Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective in Dead Ends by Robert Leslie Bellem

Author:Robert Leslie Bellem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: noir, hardboiled, detective, hollywood, mystery
ISBN: 9781434439987
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

PHONY SHAKEDOWN

I don’t like to be shot at, particularly when I’m not expecting it. Consequently, when this tawny-skinned gal with the brown hair and slender curves pushed a slug in my general direction I got sore. It didn’t matter that she had missed me, because she might do better with her next try. So I moved fast; dived at her.

All of which took place shortly after eleven o’clock one Monday night in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where I’d been attending a major preview. A few moments before the gunnery got started, I saw the picture’s final fade-out and ankled to the lobby; whereupon somebody called: “Hey, Sherlock, wait a minute.”

Pivoting, I piped Walt Monroe, the retired horse opera star, beckoning to me. Walt was one of Hollywood’s genuine old timers and he still dressed the part. Along with his tuxedo he wore a ten gallon Stetson and high heeled boots to remind you how he’d once galloped all over the landscape in cowpoke roles when men were men and movies were silent.

But the talkies had dropped him years ago, and now he rusticated on a ranch out in San Fernando Valley. It was rumored he had a copious stack of geetus salted down; and I could well believe it when I copped a gander at the dinner jacket he was wearing. It must have pushed him back at least two hundred hermans, and it was tailored to his tallness as if it had grown on him in a hothouse.

There was a pudgy, unwholesome-looking bozo with him; a guy whose pan was fishbelly pale and whose glims protruded froglike from sockets of lard. The rest of him wasn’t fat, though; just doughy, like a loaf of unbaked bread.

Monroe yodeled: “Hiya, Hawkshaw. Where’ve you been lurking lately? I want you to meet Lew Sultan. Lew, this is Dan Turner, heaven’s gift to the private snooping racket.”

When I shook the pudgy guy’s flipper, it felt like a defunct herring, soft and moist and slippery. Lew Sultan was head cheese of Supremacy Productions, one of the biggest biggies on the celluloid coast, and this was the first time I’d ever met him. But I wasn’t too impressed.

“Glad to know you, Turner,” he said. “I’d like to discuss a certain matter with you. A detective matter.”

Just then Walt Monroe spotted someone he knew. He said: “Excuse me, you guys,” and powdered.

I hung the focus on Sultan. “So you’re worried.”

“How did you know that?” he said sharply.

“People don’t hunt introductions to private gumshoes unless they’re in trouble.”

“Very clever, Mr. Turner. You’re right. I am in trouble. Of a peculiar kind.”

I set fire to a gasper. “Yeah?”

“Some lousy dame is trying to shake me down,” he said bitterly. “Will you ride home with me in my car so I can give you the whole story?”

I started to tell him my own jalopy was on the theater parking lot, but then I remembered his position. As chief of Supremacy Pix he dragged down more lettuce than

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