“I didn’t need this, you know,” I said. “I have enough trouble coping with life when everything is going right.”
Lieutenant Martin snorted. “How do you think I feel? I’m stuck with a homicide that looks like all the answers to it are out in California. Or Matsuko. He’s got a case where his four top suspects—excuse me, witnesses, take off for New York like a flock of homing pigeons.”
“Four?” I said, surprised. “Shelby, Brockway, Green, and who else?”
“Wilma Bascombe,” he said. “She’s a tricky one. As long as L.A. wants it all kept unofficial, we’ve got no leverage to get in to see her.” I asked him if they’d tried; with a disgusted look, he assured me they had.
Meanwhile, I was thinking, Wilma Bascombe, of course, why didn’t you think of her, jerk, but I said, “How about if I give it a try?”
The lieutenant grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that, Matty, but all you might get out of it is a ride in the country. I’ve got to warn you. I’ve been out there once, and she doesn’t make it easy for people to come visit her.”
Which was understandable. Throughout the forties, Wilma Bascombe was a Star (capital “S”) of stage and film, as much a sex symbol, in her day, as Melanie Marliss was now. Different type, though. Where Melanie was “gentle, yet healthy feminine radiance,” Wilma was regal, enigmatic; an ice sculpture with a cold, unearthly beauty. She had won one of the first Tony’s, and a best-actress Oscar for her performance in The Empress and the Vagabond.
At the start of the fifties, at the height of her fame, she announced she was “tired” of acting, and quit to join the faculty of a college in New York City, making its drama department even more famous than it already was. Occasionally, she could be prevailed upon to appear in a television play, because, she said, she felt she should learn the new medium in order to teach it.
In 1952, people started to hear rumors that the Empress had socialistic leanings, and that sort of thing was just not tolerated. Wilma Bascombe was summoned to appear at yet another of those congressional committees.
A lot of entertainers testified before those committees. Some admitted the error of their ways, said they were very sorry, and were told to go and sin no more—after they provided to the committee a list of their erstwhile friends, so that they could come to Washington and apologize, too. Some stood mute. And some went out of their way to martyr themselves. They were the ones who had trouble finding work for a long time afterward.
A very few, including Wilma Bascombe, told the committee what to do with itself. One of my earliest memories is watching that hearing on my family’s first TV, a seven-inch screen in a five-foot high cabinet. I remember it because I was scared—I didn’t know what was going on, but those men must have done something really bad to deserve the cold loathing and the measured contempt the pretty lady was treating them with. A radio commentator said it was Wilma Bascombe’s greatest performance, with what accuracy he never knew, because he committed suicide three months later rather than testify before that committee himself.
The committee was so shocked at the verbal flogging Wilma Bascombe had given them, they let her get out of the hearing room before they could remember they wanted to hold her in contempt. She was added to the blacklist of course, but the college, like the great institution it was, stood by her. Wilma went on to chair protest meetings. She wrote books. To some people, she was a heroine, and to many, she was a traitor.
As the years went by, and the witch-hunt days began to seem more and more like the crazy nightmare they truly had been, Wilma Bascombe became respected, almost revered, though she had stopped being active in any kind of political movement even before the fifties ended.
Then Fellow Travelers came out. Jim Bevic, in researching for his book, had somehow come across papers signed by some important officials that provided indisputable proof that Wilma Bascombe was a fraud. They showed, in fact, that she did give her greatest performance in front of that committee. She was then, and always had been, a true-blue American. Her testimony, and later her speeches and books, had been ghosted for her to give her credibility with the left; for years, she had been funneling names and information directly to certain offices in Washington, D.C.
The effect of the book was astounding. All of a sudden Wilma Bascombe became a non-person as non as any Soviet had ever been. She was an embarrassment to everybody, right or left. It was ironic that the university, which had stood so nobly by her when it was thought she was out to overthrow the government of the United States, dropped her like a used tampon when it was revealed she was working for that same government.
When the scandal broke, any potential protectors Wilma might have had in Washington were either dead, discredited, or too busy trying to save their own hides to worry about her.
Wilma had simply disappeared into the Long Island mansion she’d bought with the royalties from her ghosted books—disappeared so thoroughly that I had to hear her name mentioned before I could remember that if there was one person in the world who could hate Jim Bevic enough to want him dead, Wilma Bascombe was probably that person. And now, the lieutenant was telling me, she’d been seen on the Coast about the time Bevic was murdered.
I remembered something else, too; it had eluded me last night.
“Mr. M.,” I said, “do you have a list of the kinescopes that were stolen?”
He shuffled through the folder a second, then said, “Yeah, right here.”
“Do you remember the play ‘Be Still My Heart’?”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“Do you know who the star was?”
“Sure, that blonde, the one that married what’s-his-name.”
“Right. But I bet you didn’t know she was a last minute replacement who did the show with only four days of rehearsal.”
He raised a white eyebrow. “You mean she filled in for...”
“Wilma Bascombe. It’s a big part of Network lore—‘Kid, you’re going out there a dancing pack of Chesterfields, but you’re coming back a Star!’ And she did, too. People don’t usually mention the star she replaced, or why she had to replace her, but it’s no big secret.”
“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Rivetz said. “But what about the bowling ball?”
Good old Rivetz. Always there to make things difficult.
“I think I’ll be on my way,” I said. I left the policemen to their work and went back to the Network to check out a car.
CHAPTER 8
“Chr-r-r-is, this mon can r-r-really dr-r-r-ive an automobile!”
—JACKIE STEWART, “ABC’s WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS,” ABC
LONG ISLAND ISN’T NAMED after anybody—it really is a long island, an overgrown sand bar that sticks a hundred twenty miles out into the Atlantic. Llona and I had driven to potato-farm country before I turned off the highway and pointed the car north.
Llona was playing hooky from her job. Back at NetHQ, I’d popped into her office to find her chin-deep in paperwork, surrounded by insistent telephones. She looked at me and said, “Wherever you’re going, I’m coming with you. If I don’t get out of here, I’ll scream!”
The shape of Long Island has led to a unique road-building philosophy. There are straight, modern highways you can take if you want to travel the island lengthwise (east-west), but if you want to go north or south across its width, you have to be happy with narrow, twisting roads that always remind me of paved-over Indian trails, which some of them probably are.
Llona and I were on one of them now, with a rocky hill for a wall on either side, and the trees above making an autumn leaf canopy so thick, it was hard to remember the sun was out.
Llona and I were making small talk, or just listening to birds singing or the Network car’s motor humming. I was enjoying it. It was nice to be out in the country with a pretty girl, and on company time, too.
Then Llona gave me something to think about. She turned to me and said, “Matt, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
�
��Not if you don’t mind my reserving the right not to answer it.”
She laughed. “That’s fair. I just wanted to know if you ever hear from Monica Teobaldi any more.”
My initial impulse was to say, “What’s it to you?” but I stifled it. I’m very touchy on the subject of Monica Teobaldi. Monica was an actress over whom I had made a total idiot of myself. Twice. She treated my heart the way Spot would treat a pound of fresh liver. The worst of it was my suspicion that any time she decided to come back to New York and get me alone for five minutes, I’d let her do it again.
I looked at the road. “I get a postcard from her sometimes,” I said. “I didn’t know the gossip was still fresh.”
“You know how it is, Matt. Talk goes on about anybody who’s single. People are probably gathered around the water fountain right now, talking about us.”
“You’re probably right,” I told her. Just what we needed. “But why do you want to know about Monica?”
“Oh, just wondering.”
“Oh,” I said. I was wondering too. Llona didn’t strike me as a big one for idle curiosity.
I didn’t press the issue, because just then the car emerged from the woods into bright sunshine, and I could see, across an expanse of dirt road, the sprawling brick mansion that was Wilma Bascombe’s retreat. It had ivy on the walls, and gables on the roof.
There were lots of gables. I was about to count them, but a beam of reflected glare bounced off the rearview mirror, and stabbed me in the right eye. I winced, keeping the car on the road by memory.
After a second or so, the angles changed, and I could see into the mirror. A blue Cadillac was on the road behind us.
“Looks like we’re not the only visitors Wilma has today,” I said.
Llona turned around for a look. “That’s interesting,” she said. “Maybe she’s not as isolated as you think.”
Neither were we. The Cadillac had accelerated from the twenty miles per hour that made sense on this road to about ninety-eight, gaining on us as if it wanted to wrap its grinning grill around the rear bumper of the Network car.
“Matt! Are they insane?” Llona’s voice told me she was afraid.
I couldn’t blame her. This road wasn’t the donkey trail it had been in the woods, but it wasn’t the Bonneville Salt Flats, either. A car forced off that dirt road would have all sorts of complications to contend with—chuckholes, bushes, tree stumps, even some boulders. And there was no doubt they were trying to force us off the road.
I was standing on the accelerator to stay ahead of them, but I was just barely doing it. It was obvious the Cadillac had more under the hood than it had left Detroit with.
Llona had turned backwards on the car seat, looking at them. I yelled at her: “Don’t look at them, look at the road. Try to find a place we can turn off.”
“What?”
“I said look for a place we can get off the road without cracking up!” She looked, and so did I, but no luck.
Now the boys had a new game. Honking the horn (“Shave and a haircut—two bits!”), they’d edge the Caddy forward and give the rear of the car a playful nudge. Bump. Bump-BUMP. Like that.
There were two young men in the Cadillac. I could see them quite clearly in the mirror. There was only a trunk, a hood, and a few inches of clearance between us, after all. What I could see best was the insides of their mouths. They were laughing. The passenger slapped the driver on the back. They laughed some more. They had the ugliest uvulas I had ever seen.
One of them, the driver, had red hair, a pug nose, and freckles; the other had a head that looked like he had shaved it three days ago. They reminded me of someone—a comedy team. Not Shelby and Green—not intelligent enough. And these guys were both the same size: big.
Finally, I got it. They reminded me of Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, only these dummies were flesh and blood, unlike Paul Winchell’s wooden creations.
We’d covered a lot of ground by now. The big brick house took up most of the horizon. I calculated that at the speed we were going, we’d probably whiz right up the limestone steps and through the living room and the kitchen before coming to a stop in the pantry. If we lived.
There was a jolt, a big one. My head hit the ceiling; my teeth clacked together. “What the hell was that?” I demanded.
“The road is paved again,” Llona said. “Matt, do something!”
I ignored the command, tore my eyes away from the mirror, and saw that Llona was right. The road we were currently traveling at one hundred six miles per hour was, in fact, the best stretch of pavement we’d seen since we left the Long Island Expressway. It was wide enough for our playmates to pass us, and they did so.
Once by, they really opened that engine up, gaining about a hundred yards on us. I let go about nineteen cubic feet of air, and eased my foot off the accelerator.
That undoubtedly saved our lives from the next trick those two idiots pulled. The Caddy’s brake lights went on. Llona sobbed, “Oh, my dear God.” I took it as a last prayer, and added a quick amen.
Old Jerry Mahoney was a skillful driver, even in fear for my life I had to admit that. After he hit the brakes, he put his car through a beautiful two-hundred-seventy-degree counterclockwise spin, then skidded sideways down the road for another few dozen yards.
I can only lay claim to luck. I stomped on the brakes, and the nose of the Network car dipped so much, I could have sworn we were going downhill. We did the Caddy ninety degrees better and made a complete circle, coming to a smoking stop exactly three inches from the passenger side of the blue car. The two cars made a “T” on the road.
This position dictated what must have happened next. With my car in the way, the only way out of the Cadillac would be from the driver’s side, and since the car had bucket seats, the passenger (Knucklehead), would be delayed by the necessity to wiggle over everything in following the driver out of the car.
I didn’t see any of this. I had my eyes closed thanking God for not letting me die in such a stupid way. I opened them at a sound from Llona, who was crying softly into her hands. She looked at me in the same instant, and we said, “Are you all right?” simultaneously, and started to laugh.
I was too busy laughing to notice the redhead until he darkened the window.
I started to open the door. I had a few words I wanted to say to this clown. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. A big piece, as much as I could spare.
I never got the chance. He was opening the door with one hand, while the other one, heavy as twenty-six dollars’ worth of chuck steak, grabbed me by the back of the neck and dragged me from the car. I landed heavily on the blacktop, tearing my jacket.
My assailant looked at me in righteous anger and said, “You bedda get outta heah, aw relse!”
Despite his Long Island (pronounced Lun-GUYland) accent, it was easy to see Jerry Mahoney here was a Country Boy. A lot of people not familiar with the New York Metropolitan Area (and some who are) are surprised to learn this, but past a certain point, Long Island is chock-a-block with Country Boys.
He tipped off his origins by standing over me in a belligerent pose, waiting for me to stand up so the real fighting could get started. A City Boy (like me, for instance) would never have done that.
They have a lot of neat things in the Country. I mean it. They have Fresh Air, and Pure Water, and Natural Bran Fiber, which helps them grow big and strong. They have hard work to do, and they get a lot of sleep, which keeps them rested and in trim.
In the City, all we have is Streets. A Street is a rotten place to grow up, but it is educational. One thing you learn is that violence is a force of nature, and nature does not follow rules. In the Streets, the good guys try to avoid situations where violence will be involved; but, when you must inflict pain, you do it fast, well, and with the least possible risk to yourself.
I’m a Bachelor of Arts, and I wear a tie every day, and I meet famous people, but the Street is still with me. I assessed the situation. In a “f
air” fight with this freckle-faced creep, I would probably have been killed. I had the height on him, and maybe the reach, but this guy walked like a panther, and he was built like one of the statues out at Rockefeller Center.
“Come on, get up,” he urged. He had big fists.
“Sure,” I said. I pulled back my leg, as though to comply, then pistoned it heel first into his kneecap. He looked at me in surprise. That lasted until the pain got to whatever he used for a brain. Then he clutched at the knee and fell down.
I turned and got ready for Knucklehead, who was rushing toward me. He had mercy on his mind, though, instead of mayhem. He knelt by his fallen comrade and shouted at me, “What’s the matter with you, are you crazy?”
Llona came out of the car and stood by my side. “Are we crazy? We could have been killed. I’d like to go kick him in the other knee.”
“You’d better not,” Knucklehead said. Jerry groaned and rubbed himself. I felt guilt starting to replace anger, and I went over and checked him out myself. “It isn’t broken—it will be okay.”
I stood up again. “Now, what the hell is going on here?”
Silence.
“Would you rather tell the judge?”
“Are you cops?”
“No, but I’m on a first-name basis with several. Come on, before I get angry.”
I was surprised when that worked. I must have looked more formidable than I felt. They started by telling me their names. Jerry Mahoney was Sam Nelson; Knucklehead Smiff was Robert Murphy. Sammy and Murph. It was nice to have that sorted out.
Murph, the brains of the outfit, was petulant. “Nobody would have been hurt, you know. Sammy knows what he’s doing. He used to be a stunt driver.”
Llona snorted. I said, “That’s nice. What was he doing, aside from reckless endangerment, and a close brush with vehicular homicide?”
“Getting ahead of you. To cut you off before you reached the house.”
“That was worth risking four lives?”
“It’s our job,” Murph said, and Sammy nodded soberly. “We’re Wilma’s bodyguards,” the redhead told us.
Killed in the Act Page 7
