THE CASE OF THE EXTRA VENTRILOQUIST
by Ron Goulart
* * * *
Edward Kinsella III
* * * *
I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with a ventriloquist. But I did.
This happened in the autumn of 1951 in Beverly Hills. I first encountered her and her dummy about ten minutes before the robbery and the shooting.
It was on a crisp, yellow afternoon toward the end of October. A pretty redhead, she was sprawled on her back in among the oak trees. She was tied up with a length of yellow clothesline and gagged with a much-washed argyll sock. Lying beside her on a scatter of fallen autumn leaves was a dummy about three feet long and resembling a ten-year-old and much-freckled little girl. Her hair, done up in two pigtails, was the same shade as the young woman’s.
I’d been walking down through the thick woods above Mona Tardy’s Moroccan-style mansion on Ellison Drive. When Polly—it turned out her name was Polly Renfrew—had heard me approaching from my house uphill, she’d started trying to yell through the gag.
Handy fellows always carry things in their sport coat pockets, useful things like pocket knives. All I had in mine was an artgum eraser and a buck and a half in change.
“Get you loose in a jiffy, miss,” I promised as I knelt beside her and commenced working on the knots.
She made more noises behind her gag, scowling up at me.
“Oh, sorry. The gag first, sure,” I said. “You have to excuse me, but you’re the first bound and gagged crime victim I’ve ever—”
Polly produced more angry noise while her hazel eyes glared at me.
Gingerly, I extracted the sock. “Sorry, miss, but as I was trying to explain, I’m really not used to this sort of thing. Sure, in movies or on television, I’ve—”
“A jiffy?” she said after spitting out lint. “You’ll get me loose in a jiffy? I appreciate your rescuing me, but I can’t help wishing someone other than a bucolic slowpoke of a nitwit had—”
“I am going to attempt, in my bucolic way, miss, to untie you now,” I cut in. “Unless you’d rather wait for someone else. Maybe a Nobel Prize winner will come strolling by and—”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said. “Thanks for helping out, really. I’m Polly Renfrew. You’ve probably heard of me.”
With the argyll sock out of her mouth she was even prettier, and I really wished I had heard of her. “Movies?”
“Television,” Polly told me. “I have a local kids show every Saturday morning on KMA-TV with my dummy Sally Sawdust.” She stopped, attempting to look around. “Oh, crap, did they swipe her?”
I carefully picked the redhaired dummy up from the leafy ground, “Nope. She’s right here,” I said, dangling her by the leg.
“Hey, dumbbell, all the blood is running to my noggin,” Sally Sawdust seemed to say.
Leaning the dummy, carefully, against a tree trunk, I suggested, “Look, Miss Renfrew, suppose I just untie you and then we part forever? Until then, no more critiques. Okay?”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m rattled by all that’s happened.”
The knots were pretty simple, and I got the clothesline that was tied around her upper body untied quickly. “What did happen?” I asked as I helped Polly to sit up.
She frowned, rubbing at her arms. “Well, actually I’m not sure,” the young ventriloquist admitted. “See, I was hired by Mona Tardy and her husband to entertain at her little girl’s birthday party this afternoon.” She continued rubbing her right hand over her left wrist. “Heck, what time is it?”
I checked my wristwatch. “Almost four.”
“Darn it, I was supposed to do my act for the kids at half past three.”
“Looks like you screwed up again, sister,” said Sally Sawdust.
“Quit heckling,” Polly told the leaning dummy. “They pay darn well. She’s the movie star and her husband is Owen Deems, the Deems Pickles heir, and—”
“I know them,” I said. “Fact is, I’m supposed to show up after the ice cream and draw some cartoons. Sort of a chalk talk for the kids.” I succeeded in untying the last piece of clothesline from around her slim ankles. “I have a little house up the hill and I always cut through the woods to visit them.”
“So you’re in show business too?”
“Nope, I draw a comic strip called Slam Duncan, Private Eye and Mona figured that qualifies me to draw pictures for forty restless spoiled kids who would rather just have more ice cream.” Absently I started massaging one of her ankles. “My name’s Jack Ortega and—”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“Sure, sorry.” I stood, gathered up Sally Sawdust, and tucked her under my arm. “So how did you—”
“This lummox is trying to squash me,” complained the dummy.
“Don’t squeeze Sally so tight,” cautioned Polly.
Very carefully, I deposited the dummy across her lap. “How did you end up trussed up in the woods? What’s the back story?”
Polly shook her head, then grinned. “Well, I parked my Plymouth coupe two blocks down the hill. When they hired me, they told me not to drive onto the grounds and get in the way of the guests’ cars,” she began. “When I was about a block from the estate grounds, a very tall, gaunt guy wearing a black suit and affecting a very thick British accent walked up to me and asked if I was Polly Renfrew. I figured he was another yokel who never watches my show. He claimed to be one of Miss Tardy’s servants and he’d come to guide me to the proper entrance to the place.” She gave a resigned shrug. “While I was listening to this guy, somebody must’ve come up behind me and conked me on the head.”
“They didn’t take anything from you?”
She surveyed the area. “No, that’s my purse over by that tree yonder,” she replied. “I don’t keep Sally in a suitcase. I always carry her under my arm, though I don’t squeeze her like you do. It’s good PR to let people see her wherever I go.”
Reaching out, I helped her to her feet. When Polly’s hand touched mine, I felt suddenly elated. Not the way I usually react to a woman who’s called me a bucolic nitwit. “Let’s go in and I’ll help explain things to Mona.”
Tucking the dummy under her arm, Polly brushed bits of twigs and dry leaves off her skirt with her other hand. “I have to admit, Jack, that I don’t quite know why what’s happened to me happened. The whole darn—”
From the direction of Mona’s mansion came the sound of gunfire.
* * * *
The big wide yellow door came flapping open while we were still two hundred yards from the magenta porch of the cream-colored Art Deco mansion.
Sally Sawdust whistled. “Some joint.”
Two clowns ran out of the house. The tall one wore a polka dot suit and a green fright wig and had a light bulb for a nose. He was carrying a lumpy green canvas shopping bag that had MA NATURE’S ORGANIC MARKETS lettered on the side.
It jingled and rattled, apparently filled with loot.
The other clown was short. He wore zebra-stripe trousers, a purple vest, and a rainbow wig. He had a nose the size of an orange. He was brandishing a .38 revolver that had a piece of gray duct tape wrapped round the grip.
When he noticed Polly and me approaching, he swung the gun in our direction.
“Down,” I urged, grabbing her around the waist and forcing her over on the vast, perfect green front lawn.
“Yikes!” Sally seemed to exclaim as a single shot went whistling overhead.
The pair of escaping clowns continued escaping and reached the late afternoon street. A 1950 maroon Chevy came roaring up, then slowed. The clowns, with the loot, dived in, and the car very swiftly departed.
“Why the hell did they want to shoot us?” I wondered as I helped the pretty redhead to her feet.
“They didn’t,” she replied, bending from the waist to gather up Sally Sawdust again. “The shot went way over our heads. They just wanted to scare me.”
“They succeeded in scaring me,” I admitted. “Why’d they want to scare you?”
Putting her hand on my arm, she squeezed slightly. “I’ll tell you later,” she promised.
* * * *
Owen Deems complained, “That really hurts, Mona.”
The slender actress taped a gauze bandage to his lower left arm. “It’s only a flesh wound, Owen,” she assured him.
“But it’s my flesh,” he pointed out. Deems was a plump, deeply tanned man of about fifty five. His navy blue blazer, with the yacht club crest on the pocket, was draped over a butterfly chair in the big living room.
“You shouldn’t have confronted those clowns, dear.” Mona Tardy, as you may remember, was a very attractive patrician blonde. She’d twice been nominated for an Academy Award and her specialty was what they used to call women’s pictures. Or weepies.
“I wasn’t confronting them. I was reaching for my wallet.”
Handsomely dressed children, ranging in age from six to about eleven, were roaming the main floor of the vast house. Some were crying, others were complaining.
Two different small and highly personable blond boys had asked us, “When do we get the damn ice cream?”
Mona stepped back from administering to her husband and noticed Polly and me on the threshold. “Jack, dear, looks like we won’t need you,” she said with an apologetic smile. “We’ve had ourselves a robbery and the police are en route.”
“The last time we sent for the cops, they took an hour and forty six minutes to get here,” said Deems.
“That was during an earthquake,” the actress reminded him. “At any rate ... Say, you’re Polly Renfrew. Can you explain why these fellows showed up instead of—”
“Miss Renfrew was waylaid on her way here, Mona,” I explained. “Knocked out, trussed up, and dumped up in yonder woodlands.” I gestured in the direction of the woods with a thumb.
“The ventriloquist who said he was replacing her was lousy,” said Mona, nodding at a check-suited, curly-haired dummy who was sprawled on the off-white carpet near the huge fireplace. “You could see his lips moving all the time.”
“And he had a gun hidden in the damn thing’s back,” added Deems, touching at his injured arm and grimacing in pain.
“I had nothing to do with these people,” Polly said, kneeling beside the fallen dummy and turning him over. “Hum.”
I glanced at her. “Something?”
Shaking her head, she stood. “No, nothing.”
The pickle heir, looking at his watch, said, “And where are the damn cops?”
A pretty seven-year-old little girl looked in from the hallway. “What flavors of ice cream are we going to have? And when?”
“The flavors, my dear are hemlock, bile—”
“Owen, relax.”
“Relax? These clowns stole two hundred thousand dollars worth of jewels and bearer bonds. Doesn’t put one in the mood for relaxing.”
Mona asked Polly, “You’re absolutely sure you don’t know who these people could be?”
“I am, yes. The man who stopped me on my way here I’ve never seen before,” she said. “The person who hit me, hit me from behind and I never even got a look at him.”
Out in the hall more and more of the forty-some guest children were showing increasing signs of restlessness and unhappiness.
“Suppose,” suggested Polly, “we gather most of the kids someplace. Sally Sawdust and I can chat with them and try to calm them down.”
The actress nodded. “Yes, that might work. I’ll have one of the maids help the parents gather them into the main rumpus room.”
Moving next to me, Polly asked in a low voice, “Can you make a realistic sketch from memory?”
“Sure, but why do—”
“Take a careful look at the dummy they left behind. I’d like a detailed drawing of him. But don’t do it here.”
“You seem to know more about this mess than you’re letting on, Polly.”
She sighed. “Yes, I realized that about the time the clown shot at me.”
* * * *
Señor Gringo’s was a pretty good Mexican restaurant down near the beach in Santa Monica. It was about a mile from her cottage, and Polly had suggested that we meet there for dinner that night. I’d offered to pick her up, but she told me she had a few things to take care of on her own. So I agreed to show up at ten.
What with waiting for the police to arrive and then waiting to be questioned by the police, we didn’t get away from Mona’s mansion until nearly seven. Since I drew a detective comic strip, a fairly popular one, I knew several people on the police departments of greater Los Angeles. And since I lived in Beverly Hills, one of the lawmen I knew was Detective Ferguson, the one who headed up the investigation of the robbery.
I assured him that Polly had nothing to do with the extra ventriloquist, and I was just about certain he believed me. Trouble was, I still hadn’t quite convinced myself.
As I mentioned before, I was in the process of falling for Polly. But you can’t go into court and testify, “Your honor, I know she’s innocent because she’s awfully cute.” Not admissible.
Señor Gringo’s was full of all sorts of cactus, all in bright earth-color pots. The tables had tops of mosaic tile and each had a candle stuck in an empty Dos Equis beer bottle. Hanging up near the beamed ceiling was a multicolored pig-shaped piñata with his left ear missing.
Every time the door opened, the pig swayed. And every time, I looked up from the paper napkin I was doodling on to see if it was Polly arriving.
She finally showed up at exactly ten fifteen. I know it was exactly ten fifteen because I’d just checked my wristwatch for the ninth time.
The pig swayed and Polly, wearing a pale green cocktail dress, came in smiling. “I’m usually darn prompt.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I told her, “and also pleased you didn’t bring Sally Sawdust along.”
“I’ve been here all along, dopey. Under the table,” a voice seemed to say from down below.
“Sorry, it’s a bad habit,” Polly said as she sat opposite me. “Did you have time to make that drawing?”
“Sure. Even inked it in.” From the breast pocket of my sport coat I extracted a folded sheet of one-ply drawing paper. Unfolding it, I handed it across to her.
“Hey, that’s very good.”
“Did I mention that I’m a professional cartoonist?”
Smiling, she said, “I might as well admit now that I don’t read the Herald-Examiner and Sam Duncan isn’t in the L.A. Times.”
“Slam Duncan,” I corrected. I was about to add that my strip ran in 347 other newspapers across the country. It’s a habit I had, but I decided this wasn’t the time for that. “Suppose, Polly, you explain what you think is afoot here.”
She was studying my drawing of the dummy that had been abandoned at the scene of the robbery. “How well do you know Detective Ferguson?”
“He’s a casual friend. One of the people I sometimes consult about police procedures for the strip.”
She leaned forward, setting the drawing on the tile tabletop. “Do you think he suspects me of being involved in the robbery?”
“Are you?”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, I’m not,” she assured me. “Except...”
“Except what?”
“It’s possible that I know who is.”
That unsettled me. “Maybe you should’ve mentioned that to Ferguson.”
Polly tapped her forefinger on the drawing of the dummy. “I’m not sure. I want to look into a few things.”
“Such as?”
She said, “I want to talk to the man who made this dummy.”
I straightened. “You know who—”
“Do you wish to order drinks, señor?” inquired the lean waiter who’d materialized beside our table.
“Just water for the lady. A Dos Equis for me.”
“Bueno.” He nodded and departed.
“You can tell who made this dummy?”
“His name’s Daniel Castlemon, yes,” she replied. “He has a little shop just off Cherokee in Hollywood. He made a dummy for me about four years ago—not Sally. He has a distinctive style of carving and constructing.”
“He built this for the robbers?”
She said, “He probably sold them one he had on the shelf. We have to find out who bought it.”
“‘We’ implies you’d like me to tag along, Polly.”
“Yes, I’d appreciate that.” She passed the drawing back to me. “I want to confirm who the robbers are before the cops decide I’m in on this.”
“Are you ready to order, señor?” The waiter set two glasses of water and my bottle of beer on the table.
“Give us a few more minutes.” When he was again gone, I asked her, “Now tell me about the gunman who tried to shoot you.”
“Tried to scare me. A warning to keep quiet, I think.”
“Who is the guy?”
“I’m pretty darn sure he’s a buddy of an old boyfriend of mine,” she answered. “Back three or four years ago, he used to entertain at kids’ parties wearing an outfit like the one he had on today. He came to L.A. about seven years ago to get into show business and never quite made it. His name is Larry McNaughton.”
“What about your old beau? Could he have been the other clown?”
“No, that wasn’t Jim.”
“Full name?”
“Jim Barson, another one who never exactly made it in the entertainment world. He and Larry never got very much beyond the fringe.” She took a sip of her water. “We broke up for good over two years ago. But we run into each other now and then still.”
“When was the last time?”
She frowned. “Two weeks ago at a party down in Laguna Beach. We talked for a while and—”
“You told him about your upcoming job with Sally.”
She gave a forlorn nod. “I’m not sure now why I wanted to impress Jim at this late date,” she said. “But, you know, it was Mona Tardy’s and that was an important job for me.”
I poured my beer into a glass. “Do you think your erstwhile boyfriend was involved in the robbery today?”
“I don’t, no,” she said, sounding almost convinced, “but he must have told Larry. Taking my place would get Larry and his pals into Mona Tardy’s house.”
“And with you tied up in the woods, you’d never even see the guys involved.”
“But then you came along and spoiled that part of their plan.”
I drank about half the glass of beer, slowly. Setting it down, I told her, “I do a strip about a private eye. But I’m just a cartoonist. You are a very good ventriloquist. But not a private eye either.” I paused and looked directly at Polly. “Let’s call Ferguson right now and tell him what you suspect.”
“Okay, Jack, I’m not a private eye, but I know you need proof before you go around accusing people of robbery,” she said. “If I can’t come up with anything after we talk to Castlemon about the dummy, then maybe I’ll give up.”
She reached across and put her hand on mine. And that distracted me from insisting that she quit right then.
* * * *
Whenever Slam Duncan arrives at a house and the door is partly open, it always means that something bad has happened on the other side of that door.
“Shit,” I said as I went hurrying up the front steps of Polly’s Santa Monica cottage the next morning.
Her bright orange door was hanging partly open.
“Polly?” I shouted as I shoved the door all the way open and dived across the threshold.
Her parlor was neat and modern and she wasn’t in it.
Sally Sawdust, not in a talkative mood, was slumped in a black butterfly chair, one arm dangling over the edge.
“Polly?”
I went through the whole damn place. I saw three more of her dummies, her entire wardrobe, and framed photos of relatives and a couple of what I hoped were former boyfriends.
But Polly wasn’t there.
I didn’t smell gunpowder or spot any bloodstains. Although in her small bedroom a bedside lamp had fallen to the floor.
At first I thought I should telephone Detective Ferguson.
But then I decided, No, damn it, I’ll find her myself. It was right about that time that I came to realize that my growing affection for Polly Renfrew was causing me to act somewhat like my hardboiled comic strip detective.
NNN
On the newscast coming out of my car radio President Truman was being quoted as saying that things were looking up in Korea. Or maybe he was saying that things were looking down. I wasn’t paying much attention.
Daniel Castlemon, the man who built ventriloquist dummies, had his little shop on a narrow side street off Cherokee Boulevard in Hollywood. It was just around the corner from a small movie house that was showing Gene Kelly’s newest, An American In Paris. I hadn’t seen that yet and I thought maybe I’d ask Polly to ... “You’ve got to find her first,” I reminded myself.
I parked next to an ailing pepper tree. Two blonde hookers, or maybe they were starlets, went walking by in tight white slacks and high heels.
Castlemon apparently also built puppets. There was a cluster of them, including a well-built ballerina, dangling by their strings in the narrow, dusty front window. Sitting there in a toy rocker was a dummy in the Charlie McCarthy mode, complete with top hat, monocle, and tails.
A bell tingled loudly as I pushed open the glass door. The long, narrow room smelled of wood shavings, strong glue, and several years of smoked cigars. Its shelves were thick with dummies, puppets, a few nutcrackers, and several carved cats.
“Say, I know you,” said the bearded man sitting behind the glass-topped counter as he pointed at me with his half-smoked cigar. “Sure, I saw an article about you in Time about a month or so ago. You’re famous, but I forget for what.”
“I am, yeah,” I admitted. “Are you Castlemon?”
“None other. Famous in my own way,” he said, “though not on such a grand scale, alas. What exactly are you famous for?” He rested his smoldering cigar on the lip of a green glass ashtray. He was a man of about fifty-five and quite a bit overweight.
“I draw a comic strip.” I fished out my drawing of the dummy. “Did you—”
“Yeah, that’s right. You draw Dick Tracy.”
“Slam Duncan.” I unfolded the drawing.
“Say, that’s damned good. I could use something like that on a flyer, somewhat reduced of course.”
“Is this one of your dummies?”
“Sure, his name is Willie Wiseacre,” he replied, “although the fellow who bought him didn’t seem to take to that name. He’ll probably rechristen him and—”
“Who bought him?
“Oh, now, I don’t know if I ought to give out such—”
“I’ll pay you twenty bucks for his name and address.”
“Forty would be more suitable. Why do—”
“Who?” I pulled my wallet out of my hip pocket and handed him two twenties.
“I’ll look it up for you.” Creaking some, he rose up and turned toward a dented filing cabinet. “Funny thing, you know, I finished Willie, oh, two, three years ago and he’s just been sitting on a shelf for—”
“What did your customer look like?”
Castlemon stopped going through a file drawer to think about that. “Let’s see ... About thirty-five, plump, bald, partial upper plate,” he told me finally. “Really difficult to be a ventriloquist with false teeth, but this guy was willing to give it a try.”
“The name and address?” I reminded.
“Here it is. Larry McNaughton, lives down in Venice.” He wrote the information down on a small file card. “Venice is that rundown town that tried to look like Venice, Italy. Smelly canals, ramshackle houses.”
“I know, yeah.” I took the card and left.
* * * *
Venice, considerably rundown from its brief days of splendor in the 1920s, was a beach town down the coast from L.A. It had canals, like those in the other Venice, that brought water in from the sea. Each was about ten feet deep, around fourteen wide and had small concrete bridges arching over them.
You didn’t see gondolas plying the murky waters of these canals. Instead there were discarded beer bottles, floating garbage that the town’s bedraggled seagulls hadn’t yet gotten around to dining on, and an occasional dead cat.
I arrived in town a few minutes shy of one in the afternoon. Crossing one of the rutted bridges, I turned on to the street where Larry McNaughton was supposed to reside. His rundown stucco cottage was on the second block I drove along.
In the weedy driveway, parked behind a dented 1939 Ford, was Polly’s Plymouth coupe, the one I’d escorted her to when we’d left the scene of the crime the night before. The houses on either side of Larry’s hideout looked to be deserted. The one on the right was missing part of its roof. Between it and Larry’s cottage rose a thick overgrown hedge that was about six feet high.
Driving on by, I parked on the next block in front of a defunct mom and pop grocery store. There was a faded poster in the front window advertising a ballroom appearance in Avalon on Catalina Island of Benny Goodman and his orchestra. That had taken place in 1939.
As I sat in my car, a newspaper boy bicycled by on the empty street. His gray canvas paper bag held about a half dozen copies of the L.A. Times. Somewhere off in the unseen distance a couple of cats were having some sort of noisy assignation.
Carefully, I eased out of the driver’s seat. I cut across the street, aimed at the ramshackle cottage next to Larry’s place. The cottage had no door. I slipped quickly inside and crossed the garbage-strewn parlor floor to the glassless window.
Although it was bright afternoon outside, I saw electric light shining out of the side window of the house opposite. There was no curtain and the dusty white shade was pulled down to about two inches from the sill. I could see the window through a gap in the hedge.
If I could, unobserved, sneak over there, I should be able to take a look in that lighted window. I left the room, careful not to make any noise by stepping hard on the debris underfoot. I almost cried out when I accidentally stepped on what felt like a dead rat, but I got control of myself.
I made it across the patch of weed-rich lawn, although I narrowly avoided tripping over the rusted skeleton of a tricycle. Maneuvering quietly through the hedge, I crouched down just below the window. I realized that the window was open a few inches and that I could hear what was being said inside.
“C’mon now, Polly,” a man with a thin, reedy voice was saying, “we don’t mean you any real harm.”
“Oh, so? You shoot at me in the afternoon, then break into my house by night, conk me on the head, kidnap me, swipe my car, and—”
“Wait. It’s not really kidnapping.” The thin, reedy voice must belong to Larry. “It’s more, you know, protective custody. You’ll just remain here another day while we ... go elsewhere. Out of the country, but that’s all I better say.”
“What are you planning to do? Tie me up with clothesline again and leave me in this rathole?”
“You’re lucky I’m your pal. Most gangs of robbers would—”
“My pal? You idiots, all three of you, have been screwing up my life for the past two days, Larry,” Polly told him. “You spoiled my chance to perform at Mona Tardy’s party and make some valuable show business contacts. You—”
“Listen, it couldn’t be helped,” he explained to her. “Once I found out that you were going to entertain there, I realized that it was a perfect way for us to get in,” he said. “Despite what you may think, Polly, we really are pretty good robbers. We’ve been darn successful, though we never had a haul like this before.”
“Hooey.”
“Look at this from our point of view,” Larry continued. “I used to do kids’ parties. I still had a clown suit. As you know, I’m a pretty darn good ventriloquist myself. Once we got a dummy, we were all set. Getting into Mona Tardy’s was a cinch.”
“You’re a lousy ventriloquist, Larry. All the kids at the birthday party complained that they could see your lips move.”
“Just relax. We’re going to be pulling out in a few hours. We leave you here, and then I phone the cops while we’re en route to—to, um, someplace in Central America to convert our loot into cash—and they’ll hop over here to come and untie you.”
“Caught in the act, old chap,” said someone just behind me.
Slowly I turned, raising my hands. “Oops,” I muttered.
A tall, thin man in a dark suit was pointing a .32 revolver at me. “Hard cheese, old boy,” he said in a terrible British accent. “Let’s trot on inside, shall we?”
“That really is a lousy accent,” I informed him.
“It is indeed, old thing,” he agreed, “which is why I make my living as a crook rather than by playing crooks on the tube.”
* * * *
Polly was wearing jeans and a faded UCLA sweatshirt. She was sitting in a lopsided kitchen chair at a small wobbly table that held three empty Lucky Lager beer bottles, an unopened can of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup, and a frying pan that had earlier been used to fry eggs.
Sitting opposite her was a chunky man of about thirty five who must be Larry. “Who’s this?”
The unsuccessful actor urged me into the lighted kitchen my nudging me in the kidneys with the barrel of the gun. “It’s Jack Ortega. Caught the bloke snooping, don’t you know?”
“You sure, Kerry?”
“Saw his blooming photo in Time a few weeks since,” Kerry answered. “The funny-paper man.”
Polly gave me a small smile. “I was hoping you’d come to rescue me from these louts, Jack.”
“Exactly what I have done,Polly.”
“That’s rich,” remarked Larry, producing a chuckling sound. “We’ve got you, Ortega.”
“Not at all,” I said, sitting down in the third chair at the rickety table. “How do you think I found you gents?”
“Polly gave you my name and you dug up my address from someplace,” he answered. “I have to admit, I’ve been a bit careless about giving it out.”
I said to Polly, “Remember what I told you about Detective Ferguson using the latest scientific equipment?”
After a few seconds, she nodded. “Yes, he was going to utilize that on this case.”
“I couldn’t tell you about this last night because I’d given him my word,” I continued. “But once you’d disappeared, I insisted that he share what he’d found out with me.”
“What in the bloody hell are you two nattering about?” asked the actor.
I stood to face him. “Despite my trying to convince him otherwise, Detective Ferguson believed that Polly was in cahoots with the robbers,” I told him. “So he planted a tracking bug in her Plymouth yesterday afternoon. It was his notion that eventually she’d come to see you fellows. The gadget provided the police with your exact address.”
Larry’s chair fell over when he shot to his feet. “That can’t be true, can it?”
“Ferguson gave me your address, told me to meet him here,” I said. “I thought he’d be here by now, followed by a squad car full of uniformed cops.” I took a hopeful glance at the window, listening. “Unless he ran into traffic on the free—”
From out in the yard a gruff male voice shouted, “Men, we’ll try tear gas first. If that doesn’t work, rush them.”
That distracted the faux Englishman and he looked toward the window.
I grabbed up the greasy skillet and whapped him on his gun wrist.
“Oof,” he cried, letting the .32 fall from his grasp.
I caught the gun before it hit the floor, then turned and slugged the failed actor twice on the chin.
As he fell, out cold, down on the streaked linoleum, a third man, the one who must’ve been the other clown, appeared in the doorway. “What’s all the damn noise about?”
I shot him in the thigh, and he dropped back into the shadowy hall and commenced howling in pain.
Larry, forlornly, sat back down. “There wasn’t any tracking bug and there weren’t any cops, were there?” he realized
Polly smiled a broader smile. “Now that, old chap, was ventriloquism.”