Blackmailer

Chapter Thirteen

I hesitated in front of Walter’s door. I tried the knob. The door was unlocked. I swung it open and let myself in. I closed the door behind me.

Holding the gun in front of me, I called out, “Walter! Hey, Walter! Are you in there?”

Then I heard the voice.

“Hopalong Cassidy,” he said. “With the firearms. Somebody could get hurt.”

I whirled around.

He was sitting in the chair I’d sat in earlier in the day. His face was a pasty gray color. His eyes were vicious and cold. His feet were propped up on the small coffee table, and in his hand he held a large, dangerous-looking revolver.

“Roy Rogers,” he said. “Drop the gun. Right there. On the floor. By my feet.”

Walter’s imitation of Max Shriber’s voice had been good. But it did not compare with the real thing.

Max Shriber’s revolver was pointed directly at my chest.

“Drop the gun,” he said.

I dropped it. It made no sound at all when it hit the thick carpet.

Suddenly, Max Shriber groaned. Then he slumped forward until his head was resting on his propped-up knees. He groaned again and his whole body heaved convulsively.

I watched him in fascinated horror. It did not even occur to me to reach down and pick up the gun I had dropped.

When he pulled his head up again, his face was grayer than it had been and it was soaked with sweat.

“You don’t look so good,” I said.

“Dr. Mayo,” he said, in his heavy rasping voice. “A brilliant diagnosis. Frankly, I think I have contracted a case of bullet wound. There’s so much of it going around this time of year.”

He pulled back his coat on the left side. His shirt, high on the shoulder, was bloodstained and plastered to his skin. There was a darker spot in the middle of the dark stain.

“Who shot you?” I said. “Who did it?”

“A good question,” Max Shriber said. “By coincidence this is the very question I am here to discuss with my good friend Walter.”

“Listen,” I said. “How come you’re not in the hospital?”

“I was,” he said. “But I left.”

“I gather they found you, all right,” I said. “The maid was screaming loud enough. She thought you were dead. So did I.”

“I kill hard,” Max Shriber said. “A couple inches one way or the other and I could be. You were in my apartment?”

“That’s right. I came up to see you. I wanted to tell you I don’t like being beaten up by your gangster chauffeur. I had a few other things I wanted to tell you too.”

Max Shriber groaned and then before either of us could speak again the telephone on Walter’s desk began to ring. It rang twice.

“Pick it up,” he said. “It’s only polite. You could take a message.”

I walked to the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Elsa Maxwell,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “Party giver. Where are you?”

It was the voice. It was Max Shriber’s voice, perfectly reproduced.

“This isn’t Walter,” I said. “This is Dick Sherman.”

Across the room, Max Shriber’s lips formed the question: Who is it?

I moved my lips in silent reply: Max Shriber.

“Walter isn’t here,” I said. “I haven’t seen him.”

“He called me,” said the voice on the phone. “He said he had to see me. I told him to come over here to the Carlyle. That was an hour ago. He’s still not here.”

Max Shriber leaned painfully forward and pushed a button on Walter’s instrument panel.

The picture on the wall began to slide noiselessly on its ball bearings.

Then I saw her.

She looked very ugly sitting naked on the bed talking into the telephone. The cords on her neck stood out as she strained for the guttural, snarling sounds.

If you’d only seen her in musicals, you’d have no idea what an actress she was. You’d have to see her in a few of the scenes from “Lure of the City.”

Or you’d have to have seen her through the mirror talking into the telephone.

I’m still not sure how she made the sound.

She distorted her whole face to do it, I know that. She was a great actress. She even managed to look a little like Max Shriber as she imitated his voice.

“Wait a minute,” the voice on the phone said.

I had my eyes on her face. The cords in her neck stood out even farther on the word “minute.” And her lower jaw shot forward.

Max touched the right button and then we could hear her voice from the next room. I could hear it twice. Once on the phone and once on the loudspeaker. It had an eerie, echo-like effect.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “There’s someone at the door now. This must be Walter. Yeah, it is. I hear him. O.K., Mr. Sherman, I’ll see you around.”

In the next room Janis Whitney replaced the telephone receiver.

I leaned over and touched the button. The picture slid back into place.

“I don’t understand,” I said softly.

“The clincher,” Max Shriber said. “That was supposed to be the clincher. That was supposed to adjust the rope around his neck. The size thirteen and a half noose.”

“Whose neck?”

Max Shriber clutched his side and held on for a minute. Then he said, “You’re slow. You’re slow on the uptake. Walter’s neck. That’s whose neck. She thought she knocked me off this afternoon. Little Sure Shot came pretty close. But she didn’t quite. She should have stayed around a little longer to make sure.”

I shook my head. My knees felt weak.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand anything. “Why was she calling Walter?” I said.

“She wasn’t calling Walter. She was calling you.”

“Me?” I said.

“Look, it’s easy,” Max Shriber said. “While she was in the bathroom-you thought she was sick. But she wasn’t sick. She was on the phone calling Walter.”

“The bathroom?” I said. “There’s a telephone in the bathroom?”

He nodded. “There’s a phone in every room in the house. She was in there talking to Walter down in the library.”

“But why?” I said again.

“The frame,” Max Shriber said. “The frame. She calls Walter and she uses my voice. She tells him he’s got to come to my place right away. It’s only a few blocks so he goes. He leaves his guests for ten minutes and he goes. He rides up in the elevator. He rings the bell. No answer. He waits. He rings the bell. No answer. So he rides back down in the elevator again and he comes home. O.K.?

“Only three days from now, bright and early Monday morning, they find Max Shriber on the bed with bullet holes all over him. So it’s all set. The elevator man remembers Walter going up and he remembers Walter coming down again. He don’t know Walter never got inside. All he knows is he saw Walter come up and go down.

“And they can prove good old Max was still alive when Walter got there because you were talking to good old Max on the phone just as Walter came in.

“And Little Sure Shot. She’s got the perfect alibi. She’s in there in the next room, passed out. From too much to drink.

“She’s a great actress. The toughest thing you can play is a good drunk scene.”

That reminded me of something. I walked to Walter’s liquor cabinet, took out the brandy bottle and tilted it. I didn’t bother with a glass, I tilted it. And then I handed it to Max.

He coughed and choked, but he swallowed three or four times.

“Why?” I said. “Why?”

Max looked at me. “Why did she do it?” His voice was quieter. It was harsh and guttural, but it was lower.

“I guess that’s what I mean,” I said. “She has everything. She’s beautiful and famous and rich. Why did she have to louse it up?”

“Sick,” Max Shriber said. “Everybody is sick. The whole damn world is sick. She’s sick like everybody else, only more so.”

He motioned for me to give him a cigarette. I lighted one and handed it to him.

“She’s an actress,” he said. “The greatest. But she’s in musicals, see? And that’s all she’s gonna be in. She’s got a term contract. Seven years and no outside pictures. Her musicals make money so they keep her in musicals.

“You’ve seen the pictures she makes. She’s not dumb. She knows how lousy they are. And look-she’s thirty-one. That ain’t old, but in seven years she’ll be thirty-eight. If she wants to do something else, it’s gotta be now.

“So look. We get a chance to buy this book. This is the way to do it. She owns a piece of the book. If they want to make a picture out of the book, they gotta take her with it. It’s the only way she could ever get the part.

“So she buys into the property. It takes every bit of dough she can raise. She hocks everything she’s got to raise the hundred grand.”

“She raised a hundred thousand dollars?” I said. “I thought it was a three-way partnership.”

“It was. She put up the dough. Walter and I put up our services.”

“You mean both of you were getting a free ride on her dough?”

He ignored me.

“So she buys in for one hundred grand. Walter was tough. He makes her buy in sight unseen. He says it ain’t quite finished and Anstruther won’t let nobody see the book yet. But Walter guarantees there’s a great part for a girl.

“Walter’s a great little salesman. He tells her this is going to be the picture of the year. This is going to be the dramatic part of the decade. Like Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ or Maria in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’

“So she buys in. You gotta understand ambition. How sick you can get with ambition.

“She reads in the columns, they’re talking about Hayworth for the new Anstruther. Or she reads Bergman is going to make it in Europe. And all the time she knows she owns it. It’s hers. She’s gonna make it. Her. She’s going to make it and be so great that they give her an Academy Award. In her mind she’s figuring out what she’ll wear at the dinner when they give her the award.

“So when she finds Anstruther and she finds there’s no book-she goes off her trolley. It’s not the money. She gets most of the money back. It was lying all over the floor when she shot him. It wasn’t that. She’d decided that if there was no book, they’d fake one. Nothing was going to stop her.

“So everything goes all right. Till Jean Dahl comes into the picture. She comes to me and tries to blackmail me. I give her a grand or so to stall things along. Then I go to Janis and tell her I know what happened.

“Then everything explodes…”

Max Shriber grabbed his side again.

“Sick,” he said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“Talk to her,” Max said. “If you don’t believe me, talk to her.”

In a daze I started out of the room.

“Wait,” Max said.

I stopped.

He nodded down at the gun I had left on the floor.

“In case you find out I’m right,” he said. “Take it.”

I reached down and picked up the gun.

Then he slid forward, off the chair and onto the floor.

I stood for a moment, undecided. I started to help him. Then I stopped. “The hell with you,” I said.

I left the room without looking back.