Built for Trouble

by Al Fray

  To the Homicide Division, L.A. Police Department:

  The items in this bag are evidence of murder. The starting point is the rescue of lifeguard Edward Baker (myself) by Miss Nola Norton last July. It was a neatly camouflaged publicity stunt rigged by Nola, her agent Joe Lamb, and Chief Lifeguard Hank Sawyer, but without my knowledge or help. This publicity skyrocketed Nola into national prominence and a big-money movie contract. Hank Sawyer, who had information which would have blackballed Nola in the picture industry, tried a shakedown once he had helped make Nola a profitable target for such action. Sawyer apparently got too greedy, and Nola and Lamb murdered Sawyer. Here are the facts:

  The blackmail gambit was based on a prostitution rap Nola Norton took about a dozen years ago. Her name is really Natalie Novak; she lived in Oceanside, California; she admitted guilt in the lay-for-pay operation in San Diego. She accused Hank Sawyer of organizing this deal but he had already left town. These facts can be quickly checked in both Oceanside and San Diego.

  Investigation will show that Sawyer never supplied the liquor for any get-togethers at his place; hence he would have had no reason to deceive anyone with cheap booze in fancy bottles. The “accidental death” (by lethal booze) verdict falls apart.

  The five pictures here presented are the ones the police were unable to find from the pin-ups on Sawyer’s wall at the time of his death. The reason for their being taken down is self-evident—Sawyer pulled them off the wall but kept them for a club in his blackmail game. A check with some of the lifeguards in L.A. will prove that these were at one time on Hank’s wall. They are obviously Natalie Novak, now known as Nola Norton, and they link Nola to the past she had to cover up—even at the price of murder.

  Finally, there is the beer can. I found it where Nola “rescued” me in the waters off the beach at Playa Del Rey. Fingerprints will show that both Hank Sawyer and Nola Norton handled this homemade aqualung. It is the link which joins the two of them in the phony rescue, and ultimately in the death of one at the hands of the other.

  And as this suitcase has come to your attention, there is doubtless one more “accidental death” on the books by now, also arranged by Nola Norton and Joe Lamb. The victim will be—

  Edward Baker

  I slid the letter into an envelope, sealed it, and wrote on the outside that both suitcase and envelope were to be given to the L.A. police immediately. It was all any good investigator would need. I slipped it into the suitcase, locked it, and drove down to the Union Depot. It took only a few minutes to run in, boost it into a locker, shove a quarter into the slot, and depart with the key. When I got back to the photography shop, my eight-by-ten print of the pictures and beer can was soaking in the rinse.

  “Turned out damn good,” I observed, looking over the guy’s shoulder. He nodded, caught it with a pair of wooden tongs, and lifted it out.

  “Sure did. A close-up like that, you really get the detail. More’n you need, most likely, if you’re just trying to give that advertising agency a rough idea.”

  I grunted and picked up the negative. He rolled the wet print in a piece of wax paper, and I paid him the eight bucks. An hour later I was back in my little apartment in Santa Monica, the wet print pinned to the breadboard so the paper wouldn’t curl up as it dried. The man was right. The detail was strong. I bent to look at it again and then grinned and went into the living room and sat on the pulldown bed. Slowly I got my clothes off. It had been a long day, but a rewarding one, and tomorrow should see me over the hump. Tomorrow I could make the second contact and zero in on some real money.

  At nine in the morning I checked the scrap of paper on which I’d written Nola’s phone number, and made the call.

  “Got a picture I’d like you to see,” I said. “I’ll come over. Can you get your agent to stop by?”

  “When, Mr. Baker?”

  “No hurry. Now will be all right.”

  “We’ll have to—to make it a little later. Say about eleven?”

  “Eleven,” I echoed, and hung up. It would give me time to take care of a couple of loose ends. I crumpled the negative, held it over the sink, and struck a match. The transparent film curled up in a fast cloud of black smoke and was gone. The key to the coin locker was next; I had to keep it but I didn’t want to carry it in my pocket. If Joe and Nola managed to grab the upper hand long enough to shake me down, I wouldn’t want them to run onto that key. The locker number was stamped on it and once they saw that they’d come up with some fast answers, run down the right stand of lockers, pay the overdue storage, pick up my suitcase, get rid of the evidence—and maybe the owner of that evidence. This could run into a long caper. It was certain that the cash from Apex Pictures hadn’t all been paid in advance; part of the package was Nola’s pay for work yet to be done. I didn’t want the key on me, and there was no telling how long I’d want to stay in this particular apartment. That left my car.

  I lifted the hood, found a place where a piece of tin was fastened to the firewall with a self-tap screw, backed out the screw, and spread the metal. Dropping the key in between, I ran the self-tap through the first piece of tin, then through the hole in the key, and on into the sheetiron of the firewall. With my finger I wiped a glob of grease from the steering column, smeared it over the key to hide the thin edge of bright metal, and put the hood back down.

  At eleven I went through the heavy glass door and up to Nola’s apartment. She came to the door in a chartreuse skirt and thin, tight black sweater with a high neck. Her earrings were black and so were her high-heeled pumps. When I stepped inside, she glanced anxiously toward the street entrance, then closed the door.

  “That sweater girl effect is perfect, but it will get you nowhere; I came on business,” I said, grinning. “Where’s the friend?”

  “He’s late, apparently.” She said it stiffly and made a production of filing a fingernail. “You said something about a picture, Mr. Baker.”

  “We’ll wait for him. Meantime, here’s your jewelry,” I said, and tossed her the ivory earring. She missed it, picked it up from the sofa, and turned it idly in her hand.

  “Have a nice ride out on the freeway?” I asked. She gave me a wry smile and then the door chimes announced a new arrival. Nola turned the knob, and Joe Lamb breezed in.

  “All right, Baker, where the hell is it?”

  “Maybe you’d better sit down before you look at it. This is going to throw you.”

  “The hell you say,” Lamb barked, but a thin edge of excitement crept into his voice. He lit a smoke and sat down on the sofa next to Nola, and I dropped the big eight-by-ten photograph on the coffee table in front of them, face down. Joe reached for it and turned it over.

  “Damn it, we should have made sure these—” Joe began, but Nola cut him off.

  “And exactly what is this supposed to be, Mr. Baker?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” I took one of the smokes from her little glass box and struck a match.

  “Should I?”

  “Try,” I said. She looked toward the wall, her eyes half closed in thought, and then Joe Lamb wheeled into the line.

  “For a guy with nothing but a tin can, a few old snapshots, and a dream, you got a hell of a lot of push, Baker.” Joe moved the picture toward me and leaned back, his hands turning nervously in his lap. “So there’s maybe a small nuisance value here, a trivial embarrassment over the rescue Nola made. We don’t want to argue all day over a few bucks, so name a price and—”

  “You can take that record off right now,” I cut in. “Get out your bifocals and look again. Nola’s prints are on that can, or at least some prints a damn sight too small to have been Hank Sawyer’s, and they point—”

  “The hell with that! Let’s get down to business.”

  “All right,” I said. I looked at Nola as she rested easily on the soft cushion, calmly regarding the tip of her cigarette. But one toe tapped nervously against the heel of her other shoe. Joe inched forward on the sofa and took a quick puff of his
cigarette.

  “All right,” I said softly, “I want a flat fifty per cent of the property I helped create, the publicity you got out of that phony rescue. To be more specific, I want seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “What!” It came from both of them at once, and then Joe Lamb bounced off of the sofa.

  “Baker, are you out of your mind? Who do you think would pay you seventy-five thousand dol—”

  I pushed him back to a sitting position. “Who do I think will pay it? That’s simple—you and Nola.”

  Actress or no actress, that got through to her. Nola ground out her smoke and glared at me, and when Joe tried to get up again she put a hand on his arm and motioned him back. When she spoke her words were slow, her voice unsure.

  “Since no one in his right mind would pay such a sum for the reason you’ve outlined, and no one with any sense at all would expect such a payment, I assume there’s more. Is that right, Mr. Baker?”

  “That’s right, baby. There’s a hell of a lot more. Murder.”

  “Oh?” She said it slow again, but she’d regained part of her composure now and lit a fresh cigarette with steady hands. “I presume you’ll be able to develop that theme, Mr. Baker.”

  “I’d have to do a little guessing. You don’t have to guess at all; why don’t you add it up?”

  “Look, Baker, why don’t you give us something firm for a change,” Joe Lamb said.

  “I think I can oblige,” I said. “The last time I was here we pretty well established how this caper went from the time you set it up until I was hauled out of the water by our mermaid here. Let’s start from there and work a little in each direction.”

  “We admit nothing, Baker,” Joe said quickly, “but go ahead.”

  “Let’s suppose that a little before this time, Hank Sawyer spotted Nola in one of her bit parts—even with the long hair, the twelve years of change, and the switch from blonde to brunette. He puts the bite on, but a small bite; after all, Nola isn’t making it big yet. Then the Island Love deal suddenly looms in the immediate future. I don’t claim to know all the details, but they’re not important. The result is that Hank is willing to help Nola stage this rescue, and when it’s over she is in position to score big.

  “Except that Hank slides in with the bite once more. And strong this time. He’s in the driver’s seat—a few words about Nola’s bedtime capers in San Diego back when she was Natalie Novak, and that promising career she’s reaching for will go up in smoke. She’s dead. She couldn’t get a job sweeping out the studios once that mess smelled up the press. Now after you used it Hank was supposed to fish the beer tin out of the water at the first opportunity. He was supposed to get rid of the thing, but instead he kept you on the hook. He had the can and he had the pictures that would lead back to Oceanside and connect Nola Norton with Natalie Novak. There was no way you could get around him; it was pay him off or kill him off. Maybe you weighed some of the more obvious facts: He didn’t have any friends; you weren’t going to worry about him having shared this with anyone. And more important, you didn’t have to find the beer tin or the snapshots of Natalie Novak; you only had to risk their showing up in the wrong place. Buried, hidden away, destroyed—all of these would be safe answers. The odds were strongly in your favor.”

  Joe tried a grin that didn’t quite come off. “And you’re going to try to prove all this in court?”

  “No,” I said wearily, “I’m not going to try to prove anything in court. Or here, for that matter. I’ve written it all out. It’s wrapped up with the five snapshots of Natalie Novak and the Lucky Lager can. The letter and the evidence—a package deal. And if you haven’t thought about what will happen if this little bundle falls into the hands of a reasonably competent member of the homicide squad, you’d better think now. He’d run your prints, Nola, and match them with those on the can, and he’d spend a day down in Oceanside. And as soon as he got the motive out in the open, the field day would begin. They dig into Hank’s spending and his income and from there they go to your bank withdrawals and they’ll want to see receipts and—oh, hell, why go on? It would be over before the week was out. You know it better than I do; why beat it to death with a club?”

  “And for seventy-five thousand dollars you will see that this doesn’t happen,” Nola said, her voice low.

  “That’s the price,” I said, “and there are three simple and obvious things you can do. First, you can pay me off; I hand over the evidence and scram. I’ll go buy myself a little business of some kind and start over. I’m hoping you’ll see it that way.

  “Second, you can sit tight and leave the next move to me. Just say nothing doing and let me sing my song. And third, you can horse around with me and stall and when the chance comes, slip a knife into me or gun me down.”

  “I know which one I like best,” Joe said.

  “No, I don’t think you do, Joe,” I said softly. “You’ll want to do everything you can to keep me alive. And make no mistake, if you two should pick up the paper some morning and find that I had a car accident or caught pneumonia and kicked the bucket, you’d better race all the way to the airport. Don’t even stop for a toothbrush, Joe; you’ll need all the start you can get. I’ll be glad to spell that out as soon as we weigh the first and second choices.”

  “The first one is strictly impossible,” Joe said. He looked at Nola and then turned back to me. “Seventy-five grand! Where would we get that kind of dough? Apex didn’t hand over—”

  “I know. We’d have to work it out, but you’d better be figuring the ways and means because that’s the one you’re going to elect. It’s the only one that will solve all of your problems. You’ll make Island Love and dozens more, all for big dough.”

  “And pay you off on every one of them,” Nola said.

  I shook my head. “No, once you get back the pictures, the can, and the letter, all you have to worry about is Eddie Baker’s memory. And I’m not a pro in this game; I’m simply collecting damages without running it through the courts. I’ve said I’ll settle for seventy-five grand and I will. So you pay me and you have to trust me.”

  “Suppose,” Nola said, “we choose the second option?”

  “Simple. I scream about being had in that phony rescue. I give them what evidence I have, but without suggesting Hank was murdered. Let them come up with that angle—all I want is to be cleared and back on the lifeguard tower.” I lit a smoke from the butt of the one in my hand and shook my head. “So that option is open only if you didn’t kill Sawyer. Now stop bluffing and let’s get down to the money.”

  Nola’s eyes caught mine and then went searchingly across my face. “You mentioned a third choice, Mr. Baker.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, and got ready to lie a little. If they knew about the packet being down in Union Depot there might be a way to get it out. A small bribe, some such thing, and after that they could consider it open season on Eddie Baker. So I’d worked out a better story, which I now had to try out for size.

  “Uncle Sam has the package.”

  Nola swallowed hard. Joe coughed, dropped his smoke, fumbled for it on the white shag rug, and came up trembling. “Slow down, Lamb,” I said, grinning at him. “I can get it back in a few days. You aren’t dead—yet.”

  “Where does this lead us, Mr. Baker?” Nola asked in a small voice.

  “Out of temptation, I guess, when it comes to lowering the mace on Eddie Baker. Figure it out. There are over fifty post office sub-stations in Los Angeles. Now here’s what I’ve done. I wrapped it all up, the pix and the can and the letter of explanation, and mailed it out. Pretty heavy. The can was empty but the lead weight brings it up; the whole package weighed thirty ounces. Dollar twenty, first class, and that way she won’t be opened. I shipped it to a phony name, general delivery, Green Station out on Vermont Avenue. When I had to have it to make this picture you see here on the table, I simply went out there and picked it up. That’s where I was headed when Nola and I parted company out on the freeway.” S
he looked away quickly, her face getting red again, and then I swung back to Joe Lamb.

  “When I finished making the photograph, I wrapped the boodle up again and sent it out, this time to another station and another fictitious name, with still another phony return address and name. No one knows the station; nobody knows the names I used. Only Eddie Baker. So they’ll hold it ten days at the station where it was sent, then bounce it back to the return. When they don’t locate anyone on either end, you know what happens.”

  Nola nodded. “They have it opened to see if there’s an address or anything on the inside to indicate the sender.”

  “Naturally I’ll intercept it and ship it out again, if I’m alive,” I said. “Otherwise, my letter plus evidence will go to the police.” I stood up, picked up my eight-by-ten photograph, struck a match and lit a corner. The bright yellow flame crept upward, then subsided, and I dropped the ember on the coffee table.

  “That’s it,” I said lightly. “The packet makes its rounds, and if I’m not alive to pick it up and ship it out again, you’re dead. And do you know how sure I am that you’re going to see this my way? I don’t even have a gun. Or any intention of getting one. Now put your heads together and figure out how you’ll raise the dough, because you can forget about options two and three. The only one left is the pay-off. I’ll be away for a few days, three, probably, and when I get back you’ll be hearing from me.”

  I turned and walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind me. I went slowly along the walk and through the big glass door of the building. When I was almost to the car, there were quick footsteps behind me.

  “Hey, Baker. Hold on a second,” Joe called.

  Chapter 7