Way of a Wanton (22 page)

I looked around. I'd made an impression, all right. If there were a hundred people here, a hundred people were staring at me. One little blonde sweetheart saw me looking at her, put both hands over her mouth, and giggled behind them, going up the scale like Margaret Truman. I believe I blushed. Hell, I know I blushed.
 

I said to Raul, “Tell me, how badly did I louse everything up?”
 

“Not too much,” he reassured me. “L.G. had a fit, but that's not unusual. We'll still make out O.K. Actually, we can still use the footage we shot.” He chuckled. “Most of it, I mean.”
 

He chuckled some more at me, and it's a sad commentary on my mental state at that moment that it wouldn't be until much later that I would realize exactly what he was chuckling about. “Something else, Raul. You see two gorillas around? A couple of strangers? Anybody drive up in a car in the last hour or so?”
 

He shook his head. “Nobody. No car, no nothing.”
 

It was the answer I'd expected. Two torpedoes would hardly advertise their presence, and they were undoubtedly long gone now. I wondered how they'd known I was here. I hadn't been tailed from town, I knew. The logical answer was that somebody here had phoned from the diner
after
I showed up. Things seemed to be coming to a head.
 

“Raul, anybody make a phone call from the diner since—in the last few hours?”
 

“God knows.” His brow furrowed as he got what I was driving at. “You mean—”
 

“Yeah. Scott's here; come shoot him.”
 

He nibbled at his mustache. “Could have been anybody, Shell. Everybody's been wandering around part of the time. Most of us had lunch at the diner. Tell you one thing:
I
didn't phone anybody.” He paused and asked, still frowning, “You really had some shots taken at you?”
 

“Any number. I got one slice across the back, but otherwise I was lucky. I guess I was lucky. Well, it appears I've done all I can for one afternoon.” I looked at my watch. It was already after four P.M. “Think I'll take off, Raul.”
 

He grinned. “We're almost finished for the day. Be through before long. You ought to stick around. Next take is the big one where King swings through the trees. That's the last, and then we knock off.”
 

I winced. “I don't think I could bear to watch. But thanks. You can tell me how it comes out.”
 

I turned and walked back to my car, a mass of scratches and welts and bruises, some of them mental. The worst spot was where the bullet had burned across my back, but it wasn't bleeding any more and I figured it would wait till I could have a doc pretty it up at my leisure. I started the motor and drove to the diner. The phone booth was outside, and the people inside didn't even know what was on the menu.
 

I headed back toward town, but I wasn't even in good shape for driving, and I had a hunger that was kin to starvation. So I stopped at the first clean-looking restaurant and tore into a rare sirloin steak. Over coffee I thought about the case from its beginning until now. I'd talked to everyone who seemed important in the case—though I hadn't chatted very freely with King—and I had quite a bit of miscellaneous information even if I didn't know what to do with it.
 

I lit a cigarette and smoked it, frowning. I hadn't checked in with my client, Bondhelm, today, and I thought about him for a few minutes. He was going to be pleased with his choice of a detective when the latest news reached him. I'd considered almost everybody I'd run across in the case as conceivably being the murderer; how about the slimy Bondhelm? He stood to gain one hell of a lot from monkey-wrenching the movie, but I failed to see how strangling Zoe would help him. Furthermore, Bondhelm hadn't even been at Raul's that night. If it wasn't somebody at the Thursday night party, it could have been almost anybody.
 

Now I was cooking: It was Zoe's childhood sweetheart from Podunk; he'd followed her to Raul's and strangled her when she didn't recognize him wearing a mustache. I jabbed at my cigarette and scowled at it. Everything pointed to one of the people at Raul's as the murderer, but I couldn't entirely eliminate somebody from the outside. Oh, this was great; I was a Jim-dandy detective. Now I had it narrowed down to the world.
 

I sat at the table for a while longer, getting more and more depressed. If I kept going down at this rate I'd wind up psychotic. I didn't have one solid lead I could single out to put my finger on, but that was only half of it. I'd apparently done my best to sabotage “Jungle Girl,” nothing was settled between King and me, Fanny the Fat Girl was roasting me to a crisp brown, Genova was ready to clap me in jail, people were still trying hard to kill me, probably nine-tenths of the “Jungle Girl” people figured I was not off my trolley but clear off the tracks, and both mentally and physically I felt like garbage. I was searching for one tiny ray of light when I remembered I was, at least, a stockholder in “Jungle Girl.” At least I had that.
 

And that was the one that just about finished me. Finally the full significance of the pandemonium I'd caused on location hit me, and Raul's chuckling about salvaging
most
of the footage became horribly apparent. I wasn't only a stockholder in “Jungle Girl"; I was
in
the damn picture.
 

I groaned, sagged a little lower in my seat, and groaned some more. Well, I could always tear up my license and go to Sherry's for consolation. That perked me up enough to get up from the table and pay my check. Then I remembered I hadn't left a tip. The hell with it; let the waiter be sore at me, too. I stopped at a phone booth on the way out, dialed City Hall and asked for Captain Samson in Homicide. There, at least, was one constant factor: While I was getting shot at and running through jungles, the efficient organization of the Los Angeles Police Department—one of the most efficient in the United States—was inexorably sifting a mass of details about Zoe and everybody even remotely connected with the case. Names, dates, backgrounds, records, the works. Might be Samson would have something he could pass on to me. Maybe the case was closed and I could buy a bottle of gin and a sack of oranges and head for Sherry's.
 

When Samson came on I said, “This is Shell. How's it going?”
 

“So-so. Is that you? You sound sick.”
 

“I'm O.K. Must have been something I drank.”
 

“Or read.” He laughed uproariously. “I see you got your name in the paper again. One of the
myriad
local—”
 

“Lay off, Sam. You should know that lousy Fanny has eggs for brains.”
 

Sam could always sense my mood pretty well. “O.K., genius. What you want? Bail money?”
 

“Not yet, but soon, maybe. Frankly, Sam, you've seen me in some pretty screwy situations in the last few years, but I don't think I've ever been screwed up like now.” I briefed him on this lovely day and answered his questions. Finally I asked him, “You getting any dope on the Zoe business? I could use something.”
 

“Just odds and ends, Shell.” He rumbled on, his voice slightly muffled by the cigar undoubtedly in his kisser, telling me a few things the routine had come up with: Zoe was born in Kansas City—that let out the suitor from Podunk—and King didn't have a chance now in his custody case. That didn't bring tears to my eyes. Sam went on, saying that Sherry had worked for an advertising executive before starting with Louis Genova Productions about a year back. He kept talking while I listened with about half my mind, which under the circumstances was not much mind at all, and then something he'd said roused me a little bit, started me working my way back up from bottom again.
 

“What was that one, Sam? About Oscar Swallow?”
 

“Huh? Oh, he didn't write that book of his, that ‘Savage Christian' thing. Like I said, we talked to this Paul Jarvis that wrote it for him—ghosted it, he said. That happened over two years ago. Jarvis got practically nothing out of it; wasn't too happy. But we had to talk to him quite a spell to get it all out; seems it was a point of honor with him to keep it under his hat. Not cricket to talk about it, he said.”
 

“He ghosted the book for Swallow? Well...” I let it trail off, wondering about this new angle. I'd never cottoned to Swallow and his fake British accent, his borrowed witticisms, his studied and almost artistic dress, and now it appeared that in addition to everything else he was one of what I've always thought of as “The Brain Pickers.” The sonofabitch.
 

Sam was saying, “That little gal with the shape was down here earlier. The one you phoned me about.”
 

“Sherry? Lola Sherrard?”
 

“Yeah. Told her the same thing, Shell. She seemed as interested as you. What's the angle?”
 

“I'm not sure yet. Sam, you bring her down? She didn't come by herself, did she?”
 

“We picked her up. Took her home, too. She seems to think you've got something I never been able to see in you.”
 

“How long ago was that, Sam? When did she leave?”
 

“I dunno. Maybe half an hour.” He talked about the case a little longer, then I thanked him, told him I'd be down to make the crime report, and hung up. My depression was rapidly leaving me now, and the more I thought about what Sam had told me, the more ideas crowded into my brain. An idea, a hunch, almost a hope swelled inside me as I put this with what I already knew about Swallow: the kind of guy he was, Zoe working for him at the studio, her pregnancy, Swallow's crying that Zoe had killed herself. I fished another coin from my pocket and dialed Sherry's number, my brain starting to click.
 

The phone buzzed while I tried to reconcile Swallow's apparently perfect alibi for Zoe's murder with what looked like a beautiful motive. A double motive, at that.
 

The phone buzzed again and for a moment fear started building in me again as I remembered the last time I'd called Sherry only to receive no answer.
 

Then the phone was lifted and her soft voice said, “Hello?”
 

“Sherry? This is Shell. I've got something. Maybe.”
 

“Oh, Shell. I've been trying to reach you, but I didn't know where you were. I was just leaving.”
 

“Leaving? What—”
 

“Shell, I know who killed Zoe. I
know!
”
 

"
Yeah, well, I—”
 

“It was Oscar Swallow. Just like I told you right at first. Shell, he didn't write ‘The Savage Christian.' I haven't time to explain it all, but I figured the rest out after I got home. He hasn't written anything—not even the scripts for ‘Jungle Woman' or ‘Jungle Girl.' Don't you see what that means?”
 

“Yeah, I think so. What do you mean you haven't
time
to explain?” Something was screwy; something I couldn't pin down was bothering me.
 

Sherry went rattling on, breathless and excited, spilling the words out in a rush. “Shell, Swallow stole both the stories for both his screen plays. That's why Zoe had a ‘Jungle Girl' shooting script here. I got to wondering why Zoe would have those old pulp magazines in the house—you know, the one with the cover—and that's where Swallow stole his stories. He just stole them; lifted them right out of the magazines. He changed them a little, and by the time they were in shooting script they were practically different stories. Don't you see? That's what Zoe was going to tell everybody at the party.
That's
why he killed her.”
 

She stopped, presumably for a breath, and I said, “This is coming at me pretty fast. It makes sense, but—”
 

She interrupted me. “Shell, I've got to run. I tried to reach you, but when I couldn't I phoned location and told Genova about Swallow, and why Oscar had killed Zoe.”
 

“You what?”
 

“He was awfully nice to me. He complimented me and told me to come up to location and bring the magazines and everything. He's called the police already and said he was setting a trap for Swallow. Shell, isn't it wonderful?”
 

“I guess. I don't know for sure. You're a little ahead of me.” I was trying to digest all this. It would appear that while I was narrowing the suspects down to the world, little Sherry had been wrapping up the case. Possibly it was time I got another job. Maybe I'd go to Mexico and raise opium. I could smoke it and dream I was a detective.
 

I said, “Slow down a minute, honey. What if Swallow should try something? It might not be healthy for you.”
 

“Silly,” she said, “the police will be there. Now I've got to run. I should have left ten minutes ago. You come over here and wait for me, Shell.”
 

“Now, wait a minute, sweetness. You positive it was Genova you talked to? You sit—Hey, Sherry!”
 

She'd hung up. Damn it, I hadn't got this squared away yet. And that something I hadn't pinned down was still bothering me. I hung up, went out to the Cad, and started driving slowly toward Sherry's. It was ten minutes till six P.M.
 

When I turned into Cypress Avenue I still hadn't figured out how the hell Swallow could have killed Zoe. I'd checked him up and down, and he was the only one at the party who
couldn't
have done it. I could see how he might conceivably have lifted a couple of plots from an old, folded magazine, changed Martian greebles to African apes and switched them around a little, then put them through the idiotic Hollywood mill that twisted them inside out before they became sneak previews. And, remembering the red-penciled script I'd examined at location, I could see how he might even have got away with it. But if the guy had any sense at all, he must have known he couldn't go on like that indefinitely, that he'd have to expect trouble someday.