I thought Ciretti was going to explode or fall flat on his face or something. He looked like he couldn’t breathe and his white face got a little purple and he tried to speak and couldn’t. I felt sorry as hell for him.
He finally managed to gasp: “Where’s Dreier? Where have they taken him?”
I said: “I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll lay six, two, and even he didn’t do it. I don’t know anything about it, yet but Dreier’s not a murderer.” And I was remembering his face when he’d turned on Sarin on the set.
Ciretti went unsteadily to the door and went out without looking back. Hammer followed him and closed the door.
I took a two-minute shower and hustled into some clothes. Then I cantered to the door and opened it and started out and ran smack into the angel. Her creamy skin was about five shades lighter and her dark brown eyes were like saucers. Beautiful saucers.
“The girl said your line was busy,” she stammered, “so I got the number of your room and came up. I... I had to see you right away...”
I was steering her towards the elevator. I said: “Sure. What about?”
The elevator door slid open and we got in; she glanced at the elevator-boy and didn’t answer. We were in the car, roaring down Vine Street by the time she managed to say: “Maya Sarin’s been murdered!”
I looked at her sidewise and missed an oil-truck by inches, grunted: “Uh-huh. How did you know?”
“I saw her — I went to her dressing-room and found her lying there, dead.” I felt the angel shudder beside me and heard her take in breath swiftly, sharply.
“What did you go to her dressing-room for?”
She said: “I guess I’d better begin at the beginning.”
I nodded, swung into Sunset Boulevard. She began at the beginning and talked nearly all the way to the studio. In a large nutshell it went something like this:
She’d come to Hollywood from some place in Kansas to crash pictures, but pictures had crashed her. She’d worked extra a couple times at B. L. D. and Titanic and then there’d been a great open space without work and finally without coffee and doughnuts. She’d answered an ad that turned out to be the Nick Galbraith Detective Agency; they’d put her to work tailing some sucker for divorce evidence and then they’d sent her to Maya Sarin who it seems was one of their best undercover clients and Maya had given her a note to Bachmann asking him to give her some kind, any kind, of a job on the lot.
The idea seemed to be that Maya’s dipsomania was aggravated by a supercharged persecution complex and she wanted the angel to keep her eyes and ears open and find out who was conniving against her at B. L. D. She said Maya acted like she was scared to death of something and didn’t seem to be quite sure of what it was.
From then on the plot thickened. She’d been waiting to present her note to Bachmann when Maya had stormed in after the blow-off on the set. A couple minutes after Maya went into the private office a woman whom she recognized as Mrs. Bachmann came in and sat down and talked about the weather with the secretary. And Maya was shouting her head off inside — they could hear practically every word she said.
By the time the angel had reached that point in her story I was standing on the brakes for the stop-light at Melrose. I leaned back and listened with both ears.
She was pretty excited. She said: “Finally Miss Sarin screamed: ‘You straighten this thing out and see that I get a square deal around this dump or I’ll tell that high and mighty wife of yours some things that’ll make her hair curl!’ Mrs. Bachmann got as white as a sheet and marched out of the office.”
I said: “Is it possible that anybody in the western hemisphere doesn’t know that Bachmann and Maya Sarin used to be... well... friendly?”
The stop-light snapped green; I shifted and let the clutch in and glanced swiftly at the angel. She was smiling a little. “Probably not anybody,” she said — “except Mrs. Bachmann.” She hesitated a moment, went on: “In a few minutes Miss Sarin came out and you came in. The secretary wanted to tell Bachmann about his wife being there but he was too excited to listen. I got up and looked out the window and saw Miss Sarin go across the lawn to the dressing-rooms and after a minute Mrs. Bachmann followed her.”
“To the dressing-rooms! I saw Sarin, too, but I left the window as soon as she disappeared.”
She nodded. “Then, after you and Mister Dreier left, the secretary went in and Bachmann came rushing out and apologized and said he’d be back in a few minutes. He looked terribly worried. I watched from the window and he went over to the dressing-rooms, too. I waited about a quarter of an hour and he didn’t come back. The secretary went home and I thought maybe Bachmann had forgotten about me and wouldn’t come back to the office so I went to Miss Sarin’s room to ask her what I’d better do. I was curious about what’d happened, too. I knew where her room was from the time I’d worked there. She didn’t answer when I knocked and I opened the door and she was lying on the floor, dead.”
“What time was it?”
“It must have been about five minutes after six.” The angel was almost whispering. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any business there, or at least it would take a lot of explaining and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Then I remembered that Miss Sarin had told me about you and that you were the only person on the lot she thought she could trust. I hurried back to Bachmann’s office. He hadn’t come back. I called the agency and told them what had happened and asked the boy at the information-desk where you lived and took a cab and came to your hotel...”
I said: “What’s your name?”
“Laird — Dolores Laird.”
I thought it was a nice name.
The rest of the night was an odds-on favorite nightmare that began with reporters ganging us when we got out of the car. We finally made the Sarin dressing-room and it was so jammed with assorted Law that the walls were bulging. Everyone had a different theory.
Nick Galbraith, the angel’s boss, said it was a cinch for Sarin’s maid. Sarin had sent her off the lot to get something — probably a bottle — as soon as she’d returned to the dressing-room and according to Galbraith the maid had sneaked back and beaned her with the “blunt instrument”; that was the only thing they all agreed on.
The blunt instrument was an oversize vibrator that was still lying on the floor near the chalked-off space where the body had been found.
A detective-lieutenant named Law-son insisted that Creighton was the murderer. Creighton’s dressing-room was across the hall and when the maid had come back from her errand and found Dreier bending over the body she’d screamed and Creighton had dashed in and he and the maid had pointed the finger at Dreier. Dreier, it seemed, wouldn’t talk and most of the coppers favored one or another variation of the Dreier theory. He was being held at the Hollywood Station.
Bachmann sat and groaned.
Then a radish-nosed captain from L. A. got a brilliant idea and asked Galbraith how come he knew about Sarin’s chill so soon. Galbraith had to tell ’em about Miss Laird and they started working her over. Why hadn’t she called for help? — why hadn’t she called the police? — how long had she been in the dressing-room? — what was the reason for “personal enmity” towards Maya Sarin?
I said I’d vouch for Miss Laird and they all looked at me as if I was one of those arrangements with electric teeth that deep-sea nets bring up. Who was I? Where was I at the time of the crime?
I had a swell answer for that. I said: “What was the time of the crime?”
They all scratched their heads and asked a lot more questions and finally decided that the murder had occurred between five-thirty-five and five minutes after six — if Miss Laird was telling the truth.