“You didn’t bless me the way you blessed her.”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“Whatever. This Scarface burger is awesome. Al Pacino should work at White Castle.”
“Maybe Paul Muni made it.”
“Who?”
“The original Scar—oh, forget it. I am a geek.” He pushed away his Buster Keaton, an experience less memorable than its namesake. “You did all right today. Not many athletes would skip practice to spend the afternoon in the cellar of the county building.”
“Dibs on the newspaper files next time.”
“Do you mean that?”
She met his gaze, then put down her sandwich and wiped her mouth and her hands. “Give me your best shot. What do you need?”
“A more specific time line, to start. Architecture and dental science puts that corpse in the basement room long after Fink, and common sense says it was before the realty firm took possession. It had to have been bricked in by then or someone would have found it. That’s still a fifteen-year chunk. I need to narrow it down.”
“It might be longer than that. Your realtor overlooked twenty-four reels of Greed upstairs.”
“The saleswoman said there used to be a wall in front of it. They tore it down only recently. My guess is some flunky saw a lot of film cans, nothing unusual to show up next to a projection booth, opened a few, found them empty, and didn’t bother to look any farther. Ignoring the human skeleton in the basement is something else altogether.”
“I wonder why the reels were split up.”
“Not important to the central issue. Whose skeleton was it, and who bricked it up?”
“The murderer. Or an accomplice.”
“If it was murder. Sergeant Clifford says the skeleton might have been a stunt to spice up a B horror movie.” He told her about William Castle. “If her hunch pays off, the case is no longer official business, and we get to keep the film.”
“Yes!”
“Except playing the hunch means eliminating every missing-persons complaint filed over fifteen years, until a trick skeleton is the only explanation left. Meanwhile Greed rots away in a stuffy room at the Hall of Justice.”
“Oh.”
“Hold on, there may be a shortcut. Someone disappeared late in the Pegler era or when the film society owned the theater. I’m assuming someone missed him and reported it to the police.”
“That’d be in their files. Clifford must be all over it.”
“Let’s hope she hits the jackpot. I found some promising candidates in the old papers, but most of them turned up alive or dead in the later editions. I’m leaving the rest to the sergeant to run down.”
“What’s left?”
“I told you all I could find in four hours. You can skip past that, take my place in the reading room, and expand the search beyond L.A. Maybe someone with a connection to the Oracle went missing out of town and it wasn’t reported locally. Check the suburban papers and the AP wire. I’d do it myself, but I have fences to mend.” He avoided bringing up the Johansen tour for fear of reviving that conversation. He felt a flash of guilt. “It means missing classes. It isn’t as if you could look up the subject in an index and go right to it.”
“Yes, it is. It’s called Google. I’ll fire up the Mac and do a mouse hunt.”
He laughed and sat back. “From the mouth of Generation Y. It never occurred to me to tweak the Net.”
“While I’m at it, I can try to find what became of Warren Pegler.”
“Burial or cremation would be my guess. He was thirty-one in nineteen thirty-seven.”
“Maybe there’s a daughter or a grandson. No legs doesn’t mean no—”
“Romance. Knock yourself out. And Fanta? Thanks.”
“Anything for the program. I might learn something I can use in my practice. Oh! I almost forgot.”
They were seated in a booth, with Marlene Dietrich looking at them down the length of her elegant nose. Fanta opened her shoulder bag on the seat beside her and took out something large and flat in a slick plastic bag. “I was early, so I killed a few minutes in Barnes and Noble on the way here. I hope you don’t have it.”
He took it and slid out a coffee table book in a varnished jacket. Grauman’s Chinese Theater blazed in barbaric splendor on the cover in full color. The title was Pleasure Domes: The Golden Age of the Picture Show.
“I don’t,” he said, “but I can’t accept it. I don’t want to get in the way of paying off your student loans.”
“It was remaindered. And I’m here on an athletic scholarship. I’m a very good archer. Turn to page ninety-four.”
It was a two-page spread, of The Oracle’s auditorium, taken at the peak of its grandeur. He ran his fingertips over the glossy surface. He could almost feel the contours in the gilded baroque ornaments and the deep plush on the seats. The photographer must have chosen a premiere night, and stationed himself in an upper balcony to capture the entire scene: Iconic stars and pioneer producers in dinner jackets and ball gowns shared the orchestra, chatting and holding programs. Every seat was filled. Valentino’s throat tightened. It was like looking at a snapshot of his mother in the full beauty of her youth. He made a mental note to call her.
“It’s wonderful. Thank you.” The words seemed inadequate.
“I just wish it were in color,” she said. “What was it with black-and-white, anyway?”
“Everything’s better in black-and-white. I think even Sergeant Clifford would bear me out on that.”
CHAPTER
10
AFTER HE LET Fanta out in front of her house, he used his cell to ask Ruth if Harriet Johansen had called.
“No, but everyone else has.” She mentioned KBLA, the Times, the Post, and added the Associated Press to the list; it appeared the story of the corpse at The Oracle contained all the elements necessary to capture the attention of the national media. “That Prong creature called again,” she said. “He’s an insistent little punk. I bet he walks around with a boom box and a pistol.”
“I’m sorry for the bother. It doesn’t have anything to do with the office.” Which wasn’t really a lie, since none of the reporters knew what else the basement had contained.
“Don’t apologize. This is the first time this department has justified the cost of installing telephone equipment. I haven’t answered this many calls since the old days at Columbia.”
“Did Harry Cohn chase you around his casting couch?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
He’d caught her in a playful mood, which was an event rare enough to encourage him to pursue the conversation.
“Some good may come of this,” he said. “If I knew it would take a criminal investigation to draw attention to the program, I’d have stashed a corpse somewhere myself.”
She shut him down. “Are you coming back? It’s quieter than usual here with Dr. Broadhead gone.”
“Later. I’ve got an errand.” He reached out and laid a hand on Pleasure Domes, reassuring himself of the book’s presence. “If Ms. Johansen calls, give her my cell number.” He flipped the phone shut before she could pour another bucket of water into the tide of opinion about his love life. Was he so much the monk that a few pleasantries with an attractive woman should drench him in innuendo?
The likely answer was yes. He was a young man, reasonably good-looking if the old-fashioned matinee-idol type didn’t produce snickers, and a healthy heterosexual. But he lived his work. Since that work involved countless hours spent chasing down scraps of celluloid in attics and what-not shops, examining individual frames against the light, and wearing holes in the metal seats of the folding chairs in the UCLA projection room watching mute melodramas without even the enhancement of the original musical scores, his life must be charitably described as less than well-rounded. At times his own past experiences came back to him in a series of frames. He became corporeally insignificant the instant he stepped outside the shot.
“My God,” he said
aloud. “I’m Norma Desmond.”
It was a subject that needed serious consideration before he entered a lonely middle age filled with the empty clutter of pop memorabilia and framed certificates of merit awarded by obscure fellowships dedicated to arcane cinema; but not today. Not this moment. He had an overpowering urge to revisit The Oracle—his Oracle—and run his hands over the fossils and pottery shards of Old Hollywood.
The building, conceived upon a Jew’s idea of a cathedral, but scaled down to nestle into the relatively horizontal cityscape of Tinseltown in the 1920s, assumed a tombstone aspect under the low smutty skies of Los Angeles post-1960. The uniformed officer standing sentry at the entrance represented a later model of Valentino’s nemesis in the parking garage. He compared the visitor’s features with the picture on his driver’s license, spoke into the two-way radio clipped to an epaulet, and got an answer crackling back.
“You can go in,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”
Valentino ducked under the yellow police tape stretched across the doorway and entered the lobby. He had it to himself just then, but could hear sounds of activity beneath his feet, where investigators would be moving crates and dismantling racks in the basement, searching for bullets buried in the walls or whatever. He felt a sense of violation and trespass—and at that moment assumed in full the role of property owner, with all its challenges and responsibility.
The room was cavernous, a colossal waste of space by Eastern standards, and completely in character with the idolatry of excess that had dictated fashion in the age of sheiks and shebas, Theda Bara’s milk baths, and champagne fountains at Pickfair. Its designers had striven to shame the pharaohs of Egypt, but they had neglected to build in the permanence of the Old Kingdom. The workmen were the same who had erected the Tower of Babel for Intolerance and the Roman Coliseum for Ben-Hur; great edifices made of plywood and papier-mâché, intended to stand throughout principal photography, then to be knocked down or left to decay in the Hollywood Hills. Without regular maintenance, mildew and tarnish and termites moved in to claim their inheritance. A pane had fallen from the smiling countenance of the archangel in a stained-glass window, making him look as if he were missing a tooth.
Just because he could, and to declare defiance of officer’s orders, Valentino drew a furrow with a finger through the chalky dust on the glass surface of the candy counter, then tugged the sheet off a hunchback shape beside the staircase to the mezzanine. A cloud erupted. He stepped back to avoid being enveloped, but it left a fine skin of dessicated architecture on his shoes. He regarded the plaster cast of Pegasus with nostrils distended, wings poised to unfurl, one forefoot raised for takeoff. The gilding had flaked off the Grecian curls on the equine forehead, leaving the impression of balding, and a careless mover or a kid with an air rifle had knocked a huge chip out of a knee, but Valentino thought the sculpture could be restored. Its mate was another story. The pedestal that had supported it on the other side of the staircase was vacant. It would have to be replaced, and he had serious doubts about finding a capable craftsman or the money to compensate him. It would be more practical to remove the remaining figure.
A terrible chilling sensation of buyer’s remorse racked him. The theater was too big, too far gone, there was too much to be done, and he didn’t know where to start. And Pleasure Domes had described The Oracle as one of the smaller surviving picture palaces!
He sneezed. How Freudian, as if he could expel the burden through his nose.
“Bless you.”
Startled, he looked up at the creature descending the stairs. The naked bulb someone had wired in place of the chandelier cast a halo around short blonde hair, and for a nanosecond he thought a stained-glass angel had separated itself from a window to rescue him. But she was wearing Harriet Johansen’s smock and carrying her tackle box. He noticed her legs were well shaped, with trim ankles and long graceful muscles in the calves.
“Thank you,” he said. “I thought you were finished here.”
“I wanted another look upstairs, for signs the victim was killed there and moved to the basement. Postmortem lividity’s not an option when there’s no flesh on the corpse.”
“What did you find?”
“Some interesting stains. I did a hemoglobin test on what looked like a classic arterial-laceration pattern—slit throat—but it looks like someone just got careless opening a can of soda. Old semen traces in the projection booth; quite a lot of semen. I prescribe Clorox and plenty of it.”
“Free love,” he said. “This was a shrine to the Age of Aquarius for a while. Before my time.” He felt foolish adding it.
“That explains the traces of cannabis I found in a floor crack.” She stepped off the bottom stair and shook his hand. Hers was cool.
“You carry equipment to test for marijuana?”
“Everywhere I go.” She touched her nose. “Don’t tell the boys in the narc squad.”
“Sergeant Clifford thinks the skeleton might have been left over from a horror-show spectacle back in the fifties. It might have come from a medical school.”
“She told me. I had to disappoint her. Skeletons used for demonstration purposes are linked together with wire, to keep them from falling apart when you tap them with a pointer. That had never been done with this one. There would be wear marks and traces of metal. Also I scraped skin cells off the floor where the body was found. It did all its decomposing here on the premises.” She read his expression. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re anxious to start renovating.”
He was grateful that Clifford hadn’t been generous with the information about Greed. He preferred to choose the time and circumstances of the announcement. “It isn’t your fault. Have you figured out what killed him?”
“The skull was fractured, glancing blow from a blunt instrument. It might not have been fatal if he’d received medical treatment. As it was he probably lapsed into a coma and died either from starvation or shock.”
“Shock, I hope,” he said, with a shiver. “I never got over The Black Cat. I saw it on WGN when I was eight and I never had the courage to watch it again.”
“That’s a brave admission to make to a stranger. Most guys try to macho it out.”
Great. He was coming off as a wimp. “What else have you found out?”
Her face lapsed into deep thought, which in her case was deep indeed; she struck him as fiercely intelligent, even beyond the demands of her work. Then she shrugged, with a bright toss of her head that sent electricity tingling to his nerve ends.
“I suppose it will be on tonight’s news,” she said. “The last satellite truck pulled out only a few minutes ago; the crew got tired of waiting for the criminal to return to the scene of the crime after fifty years. He was in his late teens or early twenties, slight of build, probably not too well off. Those fillings in his teeth were primitive work, possibly by a student at a college clinic. Middle European, based on the cranium and mandibula. German or Dutch would be my guess. Don’t quote me on that. Profiling’s verboten. I don’t want to be picketed by boys in Buster Brown haircuts and wooden shoes.”
“I thought all that CSI mumbo-jumbo was Hollywood hogwash.”
“There’s a healthy dose of science fiction on those shows, but nothing we won’t have in a few years. A lot of money goes into criminology research, thanks to the statistics. We don’t have the authority those actors have. We can’t carry guns, for instance, or interview suspects, or threaten them with arrest. Those specialties belong to people like Karen Clifford.”
“Her name’s Karen? I didn’t know that.”
She smiled, with a narrowing of her exotic eyes. “What’s my first name?”
“Harriet.” He felt himself blushing.
“You have the advantage.”
“I only use mine at the DMV and to get airline tickets. My friends call me Val.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Yes.” He answered without hesitation.
“Don’t call me Harry
. People in this town make assumptions based on your haircut and your line of work.”
“I like your haircut. It fits the shape of your skull.”
She smiled again, and this time she released the full candlepower. “Val, you couldn’t have made a better choice of words with a forensic pathologist.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “This is a euphemistic minefield, isn’t it?”
“I’m not offended. Ghouls rule. You’re in the industry, right? You must have to deal with your own share of BS. Convenience store clerks pushing screenplays.”
“I’m not with the industry. Most of my clients are as dead as yours. I’m an archivist with the UCLA Department of Film Preservation.” He braced for the reaction.
“I love old movies. Astaire and Rogers.”
“Laurel and Hardy.”
“William Powell and Myrna Loy.”
“Joseph and Herman Mankiewicz.”
Her face clouded. His stomach sank.
“That’s where people start to make assumptions,” he said.
She tossed her head again. He could get used to that. “I’d like a tour sometime. It’s a wonderful building. You don’t see a lot of lath-and-plaster these days. Every cent I make seems to go into my rent, and I can hear my neighbors brushing their teeth.”
It made him think of The Crowd. He shoved that aside like a Trekkie hiding the Klingon dictionary in his closet. “How about right now?”
“I have an autopsy at two. A drowning, three days washing around in the surf off Malibu. Black tie only. That means gas mask and neoprene. Rain check?”
“Speaking of a tour—” He was reminded suddenly of more pressing things.
“UCLA film lab. Sergeant Clifford told me. How’s tomorrow morning?”
“Nine o’clock?”
“It’s a date.”
She left swinging her instrument case, sensible heels snapping on a floor paved with priceless marble and cheap linoleum and dust. Distractedly, he patted the balding head of winged Pegasus and pushed his way through the marvelous swinging inlaid mahogany-and-ebony door into the auditorium.
Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames Page 8