Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  Karen Earl Ogilvie was slumped over a steering wheel with her hair disarranged and dark smears on her forehead, chin, and the collar of her fur coat. Her eyes were open, her lips slightly parted as if to ask the photographer to wait while she freshened her lipstick. The fuzzy quality, reproduced in black-and-white from what had probably been a color original, put him in mind of freeze-frames from a 1930s newsreel commemorating some sensational tragedy; cruel, uncompromising, and somehow more sordid than anything he’d seen in a voyeuristic cable reality show. He experienced a thrill of déjà vu; double-whammy, as it came with that same sense of something lurking inches outside the reach of his memory that had visited him in the bedroom where Beata died.

  Padilla took back the material and slid it into its envelope. “She dined out with girlfriends last night. Husband was in Chicago on business, that’s confirmed. When the maid came in at seven A.M., she heard a motor running and looked in the garage. It was still running when the first officer responded, on about a teaspoon of gas left in the tank.”

  “Carbon monoxide?”

  “Toxicology team’s testing, but the results won’t change anything. That’s blood on her face and coat. Her Porsche was undamaged, so she wasn’t in an accident. Someone cracked her a couple of times with what we used to call a blunt instrument. There’s a scientific word, but I stopped listening to the eggheads when they invented DNA. I need it in my job like a monkey needs a top hat. Palm Springs cops think the killer was waiting for her in the garage, which meant he had access, and probably to the house as well.”

  “You’re certain it was a he?”

  “He, she, it; who are you, Gloria Steinem? You don’t have to be the Hulk to swing a club. But you, pal, know two murder victims spaced three days apart, so here I am.”

  “Did Ogilvie tell you he knows me?”

  “We missed him in Chicago. He’s in the air, on his way back to a surprise. They make you turn off your phone when you take off.”

  “… a woman of insight and dedication to the church…” said the elder.

  “Is it against the law to know people?” Valentino raised his voice again, and got a chorus of geriatric hissing for the indiscretion.

  “I’m not finished. Mrs. Ogilvie wasn’t wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she left her friends. They said she was wearing a two-piece suit and no coat. Maid says the coat was hers, but she hadn’t worn it in years, on account of all those animal-rights people slinging around buckets of red paint; kept it in a storage bag in a cedar closet. The lab rats are pretty sure someone put her in a dress after death. They found the suit crammed in a hamper. The extra flourishes made me think of Beata Limerick, and Beata Limerick made me think of you.”

  The lieutenant refolded the envelope lengthwise and returned it to his pocket. “Luck, that’s the job sometimes: You close your eyes and pin the tail on the donkey’s keister right off the bat.”

  I know the feeling. Aloud, Valentino said: “If the murderer changed her clothes after he killed her, how did blood get on the collar of the coat?”

  “It wasn’t a spill, it was a smear. Pattern’s different. Maybe he got blood on him and used the coat to wipe it off.”

  “Unless he did it deliberately.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Why would he change her clothes?”

  Padilla pursed his lips, turning his mournful face into a sour apple. “There’s more.”

  “Isn’t there always?” He was anxious to be dismissed. Missing Beata’s service would be the rudest thing he could do to a friend.

  Unless he solved her murder. That would wipe out the offense.

  The lieutenant ignored the question. “The side door to the garage was bolted from the house side. That means our friend let himself out that way, but we can’t figure out why he bothered to bolt the door behind him.

  “I’m not coming to you just because you could be a person of interest,” he went on. “We don’t get many flat-out murder mysteries. Most times we find the perp in the same room with the victim, literally red-handed and ready to spill his guts. This one has all the earmarks of those screwy whodunits you’re always going on about. I know some guys in the department who moonlight as technical advisors on movie sets, showing John Travolta how to walk like a cop instead of an East L.A. gigolo. So I’m suggesting you return the favor and be a technical advisor to the police, only you don’t get paid, just the satisfaction of contributing to your community and also maybe get a break if you know more about this mess than you’re letting on. You saw the Marilyn connection last time. See anything like that here?”

  In a flash, Valentino crossed the narrow chasm that had separated him from something remembered. No wonder his mind had leapt to Depression-era newsreels: Details of the story had blazed through glossy picture palaces and dusty small-town theaters for weeks; culminating, as unsolved puzzles always did, in shrugs, then the next item of juicy gossip.

  “The dress she had on,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Was it blue?”

  9

  “THELMA TODD,” VALENTINO said, when the color of the dead woman’s dress was confirmed.

  “Esther McGillicuddy,” Padilla said. “I can call out women’s names at random too.”

  “The movie star.”

  “Of course.”

  “You never heard of her, right?”

  “I never heard of the fifth Beatle, but I know you can’t finish a sentence without a movie star’s name in it.”

  “It will save us both a lot of time if we can continue this conversation at my place. Right now I’d like to say good-bye to an old friend.”

  Something stirred behind the Reaperesque face. The film archivist couldn’t quite extend himself far enough to believe the man was capable of sympathy; but he looked at his wristwatch. “I’ll meet you at that waxworks you call home sweet home in an hour.”

  * * *

  He drove Harriet to her apartment, but she stopped him before he could get out to see her to the door. Her expression made up for all the human emotion the lieutenant seemed to have been born without. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you? I’m with the department too, remember. I know enough of the tricks of intimidation to head him off.”

  “I’m starting to be an expert myself.” He kissed her. She responded with more feeling than usual.

  The unmarked car was parked next to the fire hydrant in front of The Oracle, with the same uniformed officer seated behind the wheel. Padilla was smoking a cigarette under the marquee, which wore a polystyrene bag to protect the exposed wires from the elements. Valentino couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the lieutenant actually set fire to one of his coffin nails. They shook hands—much to the host’s surprise—and entered the lobby.

  “Looks like the same train wreck to me,” Padilla said, crushing out his smoke on a patch of bare plywood. “They built the pyramids in less time.”

  “They had slave labor. I’m paying time-and-a-half for overtime.”

  The room was a shambles of coiled wire, piled plaster, and tarpaulins hanging from scaffolds. The crew was eating lunch, dropping mustard and pickles on porous marble.

  “Actually,” Valentino added, “there’s been quite a bit of progress, most of it beneath the surface.”

  “That’s what my mother-in-law said about her colon flush. Staircase looks good.”

  “I’ve got Billy Gilbert to thank for that.”

  “He does nice work. What’s so delicate we couldn’t talk about it in front of a bunch of Mormons? You got the home-court advantage: Run with it.”

  For answer, Valentino led the way into the auditorium, where the seats that had been reupholstered wore protective covers and the ones that hadn’t lay about in every stage of dismantlement. He opened a door hidden behind fresh molding and they climbed the steep unfinished stairs to the projection booth. There, a rollaway bed and a camp refrigerator shared quarters with great twin Bell & Howell projectors, racks
and stacks of DVDs, videotapes, and cans of film, and Valentino’s literature on the history of motion pictures, temporarily housed in plastic orange crates. A square opening looked out on the screen in the proscenium arch downstairs, furled like a ship’s mainsail.

  Padilla pointed at the projectors. “Why two? You can barely turn around in here without triggering the Big One.”

  “Three-D, old-school. The trick is to coordinate the frames so the audience isn’t seeing two Ray Millands at once in Dial M for Murder. That takes a specialist, and they don’t come cheap.”

  “What is it with you and murder? I have to work with it, but you don’t.”

  “My corpses are tidier, courtesy of the Motion Picture Code.” He slid a tattered paperback from one of the crates. “Thelma Todd was before your time. Mine, too. She was a glamour queen and a gifted comedienne, like Carole Lombard; who was another doomed blonde for Beata’s curse.”

  “You’d think they’d learn to lay off the peroxide.” Padilla looked around, as if the carnage of the theater under constant renovation held more interest for him than murders ancient and current. “How do you live like this?”

  “You know the housing situation. I went apartment hunting and wound up in a gilt palace, minus most of the gilt. They’d have torn it down by now if I hadn’t bought it.”

  “So far you’re not selling me on why you did.”

  He cleared his throat; reminding himself once again that preaching to the unconverted was an uphill climb. He handed over the open book. “‘Hot Toddy,’ they called her.”

  His guest studied the glossy black-and-white photograph of a beautiful woman with curly blond hair, huge eyes, and a pert, pointed chin. Plainly the flat colorless eyes were committing every detail to memory. At length he flicked his fingers at the page.

  “I saw something about this surfing channels on TV. It had that dame in it from WKRP in Cincinnati. It stalled me for a good minute and a half.”

  “I know the one you mean: A quickie starring Loni Anderson, a forty-odd sitcom star playing an actress who was murdered in her twenties.”

  “Yeah, well, they all looked older back then. All them martinis and Luckies.” Padilla dealt himself another cigarette.

  Valentino found the chapter he wanted. “Todd was a terrific actress with great comic timing, but her life was a mess offscreen, even for a star of her era. She had an affair with Lucky Luciano. The gangster?”

  “Him I know. I guess that’s before the glitter gang started hanging out with basketball players.” He scanned the rows of titles: Fade to Black, A Cast of Killers, Hollywood Babylon. “You got yourself quite a mug file here. All these people have a screw loose?”

  “Most were levelheaded, some merely eccentric. It’s the notorious ones that give a place a bad reputation. In those days L.A. was the last western boomtown, with everything that entails. Throw a lot of young undereducated people into a pile of money, cover them with the kind of adoration normally reserved for saints, and anything can happen.”

  “Not much has changed from where I sit. We got an entire evidence room reserved for celebrity sex tapes, just in case something comes under our jurisdiction.”

  Valentino hesitated to heap more fuel on the lieutenant’s blazing disdain for the industry that gave him his livelihood; but the thought of a homicidal maniac cutting a bloody swath through his friends got the better of his pride. “You’re aware Luciano’s relationship with women got him deported to Italy.”

  “He was a pimp. Toddy turned tricks for him, that it?”

  He’d feared just that reaction. Whenever someone pricked the Dream Factory, Valentino bled. “No one knows, that’s the point. In 1935 her maid found her in her garage, slumped over the wheel of her Packard convertible. The ignition was on, there was blood on her face and fur coat, the door to the garage was barred on the other side.”

  “Huh.”

  “The coroner ruled death by monoxide poisoning. She was still wearing her rings and a diamond necklace, so robbery was eliminated as a motive.” He looked up from the page. “She had on a blue dress under the coat.”

  “So you figure we got us a copycat who knows his Tinseltown trivia.”

  “Maybe he’s read this book.” The film archivist closed it and showed Padilla the cover. It was titled Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries. He offered it to the lieutenant.

  Padilla kept his hands in his pockets. “Maybe he has. Maybe he knows it by heart.” Padilla looked at him, his eyes as flat as bottle caps.

  “I just talked myself to the top of your list, didn’t I?” Valentino lowered the book.

  The other returned his gaze to the library. “It’s a long list, but unless the Earl-Ogilvie woman was a Mormon maybe I won’t have to take a trip to Salt Lake City; that’s if this isn’t a coincidence and we’re not looking at two different killers. I hope for your sake your alibi floats. You’re the suspect every junior detective dreams of.”

  Valentino returned the paperback to its space. “You’ll need a motive. I liked Beata, and apart from a brush or two when dealing with her husband I never saw Karen Earl outside episodes of the original Untouchables and Peter Gunn.”

  “I told you what’s happened to motive. It’s not just serial nuts: Guy cuts you off in traffic, looks sideways at your date, wears glasses that remind you of your crummy old man, he’s toast. Just last week I got a confession out of a fifteen-year-old kid that shot up a Burger King because a girl told him on Facebook she was too busy washing her hair to watch him shoot rats down by the docks. She’d never even been to the restaurant. These days, all you need is an Arab clerk who shortchanges you to take it out on the first man you see wearing a turban.”

  “I think there’s more to it than that, Lieutenant.”

  The other man found a flake of cigarette ash on his prison of a suit and flicked it to the floor with a savage movement, as if it were some kind of loathsome insect. “Don’t start that Curse of Marilyn stuff again. Press gets wind of it, I’ll be shaking crank tipsters off my lapels, and then the chief’s going to start shopping for smartypants psychics: Before you know it I’m wearing pansy makeup on Inside Edition. You know what I think? I think our friend’s counting on that to throw us off the trail. He’s got a certain victim in mind, and he’s out to cover up the why under a load of corpses. The hard part’s going to be nailing him before he piles up too many.”

  He couldn’t help asking. “How many is too many?”

  “Brother, he’s already caught more than his limit.”

  10

  THROUGHOUT THE NEXT week, Valentino drew all his information on the murders from ET, Access Hollywood, Variety, and the Times. A succession of talking heads plastered with bronzers, blush, and hairspray to King Tut-like preservation, doddering Distinguished Columnists, and breathless sidewalk correspondents with microphones lapped up the details like alcoholics at an open bar, but made no attempt to link the slayings to the suspicious deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Thelma Todd. Each time Valentino checked in, he held his breath, but after a dozen news cycles had come and gone without including a lesson in local lore, he gave up waiting for the other shoe to drop: Padilla and the LAPD appeared to have had some influence on such speculation, either through intimidation or barter; but fresh facts did surface.

  Karen Ogilvie had whiled away the afternoon before her dinner out with friends screening old footage in her home theater, a staple in the motion-picture community every bit as crucial as swimming pools and tennis courts. She was featured in every film: Inevitably, comparisons were made with Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, the has-been haunted silent siren of Sunset Boulevard; missing entirely the more direct connection to the near-forgotten Todd. Notwithstanding that omission, the employees in Research had little difficulty in dredging up art on the victim of the month: One of Karen’s old commercials was repeated so often, Spic and Span later reported its best quarter in a decade.

  Beata wasn’t neglected. Metrocolor newsreels, shot to cut the studio’s losses af
ter her desertion, trumpeted the “recently retired starlet’s” Cinderella-like wedding to a silver-haired billionaire industrialist, complete with confetti and streamers flying from the SS United States and the happy couple waving to well-wishers on shore. Watching the clips, Valentino’s eyes grew misty: It was clear from the lovely young bride’s smile (as it had been in her memorial pamphlet) that she was in love with her husband. She’d seldom mentioned him when they’d spoken, and he’d always assumed that her interest in him had been purely financial; now he realized that the subject of his passing was too painful for her to discuss. He’d known so little about her, and felt that he’d been less than a true friend because of his lack of interest beyond her connection with old Hollywood. Her career had been but a brief moment in a rich life.

  No public connection was made with the two deaths, apart from their close proximity; the LAPD had been adept in connecting Ogilvie’s fate to probable suicide.

  To his relief, the reports made no mention of the archivist, but Lieutenant Padilla put in an appearance (determinedly without powder or paint), informing press-conference attendees that whoever had killed Beata was probably known to and trusted by her, in order to have obtained entry to her homes and proximity to her person.

  “You mean like the Boston Strangler?” offered one plucky young thing who seemed to want to break out of the red-carpet ghetto into serious journalism. (Her sharp eyes suggested suspicion that Beata’s was not an isolated case.)

  “She wasn’t strangled.” This non sequitur was as tidy a diversion as could be imagined. For all his talk of avoiding the spotlight, the lieutenant was as adept at handling the press as any department spokesman.

  Just in case Valentino might feel he was off the hook, Padilla called him twice, ostensibly to ask questions he’d neglected earlier, but quite obviously to remind him he was still of central interest to the investigation. That was another of his manipulative skills, never allowing a suspect a moment of complacency.