MacDonald explained. “So there’s three Patricks,” he ended. “From what I got out of Gervase on the phone, they’re all distant cousins. Alan is an actor, lives in Hollywood. Gervase is a writer, staying at a friend’s out in Beverly Hills. Francis is at the Biltmore, and Gervase is pretty cagey about just what Francis’s profession is. Which stirs up my curiosity and starts me looking him up first.”
Nick Noble said, “Tell me about it when you’ve seen them.”
“You’ve got curiosity too? I can’t blame you; this is once you were in on it even before the murder.”
The wino shook his head. “Possible pattern,” he said. “Want to see if I’m right.”
Francis Patrick had graying temples but a jet black mustache. He was taller than MacDonald (though not so much that the bullet angle might clear him), but it was not his height alone that made him dominate. His formal attire, precise and complete even to spats and gloves, impressed the West Coast eye; and the measured exactitude of his movements, the rounded authority of his voice, the level coldness of his eyes formed the picture of a man shaped to command.
His first words set MacDonald against him. “Ah, officer,” he said, somewhat oratorically, “I am glad to see one young man in America with enough sense to stay out of uniform despite the pleas of the warmongers.”
The Lieutenant’s lips tightened. “Don’t give me the credit, thank you.”
“As you wish,” the other said reluctantly. “Will you sit down, Lieutenant?”
MacDonald had managed to anticipate the invitation by a fraction of a second. He felt that he would need every psychological advantage. “Been in Los Angeles long, Mr. Patrick?”
“I registered in this hotel this morning. Before that I was staying with friends.”
“Permanent address?”
“None, I confess. My work takes me everywhere.”
“What is your occupation?”
“Stock-broker.” He paused and added, “Retired.”
“Then your ‘work’—?”
“Shall we call it a hobby? It is hardly of any importance to the police.”
MacDonald said, “You knew Lally Chilton?”
“Slightly.”
He took a shot in the dark. “Employed her to help you in your hobby?”
The commanding face was impassive. “Hardly. I was merely told by some friends in the East that she was an amusing specimen of the fringe of Hollywood. I looked her up.”
“And was she?”
“Amusing?” The face condescended almost to wink. “Intensely.”
MacDonald felt an absurd twitch of jealousy. “Where were you this morning around eleven?”
“Across the street in Pershing Square.” The reply was prompt.
“With anyone?”
“Alone.”
“Doing what?”
“Applying my ear, officer, to the ground. For a man with my … hobby, there are few things so educational as listening to what the common man thinks.”
MacDonald laughed. “You won’t find that out in Pershing Square. At a union meeting or a Rotary luncheon or a church supper or on a commuters’ train—yes, there you’ll find out a fraction of what people think. In Pershing Square you’ll find nothing but pure crackpottery.”
“And what makes you think, Lieutenant, that the common man is not a crackpot?” Francis Patrick’s face was earnest, so earnest that MacDonald said nothing when he paused. The room was full of the echo of his rich voice.
He spoke again, with quiet and imposing conviction. “The untapped natural resources of crackpottery in this country, my dear officer, would astonish you. There is a Gresham’s law of the mass intellect: muddle-headedness inevitably drives out clear thinking. And the political science of the future lies in the control and application of that law to purposive ends. No, there is nothing idle about a visit to Pershing Square.”
MacDonald rose. “I’ll see you soon again.”
“I trust so. You are too astute a young man, Lieutenant, to have your mind cluttered with the idealistic cobwebs of such fictions as the nobility of the common man; I should take great pleasure in sweeping away a few of them.”
MacDonald said, “Goodbye.” He waited for Francis Patrick to ask a question, but nothing happened.
It had been a profitable five minutes. It was reasonably clear what Francis Patrick’s “hobby” was and how it tied in with Lalage Chilton’s profession. And it was exceedingly instructive that he had never asked the reason for the Lieutenant’s interrogation, nor questioned the use of the past tense in reference to Lalage.
Alan Patrick of Hollywood was not home—sudden date with a producer, his landlady said—so MacDonald went on to Beverly Hills. The address was a small adobe bungalow in the foothills. There were strange noises inside—the clinking of glass and loud snatches of song. MacDonald caught phrases of the Marseillaise, the Internationale, and the Italian Hymn of the Fascisti.
A party, and surely one of oddly assorted political tastes. MacDonald frowned, but rang the doorbell anyway. There was sudden silence, then the creak of an opening window.
MacDonald turned toward the window, saw the bright spurt of flame in the shade of the house, and ducked even before he heard the shot. The bullet zoomed past him into a wooden post.
Then the gravelly voice he had heard on the phone shouted, “Friend or enemy?”
MacDonald said “Friend” and moved swiftly before the other could fire again.
The voice yelled, “Come in. That was just a warning to stay friendly.”
MacDonald drew his automatic and stepped into the house. In the room from which the shot had come he found Gervase Patrick. He was apparently the whole party all by himself. He sat by the window, the revolver in his left hand cradled against the bandage and sling that covered the right arm. He wore old working clothes—not the smart disarray of Hollywood, but just plain shabby garments. His hair was twisted in a half-dozen directions, and his eyes and voice corroborated the evidence of the bottles on the table.
He sang a snatch of the Garibaldi hymn and said, “Have a drink. Always drink when I’m sad. Always sing when I’m drunk. Always sing political songs—more zoomph to ’em.”
“Always shoot at strangers?” MacDonald asked.
“On’y when I’m sad. Or drunk. Or sad. Have a drink.”
It was simpler to obey. MacDonald nursed his drink as he said, “It was sad about Lally, wasn’t it?”
“Saddest thing you know.” Gervase Patrick refilled his glass. “Wonnerful woman. Great head on her shoulders. ’Fall places. Polo,” he added.
“Polo?”
“Saw you looking at my sling. Polo accident. Made two goals before I knew it was broken, then passed out.”
MacDonald kept a hand on the automatic in his pocket and ad-vanced toward him casually. “Nice rod you’ve got there.” He held out the other hand suggestively, but Gervase ignored it. “You don’t want it any more, do you?”
Gervase Patrick looked up. “Damned if I do!” he agreed abruptly, and hurled it far out the window. “Have a drink. Heard your voice onna phone smorning. Thought you needed a drink. You know Lally?”
“A little. Where were you when you phoned her?”
“Here. Working. All alone. All alone …” He went into the Berlin song, then broke it off in mid-bar and began on the Peat-bog Soldiers.
“Working?”
“Writing. Told you I was a writer, dinni? Writing for Lally. Shhh!” He looked around the room with melodramatic caution. “Not supposed to tell nobody. Not my own cousin. Not my own only onest cousin. He hires Lally, Lally hires me, and nobody knows from nothin’. Not even my other only cousin. He’s even onlier, he is. Now with Lally dead and all …”
“You wrote up ideas for Lally? And your cousin Francis hired her to distribute them?”
“Din’ say that. Never said a thing. Not a word. Not a mumblin’ word.” That set him singing again, in a harsh baritone. Somehow the spiritual modulated amazingly int
o the Horst Wessel Lied. He sang it with a sort of proud contempt. “Thaswot Francis needs,” he said. “A song. Ev’body needs song. You look like a tenor. C’mon. Lessing.”
He was still singing when MacDonald left. The Lieutenant looked over the street and the weed-covered lot next door. Finding that revolver might take hours. He stopped on the porch, took out his knife, and pried at the wooden post. That would do just as well.
The family resemblance of the cousins Patrick was marked in their features, but in nothing else. The actor Alan was oddly the least actorish of the lot; he lacked both the impressiveness of Francis and the eccentricity of Gervase. Only the sports shirt and ascot marked his profession; otherwise he was simply an agreeable and inconspicuous young man, well groomed, quiet, a little shorter than MacDonald (though still well within the bullet’s angle).
“I can guess why you’re here,” he said after introductions. His voice was low, and it seemed to cost him a certain effort to control it.
“How did you know?” MacDonald asked frankly.
“I dropped by Lally’s on my way to see this producer. There was one of your men there. He told me.”
“Then you can see why I’m checking on all the Pa—” (no, there was no point in giving out what he had heard on the phone) “—on all the names in her address book. You knew her well?”
“Well enough to go to Las Vegas last month.”
“You were married to her?”
“That was supposed to be the idea. But she changed her mind at the last minute and I stayed up all night playing slot machines. Not what I’d been expecting.”
“Why?”
“Who ever knew the whys with Lally? But I still had hopes. There was always the chance … You see, I loved her.”
“I can understand that. If you didn’t know enough.”
“What do you mean, ‘enough’?”
MacDonald changed his ground. “Your cousin Francis approves of young men who stay out of uniform. You share his opinions?”
Alan Patrick’s eyes flashed and he uttered a most uncousinly epithet. “No. My clothes are no more my fault than—than I imagine yours are yours.” He held up his right hand. “My draft board just happens not to care for men without a trigger finger.”
“And producers don’t mind?”
“I wear gloves or we shoot around it and use a double for hand close-ups. If you’re under forty and still breathing you rank as a juvenile now.”
“I gather you don’t care for your cousin’s political notions?”
Alan Patrick took some typed sheets from a table. “I was working on these this morning. Speech I’m giving at the Screen Actors’ Guild. Me making a speech … But this is a time when every man has to make himself heard.”
MacDonald glanced over the speech. Hardly original or even well written, but full of solid democratic truths which the other Patricks would never understand.
“You were writing it this morning? Around eleven, say?”
“Oh oh. The fatal alibi? Yes, I was here alone, working at this, while Lally …” His voice died away.
“And how would you feel,” MacDonald asked, “if you knew that that speech was attacking Lally as bitterly as the bullet that killed her?”
Alan Patrick gaped. MacDonald explained briefly what he had learned of Lalage Chilton’s profession.
The actor spoke slowly, after a long pause. “I thought I didn’t have any illusions about Lally,” he said. “I knew she couldn’t pay for that apartment. But I loved her, don’t you see, and that didn’t matter. It damned near killed me when your man told me she was dead, but no tears. Not for me. I couldn’t. It went too …” He stood up and opened the door. “Will you get the hell out of here, Lieutenant, before I start bawling?”
“So that’s the set-up,” MacDonald said. “And at the moment I’m in a fair way to go nuts. Three Patricks—each of them knowing of Lally’s death before I could mention it, and each of them without the merest shred of an alibi. If only just one of them had an alibi so airtight I could work on cracking it …”
Nick Noble stared into his sherry glass. “Motive?” he said.
“One of them loved Lally. The others were tied up with her in a fascistic racket—Francis as a would-be Fuehrer and Gervase as a minor Goebbels. Either relationship turns to murder when it sours. Any one of them alone I’d arrest on suspicion in two shakes of a sheep’s tail. But which?”
Nick Noble sipped his sherry—a very small sip. “Last glass today unless the truck comes,” he explained, and added in the same tone, “All three.”
“A conspiracy? Nick, you’re crazy. Gervase and Francis would never trust each other, and Alan hates their whole damned racket. And the killing’s a one-man job; no need for accomplices. No, it’s one of the three—”
He broke off. The plump Mexican waitress was looking at him curiously and asking, “Lieutenant MacDonald?”
“Yes?”
“Telephone.”
He approached the phone almost reluctantly. The last time he had talked over it … He picked up the receiver and recognized at once the gravelly voice that said, “MacDonald?”
“Speaking.”
“Got that report from ballistics yet?” Gervase sounded almost sober by now; at least he wasn’t singing. “Oh,” he went on before MacDonald could answer, “I saw you dig out that slug. So even though I retrieved the gun, I guess there’s no use holding out any more.”
MacDonald kept his voice quiet. “Where are you?”
“At Lally’s. Seemed appropriate somehow. Don’t blame your guard; he got the butt end of the revolver. And now—”
“You’re ready to give yourself up?”
“Overready, Lieutenant. But not to you.”
And for the second time that day MacDonald heard a shot and a thud over the phone of the Chula Negra.
He started for the door, then turned back to the phone, dropped in a nickel, and gave certain instructions to headquarters. As he started out again, a twinge of compunction hit him. He went back to the third booth on the left and took thirty seconds to repeat the phone episode to Nick Noble. He felt good; he had never before succeeded in bringing astonishment to that sharp white face.
This time he really went out the door, almost knocking down a man about to enter the restaurant. He recognized Alan Patrick and paused. “Meet me here in an hour,” he told the actor. “No time to explain now; but by then we’ll have it cleared up.”
Alan Patrick looked dazed as he walked on in. He went up to the bar and ordered a boilermaker, which he had to explain to the elderly Mexican woman. She was out of whiskey and suggested he try tequila with his beer and it was a fine idea. Just what he needed. He had downed one and was waiting for another when the plump waitress came up and said, “Mr. Patrick?”
“Yes?”
“In the booth, please.”
He followed her, frowning. His frown deepened as he saw the man who had summoned him—a sharp-nosed, thin little man, as white as things that live in caves.
“Alan Patrick?” Nick Noble said.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Noticed finger. MacDonald spoke to you. Guessed it might be.”
The actor’s mobile face was puzzled. “When I asked for the Lieutenant at Headquarters they told me I might find him here. I did, but he dashed right off without explanation. What’s happened?”
There was pain and anger in Nick Noble’s pale eyes as he looked at his empty sherry glass. “Hard to talk without …” he said. “Hard to think.” He leaned back and let his eyes glaze over while Alan Patrick contemplated him curiously.
Finally Nick Noble’s eyes came back to life and he said, “You knew, didn’t you?”
“Knew what?” The actor’s voice was wary.
“Knew Lalage was Rumor, Inc. Why else kill her?”
“Kill her? Me?” Alan Patrick laughed. “Man, I loved that girl!”
“Sure. But hated what she did. Conflict. Only solution: murder.”
> “Nonsense.”
“Not nonsense. Pattern. You lived in own apartment. So you had to be murderer. Finger, too, of course.”
“So I killed her? And I suppose that’s why Cousin Gervase confessed and committed suicide?”
Nick Noble smiled a faded smile of relief. “You just said MacDonald didn’t tell you anything. How know about Gervase unless—”
“Don’t tell me I killed him too?”
“—unless you are Gervase.”
The bantering grin left Alan Patrick’s face. “Go on,” he said tensely.
“Three men. Family resemblance. Different hair? Easy. Different height? Elevations; actors know. One wears gloves; one has sling; one has missing finger—which gloves and sling hide. Different ages and very different characters; but one is actor.”
“MacDonald heard Gervase shoot himself just before I came here.”
“Phone booth on corner. Can’t trace dial calls. That clinched it; story couldn’t be true.”
“Why?”
“Supposed to be at Lalage’s apartment. She had French phone. Man with arm in sling can’t hold French phone and shoot himself. What you use? Paper bag?”
Alan Patrick nodded. He said softly, “It was a smart idea, I thought. After I … after Lally was dead I saw the phone. I knew someone must have heard my name and the shot. If she knew only one Patrick, I was done for.”
“Started to tear out P page in address book,” Nick Noble put in.
“Yes, and then I saw that would only look worse; they’d find me some other way. She had to know more Patricks; so I invented them—both of them. One in the address book—”
“Out of alphabet. First hint.”
“But not conclusive. She might easily have added it later. Then I phoned up and was another Patrick. I took a room at the Biltmore for one, and for the other—a friend in Beverly Hills was away and had given me a key in case I wanted to throw a brawl too noisy for my apartment.”
“That’s why it had to be you that was real. Only permanent address.”
“I knew it’d be seen through in time. But it gave me a chance to get away. First scatter suspicion, then focus it on ‘Gervase’. When MacDonald finds out the suicide’s a fake and gets the ballistic report on ‘Gervase’s’ gun, the hunt’ll concentrate on Gervase Patrick. Meanwhile Alan P. slips out of town unnoticed.”
Exeunt Murderers Page 8