“I think you’re sweet,” Maureen said unexpectedly.
Mr. Evans beamed. “Could I get you a drink?” he said. The words were ordinary; the phrase was one that Maureen had heard and often welcomed at endless dozens of parties. But Mr. Evans managed to invest it with such a delightful Edwardian gallantry that you almost thought he had said, “May I bring an ice to you in the conservatory?”
“No thanks,” she said regretfully. “I’m on duty, so to speak. But what did you mean about not being so sure?”
He frowned. “I’m not so sure about Herr Federhut’s merciless justice. Modern politics, and particularly the politics of foreign nations, is not in my line, save when I find it necessary to bring about the encounter of Derring Drew with a dastardly international spy. Then, of course, it is safest to make my villain an agent of the totalitarian powers; American literature has declared an open season on them at present.
“But ignorant though I am, I cannot help thinking and feeling and worrying. And it seems to me, Miss O’Breen, that to forswear mercy is to forswear humanity. If to destroy evil we take up its very weapons, we shall learn in time that all we have destroyed is the best in ourselves.”
Federhut’s heavy voice, which had served as ground bass to this dialogue, now paused briefly, just as F. X. Weinberg joined the group around him. “Fine, Mr. Federhut, fine!” the producer exclaimed, quite as though he had heard the whole discourse. “You are an inspiration to us here in Hollywood. You show us the paths that we must follow along.”
“I am pleased that you recognize the truth, Mr. Weinberg. In the hands of you and your industry the destiny of struggling mankind may lie. You have not forgotten those meetings of which you spoke, at which you will introduce me to my exiled compatriots?”
“So I should forget that, Mr. Federhut? What do you take me for? But I will do more than that. I’ll tell you: Metropolis will produce an anti-Nazi picture that will stir the world. You think there have been anti-Nazi pictures maybe? Ha! Wait till you see this one. We’ll put all the best resources of Metropolis into it, just as we are doing with The Speckled Band, that stirring Sherlock Holmes adventure which all America is waiting for.”
Having got in a plug at last, Mr. Weinberg sighed contentedly and relapsed into silence.
In a corner of the room, hidden behind an elaborate floral decoration in the shape of a Persian slipper (a fanciful idea suggested by Dr. Rufus Bottomley), sat Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson of the Los Angeles Police Department. (What that A. stood for was a deep mystery never solved by all the professional skill of his fellow workers, who had long since given up the riddle and decided to call him, with inevitable logic, Andy.)
Lieutenant Jackson was at the moment an exceedingly unhappy man. He had little interest in the film industry or in the arcana of Holmes research, although the Doyle tales were among his happiest childhood memories. He had come to this reception principally because it was his day off and the invitation had come from his brother Paul. When two brothers are engaged in such irregular activities as detective work and film acting, they are naturally fated to see little of each other, and any opportunity is welcome. But Paul Jackson, at the last moment, had been recalled to the studio for retakes on the last Derring Drew film—a couple of scenes had drawn misplaced laughs at the sneak preview in Pomona.
The Lieutenant knew none of those present except Maureen, with whose brother Fergus he had collaborated on an extraordinary case last January.* And she was so busy with other guests that he had retired quietly into a corner to watch the goings-on with a somewhat numb interest and to wave away the occasional reporters who mistook him for his celebrated brother. This not unnatural mistake occurred with monotonous regularity, varied only by one gentleman, fresh from the bar, who insisted that the Lieutenant was Gary Cooper.
This, Jackson thought, was certainly no busman’s holiday. Nothing farther from a routine of crime could be imagined than this gay gathering of the eminent and their parasitic recorders. It was a complete change from his usual routine and in addition, he realized, it was extremely boring. The hour was growing late; there was no longer much chance of Paul’s dropping in. He was ready to grope his way through the mob to the nearest exit when a flutter-some female in a print of an incredible green descended upon him.
“I know you!” she exclaimed, something in the manner of Archimedes crying Eureka! “You’re Paul Jackson!”
And Detective Lieutenant A. Jackson of the Los Angeles Police Department did one of the few absurd things in his efficiently ordered life. “Of course,” he said, “And what can I do for you?”
“Tell me,” said the eager damsel, “is it true that you and Rita La Marr—”
It would, of course, have been Paul Jackson’s own fault for luring his brother to such a party. The Lieutenant was fully prepared to launch into a magnificent and all but unprintable explanation of the affair Jackson—La Marr which would have trebled the circulation of the fan magazine lucky enough to receive it—and probably would have caused that magazine’s writers to be barred for good and all from the Metropolis lot.
But before Lieutenant Jackson had time to blast his brother’s reputation irretrievably, both his attention and that of the green flutter were distracted by the first interesting event of the evening.
The prelude was the sudden entrance of Mrs. Hudson. The rimless spectacles were missing, and the once so forbiddingly kempt hair was streaming like Ophelia’s. Her efficient speech was reduced to a series of plaintive yelps, among which the name of Mr. Weinberg and Miss O’Breen could barely be distinguished.
Before anyone could learn the source of her distress, that source loomed in person on the threshold. One look at Stephen Worth, and no one needed to ask why any female should scream and run away and even yelp.
Worth’s ability to carry vast quantities of liquor without showing it was a notorious fact of Hollywood gossip. The quantities he had consumed this evening must have been far more than vast; for there was no denying that he showed it, and in a major manner.
But this was no jolly uproarious drunk. He looked belligerent and mean and damned nasty. His clothes were messed as though he had already been in a lesser fight or two along the way; but his eyes glistened as though those had been just practice for the really dirty work to come. In complete incongruity to his rough appearance, he dangled a neatly strapped brief case from his left hand.
Writers are influential and often colorful figures of the Hollywood scene; but their faces, naturally, are not part of the public consciousness. One or two of the columnists present, however, did know the novelist ex-detective, and murmurs of “Stephen Worth!” began to ripple over the room. The cathedral pronouncements of the interviewed Irregulars dwindled into silence, and strong men turned from the bar. Some even set down their drinks.
“Hiyah!” said Stephen Worth.
His tone was expansive but venomous. The women among the correspondents looked about for stalwart protection (the one in green clutched Jackson’s arm with coy terror), and the men began to remember the rougher days of their apprenticeship.
“Isn’t this pretty?” Worth demanded of the universe. “Isn’t this just too ca-yute? A whole room full of whimsy-wholmesy!”
F. X. Weinberg stepped forward pigeonlike. “Mr. Worth—!”
“Easy does it, F. X. Remember the legal department. I’m just here to tell these lads and lassies a thing or three. Let ’em know what they’re celebrating. They might think it’s funny there’s a big party for The Speckled Band with everybody there but me—and I’m just the guy that’s writing it. They might get the wrong idea. You see, ladies and gentlemen of the press, Polly doesn’t trust me on this picture. They’re afraid I might put a little guts in the damn thing; and Holmes and Metropolis must be purer than the lily—purer than the Hays office even.”
He staggered and recovered by grasping a table. “You think this is something petty. Just another studio squabble and so what? But it’s more than that, and you’re g
oing to get the story. Sure, I know—this is all supposed to be a guarantee of classical fidelity; but I know better. I know it’s a plot to get me out of the way. And I don’t mean just off the script either. I’ve had threats lately—threats against my life—and I know where they came from. I’m not taking them to the police—I can take care of myself; but I just want to give you a little idea how goddamned real this setup is.”
Dr. Rufus Bottomley’s laugh was loud in the silence of the room. “Come now, sir, are we supposed to take all this seriously? At least, Worth, I never suspected you of being a neurotic. I thought if anything you were too infernally unrepressed.”
“Interesting persecution complex,” Harrison Ridgly agreed. “In his state—which, I may add abstractly, I envy—one might expect tales of little men with green beards and purple nose rings. Instead we find ourselves cast in the roles of his persecutors. Picturesque.”
Stephen Worth twisted his face into an ugly grin. “Almost as picturesque as being a bereaved brother, isn’t it, Ridgly? Of course you’ve all of you spotted that ducky little arm band—what the well-dressed mourner will wear according to Sirrah?”
Lieutenant Jackson was edging warily through the crowd. This situation was loaded with dynamite, and it was up to him, even though he wasn’t on duty, to see that nothing too regrettable occurred.
“Gather around,” Worth went on, “and you’ll get the real low-down why they’ve got to get me out of the way. For one thing, I know a little too much about Mr. Weinberg’s political activities. Anti-Nazism is a pretty mask for a lot of very unpretty things; and the Dies Committee might like to know a few things about good old F. X. and his Russian buddies.”
Mr. Weinberg snorted. “Nonsense, gentlemen! So because I hate Hitler I’m a Communist yet? For twenty years I vote the straight Republican ticket. In the Sinclair campaign I’m at Mayer’s right hand. And now this … this …”
“Sure he denies it. Who wouldn’t, if he thought I didn’t have any proofs? He forgets how much his little side-kick here knows, and how talkative she is under a nice warm blanket.”
Then everything happened at once. Without a word Maureen advanced, her face calm with the stern exaltation of Saint Agnes in the brothel, and struck Worth a coldly vicious backhand blow across the mouth. Her ring cut his puffy lip. The blood flowed unnoticed as he coolly placed his open palm against her face and shoved her flat on her back.
“You see, boys?” he inquired callously. “A pushover!”
It was in the middle of the word that Drew Furness swung at him. It was a futile, amateurish swing, that left the swinger hopelessly wide open for a return attack. But in delivering that return, Worth’s uncertain foot slipped. His hard left missed its goal, swung all the way round, and landed full in the eye of Detective Lieutenant Jackson.
The answer was an efficient professional one-two to Worth’s whisky-gutted belly.
Lieutenant Jackson slapped imaginary filth from his hands. “He’s out cold,” he announced. “Anybody want to prefer charges?”
Silence.
“Then I think, Mr. Weinberg, you’d better break up the party.”
But that was hardly necessary. At least half the guests has already streamed off in search of telephones.
* The Case of the Crumpled Knave. Simon and Schuster, 1939.
Chapter 5
Lieutenant Jackson heard the noise only vaguely, and did not even bother to notice the time. He had more than once been professionally furious with a witness who had heard the crucial shot and thought it simply an automobile’s backfire or some such familiarly civilized sound; but after this case he was more understanding. To a policeman looking at matters afterward, with full knowledge that murder has been done, it seems impossible that anyone could have disregarded a sharp crack in the night; but when you are present yourself, deeply engrossed in the solid pleasures of conversation and (in this case) cryptanalysis, it seems equally impossible that anything more sinister than an ugly mechanical noise could be going on in your neighborhood.
The party had broken up quickly. Even the caterer’s men seemed to go about their cleaning-up with unusual dispatch, prompted by the thought of getting home and telling the strange things that happen at Hollywood parties. Very soon only a handful was left in the flower-bedizened room: the five Irregulars, Maureen, and the Lieutenant, who felt a certain responsibility for seeing things through smoothly. F. X. was outside on the phone, using desperately every power that he possessed to induce the newspapers to kill the Worth story and seemingly, from the frantic rising of his voice, enjoying very little success.
Stephen Worth and his brief case had been carried into a spare bedroom upstairs and dumped respectively on the bed and on the floor. The surprisingly heavy brief case seemed to have stood up well under the strain of the evening. It still looked trim and efficient; but its master obviously needed several hours of oblivion before he could even be argued with. Just what was to be done when he did recover consciousness, no one knew; but this problem had been tacitly shelved until it had to be dealt with.
Even this small remaining group broke up in its turn. Harrison Ridgly III, who had been rapidly approaching the state which he had claimed to envy in Worth, announced that he would take a walk in the cool night air, and departed, with warnings from Maureen concerning the ease of getting lost on Romualdo Drive and its fellow angle-worms. Dr. Bottomley retired to his room for a quiet pipe. Jonadab Evans simply disappeared, and no one seemed to notice his absence. The remaining four conversed feebly (Jackson had never before realized fully the meaning of the word desultory) until Maureen rose abruptly.
“Look,” she said. “I’m a working girl, and if I know reporters it’s going to be a busy day at Polly tomorrow. I’m going home.”
Jackson looked at his watch. “Could I drive you, Miss O’Breen?”
“That’s all right. I can walk down to Highland, if I don’t run into our pet cynic in the night air, and catch a red car there. That takes me practically home.”
“Miss O’Breen …” Drew Furness offered diffidently. “I—it is my habit to have a breath of air in the evening. I was, in fact, about to take my car out. If I could combine health and service by offering you a lift—” He wondered what his Aunt Belle, who religiously ragged him for not getting out enough, would say to this freshly discovered habit.
Maureen smiled quizzically. “All right. Never let it be said that an O’Breen didn’t try anything once. I’ll go get my coat and powder my nose.”
“I assure you, Miss O’Breen, that your nose is not in the least shiny.”
Maureen caught Jackson’s eye and grinned. “Sometime, Mr. Furness, I’m going to give you a brief introductory course in idiomatic English. You go bring the car around; I’ll be right down.” She ran off lightly to the stairs.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Furness. “I’ll see you later, I presume—or possibly in the morning.”
“So long,” Jackson waved, and Otto Federhut grunted, “’n Abend.”
“I suppose,” observed Jackson, left alone with the émigré, “that in your judicial work in Vienna you had a great deal of contact with European police methods?”
Federhut nodded his shaggy white head. “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant. And I hope that you do not feel tonight that you must at once depart. I should like to hold with you a little conversation about the police.”
“I’m off duty till noon tomorrow. There isn’t much reason why I should hustle off to bed.” Jackson was pacing idly about the room. “Shoot.”
“Shoot?”
“I mean—go right ahead.”
“When even a professor of your language,” Federhut smiled, “has difficulties with your idioms, who is to blame a poor foreign scholar such as I? I make a note here in my mind: shoot does not always mean bang!”
Bang! came the noise from somewhere outside the room.
Otto Federhut started. “Does this house echo me,” he exclaimed, “or was that—?”
Jack
son shook his head. “Automobile, probably. Just Furness bringing his car around.”
The jurist sank back relieved. “Sometimes I forget that I am in America, where a loud noise means only the pleasures of life and not a sudden end to those pleasures. But what I had wished to ask you is this: Is it not true—I have heard the rumor—that here in Los Angeles you have what is much like Herr Himmler’s Gestapo?”
“Gestapo?”
“Once more an echo, Herr Leutnant? The Gestapo is the geheime Staats-Polizei—the secret State Police, which out-ferrets the Communists and the Jews. Have you not here some similar band for persecution?”
“Oh, you mean the Red Squad. Yes, we did have. The new city administration has pretty much broken it up; but it did get away with some damned raw stuff. I’ve always been glad I was on something as relatively decent as homicide. I’d hate like hell to be out for some poor bastard’s blood just because he—” Jackson halted abruptly.
“Yes?”
“Look. What the devil’s this? Seems to be some stuff of Worth’s.”
He picked up the white envelope—it rattled gently as he did so—with the typewritten address:
STEPHEN WORTH, ESQ.
TENDER C/O BAKER STREET IRREGULARS
221B ROMUALDO DRIVE
and the penciled inscription:
Mr, Worth—
A man called—foreign voice—said to tell
you it was “concerned with Amy Gray.”
Otto Federhut looked at the envelope incuriously. “I admit that it is odd that Mr. Worth should receive messages here where he was not expected; but I do not concern myself with it.”
“That’s not what interests me so much,” said Jackson. “But take a look at this.” He held up the visiting card.
Federhut contemplated it in silence, while Mr. Weinberg’s excited voice shrilled at the hall telephone. “It is strange,” he said at last. “Ricoletti. That brings something to my mind, but it is too absurd to mention.”
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars Page 6