by Paul Cain
I said: “Who did?”
Steinlen shook his head again slowly. “Aricci, I suppose.” By that time my sails were flapping. I’d been so sure Steinlen was it, and now I was so sure he wasn’t—I felt like I’d been double-crossed. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let it go at that. My hunch was that Steinlen was telling the truth but I don’t play my hunches that far. I wanted to know.
I said: “Aricci didn’t do it.” I said it as if I was sure of it.
Steinlen laughed a little. “You are very sure.”
I told him I was very sure and told him why. I told him that if Aricci had killed Mae the check would have figured in it and if Aricci had the check he, Steinlen, wouldn’t be alive to be talking about it.
When I mentioned the check Steinlen’s expression changed for the first time. His face became almost eager. He said: “Are you sure the police did not find the check?”
I nodded.
He asked: “Who, besides yourself, knew about it?”
“Only you,” I said, “and, evidently, whoever has it now.” I lit a cigarette and watched Steinlen’s face. I said: “As long as that check is in existence it’s an axe over your head. If the police get it, it will tie you up with the murder. If Aricci gets it or finds out about it, he’ll kill you as sure as the two of us are sitting here.”
Steinlen was staring blankly out the window. He nodded slightly.
“I think you’d better tell me all you know about the whole business,” I went on. “Maybe I can get an angle.”
He swung around in the swivel chair to face me; he was smiling again. He said: “Did you come here to arrest me?”
I shook my head. “Not necessarily. I wouldn’t put the pinch on anyone unless there wasn’t anything else left to do. I came here convinced that you did the trick and I intended getting it in writing and then giving you about twenty-four hours head start. I wasn’t especially fond of Mae, and I think her check idea was pretty raw, but I like Tony pretty well and I know he’s innocent and I’m not going to have him holding the bag.”
He said: “And you are sure of my innocence, too?”
I smiled a little and said: “Pretty sure.”
He started drumming on the desk again. He said: “Mae telephoned me about two this morning. She was very drunk. She said that Tony had gone out, that she was alone.”
I said: “Uh-huh. Tony went to Long Beach. He left the apartment about one-thirty.”
Steinlen scratched his nose. “Can’t he establish an alibi in Long Beach?”
“Not with the people he was doing business with. They wouldn’t be worth a nickel as an alibi.”
Steinlen nodded, went on: “Mae told me what she wanted—twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. She said if I didn’t give it to her she was going to Mrs Steinlen with my check and tell her that I had seduced her and then tried to buy her off for twenty-five hundred… .” He smiled crookedly. “Her idea was very sound—the check was irrefutable proof. Picture producers don’t give extra girls twenty-five-hundred-dollar checks as birthday gifts… .”
I said: “That was a very chump piece of business for you to do. How come?”
Steinlen laughed shortly, bitterly, shook his head. “I guess we all think we’re character sharks,” he said. “I thought she was on the level.”
One of the phones on his desk rang and he picked it up and told his secretary to put whoever was calling on. While the connection was being made he said, “Pardon me,” and then he said, “Hello, Sheila,” into the phone. He talked to her for several minutes; he asked her how the location trip had been and whether she had received his last letter. Every fifth word was darling or baby or honey. Finally he asked her if she was coming to the studio and said he’d try to get home early and hung up.
He said; “That was Mrs Steinlen—she just got back from location in Arizona.”
Then he went on about Mae. He said she’d insisted on his meeting her at the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont—she didn’t want him to come to the Mara because somebody might see him come in. The corner of Rosewood and Larchmont was only a couple blocks from the Mara.
He explained to her that he couldn’t get the money in the middle of the night, but she was very drunk; she said he’d better get it and hung up on him. He’d decided to meet her and reason with her and talk her out of it until the next day, anyway, so he’d have time to figure out what he was going to do. He went to the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont and waited from two thirty-five until almost four o’clock. She didn’t show, so he figured that Tony had come back and she couldn’t get away; he went home and tried to sleep. The first thing he knew about the murder was when he read it in the paper after he got to the studio, about ten o’clock.
The more he talked the dizzier I got about the whole layout. It would have been a cinch for Tony to start to Long Beach and then sneak back—he was suspicious of Mae, anyway—and catch her going out to meet Steinlen. He would probably have knocked her down and frisked her and found the check and that would have been that. Tony was a pretty bad boy when he was mad. But if that’s the way it had been and Tony had put on that act for me so I’d help him—then Tony was the greatest actor in the world and wasting his time bootlegging. He was not only the greatest actor in the world but I was degenerating into a prize sucker and losing my eyesight.
On the other hand, Steinlen didn’t even have the alibi of having been at home. He said he’d been on the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont from two-thirty-five till almost four. Mae had been killed around three-thirty. Steinlen could have pulled that off very nicely—he didn’t have a leg to stand on, except that I thought he was telling the truth. Maybe Steinlen was the world’s greatest actor. It was a cinch Mae hadn’t strangled herself.
I began to think very seriously about chucking the whole thing—after all, it was none of my business—if I wasn’t careful I’d be getting myself jammed up.
Steinlen said suddenly: “I’ll give five thousand dollars for that check.”
That made it my business. I told Steinlen I’d call him later and left the studio.
Tony had gone. Opal said he’d sat at the window for about a half hour without saying anything and then jumped up suddenly and gone.
I went back down to my room and lay down on the bed and tried to figure things out. Tony and Steinlen were both naturals to have put the chill on Mae, but unless I was entirely screwy neither of them had.
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’d been overlooking a bet in Cora. Maybe there’d been some kind of jealous play on Tony that I didn’t know anything about. I remembered how long he’d stayed with her the night before and how much he’d carried on about her guy walking out on her. That might have been a gag to cover up something else. It was a pretty long shot but I was mixed up enough about the whole business by that time to try anything. I called Cora and she wasn’t in. I told the switchboard girl to ask her to call me. Then I lay down again and fell asleep.
When I woke up it was twenty minutes after four and the phone was ringing. It was Bill Fraley; he said Dingo, a horse we’d made a fair-sized bet on the night before, had romped in, we’d won four hundred and thirty dollars apiece. I told him I’d meet him over at the cigar store where Hartley made book and I took a shower and shaved and went downstairs.
When I stopped at the desk for my mail there was a fellow named Gleason—an assistant cameraman that I’d known casually for a year or so—leaning on the counter talking to the clerk. We said hello and I asked him what he’d been doing—and he said he’d just got back from location at Phoenix with the Sheila Dale outfit. He said he was living at the hotel and we gave each other the usual song and dance about calling each other up and getting together real soon, then I went over to the cigar store and met Bill and collected my bet from Hartley. Bill and I went into the Derby and had something to eat. I called up Cora again but she wasn’t in.
Aft
er a while I called Steinlen. A man answered the phone in his outer office, instead of the secretary. When he asked who was calling I had a hunch and said Mister Smith and when he asked what I wanted to talk to Steinlen about I said I wanted to talk to him about a bill that was long overdue.
The man said: “Mister Steinlen committed suicide about a half hour ago,” and hung up.
Fraley looked at me and said: “You look like you’d just seen a ghost.”
I told him I had.
Steinlen wasn’t the kind of guy to bump himself off. It looked very much like Tony to me; it looked like whoever had murdered Mae had reached Tony in some way and let him get a flash of the check. They could have explained having the check by saying that Mae had been afraid Tony would find it and had given it to them for safekeeping. In the state of mind Tony was in he’d go for that. It all fitted in with the Cora angle. She’d killed Mae, and when Tony went to her after he left Opal’s she’d shown him the check and told him that that was what Steinlen was after when he killed Mae.
I called up Danny Scheyer again. He said, “What about that scoop?” and I told him to hold everything and give me all the details of the Steinlen suicide. He said Steinlen had shot himself at about five o’clock in his office at the Astra Studio. Mrs Steinlen had been with him at the time and had tried to stop him. She had been unable to give any reason for Steinlen’s act, had been taken home in a hysterical condition. I told Scheyer I’d call him back.
Well, that let Tony out—and it looked very much like it stuck Steinlen. It looked like he’d given Mae the works, in spite of my hunch that he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find the check and was afraid it would turn up, or maybe his wife had found out about the Jackman affair and had figured he murdered her and had faced him with it.
Then Fraley said: “So Steinlen bumped himself off?”
I nodded.
Fraley smiled a little, shook his head. He said: “It’s a wonder he didn’t do it a long time ago—with that bitch wife of his… .”
I took that a little. I said: “What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s the original jealous and vindictive female that all the others are copied from; she’s had her spurs in him ever since they were married.” Bill finished his coffee. “She was a plenty bad actor when I knew her back in Chi, and she’s had her nose full of junk for the last couple years—that makes her three times as bad… .”
I said: “Heroin?”
Bill bobbed his head.
I said: “I didn’t know about that… .”
Bill grinned, said: “You don’t get around very much. You’re the kind of bug they publish the fan magazines for.”
I had an idea. It turned out to be my only good idea for the day, which isn’t saying a hell of a lot for it. I went back over to the hotel and called the cameraman Gleason from downstairs. I asked him if Sheila Dale had come back with the rest of the company.
Gleason said: “Huh-uh. We finished all the scenes she was in yesterday—she flew back last night.”
I went up to my room and got Tony’s automatic. When I went back downstairs Fraley had come over from the Derby and was talking to the girl at the cigar counter. I asked him if he had any idea who Dale got her stuff from and he said he supposed it was Mike Gorman, or at least Gorman would have a line on it. I looked up Steinlen’s home address in the telephone book—and went out and got into a cab.
On the way out to North Hollywood I stopped at the apartment house on Highland Avenue where Gorman lived. A blonde gal in a green kimono came to the door and said Mike was asleep. I said it was important and went past her into the bedroom. Mike was lying on the bed with his clothes on. He was pretty drunk.
The blonde had followed me into the bedroom; I told her I wanted to talk to Mike alone and she made a few nasty remarks and went out.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and asked Mike if he’d been peddling junk to Dale. He laughed as if that was a very wild idea and shook his head and said: “Certainly not.”
I said: “Listen, Mike—something big is going to break and you’re going to be roped into it. If you’ll be on the level about this with me I can fix it.”
He shook his head again and said: “I haven’t sold any stuff for six months. It’s too tough… .”
I got up and looked down at him and said: “All right, Mike—I tried to help you.”
When I started out of the room he sat up and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed. He said, “Wait a minute,” and when I turned around and went back he said: “What’s it all about?”
I used a lot of big words and asked him again about Dale and he hemmed and hawed and finally said he wasn’t Dale’s regular connection but he’d sold her some stuff a few times. He said he’d never done business with Dale personally—it was always through her maid, a German girl named Boehme.
I told Mike I’d see that his name didn’t get mixed up with what I referred to mysteriously as the “Case” and went back out to the cab.
On the way out through Cahuenga Pass I had one of those trick hunches that I was being followed but I couldn’t spot anybody and I wasn’t trusting my hunches very much by that time, anyway.
It was pretty dark. The Steinlen house was lit up like a Christmas tree upstairs. I told the driver to wait and walked up the driveway and around to the back door. A big Negress opened the door.
I said: “I want to see Miss Boehme. It is very important.”
The Negress told me to wait and in a minute a very thin, washed-out woman with dull black hair and very light watery blue eyes came to the door, said: “I am Miss Boehme. What do you want?”
I stepped close to her and spoke in a very low voice. I told her I was a friend of Gorman’s, that Gorman had been picked up and that his address book with her name in it as a customer had been found by the police. I told her Gorman had sent word to me to reach all his customers and tell them to get rid of any junk they had around.
She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about for a minute, but I pressed it and she finally said okay and thanked me.
Then I told her I had an idea how she could beat the whole business and get her name out of it and said I wanted to use the phone. I went past her into the kitchen when I asked about the phone because I didn’t want to give her a chance to stall out of it. I wanted to get into the house.
She looked pretty scared in the light. She took me through the kitchen, through a dark hall, into a little room that was more a library than anything else. I asked her if there were any servants in the house that might be listening in at any of the other phone extensions and she said only the cook—the Negress. She said Mrs Steinlen was upstairs lying down.
The phone was on a stand near one of the windows. There was a big chair beside it and I sat down and picked up the phone. There wasn’t very much light in the room: there were two big heavily shaded floor lamps and one small table lamp on a desk in one corner. There was enough light though to watch the Boehme woman’s face.
I dialed a number and then I pushed the receiver hook down with my elbow so that the call didn’t register and then I let the hook up again. I was turning my body to watch Boehme when I clicked the hook—she didn’t see it. She was standing by the table in the middle of the room, staring at me and looking pretty scared.
When I’d waited long enough for somebody to have answered I said: “Hello, Chief. This is Red. I’m out at the Steinlen house—I’ve got Boehme and it all happened the way we’d figured… . Mrs Steinlen flew back from Phoenix last night. She’d had some kind of steer that Steinlen was cheating so she didn’t let him know she was coming—she thought she might walk in on something. She did—she walked in on the telephone call from Mae Jackman and listened in on the phone downstairs. She got Mae’s address from that and sneaked back out and jumped in her car and went over there … Sure—she killed Mae… .”
I was guessing, watching Boehme. She’d turned a very nice shade of Nile green; she was leaning against the table and her eyes looked like the eyes of a blind woman.
I went on, into the phone: “Steinlen didn’t know anything about it—he went over and waited for Mae on the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont and she didn’t show so he came home about four. Mrs Steinlen hid out someplace—probably with a friend or at a trick hotel where she wouldn’t be recognized—Steinlen didn’t even know she was back from location till this afternoon. Then she went to the studio and either scared Steinlen into his number or killed him herself and made it look like suicide—and I’ll lay six, two, and even she did it herself… . Uh-huh—a nice quiet girl… .”
Boehme straightened up and turned slowly and started for the door.
I raised my head from the phone and said: “Wait a minute, baby.” I took Tony’s gun out of my pocket and held it on my lap.
Boehme stopped and turned and stared at the gun a minute without expression. Then she swayed a little and sank down to her knees, leaned forward and put her hands on the floor. I put the phone down and stood up and took two or three steps towards Boehme.
A woman’s voice said: “You’re a very smart man, aren’t you?” The voice was very soft, with a faint metallic quality underneath, like thin silk tearing.
Boehme toppled over sidewise and lay still.
I turned my head slowly and looked at the doorway on my left. There was a woman there in the semidarkness of the hallway. As I looked at her she came forward into a little light; she was a very beautiful woman with soft golden hair caught into a big knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were large, heavily shadowed; her mouth was very red, very sharply cut. She wore a close-fitting light blue negligee and she held a heavy nickel-plated revolver very steadily in her right hand, its muzzle focused squarely on my stomach.
