Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (11 page)

"All true, but it doesn't stop me wishing you
had something more on the Kingmans," said Mendoza. “However,
thanks very much for the lecture." He started back to his own
office thinking about the little he'd got from Arnhelm. The Kingmans,
according to the affidavits they'd supplied in the process of
incorporating the Temple, hailed from Philadelphia, where Kingman had
been in the hardware business. He was fifty-nine, she was fifty-one.
References consisted of the people here who had supplied capital for
establishing the sect. And that was just about the sum total of
usable information.

Sergeant Thoms, who sat at Sergeant Lake's desk on
Lake's days off, was still patiently working his way through the
phone-book list of model agencies. He shook his head silently at
Mendoza.

The autopsy report wasn't in yet. Ballistics was
silent on the gun. Mendoza went out for coffee, and at the drugstore
counter found Goldberg sneezing violently into Kleenex over a
half-eaten sandwich.

"The very man I wanted to see," and he
climbed onto the adjoining stool. Goldberg emerged from the Kleenex
long enough to say that it was supposed to be his day off but
something had come up.

“
Whad cad I do for you?"

"Allergies," said Mendoza. "Everybody
talks about them but when it comes down to it I don't seem to know
much about them, except that they hit you different places. What are
the symptoms?"

"Are you kidding?" said Goldberg. The
paroxysm over, he put the Kleenex away. "We could sit here until
tomorrow while I told you. Almost anything. Me, I've read all the
books and spent a lot of money on specialists, and I've come to the
conclusion that nobody knows anything about it for sure. They can
tell you what you've got—sometimes—and sometimes what to do about
it, but by the time you've got one allergy cleared up you've
developed another one. What are your symptoms?"

"I haven't got any. What I want to know is this.
If you find somebody using about three times as many handkerchiefs as
the normal person, used handkerchiefs stashed away in every pocket,
isn't it likely to be a symptom of an allergy? That's the way it
takes most people?"

"That it does," said Goldberg. "Some
people have hives too, and some people itch, and various other
things, but you can say that practically anybody with allergies is
going to have, to start with, the nasal drip and the stuffed-up
sinuses, and so he's going to be using a lot of handkerchiefs. Or
Kleenex. Why?"

"Yes, I thought so. My latest corpse did, I
think. I wonder if he was going to an allergy specialist."

"If he was crazy or a millionaire, he was,"
said Goldberg.

"Don't they say it's psychosomatic?"

"Listen, damn it, you say it if you want a good
punch in the nose—go on, say it's all emotional. That's what they
tell you when they mean they don't know and can't do anything else
for you. So I'm allergic to about forty things, see, like whiskey and
cat hair and the glue on postage stamps; all right, so I get
hay-fever when I haven't been near any one of the things I'm allergic
to, so what do they say? They say, well, well, Saul my boy, you must
have grown another allergy, maybe your wife's nail polish, we'll find
out—but if I haven't got the ten or twenty or thirty bucks for more
tests, then they say, it's psychosomatic, maybe you'd better see a
head doctor. Passing the buck. The hell with them."

"I see. I suppose I can get a list of
specialists from the Chamber of Commerce or somewhere."

"And I wish you joy of them," said
Goldberg, beginning to sneeze again.

When Mendoza got back to his office Sergeant Thoms
had finished calling the agencies, without result. "But being
it's Sunday, I couldn't get hold of only about half of them, sir, and
at most of those places it was an emergency number, not their office,
and they couldn't say for sure without checking records. We're to
check back tomorrow on those."

"Damn Sunday,” said Mendoza. "I suppose
none of the doctors' offices would be open either." It would, of
course, be easier to check with someone who had known Twelvetrees:
always providing they told him the truth. But there couldn't be much
in it .... "When Frank Walsh comes, shoot him in." He had
called Slaney to borrow Walsh for more questioning. He went into his
office and called the Temple, got Kingman, and asked him if
Twelvetrees had had an allergy problem. Why, yes, so he had. Was he
going to a specialist? Yes, Kingman thought so, but couldn't tell him
which one definitely—it had been a doctor on Fairfax Avenue, he
remembered that, and the name was something like Grass or Glass.

Mendoza thanked him and had recourse to the phone
book; and there was a Dr. Graas on Fairfax Avenue. Child's play, and
what did it mean? Very likely nothing. Nevertheless, he'd ask. Just
on the chance that there was something.

He called Alison. "Would you like to visit a
place called the Voodoo Club tonight? I'1l pick you up about eight.
Preferably in that amber silk thing."

"I can't say the prospect thrills me. Of the
Voodoo Club, that is. You know I don't like night clubs—neither do
you—why this sudden passion to be conventional?"

"I just want to take a look at it, it may be
mixed up in a case."

"That doesn't reassure me," said Alison.
"The first time I went out with you it was the same sort of
thing, a place you just wanted to look at, and it ended in our
getting shot at and my ruining a brand new pair of stockings."

"
Mi carina bella
,
not that sort of thing at all. I hope. I'll take good care of you.
Eight o'clock."

"Oh, damn," she said suddenly in his ear.
"No, that's not for you, but that devilish kitten you insisted
on giving me—Sheba, no!—I've been painting the view out the
bedroom window, and she's got into the rose madder—Sheba, get down,
not on the bed, darling—" The receiver crashed in his ear and
Mendoza laughed.

Sergeant Thoms put his head in the door and said
Walsh was here. "Fine," said Mendoza, "bring him in
and go get some coffee for all of us.!
 
 

SEVEN

"No you're not lucky to catch me exactly,"
said Mr. Stanley Horwitz. "I keep legit show business
schedule—dark on Mondays—fancy of mine. Usually get a lot done on
Sundays too, but it's been slow lately .... So you want to know
something about Mona Ferne? I could write a book. Homicide—has she
killed somebody?"

Hackett said he shouldn't think so but you never
knew.

"Pity," said Mr. Horwitz. "Offer you a
drink? . . . You boys don't have to be so damn moral about rules, you
just do it to annoy. No pleasure drinking alone—but I will."
He got out a bottle of Scotch, flicked down the lever on his
intercom, said, "Milly, I'm busy for the next half hour or so,
if that nance who thinks he's America's answer to Sir Laurence
Olivier comes in, he can wait. And wait." Mr. Horwitz, who was
edging sixty, five-feet-four in his elevator shoes, and possessed a
shock of curly gray hair, poured himself a drink and slid down
comfortably in his upholstered desk-chair. "I wish you'd have a
drink, Sergeant. Nice to see somebody approximately normal in here,
for a change."

“
Don't you usually?"

"Dear God, these people," said Horwitz.
"These people. Nobody, Sergeant, nobody at all is mixed up in
show business to start with—or wants to be—unless he, she, or it
has an exhibitionist complex. Just in the nature of things they're
all egotistic as hell, and that's right where you can get into the
hell of a lot of trouble with them, because they're so very damn
smooth in covering that up, you know? You got to keep it in mind
every minute, that they're just front. It gets tiresome." He
swallowed half of the drink. "And maybe you better keep it in
mind about me, because God knows I don't suppose I'd be in this rat
race of a business if I wasn't a little bit like them. Just a little
bit. Right now, of course, they're all busy overcompensating for the
granddaddy of all inferiority complexes, and that makes 'em a little
quieter than usual."

"How's that?" asked Hackett.

Horwitz eyed him in faint surprise over the glass.
"You grow up in this town?"

"Pasadena," said Hackett.

"Don't you notice what's going on? Time was they
were this town—this was the capital of honky-tonk, the Mecca for
all faithful pilgrims who never missed the change of show at the
Bijou. Time was, all the money in this town, the real money, was
theirs—show-business money. Everything important that happened here
was show-business kind of important. Sure, the legit folk back on
Broadway kept their noses in the air, but, brother, when one of 'em
got the nod from Goldwyn or De Mille, he came a-runnin'—and for
why? The folding stuff, the long green. Oh, this was quite a town in
those days, Sergeant. And them days is gone forever. The real money
behind this town now, why, all the studios together never used or
made money like that—they're just a drop in the bucket of capital
now, since the aircraft and missile plants moved in, all kinds of
business, and since all this irrigation made us, what is it, second
highest in agricultural production of the nation? They're just
peanuts now, and tell the truth, I figure the people in this town've
got fed up with 'em too. It's time. Not surprising. You don't have to
know one of 'em personally very long before you find out what they're
like—personally—and I guess it just took a little longer for the
public to learn, living in proximity as you might say. The gimmick
doesn't work any more, not the way it did. The old glamour's dead.
They don't get in the headlines—even local—any more, for losing a
diamond necklace or marrying a European aristocrat. The gossip
columns about the stars are shoved into the second section and a back
page at that—there's too much interesting news about Cape Canaveral
and the new government contracts at Lockheed and Douglas and what big
companies are moving out here with all their personnel, building
ten-million-dollar offices and so on. Too many vice-presidents and
union officials riding around in Rolls Royces, too many of their
wives in sable coats leading French poodles—and losing diamond
necklaces at the opera—nothing to exclaim about any more, nothing
to mark them as royalty, way they used to be. See? Notice how quiet
they act these days, trying to pretend they're just like other
people, plain down-to-earth folks. That's one of the symptoms. And,
brother, how they hate the whole business! How scared and indignant
they are, and how loud they deny it's happened!" Mr. Horwitz
retired into his glass.

"They do, hm? I can see how that'd be. Never
thought much about it before."

"You're not in the business—and for that you
can thank God. Oh, yes, they're wearing a chip on the shoulder all
right—can't do this to us, you know?—and at the same time trying
to pretend nothing's happened at all, that it's still their town ....
But you were asking about Mona. Case in point. One of the worst ones.
I don't mind gossiping about Mona Ferne, if you're got time to
listen-"

"I've got time."

"—And I got the feeling," said Horwitz
dreamily, "I might do just that even if you were somebody from
TV thinking of hiring her—because she annoyed the hell out of me
just before you came in, and that was just once too often she did. To
start with, in case you're curious, her real name was Minnie
Lundgren, and she came from some place in South Dakota. Won some sort
of piddling beauty contest back there, and right away made tracks for
Hollywood—read ‘Mecca'—to join the royal family .... You
remember any of her pictures?"

"Hardly. I think I was about three when she was
in her heyday as a star. I wasn't noticing females much yet. But I've
seen her in bit parts, later on, when I was just a kid. Just vaguely
remember the name."

"You didn't miss an awful lot," said
Horwitz. "She never could act, she took direction, that's all.
They built her up, like they built up a lot of others who didn't
really have much on the ball. And you've got to remember that
comparatively speaking it's a new medium—anyway it still was
thirty-five years back—and fashions in these things, they change
like other fashions. She was a star, sure, they made her one. And
don't you forget either, Sergeant, that's just the end of one long
road, and she nor nobody else gets there, usually, without the cold
guts to kick anybody in the teeth who gets in their way. You married?
. . . Well, when you come to get married, take my advice and don't
pick a beautiful woman or an actress. The two don't always coincide.
Point is, anybody naturally good-looking, they're awful apt to
be—what's the head doctors' word?—narcissistic. Me, me, me,
twenty-four hours a day. And some of it's other people's fault,
building 'em up all the time, you what am I doing for her, when can
she expect a new contract?—good God in heaven, I've given it to her
straight enough times, but it just doesn't penetrate. Hear her talk,
you'd think she'd had a couple of pictures gross a million in the
last six months, and it's just a little legal fuss with the studio
leaves her without a contract. Every once in a while she threatens to
get another agent, and I wish to God she'd try, but she never
will—she knows damn well, if she'd admit it, nobody else would ever
put her on the books."

"I suppose she's living on what she used to
make—investments?"