Killed in the Act Read online

  “That’s all right,” I told Llona. “They think you’ve invented a new kind of crime, the false non-alarm.” I shook my head. “What hospital did they take Jerry to?”

  She told me, and I said that’s where I was going if someone needed to reach me.

  “I’ll ride down with you,” she said. “I’ll meet the firemen in the lobby and try to convince them there.”

  It was total insanity, I reflected on the way down. Here I was, a reasonably mature human being (at least, I thought I was), starting out on a desperate hunt for a bowling ball that had been stolen from a woman who made millions of dollars from people paying to see moving pictures of her with little or no clothing on.

  I looked up at a sudden noise. Llona was banging her palms against the stainless steel wall of the elevator, making a sound like native drums in a cheap jungle picture. She was usually so cool and in control; I had to look at her in surprise. She turned around, met my eyes, then took two quick steps toward me.

  I was fatalistic about it. After an attack on the (for all I knew) perfectly harmless Jerry de Loon, and the theft of a bowling ball and the entire year of 1952, it only figured that I would be attacked by a pint-sized female public relations specialist.

  Luckily, it wasn’t violence she had on her mind.

  Before I could do anything about it, assuming I wanted to do anything about it, she had her hands clasped behind my neck and was pulling my face down to hers.

  We kissed each other quite thoroughly. When we broke apart, I said, “What was that, a new PR technique? I mean, this time was fine, but I think it would make me think twice about getting on an elevator with Ritafio.”

  “I...I had to do something to...well, it was a way to break the tension,” she said at last, a little defiantly. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure, and tonight...”

  “Hey,” I said softly, “it’s better than beating on the walls, right?”

  She smiled at me. “Much better,” she said.

  The doors opened on the lobby, and sure enough, the firemen were there. Coward that I am, I left Llona to deal with them.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Surpraz, Surpraz, Sur-praz.”

  —JIM NABORS, “GOMER PYLE—USMC,” CBS

  “SPOT, STAY!” I TOLD the Samoyed on the hospital steps. Like the obedient pooch he was, he lay down on the concrete to wait for me. Dog-nappers would try to move him at their own risk.

  At the desk, I found out (after the unavoidable bureaucratic confusion) that Mr. de Loon had just been admitted, should they check to see if he was out of x-ray? He was, and they told me his room number.

  When I came into the place, I’d been prepared to bluff and/or cajole my way to seeing Jerry—assuming, of course, that he was healthy enough. I’m sneaky, but I’m not callous.

  It didn’t prove necessary. Jerry had been asking for me since they’d brought him in. He’d managed to give them the impression I was next of kin or something, so I got sent right up.

  It turned out I had to wait awhile, anyway, because there was another test they wanted to do. When it was finished, and they wheeled him into his room, he seemed chipper enough, considering he’d caught a hard one in the head.

  A man in a white coat, Kindly Old Doc, right out of Central Casting, complete with silvery hair and wire-frame half-glasses, joined me for a brief conversation in the hall.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “That’s hard to say, before I’ve seen the x-rays,” the doctor told me. “Nothing alarming in the EEG, which is encouraging.”

  “He doesn’t seem too bad, from what I’ve seen of him,” I said.

  “Head injuries are tricky,” he said. “Not like you people show on TV, you know. Makes me mad. ‘Mannix’ was the worst. That one of yours?”

  “No.” Something in the way he looked at me from the corner of his eye made me glad I could say that.

  “The damn show was a menace. Every week, Mannix got clubbed into oblivion, woke up in two minutes, felt the back of his head, and said, ‘Just a bump on the head.’ That’s what your friend told me, ‘Just a bump on the head.’ Stupidity. He tells me some girl named Mona or something called for an ambulance over his objections. That was smart.”

  “Can I talk to him now?”

  “Yes, but not for too long. It’s getting late, and if he wasn’t so bound and determined to see you, I’d make you wait.” He looked at his watch. “In a case like this, we check his reflexes and lucidity every fifteen minutes. I just did it when we brought him in—you can stay until the nurse comes around to do it again.”

  I thanked him and went in. Jerry was lying quietly on the bed, one bare foot sticking out where he had apparently kicked the sheet free. He had a fresh bandage on his head, and bruises on his throat.

  “Hello, Jerry.”

  “Hello, Mr. Cobb.” Despite all the talk about his wanting to see me, it was obvious that Jerry, at the moment, was afraid of me. I do not especially enjoy being feared.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cobb, honest. It wasn’t my fault. I—I’ll make it up to the Network somehow.”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought in exasperation. “Jerry,” I said, “relax, will you? Nobody’s mad at you, I just want to ask you some questions.”

  “Yes, sir.” His hands shook on the crisp white sheet. “It’s just that it took me so long to finally break into the industry, and when I get my chance, I blow it—”

  It didn’t look like this was going to be a very fruitful interview, unless I could get Jerry to stop apologizing to me for something I wasn’t mad at him about in the first place.

  “Jerry,” I said ominously, “the questions, remember?”

  He swallowed, and got ready for Torquemada Cobb, Master of the Third Degree. “I—okay,” he said at last.

  “Who was the star of ‘Pete Kelly’s Blues’?” I demanded.

  That did the trick. Surprised, he forgot to be scared. “Jack Webb,” he shot back. Trivia, he didn’t have to think about.

  “Not the movie,” I said, “the TV series.”

  “Why...?” He looked at me for a second, decided I must be crazy, then said, “Oh, okay—it was William Reynolds.”

  “Congratulations. You passed.”

  “Passed?”

  “How could I let them fire the only other person left in New York that even remembers there was a series called ‘Pete Kelly’s Blues’?”

  Jerry laughed, then winced, then laughed some more, burning off some of the tension and fear. “Thanks, Mr. Cobb,” he said when he was finished. “I really made a jerk out of myself, didn’t I?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “That business with the fire alarm was fast thinking.” That pleased him. “Now, I want you to tell me what happened tonight.”

  “All right, but I don’t think it’s going to help much in catching him.”

  “Are you sure it’s a man?” I asked. First things first.

  He was going to shake his head, but decided it hurt too much. “No. I never saw the person.”

  I sighed. “Well, tell me what you remember, anyway.”

  “Well, like I told you this afternoon, I’ve finished up ’49, and I’ve been working on 1950.”

  “That’s why you were there late?”

  “I thought I’d at least finish that year tonight. You see, the first thing I did when I came on the job was run through all the canisters just to see what the actual shows were—this time through, I was getting the credits, running the actors down, checking for exact air dates, and like that.”

  “Go on.”

  “Tonight—I don’t know what time, I lose track—I was in the library. I had the door closed, I didn’t want to disturb the rehearsals—do you know about the rehearsals?” I nodded. Jerry went on.

  “Anyway, I was watching an old Ann Garson show—wasn’t she a great singer?”

  “Not a bad comedienne, either,” I conceded. “Then what?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody knocked on the door. I figured it was
one of the people who usually drop in when I work late—from News, or Ops, or Special Projects, you know, on their coffee break. But I...”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I also sort of hoped it would be one of the stars, you know? Like, while I was running the ‘Ann Garson Show,’ if Ann Garson herself would knock on the door.” Just the contemplation of it brought a smile to his face. “Like Shelby and Green did this afternoon.

  “But even if it wasn’t a star or anything, I didn’t mind. I like when people come around. It makes me feel—well, more like a real part of the Network.”

  “So you opened the door,” I said.

  “Right. And nobody was there. So I stuck my head out to take a look, and he—somebody grabbed my throat.”

  “Stick with ‘he,’ it’ll make it easier to talk. You didn’t see him at all, huh?”

  “Nope. He was on the right side of the door, and he had me, right away. He pushed my head back—or rather, I pulled it back, trying to get away, and he kept pushing, then after a couple of seconds, my eyes went all red—I remember thinking I was dying. Then he let me go, but before I could see again, or even breathe, he got around behind me, and hit me on the head. It happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance!” Jerry said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Will you for God’s sake stop being sorry?” I snapped. “Believe it or not, Jerry, even though the Network is a big, cold corporation, we haven’t come to the point of expecting employees to lay down their lives in the line of duty.”

  “Their lives?”

  “Who knows? If you had a chance to struggle, he might have increased the pressure on your throat, and then what? It’s just as well you didn’t fight him.”

  I gave him a chance to get the idea that the Network doesn’t expect kinescope librarians to be two-fisted death, while I ruminated on Jerry’s story, what there was of it.

  From the mechanics of the thing, you could see the thief was right-handed. Or ambidextrous, after I thought about it a second. Or a lefty who thought swinging a sap more intricate a task than grabbing an Adam’s apple. So to hell with that flight into deductive reasoning.

  The attacker’s attitude seemed to have been that, while he had no great regard for Jerry’s well-being, he would let the boy live if he couldn’t identify him. Maybe. Or else he just beat on him to minimize interference with the theft. Or for kicks. The police were going to love this case.

  “Now,” I said, “you noticed the cans from 1952 had been stolen as soon as you came to?”

  “I set off the fire alarm as soon as I came to,” the librarian said. “I didn’t know anything was stolen, until just now. He took 1952?” I nodded. “Why?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question. What was there somebody would want to take?”

  “You got me,” he said in wonder. “All I knew at the time was that he’d trashed the place but good. Nineteen fifty-two, huh? There wasn’t nearly as much there as there was from other years.”

  “How much?”

  “Only fourteen one-hour cans.”

  Fourteen cans, I thought, my God. Fourteen hour-long cans of sixteen-millimeter movie film would weigh a ton, and make a stack several feet high. Not impossible to carry, maybe, but not exactly a bag of feathers, either. With Melanie Marliss’s bowling ball balanced on top, it would make one hell of an awkward package, especially if you expected to slip surreptitiously down seven flights of fire stairs. You couldn’t bank on Jerry setting off the alarm to mask your exit for you, either.

  “What was on the film, Jerry?”

  “Bunch of Saturday morning stuff. ‘Coony Island,’ the puppet show; ‘Dr. Wonder’—he used to do science experiments and explain—”

  “I remember it. Anything else?”

  “There was a cooking show called ‘Gone to Pot.’ One episode. I never heard of it before; nobody else I talked to did either. I finally had to go to Traffic and dig up the old logs to find out what year it belonged to. I think that was it.

  “Oh, and there was a kine of ‘Be Still My Heart.’ ”

  “Hmmm,” I said. That was interesting. It represented the first inkling for a possible motive for the theft of the films. It wasn’t much of a possible motive, and it said nothing at all about the bowling ball, but it was something to think about.

  I thought about it. “Be Still My Heart” was one of the classic live dramas from the so-called Golden Age of Television. I say “so-called” because it is a well-documented, if little-acknowledged, fact that a large percentage of the programming then was flat-out terrible. For every play like Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men,” Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” or Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty,” there were dozens of episodes of “The Continental” or “Strike It Rich”—shows, incidentally, that far outdistanced the live dramas in audience appeal—another little-acknowledged fact.

  The illusion of the Golden Age exists because people compare the best of the past with the worst of now. Sure, any era that didn’t have “Real People” on the air is going to look good in retrospect, but compare “Queen for a Day” with “M*A*S*H,” or “Lou Grant,” or any of a number of equally fine shows, and it wouldn’t be so hard to believe the Golden Age is now.

  But I digress. Roger Shazenick’s “Be Still My Heart” had been a great show, and would have been in any era. It was also an immediate critical success when it first aired in the fall of 1952, so the Network had a lot of prints of the original kinescope made up. A lot of those prints made their way into museums and colleges (that was where I first saw the show), as well as into some private collections.

  Could it be, I asked myself, that some fanatical collector wanted a copy of “Be Still My Heart” so badly he’d steal one? It didn’t seem likely, but hardly anything does any more.

  There was something else about that show I was about to remember, but I was distracted by Jerry. It wasn’t anything he was doing—he wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t, in fact, moving at all.

  I picked up the white button from the bed, and started pressing it, over and over. But that didn’t seem like enough, so I started yelling, “Nurse!”

  In practically no time, the nurse was there, along with the doctor, whose name I never did find out. With a professionalism it was a joy to see, they pushed me the hell out of the way, and tried to do something for Jerry. All I could do was watch, and pray a little.

  CHAPTER 6

  “...And don’t you forget to tell the truth!”

  —CLAYTON (BUD) COLLYER, “TO TELL THE TRUTH,” CBS

  WHEN I FINALLY WOKE up, Thursday, my mouth felt like the Ayatollah had washed his beard in it. It was much later than my usual wake-up time—I’d go to the office when I was ready to face it, if I went at all. Falzet had called a meeting for late that afternoon, but the way I felt, I needed a meeting with him the way I needed the heartbreak of psoriasis.

  I was determined to act as if trouble was something I read about in a book once. I got dressed, gave Spot clean water, patted his head for his morning dose of affection, then took him for a walk. I picked up the papers on the way. I read the funnies and sports in the News, then turned to the Times for the classified. I read the Apartment for Rent ads grimly. It’s a rule of life in New York that all kinds of places are available except one that would suit you. It was still a couple of months before Rick and Jane were due to come back, but I thought I’d better start looking. The trouble was, I’d gotten spoiled living in their plush eagle’s nest.

  It occurred to me in one of my brilliant flashes of social insight that the recent sharp increase in pre-marital cohabitation might have been contributed to by the housing shortage—“Love, shmove. You gonna let this apartment go to waste?”

  And that broke the spell. Jerry de Loon, as it turned out, had been a cohabitator. I’d been to his apartment in Queens last night, to tell his girlfriend, Hildy, what happened. Hildy was a very plain girl, with buck teeth. She wore her hair in a brown braid that reached below her waist. She was extremely
pregnant.

  I was with a policeman, a detective from the Eighteenth Precinct. He was mad at life in general, and took it out on me by forcing me to tell her. “You’re in the word business,” he said.

  Words. I gave her the doctor’s words. Jerry suffered a trauma. That means somebody hit him. He developed a hematoma. That means a blood clot. The hematoma broke loose and traveled until it became an embolus. That means it blocked off a blood vessel—in Jerry’s case, an important one in his brain. He expired. That means he died.

  Hildy had words, too, but they were screamed, or sobbed, or confused. Most of them were to convince the detective and me that we were wrong. Couldn’t we see she was going to have a baby, for Christ’s sake?

  “Jerry’s happy,” she had maintained. “We’re going to get married. He told me before he wouldn’t until he proved he was worth something. I always told him I didn’t care if he swept out buildings at night so he could try to get a job at one of the networks, I knew he could do it, after college and all.

  “But he said, ‘What if I never get a chance?’ He was mad when he found out I was...was gonna have a baby—well, not mad, worried.

  “But it’s all right now!” she insisted. “Jerry’s got a chance, and I know he’s doing a good job. He says the Network changed our luck, after two years of tough times.

  “You’re Mr. Cobb? Jerry looks up to you, he talks about you all the time. Why are you lying about him? Why? Why?”

  It had gone on for hours, and Hildy’s voice kept yelling why? in my sleep. I didn’t know, and I still don’t. One smack on the head, and he died—no warning, no anything. According to the doctor, the way Jerry had died was “rare, but not unprecedented.”

  I said a vulgar word, with feeling, and picked up the papers again. Jerry got two lines in each of the accounts. The Times article devolved into a discussion of the seminal effect of the “Harriet Gunner” series on the Women’s Movement, and the News devoted better than a quarter of a page to an old cheesecake photo of Melanie Marliss.