Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 18, No. 5, May 1973

Bad Actor by Gary Brandner

A dose of one’s own medicine, however bad, may be better than nothing.

Young would-be actors filled the waiting room of the Bowmar Talent School. They paced the carpet or perched on the chairs, sizing up the competition. I walked through the crowd to the reception desk and gave the girl my phony name.

“I’m Alan Dickens. I’d like to enroll in an acting course.”

The girl smiled without really looking at me and answered in a voice like a recorded message. “Fill out an application and leave it in this basket. You will be called for an interview.”

I took a blank form from a stack on her desk and went over to a table where a couple of beach-boy types were struggling with their spelling. In this room full of eager kids I felt about a hundred years old.

I had felt much younger the day before when I rang the doorbell at Frank Legrand’s house in San Gabriel, where the suburban greenery was a refreshing change from my dull office.

Legrand himself answered the door. A narrow-shouldered man in his mid-forties, he wore a dark business suit and a worried expression.

“Thank you for coming out, Dukane,” he said. “I... I’ve never done business with a private detective before.”

“Not many people have,” I told him.

After inviting me in, he got on with the business. “As I told you on the phone, I want you to investigate this Bowmar Talent School.”

“You said your wife and daughter were involved,” I prompted.

“Yes. A month ago Tina, that’s my daughter, acted a small part in her high school play. A couple of nights later a man from this Bow-mar outfit came to the house and said he’d seen Tina’s performance, and wanted to enroll her at the talent school. I was against it, but Tina got all excited and Esther, my wife, said it couldn’t hurt to go down and talk to them. So the next day she and Tina drove into Hollywood, and both signed up for acting lessons. The cost seemed way out of line to me, and it sounded like those people had made some questionable promises about putting Esther and Tina into the movies.”

“If you think there’s fraud involved you ought to get the police in on it.” I lit a cigarette and looked around for an ash tray.

Legrand jumped up and said, “Here, let me get you something.” He left the room for a minute and came back with a china saucer. “You can use this. When Esther and I quit smoking she threw out all the ash trays in the house so we wouldn’t be tempted.”

I took the saucer from him and dropped my burnt match into it.

He said, “I don’t really have anything to go to the police with — just a feeling. Anyway, I don’t care about prosecuting these people. The important thing to me is my wife and daughter. I don’t want them to get their hopes built up and then be hurt.”

Legrand’s eyes strayed to a pair of silver-framed photographs on the mantel. One was a dark-haired woman with dramatic eyes. The other was a pretty teen-ager with a face unmarked by emotion or intelligence.

“What makes you suspect that the school isn’t on the level?” I asked, tapping ashes into the saucer.

After a moment Legrand said, “Dukane, I love my wife and daughter. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for them. But I know them both very well, and believe me, they are not, and never will be actresses.”

I had accepted a retainer then and gone home to prepare for my entry into show business.

Now I waited in the lobby of the Bowmar Talent School while the receptionist worked her way down through the completed forms to mine. Then I almost blew the cue by not reacting when she called my new name. When the girl repeated it, I came to and hurried up to the desk.

“Miss Kirby will talk to you,” she said, indicating a tall female seemingly made of styrofoam and vinyl.

I followed Miss Kirby through a short hallway with several doors opening off of it, and into a small office with walls the color of cantaloupe. She sat down and I took a chair facing her.

“Well, Alan,” she said, scanning my application form, “so you want to become an actor, I see.”

“I hope so,” I said bashfully.

Miss Kirby leaned toward me, and the shadow of a frown marked her plastic features. “I hope you won’t take offense, but you are just a tiny bit, er, mature to be starting out on an acting career.”

My face stretched into what I hoped was a boyish grin. “I suppose I am starting a little late, but I just decided last month to have a fling at it. If it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to the bank.”

“Bank?” Miss Kirby’s interest picked up.

“My father owns a bank back home in Seattle. I’ll have to take it over eventually, but in the meantime I’d like to try what I’ve always wanted to do — acting. Unless you think it would be a waste of time.”

Her tiny frown erased itself. “You know, Alan, now that I look at you more closely, I think you’re just the type the studios are looking for these days. There are plenty of handsome juveniles around, but rugged leading men are hard to find. Yes, you’re definitely the Burt Lancaster-Kirk Douglas type.”

I lowered my eyes modestly.

“Come along now and we’ll get some pictures of you.”

“You want pictures of me?”

“Right. To send around to the studios and agencies. You want to get your face known in the business as soon as possible.”

“Oh, sure,” I agreed.

Miss Kirby led me across the hall and into a room where a man with orange hair and a big nose sat gloomily smoking a cigarette behind a desk. Photographic equipment cluttered the room, which smelled faintly of developer.

“This is Lou Markey,” Miss Kirby said as she left me. “He’ll take good care of you.”

“Have a seat,” Markey said, studying me without enthusiasm.

I put on an eager look and returned his gaze. There was something familiar about the bright little eyes, the comical nose, and the orange hair of the photographer. He used the glowing stub of his cigarette to light another, then jammed the butt into an overflowing ash tray. He offered the pack to me, but I saw they were triple-filter menthols and declined.

“Your nose is going to give us trouble,” Markey said.

“It’s been broken a couple of times,” I admitted.

“They can straighten it, I suppose, but it won’t help us now with the photos.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Markey sighed wearily. “Don’t worry. I can light you so it doesn’t look too bad, and later I can hit it with an airbrush.”

“That’s good,” I said, feeling foolishly relieved.

He stood up and walked around the desk. “Let’s get you over here by the curtain first.”

When I saw the up-and-down bouncing motion of his walk I knew why he was familiar.

I said, “Are you Beano Markey, by any chance?”

He smiled for the first time. “Thanks for the present tense. Most people ask if I used to be Beano Markey.”

“It was the early fifties, wasn’t it, when you made your movies?”

“That’s when it was. I must have been in two dozen low-budget teen-age epics. I was the comical kid who always lost his pants at the prom.”

“Do you do any acting now?”

“Not since my voice changed. Of course, the critics said I didn’t do much acting then either, the ones who bothered to review those pictures. And they were right. I never could fake reactions that I didn’t feel, so I was always playing myself — the comical, clumsy high school kid.”

Markey sat me down in front of a dark curtain, told me to turn this way and that, look up, look down, while he snapped away with a small, expensive-looking camera and kept up a low-key conversation.

“You seem like a fairly intelligent guy,” he said at one point. “Why do you want to be an actor?”

The question surprised me. “I don’t know, I guess it seemed like it would be fun and exciting.”

“Yeah, exciting,” Markey said in a flat voice. “Let me tell you something—”

Whatever he was going to tell me was interrupted when the door burst open and a young man with a thousand-watt smile bounced in.

“Hello there,” he said, “you must be Alan Dickens. I’m Rex Bowman, president of Bowmar. How are you coming, Lou?”

“I just got started,” Markey grumbled.

“You can finish up later,” Bowman said airily. Then he turned to me. “Miss Kirby has been telling me about you, Alan. Let’s walk on down to my office and we’ll lay out a program for you.”

He hustled me out of the photographer’s room and into a large office walled with pictures of show business celebrities. A mountain of a man with blond curls was just leaving as we entered. Bowman took a seat behind an acre of desk and pushed a legal form across the polished surface toward me.

“That’s our standard contract,” Bowman said. He lit a long greenish cigar and blew the smoke toward the ceiling where an air-conditioner sucked it out.

I ran my eyes down the paragraphs of fine print and saw that the contract implied much, but promised little.

“What’s this ‘career assistance’?” I asked, pointing to a line near the bottom.

“We make every effort to launch our graduates into successful careers in movies and television,” Bowman said smoothly. “And I don’t mind telling you that my personal contacts in the industry are a big help in landing that first part.”

“What contacts are those?” I asked, as innocently as I could.

He chuckled indulgently. “The names probably wouldn’t mean anything to you, but I’m in constant touch with the men who run things in Hollywood from behind the scenes.” He walked quickly to a pair of filing cabinets and slid out one of the top drawers. He dipped into a row of manila folders and drew out several 8-by-10 glossy photographs. “Now, these are a few of my graduates whom you’re probably seeing a lot of on the screen these days.”

The attractive young folks might or might not have looked like somebody on television. All the stars under thirty seemed to come equipped with the Standard Face.

Bowman stuffed the pictures back into the file drawer. “That will give you an idea of the help I give my people to get them in front of the camera.”

It gave me no such idea, but I nodded and said nothing. So far, though Rex Bowman appeared pretty fast on his feet, he didn’t seem to be breaking any laws.

He took a look at his jeweled wristwatch. “If you want to sign the contract, you can start right in with classes this morning.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’m anxious to get started. But if it’s all right, I’d like to take the contract home tonight and read it over.”

Bowman’s eyes narrowed a millimeter. “Ordinarily we don’t let a student into one of our classes without a contract. You can understand that.”

“Well—” I began.

He dazzled me with a smile. “But I’ll make an exception in your case. That’s how positive I am that we are going to have a long and profitable association.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

Bowman touched a button on his desk and the plastic Miss Kirby floated into the office.

“It’s almost time for the morning break,” he said, “but Miss Kirby will take you in to catch the last few minutes of theatrical speech class.”

In the classroom some twenty students sat on floor cushions listening to a young man who was mumbling something unintelligible. I spotted Esther Legrand and her daughter Tina near the front of the group. Both wore flared jeans and tie-dyed shirts. Esther had a loop of beads around her neck, and Tina wore a hammered silver ankh. The kid looked pretty good, the mother would have looked better if she dressed her age. I carried a cushion up front and sat next to them.

For several minutes I listened to the mumbler without understanding a dozen words. To start a conversation with Esther Legrand, I said, “There’s a guy who really needs speech lessons.”

She gave me an icy look. “That,” she said, “is our instructor.”

With that conversation out of the way I returned my attention to Mushmouth. Just before I dozed off he must have adjourned the class because my fellow students began standing up and chattering among themselves.

I turned to try again with Esther Legrand, and found her staring back at the doorway where her daughter was in animated conversation with Rex Bowman. He looked over and gave us the big smile and started in our direction. Tina frowned as he walked away from her.

Bowman said, “Glad to see you’re getting involved, Alan. It will be about twenty minutes until the next class. You’re welcome to sit in if you want.”

“Thanks, I’d like to.”

“Most of us go up the street to a coffee shop for the break. Would you like to come along?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll stay here and look around.”

“We’ll see you later, then.”

When Bowman and the students had trooped out I wandered back into the office part of the building, trying to look inconspicuous. The lobby was still full of aspiring stars. Through the open door of the photography studio I could see Lou Markey arguing with a chubby blonde about which was her good side.

As soon as I had a chance I slipped into Rex Bowman’s office. His desk was clean except for the ash tray filled with cigar stubs. I moved to the filing cabinets and started pulling out drawers. Other than the one he had opened for my benefit, they were empty.

A bookcase gave me nothing until I came to a file folder wedged in at the end. The papers inside concerned the financial aspects of Bowmar. I hadn’t read very far when I heard the voices of the returning students.

I was heading back toward the classroom when Bowman came in. He answered my smile with an odd look, but said nothing.

According to a schedule pinned on the door, the next class was going to teach us how to walk. I wasn’t too surprised to see that the instructor was my friend Mumbles from Theatrical Speech. Before I had a chance to learn much about walking, the bruiser I’d seen leaving Bowman’s office came to the door and waggled a finger at me. I walked back to see what he wanted.

“Mr. Bowman has a special class he wants you to take a look at,” the big man said.

He led me down the hall toward the back of the building and held the door open while I walked into another room. At that instant I sensed that something was wrong — half a second too late.

The sap hit me high on the back of the neck, in just the right spot and with just enough force. Curly was an artist.

I landed hard on my hands and knees, and tried to shake the buzzing lights out of my head. The room was small and bare with nothing to look at except the blond giant standing spraddle-legged in front of me.

He said, “Mr. Bowman thinks you ought to have a special class in minding your own business.”

As I tried to push myself up, he leaned forward and tapped the point of my shoulder with the sap. My right arm went dead and I kissed the floor.

Curly was enjoying himself. He grinned and laid the sap along the side of my jaw. Pain clanged through my head like a fire gong.

“This class is just for private snoopers, Mr. Dickens-Dukane.” He leaned over to let me have one in the kidney.

Curly stopped talking then and just moved around me picking his spots. My head had never cleared from the effects of the first blow, and every time I tried to get into some kind of fighting position he would hit me with the sap, just hard enough to put me down again.

After a while Curly tired of the game. Or maybe I wasn’t showing enough life anymore to make it interesting. The last thing I remember was the big blond face saying, “Nightie-night, snooper. Don’t come back.” He swung the sap at my temple and the lights went out, suddenly and completely.

I awoke to a sound like the surf. Then the sound grew louder and I got a whiff of diesel exhaust. I opened my eyes to see I was parked on a dead-end street next to the Hollywood Freeway. My head and body felt like I’d rolled down a mountain, but nothing seemed to be broken and there were few visible bruises. My wallet and watch were still with me, but the Bowmar contract was gone from my pocket.

As I reached for the ignition I saw that my registration slip had been rotated from the underside of the steering post where I kept it. Bowman must have got suspicious and sent the muscle man out to check my car.

I kicked the engine to life and drove painfully home to my apartment. From there I called a friend on the staff of The Hollywood Reporter. She did some checking for me and learned that nobody of importance in the entertainment industry had ever heard of Rex Bowman. He had been a member of the Screen Actors’ Guild a few years back, but was dropped for nonpayment of dues.

With a glass of medicinal brandy within reach, I eased my aching frame into a hot tub to soak and think. It was questionable whether Bowman was breaking any laws at his talent school, but at least I had enough information to cause him some trouble with the state licensing board. Also, I had a personal grievance now. Tonight I would pay him a visit and persuade him to let the Legrand ladies down easy, and then we would discuss my bruises.

Rex Bowman’s house, I found, was small by Bel Air standards, which means it had something less than twenty rooms. It was after ten o’clock and the streets were empty when I pulled to the curb behind a gray sedan.

I climbed out of my car and started up the walk. When I was halfway to the house the front door opened and a woman ran out. When she saw me the woman stopped, looking around as though for an escape route.

“Hello, Mrs. Legrand,” I said.

She went past me with a rush, swinging at my head with something on the end of a silvery chain. I made no move to stop her. She ran awkwardly across the lawn to the sedan, jumped in, and drove off with a shriek of rubber.

As I continued up the walk to the open door of Bowman’s house I had a feeling I wouldn’t like what I found inside.

I didn’t.

Rex Bowman sat in the center of a furry white sofa, his head sagging forward as though he were examining the bullet hole in his bare chest where the silk robe gapped open. One hand rested on the back of the sofa while the other lay in his lap with a burnt-out cigar between the fingers.

In front of the sofa was a glass-topped coffee table bearing a heavy ceramic lighter, a clean ash tray, and today’s edition of Daily Variety. A molded plastic chair was pulled up to face Bowman across the low table.

I went to the telephone and dialed Legrand’s number. I told him he’d better get hold of a lawyer and get him out there tonight. Then I called the police.

When Sergeants Connor and Gaines from Homicide arrived I told them as much as I knew, including how I ran into Esther Legrand on her way out. They let me come along when they left for Legrand’s house in San Gabriel.

Legrand’s lawyer was there when we arrived. He stood protectively behind Esther’s chair, advising her whether or not to answer the detective’s questions. Tina, who had been summoned home from a party in Beverly Hills, sulked on the couch next to her father.

Esther Legrand admitted being at Bowman’s house, but she refused to say why. Her story was that she found the man dead on the sofa, then ran out the door and panicked when she saw me.

Legrand, in something like shock, said he had no idea his wife had gone to Bowman’s place. She had told him she was going to a club meeting, and he spent the evening alone watching television.

While Sergeant Connor questioned the family, Gaines went out to check the gray sedan. In a little while he came in and called his partner aside for a conference. Gaines handed something to Connor, who came over and dangled it before Esther. It was the silver ankh I’d seen Tina wearing earlier.

“Do you recognize this, Mrs. Legrand?” Connor asked.

Esther turned to the attorney, who shook his head negatively.

The detective turned to me. “Flow about it, Dukane, is this what Mrs. Legrand swung at you when you met her coming out of the house?”

“It could have been,” I said.

Connor returned to Esther. “It was found tucked under the driver’s seat of your car.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” she said in a monotone.

Tina spoke up then from the couch. “Oh, Mother, it’s no use. They’ll find out sooner or later.” To Connor she said, “It’s mine. I was at Rex Bowman’s house tonight. I slipped away from the party and went there — it’s only a five-minute drive. We were... in the bedroom when somebody came to the front door. Rex didn’t want us to be found together, so he told me to go out the back way. While he slipped on a robe to answer the door, I gathered up my clothes and ran out. I must have dropped the ankh.”

“Did you see who was at the door?” Connor asked.

“No.”

“It wasn’t me,” Esther put in. She brushed aside the protests of her lawyer and went on. “Rex and I were...” here she forced herself to look at her husband, “having an affair. When I found out he was seeing Tina too, I went over to have it out with him. When I found Rex dead and Tina’s ankh lying on the floor, I was afraid she had killed him. I picked up the ankh and ran out. I still had it in my hand when Dukane saw me.”

Sitting motionless on the couch, Frank Legrand looked like he’d just taken a shot between the eyes with a poleax.

While the Legrand family talked themselves into deeper trouble, I got out of there. I wasn’t helping anybody, and there were some unformed ideas in the back of my head that I wanted to pull up front and examine.

It was the middle of the morning, and I was on my third pot of coffee and the last of my cigarettes when I figured it out. All I had to do was prove it, and I thought I knew how.

I drove out to the Bowmar Talent School. The death of the boss hadn’t slowed the operation. I found the lobby as full of applicants as the day before. I walked past the reception desk to the office area. Through her open door I saw the plastic Miss Kirby in worried conversation with the mumbling speech teacher. As I continued along the hall, the big blond sap expert rounded a comer in front of me. He put on a weak grin and stuck out his hand.

“Hey, no hard feelings, Dukane. Okay?”

I hit him twice in the belly before he could tense his muscles. The big man’s mouth flopped open and he turned the color of raw modeling clay. I stepped back and planted my feet for leverage, then let him have my best shot on the hinge of the jaw. His face jerked out of shape and he hit the floor like a felled oak.

“No hard feelings,” I said.

Lou Markey looked up from behind the desk when I walked into Bowman’s office. His hair was uncombed and his cheeks were sprinkled with orange stubble. The ever-present cigarette smoldered in his hand. It took him a moment to place my face.

“Oh, hello, Dickens. Were you looking for someone?”

“My name isn’t Dickens,” I said. “It’s Dukane. I’m a private investigator.”

“Are you here about Rex Bowman?” he asked.

“You know what happened last night?”

“I heard it on the radio early this morning,” he said. “I thought I’d better come in and start getting our papers straightened out. There’s a lot to be done.”

“Does that include changing the name back to the Markey School of Acting?”

“How did you know that?”

“I ran across it in some of Bowman’s papers. It looks like he kind of took over your operation.”

Markey shrugged. “Rex knew how to make money, I didn’t. The new name, Bowmar, was supposed to be a combination of his and mine, but most people thought it just came from Bowman.”

“What was he going to do next, phase you out completely?”

Markey’s forgotten cigarette singed his fingers and he jumped to light another. “It doesn’t make any difference now, does it? As the surviving partner I’ll take over the school.”

When he had his lungs full of smoke I snapped, “Give me the gun, Markey.”

“What gun?” The words popped out immediately, but Markey’s eyes flickered down and to his right.

I got to the desk drawer before he moved, and lifted out the .32 automatic that lay inside. Markey sagged back in the chair and aged ten years before my eyes.

“I didn’t go there planning to kill Rex,” he said. “But I couldn’t let him push me out of my own school the way he planned. I hated what he turned it into, anyway. Sure, he made money, but all the lies he told the kids who came to us. I told him it was wrong to lead them on like that, but Rex wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t give an inch.” He blew his nose, then looked up at me. “Where did I slip up, Dukane? How did you tumble?”

“It was the way you left things in Bowman’s livingroom after you shot him. Something was wrong, but I didn’t pin it until this morning. Bowman was smoking a cigar when he was shot — it went out in his hand. Yet the big ash tray in front of him was empty. Wiped clean. It had to be the killer who cleaned it — not to get rid of Bowman’s ashes, but his own. Neither Esther nor Tina Legrand is a smoker. Frank Legrand either, for that matter. But you light one after the other, a distinctive cigarette that would point straight to you.”

He stared down at the desk top for a long time, then looked up with the ghost of the crooked smile that belonged to Beano Markey, the comical kid in the high school movies. He said, “You didn’t really know I had the gun here, did you?”

“No,” I admitted, “but I figured you came straight here, not even going home to shave.”

“And you tricked me.”

“I just counted on your honesty. You told me you never could fake reactions.”

“The critics were right,” Markey said. “I’m a bad actor.”