Brazen

by Loren D. Estleman

  Despite all official efforts at stirring up dust, conspiracy theorists burned up the Internet with the speculation that a serial killer was targeting old-time actresses. The buzz drove every other subject off the front page and past the first commercial spot:

  A quake in San Bernardino measuring 3.2 on the Richter scale aired for thirty seconds. No one was injured, and the damage was minimal, but at any other time, all the local stations would be trotting out pet geologists with their doomsday charts.

  A mayor in the wine country sent a revealing selfie to his secretary’s phone; the story blew over before he could face more cameras with his wife by his side (and he was a Republican, thus fair game);

  An ’80s TV hunk, growing a little seedy around the edges but still fodder for rumors about his swinging sex life, came out of the closet, almost without notice;

  Geoffrey Root, a popular female impersonator who played local nightclubs, was killed in an automobile accident. Under normal circumstances his high visibility, skewering (and sometimes amusing) such flashy femmes as Dolly Parton, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Cher, and Madonna with his dead-on impressions in sequins and heavy makeup, would have led off every broadcast. Instead, the tragic on-site footage of shorn metal and scattered personal possessions was sandwiched between the latest unilluminating report on the murder(s?) and a puff-piece on Jennifer Lopez.

  Valentino, who’d had his fill of sudden death, would have switched off the TV in his office if both hands weren’t occupied spooling frames of a Betty Boop cartoon on his Moviola; but when the camera panned to the accordioned hood of Root’s mint-condition 1966 Buick and what lay upon it, all the blood dumped out of the film archivist’s face. He muted the sound and reached for his telephone. It rang before he could punch the first button.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said.

  Padilla said, “Yeah, I’m watching it, too.”

  In a flash, Valentino knew they’d both made the same connection; but the lieutenant pushed on before the other could interject anything.

  “It should tickle you to know you’re no longer my primary in the Ogilvie case. Your electrician backed up your story. Sometimes it pays to be cheap enough to call a guy up and complain about a bill after business hours.”

  “Thanks. What do you know about the Root accident?”

  “I just heard about it, same as you. It’s CHiP’s baby, but I got eyes, and you can’t beat HDTV for clear reception. Hang on.”

  A frustrated Valentino listened to soothing soft ’70s rock for ten solid minutes. In spite of himself, he was humming “Rocket Man” when the music stopped.

  “I just got off the horn with Laurel Canyon,” Padilla said. “Jogger found Root’s heap folded up against a tree there around sunup. Looks like he lost control on a curve, busted through a guardrail, and did the bank shot down a ravine. The place is rotten with ’em; troopers peel some kid off a cottonwood or a Douglas fir every prom night. If Root wasn’t in show business he’d never have made the six o’clock report.”

  “What I—”

  “I’m coming to it. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt. His head punched a hole in the windshield.” Something rustled dryly: Was Padilla chuckling? One of Valentino’s greatest fears was he’d become so familiar with mayhem he, too, would find it something to laugh about. “Root was headed to a charity benefit, which was canceled when he didn’t turn up; had a bunch of costumes in the car: Left a trail of pink feather boas and rhinestones all down the ravine. First responders said it looked like J. Edgar Hoover’s spring cleaning.”

  “Lieutenant, that’s ghastly.”

  “You’re telling me. He showed up at the morgue in black patent-leather pants and a white angora sweater. I didn’t think they went.”

  “That’s not what I meant; but I’m less concerned about his costume than I am about his wig.”

  “Which one? There was enough fake hair on those rocks to knit a gorilla suit.”

  He swallowed his resentment over this latest example of police torture, assuming an air of patience. “If you called me for the same reason I was about to call you, I think you know which wig I’m talking about.”

  A short silence crackled, during which Padilla seemed to have found a shred of compassion and poked it into an envelope reserved for evidence. In any case when he came back on he sounded like a person. “You’re not the only one who can read a book about old movie queens. I’ve been boning up since we talked. Where are you?”

  “At work.”

  “It’s after seven. If I sank as much as you did into where I lived, I’d spend a lot more time there.”

  “I have to spend as much time here as I do in order to be able to sink that much into where I live.”

  “I’ll send a car.”

  II

  THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT

  11

  “THERE’S A COP here for you.”

  One of the disadvantages of working with a fellow workaholic like Ruth was—well, she was always there. Her presence could especially be depended upon when the opportunity presented itself to heap humiliation on a superior; particularly Valentino, whose function to the university she regarded as less respectable than that of the man who filled the vending machines in the student union.

  For once he decided to go on the offensive; something Kyle Broadhead did routinely and without hesitation.

  “I knew they’d catch up with me one day,” he said into the intercom. “Ruth, I’ve been robbing the place blind for years. You’ll find my stash in the ceiling.”

  “Which ceiling? There are eight in this building alone.”

  “I can never remember.” Five minutes later, seated beside the officer Padilla had sent for him, he pictured the old gargoyle hurrying out to fetch a crowbar.

  Immediately he felt guilty; something Kyle Broadhead never did, routinely or otherwise.

  Police stations invariably disappointed the film archivist; they bore little resemblance to the romantically grubby wainscoted rooms walled with battered file cabinets and carpeted with squashed cigarette butts he knew from countless Warner Brothers features. The Beverly Hills station, well-ventilated, brightly lit, and cut up into cubicles, was no exception. It might have belonged to an accounting firm in Fresno, or some place equally prosaic. Except for the odd exposed service automatic in a tan belt holster (and even those were no longer exclusive to law-enforcement professionals), the men and women fingering the keyboards of computers and sprinting to and from a community printer were indistinguishable from the common office drone, and the desks themselves were decorated with family pictures instead of the Ten Most Wanted.

  But Ray Padilla’s private office (semi-private, actually; the glass-paneled walls fell two feet short of the ceiling) comforted the visitor. Something about the long-expired African violet and tasteful prints left to hang at Krazy Kat angles on the walls suggested they’d been inherited from a previous tenant, and his successor hadn’t bothered to replace them with something better suited to his personality. It was a place of work exclusively, and the suggestion that the occupant refused to expose anything from his private life to its sinister confines restored hope in his humanity.

  He was in shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned back, no tie. Shedding departmental conservatism seemed to have had a softening effect. Once again he shook hands, and waved Valentino into an orange plastic scoop chair facing a heap of papers theoretically supported by a desk.

  “My first partner worked the Jayne Mansfield case from this end,” he said. “Kept bending my year about it till he retired. Jayne was running around with a mob lawyer at the time, name of Brody. He represented Jack Ruby, the guy that shot Lee Harvey Oswald. What is it with these sex kittens and gangsters?”

  “Politicians, too,” Valentino said. “Don’t forget politicians.”

  “Don’t waste your breath. Can’t be done. Anyway she, Brody, and her teenage son were killed in June ’sixty-seven when her Buick rear-ended a truck on I-90 in Louisiana, on their way to do a TV inter
view in New Orleans. I caught a sergeant there in R-and-I just before quitting, Central Standard Time.”

  Without warning, he swiveled his computer screen to face his guest. A fuzzy black-and-white photo taken at the nearly fifty-year-old crime scene leapt out at him in grisly detail. As many times as he’d come across pictures of the tragedy, this was his first exposure to one too graphic to release to the press. He turned his eyes away from the mangled remains of the 1960s’ most famous sex symbol being loaded into a polystyrene bag.

  “You can see she wasn’t decapitated, in spite of all the rumors; not that pushing your face through a windshield at the rate of seventy miles an hour won’t do the job just as thorough. What happened, the wig she had on flew out through the broken glass and landed on the hood and a gawker saw it and jumped to the most sensational conclusion; as gawkers will, especially when a movie star’s involved and they can sell the story to the tabloids. That’s it there.”

  He pointed, but Valentino kept his face averted. He’d seen it perched obscenely on the Buick’s corrugated hood; the same cotton-candy wig Beata Limerick had displayed so proudly in a glass case in her living room. Frivolous vanity item that it was, in that context it was nearly as grotesque as the storied severed head.

  “No in situ pictures from California Highway Patrol yet,” Padilla went on. “From what I got from the sergeant on his way out the door, the scene’s a pretty close reconstruction.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “They happen, believe me. If those movie cops you spend so much time looking at were for real, they’d’ve come across them often enough not to blow ’em off the way they do. But hang on.” He swung the monitor back his way, rattled some keys, and slid a mouse on a pad advertising a local funeral home. Something about the movement put Valentino in mind of someone working the pointer on a Ouija board.

  Padilla grunted and rotated the screen again. “These Sacramento boys run an efficient operation. They got Geoffrey Root’s portfolio off his website and gave me the link. Take a look.”

  He was almost afraid to for fear of another nightmare image to take to bed, but he found himself looking at a grid of photos that made him think of the opening credits to Brady Bunch reruns. At first he thought that nine different women were smiling at him from publicity mug shots, but on closer examination spotted similarities in the features. They were all one woman—or rather, it dawned on him then, one man, sporting different female hairstyles and makeup.

  The female impersonator was an artist, that much was clear; one who used himself as a canvas. To the unindoctrinated, the electronic album showcased Mae West in her prime, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Streisand during her “Color Me Barbra” period, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, Diane Keaton as Annie Hall, Lana Turner in a tight sweater, Barbara Stanwyck looking hard as nails in her Double Indemnity wig, a saronged Dorothy Lamour, and—an inside joke, no doubt—Julie Andrews in not-entirely-convincing male disguise from Victor Victoria. Any one of them could have fooled a close colleague at first glance, and every one of them was Geoffrey Root. From coiffeur to costuming to cosmetics, he was the Man of a Thousand Faces for the transvestite set.

  “That accident scene should be up by now,” Padilla said. “Care to look?”

  “Would I see anything the experts didn’t?”

  “Yeah, right. Gnarly stuff. We don’t enjoy this part of the job any more than you do, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Some of us have to do this to put chops on the table. We don’t get to play at it like some others.”

  “Okay.”

  “Everybody wants to play Johnny Jump-Up, Boy Detective. Nobody wants to scrape up someone’s guts and carry ’em back to the office in a Hefty bag.”

  “Okay!” He felt himself turning green.

  The lieutenant’s glare softened, replaced by a mischievous glint; apparently, a little sadism on the job wasn’t frowned upon. He nodded, curled an arm around the monitor, and crooked a finger to mash the tip against one of the photos. He couldn’t see it from where he sat, but it was obvious he knew precisely what he was pointing at.

  “I’ll tell you what convinced me it wasn’t coincidence. This”—he thumped the picture—“is how he was got up when he took that header down the ravine. He was on his way to an AIDS benefit, and he was running late, so he was all tarted up for work. I lied about the angora sweater and tight pants, by the way. Bum joke. I should know better: My Uncle Tim asked me to call him Aunt Tina. Root had ’em in a garment bag. They wouldn’t fit the opening act. That called for a leotard and tights, and a bowler hat that rolled out from under the dash when the squad-car boys opened the door on the passenger’s side.”

  Valentino leaned forward. It was Root’s interpretation of Liza Minnelli, with black hair cropped as she’d worn it in Cabaret. That role had established her trademark short-hair look and influenced a generation.

  “It’s his real hair,” Padilla said. “No wig.”

  “But—”

  “Bingo. It’s possible—just barely—that one of the big fluffy ’dos he carried from gig to gig came loose, pitched through that hole his head made in the windshield, and just happened to land on the hood, but from where I sit, that’s pushing fate with a bulldozer.”

  “I agree.”

  “Whoop-de-doo. I’m not finished. He kept the wigs in hatboxes with the lids clamped tight.”

  “That narrows the odds.”

  “You might want to wait till I pause or say ‘over’ or give you the damn high sign before you dazzle me with your college smarts. There’s more.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Shut up. The accident investigators said none of the boxes was empty: Liz and Barbra and Mae and Zsa Zsa and all the rest were accounted for, with their names written on the lids in black Sharpie. All accounted for, that is, because they couldn’t know enough to look for the box that wasn’t there.”

  “Jayne Mansfield.”

  “Which means our boy probably took the box with him when he left. Why? He wasn’t so shy about covering up his source of inspiration the other two times.”

  “If you don’t have the answer, Lieutenant, I certainly don’t.”

  “So the sleuth is stumped for once.” He went on before Valentino could protest. “Also there were no pieces of shattered glass in the loose wig, which confirms the victim wasn’t wearing it when he kissed the windshield. So whoever sent Root on his last ride took it out—a dandy two-story job sprayed hard as a carp, like Olivia Newton-Whatserface wore in Grease—and plopped it on the hood after the car stopped rolling.”

  “My God.”

  Padilla’s face was even grimmer than always.

  “Not hardly, Boston Blackie. Right now, God’s the only One with an alibi we can’t bust.”

  12

  VALENTINO FELT SWEAT pooling at the base of his spine. He got up from the plastic chair and paced the small room, surreptitiously peeling his shirt away from his back, where it had stuck like flypaper. His path described a tight circle: The office was too cluttered with stacks of file folders and yellow legal pads scribbled all over in a cramped hand to encourage any more movement than that. The room was a factory, just as he’d thought, devoted to manufacturing arrests. With great reluctance, the film archivist acknowledged to himself that he and the lieutenant weren’t so different after all. What were a corduroy sportcoat with patched elbows and a stiff-as-siding suit between fellow job junkies?

  He stopped pacing. “The first two victims were women.”

  “Also Root wasn’t a blonde without the wigwork,” Padilla said; “but then neither were half the victims in this creep’s book, if we dig down to the roots. Our vic was all the yeller-haired bombshells in Hollywood history, rolled into a lump. Dollars to Ding Dongs he was knocked out or dead before his car went down that ravine. Our boy aimed it at the guardrail, put it in drive, jumped clear, and climbed down afterwards to dress the set. Same basic M.O. as the others.”

  “You think he was actually riding in
the car?”

  “Following behind, more likely; less risk of witnesses. Limerick and Ogilvie knew their killer. I went out on a limb there in public, but I’m not nervous. We’ll know more when Sacramento processes all the prints in Root’s car, or we may not; but he knew our serial nutjob and trusted him enough to tell him where he was headed.”

  “Are you working this case too?”

  “Normally I don’t like to butt in. I got plenty on my own plate, to begin with, and the boys who answer to the governor aren’t exactly Cub Scouts when it comes to investigating a homicide; but I can’t see my way to a tidy bust with all the trimmings if I don’t at least ask to ride along. My chief isn’t convinced this one’s related to the others, so for the time being I’m moonlighting.”

  “I can’t help thinking this character got all his ideas from Beata. When I asked her what she meant by the curse, she mentioned Thelma Todd, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow, Sharon Tate, and Jayne Mansfield. Three of those have already served as crime scenes.”

  “That checks. There was a trust issue, like I said.” He blew a gust of cigarette-flavored air. “Trouble is, by the time we finish questioning all the friends, servants, personal assistants, and presidents of fan clubs, this maniac will have died of old age.”

  Valentino considered. “You’re absolutely right. The same person who killed Beata and Karen killed Root.”

  “Yeah. Spare me your amateur dick’s intuition. Mine’s based on experience. The only thing my gut ever told me is when it’s time to eat and what I shouldn’t have ordered at Pancho O’Hara’s Mexican-Irish Pub.”

  “It’s more than that. I just figured out why our killer took away the box labeled Jayne Mansfield.”

  * * *

  The officer who’d delivered Valentino to the Beverly Hills station had clocked out, so Padilla drove. He was more comfortable behind the wheel than with his accepted work attire, topped off once again with the suitcoat and necktie.