Paul Cain - The Paul Cain Omnibus

So impulsive, big-hearted Finn bleated: “Listen, Myra — the Law will be here in a minute. You duck, and duck quick. And if they tie you up with this in any way keep your mouth shut until I get in touch with you. Got it?”

She stopped sobbing long enough to bob her head up and down.

“Under any circumstances don’t crack about coming here tonight, or seeing me. And don’t try to reach Mel — he won’t be home tonight.”

She looked at me big-eyed, nodded again.

I didn’t tell her any more about Mel; she’d find out about that soon enough. I watched her out of sight and went back into the house.

The whole piece of business with Myra was the kind of thing I’d call anybody else a sap for doing. It got me into plenty of trouble but I’d probably do it again the same way. I guess everybody has to be a sucker one way or another.

The cook had put on her best bib and tucker in honor of the occasion. A couple patrolmen in a radio car got to the house a little before Moore and got difficult with her and I objected and they got difficult with me; Moore got there just in time to save one of the cops and probably me from a good sock on the nose.

Moore was pretty new on the homicide squad — I think he’d been in the narcotic division or something like that — but he had an Italian named Amante with him who was as efficient as any half-dozen dicks I’ve ever seen.

He was a short gray-haired gent with wide-set intelligent eyes and a nice smile. Inside of half an hour he’d heard all I had to say and all the cook had to say. He’d found the spot on the porch where Fritz had been standing when whoever it was took the first shot at him. He’d decided that that first shot missed and he’d found the slug buried in the side of the house near the door. The second shot had creased Fritz’s leg and smacked into the house alongside of the other and there was a thin trail of blood from the porch into the house.

That, according to Eagle Eye Amante, was when Fritz had called me. Then the “party or parties unknown” which meant Mel and somebody else according to Amante’s theory, had followed him into the house and dragged him away from the phone and proceeded to systematically beat him to death.

That being accomplished some slight difference of opinion had arisen and he or she or they had let Mel have it. And to top it Amante found the revolver, lacking three slugs, that both Fritz and Mel had been shot with under the table near Fritz’s body. They’d have to dig the lead out of the house and out of Mel before they could be sure, of course, but it looked like a cinch.

It was swell reasoning as far as it went. And when Amante found a lot of stuff on Mel that identified him as Melville Raymond, including a wire thanking him for some flowers, signed Myra, I almost broke down and told all, but her story was still with me and I believed it and Amante’s version didn’t jibe with it at all. Call it a hunch, call it anything you like; I kept my trap closed and followed Amante’s leads in my best “Marvelous, Mister Holmes” manner.

One thing that worried me was how Mel had come out to Bel-Air. If he’d been by himself what had happened to his car? If he’d come in a cab I figured the driver would report it as soon as the story broke and that would complicate Amante’s theory a little.

The coroner and his outfit finally got there and checked perfectly with Amante. Fritz had been beaten to death — the leg wound was superficial — and Mel had died from a slug from the same gun high in the chest, shattering the breastbone and lodging in the spine.

I didn’t get home until about two-thirty. I still had to call Barbara Kiernan at Palm Springs and tell her the bad news. I hated that job because I knew she’d take it big — tear her hair and wring her hands and whatnot. She was that kind of gal, a hair tearer. I decided to put off calling till morning, and then after I got into bed I thought what the hell, I might just as well get it over with.

The cook had given me Maude Foley’s number in Palm Springs. Maude was Barbara’s sidekick and had a house down there where Barbara spent most of her weekends. I called long distance and finally got a sleepy “Hello” from Maude. That was a break — her answering instead of Barbara. I told her what had happened in as few words as possible and told her to tell it to Barbara any way she thought best. I got to sleep a little after three.

Amante called me at eleven-thirty in the morning and asked if I could stop by the station about one. Next to grave-yards and hospitals I like police stations least so I suggested we meet at the Biltmore and have lunch and he said okay.

Maude Foley called a little later and said she and Barbara were out at the house and that Barbara was pretty badly broken up. I promised to stop by later in the afternoon.

I drove out to Number Two in Beverly and told the housemen to soft pedal talking about Fritz’s murder; the morning papers were full of the case and there’d be plenty of talk without our own men joining the chorus. Then I stopped by the place in Hollywood on the way downtown and suggested the same thing to the boys there.

I was about ten minutes late at the Biltmore and found Amante in the grill with a long skinny shiny-haired guy who he introduced as Arthur Delavan of the Department of Justice.

Amante wanted to know all about Fritz — what he’d done back east, who his enemies were and why, that kind of thing. I gave him all I could, which wasn’t much. Fritz had hustled a string of books in New York and Boston, same as Hollywood, only on a smaller scale. As far as I knew he didn’t have an enemy in the world. And so on.

Delavan didn’t have much to say. I finally asked how come he was interested in a case that was so strictly local and he said he wasn’t particularly interested, he’d just come along for the ride, or words to that effect. I said “Oh, I see” out loud, but to myself I said “Nuts, baby — you’re plenty interested.”

Amante said he had several men working on Mel Raymond and he wouldn’t be surprised if something important turned up during the afternoon. They hadn’t been able to get a line on the gun because the numbers had been filed off and there weren’t any fingerprints.

He finally got around to the most important piece of evidence that had turned up so far: Mrs Bergliot, the Kiernan cook, had admitted that she thought she’d heard a woman’s voice in the living room after she’d gone to bed. That was all they could get out of her. She didn’t recognize the voice and she said she might have been dreaming. I wondered why she hadn’t told me about it.

Amante watched me very closely while he was telling me about Mrs Bergliot and so did Delavan. I began to feel pretty uncomfortable but I don’t think I showed it.

After lunch we left each other with a hey nonny-nonny and assurances of mutual cooperation and I drove out Wilshire doing a lot of wondering. I’d about decided to call up Myra and tell her to sail her own boat, to go down and tell Amante her story and see if he believed it, when I turned off Wilshire on Crescent Heights Boulevard to cut over to the apartment. There’s very little traffic on Crescent Heights that far south and it saves a lot of time.

In the second block a dark blue roadster came up from behind and passed and when it was a few feet ahead somebody opened up on me with an automatic. I think it was an automatic — I only had a split second flash of it. The first shot made a neat hole in the windwing and thudded into the seat near my shoulder. I jerked the wheel as hard as I could and heard two more shots bite into the side of the car as it bounced up over the curb, across a lawn, and stopped within inches of the front door of a pink stucco house.