“I’d like to see Miss Toni Drake,” I told her.
“Who are you?”
I told her my name. She said, “You a relative?”
“No, I’m not. But I am worried about her.”
“You can’t see her. And it wouldn’t help you if you did. She’s under sedation.”
“Did she regain consciousness?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. But she’s not to have any visitors. That’s the doctor’s order. You couldn’t get in anyhow — the police have men stationed outside her door.”
I sighed, thanking her. I felt slightly better; at least whoever attempted to kill Toni wasn’t going to get another chance at her as long as she was in the hospital.
“You any idea when I’ll be able to see her?”
She shook her head and I went out through the emergency entrance, walked to the street where I’d parked the Buick Street lights glowed in the damply shimmering darkness and I watched two nurses hurrying along, chatting to each other, capes fluttering. I glanced back at the entrance. Somebody had tried to kill Toni … because she’d been at Pawley’s hideaway? If only I could ask her the name of the person who had attacked her. I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm. It still made me sick to think she’d been down there, sharing Pawley’s bed in that room with the pink-mirrored ceiling.
Something slightly larger than the national debt stepped from the shadows, crowding me close against my car. It was Leo Ross’ mammoth hood, Frank.
He muttered, “Boss just got word Roland might get sprung.”
“So?”
“So he sends me to find out what you had to do with it.”
He pushed his hand into his coat pocket, and I knew what his orders were. For an instant red anger flared and I couldn’t even see him. I hated him, and Leo Ross, and that damned pink-mirrored bedroom at Pawley’s hideout.
We were in close, but he was reaching for his gun and I was slated for a pistol whipping. I struck out, suddenly, up close, clipping him across the Adam’s apple with all the strength born of anger and desperation.
He turned pale green and threw his arms out, gasping. I hit him in the face, and hit him again. My arm ached, and my knuckles bled, but I knew what I had to do. He buckled and I brought the side of my hand down across the back of his neck.
He lay half under the car for a moment, an unmoving hulk. He looked like a harpooned Moby Dick.
I dragged him to the curb, rolled him over. His eyes opened, gaze unsteady.
“Listen to me,” I said, my voice low and full of hatred. I removed his gun, ejected the clip and rammed it under his belt. “I got the word for you to take back to Leo Ross Now hear me good. I want no bonus from him. I want nothing. But you tell him if he thinks he can kill me and get away with it, I got the word for him. I got another carbon on Ross, straight from Pawley’s files, and it will sure as hell turn up at the police if he orders me killed. This carbon is just what Ross can’t afford to have seen. It’s the complete story of the murders Ross had executed for pay. And because I’ve got it, it’ll tie him up to me, and it’ll give him all the motive for killing me the police will ever need. Now, Frank, you get out of here, and get the word back to Leo Ross before he makes a bigger mistake than he’s ever made in his mixed-up life.”
Frank was sitting there, still nodding, when I backed out the Buick and gunned it along the rain-slicked street.
Chapter Fourteen
SHE WAS waiting for me when I entered my apartment.
Her shoes were damp and her hair, but dampest of all were her red-rimmed eyes. She had been crying all the way from the valley.
“Lorna,” I said. I tried to keep the anger from my voice. “Did you get your book end?”
“I got it, Sam.”
“You must have left it here by mistake, Lorna.”
She didn’t say anything, just stood there shivering. I stepped toward her. She said, “Don’t come near me, Sam.”
I shrugged, and sloshed a couple of straight whiskeys from a bottle on an end table. I offered her one.
She shook her head. “I don’t want a drink. I want to know how you knew it was me, Sam.”
“I kept hoping it wasn’t. But Ceil’s motive was too good. As far as the world knows, you have no motive for killing Pawley. Nobody could ever connect you with him. Especially if you charged your telegram to me — and planted a book end in my apartment. Why do you hate me, Lorna?”
“I don’t hate you.” She looked about unhappily. “You’ve been kind to me. Kinder than anybody in Hollywood.”
“Fine. It’s fine to be loved. When you chose someone to sacrifice for the great Ceil Bowne, why I was the’ first one you thought of.”
“I never thought they would trace it here.” She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter any more, Sam. I came to talk about you — and now.”
“Yes?”
“You know too much about Ceil, Sam. You know about his past, what he was and what he did thirty years ago, before either of us was even born. And you’ll hurt him. It doesn’t matter to you how good he’s been all these years.” Her eyes got wild. “You can’t hurt him, Sam.”
“I never wanted to.”
“Yes, you want to hurt him. But I’m not going to let you.”
“Lorna, you’re nuts.”
“Don’t say that!”
She trembled visibly and her hand fought into her handbag.
“Lorna, relax. Yol cleared Ceil of Pawley’s murder. That was all I was interested in.”
“Is it? Or do you think you can pull him down — because you know about me and Pawley — and all about Ceil?”
I stared at her.
“Ceil is like a god to me, Sam. He always has been. I worship him. He’s better than other men. Better because he knows what evil is, and has come so far from it. I won’t let him be dragged back into it. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Ceil. If he told me to lie down in the mud so he could walk on me, I’d do it. I love him that much. I love him so much that I wouldn’t let Pawley hurt him — and I won’t let you hurt him, Sam.”
She withdrew her hand from her slicker pocket. I stared at the small gun in her hand. “I’ve no reason to hurt Ceil.” I kept my voice level.
“Not now, maybe. But with what you know you’re dangerous to him. One day you’ll be drinking somewhere and you’ll talk to somebody. You won’t intend hurting Ceil, but you’ll talk about what you know. And you will hurt Ceil … you’ll drag him down until he’s ruined, the way that Pawley tried to do.”
I shook my head. “You went down there, prepared to bed down with Pawley if he would let Ceil alone?”
“Why not?” Her empty voice had tears behind it. “What am I beside Ceil? It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”
“Sure. That’s what you and Ceil have been fighting about. You weren’t jealous of the pretty boys Ceil hired for his movie. Ceil knows you’ve been stepping out and you couldn’t tell him where or why. His little slave girl all of a sudden starts leaving the house like a gal with a lover. He raved, but you couldn’t tell him because he might have stopped you from keeping the deal you made with Pawley.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She held the little gun fixed on me.
I stared at the stark whiteness of her face, felt cold. I wasn’t going to live through this one. In Lorna’s mind it was simple and clear. She couldn’t let me live. Anyone who might hurt her god Ceil Bowne had to be eliminated, no matter what the cost to her.
I wanted a drink but was afraid to make the movement of the glass toward my lips. That might be the action that would trigger her.
“The police are going to figure it, Lorna. A woman was with Pawley, accepted that telegram. The one you sent. You took it out to Pawley in the walled garden, fought with him, conked him with the book end and the statue.”
“It doesn’t matter what you know about me, Sam. But about Ceil — you’re the only one who knows. I can’t let you live, Sam.”
She tilted the gun slightly.
“You’re wrong, baby. Old Yol knows. Ceil spent the night at Yol’s. Told him all about it.”
“Yol stands to lose as much as Ceil. He would never breathe this, as I never would. Ceil’s secret is safe with Yol and me because we love him.”
The gun tilted again, and my mind began to click in desperation.
“I’m not the only one — there’s Toni. You ran out of there. She’s not dead, Lorna, and she knows you tried to kill her.”
Her smile was wan and tormented.
“Of course she knows I tried to kill her. I told you, Sam, it doesn’t matter about me. She doesn’t know anything about Ceil — ”
“Then why did you try to kill her?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Sam. All that matters is that I can’t let you hurt Ceil. Can’t let you live …”
Something went out of her eyes then. She raised the gun and I hesitated one more second.
I threw the whiskey in her eyes. She cried out and I slapped the gun from her hand. It clattered across the room.
I caught her around the waist and we toppled to the floor, hard. I held her and suddenly she went to pieces, sobbing, crying on my shoulder, clinging to me.
And damned if I could blink back the tears myself.
• • •
I let Lorna cry on my shoulder until she sagged like a tired child. Then I put her gun in one of my pockets “Come on, Lorna,” I said.
“Where are we going?” She was like a little girl.
“We’ve got to go down to San Rafael, Lorna.”
She nodded. “Yes, I guess so.”
Lorna got in the Buick, slumped over on the far side of the seat, closed her eyes. I was shaking as I slid under the wheel. It was like riding with a zombie, and every minute seemed like an hour.
Sergeant Scully looked up when we entered his office. He pulled over a chair for Lorna. She looked right through him, didn’t say a word.
I sat down. “Sergeant, Miss Carone wants to make a statement. If you’ll get a stenographer in here, please.”
He spoke into his intercom box and a uniformed patrolman entered, carrying shorthand pad and several pencils. He sat near the window and waited.
Lorna began to talk. She told it all, except why she had clobbered Pawley. She left Ceil out of it all the way.
I said, “It’s understandable, Sergeant. He got her down there, then got rough with her. She tried to get away. He chased her into the walled garden. Maybe they bumped the statue. Anyway she grabbed it up and when he wouldn’t let her leave, she hit him. She hit him too hard, but by now you know what a rotten character Pawley was. Maybe she won’t get a medal, but you people can go easy on her.”
“Like I told you at the start, Howell,” Scully said. “We don’t need you movie people telling us how to run things. We found that Pawley has been blackmailing. I think we can take Miss Carone’s story to the prosecutor and she should get a light sentence at worst.”
“I figure she deserves a medal.”
“We don’t give out medals for killing in this town.”
“I call it eradication.”
“If you’d stayed in Hollywood, I wouldn’t have to listen to you-call it anything.”
“If I had stayed in Hollywood, you would have sent an innocent man to the pen.”
There was a knock on the door, and just when I was congratulating myself on slickly settling it, in walked Ceil Bowne.
That’s right, the great man himself. Yol Myerene was right behind him.
Ceil went to Lorna, grabbed her in his arms. “God, Lorna, I just heard it all. Yol and I talked to the Drake girl at the hospital.” He kissed her, patted her. Finally he turned and looked at Scully.
Scully’s eyes bugged. This was nearer than he’d ever hoped to get to an overwhelming personality like Ceil Bowne. Scully’s face revealed that suddenly he understood how crimes got fouled up when the Hollywood great were involved with impressionable police.
Ceil said, “It doesn’t matter what she’s done, Sergeant I’m the guilty one.”
Lorna said, “Oh, Ceil, don’t.”
But she couldn’t stop’ him. He told it all, the way he had been blackmailed, the way Lorna had killed for him. It seemed to me that she would have come out better if he had kept quiet, but then I figured that before the police finished with the blackmail angles provided by those scripts of Pawley’s, Lorna might get that medal after all.
“Toni Drake told us that Lorna had hired her to swear she was with Pawley that night. Lorna told Toni that she would lose her part in the new Ceil Bowne picture unless she went through with it,” Yol said. He glanced at me. “Then Toni learned that Sam Howell would be hurt if he believed she had been down here, and she wanted out. Lorna was afraid of what Toni would tell and assaulted her.”
Ceil pulled Lorna into his arms again. “We’re going to be married, Lorna. Now. I’ve put you through hell, but it’s all over. You’re going to trial as Mrs. Ceil Bowne and whatever I’ve got, I’m going to use to get you free.”
The way he said it, you could believe it. And what it did to Lorna was worth everything. She glowed in that ugly room. She came alive. She was the girl for whom every dream had suddenly come true. No matter what happened to her, she was going to be Mrs. Ceil Bowne.
Ceil glanced at me. “Soon as we can get the ceremony performed, Lorna and I will marry. And, Sam, I — I’d like for you to be the best man.”
I nodded.
• • •
Betty arrived just as they brought Jack Roland from his cell.
He had shaved, spruced up. At Yol’s suggestion, I called in the studio press photographers, plus those from the Los Angeles papers. The place was jammed with photographers taking his picture as he walked out a free man.
He sucked in his gut, hamming it up. I shook my head, turned to walk out. Betty touched my arm. She looked up at me, her mouth trembling.
I touched the carbon of the Roland scandal in my inner pocket. Nobody had asked for it and I still had it.
Here was my chance to even everything between the great lover and me. Here was my chance to show her once and for all what lover boy really was.
He went on posturing for the cameras, giving them his best profile, talking about his plans after he completed his role in Tower of Babel.
I closed my hand on that paper.
I looked at Betty. I wanted to tell her that Roland hadn’t been in San Rafael to kill Pawley, but to plead with him to use the story that he’d submitted himself.
I watched Roland hamming it up for the photographers, on top of the world for one more moment. For him, all life was in front of cameras. It ate his heart out when he was away from them. Away from them he had to admit what a nothing he was.
Away from those cameras, Betty was all he had. And he had sense enough to know that.
“Sam,” Betty said.
I swallowed hard. My voice was harsh. “Why don’t you get him home before he gets in trouble again?”
“I made a promise, Sam.”
“He’s out of this jam. If you watch him closely enough, maybe you can keep him out of another one.”
“But I promised you, Sam.”
“Sure. You’d promise anything that might help lover boy. That’s the trouble with you, little mother. You love somebody, there’s nothing in the world you wouldn’t do for him …”
“Aren’t you like that, Sam?”
I took one last long look at her. “Good-bye, Betty. Take care.
“Good-bye, Sam.” I walked out of there, her voice following me.
I got out to the Buick, got under the wheel. For a long time I didn’t move. I kept thinking how far it was back up to Los Angeles. Then I remembered Toni, and I wasn’t tired any more. I knew I was going to burn up this old bus getting to that hospital.
What the hell, wasn’t old Yol giving me a brand new car?
I started the engine, gunning it so the rear wheels screamed as I headed home.
Ser
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The Brass Monkey
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A Woman On the Place
Heat of Night
Don’t Speak to Strange Girls
Mourn the Hangman
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