She slumped forward, resting her wrists on her bare muscular thighs. “My nana was in a nursing home, with dementia. She got violent sometimes, and she was the sweetest old gal you ever met.”
“She was the script girl?”
She nodded, staring at the floor.
“It isn’t the dump speech,” he said. “If anything comes of this, I promise you’ll be the first one I call.”
“Hey!” She sat up. “What about getting to see the show?”
“The show?”
“Hello?”
He was tireder than he’d thought. “I’ve only seen the first reel myself. It might be on safety by now. Dr. Broadhead will have to screen it anyway, to make sure it came out all right. You might have to watch it in negative,” he said. “At the pace they’re going, they can’t stop to strike off a positive print.”
“Insider stuff. Cool.” She put on flip-flops.
He called Broadhead’s line. Ruth answered. “Hang on, he just got off the phone. That Yolanda woman tried to reach you.”
It took him a second to make that leap. “Johansen. She’s a forensic scientist, not a stripper. Did she leave a message?”
“Something about owing you a tour. I’m putting you through now.”
Broadhead listened to Valentino, then said, “Reel one came out of the soup this morning. It needs to dry twenty-four hours. I can run the original, if you don’t mind sitting through it again. I assume you want to be present for the unveiling.”
“You assume right.”
“You two still playing Nick and Nora?”
“I’ll tell you about it when I see you.” He flipped the phone shut, yawning bitterly.
“Why don’t I borrow my roommate’s car and drive myself?” Fanta asked. “You should go home and crash.”
“Not on your life. Turns out you’re going to see it on the original silver nitrate. I want to witness the reaction. Anyway, if I went home I’d just lie there trying to stay awake.” He told her about von Stroheim’s ghost. He’d been stonewalling so much lately it felt good to trust someone with an embarrassing confession.
“Cool,” she said when he finished. “Ectoplasm.”
“Dementia. Maybe when I’m at the Country Home I should pick out a room.”
“I agree with Dr. Broadhead. Maybe you’re not hallucinating.”
“You’ve been watching too many Wes Craven movies.”
“It’s a haunted town, I’ve known that my whole life. We’ve got dead people’s footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese, streets named after dead directors, dead stars in the homes on the maps to the stars’ homes. My folks took me to the Alamo once on vacation. When I walked in, I felt the same thing I feel when I walk on Sunset, only there it’s Davy Crockett and here it’s Steve McQueen.”
“Most people don’t get advice from Davy Crockett and Steve McQueen. Why should I be singled out?”
“Let’s look at it from the spook’s point of view. The old bugger was pretty bummed out about what happened to Greed, right?”
“‘No matter if I could talk to you three weeks steadily could I possibly describe even to a small degree the heartache I suffered through the mutilation of my sincere work.’ He said that to his biographer. I memorized it.”
She nodded. “I think that’s why he singled you out.”
CHAPTER
15
“WELL, IF IT ain’t the Great Lover.”
Valentino frowned at the attendant in the campus garage. “That was John Gilbert.”
“I bet he never forgot his pass.”
“Parking fuzz,” said Fanta as they drove past the raised gate. “Probably came out here looking for a part on Hill Street Blues.”
“Dragnet, more likely. I’ve looked high and low for that damn pass.”
“Maybe von Stroheim took it.”
On the landing outside the hall to his office, Fanta laced an arm through one of his. “Let’s give Ruth a case of the fantods.”
His judgment was too foggy to protest. As they strolled through the door arm in arm, Harriet Johansen turned their way from the desk.
She wore a light summer dress that clung to her in all the best places. The orange spark in her eye when she saw him and the young woman quickened his heart and stopped it at the same time. Behind the desk, Ruth took in the scene with an expression distilled from satisfaction and disgust.
Instinctively the newcomers parted. Valentino stepped forward. “Harriet, you remember Fanta.”
“It’s a little different meeting you outside a crime scene.” The CSI’s voice was toneless.
“Hi. I wouldn’t have recognized you without your smock.”
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Valentino said.
Ruth snorted and rattled her keyboard.
“I came to take you up on that movie invitation,” Harriet said. “Afterward I thought I’d walk you through the lab downtown.”
“Your timing’s perfect. Dr. Broadhead and I were about to screen Greed for Fanta. That’s the major project you saw us working on yesterday.” He was talking fast.
“Another time.” Harriet looked at her watch. “I just remembered I’m supposed to assist with an autopsy.” She went toward the stairs, heels snapping on the linoleum.
“Can I call you downtown later?”
The door swung shut behind her.
Kyle Broadhead came out of his office. “I thought I heard voices. Let’s get moving. We’ve only got the inner screening room till five.” He stopped in mid-stride, looked from one face to the other. “Who died?”
“Some dude on an autopsy table,” Fanta said.
Valentino’s message light was blinking when he got back to his apartment. He and Harriet had exchanged home numbers. He pounced on it, but the message was from Ruth, reporting that a Mr. Khruschev had called the office to say he’d be a half hour late for their appointment at The Oracle. That would be Leo Kalishnikov, the theater designer. Valentino tried calling Harriet and gave up after eight rings.
The situation called for anxiety or rueful amusement, but by then he was too exhausted to feel anything but numb. He’d actually fallen asleep during Greed, and had missed experiencing that first reel all over again through Fanta’s eyes. Her own expressed reaction, after Broadhead shook him awake, had seemed subdued. She hadn’t been able to stop apologizing for the prank that had blown up in their faces.
But he was too far gone for mulling over the events of another roller-coaster day, and fell asleep seconds after slipping into bed. Von Stroheim, that master of irony and pity, chose not to disturb him.
He awoke refreshed, took a sip of instant coffee, and tried Harriet again. This time a machine answered; either she was screening her calls or had left early for work. He left a stumbling message of apology and explanation and asked her to call back. Next he got Kym Trujillo on the line.
“Warren’s having a great day,” she said. “He’s on his way with an attendant to visit his wife’s plot in Westwood Village Memorial. He always comes back in a chipper mood.”
“It doesn’t depress him?”
“I guess when you’re pushing the century mark, you take your friends and loved ones as you find them. He’ll be back before you get here. Knowing he has a visitor coming will set the stage nicely.”
He put himself together, resisted an impulse to call Harriet again, and left. The drive from Century City to Woodland Hills was brief in miles, but he caught every red light several times in lockstep traffic. Motorists blew their horns, observing the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of rush hour.
The Motion Picture Country Home is airy and spacious and beautifully maintained with funds from the actors and writers guilds and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kym was nowhere in sight, but a chubby young man in the office smiled up at him from behind a desk with a single sheet of paper on its glass top. A trivet read ASSISTANT ACTIVITIES DIRECTOR. Valentino figured the position turned over too often to bother personalizing the sign.
<
br /> “Warren’s expecting you,” the young man said. “They only wrote down your last name. Is your first Eric, by any chance?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. His condition comes and goes. When he’s not entirely, er, lucid, he keeps asking for someone named Eric. I thought it might be a family member. He seldom has visitors, so I assumed—” He shrugged. “Are you a relative?”
He gave the young man a card and the story he’d had ready. “I’m a film archivist. I understand Mr. Pegler worked in the developing lab at MGM in the twenties. I wanted to ask him some questions about early Hollywood.” He was pretty sure “about a murder” would not result in an interview.
“It says on your card you’re a detective.”
“Show business pizzazz. Historian doesn’t pop in this town.” He made a mental note to have more pragmatic cards printed for certain venues.
“Maybe you’re being too modest. You’ve told me more about his professional background than he’s ever told any of us, except when he’s regressing, and that’s usually a jumble. His file’s lean on detail, but from the dates and some things he’s said, it appears he was in the industry long before it was an industry. Room eighteen.”
In a sunny hallway he passed a fleet of walkers and wheelchairs and the more ambulatory elderly guiding themselves along a wall rail. Some he’d met before greeted him, others he’d met before stared through him without recognition. He identified still others whose celebrity had faded ahead of them. There was more star power under that roof than anywhere else in Tinseltown, but there were no fans or paparazzi on the grounds.
Well, there was one fan; but for once he wasn’t there to ask about gossip on the set.
A loud domestic argument seemed to be going on behind the door to eighteen. Pausing with knuckles raised inches from the panel, he heard a hysterical contralto and an infuriated baritone. Then he recognized Katharine Hepburn’s Old New England accent and Humphrey Bogart’s raspy lisp, and knocked loudly to make himself heard above the TV. The volume dropped and a third voice, calm as morning, told him to come in.
The old man in the wheelchair next to the bed had a full head of white hair and lively eyes in a thin, pale, pleated face. He wore a crisp dress shirt buttoned to the neck and loose tailored slacks, their legs cut off and stitched neatly at the knees, below which was nothing. A hand came up from the arm of the chair and squeezed the trigger on a long black object.
Valentino flinched; then the TV went silent, muted by the remote control in the old man’s hand. On the thirty-six-inch screen, Bogie and Kate tootled without sound downriver aboard the African Queen.
“I don’t know you.”
“No, sir, we haven’t met.”
Warren Pegler lowered the remote. “I like to check. First my legs went, now it’s my brain. One of these days they’ll meet in the middle and I’ll just up and disappear.”
“My name is Valentino.”
“No, it isn’t. I’m not that far gone. He died way back when I was in physical therapy.”
“Not that Valentino. I just bought the Oracle theater. I wanted to ask you some things about it as a former owner.”
“You bought yourself a money hole, how’s that for starters? Cost you less just to hang a ‘Rob Me’ sign around your neck.”
“It needs fixing up.”
“I’m not talking about repairs. They’re like allergies: They never go away, so you deal with them. Even fire can’t break you, if you’re young. It’s people. Customers, distributors, building inspectors, even my own employees took everything that wasn’t bolted down. My business manager skedaddled into Nazi Germany with all my investments. Stole from a cripple. I finally let the old trap go in fifty-six for less than I owed in back taxes. I thought they’d’ve ’dozed it by now.”
“I can see why it upset you,” Valentino said; although the man’s bitterness showed only in his words. His tone and demeanor remained even. “Up until then, all your financial ventures were successful.”
“I don’t mean that. You can always recover from a bad deal. I lost my legs at eighteen and managed to get back on my feet, so to speak.” He patted a stump. Then he gestured with the remote toward a picture in a silver frame on his nightstand. A big-boned unsmiling woman stared out with her hair in a French braid. “They took Gerda, too, in the end. That was the last straw. She was a strong woman; she made most of those repairs I mentioned, the ones I couldn’t do with just my hands to work with. But she couldn’t fix her broken heart. She just shriveled away after we lost the place.”
Valentino wondered if this was what Kym Trujillo considered chipper. Yet the old man still showed no emotion.
“Why didn’t you sell Greed? Plenty of collectors would have paid plenty for it even then.” He watched closely for Pegler’s reaction.
He was disappointed. The pale, pleated face was blank. “Sell greed? Times have sure changed if you can do that. Folks are generally born with it.”
“I’ll get to the point, Mr. Pegler.” He drew up a chair that plainly had never been sat on. “A man’s skeleton was found in the basement of the Oracle, along with some reels of old film. Do you know anything about it?”
“The basement? I kept all the pictures I rented in the projection room.”
“Some reels showed up there as well, behind the plaster partition.”
“I had Gerda put up that plaster to save on the heating bill. We didn’t leave anything behind it but some empty cans.”
“You overlooked some. The rest surfaced, along with the skeleton, when a wall collapsed in the basement. It was where Max Fink hid his private liquor stock during Prohibition.”
“Fooling around with an old man’s mind is a low thing to do, son. Especially when half of it’s gone. The basement was just a basement. If there was any liquor in it I’d have drunk it up when the jackals came.”
“But there wasn’t any—”
The remote pointed at him again; and if it were a gun he’d be ducking. “You’re asking me to take a lot at face value. If you’re who you say you are, if you own the Oracle, if there’s a skeleton and a film in a hidey-hole in the basement, that wall was there when I bought the place. You’ll have to ask Max Fink. You’ll find him in Forest Lawn under six feet of California.”
“The brickwork in the entrance was relatively new. Anyway nowhere near as old as the building. And the skeleton—”
“A lot of people have been in and out of there since me. Maybe there were two rooms in that basement and maybe there weren’t; I can’t trust my memory any more than you can, but I’m not so senile I’d forget a little thing like a skeleton. Talk to the real estate people, or the movie junkies that rented the place from them, or the hippies that moved in after they left. What are you, a cop?”
Here was anger, cold as sharpened steel. Valentino sat back.
“No. I work for the UCLA Film Preservation Department. The Oracle is a personal extravagance. Naturally I’m curious about the things that came with it, but I’m more interested in you professionally. I understand you were a film technician at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”
Pegler rested the remote on the arm of his chair. The muscles in his face relaxed. His visitor suspected this sudden shift was a symptom of his disease. “Don’t make it sound so grand,” the old man said. “I was a developer, and someone’s assistant at that. Young squirt that I was, I planned to run the studio one day, take Thalberg’s place. Do you know Mr. Thalberg?”
The change in tenses disturbed him a little. Maybe this was one of those regressions the chubby young man in the office had mentioned. “I know of him.”
“Well, ambition’s one thing, luck’s something else. I had too much of one and not enough of the other. Some damn fool who had no business being in the lab went out and left a cigarette burning next to fresh film stock. When the flames hit the chemicals on the shelves, the darkroom went up and me with it. They had to cut me in half to save what didn’t burn.” He touched the stump again, rubbed it absentl
y.
“I’m sorry,” Valentino said.
The old man looked down and saw what he was doing. For an instant he seemed to be wondering what had happened to the rest of the leg. Then he returned to the moment.
“Not necessary. I was going to direct, then produce, then buy the studio. Instead I bought a theater. Folks needed a place to go to forget when times got hard. It was a good living right up till I got robbed. Poor Gerda.”
“Who’s Eric?”
“Eric?”
“Someone told me you ask for him sometimes.”
The confusion passed. On an old face it resembled fear. “These kids around me cackle like hens. I get my years mixed up from time to time. Eric was my first dog. Smartest Great Dane you ever saw. Hell, he’s dead ninety years. Coal wagon ran over him.”
“I thought it might have been Erich von Stroheim. You both worked at Metro about the same time.”
“That fraud. I’d hear him snarling at my boss outside the darkroom, coming on like the Kaiser. You couldn’t print a frame fast enough to bring a smile to that fish face. Said he once belonged to Franz Josef’s Imperial Guard. I bet he shoveled out the stable.”
“He was a great director, though.”
“DeMille was greater. He knew how to work inside a budget, and he didn’t put on airs. Von Stroheim, my aunt’s fanny. Von old hack.”
Valentino couldn’t resist. “Any DeMille stories?”
“You know that old chestnut that ends, ‘Ready when you are, C. B.’?”
“Everyone must know that one by now.”
“Never happened.”
“Never?”
“No one on the lot ever called him C. B. Especially not a lowly second-unit cameraman. It was always Mr. DeMille. That’s what makes a great director.”
Valentino thanked him and rose. He stopped at the door. “Did you ever know a young man named Albert Spinoza? He was a projectionist.”
Pegler was quiet for a moment. Then the old chin wobbled, a pathetic sight. “I’m sorry, mister, I wasn’t listening. Did you say you were from Mr. Thalberg?”
Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames Page 12