The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs: A Masao Masuto Mystery (21 page)

The Question

It was after one o'clock in the morning when Masuto drove his Datsun, three bullet holes in the windshield, into the driveway of Laura Crombie's house on Beverly Drive, parked, and rang the doorbell. They were still awake, and a tired, harassed, and miserable Detective Beckman answered the bell and opened the door.

“I don't know what to say, Masao,” he pleaded. “I never goofed off like that before.”

“Forget it. Maybe it was the only way. At least it's over.”

“That's what we heard,” Beckman said.

“I want to talk to Laura Crombie.”

“They're both in the kitchen drinking coffee.”

He led Masuto into the kitchen. Nancy Legett poured a cup of coffee for him. Laura Crombie sat at the end of the table, her face gray and tired.

“How is Mitzie?” Nancy asked.

“She's all right. She'll be out of the hospital tomorrow.”

“And I can go home?”

“You can go home.”

“Sit down and drink the coffee,” Laura Crombie said. “You look as terrible as I feel. Do you want some cookies?”

“No, thank you.”

“Beckman says it's over.”

“It's over.”

“Beckman says it was Arthur. I don't understand that,” she said. “What possible reason could Arthur have for wanting me dead?”

“He didn't want you dead. He wanted Mitzie Fuller dead.”

“Why?”

“I'm going to tell you about that, Mrs. Crombie. If I don't tell you, you'll hear anyway, in dribs and drabs, with all the innuendo that the newspapers and the media can make of it. That's why I came here tonight—to tell you the whole story very precisely. It's going to be very painful, but there's no way to avoid that. Sometime about four years ago, maybe a few months more, your ex-husband, Arthur Crombie, met your daughter. She fell in love with Crombie.”

“No!”

“You must listen to me,” Masuto said, almost severely. “I can't spare you. You must know the truth. As I said, she fell in love with Crombie and they had an affair. Then Crombie met you. I don't know where he met you, but it was in circumstances apart from your daughter.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I met him at Acapulco. Then I went to Boston. He was here. Kelly was here—oh, my God.”

“He decided to marry you. But to do this, he had to dispose of Kelly. There was a place where they met, called The Bar, a restaurant off Laurel Canyon. He met her there one night. They drove off to Mulholland Drive in her car. He hit her as he had hit Mitzie, and then he wired the throttle of her car to take it over the cliff.”

Laura Crombie was weeping now. “That's enough. I can't stand any more of this. I can't.”

“You can and you will,” Masuto said coldly. “There are no more secrets. Do you want to read about it tomorrow?”

“Please, must you?” Nancy Legett begged him.

“Yes, I must. Now listen, both of you. That last night he was in the restaurant with your daughter, people had seen them together. Mitzie was there. She knew who he was. The others didn't. But Mitzie did not know who the girl was. She did not know that Catherine Addison was your daughter, and she had no reason to think that what had happened on Mulholland Drive was anything but an accident. Three years went by, and then you brought Mitzie into your bridge game, and Arthur Crombie learned about it. If you're in the real estate business in Beverly Hills, there's very little you don't hear about. He realized that sooner or later Mitzie would see a picture of your daughter—and that would open up the whole can of worms. So he hired a chemist with a criminal record, paid him to prepare a batch of poisoned pastry and deliver it here. He didn't care how many of you died—as long as Mitzie died. The rest of you were a diversion to cast suspicion elsewhere, as was the box of poisoned candy he sent to Alice Greene. Then he killed Alice Greene, to throw suspicion on her husband. He killed the chemist to keep his mouth closed. He killed a Chicano boy for the same reason. And finally, tonight, he tried to kill Mitzie Fuller. There was nothing human left in this man, nothing to shed a tear over. He had become a monster. Now he's dead.”

Masuto stood up. “Drive Mrs. Legett home, Sy. As for you, Mrs. Crombie, I'm sorry it had to be this way, but that's the way it is. You're safe enough now. It's over.”

At the door, as Masuto was leaving, Beckman said to him, “You were pretty hard on her, Masao.”

“Was I? Don't you think it's time she faced up to reality? She's lived with illusions all her life, the illusion that the whole world's like Beverly Hills, the illusion that a human pig can be a decent man, the illusion that you buy happiness—ah, the hell with it!” And he went out, slamming the door behind him.

He got into his car and drove back to Culver City. The light was on in the kitchen, and he entered the house by the side door. It was two o'clock in the morning. Kati, wrapped in a kimono, was waiting for him. She stared at him, and then she cried out, “Oh, Masao! What happened?”

He managed to smile. “Indeed? What happened to your raised consciousness? I thought you would be furious. I forgot even to telephone you.”

“I called Captain Wainwright. Oh, I was upset, but when you walked in, your face was so sad, so very sad.”

“I killed a man, Kati.”

“Oh, no.”

“An evil man—but, Kati, I am not one to judge and I judged him.”

Being a wise woman, she deflected his thoughts. “I have hot soup on the stove, very tasty. I am sure you had no supper. And while you eat, I'll draw a hot bath.”

“That would be so good, a hot bath.”

After his bath, he dried himself and slipped into his saffron robe.

“You're not going to sleep now?”

“I can't sleep.”

“What will you do?”

“I'll meditate for a while.”

“And then you'll sleep?”

“I'm sure.”

“Then I'll go to bed. I can sleep as long as you're home. Masao—?”

“Yes?”

“I know you don't want to talk about it, but this evil man—what did he do?”

“He murdered five people—”

“No, you must not talk about it,” Kati said.

Masuto went into the sun parlor, which he liked to think of as his meditation room. It was cold here, but that was good. It would help him to stay awake. He sat down cross-legged and tried to make his mind empty and calm. But he could not erase Wainwright's words from his mind. They had no evidence to convict Crombie of the murders. He was convinced that when they examined the bullets tomorrow, they would not match the bullets used in the murders. For those, Crombie had used Fuller's stolen gun. The chemist was dead and the Chicano boy was dead. Had he, Masuto, known that there was not enough evidence to convict Crombie of the murders? In the fraction of the second, when Crombie was shooting at him, had he come to a decision to be both judge and jury? Could he have wounded Crombie and taken him alive? His shoulder was a better target than his head.

But as much as he asked himself the question, he was unable to come up with an answer. The gray light of dawn was in the sky before his mind stilled itself and he had stopped asking the question and was finally able to meditate.

A Biography of Howard Fast

Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933). His next novels, including
Conceived in Liberty
(1939) and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in
The American
(1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write
Spartacus
(1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release
Spartacus
. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including
Silas Timberman
(1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also,
Spartacus
was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of
Spartacus
inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published
April Morning
, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography
Being Red
(1990) and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Immigrants
(1977).

Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.

Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir
Being Red
, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother's death in 1923 and their father's absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the
Bronx Home News
. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”