The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (34 page)

“Hi, Pete,” I said, and drew a bead on him. I was proud of myself for remembering that Pete was what the desk clerk had called him. “Freeze, please.”

He didn’t jump all the way out of his brogans, but he gave it the old college try. He goggled at my gat, backed against a wall and froze as instructed.

“Hey!” he strangled.

I kept him covered. “Just a formality, Pete. I’m a little nervous. For all I knew it might have been Frankenstein’s monster coming in. It might have been Jack the Ripper. It could have been anybody, but it turns out to be a combination bellhop and elevator jockey wearing a stethoscope. The stethoscope confuses me. Let’s hear about it.”

“You – you’re alive!”

“Yeah.” I gestured to the desk clerk crumpled on the floor in a motionless lump. “But he’s not. Explain the stethoscope, please. Talk it up.”

Pete regarded me with bewilderment. “I thought you were dead. When I found you a minute ago, you looked like it.”

“Ah. So you’ve been in here before.”

“Certainly. That’s why I rushed out to get my stethoscope. To try you for heartbeats. You didn’t seem to have a pulse.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a sawbones in your spare time?”

“I’m studying to be one.” He was as dignified as only a young guy who takes himself seriously can be. “I’m in my final semester of pre-med. Winthrop is the name, Peter Warren Winthrop.” His rugged jaw firmed and his kisser showed no good-humored quirk at the corners. “Just because I wear this monkey suit and accepted a dollar tip from you, don’t get wrong ideas.”

“I get many wrong ideas,” I said.

Putting away my rod, I flashed Pete a fast swivel at my private badge. It didn’t seem to be much of a surprise to him.

“Okay, son,” I said. “You were in here a moment ago. Why?”

“I was looking for old Duffy,” Pete said.

“Him?” I flicked a glance at the deceased bozo.

Pete nodded. “He wasn’t at his desk and the switchboard had a buzz. I thought perhaps he’d slipped upstairs without calling for the elevator, so I ran my car up here to Three, the top, and started scouting the halls. Duffy had a bit of listening at doors occasionally. Wood makes a good sound conductor when you put a hearing aid microphone against the panels. So I noticed this particular door open and looked in.”

“You saw what?”

“You and Duffy were on the floor. He was dead. I wasn’t sure about you, so I went for my stethoscope.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, sir. Except the wheelchair, of course.”

“Nobody was in it when you first looked?”

“Nobody.” He frowned. “I assume it’s Mr Fullerton’s chair. But if so, where’s Fullerton?”

“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “And his name isn’t Fullerton; it’s Barclay. Not that it matters to you. What does matter is, he’s gone. He was here, but he isn’t here now. You didn’t tab anybody going down the stairs?”

“I did not. Although the stairway is nowhere near my elevator, so that doesn’t spell anything.” He frowned again. “But if Fullerton, or Barclay or whatever his name is – if he uses a wheelchair he must be crippled. That’s an assumption on my part, of course, for I never laid eyes on him. But presuming he
is
a cripple—”

“He’s one-armed and legless.”

“You mean you saw him?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Then if he’s like you say, how could he get out of his wheelchair and go down two flights of steps?” Pete’s peepers narrowed and suspicion slid into them. Suspicion of me. “And who murdered Duffy?”

“The answer is in an alcove between the bedroom and bath,” I said. “Barclay experimented in prosthetics. He dabbled at inventing artificial limbs. That’s why I asked if you saw anybody scramming. He must have had a set of gams he could get around on.”

“I – see.”

“You didn’t think I croaked Duffy and abolished Barclay down the drainpipes and clouted myself unconscious, did you? You needn’t answer that. I can guess how you figured it, only you figured it wrong. Now where’s a phone?”

He pointed to a hand-set on a stand. “But you can’t go through the switchboard because Duffy isn’t there to give you a line.”

“Poor old guy,” I said. “He probably never got to spend that four bits for a perfecto. But at least he satisfied his curiosity about what the lodger in Three-seventeen looked like. He saw him. And the price he paid was much too high.”

I shooed Pete out into the hall, followed him, shut the door behind us.

“Let’s go, chum,” I said. “I’ve got dialing to do and connections to make. There’s a maniac killer on the loose and he’s thirsting for revenge, gunning for a movie mogul. This is a thing for the cops.”

It was for the cops, all right, but the cops wouldn’t have it. That cost them another bump-off before the night ended.

And it came near installing me in a coffin. Sometimes when my sleep is restless I can still feel those fingers closing like metal bands around my throat. Those are the nights I get up and drink myself very, very drunk . . .

My coupe could do eighty with a tail wind. On a downgrade it might even nudge ninety. I held it to fifty, though, because the last thing I wanted was a ticket for speeding. Not that the ticket would bother me, but you don’t like to be delayed by motorbike bulls when you’re trying to reach a guy and warn him he’s a ripe target for a madman’s bullet.

I whammed west on Sunset to Highland, north on Highland past Hollywood Boulevard and aimed for the hills above that. The multicolored lights of Los Angeles spread out behind and below me like a vast carpet of glowing embers, infernal, patterned in blotchy angles and lines that merged and dimmed against the far infinity of horizon and night.

Ahead, the convoluted hills rose darkly to a star-flecked sky, with here and there a pinprick twinkle on a knoll or cliffside, as if the crests had stretched far up and seized some of the stars to wear for diamonds. Lights in the windows of hilltop houses always look that way from a distance, and in Hollywood it’s considered swanky indeed to live in a district hilltop house.

That was why Emil Heinrich lived in one. Heinrich was big stuff.

I tooled my crate along a curving roadway and climbed. What I had to do was a cop job, but the cops wouldn’t handle it. They were a pack of dopes, particularly my old friend Ole Brunvig of the Homicide Squad. In my mind’s ear I could still hear the echo of Brunvig’s grainy, dyspeptic voice when I called him up from the lobby of the Chaple Arms.

“Nick Ransom, yeah,” I said. “There’s been a kill. A desk clerk, name of Duffy, made the mistake of looking at Ronald Barclay, and Barclay extinguished him. Now Barclay’s on the prowl to pull another bump.”

“He – what?”

I repeated it. “Barclay croaked this clerk named Duffy and now he’s out gunning for—”

“Stop kidding me. How can the clerk be out gunning for somebody if he’s croaked?”

“Not the clerk!” I yelped. “He’s defunct. It’s Barclay who’s on the loose, getting ready to kill again. The name he’s been using is Joseph T. Fullerton, but he’s really Ronald Barclay.” This sounded a little complex, but I let it go. “You remember Barclay. He used to be the hottest ham in the Paragon roster.”

“Oh. That Barclay. For a moment you had me puzzled.” Sudden peevishness sprouted through the sarcasm. “Sure I remember Ronald Barclay. He died fourteen years ago. Killed by an explosion on a sound stage. So now his ghost is horsing around Hollywood and you want him pinched for murder, hey?”

“Yes, but he’s not a ghost. He’s alive, and he’s got a roscoe and he’s on the prowl for the guy who put him in his grave.”

“Now cut that out!” Brunvig blew his lid. “If he’s alive, nobody put him in his grave. If he was in his grave, he isn’t alive. Lay off the drunken comedy.”

“It’s not comedy and I’m sober,” I said hotly. “Barclay is not dead. He never was. His funeral was phony. The explosion cost him both legs and an arm, but it didn’t really kill him. I’m telling you he knocked me senseless a little while ago and bumped a hotel clerk named Duffy and then walked out while I was too unconscious to stop him.”

“Oho. He walked out.” Brunvig’s voice rose to a shrill scream of rage, through which you could hear the gnashing of teeth. “He walked out. He’s got no legs, but he walked out. All right, Sherlock, that tears it. I’ve had enough.”

“Listen,” I said. “You don’t understand!”

“I understand plenty. You’re intoxicated. You’re fried up to the scalp. Okay, you’ve had your fun with me. Now go to bed and sleep it off before I get sore and jerk your license.” Violently he hung up in my ear.

You couldn’t blame him too much. Try to convince anybody that a screen star dead fourteen years is actually alive. Try to make a skeptical cop believe there’s a legless, one-armed bozo walking around packing murder in his pocket, hunting the party whose bomb had blasted him to a living death. You had to see it, as I’d seen it, to know it was true. Otherwise it sounded as screwy as an opium smoker’s dream.

So I got nowhere with Brunvig. I rang him back and he refused to talk to me. He wouldn’t even take the call.

That dumped it spang in my lap, which was what I deserved. It was my own fault. I should have made a getaway from Barclay’s suite when I’d had the chance, should have tipped the law to come slap a straitjacket on him when I first realized he was dangerously insane.

Instead, I’d turned my back on him so he could bash me. Worse, I’d dragged a poor old deaf yuck into the room and got him conked to his ancestors. I felt almost as guilty as if I’d killed Duffy myself.

Any way you looked at it, Barclay was now my personal responsibility. It was up to me to track him down, collar him before he slew any more citizens. Finding him shouldn’t be too difficult, I concluded. He had an obsession, a fixed idea. He craved vengeance on Emil Heinrich, therefore he would make a beeline for Heinrich’s opulent igloo in the Hollywoodland hills, probably by taxi. This called for a chase sequence, yoicks and tally-ho in a thundering hurry.

Not that I cared about Heinrich. If he had actually gimmicked the cigarette-box bomb fourteen years ago it was high time retribution caught up with him. It had to be legal retribution, though, and not meted out by a maniac with a penchant for murdering innocent bystanders. I didn’t want any more dead guys like Duffy weighing on my conscience.

So I left Peter Warren Winthrop, bellhop, elevator jockey and medical student, holding down the fort at the Chaple Arms. I posted him in the frowsy, unclean lobby and ordered him to keep phoning Homicide until he persuaded them to send a tech squad and a meat basket for Duffy’s remainders.

“Stay with it, son, and don’t take no for an answer,” I said.

Then I blipped out to my bucket and lit a shuck for high ground.

Now, ten minutes later, I twisted my tiller, scooted around a series of curves that slanted upward in tilted coils like rope a careless giant had tossed away. And presently I came to my destination.

Heinrich had a layout in keeping with his lofty position as head cheese of a major studio. It was a cubistic stucco affair on three different levels, as if the architect had melted it and let it drip down the face of the hill until it congealed there in an unsymmetrical jumble of gray blocks.

An abrupt driveway angled to a parking area in front of the garage, which might have held ten Cadillacs if you squeezed them in with a shoe-horn. From this terraced plateau, monolithic steps led up to the next level. You didn’t really need an alpenstock to make the climb.

At the top of the steps there was a flat expanse, part patio, part lawn, part flagstones, part garden and part swimming pool. Lake Michigan was bigger than the swimming pool. Skirting it, you came to the house itself, its main entrance recessed in a sort of embrasure. By that time you were ready for artificial respiration.

I thumbed the bell-push, waited for my pulse to get back down out of the stratosphere. By and by the chrome-plated door opened and a stuffed shirt in butler’s livery inspected me with the cordial sunny warmth of December in Siberia.

“Yes, sir?” He let the words slide past his sinuses, like a repressed whinny.

“Mr Heinrich,” I said, and briefly flashed my badge.

“The master is not at home, sir. And if I may say so, sir, I find your approach to be most crude in its subterfuge.”

“Hah?”

“The badge, sir. A special, I believe. Not a genuine police shield at all.” He leered at me. “You are not the only impostor who has tried to obtain an interview on false credentials. Most of them pretend to be gas meter readers, telephone repairmen and termite inspectors. I give you credit for more originality,” he added grudgingly. “But the fact remains that actors, musicians and scenario writers seeking employment with Paragon must see Mr Heinrich at the studio, not at his residence. Good night, sir.”

As that butler said “good night” he started to close the door in my face, very politely, very properly. And very firmly.

I leaned against its velvety chromium surface, just as politely and twice as firmly. I’m a patient guy, but I was fed up with people giving me the brushoff. I reached around the edge of the portal, harvested a fistful of the butler’s livery and hauled him up close to me. I thrust my kisser two inches from his, so he could smell the Scotch on my breath.

“Pal,” I said, “I’m coming in. If you insist on it I’ll trudge the length of you like a welcome mat, but I’m coming in. I’ve got to talk to Heinrich and I’ve got to have permission to prowl the property. Do you take me to your boss right now or shall we wrestle for it?”

“He – he’s not home!” he squawked, flapping like a hen laying a square egg. “Let go of me!”

I shook him a little, just enough to make his tonsils rattle.

“Don’t lie to me, baby. There’s a killer loose. He’s looking for your employer and he’s toting a thirty-eight for a divining rod. Take me to Heinrich. Pronto.”

“He’s out. There’s no-nobody home except Mrs Heinrich and myself. The rest of the household staff have the evening off. You let g-go of me or I’ll call the p-police!”

“I wish you would,” I said grimly. “Maybe they’ll listen to you. They wouldn’t to me.”