Say Yes to Murder by Todhunter Ballard (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📕
This problem was settled for him as a woman crossed the small entrance and pushed open the ground glass door. She was blond, with the enameled finish of Max Factor and the House of Westmore, neatly turned out. She gave Lennox a speculative look, but he was too busy catching the door to give her more than a passing glance.
The entry was small and tiled. An automatic elevator and a stairway which looped like a climbing snake around the cage offered a choice. He chose the elevator and rode upward in the little car with a faint accompanying sense of claustrophobia.
The girl who opened the door was small and very dark. It startled him. He was so used to blondes. She said: "Yes?" impatiently, as if she dared him to give a good excuse for knocking on the door.
She wore a flowered housecoat with a long zipper up the front, and from the way the coat fitted he judged that there could be little underneath.
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The lawyer hesitated. “Well, hints about what Mary was worth and whether her granddaughter would get it all at the old lady’s death. I didn’t think much about it at the time. People gossip about other persons’ affairs all the time.”
“About the granddaughter,” said Lennox. “Do you know whether she was unduly friendly with Heyworth?”
The lawyer cleared his throat noisily. “Not that I know of. She was friendly with Tina Kingstone, and of course Heyworth and the Kingstone woman were very friendly until he became interested in Kitty Foster.” >
It seemed to Lennox that Austin was grinning a little. The whole town seemed to know that Kitty Foster had thrown him over for Leon Heyworth.
“One thing more,” he asked. “Who met Jean Jeffries when she came back from France?”
“Why, I did,” said Austin. “Mary was busy on a picture and couldn’t go east. I met her in New York and brought her west. What makes you ask?”
Lennox shrugged. “I wonder that you recognized her after all the years she had been away.”
“As a matter of fact I didn’t,” Austin admitted. “I was laid up in my hotel, food poisoning or something. I phoned the shipping office, and the girl came directly from the boat to the hotel.”
“Thank you,” said Lennox. “Have you made up your mind whether to have me arrested?”
“You’d get out on bail. You’re harder to hold than a greased pig.” The lawyer smirked a little. “If you want any more information about Heyworth, why not ask Miss Foster?”
Lennox started to get sore, then didn’t. “Maybe that is a good idea,” he admitted. “Come on, Jake. Let’s go.”
3.
There were a lot of lights burning in the actress’ hillside home, and the circle drive was filled with cars. It was no surprise to Lennox that Kitty Foster was entertaining. She was constantly entertaining.
He told Jake to wait in the car, and as an afterthought he stripped off his light overcoat and handed it to the man. Then he walked up the curving driveway toward the entrance.
He rang the bell and smiled at the white-coated Togo when the houseboy opened the door.
“William!” Kitty Foster’s dark hair was disheveled and her cheeks were red without the need of make-up. Lennox knew she had been dancing. You could tell when she had been dancing. The rhythm of motion fired her blood, livened her, changed her into another person.
“William, darling!” She brushed past the houseboy, threw her arms around Lennox’ neck and drew his face down to hers. The lips were warm and inviting and possessive.
He knew her so thoroughly. It was almost like looking at a person through a fluoroscope—she was that transparent.
“So the candle is burning in the window for me now?”
She smiled and wrapped both hands about his arm, resting her head against his shoulder. “It’s O.K. for me to kick you around,” she told him, “but when the rest of the town starts it I get as sore as the devil.”
Several people had come into the hall and were staring at them. Kitty Foster said sweetly: ‘All your friends. They’re glad to see that the knife is coming out of your back.”
“Is it?” said Lennox.
She looked at him strangely. “Haven’t you seen the bulldog editions of the morning papers?”
He shook his head and she called Togo. “Find the Times.”
The boy disappeared obediently, to return with the paper. Kitty unfolded it and showed Bill an item. General Consolidated Studios had just announced that William Lennox had been rehired by the company. “He might,” the article stated, “be sent to the eastern office, or he might be sent to South America oh a good-will mission.”
“So that’s why the welcome?” he said, creasing the paper.
She mocked him a little. “Girls have to watch their jobs. But that isn’t the answer, William. I’ve decided to take you back. I might even marry you sometime if I get around to it.”
Lennox was silent, watching her. She was very beautiful, as beautiful as a porcelain vase, but not so fragile. She had the resilience of a rubber ball, always bouncing back into position. You might dent her, but it would come out quickly and neatly, leaving no scar upon the smooth surface.
She said: “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get a long way away from all our friends. I want to talk and talk and talk.”
“I haven’t a car,” he said. “Jake’s out in his coupe, freezing. The rear window is broken.”
“Who cares,” she was gay. “Bring him in. He can have a drink in the kitchen.”
Jake did not object. They left him at the serving table with a glass clutched in one hand, a bottle of Scotch in the other.
Judging by the noise which emanated from the house, the party was going on behind him. In fact the party did not seem to realize that its hostess had departed.
Jake’s coupe needed a valve grind. It was sluggish, and the springs listed a little to starboard, making it hard to steer.
Lennox asked without looking at his passenger: “Where to, Josephine?”
“Remember the place you took me the first night—the place where we could see all over the city?”
“I haven’t been up there for years,” he said. “It’s probably all changed. That’s Lookout Mountain.”
She shrugged, pouting like a child. “If you don’t want to…”
“But of course I want to,” he said, and turned the coupe east on Sunset, driving through Beverly and along the Strip to Laurel Canyon. In front of Schwabs they were blocked by a light, and Hynie Bartlette called them from the sidewalk.
“Going my way?”
Kitty Foster was gay. “This is no bus. Besides we’re eloping. You wouldn’t want to ride clear to Yuma, would you?”
“In that hack?” Bartlette sounded incredulous.
The light changed and Lennox turned left into Laurel. “You shouldn’t have said that.” His voice was reproving. “That schnorrer will have us all over his column in the morning.”
She laughed, a pleased little sound in the darkness at his side. “Why not? I said I might decide to marry you. Hynie’s a good guy. Give him a break.”
“He’s a tank,” said Lennox, “and a rat. I wouldn’t give him the crust off a moldy loaf of bread.” He stopped for a sign at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and then continued up the canyon to where the road branched for Lookout Mountain.
Kitty Foster said angrily, “Someone has built a fence!” She couldn’t have sounded angrier if she had suddenly discovered that she was blocked out of heaven by a high wall. Lennox had braked the car at the top of the steep grade opposite where the old turnout had once been. He said mildly: “After all, a man has a right to do what he pleases with his own property.”
Below them the city spread out for miles, a lighted checkerboard punctuated here and there by the red and green of the neon signs. They found a little shoulder of ground at the crest of the steep slope and sat down, the girl drawing her lungs full of the crisp night air.
“Gee!” said Kitty Foster, and for a moment she was no longer the actress, but just a little girl. “This gets me, down deep inside. It’s so big and clean looking. It’s as if the darkness rubbed out all that’s dirty in the world and just left the things that are clean and fine and swell.
“Billy,” she reached out and took his free hand in both of hers, “I’m a fool. I’ve been a fool. You and I together could turn this whole industry upside down. Suppose I go to Spurck and tell him I want you as the producer on my next picture?”
He caught his breath. He knew as well as she did that with her pressure behind him he could be a producer. He knew that he would have been one before save for the fact that he was much more useful to Spurck in his present capacity.
It was a subtle bribe, and he considered it with care. Less than twenty-four hours before this same girl had been out to get him in any way she could. And now she was offering him the thing he had spent five years in Hollywood to obtain. Why?
Certainly not out of generosity. It could be to put him under obligation. It could, although he doubted it, be for love. Or it might be an effort to sidetrack him from any investigation of the three deaths.
He’d come out to see this girl for a definite reason. He’d even brought her up to this hilltop vantage point for a reason. He wanted her to talk, to talk about Leon Heyworth. He wanted to know why the actor had been murdered, what the man had known that had made his death imperative. But he had to move cautiously.
He said: “I was just wondering if you would have thought this up if Heyworth hadn’t been killed.”
“William, William!” she was railing at him, half-joking, half-serious. “You are jealous, and you needn’t be. Heyworth was a good guy to go around with. He was a good actor and I learned a lot from him. I liked him—yes”—she sounded as if she were being painfully honest—“but I was using him.”
“Just as you used me and everyone else you’ve touched.”
“Why not?” she said impatiently. “The Lord looks out for those who look out for themselves.”
“Sure,” he said, “and I’m only trying to look after myself now. I got burned once, glamour girl, and I don’t want to get it again. Besides, you’re taking a chance. I’m all tied up in this murder thing. Had you forgotten? That isn’t the kind of guy you want to be with.”
She said confidently: “You’ll get that all straightened out.”
“I wish I was sure,” he told her gloomily. “If I could only figure out why Leon was killed. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense. He must have known something about somebody or he wouldn’t have been murdered. If he’d just left a note or something to explain.”
She said: “People don’t do that in real life. They only use that in pictures. He didn’t leave any note, and he didn’t even tell me what it was all about. He just said that the Kingstone woman had been calling him up for three or four days and that she had something on her mind. He told me that because he didn’t want me to get the idea he was paying her rent again. He was all through doing that a year ago.”
Lennox nodded. “I know. I wonder why she was bothering him?”
Kitty Foster’s voice lacked interest. “I don’t know. It was something about that black-haired slut, Mary Morris’ granddaughter. She’s been around town for months trading on the fact that she was related to Mary. If you ask me she’s not any better than a common street-walker, and the trouble she’s in…”
“What?”
Kitty Foster was getting a little impatient. “I’m no detective,” she said, “and I don’t care for gossip. I guess she did something pretty terrible—something that would have cooked her chance of inheriting the old lady’s money if Mary found out. Anyhow this Kingstone dame had the answers, and I think she was trying to cash in on what she knew.
“I think she wanted Leon to act as go-between for her in contacting the old lady. That would about explain things, wouldn’t it? Leon was too decent to do that. Instead he faced Jean Jeffries with the truth, she killed him, then she killed Kingstone. Finally she gave her grandmother that sleeping medicine just to make certain there wouldn’t be another slip
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