by Howard Fast
“What are you, crazy? I’m in the middle of a picture, and you’re asking me am I planning to kill some miserable broad.” He shook his head. “Are we finished? I told you I don’t know this Greene woman. You want to know would I kill Mitzie? Maybe. If I could get away with it. If I could find enough time between pictures.”
“That’s a lot of hate. Why?”
“That, Mr. Detective, is none of your goddamn business.”
“Why did your marriage break up?”
“What are you, the Louella Parsons of the Beverly Hills cops?”
“It’s very important that you answer that question.”
“Not to me.” He got to his feet.
“A few more questions, Mr. Fuller. Were you in the service?”
“Yes, I spent a lousy year in Nam with an army film unit. But you know what occurs to me? I don’t have to answer any one of your damn questions. You blackmailed me out there, telling me you’d kill a day’s shooting if I didn’t talk to you. I think I’ll talk to my lawyer about that.”
“You could do that,” Masuto agreed. “But I think it would be easier to spend a few minutes more with me and not lose the day’s shooting. You can still take it up with your lawyer.”
“Okay, okay, let’s get it over with.”
“Do you own a pistol?”
“Four of them, and I got the papers on all of them.”
“What kind?”
“I have a Colt forty-five hogleg.” For the first time, his tight face relaxed slightly and he smiled thinly. “That’s a reproduction of the old frontier Colt, bring down a man at a hundred yards, blow a hole through you big as a saucer. I got a Browning thirty-caliber automatic and I own two target pistols, both of them twenty-two.”
“What kind of guns are the twenty-twos?”
He was relaxed now. He enjoyed talking about guns. “One is an old Smith and Wesson hand ejector. It’s got to be fifty years old, but perfect. A little pocket gun, but a beauty. That’s the one I carry when I carry a gun.”
“You carry a gun?”
“Not now. At night.”
“Why?”
“Man, you got to be kidding. Do you read the newspapers?”
“Sometimes. And the other twenty-two?”
“That’s a Browning target pistol. Automatic, and it fires twenty-two longs.”
“Where do you keep your guns?”
“Like I said, sometimes I carry the little piece at night. I keep the thirty-caliber in my desk, and the hogleg and the target gun have the usual plush-lined boxes. I keep both boxes in my study.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Fuller?”
“I don’t see where the hell all this fits in.”
“If you will bear with me just a few minutes more,” Masuto said softly, “we can finish this and you can go back to your work. I was asking where you live.”
“I rent a little house on Camden. I had a goddamn mansion on Palm Drive, but it went to that bitch. You know, this is the age of the ripoff and the land of the ripoff. But there’s one ripoff that cuts everything else down to size. Divorce. I pay that bitch four thousand clams a month. I had to give her the house. We’re talking about that target pistol. She gave me that. The one goddamn thing she ever gave me, except maybe a dose of the clap. Nah! I’m only talking. The only dose she gave me was a dose of herself, and that was plenty.”
“She gave you the target pistol?”
“So she did.”
“You said it came in a large, wooden box?”
“Right.”
“Who takes care of your house?”
“I got a housekeeper, a black lady. She comes in every morning, leaves at nine.”
“Then she’s there now?”
“Certainly.”
“When,” Masuto asked him, “did you last look at the target pistol?”
“When? Jesus, I don’t know. This film you’re lousing up right now—I been with it three weeks. I know I haven’t touched the pistol in that time.”
“I suggest to you that it’s not there.”
“What’s not there?”
“The target pistol.”
“You got to be kidding. What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m saying it was stolen.”
“What! How the hell would you know? You mean one of your guys picked up a target pistol? Who says it’s mine?”
Masuto shrugged.
Fuller picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed a number. Masuto could hear, faintly, the voice of the woman who answered. Fuller said, “Lanie, this is Mr. Fuller. I want you to go into my study and open the rosewood box on my desk and tell me what’s in it. You know, there are two boxes. There’s a black teak box that I keep locked. Look in the other box, the reddish one.” There was a pause. “Yes, I’ll hold the wire.”
He stood there with the telephone in his hand, watching Masuto. It had become a game, and it had caught his attention. “You know,” he said to Masuto, “they keep arguing, does art imitate life or does life imitate art—I mean if you can call movies art. I mean this kind of a ploy is exactly what one of those movie detectives would pull. Then, if the gun’s still there, all you got to say to me is, Sue me. So I’m wrong.”
The phone demanded his attention again. He listened. Then he said, “Thanks, Lanie. No, it’s okay.” He put down the telephone and stared at Masuto.
“The gun is gone,” Masuto said.
“How the devil did you know?”
Masuto shrugged.
“Stolen?”
“You didn’t give it to anyone?”
“What does that mean?”
Again, Masuto shrugged.
“So the gun is gone. What do I do now?”
“I suggest you call the Beverly Hills Police and report it. Give them the serial number and the registration number.”
“I’m reporting it to you.”
“That won’t do. By the way, where were you last night, between ten and eleven o’clock?”
“Come on, what in hell is this?”
“I told you. It’s a homicide investigation.”
“All right. I was home.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, in bed, reading a screenplay. After a day in this place, I don’t even want to get laid.”
“No witnesses, no one to vouch that you were there?”
“Just tell me one thing, mister—what are you trying to accuse me of? Of murdering this Alice Greene, who I never even laid eyes on? Or of planning to murder Mitzie? If it’s a crime to plan a murder, you can take me in right now. Oh, shit, the hell with it! I got a film to make.”
Masuto stood up. “All right, Mr. Fuller. Don’t forget to call in about the gun. By the way”—he held out the snapshot of Catherine Addison—“do you know this girl?”
He glanced at the picture without interest. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. Would you take a good look at it?”
Fuller stared at the picture for a moment. “Good-looking kid, but the woods are full of them. No, I don’t know her.”
Masuto nodded and put the picture back in his pocket. As he left the soundstage, the strident voice of Billy Fuller was calling the actors back to their places. Outside, the blazing sunlight blinded Masuto as much as the darkness had previously, and squinting, he walked back to the guard at the gate.
“How’d it come out?” the guard asked him.
“Not too bad. Tell me, isn’t Fulton Legett here on this lot?”
“Going down the list, huh?” The guard nodded and pointed. “Over there in the executive building.”
“Are you going to give me a hard time again?”
“You’re really a Beverly Hills cop?”
For the second time, Masuto took out his badge and exhibited it.
“I didn’t know they had plainclothes cops on the Beverly Hills force.”
“They even have them in uniform,” Masuto said. “I’ll step in there and have a word with Mr. Legett.”
Insid
e, there was another guard at the desk, and once again Masuto went through the routine.
“I’ll call up,” the guard said.
“Why don’t you let me surprise him?”
“What is this? Are you going to make some kind of arrest?”
“No arrest. But I have some questions for him. If you call up there, and he says he won’t see me, and then I go up there anyway, you’re in hot water. This way, you just figured it was okay for me to go up. You can’t get into trouble.”
“He’s in room six eleven.”
“Thanks.”
The girl in six eleven—Masuto decided she was receptionist and secretary—looked up at him in surprise and said that they were not casting. She was a very pretty girl, with blonde hair and wide blue eyes.
“I’m not here for casting. I wish to see Mr. Legett.”
“Oh? Did you have an appointment, mister—?”
“Detective Sergeant Masuto. Beverly Hills police.”
“Oh? Are you sure it’s Mr. Fulton Legett you wish to see?”
“Quite sure.”
“And you’re sure you’re a policeman? I never saw a Chinese policeman before.”
“I’m a policeman,” Masuto said, showing her his badge.
She pressed a button on her telephone and said unhappily, “F.L., there’s a policeman here to see you.” She listened for a moment and then said plaintively, “He asked me if I’m sure you’re a policeman and not one of the studio guards. He thinks I can’t tell the difference between a policeman and a studio guard. That’s hitting below the belt, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Through that door,” she said, pointing.
Masuto opened the door and went into a large, square carpeted and wood-paneled room. The furnishings were all chrome and leather, with glass-topped tables and non-objective paintings on the walls. Fulton Legett sat behind a very large desk. He was a short, overweight man who looked more than his fifty years. He had pudgy hands with well-manicured nails, nails polished to a high sheen, and he had a small cupid’s bow of a mouth.
“Are you sure you want to see me?” Legett asked.
Masuto nodded. “Sergeant Masuto, Beverly Hills police.” He held out his badge.
“Ah, I see. I suppose it’s about that terrible thing at the Crombie house. Poor Alice. She deserved better.”
“Then you knew Mrs. Greene?”
“Oh, indeed, indeed. Knew her very well. I called Laura as soon as I saw it in the papers.”
“You knew Mrs. Crombie?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”
“Do you know Mitzie Fuller?”
Legett’s eyes narrowed. He hesitated a moment too long. “No,” he said shortly.
“But you do know Billy Fuller?”
“Of course I know the little son of a bitch. We’re on the same lot. He’s got a head as big as the Goodyear balloon. I’ve showed him a few scripts, nothing good enough for the little king—” He had forgotten grief and the dead; he was a producer whose scripts had been turned down by a director.
Masuto interrupted. “Your ex-wife, Nancy—”
“Yes, I spoke to her.”
“When?”
“When I called Laura Crombie. Nancy told me about the situation there. I just can’t believe it—that there’s some bloodthirsty lunatic out to kill those women.”
“There is.”
“Well, damn it, it’s one of those things that are hard to believe. Who would want to kill Nancy?”
“I don’t know.” Masuto shrugged. “Would you?”
“Are you serious?”
“I only meant would you know anyone who might want to kill her. I didn’t mean to suggest that you might want to kill her. But since you appear to take it that way, I’ll ask you. Would you want to kill her?”
“That’s a hell of a question.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But Mrs. Legett suggested it.”
“What? You mean she said I wanted to kill her?”
“Not exactly. But when I asked her who might want her dead, she pointed to you.”
“That miserable, crazy woman!”
“Oh? Then I take it she was responding emotionally.”
“What a lousy thing to say! I give that woman blood. Practically every nickel I got goes to paying my alimony. She is loaded. Loaded. That house of mine—which is now hers—up on Lexington Road is one of the best pieces of property in Beverly Hills. It would fetch a million, and from an Arab or an Iranian, maybe a million and a half, and she’s got it and I eat at Hamburg Hamlet. And now she tells the cops that I’m out to murder her. You know something,” he snapped at Masuto, “it’s not a bad idea. If I knew where to buy one of those contracts you see in films, I wouldn’t mind putting it out on her.”
“That’s not anything to tell me.”
“The hell with it! Who gives a damn?”
“Do you own a gun?” Masuto asked him.
“A gun? What in hell would I do with a gun?”
“Then you don’t own one?”
“No, of course not.”
“I asked you about Mitzie Fuller before,” Masuto said.
“Yeah?”
“You said you don’t know her.”
“You’re sitting here,” Legett said, “because you bulled your way into my office and I let it be. I don’t have to answer one goddamn question. As a matter of fact, I can have you thrown out of here. You’re a small town cop who’s off his range.”
“You called Mitzie Fuller a number of times, asking for a date. Why deny it? You’re divorced.”
“You have got one stinking nerve.”
Masuto slid Catherine Addison’s picture across the desk. Legett glanced down at it. “What’s this? That’s Kelly. What has she got to do with all of this?”
“You knew her?”
“Of course I knew her. She was Laura’s kid.” He pushed the picture back at Masuto. “That’s enough. Get out.”
Masuto put the picture in his pocket and left.
Chapter 12
Monte Sweet
Masuto was building his structure, but it was still a house of cards, fragile, unsupported. He had written the name of the murderer down on a slip of paper and had handed it to Wainwright, but that was a gesture, a touch of ego that he was almost ashamed of, and always there was the possibility that he could be wrong. If he was wrong, then he had slandered an innocent person, and the fact that only he and Wainwright knew about the slander did not lessen his guilt. Whatever else he was—a policemen, a father, a husband, a rose-grower, a Nisei—he was still above all a Zen Buddhist with an ultimate responsibility to himself.
Yet as he picked up piece after piece, the pattern he looked for was beginning to emerge. Still, it was without meaning; he had built an arch out of intuition, psychological guesswork, and shreds of disconnected evidence. The keystone was missing.
Lost wholly in his thoughts, he ran a red light, narrowly missing a cursing motorist, and then he saw the blinking light of a Beverly Hills black-and-white behind him. He pulled over to the curb, the black-and-white behind him. The officer got out of his car, walked over and said, “Traffic lights don’t mean anything to you, do they, mister?”
Then the cop bent down and said, “I’ll be damned!”
“I will if I keep this up,” Masuto said.
“Are you chasing something, Sergeant?” the officer asked.
“No, Macneil. The only thing I’m chasing is an idea. I just ran the light. I haven’t done it in years.”
Macneil shrugged. “We can’t all be perfect.”
“You ought to give me a ticket. I deserve it.”
“Ah, the hell with it! Only keep your eyes open, Sarge. You missed that guy by inches.”
Masuto drove on. He turned off Santa Monica Boulevard into the parking space behind the real estate offices of Crombie & Hawkes. Their three-story building oozed prosperity. Over the door, heavy brass letters spelled out the names of the dead Hawkes and the living Crom
bie. Inside, the first floor was reminiscent of a bank, with two rows of desks, four on each side, and behind each desk an attractive woman. These, Masuto surmised, were the residential agents. A broad staircase led up to the second floor, and brass letters indicated that business properties were dealt with up there. Next to the entrance a pretty blonde woman—there was a pretty blonde woman at almost every reception desk in West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills—supplied information. But then the pretty girls from every town in America poured into Los Angeles to become film stars, an ambition which very few of them ever achieved.
The pretty girl at the reception desk informed Masuto that Mr. Arthur Crombie was not in.
“When do you expect him?”
“He left for lunch. It’s after three now, and he’s usually back by two-thirty. So he may have had an appointment with a customer. He’ll call in sooner or later.”
Masuto gave her his card. “I would appreciate hearing from him when he returns.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Back at headquarters, Wainwright intercepted Masuto. “Well, what about it, Masao? Where are we?”
“God knows.”
“That’s a hell of an answer. Pete Bones called. He wants to talk to you.”
Dropping down behind his desk, Masuto dialed the number and asked for Bones.
The thick, throaty voice said, “Masuto?”
“Wainwright said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Right. We’re going to put away the chemist. No one’s claimed the body, so he goes into Potter’s Field. Do you want to look at the corpse before we bury it?”
It was as cold and sad and terrible as so much of the human comedy or tragedy, depending on one’s point of view. A man is trained as a chemist. What did he dream of as a kid, Masuto wondered? What wonderful adventures marked his first days with test tubes and retorts? And then what began to corrode and rot, until his knowledge produced a botulin that destroyed a poor Chicano girl who never knew of his existence or of the existence of the man who hired him. And now as alone as any corpse could be, he went into the earth, unmourned, unknown, and unwanted.
“What was his name?” Masuto asked, out of a curiosity he could not repress.
“Alfred Bindler.”
“Poor devil.”
“The son of a bitch is not worth your sympathy. Tell me, do you want to look or do we dump him?”