Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  “What are you talking about, Matty?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Let’s talk in my office,” I said. “For Baker’s sake I don’t want any more people than necessary to hear about this.”

  I told Jazz to hold all calls, sat at my desk, got my guests seated (Rivetz took a window sill again—he liked sitting on window sills), and got started.

  “All right, Baker. I think the lieutenant should know about you.”

  “How do you know about me?”

  “The Network is everywhere,” I told him. The lieutenant’s face said get on with it, so I did. “It’s no great secret,” I began, “that before you were Lorenzo Baker, you were Larry Baker, from Canton, Ohio. You went to Hollywood in...ah...sixty-four, right?” Mentally, I was kicking myself for not having taken notes when Shorty Stack called. Notes always look impressive. Baker had no reaction to the date, so I figured I could trust my memory.

  “You were going to be an actor, but you weren’t too successful. You got some work as an extra, but not enough to live on. To supplement, you started dealing in grass. Nothing much, at first.

  “But you had a talent. You were a natural businessman. They tell me, for a while, you were one of the top young marijuana wholesalers in Southern California. Then you branched out. Cocaine. Smack. Mescaline.”

  Lieutenant Martin was mad. “Matsuko didn’t tell me anything about this.”

  “He didn’t know anything about it,” I said. “The Feds caught Larry one day. He talked, in exchange for immunity. Right, Larry? They let you go, let you keep the money you made. You took it, whipped up a batch of the taco sauce recipe you probably picked up in Mexico along with the cash crop, and went into business with Lorenzo’s Tacos.”

  Rivetz was grumbling. “All right, they gave him immunity, so he’s got it, right?” Rivetz hated immunity. “So what’s the difference what he did before? We can’t bust him for it.”

  “The difference is,” I said, “that Melanie Marliss is staunchly antidrug. If this got out, she’d be a laughingstock—letting an ex-pot pusher produce her next movie. So if she hears about Lorenzo’s past...”

  “Gotcha,” Rivetz said with glee. “Instead of using those fantastic boobs for a pillow, he’d have to go buy a magazine if he even wanted to see them. Like the rest of us.”

  Baker swallowed, opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed again. “You don’t plan to tell her, do you?”

  “I don’t think the police will tell if the Feds want it quiet,” I said, “and speaking for the Network, as long as the Network is happy, we want everybody else happy. Do you follow me?” Ahh, blackmail, I thought, it’s wonderful.

  Baker seemed to take it as par for the course. “I follow you,” he said. “Melanie won’t sue.”

  That was nice to know. Took a little of the pressure off.

  “Thank God you found out,” Baker said, surprising me. “Now I can tell you why I ran from you, Cobb.”

  “Why?” Mr. M. asked.

  Baker looked up at him. “I thought he was trying to kill me.”

  I made a noise. “All right,” the taco king protested, “now I know I was wrong. But I’ve been getting threats on my life. Three so far. I couldn’t do anything but keep them a secret. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If you went to the police, Melanie might somehow find out about your past, and if you told Melanie, she’d insist you go to the police.” Like Jack Benny, Baker faced the question, “your money or your life,” and was having trouble deciding. He’d squealed on the narcotics sellers, and they play rough, but if he lost Melanie, he lost his dream of success in show business.

  “How did these threats come?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Phone. At the hotel.”

  “When was the first one?”

  “Thursday morning.” Right after Jerry’s death.

  “What did they say? Man or woman?”

  “It was whispers, like someone had laryngitis—I couldn’t say. The words were always the same: ‘Baker, the second you look the wrong way, you’re going to die.’

  “That’s why I ran when everything started happening in Studio J. I was afraid someone would come up to me in the confusion, and stab me or something.”

  “So you lied when you said you saw someone running from the studio.”

  “Yes. The only person I saw was Cobb, and from the way he chased me, I thought he was the one.”

  “I never stab people in the confusion,” I said. “They take too long to die.” I turned to the lieutenant. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Give Baker a quiet little bodyguard, I guess. I sure don’t want anyone else getting killed on me. What else can I do? Work the routine.” He waved a hand at Baker. “You can go. I may want to talk to you later.”

  Baker rose, looking like a man who has gotten off far better than he ever dreamed he would.

  “See you at the banquet,” he said, jauntily.

  CHAPTER 17

  “Tension, pressure, pain! Tension, pressure, pain!”

  —ANACIN COMMERCIAL

  I PASSED A RELATIVELY calm half-hour. By that I mean I didn’t have to fight anybody, at least with anything more lethal than words, and I didn’t have to engage in any extortion. All I had to do was fight off phone calls. Reporters from all over town—all over the country—were calling up the Network, and getting Ritafio’s patented double talk. A lot of them weren’t happy with that, and called Special Projects for the truth, which I more or less gave them. I considered it an investment. It was silly to think the Network could be saved from embarrassment now, and any time I talked to a reporter, it was a favor that could be collected at a later date.

  After a half-hour of that, though, things started to jump. The door of my office burst open, and Llona flew in, close to tears. “I quit!” she said. “I don’t have to take this! I can’t run a banquet in the middle of—of chaos!”

  “Think of how Porter Reigels must feel,” I said quietly. “If he didn’t swear this afternoon, he never will.”

  “That’s different,” she said. “He’s in charge! He’s responsible to himself; he gets paid for doing the one job. He doesn’t owe his soul to the Network! He doesn’t get calls from Falzet’s second secretary telling him to stop everything he’s doing and wait! I won’t take it! I quit!”

  “Okay,” I said. “But why quit to me?”

  “You’ll do, you’re a vice-president. I won’t wait around here long enough to speak to Ritafio. Do you know nobody has said anything to me about the show or the banquet? I don’t know if they’re on or off.” She clapped her hands to the sides of her face and slid them down, pulling her lovely features into something that looked like a reflection in a fun-house mirror. She was also leaving ink smudges from her fingers.

  “Stop it,” I told her. “You’re making your face all blue.”

  She looked at her hands and made a furious, frustrated noise back in her throat. “I’m going to run away to an island somewhere, I swear it!” I remembered she’d said that to me before.

  “Come here, I said. I got a Kleenex, wrapped it around my ringer, had Llona lick it, and started scrubbing the ink off her. She took it meekly, like a kitten having its face washed.

  “You’ll have to put your makeup back on,” I told her. “But you can stop worrying about whether the banquet is still on. And the show. If you just thought about it for a second before you decided to quit, you’d have realized that.”

  “You mean, ‘The Show Must Go On’?”

  “Not only that. Look at all this free publicity, Llona. God almighty, this will be the highest-rated show of all time! People will tune in just to see what happens next. If they call this off, they’re nuts!”

  She was wavering. “Well, maybe, but after all the months I’ve worked on this to have something happen today...I just can’t stand thinking about it.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re just tense. Care to bang my wall? No? Oh, that’s right, there’s a be
tter way.”

  Llona and I were about an eighth of an inch away from working off our tensions when Lenny Green came in.

  “Is it okay, Matt? Your secretary was away from her desk—oops! Heh, heh, heh.” He started to go back out.

  “No, come in, Len,” Llona said, without even a blush. “I was just getting back to work.” She patted her hair back into place and left.

  “Nice girl,” Green said when she was gone. “Sorry if I broke anything up. Sure beats a coffee break, doesn’t it?”

  “What’s on your mind, Len?” I asked.

  “Well,” he began, “I don’t really know if I should be telling you this...Ken told me not to...”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “Yeah, he thinks I’m blowing it out my ass about this, but I don’t. Matt, I think that ball was supposed to hit Ken. Did you see the crack in the floor? His tape there is practically ‘X marks the spot.’ ”

  “Why Ken?” I asked. “Why should someone try to crush his head?”

  “I don’t know. If it was me, maybe, but Ken I don’t know.” He rubbed his hair. “Look, Matt, Ken is my ticket back to the top, there’s no doubt about that. He was my ticket to the top the first time around. I don’t want anything to happen to him for that reason, sure, but I owe him one, a big one. I wrecked the team before, and that was just wrong. I like the guy as a friend.”

  I told him how hard I thought it would be to drop anything from that catwalk on a target, but it didn’t impress him.

  “All I know is this,” he said. “One of those people running around the studio today tried to smash somebody with Melanie’s bowling ball, and the person it would have been was Ken. Even if it wasn’t Ken, it would have been Melanie or me. I’m not too crazy about that idea, either.”

  I shrugged. When a person has latched on to an idea that strongly, all you can do is change the subject. “You know, I thought at first the fire-and-water bit was the surprise ending of yours I’ve been hearing so much about.”

  That cracked him up. I’ve noticed comedians really like to laugh. “Oh no, my boy, oh no! The last surprise I had like that broke my leg!”

  I’d been looking forward to finding out about that, “Look, Len, just how did you break your leg? Is it possible that was an attempt on you that failed?”

  “You never heard the story of the exploding toilet bowl?” He was aghast. “And I’ve known you what? Two whole days? I’m slipping. No, Matt. No attack on me. Just my own stupidity.

  “I was in a hotel in Palm Springs. Me and—well, me and a soft bumpy person had slipped away for a weekend of bliss...” It was a story masterfully told, in great detail, and with embellishments like impressions of an Italian waiter and a gay bellboy. The main part of the story took place in the suite Lenny and his companion had taken.

  They embraced, he was stroking her hair, and didn’t like the way it felt. The lady was trying a new hair spray. He said her hair was beautiful as Nature had made it, and to get rid of the spray immediately.

  “So she did. What I didn’t know was that she was going to get rid of it by spraying the can into the toilet bowl until it was empty.

  “So my love returned to me, and after we shared the bliss I mentioned earlier, I lit cigarettes for us. Romantic, like Paul Henreid, you know? Unfortunately, before the after-love smoke was finished, I had to take a leak.”

  “Oh no!” I said. I could see what was coming.

  “Bright boy,” he said, “you catch on fast. I finished the cigarette, and nonchalantly flipped it into the toilet, whereupon—”

  “Whereupon the hair spray and propellant caught fire...” I was laughing too hard to go on.

  “Caught fire my ass! It exploded like Hiroshima! Blew my poor naked body across the room!”

  “And broke your leg?”

  “I’m not finished yet. Broke my rib. The leg was my own stupid fault. I made the lady friend run away, because I needed an ambulance, and I didn’t want her to get in the papers, I—I didn’t want to get her in trouble with her husband.” His smile vanished for a split second, then returned.

  “Anyway, I finally convince her to go, and there I am, lying naked on the linoleum when the ambulance guys show up. They’re very efficient and businesslike and all that, but when we’re going down the stairs, them carrying me on the stretcher, they ask me what happened.

  “I’ve told you I’ve got a slow-motion brain, Matt. Like a dope, I told them. They were just like you, no compassion for a fellow human being. They laughed so hard, they dropped the stretcher, and that’s when I broke my leg.

  “That’s why I split up with my agent, you see. He wanted me to sue the ambulance company. I told him he had to be crazy, if he thought a comedian would sue somebody for laughing when he told a story, no matter what happened. Then he wanted me to sue the hospital when my foot got infected under the cast. I still have to soak that sucker in this potassium permanganate—nasty purple stuff—twice a day.

  “So don’t worry, my surprise ending is something a whole lot less spectacular than that. Safe, practically boring.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. Well, I’ll let you get back to work now, find out if there’s still a show Sunday. Keep an eye on Ken for me, okay? Just don’t let him know.”

  I told him I’d do my best, and he thanked me profusely and left. I was still smiling. I reflected that if Lenny’s lady friend had been a regular viewer of “Dr. Wonder” (directed by Ken Shelby), it never would have happened. She would have known the explosive properties of aerosol products.

  Reports came in from Harris, Shirley, and the others about their various wild goose chases. I dealt with more reporters. About four o’clock, the official word came down that the Network would never let a little thing like total destruction of sets or costumes stand in its way. “Sight, Sound, & Celebration” would air Sunday night, as scheduled. I felt proud.

  I decided to pass the word to Police Headquarters, figuring they’d like to know. I got Rivetz on the phone, and told him the good news. His reaction was to say, “Hurrah, hurrah,” in a bored voice. He was equally impressed by the news of the follow-ups to the nut letters.

  “Oh, by the way, the lab got back to us on that fire, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested.”

  “Everything in that bin with the exception of a little glass tube—part of an eye dropper they figure—was combustible. You had wood shavings, sawdust, paper, some really volatile floor-cleaning compound, and stuff like that. Also, the remains of seventeen cigarettes, any one of which could have done the job. Hell, there were even traces of glycerin on the inside of the eye dropper. What do you people use glycerin for?”

  “Tears.”

  “What?”

  “On the soap operas. For actresses that can’t cry on cue, glycerin looks just like tears, but lasts longer.”

  “Oh. Thought we had something there for a second.” I started to say good-bye, but Rivetz had something else to tell me. “That receipt was genuine, by the way.”

  “Receipt?”

  He was impatient with me. “Yeah, the receipt we got from Wilma Bascombe. You’re the one who told us about it.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. I had forgotten the ice Empress completely.

  “I guess we can forget about her, then,” I said.

  “I don’t know, that reporter is still dead, Cobb.” He hung up.

  I thought about that for a few seconds. Not only was Bevic still dead, but Lenny Green had talked about his and his partner’s troubles without once mentioning the fact that Bevic was found in Shelby’s pool by none other than Green himself.

  It wasn’t so much he hadn’t mentioned it—I could see where he might like to keep the subject from coming up—it was that I hadn’t noticed it. Maybe Lenny Green wasn’t the only one around with a slow-motion mind.

  I strolled around the building for a while, looking at all the busy people. Now that the bowling ball was back, Special Projects was off t
he hook for a while—as always, out of sync with the rest of the Network.

  There was a kind of London-blitz mentality floating around the Tower of Babble. Everyone I saw, from six-figure-per-annum executives, to ninety-five-dollar-a-week gophers, went about his job with either a cheerful or grim intensity that seemed to say, “Let the bastards do their worst!”

  I roamed the Tower. I wandered from the penthouse (where I was turned away from a high-level conference between Falzet and Reigels) to the basement, where I found Colonel Coyle positively joyful. It seems that he had finally garnered some concessions from the Brass on the Security matters he’d been harping on.

  When I walked in, the colonel was poring over a lock catalogue, and at the same time working out plans with the Chief of Hotel Security (aka the Head House Dick) at the Brant to protect the banquet. From what Coyle was planning, along with what I knew and guessed the NYPD would be doing, I figured there’d be more guys with guns at the banquet than at a Mafia funeral. I felt so safe I couldn’t stand it.

  Eventually, I killed enough time so I could go home. I took Spot for his walk, played Frisbee with him. He catches really well, but he can’t throw worth a damn—no thumbs. Back at the apartment, I opened a can for Spot’s supper, got him fresh water, and talked the case over with him while he ate.

  I discussed my latest theory. “What if Jim Bevic told somebody something? Like if he found something new about Wilma Bascombe, for instance...” I took a few seconds to think of something that could possibly be new about Wilma Bascombe. She was a triple agent, loyal all the time to the left? Let’s don’t be foolish, Matthew.

  “To hell with it,” I said cheerfully. “Jim Bevic was an investigative reporter. He found something out. Let’s say, he found out Melanie Marliss is really a man. How does that strike you, Spot?”

  “Woof!” he said. Spot’s talents as a conversationalist are as limited as his talents as a Frisbee player.

  “Okay, we’ll assume that’s the case. Now—suppose Bevic, checking the story, tells Shelby or Green about it before Melanie kills him. No! Better yet, she’s only afraid he might have told them. That would explain the attack on Shelby and Green, and nominally her. She stole her own bowling ball, and had Baker drop it when she was there to divert suspicion from herself, though knowing when the ball was coming down, she could have easily ducked out of the way.”