“He’s one-armed and legless.”
“You mean you saw him?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Then if he’s like you say, how could he get out of his wheelchair and go down two flights of steps?” Pete’s peepers narrowed and suspicion slid into them. Suspicion of me. “And who murdered Duffy?”
“The answer is in an alcove between the bedroom and bath,” I said. “Barclay experimented in prosthetics. He dabbled at inventing artificial limbs. That’s why I asked if you saw anybody scramming. He must have had a set of gams he could get around on.”
“I – see.”
“You didn’t think I croaked Duffy and abolished Barclay down the drainpipes and clouted myself unconscious, did you? You needn’t answer that. I can guess how you figured it, only you figured it wrong. Now where’s a phone?”
He pointed to a hand-set on a stand. “But you can’t go through the switchboard because Duffy isn’t there to give you a line.”
“Poor old guy,” I said. “He probably never got to spend that four bits for a perfecto. But at least he satisfied his curiosity about what the lodger in Three-seventeen looked like. He saw him. And the price he paid was much too high.”
I shooed Pete out into the hall, followed him, shut the door behind us.
“Let’s go, chum,” I said. “I’ve got dialing to do and connections to make. There’s a maniac killer on the loose and he’s thirsting for revenge, gunning for a movie mogul. This is a thing for the cops.”
It was for the cops, all right, but the cops wouldn’t have it. That cost them another bump-off before the night ended.
And it came near installing me in a coffin. Sometimes when my sleep is restless I can still feel those fingers closing like metal bands around my throat. Those are the nights I get up and drink myself very, very drunk . . .
My coupe could do eighty with a tail wind. On a downgrade it might even nudge ninety. I held it to fifty, though, because the last thing I wanted was a ticket for speeding. Not that the ticket would bother me, but you don’t like to be delayed by motorbike bulls when you’re trying to reach a guy and warn him he’s a ripe target for a madman’s bullet.
I whammed west on Sunset to Highland, north on Highland past Hollywood Boulevard and aimed for the hills above that. The multicolored lights of Los Angeles spread out behind and below me like a vast carpet of glowing embers, infernal, patterned in blotchy angles and lines that merged and dimmed against the far infinity of horizon and night.
Ahead, the convoluted hills rose darkly to a star-flecked sky, with here and there a pinprick twinkle on a knoll or cliffside, as if the crests had stretched far up and seized some of the stars to wear for diamonds. Lights in the windows of hilltop houses always look that way from a distance, and in Hollywood it’s considered swanky indeed to live in a district hilltop house.
That was why Emil Heinrich lived in one. Heinrich was big stuff.
I tooled my crate along a curving roadway and climbed. What I had to do was a cop job, but the cops wouldn’t handle it. They were a pack of dopes, particularly my old friend Ole Brunvig of the Homicide Squad. In my mind’s ear I could still hear the echo of Brunvig’s grainy, dyspeptic voice when I called him up from the lobby of the Chaple Arms.
“Nick Ransom, yeah,” I said. “There’s been a kill. A desk clerk, name of Duffy, made the mistake of looking at Ronald Barclay, and Barclay extinguished him. Now Barclay’s on the prowl to pull another bump.”
“He – what?”
I repeated it. “Barclay croaked this clerk named Duffy and now he’s out gunning for—”
“Stop kidding me. How can the clerk be out gunning for somebody if he’s croaked?”
“Not the clerk!” I yelped. “He’s defunct. It’s Barclay who’s on the loose, getting ready to kill again. The name he’s been using is Joseph T. Fullerton, but he’s really Ronald Barclay.” This sounded a little complex, but I let it go. “You remember Barclay. He used to be the hottest ham in the Paragon roster.”
“Oh. That Barclay. For a moment you had me puzzled.” Sudden peevishness sprouted through the sarcasm. “Sure I remember Ronald Barclay. He died fourteen years ago. Killed by an explosion on a sound stage. So now his ghost is horsing around Hollywood and you want him pinched for murder, hey?”
“Yes, but he’s not a ghost. He’s alive, and he’s got a roscoe and he’s on the prowl for the guy who put him in his grave.”
“Now cut that out!” Brunvig blew his lid. “If he’s alive, nobody put him in his grave. If he was in his grave, he isn’t alive. Lay off the drunken comedy.”
“It’s not comedy and I’m sober,” I said hotly. “Barclay is not dead. He never was. His funeral was phony. The explosion cost him both legs and an arm, but it didn’t really kill him. I’m telling you he knocked me senseless a little while ago and bumped a hotel clerk named Duffy and then walked out while I was too unconscious to stop him.”
“Oho. He walked out.” Brunvig’s voice rose to a shrill scream of rage, through which you could hear the gnashing of teeth. “He walked out. He’s got no legs, but he walked out. All right, Sherlock, that tears it. I’ve had enough.”
“Listen,” I said. “You don’t understand!”
“I understand plenty. You’re intoxicated. You’re fried up to the scalp. Okay, you’ve had your fun with me. Now go to bed and sleep it off before I get sore and jerk your license.” Violently he hung up in my ear.
You couldn’t blame him too much. Try to convince anybody that a screen star dead fourteen years is actually alive. Try to make a skeptical cop believe there’s a legless, one-armed bozo walking around packing murder in his pocket, hunting the party whose bomb had blasted him to a living death. You had to see it, as I’d seen it, to know it was true. Otherwise it sounded as screwy as an opium smoker’s dream.
So I got nowhere with Brunvig. I rang him back and he refused to talk to me. He wouldn’t even take the call.
That dumped it spang in my lap, which was what I deserved. It was my own fault. I should have made a getaway from Barclay’s suite when I’d had the chance, should have tipped the law to come slap a straitjacket on him when I first realized he was dangerously insane.
Instead, I’d turned my back on him so he could bash me. Worse, I’d dragged a poor old deaf yuck into the room and got him conked to his ancestors. I felt almost as guilty as if I’d killed Duffy myself.
Any way you looked at it, Barclay was now my personal responsibility. It was up to me to track him down, collar him before he slew any more citizens. Finding him shouldn’t be too difficult, I concluded. He had an obsession, a fixed idea. He craved vengeance on Emil Heinrich, therefore he would make a beeline for Heinrich’s opulent igloo in the Hollywoodland hills, probably by taxi. This called for a chase sequence, yoicks and tally-ho in a thundering hurry.
Not that I cared about Heinrich. If he had actually gimmicked the cigarette-box bomb fourteen years ago it was high time retribution caught up with him. It had to be legal retribution, though, and not meted out by a maniac with a penchant for murdering innocent bystanders. I didn’t want any more dead guys like Duffy weighing on my conscience.
So I left Peter Warren Winthrop, bellhop, elevator jockey and medical student, holding down the fort at the Chaple Arms. I posted him in the frowsy, unclean lobby and ordered him to keep phoning Homicide until he persuaded them to send a tech squad and a meat basket for Duffy’s remainders.
“Stay with it, son, and don’t take no for an answer,” I said.
Then I blipped out to my bucket and lit a shuck for high ground.