Hard Case Crime: Blackmailer (13 page)

The picture was on when I came in.

I stood in the back for a minute watching the screen and letting my eyes get used to the darkness.

The scene was a vaudeville theatre somewhere. There was a broken down backdrop and in front of it, Janis and the chubby young man, both dressed in high hats and carrying canes, were dancing and singing a song.

Have you noticed that in Technicolor musicals everybody looks alike? I don’t know what it is, but all the character seems to disappear from their faces.

Even Janis Whitney.

She looked beautiful. That is, she looked like a wig-maker’s dummy with a beautiful painted face. She was wearing black tights and black sheer stockings. Her legs were obviously beautifully formed. But they were without any sex appeal.

And in this case the Technicolor cameras were certainly lying. In the flesh Janis Whitney was, if nothing else, a very sexy-looking girl.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark now.

I stopped watching the picture and began examining the last few rows of seats.

I walked slowly around the back of the theatre, taking it easy and scanning the last dozen rows of seats carefully all the way around.

There was no sign of Janis.

I got back to my starting point, and paused for a minute to watch the picture.

The number on stage was over and Janis and the young man were in their dressing room afterward. He was highly excited. It seemed that a big producer had been out front. And had caught the act. And apparently for masochistic reasons of his own wanted to bring it to New York.

Janis seemed downcast by this news.

The boy was sparkling with teeth and excitement. But Janis stood with her Technicolor eyelids drooping to indicate sorrow. Or nervousness. Or something.

Then finally, with tremendous effort, she spoke.

“You don’t understand, honey,” she said. And you could see something was killing her. Either this news or her feet. “You don’t understand, honey. He doesn’t want the act. He just wants me.”

Then I wondered how they did it, how they could make a girl like Janis seem so utterly devoid of talent.

I went back into the lobby and up the stairs to the loge seats, where smoking was permitted. Again, no Janis.

As I said, it was just a hunch—and a lousy one.

When I stepped out of the warm theatre onto Sixth Avenue the cold wind nearly took my breath away.

I felt aimless and useless. I didn’t know what to do about anything.

I began to walk down Sixth Avenue looking at the crummy stores and the twenty-five-cents-a-drink saloons and the broken-down movie theatres. I stopped in front of one of the movie theatres.

The marquee was plastered with gaudy colored
lithographs. They were showing a picture called “Passion Island” a documentary-type film about some South Sea Island.
First time on any screen! Primitive Love Rites and Dances! Adults Only!
The second feature was a little lulu called “Lure of the City,” which, according to the bills, fearlessly exposed the big city’s vicious love racket. Whatever that might be.

“Lure of the City,” to judge from the stills outside, was a ten-year-old third-rate horror.

There was a picture of a fierce-looking man pointing a gun at a girl who was pressed back against a wall with a terrified expression on her face. The hair was real long and skirts were real short. It looked so silly and out of date that it took me a minute or two to recognize the girl.

I gave the cashier thirty-five cents. Who says the picture business is off? I personally was creating a one-man boom in the industry.

The promise of primitive love rites and an exposé of the big city’s vicious love racket had not attracted many customers. The theatre was about a quarter full. Even in the semidarkness you could see that everything was dirty and needed painting.

“Lure of the City” had just begun, the usherette who was perspiring, chewing gum, and scratching herself inside her uniform, told me.

I stood in the back, watching it for a while.

Janis Whitney played a little girl from the country who had come to the city and gone wrong. She had
become involved with a group of unshaven gangsters who were going to knock over a bank. The youngest and least whiskery of the gangsters turned out to be an FBI man who was working to break up the vicious mob. There was no mention of a love racket, and I felt somewhat cheated.

In many ways it was a splendid picture.

By that I mean it was a terrible picture. But terrible in a far different way than “Two a Day.”

“Two a Day” was big, slick, expensive, machine-made, so completely sterile from the very beginning that even as earthy a thing as Janis Whitney’s legs had no appeal.

“Lure of the City” must have been shot in about two weeks. A lot of it didn’t even seem to be very well rehearsed. It was slapped together by someone who thought if he could make a movie fast enough and cheap enough he could probably make a few dollars.

The story was absurd. The dialogue was very, very bad. But at least the whole thing wasn’t sterile.

The head gangster was played by a fairly well-known Broadway actor. He was nobody in the movies. But fairly well known in New York. And he was giving a great performance. All by himself. His performance had nothing to do with the rest of the picture at all. But he was acting for his own amusement and having a fine time, playing the head gangster right into the ground.

Finally the FBI man, who, on the other hand, was
terrible in the plain old-fashioned sense, told Janis who he really was and gave her her big chance to go straight and get away from her miserable existence. All she had to do was help him. She agreed. Then when everything was all set and the vicious love racket was about to be busted wide open, the boss gangster found out about Janis and the FBI man.

It was really great.

Then, I looked away from the picture for a minute and saw her.

I’d got myself absorbed in the picture and I hadn’t seen her sitting there. About four rows from the back, in the middle of the row, all by herself. She was watching the picture intently.

I moved down the aisle and sat a couple of seats away from her.

From then on, till the end of the picture, I alternated between watching her face and watching the screen.

The FBI man was tied up and lying on a cot in an old empty warehouse that the gangsters were using. The head gangster had a gun and was threatening Janis.

It was a wonderful scene. The words they were saying were foolish. The situation was idiotic. But Janis and the head gangster were having a wonderful time.

They weren’t playing in a third-rate movie somewhere. They were acting for their own enjoyment—for personal kicks. I was pretty sure they weren’t even sticking very close to the script. There was no fancy
cutting or camera work. The camera was just holding on them in a medium shot and they were standing up there acting.

It was the damnedest thing you ever saw—and Janis herself was great.

In spite of the lighting, which was very badly done, she looked wonderful and vital and physically exciting. For a minute or so, you almost believed the two of them were fighting for their lives in the deserted warehouse. Except that once in a while the camera would cut to the FBI man twisting in his bonds. You could see that if he could work himself just a little looser he was going to be able to reach the gun that the head gangster had carelessly left on the table. The FBI man was such a bad actor that he couldn’t even writhe very well. And the cutting to him took some of the edge off the Janis/head gangster scene.

I could see Janis’ face as she watched the scene.

She was tense and her eyes were shining. Her lips weren’t moving but I could tell that she was playing every line to herself.

Then the scene was over. The FBI man worked himself loose, got the gun, the police arrived and after a short chase, rounded up the vicious love racketeers. Then the lights came up.

Janis, looking a little dazed, started out past me. I stood up in my seat as she went by and caught her arm.

“Hey, lady,” I said. “Didn’t I just see you in a picture at the Music Hall?”

She jerked her arm free, turned, then for the first time saw me and smiled. It was a funny, half-embarrased smile.

“Dick.”

“Hello, Janis.”

I took her arm and piloted her up the aisle. “I’m on a movie spree,” I said. “This is my second picture this afternoon. I thought maybe I’d run into you at the Music Hall.”

She grinned a little. “žTwo a Day’?” she said. “How did you like it?”

“It’s a fine picture,” I said. “And they keep our little secret beautifully.”

“Secret?”

“That you’re an actress.”

“Oh,” she said.

We began walking slowly up Sixth Avenue.

“Every once in a while,” she said, “oh, about twice a year, I see it. Just to remind myself what it’s like to act.”

I didn’t say anything.

She mentioned the name of the actor who had played the head gangster. “What a wonderful guy he is. We really knocked ourselves out on those last scenes in
the warehouse. The director never knew what hit him.”

At Forty-eighth Street we turned west automatically. I didn’t notice it myself till we were in the middle of the block. Then I started to laugh. Janis looked at me and then she caught on too.

There was a bar on Forty-eighth that we had always gone to. Automatically. We were there almost every night the winter before Janis went to Hollywood.

I hadn’t been in it since then.

They had changed it all around. It was a little on the leatherette and chrome side now. And the faces in the autographed pictures hanging on the walls had changed too.

We sat down at a booth in the back.

“Do you suppose Martin and Lewis come in here a lot?” I said, indicating one of the pictures.

“Sure,” Janis said. “With Farley Grainger and Liz Taylor and Piper Laurie. You should see this place on a Saturday night.”

“Is there really someone named Piper Laurie?”

“Sure,” Janis said.

We ordered scotch and water.

“I wonder what ever became of Toni Seven,” I said. “They used to have a picture of Toni Seven in here. Janis,” I said, “I have something important to discuss with you. Walter thinks Max killed Charles Anstruther and Jean Dahl. And he thinks you were there when he did it.”

“Walter is fabulous,” Janis said.

“I know.”

“Well, cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“You weren’t there, of course?”

“No,” Janis said. “I wasn’t. Walter will be so disappointed.”

“What about Max?” I said.

“What about him?”

“I really owe you an explanation. That little scene this afternoon in front of the Voisin. Max’s chauffeur was one of the two men who wrecked my apartment.”

Janis looked at me, saying nothing.

“I still don’t know what they were after.”

“The money, of course,” Janis said. “Jean Dahl had been blackmailing Max. He paid her money. I don’t know how much. Then he sent his boys to get it back. And probably to get rid of her at the same time.”

“Nice Max,” I said.

“He used to be a gangster. I knew that. What I didn’t know was that he still is one.”

“I thought you were in love with him.”

“I was.”

“But you’re not.”

“Not any more.”

We stopped talking while I ordered another drink.

“Darling,” I said softly when the waiter had gone, “what are you doing mixed up with these people? Walter. Max. Jean Dahl. What the hell are you trying to do?”

Janis lifted her glass, took a long drink, then put down the glass. “Hollywood,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

Janis lifted the glass again. In a moment she said, “You know how much I got for ‘Lure of the City’?”

I shook my head.

“One thousand dollars. Five weeks at two hundred dollars a week. Not to mention spending those five week ends with the director.”

“God!”

“He wasn’t bad, really. He was a lousy director, though. Do you know what I got for ‘Two a Day’? I made a one-picture deal for sixty-five thousand dollars.”

“It was a lousy picture too.”

“I know. Someday I’m going to make a good picture again. You start doing musicals and then they won’t put you in anything else.”

I ordered a third drink.

It was getting dark outside. The neon lights outside were going on.

The waiter came over to the table carrying our drinks.

“On the house,” he said.

Then he produced a photograph of Janis Whitney.

“Would you sign this for us, please?” he said.

Janis grinned. I handed her my pen and she wrote: “Good luck and many thanks for the memories, Janis Whitney.”

“Thanks, Miss Whitney.”

“Thank
you,”
Janis said.

When the waiter had gone Janis said, “Well, I finally made it. Do you think they’ll really hang it up?”

“Sure,” I said.

We were quiet for a long time. Thinking. Then I said, “Now I’ve got it figured.” And I had, too. It was suddenly all there for me.

“What’s your next picture going to be?” I said.