Maya was sitting at her dressing room table staring drunkenly in the mirror. It was Mary Fallon, of course, but in those circumstances she looked more like Maya than Maya ever thought of. She was wearing the double of the costume Maya had been murdered in.
I expected a big triple-action gasp but I guess everyone who wasn’t in on it was too surprised to gasp, or didn’t have the wind for it. You could have heard a pin feather fall.
There was a knock at the dressing room door and Maya — I mean Mary — called “Come in,” huskily — with Maya’s voice. Hammer and Francis J. Hotaling came in. The makeup man had accomplished a miracle with those two; they were a couple old-timers that came nearer doubling Hammer and Hotaling than anyone else I could find in the files and they were dressed exactly as Hammer had been dressed when he and Ciretti crashed in on me, and as Hotaling had been dressed when he reached the studio.
Maya swung around and said: “Wha’ d’ yuh want?” and Hotaling put his hand in his pocket and answered: “We got that stuff for you.” Maya stood up and Hammer edged around behind her and picked up the vibrator and slammed her over the head. Then they both scurried out of the room and the lights dimmed and it was pitch dark again. And still — so still I could hear Dolores’ heart pounding beside me.
That went on for about a minute and then Hammer — the real Hammer — screamed. The lights came on and there was a lot of Law milling around and Hammer was still screaming.
We all sat in Bachmann’s office: Bachmann and Jacobsen and Dreier, who had been released, and the angel and I.
There was a knock at the door and Bachmann said: “Yes.” The secretary opened the door and Lawson, the dick from the Hollywood Station, waltzed in.
He said: “Everything’s under control. Hammer thought we were going to hang the rap on him and squealed. We caught Ciretti in the bathtub. He’s been crazy mad at Maya for four or five days — ever since be caught her playing post office with his chauffeur — and getting crazier all the time. And he’s been scared, too. She’s been so high with alky and heroin and what-not she’s been shooting off her mouth about where she got it...”
“Which was from Hotaling, huh? — and Hotaling was Cirretti’s man?” I wanted to be sure about that.
Lawson nodded. “Uh-huh. Both of them, with Hammer, had decided what to do about it. Ciretti had Hotaling move into the room across from yours because he figured he could jockey Maya into going to your room and bump her off there and make it look like you did it. But Maya was sore at you and wouldn’t go for it.”
I said: “Isn’t that dandy.”
Lawson went on: “Ciretti and Hammer were there last night when Hotaling came in from the studio and said Maya and Dreier had had a battle on the set. That looked like gravy to Ciretti — he hurried over to the studio and went in the extra gate with Hotaling’s pass — they look a lot alike, anyway. He wanted to put the chill on her himself on account of the jealous angle. He smacked her down and then rushed back to the hotel. He could see you were in your room — across the court — and he suddenly had the bright idea of putting on that act for you — figuring it would double as an alibi and make it look like he was broken hearted over her death.”
And that was, in a manner of speaking, that.
Dreier and Dolores and I walked out towards the set together. Dreier kept looking at her in a very quaint way and finally he asked: “Have you ever worked in pictures, Miss Laird?”
She smiled sidewise at me, said: “Yes, a little.”
We all stopped and Dreier turned to me. “You know,” he you-knowed in a faraway voice, “we’ve got to replace Maya very quickly. What do you think of Miss Laird for the part?”
I said I thought she’d be swell, but I knew a better part that she’d fit even more perfectly. She and I grinned at each other like a couple of kids and Dreier looked at us wide-eyed for a minute and then turned quietly and walked away.
Pineapple
The man in the dark-brown camel’s hair coat turned east against the icy wind. Near First Avenue he cut diagonally across the deserted street towards an electric sign: Tony Maschio’s Day and Night Tonsorial Parlor.
A step or so beyond the sign, just outside the circle of warm yellow light from the shop, he stopped and put down the suitcase he was carrying, produced a cigarette and a lighter. He stood close to the building with his back to the wind, flicked the lighter several times without producing a flame, then turned back into the wind and went on towards First Avenue.
He forgot his suitcase. It sat in the darkness just under the corner of Tony’s plate-glass window and if anyone had been close enough to it they might have heard it ticking between screaming gusts of wind — merrily, or ominously, depending upon whether one took it for the ticking of a cheap alarm clock or the vastly more intricate and alarming tick of a time-bomb.
The man walked up First Avenue to Thirteenth. He got into a cab on the northwest corner, said, “Grand Central,” and leaned back and looked at his watch.
It was nine minutes after one.
At sixteen minutes after one Tony Maschio came out of the backroom, washed his hands, whistling a curiously individual version of “O Sole Mio,” and turned to grin cheerily at the big bald man who sat reading a paper with his feet propped up on the fender of the stove.
“You are next, Mister Maccunn,” he chirped brightly.
Tony Maschio looked like a bird, a white-faced bird with a bushy halo of black feathers on his head; he spoke with an odd twittering lilt, like a bird.
Maccunn folded his paper carefully and unfolded his big body as careful from the chair, stood up. He was about fifty-five, a very heavily built, heavily-jowled Scot with glistening shoe-button eyes, a snow-white walrus mustache.
He lumbered over and sat down in Number One Chair, observed in a squeaky voice that contrasted strangely with his bulk:
“It’s a cold, cold night.”
For eight years Maccunn had come to Tony’s every Friday night at around this time; for eight years his greeting, upon being invited into Tony’s chair, had been: “It’s a cold night,” or “It’s a hot night,” or “It’s a wet night,” or whatever the night might be. When it was any of these things to an extreme degree he would repeat the adjectives in honor of the occasion. Tony agreed that it was a “cold, cold night” and asked his traditional question in turn, with a glittering smile:
“Haircut?”
Maccunn did not have so much as a pin feather hair on his broad and shining head. He shook it soberly, as was his eight-year habit, closed his eyes, and Tony took up his shears and began trimming the enormous mustache with deft and graceful gusto.
Angelo, who presided over Number Two Chair, was industriously shaving the slack chin of a slight gray-faced youth in overalls. Giuseppe, Number Three, had gone out for something to eat. Giorgio, Number Four, was sitting in his chair, nodding over an ancient number of The New Art Models Weekly. There were no other customers in the shop.
At nineteen minutes after one the telephone rang.
Maschio put down his shears and comb and started to answer it.
Angelo said:
“If that’s for me, boss — tell her to wait a minute.”
Maschio nodded and put his hand out towards the receiver, and the telephone and wall came out to meet him, the whole side of the shop twisted and curled and was a smothering sheet of white flame, and pain. He felt his body torn apart as if it were being torn slowly and he thought “God! — please stop it!” — and then he didn’t feel any more, or think any more.