The Comedy Club Mystery

by Peter Bartram

  At least that plan worked.

  But now I was out of options. Because Willis’ toes weren’t rattling as much as I’d hoped. He grabbed my arms again. I hadn’t stamped hard enough. That’s my trouble. Too much compassion.

  I struggled but Willis had a grip like a gorilla. And Gino had recovered from a lazy swing that would’ve ruled him out of major league baseball for life. He was moving in closer. Didn’t intend to miss this time.

  He raised the bat. Lined it up on my head like he was Willie Mays hoping for a home run. He grinned in a feral way – like a guy who gets a lot of pleasure from his work. He had yellow teeth. I guessed his bad breath could be just as deadly as the bat.

  He swung the bat back, taking aim. And taking his time. Why rush something you’ll look back on in years to come as one of the happiest moments of your life? He was savouring it.

  The light changed in his eyes and I knew he was going to swing the bat. I struggled more but Willis’ grip tightened. I tried the stamping trick again but he was too cute to fall for that plot now. He shifted his foot and kicked me in the back of the leg.

  I yelled in pain.

  I closed my eyes and waited for worse pain from the bat to start. Perhaps there wouldn’t be pain. Perhaps everything would just go black. For ever.

  And then a scream rent the air. Long, loud and high-pitched. Full of anger and outrage. Like a snotty kid in the stands at a baseball game had just dropped his popcorn.

  My brain closed down. And then I realised it wasn’t me screaming. The scream came from the steps leading to the club’s basement. The steps with the railings and the gate.

  I opened my eyes. A figure hustled from the basement like the place was on fire.

  The figure was Shirley.

  She screamed like she was riding a bucking bronco. But she pounded up the steps. And she was carrying something big and red.

  Gino’s arm with the bat dropped to his side as he turned to see what the hell was happening.

  Shirley stood at the top of the basement steps with a face like an avenging fury.

  She raised the red thing – it was a fire extinguisher.

  She pulled out a pin and yanked on the lever.

  The first blast of the foam hit Gino right in the face. He hadn’t been expecting it. The white stuff surged over his cheeks and ran down his shoulders. He looked like a bloke who’d just trekked through Siberia in a blizzard.

  Shirley moved in like a commando with a machine gun.

  Gino was helpless. The foam was all over him. It was in his eyes, in his ears, up his nose.

  Willis’ grip on my arms loosened. I struggled free. I turned around and kicked his left leg just enough to make him walk around like Hopalong Cassidy for the rest of his life.

  He staggered sideways and Shirley charged in with the fire extinguisher.

  Through the commotion, I heard Gino yell: “Let’s beat it.”

  He hustled up to the van and jumped into the driver’s seat. Willis scrambled into the back.

  Shirley sprayed the van with foam as Gino fired the engine and screamed away from the kerb.

  She dropped the fire extinguisher on the pavement. She grinned and let out a long sigh.

  “Now that’s what I call a good joke,” she said.

  I brushed the stray foam off my jacket.

  I said: “Does that trick with the extinguisher mean you still think I light your fire?”

  Shirley said: “What I can’t figure is why those drongos wanted to croak you.”

  “First things first,” I said. “What were you doing down the club’s basement steps?”

  It was half an hour after the ruckus outside the club. After Gino and Willis had driven away, we decided we’d better skedaddle before any cops appeared on the scene. We were in Sherry’s disco dancing to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe. There’s nothing like a smoochy number to take your mind off a close encounter with death.

  Shirley said: “After I’d stormed out of the Last Laugh, those two bozos were stepping out of their van. The short one gave me a dirty look – couldn’t stop himself. And the big one said, ‘Hey, boss, that’s the broad who’s with the mark.’ The boss man gave him a filthy look and hissed, ‘Button it.’ But it was too late, I’d heard. I guessed something was up. I just knew I was gonna have to pull your nuts out of the cracker again. So I snuck down the basement steps and kept look out.”

  “And charged in like Boadicea when the attack went down. All you needed was a chariot with knives on the wheels.”

  “All I could find was that fire extinguisher.”

  “Couldn’t have worked better had it been a Sherman tank.”

  Sonny and Cher finished their number and the DJ played The Byrd’s Mr Tambourine Man. Shirley and I started bopping with the crowd.

  I shouted above the music. “I’ve no idea why Gino and Willis wanted to kill me. I don’t even know who they are. But I’m going to find out.”

  “You’d better watch your back then.”

  “I can’t think of a way to thank you enough.”

  Shirl moved in close. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me.

  “I can think of a way,” she said.

  It was nearly two in the morning by the time I reached my lodgings in Regency Square.

  After Sherry’s, I’d taken Shirley back to her flat. She’d let me thank her. Twice as it happened, but that’s a personal matter I won’t go into here.

  I’d rented rooms on the fifth floor of a lodging house since I’d moved to Brighton. The place was run by a dragon landlady called Beatrice Gribble. She’d started letting out rooms after her husband Hector had died. I’d seen a picture of the old boy on the mantlepiece in her parlour. It showed a bald-headed bloke with the beaten expression of someone who knows he’s destined always to be last in life’s race.

  The Widow – as tenants called Mrs Gribble, but never in her hearing – had her parlour on the ground floor. All the better to watch the comings and goings of tenants. But in the wee small hours she’d be in her bed and snoring like a chainsaw.

  So I opened the front door with a devil-may-care shove and clumped into the hall.

  The Widow shot out of her parlour before I could reach the first tread on the stairs. She was wearing a pink flannelette dressing gown and fluffy slippers with pom-poms. Her hair was tied up in a net arrangement like she was worried it might get away during the night.

  The Widow moved across the hallway and cornered me by the hat-stand.

  She said: “I’ve had my evening’s entertainment interrupted three times by telephone calls for you. The first when I was watching Double Your Money. The second when that delightful gentleman Richard Baker was reading the news on the BBC. And the third while I was meditating over the Epilogue. A very thoughtful talk on the meaning of life by a vicar from Chipping Sodbury.”

  I briefly wondered whether there was any life in Chipping Sodbury.

  But I asked: “Who were the calls from?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Then how do you know they were for me.”

  “Because they just breathed heavily down the line.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “It’s no good you taking that attitude with me,” the Widow snapped. “Any more of these calls, and I shall ask you to pack your bags.”

  She stormed back into her parlour and slammed the door.

  I trudged up the stairs wondering who had called and why they’d not left their name. It was another question I couldn’t answer.

  Chapter 8

  The following morning, I arrived at the police press conference feeling like I’d slept in a hedge.

  A thorn hedge.

  I had a prickly feeling behind my eyes. My skin itched like it had been rubbed down with sandpaper.

  So I was in a scratchy mood when Jim Houghton, my opposite number on the Evening Argus, lumbered up to me. Jim had a wrinkled face that looked like a squashed sponge. He had a shock of grey hair. He wore a moth-
eaten tweed suit, a shirt with a crumpled collar, and a tie with a couple of gravy stains. He had a shaving nick on his chin and a bit of old meat stuck between the gap in his front teeth. It was the morning, so it would be bacon. (After lunch, it was Spam from his sandwich. In the evening, steak or kidney – sometimes both – from his pie.)

  He gave the impression of a shambling old geezer who couldn’t be trusted to take the right bus home. It was his secret weapon. In reality, he had a brain like a butcher’s chopper. He’d scooped me on some big stories over the years. So as I saw him shuffling across the room towards me, I sharpened my wits.

  Or what was left of them.

  Jim ambled up and switched on his grin. He said: “Looks like your theatre critic will be reviewing the prisoners’ benefit performances from Pentonville in future.”

  “What happened to innocent until found guilty, Jim?” I said.

  “I look at the evidence. I hear Pinker was holding the murder weapon when he was discovered.”

  “Trying to pull it out so he could save a life, I understand. Not so much killer as saviour.”

  A cloud of doubt passed across Jim’s face. “But Bernstein still died.”

  “Sharp as ever, Jim. Not many would spot that a murder case involved a dead body.”

  Jim mumbled: “Cocky bastard. You’ll get your comeuppance one day – just like Pinker.”

  He ambled off across the room and sat down in a seat on the end of the front row.

  I took a seat at the back and surveyed the place. It was filling up with reporters from the national newspapers. A juicy murder case with a showbiz cast would keep the Sunday tabloids in headlines for weeks. They hoped.

  There was the usual hubbub of conversation as journos swapped theories about the case with one another. Normally I’d be doing it myself. The trick is to advance a theory that’s so outrageous you know it’s untrue. You hope the bloke you’re talking to will rubbish it and let drop a fact or two you hadn’t heard.

  It’s the game you play when you’re coming from behind on a story and you don’t want to be scooped. But I wasn’t playing this time. For starters, I knew more about the case than anyone in the room – probably including the cops. And, in any event, I still hadn’t figured how I was going to get Sidney Pinker off a murder rap.

  I was puzzling over this when Alec Tomkins swaggered into the room and sat down at the top table.

  He had a thick sheaf of papers under his arm. He put them on the table and patted them into a neat pile.

  He said: “I am going to read a statement and then I will take questions.”

  He put on his glasses, picked up the top sheet of paper from his pile, and started to read.

  I’d flipped open my notebook but didn’t write anything down. Tomkins’ statement was a dull recital of everything we already knew.

  He finished reading and put the paper back on his pile.

  He surveyed the room with a self-satisfied smirk and said: “Any questions?”

  A reporter from the Daily Sketch asked: “Apart from the man you’ve arrested, are you looking for anybody else?”

  Tomkins said: “No.”

  My hand shot into the air. Tomkins ignored it, but I asked anyway: “Does that mean you’re ignoring other evidence – such as the mystery man that was in Danny Bernstein’s office building shortly before he was discovered dead?”

  Tomkins harrumphed. “We’re pursuing several avenues of enquiry,” he said pompously.

  “Does that include seeking the identity of the mystery man?”

  “It might do,” Tomkins growled.

  “So when you said ‘no’ just now, you should have said ‘yes’.”

  “No. I mean yes. I think.”

  More hands shot into the air.

  Tomkins stood up. “No more questions. I’ve got a murderer to catch.”

  “I thought you were claiming you’d already caught him,” I said.

  And on that confusing note, the press briefing broke up.

  But I felt pleased. After my cross-examination of Tomkins, none of the other journos would be able to write that Pinker was definitely the killer. It was a result. But not the big prize. I needed to work more for that.

  So I hurried up to Tomkins while he was picking up his pile of papers.

  I said: “I want to see Sidney Pinker in the capacity of prisoner’s friend.”

  Tomkins growled: “Yeah. With friends like you, Pinker would do better with enemies.”

  I frowned. “There’s a rumour going around that you’re giving Sidney a hard time because he once gave your wife a poor review in one of her amateur dramatic outings. Story hasn’t hit the press yet, but it can be only a matter of time.”

  Tomkins leaned in closer to me. I could smell the heavy stink of his breath. “You lay off any mention of Hilda or you’ll know what for,” he said.

  “You, too, if what I hear about Hilda is only half right.”

  Tomkins scrunched his papers angrily in his hand. He knew I’d backed him into a corner.

  “A ten-minute visit to Pinker. Not a second more,” he snapped.

  He turned and stamped out of the room.

  Sidney was brought up to an interview room from the cells a few minutes later.

  He looked a lot less suave than the last time I saw him. There were grey bags under his eyes. His hair had matted. He hadn’t shaved all the way under his chin.

  The collar of his shirt was stained with sweat. His trousers had crumpled around the knee.

  He sat down behind the table screwed to the floor on a chair screwed to the floor. I sat down on the opposite side of the table on another chair screwed to the floor.

  From where I sat, everything around here seemed to be screwed – including Sidney. Unless I could find a way to prove he was innocent.

  Sidney shrugged sadly and said: “They’ve taken away my cravat, dear boy. They said I might use it to do myself a mischief. Whatever they mean by that.”

  I said: “I think they’re worried you might use it to hang yourself in your cell, Sidney.”

  “With a silk cravat from Hermes? Have they no taste, these vulgar plods?”

  “As a general rule, no. But you can work with that if you know how to get around it. Besides, they used to hang peers of the realm with a silken rope.”

  “How decadent. But, really, these rough boys-in-blue aren’t to my taste.”

  “In that case, we need to get you out of here.”

  “But how?”

  “I need some information about some stand-up comics – Jessie O’Mara, Teddy Hooper, Billy Dean, Peter Kitchen and Ernie Winkle.”

  “This is no time for jokes, dearest heart.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” I said testily. “But the five I’ve just mentioned could all have a motive for killing Bernstein.”

  Sidney’s eyebrows jumped at that. “How come?”

  I told him about the competition to win a spot on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

  “I could think of a whole laugh-line of comedians who’d kill to win a place on that show,” Sidney said. “It could make their career. Which of them do you think did it, dear boy?”

  “I don’t know for sure that any of them did. But I need you to tell me as much as you know about each of them. I’m looking for something in their background that might suggest they’d be willing to kill Bernstein. Let’s start with Jessie O’Mara.”

  Sidney looked at the ceiling and scratched his chin. “You know most of my work is in the legitimate theatre. Music hall is rather down there with the common clay. Now if you were asking me about Larry or Johnny Gielgud, I could keep you enthralled for hours.”

  I let out an exasperated sigh that sounded like the Flying Scot pulling into Kings Cross. “Sidney, don’t think I’m sitting here because I enjoy it. I’m here on Figgis’ orders to pull your arse out of the fire. Now concentrate.”

  “Sorry. I do get rather carried away some times.”

  “I wish you were.”
>
  Sidney frowned. “Jessie O’Mara. The ‘Laughing Lass from Liverpool’ it says on her bill matter. That’s a laugh in itself. She comes from Birkenhead.”

  “That’s only the other side of the Mersey.”

  “Tarnishes the tale, though. She comes on stage to the song When Irish Eyes are Smiling. But she’s got about as much Irish blood in her veins as my Aunt Freda. And she comes from Sidcup.”

  “So she’s created a stage persona for herself. What’s wrong in that?”

  “Nothing if you can carry it off. For years she was a great favourite with pantomime producers at Christmas time. The kiddies who came to the shows loved her. She’d always be cast as the fairy queen. Played some big shows too – never quite made it to the Palladium, but was at the Opera House in Manchester and the Hippodrome here in Brighton. But that all stopped a couple of years ago.”

  Sidney paused for one of his knowing winks.

  “Get to the point, Sidney,” I said.

  “It turns out the white-as-snow fairy queen got pregnant. Of course, a girl who’s as tough as a blacksmith’s apron soon solved that problem.”

  “She had an abortion?”

  “Not yet legal either, although there’s now talk of changing the law. Wouldn’t have been a problem, except the news leaked out. Jessie escaped prosecution, but the bad publicity sent producers hunting for more virginal fairy queens. I hear that Jessie hasn’t found bookings quite so regular as they had been since it all came out.”

  “But what’s this got to do with Bernstein?”

  “He was her agent. What a simple little soul you are. You don’t think he hustled to get those great bookings for Jessie just because he liked the colour of her eyes, dear boy?”

  I sat back in my chair. It didn’t move and dug into my back. I’d forgotten the damned thing was screwed to the floor.

  “I’m guessing that Jessie wasn’t a Bernstein client after that,” I said.

  Sidney nodded. “She was always too good for him. Like Max Miller. Max was saucy but never smutty. It must stick in her craw that a grasping old lecher like Bernstein ended up with his Blue Book.”