Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You should open with that next time you see her. It’s better than candy and flowers.”

  “Okay, we’re even.” Valentino left the Beverly Hills city limits, and with them that subject. “What do you think of the skeleton in my closet?”

  “Nothing I hadn’t seen before. I took a shortcut through the Roman catacombs on my way to Quo Vadis.”

  “I mean the murder. If that’s what it was.”

  “If you’re worried about the Big Red Dog, don’t. The pressure to solve a crime more than four decades old ranks right up there with our obligation to restore Francis the Talking Mule. The TV morons will stop playing it up the minute some former kid actor gets arrested for beating up a transvestite, and the cops will move on.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about. Well, I am, but that’s not why I brought it up. It’s an occupational hazard, I guess. There’s a fine line between scrounging up ten feet of early D. W. Griffith and sleuthing out a felon.”

  “You’ve fallen victim to your own PR. I told you I disapproved of putting that film detective tag on your business cards. I bet you got that from Anklemire.”

  “Guilty. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. Archivist doesn’t open many doors.”

  “Speaking of doors, you’re about to drive past the one to our place of business.”

  Valentino signaled and turned abruptly into the North Campus entrance. The monster Hummer behind him screeched its brakes and blared its horn.

  “Bummer,” Broadhead said. “Now we’ve made an enemy of Governor Schwarzenegger.”

  The gray-haired parking attendant glared through his bifocals at Valentino. “Who’re you now, Ramón Novarro?”

  “I haven’t been home to pick up my parking pass,” Valentino said. “Mea culpa.”

  “I guess you Hollywood libs think that’s funny.” The attendant raised the gate. “My sister’s a nun, and my boy’s at the seminary.”

  “Sorry.” Valentino drove through.

  “First the cops, now God,” Broadhead said. “Man, you’re screwed.”

  “Don’t you have a parking pass?”

  “Our beloved department head got it revoked. He’s got a lease on an SUV the size of Sacramento and I drive a nifty little hybrid that gets a hundred and sixty miles to the gallon. He thinks I wrote in Stalin in the last presidential election. There’s a spot, next to that midlife-crisis Corvette.”

  They parked. Valentino said, “We can’t carry more than twenty cans between us. We’ll have to make two trips.”

  “Why take chances with our creaky knees when burly undergrads come twenty cents a pound? We’ll come back with two of them and a couple of cartons from Office Max.”

  “That’s like transporting the relics of a saint in a White Castle sack.”

  The professor shook his big shaggy head. “You’re too reverent, like our friend in the parking booth. I earned my first dollar in this profession pedaling reels of Wings between Toledo and Sylvania, Ohio, on a bicycle. I logged a hundred miles a night between showings.”

  “How old are you, Kyle?”

  “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. This university has a mandatory retirement policy. I don’t play golf, and fishing bores me till I bleed.”

  “It wouldn’t be that much of a culture shock. You don’t teach more than four hours a year.”

  “Those four hours entitle me to use the film library and reference sources, which is what I do with the rest of my time. I’m writing a book at last.”

  “You wrote a book. The Persistence of Vision.” He wondered, with a prick of apprehension, if his friend’s memory had begun to fail. Even the most impressive and efficient machinery broke down with time. He opened his window, letting oxygen into the stuffy car.

  “That was a coffee-table decoration. I was a sprout in my fifties when I threw it together, blathering on for page after page about material I’d never seen because it had been dead or buried for a generation. Speculation and hearsay, the coronary and cancer of serious scholarship.” He sighed bearishly. “I wish flashbacks existed offscreen. I’d revisit that benighted period and horsewhip myself. Next best thing is to prepare a second edition; denounce my adolescent exhalations and set the record straight based on what’s come to light since sliced bread. It’s almost finished.”

  “When do you write? You come in early, go home late, and I never see you at your computer or even scribbling on a piece of paper.”

  “It’s all here.” Broadhead tapped his bulbous brow. “The rest is scutwork.”

  “The scutwork is what takes most of the time. What about notes?”

  “Scratch, scratch, scratch. These old knuckles are too stiff. But my cerebral cortex is covered with shorthand.”

  “But what if you don’t live long enough to share it?”

  “I am sharing it.” He reached across the console and patted Valentino’s knee. “Let’s go find those undergrads before that stuff in the trunk reaches the third stage of decomposition.”

  “What if it has already?”

  “Then we have all the time in the world. Unless, of course, it blows up.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  “HERR VALENTINO, YOU have had your rest, ja?”

  He started awake; he thought. Afterward he wasn’t sure. A swatch of moonlight lay on the bedroom carpet like a gauntlet flung to the floor. A dark figure stood in the shadows to one side of the window.

  Valentino’s heart flopped over. Had he locked his door?

  “You will save mein Kindling, ja? I am counting on you.”

  The intruder’s guttural accent—his “will” sounded like vill, his “save” like safe—was as hard to follow as his German. The man in the bed had the wild thought that his apartment had been broken into by a neo-Nazi skinhead. All kinds of fanatic roamed the streets of Century City late at night, along with garden-variety burglars and gangbangers off their turf.

  “My wallet’s on the bureau.” His voice wobbled. “There’s some video equipment in the living room. Please take them and go.”

  A bitter laugh escaped the shape in the shadows. It chilled the listener with its mercilessness and strange familiarity. He recognized it but couldn’t place it.

  “What do I want with your trinkets and money? I spent more than you earn in a month on one dinner at the Trocadero. I want mein Kindling.”

  Vot do I vant; it was maddening, that voice, so well known and yet just outside the grasp of memory, like a character actor in an old movie. That sparked a flash, but it faded before he could bring it into focus.

  The Cafe Trocadero had been gone fifty years, along with most of the stars, directors, and cigar-chomping moguls who had dined there. Mein Kindling? He scrambled to remember his high-school German. My child, my beloved child.

  “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Another Valentino.” It sounded weirdly comical, even to him. He’d begun to believe he was dreaming. He’d fallen asleep straightaway after the long day of investment, discovery, elation, shock, and guilt.

  “Du lieber Gott!” roared the stranger. He stamped his feet twice in a goose step, thrusting himself into the shaft of cold light and halting with a click of his heels like a pistol shot.

  Valentino’s breath caught. The man was dressed head to toe in the uniform of an imperial Austrian officer. A visored cap perched at an arrogant angle above his shaved temples, his white tunic was buttoned to his throat and spangled with medals, and riding breeches were stuffed into the tops of gleaming black knee-length boots. In one hand he held a pair of gloves, in the other a leather riding crop, its braided-thong handle resting against one shoulder like an army rifle. A monocle glittered in one eye and a cigarette smoldered in a long holder clamped between his teeth.

  Erich von Stroheim. Foolish Wives, 1922; one of his frequent turns in front of his own cameras. It came to Valentino as clearly as if he were looking at a black-and-white publicity still.

  In the brief silence, he felt his
heart rate slowing. His fear lapsed into annoyance. Not a ghost or even a dream, but a practical joke, and he recognized the hand that had fashioned it. So they hadn’t been even after all.

  “Nice costume,” he said. “Tell Kyle you accomplished your mission. Where’d he reach you, through your booking—”

  “Silence!” The riding crop whistled through the air and struck one of the shining boots with a crack. “You will save it, or I will see that you never work in this town again.”

  Valentino forced himself to meet the iron gaze. A nerve twitched in a closely shaven cheek, branded by a thin white cicatrix like a Heidelberg dueling scar. It seemed to him the monocle had misted.

  A bell rang. Von Stroheim looked up as if he’d heard an air-raid siren—then vanished. The shaft of moonlight fell uninterrupted to the carpet.

  The noise continued, a harsh insistent sound, more buzzer than bell. Valentino sat up as if jerked by a wire. Sunlight filled the room. He reached over and smacked the button on his alarm clock. The buzzing stopped. The digital face read 7:31. Time to get up.

  He put on his robe and prowled the bedroom, looking for wires and projection equipment, not yet prepared to believe he’d dreamt the encounter. He hadn’t had so vivid a nightmare since the night his mother had taken him to see Alien (Rated R; what could she have been thinking?) and he’d awakened screaming, certain a hideous extraterrestial beast had erupted from his abdomen.

  There was no sign of a prank, high-tech or otherwise, there or in the living room, dominated by a forty-eight-inch rear-projection television, VCR/DVD combo, surround-sound tuner, and speakers. An unexpected bonus from his department head for his part in recovering the lost courtship footage from the 1954 version of A Star Is Born had started him thinking of getting a flat-screen TV, or even installing a digital projector and state-of-the-art screen, but then his landlord had told him he was raising the rent after Valentino’s lease ran out in December. That was what had set him on the house hunt.

  Well, if anything could fill a man’s head with startling images, the decision to commit to a white elephant in West Hollywood and the simultaneous discovery of both a legendary lost masterpiece and mysterious human remains more than qualified. “Mein Kindling” was, of course, the late director’s brainchild, butchered and cast aside by the studio. Rescuing it from destruction had been uppermost on Valentino’s mind when he went to bed. It would have been unusual not to have conjured up something weird in his sleep.

  Thirty minutes later, bathed, shaved, and dressed in California casual, he left for work. By the time he’d stopped for his morning jolt of Starbucks, the ghost of Erich von Stroheim had vanished from his thoughts nearly as thoroughly as it had from his bedroom.

  “God, I love foul play!”

  Henry Anklemire leaped up from behind his desk next to the boiler room in the basement of the administration building. The assistant director of Information Services was an evil cherub in one of the toupees he bought from Nicolas Cage’s hairdresser when the star was through with them and a checked suit (size portly), polka-dot tie, and striped shirt that made a cataclysmic statement his visitor thought could not have been coincidental. His face glowed as from a strong shot of whiskey.

  “We’ll just keep that between ourselves,” Valentino said. “My department head thinks Sherlock Holmes was a sociopath. He prefers things orderly and without mayhem.”

  “I know from bosses.” The little flack twirled a finger beside his temple. “Meshuggener, and besides that depressing to be around. I could’ve had a nice comfortable space down the hall from the director’s, with a window yet. I said, no thanks, I’ll curl up down here with the rats and spiders. All those downer vibes can crush a man’s spree de corpse.”

  “I heard that was the director’s decision.”

  “Who cares where an idea came from if it’s good?” Anklemire was on a roll. “Murder and malice, yum. Look at Marilyn Monroe; not one-tenth the talent of Judy Holliday, but she had the good sense to get herself killed by the Kennedys. You ever see Judy Holliday on a T-shirt?”

  “There’s some question about whether she was murdered, and whether the Kennedys were involved. And you wouldn’t know Judy Holliday from Doc Holliday if I hadn’t forced you to watch Born Yesterday on DVD.”

  The little man was younger than he looked. Male-pattern baldness and a high-pressure career on Madison Avenue had aged his appearance, but the spring mechanism that propelled his thoughts and actions remained intact. Retired in his thirties on a medical disability (pernicious hemorrhoids; although Kyle Broadhead insisted the surgeons had kept the hemorrhoid and thrown away the patient), he had offered his marketing savvy to the university on condition that his salary wouldn’t threaten his Social Security benefits. The director of Information Services had assured him that low pay was no obstacle to his employment.

  Broadhead wasn’t alone in his opinion of Anklemire. Most of the administration and faculty loathed him for the very reasons Valentino liked him. He was an aggressive promoter who knew the common denominator that shook loose money from every area of society, and he had no patience for questions of propriety or prestige. Give him a salable commodity and he’d sell it. Give him a dead dog with live fleas, and he’d sell that too. He knew nothing about movies or their history, but he knew how to turn silver nitrate into gold.

  “Born Yesterday. Great flick. They ought to colorize it. What you want to do, you want to send the picture—what’s it called again?”

  “Greed. But that’s not what I—”

  “I like it. One-word titles pop: Porky’s, Rambo, Caddyshack. Big-time boffo box office. And when you stick a Roman numeral on the end: Kaboom! Blockbuster. Any chance of a sequel?”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “Well, you can’t always get cream cheese with your bagel. You want to send the picture on tour, book all the revival houses, pass the hat for donations. Then you bring it out on disc. This outfit sure can use the cash.” He raised his voice above the banging of the water pipes next door. “What we do to get them in is play up the murder mystery angle. Dust off some retired forensics geek to C.G. what Mr. Bones might’ve looked like when he was walking around, air it on America’s Most Wanted. Make sure Greed gets a mention, run a thirty-second clip. See the movie, catch a killer, get a reward. Can’t miss.”

  “We may have found a great film that’s been missing for eighty years. Isn’t that worth anything?”

  Anklemire exposed gold teeth in a yawn. “Strictly third paragraph. Below the fold and after the sports and weather. Nobody cares.”

  “Nobody but the people you and I work for.” But he didn’t argue. The assistant director’s opinion sadly reflected the majority’s. “If it turns out to be Greed, I’ll come back for this lecture. What I need is to spin the situation so the LAPD doesn’t seize the film for evidence before we can strike off a safety print.”

  “Who’s the cop?”

  “Sergeant Clifford, with West Hollywood. I don’t know her first name.”

  “A broad. Why’n’t you say so in the first place? Send her flowers.”

  “That’s the dumbest, most offensive thing I’ve—”

  “Relax, Doc. I was speaking metaphysically.”

  “Metaphorically.” He didn’t bother to set him straight on Doc. To the little man, everyone at UCLA not connected with the administration was faculty. He watched Anklemire circle behind his desk, sit down, and use his handkerchief to snap a piece of lint off one of his Italian loafers. What he saved on his clothes and hairpieces he spent on shoes.

  He poked the handkerchief back into his pocket and fussed with it until it blossomed like a poppy. “You eggheads are sitting on the best chick magnet in Southern California and you never get laid. You got like a billion dollars of snazzy equipment there in the lab, but you don’t show it off. You said Broadaxe mentioned turning the dingus over piece by piece?”

  Valentino was sure Anklemire knew the name was Broadhead. “If by dingus you mean Greed, ye
s. But—”

  “Soften her up. Blind her with bling. All them computers and electronic microscopes and projectors and that gizmo that stamps and stacks discs, guys waltzing around in hazmat suits, it’s Willie Wonka Meets Doctor No. Did I get that right?” The glint of insecurity faded before his listener was sure he’d seen it. He nodded.

  “When she’s impressed, hit her with the proposition.”

  “It can’t be as simple as that.”

  “It’s a simple world. Somebody has something to sell, somebody else is looking for something to buy. I made a nice little commission for years bringing ’em together. She call you yet?”

  “Not yet. Should I wait?”

  “No. Don’t buy that BS the feminists shovel out. Broads like it when you make the first move.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No, I’ve been in advertising all my life. Call her.”

  “I’m trying to stay out of jail, not ask for a date.”

  “You’re asking for a date, all right. You’re just not picking her up or paying for dinner. Call her.” He picked up his telephone, standard, receiver, and all, and banged them down on Valentino’s side of the desk.

  “I’d better run it past Dr. Broadhead first. At this point we don’t even know what we’re trying to protect. We haven’t unwrapped it yet.”

  “Don’t stall too long, that’s my advice. If she calls first, your odds get cut in half.” He bounced his crossed leg up and down, admiring the shine on his toe. “What?”

  Valentino realized he was staring at him. “Did you ever happen to read a book called What Makes Sammy Run?”

  “What is it, a bio of Sammy Davis, Jr.?”

  “Not quite. You might want to check it out. There’s someone in it you might recognize.”

  “Well, I hope it’s short. I waded through three hundred pages of that Day of the Locust deal you gave me and didn’t see so much as a cockroach.” He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. The man simply couldn’t keep still; Valentino wondered if it was the hemorrhoids. “If this Greed turns out to be the McCoy, get me what you can for the campaign.”