The Noir Mystery MEGAPACK ™: 25 Modern and Classic Mysteries

by Joseph J. Millard

  He pushed out a sullen lower lip. “Well, you told the Mahatma you was a friend of the Dulac jane, and—”

  “Ah, step aside before I lose patience and kick out your front teeth. I said I was going out witch hunting, didn’t I?”

  “Oh,” he relaxed. “Now I get it. You’re going out to find the broad, eh?”

  “That I am,” I said, and took off for the Hollister home. But when I got there and told Lola’s husband what had happened and what I wanted her for, Pete Hollister swung a roundhouse haymaker that was aimed full at my dewlaps. Had it landed it would have knocked me into the middle of next November.

  It didn’t land, which was a break for my insurance policy. An inch was all it missed me, but an inch is all you need when you’ve got fast reflexes. I stepped inside the punch and said softly:

  “I hate to hurt you, Pete. Don’t make me.” He was big and tough and full of fire. His tallness topped my six-feet-plus with a little to spare and he outweighed my hundred and ninety by a good ten pounds, maybe more. He didn’t have much science, though, and besides, he’d telegraphed that blow before he threw it at me, so I let it zip around my neck. Then I rammed him backward and pinioned him firmly against his patio wall.

  It was a modest patio with a modest swimming pool, behind an equally modest stucco wigwam. To get there you rolled up through Laurel Canyon almost to San Fernando Valley, then twisted to the left on a corkscrew cutoff that led into a tiny, boxed-in arroyo. Here Lola Dulac and the Hollister ham had built their nest after that Nevada wedding ceremony six months ago, and here I’d come to intrude upon their private paradise. In exchange for which I had almost got my block knocked off.

  The drive from the Mahatma’s stash on Van Ness had taken less than thirty minutes, whereupon I’d jingled the doorbell and been welcomed by Peter Hollister in person. He was young and blond and vigorously muscular, with a theatrical voice and matinee idol mannerisms that would always keep him from being as big a star as his handsomeness would otherwise warrant.

  In the pictures he always played second fiddle to his wife, who was a genuinely talented actress. Not that Pete seemed to mind this state of affairs. In the years I had known him he had grown accustomed to a minor spot on the screen, and if he ever had any ambition he had long since subordinated it to the meteoric climb of Lola’s spectacular career. In brief, he was an incurable ham. He knew it, he couldn’t do anything about it, and so what?

  CHAPTER IV

  INDIGNANT HUSBAND

  You can’t help liking a fellow who realizes his own limitations that way, particularly when he accepts it gracefully. As soon as I crossed his threshold he affably offered me a nip of Vat 69, which happens to be my favorite beverage. I took a rain check, however, because I had more important things on my mind.

  “I’m looking for Lola,” I told him.

  “She’s not here.”

  “This is important,” I said. “Don’t lie to me, Pete. Trot her forth.”

  He studied me. “Hold on, Sherlock. You’re not acting like an old friend who sent us a wedding present—you’re talking like a detective on the prowl. What’s the idea?”

  “I just told you. I want Lola.”

  “And I just told you she’s not at home.” He gave me a cynical grin. “Maybe you’d like to frisk the premises?”

  “Thanks.” I pretended not to realize he was being sarcastic and took a brisk stroll through the various rooms and even inspected the rear grounds, the garage and the patio. It was refreshing to see a movie star’s home that wasn’t dripping with opulence. Ordinarily, when an actress breaks into the upper brackets of Hollywood’s financial nobility, she surrounds herself with liveried lackeys, a mansion the size of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and three or four boudoirs finished with mink wallpaper.

  But Lola Dulac had both dainty tootsies on the ground, and if you believed the gossip along the Sunset Strip she was a mighty close cookie with a buck. It had probably hurt her all the way to her insteps to have extension phones put in the bedrooms. According to rumor, she held onto her money the way iron filings cling to a magnet. She was one star who wouldn’t wind up rocking away her old age on the front porch of the motion picture academy home for indigents.

  Also, she was a star I was unable to locate anywhere around her undistinguished shanty. “Sorry, Pete,” I apologized to young Hollister after I’d strolled around the swimming pool and even peered down into the water. “It wasn’t that I disbelieved you, but I had to make sure.”

  “So all right. So you made sure.”

  “Yeah. Where is she?”

  “None of your business until you tell me what it’s all about. I don’t like mystification. I’m beginning not to like private detectives, especially a private detective named Nick Ransom, see?”

  I lighted a cigarette. “Lots of folks don’t like me. Look, Pete, is your marriage to Lola on the up and up?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

  “Did she have another husband ahead of you?” I said. “One she neglected to divorce?”

  “Now you’re being fantastic, flatfoot.”

  “I’m in a fantastic racket, and answer my question. Did Lola ever mention being hooked up with a fortune teller calling himself Mahatma Guru?”

  Hollister’s jaw jutted and his kisser became an ugly thin red slit. “Who is Mahatma Guru?”

  “A dead guy,” I said. “A dead guy who used his last breath to name Lola as his killer.”

  That was when the Hollister hambo swung on me. “Don’t you dare call my wife a murderess!” he yelped and came at me.

  I eluded the poke and jammed him to the patio wall. “Quit acting like a sap,” I said sternly as I kept his long, meaty fingers from wrapping themselves around my windpipe. “In the first place, I’m not here to make a pinch. I just want to see Lola before the cops get to her. I’ve got to hear her side of the story—if she has a story.” Then I got his arm in a lock that would ruin him if I poured on the pressure. “Besides, I didn’t call Lola a murderess. The Mahatma said it.”

  “You’re a liar!”

  “Maybe the Mahatma was, but I’m not. I heard him with my own little pink ears.”

  “Then you’ll never repeat his testimony,” Hollister said wildly, writhing in my clutch. “I’ll see to that!”

  I said: “Be yourself, Pete! I’m not the only one that heard it. There was another witness, a stooge named Reginald Percival Clancy, believe it or not. I left him to guard the corpse until the law arrived. By now he’s told them the whole thing, with gestures. In fact, the cops are probably on their way here right now.”

  He stopped struggling and fixed a frightened gaze on me. “You mean they’ll arrest Lola and maybe convict her?”

  “There’s very little maybe about it, junior.”

  “But—but—” he choked. “No! I can’t let that happen, Ransom! I’ve got to do something—you’ve got to help me!” Sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “Don’t blow a gasket,” I said. “That won’t help.”

  “But Nick, what are we going to do?”

  I said: “That ‘we’ stuff sounds sort of foolish when you won’t even tell me where to find her.”

  “Listen,” he said. “If I tell you—if I take you to her—will you promise not to take her to jail or turn her over to the cops? Will you give her a chance?”

  “You’re asking a lot,” I said. “You’re asking me to betray my oath and jeopardize my license. What’s in it for me?”

  “What do you mean, what’s in it for you? You’re my friend and Lola’s, aren’t you?”

  I lifted a lip. “Forget that. I’m in this business for the dough. I’m saving up a retirement fund so I can quit before some wise disciple engraves my vital statistic with a bullet.” I rubbed the ball of my thumb across my fing
ertips. “You know that folding stuff they put in banks?”

  “You heel,” he whispered, looking shocked. Then he said: “Okay, if that’s how it’s got to be. How much?”

  “You’re doing the buying. Make an offer.”

  “Fifty dollars?”

  “Don’t be parsimonious,” I parried.

  “All right, then, a hundred.”

  “A niggardly bid if I ever heard one.”

  “It’s all I’ve got available. Every last dime.”

  “I’ve been known to accept checks.”

  He flushed. “Our account’s in Lola’s name. She’d have to make it out and sign it.” He brightened. “Which she’ll do. I know she will. She’s got it to burn. She’ll pay you any price you ask. Any amount you name—if you get her out of this murder mess.”

  “Better slip me that century you mentioned,” I said. “Advance retainer, you know. Cash on the line before we start.”

  He was in no position to argue. He got out his wallet, dredged up a thin sheaf of crisp green lettuce; mostly fives, tens and singles.

  “Bloodsucker!” he called me bitterly.

  I let him have that one—he was entitled to it. I said: “And remember, I guarantee nothing. If Lola’s guilty, it’s just too bad. But if she convinces me the Mahatma lied about her, I’ll do everything possible.” I tried to make this ambiguity sound sincere, but I had my mental fingers crossed.

  Hollister swallowed the routine. “I know I can count on you—now that you’ve had your pound of flesh.” He added sourly: “You’re a chiseling creep, but you’re tops in your line, and even if Lola killed that bearded skunk, I’ll stand by her. I’ll stick to her no matter what happens. Let’s go to her.”

  We went out to my jalopy. “Where?” I said.

  “Paratone. They’re shooting some night retakes on her new picture. For heaven’s sake, hurry!”

  I didn’t need him to tell me to hurry. Just as I swung out of his private driveway another car came rocketing toward us, barreling into the arroyo with its red spotlight cutting a gash in the velvet night and its siren shrieking banshee soprano to the echoing hills.

  “Company coming!” I said. “Unless I miss my guess a mile and two-fifths that will be Ole Brunvig and his homicide heroes.”

  We were blocked. The arroyo road was a narrow blacktop ribbon barely wide enough to let two cars pass each other if they crawled in second gear. The way that prowl buggy was whamming toward us in the road’s very center, there wasn’t a chance in the world for us to squeeze by. Not unless we took off and flew.

  Hollister moaned: “We’re sunk! They’ll nab us and run us downtown and leave men to wait here for Lola when she comes home, and they’ll arrest her!”

  “Quiet,” I growled. “Hang onto your bridgework, bub. You paid me a century and you’re about to get value received.” I then put my lever in low, yanked the wheel around, gunned hard on the gas, and went straight up the side of the mountain.

  CHAPTER V

  FRIGHTENED STAR

  My rear treads clawed at rocks and gravel and sagebrush, took a deep bite of traction. My front wheels bounced like dice in the bottom of a cement mixer, tried to twist the tiller out of my desperate fists. I hung on, torturing the machinery until it squealed for mercy, and we kept going up.

  Far below, that cop sedan roared by with its exhaust spitting sparks. Presently you could hear its brakes screeching as it skidded to a stop on Pete Hollister’s driveway. Then I bent my course downward again.

  For an instant my coupe teetered and almost went over on its side, tugged by gravity’s invisible ropes. I fought the wheel and got past the danger point, headed for the highway. We rocked and jounced like an idiot on a pogo stick, or a mountain goat leaping across a drainage gulley, and finally got some paving under us again. Heading buckety-blip for the Laurel Canyon highway, I remarked: “Blamed good thing I took postgraduate work in movie stunt driving, eh? Now before our headquarters friends get turned around to trail us, we’ll be long gone.”

  The Hollister ham mopped at his mush with a limp handkerchief and looked like a man who had just seen his guardian angel molt a quart of tail feathers. Shaken, he huddled beside me in a speechless condition, which suited me fine. I wasn’t feeling very conversational anyhow. I settled deeper in the seat and aimed for the Paratone lot out in the valley near Warner Brothers.

  At the main gate Hollister waved his employee’s pass and an imitation cop on guard duty nodded us through. Parking the coupe away out back near the big open air scene dock, I hopped out.

  “Come on, Pete, let’s not waste time. Where’s Lola working?”

  “Stage Ten, she told me.” He spurted ahead of me, his long ungainly legs working like scissors as he hurried by the scene dock and down a long, meagerly lighted studio street. I pelted in pursuit, past a row of gigantic sound stage buildings with roofs like magnified Quonset huts, dug in my heels where Hollister had halted before an oversized sliding steel door that had a black numeral “10” painted on it. The door was closed, and in a square box with a frosted glass window a red light glowed. Even as I looked, the red winked off and a green bulb lighted up.

  When the red was on, it meant a scene was being shot inside and you didn’t dare open the door for fear of spoiling a take. But as soon as the green showed, I knew the cameras had stopped rolling. I shouldered Hollister aside, applied my heft to the portal, slid it open along its overhead track.

  Inside, on a lighted drawing room set, I buttonholed a cameraman. “Hey, pal, is Lola Dulac on deck?”

  “Nope. We’re holding the next scene for her. She was here when we started shooting after supper but she got a phone call and had to scram for a while. We’re waiting for her to come back now.” He took a look at his strap watch. “Maybe she’s in her dressing bungalow getting ready. Tried there?”

  “I will,” I said, and turned to Hollister. “Show me the way.”

  He nodded and again went ahead of me. We circled the writers’ building and the studio commissary, both of them now dark and deserted, and presently came to a double row of miniature cottages not much bigger than automobile trailers but all fancied up with pastel paint, vine-covered trellises and half-pint porches. Each bungalow was just about large enough to accommodate a single dressing room and a shower, and lights gleamed in the one at the south end of the string.

  “That’s hers,” Hollister said, and went into a sprint.

  I kept pace, and we reached the tiny building in a dead heat. By stretching, I got the doorknob before he could seize it. I started to give it a twist.

  He grabbed my arm. “Just a minute. Maybe she’s undressed. I’ll go first, if you please.”

  “At a time like this you worry about modesty?” I snapped. “Be your age! I’ve seen unclad cuties before, and I rarely cast glances at other men’s wives—especially if there’s killing involved.” I wasn’t taking any chance that he might go in and spirit Lola Dulac out a back door before I could talk to her. “Let go of me.”

  He let go, and I put my weight to the woodwork. It gave, and before you could whistle Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto I inserted myself into the dressing bungalow.

  Lola Dulac was there, sure enough, and she wasn’t undraped—but her emotions were, through. She was as pallid as milk. Her lips were quivering out of control and there was fright in her eyes: stark, undiluted fear. Her small form was dressed in a low-cut evening gown of white satin that had probably cost Paratone several hundred dollars, and the way it set off her curves made it worth every dollar. But I had no time for art appreciation—I was too busy wondering what had shocked her into the obvious panic she was showing.

  I said: “Hi, Lola! Pardon the haste, but I’ve got some questions that need answering—”

  “I’ll ask them,” Pete Hollister said from behind me. “
Lola, my darling, did you shoot a fortune teller named Mahatma Guru tonight as he sat at his horoscope table?”

  She walled up her eyes and pitched forward in a swoon.

  I caught her as she dropped. Her knees buckled and she collapsed in my clutch, whereupon I carried her to a tiny divan, stretched her on it.

  “Water, Pete; quick!” I told him.

  Hollister barged to the miniature bathroom, came back with a dripping towel and squished it on his wife’s colorless face. Gasping, she snapped out of her faint.

  “Wh-wha-what—where—”

  “Better stay conscious, kitten,” I advised her. “There’s not much time left.” Then I gave her the story, fast and complete. I told her how I’d been taken to the Mahatma’s home, how he’d accused her of plugging him and then died. I ended with: “He claimed you were his wife.”

  She drew a ragged breath. “God help me—I was.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was his wife.”

  Hollister’s optics stood out like oysters on stalks. “Lola—you don’t mean that.”

  “It was back East,” she said in a voice suddenly drained dry of inflection. “Years ago. He didn’t call himself Mahatma Guru in those days, he was billed as Wizardo. He had a magic act, and did fake mind reading. I was his assistant in the audience; we worked codes. Later I married him.”

  I said: “And divorced him subsequently, of course?”

  “N-no. He got into the fake spiritualism racket and bilked a number of people. The police caught up with him and he was sent to prison. He escaped a few months after that, and then I—I got word he’d been killed in an automobile accident. I came out here to Hollywood thinking I was a widow, thinking I was free. I got a chance in pictures, and made good, and—” Brine coursed down her wan cheeks as she turned an appealing glance to Hollister. “I met you, Pete, and we fell in love and got married, and I thought I’d finally found happiness. Then just a few nights ago he phoned me. At home. He wasn’t dead. He was alive!”