Crime on My Hands

by George Sanders

I put a teakettle on my electric grill. When it was hot, I laid Paul on his back and opened his shirt. I poured a dollop of steaming water on the tender skin of his stomach.

  No frightened gazelle ever moved faster from an ambushing lion. If the door of my trailer had opened inward, he’d have left a jagged outline of himself as he plunged through it into the night. His feet sped him instinctively away; in a few seconds, his yells were only a remembered earache.

  A round face, with great dark eyes poked itself around the trembling door. Wallingford eyed me and the kettle, smoking in my hand.

  “George!” Wallingford cried. “What you doing to that poor fellow?”

  “I just poured a little boiling water on his stomach, Wally. Come on in.”

  “Thanking you just the same, George, I’m liking it here. I can duck.”

  I poured out the water, turned off the grill. “Come on. I was just trying to get some information from him.”

  He edged into the trailer. “I don’t know from nothing. Don’t even think question marks. I’ll dream about his screams.”

  “He passed out,” I said. “I was just bringing him to.” I grinned at the fat little man. “Have a drink?”

  “Not so long as I can fight you off. You will get yourself in a cell with soft walls, George, doing things like that. Maybe you better take a few days off, huh? Maybe the strain is breaking you?”

  “Let’s just forget it,” I said. “It wasn’t very important. What’s on your mind?”

  He cast another apprehensive glance at the kettle, seemed to relax, and smiled shyly at me. “It’s John,” he said.

  I blinked. I was a little dazed. “I’d never have thought it, Wally. Fancy! John.”

  “Nor lots of others, even,” he said smugly. “I telephoned New York, and Al Williams, who should be knowing, guessed James and Jedediah. You should have heard me hang up in his ear. Guessing! I got no time for games. Even Sol Spatz in Hollywood said he thought it might be Jeffrey. So I called New York again.”

  “So far, that’s about eighteen dollars worth of phone calls.”

  “But it’s worth it, George. Now I know. I called the secretary of the Stock Exchange, and he said it was John. A good solid name, no?”

  “What is John?” I demanded. “And don’t give me an Oley Speaks’ parody.”

  “The J in my name, what else? For J.P. Morgan. It was John Pierpont.”

  “You could have found out by calling the public library,” I pointed out.

  “But it wasn’t open in New York.”

  “You could have wired one of the lions, then. Let’s get off this vaudeville routine, Wally. I have an idea. We need a sandstorm.”

  “Not me, George. I got as much use for a sandstorm as a fish for a manger.”

  “I mean in the picture. Here we are on a desert. If we have to fight our way through a sandstorm, we’ll be exhausted. Then if the redskins attack, our triumph will be all the more impressive. There’s something mystical in it, Wally. The early pioneers were determined to win through and build up this country. Neither storm nor ambush, man nor nature, deters them. They fight to the last man, but that last man wins through.”

  “If we kill ’em all off,” he reflected, “it saves money. All them extras cost as much as a couple good actors.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” I said. “Or is it hyperbolically? I don’t mean that only one man shall come through. I mean that the scene shall show the intent that at least one man shall come through. We have the evidence of that intent all about us in these latter days – buildings, roads, orchards, farms.”

  “And Hollywood,” he added. “It’s a good idea, George. It would show what people went through so we could have pictures and telephones. But we can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  He rose and seemed to tower in his rage. “Because we can’t find the author! He leaves his agent’s office for the studio, and nobody ever hears from him again! We got a scene to rewrite, and now this! I’m losing my mind. Murders, bad newspaper publicity, and no author yet!”

  “He can’t have just vanished.”

  “Claude Rains did, George. Right before your eyes on the screen in The Invisible Man.”

  “That was a trick.”

  “Maybe,” he said moodily. “I wonder. Sometimes I think we really do these things, and are just kidding ourselves with trick talk. Now we got an author up in smoke. Better I should have stayed in pants and suits.”

  “He’ll turn up,” I soothed. “Who is this author?”

  “Name’s Arthur Connaught. A thousand a week we’re paying him to be lost. It ain’t practical.”

  “Maybe I can do something about finding him.”

  He scowled at me. “You don’t find nobody. You try to find who killed that poor guy and we lose the master film. Then we lose a script girl, poor girl. Don’t you try to find no author, George. We might even lose me.”

  Presently, he went off morosely and I went to bed.

  Not to sleep, oh, no. I had yearned for this inner­spring mattress with every aching bone. I had thought to lose my worries in a cloud of unconsciousness. And the moment I hit the bed I was wide awake.

  There was nothing I could do about ascribing a motive for Flynne’s murder until James came back with biographical data, but I could think about it. I couldn’t keep my mind off it. Where did Carla fit in?

  So she and Paul were going to be married, eh? A slight wrench of disappointment twisted my insides. Carla wasn’t important in my life, but I didn’t like the comparison between me and Paul. From my own viewpoint, I was a more desirable character. So was he from his, I suppose.

  Then a really terrific idea hit me. Paul had done it. He had killed Flynne, planted the gun on me, tossed my gun into Carla’s wagon. He had played odds on that. If the murder weapon were found on me, I would be accused. If not, suspicion would fall on Carla when the prop gun was found. Then, knowing that she couldn’t be convicted, he came and made a confession which could easily be proved false. This would take suspicion off him. He would be regarded as a dope, to be sure, but that was better than having a front page picture captioned “Convicted.”

  The hows and whys escaped me, but the psychological pattern was intact. Some time, somewhere, Flynne had incurred his enmity. Coincidentally, Paul had become attracted to Carla. He learned of their past relationship, which added fuel to his burning desire to rid the world of Flynne. And so he had waited. The opportunity came, and he seized it.

  How cunning he was! He had worked out each step, and he had almost gotten away with it. Had it not been for my insomnia, he might have.

  I smiled to myself in the darkness. It was all over now, all over but using facts which James would bring back. Then accusations, arrest, trial, conviction, death. I hoped it would be a painful one, for having shot Peggy in the back.

  With this problem wrapped up in logic, I dismissed it and turned to the problem of my telephone. There must be a way to make it hang up. When the caller replaced his telephone, he broke the circuit. Now, suppose that the initial call should activate an electromagnet which caused my telephone to answer. The slight current flowing through the line while a conversation was in progress would hold my phone open. But when the call was terminated, the circuit broken, the field around the electromagnet would collapse. This would–

  That was as far as I got. I began to dream of a water-spout at sea, full of authors named Connaught.

  Sammy met me as I arrived on the set the next morning. “Did you die?” he asked. “You’re ten minutes late.”

  “I woke up in the middle of a dream. I had to go back to sleep to finish it.”

  “Hurry and get made up,” he urged. “Riegleman is in a foul mood. Everybody’s waiting on you.”

  I dashed to my dressing room and sort of hurled myself into my togs. I buckled on my guns and went out to face the camera.

  We had a new script girl, with a brand-new notebook. Still, the chair seemed empty. I saw Peggy there, how s
he had flung up her hand, jerked, fallen.

  We took our places at the point where I had broken the scene yesterday. Riegleman started to give the signal to begin, but halted to glower at me.

  “Where did you get that bloody cravat?” he yelled.

  I dismounted and walked over to him. The new script girl smiled at me. She was pretty, small, and dark. I winked at her. “In my dressing room,” I said to Riegleman. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Nothing, George,” he said gently. “It’s excellent. Only it happens not to belong in the picture. Yesterday, you wore a black string tie. We ran through most of the scene. Now we resume the scene, to find you in an Ascot. Surely somebody would ask how you changed ties while dodging bullets?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  I changed ties, thinking how unlike Riegleman this was. He did not customarily say anything about detail. He left that to others. Nor was he usually so sharp and sarcastic. Still, he’d been set back hard these last two days. Two murders couldn’t add to his serenity. They had apparently sharpened his powers of observation, though.

  The Beard was waiting outside my dressing room. Not for me. Not for anything. He simply leaned against the side of the trailer and stared fixedly at nothing. He seemed tall and stooped even in that position.

  “Hello,” I said. “Sulking?”

  He raised his flashing black eyes. “I cannot stand it,” he said, gloomily. “I have never ridden a horse before. I never will again.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “You must have a poor excuse for an agent. Didn’t he tell you you’d have to ride?”

  “Never mentioned it,” the Beard said. “If I’d known that was required, I’d never have taken the job. Mr. Sanders, I’m going back to Hollywood on the first train.”

  “Oh, come now,” I said as cheeringly as I could. “Don’t give up so easily. Stick it out. Stout fella, and all that sort of thing.”

  He groaned, and shook his head. “At my age, I cannot get used to sleeping on my stomach. I didn’t close an eye all night. I can’t sit down, and I’m so tired from standing I can hardly see.”

  ‘I’m sorry,” I said. I added, vaguely, “Cheer up,” and went away.

  I mounted my horse, and we took up the scene at a point shortly before the break of yesterday. I galloped back and forth, and when I turned to record passion for Carla on celluloid, I thought of Paul. I don’t know what my expression was, but it certainly couldn’t have been a burning one.

  Riegleman blew his whistle. Action stopped. He walked over to me. “One does not ordinarily slit his eyes at his beloved,” he chided me. “Love comes from eyes wide and clear. I’m sorry, George, old boy, but you looked as if you were ordering a bank cashier to hand over the loot. Shall we try it again? You are in love with this woman, George. Please remember.”

  I wondered if he came near the actual truth. When I looked at Carla, a little flame of triumph flickered in me. I was going to rid her of a louse.

  We tried the scene again. Riegleman broke it off. “George,” he said. “You seemed frightened. Fear also shows in eyes wide open. Get some lust into your expression, man! This girl is worth fighting for, worth killing for!”

  We tried the scene again. Same result.

  “That’s all today,” Riegleman said in disgust. “Will you drop in on me later. George?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Sammy and McGuire were a mildly arguing duo when I went into Sammy’s office trailer. The property chief was frowning.

  “Try to remember to bring ’em in tomorrow,” he said. “Or here’s a better idea. I’ll stop in your room and pick ’em up this evening.”

  I broke in, to Sammy’s evident relief. “Pick what up? I doubt if you’ll be in your room today, Sammy. We’ve got to have a sandstorm, and Iwant to work out the scene with you. We’ll have to do it ourselves, since we lost the author.”

  “Oh, yes,” Sammy answered, as if he knew what he was talking about. “The sandstorm. Look, Mac, I’ll try to remember to get those guns to you tomorrow, sure. Okay, George, let’s get at it.”

  McGuire went away. Sammy asked, “What sandstorm?”

  I explained my idea. He was enthusiastic, and went me one better. “That gives us a legitimate excuse to look the ground over. Maybe we can find the guns, and we won’t need the storm.”

  We went to the stakes I had driven, and followed their direction to the big dune. Sammy sank to his ankles on each step and was soon shuffling like a locomotive. Neither of us commented on this. We were in no mood for wisecracks.

  When we were out of sight of camp, that lonely immensity brought on a great depression. Here was the earth primeval. These dun wastes had lost their place in time. In arable land, time exists in the cycle of growth. Seeds take hold, sprout, mature, and die. Little streams grow wide in spring, dry in summer. Fledglings lose their down for more practical plumage, molt, mate, eat, fly, and die. The rhythm of caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly, marks the footstep of time. Here was no life, no death, only an eternity of shif ting, formless patterns. The wind came willy-nilly to shift one grain of sand from heedless relatives to heedless strangers. And along comes another wind to shift another grain of sand, and along comes another wind – and so on. Movement, yes, but not a time of life or death, of reaping or sowing, of weeping or laughter.

  There was a time of weeping for us, all right. It arrived after we had sifted several truckloads of sand through our fingers. That wind which had moved the unknowing grains had also covered the guns beyond our poor power to detect or deduce their location.

  “I give up,” Sammy punch-lined. “Where are they?”

  “Only the wind can tell,” I said.

  We stood there, burning under the sun, and flung lyrics at each other.

  “Then speak with the tongues of winds,” Sammy declaimed, “for this wind – this here wind – is dumb as hell.”

  “I shall speak with the tongues of wind machines,” I answered. “Progress, machine age, and stuff. Sammy, we’re insane. We’ve a touch of sun, I think. Let’s go back to the jute chutes.”

  We trudged away. “Now what?” Sammy asked.

  “I’ll sell Riegleman on the idea. I’m to see him this afternoon. I think he’s going to dutch-uncle me for bitching that scene. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get my mind on the role.”

  Sammy grunted sympathetically. “You were looking at her when she keeled over.”

  We went on in silence.

  The beards had all trooped off to dodge razors for another day, the principals and executives to whatever they do when nobody is looking, and only a scattering of technicians puttered about the wagons and trailers. A horse whinnied in his synthetic paddock, which had been placed down wind. I got off my make-up and went into town.

  I stopped at the hotel to see Riegleman, and had Wallingford in my hair before I got out of the car.

  “George, you got to do something again!” he babbled. “Better I was dead. One more is all I ask. Just one more. I will give Vesuvius cards and spades and make history. Well, do something!”

  I took away his hand, which was wrinkling my coat.

  “Please, Wally. Don’t clutch. Who’s been eating your porridge now?”

  “You’re right,” he snapped. “Little Goldilocks yet. Somebody told the L.A. papers she was questioned in jail! Call that friend you call an editor and tell him for me–”

  “Why didn’t you tell him? She’s your property, not mine.”

  “I told him. But he hung up.”

  “You’ve got to be gentle with editors.”

  ‘I’ll be gentle!” he raged. ‘I’ll buy him a new suit. A double-breasted libel, and that’s my final word.”

  “One of these days, Wally, your vocal cords are going to leap out and flagellate you. I’ll call him, so relax.”

  “Smith” gave me a mental hot-foot. “I killed the story the first time,” he said, “because Wanda isn’t very good copy. Mother Hubbard
s don’t give any pulse a dirty beat, but boyohboy! We got a picture of the lady this morning in little more than a grin and gams. What gams!”

  “Sucker,” I said, rallying as best I could.

  “Oh, yeah? Take a look at ’em sometime. Even if they were artificial I could get a glandular upset.”

  “Oh, she has legs,” I admitted. “But are you falling for that old gag?”

  “Somehow,” he lyricized, “legs are ageless for me. They never grow old. Always there’s freshness in the curve of a calf, the knife-edge of an ankle, the cornucopian flare of a thigh. I love ’em!”

  “But as a newspaper man, you don’t give columns of space to publicity hounds. This is just a gag to get her in the public eye. You ‘ll be a laughing stock – to Wanda.”

  “If she’ll laugh at me in person – How do you know?”

  “I helped her work it out,” I improvised. “We were talking one night, and I advanced the theory that any actor could get publicity by departing from the role usually associated with him. If I should dress in missionary robes, God forbid, the fact in itself would get me in the rotogravure as long as I had some kind of a story to go with it. I didn’t think she’d try to get mixed up in a murder just to test my theory. But I tell you this, chum. She had nothing to do with these murders. I give you my word of honor on that.”

  “Can I quote you?”

  “Certainly. Will you call the other papers, like a pal?”

  “If you’ll give me the break on the solution. Hell, it isn’t customary for one editor to call his competitor and warn the oaf against sticking his neck out.”

  “I’ll give you the break,” I promised. “When and if.”

  The explanation I had given sounded pretty good to me. I hung up and thought about it. Then I called “Smith” back.

  “Where’d you get these stories?”

  “We have a correspondent up there,” he said. “He telephoned them in.”

  “Who is he? How can I find him?”

  “I don’t know much about him. He’s sent in a few local items before. His name’s Lazarus Fortescue.”

  “You’re kidding. There isn’t any such name.”