Shooting Star / Spiderweb

  “We’re going to have a meeting tomorrow night, at your house,” the Professor told me. “We’ll decide on our next move there.”

  I nodded. “What about the stock deal?”

  “You were right. He sold, and I bought Imperial today. As much as I could lay my hands on.”

  “Then you’ll leave Caldwell alone?” I asked.

  “Why leave him alone?” The Professor smiled. “After all, he’s got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, just floating around.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said I’d think about it. And I have. You’ll get the full story tomorrow night. Make it nine, sharp.” He stood up. “Goodbye, Roberts.”

  Judson Roberts nodded goodbye. Eddie Haines just sat there, wondering if she’d call, when she’d call, when he’d see her again. There were definitely two of us to consider, now. Eddie Haines and Judson Roberts. Just a couple of the boys. Eddie Haines hadn’t been around very much lately. He was stuck on Ellen Post, but he never came around any more. Judson Roberts was always available, though. He was everywhere. Seen in the best places these days. A fast, smart operator, this Roberts. He knew how to handle himself and everybody else, too.

  Telling the old ladies at the lectures, “Remember the first principles of Y-O-U. Your Opportunities, Unlimited. Cultivate yourself. Allow the seeds of your personality to take root and flower. If your soul is thirsty, drink deeply.” Straight out of the old seed catalogue, that’s the way Judson Roberts worked.

  Sitting down with the shy ones, explaining, “There is a homely wisdom in the expression, ‘a diamond in the rough.’ For the personality is a jewel, and like a jewel it must be cut and polished. Experience is the cutting edge that brings out the facets of personality. The more facets, the more brilliance.” Courtesy of Mootbeck’s Cut-Rate Diamond Supply Co. The whole spiel.

  And Judson Roberts wasn’t just a spieler. He got around. He knew more about human nature than a towel girl in San Diego. A deep thinker, this Roberts. There was always study and analysis and observation, the sort of thing that helped his personality to flower like a beautiful cluster of poison ivy; gave him more facets than a rhinestone garter.

  Sometimes he played God. Sometimes he went out into the streets and worked on his cold readings. He got so that he could size up a stranger at a glance. He lectured, he autographed copies of Y-O-U. He dressed well, he was in the chips, he looked like a million.

  Of course, there were little wrinkles forming around the corners of his eyes these days. Once in a while, when he get angry, his mouth crawled out from under his mustache—and it was the kind of mouth that bites the heads off canaries. But why worry? Everything was sailing along smoothly now. Sailing along on the S.S. Schizophrenia—passengers Judson Roberts, first class, and Eddie Haines, steerage.

  That’s the way it was, and that’s the way I thought about it that night and the next day, until Ellen Post finally did call me up at the office.

  She was at her beach house, at Malibu, and would Mr. Judson Roberts care to run down tomorrow afternoon?

  “I’ll be seeing you,” said Eddie Haines.

  Fourteen

  Eddie Haines had a date for tomorrow afternoon. But Judson Roberts had a date for tonight—nine sharp, at his house.

  They joined me around the big table in the dining room: the Professor, Rogers, and Dr. Sylvestro. I had all my notes on Caldwell ready, and they kept passing them around and making notes of their own.

  I sat there and watched my companions: little Rogers with his hypersensitive twitchings; the Professor, an ivory Buddha in a black suit; Dr. Sylvestro, a gaunt gargoyle whose specialty was stony silence.

  The Professor finished reading and sat back. We all watched him.

  “You’ve done a good job,” he said.

  “Thanks. As I told you, I’m actually helping the man.”

  “Fine. And now we’re ready to take over.”

  “I see he’s sold his stock,” Rogers commented.

  “Right.”

  “That leaves our string-saving friend in possession of a cool hundred and fifty thousand in cash, does it not?” Sylvestro’s deep voice rolled out. I stared at his unnaturally pallid face, at the unnaturally red lips. He sat there smirking like a vampire, saying, “You have plans for that money, Hermann?”

  The bald head inclined slowly. “Naturally. In fact, my plans are already in effect. When Jake gets here—”

  I was sweating, but I had to make one last try. “Look, Professor. What about my idea? Buy Imperial stock and cash in. Then let me play along with Caldwell for a while. He’s going into real estate and he trusts me. I’ll be able to advise him, check every move he makes. Who knows, if we wait we may make as much or more without any risk. Now suppose you were to arrange a tie-up with some promoters who own beach property, and we could split the profits—”

  A fat hand rose and pushed the rest of the sentence back down my throat.

  “That is too slow and too uncertain. I have found a better way. With your friend, Eve England.”

  “Eve? But I paid her off, she went away.”

  “Before Caldwell broke with her, before the payoff, there was a lapse of several days during which he continued to see her. You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “But what you do not know is that Rogers also contacted Eve England for me—right after you did.”

  I sat up. “Meaning you didn’t trust me to handle the deal?”

  “No. We checked on you, naturally. That is my policy. But we had something else in mind. We anticipated this situation.” The Professor got his monocle into position, held me with his glittering eye. “Has it ever occurred to you, my friend, that if a man is willing to pay five thousand dollars he may be willing to pay a great deal more?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Let Jake tell you. That sounds like his ring.”

  I got up and answered the bell. It was our Neanderthal friend, all right—the man whose forehead was voted most likely to recede.

  “How’s tricks?” he grunted.

  “You’re the mystic, you tell me,” I suggested. “Come on in and sit down.” Our little family circle watched impatiently as he extracted an envelope from the pocket of his sports shirt.

  “Here they are,” he said.

  The Professor opened the envelope. Five small photographic negatives and an equal number of prints shuffled fanwise through his fingers. His face bore the blank stare of a professional poker player who holds a winning hand.

  “Well,” said Rogers, “what’d he get?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Rogers grabbed at the photos. Sylvestro got up and leaned over his shoulder.

  “Hey!” Rogers whispered. “How the hell did you manage to get this?”

  “The babe cooperated.”

  “I’ll say she did! But where were you?”

  “Closet. I used that new-type flash the Professor got me. No light, see? When she heard how much she could get out of the deal, she fixed me up. Got ’em all the night before Caldwell told her he was through.”

  “Boy, what a masochist!” Rogers breathed. “Look at those ropes and—”

  Sylvestro’s gargoyle grimace deepened. He beckoned to me. “Care to look?”

  I looked, then hastily turned away. I hoped the Professor wouldn’t see my face. I heard myself saying, “But what are you going to do with this?”

  Jake knew. “We’re going to shake down your pal Caldwell for about fifty G’s, to start with. Either that, or we take these pictures to his wife. And then we get another fifty, with duplicate negatives. And then another—”

  “Never mind.” The Professor silenced Jake and retrieved the photographs. “I think you understand our plan now,” he said. “Jake will go to him later tonight. Come on, gentlemen, let’s be on our way.”

  They filed out—Jake, Rogers, Dr. Sylvestro. I just sat there, waiting. The Professor lingered behind.

  “Well?” he queried.
r />   I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You aren’t going to pull a dirty trick like that! You don’t expect me to take a hand in such a stinking, rotten setup.”

  “Oh yes I do,” smiled the Professor. “And you will.”

  “Count me out.” I stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m phoning Caldwell right now. I’m telling him to have the police there when Jake contacts him. Evidence of blackmail.”

  The Professor was still smiling. “You might also ask them to send a squad around here, then,” he suggested. “For evidence of murder. Don’t forget Mike Drayton, my friend.”

  It should have stopped me, but it didn’t. I kept moving for the phone. “All right, Professor,” I said. “I’ll do just that. I’m beginning to think I deserve a rap for all the dirty things I’ve done lately. And it will be worth it if I can save Caldwell.”

  He was still smiling. “What about saving Ellen?” he murmured.

  That did stop me. “Ellen? What’s she got to do with all this?”

  “Nothing—yet. And she needn’t have, if you agree to be sensible. But remember what I told you the other evening. We could use Ellen Post nicely, in order to get to Leland Post and some big money. For your sake, I agreed to abandon the notion.

  “If you promise to cooperate with Caldwell, I’ll keep my bargain. No frame-up for Ellen Post. But if you don’t, I’ll see to it that she’s the next victim. And you know me well enough to realize I don’t bluff or make idle threats. Go to that telephone now and Ellen Post will pay for it.”

  All the while he was smiling, smiling because he knew he’d win. He was crazy, he was the Devil, but he was no fool.

  I walked over to the sofa and sat down. I put my head in my hands, but there was nowhere to hide.

  “That’s better,” the Professor told me. “Now, tomorrow morning, you can probably expect a visit from Caldwell. Here’s how you handle him—”

  He told me, and I sat there waiting to obey. Then he went away and I continued to sit there, waiting for morning to come.

  The next morning I sat in my office and waited for Caldwell to come. And I handled him.

  “My God, Roberts, say something!”

  Caldwell shook my shoulder. Maybe he just put his hand on me, but he was trembling so that he shook anything he touched.

  “Don’t you understand?” he panted. “This woman—she came back. She wants fifty thousand. She says she’ll go to Marge... And this man has those pictures, he’s in with her—”

  I shrugged his hand off. “I can’t help you. If you’d only taken my advice and broken with her the very day I suggested it, this couldn’t have happened.”

  “I know, I was a fool, a damned fool! But it has happened, and something must be done.” He gulped. “Couldn’t you see her again, talk her out of it?”

  “Please, Ed. Obviously she’s determined. And I can’t afford to get mixed up in anything like this. You understand my position.”

  “But can’t we fix up a trap or something, with the police?”

  “Then they’d see the pictures, wouldn’t they? And Marge would hear the whole story.”

  “God, what can I do? What can I do?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to pay her off.”

  Silence.

  “Look, Roberts, you’re sure there is no other way? I’d make it worth your while.”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “Well, will you come with me tonight when I meet her and that man?”

  I gave him a refrigerated smile. “That would be very unwise. And I’m afraid, until this matter clears up, that we had better not see one another.”

  “But who can I go to now? Who else is there to help me?”

  He waited, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. There was no answer left for him. I could only sit there and watch him cry, watch his jelly-flesh dissolve in his clothes, watch the red hands as they scrabbled and twisted across my desk, endlessly ravelling and unravelling a piece of dirty string. A string saver.

  He got up, finally, and shuffled out. I sat there and kept thinking about that piece of string. Suddenly I knew what was going to happen to Edgar Clinton Caldwell. Tonight he’d pay the fifty thousand. Then, in a few weeks, they’d put the bite on him for another fifty, with the duplicate negatives. And sometime later, they’d be around again for the last fifty. Maybe they’d want him to sell his house, too.

  Somewhere along the line he’d crack. He’d crack and look to a bigger piece of string to save him. Caldwell would end up by hanging himself. I knew it as surely as I knew I was sitting there. He’d follow the unconscious pattern to the end. Once a string saver, always a string saver.

  And it was my responsibility. Oh, he’d be no great loss to the world. He’d done his share of despicable things, and his behavior with Eve England wasn’t pretty. He deserved some punishment.

  But I had no right to do the punishing. Or to execute him. He saved the string, but I’d tie the hangman’s knot. I’d place the noose around his neck; I’d kick the chair away and leave him dangling there, gray jelly quivering on the end of a rope, gray jelly jerking and then the rope cutting into his chin, cutting into his neck and stretching it long and thin. They say, sometimes, when they cut down a corpse, the neck is no bigger around than a child’s wrist—

  Still, it was the lady or the tiger. Ellen or Caldwell. One of them had to go, because the Professor said so. I’d kept my bargain, and now I could go and claim my reward. I could go to Malibu this afternoon.

  I walked out of my office and down the hall. As I passed Rogers’ little cubicle in back, I suddenly remembered the lecture for this week. He’d be finishing it up, now, and I could take it along for study.

  Rogers had his door open. I went in quietly, not wanting to disturb his work. He sat hunched over his desk, going through some papers: pictures and clippings from newspaper files.

  I caught a glimpse of a leonine head and a caption:

  LELAND POST WINS STATE SENATE RACE

  That stopped me.

  Rogers looked up. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, scrabbling his clippings together in a heap. “How’d you make out with the sucker?”

  “He took it all right. He’ll sail for the fifty G’s, I think.”

  “Good.”

  I sat down on the desk, casually, and tried to keep my voice from trembling. “Thought you had my speech. But I see you’re working on something else.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Didn’t the Professor tell you yet? We’re rigging up a frame for this politician, Leland Post. He’s the key to some important dough. You’ll be in on it, of course—guess you know his niece. Well, she’s the key.”

  “So.” I stood up and clenched my hands behind my back, to keep from strangling him. “What’s the setup?”

  “That’s what I’m doping out now. The Professor’ll tell you himself, I suppose.”

  “I suppose.”

  I walked out of the room, somehow, under my own power. I made it through the hall, taking each step slowly. With every step I took, I called myself a new name.

  What a fool I’d been to trust the Professor! Of course he wouldn’t keep his bargain, he had no intention of keeping it. He was out after money and power, and he’d get everything he could. Nothing would stop him. Even while he was playing with me, he’d already set the wheels in motion to take care of Ellen and her uncle.

  And now that I knew, what could I do about it? For the moment, nothing. I’d just have to wait and see how he’d approach me, what he’d say, what the scheme was. Then perhaps I might find a way out. But I doubted it. The Professor never left any holes—with him, there was no way out. Except the way Mike Drayton took, the way Edgar Caldwell would take soon.

  Maybe, some day, I’d be taking that way out, too. Right now, there was only one place for me to go. Malibu.

  Fifteen

  The sun was warm at Malibu, so Ellen and I sat in the shade of the little beach house. Only two days had pas
sed since our meeting in the tavern, but here we sat, and I had my arm around her waist. Just a whirlwind romance. Only there was no whirlwind about it, no romance. We merely sat and talked. We had so much to talk about.

  Fireworks, for example. The way they look to you as a child. Jewels sprayed on blue velvet. That’s what she said.

  “No, my dear, children don’t think that way,” I told her. “Try hard to remember, now. You’re seven. You’re standing on the top of the bluff, at the park, looking up at the sky. You sense the puff from the ground, hear the swish. You try to decide where the burst will emerge, guessing with your eyes. Then it comes. The arcs shoot out. And something inside your throat moves with them, your mouth opens, and you go—”

  “Oooooh!” She squealed. “Of course, I remember, now!”

  I faced her. “I’d like to ask you a very personal question, if you don’t mind.”

  “What is it?”

  “Did you ever experience the supreme thrill, the ultimate attainment—of riding on a merry-go-round twice in a row?”

  “Three times.”

  “Now you’re bragging.”

  “Dad took me. And he used to give me money for the movies, on Saturday. Eleven cents. Ten for admission and a penny for—”

  “Gum?”

  “Yes, or licorice whips, or suckers. But sometimes I got a chocolate mint, because if you picked out one with a pink center you won a free candy bar.”

  She sighed. “It’s all so far away, so long ago. But sometimes I wish I could—”

  “No you don’t,” I said. “You don’t want to go back. You like it right here.”

  “What about you?”

  “Guess?” I squeezed her in the most convenient place. “I don’t want to stir. Maybe you are right, at that. There isn’t much fun any more because there’s no sense of personal participation left. In order to have fun nowadays, a kid pushes a button or twists a dial or drops a nickel in a slot. And his fun-integer is noise. Noise from TV programs. Noise from jukeboxes. Noise from portable radios, carried into the woods on picnics, carried down here to the beach, carried into the country to provide a constant background of mechanical voices frantically commanding the purchase of deodorants. I used to be a part of it myself, heaven pity me.”