The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

1. Date with a Recluse

It was a cheap, frowsy hotel in a cheap shoddy neighborhood a good distance south of Hollywood Boulevard. It was standing like a tired harridan on the east side of the street so that the setting sun in the west painted its shabby brick facade the color of old blood that nobody wanted any more.

Over the entrance faded gilt lettering said “Chaple Arms,” which could have been a misspelling of “Chapel” or might be the proprietor’s name. The cars parked along the curb in front were old, worn-out models in need of polish they would never get, with dented fenders and recap tires any self-respecting junk dealer would have sneered at.

Drifting past in second gear, I watched a mangy alley cat in the doorway, licking its chops and working on a bird it had killed. That was the only visible movement, the only sign of life. It was just as much a sign of death, if you thought about it from the bird’s viewpoint: only the bird was beyond caring. The Chaple Arms didn’t seem to care, either. It was that kind of hotel. One more stain on the steps couldn’t possibly matter.

The voice on the phone that afternoon hadn’t matched any of this. Asking me to come here at six sharp, it had sounded austere and dignified, with culture and education back of it. And money. It had sounded like a lot of money.

In the private detective business you develop a sort of extra sense which reacts to subtle nuances like that. So I was disappointed when I copped a glimpse of the Chaple Arms. It wasn’t a place where money lived. Maybe it had been, once, a long time ago. Could be. But now it was a fleabag.

I looked at my strap-watch. Five of six. I drove my jalopy to the next corner and made a U-turn, wheeled back and found a berth almost directly across the street from the tawdry brick building. At three of six I ankled past the alley cat, noticed that the bird was all gone except a few wing feathers, and barged into a dingy lobby that smelled as unclean as it looked.

The linoleum on the floor was worn through in spots by the feet of trudging years, showing that it had been laid on an original installation of white tiles. There were two overstuffed chairs against the right-hand wall, as wrinkled and sagging as the bags under a sick man’s eyes, and on the left there was a short, stained marble-top counter with a desk clerk behind it, pigeonholing folded circulars into a rectangular wooden tier of square open-front letterboxes.

His black alpaca coat was shiny with age, freckled with small gray flakes the exact shade of his hair. His back was toward me and he didn’t look around when I spoke to him.

So I spoke again, louder. “Hey, you with the dandruff on your shoulders,” I said.

He kept right on stuffing circulars into pigeonholes. Then I lamped two little twisted black wires running down along his collar, and I leaned over the counter and nudged him on the spine with my forefinger. Leaning over the counter made me feel pretty sure no laundry would ever be able to take the grease stains from the front of my clothes. Touching the clerk with my finger made me feel as if I would never wash my hands clean again, no matter how much soap and water I used.

He jumped slightly and turned around, and the little twisted wires ran from a button in his ear to a black plastic box hooked heavily to his breast pocket. He had a face like crinkled parchment and eyes as sadly apologetic as a cocker spaniel’s. He jiggled something on the plastic box, a switch that clicked audibly.

“Wear a hearing aid,” he said in a powdery voice. “Generally keep it turned off to save the batteries. You scared me a rifle, poking me like that.”

“Sorry, old-timer,” I said. “Although I should think you’d be used to it if you keep your back to the customers all the time.”

“Got me a little mirror on the wall.” He jerked a thumb. “Usually watch it so’s nobody sneaks up on me, but I guess I kind of forgot this time. Preoccupied.” He let a small sigh dribble past lips as loose as dangling rubber bands. “Something I could do for you?”

“I want to see a guy that lives here – name of Fullerton. Joseph T. Fullerton.”

“Nobody sees Joseph T. Fullerton, mister. Nobody ain’t seen Joseph T. Fullerton in nine, ten years to my knowledge. Not even the maids which brush up his rooms. You prolly think I’m kidding you, but I ain’t.”

“I’ve got an appointment,” I said.

For all that meant to him he might as well have had his hearing aid switched off. “For six o’clock,” I added. “It’s six now, even up.”

“No offense, mister, but I just plain don’t believe you.”

“About it being six o’clock?”

“About you having no appointment to see Mr Fullerton. Like I said, nobody sees him. Nobody at all. He don’t allow it.”

“I’m Nick Ransom,” I said patiently, and took a card out of my wallet to prove it. I put the card on the counter. “Somebody calling himself Joseph T. Fullerton phoned me at my office this afternoon and asked me to be here at six sharp. Maybe it was a rib, but that voice didn’t sound like a practical joker’s. You might give Fullerton a jingle and check on it. That is, if there really is a Joseph T. Fullerton registered here.”

“Orders is never to disturb him under no circumstances.” With mild curiosity he read my card, his rubber-band lips moving as he spelled out the words. “Nick Ransom. Confidential Investigations. That’s be kind of a cop, wouldn’t it?”

“Private.”

He made with another dribbling sigh.

“Nothing like this ain’t never happened before since I been working here.” He moved to a small old-fashioned switchboard and peered at it, picked up a fragment of pale blue paper that had scribbling on it. “Well, I be danged. Day man must of left this for me and I never seen it when I come on duty at five. Says somebody named Nick Ransom is to be tooken straight up to Mr Fullerton.”

“Yeah,” I said. I set fire to a gasper.

He shook his head wearily. More dandruff snowed down on the alpaca coat’s shoulders.

“Reason I never noticed it, they ain’t been no calls go through the board since I come on shift. Danged day man shouldn’t of left it tucked behind the keys that way. He ought to of told me.”

“So now you know,” I said. “And it’s two minutes past six. I don’t like to keep a client waiting.”

“Course not. Dumb me, making you stand around.”

He hit a tap-bell under the counter. It had a clean, tinkly sound that broke across the lobby and lost itself, discouraged, against musty velour draperies on the opposite wall. There followed a whirring hiccuppy noise from somewhere in the rear, and an antique elevator creaked jerkily down an open grillwork shaft. Its wrought iron gate slid open, rattling on worn grooves, and a kid in his early twenties stepped out smartly.

“Pete,” the clerk said, “show this here gent up to Three-seventeen.”

Pete’s glimmers widened. He was a tall punk, not quite up to my six feet plus but slender and lithe and broad of shoulder in a nondescript uniform a size too small for his build. He probably had inherited it from a whole series of predecessors, but he wore it with a nice jauntiness that certainly didn’t belong in a joint like the Chaple Arms.

He had wavy brown hair and even white teeth, and an uncompromising jaw that went well with the humorous up-quirk at the corners of his lips.

“Maybe I’d better borrow that ear gadget of yours,” he said, and grinned. “I’d have sworn you said Three-seventeen.”

“I did say Three-seventeen,” the clerk told him.

“But that’s—”

“Fullerton’s, yeh. And Fullerton don’t never have no callers. He does now.”

“Right-o,” Pete said. “This way, sir.”

He led me toward the elevator.

Just as I was stepping into the cage, the clerk at the counter lifted his powdery voice.

“Hey, mister.” He beckoned me, and I went back to him. “You wouldn’t want to spare me one of them cigarettes of yours, I don’t suppose?” he said. “Not that I’m awful partial to cigarettes. Cigars is my preference, only I’m a mite strapped this week, and—”

I dug a four-bit piece out of my jeans, gave it to him. “Buy yourself a perfecto.”

“Criminity. Fifty cents! Biggest tip I taken in for more’n a year. Thanks.” He leaned forward. “Confidential, mister, the real reason I called you back, I wondered would you do me a little favor.”

“Such as?”

“If you do get to see Joseph T. Fullerton, I’d sure love to hear what he really looks like. Ain’t never seen him myself, and I got a bump of curiosity a mile high.”

“I’ll give you a verbal portrait,” I said, and went over to the elevator again.

The good-looking Pete clanged the door shut and pulled a rope, and the cage moved upward in little jerky bumps, like hiccups. Midway between the first and second floors I dredged out another half-dollar and spun it around my thumb.

“Speaking of Fullerton,” I said.

“Were we speaking of Mr Fullerton, sir?”

The punk quirked a smile at me.

“Discreet bellhops in a trap like this,” I said. I put away the four-bit piece and started toying with a folded dollar bill. “Been working here long, son?”

“Four years. Putting myself through college. USC.” He eyed the folded buck as we creaked past the second-floor landing. “You were asking about Fullerton?”

“Uh-huh. He’s a recluse, I gather.”

“A mild word for it. Nobody ever sees him. When the maids tidy up he hides in a sort of closet he’s got rigged as a tuckaway. The help take him his meals. I get his supper from a place around the corner and leave it in his living room.”

“But you’ve never met him?”

“I’ve talked to him through his hideaway door, is all. Third floor, sir.” He clanged the cage open and pointed. “Three-seventeen is just past that turn in the corridor.” Then, when I handed him the dollar: “Thanks, sir. Want to know something?”

“That was my last loose buck, Buster.”

He grinned. “This is for free.” The grin got turned off like a spigot. “I don’t think you’re going to like visiting Mr Fullerton. It’s a spooky experience until you get used to it. Lots of luck, sir.”

2. Talk with a Corpse

I walked along the hallway with the elevator’s ancient hesitant creaks dwindling down behind me. Presently I came to a door and bunted it with my knuckles, then stepped aside, just in case Joseph T. Fullerton happened to be the kind of hermit with homicidal eccentricities such as shooting guns through thin wooden paneling.

“Nick Ransom out here!” I said loudly. “By appointment.”

“You’re five minutes late.”

There was something vaguely familiar in this voice, a texture my subconscious mind picked up and fingered and tried to recognize. It was a voice of the same general timbre and intonation as that of the guy who had phoned me, yet different and somehow more natural, as if, over the wire, he had disguised his delivery just a little so it wouldn’t strike a responsive echo in my memory.

Now, though, he didn’t seem to care if I caught hep. It bothered me because I couldn’t place it, and for some reason I couldn’t savvy I felt a shiver crawling down my back, the way you do when you dream something not too pleasant at night.

“Come in,” it said. “It’s unlocked for you.”

I grasped the knob and it turned in my hand. I pushed on the portal but nothing happened; it didn’t give.

“Opens outward. I forgot to tell you. Special arrangement of mine. Pull.”

Whoever he was, he was no stranger to me. I combed through my mental card-index file but the thing eluded me, like trying to pin down a shadow. I pulled, and the door swung smoothly on oiled hinges. I barged into a room that had nobody in it but me, and the empty room spoke my name.

It said, “Hello, Nick. I understand you’ve quit the stunting racket and gone into private detective work,” in the voice of a man I had known a long time ago; a man buried and gone these past fourteen years or more. The empty room said, “It’s good to see you again, Nick,” and the voice belonged to a dead man.

I could remember, and see and hear it all now, those years ago – and I knew.

I was standing on the sidelines of a movie set, out of camera range, watching two guys who were going to be blasted to bits the next minute – not make-believe blasted for a spool of film, but actually and horribly blown apart like chopped meat. That was fourteen years ago, but the fourteen years faded and vanished like a lap dissolve shot so that time was telescoped and the past merged into the present, the present became the past.

I was on a cavernous sound stage at Paragon Pix seeing a sequence in rehearsal, a sequence destined never to be played because in another sixty seconds the leading man would be a corpse. He would be the late lamented Ronald Barclay, as handsome a ham as ever starred in the flickering tintypes.

Barclay was tall and swarthy, with the brand of boudoir eyes that made matrons swoon and their daughters crave to leave home. He had dark wavy hair with touches of frost at the temples which he refused to let the makeup department do anything about, and he was built like a Roman gladiator. In private life he carried a baseball bat to beat off the women who tried to surrender their all at his shrine.

I watched him there on the set, rehearsing a brief piece of business for a close-up, a bit of action which I myself would duplicate later in a long shot. That long shot was where the peril would be, and since Paragon Pix couldn’t afford to risk Barclay’s million-dollar good looks, I was the stunt expert they had hired to double for him in the hazard scene.

Not that I considered it especially hazardous. According to the scenario he was to pick up a cigarette box from a table and open it, whereupon a bomb which the villain had planted in the box would blow up like a cannon cracker. Of course the explosion wouldn’t show in the close-up. The director would cut out the scene just as Barclay lifted the gadget.

Then I would step in and replace him while the camera was moved some distance away. I would lift the lid of the box, and a small charge of flashlight powder would ignite in such a way that I couldn’t get burned if I remembered to be careful and hold my hands in the right position.

The special effects department would subsequently doctor the footage, intensify the size of the flame-flash, and a loud boom would be dubbed onto the sound track. Meanwhile, the initial close-up had to be timed out with Barclay himself going through the motions.

I watched as a prop man walked on-stage and placed the cigarette box in position. I saw Barclay reach for it ahead of schedule as if idly curious to inspect it. There came a thunderous roar that shook the set. Ker-blaaam!

With my ears ringing and my glimmers smarting, half-blinded, I plunged forward from the sidelines, hearing behind me the shouts of the director and his camera crew, the screams of the script girl, the stunned oaths of carpenters and grips and juicers milling around in momentary panic. I reached the crumpled, unconscious forms of Ronald Barclay and the property man who had been standing too close to him when the blast went off. I bent down and beat out the flames that were charring their ripped and red-stained clothes.

Five minutes later I helped load both men into the ambulance that came wailing onto the lot from a nearby hospital. I couldn’t help thinking that the ambulance might have been toting my own gory fragments instead of theirs if the bomb had waited until my turn had come to handle it.

Barclay kicked the bucket before the internes could hoist him onto an operating table. His subsequent funeral was a nine-day wonder even for Hollywood, where nine-day wonders seldom last more than a day and a half.

The prop man wasn’t so lucky. He lived. Permanently maimed, he survived his injuries and eventually dropped out of the news, out of sight. Nobody cared; nobody bothered to fasten official blame on him for accidentally loading the mock bomb with dynamite instead of harmless flashlight powder.

Besides, he had paid for his blunder. It cost him two legs and an arm. You don’t prosecute a basket case who can’t fight back. You just let him fade into oblivion.

Fourteen years . . .

In my mind those years slowly stretched out into proper perspective, resumed their long endless shape of days and weeks and months. I snapped back to the present, and I was no longer a stunt expert on that cavernous Paragon sound stage. I was now a private dick in the drab living room of a fleabag called the Chaple Arms. I was here by the request of a telephone voice and listening to that same disembodied voice coming from nowhere; hearing it and remembering it, remembering that the last time I’d heard it was just before a property cigarette box exploded.

But it wasn’t the voice of the bomb crippled prop man, who had lived. It was the voice of Ronald Barclay, the handsome star, who had died.

It was a trick, natch. It had to be a trick. Some dizzy jerk with a perverted sense of humor was needling me, giving me a bad time. I glowered around the room at the cheap window curtains, the shabby-genteel mission furniture, the threadbare carpet and dingy walls.

A heavy-set bozo glowered back at me from over near a corner – a tall, scowling character in tweeds, with a truculent glint in his peepers. He was my own reflection in a full-length mirror set into a closet door. Nobody else was around.

“Now just one condemned minute,” I snarled. “I can go along with a gag as well as the next slob. But—”

“It’s no gag, Nick,” Ronald Barclay’s voice said. “And you needn’t be so jittery. I’m behind the mirror. It’s one of those new-fangled two-way glasses. I can see out through it, but all you can see is yourself.” There was a brief chuckle, not entirely mirthful. “I’m talking through a hole in the wall. You can’t find it, though, because it’s covered with wallpaper.”

“That’s where you usually find vermin in a drop like this,” I said. “Behind the wallpaper. And quit explaining your dime-store hocus-pocus magic act in Ronald Barclay’s voice. Barclay was sort of a friend of mine in the old days, as friendly as a star ever gets with a mere stunt man, and he’s dead. I don’t like it. Stop imitating him.”

“I can’t stop, because I’m not imitating him, and because I’m not dead. I’m alive and I’m Ronald Barclay.” Bitterness was in that. “Have a drink, Nick. I left a bottle of Scotch on that table behind you. Vat 69. That’s your brand, as I recall.”

Sure it was my brand. I picked up the bottle and let some of its mellow lightning slide down my throat. I needed it. My nerves were jumpy.

“Everybody in Hollywood knows the kind of Scotch I prefer,” I growled. “That proves nothing.”

“Do you remember the time I went on a brannigan and you took me to your apartment and kept me there three days to sober me up for a new picture I was starting?”

I stiffened. I had never told a living soul about that crazy episode. Nobody else knew it except Barclay himself, unless he had blabbed it to some third party before he died.

I was getting confused. Dead men can’t talk from behind mirrors. I took another swig from the bottle and exhaled the aroma around a test question.

“What kind of pajamas did I loan you to wear? What color?”

“You didn’t. Your spare pajamas were all in the laundry. You borrowed a nightgown from a girl in the next apartment. It was a cerise chiffon.”

I strangled. “You are Barclay! Come out of hiding. I want to look at you.”

“Nobody looks at me, Nick. Not even you. Nobody’s looked at me since I moved in here after the hospital released me. Nobody ever will.”

“But – but—”

“It was really the prop man who died, Nick. His name was Joc Fullerton, in case you’ve forgotten. He died, and I lived. A little piece of me lived. No legs. One arm. Half a face.” There was a catch in the voice, almost like a sob. Then it steadied. “I was a vain man, Nick, remember? When I found out I was going to live and look like a butchered frog, I couldn’t take it. Not as Ronald Barclay I couldn’t.”

I stared at the mirror. All I saw was my own optics bulging like oysters being squeezed from two fists.

“Women had worshipped me,” Barclay’s voice said. “Now if they saw me it would be with horror and loathing. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want sympathy. I wanted to die, but the doctors wouldn’t let me die, curse them. So I cooked up a scheme.”

“I get it,” I said thickly. “You arranged to have the property man, Joe Fullerton, buried in your name. And you took his. It was a trade, a switch. You couldn’t stand being a maimed Ronald Barclay, but a crippled Fullerton you could adjust to. You bribed the right people, and – good glory, it’s fantastic!”

“On the contrary, it was fairly simple. Fullerton had no family; neither had I. Who’d know the difference? I didn’t have to bribe anybody. Fullerton was blasted beyond recognition. So was I. Even the fingerprints of my one remaining hand had been destroyed. No fingerprints. No teeth in my mouth for dental chart comparisons. No mouth, period – until the plastic surgeons built me something I could use for a mouth, such as it is.”

“You mean you just kept insisting you were Fullerton and the hospital staff believed you?”

“Yes. Luckily the real Fullerton had an accident policy – twenty thousand dollars for the loss of two limbs, forty for the loss of three. I collected the forty thousand and moved to the Chaple Arms. I’ve been here ever since.”

“Come on out,” I said earnestly. “I want to see you.”

“Nobody sees me, Nick. How often must I say it?”

“So you’re in a wheelchair,” I said. “Which is why your door opens outward, so you can get away in case of fire. So you’re a no-legged guy with a missing arm and a face that would give dames the screaming meemies. But I’m no dame; I’m a friend of yours. I want to see you. I can take it.”

“No.” His voice sharpened. “And don’t come any closer to this closet. It wouldn’t do you any good. There’s no knob on the outside. And if you smash the glass I’ll kill you. I’ve got one good hand and it’s holding a gun, and I’d kill anybody who looked at me. I’m not fooling, Nick. Don’t force me to do something I wouldn’t want to do!”

3. Dead Man’s Diary

Ronald Barclay sounded sincere and a little hysterical, and maybe a touch demented along with it. Only a loony guy would do what he had done, live the way he had been living. And if he really had a roscoe he was as dangerous as sparks in a gunpowder factory.

I backed off, gave the Vat 69 another fast belt.

“Okay,” I said, “so you don’t want to be looked at. And for fourteen years you’ve pretended to be deceased. That much I’ll buy. As an amateur psychologist I might even understand it. But why did you ask me to come here? And after keeping your secret all these years, why let me in on it now?”

“Because I trust you. And I need a favor.”

“What favor?”

“I want you to be my decoy.”

“I don’t get that,” I said.

He said through the hole in the wall: “Decoy. Lure. Bait.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“I’m asking you to entice a certain person here to my rooms. I don’t care what pretext you use. That I leave up to your judgment. Just so you fetch him here and leave him.”

“So it’s a him, not a her,” I said. “Maybe if I stick around long enough I’ll learn even more. Don’t let me hurry you, pal. I have the evening free.”

“You have a sarcastic tongue, too. You always had. Don’t rush me, Nick. Let me tell it my way. This man I want brought here to me . . . What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Why have you got your head cocked to one side like that?”

“I told you I was listening.” I was, too. Not only to Ronald Barclay’s voice, but to something else that might have been only my imagination. “Go on with your story. You’ve got a reason for wanting a certain character lured here. What’s the reason and who is the guy?”

“He’s the man who murdered me,” Barclay said, and at the same instant I whipped out the .32 automatic I always pack in an armpit rig, hurled my tonnage across the room.

I didn’t plunge toward the mirrored closet. I catapulted at the door to the outer corridor. If there’s anything that broils me to a crisp it’s an eavesdropper. And I’d already had enough weirdness and mystification for one afternoon.

The trick door gave me trouble because I forgot it opened outward. I grasped the knob, twisted it, pulled, and almost dislocated my wrist with the sudden yank. Then I remembered to push.

I pushed. I bounced over the threshold into the musty hallway with its dead, rancid smells, and there was nobody in sight. There was nothing except gloomy, thickening shadows as dusk gathered. I might as well have peered up and down the passages of an abandoned morgue. The silence was a thing you could practically pick up and rub in your fingers.

I went back into the room and pulled the door shut after me. I had the jitters. I had the kind of shakes you get from talking to an invisible dead man who was alive enough and crazy enough to belong in a padded cell.

I needed another snort of the crazy man’s Scotch but I didn’t take it because my brain felt too fuzzy as it was. Next thing I knew I would be having delirium tremens. Maybe I already had delirium tremens.

I should have stayed out there in the hall while I had the chance. I should have copped a fast scram. I should have gone home where I could try to forget I’d ever been in a joint called the Chaple Arms. But no, I had to barge on back into the room.

Barclay’s voice came through the wallpaper-covered speaking hole. It sounded grim.

“You took your life in your hands pulling that caper, Nick. For a minute I thought you were trying to get at me. I almost shot you through this mirror. What was the idea? What spooked you?”

“I realize the risk now,” I said sourly. “But I thought I’d heard somebody outside stealing an earful.” I holstered my heater. “Evidently I was haywire. And for pipe’s sake quit yacking at me about shooting through the mirror. You’re giving me a complex.” I made a resentful mouth at the looking glass. “If you want me to leave, say the word. I’ll go quietly; I’d be glad to. I’m getting so I don’t like it here, if I ever did.”

“I apologize, Nick. I’m sorry. And I don’t want you to leave. Not just yet.”

I did want to leave, but I didn’t say so.

“And another thing,” was what I said. “Just before I dived at the door you spouted a line of dizzy dialogue about the man who murdered you. Let’s stop making with that kind of double talk. Nobody murdered you, because you’re still alive. Taking your word for it, of course. Consequently—”

“Alive! You can’t call anyone in my condition alive.”

“All I know about your condition is what you’ve told me. Have you shown yourself? No.”

“I don’t intend to,” he said harshly. “As for the murder part, call it a maimed man’s sardonic figure of speech. In my own estimation I’m worse than dead, but skip it. There was a man who got killed, though, remember? A prop man. Joseph T. Fullerton, whose name I stole. How do you classify that?”

“An accident.”

“Wrong. It was murder. Premeditated murder, as cold and calculated as slaughtering cattle in a packing house.” He hesitated a second. “Nick, on that picture with the explosion sequence, do you recall the director?”

“Sure,” I said. “Emil Heinrich. A kraut. He’s big stuff now. He climbed slow, but he climbed high. Head man of Paragon Pix. He’s come a long way. What about him?”

“He’d just been married a short while to an extra girl named Marian Lodge. Pretty, but not a brain in her head.”

“He’s still married to her,” I said. “And she’s still pretty. And she still hasn’t got a brain in her head. So what?”

“Heinrich thought I was on the make for her.”

“Were you?”

“My home-wrecking was strictly on the screen. You know that. I never looked at her sidewise, but Heinrich had notions. He actually accused me, once. I laughed at him.” The voice went brittle, metallic. “I laughed at him. Heaven help me.”

“Make your point,” I said.

The short hairs were beginning to prickle at the nape of my neck and I felt that shiver going down my spine, crawling inch by inch like a bad dream.

There was a rustling noise behind the wallpaper. “Yesterday I was getting ready to discard an old trunk, Nick. A trunk that belonged to Joe Fullerton, part of his stuff that was moved here with me when I took his name, assumed his identity. I’d rummaged through it before, thrown away the things of his I didn’t need, then I’d used it to store junk of my own. But yesterday I decided to get rid of it. I emptied it out.”

“And?”

“I discovered a false bottom compartment I’d never noticed before. It had a book in it, a diary. Fullerton’s private diary. I wouldn’t know why a man would want to keep a thing like that. Diaries are for women, I always thought. But Fullerton had one. Made daily entries – up to the day before he was killed.”

“All right, build it up. Make me wait for the punch line.”

“This is serious, Nick, not funny. I’m going to read you part of the last page Fullerton wrote. Listen. ‘Twice yesterday I found Heinrich messing around my props. He didn’t see me watching him, but I saw things I’m going to take up with the union if this keeps up. What right has a kraut director got to butt in on the property department? If he thinks I’m not capable of measuring a load of flashlight powder in a cigarette box let him take it up with the producer. Let him tell the brass hats in the front office. Next time I catch him poking around that prop bomb I’m going to raise a mess, job or no job. Up to now I’ve kept my mouth shut, but he better lay off. I don’t like outsiders fooling with my private can of flash powder, either’.”

I said in a choked voice, “Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough, Nick? After fourteen years I know what really happened! Heinrich was jealous of me. He tampered with the cigarette-box bomb. In spite of Fullerton’s watchfulness and suspicions he succeeded in fixing it to go off prematurely, when I picked it up. And he substituted something powerful for the harmless flash powder that was supposed to be in it.”

“Now wait. You’re just guessing. You’re not sure he did that.”

“All right, so I’m guessing. Theorizing. But it adds.”

He couldn’t convince me.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Maybe I was the one he was after. Maybe he had a grudge against me, for some reason I can’t figure. After all, I was the stunt man who was scheduled to let the thing explode in my hands.”

“Originally, that’s true. Unknown to you, though, Heinrich altered the script just a little. An important little. When we started rehearsing the scene he rearranged the action so that you wouldn’t be first to handle the cigarette box. He directed me to pick it up and pry open the lid for that close-up. He told me it was a dummy box; harmless. And certainly I had no reason to disbelieve him.

“He said he would then cut the scene, let you double for me in the following long shot, and go on with the action from there. He was smooth, Nick. He sold it to me and I never suspected what was coming. You know how it worked out. I picked up the real bomb and it went bang. And all these years I thought it was a mischance, an accident – until I found the prop man’s diary. Then I knew Heinrich had planned to kill me.”

I dredged out a gasper, set fire to it. The smoke burned my gullet like acid, like the fumes of blasting powder, like the hot sting that had scorched my nostrils fourteen years ago on a Paragon sound stage when I had beat out the flames charring the crimson-stained clothing of two crumpled shapes who once had been husky, healthy men.

“You can’t make it stick, pal,” I said. “Not on the diary of a guy dead and buried all this time.”

“There’s no statute of limitations on homicide, Nick.”

“All right, give it to the cops and see what happens. They’d slip you the big nix. Insufficient proof, for one thing. All you can offer is unsupported surmise. And Emil Heinrich is a powerful hombre these days. A bozo in his position packs weight.” I put my coffin nail in an ash-tray, snubbed it out, and had a swig from the Scotch bottle. “You’d wind up before a rigged lunacy commission. They’ll say you’re off your rocker. Fourteen years of hiding your ugliness from the world drove you out of your mind.”

“Do you think that?”

I hedged. “Never mind what I think. The main point is, you could wind up in a room with soft walls.”

“Not while I’ve got one hand to hold a gun.”

“Back at that again,” I said.

“And anyhow, I don’t plan to go to the police. I want Heinrich here. I want a private showdown with him.”

“Oh-oh,” I said. “No, thanks. Include me out. I’m no assassin. I’m not even an assistant assassin. If you’re looking for homicide help, get another boy.”

His voice went smooth, persuasive. “Don’t let my gun talk put wrong ideas in your head. I’m not going to kill him. He’s worth a lot more to me alive. Alive and successful and prosperous. Do you think forty thousand dollars can last forever? Most of the money I got from Joe Fullerton’s insurance policy has been spent. And I’m too settled here to relish the idea of being moved to an almshouse. I don’t want charity, and I refuse to be a public charge. I simply want to talk to Heinrich.”

“Blackmail, eh? A shakedown.”

“That’s a little crude. I want to sell him the Fullerton diary for enough cash to see me through the rest of my life. Is that unfair?”

4. Kill and Vanish

Such guff as this I didn’t swallow. It was too transparent, too obvious. Barclay had bumpery on his mind and I wanted no part of that. By the same token you can’t come right out and say no to a potential madman with a gat in his clutch. It was a situation calling for finesse.

I lied diplomatically.

“Hmmm-m-m,” I said. “Just a financial transaction, huh? That’s different.” I moved easily toward the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked uneasily.

“To do what you asked. To arrange to lure Heinrich here.”

“You’re really going to help me?”

“Anything for a pal,” I said, and pushed the portal open.

It resisted me. Something was against it, outside in the hall. Something with weight that didn’t want to yield.

I shoved with all my hundred and ninety pounds of heft, suddenly and explosively. From the mirrored closet behind me came a displeased oath. Barclay must have thought I was taking a runout on him.

And I was. Or anyhow that had been my intention until I smacked the corridor door wide open and knocked somebody sprawling on the hallway’s thin-worn carpet. Then I changed my mind, because I had finally nailed my eavesdropper.

He was the deaf desk-clerk, with the parchment face, from downstairs. The door batted him all the way across the passage and he fetched up against the opposite wall, huddled, flopping, a bag of bones in a black alpaca coat. I grabbed him, dragged him back and pulled him into the room.

It was pretty dark now, but not too dark for me to see a wheelchair rolling toward me. The mirrored closet gaped wide, and the fragment of man who used to be Ronald Barclay was out of his hiding place. Maybe my unexpected maneuver with the door had brought him forth because of curiosity. Or maybe he’d had an idea of pursuing me, guessing that I was going to scram and leave him in the lurch.

He might even have figured a double-cross and decided to gun me in the back. I don’t know and I never found out. I didn’t have time to ask him.

I only knew that in the gloom of nightfall he didn’t look so hideous. Sitting in the wheelchair, he had a blanket over his lap so you couldn’t actually tell that his legs were missing. Without the lights turned on, his face could have passed for a face, for it was a pale blur above a white shirt even paler and blurrier.

One sleeve was empty, pinned to the chest. The other had an arm in it which ended in a stubby hand, the hand being busy propelling the chair by its wheel-rim. That was swell. As long as it was busy it couldn’t do anything about the nickel-plated .38 revolver resting on the blanketed lap.

That’s what I thought.

The pale blur of face spouted harsh curses. “You tricked me!” he raved. “You tricked me out of the closet so you could look at me.”

“Stow it.” I was leaning over the desk clerk. “This lad was listening, and—”

The sky came down and hit me on the noggin. All the stars in the heavens fell with the sky and danced in my optics, and all at once I was pitching down a long black tunnel that gulped me like a raw oyster. My head came off and floated away. It wasn’t a head, it was a balloon, and somebody had cut the string. It drifted on a rising current, and the current became a whirlpool of pain filled with India ink.

Blooey. I didn’t even feel the floor when it bounced me . . .

There was one dim light in the room, and two eyes fastened on me. I didn’t like them. They were too wide open, too glassy. Eyes are supposed to blink once in a while. These didn’t. They regarded me with the cold impassive speculation of a fish three days on ice. Expressionless. Unsympathetic.

The devil with them. I wanted sympathy. My skull throbbed like an ulcer in a movie producer’s stomach. I was an ill man. I was a sick dick and I didn’t like being stared at.

Ronald Barclay hadn’t liked it either, I reflected dourly. And when he didn’t like a thing he was a man who resented it the hard way. For a one-armed guy he certainly packed a wallop. It takes a hefty bash to put me down for the count, but he had what it takes. I decided I was lucky he had only whammed me with a .38. If it had been a .45 it would probably have finished me.

As it was, I had a lump on top of my conk the size of second base and I was lying on the floor, sniffing the dust of the thin carpet and looking into a pair of cold cod-fish glims belonging to somebody sprawled a couple of feet ferninst me. I didn’t mind the character being so close, but that steady mackerel focus gave me the fantods.

I got more than the fantods when it slowly dawned on me that the bozo wasn’t breathing.

He had a vacant, expressionless face as wrinkled as parchment, as colorless as wax candles. There was a wired button in one ear and a switched-off plastic box hanging from his alpaca coat, but he wasn’t using the equipment as a hearing aid. He was the desk clerk, and he was defunct. He couldn’t be anything else, the way his left temple was crushed in.

I whispered something silently.

The fog cleared out of my brain and I tabbed a wheelchair beyond the clerk’s lifeless husk. The last time I’d seen that wheelchair it had contained Ronald Barclay. Now it contained nobody. It was just an empty wheelchair.

I sat up and waited for nausea to hit me the way it does when you’ve got a minor concussion and move too fast. My head vibrated like strings on a hockshop banjo and my stomach churned.

As soon as it stopped churning I lurched to my feet. Astonishingly, I didn’t fall down again. For a guy with a cracked plate, this was a major accomplishment. I felt well enough to hip a quick dram from that fifth of Vat 69 on the table, and then I felt even better. I dug inside my coat, unshipped my roscoe and was back in business. I prowled the apartment.

First I looked in the closet behind the trick mirror. It was a big roomy space, dark as the inside of a rubber boot until I used the beam of my pencil flash. Barclay wasn’t there. When I moved to the bedroom he wasn’t in there, either. I drew another blank in the bathroom – no Barclay. Par for the course. But in a padlocked alcove between bedroom and bath I stumbled onto all the clues a snoop would ever need.

The padlock was duck soup for the pick I carry on my keyring, and the alcove was actually a miniature workshop. It had a wooden bench with precision lathes, motors, tools, strips and bars and hunks of metal that looked like aluminium or duralumin. It had an assortment of chromium steel coil springs, leather straps and the oddest looking hinges and pivots I’d ever gandered.

The corners of the alcove were piled with contraptions too beautifully fashioned to be called junk, but too outlandish to be called anything else. Some of the things had ball-and-socket couplings with mechanical latching devices. Others were whittled of wood and padded with leather to turn a harness-and-saddlemaker green with envy. It was a museum collection, a handicraft exhibit meriting booth space at an exposition. It had probably cost Ronald Barclay ten or twelve solitary and laborious years out of his life, and it was worth maybe seven dollars for scrap.

I heard footfalls.

I whirled, skulked silently back to the living room in time to hear a doorknob click and see it turn. I brought up my cannon and snicked off the safety.

The door swung outward and a tall, wide-shouldered punk ankled into the room – a punk with brown hair in crisp waves and an uncompromising chin as substantial as a granite cornerstone. He had a stethoscope clasped around his neck and dangling down onto his manly chest, but he was no doctor. Doctors don’t wear second-hand bellhop uniforms a size too small for them.

“Hi, Pete,” I said, and drew a bead on him. I was proud of myself for remembering that Pete was what the desk clerk had called him. “Freeze, please.”

He didn’t jump all the way out of his brogans, but he gave it the old college try. He goggled at my gat, backed against a wall and froze as instructed.

“Hey!” he strangled.

I kept him covered. “Just a formality, Pete. I’m a little nervous. For all I knew it might have been Frankenstein’s monster coming in. It might have been Jack the Ripper. It could have been anybody, but it turns out to be a combination bellhop and elevator jockey wearing a stethoscope. The stethoscope confuses me. Let’s hear about it.”

“You – you’re alive!”

“Yeah.” I gestured to the desk clerk crumpled on the floor in a motionless lump. “But he’s not. Explain the stethoscope, please. Talk it up.”

Pete regarded me with bewilderment. “I thought you were dead. When I found you a minute ago, you looked like it.”

“Ah. So you’ve been in here before.”

“Certainly. That’s why I rushed out to get my stethoscope. To try you for heartbeats. You didn’t seem to have a pulse.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a sawbones in your spare time?”

“I’m studying to be one.” He was as dignified as only a young guy who takes himself seriously can be. “I’m in my final semester of pre-med. Winthrop is the name, Peter Warren Winthrop.” His rugged jaw firmed and his kisser showed no good-humored quirk at the corners. “Just because I wear this monkey suit and accepted a dollar tip from you, don’t get wrong ideas.”

“I get many wrong ideas,” I said.

5. Murder on the Make

Putting away my rod, I flashed Pete a fast swivel at my private badge. It didn’t seem to be much of a surprise to him.

“Okay, son,” I said. “You were in here a moment ago. Why?”

“I was looking for old Duffy,” Pete said.

“Him?” I flicked a glance at the deceased bozo.

Pete nodded. “He wasn’t at his desk and the switchboard had a buzz. I thought perhaps he’d slipped upstairs without calling for the elevator, so I ran my car up here to Three, the top, and started scouting the halls. Duffy had a bit of listening at doors occasionally. Wood makes a good sound conductor when you put a hearing aid microphone against the panels. So I noticed this particular door open and looked in.”

“You saw what?”

“You and Duffy were on the floor. He was dead. I wasn’t sure about you, so I went for my stethoscope.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, sir. Except the wheelchair, of course.”

“Nobody was in it when you first looked?”

“Nobody.” He frowned. “I assume it’s Mr Fullerton’s chair. But if so, where’s Fullerton?”

“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “And his name isn’t Fullerton; it’s Barclay. Not that it matters to you. What does matter is, he’s gone. He was here, but he isn’t here now. You didn’t tab anybody going down the stairs?”

“I did not. Although the stairway is nowhere near my elevator, so that doesn’t spell anything.” He frowned again. “But if Fullerton, or Barclay or whatever his name is – if he uses a wheelchair he must be crippled. That’s an assumption on my part, of course, for I never laid eyes on him. But presuming he is a cripple—”

“He’s one-armed and legless.”

“You mean you saw him?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Then if he’s like you say, how could he get out of his wheelchair and go down two flights of steps?” Pete’s peepers narrowed and suspicion slid into them. Suspicion of me. “And who murdered Duffy?”

“The answer is in an alcove between the bedroom and bath,” I said. “Barclay experimented in prosthetics. He dabbled at inventing artificial limbs. That’s why I asked if you saw anybody scramming. He must have had a set of gams he could get around on.”

“I – see.”

“You didn’t think I croaked Duffy and abolished Barclay down the drainpipes and clouted myself unconscious, did you? You needn’t answer that. I can guess how you figured it, only you figured it wrong. Now where’s a phone?”

He pointed to a hand-set on a stand. “But you can’t go through the switchboard because Duffy isn’t there to give you a line.”

“Poor old guy,” I said. “He probably never got to spend that four bits for a perfecto. But at least he satisfied his curiosity about what the lodger in Three-seventeen looked like. He saw him. And the price he paid was much too high.”

I shooed Pete out into the hall, followed him, shut the door behind us.

“Let’s go, chum,” I said. “I’ve got dialing to do and connections to make. There’s a maniac killer on the loose and he’s thirsting for revenge, gunning for a movie mogul. This is a thing for the cops.”

It was for the cops, all right, but the cops wouldn’t have it. That cost them another bump-off before the night ended.

And it came near installing me in a coffin. Sometimes when my sleep is restless I can still feel those fingers closing like metal bands around my throat. Those are the nights I get up and drink myself very, very drunk . . .

My coupe could do eighty with a tail wind. On a downgrade it might even nudge ninety. I held it to fifty, though, because the last thing I wanted was a ticket for speeding. Not that the ticket would bother me, but you don’t like to be delayed by motorbike bulls when you’re trying to reach a guy and warn him he’s a ripe target for a madman’s bullet.

I whammed west on Sunset to Highland, north on Highland past Hollywood Boulevard and aimed for the hills above that. The multicolored lights of Los Angeles spread out behind and below me like a vast carpet of glowing embers, infernal, patterned in blotchy angles and lines that merged and dimmed against the far infinity of horizon and night.

Ahead, the convoluted hills rose darkly to a star-flecked sky, with here and there a pinprick twinkle on a knoll or cliffside, as if the crests had stretched far up and seized some of the stars to wear for diamonds. Lights in the windows of hilltop houses always look that way from a distance, and in Hollywood it’s considered swanky indeed to live in a district hilltop house.

That was why Emil Heinrich lived in one. Heinrich was big stuff.

I tooled my crate along a curving roadway and climbed. What I had to do was a cop job, but the cops wouldn’t handle it. They were a pack of dopes, particularly my old friend Ole Brunvig of the Homicide Squad. In my mind’s ear I could still hear the echo of Brunvig’s grainy, dyspeptic voice when I called him up from the lobby of the Chaple Arms.

“Nick Ransom, yeah,” I said. “There’s been a kill. A desk clerk, name of Duffy, made the mistake of looking at Ronald Barclay, and Barclay extinguished him. Now Barclay’s on the prowl to pull another bump.”

“He – what?”

I repeated it. “Barclay croaked this clerk named Duffy and now he’s out gunning for—”

“Stop kidding me. How can the clerk be out gunning for somebody if he’s croaked?”

“Not the clerk!” I yelped. “He’s defunct. It’s Barclay who’s on the loose, getting ready to kill again. The name he’s been using is Joseph T. Fullerton, but he’s really Ronald Barclay.” This sounded a little complex, but I let it go. “You remember Barclay. He used to be the hottest ham in the Paragon roster.”

“Oh. That Barclay. For a moment you had me puzzled.” Sudden peevishness sprouted through the sarcasm. “Sure I remember Ronald Barclay. He died fourteen years ago. Killed by an explosion on a sound stage. So now his ghost is horsing around Hollywood and you want him pinched for murder, hey?”

“Yes, but he’s not a ghost. He’s alive, and he’s got a roscoe and he’s on the prowl for the guy who put him in his grave.”

“Now cut that out!” Brunvig blew his lid. “If he’s alive, nobody put him in his grave. If he was in his grave, he isn’t alive. Lay off the drunken comedy.”

“It’s not comedy and I’m sober,” I said hotly. “Barclay is not dead. He never was. His funeral was phony. The explosion cost him both legs and an arm, but it didn’t really kill him. I’m telling you he knocked me senseless a little while ago and bumped a hotel clerk named Duffy and then walked out while I was too unconscious to stop him.”

“Oho. He walked out.” Brunvig’s voice rose to a shrill scream of rage, through which you could hear the gnashing of teeth. “He walked out. He’s got no legs, but he walked out. All right, Sherlock, that tears it. I’ve had enough.”

“Listen,” I said. “You don’t understand!”

“I understand plenty. You’re intoxicated. You’re fried up to the scalp. Okay, you’ve had your fun with me. Now go to bed and sleep it off before I get sore and jerk your license.” Violently he hung up in my ear.

You couldn’t blame him too much. Try to convince anybody that a screen star dead fourteen years is actually alive. Try to make a skeptical cop believe there’s a legless, one-armed bozo walking around packing murder in his pocket, hunting the party whose bomb had blasted him to a living death. You had to see it, as I’d seen it, to know it was true. Otherwise it sounded as screwy as an opium smoker’s dream.

So I got nowhere with Brunvig. I rang him back and he refused to talk to me. He wouldn’t even take the call.

That dumped it spang in my lap, which was what I deserved. It was my own fault. I should have made a getaway from Barclay’s suite when I’d had the chance, should have tipped the law to come slap a straitjacket on him when I first realized he was dangerously insane.

Instead, I’d turned my back on him so he could bash me. Worse, I’d dragged a poor old deaf yuck into the room and got him conked to his ancestors. I felt almost as guilty as if I’d killed Duffy myself.

Any way you looked at it, Barclay was now my personal responsibility. It was up to me to track him down, collar him before he slew any more citizens. Finding him shouldn’t be too difficult, I concluded. He had an obsession, a fixed idea. He craved vengeance on Emil Heinrich, therefore he would make a beeline for Heinrich’s opulent igloo in the Hollywoodland hills, probably by taxi. This called for a chase sequence, yoicks and tally-ho in a thundering hurry.

Not that I cared about Heinrich. If he had actually gimmicked the cigarette-box bomb fourteen years ago it was high time retribution caught up with him. It had to be legal retribution, though, and not meted out by a maniac with a penchant for murdering innocent bystanders. I didn’t want any more dead guys like Duffy weighing on my conscience.

So I left Peter Warren Winthrop, bellhop, elevator jockey and medical student, holding down the fort at the Chaple Arms. I posted him in the frowsy, unclean lobby and ordered him to keep phoning Homicide until he persuaded them to send a tech squad and a meat basket for Duffy’s remainders.

“Stay with it, son, and don’t take no for an answer,” I said.

Then I blipped out to my bucket and lit a shuck for high ground.

Now, ten minutes later, I twisted my tiller, scooted around a series of curves that slanted upward in tilted coils like rope a careless giant had tossed away. And presently I came to my destination.

Heinrich had a layout in keeping with his lofty position as head cheese of a major studio. It was a cubistic stucco affair on three different levels, as if the architect had melted it and let it drip down the face of the hill until it congealed there in an unsymmetrical jumble of gray blocks.

An abrupt driveway angled to a parking area in front of the garage, which might have held ten Cadillacs if you squeezed them in with a shoe-horn. From this terraced plateau, monolithic steps led up to the next level. You didn’t really need an alpenstock to make the climb.

At the top of the steps there was a flat expanse, part patio, part lawn, part flagstones, part garden and part swimming pool. Lake Michigan was bigger than the swimming pool. Skirting it, you came to the house itself, its main entrance recessed in a sort of embrasure. By that time you were ready for artificial respiration.

I thumbed the bell-push, waited for my pulse to get back down out of the stratosphere. By and by the chrome-plated door opened and a stuffed shirt in butler’s livery inspected me with the cordial sunny warmth of December in Siberia.

“Yes, sir?” He let the words slide past his sinuses, like a repressed whinny.

“Mr Heinrich,” I said, and briefly flashed my badge.

“The master is not at home, sir. And if I may say so, sir, I find your approach to be most crude in its subterfuge.”

“Hah?”

“The badge, sir. A special, I believe. Not a genuine police shield at all.” He leered at me. “You are not the only impostor who has tried to obtain an interview on false credentials. Most of them pretend to be gas meter readers, telephone repairmen and termite inspectors. I give you credit for more originality,” he added grudgingly. “But the fact remains that actors, musicians and scenario writers seeking employment with Paragon must see Mr Heinrich at the studio, not at his residence. Good night, sir.”

6. Body on the Lam

As that butler said “good night” he started to close the door in my face, very politely, very properly. And very firmly.

I leaned against its velvety chromium surface, just as politely and twice as firmly. I’m a patient guy, but I was fed up with people giving me the brushoff. I reached around the edge of the portal, harvested a fistful of the butler’s livery and hauled him up close to me. I thrust my kisser two inches from his, so he could smell the Scotch on my breath.

“Pal,” I said, “I’m coming in. If you insist on it I’ll trudge the length of you like a welcome mat, but I’m coming in. I’ve got to talk to Heinrich and I’ve got to have permission to prowl the property. Do you take me to your boss right now or shall we wrestle for it?”

“He – he’s not home!” he squawked, flapping like a hen laying a square egg. “Let go of me!”

I shook him a little, just enough to make his tonsils rattle.

“Don’t lie to me, baby. There’s a killer loose. He’s looking for your employer and he’s toting a thirty-eight for a divining rod. Take me to Heinrich. Pronto.”

“He’s out. There’s no-nobody home except Mrs Heinrich and myself. The rest of the household staff have the evening off. You let g-go of me or I’ll call the p-police!”

“I wish you would,” I said grimly. “Maybe they’ll listen to you. They wouldn’t to me.”

Still holding him, I shoved him backward into a reception hall that needed only a layer of turf to make it a polo field.

“But first take me to Mrs Heinrich,” I said. “That’s assuming you were levelling about her hubby not being home.” I kicked the door shut behind me, listened for the click that satisfied me the latch had snapped. “Meanwhile, don’t let anybody else in. Except the cops, of course. I wasn’t fooling about a killer being loose.”

He flapped some more. “You c-can’t—”

“Don’t be tiresome,” I said. “I’ll even let you announce me to the lady. Nick Ransom is the handle. Maybe she’ll remember me from the days when she was an extra named Marian Lodge and I was a stunt man around the lots.”

“But – but Mrs Heinrich doesn’t like to be disturbed during her star bath.”

“Star bath?”

“Like a sun bath, only at night. Something about the cosmic rays. She read it in a book.”

I took this in stride. The night was so full of whacky events I was growing calloused to it. And Marian always had a bird-brain.

“We’ll disturb her anyhow,” I said. “Get going.”

Muttering, he led me along the reception hall to a corridor, and along that to a stairway, and up this to a level which seemed to project outward into empty space. Actually it was a glassed-in-solarium with the domed roof rolled open; a basking room built out over the cliffside with no visible means of support, ending on a sheer drop down into the next precinct.

The butler cleared his throat apologetically, spoke my name and scuttled away with his coat-tails dipping lint. He never did phone Headquarters, the heel. He was all bluff and no hole card.

I stood there trying to adjust my eyes to the dark. There was movement on something that might be a chaise longue. You couldn’t quite tell in the blackness. The movement was white, though. Fascinatingly white. And a drawling she-male voice said:

“Nick Ransom, of all people. This is a surprise. Imagine, after all these years. And just as rugged as ever.”

I went toward her, wondering how she could spot my ruggedness in a room as dark as the bottom of the La-Brea tar pits. Presently my glimmers got their second wind and there was just enough starlight to show me the shapely outlines of a jane on a daybed. Just to make sure, I lit a match on my thumbnail.

Then I said: “Yipe!” and my flabbergasted exclamation blew out the flame.

The doll was Marian Lodge, all right; Marian Heinrich, now. Brunette, statuesque, relaxed, and utterly uninhibited.

She laughed. “Shocked, Nick? That’s out of character.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t expecting—”

“To get the full benefit of star bath rays you must have them flow over you like sea foam. All over you. Over all of you. Come sit by me, darling.”

“No,” I said firmly, “I’ll talk from here. It’s serious, and I want to keep my mind on it.”

“Silly boy.” Silk whispered intimately and a zipper wheeked. “Now you can be serious. Come kiss me hello.”

I sidled closer, cautiously.

“That was years ago. Before you got married. Speaking of husbands—”

“Let’s not.” She sat up, snared my fingers, tugged me down on the cushions. “Husbands bore me. Especially mine.”

“Where is he tonight?”

“Out chasing, I suppose. As usual. Don’t worry, he won’t bother us. He never gets home until late. Kiss me.”

I could be as persistent as she was. “Any way of getting hold of him by phone?”

“Heaven forbid.” She hauled at my wrist. “I’m so glad you came to see me, Nick. Like old times.”

Old times, my elbow. I’d been on two mild parties with her and she wanted to build it up to a feature production. In technicolor. What she was doing with my captured hand would have made a wooden Indian throw away his cigars. I was no wooden Indian, though. I was a private eye hunting a homicidal madman. “Cut it out, tutz,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”

“The answer is yes. Now kiss me.”

“Remember Ronald Barclay?”

“Do I! Mmm-mmm. I adored that man. Kiss me.”

By main strength, I got my fingers away from her. “Did he ever make a pass at you?”

“No.” She sighed regretfully. “Darn it.”

“But your husband was jealous of him, wasn’t he?”

“I wish you’d stop reminding me of my husband at a time like this. For all I care he can drop dead.”

This startled me. It made two people who yearned for Heinrich to pass away. Heinrich was not a popular guy.

“You might be surprised if he did die, hon,” I said. “Tonight. With a hole in the head. A bullet-hole, that is.”

She snagged my other hand and was reckless with it. Her sultry breath danced along my cheek. She was driving me crazy.

“Silly. You don’t have to shoot him,” she murmured. “I won’t even tell him you were here.”

“I didn’t say I’d shoot him!” I choked. “I meant . . . Hey, cut it out. Quit it.”

Star glow dropped little glints in her sleek black hair and her lips were a dark flutter of challenge and demand. But whatever I was going to do about it never got done, because just then a voice full of adenoids whinnied at us from the solarium entrance.

A butler is handy to have around, sometimes.

“I beg pardon,” the butler said. “There’s a person at the door who insists upon seeing Mr Ransom.”

I leaped up to my feet. In the same motion I unholstered my fowling piece. If this was Ronald Barclay trying to trick me out where he could use me for a clay pigeon, slugs were going to fly through the blue California night.

“Describe him,” I said.

“He’s rather young, sir. And tall. He gave his name as Peter Warren Winthrop, and when I refused to admit him he asked me to convey a message to you. Something to the effect, sir, that Duffy has disappeared.”

I made a record getting downstairs to see Peter Warren Winthrop. He had plenty to say and not much breath to say it with.

“It’s the truth, Ransom, so help me,” Pete Winthrop said. His athletic shoulders twitched under a gabardine topcoat and he sounded like a guy who has experienced a profound shock, like encountering a herd of polka-dotted zebras. “I know it’s hard to believe. I could scarcely believe it myself. But it’s true.”

We were outdoors, pacing the patio flagstones. Behind us, Heinrich’s cubistic wigwam was buttoned up tighter than a bald man’s scalp, and I’d warned the butler to keep it that way when I ankled out to parley with the Chaple Arms bellhop. Keeping step with him now, and holding to the thick shadows, I had my gat in my grasp and my peepers peeled for possible peril.

“How’d you discover it, son?” I said.

“I – I had put through another call to your friend Brunvig at Homicide Headquarters, but as soon as I mentioned your name to him and said I was phoning to report the same murder you had told him about, he slammed up on me. Then I got an idea.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded, and told me about it. “I decided I would go out and try to find any kind of policeman – you know, a motorcycle officer or radio prowl car cop, maybe even a flatfoot pounding a beat. Anybody with a badge and a little authority. But first I wanted to make sure none of the tenants up on three would wander into Three-seventeen and see Duffy’s corpse and throw the whole house into a panic. I couldn’t remember whether we had left the door of the suite open or closed, locked or unlocked.”

“So you went up there.”

“Yes. And he was gone. Duffy, I mean. Vanished. Not a trace of him. Do you realize what that means? It means that Fullerton, or Barclay as you called him – it means he was there in the hotel all the time. Hiding some place. Hiding while you and I went down and started phoning from the lobby.” The punk shivered visibly in his topcoat. “You’d gone away and left me there with a killer. And he had moved Duffy’s body as soon as the coast was clear.”

“Moved it where?”

“How should I know? Not in any of the broom closets or linen pantries. I looked. I was scared, but I looked anyhow. But I didn’t try any of the rooms. We’ve got a full house, everything occupied. I couldn’t very well start knocking on doors, asking guests to let me in so I could search for a dead man. I didn’t know what to do. Then I figured I’d better come here and tell you about it. I figured you might have some angles.”

“All I ran into was curves,” I said dourly.

I was thinking of Marian Heinrich and her star bath. She would do no more star bathing tonight. Thick, sinister clouds were drifting in from Santa Monica, sullen and ominous, wrapping up the stars in black cotton batting. You couldn’t see the surrounding hills, you couldn’t even see the flagstones you were walking on. All you could see was a mental image of something maniacal and monstrous, something on artificial legs stalking you through a darkness as thick as oatmeal cooked in a vat of dye.

“He was clever,” Pete Winthrop said. “Nobody can prove he murdered Duffy if Duffy’s corpse can’t be found. The cops will never believe your story, now. Which gives him a clear field to ambush Heinrich.”

“Not while we do sentry duty,” I said.

“We?”

“Beat it if you’re yellow,” I growled. “I’ll do what has to be done.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said apologetically. “I was just flattered to think you wanted me.” Impressed. Boyish. A punk with a chance to assist a private dick and overwhelmed by it. And a little uncertain, too. “Mightn’t it be a good idea to phone the law again and try to persuade them to send somebody to help us stand guard?”

7. Fingers of Guilt

We had paced all the way back to the front door by that time, Peter and I. And as if in answer to his suggestion, the portal opened not more than half an inch.

“Mr Ransom, sir,” came through the opening in a shaky whinny.

“Close that door and keep it locked!” I rasped.

“Y-yes, sir,” the butler said. “But I thought you should be informed that I fear I delayed too long in attempting to call the police as you originally suggested. Our line seems to be dead, sir.” The door swung shut and the latch clicked.

“Golly!” Pete Winthrop made a gulping noise in his gullet. “A dead phone. A cut wire. Barclay’s here – on the grounds!”

I gave him a shove. “Scatter. Stay up here on the patio level. Keep moving. I’ll patrol down along the driveway and garage. That way I’ll be set in case he tries to dry-gulch Heinrich coming home in his car. I don’t suppose you’ve got a heater?”

“Heater?”

“Gun.”

“No.”

“Barclay has, so watch out. Don’t jump him if you see him.”

“What shall I do?”

“Yell for me and duck for cover. Don’t let him get you in the open.”

We separated, and I went catfooting down the long monolithic stairway. There was one thing in our favor – the rear of the estate was walled in by a precipitous hill, barricading it against approach or escape. You couldn’t get in that way unless you used a block and tackle or descended by parachute. You couldn’t get out without a helicopter.

This made my strategy valid. The lower-level driveway was the only entrance, and the only exit. And the house itself was practically impregnable when its doors and windows were locked. Clenching my cannon, I was ready for the payoff.

Silence pressed down around me. With the coming of the clouds, even the hillside crickets had quit being chirpy. I kept listening for anything that might sound like the metallic clank of artificial legs in motion, the scrape of soles on cement paving.

Away back in the recesses of my think-tank something bothered me, something that refused to be dragged out so I could inspect it. It was an evasive wisp, a fragment that played hide-and-seek with my subconscious. I felt the same way about it that I’d felt when I had first heard an empty room speak my name with Ronald Barclay’s voice. Haunted, uncomfortable.

I had a curious sensation that Barclay didn’t exist, that he never had existed; that everything had been a figment of my imagination. But the throbbing lump on top of my noggin contradicted any such nonsense.

Barclay had been real enough. Figments of the imagination don’t slug you to dreamland, and they don’t croak poor old deaf guys like Duffy. And I had glimpsed the maimed ham with my own optics. I had lamped him in his wheelchair, definitely legless under the lap blanket, definitely one-armed, with a shirt sleeve pinned up emptily.

“Ransom!”

The shout came hoarsely from above, and then I heard a series of scuffling sounds, the violent rustling of underbrush. I leaped for the steps, took them three at a time, catapulted across lawn and patio toward those continuing noises.

Hard by the tiled area bordering the swimming pool there was a row of clumped hydrangea bushes. I couldn’t see them stirring, but I heard them.

Flying blind, I plunged forward – and overshot the mark.

Something reached out, tripped me. As I stumbled, a heavy and panting burden landed on my back with an impact that drove me down on all fours like a bear. I didn’t lose my roscoe, but for all the good it did me I might as well have pitched it into the pool. The hand that held it was pressed knuckle-deep in loam and I couldn’t raise it, couldn’t even move it.

Weight crushed me, flattened me, and then fingers clamped around my throat from behind. They were hot, inexorable fingers as relentless as steel springs.

They throttled me, pressing against my jugular and carotid artery, collapsing my gullet and robbing my bellows of air. I bucked and arched my spine and sunfished like a rodeo bronc, but all I threw was snake-eyes. I didn’t throw my rider.

Then I didn’t throw anything. I got thrown. I was propelled headlong into the swimming pool and I sank like an anchor.

They say a drowning gee sees his whole life pass by him in a series of flashback montage memories. Not me. I just saw the scenes of the past few hours. Plummeting downward in cold water, I reviewed everything that had happened.

My head stopped throbbing and my mind sharpened like a razor on a hone. I saw the cat eating a bird on the steps of the Chaple Arms. I saw Ronald Barclay’s hotel suite, the trick mirror in the closet door, the little padlocked alcove workshop where he had dabbled in prosthetics. I saw the defunct Duffy lying with his temple crushed in, a button fastened in one ear and wires running down to a switched-off hearing gadget he would never need again.

I saw a legless figure in a rolling wheelchair, a one-armed form with a vague blur of face and a gat in his lap, and the voice of a guy I’d once considered my friend. I had the memory of a kraut director named Heinrich who had climbed to the top of the cinema heap, slowly but implacably, until he was chief poobah of a major studio.

And I saw a voluptuous and uninhibited quail, feather-brained, black of hair and gorgeously white of skin, lolling in a darkened solarium taking a star bath, letting her lovely contours soak up cosmic rays while she expressed a fervent wish that her hubby would drop dead.

I hit bottom. And, as I hit, I found all the answers. A fine time to be finding answers, when you’re drowning at the bottom of a swimming pool.

On the other hand, when you’re a murderer and you’ve strangled a guy and dumped him in the deep six, you’ll likely stand by to see if he floats to the surface again. That’s so you can shoot him, bludgeon him or shove him under to make certain he dies – if he’s not already dead. Naturally, if he’s dead he’ll stay beneath the water and you needn’t worry about him any more.

I stayed under water.

I wasn’t deceased. I wasn’t even unconscious. But I knew if I came up for air I would be a goner. The instant my conk popped out it would be a bull’s-eye, either for a bullet or a fractured skull if I happened to be within reaching distance of the pool’s edge. I realized this even while my lungs were bursting and every muscle struggled to impel me off the bottom.

I fought it. I reverted to my stunting days when I could stay immersed as long as the scenario demanded. I held my breath, got my feet planted solidly on the slippery tile floor of the immense pool and slowly started walking. Very slowly, so I couldn’t create surface ripples. And keeping my mental fingers crossed, hoping I was headed in the right direction.

My soles detected a slant – downward.

I reversed myself. My ears were pounding now, and my chest was full of molten metal that seared and burned like a blast furnace. But I had learned which way the pool’s bottom tilted, and I was heading for the shallow end. All I needed was another minute.

Too bad Emil Heinrich was such a big shot at Paragon Pix. Too bad he had so much dough. If he had been less wealthy his swimming pool would be smaller. I could reach the shallow part sooner. But no, Heinrich had to be in the top chips. Try that on your philosophy. A guy earned too much geet, and because of it people died.

I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.

I let some of it out and it streamed up over my head like an immense balloon. Like a drifting blister. Like bubble gum. It popped and broke on the surface. I could hear it.

Okay, killer. You happy now? You know what that air-bubble spells. You’ve murdered me. That was the last of my air. Now you can go away. I’m on the bottom and I’m croaked.

Oh, yeah? That’s what you think.

The pool’s floor slanted more abruptly. I kept walking. I got my cigarette holder out of my inside coat pocket. It was a plastic cigarette holder with silver filigree. A client had given it to me one time, by way of showing gratitude. I never use it, except when I’m trying to impress other clients. Cigarette holders are an affectation. I like to inhale my poison straight.

Nice cigarette holder. Not as long as a symphony conductor’s baton, but long enough. A hollow tube, slightly flared at one end; a mouthpiece on the other.

Shallow water now. Still deep enough to cover me, but shallow. Careful now. Keep at least six inches of water over your head, Ransom, old boy. Don’t break the surface.

I stuck the holder in my mouth and poked its opposite end out of the pool. I blew through it, cleared it.

Then I breathed through it. I breathed air. Wonderful element, air. Puts oxygen in your blood and hair on your chest. I breathed air through the plastic tube, and nobody knew it. Nobody could see me. To all intents and purposes I was a cadaver at the bottom of the water. For a cadaver I was feeling pretty spry.

I kept breathing, not moving. No telling how long it would be before I dared take a chance and scramble out onto dry land. I couldn’t tell who was watching, any more than the watcher could tell I was alive. I breathed, and waited. I waited and breathed.

Nobody lives forever. I walked and broke water and found the hand rails of a ladder and got my feet on the rungs, hauled myself to the bordering tiles. No gunshots. No swat on the steeple. Nothing but darkness and the squishing of my shoes and the splashy drip-drip-drip from my ruined tweeds.

That, and distant bitter dialogue, and a motor idling lazily on the driveway down below.

The motor had a rich hollow chuckle from its exhaust, like an Indian tomtom in a rain barrel. It sounded healthy and powerful and expensive. It sounded like five miles to the gallon, provided the driver did a lot of coasting.

The masculine voices sounded sore.

I skittered to the steep concrete escarpment the Heinrich menage used for an outdoor stairway and probed my way down through a night that was just as dark as it had ever been. On the parking area this side of the driveway there was something that could have been a Cadillac, a Packard, a Lincoln or a streamlined Diesel locomotive.

Its rear end was pointing inward, twin tail-lights and amber back-up lights glowing like a Christmas tree. Apparently the guy at the wheel had come up the drive and then jockeyed the massive heap around so he could back into the garage and be ready for a fast straight-ahead takeoff in the morning.

His head lamps made the driveway and parking level as bright as a movie set under sun arcs, but he wasn’t at his tiller now. He had got out and walked around to open the garage doors, and I recognized him in the red-and-amber glow of his stern lights. He was Emil Heinrich, short, dumpy, potbellied, with a face like a full moon. His wife had said he wouldn’t be home until late, but he had fooled her.

He was talking in a thick, guttural monotone to somebody who lurked in the shadows at the sedan’s far side.

“Zo. You want me to bay you one hundred thousandt tollars for dis diary. The diary of a dead man, agguzing me of murter. You zay you vill turn me ofer to the law if I revuze. Pah! Id iss ridiculous. I vill gif you one thousandt tollars cash, vich I habben to haf in mein bocket for small change. One thousandt, for your nuisanz walue.” He spat. “Take id or leaf id.”

“I’ll take it as first payment.”

I knew that voice. How well I knew that voice! Resonant. Determined. I didn’t have to gander its owner, hidden around the far side of the sedan. Hearing it was enough.

Heinrich reached into a coat pocket as if to bring forth the promised lettuce. He made a mistake. A bad mistake. He dragged a roscoe out instead.

Flame lanced out around the sneezing ka-chow! of gunfire. It wasn’t Heinrich’s gun that fired, though. He never got around to it. He lurched, took three mincing steps backward, crossed his ankles awkwardly and twisted as he fell. After he fell he didn’t even move.

8. Last Kill, Last Chase

Catapulting down the remaining steps, I was unable to draw a bead on the killer because the chuckle-purring sedan was in the way. I had my own heater ready, but I couldn’t use it. A car door slammed. The chuckle-purr snarled into a roar. Rear tires spun, screeched, got traction. The sedan made like jet propulsion going down the driveway.

I snapped a cap at where I thought its gas tank ought to be. Nothing happened. My rod had been too long under water. The cartridge must have been just slightly defective, enough to let the powder get soaked.

I swore, ejected it, jacked another shell into the firing chamber and tried again. But by that time the getaway crate had careened onto the road and was gone. The gat jumped in my fist and my slug went pee-yowp! against the opposite cliff. Clean miss.

Then I wasted time. I bent down in the darkness, inspected Heinrich’s porky poundage. His wife had got her wish. She was a widow now. Scratch one studio executive. A tunnel that only a .38 could make was drilled all the way through his chest. No matter how important you are in Hollywood, a .38 slug in your heart brings you down to size.

The nickel-plated revolver on Ronald Barclay’s legless lap had been .38 caliber. That was the final clue.

I lunged to my coupé where I’d parked it over to one side of the garage apron. Unfortunately, I’d left it headed inward. Now I had to get it started, get it horsed around in the opposite direction. That wasted more time. I finally made it and went thundering down the driveway, around the bend into the road. Then I widened out, fed my clattering cylinders all the coal they would take. I made knots. I bored a hole in the night that the night would never repair.

Down out of the hills, a siren cut loose behind me and a red spotlight stabbed my rear-view mirror.

I pulled over. A prowl car drew abreast. I bounced out, rushed to the cop chariot and yodeled:

“Boys, you’ve got a passenger!” I flashed my badge, piled into the police buggy. “Let’s go! And get me Lieutenant Ole Brunvig on your two-way short wave. Brunvig of Homicide. This is murder.”

The cops bought it. I must have sounded plenty sincere. They believed me. The one sitting alongside the driver cut in his transmitter, talked to his hand mike. Presently Brunvig’s voice rasped in the cowl speaker.

I snaked the hand mike away from the cop and made with the words. Terse words that boiled out of me like Mount Vesuvius in eruption. After a while the loud-speaker snapped back at me. I had a date with Brunvig at the Chaple Arms.

The prowl car picked up velocity. The guy at the wheel was good. He sent only three pedestrians scampering up palm trees. He took only the first skin of red paint off a passing Pacific Electric bus. He should have been a barber. He could shave you with his front fender and never leave a whisker.

Ole Brunvig’s official bucket was just pulling up in front of the Chaple Arms as we screamed to a halt behind him. Up ahead, a sedan was parked – a new, streamlined monster that didn’t belong to this neighborhood at all. It made the rest of the heaps on the street look like scrap iron. And the sedan was Emil Heinrich’s.

I leaped to the sidewalk, grabbed Ole’s arm and yanked him into the flea-bag hotel’s dingy lobby without missing a stride. There was nobody holding down the greasy, marble-topped desk. I ducked around back of it, found a chart for the rectangular tier of wooden letterboxes.

“One-thirty-nine!” I yeeped. “Ground floor. Come on!”

Brunvig hadn’t had a chance to say anything. He still didn’t. He just unlimbered his cannon and kept pace with me around a rear hallway to the door I wanted. I pointed at the keyhole.

“Okay,” he grunted. “If I get busted back to harness for this, I’ll reach down your throat and yank you inside out.” Then, expertly, he shot the lock to splinters.

I hit the portal a mighty lick and went sailing into a small, cheerless room.

“This is all of it, punk,” I said to Peter Warren Winthrop. “You’re through. You’re through being a bellhop, elevator operator and medical student. And you’re through killing people.”

He straightened up from a Gladstone bag he had been hastily packing.

“What?”

“Playing stupid will buy you nothing,” I said. “The giveaway was when you throttled me, dunked me in the pool. Up until then I hadn’t suspected you. My attention was all on Ronald Barclay. I’d sensed something haywire about the Barclay theory, but I couldn’t nail it down. Then you choked me, hurled me to a watery grave – at which juncture the finger pointed straight at you. A lot of fingers. Ten of them, to be exact.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about two hands closing around my throat. One set of fingers pressing my carotid artery, and the other set digging into my jugular vein on the opposite side of my neck. Then I knew it couldn’t be Barclay who had jumped me, because he was a one-armed guy. And the fingers strangling me were real. Human. Alive. Hot. Not one real hand and one artificial. Both hands were genuine. That eliminated Barclay.”

“This is all Greek to me,” he said.

I sneered at him. “It was to me, too, until I savvied the clue of the ten fingers. Then everything else clicked into place. I remembered pushing Barclay’s living-room door open, and encountering resistance – the pressure of somebody leaning against it outside in the hall. I remembered giving it a shove, and bouncing poor old Duffy across the corridor so that he landed like a sack of bones.

“At the time I thought he’d been eavesdropping. But eavesdroppers don’t lean against doors when you catch them at it. They turn and run for cover.”

“So what?”

“So the next time I saw Duffy he was deceased of a cracked superstructure. And his hearing aid was switched off, which didn’t spell anything to me at the time. It did later, though, when I began adding things up. With his ear gadget turned off to save the batteries, he couldn’t have been listening at the door.”

The punk shifted uneasily. “I don’t get what you’re driving at. It sounds like a lot of hogwash.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, how about this? You followed me up to Heinrich’s igloo in the Hollywoodland hills, ostensibly to inform me that Duffy’s corpse had vanished. But I hadn’t told you I was going to the Heinrich stash. I never mentioned Heinrich’s name to you. And you couldn’t have heard me say it when I phoned Lieutenant Brunvig at Headquarters, because Brunvig cut me off before I brought Heinrich into the conversation. Yet you trailed me, found me. How?”

“Why, I – I – that is, I—”

“You were the eavesdropper,” I said. “Not Duffy. You, Peter Warren Winthrop. That accounts for the stethoscope. A stethoscope is a handy listening device. Plug it in your ears and put the diaphragm end against a wall or a door and you can hear whatever is being said inside a room. Know what I think? I think you listened to everything Ronald Barclay told me. You found out who he was. And what he had on Emil Heinrich – which was plenty, from a blackmailer’s viewpoint. You probably wondered how you could make use of the information to line your own pockets. And while you listened, Duffy came upstairs and caught you with your stethoscope to the door.”

He turned a little pallid around the fringes. I had him winging now.

“Poor old Duffy,” I said. “He saw you eavesdropping, and you slugged him to keep him from raising a row. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him – I wouldn’t know about that. But you did kill him. You crushed his temple. Then you took a powder, leaving his body propped against the door. That was the pressure I felt when I shoved it open. The resistance was Duffy’s dead weight. When I bounced him across the hall he was already defunct, although I didn’t suspect it. And in the gloom and dusk I didn’t notice the depression in his skull.”

“Now see here—”

“Having murdered one guy, you were in up to your ears.” I ignored his attempted interruption. “And you saw a chance for a fortune in shakedown dough. You pranced into the room as I dragged Duffy over the threshold. Ronald Barclay wheeled his chair out of the closet at the same instant. I thought he was the one who slugged me senseless, but now I know it must have been you.

“You bashed me. Then you croaked Barclay. He was a defenseless cripple and you cooled him, pilfered his thirty-eight and the diary. You toted his remainders out of the room to make it look as if he’d left under his own steam.”

The punk made a raucous sound.

“Sheepdip,” he said.

“Sure, sheepdip,” I said. “I swallowed it. Because I found an alcove where he’d experimented in making artificial legs, I actually believed he had walked out. I was a fool. I should have realized that was impossible. He dabbled in prosthetics, yes; but everything he made was junk. Useless.

“So anyhow you came back, perhaps thinking you’d killed me as well as Duffy and Barclay. I surprised you by being alive and on my feet, with a gun aimed at you. I’ll give you credit – you played it smart. I had the drop on you, and you made the best of a bad situation. Later you got a nice break when the cops refused to come to the hotel. That forced me to lone-wolf it out to Heinrich’s tepee. It left you alone, gave you time to arrange new plans.”

“Such as?” he blustered.

“Such as moving Duffy’s corpse, hiding it where you had already hidden Barclay’s,” I said. “I doubt you ever made a telephone call to Police Headquarters.”

Ole Brunvig growled: “Right. He didn’t.”

“Okay,” I said to the punk. “With your two victims stashed out of sight, you trailed me from inside. You also cut their phone line. Then, when we separated, you faked a fracas on the upper level, drew me in and thought you bumped me. Now you had a free hand to intercept Heinrich when he came home. You could demand a hundred grand blackmail for a diary that might convict him of a kill fourteen years ago.”

I paused. “The fact that Heinrich offered to buy it makes me think that he did gimmick the bomb that croaked a prop man and maimed Barclay. I’m not too sorry you knocked him off. If that had been the only murder you pulled tonight I’d be inclined to say the devil with it. But you cooled Duffy and Barclay, and they didn’t deserve it.”

“Can you prove any of this?”

“I can try,” I said, and ankled to a closet on my left, yanked it open.

Two stiffs fell out. One of them wore a hearing aid. Duffy. The other had one arm and no legs. Barclay.

Winthrop’s hand went into the Gladstone he had been packing. It came up with a nickel-plated .38 fowling piece, the rod he had stolen from Ronald Barclay when he glommed the Fullerton diary.

Long before he could trigger the gat, though, Ole Brunvig cut loose with his service revolver. There were two sharp thunderclap barks, spaced so closely together they sounded almost like one. Winthrop yowled like a banshee and slammed against the wall with ketchup spurting from both shoulders.

Brunvig showed his teeth. “Now he knows what it’s like to be maimed. Look at that bag, Sherlock, and see if you can find the diary.”

I found it. And Peter Warren Winthrop took his shattered shoulders to the gas chamber the following month.

Sometimes I wonder if Marian Heinrich still indulges in star baths. One of these nights I’m going up in the hills to see.