“Reason I never noticed it, they ain’t been no calls go through the board since I come on shift. Danged day man shouldn’t of left it tucked behind the keys that way. He ought to of told me.”
“So now you know,” I said. “And it’s two minutes past six. I don’t like to keep a client waiting.”
“Course not. Dumb me, making you stand around.”
He hit a tap-bell under the counter. It had a clean, tinkly sound that broke across the lobby and lost itself, discouraged, against musty velour draperies on the opposite wall. There followed a whirring hiccuppy noise from somewhere in the rear, and an antique elevator creaked jerkily down an open grillwork shaft. Its wrought iron gate slid open, rattling on worn grooves, and a kid in his early twenties stepped out smartly.
“Pete,” the clerk said, “show this here gent up to Three-seventeen.”
Pete’s glimmers widened. He was a tall punk, not quite up to my six feet plus but slender and lithe and broad of shoulder in a nondescript uniform a size too small for his build. He probably had inherited it from a whole series of predecessors, but he wore it with a nice jauntiness that certainly didn’t belong in a joint like the Chaple Arms.
He had wavy brown hair and even white teeth, and an uncompromising jaw that went well with the humorous up-quirk at the corners of his lips.
“Maybe I’d better borrow that ear gadget of yours,” he said, and grinned. “I’d have sworn you said Three-seventeen.”
“I did say Three-seventeen,” the clerk told him.
“But that’s—”
“Fullerton’s, yeh. And Fullerton don’t never have no callers. He does now.”
“Right-o,” Pete said. “This way, sir.”
He led me toward the elevator.
Just as I was stepping into the cage, the clerk at the counter lifted his powdery voice.
“Hey, mister.” He beckoned me, and I went back to him. “You wouldn’t want to spare me one of them cigarettes of yours, I don’t suppose?” he said. “Not that I’m awful partial to cigarettes. Cigars is my preference, only I’m a mite strapped this week, and—”
I dug a four-bit piece out of my jeans, gave it to him. “Buy yourself a perfecto.”
“Criminity. Fifty cents! Biggest tip I taken in for more’n a year. Thanks.” He leaned forward. “Confidential, mister, the real reason I called you back, I wondered would you do me a little favor.”
“Such as?”
“If you do get to see Joseph T. Fullerton, I’d sure love to hear what he really looks like. Ain’t never seen him myself, and I got a bump of curiosity a mile high.”
“I’ll give you a verbal portrait,” I said, and went over to the elevator again.
The good-looking Pete clanged the door shut and pulled a rope, and the cage moved upward in little jerky bumps, like hiccups. Midway between the first and second floors I dredged out another half-dollar and spun it around my thumb.
“Speaking of Fullerton,” I said.
“Were we speaking of Mr Fullerton, sir?”
The punk quirked a smile at me.
“Discreet bellhops in a trap like this,” I said. I put away the four-bit piece and started toying with a folded dollar bill. “Been working here long, son?”
“Four years. Putting myself through college. USC.” He eyed the folded buck as we creaked past the second-floor landing. “You were asking about Fullerton?”
“Uh-huh. He’s a recluse, I gather.”
“A mild word for it. Nobody ever sees him. When the maids tidy up he hides in a sort of closet he’s got rigged as a tuckaway. The help take him his meals. I get his supper from a place around the corner and leave it in his living room.”
“But you’ve never met him?”
“I’ve talked to him through his hideaway door, is all. Third floor, sir.” He clanged the cage open and pointed. “Three-seventeen is just past that turn in the corridor.” Then, when I handed him the dollar: “Thanks, sir. Want to know something?”
“That was my last loose buck, Buster.”
He grinned. “This is for free.” The grin got turned off like a spigot. “I don’t think you’re going to like visiting Mr Fullerton. It’s a spooky experience until you get used to it. Lots of luck, sir.”
2. Talk with a Corpse
I walked along the hallway with the elevator’s ancient hesitant creaks dwindling down behind me. Presently I came to a door and bunted it with my knuckles, then stepped aside, just in case Joseph T. Fullerton happened to be the kind of hermit with homicidal eccentricities such as shooting guns through thin wooden paneling.
“Nick Ransom out here!” I said loudly. “By appointment.”
“You’re five minutes late.”
There was something vaguely familiar in this voice, a texture my subconscious mind picked up and fingered and tried to recognize. It was a voice of the same general timbre and intonation as that of the guy who had phoned me, yet different and somehow more natural, as if, over the wire, he had disguised his delivery just a little so it wouldn’t strike a responsive echo in my memory.
Now, though, he didn’t seem to care if I caught hep. It bothered me because I couldn’t place it, and for some reason I couldn’t savvy I felt a shiver crawling down my back, the way you do when you dream something not too pleasant at night.
“Come in,” it said. “It’s unlocked for you.”
I grasped the knob and it turned in my hand. I pushed on the portal but nothing happened; it didn’t give.
“Opens outward. I forgot to tell you. Special arrangement of mine. Pull.”
Whoever he was, he was no stranger to me. I combed through my mental card-index file but the thing eluded me, like trying to pin down a shadow. I pulled, and the door swung smoothly on oiled hinges. I barged into a room that had nobody in it but me, and the empty room spoke my name.
It said, “Hello, Nick. I understand you’ve quit the stunting racket and gone into private detective work,” in the voice of a man I had known a long time ago; a man buried and gone these past fourteen years or more. The empty room said, “It’s good to see you again, Nick,” and the voice belonged to a dead man.
I could remember, and see and hear it all now, those years ago – and I knew.
I was standing on the sidelines of a movie set, out of camera range, watching two guys who were going to be blasted to bits the next minute – not make-believe blasted for a spool of film, but actually and horribly blown apart like chopped meat. That was fourteen years ago, but the fourteen years faded and vanished like a lap dissolve shot so that time was telescoped and the past merged into the present, the present became the past.
I was on a cavernous sound stage at Paragon Pix seeing a sequence in rehearsal, a sequence destined never to be played because in another sixty seconds the leading man would be a corpse. He would be the late lamented Ronald Barclay, as handsome a ham as ever starred in the flickering tintypes.
Barclay was tall and swarthy, with the brand of boudoir eyes that made matrons swoon and their daughters crave to leave home. He had dark wavy hair with touches of frost at the temples which he refused to let the makeup department do anything about, and he was built like a Roman gladiator. In private life he carried a baseball bat to beat off the women who tried to surrender their all at his shrine.
I watched him there on the set, rehearsing a brief piece of business for a close-up, a bit of action which I myself would duplicate later in a long shot. That long shot was where the peril would be, and since Paragon Pix couldn’t afford to risk Barclay’s million-dollar good looks, I was the stunt expert they had hired to double for him in the hazard scene.