The Paul Cain Omnibus

by Cain, Paul

  Bachmann sat and groaned.

  Then a radish-nosed captain from LA got a brilliant idea and asked Galbraith how come he knew about Sarin’s chill so soon. Galbraith had to tell ’em about Miss Laird and they started working her over. Why hadn’t she called for help?—why hadn’t she called the police?—how long had she been in the dressing room?—what was the reason for “personal enmity” towards Maya Sarin?

  I said I’d vouch for Miss Laird and they all looked at me as if I was one of those arrangements with electric teeth that deep-sea nets bring up. Who was I? Where was I at the time of the crime?

  I had a swell answer for that. I said: “What was the time of the crime?” They all scratched their heads and asked a lot more questions and finally decided that the murder had occurred between five-thirty-five and five minutes after six—if Miss Laird was telling the truth.

  I called the projection room and found out that Dreier hadn’t left there till almost ten after. That gave Lawson a fresh start on his Creighton angle and they all started poking questions at Creighton who was sitting in a corner looking scared.

  I winked one of my most reassuring winks at Miss Laird and jockeyed Bachmann out into the hall; we walked down to the far end. I told him in a few one- and two-syllable words that I knew about him and Mrs Bachmann both going to the Dressing Room Building—and why.

  He looked at me with his eyes hanging out on his cheeks and said: “Pat! I swear to you that neither of us had anything to do with it.”

  “Nobody says you did. But if Miss Laird saw both of you go into the building it’s probable that someone else saw you, too. I just want to be sure you’re in the clear.”

  He put his hand against the wall to steady himself, whispered: “Mrs Bachmann talked to Maya and Maya got mad and put her out of the room. She was coming down the hall from the room, crying, when I got here. I took her out to her car—it was parked in the alleyway out there—and we sat and talked for a long while and then we heard Maya’s maid scream… . Carl was going into the projection room when we came out of the building and he saw us—he saw that Ruth was crying. I guess when he found Maya dead he thought we had something to do with it and that’s the reason he won’t say anything.”

  I patted Bachmann’s arm and steered him back towards the dressing room and told him I had an idea I wanted to work out in detail, that I was going to run along and would call him later. As a matter of fact the only idea I had at that point was to talk to Mrs Bachmann.

  They were still working on Creighton. Radish-nose was yelping about putting the pinch on everybody and a little guy from the DA’s office was running him a close second for noise by pointing out, with gestures, that there were four entrances to the Dressing Room Building and that anybody on the lot between five-thirty and six-fifteen was technically under suspicion.

  They’d forgotten about Miss Laird for the moment; I officed her and we edged out.

  Lieutenant Lawson was coming out of the phone booth in the hallway downstairs. He said: “I just talked to the Doc. He says her nibs was killed some time in the half-hour before he got to her—that’d make it sometime after ten minutes to six. An’ he says she was loaded with heroin… . He says all the licker was for was to hold the H down an’ keep her from blowin’ her noodle entirely.”

  I said: “If she was that high maybe she sapped herself with the vibrator.”

  He looked at me as if he thought I was on the level about it and galloped back upstairs.

  We ducked out the private entrance through the Purchasing Department to keep from being swamped by reporters and walked around the block to the car.

  Dreier was out, as far as I was concerned. So was Creighton and the maid. That left Bachmann, who I was sure had told me the truth or what he believed to be the truth, and Mrs Bachmann. I didn’t know her very well; I was trying to think of five or six good reasons why she shouldn’t have got mad, too, while they were going round and round, and picked up the vibrator and let Maya have it.

  I didn’t have to wait long for all six reasons. It was pretty dark by that time. We got into the car and somebody walked over from a car that was parked across the street and said: “Mister Nolan—you’ve got to do something!” It was Ruth Bachmann.

  I said: “Sure—I’ll do anything I can. Where do I begin?”

  She glanced at Miss Laird and went on, “I think Mister Dreier is needlessly sacrificing himself because he saw Jack and me come out of the dressing rooms—and I was crying. Miss Sarin put me out of her room”—her voice broke a little—“and I think l should tell the police I was there and what happened and then Mister Dreier will feel free to clear himself.”

  Something in the way she said it gave me all my reasons at once; either she was telling the truth or I was a Tasmanian watchmaker—which I wasn’t.

  I said: “You sit tight and let things go the way they are for a little while and everything’ll be all right. I’ve got an idea.”

  She agreed after a minute and went back across the street; I started the car and swung into Melrose and wished I had an idea.

  Back at the hotel I asked the clerk who the guy who lived across the court from me was.

  He said: “Hotaling—Francis J. Hotaling.” He’d lived there five days.

  The name was familiar as hell. We went up to the room and fixed a drink and I beat my head against the wall a little bit trying to remember, and one of them worked. Hotaling was a fellow who had been pointed out to me by some of the boys around the Brown Derby as a “Connection.” That meant if you wanted anything on the mossy side of the Law—anything from square-cut emeralds to marihuana—he was the guy to see. He had a pan that looked like it had been through a wringer and worked in gangster pictures occasionally but his main racket was getting things for people who wanted them very badly—people who could pay—and he majored in dope.

  So Mister Hotaling was pegged—and that wasn’t all. I called up Jacobsen, the assistant director. Hotaling had worked the last three days on Death Song. I told Jacobsen to meet me at the studio in an hour, hung up and said: “Dolores—you are about to see Pat Nolan, the great detective, at work. Fix us a drink.”

  I jumped out to the elevator and sat on the button and had a long heart-to-heart talk with the elevator boy. He checked. When I went back to the room the phone was ringing. It was the Nick Galbraith Detective Agency. He wanted to know where he could find Miss Laird. I told him I’d just put her on a train for Kansas, and clicked the receiver and told Deep South to send up a waiter. The waiter showed up in a couple minutes and we ordered dinner.

  Have you ever seen an angel eat oysters? It’s marvelous.

  Bachmann said: “We can’t do it—it’s bad taste, with this terrible thing happening to Maya and all… .”

  He and Jacobsen and Dolores and I were sitting in his office.

  I did a fair imitation of staring at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Bad taste! Is it bad taste to nail the murderer? Is it bad taste to—”

  Jacobsen interrupted: “I think it’s a swell idea.”

  I took a bow.

  “Why not give this information to the police—let them handle it?” Bachmann was gazing vacantly out the window.

  “Because they’ll ruin it! Because our only hope is to force a quick confession before they know what’s hit ’em.” I stood up. “For God’s sake, Jack—where’s your showmanship?”

  He swung around wearily, said: “All right—go ahead. But I think—”

  I’d grabbed Dolores’ hand and we were on our way; we didn’t hear what Bachmann thought. Jacobsen pattered along behind us, ducked into his office and grabbed the phone.

  By a quarter of twelve we had a complete night-crew on Stage Six. I’d told the chief carpenter what I wanted and prop-boys, grips, juicers, and what have you were scampering around like ants at a picnic.

  We worked all night. I talked Dolores into tak
ing a nap, which she probably faked; by daylight we had the whole layout working like a piece of well-oiled machinery. Jacobsen had called Mary Fallon, Sarin’s double and stand-in, and my other principals for six-thirty and when they got there we cleared the set and rehearsed for a couple hours and then knocked off for breakfast.

  The general call was for nine-thirty. The idea that we circulated around was that we were going to start Death Song over as if nothing had happened, because we had to meet the release date—the old “The show must go on” gag.

  I was taking over as director until Dreier came back and we were starting with a corner of one of the big sets with about thirty extras and four bit players. We were, according to the dope that I had everyone on the lot broadcasting, going to clean up all the big stuff first while we were trying to find a girl for the Sarin part.

  At a little before nine-thirty I left the restaurant and dashed over to Stage Six. Everything was ready; Jacobsen had draped a collection of the toughest mugs in Hollywood along a wall that was supposed to be one end of a prison yard. They wore San Quentin rompers and they included Hammer and Francis J. Hotaling. Jacobsen had called both of them for bits, at seventy-five slugs a day.

  I chinned with the cameraman a minute and sat down under the camera, nodded at Jacobson; he and his kickers yelled: “Quiet everybody!”

  Bachmann was standing a little way back of me with a couple of other B.L.D. executives; Dolores was sitting on the arm of my chair with her elbow on my shoulder, which was exactly where her elbow should be.

  I snapped in to the loudspeaker: “Gentlemen, as Mister Jacobsen has informed you, this is the scene where you look up and see the airplane that is signaling to someone in the prison. At first you are talking to each other, moving about, smoking. The sound of the airplane is your cue. When you hear it, look up—not all at once but a few at a time. Shall we rehearse it or do you all understand?”

  They bobbed their heads in concert.

  I put the loudspeaker down and said: “Turn ’em over.”

  The soundman called the number and the assistant cameraman clicked his sticks, scuttled out of the scene. I lifted my right hand and the whole stage was plunged into pitch darkness.

  It was entirely silent, entirely black; I felt Dolores’ hand tighten on my shoulder.

  There was thin slithering sound and, suddenly, a little light. The wall had split, slid back, and we were all looking into an exact replica of Maya Sarin’s dressing room. The light grew in it as it grows when an electric dimmer is reversed, on a small stage. Everything else was in darkness.

  Maya was sitting at her dressing room table staring drunkenly in the mirror. It was Mary Fallon, of course, but in those circumstances she looked more like Maya than Maya ever thought of. She was wearing the double of the costume Maya had been murdered in.

  I expected a big triple-action gasp but I guess everyone who wasn’t in on it was too surprised to gasp, or didn’t have the wind for it. You could have heard a pin feather fall.

  There was a knock at the dressing room door and Maya—I mean Mary—called “Come in,” huskily—with Maya’s voice. Hammer and Francis J. Hotaling came in. The makeup man had accomplished a miracle with those two; they were a couple old-timers that came nearer doubling Hammer and Hotaling than anyone else I could find in the files and they were dressed exactly as Hammer had been dressed when he and Ciretti crashed in on me, and as Hotaling had been dressed when he reached the studio.

  Maya swung around and said: “Wha’ d’ yuh want?” and Hotaling put his hand in his pocket and answered: “We got that stuff for you.” Maya stood up and Hammer edged around behind her and picked up the vibrator and slammed her over the head. Then they both scurried out of the room and the lights dimmed and it was pitch dark again. And still—so still I could hear Dolores’ heart pounding beside me.

  That went on for about a minute and then Hammer—the real Hammer—screamed. The lights came on and there was a lot of Law milling around and Hammer was still screaming.

  We all sat in Bachmann’s office: Bachmann and Jacobsen and Dreier, who had been released, and the angel and I.

  There was a knock at the door and Bachmann said: “Yes.” The secretary opened the door and Lawson, the dick from the Holly­wood Station, waltzed in.

  He said: “Everything’s under control. Hammer thought we were going to hang the rap on him and squealed. We caught Ciretti in the bathtub. He’s been crazy mad at Maya for four or five days—ever since be caught her playing post office with his chauffeur—and getting crazier all the time. And he’s been scared, too. She’s been so high with alky and heroin and what-not she’s been shooting off her mouth about where she got it …”

  “Which was from Hotaling, huh?—and Hotaling was Cirretti’s man?” I wanted to be sure about that.

  Lawson nodded. “Uh-huh. Both of them, with Hammer, had decided what to do about it. Ciretti had Hotaling move into the room across from yours because he figured he could jockey Maya into going to your room and bump her off there and make it look like you did it. But Maya was sore at you and wouldn’t go for it.”

  I said: “Isn’t that dandy.”

  Lawson went on: “Ciretti and Hammer were there last night when Hotaling came in from the studio and said Maya and Dreier had had a battle on the set. That looked like gravy to Ciretti—he hurried over to the studio and went in the extra gate with Hotaling’s pass—they look a lot alike, anyway. He wanted to put the chill on her himself on account of the jealous angle. He smacked her down and then rushed back to the hotel. He could see you were in your room—across the court—and he suddenly had the bright idea of putting on that act for you—figuring it would double as an alibi and make it look like he was broken hearted over her death.”

  And that was, in a manner of speaking, that.

  Dreier and Dolores and I walked out towards the set together. Dreier kept looking at her in a very quaint way and finally he asked: “Have you ever worked in pictures, Miss Laird?”

  She smiled sidewise at me, said: “Yes, a little.”

  We all stopped and Dreier turned to me. “You know,” he you-knowed in a faraway voice, “we’ve got to replace Maya very quickly. What do you think of Miss Laird for the part?”

  I said I thought she’d be swell, but I knew a better part that she’d fit even more perfectly. She and I grinned at each other like a couple of kids and Dreier looked at us wide-eyed for a minute and then turned quietly and walked away.

  Pineapple

  The man in the dark-brown camel’s hair coat turned east against the icy wind. Near First Avenue he cut diagonally across the deserted street towards an electric sign: Tony Maschio’s Day and Night Tonsorial Parlor.

  A step or so beyond the sign, just outside the circle of warm yellow light from the shop, he stopped and put down the suitcase he was carrying, produced a cigarette and a lighter. He stood close to the building with his back to the wind, flicked the lighter several times without producing a flame, then turned back into the wind and went on towards First Avenue.

  He forgot his suitcase. It sat in the darkness just under the corner of Tony’s plate-glass window and if anyone had been close enough to it they might have heard it ticking between screaming gusts of wind—merrily, or ominously, depending upon whether one took it for the ticking of a cheap alarm clock or the vastly more intricate and alarming tick of a time-bomb.

  The man walked up First Avenue to Thirteenth. He got into a cab on the northwest corner, said, “Grand Central,” and leaned back and looked at his watch.

  It was nine minutes after one.

  At sixteen minutes after one Tony Maschio came out of the backroom, washed his hands, whistling a curiously individual version of “O Sole Mio,” and turned to grin cheerily at the big bald man who sat reading a paper with his feet propped up on the fender of the stove.

  “You are next, Mister Maccunn,” he chirped bri
ghtly.

  Tony Maschio looked like a bird, a white-faced bird with a bushy halo of black feathers on his head; he spoke with an odd twittering lilt, like a bird.

  Maccunn folded his paper carefully and unfolded his big body as careful from the chair, stood up. He was about fifty-five, a very heavily built, heavily-jowled Scot with glistening shoe-button eyes, a snow-white walrus mustache.

  He lumbered over and sat down in Number One Chair, observed in a squeaky voice that contrasted strangely with his bulk:

  “It’s a cold, cold night.”

  For eight years Maccunn had come to Tony’s every Friday night at around this time; for eight years his greeting, upon being invited into Tony’s chair, had been: “It’s a cold night,” or “It’s a hot night,” or “It’s a wet night,” or whatever the night might be. When it was any of these things to an extreme degree he would repeat the adjectives in honor of the occasion. Tony agreed that it was a “cold, cold night” and asked his traditional question in turn, with a glittering smile:

  “Haircut?”

  Maccunn did not have so much as a pin feather hair on his broad and shining head. He shook it soberly, as was his eight-year habit, closed his eyes, and Tony took up his shears and began trimming the enormous mustache with deft and graceful gusto.

  Angelo, who presided over Number Two Chair, was industriously shaving the slack chin of a slight gray-faced youth in overalls. Giuseppe, Number Three, had gone out for something to eat. Giorgio, Number Four, was sitting in his chair, nodding over an ancient number of The New Art Models Weekly. There were no other customers in the shop.

  At nineteen minutes after one the telephone rang.

  Maschio put down his shears and comb and started to answer it.

  Angelo said:

  “If that’s for me, boss—tell her to wait a minute.”

  Maschio nodded and put his hand out towards the receiver, and the telephone and wall came out to meet him, the whole side of the shop twisted and curled and was a smothering sheet of white flame, and pain. He felt his body torn apart as if it were being torn slowly and he thought “God!—please stop it!”—and then he didn’t feel any more, or think any more.