Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (20 page)

And how the hell any woman—a man like Twelvetrees,
another one all front, the too—handsome collar ad— But look at it
objectively: people didn't show much common sense about these things.
Ever. When it came to feelings. How many men had fallen for a
beautiful face and found that's all there was? And he was, wasn't he,
just the type a girl like that would have fallen for—a girl without
experience, younger than her age in some ways.

A girl not in a very sound psychological state to
begin with. Whether she knew it or not . . . All right, he told
himself almost angrily: build it; how might it have happened?

Mona Ferne would have had his address: the girl would
have known where to go. Did she drive, have a car of her own? Find
out. What would it be in her mind? Please look at me, I could give
you more than she ever could! And him laughing at her? Or, If I can't
have you, she never will!

The gun. His own? Or had she planned it, come
prepared? All that business afterward—no, she couldn't— How could
he say for sure? A streak there of deliberate planning, yes; the ways
she devised for punishing Mona. She wasn't a mental defective by any
means.

"Hell," he said aloud to himself. The law
said motive wasn't very important. You needn't go hunting up a
plausible motive to match the nice solid tangible facts the law
liked—ownership of weapon, presence on the scene, witnesses,
fingerprints, and so on and so on. But in practice, that was one of
the first things you had to look for. A lot of murders were done for
very little reason, a moment's loss of temper, the ten bucks or
thirty cents in the victim's pocket, a mere suspicion of wife or
husband, things like that; but as a general rule, nobody got worked
up to murder without some hell's brew of emotion churning inside
them—whether it was what you might call rational emotion or not,
lasting a minute or a year.

He didn't like the idea, but he could see it
happening, since he knew the girl had been in love with Twelvetrees.

And it was, of course, a really wild one, no evidence
there at all—something like one of Mendoza's hunches. He thought
he'd keep it to himself for a while, see how things piled up—or
didn't—on the Kingmans. If and when there was nowhere else to look,
then look.
Meanwhile, he found the address
Mona Ferne had given him: Dave Morris was at home and unsurprised to
see him.

"I wondered if I ought to come in, when I saw
the papers—but I hadn't seen him for a day or so before he
supposedly left, I don't know anything really to tell you.
Everybody's been calling me up, shall we go to the police or not—you
know—" He shrugged. He was a stocky dark young man with an
ugly, attractive face, and vitality exhaled from him with every
breath; he was a restless talker, gesturing, changing position every
ten seconds.

"Well, maybe you can help fill in some of the
background, but first, when did you see him last?"

"On Wednesday the twenty-eighth," said
Morris promptly. "I've got all this pat in my mind, ready for
you, see. Some of us met here to talk over a new show we're thinking
of doing, and for what it's worth I'll tell you that it was the first
time Twelvetrees didn't jump at a part. He was—oh, what the British
call cock-a-hoop that night—kept hinting we might get a surprise
soon, that sort of thing .... No, nothing definite. He was just—on
air, as if he'd just heard he'd inherited a fortune or something.
Tell the truth, I wasn't very curious, and when he didn't show at our
next meeting, I didn't do any crying over it .... "

Morris liked to talk, and Hackett was used to
listening. Some more background emerged. Most of the people in this
group had got on the lowest rung of the show-business ladder at
least; Twelvetrees had been one of only three amateurs, without any
experience, among them. "And he was an awful ham, but the girls
fell for his looks, you know." It hadn't been for quite a while
they'd found out how he'd earned a living—"if you can call it
earned"—he'd apparently tried to keep his different lives in
separate compartments; and when they did, they'd kidded him about it
some. If Hackett wanted Morris's opinion, Twelvetrees didn't take the
Mystic Truth very seriously, except of course as an easy living.
Which was understandable. Morris himself wouldn't look down his nose
at anything like that; eking out subsistence with on—call TV work
as an extra was pretty precarious. No, Twelvetrees had never said
much about his background, specifically where he came from, except
just Pennsylvania. He wouldn't say that Twelvetrees had been bosom
pals with anybody in the group, though he was faithful in attendance
at their meetings and always eager to take a part in one of their
plays.

"Which kind of canceled out, if you get me,
because while some of us aren't always able to take on a part—on
count of prior commitments we'll get paid for—we do like to have
competent actors in our little productions. We get a certain number
of producers and so on keeping an eye on what we're doing, you see,
which is why we go to the trouble and expense of putting shows on,
besides giving ourselves experience. Stop me, by the way, if I get
irrelevant, maybe you're not interested in all this. Well, for one
thing, he was a bit older than most of us, you know, and the men
didn't like him—including yours  truly—because, well, we
don't usually care much for the too-too-handsome boys who go round
preening themselves in mirrors, do we? Yes, he was rather like that.
And the girls, a couple of them are faithful devoted wives, and a
couple more have enough common sense to see through that kind. And as
for the couple left who'd have been thrilled-to-pieces-darling if the
divine creature had asked them for a date, he did a lot of arm
patting and general showing off, but beyond that, not a tumble."

"You trying to say he was on the nance side?"

"Oh, Lord, no, don't think so. A bit la-de-da,
but I put that down to his having deliberately taught himself, you
know—not to be snobbish about it—upper-class manners. I think he
may have come from somewhere lower down, which is nothing against
him, and acquired the polished veneer, and people like that usually
overdo it a little. He never acted casual, if you get me. About the
girls, I figured myself he had a steady, and for some reason never
brought her round or mentioned her. Just conjecture, but maybe when
it came to females he preferred the kind he knew in the lower ranks,
and didn't care to exhibit one of 'em to us."

"Possible," said Hackett. "Any of
these girls in your bunch named Marian Marner?"

"Never heard of her. Not even a Marian in the
lot."

"Wel1," said Hackett. "Of course, he
was going around with Miss Mona Ferne—"

Morris let out a bellow of laughter and started to
tell him just what that amounted to. They'd all got a hell of a kick
out of that—not, of course, in front of Twelvetrees. Like all that
kind, he didn't have much sense of humor about himself. The first
time he'd met her he'd been all over her, putting out the full
wattage of boyish charm. Maybe it'd been a dirty trick, but the rest
of them hadn't said a word to him—seeing what was going on—about
her being a dead one so far as the profession went, kaput, washed up
long ago, and no use as a patroness. Which was obviously the idea in
his mind. And of course she was all too pleased to have him dancing
attendance . . . "that woman, that damned awful woman."
They put up with her because she was a regular at their shows, one
admission ticket to count on, and you couldn't offend people who
might talk, good or bad, about you in public; one thing you could bet
on, they never had got and never would get any cash support from
Mona, however much she talked about her sympathy for these brave
struggling young people. Had Hackett met her? Wasn't it the damndest
thing how she still saw herself as the glamour queen? All the same,
not that she needed convincing about it, one reason she'd been a soft
mark for Twelvetrees; it wouldn't be every day she picked up a
handsome young man so anxious to oblige. And mind you, she
wasn't—Morris would say—a fool, when it came to money and so on,
either; a shrewd streak there, but by all accounts she never had seen
through Twelvetrees, because she was so anxious to believe it was, so
to speak, her
beaux yeux
alone that held him.

"Another little reason none of us cared for
him—I mean, hell, I'm no moralizing prude, but there are limits. He
found out for himself soon enough she couldn't wave the fairy wand
and waft him in front of a big producer who'd fall on his neck with
the glad cry, ‘My boy, you're just what I've been looking for!' But
by then he'd also found out she was loaded, and so damn pleased to
have him hanging around there was graft to be had—you know, the
little present for a good boy."

"We'd figured that one," said Hackett. "Off
the record, you think it went any further than taking her around
night clubs and so on?"

"Who knows?" said Morris. "All I can
say is, I doubt it very strongly. For all I've been saying about him,
he was fastidious as a cat—me, I'm not, exactly, but I wouldn't
have wanted to go any further, in his position, if you take me. Would
you? No matter how much you liked the gold cigarette case and the
fancy clothes?"

Hackett laughed and said you never knew what you
could do until you got really strapped, but it didn't seem
Twelvetrees had been down so low. Morris agreed. "Why didn't we
get rid of him? Not so easy. And maybe it's a case of the pot calling
the kettle black, because he had more money to spend than most of us,
and he was always glad to fork over—props, theater rent, costumes
and so on—so long as he was one of the boys and girls all chummy
together, and got a chance to tread the boards once in a while."

"Speaking of props, about a year ago you people
did a show that called for a gun. Where did it come from and where
did it go afterward?"

Morris cocked his head. "A gun? He wasn't shot,
was he? I know you can't answer any questions, but I'm being a good
boy and not asking any because I know that, I'm not disinterested.
We're all seething with curiosity—our glamour boy murdered! Was he
shot? The papers didn't say."

"No, he wasn't. There's no reason you shouldn't
know. We found a gun there and just wonder if it was his. This gun
you used in the play—"

"
Bitter Harvest
,"
said Morris. "I remember. Twelvetrees supplied the gun, all
right, but I don't know whether it was his or he'd borrowed it
somewhere. He never said. I don't know much about guns, it was a
pistol of some sort—" He measured with his hands. "Longish
barrel—looked fairly old, but I don't know. When we went over the
list of props for that show he said he'd contract to get the gun, and
he showed up with it at the first rehearsal—that's about all I
know. Don't think any of the others could tell you any more, but you
could ask .... Loaded? My God, no, at least I don't think so, he
wasn't that big a fool. Well, actually it doesn't get fired during
the play and Twelvetrees had it all the time on stage. We ran that
show for seven nights, our usual, and then packed it up, and that's
the last I saw of the gun—he took it away again."

"Would you recognize it?"

Morris thought so. Hackett said they'd have him take
a look; but when he'd thanked him and started back downtown, it
didn't seem Morris had added much useful. Except the cocky mood
Twelvetrees , had been in on Wednesday night. Not likely to be much
in that—or was there? Be nice to know why. Be nice to know a lot
more than they I did.

Suppose it was the same gun; that didn't say it was
Twelvetrees' own, or where he'd borrowed it .... Question the whole
lot of these people who'd known him, about seeing him with a gun,
hearing him mention one. And probably came up with nothing.

A little routine to take care of. Not that it
mattered much, but send somebody to check with that Kent woman Mona
Ferne had visited on Friday night: (yes, and it might matter, for
consequently Mona wouldn't have known if the girl was out). See if
anything had come in from Pennsylvania. Also, now they knew that
Twelvetrees had been at that pharmacy on Fairfax after four o'clock,
it might not be a bad idea to have a look round the places adjacent,
see if he'd stopped anywhere else in the vicinity.

He thought again, unwillingly, about that
ridiculously unwelcome hunch of his about the girl .... He wondered
how Mendoza was getting on.
 

TWELVE

Mendoza was in a very bad mood with himself. It
seemed that from the beginning in this thing he had, like some
thickheaded ex-patrolman working his first case in plain clothes,
been overlooking little niggling details that were, on analysis, of
the first importance. The only thing he  could figure, and it
was a depressing thought, was that he must be getting old.

Mendoza, who had made a little reputation for himself
as one of the bright boys at headquarters! Maybe he needed glasses;
maybe he needed to take one of those memory courses.

He'd stood outside this damned Temple, on Saturday
night, and read the sign, and among other things it had said in black
and white, Ceremony of the Inner Chamber (whatever in God's name that
was), 8 P.M. Fridays. So? So he'd gone along building up this
beautiful story about how the Kingmans had committed the murder
beginning at about seven-thirty and ending after midnight on a Friday
night. When, by their never-enough-to-be-cursed schedule, they were
expected to be at the Temple. And it appeared that was just exactly
where they had been on Friday the thirtieth. Because Mr. Martin
Kingman wasn't the hypnotist to get twelve members of his flock to
swear to a lie on his behalf.