“I only wish her father could be here,” she said. “He actually threw himself on a grenade to save his friends in Cambodia. I’ve spent the last forty years trying to reconcile myself to heroism connected with a monstrous cliché.”
At that moment, Valentino grasped the source of her approval of Broadhead as her daughter’s suitor.
A number of unusually respectful children of both sexes, whose relationship to the parties assembled remained a mystery, rounded out the assemblage. The fare was varied, perfectly prepared, and the service several notches above excellent. The Gimbal’s proprietor was an old friend of Broadhead’s, a retired assistant director of some thirty years’ experience, who checked in regularly in his immaculate evening dress to make sure everyone was satisfied with his meal.
Such perfection cannot maintain itself indefinitely. Just as the ambassador tapped her wineglass with a spoon and rose to deliver the first toast of the evening, Valentino’s cell rang. It was Ray Padilla.
“Seen today’s L.A. Times?” he said by way of greeting.
With a sinking heart, Valentino confessed he hadn’t.
“I’ll summarize: a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who calls herself Vanessa, no last name, is throwing a party in her Beverly Hills rental to celebrate the contract she just signed with Sony. They’re remaking Beau Geste as a science-fiction flick set on Jupiter with an all-female cast. She landed the Gary Cooper role.”
“I’d thought Marty Feldman put that one to rest forty years ago. He even titled it The Last Remake of Beau Geste.”
“Just for once spare me your bullshit education on things that don’t mean doodly-squat to ninety-nine percent of the population. She’s inviting her guests to stay after dinner to watch her screen test. I didn’t bother to confirm if she booked a professional projectionist. I can’t see Arthur Augustine passing up a chance this fat.”
In an electric flash Valentino shed the magic of the evening and embraced the lieutenant’s investigation. “When?”
“My bad: I swapped my morning’s reading of the news of the day for an extra thirty minutes of shut-eye I haven’t had since this case broke. They should be polishing off dessert right now. If I know our boy, he’ll wait just ten seconds after the guests stagger on out to replay Dorothy Stratten’s last date with her boyfriend. I need geek-speak to get through to a dame with stars in her eyes. Can you be there in ten? Five’d be better.”
Valentino, aware of the eyes focused on him from both sides of the table, shook loose his trusty notebook and pen. “What’s the address?”
27
VALENTINO WAS PREDISPOSED to dislike the condominium where flavor-of-the-month Vanessa lived, on the evidence of superior past associations: The address had belonged to the fabulous sprawling mansion of a silent-film star whose entire oeuvre existed no longer, complete with an Olympic-size swimming pool, masonry carved by artisans imported from Greece, and the entire phantom cast of Griffith-era Hollywood as guests, decked out in elaborate tailoring, arriving in custom-made automobiles each a city block long. Long since gone to cranes and dynamite, the Spanish-modern-Moroccan-Italianate thumb-to-the-nose of Good Taste had been replaced with a concrete construction intended to ape the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, built in tiers separated by stripes of volcanic glass, but which in the end appeared to be a cross between a parking garage and the Breakfast Special at the International House of Pancakes.
Valentino’s compact put-put of a car was crammed to capacity with the driver, Kyle Broadhead, Fanta, and Harriet; all of whom had insisted upon abandoning the rehearsal dinner to join him in his latest adventure. No sooner had he pulled in to the curb and set the brake than they piled out like a gaggle of circus clowns dressed to attend the Court of St. James.
Ray Padilla awaited them, looking as uncomfortable as ever in his tasteful department-approved gray worsted, leaning back against his personal car.
“No backup?” Valentino asked.
“I put in for it, but the chief thinks I’m a crackpot. He might have a point. This town’s rotten with naked babes wanting to be the next Julia Roberts.”
Broadhead said, “I’m surprised you know the name.”
“You don’t know me, Doc. I’m an enigma wrapped in a puzzle with a chewy chocolate center.”
He pushed himself upright, drawing his semi-automatic from its underarm holster in the identical movement. “Same setup as before, only the girls stay here.”
Harriet said, “I’ll tell any girls who show up.”
The lieutenant pulled a face at Valentino. “Men who can’t keep their women in line—”
“—were born in the twentieth century,” Broadhead finished. “You know where to look for us when you need us.”
“Well, hell. The closer you get up in the department, the better your chances of getting tossed to the wolves.” Padilla led the way through the front door, plate glass with a chromium frame.
The elevator wouldn’t go to the top floor, where they were headed, without a key. Padilla found the building superintendent in his ground-floor apartment, an Arab in a white shirt buttoned to the neck, black trousers, and glistening black wingtips, topped off with a sky-blue turban, who scrutinized the lieutenant’s credentials and at last handed him a key plated in gold.
The elevator opened directly into the suite that occupied the entire top floor. As the doors slid apart, Padilla motioned to Valentino, who pressed his thumb against the button that kept them from closing. The wedding party remained inside the car as the lieutenant entered the suite.
Briefly his body blocked their view of the scene beyond; but as he sidled away, covering the interior with both hands on his sidearm, Valentino saw a man lying on his stomach on a costly white woolen carpet, hands clasped behind his head. Standing over him facing the door, got up in one of her outlandish haute couture outfits, form-fitting, exposing one naked polished shoulder, and caught around the waist with a broad white leather belt fastened by a diamond-studded buckle, six inches taller than the frame God gave her in stiletto heels, was Theodosia Goodman, Mark David Turkus’ go-to girl when it came to dealing down-and-dirty for commercially lucrative lost film classics, leveling a stainless-steel pistol the size of a toaster at the man at her feet.
“High time, Lieutenant,” she said to Padilla. “When I took out that ad in the Times, I thought you’d have the gendarmes surrounding the block from noon on.”
Padilla took a moment to find his voice; or rather the words to express his reaction.
“Where’s this Vanessa?”
“You’re looking at her. I placed that piece with an editor who owed me a solid. I’m the bait, and here’s the rat.” She kicked the man on the floor with a patent-leather toe; his whimper was an exact replica of Holiday O’Shea’s in the clutches of Arthur Augustine’s hired killer.
Prostrate, the author of the most celebrated homicide case in recent memory was a narrow-gauged man in his twenties, with black hair cropped close to his skull and a pale, pimpled face gaping back over his shoulder at the lieutenant. His expression pleaded for rescue. At his elbow lay a black case like the one projectionists carried their equipment in, yawning open to expose a glittering array of cutting-edge instruments and rolls of duct tape.
“Drop the gun!”
“That’s the best you can do?”
“You heard me, lady!”
“Okay, since you’re so polite.” Teddie Goodman seated the hammer and let the weapon drop to the carpet. “I’ve got a permit. Who doesn’t, nowadays? I placed this man under citizen’s arrest the moment I saw there was no projector in his case. The gear in it’s enough to book him for carrying beaucoups of concealed weapons till you gather up the rest.”
Valentino left the elevator, followed by the others. “Why take the chance, Teddie? You could’ve been killed.”
She laughed; her laugh was too much like the rattle of a diamondback to share the joy. “This, coming from the man whose staircase a couple of thugs threw me down mista
king me for him. I’m still wearing steel pins that set off the metal detectors every time I go through LAX. If you must know, SAG’s offering a reward of ten thousand for the apprehension and conviction of the curse killer. I can invest that in Supernova and pull in ten times the amount in dividends in less than a year.”
Supernova International was Mark David Turkus’ corporation, a media giant that could buy and sell UCLA any day in the week. The Screen Actors Guild, financed by dues paid by billionaire stars and table-waiting hopefuls, was more than capable of making good on its reward offer. Valentino sighed; all those weeks, and all that angst, only to put his fiercest competitor another leg up on him.
* * *
The “Curse Killer” stained front pages and breaking newscasts for two weeks, complete with its familiar backstory of parental neglect and adolescent jealousy, with the added kick of a hired killer with links to organized crime; that angle alone gave the tabloids dozens of columns on the Industry’s connection to Bugsy Siegel and Murder, Incorporated, with plenty of bloodstained art for illustration. It all made Valentino feel sorry for Arthur Augustine; until he thought of Beata Limerick.
Ray Padilla was forced to have his suit cleaned and pressed to wear before the cameras. When Augustine was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and remanded to the maximum-security ward of the state mental hospital in Camarillo, and Patrick Barlow was arraigned for capital murder, the entire episode began to fade, joining the shockers of Hollywood past.
Eleazar Sheridan, publicly absolved of any guilt in his companion’s death, pledged his hundred thousand dollar inheritance toward the establishment of the Geoffrey Root Memorial Scholarship for talented female impersonators interested in a career in theater.
Beata’s print of The Sandpiper went to auction. Teddie Goodman, representing Mark David Turkus, bid aggressively, but Valentino, remembering Beata now without sadness, topped her at the last minute with the unexpected backing of a representative of the U.S. State Department; a wedding present to her son-in-law, Kyle Broadhead, the head of the UCLA Film Preservation Department. The restoration experts at the university put the film on the list behind Charlie Chan’s Chance and two hundred feet of Theda Bara’s Cleopatra, which was all of that silent feature that had come to light.
Six months after the arrests in Orson’s Grill and the condo in Beverly Hills, Dateline NBC made Teddie Goodman a whopping offer for her story of the murderer’s capture. Instead, she sold the story to Mark David Turkus, her boss, for significantly less up front, but with stock options in Supernova International. The dividends would last beyond her lifetime; not that she would leave them to anyone if she could arrange for a separate coffin large enough to contain the amount, to be buried beside her. Mark David Turkus was credited as executive producer of that project, but Teddie’s name wasn’t mentioned. (“She’s the one person in this town who puts more store in fortune than fame,” Broadhead said.) When the time came to cast the production, the directors didn’t lack for has-beens, also-rans, and wannabes to fill the bill.
CLOSING CREDITS
The following sources were crucial in the writing of Brazen, and the Valentino series in general:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anger, H. Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon. New York: Dell, 1981.
This is the one that started it all, releasing a flood of exposé-type books as counterpoint to the standard Dream Factory elegy, laying bare the checkered lives of movie icons. This subcategory swings between serious investigative journalism and dirty-minded trash, and for the most part thrives on the shock factor in discovering that public figures are human. Anger’s text is as tasteless as the jacket photo of Gina Lollobrigida glaring at Jayne Mansfield’s exposed nipple during a photo shoot, but it’s a serviceable introduction to the dark side of Tinseltown. The sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, presumably delivers more of the same; but I’m no more motivated to check it out than I am to sit through Kill Bill II.
Austin, John. Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Ace, 1970.
This one’s better than the usual sensation piece hastily assembled from newspaper clippings. Long-time West Coast columnist Austin provides us with a good jumping-off point for studying the mysterious deaths of Marilyn, Jayne, Todd, et al.
Behlmer, Rudy, and Tony Thomas. Hollywood’s Hollywood: The Movies About the Movies. Secaucus: Citadel, 1975.
Behlmer and Thomas inform us that the motion picture industry has made some two hundred motion pictures about the motion picture industry—and that tally is forty years old. The news astonishes those unaware of just how narcissistic showbiz people are. From 1908’s Making Movies: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio through 1976’s Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood, these chroniclers report on some of Hollywood’s most notorious exercises in navel-gazing, with in-depth examinations of such gems as the satiric Sullivan’s Travels, the endlessly entertaining Singin’ in the Rain, and the industry-bashing Sunset Boulevard. (However, they fail to explain how Boy Meets Girl, featuring Marie Wilson—actually out-annoying the always-irritating Penny Singleton—smuggled an unwed mother past the censors.) Who better to teach us about moviemaking than moviemakers themselves? Until some confusion about rights to the use of publicity stills forced it to flee the field, Citadel was the gold standard for books on film.
Donnelly, Paul. Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries. London: Omnibus, 2000.
As often as I consult this book for its handy collection of facts concerning the lives of Hollywood notables, I’m reluctant to recommend it. Donnelly approaches celebrity scandal like a filthy little boy, slinging around unsubstantiated innuendo and becoming specific only when his victim is dead and unable to defend himself; in snide asides wholly unrelated to his entries, he’s circumspect to the point of cowardice, but manages to snigger nonetheless, as if he’s privy to something we aren’t, but too coy to share. It’s no surprise that he often cites Charles Higham, the master of the poison pen, from a safe distance. Higham is entirely unreliable, but Donnelly’s compendium is a useful quick-search reference, so long as you separate fact from speculation.
Edmonds, Andy. Hot Toddy: The True Story of Hollywood’s Most Sensational Murder. London: Macdonald, 1989.
Well, I’d vote for William Desmond Taylor’s as the most sensational; but hyperbole aside, Edmonds’ chronicle is the most thorough, with no book-length competition as yet, to my knowledge. A quickie TV movie was loosely based on this book, with bubblegum-blonde Loni Anderson poorly cast (not that a fortyish actress can’t embody a woman who died at twenty-nine, but Anderson’s sitcom training failed to give the presence required for this role). Screen it if you like—it’s entertaining, as these fly-by-night affairs go—but read the book, and check out the real thing on video.
Halliwell, Leslie. The Filmgoer’s Companion. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977.
This is a reliable quick-source guide to Hollywood history, touching on individual films and providing biographical material on actors, directors, screenwriters, studios, genres, etc.
Halliwell, Leslie. Halliwell’s Film Guide. New York: HarperPerennial (various).
Halliwell was a grump—a common trait of Brit pundits—particularly compared to Leonard Maltin, who seems genuinely to enjoy going to the movies. John Walker and others who picked up the torch following Halliwell’s death in 1989 are mostly occupied in watering down his more sulfurous comments. But the details are accurate, and the entries include the names of the studios involved, an important piece of information Maltin overlooks.
Kirkpatrick, Sidney D. A Cast of Killers. New York: Dutton, 1986.
An anomaly, if you buy into the “blonde curse;” Mabel Norman, who suffered career suicide merely by her connection to murdered director William Desmond Taylor, was dark-haired. But this hyped-up investigation, eight decades before such bottom-feeding tell-all programs like TMZ, serves as the template for all the Hollywood tragedies and scandals to follow. The book, clumsily written but relentlessly absorbing, centers on aging d
irector King Vidor’s obsession with solving the sixty-year-old homicide—helped out by plucky sidekick Colleen Moore, herself a survivor of the first Golden Age of the American cinema; really, this is the stuff of a rip-roaring historical mystery. To understand the dark side of Hollywood, a country unto itself run by an oligarchy of ruthless studio moguls in command of their own private army, it’s important to study this case. The money-dripping, sex-and-drug-driven 1920s Street of Dreams (which Valentino describes quite accurately as the “last western boomtown, with everything that entails”) makes jaded retreads like The Wolf of Wall Street play like The Wizard of Oz.
Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide. New York: Penguin, 2005.
This one’s indispensable. Created to reduce poundage from Maltin’s annual filmography, it provides valuable information on legendary movies made before 1960 as well as obscure titles that never appeared in the yearly guide.
Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 2015 Movie Guide. New York: Penguin, 2014.
A bittersweet valedictory. Readers of Valentino know of my reverence for and dependency on this invaluable annual guide; but after forty-five years, this is the last entry. An entitled generation of gadget-users has been brought up to believe that the fruits of a scholar’s research and experience should be available to them free, and hang the unreliability of Web-based information. Leonard and I didn’t always agree: He routinely assigned four stars to The Philadelphia Story, which I’ve always found stagebound and, worse, unfunny; thought Kill Bill was somehow worth the price of popcorn, and found the faithful-to-the-book remake of All the King’s Men inferior to the slapdash Cliff’s Notes version that took the Oscar for Best Film in the weak year of 1949. But in the main he’s been the fairest judge in a field laced with gratuitous snark.
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