by Barry Day
“I should warn you and anyone else concerned that not only are we determined but we are—what is the word?—ubiquitous? Omnipresent? You will see Chinese faces everywhere you look and you will never know which are ours, for do we not all look alike to you? Just as you all look alike to us, by the way!
“Oh, and incidentally, I really must apologize for the so-called quotations from that rather boring man, Confuscius. I have a colleague who is determined to find a saying to suit every eventuality and, frankly, he would do better to stick to Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde. I had to be extremely firm when he wanted to use something along the lines of—
“IF THY PRIVATE EYE OFFEND THEE—
PLUCK IT OUT!”
I told him that a mélange of a 6th Century BC Chinese pseudo-sage, the Bible and Californian street argot was most definitely not something I cared to subscribe to.
“However, we all have our crosses to bear—as my old Oxford tutor was unduly fond of saying.
“Now, I can tell by the way you are prodding it around your desk that Mr. Perlman’s inquisitive digit is concerning you. Just to set your mind at rest, Mr. Watson, we did not kill that rather incompetent meddler. No, that was a simple matter of thieves falling out. We did, however, find the somewhat soggy remains and took a little souvenir. Call it a marker. Next time we may be forced to leave our own mark first, which would be—as I am sure you will agree—infra dig. Do bear that in mind, my dear chap, won’t you? Time is running out—but then, so are the usual suspects. I’d hate to think you were one of them. I was only saying to my colleagues here that you were looking particularly macho this morning. That—what do you call it?—‘designer stubble’ suits you, it really does. Ah well, I mustn’t tie up your phone line any longer. We all have places to go, people to see. A bientót, old chap.”
The buzzing of electronic bees told me he had disconnected. I didn’t need to relay the conversation to Holmes. Somehow he had the knack of tuning in when he wanted to.
“I wonder what wisdom Confucius has to offer us on the subject of eyes, old fellow?”
“What do you mean, Holmes?”
“The insect device enabled our Chinese friends to hear what was said but they are clearly able to both see and observe you—at least while you are in this room.”
“Holmes, what a blind beetle I have been!” I expostulated. Now, to the best of my knowledge, I have never expostulated in my life and the only person I know who has ever used that phrase was floating next to me. What with his circumlocutions and an Oxford-educated Fu Manchu, I was rapidly getting out of my depth. On the other hand if I was honest, I hadn’t felt so alive in years. I might have forgotten to shave in my hurry this morning, but that was a detail.
I decided to commune with my old pal Ray. Chandler’s photo has stood me in good stead this many a year. The expression is sufficiently laconic that I can read into it whatever I choose. Amused resignation. Controlled irritation. Today, however, there was something different. I had never known him to wink at me. Yet there he was, one eye conspiratorially closed.
And then the dime dropped.
I unhooked the picture from the wall. Ray would wink all the way from here to eternity, for someone had cut the eye out of his picture. Behind him was a little electronic gizmo about the size of a playing card that had been using him as its own private eye. Raymond Chandler, Commie spy.
“Farewell, my lovely!” I expostulated (again), as I ripped the second infernal device from the wall and dumped it in the water cooler. Thus perish all villains!
“Hm,” was all Holmes could contribute to the proceedings. “Who would have thought the Chinese would have attained such a degree of technical proficiency? In our earlier day, Watson, they were given to scurrying along darkened alleys with pigtails, large knives and incomprehensible imprecations. Remarkable.
But this, I imagine, heralds the arrival of your friend McNulty?’
For the last several moments the sounds of police sirens had been fighting for supremacy with the varied background noises of a typical Los Angeles working day. Now with a sudden crescendo they stopped immediately below us and a few moments later an out of breath McNulty was among us, closely followed by an equally winded sergeant in uniform. McNulty has been here often enough to view the rapacious elevator as infinitely more of a health risk than the chance of cardiac arrest. His sergeant did not appear to have been given the option.
We all waited politely while McNulty gingerly prodded the disembodied digit with a pencil, before nodding to his assistant to commit it to an evidence bag, which he did even more gingerly.
“Looks like it, right enough. Want to tell me about it?”
Which I did. Mostly.
“Come in and make a statement later. OK? And keep in touch—specially if you get any more special deliveries.”
At the door a thought struck him.
“I’ve heard of lady fingers—but that’s Indian food, ain’t it? Close but no cigar, huh? Here, pooch.”
He indicated the remainder of the spring roll but Mike pretended he was licking his paw and hadn’t heard.
We were alone again until, a moment later, McNulty’s head appeared around the door and he flicked a folded piece of paper on to my desk.
“Somebody left this in your pigeonhole downstairs.
Forgot to give it to you.”
And he was gone again.
Well, at least it wasn’t another fortune cookie and I deduced that it was a long shot Confuscius had taken to writing notes, so it was probably safe to open it. But before I could do so, Holmes spoke—
“Come, Watson, what have I tried to instill in you over the years? Before you read whatever is written in that note, what can one deduce from the outside? Put the brain cells to work, man!”
I found myself doing as he suggested and, indeed, it did seem second nature, when he put it like that.
I picked up the paper by one corner and held it up to the light. I turned it this way and that, then held it up to my face, so that I could smell it. Finally, I replaced it where I had found it on my desk.
“Other than that it was written by a woman of some means and taste and that she was either frightened or in a hurry—and possibly both, I can tell you nothing. Except that her name is most probably Nana Kane.”
Holmes clapped his hands together in delight and gave one of his mirthless laughs.
“Capital, old fellow! And how did you arrive at those deductions?”
“Ah well,” I said, childishly pleased to have gained his approval. “The writing paper is of the highest quality to the touch and the water mark is of a top of the range brand of stationery. The handwriting is uncertain, indicating a flurried state of mind. And then, of course,”—I gave him a conspiratorial smile—“the whole thing reeks of Nana Kane’s perfume.”
I waited, rather like Mike, for a pat on the head. I should have known better.
Instead, Holmes simply said—
“Aren’t you going to read what it has to say?”
Collapse of smug party. I unfolded the paper …
“My sister is about to do something terrible. I just know it. Please meet me at my apartment this evening at 8 o’clock. 75 Flamingo Street, Apt. 13a. I’m counting on you”
It was signed—
Anna
“You see, Watson, you made the mistake of coming to your conclusion based on too few facts.”
Holmes seemed to be aware of the contents of the note without needing to read it.
“You were correct—but only up to a point. The notepaper is certainly expensive but is it not an odd shape? Observe the top edge. A portion of the paper has been cut off and the mark of the scissors is clearly visible. The paper almost certainly belongs to Nana Kane, as you deduced, but sister Anna has ‘adapted’ it for her own use. She wishes to separate herself—but only partially. The perfume is a
lso Nana’s distinctive fragrance but have we not detected traces of it on her sister, too?
“Then there is the question of the handwriting. Hurried? Perhaps. But there is something more at work here, old fellow. I have made some small study of handwriting, as you will doubtless recall. It is the expression of the writer’s soul. This writing is artificial in the extreme, an effort of will. I would wager that, could we lay it side by side with Nana Kane’s it would be the mirror opposite. Indicative of this woman’s struggle not to be her troubled sibling. But by so doing she is finding difficulty in defining herself.
“Oh, and one other minor point … the slight traces of chlorine suggest that your trusty chatelaine received and almost certainly read the missive.”
At least this part of Holmes’s theory was conclusively proved as we left the building.
“Such a polite young lady, Mr. W.—not like so many of those you see today, prancing around in next to nothing, showing everything they’ve got. I do hope you can help her. Funny place for her to live, though, I should have thought …”
Whatever else she should have thought was lost in the Corvette going through its heavy breathing routine before deciding to depart.
“And where are we headed, my dear fellow?”
“I thought we might treat ourselves to the movies …”
Eight
“Darling, do you want me to put the glass down before I move over to the window? Or wouldn’t it be better if I moved towards the window, then looked at the glass, paused and then came back and put it down?”
“Whatever you’re most comfortable with, darling.”
“You see, I could be remembering the times when drink had come between me and man I loved and I could have a wistful little smile there. It worked so well in Say Hello to Goodbye …”
“You see, I could be remembering the times when drink had come between me I could have a wistful little smile there. It worked so well
“Yes, darling, I’m sure it did and I must remember to catch it on late night cable but this isn’t about the man you loved. This is about three great ladies of the silver screen meeting years later—and one of them turns out to be a serial killer of old movie stars.”
“So you think put the glass down first, darling?”
“I don’t care when you put it or where you put it. In fact, Props, get rid of the God damn glass!”
“Yes, darling—I think that’s best. I remember now, I had terrible trouble with a glass in Empty Wives—Empty Lives …”
“And empty seats.” This last said semi-sotto voce.
“… that stupid cameraman Marlene used to swear by lit the scene so that, what with the glare of the glass on my diamonds, it looked as though I had these terrible bags under my eyes.
“He should try lighting you now.” Also under the breath but loud enough for Holmes and I to hear.
We were standing on the back lot—which also looked suspiciously like the front lot and possible the whole lot—at Superior Studios. A name coined by someone with a marked inferiority complex and a wicked sense of humor. It deserved its tag of “independent” since it was so small and inconspicuous it must have been one of the best kept secrets in Santa Monica. No burly gate-keeper demanding ID. No gate-keeper. Only the red light over the door indicated one of two things and, on balance and considering the time of day, I was inclined to reckon on it signifying a film studio. When it blinked off, we had shimmered in.
In one corner of the room was a partial set meant to indicate a down at heel residential hotel. Around the table three women were seated and, if they were enjoying the proceedings, that was the second best kept secret today. One of them was Linda Grace—the party of the first part in the unscripted off camera dialogue we’d just been listening to. She had gone back to studying her script and appeared satisfied that she had made a significant contribution to the proceedings.
The director seemed to feel otherwise. He was what you might call one of the old school. Tweed suit to give him that English look, even though the heat in here was in the upper 80s. Rimless eyeglasses on a chain. Thinning hair suitable for running despairing fingers through. School of Cecil B. de Mille. Sometime movie martinet but not any time recent. The whole production looked as though it had been put together in a thrift store and a cut price thrift store at that. If Nicky Parmentieri was bankrolling it, he had about as much riding on it as he would on a single turn of his roulette wheel.
The only exception to the general cheesiness were the ladies.
Now that I looked more closely, I could recognize the other two.
One was a professional blonde with distinctive candyfloss hair, so teased and sprayed she could have had half of Kane’s aviary perched inside without anyone being any the wiser. When B-pictures were on their last legs, Edie Hatton had been on hers. Sassy secretary or ageing hatcheck girl, she always had a wisecrack for the dumb cop or the executive with a poker up his ass. She’d made many a lemon palatable for the few minutes she was on the screen but I hadn’t seen her for years, except in reruns. She hadn’t aged well but then there hadn’t been much to spoil in the looks department. She was now buffing her nails, as if they were an art form. After the nuclear holocaust we’d be left with two forms of life—the cockroach and Edie Hatton.
Agnes Winters was a different matter. She’d played great ladies in the style of Ethel Barrymore or Gladys Cooper in comedies of manners. That was in the days when there were manners to have comedies about. Tall, thin and patrician, she’d looked down many a mean lorgnette at a hapless hero. “Do I understand you wish to marry my daughter, young man?” Lady Bracknell with a Boston accent. Now she was a thin carbon copy of that grande dame. She looked as though the breeze from the clapper board would blow her away. Until it did—and until the director made his mind up what to do next—she sat there quietly crocheting and doing a crossword puzzle.
The whole scene brought a whole lot of memories flood without. The kid sneaking into the local movie house back home without paying, as someone else was leaving. Spooning—yes, we actually called it that!—in the back row with a girl whose face insisted on invading my dreams even now. Why couldn’t the script we call Life be as predictable as the ones we paid good money to see? Or sometimes didn’t pay.
There was also something indescribably sad about the whole set-up. Here were these ladies—pieces of living nostalgia—being brought together one last time and paid peanuts, so that some cheapskate producer could wring out the few last drops of sentiment from the handful of people who would ever get to see the schlock movie this promised to be.
The only person who didn’t seem to understand the scenario was Linda Grace. Today she was an amalgam of her two goddess heroines. The eyes, circled in mascara to express permanent surprise, were pure 1940s Bette Davis but without Davis’s intelligence. One more circle and Linda would only have needed a raccoon coat to complete the picture. The chalky complexion and the boldly-defined mouth were a curtsey to Joan Crawford. The wardrobe—clearly her own—was a mixture of the two and I’m sure, If I’d studied it more closely, there would have been hints of Susan Hayward, Gloria Grahame, et al. in there somewhere. The woman was a walking exhibition of ‘Hollywood—the Golden Years’.
And she was having the time of her life. Or she was until her director spoiled it.
He was perched on a stool a few feet away from me, making a snack of his finger nail. The rest of his fingers suggested he’d been dining well recently. At that moment Linda sailed up to him. Why she had chosen to wear a fur stole in an indoor location wasn’t entirely clear but she had.
“Jonty, darling,” she cooed, leaning over and into him in a way I recalled well. It was a ploy that I’m sure had proved consistently effective in the not-too-recent past but it was lost on Jonty. “Jonty? Don’t you think it would be better if, instead of my sitting there with those two old ladies, I were to make an entrance and fi
nd them there, living out their poor lonely lives? After all, darling, I am the star of this picture and my fans will expect …”
If she could be Davis and Crawford, then Jonty showed that he could do a fair De Mille, when there was an audience present and he’d had it up to here.
“Fans? Any fans you ever had would be as old as Lady Windermere’s!”
She was clearly stricken but she took it in her stride.
“You know I’ve been resting, darling. This is my come-back picture.”
“Listen, sister, to come back you have to have been there in the first place.”
“Now, listen to me, you decrepit little fag …”—‘decrepit’ clearly hurt—“I was big when you were running errands and giving blow jobs to C-picture directors.” We were now getting a whiff of the lady’s true origins. Equally, it was plain that someone who had never had his name above the title and now never would was determined to play his one big scene to the hilt.
“Big? By the time you came along all the greats were gone. There was no big—except as in budget. Everything and everybody was small. TV actors with a lot of hot air pumped in them. Hollywood was over, baby. You make out you’re some latterday Davis or Crawford. You couldn’t hold an eyebrow pencil to them! And this piece of shit you call your comeback. A tax write-off, if ever I saw one. It’ll finish up on cut-price video being watched by a bunch of ga-ga senior citizens in a twilight home, who’ll think you’re Mabel Normand or Lilian Gish. I’d rather be directing a tampon commercial …”
“Then I suggest you go and find one.”
A man’s voice interrupted his soliloquy and out of the shadows stepped Nicky Parmentieri.
“You disappoint me, Jonty. This was meant to be a happy ship. You may not realize it but you were one of my childhood heroes. Saturday morning TV watching Hopalong Cassidy reruns. ‘The part of Skeeter was played by John ‘Jonty’ Evans’. I was paying off a debt, Jonty. Well, consider it paid. Good day to you.”
There was total silence on the set. There was something about the way Nicky had spoken that ended the discussion.