“Now, kitten—”
“I’m kidding you, funny face. Get in and tell me what kept you so long.”
O’Hara didn’t open the door. He said, “Honeybunch, will you do me a favor?”
“When you start that ‘honeybunch’ stuff,” Tony said dryly, “I know the fun is starting and you’re trying to ace little Ames out of it.”
There was a sudden rasp of flint against steel in her hand and the small flame of a cigarette lighter sprang into yellow life. It wasn’t much light but enough to outline O’Hara’s face and head.
She said softly, “Lipstick on your neck and blood on your chin. Did the redhead have to knock you down before you’d let her get affectionate? Get in here, fella, and tell me what happened.”
O’Hara sighed. “Try to keep anything from you, nosy.”
He didn’t get in but he talked briefly, pithily. Oscar was apparently sound asleep on the front seat and there were panes of glass between him and them but O’Hara kept his voice down anyway.
When he’d finished, Tony Ames breathed, “Ken, this is an awful, horrible mess! D’you really think the boy killed Atkins?”
O’Hara shrugged.
“But why would he have done it?”
“That’s among the things I’m going to find out. Up to now we’ve been so busy following the paper chase the kid’s leading us, that we haven’t had time to do anything. From now on he’ll have to sort of look out for himself, because two murders make this thing too big to be just background for a game of button, button, where’s Eddie Mullen.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to find out who killed the guy in the car and who killed Atkins and why. If the kid did it, he’ll have to take what’s coming.”
“Where do we start?”
“First I want you to scoot to a phone some place and get a flock of cops over here. I’ll try to slow up these Manhattan babies in moving Atkins’ body while the cops are on the way. Then you can trot down to the office, dig in the sports library and find a picture of the Brand University football squad of last fall. Eddie Mullen ought to be on it.”
Tony Ames said, “I begin to get it. Maybe Eddie Mullen isn’t Eddie Mullen. After all, nobody out here ever saw him before.”
“I want to be sure, one way or another. Now get along, little doggie.”
“Promise you won’t start anything until the cops get here?”
“Don’t worry. I’m getting smart in my old age.”
Tony Ames didn’t sound too convinced but she said, “O.K. Wake up Oscar for me.”
When the cab was a receding tail — light, swooping down the hill toward Highland. O’Hara cut back across the street and went at a smart walk toward the corner. He knew the layout of these hill apartments — a concrete apron behind them with private garages opening onto the concrete. He figured he’d have time to get back there, locate the car to which Rig and Max had carried Atkins in his trunk coffin and do something about it while Rig and Max were upstairs reviving Vic Philippi. It ought to take Philippi a little while, anyway, to shake off the effects of that kick in the chin.
There was a chance that O’Hara might find either Rig or Max along with the car and the body. He wouldn’t mind that too much, either. He could be pushed around and slapped down just so long and then something in him, harking back to the bogs of Ireland, overrode caution and what was commonly denominated as plain horse sense.
The driveway leading to the garages wasn’t twenty feet distant and O’Hara was freeing Rig’s automatic from his coat pocket where he’d dropped it, when there was a roar of exhaust back of the apartment. O’Hara swore, stretched his legs and he hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when a neat, tan sport job whipped out of the drive. It rasped rubber in a vicious right turn, swerved far into the street and straightened out.
O’Hara had a swift, fragmentary glimpse of Rig’s round, oily face behind the wheel and there were others in the car although he couldn’t tell one from another or even how many there were. But he didn’t think he’d find anybody left behind in that sixth-floor apartment. Vic and the redhead had no doubt been piled in the car, too. O’Hara had been in darkness as the car slammed out past him to the street and there wasn’t much chance anybody in the car had seen him or recognized him if they had.
Not that that made much difference, with the sport job streaking south toward the boulevard while he was virtually rooted there.
A shiny V-8 coupe purred up from the boulevard, nudged the curb a hundred feet away and O’Hara said, “Hah,” and got going. He came up on the street side of the coupe and the driver, a young fellow in evening clothes, looked up, startled. A girl was climbing out the other door to the sidewalk.
O’Hara said, “Borrow your car, laddie?”
The young fellow’s mouth dropped open. “I... I should say not. What’s the idea?”
“A swell idea if I had time to explain it,” O’Hara said. He grinned a little, no more than a little, and shoved the automatic into sight. He said, “This is part of it. Catch on?”
The lad slid away from the gun fast, almost knocking the girl down, while O’Hara jerked the door open, got behind the wheel. He said, “Thanks, old-timer,” and got the V-8 away in a fast U-turn while he was still saying it.
Down at the boulevard a block and a half away the tan sport job was slowing for a turn. It wound to the right and O’Hara jammed his foot hard on the coupe accelerator. The V-8 was fast, had lots of guts. It whooped up to fifty inside of half a block, bore down at the boulevard intersection. O’Hara eased it off at the cross walk, swung wide into the boulevard. He wove in front of a bus, startling the driver into near-spasms, and got to the outside lane of traffic.
There wasn’t a great deal of traffic on the boulevard at that hour but there was enough to hide, for the moment, the sport job. Then O’Hara saw it jogging along past a street car a block ahead, not going fast, not going slow. O’Hara let up on the throttle, began to pace the tan car. Apparently neither Rig at the wheel nor any of the occupants had any idea they were being followed and they had no intention of attracting notice by stepping along too fast.
The sport job rolled across Highland, kept going west. O’Hara beat the red light at Highland by a bare fraction of a second and rolled the V-8 closer to the sport job, settled down half a block behind and held that distance.
He hadn’t the faintest notion where Philippi and his goon squad were headed, but he knew he was headed the same place even if he didn’t know what he was going to do about anything when he did arrive. As he drove he kept his eyes open for a radio patrol car but block after block slid by and there wasn’t a sign of one.
That was the trouble with cops — when you didn’t want them around, they were all over yon like gooseflesh, and when you did need them, they were as scarce as Republicans in Texas.
Both cars crossed La Brea. Traffic got lighter as the boulevard hiked up toward the hills that were black against the star-strewn sky. O’Hara dropped the V-8 a full block behind and the sport job ground on west. It made the boulevard stop at the Laurel Canyon road and turned to the right along the canyon floor.
O’Hara gave himself one guess then. Philippi was headed for Mulholland Highway which wound along the crest of the hills for miles, deserted at this time of night and with hundreds of brush-covered slopes down which a body might be tumbled to lie hidden for weeks, months, maybe years.
His one guess was wrong. Their car whipped around the curves of the canyon road, grinding steadily upward. Its tail light vanished around a curve and when the V-8 swung to make the turn, the red spark was gone completely.
O’Hara could have drawn from memory a detailed road map of Laurel Canyon, all the tributary canyons there, and he knew instantly where the sport job was headed — Horseshoe Canyon, which angled off to the left and wound sharply upward to a cul-de-sac in the hills. He knew also that there were three canyon estates and three only along the slopes of Horseshoe and that of the three one had belonged to Harry Atkins.