Shadowtown

by Lutz, John

  “Anything I can do to help …” Merritt was saying.

  Oxman nodded. “Thanks. Maybe before this is over we’ll take you up on that.” He moved on down the long hall toward the offices and sound stage.

  Beyond the white-paneled drop ceiling, the sounds of his footsteps changed somewhat and he could sense, as he had last night, the dim vastness of the building around him. Like the feel of an echoing cavern. Then he rounded a partition and saw Tobin standing with Harry Overbeck. He watched as Tobin looked up, saw him approaching, then said something to Overbeck and moved away so he and Oxman could talk privately. Overbeck stood at a forward angle for a moment, as if he wanted to follow Tobin, then moved toward a door to what looked like a control booth. Beyond the booth several of the cast were standing around a set made up to look like the rough-hewn and functional but trendy interior of a beach cottage.

  “How you been spending your time here, Art?” Oxman asked.

  Tobin shrugged. “Following the line of questioning, meeting all the charming people.”

  “What did you pick up?”

  “If they’re anything like their soap identities,” Tobin said, “I suppose I might have picked up anything from herpes to the flu just standing around them. The truth is, though, they seem like normal, whacky show-business types who are too wrapped up in their careers to take time out to commit murder. Though they might consider killing one of their own number.”

  “Why do you say that?” Oxman asked.

  “Professional jealousy, Ox. The air vibrates with it in front and in back of the cameras.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that’s more or less standard?”

  “Never been on a soap set before,” Tobin said. “Wouldn’t know. I do know I’ve got no idea who’s good for this murder. I did find out one thing. The woman in charge of Wardrobe told me an Edgar Grume outfit is missing.”

  “A vampire costume, huh?”

  Tobin nodded. “More and more, Ox, it looks like some loony broke in here and killed McGreery. Kinda thing that happens all the time and doesn’t even make the papers, only this time it happened where a soap is taped, so it’s juicy news.”

  Oxman jammed his hands into his pockets and gnawed on his lower lip. He had to admit that what Tobin said made sense. It didn’t figure that one of the cast or production crew would have any reason to murder a watchman, because it didn’t figure they’d have a reason to be roaming around here after hours. And if one of them had wanted to kill anyone here at Shadowtown, why would he or she have gone to the trouble of stealing and wearing a vampire costume? That was apropos to murder, but a bit melodramatic even for a soap-opera star.

  “Have you decided Edgar’s come back again from the grave and is stalking the populace?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Oxman looked up from staring at a spot on the floor and saw a slender, fortyish woman of astounding beauty. She had a trim, almost waspish figure, penetrating blue eyes, and dark hair that cascaded with controlled wildness like a mantle of madness. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and tight slacks of some sort of silky material that showed off her legs. Legs worth showing off.

  “You mean Edgar Grume the vampire?” Tobin asked.

  “Only Edgar Grume I know,” she said. “Knew, rather.”

  “Too bad for vampires,” Tobin said in an admiring voice Oxman seldom heard.

  But she wasn’t looking at Tobin; she had her unwavering stare fixed on Oxman. This had to be Delia the bitch, he thought. Perfect casting.

  “I should have said Allan,” the woman said. “Allan Ames.”

  “The actor who played Grume,” Oxman said.

  “Ah, you’re a fan.”

  “No.”

  “Which is why he probably doesn’t know who you are,” Tobin said, as if apologizing for Oxman’s incredibly bad manners. “Ox, this is Lana Spence, who plays Delia on the show.”

  “Ox?” she said. “That’s a curious name.”

  “My full name’s Oxman. E. L. Oxman.”

  “What’s the E. L. stand for?”

  “Lana Spence your real name?”

  “Of course not,” she said, and smiled at his evasion. Oxman seemed actually to feel the impact of that smile. Wham!

  Rumpled Harry Overbeck walked over, along with a hulking bald man wearing dark suit-pants and paisley suspenders.

  “We’re ready to shoot the argument scene,” Overbeck said. He looked over at Oxman. “Any new developments in the case?” he asked, no doubt remembering the line from a thousand movies and TV cop shows. The bald man might have smiled, but Oxman couldn’t be sure. He didn’t look like a guy who smiled a lot.

  “We’re gradually putting the pieces together,” Oxman said non-committally, giving him back some more movie dialogue. He noticed the bald man shift his weight from leg to leg, as if impatient.

  “Come on, Shane,” Overbeck said. “We better make a final check on the time sequence.” Again he looked at Oxman. “Care to come into the control room and watch a scene being shot?” he asked. “Your partner seemed to enjoy the one he saw earlier.”

  Oxman nodded. “Thanks, I’d like that. My partner’s more knowledgeable about the soaps than I am, but I’m learning.”

  Lana Spence seemed to glide in front of Oxman as he started to follow Overbeck and bald Shane. “I do need to talk to you alone after the scene,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “About the McGreery murder?”

  Lana laughed. “Not about some other murder. You didn’t suppose I intended to seduce you, did you?” she asked. “That’s Delia you’re thinking of.”

  “Is it?” Shane asked no one in particular. Lana pretended not to have heard him as they walked toward the set and control room.

  Five minutes later, from the regulated order behind thick glass, Oxman stared out at the scene unfolding before him in the cottage. Lana Spence—or Delia—was arguing violently with a man she referred to as Roger. Roger Maler, Oxman figured. The town’s most sought-after bachelor, according to Myra Deeber. The argument seemed to be about whether Roger would go to a business meeting in New York over the next several days. Delia suggested that he was actually planning to meet another woman, his younger lover, and demanded that he spend the time with her. Roger was adamant about going until Delia mentioned something about a man from Miami who’s been asking about him. He changed his mind about the New York trip in a hurry then. When Delia licked her lips and moved in on him and promised playfully to make their time spent together worth his while, Roger wound up clutching her to him and telling her how much he loved being with her. Oxman could see his point. As she ran her fingers over the back of Roger’s handsome head and stared directly into the camera that was dollying in, she smiled wickedly.

  “Great!” bald Shane said in the control booth. Then he threw a switch that carried the sound of his voice outside the glassed-in room and said “Great!” again with the same enthusiasm.

  Roger and Delia started drifting off the set into the real world. Oxman glanced at the black-and-white monitor in the control room and saw that the cottage was empty.

  “Restaurant scene in an hour!” Shane reminded them.

  Neither of them seemed to have heard. Oxman wondered if Lana Spence ever heard Shane. Or anyone else she didn’t want to hear.

  “I’ll meet you back at the Two-Four,” Oxman said softly to Tobin. “After I see what Miss Spence has to say.”

  Tobin put on his wide and lascivious grin. “You devil, Roger—er, Elliot Leroy.”

  “Check with the earlier shift reports and see if there were any calls about vampires from anywhere else in the city.”

  Tobin nodded, somber again after Oxman’s lack of response to his goading. “I doubt if that’ll net us much, Ox. Whoever killed McGreery probably realized he might have been seen and would have ditched the costume as soon as possible. Still, I guess it’s a base we oughta touch.”

  “If we want it to be legal when we score,” Oxman said.

  “Speaking of
scoring …” Tobin worked his eyebrows Groucho Marx fashion.

  “Can it, Artie,” Oxman told him. What the hell was wrong with Tobin?

  He waited until Tobin had left the control room before stepping out and looking around for Lana Spence. She wasn’t in sight. Apparently she was waiting for him to come to her dressing room. A star was a star and was expected to act like one, he thought. But if she wasn’t in her dressing room waiting for him, she’d find out a cop could act like a cop. Overbeck told him how to get there.

  As he left the sound-stage area, he noticed Zachary Denton, the set designer who’d discovered McGreery’s body, wandering around the cottage set carrying a clipboard and pencil. When Denton passed the sofa where Delia and Roger had clinched, he paused and ran his hand along where she’d been sitting, as if to find out if the leather was still warm.

  Then he saw Oxman looking at him, grinned, and moved over to make a note about a quilt hung over the fireplace.

  Oxman found himself wondering if Zachary Denton and Allan Ames wore about the same size clothes.

  Zachary Denton—12:05 P.M.

  Zach watched Oxman leave the sound-stage area and walk toward the dressing rooms. Oxman was going to talk with Lana Spence, Zach had heard a member of the sound crew say. And it was Lana who’d requested the conversation, which wasn’t the way things usually occurred in a murder investigation. Lana should have hammed her way through enough low-grade thrillers to realize that much.

  As Zach strolled around the cottage set, looking over the props, he was preoccupied, actually thinking about Oxman. He hadn’t caught anything special in the way the homicide cop had stared at him; Oxman didn’t know anything yet.

  Or did he?

  Zach again called up the vision of Oxman’s features as they’d exchanged glances. That vision was reassuring: only the flat yet probing eyes of a cop, no spark of knowledge or emotion there along with the mild curiosity. It had been only a few hours since Zach had found out, so it wasn’t likely that Oxman knew.

  This morning, at breakfast in his apartment, Bonnie had been harping at Zach. They’d had an argument last night, over some spilled wine, and he’d lost his temper and struck her. Not hard, really, just a glancing blow off her upper arm. But it had left a large bruise that was turning an ugly purple, which Bonnie showed him indignantly as she poured his coffee.

  Zach had prudently waited until she’d put down the potentially dangerous potful of scalding liquid before telling her that if she didn’t like the way he treated her she could leave. Move out and find her own apartment. She’d gotten really mad then, and he thought for a moment she might really walk out and not return, at least for several days, so he’d lightened up and laid on the sweet talk. Pressed the right buttons.

  She was a pliable fool, like the rest of them, and after breakfast they were back in bed, making love. He was gentle with her this time, stroking her forehead as she bucked against his rhythmic thrusts into her. She kept moaning about how much she loved him. He listened to the music of the bedsprings and didn’t answer.

  What with Bonnie causing delay and confusion, he hadn’t gotten a chance to read the morning paper until after he’d showered, and had only fifteen minutes before he had to leave for the morning’s taping. He hadn’t caught Oxman’s name yesterday, and only when he read the news item about Vince McGreery did he realize who Oxman was. His, Zach’s, name was in the paper, too, and he wondered if it had meant anything to Oxman. There was something unnerving about Oxman, about the methodical way the stolid, sandy-haired detective thought and moved. A kind of calm relentlessness. It was almost spooky.

  “Honey,” Bonnie said, close to Zach. She’d lowered herself onto the sofa and had sidled up to him while he’d been absorbed in the newspaper. She was a tiny, green-eyed girl with reddish hair and freckles across the top of her chest. She was still damp from her shower, wearing only her panties; Zach noticed the few freckles down on her breasts, above the pink nipples that were puckered and rigid from the coolness after the steamy bathroom.

  When he didn’t answer her, she coiled an arm around his neck and leaned close. He felt her tongue lick and then probe warmly at his ear.

  “Jesus!” he said. “Didn’t you get enough?”

  She grinned. “Never enough of you, babe. I want you to be thinking about me all day long.”

  “I’ll be busy,” he said, “thinking about other things.” He disengaged her arm from around his neck. “I’m thinking about other things right now.”

  “Such as?”

  “Nothing that concerns you.”

  She moved away from him on the sofa. “You block me out, Zach. Unless you want sex, you treat me like some kind of pest.”

  Zach was still wondering about Oxman. “Sometimes you are a pest,” he said.

  “You don’t mean that, baby.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Damn you!” She rushed at him, feigning anger more than she was experiencing real insult. He’d called her worse. They’d fought. She’d forgiven him. Coming back for more was what she was all about.

  Almost absently, Zach shoved her away, and she nearly lost her balance on the sofa, almost slid onto the floor. She stood up and kicked him in the leg with her bare foot. That hurt her more than it did him.

  “You bastard!” she said, her anger stoked by the jolt of pain. She leaned forward and drew back her arm to slap him in the face. Too slow.

  Zach caught her wrist, stood up, and cupped a hand beneath her chin. He pushed her and she struck the wall hard, causing his new Monet print to drop to the floor. The frame cracked and fell apart. First the wine, now the print. Enough!

  “Wait!” Bonnie pleaded, but he was on her. He grabbed her by the arm, making sure his fingers dug hard into the purplish bruise, and slung her toward the sofa. She bounced off the cushions and sprawled backward onto the carpet.

  Zach walked over to stand above her. He glared down at her and she raised her arms as if to ward him off and cowered back toward the corner. Her teeth were bared like those of a terrified animal whose only defense left was to bite. He saw, faintly, the familiar glint in her eyes.

  “I don’t want you here when I come home this evening.” He spat the words at her. “Do you fuckin’ understand?”

  She nodded that she did.

  Zach picked up the folded newspaper and flung it at her. It came half apart in midair and struck her in the legs, leaving her lower body covered with crimped pages. Then he whirled, snatched up his sport coat from where it was draped over a chair, and left the apartment, slamming the door hard behind him.

  He knew Bonnie was watching him, so he didn’t bother glancing back at her. The slut! The overbearing, interfering slut! She deserved far worse than he’d ever given her, and maybe she’d get it.

  He knew she’d be there when he returned tonight.

  They both knew.

  E. L. Oxman—12:10 P.M.

  Lana Spence waited, probably longer than was necessary, after Oxman’s knock on her dressing-room door, then called for him to come in.

  He’d found the right door only due to her name in small block letters, and was naively surprised to see that there was no star on the door’s smooth surface. But he was equally surprised to see how plush the large dressing room was. He’d come to think of a place where actors and actresses changed as being small and functional, with exposed steam pipes and a large mirror surrounded by bare bulbs. Lana Spence’s mirror was surrounded by concealed lighting, there were no exposed pipes, and the furniture in the spacious room was French provincial and obviously expensive. The carpeting was royal blue and deep. This room seemed not to be associated at all with the workplace outside where dreams were spun for Televisionland. Oxman, like most of the public, had a number of misconceptions about the show-business jungle and the animals therein.

  “Sit down, please,” Lana said. She was already seated before her mirror, removing makeup with some sort of strong-smelling solvent on a soft tissue. The acrid scent reminded
Oxman of the airplane dope he used to apply to balsa-and-paper model aircraft he’d constructed as a kid.

  He crossed the deep-pile carpet and sat in a rather uncomfortable wooden chair near her. He couldn’t help feeling somewhat like a peasant in the presence of nobility. But then, that was the impression the room was meant to create.

  As he studied Lana’s reflection in the mirror, she seemed to get more beautiful as she removed makeup.

  “Dorian Gray in reverse,” he said.

  She smiled at him in the mirror. “Why, Detective Oxman, what a nice thing to say. And from a policeman.”

  “We sometimes read more than crime statistics,” Oxman said. Like the sports page. He’d read Portrait of Dorian Gray in high school and was surprised himself that it had just now bobbed to the surface of his memory.

  “I didn’t mean to imply I supposed you an illiterate,” Lana said. She was smiling from behind the folds of the tissue.

  “You wanted to talk, Miss Spence. Can we do that while you’re removing makeup?”

  She didn’t answer, but instead spent the next minute and a half finishing wiping her features clean. Then she swiveled on her padded vanity stool to face Oxman. She waited, as if for another compliment. Oxman was getting fed up with this.

  He said, “You had something to tell me about the McGreery murder.”

  “Did I?”

  “So I was led to believe.”

  “I suppose it is about the poor watchman’s murder—indirectly. At least, it could be.”

  “What is it, Miss Spence?”

  “I’ve been threatened.”

  Oxman figured that probably wasn’t so uncommon. “By who?”

  “Well, that’s just it, Detective Oxman, I’m not sure.”

  Oxman sighed. “But you’re sure you were threatened?”