Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (15 page)

McCue said, “Quick somebody. Make her a martini.”

But nobody went over to help her and she revived herself.

“I know we’re all shocked by the tragedy,” Biff Birnbaum said. “Nobody knows how it happened.”

“How what happened, old chap?” Roddy Quine said.

“Jack was found dead this morning, hanging from the rope in the dumbwaiter shaft,” Birnbaum said.

“How’d it happen?” Quine asked.

“He just said nobody knows how it happened,” Harden snapped. “Damn fool.”

“It was some kind of tragic accident,” Birnbaum said. “Apparently Jack suffered a broken neck and died. Mrs. Scott is now under sedation from Doctor Dedley.”

I noticed Clyde Snapp and Sheriff Tillis enter the room and stand quietly in the back.

“The sheriff is here,” Birnbaum said, “and perhaps he’ll be able to throw a little light on the death for us after he completes his investigation. I know you’ll all cooperate.”

“What about the filming?” Dahlia Codwell asked, apparently recovered from her attack of grief.

“This is no time to talk business,” Birnbaum said, then began to talk business. “I don’t know what the investors will decide, and so the fate of the film is up to them. As you know, this film is being developed with private money, and if that money leaves, then the film will have to be scrapped.”

“If it goes ahead, I’m in the contract. My agent told me,” Harden said.

“As I said, that’ll be up to the investors. The rest of the cast and crew are supposed to be here on Monday, and I’m just going to let them come ahead. It’s my plan to keep shooting until the money we have on hand runs out. That may force anybody who’s wavering to stay in, rather than back out and lose everything he’s put up till then.”

“Only a fool throws good money after bad,” McCue whispered to me at the bar.

“Another thing,” Birnbaum said. “As soon as word of this gets out, I’m sure we’re going to be bombarded by press people.” He looked toward the entrance. “Mr. Snapp, will you be sure to keep the guards on the gate and make sure they allow no one in except those of us who are connected with the film? And, of course, the police.”

Snapp nodded.

“I think it would be best,” Birnbaum said, “if I made all the statements to the press. This is a tragedy. Let’s don’t make it a travesty by everybody sounding off to the media, if you don’t mind. We owe it to poor Pamela not to make her husband’s death into a circus. And I know you’ll all cooperate with Sheriff Tillis, who’s in the back of the room.”

Tillis had been quietly looking over the room. Now he hitched up his belt and walked toward Birnbaum.

The producer said, “One final thing. Jack Scott was my friend and my partner for ten years. I thought of him as a brother, the brother I never had when I was growing up on the streets of New York. In his memory, I’m thinking of starting a Jack Scott scholarship.”

“For somebody who wants to be a talk-show host,” McCue whispered to me.

“And I’ll talk to you all about that more as my plans crystallize,” Birnbaum said. “Now, here’s Sheriff Tillis.”

“All’s I want to do is find out how this accident happened,” the sheriff said. “So I want to talk to you one at a time. I’d appreciate it if you just stay around the hotel or the dining room here so that you’re nearby when I need you.” He looked around and chuckled. “Heh, heh. Don’t want to have to send no sheriffs posse after you. Might think you was trying to escape.” He chuckled again, then looked at Birnbaum. “And count on it, Mr. Biffbaum, you can put the name of Sheriff Len Tillis down for a donation to that Jack Scott scholarship. Mark me down for ten dollars.”

“Jesus, is this guy for real?” McCue asked me.

“He gets worse,” I said.

An ambulance came and went with Scott’s body as the sheriff questioned everybody who was staying in the hotel. At Snapp’s suggestion, he let me sit in on the questioning.

“Never can tell, Len. He might help.”

“I doubt it, Mr. Snapp, but for you, I’ll give it a try.”

The Hollywood people drifted in and out of the dining room as Tillis questioned them. I filled my glass a half-dozen times because what Tillis may have lacked in intelligence, he made up for in tenacity, asking the same questions over and over again, making voluminous word-for-word notes on an old writing tablet provided by Snapp.

It was late in the afternoon when Pamela Scott entered the dining room, wearing a black dress and dark sunglasses.

The sheriff was understanding. “I don’t have to talk to you now, ma’am, if you’d rather wait.”

“No, no. I’m all right now. It might help me to talk.”

“Could you tell us then about last night, Mrs. Scott?”

“After we left dinner here, Jack and I went back to our room and talked for a while. We were planning to go back to New York today. Jack had some business that he wanted to take care of.”

“What kind of business?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say, but I thought I’d go back with him and spend the day with friends before coming back up here for the start of filming. At any rate, we talked some last night and then about nine o’clock, Jack got a phone call and said he was going out for a walk.”

“Was your husband drinking?” the sheriff asked.

“Drinking? No, not Jack. Jack’s habit was to have one drink a night before bed.” She paused and looked away, as if trying to peer into the past. “A lot of ice, a little rye, and a lot of club soda. Jack was not a drinking man.”

Tillis nodded. “And then?” he said.

“I took a shower and went to bed. It was kind of fun, reading by candlelight. I haven’t done that since I was a Girl Scout. Then I went outside to get a book from the car and I saw that the tire was flat, so I asked Mr. Snapp to fix it. Then it seemed like a nice night and I went for a walk on the grounds. I met Mr. Tracy there.”

“You didn’t tell me that, Tracy,” the sheriff said.

“It didn’t come up,” I said.

“And we walked back to the hotel together. What time would you say it was?”

“I remember looking at my watch. It was almost midnight,” I said. Tillis was scribbling furiously in his notebook.

“Mr. Tracy walked me to my door. I went inside, but Jack wasn’t there. I took a light sleeping pill. A Dalmane. I have insomnia, but Dalmane seems to work without aftereffects. I read a little more and fell alseep pretty quickly. Then I was awakened this morning by Biff and Mr. Tracy.” She looked painfully shy, sorry at not being able to help more, and then shrugged. “That’s all I know, Sheriff. Do you have any ideas about Jack’s death?”

“That girl, what’s her name, Sheila, said she talked to your husband about business at about nine o’clock,” Tillis said. “A little after that, the Fluff woman saw him walking upstairs from your floor. But he didn’t go to anyone’s room up there.”

“Where would he have gone, then?” she asked.

“Maybe he was looking out the window or something for the view,” Tillis said. “But that was the last we know of his movements until we found the corpse…sorry, the body.”

“A terrible accident. My poor Jack,” she said as she rose. “I have to go back to my room now, Sheriff. If you don’t mind.”

“No. Go ahead, Mrs. Scott.”

After she left, I said, “Well, Sheriff, what do you think?”

“I don’t know. If he was a drinker, it’d be easy. He got blotto and got hung up fooling around with the rope. But how an accident like that happens to a sober man, I don’t know. I guess it’ll just be a mystery.”

If it
was
an accident, I thought.

Sheila Hallowitz was sitting on the front steps of the hotel, drinking coffee, looking like a lost waif.

I sat down next to her and said, “I think we should talk.”

“Sure. About what?”

“I didn’t say anything when you were talking to the sheriff, but I think you ought to be a little more forthcoming right now.”

“Forthcoming?”

“Dammit, Sheila, don’t be cute with me. You told the sheriff that you were talking to Scott last night on the grounds, technical stuff about the film.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

“Did you and Scott always talk by yelling at each other?” I asked.

She looked startled and I said, “I was watching. He was screaming at you. You were screaming back. Now I want to know what the hell that was all about.”

Sheila looked off toward the horizon. Then she sipped her coffee. I was about to prod her when she said, “Jack was unhappy about our expenses. He said he wanted to discuss them with me.”

“What expenses? How unhappy?” I asked.

“He thought I was going a lot over budget in these early stages. He wanted me to do an accounting.”

“And he yelled at you about that? Seems sort of an ordinary thing to me,” I said. “Why’d he yell?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He seemed really worked up, but I don’t know if he really was or if it was theater. A lot of men do that to women, you know. They yell, figuring they can browbeat us.”

“You were yelling back,” I said. “Why?”

“He wanted an accounting now. I asked him how I could do an accounting here when the offices are in Los Angeles. I told him I’d get it done as soon as I could, but it wasn’t going to be next week or even the week after. I’d do it when I got to it.”

“Why didn’t you tell the sheriff about the argument?”

She looked at me with an earnest look in her eyes. “He wouldn’t have understood,” she said. “This kind of thing goes on all the time.” She pressed her lips together in a tight line. “And, you know, I’ve talked to the other people around here, and if I told the sheriff we had argued, I might have been a suspect. I was the last person to see Jack Scott alive.”

“No, you weren’t,” I said.

She looked at me quizzically.

“You’re the last one who
admits
seeing Jack Scott alive,” I said.

Sheriff Tillis was talking to Clyde Snapp near what would have been the front desk if the hotel were still a public operation.

“Len was just saying he heard from the hospital. The medical examiner said it was a broken neck that killed Scott,” Snapp said.

“Time to close this one up,” the sheriff said.

“Still a lot of questions unanswered,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like where was Scott last night after he left his room?”

“Hanging from that dumbwaiter rope, I guess,” the sheriff said smugly.

I shook my head. “He left his room maybe around nine o’clock. His wife was still in the room. Then about eleven or a little after, she went out for a walk and came back near midnight. Scott still wasn’t in the room. So where was he?”

“The way I figure it is he was off someplace drinking by himself. Then maybe when his wife went out, he came back. She wasn’t there and he was drunk and he opened the dumbwaiter door and got himself hooked up and died, and when she came back, she didn’t even know about it.”

“He had the good sense, I guess, to close the dumbwaiter door after himself,” I said sarcastically, “so his dead body didn’t disturb his wife when she came back from her walk.”

“Listen, Mr. Private Detective. You can try to make things as complicated as you want, but that’s the way it was and that’s the way it’s going to stay. You probably think I don’t know anything about this kind of work, but I’ve been doing it a lot longer than you have. There’s only three other entrances into that dumbwaiter. One is in the kitchen, but Clyde was down there all last night. The other two are in that Birnbaum’s room, right over Scott’s, and in McCue’s room on the top floor. I looked at those doors and they were both screwed shut, the way Clyde fixed them. I don’t know when Scott went through his own door in the dumbwaiter, but that’s what he did. And then he died. Case closed. Now maybe you fancy private eyes can figure out something else, but us working cops can’t.”

“No criticism intended, Sheriff,” I said. “You did a good job, especially questioning those people inside.”

“It’s my job, Tracy, and I do it every day.”

“Don’t the state police usually come in on a case like this one?” I asked.

“They come in to help if it’s a murder or like that, and I told them this wasn’t. Or else they come in to pester you and get their pictures in the paper. State police are good for getting their pictures in the paper.”

He turned to Clyde. “Well, Mr. Snapp, I think I’m about done here. I’d better get a move on. The missus is going to be sore anyway ’cause I was supposed to paint the garage today.” He held up his notepad. “And I’m not done yet. A lot of typing to do before I’m done tonight.”

The telephone behind the front desk rang with a curious buzzing sound. Snapp picked it up, listened for a moment, and said, “Don’t let anybody in. That’s an order.” He leaned over the counter to put the handset back on the base.

“There’s some television guys outside,” he told me. “I told Jerry at the gate to keep them out.”

“Good,” I said.

“I’m leaving anyway. I’ll talk to them on my way out,” Sheriff Tillis said. He started for the door and I thought it was best to let Birnbaum know that the press wolves had arrived.

Naturally, he was in his room, lifting weights.

“Some press people have arrived. The sheriff just went out to talk to them.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Just what we need. Gomer Pyle explains the world.” He grabbed his Mets jacket off the back of a chair. “I’d better do what I can to salvage this.”

“Was he on drugs? Was this a drug-related death?”

“How the hell would I know if he was on drugs?” Sheriff Tillis answered back. He was standing alongside his car just outside the front gate, facing four men and a woman. The woman and one man seemed to be reporters because they were wearing neat clothing, suitable for filming. The other three men carried small video cameras. They looked like hair balls, which was even more proof that they were photographers than the cameras they were carrying.

“You’re the sheriff, aren’t you? Aren’t you supposed to know things like that?” the male reporter asked.

“That’s right. And what I know is that we had an accident and Mr. Scott died.”

“But he was on drugs, right?” the woman reporter asked. “Or are you covering up the fact that he was on drugs?”

“Honey,” the sheriff said, and she bristled. No one had been permitted to call her “honey” since her father had. No one had wanted to either, I’d bet. “I don’t know anything about any drugs, honey,” the sheriff said. “And the coroner didn’t say anything about them, so I think maybe you’re the one on drugs.” He smiled at her and I thought, Three cheers for Sheriff Tillis.