“How’d you recognize me?”
“She gave me a picture, of course. Cut from the back of your book.”
“So I dropped in to see her. But you yourself know she was already dead. Me as the murderer doesn’t compute.”
“Details, details. Give me motive every time, dammit. Once you find the chumley with the motive you can make the details fit. We know you coulda had the motive … the hell with the details. You found out she was on to you, you gave her a good going-over to find out what she knew about you and your brother, and once she told you, you dropped the hot curlers into the tub. You grabbed the folder, sneaked out, and then came back a little later to find the body and call the cops. That’s what I was thinkin’.”
“If you were watching the building, you must have seen someone else … if not going in, then coming out for sure. There was a man who ran over me on the stairway. I went in, he came out a minute later. You had to see him.”
“Sorry, pal. Nobody else came out.” The smile slowly faded from Fleury’s gray face. “Jeez. You think the killer was in there while I went through the loft? Oh, Christ. Glad I didn’t know about that. Life’s hazardous enough without that kinda crap.”
“Somebody beat hell out of me on the stairs—well, that’s overstating it, I guess. But, well—”
“Sure, sure.” He gave me one of his stagey smirks and I stood up and went to the window. The thunder and lightning seemed to have stopped. The rain had settled into a steady throbbing downpour. The palm trees on my terrace soaked it up, loving it. “I suppose you’ve never heard of guys wounding themselves to prove they were victims, too. Well, believe me, it happens. Hell, I’ve done it myself. All you’d a had to do was fall down the stairs.”
I looked at him. He was wet and hot and his face was still ashen and the thin gray hair was plastered across his skull and his shirt had that big gob of ketchup on it and his bow tie had worked itself loose and now hung from one collar point by its clip. He was such a wreck it was hard to be too angry with him.
“Fleury, you’re too much for me. No point in arguing.”
“Aw, hell, I don’t suppose you did it. And if you did … well, you probably had your reasons. Lotta murderers in my experience damn nice fellas. She was gonna louse up your life, the way it sounded.” He sighed. “I’m bushed.”
The beer was gone, but I got my weary guest into gin and tonic. I told him I had a few things to do around the house. He nodded and turned on the television. Maybe he was thinking about moving in. I didn’t quite have the heart to throw him out into the rain. I went to the bedroom and packed a suitcase for Los Angeles.
How could you judge the information provided by a Morris Fleury? Did he have some peculiar private agenda? Had Sally really harbored suspicions about me? I’d been so close to her, I’d slept with her and worked with her, I’d even wondered at one time if I was falling in love with her. Whatever she’d thought she had on me—had it led to her death? If it had, that made me a part of it.
And somebody had the file she’d collected.
The file on Lee Tripper.
Morris Fleury was asleep the next time I saw him. I went to bed myself and got up a few hours later, showered, and put on a spiffy seersucker suit of my own, praying I’d never wind up looking like Morris Fleury in his. When I went into the living room he was gone. He’d gone out to the terrace and resumed sleeping in the deck chair. The sun was coming up. Soon it would be shining across Fifth Avenue, peeking between the buildings, across the Park, and into Morris Fleury’s eyes.
But by then I’d be boarding the plane for LA.
Six
THERE WAS A MESSAGE WAITING for me at the check-in desk at LaGuardia. Heidi Dillinger had to take care of some business matters and would be taking a flight a couple of hours later. She’d meet me in Los Angeles at the hotel. Before boarding I called my banker, Harold Berger, and told him that my building concierge was holding an envelope containing a bank draft for a quarter of a million dollars payable to me. After he finished saying “Oh God, oh God, what have you done now?” I told him I thought it was worth his personally picking it up at his earliest convenience. I told him to relax, money was not necessarily the root of all evil. He replied that as a banker he was surely better equipped to comment authoritatively on anything related to money and it certainly was the root of all evil and the root of everything else, too, for that matter. Sometimes Harold gets philosophical and I have to hang up on him.
Settling back in my first-class seat, I was confronted with fruit and champagne and several varieties of Danish and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and steaming coffee. While eating I opened the envelope from the night before. Reservations had been made and confirmed at the Bel Air Hotel. A car from Rent-A-Wreck, bit of humor, that, would be waiting for me. And there were the names of two men with whom I should speak. I knew both names but neither of the men personally. I’d seen the names on letters and contracts relating to my becoming the legal heir to JC’s interests and to the rights of the book I’d written.
Manny Stryker was the producer preparing the film about the last days of JC Tripper’s life. Freddie Rosen was the record producer who now headed MagnaDisc.
Allan Bechtol suggested in his accompanying note that these men might well know more than had previously been suspected about the secret fate of JC Tripper.
I’d only had a couple of hours of not very satisfactory sleep after my chat with Morris Fleury. Consequently I dozed off shortly after my five-thousand-calorie breakfast and came back to life somewhere approaching the Rockies. I poured fresh coffee into the bottomless pit and began to think things over.
My first thoughts turned to Heidi Dillinger. I didn’t know what was going on in her mind any more than I did Bechtol’s, but I’d been around enough highbinders in the old days not to trust either one of them. Not yet. Highbinders. That had been one of JC’s favorite words, an archaism whose meaning seemed clear without resorting to the Unabridged. Ms. Dillinger and Bechtol were or were not highbinders, but I was bound to find out. In the meantime I had to figure out just how much I could tell her if I was going to be working with her.
Was there any point in telling her about Morris Fleury?
Was there any point in telling her about the suspicions he said Sally Feinman had had about me?
How far could I trust her?
Not far enough. Not yet.
If somebody was out to tie me into some nutty plot to kill my brother or hide him, then I had no allies. Not until I’d made sure. Not until they’d proved themselves.
She showed up at the Bel Air two hours after I checked in. She found me outside on one of the picturesque bridges looking down on the swans. It was hard to take my eyes off the black one, who was the star of the show and seemed to know it.
We went back to the shady veranda and sat down at a table giving an enchanting view of the grounds, emerald green from steady watering beneath the thick stands of trees. She was in what I took for California dress, splashes of color and not at all businessy. “What’s your plan?” There was just a hint of mockery in the tone and the smile, as if she were kidding both of us. I could see it in her mouth and her eyes: she felt that we were skipping school. I doubted that she ever looked quite this way in New York. Maybe her guard was slipping. Maybe she was falling for my boyish charm. Maybe she liked that in a man.
“I’m going to start with Stryker.”
“We are going to—”
“No,” I said, heading her off at the pass. “There’s no point in duplicating our efforts. I want you to do some checking on exactly what happened to Shadow Flicker. What do the cops say? They can’t just ignore it. I want the story—talk to people at the radio station, find a reporter who covered the story. Flicker may have been killed for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with our investigation. Maybe he was still a big doper. Maybe he had violent friends … getting stuffed into a cistern may be a message for other dopers who aren’t paying their bills. He could have been
an informer for the narcs. He used to spend a lot of time out at the track. Maybe he had gambling debts. We don’t know a damned thing about what happened to him.”
She didn’t look overly enthused. “I thought we were going to work together. That was the point. That’s why I came out here. Two heads are better than one.” Well, either she was falling for me or was supposed to keep me on Bechtol’s leash.
“Look, leave all that out. If you’re going to hang around, you’re going to do it my way.”
“Next you’ll tell me you work alone and keep a bottle in the desk drawer.”
“I do work alone. Particularly when people are getting killed.” I was fighting against the impulse to feel like Bogart. I was much too large, for one thing. And I sure as hell wasn’t a private eye. Everything I knew about how to act I’d learned from books and movies. I was pathetic, but maybe I could keep everybody else from finding out the truth.
She actually batted her baby browns at me. At least we seemed to be in the same story. “You don’t trust me, do you?”
“Not much farther than Gallivan,” I said.
“Who’s Gallivan?”
“Man I used to know. Pray you never meet him.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Let’s just say he was a lowlife.”
“How low?”
“Low enough to sit on a dime and kick his heels. Thanks for asking.”
“Why don’t you trust me?”
“You suckered me. Anybody can get suckered once. But if I let you do it to me again, then it’s my fault. It’s like an inside straight. Anybody can try to fill it at first. But if you keep doing it, then you’re just not learning. I hate being a chump.”
“Chump? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone actually use that word before.”
“If you stick around, who knows what you might hear. I may call you ‘sister’ soon or tell you you’ve got great stems that go all the way to the floor.”
“You mean you’re capable of almost any enormity.”
“Almost.”
“You might just say ‘Follow that cab!’ without warning.”
I stood up. “You’re catching on. Now let’s get to work.”
“Shall we meet back here for dinner or something?”
“Let’s just wait and see.”
“You’re suddenly awfully mysterious and—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—and I like that in a man.”
The car from Rent-A-Wreck was a white ’58 Cadillac convertible with tires that reminded me of Yul Brynner, one broken taillight, and the smell of stale cigar smoke clinging to the black leather. The huge engine sounded as if it had been tuned yesterday. You could probably have seen the tips of the tail fins with a good pair of binoculars. From behind the steering wheel you really should have sent word by messenger to the front end before you hung a left, which is what I did once I passed through the huge Bel Air gates onto Sunset Boulevard.
I wondered if the car was Heidi’s touch. Maybe there were depths of humor among the shallows and reefs of ambition, greed, and calculation. Were those qualities I liked in a woman? I’d have to give it some thought. I wouldn’t have to think much about her eyes and her mouth and the willowy length of her arms and legs. I wondered where she kept her tan up-to-date. On Bechtol’s penthouse deck? Or did he have a place in the Hamptons? And what the hell difference did it make to me? She was growing on me, that was the difference.
What I really wanted to know was her place in the equation Bechtol had worked out. Was she helping me or spying on me for her master? Wouldn’t it be a good one on me if the Great-Author-and-possible-psychopath was among those who believed I was the one who needed investigating?
I’d called Stryker from the hotel to get directions to his home. It turned out Bechtol had called him and such was Bechtol’s influence that Stryker had made time for me. He said, “I’m throwing Katz here and I’ve got Lamas on the way. But sure, sure, come on. Things can’t get any more fucked up than they are.” He told me how to get to his place up on Mulholland. “If the gate’s locked, just honk your horn until that moron lets you in. Christ.” He sounded like a man who was letting things wear him down. I didn’t know who Katz was or why he was throwing him around. Or where. And Fernando Lamas was dead. In the back of my mind I had the idea that Lamas had a son who passed for an actor. Maybe he’d be there. Unfortunately I’d left my autograph book in New York.
The gate was, of course, locked. I honked the horn and in the fullness of time a young man appeared wearing cut-off jeans and a maroon-and-gold University of Southern California sweatshirt with the sleeves chopped jaggedly off. He was tall and tan and young and lovely, like someone from Ipanema. He also looked strong enough to take the gate off the hinges with his bare hands. He had a sweatband holding in place yellow hair, short back and sides and long on top. He was carrying a tennis racket and waved it at me. I nodded, he did something to the gate, and it swung back.
He looked down at me. He was probably twenty. He leaned on the doorsill. I hoped he wasn’t going to pick up the car with me in it. “You’re not the man,” he said, “to fix the tennis-court fence.”
“How true.”
“Huge hole in the fence. It was just there one morning. The ball usually stops rolling between Sunset and Santa Monica. What can I do for you?”
“Point me at Manny Stryker. He’s expecting me.”
“Well, I’m the son and heir. William Randolph. The poor man’s Harry Cohn is out back throwing Katz off the deck.”
“So I keep hearing.”
“It’s an experiment.”
A teenage girl the color of honey strolled up the driveway from the tennis court. She was, from twenty feet away, so beautiful you wanted to die for her. Then, like so many California girls, she diminished with each step closer until she was just another kid by the time you could reach out and grab a handful. It was the Great California Illusion.
“We’re out of balls, Bill,” she pouted.
The big kid looked at me. “Wouldn’t you know,” he said, “out of balls.” He pointed to a spot where I could leave the car. “Great wheels,” he said.
I nodded. “One at each corner. Standard on these older models.”
They went off to look for more balls and I set off around the corner of a house that was made of some sort of stone and looked flat, like an elongated gun emplacement defending the spine of the hills. It lived out the back, as the real estate agents love to say. I stood at the corner and watched a man in sweatpants and a loose-fitting blue shirt holding a ball of black fur at arm’s length before him. He was above me on a balcony, a story and a half above my head, leaning out over the grassy slope. A girl in a bikini waited below, aiming a video camera at the ball of fur. “Okay,” she called. “Fire one!”
The man released the ball of fur, which turned into a cat. The girl in the bikini shot the process as the cat performed a blindingly quick series of acrobatic maneuvers and landed lightly on its feet. It shook itself, gave the girl’s bare feet a look that implied it was thinking of using them as a box of kitty litter, then strolled off with massive insouciance.
Manny Stryker wasn’t throwing Katz. He was dropping cats. Hurray for Hollywood. You just never knew, that was the lesson.
He launched a couple more feline conscripts, saw me, and dropped a third without bothering to watch its landing. He called my name and came down the stairway barefoot. “Hey, nice to meet you, pal. Nice to know who you’re doing business with. Listen, Shirl, that’s enough for now. Take a look at the tape and we’ll talk and get it over to the costumer. That’s the girl.” The girl in the bikini went away, one of the cats grumbling along beside her. Stryker led the way to a large round table sitting out on a promontory of stone, and looking down on the neighbors scattered on the hillside among the blue, shimmering disks of swimming pools. Stryker’s pool was being attended to by a pair of men in coveralls. They were trolling with large nets. Below us Los Angeles
seemed to be burning beneath a scary brown haze of smoke. Through the brown murk it seemed to be a city sacked and left to smolder by vandals.
Stryker motioned me into a canvas chair as a small Mexican woman arrived with a tray containing a pitcher of iced tea, a plate of lemon wedges, and two glasses also full of ice. The day wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been in New York City. “Funny thing about cats,” he said. “The higher up they are, as a general rule, the safer they’re likely to be when they fall or jump. They’re very different from people. No matter how far a cat falls, it never falls faster than sixty miles per hour. People, see, have a much lower ratio of body surface to mass, ergo less air resistance. So people reach a velocity of a hundred and twenty miles per hour when they fall. And of course your cat is your natural acrobat, having descended over several million years from your tree leapers. But—tell me if I’m boring you, ’kay?—it takes the cat about five stories of falling, or more accurately five stories of accelerating to reach its top speed … and it’s only then that the little bugger really relaxes and splays out its legs and begins a kind of floating. Like a flying squirrel. Thus the drag’s increased and the impact of landing is spread out over a larger area. Results are incredible—there’s the case of a cat in New York who fell thirty-two stories onto a sidewalk … What do you think happened?” He waited patiently for an answer. Here was a man with a hobby.
To prove I was paying attention, I said, “Sidewalk splattered with cat as far as the eye could see.” I knew my cue. His research report was giving me a chance to look him over. His dark curly hair was cut close to his head, his nose looked as if it had repeatedly fallen thirty-two stories to the sidewalk and been considerably broadened by the experience. His eyes were dark and quiet while the rest of him tended to fidget. He was pouring iced tea, dropping lemon wedges in our glasses.
The Suspense Is Killing Me Page 8