Paul Cain - The Paul Cain Omnibus

He was lying near the big table in the middle of the room with one arm hooked over a chair and the other twisted under him. One of his legs was twisted under him, too. It looked like three or four heavyweights had worked him over for an hour or so; I’ve seen quite a few badly beaten up men at one time or another but never anything like that. He was very dead.

The phone was on the floor a little ways beyond his body. I picked it up and wiggled the receiver a couple times and it buzzed; I called the police station in LA — I didn’t know anybody in the Beverly Hills or Hollywood Divisions and I wasn’t in the mood for a lot of trick questions from strange coppers. I finally got a detective lieutenant named Moore, whom I’d met through Fritz, on the wire and told him about it.

Then I went over as far away from Fritz as I could and sat down and thought I was going to be sick. I’m not exactly a nance when it comes to carnage but he looked like he’d been stepped on by an elephant. I sat there trying to adjust myself to the idea of him being dead — I liked him as well as any man I’d ever known and it was no cinch — and then I heard a noise behind me and damn near dislocated my neck turning around.

It was the Norwegian woman who cooked and kept house for the Kiernans. She was wearing a white kimono with yellow and green and purple chrysanthemums on it. She looked from one body to the other and then at me and then back at Fritz. I thought her eyes were going to fall out on her cheeks.

I asked: “See anybody here tonight?”

She shook her head slowly without taking her eyes off Fritz. “No, sir — only Mister Kiernan.”

“Hear anything?”

“I heard three shots...”

“All at once?” She turned to me. “No — there were two, and then after several minutes there was another.”

“What’d you do?”

She hesitated a moment, said slowly: “I locked my door and stayed in my room.”

“Where’s Mrs Kiernan?”

“Went to Palm Springs this morning.” She was about winded.

I said: “You’d better get dressed — the police will be here in a few minutes.”

She clucked mournfully a couple times and hurried away. I caught her in the doorway with one more question: “Did Mister Kiernan mention that he was having visitors tonight or anything like that?”

She shook her head. “No, sir — nothing at all. I cooked his dinner and he ate by himself and then came in here. I went to bed at nine o’clock.” She clucked some more and disappeared.

In about a minute I heard a car pull up and stop out in front and I got up and went out on the porch. It was pretty dark but when my eyes got used to it I saw a coupé parked down the driveway about forty feet. It didn’t look like a police car and no one got out so I stalled, waiting for whoever was in the car to play. They didn’t. I finally strolled over and stuck my puss in. Myra Reid was sitting hunched down back of the wheel, her face green-white in the glow of the dashlight.

Myra was a kind of perennial “baby star”; she never seemed to get very far in pictures and she never seemed to be hungry. I think it all began when some contest judge dubbed her “Miss Most Beautiful Legs in Minneapolis.” Minneapolis lost a fair stenographer and Hollywood got the legs. She had a “long term” contract at one of those collapsible studios on Gower Street and made enough money to have a nice address in Toluca Lake and a flash car for front so she could run up bills.

Every so often a bunch of self-appointed talent sharks would get together and vote her and a couple dozen of her pals the “most promising young actresses of the coming year.” She’d been “promising” for about five years.

With my customary flair for the unique and penetrating question, I asked: “What are you doing here?”

She stuttered something about having a date with Fritz.

Fritz wasn’t a chaser. I knew that Myra was on our books for about four grand and figured it might have something to do with that.

She was ahead of me, went on: “I wanted to talk to him about the money I owe you; I called him up after dinner and he said he’d be home all evening. Didn’t he tell you?”

I shook my head and reached in and turned the nickel cap on the dashlight so I could see her face better. She was pretty shaky.

I said: “Well — why don’t you go in?”

She managed to smile. “I was just getting out of the car when you came out on the porch. I didn’t know who it was so I waited.”

I nodded and opened the door of the car and waited for her to get out. She put one foot out on the running board, hesitated, chirped: “Fritz is all right, isn’t he?...”

“Sure — Fritz is fine. Why?”

She laughed self-consciously. “I just wondered...”

I said: “Fritz is dead.”

She stared at me a few seconds without saying anything. Then she put her hands up to her mouth and moaned something that sounded like “Oh my God!...”

I waited. It was a good hunch. If I’d started asking questions she’d probably have closed up like a clam but instead she went entirely screwy and started babbling about “Mel” and “her career” and “poor Fritz” and a couple dozen other things. Pieced together it went something like this:

She’d made the date with Fritz at his house because she wanted to have a heart to heart talk about paying off a little at a time, and he was always so busy at the club.

My own guess was that she’d figured she might go into her baby star routine for him and he’d break down and tear up her markers or take it out in trade, or something. Maybe not.

Anyway, she was all set to leave for Bel-Air when in walks Mel, her current chump — fiancé was her word — and says: “Where are you going, my pretty maid?”

“I’m going to Fritz Kiernan’s on business,” says she — honest lass.

“Business my eye!” says he, or words to that effect, and the battle was on.

Mel, I gathered, was a lovely boy, but given to jealous rages in which he completely blew his noodle. This had been one of his best, and after building it for about an hour he’d stamped out with the loudly proclaimed intention of wiping such scum as Fritz Kiernan off the face of the earth, or some equally lousy curtain line. It seems he’d missed the point that Myra had made the date and that it was business, and a few inconsequential details like that.

She beat him to her front door and stood there with her arms spread out, yelping “No, no — not that!” or whatever seemed appropriate and he clipped her on the button and she went bye-bye. Nice fella.

I asked her what Mel looked like and she managed to tell me, with sob effects; I knew who the husky lying in the doorway was. All of which got me exactly nowhere in trying to figure out what’d happened. It was a cinch Mel hadn’t beaten Fritz to death; no one man could’ve done that without a sledgehammer. And if Fritz shot Mel where was the gun? And how could he shoot anybody if he was dead? And what did he say, “Somebody took a shot at me,” on the phone for? Mel didn’t sound like the type to take a shot at anyone; he’d be a bare-hander. None of it made sense.

I asked Myra if Mel ever carried a gun, just to be sure, and she shook her head.

Then I tried to lay out the little I knew about it in chronological order in my mind and kept on getting nowhere, fast. The only thing I was sure of, or thought I was sure of, was that Myra was telling the truth and was in a fair way of being smack in the middle of the worst jam a gal like her can draw. She believed in her career whether anyone else did or not and a scandal like that would put her on the shelf for good, even if they didn’t stick her as an accomplice or accessory or what-have-you.