Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  And just like that, it was a tragedy again.

  Without a word, I stood up and walked (carefully) with Llona to the balcony rail, and looked at the street below.

  One look was enough. A crowd was already gathering down below. Some perceptive person was pointing up at Llona and me. The police would be here soon, at last.

  We turned from the rail. Llona was crying, and shaking as though she would loosen her ligaments. “Hold me, Matt,” she sobbed. “Hold me tight.”

  I put my arms around her and held her as tightly as I could. Maybe I could stop myself from shaking, too.

  CHAPTER 30

  “That’s what they’d like you to believe.”

  —DICK MARTIN, “ROWAN AND MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN,” NBC

  IN CERTAIN WAYS, TELEVISION is far superior to real life. Take the matter of tying off loose ends. On “Barnaby Jones,” they used to get everything explained in the three and a half minutes after the last commercial, and still have time for some scenes from next week.

  After Ken Shelby died, the police and I spent something like eight hours getting the package together.

  Of course, some things came easily enough, like the reason Martin and Rivetz didn’t get there until the fun was almost over. They were cut off in Queens by a water main break.

  “That’s nice to hear,” I had told them. “I was afraid you didn’t love me any more.”

  Another thing that was nice to hear was the relative well-being of the bellboy. His space-cadet uniform was made of a heavy twill that cut the damage from Spot’s mighty jaws to just a couple of U-shaped bruises.

  After a brief detour to get my ribs taped, the next stop was Lieutenant Martin’s office at Headquarters, where everyone, including me, heard for the first time Llona’s version of what went on in Shelby’s suite before I showed up. She said she’d brought the wallet back, and agreed to stop for a quick cup of coffee. She reminded the lieutenant that she hadn’t gotten much sleep last night, either. She told us that Ken started acting strangely when she mentioned my finding the kinescopes, but that she still might have been okay if she hadn’t taken a peek into the bedroom and seen he was packing. She’d known that the police had said that no one should leave town, so she got a little more persistent about the question of where Ken intended to go than he was willing to put up with. That’s when she went from guest to prisoner.

  “He wanted me to be there in case Matt showed up, or the police,” she told the lieutenant.

  I picked up the story from my arrival. When Mr. M. heard the story of Shelby’s sleight of wallet with the million dollars, he got on the phone immediately. He woke Bob Matsuko in Los Angeles (it was still early in the morning out there) and told him he’d solved the Bevic murder for him.

  There was a pause, and the lieutenant smiled. “Like hell I’m kidding,” he told the phone. “We minority groups have to stick together. Here’s what happened.” He gave Matsuko a quick run-down of the case. I listened to what he said, and decided it was the craziest-sounding stuff I’d ever heard in my life. Then I remembered that I’d been the one who’d figured most of that out, and wondered what that implied about my mind.

  Lieutenant Martin was still talking. “Of course it would be nice to have proof, even though he’s dead. What I think...will you listen to me a second? I think you’ll have to go over Shelby’s books. The IRS will probably be glad to give you a hand, especially if Shelby or Green took that money as a tax loss when the theft was supposed to have occurred. Right. Okay. Somebody’ll be here, we never close. Bye.”

  Mr. M. turned to me with a slightly troubled look on his face. “Now, Matty, I have to call the DA’s office and see what they want to do about this.”

  The lieutenant started to pick up the phone again, but he put it down when Rivetz came in. The little detective had just come from the morgue; I imagined I could still smell death on him.

  “Well,” Rivetz said, taking his favorite seat on the window sill, “Shelby and Green are together again at last—about five lockers apart.”

  “What did you find out, Rivetz?” his superior asked.

  “Well, at the hotel, that idiot bellhop is confused, but he’s backing Cobb’s version with everything he does remember. I got him downstairs giving a statement.” That was nice of him, I thought.

  “What about Shelby?” I asked. “You didn’t happen to find a diagram of a killing bottle or something on him, did you?”

  “I don’t find anything on stiffs. Hate to touch them. What’s a killing bottle?”

  Aha, I thought. My brain did even stranger things when it was exhausted. It had me saying things before I even knew I knew anything about them.

  I grinned. “Ken was very, very consistent, Rivetz. Dr. Wonder once did a show about collecting butterflies—Jerry didn’t happen to have a copy of that one in the library, but I remember it. What you’re supposed to do when you catch a butterfly is put it in a glass jar with a couple of drops of carbon tetrachloride on a piece of cotton. That way you can kill the butterfly without squashing it. You can add it to your collection without spoiling its looks. Ken turned Lenny’s magic cabinet into a giant killing bottle.”

  “Oh,” Rivetz said. “No, we didn’t find nothing to make our job any easier. We hardly ever do. Something was missing from his belongings, though.”

  “What was that?” Mr. M. asked.

  “That gold-plated Social Security card he had. You know, the one with his old name on it, whatever that was.”

  “Kenton F. Schnellenbacher,” I said.

  “Whatever. It wasn’t in his wallet when the meat wagon boys took it off him. Wasn’t in his suitcase upstairs. Boys searching the room haven’t turned it up yet. Just the envelope with the two tickets to Brazil.” Evidently Shelby hadn’t thought Costa Rica big enough for both McHarg and him.

  I scratched my head. “That’s funny...”

  The lieutenant shrugged it off. “Maybe he got rid of it. Maybe he lost it.”

  Rivetz had a suggestion. “It might have been jarred out of his wallet when he hit. I’ve seen some weird things happen with impact, and Shelby’s body was busted open pretty good...”

  “E—excuse me,” Llona said in a choked voice, and left the lieutenant’s office, trembling.

  I looked at Rivetz. “Mr. Sensitivity,” I said. He looked out the window and whistled. I turned to the lieutenant. “How about letting her get my dog from the desk sergeant and go home? The poor kid is beat.”

  Mr. M. thought it over for a second, then said okay. I wished I could go with her, but I knew it would be a while yet before I’d be going anywhere. I was a very key witness.

  So I waited.

  Lieutenant Martin made that call to the DA, I talked some more. Lieutenant Martin brought in reporters and had me talk to them. Then I was free for a while. That was a relief. I went to the candy machine and bought some Walnettos and a Butter Nut to celebrate.

  Reports started to come in. A New York detective called from the Brant to say that cleaning fluid bottles in maids’ closets on three floors of the hotel had been mysteriously emptied. So much for where the carbon tet had come from. A report came in from Los Angeles that hinted at big news from the IRS before too long.

  I should have been happy, or at least relieved, but I wasn’t. That made me mad at myself, and that made me even less happy. To pass the time, I ate my candy and tried to figure out what happened to the Social Security card. I should have skipped it. At first I couldn’t come up with an answer; then I thought of one, but it didn’t seem to make any sense.

  Whoever had made that call from L.A. had a different definition for the phrase “before too long” from the one I had. The sun was sinking slowly toward the Hudson River by the time we heard from them again.

  Lieutenant Martin picked up the phone, said “Uh huh” three times, whistled softly, then said “Uh huh” four more times.

  He made a steeple of his fingers, reminding me of the lids of the suitcases I’d seen on Shelby’s b
ed.

  “Well, Matty,” he said to me, “the Revenooers seem to think that embezzlement got to be a habit with your friend Shelby.”

  “Oh?”

  “Guy on the phone tells me Ken has been systematically swindling his various real estate investors for years. If their accountants are un-doctoring the books properly, there’s evidence he’s ripped off something close to two million bucks on this Arizona thing alone.”

  “He needs to dazzle people,” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. This explains a lot. Can I use your phone?”

  “Who are you calling?”

  I left his grammar alone. “I’m calling the Wild Bull of the Pompous,” I told him.

  I dialed. The line clicked, and the phone rang at the Network switchboard. The operator picked it up, and I asked for Mr. Falzet’s office. It was about time I earned some of my pay.

  I told the president the case was closed, and the Network could breathe again. Falzet, naturally, wanted to know all about it, and I told him I’d report to him as soon as I could.

  That turned out to be immediately. “There’s no reason you have to hang around, Matty,” the lieutenant said. “Go get some sleep.” So I told Falzet to wait, I’d be at the Tower right away.

  Falzet (or one of his secretaries) accomplished a lot while I was in transit. This wasn’t just going to be a report, it was going to be a regular party. The big round table from the Thursday “production meeting” was back, as well as a lot of the cast: Falzet, Wilberforce, Ritafio, Reigels, the rest. There were a couple of additions (Melanie Marliss and Lorenzo Baker), and one notable absentee (Coyle).

  The president was civil when he greeted me, practically cordial. From that I deduced that the ratings for “Sight, Sound, & Celebration” had been spectacular.

  So I was businesslike. “Let me fill you in about what’s been going on,” I said, and started the damn story for what I hoped was the last time.

  Everyone listened attentively. Ritafio took notes. Wilberforce polished his glasses absently and wore a mean little smile on his thin lips. Falzet cocked his head slightly, as though he were hard of hearing in one ear.

  “...And after Bevic talked to McHarg in Costa Rica,” I was saying, when a draft around my ankles told me the door had been opened at the other end of the room, and Falzet said, “Ah, Miss Brockway. You’ve decided to join us after all?”

  Alice was making determined, if wobbly progress across the big room. I turned in my chair to get a look at her. She was wearing a smart black dress, but what I noticed was her face. It had finally happened. Alice Brockway and Matt Cobb were finally the same age. She looked, and I felt, somewhere around a hundred and forty.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” I asked quietly, hoping my voice wouldn’t carry.

  Wilberforce widened his grin three sixteenths of an inch. “I doubt she’s collecting for the March of Dimes, Mr. Cobb.”

  And, of course, he was right. Alice wanted to join the party. “I have a right to be here,” she insisted. “I—I have to know what’s going on.”

  Melanie left the table and ran to the other woman. “Oh, Alice,” she said. Alice didn’t even appear to notice.

  I shook my head. “You don’t want to hear this now, Alice,” I told her. I tried to sound kind.

  “Why not?” Porter Reigels demanded. “She’s got a right to hear it if any of us have.”

  Falzet was the boss. “Don’t be a fool, Cobb. She’s got to know eventually.”

  He was right. That hurt. And he’d put me down in perfect English, too. “Of course,” I said. “Sit down, Alice.” She sat between Melanie and Baker, and I had no choice but to go on with the story. I could hardly admit the real reason I hadn’t wanted Alice to stay—after all these years, I didn’t want to have to break the heart of the first girl I’d ever loved.

  I sighed, and started again.

  When I finished, the consensus was that I was either (a) crazy; (b) a liar; (c) a crazy liar. Alice Brockway was the only one who didn’t start babbling as soon as I was through. Porter Reigels was the loudest, so he was the one I looked at when I said, “Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Kenny was a good friend of mine from a long way back, and I don’t like thinking of him as a killer.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said quietly, “one of my major ambitions, either.”

  “Sure, you say. But you’re standing there telling us the reason you know Ken is—was guilty was that he did the bowling ball thing.

  Wasn’t that a heck of a risk? He knew it was coming down. If he’s this big criminal mastermind and all, why’d he risk his own life like that?”

  Wilberforce cleared his throat as though he intended to make a point, I could tell he knew the hole in Porter’s logic. It was tempting to let him take over the dirty work, but this was my show, for better or (primarily) worse, and I’d do it myself. Builds character.

  “Not a risk in the world, Porter,” I told the Texan and the rest of the group. “The bowling ball couldn’t fall until the sprinkler system had soaked the cardboard enough to push Melanie’s ball over the rim. And it took the fire to set off the sprinklers.

  “Not only did Ken start the fire—all he had to do was plant the crystals in the carpenter’s bin beforehand, then put a drop or two of glycerin on it when he and Melanie came offstage before the bow—he could be absolutely sure nobody would be in the way when the ball fell.”

  I got puzzled looks from my audience. “Look,” I said, “what would you do if you were out in the middle of a big open space, and water started falling from the ceiling? Melanie, you were right there, what did you do?”

  She opened her mouth and raised her head as the dawn broke in her mind. “I ran for cover.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Toward the exits. Away from the center of the room. Don’t you remember when we still believed in some Phantom lurking up on the catwalk? How we said how lucky it was the fire set off the sprinklers, and chased everyone away from the floor of Studio J?

  “In fact, if I’m remembering correctly, Ken was the first one to suggest that. Wasn’t he, Melanie?”

  “You’re right,” she told me. She looked apologetically at the rest of the gathering. “He’s right.”

  I nodded. “And I swallowed it whole.” I gave a little rueful laugh. “Once everybody believed it, Ken had it easy. God, Lenny Green summed it all up before it even happened. He told me, ‘It’s not that the hand is quicker than the eye—it’s that the mouth is mightier than the mind.’ We saw what he wanted us to see.”

  Falzet was impatient. “But, Cobb, what I don’t understand is why you’re inferring to us that Shelby had a definite reason for the bowling ball incident.”

  Under some circumstances, I might have told him he meant “implying,” not inferring, but not now. “He had a reason, all right. Ken may have been...ah...off the rails, but he wasn’t naive. I’m pretty certain the bowling ball incident was designed to neutralize Ollie McHarg. Because of Bevic, Ken knew we’d be looking for McHarg, or the police would, and he knew what Ollie would say if we found him before Ken had accomplished all he wanted to do. McHarg would tell us that he’d never taken any money from Shelby and Green.

  “But with the ball-dropping, and all the other crazy things going on around here, we discounted McHarg’s version as a self-serving attempt to disassociate himself from the murders. Because if we believed Old Uncle Ollie, Ken had to have stolen the act’s money, and we could hardly believe that, could we? We had a video tape recording of Ken not-quite-being squashed by the Phantom. He was a potential victim, not a killer. All part of the same illusion.”

  Lorenzo Baker, speaking as a practical man and an experienced felon, brought the conversation back to basics. “Why didn’t he just tell Bevic to go sell it somewhere else? The statute of limitations had to be up on the con job. He was home free. He didn’t have to worry about what Bevic wrote.”

  “Yes he did,” I said. “He wa
sn’t worried about twelve years ago, he was worried about now. Swindles apparently were habit-forming for Ken.”

  Alice made a noise halfway between a whimper and a moan. “I knew it,” she whispered. “I—some of my relatives are land developers; I know how that business is supposed to work. Ken was getting money at the wrong stages of the deal, in the wrong amounts. I didn’t want to believe he was doing anything wrong...”

  Melanie suddenly got all maternal, but Alice wasn’t buying any. She pushed Melanie’s hands away, and kept her eyes steadily on me. “Matt,” she said, “how much did Ken...?”

  Maybe I didn’t love Alice any more, but I was developing a kind of respect for her. She’d lost her man—both her men—in less than twenty-four hours, but she was facing it. A lot of people would be basket cases by now.

  “He got at least a couple million, Alice. From what I heard before I left Headquarters, the guys going over the books figure it’s been spent, or put in one of those anonymous banks in Switzerland, or maybe Panama.”

  “He didn’t spend it.” Alice sounded very sure.

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that however much he got, and whatever he did with it, he was running out of ways to hide it. Look how fast the tax people were able to get onto it today.

  “That’s why Ken met with Bevic in secret, and why he panicked and killed him when Bevic revealed what Ollie McHarg had said. Ken couldn’t afford anyone’s being curious about his finances, and if a Pulitzer prizewinner like Bevic were to reveal that Ken Shelby had stolen money from his own partner years ago, people would start to get very curious.”

  There was silence for a few seconds while that sank in, then Falzet opened his mouth to say to the visitors how sorry the Network was about this tragedy, and if there was anything he could do, or that anyone in the Network could do, don’t hesitate to ask, and similar bullshit.

  I knew him. Inside, he was shouting with joy, because with all the pre-show publicity, “Sight, Sound, & Celebration” had come just a hair short of “Who shot J.R.” in the overnights, to become the second-highest-rated show of all time; and because the Network had come through the scandal squeaky-clean.