The Paul Cain Omnibus (30 page)

I went over to the door and opened it, said: “You boys have seen too many moving pictures. It’s a pleasure, Ciretti—sometime I’ll play Indian and cowboy with you but right now I’m in a hurry. Give me a call at the studio—”

Ciretti waltzed over and very suddenly, magically, a big blue heater appeared in his hand; he jabbed it into my belly, rasped: “You go back and sit down—quick!”

Something in his tone made me realize that he
might
be on the level. I felt like a sap who’d been caught trying to make a four-card straight stand up, sat down.

Ciretti went on: “I’ve called you five, six times at the studio today.”

“That’s dandy,” I said. “I didn’t go near my office all day.”

Ciretti sat down near me, leaned forward and let the big automatic dangle loosely between his legs. “Just one thing I want understood,” he ground out. “Then you can go about business and we’ll go about ours.”

“That’ll be swell.”

“You, nor this guy Dreier,” he went on, “nor Bachmann, nor anybody else is going to freeze Maya out of this picture.”

I opened my mouth like a black bass and gave him a stunned gasp.

“Who,” I asked gently, “ever gave you the screwy idea that anyone was trying to freeze her out of anything?”

“She told me.” His voice was like a couple of billiard balls rubbed together. “She says you’re all trying to railroad her out of pictures.”

I said: “You know her better than I do. You know she’s been stiff for weeks, and yet you fall for an insane angle like that. It doesn’t make sense.”

“She says she has to drink to keep going—with everyone against her.” Ciretti straightened up and eased the automatic back into its holster, slowly. He looked worried, as if he actually believed what he was saying and didn’t know what to say next. The poor chump was evidently in love with little Maya.

Hammer was staring at the ceiling, whistling soundlessly, making a very bad job of trying to look unconcerned.

“If that’s all you wanted to see me about,” I said, “and why you picked on me instead of Dreier or Bachmann or someone who really cuts ice at B.L.D. I can’t imagine—you can tell Maya that if she’ll pull herself together and lay off the jug everything’ll be simply elegant.”

I turned to Hammer. “I still don’t savvy all the brandishing of guns and—”

Ciretti interrupted, said swiftly: “I thought you were trying to duck me—and I wanted you to know how I felt about it. You’ve got to give her a break.”

My watch was on the table. I looked at it and it was sixteen minutes after six. I started to stand up and the phone rang; I sat down again and picked up the receiver.

The girl said: “Mistah Bachmann callin’, Mistuh Nolan.”

I told her to put Bachmann on and said: “Hello, Jack,” and listened. After about a minute I stuttered something like “Okay, I’ll be right over,” and hung up and looked at Ciretti.

I said: “Maya’s out of the picture.”

He stood up slowly. “What do you mean? They can’t—”

I took a deep breath, went on: “She’s been murdered. They just found her in her dressing room. Dreier’s been arrested.”

I thought Ciretti was going to explode or fall flat on his face or something. He looked like he couldn’t breathe and his white face got a little purple and he tried to speak and couldn’t. I felt sorry as hell for him.

He finally managed to gasp: “Where’s Dreir? Where have they taken him?”

I said: “I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll lay six, two, and even he didn’t do it. I don’t know anything about it yet, but Dreier’s not a murderer.” And I was remembering his face when he’d turned on Sarin on the set.

Ciretti went unsteadily to the door and went out without looking back. Hammer followed him and closed the door.

I took a two-minute shower and hustled into some clothes. Then I cantered to the door and opened it and started out and ran smack into the angel. Her creamy skin was about five shades lighter and her dark brown eyes were liked saucers. Beautiful saucers.

“The girl said your line was busy,” she stammered, “so I got the number of your room and came up. I—I had to see you right away… .”

I was steering her towards the elevator. I said: “Sure. What about?”

The elevator door slid open and we got in; she glanced at the elevator boy and didn’t answer. We were in the car, roaring down Vine Street by the time she managed to say: “Maya Sarin’s been murdered!”

I looked at her sidewise and missed an oil truck by inches, grunted: “Uh-huh. How did you know?”

“I saw her—I went to her dressing room and found her lying there, dead.” I felt the angel shudder beside me and heard her take in breath swiftly, sharply.

“What did you go to her dressing room for?”

She said: “I guess I’d better begin at the beginning.”

I nodded, swung into Sunset Boulevard.

She began at the beginning and talked nearly all the way to the studio. In a large nutshell it went something like this:

She’d come to Hollywood from some place in Kansas to crash pictures, but pictures had crashed her. She’d worked extra a couple times at B.L.D. and Titanic and then there’d been a great open space without work and finally without coffee and doughnuts. She’d answered an ad that turned out to be the Nick Galbraith Detective Agency; they’d put her to work tailing some sucker for divorce evidence and then they’d sent her to Maya Sarin who it seems was one of their best undercover clients and Maya had given her a note to Bachmann asking him to give her some kind, any kind, of a job on the lot.

The idea seemed to be that Maya’s dipsomania was aggravated by a supercharged persecution complex and she wanted the angel to keep her eyes and ears open and find out who was conniving against her at B.L.D. She said that Maya acted like she was scared to death of something and didn’t seem to be quite sure what it was.

From then on the plot thickened. She’d been waiting to present her note to Bachmann when Maya had stormed in after the blow-off on the set. A couple minutes after Maya went into the private office a woman whom she recognized as Mrs Bachmann came in and talked about the weather with the secretary. And Maya was shouting her head off inside—they could hear practically every word she said.

By the time the angel had reached that point in her story I was standing on the brakes for the stoplight at Melrose. I leaned back and listened with both ears.

She was pretty excited. She said: “Finally Miss Sarin screamed: ‘You straighten this thing out and see that I get a square deal around this dump or I’ll tell that high and mighty wife of yours some things that’ll make her hair curl!’ Mrs Bachmann got as white as a sheet and marched out of the office.”

I said: “Is it possible that anybody in the western hemisphere doesn’t know that Bachmann and Maya Sarin used to be—well—friendly?”

The stoplight snapped green; I shifted and let the clutch in and glanced swiftly at the angel. She was smiling a little. “Probably not anybody,” she said—“except Mrs Bachmann.” She hesitated a moment, went on: “In a few minutes Miss Sarin came out and you came in. The secretary wanted to tell Bachmann about his wife being there but he was too excited to listen. I got up and looked out the window and saw Miss Sarin go across the lawn to the dressing rooms and after a minute Mrs Bachmann followed her.”

“To the dressing rooms! I saw Sarin, too, but I left the window as soon as she disappeared.”

She nodded. “Then, after you and Mister Dreier left, the secretary went in and Bachmann came rushing out and apologized and said he’s be back in a few minutes. He looked terribly worried. I watched from the window and he went over to the dressing rooms, too. I waited about a quarter of an hour and he didn’t come back. The secretary went home and I thought maybe Bachmann had forgotten about me and wouldn’t come back to the office so I went to Miss Sarin’s room to ask her what I’d better do. I was curious about what’d happened, too. I knew where her room was from the time I’d worked there. She didn’t answer when I knocked and I opened the door and she was lying on the floor, dead.”

“What time was it?”

“It must have been about five minutes after six.” The angel was almost whispering. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any business there, or at least it would take a lot of explaining and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Then I remembered that Miss Sarin had told me about you and that you were the only person on the lot she thought she could trust. I hurried back to Bachmann’s office. He hadn’t come back. I called the agency and told them what had happened and asked the boy at the information desk where you lived and took a cab and came to your hotel… .”

I said: “What’s your name?”

“Laird—Dolores Laird.”

I thought it was a nice name.

The rest of the night was an odds-on favorite nightmare that began with reporters ganging us when we got out of the car. We finally made the Sarin dressing room and it was so jammed with assorted Law that the walls were bulging. Everyone had a different theory.

Nick Galbraith, the angel’s boss, said it was a cinch for Sarin’s maid. Sarin had sent her off the lot to get something—probably a bottle—as soon as she’d returned to the dressing room and according to Galbraith the maid had sneaked back and beaned her with the “blunt instrument”; that was the only thing they all agreed on.

The blunt instrument was an oversize vibrator that was still lying on the floor near the chalked-off space where the body had been found.

A detective lieutenant named Lawson insisted that Creighton was the murderer. Creighton’s dressing room was across the hall and when the maid had come back from her errand and found Dreier bending over the body she’d screamed and Creighton had dashed in and he and the maid had pointed the finger at Dreier. Dreier, it seemed, wouldn’t talk and most of the coppers favored one or another variation of the Dreier theory. He was being held at the Hollywood Station.

Bachmann sat and groaned.

Then a radish-nosed captain from LA got a brilliant idea and asked Galbraith how come he knew about Sarin’s chill so soon. Galbraith had to tell ’em about Miss Laird and they started working her over. Why hadn’t she called for help?—why hadn’t she called the police?—how long had she been in the dressing room?—what was the reason for “personal enmity” towards Maya Sarin?

I said I’d vouch for Miss Laird and they all looked at me as if I was one of those arrangements with electric teeth that deep-sea nets bring up. Who was I? Where was I at the time of the crime?

I had a swell answer for that. I said: “What was the time of the crime?” They all scratched their heads and asked a lot more questions and finally decided that the murder had occurred between five-thirty-five and five minutes after six—if Miss Laird was telling the truth.

I called the projection room and found out that Dreier hadn’t left there till almost ten after. That gave Lawson a fresh start on his Creighton angle and they all started poking questions at Creighton who was sitting in a corner looking scared.

I winked one of my most reassuring winks at Miss Laird and jockeyed Bachmann out into the hall; we walked down to the far end. I told him in a few one- and two-syllable words that I knew about him and Mrs Bachmann both going to the Dressing Room Building—and why.

He looked at me with his eyes hanging out on his cheeks and said: “Pat! I swear to you that neither of us had anything to do with it.”

“Nobody says you did. But if Miss Laird saw both of you go into the building it’s probable that someone else saw you, too. I just want to be sure you’re in the clear.”

He put his hand against the wall to steady himself, whispered: “Mrs Bachmann talked to Maya and Maya got mad and put her out of the room. She was coming down the hall from the room, crying, when I got here. I took her out to her car—it was parked in the alleyway out there—and we sat and talked for a long while and then we heard Maya’s maid scream… . Carl was going into the projection room when we came out of the building and he saw us—he saw that Ruth was crying. I guess when he found Maya dead he thought we had something to do with it and that’s the reason he won’t say anything.”

I patted Bachmann’s arm and steered him back towards the dressing room and told him I had an idea I wanted to work out in detail, that I was going to run along and would call him later. As a matter of fact the only idea I had at that point was to talk to Mrs Bachmann.

They were still working on Creighton. Radish-nose was yelping about putting the pinch on everybody and a little guy from the DA’s office was running him a close second for noise by pointing out, with gestures, that there were four entrances to the Dressing Room Building and that anybody on the lot between five-thirty and six-fifteen was technically under suspicion.

They’d forgotten about Miss Laird for the moment; I officed her and we edged out.

Lieutenant Lawson was coming out of the phone booth in the hallway downstairs. He said: “I just talked to the Doc. He says her nibs was killed some time in the half-hour before he got to her—that’d make it sometime after ten minutes to six. An’ he says she was loaded with heroin… . He says all the licker was for was to hold the H down an’ keep her from blowin’ her noodle entirely.”

I said: “If she was that high maybe she sapped herself with the vibrator.”

He looked at me as if he thought I was on the level about it and galloped back upstairs.

We ducked out the private entrance through the Purchasing Department to keep from being swamped by reporters and walked around the block to the car.

Dreier was out, as far as I was concerned. So was Creighton and the maid. That left Bachmann, who I was sure had told me the truth or what he believed to be the truth, and Mrs Bachmann. I didn’t know her very well; I was trying to think of five or six good reasons why she shouldn’t have got mad, too, while they were going round and round, and picked up the vibrator and let Maya have it.

I didn’t have to wait long for all six reasons. It was pretty dark by that time. We got into the car and somebody walked over from a car that was parked across the street and said: “Mister Nolan—you’ve got to do something!” It was Ruth Bachmann.

I said: “Sure—I’ll do anything I can. Where do I begin?”