Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  3

  A DECIDEDLY LESS exotic brand of champagne was available a few days later. It was bottled in Schenectady, New York, and poured into plastic flutes that came in two pieces and had to be assembled by the host.

  “Hump!” Broadhead adjusted his readers to peer at the bottle. “It says here if you send in ten labels, the manufacturer will respond with an autographed photo of the founder of the distillery, a Monsieur Harvey Finkbeiner.”

  Valentino said, “It doesn’t say that at all!”

  “It should include a coupon for a free stomach pump.”

  “It was a contest between Dom Pérignon and sixteen cases of LED lights. Technology won.”

  They were standing on the sidewalk in front of The Oracle: the owner; his girlfriend, Harriet; his disgruntled mentor; Fanta, soon-to-be Mrs. Disgruntled Mentor; Smith Oldfield; and Henry Anklemire. Oldfield, the ivy-covered legal advisor to the Film Preservation Department, and Anklemire, the flack in charge of Information Services, had earned the privilege of attendance through Oldfield’s proofing of the tons of documents required to take possession of the property and to arrange the cooperation of the various contractors, and Anklemire’s tireless efforts to promote public interest in the films Valentino managed to free from Purgatory.

  The only no-show was Leo Kalishnikov, the brilliant, eccentric theater designer who had overseen the project from the start. He was in Prague, collaborating with an expatriate film director currently under indictment for U.S. tax evasion on a media center the director wanted to install in the basement of the sixteenth-century church he was converting into a private house. But the absent guest had commemorated the occasion with a congratulatory text:

  TRY NOT TO ELECTROCUTE YOURSELF. LOVE, L. K.

  “What are we waiting for? It’s dark enough.” Harriet, in a sleeveless blouse and chambray bell-bottoms, hugged herself. It was an uncharacteristically chilly night in West Hollywood.

  Valentino shrugged out of his windbreaker and draped it over her bare shoulders. “The electrician. The insurance company threatened to void the policy if I throw the switch without him present. Also he’s got the remote.”

  Above them, vanishing into gathering dusk, towered The Oracle’s marquee, dark for decades.

  “If this is going to be a replay of Christmas Vacation, I vote we open the champagne now.”

  “Kyle, be nice.” Fanta used the singsong tone she brought out when her fiancé needed upbraiding.

  Anklemire adjusted his hairpiece, a discard from Kevin Spacey’s last feature. He was a short man in a suit that needed no outside illumination. “I still think we should’ve invited the press. I got a producer with Access Hollywood laid in Salt Lake City. That’s like finding a chocolate Easter bunny in Tehran.”

  “Let’s save that gem for when we really need it.” Oldfield, it was said, spent time each month collecting the names of possible character witnesses to speak up for Anklemire at his inevitable procurement trial.

  Fanta, herself an attorney in training, asked Valentino if he was sure the wiring was safe. “With Mr. Oldfield and me here, I’m not sure about the ethics of either of us defending you from a personal-injury suit.”

  Broadhead said, “I think I resent that.”

  “I didn’t mean you,” she said. “If you took Val to court, you’d never see me naked again. I’m talking about the odd innocent passerby.”

  “I’ll grant you the ‘odd,’” he said. “I’ll get back to you on the ‘innocent.’ I’ve lived in the City of Angels long enough to shoot craps with Gabriel.”

  Anklemire frowned. “That ain’t nice, Professor. And I’m Jewish.”

  “Mea culpa.”

  “No, thanks. I et already.”

  “Where’s that electrician?” Harriet demanded. “We’re about to go into Who’s on First.”

  Just then the man himself arrived, a smiling black man wearing gray coveralls and carrying a steel toolbox with a rubber-covered handle. He shook Valentino’s hand and looked up at the marquee.

  “It was a bitch,” he said. “My crew had to sit on their fannies for a month waiting for the go-ahead from the EPA on asbestos removal, and then six weeks haggling with OSHA and the insurance company. And the wires? I had to go to my old man in the nursing home to ask him about the wires. He said that gauge went out with Tom Edison. We had to rip them all out, even the ones that were good as new, because they wouldn’t splice with the replacements. But you’ll be glad I talked you into those LEDs. They’ll pay for themselves in a year. You can leave them on all night for pennies.”

  Valentino turned out his jeans pockets. “You’re welcome to all those I’ve got left.”

  “Val,” Harriet said, “I’m weighing a brain in an hour. And I can’t feel my feet.” She was a Crime Scene Investigator with the Los Angeles Police Department.

  He nodded, and looked at the electrician, who lowered his toolbox to the sidewalk, knelt, opened it, and handed him a slim black remote-control box from inside.

  Valentino squared his shoulders, planted his feet wide, glanced toward Fanta focusing on the marquee with a camera phone, extended the remote at arm’s length, hesitated a beat, and pressed the POWER button.

  A bulb halfway up the structure glowed briefly and went out with a sigh.

  The silence that followed was broken by someone’s throat clearing.

  “Breathtaking.” Broadhead popped the cork on the bottle of champagne.

  * * *

  The party reconvened in the theater’s unfinished lobby, the electrician remaining outside to consult his schematics sheet. Dust cloths covered the candy counter and old-fashioned popcorn cart. Faux marble tiles covered half the floor; the rest was plywood, and had been for weeks, awaiting more tiles. Somewhere in the world, Valentino was certain, people were tripping over tiles, boxes and boxes of tiles; cursing them, using them for bases in games of softball, skipping them like flat stones across the surfaces of lakes, while the floor in the lobby of The Oracle yawned and scratched itself, waiting for someone to come along and dress it, like some bored French king.

  “It’s probably just like Christmas-tree bulbs,” Anklemire offered. “If one goes out—” He shrugged and slurped from his flute.

  Harriet said, “Cheer up, Val. Two steps forward, one step back. Not so long ago it was the other way around.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.” He told them about the latest item in Beata Limerick’s collection.

  Harriet shrugged out of his windbreaker. “Good God. That would freak out my section chief, and he brings liverwurst sandwiches to the scenes of gang slayings.”

  Others responded according to their kind. Smith Oldfield:

  “I wonder if Mariska Hargitay is aware of this. It would seem to me an item like that would rightfully belong to the daughter of the deceased.”

  Henry Anklemire:

  “I’m seeing a picture of Hargitay with the wig in Variety, and a little mention that the current owner is friends with a member of the Film Preservation Department.”

  Kyle Broadhead:

  “I don’t see anything unusual about it. The closer one gets to death, the more fascinated he is by it.”

  Fanta said, “If you don’t stop that kind of talk, I’m going to have my mother pull strings and invite the president to our wedding. You can deal with the Secret Service and bomb-sniffing dogs.” The bride-to-be’s mother was an ambassador.

  He shuddered. “And I haven’t voted since Abe Abolafia ran on the nudist ticket.”

  Harriet, leaning against the ticket booth, sipped champagne. “I’m with Fanta. Val, your associations are becoming morbid.”

  “This from a woman who weighs brains for a living,” Broadhead said.

  Valentino said, “I have to go back. She’s promised to sell me her master print of The Sandpiper for what she paid for it five years ago.”

  “What’s that?” Anklemire asked.

  He told him.

  The P.R. man rubbed his hands. “Tayl
or and Burton? I can smell the money!”

  Broadhead told him he could smell money from outer space.

  The electrician came in, carrying his toolbox. “If you folks are waiting for me, you might as well go home. I have to assemble my crew and inspect every inch of the wiring for breaks or frays. That’ll take the rest of the week.”

  “Pour the man some champagne,” Broadhead said. “I can hear it going flat in the bottle.”

  4

  THE INVITATION WAS for two o’clock Tuesday. Beata had promised him Mrs. Flynn’s salmon mousse, with green beans in white wine sauce and sour-apple tarts. At the hour mentioned, Valentino came off the elevator and read the old lady’s hasty hand on a page of personal stationery thumbtacked to the door:

  V.—

  Let yourself in and sit down on something. I’m putting on my face, and no man should be left to stand that long.

  Love, B.

  Classic Beata.

  Placing the package he’d brought under one arm, he opened the door. The two flat cans bound in bright silver paper contained Beata’s MGM screen test, which he’d acquired in a blind lot along with some more commercial items, and had been saving for a special occasion. Such items were a rare find; the studios routinely incinerated them when a career proved stillborn. The reels seemed a more appropriate hostess gift than an ordinary bottle of wine.

  A fifty-year-old Bell & Howell projector in excellent condition stood on a stout table facing a portable screen. It was a feature new to the apartment. He envied her contacts; it had taken him two years to track one down for The Oracle, and he craved another so he could screen early 3-D, which he thought superior to its high-tech modern counterpart. He set his package on an eight-foot chaise Hedy Lamarr had reclined on in Samson and Delilah—Beata’s tastes were a shepherd’s pie of flabby biblical epics, fantasy, noir, and lavish trash—and examined the stenciling on one of the film cans stacked on the carpet at the foot of the table: The Sandpiper, together with its production number and a stern warning that it was the property of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was not to be removed from the studio.

  Not a caveat to be taken lightly. Eddie Mannix, the head of security in those days, was still a suspect in the mysterious death of George Reeves, TV’s first Superman.

  Despite his disparagement of its worth to the history of cinema, the find excited Valentino. In his world, anything on celluloid was worth preserving (porno and the Dagwood-and-Blondie series excepted), and the prospect of obtaining a Metrocolor print in like-new condition intoxicated him.

  “They’re prone to bleeding,” he’d told his friend, when she’d offered the film to him.

  “So are old actresses. We’ll screen it over the salmon and you can judge it for yourself.”

  She belonged to a generation of actors that rose late when they were between pictures, breakfasted in bed at eleven, lunched at midafternoon, and supped at eight before caravanning to the Mocambo, to lay the day to rest at dawn. He was accustomed to dining earlier. The delicate aroma of the entrée coming from the kitchen made his stomach rumble. The cook, he knew, would have left; she disliked being complimented, considering a dish prepared properly its own reward. Just as pleasantly, music was floating from the door of the bedroom.

  Identifying the melody helped distract him from his hunger. It was “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Marilyn Monroe’s show-stopping production number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; the old vixen’s sense of humor at its most typical. Her comments on the Curse of Marilyn were still fresh in his mind. He still wasn’t sure she’d bought into that old chestnut. In a city built of irony, he pictured himself its sole literal-minded resident.

  Of all the storied bric-a-brac in her collection, he found two items most amusing: Margaret Hamilton’s pointed witch’s hat from The Wizard of Oz and Fred MacMurray’s crutches from Double Indemnity, identified with hand-lettered 3X5 index cards along with the date she’d acquired them, and letters of provenance whose signatures alone were collectable: Judy Garland and Billy Wilder. Only someone of her temperament would juxtapose those two films. She was equal parts gaudy flash and disturbing dark matter; yet, oddly, not bipolar. She never dwelt in either world long enough to obsess over it.

  He returned Francis Lederer’s ruby ring from The Return of Dracula to its plush-lined box and looked at his watch: 2:21. Beata was rarely more than five minutes late for an appointment. She’d have no one accusing her of behaving like a diva; and she’d consider it a sin to allow one of Mrs. Flynn’s masterpieces to grow cold and have to be reheated.

  The smell from the kitchen turned acrid.

  A loud, razzing noise drowned out Marilyn, who seemed to be singing on a continuous loop, returning to the beginning of “Diamonds” immediately after the closing bars.

  It was a smoke alarm.

  Beata would never have left a meal meant for a guest unattended in the oven.

  Valentino pushed through the swinging door. The kitchen was filled with smoke.

  Coughing, eyes stinging, he stumbled across to the stove, flung open the oven door, releasing yet more smoke, groped for a pot holder, and swung the smoldering pan from the rack to the top of the range. He turned off the oven and switched on the fan in the overhead ventilator.

  The smoke began to thin out. He snatched up a dish towel and snapped it, bullfighter fashion, at the saucer-shaped alarm mounted on the ceiling. After a minute the noise stopped.

  “… I don’t mean rhinestones! Diamonds…”

  He passed through the living room, following the sound of Marilyn Monroe’s kittenlike voice, and rapped on the bedroom door; pounded on it with his fist. There was nothing wrong with Beata’s hearing, he knew. She had to have heard the alarm even if she’d failed to smell the smoke.

  No response. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He banged again, hard enough to make it bounce in its frame, and called her name. He got nothing but silence from the other side.

  Well, the worst that could happen was he’d catch her completely clothed except for one eyelash and she’d accuse him of watching too many John Wayne movies.

  He’d never broken down a door. It always looked easy on-screen, but he knew that in real life they were never built of breakaway balsa. He backed off two steps and threw all his weight against the panels. His shoulder gave; they didn’t. He switched to the one that wasn’t throbbing and tried again. Two more attempts and one giant bruise later, the frame split and the door flew open. He almost fell under his own momentum, but caught himself in time to keep from sprawling across Beata’s king-size bed, which already contained Beata herself.

  * * *

  She lay on her stomach, diagonally across the pearl-colored satin comforter, clutching the receiver of a white French-type telephone (perversely, visions of Ninotchka and An American in Paris fluttered through his head) at the end of one outstretched arm. Her hair, which she’d continued to tint a soft yellow against relentless graying, was disheveled as in sleep, obscuring her profile. There were age spots on her shoulders and her skin sagged in places, but she was in remarkably good condition for a woman even much younger (“Pilates, dear boy; and the number on speed-dial of the best lift man in the Beverly Hills medical directory”). A CD player built into the wall facing the bed continued to belt out Norma Jean Baker’s anthem for gold diggers from speakers concealed in twin framed monochrome photos of the Eiffel Tower; but Beata Limerick wasn’t listening.

  She was dead, which was shocking enough. Even more shocking, she was stark naked.

  5

  “WHAT IS IT with you?” asked the man from Homicide.

  Valentino hesitated. “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  “Cops talk to each other, you know. Sergeant Clifford with the LAPD told me that picture house you bought on West Hollywood came with a skeleton.”

  “The person who belonged to it was dead before I was born.”

  “The boys in San Diego said you were the last one to talk to a washed-up actor before
he was beaten to death by Mike Grundage’s gorillas.”

  “I think that honor goes to the gorillas.”

  “Last year, a cowboy star blew his brains out over a film you dug up for him.”

  “That was his decision. And I didn’t dig up the film. Someone else did.”

  “You were first on the scene when a billionaire movie collector shot his secretary to death. I was the lucky investigator in that one.”

  “You arrested the killer. It wasn’t me.”

  “That’s why I asked what is it with you. When the squeal came in on a has-been movie queen found dead in her bed, I don’t know why I didn’t think of you right off. You go through Hollywood like a snootful of coke.”

  “I wish I knew the answer, Lieutenant.”

  “If I was Marshal Dillon I’d run you out of the county. The murder rate would drop ten percent, among the movie crowd anyhow.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “What would be, five? What we got?” Lieutenant Ray Padilla stuck his limp unlit cigarette back between his lips as if to keep air from leaking out.

  A young officer in a trim uniform read aloud from a spiral pad.

  The plainclothesman—and the clothes were indeed plain, to the point of nonexistence—circled the bed while the report droned on, studying the corpse with neutral-colored eyes and committing every detail to memory. Valentino knew him. Ray Padilla had passed out of his polyester period, but his gray suit, white shirt, and perfunctorily knotted blue necktie seemed as disconnected from the rumpled creature inside as a space suit; one imagined him climbing into it and buckling it up the back. That he managed, despite his clear disdain for appearances, to hold high rank in posh Beverly Hills said a great deal about his value to the department.

  “Shut that damn thing off,” he said when the officer finished reading.

  That party glanced uncertainly at the CD, which was still playing the same song. “Lab rats don’t like us touching anything, L. T.”