Howard Fast - The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs

“You’re damn right she was,” Sweet said.

“What hospital?”

“They took her to Cedars-Sinai and she was there three days. After that, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. She agreed to keep it quiet, and he agreed to the divorce and the settlement. He was paying her five thousand a month and he gave her the house on Roxbury Drive. I would have married her in a minute, but Alice and I agreed that we’d never let that bastard off the hook as long as he lived. Well, he got off the hook.”

“Apparently he was rich enough to afford the alimony. Why should he kill her?”

“No one is rich enough to afford sixty grand a year.”

“Do you inherit from Mrs. Greene?” Masuto asked him.

“Come on, if you haven’t spoken to her lawyers you’re lousier cops than I imagine. Her money goes to dogs. You know that. I never wanted a nickel of her money, and I’m as crazy about dogs as she was.”

“Yes, of course. I was not trying to trap you. I just wondered whether you knew what was in her will.”

“All right. That’s your job. Now what are you going to do about Greene?”

“You make an accusation. That’s not evidence.”

“You bring him in and put the screws on him, and you’ll get plenty of evidence.”

“We don’t do things that way,” Masuto said.

“I just bet you don’t, with your two-bit police force. If it was the L.A. cops-”

“They don’t go in for torture either. But I can tell you this, Mr. Sweet. We’ll have the evidence and the killer.”

“When?”

“Ah, that’s not easy to say.”

When Monte Sweet had departed, Wainwright said to Masuto, “Well, what did he give you?”

“He said Greene once owned a garage and that he could wire a car. As a matter of fact, Sweet said he could wire a car himself.”

“So where are we, Masao?”

“Closer.”

“And now?”

“I think I’ll try Laura Crombie again.”

The Bar

Going to the Crombie house, on Beverly Drive, Masuto’s car was almost sideswiped by a tourist bus. It was the second time in a single day that he had narrowly avoided an accident. It was unlike him. He had allowed himself to become submerged completely in a game of chess with an invisible antagonist-and to become absorbed in this manner was dangerous, dangerous for himself and dangerous for the women he was committed to protect.

He was crowding too much into a single day, and he was being drawn too thin, yet he could not stop. He found himself quietly cursing the tourist bus, and the fact that he could be thus irritated disturbed him. Yet, he reflected, it was ridiculous to allow these huge tourist buses to prowl the streets of Beverly Hills, adding their noxious blasts to the prevailing pollution. People from all over the country and all over the world came here to look at streets not too different from streets in any other wealthy community, content to pay then-money to have the homes of movie stars pointed out to them. Masuto knew it was a swindle. Three quarters of the places pointed to as the tourists rode by in their big buses had been vacated by the stars years ago, sold and resold since then, but still giving the tour guides a reason to sell their tickets-and of course Beverly Drive, the broad main street of the town with its magnificent mansions, was the focus of all the tour buses.

Driving more carefully, he pulled into the Crombie driveway, parking behind Beckman’s Ford. Beckman let him into the house.

“Quiet, very quiet, Masao,” Beckman said. “The ladies are driving me crazy. I don’t know if I can hold them tonight. And to make it worse, someone at the station gave my wife this number. She called here three times. Now I stopped answering the phone. I let the ladies do that.”

They were standing alone in the entrance foyer, and Masuto said to Beckman, speaking softly, “Tell me about Mitzie.”

“What’s to tell? I’m forty-three years old, Masao. If I was fifteen years younger, I’d leave my wife and marry Mitzie. Except why the hell should she look twice at a cop who makes fifteen thousand a year? I’d have to put away three years of wages to buy that Porsche of hers.”

“You’ve spent twenty-four hours with those women, and that’s all you’ve got?”

“What do you want?”

“Who is she?”

“You mean where does she come from? I’m not totally a jerk, Masao. She comes from Dallas, Texas. Her mother was a laundress. Her father was a no-good bum and a drunk. Mitzie cut out of there first chance she got and came here like all the other kids do to become a movie star. She worked around as a waitress and for a while she worked in a hair-dressing place.”

“Wait a minute-not Tony Cooper’s place?”

“That’s right. She gets a big bang out of the fact that she can go there now and lay down thirty bucks for the same service she used to dish out.”

“It’s a small world. Did you ever ask her why she and Billy Fuller split up?”

“There’s a general consensus among all three dames that he’s a son of a bitch.”

“Okay, Sy. Now I want to talk to Mrs. Crombie. I’ll wait here. Where are they?”

“Watching TV.”

“Get her.”

Laura Crombie came into the foyer with Beckman and said, “I’m sure you’ve solved everything, Sergeant, and we can stop living this nightmare.”

“Not quite.”

“Of course it can’t go on, you know that. We can’t continue to live here shut up and away from the world like this.”

“I know that.”

“When?”

“Soon, I hope,” Masuto told her. “I have just a few questions that might help. For one thing, did your ex-husband own a pistol?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what kind?”

“I’m afraid not. To me, one pistol is the same as another.”

“Did you ever see it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you do know what an automatic pistol looks like and how it differs from a revolver. Was his an automatic pistol or a revolver?”

“I think it was an automatic pistol. I’m hot sure.”

“And by any chance did he belong to the same pistol club that Alan Greene belonged to?”

“Yes, I think he did.”

“Thank you,” Masuto said. “I’ll only ask you to endure this through the rest of this evening. One way or another, it will come to an end.”

“I hope you’re right,” Beckman said as Masuto was leaving.

“We’re trying.”

Masuto got into his car, but instead of driving off, he sat there brooding. He was a meticulus man; that came with his Japanese ancestry and with his Zen training. His Zen training had taught him how elusive the truth is and it had also enabled him to use his insight to capture flashes of the truth. The meticulous quality went along with his distrust of his flashes of insight.

He released the hood of the car, got out, raised the hood, and stared at the motor. He had never wired a car with dynamite, yet faced with the necessity he felt he could pull it off. Six sticks of dynamite in a confined spot behind the engine, a detonator stuck in place with so simple a device as a couple of Band-Aids, and then a lead from the ignition.

He closed the hood of his car and sat down behind the wheel. Again he brooded for a while. Then he called the station on his radiophone. “Put me through to the captain,” he told Polly.

“For a dashing, handsome Zen Buddhist Oriental, you are the most unromantic person I know.”

“The captain, Polly.”

“What’s up?” Wainwright asked.

“I’m troubled and I’m nervous.”

“Maybe you ought to knock it off. Go home. Give it tomorrow.”

“That’s no good. If I let this go until tomorrow, something will happen tonight. I feel it in my bones.”