“Mr. Kalishnikov, please.”
“Speaking.”
Valentino introduced himself and explained his errand. He’d barely mentioned West Hollywood when he was interrupted.
“The Oracle,” Kalishnikov said. “Wonderful! Every day I expect to pick up the Times and see it’s been demolished. You know its history?”
“Quite a bit of it. I’m willing to bet you know more.” He experienced a sudden surge of inspiration; perhaps the designer knew something that would help clear up the mystery. But the man on the other end dashed that hope by reciting a long list of the architectural influences that had gone into its construction. It was of no practical use unless the murderer were a citizen of Byzantium or old Granada.
Suddenly Kalishnikov interrupted himself. “Wait. The Oracle. I’m getting something.”
Valentino waited. He felt as if he were having his fortune told.
“I did read about it in the Times,” the designer said. “The crime section. Are you the one who found the skeleton?”
“Yes. I’m sorry if you find that up—”
“Terrific!” The implied y between the second r and the first i came straight from the Black Sea. “I love a project with a sinister past. Tell me truthfully; is it haunted?”
He hesitated. He wasn’t at the point where he confided his ghostly visitations to strangers. “There’s a legend, but what building in this city doesn’t have one of those after fifty years? Poor old Max Fink.”
“Who? Oh, yes, Fink. Tough break.”
That laid to rest any hope of a solution from the Russian’s corner. He’d know all there was to know about the architect, but nothing about the various owners. Valentino was about to ask what he charged for consultation when Kalishnikov spoke again.
“I must see it. When may I?”
“Whenever you like, if you don’t mind ducking under police tape.”
Kalishnikov asked him to hold. He came back on after a moment to announce that he was meeting with a building inspector in Beverly Hills tomorrow afternoon. Could Mr. Valentino meet him at the theater at three o’clock?
“Certainly. But it’s not Mr. Val—”
“Terrific!” The line went dead.
He’d just cradled the receiver when the telephone rang. He snatched it up, hoping it was Fanta.
“You made an impression on my CSI,” said Sergeant Clifford, without greeting. “Tell me you didn’t promise to take her away from all this. She’s the only one I can talk to without a medical dictionary in my hand.”
He let that slide. “What progress have you made on the investigation?”
“We’re pursuing several leads. She said she told you that was no trick skeleton you found. I’m going to need that film.”
“This is Wednesday. You gave me till Friday morning.”
“The William Castle stunt angle was looking good then. When it went blooey I Asked Jeeves about Greed. You didn’t tell me collectors were offering up to half a million for a complete print.”
“I didn’t know that, though I’m not surprised. In my area you tend to think more in terms of artistic value than market price.”
“You and I don’t work the same area. When it comes to murder, I look for a motive, and the good old seven sins are always at the top of the chart.”
“Greed.” He couldn’t resist.
But her mind was working more linearly; she didn’t react. “Allowing for inflation, fifty years ago those reels had to have been worth ten or fifteen thousand. People have been killed for a whole lot less.”
“But if stealing them were the motive, the murderer wouldn’t have left them behind with the victim.”
“Maybe he panicked. More likely he walled them up with Mr. Bones intending to come back for them later, when there was less chance of getting caught with them. When we know who was killed and who killed him, we’ll know more of the circumstances. There’s no chance of retrieving latent prints after all this time, but if there’s a bloody thumbprint on one of those cans and we can trace it through the FBI data base, I can send the media wonks home and focus my attention on the killers that walk among us.”
He saw his out. “You can have the cans any time. Standard procedure requires removing the reels from the original containers anyway and packing them in fresh aluminum or polypropylene.”
“I don’t care if you pack them in Cracker Jacks. I’m not Harriet Johansen. I’ll send officers to collect those cans. If we don’t turn anything there, we’ll need to check the film itself for content.”
“Content?”
“Two years ago, my lieutenant cracked the alibi in a domestic homicide when the suspect showed up in a crowd shot on KBLA. Since then we’ve maintained a cordial relationship with the tape librarians at all the local stations.”
“If your suspect showed up in Greed, he’s either dead or too old to stand trial.”
“Well, we can’t speculate on the connection until we’ve seen the show.”
“It’s archival material, Sergeant. You can’t show it on any old projector.”
“We pay people to sit in rooms and examine that kind of evidence by hand, frame by frame.”
His chest felt constricted; he wondered if this was how it felt to go through cardiac arrest. “With all due respect, I can’t allow a desk jockey downtown to handle eighty-year-old film over a box of Dunkin’ Donuts!”
“I’m glad you said it with all due respect. Otherwise I’d be there in an hour with a court order, demanding immediate surrender of the evidence in question. It’s two-fifteen. You’ve got less than forty-four hours.”
He was getting used to sitting there holding a dead phone.
Ruth buzzed and told him she was putting through a call from “that Prong person.” When he opened his mouth to protest, a stranger interrupted him.
“Claudel Blount, Berkeley Prong.” The voice was deep but youthful, with a slight drawl. “You’re the man who found the deceased?”
He reminded himself to ask Ruth to brush up on her diversity. This man was no rapper. “Yes, but I—”
He had to put the man on hold to answer the other line. He recognized the light baritone of the evening anchor on KBLA. “Mr. Valentino, we’ve been trying to reach you for days. Would you agree to a live telephone interview about the Oracle Mystery?” His tone capitalized both words.
“I don’t think the police would—hang on.” The intercom was buzzing.
“The Times,” she said. “On three.”
“We have a three?” Before she could answer, he asked her to tell the caller he was out. Then he returned to Claudel Blount.
“I just wanted your comment on the fact that a busload of Native Americans here at Berkeley is on its way to Los Angeles to picket the theater,” said the young man from the Prong.
“Whatever for?”
“Their spokesperson says they’re concerned the remains may be tribal and will end up as an irreverent display in a museum.”
“The bones aren’t Indian!”
“Are you an anthropologist?”
“No, but—” He stopped himself before he could blurt out what Harriet had told him about the body’s dental work and probable ethnic origins. He didn’t want to get her in trouble by going public with details the police might be holding back, or anger Sergeant Clifford into revoking his grace period. “Talk to the police.” He excused himself, cut the connection, and spoke to the TV reporter. “I just own the building. I’m a film archivist. I’ll be happy to go on the air and talk about my work, but I don’t know anything about murder.”
“It is murder, then?” The mellow voice was deadly calm.
His heart bumped. That was a bad slip. “I can’t answer that one way or the other. The police don’t confide in me. If you want to ask me about film preservation—”
“Thanks for your time.”
The intercom buzzed.
“I’m out, Ruth,” he said. “Tell them I’m in Tibet, looking for the abominable snowman’s wedding
video.”
She left the speaker on. “I’m sorry, Miss Shasta. He’s out.”
He’d cracked her code. He jammed his thumb down on the lighted button before Ruth could hang up. “Hi, Fanta. Sorry about that. I’ve been conducting an impromptu press conference.”
“I’ll call back.”
“No!” He barked it. He apologized again. “People have been hanging up on me all day. I’m starting to feel like a telemarketer. Did you turn up any unexplained disappearances around the time Warren Pegler sold the Oracle?”
“Sure, but I did better than that. I found Pegler.”
“You’re kidding. Alive and kicking?”
“Maybe, if he had legs. But alive for sure.”
III
DISH NIGHT
CHAPTER
14
THE PRINTOUT WAS from the Pittsburgh Dispatch, dated Friday, November 30, 1956:
POLICE SEEK PHILANTHROPIST’S SON
Officers with the Missing Persons detail of the Pittsburgh Police Department are searching for the estranged son of a prominent contributor to local charities after the son failed to show up at his mother’s home for a promised Thanksgiving visit Wednesday.
Albert Spinoza, 21, a former assistant projectionist at the Roxy Theater in Pittsburgh, left the home where he lived with his parents, Abraham and Eloise Spinoza, three years ago after an altercation and had not been heard from until last week, when he telephoned his mother to say he was returning for a visit, according to Mrs. Spinoza, who was honored recently with a Citizen of the Year Award for her many large donations to nonprofit foundations in the area. She told officers that the death last December of her husband, Albert’s father, had persuaded him to end their estrangement.
Mrs. Spinoza arrived at Union Station Wednesday morning to meet her son’s train, but he was not aboard. A clerk with the railroad told the Dispatch that no record exists of anyone purchasing a ticket anywhere in the United States under the name Albert Spinoza.
Lieutenant Howard Prosper of the Missing Persons detail said that foul play is not suspected at this time. However, he said that because of Mrs. Spinoza’s prominence in the community, every step is being taken to trace her son.
Valentino skimmed the sheet, then read it a second time more closely. He was seated in a blown-out upholstered armchair in the room Fanta shared with a female classmate, absent at the time. Precisely half the room was heaped with discarded clothing, stained pizza boxes, and college texts, while the other half—where Fanta sat in front of her computer—was as neat as if someone had dragged an enormous crumb scraper to the center of the floor. One bed was made, the other invisible under detritus. There was a dormitory smell of pepperoni and neglected laundry, and someone outside the open door to the hall was listening to Eminem.
“What nationality is Spinoza?” he asked.
“Dutch, I think.”
“That’s encouraging. Harriet Johansen said the victim was probably German or Dutch. The age is right.”
“If you’d told me she said that, I might have had this yesterday.”
“Forgive me; I’ve been preoccupied. How the heck did you find this?”
She smiled, all trace of resentment gone. Today she had on cutoff jeans, a denim baseball cap with her ponytail flowing out through the hole above the adjustable band, and a blue T-shirt that read LAWYERS DO IT ON THE BENCH. She was barefoot.
“I’ve got a Word Menu program on the computer. I had it keyword every job connected with a movie theater, on the hunch there was a professional link to the Oracle. I figured if it came up empty I’d just start from scratch. Projectionist hit the jackpot.”
“Did you stop there?”
“Duh. No, and I forgive you again for asking. An usher went missing in St. Paul in nineteen sixty and a candy-counter clerk did a Winona Ryder from a theater in New Jersey with the night’s receipts in fifty-four, but they found the usher drowned in the Mississippi a couple days later and arrested the clerk at a bus station. Anyway there were local connections in both cases.”
“We still can’t connect this one to the Oracle. I don’t like the fact his parents seem to have been well-to-do. Harriet said whoever drilled and filled Mr. Bones’s teeth did it on the cheap.”
“So it’s Harriet now.” She grinned.
He sighed. “Yes, Fanta, it’s Harriet. I’m carrying her love child.”
“Whoa!”
He apologized yet again. He seemed to have developed a habit of it with her. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“I thought you looked bummed. Spinoza ran away, don’t forget. Even if they wanted to give him his allowance, they wouldn’t have known where to send it. Maybe he couldn’t stay away from the Milk Duds in the lobby and went to a quack.” She pointed at the printout. “The Dispatch ran a follow-up a week later, when the cops called off the search: no leads. I can make you a hard copy of that too, but it was mostly rehash.”
He shook his head. “This would explain why there was nothing in the L.A. papers. If the Pittsburgh police made inquiries there, it wouldn’t have been considered news. I doubt Spinoza’s own hometown sheet would’ve covered it if his mother weren’t a local hero.”
“If there was an inquiry, wouldn’t it be on file with the LAPD?”
“The big-city departments were just introducing computers then; dinosaurs with cooling units that filled rooms. If they bothered to transfer it to the memory bank back then, they wouldn’t waste space on their current hard drive with an obsolete file on a routine request from clear across the country.”
“Then Sergeant Clifford won’t have this.”
“Not unless she did what you did.” He flicked the printout with his hand. “As good citizens, we’re obliged to report this.”
“Morally, yeah. Legally—”
“—it isn’t evidence. That was your argument last time, and look at all the trouble it caused. The sooner she has this information, the sooner the case gets wrapped up and we get to keep Greed.”
“Unless it’s a wild goose chase, and she wastes a lot of time the film doesn’t have running it out.” She turned her chair, a vinyl swivel patched all over with duct tape, tore a sheet off a pad on the computer station, and turned back. “This is where we’ll find Warren Pegler. We can ask him about Spinoza and save the cops some shoe leather.”
He read the hastily penciled note, recognizing the name of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills. As a former studio technician during the Golden Age, Pegler would qualify for residency. “You just typed in his name and out came his address?”
“If it were that easy, you would have had this yesterday. But the older you get, the wider the paper trail.”
“He must be a hundred.”
“Ninety-eight. I pulled up his birth record. He’s a native, born in San Diego under Teddy Roosevelt. Married and widowed, no children. I found that feature piece you mentioned from when he bought the Oracle, but no documents or ink to back up the claim he lost both legs in an accident at MGM.”
“Hospitals move, their records get lost or go into the incinerator when they collect enough dust. Since the studio settled out of court, it probably kept the story from the papers at the time. After the Taylor and Arbuckle scandals, the last thing the industry needed was another, and back then it had the clout to silence the local press.”
“I was with you right up until Taylor and Arbuckle.”
“Not important. They were too hot to handle in nineteen twenty-two, but now they’re as cold as Albert Spinoza, if that’s him down at the morgue.” He took out his cell and punched buttons. “I’ve got a friend in Admissions at the Country Home. She can tell me if Pegler’s in shape to receive visitors.”
“You memorized the number?”
“Most of my sources have lived there for years. One or two more trips and I can claim it as my voting address.” A receptionist answered. “Kym Trujillo, please,” he said.
“Valentino!” This was a husky female voice, lightly
touched by a Hispanic accent. “You ready to check in? You could hold your own in the conversation in the cafeteria.”
“Ask me again next year. I’d like to arrange a visit with one of your residents. Warren Pegler.”
“I know Warren. I admitted him myself. He’s a quiet sort, very popular with this crowd. Hang on.”
He waited three minutes. A picture of the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and a James Dean poster hung on Fanta’s side of the room, opposite a painting of a bloated dead horse on her roommate’s.
Kym came back on, sounding subdued. “I talked to one of his nurses. He’s an Alzheimer’s case, has his good days and his bad. Today’s not so good. He’s usually at his best in the morning.”
He thanked her and said he’d call back then.
“I overheard,” Fanta said. “How many girlfriends do you have?”
He decided not to get mad. “She’s too valuable a contact to risk getting personal with.” He folded the printout, put it in a pocket, and patted it. “A possible victim and a possible witness—or suspect,” he said. “Two for one. Dish night.”
“What’s that?”
“During the Depression, theaters gave away a free piece of china with each ticket, one night a week. The idea was to keep customers coming back to collect the set.”
She shook her head. “I’ll never take it all in. This is worse than studying for the bar.”
“You’re doing fine.” He struggled out of the quagmire of his chair. “That was excellent work. You’ll make a great lawyer.”
“That sounds like the dump speech. I’m going with you tomorrow, aren’t I?”
“How many classes did you miss while you were sitting at that computer?”
“When I want to be hassled I’ll call my father. I’m the one who found Pegler.”
“If you went up there with me, all you’d be doing is reading magazines in the visitors’ room. I earn my salary talking to these people. They’re old and frail, their memories come and go, they know their weaknesses and they intimidate easily. Whatever Pegler’s part in this is, he might think he’s being ganged up on by two strangers. If he panics or clams up, we’ll have made the trip for nothing.”
Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames Page 11