The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery (10 page)

Tears welled into her eyes. Her cheeks became puffy. Suddenly her moment of competence was over and she became a fat, frightened old lady.

“You knew the name all the time,” he said.

She nodded.

“Do you want to tell me.”

“Her name was Gertrude Bestner, poor kid. God help her. God help her whatever she's into. She was such a loser—”

He walked into the Chief's office, and Kelly and Bones were there, the three of them angry; the Chief annoyed angry, Bones puzzled angry, and Kelly burning angry. Kelly did not like him; Kelly did not like the way he carried himself. Masuto could put himself in Kelly's place. Kelly would tolerate a Nisei, but there are limits to toleration. Kelly and Bones were in Beverly Hills now, and they did not like Beverly Hills or its pocket-size police force. That was understandable.

“You got explaining to do, Masao,” the Chief said.

“We all have. That is a condition of mankind.”

“Screw the philosophy,” said Kelly. “We found the lug wrench.”

“The what?”

Bones was the least angry of the three, the most intrigued, the most puzzled. “You remember, Masao, you said that she was murdered with a lug wrench. Then you tossed that rock down into the canyon. Well, we put everyone we had down there and combed out the place. We killed two rattlers—can you imagine?”

“I seen one on Mulholland a week ago,” Kelly said. “The hell with that! I want to know how come he knew this broad was knocked over with a lug wrench.”

“You got explaining to do, Masao,” the Chief repeated seriously.

“I didn't know it,” Masuto said. “I guessed.”

Kelly threw a flat hand at him and said, “Sure, you guessed. First you guessed she was scragged. Then you guessed the lug wrench. Then you guessed the money in her purse. Balls! That's just too goddamn much guessing for me, and you know what I think about your guesses? I think they're phony as you are!”

“Wait a minute—hold on!” the Chief snapped. “You're in my house now, Kelly. Don't dirty my floors.”

“To hell with whose house I'm in! I'm talking about murder—murder that took place in the City of Los Angeles. We got a corpus and we got a murder weapon, and we got enough blood and hair on the lug wrench to link them together. So don't tell me about spitting on the floor. Just tell me where your cop fits in.”

Face white, the Chief rose up behind his desk and said very softly, in a voice that Masuto and every other cop on the force had learned to dread, “Just who the hell do you think you're talking to, Kelly! Let me tell you something. I try to be a good neighbor, but one more yap out of you that anyone here is trying to bunco you, and so help me God, I'll lock you up. Make trouble for me you may, but right now you're in Beverly Hills and just keep that in mind.”

Kelly was as white as the Chief, and watching them, Masuto felt calm and detached. He himself had been forgotten; they were two men making a power play, and what they felt was their honor had been irritated, scraped bare. Now Bones stepped over to Kelly and took his arm and said, “Just work easy.” And then he said to the Chief, “So Kelly's got a big temper and a big mouth. I been his partner six years, Chief. He's a good cop, I am, Masao is. I don't know what we're ripping at each other for.”

“Forget it,” the Chief growled. “What have you got to say for yourself, Masao?”

“Nothing explains intuition,” Masuto said. “Shall I try to turn it into reason?”

“Try,” the Chief said drily.

“Murder explodes, a sort of chain reaction. We make it too difficult to be a human being, and then something snaps and the person is no longer a person but a killer, and this thing keeps snapping and the killer kills. We are filled with horror, because we inhabit the same unreasonable world—and how long can we remain human? The killer has ceased to be human, and I fit myself into the killer's world. Now I will try to see with his eyes, feel with his nerves, and move as he moves. So everything becomes something else. A car goes over the shoulder on Mulholland Drive. I see it with the eyes of the killer and it becomes a part of the logic of the killer and his progress through our world—”

“But cars go over Mulholland,” Bones objected. “It happens every day.”

“Then I could be wrong. But what are the odds at this moment? At exactly this moment? I could be wrong, but the odds are that I am right.”

“And the lug wrench?”

It was lying on a sheet of paper on the Chief's desk, a garage tool, three-quarters at one end and half an inch at the other, about a foot long and roughly straight.

“You can pick one up in a garage. The attendant turns his back and you're armed. How many things like that are lying around? It could have been a monkey wrench, but the odds are on this. And the money is no mystery either. She had to be paid off in advance.”

“Then why didn't the killer take back his roll?”

“No time, maybe. The killer could hear the kids on their motorbikes. Or maybe the money didn't mean enough for the killer to try.”

“Six yards and you toss it away like confetti!” Kelly snorted.

“Why was she killed?” the Chief asked.

“The payoff was one thing, but the killer couldn't take any chances.”

“OK, Masao—who killed her?” the Chief asked.

“I don't know.”

“Why don't you guess,” Kelly said.

“Tomorrow I'll guess,” Masuto told him.

“But you know,” the Chief insisted.

“I don't know.”

“Masao, if you're playing games with me—”

“I told you I don't know.”

“But you tie this in with Greenberg and Tulley?”

“Both of them. They were both murdered by the same person.” He hesitated, and the Chief caught it and said, “It was three, before the car went over.”

“All right—you want me out on a limb, I'll go there. His name was Fred Saxton. He was 49 years old and he was production manager for Al Greenberg. He was murdered out at the Wide World studios seven weeks ago.”

“I know the case,” Bones said. “That was an accident. A counterweight came loose and hit him.”

“It wasn't an accident,” Masuto said.

“How the hell do you know?” Kelly demanded. “We don't have a police force in LA—we just got a bunch of bums, bums who sit around on their asses all day and do nothing. We don't bother investigating a case. No, sir. A guy gets his head broken with a sandbag, we don't give it a second thought. It never occurs to us that maybe someone scrags him. We just write it down as an accident. That's because we're stupid.”

“Who's bugging you?” Bones demanded. “Every accident is an accident only until you know better.”

“But this joker knows better than anyone.”

“It happens.”

“The hell it happens,” Kelly said. “I'm not satisfied—not one bit. And speaking for myself, you haven't heard the end of this—not by a long shot.”

He went to the desk and began to wrap the lug wrench in the piece of paper.

“Fingerprints?” Masuto asked innocently.

“Fingerprints? You been reading too much Fu Manchu.”

He put the lug wrench in his pocket and stamped out. Bones stood looking after him hopelessly, and the Chief sat behind his desk, staring moodily at Masuto.

“Do me a favor, would you, Pete?” Masuto asked Bones.

Bones looked at the Chief, then at Masuto, and said, “You know, Masao, you could do me a favor. What do I do about this? A car goes over the shoulder on Mulholland Drive, and I got to come back to the boss with Kelly riding me and tell him how it's a murder, but we can't tell him who did the murder because you won't guess no more.”

“Tomorrow.”

“And suppose tomorrow you don't want to guess?”

“Masao,” the Chief said, “is this the only way you can play it?”

“I have three of them. One is the killer. They all spin threads, like damned little spiders. Three killers, three motives, three possibilities. I think I could guess. Then I guess wrong, and I have done precisely what the killer desires. This killer is not smart—diabolical but not smart. Every mistake in the book. Blunder after blunder, but because we are dealing with a lunatic, even the blunders work.”

“Bones, do him his goddamn favor,” the Chief said. “And as for you, Masao—you haven't even filed a report.”

“When do I write it? In my sleep?”

“What do you want, Masao?” Bones asked him.

“I want to find out what happened to a kid called Samantha Adams. That's her stage name. Her real name is Gertrude Bestner. She was born in 1936 or 1937, and her last known address was here in Los Angeles on Sixth near Gower. I'll give you all the facts and details. The last fix I have on her is 1955, a rooming house on Sixth, run then and now by Mrs. Dolly Baker. So you start with 1955 and bring it up to today or as far as it goes. Where is she? Dead or alive? Doing what? Where was she?”

“You don't want much, do you?”

“I want it tonight.”

“You're nuts,” Bones said.

“Well, then how soon? Shave the hours, and maybe you give a life to someone.”

“Will you back him up, Chief?” Bones asked.

The Chief nodded.

“Tomorrow. Maybe,” Bones said. “But only if she stayed in LA. If she took off, maybe a month, a year—or you can kiss your whole project goodby.”

“Try?”

“I said I'd try.”

“I want it the first moment you have it. I'll keep my band open in the car. The moment you have it, you can phone here, and the dispatcher will give it to me.”

“All right. And what do we do with the Peggy Groton thing? Keep it open?”

“You damn well do. It's murder, isn't it?”

“That's what you say, Masao.”

“Tomorrow night I'll buy you both a drink.”

“Saki—and take me out for one of your Japanese meals.”

“If I can fix it with my wife.”

“I thought you Japanese—”

“I am a Nisei,” Masuto explained.

CHAPTER FIVE

Phoebe Greenberg

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N
his way out, the girl at the dispatch desk called after him, “Masao!”

He came back, and she told him that there was a call for him. “A Mrs. Greenberg.”

It took him a moment to relate it to a face and a person, and then he took the phone, and a low and pleasant voice said, “Sergeant Masuto, this is Mrs. Greenberg—Phoebe Greenberg. Rabbi Gitlin told me you spoke with him this morning.”

“Oh, yes—yes, we had a talk.”

“He was impressed with you.”

“I was impressed with him,” Masuto said.

“He said that you were a friend of my—of my husband.”

“Yes, in a way.”

“In any way—then I would like you to come to the funeral tomorrow. But that isn't what I called you about. I would like to speak to you, if I might.”

“When?”

“Now. Is that possible?”

“In ten minutes—or less. I am leaving now.”

But the Chief intercepted him and said, “What about it, Masao? You're way out on a limb and I'm with you.”

“I told you, tomorrow.”

“I sure as God hope so, Masao.”

Even with the interruption, Masuto was at the Greenberg home in eight minutes, and now it was a little after four o'clock in the afternoon. The driveway was full and there were cars in front of the house; and in the living room, Murphy Anderson and his plump wife, Stacy, Jack Cotter alone, and Sidney Burke alone.

They would be off to the chapel later to pay their respects to the deceased. Now they were here to pay their respects to the living.

“Two chapels.” Sidney Burke said pointedly. He resented the fact that they were on opposite sides of Beverly Hills, as if he could see no reason on earth why two people in dying should not have the thoughtfulness to be of the same faith.

“Where is Mrs. Greenberg?” Masuto asked.

They explained that she was in the viewing room with Rabbi Gitlin. “I suppose he's some comfort to her,” Jack Cotter said, “but the last thing in the world I would have imagined is that Phoebe needed that kind of thing.”

“Why?”

“Her relationship with Al—”

“Oh, why don't you shut up, Jack,” Anderson interrupted.

“I don't like to be talked to like that,” Cotter said coldly.

Stacy Anderson burst out, “Have you met Rabbi Gitlin, Sergeant Masuto? He's absolutely fascinating. He's—”

Rising, Murphy Anderson said, “I think we must go, Stacy, if we want to get to both chapels tonight.”

“Poor Lenore,” Stacy said, as if she only now remembered that Mike Tulley was dead. “What a dreadful thing she went through. Just imagine—to be trapped on one side of a door while your husband is being murdered by some dreadful woman on the other side of the door. It's perfectly dreadful. Dreadful.” She enjoyed the word.