Silent Murders (6 page)

“The door was cracked open when I came up. I thought she had left it that way on purpose. She was expecting me.” On reflection, I figured the killer must have left it open accidentally in his haste to flee, but I didn’t volunteer my opinion again.

Officer Delaney examined the lock. “Look here, Brickles.” He spoke to his partner. “What do you think about this?” They took turns kneeling beside the doorknob and pressing their eyeballs right up to it. There seemed to be a bit of metal stuck inside the keyhole.

“Looks like something broke off,” said Delaney. “Looks like someone picked it.” They both looked at me.

“Not me.”

Delaney spoke up. “The old bird on the first floor says you went up the stairs at 10:10 and didn’t come banging on her door until 10:20. A real clock-watcher, that one. What were you doing in here for ten whole minutes?”

“It didn’t seem like ten minutes. I—I guess I was dazed. I made myself go over to her to see if she was dead. I guess I stood there a minute or two, trying to think what to do next. I didn’t know anyone in the building. I didn’t kill her. She’s cold. She’s been dead a good while.”

“Yeah? You a doctor?” snapped Brickles. He didn’t expect a reply, and I didn’t give him one. “You didn’t look around the place? Touch anything? Take anything?”

“No, sir.”

“A detective’ll be here soon and see about fingerprints,” said Brickles. Then he looked at Delaney and jerked his head toward me as if to say, Your turn. Delaney stepped closer and asked, “Mind if we search you?”

I minded. So what? They were going to feel me up anyway.

For an answer, I held my arms out and braced myself. Delaney had the grace to look embarrassed. His face reddened as he brushed my clothes with his hands, felt my skirt pockets, and asked politely for my hat to see if I had hidden anything there.

“You lived in Hollywood long?” He didn’t realize his partner had already asked.

“Just three months.”

“Have a job?”

“Yes, I work for Douglas Fairbanks.”

Next time I’ll mention that sooner. The atmosphere in the hallway changed the second I said it. The Fairbanks name carried authority, respectability, and just a little intimidation. Brickles stood up straighter, Delaney pursed his lips and gave a solemn nod, and the two men exchanged a meaningful look.

“Whaddya do?” Brickles continued.

“I’m an assistant script girl. Sort of a girl Friday.”

“You said you met the deceased last night. Where?”

“At a party.”

“Whose?”

“Bruno Heilmann’s. She was serving—” I almost said champagne but caught myself just in time. No point adding kindling to the fire. “Beverages. She recognized me.”

“She recognized you from twenty years ago? That musta been some trick.”

“I’m twenty-five. I’d have been five or ten when she knew me. But I think it was really my mother that she recognized. I look a lot like her.”

“You know of any reason anyone would want to kill her?”

“No, sir.”

A doctor puffed up the stairs, followed by a man with a stretcher. He didn’t waste a word on us, but headed straight to Esther. I couldn’t bear to watch. A few minutes later he came out into the hall, wiping his hands on a towel.

“Death caused by a blunt instrument,” he told the policemen. I rolled my eyes. Brilliant deduction, Sherlock, with the bloodied horse statue lying beside the body. “About nine or ten hours ago, I’d estimate.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. That ought to be enough to get me off the hook.

Brickles started knocking on every door on the third floor. It being Sunday, most of the tenants were home, but no one had heard anything alarming in the middle of last night.

“Where were you last night at two o’clock?” Delaney asked me.

“Home in bed. I left the party at quarter past midnight to catch the last Red Car. I don’t know how long it went on, probably a couple more hours.” I realized that Esther must have finished working the party and just gotten home when she was attacked.

“Is there anyone who can support your story?”

“My friend Myrna Loy was with me. We went home together.” Delaney asked for the spelling. I hated to get Myrna involved in this mess, but I needed an alibi.

“There’s something that puzzles me. There’s no telephone here. After you discovered the body, you went all the way down to the first floor to knock on doors looking for a telephone. What’s wrong with these doors right here?”

I hadn’t thought how odd that would look. But years on the stage had trained me to think fast under pressure and to ad-lib in a confident manner without fumbling for words.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I guess. I saw the old lady in her window when I came into the building and instinctively went back to someone I knew was home. She wouldn’t open the door, so I went across the hall. Look, if I had killed Esther in the middle of the night, would I come back the next day to find her and call the police?”

“Let’s go,” Delaney said, motioning me toward the stairs. My heart galloped. I wasn’t sure if he meant he was taking me to jail or the front door. And I worried about the letters in the tray that wouldn’t be picked up until tomorrow. Delaney followed as I led the way down the stairs, and I gave a sigh of relief as he passed the mail tray without checking its contents.

Out on the sidewalk, the inevitable crowd had gathered. Lots of people come out on a Sunday morning when an undertaker’s car pulls up. A man with a Chaplin moustache spoke for the throng, “What’s wrong, Officer?”

“Anyone here know Esther Frankel?” People looked at one another as if they were deciding how to respond. “Fifties. Gray hair. Heavy build.”

“I know her. What happened? Is she dead?” asked a big-breasted woman holding a baby on her hip.

“I’m afraid so. Murdered. Anyone see or hear anything in the middle of the night? Doc says it happened about two o’clock. She was just getting home after working a party.”

More murmurs and head shaking and nervous glances.

“No one was up at two or three o’clock? No one saw anything unusual?”

“I was letting my dog out at about six this morning and I saw a stranger leaving this building,” said an ancient man with a bent back and a bald head. “I remember it because he had a droopy mouth like my Edna. Hey, Edna, come here and let the officer see your face.”

Before poor Edna could be put on display like a carnival freak, Delaney shook his head. “Too late. Doc says it was about nine or ten hours ago.” The old man looked dejected.

No one else in the crowd spoke until a thin boy wearing an undershirt and dungarees volunteered, “Yesterday I saw a red McLaughlin circle the block three or four times. It was a touring car. Not from around here.”

“Did you get a license number?”

“Naw.”

Delaney jotted down the description anyway. A couple others mentioned having seen it, too. Such a creature would be easy to find—red McLaughlins weren’t exactly dime a dozen, even in Hollywood.

Then a woman separated herself from the crowd and approached Officer Delaney. She was about forty, dressed in a beige suit with a matching hat and gloves, and I guessed she had just come from church. “Officer,” she said in a low voice. “There have been two break-ins in my building just in the last month.” She pointed to an apartment building across the street and a little east of Esther’s. “In both cases, no one was home. The burglaries were reported to the police, but no one’s been caught yet.”

“And you’re wondering if this could be the same burglar who was robbing Miss Frankel’s home, thinking she was gone for the night?”

“Exactly. He thinks the place is empty because he doesn’t know she works late. She comes home, surprises him in the act, and in a panic, he kills her.”

Several residents were close enough to overhear the exchange, and three chimed in with more information.

“The thief took money and jewelry,” volunteered one.

“He picked the locks,” said another. Officer Delaney scribbled furiously, then asked for their names and addresses.

He was wasting his time. Even I could see that the three crimes were not related. Esther was not killed by a thief who had broken in to steal valuables. Esther’s killer had stolen nothing. Her apartment hadn’t been ransacked. He hadn’t been surprised in the act; he had surprised her. Judging from the blow and the location of the body, Esther had been absorbed in her playbills and hadn’t even heard the man come up behind her. But I kept quiet.

“If anyone remembers anything from the middle of the night, call the station,” said Delaney, then he turned to me. “Do you want a ride home, Miss Beckett?”

“No, thanks, Officer. I’ll go home the way I came, by streetcar.”

“I insist. You’ve had a bad shock.”

Further arguments might have looked like I had something to hide, so I climbed into the Buick touring car and directed him across town to my house. He probably wanted to check the address and my alibi with Myrna.

Wrong. He wanted to ask me to dinner.

“I been thinking…” he began as we pulled up in front of my house. I should have sensed what was coming, but Esther’s death had knocked the intuition clean out of me. “When this investigation is over in a day or so, would you like to have dinner with me?”

“Um, I … uh … geez, I guess that means you don’t think I did it?”

“I never did. Women don’t kill like that. Besides, small as you are, I don’t think you could have reached the top of her head if you’d tried. We’re looking for a man, that’s for sure. Someone strong. I knew right away you weren’t the type to kill someone.”

“Honored, I’m sure, Officer.” I gulped, thinking fast. Seeing a policeman, even for dinner, sounded like a tiptoe through a minefield considering the life I’d led. On the other hand, offending a policeman—especially the one investigating this particular crime—might be worse. The only policemen I ever wanted to see were those slapstick Keystone Cops.

“The name’s Carl, by the way. Carl Delaney.”

“Right. Honored, Carl. But I, uh, feel a little awkward about this, considering the murder and everything.”

As if on cue, Myrna stuck her head out the front door and yelled, “Jessie? Jessie, Mr. Fairbanks is on the telephone. Says it’s urgent. What shall I say?”

Rescued in the nick of time by Douglas Fairbanks—just like in the pictures. I scrambled out of the police car. “Tell him I’m coming.”

“Never mind, you go on,” said Carl, convinced now, if he hadn’t been earlier, that I really did work for Fairbanks. “Only I hafta tell you not to leave town until this is cleared up.”

“Right. And thanks for the ride home!” I dashed up the walk and into the house, so relieved to have sidestepped the invitation that I wasn’t even wondering why Douglas Fairbanks, who had never telephoned me once during the weeks I worked directly for him, would do so on a sleepy Sunday afternoon.

Men who install telephones mount them too high. I held the receiver cone to my ear and stretched up on my toes to get my lips near the mouthpiece. “Hello? Jessie Beckett speaking.”

“Jessie,” he said tersely. “Thank God you’re home. I need your help. There’s been a murder.”

I nearly dropped the receiver. “How on earth did you know about it already?”

“Zukor called me.”

“Adolph Zukor?” I repeated stupidly. The head of Paramount, the largest studio in the world. “Why?”

“Fear. He can’t afford another scandal. His people, his company, hell, the whole film industry will suffer from this. He wants to keep it out of the newspapers until he can figure out how to minimize the scandal, so almost no one knows about it yet—”

“Yes they do! I called the police.”

“You
what
? How did you—”

“I found the body. I’ve just come from there. One of the cops brought me home.”

“You were there?”

“Yes, I had gone to see her, and when I arrived, the door was ajar and her body was on the bedroom floor. It was horrible. So I called the police.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The murder!”

“Whose murder?”

“Esther Frankel, of course.”

“Who the hell is Esther Frankel?”

The spiraling tension at both ends of the line snapped as we reached the same appalling conclusion at the same moment.

“Esther Frankel was murdered last night after the party,” I explained quietly.

“So was Bruno Heilmann.”

7

The cop guarding the Heilmann house watched as a short, brown-skinned washerwoman made her way up the middle of the walk, a gimpy leg giving her steps the cadence of a slow heartbeat. Her baggy clothes were faded and worn, and a hank of black hair had escaped the yellow bandana that wrapped her head. In one hand she carried a tin pail full of rags and scrub brushes. The guard must have expected her to veer right or left at the fountain toward one of the other houses, because when she continued around it toward the center house, he stood up from his chair on the porch and peered down at her with a suspicious squint.

“I come to clean the blood,” I said, looking at his shoes so he wouldn’t wonder why my blue-green eyes didn’t go with my dark complexion.

For an answer, he drew a last, long lungful of cigarette smoke and threw the butt at my feet. Then he swaggered down the stairs, planted his boot heel on the butt, and ground it against the flagstone walk. Subtlety was not his strength.

I stood my ground. “The manservant, he send me. He say he not going back in till the blood is washed up.”

“I don’t give a goddamn about any servants. No one’s going in there until the detective comes and says so.”

“But he tell me—”

“Beat it,” he said, drawing back one arm to backhand me. It was not an empty gesture. I ducked out of his reach, retreated, and hobbled away. At every step I could feel his hostile eyes burning into my back.

Once out of sight, I lost the limp and circled around to the back of the houses on the service road until I reached the rear of the Heilmann home. Last night the adjacent houses had appeared empty. Today the two I passed were occupied, but while I heard voices coming from one and a radio blaring at the other, I saw no one. If anyone had glanced out a window, they’d have seen nothing but a Mexican servant on her way to work. The residents didn’t worry me. The guard did.