Johnny ground out a cigarette in an ashtray. He listened to Lennie Schwerner talk quietly on the telephone. He followed the conversation until the boy grinned hugely and hung up.

  “It’s set,” Lennie said.

  “He fell for it?”

  “He fell on his face. I gave him the pitch straight from the armpit and he ate it up. I’m a blackmailer. Elaine told me all about him and I can prove he killed Elaine and Tracy. But I’m not the talkative type. I can be had for the right price.”

  “How did he react?”

  “Like clockwork. I told him to meet me at Topp’s on Forty-second Street. You must have heard that.”

  “Yeah. He’s meeting you?”

  “In fifteen minutes, he says. He can’t do anything in a crowded restaurant, can he?”

  “He’s not that cracked. But I’ll go along with you, anyway. Just for protection.”

  Lennie shook his head violently. “He’d spot you,” he said. “And that would tear it.”

  “But—”

  “Please.” The boy’s tone was suddenly quite firm. Johnny let him talk. “Don’t you see, man? I got to do this by myself. I got to go down and meet this cat and pull everything out of him, and then I can hand him to you and you can hand him to the fuzz or whatever you want to do with him. But I gotta set it up on my own. It has to be my scene.”

  “For Elaine?”

  Schwerner shook his head. “Not for Elaine. For me. After this I can go back to Yonkers and sell insurance. I can shave twice a day and wear a Brooks Brothers suit and join the Kiwanis. I can marry a bridge-playing chick and contribute to the population explosion. But first I have to do something that means something. Something real.” He lowered his eyes. “Okay, so I’m coming on too strong. But it’s a moment-of-truth type of scene. I’m the matador and the bull is coming at me and all I’ve got in my hand is this short sword. I can’t cop out now. I can’t grab a gun and shoot the bull. I have to use the sword, and by myself.”

  Johnny understood.

  “I’ll be safe in there. I’ll be ice-cool, stoned on my own nerve endings. Don’t worry.”

  After Lennie Schwerner left, Johnny sat and smoked and tried to see how he had missed knowing all along that the killer was Buell. Everything pointed that way now. Everything.

  The buggy aspect figured. The two bodies, both so nude and so dead, one a man and the other a girl. Buell had been in and out of loony bins for a long time. Nobody had ever accused him of being sane.

  Evidently he was a hell of a lot sicker than anybody had ever realized. Sick enough to lose touch with reality.

  Sick enough to kill.

  From there on it was easy. Buell alternately loved and hated the show, just as he loved and hated everybody he knew, according to his mood. He had made a passionate speech defending the play at the cast meeting, but in preliminary rehearsals he had frequently run the script into the ground. He had thought Elaine was wonderful, marvelous, perfect. But there were times when he had screamed at her hysterically.

  Johnny had tried to ignore this, chalking it up to artistic temperament. There was a thin line between genius and insanity, sometimes no line at all. The areas had an annoying tendency to overlap.

  They had overlapped, in Buell.

  The director loved the script. But at the same time he hated it—maybe because he was scared of it, terrified that he could not give it the direction it deserved. In public he praised and defended the show. In private he tried to sink it.

  That, Johnny guessed, was a part of the reason for Elaine’s murder. Although Buell’s motive went a little further. Elaine was good, perfect—with her gone the show would be a shadow. But Elaine was not entirely perfect. No one is, on-stage or off. So in one sense Buell could see her as ruining the script by being less than perfect.

  And then there was the sex angle. The foot-kissing routine, coupled with his periodic disdain for her and her perpetual unwillingness to lose her virginity.

  It added up.

  And, the beating. That figured, too. Buell had gone to the cast meeting against his will. Once there, he had done his damnedest to save the show, hold the cast together. Then the meeting had ended and he had done the Jekyll-and-Hyde bit. The plan he had set up with Rugger and Marlo earlier in the day went into play.

  That whole episode had had the touch of an accomplished director, Johnny reflected. The method of contact with the two thugs, set up so that they could not identify him because they did not so much as see him or hear his natural voice. He had used kids for messengers, had even made a single hundred-dollar bill do the work of two and thus had removed any possibility of identification during a final payoff.

  Then, when the meeting had broken up, he had stayed on Johnny’s tail. He was biding his time, taking it easy. If Johnny had gone straight home, Buell would have let the thing ride for a day. He did not have to worry about time. But Johnny had returned to Jan’s. And that was the set-up. A couple of quick calls to Rugger and Marlo, and Buell was on his way home with Johnny targeted like a clay pigeon.

  It was pretty, you had to give Buell that.

  Carter Tracy’s murder had been a little different. It was not hard to spot a few reasons for Tracy’s death. First of all, the show was still supposed to go on. The death of the female lead had not been enough to stop it. The male lead also had to go.

  There was more, just as there had been more with Elaine. Tracy must have been a monumental thorn in Ernie Buell’s side. The actor’s ego had been insufferable. His success with women had been legendary. And that ability with women could only have irritated Ernie, who was awkward with the opposite sex and ugly as sin—and who had not gotten with Elaine. Tracy had probably boasted to Ernie that he was sleeping with the girl. The actor had belonged to the lay-and-tell school, Johnny knew. He had leered boastfully while informing Johnny that he knew where Jan’s apartment was, that he had been there before. He could have leered the same way when discussing Elaine, without any real justification.

  So Buell had killed him.

  Johnny lit one cigarette from the butt of another, and waited.

  The phone rang.

  Johnny snatched it up. He said hello and waited for Lennie Schwerner’s voice. But the voice that answered was not that of the bearded boy. It was Haig’s.

  “A little complication,” Sam Haig said apologetically. “Sorry to bother you. This is probably just a waste of time, but I had to check it out with you.”

  Johnny held his breath. Everybody was apologizing to him, he thought. Everybody was worried about wasting his time. What was so damned important about his time?

  “Got a call from your director,” Haig went on. “Ernest Buell. He said some nut called him on the phone and threatened to blackmail him for killing Tracy and the James girl. He arranged a meeting with the nut and called us. We went down to Topp’s on Times Square and picked the nut up. He’s nuts, all right. A beatnik. He’s got a beard looks like hell.”

  Johnny’s brain was whirring in circles. He felt as if his head were going to come off.

  Haig was talking again.

  “So I had to bother you,” he said. “This nut, his name is Leonard Schwerner. He came up with this story that he’s a friend of yours. That you know him. That you sent him with a phony story for Buell, for your own reasons. We have to follow up everything. You know that. So I called.”

  Johnny closed his eyes. He had found, over the years, that some blows were easier to take with your eyes closed. Often, when things got rough, you could make them less so by closing your eyes. It sometimes helped.

  This time it did not.

  “You still there, Johnny?”

  “Yeah,” he said hollowly. “I guess so.”

  “You don’t happen to know this Schwerner character, do you? I feel like an idiot asking, but—”

  “I know him.”

  “No kidding. I thought he was completely nuts. But this story of his is garbage, right?”

  “Wrong.” Johnny took a deep breath. He swallowed. “Lennie Schwerner is telling the truth,” he managed to force out. “I sent him to Buell. I arranged the whole thing, Sam. The kid is not nuts.”

  There was an extraordinarily long pause.

  “You get yourself down here,” Haig said.

  “Where?”

  “My office,” Haig said. “I got Buell here and I got Schwerner here and I want you here. Fast.”

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  It could have been comic.

  High comedy, say. Or low comedy. Whichever way you played it, it had all the ingredients of a thoroughly hysterical scene. The famous director Ernest Buell, furious as a cuckolded husband in a French bedroom farce. Lennie Schwerner, bearded and bedraggled, trembling like the would-be beggar in Three-Penny Opera under the wrath of Peachum. Haig, mad as hell, and Johnny, trying to explain things so that they made sense.

  It could have been a riot. All the potentials were there and with the right direction it might have been the funniest event since Charlie Chaplin’s debut. There was only one thing wrong.

  Direction was completely lacking.

  It went every which way, so it turned out tragic instead of comic.

  The curtain rose with Johnny storming into Haig’s office at headquarters. Buell was sitting on one side of Haig’s desk, glowering. Schwerner sat on Haig’s other side and looked very small. An incongruous handcuff shackled him to his chair.

  “Hold him,” Johnny snapped.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Haig said, tapping Lennie on the shoulder. “He’s not going to run very far. He’d have to carry the chair on his back, and . . .”

  “Not him, damn it. Buell!”

  Haig stared.

  “Buell did it,” Johnny said. “He killed Elaine and Tracy. He set me up for a mugging. He’s not entirely sane, Haig. He’s off his rocker. Now, Sam, hear this—”

  Johnny explained it all, carefully, patiently, and at length. He went over the entire case, giving in detail everything he had managed to piece together to show that Buell had to be the killer. Johnny filled in the psychological background, told how Buell both hated and loved the play, how he felt the same way about Elaine. By the time he was finished, all three of the men in the room regarded him with something approaching awe.

  Buell spoke first.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “You know, I thought you liked me, Lane. Some people hold it against a man that he’s spent time in a mental hospital. That never showed in your attitude toward me. I’m glad I’ve found out how you really feel.”

  Something was wrong. Buell did not sound like a man who had just been accused of double murder and quadruple insanity. In fact, he seemed calmer now than Johnny had ever known him to be.

  “It’s not a nice thing to find out,” Buell went on conversationally. “I was beginning to enjoy working with you. You’re a good producer. You handle people well. But now I won’t ever be able to do a show with you. It’s a shame, in a way.”

  “Look—”

  “You look,” Buell said. His voice hardened. “You’ve just given me grounds for seven different kinds of a slander suit. You’ve defamed my character to hell and back.”

  “You killed them, Buell. Admit it.”

  “The hell I will.” Buell sighed. “When Elaine was killed I was home all night with my wife. We had guests. Respectable people. They will so testify, Johnny.”

  “But—”

  “When Tracy was killed,” the director went on, “I was with my analyst. I’ve never claimed to be in perfect mental or emotional health, Lane. I’m not. I have my ups and downs, as you know. I go to an analyst regularly. I’m trying to straighten myself out. It’s not easy.”

  Johnny swallowed.

  “I’ve been hot and cold toward the play, of course. I’ve been moody. But not so moody as you make out.” He looked away. “And I must admit to rather strong feelings regarding Elaine James. She could have been a great actress, Lane. I was enthusiastic about her.”

  “How enthusiastic?”

  “I—I kissed her feet, Lane. Yes. Is that what you want me to say? It’s one of the few damned things that’s saving you from a slander suit, you know. It wouldn’t do me any good to have it brought up in a courtroom. I suspect the damned press would have a field day with an item like that. You can be pretty goddamned glad I kissed her feet, you son of a bitch.”

  “Ernie—”

  “I suppose I loved her. A strange sort of love, I admit. A worshipful love. I wanted to get past that strange reserve of hers. I wanted to reach her. But I didn’t kill her, Lane. I did not cut her throat. And you’re a rotten bastard to think so.”

  He stood up and walked out of the room.

  Johnny turned his head to watch Buell go, then winced at the sound of the door slamming. He fumbled the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, shook a cigarette free and stuck it into his mouth. He lit it without turning to face Haig. He took a deep drag that seared his throat.

  He turned around slowly.

  “You’re just letting him go?” he croaked. “First you should check him out. He . . . it could all be cleverness, understand. He’s very clever. And now he’s getting away and—”

  “Johnny.”

  He stopped in mid-sentence.

  “Johnny, we checked Buell’s alibi. We checked it a long time ago. We checked him out thoroughly the morning after Elaine James was killed. He was completely in the clear on that one, home with some friends all night. We checked him again when Tracy was killed. That second check was purely a matter of form, just routine. We learned he was on a psychiatrist’s couch while somebody was giving Tracy the closest and last shave of his life. Buell was at a business appointment before that and home for dinner after that.”

  “Uh—”

  “So he didn’t do anything,” Haig said. “He was completely clear. You came up with a nice fresh suspect. One that us dumb cops never would have thought up. You worked up a pretty little theory and you played it to the hilt. That was real smart, Johnny. It was a bright thing to do.”

  “Hold on, Sam. You heard how it went together. All right—it was wrong. But at the time—”

  “It looked good?”

  “Damn good.”

  Haig heaved a sigh. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s dandy. I’m not knocking your theory, Johnny. You and Bristle Face worked it up nice. It made sense.”

  “Then—”

  “Then you should have called me,” the cop said. “Jesus, suppose you were right. You think we couldn’t have gotten more out of Buell in a grill room than this kid here could get over a beer or two at Topp’s?” He turned on Lennie. “You’re a real smart kid,” he said. “You thought this Buell character was a lunatic. So you were going to sit down and play checkers with him. That was pretty clever. Suppose he took out a gun and shot a hole in your head? Where would you be then?”

  Lennie’s face fell. “He wouldn’t have come on like that,” the boy said. But his tone was uncertain.

  “Of course not,” Haig said. “He would do what any intelligent person would do. That’s what he did. He called me first. Then he went down to Topp’s with us behind him. And then we picked you up, you damn fool and now you’re chained to your chair like a monkey.”

  Lennie hung his head. Johnny felt monumentally sorry for him at that particular moment. And it wasn’t the kid’s fault. Johnny was to blame—he had to indulge his flair for the theatrical approach instead of using his fat head. And because of that, because of him, Schwerner was in trouble.

  “You know what I could do with you, kid?” Sam Haig was rubbing it in. “Buell’s slander suit would be only the beginning. Attempted extortion would go on top of that. For that you go to prison. I’ve got half a mind to toss you in the Tombs overnight to cool off. Might put some sense in your head. It—”

  “Leave him alone, Sam.”

  Haig turned. “You’ve got something to say?”

  “Just leave him alone,” Johnny blurted. “None of this mess is Lennie’s fault. All he did was come to me with some information. I took the ball and ran with it. I got him to phone Ernie and set up the meeting. So don’t blame him, Sam. He was just following my instructions.”

  “Then you weren’t very bright, Johnny.” Haig’s voice was relentless. “You could have called me. I’d have told you Buell was clean and that would have been that. Or I’d have run a check on him again for the hell of it, just to make sure. Instead, you took your act on the road and got stranded. You didn’t do it right, Johnny.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t try and tell you how to run your plays, Johnny. I don’t pick your cast or read over your script or get in your way. I wait until your show opens, and then I buy a pair of tickets—”

  “When did you last buy a ticket?”

  Haig sighed. “I take the tickets you send me,” he amended, “and I see the show. That’s all. Why are you trying to handle my job for me, Johnny?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No reason at all?”

  “It’s just the way my mind works,” Johnny said honestly. “I hardly even considered calling you. I just looked for a way to trap Ernie, to catch him.”

  Haig glared for several seconds. “I ought to jail both of you,” he said. “But the hell with it. The city’s too busy rehabilitating drunks and tapering off junkies. I can’t be bothered.”

  He picked up a key from his desk, leaned over and unlocked Lennie’s handcuffs.

  “You know,” he told Johnny, “I’d like to take this kid and hang a murder rap on him. But no jury in the world would listen twice.”

  Haig looked, suddenly, as though he were going to start laughing. “You could pin anything on a bum like this one,” he said almost affectionately. “Anything from arson to sodomy. Anything but this particular murder. You know why?”

  Johnny asked why.

  “Because he doesn’t own a razor,” Haig said. “Ain’t that a hell of a note?”

  Everything, Johnny thought, was getting to be a hell of a note. Anything and everything.

  He loaded Lennie Schwerner into a cab, although the kid insisted that the subway would be fine. Johnny gave the driver a buck and told him to take the kid home.

 

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