Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  That’s why, before we even moved that magic cabinet, I knew that in the middle of the broken plywood, gleaming like a dull ruby in the navel of some belly-dancing giantess, would be Melanie Marliss’s bowling ball.

  And so it was.

  CHAPTER 16

  “I’m so confused!”

  —JOHN TRAVOLTA, “WELCOME BACK, KOTTER,” ABC

  A LITTLE WHILE LATER, Lieutenant Martin leaned over that same hole to look at the bowling ball. “Well, Matty,” he said, “that solves your case.”

  That called for sardonic laughter, and I gave him some. “Oh, right. Sure, the lawsuit is off, but I’d still like to know who killed Jerry. And took the kinescopes. And tried to use the bowling ball like a pile driver on three of our stars.”

  The lieutenant grunted. “Me too,” he said.

  Rivetz joined us by the hole. “Okay, Lieutenant, we got their stories and sent them home or to the hotel to dry off. I told them that detectives might be calling on them.”

  That was good to hear. By the time the cops had arrived, the crowd had been making ominous rumblings.

  “Where are the three who were onstage?” the lieutenant asked.

  “I sent them to their dressing rooms. They’ll meet us in the Marliss babe’s dressing room. God, is she a piece. Even better than in the movies. Oh, I almost forgot. Alice Brockway is with them—wanted to stay with her husband.”

  “That’s okay with me,” the lieutenant said. “Where’s Baker?”

  “He’s with Marliss. He won’t be going anywhere. If he does, it’s his ass, and I told him so.”

  “Mmm.” Martin scratched his chin. “Even so, go keep them company, Rivetz.” He went. To me, the lieutenant said, “Anybody check the catwalk yet?”

  “No, I was saving that for you.”

  He feigned surprise. “I don’t believe it! Matt Cobb saving police work for the police!”

  I ignored him. “Do you want to go up there now? I got the key from Coyle.”

  “Yeah, let’s go. Where is Coyle, by the way?”

  “He’s reporting to Falzet,” I said. They deserved each other.

  “This is a tough break for that Reigels,” the lieutenant said.

  “Tough break for the whole Network. ‘Sight, Sound, & Celebration’ may turn out to be the Anchorman showing home movies.”

  We went up to the eighth floor, to the door of the catwalk near the stairwell I’d chased Lorenzo Baker down. The lieutenant paused outside the door.

  “How many ways are there to get out on that thing?”

  “Two—no, three. There’s a staircase from the studio itself, like the one to the control room, and there’s a door into the corridor on either end. I only brought us to this one because it’s closer to the spot the ball must have dropped from.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference, I just thought we’d get a break once. Either for the person coming in or for when he was going out, but forget it. These locks are shiny and nice-looking, but you can pick them with a Q-Tip.”

  “Coyle has mentioned that.”

  “Yeah? Why didn’t you listen to him?” I told the lieutenant to ask Falzet, and he went on. “Anyway, that covers getting in. He could pick the lock from the hallway, or he could have come up from the studio. Nobody would be watching a door behind the walls of the set while the show was on, right? As for leaving, all he had to do was dash back down to the studio by one of the three ways—”

  “Not this way,” I said, pointing behind me. “If he’d come out this door, I’d have seen him.”

  “Okay, one of the other two ways. All he had to do was join the crowd again. In the confusion, it would be easy.”

  I nodded. “How does Baker sound to you?”

  “Why should he want to smash his own woman?”

  “There’s more to Baker than you might know.”

  Naturally, the lieutenant wanted to know what I was talking about, but I put him off by unlocking the door. There was a small platform, then the catwalk itself.

  “Watch your step,” I told him, “and don’t look down more than you have to.”

  “Yeah,” he said, with a little more breath than necessary. When you’re standing on something, it always seems a lot higher than it does when you’re looking up at it, and the catwalk had seemed plenty high even then. If you did look down, everything below seemed tiny, but very hard.

  As I stepped out onto the catwalk, I could understand why lighting men used it as little as possible. It was solid enough—the lieutenant and I are a couple of good-sized guys, and the catwalk didn’t wobble under our combined weight—but it seemed like such a wispy, flimsy thing. There wasn’t enough of it to look at, if you know what I mean. The floor of the thing was metal grillwork, with a rim of maybe a half-inch projecting above it. The hand rails, which I held onto for dear life, were pencil-thin steel rods, and they were only about two and a half feet above the grill, so we either had to stoop or bow our legs to use it. Between the grillwork and the railing there was a gap easily big enough for a man’s body to fall through if his foot slipped.

  I concentrated on the placement of my feet, because the catwalk was wet, and it was a little slippery. I had a grudging admiration for a man who could scoot across this thing to the other door, the whole width of the studio, with sprinklers pouring water in his eyes, even if his purpose was murder.

  “Son of a gun,” the lieutenant said.

  “What is it?”

  “He left something. Look.”

  “Where?”

  “Right where we’re heading. Don’t you see something white?”

  “Well,” I said, looking, “let’s hope it’s a monogrammed handkerchief so we’ll know who it was that left it.” Then I saw it, and it was too big and too stiff to be cloth.

  Cautiously, we made our way to the spot. I let go of the railing to bend down and pick the thing up. I got a superfluous admonition to be careful from Lieutenant Martin. The white thing was a piece of cardboard, just a little thicker than shirt cardboard, but the same kind of material. It had been folded many times to make a tight little wedge, but because it was wet now, it had expanded and come loose to a great degree. There seemed to be something written on it, but instead of unfolding it there, which would have taken both my hands off the railing, I stuck it in my pocket. We could look at it later.

  There was nothing else to be found up there, but the lieutenant asked me to orient him to the studio.

  “Okay,” I said. “Directly below us, on this side, is—was, I mean, the place on the floor of the set where the marks were for Shelby, Green, and Marliss to take their bows.”

  “Marks?”

  “Yeah, T-marks or crosses made with tape for the performer to stand on. Then the cameraman knows where the person is going to be, and he can line up his shot before he gets there. Otherwise, he’d always have to be focusing on the air. It wouldn’t look good.”

  He was going to scratch his head, but changed his mind, kept his hands on the railing, and nodded instead. “Convenient. Convenient for Mr. Bowling Ball, too. He can line up his shot before the person he wants to hit is on the scene.”

  “Which raises another interesting question: Whom, exactly, did he want to hit? I mean, those marks were pretty close together, and from this height, they must have looked even closer. How could he pick one with any accuracy? Did he bring a Norden bombsight with him? Or was he looking to get all three of them?”

  “Maybe he didn’t care,” the lieutenant suggested.

  “Sure, a nut. That would fit, I suppose. The whole thing is nutty. And since a falling object accelerates at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second—”

  “Hold it, hold it. What are you talking about?”

  “The law of falling bodies. Any object, regardless of weight, increases its velocity at a rate of thirty-two feet per second for every second it falls.”

  He shook his head and grinned. “Where do you get this stuff?”

  I grinned back. “I wa
s a faithful watcher of ‘Dr. Wonder’ when I was a kid. TV is very educational, you know.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I ought to get rid of you and bring in this Dr. Wonder.”

  “You can’t, he’s dead. All I was trying to say was that that ball was traveling pretty damn fast by the time it hit that wood. A nut would like that. Whoever was hit would be smashed to jelly.”

  “Hell, I could have told you that,” he said. “Those people are damn lucky that fire broke out, Matty. Damn lucky.”

  I nodded. “Fire broke out just over there.” I risked taking an arm from its hold to point to the bin, not far from the place where the three performers had left the stage just before returning for their bows. “Must have been a big surprise for the killer—or rather, the dropper. No, goddammit, the killer!” I cursed myself for forgetting Jerry. “The killer is all ready to cut loose with the ball, when all of a sudden, it’s raining inside, and they run right out from under it.”

  “Could be frustrating,” the lieutenant agreed. “Come on. If we can get off these damn monkey bars without falling, I want to see what’s written on that cardboard.”

  We both breathed a lot more freely outside. “I just found out I’m afraid of heights,” the lieutenant said. We laughed, burning off nerves.

  With great anticipation, I took the soggy cardboard out of my pocket and unfolded it. It was a rectangle about two feet by two and three-quarters feet. There was writing on it, in pencil, big block letters and numbers: “2X4 72PCS LI6FT.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. What a disappointment.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a label. The bundles of wood the carpenters got to build the set were labeled with cardboard like this. This was off a bundle of seventy-two pieces of sixteen-foot-long two-by-fours.”

  “Shit,” the lieutenant said. “I was hoping it was a code. I haven’t come across a good code since I was with Narco division.” He took the label from me, looked it over for a while. “Hey, how did this get up on the catwalk? It’s too high to throw up there. From these creases, this thing wasn’t folded into any paper airplane and flown up.”

  He was right. Someone had to have brought it up there, and to me it looked like the killer was the only choice. I said so to Mr. M., and he said that was how it looked to him, too.

  “I just wish I could think of a reason,” I said.

  “All we can do is ask,” he said reasonably. “Come on, Matty.”

  The caption on the scene in Melanie’s dressing room could have been, “The bigger they are, the nicer they are.” Everyone was being pleasant. Melanie Marliss was blow-drying Alice Brockway’s hair in front of the lighted mirror. Alice greeted me cheerfully. Apparently, there were no hard feelings. Lenny Green, dressed now, was lighting Rivetz’s cigarette. As he puffed, the detective listened while Lorenzo Baker told Ken Shelby about our little encounter on the stairs. “...I suppose you can’t really blame Cobb. It must have looked suspicious—”

  “What looked suspicious, Mr. Baker?” the lieutenant asked. He reminded them of his name, and said he was happy they’d all had a chance to change into dry clothes. “What looked suspicious?” he repeated.

  Baker smiled the charming smile that was immortalized on the taco bags. “Why, my dashing down the stairs that way.”

  “It looked suspicious, all right,” I said, rubbing my arm. “Why did you run?”

  “I was just telling Ken. I was in the studio, watching the act, just as I’ve watched the rehearsals all week, you know—I never get tired of that sketch. Have you ever seen it, Lieutenant?”

  “Long ago. It’s funny. How about getting on with your story?”

  “Ah...of course.” There was a worried gleam in the non-Mexican eyes. “When the sprinkler started, I headed for the exit, like everyone else, but I thought I saw the other door, the one Mr. Cobb saw me come out of, opened by someone sneaking out. As I told Mr. Rivetz, I thought it might have been the person who dropped the bowling ball. So I chased him.”

  The hair drying by the mirror was finished. “That was very brave of you, Lorenzo,” Melanie said.

  “Lieutenant,” Lenny Green said, after exchanging a significant glance with his partner. “I don’t want to sound big-headed or anything, but there was a lot of publicity last night and this morning about Shelby and Green getting back together...”

  “No!” Alice Brockway said. “Matt said the same thing last night, but I won’t believe it! Ken and Lenny don’t have an enemy in the world. And I don’t think Melanie does, either.”

  Marliss smiled at the other woman. “None that would want to turn me into a pancake, at least.”

  “We’ve been looking into it, up at Special Projects. Nothing so far,” I said.

  “We’ll check too,” Lieutenant Martin promised. “But right now, I’m talking to Mr. Baker. Rivetz, did you walk through Mr. Baker’s story with him?”

  “I sure did.”

  “And?”

  “He’s lying his head off.”

  Baker resented that, and wasn’t shy about saying so.

  “Come off it,” Rivetz sneered, doing his job. “From where you say you were standing, you can barely see the hinges. Maybe you could see the door open, but I doubt it, especially the way everybody tells me that water was falling.”

  Baker was eloquent. He didn’t say he actually saw anything, he said he thought he saw something. “Besides,” he stroked his mustache, “I certainly couldn’t have dropped the bowling ball. People saw me down in the studio at the time.”

  “That’s true,” Alice Brockway said. She sounded reluctant. She probably didn’t like Baker any better than I did. “I was standing near him, and I heard some of the other witnesses tell the sergeant—”

  “Detective First Grade,” Rivetz was quick to correct. A Detective First makes more money than a sergeant.

  “Tell him...ah...that they saw Mr. Baker, too.”

  I still didn’t like it. “Didn’t it occur to you, Lorenzo, when I caught up with you, to tell me you were chasing somebody, instead of unleashing the amazing power of oriental Martial Arts?”

  I had made a point with the lieutenant. “I think maybe you just better come downtown and tell us some more about it,” he said.

  Melanie was irate; Baker soothed her. Then, making a determined face, he said, “Lieutenant, can I talk to you in private for a few seconds? There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “In a minute,” Martin said. He was letting Baker stew for a while. He turned to Shelby, Green, and Marliss. “Now,” he said, “you three were directly under whoever it was that dropped that ball. Didn’t any of you see anything? Hear anything?”

  Shelby shook his head and looked grim. “I wish I could say I knew there was someone up there, but I can’t. Did either of you?”

  Neither Green nor Marliss had.

  “We had a lot to do,” Shelby went on. “We wanted to hit our m—that is pieces of tape we’re supposed—”

  “Your marks,” Mr. M. said, as though he’d known it all his life.

  “Right. You can’t hit your mark and be looking straight up.” The lieutenant supposed he was right. Actually, it for some reason they had been looking up, there was still no guarantee they could have seen a person on the catwalk. The lights would be in the way, for one thing.

  “What puzzles me, though,” Shelby said, “is how someone got out on the catwalk carrying the bowling ball without being seen. You’d think a person carrying a big red object like that would be noticed.”

  “When can I have my bowling ball back, Lieutenant?” Melanie asked.

  The lieutenant narrowed his eyes at her, trying to decide if she was kidding. “Not for a while, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s evidence.” Melanie wasn’t happy about that. She gave the impression she’d give up her jewels to get it back. Green told her to relax, at least the ball was safe with the police.

  The lieutenant wasn’t through yet. “You sure you didn’t notice anything?”

&n
bsp; They were sure. Shelby said, “Even after the sprinklers started, I was too busy trying to pull my partner out of the rain. It’s a good thing I did, eh?” He patted Green on the back.

  “Didn’t you want to go, Lenny?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a slow-motion brain, Matt. I realized that when I broke my leg.” It occurred to me it might be interesting to find out just how he had broken his leg, but he went on before I could ask. “When the water came down, I just didn’t know what was going on—I was still being the Great Bomboni...or not being. You know what I mean. The Great Bomboni never had to run away before.”

  Alice Brockway smiled warmly. “A method actor.” Everybody but Lorenzo Baker laughed.

  Lieutenant Martin said, “We can have that talk you wanted now, Baker.”

  “Wait a minute!” Green broke in. “What about the fire? I’d like to thank the person who started it. Can you find out?”

  “We’re looking,” the lieutenant said. “Though I’m sure it was an accident—garbage emptied into the bin with a cigarette not quite out, something like that. I doubt it was deliberate.”

  “It would be one hell of a coincidence,” I said, “if someone were deliberately setting a fire at the very moment someone else was getting ready to drop a bowling ball fifty-odd feet on people.”

  “Well, it was still lucky,” Green said.

  The lieutenant signaled to Baker. Melanie gave her lover a curious look, but he smiled and told her not to worry. Rivetz, Baker, Martin, and I left. Marliss, Brockway, Shelby, and Green stayed behind.

  Out in the hall, Baker pointed at me and said, “He’s not a policeman. I said private. You gave your word.”

  Baker was right. If he’d insisted, the lieutenant would have had to run me. I wanted to be in on it.

  “You want me to be there, Baker,” I said.

  “I do not.”

  “Yes you do. I know why you’re in the taco business, you know. If I can’t join the lieutenant in talking to you about it, I’ll talk to Melanie about it. Then where will your movie be?”

  “You bastard!” Baker looked as if he wanted to go into the karate bit again, but the presence of two cops changed his mind.