The Paul Cain Omnibus (31 page)

She glanced at Miss Laird and went on, “I think Mister Dreier is needlessly sacrificing himself because he saw Jack and me come out of the dressing rooms—and I was crying. Miss Sarin put me out of her room”—her voice broke a little—“and I think l should tell the police I was there and what happened and then Mister Dreier will feel free to clear himself.”

Something in the way she said it gave me all my reasons at once; either she was telling the truth or I was a Tasmanian watchmaker—which I wasn’t.

I said: “You sit tight and let things go the way they are for a little while and everything’ll be all right. I’ve got an idea.”

She agreed after a minute and went back across the street; I started the car and swung into Melrose and wished I had an idea.

Back at the hotel I asked the clerk who the guy who lived across the court from me was.

He said: “Hotaling—Francis J. Hotaling.” He’d lived there five days.

The name was familiar as hell. We went up to the room and fixed a drink and I beat my head against the wall a little bit trying to remember, and one of them worked. Hotaling was a fellow who had been pointed out to me by some of the boys around the Brown Derby as a “Connection.” That meant if you wanted anything on the mossy side of the Law—anything from square-cut emeralds to marihuana—he was the guy to see. He had a pan that looked like it had been through a wringer and worked in gangster pictures occasionally but his main racket was getting things for people who wanted them very badly—people who could pay—and he majored in dope.

So Mister Hotaling was pegged—and that wasn’t all. I called up Jacobsen, the assistant director. Hotaling had worked the last three days on
Death Song
. I told Jacobsen to meet me at the studio in an hour, hung up and said: “Dolores—you are about to see Pat Nolan, the great detective, at work. Fix us a drink.”

I jumped out to the elevator and sat on the button and had a long heart-to-heart talk with the elevator boy. He checked. When I went back to the room the phone was ringing. It was the Nick Galbraith Detective Agency. He wanted to know where he could find Miss Laird. I told him I’d just put her on a train for Kansas, and clicked the receiver and told Deep South to send up a waiter. The waiter showed up in a couple minutes and we ordered dinner.

Have you ever seen an angel eat oysters? It’s marvelous.

Bachmann said: “We can’t do it—it’s bad taste, with this terrible thing happening to Maya and all… .”

He and Jacobsen and Dolores and I were sitting in his office.

I did a fair imitation of staring at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Bad taste! Is it bad taste to nail the murderer? Is it bad taste to—”

Jacobsen interrupted: “I think it’s a swell idea.”

I took a bow.

“Why not give this information to the police—let them handle it?” Bachmann was gazing vacantly out the window.

“Because they’ll ruin it! Because our only hope is to force a quick confession before they know what’s hit ’em.” I stood up. “For God’s sake, Jack—where’s your showmanship?”

He swung around wearily, said: “All right—go ahead. But I think—”

I’d grabbed Dolores’ hand and we were on our way; we didn’t hear what Bachmann thought. Jacobsen pattered along behind us, ducked into his office and grabbed the phone.

By a quarter of twelve we had a complete night-crew on Stage Six. I’d told the chief carpenter what I wanted and prop-boys, grips, juicers, and what have you were scampering around like ants at a picnic.

We worked all night. I talked Dolores into taking a nap, which she probably faked; by daylight we had the whole layout working like a piece of well-oiled machinery. Jacobsen had called Mary Fallon, Sarin’s double and stand-in, and my other principals for six-thirty and when they got there we cleared the set and rehearsed for a couple hours and then knocked off for breakfast.

The general call was for nine-thirty. The idea that we circulated around was that we were going to start
Death Song
over as if nothing had happened, because we had to meet the release date—the old “The show must go on” gag.

I was taking over as director until Dreier came back and we were starting with a corner of one of the big sets with about thirty extras and four bit players. We were, according to the dope that I had everyone on the lot broadcasting, going to clean up all the big stuff first while we were trying to find a girl for the Sarin part.

At a little before nine-thirty I left the restaurant and dashed over to Stage Six. Everything was ready; Jacobsen had draped a collection of the toughest mugs in Hollywood along a wall that was supposed to be one end of a prison yard. They wore San Quentin rompers and they included Hammer and Francis J. Hotaling. Jacobsen had called both of them for bits, at seventy-five slugs a day.

I chinned with the cameraman a minute and sat down under the camera, nodded at Jacobson; he and his kickers yelled: “Quiet everybody!”

Bachmann was standing a little way back of me with a couple of other B.L.D. executives; Dolores was sitting on the arm of my chair with her elbow on my shoulder, which was exactly where her elbow should be.

I snapped in to the loudspeaker: “Gentlemen, as Mister Jacobsen has informed you, this is the scene where you look up and see the airplane that is signaling to someone in the prison. At first you are talking to each other, moving about, smoking. The sound of the airplane is your cue. When you hear it, look up—not all at once but a few at a time. Shall we rehearse it or do you all understand?”

They bobbed their heads in concert.

I put the loudspeaker down and said: “Turn ’em over.”

The soundman called the number and the assistant cameraman clicked his sticks, scuttled out of the scene. I lifted my right hand and the whole stage was plunged into pitch darkness.

It was entirely silent, entirely black; I felt Dolores’ hand tighten on my shoulder.

There was thin slithering sound and, suddenly, a little light. The wall had split, slid back, and we were all looking into an exact replica of Maya Sarin’s dressing room. The light grew in it as it grows when an electric dimmer is reversed, on a small stage. Everything else was in darkness.

Maya was sitting at her dressing room table staring drunkenly in the mirror. It was Mary Fallon, of course, but in those circumstances she looked more like Maya than Maya ever thought of. She was wearing the double of the costume Maya had been murdered in.

I expected a big triple-action gasp but I guess everyone who wasn’t in on it was too surprised to gasp, or didn’t have the wind for it. You could have heard a pin feather fall.

There was a knock at the dressing room door and Maya—I mean Mary—called “Come in,” huskily—with Maya’s voice. Hammer and Francis J. Hotaling came in. The makeup man had accomplished a miracle with those two; they were a couple old-timers that came nearer doubling Hammer and Hotaling than anyone else I could find in the files and they were dressed exactly as Hammer had been dressed when he and Ciretti crashed in on me, and as Hotaling had been dressed when he reached the studio.

Maya swung around and said: “Wha’ d’ yuh want?” and Hotaling put his hand in his pocket and answered: “We got that stuff for you.” Maya stood up and Hammer edged around behind her and picked up the vibrator and slammed her over the head. Then they both scurried out of the room and the lights dimmed and it was pitch dark again. And still—so still I could hear Dolores’ heart pounding beside me.

That went on for about a minute and then Hammer—the real Hammer—screamed. The lights came on and there was a lot of Law milling around and Hammer was still screaming.

We all sat in Bachmann’s office: Bachmann and Jacobsen and Dreier, who had been released, and the angel and I.

There was a knock at the door and Bachmann said: “Yes.” The secretary opened the door and Lawson, the dick from the Holly­wood Station, waltzed in.

He said: “Everything’s under control. Hammer thought we were going to hang the rap on him and squealed. We caught Ciretti in the bathtub. He’s been crazy mad at Maya for four or five days—ever since be caught her playing post office with his chauffeur—and getting crazier all the time. And he’s been scared, too. She’s been so high with alky and heroin and what-not she’s been shooting off her mouth about where she got it …”

“Which was from Hotaling, huh?—and Hotaling was Cirretti’s man?” I wanted to be sure about that.

Lawson nodded. “Uh-huh. Both of them, with Hammer, had decided what to do about it. Ciretti had Hotaling move into the room across from yours because he figured he could jockey Maya into going to your room and bump her off there and make it look like you did it. But Maya was sore at you and wouldn’t go for it.”

I said: “Isn’t that dandy.”

Lawson went on: “Ciretti and Hammer were there last night when Hotaling came in from the studio and said Maya and Dreier had had a battle on the set. That looked like gravy to Ciretti—he hurried over to the studio and went in the extra gate with Hotaling’s pass—they look a lot alike, anyway. He wanted to put the chill on her himself on account of the jealous angle. He smacked her down and then rushed back to the hotel. He could see you were in your room—across the court—and he suddenly had the bright idea of putting on that act for you—figuring it would double as an alibi and make it look like he was broken hearted over her death.”

And that was, in a manner of speaking, that.

Dreier and Dolores and I walked out towards the set together. Dreier kept looking at her in a very quaint way and finally he asked: “Have you ever worked in pictures, Miss Laird?”

She smiled sidewise at me, said: “Yes, a little.”

We all stopped and Dreier turned to me. “You know,” he you-knowed in a faraway voice, “we’ve got to replace Maya very quickly. What do you think of Miss Laird for the part?”

I said I thought she’d be swell, but I knew a better part that she’d fit even more perfectly. She and I grinned at each other like a couple of kids and Dreier looked at us wide-eyed for a minute and then turned quietly and walked away.

T
he man in the dark-brown camel’s hair coat turned east against the icy wind. Near First Avenue he cut diagonally across the deserted street towards an electric sign: Tony Maschio’s Day and Night Tonsorial Parlor.

A step or so beyond the sign, just outside the circle of warm yellow light from the shop, he stopped and put down the suitcase he was carrying, produced a cigarette and a lighter. He stood close to the building with his back to the wind, flicked the lighter several times without producing a flame, then turned back into the wind and went on towards First Avenue.

He forgot his suitcase. It sat in the darkness just under the corner of Tony’s plate-glass window and if anyone had been close enough to it they might have heard it ticking between screaming gusts of wind—merrily, or ominously, depending upon whether one took it for the ticking of a cheap alarm clock or the vastly more intricate and alarming tick of a time-bomb.

The man walked up First Avenue to Thirteenth. He got into a cab on the northwest corner, said, “Grand Central,” and leaned back and looked at his watch.

It was nine minutes after one.

At sixteen minutes after one Tony Maschio came out of the backroom, washed his hands, whistling a curiously individual version of “O Sole Mio,” and turned to grin cheerily at the big bald man who sat reading a paper with his feet propped up on the fender of the stove.

“You are next, Mister Maccunn,” he chirped brightly.

Tony Maschio looked like a bird, a white-faced bird with a bushy halo of black feathers on his head; he spoke with an odd twittering lilt, like a bird.

Maccunn folded his paper carefully and unfolded his big body as careful from the chair, stood up. He was about fifty-five, a very heavily built, heavily-jowled Scot with glistening shoe-button eyes, a snow-white walrus mustache.

He lumbered over and sat down in Number One Chair, observed in a squeaky voice that contrasted strangely with his bulk:

“It’s a cold, cold night.”

For eight years Maccunn had come to Tony’s every Friday night at around this time; for eight years his greeting, upon being invited into Tony’s chair, had been: “It’s a cold night,” or “It’s a hot night,” or “It’s a wet night,” or whatever the night might be. When it was any of these things to an extreme degree he would repeat the adjectives in honor of the occasion. Tony agreed that it was a “cold, cold night” and asked his traditional question in turn, with a glittering smile:

“Haircut?”

Maccunn did not have so much as a pin feather hair on his broad and shining head. He shook it soberly, as was his eight-year habit, closed his eyes, and Tony took up his shears and began trimming the enormous mustache with deft and graceful gusto.

Angelo, who presided over Number Two Chair, was industriously shaving the slack chin of a slight gray-faced youth in overalls. Giuseppe, Number Three, had gone out for something to eat. Giorgio, Number Four, was sitting in his chair, nodding over an ancient number of
The New Art Models Weekly
. There were no other customers in the shop.

At nineteen minutes after one the telephone rang.

Maschio put down his shears and comb and started to answer it.

Angelo said:

“If that’s for me, boss—tell her to wait a minute.”

Maschio nodded and put his hand out towards the receiver, and the telephone and wall came out to meet him, the whole side of the shop twisted and curled and was a smothering sheet of white flame, and pain. He felt his body torn apart as if it were being torn slowly and he thought “God!—please stop it!”—and then he didn’t feel any more, or think any more.

Maccunn raised his head once and looked down at the right side of his chest and it seemed curiously flat, curiously distant; he lowered his head and was still. Angelo moaned.

The wind was like an icy wall.

In the reporters’ room of the Ninth Precinct Police Station, Nick Green was playing cooncan with Blondie Kessler, when the Desk Sergeant yelled from the next room:

“Blondie! Pineapple at Tony Maschio’s Barber Shop on Seventh—nothin’ left but a grease spot!”

Kessler put his cards face down on the table and stood up slowly.

He said very simply: “Dear, sweet Jesus!”

Green looked up at him with elaborately skeptical disdain. “Every time I get a swell hand,” he muttered plaintively, “something happens so you have an excuse to run out on me.”

Kessler, moving towards the door, yipped: “Come on.”

Nicholas, sometimes “St Nick,” Green was thirty-six—with the smooth tanned skin, bright China-blue eyes of twenty, the snowy white hair of sixty. He was tall and slim and angular, and his more or less severe taste in clothes was violently relieved by a predilection for flaming red neckties.

His nickname derived from his rather odd ideas about philanthropy. He had been at one time or another a tent-show actor, a newspaperman, gambler, gun runner, private detective, and a few more ill-assorted what-nots, and that wide experience had given him decidedly revolutionary convictions as to who was deserving and who was not.

A stroke of luck combined with one of his occasional flashes of precise intuition had enabled him to snatch a fortune from a falling stock market and for three years he had used his money and the power it carried to do most of the things young millionaires don’t do. He numbered legmen, Park Avenue debutantes, pickpockets, touts, bank robbers and bank presidents, wardheelers, and international confidence men among his wide and varied circle of friends, and he had played Santa Claus to more than a few of them at one time or another. He found the devious twistings and turnings of politics, the complicated intrigues of the New York underworld exciting, spent more of his time in night courts than in nightclubs and was a great deal prouder of his accuracy with a Colt .45 than he was of his polo.

He got up and followed Blondie Kessler out of the reporters’ room and down the corridor. In his car—a black and shiny and powerful coupé—they careened around the corner and roared north. Green swerved to miss a sleepily meandering cab by inches, asked:

“Now, about this Maschio?”

Blondie was a police reporter on the
Star-Telegram
. His hair was as black as St Nick’s was white. He was a squat stocky Dutchman almost as broad as he was long and he had a habit of staccato, almost breathless expression, particularly when he was a little excited.

“Tony Maschio is—or was—Gino’s brother. He’s run a barbershop where a lot of the town’s big shots go to have their fringes trimmed for eleven or twelve years, an’ he’s been partners with Gino an’ Lew Costain in a high-powered gambling syndicate on the side. His shop was a little bit of a two-by-four joint, but Tony an’ his hand-picked barbers were artists and it was usually full of names from Wall Street or Park Row.”

Kessler was silent a moment; and Green invited: “And …”

“And—Bruce Maccunn, my Managing Editor, has been dropping in at Tony’s for a mustache trim an’ a mudpack every Friday night for as long as I can remember. I’ve located him there a half dozen times in the last two or three years—late Friday nights.”

Green whistled softly. “And …”

Kessler had no time to answer; the car slid to the curb across the street from the pile of smoking ruins that had been Maschio’s barbershop. In spite of the hour, the glacial wind, the usual gallery of morbidly curious had gathered. Several firemen, policemen, and an ambulance squad from the Emergency Hospital were industriously combing the debris of bricks and steel and charred wood.

Kessler was the first reporter on the scene; he scurried about from one to another after information. Green strolled over to join two men who were standing a little way down the street in earnest conversation. One of them was Doyle, a plainclothesman whom he knew slightly, and the other was a wild-eyed Italian who was explaining with extravagant gestures that if he hadn’t lingered in the corner lunchroom for a second cup of coffee he, too, would have been blown to bits. He, it appeared, was Giuseppe Picelli, Tony’s Number Three Barber, and he’d been on his way back to the shop when the explosion occurred.

Green jerked his head towards the heap of wreckage. “How many have they found?”

“Don’t know.” Doyle chewed his unlighted cigar noisily. “Most of ’em are in pieces—little pieces. We’ve identified Tony an’ one of his barbers, but there’s a lot of pieces left over. This guy”—he nodded at Picelli—“says Bruce Maccunn was there—came in jus’ before he left.”

Picelli bobbed his head up and down, jabbered excitedly: “Sure, Mister Maccunn came in as I went out—an’ there was another fellow—I don’t know him… . An’ Tony an’ Angelo an’ Giorgio… .”

“That all?” Green was blowing hard in his bare hands to warm them.

“That’s all were there when I left—but Gino an’ Mister Costain were coming over. Tony was expecting them… .”

Green and Doyle looked at each other.

Doyle grunted: “If Lew Costain got there for the blow-off it makes my job about eight hundred percent harder. I don’t guess there are more than eight hundred people in New York that’d like to see him in little pieces.”

Kessler galloped over. He was a little green around the mouth and eyes.

“Mac g-got it!” he stuttered. “They just dug him out—or wh-what’s­ left of him… .”

Doyle tried to light his cigar in the screaming wind. “Why did Gino Maschio an’ Costain get it,” he growled. “Maybe there’s not enough left of them to find out, but if Picelli here knows his potatoes they were in the shop or on their way to the shop—an’ if they were on their way they would’ve showed up by now.”

Kessler gurgled: “Where’s a telephone?”

“There’s one in the lunchroom around the corner on Second Avenue.” Picelli waved his arm dramatically.

A police car, its siren moaning shrilly, pulled up and a half dozen assorted detectives piled out.

Kessler grabbed Green’s arm, shouted, “Come on, Nick—I gotta telephone an’ I wanna talk to you.” They hurried towards Second Avenue.

Green grinned down at the tugging, puffing reporter.

“You look like a crazed bloodhound,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got another one of those red-hot Kessler theories.”

“Theory my eye! I’ve got the whole business—the whole bloody shebang!”

“Uh-huh.” Green’s grunt was elaborately incredulous.

Kessler snorted. “Listen, John Sallust was released from Atlanta three days ago!”

“So what?”

Kessler’s mouth made an amazed O. “So what! So Bruce Maccunn was the man who rode Sallust—in the paper—an’ finally stuck him for the Arbor Day Parade bombing nearly five years ago. So Sallust swore by the beards of Marx and Lenin he’d get Maccunn. So, after a half dozen appeals and new trials and whatnot he finally got a commutation and what does he do but make good and plant a pineapple under the man who put him behind the bars!”

They turned the corner.

Green murmured softly: “Blondie, my child—you’re just as dippy as a bedbug—an especially dippy bedbug.”

Kessler stopped suddenly, stood with his arms expressively outstretched and said:

“For the love of God—do you mean to tell me you don’t get it? Maccunn, more than anyone else, or all the rest of ’em put together, hung that rap on Sallust. The Government wanted to drop the case on insufficient evidence, but Maccunn hated radicals like poison an’ wouldn’t let ’em. His editorials yelled about corruption and anarchy and it finally worked. What’s more natural than Sallust wanting to wipe Maccunn as soon as he got out?”

Green shook his head slowly. “Nothing’s more natural,” he admitted. “Only I happen to know Sallust a little and he’s much too bright a guy to do anything like this three days after he’s sprung—or any other time.”

Kessler’s mouth flattened to a thin, sarcastic line.

“I followed his case very closely,” Green went on, “and he was railroaded if anybody ever was. He’s really a swell guy who has his own ideas about the way the country should be run. I’ll bet he never saw a bomb in his life.”

“Nuts.” Kessler half turned. “It all fits like a glove. He’s an anarchist an’ those boys say it with dynamite. He couldn’t blow up the whole paper—that was too big an order—and Maccunn never lit long enough at his home for that to be practical, but he went to Tony Maschio’s every Friday night between twelve-thirty and one-thirty. It’s open and shut.”

Green smiled sadly, shook his head, murmured: “Mostly shut.”

“That’s my story an’ I’ll stick to it.” Kessler turned and went into the lunchroom.

Green walked slowly back towards his car, whispered into the wind:

“An especially dippy bedbug.”

The hands of the big clock over the information desk pointed to one forty-one. The great concourse of Grand Central Station was speckled with the usual scattered crowd.

On the wide balcony above the west side of the concourse, the man in the dark-brown camel’s hair coat who had forgotten his suitcase in front of Tony Maschio’s walked slowly back and forth. The collar of his coat was turned up and his hands were thrust deep in his pockets; his large dark eyes were fixed on Gate Twenty-Seven, which led to the one-forty-five Boston train, and his head turned slowly as he walked back and forth.

He was a powerfully built man of uncertain age and as much of his face as could be seen above the heavy coat collar was unnaturally flushed.

Suddenly he stopped pacing and leaned forward against the marble balustrade. He had caught sight of a man of about his own build and coloring—moving swiftly across the concourse. The man’s most striking features were the grace with which he moved and his bright yellowish-green velour hat. He flashed a ticket in front of the conductor and disappeared through Gate Twenty-Seven.

The man in the dark-brown coat hurried down the great stairway, across to one of the ticket windows. When he turned away he held a little piece of pasteboard and he strode with it through Gate Twenty-Seven. He walked the length of the train to the first coach back of the baggage car and swung aboard.

He found the man he was looking for in the smoking car of the third Pullman back. There was no one else in the smoking room; the porter was making up a berth at the other end of the car.