Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  “And you’re a great ad libber, too. That bit with the bolt while Lenny was suffocating was nothing short of genius. Not only do you build up the suspense for the folks at home, but you make sure the door on that magic cabinet doesn’t get opened a second before you want it to. That way you could make sure the carbon tetrachloride had plenty of time to work. And that line was a classic. ‘Don’t encourage him.’

  “Beautiful. So beautiful I had to throw up when I figured it out.”

  “You’re too sensitive, Matt. Lenny fulfilled every comedian’s dream—he left them laughing. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

  Every second that went by was making it harder for me to suppress the desire to jump on Shelby and strangle him, gun or no gun.

  “Jerry de Loon would have had it some other way,” I said. “Jim Bevic, too.” Far below, I could see a police car drive out of the park. I wanted to cry.

  Shelby’s gray eyes softened, and he nodded sadly. “I’m sorry about Jerry. He seemed to be a nice young man. In fact, he was responsible for the shape of my whole plan, in a way. Bevic I had to kill. I had no choice, though I must admit I was a fool to kill him in my own back yard and leave him there.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. Goddam you, Mr. M., hurry up! “Any number of people could have sneaked onto your property. You had no connection with Bevic that anybody knew about. If you tried to move him, you might have left traces of his presence in your car, and that wouldn’t have done, would it? You were supposed to be in Arizona at the time, weren’t you? And the police labs in this country are pretty thorough. No, once you had killed him, I think leaving him in your pool was probably the smartest thing you could have done.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” he said. “You may be right, at that.” He was pleased. I got the impression that he was enjoying our talk quite a bit. It’s only natural for a performer to want to sit down and hash things over when the performance is done.

  I wasn’t enjoying it nearly as much. For one thing, my finale was yet to come, and I didn’t have a glimmer of an idea of what it was going to be.

  And I wasn’t all I had to worry about. As if to remind me of that, Llona put one of her soft, warm hands in mine. I gave it a squeeze that was more reflex than reassurance.

  I sighed inwardly, and decided to keep talking. It was our only hope.

  “You killed Bevic because he got to McHarg, right?”

  “You tell me, Matt.” He waved the gun, encouraging me. “Let’s see just how good you are at figuring things out.”

  “Okay, correct me if I’m wrong. McHarg was telling the truth—still is. He never got a nickel from Shelby and Green. You took the money out of the joint account, and kept it.”

  Shelby laughed. “You know, I wasn’t going to use the money, at first. I was just going to keep it safe until McHarg took off, as I knew he would. Then I was going to bring it to Lenny and say, ‘See, you little sawed-off dope, if I’d listened to you, we’d have lost that money.’

  “But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Lenny deserved to lose it. God, he was stupid. A great comedian, but stupid.

  “And if we did stay together, I could see what the future was going to be like. He was already harping about how I’d never been out of New York before I met him, and how he brought me into the business. As though I’d been an orphan in the streets, for God’s sake. As though I hadn’t been the one who made the act work, and booked us and watched the money.

  “And there was always his unspoken attitude that he had given me Alice, as a gift.”

  I thought, privately, that that probably wasn’t so far from the truth. Except it seemed that Lenny had given Ken only half of Alice. Witness her flight to Lenny’s body last night.

  Shelby was still talking. “...So I kept the money. I saved it from the garbage—it was mine. We’d made that bet, we split up the act. I just left, and used the money to set myself up in business. I didn’t need him nearly as much as he needed me. Time has proved that.”

  “Uh huh,” I nodded. “Now let’s talk about the bowling ball trick.”

  “Wasn’t that great?” He seemed very pleased with himself. “It came to me Wednesday afternoon, when Llona was showing us around the building—we dropped in on the room where the kid had been working on the kinescopes. He talked about having a bunch of ‘Dr. Wonder’ shows from 1952. That was my last season on that show—I formed the act with Lenny that year—so I remembered a lot of the things Wonder had done on the show. Especially the one we did about fire and water.”

  “I’ve seen it,” I said dryly.

  “Well, there you are. I was right to hide those kines. The kid—”

  “His name was Jerry!” Llona exploded.

  Shelby looked at her, surprised. Then he smiled. “Very good, Llona. Jerry told me he’d only seen enough of each show to identify it, but he might have gotten to that kine, and studied it fully, at any minute. I couldn’t have that. I didn’t mean to kill him, though. I guess I hit him too hard. I was really sorry about that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That makes it all right then.”

  He looked at me, suddenly the professor-character he played on stage. “I think you’re forgetting who has the gun, Matt,” he said, not unkindly.

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “Catch me forgetting someone is holding a gun on me.” Ha, ha, yourself, yutz, I told myself. The fact was, I had almost forgotten about the goddam gun. Where are the cops?

  Sometimes, when a show is running short, the stage director will give the performer a signal by pulling his hands apart slowly, as though he’s pulling taffy. We call it a stretch. It means the performer has to ad lib, and fill in until the end of the show. Even the Anchorman, with his twenty-odd year tenure on the Evening News pales visibly when he gets a stretch sign. I never understood why until now.

  I swallowed and stretched some more. “I suppose you set it all up Wednesday night, right? I mean put the bowling ball and the cardboard up on the catwalk. Weren’t you afraid someone would find it?”

  He shook his head. “People don’t look up. Magicians learn that early. If you want to hide something, hang it over the audience’s head. Besides, what if someone did find it? They’d only think I’d hid the bowling ball to confuse my reason for taking the kines.”

  I nodded grimly. Shelby’s whole plan had been to confuse everyone; to make us juggle so many questions at once, it would be impossible to tell which was important. Or if any were.

  “Those death threats against Lorenzo Baker and Wilma Bascombe were just so much hot air, right? You made those calls.”

  He nodded smugly.

  “It kept the pot stirred up. Besides, Baker gets on my nerves, I thought I’d let the police get on his. As for Miss Bascombe, after what you told me about her I wasn’t going to let her wander from Martin’s attention for a second.”

  I sent Wilma a silent apology, then concentrated on opening my mouth again without screaming. I didn’t need to. There was a knock on the door, and a voice said, “Room Service.”

  “Just a minute!” Shelby called. “Okay, Matt, Llona,” he said calmly. “My tickets are here. Into the suite. Stay ahead of me, and go where I tell you.”

  He still had the gun, so we went. I happened to glance through the open doorway of the bedroom on the way. I remember thinking Llona’s arrival must have interrupted his packing. Drawers and closets were open, and two half-full suitcases sat back to back on the bed, their lids touching to make a high, pointed arch.

  “Stop,” Shelby said. “Over there.” He pointed with the gun to a place about eight feet to the right side of the doorway. “Stand there until I tell you to move. The gun will be on you, so don’t get cute.”

  I had to move a heavy potted rubber plant in order to stand where he wanted us. Shelby didn’t help. Out in the corridor, the bellboy was whistling “Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Seen.” It struck me as a breach of decorum for the hotel, but it was a distressingly apt selection.
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br />   When Shelby was happy with our positions, he put his right hand (with the gun) in his pocket, and kept it there. He went to open the door. I wondered idly if he’d had the foresight to shift his change to the left side so he could tip the bellboy without letting go of the gun.

  I didn’t plan to wait and see. I’d just about given up on the police (they never are around when you need them, I thought grimly) but still had my hairy little ace in the hole, and this looked like my last chance to play him.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Missed by that much.”

  —DON ADAMS, “GET SMART!” NBC

  TIMING WAS GOING TO be the most important part. I waited until Shelby lifted his hand to take the blue and white envelope, then yelled, “Take him, Spot!”

  That wasn’t the “kill” command—you can only expect so much from a dog, no matter how smart or well bred he is, and I didn’t want Spot destroyed later because he’d butchered some helpless bellboy.

  As it turned out, he didn’t exactly butcher him, but it was a near thing. The command I’d given the savage Samoyed meant that he should latch on to the arm that had something in it, and as I’d feared, my timing was off. The bellboy still had the envelope when Spot arrived, so it was he who got those sharp teeth wrapped around his forearm.

  It put a crimp in Shelby’s composure, though, and that was all the edge I had any right to ask.

  Shelby jumped away from the door—I’d counted on that. Let a snarling, ferocious beast start sprinting down a hotel corridor at you, and you’ll jump back, too, even if you don’t have three murders on your conscience.

  I’d expected Spot’s arrival to change the situation, but I hadn’t expected him to do such a thorough job of it. All of a sudden, it was as if Mack Sennett had taken over as the director of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

  Of course, I couldn’t appreciate this until later. When your life is at stake, there’s hardly any difference at all between slapstick and suspense.

  It started with Llona’s walking right toward Shelby, with a puzzled look on her face, as though she’d decided she’d just take a peek and see what was going on in the hall. So the first thing I had to worry about was her. I danced over to her (expecting a bullet any second), grabbed her around the waist, and slung her to the floor alongside the brown sofa where Shelby’s wife had nearly seduced me.

  I should have left her alone. Shelby hadn’t seemed especially eager to shoot Llona. Now she was out of the way, and I was standing there like the proverbial bug on a plate.

  I ran. I circled to my left, his right, and he had to spin to keep me in view. Once, he thought he had a shot at me and fired the gun through the fabric of his pants.

  The man who directed “Dr. Wonder,” the man who had murdered people so scientifically, should have known better. Not only did he miss (the bullet broke a lamp) but the heat of the bullet set fire to his pants. If I’d had a brain cell or two to spare, it would have occurred to me that that might have happened. A bullet doesn’t just leap out of a gun—it’s pushed out by some rapidly expanding gases. And the reason they expand so rapidly is that they’re extremely hot.

  Shelby hadn’t wasted any brain cells on the question, either, and he suffered for it now, yelling in pain, and slapping at his smoking trousers with his free hand. I figured it was a good chance to jump him.

  Spot, meanwhile, was still worrying the bellboy’s arm as if it were his favorite bone, backing up, all the while, to keep his prisoner off balance. Unfortunately, he backed directly through the doorway into the room, and I tripped over him as I made for Shelby.

  I sprawled at Ken’s feet, which gave him the opportunity to take the gun out of his pocket. His intention, no doubt, was to shoot me with it, but he was foiled when the bellboy, a kid who appeared to have more pimples than IQ points, finally decided he would be smarter to stop fighting Spot, and follow in the direction the dog wanted to take him, instead.

  Naturally, since I was lying in his path, he tripped over me, landing with both knees on my back, cracking two of my ribs, and knocking the wind out of me.

  That was the bad news. The good news was that in falling, his body had chopped down on Shelby’s arm, and knocked the gun from his hand.

  Llona had greeted each of these developments with a gasp, but she went into action now, running forward to pick up the gun, which neither Ken nor I could reach.

  I was cursing at the bellboy to get the hell off me, but he had had a glimpse up Llona’s skirt, and was now mesmerized. If I was going to get free, I was going to have to burrow out.

  Spot had given the bellboy up as a bad job (and besides, as far as he knew, I had the malefactor in custody), and joined the fun on the floor. He loves to wrestle. He yipped happily, and bounced in and out of the pile.

  I finally threw the bellboy away, and started to roll over. I nearly passed out from pain, and all I could see was bad news.

  Llona was trying to fire the pistol. She had both hands on it, and her tongue was clamped between her lips in determination. Even if she did manage to fire, it was anybody’s guess who or what she’d hit.

  “Get rid of it!” I yelled. Shelby was starting to get up; he wanted that gun. He already had his hand out, as though he expected Llona just to give it to him. I whipped my legs around, and knocked Ken down again. I was discovering several new constellations every time I moved.

  “Get rid of the gun!” I told Llona again. Shelby and I started to grapple.

  “You’ll regret this, Matt,” he grunted.

  I thought, Jesus, he talks during a fight, what does he think this is, a movie? But a second later, I told him, “Not as much as you will,” and we fought some more. Get thee behind me, reality.

  Now the bellboy reentered the picture. “Gimme the gun, lady,” he said. “I’ll hold them while you get the police.” There was no reason to believe he could make the gun go off any better than Llona could. I was glad to see Llona felt the same way. She ran away from him, out to the balcony. He chased her.

  I kept wanting to tell Spot to rip out Shelby’s throat, but whenever I tried to, I’d get punched in the stomach or the mouth, and not be able to speak for a moment. On top of everything else, I was irked that I wasn’t able to handle the man better. After all, I had twenty years on him. Then I realized that he’d probably gotten some sleep in the last couple of days, that all his ribs were intact, and that he hadn’t been a victim of poisoning by CCI4, and I felt a little better, but not much.

  To Spot, things were still fun, until he saw the bellboy, his responsibility, take off after Llona. He went after the bellboy again, caught him, and brought him down with a crash so loud that Ken and I both left off fighting for a split second to see what it was. We saw that he’d landed across the marble top of the table and knocked the coffeepot and everything else to the floor.

  A combination of conflicting efforts tore Ken and me apart, and he decided to make one last try for that gun. I followed.

  Llona saw us coming—saw Ken coming, rather, and she got a look on her face that was impossible to describe. All I could think was, that was the look she’d give her executioner.

  She stood frozen for just a second, then glanced at me, turned, and dropped the gun over the balcony. I approved; I just hoped it wouldn’t brain anyone below.

  That act, the dropping of that pistol over that low, twelfth-floor railing, did something to Ken Shelby. Before he had been a desperate man. Now he was a desperate demon.

  “You BITCH!!” he screamed, and sprang at Llona. He grabbed her by the throat, and bent her backward over the railing.

  He was still yelling when I got there. I gave him a shot with the edge of my hand to the side of his neck. He felt it, let go of Llona, and spun his weight behind a fist aimed at my face.

  I jerked my head back to dodge it, but when I did, I stepped in a puddle of coffee. On the tiles of the patio, it made a surface as slippery as Teflon.

  I went down. This time, I landed on the poor bellboy, who was out for t
he count.

  “You” Shelby said. He seemed to think it was enough of an insult all by itself. “You’re going with me, Matt!” He picked up one of the heavy wrought-iron chairs, and raised it high over his head. The plan was obviously to deboss leafy designs into my skull, and the plan would have succeeded, except for teamwork.

  There was only one thing I had time to do before he hit me—just as I had with Sammy, I pistoned back my leg and kicked him in the knee. It touched him, but I didn’t know if it would have had much effect—he was farther away than Sammy had been.

  At the same moment, though, Spot, seeing me in danger, or maybe just getting back into the fun, jumped up, and hit Shelby in the chest with his forepaws.

  And while that was happening, Llona sideswiped his head with the empty coffeepot, making a noise like a warped gong.

  Individually, probably none of these things would have had any effect. Collectively, they threw Ken Shelby off balance.

  If he’d fallen down, he would have been okay, but he used the chair as a kind of crazy counterweight, and pulled himself into a sideways stagger. Even that might have been overcome, but his stumbling took him into another puddle of tepid coffee.

  There’s a movie where Charlie Chaplin tries to roller skate. Maybe you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, you can imagine it. That’s what Shelby reminded me of then, moving his feet in little chopping steps, but not getting anywhere, swinging the chair wildly around for balance...

  He should have dropped the chair, but he just didn’t think of it. He was fascinating to watch. It would have been great stuff for the comeback of Shelby and Green, but of course Lenny would have done it onstage. After all, Lenny was supposed to be the clown of the act.

  Ken was so fascinating to watch that no one noticed how close he was to the railing until he raised the chair high, spun around, said, “Oh no!” and was pulled over the edge by the weight of the chair.

  There was no scream, just a sound like a dropped watermelon a few seconds after Ken had disappeared.