Have Gat—Will Travel by Richard S. Prather Page B

the office wondering where to start. It wasn't a pleasant moment. I didn't want to start at all, didn't want to leave. But this was like a lot of Hollywood offices — lavish, expensive, all front, and a broke tenant.
    The tenant — that's me, Shell Scott. And it looked as if Shell Scott was Hollywood's latest casualty. It had been great for a year, anyway. This one I'd liked. After the advertising agency, the stint on a newspaper, the odd jobs around Hollywood, I'd wound up a private investigator — I owned the license. Three years of it I'd had now, the last year in my office here on the Sunset Strip. That's right, the Sunset Strip.
    A private detective is supposed to be unobstructive, a man who can fade away into the shadows. But this is Hollywood. The clients I want, the men and women of the movie industry, don't feel right hiring somebody who can fade away into the shadows. They don't want a shrinking violet, but a blooming eucalyptus with morning glories springing out all over it. So, after two meager years in downtown L.A. I'd bloomed and sprung out. On the Sunset Strip — the expensive Sunset Strip. Expensive, like Mocambo, Ciro's.
    The office, like the address, is front. In Hollywood you have to have a front. A producer working on a two-million-dollar comic-strip-with-people doesn't — if he's in trouble and needs some kind of troubleshooter — get into the right mood, the paying mood, when he leaves his walnut paneled office, his mahogany desk, his pith helmet, his blonde, and enters a one-room office complete with green wooden filing cabinet. So, I've got the place fixed up to sock out the proper impression. Both rooms. Take a look at it. Squint, though, or close one eye.
    In front is a wide, shallow office with black carpet, over-stuffed red-and-gray chairs, white desk at which sits — all in black — Yolanda. Yolanda, of whom more later. Then through the connecting door into the next room, my office. Desk made from the stump of a mangrove tree from Florida's Okefenokee Swamp, complete with roots. Zebra-striped chairs. Red chaise lounge. Scattered around, or hanging on the walls are my own pith helmet, blowgun, pictures of some stars and directors and Hollywood people, and many pictures of Shell. Shell — with an elephant gun in Africa, in mountain gear climbing an Alp, skiing at Sun Valley, and so on. When a potential Hollywood client walked into my office, he knew I was good.
    Several clients had been satisfied this last year, too, but I hadn't had a real smash case for three months. Three months without a hit. Two months without even a divorce investigation. Just about everybody in the movie industry knew my name, but I was, as actors say, between engagements. Hollywood has a short memory. What counts is now, not then. You've got to keep producing.
    Finally I started packing by gathering up the pictures, stacking them on my Okefenokee-Swamp-mangrove-tree-with-roots desk. Not another one in Hollywood like it. Then Yolanda came in. That's not quite right. Yolanda doesn't come in. She walks, she floats, she soars, she dips and dives and gyrates and wiggles and flows — in a word, Yolanda enters. Yolanda entered.
    "We should have a wake or something, Shell."
    "We should have some money."
    "You're really moving it all out today?"
    I nodded, looking at her. Yolanda, tall, black-haired, lithe and luscious, white-skinned, full red lips and huge nearly black eyes. In this town, where front is so important, Yolanda had it made. She also had it made behind and sideways, and in any town. I hated to give up the office, true; but most of all I hated to lose Yolanda.
    She's my girl Friday, my secretary, phone-answerer, confidante, pal and what-not. She'd come to Hollywood to crash the movies, a dream she still clung to, but she couldn't act. She can't type either, can't take shorthand, but you can't have everything. The chaise lounge in my office is for her; that's where she takes