Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Use your elbow, and quick. I’d rather listen to a loose fan belt.”

  Marilyn stopped singing. The sudden silence was like a sharp cuff to the ears. The song had been playing so long Valentino had ceased to hear it.

  Padilla completed his circuit. In true movie star fashion, the bed was situated in the center of the room. Beata’s lifeless, naked body had begun to take on the quality of one of the figures in the Hollywood Wax Museum; or so Valentino fancied. Less than an hour had passed since he’d called 911 from the extension in the living room. He’d resisted the urge to cover his friend with the pale bedspread, knowing it would annoy the police and arouse their suspicion, if not actually invite a threat of charging him with tampering with a crime scene. But it bothered him, and after making the call he hadn’t returned to the room until the police came.

  Was it a crime scene? He’d seen no signs of violence and had felt no desire to investigate beyond what he’d seen at first glance. The woman was in her seventies, after all. There was no reason to believe she hadn’t expired of natural causes. She had no enemies, not counting those collectors she’d beaten to the bottom line at auction (souls too timid to trash-talk her except behind her back), and nothing appeared to be missing from the apartment, even that grotesque artifact Jayne Mansfield had been wearing when she was killed. The only sign of turmoil was the ruined dish in the kitchen. It was merely routine that the local Homicide squad would be called upon to eliminate the possibility of foul play.

  And yet there was something eerily familiar about the tableau that nudged at the edge of the film archivist’s subconscious. He was still in too much shock to identify it, but the answer was as naggingly close as it was infuriatingly elusive.

  The lieutenant stopped to bend close to the telephone receiver clenched in the dead woman’s hand. The instrument was an original, not a replica—the rotary dial was a dead giveaway—whose cord plugged into a jack in the floor. Having decided where the bed would be placed, she’d have arranged the unconventional installation to avoid tripping over a cord attached to the wall.

  Padilla cocked his ear close to the handset. He might have been eavesdropping on a conversation. He turned his head Valentino’s way. “This thing squawking when you broke in?”

  “Squawking?”

  “You know, that damn irritating noise it makes when the phone’s off the hook and there’s nobody on the other end. Ma Bell hates spending her monopoly money on a dial tone.”

  He hadn’t heard anyone but Kyle Broadhead call it Ma Bell in years. Aloud he said, “I can’t say for sure. The music was—”

  “Yeah.” Padilla straightened. “Well, it cuts off after a minute or so.” He laid the back of his hand against her bare arm. “Skin’s cool. When’d he say he showed up?”

  The officer who’d turned off the CD player returned to his notebook. “Two o’clock. The oven started smoking twenty minutes later, he said. Give him five to take the pan out of the oven, fan away the smoke, and bang on the door before he busted it down.”

  “Make it ten.” Valentino rubbed his sore shoulder.

  Padilla looked at the watch strapped to his wrist. “’Kay. We’ll see what the rats say, but my guess is her ticker quit before he got here, if what he says checks out. She always sleep in the raw?” he asked Valentino.

  He felt himself flush. “I wouldn’t know. You’ve got the wrong idea about our relationship.”

  “Could be. I’m wrong most of the time. Mickey Mantle struck out more times than he hit. Suppose you give me the right idea.”

  He told them about their friendship: how it started, why it continued, and why he’d been invited there that day. He started toward the open door, and the package he’d brought and left in the next room, but Padilla barked at him to stay put. “We’ll take a look at it back at headquarters after it’s dusted, the other one too. Well? Let’s have it.”

  “Have what?”

  The lieutenant looked at his cigarette, then parked it behind an ear to dry. “The last time we wanted to take possession of a piece of film, you were all climate-control this and volatile that and vinegar-effect the other thing. I thought I’d let you get it out of your system before I left with the stuff. The brass says we have to start being polite if we don’t want go around with cameras stuck on our shirts like the boys on the beat.”

  “Beata’s screen test is of no value to anyone now that she’s—gone.” Valentino stumbled over the description. “The Sandpiper would be no great loss, although of course UCLA would like a shot at acquiring it when you’re through with it. We can—”

  “Sweet of you.” The lieutenant’s eyes were bleak, either naturally or from the kind of use to which they’d been put. “How’d she seem lately? Depressed?”

  “Anything but. Do you think it’s suicide?”

  “No. I’m looking for a reason not to rule it out. I don’t like that she left dinner in the oven, or that she chose a time when she was entertaining, or that she’s naked. The phone in her hand could mean she changed her mind and was trying to call for help when she lost consciousness, but it looks like set dressing to me. You get a feel for these things: when it fell the way it did because it fell the way it did and when somebody got cute and staged it, and this is as phony as a rassling match. I notice when something’s there that shouldn’t be, also when something that should be there isn’t. How about you?”

  “I’m still working on that ‘when it fell the way it did because it fell the way it did.’” He wondered if they were taught to talk that way when the department hired them or if the department hired them because they talked that way.

  Padilla swore, not entirely beneath his breath. “The glass, Buster.”

  “Valentino. What glass?”

  “About time, Mr. Film Detective. No glass.”

  The drawer of Beata Limerick’s drawer was partially open. Padilla grasped hold of the crystal knob and jerked it open the rest of the way. Valentino had noticed something shiny inside earlier, but had refrained from touching the drawer, or anything else in the room. A squat plastic phial like the ones prescription drugs came in rolled to a stop against the front panel. The label, what he could see of it, read NEMBU.

  “Nembutal,” the lieutenant said. “You can swallow a lethal dose of sleeping pills without water, but I don’t know why you’d want to. Why not hang yourself? I mean as long as you’re making it uncomfortable.”

  A flash went off in Valentino’s head.

  “Marilyn Monroe.”

  “That damn song. I can still hear it too.”

  “I didn’t mean that, although it’s significant. The glass isn’t the only thing that was missing. I needed the pills to complete the picture and make the connection.”

  The lieutenant groped for the cigarette behind his ear. “Connect it.” He plugged the hole in his mouth.

  “The telephone, the nudity, and now the drugs. It matches the situation in Marilyn’s bedroom in Brentwood when she was found dead. The coroner blamed it on an overdose of Nembutal. There was no glass there, either. The case was ruled a suicide, but to this day a lot of people are convinced she was murdered.”

  “I’m sold,” Padilla said. “Not on the Monroe case; I was just a gleam in my old man’s eye when that one went down, and anyway it’s out of my jurisdiction. But Beata? Yeah. It’s murder, all right.”

  6

  THEY WENT INTO the living room, where Valentino sank into a chair upholstered in plush pale terry. Beata’s decorating tastes had run toward white in every shade available (and a few she’d dreamt up herself and had custom-dyed).

  Every warm shade, that was. Even her refrigerator and stove could not be referred to as “appliance white.” Sleek and modern as it was, her home seemed to envelop all who entered it like a fluffy kitten. The only traces of genuine color in the apartment belonged to the posters and props on display. Padilla, the young officer, and his partner, a weary-looking older man who seemed incapable of speech, remained standing; but their legs were
sounder than the film archivist’s in the presence of sudden death.

  “I heard the Kennedys had Marilyn killed,” said the eager youngster. “On account of her relationship with Jack and Bobby.”

  “Yeah, I’ll haul in Caroline for questioning.” Padilla’s teeth ground at his dead cigarette, glaring at Valentino. “You say this Beata’s loaded?”

  He hated that term when it was applied to someone he knew; but then, when he considered his life, she’d been the only person he’d known—really known, as opposed to having had contact with—to whom it applied.

  “She was one of the richest women in the country.” He swept a hand around the apartment, including the panoramic view through the French doors that led to the balcony.

  “I’ll take your word for it—for now. This town’s full of freeloaders eating high on the hog out of somebody else’s trough. I carried a spear on the O. J. case; it was rotten with professional houseguests. We’ll start there.”

  “With O. J. Simpson?”

  “With money, Hawking. Until it jumps another way I’m working on the assumption some shirttail relative or sponge of a friend stopped her clock for a piece of the inheritance and made it look like it was done by some nutball who saw Some Like It Hot one time too many.”

  “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” It came out automatically.

  The lieutenant spat out a soggy flake of tobacco, and with it his opinion of the insertion. “I don’t go to serial-killer flicks: It means the writers were too lazy to come up with a motive. Unless and until some shrink decides the perp had naughty dreams about Mommy, no cop can make a case.”

  “But doesn’t that fall under the heading of twisting the facts to fit the theory instead of the other way around?”

  The lieutenant’s beaming face was worse than a scowl.

  “Sherlock Holmes. Those flicks I go to: His evidence would hold up today. But just now a nutball homicide is the last thing I need. It’s been a week since the last one. Call me a cockeyed optimist. I’m going to follow the money, just like Redford and Hoffman, till the trail runs dry; then I’ll ask around and see what Anthony Hopkins has been up to.”

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant,” Valentino said. “The last time we met, you said you put as many blocks between you and the nearest movie theater as you could.”

  “I still prefer a good book. It takes time to read, and you get the chance to decide if the guy knows what he’s talking about instead of in the car on the way home, fifty bucks to the bad for the price of the gas, parking, ticket, and popcorn. But if you don’t keep up with what’s in the box office in this town, brother, you’re dead.”

  He took a Ziploc bag out of his pocket. Valentino recognized the note he’d found on the door and had given the young man in uniform: Let yourself in and sit down on something. I’m putting on my face, and no man should be left to stand that long. “Would you swear she wrote this?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah?” The cigarette shortened in direct ratio to the motion of his jaws. “Thought you was close.”

  He didn’t like the way Padilla used the word close. It carried all of Kyle Broadhead’s innuendo with none of his irony. “Friends, Lieutenant. We didn’t exchange love letters, only the occasional e-mail or telephone call. I will say it sounds like her. Anyone who knew her can tell you she was as deprecating to herself as she was to others.”

  “It says ‘Love.’”

  “So it does.” He wished he smoked, so he could produce an elegant gold-plated case, tap a cigarette on it, and slide it between his lips, like George Sanders in anything. “She was a creature of Hollywood, where it’s just another way of signing off. We weren’t lovers.”

  “My job would be a hell of a lot easier if people spoke plain English.” He scanned the three lines a second time through the transparent plastic. “I’ll give it to the department graphologists. There ought to be samples in the apartment.” The note was whisked into a pocket so swiftly Valentino thought he’d actually scored a point. Just when you thought the police an inhuman institution—

  Padilla charged on. “Older woman living alone should know better than to leave her door unlocked. Was that normal?”

  He smiled through his sadness. He and Beata weren’t close, really—not in the sense the lieutenant had suggested, and not in the way Valentino felt toward Kyle Broadhead and Fanta (certainly not like his relationship with Harriet)—but she’d been a bright daub of color in his often-gray academic life.

  “I’ve never heard ‘Beata’ and ‘normal’ used in the same sentence. But I wouldn’t say she tempted fate. She was superstitious.”

  “You mean like voodoo, wiccan, shi—stuff like that?” Padilla seemed suddenly to remember the town where he worked.

  “Not that extreme. She was a native Californian, she said, and that it was her birthright. She told me she dropped out of the movie business right after Jayne Mansfield died because she believed there was a curse on female blond stars.” He began to tick off the names, beginning with Thelma Todd’s mysterious death and finishing with the Manson-family bloodbath that had claimed Sharon Tate and a houseful of friends.

  “‘The Curse of Marilyn,’ seriously?”

  “She said so. It was one of the few things she didn’t take lightly. Perhaps the only one.” Except friendship, he thought; but that was one subject he wouldn’t open to police cynicism.

  “Ironic; I don’t think. I wonder who else she told.”

  “I suppose I’m a suspect.”

  “That goes with being the one who reported it. You’d be surprised how many cases we nail down in situ. If this happened anywhere but this deep in the land of fruits and nuts, I’d book you as a material witness. Where else would two grown people spend a non-smog-alert afternoon indoors in front of a movie screen?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Valentino volunteered.

  “What could be worse than watching an old movie on a beautiful day?”

  “Watching a bad old movie.”

  “That puts you halfway to an insanity plea.”

  “I don’t believe you really think I’m a killer.”

  Padilla drew out the cigarette, which didn’t resemble one anymore, looked around, appeared to think of the CSI team, and put it in a pocket; one could only wonder how many others it had joined there. “Off the record, no. You get a feel for these things—I don’t mean that mystical junk, cops are immune to that even in this burg, a hunch is something else—and you aren’t putting out anything you didn’t last time. That doesn’t mean you’re home free. I’m wrong most of the time, remember.”

  Valentino found that less than reassuring; particularly since it was the second time he’d said it.

  “Do you think it’s likely the note was forged by the murderer?”

  “I put ‘likely’ next to ‘luck’ in the useful department. But I don’t like that a woman who bought into curses and such leaving her door open for just anyone to walk in. You can spot the local celebrities just by looking for the nearest ring of bodyguards.”

  “It was different in her day, Lieutenant. The studios controlled the press. Whenever a tabloid got too fresh, its advertisers would mysteriously melt away until it was forced to close. The stars were well-nigh untouchable, therefore more approachable; but people didn’t, by and large. They might ask for an autograph, but that was as far as the stalking went. People respected privacy then. Famous actors were like royalty.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to Buckingham Palace.”

  “Also she wasn’t famous anymore. Not in that sense. A whole generation has grown up since she quit the business.”

  “I still don’t like it, and what I don’t like eats my lunch till I see sense in it.” He looked at the young officer. “You got his contact info?”

  “Yes, sir.” He patted his notepad.

  “Good. Stay available.”

  Taking that as a dismissal, Valentino got up.

  The older cop took a step and said something low to the lieutenant. It
was the first indication the Beverly Hills Police Department hadn’t started hiring mutes. Bashful was monumental enough.

  “Good work.” Padilla looked at a set of glass shelves containing Beata’s CDs, the boxes lined up neatly in alphabetical order. “Do you know if ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ was part of her collection?” he asked Valentino.

  “I couldn’t say. She usually played classical music when I visited, when she played anything at all.”

  “We’ll check it out. If we don’t find the box it belongs to with the others, it means the killer brought it, and that means premeditation.”

  “How do you poison someone without working it out first?”

  “That’s up to the medical examiner. Maybe he strangled her or hit her on the head, then dressed up the scene to look like something else.” His bleak eyes took in the naked corpse. “So to speak.”

  As Valentino was drawing the door shut behind him, he heard the lieutenant address the older officer. “I wish to hell you’d shut up and let a man think.”

  7

  THE CRIME SCENE Investigation team was setting up base camp in the lobby as Valentino emerged from the elevator. In their HazMat suits, carrying black steel toolboxes, they resembled the contract laborers who had taken over The Oracle: Both teams were interested primarily in reconstruction, and prepared to destroy everything in their immediate vicinity toward that end. All this took place to the visible consternation of the security guard in the lobby, a retired thirty-year veteran of the California State Police—a hard-boiled force for justice if ever there was one—who’d been tamed by tens of thousands in Christmas gratuities into a glorified house mother. His priorities had shifted from protecting the residents’ lives to sequestering them from harsh reality.

  “What a shame,” Beata had said, “to turn a pit bull into a French poodle.”

  When Valentino returned to his office, Ruth was absent from her station, sparing him her judgment on how little time he spent there. Perhaps the Call of Nature applied to her as well as to the rest of humanity after all.