Hard Case Crime: Blackmailer (12 page)

Max Shriber’s apartment was in the tower.

I didn’t use the house phone. I thought it might be better if I went up unannounced.

I got in the elevator and said, “Max Shriber.”

Up on Max’s floor there were only two apartments, A and B. Max was A.

I rang the bell and fiddled with the gun in my pocket. I wanted it to come out easily.

I rang the bell and nothing happened. I could hear it buzzing faintly inside the apartment. But nobody answered the door.

I felt a wave of relief sweep over me. The hell with it. Nobody home. O.K., too bad. I’ll call some other time. I had been brave enough when I started out. But now that it looked like I would not have to meet the man with the nasty voice I could feel my knees shaking with relief.

I turned the doorknob and pushed. It was just a casual gesture to show I wasn’t really afraid. I almost fainted when the door opened easily.

Well, a man’s got to live with himself. I opened the door wider, stepped inside and very quietly closed the door behind me again.

I was in a small, beautifully furnished foyer. The
foyer opened into a living room that obviously was used as an office. There was a big desk. Some wood-covered filing cabinets. And the walls were decorated with big, framed autographed pictures of some of the big people that Max Shriber, big agent, handled.

Holding the gun in front of me as I had seen them do in the movies, I advanced into the room.

“Anybody home?” I said. I was surprised. My voice was a hoarse, rather dismal croak. I tried it again. “Anybody home?”

Still no answer.

“Hey, Maxie,” I called in a loud, courageous voice. “Where are you? Hey, big agent. What’s the matter? Where are you?”

I walked over to the desk. There was nothing very special on it.

I thought about the two men who had wrecked my apartment. Max Shriber’s chauffeur and the smaller one. I wondered who the smaller one was. His valet, probably.

I pulled out the top drawer of the desk and dumped the contents onto the floor. I opened the files and began throwing handfuls of papers on the floor. It was a wonderful feeling.

I started to pull the books out of the bookcase. But I couldn’t do it. I’m a book publisher. I hate to see anybody mishandle books. Break their bindings or even turn down corners of a page.

I suddenly felt very foolish. I bent down and started
to put the stuff back into the desk drawer. But I felt even more foolish doing that. I straightened up.

“Hey, Maxie,” I said once again. “Where the hell are you, Maxie?”

I walked across the living room to the bedroom. And then I saw Maxie.

He was lying very still on the unmade bed. The blood had stained the pillowcase and the blankets and sheets.

A gun was lying on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Sick with shock, I reached down and picked up the gun. I sniffed it. It smelled as if it had been fired.

I held the gun gingerly, dazed for a moment or two. But I came out of it with a shudder. I threw the gun back down on the floor where it had been and started out of the room.

Fingerprints, I thought belatedly, and came back and picked up the gun with my handkerchief. I was wiping off my fingerprints when I suddenly remembered my prints must be all over the desk and the filing cabinet. I was still wiping the gun and had started walking into the living room, when the front door opened. “Maid?” a woman’s voice said.

I was too startled to speak. I thought of telling her to come back later but I was too frightened to force the words out.

The maid came into the room. A round, smiling, cheerful woman. “Good afternoon,” she said.

Then she saw the gun in my hand.

“My God!” she gasped. “Is that a gun?”

I laughed nervously. “A gun?” I said and laughed again. I put a cigarette in my mouth and held the gun up to it and pretended to click the trigger.

“Darn it,” I said. “These fancy cigarette lighters never work. Must be out of fluid. Ha, ha,” I added. “Guess I’d better use a match.”

The maid was eying me with suspicion.

I laughed foolishly. “Did you think that was a real gun?” I said.

“Who are you?” the maid said. “What are you doing here?” Then she saw the overturned file drawer. “What are you doing in here? Where’s Mr. Shriber?”

“So you really thought that was a gun,” I said, smiling idiotically. “That certainly is a good one.”

The maid looked around uncertainly. “Mr. Shriber!” she called. “Mr. Shriber!”

Then she started for the bedroom.

“Keep out of there!” I said. “Get out of there!”

But I was too late.

She saw his body and began to scream. She was reaching for the phone before I got to the door.

The human brain is an amazing instrument. Sometimes it’s hard to believe how quickly and apparently without conscious direction it can act.

On my way out the door, without hesitating, without thinking what I was doing, without even breaking my stride as I ran, I jerked the maid’s passkey out of the door lock.

I hardly realized what it was but I knew I had to hang on to it. By the time I had hit the fire stairs the maid was finished phoning. At least I figured she was because she’d started to scream again.

I took the stairs about five at a time. I pounded down six or seven flights and then, still not really thinking, just acting on instinct, I stopped and pushed open the exit door. I was standing in a corridor. There were more apartments to a floor now. Eight or ten.

I stood by the stairway door listening. I must have stayed there five minutes. Then I heard the voices from above. And I could hear footsteps racing down the stairs.

Very gently I closed the stairwell door and moved along the corridor.

That was when it first dawned on me why I needed the passkey.

I paused in front of an apartment door. Inside I could hear a radio. I moved on. I could hear voices in the next two apartments. But the fourth one was quiet.

From the stairwell I could hear the sound of voices and footsteps growing louder.

I decided to take a chance. I put the passkey into the lock. The door opened easily and I stepped quickly inside.

The apartment was pitch black. The blinds and curtains were drawn. I closed the door behind me very softly, and slipped the catch. I stood by the door in the dark for a moment or two breathing heavily.

I was moving my hand carefully along the wall hunting for the light switch when the voice said, “Is that you, darling?”

It was a soft, melting feminine voice. I grunted an affirmative sound.

“I’m glad you came back so soon. Wasn’t Mr. Pearson there?”

I made a negative grunt.

“I’m so glad. The hell with Mr. Pearson, darling. It’s perfectly stinking to have to see a man on business on your honeymoon. I’m glad he was out.”

There was a long pause.

I had my hand on the doorknob. But the voice stopped me.

“Darling?”

“Huh?”

“I did just what I promised. I said I wouldn’t move out of bed till you got back. And I haven’t.”

I made what was supposed to be a small sound of ecstasy.

“I haven’t even opened the blinds or turned on the lights. I’ve just been lying here thinking about...”

And for several paragraphs she told me, quite explicitly, what she had been lying there in the dark thinking about.

I pressed my ear to the door.

I could hear people moving in the corridor outside. And I could hear voices.

“Come over here, darling. Where are you?”

Obediently I made my way toward the voice. I was doing fine till I knocked over a lamp.

She laughed.

“Maybe I better turn on the light. Just for a tiny second.”

“Uh-uh,” I said, as forcefully as possible.

“Aren’t you the cutest!”

I moved toward her and after a moment a hand reached up out of the darkness and touched my face. “There you are!”

The hand caressed my face and stopped suddenly.

“Sweetie, you know Dr. Bryson told you to wear your glasses. Why haven’t you got your glasses on?”

“Dark,” I whispered. “Don’t need ’em.”

Then she pulled my head down and kissed me. It was a long, honeymoon-like kiss.

There was a kind of madness about it.

It didn’t seem real. It wasn’t happening.

Then her hand took my hand and conducted it very carefully beneath the sheet.

I tried to take my hand away. She held it there.

“Lady,” I said, “please don’t scream. But I think you ought to turn on the light.”

She gasped.

I heard her fumbling for a moment and then the lights came on.

She was a rather pretty blonde girl. About nineteen or twenty. She had pretty, wide blue eyes.

She looked at me sitting on the edge of the bed
holding a gun in one hand and her in the other.

Her eyes widened even more. Then she closed them, gasped and fainted.

I put the gun in my pocket, crossed the room, and darted out the door.

A uniformed policeman and a man from the hotel were standing in the corridor.

“Thank God,” I said. “Can you help me? My wife has fainted. Is there a doctor in the hotel?”

“What’s the matter, mister?” The cop looked at me suspiciously.

“My wife has fainted,” I said. Then I managed to stammer boyishly, “It’s our honeymoon, officer. I’m afraid we got a little overexcited.”

I pushed the elevator button hysterically.

“Will you give her first aid, Officer? I’ve got to get her some brandy. She has these attacks sometimes. Brandy is the only thing that can help.”

The cop peered into the room. She hadn’t moved. The sheet was almost all the way off.

“O.K.,” the cop said, rather cheerfully, I thought. “You get some brandy. I’ll see what I can do. Take it easy.”

The elevator doors slid open and I got in.

“Ground floor, please,” I said.

On the ground floor I walked briskly through the lobby and out to the street.

I walked very fast for several blocks. Then I got on a bus. I got off the bus and got into a cab. I could
not think of where to tell the cab driver to take me. Rockefeller Center was the best I could think of.

I stood for almost an hour watching the skaters down in the Plaza. For a while I stood there trying not to think about anything. Then I began to think about Janis.

I had met Janis Whitney at a party.

It was a terrible party. A lot of unemployed and largely unemployable actors were gathered at somebody’s apartment on West Fourth Street.

The same faces you met all day long. At lunch in the mirrored basement at Walgreen’s on Forty-second Street. And in the afternoons in agents’ and producers’ offices.

Some of the faces we knew in those days—it was the winter of 1940—have since become well known. Janis was one of the fortunate ones.

But for every successful Janis there were fifty girls whose names I have forgotten who quietly gave it up and went back to wherever it was they’d come from.

It’s hard to say what makes a Janis different from the others. Luck, maybe. But I doubt it.

Talent? Possibly. But a lot of the others whose names I’ve forgotten were talented too. I think it’s something else. I think it’s some kind of drive. An almost monomaniac desire. A willingness to sacrifice your life, your youth. Anything. Everything.

I don’t think Janis could tell you herself. I don’t think the question has ever occurred to her.

I’d seen her, before the party, once or twice in
offices. I even knew her last name. I don’t think anyone at the party actually introduced us.

When we left the party we walked all the way uptown from Fourth Street. We held hands and I kissed her lingeringly at her door.

Then I said to her, “Say, what the hell is your name, anyway?”

I’m a little embarrassed to remember that line today. It was the tag-line of the first act of “Stage Door.” At the time it seemed very apt and very witty and very tender.

I was proud of having said it at the right moment. I was twenty-two years old.

It lasted all that winter, and in July Janis went away to summer stock. We picked up again in the fall, but there was something different about it now. I had stopped saying things like, “Say, what the hell is your name, anyway?”

Janis had been promised tests by both Fox and the company that finally hired her. She was very tense that fall and one night in my apartment she began to cry. She couldn’t stop. Finally I had to walk with her to St. Vincent’s, where they gave her a sedative.

Janis was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known.

We tried to write after she left for California but neither of us was a good correspondent.

I saw her first picture. She had a bit part in a Cary Grant movie. She was only on the screen twice. Once for about a minute. And once for about half that
long. I read somewhere that they got over fifteen hundred letters about her from those two short scenes.

After that, though, I didn’t go to see her pictures any more. I couldn’t take it.

I threw the cigarette away and walked slowly to Sixth Avenue. I stopped at the newsstand on the corner and bought a paper. Then I went into the drugstore, sat at the counter and ordered coffee. I looked through the paper. I wanted to see if there was anything more about the accident at the gay Fifth Avenue party. There wasn’t.

And it was too early for there to be anything about the big agent from Hollywood who had handled so many big people.

I turned the pages of the paper.

I was not really reading, just turning the pages, when the name jumped out at me.

I’d just been thinking about her and it seemed funny to see her name.

It was in the amusement section. A big, half-page ad for the picture that was opening that day at the Music Hall. “Two a Day,” a musical extravaganza (it said) in new, glorious Technicolor. With that pretty young man who is always in Technicolor musicals, an ex-Broadway comedian, and Janis Whitney.

I had a hunch. Perhaps I’d find Janis on a busman’s holiday.

I finished the coffee and began walking the two blocks up Sixth Avenue to the theatre.