Chapter 4 #2
“This is a desert area,” Perkins said, “but your shoes are extremely well polished. You’ve obviously had time to get your shoes polished, and that is what one does at airports when killing time.
There are newsprint smudges on your hands.
You probably spent some time reading the paper while you waited.
But in any case, there have probably been all sorts of people arriving today, and somebody has to meet them.
That’s traditionally the publicist’s job. ”
A regular Sherlock Holmes, I thought.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a brilliant deduction,” Perkins said, tugging at his shirt cuffs, pulling them down from the jacket sleeve. Up close, his suit was extremely well made, a lightweight wool that didn’t wrinkle. Or perhaps Perkins had stood up on the plane all the way from Chicago.
“Good flight?” I asked.
“Exactly the same as every other flight I have ever taken in my life,” Perkins said.
I tried a winning smile, feeling like a fool. “I don’t suppose you often find yourself in Tucson.”
“The last time was 1971, when they were shooting Judge Roy Bean. Before that, I was here in 1969 and 1968. I first came here in 1965.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
He ran his hands over the lapels of his jacket, smoothing them down. The luggage was beginning to move on the stainless-steel conveyor.
“That’s my bag there,” he said, pointing to a leather two-suiter.
It seemed to be a cue. I picked it up. He stood and watched me. I was liking Mr. Perkins less all the time.
“I assume the car is this way,” he said, heading for the exit. I followed behind, carrying his bag.
* * *
As the limousine purred down the flat highway into town, I turned to Perkins and said, “I’m afraid there isn’t much I can tell you about the murder. I was only—”
“Then don’t tell me anything,” Perkins said. “I prefer to arrive without preconceptions, and certainly without misconceptions.”
Screw you, I thought, and said nothing at all for several minutes.
Perkins stared out the window at the desert.
In this area, there was very little of the saguaro cactus for which Tucson is famous.
That cactus is what movie companies come here for.
It’s a very distinctive landscape: red hills, high peaks with snow, and those funny, almost human-looking cactus bushes growing everywhere.
Some places, it’s almost a forest of cactus.
But here the landscape was mostly flat and brown. The sky was clear.
Perkins turned back to me. “Has the weather been good?”
“Good after the first week. We had some flash flooding, washed out roads to the location.”
“How far behind is the production?”
“We’re at day fifteen, and we figure we’re two and a half behind.” This was the most optimistic view. It would be more accurate to say we were probably four days behind, or maybe five. And we’d just lost today, which added one more.
“Counting today?” Perkins asked. “I assume you didn’t shoot today.”
“Counting today, it would be three and a half.”
“I’m not doing insurance business this trip,” Perkins said heavily. “How far behind are you?”
“Probably five days.”
Perkins nodded. “Now this man McDougall. He was the writer, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Has he been at the location from the start?”
“Yes,” I said. I knew why he was asking. It was unusual for a screenwriter to stay with a film once it began shooting. “We needed some rewrites as we went. Brenda Conrad was a last-minute casting choice. Her role had to be reshaped.”
“I see. And his body was found this morning.”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Was he having an affair here?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I wanted to add, nobody would touch him. Maybe Perkins guessed that, because he said, “Was he well liked?”
“Not especially.”
“You’re not talking to a reporter now either. Was he well liked?”
“He was an obnoxious, unpleasant man.”
“Paranoid?”
“He was a writer.” All movie writers are paranoid. They’re all convinced that frivolous souls are degrading their brilliant screenplays. All writers are paranoid the way all stars are insecure and all directors are megalomaniacs. That’s just the way it is.
“I see.” And then Perkins just stared out of the window, apparently thinking. At least he didn’t say anything. We came into Tucson. Perkins looked out at the buildings. “They keep adding new buildings,” he said, “and making it worse.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s really a rotten town.”
“I always liked it,” Perkins said.
There was another long silence after that.
* * *
Checking Perkins into his room at the Holiday Inn—he said he preferred to “stay with the troops”—I heard a familiar voice from the banquet hall saying, “No, no, do I have to tell you a thousand times? No, I want it authentic.” That was Tom Franklin, the director.
Perkins was signing the register, so I excused myself and went into the banquet hall, which was empty except for Franklin, Mann, Claude Binyon, and about fifty Arizona coeds trying their damnedest to look like classic Western saloon girls.
The coeds were lined up along one wall like chorus girls.
Franklin paced up and down in front of them.
“Goddamn it, Claude, I told you last week they had to be real women, not teenyboppers.”
Claude rolled his eyes. “They’re only background.”
“Background, background. We’re not shooting Academy ratio anymore. We’re shooting two-three-one.” Franklin stretched his arms expansively. “We’re shooting Panavision, and I’m telling you, Claude, we’ll read the background, and it’s going to look like a bunch of surf bunnies playing dress-up.”
Throughout all this, the fifty coeds stared impassively forward. A couple of them giggled. Charles Mann stood in a corner and surveyed all that young firm flesh and puffed his cigar. Then he saw me and hurried over.
“Where’s Perkins?” he said.
“Checking in.”
“Stay with him,” Mann said, rolling the cigar around his lips. “Jason, I want you to stay with that son of a bitch night and day. See that he gets whatever he wants. And keep track of what happens. Report to me tonight.”
As I left the room, the last thing I heard was Franklin saying, “You know what we’re going to have? A bunch of strapless dresses showing off tan lines, that’s what we’re going to have.” Claude made some soothing reply about makeup, and then I saw Perkins standing by the elevator.
“More production problems?” he asked, not smiling.
“Just extra casting,” I said. We could hear Franklin shouting again. “Everybody’s on a thin edge.”
“I should imagine so,” Perkins said.
We rode the elevator to the third floor and went to his room. It was the same room as all the other rooms. He looked around, impassively.
“I will require an hour to clean up,” he said. “Then I want to see the room where the death occurred, and I will want to talk to the police officer in charge. Can you arrange that?”
I said I could.
“I will meet you here in an hour,” he said, and closed the door in my face.
* * *
You have to understand something. The reason I get along with almost everybody is because I’m just the type of guy who likes people.
I really do. Hell, I can even get along with Henry Hathaway and Glenn Ford.
So it was a new experience for me to be in a room with two people I didn’t like: Perkins and Art Corey, the chief of the Tucson homicide division.
We were in McDougall’s room, where his body was found.
The body had been removed, but the room was otherwise unchanged.
Perkins was examining everything around him, and he was now wearing a cashmere blazer that must have put him back a good bit of change.
He was looking very elegant, very graceful, very correct.
Corey was slumped back in his chair, leaning against the wall by the door, smoking a filter-tip menthol cigar.
Corey is about six feet and has a paunch that hangs over his gun belt.
He wears Western clothes, shirts with pearl buttons and pointed flaps over the pockets, and cowboy boots and a Stetson that he never takes off.
Of course, I had a read on Corey. He was terrified.
Until today, he was nothing more interesting than a big man in a small town, strutting around the cattlemen’s clubs and kicking the shit out of a few locals now and then.
Then all of a sudden, he’s got a high-profile death on his hands, one that a lot of the country will be watching because it involves Hollywood stars.
Corey was in way over his head, and he knew it.
Which is why he was watching Perkins with such a mixture of hope and resentment.
Perkins paid no attention to Corey at all. This was my first view of Perkins’s legendary concentration, and it was total. He was like a bloodhound in a cashmere coat—the scent was everything. Even when he started asking questions, he never looked away from the room itself.
“The room hasn’t been touched?”
“Not a bit,” Corey drawled.
“When the body was found, the bed was made as we see it now?”
“Like I said, nothing’s been touched.”
Perkins walked around the bed. “Who found the body?”
Corey flipped open a notepad. “Millicent Pink,” he read, “Five forty-five a.m.; she was coming to his room for some writing he was supposed to be doing.”
“Script revisions,” I said. “She’s the script supervisor.”
“I gathered,” Perkins said dryly. He bent over the bed and looked underneath, then got to his feet again, dusting his hands. “You’ve checked for prints?”
“Checked the whole premises,” Corey said.
“And?”
“No fingerprints. Everything was wiped.”
“Wait,” I said. “Say that again.” I’d been standing by the door, staying out of the way, but after a morning full of stunners, this was the biggest yet.
“You heard me,” Corey said, not bothering to look my way. “The room was wiped.”
Here I was, so sure that McDougall’s death had been an accident, but if that were true, why would someone take all the time and effort to remove every fingerprint? Maybe Appelbaum’s wild rumor wasn’t so wild after all . . .
But Perkins just nodded, not looking nearly as shaken as I was. Or shaken at all, not even stirred. He seemed completely unsurprised that this accident had just turned into a probable murder.
He crossed the room to the desk. It was the same desk that was in every room, but McDougall had moved his desk away from the wall, apparently to make it easier to work.
There was a copy of the script and several sheets of blank yellow paper, and a razor blade and a rolled dollar bill. “This desk is untouched?”
“As I said . . .” Corey began, sounding weary, “one more time . . . nothing’s been touched.”
“You search the room for cocaine?”
“We searched for cocaine,” Corey said. “We found no narcotics.”
Perkins unrolled the dollar bill and then released it. It sprang shut again. He said nothing. He peered closely at the desk surface, squinting at it. He picked up the razor blade and examined its edge, then set it down again.
“You find liquor in the room?”
“No.”
Perkins by now was examining the trash basket underneath the desk.
He poked around in it, coughing in the stirred-up cigarette ashes.
Then he turned to the closet. It contained three tweed jackets and several pairs of neatly folded slacks.
Perkins examined each briefly. “They were buttoned on the hangers as they are now?”
“Nothing,” Corey drawled. “Has. Been. Touched.”
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” Perkins said.
“I have no desire to waste your time, or mine.” He went to the dresser drawers and opened several.
I caught a glimpse of neatly folded sweaters and shirts.
He checked one label, then shut the drawer.
He checked the bedside table, flipped through the Gideon Bible, shut the drawer, and went into the bathroom.
There was still a lot of blood in the bathroom. It was completely dried now, and much darker, and cracking in odd patterns. With the body removed, it seemed abstract and merely strange to me. At least, I didn’t feel sick again.
“He was found in the bathtub,” Perkins said. “Is that right?”
Lazily, Corey pushed himself out of the chair and sauntered into the bathroom.
“Yep,” he said. “Lying with his head about here . . .” He pointed to the back of the tub.
“With his feet forward, one in the tub, one hanging over the edge. He was dressed in all his clothes except he had his shoes off and one sock off. The way we reconstruct it, he came in and slipped here . . .” He pointed to the floor, where the bath mat was crumpled off in one corner.
“He slipped . . .” Perkins said, “or was pushed, perhaps.”
Corey gave that idea a quick shrug and continued: “Either way, he fell and hit his head on this . . .” He pointed to a towel rack with a sharp edge, and lots of blood. “And then landed in the bathtub and died.”
“You have pictures of the body in place, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Where is the other sock?”
“We found it by the door.”
“I want to see,” Perkins said, and walked to the door.
“We took it down to the lab,” Corey said.
“I thought nothing was moved,” Perkins said.
“Well, we wanted it for analysis.”
“Analysis of what?”
“Whatever,” Corey said. He was starting to have a hounded look on his face.
“Make sure you check it for soap,” Perkins said. “Camay soap, to be precise.”
Corey blinked.
“I think I’ve seen all I need for the moment,” Perkins said. He opened the door, looked out into the hallway, then back into the room. “One last question: How did the script supervisor get into the room this morning?”
“The door was unlocked.”
“Was that usual for McDougall?”
“No, apparently not.”
Perkins looked at the door carefully. “This door can’t be left unlocked,” he said.
“Well, then it was ajar. I don’t know.”
“What did Miss Pink do when she found the body?”
“She called Mr. Mann, the producer.”
“And?”
“He came and looked, and then he had her call us.”
“I see,” Perkins said. “Thank you very much, Mr. Corey.”
He started walking down the hallway. I hurried after him. “By the way, Jason,” he said as I fell into step beside him. “Do you happen to know if McDougall was right- or left-handed?”
“No,” I said. “But can we talk about what Corey just told us? About the room being wiped?”
“Was McDougall married?”
“No,” I sputtered.
“Any children?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Had he ever been in an accident? Hospitalized?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we find out the name of his personal physician?”
“I can try.”
“Do that,” Perkins said, shooting his cuffs and adjusting his tie. “And as for the so-called news that the room had been cleaned of all fingerprints, don’t tell me that came as a surprise to you. Not after everything else we saw in there.”
I was still trying to put together an intelligent answer when he cut me off.
“When can we see yesterday’s dailies?” he asked.
I looked at my watch. It was almost seven thirty. “They should be screening them right now.”
“Then lead the way!” he said. “It is essential that we see them!”