Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  He hung up and looked at Lorna. “Who represented Craig during your divorce?”

  “Cooper and Clive. Craig retained them ever since that phony paternity suit five years ago.”

  “He never used Horace Lysander? Maybe for the trouble in Mexico?” He remembered Lysander was a criminal lawyer.

  “Is that who answered? I never heard of him.”

  “You would if you had breakfast with Mike Grundage.”

  *

  He drove away with the uneasy sensation that he knew less now than when he’d come. He did know more about one thing than the police did: Lorna’s story that she hadn’t had recent contact with Craig had kept them from doing the same thing Valentino had done, and from discovering yet another link with Grundage through his attorney. For the same reason, they wouldn’t attach as much importance to the books in the suitcase as Valentino did; not that it had any importance at all, as far as he could tell.

  And the knowledge itself left him feeling ignorant. Lysander was a top-drawer lawyer with an impeccable reputation, despite the notoriety of many of his clients. If Grundage was involved in whatever deal Craig had had going, it wouldn’t be through his loan sharks. A smart gangster kept his shady operations separate from the man who represented him in matters legal. Lysander himself would insist upon it as an officer of the court with a license to preserve. The size of his retainers alone would save him from temptation.

  Finally, Valentino was unsettled in his mind about Lorna. Spouses and ex-spouses were routinely listed among the suspects in murder cases, but he couldn’t imagine her setting up such a grisly act, even if she had a discernible motive. The reason she’d given for lying to the police was credible, but thin. Her grief seemed genuine, but he could not put aside the knowledge that she was an accomplished actress. The buts kept mounting.

  He went to The Oracle. The directory in the projection booth would have the number of Lysander’s firm. He wanted to make an appointment in private, and he couldn’t very well do that on Lorna’s redial with her present.

  Leo Kalishnikov greeted him in the foyer, got up all in monochrome: matching white Borsalino hat, alpaca cape, and double-breasted suit, with a white necktie on a black satin shirt and a black silk handkerchief exploding from his breast pocket. Valentino wondered if the theater designer deducted the cost of his outlandish outfits from his income taxes. He knew for a fact the man was widowed, with two grown sons, and was convinced he was heterosexual, but stereotypes were everything in Hollywood: The so-called tolerant artistic community preferred its mechanics German, its gardeners Asian, and its decorating consultants as gay as an inaugural ball. The straight world was secure in its belief that all homosexuals dressed the part.

  “Your timing’s dead on.” Today appeared to be a day when the American idiom was appropriate. “We’ve arrived at a color scheme.”

  “Have we?”

  “We meaning myself and Google. This is Stan Sinakis, a house painter of uncommon skill. It’s in his genes.”

  He thought at first it was jeans, and his gaze went immediately to the baggy pair worn by the man who stood at Kalishnikov’s side, a palimpsest of many painting sessions smeared and stiffened with many coagulated shades. Valentino had paid him little attention, assuming he was a member of the regular crew. He was in his sixties, stout and white-haired, with corduroy shirttails hanging out and a painter’s cap as stained as his trousers jammed down over his forehead. His face was red, a map of broken blood vessels, and his baggy grin appeared to be as indelible as the paint caked under his nails. “How do.” He touched the bill of his cap.

  “Stan’s father, Miklos Sinakis, now unfortunately deceased, was a painter’s apprentice, assigned to The Oracle’s original construction. My faintest of hopes, that he would remember what color was used on the exterior, were dashed when I learned of his demise, but a greater treasure yet awaited me in the shadows of Stan’s garage.” The Russian’s speech invariably reverted to a good translation of Gogol when he was excited.

  “Pop never threw nothing away.” Sinakis raised the paint can he was carrying at his side, rusted and calcined with many spills and drips. Age and exposure had reduced them to an unidentifiable shade. A faded grease-pencil scrawl on the lid read 5/7/27; now Valentino was excited.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “But I am,” Kalishnikov said. “When I called, Mr. Sinakis said his late lamented father had kept the dregs from every job he’d ever had in the family garage, which Sinakis fils inherited. He spent the better part of today excavating the sample you see from the hoard. He asks but fifty dollars for his time.”

  “No offense, but is it worth it? Eighty years is hard on everything.”

  “I am assured by the wizards at Home Depot that a shard pried loose from the petrified contents will, through the magic of computer matching, deliver unto us once again the genius of Max Fink.”

  Fink was the tragic visionary who had built The Oracle—just in time for talking pictures to force him into debt retrofitting the theater for sound equipment, a setback followed closely by the Great Depression. “I was okay with turquoise,” Valentino said. “You save me from solvency in the name of historical authenticity.” Kalishnikov’s speech patterns were addictive.

  “You pretend cynicism, my friend. We are fellow zealots, you and I: madmen in a world overpopulated by the sane and the mundane. Pay the man.”

  Valentino reached for his checkbook. “I never paid more than seven dollars for a can of paint in my life.”

  “You will pay many times more than that before that part of the job is done. I estimate twenty gallons.” The designer worked the buttons of a BlackBerry.

  Valentino gave Sinakis his check and left the company before it could cost him more money. He went upstairs lugging the twin burdens of Craig Hunter’s suitcase full of books and his own personal debt.

  6

  INSIDE THE PROJECTION booth his roommate awaited him, swathed in cheesecloth and resembling the Elephant Man. This was the rebuilt 1952 Bell & Howell projector he’d bought on eBay, a beautiful piece of machinery that would enable Valentino to screen old 3-D films once he found another to match it: Bwana Devil and the original House of Wax required two separate prints superimposed upon each other to make their monsters and man-eating lions leap out into the audience. He inspected the cloth to make sure it was keeping out construction dust and opened the suitcase.

  He laid the books side by side on the sofa bed and on the floor in front of it. His own extensive library on the history of film, most of which was in storage until the last of the workmen packed up his tools and left, contained several of the same titles. He’d read them all, but he thought staring at the covers in the privacy of his home might give him an idea of the shape of the puzzle, if not its actual solution.

  Without exception the books were about horror and fantasy films produced many years before he was born, most of them by Universal. That studio had pioneered the concept of the chiller with The Phantom of the Opera, starring the great Lon Chaney (and one of the first of his one thousand faces), in 1925, and completed the cycle some thirty years later with Creature from the Black Lagoon and its two sequels, Revenge of the Creature and The Creature Walks Among Us. In between, a veritable herd of misshapen half humans had lurched through dry-ice fog and up crumbling castle steps carrying swooning women (scantily clad in nightgowns or swimsuits) in their arms. The monsters were electrocuted, burned alive, staked through the heart, shot with silver bullets, and smothered in quicksand, only to be revived by some clever scenarist in the follow-up.

  When you yearned for a musical extravaganza or a luscious period piece, you went to MGM. If gritty urban dramas and prison flicks were your thing, Warner Brothers was the studio for you. But if you ran home from the theater and dived under the covers to protect yourself from demons under your bed, chances were the culprit was Universal.

  Standing there with arms folded contemplating hand-tinted images of suave vampires, hirsute werewol
ves, unspooled mummies, and flat-headed walking corpses with bolts in their necks, he recognized a finer pattern still. Most of the filmographies were devoted to classic horror in general, but the individual biographies and chronologies were evenly divided between two actors: Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

  In the wake of Lon Chaney’s death in 1930, Lugosi had kick-started the monster cycle back into life with Dracula, based on Bram Stoker’s novel of gothic dread and the first American film to present the supernatural as something other than a sly hoax. It had been produced over the stern objections of the in-house censor, and its box office receipts had rescued Universal from bankruptcy in the depth of the Depression. Lugosi, who like Count Dracula was a native of Transylvania, had mesmerized viewers with the intensity of his gaze and heavy Balkan accent and convinced a generation of moviegoers that the dead could walk again and prey upon the living. Eighty years later, the most amateur impressionist had only to say, “I vant to drink your blood” for his listeners to know he was pretending to be Dracula, whether or not they’d ever seen the movie and regardless of the fact that Lugosi himself had never spoken the line.

  Karloff was a chip off a very different block, a proper English gentleman plucked from obscurity (after fifty-odd motion picture appearances) to don the famous flattened headpiece and stitches of the Monster in Frankenstein. The mute role, famously scorned by Lugosi when it was offered to him, had assured the actor’s future for the next forty years. As it was with the Dracula star’s signature accent, one had only to assume Karloff’s stiff-legged, groping-armed walk to tell people (even those who’d never watched the film) whom he was imitating.

  The players’ stories, however, followed opposite trajectories. Bela Lugosi never again came near the success he’d known when Dracula was in its first release, descending to steadily more demeaning roles and deeper into poverty, while Boris Karloff’s star continued to burn brightly, keeping him active and in the public eye until his death by natural causes at age eighty-one. His biography was inspirational, his colleague’s tragic.

  Valentino wondered if Craig Hunter had selected the two lives for study because his own so closely paralleled Lugosi’s: early promise followed by disappointment after disappointment, leading to substance abuse (and, although Craig could not have predicted his own end, death in squalid circumstances). It was as if he’d hoped to learn from his predecessor’s mistakes and rebuild his fortunes on Karloff’s example.

  His friend picked up The Films of Bela Lugosi at random and found a page corner turned down in the biographical section. Had Craig marked it himself for his own edification? But with nothing else to narrow it down, that page and the one opposite covered too much ground to indicate what had drawn his interest. The passage began with Lugosi’s sudden stardom at age forty-eight and ended with his complaints about having been stereotyped as a fiend after appearances in White Zombie and Murders in the Rue Morgue. It wasn’t an exact comparison with Craig’s plight, if that was what he was after. Typecasting had not hurt him, despite his constant association with summer action pictures. His addictive personality had succumbed to the L.A. demimonde of drug parties and bar-hopping; Lugosi’s struggle with narcotics had not begun until his career was in freefall.

  The other books beckoned, but Valentino hadn’t time for abstract speculation when he had a lead who might be able to furnish direct answers to direct questions. In the “Attorneys” section of the massive area directory he found Horace Lysander’s name and number in a tasteful single line among competitors’ display advertisements both dignified and garish. When the same cool voice answered, he identified himself and asked if he could speak with Lysander.

  “Are you currently a client?”

  “No, I just—”

  “If you wish to retain Mr. Lysander’s services, you’ll have to make an appointment.”

  “Has he an opening this week?”

  “The first week of November is the earliest I’m showing.”

  “Please tell him it’s about Craig Hunter.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know the name, and I handle all of Mr. Lysander’s appointments.”

  “I don’t know if he had one or not, but they spoke over the telephone shortly before he was murdered.”

  “I see.” He might have been a plumber describing a slow leak in the basement for all her tone changed. “I’ll give Mr. Lysander the message, Mr.—?”

  “Valentino,” he repeated. He gave her his home number and the number of his cell. As an afterthought—because his office hours were erratic—he added his number at the Film Preservation Department.

  Later, he was sure that but for that last-minute addendum, he’d still be waiting to hear from the busy lawyer.

  *

  He was hungry suddenly, for food and human contact. It was well past lunchtime, but he knew Kyle Broadhead paid as little attention to scheduling meals as he did, fueling up only when the tank was empty and impossible to ignore. Valentino found him in, and arranged to meet him at their favorite new restaurant.

  The Brass Gimbal catered to industry insiders. The photos on the walls were more likely to feature great cameramen than iconic movie stars. Broadhead waved Valentino over to the Billy Bitzer booth and they ordered beer on tap and burgers from a waitress wearing a necktie that looked like a film strip. Valentino chose the Smash Cut, a quarter pound of black Angus drenched in Technicolor Sauce (a rainbow of ketchup, mustard, and guacamole), Broadhead a vegetarian burger identified on the menu as the Green Screen. “I’m a little worried about the special effects,” he said, “but Fanta wants me to start eating healthy.”

  Valentino wasn’t in the mood for small talk. He told him about Hunter.

  Broadhead nodded. “Ruth filled me in on the police visit. She made it sound like a raid. I’m sorry, but the way he was going, this end seems almost merciful.”

  “What’s merciful about a bludgeoning?”

  “You haven’t had the advantage of thirty-six months buried alive in a Communist prison, without clean linen or hope.”

  “So many of our conversations come back to that. Do I have to wait until your book is published to find out the details?”

  “You won’t find them in this one. I’ve decided not to write it as autobiography after all. I’d hate to invest so much angst in a project the CIA will never allow to see print.”

  Valentino had heard him drop hints before about his jailing in Yugoslavia on a trumped-up charge of espionage. Was it trumped up? This aging curmudgeon with unruly gray hair and a slept-in face was the least political person he knew; but wasn’t that part of the criteria? The archivist could focus on only one mystery at a time. “Explain that suitcase full of books.”

  “It may be significant or not. Maybe he got them cheap and hoped to lay them off somewhere and score dope with the profit.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything to my theory?”

  “Theories are based on fact, not guesses. Lugosi’s travails are a lesson in the danger of hubris—he turned down Frankenstein, for pity’s sake—but it’s certainly not unique in show business.”

  Something Broadhead had said resounded deep in Valentino’s subconscious. He tried to bring it to the surface, but lost it in the murk. His brain was a spare room crammed to the ceiling with running times, release dates, cast lists, and Hollywood lore, arranged in no particular order. At times it might have been empty for all it was of any use. “What about Karloff?”

  “We measure failures against successes. He started out the lowest of the low, you know.”

  “He drove a truck and performed menial jobs in between pictures when he was starting out. Nothing unique there either.”

  “William Henry Pratt”—Broadhead used the actor’s birth name—“was the son of a British civil servant and an East Indian woman: a half-caste. In Victorian society, that was the bottom rung of the ladder, with no hope of ascending ever. Then there were seven older brothers to bully him, mentally and physically. The abuse continued into a
dulthood, driving him into exile in Canada, then to the U.S. in search of work. He left at least three marriages in the dust before he was forty-five. Does any of this strike you as familiar?”

  “It’s the plot of Frankenstein—the Monster’s part, anyway, roughly. It’s no wonder he identified so well with a cobbled-up creature, alone and despised.” Valentino had noted the swarthiness of the gaunt actor’s features, which became more pronounced as his hair whitened. He’d assumed it was because of the California sun, shining down on him beside his swimming pool; stories had circulated of his eccentricity, basking beside it in a swimsuit and top hat, of all things. “How do you know this?”

  “How does a popular-culture historian know anything? I got it from the horse’s mouth.”

  “You knew Karloff?”

  “I made my first dollar in this town—and precious little more—working as a studio messenger. I delivered pages of Bogdonavich’s screenplay to him when he was filming Targets, the last year of his life. Age confides in youth, as I am doing now. He knew the end was near. He was confined to a wheelchair, except when he gathered the strength and courage to stand before the camera. Crippling arthritis was the culprit, abetted not a little by three unsuccessful spinal surgeries to correct the miseries brought on by that sadist James Whale. Did you know he forced Karloff to carry Colin Clive up the hill to that windmill in Frankenstein dozens of times? That experience made him an early activist on behalf of the Screen Actors Guild. A man will tell things to a complete stranger he would never share with his own flesh and blood.”

  Their meals came. Valentino took one look at his burger, an obscene lump of cooked flesh covered with bloodred sauce, and knew he would never bring himself to take a bite. He couldn’t erase the picture of Craig Hunter beaten to a pulp. He found the bitter taste of the beer more palatable. Was this how alcoholics were born? He couldn’t ask Craig.

  Broadhead, the healed-over cynic, poured ketchup on his sandwich and helped himself to it with apparent gusto. “All this is public knowledge now. Oscar Wilde said the posthumous biography brings a new horror to death. You’ve been preoccupied with your experiment in resurrectionist architecture, or you’d be aware of more recent discoveries in the history of our quaint industry. The ghouls who call themselves scholars would send George Romero screaming into the night.”