Paul Cain - The Paul Cain Omnibus

When I woke up it was twenty minutes after four and the phone was ringing. It was Bill Fraley; he said Dingo, a horse we’d made a fair-sized bet on the night before, had romped in, we’d won four hundred and thirty dollars apiece. I told him I’d meet him over at the cigar store where Hartley made book and I took a shower and shaved and went downstairs.

When I stopped at the desk for my mail there was a fellow named Gleason — an assistant cameraman that I’d known casually for a year or so — leaning on the counter talking to the clerk. We said hello and I asked him what he’d been doing — and he said he’d just got back from location at Phoenix with the Sheila Dale outfit. He said he was living at the hotel and we gave each other the usual song and dance about calling each other up and getting together real soon, then I went over to the cigar store and met Bill and collected my bet from Hartley. Bill and I went into the Derby and had something to eat. I called up Cora again but she wasn’t in.

After a while I called Steinlen. A man answered the phone in his outer office, instead of the secretary. When he asked who was calling I had a hunch and said Mister Smith and when he asked what I wanted to talk to Steinlen about I said I wanted to talk to him about a bill that was long overdue.

The man said: “Mister Steinlen committed suicide about a half hour ago,” and hung up.

Fraley looked at me and said: “You look like you’d just seen a ghost.”

I told him I had.

Steinlen wasn’t the kind of guy to bump himself off. It looked very much like Tony to me; it looked like whoever had murdered Mae had reached Tony in some way and let him get a flash of the check. They could have explained having the check by saying that Mae had been afraid Tony would find it and had given it to them for safekeeping. In the state of mind Tony was in he’d go for that. It all fitted in with the Cora angle. She’d killed Mae, and when Tony went to her after he left Opal’s she’d shown him the check and told him that that was what Steinlen was after when he killed Mae.

I called up Danny Scheyer again. He said, “What about that scoop?” and I told him to hold everything and give me all the details of the Steinlen suicide. He said Steinlen had shot himself at about five o’clock in his office at the Astra Studio. Mrs Steinlen had been with him at the time and had tried to stop him. She had been unable to give any reason for Steinlen’s act, had been taken home in a hysterical condition. I told Scheyer I’d call him back.

Well, that let Tony out — and it looked very much like it stuck Steinlen. It looked like he’d given Mae the works, in spite of my hunch that he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find the check and was afraid it would turn up, or maybe his wife had found out about the Jackman affair and had figured he murdered her and had faced him with it.

Then Fraley said: “So Steinlen bumped himself off?”

I nodded.

Fraley smiled a little, shook his head. He said: “It’s a wonder he didn’t do it a long time ago — with that bitch wife of his...”

I took that a little. I said: “What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s the original jealous and vindictive female that all the others are copied from; she’s had her spurs in him ever since they were married.” Bill finished his coffee. “She was a plenty bad actor when I knew her back in Chi, and she’s had her nose full of junk for the last couple years — that makes her three times as bad...”

I said: “Heroin?”

Bill bobbed his head.

I said: “I didn’t know about that...”

Bill grinned, said: “You don’t get around very much. You’re the kind of bug they publish the fan magazines for.”

I had an idea. It turned out to be my only good idea for the day, which isn’t saying a hell of a lot for it. I went back over to the hotel and called the cameraman Gleason from downstairs. I asked him if Sheila Dale had come back with the rest of the company.

Gleason said: “Huh-uh. We finished all the scenes she was in yesterday — she flew back last night.”

I went up to my room and got Tony’s automatic. When I went back downstairs Fraley had come over from the Derby and was talking to the girl at the cigar counter. I asked him if he had any idea who Dale got her stuff from and he said he supposed it was Mike Gorman, or at least Gorman would have a line on it. I looked up Steinlen’s home address in the telephone book — and went out and got into a cab.

On the way out to North Hollywood I stopped at the apartment house on Highland Avenue where Gorman lived. A blonde gal in a green kimono came to the door and said Mike was asleep. I said it was important and went past her into the bedroom. Mike was lying on the bed with his clothes on. He was pretty drunk.

The blonde had followed me into the bedroom; I told her I wanted to talk to Mike alone and she made a few nasty remarks and went out.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and asked Mike if he’d been peddling junk to Dale. He laughed as if that was a very wild idea and shook his head and said: “Certainly not.”

I said: “Listen, Mike — something big is going to break and you’re going to be roped into it. If you’ll be on the level about this with me I can fix it.”

He shook his head again and said: “I haven’t sold any stuff for six months. It’s too tough...”

I got up and looked down at him and said: “All right, Mike — I tried to help you.”

When I started out of the room he sat up and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed. He said, “Wait a minute,” and when I turned around and went back he said: “What’s it all about?”

I used a lot of big words and asked him again about Dale and he hemmed and hawed and finally said he wasn’t Dale’s regular connection but he’d sold her some stuff a few times. He said he’d never done business with Dale personally — it was always through her maid, a German girl named Boehme.

I told Mike I’d see that his name didn’t get mixed up with what I referred to mysteriously as the “Case” and went back out to the cab.

On the way out through Cahuenga Pass I had one of those trick hunches that I was being followed but I couldn’t spot anybody and I wasn’t trusting my hunches very much by that time, anyway.

It was pretty dark. The Steinlen house was lit up like a Christmas tree upstairs. I told the driver to wait and walked up the driveway and around to the back door. A big Negress opened the door.

I said: “I want to see Miss Boehme. It is very important.”

The Negress told me to wait and in a minute a very thin, washed-out woman with dull black hair and very light watery blue eyes came to the door, said: “I am Miss Boehme. What do you want?”

I stepped close to her and spoke in a very low voice. I told her I was a friend of Gorman’s, that Gorman had been picked up and that his address book with her name in it as a customer had been found by the police. I told her Gorman had sent word to me to reach all his customers and tell them to get rid of any junk they had around.

She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about for a minute, but I pressed it and she finally said okay and thanked me.

Then I told her I had an idea how she could beat the whole business and get her name out of it and said I wanted to use the phone. I went past her into the kitchen when I asked about the phone because I didn’t want to give her a chance to stall out of it. I wanted to get into the house.

She looked pretty scared in the light. She took me through the kitchen, through a dark hall, into a little room that was more a library than anything else. I asked her if there were any servants in the house that might be listening in at any of the other phone extensions and she said only the cook — the Negress. She said Mrs Steinlen was upstairs lying down.