Strange Embrace (14 page)

“Groovy pad you got here. Must cost you heavy bread, huh?”

“It’s not cheap.”

“Yeah,” Lennie said. “Penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a view of the park. You got a terrace, too?”

“A balcony.”

The boy nodded. “Yeah. You know what I pay where I live? Thirty-seven bucks a month. That’s with electricity tossed in. It’s unheated, of course. I picked up a pair of gas heaters for three-and-a-half bucks apiece and hooked ’em up.”

He put out his cigarette. “I think Elaine was paying more,” he said. “Her pad was a little larger. I think she said she was shelling out forty, maybe forty-five. And she had more stairs to climb. But you saw her place, didn’t you?”

Johnny nodded. “I saw it.”

“And she was going to move uptown. She didn’t talk much but she dropped a word here, a phrase there. Talking about something on a high floor by the East River. Paying forty-five tops a month and talking about the East River. When you can’t pay more dough than that you don’t go looking at the East River. You jump in it.”

Johnny offered him another cigarette. He took it and accepted a light. He dragged hard on the cigarette and blew out smoke. He took another drag and let it out slowly.

“I don’t know why I came here,” Lennie said suddenly. “I had a few ideas after you cut out yesterday. Ideas about why Elaine caught it. I was going to talk to you, fill you in. Then I read about this Tracy and how he caught it the same way. It switched things around, you know?”

“I know.”

“I thought Elaine got killed for a reason. You know, like she was taking chances shaking down some cat and he got rid of her. That’s ugly all by itself. But at least it adds up that way. You can say all right, she was a nice chick and all, but she was kind of a bitch and she got killed for a reason. That way it makes a little sense. It’s still ugly but it makes sense. But this way! Man, she was killed because she was there. She was in your show and somebody was down on your show and she caught it in the neck.” Lennie paused, shaking his head. “Bad,” he said. “It’s bad to get killed at all. It’s worse to get killed for no reason. It can’t get much worse than that.”

Johnny looked at him. “You could use a drink, Lennie.”

“That’s an idea.”

He got a bottle and poured short ones, tossing one down his throat and handing the other to the kid. Lennie sipped the bourbon slowly, appreciatively. He put the shot glass down empty.

“Thanks,” he said. “I suppose I should get the hell home. Sit on the floor and contemplate the perfection of the universe and the
karma
of all things. I’m wasting your time.”

“You came here to tell me something, didn’t you?”

“I thought so. I’m not sure now. You know why I fell up here? Because it hurts to sit still. Somebody killed a girl I knew. I wasn’t in love with her, I wasn’t sleeping with her—I just knew her and liked her a little. So it’s rough to sit around contemplating the perfection of the universe while the bastard who killed her walks around free.”

Johnny knew what he meant. He felt the same way himself. But there was not a hell of a lot else to do. He had tried last night, and after a bucketful of clever acting and a barrelful of theatrical gymnastics, all he had managed to do was beat the hell out of a muscle-bound oaf with his brains in his fists. Johnny had not found out a thing that helped him. He had not narrowed down the range of suspects; more accurately, he hadn’t turned up a single suspect.

“I thought of something,” Lennie went on. “Only I guess it doesn’t make it any more. It’s like
passé.
”

“And you were bringing it to me?”

The boy nodded.

“Why not to the cops?”

“The fuzz don’t dig me too much. They look at me and all they see is the beard.”

“Some aren’t too bad,” Johnny said, thinking of Haig. “Some of them—”

“To hell with them,” Lennie said. “About Elaine. I got to meditating, sort of, and I came up with a notion. I thought of somebody who might have killed her. But that was before Tracy got hit. That changed things.”

“Who were you thinking of?”

Lennie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I was buggy coming here in the first place. I guess I just had eyes to talk to somebody and you were handy. Thanks for listening.”

He got to his feet and started for the door.

“Hold it—”

The boy stopped, turned around. “Yeah?”

“You got this far,” Johnny told him. “You wasted this much time. So you might as well waste a minute or two more. You said you thought you knew who killed Elaine—”

“That’s history now.”

“So make like a historian.”

“What good’s it gonna do?”

Johnny took a deep breath. The kid was right—what good was it going to do? But in a mess like this anything could help. The only thing to do was gather every scrap of information that happened to crop up.

“Tell me about it,” Johnny said steadily. “Sit down, relax, and tell me about it. Want another drink?”

“I better not.”

“Then just talk.”

Lennie said, “It’s nothing, really. Just a guy she talked about.”

“What’s his name?”

“She didn’t mention it. Or if she did I don’t remember. I got a rotten memory for names.”

“He was in the cast?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what he did. She told me but I forget. He had this big yen for her. According to her, he spent a lot of time bugging her. Coaching her in her part, then making silly passes at her. Nutty ones. You know, like falling down in front of her and kissing her feet. Bugged, you dig?”

“Go on.”

“That’s it. He would switch back and forth all the time. One minute the bit is she’s the greatest actress since Duse and the world’s going to love her. The next minute she’s no damn good at all. He was coming on hot and cold like that and she didn’t know where she stood with him. That got her all shook up.” He paused significantly. “That was very important to her,” he told Johnny. “The theater, I mean. Her career. She was sincere as all hell about it. She may have been a cheap little bitch in a lot of ways but she was straight on the acting scene. It was important to her, man.”

“I know that.”

“She really cared. She wanted to be an actress in a big way. I don’t know how good she was—”

“Really good,” Johnny said.

“And she never got the chance.” Lennie Schwerner stared hard at the floor. His hand went to his beard—a scrawny, unkempt beard that somehow did not look nearly so ridiculous to Johnny anymore. The boy stroked the beard idly. “Back to this cat,” he said finally. “He was bugging her, especially when he would do his switch and scream on her, telling her she couldn’t act her way out of a cardboard box. But she didn’t mind that after a while. Because he was the same way about the show itself, she told me. One minute it was the greatest thing since
King Lear
and it would sail through two thousand performances. The next minute it was lousy. It was the worst script in the world. It shouldn’t be produced. It would be a crime to have the play produced and—”

He stopped when he saw the expression on Johnny’s face.

“I said something?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s the pitch?”

“To hell with the pitch,” Johnny snapped. “First, let’s figure out who the man is.”

Lennie looked at him. “I said something important?”

“Yeah. And for the wrong reason. I don’t want to go into it now. But somebody connected with the show—hell, it could be anybody. A stage manager, an assistant prop hand, anybody in the damned business. She was ready to listen to anybody when it came to acting. I gave her a few hours of instruction myself.”

He stopped suddenly and swallowed. “Hell,” he said, “this mystery man couldn’t be me, could it? I get depressed about shows. I bawl people out. I—”

“You ever kiss her feet?”

“What the—”

“Then that lets you out,” Schwerner said patiently. “This cat kissed her feet. So—”

“Anybody. Anybody from the set designer to the third assistant pencil sharpener to the costume director to the—”

“Director!”

Johnny stared. Schwerner was snapping his fingers, his eyes alert now. “That was it,” he said. “Some kind of a director. What’s the director’s name?”

“Ernie Buell. But—”

“Buell. Ernie Buell. Ernie, Ernest. Buell.”

“It ring a bell?”

“A whole steepleful,” the boy said. “That’s the foot-kisser. That’s our boy.”

Buell was married, Johnny thought. Buell was a happily married guy with a pair of kids. Buell—

Buell was also a little bit nuts.

“What do we do now, man? What do we do?”

Johnny looked at the boy. “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

It was amazing how neatly the pieces fitted when you saw the way to put them together. It was absolutely incredible how obvious everything became once it was obvious.

Johnny ground out a cigarette in an ashtray. He listened to Lennie Schwerner talk quietly on the telephone. He followed the conversation until the boy grinned hugely and hung up.

“It’s set,” Lennie said.

“He fell for it?”

“He fell on his face. I gave him the pitch straight from the armpit and he ate it up. I’m a blackmailer. Elaine told me all about him and I can prove he killed Elaine and Tracy. But I’m not the talkative type. I can be had for the right price.”

“How did he react?”

“Like clockwork. I told him to meet me at Topp’s on Forty-second Street. You must have heard that.”

“Yeah. He’s meeting you?”

“In fifteen minutes, he says. He can’t do anything in a crowded restaurant, can he?”

“He’s not that cracked. But I’ll go along with you, anyway. Just for protection.”

Lennie shook his head violently. “He’d spot you,” he said. “And that would tear it.”

“But—”

“Please.” The boy’s tone was suddenly quite firm. Johnny let him talk. “Don’t you see, man? I got to do this by myself. I got to go down and meet this cat and pull everything out of him, and then I can hand him to you and you can hand him to the fuzz or whatever you want to do with him. But I gotta set it up on my own. It has to be my scene.”

“For Elaine?”

Schwerner shook his head. “Not for Elaine. For me. After this I can go back to Yonkers and sell insurance. I can shave twice a day and wear a Brooks Brothers suit and join the Kiwanis. I can marry a bridge-playing chick and contribute to the population explosion. But first I have to do something that means something. Something real.” He lowered his eyes. “Okay, so I’m coming on too strong. But it’s a moment-of-truth type of scene. I’m the matador and the bull is coming at me and all I’ve got in my hand is this short sword. I can’t cop out now. I can’t grab a gun and shoot the bull. I have to use the sword, and by myself.”

Johnny understood.

“I’ll be safe in there. I’ll be ice-cool, stoned on my own nerve endings. Don’t worry.”

After Lennie Schwerner left, Johnny sat and smoked and tried to see how he had missed knowing all along that the killer was Buell. Everything pointed that way now. Everything.

The buggy aspect figured. The two bodies, both so nude and so dead, one a man and the other a girl. Buell had been in and out of loony bins for a long time. Nobody had ever accused him of being sane.

Evidently he was a hell of a lot sicker than anybody had ever realized. Sick enough to lose touch with reality.

Sick enough to kill.

From there on it was easy. Buell alternately loved and hated the show, just as he loved and hated everybody he knew, according to his mood. He had made a passionate speech defending the play at the cast meeting, but in preliminary rehearsals he had frequently run the script into the ground. He had thought Elaine was wonderful, marvelous, perfect. But there were times when he had screamed at her hysterically.

Johnny had tried to ignore this, chalking it up to artistic temperament. There was a thin line between genius and insanity, sometimes no line at all. The areas had an annoying tendency to overlap.

They had overlapped, in Buell.

The director loved the script. But at the same time he hated it—maybe because he was scared of it, terrified that he could not give it the direction it deserved. In public he praised and defended the show. In private he tried to sink it.

That, Johnny guessed, was a part of the reason for Elaine’s murder. Although Buell’s motive went a little further. Elaine was good, perfect—with her gone the show would be a shadow. But Elaine was not entirely perfect. No one is, on-stage or off. So in one sense Buell could see her as ruining the script by being less than perfect.

And then there was the sex angle. The foot-kissing routine, coupled with his periodic disdain for her and her perpetual unwillingness to lose her virginity.

It added up.

And, the beating. That figured, too. Buell had gone to the cast meeting against his will. Once there, he had done his damnedest to save the show, hold the cast together. Then the meeting had ended and he had done the Jekyll-and-Hyde bit. The plan he had set up with Rugger and Marlo earlier in the day went into play.

That whole episode had had the touch of an accomplished director, Johnny reflected. The method of contact with the two thugs, set up so that they could not identify him because they did not so much as see him or hear his natural voice. He had used kids for messengers, had even made a single hundred-dollar bill do the work of two and thus had removed any possibility of identification during a final payoff.

Then, when the meeting had broken up, he had stayed on Johnny’s tail. He was biding his time, taking it easy. If Johnny had gone straight home, Buell would have let the thing ride for a day. He did not have to worry about time. But Johnny had returned to Jan’s. And that was the set-up. A couple of quick calls to Rugger and Marlo, and Buell was on his way home with Johnny targeted like a clay pigeon.

It was pretty, you had to give Buell that.

Carter Tracy’s murder had been a little different. It was not hard to spot a few reasons for Tracy’s death. First of all, the show was still supposed to go on. The death of the female lead had not been enough to stop it. The male lead also had to go.

There was more, just as there had been more with Elaine. Tracy must have been a monumental thorn in Ernie Buell’s side. The actor’s ego had been insufferable. His success with women had been legendary. And that ability with women could only have irritated Ernie, who was awkward with the opposite sex and ugly as sin—and who had not gotten with Elaine. Tracy had probably boasted to Ernie that he was sleeping with the girl. The actor had belonged to the lay-and-tell school, Johnny knew. He had leered boastfully while informing Johnny that he knew where Jan’s apartment was, that he had been there before. He could have leered the same way when discussing Elaine, without any real justification.