One Deadly Dawn

by Harry Whittington

  He nodded to me from his big chair. “Thank you for coming, Sam.”

  I smiled at him. “You were expecting maybe my secretary?”

  “You’ve been with me a long time now, Sam.”

  “Yes.” I stood in front of his desk. He didn’t invite me to sit down. It was a matter of being practical; if I sat in one of the low chairs, he would have to stand up to see me across that desk.

  “You’ve wanted to leave me, and I’ve raised your pay and talked you into staying. You still have the dream, boy? A small farm?”

  “Everybody wants something,” I said.

  “Yes. All I want is the best for this studio. There’s no sense pretending we’re as big or important as we once were, Sam. You know better. We were primarily a major studio making B pictures, sometimes C and D program pictures. Well, there’s no market for those things any more, eh, Sam?”

  “It has been better.”

  “Yes. It has been better. Still, I want the best for this place. That’s why I’ve tried to keep you. You’re a good man, Sam — a diplomat, a smooth operator, a real pro.”

  “Come on, boss. You sound like my mirror.”

  He smiled and nodded. “We’ve got other publicity men, good ones. But when I think of a big job, the need for the best, I tell Gaye and she calls you — reading my mind after all these years.” He fumbled with his watch chain. “I want you to do something for old Yol, son. No matter what your personal feelings are, do this one for Yol. I want you to go down to San Rafael and see what you can do for Jack Roland.”

  “Boss, he’s a has-been. A real has-been. Why, the gatemen won’t even let him on the lot any more. What do we care about him?”

  Yol’s voice was gentle. He was a great old man. “Jack Roland made this lot, son, or a big part of it. His pictures brought in millions. When we were strapped, we could always ship out a new Jack Roland, and count on returns before anybody even bought a ticket.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Yes. A long time ago. But we can’t forget, just because the public forgot, just because other people forgot. We’ve got to take care of him, son — you and old Yol.”

  I looked about the office, but his gentle voice brought my gaze back to him.

  “As a favor to old Yol, Sam, you do what you can for Jack Roland. Whatever else you’re doing, I’ll have it taken care of for you.”

  I looked at my hands. “All right, sir. I’ll do what I can.”

  There was a brief silence. I thought Yol had forgotten to dismiss me. “This slime, this Pawley, he must have made a great many enemies. He deserved to be killed for the things he published. See what you can do for Jack Roland, son.”

  • • •

  Betty was reading a copy of Cosmopolitan and sipping coffee from a paper cup when I returned to my office. She put both aside, looked up at me from behind my cluttered desk.

  “Yol wanted you to help Jack?” She said it matter of factly.

  I nodded.

  Her throaty voice had the sound of tears in it. “If everybody were like Yol, it would be a fine world. Did you know that he was trying to get Jack a part in the new Ceil Bowne picture?”

  I shook my head. “I knew the old man was getting soft, but I didn’t know he was so far gone.”

  Betty looked at the magazine, at her fingers that showed the effects of housework, at the plain band of gold that Jack had given her and hadn’t hocked yet.

  “Jack caused Yol a lot of trouble, too, Sam.”

  “He caused everybody a lot of trouble.”

  “Yol more than anybody. He lost a fortune when Jack caused him trouble.”

  I looked at her, thinking that here were two good people, Betty and old Yol. Yol remembered only that Jack Roland made the studio millions, that his pictures were sure-fire money-makers. Betty remembered what Jack had cost the old man in time, money and gray hairs. But both wanted to help him, wanted it above everything else, all the present, all the past.

  Betty said, “Yol can forgive him, Sam … why can’t you?”

  I lifted my hand, palm outward. My voice was sharp and impatient. She’d worn through the insulation.

  “It doesn’t matter now whether I do or not, baby. Yol has ordered me to do what I can for lover boy.”

  She pressed the backs of her fingers tightly against her ‘mouth. Her eyes glittered with violet-hued tears.

  “You won’t be sorry, Sam.”

  “I’m already sorry.”

  “What I promised you, Sam. It still goes. Anything you want.”

  I cursed, knocking over a water pitcher and watching it crash on the floor. “God, how you must love that silly bastard, standing here, offering to submit to a fate worse than death just to save him. You’ve said it all now … I know just how you feel about me. Forgive me if I get out of here. And don’t call me, baby — I’ll call you.”

  She caught her breath, moving after me to the door; but when I closed it sharply in her face, she let it stay that way. I growled at Julie and strode out of there. The sun was brilliant when I reached the street.

  • • •

  I drove my Buick through the gateway of Ceil Bowne’s place in the valley.

  For a moment I glanced back across my shoulder, thinking of the places where I wanted to be. I can’t pretend that I’d been in this place often enough to form anything but vague opinions about it. Just the same, the air seemed fresher on the other side of that fence.

  Bowne’s home was a pale lavender ranch-type affair set in the midst of manicured landscaping so it seemed a part of it. It was stone and opaque glass with long slanting roofs that resembled ski-runs. Where the house finally ceased rambling, everything was deep green grass, deep green shrubs, or blue-green swimming pool.

  I parked the Buick, crossed the veranda and rang the doorbell. The butler was an old time silent film actor who remembered my face.

  “Hello, Mr. Howell. It’s been a long time.”

  “Skinner, how have you been?”

  “I’ve been very well, Mr. Howell. Whom did you wish to see?”

  “Ceil Bowne, Skinner. Tell him it’s studio business.”

  “Yes, sir. Come in.” He led me into a sun parlor, into which the sun slanted through lavender-tinted glass roofing. The furniture was all modern, right out of one of those home and garden magazines where they get you to work in your garden because it’s too uncomfortable sitting in the house.

  After a trek into the deep recesses of the place, Skinner returned.

  “Mr. Bowne is still in bed,” he said. “He asked you to meet him in the gym. He’ll take his setting-up exercises while he’s talking to you.”

  He preceded me through a corridor and down a short flight of steps to a pine-paneled room. A glass wall at the far end opened onto the patio and the green swimming pool.

  Skinner held the pine door opened for me, but didn’t enter the gym.

  I was already in the room before I saw that the place was well-populated. There must have been six young men in tight fitting briefs working-out on all the equipment in the place. I felt indecent, standing on the short stairway fully dressed.

  “Hello there.”

  The voice came from a man working with pulleys at the side of the stairs. I walked over to him.

  He looked me over. “You’re not working out with us, are you?”

  “God forbid. What is this anyway, a Charles Atlas class?”

  “Oh, no. C.B. brought us out here so we can keep in shape. He’s using us in his new movie spectacle, Tower of Babel. It’s going into production soon.”

  I didn’t say anything, but they would have looked more appropriate in a picture about Sodom and Gomorrah. They were perfect physical specimens, all of them, but I felt myself withdrawing from them. They looked like the boys the old Greeks used to collect on Olympus. Muscles and hair all rippled the same way, and you had to admire their strength and grace. But even being acquainted with C.B.’s exotic tastes as I was, I was surprised to find them
living in his house with him. I began to understand Lorna’s turning up at my party in tears.

  I leaned against a silent vibrating-horse and watched the boys go through their paces. They were not quiet a moment; each one seemed to want to outdo the others in feats of strength, as though they could prove their masculinity in this gym, and ignore it in bed.

  “How long you fellows been out here?” I asked the young god who had spoken to me. He was at least six-feet-four and his golden hair was damp with perspiration.

  “Well, I’ve been here a couple of weeks. I’ve been in some weird setups in my time, but this is the craziest one yet. I’ve been around — I wouldn’t want you to doubt that.”

  “No.”

  “But this is the most. Here we live in every kind of luxury and he keeps us on a regime that would have killed off the Roman gladiators. All he can talk about is our muscles, and the way we’ve got to look in his picture.”

  I glanced at the door impatiently, willing Ceil to come down and get me out of this cloying atmosphere.

  The young god kept working with the pulleys. “You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy things I’ve done.”

  “Probably not.”

  “When I get drunk, I go off on some really weirdies; but even when I’m sober, I get the feeling I’m nuts, that I’m different. You ever feel that?”

  I made a sound that must have seemed sympathetic, and he began telling me about his adventures. He had run guns in China, fought hand-to-hand in French Indo-China, just for the hell of it. “I flew for a dictator down in Central America,” he said. “They wanted me to stay on down there, but when it got quiet, I couldn’t take it. I had to move on. I’m never satisfied anywhere. Now, I’m trying the movies, but this is too much like work.”

  I didn’t tell him that he was running away from himself, from the truths he couldn’t admit to himself; that he had a clown’s virility in a kingly body and it was sending him around the world as he tried to outrun himself.

  That brought me up sharp. Why should I tell him anything like that? Wasn’t I the boy who wanted to get away to a chicken ranch?

  “Everybody is running from something,” I said.

  Through the glass wall I saw Ceil Bowne motioning to me, and I walked out there to the patio.

  “Quite a collection you’ve got there, C.B.” I said.

  “I always have been a curio hunter,” he said in perfectly normal tones.

  I didn’t push it. He stood on his head and walked along the edge of his pool on his hands. I sat down in a lounging chair to wait for him.

  Bowne was thick-set, with chiseled features, as though forehead, nose and chin had been painfully hewn to sharp perfection from old brass. He was a short man, but muscular. His brown hair was thick and streaked with gray. He was in his early fifties and had been making movies-all of them box-office smashes — for thirty years.

  He flopped down to his legs, began doing knee bends and duck walks on the flagstones in front of me.

  “What brings you out here, Sam? They haven’t assigned you to my unit, have they?”

  I smiled. “Thanks, but I don’t believe anybody has done anything without your full knowledge in many years.”

  “The way to get what you want is to take it, Sam. That’s what I’ve found out. You show any weakness and they’ll rip you apart. Nobody has ripped me apart yet.”

  “You’ve had successful pictures.”

  “No, Sam.” He swung his arms in lifting exercises. “I didn’t have successful pictures. I took them. I’ve never let anybody else get a property that I wanted. I start with a successful story, using basic situations heavy with sex. I put everything into it that I know the public wants, and then I fight for it all the way — for the best position, the best release, the best play dates.”

  I admitted the truth of all this, knowing the personal drive he was revered and feared for, but I glanced at his newest collection in the gym, trying to fit them in with the rest of his personality. I turned back, found him watching me, his thin mouth twisted and his eyes narrowed.

  I said, “I came out here because Yol ordered me to do what I could for Jack Roland.”

  “Haven’t you heard what Roland’s done?”

  “Yes. That’s what the old man means. He wants me to get Roland out of it. I wondered what you could tell me — the word is that Yol had talked you into giving Jack a part in Tower of Babel.”

  He went on exercising. “Sure. The old man wanted me to put Roland in the new picture. Offered me several pleasant inducements. I hadn’t made up my mind. But I have now.”

  “He’s out?”

  “Hell, what do you think? The part wasn’t much, a middle-aged-friend-of-the-heroine thing. When Yol read it, he thought it sounded like the old character Roland used to do. He gets killed off after a few reels, a lot of sympathy. I knew he couldn’t act, but I liked the idea of his playing himself — the old Jack Roland role ten years after. It might have been worth something at the box-office, but he’s killed that now. As far as I’m concerned, they can bury Jack Roland. He’s dead.”

  “Not much you can do for me, then?”

  “Hell. What could I do? Even if I were a fool like old Yol, I wouldn’t touch this thing. Why Roland has been dead for the last seven years, but he can pull his grave in on him after this scandal.”

  I watched him inhale, exhale, bend, straighten. I watched the wind ripple the water in the pool. I watched a horse switch his tail at flies in the backyard corral.

  “You wouldn’t use any of your influence to help him, then?” I said it softly, so that Ceil Bowne would know I was not being persistent, just wrapping the thing up.

  He stopped exercising. “Sam, I’m a producer-director. My job is making pictures. I try to know what the public will buy. They won’t buy a murderer. And they damn sure won’t buy a murderer who’s also a has-been. Now, Yol told you to do what you can for Roland.” He nodded emphatically. “You do it. But not me. I’m out. A man makes mistakes, let him be prepared to pay for them…. And according to my memory, Jack Roland has made more than his share.”

  The door opened behind me and Lorna Carone came out with Bowne’s orange juice and coffee on a tray. The afternoon papers were beside the coffee pot.

  I could read the headline: ACTOR HELD IN SLAYING. Scandal Publisher Slain in Garden.

  I pulled my gaze up to Lorna’s face, seeing her silhouetted against Ceil’s collection of muscle men. In this background, Lorna’s taut-drawn misery fit exactly.

  She was staring at me, eyes widened, and I saw the fright, the silent, nervous message. Don’t tell Ceil I was at your apartment last night. Please don’t tell him. I didn’t have to be an expert to get that message.

  I grinned at her, hoping she would be reassured.

  She was too far gone for reassurance.

  I moved my gaze over her. Now in her early thirties, she was the luscious kind of lovely who had to watch her diet, count her calories. She would have made some farmer a healthy, stout wife with lots of kids, but here she was clinging to Ceil Bowne.

  She had been under contract to Twenty Grand Pictures for years, had made a few films, but never clicked. Some have it, some don’t. With Lorna, she didn’t care. All she wanted was to marry Ceil Bowne. But although he let her hang around, marriage to Lorna was not on his mind. Ceil Bowne had come up the rough way, and everybody felt that if he ever married, it would be to a woman who could further his career. I was always faintly astonished that he hadn’t merged with one of Yol Myerene’s daughters.

  She said, “Hello, Sam. Isn’t it sad about poor Jack?”

  Ceil sat down at an aluminum table. Lorna placed the tray before him, her frantic eyes never leaving his face.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s going to be tough to prove he didn’t do it.”

  Ceil tilted an eyebrow. “You sound positive.”

  “When love birds peck you to death, or butterflies kick you to death,” I said, “Jack Roland will be a killer.”
/>   Ceil threw back his head and laughed. His laughter bounced against the glass wall. The muscle men inside the gym stopped working and stared out at him.

  In all the time I had known Ceil, I had never seen him in such a gay mood. Perhaps it pleased him to see Lorna so completely dejected. I’ve heard that when men don’t want women for anything else, they find it’s pleasant to have them around to walk on.

  Lorna would make soft walking.

  “Have some lunch, Sam,” Ceil said. “I won’t eat until seven, nor will the boys who are working out, but I’m sure Lorna would welcome your company. Wouldn’t you, dear?”

  “I’d be pleased to have you, if you’d stay.”

  But I wanted out. The green pool, the lavender house, the muscle men and Lorna’s deep unhappiness all pressed in on me.

  “I better get on my horse,” I said. “Whatever I can do for Jack, I’d better do in a hurry.”

  Ceil waved that aside. “Let him rot down there. If he doesn’t owe for this, he’s still way overdue. And if you get him out of jail he’ll come whining around here, wanting to get in the picture.”

  “Next time I see him, I’ll tell him that’s out.”

  “I’d be eternally grateful, Sam.”

  Lorna said she would see me to the door. We both wanted to skirt the gym so we went through the dining room and across the foyer. Lorna said, “I’m sorry I was such a fool at your apartment. If I’d known you were having a party, I wouldn’t have barged in.”

  “It’s all right. If I’d known I was going to have a party, I wouldn’t have been at home.”

  She smiled, touched my hand. “You’re good, Sam.”

  “Yeah. Hell, isn’t it?”

  I walked on out to my car. I remembered the numbers I’d copied from the telegram at Pawley’s hideaway and decided to check with Western Union. I was reaching for the door when I saw the man sitting behind the wheel, but I didn’t see the gun in his hand until I was too close to do anything except stand there and stare at it.