The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery

by Howard Fast

  “Of course it is. But what other way can we play it? I must gamble that only one of them will come out—and that’s our cookie. How many doors does the stage have?”

  “The hanger doors are locked. On the side facing the street, there are two doors, one at each corner. Then there’s the alley, with a third door. That’s the side alley. Back alley has two fire exits from the flying bridges and outside fire escapes.”

  “Is there anything about this studio that you don’t know?” Masuto asked.

  “Very little, bubby—very little. If they pay me thirty-five thousand a year to walk around here in a cowboy hat, there’s got to be a reason why.”

  “All right. I come out of that door—the one nearest us.” They were at Stage 9 now, and Masuto pointed across the big square to Stage 6. “So that’s covered. I want a man in the street to cover the other street door. I want a man in the alley, and I want a man behind the building to cover the fire exits. That’s three men. Got them?”

  “They’re yours. When?”

  “I want them behind the building at 10:40. On the nose. I’ll meet them there.”

  “You got it. What else?”

  “I want them armed.”

  “They’re armed. But I don’t want any shooting, Masao. They’re good men and they know how to use their hands and they carry billies. I got a clean record on this lot. We never had shooting, not in the eighteen years I been here, and I don’t want any now.”

  “The killer will be armed.”

  “Then if a gun is pulled, it’s up to them to get the drop. Don’t worry about that. When your killer shows, they will control the situation. I told you they’re good men.

  “I just hope to God they are.”

  “And I want to do it quiet and quick, Masao, because the tours keep coming. A bus moves into this square every three minutes and another one moves out. Everything is timed, controlled and staged. We could put five thousand people through the tour on a busy day, so just think of how that could be loused up. I get paid to keep things from getting loused up. All right, we’ll work it out. Let’s go into makeup now.”

  The room was for extras, for bit players, for second leads and any others who didn’t have their own dressing rooms or their own makeup people. It was crowded, noisy, and dominated by a tall, hawk-faced, efficient woman with dark eyes and grey hair. This was Jesse Klein, and when she spotted Jefferson, her dour hatchet face broke into a grin and she yelled, “Hey, cowboy! We got a part for you in this one.”

  “Not me, bubby. You don’t make no actor out of me.”

  “Why don’t you stop with that bubby-business, you big ape? How do you think it sounds to people, the way you go around, bubby this and bubby that? Anyway, we’re busy here. You don’t want to act, you want to tear down the profession—beat it.”

  He took her arm, introduced Masuto softly, and asked her to step outside with them.

  “That sounds like a dirty invitation.”

  “Come on, come on—stop with the wisecracks already, bubby.”

  “You know,” she said, going out with them, “you got 1930 slang, old Franko. The kids don’t say wisecracks anymore. There are no more wiseacres. That has gone the way of 23 skiddoo. Today you break them up or you’re putting them on or you’re bleeding on them or you’re talking cockamamie or something. What do you want, anyway?”

  “You know Phoebe Greenberg, bubby?”

  “Sure I know her, poor kid. She inherited nothing but lousy. Then she married poor Al, and the whole world said she had it made. Everyone—Phoebe, you got it made. You got the world by the short hairs. And everybody tells Al he married an angel. Are you a religious man, John Wayne?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Jefferson said. “You stop calling me John Wayne, I stop calling you bubby. Is that a deal?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “So I’m not religious, bubby.”

  “All right—you religious?” she asked Masuto.

  “It’s a foreign religion, so go right ahead.”

  “Then I’ll tell you about God. You want to know what God does for kicks? He’s got these angels roaming the world, trying to find someone’s happy or got it made. Then one of ’em yells up to God, ‘Hey God, here’s Phoebe down here. She’s got it made!’ Then? You know what then? Then—wham!”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Jefferson said. “The point is this. Phoebe is coming in in maybe ten, fifteen minutes, and she wants to be made up. She’ll tell you how she wants to be made up. You make her up. You ask no questions. You make her up.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. She wants a costume, get it for her. Who’s on wardrobe?”

  “Bessie Kenning.”

  Jefferson took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a few words. “Give that to Bessie,” he told Jesse Klein, handing her the slip of paper.

  “You don’t want to tell me any more?”

  “I don’t want you to ask any more, bubby,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the cafeteria at one o’clock and I’ll buy you lunch and I’ll buy you an ice cream soda for desert, and we’ll set the whole place talking about me. Then, if you behave, I may tell you what kind of tricks we’re up to.”

  “You’re all heart,” she said.

  He walked down toward Stage 6 with Masuto. “Wait in the alley at the back,” he said. “I’ll have the three boys with you in ten minutes.”

  “Time’s running out,” Masuto said.

  “Don’t worry. They’ll be there.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Captain Sharkman

  MASUTO was nervous. Time crowded him and caught up with him, and the whole machine was running too rapidly. He was a man who liked to think, who mistrusted quick conclusions, and now there was no time to think. He spent ten minutes waiting in the back alley, increasingly irritated as the minutes ticked by; and then when the three studio policemen appeared in uniform, his annoyance reached the bursting point.

  “Why aren’t you in plain clothes?” he demanded.

  “Because nobody told us to get into plain clothes,” one of them explained. “If you want us to, we’ll go back and change.”

  Masuto’s watch said ten-forty. “No, it’s too late. We’ll make out.” Masuto caught himself and calmed himself. In any case, it was not their fault. They simply did as they were told. Suddenly, he was almost physically sick with a wave of mistrust of Frank Jefferson. But then he overcame that. It was insane and pointless—and unless he controlled his thoughts and rode hard on his suspicions the entire fabric he was weaving would collapse. The point was not to mistrust Frank Jefferson, but to recognize an area of stupidity—which was always obvious in another person. It was his own errors, his own misjudgements and stupidities that might destroy him and Phoebe, not another’s.

  He explained the situation in as few words as possible. “I want the killer,” he said, “but above all, I want Mrs. Greenberg unharmed.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Sergeant.”

  “Don’t worry,” Masuto said bitterly. “How the hell can I not worry when I am told that no guns are to be fired?”

  “Unless we have to.”

  “What determines that?”

  “Circumstances.”

  “I am armed,” said Masuto. “If the killer has a gun, I’ll use mine—that is, if the killer’s gun threatens Mrs. Greenberg or myself. If the killer shows no gun, I won’t use mine. Is that agreed?”

  They nodded slowly.

  “All right. I am going into the stage now. Remember—if possible I will come out of there into the street at nine minutes after eleven. I don’t think so, but conceivably I could have a gun in my hand. Just take a long, hard look before you make any decision. That’s nineteen minutes from now—right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then take your posts and stay on them.”

  Then Masuto walked out of the back alley, turned right at the side alley, through the hard shadow into the burning white sunlight of the studio street. The candi
dates for murder were prompt, but perhaps that was to be expected. Trude Burke’s MG was parked in front of the stage, and a grip was climbing in to return it to the parking lot. Sidney and Trude were standing at the door to Stage 6, and Sidney said cheerfully, “We’re waiting, Sarge. I don’t go in there without an escort.”

  At the same moment, a huge black Northeastern company limousine drew up to the soundstage, and the uniformed chauffeur opened the door for the five people inside: Murphy Anderson, Stacy Anderson, Jack Cotter, Arlene Cotter, and Lenore Tulley.

  “We thought we’d come together,” Anderson explained to Masuto. “We wanted to bring Phoebe, but she had already left when I called her home.”

  “There was a message from her at the gate,” Masuto told them. “There was some mix-up at the cemetery. Evidently, they had some sort of title problem about the grave site. She had to buy seven square feet of additional land, and there was nothing to it but they must have a certified check. She went to the bank first, then to the cemetery, and then she’ll be here. It doesn’t matter.”

  “We’ll hold it up, then?” Cotter asked. They were all tense and nervous.

  “No—no, we don’t need Mrs. Greenberg.”

  “How do you know?” Cotter demanded.

  “For Christ’s sake, Jack—don’t be a damn fool!” Stacy said.

  Sidney and Trude Burke stepped over to join them, and Murphy Anderson said, “Hello, Sidney.”

  “I’m putting that in the record,” Sidney said. “A leper needs hellos. He files them away. Take it from me, Murph—don’t be Mr. Goodguy. No percentage.”

  “I don’t like that,” Cotter said. “You’re too damn quick with that tongue of yours, Sidney, and one day you’re going to choke on it.”

  “For crying out loud—” Anderson began. Cotter snapped at him, “Who the hell is Masuto here to act as any kind of judge and jury? It’s no worse to think of Phoebe as the killer than it is to think of Trude as the killer—”

  “Oh, drop dead,” Trude told him. “I never knew a cowboy player who wasn’t an idiot—so why don’t you stop trying to be a bigger shmuck than God made you! Let’s get inside and get this lousy horror over with.”

  “I’m for that,” Lenore Tulley said.

  Masuto opened the door to the soundstage, and Sidney went through and opened the inside sounddoor. One by one, they entered—Masuto last. It was exactly one minute after eleven o’clock.

  Inside the door, they stood in a tight group, allowing their eyes to become used to the dim light. Directly in front of them, a pile of cable lay like a tangle of enormous snakes in a jungle of arc lights and reflectors. There was a standing set of a modern kitchen, tiny and surrealist in the great inclosed space, and in the background one side of an ocean liner. Otherwise, only two high, half-drawn cycs and the shadowy spaces of roof, catwalks and far walls. Still, it was a dark forest—full of lairs and windfalls.

  “Mrs. Greenberg left word that she would be here no later than eleven-five, and it’s almost that now,” Masuto said.

  “If Phoebe’s pegged for the killer,” Stacy said, “then I am getting out of here right now.”

  “No one said she is pegged for the killer,” her husband reminded her.

  “I hate this stage. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I just realized,” Trude said.

  “What?”

  “He got his first one here. This is where Freddie Saxton was killed. Of course.”

  “Which is why we’re here, bright eyes,” Sidney said. “And it’s no he. We got a dirty-minded broad doing all this scragging.”

  They were drifting apart now, just as Masuto had predicted, gathering courage as they realized that the soundstage was only a soundstage—no more, no less.

  “Clean-minded Sidney,” Trude said. “That’s why I married you, my turtle dove, because you’re so clean-minded and sincere.”

  “You married me for my money.”

  “Big discovery.”

  Masuto said loudly, “Look everyone—stay together and stay inside. For your own protection, stay together—and under no circumstances is anyone to leave the soundstage without permission from me—not until the witness arrives.”

  “Where is Phoebe?” Cotter demanded petulantly. He was over by one of the great cycs now, and he called out to Anderson, “Murph, this is ripped—did you know? They’ll bill us for a new cyc—they come to about seven hundred dollars.”

  “The hell with it!” Anderson said. “Stop worrying about the goddamn cyc.”

  “Mr. Anderson,” Masuto said, “I’m stepping to the door to see if Mrs. Greenberg arrived. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Sure.” Then Anderson called to Cotter, “Anyway, I think that cyc was torn before. Forget it.”

  Masuto stepped through the soundstage door into the street, blinking in the hot sunlight. The soundstage had been dim, cool and silent. Out here, a steam calliope was blaring circus music from the other side of the square. Busses with their brightly striped awnings of yellow and black were rolling in and out of the square, and under the guidance of young men and women in costume, crowds of tourists were being ushered through the carpentry shop and the plaster shop and the mocked-up Soundstage 11 to see all the wonders of how movies were made. There were kids eating icecream cones and popcorn and frankfurters, boys and girls holding hands, cowboys, Indians and gay Western ladies of the movie saloons. And through it all moved the grotesque lumbering figures who were America’s cartoon heroes—Captain Devildom, with five wiggling tentacles and a ray gun; Major Meridean, dressed like a gladiator but with a rocket belt that could zip him anywhere in the world to right wrongs and defeat master criminals; Space Ace Ambrose in his gleaming space suit of red, white, and blue anodized aluminum, and other symbols of character and courage.

  The calliope was screaming out a Sousa March as Masuto crossed the street, turning to face the soundstage. At the far end of the stage, the uniformed studio guard stepped out of the alley and lounged a few steps down the street, so that he could watch the door without appearing too obvious.

  At the same moment, out of the corner of his eyes, Masuto saw Phoebe leave Stage 9 and start toward him. At least, he was certain that the stout, dark-haired woman—hair greying and wearing a cheap blue cotton dress that fell four inches below her knees—was Phoebe Greenberg. It had to be. Yet he wouldn’t have believed that any makeup could be so perfect.

  Then she met his eyes and they exchanged glances and he made a slight circle of approval with his middle finger and his thumb and she dropped one lid, and he knew that it was Phoebe. But in that time, for one part of a moment, for one part of a second, he made the error of negligence and sheer stupidity that he was destined to make. For one instant, he took his eyes off the soundstage door. When he glanced at it again, Captain Sharkman stood in the street in front of the stage.

  Even in that instant, Masuto could not help thinking what a remarkable and impressive costume it was. It was mad, but then the world was mad and this was a dream factory out of which rolled, day in and day out, the phantasies, romances and nightmares of an entire nation. This was why a thousand generations had lived and died and fought and toiled—so that an apparition called Captain Sharkman could strut slowly toward him on the sun-soaked studio street. Captain Sharkman was six and a half feet tall. From the waist down, each leg was the separate body of a shark, an astonishing imitation of the pasty white skin of the fish itself. The torso was white and pale grey, and the arms were two ugly appendages that ended in sharkfins, and the head was a shark’s head, ugly, expressionless, uptilted with the undercut jaw open. Through that opening, Captain Sharkman had vision, but the mask was cleverly constructed and no eyeholes were apparent. And on either side of Captain Sharkman’s head, a pair of moist red gills moved in slow rhythm. Two red, white and blue striped epaulets gave him his rank.

  During the next few seconds, things happened very quickly. Masuto saw the studio guard staring at Captain Sharkman but making no move to stop h
im. “Look for a murderer,” he had been told. But no one told him to look for Captain Sharkman. If a decision was difficult for Masuto to make, it was impossible for the guard. If the guard followed Captain Sharkman, the door would be left unguarded.

  “And what do I do?” Masuto asked himself.

  But there was nothing to do. Captain Sharkman shuffled up the street toward him. Phoebe walked across the square toward him. Masuto stood and waited, and a tour bus slowly moved across the top of the street toward the high mesquite hills on the back lot. The plan, prepared so carefully, had come to pieces.

  Masuto made his decision. He let go of his plan and he let go of Phoebe. It was wrong, and he wanted her out of there, and as the bus crossed in front of her, he yelled, “Get on that bus!”

  She had a mind and she had good reactions. Masuto watched with pleasure how specifically and quickly she reacted to his command, stepping onto the bus as if she had been waiting for it, standing on the running board and hanging onto one of the steel uprights that supported the awning. The passengers giggled with pleasure at her makeup and costume, and the driver-guide spoke into his microphone, “One of our Western ladies of small repute, friends, right out of a border saloon, yes, sir—one of the many surprises—”

  Captain Sharkman broke into an entirely unexpected and most unlikely sprint, swinging onto the running board on the opposite side of the bus, hooking an arm-fin around the steel support. Masuto raced after him, caught the upright at the very end of the bus and hung on there as the bus rolled out of the square and onto the beginning of the mountain road, and still Masuto did not know for certain whether the murderer was on the bus here with him or back on Sound-stage 6, chatting with the others and laughing quietly at Masuto’s stupidity. Well, that’s the way it was; you were brilliant and intuitive and you built a plan step by step and removed every wrinkle and considered that finally it was foolproof, and then the unexpected.

  “An unexpected pleasure,” the driver said into the microphone that curved toward him from under his rear view mirror. “Here we have Captain Sharkman himself. Well, that’s something to talk about, isn’t it? We are taking the hairpin climb up there to the Peak of Despondency, and you can see the Norman tower up there built for the great remake of ‘The Conqueror’—and we have two studio guests, this little lady from the old West and Captain Sharkman. In case any of you have not had the pleasure of watching Captain Sharkman perform his great deeds on TV, I can tell you that he is one of the great cartoon stars of Grapheonics, and he does his part in righting wrong, preventing crime, and defending the American way of life. In his college days, Captain Sharkman was all-American—at the Naval Academy. Three years after his graduation he was in command of an atomic submarine, the ill-fated Finray that exploded off the coast of Africa in 1961. But by some miracle of electronics, instead of dying in that atomic blast, Captain Sharkman and his crew were transformed in a strange evolutionary process provoked by the atomic blast. They became sharkmen, and so were able to continue their lives and adventures in defense of the free world and the American way—”