Way of a Wanton (7 page)

“Same thing,” he said. “Good as gold. This makes you part of the movie industry, Mr. Scott.”
 

“That doesn't overwhelm me.”
 

“And I grant you that the par value of the two shares is only eight thousand dollars. But say the net profits of ‘Jungle Girl' are a million dollars. You hold in your hand the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars.”
 

“Slow down, Mr. Bondhelm. Why not say a billion? That stinker's not about to net a million. And suppose it's a flop? I got a handful of paper.”
 

His eyes narrowed and almost went out of sight in the fat around them. He didn't answer.
 

I looked at the papers I was holding, and wondered how heavy twenty thousand dollars would be. I said, “I'd prefer to have money. If I take the case.”
 

He shook his head, once left, once right. “No. I can't give you money. I have only one offer.”
 

I looked at the “potential profits” in my hand again. I thought about Helen. I said, “Mr. Bondhelm, the proposition isn't entirely unattractive, but I'd have to know more about your interest in the case. Maybe it's unusual, but it's the way I work. Also, what if I don't learn anything—or the police have the killer tomorrow?”
 

He didn't answer for quite a while and his eyes did their disappearing act again. He was a strange character; I didn't like him at all. He opened his eyes wide and stared impassively at me. “You would keep the shares, Mr. Scott,
if
you contributed materially to the solution of the case. Naturally if you, ah, accomplish nothing at all, you couldn't expect so large a fee.” He paused, then went on rapidly, “But inasmuch as it seems obvious that one of those present at the Thursday-night gathering at Mr. Evans's home killed the girl, I would naturally expect you to concentrate most of your efforts on them. I ... have my reasons.”
 

This was very damned screwy. I said, “Well?”
 

He sighed and leaned slightly forward, then pulled a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and wiped it over his perspiring face. He started talking, and I think he'd been intending to tell me this all along. “I want to be very frank with you, Mr. Scott,” he said. “I make a good deal of money through investment in motion pictures. Mr. Genova's last picture was a—a flop, as you say. His financial backers left him. None of the banks would take another chance with him. I was the only man he could get to finance the movie. We formed a corporation to produce ‘Jungle Girl' and he put up all he could get his hands on: one hundred thousand dollars. I advanced the remaining three hundred thousand. Before I did, however, I had inserted into our contract a clause stating that if at any time the picture went three per cent over the budget, all rights were relinquished to me. You can understand that it would be to my advantage if the film did go over the budget.”
 

The old pirate. I was beginning to understand, all right. Over the budget equals Genova out and Bondhelm in the driver's seat. I could understand now the frantic efforts of Louis Genova Productions to keep expenses down. I could also understand something else: I was getting tired of Peter Bondhelm.
 

I said, “In other words, all I have to do is pin the kill on somebody in the picture, huh? For two shares of maybe worthless stock I frame somebody and ruin the ‘Jungle Girl' budget.”
 

He said easily, “Not at all, Mr. Scott. You will decide—determine who is the guilty party. It merely seems apparent to me that someone from Genova Productions is the logical choice.” He hesitated and mopped his face again. “I will say this: If, by any accident, you should interrupt shooting—or be forced to interrupt it—and those interruptions worked to my benefit, there would be more shares waiting here for you.”
 

The slimy sonofabitch was trying to pay me to wreck the movie. I got up and tossed the papers into his lap, then turned and started out, but he yelled after me.
 

“Mr. Scott! You misunderstand me. Please. I've been very frank with you, haven't I? Please don't think I want you to do anything illegal or underhanded. You ... may do what you see fit.”
 

I turned around and walked back to the chair he was still in. Maybe he needed help to get out of it. I said, “Now you listen a minute, friend. I interrupted a highly pleasant evening to come out here because I thought you had a legitimate offer. I wouldn't even touch the case with strings on it. Not for all your damn stock.”
 

He calmed down and seemed to become quite agreeable. The upshot of it was that I could do it my way. Finally I said, “And why me? There are a lot of other detectives—and some of them might even go for your strings.”
 

He cleared his throat. “I understand you are acquainted with one or two of the Genova people. Also you were present at Mr. Evans's this evening. Obviously that alone gives you a great advantage over anybody else I might hire. I might also add, Mr. Scott, that your excellent record is quite well known.”
 

“One other thing.” I thought a moment and stretched the framework of my question a little to see if I could get more. “The dope on Zoe's murder hasn't hit the papers or broadcasts yet; so just how did you know all this so soon?”
 

He shook his head again, left, right. “No. It isn't necessary for you to know.”
 

And he wasn't expanding on that, either. We went around some more, but after another five minutes I said, “O.K. But understand this: I'll take the case, I'll follow any lead I see fit, I'll report to you. But that's absolutely all. I handle this the way I would any other case. And for three shares.”
 

It took five more minutes, but when I went out the front door I had a client and three shares in ‘Jungle Girl.' Three shares, quite possibly, of nothing.
 

Back at the Spartan I trotted eagerly up to the second floor and down the hall to my apartment. I opened the door and stuck my head inside.
 

“Hey, Helen,” I yelled. “Yoo-hoo.” The lights were burning brightly, but there was no answer. “Here I am,” I cried. “I'm back!”
 

I shut and locked the door and there still wasn't any answer. I waited a moment. Oh, no! I thought. She can't have done this to me. Then I started thinking clearly again: She was asleep. Well, I thought slyly, let her sleep. The doll, she was already in bed, that was what. I turned out the living room lights and tiptoed into the bedroom. I was wrong: That wasn't what. There was still the indentation of Helen's long, lovely body on the bedspread, but the long, lovely body was gone. A note on the table—resting against the phone, of all places—said, “Shell, darling, it got a little late for me. And I was tired. Too tired. Did you make lots of money?”
 

I undressed anyway, showered, and fifteen minutes after I'd torn up the note I climbed sadly between cold sheets. I'd looked everywhere in the apartment, and Helen had gone, all right. There was no doubt in my mind that I was alone now. The shape I was in, I had even looked under the bed.
 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

THE first alarm pulled me halfway up from delicious, dream-drugged sleep and left me suspended in warmth and drowsiness. Then the second alarm banged against my ear and I blinked stupidly around me, remembering the party, the pool, and finally Helen. The strange thing was, I'd been dreaming of Sherry.
 

Twenty minutes later, still only about one-third awake, but dressed in a tan gabardine suit, brown knit-wool tie, Cordovans, and my .38 Colt, I went downstairs, climbed into the Cad, and headed for breakfast. The Cad is still so new that I'm not quite used to it, but it's a beauty.
 

It made me feel like a capitalist, which I was, and as I drove away from the Spartan I flashed my chrome happily at a two-year-old Chevy parked around the corner on Clinton. On Sunset Boulevard I turned right and headed for Lyle's, where I often have my meager breakfast when I'm too lazy to cook my own mush. Automatically I checked the rear-vision mirror and idly noted another two-year-old Chevy about a block behind me. A green one this time; I couldn't remember what color the other one had been. Not that it mattered; it was too early in this case for guys with submachine guns to be following me.
 

With a number of other people, I feel that the first half hour or so of each morning is best forgotten. I hate life, people, food, damn near everything—at least till I have coffee. Lyle's was up ahead on my right at the corner, and as I pulled in to the curb and parked, a Chevrolet went by. Just for the hell of it I sat there and watched it as it went a block past St. Andrews Place and took a right on Western. I got out, bought copies of the
Times, Examiner
, and
Crier
from the metal stands in front of Lyle's, and dropped my three dimes in the slots. The
Times
and
Examiner
were for news; the
Crier
for dirt. I'd barely glanced at the headlines when I spotted the green Chevy again, and this time I was damned sure it was the same one. The driver had driven around the block and parked on St. Andrews facing Sunset—and me. It looked very much as if he were waiting there to pick me up when I left. I didn't get it.
 

Neither did I like it, so I folded the papers under my arm, walked across St. Andrews, and turned right. As I approached the Chevy, the man sitting behind the wheel ignored me completely. Maybe too completely—and maybe I was in even worse shape than I usually am before breakfast. But, if nothing else, I wanted a good look at this character, just in case.
 

I walked around to the driver's side of the car and he didn't once glance at me. A very uncurious boy. I stopped and leaned on the door, and he finally looked up.
 

“Morning,” I said. “Haven't I seen you somewhere before?”
 

He was a little man with a narrow face and horn-rimmed spectacles perched on his sharp nose. A small bald spot was eating its way outward from the top of his head. “Why ... good morning,” he said. He looked puzzled. “I don't believe so, sir.” He frowned and added, “I'm sure I've never seen you.”
 

“Maybe around the Wilshire Country Club,” I said pleasantly. He started to shake his head and I went on, “Not exactly the club—across the street on Clinton, just off North Rossmore.”
 

He blinked at me. It occurred to me that all this was a bit silly if he was a tourist examining the smog. I said, “I made you from across the street and thought I'd let you know.” He didn't say anything to that, but if for any reason he had been tailing me, he'd know what I meant. I left him and jaywalked back to Lyle's, wondering if I were cracking up. At least I'd know him if I saw him again, though a further meeting didn't seem likely then.
 

In Lyle's I ordered toast and coffee, then skimmed through the
Crier
, which was on top of the stack of papers. The front page was having a fit over the murder of Zoe Townsend. It was all there, complete with sly and indignant conjectures about bathing suits in pools, Hollywood orgies, love nests. I was reminded again that those who express the greatest shock and most towering indignation about alleged immorality or indecency are almost invariably the ones most avid for the intimate and sensual details. I read on. The police were confident. A picture of the body under a sheet was on the second page. It was the usual coverage, the kind of story I was used to by now.
 

A waitress brought my toast and coffee as I glanced at Fanny Hillman's movie-page column, “The Eye at the Keyhole.” I'd never seen Fanny, but with a kind of masochism I had from time to time read her column, and I had long ago come to the conclusion that she was referring to the bathroom keyhole. She wasn't in the same league as the big-shot gossip mongers, being a relative newcomer, but she had her own following of morons. It was obvious from Fanny's vocabulary that she could win an argument with any half-wit in the land.
 

Fanny was Hollywood's Pandora with a new box to open every day including Sunday; she was another self-appointed guardian of public immorals, and it was safe to bet that if she had her way General Motors would swing hastily into mass production of chastity girdles. She was a news maker, quite literally, and exaggeration was her legitimate technique; people were potential items, no more, and she used them like a blood bank. It was my considered opinion that she was a gal who never let her left hand know what her right hand was scratching. As you may have guessed, I have no use for the Fanny Hillmans.
 

I gritted my teeth and plunged into her column. It took a man with a strong stomach to read the stuff, but to write it Fanny must have had a stronger stomach than a mortician who brings his lunch to work. The column gushed forth this morning with a reference to the murder beginning, “The stark-naked body of delicately lovely Zoe Townsend, brutally strangled by a ‘person or persons unknown,' was last night discovered in the swimming pool of one of our town's foremost directors...”
 

Zoe hadn't been naked, but I particularly liked that “person or persons unknown” bit, wondering what was the record number of persons ever to strangle a body. I stopped being even slightly amused when I reached the bottom of the column. I got so unamused that I almost strangled, myself, on my first gulp of coffee—the only gulp I was going to get—and punched a thumbnail through a halftone photo of Lili St. Cyr. Fanny ended each day's column with what she called, coyly, “Can You Guess?” Usually I didn't try; this morning I didn't have to.