He spent much of the next two hours on the telephone, tracking down Beata Limerick’s executor according to hints she’d dropped during casual conversation. That party, a Jersey Coaster who seemed to speak entirely through his nose, had heard the news, but from the way he dithered over the dispensation of certain of his late client’s estate—The Sandpiper being the issue under discussion—Valentino got the impression that some dim future inheritor of his present position might perhaps benefit from the exchange. In a fit of temper he said, “This is trash we’re talking about. Ted Turner nailed Citizen Kane in thirty minutes.”
The supernumerary surprised him with his film scholarship. “Correct me if I’m wrong; but I don’t recall either Liz or Dick showing up in that one.”
Valentino hit END. He wished he’d called the jerk over a landline so he could slam a receiver into a cradle.
The phone rang immediately. “What?” he roared.
“This is Peter.” The calmness of the response mortified him. “Your electrician?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were an executor. Have you fixed the marquee?”
“Well, I’m on track. I think the problem’s in the fuse box in the basement.”
“There’s a fuse box in the basement?”
“My tracking equipment says so. The problem is it’s walled up.”
He felt a frisson. When he’d purchased the property, a walled-up portion of the basement had contained a human skeleton, placed there by the murderer. “Details, please.”
“It’s not unusual, with buildings this old, that’ve been redone again and again by this owner and that. In those days, you needed a separate set of fuses for everything: the auditorium, the lobby, the restrooms, the backstage area where they staged live shows before the feature. It was a real drain. So what I need to do is punch a hole in the south wall of the basement, see can I track down the box that operates the marquee and fix it.”
Valentino subsided in his chair, seeing dollar bills flying out the window on wings. “What’s that going to cost?”
“Let me see.” Something clattered on the other end of the line: a calculator. Shift the image from dollar bills to fives, then tens. Twenties, by the bale? Ulysses S. Grant was fast becoming his least favorite president.
“Fifty should do it.”
“Dollars?” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard that denomination spoken aloud. Pocket change.
“Maybe less. What we do, we drill a small hole, stick a teeny camera through it on a stick. If a fuse box shows up, we bust through. Then we identify the burned-out fuse, screw in a fifty-cent replacement, and we’re good to go. Easy cheesy, Japanesy, as my old man used to say. I guess he’d have to say ‘Asian’ now, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.”
“God bless your old man.”
“I said if. We don’t find a box, it’s a whole new ball game.”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Play ball.”
* * *
The ill wind blew him some good. Two lines in the L.A. Times identified Valentino as the man who’d discovered the murdered woman, and the owner of a string of auto dealerships in the Valley read them and called with an offer.
“Free lubes for life?” asked Broadhead, when Valentino burst into his office with the news.
“Even better.”
“Better than never having to pay for an oil change again? This should be good.” The professor drummed together a sheaf of closely printed pages, made sure all the edges were flush, and dumped it into his wastebasket. His colleague wondered often about the contents of his trash. Just how many unique gems of cinema history routinely went up in the incinerator kept the younger man awake nights.
“It is. His great-great-grandfather was a mechanic with Hal Roach Studios.”
“Is that all? My great-great-grandfather tried to blow up Czar Nicholas the First.”
“Be serious for just a minute.”
“I’m always serious. What’s funny about attempted regicide? Had he succeeded, there never would have been a Nicholas the Second, and what would have happened to the Russian revolution? McDonald’s would be serving beluga at the drive-through.”
“This mechanic,” the other plowed on, “maintained the junk Model T’s Roach bought for a buck apiece and systematically destroyed during his comedy shorts. When the dealer read what I do for a living he asked if I’d be interested in taking some material off his hands. He knows nothing about the movies, but his father left him a dozen cans of film and he’s kept them in storage for forty years, not knowing what else to do with them. If what he says holds any water, he’s sitting on a cache of silent Laurel and Hardy shorts that haven’t seen the sun since the premiere of The Jazz Singer.”
“What shape are they in?”
“Round, and about so deep.” He spread his hands like a man boasting about a fish.
Broadhead scowled. “Never rub another man’s rhubarb, boy. What’s he asking?”
“‘When can you come and get them out of my basement? My wife wants to install a ballet barre.’”
The two men who comprised the backbone of the Film Preservation Department invested two days in examining the loot, which turned out to be a mixed bag, in varying degrees of condition, of outtakes, finished footage, and thirty-seven feet of Billy Gilbert sneezing; not quite the treasure trove they’d hoped for, but an advance of one-tenth of one percent against the ninety percent of pre-talkies that had been sacrificed to time and complacency. The auto dealer, many times a millionaire, refused monetary compensation, but agreed to a line in the credits of the restored films honoring the contribution of Clarence “Crankcase” Mooney, his great-great-grandfather.
The dean of their program turned out to be a Billy Gilbert fan. (“Who knew?” Broadhead said. “He hasn’t cracked a smile since Mount St. Helens.”) He went to the board of regents and arranged a substantial bonus for the professor and his protégé. Broadhead used his to upgrade Fanta’s arrangements for their wedding. Valentino spent his on gold leaf. For the first time since President Truman, the banister of the grand staircase to The Oracle’s mezzanine glittered as if wired for electric light.
He was glad something did. So far the electrician had bored more holes than a colony of worms and his fiber-optic camera hadn’t discovered anything resembling an auxiliary fuse box.
Then came an envelope addressed to the film archivist by a former bridge partner of Beata Limerick’s, inviting him to attend her memorial service.
Cars were parked on both sides of the street for blocks; Beata had been no recluse, with many friends and, Valentino assumed, still a respectable number of fans. He left his beat-up compact a stone’s throw from Griffith Park and walked with Harriet along the sidewalk leading to the colonnaded front of the Mormon temple. A leather sole scraped concrete behind him and Kyle Broadhead came abreast of the couple.
He showed them his invitation. “Beata a Latter-Day Saint,” he said. “I had her down as a Unitarian; one of those useful denominations that lets you appear to be a believer without actually praying.”
“She never mentioned religion, and I never saw anything faith-related in her apartment. She was a private person when all was said and done.”
“With good reason. No studio would have touched her if it got out she wasn’t a conventional Christian.”
“That may have been necessary when she was acting, but when I knew her she didn’t behave as if she had any secrets, dark or otherwise.”
“I didn’t know her as well as you did, but she had both.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because people who don’t have something to hide bore me sick.”
Valentino changed the subject. “Where’s Fanta?”
“Attending a lecture on tarts. She sends regrets.”
“You mean torts,” Harriet said.
“No, the city council’s debating a measure to shift prostitution enforcement from the pros to the johns. Her faculty advisor told her to
brush up. Speaking of enforcers, have you heard anything from the Gay Lieutenant?”
“What makes you think Padilla’s—? Oh. You were being ironic. Not a word, and there’s been nothing new in the media. Maybe she died of natural causes after all.”
“One can only hope. Just when it seems the world’s laid this Marilyn thing to rest, something else comes along to stir it back up. Monroe’s real tragedy was that being a movie star wasn’t good enough for her: She had to be an actress, too. So she went to that New York School crowd and they stamped out what genuine talent she had.”
Just then a nondescript car pulled up in front of the entrance and an LAPD officer in uniform got out to open the door on the passenger’s side for his superior. As before, the Homicide lieutenant’s gray suit seemed to be wearing him rather than the other way around.
“Maybe he came to pay his respects,” Valentino said.
“Maybe,” said Broadhead. “Or maybe he’s been on grave detail so long he’s taken up funeral-going as a hobby.”
Harriet squeezed Valentino’s hand: a gesture of support as well as confirmation that like it or not Ray Padilla was there to do his job.
8
THE MAN FROM Homicide trotted up the steps to the entrance without glancing Valentino’s way, but the archivist was sure he’d seen him. He’d spent enough time around experienced detectives to know they had the peripheral vision of a chameleon.
It was a heartbreakingly bright afternoon, with the Ozone Alert at zero and the sun pasted on a Crayola-blue sky: Paint a smile on its face and it might have been drawn by a child.
The cheery weather depressed him even more than the event itself. He preferred gray overcast and a weepy rain during funerary events, sparing him pity for the deceased, who at least had not missed a beautiful day. The crowd filled all the chairs and stood along the walls, while security men in black double-knit suits kept photographers and camera crews from entering the temple. The theme from A Summer Place was playing over the sound system: the deceased’s plucky sense of humor personified. Sandra Dee had beaten her out for the role of the daughter, and been stereotyped as the Troubled Blonde for the rest of her career.
There was no casket. The body had yet to be released by the coroner. An enormous color blowup of the guest of honor late in life beamed out from an easel on the dais at the front of the room, perfectly coiffed with tiny tasteful diamonds in her lobes.
After some searching, they found three seats together, and browsed the pamphlet they’d each been handed by an attendant at the door. Beata smiled on the cover, this time in the full bloom of youth, costumed as an Egyptian dancer complete with golden-snake headband and exotic eye shadow. Beneath the photograph, in skirling italics, was the line:
Excuse my dust.
—Dorothy Parker
Valentino chuckled despite himself. Inside, where there was usually a text with quotations from poetry or scripture, a collage of photos spread across two pages: a sepia-tone studio shot of an adorable golden-ringleted toddler, a stunning twentysomething sipping a Manhattan across a nightclub table from silver-templed Clark Gable, a cheesecake snap of a teen beauty queen in white shorts and a halter top, a wedding-anniversary portrait showing a ruddy senior citizen cheek-to-cheek with a radiantly smiling wife a fraction of his age (photographic proof, for Valentino, that her marriage had been no sham); others, each selected to harvest smiles rather than tears.
“I’m sure she planned this,” Valentino told Broadhead.
“So have I. I’m to be thrown in the recycling bin, and reincarnated as the soap in Sophia Loren’s shower.”
Harriet, seated at Valentino’s right, nudged him with her elbow, stopping him in mid-sigh. He wondered just what sort of occasion it would take to quell the professor’s relentless cynicism.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He twisted in his seat to face Ray Padilla. Like the proverbial stopped clock that was right twice a day, the lieutenant’s perennially grim demeanor fit the present proceedings. “If I were half the people here, I’d think twice before going to a funeral. The ushers might not let them leave.”
The film archivist surveyed the sea of white heads. “Thirty years ago, you’d have had to pay admission to see them. You don’t often find this much Hollywood history gathered in one spot.”
“Thirty years ago they’d all have been suspects. I don’t see a set of muscles strong enough to force those pills down even an old woman’s throat.”
“Was it the pills that killed her?”
“M.E. says yes. She put up a fight; lesions and contusions and a fractured skull, all artfully concealed by someone who knew something about hairdressing and makeup. The deeper we dig, the more this looks like an industry job.”
An elderly man Valentino recognized vaguely from a failed ’70s sitcom coughed pointedly into a crepey fist. Padilla, who was sitting next to him, looked at Valentino and jerked his head toward the back of the room. Valentino patted Harriet’s hand, fumbled his way past fellow mourners to the aisle, and joined the lieutenant in a corner behind a potted bougainvillea.
“No other Marilyn CDs on the premises,” Padilla said. “No box for the one that was playing. No prints we can’t account for either, surprise-surprise. Like anybody clever enough to dress up the scene wouldn’t think to wear gloves. And our graphology guy says that wasn’t her handwriting on the note.”
“What about the Kennedys?”
Bleak eyes stared without expression. “We don’t rule anything out. Caroline was in New York, giving an endorsement speech for a Democratic candidate for mayor and the rest of the brood was split up between the family compound in Massachusetts and Switzerland: Skiing. Some people never learn.”
“If you told them that, I wish I’d been listening on the extension.”
“I never figured to make captain anyway. Too many press conferences. You probably guessed I don’t test high on patience and diplomacy. But I’m not here about the Limerick woman.”
“You’re not? I thought it was standard operating procedure, in case the murderer shows up for the service.”
“That’s somebody else’s duty. I’ve cracked a dozen homicides and not once did the one we nailed come to pay respects. It was the same thing when I was with Arson, but I went to more fires than Smokey Bear on the slim-to-nothing chance the perp hung around to drool over the flames.”
“You just trashed half the crime movies I’ve seen.”
“Well, keep it under your hat. The more guff gets out there, the better for us: Like that malarkey about a cop having to tell you he’s a cop if you ask or he can’t arrest you.”
“I knew that one. Lieutenant, am I still a suspect?”
“I wouldn’t brag about it. It isn’t exactly an exclusive club. I talked to an elder,” he added.
The abrupt change of subject caught him off-balance. He wondered if it was some new interrogative tactic. “An elder what?”
“Mormon muckety-muck; that’s him, the bird in the black double-knit pretending to arrange the flowers. He’s counting the house. The Limerick woman was a good, God-fearing woman, according to him. She told him she was leaving ten percent of her estate to the church.”
“She never did anything halfway.”
“Something we’ve got in common. Now I get to add most of the population of the State of Utah to the list of suspects. Feeling a little less special?”
An unearthly squeal split the air. The man Padilla had identified as an elder was adjusting the microphone on the dais. The service was about to begin.
“Since I’m no longer Public Enemy Number One, may I return to my seat?”
“In a minute. Where were you last night between ten P.M. and midnight?”
Valentino, who always broke out in sweats when pressed by authority, reached back to peel his suitcoat and shirt away from his back. It had turned clammy. He’d heard some version of that question on the soundtracks of countless melodramas, never expecting he’d have to answer it himself.
&n
bsp; “What happened last night?”
“See, it works like this: I ask the questions, you blurt out the first lie that comes into your head, I keep asking till you stumble over the truth.”
“I resent that.”
“What’d I say about patience and diplomacy? You want me to repeat the question, like in court?”
“I was at home, going over construction bills.”
“Anyone who can verify that?”
“A plumber in Tarzana, though he might not admit it. I called him at his home around eleven to ask why it cost six hundred dollars to unplug a drain in the ladies’ room.”
“You better hope he isn’t dead, too. Landline?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll check out the phone company records.”
“What’s so important about where I was last night?”
“Did you know a woman named Karen Ogilvie?”
The chill spread to Valentino’s face. “I know her husband, Morris. He’s a major contributor to the Film Preservation Department. Karen used to do television, a long time ago; she was Karen Earl then. She quit acting when she married Morris. Has something happened to her?”
He’d raised his voice a notch. A woman with blue-rinsed hair and a flesh-colored button in each ear turned around in her back-row seat and shushed him. He’d seen her face, unwrinkled then but crowned by the same beehive, belonging to a Twist-dancer in a 1960s teen flick.
Padilla, staring at her, made a circular motion with his hand. She blew a gust of air and faced front. But he lowered his voice. “Palm Springs PD faxed these over this morning.” He slid a manila envelope from his jacket, tipped out the contents, and passed them to Valentino.
“Dear friends,” intoned the elder at the front of the room, “thank you for attending this celebration of the life of Beata Limerick, our sister in faith.”
Studying the pictures he’d been handed, Valentino tuned out the eulogy. They were smudged and grainy, printed on coarse non-reflective paper, but the face of the dead woman—for she was emphatically dead—struck a chord in his memory. Oddly, although he’d known her in old age, his first image was of a breathtaking blond siren first encountered on a fluttery old-fashioned picture tube early in his puberty. He blinked, bringing the visible tracks of time back into focus.
Brazen Page 4