The Paul Cain Omnibus (35 page)

One thing that worried me was how Mel had come out to Bel-Air. If he’d been by himself what had happened to his car? If he’d come in a cab I figured the driver would report it as soon as the story broke and that would complicate Amante’s theory a little.

The coroner and his outfit finally got there and checked perfectly with Amante. Fritz had been beaten to death—the leg wound was superficial—and Mel had died from a slug from the same gun high in the chest, shattering the breastbone and lodging in the spine.

I didn’t get home until about two-thirty. I still had to call Barbara Kiernan at Palm Springs and tell her the bad news. I hated that job because I knew she’d take it big—tear her hair and wring her hands and whatnot. She was that kind of gal, a hair tearer. I decided to put off calling till morning, and then after I got into bed I thought what the hell, I might just as well get it over with.

The cook had given me Maude Foley’s number in Palm Springs. Maude was Barbara’s sidekick and had a house down there where Barbara spent most of her weekends. I called long distance and finally got a sleepy “Hello” from Maude. That was a break—her answering instead of Barbara. I told her what had happened in as few words as possible and told her to tell it to Barbara any way she thought best. I got to sleep a little after three.

Amante called me at eleven-thirty in the morning and asked if I could stop by the station about one. Next to grave-yards and hospitals I like police stations least so I suggested we meet at the Biltmore and have lunch and he said okay.

Maude Foley called a little later and said she and Barbara were out at the house and that Barbara was pretty badly broken up. I promised to stop by later in the afternoon.

I drove out to Number Two in Beverly and told the housemen to soft pedal talking about Fritz’s murder; the morning papers were full of the case and there’d be plenty of talk without our own men joining the chorus. Then I stopped by the place in Holly­wood on the way downtown and suggested the same thing to the boys there.

I was about ten minutes late at the Biltmore and found Amante in the grill with a long skinny shiny-haired guy who he introduced as Arthur Delavan of the Department of Justice.

Amante wanted to know all about Fritz—what he’d done back east, who his enemies were and why, that kind of thing. I gave him all I could, which wasn’t much. Fritz had hustled a string of books in New York and Boston, same as Hollywood, only on a smaller scale. As far as I knew he didn’t have an enemy in the world. And so on.

Delavan didn’t have much to say. I finally asked how come he was interested in a case that was so strictly local and he said he wasn’t particularly interested, he’d just come along for the ride, or words to that effect. I said “Oh, I see” out loud, but to myself I said “Nuts, baby—you’re
plenty
interested.”

Amante said he had several men working on Mel Raymond and he wouldn’t be surprised if something important turned up during the afternoon. They hadn’t been able to get a line on the gun because the numbers had been filed off and there weren’t any fingerprints.

He finally got around to the most important piece of evidence that had turned up so far: Mrs Bergliot, the Kiernan cook, had admitted that she thought she’d heard a woman’s voice in the living room after she’d gone to bed. That was all they could get out of her. She didn’t recognize the voice and she said she might have been dreaming. I wondered why she hadn’t told me about it.

Amante watched me very closely while he was telling me about Mrs Bergliot and so did Delavan. I began to feel pretty uncomfortable but I don’t think I showed it.

After lunch we left each other with a hey nonny-nonny and assurances of mutual cooperation and I drove out Wilshire doing a lot of wondering. I’d about decided to call up Myra and tell her to sail her own boat, to go down and tell Amante her story and see if he believed it, when I turned off Wilshire on Crescent Heights Boulevard to cut over to the apartment. There’s very little traffic on Crescent Heights that far south and it saves a lot of time.

In the second block a dark blue roadster came up from behind and passed and when it was a few feet ahead somebody opened up on me with an automatic. I think it was an automatic—I only had a split second flash of it. The first shot made a neat hole in the windwing and thudded into the seat near my shoulder. I jerked the wheel as hard as I could and heard two more shots bite into the side of the car as it bounced up over the curb, across a lawn, and stopped within inches of the front door of a pink stucco house.

I leaned out and watched the roadster go north like a bat out of hell. Then I got out and looked at the holes in the side of the car. The people who lived in the pink house were evidently not at home; a couple neighbors strolled over to watch me maneuver the car back on to the street. I guess they thought I was drunk and that the car had backfired when it went out of control; they didn’t crack about any shooting.

Outside of the damage to the car it’d accomplished one thing very definitely: I’d decided what to do about Myra. Fritz murdered and somebody trying to murder me meant an entirely new angle—one that certainly didn’t have anything to do with the Mel-Myra combination.

I drove a few blocks and stopped at a drug store and called and told Myra Amante was working on Mel and would probably get to her before long and for her to sit tight. She said she’d been trying to get me at home: her colored maid knew Mel had been at her house Friday night and had probably overheard some of the battle. She wanted to know whether she should give the maid a couple month’s salary, or what.

I told her that if she did she’d be paying off blackmail when she had a long gray beard, and if they picked her up to play dumb—which shouldn’t be hard—because no one would believe her story and it would only get her jammed up so tight that no one could get her out of it.

Then I called Amante. After talking to about half a dozen assorted assistants I finally got him and said: “Somebody tried to shoot me on Crescent Heights Boulevard about ten minutes ago—three slugs in my new car. Who do I charge it to?”

He said: “That’s very interesting.”

I told him it was not only interesting, it was assault with intent to do great bodily harm and I didn’t like it. I asked if it changed his theory any and he said it didn’t. I gave him a description of the roadster and that was that.

Then I stopped at the place in Hollywood and picked up Harry Gaige. He’d been a sort of protection-man for Fritz for a long time, had the reputation of being fast and accurate with anything from a water-pistol to an elephant-gun. I figured if strangers were taking potshots it would be a good idea for him to travel around with me for a while. I told him about it on the way out to the Kiernan house.

Maude Foley let us in. She said she’d loaded Barbara with bromides and she’d quieted down; she was upstairs trying to sleep. I told Maude all there was to tell, except about Myra, and tried to get angles from her but she didn’t have any. I wanted something—anything—to work on; I knew I’d get some kind of a lead sooner or later but I wanted it to be sooner.

We had a few drinks and tried to figure out who would want to knock off both Fritz and me, and why, but we didn’t get very far. When we left it was about a quarter of five. The newsboys were yelling their heads off at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard; we bought a paper and there it was in three-inch headlines: ACTRESS ARRESTED IN KIERNAN MURDER.

They’d picked up Myra and her maid, and the maid had evidently talked enough to last any five ordinary women the rest of their lives. They were holding Myra incommunicado charged with practically everything in the book.

Amante got a great spread as the hero of the occasion, the man who had solved the great Bel-Air Murder Mystery; the story was a little lean on exactly what his “solution” was, exactly what had happened, but it said he “broadly hinted” a complete case with all the details and “sensational developments” within a few hours.

Harry read the story to me as we rolled on down Wilshire—I was driving as fast as I could without taking chances on a pinch—and after he’d finished he was quiet for a minute and then he croaked: “That guy Amante hates publicity, don’t he?”

Amante wasn’t in his office; I located Moore and he said he guessed Amante was still working on the Reid woman. I said I wanted to help him work on her and Moore said it couldn’t be done but when I indicated in a few well chosen words how invaluable my services would be he had a sudden attack of smartness and got me a pass.

I told Harry to wait. He looked around at all the Law and asked wistfully if I minded if he waited in the pool hall across the street and I said it was all right and went up to the jail.

Myra’s face lit up like a Christmas tree when she looked up and saw me grinning at her through the bars. The grin was about ninety percent phoney but she didn’t know that. The maid’s story made it impossible for her to keep up the clam act—she’d have to talk.

Amante didn’t act so gay about the interruption at first but when the screw unlocked the cell door and I went in and sat down on the cot beside Myra and said, “Okay, baby—Now that we’re all here you can tell Mister Amante what really happened,” he entered into the spirit of the thing and got just as happy as a lark. I guess he’d been giving her the works without getting a word out of her; he didn’t ask how or why or how many, it was enough for him that somebody could make her open up.

I said: “First, before Miss Reid begins—I told her not to talk if she was picked up because I’m convinced she had nothing to do with the murders and I want her to get a break.”

Amante and the big copper with him glanced at each other but didn’t say anything.

I smiled at Myra, went on to Amante: “Are you willing to forget your theory for a minute and listen to her side of it and give her all you can?”

The big fella grunted something about “obstructing justice”—I don’t think he was very fond of me—but Amante grinned and whinnied: “Sure… . sure… .”

I leaned forward, smiled my sweetest smile and finished like a Dutch Uncle: “Fritz Kiernan was my partner and one of my best friends. I intend to find out who really killed him. This kid,” I nodded at Myra, “is gummed up enough without hanging a rap that won’t stand up on her because it fits in with a theory. Give me a little time and I’ll hand over the parties that killed Fritz, and Raymond, and tried to kill me this afternoon.”

Amante said, “Sure—sure,” again.

I gave Myra the office and she went into her version of Friday night. She told it just about the way she’d told it to me. It didn’t sound quite so good with Amante and the big lug giving her the fishy eye all the time but it still sounded like the truth—to me.

When she got to the part about coming out to the Kiernan house after she came to, and about me telling her to duck, Amante looked at me as if I’d betrayed him and all his family and then finished by stealing his rollerskates.

He gurgled in a voice practically trembling with heartbreak: “What did you want to do that to
me
for?”

I kept from laughing in his face by a hair, shook my head. “I didn’t want to do anything to you—I wanted to give an innocent girl the only chance she had to avoid getting tied up with this.”

Myra went on with her story and when she finished, Amante sat staring at her with a dead pan for a minute or two and then got up and he and his boyfriend and I went back down to his office. I winked at Myra and patted her shoulder and she gave me a big smile before we left.

There were five or six reporters in the corridor outside the office. They ganged around Amante when we got out of the elevator and he said he’d have something for them in a few minutes.

He mumbled, “Sit down, Mister Finn,” when we went into the office and waved at a chair, and he sat down at his desk and rifled through some papers and scribbled a few notes. Then he looked up at the big copper and said, “Let those boys in.”

The reporters draped themselves around the room and Amante leaned back and smiled at them like an alderman the night before election.

“Well, boys,” he cooed tenderly, “here it is… . The Reid woman owed Kiernan and Finn nearly four thousand dollars and couldn’t pay off. She liked Kiernan pretty well so she figured she might as well combine business and pleasure and last night she called him to make a date. His wife had gone out of town so he told her to come on out to the house… .”

Amante leaned forward and opened a drawer and took a thick yellow cigar out of a box. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth and squinted across the end of it at me for a fraction of a second, went on:

“She was all set to leave for Kiernan’s around nine-thirty when Raymond, who’s been running around with her for several months, dropped in unexpectedly. She’s been up to the neck with Raymond for some time—they’ve battled practically every time he’s been at the house for the past two weeks. Her maid will testify to that.”

He glanced at me again and slid the cigar to the other corner of his mouth.

“She told Raymond where she was going and he objected and she got mad and they went round and round. They were still at it at twenty after ten when the maid left to go home. Finally Raymond, crazy with jealousy, ran out of the house and jumped in his car and started for Kiernan’s. She followed him in her car. He had a big Duesenberg—we found it this afternoon parked on the highway below Kiernan’s house—and he beat her there by a few minutes… .”

Amante stopped to light his cigar. He didn’t look at me any more but went on to the reporters:

“Kiernan was out on the porch taking the air, or maybe Raymond called him out. Raymond stood in the driveway and shot at Kiernan twice; the first shot missed and the second nicked his leg. Kiernan ran into the house and called Mister Finn”—he waved his hand airily in my general direction—“and said, ‘Somebody took a shot at me.’ About that time Miss Reid arrived and Raymond had to make good; or maybe she got there after he’d followed Kiernan into the house. Anyway, Raymond dragged Kiernan away from the phone and beat him with the butt of the gun and then threw the gun down and finished by kicking his skull in. Miss Reid probably tried to stop him—I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt—and then she saw the gun and picked it up, and when Raymond started to go she shot him… .”