“Not with the people he was doing business with. They wouldn’t be worth a nickel as an alibi.”
Steinlen nodded, went on: “Mae told me what she wanted — twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. She said if I didn’t give it to her she was going to Mrs. Steinlen with my check and tell her that I had seduced her and then tried to buy her off for twenty-five hundred...” He smiled crookedly. “Her idea was very sound — the check was irrefutable proof. Picture producers don’t give extra-girls twenty-five-hundred-dollar checks as birthday gifts...”
I said: “That was a very chump piece of business for you to do. How come?”
Steinlen laughed shortly, bitterly, shook his head. “I guess we all think we’re character sharks,” he said. “I thought she was on the level.”
One of the phones on his desk rang and he picked it up and told his secretary to put whoever was calling on. While the connection was being made he said, “Pardon me,” and then he said, “Hello, Sheila,” into the phone. He talked to her for several minutes; he asked her how the location trip had been and whether she had received his last letter. Every fifth word was darling or baby or honey. Finally he asked her if she was coming to the studio, and said he’d try to get home early and hung up.
He said: “That was Mrs. Steinlen — she just got back from location in Arizona.”
Then he went on about Mae. He said she’d insisted on his meeting her at the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont — she didn’t want him to come to the Mara because somebody might see him come in. The corner of Rosewood and Larchmont was only a couple blocks from the Mara. He explained to her that he couldn’t get the money in the middle of the night but she was very drunk; she said he’d better get it and hung up on him. He’d decided to meet her and reason with her and talk her out of it until the next day, anyway, so he’d have time to figure out what he was going to do. He went to the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont and waited from two thirty-five until almost four o’clock. She didn’t show, so he figured that Tony had come back and she couldn’t get away; he went home and tried to sleep. The first thing he knew about the murder was when he read it in the paper after he got to the studio, about ten o’clock.
The more he talked the dizzier I got about the whole layout. It would have been a cinch for Tony to start to Long Beach and then sneak back — he was suspicious of Mae, anyway — and catch her going out to meet Steinlen. He would probably have knocked her down and frisked her and found the check and that would have been that. Tony was a pretty bad boy when he was mad. But if that’s the way it had been and Tony had put on that act for me so I’d help him — then Tony was the greatest actor in the world and wasting his time bootlegging. He was not only the greatest actor in the world but I was degenerating into a prize sucker and losing my eyesight.
On the other hand, Steinlen didn’t even have the alibi of having been at home. He said he’d been on the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont from two thirty-five till almost four. Mae had been killed around three-thirty. Steinlen could have pulled that off very nicely — he didn’t have a leg to stand on, except that I thought he was telling the truth. Maybe Steinlen was the world’s greatest actor. It was a cinch Mae hadn’t strangled herself.
I began to think very seriously about chucking the whole thing — after all, it was none of my business — if I wasn’t careful I’d be getting myself jammed up.
Steinlen said suddenly: “I’ll give five thousand dollars for that check.”
That made it my business. I told Steinlen I’d call him later and left the studio.
Tony had gone. Opal said he’d sat at the window for about a half hour without saying anything and then jumped up suddenly and gone.
I went back down to my room and lay down on the bed and tried to figure things out. Tony and Steinlen were both naturals to have put the chill on Mae, but unless I was entirely screwy neither of them had.
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’d been overlooking a bet in Cora. Maybe there’d been some kind of jealous play on Tony that I didn’t know anything about. I remembered how long he’d stayed with her the night before and how much he’d carried on about her guy walking out on her. That might have been a gag to cover up something else. It was a pretty long shot but I was mixed up enough about the whole business by that time to try anything. I called Cora and she wasn’t in. I told the switchboard girl to ask her to call me. Then I lay down again and fell asleep.
When I woke up it was twenty minutes after four and the phone was ringing. It was Bill Fraley; he said Dingo, a horse we’d made a fair-sized bet on the night before, had romped in, we’d won four hundred and thirty dollars apiece. I told him I’d meet him over at the cigar store where Hartley made book and I took a shower and shaved and went downstairs.
When I stopped at the desk for my mail there was a fellow named Gleason — an assistant cameraman that I’d known casually for a year or so — leaning on the counter talking to the clerk. We said hello and I asked him what he’d been doing and he said he’d just got back from location at Phoenix with the Sheila Dale outfit. He said he was living at the hotel and we gave each other the usual song and dance about calling each other up and getting together real soon, then I went over to the cigar store and met Bill and collected my bet from Hartley. Bill and I went into the Derby and had something to eat. I called up Cora again but she wasn’t in.
After a while I called Steinlen. A man answered the phone in his outer office, instead of the secretary. When he asked who was calling I had a hunch and said Mister Smith and when he asked what I wanted to talk to Steinlen about I said I wanted to talk to him about a bill that was long overdue.
The man said: “Mister Steinlen committed suicide about a half-hour ago,” and hung up.
Fraley looked at me and said: “You look like you’d just seen a ghost.”
I told him I had.
Steinlen wasn’t the kind of guy to bump himself off. It looked very much like Tony to me; it looked like whoever had murdered Mae had reached Tony in some way and let him get a flash of the check. They could have explained having the check by saying that Mae had been afraid Tony would find it and had given it to them for safe keeping. In the state of mind Tony was in he’d go for that. It all fitted in with the Cora angle. She’d killed Mae, and when Tony went to her after he left Opal’s she’d shown him the check and told him that that was what Steinlen was after when he killed Mae.
I called up Danny Scheyer again. He said, “What about that scoop?” and I told him to hold everything and give me all the details of the Steinlen suicide. He said Steinlen had shot himself at about five o’clock in his office at the Astra Studio. Mrs. Steinlen had been with him at the time and had tried to stop him. She had been unable to give any reason for Steinlen’s act, had been taken home in a hysterical condition. I told Scheyer I’d call him back.
Well, that let Tony out — and it looked very much like it stuck Steinlen. It looked like he’d given Mae the works, in spite of my hunch that he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find the check and was afraid it would turn up, or maybe his wife had found out about the Jackman affair and had figured he murdered her and had faced him with it.
Then Fraley said: “So Steinlen bumped himself off?”
I nodded.
Fraley smiled a little, shook his head. He said: “It’s a wonder he didn’t do it a long time ago — with that wife of his...”
I took that a little. I said: “What do you mean?”