One Deadly Dawn

by Harry Whittington

  “All right, baby.”

  “No matter what it is?”

  I pushed my hand through her hair. I got up, showered and dressed. I needed a shave, but said to hell with it. I kissed Toni good-bye.

  She was fast asleep.

  • • •

  The sun that had been shining when I left the apartment disappeared, and it began to rain before I reached San Rafael. I couldn’t get Toni off my mind. I wondered what trouble she was in, figured it couldn’t be too bad or she would have told me. I grinned. At least it would give me an excuse to check back in over there when I got back to L.A.

  I shook my head. No, the kid had paid for something — I sure as hell had gotten value delivered. She deserved somebody a lot better than I. Besides, I’d married one starlet and that’s par for the course.

  With the rain and the crazy drivers on the freeway and the highway, it took most of the morning to get back to San Rafael.

  The village drooped like a wet duck. I drove toward the jail, changed my mind.

  I had to find out more about Pawley. Hadn’t Yol Myerene said so in his office? Pawley had plenty of enemies, a lot of them out here in California. And now it had been narrowed down to somebody who felt chummy enough with me to charge threatening telegrams to my phone bill.

  It didn’t necessarily follow that whoever sent that telegram had killed Pawley. But finding out who had sent it would move me a giant step closer.

  I parked across the street from the supermarket, and walked across the street to the local Western Union office. It took five dollars and twenty minutes to learn the name of the boy who delivered the telegram out to Pawley the night he was clobbered in his garden.

  This boy was as tall as I, and as thin as lattice work. His protuberant Adam’s apple bobbed when he talked, and two of his teeth were missing.

  He was sitting in the cafe enjoying a cup of coffee and the notoriety that had come to him as the last person except the murderer to have seen Fredrick Pawley alive in his hideaway.

  “Yes, sir?” He stared at me, squinting when I sat beside him and ordered his coffee warmed and a cup for me. “What do you want?”

  “A question I’d like to ask you.”

  “Well, now, the police has told me not to talk any more than I got to. You a reporter or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you got no camera?”

  “What you want with a camera?”

  “If you’re gonna get my statement, why don’t you take my picture to run with it?”

  I nodded. “Ah-hah, ought to sell some extra copies at that. Tell you what, I’ll get your statement, then I’ll send a cameraman over to take your picture. Okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “In the meantime, how about a five dollar bill?”

  I shoved it over beside his coffee cup, making a mental note to add some of this money to my expense account.

  “Well, that seems all right. Whattya you want me to tell you?”

  “Nothing very tough. This telegram you delivered. Did you deliver it right to Mr. Pawley in person?”

  He flushed, looked around at the people he’d been telling his story to. He took the five dollars, swallowed and bobbed his Adam’s apple.

  I added a five. “I’ve got to have the truth.”

  He flushed some more. “Why don’t we just step outside?”

  Frowning, I followed him outside. “What’s all the secrecy about?” I said.

  He looked around. “I been telling folks that I seen Mr. Pawley, that I delivered the telegram to him.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  He flushed again.

  “Why did you say you had?”

  “Well, you’re the first one that asked me if I did or not. The police just took it for granted. You’re the only one that asked me.”

  “Who was it, boy? Was it Pawley?”

  He took some minutes to think that over. He spent them staring at the two five spots in his hand. “No, sir. I don’t think so.”

  Scully had told me that Pawley had a male secretary out at his place. This man handled details and kept a direct wire open to Pawley’s editorial offices in Manhattan. I felt my heart quicken. “Was it another man, boy?”

  He shook his head again.

  “No sir, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a man at all. That’s why I know it wasn’t Mr. Pawley. It was mister nobody. It was some lady, mister.”

  I swallowed as hard as he had. “A lady?”

  “Yes, sir. She come right to the door in a frilly nightgown.”

  I should have been pleased. Ten bucks had bought me information the police probably didn’t have. Pawley had had a chicken in his coop the night he was killed. Somebody else had been in that house besides Jack Roland.

  I walked back inside the cafe, finished my coffee. It tasted like dishwater. What I was thinking couldn’t be true. Hell, I’d had it. Betty had given me the shaft, and now Toni Drake crooked her finger and I went running back for more.

  I couldn’t get her out of my thoughts, and I couldn’t get the sickness out either. I had to know for sure. I began to see why Toni Drake had been so sweet last night, and it hurt, it hurt so bad the coffee swirled around, curdling inside my stomach.

  I went into the phone booth at the corner of the cafe, put through a call to Toni’s apartment. I pushed money in the slots viciously when the operator ordered them.

  “Toni.”

  “Sam, darling. You called me. Sam, that’s sweet.”

  “Tom, I — look, I don’t feel sweet. I want an answer, baby, just one straight answer.”

  Her voice was hollow. “Sam, you sound so funny.”

  “Believe me, I’m not.”

  “Sam, what’s the matter?”

  “Will you tell me straight?”

  A long silence. “Anything, Sam.”

  “This trouble you’re in. The cops might find out — they might question you. You want me to say you were with me all night, the night before last. Is that right?”

  She sounded a million miles away. “Yes.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  “Go ahead, baby; I can take it. Now I can take it.”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  “You want me to say it?” My voice shook, my hands shook and sweat poured off me. “You want me to say it, Toni? You were down here in San Rafael — with Fred Pawley. Is that the truth, Toni?”

  There was nothing, only the hum of the wires.

  “Answer me, damn it.”

  “Sam, I didn’t want to tell you. And after last night I didn’t want to more than — ”

  I hung up.

  I felt that coffee rolling around and moving upward. I had to get out of there or I’d be sick.

  Big smooth Sam Howell. Too smart to be suckered in.

  I walked across the street, knowing I was sicker than I had ever been in all my life. I wanted to laugh, I wanted to cry, I wanted to smash something. All night long, the kind of excitement you dream about, the sweetness and the goodness that’s too young and too fresh to doubt. God, what a mockery. Another laugh on good old Sam Howell.

  In my mind I could see her deciding to call Sam and fix an alibi. Hell, yes, why not give it to Sam Howell tonight? Yeah. Why not? And last night, that slime Fred Pawley.

  I felt ill just thinking I had even touched the same woman he’d lain in bed with, smelling of cigars and whisky and slime. Last night, Fred Pawley, tonight Sam Howell, tomorrow night, open date — why not an ape from the zoo? We girls, we’ve got to have our kicks, we fresh, good, sweet-smelling girls.

  I started the car and drove away from there, but I’ll be damned if I could even see where I was going.

  Chapter Nine

  I DROVE as far as the nearest bar.

  The San Rafael Tavern is a family proposition. The man and woman who own it have been married for. twenty-eight years, and like to have people come in and talk, like to keep the place friendly. Saturday is the happie
st night in their week. They told me all that while I consumed the first six straight whiskeys; then they began to worry, and finally look at each other and wish I would get out of there. The hell with them.

  I couldn’t get Toni out of my mind. I couldn’t believe that she had ever been with Pawley as she had with me, and I knew I couldn’t believe it because I didn’t want to, because it made me sick in the guts to believe it. The world was an empty and ugly place, but knowing what I knew now, made it slimy as well.

  Abruptly, on the seventh whiskey, I gave up on liquor.

  So what do you do then? You can’t get drunk; you aren’t sober. What you are is angry. Deeply hurt and angry. You want to smash things, people’s faces and people’s furniture. But you can’t do it. You’re not lucky enough to be the kind of guy who can spend his anger in destruction. All you can do is look at the old man, worried because you’re drinking too much in his tavern and he likes everything quiet.

  You get up and walk out.

  It’s raining, but you don’t give a damn. You can’t drink it out of your mind. You wish you could run away from it, but they won’t let you. Five years ago it was like this … the hurt you couldn’t live with, the desire to just pick up and run. But they wouldn’t let you do it that time either.

  You finally admit it.

  The answer is the only one you knew you’d have to find right from the start. You can’t drink it away, you can’t run from it, but you can work. You can work harder than ever, and work will insulate you. And if you never stop to think, pretty soon you’ll be tough again.

  I got in the Buick and drove out in the rain to the hideaway cottage of the murdered publisher.

  I parked on a side road, east of the Pawley estate. My car was hidden from the highway by the hedge that grew out over the fence.

  I sloshed through the soupy drive to the front door. I rang the bell. No answer. I rang it half a dozen times more. Still no answer.

  I walked around the house and contemplated the walled garden. This was the way that Scully insisted that Jack Roland had entered and left the publisher’s house.

  It took some minutes to shinny up the wall, grasp the top, chin myself and fall over into the garden. After all, I never starred in any Jack Roland thrillers. Any woman fool enough to want me in her boudoir had to unlock the front door.

  Come in Sam. Last night Fred Pawley, and tomorrow …?

  I shook the thought away. After all, it confirmed what I’d been saying since my divorce. I was no ladies man. When they called me they wanted something, but it wasn’t sex.

  I went across the garden and let myself in through a French door.

  Inside Pawley’s house there was a silence that you sometimes feel in mortuaries or morgues. It was a cold tangible thing. The steady rain in the garden didn’t help any, either.

  I let myself into Pawley’s paneled office. I looked around, moved toward the files.

  The telephone rang and I jumped a foot.

  When I finally calmed down, I stood there looking at it. Finally it rang itself out.

  Snapping the locks on the files was simple. The drawers didn’t sit right afterwards, but what the hell.

  I found dozens of folders crammed with those five page, typewritten scandal scripts ready to be okayed for publication. People buy those magazines thinking they’re getting an inside line on the great, but what they really get is fifteen hundred words of innuendo wrapped around a single fact like bacon on a cheap filet.

  I soon found that small notation cards had been clipped onto most of the scripts, and these were initialed by Pawley.

  His notations made these stories really interesting.

  I had better mention that these scripts were carbons on thin yellow paper. This meant they’d been sent airmail to Pawley for his okay. If something were really hot and near a deadline, it would be sent on teletype. All had to have Pawley’s okay. Then his secretary would read his notations over the phone to Pawley’s editor and the original or some other carbon would go to the printer — and from there out to the panting world.

  Four of these stories concerned people I knew intimately, including Leo Ross, whose tax fraud fix had been dug up last year.

  The story on Jack Roland had a most interesting notation. I folded the script, put it and the notation in my inside pocket. I didn’t read the story. I didn’t need to read it. That particular scandal was old stuff to me. Jack had some man’s wife on the Super Chief, and the guy flew to Chicago, boarded the train there. He would have killed the lover — if he could have found him.

  Besides, the notation told me all I needed to know, and all the police would need to know, too.

  The story that interested me most was the one on Ceil Bowne.

  I felt the hairs stand up on the nape of my neck. I’d met Bowne when I first came to Hollywood, and I thought I knew all about him. But now I learned better. Ceil Bowne had started his career as a New York pimp. I stood there shaking my head, still unable to believe it.

  The shock was hard to take. I knew Bowne as the biggest independent producer-director on the Twenty Grand lot. His pictures never grossed under ten million, and Tower of Babel was sure to go twice that.

  Ceil Bowne had been a big name in movies even before I got out of grammar school. Naturally, I had heard whispers about a lot of big names, but not about Ceil. In fact, I had been afraid that maybe Pawley had latched onto Ceil’s latest little collection of curio boys, his newest kick. It would have made great reading for the millions of people who like to believe that every man in Hollywood is a queer, and every woman a Lesbian. But this — this was something that ninety-nine percent of Hollywood didn’t even know.

  I don’t know how long I’d been standing there. I hadn’t heard anything from the other part of the house, and then I remembered that the office was soundproofed.

  “Now if you’ll just hold that,” said the voice from behind me, “I’ll call the police and have them take you away.”

  I tensed, moved to turn around.

  His voice struck at me. It was sharp, high pitched and excited. “Just stand still. I told you, stand still. Sudden moves make me nervous.”

  “I just want to turn around.”

  “Make it slow. Keep your arms out at your sides. Way out.”

  I held the three carbons in my hand and turned, keeping every move slow and cautious.

  He was a sallow, blond-haired man with a clipped mustache. I knew I’d seen him somewhere before, but for the moment I couldn’t remember where. His excitability was contagious; we were two nervous people. He was afraid he was going to have to shoot me, and I was afraid he was going to, whether he had to or not. His hand on the gun shook.

  There were rain flecks on his shoulders. His feet were wet and he had made prints across Pawley’s expensive rug. This boy had just come in out of the rain, and seemed to know his way about the house.

  “I hate guns,” he said. “I’d hate worse to kill anybody — even a sneak thief.”

  “This stuff would attract bigger game than sneak thieves. It would attract blackmailers.” I stared at him, trying to see what effect this had on him.

  It had none. “Sneak thief or blackmailer, you broke into this house.”

  “What’s that to you?”

  “I’ll ask the questions. You just back over against that wall.”

  I backed to the wall. The swirling fear in his eyes warned me to do what he said. Nervous people are the most dangerous, especially when armed. I saw this boy would shoot me for sneezing.

  He looked at the filing cabinets, saw the jimmied locks, the way I had ripped through the folders. His face whitened, and I saw that he belonged in this place. It was then I remembered where I had seen him. That first morning when I came out here with Scully, he had been overseeing the removal of Pawley’s body.

  He moved to the desk, thumbed through the papers I had spread out there.

  “Looks like I got here just in time,” he said His mustache quivered.

 
“No,” I said. “Just too late. No matter what you do now, I know what your game was.”

  “My game?”

  “All right — Pawley’s little game.”

  “Mr. Pawley’s a publisher.”

  “Sure. A publisher without mailing privileges. A publisher without any standing among reputable publishers. A man living on carrion, and harassing his victims.”

  He laughed. “My. You sound holy. A thief. Breaking in here.”

  “Okay. You drop your Holy Joe role, and I’ll drop mine. Nobody ever worked with Pawley as long as you have without knowing the truth about what was going on.”

  “I don’t know why you’re saying all this, because you’re not going to talk yourself out of anything with me. I don’t know what your insinuations about Mr. Pawley are supposed to mean, but whatever he did, he’s dead now. And you’re a matter for the police.”

  I stared at him. “Go ahead,” I said. “Call them.”

  I didn’t think he would. He saw I had been into those files. But he called my bluff.

  He lifted the phone from its cradle, laid it on the desk. He shifted the gun to his left hand, held it fixed on me while he dialed.

  From across the room I heard the buzz as the phone rang. He lifted the phone, spoke into it, watching me all the time.

  “Hello, Sergeant Scully? This is Blake. Yes. Mr. Pawley’s private secretary. Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some distressing news — and. a job for you…. Yes, we’ve had a break in…. That’s right. I just returned to Mr. Pawley’s house and found some thief ransacking Mr. Pawley’s private files…. Yes, that’s right…. Oh, I caught him. I’ve got a gun on him…. Yes, I can hold him until you get here…. You’ll hurry?” The relief was evident in Drake’s voice. “That’s fine. Yes.”

  He replaced the phone, exhaling, looking like a man who has just completed a momentous piece of work.

  He sat on the edge of the desk, watching me. His mouth twisted, pulling his clipped mustache out of shape.

  “Picking the bones,” he said. “What do you think you could have done with those stories if you had gotten away with them?”

  “Oh, I’d have found use for them.”

  He cocked his ear, as if listening for the police already. His nervousness had not subsided. I could almost read his mind. He was afraid I was going to jump him, and in that case two things could happen: I would either clobber him, or he would shoot and kill me. Both alternatives were equally abhorrent to him.