“Well, which is it? The easy way or the hard way?”
Billy Fuller stared at Masuto. Then he turned to the circle of people and snapped, “Take ten! But stay close!” Then he motioned to Masuto and led him past the set to a line of portable dressing rooms. “In here.” It was fitted out as a small office, with a desk and several chairs.
“Now what the hell is this all about?” Fuller wanted to know. He dropped into a chair. Masuto sat facing him.
“Last night a woman named Alice Greene was killed.”
“You mean that thing on Beverly Drive?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know the dame from Adam. Never met her.”
“She was a friend of your ex-wife, Mitzie.”
“I don’t know her either. The bitch doesn’t exist.”
“She exists,” Masuto assured him quietly. “I want her to continue to exist. She’s in very great danger. The same man who killed Alice Greene is trying to kill her.”
“Come on!”
“Believe me.”
“Look, you came to the wrong party. I don’t start any defense fund. If someone is looking to finish off Mitzie, he doesn’t get my help. But I don’t interfere either.”
“I see. Are you by any chance planning to kill her?” Masuto asked quietly.
“What are you, crazy? I’m in the middle of a picture, and you’re asking me am I planning to kill some miserable broad.” He shook his head. “Are we finished? I told you I don’t know this Greene woman. You want to know would I kill Mitzie? Maybe. If I could get away with it. If I could find enough time between pictures.”
“That’s a lot of hate. Why?”
“That, Mr. Detective, is none of your goddamn business.”
“Why did your marriage break up?”
“What are you, the Louella Parsons of the Beverly Hills cops?”
“It’s very important that you answer that question.”
“Not to me.” He got to his feet.
“A few more questions, Mr. Fuller. Were you in the service?”
“Yes, I spent a lousy year in Nam with an army film unit. But you know what occurs to me? I don’t have to answer any one of your damn questions. You blackmailed me out there, telling me you’d kill a day’s shooting if I didn’t talk to you. I think I’ll talk to my lawyer about that.”
“You could do that,” Masuto agreed. “But I think it would be easier to spend a few minutes more with me and not lose the day’s shooting. You can still take it up with your lawyer.”
“Okay, okay, let’s get it over with.”
“Do you own a pistol?”
“Four of them, and I got the papers on all of them.”
“What kind?”
“I have a Colt forty-five hogleg.” For the first time, his tight face relaxed slightly and he smiled thinly. “That’s a reproduction of the old frontier Colt, bring down a man at a hundred yards, blow a hole through you big as a saucer. I got a Browning thirty-caliber automatic and I own two target pistols, both of them twenty-two.”
“What kind of guns are the twenty-twos?”
He was relaxed now. He enjoyed talking about guns. “One is an old Smith and Wesson hand ejector. It’s got to be fifty years old, but perfect. A little pocket gun, but a beauty. That’s the one I carry when I carry a gun.”
“You carry a gun?”
“Not now. At night.”
“Why?”
“Man, you got to be kidding. Do you read the newspapers?”
“Sometimes. And the other twenty-two?”
“That’s a Browning target pistol. Automatic, and it fires twenty-two longs.”
“Where do you keep your guns?”
“Like I said, sometimes I carry the little piece at night. I keep the thirty-caliber in my desk, and the hogleg and the target gun have the usual plush-lined boxes. I keep both boxes in my study.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Fuller?”
“I don’t see where the hell all this fits in.”
“If you will bear with me just a few minutes more,” Masuto said softly, “we can finish this and you can go back to your work. I was asking where you live.”
“I rent a little house on Camden. I had a goddamn mansion on Palm Drive, but it went to that bitch. You know, this is the age of the ripoff and the land of the ripoff. But there’s one ripoff that cuts everything else down to size. Divorce. I pay that bitch four thousand clams a month. I had to give her the house. We’re talking about that target pistol. She gave me that. The one goddamn thing she ever gave me, except maybe a dose of the clap. Nah! I’m only talking. The only dose she gave me was a dose of herself, and that was plenty.”
“She gave you the target pistol?”
“So she did.”
“You said it came in a large, wooden box?”
“Right.”
“Who takes care of your house?”
“I got a housekeeper, a black lady. She comes in every morning, leaves at nine.”
“Then she’s there now?”
“Certainly.”
“When,” Masuto asked him, “did you last look at the target pistol?”
“When? Jesus, I don’t know. This film you’re lousing up right now-I been with it three weeks. I know I haven’t touched the pistol in that time.”
“I suggest to you that it’s not there.”
“What’s not there?”
“The target pistol.”
“You got to be kidding. What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m saying it was stolen.”
“What! How the hell would you know? You mean one of your guys picked up a target pistol? Who says it’s mine?”
Masuto shrugged.
Fuller picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed a number. Masuto could hear, faintly, the voice of the woman who answered. Fuller said, “Lanie, this is Mr. Fuller. I want you to go into my study and open the rosewood box on my desk and tell me what’s in it. You know, there are two boxes. There’s a black teak box that I keep locked. Look in the other box, the reddish one.” There was a pause. “Yes, I’ll hold the wire.”
He stood there with the telephone in his hand, watching Masuto. It had become a game, and it had caught his attention. “You know,” he said to Masuto, “they keep arguing, does art imitate life or does life imitate art-I mean if you can call movies art. I mean this kind of a ploy is exactly what one of those movie detectives would pull. Then, if the gun’s still there, all you got to say to me is, Sue me. So I’m wrong.”
The phone demanded his attention again. He listened. Then he said, “Thanks, Lanie. No, it’s okay.” He put down the telephone and stared at Masuto.
“The gun is gone,” Masuto said.
“How the devil did you know?”
Masuto shrugged.
“Stolen?”
“You didn’t give it to anyone?”
“What does that mean?”
Again, Masuto shrugged.
“So the gun is gone. What do I do now?”
“I suggest you call the Beverly Hills Police and report it. Give them the serial number and the registration number.”
“I’m reporting it to you.”
“That won’t do. By the way, where were you last night, between ten and eleven o’clock?”
“Come on, what in hell is this?”
“I told you. It’s a homicide investigation.”
“All right. I was home.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, in bed, reading a screenplay. After a day in this place, I don’t even want to get laid.”
“No witnesses, no one to vouch that you were there?”
“Just tell me one thing, mister-what are you trying to accuse me of? Of murdering this Alice Greene, who I never even laid eyes on? Or of planning to murder Mitzie? If it’s a crime to plan a murder, you can take me in right now. Oh, shit, the hell with it! I got a film to make.”
Masuto stood up. “All right, Mr. Fuller. Don’t forget to call in about the gun. By the way”-he held out the snapshot of Catherine Addison-“do you know this girl?”
He glanced at the picture without interest. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. Would you take a good look at it?”
Fuller stared at the picture for a moment. “Good-looking kid, but the woods are full of them. No, I don’t know her.”
Masuto nodded and put the picture back in his pocket. As he left the soundstage, the strident voice of Billy Fuller was calling the actors back to their places. Outside, the blazing sunlight blinded Masuto as much as the darkness had previously, and squinting, he walked back to the guard at the gate.