Have Gat—Will Travel

by Richard S. Prather

  "Shell Scott, Mrs. French. Your husband around?"

  "He — no." She unlocked the front door. "What do you want?"

  I followed her inside, showed her my license, told her I was a detective. "Your husband's in jail," I said.

  "Jail! What for?"

  "Same deal I'm working on. The Melba Mallory thing?"

  She gasped. "But that . . . he shouldn't be in jail."

  "He is. Your husband was running down the street with no clothes on, and there seems to be some kind of law about —"

  I broke it off because she was laughing. But it was stretched thin, close to hysterical laughter. She calmed herself, her face twitched, and words poured from her. "I've been driving around ever since it happened, trying to get my thoughts straight. I guess I went a little crazy."

  I held my breath. It sounded as if I were about to get a lot of answers. She went on, "It was about two-thirty this morning, maybe three. I was alone. Everybody else was with somebody. I went looking for Alan. He'd gone out back with a bottle. I went out to the pool. Alan wasn't around, but I saw them — Melba and Si. My husband, with her!"

  She stopped. Quietly I said, "By the pool, you mean?"

  "Yes. And the lights were on. Not bright, but . . . right there, out in the open. I ran up to them. I guess I did what I did because of what he said — damn him! I yelled at him, 'Stop that this minute!'" She laughed shortly. "That damn living creep said, 'Really, darling. Not this minute.'"

  She swung around and walked away from me, then turned and said, "I just got crazy mad. There was an empty whisky bottle there, and I picked it up, Officer. I'm sorry now for what I did, Off —" She stopped suddenly. "Let me see that — that thing you showed me again."

  She meant the photostat of my license. I hadn't told her I was a policeman, hadn't realized till just now that she must have assumed that "detective" meant "police officer." I took out the photostat and told her, "I said I was a detective, Mrs. French. And I am. But I don't want to commit a misdemeanor here. I'm a private detective. Not that it makes much difference, really. How about finishing what you were saying?"

  "You told me Si was in jail," she said. "Why would a private detective be interested in that?" She paused again. "I think you'd better leave."

  I tried to get her talking again, but it was over. She told me to get out. Before I reached the door somebody knocked on it. Mrs. French opened the door and admitted two men. "Police officers," one of them said, showing his I.D. card. "You'll have to come downtown with us, Mrs. French."

  I didn't know the man speaking; the other was an officer I knew casually, a man named Lake. He nodded briefly to me as Mrs. French said, "Downtown? What for? What right have you —"

  "Come along, Mrs. French. You're under arrest."

  "Arrest?" She sank into a chair. "What for?"

  "Suspicion of murder."

  Her face got ashen; shock spread over her features. "Who . . . Murder? Whose murder?"

  I said, "Melba Mallory's."

  She fainted. Her body slumped and she fell out of the chair.

  Both of the officers jumped forward; they picked her up, placed her on a divan. The phone rang. Lake took it, listened a moment, then said to me, "It's for you, Scott. Guy named Kennedy."

  Kennedy had been calling all over for me, had located me by going down the list of names he'd supplied me with this morning until he'd caught me here. He said, "Get over to the Graystone quick, Scott. Something's happened."

  "If it's about the case, it's probably not important now. Mrs. Simon French just got through confessing. At least she started to. The police will get the rest of it. Looks as if this is working out about as well as it could."

  He was silent for quite a while, letting what I'd said soak in, then his voice went on, "Not quite. Alan Grant just fell out of his fourth-floor window."

  "He what?"

  Kennedy said it again. "Either fell or jumped. I thought maybe he'd given us a false story this morning, and jumped . . . You say Anastasia confessed?"

  "Well, not exactly. Now I think of it, she didn't actually get to the important points. I'll be right over."

  I hung up and turned around. "It's okay if I leave, isn't it?" I asked Lake. "Client wants to see me."

  "Yeah, you can go. But it's a good thing you didn't try to pass yourself off as a policeman."

  "You heard that part?"

  "We heard it all."

  In Grant's room at the Graystone were Kennedy, a doctor, and Alan Grant — on the bed. I pointed at him and said to Kennedy, "I thought he'd be dead. Or at least in the hospital."

  "Dead? That sodden, limp, drunken idiot? No. He fell on the awning over the apartment entrance. Bruised a good deal, but that's all. And drunk. That's mainly what's wrong with him now. He's so drunk he could have missed the awning and, anyhow, he'd probably lay there asking for bourbon." Kennedy pointed to a half-full bottle of bourbon on a stand beside the bed. "I left Alan passed out, but he must have come to wanting a drink. He always comes to wanting a drink."

  The doctor straightened up, put some machinery back into his black bag. "He'll be all right. If he quits hitting the bottle."

  That phrase made me think of Mrs. French again. She'd mentioned picking up the empty whisky bottle on the lawn by the pool; I was sure her next sentence would have been that she started swinging it at her hubby and Melba. Or just Melba. I looked at Alan Grant's sprawled body and asked the doctor if Grant would be able to talk to us. The doc said he would be able to talk all right, once he swam out of his alcoholic stupor. I sat down and thought about several bits of information I'd picked up.

  After the doctor left I turned to Jay Kennedy. "You told me earlier that there were supposed to be some retakes made today at the studio. Is there a camera crew ready?"

  "Yes. There's other work in progress. The whole crew, not just the cameramen."

  "I'd like to borrow a cameraman, lighting expert, camera, film, the works. I want to make a movie."

  He looked at me as if I'd just told him I wanted to hang him. "Why in the world do you want to make a movie?"

  "So I can do the job you hired me for. Catch a killer, clean this up. I've been thinking, and it seems to me this might be the best way to do it. Maybe the only way. Well?"

  He thought about it for a few seconds, then the quick decision and the immediate action. "All right." He walked to the phone, dialed, and barked a few orders into the phone, telling somebody to get a crew ready.

  "This is, in a way, protection for you, Mr. Kennedy. It's pretty certain that one of nine people at the Trents' party killed Melba. It looks as if it was Mrs. French, but maybe not — and you were, after all, one of the nine. I'm personally convinced that you wouldn't kill the girl and then hire a detective to find out who killed her, which would be some kind of record for going crazy in a hurry. Besides which, both you and Miss Le Braque can alibi each other. But others might not be as convinced as I. And if this little movie is supposed to catch the right one of the nine, then none of the nine should know what's going to happen."

  He nodded. "I believe I see what you're up to. Are you going to recreate the crime, Mr. Scott?"

  "In a way. You'll see tonight. Oh, when your cameraman shoots what I tell him to, how soon can the film be ready for showing? I'd like to have this all set by four or five p.m. Projection room ready and so on."

  He glanced at his watch. "Make it six tonight and I think it can be handled, if you don't spend more than an hour filming. This will cost a lot of money —"

  "So did Wagon Wheels."

  That hit him in his heart, right in the hundred-dollar bills. He spoke into the phone some more, talking about cameramen, cutters, technicians I hadn't even heard of, then he said, "One final point. For the rest of the afternoon, Mr. Shell Scott has carte blanche; the crew will take his orders. Anything he says, they are to consider my orders." Kennedy hung up.

  A little worry seeped into my brains. I said, "It sounded as if I were going to shoot Gone With The Win
d. This is just a simple, amateur —"

  He interrupted. "You'll need all of them. The film has to be shot, processed, cut, spliced — this is my department, Mr. Scott. Yours is solving the murder."

  I got a cold, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had been buzzing around pretty fast today, and this film idea had just entered my head. If it was a flop, I was dead. It had to work now; the wheels were rolling at what I imagined was ten thousand dollars an hour. I had done it. Oh, boy, I had done it. If this thing merely popped instead of exploding, the next murder would be Shell Scott's. Maybe Jay Kennedy would get the gas chamber for it, but he'd die laughing.

  As if he'd read my thoughts, Kennedy looked at me soberly and said, "Mr. Scott, one of the reasons I'm agreeing to this — this scheme of yours, in the dark, so to speak, is that the police have already talked to me at some length. After leaving them I returned here and learned of Alan Grant's mishap. But they were rather rough on me — not physically, of course, but their questions . . . it was a disturbing experience. And I had to tell them about wiping that whisky bottle clean and throwing it into the water. They were most unhappy about that. I want no more of it. I want this cleaned up. I don't want newspapers filled with conjectures, innuendoes, damaging remarks about me or any other innocent persons, remarks that might be remembered later even after all the truth is known. While Los Angeles and Hollywood are reading about the murder, I want it known that the case is closed, Melba's killer in jail. And, too, there must not be the slightest suspicion that Gargantua Productions would attempt to shield anyone in this matter, even myself. I want this matter closed tonight." He paused, and then said, so slowly that I missed not a single inflection, "That, Mr. Scott, is what I expect from you."

  I grinned like a man whose teeth had just fallen out — painfully. "That, Mr. Kennedy, is what you're going to get." But I was thinking: I've never solved a murder; I've never even worked on a murder case. Good-by, office; good-by, Yolanda; good-by, Hollywood.

  But then I got a grip on myself. "Good-by, Mr. Kennedy," I said. "I mean, I'd better get started." He nodded grimly. Maybe one nod is pretty much like another, but not this one. It was really grim.

  It was also true that I'd better get started. I had Mr. Kennedy going along with me, but now I had to get the Los Angeles Police Department to cooperate. As long as I was past the point of no return, I told Jay Kennedy a couple other things I needed, and left to burn more bridges.

  Well, for the first couple of hours after leaving the Graystone I had myself a ball, even though there were moments when I felt myself becoming appalled all over again. But with Kennedy and Gargantua behind me, I got enough cooperation from everybody, including the police, and was allowed to shoot the film at the murder scene itself, the Trents' home, in the Trents' absence. From the police I learned a few additional items: the time of Melba's death was still figured as between two and three this morning; Melba had been hit hard enough with the bottle — which had been recovered and examined without helpful results — to cause a concussion, but her death had been due to drowning — there was water in her lungs, breathed in when she "was pushed or fell" into the pool.

  I arranged for two between-engagements actors, and one actress, to be present at the Trents' home; then I phoned Yolanda at the office.

  "Hi, this is Scott." I gave her the address and said, "Grab your bikini and come out here. You're going to be in a movie."

  Her delighted squeal drowned me out but I went on, "Hold it. This is a small thing I'm producing. And you play a corpse."

  She stopped squealing, asked a couple questions which I answered, then said she was on her way. Actual filming took only about half an hour; I knew what I wanted. I talked a while with the crew, taking a couple aside and giving them instructions, then they left to handle their various jobs. Ten minutes after six p.m. everything was set.

  Gathered in the projection room at Gargantua Productions were eleven people: the nine who had been at last night's party, including the partygoers I hadn't yet talked to, Yolanda and me, and a half-sober, and aching, Alan Grant. I'd found time to talk with Grant a short while before. Though more sober, he remembered even less about what had happened at the party. He didn't have the faintest idea whom he'd seen and didn't remember anything about his tumble from the Graystone, so I had to go ahead. Mrs. French had been brought there by policemen. No police officers were now inside the room itself, but a couple were right outside the door. I walked to the front of the room, stood before the white screen, facing the small group. I waited for a while, looking up at the heavy lamps poised above their heads, then down at their faces, letting it get quiet in the room. I was sweating, but not only because of some natural nervousness. The air conditioner hummed a bit noisily, but even with it cooling the air, it was still extremely hot. That was fine, though; I wanted it hot. I hoped to make it hot enough in here to catch a killer. I glanced around again, then started in.

  "You all know part of the reason for your being here. It's because Melba Mallory was murdered at the party you all attended last night. One of you killed her. I know which one of you did it, and I'm going to tell you right now — or, better, I'm going to show you. This afternoon a crew from the studio and I shot a movie, a recreation of the murder which occurred last night."

  I paused and looked at them. Jay Kennedy stared back at me, still grim. Mrs. Anastasia French, seated by her husband, placed one hand against her throat; her lips were parted, her face pale, and she looked as if she were going to faint again. Simon French chewed on his lip, frowning. A.A. Porter looked intently at me, occasionally nodding his big head. Both Evelyn Druid and Miss Le Braque sat quietly, staring at me. Alan Grant had both hands pressed against his temples. Mr. and Mrs. Trent were holding hands, Mrs. Trent saying something to her husband.

  After a few seconds I went on, "One word for the murderer. You can make this a lot easier on everybody, including yourself, by telling us about it now." I didn't expect any results; nor did I get any. I said, "This film was shot in the daytime, with actors and actresses, but as you watch it, imagine that it's between two and three o'clock this morning. You all know where you were, including the killer." I smiled. "And now — if you'll pardon the expression — we'll look at the rushes."

  I walked to my seat and slid in next to Yolanda. In the darkness, the killer would see the murder enacted again, the moment of death. His suspense and internal agony would surely, steadily mount. He'd be sweating even more than the rest in here, getting scared. And then he'd give himself away, if I'd set this up right.

  As soon as I waved my hand in the air the lights went out, then the sudden darkness was relieved slightly by the faint reflection from the screen as the film began. There was no sound track and as the minutes passed the silence was broken only by the whisper of cloth against leather as somebody shifted position in a seat, the hum of the air conditioner, a heavy sigh or cough.

  The action on the screen began with a long shot of the Trents' home, shooting across the pool toward the rear of the house. Nobody was in sight. Then the actor playing the part of Alan Grant strolled, occasionally staggering, into the scene. A partly full bottle of bourbon was in his hand. He sank to the ground at the base of the bushes where Alan Grant had, in fact, passed out. The camera moved in for a close-up as he drained the bottle, looked at it, then threw the bottle as it came to rest; then the bottle dissolved into Yolanda's face. She, playing Melba, whirled and ran around the side of the house toward the pool, followed by the actor representing Simon French. At the edge of the pool they sank to the grass, the writer in swimming trunks, Yolanda in her bikini. There was one kiss, that was all. Then the camera was raised, panned slowly from right to left over the grass, passing the empty bottle, then stopping on Alan Grant as he stirred, raised his head and stared toward the pool, eyes widening.

  All of this was in silence in the projection room, but sitting there, watching the action unroll on the screen, I thought that there should have been a sound track. There should
have been a burst of sound then, a crash of music. Something to show that this moment was a high point, a part of the climax. But I got something just as good; better, really — the quick, sharp intake of someone's breath. You couldn't tell from the sound where it came from; but I knew who it had been. Then the camera swung to the short, red-haired woman who left the side door, looked around, walked toward the pool. Mrs. French, the real one, would be the first to know who that actress represented.

  The redhead walked toward the pool, stopped when she saw the two forms close together, raced to them, waving her arms, her mouth moving. The two on the grass didn't move apart. On the screen, Mrs. French whirled, face angry, saw the bottle on the ground, picked it up and raised it in her hand as she turned again. As her arm started downward a woman screamed, "Stop it! Stop it!" The piercing cry was a physical shock in the silent room.

  Immediately the film stopped, the lights went on. Anastasia French was standing, hands pressed hard against her cheeks, eyes closed. "Don't show any more. Please. I'll tell you."

  The slowly mounting tension had been too much for her. That was all right with me. In a harsh, fast burst of words, Mrs. French poured out almost the same story she'd told me earlier today, but this time she continued. "I barely hit my . . . husband. He ran. I hit her, hit Melba twice, three times. God, I don't know. I didn't mean to kill her. I was furious. I ran to my car, drove for hours." She pressed her hands against her eyes, sobbing. "I didn't even know I'd killed her."

  I stood up. "Just a minute, Mrs. French," I said slowly. "You didn't kill her."

  Anastasia turned quickly to look at me. But so did all the others in the room. I had them now, right where I wanted them. And that included the person who'd actually murdered Melba. Anastasia French wasn't the one I was after, but her outburst had helped. That shocking scream, her shrill words and sobs, had drawn the tension even tighter in here, squeezing us all together emotionally — all except one of us.