The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery (11 page)

“Sergeant Masuto,” Anderson said, “the three of us—Mr. Cotter, Mr. Burke and myself—would like to talk to you tonight. We feel that it's very important.”

“Where?”

“My house. I'm on North Rodeo. Say about nine?”

“I'll be there,” Masuto agreed.

The Japanese houseman came back into the room at that point and speaking in Japanese told Masuto that Mrs. Greenberg would like to see him.

“Why in hell doesn't he talk English?” Cotter growled.

“I am sorry,” Masuto apologized. “He apparently forgot himself with me—there is a natural desire to use one's own language. He simply told me that Mrs. Greenberg would like to see me.”

Masuto followed the houseman into the viewing room. Pale, deep circles under her eyes, Phoebe Greenberg greeted him with evident relief. Rabbi Gitlin, sprawled in a chair at one side of the room, nodded at him. Phoebe asked him whether he would have a drink. She had a drink in her hand. She wore a pale green at-home that was most becoming and gave her a sort of ethereal appearance.

“If you wonder why I don't wear black, Mr. Masuto,” she said, “it is because my husband hated symbols as a substitute for reality. He bought me this dress himself. I have very few abilities and very few ways to pay tribute to him.”

“You have the only ability that counts,” Masuto answered.

“And what is that?”

“To see yourself as a human being.”

“I don't really understand that,” she said, frowning. “But I am glad that you came here. I was very troubled about what I should do, and Rabbi Gitlin suggested that I talk to you. He said that you would hear whatever I had to say with understanding.”

“That's very kind of you,” Masuto told the rabbi.

Gitlin rose and said, “Perhaps it would be best if I left you alone—both of you.”

“No, no,” Phoebe protested. “I want you to remain.”

“All right.” Gitlin sank back into the chair. Masuto remained standing and Phoebe Greenberg paced nervously as she spoke.

“I didn't want to bring this whole thing up. I wasn't going to. My husband was a very sick man, Mr. Masuto. I knew this, because his physician told me and also instructed me in what to do in an emergency. I can't talk very well about the relationship between my husband and me. We were only married three years, and his illness precluded any normal relationship. But I think I worshipped the ground he walked on. I never looked at another man after I married him, Mr. Masuto. Well, that's done, and I cannot weep or carry on. Some can, some can't. I was going to wash this whole wretched thing out of my mind until Mike was killed today. Tell me, do you think that the same person who murdered Mike Tulley killed my husband?”

“Let me answer that obliquely, Mrs. Greenberg. No one will ever know, unless there is some sort of a confession, whether or not your husband was murdered. But I do know this—that if he was murdered, it was the same person. And I can tell you that this same person coldbloodedly killed two others.”

“Oh, no! Who?”

“Did you know a man called Fred Saxton?”

“Yes—yes, I knew Fred. He worked for Al—for my husband. But his death—it was one of those awful accidents.”

“I don't think so, any more than the death of a woman called Peggy Groton, whose car went over the shoulder up on Mulholland Drive today, was an accident. There is very little doubt in my mind that both of these people were murdered.”

“That's a pretty terrifying statement,” Gitlin said. “What are you trying to tell us, Sergeant? That four murders were committed? Then what kind of horror is loose among us?”

“You're asking for a philosophical conclusion, rabbi. I am only a policeman.”

“It's not fashionable to faint, is it?” Phoebe asked.

Masuto and the rabbi helped her to a chair. Very pale, she sat there and said, “When I was a little girl, my mother used to tell me about fainting and smelling salts and that sort of thing. It was very fashionable once, but I guess no one faints any more. You never hear about it. I don't even have smelling salts in the house, whatever they are.” She took a deep breath and went on, “I am going to tell you about this, Mr. Masuto. It may be wrong and vile to speak about it, because it happened a long time ago. But I must tell you about it—I must.”

Masuto waited. The rabbi glanced from Phoebe to Masuto, opened his mouth to say something, then clamped it shut.

“A terrible thing happened eleven years ago on a set where my husband was producing a TV segment. A man—well, it was Sidney Burke, because I will have to name names or this whole thing is meaningless. Sidney got some young kid actress to agree to have sex with some men on the set in return for a tiny part in the show. You have to be an actress yourself to know what these crazy kids will do for a part—any part. They all live with some kind of childish, pathetic dream that once they are seen, they will all instantaneously become Natalie Wood. So Sidney arranged this ghastly affair and—oh, it's so hard for me to speak about it.”

“I know about it,” Masuto said shortly.

“You do?” She was genuinely surprised.

“Who told you about this? Your husband?”

She nodded.

“What did he tell you was his role in the affair?”

She stared at Masuto for a long moment, and then she shook her head. “No. Oh, no. You are not going to tell me that he lied to me—”

“I didn't say he lied to you. I only asked you to tell me what he said was his role in the affair.”

She turned desperately to Rabbi Gitlin, who said, “Tell him, Phoebe. Let's get this whole filthy business out into the open. There's no other way.”

Then she said deliberately, “My husband did not lie to me, Mr. Masuto. He told me that the moment he found out what was happening, he put an end to it. He was sick and angry.”

“I don't think he lied,” Masuto said. “That's essentially the same thing that Murphy Anderson told me—that he came on it and put a stop to it.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Still, it is very important that you tell me exactly what your husband told you about this affair—and anything else you ever heard about it.”

“But if what my husband told me was true, why was he murdered? She must have known—”

“Who must have known, Mrs. Greenberg?”

“Samantha.”

“Oh?”

“I said Samantha. Do you know who she is?” she cried.

“As much as anyone knows who she is.”

“Then why—”

“That will not help,” Masuto said. “You are piling up premises. You are trying to be logical. But most of the logic we live with is a lie, and most of our attempts to be logical are only attempts to evade the reality. So if we have a puzzle, stop trying to solve it. Don't cling to thoughts and notions. Let them pass through your mind and then dismiss them—or treat them all with equal indifference. Nothing that will ever happen or become known to you can change anything about your husband's relationship to you.”

She turned to the rabbi pathetically. “Is that true?”

“Quite true,” Gitlin said.

“But if you will answer my questions,
you
can help,” Masuto told her.

“What questions?”

“As far as you know, who were the men involved in this incident eleven years ago?”

“Must I?”

“I know their names,” Masuto said. “I am asking for corroboration, which is very important.”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Very well. You know about Mike Tulley. Poor Mike. He walked into all these things. He always had to prove that he was a man, and that bitch he was married to never let him believe he was a man for more than five minutes. Oh, I am sorry over poor, silly Mike. Then Jack Cotter.” She made a face.

“How can you explain about Cotter? Jack is a Hollywood cowboy. Maybe the only time he was actually alive was when he put on his cowboy suit and his six-guns on the back lot. It's a special spongy kind of brain. They really think they are cowboys. The back lot is the universe. It's real. Do I make any sense?”

“You make sense,” Masuto said. “And Murphy Anderson?”

“Murphy. I could never understand it about Murphy, but then I appear to understand very little about men. Sidney Burke, of course. What can one say about Sidney? Max Green—poor Max. He was such a fool—poor Max died of a heart attack a year ago, and then Freddy Saxton. Of course. That's why you asked me about him. And it wasn't an accident?”

“I am afraid not,” Masuto said.

“What kind of a devil is she? Freddy has six children. Six kids. So he did something vile eleven years ago. Does that condemn him to death and his six kids—what does this all mean?”

Masuto turned to the rabbi, who shook his head. “I am past speculation on that point. I don't know what anything very much means—except that we store up horror. We prepay for it, so to speak, and then we are astonished when it happens.”

“What can one say about Sidney Burke?” Masuto asked her.

“What? Really, what?” She sighed. “When I asked Al why he didn't break Sidney's back, he said a very peculiar thing—that you cannot make a moral judgement of a person who is utterly without morality. Anyway, Sidney is Hollywood—I mean the place is full of Sidneys. Sidney doesn't do evil—he is just completely unaware of any difference between good and evil. Sidney is the ultimate amoral. If you asked him about that wretched gangshag he set up eleven years ago, he might be nervous—but not ashamed. He was doing everyone a favor. He was doing Samantha a favor by getting her a job on TV. He was doing the boys a favor by getting them a free lay on the set. And he was being progressive. He was forwarding the whole industry in his own way. That's the way Sidney is. He comes in dressed in his black silk suit with his pointed shoes and his thirty-dollar white-on-white tab shirt, and he gives you that big grin of his and a big kiss, and he never really gets angry at anything you say to him and he's also thinking of some kind of favor he can do for you. That's because he wants so much to be liked—”

Her voice trailed away. Masuto was listening with astonishment. This was Phoebe Greenberg, who should have been a senseless blonde who never made it as an actress. He looked at the rabbi, who permitted himself a slight smile.

“I go home,” Masuto said—“that is, sometimes I go home, and then when I do my wife says to me, tell me about today. What kind of a day was it?”

“It might surprise you,” the rabbi said, “to find that her day is equally inscrutable.”

“Perhaps. But we have been talking about this and that, Mrs. Greenberg. You didn't call me over here to chat. You called me here to tell me who is Samantha, didn't you?”

“What a notion!”

“But you did.”

“I think you fancy yourself, Mr. Masuto, because you happen to be Japanese. It gives you a sort of racial crystal ball which you can bring out whenever the mood suits you.”

“I think we both fancy ourselves,” Masuto said flatly. “All people do. All people build their own aura, their own mask that separates them from the world. Perhaps mine is that of the inscrutable Oriental—I imagine the rabbi chose that word deliberately—and Rabbi Gitlin goes through life as a large, confused innocent, as much of a mask as my own Oriental magic kit. And you, Mrs. Greenberg—”

“And me?”

“You are the professional Hollywood dumb blonde. Do you mind me being a bit shaken by what is underneath?”

“And how do you know that I am a professional dumb blonde?” she asked coldly.

“A word here and a word there. I listen. So why don't we stop fencing. Who do you think is Samantha?”

“Shall I tell him?” she asked the rabbi.

“That's up to you, Phoebe.”

“Very well. Samantha is Trade Burke, Sidney's wife.”

The Japanese butler brought tea and tiny sandwiches, and he told Phoebe that there had been a call from the funeral chapel and that people were beginning to arrive, and that some relatives of Mr. Greenberg were arriving from the East and would go directly there, that his two sons were expected—his daughter was in Europe and could not be reached—and when would she be there?

“I should go now,” she said, “but I must talk to Mr. Masuto. Please have some sandwiches, Mr. Masuto.”

“I'll go there directly,” said Rabbi Gitlin. “I can arrange for my wife to be there.”

“The truth is, I am afraid to go there,” she said.

“Well, that's natural, Phoebe. Take your time, but come. You must. Meanwhile, my wife and I will constitute ourselves a sort of semifamily committee. There are no other relatives here in Los Angeles, are there?”

“No, but Murph is the closest friend Al had, and he and Stacy will be there. I'll try to come within the hour.”

Masuto, his mouth full of sandwich—eating with the feeling that this would be as close to dinner as circumstances might permit—motioned for the rabbi to wait.

“Please.” He swallowed quickly.

“What is it, Sergeant?”

“Have you spoken about this, Mrs. Greenberg,—about your feeling that Trude Burke is Samantha—to anyone else?”

“No. Only to you and Rabbi Gitlin.”

“Good. Now listen to me, Rabbi—you are not to mention this, not even in passing, not even as a nameless suspicion, not to Anderson or Cotter or Burke. And not to their wives—”

“But surely,” Phoebe broke in, “you don't—”

“I damn well do, and I tell you, Rabbi, that one word about this can mean Mrs. Greenberg's death. No—one word about it
will
mean Mrs. Greenberg's death.”

“‘Damn well,'” the Rabbi repeated. “Slang sits oddly with you, you know. Of course—just as you say.”

He left them then, and Masuto stuffed another sandwich into his mouth, worked it down quickly, dialed the City Hall, got the Chief and said to him.