Kill Me Tomorrow
A Shell Scott Mystery
FOR TINA
who helped more than she knows.
CHAPTER ONE
She was a full-lipped and -hipped Italian tomato with Rome burning in her eyes.
Tall, with long firm shapely legs, a waist hourglassed by a swinging Mother Nature, and an improbably extravagant bosom carried with the flirtatious yoo-hoo that glazes male eyeballs and ripens fruit in the trees, she had the look of Carnival in Rio, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or bullfights in Spain, or Saturday night in my apartment.
My apartment was a long way from here—here being the cool, quiet cocktail lounge of Del Webb’s luxurious Mountain Shadows resort hotel, nestled between Mummy and Camel-back Mountains in Paradise Valley, lush oasis on the edge of Scottsdale, Arizona, in the Valley of the Sun.
My apartment is a bachelor’s Hollywood pad in the Spartan Apartment Hotel—on North Rossmore, a couple of near-wrecks on the Freeway from my downtown L.A. office, Sheldon Scott, Investigations—but I was taking a week’s vacation from the Los Angeles smog and rumble and clatter, a hiatus from the hoods and heavies and grifters with whom I normally rub elbows or bump heads. I was here to soak in the pools and sweat in the heat, to laze and loll, to booze a little and unwind a lot. So, for the last hour, or since three P.M. of this steaming Friday in July, I had been sitting at the bar doing part of what I was here for.
I’d yacked with the two bartenders, peeked at a couple of Eddie’s enchanting pictures and informed him that he was under citizen’s arrest, and listened to several of Fernando’s unbelievably atrocious jokes at which he—he alone—laughed uproariously, and I had jollied the three bouncy and good-looking waitresses, Harriette and Vera and Lou.
But now I sat with my fingers touching the moist glass holding my half-finished bourbon-and-water and wondered what Lucrezia Brizante was doing in Scottsdale, Arizona.
That was her name: Lucrezia Brizante.
I didn’t hear her come in. Maybe I felt her. Or sensed the heat she seemed to bring in with her from the sun-burned desert outside. I wasn’t the only one.
It was suddenly quiet in the bar. There had been the murmur of conversation, clink of ice on chilled glass, ripples of soft laughter, and then suddenly it was still.
I knew who she was. Who didn’t?
Dressed entirely in white, from high-heeled pumps, to high-on-thigh minifrock with low-on-loveliness neckline, to ridiculous puff of feathery hat on her hell-black hair, she lit up the room. She lit more than that. Standing motionless inside the doorway gazing at the men and women seated at tables behind me, she was a white-sex explosion, a fragment of Neronian orgy or solo Saturnalia momentarily held still and hugged by time.
Then her glance fell on my face like the brush of a soft, warm wing. Her lips curved slightly, as if remembering a smile. And then she walked across the room toward me. Straight toward me.
Well, maybe not straight, exactly.
She moved in a direct line, true; but that movement in space was merely the invisible axis for a whole Ferris wheel of feminine goodies—Ferris wheel, hell, it was an entire circus of sensuous ripples and shimmers and tremblings—that notorious thrust of breast and swoop of waist and flare of hip so emphatic she appeared to be shaped in several more than three dimensions, obviously crammed with all the familiar female hormones plus aphrodisiac juices previously unknown.
This was the first time I’d seen her in person, rather than brightening a magazine cover or in photos or on film, and for a moment I thought that a woman who looked so unbelievably good must be half real and half mirage, like those heat-wave oases that shimmer in hot sands. But I thought that only for a moment; because by then Lucrezia Brizante was halfway across the room and still coming toward me.
Me? I thought. Why should the glory of the entire Italian peninsula want to see Shell Scott, private eye? Maybe it’s a horrible mistake; maybe she thinks I’m Grandpa Willie.
Don’t get me wrong. You will never see me on television, advertising toothpaste which—in ways mystifying to all mankind—smacks gooey kisses upon male chops; even so, I do not look at all like Grandpa. The thought had occurred to me simply because, on rare occasions, strangers glimpsing me from a distance have gotten the impression I might be an octogenarian, or at least more ancient than the lively lad of thirty years which I am, since my hair, which sticks straight up into the air for half an inch or as much as an inch when I let it grow to pot, is as white as bleached bone-slivers—this once leading an unbelievably dumb broad to comment that my skull appeared to be unraveling—as are the up-slanting and bent-down-at-the-ends brows over my gray eyes.
But it is my eyes, not my hairs, that are gray; and since I am a six-foot-two ex-Marine with a broken nose and other visible and invisible testimonies to public and private wars, and weigh two hundred and six solid pounds, and am tanned approximately the shade of a ripe banana, that impression had not yet persisted in a viewer’s mind when he, or she, lamped me from less than ten feet away.
And Lucrezia Brizante was now only a foot and a half from me. Then I was standing, looking down at her, and she was at least a foot closer. And you can bet she knew I wasn’t Grandpa Willie.
“Mr. Scott?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Shell Scott.”
“How do you do?”
She extended her hand, and I shook it gingerly, and even with that very casual touch she turned my thumb and four fingers into five little erogenous zones. A mere half-dozen words she’d said to me, but in them were the Thousand Nights and a Night in the Garden of Kam—that perfumed garden of sensual delights where the flesh burns forever with shameless desire—because they were breathed in a voice a man hears in his inner ear, if he dreams of houris and wantons and bawds.
“I’m so glad I found you here, Mr. Scott”—sweet, scented breath warmed that inner ear, and before the inner eye nubile maidens undulated, busily flinging off diaphanous veils—“I need your help.”
“Lady,” I said, “you’ve got it.” And I meant it both ways.
She smiled like a woman getting chewed on the neck by Pan. It was a nice smile. I liked it. It went in my eyes and reamed out my arteries and steamed my blood and opened up half a dozen glands like cooked lotus blossoms.
“But you don’t even know what I want you to do, Mr. Scott. It might be dangerous—”
“Dangerous?” I laughed lightly. “Miss Brizante, you speak of danger—to me? Why, I am the man who parachuted alone into Red China armed only with poisoned chopsticks—which were made in Japan, at that. I am the man who fed peanuts to King Kong. Who twice addressed the Legion of Decency in his shorts—”
“Really?” Her lips curved slightly.
“Well, not really. I was just trying to impress you.”
She looked up at me. “You are rather impressive, in an … unusual way. The word Harry used was ‘batty.’”
“Harry? Batty?”
“Shall we find a booth where we can talk, Mr. Scott? I would like to tell you about it.” She was glancing around. “How about over there?” With a nod she indicated a booth near which no other customers sat, a spot where we’d be assured of some privacy. Not much. I said, “Splendid,” anyhow, and steered her past a couple of tables and into the booth. I’d brought my half-full bourbon-and-water from the bar, so I asked Lucrezia if she’d like a drink.
“Yes, I would, Mr. Scott.”
“Shell?”
She dropped her gaze to my mouth, then returned it like a gift to my eyes. “I’d like something cool and frosty.… Make it a Margarita, Shell.”
I caught Vera’s glance—stare, it was, really—and she took the order, looking long at Lucrezia, briefly at me, and then apparently at something invisible which gave her a stomach ache. While waiting for the drink I took a long look at Lucrezia myself. If she’d been heat in the doorway, she was fire and brimstone this close in the booth. Her skin looked softer than the fuzz on baby chicks, the lips were provocatively pouting and pagan, and those black-velvet eyes could have burned holes in wet blankets.
“Well,” I said, “here we are. I don’t know anything about the case yet, of course. But let’s be optimistic and suppose we get it all settled nicely in a day or two, or less. If so, how about dinner some night—soon—Miss Brizante? Lucrezia?”
The question caught her off guard. “No,” she said.
“No?”
“Harry said you’d be like this. I’ll have to insist that we remain … businesslike, Mr.—Shell. I really do need your help. I think.”
There was Harry again. “Harry who?”
“Feldspen.”
Ah, I thought. That Harry. Harry J. Feldspen was a longtime friend and sometime client, a man small in stature but very big, in Hollywood terms supercolossal, in moviebiz.
He was head of Magna Studios, producers in the last two years not only of Sins of Sheba—advertised almost entirely by life-sized photos of abundantly endowed Sarrah Starr wearing what appeared to be a fig leaf left behind by the locusts—which had grossed forty-seven million dollars worldwide, but also of the Oscar-winning Wagner, which despite the presence in it of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Pops and three hundred flautists playing golden flauts grossed under six million.
Since Harry Feldspen, though himself a classical-music buff and enamored of critical acclaim, was also a man wise in the ways of the millions, and since he had lost five hundred thou on his earlier Beethoven, he did not now plan to produce Respighi, or even Mozart, not as long as he lived.
He was, instead, on the verge of filming his latest epic, which might possibly gross a million dollars merely in Yonkers.
“Ah,” I said aloud, when the salt-rimmed Margarita arrived, “Harry. Sure. You’re going to star in his Sins of Caesar’s Orgies. Right?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Not as Caesar, I’ll bet.”
“Of course not … will you quit it?”
“OK. What did Harry tell you about me?”
“Oh, he told me all about you.”
“That was foul of him.”
“I don’t think he was serious. I think he was just trying to frighten me.”
“Miss Brizante,” I said soberly. “Lucrezia? Well, no matter what little fibs Harry told you, I am now none of those things. I am alert, almost entirely sober, and prepared to be industrious. To prove I’ve been listening attentively, you said you need help—you think. Is there some doubt?”
“I’m not really sure.” She lifted her drink, let her lips sort of snuggle up to the salted rim of the glass. “It’s my father. He and my mother live at Sunrise Villas. You know where that is, don’t you?”
I nodded. It was one of those “retirement communities” for the fifty-and-over set, a regular little city with its own local government, fire department, hospitals and such, with a population of around twelve thousand citizens and more residents doddering in daily. It was out in the desert about twenty miles from Scottsdale.
I’d never been to the place, but similar “retirement cities” had mushroomed, almost exploded, throughout the land during the past three or four years, some of them thriving and some kind of doddering, so to speak; as a result the brains in Washington, D.C., had set up an agency which would make grants to those communities most in need of federal assistance. A Congressional delegation was at the moment studying the situation in Arizona. Consequently Sunrise Villas as well as the Del Webb—also builder of my Mountain Shadows vacation retreat—development, Sun City, a thriving community out in the Youngtown-Peoria area, and a couple of other similar developments near Tucson and Flagstaff in Arizona had been prominent in the local news of late.
“Haven’t been there, but I’ve been reading about it,” I said.
“Well, I’ve been staying with Dad and Mom for the last week, resting up and getting in shape …” Lucrezia hesitated—as well she might, I thought—smiled very slightly, then continued, “… getting rested before starting Caesar. And Dad just isn’t himself, he’s terribly worried about something. I’m sorry I can’t be more definite—he won’t tell me what’s wrong. But I know him, and I know he’s very worried. Or frightened.”
“You’ve no idea what’s bugging him?”
“Nothing specific. But night before last he got a phone call, and after Dad hung up he started swearing and growling about crooks and thieves and ruffians, things like that.”
“Crooks and thieves and ruffians, eh? I don’t suppose he mentioned any helpful names?”
“No. I was standing in the doorway, and Dad must not have realized I was there, because when he saw me he stopped talking to himself. Just suddenly got quiet. I asked him what had got him so excited—he’s quite volatile, anyway, easily excited, like many Italians.”
“Hmm.”
“But he wouldn’t tell me anything at all.”
So far, it didn’t sound dangerous to me. But, then, I had not at any time assumed Lucrezia Brizante was faced with a problem of very dangerous dimensions—except the one she always had. Even so, a mere bit of swearing and growling seemed hardly enough to send her looking for a private investigator.
“How did you happen to find me here?” I asked her.
“I saw a little piece in the Whatyoucallit? this morning, about your vacationing at Mountain Shadows.”
The Arizona Republic isn’t a whatyoucallit, it is one of the finest newspapers in the country; and it had been a big piece. In fact, it had been a whole “profile” of me by award-winning Maggie Wilson, gal columnist on the paper. Even including mention that I was in Arizona recuperating from a gunshot wound and several blows on and about the head which had resulted from my attacking several crooks and thieves in Los Angeles.
More accurately, they had attacked me, since I seldom assault bands of ruffians single-handed if I can help it. The Republic’s reporter had been kind enough to mention that, of the five dangerous thugs, only two got away from me. Unfortunately she’d included the fact that I hadn’t gotten away either, having come to in the Receiving Hospital. There was also one other passage which had not been wholly clear to me, concerning my committing mayhem upon the hoodlums, and “in typical Shell Scott fashion had everything well in hand, and was feigning unconsciousness very convincingly when two police cars arrived, barely in time to rescue the remaining criminals …”
Slightly miffed, I said, “Is that all? You want me to investigate your father’s conversation? With himself?”
“Dad wouldn’t tell me anything more. He refused even to discuss it with me. There is one other thing I should mention, though. A couple of nights ago, Dad called a friend of his—a Mr. Jenkins, Fred Jenkins—and he came right over. He and Dad spent hours talking together. Like … like some kind of conspirators.”
“Could you maybe make that a little clearer?”
“They were scowling and waving their hands in the air. You know?”
“Well, I … Go on.”
“They went into Dad’s den and drank wine and talked and talked and talked until way after midnight. But whenever Mom or I went in they’d stop talking. Then shoo us out. But we caught them whispering, and scowling, and mumbling.”
“Sounds serious, all right. Who’s this Jenkins?”
“I think he used to be an executive in a phone company, or an electronics company—some kind of engineer. Why?”
“Beats me. I’m probing—looking for clues.”
Actually, by listening attentively I had already come up with one. A very small clue, perhaps, but I decided to impress Lucrezia with my keenness, anyhow. I wanted her to be sure I was the right man for this job.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Your father got a phone call Wednesday night. Shook him up. Crooks and thieves and ruffians! Then he phoned Jenkins after that—the same night! Significant, what? How about that?”
She blinked slowly, impossibly long lashes swooping down and up, down and up again. But she didn’t seem very excited. Seemed to be going to sleep. “Of course,” she said.
“Yes … of course.” I paused, wondering where I’d gone wrong, then proceeded briskly, “Well, we’re off to a fine start, what? Just in case I wrap this job up before, ah, eight P.M., how about dinner tonight, Miss Brizante? Lucrezia?”
“No.”
“Ah. Hum, well. Anything else you can tell me? Besides ‘No,’ I mean?”
“No.”
“That’s swell. Well, ah, do you want me to take the case? Whatever it is?”
“Of course I do. Why do you think I came here to see you?”
“Makes sense. OK. I’m on the job. Rarin’ to go.”
“Then, shall we go, Mr. Scott?”
“Shell?”
“I mean, Shell. I forgot.”
After a thick silence I said, “You—forgot.”
She leaned forward, smiling a wise smile, and dropped a cool, soft palm on the back of my hand, her body pressing against the table’s edge. More accurately, what it appeared she did was rest her sensational bosom upon the tabletop, whereupon as though impelled by reverse gravity it began preparing to sit on my lap.
Mollified, I said, “Well, I suppose we’d better get at it.”
“Yes, you should talk to Dad as soon as possible.”
“Dad?”
“If we hurry, we can get there during the council meeting.”
“Dad—council—ah. He’s in a council meeting? What council is this?”
“Dad is president this year of the Sunrise Villas Community Representation Council. They meet every Friday afternoon, and Kerwin Stephens will be there this time, so it’s a very important meeting not only for Dad but for all the residents.”
“Kerwin? Kerwin … I—”
“Congressman Stephens. His brother’s been at the Villas for the last week—he’s the Congressman’s representative, sort of advance man, you know—but the really important thing is to impress the Congressman himself, you understand.”
“Sure …”
“After all, what happens at the council meeting this afternoon may have a lot to do with whether Sunrise Villas gets an AGING grant or not. I’d like to be there myself, so we’d better hurry.”
“Congressman Stephens. That Kerwin. His brother has been … His brother—”
“David Stephens. Brother of Kerwin Stephens, head of the Committee on AGING.” She paused. “I thought you said you’d been reading about it.”
I nodded, gathering my thoughts. I nodded for a while.
I would like to put it on the record that I am not a dummy. Actually, my brain often hums along like a well-oiled machine. Obviously Lucrezia had assumed I knew what she was talking about. Her comment “reading about it” proved the key clue. Lucrezia was making it difficult for me to demonstrate my keenness—but she’d been throwing a lot of good stuff at me there. And she had lots of good stuff to throw.
Now, however, I had it straightened out. Kerwin. Congressman Stephens. David Stephens. Brother. AGING. Council. Friday afternoon. It was July, and I was at Mountain Shadows, and Mountain Shadows was in Arizona.
“Right,” I said decisively. “We sure better.”
“Better what?”
“Better hurry.”
Lucrezia waited in the lobby while I made a quick trip to my suite, strapped on my gun harness and shoved my Colt .38 Special into the clamshell holster. For a case which had begun in this happy fashion, and involved merely the kind of “crooks and thieves and ruffians” one might expect to find in a retirement community where people sort of dawdled about, I was ninety-nine-percent certain I wouldn’t need the revolver. Still …
With Miss Brizante at my side, peering past my shoulder, I left a note at the desk for Dr. Paul Anson. Paul, who lives a couple doors down the hall from me in the Spartan, is a movie-colony medicine man and sometime healer, a jolly, vital and vigorous cat who is my very good friend and stimulating companion. He was at the moment en route from L.A. to attend one of several conventions currently being held in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, this one a gathering of electronic and other scientific experts, including several top-notch medical men, here at Mountain Shadows. I had been looking forward to spending a couple of days in Paul’s company, that being one of the reasons I had chosen this time and place for my own vacation.
Probably, I thought, as Lucrezia and I went out through the lobby’s swinging glass doors and headed for my Cadillac, I’d have time to wrap up this job and—unless Miss Brizante at least let me start calling her Lucrezia—still have plenty of time left over for Paul.
And so it happened that, with Lucrezia Brizante at my side, in Arizona, in July, I headed gaily for Sunrise Villas—and the sunset.
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CHAPTER TWO
The drive to Sunrise Villas was quite pleasant—it could hardly have been otherwise with Lucrezia Brizante in the car. But she insisted upon wearing her seat belt. When she also insisted I put on my seat belt, I concluded Lucrezia’s mother had taught her that Yes was a No-No, and let my thoughts wander a bit.
At least it helped me unjumble what Lucrezia had been talking about back there in the bar. I had read a good deal about it, but concentration was easier with Lucrezia wearing a seat belt instead of leaning over a cocktail table. Probably she should wear a seat belt when leaning over cocktail tables.
AGING. It was an acronym, part of the alphabet sop so dear to the heads of legislators and bureaucrats in the Capitol. The Capitol letters stood for the “Agency for Gerontological Investigation and Need-Grants.” Congressman Kerwin Stephens was the chairman of the Commission on AGING. His brother David had for a week or so been surveying the situation at Sunrise Villas, but today Congressman Stephens, the boss-man himself, would be present in the flesh. And with her father president of the council of something-or-other, I could understand Lucrezia’s feeling that the upcoming meeting was very important.
I supposed it was pretty important, at that. I did think the growth of retirement communities was in many ways a splendid development—men and women from the young-middle-aged on up, often with kindred interests, able to afford living in an environment specially designed for them. That part was fine.
It was those giant brains in Washington, D.C., which bothered me, that and the giant AGING grants which might eventuate from government intervention, because when the federal government started out to improve a situation it almost invariably managed to screw it up beyond the power of mortal minds to comprehend. Besides, these vast spending programs always cost a lot of money. It is undeniable that spending costs money. But … maybe this time it would be different.
About halfway to Sunrise Villas Lucrezia said, “What happened to you in Los Angeles, Shell?”
“Nothing happened to me. I’m perfectly marvelous. Just a little quiet, that’s all—”
“I mean the trouble mentioned in the Republic article. The fight, and your getting shot.”
There wasn’t much to tell, but I hit the high spots for her. The head of a construction company had hired me to check into the background of some unsavory characters he suspected of muscling his employees and sabotaging expensive machines. Behind the violence was a union boss—with reputed but never formally proved Mafia ties—who had demanded that my client sign a closed-shop contract with his union, despite the fact that eighty percent of my client’s employees, by secret ballot, had turned thumbs down on the proposal.
During the investigation I arranged to meet a nervous informant who was to supply me with additional info on four lobs whom I already knew to be professional heavy men. It turned out that my presumed informant was buddy-buddy with the four hoods, who thus were awaiting me at the meeting place. Because that meeting place was on a dimly lighted stretch of lonely road and I am suspicious of nervous informants anyway, I had my gun in my hand before the first shot was fired at me. Because that was the way those lads said Hello.
The slug banged my side and bounced off a rib. It didn’t knock me down but I let myself go down, hoping whoever was after me would think he, or they, had got me. Presumably they did think I was, if not dead, unconscious; because all four of them trotted toward me and, from flat on my back, I shot and killed two of them while they were still trotting.
As for the rest of it, I got up and emptied my Colt Special, slugged one guy and knocked him pretty far into unconsciousness, took another slug in my leg and went down. The Arizona Republic’s Maggie Wilson had been right about the arrival of police cars barely in the proverbial “nick of time.” Because the only man on his feet when spots from two prowl cars hit his face was a short, burly hood named James Q. Ryan, called Jimmy Ryan or more often simply “Lucky,” and I was still conscious enough to see the heavy .45 in his hand pointed at my gut, and his square, milk-white face behind the gun.
Some years back, for reasons not now important, Ryan’s associates had decided it was necessary to get rid of him. Three times in two weeks they’d tried to kill him, and each time he almost miraculously escaped completely unharmed. From that time till now he’d been called “Lucky,” and since then Lucky Ryan had led a charmed—if not charming—life. Even in L.A. with me his luck had held, since I had pumped one squarely into his head—or, rather, it would have gone into his head if my gun had not by then been empty.
I finished it up for Lucrezia. “Anyhow, the cops scared Lucky Ryan off but caught him and my informant a couple of blocks away, took them and the guy I’d clobbered in to book them and hauled the other two downtown in the dead wagon. Me, I started taking a nap about that time, so the last part is hearsay.”
“You really got shot twice?”
“Yeah, but the one in my side was nothing, and I limped for a while from the pill in the leg, that’s all. I guess I’m just a lucky fellow. When it comes to getting shot.”
“Now, don’t start that again. Turn left up there, Shell—that’s Sunrise Villas, a mile down Saguaro Way.”
So I took a left, and there it was sprawled out in the desert ahead of us. We drove beneath a huge orange sign arched like the upper rim of the rising sun, on which was lettered SUNRISE VILLAS and beneath the name the slogan, “Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin.” Here Saguaro was a two-lane street bisected by a four-foot-wide strip of grass enclosed between cement curbs, with palm trees planted in the grass every fifty feet or so. On left and right were clusters of adjacent apartments forming three sides of a square, the fourth side open next to the sidewalk and street, plus rows of small houses, most set back behind recently mowed lawns or individually planted cactus gardens, some with beds of green or dull-red crushed rock in place of lawns.
We passed two big shopping centers crowded with cars and people moving leisurely in and out of stores and through the black-topped parking lot, and a group of long, low wood-and-cement-block buildings which Lucrezia pointed out as the Community Recreation Center. As we passed it I got a glimpse of blue water in a curving swimming pool beyond one of the brown-and-white buildings. It all looked pleasant, and peaceful.
As I pulled up to a stop sign, preparing to turn on Palos Verde Drive following Lucrezia’s directions, I glanced out the Cad’s window at a large, velvety, lawn-bowling green across the street. Nearest me, in a group of four fairly ancient citizens, one man was preparing to bowl. He was tall, thin as a string, and about a hundred and fifty years old. I got the impression he’d been preparing to bowl for some time. The three men watching him seemed frozen, but he was bent over, head thrust forward on a long thin neck, rigid except for his right arm which swung forward, back, forward again, hand holding a grapefruit-size bowling ball. Back went the arm again, forward once more. Back, forward. Man, I thought, I might run out of gas before he gets that thing on its way. But finally he unleashed the wooden projectile and it began rolling, rolling, and he began straightening up, straightening.…
“I said, we turn left here, Shell.”
“Yeah. Just a minute. This is fascinating.”
The ball, moving a bit more rapidly than a three-legged turtle, was about midway to the stake, and the bowler was still straightening, straightening. He’d got his left hand on one side of his lower back, and was making a sort of cranking motion with his right hand.
The ball was barely moving as it approached the stake. It gently kissed one of the three balls already there, rolling it out of the way, nudged a second ball, came to rest against the stake. Two of the men near the bowler smacked fists into their hands as if disappointed, while the other whooped and waggled both arms in the air. The old boy was still trying to reach an approximately vertical position.
As I swung left around the corner into Palos Verde Drive, a sense of peace, of laziness almost, was stealing over me. This job was going to be a dandy. I could feel it in my bones.
A block ahead on our right were two more long, low buildings in the same wood and cement-block style of the Community Recreation Center we’d recently passed. I guessed, correctly, that they housed the Town Hall and various offices of the Sunrise Villas city government—and in one of them the meeting of the Sunrise Villas Community Representation Council was now under way.
As I found a spot at the curb and parked, I said, “Just what is this council, Lucrezia?”
“It’s a kind of semiofficial group, twelve men chosen by other homeowners to represent them, plan and discuss improvements, make recommendations for needed services, hear complaints. Once a month their reports go to the official governing body of the Villas. Mainly they’re a kind of buffer between all the homeowners and residents and the mayor and council and other elected city officials—Dad could tell you more about it.”
We proceeded up a wide cement walk lined with low green shrubs, several mimosas, and half a dozen thin-trunked palm trees, and turned between the two buildings to enter the one on our left. The air-conditioned interior was pleasantly cool after the hot-but-dry oven outside. Lucrezia rested one hand on my arm as we walked down a hallway to a pair of heavy double doors. From beyond them I could hear the muted sound of someone speaking. We went in.
Near us were about forty wooden folding chairs, only seven of them occupied by interested citizens. Beyond the chairs, around an elongated oval table, sat twelve men, one of them tapping the tabletop with the eraser end of a yellow pencil as he spoke.
“—in consequence,” he was saying as Lucrezia and I took seats in the front row, “I recommend that we submit a formal resolution to the mayor and City Council expressing our combined agreement on the urgent need for action on this matter. And that we make it unmistakably clear, if there is no improvement in trash and garbage collections, it is our unanimous opinion a lawsuit should be brought against Tri-City Sanitation Engineers. Preferably by the city of Sunrise Villas, but that if the city fails to act, this citizens’ group will itself initiate the legal action.”
A man at the end of the oval table on my right said in a strong, resonant voice, slightly accented, “We’ve discussed this at length, and it seems to me we’re in agreement. So I’ll just ask if there are any objections.”
Heads shook around the table. Nobody spoke.
Lucrezia whispered, “That was Dad, Shell.”
Brizante was an impressive-looking old gentleman. Not really so old—in his middle fifties, I guessed—and with the firm features and strong voice of a younger man, but the large moustache adorning and almost completely hiding his upper lip made him appear older than he’d have looked without the brush. It was a regular old-time handlebar job, curving out and up a good four or five inches on each side, thick and uniformly gray. Those whiskers looked wiry and strong enough to support a small boy without bending. His eyes were stern, hawklike under heavy brows.
“All right, then. We’ll let you draw up the proposal.” The man nodded, tapping away with his pencil. “You can bring it to our meeting next week,” Brizante finished.
The next fascinating discussion concerned potholes in a couple of streets paved by the Atlas Paving Company, unreasonable delay in the beginning of construction on the Sunrise Villas Doctors’ Hospital and such—all stressing the great need for money—so I looked over the men seated around the conference table. And almost immediately I got a queer feeling. Like that cool prickly sensation you get on your skin just before the goose-bumps pop out.
I was glancing from Brizante to my left, casually eyeing the men whose faces were visible to me, when I felt that prickly chill. I pulled my eyes back, let my gaze stop on the man seated next to Brizante. And it was as though ancient little bells rang, tolled in a slow and measured rhythm somewhere deep inside my brain. So I lit a cigarette and took a closer look at the guy on Brizante’s right.
Nothing. I didn’t recognize him. As far as I knew I’d never seen the creep before. And creep he was.
It was an old, lined face, very old, very lined. He had to be pushing—or, more likely, pulling—ninety, and he looked a little bit like one of Death’s pallbearers. The brows were thick, gray with a few streaks of black, over dark, sunken eyes. The nose was big, fleshy, and even from twenty feet away I could see that it appeared pitted, as if dotted with enormous open pores or strangely scarred. Under that big nose and the bushy brows his mouth appeared much too small for the wizened face, the too-thin lips puckered, contracted, grotesquely wrinkled, as if it were the mouth of a thousand-year-old boy. The skin of his face was almost gray but faintly marked with darker amoeba-like splotches, resembling the liver spots elderly men get on the backs of their shiny hands, and it sagged beneath his eyes, under his sharp cheekbones, at the corners of his mouth. Loose flesh hung in a long crepey wattle underneath his pointed chin.
“Who’s the dead guy on your father’s right?” I asked Lucrezia.
She winced slightly. “That’s Mr. DiGiorno. One of the oldest residents here.”
“I had a hunch he wasn’t one of the youngest.”
“I mean one of the first people to buy a home and settle here at the Villas, after it was opened to the public six years ago. He was one of the original organizers of the Community Council, served two years as president. He’s quite wealthy. I understand he owns a good deal of property here.”
“Like mortuaries, cemeteries? Funeral—OK. You don’t have to look at me like that.”
“Dad could tell you more than I can—he’s been on the council with Mr. DiGiorno for over three years now. I think he owns a hundred acres or so where they’re considering building the new golf course. And—” She stopped for a moment, brows elevated prettily. “I think he does own the cemetery. Or at least sold the city most of the land for it. How did you know that?”
“I didn’t. I just figured a guy with his looks had to live—skip it. Can’t I make a little joke once in a while?”
I was gazing at Lucrezia’s profile when another man began speaking. It was a voice I hadn’t yet heard this afternoon, but even without taking a look I figured it belonged to a preacher or reverend or pastor of some kind. The voice was one of those syrupy humbler-than-thou sounds which at the same time managed to be sonorous and oracular, its pitch and rhythm—even while the guy spoke to his fellow council members about the desirability of improving sewage systems so toilets wouldn’t back up—throbbing with that peculiarly oboe-like vibration and gently swinging Pavlovian meter which issues from many pulpits on Sunday mornings.
“I have personally been the recipient of more than twenty complaints, merely from among the members of my congregation,” he said solemnly. “This in the seven-day period since last Friday alone, since our previous meeting. Much linoleum has been soiled, and two living room carpets have been damaged beyond repair. One particularly distressing example, gentlemen. Mrs. Ginsburg and Mrs. Okiyame live in adjacent houses on Pomegranate Street. Whenever Mrs. Ginsburg flushes her toilet, Mrs. Okiyame’s overflows. Whenever Mrs. Okiyame lets the water out of her bath, it appears in Mrs. Ginsburg’s kitchen sink. They have very nearly come to blows. And can we blame them? Of course we cannot. I feel sure I need not cite other examples, gentlemen. But clearly, action must be taken. Something must be done!”
That’s what he said. And it sounded as if he were reciting a newly discovered poem, written in collaboration, by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
“Who’s he?” I asked Lucrezia.
“Reverend Archie.”
“Archie?”
“Well, it’s really the Reverend Stanley Archibald, but most people call him Reverend Archie.” She paused. “Are you going to say something funny about him?”
“Well … not now.”
Reverend Archie, unlike the three or four others who’d spoken before him, had risen to his feet to deliver his remarks and was just sitting down again. He was a tall man, heavy but not quite fleshy enough to be called fat, with a wide almost cherubic face and a pink scalp partially hidden by strands of light brown hair. I guessed his age at between fifty and sixty, probably nearer the latter figure. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie with a very small tight knot.
In less than five minutes a committee of three men had been selected to investigate the problem and report back next Friday, with special attention paid to those who’d complained to the Reverend, particularly to Mrs. Ginsburg and Mrs. Okiyame.
Then Mr. Brizante stood for the first time and began to speak of the Commission on AGING and that the council members were “honored and gratified” that so eminent an individual as its chairman, Congressman Kerwin Stephens, was present.
I’d forgotten all about the guy, despite Lucrezia’s remarks to me. But he was indeed present, for Brizante concluded his remarks by saying he hoped the afternoon’s meeting had indicated the need for federal assistance in combatting the many serious problems which had in the past two years begun to plague Sunrise Villas, and that Congressman Stephens had graciously consented to speak “a few words” to the assembled council members.
Brizante moved his chair aside, and from one of the seats behind me a man arose and walked to the end of the oval table. Standing there, between Brizante and creepy Mr. DiGiorno, he began to speak. And, grudgingly, I had to give him a silent hand. He actually did keep it down to a few words.
Congressman Kerwin Stephens was a rather odd-looking bird. I choose the noun with care. He looked like a bird. Not any particular kind of bird. Just a whole bunch of birds mashed together. He wasn’t a small, wispy man—I’d say he was five feet, ten or eleven inches tall and weighed about one-seventy—but his features, individually and collectively, were very, well, very birdy.
His hair was gray and smooth and full, and combed straight back from forehead to nape of neck; his eyes were small, almost beady, black as ripe little berries; and his nose was so thin and arched and hooked, and looked so much like a beak, I expected it to open and clack when he began to speak. He did have a fine, rich voice, vibrant and full yet soft, mellow but husky, like the cooing of a dozen doves with flu. But, after all, he was a Congressman, and men in politics rarely sound like chalk screeching on a blackboard.
Stephens came across quite well. After merely stating that he was not in Arizona seeking votes—he was from out of state—but that if his constituents ever failed to return him to “the Hill,” God forbid, he would himself like to live in a community such as Sunrise Villas. He even made a little joke to the effect that he meant a Sunrise Villas in which the plumbing worked without fail. He appreciated the problems, the great need, and concluded by saying, “And I am one of those who sincerely believe in the oft-quoted phrase, ‘Find a Hole … er, Find a Need—and Fill It.’ I have already visited similar communities in California and Oregon, gentlemen, and I can honestly say your need here is greater than anything I have previously encountered. Of course, I cannot promise that the entire Commission will share my views, but I can assure you that my personal recommendation will be that one of the first AGING grants be made to Sunrise Villas.”
Everybody applauded. Well, almost everybody. Then Stephens spoke briefly to Brizante, smiled, nodded, and left.
I discovered, almost to my dismay, that I had been quite impressed by the man. Brizante gaveled the meeting to an end, and Lucrezia and I stood up. Mr. Brizante nodded to his daughter and smiled, spoke for a moment longer to the Reverend Archie who was standing next to him, then both of them walked over to us.
Lucrezia performed the introductions and I shook hands, first with her father. His grip was strong, the skin of his hand not calloused but rough, and he smiled at me, showing strong, crooked, clean and very white teeth. The Reverend Archie’s skin was soft and smooth, and his palm felt almost squishy, like warm dry fat. Maybe part of it was that he merely extended his hand and let me pump it, his fingers returning no pressure, just sort of going along for the ride. And when he smiled he showed no teeth. His lips stretched out and curved up at the corners, almost sweetly; but no teeth peeked through.
We mumbled a few inanities, and I said this was the first council meeting I’d attended, but I’d found it a lot more interesting than having a tooth drilled.
The Reverend assumed what I took to be a grieved expression, but Brizante laughed and said, “We do our best to discourage sightseers, Mr. Scott. You got only yourself to blame. Or did Lu make you come here?”
I told him Miss Brizante had suggested it, but I’d come of my own free will. At that the Reverend managed another of those sweetish smiles and commented, “I daresay, to those not intimately involved with the issues under discussion, these meetings must often seem dry as—as sermons,” he finished, seeming pleased. “But the work is necessary.” His eyes—which I noted were light brown—took on a sort of glazed and distant look. “‘Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.’ Psalms: One-oh-four, Twenty-three. Indeed, the work must be done. ‘And thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do.’ Exodus: Eighteen, Twenty.”
Keerist, I thought, this guy must think I’m his congregation.
“For,” the Reverend continued, all Revved up, “‘by works a man is justified’—James: Two, Twenty-four—and ‘Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.’ Psalms: Sixty, Two-twelve.”
Pretty quick the Reverend would start trying to save me, I feared. And I didn’t want to be saved. At least, not this minute. So, as he launched into “‘Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak,’” I smiled and said, “‘What I must do is all that concerns me, no matter if the kitchen sinks.’ Emerson, Self-Reliance, slightly edited.”
Brizante laughed again. The Reverend didn’t. Brizante said, “You were lucky enough to hear about one of our most interesting problems here at Sunrise Villas, Mr. Scott. Maybe Reverend Archie should tell Mrs. Okiyame, ‘Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing.’ Or doeth? Or is that in the Bible—”
“Matthew: Six, Four,” said the Reverend, without enthusiasm. Then he looked upon me. “It’s Mr. Sheldon Scott?” I nodded. “Well, I would guess you aren’t a resident of the Villas. Are you visiting here, Mr. Scott?”
“Just passing through,” I said. “Though I might stick around for a few days. Hard to say, Reverend.”
“I do hope you can remain over the weekend. Perhaps you could attend services at my church Sunday morning. It’s open to all, the Universalist Communion Church on—”
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “I usually sleep late on Sunday mornings.”
That didn’t go over real big with him. After a couple more bland comments he excused himself and walked out.
Lucrezia said, “You want to wait for us in the car, Shell?”
“Sure.” I figured she wanted to give Brizante a hint about what I was doing here. I noticed that ancient Mr. DiGiorno was leaving the table, so I waited till he went by us and out the door. As he passed I saw that the little finger on his left hand was missing, and there was a fine white scar on the right side of his wrinkled neck. All in all, not exactly a man to inspire confidence in the innocent and pure.
By the time I got outside, DiGiorno was standing on the sidewalk talking to a short, very wide man, wearing tan whipcord trousers and short-sleeved shirt. On his head was a white Stetson, and the hair visible below the hat was trimmed so short in back it almost looked shaved. As I walked toward them DiGiorno turned and moved along the sidewalk, reasonably agile for a guy with both feet in the grave, and the broad-shouldered man went across the street, with long strides and an exaggerated swinging of his shoulders, to a tan-colored car with an official-looking seal painted on the door. In a half-circle over the seal I could just make out the words, “Sunrise Villas Security Guards.”