Murder can be fun aka a.., p.3
Murder Can Be Fun # aka A Plot for Murder, page 3
“You haven't drunk any beer. Just highballs.”
“The principle's the same, Tracy. Hi, Baldy, has he been talking murder to you?”
The bartender looked at them lugubriously. “Yeah,” he said, “and the program idea's good, but — Look, real murder ain't funny. A guy tried to murder me once, and I didn't get even a chuckle out of it.”
“Tell Tracy,” said Millie. “He'll sell the story and split with you and then you can split with the guy who tried to murder you.”
Baldy said “Nuts,” and moved down to the customers at the other end of the bar.
Millie leaned a little closer to Tracy and he caught a whiff of her perfume. “Tracy,” she said quietly, “you feeling any better? Less worried?”
“I was, dammit. Until just now Baldy pops up with the bright thought that I could use Dineen's murder — the idea of the Santa Claus disguise, that is — for a radio program for the series I was telling him about.”
“Why not? I mean, why wouldn't he think of it, since he'd just read it in the papers?”
“Sure, but — Want a drink, Millie?”
“Thanks, no. 'Fraid I had too many already. Look, Tracy, that ought to show you the whole thing was a coincidence in the first place. I mean, here Baldy pops up with the idea of your using it for a script, and — you see what I mean?”
“Sure, toots. But that's after it happened. And — oh-oh!”
“What?”
“I just thought. It just hit me, Millie. I'll have to drop this particular script from the series when I do get around to offering them. All that work and thought for nothing.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I got beaten to the punch. It's plagiarism for me to use it now; it's a used idea, strictly second-hand. Hell, and I was going to use it to lead off the series. I thought it was a good one. It really was a good one. But now I can't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Who'd believe it was original?”
“Me. I would.”
“But you know the sterling stuff I'm made of. And besides, you read the synopsis in my typewriter before the murder happened. So you're different.”
Millie sighed. She said, “Also, I'm a little drunk. I think we better go home. Me, anyway. If you want to make a night of it, I'll take a cab and—” She nearly fell as she slid down off the stool.
Tracy caught her. He said, “All right, I won't abandon you. I'll call it a night, too. Maybe it is a night. You have to work tomorrow?”
“Nope. I'm off tomorrow. But I feel kind of like I'm going to lie down on the ceiling and go to sleep any minute. It must have been those crackers I ate with the cheese.”
Tracy stood up and found that the room was swaying around him in a manner that would have been more disconcerting if it had been less familiar.
He said, “I guess you're right; it is a night. There's a cab stand down on the corner. Can we make it that far?”
In the cab, Millie's head dropped onto his shoulder and her body felt soft and warm in his encircling arm. She said, “Tracy—”
“Yes, Millie?” .
“L-let's look at it seriously. The script and the murder. It really couldn't have been a co — coindi — you know what I mean. Could it, Tracy?”
“You're a big help to a man trying to forget something. Shut up and let me kiss you.”
“Not now. I'm numb and I wouldn't feel it. But I think you're making a mistake on the forget-it stuff. You ought to face it, Tracy. We ought to've talked about it seriously instead of getting pie-eyed. Let's — I want a cup of black coffee, Tracy, and then let's talk it over. I'm feeling better now, a little.”
Tracy frowned, but he called out to the driver to let them off at Thompson's, on the corner, instead of at the apartments.
And over coffee and doughnuts he said, “Okay, Millie, detect away. Where do we start?”
“What time was it when you wrote that Santa Claus business?”
“About seven o'clock. From then on until I left. I put the paper in my typewriter at seven, and I'd pace around a while and then go back and write another sentence and then pace the floor again.”
“And the murder was committed this morning, at ten o'clock. So probably the murderer read your script last night.”
“Why, for sure? I mean, why not this morning while I was still in bed asleep?”
“Because he wouldn't have had time to get ready, Tracy. Not unless he had a Santa Claus suit in his closet and didn't have to hunt one up. He'd need to steal one, if he didn't already have it — and how many people have Santa suits lying around?”
“Ummm,” said Tracy. “You're dead right on that. He couldn't openly buy or rent a suit he was going to use for that purpose. He'd have to steal it, all right. And if he read the script yesterday evening, he'd have had all night to get himself the costume, and he'd need that long, I guess. But unless you're lying or I'm lying, and neither of us is, then nobody read that script last night. So, Miss Holmes?”
“Tracy, did you have any rough notes for that idea, before last night? A line in a notebook, or anything?”
Tracy shook his head, definitely. “I didn't. I thought of it for the first time just as I sat down at the typewriter. Matter of fact, I sat down to work a little on a Millie's Millions script idea, but I got this other idea instead and forgot about Millie completely. Nope, toots, unless it really was a coincidence, then—”
He took an envelope and a pencil stub from his pocket. He wrote down an “A” on the back of the envelope. He said, “A. Either you or I killed Dineen, or anyway, one of us is an accomplice in the murder.”
“You're lumping a lot under that, Tracy. That should be A, B, C and D, shouldn't it?”
“Yes, if you want to get technical. But I don't believe any of them, so I was trying to get it all out of the way under one blanket heading. Then — letter E, or rather letters E and F — one of us told somebody about the idea last night, and that somebody used it. I didn't.”
“I didn't either, Tracy. I'm absolutely positive. So next on the list, someone else got into your apartment. Does anybody have a key besides you?
“No. Except, of course, the master key.”
“And the janitor has that. Frank what's-his-name. Would he have had any reason for going to your place?”
“Frank Hrdlicka. No, he wouldn't have gone to my apartment. Not without some reason, and there wouldn't have been any reason; I mean, I hadn't asked him to fix a leaky faucet or anything. Besides, what reason would he have had for killing Dineen? And besides that, he's a swell guy. I like him a lot. He's no killer.”
“I wouldn't know,” Millie said. “I don't know him except by sight. But if he's got a master key, he could have got in your place. Or — you might check with him that he hasn't lost the master key.”
“First thing tomorrow. Then — next letter; I've lost track of them — somebody broke in some other way. I don't think it could have been through the door because that's a really good lock; a burglar might have broken it and got in, but he couldn't, I'm pretty sure, have opened it without breaking it.”
“The back door?”
“Bolted on the inside. I never use it, and it just stays bolted all the time. And my only windows are on the street side of the building. It's technically possible somebody could have got in a window — lowering himself down a rope from the apartment above mine, but that's fantastic. Especially since it would have been in plain sight of a fairly busy street. Just the same, I'll look at the window sills and locks.”
“They all sound either fantastic or impossible, Tracy, all of! your letters. And especially because nothing was stolen, except a pack of cigarettes and an idea. And nobody could have known that the idea was there to steal. Tracy, this coffee helped a little for a while, but not any more. I'm getting woozy all of a sudden. I — I got to get home.”
She stood up, and Tracy had to catch her again to keep her from falling.
They got outside and the Smith Arms was only half a block away. They made the door; they made the elevator, and with Millie leaning against him, Tracy pressed the button.
By the time the elevator came to a stop, he was holding her up. Her head rolled limply onto his shoulder.
Tracy grunted and picked her up.
His own legs were a bit rubbery, and it was tough going down the hallway. The momentary sobriety the hot coffee had given him was wearing off already, and he felt more than a little drunk, and sleepy as hell to boot.
Millie's hundred and ten pounds felt like two-twenty, at least. The exertion made his head start to go in circles.
She didn't wake up when he had to put her down beside her door in order to get her key out of her handbag. She didn't wake up when he picked her up again.
Millie's apartment was a two-room one, just like his. He had to tack twice getting across the outer room. He nearly fell across her when he put her down on the bed.
Then the sudden absence of weight and responsibility made him sway giddily for a moment, and he had to brace his hand against the wall. The drinks — the ones he'd guzzled so fast in Baldy's place — were hitting him now, full force, but he managed to fight them off long enough to pull off Millie's shoes — fortunately, they were pumps, sans laces or buckles — and to get as far as the doorway between the rooms and lean against it.
The floor of the outer room was pitching like the deck of a brigantine in a storm. As far as Tracy could remember, this was the drunkest he had ever been. Much, much drunker than he'd been the night before.
But the thought came to him — Even now my mind is clear; I know everything I did and said tonight; know I told Baldy about Murder Can Be Fun but that I didn't tell him the gimmick of any individual script of it; I know I didn't tell anybody about the Santa Claus script last night; and Millie's the same way — her mind was clear and she talked sensibly right up to the time she passed out.
But that wasn't getting him home to his own bed. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and took a deep breath.
CHAPTER 3
TRACY PUSHED himself away from the doorjamb and tried to cross the precariously slanting floor before it pitched again and slanted the other way. But an ottoman got in front of his feet and he fell across the arm of the overstuffed chair before which it stood.
It was a big, comfortable chair. He twisted his body around and sat down in it. It was a haven in the midst of a storm. He'd have to sit there a moment to get his balance back, to orient himself.
Just for a moment; he wouldn't risk it longer. And even for a moment he'd have to keep his eyes open. In a moment he'd get up and walk twenty steps and he could fall into his own bed. But he'd have to rest that moment before he could make it.
He was drunk, but — he told himself — he wasn't so drunk that he couldn't sit here a few seconds without falling asleep.
But he was, and he did.
It was light, broad daylight, when he awakened.
It took him a few seconds to realize where he was, because the walls and the ceiling and the general shape of the room were like the outer room of his own apartment. But when he looked into the corner of the room where his desk should have stood, there was only a taboret with a Spanish shawl over it. And then he remembered.
He moved a little and found that his shoes had been taken off and his collar opened, and a blanket had been thrown over him.
But the inside of his mouth tasted like a drainage ditch. He sat up, and then stood up, very slowly. He knew, from experience about the midgets with sledge hammers inside his head who were waiting for him to make a sudden move. He knew that the only way to circumvent them was not to move suddenly.
He turned his head slowly. The door of the inner room, the bedroom, was closed. He hadn't closed it when he came through it last night. So Millie must be there; if she'd gone out, she'd have left the door open so he could see, when he waked up, that she had gone.
Probably she'd waked up early, discovered him here, made him a little more comfortable, and then gone back to bed. He remembered her saying she didn't have to work today.
He bent down — slowly and carefully — and picked up his shoes.
The thing now was a shower and a shave and fresh clothes, and then he might feel and look human again. And if Millie was awake by then, he could apologize and take her downstairs for breakfast — unless she preferred to make breakfast for them here. Millie's kitchenette, unlike his, contained the various things a well-bred kitchenette should contain.
He went to the hallway door, opened it a crack and stood listening to be sure no one was going by outside. No one was, but there was a phone ringing that could be the one in his own apartment.
He hurried across and it was his phone. He got the receiver off the hook and croaked “Hello,” but there wasn't any answer.
He was under the shower by the time it rang again, but this time he made it in time.
“Tracy? This is Wilkins at the studio. I've been trying to get you all morning, since nine o'clock. Thank heaven I reached you.”
“Sorry,” Tracy said. “I went out early this morning, Mr. Wilkins. To do some research at the library. Is something wrong?”
“Yes. Your friend Kreburn — he's got laryngitis. He can't talk above a whisper. We haven't got an understudy; and there's nobody around here who can imitate his voice well enough to take over his part. He's in today's script, and we've got to write him out of it.”
Tracy thought fast. He said, “Can't be done, Mr. Wilkins. Today's program — the whole damn sequence for this week — is built around him. Why, Reggie Mereton — Kreburn — has swiped money from the bank he works for and the bank examiners are coming, and he confesses to sister Millie so she's trying to raise the money to—”
“I know all that, Mr. Tracy. We've been studying it. But what can we do? If we pull anything so rank as to substitute an actor whose voice doesn't sound like Reggie's, our sponsor will be so mad he may break the contract.
“Can't we change the sequence of things, somehow? We've been trying to figure it out, and calling you every few minutes.”
“Where's Dick?”
“He's down here. He suggests that instead of trying to write him out of the script we write in the fact that he's got laryngitis. But the studio doctor forbids letting him talk — through a whole program anyway.”
“Is his voice audible?”
“Yes, if we give him a turned-up mike. But it's not much more than a hoarse whisper.”
Tracy said, “But dammit, if he really had laryngitis — in the serial, I mean — he wouldn't be going to work at the bank anyway. They wouldn't let a teller work if he had laryngitis, even if he wanted to. And that alone would change everything. My God!”
“But what shall we do? And besides, the doctor's right in saying he shouldn't be on the program at all, for that matter. His throat looks like a piece of raw beefsteak, and if he does read a part today, it'll be worse tomorrow. So—”
“But if he doesn't get a chance to alter those figures at the bank — “ Tracy groaned. “Listen, I'll come right down in a taxi. I'll think of something on the way, I hope. And have a stenographer ready for me; I type with two fingers and I can dictate faster.”
“All right, Tracy. But hurry.”
Tracy was dressed and on his way in ten minutes, and another ten minutes in a cab got him to the studio. But his head was thumping so hard from hurrying that he took time out for a bromo and a cup of scalding hot coffee in the drugstore in a corner of the studio building before lie took the elevator upstairs.
Outside the door, he could hear the pandemonium of argument within. He took a long, deep breath before he opened the door.
The Millie's Millions actors were all there. They were all talking at once, or trying to. All but Dick Kreburn, sitting in a corner of the room alone, looking like the end of the world.
Tracy looked at the clock. It was forty minutes before they went on the air.
They heard the door close, and turned.
Helen Armstrong — Millie Mereton of the air — got to him first. She grabbed his arm. “Listen, Tracy, I've been telling them the only thing to do is use a cutback sequence showing Reggie and myself as kids, as a build-up to the sentiment between us and why I want to help him from being caught, even if he's an embezzler and a weakling, see? I can make my voice sound like a teen-age girl in the sequence, and any juvenile around the studio can handle Reggie as a kid because it would be before his voice had changed, and it would be supposed to sound different, and—”
Pete Meyer — who, as Dale Elkins, was the current hero and leading suitor for Millie Mereton's much-sought hand — had Tracy's other arm. He was saying, “Listen, Tracy, can't we just postpone the whole bank sequence business, at least for today, and throw in some love scenes here? Millie's worried because she's trying to raise that money for her brother and so she's kind of distant to me, and I don't know why, so it leads to a lovers' quarrel and then.I—”
Wilkins, the program manager, a moon-faced, pudgy little man, had pushed his way through the crowd in front of Tracy. His pince-nez glasses had fallen from his nose and dangled at the end of the black ribbon fastened to his lapel. He looked like a distraught rabbit.
He piped, “Tracy, we've got to hew to the line of the bank business, somehow. That's the important thing because it's what the listeners are interested in, and—”
Jerry Evers, who did a lot of doubling, and was currently playing the role of head teller at the bank, crowded past Pete Meyer on Tracy's left. “Listen, Tracy, I can play a money lender, see, for today's sequence, and Millie can come to me to try to borrow money, and I can cross-question her what she needs it for and refuse it unless she can explain why, which she can't and—”
Tracy yanked his arms free and raised them desperately. He yelled “Quiet!” and miraculously everyone stopped talking at once. Tracy winced and held his eyes shut until the worst of the sudden hammering inside his head was over.
