Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 01 - Frames

by Loren D. Estleman

  The silence was complete. Even Todd and Broadhead had stopped talking and were watching them, motionless. They’d overheard.

  Fanta shuddered. Valentino couldn’t tell if it was real or if her drama teacher had grossly underestimated her talent. In that same slow, heavy speech she said, “His head’s cracked open. What should we do?”

  She’d lost the gamble. The eyes changed again, glittered lucidly. He seemed to be returning to the present. Then they clouded again.

  “Gerda!”

  The shout jarred the listeners. It was loud enough to carry all through the building. Pegler braced his hands on the arms of the wheelchair and raised himself from the seat, turning his head to call over his shoulder. “Gerda! You didn’t finish that wall yet, did you? You forgot the reels in the storeroom. Come and get them.”

  In a minute or so they would be up to their necks in personnel. Everyone leaned forward, straining for what came next.

  Pegler appeared to be listening to something, a voice dead to everyone but him. His arms went slack. He slumped back into the chair with his chin on his chest, a man much older than just ninety-eight. “No, leave the bricks up.” His voice bleated weakly. “We’ll just plaster it over. Von Stroheim’s dying. We won’t be getting any more money out of him. We’ll just go ahead and sell the place.”

  “I am not dead yet.”

  The part of Valentino that was Valentino was chilled by the voice that broke the stillness; it might have belonged to von Stroheim’s ghost and not himself. He wasn’t in control of it. Valentino held up a hand to stop the stampede of rescuers at the entrance to the room, Kym Trujillo at its head. Von Stroheim lowered it and gripped the arms of his chair as if it were the throne of Austria. All eyes were upon him.

  “What did you mean when you said I put your life in danger?”

  The thin old face stared back. It seemed to have been carved from petrified wood. Then it bent in the middle, making a smile as sharp as a lance. “Still smoking, Erich?” he asked.

  CHAPTER

  24

  THE INTERVIEW SETUP at police headquarters bore a certain resemblance to the layout of a psychiatrist’s office, which seemed appropriate, given its location in downtown Los Angeles.

  The waiting area was less comfortable, consisting of a row of hard chairs in a hallway, and in place of the usual outdated magazines the reading material was restricted to a display of posters on the glass wall opposite promoting safety; but the exit from interrogation was separate from the entrance, so that once a subject was called inside, he was not seen again by his fellows except on the other side of the glass on the way to the elevator. Valentino suspected that in the present case the arrangement had less to do with polite discretion than with preventing interviewees from comparing their stories.

  He sat there for what seemed hours and probably was; no clock was visible and he’d left his wristwatch in a pocket of his street clothes in the name of consistency of character. He was too tired to speculate with his neighbors. Kyle Broadhead and then Todd the attendant and then Fanta and finally Kym Trujillo were collected and escorted around the corner by an officer in uniform, to reappear briefly twenty or thirty minutes later, making their escape behind glass. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the order, like scenes shot out of context. Valentino was left alone. The air-conditioning in the hallway was inadequate, and although he’d shed the uncomfortable tweed jacket and hung it over the back of his chair, he was clammy with sweat and itched in patches big and small. His right eye kept twitching—payback from the muscles for subjecting them to a monocle, of all things. Peering through the thick prescription lens had given him a pounding headache. His back hurt and his neck was stiff. He wondered how von Stroheim had put up with it for seventy-one years. It seemed to explain his disposition.

  Sergeant Clifford was letting him steep. He regarded that as just punishment. Sitting there marooned, he projected the events of the past week onto the glass wall in front of him and found himself picking holes in the plot. None of the motivations made sense, the characters kept second-guessing one another, and the hero appeared ridiculous. If he’d been in a theater, he’d have walked out soon after the opening credits.

  “May I join you, or will you be brooding alone this evening?”

  He looked up at Kym Trujillo, standing beside his chair with her hands in the pockets of a short silvery all-weather coat. Rain was still falling, or had been anyway the last time he’d seen the outdoors. He started to get up.

  “Stay put. If you came to the Country Home looking like that, I’d order oxygen.”

  “How’d you make it back here?” he asked. “I saw you bolting for freedom a little while ago.”

  “I shook my tail and doubled back. Actually, they don’t care what happens to you after you leave the place. They don’t even offer you a ride home after they bring you here in the backseat of a squad car. I drove. Should I hang around?”

  “You might have to wait one to three years. Whatever the going rate is for obstruction of justice.”

  She sat down in the chair next to him. “You caught a murderer. That should count for something.”

  “I browbeat a confession out of an old man in a wheelchair.”

  “I’ve been in elder care five years,” she said. “The woman I replaced was there when poor Johnny Weismuller started wandering into the other residents’ rooms, giving the Tarzan yell. He won five gold medals in two Olympics, broke the world speed swimming record twice, and made twenty-seven movies, but at the home he’s remembered as a pathetic old pest. It’s easy to forget what they were when you see them as they are. Warren Pegler is an old man in a wheelchair who bludgeoned a man to death in the prime of his life. Also he’s a blackmailer.”

  “Can we not talk about that?” he asked. “I betrayed your trust.”

  “I’ll be a while forgiving you for that. Was it worth all the fuss?”

  “I’ve been telling myself all along it was. Sitting here these last few hours, I’m not so sure. Kyle Broadhead says I can sell Greed to UCLA for fifty thousand. I’ve been wondering if that’s what I went to all the fuss for, and all this high-minded talk of saving a great work of art is so much hooey. Maybe von Stroheim was right. Maybe it all comes down to greed in the end.”

  She was quiet for a minute.

  “Maybe you’re thinking too much about the end and not enough about the beginning,” she said then. “Go back to the first time you visited that projection booth and read the labels on those cans. How’d you feel?”

  “My palms got sweaty and my heart rate shot to two hundred.”

  “Was it like winning the lottery?”

  “I’ve never won the lottery. I’ve never played.”

  “Well, was it like coming into unexpected money?”

  “No. It was like what Hillary said when he climbed Everest. He couldn’t wait to see the expression on the face of the leader of the expedition when he came back down. I couldn’t wait to tell Kyle.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the reaction of someone who just found the shortcut to Easy Street.”

  “It can’t be as simple as that.”

  “Most things are, until you start picking at them. Why do you think they left us cooling our heels out here in the hallway?”

  “So von Stroheim was wrong, and Greed’s a fraud.”

  “It’s a movie. If movies were real, there’d be no reason to go to them.” She yawned; he realized then she’d been up as long as he. “All I know is, someone who never played the lottery isn’t in it for the money.”

  “Somehow I doubt Sergeant Clifford will be that charitable. How was it in there?”

  “She’s tough. She thought I was trying to make you look good because we’re friends.”

  “We must be, if you were able to make me look good.”

  “I said I tried. Anyway, I only came in on the last act. I guess you’d call it the last reel. Todd would’ve given her the rest.”

  He looked at her out
of the corner of his eye. “So are we friends?”

  She kept her perfect profile turned his way. The modeling profession had lost a potential icon when she’d decided to go for an MBA. “Stay away from the Country Home for a while. The people I answer to don’t read murder mysteries.”

  It was an unsatisfactory response, but he didn’t push for more. He had neither the energy nor the moral authority.

  The uniformed officer returned and scowled down at Kym. Valentino sensed in him a philosophical kinship with the stickler in the university parking garage. She rose to leave.

  “The sergeant will see you now,” he told Valentino.

  When Valentino stood and picked up the tweed jacket, Kym leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll send you a box of popcorn with a file in it,” she whispered.

  The interview room was nearly as clean as the lab, the linoleum tiles waxed recently and the walls glistening with fresh beige paint, but that was just cosmetics to cover a miasma of guilt and fear. Sergeant Clifford received him leaning in a corner with arms and ankles crossed. She wore a blue silk blouse and black slacks with an empty holster clipped to her belt. He didn’t know if this was a precaution against attempts at escape or suicide or her own impatience. She looked taller than ever. Her mane of red hair was fiery in the light of a bare bulb in a cage on the ceiling. She told him to sit down.

  “Not there. Face the mirror.”

  He draped the jacket over the back of a plastic scoop chair and sat at a laminated table. A video camera on a tripod regarded him with its unblinking red eye. His face in reflection looked wan and gray. He felt other eyes watching him from the opposite side of the glass.

  “Tell it,” she said.

  He told it straight through, from his first two visits to The Oracle and the discoveries he’d made there all the way through his second conversation with Warren Pegler that afternoon—yesterday afternoon, possibly; his inner clock insisted midnight was close, if not past. He went back a few times to provide details he’d forgotten, and terse questions from the sergeant reminded him of others. This time he didn’t leave out Fanta and Broadhead and their contributions. He was sure they hadn’t, and for once he’d decided that telling the whole truth would spare them further trouble. Then the questioning began in earnest and he told it all two or three more times, out of order. It was like cutting up a reel of film and having to splice it back together several times before he got it right. She was trying to trip him up, and she was good at her job. He found himself second-guessing things he’d been sure of all along and dismissing things he’d questioned earlier out of hand.

  Finally the cross-examination stopped. For the first time in an hour she stirred herself from her corner, walked over to the camera, and pushed a button. The red light went off.

  “I had a warrant all sworn out for your arrest when we got the call from Woodland Hills,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from him. She folded her forearms on the table. “Did you think cops are too dumb to read title frames on film?”

  He was still trying to construct an answer that wouldn’t get him in deeper when she spoke again.

  “Your friend Dr. Broadhead confessed to switching movies. He said you had nothing to do with it. I thought he was just protecting you, but I see now you’re not culpable. Just stupid.

  “As for interfering with an official police investigation,” she went on, “you’re guilty as Cain. You need to read something in the paper besides the entertainment section. The century turned a few years ago. These days, Sherlock Holmes would be spending so much time as a guest of Scotland Yard he wouldn’t have any left to trample over footprints and taint evidence. Did you ever have one moment of madness where you thought it might be a good idea to call a professional and tell her what you’d stepped in?”

  “I was pretty sure you’d tell me to butt out.”

  She stuck a red-nailed finger at him. “That’s at the top of the list of One Hundred Reasons Why I’m a Detective and You’re Not. I act on tips, no matter how looney the source. How’d you identify Albert Spinoza as the victim?”

  “It’s in my statement. Several places.”

  “Pretend it isn’t.”

  “Fanta found an old newspaper article on the Internet. Everything about the missing person checked with what we knew about the skeleton.” She was torturing him.

  “What we knew; but that was public record, so I won’t be calling Harriet Johansen up for a disciplinary hearing for spilling it to her gentleman friend. Here’s another juicy piece of inside information: We have computers too. We were gathering more background to spring on Pegler when you and Mickey and Judy decided to put on a show. With it, we’d have gotten everything we needed from Pegler without blowing our case on a charge of entrapment.”

  He sat back as if she’d struck him across the face. “I never realized—I didn’t think—”

  “Bam!” An open hand smacked the table. “You Didn’t Think. That’s reason number two.”

  “Sergeant,” he said, “I’m sorry. It was an old case, not exactly a priority with so many new ones coming across your desk every day. I was concerned with what might happen to Greed while it was simmering on the back burner. Do you really think Pegler will get away with it?”

  “He already has. We haven’t spoken with his physician yet, but based on the statements we took from the two Country Home employees who were present, the DA informs me no psychiatrist in the system will declare him fit to stand trial. At his age and in his condition, he’ll probably never live long enough to be committed to an institution. Anyway, what’s the point? He’s in an institution now.”

  “Why do you think he did it?”

  She sat back and crossed one leg over the other. Her eyes were smoky green. “He told you his fears. Delusional people don’t lie. The motion picture projectionists’ union has no record of an Albert Spinoza ever applying for membership in this state, but he did attend film school briefly at the University of San Diego; the program was brand new then, and they’ve preserved the early records. Pegler didn’t know that, or he wouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that Spinoza had somehow heard about Greed when he was working at the Roxy in Pittsburgh. If he had known, he probably wouldn’t have hired him, because an ignorance of film history would have helped Pegler keep his secret. Money was already tight—he was probably paying coolie wages for nonunion help. When he caught Spinoza snooping, he saw the gravy train ending for good once the secret got out. He flipped.” She laughed without enjoyment. “The ironic part is he could have pled temporary insanity and probably walked.”

  “He’d still be guilty of extortion.”

  “Who from? You said von Stroheim died soon after. No crime has taken place when there’s no one to press charges.”

  “His wife was his accomplice. She carried the body to the cellar and walled it up. She looked sturdy enough, Spinoza was small, and Pegler said she was handy at repair work. Then she plastered over the room next to the booth to conceal the evidence she’d overlooked.”

  “She was a loyal Old World–style helpmeet. Thank God they’re extinct. She might’ve drawn a suspended sentence. She was dead within three years; of guilt, if you’re poetically inclined. L.A. Medical Examiners office says it was ovarian cancer.”

  “I can’t help feeling sorry for Pegler,” Valentino said.

  “I can. But then I’m trained to see past things like wrinkles and wheelchairs.”

  “The wrinkles were recent. If what he said is true, it was Erich von Stroheim’s careless smoking that robbed him of his legs.”

  “Filthy habit.” She looked at her watch. He noticed nicotine stains on her first and second fingers. “Pegler should have sued,” she said. “That’s what civilized people do in these situations. But if you happen to be one of those benighted souls who favor punishment over rehabilitation—as I do—you can take comfort from the knowledge that Pegler’s serving a life sentence at hard labor, reliving his crime over and over, every d
etail as fresh as the day he committed it. Hell on earth. Or at least in Hollywood.”

  “What about Greed?”

  “If you mean that pile of gumbo in the evidence room, you can pick it up any time. The watch captain will give you a release.”

  “I mean the real thing.”

  “How about a ticket to the premiere? I assume there will be one. You owe me a good seat.”

  “You won’t need it for evidence?”

  “Of what? I said there isn’t going to be a trial. Is it really ten hours long?”

  “Eight or ten. But you said—”

  “We’ve located a Spinoza cousin in Philadelphia; if he agrees to submit to a DNA test and it matches what we got from Mr. Bones, we can snap shut the file on this one. I’m not giving up my day off to appear against you on an interference charge that will probably just get thrown out of court.”

  “I’ll get you as many tickets as you want,” he said. “Bring all your friends.”

  “One’s fine. I’m a cop.” She tilted her head, and he realized what a beautiful woman she was when she wasn’t pulling rank. “I’m curious about the picture. I’ve never seen one anybody was willing to go to jail for. That is, not since I left Vice.”

  “I’m free to go?”

  “If you promise to confine your sleuthing to the area outside my precinct.”

  “I’ll quit cold turkey.”

  “I won’t even try to hold you to that. You and your friends had too much fun. Just keep it out of West Hollywood.” She watched him get up and retrieve his jacket. “Speaking of friends, Harriet Johansen’s finishing up the late shift in the lab. You can just catch her if you don’t take the elevator.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  THE SAD STUMP of The Oracle’s original marquee was dark. If any of the remaining bulbs were still functional, the wires to them had long since corroded or been chewed to pieces by squirrels. So many black snap letters were missing from GONE OUT OF BUSINESS that it had become a game among the neighbors to suggest answers to the puzzle: GO TO SIN was the winner so far. But today, as dusk drifted in under the diurnal stratum of smog, some of those neighbors may have found more entertaining speculation in the presence of lights burning on the ground floor after years of shadow.