Valentino watched him puttering with his pipe, the only fetish in his acerbic, ascetic life. “You’re a good friend, Kyle.”
“Your only friend. You can’t count Harriet Johansen yet. She’s still your Dulcinea at this early stage.”
“You forgot Kym Trujillo at the Country Home.”
“Have you ever had dinner at her house? Or had her to dinner at yours?”
“Lunch, a couple of times.”
“Lunch is a bribe, to patch up the pipeline to your best source of anecdotal information. Did you tell her about your ghost?”
“Of course not.”
“I rest my case. How is old Erich, by the way? Dead and well, I trust? In good spirits?”
“I missed him last time. He left his smoking paraphernalia in my car, but only for a moment.”
“Um.” Broadhead sucked on the cold pipe. “I wouldn’t think an apparition had any pressing engagements.”
“When I said you were a good friend, I was referring to your efforts to distract me from the thought that right now a bunch of day laborers with flat feet and a taste for deep-fried pastry are putting their ham fists all over the find of two centuries.”
“Snobbery doesn’t become you. As a matter of fact, many of L.A.’s finest are blessed with admirably high arches. As to the value of the confiscated property, I have my doubts; although dogs are universally popular. You said Pegler still mourns the one he lost to a coal wagon ninety years ago.”
“What do dogs have to do with Greed?”
“Nothing, in context. Gluttony’s as close as they come to that human sin. But I do expect a proper demonstration of wrath when Sergeant Clifford and her people get past the first three reels and find themselves following the adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin.”
Valentino sat up. “Elucidate.”
“History has largely forgotten that before the brothers Warner greenlighted The Jazz Singer, rescuing us all from the poetry of silence, the exploits of a heroic German shepherd were all that stood between them and bankruptcy. They ran that studio on a shoestring and gallons of red ink.”
“Tell me you didn’t put Rin-Tin-Tin in those cans before you let them go.”
“Very well. I did not.”
“Kyle!”
“Assuming you wish to rephrase that as a question, I will respond that I did not do that solely. I’m no piker, and anyway I couldn’t fill all forty-two cans with less than three thousand feet of film. I put in reels one, two, and three of Greed, which we’d just barely transferred to safety, threw in the dog, and finished out the bill with Tarzan of the Apes, starring the immortal Elmo Lincoln, his leopard skin, and his beer belly. Grand stuff, and we’ve got it all on backup. What more could you ask, short of a travelogue, a newsreel, and Porky the Pig?”
Valentino cursed loud and long. Ruth pounded.
“I considered The Perils of Pauline,” Broadhead said, “but it doesn’t date nearly as well. I have standards.”
A fist slammed the desk, starting a paperslide of scripts and playbills that continued long into the speech that followed. “This isn’t a fraternity prank. We started out by withholding evidence, now we’re tampering with it. Clifford’s smart enough to spot the difference between Zasu Pitts and a police dog.”
“Debatable. Pitts was no great beauty. But Greed’s safe in our hands, and posterity will judge whether it’s more important to punish a murderer or save a masterpiece.”
“You’re wrong. A judge will judge, and you and I will be watching all our movies in the San Quentin cafeteria. And how did Greed manage that tricky U-turn back to masterpiece? A few minutes ago it was a commodity.”
“I was speaking for posterity, not myself. Anyway, it won’t even be a commodity if we let them stick it in the refrigerator with the tuna sandwiches. Your view of penal life is confined to the screen, incidentally. If you don’t actually shiv someone in the shower room, they pipe basic cable into your cell. Citizen Kane with feminine hygiene spots is better than no Kane at all.” Broadhead scratched the side of his nose with the paper clip, leaving an ashen mark. “But that’s my burden. You’ll be in your own Xanadu, fighting with building inspectors, while I’m busy rattling my cup against the bars, demanding more gruel.” He cocked his head. “No, that’s Oliver Twist. It’s high time I retired to the rock pile. I can no longer distinguish between Jackie Coogan and Jimmy Cagney.”
“If you think I’m going to stand by and let you take the rap alone—”
“Spoken like George Raft. It’s not your choice. I’ll exonerate you in my confession. I won’t have you playing Cook to my Peary and smudging my individual achievement.”
“Don’t you mean your martyrdom?”
“The image is inconsistent. Cook and Peary were explorers, not martyrs. Those don’t come in pairs. Which was the whole point of my argument.” He smiled his baggy academic smile. “Don’t weep for me. The cell is bound to be more comfortable than that Eastern European dungeon, and if I can resist the temptation to crash the gate, the warden may let me have paper and pencils to finish my book. A lot of great literature has been created behind bars: Don Quixote, the stories of O. Henry, The Gulag Archipelago.”
“You left out Mein Kampf.”
“Hitler’s style meandered too much to qualify. Anyway, that whole Holocaust thing detracts from the text. Mad dictators should hire ghosts to write their memoirs; meaning no offense to Herr von Stroheim.”
“Heroes make a difference. That’s how you know they’re heroes. You’ll just be a drain on the taxpayers while Clifford gets a court order and takes the film anyway.”
“That’s her privilege. We’ll have it on safety by the time my trial date is set. The publicity alone should encourage our president to put the entire technical staff on the job and step up the pace.”
Valentino said, “I know just how he’ll feel.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you just doubled my determination to solve this case before they drag you away to jail.”
Broadhead tapped a tooth with the mouthpiece of his pipe. “Can I play too?”
CHAPTER
19
FANTA JOINED THEM at the microbrewery downtown, where the bunkerlike atmosphere of booths and conversational buzz provided a comfortable environment for plotting strategy. They’d hoped for a spot by the picture of Basil Rathbone with deerstalker and pipe, but that was occupied by some mid-level studio executives scribbling new dialogue on a script with a pen borrowed from their waitress. The trio settled for one near the kitchen under the sardonic supervision of Warren William.
“Didn’t he play Sam Spade once?” Fanta asked.
“Badly,” Broadhead said.
“Perfect,” said Valentino. “He won’t show us up.”
The men ordered beers, the young woman iced tea, and they shared a platter of ethnic samplers, referred to in the menu as the Our Gang Plate. Valentino watched the professor strip all the greenery from a pita sandwich. “Why the change of heart? You’ve been riding me with Junior G-Man jokes all week. Now you’re joining the squad.”
“That was work, this is play. I told you my job is to be the wise Fool to your King Lear.”
“You said you were the Greek chorus.”
“They provide the same stage business. In any case it’s been no fun hovering upstage. I want to share the center spot.”
Fanta said, “Do you two think we can restrict the analogies to the movies? I was just starting to recognize some of them, and now you ring in Aeschylus and Shakespeare.” She colored when the men stared at her. “Okay, I went for a theater major my freshman year. I was going to be the next Barrymore.”
“John or Ethel?” They said it together.
“Drew. I got a shot of good sense up the ying-yang when I auditioned for Marat/Sade in the school play.”
“Was that Dr. Zinnerman’s production?” Broadhead asked.
“Yes. Did you see it?”
“I never go to the theater: too much yelling and sto
mping about. But Zinnerman’s the nastiest piece of work on the faculty. If he taught law instead of drama, he’d have humiliated you out of going for that degree.”
“No way. He was a bear, but he did me a favor. I might have wasted a whole semester finding out I’ve got less talent in my whole body than Lynn Fontanne has in her dead little finger.”
“Is that how he put it?”
“He used adjectives. Mr. Yardley was plenty tough in the class I took from him on contract law, but he couldn’t shake me. I aced the final.”
“That’s impressive,” Broadhead said. “Jack Yardley started out as a criminal attorney, reducing mob killers to tears during cross-examination. And he hands out A’s the way Fort Knox gives free samples.”
Valentino said, “Maybe we should invite him in.”
“Ew,” Fanta said. “I bet he hasn’t trimmed the hair in his nose since his bar exam.”
The professor finished weeding his pita. “A distinct advantage in court. It’s almost impossible to get a jury to pay attention to your summation when they’re watching your opponent marcelling his nostrils at the defense table.”
“Charming.” Valentino pushed away his plate of angel hair pasta.
Fanta drank iced tea. She wore a tank top and cargo pants and her black hair loose to her shoulders, a hooded cellophane raincoat flung over the back of her seat. It was an incongruous mix with the woven-leather shoulder bag beside her on the cushion. The bag was the same one she’d had with her the day she and Valentino had started their investigation. The young studio executives looked up frequently from the script they were mutilating to cast admiring glances her way. She appeared oblivious to their interest. “I like this place,” she said. “It reminds me of the pub in The Invisible Man. I’ve been boning up on old videos.”
Valentino said, “They built it on top of a cocktail bar. William Holden drank himself to death at a corner table.”
“I thought he got drunk and fell down in his apartment.”
“He was already half embalmed when he left here.”
“Charming.” Broadhead set down his beer untasted. “The Invisible Man isn’t a murder mystery,” he told Fanta.
“I know, but I fell in love with Claude Rains’s voice when I saw Deception. You don’t hear pipes like that anymore, and we had some great ones in drama class.”
“Microphones,” said Broadhead. “No reason thundering out to the back row when you’re wearing a lavalier around your neck.”
From there the talk turned to other great stage-trained voices, Rathbone’s and Welles’s and Edward Arnold’s. It was Valentino who steered it back to the business at hand. “Let’s review what we’ve got so far.”
“Not much,” Fanta said. “A newspaper article about a missing projectionist who fits the skeleton’s description and what Warren Pegler told you.” He’d filled her in on the interview while they were waiting for the booth.
“What he didn’t tell me amounts to a lot more,” Valentino said.
Their waitress, older and more ambitious than the woman who’d served them the other day, asked if they wanted anything else, took orders for coffee and a refill of Fanta’s tea, and left, bearing away their dishes.
“Maybe this’ll help.” Fanta dragged the shoulder bag onto her lap and opened the clasp. Valentino half expected her to produce another coffee table book with a picture of The Oracle in its glory, but instead she drew out a thick padded mailer and tipped a pile of folio-size newspapers onto the freshly cleared table. They smelled musty and the brittle old pulp was crumbling at the folds, but the heavy black mast-head, identical on all three, still screamed for attention:
THE ANGEL CITY INTELLIGENCER est. 1925
The edition on top of the slanted stack was dated January of that same year.
“I tracked it down through the Smithsonian Web site,” she said. “An online book finder found it for me in a shop in Las Cruces, New Mexico, of all places, and had them overnight it: the entire run, all three issues.”
Broadhead picked up the top copy and unfolded it to study a grainy photo of a pair of corpses in hats and overcoats sprawled on the bullet-riddled front porch of a miniature Spanish hacienda. MEX SPEAK SERVES UP 2 STIFF ONES, read the caption.
“Offhand, I’d say they overestimated their readership when they named the rag.”
“There were dozens of these little dudes floating around town those days,” Fanta said. “When I found that out, I started wondering if some of their editors didn’t flip the bird at the studios and their control of the press.”
“Flipping the bird was the tabloids’ specialty,” Broadhead said, “although they usually selected safer targets, like cops and gangsters. Picking on Hollywood might explain why this one ran only three issues.” He spread it open to an inside page. “Oh, look. Calvin Coolidge in a Sioux warbonnet.”
Valentino felt a little buzz of anticipation, as if he were homing in on a Griffith reel. “What made you choose this one?”
“I didn’t. It chose me. This isn’t the only package I got. My floor at home is covered with old newspapers. Now my side looks just like my roommate’s.”
“How much did all that cost?” he asked her.
“Let’s just say my parents are getting McDonald’s gift certificates for Christmas this year.”
Broadhead closed and folded The Angel City Intelligencer. “That’s extravagant, young lady. At your age you should be blowing textbook money on keggers.”
She screwed up her face and stuck out her tongue between her teeth. The professor sighed heavily.
“Good heavens, look at those old newspapers! Is one of us a scrapbooker?”
All three looked up at their waitress, who moved the stack to set down the coffees and iced tea.
“I’m thinking of taking it up,” Broadhead said. “My doctor says I need to find a hobby less strenuous than Civil War reenactment. Carrying around that sword is murder on the sacroiliac.”
“Just make sure you seal it all in archival plastic. The older the material, the sooner it deteriorates.”
He thanked her for the advice.
When they were alone again, Valentino said, “Civil War reenactment?”
“My idiot older brother. He died at Gettysburg for Selznick and again at Shiloh for John Huston.”
“How old are you?”
“Older than Ruth and younger than San Jacinto.” He looked at Fanta. “Are you going to guide us to the truth, or must we spend all day improving our education on flappers and philosophers?”
“I’m not sure I know what that means, but here.” She slid out the February issue, opened it to an inside page, folded it carefully into a square, and passed it across to Broadhead. Valentino leaned over his shoulder to read the square two-column item in the lower lefthand corner:
REEL-LIFE SCOUNDREL PROVES REAL-LIFE HERO
Erich von Stroheim, billed in theaters as “The Man You Love to Hate” for his numerous portrayals of villains on the silver screen, reversed roles to save the life of a fellow studio employee during a fire on the MGM lot late last month.
Unnamed sources report that when a blaze broke out in the film developing laboratory, actor-director von Stroheim, who was present, disregarded his own life and safety to pull an assistant developer from the blaze.
Von Stroheim received minor burns during the rescue. Warren Pegler, 18, was taken by ambulance to Los Angeles General Hospital, where his condition is still critical. The cause of the fire is under investigation, although inspectors suspect careless smoking was involved.
The text surrounded a cropped photograph of von Stroheim that Valentino recognized from the director’s early days at Universal, wearing a monocle and a well-cut tweed suit and carrying a walking stick, a Tyrolean hat at an arrogant angle on his bullet-shaped head. He had the ubiquitous cigarette and holder clamped between a thumb and forefinger.
“I can’t understand why MGM suppressed the story in the bigger papers,” Fanta said. “Nowdays it would be all
over ET and People. Von Stroheim rocked.”
Broadhead said, “Nowadays, studios have insurance. Careless smoking is serious negligence. If a personal injury attorney had gotten wind of it, the suit would have cost millions, and the trial would have dragged on for weeks on every front page in the country, smearing the industry at a time when it couldn’t afford another witch hunt. It was lucky this got lost in the tabloid avalanche.” He looked up from the page. “You’ve unearthed a previously undiscovered piece of cinema history. That’s like finding a nugget the Forty-Niners overlooked. Think you can handle a second major?”
Smiling, she propped her chin on her palm. “Tell you after I finish making up for all the homework I blew off this week.”
“She’s done more than just add to Hollywood lore,” Valentino said. “She’s established a direct link between Warren Pegler and Erich von Stroheim. It can’t be coincidence we found Greed in the Oracle.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” Fanta said. “The theater, I mean. You said Pegler told you his business manager took off for Nazi Germany with all his investments?”
“That’s what he said.”
“I should’ve paid more attention during Western History. Didn’t the Nazis surrender in, like, nineteen forty-four?”
“Forty-five.” Broadhead drank coffee. “According to my great-grandmother.”
“So what kept him going till he sold the place in fifty-six?”
“Tickets and popcorn,” Broadhead said.
“It wouldn’t have been enough.” Valentino sat back. “The book Fanta gave me said the Oracle was one of the first movie houses in L.A. to install Cinerama and three-D projectors and stereophonic speakers, to compete with television. The retrofitting alone would have cost him thousands, just at the time he said he was struggling. Why didn’t I think of that when I was asking him questions?”
Broadhead said, “You’re an archivist, not a criminal investigator, no matter what your cards say. You’re not used to tripping people up in their lies. Most of the old-timers you talk to have been waiting years for an audience they haven’t told the same stories to a hundred times. The trick is getting them to shut up.”
Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames Page 15