“Take care of Spot,” I added as an afterthought. Some dog-sitter I was. I hadn’t even thought of the poor little pooch for hours.
Millie ran the disc again. And again and again. It was just like Babe Ruth and that stupid home run, but grimmer.
There came a time when I knew I’d have to stop. I couldn’t concentrate. My brain insisted on mixing its own images with what was on the tape.
So I saw Shelby and Green, and I saw the famous pants-down poster sequence. I saw Melanie Marliss, and I saw Lorenzo Baker and tacos and kung fu. I saw Lenny Green’s pants get ripped off, and I saw him get blown up by his motel toilet bowl, and I saw him laughing about it. I saw the sprinkler cut in, and I saw myself as a kid, rushing home from school in the rain to get another sweet look at Alice Brockway. I saw Alice and me on that sofa in the Brant. I saw myself as a kid again, watching Saturday morning shows, and I saw Porter Reigels and Ken Shelby in primitive control rooms directing those same shows.
The audio got mixed up, too. In between the ad libs and the jokes from the monitor, I heard Porter Reigels say, “Real nice,” and Llona say, “It’s a trap.” I heard Lenny screaming for help from inside the box—no, that was real, came right from the monitor. Get a grip on yourself, Cobb.
But the humming and buzzing got louder, and the voices went on. I watched Ken and Melanie struggling with the bolt, and again I heard Lenny. “It swells up when it gets wet.”
Capillary action, I had said. Makes a wet sponge expand to twice its dry size. Lifts tons of nutrients to the topmost leaves of a giant sequoia. I’m surprised at you...
On the screen, Lenny Green’s body fell for the fifteenth or twentieth time. I heard my own voice say to Porter Reigels, “Hey, I’m one of the good guys!”
The picture stopped. I sat there looking at the blank screen.
“How about it, Cobb?” Millie said through a yawn. “It’s practically 6 A.M., for crying out loud.”
The hum was gone. I was spent, drained, and disgusted with myself. Congratulations, Cobb, I mocked myself. What had I accomplished, I asked myself, aside from proving that that scene with Vivien Leigh hearing voices at the end of Gone With the Wind wasn’t as stupid as I used to think it was?
And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, I answered myself. You cracked the case, idiot.
I closed my eyes and watched it all fall into place. Piece after piece. And the more of the picture I had, the easier the other pieces fit in.
The picture was ugly.
Before I even knew where I was going, I was out of Master Control and hurrying down the hallway. I stiff-armed the door to the men’s room, found a stall, knelt, and was bitterly and violently sick.
I was wiping cold sweat from my face with a paper towel when I emerged. Millie was waiting outside the door.
“Jeez, Matt, are you all right? It sounded like you were coming up with your soul in there.”
“Symptom of carbon tetrachloride poisoning,” I told her. “Look it up.” I grinned. I was weak, but I had to grin. Finally, someone besides the killer knew what the hell was going on around here. That part, at least, was a good feeling.
“Millie,” I said, “are you all paid up and registered with the Projectionists Union?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Because,” I said, “if I’m right, I’ll be wanting you to run some kinescopes for me.”
CHAPTER 27
“Patch me through to McGarrett.”
—JAMES MAC ARTHUR, “HAWAII FIVE-O,” CBS
I LOST MILLIE MOMENTARILY in the hallway. She had short legs, and I was too pumped up to slow down for her. She ran a few steps, rounded the corner, and caught up with me.
“Cobb,” she began. She managed to be breathless and menacing at the same time. “Cobb, this better be something. I mean, there better be some goddam point to this.”
I stopped, looked down at her, and very gravely said, “Millie, the point is, ‘Things are not always what they seem.’ ”
Millie thought it over for a second, then said, “Good!”
“Good?” I hadn’t been expecting that.
“Yeah. Because you seem nuts!” She started walking again.
“No,” I said, trying to catch up with her this time. “It’s important that someone remember that; God knows I keep forgetting. I could have solved this case a week ago.”
Something had suddenly occurred to me, a hole in my puzzle. How did the fire get started? Well, genius?
“We’ll take the stairs,” I said. “It’s only three floors down.” To hell with the fire, I thought. First things first. Let’s see about those kines.
The seventh floor was deserted, except for a uniformed cop who told us Studio J was off limits until further notice.
Millie was all set to put up an argument. Nobody was going to keep the Chief Technician of Network Operations out of a Network studio while she was alive.
I spoiled her fun. While Millie was still flexing her lip, I smiled nicely at the policeman and told him our business didn’t have anything to do with Studio J, which was a lie, but not a terrible one.
I took Millie’s wrist, and pulled her instead to the J. V. Hewlen Kinescope Library. Very carefully, I closed the door behind us, and locked it. I walked over to the table Jerry de Loon had used for his work, rested my hands on the back of his chair.
I had a sore throat now, to go with my headache. I had to force the words out, and they came strained and a little hoarse.
“Sit down, Millie,” I said. She sat, took off her glasses, and blinked at me as though it had suddenly occurred to her I might be dangerous.
“Before I do anything,” I said, “I want you to know you may have to testify in court about what I’m going to do here, so pay attention.”
“Uhh, right,” she said, putting her glasses back on. “This is the stuff about things aren’t what they seem?”
“That’s exactly what this is!” I was suddenly furious with myself. I slammed a fist into the back of the chair. “I’m a goddam idiot!”
I saw I was scaring Millie, so, with an effort, I brought myself under control. “Look,” I said. “You’ve heard about that incident with Melanie Marliss and the five security guards Saturday afternoon, right?” She nodded. “Well,” I went on, “I remember thinking at the time that when you see a woman in a violent struggle with five men, you automatically assume they attacked her. It doesn’t make sense any other way.”
“Marliss never makes sense,” Millie said sourly. “Never did.”
“Neither has this case! That’s the trouble! Another automatic assumption we made has messed us up from the beginning.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, let me ask you. Someone bursts into this room, assaults Jerry—injuring him fatally in the process, it turns out. When someone arrives to investigate, not only is the assailant gone, but Melanie’s bowling ball is missing from the studio, and none of those kines from 1952 can be found in here. What’s the natural assumption?”
“Wh—what do you mean?”
“I mean what did everybody automatically think?”
“That someone wanted that dumb ball and those dumb kines. Come on, Cobb, I’m a long time out of kindergarten.”
I nodded and rubbed an eyebrow. “Okay, Millie, I’m sorry. But you’ve made my point. Everyone—the police, Coyle, and Matthew Cobb, boy genius, came to the conclusion that the criminal wanted to steal that stuff. And I’ll bet fifteen Nielsen points that that’s just where we went wrong.”
Millie shook her head. “I’m sorry, Matt. You’re too much for me. You trying to say he stole all that big heavy stuff without wanting to?”
“No-oo!” I laughed. “Do you see how insidious one of those damnable ‘natural’ assumptions is? No, he wanted to do what he did, all right. The point is, he never stole anything!”
“No, huh?” Millie’s face said she wondered how she could get me to a doctor with the least possible trouble.
; “No.”
“Then where are the kines?”
“In this room. See if I’m not right. Can I move a chair without getting in trouble with the union?”
“What? Oh, sure, sure. Go ahead, Matt.”
I pulled Jerry’s chair a few feet from the table, and stood on the seat. I straightened up, put my hands against the fiberboard ceiling panel, and pushed. The panel gave, just as the one in the identical room down the hall had when Porter Reigels knocked it askew with his fist. Plenty of space up there. I should have thought of it days ago.
I stood on tiptoe and poked my nose into the darkness. I saw them, lying like flat gray beetles on the metal housings of the built-in fluorescent lights.
I could just reach one from where I stood. I stretched, got my fingers on the dusty can, and pulled it to me.
“ ‘Dandy Donny Daniels Show,’ ” I read from a hand-printed label on the can. “ ‘Kids show, Sat. Aft., 1952.’ ” The label had Jerry’s initials on it.
“I’ll be a spayed bitch in heat,” Millie said. “You were right!”
“Yeah,” I said. One day, I have to arrange to score a triumph under circumstances that will let me enjoy it. At that moment, I was too busy remembering what an idiot I’d been to enjoy anything. How many times had I wondered how the attacker had gotten away with the bowling ball and the heavy films? But of course, once it started to come to me, after the big stroke of inspiration up in Master Control, the answer to that came, too: He didn’t carry them anywhere. It didn’t matter how goddam heavy they were. True, it took the killer some time to get them distributed in the ceiling (couldn’t have a telltale bulge in the fiber-board, after all), but he’d had plenty of time. He could have always given Jerry an additional clop on the head if the need arose.
I handed Millie the last reel of “Be Still My Heart.” I looked around for anything else of interest that might be up there, but I didn’t see anything. I stepped down. “Fourteen cans, Millie?” I asked.
She ran a stubby finger alongside them. “Yep, fourteen. That’s all of them, right?” She shook her head. “He hid them, for God’s sake. Why the hell would he kill poor Jerry just to hide them?”
“Mmmm,” I said grimly. “Because he didn’t want anyone to see what was on them!”
Millie eyed me suspiciously. “You know what’s on them, don’t you, you cagey bastard?”
“Let’s just call Lieutenant Martin and watch the movies. Then we’ll find out for sure, okay?” Millie shrugged and went to work setting up Jerry’s old projector.
My part of the business was a little more difficult. It’s very easy to call the police, but it’s not so easy to call one particular policeman. All they’d tell me at Headquarters was that the lieutenant and Rivetz were out. I knew where they were—either still talking to Wilma Bascombe (a fool’s errand, if my suspicions were correct) or trapped in the traditional Monday morning traffic jam on the inbound Long Island Expressway. God knew when they were going to be back. I couldn’t even talk to Gumple—he was interrogating someone.
They said they had somebody just as good as Lieutenant Martin for me to talk to, but I doubted it. Nobody who hadn’t been in on this from the beginning was going to be able to appreciate these films.
“Which one do you want to see first?” Millie demanded.
“ ‘Dr. Wonder,’ ” I said. “How many are there?”
“Three cans. Six shows.”
I made my lips tight and shook my head. Not good odds. Back in 1952, they produced thirty-nine episodes of a given series every year. Dr. Wonder, that kindly old gray-haired actor-scientist, used to do about four experiments a week. I would have called my case proved if these kines turned up any one of three—three that someone had turned to deadly use.
I got lucky, but it took a while.
It was in the fifth “Dr. Wonder” episode. Dr. Wonder had led his little friends from the fictitious TV neighborhood through the world of kites (“Bernoulli, Dr. Wonder? Was he Italian?” “Heh, heh, no, Bucky, he was Swiss.”); light (“Pola...pola...pola...what?” “Heh, heh, polarization, Nancy.”); and a dozen other topics.
I surprised even myself to find how incredibly well I remembered these shows. I don’t mean just the format, or Dr. Wonder’s indulgent little laugh, I mean specific episodes. Little Matt Cobb had paid closer attention to the talking shadows of his youth than even he was aware of. I could almost mouth the next stupid question Bucky or Nancy was scripted to ask.
And so when the teaser for the fifth episode came on, I knew I’d hit pay dirt.
“The Babe always knew he was going to hit that home run,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind, Millie. Watch the show.”
We watched.
The doorbell rings. Dr. Wonder says come in, and Bucky skips in, crooked baseball cap and all. Dr. Wonder is sitting at a table, amusing himself by making matches burn underwater.
“Gee, whiz, Dr. Wonder,” Bucky says. “How’d ya do that?”
“Oh,” Dr. Wonder replies, “that’s just one of the fascinating things we’ll learn about today as we explore the world of...Fire and Water.”
Five minutes into the show, Dr. Wonder made a volcano. He mixed iron filings, some sulphur, and some purple crystals of potassium permanganate in a coffee can, then buried the can down to the rim in a big wooden box of dirt he happened to have lying around the studio. He explained to Bucky how potassium permanganate is a powerful chemical doctors sometimes prescribe as a disinfectant, like boric acid, only stronger. Then he got a medicine dropper full of glycerin, and saying, “Now, don’t you kids try this at home,” he put two drops of glycerin into the mixture.
“That’s how he did it,” I whispered. The killer wouldn’t have even needed the filings or the sulphur—they were just for sparks and “lava” to make the phony volcano seem more impressive. It was the glycerin and the permanganate that made the difference. It would have taken a couple of seconds at the outside to start that fire Friday afternoon. A paper spill of crystals in one pocket, and a medicine dropper with a tiny bit of glycerin in it in the other. They’d be harmless separately, but together they’d easily create enough heat to send the flammable stuff in the carpenter’s bin up in flames. The potassium compound, in fact, would burn so completely, it is likely the police lab would never find a trace of it. And if the police noticed the traces of glycerin, well, they’d certainly find some obliging show-biz type like me to explain it away as makeup.
I remembered Lenny’s telling me he had to soak his infected foot. I marveled how well the killer had used the people and things around him as essential parts of his plan. The Network’s glycerin. Lenny’s crystals. My stupidity. Especially that.
But Dr. Wonder was talking again.
“...called capillary action, Bucky. That’s how water tends to cling, and climb, and soak into things. It’s the force that makes a sponge expand, and lifts tons of water and nutrients to the top of a giant sequoia...”
I pressed my knuckles into my temples. Dr. Wonder was long since a skeleton, and for all I knew, Bucky was a middle-aged science teacher at a junior high in the Bronx. But the Network had offered the doctor as my guru, and Bucky as my vicar, and I had accepted both so unconsciously and so thoroughly, I’d been quoting the old man all week, and had never even realized it.
“Really?” The ghost of Bucky’s incredulous child-voice came tinnily from the speaker in the side of the projector.
“Absolutely,” said Dr. Wonder with a grin. “Why, I can even make it lift you!”
Bucky didn’t believe him, so Dr. Wonder had to prove it. Scientifically. Two coffee cans. Dr. Wonder loved coffee cans—coffee was a lot cheaper in those days. Cardboard, a large sheet of it, exactly the same kind, I noticed, that the Network carpenters used to label their stacks of lumber.
Bucky helped the doctor cut the cardboard into squares about four inches on a side. They stacked them in the coffee cans.
Dr. Wonder made the boy stand on th
e cans, one foot on each. Then he got a watering can and poured water into both cans. They laughed as Dr. Wonder accidentally poured some water on Bucky’s sneaker.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then Bucky grinned and waved his arms in a circle. “I’m falling over!” he said.
“You’re rising!” Dr. Wonder grinned back. Bucky regained his balance, and I watched with as much interest as I had when I was a child. The water swelled into the fibers of the cardboard and lifted Bucky two, three, almost four inches above the rims of the cans.
I remembered it. I remembered it in every corny, childish detail. And it had sat like a time bomb in my memory, waiting for something to set it off.
My memory, and the killer’s.
There had been modifications, of course. Bucky weighed (at the time the show was done) maybe a hundred pounds. A standard bowling ball weighs sixteen. And there was no need to lift the bowling ball inches into the air—all that was needed was to lift it the fraction of an inch necessary to send it over the tiny lip at the edge of the floor of the catwalk. A small, folded wedge of cardboard, like the one we had found, would be ample.
And of course, the water hadn’t come from a watering can, but from the Network’s own fire safety system.
But, as Dr. Wonder used to point out with a twinkle in his eye—was in fact pointing out to me at that very moment from the screen—“The scientific principle doesn’t change.”
“No,” I said, “only the human principle.”
“Shut up, will ya, Matt?” Millie said uneasily. “You’re making me nervous—talking to yourself that way.”
“Okay, Millie, okay, that’s it. Thanks a lot. Go on home; take care of Hildy and the cats.”
“You ought to take your own advice.”
I yawned wide. The yawn seemed to take on a life of its own, and I had to fight my mouth to close it. “Right as usual, Mildred, my dear...” Millie made a face. When I start doing Fields, I’m really on my last legs. “Sorry,” I said. I looked at my watch and felt like yawning all over again. It was past nine, and most normal people would be just starting their day’s work.
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