Somewhere behind me somebody said, “Should we cut, Mr. Capra?”
“Hell no,” came a delighted voice.
I was getting tired, but Beaumont must have been in worse shape. He rolled over on me. His weight was his main advantage. My head hit something, and Beaumont was off me and moving again. I could hear him puffing.
Someone helped me up. It was Gary Cooper.
“Thanks,” I breathed.
“My pleasure,” he said, lifting his eyebrow.
Beaumont was out of another door, and I was behind him. He pushed a couple of girls in cheerleaders’ uniforms and went through another door. We were on the Knute Rockne gym set where I had played table tennis with Don Siegel.
We moved slowly, very slowly, and Beaumont almost collapsed.
His back against the bleachers, he turned for a goal line stand. A weak right came up, and then he made a grab for me with his arms wide. I stepped back and hit him in the face with a right. It hurt like hell, but I felt his bone crack, and he went down.
I was exhausted and breathing hard. I sat on the floor and started to go through his pockets. He wasn’t unconscious, but there wasn’t enough left in him to raise his arms. It was in the back pocket of his pants under his pirate suit. The envelope was small, brown, big enough to hold a four by five negative. I opened it and recognized the negative. It was the same one I had held in my hand a few seconds before Cunningham was killed.
I started to put the picture in my jacket pocket and pull myself up. Beaumont, his nose bloody, looked up at me. He looked frightened and gulped blood.
“You’re really something, Harry,” I gasped. “Using pictures of your own daughter for blackmail. I’ve seen them low, but not as low as you are right now.”
His eyes looked up at me pleading, but they weren’t focusing properly. Then I realized that they weren’t focusing on me. It was like the moment just before Cunningham caught the bullet from my gun. I started to turn toward where Beaumont was looking. Something inside, maybe experience, told me to duck when I turned. It probably saved my life. There was an explosion, and I saw the inkwell in my desk when I was a kid in third grade. I dived into the ink and swam lazily in the darkness. It was pleasant. After a while I came out of the ink and opened my eyes. I had a feeling that I was alive, but might wish I wasn’t.
The negative was gone. I knew it would be. Beaumont was still there. I was afraid he would be. His eyes were wide open, and there were two red holes through the chest of the pirate uniform.
For a minute or two, I sat in the middle of the gymnasium set with my third corpse in two days. This one was the worst. Half of the Warner Brothers lot had seen me fighting with Beaumont. It was even on film, and here I sat with his body. I would have bet my car, my salary from Flynn and the two hundred I would probably never collect from Adelman that the two bullets in Beaumont’s chest were from my gun.
If history was repeating itself, someone would be coming in a few minutes, and it would probably be the cops. They were getting less friendly with me with each encounter.
My head was sore. I touched it and felt blood. The killer had tried to make it three, but I was a secondary target, and the bullet had only plowed a furrow in my scalp. The gun wasn’t in sight. I didn’t expect it to be. I got up, looked at Beaumont once more, and moved into the darkness of the set. There were no sirens, and I heard no footsteps, but it wouldn’t be long before my brother was after me. This time, I was sure, he wouldn’t let me walk out of his office.
I found a water tap outside the building and stuck my head under it. I splashed some water on my muddy legs and shoes, pulled myself together and stumbled in the general direction of my car. I was going to be lucky to come out of this whole thing with my brains still unscrambled.
When I turned the corner in front of Sid’s office, I saw my car. Seidman was standing next to it. My brother was probably inside talking to Adelman about Cunningham. In a few seconds, my brother would know about me and Beaumont and follow my trail through ruined footage. I headed away from my car and toward the front gate.
I walked out of the gate as briskly as I could and caught a Sunshine cab which had just dropped someone off. I told the Italian driver to take me to the Y.
“You a movie actor or writer or something?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but I’ve got something to do with pictures.”
“I just gave a ride to a producer named Blanke,” said the driver, “you heard of him?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to decide what I was going to do until nine o’clock.
“Cheap. Quarter tip,” said the cabbie.
“Well,” I said closing my eyes, “you just never know what to expect from these movie people.”
12
The cabbie dropped me off in front of the Y, but I decided not to stay there. My brother might check cabs leaving the studio and give my description. That might lead to the Y.M.C.A. Phil would figure me to be smarter than that, but he’d check it out anyway.
I walked a few blocks, got another cab and went three blocks past a cheap hotel I knew on San Pedro. I had once spent the night at the place talking a runaway grandmother into going home to her son and daughter-in-law. The old lady had been living happily in the hotel when I found her. Her son was the owner of a pretty big Van Nuys toy store, and he paid cash up front. I remembered the hotel had asked her no questions and had been surprisingly clean.
I registered as Murray Sklar. When amateurs register anonymously, they usually keep some part of their real name, maybe the same initials, or their middle name. I moved as far as I could from mine. I had no luggage, but I paid cash, and the woman at the desk appreciated being compared to Joan Crawford. Most of the women in Los Angeles thought they looked like Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Joan Blondell or Olivia DeHavilland. The Joan Crawford behind the desk looked more like Marjorie Main in
The room was clean and neat, but small. I didn’t care. I only expected to stay for a few hours. There was a phone in the hall. I called Sid Adelman.
“What the hell are you doing? Just what the hell are you doing?” he huffed. “I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re killing off the goddamn employees of this studio one by one.”
“I didn’t kill them, Sid, and besides, you really won’t miss any of them.”
“That’s not the point,” he cried. “The publicity is going to be terrible, terrible if anyone finds out. We may be able to keep it out of the papers, but I don’t know.” Long pause. “Was Beaumont the second blackmailer?”
“I think so,” I said. An old man in a bathrobe passed by me in the hall. I nodded and spoke more softly. “I had my hands on the negative for a few seconds again.”
“And you lost it, huh putz?” I could imagine Sid Adelman shaking his little head.
A relatively old lady of the evening walked past me down the hall. She didn’t look as good as Marjorie Main in
“What did the cops want?” I asked Adelman.
“Bette Davis’s autograph,” he said sarcastically. “They wanted you. They want you. Some lieutenant named Pevsner will probably kill you if he gets his hands on you.”
“So they know about me fighting with Beaumont?”
“And,” he dripped, “ruining several hundred feet of film and destroying one short comedy by killing the villain.”
“Sidney, I didn’t kill him.”
“The cops think it was you. I’m supposed to tell you to call Lieutenant Pevsner if you call me. Call Lieutenant Pevsner. There, I told you.”
I asked him if he had sent someone to guard Flynn at the hotel. The killer was obviously someone who could get onto the lot without trouble. If he could get on the lot, he might have no trouble finding Flynn in the hotel. Flynn was not doing a good job of keeping his hiding place secret.
