“All right, build it up. Make me wait for the punch line.”
“This is serious, Nick, not funny. I’m going to read you part of the last page Fullerton wrote. Listen. ‘Twice yesterday I found Heinrich messing around my props. He didn’t see me watching him, but I saw things I’m going to take up with the union if this keeps up. What right has a kraut director got to butt in on the property department? If he thinks I’m not capable of measuring a load of flashlight powder in a cigarette box let him take it up with the producer. Let him tell the brass hats in the front office. Next time I catch him poking around that prop bomb I’m going to raise a mess, job or no job. Up to now I’ve kept my mouth shut, but he better lay off. I don’t like outsiders fooling with my private can of flash powder, either’.”
I said in a choked voice, “Is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough, Nick? After fourteen years I know what really happened! Heinrich was jealous of me. He tampered with the cigarette-box bomb. In spite of Fullerton’s watchfulness and suspicions he succeeded in fixing it to go off prematurely, when I picked it up. And he substituted something powerful for the harmless flash powder that was supposed to be in it.”
“Now wait. You’re just guessing. You’re not sure he did that.”
“All right, so I’m guessing. Theorizing. But it adds.”
He couldn’t convince me.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Maybe I was the one he was after. Maybe he had a grudge against me, for some reason I can’t figure. After all, I was the stunt man who was scheduled to let the thing explode in my hands.”
“Originally, that’s true. Unknown to you, though, Heinrich altered the script just a little. An important little. When we started rehearsing the scene he rearranged the action so that you wouldn’t be first to handle the cigarette box. He directed me to pick it up and pry open the lid for that close-up. He told me it was a dummy box; harmless. And certainly I had no reason to disbelieve him.
“He said he would then cut the scene, let you double for me in the following long shot, and go on with the action from there. He was smooth, Nick. He sold it to me and I never suspected what was coming. You know how it worked out. I picked up the real bomb and it went bang. And all these years I thought it was a mischance, an accident – until I found the prop man’s diary. Then I knew Heinrich had planned to kill me.”
I dredged out a gasper, set fire to it. The smoke burned my gullet like acid, like the fumes of blasting powder, like the hot sting that had scorched my nostrils fourteen years ago on a Paragon sound stage when I had beat out the flames charring the crimson-stained clothing of two crumpled shapes who once had been husky, healthy men.
“You can’t make it stick, pal,” I said. “Not on the diary of a guy dead and buried all this time.”
“There’s no statute of limitations on homicide, Nick.”
“All right, give it to the cops and see what happens. They’d slip you the big nix. Insufficient proof, for one thing. All you can offer is unsupported surmise. And Emil Heinrich is a powerful hombre these days. A bozo in his position packs weight.” I put my coffin nail in an ash-tray, snubbed it out, and had a swig from the Scotch bottle. “You’d wind up before a rigged lunacy commission. They’ll say you’re off your rocker. Fourteen years of hiding your ugliness from the world drove you out of your mind.”
“Do you think that?”
I hedged. “Never mind what I think. The main point is, you could wind up in a room with soft walls.”
“Not while I’ve got one hand to hold a gun.”
“Back at that again,” I said.
“And anyhow, I don’t plan to go to the police. I want Heinrich here. I want a private showdown with him.”
“Oh-oh,” I said. “No, thanks. Include me out. I’m no assassin. I’m not even an assistant assassin. If you’re looking for homicide help, get another boy.”
His voice went smooth, persuasive. “Don’t let my gun talk put wrong ideas in your head. I’m not going to kill him. He’s worth a lot more to me alive. Alive and successful and prosperous. Do you think forty thousand dollars can last forever? Most of the money I got from Joe Fullerton’s insurance policy has been spent. And I’m too settled here to relish the idea of being moved to an almshouse. I don’t want charity, and I refuse to be a public charge. I simply want to talk to Heinrich.”
“Blackmail, eh? A shakedown.”
“That’s a little crude. I want to sell him the Fullerton diary for enough cash to see me through the rest of my life. Is that unfair?”
4. Kill and Vanish
Such guff as this I didn’t swallow. It was too transparent, too obvious. Barclay had bumpery on his mind and I wanted no part of that. By the same token you can’t come right out and say no to a potential madman with a gat in his clutch. It was a situation calling for finesse.
I lied diplomatically.
“Hmmm-m-m,” I said. “Just a financial transaction, huh? That’s different.” I moved easily toward the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked uneasily.
“To do what you asked. To arrange to lure Heinrich here.”
“You’re really going to help me?”
“Anything for a pal,” I said, and pushed the portal open.
It resisted me. Something was against it, outside in the hall. Something with weight that didn’t want to yield.
I shoved with all my hundred and ninety pounds of heft, suddenly and explosively. From the mirrored closet behind me came a displeased oath. Barclay must have thought I was taking a runout on him.
And I was. Or anyhow that had been my intention until I smacked the corridor door wide open and knocked somebody sprawling on the hallway’s thin-worn carpet. Then I changed my mind, because I had finally nailed my eavesdropper.
He was the deaf desk-clerk, with the parchment face, from downstairs. The door batted him all the way across the passage and he fetched up against the opposite wall, huddled, flopping, a bag of bones in a black alpaca coat. I grabbed him, dragged him back and pulled him into the room.
It was pretty dark now, but not too dark for me to see a wheelchair rolling toward me. The mirrored closet gaped wide, and the fragment of man who used to be Ronald Barclay was out of his hiding place. Maybe my unexpected maneuver with the door had brought him forth because of curiosity. Or maybe he’d had an idea of pursuing me, guessing that I was going to scram and leave him in the lurch.
He might even have figured a double-cross and decided to gun me in the back. I don’t know and I never found out. I didn’t have time to ask him.
I only knew that in the gloom of nightfall he didn’t look so hideous. Sitting in the wheelchair, he had a blanket over his lap so you couldn’t actually tell that his legs were missing. Without the lights turned on, his face could have passed for a face, for it was a pale blur above a white shirt even paler and blurrier.
One sleeve was empty, pinned to the chest. The other had an arm in it which ended in a stubby hand, the hand being busy propelling the chair by its wheel-rim. That was swell. As long as it was busy it couldn’t do anything about the nickel-plated .38 revolver resting on the blanketed lap.
That’s what I thought.
The pale blur of face spouted harsh curses. “You tricked me!” he raved. “You tricked me out of the closet so you could look at me.”
“Stow it.” I was leaning over the desk clerk. “This lad was listening, and—”
The sky came down and hit me on the noggin. All the stars in the heavens fell with the sky and danced in my optics, and all at once I was pitching down a long black tunnel that gulped me like a raw oyster. My head came off and floated away. It wasn’t a head, it was a balloon, and somebody had cut the string. It drifted on a rising current, and the current became a whirlpool of pain filled with India ink.