Crime on My Hands by George Sanders

cameramen, make-up artists, dress designers, and the rest, as a Good Kid. A girl with a sense of fun, who occasionally thought of weird and hilarious practical jokes. She didn’t fit into this new siren role at all.
    Because it was definitely a role, and she was proving to be a definitely bad off-stage actress.
    Why? Why was she deliberately taking on that role?
    What had she been doing in Severance Flynne’s room? What was the business of the fingerprints?
    Why had she showed up here, slipping through the dark to my door?
    I had to shrug off the questions, for I heard somebody else coming through the dark to my door. Somebody else? How did I know? It might be Wanda again. I had a sudden, depressing picture of her constantly arriving, bathed in the brilliance of my searchlight. I sighed and picked up my gun.
    The light switched on, and Listless Nelson shielded her eyes with a furred arm. She was dressed for a hard winter in what might have been dyed lemming, and a pair of denim slacks.
    I fixed the lights. “Come in,” I said wearily. “I don’t want to seem inhospitable, but I want to know why you’re here, and why you enter uninvited.”
    She wasn’t embarrassed. She wasn’t brazen. She was just terribly earnest. “I’ve got to talk to somebody,” she whispered.
    â€œYou could go on the radio,” I said. “Listen, Miss Nelson, I warn you that you’ll get into serious difficulties if you don’t give me some answers. Where were you when Flynne was killed?”
    Her eyes widened. “Why, I was watching Sammy telling everybody how to do right.” Her eyes became softly blue. “Gee, he’s swell.”
    I looked at a spot just over her head for a moment. If she had been watching Sammy, and if Sammy was behind the cameras, what else did she see? According to such evidence as I had, the shot had come from near – or in line with – the first camera. I tried to put myself in a position that might correspond to hers. There would have been Riegleman, Sammy, the script girl, the cameraman, in one group. Then the boom crew and the technicians scattered around in the foreground. She would have had almost all of the possible suspects in sight.
    â€œMiss Nelson,” I said. “How is your memory?”
    â€œI won a prize in reciting, in seventh grade. But I don’t think Sammy would be interested.”
    â€œI might be,” I said. “Try to pretend you’re back on the set today when Severance Flynne was shot. Try to remember if you noticed anything that seemed unusual.”
    She didn’t understand. She stared blankly from enormous blue eyes.
    I explained. “I’ll stake my shirt that nobody in the scene killed him, Miss Nelson. The psychology is all wrong. If I’m correct, then someone behind the camera shot him, and behind the first camera, at that. So we know the approximate location from which the shot was fired. If you were watching Sammy, you had a large group under observation. Did any of that group do anything out of character?”
    â€œI don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “I didn’t pay any attention to anybody but Sammy. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
    A sudden thought struck me. Maybe Sammy had done something unusual. Perhaps that was what she was trying to tell me.
    â€œYes,” I said softly. “Tell me.”
    â€œWell, uh, my mother told me about him when I told her he had come to work on our lot. Mother said she saw him when he was a boy, dancing. And she said he was like a bird. That’s what she always said, a bird. Sometimes she said a hummingbird, but mostly just any old bird. And I couldn’t see how, Mr. Sanders. He’s so fat, and all. But mother talked a lot about him, and I started watching him when I could, and you know he sort of walks graceful. Like he didn’t have any body, sort of. And then I accidentally waited