The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (36 page)

I saw a legless figure in a rolling wheelchair, a one-armed form with a vague blur of face and a gat in his lap, and the voice of a guy I’d once considered my friend. I had the memory of a kraut director named Heinrich who had climbed to the top of the cinema heap, slowly but implacably, until he was chief poobah of a major studio.

And I saw a voluptuous and uninhibited quail, feather-brained, black of hair and gorgeously white of skin, lolling in a darkened solarium taking a star bath, letting her lovely contours soak up cosmic rays while she expressed a fervent wish that her hubby would drop dead.

I hit bottom. And, as I hit, I found all the answers. A fine time to be finding answers, when you’re drowning at the bottom of a swimming pool.

On the other hand, when you’re a murderer and you’ve strangled a guy and dumped him in the deep six, you’ll likely stand by to see if he floats to the surface again. That’s so you can shoot him, bludgeon him or shove him under to make certain he dies – if he’s not already dead. Naturally, if he’s dead he’ll stay beneath the water and you needn’t worry about him any more.

I stayed under water.

I wasn’t deceased. I wasn’t even unconscious. But I knew if I came up for air I would be a goner. The instant my conk popped out it would be a bull’s-eye, either for a bullet or a fractured skull if I happened to be within reaching distance of the pool’s edge. I realized this even while my lungs were bursting and every muscle struggled to impel me off the bottom.

I fought it. I reverted to my stunting days when I could stay immersed as long as the scenario demanded. I held my breath, got my feet planted solidly on the slippery tile floor of the immense pool and slowly started walking. Very slowly, so I couldn’t create surface ripples. And keeping my mental fingers crossed, hoping I was headed in the right direction.

My soles detected a slant – downward.

I reversed myself. My ears were pounding now, and my chest was full of molten metal that seared and burned like a blast furnace. But I had learned which way the pool’s bottom tilted, and I was heading for the shallow end. All I needed was another minute.

Too bad Emil Heinrich was such a big shot at Paragon Pix. Too bad he had so much dough. If he had been less wealthy his swimming pool would be smaller. I could reach the shallow part sooner. But no, Heinrich had to be in the top chips. Try that on your philosophy. A guy earned too much geet, and because of it people died.

I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.

I let some of it out and it streamed up over my head like an immense balloon. Like a drifting blister. Like bubble gum. It popped and broke on the surface. I could hear it.

Okay, killer. You happy now? You know what that air-bubble spells. You’ve murdered me. That was the last of my air. Now you can go away. I’m on the bottom and I’m croaked.

Oh, yeah? That’s what you think.

The pool’s floor slanted more abruptly. I kept walking. I got my cigarette holder out of my inside coat pocket. It was a plastic cigarette holder with silver filigree. A client had given it to me one time, by way of showing gratitude. I never use it, except when I’m trying to impress other clients. Cigarette holders are an affectation. I like to inhale my poison straight.

Nice cigarette holder. Not as long as a symphony conductor’s baton, but long enough. A hollow tube, slightly flared at one end; a mouthpiece on the other.

Shallow water now. Still deep enough to cover me, but shallow. Careful now. Keep at least six inches of water over your head, Ransom, old boy. Don’t break the surface.

I stuck the holder in my mouth and poked its opposite end out of the pool. I blew through it, cleared it.

Then I breathed through it. I breathed air. Wonderful element, air. Puts oxygen in your blood and hair on your chest. I breathed air through the plastic tube, and nobody knew it. Nobody could see me. To all intents and purposes I was a cadaver at the bottom of the water. For a cadaver I was feeling pretty spry.

I kept breathing, not moving. No telling how long it would be before I dared take a chance and scramble out onto dry land. I couldn’t tell who was watching, any more than the watcher could tell I was alive. I breathed, and waited. I waited and breathed.

Nobody lives forever. I walked and broke water and found the hand rails of a ladder and got my feet on the rungs, hauled myself to the bordering tiles. No gunshots. No swat on the steeple. Nothing but darkness and the squishing of my shoes and the splashy
drip-drip-drip
from my ruined tweeds.

That, and distant bitter dialogue, and a motor idling lazily on the driveway down below.

The motor had a rich hollow chuckle from its exhaust, like an Indian tomtom in a rain barrel. It sounded healthy and powerful and expensive. It sounded like five miles to the gallon, provided the driver did a lot of coasting.

The masculine voices sounded sore.

I skittered to the steep concrete escarpment the Heinrich menage used for an outdoor stairway and probed my way down through a night that was just as dark as it had ever been. On the parking area this side of the driveway there was something that could have been a Cadillac, a Packard, a Lincoln or a streamlined Diesel locomotive.

Its rear end was pointing inward, twin tail-lights and amber back-up lights glowing like a Christmas tree. Apparently the guy at the wheel had come up the drive and then jockeyed the massive heap around so he could back into the garage and be ready for a fast straight-ahead takeoff in the morning.

His head lamps made the driveway and parking level as bright as a movie set under sun arcs, but he wasn’t at his tiller now. He had got out and walked around to open the garage doors, and I recognized him in the red-and-amber glow of his stern lights. He was Emil Heinrich, short, dumpy, potbellied, with a face like a full moon. His wife had said he wouldn’t be home until late, but he had fooled her.

He was talking in a thick, guttural monotone to somebody who lurked in the shadows at the sedan’s far side.

“Zo. You want me to bay you one hundred thousandt tollars for dis diary. The diary of a dead man, agguzing me of murter. You zay you vill turn me ofer to the law if I revuze. Pah! Id iss ridiculous. I vill gif you one thousandt tollars cash, vich I habben to haf in mein bocket for small change. One thousandt, for your nuisanz walue.” He spat. “Take id or leaf id.”

“I’ll take it as first payment.”

I knew that voice. How well I knew that voice! Resonant. Determined. I didn’t have to gander its owner, hidden around the far side of the sedan. Hearing it was enough.

Heinrich reached into a coat pocket as if to bring forth the promised lettuce. He made a mistake. A bad mistake. He dragged a roscoe out instead.

Flame lanced out around the sneezing
ka-chow!
of gunfire. It wasn’t Heinrich’s gun that fired, though. He never got around to it. He lurched, took three mincing steps backward, crossed his ankles awkwardly and twisted as he fell. After he fell he didn’t even move.

Catapulting down the remaining steps, I was unable to draw a bead on the killer because the chuckle-purring sedan was in the way. I had my own heater ready, but I couldn’t use it. A car door slammed. The chuckle-purr snarled into a roar. Rear tires spun, screeched, got traction. The sedan made like jet propulsion going down the driveway.

I snapped a cap at where I thought its gas tank ought to be. Nothing happened. My rod had been too long under water. The cartridge must have been just slightly defective, enough to let the powder get soaked.

I swore, ejected it, jacked another shell into the firing chamber and tried again. But by that time the getaway crate had careened onto the road and was gone. The gat jumped in my fist and my slug went
pee-yowp!
against the opposite cliff. Clean miss.

Then I wasted time. I bent down in the darkness, inspected Heinrich’s porky poundage. His wife had got her wish. She was a widow now. Scratch one studio executive. A tunnel that only a .38 could make was drilled all the way through his chest. No matter how important you are in Hollywood, a .38 slug in your heart brings you down to size.

The nickel-plated revolver on Ronald Barclay’s legless lap had been .38 caliber. That was the final clue.

I lunged to my coupé where I’d parked it over to one side of the garage apron. Unfortunately, I’d left it headed inward. Now I had to get it started, get it horsed around in the opposite direction. That wasted more time. I finally made it and went thundering down the driveway, around the bend into the road. Then I widened out, fed my clattering cylinders all the coal they would take. I made knots. I bored a hole in the night that the night would never repair.

Down out of the hills, a siren cut loose behind me and a red spotlight stabbed my rear-view mirror.

I pulled over. A prowl car drew abreast. I bounced out, rushed to the cop chariot and yodeled:

“Boys, you’ve got a passenger!” I flashed my badge, piled into the police buggy. “Let’s go! And get me Lieutenant Ole Brunvig on your two-way short wave. Brunvig of Homicide. This is murder.”

The cops bought it. I must have sounded plenty sincere. They believed me. The one sitting alongside the driver cut in his transmitter, talked to his hand mike. Presently Brunvig’s voice rasped in the cowl speaker.

I snaked the hand mike away from the cop and made with the words. Terse words that boiled out of me like Mount Vesuvius in eruption. After a while the loud-speaker snapped back at me. I had a date with Brunvig at the Chaple Arms.

The prowl car picked up velocity. The guy at the wheel was good. He sent only three pedestrians scampering up palm trees. He took only the first skin of red paint off a passing Pacific Electric bus. He should have been a barber. He could shave you with his front fender and never leave a whisker.

Ole Brunvig’s official bucket was just pulling up in front of the Chaple Arms as we screamed to a halt behind him. Up ahead, a sedan was parked – a new, streamlined monster that didn’t belong to this neighborhood at all. It made the rest of the heaps on the street look like scrap iron. And the sedan was Emil Heinrich’s.

I leaped to the sidewalk, grabbed Ole’s arm and yanked him into the flea-bag hotel’s dingy lobby without missing a stride. There was nobody holding down the greasy, marble-topped desk. I ducked around back of it, found a chart for the rectangular tier of wooden letterboxes.

“One-thirty-nine!” I yeeped. “Ground floor. Come on!”

Brunvig hadn’t had a chance to say anything. He still didn’t. He just unlimbered his cannon and kept pace with me around a rear hallway to the door I wanted. I pointed at the keyhole.

“Okay,” he grunted. “If I get busted back to harness for this, I’ll reach down your throat and yank you inside out.” Then, expertly, he shot the lock to splinters.

I hit the portal a mighty lick and went sailing into a small, cheerless room.

“This is all of it, punk,” I said to Peter Warren Winthrop. “You’re through. You’re through being a bellhop, elevator operator and medical student. And you’re through killing people.”

He straightened up from a Gladstone bag he had been hastily packing.

“What?”

“Playing stupid will buy you nothing,” I said. “The giveaway was when you throttled me, dunked me in the pool. Up until then I hadn’t suspected you. My attention was all on Ronald Barclay. I’d sensed something haywire about the Barclay theory, but I couldn’t nail it down. Then you choked me, hurled me to a watery grave – at which juncture the finger pointed straight at you. A lot of fingers. Ten of them, to be exact.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about two hands closing around my throat. One set of fingers pressing my carotid artery, and the other set digging into my jugular vein on the opposite side of my neck. Then I knew it couldn’t be Barclay who had jumped me, because he was a one-armed guy. And the fingers strangling me were real. Human. Alive. Hot. Not one real hand and one artificial. Both hands were genuine. That eliminated Barclay.”

“This is all Greek to me,” he said.

I sneered at him. “It was to me, too, until I savvied the clue of the ten fingers. Then everything else clicked into place. I remembered pushing Barclay’s living-room door open, and encountering resistance – the pressure of somebody leaning against it outside in the hall. I remembered giving it a shove, and bouncing poor old Duffy across the corridor so that he landed like a sack of bones.

“At the time I thought he’d been eavesdropping. But eavesdroppers don’t lean against doors when you catch them at it. They turn and run for cover.”

“So what?”

“So the next time I saw Duffy he was deceased of a cracked superstructure. And his hearing aid was switched off, which didn’t spell anything to me at the time. It did later, though, when I began adding things up. With his ear gadget turned off to save the batteries, he couldn’t have been listening at the door.”

The punk shifted uneasily. “I don’t get what you’re driving at. It sounds like a lot of hogwash.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, how about this? You followed me up to Heinrich’s igloo in the Hollywoodland hills, ostensibly to inform me that Duffy’s corpse had vanished. But I hadn’t told you I was going to the Heinrich stash. I never mentioned Heinrich’s name to you. And you couldn’t have heard me say it when I phoned Lieutenant Brunvig at Headquarters, because Brunvig cut me off before I brought Heinrich into the conversation. Yet you trailed me, found me. How?”

“Why, I – I – that is, I—”

“
You
were the eavesdropper,” I said. “Not Duffy. You, Peter Warren Winthrop. That accounts for the stethoscope. A stethoscope is a handy listening device. Plug it in your ears and put the diaphragm end against a wall or a door and you can hear whatever is being said inside a room. Know what I think? I think you listened to everything Ronald Barclay told me. You found out who he was. And what he had on Emil Heinrich – which was plenty, from a blackmailer’s viewpoint. You probably wondered how you could make use of the information to line your own pockets. And while you listened, Duffy came upstairs and caught you with your stethoscope to the door.”