The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs: A Masao Masuto Mystery

by Howard Fast

  As he approached the top of Laurel Canyon Pass, where Mulholland Drive intersects it, and where Laurel Canyon Boulevard sweeps on down into the San Fernando Valley, another choice faced him. If indeed the yellow Porsche was ahead of him, it had three choices: to continue ahead and down into the Valley, to turn right and follow Mulholland Drive to Cahuenga Pass, or to turn left on Mulholland. Since he couldn’t see the car he hoped he was following, if indeed he was following it, he could toss a mental coin. Except that it was not in Masuto’s manner to toss coins for lives, even mental coins. Just as he himself was in violent motion, so, he believed, was the killer. The killer would do what he had done twice before, turn left and westward on Mulholland Drive and let the road be the murderer.

  Masuto saw the traffic light at the top of the pass now, red, with a line of cars stopped in front of it. He pulled into the left-hand lane, providentially empty, and roared up to the top of the hill, taking a left turn on two wheels and then racing down Mulholland Drive, his headlights cutting a crazy twisting beam through the night.

  It was, Masuto remembered, one mile and seven-twentieths, as Officer Commager had read it from his report. It was not history repeating itself, but the tortured, maniacal mind of a sick man. There was a limit to how fast any car could go on this road. Masuto pressed his car to that limit, screaming around the curves, with the whole sparkling spread of the San Fernando Valley a thousand feet below him, with his tires skidding almost to the edge of the sheer drops that lined the road.

  And then he saw it in front of him, the yellow Porsche, the motor hood in back of the car open, and the man, standing there bent over the motor, and then straightening up to see the car approaching. At that point on the road, there was a shoulder of earth off the right lane. A car could park there while the traffic went by—yet there was almost no traffic on Mulholland at this hour—and that was where the Porsche stood, off the road, its nose facing the edge of the cliff.

  Masuto’s brakes screamed and his tires skidded as he headed straight for the Porsche. Then the man had a gun in his hand, and he began to fire at the oncoming car. It all happened in the space of a second or two, the man standing and shooting, three holes in the windshield, the bullets so close that Masuto could almost feel them as he ducked down behind the wheel, and then the scream of a black-and-white’s siren. Masuto opened his car door and propelled himself out, skinning his hands on the road, rolled over, pulling out his gun—and then saw the man who had fired at him leap over the edge of the parking place into the black, mesquite-covered hillside.

  The black-and-white pulled up alongside his car, and two Los Angeles cops leaped out, covering him with their drawn guns.

  “Just drop that gun, mister, nice and easy.”

  Masuto let his gun drop.

  “Are you that crazy bastard who just drove up Laurel Canyon?” the other cop asked. “Because if you are, we are going to throw everything the book says at you.”

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Masuto of the Beverly Hills police. There’s a girl in that car who needs attention, if she’s still alive. So call an ambulance.”

  “Just don’t move, mister.”

  The other went to the Porsche. “Get an ambulance, Joe.”

  “Is she alive?” Masuto wanted to know.

  “She has a pulse. She has a bad crack on the head, but she’s alive. Who did you say you are?”

  “Masuto, Beverly Hills police. If you’ll let me put my hand in my pocket, I’ll show you my badge.”

  “All right, but nice and slow. I got a nervous finger.”

  Masuto took out his badge and handed it to him. While he was studying it, the other officer looked at the Datsun.

  “Three bullet holes in the windshield. What in hell goes on here?”

  The officer called Joe was handling Masuto’s gun, smelling it. “Not fired,” he said.

  The other cop gave Masuto’s badge back to him.

  “Let me look at the girl,” Masuto said.

  “Better not move her.”

  “Where’s the guy who did the shooting?”

  The door of the Porsche was open. Mitzie was slumped behind the wheel, a huge welt on the side of her head. She stirred and groaned.

  “I asked you, where is the guy who did the shooting?”

  Masuto pointed down the dark, mesquite-covered hillside. “He went down there.”

  “Then that’s where we ought to be looking.”

  “In the dark? Forget about that,” Masuto said.

  “You’re pushing a lot of weight around here for a Beverly Hills cop.”

  Now a second black-and-white pulled up, and with it, the ambulance. Sergeant Jack Kelly, in the second black-and-white, knew Masuto.

  “Thank God for a friendly face. Kelly, will you tell these guys that I’m legitimate? They almost shot me.”

  “What goes on here?” Kelly asked.

  “A damn lot,” Masuto said. “Down there”—pointing over the edge “—is a man who’s wanted for three killings in L.A. and for a fourth in Beverly Hills. The woman they’re putting in the ambulance is the witness who’s going to hang him. If you talk to Pete Bones downtown, he’ll fill you in. But what’s important now is that no one gets near that woman. Her name is Mitzie Fuller—”

  “Hold on, Masuto. If that son of a bitch is down there, we ought to be down there looking for him.”

  “In the dark? He’s half a mile away by now. There’s a whole ring of houses around the canyon. All he has to do is pick up a car and get out, and maybe by now he’s done that. Don’t worry about him. I know where to find him. The important thing is the girl. Hold up there!” Masuto called out to the ambulance driver. And to Kelly, “I’m going with the ambulance. The keys to my car are in the ignition. Can you have someone drive it over to the Beverly Hills station on Rexford?”

  “What about the Porsche?”

  “Are the keys in it?”

  Kelly looked. “They’re there.”

  “Send them both to the station, and give the keys to whoever’s on duty. I’m going to steer the ambulance to All Saints in Beverly Hills.”

  In the ambulance, Mitzie Fuller opened her eyes and began to cry. She tried to talk. Masuto put his finger across his lips. “Later, Mitzie, later.”

  “I want to tell you—” she managed.

  “I know. There’s nothing to tell me. Don’t try to talk.”

  “She’ll be all right,” the attendant said. “She wouldn’t be talking like that if it were anything worse than a bad concussion.”

  “I hope so,” Masuto said, and then dropping his voice, “you might get an inquiry. Any inquiry. Just say you took her to All Saints in Beverly Hills.”

  “You don’t want it kept quiet?”

  “No.”

  Mitzie was trying to talk again. “He wanted to kill me—”

  “I know, Mitzie. The danger’s over. I want you to rest.”

  It was almost ten o’clock when they reached the hospital. Mitzie Fuller was taken into the emergency room. Masuto went to admissions, where Sister Claridge was on duty.

  Sister Claridge managed to squeeze a smile out of her long dour face. “What now, Sergeant? What awful things do you bring us tonight?”

  “It’s the nature of my work, Sister. We brought a lady into emergency. Her name is Mitzie Fuller, and she has a concussion. In other words, someone hit her over the head and tried to kill her.”

  “It just gets worse, doesn’t it, Sergeant? Worse and worse.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s always been this way. The point is this: I want her put in a room, but I want the records to show her in another room. In other words, when inquiries come, I want whoever it is directed to the second room.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone may try to finish the job, and I’ll be in the room he comes to. I don’t want her there.”

  “Isn’t that rather dramatic, Sergeant?”

  “It comes with being a cop.”

  “We’ll bill her f
or the room she’s in. We’ll have to bill the police department for the other room.”

  “Just for me to sit there?”

  “Hospital rules. You’re using the room. We’ll have to change the linen.” The smile was gone. Sister Claridge considered Masuto an unredeemed heathen. For a time she had tried, gently, to show him the path. Lately, she had given up. “Also, Sergeant, I’ll have to check with my supervisor. We can’t have violence here in the hospital.”

  “I’m trying to prevent violence, Sister. Now what room can you give me?”

  Still she hesitated.

  “I’m trying to save her life—and the lives of two other women. Please help me,” Masuto said quietly.

  She sighed and nodded. “All right. Room three fifty-one.”

  “Thank you. And spread the word, please. Hospital people, floor people, and anyone who calls, friends, press, anyone. Room three fifty-one.”

  “I feel like a conspirator,” the sister said.

  “In a good cause. Is there a phone I could use?”

  She pointed to a booth on the main floor. Masuto looked longingly at the phone on her desk. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s for hospital use only. Really, Sergeant, you can’t walk in here and use the hospital as a police station.”

  He went to the booth and called Wainwright. Mrs. Wainwright answered the phone in a tone not unlike that of Sister Claridge. “He is not here, Sergeant,” she said acidly. “He’s at the station.”

  Masuto called the station. Wainwright’s snarl was almost comforting after talking to the two women.

  “Where the hell are you?” Wainwright demanded. “The whole thing busts loose, and you disappear. Do you know that Mitzie Fuller’s gone? Beckman let her walk out of there. I’m going to have his head for this—”

  “Take it easy. Beckman couldn’t help it.”

  “Why? Because he was taking a crap? Who the hell says he has to take a crap when he’s on duty! If that dame’s dead, we can all spend our time on the crapper.”

  “She’s not dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s here with me at All Saints Hospital. She got a nasty concussion, but she’s all right.”

  “Why am I always the last to know? What happened?”

  Masuto summed it up as tersely as possible.

  “You can’t be sure that he’ll try it tonight,” Wainwright said.

  “It’s in his nature. He’s in motion, and now he’s desperate. He planned this whole thing like a lunatic chess game, and it came to pieces at the seams. That girl’s testimony will send him to the gas chamber.”

  “For what, Masao? For attempted murder. You still have no way to tie him into the murders.”

  “Mitzie can.”

  “You tell that to the D.A. when the time comes.”

  “I have the owner of the bar and the piano player.”

  “To do what? To tell us that he was there?”

  “Captain, don’t worry it. Let me pick him up. We have the assault on the girl and the shots he fired at me. If the bullets are in the car, we may have something. And he’ll have a gun tonight.”

  “Which gun? You don’t think he’s walking around with the murder weapon?”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Masuto said.

  He came out of the booth and walked over to Sister Claridge. She nodded smugly. “I trust I’m doing the Lord’s work and not the devil’s work, Sergeant Masuto. While you were in the booth, a gentleman called. He said he was Mrs. Fuller’s husband.”

  “Mrs. Fuller is divorced.”

  “I am simply telling you what he said. He said he was Mrs. Fuller’s husband. He was very concerned about her condition. I told him she would be all right but we were keeping her here overnight. He was very insistent on seeing her tonight, and I told him at this hour it would be impossible. I told him we were discharging her at ten o’clock tomorrow morning and that he could pick her up then.”

  “Did he ask what room she was in?”

  “Yes, he did. And I told him she was in room three fifty-one.”

  “Thank you,” Masuto said. “You did nobly. I don’t know how he’ll get in, but if anyone comes through the front door between now and midnight, I want you to pretend to be dozing. For your own safety.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Please, please do as I say. I don’t have the time to stand here and convince you. All the odds are that he won’t come in the front door, but if he does—”

  “I don’t know why I’m going along with this—”

  Masuto went to the elevator. On the third floor, he said to the nurse on duty, “I’m Sergeant Masuto, Beverly Hills police. I’ll be in room three fifty-one. You can check that with Sister Claridge. If a man comes up here and asks for Mrs. Fuller or for room three fifty-one, don’t stop him. If anyone—doctor, attendant—if anyone wishes to go into room three fifty-one, don’t interfere.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Masuto said harshly. “I don’t have the time. And if anyone asks, I’m not in that room. Mrs. Fuller is—alone. Do you understand me? And above all, do not interfere.”

  Then Masuto walked down the corridor and into room three fifty-one. It was a very ordinary hospital room, one window, the hospital bed and two chairs. There were two pillows on the bed. On a shelf in the closet, Masuto found a third pillow and two extra blankets. With the pillows and the blankets, he put together a vaguely lifelike form which he covered with the counterpane, pressing it into shape. Then he switched on a small blue night light and switched off the overhead lights.

  Then he went into the room’s bathroom and stood there in the dark, his gun in his hand, the door open just a crack. His mind was clear, without memory or anticipation. He was aware of himself, of his feet on the floor, of the gun in his hand, and of his view of the room through the crack in the door.

  Nothing else existed. Time did not exist. When finally he heard the steps outside the door, he had no notion of how long he had been waiting there. The door opened. The man stepped into the room, grotesque in the blue light. For a long moment, the man stood without moving, one hand in the pocket of his jacket. Then the hand came out with the gun, the heavy, long-nosed .22-caliber automatic target pistol. The gun came up, and he fired into the bedclothes, five shots, one after another, lacing across the simulated body.

  Masuto kicked the toilet door open and snapped, “Drop it, Crombie!”

  Crombie was very quick. Masuto lived because he was in the dark, because he presented no visible target, but Crombie got off two more shots before Masuto fired. Crombie’s shots splintered the edge of the bathroom door. Masuto’s single shot caught Crombie between the eyes.

  The Question

  It was after one o’clock in the morning when Masuto drove his Datsun, three bullet holes in the windshield, into the driveway of Laura Crombie’s house on Beverly Drive, parked, and rang the doorbell. They were still awake, and a tired, harassed, and miserable Detective Beckman answered the bell and opened the door.

  “I don’t know what to say, Masao,” he pleaded. “I never goofed off like that before.”

  “Forget it. Maybe it was the only way. At least it’s over.”

  “That’s what we heard,” Beckman said.

  “I want to talk to Laura Crombie.”

  “They’re both in the kitchen drinking coffee.”

  He led Masuto into the kitchen. Nancy Legett poured a cup of coffee for him. Laura Crombie sat at the end of the table, her face gray and tired.

  “How is Mitzie?” Nancy asked.

  “She’s all right. She’ll be out of the hospital tomorrow.”

  “And I can go home?”

  “You can go home.”

  “Sit down and drink the coffee,” Laura Crombie said. “You look as terrible as I feel. Do you want some cookies?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Beckman says it’s over.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Beckman say
s it was Arthur. I don’t understand that,” she said. “What possible reason could Arthur have for wanting me dead?”

  “He didn’t want you dead. He wanted Mitzie Fuller dead.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to tell you about that, Mrs. Crombie. If I don’t tell you, you’ll hear anyway, in dribs and drabs, with all the innuendo that the newspapers and the media can make of it. That’s why I came here tonight—to tell you the whole story very precisely. It’s going to be very painful, but there’s no way to avoid that. Sometime about four years ago, maybe a few months more, your ex-husband, Arthur Crombie, met your daughter. She fell in love with Crombie.”

  “No!”

  “You must listen to me,” Masuto said, almost severely. “I can’t spare you. You must know the truth. As I said, she fell in love with Crombie and they had an affair. Then Crombie met you. I don’t know where he met you, but it was in circumstances apart from your daughter.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I met him at Acapulco. Then I went to Boston. He was here. Kelly was here—oh, my God.”

  “He decided to marry you. But to do this, he had to dispose of Kelly. There was a place where they met, called The Bar, a restaurant off Laurel Canyon. He met her there one night. They drove off to Mulholland Drive in her car. He hit her as he had hit Mitzie, and then he wired the throttle of her car to take it over the cliff.”

  Laura Crombie was weeping now. “That’s enough. I can’t stand any more of this. I can’t.”

  “You can and you will,” Masuto said coldly. “There are no more secrets. Do you want to read about it tomorrow?”

  “Please, must you?” Nancy Legett begged him.

  “Yes, I must. Now listen, both of you. That last night he was in the restaurant with your daughter, people had seen them together. Mitzie was there. She knew who he was. The others didn’t. But Mitzie did not know who the girl was. She did not know that Catherine Addison was your daughter, and she had no reason to think that what had happened on Mulholland Drive was anything but an accident. Three years went by, and then you brought Mitzie into your bridge game, and Arthur Crombie learned about it. If you’re in the real estate business in Beverly Hills, there’s very little you don’t hear about. He realized that sooner or later Mitzie would see a picture of your daughter—and that would open up the whole can of worms. So he hired a chemist with a criminal record, paid him to prepare a batch of poisoned pastry and deliver it here. He didn’t care how many of you died—as long as Mitzie died. The rest of you were a diversion to cast suspicion elsewhere, as was the box of poisoned candy he sent to Alice Greene. Then he killed Alice Greene, to throw suspicion on her husband. He killed the chemist to keep his mouth closed. He killed a Chicano boy for the same reason. And finally, tonight, he tried to kill Mitzie Fuller. There was nothing human left in this man, nothing to shed a tear over. He had become a monster. Now he’s dead.”