Cast the First Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  “You want me to knock?” asked Gene. “In case we’re not welcome.”

  I shook my head, already soaking wet from the walk from the car. “They won’t try any rough stuff with a girl.”

  Gene extended a gentlemanly hand to cede me the right of way. I knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door to no effect. I rapped again a few moments later. The sound of the rain made it hard to hear anything from inside, but finally, after about twenty seconds, the inner door opened partway, and a pair of eyes peered out.

  “Yes?” came a woman’s voice. “What do you want?”

  “Are you April Kincaid?” I asked, already recognizing her from the photograph I’d seen in her apartment.

  “Who are you?”

  She was thin. Too thin. A pretty brunette with shoulder-length hair held back by a plastic hairband. Dressed in a wrinkled white blouse and a dark skirt, she was wearing socks and no shoes. She stared us down through the screen.

  “My name is Eleonora Stone. Ellie Stone. And this is Gene Duerson.”

  “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “We’re reporters. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

  “Questions? About what?”

  I played my card. “We’re looking for Tony Eberle.”

  She positioned the door firmly between herself and us, as if preparing to slam it shut.

  “I don’t know anyone named Tony Eberle,” she said.

  “We know he’s here. We’re not going to cause any trouble. We want to help.”

  “What about your friends?” she asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Out there. The car down the street.”

  Gene and I turned as one to look. There, about forty yards down the unpaved road, a late-model sedan crouched, huffing exhaust into the air. I tried to remember if I’d seen any cars on the street when we arrived. I doubted it. At least nothing as new and fancy as this one. It looked to be a big Chrysler or something similar. Not a pickup truck or an old junker like the rest of the cars in the neighborhood.

  I glanced at Gene to check his reaction. He shook his head slowly.

  “You’d better let us in,” I said. “We have no idea who’s in that car, but they must have followed us.”

  She stood to one side. “You’ve ruined everything. Now you’ve brought the police with you.”

  Gene and I ducked inside, and the girl locked the door behind us. Her eyes showed fear. She told us Tony wasn’t there.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Out. He went to the market.”

  “That means he’ll be coming back soon. We need to get word to him and warn him to stay away.”

  “Taylor’s Market is on Route Fifteen,” she said. “He went to get some beans and milk and bread.”

  I turned to Gene. “I know it’s raining hard, but if those are cops in that car, we all lose. Can you sneak out the back way and try to find Tony?”

  “I’ve seen worse rain.”

  “Burma?”

  He nodded.

  April explained how to find the market, and Gene slipped out the back door. We watched him pick through the scrub, working his way around a house about a hundred yards away and regain Bradshaw Drive to the east. Moving to the front of the house, I pulled back the sheer white curtains—worn thin and yellow by the years and the wind—and peeked out to see if the dark sedan had moved. It was still there.

  “How did you find us?” asked April.

  “It wasn’t easy,” I said.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  I told her I’d found a snapshot of her in her old waitress uniform. A little research and voilà. The Charlie Horse in Barstow.

  “Where did you find a picture of me?” she demanded.

  I coughed. “Your apartment.”

  “You broke into my place?”

  “No. Nothing like that. The super let me in. Mr. Szolosi.”

  April took a step back, regarding me with renewed distrust. She might have wanted to run, but where would she have gone? She certainly regretted having let me inside. And I was sure she was wishing she hadn’t left that snapshot behind in her apartment.

  “What do you want with Tony?” she asked.

  “I work for the newspaper in his hometown. They sent me out here to interview him. He was supposed to meet me Tuesday morning on set, but he didn’t show.”

  She frowned and took a seat on an old couch. “So you’ve really got a good story to tell. Tony washed out as an actor, and now he’s suspected of murder.”

  “I don’t want to write that story. I want to tell the folks back home that he made it. I’m trying to get him his job back on the picture.”

  She sniggered, sad and bitter. “How are you going to manage that?”

  “Is Tony mixed up in this murder of Bertram Wallis?” I asked.

  She glared at me, her eyes sharp and restive, as if she were challenging me to accuse him. Then she looked away and shook her head.

  “Tony didn’t kill that awful man, but who’s going to believe that? He’s nobody. He’ll be a convenient scapegoat for the police. Everyone will be happy.”

  I sat down next to her on the couch and let her think for a moment. Then I asked if she had any ideas of who might have wanted to toss Bertram Wallis over the railing of his terrace.

  She shook her head and went quiet.

  Forty minutes later, Gene reappeared at the back door, soaked to the skin. He was alone.

  “No sign of Tony at the market,” he said. “But there’s a special on round steak.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The dark sedan was still waiting down the street when we checked again a little after noon. Tony must have been spooked by the two strange cars on the street, because he hadn’t returned.

  “He can’t call. The phone’s been disconnected,” said April, sitting on the sofa in the dark room.

  “Where do you think he might have gone?” I asked. “Do you have any friends or family in Barstow?”

  April shook her head. “My dad passed away a year ago. Mom ran off when I was little. There’s no one else.”

  Gene had shown the wherewithal to pick up some hot dogs and soup at the market on his failed mission to find Tony. I asked April if she was hungry.

  “Sure,” she said, looking half starved. “The stove is out of commission, but there’s the fireplace.”

  “Maybe I can fix it,” said Gene. “I worked as an electrician’s assistant for a while.”

  “Power’s cut off. I didn’t pay the bill.”

  Gene made a small fire with some kindling and a few pieces of broken furniture. We warmed the soup and cooked the hot dogs in the hearth then ate in silence. I didn’t have much of an appetite, but Gene and April looked as if they wanted more. I asked her how she and Tony had been managing the past few days without any money.

  “Tony has a couple of bucks,” she said. “Got it from Mickey.”

  “What will you do when that runs out?”

  She shrugged and peered miserably into her empty soup bowl.

  “Okay,” I said, reaching for my purse. “I’ve got a ten-dollar bill here. It’s yours on one condition.”

  April argued with me for the better part of an hour. She didn’t like the idea of driving back to Los Angeles with Gene. And she liked even less the plan of leaving Tony behind in Barstow.

  “We wait until dark,” I explained. “Then you and Gene will stroll out to my car, climb in, and drive away. Gene will take you back to your place. No one knows who you are. They’ll never trace you there.”

  “What if that car follows us?” she asked.

  “It won’t. Whoever’s out there isn’t interested in me. Or you, for that matter. They’re looking for Tony. So when they see you two leave, they’ll assume you’re me.”

  “What happens to you, then? Won’t they barge in here as soon as we leave?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But they won’t find Tony.”

 
Gene was conspicuously quiet throughout our discussion. He sat in a chair near the fireplace, chipped plate balanced on his knee. He watched April the entire time, studying her. Or maybe he was writing his story in his head. Finally he piped up.

  “Whoever followed us here knows who Ellie is. I doubt they want to harm her. They could have done that in Los Angeles.”

  “What happens if Tony comes back when we leave?” asked April.

  “First of all,” said Gene, “we don’t even know what those people want. Maybe their intentions are friendly. Or maybe not. Second, Tony’s a smart guy. He knew enough to make himself scarce once he saw the unfamiliar cars in the street. He won’t come back if that one’s still out there.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “If it’s not the cops, whoever it is probably killed Wallis. Now they’re after Tony.”

  “It’s Ellie’s way, or you don’t get the money.”

  April mulled it over for another minute before she caved. She held out her hand for the ten-dollar bill I’d been offering as a carrot since the conversation began. I gave it to her, and she tucked it into the pocket of her skirt.

  We sat in the darkened room for hours, at turns talking and keeping quiet. During one of her more loquacious spells, April told us how she and Tony had met. She’d moved to Los Angeles in late August and found work as a waitress in the tearoom at Bullock’s department store on Wilshire. The job wasn’t going well, according to April. Her supervisor was a shrew who demanded perfection from her staff. And April was often late or poorly turned out.

  “She told me I wasn’t pretty enough to make it on my looks alone,” she said. “She was always picking on me for my uniform, my hair, and my makeup. Finally I had enough and I quit. Tore off my apron and threw it at her in front of a table of lavender-haired ladies in fox stoles.” April smiled at the memory. “And I called her a dirty c—”

  “Let’s put that to one side, shall we?” I said.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I ran out of the tearoom smack into Tony, who was just coming in with some rich guy in a suit. I hit the floor, and Tony helped me up. It was love at first sight.”

  “How long ago was that?” I asked, making mental notes for my story.

  “October fourteenth. He asked me out on a date, and we’ve been together ever since. We’re going to get married as soon as this mess blows over.”

  “Married? What are you going to live on?”

  “Tony’s going to be a star,” she said, practically breathless. “And I can wait tables and take acting classes until I get my big break. Tony’s not the only one who’s going to make it in the movies.”

  I resisted the urge to remind her what that shrew of a supervisor had said about her looks. And Tony’s career wasn’t looking all that promising just then, either. I concentrated instead on what she knew of Bertram Wallis.

  “Tony had nothing to do with that,” she insisted.

  “There are witnesses who can place Tony at Wallis’s place the night he died.”

  April swore he’d never been to Bertram Wallis’s house. The witnesses were lying. “Fag liars,” she said. Every last one of them.

  “And you’ve never been there either?”

  “Of course not. Like I said, the cops will find people to lie and say whatever suits their story. They’ll swear Tony was there and that he killed that pervert.”

  “I saw you drive up Nichols Canyon Road Wednesday night,” I said. “Wallis’s house is at the top of Nichols Canyon on Solar Drive.”

  “What? No you didn’t. I’ve never been up there.”

  “I followed you,” I repeated, then produced the print of her license plate. “You drove from Tony’s apartment on Wilton Place around ten thirty Wednesday. I tracked you across Hollywood Boulevard and up Nichols Canyon Road. Do you remember a car blowing the horn behind you at a stop sign?”

  She did. At least her trapped expression suggested as much.

  “April, if I wanted to turn you in, I would have done it last night. I had dinner with the cop investigating Wallis’s murder. You’ve got to trust me. Tell me the truth.”

  “I might have driven up Nichols Canyon, I don’t remember. But I was alone.”

  My head dropped into my hands. “There were three people in the car,” I said. “Take a look at the photograph before you lie to me. You can clearly see three heads through the rear window.”

  She clammed up, refusing to say anything more. I begged her to level with me, but she said she had a headache.

  The rain continued to fall on the shingled roof and roll down the grimy windows. The dark sedan still waited outside in the street. And Gene and I slouched in our chairs waiting for April to open up or for Tony to return.

  Another hour passed. With April reluctant to talk, I chatted some more with Gene about his life. And he asked me about mine. I don’t normally like to discuss my personal affairs, and that day was no different. I divulged what I felt like sharing and held back what I didn’t.

  “How is it you never married?” I asked.

  He took a drag from a cigarette he’d lit and scowled in his practiced way. He wasn’t as grouchy as he liked to pretend. “I’ve never been lucky in love,” he said in a low, gruff voice. “There was a girl or two along the way, but the sentiment was never returned.”

  “You loved, she didn’t?”

  “Something like that. What about you? Pretty girl. No offers?”

  I laughed. “Something like that. I’m not in the market for a husband. Most men end up disappointing me. They belch or they have dirty fingernails. Or bad grammar. And I’m afraid they see plenty of faults in me, too.”

  “Some folks aren’t meant to find love,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “Not everyone finds love at first sight.” He threw a glance at April.

  I turned to our hostess. “Tell me something, April. Is Tony in the habit of lying as much as you and Mickey?”

  By five thirty all was dark outside. April had a few candle stumps left from some long-forgotten blackout or perhaps a distant romantic evening. It was chilly in the house, even for an easterner like me. There wasn’t enough wood to build a proper fire, so we huddled in the dark, wrapped in wool blankets. April nodded off.

  Gene and I plotted out the story we intended to write together. Starting with the discovery of the body on Thursday morning, we worked backward to the party at Wallis’s place on Monday night. Then we wove Tony Eberle into the narrative, starting with the presence of his phone number in the victim’s pocket. With practice, I’d become a fast writer, at least when all my ducks were in a row. I worked the small-town-boy, big-city angle, trying to create an element of mystery at the same time. Who was Tony Eberle really? And how had he gotten mixed up with an enfant terrible producer like Bertram Wallis? While I toiled away on the opening and middle, Gene worked on the Barstow portion of the article.

  I read his stuff. It was good. Tight and muscular, with the occasional gem of simplicity. Referring to the broken dreams of aspiring actors, actresses, and writers, he called Hollywood “the last depot before oblivion.” I glanced up at him in the candlelight after reading that line. He was puzzling over some turn of phrase or another, face twisted in concentration. I thought what a shame he’d never landed somewhere permanently. He’d had a rough row to hoe.

  We reviewed each other’s work and reread the whole thing, exchanging notes and corrections. Barely an hour and a half after we’d started, we had a pretty good story. Now the only thing left to decide was when to go to the papers or wire services with it.

  “It’s time,” I said, rising from the couch and crossing to the window where I pulled back the curtains to see. The sedan was still there. “April, leave me your keys and take my coat and umbrella. Keep your head down as you walk to the car. You should drive, at least until you’re out of sight. Then you can let Gene take the wheel.”

  “I know how to drive,” she said to protest.

  “Suit yourself. It’s a rental. If you wreck it, can
you pay for it?”

  She seemed to reconsider.

  I watched them slip out the door. Gene turned to wave to me, making a good show of his departure. I hung back in the shadows of the threshold, hoping our watchers wouldn’t notice the switch. Gene and April made their way through the mud to my car and climbed in. April started the engine and shifted into gear. Then she pulled away, heading directly toward the dark sedan. This was the moment. Would the car follow her or stay put?

  My rented Chevy receded down Bradshaw Drive and turned onto Santa Fe. I strained to see it until it disappeared from view. Then I turned my attention back to the sedan parked down the street. It hadn’t budged.

  Perhaps I’d been too cavalier about trading places with April. I began to question the wisdom of my plan. Who was going to help me if the people in the sedan decided to get rough? And what if Tony came back at the wrong moment? I might end up the inconvenient remainder in the equation. I lit a cigarette and puffed away in the dark.

  I dozed off sometime later. Asleep on the lumpy sofa, neck crooked into an uncomfortable angle, I dreamt that George Walsh had arrived in Los Angeles. He was staying at the McCadden Hotel, sharing the room next to mine with Harvey Dunnolt, the reporter from the Schenectady Gazette. George and Harvey had won over Marty the bellhop, who wouldn’t even accept my quarters anymore. He called me Eleonora. And Tony was having dinner with my rivals, telling jokes and posing for pictures. I got a wire from Charlie Reese informing me that Artie Short had fired me. Then Sergeant John Millard grabbed me around the waist from behind.

  I lay there in the dark of April Kincaid’s broken-down house in Barstow, California, staring at the ceiling, stomach growling, and wondered where my next meal was coming from. The closest thing to food in the house was the rusty water from the pump out back. A train clattered along the tracks outside for several minutes before passing into the night. I smelled smoke.