Crime on My Hands

by George Sanders

  He grinned frankly. “Something like that.” He looked at me in sudden alarm. “Stop getting purple, George! I really love the gal. I think she’s wonderful.”

  I had to shrug, finally. It wasn’t the first time some girl was married for the money she was able to make. And that was none of my business.

  “By the way,” he said conversationally. “It seems to me that you’re on something of a spot. You say you had the murder weapon. You played this last scene with it. If you can’t dig up proof that somebody planted it on you, it’s going to look bad, eh?”

  It wasn’t an open threat, but his shrewd eyes carried all the implications. I said nothing. After a long stare, I went away.

  Sammy had his head in his hands. He looked up as I came in. “Well, anyway, you’ve still got the museum piece, George. Now we got to get the other from that deputy.”

  “I’ll do that today.”

  I sat down. We didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. All paths of investigation seemed to be closed to me. If I had hung on to the gun, or if I had seen who took it from me, the problem would have been solved. Certain routine matters could have rolled into operation. We could have checked the serial number, and sweated out the truth from the man who had the gun in his possession. After all, if I had seen who took it, I’d have seen the murderer.

  I was out of my depth, and I knew it. It was a sad admission. I had felt confident all along. It would be only a matter of hours before I could point a melodramatic finger and say, “Ecce homo!” At one time, I had had all the factors fairly clear in my mind. One of a certain group was the murderer. The actions of a few of that group had attracted my attention, which grew to suspicion and dissipated into nothingness. I had wound up with no definite suspect, with nothing but the knowledge of unrelated acts, and without the gun.

  I got to my feet and went out, saying nothing to Sammy. I don’t believe that he noticed my going.

  Lamar James was in his laboratory. He was tipped back in a chair, his feet on a table with two microscopes, his eyes on far space. He grinned mildly at me.

  ‘I’m trying to work out a mathematical equation, George. But I’ve been trying for two years. What’s on your mind?”

  “I need help.”

  I sat down. He took a bottle of chemical analysis alcohol from a cupboard, put a teaspoonful in each of two glasses, filled them with water, and gave me one. It tasted something like good gin, and warmed a path down my gullet.

  “When Flynne was killed,” I began, “I had a pair of valuable guns in my hands. They were Colt thirty­eights on forty-five frames, pearl handled.” His dark eyes sparked. He flicked a glance at another cupboard. “During the crush after the scene,” I went on, “somebody took one of those guns. He replaced it with what I believe to be the gun that killed Flynne. Sammy took both guns from me, and noticed the strange weapon. He decided to put them in his office, and ask me about it later. His girlfriend, who knew he was worried about them, threw both guns on the other side of a big sand dune when she heard somebody had been shot. We couldn’t find them, and then you turned up one of the original pair in Carla’s wagon.”

  “You knew it was there,” James broke in. “When you got that blanket to cover Flynne, you saw it. I figured that out later. You should have told me then.”

  “But look at my position. The sheriff is inclined to go off half-cocked. He could have arrested me.”

  “I could pinch you now for obstructing justice.”

  “Wait until I finish,” I said. “You’ll do whatever seems best then.”

  I told him of the parade of people who came to my trailer that night, and related their conversations. He listened without interruption.

  “I was ready to give up and tell you what I knew,” I said. “I knew that if I made that scene over, carrying forty-fives, Peggy would notice. Then she was killed. I lost my head, I suppose. It became a personal matter. Flynne hadn’t meant anything to me. My going into the investigation was strictly a move of self-defense. But when Peggy got a slug in the back, I was furious. Revenge was what I wanted. Personal revenge. And I knew more of the currents than you. I figured I could work alone better than with you. There was still the matter of the missing gun, too.”

  I told him about Paul, and my conclusions. I told him Paul was coming to my trailer.

  James thought silently for a long time. Finally he said, “I’ll come over and listen to what he has to say. But I’ll tell you this much, George. You’re not in the clear. I haven’t seen any proof of your innocence. The film is missing. And you could have shot the Whittier girl. You say she threw up a hand as if to stop everything, and then fell over. I don’t see how you can prove that she didn’t turn around to tell somebody behind her, Riegleman, for instance, and you let her have it.”

  “But I was carrying forty-fives then. I can prove that.”

  “But can you prove that you didn’t also have a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight special on you?”

  “I wouldn’t have dared, with the camera on me in a close-up.”

  “I saw the – whatcha call ’em? Rushes? The critical shot of you was a close-up, showing only your head and shoulders. Who knows what you did with your hands?”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Not more than half,” he countered. “I’ve got to regard you as a suspect. Look at how it stacks up. You took that reel of film, which you claim would show you to be innocent. It disappeared while in your possession. You could have wanted to destroy it.”

  “Look,” I said, “I came in here of my own free will trying to clarify this thing. Now we’re off on another tangent. I didn’t kill Flynne. I’d never even seen him before.”

  “That’s what everybody says,” James went on patiently. “Somebody’s lying. So I can’t believe anybody.”

  “I have some corroboration. Sammy and Miss Nelson.”

  “What can they testify? One that you had the gun, the other that she threw it away. Does that prove anything?”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing – yet. I have a couple of ideas. I’m letting them ride.”

  “If I’m not under arrest, then, I’m going to eat.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll see you at your trailer.”

  I went to the restaurant in the hotel. Wallingford, Riegleman, Paul, and Sammy were together at a table. I joined them.

  “Sunsets are corny,” Wallingford was saying. “The scene would be better in a dark cellar. It would mean something, too.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the sunset,” Riegleman said, wearily. “All I want is something. I’ve spent more than sixty dollars in telephone calls trying to find Connaught. We can’t have any scene until we locate him.”

  Wallingford made a sudden decision. “Everybody get packed. We’ll leave tomorrow morning. We got all we need here, and if I say so myself it’s terrific.”

  “I think I’ll drive down tonight,” I said. “I have an appointment in an hour.” I looked at Paul, who nodded imperceptibly. “After I keep it, I’m free.”

  I went out to my trailer, to find James waiting. I explained my electric-eye apparatus for turning on the lights, which brought up the subject of my telephone apparatus. I told him what I was trying to do.

  “You ‘ve got it now so that you can take incoming calls?” he asked.

  “Yes, but I have to open the base of the phone to hang up. I’ll be glad to be back. I’m going to whip that little problem.”

  James looked impatiently at his watch. “Where’s Paul?”

  “He’ll be along any time now.”

  We heard a flat spat outside, apparently originating a considerable distance away. It could have been a backfire on the highway. We sat tensely.

  “That was a shot,” James said. “Let’s take a look.”

  We went outside. We were blind in the sudden darkness, but scattered stars shed a kind of light when our eyes became adjusted. The stars were only a random handful of gems flung on velvet, but the
y showed a dark bundle some twenty feet away.

  The bundle was Paul. He was dead, shot in the back.

  “Then he was telling me the truth,” I said slowly. ‘I’m sorry I acted the way I did.”

  We were in James’s car, with Paul in the back seat. We roared into town behind the siren. We slid under the porte-cochere of a private hospital, and attendants carried Paul inside. James and I waited while the doctor extracted the bullet.

  Presently it was delivered to him, and we went to his laboratory. He made a brief examination under the comparison microscope, then looked at me.

  “Well,” he said. “This came out of the same gun that killed Flynne. The one you say was stolen from you today.”

  “The one I say was stolen,” I said. “Look, James, even you’ll have to admit I was with you when that gun was used on Paul, or should I try to get a few witnesses?”

  James nodded. “Don’t bother with the witnesses, George. I guess this lets you out.”

  I tried not to sound as relieved as I felt. “Then I’ll be on my way. It’s your party from now on. I’ve messed around in it too much already. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a detective,” I admitted handsomely.

  ‘I’m afraid you’d better stick around,” he said. “These murders occurred in our county. We can’t let anybody get into another county until we’ve tabbed the killer.”

  “You can’t hold the whole company here!”

  “Can’t we?” he asked grimly. “You just watch.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  One reason why Wallingford was popular was that he would fight for his own. On this occasion he was fighting for his shooting schedule, but he had fought as fiercely before for one of his people. Many times. There was the occasion when a prominent comedian hit the headlines with a slosh and studio moguls cancelled his contracts. Wallingford had stormed into the executive vice-president’s office, like a circus performer striding into the lion’s cage.

  “Where do headlines wind up?” he’d yelled. “In a morgue! But pictures go to the Museum of Modern Art! Is a bottle as big as immortality? I’m gonna gnaw the bars outa that jail, and he’s gonna finish my picture, even if it costs you a hundred grand! Besides, he’s a good guy. Anybody can take a quart too many sometimes. Besides, people that live on glass bottles shouldn’t throw stones! That’s my final word!”

  On the morning after Paul’s death, he fixed Sheriff Call-Me-Jerry Callahan with a Damascene stare.

  “Are you gonna arrest us all? You’re gonna feed us, too? Listen, Mr. Sheriff, we got investments in this company. It’s gonna cost somebody money to hold us up, and it ain’t going to be me. That’s my final word I”

  “Now, Mr. Wallingford,” Callahan said soothingly, “look at where I set. One of you is a murderer, and I got jurisdiction here. I got to catch you, whoever he is.”

  “Stop looking at me like a bail bond!” Wallingford snapped. “I wasn’t even here when that extra got it!”

  “But Ican’t take a chance,” Callahan went on. “All I know is, somebody in your crowd done it. I expect to make an arrest at any moment.”

  “How?” Wallingford demanded. “George don’t know, and he’s smart. You got a crystal ball and chain somewhere?”

  “We have our methods,” Callahan said uneasily.

  “You give me an ear for a minute,” Wallingford said. “This is the fifth day since we got up here. We had a murder each on the first two days. And now last night. And I ain’t observed you do nothing but sit on your backside. You think you’re gonna wait till the murderer dies of hard arteries and makes a deathbed confession? Mister, time is money to us. I personally will go to the voters and tell ’em what you’ve done. I personally will see that hotel clerk’s grandson made sheriff.”

  “He ain’t old enough,” Callahan said in mild triumph.

  “We’ll age him! We’ll let him read your record in office. That would give a billiard ball gray hair.”

  “You gotta stay,” the sheriff said doggedly.

  I cut in, in the interests of Wallingford’s apoplexy. “Just a moment, gentlemen. Let me show you something.”

  I gave Callahan a telegram which had arrived that morning. He read it, frowned at me, read it again.

  “Ain’t Paul Revere dead?” he demanded belligerently.

  “You can’t claim any of us did that,” Wallingford said quickly.

  “The signature,” I said, “is my press agent’s quaint idea of a gag. But that telegram gives us a clue. It says that the core of our problem is in Hollywood. We’ll never–”

  “It don’t say nothing of the kind,” Callahan interrupted. “It says–” He peered at the message. “It says ‘THE BRITISH ARE COMING SIGNED PAUL REVERE.’ Wasn’t there something about a lantern in that story?”

  “One if by land, and two if by sea,” I said. “But what I started to–”

  “My little niece,” Wallingford put in, “knows it by heart. Five years old, she says, ‘Listen, my chillun’ – she don’t talk so plain, but she talks – ‘and you can hear’ and however it goes from there.”

  “That’s pretty poetry,” Sheriff Callahan said. “Don’t see how them guys think up all them rhymes. Can’t do it myself. Tried once, but couldn’t find nothing to rhyme with revolver. I got it right here somewheres.” He began to rummage in his desk.

  “Maybe you could help me with it, Mr. Sanders. You use big words.”

  I gritted my teeth. I said, without opening them, “I’d be glad to, Sheriff.”

  He handed me a sheet of paper, blank except for one scrawled line:

  The Malibu Kid pulled out his revolver.

  “Got stuck there,” he said. “Think it’s any good so far?”

  “It has action,” I said. “The story line isn’t any too clear. Suppose he’s going to shoot the girl who double­crossed him. It could go something like this:

  “‘The Malibu Kid pulled out his revolver, And aimed it at Calico Lee.

  He called for the priest to come and absolve her.

  He despised double-crossers, did he.

  “You could go on and tell how she talked him out of it, and let them go into a tear-jerking clinch at the last.’”

  “Say!” Callahan exclaimed. “That’s swell. Here, lemme just write that out. I’ll show my old lady, in my own handwritin’.”

  We waited until the scratch of his pencil ceased. He looked at me amiably. “Sure do thank you, Mr. Sanders. Now what was it you was sayin’?”

  “I said that we’ll never find the murderer here. We’ll find him in Hollywood.”

  “But he ain’t in Hollywood, he’s here. And if he ever gets to Hollywood, we’ll lose him. My brother-in-law’s nephew – nice young fella with a wife and kids – went into a bar on Wilcox Street five years ago, and nobody seen him since.”

  “That,” I said patiently, “isn’t what I mean, Sheriff. The motive can be found in Hollywood. All we need is the motive. It will point to the killer.”

  “But if I let three hundred people loose in Hollywood, the voters is gonna be sore.”

  “Send along your deputy. All of our names and addresses are on record. If any one of us skips, it will be easy to catch him. And James would be on hand to make the arrest.”

  “We got no allotment to take care of deputies’ travel expenses.”

  “Oh, we’ll pay his expenses,” I said impatiently.

  “Now, that’s different,” Callahan replied. “How much? He’s got to have at least twelve-fifty a day.”

  “That’s what we pay a good extra!” Wallingford cried. “He can’t act, can he? Seven-fifty is all we pay, and he buys his own gas!”

  “Then you stay here,” Callahan pronounced. “Twelve-fifty or no go.”

  “But he ain’t worth twelve-fifty, Sheriff. He’d be a dead loss, and if we gotta lose, we can’t lose no more than seven-fifty.”

  “Wadda you care?” Callahan yelled. “You got lots of money!”

  “I didn’t get it by giving deputy
sheriffs joy rides,” Wallingford said stubbornly.

  “It will be only a few days, Wally,” I said.

  “I don’t care if it’s a few hours, George. It ain’t the principle of the thing, it’s the money. It didn’t used to cost so much to buy a cop, and the cops ain’t any better today, even with the price of living going up. It’s too expensive. Seven-fifty, that’s my final word.”

  “How about ten dollars?” Callahan proposed. “And a bonus for me if I get him inside a week?”

  “Eight,” Wallingford countered.

  Callahan pondered. “Nope,” he said finally. “Nine-fifty’s my lowest figger.”

  “Eight-twenty-five.”

  “Nine-twenty-five.”

  “Eight-thirty-three,” Wallingford said.

  “Nine dollars.” The sheriff was getting desperate.

  ‘I’m losing money,” Wallingford said sadly, “but eight-fifty.”

  “Aw, come on, Mr. Wallingford. Have a heart. I’ll settle for eight-seventy-five. I can’t come no lower!”

  Wallingford was adamant. “Eight-sixty-six. That’s my final offer.”

  “I won’t take it. I just won’t.”

  “And two-thirds!” Wallingford spat.

  Sheriff Callahan grinned. “Guess that’s the best I can get. I’ll take it.” He chuckled. “Woulda settled for six bucks. Guess I got the best of ya.”

  “Ha!” Wallingford snapped. “I would’ve paid fifty.”

  Nine-thirty a.m. Perhaps Carla wasn’t up yet. Somebody had to tell her, and now was a good time, while the bargain hunters settled details in the sheriff’s office.

  I went to the hotel, where a quartet of Los Angeles reporters leaped at me.

  “How’s it going, George?”

  “Catch him yet?”

  “Give us something for your fans. You should see the mail, since we announced that you were going to solve it!”

  “You’ve got the female vote, George. And a whole gallery of pictures.”

  I waved them back. “There are no new developments,” I said formally. “A startling announcement is expected momentarily.”

  “Oh, come, George. Give us something. The city desk will chew my ears if I don’t turn in something.”