Not that I considered it especially hazardous. According to the scenario he was to pick up a cigarette box from a table and open it, whereupon a bomb which the villain had planted in the box would blow up like a cannon cracker. Of course the explosion wouldn’t show in the close-up. The director would cut out the scene just as Barclay lifted the gadget.
Then I would step in and replace him while the camera was moved some distance away. I would lift the lid of the box, and a small charge of flashlight powder would ignite in such a way that I couldn’t get burned if I remembered to be careful and hold my hands in the right position.
The special effects department would subsequently doctor the footage, intensify the size of the flame-flash, and a loud boom would be dubbed onto the sound track. Meanwhile, the initial close-up had to be timed out with Barclay himself going through the motions.
I watched as a prop man walked on-stage and placed the cigarette box in position. I saw Barclay reach for it ahead of schedule as if idly curious to inspect it. There came a thunderous roar that shook the set. Ker-blaaam!
With my ears ringing and my glimmers smarting, half-blinded, I plunged forward from the sidelines, hearing behind me the shouts of the director and his camera crew, the screams of the script girl, the stunned oaths of carpenters and grips and juicers milling around in momentary panic. I reached the crumpled, unconscious forms of Ronald Barclay and the property man who had been standing too close to him when the blast went off. I bent down and beat out the flames that were charring their ripped and red-stained clothes.
Five minutes later I helped load both men into the ambulance that came wailing onto the lot from a nearby hospital. I couldn’t help thinking that the ambulance might have been toting my own gory fragments instead of theirs if the bomb had waited until my turn had come to handle it.
Barclay kicked the bucket before the internes could hoist him onto an operating table. His subsequent funeral was a nine-day wonder even for Hollywood, where nine-day wonders seldom last more than a day and a half.
The prop man wasn’t so lucky. He lived. Permanently maimed, he survived his injuries and eventually dropped out of the news, out of sight. Nobody cared; nobody bothered to fasten official blame on him for accidentally loading the mock bomb with dynamite instead of harmless flashlight powder.
Besides, he had paid for his blunder. It cost him two legs and an arm. You don’t prosecute a basket case who can’t fight back. You just let him fade into oblivion.
Fourteen years . . .
In my mind those years slowly stretched out into proper perspective, resumed their long endless shape of days and weeks and months. I snapped back to the present, and I was no longer a stunt expert on that cavernous Paragon sound stage. I was now a private dick in the drab living room of a fleabag called the Chaple Arms. I was here by the request of a telephone voice and listening to that same disembodied voice coming from nowhere; hearing it and remembering it, remembering that the last time I’d heard it was just before a property cigarette box exploded.
But it wasn’t the voice of the bomb crippled prop man, who had lived. It was the voice of Ronald Barclay, the handsome star, who had died.
It was a trick, natch. It had to be a trick. Some dizzy jerk with a perverted sense of humor was needling me, giving me a bad time. I glowered around the room at the cheap window curtains, the shabby-genteel mission furniture, the threadbare carpet and dingy walls.
A heavy-set bozo glowered back at me from over near a corner – a tall, scowling character in tweeds, with a truculent glint in his peepers. He was my own reflection in a full-length mirror set into a closet door. Nobody else was around.
“Now just one condemned minute,” I snarled. “I can go along with a gag as well as the next slob. But—”
“It’s no gag, Nick,” Ronald Barclay’s voice said. “And you needn’t be so jittery. I’m behind the mirror. It’s one of those new-fangled two-way glasses. I can see out through it, but all you can see is yourself.” There was a brief chuckle, not entirely mirthful. “I’m talking through a hole in the wall. You can’t find it, though, because it’s covered with wallpaper.”
“That’s where you usually find vermin in a drop like this,” I said. “Behind the wallpaper. And quit explaining your dime-store hocus-pocus magic act in Ronald Barclay’s voice. Barclay was sort of a friend of mine in the old days, as friendly as a star ever gets with a mere stunt man, and he’s dead. I don’t like it. Stop imitating him.”
“I can’t stop, because I’m not imitating him, and because I’m not dead. I’m alive and I’m Ronald Barclay.” Bitterness was in that. “Have a drink, Nick. I left a bottle of Scotch on that table behind you. Vat 69. That’s your brand, as I recall.”
Sure it was my brand. I picked up the bottle and let some of its mellow lightning slide down my throat. I needed it. My nerves were jumpy.
“Everybody in Hollywood knows the kind of Scotch I prefer,” I growled. “That proves nothing.”
“Do you remember the time I went on a brannigan and you took me to your apartment and kept me there three days to sober me up for a new picture I was starting?”
I stiffened. I had never told a living soul about that crazy episode. Nobody else knew it except Barclay himself, unless he had blabbed it to some third party before he died.
I was getting confused. Dead men can’t talk from behind mirrors. I took another swig from the bottle and exhaled the aroma around a test question.
“What kind of pajamas did I loan you to wear? What color?”
“You didn’t. Your spare pajamas were all in the laundry. You borrowed a nightgown from a girl in the next apartment. It was a cerise chiffon.”
I strangled. “You are Barclay! Come out of hiding. I want to look at you.”
“Nobody looks at me, Nick. Not even you. Nobody’s looked at me since I moved in here after the hospital released me. Nobody ever will.”
“But – but—”
“It was really the prop man who died, Nick. His name was Joc Fullerton, in case you’ve forgotten. He died, and I lived. A little piece of me lived. No legs. One arm. Half a face.” There was a catch in the voice, almost like a sob. Then it steadied. “I was a vain man, Nick, remember? When I found out I was going to live and look like a butchered frog, I couldn’t take it. Not as Ronald Barclay I couldn’t.”
I stared at the mirror. All I saw was my own optics bulging like oysters being squeezed from two fists.
“Women had worshipped me,” Barclay’s voice said. “Now if they saw me it would be with horror and loathing. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want sympathy. I wanted to die, but the doctors wouldn’t let me die, curse them. So I cooked up a scheme.”
“I get it,” I said thickly. “You arranged to have the property man, Joe Fullerton, buried in your name. And you took his. It was a trade, a switch. You couldn’t stand being a maimed Ronald Barclay, but a crippled Fullerton you could adjust to. You bribed the right people, and – good glory, it’s fantastic!”
“On the contrary, it was fairly simple. Fullerton had no family; neither had I. Who’d know the difference? I didn’t have to bribe anybody. Fullerton was blasted beyond recognition. So was I. Even the fingerprints of my one remaining hand had been destroyed. No fingerprints. No teeth in my mouth for dental chart comparisons. No mouth, period – until the plastic surgeons built me something I could use for a mouth, such as it is.”
“You mean you just kept insisting you were Fullerton and the hospital staff believed you?”
“Yes. Luckily the real Fullerton had an accident policy – twenty thousand dollars for the loss of two limbs, forty for the loss of three. I collected the forty thousand and moved to the Chaple Arms. I’ve been here ever since.”