Hollywood Kills (1993) Anthology by Staff of Mystery Scene

Author:Staff of Mystery Scene [Scene, Staff of Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

chapter ten

He sat for an hour in his unlighted study, thinking back on it all from Laura’s first bit of gossip. That had been Wednesday, as they drove home from Santa Barbara. And after he had gone to see Jameson that same evening, a few new facts had been revealed to him. He could see no pattern in them but if he gave them to Tomkevic, perhaps the detective could.

What then was preventing him from phoning Tomkevic? The unadmitted fear that Bergdahl was the murderer? If Harry wasn’t, the insurance money was safe. If Harry was, did he want him revealed?

Harry’s own nephew wanted to know; he wasn’t afraid of the truths. But Harry’s own nephew wasn’t thirty-seven years old and he wasn’t carrying the financial load Steve was. He could afford his militant morality.

He thought back on John Abbot’s phrase: “the sanctity of solvency.” John could afford morality, too. He had been active in a seller’s market before the days of confiscatory taxation.

Your job is making pictures, Steven Leander, not moral judgments. That would be the pragmatic view. If he had sinned, they had been sins of omission. Overlooking, of course, one small sin of commission on Pat Cullum’s wide, low bed.

Tomkevic was not concerned with sin; he was concerned with crime. Though the crime that concerned him now was also a sin, the sin of murder.

I am innocent of murder. So far as I know there has been no murder.

That was the thought that he took to bed with him—so far as he knew, there had been no murder. It helped to bolster the righteousness of his anger over the deportment of his unreasonable wife.

It didn’t help him to sleep. But there were pills for that, and he took them after the first restless hour, falling asleep to dream of his personal Javert, the brush-haired, brown-eyed, soft-voiced Tomkevic.

Marcia didn’t join him at breakfast. Mrs. Burke served him with a minimum of dialogue, and Steve wondered if she had overheard last night’s quarrel. He had finished eating by the time Dave came, and they left immediately to pick up Laura.

Steve had always managed to divorce his personal troubles from his professional problems. Today he didn’t achieve this. He was short-tempered and sarcastic. He had a hopelessly disrupted cast halfway through the morning’s shooting.

He knew he was dealing with temperamental people and he knew he was handling them badly. But some perversity in him persisted. His temper grew shorter and his tongue sharper.

They stopped for a break at ten-thirty, and Laura came over to tell him quietly, “You’ll have a mutiny on your hands any minute. What’s wrong, Steve?”

“Everything,” he said curtly. “You know you’re not delivering, don’t you?”

She flushed. “No, I didn’t. But I’ll take your word for it.” Her voice was bitter. “Possibly the role is too big for me.”

He almost said possibly but stopped in time. He said, “It seems to be too much for you this morning. It wasn’t Friday.”

She started to say something, paused, and turned away.

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