Gun in Cheek Read Free Page B

Artie; so do his drunken wife, his well-endowed mistress, and his two "scrip'" writers. And so does Woolrich, who has a professed fondness for fine art. Of course, Tony also has a fondness for such fine art as one of the actresses, Sara, and is too busily engaged in making a play for her to worry about somebody knocking off Artie.
    (You should not get the impression, however, that Tony is a playboy. Nor should you get the impression that he is suave, sophisticated, or has a scintillating wit. The best word to describe him might be "virginal." He blushes quite a bit, particularly when someone makes a sexual reference, and says things like "the moon fell on my head and burst into a million rose-colored bubbles" after an evening with Sara.)
    Comes the night of the big broadcast. Artie's role in Cyrano has been completely rewritten to include plenty of boffo laughs and "Wanna woo-woos?" The audience, we are told, topples out of its collective seat and rolls in the aisle. The cast grimaces. Woolrich grimaces. Then, near the climax, Artie grabs the microphone in both hands, gives Sara a magnificent leer, and says his most obscene "Wanna woo-woo?" ever. Whereupon he falls down dead. No fanfare, no histrionics. He simply says "Wanna WOO-woo?" and falls down dead.
    Joe Holden, of the "downtown Homicide Squad," is called in. A preliminary examination of the body reveals no marks or signs of violence; could Artie have succumbed to a heart attack? Joe, who has the IQ of a house plant, conducts a superficial investigation, becomes frustrated, and turns to Woolrich for assistance; it seems he is in awe of Tony's AD abilities, having worked with him once before on a case. He asks the county sheriff to swear Woolrich in as a special deputy, complete with badge and gun and a salary of ten dollars a day.
    Tony is overwhelmed by this. "Imagine," he says, "an undercover deputy at my age? It's like a bad B picture!"
    Yes, indeed.
    Joe and Tony do a considerable amount of running around, questioning and also bantering with suspects. Raison's long suit is sparkling repartee, as may be seen from the following two examples:
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"Been having your tea-leaves read?" asked Tony.
"No. I guess I've had my intuition simonized."
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"I've been wondering about you, Joe."
"Well, here I am, sister. If they kick me off the force, maybe you can make me a radio writer."
"Radio writers are not made; they're unearthed," she answered.
"You're a pretty good-looking corpse yourself, Betty," said Joe.
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    What seems like a long time later, inspiration strikes Tony. Despite the fact that the coroner has carved up Artie's remains and discovered no internal evidence of violence, Tony is convinced Artie was murdered. And he knows who did it and how it was done! He does some checking at the studio where Cyrano was broadcast, after which he has all the suspects assembled there in traditional AD fashion.   Then he beings his reconstruction of the crime.
    The killer, who turns out to be one of Artie's writers, a man who "had obviously overeaten since leaving the Navy, for his stomach bulged suddenly," happens to have had electrical training from Uncle Sam during the war. After deciding to murder Artie—Artie had been having a secret affair with the writer's wife—he rigged an "electric ear": an electromagnetic relay connected to a "hot" 220-volt circuit attached to the base of Artie's microphone. This relay was activated by a photocell designed to respond to Artie's speech pattern when the comic spoke a specific phrase. As the culprit explains:
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"In order for Artie to kill himself . . . he had to grab both the mike and the stand to complete the circuit the moment he said 'Wanna woo-woo?' Well, there wasn't much chance that Artie wouldn't do that. It was part of the act. I was really playing safe because I knew that he would at least once—in the many times he said that poisonous gag—say it at the precise moment he grabbed the mike and stand and