Glaring white light flooded the screen for an instant and then numbers began to appear in a quick backward sequence: 10 9 8 7 6. Another piece of film coming on. Lisa felt a sudden queasiness in her stomach. This would be the camp scene. The murder scene. She must have clenched her fingers because she felt Dick returning the pressure. 5 4 3 2 1 the numbers read and the glaring white light was replaced by color. Back of the man holding the blackboard on which was printed “Scene 931A—Tiger in the Night—Director: Gordon,” she could see the campfire with the natives around it and the three tents in the background and the pole from which the holstered pistol was hanging. The man raised the hinged arm on the top of the blackboard, brought it down with a hollow thud and trotted away.
Now Ashton Graves should have come limping out of the hunters’ tent, but he didn’t. Nothing happened. The natives remained motionless around the fire. It could have been a color slide except for the smoke rising from the burning wood. Waiting tensely, Lisa had an eerie feeling of being alone in the dark projection room. She could hear nothing, not even breathing. She felt a chill wave of fear, worse than the fear that had gripped her during the long night in the dingy hotel room they had put her in. This could be her only chance. Why didn’t something happen?
Edged with irritation, Josh Gordon’s voice came over the sound track. “Somebody move that holster around in front. So we can see it.” A man’s back blocked the screen, then diminished in size as he ran past the fire to the tent pole. She saw the man was Dick and suddenly remembered that was what had held up the scene. Getting the holster in the proper place. She watched him reach for the holster, dislodge the belt from the nail holding it to the pole. He caught the holster and then, as the Webley slipped out, he caught it. Holding the pistol pressed to his stomach, he turned away from the camera. Now she couldn’t see what he was doing. Abruptly, Josh Gordon leaned over her, pushed hard on Dick’s shoulder.
“Quick!” he whispered. “Miller Place!”
She felt Dick’s hand slide from hers and he was on his feet and starting up the aisle. On the screen he was still fumbling with the pistol. A voice to the right of her yelled, “Stop the film!” Another voice cried, “Lights!” A babel of voices came on. She turned to look up the aisle, saw the projection room door just closing. She heard Mr. Fabro’s voice, thick with anger, shout, “Get him, somebody! Get him!” There was a crash close by. Sergeant Grimsby had tripped over Josh’s cast. Captain Walsh came up as the sergeant got to his feet. “Never mind the foot race,” he said. “Put out an all points on him.” Sergeant Grimsby went to the telephone on the control desk. Captain Walsh stared down at Josh, his tired face somber.
“So it was Blake,” he said.
“Sure looks that way,” Josh said.
She felt herself begin to tremble. She felt like being sick. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Yet how else could the pistol have been loaded?
Richard Blake
Glass pinged against glass as he put the half-finished vodka-and-tonic on the coffee table beside Yvonne’s long-dead drink. The liquor didn’t help. His nerves were vibrating like high-tension wires in a hurricane. He felt like Dillinger, holed up in an apartment hide-away, waiting to shoot it out with the FBI. Only, unlike Dillinger, he was scared. He didn’t want to shoot it out with anybody. Or get shot.
So why in hell had he run?
An excellent question. One that he should have asked himself three hours ago. But the flight had been so absurdly simple, out the unguarded executives’ entrance and across the street to his car in the parking lot, that he hadn’t asked himself anything. Hadn’t until, safely inside the apartment, he’d suddenly realized what he had done. That was when the question came.
Why in hell had he run?
He couldn’t even pretend it was on account of Lisa. She was off the hook. The film had taken care of that. He scowled at his half-empty glass. How could he and Josh and the others have forgotten about his adjusting the holster? He supposed because everyone had been trying to remember what had happened during the scene itself, concentrating on the moment Caresse had been killed. Thinking of who rather than how. And now the film had given them both how and who.
He glanced at the electric clock above the fake fireplace. It read 2:36. He bent over the envelope Gordon had handed him in the projection room. On its back, in pencil, was scrawled:
Writing in hospital. Police
sore, got man watching me but
get this to you somehow.
Thought done for, ledgers gone.
blonde dead but just had idea!
Four things.
Give Herbie photo of Pixley. A
must. He knows what to do.
Boxes Webley bullets. Buy. Get
Orthman put aside, untouched.
Ask Selig about dueling pistols.
Go Academy Award broadcast tonite.
Follow Fabro.
Cheers for backward school of
detection!!!
Josh
He frowned unhappily at the barely legible writing. Gordon obviously had something in mind, but he had no idea what it was. The four things he was supposed to do meant nothing, opened up no trains of thought. And besides he couldn’t do any of them, now he was a fugitive. As far as he was concerned the doors had closed forever on the backward school of detection.
He carried his glass into the kitchen. Backward was certainly the word. He being hunted for something he hadn’t done while the real murderer sat around waiting for him to be caught. He swallowed part of his drink, added more vodka. From now on he’d settle for the police school of detection. If it wasn’t too late.
Why in hell had he run?
He thought about Lisa again. It wasn’t much better than chinking about himself. She would be sure, by now, that he was guilty. The film, even in the brief glimpse he had caught of it, was damning. Letting the pistol fall out of the holster and then holding it, half concealed by arms and his left hip, to his stomach! He remembered that he had fooled around with it for almost half a minute. Plenty of time to slip a couple of real bullets into the clip.
A bell jangled somewhere and vodka-and-tonic spilled from the glass, soaked the back of his hand. The bell rang again. Hand clenching the glass, he went cautiously into the living room, tiptoed towards the front door. He knew it was the police. He wanted to peer out the window under the chintz curtain to the right of the door, but he was afraid they might shoot at his head. The bell rang a third time. He opened the door a crack. Instead of a hail of .38 caliber bullets, Herbie came into the apartment. Back of him was Lisa. She made a muffled noise deep in her throat and ran to him.
“Oh, darling … darling!”
She kissed his jawbone and then his lips. She smelled of jasmine and pine. She put her cheek against his.
“My poor baby!”
“Lisa …!”
“Relax, darling.”
“I … I thought you were the cops.”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“No.”
Herbie said, “Don’t get any ideas they ain’t after you, though.” His normally pink face was pale. “Got an all points alarm out.”
“Where’s Josh?”
“In the hospital,” Herbie said. “Or the clink.”
“The clink?”
“It seems he tripped Sergeant Grimsby,” Lisa said. “While you were escaping.”
“But he sent you?”
“Sent me,” Herbie said. He moved over to the coffee table, peered wanly at the glass on it. “Any more liquor around?”
“Bottle’s in the kitchen.”
Herbie went into the kitchen. Blake turned back to Lisa. “Why did you come?”
“I wanted to.”
“You don’t think I killed her?”
“Of course not.”
“But the film …”
“You never thought I killed her, did you?”
“No.”
“Then why should I think you did?”
&nbs
p; Looking into the gray-green eyes, at once tender and faintly mocking under the dark lashes, he felt muscles and nerves relax. “I don’t deserve you,” he said brokenly.
Herbie came back from the kitchen, the vodka bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. “Don’t deserve me, either,” he said cheerfully.
“You think I’m guilty?”
“Who cares what an assistant director thinks?” Evidently Herbie had already had a drink. There were splotches of red over both cheekbones. “First thing’s the photograph.”
“Pixley’s?”
“Who else?”
Blake took the photograph from his pocket, gave it to Herbie. “What’s this about?” Lisa asked. Blake pointed to the envelope on the table. “All I know is what Josh wrote there.” Lisa picked up the envelope.
Herbie was studying the photograph. He squinted at the inscription, read, “‘Let my words rise from my ashes, Caresse, to sing my love!’” He looked up in bewilderment. “What’s that mean?”
“He was a poet,” Blake said.
Nodding as though that explained everything, Herbie said, “Pretty damn close.”
“What is?”
Herbie went to the front door, opened it and shouted, “Forbes!” Presently a man appeared in the doorway. “Yes?” he said. He was a gaunt man in a threadbare blue yachting jacket and discolored flannel trousers. Around his neck was a silk scarf and on his bare feet were open-toed sandals.
“Stand there,” Herbie said.
“Right-oh,” said the man in an actorish, very British voice. “Full face? Or profile?”
“Just stand there.” Herbie looked at the photograph, then at the man, then at the photograph. “Very damn close,” he said. He handed the photograph to Blake.
It wasn’t very damn close, Blake saw. The man was younger and his face didn’t have the wild look of prophetic power that even in the photograph Pixley’s face conveyed. But there was a resemblance.
“What do you think?” Herbie asked.
“They look something alike.”
“Then Josh has a job for him.”
Lisa was watching them. “What Kind of a job?”
“Thank you, fair lady,” the man said. “Exactly what I’ve been endeavoring to ascertain.”
“Crap on this ascertaining,” Herbie said. “You know the important thing.”
“Ah, yes. The five hundred dollars.” The man’s eyes drifted past Blake, drifted past Lisa to the vodka bottle on the coffee table. “I accept.”
“Okay,” Herbie said. “Back to the car.”
The man didn’t move. “I wonder,” he began, and coughed diffidently. “A small libation … to seal the contract?”
Herbie poured a large libation into a glass. The man accepted the glass, said, “Cheers,” and downed the libation. He gave the glass back, said, “Been a pleasure,” and went out the door. Herbie poured himself a libation.
Blake said, “What if he calls the cops?”
Herbie snorted. “For five hundred bucks he’d put the Queen Mother in an Argentine whorehouse.”
“Is that what he’s supposed to do?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Josh must have told you something.”
“He told me to bring Forbes here.” Herbie drank his libation. “And if he looked anything like Pixley I was to get him made up at the studio to look exactly like him.”
“And then what?” Blake asked.
“Josh said he’d tell me later.”
“And that’s all?”
“All about Forbes and Pixley.” Herbie frowned. “Except for one thing. Kinda crazy.”
“What was that?”
Herbie hesitated. “Well, Josh said this was going to be …”
“Going to be what?”
“The first murder case in history ever solved by a dead man.”
Lisa Carson
I dreamed I won an Academy Award in my Maidenform bra.
She was the girl in the ad who finds herself at the opera or at “21” or being presented at Court wearing nothing above the waist except her Maidenform bra. Only she was tiptoeing down a theater aisle, and under the black Adrian original she had bought on sale at I. Magnin for a hundred and sixty-five dollars she wore no brassiere.
It was a dream and it wasn’t.
The theater was real and so were the receding rows of chalky faces, each intent on the flood-lit stage with its huge gold Oscar. Yet she felt half-naked, like the girl in the ad. She was dreaming and Dick, walking glumly beside her, a mourner from potter’s field in the threadbare dress suit she had rented for him at Western Costume, was a part of her dream.
Some of this strange sensation of duality left her as she reached Row GG and took the inner of the two seats that were blessedly on the aisle. It was like finding a hiding place. She felt Dick take the seat beside her. Covertly, she looked around. No eyes were watching. The dim faces were all turned towards the stage. She looked at Dick. His rigid body, pale skin and glassy expression gave him an embalmed appearance. She found his hand, squeezed ice-cold fingers.
“Scared, darling?”
“Christ, yes,” he said. “I expected a bullet in the back every step of—”
“Sssh,” a voice hissed behind them.
A man was coming out on the stage. He had massive shoulders and a turkey-red face and he looked like a hod-carrier. He was Carleton Beatty, a director noted for his sensitivity and president of the Academy. He crossed to the stand where the awards would be presented, put down a piece of paper, put on horn-rimmed glasses and turned towards the wing he had come out of. A man wearing a tuxedo and earphones was poised there.
Dick began, “Do you think anybody—”
“Ssssh!” the voice hissed.
The man in the tuxedo raised an arm over his head. Thirty-six hundred spectators waited in silence. Ten seconds went by. The arm came down in a dramatic arc that left it pointed at the award stand. Now there were seventy-five million spectators. Carleton Beatty cleared his throat.
“Good evening,” he said. “The Ides of March have rolled around again, and as has been the custom of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since nineteen twenty-eight, we are gathered together not to bury the Caesars of our industry, but to …”
Pressure on her hand caused her to look at Dick. He, in turn, was looking at one of the center rows on the far side of the theater. She saw the bulky figure of Karl Fabro, diffused light giving his jowels a bluish cast, and beside him the plump woman who was his wife and whose name she couldn’t remember. By her was a vacant seat. For T. J. Lorrance, she supposed, wondering where he was. She glanced again at Dick. He was still staring at Fabro, his face puzzled.
It was a puzzle to her, too. “Go Academy Award broadcast,” Josh Gordon’s note had read. “Follow Fabro.” But follow him where? And why? It made no sense, except as a crazy whim on Josh’s part. Worst) than crazy. Practically suicidal as far as Dick was concerned, with the city’s entire police force searching for him.
Dimly hearing Carleton Beatty say, “… here a galaxy of creative talent unsurpassed anywhere in time or …” she pictured the note. Everything Josh had scrawled on the envelope back was a puzzle, even though she had gone with Herbie on two of the errands originally intended for Dick. She had listened while Herbie told Selig, the Studio’s gaunt head carpenter, to bring the dueling pistols to the executives’ projection room at ten o’clock that night. And she had heard him persuade Mr. Orthman, a gnome appearing out of darkness in his weird gunshop, to bring his boxes of bullets for the Webley to the projection room at the same time.
A hollow thunder of clapping hands filled the theater. Carleton Beatty had finished his address and was introducing Jack Benny. Jack had a question. As a master of ceremonies he hadn’t used his ticket. So to whom was he to give it for the refund? Laughter from the theater joined laughter in twenty-five million homes.
Webley bullets, dueling pistols and an actor who looked like a dead poet. Whe
re did they fit in the puzzle? Herbie certainly didn’t know. She went over what he had said in the apartment after that eerie line from Josh about its being the first murder case in history ever solved by a dead man. He had admitted he didn’t have any idea what Josh meant. Then he’d told Dick about the arrangements with Selig and Mr. Orthman.
“Why the projection room at ten o’clock?” Dick asked.
“For the slow motion blow-ups?”
“Slow motion blow-ups?”
“Of the film.”
“Great,” Dick said, looking as though he were listening to a newly invented language. “Just the thing.”
Music from violins and wood winds rose from the orchestra pit. Jack Benny turned towards the left side of the stage. A deeply tanned girl in a white dress came from the wing. It was Doris Day. She began the first of the nominated songs: “Oh, mirror, mirror, tell me true …”
Next, she remembered, Herbie had given Dick the two tickets for Academy broadcast. “For you and Lisa.”
“For God’s sake, we can’t go there.”
“Josh says you gotta.”
“But they’ll grab me.”
“He says it’s the last place the cops’ll ever think of looking.”
“It’s more likely the last place I’ll ever go.”
Herbie patted Dick’s shoulder. “Think of the story you’ll have when this is over.”
“Sure,” Dick said. “Dateline: gas chamber.”
And with that he had collapsed on the couch and Herbie had gone. And she-Applause for Doris Day slid along the rows of seats like surf breaking on a reef. Jerry Lewis made a hesitant entrance from the wings. It seemed he didn’t have a ticket. Did Jack happen to know where he could buy one? By a strange coincidence Jack did.
Black Is the Fashion for Dying Page 17