“You’ve seen the pictures she makes. She’s not dumb. She knows how lousy they are. And look-she’s thirty-one. That ain’t old, but in seven years she’ll be thirty-eight. If she wants to do something else, it’s gotta be now.
“So look. We get a chance to buy this book. This is the way to do it. She owns a piece of the book. If they want to make a picture out of the book, they gotta take her with it. It’s the only way she could ever get the part.
“So she buys into the property. It takes every bit of dough she can raise. She hocks everything she’s got to raise the hundred grand.”
“She raised a hundred thousand dollars?” I said. “I thought it was a three-way partnership.”
“It was. She put up the dough. Walter and I put up our services.”
“You mean both of you were getting a free ride on her dough?”
He ignored me.
“So she buys in for one hundred grand. Walter was tough. He makes her buy in sight unseen. He says it ain’t quite finished and Anstruther won’t let nobody see the book yet. But Walter guarantees there’s a great part for a girl.
“Walter’s a great little salesman. He tells her this is going to be the picture of the year. This is going to be the dramatic part of the decade. Like Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ or Maria in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’
“So she buys in. You gotta understand ambition. How sick you can get with ambition.
“She reads in the columns, they’re talking about Hayworth for the new Anstruther. Or she reads Bergman is going to make it in Europe. And all the time she knows she owns it. It’s hers. She’s gonna make it. Her. She’s going to make it and be so great that they give her an Academy Award. In her mind she’s figuring out what she’ll wear at the dinner when they give her the award.
“So when she finds Anstruther and she finds there’s no book-she goes off her trolley. It’s not the money. She gets most of the money back. It was lying all over the floor when she shot him. It wasn’t that. She’d decided that if there was no book, they’d fake one. Nothing was going to stop her.
“So everything goes all right. Till Jean Dahl comes into the picture. She comes to me and tries to blackmail me. I give her a grand or so to stall things along. Then I go to Janis and tell her I know what happened.
“Then everything explodes…”
Max Shriber grabbed his side again.
“Sick,” he said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“Talk to her,” Max said. “If you don’t believe me, talk to her.”
In a daze I started out of the room.
“Wait,” Max said.
I stopped.
He nodded down at the gun I had left on the floor.
“In case you find out I’m right,” he said. “Take it.”
I reached down and picked up the gun.
Then he slid forward, off the chair and onto the floor.
I stood for a moment, undecided. I started to help him. Then I stopped. “The hell with you,” I said.
I left the room without looking back.
Chapter Fourteen
I went back into the room.
I had the gun in my hand.
Janis was lying on the bed as I had left her. She was covered by the sheet. She was sleeping like a baby. Breathing gently. Her face in repose was beautiful again.
But I couldn’t forget how she had looked on the telephone.
I walked over and picked up the telephone.
I picked up the phone but I kept my finger on the button so that the phone was completely dead.
I dialed three numbers. The way you do to get one of Walter’s inside extensions.
“Is Mr. Heinemann there?” I said into the dead telephone. “All right. I’ll wait.”
I kept my eyes on her face while I was talking. Her eyelids didn’t move. Not a flutter. She could have been completely asleep.
Silently, I eased the receiver back onto the hook.
Then I sat down on the foot of the bed holding the gun waiting for her to open her eyes.
I sat there watching.
She looked very beautiful.
“Hello, Walter,” I said. “This is Dick Sherman. I’m here in Janis Whitney’s room. She’s asleep. Walter, I want to talk to you. There’re a few things that are bothering me. I want to talk to you about them.
“Walter, what I want to ask you is this. Do you think it’s possible that Janis Whitney killed Charles Anstruther? Do you think she killed Jean Dahl? Do you think she tried to kill Max Shriber? Do you think that’s possible?
“You see, Walter, I just got through talking to Max. He’s in the next room with a bullet in his shoulder. He says Janis shot him. He says Janis murdered Anstruther and Jean Dahl. And the funny thing is, Walter, it could have happened that way. She could have arranged to meet Jean Dahl at your cocktail party. I don’t know why she wanted to meet her. I have an idea about that, but we can talk about it later.
“Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that Janis met Jean Dahl at your party, and let’s just say that Janis fed her a loaded drink.”
Janis Whitney slowly opened her eyes. She saw that I had no phone in my hand. She saw that I did have a gun. You couldn’t tell from her expression that she had seen anything.
She just looked at me.
I went on talking. “Jean Dahl was supposed to go home and pass out. When they examined her they’d find that she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and that would be the end of that. Only I happened to come along and spoil it. I kind of put Janis on the spot.
“The only thing she could do was follow us upstairs. Then she phoned me from the room across the hall. She used Max’s voice when she called.
“I’m glad I didn’t see her. She doesn’t look so pretty when she does her imitation of Max. The cords in her neck stand out and her face takes on a strange expression.”
I reached into my pocket and took out my cigarettes.
“Just a minute,” I said. “Let me get a cigarette.”
I did not let go of the gun.
I lighted a cigarette for me. Then I lighted one for Janis. I handed it to her. She reached up, took it, and continued to watch me, not smiling, and with no expression at all in her green eyes.
“I didn’t see her when she slugged me as I came out the door,” I said. “And I didn’t see her doing her stuff in the dark at Walter’s. I’m glad I couldn’t see her face when she came up on Jean and me and stuck that flashlight in our faces. Then she did her imitation of Max again. I’m especially glad I didn’t see her during those few seconds when everything went crazy and the light fell on the floor and someone got hit on the head with a lamp.
“What’s that, Walter? You want to know if Janis was the person holding the light, who did she hit on the head? She hit Jean Dahl. That’s who she hit. She hit her very hard and very fast a couple of times. She hit her hard enough to kill her.
“How did she move the body? First to in front of the door where it was when the lights went on? And then to the foot of the stairs where it was found?
“Now, Walter, really, that’s a silly question. She didn’t have to move the body to the door, because that’s where we were standing when Jean Dahl got hit. I didn’t know it then because I was lost in the dark. But Janis knew it. She knew the layout of the house and she had a flashlight. She belted Jean Dahl and left her lying right where she was. Then she grabbed my hand and off we went.
“Janis herself is still wondering how the body got from the door to the foot of the stairs. You could tell her, couldn’t you, Walter? You moved it yourself. Not because you murdered her, but because you wanted to hide the fact that a murder had been committed.
“You played right into her hands because you didn’t want an investigation right now. There was too much going on. There was too much at stake. You saw a chance to make it look like an accident and you took it. When the body was found at the foot of the stairs it was just as much of a surprise to Janis as it was to me.”
Janis sat up very slowly, without taking her eyes off my face. There was still no expression in her eyes.