Its rear end was pointing inward, twin tail-lights and amber back-up lights glowing like a Christmas tree. Apparently the guy at the wheel had come up the drive and then jockeyed the massive heap around so he could back into the garage and be ready for a fast straight-ahead takeoff in the morning.
His head lamps made the driveway and parking level as bright as a movie set under sun arcs, but he wasn’t at his tiller now. He had got out and walked around to open the garage doors, and I recognized him in the red-and-amber glow of his stern lights. He was Emil Heinrich, short, dumpy, potbellied, with a face like a full moon. His wife had said he wouldn’t be home until late, but he had fooled her.
He was talking in a thick, guttural monotone to somebody who lurked in the shadows at the sedan’s far side.
“Zo. You want me to bay you one hundred thousandt tollars for dis diary. The diary of a dead man, agguzing me of murter. You zay you vill turn me ofer to the law if I revuze. Pah! Id iss ridiculous. I vill gif you one thousandt tollars cash, vich I habben to haf in mein bocket for small change. One thousandt, for your nuisanz walue.” He spat. “Take id or leaf id.”
“I’ll take it as first payment.”
I knew that voice. How well I knew that voice! Resonant. Determined. I didn’t have to gander its owner, hidden around the far side of the sedan. Hearing it was enough.
Heinrich reached into a coat pocket as if to bring forth the promised lettuce. He made a mistake. A bad mistake. He dragged a roscoe out instead.
Flame lanced out around the sneezing ka-chow! of gunfire. It wasn’t Heinrich’s gun that fired, though. He never got around to it. He lurched, took three mincing steps backward, crossed his ankles awkwardly and twisted as he fell. After he fell he didn’t even move.
8. Last Kill, Last Chase
Catapulting down the remaining steps, I was unable to draw a bead on the killer because the chuckle-purring sedan was in the way. I had my own heater ready, but I couldn’t use it. A car door slammed. The chuckle-purr snarled into a roar. Rear tires spun, screeched, got traction. The sedan made like jet propulsion going down the driveway.
I snapped a cap at where I thought its gas tank ought to be. Nothing happened. My rod had been too long under water. The cartridge must have been just slightly defective, enough to let the powder get soaked.
I swore, ejected it, jacked another shell into the firing chamber and tried again. But by that time the getaway crate had careened onto the road and was gone. The gat jumped in my fist and my slug went pee-yowp! against the opposite cliff. Clean miss.
Then I wasted time. I bent down in the darkness, inspected Heinrich’s porky poundage. His wife had got her wish. She was a widow now. Scratch one studio executive. A tunnel that only a .38 could make was drilled all the way through his chest. No matter how important you are in Hollywood, a .38 slug in your heart brings you down to size.
The nickel-plated revolver on Ronald Barclay’s legless lap had been .38 caliber. That was the final clue.
I lunged to my coupé where I’d parked it over to one side of the garage apron. Unfortunately, I’d left it headed inward. Now I had to get it started, get it horsed around in the opposite direction. That wasted more time. I finally made it and went thundering down the driveway, around the bend into the road. Then I widened out, fed my clattering cylinders all the coal they would take. I made knots. I bored a hole in the night that the night would never repair.
Down out of the hills, a siren cut loose behind me and a red spotlight stabbed my rear-view mirror.
I pulled over. A prowl car drew abreast. I bounced out, rushed to the cop chariot and yodeled:
“Boys, you’ve got a passenger!” I flashed my badge, piled into the police buggy. “Let’s go! And get me Lieutenant Ole Brunvig on your two-way short wave. Brunvig of Homicide. This is murder.”
The cops bought it. I must have sounded plenty sincere. They believed me. The one sitting alongside the driver cut in his transmitter, talked to his hand mike. Presently Brunvig’s voice rasped in the cowl speaker.
I snaked the hand mike away from the cop and made with the words. Terse words that boiled out of me like Mount Vesuvius in eruption. After a while the loud-speaker snapped back at me. I had a date with Brunvig at the Chaple Arms.
The prowl car picked up velocity. The guy at the wheel was good. He sent only three pedestrians scampering up palm trees. He took only the first skin of red paint off a passing Pacific Electric bus. He should have been a barber. He could shave you with his front fender and never leave a whisker.
Ole Brunvig’s official bucket was just pulling up in front of the Chaple Arms as we screamed to a halt behind him. Up ahead, a sedan was parked – a new, streamlined monster that didn’t belong to this neighborhood at all. It made the rest of the heaps on the street look like scrap iron. And the sedan was Emil Heinrich’s.
I leaped to the sidewalk, grabbed Ole’s arm and yanked him into the flea-bag hotel’s dingy lobby without missing a stride. There was nobody holding down the greasy, marble-topped desk. I ducked around back of it, found a chart for the rectangular tier of wooden letterboxes.
“One-thirty-nine!” I yeeped. “Ground floor. Come on!”
Brunvig hadn’t had a chance to say anything. He still didn’t. He just unlimbered his cannon and kept pace with me around a rear hallway to the door I wanted. I pointed at the keyhole.
“Okay,” he grunted. “If I get busted back to harness for this, I’ll reach down your throat and yank you inside out.” Then, expertly, he shot the lock to splinters.
I hit the portal a mighty lick and went sailing into a small, cheerless room.
“This is all of it, punk,” I said to Peter Warren Winthrop. “You’re through. You’re through being a bellhop, elevator operator and medical student. And you’re through killing people.”
He straightened up from a Gladstone bag he had been hastily packing.
“What?”
“Playing stupid will buy you nothing,” I said. “The giveaway was when you throttled me, dunked me in the pool. Up until then I hadn’t suspected you. My attention was all on Ronald Barclay. I’d sensed something haywire about the Barclay theory, but I couldn’t nail it down. Then you choked me, hurled me to a watery grave – at which juncture the finger pointed straight at you. A lot of fingers. Ten of them, to be exact.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about two hands closing around my throat. One set of fingers pressing my carotid artery, and the other set digging into my jugular vein on the opposite side of my neck. Then I knew it couldn’t be Barclay who had jumped me, because he was a one-armed guy. And the fingers strangling me were real. Human. Alive. Hot. Not one real hand and one artificial. Both hands were genuine. That eliminated Barclay.”
“This is all Greek to me,” he said.
I sneered at him. “It was to me, too, until I savvied the clue of the ten fingers. Then everything else clicked into place. I remembered pushing Barclay’s living-room door open, and encountering resistance – the pressure of somebody leaning against it outside in the hall. I remembered giving it a shove, and bouncing poor old Duffy across the corridor so that he landed like a sack of bones.
“At the time I thought he’d been eavesdropping. But eavesdroppers don’t lean against doors when you catch them at it. They turn and run for cover.”
“So what?”
“So the next time I saw Duffy he was deceased of a cracked superstructure. And his hearing aid was switched off, which didn’t spell anything to me at the time. It did later, though, when I began adding things up. With his ear gadget turned off to save the batteries, he couldn’t have been listening at the door.”