The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery (4 page)

“Six years ago.”

“An actress?”

Tulley nodded.

“When you go to bed with a woman, don't you look at her?” Masuto asked coldly.

“I told you it was dark in that lousy dressing room.”

“Was Al Greenberg involved?”

“I think he was. I can't be sure, but I think I remember him on the set that day.”

“Cotter? Murphy Anderson? Sidney Burke?”

“I think so. Burke brought the girl onto the set.”

“How old is your wife, Mr. Tulley?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Do you think that your wife was in the room with Mr. Greenberg?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you own a gun?”

“We have a small thirty-two automatic. I keep it in the bedroom.”

“Obviously, you looked for it when you came home tonight. Was it there?”

“No.”

“And you asked your wife whether she knew where it was?”

“She didn't know. She said she couldn't care less. She hates guns and she has been after me to get rid of it.”

“Why don't you, Mr. Tulley? We have an excellent police force here in Beverly Hills.”

“Which couldn't do one cotton-picking thing about keeping Al Greenberg alive.”

“We are policemen, not physicians. Those men and women you had dinner with tonight—they have all been here at your home?”

“They have.”

“Within the past two weeks?”

“That's right. We entertain a lot—dinner parties, cocktails. Sometimes when Al wanted a conference about the show, we would have it here.”

“I see. But to get back to what you were inferring—is it your notion that this Samantha waited patiently for eleven years to have her revenge, and that she began by murdering Al Greenberg?”

“It sounds stupid when you put it that way. Maybe she waited for the one opportunity. Maybe she's patient. It still seems stupid.”

“Farfetched, let's say. Still, someone wrote a note on your wife's typewriter and signed it ‘Samantha.'”

“Don't you want to compare the note with a sample from the typewriter?”

“What will that prove, Mr. Tulley? If Samantha is patient enough to wait eleven years for her revenge, she's patient enough to wait for a chance at your wife's typewriter.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I can't say, Mr. Tulley. If you believe you are in danger, you can inform my chief and he will no doubt station a policeman in front of your house.”

“Just one thing,” said Tulley, shooting out a hand at Masuto. “You're a cop—and this is Beverly Hills. So don't throw your weight around with me.”

“I am very sorry if I gave that impression,” Masuto said, smiling deferentially. “Thank you for your information.”

Tulley's apology was contained in the gesture of rising and escorting Masuto to the door.

Masuto's wife was awake and waiting for him when he got home. She was very gentle and full of many fears, and when a case kept him hours past his regular working time, she could not sleep, and hovered over her two children and allowed her mind to fill with awful possibilities. Although she had been born in Los Angeles, her first years had been spent in an old-fashioned and protected environment, and she had many of the mannerisms of a girl brought up in Japan. Without trying, and very tastefully, she had given a Japanese decor to their little house in Culver City. She liked paper screens and low, black enamel tables, and both she and her husband, when they were alone for the evening, would wear kimono and robe; and tonight she had his robe waiting and tea ready, and she sat dutifully staring at him with great affection and waiting to hear whether he proposed to speak of what had happened.

“Al Greenberg died,” he said finally, after he had tasted the tea and relaxed somewhat. “You will remember that when we ride with the children in Beverly Hills and I point out houses, his is the house with the great columns, like the big house in front of the old Selznick Studio.”

“I am sorry to hear that. He was your friend.”

“I think so. As much as anyone is a cop's friend.”

“But why did they need the police?”

“One of the guests said that Mr. Greenberg was murdered.”

“Was he?” she asked anxiously.

“I don't know. In the guise of being a philosophical Oriental type—which I am not—I would say that these people murder endlessly. Then there could be no death among them without the charge of murder being justified.”

“I don't understand you.”

“I am not sure that I want you to. Let's go to bed, and perhaps I will stop dreaming, because this is like a nasty and turgid dream, pointless and with neither dignity nor honor.”

“Has it ever occured to you,” Rabbi Matthew Gitlen asked Masuto the following morning, “to ponder on the curious parable of the camel and the needle's eye, and the rich man and the gates of heaven? A member of my congregation once coined a rather famous line to the effect that he had been rich and he had been poor and rich was better. The poor are too often maligned when they are accused of happiness, and the rich are maligned by the same accusation. As incredible as it may seem, I preach occasionally to my congregation—in my own words of course—that the Kingdom of God is within them. Which can be a dilly, you know. Are you a Christian? I ask in the most perfunctory professional sense, not to pry—simply to find a manner of discussing your inquiry. I trust the question does not embarrass you?”

“Not at all,” Masuto replied, smiling. The rabbi was an enormous man, almost six-foot-four, Masuto would guess, very fat and apparently very civilized, but big enough in his frame to wear his weight with great dignity and to give the impression that a very large and hard-muscled man carried around another, a fat man, not out of indulgence but out of compassion. It had a curious effect on Masuto, who was put at his ease and who continued, “But I am not a Christian. I was never baptized. I am a Zen Buddhist—but that is not to be thought of as a religion in your sense.”

“I reject the obvious comment, and I am utterly fascinated,” the rabbi rumbled, rising from behind his desk and going to one corner of his study, where there was a small refrigerator with a wood finish. He opened it and peered inside. “Will you join me in a yogurt, Detective Masuto? Supposedly, it reduces me, which is nonsense. A Zen Buddhist.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Masuto said.

“Plain or orange or strawberry?”

“Plain, if I may.”

“Of course.” He handed Masuto a cup of yogurt and a spoon and sat on a corner of his desk as he opened his own. “Zen,” he said. “What do they say? ‘Those who know, speak not. Those who speak, know not.' Do you subscribe to that?”

“Oh, no—not at all,” Masuto answered. “Everything can be spoken of, poorly perhaps, but English is a rich language. But a detective's time is not his own.”

“Naturally. I might even say that a rabbi's time is not his own. This is the curse of a civilization that rushes so desperately. We must talk about Al Greenberg, may his soul rest in peace.”

“He was a member of your congregation.”

“In the most nominal sense. He was not a religious man—but pleasant and anxious to quiet his guilts with money. His contributions were generous, and when he married Phoebe three years ago, she decided to become Jewish. She was very grateful to him. Perhaps with reason. She was in the hospital, you know, with TB—in a ward, broke, two suicide attempts behind her. She had worked for him in what they call a ‘special' some years before, and when he discovered she was in the hospital, he spared nothing to help her. The best doctors, the newest drugs—and then somehow he got up the nerve to ask her to marry him and she agreed. Gratitude. He endeared himself to her. But it was essentially a father-daughter relationship, no more than that. He was a widower. Of course, her becoming Jewish was not as serious as it might have been. I instructed her for two weeks and then her interest waned. But I got to know her a little—only why should this matter to the police?”

Detective Masuto told him why it mattered to the police, and the rabbi ate his yogurt and listened with interest, and then when Masuto finished, said, “I called the house when you telephoned me. Mrs. Greenberg was still asleep. I think I had better go over there now. She'll need someone to lean on.”

“You don't appear surprised.”

“At murder?” asked Rabbi Gitlin. “But you don't know that it is murder, and nothing should surprise us in this world.”

“I am not completely at home with the social relationships and overlaps of your Western religions, but would a man like Mr. Greenberg, under great stress, cry out the name of Jesus Christ?”

The rabbi shrugged. “Who knows what any of us would do under great stress.”

“May I ask you an unspeakable question?”

“Of course,” the rabbi smiled. “But you must forgive me if I give you an unspeakable answer.”

“In your opinion, could Mrs. Greenberg have murdered her husband?”

“Not unspeakable, but interesting. You do not ask whether I think she had reason to, incitement to—but only whether she could have. But how could either of us, Detective Ma suto, even know what the human mind and soul is capable of? Murder is a terrible ultimate. It is the ghost, the monster that lurks wherever human beings live. It is not your question that is unspeakable, but murder itself. I cannot accept the proposition that Al Greenberg was murdered, but if he was murdered, then that defines the murderer. You told me that you met Al Greenberg?”

“Several times.”

“Then you must understand that if he was murdered, then your murderer is without heart or compunction, someone who will stop at nothing. The very thought of such a murderer is particularly terrifying. I would be relieved if you told me your own thoughts.”

“That there was no murder?”

“I would like to think that, Detective Masuto.”

“Have you time enough for me to call Dr. Baxter—our medical examiner? He should be at the hospital now, completing the autopsy.”

“If you wish.” The rabbi pointed to his telephone, and Masuto dialed the hospital and was transferred to the autopsy room. A nurse answered and asked whether he would wait a moment or two, since Dr. Baxter was washing up. The rabbi watched Masuto thoughtfully. Then Baxter got on the phone and told him testily that he had spent three hours on a lot of nonsense.

“What did you find?” Masuto asked.

“That he died of a heart attack.”

“Suppose—Doc, suppose that he fell down and someone held a pillow over his face for a minute or two. Would it show up in the autopsy?”

“No.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. No. What do you want, an autopsy or the kind of nonsense you read in novels?”

“But the pillow would cause his death?”

“Well, of course it would. You don't breathe, you die.”

“That would be murder.”

“Not with me on the witness stand, it wouldn't. I told you he died of a myocardial infarction. That still goes.”

“But the pillow?”

“I could invent a lot of other ways to kill him, and it would still be a heart attack. So you're on your own, my lad.”

Masuto replaced the telephone and turned to the rabbi, who smiled sadly. “I'm afraid I prefer to agree with your doctor,” he said. “If you want a murder, Mr. Masuto, you must find it.”

“Perhaps whether I want it or not, it'll find me.”

“Perhaps.”

In school, on being asked his mother's name—that is, her maiden name—Masuto's son had once replied, “Katherine Asuki.” Masuto was distressed when he heard about it, as he always was when he noticed any sense or action of inferiority on the part of his children. Her name was Kati or Katy, depending on how far the Anglicization went, and now Masuto pulled up at the loading walk of the Food Giant Supermarket, leaned out of the car and shouted, “Hey, Kati—I'm here!”

It was one of the very few aggressive, extroverted actions he indulged in, and he only did it because he detested supermarkets. Now Kati came rushing out with her cart, exclaiming as always, “Why do you embarrass me so? They will think we are people of no manners whatsoever.”

“Let them,” he said, stowing the bags into the car. “Come—in with you and off.” She would not drive. He drove to his house and she apologized for interrupting his work so often.

“Today I have nothing to do,” he said. “The chief gave it to me. Today, tomorrow—so that he will be able to tell the press and everyone else that poor Mr. Greenberg died of a heart attack. If it had happened in Culver City or in West-wood or in Hollywood, that would be something else. Not in Beverly Hills—and least of all north of Wilshire Boulevard. So today I will prove there was no murder, and tomorrow I will go to the funeral and the next day we will all have a picnic at my uncle's farm.”

“That's very nice, but you're teasing me, aren't you?”

“No.”

“Where were you this morning?”

“With a rabbi,” he said.

“A rabbi? That's a Jewish priest, isn't it?” He burst out laughing, and she said plaintively, “Why must you laugh at me? I don't pretend to know all these things. You knew I was an old-fashioned girl when you married me. Now you're sorry you married me.”

“If you are such an old-fashioned girl,” he said, “then why do you allow me to carry the bundles into the house?”

“Because I try to learn the things you teach me,” she said sweetly.

The lady at the Screen Actors Guild had that quality of faded beauty that is so abundant in Hollywood and so occasional in the rest of the country. She was in her late sixties, Masuto judged, but with the bone structure of a star and the practiced dignity of at least a bit-part player. He seemed to remember having seen her in this film or that, and he wished he could refer to one of them with any certainty and thereby win her wholehearted cooperation. But he knew that if he faked a memory of her playing opposite Mary Pickford she would be insulted, and if he made it Joan Crawford, she would inform him that she had never been an actress. Things turned out that way for him.