by Howard Fast
“Did you see the gun?”
Mrs. Holtz nodded.
“Can you describe it for me?”
“It was small, silver, very small. Like a toy gun. Like guns you see, but they’re really cigarette lighters.”
“Thank you. I’ll talk to Miss Jones later. You’ve been very helpful.”
Masuto went upstairs then and joined Beckman, who was waiting for him outside the door of Angel Barton’s room. “Anything?” he asked Beckman.
“Quiet as a grave. Nobody in, nobody out. There’s still reporters and TV characters outside, but Dempsy’s held the line against them. You’d think the telephone would be ringing constantly, but the black kid they call Jonesey tells me that they have an unlisted number and they keep changing it. Still, you’d think a star would have loads of friends.”
“You’d think so,” Masuto said. He tapped at the door of Angel’s room. “Where’s Miss Newman and Mrs. Goldberg?”
“That room, down the hall,” Beckman said, pointing.
Masuto knocked at the door again, waited a few seconds, and then turned the handle and opened the door. The room was pink and white—white carpet on the floor, pink walls, white bed, pink coverlet, two pink and white angels suspended by wire from the ceiling fleeting over the bed, mirrors on one whole wall, white baroque furniture, a pink and white chaise longue, and lying on it, half-reclining, Angel Barton in a pink robe over a white silk and lace nightgown. Her hair was a hairdresser’s triumph—long, spun gold, and two wide, innocent blue eyes stared at them out of a Marilyn Monroe face.
The two men halted just inside the door, staring at Angel, who returned their stare unblinking.
“Sy, close the door,” Masuto whispered.
He closed the door and said, “Masao, what the hell goes on here?”
Masuto walked over to Angel Barton and picked up her arm. There was no pulse and the hand was cold.
“Is she dead, Masao?”
He pushed the lids down over the staring blue eyes. “Very dead, I think.” On the floor next to the chaise longue there was an empty hypodermic needle. Beckman picked it up with his handkerchief.
“How long?” he asked Masuto.
Staring at Angel thoughtfully, Masuto said, “The hands are cold. Twenty minutes, half an hour.” He was examining her arm. There was a single puncture mark. “What’s the smell?” he asked Beckman, who was sniffing the air.
“Ether.”
“I thought so. Go downstairs, Sy, and tell Dempsy that no one leaves the house. I’ve been stupid, and I don’t want to go on being stupid. Then call the station and tell them to get another cop over here and to inform the captain. Then call Baxter and tell him we want him and an ambulance.”
“He’ll love that.”
“We’ll try to live with his displeasure.”
Beckman was studying the hypodermic. “No prints.”
“No, he wanted to get rid of it, so he wiped it and dropped it.”
Beckman left the room. Masuto walked over to the dressing table and raised the lid. There was the gun Mrs. Holtz had spoken about. It was a small, expensive purse gun, twenty-two caliber and probably, Masuto guessed, of Swiss make. He took it out, hooking his pinky through the trigger guard and then brought it into the light of a lamp, studying it carefully. It bore a clear set of prints which, he was convinced, would match those of the dead Angel. He then wrapped it in his handkerchief and dropped it into his pocket.
He then walked over to the dead Angel and stared at her thoughtfully. She was indeed a very beautiful woman, even in death. He tried to analyze his own feelings. Had he been the cause of her death? Was his own failure to anticipate it to be condemned? Should he have known? There was something missing. He was not attempting to exonerate himself. There was simply something missing.
He bent over the dead woman now and raised one of the eyelids he had closed before, peering at the cold blue eye it revealed. Then he lowered the lid again. There were two doors at one side of the bedroom. Masuto went to them now. One led to a bathroom, where tile and sink and tub were in varying shades of pink. The other door opened on an enormous walk-in closet.
Masuto flicked on the closet light, staring at the racks of dresses, slacks, and evening gowns. One entire wall of the closet was devoted to a shoe rack, holding at least a hundred pairs of shoes and, at the bottom, four pairs of riding boots. He then went through the racks and finally found, not on the racks, but carefully folded on a shelf behind the dresses, six pairs of whipcord breeches. What this added up to, Masuto could not for the life of him imagine. Possibly nothing. Possibly she liked to ride. In the detective stories he read occasionally, everything pointed in a specific direction. But here were things most curious that pointed nowhere.
The Departed Angel
“You don’t need me,” Dr. Baxter said sourly. “I don’t have to dance attendance on every corpse you clowns turn up. I was in the middle of my dinner—”
“It’s ten o’clock,” Wainwright said apologetically.
“Civilized people eat late, and if you think I’m going to spend all night doing an autopsy, you’re crazy. I’ll get at it in the morning.”
“All we want to know,” Wainwright begged him, “is why she died.”
“Because her heart stopped. It causes death.”
“Come on, Doc, be reasonable.”
“Are you reasonable? What do you think they pay me to be medical examiner for this silly town of demented millionaires. All right, you want to know what she died of? I’ll tell you what she didn’t die of. She didn’t die of an over-dose of heroin, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s not a user.”
“Was she murdered?”
“How the hell do I know whether she was murdered? I’m not a cop, and I can’t read the minds of the dead. When I cut her up, I’ll tell you what I find.”
“You can take her away,” Wainwright told the stretcher bearers. They left the bedroom with the body, Baxter stalking after them.
“He’s a doll,” Beckman observed. “He’s just a sweet, good-natured doll.”
Sweeney, glancing up from his search for fingerprints, blamed it on Baxter’s profession. “You do that kind of work, it’s got to show.”
The photographer was still working his flashbulbs. “The body’s gone,” Wainwright said tiredly. “That’s enough. Take what you got back to the station and develop it.”
“I don’t know how the word gets around. Maybe it’s ESP,” Beckman said. “But there’s two TV crews outside and four or five reporters. Someone’s got to talk to them.”
“I’ll talk to them. Just tell them to wait and be patient.” Beckman left the bedroom. Wainwright slumped down on the chaise and said to Masuto, “What makes you so damn sure she was murdered?”
“It had to be. Only I didn’t have enough sense to realize it.”
“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, Masao, but I know one thing. This afternoon you told me you knew who killed Mike Barton. No more games. I want the name.”
“All right. But it doesn’t finish anything. Angel Barton killed her husband—but only in a legal sense. She was with a man, and the man pulled the trigger. Of course, she was part of it. They planned the thing together. And the stakes were high—one million dollars in cold cash, and if it worked, anything she was entitled to in his will.” Masuto reached into his pocket and took out the gun he had wrapped in his handkerchief. “Here’s the gun that killed Mike Barton.”
Wainwright stared at it speechless. Sweeney came over, lifted the little pistol carefully by its trigger guard, and examined it in the light of a lamp.
“As lovely a set of prints as I’ve ever seen.”
“Where did you get it?” Wainwright demanded.
“Over there—in her dressing table. Where the killer had placed it after he finished with Angel. The prints are excellent. He put them on the gun after Angel was dead, pressing her fingers to it.”
“And how did he kill her?”
&nbs
p; “I don’t think we’ll ever know that. My guess is that he knocked her out with something, perhaps ether, and then he injected her vein with air. I don’t know whether that can be proven in an autopsy. They may find traces of something in the syringe. He was desperate and in a hurry, and I guess he decided to make it look like suicide. It was a stupid, witless crime from the moment it started this morning.”
“Yeah, when it’s not stupid, we don’t even know that a crime took place. I guess you’re right about the gun, but we’ll let Ballistics decide. You said this morning, you think the whole kidnap caper was a rigged job?”
“A kid’s job. I think the husband, Mike Barton, was in on it, and then his Angel double-crossed him and brought someone else into it. Or maybe the whole thing started with the killer. I couldn’t make any sense out of the kidnap thing until I spoke to a cousin of mine who’s an expert on legal ways to cheat Internal Revenue, and he said that there would have been a big tax break for Barton.”
“Except that from what I hear, neither Barton nor the Angel were smart enough to figure it out.”
“Exactly. There’s another small matter,” Masuto said. “The killer is right here in this house.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very sure. No one came in when it was done, no one left.”
“That’s beautiful.” Wainwright rose and began to pace the room. “Pink and white, pink and white, she must have really seen herself as some goddamn kind of angel. They don’t want a cop for my job, they want a diplomat. Downstairs, we only got one of the most prominent lawyers in town, a top film producer, a hotshot business manager, and a congressman. Plus a chauffeur with a record long as my arm.”
“Not to mention a number of women who are probably a lot smarter than the men.”
“And a fed. That kid from the FBI pushed his way in and started bugging me about what was his role in all this. I told him how the hell did I know what his role was? He’s a goddamn idiot. He’s got a notion that the Mafia is mixed up in it because he heard we found a syringe in here.”
“Is he still here?”
“Prowling around downstairs. I can’t throw him out. We’ve had too many run-ins with the feds.”
“We’ll both be very kind to him.”
They had their opportunity almost immediately. As they went downstairs from the second floor of the Barton house, they saw Frank Keller waiting for them at the foot of the staircase, his pink-cheeked, snub-nosed face set in a grimace of determination. He was wearing a carefully pressed gray flannel suit, a white shirt, and a tie with brown and maroon stripes. Masuto, who wore an old brown tweed jacket over rumpled trousers and a tieless shirt, had once been asked by another FBI man whether he always dressed that way or only when in disguise.
“I’ve been trying to work out my role here,” Keller said. “I don’t want to push in like a bull in a china shop.”
“That’s very considerate of you,” Masuto agreed.
“On the other hand, there’s been a kidnapping, even though both the victim and the ransom payer are dead. You know, it’s a national tragedy. I don’t think anything quite like this ever happened before. You think of Mike Barton and you think of Robert Redford, Al Pacino, John Wayne—although I don’t think it would have happened to John Wayne in just this manner.”
“I guess not,” Masuto agreed.
“Of course, the murders are a local matter, if murder is the correct term?”
“We think Angel Barton was murdered,” Wainwright told him. “We won’t know for certain until after the autopsy. We found a syringe and a puncture mark—which is all we know for sure.”
“You could do one thing that would be very helpful,” Masuto said.
“Be glad to.”
“We can be pretty certain that if Mrs. Barton was murdered, someone here in the house at this moment killed her. And we can work up a background on every one of them except Mr. Hennesy.”
“Congressman Hennesy?”
“That’s right.”
“But surely,” Keller protested, “you can’t suspect Congressman Hennesy of an act of murder.”
“I have to. I have to suspect every one of them.”
“We’re not accusing him or anyone else,” Wainwright explained, talking softly, since from their position at the foot of the stairs they could hear the chatter of voices from the living room. “Believe me, here in Beverly Hills, a thing like this is no picnic. One wrong move on our part and we could face a million-dollar lawsuit—and that fellow McCarthy in there is one of the sharpest lawyers in town. That’s why we’d like you to get us a rundown on Hennesy. Your office must have everything there is to have on him.”
“I’ll try. I don’t know what they’ll say in Washington. Is he involved in the kidnapping?”
“I don’t know,” Masuto said.
“Does anything point in that direction?”
“If you wanted to point it, you could. He was at the same party Angel attended the night she was kidnapped, but when we talked to him about it this afternoon, he seemed to have forgotten that he left the party with her. He offered a lie as an alibi without being accused of anything. I don’t know what it adds up to, but if you want to make a connection with the kidnapping for the people in Washington, there’s enough there.”
“All right. I’ll do my best. But it won’t be sooner than noon tomorrow.”
“We understand.”
“You don’t mind if I stick around for a while?”
“Be our guest,” Wainwright said generously, and then he led the way into the living room.
They were all there—McCarthy and Ranier and Joe Goldberg and his wife, and Congressman Hennesy and Mrs. Cooper and Elaine Newman—with Beckman leaning his huge figure against a grand piano and watching them with calculated indifference.
“You have no right to hold us here,” McCarthy said immediately. “You know that, Captain Wainwright. From what I gather, you don’t know what caused Angel Barton’s death. This is Beverly Hills, and I find it outrageous that this oversized officer of yours”—he indicated Beckman—“should tell us that we are not to leave.”
“If he told you that, he was mistaken,” Wainwright said placatingly. “Of course you are free to leave whenever you wish. I only suggested that we would like to have a few words with you, that is with any of you who don’t have to leave immediately. You were friends of the Bartons, and in that capacity you could be very helpful. But if you wish to leave, Mr. McCarthy, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”
“For how long?”
Wainwright turned to Masuto. “Ten, fifteen minutes,” Masuto told them. “Your assistance would be invaluable. But as the captain said, any of you who wish to leave now are free to do so.”
No one moved. Hennesy said, “Since as a concerned citizen I am to be part of this charade, I’d like a drink.”
Wainwright nodded at Lena Jones, who was hovering in the doorway. She came forward slowly.
“Take orders from all of them,” Masuto told her. “Is Kelly still around?”
“He’s in the pantry. He’ll make the drinks.”
“All right. Bring back the drinks, and then we’re not to be disturbed.”
While the people gathered in the living room were giving their orders for drinks, Beckman walked over to Masuto and whispered, “Any way to smell their hands, Masao?”
Masuto chuckled. “Want to try? Ether leaves an odor, but there’s soap and perfume.”
“Just a notion.”
To Wainwright, Masuto said softly, “I want to tell them that Angel was murdered.”
“Will it help?”
“I think so.”
“Is it one of them?”
“Or Beckman or myself or one of the three servants. No one else was in the house.”
“Go ahead and do what you got to do.”
“I’ll step on toes.”
“There’s no other way. The city manager will be in my office tomorrow morning yelling his head off. But he’l
l yell at me, not at you. So just take it with a grain of salt if I put you down and save face.”
“I’m all understanding.”
Jones returned now with the drinks, and when she had left the room, Masuto said to the assembled company, “I must begin by telling you that Angel Barton was murdered, and we have every reason to believe that she was murdered by the same person who killed her husband. I must add that the murderer is still in the house, since no one entered or left this house since at least an hour before the murder took place. That doesn’t mean the murderer is in this room, not necessarily, since there are also three servants in the house. This information does not change what Captain Wainwright said before. There are no charges against any of you, and any one of you is free to leave when he or she pleases.”
“And to be tagged as your mysterious killer!” Mrs. Cooper snorted.
“This whole procedure is outrageous,” McCarthy said. “I challenge your statement that no one entered or left this house this evening. There are French doors, a kitchen door, a basement door—there are windows. How dare you come in here with your asinine conclusions and browbeat a group of people whose only sin is that they were the close friends of Mike and Angel Barton!”
“There’ll be no browbeating, Sergeant!” Wainwright snapped.
“Terribly, terribly sorry,” Masuto said. “Please forgive me if I gave any impression of browbeating. You may leave now, if you wish, Mr. McCarthy.”
“I have clients here. I will not leave them without legal protection.”
“Would anyone else like to leave?”
No one moved.
“Then I must tell you, as Mr. McCarthy certainly would have, that you have the right to ignore any questions I may ask you. I shall question each person in turn, and I would appreciate it if the others did not interfere. Except, of course, Mr. McCarthy, who will be duty-bound to advise his clients not to answer when he feels they should not answer.”
“I’m not sure I want to answer any of your damned questions,” Hennesy said.
“As you please, Congressman. I’ll start with Mrs. Goldberg.”
