Come Back Dead (24 page)

“Or you're not imagining enough, Scotty.”

She took a break after that and sipped her drink. It was a chance for me to introduce a subject that I didn't really want to discuss, a subject that wasn't any of my business but bothered me anyway.

“I spoke with Eric Faris last night. Remember him?”

“Yes,” Linda said. She relaxed slightly and said, “All the energy of a terrier and none of the teeth.”

“That's the guy. He told me you drove him to his motel after you'd warned him off Drury last Saturday.”

“That's right. I did.”

“He said when you got him there, you kissed him.”

“What?” Linda said and laughed.

I smiled myself, from relief. “Out of the blue, you kissed him.”

“Why would I do that? It's crazy. He must have made it up.”

It was the answer I'd wanted to hear. Linda read the line well enough. Then she undercut her delivery by blushing and fumbling her sunglasses back into place.

“Why would he say a thing like that?” she asked. “To get back at me? I didn't treat him that rough.” She laughed again, but now it was forced. “Is there something about me that says ‘desperate widow' to you California men?”

Before I could answer her, I heard Paddy's name being called out, his Sunday name: Patrick J. Maguire. I turned in my seat in time to see a bellhop pass the open door of the bar.

I told Linda I'd be right back and chased after the kid. I caught him easily, since he was weighed down by a silver salver that held a single telegram. I traded him a coin for the flimsy envelope and returned to the bar.

Linda's side of the booth was empty. The bartender pointed to the street door and shrugged sympathetically.

40

I opened the telegram with the sympathetic bartender looking on. There was no reason not to. He and I kept no secrets from each other.

The wire was from Los Angeles, and it read: “Drury's leg not broken. All a publicity stunt says doctor. Lange.”

“Bad news?” the bartender asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I've been drafted again.”

I left the lounge and crossed the lobby to the elevators, thinking as I went how thoroughly Paddy's attempt to move me from center stage to the wings had backfired. I thought, too, of Linda Traynor and how near the breaking point she seemed to be. And for what? Why was she suffering, and why were Shepard and Whitehead dead? The words from the telegram–“All a publicity stunt”–danced around in my head like the latest radio jingle until I felt like shouting them out.

The elevator jockey sensed my mood. “Who ran over your collie?” he asked.

“Just drive, kid,” I said, “and you won't get run over yourself.”

Rodman answered the suite door, looking none too happy about his new duties. Beyond him, Drury was lighting a cigar. He'd lost his dark suit jacket. It had been covering up an open-collared shirt of white silk. The loose-fitting shirt and his wild hair gave him the look of a B-picture buccaneer.

“Scotty,” he said. “There you are finally. Do you feel up to eating something?”

I was still standing next to Rodman. “I need to talk to Mr. Drury privately,” I told him.

The deputy looked to Drury, who said, “It's all right. Go find yourself a sandwich.”

Drury's mind was still on food after Rodman left. “Can we order up lunch, Scotty? Or has Gilbert cut off our meal allowance?”

I'd noted before that Drury tended to find the center of any room he entered. True to form, he was parked in the open middle of the sitting room. I walked over to the side of the wheelchair.

“Can we eat while we talk?” he asked.

“No,” I said and tipped his chair over onto its side. It didn't take much tipping, geniuses being top-heavy by definition. My foot on the chair's arm and one good shove did the trick.

Drury ended up on his stomach, too startled or winded to call out. I pulled the chair away from him and patted him down for a gun. Then I extracted his cigar from the hole it was burning in the carpet and stepped away.

Drury had inhaled by then. “Scotty! Have you gone mad? My leg!”

“Good news from Dr. Petry,” I said. “He got your X rays crossed with another patient's. You're having twins.”

I left Drury lying on the floor, looking like a man poised for his first push-up, and went into the bedroom he'd been using. The maid had already straightened up the place, which was a shame. I intended to toss it, to use one of Paddy's apt terms.

I started by emptying the drawers of the dresser onto the bed. I checked the nightstand next, finding only a Gideon Bible and the replacement script for
The Imperial Albertsons
, dug out of the RKO archives after Drury's original had been stolen in California. Next I pulled the bedding onto the floor and checked beneath the mattress and under the bed itself. Then I emptied the closet of suits, shoes, and, finally, luggage. The last piece I checked was a large traveling bag of maroon leather. The bag made a thumping sound when I tilted it, but when I looked inside, it was empty.

The answer to that paradox turned out to be a false bottom held in place by hidden snaps. Inside the secret compartment was a duplicate of something I'd already found, another copy of the shooting script for
Albertsons
. This one had Drury's name embossed on its beaten-up cover and marginal notes on every page, written in every color of ink.

I carried the script back into the sitting room. While I was away, Drury had managed to roll over onto his back. He sat up as I entered. I dumped the script on his lap.

“If there's a reward out for that,” I said, “I'll take cash.”

“How did you know, Scotty?”

“If you're asking how I knew you'd stolen your own script, the answer is, I didn't. I was looking for something else in there and just happened across it.”

“I meant, how did you know my leg wasn't broken?”

“I should have guessed that the night of the cross burning. You were supposed to be weeks away from walking on crutches, but you stood up that night like a guardsman. When you realized what you'd done, you pulled a fainting spell, and I bought it.

“You counted on my buying everything. You were so confident, you even told me how you'd survived the fall from the camera crane. That was the point of your reminiscences about the Banfi Family Circus. You wanted to tell me you were a trained tumbler. It amused you to. You were that certain I'd never figure out what was really going on.”

“But you have?” Drury asked, showing me his perfect teeth.

I fought the urge to kick them down his throat. “What are the odds, right? That it should be me who tracked you down, the man you handpicked from all the has-beens and failures in Hollywood.”

“You're being too hard on yourself. You came highly recommended.”

“I know. By Torrance Beaumont, no less.”

Drury tucked his teeth away where they'd be safe, and I chalked up one for me.

“How did you learn that?” he asked.

“Dumb luck. I happened to visit Beaumont, and he happened to mention that you'd been to see him. I know Beaumont, so I can guess what he told you about me. He'd have said I was a down-on-my-luck ex-actor with more loyalty than brains, that the thing I was most loyal to was a silly, romantic dream of Hollywood as it used to be, that I'd be a sucker for your plan to turn back the clock by resurrecting
Albertsons
. In other words, I was just the security man you were looking for, one who wouldn't get in the way of your schemes. ‘A prize sap,' as Tory likes to say.”

Mr. Drury was reserving comment.

“I may even have gotten a plug from Hank Shepard. He might have mentioned that he'd slept with my wife. That was another point in favor of hiring me. It made me a potential fall guy for a murder rap. Were you planning to kill Shepard as far back as that?”

“What?” Drury demanded. “Scotty, please! What are you saying?”

“You haven't asked me what I was looking for when I came across the missing script. I was after the gun you used to kill Hank Shepard. It's called a Liberator, in case you're interested. You found it in the Riverbend parlor, along with comic book instructions showing how to load it and fire it.”

“I couldn't have shot Hank.”

“That's what we thought yesterday when we believed your leg was broken.”

Drury tried to laugh. “You found out about my leg and jumped to the conclusion that I'm a murderer?”

“It was the other way around. Thinking you might be the murderer led me to the truth about your leg. We all believed that you couldn't have shot Shepard because he died of a contact wound, and a man in a wheelchair couldn't have climbed up into the tack room to press the gun against his chest. But a witness saw you do it, so it followed that your leg couldn't really be broken.”

“What witness?”

“John Piers Whitehead. Eric Faris will testify that he saw Whitehead at Riverbend on the night of the murder.”

“John never told anyone he saw me kill Hank.”

“Of course not. You'd paid him too well to keep quiet. He came to you here in this suite on the night after the murder, just as you told me he did. Only it was to blackmail you. You agreed to take him back. In exchange, he promised to take your secret to his grave, which is how it worked out.”

“Why would I kill Hank Shepard? He was my friend.”

It was a piece I hadn't had when I'd entered Drury's suite, but I thought I'd found it there. I looked down at the script in the director's lap.

“This?” Drury asked, picking up the script and shaking it at me. “This was my motive? This was a publicity stunt. Okay, I admit it. Hank and I faked all the sabotage attempts back in Hollywood. But it was just for publicity, so we'd get a big play when we took the wraps off the production. And, yes, we faked my broken leg. What was so terrible about that? Worse frauds than that are worked in Hollywood every day.”

“You and Shepard slashed the car tires at the RKO lot?”

“Yes,” Drury said.

“And stole your own script?”

“Yes.”

“And set fire to the editing room?”

Drury missed his cue.

“I suppose Shepard burned himself to make it look good. Don't tell me his burns were faked. Max Factor himself isn't that good.”

“We never intended for Hank to be hurt,” Drury said. “The fire got out of hand.”

“Maybe the shooting got out of hand,” I said. “Maybe you only meant to hit him in the fleshy part of his heart.”

Drury winged the script at me. I caught it by its title page and tucked it under my arm.

“I don't think the attempts against
Albertsons
were faked,” I said. “I think they were genuine sabotage, and I think you're the saboteur. Shepard was never in on it, but he may have figured it out. That may have been why you shot him.”

“Why would I hire a security company if I was behind the sabotage?”

“For window dressing. You had to do it to keep up the pretense that the sabotage attempts were real–and the bigger pretense: the idea that your comeback was real.”

Drury squirmed an extra inch away from me, and I knew I had him–thanks to Tory Beaumont. I had remembered something else from my visit to the dying actor.

“Do you know why Beaumont calls me a sap? I made the mistake once of telling him that I thought it would be better if every man's life could fade to black after he'd done his best day's work, the way it does for a character in a movie. Beaumont doesn't believe that–he's got too much inside–but you do, Drury. You're hollow from the neck down.”

“I have no idea what you're raving about,” Drury said, more and more of his native Cleveland sneaking into his speech. He rolled over onto his stomach and began to drag his prop cast toward a table that stood in the corner farthest from me.

“I'm talking about the central problem of your life. Where do you go from up? Your answer has always been to jump from one thing to another. Tired of setting Broadway on its ear? Move to radio. Conquered radio? Move to Hollywood. Never let the critics tire of your gimmicks. Never let them see the bottom of your bag of tricks.”

“There were no gimmicks or tricks in
First Citizen
!” Drury yelled, his back to me as he crawled. “It was a work of art!”

“It was,” I said, “but that only made your dilemma worse. You'd made the greatest movie of all time, first shot out of the box, and you had nowhere left to jump. There were no new worlds to conquer. It's a shame television wasn't up and running. You could have been Milton Berle.”

“I made a second masterpiece!
Imperial Albertsons
!” Drury grappled with the table, struggling to pull himself up and sending the table's load–his box of cigars, a bowl of fruit, a vase of flowers–crashing to the floor. “If Whitehead and the studio hadn't ruined it, I would have gone on to make a dozen more.”

“You tried to make a second masterpiece–I'll give you that much. But sometime late in the going, you lost heart. You saw that
Albertsons
wouldn't top
First Citizen
, or maybe it dawned on you that another success would just double the pressure to perform. So you ran off to England for the State Department and left your unfinished movie in the hands of John Piers Whitehead, a man you knew couldn't handle the job.”

“John was a fine producer.”

“In the theater. In radio, he'd been adequate. In Hollywood, he was plain lost. And you knew it. You knew just what would happen the second your back was turned. You couldn't have destroyed your movie any more surely if you'd dropped it in the ocean on your way to London.”

Drury had struggled to a standing position by then, supported by the table and the wall next to it. The effort had taken all his strength. His thin chest was heaving under the sweat-stained silk of his shirt.

“Your comeback must have worked the same way,” I said. “It must have been genuine at the start. You wouldn't have risked Eden otherwise. You must have felt you were far enough removed from the old, scary days to try again. So you sucked in poor Hank Shepard for one more go at the brass ring. He'd watched you throw away chance after chance, and his own career with them, but he went along for one more ride.

“Sometime after you'd bought the negative and set yourself up at RKO, you lost your nerve again. You were afraid it wasn't going to come together maybe, or afraid that it was. You started looking for a way out. You decided to burn the negative after doing some minor vandalism as a warm-up. You were going to torch your last chance and Shepard's. But he stepped in and saved it.

“He was close to the truth after that. Something about the fire must have made him suspicious. So you arranged the accident with the camera crane and made sure you were the only one on the platform when it fell. You probably set the whole thing up with Dr. Petry in advance. Shepard believed, like the rest of us, that your leg really was broken. That put him off your trail for a time. When he got suspicious all over again, you killed him.”

“Perhaps I killed him because he saved the negative from the fire in Culver City,” Drury said. He'd recovered his wind and his swagger. He was staring me down from behind a veil of black hair that curved almost to his mouth. “That would fit in better with your psychoanalysis. I suppose I murdered John, too. How did I manage that? With a slingshot?”

“You murdered Whitehead in 1942,” I said, “when you made him the patsy for
Albertsons
. You just finished him off last night. After Linda and Gilbert left you, you went with Whitehead onto the terrace. He probably pushed your chair.”