Stuart Kaminsky - The Howard Hughes Affair

The microphone and boom thudded down on the stage within a sigh of taking off the toes of my bare right foot. I had taken the shoe off because the bottom of my right foot began to itch after an hour of waiting in the dark studio at NBC. With the microphone still rolling into the wings, I reached for my shoe and sock, went flat on my stomach and squinted into the darkness.

Things were not going right for me. I had conned my way past the night guard and taken a seat on the side of the stage where I could see anyone who came into Studio B. The killer was supposed to wait for me to contact my informant before making his move-and getting caught. It was all very reasonable and simple, but the killer didn’t seem to understand what was expected of him.

The dim corridor light behind the killer caught a glint of metal in the audience. Studio B was soundproof. I could be dead without anyone knowing it till morning. At 44, I was still agile and ugly, but with one shoe off and against a pistol I was too slow and unarmed. In addition to which there wasn’t a hell of a lot of room to hide. Even if I could get to my.38, which I had left in the glove compartment of my car, I had never shot a human in my life in spite of seven years as a Glendale cop, five more as a Warner Brothers security guard and almost five years as a private investigator. In stark contrast, my friend in the audience had done away with three people in the last five days. I was seriously outclassed.

At any time except two in the morning, someone would pass the studio and look in-an announcer, a producer, somebody-but I had done too good a job of setting myself up.

The killer stepped forward carefully, showing first the barrel of his gun and then his silhouette clearly against the dim light from the hall. When the shot came, I rolled hard toward the control booth at the back of the stage, abandoning my shoe in mid-air and throwing a kick at the door. The shot didn’t have the sharp crack I knew and hated. It had a muffled sound like a gorilla spitting. Any sane man given the choice of kicking a door with a shoe-covered foot or bare one would have chosen the shoe-covered foot, but Toby Peters was not a sane man. He was a cornered, one-shoed idiot who had thought he had a plan to catch a killer and instead wound up victim Number Four-maybe.

In spite of a bad back, very few friends, and a small bank account, I had one hell of an impulse toward self-preservation. I rolled into the control booth on my side and scrambled over a chair until I came against the wall under the main panel. I could hear the stage boards creak slightly as the killer followed. His grey shadow played against the back wall and scared the hell out of me. I clenched my teeth and tried to salivate to keep from gagging and giving myself away. My foot was sore from kicking the door and so was I. I had been warned by my client not to do this, but why should I take advice from Howard Hughes on how to catch a killer? Did I tell him how to invest a million, design an airplane, direct a movie? The killer with the silencer, meanwhile, was making his way toward the control booth door I had left open.

I inched my way out from under the panel toward the far end of the booth, trying to remember if there was a door there. I got to my knees slowly, and crawled to the wall. There was a door. The footsteps were no more than fifteen feet away, and if I turned, I was sure I’d find myself looking into the barrel of the pistol and its too quiet death. I grabbed for the door, missed, grabbed again and ran like hell in hope that the killer’s aim would stay sour. A second shot tore into the acoustical wall on my right. I pulled off my shoe on the run and threw it over my shoulder is the general direction of the booth in the brilliant hope that it would slow him down. There were no running footsteps behind me, and I prayed to gods unknown that the killer was willing to call it a day if I was.

I got to the studio door and limped toward the front lobby.

I limped not because I was shoeless but because one foot hurt from kicking the door, and the other had stepped on something sharp in the darkness. There was a swinging door just before the lobby, and I plunged through it looking for help. The night receptionist wasn’t there. Neither was the night guard. I hobbled toward the front door. No one was on the street so I dragged my foot around the corner to the parking lot where I made my painful way to my rusting green Buick sitting like a sad turtle, catching the light of the moon on its dirty windshield. I got in, retrieved my.38 from the glove compartment, put it on the dashboard, took a quick look toward the NBC building to see no one there and yanked out my keys. The Buick turned over but jerked forward, banging my head into the steering wheel and sending the.38 and a half-used box of Kleenex flying into the back seat. One of my tires was flat. I turned around to scramble for the.38 in the shadows, missed it and caught a glimpse of a figure with a gun walking slowly across the lot toward me. Bullet Number Three turned my front windshield into a spider web. It was a fascinating pattern, but I didn’t have time to admire it or wonder where the hell the population of Los Angeles was. I pushed the door open after one more frantic search for the pistol and rolled onto the gravel.

My grey zipper gabardine windbreaker from Muller and Bluett’s was holding up reasonably well, but my expenses were mounting-a flat tire, cracked windshield, medication and treatment for a lacerated foot. I got to my knees and scrambled around a couple of cars toward the side of the NBC building, counting my assets.

These included about 17 years of dubious experience and darkness to hide me. On the debit side, I thought as I stumbled toward what looked like a door, I had a bum foot, no pistol, no help and a calm killer behind me. I hit the side door hard, expecting to bounce off it like a bullet against steel, but it gave and I tumbled back into NBC.

Gary Cooper had probably been in this carpeted corridor once, but where was he when I needed him? I wondered what he would have done in my place. I knew he would have had both shoes on and a gun in his hand. I was getting closer and closer to the point of imagining how the discovery of my body would look. I wanted to be at least a semidignified corpse. I could see my brother Phil the cop standing over me, looking down at my bruised bare feet and thinking it was just the kind of nonsense he expected. Maybe he’d spend a few days trying to figure out why the killer had taken me to NBC, removed my shoes and tortured me before putting me away. The prospect gave me as much incentive to keep moving as did the likelihood of my death.

Footsteps trampled gravel outside the door I had just dived through. The long barrel of the pistol came into view, and I scrambled down the hall smelling the carpet, the walls, and people. I was aware of too much. It was a sure sign of fear.

In the second or two it took the character with the gun to step into the light, I pushed at a door. It didn’t give. Bullet Number Four missed.

A plan came to mind while I panted and ran. It was just as bad as my other plans: I decided to scream until someone in the damn building heard me. The hell with dignity. I’d even take an old cleaning lady. But I changed my mind. What difference would a cleaning lady or two make to someone who was out to equal the record of Billy the Kid?