by Howard Fast
“Do you think he did?”
“No.”
“Then where is he?”
“I imagine he’s right there in his room.”
“Come on, you know Dempsy. He’d pound on the door and yell loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Nobody yells loud enough to wake the dead. Take your car, Sy. I’ll follow you to the house.”
“Wait a minute, Masao—what are you trying to tell me? That Kelly is dead?”
“Perhaps. Civilization, or what we have of it, stops short at a million dollars. It’s a strong inducement.”
The Loser
Officer Dempsy was waiting in the driveway when Masuto and Beckman pulled their cars up in front of the garage. A TV unit was there, photographing the house, and one of the men in the unit recognized Masuto and came over to ask whether there were any new developments.
“Not that I know of,” Masuto said. “Anyway, I don’t do the P.R. You know that. They’ll give you the story over at headquarters.”
“You know they give me nothing. Anyway, we want pictures. If I could talk to the servants?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I don’t have to talk to them. Let us photograph them.”
“No.”
He went back to his unit, and Dempsy said, “They’ve been driving me crazy, Sergeant. Anyway, the two ladies are too scared to come out of the house, and I wouldn’t let them in.”
“Good. Now where’s Voorhis?”
“Home, sleeping.”
“Wake him up and get him over here. Now, as I understand it, Kelly’s place is over the garage.”
“That’s right.”
“Two entrances,” Beckman said. “I checked it out yesterday. There’s one door at the top of that staircase outside”—he pointed to the farther wall of the garage—”and another at the end of a passageway on the top floor of the house. Same passageway leads to Mrs. Holtz’s room and the maid’s room. Both doors have those locks with the little thing in the handle. You turn it, and then you can close the door from the outside and it’s locked. No keys. I asked Kelly about that. He said there never were any keys while he worked here.”
“You tried both doors?” Masuto asked Dempsy.
“Sure. The doors are the kind you can kick in, but I didn’t want to try that until you gave the word.”
“What do you think, Masao?” Beckman asked. “Can we force entrance, or will we be asking for trouble?”
“Who from? Both owners are dead, and if Kelly’s alive, why would he lock the doors?”
“Do you have sufficient cause?”
“A man could be half dead in there. That’s sufficient cause.”
Before they went into the house, Masuto said to Dempsy, “No media inside the house. If Ranier or McCarthy or any other friends of the Bartons show up, tell them to wait and get me. And when Voorhis arrives, I want to see him. Now get him over here.”
Masuto and Beckman went into the house and through to the kitchen. The two women turned from their work to stare woefully at the detectives.
“What happens now, Mr. Masuto?” Mrs. Holtz wanted to know.
“We’ll see. I want to get into Kelly’s room. I’m told there are no keys.”
“That’s right. Kelly never asked for them. He said he didn’t need them, so Mr. Barton never had them made.”
“Is it a single room?”
“No, two rooms, a bedroom and a little sitting room. The outside door is into the sitting room. Kelly always kept that locked, but he never locked the door into the hall upstairs.”
“But we hardly ever went into his rooms,” Lena said. “When we had to go in there and clean, it made him mad. He tell us to stay out, with a lot of badmouth talk.”
“Mrs. Holtz,” Masuto said, “I have to address you as the caretaker of the house, simply because there’s no one else responsible. I’m informing you that I have good reason to believe that Kelly is injured and requires help. I want you to understand that considering these circumstances, I shall break down the door.”
Mrs. Holtz sighed and shrugged. “If you must, you must.”
“Servants’ quarters,” Beckman said as he led Masuto up the kitchen stairs and into a shabby hallway. “Four rooms here, and Kelly’s place. I guess they don’t build them like this anymore. That’s it,” he said, pointing to the door at the end of the hall.”
“Kick it in, Sy.”
Beckman raised his size fourteen shoe and let go at the door. It flew open, the bolt tearing out of the jamb, and they walked into Kelly’s bedroom. There was a single bed, neatly made up, and pasted on the wall, several tear sheets from skin magazines.
“Super neat, some of these ex-cons,” Beckman said.
Masuto opened the door to the sitting room. Kelly sat in an ancient armchair, a crooked smile on his face, his eyes wide open. There was a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
“Poor bastard,” Beckman said. “Poor dumb loser.”
“It was his karma.”
“Spends the best years of his life in jail and ends up like this, hates the whole world, hates Jews, hates blacks, and the poor dumb bastard never knew what he was doing.”
“That’s it. He never knew what he was doing.”
“Why?” Beckman wondered. “Why did they kill him?”
“He wanted some of the million dollars. Probably, he didn’t want too much. He was always a petty thief. But whatever he wanted, it was more than his life was worth.”
“The same killer?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Masuto said slowly. “We have three murders, and we have three murderers.”
“Come on, Masao, why? Why three?”
“Because I think I know who two of them are, and neither of them could have killed Kelly.”
“I’ll call the captain. What about Doc Baxter? He’s doing the Angel’s autopsy.”
“I want him here. I want to know when Kelly died. Tell the captain that, and let him fight it out with Baxter.”
For a while after Beckman had left, Masuto stood staring at the dead man. It would be comfortable, he felt, to believe, as his ancestors had, that people lived many lives, and that perhaps in one of them Kelly would have found some peace. Now three people were dead, a simple, bloody case of greed—vulgar and grotesque.
Masuto went back into the bedroom and opened the top drawer of the old chest that served as Kelly’s wardrobe. He pushed aside underwear and a rumpled shirt, and there was Kelly’s gun, an ancient automatic pistol, rusted and clogged in the barrel. When he had worked out the clip, he saw that it was empty. If anyone had tried to fire the gun, it would have blown up in his face, a gun that Kelly had picked up somewhere, perhaps in a garbage dump. Aside from the gun, the two small rooms revealed nothing that could relate in any way to his death. No writing, no pens, no pencils. Perhaps Kelly had been illiterate. There were half a dozen magazines, Playboy, Penthouse, two suits in the closet, a pair of sneakers, an extra pair of shoes, a razor and shaving cream on the sink in the tiny bathroom and only aspirin and a laxative in the medicine chest. A plant with several red geranium blossoms served as the only touch of color or decoration.
Masuto closed his eyes and stood silently until he heard steps in the passageway. It was Beckman returning, and with him, Officer Voorhis.
“Oh, Jesus,” Voorhis said. “When did that happen?”
“While you were on duty last night. What happened, Voorhis, did you fall asleep?”
“Sergeant, I swear to God—”
“I don’t want that!” Masuto snapped at him. “I want to know whether you fell asleep, and I want the truth!”
“Jesus, Sarge, this place was quiet as a tomb. Maybe I dozed a little, but I didn’t sleep.”
“You can explain the difference another time. Where were you?”
“In the front hall.”
“Did you go out and patrol the grounds?”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
Voorhis hes
itated.
“The truth,” Masuto said.
“Once.”
“Great. Just great. And when was that?”
“About an hour after you left.”
“So from one o’clock until Dempsy relieved you, you just sat in the hall and dozed, as you put it. You didn’t sleep, you dozed. That’s a damn easy way to earn your pay.”
“I told you it was quiet as a tomb. Nothing moved.”
“When you were awake or when you were sleeping? Never mind. Did you hear anything, the shot, the sound of a car?”
“Nothing, Sarge. I never heard a sound.”
“Beautiful!” Beckman exploded. “You’re one smart cop, Voorhis. You’re put on duty to guard a house and a murder takes place right under your nose.”
“For Christ’s sake, what am I, a platoon? I was in the front hall. There’s an outside entrance to this place, and whoever killed him must have used a silencer. The ladies didn’t hear anything, so why are you leaning on me?”
“All right, Voorhis,” Masuto said. “Go back to the station and write out your report.” And to Beckman, “The ladies heard nothing?”
“Nothing. And the walls and doors in this servants’ wing are paper thin. So he must have used a silencer.”
“I suppose so.”
“That’s a steady hand. A gun with a silencer and pop—right between the eyes. That’s very professional shooting, Masao, and cool too. It wouldn’t be a contract, would it?”
“Not likely. There just hasn’t been time enough to set something up. This is the result of what happened yesterday.” Masuto peered closely at Kelly. “No powder burns. He probably stood across the room. Sy,” he said, turning to Beckman, “I want you to go out to Malibu and search the Barton place. You’ll have to sweet-talk Cominsky to get in there, but I don’t think he’ll mind.”
“He searched it, you know.”
“But he wasn’t looking for something.”
“What am I looking for? The million dollars?”
“No, it’s not there.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” Masuto said.
“But not like Cominsky, I’m looking for something. Only I don’t know what.”
“That’s right.”
“If you say so.”
“And one more thing. After that, Sy, I want the war records, if any, of McCarthy, Goldberg, Ranier, and Hennesy. I want to know what they were in the service—rank, division, job, whatever you can come up with.”
“And who took commendations for pistol marksmanship?”
“That would help.”
“And where will you be?”
“Here, I suppose. Or at the station.”
Only a few moments after Beckman left, Captain Wainwright stalked in, followed by Sweeney with his fingerprint kit, Amos Silver, the police photographer, and Dr. Baxter, who said cheerfully, “Live in Beverly Hills. A short life but a merry one. What goodie do you have for me now?”
Masuto pointed to Kelly’s corpse, visible through the door to the next room.
“Went out with a smile,” Baxter said. “Few of them do.”
“You’re a damned ghoul,” Wainwright muttered.
“Pathology, dear Captain, is a ghoulish business. Let’s have a look at him. Would it surprise you if I said he died of severe trauma of the brain? No, it would not. No powder marks. I’d say the shot was fired from at least ten feet. Took the back off the skull, perhaps a thirty-eight. And of course you whiz kids are waiting for me to tell you when he died. Not easy. Not easy at all,” Baxter complained, flexing Kelly’s fingers and feeling his cheeks. “At least six hours. That’s the best I can do.”
“Which would put it back to four o’clock in the morning.”
“Give or take an hour.”
“And when you autopsy,” Masuto asked, “you can certainly pin it down more closely?”
“Ah, the autopsy. Just happen to be in the midst of an utterly fascinating autopsy—one Angel Barton.”
“What have you got?” Wainwright demanded. “What killed her?”
“Ah, there’s a question,” Baxter said, smiling impishly. “But, you see, I am not quite through, and not one word until I finish. I’ll have some surprises, depend on it. Tell you what, send our Oriental wizard over to the hospital in an hour or so, and I’ll give him chapter and verse. Now I’m on my way—unless there are any other questions about the deceased?”
When Baxter had departed, Wainwright asked, “Why do I hate that man?”
“He’s a good pathologist,” Masuto said. “I suppose it’s just his nature to be nasty.”
“Have you searched the place?”
“Nothing that means anything. As Beckman said, the poor devil’s a loser—all his life. This gun was in a drawer of the chest.”
“This gun can’t be fired. Why do you suppose he hung on to an old piece of junk?”
“It probably gave him a sense of security.”
The photographer finished his work, telling them, “I’ll have prints in an hour or two.” The ambulance men arrived as the photographer left, straightened Kelly’s body with difficulty, and carried him out.
“I hate this,” Wainwright muttered. “I hate this whole case. Is there any hope of winding it up, Masao?”
“Tonight perhaps.”
“You got to be kidding.”
“No. I know who killed Barton—”
“His wife? How the hell do you ever prove that? She’s dead.”
“You’re right. I don’t think we’ll ever prove it, and if she weren’t dead, I don’t think we could ever convict her. I’m not sure we could convict the other two—”
“Two of them?”
“I think so. One killed Angel, and someone else killed Kelly. We have three murders, three murderers.”
“Beautiful—that’s just beautiful.” He stared at Masuto. “I never know when you’re telling me something you know or handing me a line of crap. You think you can clean this up tonight?”
“I think so, yes.”
“All right, who killed Angel and who killed Kelly?”
“I think I know who killed Angel. Kelly …” He shook his head. “But if you can get them here tonight, I think I can give it to you. Kelly and Angel both.”
“Who? Get who here? How do you get people here? Are you indulging in some goddamn literary detective fantasy?”
“McCarthy, Ranier, the Goldbergs, Mrs. Cooper, Miss Newman, and Hennesy.”
“Masao, have you lost your bearings. You don’t do such things.”
“It can be done.”
“How? Do I arrest them? Do I kidnap them?”
“Have someone reach each one of them and tell them that tonight we are going to expose the killers. You can’t force them to come, but they’ll come.”
“You read that in a book.”
“I don’t read murder mysteries,” Masuto said with some annoyance. “It’s bad enough that I live with it. Do you want me to read about it as well?”
“I read them,” Sweeney said. “You put them in one room and you get the killer. It’s pure bullshit. Every time I read one of them, I ask myself why those clowns don’t take a look at the way ordinary cops work. Like crawling around this place looking for fingerprints. From what I see, this Kelly never had a visitor. All the prints match up.”
“With what?” Wainwright demanded. “How the hell do you know that they match up?”
“Because,” Sweeney replied, smiling thinly, “when you tell me this joker has a record, which was yesterday, I pull a set of prints from the Los Angeles cops and I got it right here with me.”
“Yeah, you’re a real smartass cop,” Wainwright said and, turning to Masuto, “I don’t like it. Anyway, how can you be sure they’ll come?”
“I’m not sure. But look at it this way, Captain. There are two draws—curiosity and guilt. These people like to talk, and this is something to talk about, something to make them shine at a dinner party or whatever. On the othe
r hand, the guilty ones will feel they’re pointing to themselves if they don’t show.”
“And how about this Angel business, Masao? Do you really think you know who killed her?”
“I’m guessing. I could be wrong.”
“And when you get them here, what then?”
“I think I know a way.”
“You’re sure it’s one of them?”
“Two of them,” Masuto said. “Will you give it a try?”
“All right. But I’ll be going way out on a limb, and so help me God, Masao, if you leave me hanging there, I’ll take it out of your hide. What time?”
“Let’s say nine o’clock. And I’ll need some money.”
“What do you mean, you’ll need some money?”
“You’ll get it back.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“All of it?” Wainwright asked suspiciously. “What the hell is it for if I get all of it back?”
“Trust me, please.”
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars.”
Wainwright regarded Masuto sourly. “All right. But I want it back, every cent of it. I’m going to the station house now, and I’ll pull a draft for you and you can cash it at the bank. Are you going to call these characters?”
“If you could do it,” Masuto said gently, “it would be much more meaningful. You’ve got the rank and they’ll be impressed with a call from you.”
Wainwright stared at him, shook his head, turned on his heel, and walked out. Sweeney, putting his equipment together, looked at Masuto with respect. “That was beautiful,” he said. “That was like Moses getting water from a rock. The captain will never be the same again.”
“I think he took it very well.”
“Look, Sarge, do you expect any significant prints from this place?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell do you let me work my ass off?”
“You’re fingerprints. If you don’t look for fingerprints, the captain would be very upset. You know that.”
“The hell with you!” Sweeney said, and stalked out. A minute or so later, Masuto followed him.
Downstairs in the kitchen Mrs. Holtz and Lena Jones sat at the kitchen table, depleted, their faces full of hopeless fear. Elaine Newman stood at a window, staring at the gardens behind the house. She had come there while Masuto was upstairs in Kelly’s quarters, and now as he entered the kitchen, she turned slowly to face him.