One Deadly Dawn

by Harry Whittington

  I shrugged my coat up on my shoulders. The ex-great lover still had it as far as good looks was concerned. I won’t try to take that away from him; it’s too easy to cut him to ribbons in other ways. He was getting heavier. Never as tall as his publicity releases would have you believe, he was a stout man of medium height now. That wavy hair women had fought to run their fingers through was turning gray at the temples, but it was still all there. The hairdressers never had to touch it up, and the hell of it was that when he went into action before the cameras and it sprang out of place, it improved his looks. All right, so they used to have to work with ice and foundation powder and every trick known to cameramen to hide the bags under his eyes there at the last.

  I looked at him, remembering what was under the reams of exaggeration we used to pour out for Jack Roland. Dudley Grasmyer from Colby, Kansas, that was our boy. His father ran a feed store and then worked in the local grain elevator and ran a filling station all the years Dudley was Twenty Grand’s lover, Jack Roland. His old man voted the straight Republican ticket and never accepted a penny from Dudley no matter how tough times became out there on the plains. He had little trouble with Dud about this; the son said the old man was stingy, but I knew that the lover never carried cash on his person, the temptation to spend being distasteful.

  Jack Roland became a star in the late thirties. He lasted, being kind and counting the expiration date of his last contract with any producer, just about ten years before the cameras. Now, you’d be amazed at how many featured players and stars never last half that long. In fact, we proved once by statistics that the average life of a star is five years. So Roland lasted twice around the track. We can attribute part of this to the fact that during the war men were scarce in Hollywood and Jack, having been rejected by the draft board, was much sought after in those years. He played the part of the marine who died cursing and shooting his machine gun when the Japs overran another Pacific island, and people ate it up. In fact, he won the war single-handedly in so many places and so often that around Twenty Grand we joked about how lucky for the Nazis and the Japs that the army wouldn’t take Jack Roland.

  I offered Jack a cigarette and he shook his head. He was all out of character. In one picture, his bit with a cigarette when the Nazis were going to execute him had all the lonely women in America weeping.

  When Jack became a star, a sad thing happened to him career-wise at Twenty Grand. At that time our studio had a definite policy; when a star’s name was big enough to sell tickets, he stood alone. Our Jack had a tough time doing this. At MGM when a star was big, they would team him with a female star of equal magnitude and ballyhoo the thing as “Now they’re together” … “Now She’s Got Him.” But at Twenty Grand, the policy had been set early in the twenties. You experimented with a property until he paid off. Then you ground out remakes of this successful formula until the public gagged at the mention of the guy’s name. By that time you had another star and another formula, so you gave him the boot. This is just about the story of Jack Roland.

  That’s what happened to him. The studio brought up those lovely little starlets and they played opposite Jack Roland. Most of the time they couldn’t act any better than he could, and many of them didn’t have that indefinable appeal that reaches out from a screen and grabs the audience. We’ll give Dudley Grasmyer credit for that — he had it in big hunks. Jack Roland had been a big name.

  I looked at him in that cell and thought that, A has-been.

  All that had happened to Jack Roland hadn’t been his fault. He ground out thirty pictures in those ten years, most of which stank, and the worst of it was most of them stank alike. But before you condemn the studio for near-sightedness, remember that this policy had been paying off since about the time Jack Roland was being born out in Colby, Kansas. In fact, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. made about thirty pictures his first four years in Hollywood and their content never varied. The success of Fairbanks and others like him, Charles Ray, Harold Lloyd and the rest, was a determining factor in forming the policy at Twenty Grand. Also, the powers felt that they shouldn’t gamble when they had a sure thing; the public was going to tire of a star anyhow, and most of the public liked to know what it was going to get — until they got fed up. So now it was nobody’s fault; the people who bought tickets got what they deserved.

  A lot that had happened to Jack Roland had been his own fault. He was married when they brought him to Hollywood, and turning him loose among all those women was like releasing an alcoholic in a brewery. He married five of them which was not bad for ten years, and only the good Lord knows how many he just grazed around in for free. He drank like a wild man, drove his imported cars like they were homemade jalopies, fought the cops, listened to no advice and, despite the fact that he was one of the stingiest stars ever to exist in Hollywood, was broke when his contract terminated. It had been one long binge. Ten years.

  This was the hangover.

  I sighed heavily. “What do you want me to do, keep it out of the papers?”

  He pressed the flat of his hand against his graying temples. How many times had he done that on a screen? “No; you can’t. Reporters have already been here, Sam.”

  “That’s fine. Did they spell your name right?”

  “Take it easy, Sam. You don’t have to ream me. I’m bloody, man.”

  “That’s what you really wanted, wasn’t it, Roland?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Publicity. The front pages. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. “Don’t be a fool, Sam. This is gas chamber stuff.”

  “Did you realize that before — or after?”

  “I didn’t do it, Sam. My God, you have to believe me.”

  “Why?”

  He jerked his head toward where Scully leaned against the corridor wall, poised like an Irish setter with the scent. “That cop isn’t kidding, Sam. He was there — why he was right there at Pawley’s place on the ocean when I got there.”

  “The cops were there before you even got there?”

  “It’s God’s truth. He won’t believe me. He swears I was hiding and came out after the cops arrived. No matter what I say, that’s what he believes.”

  “Why were you down there?”

  Even in the dim light from the corridor I saw Jack’s face redden. He had never been a good actor, and he was no liar. It was amazing that he’d had so much success with women.

  He shifted nervously. “It was about something he was going to print in his slander magazine about me.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. It was an old story but he was going to rake it up.”

  I stared at him, the has-been, the medium-tall, stout man with the graying hair and the deep brown eyes that women had called soulful … ten years ago.

  “Why?”

  He straightened a little, pulling in the beginning of a pouch, and he faintly resembled the great lover.

  His voice was sharp. “Because a story about me would sell copies.”

  I had to think that over. The only angle I could see from Fred Pawley’s point of view was that if the scandal were racy enough, people might paw back in their memories for the days when Jack Roland was news.

  “He must have picked a bright and juicy morsel from your past.”

  He flushed again. “I guess so.”

  I nodded, buying it. “It would have to be.” I shook my head. “Plenty of stories like that. I know; I spent ten years hushing them up.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes, Sam.”

  “Not everybody makes them in mass production, though.”

  “Sure.” The bitterness in his voice was something entirely new. “Sure. All those years I was a star. Drinking or not, I was drunk. That’s what it was, Sam; I didn’t believe it was really happening, and yet, at the same time, I never thought it would end.”

  I shrugged. “I still don’t see what you went to his place
for, that time of the morning.”

  He flushed again, wiped at the sweat on his forehead. “It was because of Betty … I couldn’t see raking it all up, Sam. There was no use hurting her.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was wondering if Betty would notice one more hurt.

  He pressed against the bars again. I said, “Did you talk to Pawley?”

  “Only over the telephone. I was in Hollywood. I had been trying all night to get in touch with him. When I finally got through, I told him I’d come down to his place. He said it wouldn’t do me any good, but that I could come if I wanted to. I drove down there, but when I got to his ocean house, he was dead.”

  “Good Lord. That ought to be easy enough to clear up. Let Scully call Betty. She can tell them what time you left Hollywood — they can figure out how long it would take you to drive down here — and you’re clear.”

  His face flushed and his eyes winced. “Not exactly.”

  I got sharp at that. “No?”

  “I drove around a long time, Sam. Hell, maybe hours. I don’t know. I was upset.”

  “What you’re trying to say is you don’t have any alibi?”

  “He was dead, Sam. He was dead when I got there. Somebody had killed him in the walled garden. I went in the front door. Why, there were cops all over the house when I walked in.”

  I stared at him, scowling. “Why did they suspect you, then?”

  Jack paced his cell. He walked all the way into the deepest recess and came back toward me, shoulders round and arms at his side, much the way he was going to look entering the gas chamber at San Quentin.

  “Because he had it on him.”

  “He had what on him?”

  “The story. The one he was going to print about me. It was in his pocket. They were reading it when I came in.”

  His head sank on his chest. He ran his hand through his waves. They sprang out of place beautifully.

  “Did you tell them the truth?”

  “Truth.” He made a bitter sound of it. “Once the cops read that story, they wouldn’t listen to anything I said.”

  • • •

  I walked back along the corridor with Scully and we returned to his office. It was just as hot in there, but it smelled better.

  “You’ve got to admit this thing looks bad. for him.” Scully sat behind his desk, pleased with himself. “And we aren’t asking for any interference. Why, when that fat comedian ripped that poor starlet’s insides years ago with a bottle, you movie people almost got him off by saying it was self-inflicted.”

  “That was before my time, too, Scully. And I think you’re wrong on this one.”

  “Wrong?” He leaned forward, eyes wide. “How could I be wrong? We’ve got the goods on him. You admit it looks clear that he’s guilty, don’t you?”

  “I’ll admit that. But I’ll tell you something. I’ve caught him in women’s beds where he’s looked guiltier … and I never believed he was guilty of what he should have been in such circumstances, because I never believed him capable.”

  “That’s double talk.”

  I shrugged. “You’re the arresting officer. But Roland says the body was in a walled garden. He says he came in the front door.”

  “Look, I’ve seen those old Roland movies — wait a minute, there was one called Reach For The Stars. You remember that?”

  “With some nausea.”

  “In that picture, he got over walls a lot higher than the one out at Pawley’s place. Now we’ve got it clear: this guy jumped the wall. He and Pawley fought over that article Pawley meant to print; Roland smacked him over the head with one of the garden statues, leaped over the wall, waited until the cops arrived, then walked back in. It’s that simple.”

  “If he killed Pawley, why didn’t he take the scandal story?”

  Scully looked wise at that. “We’ve got that figured, too. He couldn’t find the story. He looked for it. That’s why he came back.”

  “But if it was on Pawley’s person, why didn’t he find it?”

  “It was in Pawley’s inside pocket. You don’t think Pawley would tell him he had a story like that on him, do you?”

  Chapter Three

  THEY WERE removing Pawley’s body when Scully and I got out to his place about six that morning.

  We turned off the ocean highway, drove through the gate in a cyclone fence backed by a thick pepper hedge, and onto a circular drive. The house sat a couple of acres back from the road, and you would have thought even a publisher like Pawley would have been safe in there. But that’s the problem; it gets so you can’t even trust your friends.

  Smog-tinted dew still dripped from the trees and the eaves as we crossed the walk. We stood aside while men from the local undertaking establishment carried out the sheet-covered body. A sallow faced man walked out beside it, but I looked at the body and paid no particular attention to its convoy.

  “Like I said,” Scully told me when we entered the foyer, “I don’t mind you walking around, looking things over. I want you people to see everything. I don’t want it ever said I didn’t let you look things over. Just don’t go fouling anything up.”

  He led me into an air-conditioned, sound-proofed office to the right of the foyer. In there Pawley had handled his long distance supervision of Tattle which was published in New York. His equipment included a teletype, a hot phone, electric typewriters, tape recorders, filing cabinets and a single painting that must have cost fifty grand, an abstract nude. To me it was worth nothing, which is no criticism of the painting.

  I glanced around at the gleaming wood paneling, the tall narrow windows permanently locked. Here was a man who spent his money and bought value.

  We returned to the foyer. Out there some of the sounds from outside intruded; the pound of the ocean against the boulders at the rear of the estate, the occasional car moving fast on the damp highway.

  Scully was called to a conference with two men from the sheriff’s office.

  “Hold what you’ve got, Howell.”

  He called in a uniformed cop, spoke earnestly and rapidly to him. He glanced toward me. Patrolman Davies will show you around, Howell.”

  Davies looked to be in his early twenties, dark and serious about his work. He wore his gun loose in his holster and looking at him gave me a feeling of insecurity. I knew suddenly what they meant when they spoke of a dangerous cop. This was that kind, wearing his authority like an oversized night stick.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  He strode into the dining room, which was large enough for a banquet.

  I paused for a moment before a cupboard of cut glass.

  “Don’t touch that!” Davies’ voice was sharp.

  I looked at him over my shoulder. His mouth pulled down and his eyes narrowed, waiting for me to make something of it.

  I just laughed and could almost see the smoke mushrooming out of his cap.

  The kitchen was done in aluminum and chrome, an oversized room with cabinets, freezers and stoves built into the gleaming la vendar walls.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Davies said again.

  I stopped walking. “Friend, that can get tiresome.”

  “Then you just watch yourself.”

  “Does it ever wake you up at night?” I said.

  He set himself. “What?”

  “Thinking about what a big man you are. A cop.”

  “Don’t call me no goddamn cop.”

  I walked out of the kitchen and went along the hallway toward the stairs.

  He followed me, walking fast. “You heard me. I ain’t no goddamn cop.”

  “You said it,” I told him.

  He was breathing hard by the time we reached the head of the stairs, and it had nothing to do with the climb. I moved ahead of him and touched a doorknob.

  “Just a minute, fellow. I’ll open that.”

  I shrugged and stepped back. He opened the bedroom door, letting it swing wide. When he looked at me, I was smiling. He didn’t like
it.

  “I don’t know who you think you are in Hollywood, Baldy,” he said, “but you ain’t nobody down here.”

  I went on grinning at him, knowing that was a needle this boy couldn’t take. He had given up smiling when he took his oath as a policeman, and the rest of the world was going to take him as seriously as he took himself, or find themselves in trouble.

  I walked around the bedroom. I turned back the covers on one of the beds just to hear him snort.

  “Now what’s the idea of that?” he wanted to know.

  “Hell” I said. “Never know what you’ll find in a bed.”

  “You want trouble, I can tell you where to find it.”

  “I don’t want any trouble. I just want to look the place over.”

  “So look. Cut out wasting time and let’s get it over with.”

  “You in a big rush?”

  “So, if I am?”

  “So run on. This is a big house but I won’t get lost. Scram.”

  “Look, don’t tell me what to do. You smart bastard. Walking in here, telling me what to do.”

  I ignored him, walked out of the bedroom. The last room along the hall was the master bedroom. It was done with pink tinted mirrors in the ceiling. Sliding doors stood open, exposing at least fifty suits; the man who had just died was a man who had lived.

  The bedrooms were all occupied. I made a mental note to ask Scully if Pawley had been alone in the house at the time of the attack and murder. A man with pink tinted mirrors in his ceiling was not a man given to sleeping alone.

  We went down a flight of winding stairs that exited into the walled garden.

  Through the French doors and lighted windows I could see the other officers, still talking this business over and getting nowhere.

  The walled garden might have been called a patio in a Spanish-type house. This one was indirectly lighted in a way that drew attention to the rare and exotic plants Pawley had cultivated. There was a strong sweet odor in the garden, something like a florist’s workroom. Salted about among the plants were nude statues.

  I did not have to ask Davies where Pawley had been felled; this was marked out in some kind of white powder. Part of the small statuette that had been used to brain him had fallen under a bush, but from where I stood it was plainly visible.