The Shell Scott Sampler Read Online Free Page A

just one nude woman running at you. My brain sort of wobbled, and I thought: How’d this happen?
    It had started happening with a phone call from the wife of the late Judge Phineas Latham. The judge had died recently in an apparently accidental fire, but Mrs. Latham thought he’d been murdered. She’d hired me to check it. Nearly a month of investigation had convinced me she was right. And every lead I followed up pointed to a shadowy racket boy named Victor Grieg.
    Grieg’s motto must have been, “To Victor belong the spoils,” because he was so rich he had TV in the john, and it seemed he was involved in practically every crime except suicide. But I couldn’t yet prove it. I was getting close to him, though, and he knew it. The fact that many of my friends in the L.A. Police Department knew I was trying to get Grieg made it almost impossible for him to have me shot in the head without virtually naming himself as responsible. So one day Grieg phoned and asked me, politely, to call at his office. I went.
    I got there sooner than I’d expected to and glimpsed a long-limbed bleached blonde leaving Grieg’s office. She walked with a loose-limbed sway that, combined with her yellowish hair and a kind of meat-hungry look on her face, made me think of a tired tiger.
    Victor Grieg himself was about forty or forty-five, with black hair and heavy brows, and he looked like what he was: a tough customer. His words slid down icicles at me. It was a long session, but what it boiled down to was that Grieg couldn’t buy me off, or scare me off, and at the present time it would be inconvenient for him to have me killed. His last remark was, “If you don’t lay off, I’ll squash you like a bug. I’ll get you one way or another, and even if I got to do it legal, I’ll do it legal.”
    I grinned at him and left. Two days later a friend called from Sacramento and told me there’d been pressure brought, unsuccessfully, to have my state investigator’s license revoked. If Grieg could get my license jerked, it would be like pulling my fangs, and that should have warned me….
    My brain continued to wobble, but gently now. The three nude babes were all over me, screeching and pawing at me, and trying to get through the door. As I broke out in a cold sweat, I realized what Grieg’s next move had been.
    There is a section of the California Penal Code, referring to private investigators, which states that the applicant for or possessor of a license must be “of good moral character and temperate habits.”
    Well, it is widely known that I have an eye for the women. As a matter of fact, it is pretty well known that if I had eight eyes, I would have eight eyes for the women. But my morals aren’t any more questionable than anybody else’s. Than any red-blooded man’s, anyway. Well, any lusty red-blooded man’s. At least, nobody could prove anything. Not until now, I thought gloomily.
    Finally the gals calmed down. Apparently a couple of them had got the impression that I was a strange man who’d wandered in here and started knocking people unconscious. Once I made it clear that I lived here, sanity returned. All three were familiar in appearance, and now I recognized two of them—the white-blonde with the bronze tan, and the saucy redhead from the shower—as lovelies who had often posed for pictures in the slick men’s magazines. But the third one, the pale-white blonde, had me puzzled for some seconds longer. Then I recognized her. She was the tired tiger.
    This was the long-limbed gal I’d seen so briefly outside Grieg’s office. A few fast questions of the other two verified my suspicions. The two models had thought they were merely modeling for Untamed magazine’s monthly feature, “Apartment of the Month,” and they’d been told the owner—Shell Scott—knew all about it. They had been getting ready to