The Pictures

by Guy Bolton

  “Do we know who he is?”

  “Not yet but we’re working on it. We should have an answer in the next few hours. Craine, there’s something else you should know. Billy Wilson’s in hospital. He’s critical. Looks like he fell from a fifth-floor window.”

  “He was pushed?”

  “We don’t know that for certain.”

  Craine opened the door to the police car and looked down at Michael. He was still shaking like a leaf. “There are some things I need to do. I can’t take you with me.”

  Michael shook his head. He started to whimper and cry again and Craine reached inside and held him by the shoulders. It hurt to see him like this.

  “The men who came to kill us . . . I need to find them. I need to find them so that they can’t do it again. So that we’re safe. Do you understand?”

  Michael was drawing in deep breaths. His eyes were red raw from crying.

  “These officers will protect you. This is Officer Becker, he’s going to stay with you, take you to a place you’ll be safe. I trust him. I know you’ll be safe with them, okay?” His son’s tiny shoulders were shaking. Craine had to pry his fingers off his arms. “Michael, look at me,” he said. “Look at me. I’ll come back for you. There are things I need to do tonight but I’ll come back for you, I promise.”

  Before Michael’s sobs could make him change his mind, Craine closed the door and walked toward one of the unmarked police cars parked in front.

  Simms was still with him. “Where are you going?”

  “I need to know who did this,” he said, sitting in the driver’s seat and pulling the door closed.

  Simms was by the driver’s window now. “Please, Craine, where are you going?”

  Craine twisted his head to see Michael still sitting in the back of the police car behind, staring straight ahead. “I want someone to take care of Michael. I want him protected at all times. Don’t let him out of your sight.”

  “Craine, wait. You can’t go, we need you here—”

  But Craine wasn’t listening. The keys were in the ignition and the engine turned the first time. Ignoring Simms’ calls, he pulled out and accelerated toward the hills.

  He felt suddenly alone again.

  It was after ten o’clock when Craine arrived at the hospital. The waiting room was almost empty of patients; only a few drunks and hobos dared sit among the gaggle of police officers minding the first floor.

  He nodded to blue-topped uniformed officers as he passed reception. A nurse caught sight of him and frowned.

  “Sir, you can’t go down there. Sir, where are you going?”

  Craine didn’t answer, holding out his tin police insignia as he angled toward the self-service elevators with a resolute stride. A doctor tried to stop him.

  “Can I help you, Detective?”

  “Where is the gunshot victim brought in an hour ago?”

  “By the police? He’s stabilized. He’s going into surgery any second.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “He’s in a pretty bad way but yes, he’s alive. The bullet passed through below his ribs. Missed his spine. Ruptured his lower left lung but he’s stable now.”

  The doctor held the door open as Craine stepped inside the elevator. “It’s crucial he’s not disturbed during his recovery period.”

  “Move out of the way, Doctor. What floor?”

  “He’s not ready for visitors.”

  “What floor?”

  The doctor sighed. “I don’t care who you are, I’m calling security.”

  Craine grabbed the doctor by his collar and wheeled him against the elevator wall.

  “I won’t ask you again.”

  “The third floor,” he gasped before Craine pushed him into the foyer and the doors slid shut.

  When the elevator doors opened, Craine stepped out into a hallway lit by long fluorescent bulbs. He followed signs past a nurse’s station. He saw one of them nervously pick up the phone as he swung through the double doors into the surgical ward.

  The shooter looked to have his own private room, two uniformed officers standing tall outside the door.

  “Has he woken up yet?”

  “He’s conscious,” one of the officers said.

  “I need five minutes with him,” Craine muttered and they stepped aside.

  There was a figure in the bed with his eyes closed, his arms handcuffed to the metal bars on the bedrails either side of him. Glass bottles of saline hung above him on I.V. poles and a central venous line ran down into his neck.

  The man sat bolt upright when he saw Craine walking in but there was little he could do. He tried to hold up his hands in self-defense but his wrists were cuffed tightly to the bed. Craine wrapped one palm over the man’s mouth and swung his fist into the side of his neck. There was a muffled scream but not loud enough to be heard from outside. Craine hit him again. He’d never been a violent man, never had much of a temper on him but the thought of this man in his house, the thought of how close Michael came to being killed, had let loose something deep inside him.

  Craine leaned in, whispering into his ear.

  “Can you hear me? Nod if you can understand me. Nod!”

  A nod as the man gasped for breath, taking stock.

  “Then who sent you?”

  The slightest hesitation and Craine pushed his thumb into the man’s ribs. A brief, hog-like squeal followed before he pressed the palm of his free hand tighter around his mouth.

  “You work for the Lilac Club?”

  His head tilted downward.

  “Who sent you?”

  Two bloodshot eyes looked away. Craine could hear the man’s shallow, uneven breaths but his chest was barely rising. He took his hand away from his mouth and moved it toward the bandaged chest.

  “Wait, please,” he coughed through tears. “I was with Kinney.”

  “Kinney? The security head?”

  “Yes, Kinney.”

  He looked into the man’s eyes and the man looked away. “Why?”

  There was a noise from outside before he could get his answer. Through the glass door he could see the doctor from downstairs arguing with the uniformed officers. Craine grabbed a chair from the corner and jammed it under the doorknob.

  “Why?” he said, returning to the bedside.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The man spat blood on himself. He coughed loudly, gasping for air. “We had to. We were ordered to.”

  The doorknob was rattling now. The argument outside had intensified. The doctor was trying to get in. Craine had only a few seconds remaining.

  “By who? Carell?”

  A shake of the head. “He gave the order. But someone else instructed him to.”

  “Who? Someone higher? Frank Nitti?”

  “No, a client.”

  “Who?”

  “If I tell you, they’ll kill me.”

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you. Now who was it?”

  Craine held his bloodied palm up for the man to see before lowering it toward his rib cage.

  “He works for the movie studios,” the man blurted out.

  “You know his name?”

  A long pause. “Yes,” he said at last through labored breaths. “I know his name.”

  The Wicked Witch was dead.

  For over half an hour, the audience in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre laughed and cheered at the picture that almost cost Louis Mayer his career. For a few minutes, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had even allowed himself to enjoy the movie with them, jeering when Toto was snatched away from Dorothy by her irascible neighbor Miss Gulch, crying during “Over the Rainbow,” applauding with the audience when Dorothy skipped down the yellow brick road with the Munchkins in tow.

  People often asked Louis Mayer what the secret to a great picture was. Not a good one, a great picture. Was it lightning in a bottle, or was it a list of tried-and-tested ingredients that allowed M.G.M. to produce critical and c
ommercial hits, time after time? The truth was that it was somewhere in between. You could throw all the money in the world at a producer and he wouldn’t make a picture worth a dime. You could hire writer after writer to tighten the script line by line, you could hire the best directors, the most popular actors and actresses—but as much as it pained him, there was no recipe for a hit movie. Not until Dorothy walked through that sepia door into Munchkinland and Mayer could see the faces of the children in the audience light up did he know he had something special on his hands. The hard work had paid off. They’d created something beautiful.

  But now, as Dorothy and the Scarecrow sang “If I Only Had A Brain,” something else caught Mayer’s eye.

  Whitey Hendry, almost shapeless in the half-light, appeared through one of the double doors at the rear of the theater and began whispering urgently to a member of his security detail. From his booth in the wings, Mayer saw the security guard point up toward the balcony.

  Mayer shifted in his seat. Something had happened.

  “What’s wrong, Louis?” Margaret whispered, resting her hand on his.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, standing up.

  “You need the bathroom?”

  “I have to go talk to Hendry for a second.”

  Margaret glared at him with disbelief. “Now?”

  “Something’s come up.”

  “But it’s the premiere,” she hissed. “Louis—”

  “Please, Margaret, don’t yell at me. Not now. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  He met Hendry coming up the stairs toward the wings.

  “What is it?” Mayer asked, knowing that something terrible had happened.

  “We got word from one of our police informants about twenty minutes ago. Jonathan Craine has been involved in a shoot-out.”

  The words sent Mayer reeling. “What are you talking about? Where?”

  “Carell’s men tried to take him at his house. They killed another detective too. Patrick O’Neill.”

  “The kid?” Mayer said, glaring at him with disbelief.

  His silence told him that Hendry couldn’t believe it himself. When Hendry nodded, Mayer bowed his head and pinched the flesh at the bridge of his nose. He’d always been wary of associating too closely with Benjamin Carell. Even when he agreed to Carell approaching his contract stars for his escort service, Mayer had been under no illusions about how dangerous he was. But this? Killing police officers? Carell had promised him, sworn to him in fact, that he’d had no part in the Loew House shootings. He’d convinced Mayer that someone else was behind Rochelle’s murder and that he’d had absolutely no part in Herbert Stanley’s death. So why would he choose now to go after Jonathan Craine?

  “Why?” he stammered. “What did they want from them?”

  “Carell wouldn’t say.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “I called him ten minutes ago. He thought we knew. That it was what we wanted. He was trying to protect our agreement. Sir, were you not aware of any of this?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Mayer stood back and contemplated for a second the sheer scale of these implications. M.G.M. was now involved in the brutal slaying of a police officer. There was blood on his hands, enough blood to drown in. How had he been so foolish as to not see what was happening?

  “Sir, he said the order to kill Craine came from us.”

  “Bullshit, I did no such thing.”

  But as he spoke, the final pieces of the puzzle slipped into place. He knew of only one person Carell would take orders from on behalf of M.G.M. A person close enough to him to manipulate his every decision. Familiarity had confused things; it had blinded him to the truth. But finally the illusion had dropped. Gone were the questions, the suspicions, the hazy theories behind Herbert Stanley’s death two months ago. The answer had been greeting him every morning for the past seven years.

  “Sir, Carell believed he was acting on our approval. He told me who the order came from . . .”

  “Yes—”

  And when Hendry continued, Mayer mouthed the words with him.

  “The order came from Russell Peterson.”

  Chapter 40

  Russell Peterson lived in a suite on the ninth floor of the Sunset Tower apartment building, the tower block at the peak of Sunset Boulevard. It was a distinguished address even in motion picture circles. Its concrete facade was decorated with chevron motifs and its faceted glass windows offered a view of the city matched only by City Hall.

  It was pitch-black outside when Craine walked through the lobby. As he took the self-service elevator up to the ninth floor, he felt the comforting surge of blood through his chest and extremities. Tiredness had given way to a feverish clarity of mind. He was thinking clearly, perhaps for the first time.

  He had visited Peterson’s suite so many times for casual drinks parties and studio-sponsored charity galas that he felt now as if he was trespassing on home ground. To arrest Peterson was to bite the hand that had dutifully fed him for a quarter of his life. He owed everything he had to the motion picture industry; was he so willing to tear all that apart? He was beginning to understand that his life was changing, going forward with or without him, and he couldn’t go back.

  When the elevator doors opened, a wide, lamplit corridor stretched in front of him, three doors on either side. There was no one here, no sound of movement, not a whisper in the air. Craine took out his Browning and chambered a round.

  Walking briskly down the hall with the pistol beside his right leg, Craine could see that the walnut door to Peterson’s suite was ajar; his fingers tingled with anticipation as he pushed the door open.

  Craine stepped in and took in his surroundings. He was standing in Peterson’s living room. A closed doorway to his right led onto the kitchen and bedrooms. In front of him, half-drawn curtains framed a view of Sunset Boulevard advancing west toward the San Pedro Harbor. All the furniture was intact. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  There came a familiar voice. “He’s gone.”

  It was Mayer, slumped behind a green leather desk in a pool of uneven shade as if he’d been waiting for him to enter. If he was surprised, Craine didn’t show it.

  “When?”

  Mayer looked at him despondently. Gone were the vaunted speeches and wide-grinned confidence. He was wearing a long overcoat but his tuxedo was visible underneath; he looked unusually disarranged, his hair damp and tousled, his high forehead flushed.

  “Lobby attendant said he didn’t come back tonight,” he said, speaking swiftly. “Didn’t say goodbye, gave no indication where he was going, but we think he’s got a flight or a train ticket booked somewhere.”

  Craine digested this. He couldn’t believe it himself. Was it Peterson in the photographs, or was he protecting someone else? And if it was him, was he so desperate to protect his reputation? He took his time to answer.

  “Then why are you here?”

  Mayer shifted in his seat. “The same reason you are. A few hours ago Peterson ordered you dead. He told Carell it was on my request. When Carell figures it wasn’t—”

  “Why? Why did Peterson want me dead?”

  “That I don’t know.” Mayer’s head gave the slightest twitch. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief hidden in his palm. “I want you to appreciate that I had nothing to do with what happened tonight. Carell’s men were sent on Peterson’s demand, not mine.”

  “Does it ease your conscience at all, saying that? They came into my house. Did you know that? My son is lucky to be alive. They murdered a police detective.” As Craine spoke his voice grew louder until he was almost shouting across the living room. “O’Neill was cut in two with shotguns and for what?”

  Mayer didn’t reply. Something in his look and manner suggested he had given up; he was resigned to Craine’s accusations.

  “That other detective—”

  “His name was Patrick O’Neill.”

  “I’m sorry for what happened to him. Plea
se, you must understand that I didn’t want any of this to happen.”

  “And Jack Rochelle?”

  “No, that was nothing to do with me either,” Mayer said, almost contemptuously now. “None of this was. I went along with Peterson’s story about the love triangle. He convinced me. We had no idea Peterson was the one behind it.”

  “Whose we? You and Carell?”

  When Mayer nodded, he said, “You sit there pretending you’re completely innocent in all of this when all this time you’ve been playing us like puppets.”

  “I want to make amends, Craine. I can help you. We’ve spoken to Peterson’s accountant. I have information.”

  Craine allowed himself a slow nod. “Go on.”

  “Five weeks ago he made a payment of twelve thousand dollars into an unnamed New York account.”

  “That tells us nothing. Who’s to say Carell didn’t hire the shooter?”

  “Carell denies it. He has no reason to lie. No, we’ve already traced the payments. You can’t hide twelve thousand dollars that easily. Don’t you see? It was Peterson, Craine. Something happened and he had them killed. It all points to Peterson. I had no idea about any of this, I swear to you on my daughters’ lives.”

  “But you knew about the girls, didn’t you? You have a deal with the Lilac Club. You encourage your actors to sleep with their prostitutes.”

  “It wasn’t a deal. There was no contract, simply a verbal agreement. Peterson and Rochelle took care of things; it was in their hands. And I had no choice, you have to understand that. I needed to keep the Chicago syndicates happy.”

  “Why?”

  Mayer tilted his head, looking out of the window toward the sea. His tone dropped. “The unions,” he muttered.

  “Labor unions?”

  No reply.

  “The labor unions, Louis?”

  “Yeah.” He leaned back in the chair. “Carell’s got a guy inside at the top. Don’t you see? Chicago controls the unions, so they have say over the studios. It’s extortion, basically. Warner’s, Paramount, R.K.O.—all of us are paying off Carell and Nitti not to raise labor wages.”

  “Why haven’t you said anything? You have political influence. Why not bring in the police? Or the Federal Bureau?”