Show Red for Danger Page 7

  “They paid to see her,” Dale said. “She was worth seeing, you know. She could wear clothes, and give the impression she wasn’t wearing them, if you know what I mean. She had a hell of a lot of vitality, and it showed on the screen.”

  “Could she act?”

  “All right,” Dale said, “if it matters a damn—not for peanuts. She drove Tony Zersk crazy. She drove a lot of directors crazy. Now and then she drove me crazy, if you want to know. And—what’s the idea? Somebody kill her because she wasn’t much of an actress and drove directors and actors crazy? If that sort of thing went on, half the babes in Hollywood would be as full of holes as sieves. More than half.”

  “But,” Heimrich said, “Mr. Marley, and other producers apparently, gave her parts.”

  “Sure. I told you why. But, you saw her, man.”

  “Not alive,” Heimrich said. “However—”

  “Take my word for it,” Dale said. “Sure, I was a steppingstone. And, believe it or not, knew it at the time. And—didn’t give a damn.” He considered. “For a few months, anyway,” he said.

  What precisely, Heimrich wanted to know, did Dale mean by “steppingstone?” Dale would have thought that obvious. Also, and again, what was all this about? He looked at Heimrich, his eyes narrowed.

  “Listen,” he said, “you’re not playing along with the newspapers on this, are you? I mean—I’ve heard of policemen who don’t mind publicity. And aren’t above making mysteries because mysteries make better newspaper stories and—” He paused. Heimrich had closed his eyes. “Skip it,” Dale said.

  Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “Where there aren’t any mysteries,” Heimrich said. “Mr. Dale, we have trouble enough with things as they are. As for what it’s all about—it helps to know as much as we can find out about people involved. Particularly about people who get killed. I take it you meant Miss Belford felt there would be certain advantages to being your wife?”

  “Of course,” Dale said. “It sticks out—stuck out then. Like it or not, I’m a star. Box office. Which gives me a certain amount of influence. Peggy—felt she could use influence. So—”

  “A trade,” Heimrich said.

  Dale fingered his itchy beard. He said, a little wearily, that Heimrich could call it that, if he wanted to call it that. If he found it simpler to call it that.

  “Now Mr. Dale,” Heimrich said. “I don’t imply—”

  Dale waved a hand. He said, again, “Skip it, captain. You don’t have to approve.”

  “That,” Heimrich said, “doesn’t come into it. You helped her along?”

  “To a degree. Suggested her name here and there, for parts she could handle. And she did well enough, for a girl who couldn’t act. And, come to that, knew it. She’s—she was bright enough, in her way. Didn’t think she was going to be another Lynn or Helen. Far’s I know, didn’t particularly want to be. More the diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend type.” He looked at Heimrich and smiled faindy. “I suppose you think were an odd menagerie,” he said.

  “I gather,” Heimrich said, “that Mr.—” He paused, remembering. “The automobile dealer,” he said, and remembered. “Mr. Fielding. That he was the diamond type?”

  “Fielding,” Dale said, “was more the alimony type, as it turned out. I imagine it ran to diamonds.” He leaned forward suddenly. “You don’t have to pay alimony when they’re dead,” he said. The idea, evidently, pleased him. “If you decide not to settle for Collins.”

  “Thanks,” Heimrich said. “That’s very—”

  The door of The Suite’s living room opened with a slight explosion.

  “M. G.’s fit to be—” a man said, his voice also explosive, and stopped with that and added, “Oh!”

  “Captain Heimrich, Paul,” Francis Dale said. “The local police. Seems he doesn’t altogether buy our friend Collins. And is—shopping. This is Paul Marley, captain. The producer of The Last Patroon. By the way, do you like the title, captain?”

  “I think,” Heimrich said gravely, “that it lacks something. Fit to be what, Mr. Marley? Tied, I suppose?”

  Marley was a big man with a big head and he had a deep voice. By the time he was fifty, Heimrich thought—and that he was some ten years from that—he might well be a big fat man. He had wavy blond hair. (When Marley had been thirty, Heimrich thought, he must have looked like an unmarred heavyweight. Or football player.)

  “Tied,” Marley agreed, deeply. “What does he mean you’re not satisfied with Collins?”

  Heimrich said that went too far. He again went through the routine about routine. Dale lifted the botde from the cocktail table and Marley said, “God yes,” and went to it and poured from it. “Still sitting out?” Dale said, politely, and Heimrich nodded.

  “Did you,” Dale said, “tell M. G. that you were through with her? Except for a couple of long shots you can fake?”

  “Obviously,” Marley said. “Kept on yelling at me. You know how he is about dead ones.”

  “I know,” Dale said, and turned to Heimrich. “M. G. Drisken,” he said, “has a fetish about actors being dead when their films are released. Thinks audiences tend to puddle up seeing dead people so alive on the screen. And he’s got a couple of Peggy’s in cans. In addition to the one we’re finishing now.”

  “You mean,” Heimrich said, “that he won’t release the pictures? Because Miss Belford’s dead?”

  Both men looked at him in astonishment They looked at each other.

  “I said,” Dale said, “that he had a fetish. I didn’t say he was a lunatic.” He turned to Paul Marley. “I suppose,” he said, “he blames you?”

  “Who else?” Marley said, in his very deep voice, and sighed deeply. “If I can’t keep my actors alive, he’ll have to look around for somebody who can. Also, who the hell is this guy Collins, and what does he think he is? And that I was the one who insisted on having Peggy in it, although he’d told me a hundred times she was more trouble than she was worth.”

  “Were you?” Heimrich asked. “Had he?”

  The two men looked at each other again. Dale shrugged.

  “M. G.,” Dale said, “is a brilliant man in the industry. He is given to getting excited. He didn’t particularly object to Peggy in the part. Both Paul and I thought she would be quite satisfactory in it.” He smiled faintly. “It was not,” he said, “what they call a demanding part. She looked pretty. She was a milkmaid. Early on I, the last patroon, come on her bathing in what I suppose is a mill-pond. Very pretty indeed. I can see her, I might add, much more clearly than the audience can. In view of the Code. Her big scene is when she chooses George instead of me. Nothing beyond her powers.”

  “George Latham,” Marley said. “Juvenile lead. Which reminds me. You the policeman my stepdaughter was talking to?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  “That kid,” Marley said. “About what a bitch Peggy was, I suppose?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  Marley looked astonished.

  “Tell me?” he said. “She wouldn’t, as they say, give me the time of day. She glided out of the bar, leaving George flat, and after a while glided back in and said, in that voice of hers, ‘The police have been questioning me.’ I was a couple of tables away with Tony Zersk. Her voice carries. That tragic queen voice.”

  Marley, when he quoted his stepdaughter, himself used a very special voice—a voice with Chris’s own throb in it. Another actor, obviously.

  “She hoped,” Heimrich said, “that I could do something to lessen the publicity.”

  “By God,” Marley said, “she had something there. For once.” He looked at Heimrich intently, measuringly. “M. G. would be pleased,” he said. “Very pleased.”

  “I told her, of course,” Heimrich said, “that that was quite impossible.”

  “But damn it,” Marley said. “It’s open and shut. Everybody says that. You’ve got some reason for saying it isn’t? Something wrong with the way it looks?”

  Heimrich wen
t, once more, through the routine about routine. It didn’t sound too convincing to his own ears. He, however, asked questions to prove it.

  Had Marley known that Brian Collins was in the village, and hence away from the house he died in, for some time that afternoon? Marley had not. Had he known that Miss Belford was going to Collins’s house to swim in his pool?

  “Sure,” Marley said, and looked at Francis Dale and said, “You heard her too, Frank. And Tony did and probably Georgie-Porgie.” (Heimrich felt sympathy for George Latham, whom he had not yet met.)

  Dale nodded his becomingly silvered head. He moved it slowly, with control.

  “When we finished,” Marley said. “It was a little after noon—when we finished she said that she was going over and use Brian’s pool and that if anybody else wanted to come along she was sure Brian wouldn’t mind. Nobody did.”

  “Because the rest of you thought Collins might mind?”

  Heimrich was looked at in surprise by both tall men.

  “Why would he?” Marley asked. “Anyway, he’d more or less given us carte blanche.”

  And Francis Dale smiled, then let the smile expand to a chuckle.

  “What Paul really means,” he said, “is What pool wouldn’t we honor?’ We get that way, captain.”

  And, saying that, Dale convinced Heimrich that he, for one, hadn’t got that way at all. Unless— It didn’t matter.

  “A little after noon,” Heimrich said. “She’d have to come back—she was staying here at the Inn?”

  She had been.

  “And changed, and driven over to the Collins place. By the way, in a Buick wagon?”

  “Mine,” Marley said. “Damn it all, I’d forgotten about it. Is it still up at the Collins place?”

  It was. Would it be all right for one of them to go up and get it? It would, whenever they liked. Miss Belford had borrowed the car? She had. That is— Marley looked at Dale and shrugged.

  “What it comes to,” Dale said, “is that we more or less use any car handy. The station wagon. The panel truck. A—an aborted sense of mine and thine, captain. What Peggy actually said, as I recall it, was, ‘I’ll take the wagon if nobody else wants it’ And did.”

  Heimrich nodded his head. He closed his eyes momentarily. “A little after noon” might, he supposed, mean anything. He asked. It seemed to mean about twelve-twenty to Dale; twelve forty-five was more like it to Marley. Twenty minutes to drive to the Inn. How long to change? He could only guess. Lunch? He asked. Neither man knew. They had not seen her lunching at the Inn, but they had been in the taproom. She might have been in the main dining room. Equally, she might have got a sandwich somewhere else—on the road down from location.

  There was no way to pin it down.

  “I don’t,” Marley said, “see what the hell difference it makes.”

  “I don’t know that it makes—” Heimrich said, and somebody knocked at the door and Dale said, “Come in.” Sergeant Forniss came in. He said, “Got a minute, captain?”

  Which meant, of course, that Forniss had come up with something.

  VI

  While he had been there, it had been possible, with some effort, to keep it pushed to the back of the mind; to wall it off there; to, in a fashion, draw a screen over the picture. It had been possible, to some degree, to think of murder in the abstract, as a problem to be solved. (Assuming always that there was a problem.) After he drove off, that had no longer been possible.

  Then the picture came back—the ugly picture of violent death. One read of such things and, inevitably, imagined the way they had looked. But this was as one imagined, with horror in the mind rather than in the senses, the deaths far away, of famine, of thousands unknown, to a degree unreal. Even photographs were not the same —photographs of emaciated faces and bloated bodies if death came from famine; of the torn victims of accidental death or of death by murder. For one thing, such pictures are edited for flinching minds. “The body of one of the victims may be seen in the left foreground,” but what is seen is a sheet over something—the shape of something. Which, Susan Faye thought, is the way it should always be, and blood should be only a word. Not something seeped deeply into a chair. A “head wound” should be a term of description, not—not the hideous thing it is.

  With him there, she had been able—almost able—to think of the violent deaths of Peggy Belford and Brian Collins as death in the abstract; as if, she thought, they had bled sawdust. (It was odd that the girl had bled so little. Or wasn’t it odd? She didn’t know.) She supposed this was because, with him there, she could to some degree share the attitude which it was essential he adopt. Bodies have been broken. Hence, the law has been broken. One finds out how, by whom.

  She knew him too well to think that detachment went deep in Merton Heimrich. Once or twice, when he had talked about cases he was working on—cases of which she knew no more than he told her—she had realized, and each time with momentary surprise, how deeply he felt about them. Possibly, she thought—had thought those times and thought again now—it was because of a fundamental rejection of violence, almost a loathing of it, that he had decided to follow the trade he followed. She would ask him sometime.

  With the trade, certainly, had come an ability to insulate himself —to pretend, on the surface of the mind, that bodies bleed sawdust; that murder is not a hideous picture which can fill the mind, but a puzzle to be solved. And, when he was with her, she could somehow share that insulation, try with him to work out the problem.

  And now he had gone and left her with the picture in her mind. She could look at anything—look at the frypan to be scraped, put to soak—and see a slender girl in a bathing suit, one knee gracefully lifted, dead eyes staring at a ceiling; see a man she had talked to only hours before slumped with a great black hole in his head and blood all around him. She scraped blood from the frypan, not what remained of lamb curry. She—

  Damn the man, Susan Faye thought, quite irrationally. (Because I was the one who led us to it, not he.) To go off to see people, talk to people, work on his puzzle, and leave me here to remember—to vividly remember blood. To feel lie beginning of nausea because wherever I look—

  The thing was, of course, to put it out of her mind. People were always saying that—“Just put it out of your mind. Don’t let yourself think about it.” So—think about what, then? About a large doleful dog who had followed her into the kitchen and watched, hopelessly, while she threw food away? “You know you won’t eat anything with curry in it,” Susan Faye told Colonel. “Why do you pretend?”

  Colonel sighed. There was little about Colonel, at best, to uplift the spirits. When he saw food disappear anywhere except into dog, Colonel was not at his best.

  Very well, if it could not be put out of the mind, think of it as a puzzle. That was, certainly, the only sensible thing to do. The other was—indulging the emotions. Chilling one’s own blood, which did no good to anyone. Think of it as a puzzle. If it was a puzzle. Decide, clearly, why—unclearly—her mind had rejected what was obviously true: that Brian Collins, in what must have been a moment of uncontrollable desperation, had killed a girl he must have loved enough to hate. Why had she rejected what was obvious?

  She had told him—the great oaf, the dear slow oaf, the bump on a log—that it was because what Collins seemed to have done did not jibe with what she knew about Brian Collins, with the kind of man she was sure he was. And the great oaf had listened, been kind enough, gentle enough, to pretend for them both that what she said made sense. (I do wish, Susan thought, in parenthesis, that he wouldn’t be quite so damn gentle.) He had even pretended to believe, for both of them, that what he called the “outline” of a person, detected quickly, had some validity.

  I know better, Susan said, wandering out onto the terrace—followed gloomily by Colonel—and of course he knows better. Collins was a man; he was even, probably, sometimes a violent man. Abrupt —she herself had said that about him, before any of this had happened. And certainly one cannot tel
l from a few meetings, from a few words of no consequence. One’s own experience should tell one that. People, even people one had known well for years, sometimes did the most unlikely, the most inexplicable, things. She knew that as well as anybody. Honor students at high school, highly regarded by one and all, now and then killed their parents, in fits of exasperation. And mousy little doctors killed their wives and buried them deep, and the neighbors assured one another that they just couldn’t believe it.

  So—there was nothing to the contention that Brian Collins simply had not been the type. Erase that, rub it from the mind. And—what was left?

  Susan lighted a cigarette and looked up at the sky—it was beginning to haze over—and waited to see what was left.

  What was left was, quite simply, the abiding conviction that what appeared to have happened at Brian Collins’s house was not what had actually happened. Aside, obviously, from the fact that two people had been shot to death.

  You, Susan Faye said to Susan Faye, are a silly female, a ridiculous female. Which is an insult to your intelligence. You, Susan Faye told herself sternly, are having intuition. It doesn’t become you.

  Thus admonished, she gave her mind a moment finally to erase this ridiculous conviction. And, resolutely, her mind declined the opportunity. Also, her mind said, a little smugly, It isn’t an intuition. So, face it, Susan Faye.

  If not an intuition, then something was wrong with the picture. (Not the “picture”; don’t open the mind to a picture. Not again.) With, then, the setup. Consider the setup, if you’re so sure something is wrong with it. Consider it objectively. Get yourself a drink and sit here calmly and consider objectively. She went into the house—doing something with the body, and especially with the hands, is always a good idea—and mixed herself a very mild gin-and-tonic and brought it back out to the chaise built for two. Now—

  Brian Collins was a man of violent emotions, violent jealousy. Assume that, since you do not know he wasn’t. He wanted a very pretty young woman, most enticingly under-clothed—and hadn’t she known it, the little vixen—to return to him and she had—what? Laughed? That might easily have done it. So he shot her. And—she sprawled. Most hideously. (And don’t make a picture of it, for the love of God!)