulders back, straining the sweater dangerously, as if aiming at us. Hell, even to an innocent bystander it would have been an obvious act of deliberate aiming, and Jim, unashamedly staring, pushed me aside as though to accept the whole charge himself and cried, “To hell with the blindfold!”
For a second or two I thought he was going to charge forward like the Light Brigade and hurl himself upon the cannons, but instead he spun around once in a speedy circle and then said, “Well, we all have to drive back to L. A. tonight, anyway. My place sort of hangs over the Sunset Strip. How about a late supper there?”
“Sounds fun,” Eve said, and Laurie chimed in, “Fine.”
Jim went on, “Then, after chow, we can do something jolly, like — well, we can work out chess problems, or read Proust to each other, or play cards. … ”
Eve smiled. “Cards. And you live over the Sunset Strip.” She glanced at Laurie. “Honey, what do you bet they suggest Sunset-Strip poker?”
I could feel something steamy creeping up on me. It was blood. “Hoo!” I said. “Laurie, I have a full house!”
“But I’ve got a straight flush,” she laughed.
“We’ve got this thing backwards — ”
“Who cares?” interrupted Jim. “How can you lose?”
Laurie, I was pleased to note, was laughing, her brown eyes wide and bright. Eve, also laughing, cried, “I’ll raise!”
“Yeah!” Jim yelled. “Yah! Why not?”
People were looking at us by now. Some were even getting the hell away from the area, and one old gal about a hundred and forty years old was eyeballing us with her gums going up and down.
“Well,” I said, “we’ve raised hell already. Guess there isn’t much left to do.”
“I’ll bet there is,” Eve said. “Let’s try to think of something.” The look in those pale green eyes said she’d thought of a thing or two all by herself.
It steamed on for another couple of minutes, and we agreed to meet later. Both girls had driven from the city, Eve in her white T-Bird and Laurie in her little red MG, so they suggested we all go our separate ways and they’d join us at Jim’s. Eve suggested midnight, so it was to be the witching hour. Without witches.
After the girls took off, Jim lifted what was left in his glass and said, “Here’s to success.”
“May you sell lots of lots.”
He grinned. “That, too. Wow, how about Eve? For six days I’ve been yakking it up with her, but it was like melting a glacier with matches. She looks — well, you’ve seen her. But it was freeze and chill until tonight.”
“Something sure defrosted her.”
“Persistence. Positive thinking. A good fairy. Who cares? Man, when she got off that gag about Sunset-Strip poker, I almost swallowed my tobacco. At least, I guess it was a gag.” He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You don’t suppose she was serious, do you?”
“I don’t suppose. Probably just conversation. Uh, don’t you suppose?”
“I wonder,” he said. “I wonder. … ”
As a matter of fact, I wondered, too. All the way home.
Chapter Three
It takes only an hour to get from Laguna to Los Angeles on the Santa Ana Freeway and I’d left well before ten, so by eleven-fifteen that balmy p.m. I was driving my convertible Cadillac up the Sunset Strip, top down, breeze cooling my freshly showered, shaved, and after-shave-scented chops.
Decked out resplendently — I thought — in creamy-beige silk-gabardine slacks, white jacket cut to conceal the slight bulge of my .38 Colt Special nestled between jacket and white shirt, and wearing a blazing peacock-colored necktie, I felt ready to grapple with anything the evening might offer. Though I didn’t really expect to need the gun.
Jim lived on the high side of Forest Knoll Drive, well above street level, in a low and modern eight-room house which jutted from the side of a steeply sloping hill and was supported on the downhill side by thick concrete pillars. It seemed to float in the air like a huge wing, high over the Sunset Strip, and on a clear night the view of the city’s lights spread out below was dazzling. Because of the location, there was plenty of seclusion and privacy, and the land was so thickly landscaped and overgrown it would discourage the most prying eyes.
I drove up Sunset Plaza Drive, turned off on Forest Knoll, and parked on Laurel at the foot of a long flight of wooden steps which led up to Jim’s place, then started climbing them. At the top of the steps was a gently sloping earthen path which ended before a ramp curving up to both the big wooden deck in front of the house and a side door which opened into Jim’s sunken living room. As I started up the dirt path, a movement on my left caught my eye.
The area here was lush with shrubs and tropical plants, ferns and elephant ears, philodendron and birds of paradise. Ahead and on my left was a clump of three Senegal date palms, and that’s where I thought something had moved.
“Jim?” I called. “That you?”
There wasn’t any answer — but something moved there, for sure. More quickly now. And away from me. Squinting, I could see it was a man’s figure, a man bent over and starting to trot toward the narrow street behind Jim’s house.
“Hold it!” I yelled — and at that moment light spilled from the side of the house. I heard Jim’s voice calling something. He’d opened the door up there and light from inside brightened the area — but it fell on me, not the other man, and I could barely see him, now.
“Hold it!” I yelled again, and the guy started running as if pursued by the hounds of hell. He was pursued, at least briefly, by me. I leaped forward and my foot skidded on slick grass. My feet went up, and I went down. By the time I got to my feet and started sprinting forward I could hear the sound of the man running well ahead of me. Then the quick slap-slap of shoe leather on paving, the sudden sound of a car’s acceleration, and then the car door slamming. I reached the street in time to see the flare of taillights, then the car was gone.
As I walked up the ramp Jim said, “What the hell was that?”
“You know as much as I do,” I said. “You see the guy?”
“Just a glimpse. Any idea who he was?”
I shook my head.
We didn’t get anywhere guessing about the man, so we dropped it and went inside. Soft music from hidden speakers throbbed in the air. From the door, three carpeted steps led down into the living room. It extended almost the entire width of the house, to a wall paneled in pecky cedar, beyond which was the master bedroom. On the left, two wide and curving steps rose to an area that while actually part of the living room seemed separate from it. The area was furnished with an off-white divan slanted near a fireplace, a hanging pierced-metal lamp that looked Persian, a low bar in dark wood, another off-white overstaffed chair, and four big brightly-colored “harem” pillows on the floor.
“Now that you’ve caught your breath,” Jim said, “I have a drink that’ll take it away.”
I grinned. “What’s it called? Halitosis?”
“No, this is my special Martini — you don’t stir the gin and get it all diluted with water, and you use vodka instead of vermouth. Or would you prefer a Blastoff?”
“I doubt it. It sounds like a Russian corporal — ”
“Not at all. It’s one part Kahlua and four parts kerosene.”
“That’s a drink?”
“Of course not. You just light it and watch it burn. But obviously you’re a man who can’t make a decision. I shall therefore give you one of my Martinis in a beer mug, which will render all decisions academic.”
We perched on stools at the bar, and I discovered Jim really had made his special Martinis, poured the poison into two one-quart champagne bottles and inserted the bottles into silver wine buckets filled with crushed ice.
“Suppose the girls don’t like undiluted gin-vodka Martinis?” I commented.
“Then these are all for us,” he said sadly. “Or, I shall tell them it’s very cheap champagne, the kind that doesn’t tickle. Cheers.”
We drank. It wasn’t bad, I guessed. It wasn’t good, either. In fact, I decided, it was lousy.
I had another sip, and bang, out of nowhere, I placed a face. Earlier I had unsuccessfully squeezed my mind trying to remember who was the guy I’d seen talking to Adam Preston. As so often happens when you worry an idea and then drop it out of mind, it had sprung back into consciousness when I least expected it.
It had been years since I’d seen those cold eyes and pinched features, but now I remembered them — and his name. Mickey M. he was called among the light-fingered lads and the boys on the heavy. Some years ago in L. A. there’d been a loosely-knit gang of heist men and hop-heads engaged in making a fast buck from whatever was illicit, four or five crumbs headed by a mugg named Lou the Greek. Two of the others were Mickey M. and Anthony “Ants” Cini. It was possible that Mickey had gone legit since then, but most underworld cats, like leopards, never change their spots, and it was a solid bet that Adam’s acquaintance was still on the turf.
I said to Jim, “Do you know if Adam has ever been mixed up with guys in rackets?”
He looked startled. “What the hell kind of question is that? What brought this on?”
I told him what I knew about Mickey M., mentioned seeing him with Adam earlier, and repeated what I’d heard of their conversation. “I don’t know what it was all about,” I said, “but the little guy was talking pretty big. It’s just a thought, Jim, but a multi-million-dollar operation like Laguna Paradise is the kind of thing today’s muscle boys would love to muscle in on.”
Jim was frowning, silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “He mentioned Brea? This little guy?”
“Yeah. That’s all I heard, just the word. Or name. Mean anything to you?”
Jim’s face smoothed. “Probably Brea Island.”
“What’s Brea Island?”
“A little island off the coast about fifty miles. As you know, Shell, if the Laguna project pans out it’ll be the first in a series of similar developments. There’ll be one in Baja California, a Monterey Paradise, maybe one down near Torrey Pines. And then there’s the one I’d really like to do — Paradise Island.” He looked past me, silent for a moment as he thought about it. “It’d be on Brea, big hotel, pools, beaches, cabañas, there’s even room for a golf course and a little bay where we could build slips for pleasure boats.”
“You own this island?”
“No, but Adam does. When he showed up last October, when we met I mean, he’d just bought it. Didn’t have any special plans for it, but when he came in with me on the Laguna thing we got to talking about developing the island.” He grinned. “If we didn’t go broke in Laguna first, that is. I went out there with him a couple times and looked it over, and Adam’s spent a lot of time there the last few months. He really got steamed up about it — even had a crew of men with him for a while, surveying, clearing a section away, building a little shack. Anyway, that could be the next project: Paradise Island. How does it sound?”
“Great. Save me a cabaña for the opening. But what’s that got to do with Mickey M.?”