“Who knows?” grumped Broadhead. “We might scrape together enough rubles to re-master Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hey!”
Valentino, preoccupied with what the morrow might bring, dismissed his mentor’s sarcasm as a symptom of his fast-approaching nuptials. Despite his loathing of all things hackneyed, Broadhead had agreed to a June wedding. His bride-to-be, for all her rebellious attitude, was a traditionalist at heart.
“I was married the first time in December,” he comforted himself aloud, “which brought a whole new terror to the first sighting of a sidewalk Santa at Halloween.”
“I thought it was a happy marriage,” said Valentino, who had never known the first Mrs. Broadhead.
“It was. The thought that there might be two women who would tolerate my constant presence is a source of humility and awe. I’ll remind you of this as your tenth anniversary approaches, and you find yourself having to outdo the previous nine. The pressure mounts exponentially.”
At this point his friend changed the subject by directing attention to the grainy image on-screen. Valentino and Harriet had yet to discuss the possibility of a lifelong commitment, despite the assumption of everyone who knew them that the event was inevitable.
As it happened, when she called the next morning with a time and place for the date with Padilla, he’d forgotten all about it. Leo Kalishnikov, his theater designer, had presented him with his latest report of disaster: While digging up The Oracle’s basement to replace sections of the brittle foundation, the excavating crew had struck water: a geyser, in fact, in the middle of the worst drought in the history of Southern California. New drainage tile would have to be laid, more permits arranged, and the cost “substantial.” Which was a word Valentino had come to dread. “I could sugarcoat the details,” the other told him, “but it wouldn’t make them less grim.”
The film archivist’s life had broken into two separate parts: construction and criminal investigation. When the Russian called back with the welcome news that the water had come from a broken main only, whose repair would run a fraction of the amount anticipated, Valentino had forgotten about the basement. Harriet had called: They were to meet with the lieutenant on enemy ground: The Long Arm, a cocktail lounge three blocks from the Beverly Hills station, and a cop hangout so notorious not even a deadbeat dad had gone within a mile of it in years.
“What can I expect?” he’d asked. He’d seen enough of the real thing lately to know that the movies were unreliable on the subject.
“Oh, the usual: old prizefighting posters, bare electric bulbs, and over everything the distinct bouquet of Kentucky Rye.”
“Now you’re playing with me.”
“Relax, darling. The owner sold all the spittoons for scrap years ago.”
He arrived on time, and found Harriet seated alone in a well-lit booth upholstered in shiny green Naugahyde and neat paper napkins with THE LONG ARM embossed on them in block letters. Men and women, some in street clothes, others in uniform, sat at tables and around a bar overhung with crystal glasses in grooved racks, with a soccer game playing on flat-screen monitors. Something was trilling softly over a concealed sound system. Valentino strained to make it out: “Walk On By.”
“I’ve turned down three drinks sent to me by three different patrons,” Harriet said, raising her face for a peck. “One of them was kind of cute.”
“The patron or the drink?”
“The patron. He runs the records bureau in Huntington Park.”
“He probably just wanted to dust you for prints.”
He couldn’t blame the others. She was beautiful even in the shapeless smock she wore to work, more so once she’d changed into a sleeveless blouse and skirt. She watched him closely as he sat down across from her, looking around. “Disappointed?”
“A little. The place might as well be an Olive Garden.”
“Don’t be taken in by the ambience. Last year a couple of punks in ski masks stuck a shotgun in the bartender’s face and guess what happened?”
“I can hear actually hear the pistols cocking.”
“It was like a fire crackling through Laurel Canyon. This is where every cop in the city comes to cash his paycheck. Even the bartender drew down on them. He retired from active duty when Detroit broke up the gang squad.”
He looked at the man behind the bar, a mild-looking sixty in horn-rimmed glasses and a polka-dot bow tie. “Where’s our host?”
“He isn’t buying, we are. This was our idea, remember? Be patient. He’s only a couple of minutes late.”
They ordered drinks: white wine for her, a Miller Lite for him. He’d nurse it; two beers and he was no good for the rest of the day. But a Dr Pepper seemed inappropriate to the expected company.
Padilla came in just as the bartender was setting out their drinks, nodding here and there to scattered patrons. He wore the same conservative suit. Valentino wondered what had become of his distinctive double-knits. The laws of the State of California would prohibit disposing of them in public landfills because of what they might do to the water table, and burning them would have sent up a signal flame visible from outer space. The newcomer plunked himself down beside Harriet. “Diet Pepsi,” he told the bartender.
Valentino goggled. The lieutenant smiled bitterly and held up a colorful plastic chip. “Five years sober.” He put it away. “It was the Scotch or the job.”
Padilla was opening up, it seemed. Valentino began to feel less on edge.
The other produced his wallet, as if he were going to pony up for all their drinks after all, but instead of bills drew out three business cards.
“You were right about Limerick, Ogilvie, and Root: Stone pros, respecting the rules of the projectionists’ union.”
“So you have a new suspect?” He tried to keep the eagerness from his tone.
“See for yourself.”
Valentino accepted the cards. The first read:
S. A. BRUGH
PROJECTIONIST
A.S.M.P.T.
“American Society of Motion Picture Technicians,” he said. “One of the biggest unions in the industry, and one of the most powerful.”
“So he told me.”
The next contained the same information under the name Bernard Schwartz.
Without comment, Valentino looked at the third. The identical legends, but this time the name was Mike Morrison.
“Three different guys,” Padilla said. “But they all had to belong to the union. I interviewed Brugh. My team tracked down Schwartz and Morrison. Brugh had run Limerick’s projector from time to time—it’s in company records—and Schwartz and Morrison had each done the same for Ogilvie and Root. The last two had dicey alibis: Schwartz said he was walking his dog in his Orange County neighborhood around the time the CSIs figure Ogilvie was killed; two of his neighbors thought they saw him, but since he walked the dog just about every night at that time they couldn’t swear if it was that night. Morrison went to a movie—if you can believe that, what he does for a living—alone. There were no ushers and the ticket clerk never looks at faces.”
“What about Brugh?”
“He was scheduled to work the projector the day Limerick wanted to screen that picture for you—the day you found her body—but then he got a message through his company canceling the gig. That was an hour before he was expected. After he got word he went to his ex-wife’s place in Long Beach and borrowed his kid. They rented a sloop and went sailing all day. The ex, the boy, and the guy who rents boats at the marina backed him up.”
“How hard did you lean on the others?”
Padilla snatched back the cards.
“We don’t lean. We persevere. My crew, which I trained myself, is satisfied neither one of them is Jack the Ripper. If we didn’t have a suspect as sweet as Sheridan, we might risk a harassment suit and press ’em tight, but I got people to answer to, and if you think the rank of lieutenant means job security, you know even less about police than the guys who write movies. You can’t blast a captain out o
f his spot, and sergeant’s too low in the order to look like anything but a scapegoat; the press can smell a cover-up like that a mile away. Scrapping a lieutenant spins nice on the six o’clock news, and there’s always a line of good men and women waiting to take his place.
“Plus,” he said, “we got a confession from Sheridan.”
The bartender brought Padilla’s Pepsi. He returned the business cards to his wallet, sipped, and studied Valentino’s face. Turning to Harriet, he said, “I got through finally. I was starting to think it would take a massive stroke to make your boyfriend go up in his lines.”
Valentino drank beer. It tasted as bitter as the lieutenant’s smile.
III
THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS
20
BY MERCY OF events, Valentino found distance from sordid things in the flurry of his closest friend’s nuptials; the fittings for the bridegroom’s raiment continued apace, as did the arrangements for the ceremony itself, most of which fell to Harriet, as maid of honor; earlier incidents involving the acquisition of Red Montana’s first cowboy feature had put the details of the bachelor party months in the past. For all the bride’s millennial-charged chiding, and the groom’s relentless curmudgeonism, Fanta and Kyle were a match made, if not exactly in heaven, then certainly in the fairy-tale atmosphere of Hollywood, remote island that it was in the sea of twenty-first-century reality.
The professor, who’d lost touch with his only progeny sometime in the turgid sixties (a son, Valentino gathered; but whose circumstances were as plainly verboten to inquiry as the father’s mysterious incarceration in Communist Yugoslavia), had no interest in propagation, and the legal student had made her peace (with relief, it seemed), with the diagnosis that she was incapable of reproducing. That hurdle overcome, the difference in their generations was entirely a matter of their own discussion.
The future wedding party experienced an ominous preview of fireworks to come when the bride-to-be asked Harriet to attend the cake tasting.
The maid of honor demurred. “I’m trying to watch my waistline. I can just fit into that horrible dress you picked out. Anyway, isn’t that the groom’s responsibility?”
Fanta looked like the poster child for bridal jitters. “Please? The old bear blew up when I asked him. He said, ‘What’s the point? Every wedding cake tastes the same: melted cotton candy poured over a Hostess Sno Ball. It should come with a shot of insulin.’”
“You know, he’s kind of right,” said Valentino, when the telephone conversation was reported to him.
“Not the point. If I have to go, so do you.”
The room, usually reserved for private parties, was closed off from the others in the Culver City patisserie. It wasn’t enough that Fanta and Harriet had to sample the various wedges presented by the female proprietor, a sturdy brunette with jet-trail eyebrows like Vampira; he was obliged to pick up a fork as well. The first tasted exactly as Broadhead had described it, the second something like Bazooka bubble gum. He was lifting a forkful of the third when the bridegroom entered, scarlet-faced and wearing his tweed Ellis Island uniform.
“You came!” Fanta’s eyes sparkled.
He stopped in his tracks before their table. “I thought by now you’d have moved on to the figures for the top of the cake.”
“That comes later. What are you hiding behind your back?”
He brought his hand around in front of him and opened it. A green ceramic frog glistened on his palm.
The sparkle faded. “Which one is it?”
“The groom, of course.”
“If that’s how you see us, we need counseling.”
The others excused themselves. Outside, Valentino expelled a gust of air. “I can’t wait for what happens after the honeymoon, the first time they discuss whether to watch The Seventh Seal or Hot Tub Time Machine.”
The look Harriet gave him was not unlike what Broadhead had gotten from Fanta. “You can’t visualize them working out their difficulties in bed, can you?”
His response was to turn Technicolor red; but he attempted to pose as a man of the world. “I’m sure he picked up some things during his travels abroad. You know, there’s a showing of Metropolis tonight at Grauman’s. The department played a part in the reconstruction. Are you up for it?”
“You know, you won’t always be able to depend on old Hollywood to redirect the course of an uncomfortable conversation.”
They were stopped at a red light. He leaned in as close as he could against the restraint of his seat belt. “I’ll buy the refreshments. I’ll even pop for those pretzel bites you can’t resist.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll meet you halfway. AMC is running The Breakfast Club continuously starting at eight P.M. We can catch the first showing and fight over the relative merits of Molly Ringwald and Brigitte Helm over dinner at the Morocco Lounge.”
“The Morocco? I was thinking of a quick sandwich at the Brass Gimbal on the way home.”
“As good as the James Wong Howe Chop Suey sounds, I thought the Rack of Lamb Nelson Mandela a bit more suited to our second anniversary.”
Which hit him like a runaway piano in a Hal Roach feature. He couldn’t believe two years had passed since they’d met; and since he’d sunk himself in the mire of bringing The Oracle back to its former glory.
The Morocco was one of the few dining spots in L.A. where a dress code was enforced. The effect Harriet had upon the male clientele, wearing a frost-green off-the-shoulder cocktail dress and the emerald earrings Valentino had given her on her last birthday (putting off the purchase of platinum doorknobs), made him grateful for his decision to have his one-and-only suit dry-cleaned and pressed. She’d approved, making one adjustment only: jettisoning the necktie printed with megaphones and movie cameras in favor of a gift provided by her, a shimmering silk tie that matched her dress.
A rarity in a culture that celebrated departed glory, the establishment contained no references, visual or otherwise, to extinct Hollywood. Instead it opted for Manhattan elegance. The maitre d’ wore tails, the waiters short red jackets with brass buttons, and one could cut a finger on the creases in the crisp linen tablecloths. There were no potted palms, no beaded curtains, and the pianist sat at a glistening black baby grand playing selections from light opera. In their well-meaning effort to blast the Tinseltown stereotype, the restaurant’s designers had substituted someone else’s vision for homegrown originality.
“What are you looking for?” asked Harriet, once her chair had been pulled out for her and they were seated.
Valentino stopped craning his neck. “Noël Coward; or a reasonable facsimile.” He caught her expression. “I’m sorry. It tries so hard not to look like the movies it looks like a set from Top Hat.”
“You know, Val, I don’t mind your pet obsession. In fact, it’s one of the things that attracted me to you in the first place. The men I was involved with before you were all so relentlessly grown up—lawyers, investment brokers, insurance actuaries, whatever those are—your childish infatuation with make-believe was like a blast of fresh air. I indulged that, I admit; but when you apply the movies to every experience we share—”
“Say no more.” He smiled, propped an elbow on the table, and held out his hand. To his relief, she laid hers in it without hesitation. “In my defense, they’re no less important to me, or to my livelihood, than legal precedents, the prime rate, and how long a client is expected to live—that’s what an actuary does, by the way—but sometimes I make the mistake of defining myself by my work. Also this murder case refuses to leave my mind. I’ll try to do better.”
She smiled in turn and squeezed his hand. “What’s that line from How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days? Oh, yes: ‘Bullshit.’ That’s not all that’s worrying you. Every time the subject of our friends’ wedding comes up, you go deeper into Merton of the Movies. Is it us you’re worried about?”
“No. Well, not us, particularly. Well, us.”
She slid her hand out of his. His heart fell; but then h
e saw the red-jacketed waiter approaching their table. They ordered drinks and found themselves alone again.
“That thing between Kyle and Fanta works for them,” he said. “That whole Tracy-Hepburn friction thing. I don’t want us to be like that.”
“We won’t be. For one thing, you and I were born only two months apart. That May–December whatever is a scene from another movie; there I go, rationalizing things on your terms. Don’t you realize I wouldn’t make the attempt if I weren’t crazy about you—baby?”
He flushed. “Do me a favor and don’t quote from Double Indemnity when you’re trying to get me into bed.”
They were interrupted again, but this time there was no scarlet coat. The sight of Lieutenant Ray Padilla approaching their table, looking as uncomfortable as ever in tasteful gray worsted, the uniform of established authority, catapulted the scene straight out of romantic comedy back into murder melodrama.
“This a private party, or can I barge in?”
“Would it make a difference if I said no?” But Valentino was relieved by the distraction. He didn’t fear commitment so much as the question whether he could support both a marriage and The Oracle, and the prospect of being forced to choose between them shattered any chance of his ever having another good night’s sleep.
Without answering, the newcomer appropriated a chair from a vacant table, sat, and scooted it up to theirs. He stuck a thumb back over his shoulder. “Twenty-second anniversary.”
“Won’t she be annoyed you left her?” It seemed he couldn’t escape the subject of matrimony.
“She’s in the powder room. I don’t know what they do in there and I don’t want to, but she’s good for twenty minutes. Sitting there alone with all that texting going on around me gives me the hives. Sounds like a flock of woodpeckers on crack. Hello, Johansen.”
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