The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery (9 page)

Lieutenant Pete Bones of the Los Angeles police saw Masuto and called to him, “Howdy, Masao. I thought you had your own stiffs to bury.”

“When death comes to town, he stays for a while, doesn't he?”

“That's nicely put. What are you doing up here?”

“Who are the Hell's Angels boys?” pointing to the motorcycle riders.

“They saw the car tumble from around the bend, across that little canyon there.”

“Did they see it leave the road?”

Bones shook his head. “They saw one turn and then it come to rest against that rock—the way they tell it.”

Masuto nodded thoughtfully, closed his eyes for a long moment, and then nodded again.

“Well, what?” Bones demanded. “It's a Mulholland Drive accident. The books are full of them. If a month went by without someone killing himself on this crazy road, I'd ask for my pension. You live in a crazy town, you get crazy deaths. Look at those bareass lunatics on their damn motorcycles.”

“They are more comprehensible and less terrifying than that car down there,” Masuto said.

“Why? Furthermore, what does your boss mean, hold it? What should we hold?”

“I didn't want you to drag the car away.”

“Without a crane? Furthermore—ah, the hell with it. You want to see the body?”

“Yes. Just to satisfy myself that her skull was caved in from behind—maybe back of the temple.”

A cop in plain clothes pulled himself up on to the road, and Pete Bones said to him, “Kelly, this here is Masao Masuto from the Beverly force and he has got himself a sort of crystal ball. He says the lady's skull is bashed in from behind.”

The man called Kelly gave Masuto a sharp glance and said hello suspiciously.

“Let's go have a look,” he told them.

They walked over to where the ambulance man was easing the stretcher into the ambulance.

“How did she die?” Bones asked him.

“Isn't it obvious, officer? You go over Mulholland in one of those tin cans and you die.”

“I mean what happened to her physically? And don't be a wiseguy.”

“She got banged up. Broken bones, shock, internal injuries, and heart failure.”

“What about her skull?”

“Bad fracture.”

“How bad?”

“Her skull was smashed in. In nontechnical language, she was struck a hard blow slightly behind her right temple—a very hard blow.”

“From the accident?”

“How else?”

“We're asking you!” Kelly snarled. “Don't be such a goddamn wiseguy. How did it happen? Could it happen from the accident?”

“Please uncover her,” Masuto asked.

“OK—OK. Don't get excited. You ask me could this skull injury happen from such an accident. Jesus Christ, just look over the edge at that car down there.”

He was uncovering the body, when one of the motorcyclists walked over and demanded, “What have you got on us? Every goddamn thing happens in LA County, you got to pin it on us. We want to move on.”

“Drop dead,” Kelly said.

“Sure. That's the prerogative of fuzz. I answer you back, and you break a pair of brass knucks across my mouth—”

“What the hell is eating this creep?”

“Why don't you just simmer down—” Bones began, but then he and Masuto noticed that the boy's eyes were fixed on the face of the dead woman.

“You know her, buster?” Bones asked him.

“I know nothing. I don't even know my right name. I don't even know how I got here.”

“Now just a minute, young feller,” Masuto said. “This is not my own place. I'm here as a guest of these officers. But I think they will go along with me if I put my oar in.” He glanced at Bones and Kelly who nodded slightly, and Masuto went on, “On the one hand—treat us as people, we treat you as people. I don't really care if you tour the country in a jock—until you break some law. I don't know of any law you broke. Be decent and you ride away from here in ten minutes, because I'll put myself on record for you. But if you make it hard for them, they'll make it hard for you. Is that all right?” he asked Kelly, who nodded without answering.

“What do you want?” the bearded boy asked.

“Who is she?”

“So I know her—so ten thousand guys knew her. She's an old stripper called Peggy Groton. I guess she's almost forty years old. Ran out of steam. She became a hooker, but what's the percentage for an old hooker in this town? You go down on the strip and bend a finger and the chickies come running. Who needs to pay? That's all I know about her. I caught her act, it was lousy. Then I been to parties where she performed and after that for a couple of bucks she would make it. She turns my stomach—lousy whore.”

“Sure, she turns your stomach,” Bones said.

“I'd like to turn your stomach,” Kelly said. “I sure could turn your stomach.”

“You said you'd let us go if I cooperated.”

“Who the hell wants you?” Bones asked with disgust.

“Is she a user?” Masuto asked.

“How do I know?”

“She's a user,” the ambulance man replied. “Or was. You always lose your tenses with these stiffs. Look.” He raised her arm, pointed to a cluster of punctures. “She was a big one—user and loser. They all are—all alike.”

“But you didn't know she had a habit?” Kelly said to the bearded kid.

“How should I know?”

“Let him go,” Masuto said tiredly. “Let the lot of them go. They are unreal. They play a game with you. They irritate you. They take our eyes away from the target.”

“Let them go. You tell me, I jump to it,” Kelly scowled.

“Oh, hell, let them go,” Bones said. “If Masao says they are clear of this, they're clear of it. Send them away. They make me itch and want to scratch just to look at them.”

Kelly went to tell them to move on, and Bones said to Masao, “Enough?”

Masuto was looking at a drawn, tired, ravaged face that might once have been lovely. Once. Even in death, Peggy Groton was robbed of identity, of meaning. He shivered.

“Yes, you can take her away.”

They bundled the stretcher unceremoniously into the ambulance and drove off. Then the motorcycles roared by, the riders leaving a string of Anglo-Saxon words behind them. One of the rescue men came up the slope with Peggy Groton's purse and handed it to Bones.

“Want to have a look?” Bones asked Masuto.

“There should be about five hundred dollars in there. There might also be the murderer's address and phone number. Maybe. Maybe not. You know, Pete, this monster we are contending with has made every error, every stupid play that a killer can make—and still we can't pin it or stop it.”

“And you say there's half a grand in here—right here in the bag of a broken down hooker.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“X-ray eyes,” said Kelly. “You going to tell us she was murdered?”

“She was.”

“How? Who?”

“I'll tell you how—”

Bones had meanwhile opened the purse, and now he was holding out a stack of twenty dollar bills.

“—probably with a lug wrench that the murderer lifted from a filling station. Then, I guess, he threw it down in the yucca there.” Masuto bent, picked up a rock, and flung it down the slope. It landed a long way down, far beyond the car. “Somewhere around there—”

“And the money?”

“She was paid off, God help her.”

“Six hundred dollars,” Bones said.

“She was good,” Masuto said thoughtfully.

“How do you know?”

“Names—addresses?”

Bones held up a worn address book. “Do you want to go through it?”

Masuto shrugged. “When you're through with it, I'd appreciate a list of the contents. You might send it up to City Hall.”

“Don't you want to see it?”

Masuto shook his head.

“You mean because it's our murder?” Kelly demanded hotly.

“Who said it's murder?” Bones reminded him. “Ain't we got enough problems?”

“He says so. He says the name of the killer is in that book.”

“No, I didn't say that at all,” Masuto objected. “Still—”

He reached for the little book, riffled through it, saw nothing to catch his eye and then gave it back to Bones. He walked over to his car, and Bones called after him.

“Be in touch!”

“I will,” Masuto promised.

The day was wearing through. Masao Masuto had that feeling—not extraordinary for a Buddhist—that the day was a repeat. It had all happened before. It had happened a thousand times before; perhaps nothing changed, perhaps a little changed. He was a stranger in a strange place. He drove east on Mulholland Drive to its connection with Laurel Canyon Boulevard, past the housing developments on top of the skinny ridge of hill. On the Valley side the smog was yellow and noxious; on the other side, on his right, the buttocks of the lower hills were gashed and sheared for the ninety-thousand-dollar homes, where you could sleep above the smog. It occurred to him idly, but with certainty, that he had once known another existence, lived and perished. This was his purgatory. He smiled rather sadly at the thought, remembered the face of Peggy Groton, hooker and onetime stripper, and then turned right onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard. His mind was open and receptive. When he reached Hollywood Boulevard he knew what to do, and he turned east and then south on La Brea.

The bungalow on Sixth Street was even more forlorn revisited than it had been on first sight. In itself—its form, shape, its single tired palm tree in the postage stamp front yard—in itself it was all the brief history, the tawdry illusion that was Hollywood. Just as its mistress was the past of Hollywood, the single long generation that had turned some bright-eyed young girl into this slatternly rooming-house keeper.

She must have been sitting by the window and waiting, for she opened the door, smiled slightly and said, “I knew you'd come back, Mr. Moto.”

“How did you know?”

“Horoscopes and stuff. Anyway, I like you. I had dreams about you. That brought you back. What shall I call you? I can't keep on being a crumby racist and calling you Mr. Chan and Mr. Moto. It makes me ashamed of myself.”

“Call me Masao.”

“All right, Masao. Will you join me in a cup of tea?” She was quite serious. She was dressed now; her hair was combed; and Masuto liked her better than ever. He did not seek for reasons why. He allowed himself to like her because he liked her.

“I would be honored,” he said, bowing slightly. “May I revert to poor politeness? I would find nothing more refreshing than a cup of tea.”

She led him into her kitchen, and he was pleased by its cleanliness, by the fact of a modern refrigerator, a good electric stove, and a new vinyl floor. Obviously, the kitchen was all that she retained as her home. She brewed tea and sliced up a grocery store poundcake. But she did not offer him a drink of liquor or take one herself.

“I want you to know that I got an attitude toward cops,” she said. “I don't like cops. I think that's a healthy attitude, but that's from my point of view.”

“I understand. Why do you exclude me?”

“I don't know. Maybe because you don't seem to be a part of this lousy establishment. That's a nice word. When I was a kid, that word didn't exist for us. But it says something. Don't you agree?”

“It says something.”

“And you figure you'll come back here and start talking to me and maybe jog my memory and I'll remember about Samantha.”

“Possibly.”

“What do you want her for, Masao? When they put a high-class educated Beverly Hills cop like you on something, and you keep asking questions, then it must be pretty big. Does it connect up with Mike Tulley's murder?”

He watched her without answering.

“It's been on the radio. Look, sonny, everyone knows, but how you work that poor kid into it is more than I can take. Is the tea all right?”

“Fine.”

“No sugar?”

“No.”

“You know, I read a lot,” she said.

“That's a habit an actress gets into. To wait and wait, to be destroyed and frustrated endlessly—”

“How did you know I was an actress, Masao?”

“That's not such a brilliant guess in Hollywood, is it?”

“There are old bums in Hollywood who aren't actresses.”

“You're not an old bum,” he said sharply. “Don't lower yourself. Don't denigrate yourself.”

“Then don't play games with me, Masao.”

“You think I come here and taste your tea to play games with you? If you think that, then you are most mistaken.”

She regarded him thoughtfully and silently for a while, and during that time, he sipped his tea and said nothing. Then she tasted her own tea, and asked him, “You're not a Christian, are you?”

“No. I am a Buddhist.”

“That's different, isn't it?”

“Yes, quite different.”

“How?”

He shook his head and smiled.

“That's no answer.”

“How can I answer you?” he asked seriously.

“You can try.”

Masuto held out his hand above the table, the fingers spread. “To you, Mrs. Dolly Baker,” he said softly, “skin is something that separates a human hand, a human being from the rest of the universe. Is that so?”

She nodded.

“As I think, the skin connects me with the rest of the universe. Do you understand?”

For almost a full minute, she sat in silence; and then she said to him, “I told you before that I read a lot. You pick up odds and ends of things.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Like the expression the British have for it. They call it a ‘copper's nark.' That's good. It sounds like what it is. What do we call it? A fink? A stoolie?”

“I must know about Samantha. Human lives depend on that. Can you say that you will let anyone go to his death if you have the power to change it? Can you sit in judgement? Can you exercise the power of life and death?”