The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “Does it? Mel, how much do you think Alex is paying?”

  “How would I know? Why? Did Claudia tell you how much?”

  “She did. Now take a guess. Please.”

  Mel did some swift mental arithmetic.

  “Well,” he said, “since the statues are all Paolo’s work from the original designs up to the finished product, they ought to be worth between five and ten thousand bucks. But I’ll bet the kid never got more than two thousand from Alex.”

  “Mel, he got five hundred. One hundred down, and the rest on completion. Five hundred dollars altogether!”

  You couldn’t beat File, Mel thought almost with awe as they recrossed the bridge over the swollen and murky Tiber. A lousy $500 for all twelve statues. And with Claudia Varese thrown in for good measure.

  Mel had it out with File the next morning, glad that Cy and MacAaron were there in the office with them to get an earful about what had been going on.

  Physically, File was not the bravest man in the world. He was plainly alarmed by the outlook.

  “What the hell,” he blustered, “you know these girls around here. If it wasn’t me yesterday, it would be somebody else today. But if this brother of hers got any ideas about sticking a shiv in my back, maybe I can—”

  “I didn’t say that,” Mel pointed out. “All I said was you’d be smart to steer clear of him. He’ll be done with his job tomorrow. You might find something to do in town until he’s gone.”

  “You mean, let this ginzo kid run me off my own property?”

  “You started the whole thing, didn’t you? Your bad luck you just happened to pick the wrong kind of girl this time.”

  “All right, all right! But I’ll be back in the evening to see that last set of rushes, and we’ve got an important meeting in the office here right afterward. All of us, you understand? So you all be here.”

  That had an ominous sound, they agreed after File left, but it didn’t bother them. There were only a couple of scenes left to be shot, about a week’s work editing the picture, and that was it. File had done his worst, but it hadn’t stopped them from doing their best. Whatever card he now had up his sleeve—and File could always produce some kind of nasty surprise at those meetings—it was too late for him to play it. That was all that mattered.

  They were wrong. File returned late in the evening to view the rushes with them, and when they gathered in his office afterward, he pulled from his sleeve, not a card, but a bombshell.

  “I want to clear up one little point,” he said, “and then the meeting’s over. One little point is all. Goldsmith, I got an idea you’re finally supposed to be done with the photography this week. Is that a fact?”

  “By Friday,” Cy said.

  “Then it’s settled. So Friday night when you all walk out of here it’ll be for the last time. Get the point? Once you’re on the other side of that gate you’re staying there. And don’t try to con the guard into anything, because he’ll have special instructions about keeping you there.”

  “Sure,” said Cy, “except that you overlooked one little detail, Alex. The picture has to be edited. You’ll have to wait another week before you tell the guard to pull his gun on me.”

  “Oh?” said File with elaborate interest. “Another week?” His face hardened. “No, thanks, Goldsmith. We’re already carrying a guy on the payroll as film editor, so you just wave goodbye Friday and forget you ever knew me.”

  “Alex, you’re not serious about Gariglia doing the editing. But he’s completely useless. If I’m not there to tell him what to do—”

  “So from now on I’ll tell him what to do.”

  “You?”

  “That’s right. Me.” File angrily jabbed a forefinger into his chest. “Me. Alex File who was making pictures when you were still jumping ponies over a cliff for Monogram at ten bucks a jump.”

  “You never made a picture like this in your life.”

  “You bet I didn’t.” File’s voice started to rise. “A month over schedule. Twenty per cent over budget. Twenty per cent, you hear?”

  Cy’s face was bloodless now, his breath coming hard.

  “Alex, I won’t let you or anybody else butcher this picture. If you try to bar me from the lot before the editing is done—”

  “If I try to?” File smashed his fist down on the desk. “I’m not trying to, Goldsmith, I’m doing it! And this meeting is finished, do you hear? It’s all over. And there won’t be any more meetings, because I’m staying away from here until Saturday. All I got from this picture so far is ulcers, but Saturday the cure begins!”

  This was no feigned fury, Mel saw. The man was blind with rage, literally shaking with it. The gods he worshipped were Budget and Schedule, and he had seen them spat on and overthrown. Now, like a high priest fleeing a place of sacrilege, he strode to the door bristling with outrage.

  Cy’s pleading voice stopped him there, hand on the knob.

  “Look, Alex, we’ve known each other too long for this kind of nonsense. If we—”

  “If we what?” File wheeled around, hand still on the knob. “If we sit and talk about it all night, maybe I’ll change my mind? After what’s been going on here all summer? Well, get this straight, you lousy double-crosser, I wouldn’t!”

  The door was flung open. It slammed shut. File was gone.

  The four of them stood there staring at each other. It was so silent in the room that Mel heard every sound from outside as if it were being amplified—the highpitched piping of a train whistle in the distance, the creaking of the light globe outside the building swinging back and forth on its chain in the warm nighttime breeze, the sharp rapping of File’s footsteps as he walked toward his car.

  It was Betty who broke the silence in the room.

  “Dear God,” she whispered, and it sounded as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, “he meant it. He’ll ruin the picture and not even know he’s ruining it.”

  “Wait a second,” Mel said. “If Cy’s contract provides him with the right to edit the picture—”

  “Only it don’t,” said MacAaron. He was watching Cy closely. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  Cy grimaced.

  “Great. It only hurts when I laugh.”

  “You look lousy. If I thought you’d settle for one little drink—”

  “I’ll settle for it. Let’s just get the hell out of here, that’s all.”

  They went outside. The moon, low on the horizon, was only a wafer-thin crescent, but the stars were so thickly clustered overhead that they seemed to light the way to the parked cars with a pale phosphorescence.

  Then Mel noticed that File’s Cadillac was still standing there, headlights not on, but door to the driver’s seat swung open. And File was not in the car.

  Mel looked around at the dark expanse of the lot. Strange, he thought. File was a creature of rigid habit who got into his car when the day’s work was done and headed right out of the gate. He had never before been known to go wandering around the deserted lot after working hours, and what reason he might have for doing it now—

  Cy and MacAaron had been walking ahead, and Mel saw Cy suddenly pull up short. He walked back to Mel with MacAaron at his heels.

  “I could have sworn I heard that little punk going this way when we were inside,” he said. “He doesn’t have another car stashed around here, does he?”

  Mel shook his head. “Just the Caddie. The door is open, too, so it looks as if he was getting in when he changed his mind about it. Where do you figure he went?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cy. “All I know is that it’s not like him to make any tour of inspection this time of night.”

  They all stood and looked vaguely around the emptiness of the lot. There was a dim light suspended over the office door, another light over the gate, half revealing the gatekeeper’s house which was the size of a telephone booth, and that was all there was to be seen by way of illumination. The rest was the uncertain shadowy forms of buildings against
pitch blackness, the outline of the sound stage towering over all the others.

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” MacAaron said at last. “If something happened to him, we can always send poison ivy to the funeral. Come on, let’s get going.”

  It would have been better if he hadn’t said it, Mel thought resentfully. Then they could have shrugged off the mystery and left. Now the spoken suggestion that something might be wrong seemed to impose on them the burden of doing something about it, no matter how they felt about File.

  It appeared that Cy shared this thought.

  “You know,” he said to Mel, “Mac is right. There’s no need for you and Betty to hang around.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll wait it out a while. He’ll probably show up in a few minutes.”

  “Then we can wait with you,” Mel said, closing his ears to Betty’s muttered comment on File.

  The minutes dragged by. Then, at the sound of approaching footsteps, they all came to attention. But it wasn’t File who showed up out of the darkness, it was the projectionist who had screened the rushes for them. He had been rewinding the film, he explained in answer to Cy’s questions, and no, he had not seen Signor File since the screening. Buona sera, signora, signori—and off he went on his scooter amid a noisome belching of gasoline fumes.

  They watched the guard emerge from his booth to open the gate for him, the scooter disappear through the gate, and then all was silence again.

  “Hell,” Cy said abruptly, “we should have thought of it right off. That guard might have seen Alex.” And he shambled off to engage the guard in brisk conversation.

  When he returned, shaking his head, he said, “No dice. The guard heard the office door slam, but he was reading his paper in the booth so he didn’t see anything. And he says the only ones he hasn’t signed out yet are Alex and us—and Paolo Varese.”

  That was it, Mel thought. If they all felt about it the way he did, that was the ominous possibility they had all been trying to close their eyes to. It was the real reason for this sense of disaster in the air. File and Paolo Varese. The boy hidden out of sight in back of the car, File opening the door, seating himself behind the wheel, the knife or gun suddenly menacing him, the two figures, one prodding the other out of the car, moving off into the darkness so that the job could be finished in some safe corner.

  Or was there a skull-crushing blow delivered right there on the spot with one of those iron bars used in assembling the armatures for the statues, then the body hoisted to a muscular shoulder and borne away into that all-enveloping darkness? But the evidence would remain. Spatters of blood. Worse, perhaps.

  The temptation to look into the car, see what there was to be seen on its leather upholstery, rose in Mel along with a violent nausea. He weakly gestured toward the car.

  “Maybe we ought to—”

  “It’s all right,” Cy said, clearly taking pity on him, “I’ll do it.”

  Mel gratefully watched him walk to the car and lean inside it. Then the small glow of the light on the instrument panel could be seen behind the windshield.

  “The keys are in the lock,” Cy called in a muffled voice, “but there’s no sign of any trouble here.”

  The dashboard light went off, and he withdrew from the car. Keys in hand, he went around behind it, opened the trunk lid, and peered inside. He closed the lid and returned to them.

  “Nothing,” he said. “All we know is that Alex got into the car and then got out again.”

  “So?” Betty said.

  “So I’m going to look in at the carpenters’ shop and see if Varese is there in that studio of his. Meanwhile, Mac can take a look through the sound stage. But there’s no need for you and Mel—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Betty said. “It’s still the shank of the evening.”

  “All right, then you two take your car and run over to the backlot gate and check with the guard there. On the way back here cruise around and look over as much of the grounds as you can. Take your time and keep the headlights on full.”

  They followed instructions to the letter, and when they rejoined Cy and MacAaron in front of the office twenty minutes later, Mel was relieved to see that both still reflected only puzzlement.

  “Mac tells me the sound stage is all clear,” Cy said. “As for the kid, he’s in the shop working on that last statue, and he swears on his mother’s life he hasn’t been out of there since dinner. I believe him, too, not that he made any secret about how happy he’d be if Alex broke his neck. The fact is, if he really intended to jump Alex, he’d never do it out here in the open with that guard only fifty feet away and with us likely to walk out of the office any minute. So unless you can picture a chickenheart like Alex walking into that studio all by himself and looking for trouble—”

  “Not a chance,” said Mel.

  “That’s how I feel about it. What did the guard at the backlot have to say?”

  “Nothing, except that he locked up the gate at quitting time and hasn’t seen a soul around here since then. We covered the lot, too, and all we turned up was a couple of stray cats. Now where does that leave us?”

  Cy shook his head. “With a ten-foot fence all around and no way out for Alex unless he learned how to fly with his hands and feet. He’s sure as hell around here somewhere, but I can’t think where. The only thing left to do is comb through every building and see what turns up. Mac will help me with that. You get Betty back to the hotel. She looks dead on her feet.”

  She did, Mel saw. And he could well imagine what she was thinking. As long as Paolo was in the clear—

  “Well, if you can get along without us,” he said.

  “We’ll manage. Oh, yeah, on your way out, find some excuse to have the guard look into your car trunk. Make sure he gets a good look. And don’t worry about what he’ll find there, because I already checked it. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” said Mel, “not as long as Alex wasn’t in it.”

  He was wakened early the next morning by a phone call from Cy at the lot reporting that he and MacAaron—and Paolo Varese, too, when he had finished the twelfth statue—had searched every inch of the lot and turned up no trace of File.

  “He’s gone, all right,” Cy said tiredly. “I even called his hotel just now on the wild chance he somehow got out of here, but they told me he didn’t show up all night and isn’t there now. So I figured the best thing to do was call in the police. They’ll be here in a little while.”

  “I’ll get out there right away. But wasn’t this calling in the police pretty fast, Cy? It’s only been a few hours altogether.”

  “I know, but later on someone might ask why we didn’t get the cops in as soon as we smelled something wrong. Anyhow, it’s done now, and the only question is what we tell them about that little fracas in the office just before Alex walked out. I’ll be honest with you, Mel. I think it would be a mistake to say anything about the film editing or about being barred from the lot after Friday. Betty was there, too, so if they want to start pinning things on us—”

  Mel glanced at Betty who was sitting up in bed and regarding him with alarm. “What is it?” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. No,” he said in answer to Cy’s query, “I was talking to Betty. I’ll explain everything to her. She’ll understand. I suppose you already talked it over with Mac?”

  “Yes. He sees it the way we do.”

  “And how much do we tell about Paolo?”

  “Anything we’re asked to tell. Why not?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Cy. If the cops find out what happened when I drove the kid home in the rain the other night—”

  “Let them. As long as he had nothing to do with Alex disappearing, there’s nothing they can pin on him. And maybe you didn’t notice, but Wanda Pericola was standing right outside that office window when you were giving Alex hell about him and Varese’s sister. What’ll you bet Wanda spills the beans first chance she gets?”

>   It was not a fair bet, Mel knew. It was too much of a sure thing.

  The police, two men in plainclothes, were already at the lot when he and Betty arrived there, and, as the day passed, Mel saw that in terms of the official attitude it was divided into three distinct periods.

  First, there was the cynical period when the two plainclothesmen smilingly indicated that this whole affair was obviously a publicity stunt arranged by File Productions.

  Then, persuaded otherwise, they became the sober investigators, ordering everyone to report to the sound stage for a brisk questioning and a show of identification papers.

  And finally, now thoroughly baffled and angry, they called headquarters for help and led a squad of uniformed men through a painstaking search of the entire lot.

  Close behind the squad of police came reporters and a gang of paparazzi—free-lance photographers, most of them mounted on battered scooters—and the sight of them gathered before the front gate, aiming their cameras through the wiring, shouting questions at anyone who passed within hailing distance, seemed to annoy Inspector Conti, the senior of the two plainclothesmen, almost as much as his failure to locate the missing Alexander File.

  “Nuisances,” he said when Cy asked about holding some sort of press conference in the office. “They will stay on the other side of that fence where they belong. There can be no doubt that Signor File, alive or dead, is here inside the perimeter of that fence, and until we find him no one is permitted to enter or leave. It will not take long. Assuming the worst, that a crime has been committed, it is impossible to dispose of the victim beneath the pavement which covers the entire area. And thanks to your foresight, signore—” he nodded at Cy who wearily shrugged off the compliment “—this place has been hermetically sealed since immediately after the disappearance. There can be no question about it. Signor File is here. It is only a matter of hours at the most before we find him.”

  The Inspector was a stubborn man. Not until sunset, after his squad had, to no avail, moved across the lot like a swarm of locusts, not until File’s records and correspondence had futilely been examined page by page, did he acknowledge temporary defeat.