“If you pull that trigger, someone will hear the shot,” Irene said.
“I doubt it,” Claudia said. She stepped over Henry’s unmoving body. “This villa is quite secluded. Everyone knows that Oliver Ward likes his privacy. Even if someone did hear a shot, it would probably be dismissed as a backfire. No one expects to hear gunshots in a classy place like the Burning Cove Hotel. But I didn’t come here to kill you, Irene.”
“For some reason I don’t believe you. I’m afraid you’re a rather poor actress, Claudia.”
“You think you know everything, don’t you? I just want to talk to you. Turn around. Let’s go into the living room. We’re going to have a chat like two normal people.”
Irene did not move. “As far as I can tell, there’s not much normal about you, Claudia. Lucky for you, Henry Oakes came along, right? What would you have done with the guard at the front door?”
“He wouldn’t have been a problem. I would have handled him the same way I did Henry Oakes.”
Out of nowhere, Irene remembered the advice that Oliver had given to the carful of young people who came across them at the secluded beach. Never turn your back on the ocean. It will take you by surprise every time.
Claudia was like the wild surf at the foot of the cliffs, she thought, filled with treacherous currents. Her victims had all been struck from behind. Perhaps she had a problem with looking them in the eye. Or maybe she simply couldn’t come up with another way to commit murder. According to Oliver, most tricks were simple enough. The hard part was figuring out a new way to create the same illusion.
Cautiously, Irene retreated backward into the living room, never turning her back to Claudia.
“I said, turn around,” Claudia said.
“We both know I can’t do that,” Irene said, gentling her tone. “Not until you tell me what you came here to say. You want me to know your side of the story, don’t you?”
She halted next to Oliver’s big, thickly cushioned reading chair, vaguely surprised to realize that she was still clutching her handbag.
Claudia stopped at the edge of the living room, several feet away.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “I came here to explain things before anyone else gets hurt.”
“I see. How many people, exactly, have been hurt so far?”
Seething anger flashed in Claudia’s eyes, burning away all traces of nervy anxiety. She drew visible strength from the maelstrom.
“I didn’t have any choice,” she said.
Oliver had also mentioned the virtues of misdirection, Irene thought. She had to find a way to keep Claudia talking.
“I assume that not all the films you and your friends made in Seattle were destroyed in the fire at that little movie studio,” she said.
“Betty told us that they were all gone but she lied. She saved the two that Nick made, Island Nights and Pirate’s Captive.”
“Who burned down the studio?”
“That was Betty. She was in love with Nick, you see. He was plain Archie Guthrie in those days. But after he told her that he was going to Hollywood with me, she was furious. She knew that if Archie made it big, those films would make excellent blackmail material.”
“She murdered the man who made those films and the other actor.”
“I honestly don’t know if she intended for that creepy director and Ralph to die in the fire. But they were both there that night, probably passed out. They were heroin addicts.”
“When did you learn that Betty had stolen the two pornographic films?” Irene asked.
“She made her demands right after the release of Nick’s first film, Sea of Shadows. She telephoned him anonymously and told him how much she wanted. Nick panicked. He planned to go straight to Ernie Ogden. But I knew that would be a disaster. Nick was clearly an up-and-coming actor but he wasn’t a real star, not yet. I was sure the studio would drop him rather than pay blackmail. So I told Nick that I would take care of everything.”
“He believed you?”
“Of course.” Claudia smiled. “He needs me and he knows it. I’m the one who slept with three different directors in order to get him his first screen test. I’m the one who came up with the name Nick Tremayne. I’m the one who read his lines with him. I’m the one who worked the lunch counter at Woolworth’s and picked up traveling businessmen in bars in order to pay the rent. I did it so that Nick could focus on his acting.”
“How did you land the job as his personal assistant?”
“It was obvious after the release of Sea of Shadows that women loved Nick Tremayne. The studio publicist wanted Nick to get single in a hurry. Better for his image, they said. They told him that he had to get divorced.”
The penny dropped.
“You and Nick Tremayne were married?” Irene asked.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“No,” Irene said. “No, it’s all starting to make a lot more sense.”
“The studio said they would pay for me to spend six weeks in Reno at a divorce ranch. For a pitiful amount of money, I was supposed to disappear.”
“They paid you to get the divorce?”
“Not nearly enough to make up for what I would lose in the long run. Not enough to compensate me for the sacrifices I had made. I knew that, unless Nick made some huge mistake, in a few years he would be worth millions. As his wife, I would have gotten a share of the money.”
“But as his ex, you’d wind up with nothing.”
“It wasn’t fair,” Claudia said. “Nick pleaded with me to get the divorce. They were threatening to cancel his contract if I didn’t. I finally told him that I would get the divorce but in exchange he had to find a way to let me stay close to him. I reminded him that I was his best friend. I told him that now that he was becoming famous, the only person he could ever really trust was someone who had been his friend and his lover from the old days.”
“He loved you?”
Claudia snorted. “Archie has never loved anyone but himself. But he knew that he owed me so he convinced the studio to hire me as his personal assistant. They agreed. All they cared about was that Nick Tremayne was single.”
“So you went to Reno, got the divorce, changed your name, and became Nick Tremayne’s personal assistant.”
“Just another Hollywood story,” Claudia said. “But then the blackmail started.”
“How did you figure out that Betty Scott was the extortionist?”
“That wasn’t hard. By then the director and Ralph were both dead. There was no one else who would have had access to those two films. It was obvious that Betty was the one who had possession of Island Nights and Pirate’s Captive.”
“So you decided to get rid of Betty Scott.”
“I told her that I would bring the money to her. I took the train to Seattle. We arranged to meet at the boardinghouse on a night when everyone else was out partying. I went upstairs to her room. She came out into the hall. When she realized I hadn’t brought the cash with me, she was furious. I tried to reason with her. I told her that we could both make a lot of money if we just waited until Nick was a bigger star. She laughed in my face. She said that she’d rather have a bird in the hand.”
“That’s when you killed her?”
“The bitch called me a failed actress.” Claudia’s voice rose in fury. “When she turned around to go into her room, I grabbed the big flower vase off a table and I hit her.”
“Betty Scott was found in the bathtub.”
“It wasn’t easy getting her into the tub, believe me.”
“What about the films?”
“Afterward I searched her room and found the two cans of film.” Claudia got herself back under control. “I now possess the negatives of each of Nick Tremayne’s pornographic films. They’re dynamite because they both feature Nick Tremayne having sex with Ralph.”
“That would be guaranteed to kill Tremayne’s career.”
“Definitely,” Claudia said. “But timing is everything. A year from now when Nick is the next Clark Gable those old films will be worth a fortune. The studio will pay whatever it takes to get ahold of the negatives.”
Irene managed to get her handbag open behind the chair. She reached inside. Her fingers closed around the small gun.
“Blackmailing a major film studio will be a very dangerous proposition,” she said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Claudia said. “I plan to disappear before I go into business.”
“Does Archie—Nick Tremayne—believe that Betty’s death was an accident?”
“He did at the time. He wanted to believe it, you see. But now I think he’s starting to wonder. Sometimes he looks at me as if he’s no longer sure he can trust me. That other reporter from Whispers is the one who put the doubts in his mind.”
“You murdered Peggy Hackett because she was closing in on the story about the pornographic films, didn’t you?”
“I had to get rid of her. I broke into her house and waited for her upstairs in a hall closet. I couldn’t believe my luck when she had a couple of martinis and then decided to take a bath.”
“The fireplace poker was missing. That’s what you used to kill her.”
“She heard me at the very last instant but by then it was too late.”
“Why did you murder Gloria Maitland?”
“She got too close to Nick,” Claudia said. “They had an affair. He got drunk and made the mistake of telling her about those early films. After he dumped her, she started hounding him. Ogden paid her to go away but she didn’t.”
“Why did she follow Nick to Burning Cove?”
“She told Nick she would give him one last chance to resume their affair. They quarreled.”
“That was the fight that the hotel housekeeper witnessed.”
“Nick has a temper. He lost it and told Gloria he never wanted to see her again. I kept an eye on her. No one ever notices the star’s personal assistant. The next night she spent the evening drinking alone in the lounge. That wasn’t like her. Gloria liked to have people around. When she left, I followed her. When she went into the spa, I knew something was up. I confronted her. She laughed at me. Told me that you would be there any minute. She said that if I came up with more money than Whispers, she’d keep quiet.”
“What did you use to hit her?”
“A rock from the garden,” Claudia said.
“You shoved her into the water to drown, and then you tried to murder me.”
“I didn’t know how much you knew at that point or what you’d seen. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. When you escaped, I got scared. The next morning the story of Gloria Maitland’s drowning was on the front page of Whispers and you had implicated Archie. Ogden called, demanding to know what was going on.”
“You knew you had lost control of the situation. Ernie Ogden took over. He sent someone to search my apartment. He got me evicted. He even got me fired.”
“That should have been enough to silence you but you didn’t go away,” Claudia said. “Ogden said there was no need to worry but I knew he was wrong.”
“So you cooked up the scheme to make me disappear in a fire. Was Ogden in on that plan?”
“No. He had no way of knowing how high the stakes were, you see. He thought that with you off the Gloria Maitland story, everything was under control. But I knew you weren’t going to stop.”
“You were afraid that eventually I’d make the connections between the murders and those two early pornographic films. You used poor Daisy Jennings to lure me to that warehouse. You killed her. If Ernie Ogden wasn’t involved, how did you arrange to send Springer and Dallas to set the fire?”
“It’s no secret at the studio that Ogden uses Hollywood Mack when he wants some muscle work done. I made the call to Mack. Told him that Mr. Ogden wanted Springer and Dallas to throw a real scare into a nosy reporter. I told him I knew exactly where you would be that night and that Mr. Ogden wanted the warehouse set on fire.”
“But you weren’t going to take any chances, were you?” Irene said. “You were going to make sure I was dead first.”
“I waited for you in the old boathouse. But everything went wrong.”
“Because Oliver Ward showed up first and you knew that he was probably armed.”
“I realized that if he had accompanied you, he suspected a trap. So I stayed out of sight and waited for Springer and Dallas to arrive. I hoped that I’d get lucky and that you and Ward would both die in the fire.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“Things kept going wrong.” Claudia’s voice climbed in an unstable wail of frustration and rage.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Irene said. “You murdered Betty Scott at the start and then you killed three more people to cover up your crime. I think that’s all I need to write my story. You’re going to make headlines in the morning, Claudia Picton. Congratulations.”
“Shut up.” Claudia made a jerky motion with the gun. “Outside. Move.”
Irene glanced at the crowbar in Claudia’s hand. “Are you planning to bash me over the head and dump me in the lap pool? You have got to be kidding me. How will you explain poor Henry Oakes’s death?”
Claudia smiled. “You’ve got it all wrong. Again. Everyone will think this is Henry Oakes’s gun. They’ll assume that he’s the one who shot you. And then he will put the gun to his own head. It will turn out that all the murders were committed by a crazed fan.”
“You’re finally going to rewrite the murder scene.”
“This is the last scene. It needs to be different.”
Irene looked past Claudia toward the front door. “Heard enough, Detective?”
Claudia did not bother to glance over her shoulder.
“Do you think I’m dumb enough to fall for that trick?” she asked.
“It was worth a try.”
“Move.”
“So you can shoot me in the back? You really have an issue with doing this sort of thing face-to-face, don’t you?”
“I said, turn around. Outside. Now.”
“I get it; you’re planning to shoot me but you still want to finish me off in the pool. Tell me, why do you like to use water? Was it because that was how you staged the first murder? Or does it have some other significance?”
“Turn around, damn you.”
Claudia was shaking with rage now. The gun wobbled.
Irene obediently started to turn as though she was about to walk out onto the patio.
She yanked Helen’s gun out of her handbag and dropped to the floor behind the chair.
“Get up,” Claudia screeched.
Irene leaned around the side of the chair, revealing the gun in her hand.
“Get out of this house,” she said. “Run while you can.”
The sight of the weapon seemed to transfix Claudia. She stared at it, horrified.
“Drop it or I swear I’ll shoot,” Irene said, keeping the heavy chair between herself and Claudia. “You’ll probably get a shot off, but it will most likely hit the chair. I can’t miss. Not at this range.”
“No,” Claudia whispered. “No, damn you.”
She reeled backward, simultaneously squeezing the trigger.
Her gun roared. The sound was deafening but Irene realized in a rather vague way that she wasn’t dead. The bullet had plowed into the heavily padded back of the chair. Evidently Claudia hadn’t had much experience with guns, either.
Irene leaned around the chair again and pulled the trigger of Helen’s gun, not bothering to aim, just trying to scare the daylights out of Claudia.
There was an audible click. Nothing happened.
Jammed, she thought, or something. She didn’t know enough about guns to even begin to guess what had gone wrong. A fine time for Oliver to be proved right about the unreliability of firearms.
She had nothing left to lose now. Damned if she would stay where she was, cowering behind the reading chair while she waited for Claudia to put a bullet in her head. She would rather go down fighting.
She leaped to her feet and hurled the useless gun at Claudia, who instinctively ducked and retreated again. This time she stumbled against Henry Oakes’s inert body. She nearly lost her balance.
Irene grabbed the fireplace poker out of the iron stand, jumped to her feet, and charged.
It was the last thing Claudia was expecting.
Confused and disoriented, she stumbled again and looked down, trying to find a way to get past Henry Oakes’s body. She seemed transfixed by the sight of the madwoman closing in on her with the heavy poker. Maybe she was recalling the occasions when she had used a similarly lethal object to knock her victims unconscious before drowning them. Maybe she simply panicked.
Whatever the case, she scrambled backward—and came up hard against the liquor cabinet. She squeezed the trigger convulsively but she was too panic-stricken to even try to aim. Her gun roared again but the bullet plowed into the ceiling.
Irene held the poker like a sword and drove straight for Claudia’s midsection.
Claudia reeled to the side in a desperate effort to avoid the poker. She stumbled and went down. The gun fell from her hand. Irene turned aside long enough to kick the weapon across the tiled floor, out of Claudia’s reach.
Gripping the poker in both hands, she stood over Claudia.
“Move and I’ll smash your head just like you crushed Peggy’s head,” Irene said.
Crouched on the floor, Claudia stared up at her. “You’re crazy.”
“Right now? Definitely.”
The front door slammed open.
“Nobody moves,” Oliver thundered in a voice that had once electrified audiences.
Irene and Claudia went utterly still for a beat. Then they both looked at Oliver. He had a gun in his hand.
“You can put that poker down now, Irene,” he said.
She took a couple of steps away from Claudia. She was breathing hard.
“She murdered Peggy,” she said. “She killed all of them.”
“I understand,” Oliver said. “But she won’t kill again. You can put the poker down.”
Irene focused on the poker. She realized she still had a death grip on it. She took another deep breath.
“All right,” she said. She set the poker down with great care. “The guard. I think Henry Oakes did something to him. Oakes said something about the gardening shed.”
Another guard showed up at the door. He was red-faced from running. He looked at Oliver for direction.
“Find Randy Seaton,” Oliver said. “He may be hurt. Search the gardening shed first.”
“Yes, sir.”
The guard raced off.
Irene went to Henry Oakes. She put two fingers to his throat. And nearly collapsed with relief when she found a pulse.
“He’s alive,” she whispered.
“Get the gun, Chester,” Oliver said quietly when his uncle appeared behind him. “Use a handkerchief. There will be fingerprints.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Chester muttered.
He whipped a handkerchief out of his overalls and moved to scoop up the weapon.
Another voice spoke from the front doorway.
“What’s going on here?” Nick Tremayne said. He took two steps into the room and stopped short. “Claudia? What have you done?”
Oliver looked at him. “The more interesting question at the moment is, what are you doing here?”
Nick switched his attention to Irene. He looked stunned. Probably sees his career going up in flames, she thought.
“I couldn’t find her,” he explained in a dull, defeated voice. “No one seemed to know where she was. That’s not like her. She usually sticks to her routine. I went to the front desk and asked if they had seen her. They said no. But the hotel operator said that Claudia had recently taken a telephone call from Seattle. That didn’t make sense. I got a bad feeling.”
“So you came here?” Oliver said.
Nick groaned. “Yeah. I was afraid she might have decided to confront Miss Glasson. Maybe do something terrible.”
The red-faced guard reappeared in the doorway. He was panting now.
“Found Randy,” he gasped. “He’s tied up in the shed but he’s not hurt. Kind of sick, though. Says a workman showed up saying he had been sent to fix a plumbing problem. Randy was suspicious. He started to turn around to knock on the door to see if anyone had called a plumber, and that’s the last thing he remembers.”
“Go take care of him,” Oliver said.
“No,” Claudia shrieked. She scrambled to her feet. “It doesn’t end this way. Not after all I’ve done.”
“You’re wrong,” Irene said. “It does end this way. And it ends now.”
Claudia burst into tears. She turned to Nick, pleading now. “You need me, Archie. We’re a team. The studio knows that. The studio will protect me.”
“No,” Oliver said. “The studio won’t protect you. You’re not the star. You’re just Nick Tremayne’s personal assistant. You can be replaced.”
Claudia succumbed to another round of tears. No one offered comfort.
Oliver looked at Irene. His usually unreadable eyes were intense with some fierce emotion.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But I will be just as soon as I get to a typewriter.”