The Case of the Angry Actress: A Masao Masuto Mystery

by Howard Fast

  “We are penniless, the way you watch every dollar!”

  “Masao!”

  She always knew when something happened inside of him. It was not the things that occurred outside of him that worried her, but the strange responses that sometimes overtook him. That was the way it was tonight. In bed she left a space between their bodies, and when he whispered to her, she pretended that she was asleep.

  Sleep came hard to him. He would doze off and come awake again. He dreamed of being lost in strange places—jungles and cities and boundless plains—but in each and every place there was Beverly Hills. Yet finally, he fell fully asleep and slept until the alarm awakened him at seven in the morning.

  This morning, he was more than solicitous of his wife, Kati. He went out of his way to help her with the smallest child and then he made the seven wonderful faces for Michael, who would spend the day in bed. He was almost ready to leave when the telephone rang. Kati answered it. Masuto was outside the kitchen door when she called him, “It’s Pete Bones.”

  He came back and picked up the phone and said, “Masao, Pete. I’m on my way out.”

  “Well, just hold still for a moment. We got a make on Gertrude Bestner.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, no—no, I don’t believe it. You only give us the life and death howl, and research works fifteen hours straight, and now you ask me, who is Gertrude Bestner.”

  “Wait—you mean Samantha Adams, nee Gertrude Bestner?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You mean you’ve found her?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Bones said. “All that’s mortal. She’s buried in the County Pauper’s Reserve.”

  “Dead.”

  “Very dead, Masao.”

  “You know—funny thing, but I felt it. The poor kid was a loser.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When did she die?” Masuto asked.

  “Nineteen fifty-six, age nineteen, pneumonia, Mt. Sinai Hospital, emergency case; picked her up in the street where she had fainted; malnutrition, semistarvation, pulmonary—she died seven hours after admission to the hospital. Her death certificate was signed by the ward resident, name of Harry Levine. Practices medicine in Brentwood. I have name, address and telephone. Do you want it?”

  “No,” said Masuto.

  “Funny thing, Masao, when she was admitted she gave them the name of Samantha Adams—the way these kids cling to the dream that it’s theirs to make big, real big. It wasn’t until she died that they got her real name from the ID in her purse.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Chicago—but no connection, no family, no nearest of kin, nothing. A kid dies and it’s like she’s never been. Jesus, there are times when you could take this job and shove it right up your ever-loving.”

  “It’s not the job, it’s just the way things are,” Masuto said.

  “I suppose so. Look, we got her effects from the morgue file. Not much. A purse, a few incidentals—you know what a kid keeps with her—and a little leather-bound day book with a few phone numbers and some diary entries.”

  “Have you checked the phone numbers?”

  “Aside from agencies and the unions and that kind of thing, they’re all discontinued. She’s got the number of Sidney Burke’s PR outfit, but I guess you expected that.”

  “I expected it,” Masuto said. “Did you read everything?”

  “Well, it wasn’t no War and Peace. Sure, I read it all.”

  “Anything?”

  “Well, it depends on what you want. I got it here in front of me. On December 25th, 1955, she wrote, ‘This is Xmas. It’s a lousy Xmas. That’s all I can say. It’s a lousy, lousy Xmas. I had no date on Xmas Eve, and I walked around and I walked up to the Strip and. I almost began to cry for feeling sorry for myself. Then I walked over to Fairfax and I bought a fruit cake for thirty-five cents. That left me with eighteen cents, but I had to have something even for a lousy Xmas like this. So I went home and stuffed myself with the fruit cake. It wasn’t much good. It wasn’t anything like the fruit cakes Mrs. Walensky used to make in Chi. They were great fruitcakes. God, I wish I was a kid again. I don’t. It was lousy to be a kid. But God, I wish I was a kid again. Today, I’m sitting here in my room waiting for Santa Claus. This is Samantha, Santa Claus. Wishing you a lousy merry Xmas—”

  “That’s enough,” said Masuto.

  “There’s more. A million laughs.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “That’s a fine way to thank a buddy. Do you know what I told the boss—I told him to bill Beverly Hills for the time spent. You can afford it. You can afford to pave your streets with two-bit pieces.”

  “I’ll tell them that at City Hall.”

  “Do you want to look at this stuff?”

  “No.”

  “At least be grateful.”

  “Thanks,” said Masuto. He replaced the telephone and then stood there staring at it.

  “Masao,” his wife said.

  Not moving, he stared at the telephone. Perhaps not hearing, because she asked him again.

  “Masao, please, what happened? Did something terrible happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “A girl died. A little girl died.”

  “How awful! Is it someone close to you? Who is it?”

  “I don’t know her. I never saw her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She died ten years ago, and they buried her in a pauper’s grave. Her name was Samantha. That was her stage name. Her real name was Gertrude Besther, and in the whole world today, maybe only Pete Bones and I speak that name aloud.”

  “Samantha. Pete Bones. What strange names the Anglos use!”

  “Anglos?”

  “You don’t like the word?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a word. We’re not Mexicans.”

  “Is it a word only for the Mexicans? What do we call them?”

  “People. Just people. That’s enough.”

  “You’re in a strange mood,” she said. “This case has changed you. When will it be over?”

  “Today, I think.”

  “Oh, God—Masao—”

  “I will be in no danger,” he said impatiently. “Nothing will happen to me. We will have a good dinner tonight, and I will tell you all about it.”

  “And it will be over?”

  “All over and done with. I promise you that, and then I can go back to being a Beverly Hills policeman.”

  “And tomorrow is your day off,” she said with delight. “We can have a picnic.”

  “If Michael is well enough.”

  “And where will we go, Masao?”

  “To San Fernando, I think, to Soko’s place. He promised that he would have the Sashu Roses from Japan. They are new, quite small, almost a mustard color, and they have a very good, strong smell. I am tired of these new beautiful tea roses that have no scent. We will eat in his garden, and then I will bring home the rose bushes and plant them.”

  “Good. Good.”

  He kissed her and went out to the car. The windshield was blurred with the wet morning mist, and upon it, in big block letters, he traced out SAMANTHA. Then he wiped it away with the palm of his hand, and then got in the car and drove off.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Frank Jefferson

  IN the mood that gripped him this morning, Masuto was unable to face the freeway with its maniacal roar of seventy-mile-an-hour traffic, and he decided to take a few minutes longer on his journey to the Valley and World Wide Studios by going through Beverly Drive to Coldwater Canyon. He was glad that he did. This was one of those utterly improbable Los Angeles mornings when there is neither smog nor fog and the air is as sharp and as clean as crystal. When he passed over the rise of Coldwater, the Valley lay etched below him, so clean and clear that he imagined he could see San Fernando in the distance.

  Almost, the Valley reminded him of the way it had been when he was just a kid, with its acres of oran
ge grove and mango grove and avocado and pecan, its woods and stately avenues of eucalyptus and little brooks and Mexican and Japanese farmers, its tiny towns, its fiestas and roadside picnic places. Scattered around the Valley were relatives and friends. Masuto’s father then had an old, old Model A Ford, and when it was loaded with venerable family and grinning children, it was always a great adventure to see whether it could puff and grind its way over wonderful Coldwater Canyon Road.

  All that gone—and overnight. The proliferating hundred thousand dollar houses had turned Coldwater into a sort of street, and every inch of the Valley below was subdivided and covered with frantically built wooden houses. The orchards were gone and the ranches were gone. Thirty thousand dollars an acre was a price no farmer could resist, and most of the year its green wetness lay under a cover of yellow, noxious smog.

  He pushed all this away from him, telling himself that he was only a cop and that too much halfbaked philosophy was notoriously bad for policemen. And then, when he reached Ventura Boulevard, he deliberately went on to the freeway and raced over the last few miles to World Wide Studios at seventy miles an hour, as any proper Southern Californian should.

  It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning, but the vast sprawling studio was already awake and working: the stream of extras parking their cars in the great expanse of the employees’ lot, the stars parking their Ferreris and Rollses and Thunderbirds in the few precious shaded spots; the little studio electrics shunting back and forth; the grips and carpenters and electricians walking from their cars to the stages where they would work this morning; the executives, the producers and directors, halting in little groups of emphatic importance; the office workers pouring into the cafeteria for the cup of coffee they missed at home; the writers dragging their feet, bowed in the inevitable gloom of their profession; the cowboys and badmen and Civil War soldiers and gowned and beribboned ladies giving that final and delightful sense of color to the gigantic dream-factory—all of it a never-ending wonder to Masuto.

  He always watched and reacted; it was always new and exciting. He waved to the guards at the gate as he drove in, and he preempted one of the spaces marked off for security and then he walked over to the security cottage, where Frank Jefferson presided. Frank Jefferson was a grizzled man in his middle sixties, a onetime cop, onetime head of one of the largest private detective agencies on the West Coast, and now, at a better salary than he had ever earned, in charge of the private police force of forty uniformed and un-uniformed men who guarded World Wide Studios.

  He sat back in his swivel chair now, his feet—in the low, embossed cowboy boots he affected—up on his desk, and regarded Masuto with interest and respect.

  “Masao,” he said, “you are not the model of a public servant. You got a mind in that noodle of yours. Come out here and I’ll start you at twelve thousand. A year from now you’ll head up my plainclothes division at eighteen thousand. What do you say?”

  Masuto smiled and shook his head.

  “All right, the hell with it. No cop really has brains, or what for would he be a cop? What can I do for you?”

  “Got fifteen minutes?”

  “I got the whole morning if you need it.” He opened his intercom and said to the girl outside, “Bubby, hold any calls, and if you do it real nice, I’ll give you a brand new set of black lace panties I got in my drawer.”

  He grinned at Masuto. “Lousy sense of humor, huh? But I got a good reputation. I stopped patting behinds five years ago, so I can say anything I want to. I’m an eccentric—just like you, Masao. For half a century I been a coarse old bastard, but now I’m an eccentric. How about that?”

  “It’s an improvement.”

  “Ah! Like hell it is! It’s a case of gonadal decay. Now what can I do for the police force of Beverly Hills?”

  Masuto told him. He told him the entire story, and Jefferson listened with interest and approval.

  “Pretty good,” he said when Masuto had finished. “Pretty damn good.”

  “You agree with me?”

  “Well! That’s the question, isn’t it? As a cop, Masao, I am inclined to agree. As a member of the jury, I don’t convict on what you got. It’s a series of indications but not evidence. The curse of a cop is no different from the curse of the world—subjectivity. Like you, I liked Al Greenberg. He was direct, simple, and kind—and if that ain’t unusual in this business, I don’t know what is. It’s too easy to get mad at the thought of some swine knocking him over that way. As for Mike Tulley—well, I’ll tell you. With actors it’s this way, you either like them or you don’t. Same as with kids. You either like kids or you don’t, and if you don’t there’s nothing a kid can do that’s right. Myself, I like actors. I know what they are. They are vain, narcissistic, totally self-absorbed, selfish, self-pitying, self-indulgent, and maybe a few other things. They are also generous, outgoing, emotional and sometimes the best kind of people to have around. So maybe I’ll cry a few tears over Mike Tulley—and you might too. So judgement is not to be trusted one hundred percent. I think you’re right, but even if you are wrong, it’s good odds that you’ll smoke out the bastard responsible for all this. I don’t like the thought of a murder at World Wide. I don’t like the thought that a killer can operate in this studio with impunity. God knows, you got enough going in a studio to give any cop gray hair just in the ordinary run of things. I don’t want any carte blanche for murder, and I like to keep my own house clean. Now what do you want from me?”

  “Can you take a walk over to Stage 6?” Masuto asked.

  “All right.”

  They walked across the studio grounds toward Stage 6. Jefferson wore a big, expensive, pearl-colored Stetson, a sport coat with gray checks, and he packed a forty-five caliber revolver in a shoulder holster. “Protective coloration,” he had once told Masuto. “It makes me a part of the place.” But he was consciously a character, a big man, well over six feet. He knew everyone and said hello to everyone.

  “Always let them underestimate you, Masao,” he said. “But you know that as well as I do.”

  State 6 was a large, cement-covered square block of a building. It completed a street of stages and processing houses, and then there was a big open space, bounded on three sides with stages and storerooms, but open on the fourth side to the thousand-acre stretch of sage and mesquite-covered hills that made up the vast back lot of World Wide Studios. Up in those hills was all that was necessary to the operation of a modern, contained studio: ranches, blockhouses, frontier forts, Indian villages, lakes, rivers, falls, sections of steamboats, an African village, a French town a medieval castle, a casbah, a New York street scene, a London Street scene, alpine peaks, cliffs—all of it linked by a winding, improbable road which was the basis for the studio tour.

  “This square,” said Jefferson, “is the first stop for the tour. You know, star’s dressing room, sound stage—they go through Stage 11, over there. Then they snoop through the carpentry shop and the plaster shop. Neither shop does the real work anymore. We’ve moved the main effort over to West Studio, but we still do enough here to give it a feeling of validity. This tour gives me a headache, and I’ll have to put on six or seven extra men, but it is still the most original piece of entertainment anyone has thought of for a long time. Well, like I said, all the tour cars stop here. There’s the first one coming now.”

  He pointed down the studio street to where a gaily painted bus of sorts had appeared. An open bus, its seats stretched full across like the seats in a San Francisco cable car, with front, back and sides, were open except for a striped yellow and black awning. The awning was supported by six upright posts. The bus carried some twenty-four people. There was no question but that they were out-of-state sightseers. They wore sport shirts, carried cameras, and ran strongly to old folks and children; and they had the incredibly innocent, ready-to-believe look of people transported to some place as unlikely as the moon.

  “The bus is a six-cylinder GM special job, geared very low,” Jeff
erson said. “The best it can do is twenty miles an hour, but on that one-lane road, that’s more than enough. There are hairpin turns up there on the mountain that you wouldn’t want to joyride over. Well, enough of that. You want to bring your kids out here for the tour, I’ll get them passes.”

  “That’s good of you,” Masuto said.

  “It is, bubby. Even the studio executives pay. Now let’s get down to cases. Here’s Stage 6. What do you want me to do?”

  “You understand, Frank, that I can’t map out all that’s going to happen. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe our killer knows it’s a bluff.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But the odds are that I was believed, and if I was believed, the killer is as cool as ice and will plan to take out the witness. The killer is insane, and therefore the plan will be somewhat insane. Now we cannot anticipate the plan, but we can lay down certain rules for the game. Phoebe Greenberg will be outside. By the way—where will she make up?”

  “They got their makeup department on Stage 9. They’re shooting two pilots, one on Stage 9 and the other on Stage 10, but they coordinate the makeup and do it all on Stage 9. The makeup girl there is Jesse Klein, a real bubby. Why don’t we walk over and talk to her?”

  “Good enough.” They started over to Stage 9. “She comes over from Stage 9 to Stage 6. By then, I’ll have the whole lot of them, with the exception of Phoebe, in Stage 6.”

  “If they show.”

  “They’ll show. You can be sure of that. Now here’s what I mean when I say that I can lay down certain rules for the game. I tell them that they must stay on stage—that under no condition is anyone to leave the stage until I return. Then I go outside and meet Phoebe. Then, when I have left, one of them will find some way to evade the others and get out of the soundstage.”

  “Won’t the others miss him right off?”

  “No. The place is too big—and they’re all mavericks. They won’t stay together no matter what I tell them. Leave it to our killer to work it out.”

  “This is a mighty iffy business, bubby,” Jefferson said.