“You saw what?”
“You and Duffy were on the floor. He was dead. I wasn’t sure about you, so I went for my stethoscope.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, sir. Except the wheelchair, of course.”
“Nobody was in it when you first looked?”
“Nobody.” He frowned. “I assume it’s Mr Fullerton’s chair. But if so, where’s Fullerton?”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “And his name isn’t Fullerton; it’s Barclay. Not that it matters to you. What does matter is, he’s gone. He was here, but he isn’t here now. You didn’t tab anybody going down the stairs?”
“I did not. Although the stairway is nowhere near my elevator, so that doesn’t spell anything.” He frowned again. “But if Fullerton, or Barclay or whatever his name is – if he uses a wheelchair he must be crippled. That’s an assumption on my part, of course, for I never laid eyes on him. But presuming he is a cripple—”
“He’s one-armed and legless.”
“You mean you saw him?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Then if he’s like you say, how could he get out of his wheelchair and go down two flights of steps?” Pete’s peepers narrowed and suspicion slid into them. Suspicion of me. “And who murdered Duffy?”
“The answer is in an alcove between the bedroom and bath,” I said. “Barclay experimented in prosthetics. He dabbled at inventing artificial limbs. That’s why I asked if you saw anybody scramming. He must have had a set of gams he could get around on.”
“I – see.”
“You didn’t think I croaked Duffy and abolished Barclay down the drainpipes and clouted myself unconscious, did you? You needn’t answer that. I can guess how you figured it, only you figured it wrong. Now where’s a phone?”
He pointed to a hand-set on a stand. “But you can’t go through the switchboard because Duffy isn’t there to give you a line.”
“Poor old guy,” I said. “He probably never got to spend that four bits for a perfecto. But at least he satisfied his curiosity about what the lodger in Three-seventeen looked like. He saw him. And the price he paid was much too high.”
I shooed Pete out into the hall, followed him, shut the door behind us.
“Let’s go, chum,” I said. “I’ve got dialing to do and connections to make. There’s a maniac killer on the loose and he’s thirsting for revenge, gunning for a movie mogul. This is a thing for the cops.”
It was for the cops, all right, but the cops wouldn’t have it. That cost them another bump-off before the night ended.
And it came near installing me in a coffin. Sometimes when my sleep is restless I can still feel those fingers closing like metal bands around my throat. Those are the nights I get up and drink myself very, very drunk . . .
My coupe could do eighty with a tail wind. On a downgrade it might even nudge ninety. I held it to fifty, though, because the last thing I wanted was a ticket for speeding. Not that the ticket would bother me, but you don’t like to be delayed by motorbike bulls when you’re trying to reach a guy and warn him he’s a ripe target for a madman’s bullet.
I whammed west on Sunset to Highland, north on Highland past Hollywood Boulevard and aimed for the hills above that. The multicolored lights of Los Angeles spread out behind and below me like a vast carpet of glowing embers, infernal, patterned in blotchy angles and lines that merged and dimmed against the far infinity of horizon and night.
Ahead, the convoluted hills rose darkly to a star-flecked sky, with here and there a pinprick twinkle on a knoll or cliffside, as if the crests had stretched far up and seized some of the stars to wear for diamonds. Lights in the windows of hilltop houses always look that way from a distance, and in Hollywood it’s considered swanky indeed to live in a district hilltop house.
That was why Emil Heinrich lived in one. Heinrich was big stuff.
I tooled my crate along a curving roadway and climbed. What I had to do was a cop job, but the cops wouldn’t handle it. They were a pack of dopes, particularly my old friend Ole Brunvig of the Homicide Squad. In my mind’s ear I could still hear the echo of Brunvig’s grainy, dyspeptic voice when I called him up from the lobby of the Chaple Arms.
“Nick Ransom, yeah,” I said. “There’s been a kill. A desk clerk, name of Duffy, made the mistake of looking at Ronald Barclay, and Barclay extinguished him. Now Barclay’s on the prowl to pull another bump.”
“He – what?”
I repeated it. “Barclay croaked this clerk named Duffy and now he’s out gunning for—”
“Stop kidding me. How can the clerk be out gunning for somebody if he’s croaked?”
“Not the clerk!” I yelped. “He’s defunct. It’s Barclay who’s on the loose, getting ready to kill again. The name he’s been using is Joseph T. Fullerton, but he’s really Ronald Barclay.” This sounded a little complex, but I let it go. “You remember Barclay. He used to be the hottest ham in the Paragon roster.”
“Oh. That Barclay. For a moment you had me puzzled.” Sudden peevishness sprouted through the sarcasm. “Sure I remember Ronald Barclay. He died fourteen years ago. Killed by an explosion on a sound stage. So now his ghost is horsing around Hollywood and you want him pinched for murder, hey?”
“Yes, but he’s not a ghost. He’s alive, and he’s got a roscoe and he’s on the prowl for the guy who put him in his grave.”
“Now cut that out!” Brunvig blew his lid. “If he’s alive, nobody put him in his grave. If he was in his grave, he isn’t alive. Lay off the drunken comedy.”
“It’s not comedy and I’m sober,” I said hotly. “Barclay is not dead. He never was. His funeral was phony. The explosion cost him both legs and an arm, but it didn’t really kill him. I’m telling you he knocked me senseless a little while ago and bumped a hotel clerk named Duffy and then walked out while I was too unconscious to stop him.”
“Oho. He walked out.” Brunvig’s voice rose to a shrill scream of rage, through which you could hear the gnashing of teeth. “He walked out. He’s got no legs, but he walked out. All right, Sherlock, that tears it. I’ve had enough.”
“Listen,” I said. “You don’t understand!”
“I understand plenty. You’re intoxicated. You’re fried up to the scalp. Okay, you’ve had your fun with me. Now go to bed and sleep it off before I get sore and jerk your license.” Violently he hung up in my ear.
You couldn’t blame him too much. Try to convince anybody that a screen star dead fourteen years is actually alive. Try to make a skeptical cop believe there’s a legless, one-armed bozo walking around packing murder in his pocket, hunting the party whose bomb had blasted him to a living death. You had to see it, as I’d seen it, to know it was true. Otherwise it sounded as screwy as an opium smoker’s dream.
So I got nowhere with Brunvig. I rang him back and he refused to talk to me. He wouldn’t even take the call.
That dumped it spang in my lap, which was what I deserved. It was my own fault. I should have made a getaway from Barclay’s suite when I’d had the chance, should have tipped the law to come slap a straitjacket on him when I first realized he was dangerously insane.
Instead, I’d turned my back on him so he could bash me. Worse, I’d dragged a poor old deaf yuck into the room and got him conked to his ancestors. I felt almost as guilty as if I’d killed Duffy myself.
Any way you looked at it, Barclay was now my personal responsibility. It was up to me to track him down, collar him before he slew any more citizens. Finding him shouldn’t be too difficult, I concluded. He had an obsession, a fixed idea. He craved vengeance on Emil Heinrich, therefore he would make a beeline for Heinrich’s opulent igloo in the Hollywoodland hills, probably by taxi. This called for a chase sequence, yoicks and tally-ho in a thundering hurry.
Not that I cared about Heinrich. If he had actually gimmicked the cigarette-box bomb fourteen years ago it was high time retribution caught up with him. It had to be legal retribution, though, and not me
ted out by a maniac with a penchant for murdering innocent bystanders. I didn’t want any more dead guys like Duffy weighing on my conscience.
So I left Peter Warren Winthrop, bellhop, elevator jockey and medical student, holding down the fort at the Chaple Arms. I posted him in the frowsy, unclean lobby and ordered him to keep phoning Homicide until he persuaded them to send a tech squad and a meat basket for Duffy’s remainders.
“Stay with it, son, and don’t take no for an answer,” I said.
Then I blipped out to my bucket and lit a shuck for high ground.
Now, ten minutes later, I twisted my tiller, scooted around a series of curves that slanted upward in tilted coils like rope a careless giant had tossed away. And presently I came to my destination.
Heinrich had a layout in keeping with his lofty position as head cheese of a major studio. It was a cubistic stucco affair on three different levels, as if the architect had melted it and let it drip down the face of the hill until it congealed there in an unsymmetrical jumble of gray blocks.
An abrupt driveway angled to a parking area in front of the garage, which might have held ten Cadillacs if you squeezed them in with a shoe-horn. From this terraced plateau, monolithic steps led up to the next level. You didn’t really need an alpenstock to make the climb.
At the top of the steps there was a flat expanse, part patio, part lawn, part flagstones, part garden and part swimming pool. Lake Michigan was bigger than the swimming pool. Skirting it, you came to the house itself, its main entrance recessed in a sort of embrasure. By that time you were ready for artificial respiration.
I thumbed the bell-push, waited for my pulse to get back down out of the stratosphere. By and by the chrome-plated door opened and a stuffed shirt in butler’s livery inspected me with the cordial sunny warmth of December in Siberia.
“Yes, sir?” He let the words slide past his sinuses, like a repressed whinny.
“Mr Heinrich,” I said, and briefly flashed my badge.
“The master is not at home, sir. And if I may say so, sir, I find your approach to be most crude in its subterfuge.”
“Hah?”
“The badge, sir. A special, I believe. Not a genuine police shield at all.” He leered at me. “You are not the only impostor who has tried to obtain an interview on false credentials. Most of them pretend to be gas meter readers, telephone repairmen and termite inspectors. I give you credit for more originality,” he added grudgingly. “But the fact remains that actors, musicians and scenario writers seeking employment with Paragon must see Mr Heinrich at the studio, not at his residence. Good night, sir.”
6. Body on the Lam
As that butler said “good night” he started to close the door in my face, very politely, very properly. And very firmly.
I leaned against its velvety chromium surface, just as politely and twice as firmly. I’m a patient guy, but I was fed up with people giving me the brushoff. I reached around the edge of the portal, harvested a fistful of the butler’s livery and hauled him up close to me. I thrust my kisser two inches from his, so he could smell the Scotch on my breath.
“Pal,” I said, “I’m coming in. If you insist on it I’ll trudge the length of you like a welcome mat, but I’m coming in. I’ve got to talk to Heinrich and I’ve got to have permission to prowl the property. Do you take me to your boss right now or shall we wrestle for it?”
“He – he’s not home!” he squawked, flapping like a hen laying a square egg. “Let go of me!”
I shook him a little, just enough to make his tonsils rattle.
“Don’t lie to me, baby. There’s a killer loose. He’s looking for your employer and he’s toting a thirty-eight for a divining rod. Take me to Heinrich. Pronto.”
“He’s out. There’s no-nobody home except Mrs Heinrich and myself. The rest of the household staff have the evening off. You let g-go of me or I’ll call the p-police!”
“I wish you would,” I said grimly. “Maybe they’ll listen to you. They wouldn’t to me.”
Still holding him, I shoved him backward into a reception hall that needed only a layer of turf to make it a polo field.
“But first take me to Mrs Heinrich,” I said. “That’s assuming you were levelling about her hubby not being home.” I kicked the door shut behind me, listened for the click that satisfied me the latch had snapped. “Meanwhile, don’t let anybody else in. Except the cops, of course. I wasn’t fooling about a killer being loose.”
He flapped some more. “You c-can’t—”
“Don’t be tiresome,” I said. “I’ll even let you announce me to the lady. Nick Ransom is the handle. Maybe she’ll remember me from the days when she was an extra named Marian Lodge and I was a stunt man around the lots.”
“But – but Mrs Heinrich doesn’t like to be disturbed during her star bath.”
“Star bath?”
“Like a sun bath, only at night. Something about the cosmic rays. She read it in a book.”
I took this in stride. The night was so full of whacky events I was growing calloused to it. And Marian always had a bird-brain.
“We’ll disturb her anyhow,” I said. “Get going.”
Muttering, he led me along the reception hall to a corridor, and along that to a stairway, and up this to a level which seemed to project outward into empty space. Actually it was a glassed-in-solarium with the domed roof rolled open; a basking room built out over the cliffside with no visible means of support, ending on a sheer drop down into the next precinct.
The butler cleared his throat apologetically, spoke my name and scuttled away with his coat-tails dipping lint. He never did phone Headquarters, the heel. He was all bluff and no hole card.
I stood there trying to adjust my eyes to the dark. There was movement on something that might be a chaise longue. You couldn’t quite tell in the blackness. The movement was white, though. Fascinatingly white. And a drawling she-male voice said:
“Nick Ransom, of all people. This is a surprise. Imagine, after all these years. And just as rugged as ever.”
I went toward her, wondering how she could spot my ruggedness in a room as dark as the bottom of the La-Brea tar pits. Presently my glimmers got their second wind and there was just enough starlight to show me the shapely outlines of a jane on a daybed. Just to make sure, I lit a match on my thumbnail.
Then I said: “Yipe!” and my flabbergasted exclamation blew out the flame.
The doll was Marian Lodge, all right; Marian Heinrich, now. Brunette, statuesque, relaxed, and utterly uninhibited.
She laughed. “Shocked, Nick? That’s out of character.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t expecting—”
“To get the full benefit of star bath rays you must have them flow over you like sea foam. All over you. Over all of you. Come sit by me, darling.”
“No,” I said firmly, “I’ll talk from here. It’s serious, and I want to keep my mind on it.”
“Silly boy.” Silk whispered intimately and a zipper wheeked. “Now you can be serious. Come kiss me hello.”
I sidled closer, cautiously.
“That was years ago. Before you got married. Speaking of husbands—”
“Let’s not.” She sat up, snared my fingers, tugged me down on the cushions. “Husbands bore me. Especially mine.”
“Where is he tonight?”
“Out chasing, I suppose. As usual. Don’t worry, he won’t bother us. He never gets home until late. Kiss me.”
I could be as persistent as she was. “Any way of getting hold of him by phone?”
“Heaven forbid.” She hauled at my wrist. “I’m so glad you came to see me, Nick. Like old times.”
Old times, my elbow. I’d been on two mild parties with her and she wanted to build it up to a feature production. In technicolor. What she was doing with my captured hand would have made a wooden Indian throw away his cigars. I was no wooden Indian, though. I was a private eye hunting a homicidal madman. “Cut it out, tutz,” I said. “I want to ask you
something.”
“The answer is yes. Now kiss me.”
“Remember Ronald Barclay?”
“Do I! Mmm-mmm. I adored that man. Kiss me.”
By main strength, I got my fingers away from her. “Did he ever make a pass at you?”
“No.” She sighed regretfully. “Darn it.”
“But your husband was jealous of him, wasn’t he?”
“I wish you’d stop reminding me of my husband at a time like this. For all I care he can drop dead.”
This startled me. It made two people who yearned for Heinrich to pass away. Heinrich was not a popular guy.
“You might be surprised if he did die, hon,” I said. “Tonight. With a hole in the head. A bullet-hole, that is.”
She snagged my other hand and was reckless with it. Her sultry breath danced along my cheek. She was driving me crazy.
“Silly. You don’t have to shoot him,” she murmured. “I won’t even tell him you were here.”
“I didn’t say I’d shoot him!” I choked. “I meant . . . Hey, cut it out. Quit it.”
Star glow dropped little glints in her sleek black hair and her lips were a dark flutter of challenge and demand. But whatever I was going to do about it never got done, because just then a voice full of adenoids whinnied at us from the solarium entrance.
A butler is handy to have around, sometimes.
“I beg pardon,” the butler said. “There’s a person at the door who insists upon seeing Mr Ransom.”
I leaped up to my feet. In the same motion I unholstered my fowling piece. If this was Ronald Barclay trying to trick me out where he could use me for a clay pigeon, slugs were going to fly through the blue California night.
“Describe him,” I said.
“He’s rather young, sir. And tall. He gave his name as Peter Warren Winthrop, and when I refused to admit him he asked me to convey a message to you. Something to the effect, sir, that Duffy has disappeared.”
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 27