77 Sunset Strip

by Roy Huggins

  I didn’t say anything, so she went on, “Oh, we were planning to be married, vaguely. I’ve had those plans before; and we did tell Gordon Trist we were married to get Greg off a spot.” She took another drink, not very tidily. “I couldn’t stand that kind of publicity. I’d be washed up.”

  “How do I know you didn’t kill him, angel? It’s a murder rap, and I’d be under oath. If they caught me, I’d have a long, long time to wonder if you were worth it.”

  “I didn’t kill him, and you know it! If I had stayed in the bedroom the other morning, like I wanted to, you’d have thought Greg was alone. I’m the only one in the world who could contradict you if you tell the story the way I want it told.”

  “Did Mrs. Trist think you two were married?”

  “Of course not . . .” She stopped suddenly and paled. “Oh, Lord, what if he told her? He said he wouldn’t.”

  “Had Crukston been playing her?”

  She hesitated and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Baby, if you want to play, let’s share our toys. Was Trist right about his wife and Crukston?”

  “He didn’t brag about it, but I think the answer is yes.”

  I stood up. “Thanks. I think you just put the finger on two murders.”

  “I’m not interested in who murdered who! God, and I thought all good-looking heels were actors.”

  “Does anybody—” I asked, “friends, bellhops, maids —know that you were at Crukston’s when I was there yesterday?”

  She looked worried. She stood up with me and looked at me steadily for a long moment. “Yes, damn you,” she whispered. “The bellhop, a hard-nosed little beast. He saw me just after you left.”

  I nodded, and I noticed that her eyes were green, and that they looked like honest eyes, and she had told me the truth when a lie would have been just as easy and twice as safe.

  I smiled and said, “You told me the truth.”

  She laughed a nervous little laugh and said, “I hate you, Bailey . . . I was afraid to lie to you.”

  “You won’t have any trouble with little hard-nose. And as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t see you at Crukston’s. Thanks a lot, but it’s free.”

  She took a couple of steps slowly, a little deliberately, and put her arms around my neck.

  “This is a debt of honor, Stu; don’t ask me to welsh on it.”

  She was a little thing, and her back was hard and smooth under my hands. But something was wrong. It was the ash tray. It was still in my pocket, and it was pressing against a bone.

  I whispered, “Just a minute, beautiful.” I took the tray out and started to throw it on the davenport. That was when I saw it. It didn’t hit me suddenly. At first it was just a realization that something was wrong. And then I knew what it was. The scratch that I had put on the bottom of the tray was gone. It was smooth as glass. I took Rita Rogell’s hands from around my neck and went into the kitchen.

  Rita Rogell yelled, “Hey!”

  I got out a knife and scratched the tray, and then I tried to rub the mark away. But the mark wouldn’t rub away. It was there for good, as the mark on the bottom of the other tray had been.

  I went back into the living room and sat down. I had never really believed the ash tray meant anything. And now here it was, the key to murder. Not the one I held in my-hand, but the one that was lifted while I lay in the corridor below Sara Franzen’s apartment.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Rita Rogell didn’t understand. She thought I was being nasty. She put on her coat, and at the door she said, “Chum, you’ve let that technique of yours get the best of you. It’s become an end in itself. I leave you with it.” She slammed the door as she went out, but I wasn’t paying much attention, because the idea was taking shape. It looked good at first, I don’t know why. By the time I had called Landis Berry, it was beginning to look sick. Berry was an industrial chemist. We had gone to school together for a while. He kept going and got himself a Ph.D.

  After some small talk, I said, “Would it be possible to carve a knife out of plastic and stab someone through the heart with it?”

  “Sure. Steel works even better.”

  “Yeah. Then could you drop that knife into boiling water and get it soft enough to mold it into something else?”

  “Stu, there are plastics and there are plastics. Some you couldn’t touch with boiling water; others would soften up in lukewarm water.”

  But by that time I was thinking again, and was anxious to pretend it was someone else’s idea—the third moron from the end. I said, “Thanks, Landis; it was just a vague idea I had.”

  “Let me know if it works.”

  We hung up.

  You’ve got a right to know. The idea I had was that someone carved a dagger out of plastic. They stabbed

  Trist with it, dropped it into the teapot, and later, while we were waiting for the Homicide crew to arrive, removed it and molded it into an ash tray. I hadn’t had any breakfast, there was still a bump on my head, I’d been breathing Rita Rogell’s fifty-dollar-an-ounce perfume . . . and someone had taken the trouble to remove a dime-store ash tray from my pocket and substitute another.

  I was out in the kitchen telling myself I should be thinking, and not knowing how to begin, when the answer hit me. Not slowly, as ideas usually come to me, but with a swift and chilling abruptness that took my breath away and left me standing there with an ice cube in my hand until the coldness of it began to hurt.

  I left the drink unmade and went in and sat down and stared at the floor. I wasn’t thinking really, because I was inarticulate before the beauty, the cunning, the utter terrifying simplicity of the method used to kill a man in a room full of witnesses, the witnesses to become suspects, and the case to become boggled in a hunt for a weapon that didn’t exist.

  After a while I went back in and finished making the drink. I was shaking a little, possibly with excitement, but the edge was wearing away, because I didn’t have the ash tray. And without it I was just a man with a theory. Then I realized that I knew where I could find the ash tray . . . if it wasn’t too late.

  It took me eight minutes to drive to Sara Franzen’s apartment. “The stout lady wasn’t walking her poodle, so I called from the alcove phone. No one answered. I pushed a couple of other buttons, the door buzzed, and I went in. The elevator was waiting. I got off at six, walked up the stairs and knocked quietly. She wasn’t home or she wasn’t answering doors. I went back down to the sixth floor, went along the hall past the elevator, hesitating a little at the place where the stairs went down to the right, and walked on down to the emergency fire door. I opened it and looked out. No one standing around minding my business. I took the fire escape to the roof. It was quiet up there, and hot with the afternoon sun. The roof met Sara Franzen’s apartment at about window height. I walked over, the gravel-crusted roofing cracking and complaining under my feet. I tried three windows before I found one that was unlocked. It opened into the kitchen, a bright yellow little room without any dirty dishes visible. .

  I climbed in and then stood still and waited. Traffic hummed distantly, and from somewhere below a radio agonized over the dull thrum of a vacuum cleaner.

  I went on into the living room. No on there. I looked into the jingle bedroom. Neat, not too fussy and unoccupied. I went back into the living room and started the search.

  I found it. It was tucked down in one of the deep chairs between the cushion and the back. That was that. It would be nice to go on from there and wrap the case up, like a real-life private detective. I even gave it a couple seconds of thought. But it was time for me to step out; I had a living to make and some good will to collect. I drove down to the City Hall and looked up Quint.

  But Quint was a skeptic. He didn’t like my choice of a villain, and he wanted to see it work just the way I said it had been done before he’d believe it. But while we were talking I saw a gleam come into his eye, and Quint had an inspiration. I had planted the seed of that inspiration as carefully as I knew ho
w, but I hadn’t expected it to flower.

  By five-thirty that afternoon we were on our way out to the pink stucco house in Westwood. The butler was back again, and he ushered us into the Trist library. There was a fire in the grate, a smell of whisky-sour in the air, and two women getting up to greet us.

  Sara Franzen smiled. Mrs. Trist looked gracefully mournful, but there was a pinched weariness in her face that made it seem genuine. She found us a couple of seats, sat down and looked at us expectantly.

  Quint said, looking more at Sara Franzen than at Mrs. Trist, “Mr. Bailey thinks he’s found the answer for us. He believes that Mr. Crukston was the one who killed Mr. Trist.”

  Sara Franzen frowned and looked over at me.

  Mrs. Trist stared blankly and said, “Oh, no!”

  “Who else could it be, Mrs. Trist?”

  “I— Oh, it’s just that—” She stopped—maybe because she had heard the front door open.

  Freddie came in, looked around, and said, “Making an arrest, or is this just a social call?”

  Sara Franzen said quietly, “Sit down, Freddie.” Freddie sat down.

  Quint went on. “That’s just Mr. Bailey’s theory, of course. The department isn’t ready yet to arrest Crukston.” That had been part of Quint’s inspiration. He watched the three faces. No one looked trapped, no one blurted out the guilty knowledge that Crukston was dead. They listened politely. “But the reason we’re here, Mrs. Trist, is to try out another theory of Mr. Bailey’s. He thinks he’s found the weapon.”

  Freddie had been looking bored. He was suddenly interested now.

  Quint droned on. “We’d like your permission to test the theory here, Mrs. Trist, so the conditions, will be the same.”

  Mrs. Trist agreed readily enough, and Quint assured them that he knew they were all anxious to help. We were on our way into the living room. No, no, it was quite all right for them all to be present. Quint was sure they would be able to help correct any errors in Mr. Bailey’s theory. He was almost smiling, and being as subtle as a Mickey Finn. But no one seemed to notice. Quint took the wing chair and the others sat on the chesterfield. It was crowded on the chesterfield, but no one seemed to want to sit in the barrel chair where Gordon Trist had died.

  The maid with the frosty eyes had been sent to bring in some tea. Quint told her to be sure the water was boiling, and to hurry in with it. The floor was mine and I was standing with my back to the fireplace, wondering if the thing was really going to work. The police chemist had been skeptical too. He was an expert in these things. It was something about temperatures. I could feel my hands getting wet.

  The maid came in with the huge teapot steaming gaily over the blue flame of the samovar. She seemed to have got the idea, because there were no cups on the tray. She started out, and Quint told her it would be quite all right if she stayed. So now we were all there except Crukston, who could probably have saved us all the bother.

  The faces were staring at me now as if the arrival of the tea, sending a tiny spiral of steam up from the coffee table, were a curtain rising. They were intent faces, but, if I was looking for guilt, I’d have found it only in the face of the maid, whose pale eyes seemed to yammer at me silently.

  I said, “It was a rather simple thing that happened. The tea had been brought in, and a moment later the lights went off, and in a matter of seconds Mr. Trist had been stabbed through the heart and the weapon disposed of in a way that I think is answered now.”

  I reached into the side pocket of my coat and brought out the ash tray that I had found earlier that afternoon in Sara Franzen’s apartment. But it didn’t look like an ash tray now. It had been rolled and extended and molded into the shape of a crude but sufficiently lethal dagger.

  I said, “He was stabbed with this.”

  Quint was tense now; a nerve was jumping in his throat. His eyes were darting from one face to another, and I thought there was almost anything now in those faces that you might want to find there—guilt, apprehension or simple fear.

  I went on, “The killer stepped to Trist and touched him in the darkness. That was when we heard him say, ‘Who is it?’ The knife was plunged into his heart, the blade was withdrawn and wiped across the dead man’s sleeve. Then”—I stepped over to the coffee table and lifted the lid on the teapot—“the knife was dropped into the water.” I dropped the knife into the water and stepped back to the fireplace and waited.

  This was an important moment, a part of Quint’s inspiration. At this point, Sara Franzen was supposed to break down, to stand up and scream, to pull a pearl-handled revolver out of her bosom and start shooting her way out of the joint. She sat and looked at me and waited. Quint licked his lips.

  I said, “I think it was about twenty minutes before the law arrived. Sometime during that twenty minutes someone took the knife out of the pot . . .”

  Freddie snorted. He leered at me, his mouth all on one side of his face, and said, “That knife looked like plastic. Don’t try to tell us that the murderer took it out after it got hot and molded it into a piece of bric-a-brac. My eyes didn’t leave anyone in this room for more than a second at a time after Dad died!”

  Sara Franzen stirred uneasily, and Mrs. Trist said, “What are you trying to prove, Mr. Bailey?”

  Quint stood up and said, “Let’s call a halt for a few minutes, Bailey. I’ve got to make a call.-I’ll be right back, and I’d rather no one left the room.” He walked to the French doors and turned and added, “Of course, any of you have the right to leave if you want.” He went on out and closed the doors behind him.

  Time passed, and again a kind of bitter tension grew in the room. I hadn’t noticed when, but at some point in the five minutes just past, they had all realized what we were after. They waited and looked at the silver teapot and said nothing.

  Quint came back in and sat down. “It’s been twelve minutes, Bailey. How about pouring yourself a cup of tea?”

  I nodded. My hands were wet again. I suddenly felt that the whole theory was a delusion, a quite adequate explanation of what happened, like Aristotle’s explanation of why the rock fell to the earth, but false in fact. My hand shook as I lifted the lid and peered in, knowing that I would see a dagger there, a little limp perhaps, but a dagger.

  But what I brought out and laid on the table was not a dagger. It was a crude round ash tray, soft now, and glistening. But in a few minutes here on the table it would become hard and someone would come along and drop an ash in it.

  I looked at Mrs. Trist. She was pressed back hard against the chesterfield, as if she were trying to get as far away from the thing on the table as she possibly could.

  I said, “Yes, it worked, Mrs. Trist. You see, it’s the original one. I found it where you hid it last night. You shouldn’t have got panicky. You should have kept it in your purse.”

  Her mouth opened and she tried to talk, but her lower jaw wouldn’t behave. Then it came. “You know . . . that I couldn’t have done it!”

  Quint interrupted. “I just called headquarters, Mrs. Trist. Crukston has just signed a statement that he turned off the lights for you.”

  Her shoulders rose convulsively and it came out fast, “That’s a lie! He could—” She didn’t finish the last word. It broke off abruptly, and for a hung moment of silence we waited while panicked thought skittered visibly about on her face. And then she knew that she had thought too long, and that we had all seen that thought as clearly as if she had shouted it at us. And then she seemed suddenly to have decided that she had fought too long, and that she didn’t want to fight any longer.

  She sat down slowly in the corner of the chesterfield and retched suddenly and sickeningly. Quint lifted his thumb and pointed to the door. We all went out of there.

  There were three men from Homicide in the hall. They went into the room and closed the door, but I could still hear the retching. It had become a sob now, dry and rhythmic. I walked on down the hall to where Freddie and Sara Franzen were standing.

 
; Sara Franzen didn’t want to talk about it. She had no curiosity about it. She wanted to go home.

  Freddie said, “I’ll take you, Sally. But first I’ve got to know why.” He looked at me. “Why did she kill him, and why did she go to pieces there?”

  “Crukston is dead. She was about to tell us that, when she caught herself.”

  Freddie’s mouth hung open for a moment and he shook his head slowly. “She killed him?”

  “Uh-huh. It would seem that Crukston had promised her a love nest after your father was out of the way. But Crukston had another reason for wanting your father dead. The love nest didn’t really appeal to him. Mildred didn’t like that.”

  Freddie stared at nothing over my shoulder. His cheeks were flushed. He took Sara Franzen’s arm. “All right, Sally,” he said. “Home now.”

  I said, “Hey, aren’t you going to ask me about the dagger?”

  “Oh, I know about that. I read all about it in a magazine article. ‘The plastic with a memory’ they dubbed it.”

  “Yeah. They tell me this was a different plastic, but it works the same.”

  “Coming?”

  “No, I think I’ll just stand here for a while.”

  They went on out and closed the door.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and looked into the chill gray eyes of the maid.

  She said, “I’m asking about that dagger. Where’d it go to?”

  I smiled. I said, “Well, it’s this way—”

  But Quint was coming down the hall with one of the Homicide men. He was saying, “It’s the molecules in this stuff.” He had the ash tray in his hand and he tossed it up and caught it. “The damned things have a memory; there’s no other way to put it. Once this stuff is molded into some shape, like an ash tray, it’s set. You can heat it after that and mold it by hand into anything you like, but it’ll always go back to the ash tray shape if you heat it again.” He looked up and saw me. “Coming, Bailey? I owe you a coupla drinks.”