by Howard Fast
“That’s understandable.”
“Won’t you sit down, please?”
Masuto dropped into a chair, facing her.
“How did you know it was Ranier?” she asked him.
“I knew it, but I had to confirm it. That silly trick with the bag did it.”
“But how did you know it?”
“There was a hundred thousand dollars of his own money in the bag—or his clients’ money. That would make no difference. It was money he had in his hands. He was taking no chances. He would kill before he ever let that money out of his hands.”
“And the money’s at his house?”
“We’ll have a search warrant in the morning, and we’ll pick it up.”
“I still don’t understand how you knew,” she said.
“The first thing he asked Angel when she entered the house was whether she had dropped the money at his house.”
“But you weren’t here when she came back.”
“But you were, Miss Newman, here in this library. So you heard Angel—you yourself mentioned how the air vents carry sound—and I imagine Kelly, who was in the pantry, heard it as well.”
“Really?” She put down her pen and looked at Masuto with new interest. “But there’s no way you could have known whether or not I was here in the library, since you were not in the house.”
“Perhaps.”
“And I suppose you’re also guessing that Kelly was in the pantry and that he overheard from there. Do you think that is why he was shot?”
“Yes. Probably he tried to shake down Ranier for part of the million dollars.”
“And Ranier killed him.”
“Yes.”
“You still haven’t explained how you knew about Ranier.”
“Ah, so.” Masuto stared at her thoughtfully. “You told me,” he said.
“What?”
“Yes, Miss Newman, yesterday in the living room, after Mike Barton was killed, you lashed out at Ranier. You said something to the effect of, ‘Are you going to kill me too?’”
“Did I? Truly?” She appeared not at all disturbed.
“Yes, you did.”
“Well—” Elaine sighed. “I was upset, distraught, and I had to lash out at someone. Bill was there. I never liked him, and I begged Mike to get rid of him. He was stealing Mike blind. But come now, Sergeant, you didn’t build your whole case on what I blurted out in a fit of grief and anger?”
“No, I didn’t. You’re absolutely right. And I wasn’t wholly certain until our little ploy with the suitcase worked. But on the other hand, Miss Newman, I never for a moment believed that you would have indulged in that outburst unless you knew something. You’re not the type. You are very cool, very collected, very much in control of yourself. There was also no doubt in my mind that Angel Barton had killed her husband. Of course, I could have been wrong.”
“I don’t think you were wrong.”
“I know you don’t,” Masuto said, “because you were here in the library, and you heard Ranier ask Angel whether she had taken care of Mike, and you heard Angel tell him that she had. Then, I suppose, Ranier asked her what she had done with the gun, and she said she had forgotten to get rid of it. Ranier must have been very angry, and he took the gun from her and dropped it behind a row of books in here—”
“And never noticed I was here?” Elaine smiled.
Masuto pointed to the door. “You see how it opens inward. You simply stepped behind the door. Very cool and quick-thinking. If Ranier had seen you, he would have killed you.”
“How amazing!” Elaine looked at him and nodded. “What a remarkable man you are, Detective Masuto! I had always thought that policemen had no imagination, but you have a marvelous gift of fancy. Please go on. I can’t wait until I hear what happened next.”
“You must have brooded about it for a while. I’m sure you loved Mike Barton a great deal. You would have made him a good wife.”
“You’re damn right I would!” she said, almost harshly, and then she began to cry. “Forgive me, please.” She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I’m all right.”
“Can I get you anything? A drink?”
“No, I’m all right.”
Masuto watched her and nodded. “You, you would have made him a good wife. You would have mothered him, and you have the wit and intelligence he lacked.”
“Stop it! I don’t want to hear about that! If you wish to continue your fairy tale, then do so. Otherwise, please go.”
“I’ll continue, Miss Newman. I don’t know where you got the chloral hydrate, but I can guess. I would say that Angel had it and you found it in her medicine cabinet when she was out, and deciding that she intended to use it against Mike, you appropriated it. How you must have hated her! Of course, you knew her secret. Well, you waited for the proper moment, and it came when you heard Kelly shouting for Lena to get the drink and take it up to Angel. You had the chloral hydrate. You stepped into the hall and dropped it into the glass of whisky. Kelly had meanwhile gone into the kitchen. Then you waited until the coast was clear, took the gun from its hiding place, slipped up to Angel’s bedroom, and found her unconscious, the chloral hydrate having done its work. Apparently, you knew where she hid her syringe and heroin—I don’t think anyone else could have known that—and you gave her a large dose of heroin. I don’t know why you took the ampule with you, possibly you were startled by some sound. You would have used the gun if you had to, but there was no need. You put the gun in her dressing-table drawer and you left. I suppose you flushed the ampule down a toilet. Yes, you must have hated her a great deal.”
Elaine was herself again, and she smiled with approval. “What a stunning pattern of events you’ve invented. And you make it all fit together as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. You’re right about one thing, Sergeant. I hated Angel. Of course I knew about the sex change, but since it was Mike’s secret in life, I was determined that it should be his secret in death. His Angel was a devil in human form, and I shed no tears for her. I’m glad she’s dead. But tell me, do you actually believe this fairy tale you’ve put together?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Are you going to arrest me for the murder of Angel Barton?”
“Only if you are willing to make a confession and sign it.”
“And wouldn’t I be a fool to do that, Sergeant Masuto? You haven’t one tiny shred of proof or evidence to back up this complex story of yours. Not even enough to arrest me.”
“I know that.”
“And if you did, Mr. McCarthy, who was Mike’s lawyer too, would be so happy to slap the City of Beverly Hills with an enormous false-arrest suit, not to mention defamation of character and mental stress.”
“I know that too.”
“I worshipped Mike. I adored him. He was my lover and my child at one and the same time. Bill Ranier was as guilty as Angel of Mike’s murder. She pulled the trigger, but he was an accessory before the fact and after the fact. And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Detective, in three years he’ll be out of jail. You lied about Lena Jones. She’s no witness. So what will they get Ranier for? Conspiracy to defraud the government? Resisting arrest? You said it yourself. He’ll be out in three years or less.”
“Possibly,” Masuto agreed. “Unless you testified against him.”
“You do so want life to fit your fantasies. But, you see, I wasn’t in the library and I did not kill Angel, and I’m afraid we must leave it there.”
Masuto stood up. “I don’t believe in revenge, Miss Newman. The person who takes the revenge pays too great a price.”
“But justice? Do you believe in justice, Detective Masuto?”
“I’m not sure that any of us are wise enough for justice. I’m not sure I know what justice is.”
Elaine walked with him to the door. “I wish I could know you better, Mr. Detective. You’re a very strange and interesting man.”
“We never truly know another person,” Masuto said. “Even Angel Barton had a spark of something human and won
derful buried inside her. Perhaps no one ever tried to find it.”
“Whatever you think I’ve done,” Elaine Newman said, “you’re not making it any harder for me to live with it. I knew Angel Barton. You did not.”
She stood at the door, watching him as he walked out and over to where his car was parked.
A Biography of Howard Fast
Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.
Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.
Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.
Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast’s appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin’s purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.
Fast’s career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast’s books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).
Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.
Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother’s death in 1923 and their father’s absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”
A copy of Fast’s military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.
Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. “Everyone worked at the prison,” said Fast during a 1998 interview, “and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America.” Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: “I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison.”
Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette’s father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)
Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. “I got a disease, which is called ‘candidateitis,’” he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. “And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you’re ready to kill to win that election.” He concluded: “I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience.”
In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson’s work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. “Paul,�
�� he said, “was an extraordinary man.” Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.)
Howard and Bette Fast in California in 1976. The couple relocated to the West Coast after Fast grew disgruntled over the poor reception of his novel The Hessian. While in California, Fast temporarily gave up writing novels to work as a screenwriter, but, like many novelists before him, found the business disheartening. “In L.A. you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you are cheating on your wife,” he told People after he had moved back East in the 1980s. Of course, Fast, an ardent nature-lover, did enjoy California’s scenic beauty and eventually set many of his novels—including The Immigrant’s Daughter and the bestselling Masao Masuto detective series—in the state.
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copyright © 1982 by E. V. Cunningham
cover design by Jason Gabbert
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