Shadowtown

by Lutz, John

  “I’m fine,” Lana reiterated.

  Hortensia cleared her throat and backed out, closing the door behind her. After a while, the hollow drone of the vacuum cleaner found its way into the quiet bathroom.

  Lana began another effort to lift herself out of the soothing water. Then she changed her mind. She smiled and settled back down. The water was so warm and comfortable, and she still had a bit of a buzz on.

  Sometimes reality seemed to be falling away from her, she reflected. Possibly she’d played Delia Lane too long. But that wasn’t all there was to it. Getting older had something to do with it, Lana decided. Aging was particularly difficult for an actress like her—not that she wasn’t still one of the industry’s truly beautiful and desirable women. But she wasn’t all that she’d been, of course. Maybe that was the thing about Oxman that attracted her; he was so solid, beyond being bothered by mortal agonies. Men like Oxman were like sturdy oak trees that matured and then seemed impervious to time. She tossed back her head and smiled. Was there something phallic in that sturdy oak-tree analogy? Probably, she admitted. She ran her hands over the swell of her firm breasts, shivering as her soapy palms massaged her erect nipples. She sank deeper into the warm water and thought about E. L. Oxman. Drugs, sex, and bubble baths. The great escapes.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m someone else,” she said softly, startling herself with the sound of her own voice. Who? Delia Lane?

  Lana closed her eyes, opened them, and stared at the gold-faced clock on the vanity. Time seemed so disjointed and unpredictable lately. That was why she’d been late so often on the set. But she had plenty of time to dress and get to Shadowtown Productions to meet Sy Youngerman.

  She raised a languid hand and flicked a few glistening bubbles out of the tub. One of them rode the air, gleaming, and then popped.

  Let Sy wait. He’d said an hour, so Lana decided to appear at the “Shadowtown” studios in an hour and a half. She’d show him she didn’t really need the goddamn part. Didn’t need Sy, or anyone else, for her career to keep on thriving. She was a star, and she still burned bright!

  Well, maybe she’d make it an hour and fifteen minutes.

  Art Tobin—2:30 P.M.

  Overbeck looked more rumpled than usual today, Tobin thought, when the “Shadowtown” producer invited him into his high-rise Central Park South apartment. He had on a camel-colored sweater, beige corduroy slacks, and tan suede shoes. A vision in brown. Everything but the shoes were wrinkled, and a checked, twisted shirt collar protruded unevenly out of the wooly sweater and writhed around Overbeck’s pudgy neck like an affectionate boa constrictor.

  “I guess, to the police, Saturday’s like any other workday,” Overbeck said.

  “Yeah, crime never takes a day off.” Tobin moved inside and shut the door behind him. “Crime’s like that. Inconsiderate.”

  Overbeck stepped down into his sunken living room and crossed the plush carpet to where the sliding glass door to his balcony was open about six inches. Tobin noticed a small telescope on the balcony’s ledge and wondered if Overbeck spent much time out there, spying on his faraway neighbors across the green rectangle of Central Park. Was that, in fact, what Overbeck had been doing before Tobin arrived? There was a vaguely guilty expression on Overbeck’s flushed features, as if he might have been watching something intensely personal through a distant window. Voyeurism was a pastime for a lot of New Yorkers.

  “Great day out there,” Tobin said, probing. “Nice and clear.”

  Overbeck smiled. “I wouldn’t know; I was just about to step outside and check on the weather when the doorbell rang.”

  For the first time Tobin noticed a hardness, a sheen, to Overbeck’s eyes. Did he spend his off days doing drugs? Did he know Phil the way Egan, Jardeen, and Lassiter had? One thing he had in common with them: He seemed to hate Lana Spence.

  “You didn’t come here to talk about the weather, Detective Tobin,” Overbeck said. There was a hint of trepidation in his voice. And Tobin couldn’t remember anyone else outside the department ever referring to him as “Detective Tobin.”

  “Nope, I didn’t,” Tobin said. He stepped down into the living room and sauntered over to where Overbeck stood near the sliding door.

  Overbeck seemed bothered by Tobin’s nearness. He swallowed, then ran a hand over his brush-cut hair. “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Because I know,” Tobin said, playing on Overbeck’s nerves.

  Overbeck feigned impatience, though actually he wasn’t at all eager to hear what Tobin was about to say. “Know what?” he asked, pacing toward the balcony and then back. He did want to hear it, but then again he didn’t. Agony.

  “You on something, Mr. Overbeck?”

  “On something? Wha—why, no! You mean drugs, don’t you? Hell, no! I don’t do drugs. You don’t last long in my business if you’re part of the drug scene.”

  Toby almost laughed at that one. He liked the way this conversation was going, all right. He decided not to tell Overbeck about his phone number turning up in Egan’s apartment; he’d let Overbeck think he had something even more damning than that.

  “Are you going to tell me what it is you know?” Overbeck asked. “Or are you going to search the apartment for controlled substances?”

  Ah, Tobin thought, a show of bravado. He said, “I know about your connection.”

  “Connection?”

  “With Egan, Jardeen, and Lassiter.”

  Wow! There went the bravado. Overbeck’s face changed from ruddy to chalk-colored. He palmed his crewcut again, as if trying to make it stand a certain way and set his world right. “Burt Lassiter? The man who died?”

  “The same,” Tobin said. “And Marv Egan and Lance Jardeen. All former lovers of Lana Spence. As you are, Harry.” Tobin liked the “Harry” touch; Harry and Detective Tobin.

  “Is that your connection between us?” Overbeck asked. “Lana Spence?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if that was all there was to it,” Tobin said. He noticed that a big console television was on in a corner, playing a tape of a “Shadowtown” episode. Lana Spence herself was rolling around on a mattress with a young man wearing only swimming trunks. They both looked as if they were having one fine time. The camera zoomed in on Lana’s half-closed eyes and she rolled them back as if experiencing an orgasm. Just like real life, Tobin thought. Almost, anyway.

  Overbeck stuffed his fists into the pockets of his baggy corduroys. “I don’t exactly know what we’re talking about here,” he said, but not with much conviction.

  Tobin took a chance and dived in. “You better figure it out, Mr. Overbeck; you’re up for three counts of homicide.”

  The camera was pulling away from Lana and the young guy on the bed. Suddenly they were gone and replaced by a reed-thin woman munching a popular brand of diet cookies. She bit into one and rolled back her eyes the way Lana had.

  Overbeck broke. By degrees. He seemed to shrink into his wrinkled clothes and age ten years right there in front of Tobin, a year every second. He stumbled to the low sofa and slumped down into a corner of the soft cushions. He was having a problem catching his breath. His lips were parted in shock.

  Tobin waited until the rasping breathing leveled out. Then he said, “What’s happened to Marv Egan? Where is he?”

  Overbeck gazed up at him with zombie eyes. “Egan? What do you mean? Is he missing?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Tobin told him. “I asked you where he is.”

  Overbeck bowed his head and buried his face in his hands. A vein in his forehead was pulsating with blue ferocity. “I don’t know where Egan is, and that’s the truth.”

  Tobin sat down beside him. What he didn’t want was for Overbeck to ask if he was being formally charged. To clam up and wait for his lawyer before he talked. But Overbeck was obviously consumed by guilt and not thinking straight. Fine, Tobin thought. Smooths the way.

  Very gently he asked, “What else is the truth, Harry?”

  Overbeck p
ulled his hands away from his face, then flung himself even deeper into the cushions, so the back of his head was resting on the sofa and he was staring through watery eyes at the ceiling. As if there might be something playing on a screen up there.

  Tobin was going to hear it now, at last; he could feel it. Overbeck was ripe to talk, had to give it release before it devoured him from the gut out. That was the way guilt worked. Tobin had seen it this way in hundreds of interrogations.

  “You’re right,” Overbeck said. “The four of us did this together.”

  “You, Lassiter, Egan, and Jardeen,” Tobin said, not asking a question, but as if he knew and was merely commenting.

  “Yeah,” Overbeck said in a weary voice. “Those three—washed-up old actors—were into drugs. They went to the same shooting gallery down in the Village to trip out. They used to talk about the good days, when they were working and prosperous. And they talked about Lana, about how they hated her. They concluded, maybe rightly so, that she was to blame for their ruined careers. After Allan Ames’s death, they decided to use some of their acting skills to terrorize Lana with threatening notes and glimpses of Ames’s vampire character Edgar Grume. It started as a practical joke.

  “Then, when Egan was on the set to plant one of the letters, the watchman, Vince McGreery, caught him. And Egan panicked and killed poor Vince.

  “After that, he and Lassiter and Jardeen blamed Lana not only for the loss of their careers and dignity; they blamed her for making them murderers.”

  “They told you this?” Tobin asked.

  Overbeck nodded, still staring at the ceiling. “The night of McGreery’s murder, I’d slipped away from Sy’s party to get something from my office, and I saw Egan outside the studio. In the Edgar Grume costume. Lassiter was with him. They told me what had happened; they knew I hated Lana as they did. I thought about what they told me—thought about it too long. It would have looked funny if I’d gone to the police and changed my story about the night of the murder. Instead of turning them over to the law, I struck a deal. I wanted them to continue the Edgar Grume appearances, to generate publicity and boost ‘Shadowtown’ ratings, which had begun to slip.” He rolled his head on the sofa back and gazed beseechingly at Tobin. “After all, Vince was already dead; what did it matter?”

  Tobin shrugged as if he might agree; not breaking the momentum, keeping Overbeck talking. He knew confession was a catharsis and everything would come out of the festering conscience, if only he was patient and there were no interruptions.

  “Then they tried to take advantage of me,” Overbeck said. “Lassiter came to me and demanded a role in ‘Shadowtown’ in exchange for his silence about the McGreery murder. He said nobody could prove he was at the studio when the murder occurred, and he’d tell the police Marv Egan had confided in him and confessed while drugged up. I went to Egan and told him Lassiter was breaking. Egan went to see Lassiter and they quarreled, and Egan killed him.”

  “To keep him from talking?”

  “Of course,” Overbeck said. “Lassiter was an aging egotist who’d gone completely around the bend. He would have confessed eventually just for the publicity.”

  Tobin thought about that. Lassiter had been an old actor with an actor’s compulsions. “Probably,” he agreed.

  “So he had to die, don’t you understand?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Tobin said.

  “But somebody frightened Egan out of Lassiter’s room before he could get the Edgar Grume costume from Lassiter’s closet. And the police found it. It was like Egan and I were in on Lassiter’s murder together; No turning back for me then, no way at all. So I decided to keep going and make the best of it. I doctored one of the ‘Shadowtown’ tapes to include a background glimpse of Egan in Edgar Grume makeup. That was a mistake.”

  “It sure boosted ratings,” Tobin said.

  “But it also really got Egan going. He began to live the role. He killed Manny Brokton, whom he’d always hated—along with half the people in show business—and punctured Brokton’s neck with the bent tines of a fork. The idea was to build on the publicity and vampire myth and perpetuate the case’s occult aspect that was confounding the police. And you were confounded. Admit it.”

  “Confounded,” Tobin conceded.

  Overbeck sat forward and began laughing in a way that scared Tobin. The producer’s eyes were so animated they seemed about to leap from their sockets like separate, vibrant beings. Here was a glimpse of absolute madness. It was a madness that lay, deep down, in everyone, even Tobin, and he couldn’t look directly at it.

  Then the laughter burbled to silence and Overbeck was serious again. “Do you know what fools soap-opera fans are, Detective Tobin?”

  “Tell me,” Tobin said.

  “To capitalize on all the vampire publicity, we’re introducing a new character, Graveman, another vampire with sex appeal. They’re going to watch the show in the millions and millions! Graveman is my idea, and it’s going to work!” Overbeck gave that laugh again, a sound like thin glass breaking. “Don’t you get it?” he almost shrieked. “Graveman! Shuffle the letters around and they spell Marv Egan.” He laughed again, sending ice up Tobin’s spine. “My idea! Mine! And nobody out there would catch on!” He became solemn again, instantly. “Not just a joke though—not at all. It would keep Egan in line, keep him from getting extortion ideas like Lassiter. He could hardly say he hadn’t been involved in the murders when all the time I had a character on the show named after him. Don’t you see—that proved he was an accomplice and I anticipated trouble from him, that we were partners in murder and I feared him and needed some insurance against his greed and vampire evil. Against his insanity.”

  Tobin stood up. He’d heard enough. And he was afraid Overbeck might lose control completely and make things difficult. “Well, I think we better go uptown, Harry.”

  “Uptown? Oh! Sure. I see what you mean. To the police station. Usually the station’s downtown on television. You know, the writers use that expression too much these days. On our show, too, though it isn’t a police show. But you use a similar expression in real life, I see. There’s not as much difference as some people think. The soaps are like parallel universes. You ever think of them that way?”

  “No,” Tobin said, waiting for Overbeck to stand. Was this going to be a problem? He didn’t want a hassle, didn’t want to have to wrestle Overbeck to the floor and use the cuffs.

  The phone rang.

  Overbeck stared at it as if he’d heard a sound from a thousand miles away. One that didn’t quite make sense. He wasn’t going to answer it.

  Tobin walked over and lifted the receiver.

  “Harry?”

  The voice sounded familiar. With a dash of desperation in it. “No, this is Art Tobin.” Tobin noticed the commercial was over and Lana was back on the bed with the guy in swimming trunks.

  “Tobin … the detective. Good! Great! This is Sy Youngerman, Tobin. Listen, why I called, I phoned Lana Spence and her maid said Lana wasn’t home, that she’d gotten a call from me asking if she’d meet me at the ‘Shadowtown’ studio. But I never made that call, Tobin. What I want to know is, did Harry?”

  “When was she supposed to meet you?” Tobin asked.

  “Now. She’s there now. And it’s Saturday; the place is closed down and empty today. Ask Harry and see if he called her, will you?”

  “Sure,” Tobin said. He put down the phone and turned.

  Overbeck was gone.

  “Damn!” Tobin said, cursing his carelessness. His glance flicked to the door to the hall, but he immediately realized he’d have glimpsed Overbeck in the corner of his vision if he’d sneaked out that way. Overbeck might have gone into the bedroom.

  Tobin took a few steps in that direction. Then, with sudden cold paralysis, he made a more accurate guess. He stood motionless and listened to the ocean roar of blood in his ears.

  Within a second he could move again, and he ran across the living room to the sliding glass door to
the balcony. Even as he approached, he could see that the door was open wider than when he’d arrived.

  Then he was outside, feeling the bite of cooler air and skidding across the balcony’s concrete floor on leather soles. He hit the ledge with both hands, his momentum almost enough to tumble him over.

  He swallowed, leaned dizzily out over the ledge, and looked down.

  Twenty stories below, a crowd was gathering around a bundle of rumpled brown clothes. The scene reminded Tobin of ants closing in on a dead insect.

  He rushed back into the apartment, depressed the phone’s cradle button, phoned the Two-Four and asked for Oxman.

  As he sat with the receiver getting slippery in his sweating hand, he realized it was probably Egan who’d phoned pretending to be Youngerman. Egan who’d set up the appointment with Lana Spence.

  Oxman wasn’t there, Murray Felstein said, and no one there knew where to reach him.

  Tobin started to report Overbeck’s leap to hard death, but he heard sirens reaching crescendo below, and more wailing in the distance. Somebody had notified the police already.

  “A call just go out on a jumper?” Tobin asked, to make sure.

  “Yeah. Central Park South. You near there?”

  After telling Felstein what had happened, Tobin left the apartment, made his way through the swelling crowd on the sidewalk, and headed for his car to drive to Shadowtown Productions.

  For some reason he remembered the television set still on in the apartment, Lana Spence—Delia Lane—in ecstasy while Overbeck lay dead on the pavement below. “Like parallel universes,” Overbeck had said of soap operas. Said that in the madness of his guilt.

  And the steamy love scene, and Delia Lane, were more real now than Harry Overbeck.

  E. L. Oxman—3:00 P.M.

  The entrance to Shadowtown Productions should have been locked. Oxman had felt certain that the security guard would have let him in, but if there’d been a problem he was going to call Youngerman or Overbeck and have them clear him to go in and search for evidence. Either way, he wanted to get inside and snoop around when the place was deserted, to find out what he could about Zach Denton. Wanted to see the bastard hanged by his balls, guilty or innocent.