He grimaced faintly. A very humorous guy, this Vic Philippi, picking out Harry Atkins’ own place as a dumping ground for his body.
O’Hara drove the V-8 a hundred feet beyond the entrance to Horseshoe Canyon, parked it. Horseshoe Canyon was dark, quiet, almost as isolated as though it had been ten hours instead of ten minutes away from busy Hollywood. The sky was a star-powdered ceiling to the canyon as he plodded upward but the floor of the canyon, the dirt road, lay in complete blackness.
In the stillness his feet seemed to wake tiny, almost inaudible echoes. Only he knew they weren’t echoes when he stopped for a moment and the echoes came right on up the canyon after him. So he freed the automatic from his pocket, stepped into the darker gloom of a tree bole. After a little his eyes picked out a figure and when the figure came abreast of him, he chuckled faintly.
He said with dryness in his voice, “Well, Gadget?”
The figure jumped a loot and Tony Ames said, “You idiot, d’you want to scare my permanent wave right off my head?”
“When you walk up dark roads, you can expect boogymen. So what are you doing here — and keep it down.”
“I’ll tell you,” Tony whispered, “and then maybe you’ll tell me. I’d just finished putting through that call for the cops in a drugstore at Highland and the boulevard and was coming out the door when I saw you slide past in a V-8. Well, that wasn’t according to schedule. You should still have been up at that apartment. So I hopped into the cab and set sail after you. You were way ahead when you turned into the canyon but I saw the V-8 parked down there. So some rapid deductions and so here we are. Maybe you can tell me why.”
O’Hara told her. He added. “I don’t know if that exactly answers why but I’m hoping to go deeper into the subject. Now would you mind scramming and phoning the cops a new address?”
“I can’t walk that far back,” Tony said. “My feet hurt. Let’s use the phone at Atkins’ place.”
O’Hara sighed. “I was afraid you’d be like that, pest. Got a gun with you?”
“I’ve got the sweetest little .25 in my bag, as you very well know.”
“O.K., break it out.”
They almost ran into the rear of the sport job before they saw it. The car was parked off the road, half in and half out of a clump of brush and across the road lights gleamed mellowly from a studio window high on the canyon side.
O’Hara said, “Easy,” under his breath and got his eyes up to the rear window of the sport job slowly, cautiously. He hadn’t expected the car to be parked there deserted or to see lights on in Atkins’ sprawling hillside home.
After a moment he took his eyes away from the rear window and stepped around the car, jerked the rear door open. He said, “Hello, Red.”
The redhead, who was slumped in the rear seat, squalled a little but not very much or very loudly at the sight of him. She said thickly, “ ’S handsome brute, b’ Gawd. Wha-what’re you doing here, ol’ handsome brute? What you followin’ me round for?”
There wasn’t anyone else in the car and the body of Harry Atkins, if it had been in it, wasn’t there now. O’Hara said, “Climb out, Red, and no noise if you don’t want to get slapped in the pan with a lot of gun barrel.”
The redhead climbed out awkwardly. She was in bedroom slippers, a dress that had been hastily pulled on over her head so that the red hair was all awry in the faint light from the studio window up the hill.
O’Hara said, “Can you handle her, kitten?”
“What d’you think I am?” said Tony. “A sissy?”
“Then she’s all yours while I case the place, and maybe crash the party there. If you hear a couple of whistles that’s an engraved invitation for you to join the merry throng — but otherwise, Gadget, you keep Red down here.”
O’Hara plowed away into blackness. He found a gate, opened, in a high wire fence and after that it was really too easy. He angled across a smooth, upward sweep of lawn, came alongside the house and looked through the studio window from a dozen feet away. He could see Vic Philippi standing in the center of a big, white-walled room, talking through a jaw that was twice the size it should have been.
Max was lounging on a table beside Philippi and Deke Hanna and Mat Wyman stood very stiffly and tensely against one wall under a gun in the hand of the oily-faced man named Rig who was just inside figure draperies at an archway. O’Hara saw shoe tips of imported Scotch grain and by stretching a little he saw the rest of Eddie Mullen.
The blond young man was stretched out on a divan across the room, an arm trailing limply to the floor. O’Hara could see his chest moving spasmodically, his lips fluttering loosely with each breath.
O’Hara cut across velvety grass again toward white stone steps. His feet didn’t make any noise when he went up the steps or when he went through a wide-open door and along the thick, expensive rug of an entry hall. He stopped just the other side of the archway he had seen through the window, got his hand on folds and jerked.
He put the muzzle of the automatic into Rig’s fat neck and said, “Surprise, fellows! And in case you’re puzzled, what I’ve got poked into your neck, Rig, it’s your own trusty rod. Now just drop that cannon you’re holding and we can all be friends.”
Rig swore fluently and Philippi cursed sharply once and was silent. Max didn’t say anything but Rig was still swearing when the gun dropped out of his hand onto a thick Oriental.
Deke Hanna’s rawboned face was quiet, expressionless but Mat Wyman cried out sharply with relief. He said, “Cripes, O’Hara, wherever you came from, am I glad to see you! These... these — cripes, these muggs were trying to decide whether to blast us or just beat our brains out.”
O’Hara said, “Everybody over to that wall, facing it and hands reaching. You too, Mat.”
“But, Ken, what the hell? All I’ve done is try to do people favors and get kicked in the pants for it. You asked me to feed your pal a mickey if he showed at my Bolero Club and I did. And I couldn’t keep him around there so I got Hanna to help me get him up here. If there’s any funny business, all I want is out of it.”
“And all I want.” O’Hara said, “is answers, Mat. After I’ve got the answers, maybe you can beat it, maybe you can’t. Now everybody against the wall before I get very, very nervous. And you. Rig, quit cussing; you’re repeating yourself.”
Rig shrugged and moved across the room reluctantly. When O’Hara had them all lined up, he said, “Swell. And now where’s Atkins’ body, Philippi?”
Philippi said thickly, as though his jaw wasn’t feeling any too good, “We dumped him over his own fence and what’s it to you, nosy?”
“One of the answers,” O’Hara said. He let his eyes flick sidewise at Eddie Mullen and for the first time saw the long purple bruise over the blond kid’s right temple. He said, “What’d you do, Mat, feed the kid his mickey with a sap?”
“I swear—”
“Skip it,” O’Hara grunted. He put two fingers of his left hand to his teeth, blew a couple of shrill blasts. “In a moment, pals, we’ll be getting some more answers. Just relax, but not too relaxed.”
After a little there were steps in the hallway. The redhead weaved past O’Hara, made one complete turn and flopped into a chair and Tony Ames came in after her, kept a serious, hazel gaze and a small but competent-looking gun on her.
O’Hara said, “Thanks, Gadget. And now for the inquiring reporter stuff. Mat, suppose you start by telling me where you were between six and eight this evening.”