Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  The lieutenant was forced to admit Shelby had a point.

  Porter Reigels picked up where he’d left off. “I’m getting out of this room, out of this building, out of this city, out of show business altogether.”

  Lorenzo Baker had been trying to keep a low profile, but he was having a hard time kicking his big-brother habit. “Come on, Porter,” he said as he bent his mustache with a friendly grin, “it’s not that bad.”

  “The heck it ain’t! My career is through. Whoever this killer is, besides everything else he’s done, he killed my show. He killed my career—not that it had much life left anyway.”

  “I don’t believe you people!” Melanie swept an ashtray off the table. It clattered on the floor. She stood up and whirled on her audience.

  Now that she had our attention, she used it. “Don’t you realize that this person isn’t through? That any one of us could be next? Mr. Martin, I demand to know what you’re doing to protect me!”

  “You mean ‘us,’ ” I suggested.

  She turned a puzzled look at me. “What?” People like that never notice when they begin talking about the good of the community and finish up talking about the good of their own selves.

  “Never mind,” I told her.

  She turned her attention back to the police. “Well?” she demanded.

  “We’re doing all we can, Miss Marliss...” the lieutenant began.

  “That’s not enough!” she snapped. “That bowling ball almost hit me, you know.”

  Mr. M. holds his temper as well as anyone with a temper that size can be expected to, but enough was enough.

  “You see here, young woman,” he yelled. “Against my advice, the department has been ordered to bend over backward to accommodate the Network and all you famous guests. God forbid you should be inconvenienced over a little thing like murder. Two murders—no, three murders!

  “Well that’s over, for starters. And remember this. You said the killer might be after any of you. Keep in mind that he might also be any of you!”

  Melanie and the rest were either shocked or intimidated into silence.

  Lieutenant Martin dismissed the troops. “You can go now. One of my men will be around to speak to you tomorrow. Rivetz, I want you to go back to the hotel ahead of Mr. and Mrs. Shelby and check out their room before they go into it.”

  Shelby chuckled. “Why, Lieutenant?”

  Mr. M. shrugged. “This might sound brutal, but now that Mr. Green is out of the way, he might decide to turn his attention back to you.”

  Shelby looked like a man who had just eaten a bad egg.

  “Maybe you’re right. Okay.” To Rivetz, he said, “We’re all yours. Lead the way back to the hotel.”

  Alice Brockway, who had spent the whole session looking at the toe of Rivetz’s left wing-tip and saying nothing, showed a sign of life. She lifted her head to show everyone a surprised look.

  Melanie and Lorenzo had left. Reigels was waiting in the doorway. “Coming, Ken? Alice?”

  “Just a minute, Ken,” I said. I was about to give Shelby his wallet, but I had to indulge my curiosity first.

  “Yes, Matt?”

  “When did you change your name?”

  “My name?” He was good with his face. “What makes you think I changed my name?”

  “Wait a minute, now,” the lieutenant said.

  “Well,” I went on, “why do you carry a Social Security card in the name of Kenton F. Schnellenbacher?”

  The curious look was replaced with a grin. “You’ve found me out,” he said. “I did change my name. I carry that card—it’s a facsimile, naturally—to remind myself of my first job, which was loading potatoes into every German restaurant in Yorkville, where I grew up. In Yorkville, everyone has a name like that. When I got a job outside the neighborhood, though, I found it was too cumbersome. It was long before I went into show business, even as a director. It’s all legal, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “Then why lie about it?”

  He was still grinning. “I didn’t exactly lie, you know.”

  He was right. “Touché,” I said. An English major shouldn’t get fooled on things like that. “Okay, why did you duck the question?”

  “Well, just because I occasionally like to remind myself of my humble origins, it doesn’t necessarily mean I want to have to tell the potato story every time I’m interviewed. I mean, there are only so many hours in a day—”

  “You make me sick!” The Alice Brockway of Wednesday was back; the harpy; the ungovernable fury. “You all make me so sick I could die! Everyone is worrying about his own problems, talking chitchat—chitchat!” She liked the word. People do that when they’re angry, repeat a word over and over. “Chitchat! Laughing, telling stories. Damn you, Lenny is dead!!

  “And nobody’s doing anything...doing...” She started to cry.

  Shelby put a sympathetic arm around her. “All right, Alice,” he said soothingly. “This has been a shock to all of us. We’ll go back to the hotel, you can lie down...”

  “I’m going to Lenny! I’m not going to leave him lying somewhere all alone!”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea, dear. No.” Ken Shelby seemed very close to tears himself. “What good would it do anybody, Alice? He’s dead. I—I can’t go look at his body...God, Alice, he got me into show business...showed me the country. He brought us together. I don’t know if I could take seeing him...”

  “Oh, Ken,” his wife began. “I—I—” She wanted to explain something, but couldn’t. “I have to go to him. Please come.” She had taken her husband’s hands. She dropped them now, and ran past Reigels through the doorway of the conference room.

  Ken Shelby shook his head, reached into his pocket, and handed Rivetz his hotel key. “Here you go. Check the room while we’re gone. Where is he, Lieutenant?”

  “The morgue by now, I suppose.”

  “Yes. That’s where my wife and I will be if you need us.” He followed her into the corridor of the Tower of Babble.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Shazam!”

  —MICHAEL GRAY, “SHAZAM!” CBS

  “WHAT THE HELL GOOD do you expect this to do, Cobb?” Millie Heywood asked. Her eyes behind her harlequin glasses were belligerent and suspicious.

  “Expect?” I said. “I don’t expect anything but a pain in the ass. And I was right. It’s started already.”

  “Look, Miss Heywood,” Lieutenant Martin began.

  “Quiet!” Millie said. That nice little old-lady look Millie carried around with her always made her look out of place in the science-fiction surroundings of Network Master Control—as though you’d plunked your great aunt into the ready room of the Strategic Air Command. But those circuits and patchracks were her domain, and she made sure everyone knew it.

  “I know,” she said to the lieutenant, “that you can order me to run the goddam tapes for you now, instead of at some kind of respectable hour in the morning, but Cobb here put it as a favor, ‘Do me a favor, Millie,’ you heard him say it. So I want to know why. In the middle of the biggest case of mass panic around here since Oswald was shot, I got the Network put to bed, finally, but I’ve still got to take care of the kid, you know? So I’d like to know this is gonna be worth while.”

  The “kid” was Hildy, who was sleeping in a chair placed in front of a bunch of green lights. Millie had probably brought her along tonight for an inside look at the Exciting World of TV.

  I tilted my head toward the young woman. “There’s a tiny little chance something on one of those pieces of tape can point us toward the person who killed her man, Millie. The father of that bulge she’s got her hands folded across. Let’s wake Hildy up, and ask her if she wants us to wait.”

  Millie made a raspberry. “You would, too, you bastard.”

  “Besides,” I said, suddenly impatient. “Nobody said you had to stay and punch the buttons, you know. You’re not the only techy at the Network.”

  That did it. Mi
llie stamped her little foot and thumbed her glasses to the top of her gray head, a sure sign she was mad. “Not the only one, you bastard, but the goddam best! All right, Cobb. Monitor D. You’re gonna get instant replays until you get blisters on your eyeballs. Sit down!”

  She stomped away to the VTR control bank while Mr. M. and I wheeled gray swivel chairs in front of Monitor D. Monitor D was engineered to give the best picture the art of electronics was capable of giving. It was usually used to match cameras for color before a show.

  “Quite a way with women you have there, Matty,” the lieutenant said with a tight smile as we sat down.

  “Never fails,” I told him.

  “What order do you want to see these things in?” Millie asked.

  “Whatever’s easiest for you,” the lieutenant answered.

  “No problem, I put them on a playback disc while you were upstairs.”

  I never had gotten around to returning Ken Shelby’s wallet, so just before Millie’s brief tantrum, I’d gone up to my office and left it on my desk with a note for Jazz to get in touch with Shelby as soon as she got the chance tomorrow morning—later this morning actually. It was well into Monday already.

  I turned to Lieutenant Martin. “Which one first?”

  He blew a little gust of air through his nose. “Don’t ask me, boy. You’re the one that was so hot to do this. The New York Police Department could have waited till morning.”

  So it was up to me. “The bowling ball first, Millie,” I called. “The one from Friday.” I told myself it would be better to take things chronologically, but the real reason was I had to prepare myself before I could stand to watch Lenny Green tumble from that cabinet again.

  Millie started the playback machine. The picture blinked a few times, then locked, and it was Friday again. Ken Shelby’s comic temporizing; the bogus Bomboni; Melanie; the door swinging open; the magic; and so on, until the sprinklers cut loose over the fire in the trash bin, and the picture dissolved into oatmeal. We could see the shapes of the performers as they fled, and a dull red blur as the bowling ball came crashing down to the set.

  “Hold it a second, Millie,” I called. “Well, Mr. M., that do anything for you?”

  He shook his head. “I’d just like to know who had the brass-bound guts to go up there with that bowling ball. I nearly wet my pants when you had me risking my life for a stupid piece of cardboard.”

  I let it pass. I drummed my fingers nervously on the console, watched the screen. “Roll it, Millie.”

  I was surprised to see just how similar the two abortive performances of the Reluctant Magician had been. The timing, the flow, were practically the same. Until, of course, the door bit, when the three stars had to work hard to pull the door open.

  There was a pretty good shot of the inside of the cabinet, and I tried to see if I could spot the bag of carbon tetrachloride I knew was in there, but I couldn’t. The insides of practically all magic apparatus are painted a dead black for the express purpose of keeping people from getting a good look at any gimmick that might be in there. Our friend the killer doubtlessly knew that.

  I didn’t even see Lenny Green step on the bag and break it, because his partner had closed the door behind him so fast. But I heard Lenny’s cries for help, and I heard the laughter. All that cruel, stupid laughter. I had a silly notion that I could hear my own voice laughing as Lenny died.

  The playback showed the rest of it, too, the truth slowly seeping through the studio; the laughter dying; and Lenny’s body spilling to the set as the waterlogged door was finally wrenched open. I wondered how much the warping of the wood of that cabinet had contributed to Lenny’s death.

  “It swells up when it gets wet,” Lenny had said Saturday afternoon, “that’s all.”

  I felt that tight little bass note in the bottom of my brain again.

  I jumped, as though I’d leaned up against a hot stove. “It swells up when it gets wet.” What did I think I meant by that? All kinds of things swell up when they get wet.

  “Run it again, Millie,” I said. Play it again, Sam, I heard echo in my head. My mind was starting to race. I was weak and I needed sleep.

  “Matty,” Mr. M. began, but I insisted on seeing it again.

  By the time the two segments were over this time, the bass note had drawn out into a low, rumbling pedal tone that was driving me crazy. I was about an inch away from something. I was about to call for Millie to show it again when Rivetz came in.

  “Well?” the lieutenant asked him.

  “No bogeyman in Shelby’s room. Oh, the Brockway broad won’t be staying at the Brant Hotel tonight. Guess the Network is out the money, eh, Cobb?”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. What was it?

  “Why not, Rivetz?” the lieutenant wanted to know. “Where is she going to be?”

  “Shelby and her had another tiff at the morgue,” Rivetz explained. “I figured I better keep an eye on them, so I took them there myself. Brockway wanted to claim the body right away; Shelby said they ought to find out about Green’s relatives at least. Which makes sense to me, but figure out a woman, right?

  “Anyhow, it comes down to Brockway won’t sleep under the same roof with such a callous bastard, so she’s spending the night with Doreen somebody, actress on one of those stupid soap operas. Old friend or—what’s so funny, Cobb?”

  “Nothing,” I said, but I went on laughing. Doreen had people crying on her shoulder in real life, now.

  “Cuckoo,” Rivetz said. “Anyway, I got the address and phone number, we can get her if we need her.” He patted the notebook in his back pocket. “What now, Lieutenant?”

  Lieutenant Martin looked at his watch, shook it, and said a swear word. “What the hell time is it?”

  “About four-thirty,” I said, without looking at my watch. “Four-twenty-seven,” Rivetz said at the same time. It’s a talent I have, completely useless, except as a constant reminder that I’m using up my life.

  “Well,” Mr. M. said with a sigh, “let’s go talk to Wilma Bascombe. We’ll make her place about sunup. Come on, Matty.”

  “No,” I said.

  The lieutenant was surprised. “No?”

  “I’m close to something, dammit! I can feel it!”

  “You’re close to a breakdown, is what you’re close to, Cobb,” Rivetz said. “Go take a look at yourself in a mirror. You look like secondhand death.”

  “Shut up, Rivetz,” the lieutenant told him. “What have you got, Matty?”

  I shook my head, helplessly. “I—don’t—know!” Rivetz made a noise. I ignored him. “Look. There’s something on that tape, or something in my head, or both, that’s important here. Goddam, I wish I knew what it was.”

  “If you ask me,” Rivetz said, “old Wilma Bascombe is our last stop on this case.”

  Mr. M. scratched his chin. “You think so, too, huh?”

  I was disgusted. “Oh, come off it.”

  “Matty, she’s the only one in this case that’s had even the shadow of a motive against anybody. She was in L.A. when Bevic was killed. With her two sweet-boy friends, she’s got built-in muscle for the theft of the ball and the films, and the catwalk business...”

  The films, I thought. The theft of 1952. I grabbed my temples. Now everything was humming, not just my inadequate mind. The air was making noise.

  “...And,” the lieutenant continued, “she just happened to be in this building this morning, with that death-threat story. I bet they smelled that one over in Jersey, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Besides,” Rivetz put in. “You saw one of her boys in the lobby. Who’s to say the other wasn’t posing as a workman and planting the carbon tet in the magic cabinet? God knows it’s easy enough to get the stuff.”

  “She’s our best bet, Matty,” the lieutenant concluded. “If you think about it, she’s the only one who hasn’t been threatened either physically or financially by what’s been going on.”

  I closed my eyes. “You’re probably right,” I lied, t
o end the argument. “But I’m sorry, Mr. M., I’m just not up to a ride out on the Island. I think I’ll go home and sleep on it.”

  He nodded and ruffled my hair, in a way he hadn’t done since I was a kid. Then he smiled. “I always said you white boys needed more sleep. God knows it’s a good idea. Well, let’s go, Rivetz. Take care, Matty.”

  “Always do,” I said. I waited until the policemen had left Master Control. Then I rubbed my eyes and sat up.

  “Millie!” I yelled.

  “What, what?” She must have dozed off for a few minutes.

  “Let’s see it again.”

  Millie rolled her disc. After a couple of times through, Llona showed up, looking for me.

  “One of the guards told me you were here,” she said. We kissed hello. I was glad to see her, but part of me was impatient with the interruption, anxious to get back to the monitor.

  Llona was being motherly. “Honestly, Matt, don’t you ever get enough?”

  “My job, Llona.” I rubbed my eyes, but they kept burning.

  “Why don’t you just stay home and stick needles in yourself? Matt,” she said, suddenly very grave, “no job is this important. You have to look out for yourself too, you know. Come home.”

  “In a little while,” I said. Something about that door...

  “Now!” Llona stamped a foot. Now that I looked at her, she didn’t look too great herself. She’d probably just finished handling the nation’s ravenous newshounds. They’d sell a lot of papers with this story.

  “I can’t, Llona, honest. I—I’m close to something.” That was a mistake—she wanted to know what it was.

  “I’ll tell you when I know myself,” I said. I handed Llona my keys. “Look, I’ll meet you later, I promise. We’ll sleep the rest of the week.”

  “Mmm hmm,” she said. She was skeptical, but she took the keys. She also agreed to put Hildy in a cab and get her safely to Millie’s. We woke up the pregnant girl, and she left with Llona.