Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  I said another vulgar word and pitched the papers away from me again. This could have gone on all day, but I was interrupted by the building intercom buzzer, which meant the doorman had something to say to me.

  “What do you want?” I snapped.

  “There’s ah...a policeman down here, Mr. Cobb,” the doorman said.

  The doorman’s mild Spanish accent was replaced with a gruff Brooklynese. “Just tell him it’s Rivetz, willya?”

  “Send him up,” I said.

  “Yes, Mr. Cobb.” He clicked off. I had to wonder what Rivetz wanted. Horace A. Rivetz was a hard-boiled little detective with spikes of iron-gray hair sticking up from his head, and a face like a clenched fist. He and I had first met in a cheap Times Square hotel room, with the freshly killed body of a man named Vincent Carlson on the floor between us. He spent most of his effort on that case trying very hard to pin a murder rap on me. He was man enough to admit he was wrong, however, and since then, relations had been cordial.

  I was a little surprised to see him—I’d figured the death of a nobody (I made fists) like Jerry de Loon would be handled on a lower level than Headquarters, which is where Rivetz operated from.

  Rivetz rang the bell, and I invited him in. “Nice place you got here, Cobb,” he said.

  “Thanks. What can I do for you?”

  “You can take a little ride with me.”

  I had an uncomfortable flash of déjà vu, and said so. Rivetz grinned. “Relax, Cobb, I’m not even on duty, officially. I’m doing the lieutenant a favor.”

  “Lieutenant Martin wants to see me? What about? That’s from Hammacher-Schlemmer.”

  Rivetz gave a little guilty start, and put down the lamp he’d been looking at the bottom of. He asked me how much it cost. After I told him, he whistled and said, “My wife is just gonna have to live without one, then.” He whistled again. “All that money for something to hold a light bulb, for God’s sake.

  “Anyway, I don’t know what the lieutenant wants, although he did get a complaint from one of the precinct boys about you talking to the de Loon kid before they had a chance to.”

  That made me mad. “What did they think? Jerry died sooner because I showed up? What a lot of crap. Listen, if I didn’t talk to him, no one would have ever talked with him.”

  “We’ll find out when we get to Headquarters,” Rivetz said. “Of course, you don’t have to come...”

  “I’m coming, don’t worry.” I told Spot to behave himself while I was gone.

  Nobody but my parents has known me as long as Detective Lieutenant Cornelius U. Martin, Jr., has—he and his family integrated our neighborhood when I was six years old, and Mr. M. was still pounding a beat. I got to be best friends with his son, Cornelius U. Martin III, and Corny and I divided our time pretty evenly between my place, his place, and the basketball court.

  Corny was living out in Wisconsin now, coaching at a small college, but I still saw his father pretty frequently.

  The lieutenant’s office was a cubbyhole on the third floor of Headquarters and the lieutenant himself filled it up pretty well. He was big and powerful-looking, but just recently he’d started to show signs of slowing up a step, as though his body had finally decided to believe that snow-white hair on his head. His big, round face was kind, but not kindly—there was too much shrewdness in it for it to look kindly.

  Besides the lieutenant’s desk, there was one cracked leather armchair in the office. As the guest, I got to sit in it. Rivetz sat on the window sill.

  After the hellos had been taken care of, the lieutenant said, “What have you got planned for today, Matty?”

  “Nothing much,” I told him. “I have a meeting at the Tower at three o’clock.”

  “What about?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “In other words, it’s about the murder,” he said.

  “That’ll be touched on,” I said, “but the main event will be what to do when Melanie Marliss sues the Network for negligence for losing her bowling ball.”

  “Oh, come on,” the lieutenant said.

  “Well, last night, or rather this morning, when the festivities broke up, the taco king delivered the message on behalf of the star, who was not speaking to any of us. Remember Groucho Marx in Duck Soup? ‘Of course you realize, this means war!’? That’s how Lorenzo Baker was last night. He’s very protective of his little Melanie’s interests, you know. The fact that a lawsuit against the Network would be monumental publicity for the picture he’s producing is just gravy.”

  “How much could she get?” Rivetz asked. “I paid sixty bucks for my bowling ball. To me, that’s a lot of money, but to a movie star, it ought to be peanuts.”

  “Actually, the ball didn’t cost her anything—it was the thanks of a grateful Network. What Melanie wants to be recompensed for is mental anguish and things like that.” I grinned. “And guess who’s in charge of getting it back?”

  “You, right?”

  I nodded grimly. “It’s not going to be easy, maybe, but I don’t mind, because when I find the guy with the bowling ball, I’ll have Jerry’s killer.”

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant said. “Just you don’t forget the police are going to have something to say about it, too.”

  Of course.”

  “Don’t ‘of course’ me,” he said. “I know you. Obstructing justice seems to be a hobby of yours.”

  I denied that. Once I knew it was justice, and not just spadework, I was obstructing, I always stepped aside. “There’s nothing for the Network to hide, this time,” I told him.

  “Good. Maybe we can all help each other out.”

  Rivetz, who had been perusing a folder of reports, snorted. “We’re all gonna need help, too. According to this, everybody was somewhere else. A few even have alibis—woman named Hall, man named Ritafio, together in an office. Bunch of people rehearsing a re-enactment of the Theodore Farnsworth radio variety show—that ought to be good. What a voice that guy had.” Rivetz broke into song, a surprisingly good impression of Theodore Farnsworth doing “Song of Romance.” He stopped just as abruptly as he started.

  “Anyway,” he went on, ignoring a look from Lieutenant Martin, “they all alibi each other, as do, let’s see, Lenny Green and Alice Brockway, who say they were across the street. Other people claim they were in their office, alone, or they went to the bathroom and the bar downstairs, alone, or they went home, also alone.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” I asked. This was the second time around for me. The precinct detective with whom I had gone to Queens, had had me alongside him when he interviewed every single person who’d been in the building at the time, and the results weren’t going to change.

  “No reason,” Rivetz said. “I was about to say it looks from this like an outside job, maybe two or three people to carry all that stuff.”

  “It was an inside job,” Lieutenant Martin said flatly.

  “Oh,” Rivetz said. I didn’t say anything; the lieutenant would get to the point soon enough.

  “Matty,” he said, eying me closely, “in that way you have of doing things, you and your Network have landed smack dab in the middle of another one.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. M.?”

  “I mean I want you to tell me, without evasions, lies, or English-teacher tricks, everything you know about Jim Bevic.”

  I had to admit, it threw me for a loss for a few seconds. Then the dawn broke. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re looking into this for the LAPD.”

  “Sort of semi-officially,” he said. “I’m doing a favor for Bob Matsuko.”

  “Who’s he?” Rivetz wanted to know.

  “Homicide lieutenant,” Mr. M. explained. “I met him that time I went out to the Coast to bring that embezzler back a few years ago. Japanese guy. Good cop.

  “So he’s got a homicide out there that leads to New York, but for a lot of reasons, he doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers, so he asks me to keep an eye on it. I told him I’d do wha
t I could, but that we were going fifteen-, sixteen-hour shifts just on our own stuff. He’ll be happy to know that thanks to last night his murder is tied right in with our own stuff. Do you follow me, Matty?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re saying the murder of Jerry de Loon and the theft of the bowling ball and film tie in with the murder of Jim Bevic in some way.” I told myself to relax. Someday, this was going to make sense. “ ‘In some way,’ ” he mocked. You’re no fool, Matty, you know as well as I do in what way.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “So tell me what you know about Jim Bevic. All of it.”

  I couldn’t see what he was driving at, but I decided to play along and tell him what I knew about the reporter. I didn’t know much.

  “He was a writer,” I said. “A good one. He was somewhere in his early thirties when he died. He used to work for some newspaper in Ohio or somewhere—”

  “Pennsylvania,” the lieutenant corrected. He sounded ominous.

  “Okay, Pennsylvania,” I conceded. “According to the dust jacket on his book, he quit that, and took up driving a cab by night, and writing and researching by day, until he came out with a book called Fellow Travelers, about the Red Scare in the forties and fifties. Good book, made the best seller list. I bought one three-four years ago when it came out. He was going bald—”

  “That all you can tell me?” the lieutenant snapped.

  I thought about it. “That’s about it. The obituary in the paper could tell you as much.”

  “I know that. Don’t fool with me, Matty, I’m warning you.”

  “What do you want me to say, for God’s sake?”

  “What was he working on when he died? What was he doing in Costa Rica just before he went to Los Angeles?”

  I sputtered at him. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  “You published him, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” I said.

  “You can’t hold out on me this time, Matty. I looked it up. Since the year before Bevic’s book came out, the publishing company, Austin, Stoddard & Trapp, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Network!”

  I shook my head at him. “Mr. M.,” I said, “the Network also has a wholly owned subsidiary in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that makes paper boxes. That doesn’t mean I’m up on all the latest dirt from the corrugation machine.”

  “I know how you and your Special Projects people get around.”

  “Austin, Stoddard & Trapp isn’t even in the Tower—they have their own building on the East Side. You think Bevic was working on a book when he was killed? Why don’t you ask his editor? He ought to know.”

  “I already did. They don’t know anything. They say. All they know is he was working on a new book. He was very secretive about that kind of thing, they tell me.

  “All you people who work for the Network are secretive.” He ran a hand over his head. “All right. I thought you’d know—you seem to know everything that goes on in the Network. You say you don’t, and maybe you don’t, but I’d still like to find out. In fact, there’s a bunch of things I’d like to find out.

  “I’d like to know what Jim Bevic was doing in Costa Rica. I’d like to know why he went from there to L.A. I’d like to know how it turned out that Lenny Green found him floating in Ken Shelby’s swimming pool...

  “And I’d really like to know why on the very day they’re finally allowed to leave L.A., they’re in or near a building that houses the corporation that owns Jim Bevic’s publisher while a man is being killed!”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.”

  —BARRY M. GOLDWATER, 1964 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION, ALL NETWORKS

  “IT MAKES ME MAD to have to say this,” I admitted, “but I don’t think Jerry’s death was part of a plan. I think as far as our bowling ball pilferer is concerned, his death was an unfortunate complication.”

  “How do you know?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Well, say he did for some reason have it in for Jerry. He did a pretty sloppy job, didn’t he? Especially after the efficient way Jim Bevic was taken care of. I mean, it was a big surprise that Jerry died at all.”

  “Where does it say a killer can’t screw up the same as everybody else, Matty? Hell, if they didn’t screw up, we’d never catch them.”

  “How do you explain the bowling ball and the kinescopes?” I asked quietly.

  “I don’t explain anything,” he said irritably. “At least not yet. Maybe the killer wanted to leave a false trail or something. All I know is, Jerry de Loon was murdered, and I’d be a dope if I didn’t look for someone with a reason to kill him.”

  I sighed. “I suppose so, but I doubt you’ll find anything. You might want to check out his girlfriend’s parents.”

  “I know how to do my job, Matty,” he assured me.

  He was right, of course, and I knew how to do mine. “The Network would appreciate it,” I said, “if you would keep publicity about Shelby and Green in this case to a minimum.”

  “This is the first you’re hearing about it, right? Hell, it’s even the first time Rivetz has heard about it. Don’t worry, L.A. and New York both want to keep this as quiet as possible until something solid turns up. Let the reporters latch on to a show-business angle, and it’s nuthouse time. You’ll notice it hasn’t even come out yet where the body was found.”

  Yeah, Rivetz said, I been wondering about that. How did Green come to find the body in Shelby’s pool?”

  “I’m going to fill you in on that now,” the lieutenant said. He took a manila folder out of his desk, and put on a pair of reading glasses—another recent concession to age.

  “You understand,” he began, “officially, Green and Alice Brockway are witnesses, not suspects. Shelby, supposedly, was out in Arizona, working on a real estate development he’s in on. Bob Matsuko kept them in L.A. with sweet talk as long as he could, but there was no evidence to hold anybody on, let alone three prominent citizens like them, so when they absolutely insisted they had to come to New York for that bash at the Network, he had to let them go. He asked me to keep an eye on them.”

  I rubbed my forehead. Public Relations was going to love this. I could see Llona’s face now, and hear Ritafio’s whine.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, according to Matsuko, Green says he was driving around the neighborhood—Beverly Hills, some neighborhood—and drove up to Shelby’s house on the chance he might be home. He wanted to talk about the letter they’d gotten from Porter Reigels, finalizing what sketch they were going to do on the show. They hadn’t had much of a chance to go over it in person, because Green was getting over a broken leg at a friend’s ranch out in the desert somewhere. Hurt it in some kind of freak accident, but it’s pretty well healed by now.”

  “He still limps a little,” I said.

  “Anyway,” the lieutenant went on, ignoring me, “he drove up to the house, and rang the bell. He wasn’t surprised to get no answer, because, though the Shelbys have servants, they often let them take the afternoon off, especially if Mrs. Shelby is the only one home.

  “Green decided, he says, that as long as he was there, he might as well exercise his leg, and walk around the house to see if they were in their pool—built-in job away from the house.”

  “And he went there and found the body? One of the few details that has gotten out is that the body’d been floating for at least twenty-four hours. Nobody discovered it in all that time?”

  “It’s not that hard to believe. The servants don’t go down to the pool unless it’s to bring the Shelbys a drink or something. Shelby himself was out of town, and his wife, at the time the murder must have been committed, was heading out to a taping of ‘Hollywood Secrets,’ which I find out, isn’t done in Hollywood at all—”

  “Burbank,” I put in.

  “Yeah. Anyway, since the way they do these things is to t
ape five shows in one evening, one right after another—”

  “You know how they lift a fingerprint?” I said. “They brush or blow this very fine powder, light for dark surfaces, dark for light ones...”

  Don’t ever let anyone ever tell you black people can’t blush. The lieutenant’s face went from brown to cordovan, and he said, “Okay, Matty, you got me that time. I don’t have to tell you your job either. From now on I’ll skip the technical TV stuff. What I was driving at was that it would have been dark by the time she got home.

  “There’s also a twelve-foot-high wooden fence around the pool. It would be hard for someone just casually passing by to see a body floating in the water.

  “Green, though, says he opened the gate and went inside the fence. There was no phone handy to call the police when he found the body, so he went back to his car, drove around Beverly Hills until he found a patrol car, and led it back to the house.

  “By the time they got there, Alice Brockway was home. Since, as you know”—he shot me a challenging look—“they do two weeks’ worth of ‘Hollywood Secrets’ at a time, ten shows, she was supposed to be at the NBC studio Sunday evening, as well, but—and this is confirmed—she came down with a migraine and had to go home. Needless to say, when the cops told her she had a corpse in her pool, she nearly passed out.”

  “Completely needless,” I said. “I’ve seen some of Alice’s emotions in action. What has the investigation turned up since?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “The autopsy made it murder—Bevic died of drowning, actually—he was alive when he went into the pool—but he’d been knocked unconscious first.”

  “It couldn’t have been an accident?” I asked.

  “Not according to this. He was hit with something more or less rounded, like a sock full of sand. If he’d hit his head on the edge of the pool, the characteristics of the wound would have been much different.”

  I could see how that lent credence to the lieutenant’s position the two deaths were connected. Bopping heads isn’t a rare modus operandi, or anything, but it was an indication.